[171] Persons fond of noticing such coincidences remarked also that Thursday had been a fatal day to Henry VIII. and the succeeding Tudor sovereigns, he himself, Edward
VI., Mary, and Elizabeth having all died on that day. (Stowe's Chronicle, ed. Howes, p. 812.)
[172] As printed in the Book of Proclamations (fol. Lond. 1609, p. 1.) there are thirty-seven signatures appended to it, headed, according to ancient custom upon such occasions, by Robert Lee, Maior. The others were Archbishop Whitgift, Lord Keeper Egerton, Lord Treasurer Buckhurst, and the principal nobility, officers of state and of the household then in town. The honourable roll was closed by Sir John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.
[173] Aulus Gellius; Noct. Atticæ, i. xiv.
[174] The way in which the exuberance of Lord Beauchamp's loyalty occasioned this report will appear in a subsequent entry. This Lord Beauchamp was the father, as our readers will be aware, of the Marquess of Hertford, who was the faithful servant of Charles I., faithful even to death, and after the Restoration was created Duke of Somerset.
[175] The particulars of Cary's wonderful ride are related by himself in his Memoirs. "He took horse," apparently at the lodging of the Knight Marshal at Charing Cross (probably at the old Mews), "between nine and ten o'clock," on the morning of Thursday the 24th of March, "and that night rode to Doncaster," about 160 miles. On Friday night he came to his own house at Widdrington, about another 135 miles. "Very early on Saturday he was again on horseback and reached Norham on the Tweed about
noon." This was about 50 more miles, and left only about another 50 miles, "so that," he says, "I might well have been with the King at supper time: but I got a great fall by the way, and my horse, with one of his heels, gave me a great blow on the head, that made me shed much blood. It made me so weak that I was forced to ride a soft pace after, so that the King was newly gone to bed by the time that I knocked at the gate" [of Holyrood House.] (Memoirs of Robert Cary, Earl of Monmouth, ed. Edinb. 1808. pp.
126-128.)
[176] Dr. Ralph Some, Master of Peter House, Cambridge, elected 1589. (Hardy's Le Neve, iii. 668.)
[177] Epist. lib. i. 41.