dinner we took a walk in the Abbey, one of the most ancient buildings
in the kingdom, near a thousand years old; and one of the largest,
being 560 feet in length[3] (considerably more than Westminster Abbey)
and broad and high in proportion. Near the east end is the tomb and
vault of good Duke Humphrey. Some, now living, remember since his body
was entire; but after the coffin was opened, so many were anxious to
taste the liquor in which it was preserved, that in a little time the
corpse was left bare, and soon mouldered away. A few bones are now all
that remain.”
[Sidenote: “GOOD” DUKE HUMPHREY]
The Duke Humphrey referred to was Humphrey Plantagenet, Duke of
Gloucester, uncle to Henry the Sixth, who was renowned for his
hospitality, and commonly called “The good Duke Humphrey.”
The “goodness” of Duke Humphrey must be, at the very least, an historic
doubt. Born in 1391, the youngest son of Henry the Fourth, he was a
man of affable and easy manners, cultured, and a patron of literature,
and considered by the people a patriot. Those were the days when to
be a “patriot” with one party was to be a “traitor” with another, and
jealousy on the part of Queen Margaret, consort of his nephew, Henry
the Sixth, caused his arrest at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447. The day
after his arrest, the Duke died, not without suspicion of foul play;
the times being such that the sudden death of any prominent person
could never be put down to natural causes; which sufficiently shows
the uncomfortable nature of those times. It seems, however, clear that
he died from paralysis, brought on through a life of debauchery, and
hastened by the shock of his arrest; but, if we may judge by the temper
of the age, his death happened in time to prevent the political murder
that assuredly would have been committed.
[Sidenote: _IMPOSTURE_]
So much for the “goodness” of the “good Duke,” who, whatever his
morals, was, if we are to believe the story told of him by Sir Thomas
More, a good deal more keen-witted than most people. It seems that he
completely exposed an impostor who claimed to have been born blind,
but to have recovered his sight at the shrine of St. Alban. The Duke
asked him the colours of the clothes himself and his suite were
wearing, and they were readily given by the man, who did not perceive
that, had he been born blind, he could not possibly know the names of
colours. The answer exposed him, and he was put in the stocks. The
story was long a favourite one at St. Albans, and forms a scene in the
second part of _King Henry the Sixth_; and by the same token fortifies
many in the belief that Bacon, and not Shakespeare, wrote that play.
[Sidenote: _MIRACLES WHILE YOU WAIT_]
_Enter a_ Townsman _of St. Albans, crying_, “A miracle!”
_Gloucester._ What means this noise?
Fellow, what miracle dost thou proclaim?
_Towns._ A miracle! a miracle!
_Suffolk._ Come to the king and tell him what miracle.
_Towns._ Forsooth, a blind man at St. Alban’s shrine,
Within this half hour, hath received his sight;
A man that ne’er saw in his life before.
_K. Henry._ Now, God be praised, that to believing souls
Gives light in darkness, comfort in despair!
_Enter the_ Mayor of St. Albans _and his brethren_, bearing Simpcox,
_between two in a chair_; SIMPCOX’S Wife _following_.
_Cardinal._ Here comes the townsmen on procession,
To present your highness with the man.
_K. Hen._ Great is his comfort in this earthly vale,
Although by his sight his sin be multiplied.
_Glo._ Stand by, my masters: bring him near the king;
His highness’ pleasure is to talk with him.
_K. Hen._ Good fellow, tell us here the circumstance,
That we for thee may glorify the Lord.
What, hast thou been long blind and now restored?
_Simpcox._ Born blind, an’t please your grace.
_Wife._ Ay, indeed, was he.
_Suf._ What woman is this?
_Wife._ His wife, an’t like your worship.
_Glo._ Hadst thou been his mother, thou couldst have better told.
_K. Hen._ Where wert thou born?
_Simp._ At Berwick in the north, an’t like your grace.
_K. Hen._ Poor soul, God’s goodness hath been great to thee:
Let never day nor night unhallow’d pass,
But still remember what the Lord hath done.
_Q. Margaret._ Tell me, good fellow, camest thou here by chance,
Or of devotion, to this holy shrine?
_Simp._ God knows, of pure devotion; being call’d
A hundred times and oftener, in my sleep,
By good St. Alban, who said, “Simpcox, come,
Come, offer at my shrine, and I will help thee.”
_Wife._ Most true, forsooth; and many time and oft
Myself have heard a voice to call him so.
_Car._ What, art thou lame?
