Sulgrave, was chosen first in 1532 and last in 1546. The place was then,
as it continued to be for a hundred and thirty odd years, the mediæval
town of which the visitor now sees only a few relics in here and there
an ancient house. Happily most of the old churches escaped the fire that
swept away the old dwellings in 1675, and left the modern Northampton
to grow up from their ashes the somewhat American-looking town we now
find it. The side streets are set with neat brick houses, prevailingly
commonplace. One might fancy one’s self, coming towards the Church of
All Saints, in the business centre of some minor New England city, but
with rather less of glare and noise, and held in a certain abeyance by
the presence of the church. All Saints is not one of the churches which
escaped the flames; and of the original structure only the Gothic tower
is left; the rest, a somewhat vague little history of the city says, “is
wholly modern.” But modernity, like some other things, is relative, and
a New England town might find a very satisfying antiquity in an edifice
which at its latest dates back to Queen Anne, and at its earliest to
Charles II. The King gave a thousand tons of timber from his forest of
Whittlebury towards the rebuilding of the church, and for this
munificence he has been immortalized by sculpture over the centre of a
most beautiful and noble Ionic, or Christopher-Wrennish, portico, where
he stands in the figure of a Roman centurion, with, naturally, a
full-bottomed wig on. Few heroic statues are more amusing, and the
spirit of the royal reprobate so travestied might be very probably
supposed to share the spectator’s enjoyment. Behind one end of the
portico, which extends for eighty feet across the whole front of the
church, were once the rooms in which many non-conformists of Northampton
were tried for the offence of thinking for themselves in matters of
religion, which were then so apt to become matters of politics.
The members of the Corporation were formerly the patrons of the living,
and the mayor still has his seat in the church under the arms of the
town, and doubtless that official had it in the older building before
the fire,
[Illustration: THE BUSINESS CENTRE OF NORTHAMPTON]
when the mayor was Lawrence Washington. In the wall is a tablet to the
memory of a man who was born in the century when Lawrence was twice
chosen chief magistrate of Northampton, and who died in the century when
George Washington was twice chosen Chief Magistrate of the United
States. John Bailes was a button-maker by trade, and if he links the
memories of those far-parted Washingtons together, by force of
longevity, it is with no merit of his, though it is recorded of him that
“he had his hearing, Sight & Memory to ye last.” I leave more mystical
inquirers to trace a relationship between the actual civilizations of
Northampton and the United States in the presence, beside the church, of
a house of refection, liquid rather than solid, calling itself the
Geisha Café. If ever the ghost of the Merry Monarch comes to haunt his
Roman effigy in the full-bottomed wig, it may humorously linger a moment
at the door of the genial resort.
It is mainly through her churches that Northampton has her hold on the
American patriot who is also a person of taste, as one must try to be in
going from one church to another. The reader who could give as many days
to them as I could give minutes, would have a proportional reward,
whether from St. Peter’s, unsurpassed for the effect of its rich Norman;
or from St. Sepulchre, with the rotunda which marks it one of the four
churches remaining in England out of all those built during the Crusades
in memory of the Holy Sepulchre. There are other old churches, but
perhaps not dating back with these to the ten and eleven hundreds. One,
which I cannot now identify, bears tragical witness to the rigor of the
times in the scars on the masonry about the height of a man, where
certain royalists were stood beside the portal to be shot. The wonder is
that the grief ever goes out of such things, but it does, and they who
died, and they who did them to death, have long been friends in their
children’s children.
It is curious how everything becomes matter of æsthetic interest, if you
give it time. We stood looking at the Queen’s Cross, near Northampton,
which rises not so very far from the field of Naseby, and with our eyes
on the wasted beauty of the shrine, we two Americans begun by a common
impulse to say verses from Macaulay’s stalwart ballad of the battle. Our
English companion, who was a cleric of high ritualistic type, listened
unmoved by any conscience he might have had against the purport of the
lines as we rolled them forth, and, for all we could see, he had the
same quality of pleasure as ourselves in the adjuration to the Puritans
to “bear up another minute” for the coming of “brave Oliver,” and in the
supposed narrator’s abhorrence of “the man of blood,” whom brave Oliver
presently put to rout.
But see, he turns, he flies! Shame on those cruel eyes
That bore to look on torture and that dare not look on war.
If he had a feeling as to our feeling, it was amusement that after two
centuries and a half there should be any feeling about either party in
the strife, and doubtless he did not take us too seriously.
