that the entrance to historic Alnwick should be by the gas-works, the
railway station, the Farmers’ Folly (of which more shall presently be
said), and other unmistakable and unromantic evidences of modernity that
spread beyond the ancient confines of the town to form the suburb of
Bondgate Without; but man cannot live by medievalism alone. The town
itself is gained at that point where the heavy blackened mass of Bondgate
itself spans the road, just beyond the elaborately rebuilt “Old Plough,”
still exhibiting, however, the curious tablet from the old house:—
That which your Father old hath purchased and left
You to possess, do you dearly
Hold to show his worthiness. 1714.
[Picture: Alnwick]
XXVII
ALNWICK is a town with a great past and a somnolent present. There are
yawns at every turn, echoes with every footfall, and grass growing
unbidden in the streets. But there are forces of elemental power at
Alnwick, little though the stranger suspects them. There have of late
years been periods of storm and stress in the columns of the _Alnwick
Gazette_, for instance, respecting the local water-supply, which have
drawn forth inappropriately fiery letters from correspondents, together
with many mixed metaphors. How is this for impassioned writing?—“The
retributive forces of well-balanced justice have, after a dead ebb,
returned with a swelling tide, and overtaken the arrogative policy of the
freeholders.” But this is nothing to the following striking figure of
“the arm of scandalous jobbery steeped to the lips in perfidious
dishonour;” a delightful literary image unsurpassed in Ireland itself; or
“another hydra of expense arising phoenix-like from the ashes of
misgovernment.” Did the word “hydrant,” we wonder, suggest this last
period? Is the dulness of Alnwick due to the decay following the
corruption hinted at? Perhaps, for, as this publicist next inquires,
“How could anything symbolical of greatness, wrapped with ropes of sand,
ever and for aye, flourish like the green bay-tree?” Ah! how? It is a
difficult question to answer, and so we will leave the question at that.
Alnwick, of course, derives its name from its situation on the romantic
Aln: the “wick,” or village on that river. The name is kin to that of
many other “wicks,” “weeks,” and “wykes” in England, and has its fellows
in such places as High Wycombe; Wykeham (now spelt Wickham) in Hampshire,
whence came William of Wykeham; the village of Week, near Winchester; and
in the town named simply Wick, in the north of Scotland. Alnwick in
these times is a place of a certain grim and lowering picturesqueness.
Its grey stone houses are at one with the greyness of the Northumbrian
skies, and a general air of barren stoniness impresses the traveller as
its chief feature. It is an effect of prisons and jailers which reaches
its height in the open space that fronts the barbican of the castle. You
look, instinctively, for His Majesty’s prison regulations on the outer
walls, and, approaching the gate, expect a warder’s figure at the wicket.
This is no uncongenial aspect of that old fortress. It is rather in the
Italian drawing-rooms, the picture-galleries, and the Renaissance
luxuries of the interior of the castle that the jarring note is struck
and all association with feudal times forgotten. Many a Border
moss-trooper has unwillingly passed through this grim barbican, and so
left the world for ever; and many more of higher estate have found this
old stronghold of the Percies a place of lifelong durance, or have in its
dungeons met a secret end. For chivalry was not inconsistent with
midnight murder or treachery, and the Percies, centred in their fortress
like spiders in their webs, had all the virtues and the vices of
chivalric times. Ambitious and powerful, they were alike a bulwark
against the Scots and a menace to successive kings of England, and none
in those olden times could have approached their castle gate with the
equable pulsation of the modern tourist. In those times, instead of
finding a broad level open space here, a deep ditch would have been seen
and a drawbridge must have been lowered before access was possible. Then
possibly the stone figures in violent attitudes that line the
battlements, and seem to be casting missiles down upon the heads of
visitors, may have been alarming; to-day we only wonder if they could
ever have tricked even the most bat-eyed warrior into a belief that they
were really living men-at-arms.
