unusual jealousy that keeps the building locked, combine to hide much of
interest from all wayfarers, save those of the most determined type. The
enterprising and energetic who prevail have their reward, for the
interior—good Early English and Decorated—has an unusually interesting
collection of monuments. Here, cross-legged and mail-clad, lies the
effigy of Sir William Keynes, one of the last of his family, settled
here—no, _not_ settled, because they were continually away, warring for
kings or against kings; rather let us say, who owned this manor—from the
Conqueror’s time until that of Edward III., when the name was
extinguished in the marriage of an heiress, the last representative. The
true significance of the crossed legs of these old knights is still in
dispute, but the commonly received idea is that the attitude proclaims a
Crusader. But it is scarce possible that Sir William de Keynes (who died
in 1344) ever fought for the Cross in Palestine. Had he done so, he must
have been, in two senses, an infant in arms, for the Crusades were over
and done with, and the Soldan had got his own again (or what was as good
as his own) before William could have relinquished his coral and bells
and taken to mace and broadsword. The fact seems to be that the early
Crusaders, who adopted this mortuary symbolism, were followed in it by
many who had never warred against the Infidel at all, and debased the
original significance into a mere fashion.
Two others of the family are represented here in effigies of women,
thought to be Hawisa de Keynes (1330) and her great-granddaughter,
Wentiliana (1376). The earliest of the two is wooden, and is represented
in the nun-like headdress of her time.
But the finest monument is that of Sir John Cressy, who died in 1444,
across the seas in Lorraine, in the service of Henry VI. He is
represented in plate-armour, and wears the Lancastrian badge, the Collar
of SS. On the breastplate of the effigy is carved, very bold and deep,
“Iohn Newell 1601.” Who John Newell was, except that he thus proves
himself of the great ’Arry family, it is hopeless to inquire. “I.A.
1776” has also proved on the alabaster the barbarism of his nature and
the mettle of his penknife.
Besides these memorials, the church has numerous brasses and tablets,
while in the churchyard a stone tells of a Major Campbell, commanding
the Royal Artillery at Weedon, who died in 1809, after having lived
“strictly fulfilling the duties of the Soldier, Gentleman, and
Christian: not less lamented in death than valued in life.” In
conclusion, an odd custom prevailing here and in surrounding villages
may be noticed: epitaphs on stones erected by widows over their husbands
giving the relationship, “the husband of.” So complete a reversal of the
usual practice, placing the man in the subsidiary place, is a novelty.
The remainder of the way to Daventry, or “Daintry,” as old travellers
always called it, is hilly, but beautifully shaded by hedgerow trees.
Hills and vales in constant alternation are seen on either hand; the
frowning bulk of Borough Hill on the right, crowned with British
earthworks, converted by the Romans into a military camp, probably
identical with the lost station of _Beneventa_. Roman remains have been
discovered up there in great numbers in days before the hill became
enclosed, cultivated, and hedged about with difficulties in the way of
exploring antiquaries. Down below, and near the road, is the ruin-strewn
field called “Burnt Walls,” known by that name at least six hundred and
fifty years ago, when it is mentioned as “ad brende walles” in a deed
relating to property. On the eastern side of Borough Hill, near the
village of Norton, and adjoining the Watling Street, another field,
oddly named “Great Shawney,” has yielded many traces of old Rome. The
name, indeed, is thought to be a faint and far echo of _Isannavaria_,
another vanished Roman camp.
It was on Borough Hill that Charles I.’s army of ten thousand men, on a
night in June, 1645, set a seventeenth-century example to the
eighteenth-century ten thousand under the “brave old Duke of York,” who
were marched to the top of a hill and then marched down again, as a
well-known rhyme tells us. Nothing happened on either occasion.
Charles’s troops, occupying Daventry and the surrounding villages for
some days before, were frightened to that night’s hill-top vigil by some
skirmishing exploits on the part of Fairfax. Before morning came, they
descended and went off in retreat to Naseby, the King with them,
reluctant to leave the comfortable lodgings he had enjoyed for six
nights past at the “Wheatsheaf.”
XXXV
The first prominent object on approaching the town is the “Wheatsheaf”
itself, boasting of being established in 1610, but rebuilt in the
coaching age, and just a white-painted, stucco-fronted building with a
courtyard and a general Pickwickian and respectable Early Victorian air.
