Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/602

 confessed that the duke was smothered with pillows. His body was then undressed, covered with furred mantles, and a report spread that he had died of a fit of apoplexy while dressing for dinner. The Earl Marshal, who was nearly related to the duke, instantly put on mourning for him, as did all the English knights and squires in Calais. The body of the murdered man was then embalmed, put into a leaden coffin, and sent to England. It was landed at Hadleigh Castle, that fortress whose mossy ruins still look down upon the junction of the Thames and Medway. There the dishonoured corpse, to which nobody dared show respect, was put in a cart and sent, without escort, to Pleshy to be buried in the church of the Holy Trinity, which the duke himself had founded, and endowed with twelve canonries. Here at last the stern duke found real mourners; and the duchess, his son Humphrey, and his two daughters shed bitter tears of rage and grief at his murder, and double cause indeed had the duchess to grieve, for the king had just had her uncle, the Earl of Arundel, beheaded in Cheapside before his own eyes, and the Earl of Warwick banished for life to the Isle of Wight, "opposite the coast of Normandy."

Pleshy-Plaisant, the pleasant place, had become a desolation; God's vengeance may sometimes seem slow, but it is unerring—two years after the halberds of those Pontefract men of arms raised together, fell together, and when they fell they beat out the life of Richard of Bordeaux. In Shakespeare's Richard the Second—a play in which the poet has thrown a false halo of sympathy over an abandoned and ruthless king—he makes the widowed Duchess of Gloucester revile John of Gaunt for not revenging his brother's slaughter, and the mourning duchess sends a sorrowful and bitter message to York, her dead husband's second brother:

And in a later part of the same play the Duke of York at Ely House (Ely-place) commands a servant

Many a sorrowful day after, at Flint, and at Pontefract, Richard of Bordeaux must have thought of that fatal evening when at star rise "the murdered man" rode gaily beside him on the London-road, lured by treacherous flattery to a cruel death in the vaulted room at Calais.

Pipes and tabors sound your best, for Dunmow is hard by Pleshy, with its purple waves of clover not untenanted by bees; malthouse cowls peer out among the green trees. The crow honours Dunmow, not so much for the sake of its world-famous Flitch, as for having been the birthplace of one of those great originators who reshape the world on their lathes, and send it spinning on truer and faster. Lionel Lukin, the inventor of lifeboats, was born in this Essex village, and all advocates for local patriotism should desire to see a statue to him erected there, to incite future Dunmow men to direct their talents to as noble issues as Lukin. He obtained his patent in 1785. In 1789 a Mr. Henry Greathead, of South Shields, carried out a similar idea to meet a similar want, and by 1804 there had been thirty-one lifeboats built and three hundred lives saved. Mr. James Beeching, of Yarmouth, improved the lifeboat in 1851, and in 1852 the tubular lifeboat was patented by Mr. H. Richardson, "the challenger." In 1865 there were one hundred and eighty-five lifeboats on our coasts. In 1864 they and Captain Manby's invaluable rope-throwing rockets together had saved three thousand six hundred and nineteen lives, making, with the nine previous years, thirty-six thousand two hundred and sixty-one lives saved by the invention of Lionel Lukin, the noble man of Dunmow.

Ghosts of Beaumont and Fletcher hover round us while we tell of the old custom of Little Dunmow, referred to by Chaucer, and mentioned by Grose as a jocular tenure never to be forgotten. One of the Fitzwalters, in the early part of the thirteenth century, is said, after some sardonic reflections on the joys and sorrows, the roses and thorns of matrimony, to have first instituted the ceremony (circa May 3). He was probably the son of that "Mars of men," Robert Fitzwalter, father of Matilda the fair, a lady with whom King John fell madly in love. He banished her father, who was in the way, in 1213, and then sent a perfumed messenger to the lonely Matilda, with fresh protestations of his old suit; but she, being still cold, disdainful, and inexorable, the messenger, who either took it very much to heart, or else had conditional orders, poisoned the lady with a poached egg salted with arsenic.

The celebrated custom at Dunmow was to solemnly and rejoicingly present a flitch or gammon of bacon to any married couple who, a year and a day after their marriage, would take a prescribed oath that neither of them had repented their union, or had a word of quarrel. The claimants kneel on two uncomfortably sharp-pointed stones in the churchyard, and there, after certain other rites, take the following quaint oath: