The Three Ravens Folk Tales

2

Herne the Hunter

A Berkshire Tale

A famous figure of English folklore, Herne the Hunter is mentioned by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor and in several other places, too. He is one of many ghostly wild huntsmen who haunt the nation's landscapes, sometimes with packs of dogs, including the likes of 'Old Crockern' in Devon, 'Gabriel's Ratchets' in Derbyshire and the North of England, and 'Eadric the Wild' in Shropshire and Hereford.

Our first recorded Wild Hunt story comes to us from twelfth-century writer, Walter Map, in his De Nugis Curialium ('Of the Trifles of Courtiers'), where the tale is of King Herla and set in Cambridgeshire. So the story goes, Herla rode into the Otherworld of the faeries and then out again, though once he had returned 300 years had passed.

As for Herne specifically, he has stag's antlers and was - and still is - famously associated with an oak tree in Windsor Great Park. This tree has been felled and replanted several times and is held as significant to monarchs including Queen Victoria.

That the 'original' ancient Herne's Oak was felled during the reign of George III felt like too good a detail. After all, George III went mad, and it was under his reign that England lost the American War of Independence. This felt somehow significant. Hence my placing of this story in the mouth of Dr Robert Darling Willis, a real historical figure who had a complex personal life and treated the king alongside his father, Francis.

MV

Dearest Mary, how I crave to see you.

The shocks I have had to my heart and to my mind are the stuff from which some men never recover. Were it not for your love of me, I too may have lost grasp of my senses, as has he. But he is not mad, Mary. It is not what I thought. I have seen with my own eyes the truth of it. Our most noble king is no lunatic. Rather, he is haunted by a fiend most ancient and abhorred, afflicted with a curse I fear may never be lifted.

As you know, my father was the first in our family called to serve the king. That was in the year 1788, when I was still in pursuit of my fellowship at Gonville & Caius College. I was, at this time, intermittently employed as a physic in Grantham, working alongside my brother, John. He, being older, accompanied our father down from Lincolnshire to London, and there repaired to the White House at Kew Gardens under the strictest conditions of secrecy.

You know, my love, that the Willis family are not from an ancient or noble line and our fame and wealth, such as it is, is a direct result of the efforts of John and my father in the treatment of our king. For all the kingdom knew of the madness of King George III - nay, all the world knew of it - and so, those men who by their skill cured him of it, well, the world was open to them like a pearl revealed within an oyster.

I was at that time but twenty-eight years old, a decade from meeting you that fine summer's day. And now I know you are at home in Buckingham Street, with our angel Robert no doubt babbling on your lap. It is of great shame to me that I cannot be with you, and my heart burns to know the ignominy heaped upon men such as I, who wed though forbidden to do so.

As a Cambridge Fellow, I have duties to perform, and no greater duty than this which I have undertaken to do, and so we must remain apart and our love a secret. But I had always believed that once the king was well again, I could return to my duties as a father and as your beloved.

Alas! For what I have seen tonight chills me to the core and gives me the fear that I should never be able to return to your side, for our king's malaise is not of the mind but of the body politic.

Yet, how to treat this ailment? For I remember well Father's return to Bourne as a famous man with an annuity of £1,500. It was with these funds he opened Shillingthorpe Hall, his second sanitorium, following the model of Greatford Hall, his first success.

I should think you will never meet my father, for he is loath to travel now and is a sanguine fellow and formidable when formed of an opinion. It was my ardent hope that he would change his mind, but he is a man of iron intent, defined by his dedication to unambitious, all but artless, service of mankind.

His is a long shadow, and I but a Pygmy within it.

As a boy, I saw him treating those men and women all thought mad beyond mortal aide, all of whom he set to work on the lands of Greatford Hall. He put them to labouring as ploughmen, gardeners, threshers, thatchers - all attired in black coats with white waistcoats, black silk breeches and stockings. Each looked so neat against the russet earth and wide sky.

He even had the head of each bewigged, well powdered, neat and arranged, and it seemed a miracle that in that atmosphere of health and cheerfulness, he aided in the recovery of every person attached to that place.

Perhaps, Mary, you are unfamiliar with the ways of the asylums, but they are, for the most part, rotten places - little better than prison cells. Across this land, Christian souls are abandoned to gibber in their filth, but Father has always said, 'treat a soul as less than human and so their faculties will remain'.

His methods were in contrast to the likes of Baillie and Heberden, the first physicians to treat the king. Great men of their day, but they did burn the monarch's skin as if he were possessed by a demon, striking his person and restricting him within the confines of a straitening jacket.

The bleak nature of these treatments was hateful to my father, who instead set the king to work, of all things. So it was that His Majesty took to planting flowers in the great gardens at Kew, engaging in daily exercise and toil, with the companionship of my father and John.

This is how King George recovered. Yet now his illness has returned with threefold strength, and knowing its root cause, I fear there is little hope - though to say so may be treason.

You see, when John, who had accompanied our father at Kew, returned to the practice at Grantham, he was quiet on the matter of the king. I spent many an evening and a good deal of port wine in an effort to loosen his lips, but John is a faithful and trustworthy man, irrespective of the £650 he receives annually from the king as reward for his past labours.

When I would ask of him, his face would darken and he would say, 'Robert, speak not of it,' and I would know to let it be.

Only now, with father too old to travel, as you know well, it has fallen to John and me to attend His Majesty. And so, before we came here to Windsor, John finally abated and revealed to me the truth.

I remember his white face and bright blue eyes as he spoke, his hair already grey as wire. His nervous disposition caused his fingers to shake about his wineglass and he looked down as he spoke, as if ashamed.

'The trouble,' he told me, 'began in 1775, Robert. Much earlier than most know. For it was then that the king first saw him: the green rider, galloping through Windsor Park.'

It took a while for John to explain it fully, but it seemed the rider he alluded to was a phantasm seen only by His Majesty. A stag-headed man, he said, with antlers growing from his hoary skull, his skin covered with myriad mosses and lichen.

When John first told me of it, I laughed, thinking he was pulling my leg, but he shot back such a look of thunder that I knew I had transgressed upon his honour and that of the king, and I so begged forgiveness both of him and the king, and of the Lord, our saviour.

Thusly, I learned that the malaise began in earnest when, across the wide Atlantic sea, battles were raging at Lexington and Concord. Our American brothers had risen up against us and so, amidst this bad news, it was said the king first noticed the green rider about his palace at Windsor, thundering through the park on a horse of leaves and tree roots with eyes of coal-red flame.

There are legends of this place, Mary - of that rider - stretching back to the time of Queen Elizabeth and earlier still. It's said that on the threat of Spanish invasion, she saw him and called on Dr Dee, who also saw him and heard him, rattling his chains and leading hounds of pale blue fire about her forests. It's said that after he's seen, all the cattle hereabouts give not milk but blood, and for as long as there's been an England, when it's threatened the green rider will appear.

My father, being an ardent student of nature, thought these stories of the king's to be some form of delusion - a children's story heard by His Majesty as boy, twisted into a living fantasy.

So it was that, although the king was said to often speak to the rider, who he said came to his chambers, communicating to him in an endless, babbling stream of speech all through the night as well as the day, once repaired to Kew, away from the ancient forests of Windsor, the monarch made a recovery. My father was said to have convinced him, in time, that his talk of the green rider was but a product of an overactive mind.

With this knowledge, John and I attended His Majesty at his palace at Windsor, beginning our treatments last August. And though I came to that most grand of palaces with no doubt in my heart or my mind that His Majesty's tales of the green rider were but delusions, I have now learned better, and I must...