SHAKESPEARE RELICS AT WORCESTER
Worcester, July 23, 1889.--The present wanderer came lately to The
Faithful City, and these words are written in a midnight hour at the
Unicorn Hotel. This place is redolent of the wars of the Stuarts,
and the moment you enter it your mind is filled with the presence
of Charles the Martyr, Charles the Merry, Prince Rupert, and Oliver
Cromwell. From the top of Red Hill and the margin of Perry wood,--now
sleeping in the starlight or momentarily vocal with the rustle of
leaves and the note of half-awakened birds,--Cromwell looked down over
the ancient walled city which he had beleaguered. Upon the summit of
the great tower of Worcester Cathedral Charles and Rupert held their
last council of war. Here was lost, September 3, 1651, the battle
that made the Merry Monarch a hunted fugitive and an exile. With a
stranger's interest I have rambled on those heights; traversed the
battlefield; walked in every part of the cathedral; attended divine
service there; revelled in the antiquities of the Edgar Tower; roamed
through most of the city streets; traced all that can be traced of the
old wall [there is little remaining of it now, and no part that can be
walked upon]; explored the royal porcelain works, for which Worcester
is rightly famous; viewed several of its old churches and its one
theatre, in Angel street; entered its Guildhall, where they preserve a
fine piece of artillery and nine suits of black armour that were left
by Charles the Second when he fled from Worcester; paced the dusty and
empty Trinity Hall, now abandoned and condemned to demolition, where
once Queen Elizabeth was feasted; and visited the old Commandery,--a
rare piece of antiquity, remaining from the tenth century,--wherein
the Duke of Hamilton died, of his wounds, after Cromwell's "crowning
mercy," and beneath the floor of which he was laid in a temporary
grave. The Commandery is now owned and occupied by a printer of
directories and guide-books, the genial and hospitable Mr. Littlebury,
and there, as everywhere else in storied Worcester, the arts of peace
prevail over all the scenes and all the traces of
"Old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago."
[Illustration: _Worcester Cathedral, from the Edgar Tower._]
In the Edgar Tower at Worcester they keep the original of the
marriage-bond that was given by Fulk Sandells and John Richardson,
of Shottery, as a preliminary to the marriage of William Shakespeare
and Anne Hathaway. It is a long, narrow strip of parchment, and it
has been glazed and framed. Two seals of light-coloured wax were
originally attached to it, dependent by strings, but these have
been removed,--apparently for the convenience of the mechanic who
put the relic into its present frame. The handwriting is crabbéd and
obscure. There are but few persons who can read the handwriting in
old documents of this kind, and thousands of such documents exist in
the church-archives, and elsewhere, in England, that have never been
examined. The bond is for £40, and is a guarantee that there was no
impediment to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway.
It is dated November 28, 1582; its text authorises the wedding after
only once calling the banns in church; and it is supposed that the
marriage took place immediately, since the first child of it, Susanna
Shakespeare, was baptized in the Church of the Holy Trinity at
Stratford on May 26, 1583. No registration of the marriage has been
found, but that is no proof that it does not exist. The law is said to
have prescribed that three parishes, within the residential diocese,
should be designated, in any one of which the marriage might be made;
but custom permitted the contracting parties, when they had complied
with this requirement, to be married in whatever parish, within the
diocese, they might prefer. The three parishes supposed to have been
named are Stratford, Bishopton, and Luddington. The registers of two
of them have been searched, and searched in vain. The register of
the third,--that of Luddington, which is near Shottery, and about
three miles southwest of Stratford,--was destroyed, long ago, in a
fire that burnt down Luddington church; and conjecture assumes that
Shakespeare was married at Luddington. It may be so, but until every
old church register in the ancient diocese of Worcester has been
examined, the quest of the registration of his marriage ought not
to be abandoned. Richard Savage, the learned and diligent librarian
of the Shakespeare Birthplace, has long been occupied with this
inquiry, and has transcribed several of the old church registers in
the vicinity of Stratford. The Rev. Thomas Procter Wadley,[20] another
local antiquary, of great learning and incessant industry, has also
taken part in this labour. The long-desired entry of the marriage
of William and Anne remains undiscovered, but one gratifying and
valuable result of these investigations is the disclosure that many
of the names used in Shakespeare's works are the names of persons who
were residents of Warwickshire in his time. It has pleased various
crazy sensation-mongers to ascribe the authorship of Shakespeare's
writings to Francis Bacon. This could only be done by ignoring positive
evidence,--the evidence, namely, of Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare
personally, and who has left a written description of the manner in
which Shakespeare composed his plays. Effrontery was to be expected
from the advocates of the preposterous Bacon theory; but when they
have ignored the positive evidence, and the internal evidence, and the
circumstantial evidence, and every other sort of evidence, they have
still a serious obstacle to surmount,--an obstacle that the researches
of such patient scholars as Mr. Savage and Mr. Wadley are strengthening
day by day. The man who wrote Shakespeare's plays knew Warwickshire as
it could only be known to a native of it; and there is no proof that
Francis Bacon knew it or ever was in it.[21]
[Illustration: _The Edgar Tower._]
With reference to the Shakespeare marriage-bond, and the other records
that are kept in the Edgar Tower at Worcester, it may perhaps justly
be said that they are not protected with the scrupulous care to which
such treasures are entitled. The Tower,--a gray and venerable relic,
an ancient gate of the monastery, dating back to the time of King
John,--affords an appropriate receptacle for those documents; but it
would not withstand fire, and it does not contain either a fire-proof
chamber or a safe. The Shakespeare marriage-bond,--which would be
appropriately housed in the Shakespeare Birthplace, at Stratford,--was
taken from the floor of a closet, where it had been lying, together
with a number of dusty books, and I was kindly permitted to hold it
in my hands and to examine it. The frame provided for this priceless
relic is such as may be seen on an ordinary school slate. From another
dusty closet an attendant extricated a manuscript diary kept by William
Lloyd, Bishop of Worcester [1627-1717], and by his man-servant, for
several years, about the beginning of the reign of Queen Anne; and in
this are many quaint and humorous entries, valuable to the student of
history and manners. In still another closet, having the appearance
of a rubbish-bin, I saw heaps of old parchment and paper writings,--a
mass of antique registry that it would need the labour of five or six
years to examine, decipher, and classify. Worcester is especially rich
in old records, and it is not impossible that the missing clew to
Shakespeare's marriage may yet be found in that old cathedral city.
