impoverishing Germany; Richelieu was living to rule France in the name
of his royal master, Louis XIII; England was gathering up those forces
of good and evil which from resisting tyranny at last grew intoxicated
with power, and so came to play the tyrant and regicide. For it was
about that time that Charles I had disbanded his army, trusting to the
divinity that, in the eyes of the Stuarts, did ever hedge a king, and at
the same time thrown away his honor by pledging himself to what he never
meant to perform. While this farce, which preceded the tragedy, was
being set upon the stage of history, here, three thousand miles away,
nature had begun to build up the waste, and to prophesy growth.

Salisbury, and afterwards Amesbury, were named from the two towns so
famous in England, the Salisbury Plain of Druidical memory, on which is
the celebrated Stonehenge, and near by, the Amesbury where was one of
the oldest monasteries in England. It is supposed that the towns were so
named because many of the new settlers came from those old English
towns. The latter name used to be spelled Ambresbury, and Tennyson in
his "Idylls of the King" spells Almesbury. After the discovery by Modred
of the guilt of King Arthur's fair and false wife, he says:--

"Queen Guinevere had fled the court and sat
There in the holyhouse at Almesbury
Weeping."


Describing her flight, he tells us that she sent Lancelot

"Back to his land, but she to Almesbury
Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald."