a Druid temple, nor as memorials of victory, nor for the election and
inauguration of primitive kings, but for sepulchral purposes, rest
their case largely on the Whispering Knights. This third group is made
up of five stones which apparently once formed a cromlech and may have
been originally covered with a mound. They are some quarter of a mile
behind the circle,--a bad quarter of a mile I found it as I struggled
across the rugged moor knee-deep in rank clover and other withering
weeds. Just before me would fly up partridges with a startled whirr,
hovering so near in their bewilderment that I could almost have
knocked a few of them down with my parasol, if that had appealed to me
as a pleasant and friendly thing to do. For this was a "cover,"
destined to give a few of Blake's and Shelley's countrymen some autumn
hours of brutalising sport.
"Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain doth tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing;
A cherubim doth cease to sing."
The Five Knights lean close together, yet without touching, enchanted
to stone in the very act of whispering treason against their ambitious
chief. They whisper still under the elder tree, and often will a lass
labouring in the barley fields slip away from her companions at dusk
to beg the Five Knights to whisper her an answer to the question of
her heart. I walked back, having hit on a path, in company with a
rustic harvester, whose conversation was confined to telling me five
times over, in the stubborn, half-scared tone of superstition, that
while the other elders are laden with white berries, this elder always
bears red; and the collie wagged his tail, and the donkey wagged his
ears, in solemn confirmation.
The wagonette gathered us in again, and soon we passed, not far from
the fine Elizabethan mansion known as Chastleton House, the Four-Shire
Stone, a column marking the meeting-point of Oxfordshire,
Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire. Our route lay for a
while in Gloucestershire. As our shy young driver refreshed our
skeleton steed, which had proved a good roadster, with gruel, that
favourite beverage of English horses, at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, another
little grey stone town with open market-hall, we noted a building
marked P. S. A. and learned it was a workingman's club, or something
of that nature, and that the cabalistic initials stood for Pleasant
Sunday Afternoon. We changed horses at Campden, did our duty by the
inevitable cold joints, and drove up to Fish Inn, with its far
outlook, and thence down into the fertile Vale of Evesham. We had not
been ready to say with Richard II,
"I am a stranger here in Glostershire;
These high wild hills and rough uneven ways
Draw out our miles, and make them wearisome,"
but we found a new pleasure in the smiling welcome of gardened
Worcestershire. The charming village of Broadway, beloved of artists,
detained us for a little, and at Evesham, even more attractive with
its beautiful bell-tower, its Norman gateway and cloister
arch--pathetic relics of its ruined abbey--and with its obelisk-marked
battlefield where fell Simon de Montfort, "the most peerless man of
his time for valour, personage, and wisdom," we brought our
driving-tour in the Midlands to a close.
OXFORD
Shakespeare's frequent horseback journeys from London to Stratford,
and from Stratford to London, must have made him familiar with the
county of Oxfordshire. He would have seen its northern uplands
sprinkled over with white-fleeced sheep of the pure old breed, sheep
so large that their mutton is too fat for modern palates: a smaller
sheep, yielding inferior wool, is fast supplanting the original
Cotswold. He would not have met upon the downs those once so frequent
passengers, the Flemish merchants with their trains of sumpter mules
and pack-horses, bound for Chipping Campden or some other market where
wool might be "cheapened" in the way of bargaining, for by
Shakespeare's day the cloth-making industry in the valley of the
Stroud Water, Gloucestershire, had attained to such a flourishing
condition that the export of raw material was forbidden.
