HAUNTED GLENS AND HOUSES
Warwick, July 6, 1888.--One night, many years ago[3] a brutal murder
was done, at a lonely place on the highroad between Charlecote Park
and Stratford-upon-Avon. The next morning the murdered man was found
lying by the roadside, his mangled head resting in a small hole. The
assassins were shortly afterward discovered, and they were hanged at
Warwick. From that day to this the hole wherein the dead man's head
reposed remains unchanged. No matter how often it may be filled,
whether by the wash of heavy rains or by stones and leaves that
wayfarers may happen to cast into it as they pass, it is soon found to
be again empty. No one takes care of it. No one knows whether or by
whom it is guarded. Fill it at nightfall and you will find it empty
in the morning. That is the local belief and affirmation. This spot is
two miles and a half north of Stratford and three-quarters of a mile
from the gates of Charlecote Park. I looked at this hole one bright day
in June and saw that it was empty. Nature, it is thought by the poets,
abhors complicity with the concealment of crime, and brands with her
curse the places that are linked with the shedding of blood. Hence the
strong lines in Hood's poem of _Eugene Aram_:
"And a mighty wind had swept the leaves,
And still the corse was bare."
[Illustration: _Hampton Lucy._]
There are many haunted spots in Warwickshire. The benighted peasant
never lingers on Ganerslie Heath,--for there, at midnight, dismal bells
have been heard to toll, from Blacklow Hill, the place where Sir Piers
Gaveston, the corrupt, handsome, foreign favourite of King Edward the
Second, was beheaded, by order of the grim barons whom he had insulted
and opposed. The Earl of Warwick led them, whom Gaveston had called the
Black Dog of Arden. This was long ago. Everybody knows the historic
incident, but no one can so completely realise it as when standing on
the place. The scene of the execution is marked by a cross, erected
by Mr. Bertie Greathead, bearing this inscription: "In the hollow
of this rock was beheaded, on the first day of July 1312, by Barons
lawless as himself, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall. In life and death
a memorable instance of misrule." [Hollinshed says that the execution
occurred on Tuesday, June 20.] No doubt the birds were singing and the
green branches of the trees were waving in the summer wind, on that
fatal day, just as they are at this moment. Gaveston was a man of much
personal beauty and some talent, and only twenty-nine years old. It was
a melancholy sacrifice and horrible in the circumstances that attended
it. No wonder that doleful thoughts and blood-curdling sounds should
come to such as walk on Ganerslie Heath in the lonely hours of the
night.
Another haunted place is Clopton--haunted certainly with memories if
not with ghosts. In the reign of Henry the Seventh this was the manor
of Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London, in 1492, he who built the
bridge over the Avon,--across which, many a time, William Shakespeare
must have ridden, on his way to Oxford and the capital. The dust of Sir
Hugh rests in Stratford church and his mansion has passed through many
hands. In our time, it is the residence of Sir Arthur Hodgson,[4] by
whom it was purchased in July, 1873. It was my privilege to see Clopton
under the guidance of its lord, and a charming and impressive old house
it is,--full of quaint objects and fraught with singular associations.
They show to you there, among many interesting paintings, the portrait
of a lady, with thin figure, delicate features, long light hair, and
sensitive countenance, said to be that of Lady Margaret Clopton, who,
in the Stuart time, drowned herself, in a dismal well, behind the
mansion,--being crazed with grief at the death of her lover, killed
in the Civil War. And they show to you the portrait of still another
Clopton girl, Lady Charlotte, who is thought to have been accidentally
buried alive,--because when it chanced that the family tomb was opened,
a few days after her interment, the corse was found to be turned over
in its coffin and to present indications that the wretched victim of
premature burial had, in her agonized frenzy, gnawed her flesh. Her
death was attributed to the plague, and it occurred on the eve of her
prospective marriage.
[Illustration: _Old Porch of Clopton._]
It is the blood-stained corridor of Clopton, however, that most
impresses imagination. This is at the top of the house, and access
to it is gained by a winding stair of oak boards, uncarpeted, solid,
simple, and consonant with the times and manners that it represents.