_Simp._ Ay, God Almighty help me!
_Suf._ How camest thou so?
_Simp._ A fall off of a tree.
_Wife._ A plum-tree, master.
_Glo._ How long hast thou been blind?
_Simp._ O, born so, master.
_Glo._ What, and wouldst climb a tree?
_Simp._ But that in all my life, when I was a youth.
_Wife._ Too true; and bought his climbing very dear.
_Glo._ Mass, thou lovedst plums well, that wouldst venture so.
_Simp._ Alas, good master, my wife desired some damsons,
And made me climb, with danger of my life.
_Glo._ A subtle knave! but yet it shall not serve.
Let me see thine eyes: wink now: now open them:
In my opinion yet thou seest not well.
_Simp._ Yes, master, clear as day, I thank God and St. Alban.
_Glo._ Say’st thou me so? What colour is this cloak of?
_Simp._ Red, master; red as blood.
_Glo._ Why, that’s well said. What colour is my gown of?
_Simp._ Black, forsooth; coal-black as jet.
_K. Hen._ Why then, thou know’st what colour jet is of?
_Suf._ And yet, I think, jet did he never see.
_Glo._ But cloaks, and gowns, before this day a many.
_Wife._ Never, before this day, in all his life.
_Glo._ Tell me, sirrah, what’s my name?
_Simp._ Alas, master, I know not.
_Glo._ What’s his name?
_Simp._ I know not.
_Glo._ Nor his?
_Simp._ No, indeed, master.
_Glo._ What’s thine own name?
_Simp._ Saunder Simpcox, an if it please you, master.
_Glo._ Then, Saunder, sit there, the lyingest knave in
Christendom. If thou hadst been born blind, thou mightst
as well have known all our names, as thus to name the
several colours we do wear. Sight may distinguish of
colours, but suddenly to nominate them all, it is impossible.
My lords, St. Alban here hath done a miracle;
and would ye not think his cunning to be great, that
could restore this cripple to his legs again?
_Simp._ O, master, that you could!
_Glo._ My masters of St. Albans, have you not beadles
in your town, and things called whips?
_Mayor._ Yes, my lord, if it please your grace.
_Glo._ Then send for one presently.
_May._ Sirrah, go fetch the beadle hither straight.
[_Exit an_ Attendant.
_Glo._ Now fetch me a stool hither by and by. Now,
sirrah, if you mean to save yourself from whipping, leap
me over this stool and run away.
_Simp._ Alas, master, I am not able to stand alone:
You go about to torture me in vain.
_Enter a_ Beadle _with whips_.
_Glo._ Well, sir, we must have you find your legs.
Sirrah beadle, whip him till he leap over that same stool.
_Bead._ I will, my lord. Come on, sirrah; off with
your doublet quickly.
_Simp._ Alas, master, what shall I do? I am not able
to stand.
[_After the_ Beadle _hath hit him once, he leaps over
the stool and runs away; and they follow and cry_,
“A miracle!”
_K. Hen._ O God! seest thou this, and bearest so long?
_Q. Mar._ It made me laugh to see the villain run.
_Glo._ Follow the knave; and take this drab away.
_Wife._ Alas, sir, we did it for pure need.
_Glo._ Let them be whipped through every market-town,
till they come to Berwick, from whence they came.
[_Exeunt_ Wife, Beadle, Mayor, _etc._
_Car._ Duke Humphrey has done a miracle to-day.
_Suf._ True; made the lame to leap and fly away.
_Glo._ But you have done more miracles than I;
You made in a day, my lord, whole towns to fly.
There are a good many market-towns on the 317 miles between St. Albans
and Berwick.
The Duke was buried hard by the shrine of St. Alban, where his
magnificent chantry tomb, built by Abbot Wheathampstead, still remains,
bearing amid its delicate sculptures the antelope, his badge. The
leaden coffin of the Duke was opened in 1703, when the body was found
“lying in pickle.”
The once well-known phrase, “dining with Duke Humphrey,” is variously
explained. It seems to have originated with a visitor to the Abbey
in the late sixteenth century having been accidentally locked in the
chantry chapel all night. The humour of it spread to London and found
a more poignant note in its application to the beggars and insolvent
debtors who, with nothing else to do, paced the aisles of Old St.
Paul’s. They went dinnerless, without the will to it, and were said to
“dine with Duke Humphrey.”
That famous fourteenth-century traveller and writer of travel-lore,
Sir John Mandeville, was, according to his own statement, born at St.
