they looked when having given the Cardinal the cold shoulder themselves they saw the King's Highness lead him by the hand to the great window in the hall of Grafton, and bid him be covered while he talked to him; how, after dining in private with Mistress Anne Boleyn, who chid him for so gentle an entertainment of the Cardinal, Henry again called Wolsey to the great window, and talked secretly with him; how, there being no room for my lord at Grafton, the secretary rode over to Master Empson's, at Easton, to provide lodging for him, where accordingly he came by torchlight; how at supper, instead of politics, the wary churchman talked jolly about greyhounds and like disports, to the sore mortification and mystification of the company, who came to espy from his conversation how the land lay with his master; how, when he returned early the next morning to Grafton, Mistress Anne had been beforehand with him, for he found the King just mounting his horse to view the ground for the new park at Hartwell, where madam had made provision for a sort of picnic dinner, fearing the King should return before the Cardinals had finally quitted Grafton. It was a melancholy end to so fine a house, and so regally connected, that it should have fallen into the hands of the Parliamentarian forces in 1643. On Christmas Eve, in that year, being Sunday, the Roundheads, reinforced by troops from Northampton, entered the house, where they found great and rich plunder which they had for their paines,'t and the better the day, the better the deed-on Christmas morning fired it. Out of its ruins was constructed a building, now occupied by one of the family who take the name of their dukedom from this place.

It was but a few miles distant, in the quiet village of Green's Norton, that a warier and shrewder wife was waiting her turn, to take for her third husband the inhuman monarch who had been the death of so many of his sweethearts. Catherine Parr (who, but for her great adroitness, had once well nigh followed the fate of her predecessors, but who lived to take a fourth

Easton-Neston, which, during this reign, was sold by the Empsons to the ancestor of the Earl of Pomfret, the present owner. In the hamlet of Sewardsly in this parish have just been discovered some relics of the Cistercian nunnery, and a sepulchral cross, which probably covered the body of William de Paviley, who by his will desired to be buried here.

In this year occur entries in the king's privy-purse expenses of disbursements at Grafton, such as these:- Paid to a servant of the mayor of Northampton for bringing peres to the king's grace at Grafton, va; the same daye paied to a pouer woman that gave the king's grace peres and nuts in the forest, iiij and viiid:" he was riding out no doubt with Mistress Anne, who helped him to crack them: 'also for cocumers for his table: for an angle-rodde: for bromes to Master Spencer's servant,' doubtless from Althorp, to strew the floor of the great hall.

A true Relation of the taking of Grafton House,' &c., printed for John Wright, 1643. Baker, p. 175.

husband

husband in Lord Seymour, brother of the Protector Somerset, within a year of Henry's death) was the youngest daughter of Sir Thomas Parr and Maud Green, of Green's Norton, near Towcester; and Baker reasonably asserts the claim which Fuller abandons, of her being a native of that place. Her brother William was created Earl of Essex by King Henry, and afterwards Marquis of Northampton by Edward VI.; but being implicated in the attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, he was attainted of high treason in Mary's reign, and deprived of his honours, though not of his life. Of Catherine Parr, the only known relic in the county is a fine full-length, but not fullsize, portrait by Holbein, at Glendon Hall, engraved in Baker's History,' and which probably came there through the Lanes, Sir Ralph Lane marrying Maud, daughter of Lord Parr, the Queen's uncle, whose monument still remains in Horton Church.

It was during Henry VIII.'s reign (1533) that Leland, his librarian, was sent on a tour a little before the dissolution of the religious houses, no doubt with an eye to the royal lion's share of the spoil. His notice of Northampton on the browe of a meane hille' is only remarkable from his mentioning that the new houses are of timber instead of stone. The letters of the commissioners to Henry, on the confiscation of St. Andrew's monastery, are highly characteristic. Richard Leyton, in particular, seems to have been of that uncharity that thinketh every evil, and had no other aim than to make things pleasant to his grasping master. Less complaisant were the commissioners who visited Catesby; but the good word they spoke for this house was uttered in vain. The wolf had no thought of hearing the lamb's arguments, and the King's Highness charged the commissioners with receiving bribes for their so favourable report. If ever the overstrained theory of sacrilege advanced by Spelman could be speciously instanced, it would be in the disastrous fortunes of the several possessors of Catesby Priory, wherein the failure of heirs male and other domestic calamities might be construed as avengers of the spoliation of the good prioress, Dame Joyce Berkeley. Traces of the dormitory still remain, but the nun's lock' on the cedar room, a beautiful specimen of the ironwork of the fifteenth century, engraved in Baker, has unfortunately disappeared.

