CHAPTER XXI

“It is God’s grace!” exclaimed the dying De Montfort. The exultant enemy did not scruple to mutilate his body and to send portions of it about the country.

“Such,” says Robert of Gloucester,

“was the murder of Evesham, for battle none it was,And therewith Jesus Christ ill pleased was,As he showed by tokens grisly and good.”

In spite of the Ban of Kenilworth, which forbade the people to regard Simon de Montfort as a saint, and forbade them to pay reverence to his memory, the resting-place of what remains of him could be collected was before the High Altar of the Abbey Church, and there thousands prayed and miracles were performed. For generations his shrine was the best asset of the church and contributed largely to its rebuilding.

The next important warlike incident at Evesham was also the last; the assault and capture of the town in May 1645 by Massey, the Parliamentary Governor of Gloucester, in spite of a gallant defence by Colonel Legge and his small garrison of 700 men. It was a three-to-one business, for Massey had 2000 men at his disposal. Since then the town has had peace to follow that fruit-farming and market-gardening career which it has pursued with ever-increasing success for twocenturies. There are not many tree- and bush-fruits uncultivated in the Vale of Evesham, whose deep rich soil yields abundantly to the growers’ efforts, but the plum is the speciality of this Vale. It is not like the fabled Arthurian Vale of Avalon, “where comes not hail nor frost”; for indeed the belated frosts of spring are the bugbear of the Evesham fruit-farmer, and he has been driven in self-defence of late years, to combat those nipping temperatures by burning nightly “smudges” of heavy oil, to take the sting out of the airs that would otherwise congeal his fruit-buds at the time of their setting, and thus ruin his prospect of a crop. The plum—and especially the yellow “egg plum”—is the Evesham speciality, and in April its blossom fills the Vale like snow. But there are comparatively few strangers who see that wonderful spectacle. If the close of April be kind, you may see it and rejoice, but if the month be going out in rain and wind, then it is better to be at home than on Cotswold or in this sink of alluvial earth below those hills. I was caught in April showers at Evesham, on a day that was “arl a-collied like,” as they say in these parts, meaning gloomy and overcast; and then “the dag came arn, an’ then et mizzled, an’ grew worser ’n worser, until et poured suthin tar’ble.” And there I stood long in one entry off the High Street until I was tired of it, and then in another, and thus having done Evesham by double entry, ended the unprofitable day by staying the night, while the wind raged, and it hailed and rained and snowed by turns and simultaneously. But the next morning was a glorious one, although the roads were full of puddles and strewn with plum-blossom ravaged from the orchards by those nocturnal blasts.

Abbey Gateway, Evesham

One need not be long at Evesham to note the extraordinary number of fruit-growers and market-gardeners hereabouts, as shown by the many wagons, or floats, on their way to or from the railway station with baskets and hampers of apples, pears, plums, gooseberries, currants, tomatoes, or asparagus; while to travel south of the town, through the favoured Vale, by any road you please, is to see that these are highly specialised cultivations that give as distinct a character to this landscape as do the hop-gardens or the cherry-orchards of Kent.

Leaving Evesham, it will be noticed how very much after the style at Stratford the Avon has been artificially widened and made to wear an almost lakelike effect, with a kind of everyday gala appearance. Here are trim grassy edges and public gardens; and boats and punts to be had for the hiring: a tamed and curbed Avon, like the Round Pond or the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens.

Broadway—Winchcombe—Shakespearean Associations—Bishop’s Cleeve.

“AnEden of fertility,” says an old writer, dwelling with satisfaction upon the Vale of Evesham. The neat orchards of to-day, with their long perspectives, and with bush-fruit planted in between the lines of plum and apple-trees, to economise every inch of this wonderful soil, would seem to him even more of an Eden, neater and more extended than in his day. It is not, you will say, the most picturesque form of cultivation, but it has that best of picturesque beauty to some minds, the picturesqueness of profit. I never yet knew a farmer who could see a cornfield with an artist’s eye, and was the better pleased the more the poppies, corn-cockles, and herb-daisies grew in it. For generations past, you will be told, the fruit-growing of the Vale of Evesham has been steadily giving less profit, and scarce a man among the growers but will declare the times are ruining the trade. But the pastures continue to be planted as extensions of the orchards, and the railway traffic in fruit is an increasing branch of business. The only possible inferences, therefore, are that these jolly-looking market-gardeners, who live so well and look so prosperous, thrive on ruination and really cultivate the plum for the æsthetic but fleeting pleasure of seeing every spring that wondrous vale of snow-white blossom that spreads out below Cotswold.

Five miles or so south-eastwards across the vale bringsyou into Broadway, a village exploited some thirty years ago, and now, converted from the rustic place it was, into a residential district. The old houses and cottages remain, but the simple rustic folk who lived in them are dispersed, and in their old homes live that new class of appreciative and cultivated people with anything at command, from great wealth down to a sufficient independence. A generation ago people of this class would have thought life out of London or such great centres unendurable. They would have missed their town life and the shopping and all the thousand-and-one distractions, and if you had suggested Broadway or any such place, they would indignantly have asked if you wanted them to “bury themselves alive.”

And now ideals have changed, or perhaps more exactly, a new class of persons has been born. The wealthy who cannot live away from the centres of life still numerously exist, but there are great numbers of the leisured who have culture and resources within themselves and are not dependent for their amusement upon extraneous things. Also we have in these days of swift travel by road and rail to reckon not only with the “week-ender” (who does not trouble Broadway much), but upon that class who will have it both ways, will take the best of town, and when the country is most desirable will leave town to others and retire to such places as this.

These things have made Broadway a very different place from what it was a generation ago. The old people, sons of the soil, have been disinherited, and strangers—not only the “foreigners,” of whom the rustics speak, meaning merely people not of the same shire, but foreigners from overseas—are living in their homes, and they still resent it, even though they may earn more in wages and in “tips” from the tipping classes. The sense of place and of justice too, is strong in theblood of the countryman, and he feels it to be a shame that strangers should come from remote countries and covet the house where he and his fathers lived, and turn him out. It is an outcome of the recent appreciation of country life which is creating bitterness and resentment, not at Broadway alone, but all over the country.[213]

The broad street, with its grey stone houses, is to outward seeming very much the same, but there is a neatness, an unmistakable sense of money about the place. Every little plot of grass in front of the houses at the upper end, that never used to know the attentions of the mower, has become a lawn; small cottages have been enlarged and thrown into one another, and farmhouses, whose ancient features have been ingeniously adapted by resourceful architects, have become residences of the most delightful type. A little golfing, some motoring, half a dozen other interests and the modern craze for collecting, fill the lives of the people who live here. A retired actress collects pewter, and others scan the neighbourhood with the amiable object of snapping up rare and valuable pieces of china or furniture at much less than their worth from country-folk who are ignorant of their value. There is a curiosity shop in the village, too, where the stranger may find bargains, or may not; and I am told—although I have never seen him—that an innocent-looking old person carrying a rare specimen of a grandfather’s clock under his arm may generally be seen crossing the road by the “Lygon Arms,” at times when obviously wealthy, andpossibly American and appreciative, occupants of motorcars drive up. The suggestion is that very often this ingenious person sells his rare, and possibly “unique,” clock at a stunning price and will be seen in another day or two with the fellow of it. This has been indignantly denied by the outraged people of Broadway, but reaffirmed in print, and I will leave it at that.