Albans: a statement which, coming from such an accomplished liar as he
who, more than any other before or since, has made “travellers’ tales”
a byword, does not necessarily bear the stamp of truth. Indeed, modern
commentators are not altogether satisfied that there ever was such a
person as this Mandeville, who, if these carping critics be correct,
was so incorrigible a fibber that he lied in saying he was ever born
at all! Here we begin to flounder in heroics and the immensities; and
the further we inquire, the more marvellous and inexplicable grows the
mystery. Whether you take him as a real person, or as a myth, it is
equally remarkable that an existent, or a non-existent, body should be
buried in two places, as is claimed for Mandeville’s.
[Sidenote: _SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE_]
What purports to be the grave of the famous traveller is shown in this
Abbey of St. Alban, near the west end of the nave. A tablet placed on
the pillar above it formerly stated that Sir John Mandeville was born
here, and here buried in 1372, having commenced his famous travels in
1322, and continued them through the greater part of the world during
thirty-four years. There still remains on the pillar the curious
black-letter inscription:—
Lo, in this tomb of travellers do ly
One rich in nothing but memory,
His name was Sir John Mandeville, content,
Having seen much mirth, with small confinement;
Towards which he travelled ever since his birth,
And at last pawned his body to the earth,
Which by a statute must in mortgage be
Till a Redeemer come to set it free.
This seems very straightforward and matter-of-fact, and might stand,
were it not that an equally matter-of-fact tomb, with a long Latin
epitaph to the same person, was frequently noted by visitors to the
church of the _Frères Guillemins_ in Liège, until 1798, when the church
was destroyed, during the troubles of the French Revolution.
Such marvels as these are thoroughly in keeping with this prototype
of Munchausen, whose wildest flights of acknowledged fancy do not
approach the magnificent fictions of Mandeville, who appropriated all
the most stupendously tall stories of Marco Polo and other narrators
of the thing that was not, and added a skyscraping superstructure
of audacious inventions of his own. Modern writers, with the fear of
others who have been there, may well envy Mandeville, who could write
of men whose heads grew under their arms, and yet be regarded by his
contemporaries as truthful; or could convincingly talk of Ethiopia,
after this sort:
“In Ethiope there are such men as have but one foot, and they go so
fast that it is a great marvel; and that is a large foot, for the
shadow thereof covereth the body from Sun or Rain when they lie upon
their backs.”
Every man his own umbrella; what a splendid ideal!
XV
The interest of St. Albans and its surroundings is not easily to be
compressed into a few pages. Everywhere are memories, and in most
places visible remains, wherewith to fortify imaginations not of a
robust order. The walls of Roman _Verulamium_ yet remain in fragmentary
condition, to south and west of the Abbey, and close by them stands the
village of St. Michael’s, in whose church, sadly spoiled by the late
Lord Grimthorpe’s restoring zeal, is the statue of the great Francis
Bacon, Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, whose genius was probably
keen enough to have made him capable of writing Shakespeare’s plays:
although, despite the contentions of fanatics to the contrary, he did
nothing of the sort. The ruins of his father’s and his own house of
Gorhambury are still visible a mile away, in the park, and close to the
great ugly eighteenth-century classic mansion of Gorhambury, seat of
the present Earl of Verulam.
[Illustration: GORHAMBURY.]
[Sidenote: _GORHAMBURY_]
To seek Gorhambury on some thymy morning in May, when the pink
horse-chestnuts are in bloom, when the air is moist with recent
rain and suppressed heat, and a blue haze settles over the wooded
landscape, is delightful. Then the scene of the great Chancellor’s
pride, and of his despairing retirement, is beautiful indeed. The
“wisest, wittiest, meanest of mankind” was housed sufficiently well,
as the porch, the best-preserved portion of the building, shows. It is
a typical Elizabethan Renaissance building, with panels of marble,
and terra-cotta medallion heads of Roman Emperors; but it looks so
small and toylike. Propped though it be with brickwork and iron rods,
it cannot much longer survive, and the elaborate shield of the royal
arms, the defaced statues and shattered columns are surely falling from
picturesque into complete ruin. Apart from the chief group of crumbling
walls there stands a poor old battered one-legged and headless statue,
said to represent Henry the Eighth, but unrecognisable, scored
amazingly with the penknives and the initials of generations of Toms,
Dicks, and Harrys. The scene of past pomps and vanities is scarcely
mournful, as some might find it; the sight of it makes history live
again as human experience, not as we read it in the dulled pages of
historical exercise.
