_Kenilworth._
WE never decided whether it was to our advantage or disappointment that
we all re-read the novel of that name before visiting Kenilworth. It is
certain that we came away saying bitterly uncharitable things of Oliver
Cromwell, to whose command, and not to Time, is due the destruction of
one of the finest castles in the realm. Caput, who, after the habit
of amateur archæologists, never stirs without an imaginary surveyor’s
chain in hand, had studied up the road and ruins in former visits, and
acted now as guide and historian. We were loth to accept the country
road, narrower and more rutty than any other in the vicinity, as that
once filled by the stupendous pageant described by Scott and graver
chroniclers as unsurpassed in costliness and display by any in the
Elizabethan age. Our surveyor talked of each stage in the progress
with the calm confidence of one who had made a part of the procession.
We knew to a minute at what hour of the night the queen—having
been delayed by a hunt at Warwick Castle—with Leicester at her
bridle-rein, passed the brook at the bottom of Castle-hill. A stream
so insignificant, and crossed by such a common little bridge, we were
ashamed to speak of them in such a connection. The column of courtiers
and soldiers thronging the highway was ablaze with the torches carried
by Leicester’s men. The castle, illuminated to the topmost battlement,
made so brave a show the thrifty virgin needed to feast her eyes
often and much upon the splendid beauty of the man at her saddle-bow
to console herself for having presented him with Kenilworth and the
estates—twenty miles in circumference—pertaining thereunto.
All this was fresh in our minds when we alighted where Leicester sprang
from his charger and knelt at the stirrup of his royal mistress in
welcome to his “poor abode.” The grand entrance is gone, and most of
the outer wall. There is no vestige of the drawbridge on which was
stationed the booby-giant with Flibbertigibbet under his cloak. By the
present gateway stands a stately lodge, the one habitable building on
the grounds. “R. D.” is carved upon the porch-front, and within it,
in divers places. Attached to this is a rear extension, so mean in
appearance we were savagely delighted to learn that it was put up in
Cromwell’s time. Passing these by the payment of a fee, and shaking
ourselves free from the briery hold of the women who assaulted us with
petitions to buy unripe fruit, photographs, and “Kenilworth Guides,”
we saw a long slope of turf rising to the level, whereon are Cæsar’s
and Leicester’s Towers, square masses of masonry, crumbling at top and
shrouded, for most of their height, in a peculiarly tough and “stocky”
species of ivy. The walls of Cæsar’s Tower—the only portion of the
original edifice (founded in the reign of Henry I.) now standing—vary
from ten to sixteen feet in thickness. Behind these, on still higher
ground, are the ruins of the Great Hall, built by John of Gaunt. In
length more than eighty feet, in width more than forty, it is, although
roofless, magnificent. The Gothic arches of the windows, lighting it
from both sides, are perfect and beautiful in outline. Ivy-clumps hang
heavy from oriel and buttress. To the left of this is Mervyn’s, or the
Strong Tower, a winding stair leading up to the summit. A broken wall
makes a feint of enclosing the castle-grounds, seven acres in area,
but it may be scaled or entered through gaps at many points. The moat
down which the “Lady of the Lake,” floating “on an illuminated movable
island,” seemed to walk on the water to offer Elizabeth “the lake, the
lodge, the lord,” is a dry ravine, choked with rubbish, overgrown with
grass and nettles. The decline of the hill up which we walked to the
principal ruins was the “base court.” A temporary bridge, seventy feet
long, was thrown over this from the drawbridge to Cæsar’s Tower, and
the queen, riding upon it, was greeted by mythological deities, who
offered her gifts from vineyard, garden, field, and fen, beginning the
ovation where the modern hags had pressed upon us poor pictures, acerb
pears and apples.
