t aware at the time that his Grace was dead. Villiers
made an arrangement that when both were dead and the devil gave them a
holiday they would both hunt together on a certain moor.

"There be those whose word has been handed down to us," continues Calvert,
"who sware to having seen these two ahunting of a spirit fox with a spirit
pack of a moonlight night. I know one who hath in memory a song of that
day anent these two but it be so despert blasfemous that for the very fear
of injuring the chance of my own soul's salvation I do forbear to give it,
but if it be that you wish to copy on't, one Tom Cale a cobbler living in
Eastgate Pickering hath to my knowledge a copy on't."

[Illustration: THE HOUSE AT KIRBY MOORSIDE IN WHICH THE 2ND DUKE OF
BUCKINGHAM--THE FAVOURITE OF CHARLES II.--DIED.

The window of the bedroom is shown in the illustration. It is on the first
floor at the right hand side of the house.
]

The Duke lived to the age of sixty in spite of his life of unbridled vice,
and it seems that a sudden illness seized him after a hard day's hunting,
and he died at the house in Kirby Moorside where he was taken instead of
to Helmsley. The house is still standing, and one may even see the room in
which the reckless Duke expired. As may be seen from the illustration the
house is a good one, and at that time must have been, with one exception,
the best in the village. The lines by Pope descriptive of the favourite's
death are, therefore, quite unwarranted:--

"In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung,
The floors of plaster and the walls of dung."

It never was an inn, and the Rev. R. V. Taylor[1] has discovered that the
house was in the occupation of one of his tenants. I have carefully
examined the house without finding anything to suggest that such squalor
could have ever existed there. The staircase is very picturesque, and one
of the brass drop handles on the bedroom doors shows that the building was
a good one. The bedroom in which the Duke died has the fireplace blocked
up; there is a recessed window containing a seat, and the walls, where
they are panelled, are of fir, although the larger beams throughout the
house seem to be of oak.

[Footnote 1: "Yorkshire Notes and Queries," May 1904, p. 68.]

The sudden demise of this famous man must have created a sensation in the
village, and although the body was not buried at Kirby Moorside, the
parish register of that time has this illiterate entry[