Here, too, was buried the Princess Cecilia Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV, who was a beauty of her age, and after the marriage of her sister Elizabeth to Henry VII became Lady Welles. The second husband of this unconventional Princess was a commoner, one Master Thomas Kyme or Kyne, to whom she is stated to have borne two children. After her second marriage she retired to Standen, and lived there for a period of three years (1504-7), dying at the age of thirty-eight. The memorials of all these were defaced or utterly destroyed at the time of the suppression of the religious houses. The Abbey was fully fortified in the reign of Edward III by Royal licence, as it had been attacked in a previous reign by the French pirates who made periodical descents upon our coasts, and was on account of its great wealth “in treasure as well as lands” liable to future attack. The stout stone wall which was built to encircle it enclosed an area of no less than forty acres. Fragments of the sea gate, which had a portcullis, and the wall can still be traced; as may also some of the foundations of the Abbey itself which have of recent years been excavated. [Illustration: COWES. SUMMER] On the suppression of the monastic institutions by Henry VIII, Quarr passed by purchase into the possession of two brothers by the name of Mills, belonging to Southampton, who promptly set to work to pull down the Abbey, Church, and other monastic buildings. In the reign of James I, Sir Thomas Fleming, Lord Chief Justice of England, purchased the estate from descendants of the Mills family. So great was the destruction wrought by the vandalistic tendencies of the latter, that we are told “even in the reign of Charles I there was little more remaining to be seen of this great Abbey and its dependent buildings than at the present day.” Hard by the Abbey grounds is a delightful woodland spot known as Eleanor’s Grove, where tradition asserts the Queen of Henry II, who was a prisoner in the Abbey, lies buried in a golden coffin, which, though often sought for, has never yet been discovered! Onward from Quarr along the coast to Cowes one passes Fishbourne, and wood-shaded Wootton Creek. One must only linger to point out the pretty village of Wootton Bridge at the head of the creek, with its feet almost in the water, and the fine sweep of Arreton Down as a background. Formerly this was a busy spot, and in the good old smuggling days many a cargo, which had escaped capture in the open Channel or in Christchurch Bay and the Solent, was silently landed on the well-wooded shores of Wootton.