Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/349

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
SIR "JUDAS" STUKELEY
285

to him, is willing to sett the saddle upon the right horse, and accuses his Master."[1]

But the accusation was not pressed. King James owed Stukeley too deep a debt to let him suffer, and he threw him a pardon, so that the evidence against him was not gone into. It may be remembered that "Lusty" Stukeley had also been implicated in clipping and coining, and had only escaped arrest by flying the country.

Stukeley, an outcast from society in London, went down to Affeton. But even there he was ill-received. The gentry would not speak to him, his own retainers viewed him with a cold, if not hostile, eye, and rendered him but bare obedience.

The brand of Cain was on him, and he fled from the society of his fellow men to the isle of Lundy, and shut himself up in the lonely, haunted tower of the De Mariscoes. There he went raving mad and perished (1620), a miserable lunatic on that rock, surrounded by the roaring of the waves and the shrieks of the wind. His body was conveyed to South Molton, so that he was denied even a grave beside his ancestors at Affeton.

For authorities, see Gardiner, Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage, Vol. I, London, 1869; Dr. Brushfield's Raleghana, Part VII; the Dictionary of National Biography, s.n.; and the various Lives of Raleigh.

  1. Letter from T. Lorkin to Sir T. Puckering.