ts back
and killed it, but was killed by the stag as it fell. It does not seem
impossible. Against the story of the keeper being killed in rescuing the
Queen, Mr. F.W. Smith, a local authority, has urged that Queen Elizabeth
would hardly have been hunting six weeks after the execution of Mary
Queen of Scots, and also when the Armada was almost on its way. But
nobody in England, certainly not Drake, ever stopped doing anything
because the Armada was coming, and as for hunting six weeks after the
death of Mary Queen of Scots, that would be nothing out of the way for
Queen Elizabeth. A huge oak, thirty feet in girth, is spoken of as the
tree under which the stag was killed at the Queen's feet, but nobody
could tell me where it was. There are many superb oaks in the gardens in
Walton and Weybridge. Once the whole district was included in Windsor
Park.

Hidden in a group of obscure cottages stands the old manor-house, partly
preserved as a curiosity, partly as an addition to a garden. The house
was not improved by an experience for some years as a tenement dwelling,
crowded with more families than it should have held. It was rescued from
that indignity by its present possessor, Mr. Lowther Bridger. Heavy
beams, oak panels, and a fine chimney-piece remain, relics of the Stuart
days when John Bradshaw, President of the Council, had the house.
Tradition, certainly wrongly, says that Bradshaw signed Charles's
death-warrant in the hall. Bradshaw, no doubt, signed it at Westminster.
But the association of his name would be enough for village gossip. "The
place where they cut off the king's head," is a variant of the story.

Above Walton Bridge are Coway Stakes, where Julius Caesar is supposed to
have crossed the Thames in pursuit of Cassivellaunus, king of the
Catuvellauni. The British chief drove sharpened stakes into the bed of
the river, to block the ford, and built a palisade along the bank, where
he waited for the enemy. They came on, cavalry and infantry, in spite of
the stakes. The Catuvellauni would have met them, but fled in horror at
the sight of an armoured elephant.

A great cricketer is buried in Walton churchyard, and a great astrologer
in the church. The cricketer was Lumpy Stevens, whom we met at Send. The
astrologer was William Lilly, author of a yearly publication, _Merlinus
Anglicus Junior_, a sort of Old Moore's Almanac. The prophecies of
storms, fires and disasters were as dull reading then as they are now,