This, then, was Kenilworth. We strolled into the Banqueting or Great
Hall—now floorless—where Elizabeth and Leicester led the minuet on the
night when the favorite’s star was highest and brightest; laughing
among ourselves, in recalling the Scottish _diplomat’s_ saying that
“his queen danced neither so high nor so disposedly” as did the
Maiden Monarch. We climbed Mervyn’s Tower in which Amy Robsart had
her lodging; looked down into “The Pleasaunce,” a turfy ruin, in its
contracted bounds a dismay to us until the surveyor’s chain measured,
for our comfort, what must have been the former limits. It is now an
irregular area, scarcely more than a strip of ground, and we sought
vainly for a nook sufficiently retired to have been the scene of the
grotto-meeting between Elizabeth and the deserted wife.
“Of course you are aware that Amy Robsart was never at Kenilworth; that
she had been dead two years when Elizabeth visited Leicester here;
that he was secretly married again, this time to the beautiful widow
of Lord Sheffield, the daughter of Lord William Howard, uncle to the
queen?” said Caput, drily.
Argument with an archæologist is as oxygen to fire. We turned upon him,
instead, in a crushing body of infidel denial.
“We received, without cavil, your account—and Scott’s—of the
torch-light procession, including Elizabeth’s diamonds, after a day’s
hunting, and horsemanship; of Leicester’s glittering ‘like a golden
image with jewels and cloth of gold.’ We decline to discredit Scott
now!”
He shrugged his shoulders; took a commanding position upon the ruined
wall; his eyes swept the landscape discontentedly.
“We dwarf the history of Kenilworth to one little week,” he said. “I
am tempted to wish that Scott had never written that fiction, splendid
as it is. Do you know that Cæsar’s Tower—by the way, it will outlast
Leicester’s, whose building, like the founder, lacks integrity—do you
know that Cæsar’s Tower was begun early in the twelfth century? that
it was the stronghold of Simon de Montfort in his quarrel with Henry
III.? Edward Longshanks, then Prince Edward, attacked de Montfort in
Sussex, took from him banners and other spoils and drove him back into
Kenilworth, which the insurgents held for six months. His father, the
Earl of Leicester, met Edward’s army next day on the other side of
the Avon—over there!” pointing. “Gazing, as he marched, toward his
good castle of Kenilworth, he saw his own banners advancing, and soon
perceived that they were borne by the enemy.
“It is over!” said the old warrior. “The Lord have mercy upon our
souls, for our bodies are Prince Edward’s!”
“He was killed, fighting like a lion, in the battle that followed.
And, all the while, his son, chafing at his inability to help him,
lay,—the lion’s cub at bay,—within these walls. There were Leicesters
and Leicesters, although some are apt to ignore all except the basest
of the name—the Robert Dudley of whom it was said, ‘that he was the son
of a duke, the brother of a king, the grandson of an esquire, and the
great-grandson of a carpenter; that the carpenter was the only honest
man in the family, and the only one of Leicester’s near relatives
who died in his bed.’ Edward II.—poor, favorite-ridden wretch! was a
prisoner at Kenilworth after the execution of the Despensers, father
and son. He was forced to sign his own deposition in the Great Hall,
where you thought of nothing just now but Elizabeth’s dancing. The
breaking of the white wand,—a part of the ceremonial at a king’s
death—by Sir Thomas Blount, before the eyes of the trembling sovereign,
is one of the most dramatic events in English history. Another royal
imbecile, Henry VI., had an asylum here during Jack Cade’s Rebellion.
There was stringent need for such fortresses as Kenilworth and Warwick
in those times.”
We heard it all,—and with interest, sitting upon the edge of the
ivied wall of Mervyn’s Tower, overlooking a land as fair as Beulah,
in alternations of hill and vale; of plains golden with grain, and
belts and groves of grand old trees; the many-gabled roofs and turrets
of great houses rising from the midst of these, straggling villages
of red-brick cottages on the skirts of manorial estates indicating
the semi-feudal system still prevailing in the land. The Avon gleamed
peacefully between the borders tilled by men who never talk, and most
of whom have never heard, of the brave Leicester who fought his last
battle where they swing their scythes. Yet he was known to the yeomen
of his day as “Sir Simon the Righteous.”
