Lord Middlesex. She gave him no further heirs, but brought considerable addition to his estates. “An unseemly woman,” so ran her husband’s comment, “and of a most unseemly temper, of which I would have none. She was red as a fox, but rich.” But these events (apart perhaps from the birth of his two sons) were no more than acts of routine in his career, his passion was the creation of this palace and pleasaunce of Stanier. Only twelve years had elapsed between the day when he had gone, a bare-footed shepherd boy with his crook and his lamb, to wait upon the Queen at Brede, and now at her death he retired from Court life and came back, Earl and Knight of the Garter, to his estates at Tillingham. His father’s farm was close by, where the “drunken old sot” still lived, and Colin, coveting it for the completion of his gardens, found a way to dispute the ownership, claiming that it was part of the monastic land devised him by the Queen, and turned the old man out. He gave him, however, a decent enough dwelling-place for a man of his station, and adequate maintenance, and further allowed him to draw on his brewery for unlimited ale, making only the provision that the old man should never attempt to see him or obtain access to him: otherwise his maintenance should be withheld. This indulgence in the matter of the brewery may have been kind in intention, for assuredly the old man was fond of beer, but the effect was that he did not long enjoy the bounty. He was oftener drunk than sober, and, before the year was up, he had a stroke of which he died. Meantime the great house was rising rapidly, and in two years was complete up to the lettered balustrade, where you might read in Latin that, unless the Lord built the house, their labour was but lost that built it, and into it Lord Yardley poured the treasures that he was constantly acquiring: Oriental carpets, and French Tapestries, Chinese porcelain, Greek marbles, and Italian pictures: all arts and ages were sought by him, for there was kinship in all fine work, and a Greek relief of Heracles and Hylas might be flanked by a crucifixion by Tintoret on one side, and a portrait by Rembrandt on the other. He made, too, a wonderful collection of occult and magical books, that told the student how he might acquire supernatural powers, and among them was a missal, as Colin read “of wondrous blasphemies”.... Out of doors the work was pushed forward with the same expedition: the great terraced garden to the south of the house was levelled and stepped and encircled by the yew-hedge: below, the dam was pushed out across the dip of the valley in which had stood the house of his youth, and the lake formed. He planted, too, on the bare upland east of the house the oaks that flourished there now.