pt.

It was about this time, that in one of her majesty's summer progresses
an incident occurred which the painter or the poet might seize and
embellish.

Passing through Northamptonshire, she stopped to visit her royal castle
of Fotheringay, then, or soon after, committed by her to the keeping of
sir William Fitzwilliam several times lord-deputy of Ireland. The castle
was at this time entire and magnificent, and must have been viewed by
Elizabeth with sentiments of family pride. It was erected by her remote
progenitor Edmund of Langley, son of king Edward III. and founder of the
house of York. By his directions the keep was built in the likeness of a
fetter-lock, the well known cognisance of that line, and in the windows
the same symbol with its attendant falcon was repeatedly and
conspicuously emblazoned. From Edmund of Langley it descended to his son
Edward duke of York, slain in the field of Agincourt, and next to the
son of his unfortunate brother the decapitated earl of Cambridge; to
that Richard who fell at Wakefield in the attempt to assert his title to
the crown, which the victorious arms of his son Edward IV. afterwards
vindicated to himself and his posterity.

In a collegiate church adjoining were deposited the remains of Edward
and Richard dukes of York, and of Cecily wife to the latter, who
survived to behold so many bloody deeds of which her children were the
perpetrators or the victims. Elizabeth, attended by all the pomp of
royalty, proceeded to visit the spot of her ancestors' interment: but
what was her indignation and surprise on discovering, that the splendid
tombs which had once risen to their memory, had been involved in the
same destruction with the college itself, of which the rapacious
Northumberland had obtained a grant from Edward VI., and that scarcely
a stone remained to protect the dust of these descendants and
progenitors of kings! She instantly gave orders for the erection of
suitable monuments to their honor: but her commands were ill obeyed, and
a few miserable plaster figures were all that the illustrious dead
obtained at last from her pride or her piety. These monuments however,
such as they are, remain to posterity, whilst of the magnificent castle,
the only adequate commemoration of the power and greatness of its
possessors, one stone is not left upon another:--it was levelled with
the ground by order of James I., that not a vestige might remain of the
last prison of his unhappy