My amiable friend, Mr. S. B. Russell of the “Lygon Arms,” is of those who deny this quaint tale. The “Lygon Arms” itself has become a stately house, both without and within. As the “White Hart,” of olden days it dates back to 1540. Traditionally Cromwell lay here, the night before the Battle of Worcester, and there are even traditions of Charles the First staying here, ten years earlier. I am not concerned to deny or to affirm these legends. In any case, it would be sheer futility to do so, for no evidence survives. But it is likely enough, for the “White Hart,” as it then was, ranked with the best—as it does now, if I may say it. We may readily judge of its then standing, by the fine Jacobean stone entrance doorway, built by John Trevis in 1620, and still admitting to the house. It bears his name and that of Ursula his wife, with the date, and seems to mark a general restoration of the already old hostelry undertaken at that time. John Trevis—or “Treavis”—himself lies in Broadway old church, an interesting old building a mile or more distant from the village, and situated along a lonely wooded road, adjoining an ancient manor-house lately restored with much taste and discrimination. Trevis died in 1641, and has a brass to his memory. This old church is in a solitary situation, and is largely superseded by a modern building near the village. There is a palimpsest brass in the chancel, and hard by is an enriched wooden pulpit, bearing this distinctly apposite and characteristicallyReformation-period inscription: “Prov. 19. Wher the word of God is not preached, the people perish.”

But to return to Broadway and the “Lygon Arms.” Thirty years ago the house had fallen into a very poor condition, and the great stone building with its fine rooms and its air of being really a private mansion, had declined to the likeness of a village alehouse. It was all the doing of the railways, which had disestablished the coaches, and brought desolation upon this road, in common with most others. But in the dawn of the new era of road travel the present proprietor bought the house, and has by degrees reinstated those stone mullions which had been torn from the windows and replaced at some extraordinarily inappreciative period by modern sashes; and has wrought altogether, a wonderful transformation. The “Lygon Arms,” is now as stately a hostelry as ever it was.

I reach the old town of Chipping Campden by another route, and so will not climb on this occasion the steep, mile-long Broadway Hill by which you come this way to it. I will turn instead further south, to Winchcombe.

Winchcombe, it may be thought, is a far cry from Stratford-on-Avon. It is twenty-four miles distant, but though twenty-four miles formed in olden days a very much more considerable journey than now, the place and its surroundings were familiar to Shakespeare. If you would seek here local allusions in the plays, wherewith to belabour the Bacon fanatics, there is no lack in this district of “Cotsall,” those Cotswolds on which Page’s fallow greyhound was outrun: a portion of those “wilds in Gloucestershire,” whose “high wild hills and rough uneven ways, Draw out our miles and make them wearisome,” as Northumberland complains inKing Richard the Second.

Shakespeare knew most that was to be known aboutthe Cotswold Hills, and when he makes Shallow bid Davy “sow the headland with red wheat,” he alludes to an olden local custom of sowing “red lammas” wheat early in the season.

He was familiar with the consistency of Tewkesbury mustard, with which, doubtless, the Stratford folk of his day relished their meat, and he finds in it an apt illustration of a dull man’s attempted sprightliness: as where he makes Falstaff say, “He a good wit, hang him baboon! his wit is as thick as Tewkesbury mustard.”

Here, in the neighbourhood of Winchcombe, familiar rhymes, generally uncomplimentary, upon surrounding places are attributed to him almost as freely as are those upon the “Eight Villages.” They tell of—

“Dirty Gretton, Dingy Greet,Beggarly Winchcombe, Sudeley sweet;Hanging Hartshorn, Whittington Bell,Dull Andoversford, and Merry Frog Mill.”

The epithets vary with the different narrators of the lines. Those quoted above do not in general fit the places, except beautiful Sudeley and perhaps “once upon a time” Frog Mill, which, in spite of its name was probably of old a sufficiently merry place, for it is the name of an ancient and once renowned inn adjoining Andoversford: an inn where men made merry until the railway came hard by and disestablished its custom.

Winchcombe it is difficult to believe ever “beggarly.” It is an old and picturesque market town in the Cotswolds, with a noble and particularly striking Perpendicular church, with clerestoried nave and central tower, and an array of monstrously gibbering gargoyles. Next it is a curious old inn, oddly named the “Corner Cupboard.” Here, too, at the “George” inn, are some traces of the hostelry formerly maintained by the Abbotsof Winchcombe for pilgrims to their altars. Sudeley Castle, in its park a mile away, is a place of great interest, now restored, with a modern altar-tomb and effigy to Catherine Parr, sixth and last wife of Henry the Eighth, who resided here.

Gretton is a village two miles from Winchcombe, on the Tewkesbury road, and Greet is a wayside hamlet in between. We have no authority for the Shakespearean authorship of the rhymes, but “old John Naps of Greece,” who is mentioned with “Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell” as cronies of Christopher Sly, was not “of Greece” but of this place. “Greece” is one of those many misprints that in the early folios and quartos continue to puzzle critics. In one of them Hamlet declares he can tell the difference between “a hawk and a handsaw,” and it was long before “handsaw” was seen to be a printer’s error for “heronshaw,” a young heron. To emigrate John Naps from Greet to Greece was a comparatively easy matter, in type, if not in actual travel. We will allow, for argument’s sake, that this by itself might not be convincing evidence that Shakespeare knew Greet and intended to refer to it; but we have Davy, Shallow’s servant in the Second Part ofHenry the Fourth, referring to “William Visor of Woncot,” who has an action at law against “Clement Perkes of the hill.” By “Woncot,” is meant the hamlet of Woodmancote, three miles west of Winchcombe, a place then and now called “Woncot,” locally. The name, correctly spelt in the original edition of 1600, has been mistakenly altered to “Wincot,” in later issues. At Woodmancote the family of Visor, sometimes spelled “Vizard” was in Shakespeare’s time and until recent years living. It lies beneath Stinchcombe Hill, locally “the Hill,” which rises to the imposing height of 915 feet. There, it hasbeen ascertained, the Perkes family then had their home. The name of Perkes was variously spelled “Purkis” and “Purchas.” The last representative appears to have been one “J. Purchas, Esq., of Stinchcombe Hill, near Dursley, Glos.,” who is mentioned in theGentleman’s Magazine, 1812, as having died at Margate, in his seventy-fifth year.

It is a tremendous and a beautiful view from the lofty plateau of Cleeve Common as you go from Winchcombe to Woodmancote and Bishop’s Cleeve, on the way to Tewkesbury. I shall never forget the glory of that evening of early summer when, romping out of Cheltenham, our car breasted the long rise to this view-point and we halted here as the westering sun sank across the golden-blue distance of the Vale of Avon, with the Malvern Hills, grey and indistinct, beyond. Distant views of the Promised Land could have made no better promise of beauty and plenty.

From this Pisgah height you come “down-a-down-a,” as Ophelia says, to Bishop’s Cleeve, thinking upon the sheer appropriateness of the place-name; not the “Bishop” part of it, but the “Cleeve”; which stands of course for “cleft,” or “cliff.” Thenceforward, the way lies along the levels into Tewkesbury, through Stoke Orchard and Treddington.

