lovely ruin. Hour upon hour we would wander about among the noble
fragments which Nature was so tenderly comforting for the outrages of
His Rapacity Henry VIII. Harebells shone blue from the top of the
broken arch of the tall east window, whose glass was long since
shattered and whose mullions were wrenched away. Grasses and all
manner of little green weeds had climbed up to triforium and
clerestory, where they ran lightly along the crumbling edges. Ivy
tapestries were clinging to the ragged stone surfaces. Thickets of
nightshade mantled the sunken tombs and altar steps. Ferns nodded over
the fretted canopies of the richly wrought choir stalls and muffled
the mouths of fierce old gargoyles, still grinning defiance at Time.
In the blue overhead, which no roof shut from view, a seagull would
occasionally flash by with the same strong flight that the eyes of the
Vikings, whose barrows once dotted the low islands of this western
coast, used to follow with sympathetic gaze. Wrens have built their
nests in plundered niche and idle capital. The rooks, arraying
themselves in sombre semicircle along some hollow chancel arch, cawed
reminiscent vespers. And little boys and girls from Barrow, joyous
mites of humanity not yet smelted into the industrial mass, tried
leaping-matches from the stumps of mossy pillars and ran races through
nave and cloister. The wooden clogs of these lively youngsters have
left their marks on prostrate slab and effigy, even on "the stone
abbot" and "the cross-legged knight," much to the displeasure of the
custodian,--a man who so truly cares for his abbey, the legal property
of the Duke of Devonshire, that he has purchased two of the chief
antiquarian works upon Furness in order that he may thoroughly
acquaint himself with its history. It was he who told us that many of
the empty stone coffins had been carried away by the farmers of the
neighbourhood to serve as horse-troughs, and that in their barn walls
might be seen here and there sculptured blocks of red sandstone quite
above the appreciation of calves and heifers. He told how he had shown
"Professor Ruskin" about the ruins, and how, at Ruskin's request, Mrs.
Severn had sent him from Brantwood seeds of the Italian toad-flax to
be planted here. He lent us his well-thumbed folios, West's
"Antiquities of Furness" and "Beck's Annales Furnessienses," so that,
sitting under the holly-shade in the Abbey Hotel garden, with a
"starry multitude of daisies" at our feet, we could pore at our ease
over that strange story, a tale of greatness that is told, and now,
save for those lofty ribs and arches so red against the verdure,
nothing but a tale. Our readings would be pleasurably interrupted
toward the close of the afternoon by the advent of tea, brought to us
in the garden, and the simultaneous arrival of a self-invited robin.
"Not like a beggar is he come,
But enters as a looked-for guest,
Confiding in his ruddy breast."
We tossed crumbs to him all the more gaily for the fancy that his
ancestors were among the pensioners of the abbey in the day of its
supremacy. For the monks of Furness maintained an honourable
reputation for hospitality from that mid-thirteenth-century beginning,
when the Grey Brothers from Normandy first erected the grave, strong,
simple walls of their Benedictine foundation in this deep and narrow
vale, to the bitter end in 1537. Meanwhile they had early discarded
the grey habit of the Benedictines for the white of the Cistercians,
and their abbot had become "lord of the liberties of Furness,"
exercising an almost regal sway in his peninsula, with power of life
and death, with armed forces at command, and with one of the richest
incomes of the kingdom under his control. With wealth had come luxury.
The buildings, which filled the whole breadth of the vale, had
forgotten their Cistercian austerity in a profusion of ornament.
Within "the strait enclosure," encompassing church and cloisters, the
little syndicate of white-vested monks not only chanted and prayed,
transcribed and illuminated manuscripts, taught the children of their
tenants and entertained the stranger, but planned financial
operations on a large scale. For outside this, the holy wall, was
another, shutting in over threescore acres of fertile land which the
lay brothers, far exceeding the clerical monks in number, kept well
tilled. Here were mill, granary, bakehouse, malt-kiln, brewery,
fish-pond; and beyond stretched all Furness, where the abbey raised
its cattle, sheep and horses, made salt, smelted its iron, and
gathered its rents.
