CHAPTERVIISHAKESPEARE RELICS AT WORCESTER

Worcester, July 23, 1889.—The present wanderer came lately to The Faithful City, and these words are written in a midnight hour at the Unicorn Hotel. This place is redolent of the wars of the Stuarts, and the moment you enter it your mind is filled with the presence of Charles the Martyr, Charles the Merry, Prince Rupert, and Oliver Cromwell. From the top of Red Hill and the margin of Perry wood,—now sleeping in the starlight or momentarily vocal with the rustle of leaves and the note of half-awakened birds,—Cromwell looked down over the ancient walled city which he had beleaguered. Upon the summit of the great tower of Worcester Cathedral Charles and Rupert held their last council of war. Here was lost, September 3, 1651, the battle that made the Merry Monarch a hunted fugitive and an exile. With a stranger's interest I have rambled on those heights; traversed the battlefield; walked in every part of the cathedral; attended divine service[113]there; revelled in the antiquities of the Edgar Tower; roamed through most of the city streets; traced all that can be traced of the old wall [there is little remaining of it now, and no part that can be walked upon]; explored the royal porcelain works, for which Worcester is rightly famous; viewed several of its old churches and its one theatre, in Angel street; entered its Guildhall, where they preserve a fine piece of artillery and nine suits of black armour that were left by Charles the Second when he fled from Worcester; paced the dusty and empty Trinity Hall, now abandoned and condemned to demolition, where once Queen Elizabeth was feasted; and visited the old Commandery,—a rare piece of antiquity, remaining from the tenth century,—wherein the Duke of Hamilton died, of his wounds, after Cromwell's "crowning mercy," and beneath the floor of which he was laid in a temporary grave. The Commandery is now owned and occupied by a printer of directories and guide-books, the genial and hospitable Mr. Littlebury, and there, as everywhere else in storied Worcester, the arts of peace prevail over all the scenes and all the traces of

"Old, unhappy, far-off thingsAnd battles long ago."

"Old, unhappy, far-off things

And battles long ago."

Worcester Cathedral, from the Edgar Tower.

In the Edgar Tower at Worcester they keep the original of the marriage-bond that was given by Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, of Shottery, as a preliminary to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. It is a long, narrow strip of parchment, and it has been glazed and framed. Two seals of light-coloured wax were originally attached toit, dependent by strings, but these have been removed,—apparently for the convenience of the mechanic who put the relic into its present frame. The handwriting is crabbéd and obscure. There are but few persons who can read the handwriting in old documents of this kind, and thousands of such documents exist in the church-archives, and elsewhere, in England, that have never been examined. The bond is for £40, and is a guarantee that there was no impediment to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. It is dated November 28, 1582; its text authorises the wedding after only once calling the banns in church; and it is supposed that the marriage took place immediately, since the first child of it, Susanna Shakespeare, was baptized in the Church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford on May 26, 1583. No registration of the marriage has been found, but that is no proof that it does not exist. The law is said to have prescribed that three parishes, within the residential diocese, should be designated, in any one of which the marriage might be made; but custom permitted the contracting parties, when they had complied with this requirement, to be married in whatever parish, within the diocese, they might prefer. The three parishes supposed to have been named are Stratford, Bishopton, and Luddington. The registers of two of them have been searched, and searched in vain. The register of the third,—that of Luddington, which is near Shottery, and about three miles southwest of Stratford,—was destroyed, long ago, in a fire that burnt down Luddington church; and conjecture assumes that Shakespeare was married at Luddington. It may be so, but until every old church register in theancient diocese of Worcester has been examined, the quest of the registration of his marriage ought not to be abandoned. Richard Savage, the learned and diligent librarian of the Shakespeare Birthplace, has long been occupied with this inquiry, and has transcribed several of the old church registers in the vicinity of Stratford. TheRev.Thomas Procter Wadley,[20]another local antiquary, of great learning and incessant industry, has also taken part in this labour. The long-desired entry of the marriage of William and Anne remains undiscovered, but one gratifying and valuable result of these investigations is the disclosure that many of the names used in Shakespeare's works are the names of persons who were residents of Warwickshire in his time. It has pleased various crazy sensation-mongers to ascribe the authorship of Shakespeare's writings to Francis Bacon. This could only be done by ignoring positive evidence,—the evidence, namely, of Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare personally, and who has left a written description of the manner in which Shakespeare composed his plays. Effrontery was to be expected from the advocates of the preposterous Bacon theory; but when they have ignored the positive evidence, and the internal evidence, and the circumstantial evidence, and every other sort of evidence, they have still a serious obstacle to surmount,—an obstacle that the researches of such patient scholars as Mr. Savage and Mr. Wadley are strengthening day by day. The man who wrote Shakespeare's plays knew Warwickshire as it could only be known to a native of it; and there isno proof that Francis Bacon knew it or ever was in it.[21]

The Edgar Tower.

