Notes and Queries, Number 27, May 4, 1850 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 74 pages of information about Notes and Queries, Number 27, May 4, 1850.

Notes and Queries, Number 27, May 4, 1850 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 74 pages of information about Notes and Queries, Number 27, May 4, 1850.
conducted to the scaffold out of the window of the Banqueting House.’  Ludlow, who tells us this, was one of the regicides, and what he states, simply and straightforwardly, is confirmed by any engraving of the execution, published at Amsterdam in the same year, and by the following memorandum of Vertue’s on the copy of Terasson’s large engraving of the Banqueting House, preserved in the library of the Society of Antiquaries:—­’It is, according to the truest reports, said that out of this window King Charles went upon the scaffold to be beheaded, the window-frame being taken out purposely to make the passage on to the scaffold, which is equal to the landing-place of the hall within side.’  The window marked by Vertue belonged to a small building abutting from the north side of the present Banqueting House.  From this window, then the King stept upon the scaffold.”

We shall probably next week indulge in a few QUERIES which have suggested themselves to us, and to which Mr. Cunningham will perhaps be good enough to reply.

       * * * * * {437}

ANECDOTE OF CHARLES I.

I have great pleasure in forwarding to you an anecdote of the captivity of Charles I., which I think will be considered interesting to your readers.  Of its authenticity there can be no doubt.  I extract it from a small paper book, purchased some fifty years since, at Newport, in the Isle of Wight, which contains the history of a family named Douglas, for some years resident in that town, written by the last representative, Eliza Douglas, at the sale of whose effects it came into my grandfather’s hands.  There are many curious particulars in it besides the anecdote I have sent you; especially an account of the writer’s great-great-grandfather (the husband of the heroine of this tale), who “traded abroad, and was took into Turkey as a slave,” and there gained the affections of his master’s daughter, after the most approved old-ballad fashion; though, alas! it was not to her love that he owed his liberty, but (dreadful bathos!) to his skill in “cooking fowls, &c. &c. in the English taste;” which, on a certain occasion, when some English merchants came to dine with his master, “so pleased the company, that they offered to redeem him, which was accepted; and when freed he came home to England, and lived in London to an advanced age; so old that they fed him with a tea-spoon.”

After his death his wife married again; and it was during this second marriage that the interview with King Charles took place.

“My mother’s great-grandmother, when a-breeding with her daughter, Mary Craige, which was at y’e time of King Charles being a prisoner in Carisbrook Castle, she longed to kiss the King’s hand; and when he was brought to Newport to be carried off, she being acquainted with the gentleman’s housekeeper, where the King was coming to stay, till orders for him to leave the island, she went
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Notes and Queries, Number 27, May 4, 1850 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.