They lived and died in Coventree."
It had a dim memory of some old-time slaughter--perhaps of
Danes--commemorated in its play of Hock Tuesday. Coventry was, indeed,
a "veray revelour" in plays and pageants, and if nothing else could
have brought a long-limbed, wide-awake youth to try what his Rosalind
and Celia and Orlando found so easy, a holiday escapade in the Forest
of Arden, we may be all but sure the Corpus Christi Mysteries would
have given the fiend the best of the argument with conscience. It is
not likely, however, that it had to be a runaway adventure. That
worshipful alderman, John Shakespeare, was himself of a restless
disposition and passing fond of plays. He would have made little, in
the years of his prosperity, of a summer-day canter to Coventry, with
his small son of glowing countenance mounted on the same stout nag.
Later on, when debts and lawsuits were weighing down his spirits, the
father may have turned peevish and withheld both his company and his
horse, but by that time young Will, grown tall and sturdy, could have
trudged it, putting his enchanting tongue to use, when his legs, like
Touchstone's, were weary, in winning a lift from some farmer's wain
for a mile or so along the road. But by hook or by crook he would be
there, laughing in his doublet-sleeve at the blunders of the "rude
mechanicals"--of the tailors who were playing the Nativity and of the
weavers on whose pageant platform was set forth the Presentation in
the Temple. Robin Starveling the Tailor, and his donkeyship Nick
Bottom the Weaver, were they not natives of Coventry? And when the
truant--if truant he was--came footsore back to Stratford and acted
over again in the Henley Street garden, sweet with June, the
"swaggering" of the "hempen home-spuns," did not his gentle mother
hide her smiles by stooping to tend her roses, while the father's
lungs, despite himself, began to "crow like Chanticleer"?
Foolish city, to have kept no record of those visits of the yeoman's
son, that dusty youngster with the dancing eyes! When royal personages
came riding through your gates, you welcomed them with stately
ceremonies and splendid gifts, with gay street pageants and gold cups
full of coin. Your quills ran verse as lavishly as your pipes ran
wine. You had ever a loyal welcome for poor Henry VI; and for his
fiery queen, Margaret of Anjou, you must needs present, in 1456, St.
Margaret slaying the dragon. Four years later, though with secret
rage, you were tendering an ovation to her arch enemy and conqueror,
Edward IV. Here this merry monarch kept his Christmas in 1465, and
nine years later came again to help you celebrate the feast of St.
George. For Prince Edward, three years old, your Mayor and Council,
all robed in blue and green, turned out in 1474, while players
strutted before the child's wondering eyes, while the music of harp
and viol filled his ears, and the "Children of Issarell" flung flowers
before his little feet. His murderer, Richard III, you received with
no less elaborate festivities nine years later, when he came to see
your Corpus Christi plays. But it was to you that his supplanter,
Henry VII, repaired straight from the victory of Bosworth Field, and
you, never Yorkist at heart, flew your banners with enthusiastic joy.
His heir, Arthur, a winsome and delicate prince, you greeted with
unconscious irony, four years before his death, by the blessings of
the Queen of Fortune. You summoned the "Nine Orders of Angels," with a
throng of "divers beautiful damsels," to welcome Henry VIII and the
ill-omened Catherine of Aragon in 1510. They were sumptuously
entertained at your glorious Priory, for whose destruction that
graceless guest, the King, was presently to seal command. But before
its day of doom it sheltered one more royal visitor of yours, the
Princess Mary, who came in 1525 to see the Mercers' Pageant. In 1565,
the year after Shakespeare's birth, you fêted with all splendour Queen
Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, and in 1616, the year of
Shakespeare's death, you spread the feast for King James, the first of
the Stuarts. But you have forgotten your chief guest of all, the
roguish youngster munching his bread and cheese in the front rank of
the rabble, the heaven-crowned poet who was to be more truly
king-maker than the great Warwick himself.