It is not likely that his usual route would have given him the chance
to refresh himself with Banbury cakes at Banbury and, profane player
that he was, bring down upon himself a Puritan preachment from Ben
Jonson's Zeal-of-the-land-Busy; but Shakespeare's way would almost
certainly have lain through Woodstock. This ancient town has royal
traditions reaching back to King Alfred and Etheldred the Redeless, but
these are obscured for the modern tourist by the heavy magnificence of
Blenheim Palace, the Duke of Marlborough's reward for his "famous
victory." The legend of Fair Rosamund--how Henry II hid her here
embowered in a labyrinth, and how the murderous Queen Eleanor tracked
her through the maze by the clue of a silken thread--Shakespeare, like
Drayton, could have enjoyed without molestation from the critical
historian, who now insists that it was Eleanor whom the king shut up to
keep her from interfering with his loves. Poor Rosamund! Her romance is
not suffered to rest in peace here any more than was her fair body in
the church of Godstow nunnery. There she had been buried in the centre
of the choir, and the nuns honoured her grave with such profusion of
broidered hangings and burning tapers as to scandalise St. Hugh, Bishop
of Lincoln, who, on visiting the nunnery in 1191, gave orders that she
be disinterred and buried "out of the church with other common people
to the end that religion be not vilified." But after some years the
tender nuns slipped those rejected bones into a "perfumed leather bag"
and brought them back within the holy pale. The dramatist, who seems to
have done wellnigh his earliest chronicle-play writing in an episode of
the anonymous "Edward III," may have remembered, as he rode into the
old town, that the Black Prince was born at Woodstock. But whether or
no he gave a thought to Edward III's war-wasted heir, he could hardly
have failed to muse upon that monarch's poet, "most sacred happie
spirit," Geoffrey Chaucer, whose son Thomas--if this Thomas Chaucer
were indeed the poet's son--resided at Woodstock in the early part of
the fifteenth century. And still fresh would have been the memory of
Elizabeth's imprisonment in the gate-house during a part of her sister
Mary's reign. It was here, according to Holinshed, on whom the burden
of pronouns rested lightly, that the captive princess "hearing upon a
time out of hir garden at Woodstock a certaine milkemaid singing
pleasantlie wished herselfe to be a milkemaid as she was, saieing that
hir case was better, and life more merier than was hirs in that state
as she was."
Charles I and the Roundheads had not then set their battle-marks all
over Oxfordshire, and Henley, now famed for its July regatta as far as
water flows, was still content with the very moderate speed of its
malt-barges; but Oxford--I would give half my library to know with
what feelings Shakespeare used to behold its sublime group of spires
and towers against the sunset sky. This "upstart crow," often made to
wince under the scorn of those who, like Robert Greene,--the
red-headed reprobate!--could write themselves "Master of Arts of both
Universities," what manner of look did he turn upon that august town
"gorgeous with high-built colleges,
And scholars seemly in their grave attire,
Learnèd in searching principles of art?"
Here in the midst of the valley of the Thames, Oxford had already kept
for centuries a queenly state, chief city of the shire, with a
university that ranked as one of the "two eyes of England." The
university, then as now, was made up of a number of colleges which
owned, by bequest and by purchase, a considerable portion of the
county, though they by no means limited their estates to Oxfordshire.
Almost all those "sacred nurseries of blooming youth" which delight us
to-day were known to the dust-stained traveller who put up, perhaps
twice a year, perhaps oftener, at the Crown Inn, kept by John
Davenant, vintner. Apart from the painfully modern Keble, a memorial
to the author of "The Christian Year," and the still more recent
roof-trees for dissent, Congregational Mansfield and Unitarian
Manchester, what college of modern Oxford would be utterly strange to
Shakespeare? Even in Worcester, an eighteenth-century erection on the
site of the ruined Benedictine foundation of Gloucester College,
search soon reveals vestiges of the old monastic dwellings. Not a few
of the very edifices that Shakespeare saw still stand in their Gothic
beauty, but in case of others, as University, which disputes with
Merton the claim of seniority, boasting no less a founder than Alfred
the Great, new buildings have overgrown the old. Some have changed
their names, as Broadgates, to which was given, eight years after
Shakespeare's death, a name that even in death he would hardly have
forgotten,--Pembroke, in honour of William, Earl of Pembroke, then
Chancellor of the University. Already venerable, as the poet looked
upon them, were the thirteenth-century foundations of Merton, with its
stately tower, its library of chained folios, its memories of Duns
Scotus; and Balliol, another claimant for the dignities of the
first-born, tracing its origin to Sir John de Balliol, father of the
Scottish king, remembering among its early Fellows and Masters John
Wyclif the Reformer; and Hart Hall, where Tyndale was a student, the
Hertford College of to-day; and St. Edmund Hall, which has been
entirely rebuilt. Another thirteenth-century foundation, St. Alban
Hall, has been incorporated with Merton.