Few of the monastic establishments had so much to lose, but Furness
was surrendered to the commissioners of Henry VIII with seemingly no
resistance. The Earl of Sussex reported to his greedy master that he
found the Lord Abbot "of a very facile and ready mynde," while the
prior, who had been a monk in that house for fifty years, was
"decrepted and aged." Yet it may be noted that of the thirty-three
monks whom Sussex found in possession, only thirty signed the deed of
surrender. On the fate of the three history is silent, save for a
brief entry to the effect that two were imprisoned in Lancaster
Castle. There is no record of their liberation. The monks who made
their submission were granted small pensions. The abbot received the
rectory of Dalton, so near the desecrated abbey that he might have
heard, to his torment, the crash of its falling towers. But there is
room to hope that in those cruel dungeons of Lancaster two men died
because they would not cringe. We do not know, and it was in vain we
hunted through the moonlight for the ghost of that mysterious
thirty-third, who, too, might have a gallant tale to tell.
The region abounds in points of interest. Romney, the painter, is
buried in the churchyard of Dalton, his native place. Beautiful for
situation is Conishead Priory, "the Paradise of Furness," once a house
of the Black Canons and now a much-vaunted Hydropathic, for, in the
stately language of the eighteenth-century antiquary, Thomas West,
"Æsculapius is seldom invited to Furness, but Hygeia is more necessary
than formerly."
[Illustration: THE TRENT AND MERSEY CANAL]
Near the banks of the Duddon stands Broughton Tower, with its legend
of how the manor, in possession of the family from time immemorial,
was lost by Sir Thomas Broughton--and this was the way of it. In 1487
Lambert Simnel, claiming to be the son of the murdered Clarence,
sailed over from Ireland, where he had been crowned by the sister
of Richard III, to dispute the new throne of Henry VII. Among his
supporters were the Earl of Lincoln, Lord Lovel of Oxfordshire, and
Lord Geraldine with an Irish force; but it was the general of his two
thousand Burgundian mercenaries, "bold Martin Swart," who is credited
with having given name to Swarthmoor, where the invaders encamped. Sir
Thomas joined them with a small body of retainers and, in the crushing
defeat that followed, was probably left dead upon the field. But
legend says that two of the English leaders escaped,--Lord Lovel to
his own house in Oxfordshire, where he hid in a secret chamber and
perished there of hunger, and Sir Thomas to his faithful tenantry, who
for years concealed him in their huts and sheep-folds, and when he
died, white-haired, wrapped him in his own conquered banner, and gave
him a burial worthy of his race.
But our associations with Swarthmoor were of peace and not of war. Our
pilgrimage thither was made for the sake of Mistress Fell of
Swarthmoor Hall and of George Fox, her second husband, who established
hard by what is said to be the first meeting-house of Friends in
England. Quitting the train at Lindal, a few miles above the abbey, we
found ourselves in the rich iron country, "the Peru of Furness." It
must be the reddest land this side of sunset. Even the turnips and
potatoes, we were told, come red out of the ground. I know that we
tramped amazedly on, over a red road, past red trees and buildings,
with a red stream running below, and the uncanniest red men, red from
cap to shoe, rising like Satan's own from out the earth to tramp along
beside us. The road was deeply hedged, airless and viewless, and we
were glad when we had left three miles of it behind, though the
village of Swarthmoor, at which we had then arrived, proved to be one
of those incredibly squalid English villages that make the heart sick.
Between wide expanses of sweet green pasture, all carefully walled in,
with strict warnings against trespass, ran two or three long, parallel
stone streets, swarming with children and filthy beyond excuse. The
lambs had space and cleanliness about them, soft turf to lie upon,
pure air to breathe, but the human babies crawled and tumbled on that
shamefully dirty pavement, along which a reeking beer wagon was
noisily jolting from "public" to "public." Farther down our chosen
street, which soon slipped into a lane, there were tidier homes and
more sanitary conditions. Yet even Swarthmoor Hall, the fine old Tudor
mansion which rose across the fields beyond, had a somewhat uninviting
aspect. There were broken panes in the windows, and the cows had made
the dooryards too much their own. The present proprietors, who, we
were assured, value the old place highly, and had refused repeated
offers for it from the Society of Friends, rent it to a farmer. The
housekeeper, not without a little grumbling, admitted us, and showed
us about the spacious rooms with their dark oak panelling, their
richly carven mantels, their windows that look seaward over Morecambe
Bay and inland to the Coniston mountains. The hall which Judge
Fell--that wise and liberal man, tolerant beyond his time--allowed the
Friends to use for their weekly meetings, is a room of goodly
proportions, with flagged floor and timbered roof. In the dining-room
window stands a simple deal desk once belonging to George Fox, but
that upper door through which he used to preach to the throng in
orchard and meadow is now walled up. As we, departing, looked back at
the house, large, plain, three-storied, covered with grey stucco, we
noted how right up on the chimney, in the alien fellowship of the
chimney-pots, flourished a goodly green yew, sown by passing wind or
bird. The housekeeper, who had waxed so gracious that she accompanied
us for a few steps on our way, said she had lived in Swarthmoor
thirty-four years and had always seen the yew looking much as it did
now, but that an old man of the neighbourhood remembered it in his
boyhood as only finger-long. It had never, so far as she could tell,
been provided by mortal hand with earth or water, but grew by some
inner grace, a housetop sign and signal.
