I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long ranks and
lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one
end of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place
for those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or
scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact
from a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets
for the Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me
for this horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a
certain spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading
a rising against Henry IV.; or some such execution.
What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the storyless
New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen
triumphing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Roses, where the
Red was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy
to have Northumberland, when he bade him come to York, pass through the
gateway on which the head of his son, Hotspur Harry, was festering. No
wonder the earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully
meant to imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him.
But there seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the
beginning, in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting.
After the citizens drove out Conqueror William’s garrison, and Earl
Waltheof provided against the Normans’ return by standing at the castle
gate and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came
forth, William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far
as Durham. His son William gave it a church, and that “worthy peer,”
King Stephen, a hospital. In his time the archbishop and barons of York
beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to
Henry II. at York for his kingdom. Henry III. married his sister at York
to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king’s successor. Edward I.
and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of St.
William’s bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his defeat at
Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king’s
varied occasions of fighting and feasting. Weak Henry VI. and his wilful
Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the
city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father’s head
on Micklegate Bar. Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout and
death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII.
wedded Elizabeth, the “White Rose of York,” and afterward visited her
city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her uncouth
son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in
London. His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched
many for the king’s evil; later, he was there again, but could not cure
the sort of king’s evil which raged past all magic in the defeat of his
followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell. The city yielded to the Puritans,
whose temperament had already rather characterized it. James II., as
Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; “proud Cumberland,” returning
from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the city
and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts;
perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were
executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting
to play the horses. The reigning family has paid divers visits to the
ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was
heard of. The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if
it is to fulfil itself and increase York’s seventy-two thousand beyond
London’s six million.