Tewkesbury.

Thelittle town of Tewkesbury, which numbers about 5500 inhabitants, and is one of the most cheerful and bustling, and withal one of the most picturesque towns in England, occupies a remarkable situation. Not remarkable in the scenic way, for a more nearly level stretch of very often flooded meadow lands you will not see for miles. The site of Tewkesbury is close upon, but not actually on, the confluence of England’s greatest river, the broad and turbid and rather grim Severn, with the Avon. All around, but in grey and blue distances, are hills: the Cotswolds, the Bredon Hills, the greater Malverns, and the yet greater, but more distant Welsh mountains; but the Severn and the Avon flow through levels that extend considerable distances. When those two rivers—so different in every respect; in size, in character, and in the very colour of their waters, the Avon being clear and bright, and the Severn a sullen, dun-coloured waterway—unite to flood these low-lying lands the only way to travel comfortably about the neighbourhood is by boat. Tewkesbury is at all times particularly old-world and quaint, and it makes on these occasions an excellent substitute for Venice. This peculiarity, or rather this contingency, let us say, perhaps explains the at first sight rather singular fact that the town should have been built on the Avon, half a mile from its junction with the Severn, and not upon the larger river at all. It looks like a wanton disregardof the advantages that the Severn navigation would bring to the town, with riverside wharves and quays; but those who selected the site probably considered the Severn to be too dangerous a river, and so set their town back half a mile or so from its banks. A consequence is that the external trade of Tewkesbury has always been negligible, and to-day, although the text-books tell you of its industry of making shirt-fronts—“particularly stiff shirt-fronts”—and the olden one of flour-milling, which is carried on by Avonside, the scale of their activities has never become large.

The founding of Tewkesbury is said to have been the work of a seventh-century religious Saxon named Theoc, who established a church here; but the Roman station,Etocessa, was here first, and although the place-name is supposed to derive from Theoc, by way of “Theocsbyrig,” and the Domesday version, “Teodechesberie,” too little is known of him for us to take much interest in it. It is rather interesting, however, to consider that, the site being among water-meadows, and that the land at the confluence of Severn and Wye is called “the Ham,” how very near Tewkesbury was to being called “Tewkesham.”

The monastery that was thus seated by the two rivers became a flourishing Benedictine house, and after its full share of the early adversities of fire and sword, famine and flood, it resulted in the building of the grand Abbey church, which is still the greatest architectural glory of the town. The re-founder of the monastery and builder of this noble and solemn example of Norman architecture was Robert Fitz Hamon, Earl of Gloucester, the greatest of the early Lords Marchers of Wales, and overlord of Glamorgan, who died in 1197, fighting in foreign wars. He had seen so many post-mortem bequests go wrong and never reach their intendeddestination that he determined to perform his re-founding of monastery and church in his own lifetime. Both were well advanced when he died, and the Abbey was finally consecrated in 1223; a remarkable example of expedition for those times. I do not propose to narrate the story of the Abbey, which has no such picturesque and fantastic falsehoods as that of Evesham. The monastery ran its course and was suppressed with others by Henry the Eighth, and the Abbey church was saved by the townsfolk, who paid the King the equivalent of £5000 for the site and fabric. And so it remains to us to this day, more venerable by lapse of time, minus its Lady Chapel, and with evidences of the puritan zeal of rather more than a hundred years later than Henry’s great reform; but it is yet the veritable building of Fitz Hamon’s and of the generations that succeeded him.

You cannot see this great Abbey church to advantage from the town. It is only from the open meadows by the Severn, and its tributary brooks, where the little town is to be guessed at by the evidence of a few roofs and chimneys, that its great scale and solemn majesty are fully apparent. There the great central Norman tower and the magnificent and unique West Front of the same period are seen in their proper relation with the surroundings. The long outline is very like that of St. Albans, but 237 feet less; St. Albans Abbey being 550 feet long, and Tewkesbury 313 feet.

The near view of the West Front and its great and deeply-embayed Norman window, filled not unsuitably with the Perpendicular tracery of three hundred years later, is no disillusionment; it is, after the glorious West Front of Peterborough, one of the most striking compositions of the kind in England, and the flanking Norman tourelles and spirelets have by contrast the most delicate appearance.

Entering the building, a massive Norman nave is seen, singularly like that of Gloucester cathedral, and no doubt designed by the same hand. The same massive but disproportionately lofty columns, with dwarfed triforium and clerestory, proclaim a similar origin. The columns are Fitz Hamon’s work, and the clerestory above, and the stone-vaulted roof are the additions of over two centuries later, when the builders had grown more daring and risked a heavy stone roof in place of the former flat wooden one. Fitz Hamon’s transepts also remain and his choir, in its essentials; although in the same Decorated period which witnessed the addition of the clerestory and stone vaulting to the nave the Norman choir was remodelled. To this period belong the seven windows filled with splendid old stained glass, representing all good benefactors, from Fitz Hamon onwards, praying for heavenly grace, but clinging to their ancient heraldic cognisances of long descent as tenaciously as though the authority of Garter King-at-Arms and all his fellow-kings and pursuivants extended to Heaven, and St. Peter was authorised to admit to the best places only those who could display these patents of gentility. It is glorious old glass, more than much damaged and time-worn, but still splendid in design and colour.

Behind the choir still runs the semi-circular ambulatory, as on the old Norman plan, but the Lady Chapel has disappeared. Here too are some of the ancient chapels formerly clustered about the east end. Here are some mouldering swords, deeply bitten into by Time’s teeth, from the battlefield of Tewkesbury. Fitz Hamon’s chantry is not of his period: it was rebuilt more than three hundred years later; proof that he, and the health of his immortal part were kept in mind, and incidentally showing us that not all gratitude is, as cynics would declare, “a lively sense of favours to come.”

High Street, Tewkesbury

The so-called “Warwick” chantry, built 1422 by Isabel le Despencer in memory of her first husband, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Abergavenny, is in the last, and most elaborated style of Gothic architecture and decoration. There are many other monuments: including the beautiful one of Hugh le Despencer and his wife Elizabeth. Their splendidly sculptured alabaster figures lie there with a calm indifference contrasting with his violent end, for he was executed in 1349, at Hereford. So often did the great nobles of those centuries suffer from the headsman’s axe and with such frequency did they die on the battlefield that it became a matter of pride to declare how rarely they ended peacefully and of old age, in their beds. It was almost a slur upon one’s personal character to pass in this way, when one might in the last resource join some desperate rebellion and be handsomely slain; or at the very least of it, be taken and properly beheaded.

These philosophical and historical considerations bring one, by a natural transition, to the Battle of Tewkesbury, fought in the meadows to the south of the town on May Day 1471. The place where the fight raged fiercest was close by the Gloucester road, in the field still called “Bloody Meadow,” whose name it is understood the town council, in the interests of the rising generation, are keenly desirous of seeing changed to something more respectable.

If you have never been to Tewkesbury, the battle will be a little unreal to you. You may know perfectly well “all about the war, and what they killed each other for,” and you may even be a partisan of either White Rose or Red, and may throw up your cap for those rivalHouses of York or Lancaster; but if you have never visited the scene where this great fight raged, it will remain shadowy. But in Tewkesbury town, whose streets are still astonishingly rich in old timbered houses that stood on the morning of that great clash of arms where they do now, it is a vital thing.

