tell us that he has seen the vision of the White Lady who weeps and wrings her hands.
Or those two young cavaliers whose bones were found under the pavement of the cloister in the Fountain Court, and whose ghostly presence was felt in the rooms of a lady near; do they now sleep well where they lie in Hampton Churchyard? What tragedy lies behind their burying in the "Cloister Green "in hugger-mugger?
Edward VI.'s nurse, or Mistress Penn—not the "Mother Jak" (so labelled) of Holbein's drawing, whom we now know to be Margaret Clement, Sir Thomas More's adopted child[1]—cannot she rest in peace in Hampton Church under her fine tomb—she
"Whose virtue guided hath her shippe unto the quiet rode?"
She died in 1562 of small-pox, and her body reposed, they tell you, till 1829, when the old church was destroyed. She then returned to the Palace, and worked her ancient spinning-wheel in a room that had remained concealed for two centuries. She walks, so say those who have seen her, in a "long grey robe with a hood over her head, and her lanky hands out-stretched before her;" and, like Hamlet's father to the sentries "on their watch in the dead waist and middle of the night" she comes, and being challenged, passes into air.
Hampton Court is certainly the very place where
- ↑ This is one of the very few points where Mr. Ernest Law is at fault ("History of Hampton Court," vol. i. p. 197, note 2).
