Majesty's Coldstream Guards, and His Majesty's Scots Guards--were
merrily playing away, and presently the clamorous ringing of what
might have been a sturdy dinner-bell called us to the Acrobatic Stand,
about which the crowd soon became so dense, while the somersault
artists converted their bodies into giddy playthings, that one rustic
philosopher was heard to remark: "Well, we ain't seeing owt, but we're
in t' show." Then came the horse-leaping, which was such a favourite
feature that not even the miraculous performances of the King of the
High Wire, and the ether-dancing feats of the Cee Mee Troupe availed
to divide the multitude. When Rufus, to the deep but decorous delight
of the Cheshire visitors, had outleaped all the rest, we swarmed
across the Quarry and sat down on the grass to wait for the ascent of
the monster balloons, those gigantic golden-brown puffs of gas that
had been softly tugging at their bonds all the morning. The Shrewsbury
had already made a number of captive ascents and finally achieved its
"right away" in good order, rising majestically into the upper air
until it hung like an orange on our furthest reach of vision, but the
wayward Wulfruna broke her ropes on a captive trip and feloniously
made off with several astonished passengers, among whose vanishing
heads peered out the scared, ecstatic face of a small boy.
As dusk grew on, our ever-greatening host still comported itself with
well-bred English quietude. We never forgot what was due to the
presence of the county families. Even the lads in Eton jackets tripped
one another up softly and engagingly. Bath chairs and baby wagons
traversed the thick of the press. The King of the High Wire, who
seemed to be made of air and india-rubber, appeared again and
performed such impossible antics on his dizzy line that the setting
sun rested its chin on the horizon to stare at him, and from a slit in
the gaudy trapeze tent half-chalked visages peered out and paid him
the professional tribute of envy. The tumblers tumbled more incredibly
than before. The Handcuff King shuffled off one mortal coil after
another. The Lady Cyclists cycled in an extremely unladylike
manner,--a performance punctuated by the impatient yelping of little
dogs beneath the stage, eager to show off their own accomplishments.
On they came at last, bounding, barking, wagging, tumultuous, all
striving to take part in every trick. They quite refused to stop when
their respective turns were over, but went on all together excitedly
jumping rope and hitting ball long after ropes and balls had
disappeared, until they were unceremoniously picked up and bundled
down a trap-door, an exit of wagging tail-tips.
As darkness fell, the Severn was all astir with pleasure-boats, while
happy ragamuffins, getting their fireworks for nothing, thronged the
further bank. Rockets went skittering over our heads, fire-wheels
spluttered and whizzed, and as the first of the fire-balloons flashed
up, a baby voice behind us piped:
"O mummy, mummy! See! There's a somebody died and going up to heaven."
Altogether the Floral Fête was as sweet-natured and pleasurable a
festival as ever we chanced upon and completed our subjugation to this
old town that the Severn so lovingly embraces. To quote from a
black-letter ballad treasured in the Bodleian:
"The merry Town of Shrowsbury
God bless it still,
For it stands most gallantly
Upon a high hill.
It standeth most bravely
For all men to see.
Then every man to his mind,
Shrowsbury for me!"
The county of Shropshire smooths away on the east into a level
pasture-land belonging to the central plain of England, but its
western portion is roughened by the spurs of the Welsh mountains. Its
own mountain is the Wrekin, a solitary height a few miles to the east
of Shrewsbury. The summit commands so wide a view that the toast of
Salopians everywhere is "All round the Wrekin." South of the Severn
run several ranges of hills down toward the hop-gardens and
apple-orchards of Hereford and Worcester. Of these, "Clee Hills," the
highest of the ranges, "be holy in Shropshire."[7] North Salop has a
coal-field, with its accompanying prosperity and disfigurement,--busy
factories, belching furnaces, houses that tip and tumble from the
hollowing out of the ground beneath. We rioted in our memorable motor
car through several of these grimy towns, Wellington among them, and
Newport, where the runaway Shrewsbury balloon came safely down.
Wellington cherishes a legend relating to a bad old giant of Wales,
who, having a spite against the Mayor of Shrewsbury, purposed to choke
up the Severn and drown out the town. So he started off with a heavy
sack of earth over his shoulder, but lost his way, like the stupid
giant he was, and met, near Wellington, a cobbler carrying home a bag
of boots and shoes to mend. The giant asked him how far it was to
Shrewsbury, and the cobbler, emptying his sack of ragged footwear,
declared he had worn out all those boots and shoes on the road. This
so discouraged the giant that he flung down his burden of earth,
forming the Wrekin, and trudged meekly home again.