It was the last desperate venture of the Lancastrians, stricken to the ground on many an earlier occasion, but always hitherto recovering, to try conclusions again, for sake of right. At Towton, Blore Heath, Hexham, and other places they had been slaughtered, and such victories as Wakefield, in which the Yorkists were decimated, were of no permanent value. Only a month before Tewkesbury they had been signally defeated at Barnet, and their cause apparently broken; but here again the party was re-formed. Queen Margaret, whose devotion and sorrows are among the most pitiful records of history, had come from France with her son, Prince Edward, the young hope of the Red Rose. Gathering a force at Exeter, they advanced towards the midlands, hoping to join hands with Welsh sympathisers. But the treacherous Severn, coming down from those Mortimer borderlands where the White Rose had ever been strongest, proved itself on this occasion the most useful ally of the Yorkists. It was in flood and prevented that junction of the two Lancastrian armies whose combined force might have given them the day and changed the course of the nation’s story.

The Yorkists, commanded by Edward the Sixth, came up from the direction of Cheltenham and found their opponents drawn up on the “plains near Tewkesbury,” as Shakespeare has it, in the Third Part ofHenry the Sixth. The battle was lost to the Lancastrians partly through their being deceived by a pretended flight of the troops commanded by Richard, Duke of Gloucester,and in a great measure by quarrels among themselves. Their ranks were broken and the battle was continued and ended by fighting and heavy slaughter in the streets of the town. Finally the defeated Lancastrians took refuge in the Abbey church, from which they would have been dragged had not the monks in solemn procession prevented it. Shakespeare adopts Holinshed’s account of the death of Prince Edward.

Holinshed tells us that proclamation being made that a life-annuity of £100 should be paid to whoever brought the Prince, dead or alive, and that, if living, his life should be spared, Sir Richard Crofts brought him forth, “a fair and well-proportioned young gentleman, whom, when King Edward had well-advised, he asked him how he durst so presumptuously enter his realm with banner displayed, whereupon the prince boldly answered, saying, ‘To recover my father’s kingdom and heritage from his grandfather to him, and from him after him to me lineally descended’; at which words King Edward thrust him from him, or (as some say) stroke him with his gauntlet, whom directly George, Duke of Clarence; Richard, Duke of Gloucester; Thomas Grey, and William, Lord Hastings, that stood by, cruelly murdered; for the which cruel act the more part of the doers in their latter days drank the like cup by the righteous justice and due punishment of God. His body was homely interred in the church of the monastery of the black monks of Tewkesbury.”

The thanksgiving of the next day, Sunday, held by the Yorkists in the Abbey was one of those services in which the victors in a battle have always adopted the Almighty as a partisan. In the same time-honoured fashion the King of Prussia, delighting in the defeats of the French in the war of 1870–71, was in the habit of exclaiming “Gott mitt uns,” and sending pioustelegrams to the Queen, caricatured by the humorist of the time—

“Rejoice with me, my dear Augusta,We’ve had another awful buster;Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below—Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”

The “Bear” Inn and Bridge, Tewkesbury

The thanksgiving was followed next day by a ruthless, cold-blooded massacre of those who had been hiding in the town. On the Tuesday the great nobles, leaders in the fight, were executed, and the Yorkist vengeance was complete.

The nodding old gabled houses of Tewkesbury—many of them nodding so amazingly that it is surprising they do not fall—include a number of ancient inns: the “Wheatsheaf” and the “Bell” prominent among them. The “Bell,” hard by the Abbey and the old flour-mills, has a bowling-green and owns associations with Mrs. Craik’s once-popular story,John Halifax, Gentleman: which, I believe, was considered eminently a tale for the young person. “No,” said a bookseller long since, in my own hearing, to a hesitating prospective purchaser, “it is not a novel: it is an improving story, and may be read on Sundays.” I do not know what is read by the young person nowadays, either on Sundays or week-days, but I am quite sure it is notJohn Halifax,Gentleman, and I am equally sure that the young person will in these times resent any choice made for him or her, and read or not read what he or she chooses. But the monument to Mrs. Craik in the Abbey is inscribed to the author of the book, and as it is evidently a great source of interest to visitors,John Halifaxis perhaps not quite so out-of-date as we suppose him to be.

The “Hop Pole” and the “Swan,” in their present form, belong to a later age; the first being the housewhere Mr. Pickwick and his friends made merry and drank so astonishingly. But the “Old Black Bear,” as you leave the town for Worcester, is easily the most picturesque of all; in itself and in its situation by the rugged old Avon bridge. The sign was, of course, originally that of the “Bear and Ragged Staff.”

Clopton House—Billesley—The Home of Shakespeare’s Mother, Wilmcote—Aston Cantlow—Wootton Wawen—Shakespeare Hall, Rowington.

Thereis a mansion of much local fame rather more than a mile out of Stratford, off the Henley road: the manor-house of Clopton, for long past the seat of the Hodgson family, but formerly that of one of the ancient families of Clopton, who are found not only in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, but in Suffolk as well. Widespread as they once were, I believe that the very name is now extinct.

There is necessarily much mention of the Clopton name in these pages, for Sir Hugh Clopton was the great fifteenth-century benefactor of Stratford. He was a younger son of the owner of this manor. The house has been time and again altered and partly rebuilt, but it still contains portraits of the Cloptons on the great Jacobean staircase, and painted on the walls of an attic, once used as a secret chapel by Roman Catholics, are to this day the black-letter texts upon which Ambrose Rookwood, prominent in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, must have looked. He had rented Clopton House for a time, in order to be conveniently near his friends, and to the meeting-place on Dunsmore, which the conspirators had appointed the scene of their rebellion when King and Parliament should have been blown sky-high by Guy Fawkes’ thirty-two barrels of gunpowder. After the failure of the plot and the arrest of theconspirators, the High Bailiff of Stratford was instructed to seize Ambrose Rookwood’s effects at Clopton House. An inventory of them is preserved in the Birthplace Museum at Stratford, and affords some quaint reading. Chalices, crosses, crucifixes, and a variety of obviously Papist articles, are in company with “an oulde cloake bagge,” whose value was sixpence, and “a white nagge,” twenty shillings. The High Bailiff evidently cleared the house, taking all he could find, for mention is made of “one pair of old boots, 2d.these being the goods of Ambrose Fuller.” There is a further note that Ambrose Fuller had his old boots restored to him; the High Bailiff being presumably unable to find anything treasonable in them.

Shakespeare is said to have taken his idea of Ophelia from Margaret Clopton, who in the misery of disappointed love is supposed to have drowned herself in a well in the gardens in 1592. A Charlotte Clopton, too, is supposed to have been buried alive in the Clopton vault in Stratford church in 1564, when the plague visited the neighbourhood, and thus to have given Shakespeare a scene inRomeo and Juliet. But it is only fair to say that the stories are legendary and not sustained by any known facts in the Clopton family history.

From Clopton we will retrace our steps to Stratford, and thence set out anew, to visit some outlying villages of interest, better reached from the road to Alcester.

