SOME OLD LEGENDS

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 154, 28 December 1936, Page 14

SOME OLD LEGENDS

OF ELIZABETHAN AGE

Professor J. E. Neale, the historian, who gave a lecture at the "Sunday Times" Book Exhibition in London, dealt with some of the extravagant legends of the Elizabethan age, says the "Daily Telegraph." Professor Neale said that Elizabeth's reign contained more mysteries and problems than any other in English history. According to. one legend, Elizabeth herself was sent as a child to the Gloucestershire village of Bisley where, being neglected, she died. When a visit of Henry VIII was announced her terrified guardians substituted one of her playmates, a boy named Neville. Henry was satisfactorily deceived, and Neville kept up the imposture for the rest of his life. The weakness of this story, which later took on some of the atmosphere of the tale of the Sleeping Beauty, was that Elizabeth as a child was never in Gloucestershire. From the famous Casket Letters of Mary Q'usen of Scots, long believed forged but now thought to be at least in part authentic, Professor Neale turned to the legend of the ring on Elizabeth's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The story was that she died of a broken heart after the dying Countess of Nottingham had confessed she intercepted the ring which Elizabeth was supposed to have given to Essex with the promise that on sight of it she would come to his aid. By the end of the eighteenth century two identical rings existed", but, in fact, the story was nonsense, and it had been shown also that the gruesome story that Elizabeth's body exploded after her death originated in a Jesuit tract.