GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



and Bonner was acting as an ecclesiastical sheriff in the most 

 refractory district of the realm." 



Be this as it may, his reputation for cruelty was so great that 

 Elizabeth, on her accession, refused to allow him to kiss her hand, 

 although he sat and voted in the Parliament and Convocation of 

 1559. 



The belief that Bonner's burly ghost for he was a corpulent 

 man haunts the gardens at Fulham and the north side of the great 

 quadrangle in which his private rooms had been, arose from the 

 popular belief that, owing to his misdeeds in life, his spirit could 

 find no rest in his grave. Strange to say, though he had been 

 interred by night, his ghost walked by day ! How long the legend 

 held is uncertain there may even be some living who believe 

 it now. Faulkner, writing a hundred years ago, gives the 

 story : 



" In the gardens of Fulham Palace," he says, " is a dark recess ; 

 at the end of it stands a chair, which once belonged to Bishop 

 Bonner. 



" A certain Bishop of London, one fine morning in the month of 

 June, more than two hundred years after the death of the afore- 

 said Bonner, just as the clock of the Gothic chapel had struck six, 

 undertook to cut with his own hand a narrow path through, 

 since called ' the Monks' Walk.' Just as he had begun to clear 

 the way, suddenly up started from the chair the ghost of Bishop 

 Bonner." 



The narrator goes on to tell us that, in a tone of bitter indigna- 

 tion, the ghost spoke, upbraiding the intruder, and uttering certain 

 verses which do not seem to me worth recording ; although the 

 weird tale itself has some significance as being the expression of 

 that popular detestation in which his memory is held. Bonner's 

 chair, long existing, has now disappeared ; but the scene of the 

 visitation was an arbour down by the moat, near a small orchard, 

 which lies between the Home Park, and a shrubbery contiguous to 

 Fulham Churchyard. 



If, as we have seen, a better man than Bonner, and one who was 

 as good a Catholic as he, had preceded him, so now, a better man, 

 who was an excellent Protestant, was his successor ; for high pur- 

 pose, purity of character, and humanity, are of the man, not of 

 his faith. 



68 