Far more delightful than automobiling were the leisurely drives we
took in the neighbourhood of Shrewsbury. One fair afternoon we drove
five miles southeast to Wroxeter to view the tragic ruins of the Roman
city of Uriconium. Here, at the junction of Watling Street with the
western Roman road, guarding these communications and the passes of
the Severn, stood "The White Town in the Woodland." After the Roman
armies were withdrawn, it was stormed and burned by the Saxons. The
lapse of fourteen hundred years has not obliterated the traces of that
anguish. Only a little below the surface lies earth still black from
the heats of the tremendous conflagration; charred bones crackle
beneath the tread; in an under-chamber of one of the baths has been
found the skeleton of an old man crouched between the pillars, as if
seeking refuge from the rage of fire and sword. The skeletons of two
women were beside him and, close to his bony hand, his little hoard of
coins. There still stands a rugged mass of wall some seventy feet in
length, its Roman string-courses of flat red bricks showing bright
against the prevailing grey of that jagged, gaping structure. Now
birds nest in it, and from the lower heaps and ranges of broken
masonry all about springs the wild rose as well as the thistle.
Uriconium was larger than Pompeii, and its ruins, said to be the most
extensive of their kind in England, smite one with heartache. We
roamed about its grassy hollows and thicketed mounds, its bone-strewn
forum, and its baths with their patches of mosaic flooring, their
groups of little brick columns, and other fragments of a perished
luxury. We wondered that the sky above this city left so desolate, a
sky of softest azure flecked with cloudlets dazzling white, did not
wear perpetual shadow for its sake. But those heavens were as serene
as if the dying wail of Uriconium had never pierced them, and the
cleft summit of Milton's "blue-topped Wrekin"--a deep, intense,
gleaming blue it was that afternoon--kept no memory of the day when
the Severn ran red with blood and its own head was veiled with smoke
and ashes.
The noble Norman church of Wroxeter, near by, has set at its
churchyard gate two Roman pillars with finely sculptured capitals that
have been recovered from the river-bed. Its font is hollowed out of
another Roman capital and looks only half converted. The church is
remarkable for its Easter sepulchre, an arched niche in the north wall
of the chancel, and for its altar-tombs. This Easter sepulchre, where
the crucifix would have been placed on Good Friday to be raised again
with rejoicing on Easter morning, is of creamy stone with ball-flower
ornament. Within the niche are reddish traces of a Resurrection
fresco. The effigies on the altar-tombs have been singularly preserved
from mutilation. Even the rings upon those comely hands that clasp
their prayer-books in the centuried trance of their devotions remain
intact. Here sleeps a Jacobean baronet splendid in scarlet alabaster
robes and broad gilt chain. A peacock is at his head and a lion's claw
at his feet. His lady, from gold head-dress to dainty shoon, is no
less immaculate. May their rest on their stone pillows be forever
unprofaned! In that hushed and almost forgotten sanctuary slumber also
Elizabethan knights and ladies whose tombs, wrought about with quaint
figures, are peculiarly individual and tempted us to closer study than
the waning light allowed.
There were many pilgrimages we longed to make in Shropshire--to the
birthplace and burial-place of Lord Clive, her Indian hero, and to the
home of Lord Herbert of Chirbury, brother of the Saintly George
Herbert, himself a Jacobean courtier only less eminent in letters than
in life. Even bluff Ben Jonson hailed him as "All-virtuous Herbert."
Other Shropshire worthies, who would hardly so have designated each
other, are Richard Baxter and William Wycherley. Two others that I
would like, in the interests of a broader charity, to pair together in
the procession of great Salopian ghosts, are Bishop Percy of the
"Reliques," and Dick Tarlton, lord of mirth, the best-beloved clown of
the Elizabethan stage. The queen herself had a good friend in Dick
Tarlton, for he told her, says Fuller, "more of her faults than most
of her chaplains and cured her melancholy better than all her
physicians."