The Percies, whose name attaches more than any other to Alnwick, were,
strictly speaking, never its owners. The first of that name came over to
England with the Conqueror in the person of William de Percy, a younger
son of the feudal lord of the village of Percie in Normandy, which still
exists to point out to the curious tourist the spot whence this historic
family sprang. This William de Percy was nicknamed “Als Gernons,” or
“Whiskers,” whence derives the name of Algernon, even now a favourite one
with the Smithson-Percies. “Whiskers” was present at the battle of
Hastings, and for his aid was granted manors in Hampshire, Lincolnshire,
and York, but none in Northumberland. He died in 1086, when with the
Crusaders, near Jerusalem. The Percies never became connected in any way
with Alnwick, for the family of this William de Percy became extinct in
1166, when Agnes, an only child of his descendant, married Josceline de
Lovaine; and it was not until 1309 that the descendant of this Lovaine,
who had assumed the Percy name, came into wrongful possession of the vast
estates. Alnwick and sixty other baronies in Northumberland had until
then been in possession of the de Vescis, of whom Yvo de Vesci was the
original Norman owner. His descendant, William de Vesci, who died in
1297, was the last of his line, and appears to have been of a peculiarly
trusting disposition. He put a great (and an unfounded) faith in the
honesty of churchmen, leaving all his estates to Anthony Bek,
Prince-Bishop of Durham, in trust for an infant illegitimate son, until
he should come of age. But Bek picked a quarrel with his ward, and in
1309 sold the lands to Henry Percy, who thus became the first Baron Percy
of Alnwick.
But let us not do an injustice to the Church. Prince-Bishops were kittle
cattle, an amorphous kind of creature. Perhaps his lay half impelled Bek
to this knavery, and, following the Scriptural injunction not to let the
right hand know what is done by the left, his clerical moiety remained in
ignorance of the crime. Heaven be praised, there are no longer any of
these Jekyll and Hyde creatures, for the Bishops-Palatine of Durham were
abolished two generations or more since.
There were, in the fulness of time, three Barons Percy of Alnwick, and
then the Barony was erected into the Earldom of Northumberland. The axe
and the sword took heavy toll of this new line, for the Earls of
Northumberland seldom died in their beds, and father and son often
followed one another in a bloody death, until at length they became
extinct with the death of the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland.
Of these eleven, only seven died a natural death. There were Percies who
fell in battle; others who, rightly or wrongly, met the death of
traitors; one was torn to pieces by a mob; and another was obscurely done
to death in prison. Nor did only the heads of the family end violently;
their sons and other relations led lives as turbulent, and finished as
suddenly.
The only child of the eleventh Earl of Northumberland was a daughter,
Elizabeth Percy. She married firstly the Earl of Ogle; secondly, Thomas
Thynne of Longleat, who was murdered in Pall Mall in 1682 by Count
Koningsmarck; and thirdly, the sixth Duke of Somerset; thus bringing the
Percy estates into the Seymour family, and the Percy red hair as well.
It was of red-haired Elizabeth Percy, when Duchess of Somerset, that Dean
Swift wrote the bitter and diabolically clever lines that are supposed to
have lost him all chance of becoming a bishop. He wrote of her as
“Carrots”:—
Beware of carrots from Northumberland,
Carrots sown _Thynne_ a deep root may get,
If so be they are in Sumer set;
Their _cunnings mark_ thou; for I have been told
They assassin when young and poison when old.
Root out those carrots, O thou whose name
Is backwards and forwards always the same.
The one whose name was backwards and forwards alike was Queen Anne, for
Swift’s purpose “Anna.” It will be noticed that Swift not very obscurely
hints that Elizabeth Percy connived at murder.
Her eldest son, the seventh Duke of Somerset, had, curiously enough, only
one child, a daughter. She married “the handsomest man of his time,” Sir
Hugh Smithson, in 1740, and thus the property came into the hands of the
present holders.
This most fortunate, as well as most handsome, fellow was Sir Hugh
Smithson, one of a family of Yorkshire squires whose ancestor gained a
baronetcy, created 1660, for his services to the Stuarts. Sir Hugh, horn
1714, a son of Langdale Smithson, and grandson of another Sir Hugh, the
third baronet, had little early prospect of much position in life. He
was a younger son, and, like many another such, he went into trade. He
was an apothecary. Having succeeded as fourth baronet to position and
wealth, and with what he had made in commerce, the “handsomest man” made
this very handsome marriage. He had the aristocratic instinct, and,
discarding his old name, took that of Percy, to which, of course, he had
no sort of right.
For him in 1749 was revived the old title, Earl of Northumberland,
together with that of Baron Warkworth. In 1766 he became further, Duke
of Northumberland and Earl Percy, and died 1786.