Queen Elizabeth, best known in her ministers, appears in Northamptonshire strongly represented in Lord Treasurer Burghley of that ilk, in Lord Keeper Hatton of Holdenby and Kirby, in Sir Walter Mildmay of Apethorpe, her Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in Sir Christopher Yelverton of Easton Maudit, Speaker of the House of Commons; nor will

the

the Castle of Fotheringay be easily dissevered from her tarnished memory. Built originally by Simon de St. Liz, the regenerator of Northampton, rebuilt by Edmund, son of Edward III., who planned the keep in the form of his badge, the fetter-lock (as the Escurial ground-plan represents a gridiron, and the hall at Hardwick an H, and many Elizabethan houses an E), it became a chief and favourite residence of the House of York; here were buried the bodies of Edward Duke of York, who fell at Agincourt, of Richard Plantagenet, father of Edward IV., who fell at Wakefield, and of his son Edmund, cruelly put to death the same day; and here Richard III. was born. Henry VIII. gave it to Catherine of Arragon, and the first bridge of sighs that linked the palace with the prison was that trodden by this injured Queen when, after her divorce, she lived here in such nominal liberty as is allowed to those who under royal disfavour still live on. Queen Mary made it a formal state-prison, to become, in its last and most celebrated stage, the cell and the scaffold of her ill-fated namesake of Scotland. It had been well if Elizabeth's name had only been associated with Fotheringay by the monuments of the Yorks which she found in decay in the even then dilapidated choir, and which she reinstated in the style of her time, though very meanly, in the present church; but it will ever rather be recalled by the scene in the great hall, on the morning of February 8, 1587,* when Thomas Andrews, sheriff of Northants, informed his royal prisoner that it was time to come forth. And forth she came '-not the Mary of historical picture and romance, but, as is described by an eyewitness-being of stature tall, body corpulent, round-shouldered, her face fat and broad, double chinned, and hazel-eyed' -such as she is drawn in Lord Montague's picture, now the Duke of Buccleuch's, at Boughton, said to have been taken the day before her execution. It was a short business, and two strokes of the axe finished it all; and when the executioner lifted up the severed head, and the dressing of lawn fell from it, her hair, polled very short, appeared as grey as if she had been three-score-years-and-ten. Her little dog, who had followed unperceived, was found ensconced in her robes, and would only be gotten forth by force. It was not till the 31st of the July following that her funeral procession was met by the bishop, dean, and clergy of Peterborough at the magnificent west portal of their cathedral by torchlight, and her body interred

* The gentle Sir William Fitzwilliam, of Milton, had now been superseded as governor of the castle by Sir Amias Paulet. There still hangs at Milton the portrait of James I. as a boy, given to Sir William in recognition of his kind treatment of her by Mary herself.

