The monks escaped, however, owing to the refusal of the soldiers to carry out the King’s barbarous order. And at night the King dreamed that he was condemned at the Last Judgement to be scourged by the very monks he had intended to have slain. This dream--as did many similar ones at that time--made a great impression upon the King’s mind; and as an acknowledgement of the evil he had intended to do, he determined to found an Abbey for the accommodation of the monks of the Cistercian Order as a propitiatory act to the Almighty. It was at Beaulieu, which name means “fair spot,” and indicates the loveliness of its situation, that he built an abbey set amid primeval forest trees, and washed by the meadow-bordered waters of the River Exe, which widens out into Beaulieu Creek. The privilege of sanctuary was conferred upon the Abbey by Pope Innocent IV about 1235, and on several occasions celebrated personages availed themselves of the protection that the Abbey was thus able to afford. Claiming sanctuary the Countess of Warwick, wife of the King Maker, took refuge here in April, 1471, after landing from France at Southampton hard by, and learning of the defeat and death of her husband at the Battle of Barnet. A few days before, too, to Beaulieu also came Margaret of Anjou, who also landed on English soil on the day of the Battle of Barnet, with reinforcements for her husband, Henry VI. A few years later there hastened to Beaulieu a very different sanctuary seeker in the person of Perkin Warbeck, of ridiculous memory, the tool of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy and the Yorkists, in flight before the forces of King Henry VII. At the time of the suppression of the monasteries in 1539 to 1540 it is recorded that there were no less than thirty-two men, some with wives and families, living under the protection of the abbey walls. After its dissolution as a religious foundation the Abbey and its lands experienced various vicissitudes; passing into the possession successively of one Thomas Wriothesley, afterwards created Earl of Southampton; then, by marriage, into that of Lord Montagu, the founder of Buckler’s Hard; and afterwards into the family of the Duke of Buccleuch, also by marriage; and lastly was settled in 1884 by the then Duke on his second son, who three years later became first Baron Montagu of Beaulieu. The Abbey ruins are very fragmentary and much less extensive than is the case with many institutions of a similar character which were destroyed about the same time. Anciently the grounds had an area of more than a mile and a quarter, and the church--only a fragment of which now remains--then consisted of a lengthy nave, aisles, transepts with aisles, and apsed choir, with a lofty central tower crowning the whole. When the Abbey fell into the hands of the despoilers, much of the stone of which the church was built was taken away to Hurst and used to build the castle and fort at that place.