[56] Green's Princesses. p. 94.
[57] Funeral Sermon for Prs. Mary, by G. Leech, preached in Henry the Seventh's Chapel, Sept. 23, 1607.
CHAPTER VIII.
HENRY FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES.
Among the Hampshire moors, covered with sheets of purple heather and dark forests of Scotch firs, stands a grand old house built of red brick with stone facings. It is a noble mansion, with its saloons and libraries; its great hall where the Yule log burns at Christmas on the hearth of a vast fireplace; its wide oaken staircases, secret doors and passages; its "Long Gallery" running the whole width of the building; its wonderful ceilings fretted with patterns and pendants of plaster-work; its oak-panelled bedrooms; its attics big enough to house a whole regiment. Outside there are terraces and lawns of finest turf, where Troco and bowls used to be played nearly three hundred years ago; and walled gardens opening one into the other with beautiful wrought-iron gates of intricate pattern. The Virginian creeper climbs over the house, and veils the stone mullions of the deep embayed windows in a delicate tangled tracery of stems and leaves. Groups of tall red brick chimneys rise above the gables of the roof. And crowning the splendid western front—above the great entrance through a triple arched porch, above the exquisite oriel window that hangs out from the walls of the chapel-room—the Prince of Wales's three feathers, the badge that Edward the Black Prince won at Cressy, are carved in stone.
It seems a long way from Westminster Abbey to Bramshill House. But the two are connected in more ways than one with the young hero of our story. For King James the First began to build that fine old house as a hunting box for his son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. He brought those giant fir-trees from Scotland, that stand like sentinels on Hartford Bridge Flats and in Bramshill Park; and he planted them in groups here and there as a memento of his northern home, little dreaming that they would take so kindly to the soil, and that millions upon millions of their self-sown children would turn the bleak moorland into thick deep forest. Lastly it was in Bramshill Park that the writer's worthy ancestor, George Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, the dear friend and adviser of Henry, Prince of Wales, met with the misfortune that blighted his life. King James who was staying either at Bramshill, which had been bought by Lord Zouch, or at Elvetham close by, insisted on the archbishop going out shooting with him. And when, much against his will, the prelate consented, his shot aimed at a deer, glanced off a tree and killed one of the keepers instead. The archbishop was suspended from his office for a year, and it is said he never smiled again, a tradition that is borne out by his beautiful, sad portrait painted by Van Dyck.[58] It is not, however, with George Abbott, but with the young prince he loved so devotedly, that we have to do.
ENTRANCE TO BRAMSHILL HOUSE.