He sent us later on our way to Great Brington with the assurance that
the rector of the church would be waiting us in it to show us the tomb
of the Washington buried there. His courtesy was the merit of my friend
the genealogist with whom I had exhausted the American origins in
London, and who had now come with me into the country for the most
important of them all. When we were well started on our drive, that
divine September afternoon, we would gladly have had it twelve rather
than six miles from Northampton to Great Brington. The road was
uncommonly open, or else it was lifted above the wonted level of English
roads, and we could see over the tops of the hedges into the fields,
instead of making the blindfold progress to which the wayfarer is
usually condemned. It was not too late in the year or the day for a
song-bird or so, and the wayside roses and hawthorns were so red with
hips and haws that we gave them the praise of an American coloring for
their foliage till we looked closer and found that the gayety was not of
their leaves. Where the leaves felt the fall, they showed it in a sort
of rheumatic stiffness, and a paling of their green to a sad gray, or a
darkening of it to a yet sadder brown. But we did not notice this till
we had turned from the highway, and were driving through Althorp Park.
There was a model farm village before our turning, where some nobleman
had experimented in making his tenants more comfortable than they could
afford, in cottages too uniformly Tudoresque; but at differing
distances, in various hollows and on various tops, there were more
indigenous hamlets, huddling about the towers of their churches, and
showing a red blur of tiles or a dun blur of walls, as we saw them alow
or aloft. When we got well into the park there was only the undulation
of the wooded surfaces, where wide oaks stood liberally about with an
air of happy accident in their informal relation. I should like, for the
sake of my romantic page, to put does under them; they were a very fit
shelter for does; and I have read that does may sometimes be seen
lightly flying from the visitors’ approach through the glades of the
park. It was my characteristically commonplace luck to see none, but I
hope that in their absence the reader will make no objection to the
black and white sheep which I did abundantly see feeding everywhere. It
will be remembered, or not unwillingly learned, that sheep were once the
ambition, the enthusiasm of the Spencers, who made them early an
interest of the region, so that it was the most perverse of fates which
kept their greatest flock down to 19,999, when they aimed at 20,000.
Still, if they were black-nosed sheep, the lower figure might represent
a value greater than 20,000 of the common white-nosed sort. A black nose
gives a sheep the touch of character which the species too often lacks:
a hardy air of almost goatlike effrontery, yet without the cold-eyed
irony of the goat, which forbids the lover of wickedness the sympathy
which the black-nosed sheep inspires. A black-nosed lamb affects one
more like a bad little boy whose face has not been washed that morning,
or for several mornings, than anything else in nature; and it would not
be easy to say which was more suggestive of racial innocence mixed with
personal depravity. I am not able to say whether a black nose in a sheep
adds to the merit of its mutton or its fleece, but I am sure that it
adds a piquant charm to its appearance, and I do not know why we have
not that variety of sheep in America. I dare say we have.
When presently we drove past Althorp house, standing at a dignified
remove from our course, which was effectively the highway, I felt in its
aspects the modernity which has always been characteristic of the
family. It is of that agreeable period when the English architects were
beginning to study for country houses the form of domestic classic which
the Italian taught those willing to learn of them simplicity and grace
at harmony with due state, and which is still the highest type of a
noble mansion. The lady of the house more than two centuries back had
been the Saccharissa of Suckling’s verse, and her charm remained to my
vague associations with the place, where she figured in the revels of
happier times, and then in her beneficences to the distressed clergy
after the Civil War, when the darker days came to those of the Spencer
praying and fighting. There is no reason why she should not be related
in these to the Washingtons, who needed if they did not experience her
kindness, and if the reader wishes to strain a point and make her more
the friend than mistress of that Lucy Washington who was sometime
housekeeper at Althorp, I will not be the one to gainsay him. For all
me, he may figure these ladies in the priceless library of Althorp:
priceless then, but sold in our tunes to Mrs. Rylands at Manchester, for
a million and a half, and there made a monument to her husband’s memory.
