Pontefract that Edward IV. and Warwick rode out to the field of Towton;
it was in any case on a very different surface. The town of Pontefract
itself is strangely unimposing for a place of such great renown; the
houses are unpicturesque, the surrounding country dull. Yet Camden says
it is sweetly situated, and is remarkable for producing liquorice.
There are other things for which Pontefract has been remarkable in its
day; but as we mount the slope into the long, straggling town there is
little to show that it has ever been concerned with affairs of more
vital importance than liquorice. There is, it is true, a fine church
greatly ruined on our right, which has the air of having lived through
a good deal. It was battered to pieces in the course of three sieges,
and the transept only has been rebuilt. The strange Perpendicular
tower, of which the lower part is square and the upper octagonal, seems
oddly enough to have suffered less than the body of the building,
for it has been very little restored. This church of All Saints was
connected with a religious house whose brethren served the castle
chapel; but it was not the abbey that Camden "industriously omits" from
his description of Pontefract, because even in his day there was hardly
a sign of it left. In his day the walls of this forlorn nave were still
unbroken, and rising high above it on the hill were all the towers of
the castle, a splendid cluster, with the great Norman wall encircling
them, and the Round Tower of Ilbert de Lacy tallest of all. Of this
"high and stately, famous and princely impregnable castle and citadel,"
as it was called only a few years before the Civil War, there is
deplorably little for us to see. Hardly one stone was left upon another
by General Lambert. The _débris_ were heaped over the foundations, soil
was spread over all, and the sinister fortress whose walls had echoed
the sighs of royal prisoners and the last groan of a king, the "guilty
closure" that was drenched with blood and tears, was devoted to the
rearing of silkworms and other such innocent uses. During the last
century, however, a good deal was excavated, and we may without great
difficulty find out the scene of much that has happened here.
[Illustration: NORMAN DOORWAY IN PONTEFRACT CASTLE.]
"Oh, Pomfret! Pomfret! O thou bloody prison,
Fatal and ominous to noble peers!"
The names of those to whom it has been fatal make a long list. The most
illustrious name on that list is Richard Plantagenet.
That Richard was by some means done to death in this castle is, I
believe, certain; but how he died and where is unknown. The old tale
that tells how Sir Piers Exton and his eight men rushed into the room
where the imprisoned king was dining, and how Richard "right valiantly
defended himself," but was finally struck on the head with a poleaxe
by Sir Piers, who "withal ridded him of his life in an instant," was
discredited when Richard's grave at Westminster was opened, and the
skull, which was perfectly preserved, showed no mark of a blow. Another
theory is the one believed by Northumberland and Harry Hotspur, who
accused Henry IV. of having traitorously caused their sovereign lord
and his "with hunger, cold, and thirst to perish, to be murdered." If
we skirt the lawn-tennis court and turn down a little path to the left
we shall find, behind the raised bowling-alley, a fragment of vaulted
ceiling and a wall with three little recesses in it. This is reputed
to be Richard's prison. I do not know if there be any real evidence
that it was so. There is certainly not the evidence of a continuous
tradition; for until the siege destroyed it a room in the round tower
was shown to visitors as the scene of Piers Exton's fabulous exploit
with the poleaxe--a room in which there was a post all hacked and cut
by the blows aimed at the King! When the post disappeared the scene of
Richard's death moved to this Gascoign Tower where we see the vaulted
ceiling. It is curious how often the only fragment left of a building
happens to be the scene of the event in the building's history that is
most likely to appeal to popular sentiment. One grows suspicious of
local traditions!
Richard II. was not the only prince to be imprisoned in Pontefract
Castle. James I. of Scotland was here, and with him were the Dukes
of Orléans and Bourbon and other prisoners taken on the field of
Agincourt. Henry V. was a little anxious at one time lest he should
lose "the remnant of his prisoners of France," for a plot was on foot
to rescue them. "I will," wrote the King, "that the Duke of Orléans
be kept still within the Castle of Pomfret, without going to Robert's
Place or to any other disport; for it is better he lack his disport
than we were deceived of all the remnant."