The Alcester road is the least interesting road out of Stratford. It leads past the Great Western Railway station, and thence up Red Hill, reaching Alcester, the RomanAlauna, in seven and a half miles. There is little joy or interest to be got out of Alcester, which is a pleasant enough little town of 3500 inhabitants and a manufacture of needles, but not thrilling. There isstill some unenclosed land along this road, on the left, a rather wild upland common—the “unshrubb’d down”; and it is a tumbled up and down country on the right, where Billesley stands. Billesley is a parish, with a parish church and an ancient manor-house, but no village. I can imagine the tourist—the cyclist, of course, who is a more enterprising person than most—saying, as he sees Billesley on the map, “I will put up there,” and I can imagine him, further, getting there under circumstances of night and rain and wind, and finding it to be the most impossible of places to stay at. For there is no inn, and not the slightest chance of hospitality. But it is well enough if you come to it in daytime, for it has the charm of singularity: the strangeness of the old manor-house behind its lofty enclosing garden-walls and the weirdly rebuilt eighteenth-century church at the end of a farm-road which you dispute with porkers and cluttering fowls. Billesley church is one of the claimants for the honour of witnessing Shakespeare’s marriage, but on what evidence the claim rests no one can tell, and, in any case, it was entirely rebuilt afterwards. The tradition is probably only a hazy association with the marriage of his grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, whose wedding took place in the former building in 1639. Little belief, either, can be given to the panelled room in Billesley Hall, said to have been a library in Shakespeare’s youth, in which he was allowed to study.

Downhill and to the right, and you come to Wilmcote, the home of Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. It was in her time merely a hamlet of Aston Cantlow, but is now a separate ecclesiastical parish, with an uninteresting church. Wilmcote is not a particularly inviting place, and not one of a number of boys playing cricket could tell me where was the home ofShakespeare’s mother. However, in a place like Wilmcote it does not take long to solve such a point, even if it were to come to a house-to-house inquiry. The home of the Ardens, yeomen-farmers, seems to modern ideas quite a humble house. It is one of a row of ancient timber-framed and plastered cottage-like houses, with a large farmyard at the back.

The Arden House, Home of Shakespeare’s Mother, Wilmcote

Rambling, low-ceilinged rooms with ingle-nooks in the fireplaces form the interior. Some day, I suppose, when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has ceased to expend much money in the collection of rare editions and in paying fat pensions to its super-annuated servants, it will seek to purchase the Arden home, and show to Shakespearean travellers the house in which Robert Arden, a sixteenth-century yeoman of some standing and some pretensions to gentility, yet sat at table with his farm-servants in the old way, just as in the remoter parts of the West of England is still done.

It is generally supposed that Wilmcote is the place referred to by Shakespeare in the induction to theTaming of the Shrewas “Wincot.” The name is locally pronounced in that way, as it would be when we consider the difficulty in ordinary rustic speech of twisting the tongue round “Wilmcote.” But reasons are given on p. 169 for identifying it with Wincot in Quinton. There is, however, another place which claims the honour; the unlovely Wilnecote, a brick and tile-manufacturing settlement on the Watling Street, over twenty-five miles distant. It also is locally “Wincot,” and in Shakespeare’s time brewed a famous tipple. Sir Aston Cokain, whose verses were published as near Shakespeare’s own day as 1658, had no difficulty in identifying it. Writing to his friend, Mr. Clement Fisher, who resided at Wilnecote, whom he addresses “of Wincott,” he says

“Shakespeare your Wincot ale hath much renown’dThat fox’d a beggar so by chance was foundSleeping that there needed not many a wordTo make him to believe he was a lord.But you affirm (and in it seem most eager)’Twill make a Lord as drunk as any beggar,Bid Norton brew such ale as Shakespeare fancies,Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances;And let us meet there for a fit of gladness,And drink ourselves merry in sober sadness.”

It is quite evident, among other things, that Sir Aston Cokain wrote pretty bad verse, but the point to be emphasised is that there were certainly in Shakespeare’s time three “Wincots,” any one of which might have served his turn. But the vanished ale-house of Wincot in Quinton is the place more particularly meant by him.

Wootton Wawen Church

“Stephen Sly” alluded to in the play, was a real person who seems to have been what people call “a character.” He was probably a half-witted creature, the butt of Stratford, and occasionally appears in the unimpeachable records of the town as a servant of the Combes of Welcombe, or as a labourer. There also appears in those same chronicles in later years a Joan Sly, who was fined in 1630 for travelling on the Sabbath: an offence not so great in itself, but very reprehensible in the eyes of the Puritan magistrates of that time.

The parent village of Aston Cantlow is two miles from Wilmcote. The site only of the ancient castle of the Cantilupes remains, behind the church, in a tangled moat still sometimes flooded by the little river Alne. The old Court House, a long half-timbered building now divided into three or four cottages, is the chief feature of the village street.

Wootton Wawen, in something less than another three miles, owes the first part of its singular name to its olden situation in the Forest of Arden, and the second part to the Saxon lord of the place, a landowner named Wagen, whose name appears as witness to the foundation charter of the monastery at Coventry founded by Leofric, the husband of Godiva, in 1043. It stands at a junction of roads, where the highway from Stratford through Bearley comes swinging up round a corner from the channels of the Alne, and runs, broad and imposing, on to Henley-in-Arden and Birmingham. The church, occupying a knoll, is a strange but beautiful group, with central tower in the Decorated style, a rather plain south chapel of the same period, and a beautiful nave clerestory of the fifteenth century. A very large Decorated chancel east window has its moulding set with elaborate crockets.

The stranger, attracted by this noble church, tries the door. It is locked, but before he can turn away it will be opened by a girl, who says, “There is a fee of sixpence.” There always is!

You render tribute for sake of seeing the interior, uneasily suspecting that it is another sixpence gone towards some scheme of alteration which would not have your approval; but these things cannot be helped.

Shakespeare Hall, Rowington

The interior discloses some unexpected features, the lower part of the tower being unmistakably Saxon work, with very narrow arches to nave and chancel. Here are two curious enclosed carved oak pews that were perhaps originally chantries, and a fine fifteenth-century oak pulpit. A desk with eight chained books, and an ancient chest with ironwork in the shape of fleurs-de-lis, together with effigies and brasses to the Harewell family, complete an interesting series of antiquities. Here is buried William Somerville, author ofThe Chase, who died in 1742.

The town of Henley-in-Arden, with its broad and picturesque street and the “White Swan” inn, is much afflicted in these latter days by excessive motor traffic from Birmingham. Beaudesert, a seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, adjoins it, and Preston Bagot, on the east, lies in a once-remote district. The sign of the “Crab Mill” inn, on the way, alludes to a former manufacture of cider here. The old manor-house of Preston Bagot, beside the road, is locally said to have been the first house built in the Forest of Arden, but of that we cannot, obviously, be at all sure. There is a house about four miles onward, at Rowington Green, on the other side of Rowington, which looks, in parts, older. It is the romantic-looking house known as “Shakespeare Hall,” for many years a farmhouse, but now the residence of Mr. J. W. Ryland, F.S.A. It dates back to the early part of the fifteenth century, and had until recently a moat. Traditionally, it was the home of one Thomas Shakespeare, a brother of William Shakespeare’s father; and Shakespeare is further said to have composedAs You Like Itin the room over the porch. We need not believe that tradition, which has no evidence to warrant it, although the house was once the home of one of the very numerous Shakespeare families in Arden, the poet’s family were relations. The massive horseman’s “upping-block” has been allowed to remain, beside the front-door.

