HISTORIC NOOKS OF WARWICKSHIRE
Stratford-upon-Avon, August 20, 1889.--The traveller who hurries
through Warwickshire,--and American travellers mostly do hurry through
it,--appreciates but little the things that he sees, and does not
understand how much he loses. The customary course is to lodge at the
Red Horse, which is one of the most comfortable houses in England, and
thus to enjoy the associations that are connected with the visits of
Washington Irving. His parlour, his bedroom (number 15), his arm-chair,
his poker, and the sexton's clock, mentioned by him in the _Sketch
Book_, are all to be seen, if your lightning-express conductor will
give you time enough to see them. From the Red Horse you are taken in
a carriage, when you ought to be allowed to proceed on foot, and the
usual round includes the Shakespeare Birthplace; the Grammar School
and Guild chapel; the remains of New Place; Trinity church and the
Shakespeare graves in its chancel; Anne Hathaway's cottage at Shottery;
and, perhaps, the Shakespeare Memorial library and theatre. These are
impressive sights to the lover of Shakespeare; but when you have seen
all these you have only begun to see the riches of Stratford-upon-Avon.
It is only by living in the town, by making yourself familiar with it
in all its moods, by viewing it in storm as well as in sunshine, by
roaming through its quaint, deserted streets in the lonely hours of
the night, by sailing up and down the beautiful Avon, by driving and
walking in the green lanes that twine about it for many miles in every
direction, by becoming, in fact, a part of its actual being, that you
obtain a genuine knowledge of that delightful place. Familiarity, in
this case, does not breed contempt. The worst you will ever learn of
Stratford is that gossip thrives in it; that its intellect is, with
due exception, narrow and sleepy; and that it is heavily ridden by the
ecclesiastical establishment. You will never find anything that can
detract from the impression of beauty and repose made upon your mind by
the sweet retirement of its situation, by the majesty of its venerable
monuments, and by the opulent, diversified splendours of its natural
and historical environment. On the contrary, the more you know of those
charms the more you will love the town, and the greater will be the
benefit of high thought and spiritual exaltation that you will derive
from your knowledge of it; and hence it is important that the American
traveller should be counselled for his own sake to live a little while
in Stratford instead of treating it as an incident of his journey.
[Illustration: _The Red Horse Hotel._]
The occasion of a garden party at the rectory of a clerical friend at
Butler's Marston gave opportunity to see one of the many picturesque
and happy homes with which this region abounds. The lawns there are
ample and sumptuous. The dwelling and the church, which are close to
each other, are bowered in great trees. From the terraces a lovely
view may be obtained of the richly coloured and finely cultivated
fields, stretching away toward Edgehill, which lies southeast
from Stratford-upon-Avon about sixteen miles away, and marks the
beginning of the Vale of the Red Horse. In the churchyard are the
gray, lichen-covered remains of one of those ancient crosses from the
steps of which the monks preached, in the early days of the church.
Relics of this class are deeply interesting for what they suggest of
the people and the life of earlier times. A fine specimen of the
ancient cross may be seen at Henley-in-Arden, a few miles northwest of
Stratford, where it stands, in mouldering majesty in the centre of the
village,--strangely inharmonious with the petty shops and numerous inns
of which that long and straggling but characteristic and attractive
settlement is composed. The tower of the church at Butler's Marston,
a gray, grim structure, "four-square to opposition," was built in the
eleventh century,--a period of much ecclesiastical activity in the
British islands. Within it I found a noble pulpit, of carved oak, dark
with age, of the time of James the First. There are many commemorative
stones in the church, on one of which appears this lovely couplet,
addressed to the shade of a young girl:
"Sleep, gentle soul, and wait thy Maker's will!
Then rise unchanged, and be an angel still."
The present village of Butler's Marston,--a little group of cottages
clustered upon the margin of a tiny stream and almost hidden in a
wooded dell,--is comparatively new; for it has arisen since the time
of the Puritan civil war. The old village was swept away by the
Roundheads, when Essex and Hampden came down to fight King Charles at
Edgehill, in 1642. That fierce strife raged all along the country-side,
and you may still perceive there, in the inequalities of the land, the
sites on which houses formerly stood. It is a sweet and peaceful place
now, smiling with flowers and musical with the rustle of the leaves
of giant elms. The clergyman farms his own glebe, and he has expended
more than a thousand pounds in the renovation of his manse. The
church "living" is not worth much more than a hundred pounds a year,
and when he leaves the dwelling, if he should ever leave it, he loses
the value of all the improvements that he has made. This he mentioned
with a contented smile. The place, in fact, is a little paradise, and
as I looked across the green and golden fields, and saw the herds at
rest and the wheat waving in sun and shadow, and thought of the simple
life of the handful of people congregated here, the words of Gray came
murmuring into my mind:
"Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool, sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way."
