[Illustration:  THE HOUSE AT KIRBY MOORSIDE IN WHICH THE 2ND DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM—­THE FAVOURITE OF CHARLES II.—­DIED.

The window of the bedroom is shown in the illustration.  It is on the first floor at the right hand side of the house. ]

The Duke lived to the age of sixty in spite of his life of unbridled vice, and it seems that a sudden illness seized him after a hard day’s hunting, and he died at the house in Kirby Moorside where he was taken instead of to Helmsley.  The house is still standing, and one may even see the room in which the reckless Duke expired.  As may be seen from the illustration the house is a good one, and at that time must have been, with one exception, the best in the village.  The lines by Pope descriptive of the favourite’s death are, therefore, quite unwarranted:—­

  “In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung,
  The floors of plaster and the walls of dung.”

It never was an inn, and the Rev. R. V. Taylor[1] has discovered that the house was in the occupation of one of his tenants.  I have carefully examined the house without finding anything to suggest that such squalor could have ever existed there.  The staircase is very picturesque, and one of the brass drop handles on the bedroom doors shows that the building was a good one.  The bedroom in which the Duke died has the fireplace blocked up; there is a recessed window containing a seat, and the walls, where they are panelled, are of fir, although the larger beams throughout the house seem to be of oak.

[Footnote 1:  “Yorkshire Notes and Queries,” May 1904, p. 68.]

The sudden demise of this famous man must have created a sensation in the village, and although the body was not buried at Kirby Moorside, the parish register of that time has this illiterate entry[2]—­

"buried in the yeare of our Lord 1687
Marke Reame .....  Aprill y^e 12
Gorges viluas Lord dooke of bookingam etc. 19"

[Footnote 2:  The third volume of the registers at the top of page 4.]

A letter from Lord Arran to the Duke’s late chaplain, dated April 17th, 1687, says, “I have ordered the corpse to be embalmed and carried to Helmsley Castle and there to remain till my Lady Duchess her pleasure shall be known.  There must be speedy care taken; for there is nothing here but confusion, not to be expressed.  Though his stewards have received vast sums, there is not so much as one farthing, as they tell me, for defraying the least expense.”  From this it appears that he died on or before the 17th of April, and that after the embalming process had been performed the intestines were buried at Kirby Moorside on the 19th and not on the 17th, as stated by Gill in his “Vallis Eboracensis.”

One of the tattered registers[1] of Kirby Moorside also contains the following remarkable entry:—­

“Dorythy Sowerbie of Bransdales (slayne with 6 bullett by theeves in the night) was buryed the 23th (sic) Day of May 1654.”  A few years before this in 1650 the burial is recorded of “a stranger that y^t sold stockins.”