Our first seeing of the name of Warwick in Warwickshire was over a
green-grocer's shop in Coventry. The green-grocer was all very well,
but the sewing-machine factories and, worse yet, the flourishing
business in bicycles and motor-cars jarred on our sixteenth-century
dream. I am ashamed to confess how speedily we accomplished our
Coventry sightseeing, and how early, on the day following our arrival,
we took the road again. We set out in our sedate victoria with high
expectations, for we had been told over and over that the route from
Coventry to Warwick was "the most beautiful drive in England." For
most of the distance we found it a long, straight, level avenue,
bordered by large trees. There were few outlooks; clouds of dust hung
in the air, and gasoline odours trailed along the way. We counted it,
as a drive, almost the dullest of our forty odd, but it was good
roading, and the opinion of the horse may have been more favourable.
Five miles brought us to Kenilworth, about whose stately ruins were
wandering the usual summer groups of trippers and tourists. Its ivies
were at their greenest and its hollies glistened with an emerald
sheen, but when I had last seen the castle, in a far-away October,
those hollies were yet more beautiful with gold-edged leaves and with
ruby berries. Then, as now, the lofty red walls seemed to me to wear
an aspect, if not of austerity, at least of courtly reserve, as if,
whoever might pry and gossip, their secrets were still their own. In
point of fact, the bewitchments of Sir Walter Scott have made it
well-nigh impossible for any of us to bear in mind that in the ancient
fortress of Kenilworth King John was wont to lurk, spinning out his
spider-webs, that Simon de Montfort once exercised gay lordship here,
and here, in sterner times, held Henry III and Prince Edward
prisoners; that these towers witnessed the humiliation of the woful
Edward II, and that in these proud halls the mirth-loving Queen Bess
had been entertained by the Earl of Leicester on three several
occasions prior to the famous visit of 1575. On her first coming our
poet was a prattler of two--if only Mistress Shakespeare had kept a
"Baby Record"!--and I am willing to admit that the event may not have
interested him. When her second royal progress excited Warwickshire,
he was a four-year-old, teasing his mother for fairy stories, and
peeping into the acorn-cups for hidden elves, but hardly likely to
have been chosen to play the part of Cupid while
"the imperial votaress passèd on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free."
As a boy of eight, however, a "gallant child, one that makes old
hearts fresh," he may have stood by the roadside, or been perched on
some friendly shoulder to add his shrill note to the loyal shout when
the Queen rode by amid her retinue; and three years later, I warrant
his quick wits found a way to see something of those glittering shows,
those "princely pleasures of Kenilworth Castle," which lasted nineteen
days and were the talk of the county. How eagerly his winged
imagination would have responded to the Lady of the Lake, to Silvanus,
Pomona and Ceres, to the "savage man" and the satyrs, to the "triton
riding on a mermaid 18 foot long; as also Arion on a dolphin, with
rare music"![6] If we did not think so much about Amy Robsart at
Kenilworth as, according to Scott, we should have done, it is because
we were unfortunate enough to know that she perished fifteen years
before these high festivities,--three years, indeed, before the Castle
was granted to Robert Dudley.
Stoneleigh Abbey, with its tempting portraits, lay three miles to the
left, and we would not swerve from our straight road, which, however,
grew more exciting as we neared Warwick, for it took us past Blacklow
Hill, to whose summit, six hundred years ago, the fierce barons of
Edward II dragged his French favourite, Piers Gaveston, and struck off
that jaunty head, which went bounding down the hill to be picked up at
the bottom by a friar, who piously bore it in his hood to Oxford.
We halted again at Guy's Cliff, constrained by its ancient tradition
of Guy, Earl of Warwick, he who
"did quell that wondrous cow"
of Dunsmore Heath. My own private respect for horned beasts kept me
from flippantly undervaluing this exploit. After other doughty deeds,
giants, monsters, and Saracens falling like ninepins before him, Guy
returned in the odour of sanctity from the Holy Land, but instead of
going home to Warwick, where his fair countess was pining, he sought
out this cliff rising from the Avon and, in a convenient cavity,
established himself as a hermit. Every day he begged bread at the gate
of his own castle, and his wife, not recognising her dread lord in
this meek anchorite, supplied his needs. Just before his end he sent
her a ring, and she, thus discovering the identity of the beggar, sped
to the cave, arriving just in time to see him die. Other hermits
succeeded to his den, and in the reign of Henry VI, Richard Beauchamp,
Earl of Warwick, founded a chantry there. Henry VIII made short work
of that, and the romantic rocks passed from one owner to another, the
present mansion having been built above them in the eighteenth
century. Guy's Cliff was termed by Leland "a place delightful to the
muses," and we were pleased to find it still enjoyed their favour. One
of those supernaturally dignified old servitors who hang about to
catch the pennies struck an attitude on the bridge and, informing us
that he was a poet and had had verses in print, recited with touching
earnestness the following effusion:
"'Ere yer can sit and rest a while,
And watch the wild ducks dive in play,
Listen to the cooin' dove
And the noisy jay,
Watch the moorhen as she builds her rushy nest
Swayin' hupon the himmortal Havon's 'eavin' breast."
