place, but nothing is more astonishing than the ease with which raiders
often surprised even the stoutest castles. Let us take, for instance,
the affair of the “bold Buccleuch” and Kinmont Willie, in the times
of Queen Elizabeth. The borders had long been free from war on the
larger scale, but the moss-trooping, reiving forays survived in much of
their early severity, in spite of the amicable appointment of English
and Scottish Lords Wardens, who were supposed to restrain the lawless
folk on either side of the debateable lands between the marches. The
Wardens’ Courts were strictly conducted in the districts of the Solway,
and those assembled at them were guaranteed from violence on either
side. But in 1596, when the Court assembled at Kershopeburn to settle
grievances in connection with the great raids of the Armstrongs, who
had come across from Scotland to the number of three thousand and
lifted all the stock for miles around, the feelings of the English were
raw. A notable man among these cattle-thieves was this same “Kinmont
Willie,” and the English sorely longed to take vengeance upon him. At
the Court, he was protected by the rules of that assemblage, but in
riding away he was reckless enough to go off alone, and what might have
been expected happened. He was captured and consigned to a dungeon in
Carlisle Castle.
All the Scottish side of the Border was immediately in an uproar at
this violation of agreements, and Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, Keeper
of Liddesdale, was moved to apply for the raider’s release. Buccleuch
was a law-abiding person, and would probably have been glad enough to
see Kinmont Willie properly hanged on his own side, but this breach of
the understanding between the Wardens was an outrage not to be endured.
[Sidenote: _SIEGE OF CARLISLE_]
Lord Scrope, the English Warden, informed him the affair was so
important that it must be referred to the Queen; and she in turn
ignored it altogether. Buccleuch therefore determined, at whatever
cost, to rescue the prisoner, who would otherwise soon have been
hanged, and he put himself at the head of two hundred and ten desperate
spirits who at night crossed the Esk and silently drew near to
Carlisle, two hours before peep o’ day. They had brought with them,
on horseback, scaling ladders for the castle walls, and pickaxes, and
made a breach by the postern-gate. What were those sentinels doing, who
were not alarmed? Sleeping, doubtless. At any rate, the garrison knew
nothing until Buccleuch’s men had forced an entrance. The dungeon where
the prisoner was immured was known, and he was brought forth, chains
and all, and hurried away. The whole party were speedily off again, and
into their own country, before pursuit was properly organised.
The last raid took place actually in 1601, when the kingdoms were
united by the accession of James the First, and while he was at
Berwick, journeying to London. Several hundreds of Scots then came
plundering past Carlisle, and many were captured and duly hanged.
James, anxious to unite the kingdoms in reality, ordered that the name
of “the Border,” standing for centuries of warfare, should give place
to “the midlands,” but the new style does not seem ever to have come
into general use; and the coming of the Stuarts meant in after years
much more trouble for Carlisle and its surroundings; for it was in
1644-5 that the city endured the longest and most severe siege in its
history. It was held for the King, and beleaguered for eight months
by the Scottish General, Leslie. The citizens paid dearly for their
loyalty, and were reduced to eating horses, dogs, and rats. Hungry
folks chased errant cats hazardously across roof-tops, in view of the
besiegers, who took long shots at them; and even hemp-seed became so
dear that only the wealthy could afford it. Money current in the city
was coined from silver plate; but there was so little food to purchase
that, as a diarist of the time wrote, “the citizens were so shrunk
from starvation, they could not choose but laugh at one another, to see
their clothes hang upon them as upon men on gibbets.”
It was upon the surrender ending this memorable siege that Carlisle
Cathedral suffered so greatly. The visitor who first sets eyes upon the
venerable pile finds himself bewildered by its unusual proportions,
and has some difficulty in distinguishing which end is east and which
west. He has been used, everywhere else, to see the nave of a cathedral
much longer than its choir, and to see the building stretching away
westward from the central tower five and six times the length of the
eastern, or choir, limb. Here, however, when he has definitely settled
his bearings, he perceives the choir to be more than thrice the length
of the nave.