“There were Leicesters and Leicesters,” Caput had truly said, and that
the proudest and most magnificent of them all was the most worthless.
But when we had picked our way down the broken stairs, and sat in the
shadow of Cæsar’s Tower, upon the warm sward, watching men drive the
stakes and stretch the cords of a marquee, for the use of a party who
were to pic-nic on the morrow among the ruins, we said:—
“To-morrow, _we_ will see Leicester’s Hospital and Leicester’s tomb, at
Warwick.”
The walk from Leamington to Warwick was one greatly affected by us as
a morning and afternoon “constitutional.” It was delightful in itself,
and we never wearied of rambling up one street and down another of
the town. We never saw Broek, in Holland, but it cannot be cleaner
than this Rip Van Winkle of a Warwickshire village, where the very
children are too staid and civil—or too devoid of enterprise—to stare
at strangers. A house under fifty years of age would be a disreputable
innovation. House-leek, and yellow stone-crop, and moss grow upon the
roofs; the windows have small panes, clear and bright, and, between
parted muslin curtains, each window-sill has its pots of geraniums and
gillyflowers.
We bought some buns in a little shop, the mistress of which was a
pretty young woman, with the soft English voice one hears even among
the lowly, and the punctilious misapplication of _h_ we should, by this
time, have ceased to observe.
“The H’earl h’of Leicester’s ’Ospital h’is a most h’interesting
h’object,” she assured us, upon our inquiring the shortest way thither.
“H’all strangers who h’admire ’istorical relicts make a point h’of
visiting the H’earl h’of Leicester’s ’Ospital.”
The street has been regraded, probably laid out and built up since
the “’istorical relict” was founded, in 1571. We would call it a
“Refuge,” the object being to provide a home for the old age of a
“Master and twelve brethren,” the latter, invalided or superannuated
tenants or soldiers, who had spent their best days in the service of
the Leicesters. It was a politic stroke to offer the ease, beer, and
tobacco of the Refuge as a reward for hard work and hard fighting. We
may be sure Robert Dudley did not overlook this. We may hope—if we
can—that he had some charitable promptings to the one good deed of his
life.
The Hospital is perched high, as if deposited there by the deluge, upon
an Ararat platform of its own. The plastered walls are criss-crossed by
chocolate-colored beams; the eaves protrude heavily; odd carvings, such
as a boy might make with a pocket-knife, divide the second and third
stories. It is a picturesque antique. People in America would speak
of it, were it set up in one of our suburban towns, as a “remarkable
specimen of the Queen Anne style.” One learns not to say such things
where Queen Anne is a creature of yesterday. A curious old structure
is the “relict,”—we liked and adopted the word,—and so incommodious
within we marveled that the brethren, now appointed from Gloucester and
Warwickshire, did not “commute,” as did “our twelve poor gentlemen”
in Dickens’ Haunted Man. But they still have their “pint”—I need not
say of what—a day, and their “pipe o’ baccy,” and keep their coal
in a vast, cobwebby hall, in which James I. once dined at a town
banquet. They cook their dinners over one big kitchen-fire, but eat
them in their own rooms; have daily prayer, each brother using his own
prayer-book, in the Gothic chapel over the doorway, the “H’earl of
Leicester” staring at them out of the middle of the painted window, and
wear blue cloth cloaks in cold weather, or in the street, adorned with
silver badges upon the sleeves. These bear the Leicester insignia, the
Bear and Ragged Staff, and are said to be the very ones presented by
him to the Hospital. Sir Walter Scott is—according to Caput—responsible
for the fact that, in the opinion of the ladies of our company, the
most valuable articles preserved in the institution are a bit of
discolored satin, embroidered by Amy Robsart (at Cumnor-Hall?) with the
arms of her faithless lord, and a sampler whereupon, by the aid of a
lively imagination, one can trace her initials.