Of all those who actually met their death here Thomas Earl of
Lancaster--he whom Gaveston called the Actor--had the hardest fate. The
place belonged to him, and he had done much for it. Among other things
he built or repaired the tower called Swillington, the tower that was
destined to be his own prison, whose fragments we may see down there
guarding the moat on the north side. His hatred of Gaveston and the
Despencers, Edward II.'s favourites, brought him to this plight; to
this dark tower whose walls he had made so thick, whose entrance was a
trap-door in the roof; to his mock trial by his enemies in the great
hall that stood here on the north side of the lawn; to his condemnation
and ignominious death. It was here within this court, somewhere near
the northern boundary wall, that he stood facing the Despencers as
they venomously sent him to the block; it was here that he uttered his
last despairing words: "Shall I die without answer?" Then they muffled
his head in an old hood and set him, the King's uncle, on "a lean mare
without a bridle," and so led him out among the mocking soldiers to
his death. We can see, from the castle ramparts, the hill where he was
beheaded. It is called St. Thomas's Hill to this day, for later on he
was canonised and his grave in St. John's Priory became a shrine. The
site of the priory--the monastery that Camden industriously omitted--is
between the hill and the castle.
Pontefract was fatal to many of Edward IV.'s followers and kin. Before
his final triumph at Tewkesbury some of his supporters were imprisoned
here. "John Pylkyngton, Mr. W. att Cliff, and Fowler ar taken," we read
in the Paston Letters, "and in the Castyll of Pomfrett, and ar lyck to
dye hastyly, withowte they be dead." Very hastily, too, and without
trial, Edward's brother-in-law Lord Rivers, and stepson Sir Richard
Grey died here by order of Richard III.
It really seems as though there had been something sinister in the
atmosphere of this place. Even its one gay memory--the visit of Henry
VIII. and his fifth bride--is overshadowed by the scaffold; for it was
here that Katherine Howard put a weapon into her husband's hand by
making Francis Derham her private secretary.
Indeed Pontefract has no cheerful annals: they are all of battle,
murder, and sudden death. There was very little bloodshed, I believe,
when the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace took the castle; but who can
guess how many died during the three sieges of the Civil War? The place
was Crown property, but after two sieges it surrendered to the army of
the Parliament. It is rather difficult to ascertain by what particular
form of treachery it was recovered by the Royalists. The deed was
done, in any case, by one Colonel Marris, whom Clarendon describes
as "a stout and bold undertaker in attempts of the greatest danger."
Stout and bold he certainly was, but not very attractive; for he began
by deserting the royal cause, and then, when he wished to turn his
coat again, was enabled to carry out his plot by his close friendship
with the governor. Being always welcome he made friends with some of
the guard. The garrison, as it happened, needed new beds, so when
Marris and some others appeared at the gates laden with beds they were
admitted at once. They carried the beds into that solid-looking house
that was on our right as we entered the castle, the house that bears
the arms of Lancaster over the door. It was the Main Guardhouse. There
they flung the beds upon the floor and overpowered the friendly guard.
So Pontefract came back to the Crown, the Parliamentary garrison were
imprisoned in the magazine, and the third siege began. The magazine in
which Colonel Cotterell and his men lived for eleven weeks is under the
lawn-tennis court. If you borrow a taper from the custodian you can go
down into it, and read, on the wall of the staircase, the names that
some of these soldiers cut in the stone.
When the time came for discussing terms of surrender General Lambert
said that Marris and five others must be given up to him. The governor
asked and was granted six days in which the six men might do their
best to escape. On the fifth day they had all disappeared and the
garrison surrendered. Two of the six, however, were still within the
castle, in a secret place beneath the Pipe Tower, which stood over
there beyond the Norman Keep. They were walled up "with great store of
waste stones," and had food for a month beside them. The situation was
a critical one. They heard their garrison march away, some to Newark,
some to the enemy's camp, some to their homes, the officers with their
horses and arms, even the men with Portmantles and Snapsacks; heard the
rumbling of the three waggons that carried the wounded; heard, during
ten awful days, the incessant clamour and crash of the first hurried
dismantling of the castle, the clamour that might be their death at any
moment; heard at last the withdrawal of the Parliamentary troops. Then
they took down their wall of waste stones, and stole away.
These men who imprisoned themselves were the last prisoners of
Pontefract Castle, for after this the historic ground was sown with
liquorice; but the Main Guardhouse was spared, as we see, and for
another century or two kept up the gloomy traditions of the place as a
prison.