Many years ago a squire of Clopton murdered his butler, in a little
bedroom near the top of that staircase, and dragged the body along
the corridor, to secrete it. A thin dark stain, seemingly a streak of
blood, runs from the door of that bedroom, in the direction of the
stairhead, and this is so deeply imprinted in the wood that it cannot
be removed. Opening from this corridor, opposite to the room of the
murder, is an angular apartment, which in the remote days of Catholic
occupancy was used as an oratory.[5] In the early part of the reign of
Henry the Sixth, John Carpenter obtained from the Bishop of Worcester
permission to establish a chapel at Clopton. In 1885 the walls of that
attic chamber were committed to the tender mercies of a paper-hanger,
who presently discovered on them several inscriptions, in black
letter, but who fortunately mentioned his discoveries before they were
obliterated. Richard Savage, the antiquary, was called to examine them,
and by him they were restored. The effect of those little patches of
letters,--isles of significance in a barren sea of wall-paper,--is
that of extreme singularity. Most of them are sentences from the
Bible. All of them are devout. One imparts the solemn injunction:
"Whether you rise yearlye or goe to bed late, Remember Christ Jesus
who died for your sake." [This may be found in John Weever's _Funeral
Monuments: 1631_.] Clopton has a long and various history. One of the
most significant facts in its record is that, for about three months,
in the year 1605, it was occupied by Ambrose Rokewood, of Coldham Hall,
Suffolk, a breeder of race-horses, whom Robert Catesby brought into
the ghastly Gunpowder Plot, which so startled the reign of James the
First. Hither came Sir Everard Digby, and Thomas and Robert Winter, and
the specious Jesuit, Father Garnet, chief hatcher of the conspiracy,
with his vile train of sentimental fanatics, on that pilgrimage of
sanctification with which he formally prepared for an act of such
hideous treachery and wholesale murder as only a religious zealot
could ever have conceived. That may have been a time when the little
oratory of Clopton was in active use. Things belonging to Rokewood,
who was captured at Hewel Grange, and was executed on January 31,
1606, were found in that room, and were seized by the government. Mr.
Fisher Tomes, resident proprietor of Clopton from 1825 to 1830, well
remembered the inscriptions in the oratory, which in his time were
still uncovered. Not many years since it was a bedroom; but one of Sir
Arthur Hodgson's guests, who undertook to sleep in it, was, it is said,
afterward heard to declare that he wished not ever again to experience
the hospitality of that chamber, because the sounds that he had heard,
all around the place, throughout that night, were of a most startling
description. A house containing many rooms and staircases, a house
full of long corridors and winding ways, a house so large that you may
get lost in it,--such is Clopton; and it stands in its own large park,
removed from other buildings and bowered in trees. To sit in the great
hall of that mansion, on a winter midnight, when the snow-laden wind is
howling around it, and then to think of the bleak, sinister oratory,
and the stealthy, gliding shapes upstairs, invisible to mortal eye, but
felt, with a shuddering sense of some unseen presence watching in the
dark,--this would be to have quite a sufficient experience of a haunted
house. Sir Arthur Hodgson talked of the legends of Clopton with that
merry twinkle of the eye which suits well with kindly incredulity. All
the same, I thought of Milton's lines--
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."
The manor of Clopton was granted to John de Clopton by Peter de
Montfort, in 1236, while Henry the Third was king, and the family of
Clopton dwelt there for more than five hundred years. The Cloptons of
Warwickshire and those of Suffolk are of the same family, and at Long
Melford, in Suffolk, may be found many memorials of it. The famous Sir
Hugh,--who built New Place in 1490, restored the Guild chapel, glazed
the chancel of Stratford church, reared much of Clopton House, where he
was visited by Henry the Seventh, and placed the bridge across the Avon
at Stratford, where it still stands,--died in London, in 1496, and was
buried at St. Margaret's, Lothbury. Joyce, or Jocasa, Clopton, born
in 1558, became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, and afterwards
to Queen Anne, wife of James the First, and ultimately married George
Carew, created Earl of Totnes and Baron of Clopton. Carew, born in
1557, was the son of a Dean of Exeter, and he became the English
commander-in-chief in Ireland, in the time of Elizabeth. King James
ennobled him, with the title of Baron Clopton, in 1605, and Charles
the First made him Earl of Totnes, in 1625. The Earl and his Countess
are buried in Stratford church, where their marble effigies, recumbent
in the Clopton pew, are among the finest monuments of that hallowed
place. The Countess died in 1636, leaving no children, and the Earl
thereupon caused all the estates that he had acquired by marriage with
her to be restored to the Clopton family. Sir John Clopton, born in
1638, married the daughter and co-heiress of Sir Edward Walker, owner
of Clopton in the time of Charles the Second, and it is interesting
to remember that by him was built the well-known house at Stratford,
formerly called the Shoulder of Mutton,[6] but more recently designated
the Swan's Nest. Mention is made of a Sir John Clopton by whom the well
in which Lady Margaret drowned herself was enclosed; it is still called
Lady Margaret's Well; a stone, at the back of it, is inscribed "S. J.