The fourteenth-century colleges, too, would have worn a weathered look
by 1600,--Exeter and Oriel and Queen's and New. The buildings of
Exeter have been restored over and over, but the mediæval still haunts
them, as it haunted Exeter's latest poet, William Morris, who loved
Oxfordshire so well that he finally made his home at Kelmscott on the
Upper Thames. Oriel, which, as Shakespeare would have known, was Sir
Walter Raleigh's college, underwent an extensive rebuilding in the
reign of Charles I. To Oriel once belonged St. Mary Hall, where Sir
Thomas More studied,--a wag of a student he must have been!--and now,
after an independence of five hundred years, it is part of Oriel
again. Queen's, named in honour of Philippa, the consort of Edward
III, has so completely changed its outer fashion that George II's
Queen Caroline is perched upon its cupola, but by some secret of
individuality it is still the same old college of the Black Prince and
of Henry V,--the college where every evening a trumpet summons the men
to dine in hall, and every Christmas the Boar's Head, garnished with
the traditionary greenery, is borne in to the singing of an old-time
carol, and every New Year's Day the bursar distributes thread and
needles among its unappreciative masculine community with the succinct
advice: "Take this and be thrifty."
New College, unlike these three, has hardly altered its original
fabric. If Shakespeare smiled over the name borne by a structure
already mossed and lichened by two centuries, we have more than twice
his reason for smiling; indeed, we have one excuse that he had not,
for we can think of Sydney Smith as a New College man. Old it is and
old it looks. The very lanes that lead to it, grey and twisted
passages of stone, conduct us back to the mediæval world. The Virgin
Mary, the Archangel Gabriel, and, no whit abashed in such high
company, Bishop Wykeham, the Founder, watch us from their storm-worn
niches as we pass under the gateway into the majestic quadrangle. Here
time-blackened walls hold the gaze enthralled with their ancientry of
battlements and buttresses, deep-mullioned windows and pinnacle-set
towers. Beyond lie the gardens, still bounded on two sides by the
massive masonry, embrasured, bastioned, parapeted, of the old City
Wall,--gardens where it should always be October, drifty, yellow,
dreamy, quiet, with wan poplars and aspens and chestnuts whispering
and sighing together, till some grotesque face sculptured on the wall
peers out derisively through ivy mat or crimson creeper, and the
red-berried hollies, old and gay with many Christmases, rustle in
reassuring laughter. Meanwhile the rooks flap heavily among the mighty
beeches, whose tremendous trunks are all misshapen with the gnarls and
knobs of age.
Of the fifteenth-century foundations, All Souls, "The College of All
Souls of the Faithful Departed," and especially of those who fell in
the French wars, retains much of its original architecture; in the
kitchen of Lincoln, if not in the chapel, Shakespeare would still find
himself at home; and for him, as for all the generations since, the
lofty tower of Magdalen rose as Oxford's crown of beauty. Magdalen
College is ancient. The very speaking of the name (Maudlin) tells us
that, all the more unmistakably because Magdalen Bridge and Magdalen
Street carry the modern pronunciation. But Magdalen College, with its
springing, soaring grace, its surprises of delight, its haunting,
soul-possessing loveliness, has all the winning charm of youth. Its
hundred acres of lawn and garden, wood and park, where deer browse
peacefully beneath the shade of giant elms and where Addison's beloved
Water Walks beside the Cherwell are golden with the primroses and
daffodils of March and blue with the violets and periwinkles of later
spring, are even more tempting to the book-fagged wanderer than Christ
Church Meadow and "Mesopotamia." It is hard to tell when Magdalen is
most beautiful. It has made the circle of the year its own. On May Day
dawn, all Oxford, drowsy but determined, gathers in the broad street
below to see--it depends upon the wind whether or no one may hear--the
choir chant their immemorial hymn from the summit of the tower. When
the ending of the rite is made known to the multitude by the flinging
over of the caps,--black mortar-boards that sail slowly down the one
hundred and fifty feet like a flock of pensive rooks,--then away it
streams over Magdalen Bridge toward Iffley to gather Arnold's white
and purple fritillaries, and, after a long and loving look at Iffley's
Norman Church, troops home along the towing-path beside the Isis.