Worcester is rich also in a superb library, which, by the kindness of
Mr. Hooper, the custodian, I was allowed to explore, high up beneath
the roof of the lovely cathedral. That collection of books, numbering
about five thousand, consists mostly of folios, many of which were
printed in France. They keep it in a long, low, oak-timbered room,
the triforium of the south aisle of the nave. The approach is by a
circular stone staircase. In an anteroom to the library I saw a part
of the ancient north door of this church,--a fragment dating back to
the time of Bishop Wakefield, 1386,--to which is still affixed a piece
of the skin of a human being. The tradition is that a Dane committed
sacrilege, by stealing the sanctus bell from the high altar, and was
thereupon flayed alive for his crime, and the skin of him was fastened
to the cathedral door. In the library are magnificent editions of
Aristotle and other classics; the works of the fathers of the church; a
beautiful illuminated manuscript of Wickliffe's New Testament, written
on vellum in 1381; and several books, in splendid preservation, from
the press of Caxton and that of Wynken de Worde. The world moves, but
printing is not better done now than it was then. This library, which
is for the use of the clergy of the diocese of Worcester, was founded
by Bishop Carpenter, in 1461, and originally it was stored in the
chapel of the charnel-house.
Reverting to the subject of old documents, a useful word may
perhaps be said here about the registers in Trinity church at
Stratford,--documents which, in a spirit of disparagement, have
sometimes been designated as "copies." That sort of levity in the
discussion of Shakespearean subjects is not unnatural in days when
"cranks" are allowed freely to besmirch the memory of Shakespeare, in
their wildly foolish advocacy of what they call "the Bacon theory" of
the authorship of Shakespeare's works. The present writer has often
held the Stratford Registers in his hands and explored their quaint
pages. Those records are contained in twenty-two volumes. They begin
with the first year of Queen Elizabeth, 1558, and they end, as to the
old parchment form, in 1812. From 1558 to 1600 the entries were made
in a paper book, of the quarto form, still occasionally to be found in
ancient parish churches of England. In 1599 an order-in-council was
made, commanding that those entries should be copied into parchment
volumes, for their better preservation. This was done. The parchment
volumes,--which were freely shown to me by William Butcher,[22] the
parish clerk of Stratford,--date back to 1600. The handwriting of the
copied portion, covering the period from 1558 to 1600, is careful and
uniform. Each page is certified, as to its accuracy, by the vicar and
the churchwardens. After 1600 the handwritings vary. In the register
of marriage a new handwriting appears on September 17 that year, and
in the registers of Baptism and Burial it appears on September 20. The
sequence of marriages is complete until 1756; that of baptisms and
burials until 1812; when, in each case, a book of printed forms comes
into use, and the expeditious march of the new age begins. The entry of
Shakespeare's baptism, April 26, 1564, from which it is inferred that
he was born on April 23, is extant as a certified copy from the earlier
paper book. The entry of Shakespeare's burial is the original entry,
made in the original register.
Some time ago an American writer suggested that Shakespeare's
widow,--seven years his senior at the start, and therefore fifty-nine
years old when he died,--subsequently contracted another marriage.
Mrs. Shakespeare survived her husband seven years, dying on August 6,
1623, at the age of sixty-seven. The entry in the Stratford register of
burial contains, against the date of August 8, 1623, the names of "Mrs.
Shakespeare" and "Anna uxor Richard James." Those two names, written
one above the other, are connected by a bracket on the left side; and
this is supposed to be evidence that Shakespeare's widow married again.
The use of the bracket could not possibly mislead anybody possessing
the faculty of clear vision. When two or more persons were either
baptized or buried on the same day, the parish clerk, in making the
requisite entry in the register, connected their names with a bracket.
Three instances of this practice occur upon a single page of the
register, in the same handwriting, close to the page that records the
burial, on the same day, of Mrs. Shakespeare, widow, and Anna the wife
of Richard James. But folly needs only a slender hook on which to hang
itself.
John Baskerville, the famous printer [1706-1775], was born in
Worcester, and his remains, the burial-place of which was long unknown,
have lately been discovered there. Incledon, the famous singer, died
there. Prince Arthur [1486-1502], eldest son of King Henry the Seventh,
was buried in Worcester Cathedral, where a beautiful chantry was built
over his remains in 1504. Bishop John Gauden [1605-1662], who wrote the
_Eikon Basiliké_, long generally attributed to Charles the First, rests
there. The Duke of Hamilton, who died of his wounds, after a Worcester
fight, was transferred to that place, from his temporary grave in the
Commandery. And in the centre of the sacrarium stands the tomb of that
tyrant King John, who died on October 19, 1216, at Newark, and whose
remains, when the tomb was opened,[23] July 17, 1797, presented a
ghastly spectacle.