/Il>a5ters of tbe IRogal Bucftboun&s 201 



there passed the hereditary Mastership, which, however, 

 the Watsons do not appear to have claimed. 



The first Master of the Privy or Household Buckhounds 

 was the ill-starred George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, 

 whose name is mixed up with one of the foulest scandals 

 in English history. Like the rest of his family, George 

 Boleyn was not hampered in his actions by any scruples 

 of honour or morality. He took it as a piece of good 

 luck that his mother and his eldest sister should, by the 

 sacrifice of their chastity, have won the King's favour, 

 and when his younger sister played her cards so well as 

 to inveigle the monarch into matrimony, he saw that 

 his future was made. One good thing after another 

 fell to his lot, and among them the Mastership of the 

 Buckhounds, for which he was eminently qualified, for he 

 was a bold horseman and a keen sportsman. A handsome 

 and gallant youth he was, too, with a pretty gift of verse. 

 But the luck of the Boleyns was short-lived. 



George was implicated in the horrible charges brought 

 against his sister Anne. Whether he were guilty or not we 

 shall never know, but it is certain that he died on the scaf- 

 fold with words on his lips which appeared to the specta- 

 tors to be, if not a confession, at any rate something very 

 nearly approaching it. There is a legend which, for the 

 credit of human nature, one is loth to believe, that Henry, 

 on the morning of Anne Boleyn's execution, was out 

 with his huntsman and the buckhounds at Pleshet, near 

 Eastham, in Epping Forest ; that he stood there on a 

 knoll waiting eagerly to hear the signal gun from the 

 Tower which should announce the death of his faithless 

 queen, and that the instant the boom of the cannon 

 reached his ears, he cried, ' Ha ! ha ! The deed is done. 

 Uncouple the hounds, and let us follow the sport.' 