The country that lies between Pontefract and Beverley is by no means
beautiful. It is so aggressively dull that it may almost be called
ugly. It is not for the sake of the scenery, truly, that we cover so
many miles of Southern Yorkshire, but chiefly for the sake of Beverley
Minster; and there are many, no doubt, who will prefer to make York or
Pontefract the last stopping-place of their tour. Those who do not care
for historical memories unless there be something beautiful connected
with them I advise to drive across from York to Beverley by the most
direct road.
Half-way between Pontefract and Knottingley we have once more a
flashing glimpse of the Great North Road and the immense signposts
that mark its dignity, and are in themselves a lesson in geography; at
Chapel Haddlesey we cross a toll-bridge. These are the only incidents
on this singularly uneventful route until we reach Selby; but as all
good motorists very well know, the road without incidents is often as
happy as the country without history, and the particular road that lies
through these melancholy fields and unattractive villages is very fine.
Those who depend on horses or trains cannot vary their speed according
to the beauty of the country, but to us is given the special joy of
sauntering through lovely landscapes and hurrying on when there is
nothing to be seen.
In 1906 the name of Selby was brought into tragic prominence by the
fire that made its abbey roofless and "only not a wreck." But as there
are disastrous victories so there are beneficent calamities; and Selby
Abbey, it seems, whose restoration has already been a triumph of
energy, will soon be more complete than it has been since 1690, when
the tower fell and ruined the south transept.
This grand church is the work of many hands. It is a mixture of
every style of architecture, both within and without: Early Norman,
Transition, Early English, Decorated, Perpendicular. The west front,
for instance, has a splendid Norman doorway with five mouldings, and
above it an Early English window filled with Perpendicular tracery. No
part of this building was raised by the founder; and indeed it was not
to this exact spot, but nearer to the Ouse, that Benedict of Auxerre,
bringing with him "the glorious finger" of St. Germanus and the memory
of a heavenly vision, came to set up his hut. The first benefactor of
the foundation was the man who presented a tent to shelter the relic,
round which a cluster of wooden buildings grew, and formed the first
monastery of Selby. William the Conqueror gave land, and a charter, and
many privileges; and Abbot Benedict won from the Pope the much-coveted
honour of the mitre. William's charter was dated the year after the
birth of Prince Henry, and its great generosity, it is said, was
prompted by the fact that Selby was the birthplace of this favourite
son of the king, Henry the fine scholar, Henry the lion of justice. To
him, says an old chronicler, "Almighty God gave three gifts--wisdom,
victory, and riches." Yet his wisdom failed him, alas, in the matter of
lampreys!
[Illustration: WEST DOORWAY OF SELBY ABBEY.]
It was Abbot Hugh, a member of that great house of de Lacy which gave
so many fine buildings to England, who raised the abbey on the spot
where it still stands. That massive pillar at the east end of the nave,
the pillar with the spiral mouldings, was part of his work. It is even
possible that some of its stones were actually laid in their places by
his strenuous hands, for he worked with the builders. It is a fine
picture--the beautiful pillar rising course by course towards the open
sky, as Hugh de Lacy, abbot and noble, with infinite care and reverence
fixed each stone in its place with a hymn of praise.
The later abbots, the three who in the fourteenth century raised the
choir that has been called peerless, were men of another fashion--not
especially humble--members of Parliament, entertainers of kings, men
of the world. Yet to them, too, we owe much gratitude for all this
splendour of ornament, these capitals and bosses, this great east
window, this flowing parapet that is so often repeated. And, as a
nation, we owe gratitude to all those whose work or money has helped in
the recent restoration.[7]
There is nothing but the abbey itself to keep us in Selby. There is
no sign by which we may know the spot where Sir Thomas Fairfax, by
defeating the Royalists and capturing their colonel, first made his
name honoured. We do know, however, that he and his troops marched
to Selby on that occasion by this wondrously level road upon which
we drive away. For the first mile or so, until we turn away from the
Ouse, we are on the road that used to be, in the old coaching days,
called the lower road to York. It diverges from the Great North Road
at Barnet, and though not the main highway, was the more direct route,
and therefore the one chosen by those who were in a hurry. It is for
a very short time that we are on it; but surely, for a moment, above
the humming of the engine, above the rushing of the wind, we hear the
ringing of Black Bess's hoofs.
