With all his convent, honourably received him;
To whom he gave these words—“O Father Abbot,
An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;
Give him a little earth, for charity.”
He died the third day of his arrival, in the sixtieth year of his age. On the second day, observing his custodian, the Lieutenant of the Tower, in the room, he said, “Master Kyngston, I pray you have me commended to His Majesty. Had I but served God as I have served him, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is my just reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but only my duty to my prince.”
And thus died the proud Cardinal, before whom all in the land, except his Sovereign, had earlier abased themselves. They buried him in the Lady Chapel, but in another seven years the Abbey itself was dissolved, its lands seized, and the buildings themselves destroyed; and no man knows what became of the body of Wolsey. Like that of Richard the Third, it was obscurely dispersed with others, and hence these two great historic characters have no known resting-place and no monument. The site was granted to a Mr. Cavendish, and on it in another thirty years was built the mansion whose ruins are now to be seen.
This way ran the old original road out of Leicester to the north, instead of the existing road through Belgrave. The change, like that in the southern approach to the town, was due to the dread with which wayfarers in the early years of the seventeenth century regarded the place, sore stricken with the plague. They sought the byways and unfrequented paths outside the walls, and were careful not to enter the town itself. Traffic has ever been conservative, and when all fear of infection had at last died out, the new routes thus struck out were retained.
XXIII
Climbing steeply up out of the seething hollow where Leicester’s busy population strives, the road in a mile and a half comes to the hundredth mile from London. It is quiet and solitary, the village of Wanlip, near by, not revealing its existence. But the neighbourhood of Rothley—i.e. Roth-ley, the red field—on the left hand is presently seen by the disgusting deshabille of the allotments. However economically and socially desirable they may be, allotment gardens have ever a squalid note. Rothley is growing vast and growing ugly, with cheap, flimsy buildings and a hard-working population of stockingers and quarrymen; and the march of the little hutches of provincial suburbia is advancing on Rothley Temple, that historic house in its beautiful park of stately trees where Thomas Babington Macaulay was born, October 25th, 1800, “in a room panelled from floor to ceiling, like every corner of the ancient mansion, with oak almost black with age.” It had been in the time of Queen Elizabeth the home of that Anthony Babington who in 1586 was executed for a wild and foolish plot to murder the Queen and to release the Queen of Scots: a conspiracy that not only failed, but sealed the fate also of the Scottish queen.