A field-path across the pleasant water-meadows of the river Ver leads
from Gorhambury to Prae Mill House and so on to the road again, and
thence to Redbourne, a sleepy village with a sleepy railway-station,
fringed with meadows where donkeys and ponies graze and ducks and geese
march and countermarch aimlessly, their inevitable later association
with green peas and sage-stuffing happily hidden from them. Redbourne
is one of those “bourne” places which, without adequate reason, appears
to discard the final “e.” According to an emphatic inhabitant, “we
spell it with a hen, without a he at the hend.” Through the village and
out again upon the broad highway, we come presently to Friar’s Wash,
once a water-splash across the road, now a tiny row of cottages and
a wayside inn, the “Chequers,” standing beside the little river Ver
where the old road of pre-Telford days goes off to the right. Flamstead
(_i.e._ Verlamstead) church on the hilltop, its characteristic
Hertfordshire spirelet, with the appearance as though the greater
portion had subsided through the roof, looks down upon the quiet scene.
Beyond comes Markyate.
[Illustration: MARKYATE CELL.]
[Sidenote: _ROGER, THE HERMIT_]
Markyate Street, as it is how, is a wayside village, with a number
of more or less decayed coaching and drovers’ and waggoners’ inns in
its narrow street. The lovely old mansion of Markyate Cell, beyond,
standing removed from the dusty road, in its beautiful park, owes its
name to the spot having once been the hermit’s cell of one Roger, a
monk of St. Albans, who, returning from pious pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
was confronted by three angels, who there and then laid the vocation
of hermit upon him, and conducted him to this spot, where he lived
ever after: not altogether happy, for he suffered constant persecution
from the Devil, who, according to Roger’s own account, tried once to
drown him, and once set light to his hood. Had he ceased praying, there
can be no doubt the worst would have befallen him; but he continued,
unmoved, under these most alarming circumstances, and the Enemy was
foiled.
After a while in this solitude, a “holy virgin,” Christina by name,
came from Huntingdon and settled near by the equally holy Roger, who
afforded her religious instruction, until he was called away from this
vale of tears, when his body was laid in St. Albans Abbey. Christina
established the Benedictine Convent of Markyate Cell, and became first
Prioress of it in 1145. The mansion that now stands on the site in the
wooded park is a veritable dream of peace and beauty; but there are
hiding-holes in it, which sufficiently prove, if proof were wanted,
that not always was peace and security the dominant note.
At one mile before Dunstable we leave Hertfordshire and enter
Bedfordshire. It was a standing joke with all the coach-guards to ask
their passengers “What comes after Herts?” and to answer, before their
victims had time to reply, “Beds, if the Herts are serious enough.”
Fortunately, even the weakest jokes that would be anæmic enough by
the fireside seem quite robust in the fresh air; and the tedium of a
long journey was such that even this wretched specimen was not usually
resented.
Dunstable’s long and very broad chief street was until quite recently
a pleasant gravelled stretch of road, but since fast motor-cars have
come in crowds upon the highway, the townsfolk, in an attempt to save
themselves from the dust they raise, have been obliged to resort to the
expedient of treating the thoroughfare with a tarry preparation; with
the result that the dust nuisance has not been thoroughly abolished,
and instead of the old, cleanly-looking surface there is an ugly,
coaly-looking way, smelling abominably.
Of Dunstable, or “Dunstaple” as it was formerly written, you may read
more fully in the HOLYHEAD ROAD; but attention may here be drawn to
the old seal of the town, in which one of the once favourite punning
allusions is found: here in a double-barrelled form, the representation
of a horseshoe standing both for the mythical stable of the legendary
robber, Dun, and for a staple, or hasp.
[Sidenote: _HOCKLIFFE_]
And so at last, through Dunstable town and out by the deep cutting
that carries the road on the level, through the chalk downs, we come
to Hockliffe, where the Holyhead Road goes off by itself, straight
ahead, and the Manchester and Glasgow Road turns sharply to the right,
continuing henceforward an independent course.
To compare small things with greater, Hockliffe was to the coaches to
and from the north-west of England very much what Rugby Junction is
now. Onward swept the coaches for Coventry, Birmingham, and Holyhead,
while the traffic for Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow bore away to
Woburn.
