LAMBETH PALACE 



perpetuated in the name by which the tower is best known. Thus 

 ' the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred 

 with their bones." 



There are people who, finding the stories they had believed ill 

 to be apocryphal, straightway lose their chief interest in history ; 

 for, robbed of its romance, it becomes to them merely a dry thing 

 of dates, and statistics, a catalogue of Acts of Parliament and 

 accounts of the struggles to get them passed, punctuated, and 

 relieved, here and there, by a battle, or a revolution. Hence, 

 while it is a good thing to bring criticism and research to bear upon 

 the perversions and exaggerations that distort historical fact, it is 

 not always necessary, while it is frequently undesirable, to sweep 

 away ruthlessly all the picturesque and innocent accretions that 

 may in time have grown round them. When a tradition apper- 

 taining to a person, or a place, is morally beautiful, inspiring 

 and harmless, when no memory is unfairly attacked by its accept- 

 ance, when there can be no question at all of giving even the devil 

 his due, it is surely a pity that it should be robbed of a shred of 

 its picturesqueness by means of a merciless investigation, that, 

 when accomplished, cannot in the least alter the trend of that 

 history of which it is, in all probability, merely an unimportant 

 side-issue. 



For example, childish faith in the stories of William Tell and 

 Fair Rosamond did nobody any harm, and what earthly interest can 

 we find in " TelPs " chapel on the shores of Lake Leman now that 

 we all know that the incident of the shooting of the apple from 

 the child's head is pure fiction, and since that most disagreeable 

 person, the iconoclastic historian, has gone so far as to assure 

 us that Tell himself never existed ? 



With regard to Fair Rosamond and the dreadful choice she had 

 to make, we cannot whitewash the memory of the jealous queen 

 by doing away with the bowl and the dagger, the labyrinth and 

 the clew ; for Eleanor, the divorced Queen of France before she 

 became Queen of England, was in no position to cast a stone at 

 the unhappy object of her hate. It is a sordid, ugly story, anyway, 

 though founded on solid fact, for there really was a beautiful 

 Rosamond Clifford, and, as I had occasion to mention in the first 

 chapter, Henry II. actually had a palace and a shooting lodge, 

 and a " parke " or chase, at Woodstock ; and if the poison-chalice 



35 3* 