Opposite stands an “Independent Chapel, erected 1722,” which, with its
secular air and big gates, looks like a converted inn. Continuing along
the narrow and unpicturesque Sheaf Street thus entered, the unwary
pilgrim, unobservant on wheels, is downhill at the other end and out of
the town in the proverbial “jiffy,” or the not less proverbial
“two-twos.” But Sheaf Street, lining the Holyhead Road, is a snare and a
delusion. _That_ does not form the sum and substance of Daventry,
sprawling largely down a street to the right and developing itself
astonishingly at the end in a mutton-chop-shaped market-place, continued
to the left hand again as a High Street. It is as though Daventry had
long ago resolved to keep itself retired and select from the throng that
once went up and down the Holyhead Road; and very quiet and empty the
market-place looks to this day, with a church rebuilt in 1752 and
supposed to be Doric: the exterior in a yellow sandstone rapidly
crumbling away, and the interior like a concert-hall. The eye lights
upon only one memorable thing, and that an epitaph to a certain Susanna
Pritchett Godson, who died in 1809, aged twenty-five:—
She was——
But room won’t let me tell you what.
Name what a Wife should be,
And She was that.
[Illustration: DAVENTRY MARKET-PLACE.]
Daventry Priory once stood hereby, but many years have passed since its
last fragments were cleared away to provide a site for the town gaol in
front of this ugly church. The Priory itself was, with others,
suppressed by Wolsey, that ambitious Cardinal, for the purpose of
seizing its funds, towards the endowment of his colleges at Oxford and
Ipswich. He is charged with having sent five of his creatures to pick a
quarrel with the house, and, causing the dispute to be referred to
himself, of having dissolved it by fraud. The story of what happened to
his five emissaries and himself, and the moral drawn from their fate,
are quite in keeping with the superstitious spirit of those times. Thus,
one learns that two of the five quarrelled, and one slew the other, the
survivor being hanged; that a third drowned himself in a well; that a
fourth, formerly well-to-do, became penniless and begged till his dying
day; and that the remaining one “was cruelly maimed in Ireland.” This
series of “judgments” is then carried on to the Cardinal, whose
miserable end is historic; to his colleges, of which one was immediately
pulled down, and the other finished under other patronage; and to the
Pope who permitted Wolsey’s high-handed doings, and who was besieged and
long imprisoned. Unhappily, for the sake of a poetic completeness of
vengeance, Henry VIII.—who dissolved more religious houses than any one,
and, moreover, appropriated their revenues and lands to his own
uses—flourished amazingly for years afterwards. Like the wicked whoso
good fortunes are bitterly lamented by the Psalmist, his eyes swelled
out with fatness, and he was well filled.
[Illustration: TOWN SEAL, DAVENTRY.]
The old pronunciation of “Daintry” goes back certainly to the sixteenth
century, when it was probably responsible for the device of the old town
seal, adopted at that time, representing a figure intended to picture a
Dane at odds with an indeterminate kind of a tree. Pennant, on the other
hand, derives the name from “Dwy—avon—tre,” “the dwelling of the two
Avons”: and indeed the town is placed, as it were, at the fork of the
Nen, sometimes called the Avon, and another insignificant stream; but
this is looked upon with an almost equal contempt, and mystery still
enshrouds the real origin and the significance of the name.
Whips were made at Daventry a hundred years ago, but it is now a
boot-making town, not altogether unpicturesque, in the slatternly sort.
Besides its “Wheatsheaf,” there are the “Peacock,” the “Dun Cow,” the
“Bear,” and the “Saracen’s Head”—all old; but the palm must be given to
the last, containing much black oak, and altogether a great deal more
interesting than a casual glance at its commonplace plastered front
would disclose. Its courtyard is especially quaint; in red brick, with a
large building to one side, now practically disused, but once the busy
dining-room of the coaches. It was built probably about 1780: the upper
part ornamented with grotesque wooden figures of Jacobean date,
evidently the spoils of some demolished building. The whole, overhung
with grape-vines, makes a very pretty picture.
[Illustration: BRAUNSTON HILL.]
One leaves Daventry steeply down hill, through a trampish,
out-at-elbows,
dirty-children-wallowing-in-the-dust-in-the-middle-of-the-road quarter.
