Stony Stratford and its immediate neighbourhood are intimately concerned in the events leading up to the tragedy of young King Edward V. and his brother, murdered in the Tower of London, in 1483. Scarce three miles beyond the town, and distinctly seen from the Holyhead Road, there stands an ancient and historic house known as Potterspury Lodge, at the end of a long and majestic avenue of limes. This was at one time a hunting-lodge, and borders upon what is left of the sylvan glades of Whittlebury Forest, once a Royal Chase of the enormous extent of thirty-two square miles, but shrunken for centuries past into woodlands of not one quarter the original area. In times long gone by, the Forest began at the very end of Stony Stratford, and the timorous wayfarer plunged at once, after crossing the river Ouse, into its dim and tangled alleys of oaks and thick undergrowth. [Illustration: QUEEN’S OAK.] It was when hunting in this wild resort of deer in the short January days of 1464, that Edward IV. met Elizabeth Woodville, not more than two hundred yards to the rear of the spot where the old hunting-lodge stands. The place of meeting is still marked by the ancient and gigantic tree known far and wide as the “Queen’s Oak,” a gnarled and hollowed giant, whose trunk measures thirty-one feet round and whose cavernous interior can, and constantly does in summer-time, seat a tea-party of three or four persons. It must have been a notable tree when, four hundred and forty years ago, Edward, a king peculiarly susceptible to female loveliness, found here the beautiful young widow of Sir John Grey of Groby, a knight who had been killed in the second battle of St. Albans, little more than two years before, on the Lancastrian side, and whose estates had since been confiscated by the Yorkists. The story tells that the beautiful and distressed lady, anxious to see the King and to obtain from him the restoration of her lands, was waiting at the oak when he rode by, and that, not recognising him, she asked where his Majesty could be found. The probabilities are, however, that she knew perfectly well to whom she spoke. Edward declared himself to be the one she sought, and, when she fell upon her knees, raised her up and escorted her to her home at Grafton. It is a historic instance of calculating ambition and of love at first sight. On May 1st, then, Edward was privately married to the fair stranger at Grafton, the only others present being her stepmother, the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, two gentlemen, and “a young man to help the priest sing.” Not until the Michaelmas following was the marriage disclosed.