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Black Swan, whose pretty red-tiled porch bears the date 1632; but it was the
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King's Head, further up the street, to which Pope alluded when he said, neither truthfully nor politely, that the second Duke of Buckingham died at Kirbymoorside
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This trim, modern-looking house with the sober front of grey, so unsuggestive of the rakish duke, has never formed a part of the inn, and it was in its best room that Buckingham, on his deathbed, declared he had always had the greatest veneration for religion and reason. We may not cross the threshold of the room into which the dying man was carried--and, indeed, even penitent upon his deathbed, George Villiers the second was hardly an object for pilgrimages!--but here is its little window overlooking the street, the middle window of the three that are next the inn. Many writers, following Macaulay and Pope, assume that Buckingham died in this house because he had squandered his fortune so thoroughly that he could not secure a more comfortable place to die in. But some tell a more likely, if less edifying, tale. The duke was injured or taken ill, they say, while hunting near this town, and as his own castle of Helmsley was several miles away he was carried hither, to the house of one of his tenants. It seems certain that the estate of Helmsley was still his at his death, since his executors received nearly ninety thousand pounds for it from Charles Duncombe, banker and goldsmith. A man who had once possessed all that the Buckinghams had taken from their kings might be said to have squandered his fortune without being actually in want of a roof to die under. He had at one time a very fine roof of his own here at Kirbymoorside, but this may have been one of the many things he had lost, or possibly the Civil War had left it in a state even less luxurious than this little grey house. By following a stony lane we may see, in a farmyard above the town, the few fragments of masonry that are the last remains of the castle of the Nevilles and the Buckinghams. Queen Elizabeth took it from the Nevilles, and her successor gave it to the man of whom he said:
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You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than any one else.