How much of heart-ache and heart-sinking, of hope deferred, and
baffled desire may have been stitched into these faded scraps of stuff
that have so long outlasted her and her generation! Needlework has
been the chosen confidante of women since Eve, with shaking fingers
and tear-blinded eyes, quilted together fig-leaves, in token of the
transgression that has kept her daughters incessantly busy upon
tablier, panier, and jupon.
From the Hospital we went to St. Mary’s Church. There is a cellary
smell in all these old stone churches where slumber the mighty dead,
suggestive of must, mould, and cockroaches, and on the hottest day a
chill, like that of an ice-house. Our every step was upon a grave;
the walls were faced with mortuary brasses and tablets. The grating
of the ever-rusty lock and hinges awakened groans and whispers in
far recesses; our subdued tones were repeated in dreary sighs and
mutterings, as if the crowd below stairs were complaining that wealth
and fame could not purchase the repose they were denied in life. Our
cicerone in St. Mary’s was a pleasant-faced woman, in a bonnet—of
course. We never saw a pew-holder or church-guide of her sex,
bonnetless while exercising her profession. Usually, the bonnet was
black. It was invariably shabby. St. Paul’s interdict against women
uncovering the head in church may have set the fashion. Prudent dread
of neuralgias, catarrhs and toothaches would be likely to perpetuate
it. The guide here neither evaded nor superadded _hs_, and we made a
grateful note of the novelty. She conducted us first to what we knew in
our reading as the “Chapel of Richard Beauchamp.”
“The Beechum Chapel? yes, sir!” said our conductress, leading the
way briskly along the aisle, through oratory and chantry up a very
worn flight of steps, under a graceful archway to a pavement of
black-and-white lozenge-shaped marbles. The Founder sleeps in state
second to no lord of high degree in the kingdom, if we except Henry
VII. whose chapel in Westminster Abbey is yet more elaborate in design
and decoration than that of the opulent “Beechums.” The Bear and
Ragged Staff hold their own among the stone sculptures of ceiling and
walls. The former is studded with shields embossed with the arms of
Warwick, and of Warwick and Beauchamp quartered. The stalls are of dark
brown oak, carved richly—blank shields, lions, griffins, muzzled and
chained bears being the most prominent devices. The “Great Earl,” in
full armor of brass, lies at length upon a gray marble sarcophagus. A
brazen hoop-work, in shape exactly resembling the frame of a Conestoga
wagon-top, is built above him. Statuettes of copper-gilt mourners,
representing their surviving kinsmen and kinswomen, occupy fourteen
niches in the upright sides of the tomb. Sword and dagger are at his
side; a swan watches at his uncovered head, a griffin and bear at his
feet; a casque pillows his head; his hands are raised in prayer. The
face is deeply lined and marked of feature, the brows seeming to gather
frowningly while we gaze. It is a marvelous effigy. The woman looked
amazed, Caput disgusted, when we walked around it once, gave a minute
and a half to respectful study of the Earl’s face and armor; smiled
involuntarily in the reading of how he had “decessed ful cristenly
the last day of April, the yeare of oure lord god AMCCCCXXXIX.”—then
inquired abruptly:—“Where is the tomb of Queen Elizabeth’s Leicester?”
As a general, Leicester was a notorious failure; in statecraft, a
bungler; as a man, he was a transgressor of every law, human and
divine; as a conqueror of women’s hearts, he had no peer in his day,
and we cannot withhold from him this pitiful meed of honor—if honor it
be—when we read that “his most sorrowful wife Lætitia, through a sense
of conjugal love and fidelity, hath put up this monument to the best
and dearest of husbands.”
“By Jove!” said Dux, again.
“She ought to speak well of him!” retorted Caput. “He murdered her
first husband, and repudiated his second wife Douglas Howard (Lady
Sheffield) in order to espouse Lettice, not to mention the fact that
he had tried ineffectually about the time of the Kenilworth fête, to
rid himself of No. 2 by poison. He was a hero of determined measures.
