ELIZABETH WIDVILE AND LADY JANE GREY.
Charnwood Forest is also associated in history with two unfortunate women. Elizabeth Widvile was the wife of Sir John Grey of Groby, who lost his life and estate in serving the House of Lancaster, leaving Elizabeth with two sons; for their sake she sought an interview with King Edward IV. to ask him to show them favor. Smitten by her charms, Edward made her his queen, but he was soon driven into exile in France, and afterwards died, while her father and brother perished in a popular tumult. Her daughter married King Henry VII., a jealous son-in-law, who confined Elizabeth in the monastery of Bermondsey, where she died. Bradgate passed into the hands of her elder son by Sir John Grey of Groby, and his grandson was the father of the second queen to which it gave birth, whose name is better known than that of Elizabeth Widvile—the unfortunate "ten-days' queen," Lady Jane Grey. She lived the greater part of her short life at Bradgate, in the house whose ruins still stand to preserve her memory. We are told by the quaint historian Fuller that "she had the innocency of childhood, the beauty of youth, the solidity of middle, the gravity of old age, and all at eighteen—the birth of a princess, the learning of a clerk, the life of a saint, and the death of a malefactor for her parents' offences." These parents worried her into accepting the crown—they played for high stakes and lost—and her father and father-in-law, her husband and herself, all perished on the scaffold. We are told that this unfortunate lady still haunts Bradgate House, and on the last night of the dying year a phantom carriage, drawn by four gray horses, glides around the ruins with her headless body. The old oaks have a gnarled and stunted appearance, tradition ascribing it to the woodsmen having lopped off all the leading shoots when their mistress perished. The remains of the house at present are principally the broken shells of two towers, with portions of the enclosing walls, partly covered with ivy.
LEICESTER ABBEY AND CASTLE.
LEICESTER ABBEY.
GATEWAY, NEWGATE STREET, LEICESTER.
The city of Leicester, which is now chiefly noted for the manufacture of hosiery, was founded by the Britons, and was subsequently the Roman city of Ratæ. Many Roman remains still exist here, notably the ancient Jewry wall, which is seventy-five feet long and five feet high, and which formed part of the town-wall. Many old houses are found in Leicester, and just north of the city are the ruins of Leicester Abbey, This noted religious house was founded in the twelfth century, and stood on a meadow watered by the river Soar. It was richly endowed, and was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but its chief fame comes from its being the last residence of Cardinal Wolsey. This great man, once the primate of England, has had his downfall pathetically described by Shakespeare. The king summoned him to London to stand trial for treason, and on his way Wolsey became so ill that he was obliged to rest at Leicester, where he was met at the abbey-gate by the abbot and entire convent. Aware of his approaching dissolution, the fallen cardinal said, "Father abbot, I have come hither to lay my bones among you." The next day he died, and to the surrounding monks, as the last sacrament was administered, he said, "If I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, He would not have given me over in my gray hairs." The remains were interred by torchlight before daybreak on St. Andrew's Day, 1530, and to show the vanity of all things earthly tradition says that after the destruction of the abbey the stone coffin in which they were buried was used as a horse-trough for a neighboring inn. Nothing remains of the abbey as Wolsey saw it excepting the gate in the east wall through which he entered. The present ruins are fragments of a house built afterwards. The foundations that can still be traced show that it was a grand old building. The gardens and park now raise vegetables for the Leicester market.