This present odd aspect of the Cathedral, looking as though it had been
twisted bodily round, is entirely owing to the fury with which the
soldiery fell upon it, after the siege. Where there were once eight
bays to the Early Norman nave, there are now but two: the rest all went
as so much rough stone wherewith to repair the walls of the city and
to erect guard-houses: a curious reversal of its early use, for it was
from the ancient Roman wall that these stones came in Norman times.
[Illustration: EAST END, CARLISLE CATHEDRAL.]
[Sidenote: _THE STEEL THAT MAKES AFRAID_]
But Carlisle was not done with trouble, even in the sacrilege of 1645.
It escaped in 1715, for the rebels avoided coming to clashes with a
fortified city; but it came to know intimately of the much more nearly
successful rebellion of 1745. But what use are battlemented walls of
stone, if they be manned with faint hearts? After all the brave doings
of “merry Carlisle,” it is sad to think how low the martial spirit
had sunk by 1745, when the militia, assembled in the city, declined
to fight the rebels under Prince Charlie. A bold front would have
compelled the invaders to leave Carlisle alone; but the broadswords
of the Highlanders had so much of what military historians term
“moral effect” that the militiamen positively refused to run the risk
of being cleaved by that terrible cold steel. Poor Colonel Durand,
in command—if we may still call that a command which will not obey
orders—might rave, and implore, and even weep, but it was useless, and
the city was surrendered. Prince Charlie was in camp at Brampton, eight
miles away, and it must have been a proud moment for him—if a sorry
humiliation for some—when mayor and corporation went out to him and
on their knees offered the keys of the gates. The next day the Prince
entered in triumph, on a milk-white horse, one hundred pipers piping
before him. It must have been a fearful moment—for those who did not
love the bagpipes.
George the Second, at St. James’s, began to reconsider his position
at hearing of this signal failure of his sworn protectors, and many
excellent, though time-serving, people in high places began to explain
away the disagreeable things they had said of the Stuarts. But in a
few weeks, as we know, the Highlanders were retreating; and, trimming
their sails anew, politicians and witlings were repeating again their
protestations of loyalty to the House of Hanover, and refurbishing that
old quotation from Revelation, chapter xvii. verse 11, first current
in 1715, by which they affected to believe that James the Second of
England and Seventh of Scotland, and his son, the Pretender (_de jure_
James the Third and Eighth) were the subjects of prophecy: “And the
beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven,
and goeth into perdition.”
An ingenious find, it must be allowed, and sufficient, providing no
one else could refer to Revelation and find another quotation, a little
destructive of the first. But such an one was actually to hand in
the preceding verse, which very curiously says, “And there are seven
kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come;
and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.” There were those
excellent Whigs who, reading this, were not entirely happy until events
demonstrated that the rebellion was absolutely hopeless.
The Duke of Cumberland with ease retook the city, and captured with
it Prince Charlie’s devoted rear-guard: the brave Colonel Townely and
his 120 men of the Manchester Regiment, together with over two hundred
Highlanders, and some few Frenchmen. They were lodged in the Cathedral,
and thence taken in a long melancholy procession to London, there,
according to their degree, to be beheaded as gentlemen, or hanged like
common malefactors. They rode, tied hand and foot, or walked, roped
together, the whole bitter way.
[Sidenote: _THE CASTLE DUNGEONS_]
The Duke was not greatly impressed with the military value of the
castle. He called it “an old hen-coop,” but it held securely enough
the other miserable prisoners who were sent into Carlisle after
Culloden. Four hundred of them awaited their doom in the grim dungeons,
throughout the hot weather of 1746, and in October the executions
began. Ninety-six fell to the hangman, and others were transported
beyond seas. In batches of half-a-dozen or a dozen at a time, they
were called forth from their captivity and drawn on hurdles to that
Hanoverian Golgotha, Gallows Hill, south of the city, where they were
hanged and afterwards quartered, in the bloody-minded old way; their
heads afterwards set upon poles over the Scotch Gate.
