There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is
an unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place
that began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and
grew into municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans
and the ruder nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of
the last, and the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose
and led Sheffield men back to battle in France, where the first earl
fell on the bloody field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453
that there was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss.
Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure;
but we will say that it duly suffered for one or the other; and it is
certain that the great Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield
Manor just before he went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots
spent fourteen years of sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor
and sometimes in Sheffield Castle. This hold was taken by the
Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but the famous industries of the
place had begun long before; so that Chaucer could say of one of his
pilgrims,
“A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose.”
Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of
Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool
in 1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the
world. Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them
from agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand
or more. Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of
prosperity and adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist
agitation continued there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near
open rebellion as it well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then
that cause of the people, like many another, failed, and liberty there,
as elsewhere in England, was fain to
“broaden slowly down
From precedent to precedent.”
Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor troubles
must, but leisure has always been equal to their pacification, and now
Sheffield takes its adversity almost as quietly as its prosperity.
[Illustration: TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD]
V
We were not there, though, for others’ labor or leisure, which we have
plenty of at home; but even before I appeased such conscience as I had
about seeing a type of the works, we went a long drive up out of the
town to that Manor where the poor, brilliant, baddish Scotch queen was
imprisoned by her brilliant, baddish English cousin. In any question
of goodness, there was little to choose between them; both were
blood-stained liars; but it is difficult being a good woman and a queen
too, and they only failed where few have triumphed. Mary is the more
appealing to the fancy because she suffered beyond her deserts,
but Elizabeth was to be pitied because Mary had made it politically
imperative for her to kill her. All this we had threshed out many times
before, and had said that, cat for cat, Mary was the more dangerous
because she was the more feminine, and Elizabeth the more detestable
because she was the more masculine in her ferocity. We were therefore
in the right mood to visit Mary’s prison, and we were both indignant and
dismayed to find that our driver, called from a mews at a special price
set upon his intelligence, had never heard of it and did not know where
it was.
We reported his inability to the head porter, who came out of the hotel
in a fine flare of sarcasm. “You call yourself a Sheffield man and not
know where the Old Manor is!” he began, and presently reduced that proud
ignoramus of a driver to such a willingness to learn that we thought it
at least safe to set out with him, and so started for the long climb
up the hills that hold Sheffield in their hollow. When we reached their
crest, we looked down and back through the clearer air upon as strange
and grand a sight as could be. It was as if we were looking into the
crater of a volcano, which was sending up its smoke through a thousand
vents. All detail of the works and their chimneys was lost in the
retrospect; one was aware only of a sort of sea of vapor through which
they loomed and gloomed.
Our ascent was mostly through winding and climbing streets of
little dirty houses, with frowsy gardens beside them, and the very
dirtiest-faced children in England playing about them. From time to time
our driver had to ask his way of the friendly flat-bosomed slatterns,
with babies in their arms, on their thresholds, or the women tending
shop, or peddling provisions, who were all kind to him, and assured him
with varying degrees of confidence that the Old Manor was a bit, or a
goodish bit, beyond. All at once we came upon the sight of it on an open
top, hard by what is left of the ruins of the real Manor, where Wolsey
stayed that little while from death. The relics are broken walls, higher
here, lower there; with some Tudor fireplaces showing through their
hollow windows. What we saw in tolerable repair was the tower of the
Manor, or the lodge, and we drove to it across a field, on a track made
by farm carts, and presently kept by a dog that showed his teeth in a
grin not wholly of amusement at our temerity. While we debated whether
we had not better let the driver get down and knock, a farmer-like man
came to the door and called the dog off. Then, in a rich North Country
accent, he welcomed us to his kitchen parlor, where his wife was peeling
potatoes for their midday dinner, and so led us up the narrow stone
stairs of the tower to the chambers where Mary miserably passed those
many long years of captivity.
The rooms were visibly restored in every point where they could have
needed restoration, but they were not ruthlessly or too insistently
restored. There was even an antique chair, but when our guide was put on
his honor as to whether it was one of the original chairs he answered,
“Well, if people wanted a chair!” He was a rather charmingly quaint,
humorous person, with that queer conscience, and he did not pretend to
be moved by the hard inexorable stoniness of the place which had been
a queen’s prison for many years. One must not judge it too severely,
though: bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and Mary
Stuart may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she could
not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that Earl and
Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was, though she never
ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof, of lead or stone,
whither her feet must have so often heavily climbed, and looked out over
the lovely landscape which she must have abhorred; and the wind that
blew over it, in late August, was very cold; far colder than the air of
the prison, or the bower, below.
The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic duke,
and owes its restoration to his pity and his piety. Our farmer guide
was himself a Protestant, but he spoke well of the duke, with whom he
reported himself in such colloquies as, “I says to Dook,” and, “Dook
says to me.” When he understood that we were Americans he asked after a
son of his who had gone out to our continent twenty years before. He had
only heard from him once, and that on the occasion of his being robbed
of all his money by a roommate. It was in a place called Massatusy; we
suggested Massachusetts, and he assented that such might be the place;
and Mary’s prison-house acquired an added pathos.