Many hallowed memories cluster about that old Elizabethan mansion. It
was in 1632 that Judge Fell brought thither his bride, Margaret Askew,
sixteen years his junior. She was a descendant of Anne Askew, who, a
beautiful woman of twenty-four, thoughtful and truthful, had been
burned as a heretic,--one of the closing achievements of the reign of
Henry VIII. "I saw her," reports a bystander, "and must needs confess
of Mistress Askew, now departed to the Lord, that the day before her
execution, and the same day also, she had on an angel's countenance,
and a smiling face; though when the hour of darkness came, she was so
racked that she could not stand, but was holden up between two
serjeants."
It was then that the Lord Chancellor--who previously, when even the
callous jailer had refused to rack the delicate body further, had
thrown off his gown and worked the torture-engine with his own
hands--offered her the king's pardon if she would recant, receiving in
reply only the quiet words, "I came not hither to deny my Lord and
Master."
It is not easy for us who read to echo the prayer of her who suffered:
"Lord, I Thee desyre,
For that they do to me,
Let them not taste the hyre
Of their inyquyte."
No wonder that Margaret Fell, with such a history in her heart, should
have lent a ready ear to the doctrines of the "Children of Light," as
the people dubbed them, the "Friends of Truth," as they called
themselves, the "Quakers," whose prime contention was for liberty of
conscience.
She had been married twenty years when George Fox first appeared at
Swarthmoor Hall, where all manner of "lecturing ministers" were
hospitably entertained. Three weeks later, Judge Fell, a grave man not
far from sixty, was met, as he was riding home from circuit, by
successive parties of gentlemen, "a deal of the captains and great
ones of the country," who had come out to tell him that his family
were "all bewitched." Home he came in wrath, but his wife soothed him
as good wives know how,--had the nicest of dinners made ready, and sat
by him, chatting of this and that, while he ate.
"At night," says her own account, "George Fox arrived; and after
supper, when my husband was sitting in the parlour, I asked if he
might come in. My husband said yes. So George walked into the room
without any compliment. The family all came in, and presently he began
to speak. He spoke very excellently, as ever I heard him; and opened
Christ's and the Apostles' practices.... If all England had been
there, I thought they could not have denied the truth of these
things. And so my husband came to see clearly the truth of what he
spake."
The next First-day the meeting of the Friends was held at Swarthmoor
Hall on Judge Fell's own invitation, though he himself went, as usual,
to "the Steeplehouse." The spirit of persecution was soon abroad, and
one day, when the Judge was absent on circuit, Fox, while speaking in
the church, was set upon, knocked down, trampled, beaten, and finally
whipped out of town. On Judge Fell's return, he dealt with the
Friend's assailants as common rioters. The Judge held, however, his
mother's faith to the end, never becoming a member of the Society. He
died in the year of Cromwell's death, 1658, and was buried by
torchlight under the family pew in Ulverston church. "He was a
merciful man to God's people," wrote his widow, adding that, though
not a Friend, he "sought after God in the best way that was made known
to him."
Meanwhile Margaret Fell had become a leader among the Children of
Light. Twice she wrote to Cromwell in behalf of their cause, and again
and again to Charles II, with whom she pleaded face to face. Now that
her husband's protection was withdrawn, persecution no longer spared
her, and she, like Fox and many another of the Society, came to know
well the damp and chilly dungeons of Lancaster Castle,--that stern
prison of North Lancashire which may be viewed afar off from the
ominous height of Weeping Hill.
"Thousands, as toward yon old Lancastrian Towers,
A prison's crown, along this way they passed,
For lingering durance or quick death with shame,
From this bare eminence thereon have cast
Their first look--blinded as tears fell in showers
Shed on their chains."
