I went again to the cathedral, and, on seeing the monument of Edward ii a new historic doubt started which I pray you to solve.  His Majesty has a longish beard — and such were certainly worn at that time.  Who is the first historian that tells the story of his being shaven with cold water from a ditch and weeping to supply warm, as he was carried to Berkeley Castle?  Is not this apocryphal?  The house whence Bishop Hooper(115) was carried to the stake, is still standing, tale quale.  I made a visit to his actual successor, Warburton, ’who is very infirm, speaks with much hesitation, and, they say, begins to lose his memory.  They have destroyed the beautiful cross; the two battered heads of Henry iii. and Edward iii. are in the Postmaster’s garden.

Yesterday I made a jaunt four miles hence that pleased me exceedingly, to Prinknash, the individual villa of the abbots of Gloucester.  I wished you there with their mitre on.  It stands on a glorious, but impracticable hill, in the midst of a little forest of beech, and commanding Elysium.  The house is small, but has good rooms, and though modernized here and there, not extravagantly.  On the ceiling of the hall is Edward IVth’s Jovial device, a fau-con serrure.  The chapel is low and small, but antique, and with painted glass, with many angels in their coronation robes, i. e. wings and crowns.  Henry viii. and Jane Seymour lay here:  in the dining-room are their arms in glass, and of Catherine of Arragon, and of Brays and Bridges.  Under the window, a barbarous bas-relief head of Harry, young:  as it is still on a sign of an alehouse, on the descent of the hill.  Think of my amazement, when they showed me the chapel plate, and I found on it, on four pieces, my own arms, quartering my mother-in-law, Skerret’s, and in a shield of pretence, those of Fortescue certainly by mistake, for those of my sister-in-law, as the barony of Clinton was in abeyance between her and Fortescue Lord Clinton.  The whole is modern and blundered:  for Skerret should be impaled, not quartered, and instead of our crest, are two spears tied together in a ducal coronet, and no coronet for my brother, in whose time this plate must have been made, and at whose sale it was probably bought; as he finished the repairs of the church at Houghton, for which, I suppose, this decoration was intended.  But the silversmith was no herald, you see.

As I descended the hill, I found in a wretched cottage a child, in an ancient oaken cradle, exactly in the form of that lately published from the cradle of Edward ii.  I purchased it for five shillings; but don’t know whether I shall have fortitude enough to transport it to Strawberry Hill.  People would conclude me in my second childhood.