tried to sleep, and then our joy in the chimed quarters of St. Mary’s
clock was still tasteful, but not so holy as it had been at first. The
bells had miraculously transferred themselves to the interior of our
rooms, which were transformed into deeply murmuring belfries; and we
discovered that there were not four but twenty-four quarters in every
hour. These were computed by one stroke for the first quarter, two for
the next, four for the next, eight for the next, and so on until about a
thousand strokes told the final quarter in the twenty-four. In the mean
time the heat broke in a passion of rain. A thunder-storm came on, and
having the whole night before it, and being quite at leisure, it
bellowed and flashed till daylight, when it retired from the scene and
left it as hot as ever, and a great deal closer.
If the entire truth must be told, in that old border-town which, after
an inarticulate Roman antiquity, had held back the Welsh from England
for nearly a thousand years, and finally witnessed the triumph of the
Red Rose over the White in the fight where Hotspur Harry fell, we had
been allured by the delicious incongruity of seeing “The Belle of New
York” in the most alien of all possible environments. We had never seen
the piece in its native city; money could not there have overcome our
instinct of its abominable vulgarity, but here in a strange land (if our
English friends will let us call it so for the sake of the antithesis)
we made it an act of patriotism to go. We bought two proud front seats,
and found our way to them before a risen curtain, to realize too late
that until its fall there was no retreat for us. The theatre at
Shrewsbury is not large, under the best of circumstances, and that night
it was smaller than ever. Such was the favor of “The Belle of New York”
with that generous population, that every seat in the orchestra was
taken, and the walls of the edifice pressed suffocatingly inwards. On
the stage the heat was so concentrated that in the glare of the
foot-lights the faces of the performers steamed with perspiration
through the grease-paint of their faces, as they swayed and sang, and
leaped and bounded in obedience to the dramatist and composer, and
delivered our New York slang in a cockney convention of our local accent
which seemed entirely to satisfy the preconceptions of Shrewsbury.
Altogether, the piece enjoyed an acceptance with the audience which, in
the welding heat, was so little less than stifling that the adventurous
strangers, at the close of an act that lasted as long as a Greek
trilogy, escaped into the street with what was left of their lives. I
know that it is making an exorbitant demand upon the credulity of the
reader to relate that upon their return to Shrewsbury a week later these
strangers again went to see an American play in the same theatre, which
seemed to have been greatly enlarged in the interval, and so deliciously
lowered in temperature that in their balcony seats they all but shivered
through a melodrama of New York life professing to have been written by
Joseph Jefferson. There was an escape of the hero from prison in one
scene, and in another a still narrower escape from drowning in the East
River at the hands of perhaps the worst reprobate who ever came to a bad
end on the stage; and there was a set (I think it is called) of the
Brooklyn Bridge, which though attenuated and almost spectralized,
recalled the reality as measurably as the English Bobby in blue recalled
the massive Irish-American guardians of our public security. The
“Shadows of a Great City” did not convince us of our dear and
now-lamented Jefferson’s authorship; but it was not so unbearable as
“The Belle of New York,” for meteorological reasons, if not for others,
and upon the whole it interested, it flattered the mind to the fond
conjecture that here in this ancient, this beautiful town, the American
drama, if finally neglected in its own land, might be welcomed to a
prosperous and honored exile.
St. Mary’s Church was so near at hand that it could hardly fail of
repeated visits, and it merited a veneration which might have been more
instructed but could not have been more sincere than ours. In every
author who treats of it the riches of its stained glass is celebrated,
and I will not dwell upon its beauties or even its quaint simplicities.