The name of Percy is one to conjure with. The Lovaines, who had assumed
it, made it famous in the annals of chivalry, with a thousand deeds of
derring-do in the debateable lands. Smithson, too, is a good name. It
at least tells of descent from an honest craftsman, and Sir Hugh’s
knighted ancestor had, obviously, done nothing to be ashamed of.
Unfortunately for Sir Hugh and his successors, this unwarranted
assumption of an historic name took place so well within the historic
period that it is never likely to be forgotten. George the Third, who
also had the instinct of aristocracy, kept the fact well in mind, and
when, sorely against his will, he was obliged to confer the Dukedom of
Northumberland upon this ex-apothecary, consoled himself by vowing that
he should never obtain the Order of the Garter. The duke personally
solicited a blue ribbon from the king, and observed that he was “the
first Percy who has been refused the Garter.” “You forget,” replied his
Majesty, “that you are the first Smithson who has ever asked for it.”
The huge and historic stronghold of Alnwick had by this time become
ruinous, and the Smithson duke was for a while uncertain whether to
reside here or at Warkworth. Alnwick, however, found favour with him,
and he set to work to render it a place worthy of one of his quality. To
this end he wrought havoc with the feudal antiquities of the castle,
pulling down the ancient chapel and several of the towers, filling up the
moats, plastering the walls and ceilings, enlarging arrow-slits into
great windows, and playing the very devil with the place. The military
history of the castle, as expressed in the picturesque irregularity of
successive alterations and additions during many centuries, was swept
away by his zeal for uniformity, and the interior rooms were remodelled
in the taste of that age, to serve for a residence, to such an extent
that only the outer walls retained even the appearance of a castle. When
Pennant wrote of it in 1767, he said:—“You look in vain for any marks of
the grandeur of the feudal age; for trophies won by a family eminent in
our annals for military prowess and deeds of chivalry; for halls hung
with helms and hauberks” (good alliteration, that! but rash for Cockney
repetition), “or with the spoils of the chase; for extensive forests or
for venerable oaks. The apartments are large, and lately finished with a
most incompatible elegance. The gardens are equally inconsistent, trim
in the highest degree, and more adapted to a villa near London than to
the ancient seat of a great baron.” It was to this criticism of
“trimness” that Bishop Percy objected. Discussing Pennant with Dr.
Johnson, he could not sit quietly and hear him praise a man who had
spoken so disrespectfully of Alnwick Castle and the Duke’s
pleasure-grounds, and he eagerly opposed the Doctor, evidently with some
heat, for Johnson said, “He has done what he intended; he has made you
very angry.” To which the Bishop replied, “He has said the garden is
trim, which is representing it like a citizen’s parterre, when the truth
is, there is a very large extent of fine turf and gravel walks.”
“According to your own account, sir,” rejoined Johnson, “Pennant is
right. It is trim. Here is grass cut close and gravel rolled smooth.
Is not that trim? The extent is nothing against that; a mile may be as
trim as a square yard.” The Bishop was vanquished.
All the sham Gothic alterations made at a huge outlay by the first Duke
(with the exception of one room, which remains to show how atrocious his
style was) were swept away by Algernon, the fourth Duke, about 1855, and
at a still greater cost replaced internally with an interminable series
of salons in the Italian style. Externally, the castle is a mediæval
fortress; internally it is an Italian palace. These works cost over
£300,000, and serve to show the measure of ducal folly. Make a man a
duke and give him an income commensurate, and he goes mad and builds and
rebuilds, burying himself in masonry like a maggot in a cheese. But it
is good for trade; and perhaps that is why Providence allows a duke to be
created now and then.
This magnificence for a long time created its own Nemesis, and the Dukes
of Northumberland, in their gigantic castle, were worse off in one
respect than a clerk in London suburbs in a six-roomed, nine-inch walled,
jerry-built “villa” at £30 a year. They could never get a hot dinner!
The kitchen is large enough, and the fireplace so huge that the fire
cannot be made up without shovelling on a ton of coals; but the
dining-room is so far away, and the communication was so bad (involving
going across courtyards open to the sky) that everything was cold before
it reached table. This has been remedied, and my lords dukes now have
their food sent to them along rails on trolleys—just as they feed the
beasts at the Zoo.
