Crime & punishment > Peveril of the Peak > Volume 2

peveb.il, of the peak.
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ed, its present state was ill adapted for the resi¬
dence of the noble propi-ietor. Yet it had been
often the abode, not only of the Lords of Man,
but of those state pi’isoners whom the Kings of
Britain sometimes committed to their charge.
In this Castle of Holm-Peel the great king¬
maker, Richard, Earl of Warwick, was confined,
during one period ’of his eventful life, to rumi¬
nate at leisure on his farther schemes of ambition.
And here, too, Eleanor, the haughty wife of the
good Duke of Gloucester, pined out in seclusion
the last days of her banishment. The sentinels
pretended that her discontented spectre was often
visible at night, traversing the battlements of the
external walls, or standing motionless beside a
particular solitary turret of one of the watch-
towers with which they are flanked; but dissol¬
ving into air at cock-crow, or when the bell toll¬
ed from the yet remaining tower of Saint Ger¬
main’s church.
Such was Holm-Peel, as records inform us, fill
towards the end of the seventeenth century.
It was in one of the lofty but almost unfurnish¬
ed apartments of this ancient castle that Julian
Peveril found his friend the Earl of Derby, who
had that moment sate down to a breakfast com¬
posed of various sorts of fish. “Welcome, most
imperial Julian,” he said; “welcome to our royal
fortress; in which, as yet, we are not like to be
starved with hunger, though well nigh dead for
cold.”
VOL. II. D