Witness the trifling episode of Amy Robsart to which the Earl is
indebted for our visit to-day.”
We stood our ground in calm disdain of the thrust; were not to be
diverted from our steadfast contemplation of the King of Hearts. That
his superb physique was not overpraised by contemporaries, the yellow
marble bears satisfactory evidence, yet the chief charm of his face
was said to be his eyes. The forehead is lofty; the head nobly-shaped;
the nose aquiline; the mouth, even under the heavy moustache, was,
we could see, feminine in mould and sweetness. His hands, joined in
death, as they seldom were in life, in mute prayer upon his breast, are
of patrician beauty. He is clad in full armor, and wears the orders
bestowed upon him by his royal and doating mistress. He was sadly
out of favor with her at the time of his death in 1588. She survived
him fifteen years. If she had turned aside in one of her famous
“progresses” to look upon this altar-tomb, would she have smiled,
sobbed or sworn upon reading that his third countess had written him
down a model Benedict? His sorrowful Lætitia dragged on the load of
life for forty-six years after her Leicester’s decease, and now lies
by his side also with uplifted praying hands. She is a prim matron,
richly bedight “with ruff and cuff and farthingales and things.” The
chaste contour and placidity of her features confuse us as to her
identity with the “light o’ love” who winked at the murder that made
her the wife of Lady Douglas Howard’s husband. The exemplary couple are
encompassed by a high and handsomely wrought iron fence; canopied by a
sort of temple-front supported by four Corinthian pillars. It is almost
unnecessary to remark that the ubiquitous Bear and Ragged Staff mounts
guard above this. A few yards away is the statue of a pretty little
boy, well-grown for his three years; his chubby cheeks encircled by a
lace-frilled cap; an embroidered vestment reaching to his feet. He lies
like father and mother, prone on his back, upon a flat tombstone.
“The noble Impe Robert of Dudley,” reads the inscription, with a
list of other titles too numerous and ponderous to be jotted down or
recollected. The only legitimate son of Amy’s, Douglas’, Elizabeth’s,
Lettice’s—Every-woman’s Leicester, and because he stood in the way of
the succession of some forgotten uncle or cousin, poisoned to order,
by his nurse! “The pity of it!” says First thought at the sight of the
innocent baby-face. Second thought—“How well for himself and his kind
that his father’s and mother’s son did not mature into manhood!”
Leicester left another boy, the son of Lady Douglas, whom he cast
off after she refused to die of the poison that “left her bald.”
Warwickshire traditions are rife with stories of her and her child who
also bore his father’s name. Miss Strickland adverts to one, still
repeated by the gossips of Old Warwick, in which the disowned wife,
with disheveled hair and streaming tears, rocks young Robert in her
arms, crooning the ballad we mothers have often sung without dreaming
of its plaintive origin:—
“Balow my baby, lie still and sleep!
It grieves me sair to see thee weep.”
To this Robert his father bequeathed Kenilworth and its estates in the
same will that denied his legitimacy. The heir assumed the title of
Earl of Warwick, but “the crown”—alias, Elizabeth—laid claim to and
repossessed herself of castle and lands.
Thus, the Hospital is the sole remaining “relict” of the man who turned
Queen Bess’s wits out of doors, and while her madness lasted, procured
for himself the titles and honors set in array in the Latin epitaph
upon his monument.
In another chapel—a much humbler one, octagonal in shape, is the tomb
of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. He selected the chamber as the one in
which he desired to be buried, and wrote the epitaph:
“FULKE GREVILLE, SERVANT TO QUEEN ELIZABETH, COUNSELLOR
TO KING JAMES, _and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney_.”
Upon the sarcophagus were the rusty helmet, sword and other pieces of
armor he had worn without fear and without reproach;—a record in Old
English outweighing with righteous and thoughtful people, the fulsome
Latinity of Leicester’s Grecian altar and the labored magnificence of
the “Beechum Chapel.”