tyrannical severity the jury who acquitted him. This was under Queen Mary, at the same time that she held her sister Elizabeth a prisoner in the Tower.*

Early in Elizabeth's reign the unbounded influence of this statesman secured places under the government for many of his relations, and jobs and favors of various kinds for others.† Among the rest, his son Thomas obtained from the crown a valuable lease of land at a moderate rent, conditioned, however, to be void upon non-payment of the rent for forty days after it fell due.

A default in payment occurred, and the capricious queen failed to show the indulgence that might have been expected. Taking advantage of the technical forfeiture, she treated the lease as absolutely void, and conveyed the inheritance to a third party, who afterwards conveyed to Sir Moyle Finch. Finch then made a new lease, and Throckmorton sued Finch's lessee in the Court of Exchequer in an action of ejectment.

The result was a total defeat for Throckmorton. The court upheld Finch's title. They decided that by reason of the forfeiture for non-payment of rent to the queen, the title of the queen had become absolute, and with it of course her right to convey the land away. Throckmorton took out a writ of error, but the judgment was finally affirmed in the exchequer chamber. Sir Edward Coke was at that time attorney-general, and was of counsel for Finch, representing as well the interest of the queen.

Much to the disgust of Finch, who was congratulating himself upon having at last reached the last hair in the tail of litigation, and very little to the satisfaction of the queen, whose claims had been triumphantly vindicated, and to the absolute horror of Sir Edward Coke as a common lawyer, Throckmorton had the presumption to appeal for relief to the chancellor. Notwitstanding a final judgment against him in the common-law court of last resort, and that upon a controverted question of title to real estate, he filed a bill to be relieved against the technical forfeiture, and to be relieved from the effect of the judgment. CHARLES E. PHELPS.

(To be continued.)

* 4 Holingshed Chron., 31-55; 1 Howell, State Trials, 1554.

See a pamphlet, bound with Peck's "Memoirs of Milton," entitled "Legend

of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton."

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE MULBERRY TREE.

IN 1758 a mulberry tree at Stratford-on-Avon was known as Shakespeare's. In 1760 a lady who visited Stratford-upon-Avon wrote a letter to a friend-which was unearthed by Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps— in which, referring to that part of the epitaph on Shakespeare's tomb which says that "envious death" had taken away the dramatist, she said that "death, however, in taking Shakespear from the world so early, is, I think, far outdone by a man now living in or near this town; for there was till lately the house in which Shakespear lived and a mulberry tree of his planting, the house large, strong and handsome, the tree so large that it would shade the grass-plat in your gar. den, which I think is more than twenty yards square, and supply the whole town with mulberries every year; as the curiosity of this house and tree brought much fame and more company and profit to the town, this man, on some disgust, has pulled the house down so as not to leave one stone upon another, and cut down the tree and piled it as a stack of firewood, to the great vexation, loss and disappointment of the inhabitants; however, an honest silversmith bought the whole. stack of wood, and now makes many odd things of this wood for the curious."

Whence all this wood? There is a great deal of possibility in a supposition that when the mulberry tree was domesticated in England. by the royal interest in an attempt to encourage the silk industry, Shakespeare, the most prominent resident of Stratford-an always important town-may have received some shoots or saplings in the general distribution, and so planted them in his garden. He certainly would have planted them nowhere else. Sir Hugh Clopton, who, as we have elsewhere noted,* lived in New Place up to about 1751, died in 1751, and his representatives sold the estate to Gastrell. Is there not something to be said for even Gastrell? A tree of a family not indigenous to the soil, of half a century's growth, might well have become dangerous, or at least inconveniently large.

The letter of the lady is enough to show that there were tradition and pieces of mulberry wood, and if Gastrell cut down the tree at all, he must have cut it down prior to the year 1760, when the lady wrote her letter. Already the tradition is therefore found to have something unusual in traditions-an approximate date of inception. A lawyer would perhaps say that such a tradition would have no legal value, because it did not date from a time "when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary," as the jargon was and is to this day.

*Ante, Vol. VII., p. 151.

Be this as it may, we group herewith from Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps "Outlines" such desultory evidence as he was able to gather:

I. Tobacco-stoppers, said to have been made from Shakespeare's mulberry tree, can be proved to have been on sale in Stratford-uponAvon as early as the year 1759. The sale reached to Birmingham, where one Moody, a toyseller, in that year sold one of them to Shenstone, the poet. In 1760 an inkstand made of the alleged wood was presented by the corporation to the steward to the Court of Record, and his letter of thanks found its way into Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps' possession.

II. The "honest silversmith " mentioned in the letter of the lady above was ascertained to have been named Thomas Sharp, and one Thomas Gibbs, who was his apprentice or assistant, was alive in 1863, and told Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps that Sharp bought the whole tree, as felled, from Gastrell's gardener for firewood; that when he (Sharp) began to dispose of the tobacco-stoppers, etc., doubts began to be expressed as to the volume of material called for, and that Sharp thereupon made an affidavit, copies of which he gave away with the articles he sold, which ran to the effect that "Gastrell cut down the mulberry tree and cleft it as firewood, when the greatest part was purchased by me, the said Thomas Sharp, who employed one John Luckman to convey it to my own premises, where I have worked it into. many curious toys and useful articles from the same." Thomas Gibbs added to this the detail that Thomas Sharp bought, as Gastrell sold, the wood for firewood, but that when sitting before a fire upon which some of it was burning (and indeed after many instalments of it had been consumed) it occurred to him to sell it as relics, and he snatched the burning wood from the fire.