The church is as old as Norman architecture can make it, and it invites
with a hundred interesting facts, so that I hardly know how to justify
the specific attraction which one piece of modern sculpture there had
from me above all other things. The tomb of General Curston by
Westonscott has not even the claim of being within the church, where so
many memorable and immemorable dead are remembered. It is in the square
basement of the tower, and the soldier’s figure is on your right as you
enter. He was perhaps not much known to history, being only an
adjutant-general, who fell in battle with the Sikhs at Runneggar in
1848, but no one who looks upon his countenance in the living stone can
forget it. His left hand rests at his side; his right lies on his heart
holding his sword; his soldier’s cloak opens, showing his medals. In the
realistically treated face, with its long drooping mustache and
whiskers, is a look of dreamy melancholy which, whatever the other
qualities of the work, is a masterpiece of expression. Of a period when
the commonplace asserted itself with a positive force almost universal
in the arts, this simple monument is of classic beauty.
As quaint as any of the earliest inscriptions on the monuments of the
church is the tablet in the outer wall of the tower to the bold
eighteenth-century aëronaut who came to his death in an endeavored
flight from its top to the farther bank of the Severn. It appears that
in this as in some other matters--
“Not only we, the latest seed of time,
That in the flying of a wheel cry down
The past--”
have excelled or even failed. Nor is it probable that the bold youth who
perished in 1759 was the first to try imperfect wings in the region
where none have yet triumphed; and the faith of his epitapher is not
less touching than that of the many who survive to our own day in the
belief of antemortem aërostation.
“Let this small monument record the name
Of Cadmus, and to future time proclaim
How by an attempt to fly from this high spire
Across the Sabrine stream he did acquire
His fatal end. ’Twas not for want of skill,
Or courage to perform the task, he fell.
No, no, a faulty cord being drawn too tight,
Hurried his soul on high to take her flight.”
The imagination which does not rest its hopes on faulty cords, but
follows carefully, on the sure and firm-set earth, in the steps of fact
and then flies forward in most inspired conjecture, has its abiding in
the memory of the great Darwin, son of Shrewsbury town, and scholar of
her famous school. If we cannot count him
“The first of these who know”
among such savans and philosophers as Jenner, Paley, Kennedy, and
Butler, his name will carry to further times than any other the glory of
that “faire free schoole,” founded by Edward VI., of which even in the
seventeenth century it could be written, “Itt hath fowr maisters, and
their are sometimes six hundred schollers, and a hansome library
thirunto belonging.” The stainless Sir Philip Sidney, and the
blood-stained Judge Jeffreys were both of its alumni, but it is the
statue of Darwin to which the devotees of evolution will bend their
steps in Shrewsbury. It was my fortune to find myself by chance in the
house where he lived with his first teacher, the Unitarian minister at
Shrewsbury, and to stand in the room where he began, very obliquely and
remotely, the studies which changed the thoughts of the world. But the
old man he became sits in bronze at a far remove from this in front of
the museum of Roman antiquities.
As a museum it is not so amusing as you might expect of a collection
containing the remains of Latin civilization from the Roman city of
Uriconium, long hidden from fame under the name of Wroxeter, which
lies, as my laconic Baedeker tells, “about 5 m. to the S. E.” of
Shrewsbury. But probably it is your want of archæology which disables
your interest in the province of these remains, while you readily
grapple with the fact that the museum itself is part of the old Edward
VI. foundation, and that Darwin, whose mild, wise face welcomes you up
the way to the building, often went it “unwillingly to school” in that
very place.
Another dear son of memory who may be associated with Shrewsbury was the
poet Coleridge, vaguely and vagariously great, who in his literary
nonage preached in the Unitarian chapel of the town. This chapel (“now
used,” my guide says, “by a Theistic congregation,”) was afterwards
partially destroyed by a mob which had the divinity of Christ so much at
heart that it could not suffer a Socinian place of worship; but it was
restored by the King’s command at the public cost, as we ought to
remember of that poor George III. whose name we cannot otherwise revere.
It was restored in the good architectural taste of the time, and as you
stand within it you might readily fancy yourself in some elderly fane of
our own once Unitarian Boston.
Darwin’s mother was of that cult, which has enjoyed rather a lion’s
share of the social discountenance falling to all dissent in England,
but the tale of his fellow-scholars in aftertimes and aforetimes at the
school of Edward VIth, shines with so many Established bishops and
divines, as to relieve Shrewsbury from any blight falling upon it for
that cause. With these, and such statesmen as Halifax, such dramatists
as Wycherley, such poets as Ambrose Phillips, such savans as Dr.