Five level miles bring us to the door of Hemingborough Church, which
is large and renowned, but of a dreariness so gaunt and bare that it
altogether fails to charm. Its walls, unsoftened by creepers, rise
from the treeless landscape in uncompromising severity; and inside the
building the colourless effect is equally depressing, in spite of some
fine woodwork. The tall and slender spire is really beautiful, however,
and may be seen for miles across the plain.
To visit Wressle Castle we must leave the direct road to Howden,
turning to the left immediately after crossing the Derwent. Here again
the sad landscape seems to have infected the building. Theoretically it
has all the elements of romance, and to read of it without seeing it
is to conjure up a picture of decaying splendour, of venerable walls
eloquent of revelry and war, a picture worthy of the great names of
Percy and Lacy and Seymour. A castle founded by that Earl of Worcester
whose headless body lies in Shrewsbury Abbey because he fought for
Richard II.'s lost cause, a castle that has seen all the might of
the Northumberlands and all the tragedy of civil war, must surely
have "the grand air." So one thinks till one has seen Wressle. In the
background is a building, shabby but not ruined; in the foreground is a
cabbage-patch.
Yet once this place was all magnificence, made "al of very fair and
greate squarid stone both withyn and withoute." Leland tells us of
its halls and great chambers, and its five towers, and its brewhouse
without the wall, and its "botery, pantery, pastery, lardery, and
kechyn." All these things were exceedingly fair, he says, and so were
the gardens within the moat and the orchards without. It was here where
the cabbages are that those fair gardens grew. And in the orchards were
mounds, "writhen about with degrees like turninges of cokilshilles,
to cum to the top without payn." Most fondly of all he describes the
"study caullid Paradise," with the ingenious device of ledged desks
for holding books. There, looking down upon us from the upper part of
the tower nearest to the road, are the empty windows of that Paradise
whose inhabitants were driven out of it for ever by the flaming sword
of Civil War.
This is only a fragment of the original castle. The Northumberlands
needed a considerable amount of house-room, for they had, it appears,
two hundred and twenty-nine servants. There were gentlemen to wait
before noon and gentlemen to wait after noon, and gentlemen to wait
after supper; there were yeoman officers, and groom officers, and
grooms of the chambers; there was a groom for brushing clothes, a
groom of the stirrup, a groom to dress the hobbies and nags, a groom
to keep the hounds, a groom to keep the gates, and an endless list of
others. The day came when the servants in this house were called upon
by the Parliament to demolish it themselves, and were given a month
to do it in. This one side of the quadrangle was all they left. It is
possible, I believe, to climb one of the towers to see the view--but I
cannot think it desirable. The view from the bottom of the tower is not
so attractive as to make one wish for more.
A very great relief to the eye is Howden, about three miles further on.
The town itself is not without a certain degree of picturesqueness,
though it was scarcely a happy thought to surmount the ancient steps
of the cross in the market-place by a modern street lamp. However,
from that same market-place we see, behind the red houses, the ruined
gable-end of the church that is Howden's pride, whose lovely tower is
one of the landmarks of the plain. The peculiarly slender and graceful
effect of this tower is partly owing, I think, to the unusual height
of the lower stage compared with the upper. Those tall lancets were the
work of Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, whose palace stood over there
to the east of the church, where the pretty gardens are. If we venture
a little way on foot along that lane at the corner of the square, we
may see, without trespassing, the beautiful old ivy-covered wall and
the blocked gatehouse with the shield upon it, within which the bishops
of Durham were wont to seek rest and change. Camden's tale, to the
effect that Bishop Skirlaw built "the huge tall steeple" as a refuge
for the inhabitants in times of flood, need not be believed; it was
probably the invention, as a certain quaint old book suggests, of "some
doating scribe, desirous of assimilating the steeple of Howden Church
to the tower of Babel."
In the thirteenth century the Archbishop of York, seeing that this
church was "very wide and large," and rich enough to support "many
spiritual men," made it collegiate. Hence arose the need for the
chapter-house that Walter Skirlaw built on the south side of the
choir, and made so wonderfully beautiful that even now, robbed as it is
of its groined roof and much of its rich ornament, it dwells in one's
mind as a thing apart. The Decorated choir, which was first the work
and afterwards the shrine of the thirteenth-century poet, John Hoveden,
is itself a ruin; for when the church lost its prebends and its riches
in the reign of Edward VI. there was neither need nor means left for
keeping this part of the building in repair. The nave is still the
parish church.
[Illustration: CHAPTER HOUSE, HOWDEN.]