[Illustration: FEEDING THE PEACOCKS AT WARWICK CASTLE]
Warwick, a wide-streeted, stately old town, with two of its mediæval
gates still standing, was familiar to us both. I had spent a week
here, some years ago, and taken occasion, after inspecting the lions,
to view the horses, for the autumn races chanced to be on. I remember
sitting, surprised at myself, on the grand stand, in an atmosphere of
tobacco smoke and betting. The bookmakers stood below, conspicuous in
green velveteen coats; some had their names on the open money-bags
hanging from their necks; all were shouting themselves hoarse. A
red-nosed lady in dashing apparel sat on my right, enlightening my
ignorance with a flood of jockey English, while on my left a
plain-faced, anxious little body would turn from helping her husband
decide his bets to urge upon me the superior morality of this to all
other forms of English sport. The green below was filled with a
bustling crowd of men, women, and children, pressing about the booths,
the Punch-and-Judys and the show-carts, adventuring upon the swings
and merry-go-rounds, tossing balls at gay whirligigs and winning
cocoanuts in the fascinating game of "Aunt Sally," or ransacking the
"silken treasury,"
"Lawns as white as driven snow,
Cyprus black as e'er was crow,"
of many a modern Autolycus. The throng was bright with fluttering
pennons, red soldier coats, and the vivid finery of housemaids on a
holiday. I saw five out of the seven races sweep by and waxed
enthusiastic over "Porridge" and "Odd Mixture," but "good old Maggie
Cooper," on which my red-nosed neighbour lost heavily, while the
husband of my moral little friend won, put me to such embarrassment
between them that I bethought myself of my principles and slipped
away.
Eschewing such profane reminiscences, I recalled the Church of St.
Mary, with its haughty Beauchamp Chapel where ancient Earls of Warwick
keep their marble state, together with the Earl of Leicester and his
"noble impe." I recalled the delectable home for old soldiers,
Leycester's Hospital, so inimitably described by Hawthorne. Across the
years I still could see the antique quadrangle with its emblazoned
scutcheons and ornately lettered texts; the vaulted hall with its
great carven beams; the delightful kitchen with its crested fireplace
of huge dimensions, its oaken settles and copper flagons, its Saxon
chair that has rested weary mortality for a thousand years, and its
silken fragment of Amy Robsart's needlework. Most clearly of all rose
from memory the figures of the old pensioners, the "brethren" garbed
in long blue gowns with silver badge on shoulder, stamped, as the
whole building is stamped over and over, with the cognisance of The
Bear and the Ragged Staff. I had done homage at Warwick to the memory
of Landor, who was born there in a house dear to his childhood for its
mulberries and cedars, its chestnut wood, and its fig tree at the
window. Partly for his sake I had visited Rugby, on the eastern border
of Warwickshire,--that great public school which became, under Dr.
Arnold's mastership, such a power in English life. Rugby disapproved
of my special interest, for it has had better boys than Landor, so
wild-tempered a lad that his father was requested to remove him when,
only fifteen, he was within five of being head of the school. But the
neighbouring village of Bilton entirely endorsed my motives when I
went the rounds of Bilton Hall as an act of respectful sympathy for
the eminent Mr. Addison, who wedded the Dowager Countess of Warwick
and here resided with her for the three years that his life endured
under that magnificent yoke.