Jonathan Scott, the orientalist, Dr. Edward Waring, the mathematician,
Rev. C. H. Hartsborne, the antiquarian, the venerable foundation is
surely safe in the regard of the most liturgical.
But Shrewsbury swarms with all sorts of high associations. Here David,
the last of the old British Princes of Wales, was put to death by order
of the English King, and here in the last battle between the Roses, the
Welsh hope was finally broken in the defeat of the White Rose. Here
Falstaff fought with Harry Hotspur “a long hour by the Shrewsbury
clock”--probably the very clock in St. Mary’s tower which kept me awake
much longer; and here was born the second son of Henry IV., one of the
princes whom their wicked uncle Richard slew in the Tower. Here, in one
of his flights before his subjects, Charles I. stayed with the brief
splendor of his court about him, and minted the plate of the loyal
Shropshire gentry, till treachery overtook him (in the local
guide-book), and the town fell to the Parliament; and here James II.
paused a day when time was getting to be more than money to him. Twice
the good Queen Victoria visited the town, and once, long before, the
Prince of Darkness himself came, in storm and night, and spoiled the
clock of St. Alkmund, leaving a scratch from his claw on the fourth
bell. The precise occasion of his visit is not recorded, nor is it told
just why the effigy of Richard of York, the father of Edward IV., should
be standing, “clad in complete steel,” in front of the beautiful old
Market Hall, and stooped in an attitude of such apparent
discomfortableness that he is known to some of a light-minded generation
as the “Stomach-ache Man.”
The city is the home of those Shrewsbury cakes, famed in _The Ingoldsby
Legends_, and once offered to distinguished visitors, who thought them
“delicious,” but if they were then no better than now, we can imagine
how poor the living of the proudest was in olden times. Rather than the
bakery which professes to be the original Pallin’s, or even the Norman
castle from which Henry IV. went out to beat Henry Percy and his Yorkish
followers, the gentle reader will wish to see the quaint streets and
places in which the timbered houses called Tudor abound beyond the like
anywhere else in England. There are whole lengths and breadths of these,
some stately and tall, and some so humble and low that you can put your
hand on their eaves as you pass, but all so charming and so picturesque
that you could wish every house in the town to be like them. Failing
this, you must console yourself as best you can by visiting the most
beautiful old Abbey Church in the world: how old it is I will not say,
and how beautiful I cannot, but it fills the heart with reverence and
delight. I will not pretend that the inside is as lovely as the outside:
that could not be, and any one outlive the joy of it; but it is within
and without adorable. You do not require a late afternoon light on the
rich façade, but if you have it you are all the happier in its
century-mellowed masonry and the old-lace softness of the Gothic window
which opens over half its space. From the church you will fancy,
inadequately enough, what the whole abbey must have been before it fell
into ruin under the hand of Reform. But a relic of the monastic life
remains which will repay the enthusiast for going across the way and
putting his nose and eyes between the palings of the railroad
freight-yard in which it stands, and lingering long upon the sight of it
among the grime and dust of the place. It is the pulpit of the refectory
where some young brother used to stand to read to the other monks, while
they sat at meat, and listened to his prayer and praise, if anything,
[Illustration: THE ENGLISH BRIDGE]
and not to one another’s talk. That youthful ghost now reads to a
spectral brotherhood, not more dead now than then, to all the loveliness
of life; and the porters come and go through their shadowy company,
pushing their heavy trucks to and from the goods-vans, and from time to
time the engines lift their strident voices above the monotonous silence
of the reader’s words; and all is very weird and sad.
