[Footnote 5: In our own day Cove has been called Queenstown in honour of Queen Victoria.]
[Footnote 6: _Leeze-holders_, a right of turning on the coming or Leeze (_Celtic_, Leswes) twenty-four sheep, which of late years, by a bye-law, has been arranged to substitute either two horses or three bullocks. A Leeze is supposed to contain about seven acres of land of herbage. The common consists of about 240 acres, including roads.]
[Footnote 7: See Hogarth's Visit, &c. to Queenborough. A hearty laugh will repay the trouble. The mayor was then a thatcher: the room remains as it did in Hogarth's day; and as Queenborough was then, so it is now, one long street without any trade.]
[Footnote 8: Of Mr. Greet's mayoralty many humorous tales are told: he was at times popular, but towards the close of his reign most decidedly the reverse. At his funeral the dredgers, &c. threw halfpence into his grave to pay his passage to the lower regions. He, one day, _ex officio_, sentenced a pilferer to a flogging at the cart's tail, and as executioners did not volunteer, he took off his coat, and himself applied the cat to the bare back of the culprit from one end of the street to the other. Mr. Greet was one of the best friends Queenborough ever had. After his death it plunged deeply into debt, had its paraphernalia and books seized and sold by the sheriff, and now all its property is in the hands of trustees to pay its debts, whilst its poor-rates are, a witness, a late mayor said, nine shillings in the pound. The debt was originally 12,700l.; but as no interest has been paid thereon, it is now 17,000l. The trustees have received about 4,000_l_., but this sum has been melted in subsequent litigation; for Queenborough men are mightily fond of supporting the law courts.]
Mark Noble, in his _Lives of the Regicides_, says that Owen Rowe was descended from Sir Thomas Rowe, Lord Mayor of London in 1568. In the Additional Manuscripts (British Museum), 6337. p. 52., is a coat in trick: Argent, on a chevron azure, three bezants between three trefoils per pale gules and vert, a martlet sable for difference; crest, a roe's head couped gules, attired or, rising from a wreath; and beneath is written, "Coll. Row, Coll. of hors and futt." These arms I imagine to have been the regicide's. If so, he was a fourth son. Query, whose? The Hackney Parish Register records, that on Nov. 6, 1655, Captain Henry Rowe was buried from Mr. Simon Corbet's, of Mare Street, Hackney. How was he related to Colonel Owen Rowe? I should feel particularly obliged to any correspondent who could furnish me with his descent from Sir Thos. Rowe.