Welcombe—Snitterfield—Warwick—Leicester’s Hospital—St. Mary’s Church and the Beauchamp Chapel.

Thedistance between Stratford and Warwick is eight miles, and the road, the broad highway, runs direct. It is an excellent road, but for those who do not care overmuch for main routes, however beautiful, in these times, a more excellent way, for a portion of the journey at any rate, is by Snitterfield. You turn off to the left from the tree-bordered main road at a point a mile and a half from Stratford, well in view of the lofty obelisk on the hillside at Welcombe which was built in 1873 to perpetuate the memory of the obscure person, a certain Mark Phillips, who had erected the mansion of Welcombe Lodge in 1869. Without the aid of this monument he would by now have been completely forgotten; but it is 120 feet in height and prominently visible from amazing distances, and so its object is attained. Not perhaps exactly in the way originally intended, for being in a district where most things are associated in some way with Shakespeare, it is generally supposed to be one of them, and when the disappointed stranger finds himself thus deluded, he usually reflects upon Mark Phillips in the most scathing terms.

Up at Welcombe are those Dingles already referred to. The way to Snitterfield takes you uphill, past lands that once belonged to Shakespeare, and by a pond which is all that is left of the lake of Snitterfield Hall, a mansion demolished in 1820. Here the road has reached a considerable height, commanding beautiful views down over the valley of the Avon at Hampton Lucy and Charlecote.

Leicester’s Hospital, Warwick

Snitterfield village is embowered amid elms. The church is a rustic building in the Decorated style, with seventeenth-century pulpit and enriched woodwork of the same period furnishing the altar-rails. Here the Rev. Richard Jago was vicar for twenty years, dying in 1781. His duties did not bear heavily upon him, and he occupied most of his time in writing a long poem, “Edgehill, or the Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralised,” a published work which no one ever reads, the prospect of moralising held forth on the title-page scaring the timid. His vicarage remains, and on its lawn are still the three silver birches planted by his three daughters. There are some beautiful lime-trees and an ancient yew in the churchyard. No relic of Henry Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s uncle, or of his father or grandfather, who lived at Snitterfield, now remains.

The road now trends to the right, and, steeply descending, regains the main route into Warwick. The town of Warwick looms nobly before the traveller approaching from the west. The broad level highway makes direct for it, and over the trees that border the road you see, as a first glimpse of the historic place, the lofty tower of St. Mary’s church, rising apparently an enormous height, and looking a most worshipful specimen of architecture. On a nearer approach it sinks into less prominence, and, passing through an old suburb, with a porch-house on the right, formerly the “Malt-Shovel” inn, the West Gate of the town, with its chapel above it, takes prominence.

Leicester’s Hospital: The Courtyard

The West Gate is one of the two surviving ancient gateways of Warwick and leads steeply up into the town beneath a rude-ribbed arch of great massiveness, based sturdily upon the dull red sandstone rock. It is a very picturesque and in every way striking composition, and if it were not for the even more picturesque scene provided by Leicester’s Hospital, just within the gate, would be often illustrated. But the nodding black and white gables of that almshouse effectually attract the greater notice. The West Gate, with the chapel above, dates from about 1360. Nowadays it is almost only the curious visitor who passes through the long, tunnel-like arch, gazing with astonishment at the sudden outcrop of rock on which the building stands, and at the ribbed stone roof supporting the chapel. A roadway has been made to the right of the gate, through the town walls, and the traffic goes that way by choice, obscuring the ancient defensive function and importance of this entrance to the town. A chapel also occupies the like position over the East Gate, and shows that the people of Warwick prayed as well as watched.

The Leicester Hospital, so-called because founded by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, looks down with admirable effect from its elevated position on the left hand, as you come up into the town; but it would look even better if it were properly kept. It very urgently needs a thorough overhauling, not in the necessity for any structural repairs, but with the object of treating the buildings in a sympathetic and cultured way. There is a vast difference between photographic views of what is called, in the Wardour Street way, “Leycester’s” Hospital, and the actual effect of looking upon the place with one’s own eyes. The Hospital, in fact, looks very much better in photographs than it reveals itself to the disappointed gaze: simply because those responsible for the upkeep of it do not understandhow to treat the old timbers, and have smeared them over with black paint.

This Hospital or Almshouse occupies the site of the ancient united religious and charitable guilds of Holy Trinity and St. George-the-Martyr, with some of their surviving buildings. These united fraternities had numerous activities. They supported the priests who served in the chapels over East and West gates, and contributed towards the keep of others in the parish church; being also largely responsible for the maintenance of the great bridge, now and for long past in ruins, which carried the Banbury road across the Avon, in front of Warwick Castle. They also supported eight poor persons of the Guild. In common with all other religious, or semi-religious institutions, the Guild was dissolved in the time of Henry the Eighth, and its buildings were granted by Edward the Sixth to Sir Nicholas le Strange, from whom Dudley acquired them; or, according to another version of these transactions, Dudley had a gift of them direct from the town of Warwick, to which the Guild had voluntarily transferred its property. This gift to the magnificent Dudley, the newly-created Earl of Leicester and possessor of vast wealth and power, was not for his own personal advantage, but for the purpose of helping him to establish an almshouse, which he at once proceeded to do, in the interest of “twelve impotent persons, not having above £5 per annum of their own, and such as either had been, or should be maimed in the warrs of the Queen, her service, her heirs and successors, especially under the conduct of the said Earl or his heirs, or had been tenants to him and his heirs, and born in the Counties of Warwick or Gloucester, or having their dwelling there for five years before; and in case there happen to be none such hurt in the Warrs, then other poor of Kenilworth,Warwick, Stratford super Avon in this county, or of Wootton under Edge or Erlingham in Gloucestershire, to be recommended by the Minister and Churchwardens where they last had their aboad; which poor men are to have Liveries (viz. Gowns of blew cloth, with a Ragged Staff embroydered on the left sleeve) and not to go into the Town without them.”

Leicester and his magnificence, and all the direct lineage of the Dudleys have disappeared long ago. Leicester himself, and after him his brother Ambrose, died childless, and the patronage of the Hospital passed to their sister Mary, who married Sir Henry Sidney of Penshurst. Thence it has descended to Lord de L’isle and Dudley, the present representative of the Dudleys and the Sidneys.

The entrance is by a stone gateway bearing the inscription “Hospitivm Collegiatvm Roberti Dvdlei Comitis Leycestriæ 1571.” The great Dudley’s picturesque buildings deserve to be better kept, for they are among the daintiest examples of highly enriched half-timbering in England. Passing beneath an archway with a sundial overhead, you enter a small quadrangle with a quaint staircase on one side, and gables with elaborate pierced verge-boards looking down upon the scene. The famous Warwick badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff surmounts the finials and lurks under the eaves, in frequent repetition, together with the Porcupine, that of the Sidneys. On the further side, over the windows of the Master’s Lodge, is the painted inscription, “Honour all men; love the brotherhood; fear God; and honour the King,” a quadripartite injunction which we may confidently affirm, no man ever yet observed. Our own—but much more other people’s—natures will have to be very greatly amended before we are prepared to “honour all men.”