Hills again rise to left and right: on the left Catesby Abbey; ahead,
the exceedingly steep descent of a mile down Braunston Hill, with
Braunston spire, a deserted and ruinated windmill, and leagues upon
leagues of distant country, unfolded to the startled eye. The “steep and
dangerous descent” was to have been improved by Telford, but the design
was never put into execution, and the hill still owns those defects, and
hurtling motor-cars and cycles descending at extravagant speeds alarm
the propriety of the neighbourhood. In the hollow, 197 feet below the
hill-top, stands Braunston Station, the “Old Ship” inn nestling beneath
the thunderous girders of the railway-bridge crossing over the road; and
on the next rise over the Oxford Canal, a roadside forge and the
“Castle” inn, as old as Queen Elizabeth’s day. Here the rising road
forks, presenting a puzzle to the stranger, for either has the
appearance of a high road. The Holyhead Road, however, bears to the
left, that to the right leading in an outrageously steep semi-circle to
the long, rustic, stone-built street of Braunston village.
[Illustration: BRAUNSTON.]
The tower and spire of the fine Decorated church are imposing, but the
interior is of little interest—the body of the building, reconstructed
some fifty years ago, swept and garnished, and cleared of everything but
one old relic: the mail-clad effigy of a splay-footed crusading knight,
in the act of violently drawing his sword, thrust in an unobtrusive
corner.
XXXVI
Two-and-a-half miles from this point, across country and in the angle
formed by the branching of the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road from
Weedon, lie the village and the romantic manor-house of Ashby St.
Ledgers, the home of Robert Catesby, chief conspirator in the Gunpowder
Plot. From Braunston is by no means the best way to Ashby: reached by a
long, steep lane, and across six fields and two cross-roads. The only
guides on this solitary way are the traveller’s bump of location and a
battered sign-post in a cross-road, on one of whose decrepit arms,
pointing vaguely through an impenetrable hedge into a ploughed field,
the words, “To Ashby St. Ledgers and Crick Station,” can, under
favouring circumstances of sunshine, be faintly spelled. A meditative
rook, perching on a deserted harrow, typical of solitude, seemed, when
the present historian came this way, to hold and keep the secret of the
route, only discovered by diligent scouting at the next field-gate.
But Ashby St. Ledgers is worth this effort. At the end of the rather
uninteresting village, and closing the view, there suddenly comes the
beautiful grouping of old church, gatehouse, and ancient trees, leading
to the manor-house itself, glimpsed through the gate—a fine old
Elizabethan house, a picturesque pile of terraces, oriel windows and
gables, weather-stained and delightfully picturing the orthodox
character of a conspirator’s home.
[Illustration: ASHBY ST. LEDGERS.]
They still show the “Gunpowder Plot Room” over the gateway, and the
memorials of Catesby’s ancestors can even now be seen in the church—that
Church of St. Leodegarius from whom the place derives its name. There
they lie on the floor; monumental brasses of Catesbys, with their
cognizance, a black lion, conspicuous where the fury of centuries ago
has not hacked the workmanship out of recognition. There lie Sir William
Catesby, 1470, and his son, Sir William, taken prisoner at Bosworth
Field fifteen years later, _ex parte_ Richard III., and beheaded at
Leicester; great-great-great-grandfather of the conspirator, Robert, and
a warning, had he lent an ear to the history of his family, against too
rashly entering into the bloody politics of those times. That remote
ancestor’s fate carried with it the forfeiture of his estates, soon
restored to his son; but when Robert Catesby fell in his attempt to
destroy King and Parliament, and to subvert the Protestant religion, the
property, forfeited again, was never restored.
XXXVII
Retracing our steps to the Holyhead Road again, the “dumpling hills of
Northamptonshire,” as Horace Walpole calls them, give place to the long
Warwickshire levels. Four miles and a half from Daventry, and just
before reaching Willoughby village, lying off the road, the Great
Central Railway comes from Rugby, and crosses over on an embankment and
a blue-brick-and-iron-girder bridge; a station labelled “Willoughby, for
Daventry,” looking up and down the road. Does any one, it may be asked,
ever alight for Daventry in this solitary road, four miles and a half
distant from that town, on the inducement of that notice? And when the
innocent traveller has thus alighted, what does he say when he gets his
bearings, and finds himself thus marooned, far away from where he would
be?
Possibly he resorts, after being thus scurvily tricked by the railway
company, to the “Four Crosses” Inn, a house with a history, standing
close by. The old inn of that name, demolished in 1898, faced the
bye-road to Willoughby village; the new building fronts the highway. The
junction of roads at this point has only three arms, hence the original
sign of the “Three Crosses,” changed to four, according to the received
story, at the suggestion of Dean Swift, who was a frequent traveller
along this road between Dublin and London, riding horseback, with one
attendant. The old inn, hardly more than a wayside pot-house, was scarce
a fit stopping place for that dignitary; but it is well known that Swift
delighted in such places and the odd society to be met in them, and it
may have been in some ways more convenient than the usual posting-houses
at Daventry and Dunchurch.
