If the following story, told by John Wesley in his Diary of 1769, is correct, some people must have queer tastes, and strange stomachs:
“2nd Aug.—Some friends from London met us at St. Albans. Before dinner we took a walk in the Abbey, one of the most ancient buildings in the kingdom, near a thousand years old; and one of the largest, being 560 feet in length[3] (considerably more than Westminster Abbey) and broad and high in proportion. Near the east end is the tomb and vault of good Duke Humphrey. Some, now living, remember since his body was entire; but after the coffin was opened, so many were anxious to taste the liquor in which it was preserved, that in a little time the corpse was left bare, and soon mouldered away. A few bones are now all that remain.”
“GOOD” DUKE HUMPHREY
The Duke Humphrey referred to was Humphrey Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, uncle to Henry the Sixth, who was renowned for his hospitality, and commonly called “The good Duke Humphrey.”
The “goodness” of Duke Humphrey must be, at the very least, an historic doubt. Born in 1391, the youngest son of Henry the Fourth, he was a man of affable and easy manners, cultured, and a patron of literature, and considered by the people a patriot. Those were the days when to be a “patriot” with one party was to be a “traitor” with another, and jealousy on the part of Queen Margaret, consort of his nephew, Henry the Sixth, caused his arrest at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447. The day after his arrest, the Duke died, not without suspicion of foul play; the times being such that the sudden death of any prominent person could never be put down to natural causes; which sufficiently shows the uncomfortable nature of those times. It seems, however, clear that he died from paralysis, brought on through a life of debauchery, and hastened by the shock of his arrest; but, if we may judge by the temper of the age, his death happened in time to prevent the political murder that assuredly would have been committed.
IMPOSTURE
So much for the “goodness” of the “good Duke,” who, whatever his morals, was, if we are to believe the story told of him by Sir Thomas More, a good deal more keen-witted than most people. It seems that he completely exposed an impostor who claimed to have been born blind, but to have recovered his sight at the shrine of St. Alban. The Duke asked him the colours of the clothes himself and his suite were wearing, and they were readily given by the man, who did not perceive that, had he been born blind, he could not possibly know the names of colours. The answer exposed him, and he was put in the stocks. The story was long a favourite one at St. Albans, and forms a scene in the second part of King Henry the Sixth; and by the same token fortifies many in the belief that Bacon, and not Shakespeare, wrote that play.
MIRACLES WHILE YOU WAIT
Enter a Townsman of St. Albans, crying, “A miracle!”