Visit of King James, 1612

An extract from Leicester Forest: by Levi Fox and Percy Russell (1948). Part 2. Ch. 5. by Percy Russell

The King's Stand

On 18th August [1612] King James made first visit to Leicester. He was accompanied by his eldest son, the accomplished and popular son, Prince Henry. they lodged at Lord's Place, in the High Street, to which they passed through arcades of greenery cut from the forest. On the following day the King and Prince rode out with the royal huntsmen to see what sport the ancient chase afforded.

The proposal for a launde came up again, and it was left to the Earl of Huntingdon, as chief forester, to settle the details. Riding the deer down was no longer fashionable, even if it were practicable over so much open ground. Nor was the drive with a line of bowmen, as described in 1525, favoured.

What appealed to James was a manner of shooting deer from a fixed station, which had been practised in some parts at least as early as 1400. The Master of Game compiled in that year directs that "the master should meet the Kynge and bring him to his standing" (New Oxford Dictionary). In Ashdown Forest, and in the Forest of Wychwood and elsewhere, the name of King's Stand survives; the sites indicated being not very far from the hunting lodge.

The place selected for the King' stand was on the highest part of the forest, a few hundred yards east of Desford cross-roads and the Heathly lodge. There exists today a recangular enclosure, some hundred yards long, given over to self-sown trees and scrub. The fields of the farm of the same name extend eastward from the coppice to the modern farm buildings, which have all but usurped the title.

As we may read in Love's Labour Lost, "hereby upon the edge of yonder coppice; a Stande where you may make the fairest shoote".

King James never saw his new stand. He visited Leicester again two summers later. Alderman Robert Heyricke wrote to his brother in london, "the Kynge went not into the forest, nor did not see his new lande; but so soon as had broke his fast, away to Dingley that night."

Heyricke's surprise that the King neglected the forest and his new launde perhaps fails to take account of one moving circumstance. After their stay at Leicester in 1612 James and his son parted company, the King going to Dingley and Prince Henry to Coventry. Within a few weeks the Prince was gravely ill, and before Christmas he was dead. Their visit to Leicester was the last occasion on which father and son went riding together; his return to the town must have brought to King James some very poignant memories.

(from Leicester Forest by Levi Fox and Percy Russell, published by Edgar Backus, Leicester for the Leicestershire Archaeological Society, now the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society (LAHS). Reproduced by kind permission of the LAHS, 2007.)