The inexorable almanac urged us on, but one excursion that we could
not forego was that to Battlefield Church. Thither we drove through
such a tender afternoon, the soft sky brooding close above the earth
as if she loved it, that it was hard to realise associations of wrath
and war. The sun made golden windows in the clouds. The brown Severn
was slyly breaking down its banks as it ran. We took our way through
Shropshire lanes whose hawthorn hedges on either side were fringed
with yellow wisps of rye scraped off from the harvest loads. Beyond we
came upon the harvest fields with their shining stacks. And in
Battlefield Church itself we found, almost rough-hewn from the
tree-trunk, a mediæval image of Our Lady of Pity.
Here was fought on another summer day, July 21, 1403, the decisive
battle between Henry IV and the Percies. Henry had sat but four years
upon his troubled throne when these proud nobles of the north, by
whose aid he had ousted Richard II, rose against him. Although Richard
had been murdered, Edmund Mortimer, the next of blood, was a thorn in
Henry's pillow. Mortimer had been taken prisoner by the revolting
Welsh leader, Owen Glendower, and Henry, if we may take Shakespeare
for our historian, listened coldly and incredulously to Harry Percy's
assurances of Mortimer's resistance. In vain did this eloquent
Hotspur, Mortimer's brother-in-law, pour forth his impetuous tale--how
"on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank,
In single opposition, hand to hand,
He did confound the best part of an hour
In changing hardiment with great Glendower;
Three times they breath'd, and three times did they drink,
Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood;
Who then, affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank
Blood-stained with those valiant combatants."
When the king refused to ransom Mortimer, Hotspur's anger bubbled
over:
"He said he would not ransom Mortimer,
Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer,
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I'll holla 'Mortimer!'
Nay,
I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer' and give it him."
Thus Hotspur, and his father, the Earl of Northumberland, his uncle,
the Earl of Worcester, "the irregular and wild Glendower," and the
valiant Douglas of Scotland raised their united banners against the
usurper. Many Cheshire gentlemen, to their sorrow, joined Hotspur as
he marched through their county. He came in sight of Shrewsbury on the
evening of July nineteenth. But Henry was there before him; the royal
standard floated over the castle; and it was three or four miles to
the north of the town that the shock of battle came. Five thousand of
the rebels and three thousand of the loyal forces fell. The Earl of
Worcester was slain on the field, and "that spirit Percy" himself,
"the theme of honour's tongue," he who had ever been "sweet fortune's
minion and her pride," perished there in the toils of his "ill-weav'd
ambition." The traditional spot where he fell is pointed out, as also
the antique oak from whose leafy top Owen Glendower is fabled to have
watched, at a safe distance, the fortunes of the fight.
Battlefield Church was built in gratitude for this victory, and a
perpetual chantry of eight canons was endowed to serve it with daily
masses "for the king's salvation during his life, and after his death
for his soul, and for the souls of his progenitors and of those who
were slain in the battle and were there buried, and for the souls of
all the faithful departed." The meadow behind the church, which, with
its mounds, ridges, and depressions, still bears the battle-scars, is
supposed to be the grave of thousands of the soldiers. The masses were
duly said for nearly one hundred and fifty years, until the chantry
was surrendered to Henry VIII. The church, abandoned after the
Dissolution and suffered to fall into decay, has been restored. Its
curious image of Our Lady of Pity was an ancient treasure of Albright
Hussey, a neighbouring hamlet where we paused on our homeward way to
see a veritable moated grange, and was brought to Battlefield early
in the fifteenth century, when the church was consecrated. In the
vestry are two small windows that keep such bits of the original glass
as could be gathered up from the pile of shreds and splinters stored
away in a farm-building close by. One of the recovered designs is a
figure of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, vivid, ascetic, with loaf in
hand. But more vital yet is the portrait of Henry IV--a royal form
robed in such glowing, living crimson as only the old craftsmen knew
how to pour into their glass. The face, "wan with care," is earnest
and sorrowful.
Many are the battle-tales of these counties on the Welsh marches.
William the Conqueror gave leave to certain of his followers to take
and hold what land they could in that wild region, and a line of
strong castles was erected; but the fierce British, making sudden
raids from their mountain fastnesses, were a constant threat and
trouble, until Edward I, despite the tuneful curses of all the Welsh
bards, reduced them to subjection, putting the last native Prince of
Wales to a cruel death at Shrewsbury and transferring the title to
his own firstborn son. As the jurisdiction of the Marches became of
importance, special courts were held by the Prince of Wales either in
person or through a deputy known as the Lord President of Wales,--an
office not abolished until 1688. The seat of these courts was Ludlow,
a place that even to our partial eyes rivalled Shrewsbury in beauty
and is counted by many the banner town of England. It stands in the
very south of Shropshire on a commanding height just where the river
Teme, which forms the Hereford boundary, is joined by the Corve. The
lofty-towered Church of St. Lawrence, only second in praise to St.