Many bolder things have been feigned than these ladies sitting together
among the books, which would be the native air of the rhyme-worn
Saccharissa, and discoursing with Mistress Lucy’s kinsman, Lawrence
Washington, lately Fellow of Brasenose College, and lecturer and proctor
at Oxford, and now rector of Purleigh, whence he was to be wrongfully
removed for drunkenness: all with the simultaneity so common in the
romance of historical type. How they would thee and thou one another as
cousins of the seventeenth-century sort I leave the archæological
novelist to inquire, gladly making over to him all my right and title in
the affair. If he wishes to lug in the arrest of King Charles by Cornet
Joyce of the Parliament forces, he can do it with no great violence, for
it really happened hard by at Holmby House, whence the King was fond of
coming to enjoy the gardens of Althorp. He can have Saccharissa and
Mistress Lucy Washington, and his reverence Mr. Washington, looking
down at the incident from a window of the library, and if he is the
romanticist I take him for, he will easily have young Lawrence rapt in a
vision of his great-great-grandson arresting the kingly power in
America. The vision will have all the more fitness, in the reflections
it suggests to the ancestor, from the fact, of which he will also be
prescient, that both the Washingtons and Spencers, devoted and perhaps
unreasoning royalists in their days, were destined to become more and
more freed from their superstition, and to stand for greater freedom
under different forms, as time went on. In his prophetic rapture, the
Reverend Lawrence may have been puzzled to choose among his
great-great-grandsons who was to fulfil it, for he was the father of a
populous family counting seventeen in the first descent, and he could
not have been blamed if he could not know George Washington by name, or
identify him in his historical character.
It is this Lawrence Washington whose tablet one goes to revere in the
church at Great Brington, where he lies entombed with the mother of his
eight sons and nine daughters; and if one arrives at the sort of
headland where the church stands on such a September afternoon as ours,
and looks out from it over the lovely country undulating about its feet,
one must try hard in one’s memory or imagination to match it with a
scene of equal beauty. Of like beauty there is none except in some other
English scenes like the home of Washington’s ancestors, and it is
English in every feature and expression. The fields with their dividing
hedges, the farmsteads snuggling in the hollows, the grouped or solitary
trees, all softened in a sunny haze, and tented over with the milky-blue
sky, form a landscape of which the immediate village, at the left of the
headland, is a foreground,
[Illustration: THE CHURCH AT GREAT BRINGTON
Under the floor of the nave was buried the first Lawrence Washington,
great-great-grandfather of George Washington]
with the human interest without which no picture lives.
I suppose that if I had been given my choice whether to have one of
these village houses unroofed, and its simple drama revealed to me, I
should have poorly chosen that rather than had the wooden cover lifted
from the church floor where it protects the mortuary tablet of Lawrence
Washington and his wife from the passing tread. But the rector of the
church at Great Brington could not have gratified me in my preference,
whereas he could and did lift the lid from the tablet in the nave, and
let us read the inscription, and see the armorial bearings, in which the
stars and stripes of our flag slept, undreaming of future glory, in the
chrysalis arrest of the centuries since they had been the arms of a race
of Northamptonshire gentlemen. The rector was in fact waiting for us at
the church door, hospitably mindful of the commendation of our
Northampton clerical friend, and we saw the edifice to all the advantage
that his thoughtful patience could lend us. He had at once some other
guests, in the young man and young woman who followed us in with their
dog. They recalled themselves to the rector, who received them somewhat
austerely, with his eyes hard upon their companion. “Did you mean to
bring that animal with you?” he asked, and they pretended that the dog
was an interloper, and the young man put him out in as much disgrace as
he could bring himself to inflict. Probably there was an understanding
between him and the dog; but the whole party took the rector’s reproof
with a smiling humility and an unabated interest in the claims of the
Washington tablet, and in fact the whole church, upon their attention.
They somewhat distracted my own, which is at best an idle sort, easily
wandering from Early English architecture to Later English character,
and from perpendicular windows to people of any inclination. Yet, the
church at Great Brington is most worthy to be studied in detail, for it
is “notable even among the famous churches of Northamptonshire,” and it
is the fitting last home of Washington’s ancestors.
I bring myself with some difficulty to own that the specific knowledge I
have on this point, and several others in this vague narration, I owe to
an agreeable sketch of “The Homes of the Washingtons” by Mr. John
Leyland. But if I did not own it, some one would find me out, and it is
best to confess my obligation together with my gratitude. I wish I had
had the sketch with me at the time of my visit to Great Brington church,
but I had not, and I lingered about in the church-yard, after we came
out and the rector must leave us, under the spell of a quiet and in the
keeping of associations unalloyed by information. For this reason I am
unable to attribute its true significance to the old cross which stands
apart from the church, and guides and guards the way to the place of
graves beside it. I must own that at first glance it has somewhat the
effect of an old-fashioned sign-post at an inn yard, and perhaps that
were no bad symbol of the welcome the peaceful place holds for the
life-weary wayfarers who lie down to their rest in it. Great Brington
remains to me an impression of cottage streets,--doubtless provided with
some shops. But when we had taken leave of the rector, and looked our
last at the elegy-breathing church-yard, with its turf heaving in many a
mouldering heap as if in decasyllabic quatrains, we drove away to see
the Washington house in Little Brington.