[Illustration: _The Grammar School, Stratford._]
"Unregarded age, in corners thrown." Was that fine line suggested to
Shakespeare by the spectacle of the almshouses of the Guild, which
stood in his time, just as they stand now, close to the spot where he
lived and died? New Place, Shakespeare's home, stood on the northeast
corner of Chapel street and Chapel lane. The Guild chapel stands on the
southeast corner of those streets, immediately opposite to what was
once the poet's home. Southward from the chapel, and adjoining to it,
extends the long, low, sombre building that contains the Free Grammar
School, founded by Thomas Jolyffe in 1482, and refounded in 1553 by
King Edward the Sixth. In that grammar school, there is reason to
believe, Shakespeare was educated; at first by Walter Roche, afterward
by Simon Hunt,--who doubtless birched the little boys then, even as the
head-master does now; it being a cardinal principle with the British
educator that learning, like other goods, should be delivered in the
rear. In those almshouses doubtless there were many forlorn inmates,
even as there are at present,--and Shakespeare must often have seen
them. On visiting one of the bedesmen I found him moving slowly, with
that mild, aimless, inert manner and that bleak aspect peculiar to such
remnants of vanishing life, among the vegetable vines and the profuse,
rambling flowers in the sunny garden behind the house; and presently I
went into his humble room and sat by his fireside. The scene was the
perfect fulfilment of Shakespeare's line. A stone floor. A low ceiling
crossed with dusky beams. Walls that had been whitewashed long ago. A
small iron kettle, with water in it, simmering over a few smouldering
coals. A rough bed, in a corner. A little table, on which were three
conch-shells ranged in a row. An old arm-chair, on which were a few
coarse wads of horsehair, as a cushion. A bench, whereon lay a torn,
tattered, soiled copy of the prayer book of the church of England,
beginning at the epiphany. This sumptuous place was lighted by a
lattice of small leaded panes. And upon one of the walls hung a framed
placard of worsted work, bearing the inscription, "Blessed be the Lord
for His Unspeakable Gift." The aged, infirm pensioner doddered about
the room, and when he was asked what had become of his wife his dull
eyes filled with tears and he said simply that she was dead. "So runs
the world away." The summons surely cannot be unwelcome that calls such
an old and lonely pilgrim as that to his rest in yonder churchyard and
to his lost wife who is waiting for him.
[Illustration: _Interior of the Grammar School._]
Warwickshire is hallowed by shining names of persons illustrious in
the annals of art. Drayton, Greene, and Heminge, who belong to the
Shakespeare period, were born there. Walter Savage Landor was a native
of Warwick,--in which quaint and charming town you may see the house of
his birth, duly marked. Croft, the composer, was born near Ettington,
hard by Stratford: there is a tiny monument, commemorative of him, in
the ruins of Ettington church, near the manor-house of Shirley. And in
our own day Warwickshire has enriched the world with "George Eliot" and
with that matchless actress,--the one Ophelia and the one Beatrice of
our age--Ellen Terry. But it is a chief characteristic of England that
whichever way you turn in it your footsteps fall on haunted ground.
Everyday life here is continually impressed by incidents of historic
association. In an old church at Greenwich I asked that I might be
directed to the tomb of General Wolfe. "He is buried just beneath where
you are now standing," the custodian said. It was an elderly woman who
showed the place, and she presently stated that when a girl she once
entered the vault beneath that church and stood beside the coffin of
General Wolfe and took a piece of laurel from it, and also took a piece
of the red velvet pall from the coffin of the old Duchess of Bolton,
close by. That Duchess was Lavinia Fenton, the first representative
of Polly Peachem, in _The Beggars' Opera_, who died in 1760, aged
fifty-two.[28] "Lord Clive," the dame added, "is buried in the same
vault with Wolfe." An impressive thought, that the ashes of the man who
established Britain's power in America should at last mingle with the
ashes of the man who gave India to England!