Mary Redcliffe of Bristol, and the impressive remains of what was once
both Castle and Princely Palace crown this precipitous mass of rock,
from which broad streets, retaining a goodly number of stately
timbered houses dating from the times when the Courts of the Marches
gathered illustrious companies at Ludlow, descend to plain and river.
No description of this once royal residence, with its pure, bracing
atmosphere, can better the honest lines of old Tom Churchyard:
"The towne doth stand most part upon a hill,
Built well and fayre, with streates both longe and wide;
The houses such, where straungers lodge at will,
As long as there the Counsell lists abide.
"Both fine and cleane the streates are all throughout,
With condits cleere and wholesome water springs;
And who that lists to walk the towne about
Shall find therein some rare and pleasant things;
But chiefly there the ayre so sweete you have
As in no place ye can no better crave."
The magnificent old castle has seen strange sights. While undergoing
siege by Stephen, in his war against Maud, Prince Henry of Scotland,
who accompanied him, was caught up by a long iron hook and all but
pulled within the walls. Stephen himself galloped up just in time to
cut the cords with his sword and rescue the dangling prince. The
redoubtable Sir Hugh de Mortimer, Lord of Wigmore, once lay captive in
what is still known as Mortimer's Tower. It cost him three thousand
marks of silver, besides all his plate, horses, and hawks, to go free
again. Ludlow Castle was, at a later period, added by marriage to the
already formidable holdings of the Mortimers. Roger de Mortimer took
an active part in the deposition of Edward II and was created Earl of
March. In imitation of King Arthur, whose great tradition arches over
all that countryside, the ambitious young noble held a Round Table,
and conducted Queen Isabella, with whom his relations were not above
suspicion, and his boy sovereign, Edward III, to his castles of
Wigmore and Ludlow, where he entertained them with "great costs in
tilts and other pastimes." There was not room in England for him and
for a king, and his arrogant career was ended on the Smithfield
gibbet. Marlowe gives him a proud exit from the tragic stage:
"Weep not for Mortimer
That scorns the world and, as a traveler,
Goes to discover countries yet unknown."
It was his great-grandson, Edmund de Mortimer, who, by marriage with
the daughter of Prince Lionel, third son of Edward III, gave that
other Edmund Mortimer, his descendant, a better title to the throne
than that of Henry IV. This last of the Mortimers was until his death
the apparently listless centre of continual conspiracies. When he gave
up his ineffectual ghost, his estates passed to his nephew, the
vigorous Duke of York, who fixed his chief residence at Ludlow Castle.
As the York rebellion gathered force and the Wars of the Roses set
in, this neighbourhood became a centre of hostilities. The
Lancastrians, in their hour of triumph, wreaked furious vengeance on
Ludlow, but Edward IV, on his accession, consoled the town with a
liberal charter and selected it as the residence of his sons, the
Little Princes of the Tower. It is pleasant to think that before their
swift fate came upon them they had a few years of happy childhood
playing on the greensward of those spacious courts, perched up with
their lesson books in the stone window-seats, and praying their
innocent prayers within the arcaded walls of that circular Norman
chapel, built on the model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and
praised by Churchyard as
"So bravely wrought, so fayre and finely fram'd,
That to world's end the beauty may endure."
Another princely association, hardly less pathetic, haunts these
arched portals and embattled towers. The heir of Henry VII, Prince
Arthur, in whom the greatness of Britain's legendary hero was to live
again, passed his delicate childhood here, and here, shortly after his
marriage to Catherine of Arragon, died suddenly on a spring day of
1502, a lad of sixteen summers. An unknown contemporary tells how
letters were hastily despatched from Ludlow to His Majesty's Council,
and they, seeking the gentlest bearer of such grievous news, "sent for
the King's ghostly father.... He in the morning of the Tuesday
following, somewhat before the time accustomed, knocked at the King's
chamber door; and when the King understood it was his Confessor, he
commanded to let him in. The Confessor then commanded all those there
present to avoid, and after due salutation began to say, _Si bona de
manu Dei suscepimus, mala autem quare non sustineamus?_ and so showed
his Grace that his dearest son was departed to God. When his Grace
understood that sorrowful heavy tidings, he sent for the Queen, saying
that he and his Queen would take the painful sorrows together. After
that she was come, and saw the King her lord and that natural and
painful sorrow, as I have heard say, she with full great and constant
comfortable words besought his Grace that he would, first after God,
remember the weal of his own noble person, the comfort of his realm
and of her ... over that how that God had left him yet a fair prince,
two fair princesses; and that God is where he was.... Then the King
thanked her of her good comfort. After that she was departed and come
to her own chamber, natural and motherly remembrance of that great
loss smote her so sorrowful to the heart, that those that were about
her were fain to send for the King to comfort her."