Refusing, as a Quaker must needs refuse, to take the oath of
supremacy, Mistress Fell stood her trial in 1663, her four daughters
beside her. Her arguments irritated the judge into exclaiming that she
had "an everlasting tongue," and he condemned her to imprisonment for
life, with confiscation of all her property to the Crown. But after
some five years of Lancaster's grim hospitality she was released, and
forthwith set out on a series of visits to those English jails in
which Quakers were immured. It was not until eleven years after Judge
Fell's death that she married George Fox. The courtship is summarised
in Fox's "Journal": "I had seen from the Lord a considerable time
before that I should take Margaret Fell to be my wife; and when I
first mentioned it to her she felt the answer from God thereto." Yet
after the marriage, as before, they pursued, in the main, their
separate paths of preaching, journeying, and imprisonment. It was
seven years before illness brought Fox to Swarthmoor, which had been
restored to the family, for a brief rest. About a quarter of a mile
from the mansion, stood a dwelling-house in its three or four acres of
land. This modest estate Fox purchased and gave it "to the Lord, for
the service of his sons and daughters and servants called Quakers....
And also my ebony bedstead, with painted curtains, and the great
elbow-chair that Robert Widder sent me, and my great sea case with the
bottles in it I do give to stand in the house as heirlooms, when the
house shall be made use of as a meeting-place, that Friends may have a
bed to lie on, a chair to sit on, and a bottle to hold a little water
for drink." He adds: "Slate it and pave the way to it and about it,
that Friends may go dry to their meeting. You may let any poor,
honest Friend live in the house, and so let it be for the Lord's
service, to the end of the world."
A deep hawthorn lane, winding to the left, led us to that apostolic
meeting-house, well-nigh hidden from the road by its high, grey,
ivy-topped wall. We passed through a grassy outer court into an inner
enclosure thick-set with larches, hollies, and wild cherry. The paths
are paved. Luxuriant ivy curtains porch and wall, and clambers up over
the low tower. Above the door is inscribed:
_Ex dono G. F._, 1682.
The meeting-room within is of Quaker plainness, with drab-tinted
walls. The settees are hard and narrow, though a few "at the top" are
allowed the creature comforts of cushions. Only the posts are left of
the ebony bedstead, but two elbow-chairs of carven oak, a curiously
capacious and substantial travelling-chest, and a Bible still are
shown as Fox's personal belongings. The Bible is a black-letter folio
of 1541, the Treacle Bible, open at the third chapter of Jeremiah,
where, in the last verse, comes the query: "Is not there any tryacle
in Gylyad?"
But Lancashire has other saints no less holy than those dear to
Protestant and Quaker memory. Surely martyrs, irrespective of the
special phase of the divine idea for which they gladly give up their
bodies to torture and to death, are the truest heroes of history.
"For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow."
This remote county, especially the north with its perilous bogs and
rugged fells, clung to the mother faith. Many of its old families are
still Catholic; many a Tudor mansion can show its "priest-hole" from
which, perhaps, some hidden Jesuit has been dragged to the dungeon or
the scaffold. We journeyed up from Manchester on a sunny afternoon,
for love of one of these, to the beautiful valley of the Ribble, rich
in manifold traditions. Our time was short, but we climbed to the keep
of Clitheroe Castle, ruined for its loyalty to Charles I, and viewed
that wide prospect whose most impressive feature is the witch-storied
stretch of Pendle Hill. On that long level range the famous witches
of Lancashire used to hold their unseemly orgies, hooting and yowling
about Malkin Tower, their capital stronghold, whose evil stones were
long since cast down and scattered. Peevish neighbours they were, at
the best, ready on the least provocation to curse the cow from giving
milk and the butter from coming in the churn, but on Pendle Hill the
broomstick battalion was believed to dance in uncouth circle about
caldrons seething with hideous ingredients and to mould little wax
images of their enemies who would peak and pine as these effigies
wasted before the flames, or shudder with fierce shoots of agony as
red-hot needles were run into the wax. What were honest folk to do? It
was bad enough to have the bride-cake snatched away from the
wedding-feast and to find your staid Dobbin all in a lather and dead
lame at sunrise from his wild gallop, under one of these "secret,
black and midnight hags," to Malkin Tower, but when you were saddled
and bridled and ridden yourself, when the hare that you had chased and
wounded turned suddenly into your own wife panting and covered with
blood, when your baby was stolen from the cradle to be served up in
the Devil's Sacrament of the Witches' Sabbath, it was time to send
for one of King James's "witch-finders." So the poor old crones,
doubled up and corded thumb to toe, were flung into the Calder to see
whether they would sink or swim, or sent to where the fagot-piles
awaited them in the courtyard of Lancaster Gaol, or even--so the
whisper goes--flung into their own lurid bonfires on Pendle Hill. But
still strange shadows, as of furious old arms that scatter curses, are
to be seen on those heather-purpled slopes, and from the summit black
thunderstorms crash down with supernatural suddenness and passion.