[Illustration: THE “FOUR CROSSES,” WILLOUGHBY (DEMOLISHED 1898).]
The story runs that on one of his journeys, anxious for breakfast and to
be off, he could not hurry the landlady, who tartly told him “he must
wait, like other people.” He waited, of necessity, but employed the time
in writing with his diamond ring upon one of the panes:—
There are three
Crosses at your door:
Hang up your Wife
And you’l count Four.
Swift, D., 1730.[2]
The landlord probably did not hang up his wife, but he certainly seems
to have altered his sign.
Footnote 2:
The date is worth notice. All who have ever written on Swift give his
last visit to England as 1727. But this flatly contradicts them. Nor
is it in order to suppose this inscription a forgery, for it exhibits
the characteristic handwriting of the Dean, as seen in his manuscript
diary at South Kensington.
The window-pane disappeared from the old inn very soon afterwards, and
it is not at all unlikely that the landlady herself saw to it being
removed. Certainly it had disappeared in 1819, when some verses in the
_Gentlemen’s Magazine_ gave the misquotation of those lines that has
been the basis of every incorrect rendering since then. Many years ago
the late Mr. Cropper, of Rugby, who was a native of Willoughby, and
whose father had kept the “Four Crosses,” purchased the pane of a
cottager in the village. It is of the old diamond shape, of green glass,
and bears the words quoted above, scratched in a line, bold style.
The distinction is wrongly claimed for the “Four Crosses” Inn at
Hatherton, near Cannock, on the Watling Street; a very fine old coaching
inn, under whose roof Swift must certainly often have stayed; but as the
roads at that point form a complete cross of four arms, the sign must
always have been what it is now, and certainly all the evidence points
to the Willoughby claim being justified.
Willoughby may on some old maps be found marked as a “spa,” and a little
handbook, published in 1828, dealing with the merits of the “New
Sulphureous and Saline Baths” that stood opposite the “Four Crosses,”
assured all likely and unlikely scrofulous visitors that the waters were
just as unpleasing to taste and smell, and inferentially as efficacious,
as those of Harrogate itself. Cropper was both proprietor of the new
baths and keeper of the inn, somewhat grandiloquently described as the
“principal house for the reception of company.” The little shop seen
built out from the old “Four Crosses” was a chemist’s, added at that
hopeful time. But the Willoughby Spa, although so conveniently situated
on the great road, never attracted much custom, and is now quite forgot.
The chemist gave up in despair, and his shop was in use as a bar-parlour
at the last: the old drug drawers, with their abbreviated Latin labels,
remaining until the house was pulled down.
Willoughby legends still linger. They tell even yet, of the cross that
stood here in the seventeenth century, and of Cromwell’s soldiery,
retreating from Edge Hill, tying a rope round the shaft to pull it down,
only being dissuaded by the vicar, who diverted their attention with a
foaming beer-jug. It is gone now, however, but the date of its
disappearance is uncertain. Gone too are the seventeen hundred acres of
common land that once belonged to the parish; but their fate is a matter
of precise information. They were enclosed in 1758 and the plunder
divided, as by law enacted.
There was once a “New Inn” between Willoughby and Dunchurch, but it no
longer tempts the wayfarer; just as there was a toll-gate at Woolscot,
not far beyond, that no longer takes tolls. The toll-house remains, as
do certain legends of the ways of Rugby boys with the pikeman; boys and
man alike long since ferried across the inky Styx by the grim boatmen.
Pikemen acquired a preternaturally acute memory for faces. It is an
acquirement that, with the smile of recognition which costs nothing,
makes princes more popular and beloved than the exercise of the most
austere virtues. Not that pikemen commonly smiled. Suspicion and
malevolence sat squarely on their countenances, and when a something
that might by an effort be construed as a smile contorted their
countenances, it was like that of an alligator who perceives a fine fat
nigger within reach of his jaws. A pikeman who took toll of even a
thousand persons in the course of a day, might safely be counted upon to
recognise each on his return and to pass him without the formality of
halting to show the ticket issued in the morning; but let one who had
not already paid toll that day attempt to pass with the customary nod of
the returning traveller, franked through by his morning’s payment, and
he was certain to be stopped and asked for his ticket. Those were the
occasions when the pikeman smiled in his most hateful manner. The only
places where this cold-blooded grin of triumph may nowadays be seen off
the melodramatic stage, are the Old Bailey and other criminal courts;
when prosecuting counsel have forged the last link in a chain of
conviction.
