Shakespeare planted with his own hands his celebrated Mulberry tree. It
was a noble specimen of the black Mulberry introduced into England in
1548[009]. In 1605, James I. issued a Royal edict recommending the
cultivation of silkworms and offering packets of mulberry seeds to those
amongst his subjects who were willing to sow them. Shakespeare's tree
was planted in 1609. Mr. Loudon, observes that the black Mulberry has
been known from the earliest records of antiquity and that it is twice
mentioned in the Bible: namely, in the second Book of Samuel and in the
Psalms. When New Place was in the possession of Sir Hough Clopton, who
was proud of its interesting association with the history of our great
poet, not only were Garrick and Macklin most hospitably entertained
under the Mulberry tree, but all strangers on a proper application were
admitted to a sight of it. But when Sir Hough Clopton was succeeded by
the Reverend Francis Gastrell, that gentleman, to save himself the
trouble of showing the tree to visitors, had "the gothic barbarity" to
cut down and root up that interesting--indeed _sacred_ memorial--of the
Pride of the British Isles. The people of Stratford were so enraged at
this sacrilege that they broke Mr. Gastrell's windows. That prosaic
personage at last found the place too hot for him, and took his
departure from a town whose inhabitants "doated on his very absence;"
but before he went he completed the fall sum of his sins against good
taste and good feeling by pulling to the ground the house in which
Shakespeare had lived and died. This was done, it is said, out of sheer
spite to the towns-people, with some of whom Mr. Gastrell had had a
dispute about the rate at which the house was taxed. His change of
residence was no great relief to him, for the whole British public felt
sorely aggrieved, and wherever he went he was peppered with all sorts of
squibs and satires. He "slid into verse," and "hitched in a rhyme."

Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,