XVI
Turning suddenly from the Holyhead Road at this not very conspicuous
corner, the telegraph-poles that have hitherto made so brave a show are
missed, and the Manchester Road, for lack of them, seems of less than
the first-class importance it really owns. Solitary runs the road for
some miles, the sequence of trees and well-plashed quick-set hedges of
this well-cared-for district varied only by the companionable signposts
bearing the quaint or sonorous names of places on either side: places
to which you do not want to go, and of which you have probably never
before heard: but you like the information all the same. For one thing,
they are earnest of the fact that the country really is inhabited:
which the emptiness of the road would lead one to doubt. You speculate
idly as to what manner of place “Simpson” may be: “Eaton Bray” is
alluring, “Ellesborough” attractive; but it is still over 360 miles to
Glasgow, and the invitation into the byways is resisted.
There is a reason for this apparent—and in some sense
real—depopulation. We are here within the radius of the blighting
influence exercised by the Dukes of Bedford, whose immense seat of
Woburn Abbey we are approaching. And even where the Russell tentacles
do not reach, there are numerous other great parks. Away to the
right, is, for instance, Wrest Park, one of the finest domains in
Bedfordshire. Were there aught in the sound of that name, Wrest in Beds
should be an ideal place for the born-tired.
[Sidenote: _THE EARTH IS THE LORDS’_]
By reason of these great landowners, the district through which the
road runs for some ten miles is wholly park-like, and the villages
to either side are mere insignificant incidents. There is at Milton
Bryant, on the right-hand side of the road, a highly instructive
example of the manner in which these influences work. The local
Wesleyan chapel, greatly resembling a small barn, stands beside the
village pond, and indeed, until recently stood in it, being supported
above the water on posts. In that manner the tiny chapel was originally
built in 1861, it being impossible to obtain land elsewhere for the
purpose.
Now comes the park-wall of Woburn Abbey, skirting the road for two
miles. And not merely a wall, but a hedge in front of it, as well.
At such pains have their Graces of Bedford been to obtain additional
seclusion in a country where you will scarcely ever meet one person in
a mile.
On the way to the little town of Woburn, the chief entrance to this
great park is passed; the iron gates, painted an agonising blue which
in a mere commoner would be shocking bad taste, recessed from the road
at the rear of about half an acre of grass-plot. That grass-plot is
instructive, for it is earnest of the truly ducal scale on which things
are done at Woburn.
Woburn Abbey was from 1145 until 1537 a home of Cistercian monks whose
Abbots do not figure in history. They performed their religious duties
and ruled the brethren and brought their land out of a wild state into
an excellent agricultural condition. Only the last Abbot of this long
line lives in history. This was Robert Hobbs, who, torn by a tender
conscience and uncertain in what way to act for the best, first made
submission to Henry the Eighth and then threw in his lot with the
insurgents of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a movement to re-establish the
monasteries and to replace the ejected monks. The unfortunate Abbot,
taken in arms, was executed with dramatic completeness, being hanged on
an oak-tree in front of his own Abbey.
Ten years later, that luckiest of Russells, John Russell of Kingston
Russell in Dorsetshire, who by fortunate circumstance and courtly
address rose from the condition of an obscure country squire to be
Earl of Bedford, was granted these lands of Woburn and the fabric of
the Abbey, together with much other monastic property in different
parts of the country. Other families were recipients of many broad
acres, but the Russells were gorged to repletion. Burke in 1796 truly
declared that “the grants to the House of Russell were so enormous as
not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility”; and the
results of those favours are evident to this day in the huge and varied
properties of which the Dukes of Bedford are landlords. The great
London estates of Bloomsbury and Covent Garden, the lands of Tavistock
Abbey, vast districts in the Fens, once the property of Thorney Abbey;
and other manors here, there, and everywhere render them really “rich
beyond the dreams of avarice.”
[Sidenote: _THE RUSSELLS_]
The more superstitious among the Roman Catholics have ever dwelt upon
the disasters prophesied to the House of Russell, as the beneficiaries
to so enormous a degree of the spoliation of the Church; but let us
inquire into the subsequent history of the family.
The first Earl of Bedford died in the fulness of time, in his bed,
without anything in the supernatural way affecting him. He was
succeeded by his son, who was not so fortunate, for three of his four
sons died before him, the third being killed by the Scots, on the
Borders. His fourth son, Edward, succeeded him as third Earl. He in
turn died, in 1627, childless, and the title and estates fell to his
cousin Francis. Believers in judgment awaiting sacrilege began at this
period to remember the discredited old legends which had declared that
no Earl of Bedford should be succeeded by his eldest son.