C. 1686." Sir John died in 1692, leaving a son, Sir Hugh, who died in
1751, aged eighty. The last Clopton in the direct line was Frances,
born in 1718, who married Mr. Parthenwicke, and died in 1792.
[Illustration: CLOPTON HOUSE]
Clopton House is of much antiquity, but it has undergone many changes.
The north and west sides of the present edifice were built in the time
of Henry the Seventh. The building was originally surrounded with a
moat.[7] A part of the original structure remains at the back,--a
porchway entrance, once accessible across the moat, and an oriel window
at the right of that entrance. Over the front window are displayed
the arms of Clopton,--an eagle, perched upon a tun, bearing a shield;
and in the gable appear the arms of Walker, with the motto, Loyauté
mon honneur. Sir Edward Walker was Lord of Clopton soon after the
Restoration, and by him the entrance to the house, which used to be
where the dining-room now is, was transferred to its present position.
It was Walker who carried to Charles the Second, in Holland, in 1649,
the news of the execution of his father. A portrait of the knight, by
Dobson, hangs on the staircase wall at Clopton, where he died in 1677,
aged sixty-five. He was Garter-king-at-arms. His remains are buried in
Stratford church, with an epitaph over them by Dugdale. Mr. Ward owned
the estate about 1840, and under his direction many changes were made
in the old building,--sixty workmen having been employed upon it for
six months. The present drawing-room and conservatory were built by
Mr. Ward, and by him the whole structure was "modernised." There
are wild stories that autographs and other relics of Shakespeare once
existed at Clopton, and were consumed there, in a bon-fire. A stone
in the grounds marks the grave of a silver eagle, that was starved to
death, through the negligence of a gamekeeper, November 25, 1795. There
are twenty-six notable portraits in the main hall of Clopton, one of
them being that of Oliver Cromwell's mother, and another probably that
of the unfortunate and unhappy Arabella Stuart,--only child of the
fifth Earl of Lennox,--who died, at the Tower of London, in 1615.
Warwickshire swarmed with conspirators while the Gunpowder Plot was in
progress. The Lion Inn at Dunchurch was the chief tryst of the captains
who were to lead their forces and capture the Princess Elizabeth and
seize the throne and the country, after the expected explosion,--which
never came. And when the game was up and Fawkes in captivity, it was
through Warwickshire that the "racing and chasing" were fleetest and
wildest, till the desperate scramble for life and safety went down in
blood at Hewel Grange. Various houses associated with that plot are
still extant in this neighbourhood, and when the scene shifts to London
and to Garnet's Tyburn gallows, it is easily possible for the patient
antiquarian to tread in almost every footprint of that great conspiracy.
[Illustration: _Warwick Castle, from the Mound._]
Since Irish ruffians began to toss dynamite about in public buildings
it has been deemed essential to take especial precaution against
the danger of explosion in such places as the Houses of Parliament,
Westminster Abbey, and the Tower of London. Much more damage than the
newspapers recorded was done by the explosions that occurred some time
ago in the Tower and the Palace. At present you cannot enter even into
Palace Yard unless connected with the public business or authorised
by an order; and if you visit the Tower without a special permit you
will be restricted to a few sights and places. I was fortunately the
bearer of the card of the Lord Chamberlain, on a recent prowl through
the Tower, and therefore was favoured by the beef-eaters who pervade
that structure. Those damp and gloomy dungeons were displayed wherein
so many Jews perished miserably in the reign of Edward the First; and
Little Ease was shown,--the cell in which for several months Guy Fawkes
was incarcerated, during Cecil's wily investigation of the Gunpowder
Plot. A part of the rear wall has been removed, affording access to the
adjacent dungeon; but originally the cell did not give room for a man
to lie down in it, and scarce gave room for him to stand upright. The
massive door, of ribbed and iron-bound oak, still solid, though worn,
would make an impressive picture. A poor, stealthy cat was crawling
about in those subterranean dens of darkness and horror, and was left
locked in there when we emerged. In St. Peter's, on the green,--that
little cemetery so eloquently described by Macaulay,--they came, some
time ago, upon the coffins of Lovat, Kilmarnock, and Balmerino, the
Scotch lords who perished upon the block for their complicity with the
rising for the Pretender, in 1745-47. The coffins were much decayed.