You pay sixpence to be shown over the Hospital, and one of the twelve bedesmen acts as guide to the buildings and the very miscellaneous collections accumulated in them. Nowadays the “blue gown” has become black, and the Bear and Ragged Staff badge is in silver, instead of embroidery. A welcome change has come over their headgear. Instead of the more or less rusty silk hats they wore during the greater part of the nineteenth century, they have now a “beefeater” hat similar to those worn by the Tower warders in London, but wholly in black. The bedesmen no longer dine together as once they did, but each separately in his own quarters, because they could not always obey the injunction to “love the brotherhood,” and grew cantankerous in company, and quarrelled; but here is still the kitchen they have in common, containing many other things one does not expect to find in kitchens; an odd assortment, a Malay kris, a Russian helmet from the stricken fields of the Crimea, an oak cabinet from Kenilworth Castle, and a framed piece of needlework said to have been executed by Lady Robert Dudley, whom “historians” will persist in styling either by her maiden name, Amy Robsart, or else by the title of Countess of Leicester, she having died or been murdered many years before her husband became an Earl. Perhaps we had better emphasise the wordsaid. Beneath that framed piece of needlework is a Saxon—more or less Saxon—chair. A piece of Gibraltar rock, polished, is a further item displaying the catholicity of taste displayed here, together with the muskets with which the inmates of the Hospital were armed when the Chartist rising was supposed to threaten the security of Warwick.

Leicester’s Hospital: One of the Brethren

The banqueting hall, a surviving portion of the old Guild buildings, very greatly needs restoration. It has been grossly used and subdivided, the Minstrel Gallery having been taken out of it in order to provide a fine additional room for the Master’s residence; the Master being, of course, a clergyman with a fine fat stipend: the person who has the very best of it at Leicester’s Hospital. In this once-beautiful banqueting hall, with its noble roof of Spanish chestnut, whitened with age, James the First was entertained by Fulke Greville in 1617. Coal-bins and wash-houses now subdivide it.

Flights of stone stairs lead up from the Hospital over the West Gate and into the chapel, a fine spacious building where the twelve old men have to attend every week-day morning at ten o’clock and listen to the perfunctory service read by the Master. In addition to this spiritual treat, they attend service at the parish church on Sundays. There is nothing to say about the interior of the chapel; it was “restored” by Sir Gilbert Scott, and so there would not be.

For dulness and pretentious ugliness combined, the town of Warwick would be difficult to match; and the ugliest and dullest part of it is that main street called Jury Street, stretching between the West Gate and the East. The ugliness is due to the great fire of 1694, which destroyed a great part of the town and necessitated a rebuilding at a period when architects were obsessed with the idea of designing “stately” buildings. What they considered stately we nowadays look upon with a shudder and style heavy and unimaginative.

But the weirdest building in the town is that parish church of St. Mary whose tower looks in the distance so stately. There were once ten churches in Warwick and there are now but two. St. Mary’s was almost entirely destroyed in the great fire, in consequence of the frightened townsfolk storing their furniture in it, for safety. The church itself was not threatened,but some of the articles hurriedly placed in it were alight, and thus it shared the fate of much else.

The rebuilding of St. Mary’s was completed in 1704, as an inscription on the tower informs us. I think those who placed that inscription here intended a Latin pun, a play upon the name of Queen Anne and the word anno, for “year”; for thus it runs: “Annaeauspiciis A° memorabili 1704.” One scarcely knows which is the more deplorable, the building or the pun; the first, probably, because not every one can see the play upon words, but the tower is an outrage impossible to escape.

The bulk and loftiness of it are majestic, but its classic details in a Gothic framework have a curious effect on the beholder. They seem, those unhallowed pagan alcoves, mounting stage by stage toward the skies, like some blasphemous insinuation. The nave and transepts, rebuilt at the same time, are, oddly enough, not nearly so offensive, and it is rather a handsome as well as imposing interior that meets the stranger’s gaze. It may be that it seems so much better because, warned by the outside, one expects so much worse. That familiar ornament in classic architecture, the “egg and dart,” is an incongruous detail when worked into the capitals of columns in which the Gothic feeling predominates, and it sounds quite shocking when described; but here it comes with a pleasing, if scarcely ecclesiastical effect in this fine and well-proportioned interior.

The Beauchamp Chapel, Warwick

The chancel of St. Mary’s, together with the chapter-house on the north side of it and the Beauchamp Chapel on the south, escaped the fire, and remain uninjured to this day. It is possible to peer through the locked iron gates of the chancel from the nave, which is the only portion of the church that is to be seen without payment, but to see the chapter-house, and theBeauchamp Chapel, to descend to the crypt and to mount the tower, you must pay and pay and pay again. The clergy in all the wide radius of the Shakespeare Country have the keenest scent for sixpences, and would make excellent business men. Better business men than clergymen, for all I know. They have long since learnt to charge and to keep their doors locked until their charges are satisfied; and none understand the business better than those who have the keeping of St. Mary’s at Warwick. But, when you have paid for this and for that and for t’other, and are resting and reading, and possibly making notes in the nave, it is gross, I say, and offensive and blackguardly to be followed up and spied upon and to be asked if you are sketching! “Because if you are it will be half-a-crown.” I will now leave this unsavoury subject, wishing the clergy and churchwardens of St. Mary’s more enlightenment and the people they employ better discretion.

The chancel, or choir, founded by Thomas Beauchamp, twelfth Earl of Warwick, who died 1369, is a stately Perpendicular work, with the altar-tomb of the founder and his wife Katharine, who died the same year, in the middle. His armoured effigy, with crosses crosslet displayed on the breastplate, rests its feet upon a bear, and at the feet of his wife is a lamb. He holds his wife’s hand.

Around the tomb, in niches, are small figures representing members of the family, thirty-six in all. In a grave near by, unmarked by any monument or inscription, lies William Parr, brother of Katharine Parr, last and surviving wife of Henry the Eighth. He was created Marquis of Northampton, and died in 1571, sunk to such poverty that no money was forthcoming to bury him. A few years later, Queen Elizabeth founda trifle, and he was decently interred, but no one ever thought it worth while to mark his resting-place.

Passing the greatly-enriched Easter Sepulchre in the north wall, the Chapter House is entered by a corridor. In the centre of this building stands the enormous monument to Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who was murdered by his man-servant in 1628. “Delaying to reward one Hayward, an antient servant that had spent the most of his time in attendance upon him,” says Dugdale, “he received a mortall stab in the back by the same man, then private with him in his bed-chamber at Brooke House in London, 30th Sept. ann. 1628, who, to consummate the tragedy, went into another room, and, having lockit the dore, pierced his own bowells with a sword.”

The crypt is the oldest part of St. Mary’s, with Norman pillars. It contains the old ducking-stool for scolding women.

