Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/93

 s. vii. FEE. 2, i9oi.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

85

to personate the deposed monarch, and was dressed up in royal robes and escorted by these nobles. The primary object was to seize the new king at a tournament at Oxford, but this failed, and a strong body of conspirators and their retainers marched to London. Thence they proceeded to Ciren- cester. As Froissart says :

" They came to a strong town called Soncestre, which had a bailiff attached to King Henry for the guard of the town and defence of the adjacent parts,"

and by the same authority the bailiff is called "a valiant and prudent man, and much attached to King Henry." He collected all the forces he could muster, amounting to some two thousand men, and completely defeated the insurgents, who did not number more than three hundred. The Earls of Huntingdon* and Kent were slain, with many other' leaders of the insurrection, and their heads sent as a present to Henry TV. and the Londoners "in two panniers, as fish is carried, by a varlet on horseback " ; and the heads of the Earl of Salisbury and Lord de Spencer were also forwarded to the same quarter. To this gruesome present Shakspere refers :

Northumberland. The next news is, I have to

London sent

The heads of Salisbury, Spencer, Blunt and Kent. Enter Fitzwater.

Fitzwater. My lord, I have from Oxford sent to

London The heads of Brocas and Sir Bennet Seely.

'Richard II.,' V. v.

We read in Jewish history of the heads of Ahab's sons being laid in two heaps at the en- trance to Jezreel as an acceptable present to Jehu, and in after ages of the head of John the Baptist having been presented to her mother by the daughter of Herodias, but one scarcely expected such a present to have been offered in later times "to rejoice the king and his Londoners," as Froissart observes. The date of this is January, 1400.

The remains of the young Earl of Kent were reinterred at Mount Grace Priory, in Yorkshire, a Carthusian house which he had founded, having been removed from the Abbey of Cirencester, where they had been buried ; but the exact place of his tomb at Mount Grace is unknown. The priory, founded in 1397, was one of the nine Car- thusian houses in England, and remains one of the most interesting ruins in this country. In it may be seen the remarkable

T*ir t ' in asserti n? that Sir John Holand, Uarl of Huntingdon, was slain at Cirencester. must be wrong, as he was beheaded at Fleshy in Essex, 7 January, 1400.

difference existing between the arrangements of a Cistercian or Benedictine monastery and of a Carthusian priory.

It may be worth noting that Aumerle, who so narrowly escaped from the meshes of the conspiracy and its punishment, sub- sequently became Duke of York ; and he it was who said to his cousin Henry V., on the eve of the battle of Agincourt :

My lord, most humbly on my knee I beg The leading of the vaward.

'Henry V.,' IV. iii.

He fell valiantly upon St. Crispin's Day, 25 October, 1415, one of the very few Englishmen that were slain, if we may believe Shakspere :

[Herald presents another paper.] Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire : None else of name ; and of all other men But five-and-twenty.

'Henry V.,' IV. viii.

As to the prime inventor of the plot, the Abbot of Westminster, what his fate was I cannot say, but most probably it was a violent death. Shakspere thus indirectly alludes to it :

Percy. The grand conspirator, Abbot of West- minster,

With clog of conscience and sour melancholy Hath yielded up his body to the grave.

' Richard II., ' V. vi.

Thus did the Abbot's plot fail in effecting the overthrow of King Henry IV., and result in the destruction of those who combined for the purpose. Henry's whole reign was disturbed by insurrections and conspiracies, and never were the words of Shakspere. "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown," applied with greater truth to any sovereign than to Henry Bolingbroke.

JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge.

'N..& Q.' IN FICTION.

"As she sipped a cup of tea she studied the room in which she sate and found it as distinguished and original as its mistress. There was a Chippendale cabinet and a Chippendale bookcase gleaming with classics in English, French, and German, and a long set of Notes and Queries." 'The Mantle of Elijah,' by Israel Zangwill, book ii. chap. ix.

J. L. HEELIS.

" CABA." The ' H.E.D.' notes this as "U.S.," giving a citation dated 1885. The word occurs in chap, xxxiv. of Charlotte Bronte's 'Villette' (1853): "The patterns for the slippers, the bell-ropes, the cabas were selected, the slides and tassels for the purses chosen." A caba, in Philadelphia, used to mean a hand-bag or satchel carried by a lady. It has been sug-