have company, physicians, conference with his
creditors and friends about his debts and the
necessities of his estate, and helps for his
studies and writings. At St. Albans he says
he lived "upon the sword-point of a sharp
air, endangered if I go abroad—dull if I stay
within—solitary and comfortless, without
company, banished from all opportunities to treat
with any to do myself good, and to help out
any wrecks, and that which is one of my
greatest griefs, my wife, that hath been no
partaker of my offending, must be partaker of
the misery of my restraint." But time
gradually made Gorhambury less of a prison, and
Bacon expressed his resolve to study "not to
become an abbey lubber, as the old proverb
was, but to yield some fruit of my private life."
In those green shades he studied and meditated
with his chaplain, Dr. Romley, his faithful
secretary Meautys, his wise amanuensis Hobbs,
and his loving friend George Herbert. In
October, 1625, the autumn before he died, he
wrote to a friend:

"Good Mr. Palmer, I thank God by means
of the sweet air of the country I have obtained
some degree of health, and I would be glad in
this solitary time and place to hear a little from
you how the world goeth."

In his will he desired to be buried in St.
Michael's church, near St. Albans, for, says the
great philosopher, "There was my mother
buried, it is the parish church of my
mansion house of Gorhambury, and it is the
only Christian church within the walls of old
Verulam." In a niche formed by a bricked-up
window on the north side of the church which
is built of Roman tiles, is a marble statue of
Lord Bacon, which was erected by his faithful
secretary, Sir Thomas Meautys, who lies
himself beneath an almost plain stone at the feet
of his great Gamaliel. The statue, which
represents Bacon seated in "deep yet tranquil
thought," was the work of an Italian artist, and
below it is an inscription from the pen of Sir
Henry Wotton, the diplomatist, wit, and poet.
"SIC SEDEBAT, so he sat," says the epitaph.
Bacon is leaning back in a square-backed elbow-
chair, his head resting on his hand. He wears
a long, stately, furred robe and voluminous
trunk-hose, a laced ruff, sash garters, and shoes
adorned with large ribbon roses. His capacious
brow is partly hidden by a low-crowned broad-
brimmed hat. So sat the mighty Verulam!

At Bedford on the Ouse, the crow alights to
look for relics of honest John Bunyan, who
was born at Elstow, close by, who preached
in a barn on the site of the chapel now existing,
and who pined in the darkness of the old gate-
house prison on the bridge for twelve years,
during which he wrote his wonderful and
imperishable allegory. His rude chair is still
preserved in the chapel vestry, and the county
subscription library possesses his favourite
book, Fox's Book of Martyrs, two volumes
folio, black letter, which contain his autograph
and some uncouth quatrains written by him
under the rude woodcuts.

Another good man, Howard, the
philanthropist, is associated with Bedford,having
lived at Cardington, close by, where he
bought an estate. Howard was the son of
a rich Smithfield carpet-seller, and on his
way to Lisbon to observe the effect of the
great earthquake that had swallowed half that
city, Howard was taken prisoner by a French
privateer. His sufferings in France led his
mind to the question of the condition of prisons,
and the rest of his life was devoted to their
improvement. In 1774 he offered himself as
a candidate for Bedford, but was not returned,
in spite of his popularity among the Dissenters

Fast northwards from Bedfordshire into
Huntingdonshire, where the crow selects, amid
the pleasant hills and valleys brimmed with
golden corn and dark green woodland, the
Duke of Manchester's square and massive
castle of Kimbolton. The Montagues, from
Montacutus in Normandy, flourished here
from the time of the Conquest. Sir Edward
Montague, Lord Chief Justice of the Common
Pleas, was a member of the Privy Council of
Henry the Eighth, and one of that bluff tyrant's
sixteen executors. The castle was the scene of
that last touching episode in the history of
Katharine of Arragon, which Shakespeare has
so exquisitely dramatised. The ill-used,
insulted, deserted woman, had objected to
Fotheringay as unwholesome, and Kimbolton, which
she equally disliked, was then chosen for her.
A bill had just been published against the
king in Flanders, and he was raging mad at
the Pope and at all his adherents who would not
legalise the divorce. The queen's confessors
he had thrown into Newgate. Her nominal
income of five thousand a year, as Prince
Arthur's widow, was paid her only in driblets.
The brutal king even refused to let her see
her child. The queen's castellans regarded
with suspicion even her last interview with
her nephew Charles the Fifth's ambassador.
Henry shed tears over his wife's last
reproachful letter, but instantly sent a lawyer to
seize the property of the dead woman. The
queen, in her will, desired five hundred masses
to be said for her soul, and a pilgrimage to
Walsingham to be made on her behalf, and also
begged that all her gowns might be made into
church ornaments. She had wished to be
buried in a convent of Observant Friars, but
the king had her interred near the great altar
at Peterborough, an abbey which he spared
for her sake. Old Scarlett, the sexton, who
buried her, lived also to bury Mary, Queen of
Scots, in the same cathedral.

At the obsequies performed at Greenwich
the king and the court appeared in black, but
Anne Boleyn dressed herself in yellow, and
lamented the good end which her rival had
made. A chamber hung with tapestry is still
shown at Kimbolton as that in which Queen
Katharine expired. The hangings conceal
the door to a small ante-room. The duke
also preserves a travelling trunk, which is
covered with scarlet velvet, and bears upon
its lid the queen's initials and a regal crown.
As the latest historian of this unhappy woman
has well observed, among many eulogists,