We saw on a Sunday, in the beautiful Church of St. Lawrence, a dole of
bread for the poor, a row of twelve goodly loaves set out on a Tudor
monument which is believed to commemorate Prince Arthur, and possibly
to cover the ashes of his boyish heart, although the body was buried
in Worcester Cathedral, where his chantry stands at the right of the
High Altar.
Among the tombs in the rich-windowed choir is one whose inscription
reads:
"Heare lyethe the bodye of Ambrozia Sydney, iiii doughter of
the Right Honourable Syr Henry Sydney, Knight of the moste
noble order of the Garter, Lord President of the Counsell of
Wales, etc. And of Lady Mary his wyef, doughter of the famous
Duke of Northumberland, who dyed in Ludlow Castell, ye 22nd
of Februarie, 1574."
We paused there a moment in reverence to Sir Philip Sidney's mother,
"a full fair lady" who lost her beauty by nursing Queen Elizabeth,
from whom she took the contagion, through an attack of smallpox, and
afterwards "chose rather to hide herself from the curious eyes of a
delicate time than come upon the stage of the world with any manner of
disparagement."
The last Lord Marcher before the Restoration was the Earl of
Bridgwater, whose appointment was most gloriously celebrated by the
creation of Milton's "Comus," presented on Michaelmas Night, 1634, in
the Great Hall of the castle. The first to hold the office--thenceforth
only nominal--after the Restoration was the Earl of Carberry, whose
seneschal was one Samuel Butler, a steward who may or may not have kept
good accounts, but who used his pen to effective purpose in writing, in
a chamber over the gate, the first portion of "Hudibras."
Ludlow is the centre for fascinating excursions. The delicious air and
most lovely scenery tempt one forth on roads that run between
bird-haunted banks fringed with luxuriant bracken and lined with all
manner of trees to whose very tops climbs the aspiring honeysuckle.
The glint of red berries from the mountain ash, the drooping sprays of
the larches, the silvery glimpses of far vistas framed in leafy green,
the spicy forest fragrances, the freshness and buoyancy of the air,
all unite to make the spirit glad. From every rise in the road are
views that range over a fair outspread of plain and valley, rimmed by
gentle hills. All over Worcestershire we looked, and into Wales, and
up through Salop to where the Wrekin smiled a gracious recognition.
Points of special interest abound,--Haye Wood, where Lady Alice,
daughter of the Earl of Bridgwater, and her brothers lost their way
and by their little adventure gave young Milton the suggestion for his
Masque; St. Mary's Knoll, once crowned by a venerated image of the
Virgin; Oakley Park, with its Druid trees; the little church of Pipe
Aston, with its curious semi-cirque of Norman carving over the door;
Leinthall church, overtopped at either end by lofty yews; British
fort; Tudor mansion; storied battlefield.
Our first goal was Richard's Castle in Hereford, dating from the reign
of Edward the Confessor,--a Norman keep before the Norman Conquest.
Nothing of that brave erection is left save a mound of earth and a bit
of broken wall. Near by stands an old church with some remnants of
fine glass and with the rare feature, in England, of a detached
bell-tower. We lingered in the church yard, looking out from a massive
recumbent slab that was cleft from end to end, as if the impatient
sleeper could not wait for the Archangel's trump, eastward to the
Malvern Hills, whose earthly blue melted as softly into the blue of
the sky as life melts into death. But a line of rooks flapping
roostward awoke us to the flight of time, and the pensive appeal of
that quiet spot, with its lichened crosses and grave-mantling growths
of grass and ivy, was dispelled by a donkey who thrust his head
through a green casement in the hedge and waggled his long ears at us
with a quizzical expression.