Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Pie

A quiet family walk round Duncombe Park, or so we hoped. We picked the one weekend a mega motorcycle festival decided to roar through, and so much for peace and birdsong.

I wonder what Helmsley Castle made of the scene. Perched on a rocky outcrop above the River Rye, its shattered east tower looming over the town like an old soldier who refuses to lie down. Walter Espec built the place in the 1120s as the seat of his Yorkshire estates. Across the Middle Ages it grew teeth: new buildings, thicker walls, sterner defences. By the sixteenth century it had softened into a rather grand Tudor mansion. The Civil War then knocked much of it about, though the toffs carried on living there into the early 1700s.

Its most colourful tenant was George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, a man who treated scandal as a hobby. Raised alongside the future Charles I, exiled for his Royalist loyalty, imprisoned in 1657, he bounced back by marrying Mary Fairfax and reclaiming his title. After the Restoration he rose to Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding, while his private life ran on rather different rails. An affair with the Countess of Shrewsbury ended in a duel that killed her husband, and his reputation never recovered.

He died in 1687, poor and unwell, after catching a chill out hunting. Dryden skewered him in Absalom and Achitophel, and the rhyme ‘Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Pie, kissed the girls and made them cry’ has long been pinned on him too, though plenty of folklorists hand the credit instead to his grandfather, the first Duke, equally famous for breaking hearts and rules. Either Villiers fits the verse rather snugly, which says more about the family than it does about the rhyme.