The Life of Thomas Hardy
of the Duke. The night following Monmouth's defeat, a cloaked and spurred gentleman, a mud-spattered cavalier, knocked at Christopher's door. He declined to disclose his identity, but Christopher respected his incognito and gave him shelter, even as the fleeing Henry of Richmond had been sheltered by Clement Le Hardy. But the unfortunate Duke found it impossible to resist the charms of the pretty Swetman daughters. Honest Christopher discovered him making love to one of them in the garden and ordered him to be on his way. A few days later news came that Monmouth was apprehended and beheaded in the Tower, but not before Swetman had observed a mysterious figure removing the hidden Ducal trappings from his cupboard. It was thus that the Swetmans, because of their bourgeois horror for courtly customs, missed what was perhaps an opportunity to rise in the world similar to the one which came to the Jersey Hardys in the Fifteenth Century. That tradition, according to Hardy, has been handed down from Swetman to Swetman for more than two hundred years, although the Childs family also lays claim to it.
Hardy's grandmother was born in 1772 and lived until 1857. Thus, until he was seventeen years old, the poet had the advantage of sitting at this ancient's lady's feet and listening to many an obscure legend, humorous or pathetic, from her lips. For she was, by all accounts, a storehouse of local stories and pictures, and not at all averse to retailing them. Her garrulity, if such it was, served Hardy well in his later efforts to create living images in prose and verse of the swiftly vanishing color of his Dorset environment. For he retained in his ex-
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