The Dukes of Northumberland are well titled. They are autocrats in that
county, owning as they do 181,616 of its acres, and drawing a rental of
£161,874. Some of them have been insufferably egotistical. The
“Brislec” Tower, built on the neighbouring height of Brislaw by the first
Duke, is evidence sufficient to prove that. It is a monument by himself
to his own doings, and invites the pilgrim, in a long bombastical
inscription, to “Look around, behold,” and marvel at the plantations with
which he caused the bare hillsides to be covered.
But the most prominent memorial in Alnwick is the well-named “Farmers’
Folly,” erected to the second Duke in 1816. Entering or leaving the
town, it is a most striking object: a pillar 85 feet in height with the
Percy lion on its summit. What did the second Duke do to deserve this?
Did he serve his country in war? Was he a statesman? Was he benevolent
to the tenants who erected it? Not at all. Here is the story.
When the nineteenth century dawned we were at war with France, and wheat
and all kinds of produce were at enormously enhanced prices. The
farmers, therefore, began to do very well. Their banking-accounts
swelled, and some of them were on the way to realise small fortunes. The
Duke saw this and sorrowed because they found it possible to do more than
exist, and accordingly he added to their rents, doubling in almost every
instance—and in many others quadrupling—them. But when the country
entered on the long peace that followed Waterloo, and prices fell
enormously, the unfortunate farmers found it impossible to pay their way
under these added burdens. Mark the ducal generosity! As they could not
pay, he reduced the rents by twenty-five per cent.! Like a draper at his
annual sale, he effected a “great reduction,” an “alarming sacrifice,” by
taking off a percentage of what he had already imposed. How noble! Then
the tenants, the grateful fellows, subscribed to build the column, which
is inscribed: “To Hugh, Duke of Northumberland, by a grateful and united
tenantry.” Having done this, they went into bankruptcy and the
workhouse, or emigrated, or just gave up their farms because they could
not carry on any longer. The money they had subscribed did not suffice
to complete this testimonial to Duke Hugh’s benevolence, and so—a comic
opera touch—he subscribed the rest, and finished it himself. What
humorists these Smithsons are!
[Picture: Alnwick Castle, from the Road to Belford]
XXVIII
THE road, leaving Alnwick, plunges down from the castle barbican to the
black hollow in which the Aln flows, overhung with interlacing and
over-arching trees. The river is crossed here by that bridge shown in
Turner’s picture, the “Lion Bridge” as it is called, from the Percy lion,
“with tail stretched out as straight as a broom-handle,” standing on the
parapet and looking with steadfast gaze to the North. It is an addition
since Turner’s picture was painted, and an effective one, too. Also,
since that time, the trees have encroached and enshrouded the scene most
completely; so that the only satisfactory view is that looking backwards
when one has emerged from the black dell. And a most satisfactory view
it is, with the i’s and t’s of romance dotted and crossed so emphatically
that it looks like some theatrical scene, or the optically realised home
of the wicked hero of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. If this were not the
beginning of the twentieth century, one might well think twice before
venturing down into the inky depths of that over-shaded road; but these
are matter-of-fact times, and we know well that only the humdrum
burgesses of Alnwick, in their shops, are beyond; with, instead of a
mediæval duke in the castle, who would think nothing of hanging a stray
wayfarer or so from his battlements, only a very modern peer.
The road onwards is a weariness and an infliction to the cyclist, for it
goes on in a heavy three miles’ continuous rise up to the summit of
Heiferlaw Bank, whence there is a wide and windy view of uncomfortable
looking moorlands to the north, with the craggy Cheviots, perhaps covered
with snow, to the north-west. As a literary lady—Mrs. Montagu—wrote in
1789, when on a northern journey, “These moors are not totally
uninhabited, but they look unblest.” How true!
The proper antidote to this is the looking back to where, deep down in
the vale of Aln, lie town and castle, perhaps lapt in infrequent
sunshine, more probably seen through rain, but, in any case, presenting a
picture of sheltered content, and seeming to be protected from the rude
buffets of the weather by the hill on which we are progressing and by the
wooded flanks of Brislaw on the other side. “Seeming,” because those who
know Alnwick well could tell a different tale of wintry blasts and
inclement seasons that belie the hint of this hillside prospect for three
whole quarters round the calendar and a good proportion of the fourth.