You may see relics of that savage time, even now, in the cell fashioned
in the thick eastern wall of the keep: the prison occupied by Macdonald
of Keppoch. He whiled away the tedium of imprisonment by decorating the
walls with designs, executed with a nail, and there they still remain.
At this day Carlisle Castle is a somewhat shabby military depôt. The
outer bailey is a parade-ground skirted with barracks, and the inner
ward and keep are War Office storehouses. But it is in the unexpected
modern surroundings of the public library that the most tragical
memento of that time brings the hazards of rebellion with greatest
vividness before you. This is a plaster cast of a monument erected to
Dr. Archibald Campbell in the Savoy Chapel, London. The Chapel was
largely destroyed by fire in 1864, and with it the marble monument.
The unfortunate doctor was a non-combatant who acted as surgeon to the
rebels at Culloden, and escaped abroad from that disastrous field. He
returned, after seven years, to his Scottish home, thinking he might
then safely do so; but was informed against and executed.
XXV
[Sidenote: _CARLISLE COACHING_]
The greatest figure in the coaching world up north was Teather, who was
principal contractor for mails and stage-coaches in all that lengthy
territory of 166 miles between Lancaster and Glasgow. The careers
of the Teathers reflect the fortunes of the road. John Teather, the
father, was originally landlord of the “Royal Oak,” Keswick, which does
not stand on the main route to the north; but he left the comparative
obscurity of that Lakeland town for the bustling activities of
Carlisle, and from that strategic coaching position worked the coaches
sixty-five miles south to Lancaster, and 101 miles north, to Glasgow.
Eight mails entered and left Carlisle daily, and seven stage-coaches;
and eighty horses were kept for the proper working of them. Teather and
his son managed this important business: the younger succeeding to it
in 1837 and, in the general wreck brought about by railway extension,
living to end where his father had begun, as landlord of the “Royal
Oak” at Keswick.
With the coming of the nineteenth century, some steps were taken to
make Carlisle a port. It was thought that a ship-canal from a place
called Fisher’s Cross on the Solway, to Carlisle, a distance of twelve
miles, would make the ancient city a place of commercial importance;
and accordingly the canal was cut, 1819-23, at a cost of £90,000, and
Fisher’s Cross was dignified by the new name of “Port Carlisle.” The
enterprise never paid its way, any steps that might in after years
have been taken to improve the position being rendered impossible by
the coming of railways; while the irony of fate long ago overtook the
canal, in its conversion into a railway.
It was in December 1846 that the first railway ran into Carlisle from
the south. This was the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, long since
absorbed into the London and North-Western. In September 1847 the
Caledonian Railway, from Carlisle to Moffat, carried on the new methods
another stage, and in the following February it was further extended to
Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was necessarily the death-blow of the coaches
along the main route. My old friend, Mr. W. H. Duignan, of Walsall,
who remembers that time, travelled from Carlisle to Glasgow by the
last mail-coach. He went to the “Bush” hotel and booked a seat for the
occasion.
The bookkeeper remarked, when he gave his name, “I think I have often
booked you before, sir, have I not?”
“Yes,” the traveller replied.
“Then, sir,” rejoined the clerk, refusing the money, “Mr.——”—mentioning
the name of the hotel-keeper—“will feel it a pleasure if you will
accept a seat, and order anything you please, at his expense.”
My friend declared that was the most gentlemanly-dying mail he ever
knew.
The “Bush” has since been rebuilt, but at Corby Castle, some two miles
away, in what was once the “Haunted Room,” there hangs in a frame an
interesting pane of glass from one of its windows, inscribed by no less
notable a traveller than Hume, the historian, with the satirical verse,
reflecting upon the “Bush,” the Cathedral, and Carlisle in general:
Here chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl;
Here godless boys God’s glories squall;
Here heads of Scotchmen guard the wall,
But Corby’s walks atone for all.
Sir Walter Scott saw this in 1825, and humorously remarked in a letter
to his friend Morritt upon “Hume’s poetical works.”
