242 THE ANCESTOR not mention it under that parish. The total price of these estates at twenty years' purchase was ;£728 14J. yj^. and this was actually paid to the Crown in 1543. The whole was to be held of the Crown as a twentieth of a knight's fee. Thus is the story finally demolished. The royal ride, the light-hearted gift, the alleged ancestor, the favourite courtier, the hatless king and the shoeless queen, exeunt omnes,
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Yet the London paper was perfectly right in its prophecy that much attention would be attracted by the interesting 'relics,' as the catalogue styles them, at the New Gallery. Whether even the absolute disproof of the whole story that we have given will put a stop to it may be doubted. For it is now some twenty years since Mr. J. A. C. Vincent demolished, in his ^een Elizabeth at Helmingham^ the very precise story that the queen had stayed there with the Tollemaches in 1561, stood sponsor to one of their sons, and presented them with her lute which is still preserved as a great treasure at Helming- ham. He was able to show that it was not Helmingham but Castle Hedingham in Essex that the queen had visited in 1561, and that the date on the lute itself did not confirm the tradition. Even Sir Bernard Burke admitted that the argument was
- overwhelming,' and that the visit, ' the royal christening and
the memorial lute have no reality.' And yet an evening paper recently mentioned, in speaking of Lord Tollemache, that ' Queen Elizabeth once visited Helmingham and presented a lute to the then Lady Tollemache.'
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How do these stories arise ? We cannot here raise the somewhat thorny and delicate subject of 'rehcs' in general, although it is one with which the student of the Middle Ages is called upon at times to deal. We will only invite the readers of The Ancestor to observe that a family tradition can assume, as we have seen, definite form and can even succeed in obtain- ing currency and receiving a certain sanction through a London exhibition organized by a committee of experts, although the entire story can be shown to have no foundation. Surely, ga donne a penser. The moral is one, we think, that hardly needs pointing, and if our readers should hesitate at times to accept the critical conclusions of the new scientific genealogy, we hope they will remember the value of tradition as exempli- fied by the hat of Henry VIII. and the shoes of Anne Boleyn.