In this lies a suggestion of why the Percies were so warlike. They and
their northern foes fought to keep themselves warm! Nowadays such
courses would lead to the police-court, and so football has become a
highly-popular game in these latitudes. But the southward glimpse of
Alnwick and its surroundings from the long rise of Heiferlaw Bank is,
when sunshine prevails, of a quite incommunicable charm. The background
of hills, covered with Duke Hugh’s woods and crowned with his tower,
recalls in its rich masses of verdure the landscapes of De Wint, and if
in the Duke’s inscription on that tower he seems to rank himself in
fellowship with the Creator, certainly, now he has been dead and gone
these hundred and twenty years, his saplings, grown into forest trees and
clothing the formerly barren hillsides, have effected a wonderful change.
[Picture: Malcolm’s Cross]
Beside the road are the few remaining stones of St. Leonard’s Chapel,
and, a short distance beyond, on the right, in a grove of trees,
Malcolm’s Cross, marking the spot where Malcolm Caenmore, king of
Scotland, was slain in 1093. It replaces a more ancient cross, and was
erected by the first Duchess of Northumberland in 1774. It was on his
seventh foray into Northumberland, besieging Alnwick Castle, that Malcolm
was killed, in an ambush carefully prepared for him. The legend, which
tells how he was treacherously slain by a thrust of a spear in the eye by
one of the Percies, who was pretending to deliver up the castle keys on
the spear’s point, is untrue, as of course is the popular derivation of
the family name from “pierce eye.” Moreover, the Percies, as we have
seen, did not own Alnwick until more than two hundred years afterwards.
Heiferlaw, as befits so commanding a hill-top so close to the Border, has
its watch-tower, looking across the marches, whence the outlying
defenders of Alnwick, ever watchful against Scottish raids, could give
timely warning to the garrison. It stands to-day a picturesque ruin, in
cultivated fields that in those fierce old times, when men had no leisure
for peaceful arts and industries, formed a portion of the wild moorland.
“Blawweary,” they call one of these fields, and the title is as
descriptive of this exposed situation as anything in the whole range of
nomenclature. Beyond this point the road descends to a level stretch of
country leading to North Charlton, where a few farmsteads alone stand for
a village, together with a prominent hillock covered with trees and
looking as though it had, or ought to have, a story to it; a story which
research fails to unearth. Opposite, meadows called locally “Comby
Fields,” presumably from a series of ridges seen in them, seem to point
to some forgotten history. Brownyside, adjoining, is an expanse of
moorland, covered with bracken, followed by Warenford, a pretty hamlet in
a hollow by a tiny stream, with Twizel Park on the left. At Belford, a
large wide-streeted village with a nowadays all too roomy coaching inn,
the “Blue Bell,” and an old cross with gas-lamps fitted to it by some
vandal or other, the road draws near the coast; that storied Northumbrian
sea-shore where Bambrough Castle on its islanded rock, many miles of
yellow quicksands, and the Farne and Holy Islands are threaded out in
succession before the gaze. Bambrough, the apex of its pyramidical form,
just glimpsed above an intervening headland, looks in the distance like
another St. Michael’s Mount, and Holy Island, ahead, is a miniature
fellow to it. The ruined cathedral of Holy Island, the ancient
Lindisfarne, the spot whence the missionary Aidan from Iona began the
conversion of Northumbria in 634, and where he was succeeded by that most
famous of all northern bishops and saints, the woman-hating St. Cuthbert,
is the mother-church of the north, and became possessed in later times of
great areas of land through which the road now passes. Buckton, Goswick,
Swinhoe, Fenwick, Cheswick, were all “possessions” of the monastery; and
the old ecclesiastical parish of Holy Island, once including all these
places on the mainland, and constituting then an outlying wedge of Durham
in the county of Northumberland, although now a thing of the past, still
goes by the local name of Islandshire. Buckton, now a few scattered
cottages by the roadside, held a place in the old rhyme which
incidentally shows that the monks of Lindisfarne adopted that comforting
doctrine:
Who lives a good life is sure to live well.
Their farms and granges yielded them all that the appreciative stomachs
of these religious recluses could desire, save indeed when the Scots
swooped over the Tweed and took their produce away. It is a rhyme of
good living:—