[Sidenote: _A RAILWAY CENTRE_]
The reason that made Carlisle in early days the key of military
dispositions, and in later times so important a coaching centre, acted
even more powerfully in making it the busy centre of many railway
systems that it is to-day. Carlisle has ever stood squarely in the
way of those who would pass on the west between England and Scotland.
To-day, the rival railways all run into one joint station: and there
the London and North-Western, the Midland, and their respective allies,
the Caledonian, the North British, and the Glasgow and South-Western,
after many a Parliamentary battle in the past, compose their
differences.
The chief coaching-business was ruined thus early, but the branch
coaches yet remained, and the last coach—that to Edinburgh by
Hawick—did not leave Carlisle on its final journey until August 31st,
1862. Coaching history, however, is as little illustrated in Carlisle
by visible remains as the ancient story of the place, for while the
“Bush” has been rebuilt, the rival inn, the “Crown and Mitre,” in
Castle Street, has declined to the state of a coffee-tavern, and the
“Blue Bell,” in Scotch Street, has obviously seen its best days.
If you seek frowning gateways, embattled walls, and the like,
sufficient to clothe the stirring story of Carlisle, you will be
freezing in the cold shade of disappointment, for the streets of
Carlisle are wide, many of the houses are modern, and railways are very
much to the fore. The Cathedral is obscurely placed, and almost the
only picturesque nook is the alley called St. Alban’s Row. Even the
old upping-blocks that used to stand so plentifully by the kerbstones
for the convenience of horsemen, and were a feature of Carlisle, have
disappeared. Only the odd names of the streets and alleys occasionally
remain: among them Rickergate, Whippery, and Durham Ox Lane.
[Illustration: ST. ALBAN’S ROW.]
[Sidenote: _“MERRY” CARLISLE_]
Carlisle of to-day has a commercial reputation. It makes hats and
whips, and textile fabrics, to say nothing of dye-works, where the
citizens of Carlisle are prepared (at a price) to dye for their
country. The manufacture of gingham, too, the secret of it stolen long
ago from Guingamp, its native place, in Brittany, occupies a good
deal of attention, and the production of biscuits and cardboard-boxes
makes up the tale of the city’s activities. But Carlisle, for all
these developments, looks a poor place, and by no means a merry. All
the fun ceased when raiding and murdering went out of date, and the
only merry-making nowadays to be seen and heard is not indigenous. It
is to be found at the great Carlisle Joint Station, at unseasonable
hours, and is provided, free, gratis, all for nothing, by travelling
theatrical companies bound for Scotland. For two generations past,
the low comedians of the companies have whiled away the weary waiting
sometimes to be done on Carlisle platforms, and astonished the tired
porters by dancing Scotch reels and sword-dances, accompanied by
fiendish yelps, or have expressed a desire to have a “willie waucht,”
to “dee for Annie Laurie,” to be “fou the noo,” or anything else
supposedly Scottish. It is one of the most cherished conventions of
the theatrical profession on tour.
This great joint railway station—the Citadel Station, as it is
called—is neighboured by two enormous mediæval-looking drum towers of
red sandstone, restorations of two of the same character built in the
sixteenth century. They look none the less gloomy because they serve
merely the purpose of Assize Courts, instead of fortifications. You
must needs pass between them on entering Carlisle from the London road,
and they are among the first things to dispel any idea the stranger may
have brought with him that Carlisle is really “merry.”
There is that about the modern appearance of Carlisle which
irresistibly reminds one of a ragged urchin clothed in some full-grown
man’s trousers. Many things are too large for its circumstances. Two
prominent things among the many that suggest this comparison are the
unnecessary electric tramways and the noble Eden Bridge, carrying the
road across the river to Stanwix. The bridge, built a hundred years
ago, is monumental, and even the lamp-standards, designed for it at the
same time, are fine. But the over-head trolley-wires are an offence
to the spirit of the thing, and the city of Carlisle cares so little
for it that ugly electric light standards are placed at intervals, and
the fine old iron lamps that might so easily and handsomely have been
adapted, now serve no useful purpose.
