“Of a good many of them,” observed Buckingham behind his hand.
The Earl of Castlemaine lived to see a good many changes. It was not necessary in those times to live to a great age to witness many revolutions and counter-revolutions. He was committed to the Tower shortly after the accession of William the Third, and remained a prisoner there from February 1689 until February 10, 1690. He died in 1705.
A little to the north of Dorney, between it and the Bath road, are the remains of Burnham Abbey, a house for Benedictine nuns founded in 1265 by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and titular King of the Romans, brother of Edward the Third. There were an abbess and nine nuns when the establishment was surrendered to Henry the Eighth’s Commissioners. The ruins are now amid the rickyards and agricultural setting of the Abbey Farm, and although the church has wholly disappeared, the remains of the chapter-house and the domestic buildings form an exquisite picture, untouched by any busybodying “tidying-up” activities. The seeker after the picturesque, who finds historical evidences destroyed by well-meaning “restorers”; the artist, who generally discovers the artistic negligence of his foregrounds abolished in favour of neatly kept flower-beds and gravel paths and the feeling of ruin and decay thus utterly disregarded, will be rejoiced here, and will find the ruins still put to farming uses, just as Girtin and Turner and the other roaming artists of a hundred years ago were accustomed to find the castles and abbeys of their day. There is more pure æsthetic delight in such scenes as this, left in their natural decay and put to the uses to which they in the logical order of things descended, than in the same place swept and garnished to be made a show. The Lady Chapel and the refectory are stables, where the cart-horses shelter and form a picture so exactly like Morland’s stable interiors that the place might well have been a model for him. Every detail is complete in the Morland way, even to the old stable-lantern hanging on a post. Much of the ruined buildings is of the Early English period, and the horses come and go through pointed doorways. Gracious trees richly surround and overhang the scene.
BURNHAM ABBEY.