Pacis amans, musisque favens melioribus, unde
Gratum Opus Oxonio, quae nunc schola sacra refulget
Invida sed mulier regno, regi, sibi nequam,
Abstulit hunc, humili vix hoc dignata sepulchro
Invidia rumpente tamen post funera vivit.
Deo Gloria.
(Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments, p. 555, writing in 1631; Ashmole MS., 784, f. 41, writing in 1657; Sandford, Genealogical History, 309, writing in 1677 and dating the epitaph about 60 years earlier; History of the County of Hertfordshire, by Robert Clutterbuck (London, 1815), i. 73.)
The third line of this epitaph refers to a legend which first appears in the works of Sir Thomas More, and which had a great popularity at one time. It recounts how a man, who declared that he had been blind from birth and that he had been miraculously cured at the shrine of St. Alban, was proved to be lying by the Duke of Gloucester, who asked him the colours of the coats of the various people standing round and was answered correctly. As the man declared that his sight had been restored that very day, the impossibility of his having learned the various colours in so short a time proved the baselessness of his story. (Foxe, Acts and Monuments, iii. 713; cf. Shakespeare, Second Part of King Henry VI., Act II. Scene i.)
Later generations made a strange mistake with regard to the place where Duke Humphrey was buried. The reverent affection with which his name was regarded, after the defamations of the Lancastrians had caused a reaction which went to the opposite extreme, led the Londoners to do him honour, and for this purpose they selected a tomb in the old St. Paul’s Cathedral. By what chance the mistake was made cannot be known, but in the days of John Stow, the chronicler, the tomb of Sir John Beauchamp, son of Guy, Earl of Warwick, who died in 1358, was thought to contain the remains of the ‘Good Duke.’ Every year a ceremony was observed when ‘on May Day tankard-bearers, watermen, and some other of like quality beside, would use to come to the same tombe early in the morning’ and strew herbs and sprinkle water thereon. The precise significance of this proceeding seems to be unknown. (Stow’s Survey of London, ed. Thomas, 1842, p. 125.)
In connection with this mistake as to Gloucester’s tomb, there grew up a saying, which is known to most people at the present day, though in many cases the origin is forgotten. ‘To dine with Duke Humphrey’ was till comparatively recent years synonymous with not dining at all, and the saying arose from the mistaken idea, that the tomb in St. Paul’s was Gloucester’s last resting-place. In the days when the Cathedral was a public meeting-place for Londoners, and a centre of social and commercial life, it was the custom for certain gallants, whose pretensions were greater than their purses were full, to hang about there in the hopes of receiving an invitation to dinner, and failing in their quest, they were compelled to dispense with dinner altogether. The rendezvous of these hangers-on of society, who sought to live on men whose social position they despised, was opposite the tomb of Sir John Beauchamp, and it is of them that Thomas Dekker, who has left us so many interesting facts relating to the early seventeenth century, wrote, when he said: ‘Such schemes are laid about eleven o’clock in St. Paul’s (even amongst those that wear gilt rapiers by their sides), where for that noone they may shift from Duke Humphrey, and be furnished with dinner at some meaner man’s table’ (Dekker’s Dead Terme, D. 3). Those that failed in their endeavours, and were left dinnerless near the tomb where they had taken their stand, were therefore said ‘to have dined with Duke Humphrey.’ A reflection of this same phrase is to be found in Bishop Corbet’s ‘Letter to the Duke of Buckingham,’ where he alludes to