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Swindon and its Neighbourhood — No. 2. 



broad ones. The fussiest gentleman upon this occasion appears to 

 have boen a certain Sir John Harrington, of Kelston, near Bath, 

 a courtier of some celebrity, who had borrowed money from Mr. 

 Sutton, and was continually proposing some scheme, in which he 

 did not neglect his own interests. One was that Mr. Sutton should 

 leave all his property to the Duke of York (afterwards Charles II.)- 

 in return for which Harrington undertook to say that Sutton should 

 be made a peer of the realm. Duke Charles probably made no 

 objection to this little arrangement : but Mr. Sutton did. A letter 

 which he wrote upon the subject to the Lord Chancellor is so manly 

 that I must read it : — 



" May it please your Lordship. I understand that his Majesty " [then King 

 James I.] "is possessed by Sir John Harrington (as I imagine), or by some 

 other by his means, that I intend to make his son, the Duke of York, my heir : 

 whereupon it is reported that his Majesty proposeth to bestow the honour of a 

 Baron upon me : whereof, as I am unworthy, so I vow to God and to your Lord- 

 ship, I never harboured the least thought or proud desire of any such matter : 

 and now I am going to my grave, to gape for honours might be accounted mere 

 dotage in me, so unworthy a person. I confess unto your Lordship that this 

 knight (Harrington) hath often been tampering with me to that purpose, to 

 entertayne honour and to make the noble Duke my heir : to whom I made answer 

 that, if he had due regard to wit or honesty, he would never have engaged him- 

 self in this business, so egregiously to delude his Majesty and wrong me." 



Harrington then suggested a more respectable application of the 

 money; viz., to the restoration of Bath Abbey Church, which had 

 been for many years left in a most ruinous and deplorable condition, 

 and he urged the old gentleman to do it in his lifetime by this 

 among other pithy arguments : — " Almsgiving in one's life is like 

 a candle carried before one, whereas alms after death is like a candle 

 carried behind one." By way of making this hint more palatable, 

 he at the same time strongly recommended the use of the Bath 

 waters, as very likely to make a lame old man young again. But 

 Mr. Sutton had a mind of his own, and had made it up unchange- 

 ably. This was, to found a " Hospital " and endow it with the 

 estates he had bought in Cambridgeshire, Wiltshire, and elsewhere. 



An idea has been encouraged by some writers that Mr. Sutton 

 was satirized by Ben Jonson in the character of Volpone, in the 

 play called " The Fox," and so he has sometimes been spoken of as 



