RICHARD BUSBY (16o6-1695) , English clergyman, and headmaster of Westminster school, was born at Lutton in Lincoln-shire in 16o6 . He was educated at the school which he after-wards superintended for so long a period, and first signalized himself by gaining a king's scholarship . From Westminster Busby proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1628 . In his thirty-third year he had already become renowned for the obstinate zeal with which he supported the falling dynasty of the Stuarts, and was rewarded for his services with the prebend and rectory of Cudworth, with the chapel of Knowle annexed, inSomersetshire . Next year he became head master of Westminster, where his reputation as a teacher soon became great . He himself once boasted that sixteen of the bishops who then occupied the bench had been birched with his " little rod." No school in England has on the whole produced so many eminent men as Westminster did under the regime of Busby . Among the more illustrious of his pupils may be mentioned South,Dryden, Locke, Prior and Bishop Atterbury . He wrote and edited many works for the use of his scholars . Hisoriginal treatises (the best of which are his Greek and Latin grammars), as well as those which he edited, have, however, long since fallen into disuse . Busby died in 1695, in his ninetieth year, and was buried in WestminsterAbbey, where his effigy is still to be seen . (Excert from 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica)

In The Last Seal I portray Busby as many of his pupils remembered and wrote about him: prone to severe tempers and using corporal punishement at whim. He can come across as rather a 19th century public school headmaster but that is because public schools in the 18th centuy onwards owed so much to his approaches to education via rigourous disciplined teaching styles. There is saying that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Perhaps it should have been Westminster.