With reference to the Shakespeare marriage-bond, and the other records that are kept in the Edgar Tower at Worcester, it may perhaps justly be said that they are not protected with the scrupulous care to which such treasures are entitled. The Tower,—a gray and venerable relic, an ancient gate of the monastery, dating back to the time of King John,—affords an appropriate receptacle for those documents; but it would not withstand fire, and it does not contain either a fire-proof chamber or a safe. The Shakespeare marriage-bond,—which would be appropriately housed in the ShakespeareBirthplace, at Stratford,—was taken from the floor of a closet, where it had been lying, together with a number of dusty books, and I was kindly permitted to hold it in my hands and to examine it. The frame provided for this priceless relic is such as may be seen on an ordinary school slate. From another dusty closet an attendant extricated a manuscript diary kept by William Lloyd, Bishop of Worcester [1627-1717], and by his man-servant, for several years, about the beginning of the reign of Queen Anne; and in this are many quaint and humorous entries, valuable to the student of history and manners. In still another closet, having the appearance of a rubbish-bin, I saw heaps of old parchment and paper writings,—a mass of antique registry that it would need the labour of five or six years to examine, decipher, and classify. Worcester is especially rich in old records, and it is not impossible that the missing clew to Shakespeare's marriage may yet be found in that old cathedral city.

Worcester is rich also in a superb library, which, by the kindness of Mr. Hooper, the custodian, I was allowed to explore, high up beneath the roof of the lovely cathedral. That collection of books, numbering about five thousand, consists mostly of folios, many of which were printed in France. They keep it in a long, low, oak-timbered room, the triforium of the south aisle of the nave. The approach is by a circular stone staircase. In an anteroom to the library I saw a part of the ancient north door of this church,—a fragment dating back to the time of Bishop Wakefield, 1386,—to which is still affixed a piece of the skin of a human being. The tradition is that a Dane committed sacrilege, bystealing the sanctus bell from the high altar, and was thereupon flayed alive for his crime, and the skin of him was fastened to the cathedral door. In the library are magnificent editions of Aristotle and other classics; the works of the fathers of the church; a beautiful illuminated manuscript of Wickliffe's New Testament, written on vellum in 1381; and several books, in splendid preservation, from the press of Caxton and that of Wynken de Worde. The world moves, but printing is not better done now than it was then. This library, which is for the use of the clergy of the diocese of Worcester, was founded by Bishop Carpenter, in 1461, and originally it was stored in the chapel of the charnel-house.

Reverting to the subject of old documents, a useful word may perhaps be said here about the registers in Trinity church at Stratford,—documents which, in a spirit of disparagement, have sometimes been designated as "copies." That sort of levity in the discussion of Shakespearean subjects is not unnatural in days when "cranks" are allowed freely to besmirch the memory of Shakespeare, in their wildly foolish advocacy of what they call "the Bacon theory" of the authorship of Shakespeare's works. The present writer has often held the Stratford Registers in his hands and explored their quaint pages. Those records are contained in twenty-two volumes. They begin with the first year of Queen Elizabeth, 1558, and they end, as to the old parchment form, in 1812. From 1558 to 1600 the entries were made in a paper book, of the quarto form, still occasionally to be found in ancient parish churches of England. In 1599 an order-in-council was made,commanding that those entries should be copied into parchment volumes, for their better preservation. This was done. The parchment volumes,—which were freely shown to me by William Butcher,[22]the parish clerk of Stratford,—date back to 1600. The handwriting of the copied portion, covering the period from 1558 to 1600, is careful and uniform. Each page is certified, as to its accuracy, by the vicar and the churchwardens. After 1600 the handwritings vary. In the register of marriage a new handwriting appears on September 17 that year, and in the registers of Baptism and Burial it appears on September 20. The sequence of marriages is complete until 1756; that of baptisms and burials until 1812; when, in each case, a book of printed forms comes into use, and the expeditious march of the new age begins. The entry of Shakespeare's baptism, April 26, 1564, from which it is inferred that he was born on April 23, is extant as a certified copy from the earlier paper book. The entry of Shakespeare's burial is the original entry, made in the original register.

Some time ago an American writer suggested that Shakespeare's widow,—seven years his senior at the start, and therefore fifty-nine years old when he died,—subsequently contracted another marriage. Mrs. Shakespeare survived her husband seven years, dying on August 6, 1623, at the age of sixty-seven. The entry in the Stratford register of burial contains, against the date of August 8, 1623, the names of "Mrs. Shakespeare" and "Anna uxor Richard James." Those twonames, written one above the other, are connected by a bracket on the left side; and this is supposed to be evidence that Shakespeare's widow married again. The use of the bracket could not possibly mislead anybody possessing the faculty of clear vision. When two or more persons were either baptized or buried on the same day, the parish clerk, in making the requisite entry in the register, connected their names with a bracket. Three instances of this practice occur upon a single page of the register, in the same handwriting, close to the page that records the burial, on the same day, of Mrs. Shakespeare, widow, and Anna the wife of Richard James. But folly needs only a slender hook on which to hang itself.

John Baskerville, the famous printer [1706-1775], was born in Worcester, and his remains, the burial-place of which was long unknown, have lately been discovered there. Incledon, the famous singer, died there. Prince Arthur [1486-1502], eldest son of King Henry the Seventh, was buried in Worcester Cathedral, where a beautiful chantry was built over his remains in 1504. Bishop John Gauden [1605-1662], who wrote theEikon Basiliké, long generally attributed to Charles the First, rests there. The Duke of Hamilton, who died of his wounds, after a Worcester fight, was transferred to that place, from his temporary grave in the Commandery. And in the centre of the sacrarium stands the tomb of that tyrant King John, who died on October 19, 1216, at Newark, and whose remains, when the tomb was opened,[23]July 17, 1797, presented a ghastly spectacle.

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