Great Britain -- History -- Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1660 -- Fiction; Historical fiction
Upon the Restoration, Doctor Rochecliffe regained his living of
Woodstock, with other Church preferment, and gave up polemics and
political intrigues for philosophy. He was one of the constituent
members of the Royal Society, and was the person through whom Charles
required of that learned body solution of their curious problem, “Why,
if a vessel is filled brimful of water, and a large live fish plunged
into the water, nevertheless it shall not overflow the pitcher?” Doctor
Rochecliffe’s exposition of this phenomenon was the most ingenious and
instructive of four that were given in; and it is certain the Doctor
must have gained the honour of the day, but for the obstinacy of a
plain, dull, country gentleman, who insisted that the experiment should
be, in the first place, publicly tried. When this was done, the event
showed it would have been rather rash to have adopted the facts
exclusively on the royal authority; as the fish, however curiously
inserted into his native element, splashed the water over the hall, and
destroyed the credit of four ingenious essayists, besides a large
Turkey carpet.
Doctor Rochecliffe, it would seem, died about 1685, leaving many papers
behind him of various kinds, and, above all, many valuable anecdotes of
secret history, from which the following Memoirs have been extracted,
on which we intend to say only a few words by way of illustration.
The existence of Rosamond’s Labyrinth, mentioned in these pages, is
attested by Drayton in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Rosamond’s Labyrinth, whose ruins, together with her Well, being paved
with square stones in the bottom, and also her Tower, from which the
Labyrinth did run, are yet remaining, being vaults arched and walled
with stone and brick, almost inextricably wound within one another, by
which, if at any time her lodging were laid about by the Queen, she
might easily avoid peril imminent, and, if need be, by secret issues
take the air abroad, many furlongs about Woodstock in Oxfordshire.[5]
[5] Drayton’s England’s Heroical Epistles, Note A, on the Epistle,
Rosamond to King Henry.
It is highly probable, that a singular piece of phantasmagoria, which
was certainly played off upon the Commissioners of the Long Parliament,
who were sent down to dispark and destroy Woodstock, after the death of
Charles I., was conducted by means of the secret passages and recesses
in the ancient Labyrinth of Rosamond, round which successive Monarchs
had erected a Hunting-seat or Lodge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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