Our driver was a subdued old man, with an air of chronic
discouragement. He met the simplest questions, about trains, about
trees, about climate, with a helpless shake of the head and the humble
iteration: "I can't say. I'm no scholard. I never went to school. I
can't read." He eyed Pendle Hill, standing blue in a flood of
sunshine, with obvious uneasiness, and asked if we thought there
really were "such folk as witches." As we drove up the long avenues of
Stonyhurst, our goal, that imposing seat of learning seemed to deepen
his meek despondency. He murmured on his lofty perch: "I never went
to school."
Stonyhurst, the chief Catholic college of England, was originally
located at St. Omer's in France. Over sea to St. Omer's the Catholic
gentry of Elizabethan times used to send their sons. There the exiled
lads vainly chanted litanies for England's conversion, their church
door bearing in golden letters the fervent prayer: "_Jesu, Jesu,
converte Angliam, fiat, fiat._" The Elizabethan sonneteer, William
Habington, who describes "a holy man" as one who erects religion on
the Catholic foundation, "knowing it a ruinous madness to build in the
air of a private spirit, or on the sands of any new schism," was a St.
Omer's boy. Nineteen of those quaintly uniformed lads, blue-coated,
red-vested, leather-trousered, afterwards died on the scaffold or in
prison, usually as Jesuit priests who had slipped into England against
Elizabethan law.
During the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the strong
feeling against the Jesuits led to their banishment from France and
finally to the temporary suppression of the order, the school began
its wanderings,--from St. Omer's to Bruges, thence to Liège, and at
last, in 1794, from Liège to England, where one of the alumni
presented the homeless seminary with the fine estate of Stonyhurst. In
this secluded, healthful situation there now stands a prosperous
college, with dormitories for two hundred students, with well-equipped
academic buildings, a preparatory school, and a great farm which of
itself maintains the institution.
Stonyhurst has many treasures,--illuminated missals, Caxton editions,
a St. John's Gospel in Gaelic script said to have been found in the
tomb of St. Cuthbert, relics of "Blessed Thomas More," original
portraits of the Stuarts,--including the winsome picture of Bonny
Prince Charlie as a child,--but the object of our quest was a little
manuscript volume of Robert Southwell's poems. Of course the porter
knew nothing about it, though he strove to impart the impression that
this was the only matter in the universe on which he was uninformed,
and "the teaching fathers" were still absent for their summer holiday;
but a gentle old lay brother finally hunted out for us the precious
book, choicely bound in vellum and delicately written in an unknown
hand, with corrections and insertions in the young priest's own
autograph. This Stonyhurst manuscript gives the best and only complete
text for the strange, touching, deeply devotional poems of Father
Southwell,--the text on which Grosart's edition rests. It is supposed
that they were written out for him by a friend while he lay a prisoner
in the Tower, and that in the intervals between the brutalities of
torture to which that most sensitive organism was again and again
subjected, he put to his book these finishing touches,--only a few
months and weeks before he was executed at Tyburn by a blunderer who
adjusted the noose so badly that the martyr "several times made the
sign of the Cross while he was hanging."
Our eyes filled as we deciphered the faded Elizabethan script:
"God's spice I was, and pounding was my due;
In fading breath my incense savored best;
Death was the meane, my kyrnell to renewe;
By loppynge shott I upp to heavenly rest.
* * * * *
"Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose;
It was no death to me, but to my woe;
The budd was opened to lett out the rose,
The cheynes unloos'd to let the captive goe."
As we were driving on to Whalley, to pay our tribute of honour to yet
one shining memory more, the summit of Pendle Hill suddenly wrapped
itself in sable cloud, and its haunting vixens let loose upon us the
most vehement pelt of rain, diversified with lightning-jags and
thunder-crashes, that it was ever my fortune to be drenched withal.
One of the Lancashire witches is buried in Whalley churchyard under a
massive slab which is said to heave occasionally. I think I saw it
shaking with malicious glee as we came spattering up the flooded path,
looking as if we had ourselves been "swum" in the Calder.