In the year 1597 Shakespeare, minded to end his days in his native town, as should become an Armiger of good means, bought New Place, which had been the most considerable house in Stratford; but the buildings were in ruins, and the poet built himself a new house with three gables, the centre of which carried a shield with the spear, which he adopted as his coat-of-arms. “Shakespeare paid for it,” writes Sir Sidney Lee, “with two gardens, the then substantial sum of sixty pounds. A curious incident postponed legal possession. The vendor of the Stratford Manor House, William Underhill, died suddenly of poison at another residence in the county—Fillongley, near Coventry—and the legal transfer to the dramatist was left at the time incomplete. Underhill’s eldest son Fulk died a minor at Warwick next year, and after his death he was proved to have murdered his father. The family estates were thus in danger of forfeiture, but they were suffered to pass to the felon’s next brother Hercules, who, on coming of age in 1602, completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare.” Sir Sidney goes on to say that the poet does not appear to have permanently settled at New Place until 1611. In the meantime, he had been busy rebuilding the house and planning his garden. And now for the history of the famous mulberry tree. Soon after his accession to the throne King James the First appears to have been fascinated by the idea of establishing the cultivation of silk in this country. There was a Frenchman, a native of Picardy, of the name of Forest, who, in the year 1608, “kept greate store of English silk-worms at Greenwich, the which the King, with great pleasure, came often to see them worke; and of their silke he caused a piece of taffeta to be made” (Malone’s “Life of Shakespeare”). This led to the King’s planting many hundred thousand mulberry trees in this country, those destined for the Midland Counties being distributed by a Frenchman named Véron. But the King also planted a number of trees south of Hyde Park, at the western end of what now are Buckingham Palace Gardens. These trees gave the name to the famous “Mulberry Gardens,” of which I shall say a word later.