Shakespeare may himself have heard, if he chanced to be passing
through on St. John Baptist's Day, the University sermon preached from
the curiously canopied stone pulpit well up on the wall in a corner of
one of the quadrangles, while the turf was sweet with strewn rushes
and all the buildings glistening with fresh green boughs. But even in
midwinter Magdalen is beautiful, when along Addison's Walk the fog is
frosted like most delicate enamel on every leaf and twig, and this
white world of rime takes on strange flushes from the red sun peering
through the haze.
Of the six Tudor foundations, Trinity occupies the site of Durham
College, a thirteenth-century Benedictine institution suppressed by
Henry VIII; St. John's, closely allied to the memory of Archbishop
Laud, is the survival of St. Bernard College, which itself grew out of
a Cistercian monastery; Brasenose, associated for earlier memory with
Foxe of the "Book of Martyrs" and for later with Walter Pater,
supplanted two mediæval halls; and Jesus College, the first to be
founded after the Reformation, endowed by a Welshman for the increase
of Welsh learning, received from Elizabeth a site once held by
academic buildings of the elder faith. Only Corpus Christi, where
Cardinal Pole and Bishop Hooker studied to such different ends,
although it is, as its name indicates, of Catholic origin, rose on
fresh soil and broke with the past, with the mediæval educational
tradition, by making regular provision for the systematic study of
Latin and Greek.
[Illustration: THE TOWER, MAGDALEN COLLEGE]
The great Tudor foundation was Christ Church, built on the sacred
ground where, in the eighth century, St. Frideswide, a princess with a
pronounced vocation for the religious life, had erected a nunnery of
which she was first abbess. The nunnery became, after her death, a
house of canons, known as St. Frideswide's Priory. Cardinal Wolsey
brought about the surrender of this priory to the king, and its prompt
transfer to himself, some fifteen years before the general
Dissolution. His ambition, not all unrealised, was to found as his
memorial a splendid seat of the New Learning at Oxford to be called
Cardinal's College. He had gone so far as to erect a magnificent hall,
with fan-vaulted entrance and carved oak ceiling of surpassing beauty,
a kitchen ample enough to feed the Titans, "The Faire Gate" and, in
outline, the Great Quadrangle, for whose enlargement he pulled down
three bays of the Priory church, when his fall cut short his princely
projects. His graceless master attempted to take over to himself the
credit of Wolsey's labours, substituting the name of King Henry
VIII's College, but on creating, a few years later, the bishopric of
Oxford, he blended the cathedral and college foundations as the Church
and House of Christ. The cathedral fabric is still in the main that of
the old Priory church. Of the several quadrangles, Canterbury Quad
keeps a memory of Canterbury College, which, with the other
Benedictine colleges, Gloucester and Durham, went down in the storm.
Christ's Church--"The House," as its members call it--is the
aristocratic college of Oxford. Noblemen and even princes may be among
those white-surpliced figures that flit about the dim quads after
Sunday evensong. Ruskin's father, a wealthy wine-merchant of refined
tastes and broad intelligence, hesitated to enter his son as a
gentleman commoner at Christ's lest the act should savour of
presumption. Yet no name has conferred more lustre on "The House" than
that of him who became the Slade Professor of Fine Arts, waking all
Oxford to nobler life and resigning, at last, because he could not
bear that the university should sanction vivisection.
Wadham College, though the lovely garden with its hoary walls starred
by jasmine and its patriarchal cedars casting majestic shadows--a
garden that rivals for charm even those of St. John's and Worcester
and Exeter--has such a venerable air, is the youngest of all these.
Its first stone was laid, on a site formerly occupied by a priory of
Augustinian Friars, only six years before Shakespeare's death. In his
later journeys he would not have failed to note the progress of its
erection.
But if Shakespeare saw, as he rode through Oxford, almost all the
colleges that may now be seen, he also saw much that has crumbled away
into an irretrievable past. Not only were the various colleges, halls,
priories, and friaries of the monastic orders still in visible ruin,
but the great abbeys of Osney and of Rewley, the former one of the
largest and richest in all England, still made the appeal of a
beautiful desolation. No wonder that Shakespeare compared the naked
branches of autumn, that wintry end of the season
"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,"
to
"bare, ruined choirs."
