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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. 
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