With so much sightseeing to our credit, we decided to limit our
Warwick experiences on this occasion to luncheon and the castle, for
although we both had "done" the splendid home of the Earls of Warwick
more than once, even viewing it by moonlight and by dawnlight from
the bridge across the Avon, it did not seem decorous to pass by
without leaving cards--not our visiting cards, but those for which one
pays two shillings apiece in the shop over against the gate.
Warwick Castle, built of the very centuries, cannot be expected to
alter with Time's "brief hours and weeks"--at least, with so few of
them as fall to one poor mortal's lot. From visit to visit I find it
as unchanged as the multiplication table. By that same chill avenue,
cut through the solid rock and densely shaded, we passed into the same
grassy court lorded over by the same arrogant peacocks--who have,
however, developed an intemperate appetite for sweet chocolate--and
girt about by the same proud walls and grey, embattled towers. A
princely seat of splendid memories, one is half ashamed to join the
inquisitive procession that trails after a supercilious guide through
the series of state apartments--Great Hall, Red Drawing Room, Cedar
Room, Gilt Drawing Room, Boudoir, Armory Passage, and so on to the
end. We looked at the same relics,--old Guy's dubious porridge pot,
Marie Antoinette's mosaic table, Queen Anne's red velvet bed, the mace
of the King-maker, Cromwell's helmet; the same treasures of rare
workmanship and fabulous cost,--a Venetian table inlaid with precious
stones, shimmering tapestries, enamelled cabinets and clocks; the same
notable succession of portraits in which the varying art of Van Dyke,
Holbein, Rembrandt, Rubens, Lely, Kneller has perpetuated some of the
most significant faces of history. How strangely they turn their eyes
on one another!--Anne Boleyn; her Bluebeard, Henry VIII, pictured here
not only in his rank manhood, but as a sweet-lipped child; Loyola in
priestly vestments of gold and crimson; the Earl of Strafford with his
doomful look; Charles I; Henrietta Maria; Rupert of the Rhine; the
heroic Marquis of Montrose; the literary Duke of Newcastle; the
romantic Gondomar, Spanish ambassador to Elizabeth; and with
them--confuting my rash statement that the castle knows no
change--Sargent's portrait of the present Countess of Warwick, a
democrat of the democrats, enfolding her little son. There remained
the walk through the gardens to the conservatory, whose Warwick Vase,
said to have been found in Hadrian's Villa, is, for all its grandeur,
less dear to memory than the level green branches of the great
cedars of Lebanon. But when it came to peacocks and pussycats cut in
yew, we deemed it time to resume our journey.
[Illustration: WILMCOTE, THE BIRTHPLACE OF SHAKESPEARE'S MOTHER]
Leamington was close at hand, with its Royal Pump Rooms,
swimming-baths and gardens, its villas and crescents and bath-chairs
and parades, its roll of illustrious invalids who have drunk of its
mineral waters; but we would not turn aside for Leamington. Dr. Parr's
church at Hatton could not detain us, nor other churches and mansions
of renown, nor the footsteps of the worthies of the Gunpowder Plot,
nor Edge Hill where Charles I met the Parliamentarians in the first
battle of the Civil War, nor the park of Redway Grange in which
Fielding wrote--and laughed as he wrote--a portion of "Tom Jones," nor
the Red Horse cut in turf, nor any other of the many attractions of a
neighbourhood so crowded with memorials of stirring life. Our thoughts
were all of Shakespeare now; our goal was Stratford-on-Avon.
Should we drive by the right bank of the river, or the left? The
choice lay between Snitterfield and Charlecote Park. In Snitterfield,
a village four miles to the north of Stratford, the poet's paternal
grandsire, Richard Shakespeare, wore out a quiet yeoman life, tilling
the farm that he rented from Robert Arden of Wilmcote, father of the
poet's mother. There must have been a strain of something better than
audacity in the tenant's son to win him the hand of Mary Arden. Henry
Shakespeare, the poet's uncle, died at Snitterfield in 1596, when the
quick scion of that slow blood was in the first fever of his London
successes. But we chose the left-hand road and Charlecote Park. For a
while the sunny Avon, silver-flecked with such swans as Shakespeare
and Ben Jonson may have smiled upon together, bore us blithe company;
then we passed under the shadow of oaks with "antique root"
out-peeping, and of more
"moss'd trees
That have outliv'd the eagle."
