Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 3.djvu/291

 ns.m.A,KiLi5,i9ii.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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hand if you know of any : if you know not, enquire ot some against ye next returne of ye carrier, but in the mean time neglect not to send now that which I have now written for. Iterum Vale. [No signa- ture.]

[Addressed :] " To my very loving friend Mr. Clement Knight at ye holy Lambe in Paules Church- yard These."

C. C. STOPES.

HARE FOLK-LORE AND EASTER. One rarely meets with items of folk-lore in the Calendar of State Papers, but in the volume for 1619-23, Domestic, under date 6 April, 1620, Thomas Fulixetby writes to Lord Zoueh to beg leave to kill a hare on Good Friday, as huntsmen say that those who have not a hare against Easter must eat a red herring. W. B. GERISH.

HARRISON THE REGICIDE. The ancestry of the notorious regicide Major -General Thomas Harrison was in 1880 the subject of a contribution to ' N. &Q.' (6 S. ii. 383) by the late COL. J. L. CHESTER. The writer referred to a will in the P.C.C., dated 13 May, 1656, of one Ralph Harrison of Highgate, Middlesex, by which he appointed his son-in- law Thomas Harrison sole executor. On 10 December, 1660, letters of administration " de bon is non " were granted to Catherine Harrison, daughter of the testator, as Thomas Hp.rrison the executor had since died. COL. CHESTER suggested that this Thomas Harrison was identical with the regicide, and based his opinion on the fact that the name of the Major-General's wife was Catherine, as is proved by the registers of St. Ann, Blackfriars, and that the execution of Harrison in May, 1660, agrees in time with the death of the executor of the will.

I am not sure if since COL. CHESTER wrote any fresh information has come to light, but I have recently found a Chancery suit (Bridges before 1714, bundle 39, No. 30) which clears up the doubt as to the identity of the executor of the will with that of the Parliamentary general. It is sufficient to say that the subject of the suit was a dispute between Richard Dawlman of the Middle Temple and the Lord Mayor of London and Hester Harrison, widow of Ralph Harrison, concerning the lease of some property in the Manor of Finsbury. The bill states that Ralph Harrison made Thomas Harrison, "lately called Major -General Thomas Harrison, since dead," his sole executor, and that Harrison proved the will, but that he was shortly after sent a prisoner to the Tower by order of Cromwell, and soon after died.

This clearly proves that COL. CHESTER was right in his opinion, but it still leaves uncer- tain if there was any relationship between the family of Thomas Harrison and that of his wife. It has been said that the regicide was of humble extraction, but his father-in- law seems to have been a man of some substance. He is probably the Ralph Harrison of Bread Street Ward mentioned in a List of the Principal Inhabitants of London in 1640 (Misc. Gen. et Her., Second Serie, vol. ii.).

A. J. C. GUIMARAENS.

WELLINGTON STATUES IN LONDON. A very unlikely source of information on this subject, ' Passages from the Private and Official Life of the late Alderman Kelly,' by the Rev. R. C. Fell, provides a few interest- ing facts. Kelly was Lord Mayor in June, 1837, when a committee \vas formed and subscriptions invited to erect an equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington in the centre of the City.

" Some hesitation was felt by the Committee- in the choice of an artit for the work, the doubt lying between Mr. \\yatt and Sir Francis Chan- trey. At a meeting held for the purpose of finally settling the point, there being only twenty-six out of the forty members of the Committee present, and the votes being equally divided, the casting vote fell to the Lord Mayor, who gave it in favour of Sir Francis. The decision, in effect, gave two statues to the Duke, instead of one ; for Mr. Wyatt's friends, disappointed at the result, subse- quently got up a second subscription for a kindred purpose, eventually charging that gentleman with the execution of the elaborate work, now standing in front of Apsley House."

The dissatisfaction at the Committee's decision was not confined to Wyatt's friends. Evidently the City site was not considered suitable for a national memorial, and merely an equestrian statue was by many thought inadequate. In 1839 there was issued ton Memorial and the Waterloo Model, with a Suitable Elevation, by F S T.' This simply advocates the purchase of Siborn's model of the Battle of Waterloo, and its preservation as an illustrative memorial in a temple situated in a park. The elevation shows a domed edifice having statuary on projecting plinths, and busts in niches. Its principal entrance resembles the centre of Decimus Burton's screen at Hyde Park Corner, but two lions guard it, and it is sur- mounted by an equestrian statue of the- Duke. The whole ingenious proposal was. an alternative to the scheme advanced by Wyatt's friends, and it is said that ita adoption "will not incur a greater outlay
 * Remarks on the Connexion of the Welling-