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 in 
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 “ Tell’s ’” 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* 