When you come to it, or do not come to it, you find Little Brington
nothing but a dwindling Great Brington, or a wider and more shopless
dispersion of its cottages on one long street, which is really the
highroad back to Northampton. Some bad little boys hung on to the rear
of our carriage, and other little boys, quite as bad, I dare say, ran
beside us, and invited our driver to “Cut be’oind, cut be’oind!”
probably in the very accents, mellow and rounded, of our ancestral
Washingtons. They all dropped away before we stopped at the gate of the
very simple house where these Washingtons dwelt. It is a thatched stone
house, of a Tudor touch in architecture, with rooms on each side of the
front door and a tablet over that, lettered with the text, “The Lord
giveth and the Lord taketh away: blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Perhaps in other times it was of the dignity of a manor-house, but now
it was inhabited by decent farmfolk, and very neatly kept. The farmwife
who let us go up-stairs and down and all through it was a friendly soul,
but apparently puzzled by our interest in it, and I fancied not many
pilgrims worshipped at that shrine. It was rather ruder and humbler
within than without; the flooring was rough, and the whitewashed walls
of the little chambers were roughly plastered; neither these nor the
living-rooms below had the beauty or interest of many colonial houses in
New England. There was a little vegetable-gardened space behind the
house, and a low stable, or some sort of shed, and on the comb of the
roof an English true robin redbreast perched, darkly outlined against
the clear September sky, and swelled his little red throat, and sang and
sang. It was very pretty, and he sang much better than the big awkward
thrush which we call a robin at home.
Our lovely day which had begun so dim, was waning in a sweet
translucency, and we drove back to Northampton over gentle uplands
through afternoon influences of a rich peacefulness. The road-side
hedgerows now kept us from seeing much beyond them, but they were red,
like those we passed in coming, with haws and wild rosepips, which we
again took for a flush of American autumn in their leaves; but the trees
were really of a sober yellow, with here and there, on a house wall, a
flame of Japanese ivy or Virginia creeper. The way was dotted with
shoe-hands, men and girls, going home early from the unprosperous shops
which our driver said were running only half-time. But even on half-pay
they earned so much more than they could on the land that the farmers,
desperate for help, could pay only a nominal rent. Much of the land was
sign-boarded for sale, and this and the unusual number of wooden
cottages gave us a very home feeling. In our illusion, we easily took
for crows the rooks sailing over the fields.
THE END
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE:
[A] BATH.
Rules laid down by Richard Nash, Esq., M.C., put up by Authority in the
Pump Room and observed at Bath Assemblies during his reign.
I.
“That a visit of ceremony at coming to Bath, and another going
away, is all that is expected or desired by Ladies of Quality and
Fashion--except Impertinents.
II.
“That Ladies coming to the Ball appoint a Time for their Footmens
coming to wait on them Home, to prevent Disturbances and Inconveniences
to Themselves and Others.
III.
“That Gentlemen of Fashion never appearing in a Morning before the
Ladies in Gowns and Caps shew Breeding and Respect.
IV.
“That no Person take it ill that any one goes to another’s Play or
breakfast and not to theirs;--except Captious by Nature.
V.
“That no Gentleman give his Tickets for the Balls to any but
Gentlewomen;--N. B. Unless he has none of his Acquaintance.
VI.
“That Gentlemen crowding before the Ladies at the Ball, shew ill
Manners; and that none do so for the Future;--except such as respect
nobody but themselves.
VII.
“That no Gentleman or Lady take it ill that another Dances before
them;--except such as have no Pretence to dance at all.
VIII.
“That the Elder Ladies and Children be contented with a Second Bench at
the Ball, as being past, or not come to Perfection.
IX.
“That the younger Ladies take notice how many Eyes observe them;--This
don’t extend to the Have-at-all’s.
X.
“That all whisperers of Lies and Scandal be taken for their Authors.
XI.
“That all Repeaters of such Lies and Scandal be shun’d by all
Company;--except such as have been guilty of the same Crime.
“_N. B.--Several Men of no Character, Old Women and Young Ones of
Questioned Reputation, are great Authors of Lies in this place, being
of the sect of LEVELLERS._”
Date 1707.