Father John Ingoldsly, to whose papers I am largely indebted for the Saintly records which follow, was brought up by his father, a cadet of the family, in the Romish faith, and was educated at Douai for the Church. Besides the manuscripts now at Tappington, he was the author of two controversial treatises on the connection between the Papal Hierarchy and the Nine of Diamonds.
From his well-known loyalty, evinced by secret services to the Royal cause during the Protectorate, he was excepted by name out of the acts against the Papists, became superintendent of the Queen Dowager's chapel at Somerset House, and enjoyed a small pension until his death, which took place in the third year of Queen Anne (1704), at the mature age of ninety-six. He was an ecclesiastic of great learning and piety, but from the stiff and antiquated phraseology which he adopted, I have thought it necessary to modernize it a little: this will account for certain anachronisms that have unavoidably crept in; the substance of his narratives has, however, throughout been strictly adhered to.
His hair-shirt, almost as good as new, is still preserved at Tappington,—but nobody ever wears it.
THE JACKDAW OF RHEIMS
'Tunc miser Corvus adeo conscientiae stimulis compunctus fuit, et execratio eum tantopere excarneficavit, ut exinde tabescere inciperet, maciem contraheret, omnem cibum aversaretur, nec amplius crocitaret: pennae praeterea ei defluebant, et alis pendulis omnes facetias intermisit, et tam macer apparuit ut omnes ejus miserescent.' …
'Tunc abbas sacerdotibus mandavit ut rursus furem absolverent; quo facto, Corvus, omnibus mirantibus, propediem convaluit, et pristinam sanitatem recuperavit.' De Illust. Ord. Cisterc.THE Jackdaw sat on the Cardinal's chair!
Bishop and abbot and prior were there;
Many a monk and many a friar,
Many a knight, and many a squire,
With a great many more of lesser degree,—
In sooth a goodly company;
And they served the Lord Primate on bended knee.
Never, I ween,
Was a prouder seen,
Read of in books, or dreamt of in dreams,
Than the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims!
In and out
Through the motley rout,
That little Jackdaw kept hopping about;
Here and there