It was at Woolscot toll-gate that the pikeman on one occasion was paid
twice in one day for a gig. Tom Pinner, a well-known coachman who
afterwards kept the “Five Ways” tavern at Birmingham, was once visited
at Dunchurch by some friends who set out early from Daventry. They had a
pleasant day and wound up with dinner. The feast was good, the wines
potent, and the guests slept heavily. As they lay thus, the jocular
Pinner blacked their faces, and when they had revived a little started
them home. When the gig drew up in the flickering light of the
toll-gate, they of course could not find their tickets, and the pikeman
insisted on toll being paid: he was quite sure no black men had passed
that day!
Passing over the streamlet spanned by Rains Bridge, which is probably
the “stone bridge” referred to by Ogilby in 1675, as situated at the end
of the twelve furlongs’ length of “Dunchurch Lane, bad way,” the
exquisite half-mile avenue of majestic elms leading along a gently
curving road into Dunchurch is entered. Branches and thick foliage meet
overhead and realise the oft-met similitude drawn between cathedral
aisles and avenues such as this.
XXXVIII
Dunchurch and the surrounding Dunsmore—at this time tamed somewhat from
its ancient wildness and tickled into productiveness and smiling
fertility by plough and harrow—were associated, close upon three hundred
years ago, with a conspiracy that might well, had it been successful,
have added such a page to England’s story whose likeness for horror and
ferocity it would perhaps be impossible to match. Dunchurch, in short,
has a scenic part in the “Gunpowder Treason and Plot,” that came near to
blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, in Parliament assembled, on the
famous Fifth of November, 1605. “To blow the Scottish beggars back to
their native mountains” was Guy Fawkes’ savagely humorous explanation of
the plot, when asked its object by a Scottish nobleman; but its real aim
was the avenging of Roman Catholic wrongs and disabilities upon James
I., and the Protestants. We have already seen the home of Robert
Catesby, the true and original begetter of the plot: and here, at
Dunchurch, was to be assembled a great gathering of Roman Catholic
noblemen and gentlemen, to take part in a rising to follow upon the
success of the blow to be struck in London. Those were times when
assemblages of any kind were looked upon with suspicion, and so it was
given out that the great preparations being made along the road from
London, in providing relays of horses at every stage, were in connection
with an elaborate hunting-party on Dunsmore, to which the squire of
Ashby St. Ledgers had bidden the whole countryside. Never doubting the
success of their design to blow Parliament sky-high, Catesby with three
of his fellow-conspirators, Percy, and John and Christopher Wright, left
London for Dunchurch on the eve of the fatal Fifth. Fawkes, fanatically
courageous, was in his cellar, under the Parliament House: the sinister
figure that close upon three hundred anniversary “Guy Fawkes Days” and
innumerable ludicrous “guys” have not wholly succeeded in robbing of its
dramatic force. There he lurked: booted and spurred, slouch-hatted and
cloaked; slow-matches in his pocket, and a dark-lantern behind the door.
Two others of the conspirators remained in town, to watch the success of
the dark design. They were Ambrose Rookwood and Thomas Winter. But as
the midnight of November 4th, sounded from the clocks of London and
ushered in the opening hour of the Fifth, Fawkes was arrested in his
hiding-place, and the scheme wrecked. Instantly, as though by magic, the
rumours of some calamity narrowly averted, pervaded London, and warned
Rookwood and Winter to fly. Had they trusted to the staunchness of
Fawkes they and the others would have been safe enough, for that
unwilling sponsor of all subsequent “guys” was as secret as the grave,
and even under torture made no disclosures until by their own later acts
the conspirators had rendered concealment useless. But, panic-stricken,
Rookwood and Winter left London behind in the forenoon; Winter for
hiding in Worcestershire, Rookwood to overtake and warn Catesby and his
companions on the Holyhead Road. He came up with them at Little
Brickhill and with laboured breath—for he had ridden headlong—told the
tale of how the plot had been discovered. They wasted no time in
discussion. If they had hasted before, they journeyed frantically now.
By six o’clock, riding through a day of November rain, they had gained
Ashby St. Ledgers, casting away their heavy cloaks as they went,
together with aught else that might hinder their mad flight.
Seventy-eight miles in seven hours was a marvellous ride in those times,
and under such conditions. Perhaps some modern cyclist, eager to draw a
parallel, will essay the feat under like meteorological conditions.