in the south aisle of the choir. There was plenty of black baize and escutcheons of metal, and all the parade of sepulchral heraldry, such as became a king's daughter. The Bishop of Peterborough gave a great supper, and the Bishop of Lincoln preached the funeral-sermon, giving thanks for the happy dissolution of the high and mighty princess, of whose life and death,' said he, at this time, I have not much to say, because I was not acquainted with the one, neither was I present at the other,' and so with prudent generalities concluded. Twenty-five years afterwards her body was removed by her son James I. to Westminster Abbey, and nothing but a plain ledger stone of great size now marks the spot where her body lay in Peterborough Cathedral. Undisturbed, and exactly opposite, but under a yet meaner stone, lie, buried by the same sexton,* the remains of the earlier occupant of Fotheringay, Catherine of Arragon, who had been only removed from that castle to die at Kimbolton, whence, as wife of Prince Arthur, not of King Henry, she was brought and buried here with courtly pomp. The Castle of Fotheringay remained standing and furnished to the last years of James I.'s reign, not being dismantled by that king, as the tradition is, to efface the scene of his mother's execution, but gradually destroyed and used up in other buildings; the great hall having been removed and re-erected at Connington, and other parts to build the chapel at Fineshade. Not a stone is now left upon another on the spot, and the last relic of this memorable building exists in the keys, which are in the possession of Archdeacon Bonney, the historian of the place.†

The authoress of Father D'Arcy' has familiarised us with that part of the county which was the scene of the Popish conspiracies. In the Gunpowder Plot, Northamptonshire bore an unenviable share. The feeling of the conspirators was an hereditary one. In Elizabeth's reign, Sir William Catesby of Ashby, Sir Thomas Tresham of Rushton, with Lord Vaux of Harrowden, all in this county, had been cited for harbouring Jesuits and attending Mass. It was in the chamber still existing over the gateway of Ashby Ledgers, that the sons of the two first, Robert Catesby and Francis Tresham, in concert with Lord Mordaunt of Drayton, Sir Everard Digby of Stoke Dry (just without the north border of the county), Percy, and others, are said to have concerted the conspiracy and to have met to report its progress. The singular triangular lodge at Rushton, built by the

* Old Scarlett, who also 'buried the town twice over,' and whose portrait, now in the nave of the cathedral, would be better placed in the chapterhouse or elsewhere.

+ Historic Notices of Fotheringay, by Archdeacon H. Bonney." 1821.

elder

elder Tresham, is also pointed out as a rendezvous for the conspirators; and it would certainly be no unfavourable place, for its form and isolation deny ears to its walls. The trinary symbolism which exists in the name and arms of Tresham-three trefoils-is here shown forth in every conceivable architectural form and device.

The fatal field of Naseby was not the first introduction of Charles I. into the county. His tent had been earlier pitched in peaceful times, when for nine days he lived under canvas with his queen at Wellingborough, where they came in 1626 to drink the chalybeate waters of the Red Well there. But in the year 1642 the times had grown hotter, and the bed which they still show at Edgecote as the one in which Charles slept before the battle of Edgehill, though under a firmer roof-tree than his couch at Wellingborough, afforded him probably but a fevered rest. Then followed on June 14th, 1645, the battle of Naseby. The King had advanced from Leicester to Daventry, and had again retired upon Harborough, when hearing that the Parliamentary army under Fairfax was closer upon his heels than he had expected, by a council of war held, as tradition runs, at the old ball at Lubbenham, it was determined to face the enemy posted between themselves and Northampton, and to fight

"For God, for the cause, for the Church, for the laws,

For Charles, King of England, and Rupert of the Rhine.' The King's forces coming up through Sibbertoft found the enemy encamped on the heights of Naseby. Their advantageous position, the hurried march of the King's troops, the rashness of Prince Rupert, and, above all, the military genius of Cromwell, decided the day in favour of Fairfax, and drove the remnant of the royal forces in the direction of Leicester. Between Naseby and Harborough lies a small village which, from the mainroad terminating at the church in a cul-de-sac, is called pudding-poke Marston. Here, from the nature of the place, a great body of the retreating army was caught at a disadvantage and cut to pieces; a little farther onward, where the road crosses the Welland, it still retains the name of Slaughterford. The high table-land of Naseby, with its succession of slight rises and falls to the north, seems, even in its present enclosed state, to mark it out as a field of battle-nor was it unfitting that the die of the great national struggle should be cast in the very central boss of England. The road from Sibbertoft now lies.

ivy dupaλy. The ancient spelling was Navesby; and the phrase of an old writer applied to the county-town-in ipso insula umbilico'-would have greater significancy here.

directly