Before the Forest of Arden was cut away for the use of the Droitwich
salt-boilers and other Vandals, the land was so thickly wooded that
tradition says a squirrel might have skipped from bough to bough
across the county, without once touching the ground. Now it is rich
glebe and tillage. We skirted the broad acres of Charlecote Park and
viewed its "native burghers," the deer, but were loth to believe that
Shakespeare, even in his heyday of youthful riot, would have "let the
law go whistle" for the sake of "a hot venison-pasty to dinner." Yet
it is like enough that there was no love lost between the Shakespeares
and the Lucys, a family who have held the manor since the twelfth
century and, in their Elizabethan representative, laid themselves open
to the suspicion of pompous bearing and deficient sense of humour. The
_luces_, or pikes, in their coat of arms, the pun-loving tongue of a
"most acute juvenal" could hardly have resisted. "The dozen white
louses do become an old coat well." Sir Thomas Lucy entertained Queen
Elizabeth in 1572, and if the boys from Stratford Grammar School were
not in evidence at the Park Gates on her arrival, it must have been
because Holofernes was drilling them for a show of the Nine Worthies
later on.
In the fields about the town the pea-pickers, an autumn feature of
this neighbourhood, were already at work. They held our eyes for a
little and, when we looked forward again, there by the river rose the
spire of Holy Trinity, keeping its faithful watch and ward. We
clattered over the old stone bridge of fourteen arches and there we
were, between the staring rows of tourist shops, all dealing in
Shakespeare commercialised. His likeness, his name, his plays are
pressed into every huckster's service. The windows fairly bristle with
busts of Shakespeare of all sizes and half a dozen colours; with
models of the Henley Street house, ranging in price, with varying
magnitude and material, from pennies to pounds; with editions of his
works, from miniature copies to colossal; with photographs,
postal-cards, etchings, sketches; with rubbings of his tombstone
inscription; with birthday books and wall texts, and with all sorts of
articles, paper-cutters, match-boxes, pencil-trays, I dare say
bootjacks, stamped with verse or phrase of his. This poet-barter is
only a fraction of Shakespeare's endowment of his native town.
Innkeepers, porters, drivers, guides, custodians are maintained by
him. Sir Thomas Lucy never dreamed of such a retinue. Hardly did
Warwick the King-maker support so great a household. He is not only
Stratford's pride, but its prosperity, and the welfare of the
descendants of Shakespeare's neighbours is not a matter for the
stranger to deplore. Nevertheless, we hunted up lodgings, drank bad
tea at one of the Shakespeare Tea Rooms, and were out of those greedy
streets as quickly as possible on a stroll across the old ridged
fields to Shottery.
[Illustration: CHARLECOTE PARK ENTRANCE]
On the way we met a sophisticated donkey, who, waggling his ears,
asked in Bottom's name for a gratuity of "good sweet hay"; and a bevy
of children scampered up, as we neared Anne Hathaway's cottage, to
thrust upon us their wilted sprigs of lavender and rosemary. They were
merry little merchants, however, and giggled understandingly when we
put them off with "No, thank you, William," "No, thank you, Anne." We
arrived a minute after six, and the cottage was closed for the night,
though a medley of indignant pilgrims pounded at the garden gate and
took unavailing camera shots through the twilight. But we were content
with our dusky glimpse of the timber-and-plaster, vinegrown walls and
low thatched roof. In former years we had trodden that box-bordered
path up to an open door and had duly inspected fireplace and settle,
Bible and bacon-cupboard, and the ancient bedstead. What we cared for
most this time was the walk thither, coming by that worn footway
toward the setting sun, as Shakespeare would have come on his eager
lover's visits, and the return under a gossamer crescent which yet
served to suggest the "blessed moon" that tipped
"with silver all these fruit-tree tops"
for a rash young Romeo who would better have been minding his book at
home.
The next morning we spent happily in revisiting the Stratford shrines.
Even the catch-shilling shops bore witness, in their garish way, to
the supremacy of that genius which brings the ends of the earth to
this Midland market-town.