If, as seems probable, the Arden sympathies lingered long with the
Mother Church, if Shakespeare did not forget, even in those closing
years when his homeward trips brought him to a Puritan household and
an ever more Puritan town, the bitter fate of his kinsmen of Wilmcote
and Wootton-Wawen, he must have been keenly alive to these ravages of
the Reformation. Yet he had been some twenty years at the vortex of
Elizabethan life, in the very seethe of London; he had witnessed many
a wrong and many a tragedy; he was versed to weariness of heart in the
"hostile strokes" that befall humanity, in all the varied
"throes
That nature's fragile vessel doth sustain
In life's uncertain voyage";
and he knew, no man better, that Right is not of one party, nor Truth
of a single creed. He must have mused, as he took the air in Oxford
streets after Mistress Davenant had served his supper, on the three
great Protestant Martyrs of whose suffering some of the elder folk
with whom he chatted had been eyewitnesses. The commemorative cross
that may now be seen in front of Balliol, near the church of St. Mary
Magdalen whose tower was a familiar sight to Shakespeare's eyes,
displays in richly fretted niches the statues of "Thomas Cranmer,
Nicolas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who
near this spot yielded their bodies to be burned." Most of all, his
thought would have dwelt on Cranmer, that pathetic figure whose life
was such a mingled yarn of good and evil. He had won the favour of
Henry VIII by approving the divorce of Queen Catherine. He had
beheld--and in some cases furthered--the downfalls of Sir Thomas More,
of Anne Boleyn, of Wolsey, of Cromwell, of Catherine Howard, of
Seymour, and of Somerset. He had stood godfather to Elizabeth and to
Edward. He had watched over the death-bed of the tyrant; he had
crowned that tyrant's frail young son as Edward VI. When by his
adherence to the cause of Lady Jane Grey he had incurred sentence of
treason, he was pardoned by Queen Mary. Yet this pardon only amounted
to a transfer from the Tower of London to the Bocardo in Oxford, that
prison-house over the North Gate from whose stone cells used to come
down the hoarse cry of cold and hunger: "Pity the Bocardo birds."
There were those still living in Oxford who could have told the
dramatist, as he gazed up through the moonlight (for who does not?) to
the pinnacled spire of St. Mary-the-Virgin, all the detail of those
April days, only ten years before his birth, when Cranmer, with Ridley
and Latimer, was brought into the church and bidden, before a hostile
assemblage of divines, to justify the heresies of the new prayer-book.
On the Tuesday Cranmer pleaded from eight till two; Ridley was heard
on the Wednesday, and on the Thursday the aged Latimer, a quaint
champion as he stood there "with a kerchief and two or three caps on
his head, his spectacles hanging by a string at his breast, and a
staff in his hand." On the Friday all three were condemned. After a
year and a half of continued confinement, Archbishop Cranmer, whose
irresolution was such that, from first to last, he wrote seven
recantations, was made to look out from his prison window upon the
tormented death of his friends. Then it was that the stanch old
Latimer, bowed with the weight of fourscore years, but viewing the
fagots undismayed, spake the never-forgotten words: "Be of good
comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle, by
God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Cranmer's
own end came six months later, on March 21, 1556. He was first brought
to St. Mary's that he might publicly abjure his heresies. But at that
desperate pass, no longer tempted by the hope of life,--for hope there
was none,--his manhood returned to him with atoning dignity and force.
Prison-wasted, in ragged gown, a man of sixty-seven years, he clearly
avowed his Protestant faith, declaring that he had penned his
successive recantations in fear of the pains of death, and adding:
"Forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, my
hand therefore shall be first punished; for if I may come to the fire,
it shall be the first burnt." And having so "flung down the burden of
his shame," he put aside those who would still have argued with him
and fairly ran to the stake,
"Outstretching flameward his upbraided hand."
The university church, this beautiful St. Mary's, has other memories.
From its pulpit Wyclif proclaimed such daring doctrines that Lincoln
College was founded to refute them,--Lincoln, which came to number
among its Fellows John Wesley and to shelter those first Methodist
meetings, the sessions of his "Holy Club." In St. Mary's choir rests
the poor bruised body of Amy Robsart. The spiral-columned porch was
erected by Laud's chaplain, and its statue of the Virgin and Child so
scandalised the Puritans that they pressed it into service for one of
their articles of impeachment directed against the doomed archbishop.