The duke, according to the old story, lay in a ditch near the house, on the outskirts of the coppice, disguised, it is said, in the smock of a countryman, and was arrested at night by John Mytton, who came over from the old hall at Shipton, with a force of armed men. When Buckingham knew that his arrest was due to the treachery of his servant, he broke forth and cursed his faithless steward in the most awful, and terrible manner. He cursed his goings in, and goings out, the air he breathed, the liquor he drank, and the very bread he ate, and with the same curse, he cursed all his family. According to tradition, they all ended miserably.
An old writer declares, “Shortly after Banister had betrayed his master, his son and heir waxed mad, and died in a boar’s stye; his eldest daughter, of excellent beauty, was suddenly stricken of a foul leprosy; his second son became very marvellously deformed in his limbs, whilst his youngest son was drowned ‘and strangled’ in a very small puddle of water. And Banister himself, when he became of extreme old age, was found guilty of a murder, and was only saved by the intervention of the clergy, to whom he had paid large sums. As for the £1000, the king,” says the same old writer, “gave him not one farthing, saying ‘that a servant who had been so untrue to so good a master, would be false to all other.’”
Shinewood House—for the old manor of the duke’s time has gone—I could not see, but I knew the place, and as I looked across wood and meadow, all the old story and its tragedy came back to me. Some writers say that Buckingham was executed at Shrewsbury, but Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More declare that he was executed at Salisbury on the feast of All Souls.
A VISIT TO DONKEYLAND
Bess and I walked down the cart-track and looked below. Five or six donkeys were browsing on the scant herbage, for every one at Homer keeps a donkey, and the common name of the hamlet is Donkeyland. After a few minutes’ walking, we left the main track, and made our way to a little homestead that nestles close against the hill, and is surrounded by a bower of fruit trees. As we turned through the wicket a band of dark-eyed children quitted the little school and greeted us. The children looked as if they belonged to another race than those at Much Wenlock. They had dark, almost black eyes, and swarthy skins. I have been told that in the end of the eighteenth century a gang of gipsies came and settled at Homer, built huts for themselves, married and settled there; and that is why the good folks of Homer seem of a different race from the rest of the neighbourhood. I paused before knocking at the cottage door, and begged Fred, the groom who had followed us, to take my little maiden for a ride, and bring her back in half an hour.
“Mayn’t I come in?” asked Bess.
“Not to-day, for Mrs. Harley is really ill,” I answered. “Take the dogs, and come back presently.”
Bess and her pony, followed by Tramp and Tartar, vanished, and old Betty opened the cottage door. All was irreproachably clean. The brass warming-pan over the chimney piece shone like gold, and the old-fashioned dresser was garnished with spotless blue and white china. There was a mug or two of lustre-ware, a few embroidered samplers on the walls, and a pot or two of budding geraniums behind the windows. Upon the hob a copper kettle hissed gaily.
I asked after Mrs. Harley, the owner of the cottage. But Betty shook her head. “She ’ave a-heard the Lord’s call,” she replied; “but she’s ready—been ready this forty years, and her wants to go.”