While at Oxford the boys were taken to Woodstock, a distance of some eight miles. The old ballad of “Fair Rosamond” so haunted the mind of Ernest Wynn, at Oxford, that he induced Master Lewis to make an excursion to Woodstock, the scene of the fancied tragedy.
“I have seen Kenilworth, the scene of one of Walter Scott’s romances,” said Ernest; “have been among the associations of ‘Ivanhoe,’ and ‘Peveril of the Peak,’ and I shall always be glad to have seen the place of the novelist’s other English fiction.”
The town of Woodstock once constituted a part of the royal demesnes. Here Ethelred held a council, and Alfred the Great translated the “Consolations of Boethius.” The history of the old palace of Woodstock is associated with dark romances, splendid cavalcades, and crumbled kings and queens.
Not a vestige of the palace now remains; its site is merely marked by two sycamore trees.
The famous Rosamond’s Bower, Maze, or Labyrinth seems to have consisted of a succession of under-ground chambers, and is thought to have existed before the time of King Henry II., who is supposed to have used it to hide Fair Rosamond from his jealous queen. There was but one way into it, though there were many ways that would lead astray any one who should try to find the right passage. It may have been like the following diagram, which may puzzle the reader who attempts to find an open way to the centre.
Henry II. had married Eleanor of Aquitaine, a woman of bad reputation, full of craft and wickedness, whom the French king had put away. But he gave his affections to Rosamond Clifford, whose beauty had charmed him when he first met her in the valley of Wye. It is said that she supposed herself wedded to him; but however this may be, she and not Eleanor was the spouse of his heart. She pined away in the seclusion that the king provided for her, but he was true to her in her illness; he hovered around her sick bed, and at last, when she was laid away to rest in the chapel at Edstowe Nunnery, he kept her grave bright with lights and sweet with flowers. The story of her being poisoned by Queen Eleanor is a fiction, although it is said the Queen discovered her place of concealment, and administered to her a severe reproof.