After leaving Howden we have to pass, with what speed we may, over
ten more miles of absolutely level, absolutely uninspiring country.
Then we go through North Cave, where George Washington's ancestors
used to live; and at last the road begins to rise over Kettlethorpe
Hill. The flat land is laid out like a map below us; far away upon the
horizon--which is level as the sea--rises "the huge tall steeple" of
Howden; and between the plain of Yorkshire and the rising-ground of
Lincolnshire are the sullen waters of that great river that has brought
England so much of her prosperity. Not always, however, has the Humber
brought prosperity. More than a thousand years ago the fleet of the
avenging Danes, Hinguar and Hubba, swept up between these low banks,
to lay this rich country waste. Right into the heart of the land they
sailed, and ceased not to destroy till all the country of the fens was
desolate. Now this calamity and much more besides--the destruction of
Lindisfarne and Whitby, of Croyland and Ely and Peterborough, and the
death of St. Edmund the King--was brought about by the jealousy of one
obscure individual. For Lothbroc the Dane, being a guest at Edmund's
Court, had showed so much skill in the trapping of birds and beasts
that the King's head-keeper, as one may call him, was "inflamed with
mortal envy." So he slew Lothbroc treacherously. Then the King sent
the murderer to sea in a little boat, without sail or oars, and the
boat drifted to the shores of Denmark. And the wicked keeper sought the
sons of Lothbroc, whose names were Hinguar and Hubba, and told them
that their father had been slain by order of King Edmund. So Hinguar
and Hubba swore by "their almighty gods that they would not leave that
murder unpunished"; and verily they fulfilled their oath.
Two hundred years later another Dane, Sweyn of the Forked Beard, "a
cruel man, and ready for the shedding of blood," sailed up to conquer
the north. Just beyond that island that lies close to the left bank,
where we see the Ouse suddenly widen into the Humber, Sweyn turned into
the river Trent. And "all England groaned like a bed of reeds shaken by
the west wind."
At the top of the hill we pass through a wonderful avenue of beeches
and sycamores; then run down a long and pleasant slope into Walkington;
and soon the blue towers of Beverley appear.
The brief run across the common above Beverley will probably be the
last of our memorable moments in Yorkshire: the last of those memories
which we motorists--while the days are long and the winds are soft and
the engine purrs contentedly hour after hour--hoard up to enjoy again
and again, not only through the winter but through the years. This
particular moment is a very short one; but it will be long, I think,
before we forget the beauty of the town of Beverley as it lies in the
blue dusk of a summer evening, with its matchless towers dominating it.
Yes, surely, they are matchless! See how the straight, clean lines of
their tall buttresses--those parallel lines that are repeated again
and again in the Perpendicular panels, and even in the deep shadows
cast by the masonry--give the impression of slenderness and height. Not
anywhere, not at Lincoln, not at York, are there towers of a design so
complete and finished, of a simplicity so exquisite. Nowhere else does
the accumulation of straight lines produce so rich a whole; nowhere
else are the very shadows used to enhance the effect. There is much
that is beautiful in Beverley Minster, but in the main it is these
twin towers that are going to be our compensation for all those miles
we have driven between flat fields, "enclosid," as Leland says, "with
hegges."
The monastery of Beverley was founded, or at all events much frequented
in the eighth century, by a certain Archbishop of York, who retired
hither "out of a pious aversion to this world," and has been known
ever since as St. John of Beverley. Bede's account of this saint is
well worth reading. He was a man of many miracles, of much kindliness,
of some sharpness of tongue. Never was there a saint of so much
commonsense, mingled with the compelling power that works miracles in
every age. There was a "dumb boy," for instance, who had also a sore
head. The archbishop divined the nervous nature of the dumbness, and
cured it so thoroughly that the youth talked incessantly for a day and
a night, as long as he could keep awake. Then the archbishop "ordered
the physician to take in hand the cure of his head." The shrewd saint
recognised his own limitations. On another occasion he was brought to
heal a dying nun. "What can I do to the girl," he asked tartly, "if she
is like to die?"
[Illustration: BEVERLEY.]
Such was St. John of Beverley, of whom we may see a picture, though
not, I fear, a portrait, in the south transept of this minster.
It represents him receiving from King Athelstane a charter with a
portentous seal and the following legend:--
"Als fre make I the
as hert may thynke
or egh may see."