The plates were removed, and these may now be viewed, in a glass case
on the church wall, over against the spot where those unfortunate
gentlemen were buried.[8] One is of lead and is in the form of a
large open scroll. The other two are oval in shape, large, and made
of pewter. Much royal and noble dust is heaped together beneath the
stones of the chancel,--Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey,
Margaret, Duchess of Salisbury, the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of
Northumberland, Essex, Overbury, Thomas Cromwell, and many more. The
body of the infamous and execrable Jeffreys was once buried there, but
it has been removed.
[Illustration: _Warwick Castle, from the River._]
St. Mary's church at Warwick has been restored since 1885, and now it
is made a show place. The pilgrim may see the Beauchamp chapel, in
which are entombed Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the founder of
the church; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in whose Latin epitaph
it is stated that "his sorrowful wife, Lætitia, daughter of Francis
Knolles, through a sense of conjugal love and fidelity, hath put up
this monument to the best and dearest of husbands";[9] Ambrose Dudley,
elder brother to Elizabeth's favourite, and known as the Good Earl
[he relinquished his title and possessions to Robert]; and that Fulke
Greville, Lord Brooke, who lives in fame as "the friend of Sir Philip
Sidney." There are other notable sleepers in that chapel, but these
perhaps are the most famous and considerable. One odd epitaph records
of William Viner, steward to Lord Brooke, that "he was a man entirely
of ancient manners, and to whom you will scarcely find an equal,
particularly in point of liberality.... He was added to the number of
the heavenly inhabitants maturely for himself, but prematurely for his
friends, in his 70th year, on the 28th of April, A.D. 1639." Another,
placed for himself by Thomas Hewett during his lifetime, modestly
describes him as "a most miserable sinner." Sin is always miserable
when it knows itself. Still another, and this in good verse, by Gervas
Clifton, gives a tender tribute to Lætitia, "the excellent and pious
Lady Lettice," Countess of Leicester, who died on Christmas morning,
1634:
"She that in her younger years
Matched with two great English peers;
She that did supply the wars
With thunder, and the Court with stars;
She that in her youth had been
Darling to the maiden Queene,
Till she was content to quit
Her favour for her favourite....
While she lived she livéd thus,
Till that God, displeased with us,
Suffered her at last to fall,
Not from Him but from us all."
[Illustration: _Leicester's Hospital._]
A noble bust of that fine thinker and exquisite poet Walter Savage
Landor has been placed on the west wall of St. Mary's church. He was
a native of Warwick and he is fitly commemorated in that place. The
bust is of alabaster and is set in an alabaster arch with carved
environment, and with the family arms displayed above. The head of
Landor shows great intellectual power, rugged yet gentle. Coming
suddenly upon the bust, in this church, the pilgrim is forcibly and
pleasantly reminded of the attribute of sweet and gentle reverence
in the English character, which so invariably expresses itself, all
over this land, in honourable memorials to the honourable dead. No
rambler in Warwick omits to explore Leicester's hospital, or to see as
much as he can of the Castle. That glorious old place has long been
kept closed, for fear of the dynamite fiend; but now it is once more
accessible. I walked again beneath the stately cedars[10] and along the
bloom-bordered avenues where once Joseph Addison used to wander and
meditate, and traversed again those opulent state apartments wherein
so many royal, noble, and beautiful faces look forth from the radiant
canvas of Holbein and Vandyke. There is a wonderful picture, in one
of those rooms, of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, when a young
man,--a face prophetic of stormy life, baleful struggles, and a hard
and miserable fate. You may see the helmet that was worn by Oliver
Cromwell, and also a striking death-mask of his face; and some of the
finest portraits of Charles the First that exist in this kingdom are
shown at Warwick Castle.
[Illustration: _From the Warwick Shield._]