THE YORK ROAD 327 



however I think is an allegory — but what is quite certain 

 about the place is that it was undoubtedly one of those 

 Maisons du Roi, as they were called, which in days gone 

 by, when the roads still had life in them, were placed at 

 the special service of kings and their retinues as they 

 passed here and there through England on royal pro- 

 gresses or quelling insurrections. Perhaps indeed as 

 well-known an historical event as can be chronicled — 

 (not an important historical event because they are as a 

 rule not well known) — took place in the three fine sitting 

 rooms, which were then one room, over the entrance 

 gateway of this celebrated inn. For here, on October 

 19th, 1485, Richard the Third signed the death-warrant 

 of the Duke of Buckingham. This in itself is an appe- 

 tizing fact to an imaginative traveller. > It is not often I 

 fancy that one can smoke the pipe of peace under a floor 

 which creaked four hundred years ago to the unequal 

 strides of a hunchbacked and irritable king. I thought 

 I heard Richard's voice myself when I was last at Grant- 

 ham, and the beautiful moulding in the oriel window of 

 the Angel smoking-room gave life to the illusion. 



It will be seen then perhaps from what I have said, 

 that at Stamford and Grantham are two as fine speci- 

 mens of the old hostelries of the great roads of England as 

 can be found, which, fed as they are by great lines of rail- 

 way, keep a generous life throbbing in their old hearts still. 

 But whether the inns at Grantham and Stamford are as 

 representative of the Coaching Age in its prime, as I 

 suppose them to be, or no, it is very certain that no 

 place more representative of the " Coaching Age 

 Decayed," than Stilton, is to be found on Earth. 



For here the Great Northern Railway has diverged 

 from the line of the old road, and by doing so has turned 

 a vast coaching emporium into a corpse of a town — if 

 town indeed Stilton could by any stretch of language 

 ever have been called. It was rather, in its best days, 

 a village clustering about two magnificent inns, the 

 Angel and the Bell, which still stare at each other stonily 