XXVI
[Sidenote: _THE WALL_]
Crossing to Stanwix, we are at last on the Border, for here ran the
Roman wall, on its way from Wallsend, near Newcastle-on-Tyne, to
Bowness, dividing the civilisation of that time from the unknown
savagery further north. Built about A.D. 121, at the instance of the
Emperor Hadrian, it kept the painted, skin-clad “Picts” in their own
wild country for over three hundred years, and employed a considerable
garrison to patrol it and exercise a continual vigilance along those
bitter, wind-swept miles. Many a gallant centurion, condemned to
mounting guard in these ancient marches, has doubtless in the long ago
leant over the ramparts of the Wall, and gazing into the shaggy forest
and brushwood beyond, called down curses upon the “forward policy” in
Rome, that pushed the limits of Empire into the frozen north, before
the southernmost provinces were fully settled. Here was no society, and
no glory in fighting with savages to be compared with that to be gained
in campaigns against the armies of Carthage or of Greece.
Here, at this wall-fortress of _Convagata_, there was, at any rate,
the neighbourhood of _Luguvallum_, apparently well-settled, but the
solitary life of these wardens of old Rome in the lonely mile-castles
of the wall must have been so exceedingly dull that the dangers of an
occasional Pict raid would be welcomed.
Even in times so comparatively modern as the beginning of the
seventeenth century the Border was little known. Camden spoke of the
northern reaches of this road, before he visited Cumberland in 1607, as
a part of the country “lying beyond the mountains toward the Western
Ocean,” and was greatly exercised with the hazards of even nearing
these remote fastnesses. He approached the Lancashire people with “a
kind of dread”; but, trusting to the protection of God, determined at
last to “run the hazard of the attempt.” He did indeed come to the
Border, but found, in exploring the Roman Wall dividing England and
Scotland, that the Wall was not only a division between two countries,
but marked the confines of civilisation. He accordingly returned,
shivering with apprehension, leaving his projected work incomplete.
[Illustration: CARLISLE.]
Stanwix, site of _Convagata_, obtains its name from the “stone way”
the Saxons found here. Truth to tell, modern Stanwix is a sorry spot
on which to meditate upon the departed colonial fortunes of Imperial
Rome, for the Wall is gone and Stanwix church and churchyard stand upon
the site of the fort. A precious ugly church, too, it is that has been
built here: Early English only by intention; with a dismally crowded
churchyard around it. A pathetic story is told by one of the epitaphs:
“Here lie the mortal bodies of five little sisters, the much-loved
children of A. C. Tait, Dean of Carlisle, and of Catherine, his wife,
who were all cut off within five weeks.” They died during an epidemic
of scarlet-fever, in 1856. A memorial window to them is in the north
transept of the Cathedral. “A. C. Tait” was, of course, Archibald
Campbell Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.
But if Stanwix be so ugly and commonplace, the scenery in which it is
placed is extremely beautiful. The greater, then, the crime of those
who have made it what it is. There is a lovely steep grassy descent,
plenteously wooded with noble trees, that falls away from the ridge of
Stanwix down to the Eden, and thus skirts the river for a mile or more.
“Rickerby Holmes” is the name of this beautiful feature. From this
point you gain the finest view of Carlisle.
[Sidenote: _THE BORDER_]
It is a flat, featureless country that stretches north from Stanwix
across the nine miles to the Border-line. Miserable villages that are
merely collections of gaunt cottages little better than hovels, often
built of “dubbin,” _i.e._ clay and straw, occur at intervals. Nearly
all of comparatively modern date, they point unmistakably to the fact
that it is not so very long since to live in the Debatable Land was
hazardous, and not to be thought of by the law-abiding. Very well
indeed for moss-trooping vagabonds and cow-stealers, but not for the
responsible, or those who wished for a quiet life.
Passing Goslin Syke, where a marshy stream crosses the road, we come to
Kingstown, where the road branches right and left. On this, the last
stage to the Border, this parting of the ways meant much to eloping
couples, bound for Scotland and marriage immediately on reaching
Scottish soil.