The entrance to that most gorgeous relic of old St. Mary’s, the Beauchamp Chapel, which is the principal item in the list of these ecclesiastical showmen, is on the east side of the south transept. The mortuary magnificence of the Beauchamps obscures the dedication of the Chapel to Our Lady, and the generations that have passed since the building of it between the years 1443 and 1464, and its final consecration in 1475, have rightly agreed to style it by the name by which it now, and always has been, popularly known. It reminds one very keenly of the insincere modern cant phrase which forms the dedication of memorial stained-glass windows. “To the Glory of God and to the memory of —,” a shabby sop to the Almighty at which the soul revolts. The very entrance is obviously proprietary, and shows us that this is really the Beauchamp mausoleum.

The Crypt of St. Mary’s, Warwick

It is a magnificent entrance, a very highly-enriched work inpanelled and sculptured stone, with the Warwick Bear and Ragged Staff on either side, facing the Beauchamp shield of crosses crosslet. Near it, on the wall, and green with neglect, is the fine brass to Thomas Beauchamp, thirteenth Earl of Warwick, who died in 1401, and of his wife Margaret, who died 1406. It seems strange that out of all the money contributed by visitors, and chiefly on account of the Beauchamp monuments, there cannot be some small surplus set aside for a restoration of the altar-tomb on which these figures were placed up to that time when the great fire destroyed it and much of the church. It is not well that so fine an example should remain on a wall; the most unsuitable position for a monumental brass. The Earl, who is given the old original name of the Norman Beauchamps who came over with the Conqueror—“Bellocampo,” meaning “fair field”—is in complete armour, which has, besides the crosses crosslet of the family arms, a decorative border of ragged staves around his helmet. The Countess is habited in an heraldic mantle of crosses crosslet.

This Thomas Beauchamp was not so great or distinguished a man as his son, in whose honour the Beauchamp Chapel was erected.

The Beauchamp Chapel is slightly below the level of the south transept and is entered down a flight of steps. Photographs give an exaggerated idea of its size, but scarcely do justice to its beauty and the extreme richness of its details, still remarkable, although the ancient coloured glass has been mostly destroyed and the golden images of the altar have disappeared. It is indeed due to the second Lord Brooke, who although a partisan of the Cromwellian side during the Civil War, was naturally keen to preserve the glories of Warwick, that the Chapel was not wholly destroyed in that age of tumults. Lord Brooke was the son of that Sir FulkeGreville, first Baron Brooke, to whom James the First had granted Warwick Castle in 1605, and he no doubt looked upon the Beauchamps as ancestors, although there was never the remotest connection between that ancient martial family and his own, the Grevels, or Grevilles, who descend from the old wool-merchants of the name at Chipping Campden and elsewhere in the Cotswolds. He adopted them, and took them over, so to speak, with the Castle; and a good thing too, for these old monuments, that they had so fortunate an adoption.

The building is in the middle period of the Perpendicular style, that last manifestation of the Gothic spirit and the feudal ages, and is elaborately groined in stone. The great Richard Beauchamp, who lies here in these gorgeous surroundings, directed by will the building of the Chapel and the erection of his monument. He was the greatest as yet of his name, and appears to have been perfectly conscious of it, if we may judge by the state in which he ordained to lie. He was also to prove the greatest to all time, for although his son Henry who succeeded him at his death in 1439 was created Duke of Warwick, his career was undistinguished and soon ended, for he died in 1445. With him ended the long line of his race.

Richard Beauchamp, fourteenth Earl of Warwick, whose effigy lies here in lonely magnificence on the altar-tomb he directed to be made, as though he were too great a personage to have his wife beside him, was holder of the greatest offices of State of his period. The long inscription round his tomb tells us of some of these responsible posts—

“Preieth devoutly for the Sowel whom god assoille of one of the moost worshipful Knights in his dayes of monhode and conning Richard Beauchamp, late Earlof Warrewik, lord Despenser of Bergevenny and of mony other grete lordships whos body resteth here vnder this tumbe in a fulfeire vout of stone set on the bare rooch the whuch visited with longe siknes in the Castel of Roan therinne decessed ful cristenly the last day of April the yer of oure lord god A mccccxxix, he being at that tyme Lieutenant gen’al and governer of the Roialme of ffraunce and of the Duchie of Normandie by sufficient Autorite of oure Sou’aigne lord the King Harry the vi., the whuch body with grete deliberacon’ and ful worshipful conduit Bi See And by lond was broght to Warrewik the iiii day of October the yer aboueseide and was leide with ful solemn exequies in a feir chest made of stone in this Chirche afore the west dore of this Chapel according to his last wille and Testament therin to rest til this Chapel by him devised i’ his liff were made Al the whuche Chapel founded on the Rooch And alle the membres thereof his Executours dede fully make and Apparaille By the Auctorite of his Seide last Wille and Testament And therafter By the same Auctorite Theydide Translate fful worshipfully the seide Body into the vout abouseide, Honured be god therfore.”

History comes in few places with such vivid reality to the modern person as it does here. Unmoved, because too often without the mental agility to perceive the significance of it, we look upon the old royal arms of England as they were for centuries, until the time of George the Third, and see the quartering of the Lions of England with the Lilies of France; that proud boast, an idle pretension long before Calais, the final French possession of England, was lost, in the reign of Queen Mary. But standing before the tomb of the great Beauchamp, and reading his sounding titles, no mere ornamental designations, but the veritable responsible offices of State, as “Lieutenant-General and Governorof the Realm of France and the Duchy of Normandy,” we live again in tremendous days. No tomb of King or Emperor impresses me as does that of this puissant representative and viceroy of such sovereignty.

Beneath a hooped frame or “hearse” of gilded brass which formed the support for a gorgeous pall of crimson velvet lies the effigy of this great soldier and statesman, also in brass, once highly gilt. His bared head rests upon his helmet and his feet upon a griffin and a muzzled bear, and the Garter is on his left leg. The arms are raised in the usual attitude of prayer, but the hands themselves are not joined, as usual. They are, instead, represented apart, in the priestly pose during the celebration of mass.

The rich crimson velvet pall that covered the effigy and was lifted for its inspection by every visitor, was at last removed, on the plea of the injury it was supposed to be causing the figure, and has now unaccountably disappeared.

In niches around the altar-tomb are little figures representing his family, and sons- and daughters-in-law: fourteen in all; such great names as Henry Beauchamp, his son and successor, with his wife Cicely; Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and his wife Alice; Richard Neville, afterwards Earl of Warwick and his wife Anne; Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and his wife Eleanor; Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and his wife Anne; John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his wife Margaret; and George Neville, Lord Latimer, with his wife Elizabeth.

Against the north wall of the Chapel is the costly and ostentatious monument of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, rising in lofty stages of coloured marbles; a vulgar piece of work. The effigies of Dudley and his wife Lætitia, who survived him forty-six years anddied in 1634, are gorgeously robed and painted in lifelike fashion. The mantle of the Order of the Garter covers his armour, and the Garter itself is shown on his leg. It is with surpassing interest that one looks upon the chief of these figures; that Dudley who came near being King-Consort of Elizabeth, and died in 1588, at the comparatively early age of fifty-four; the vain and magnificent creature suspected of the murder of his first wife and traditionally poisoned by his last, who is said to have given him the lethal cup he had intended for herself. A long Latin epitaph sonorously recounts his many titles and honours, with the hardy belief in “a certain hope of his resurrection in Christ.”

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