What should have possessed us to drive beyond the Abbey Church to view
“the quaint Dun Cow Inn,” heaven knows; but that was what we did, and
now I can testify that there is really an image of the Dun Cow standing
over its door, and challenging the spectator for any associations he has
with it. We had none, but I do not say it is not rich in associations
for the better-informed. Even we can suppose Coleridge stopping there,
and perhaps not being able to pay for the milk it yielded, and so
staying on till the youthful Hazlitt came and ordered the meal--in the
essay where he has so divinely rendered the consciousness of “the
gentleman in the parlor” waiting for his supper. We must have it that he
paid the poet’s bill; otherwise we should have seen him still pent and
peering sadly from the window, with the image of the Dun Cow watching
relentlessly overhead.
There are two bridges crossing the Severn at Shrewsbury: the English
Bridge and the Welsh Bridge, by which the Briton and the Sassenach
respectively went and came during the ages of border warfare before that
last battle of the Roses. Now the bridges are used by travellers who
wish to drink so deep of the Severn’s beauty (in which the softly wooded
shores are glassed as tenderly as a lover in his mistress’ eyes), that
they can never go away from Shrewsbury, but must remain glad captives
to the witchery of her wandering up-and-down-hill streets, her Tudor
houses, her beautiful churches, her enchanting remains of a past rich in
insurpassable events and men. I say insurpassable to round my period;
but there is no place in England that is not equally insurpassable in
these things.
XIII
NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY
Great Brington is the name of the village neighborhood clustering
about the church where, under the floor of the nave, the
great-great-grandfather of George Washington lies buried. Little
Brington is the village neighborhood, hardly separated from the other,
where the Washington family dwelt in a house granted them by their
cousin, Earl Spencer, when the events of the Civil War drove them from
their ancestral place at Sulgrave. To reach the Bringtons from London
you must first go to Northampton, where in his time the first Lawrence
Washington was twice mayor. The necessity is not a hardship, for to see
Northampton, ever so passingly, is a delight such as only English travel
can offer. To drive the six miles from Northampton to the Bringtons is
another necessity which is another delight, still richer if not greater.
Be chosen by a 28th of September, veiled in a fog with sunny rifts in
its veil, for your railroad run through a level pastoral scene where
stemless blotches of trees shelter white blurs of sheep, and vague
canal-boats rest cloudily on the unseen waterways, and you have
conditions in which, if you are worthy, the hour of your journey will
shrink to a few golden minutes. You will be meanwhile kept by the
protecting mists from the manifold facts which in England are apt to
pierce you with a thousand appeals and reproaches. The many
much-storied places will be faded to wraiths of towers and gates and
walls, and you will escape to your destination without that torment of
regret for not having constantly stopped on the way from which nothing
could otherwise deliver you.
If at Northampton the fog lifts, and the autumnal sun has all the rest
of the day to itself, you arrive with unimpaired strength for what you
have come to see. Yet with all your energy conserved on the way, you
will not be fully equal to the demand upon you. Northampton did not fail
to begin with the Britons, and though it was not a permanent Roman
station, and lay dormant during the Saxon hierarchy, it revived
sufficiently under Saxon rule in the eleventh century to be twice taken
and once burnt by the Danish invaders. It suffered under the Normans,
but was walled and fortified in the Conqueror’s reign, and began a new
life with the inspiration of his oppressions. A picturesque incident of
its civil history, which was early a record of resistance to the royal
will, was Thomas à Becket’s defiance of Henry II., when the King tried
to reduce the proud churchman to the common obedience before the laws.
The archbishop, followed by great crowds of the people, appeared as
summoned, but when the Earl of Leicester bade him, in the old Norman
form, hear the judgment rendered against him, he interrupted with the
words, “Son and Earl, hear me first! I forbid you to judge me! I decline
your tribunal, and refer my quarrel to the decision of the Pope.” Then
he retired, and shortly escaped to Flanders, but coming back to
Canterbury, was murdered, as all men know, by four of the King’s
knights, at the altar in the cathedral.