Entries Nos. 78, 79, 80 and 179 of the Halliwell-Phillipps' " Rarities" are respectively:

78. The original memorandum-book of Thomas Sharp, the clockmaker of Stratford-on-Avon, who purchased the wood of Shakespeare's mulberry tree when it was cut down in the middle of the last century. This manuscript came afterwards into the hands of Sharp's only surviving assistant, Thomas Gibbs, whose note at page 186 shows how he came into the possession of some pieces of the mulberry wood, the few remaining portions of which were purchased by me at the sale of his effects in 1866.

79. A small piece of the wood of Shakespeare's mulberry tree, interesting as being an unworked fragment as it must have originally appeared, nearly all the bark still remaining. This is one of the few bits of the wood that are mentioned in the preceding article as having been in the possession of Thomas Gibbs at the time of his decease. He died in 1866, aged 84.

80. A small tea-caddy, one of the best specimens extant of Sharp's

carved work from the wood of the poet's mulberry tree, with the original stamped note, Shakespear's Wood, Sharp, Stratford-on Avon." Sharp purchased the wood about the year 1759, and traded in relics made from it until his death in 1799, but the present specimen. has every appearance of belonging to one of the earlier years of that period. Five inches long, 34 wide, 4 deep.

197. A copy of verses by R. P. Jodrell on the mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare and cut down by the Rev. Francis Gastrell.

III. In the archives of the corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon there is a bill from Sharp dated 1760 for portions of this wood, either worked or unworked, supplied by him upon two occasions.

IV. The well-known R. B. Wheler told Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps that he recollected his father saying that, when a boy, he assisted in breaking Gastrell's windows in revenge for the fall of the tree, adding, however, "it is well known that neither of these trees, that at New Place and one in Old Town, nor that growing in the Lion garden, nor any other reported as such, ever sprung from Shakespeare's tree; many people are willing enough to affirm their own as a scion from the celebrated tree, but unfortunately their tales are foolish and improbable when examined."

V. In a plan of Stratford made in 1802, the “spot on which grew Shakespeare's mulberry" is marked as being in that garden, but apparently at some little distance westward from the present tree.

VI. A letter from Malone to Davenport, dated in April, 1788, in which he says: "Old Mr. Macklin, the player, who is now playing with wonderful vigor in the eighty-eighth year of his age, informs me that Mr. Garrick and he paid a visit to Stratford about the year 1744, and were hospitably entertained by Sir Hugh Clopton, then a very old gentleman; his memory, however, is by no means accurate." Denis Delane, the actor, was in company with Garrick and Macklin on the occasion. ("Ireland's Views," 1795, p. 201.)

VII. The testimony of Jordan, saying that "the mulberry tree in the garden of New Place, planted by Shakespeare, was grown to a very large size, with wide-spreading boughs that shaded many yards of ground, under which were placed benches to sit on in the shade, and which I have heard Sir Hugh Clopton took great delight in showing to those whose curiosity excited them to visit the last memorial. of immortal Shakespeare." (MS. at Stratford-on-Avon, repeated in nearly the same words in another MS. by the same writer.)

VIII. Theobald's statement that Sir Hugh Clopton valued the mulberry tree on account of its having been planted by Shakespeare.

IX. Thomas Sharp, the aforesaid relic-carver, in a declaration made upon oath shortly before his death in 1799, asserted that "I was personally acquainted with Sir Hugh Clopton, knight, barristerat-law and one of the heralds-at-arms, who was son of Sir John Clop

ton, knight, that purchased a certain messuage or house near the chapel in Stratford, called the New Place, of the executors of Lady Elizabeth Barnard, and granddaughter of Shakespear; and that I have often heard the said Sir Hugh Clopton solemnly declare that the mulberry tree which growed in his garden was planted by Shakespear, and he took pride in shewing it to and entertaining persons of distinction whose curiosity excited them to visit the spot known to be the last residence of the immortal bard."

X. Malone's statement that "the Rev. Mr. Davenport informs me that Hugh Taylor, who is now (1790) eighty-five years old and an alderman of Warwick, says he lived when a boy at the next house to New Place; that his family had inhabited the house for almost three hundred years; that it (the fact of Shakespeare planting the tree) was transmitted from father to son during the last and the present century; that this tree, of the fruit of which he had often eaten in his younger days, some of its branches hanging over his father's garden, was planted by Shakespeare, and that till this was planted there was no mulberry tree in that neighborhood. Mr. Taylor adds that he was frequently when a boy at New Place, and that this tradition was preserved in the Clopton family as well as his own." ("Life of Shakespeare, ed. 1790, p. 118.)

XI. One Charles Oakes, in an affidavit made in a lawsuit in 1807, supported by recollections of Stratford extending to the period of Gastrell's residence there, says that the garden which was opposite the vicar's garden wall, the latter near the chapel and in Chapel Lane, "was called the Shakespeare Garden, being the garden on the north side of the lane, and so called from the mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare growing therein."

As to Gastrell's excuse for removing in the first instance the great tree, which act became the fruitful cause for so much wanton destruction of precious matter, Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps is disposed to be lenient. He says:

"Several accounts agree in stating that it [the mulberry tree] had attained a great magnitude with overhanging boughs, the trunk being in a state of decay, and indeed it is most probable that a tree of a century and a half's growth would have been of a very considerable size, the soil of Stratford being peculiarly favorable to the luxuriant growth of the mulberry. If planted at all near the house, its boughs would certainly have overshadowed some of the rooms at the back. Davies, in his 'Life of Garrick,' the first edition of which appeared in 1780, expressly asserts that' the mulberry tree planted by the poet's own hand became an object of dislike to this tasteless owner of it because it overshadowed his window and rendered the house, as he thought, subject to damps and moisture.' Here is a plausible reason given for the removal of the tree, which may have been accomplished somewhat