Perhaps the feeling of the people was less for the prelate than against
the prince, for the first Protestant heresies spread rapidly in
Northampton, and the doctrines of Wickliffe had such acceptance that the
mayor himself was accused of holding them, and of favoring the spread of
Lollardy. In the two great Civil Wars, Northampton stood for the White
Rose and then for the Parliament, against the two kings. In 1460, a
great battle was fought under the city’s walls; ten thousand of Henry’s
“tall Englishmen” were killed or drowned in the river Nene, and Henry
himself was brought prisoner into the town. In 1642, the guns of the
Puritan garrison “plaid for about two hours” on “the cavaleers and shot
about twenty of them” when they attempted to assault the place, which
became a rendezvous for the parliamentarians, and sent them frequent aid
from its fifteen thousand in their attacks on the neighboring places
holding for the King. In 1645, both parties met in force, a little
northwest of the town, and Cromwell, who had joined Fairfax, won the
battle of Naseby after Fairfax had lost it, and with an overwhelming
victory ended the war against Charles.
If any Washingtons were in the fight, as some of so numerous a line
might very well have been, it was on the King’s side. They put their
faith in princes while they remained in England; it wanted yet a hundred
and thirty years, at the remoteness of Virginia, to school them to the
final diffidence which they were not the first of the Americans to feel.
The slow evolution of the race out of devoted subjects into devoted
citizens was accomplished in stuff other than that of the Puritan chief
who soon after could “say this of Naseby,--that when I saw the enemy
draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor
ignorant men ... I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile
out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would by
things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had
great assurance, and God did it.” Yet the faith in poor common men, once
kindled in Washington, if not so mixed with piety as Cromwell’s,
outlasted that through parliamentary trials as severe as ever it was put
to by poor uncommon men.
Non-conformity, civil as well as religious, which the Washingtons were
no part of, was the note of Northampton from the first, and to the last
it has been represented in Parliament by such bold dissentients as
Bradlaugh and Mr. Labouchere. It is the great shoe-town of England, and
apparently there is nothing like leather to inspire a manly resistance
to the pretensions of authority. But the Washingtons of Northampton were
never any part of the revolt against kingly assumptions. The Lawrence
Washington who was twice Mayor of Northampton profited by Henry VIII.’s
suppression of the monasteries to possess himself of Sulgrave Manor,
where his descendants dwelt for a hundred years and more, until 1658,
when their discomforts under the Commonwealth, and their failing
fortunes, made them glad of the protection of their noble kindred the
Spencers at Brington.
It is not clear how the house at Little Brington, which is known as the
Washington house, was granted them, or how much it was loan or gift of
the Spencers; but it does not greatly matter now. The Washingtons, who
had shared the politics of their cousins, were rather passive royalists,
but they suffered the adversities of the cause they had chosen, and they
did not apparently enjoy the prosperity which the Restoration brought to
such of their side as could extort recognition from the
[Illustration: THE WASHINGTON HOUSE AT LITTLE BRINGTON]
second Charles, as thankless as the first Charles was faithless; and
neither the Washingtons who staid in England, nor those who went to
Virginia, had ever any profit from their fidelity to the Stuarts. They
were gentlemen, who were successful in business when they turned to
trade, but in the household records of their noble cousins at their seat
of Althorp there is said to be proof of the frequent goodness of the
Spencers to the needy Washingtons of Little Brington. If the Washingtons
paid for the favor they enjoyed in the ways that poor relations do, it
is not to the discredit of either line that a lady of their family
should have been at one time housekeeper at Althorp. One fancies, quite
gratuitously, that Lucy Washington was a woman of spirit who wished to
earn the favor which her people had, whether less or more, from their
kinsfolk. Two of the Washingtons elsewhere, who made fortunes, were
knighted, but the direct ancestor of our Washington was a clergyman who
suffered more than the common misfortunes of the Washingtons at
Brington. He was falsely accused of drunkenness at a time when any
charge was willingly heard against a royalist clergyman, and was ejected
from his rich benefice as a scandalous minister. His character was
afterwards cleared, but he had thenceforth only a small living to the
end, and probably was, like his kindred at Brington, befriended by the
Spencers.