ANNE BOLEYN'S WINDOW, DEAN'S CLOISTERS
HenryVI, the founder of Eton College in 1440, was born at Windsor, and buried in the south aisle of St George's Chapel, but not until some years after his death.
Edward IV rebuilt St. George's Chapel, or began the building which was completed under Henry VIII and Edward VI. On the north side of the Chapel he built the Dean's and Canons' houses, and those of the petty Canons. Edward and his queen were buried near the altar under a tomb of such splendour that it was plundered in 1642.
Henry VIII began the royal tomb-house at the east end of St. George's as a sepulchral chapel for himself. Later he granted it to Wolsey, who caused a black marble sarcophagus to be made, bordered and canopied with costly bronze work. The Cardinal never lay under it. It was stripped, and the ornaments sold, by Parliament soldiers a century later. The sarcophagus itself was afterwards used to cover the body of Nelson at St. Paul's. In the choir of the Chapel of St. George lie Jane Seymour and Henry VIII, who built the gateway bearing his name, under which the public enter the lower ward.
When Henry VIII's queen, Anne Boleyn, was crowned in June, 1533, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and then about sixteen years old, carried the fourth sword. This young man, who was to be atrociouslyexecuted at the age of thirty by the same Henry, lived at Windsor for some time as the companion of the king's bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, and while confined there some years later he wrote a poem which gives perhaps the most beautiful picture connected with Windsor. I will belittle the rest of this little book by here quoting the poem in full: "Prisoned in Windsor he recounteth his pleasure there passed":
So cruel prison how could betide, alas,As proud Windsor? Where I, in lust and joy,With a King's son, my childish years did pass,In greater feast than Priam's sons of Troy.Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour,The large green courts, where we were wont to hove,With eyes cast up into the Maiden's tower,And easy sighs, such as folk draw in love.The stately seats, the ladies bright of hue,The dances short, long tales of great delight;With words and looks that tigers could but rue;Where each of us did plead the other's right.The palme-play, where, despoiled for the game,With dazzled eyes oft we by gleams of loveHave miss'd the ball, and got sight of our dame,To bait her eyes, which kept the leads above.The gravel'd ground, with sleeves tied on the helm,On foaming horse, with swords and friendly hearts;With chere, as though one should another whelm,Where we have fought, and chased oft with darts.With silver drops the mead yet spread for ruth,In active games of nimbleness and strength,Where we did strain, trained with swarms of youth,Our tender limbs, that yet shot up in length.The secret groves, which oft we made resoundOf pleasant plaint, and of our ladies' praise;Recording oft what grace each one had found,What hope of speed, what dread of long delays.The wild forest, the clothed holts with green;With reins availed, and swiftly-breathed horse,With cry of hounds, and merry blasts between,Where we did chase the fearful hart of force.The wide walls eke, that harbour'd us each night:Wherewith, alas! reviveth in my breastThe sweet accord: such sleeps as yet delight;The pleasant dreams, the quiet bed of rest;The secret thoughts, imparted with such trust;The wanton talk, the divers change of play;The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just,Wherewith we past the winter night away.And with this thought the blood forsakes the face;The tears berain my cheeks of deadly hue:The which, as soon as sobbing sighs, alas!Up-supped have, thus I my plaint renew:"O place of bliss! renewer of my woes!Give me account, where is my noble fere?Whom in thy walls thou dost each night enclose;To other lief; but unto me most dear."Echo, alas! that doth my sorrow rue,Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint.Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,In prison pine, with bondage and restraint:And with remembrance of the greater grief,To banish the less, I find my chief relief.
The critics, I believe, regard this poem as a conventional poetical exaggeration of some unimportant or wholly imaginary event in Surrey's life, because he was then married, and because the lady who is conjectured to have been the subject of his "Description and Praise of Geraldine" was then only twelve years old.
QueenElizabeth built the North Terrace of the Castle in 1576, a gallery to the west of it now used as a library, and an octagon banqueting hall, at the east end, which Charles I pulled down to substitute a gateway and drawbridge leading into the Home Park. He also demolished the fountain of Queen Mary Tudor in the Upper Ward. He thought, but in vain, to build another banqueting hall, and to construct a fountain, where Hercules was to have been seen strangling Antæus, so as to make it appear that "by squeezing of him the water came out of his mouth". Charles often held his Court at Windsor, and was at the Castle in January when the Civil War was at hand; there was a garrison of forty officers and four hundred horse, and wagons of ammunition were arriving. But in October, 1642, appeared a pamphlet, entitled "Exceeding true and happy news from the Castle of Windsor declaring how several troops of Dragoons have taken possession of the said Castle to keep it for the use of the King and Parliament". "For King and Parliament" was a euphemism. Windsor was esteemed one of the strongest places in the kingdom, and could the Cavaliers have retained and fortified it, they might have descended upon London. And so "several well-affected Gentlemen and valiant Religious Commanders have gone to raise several troops of Dragoonersand Volunteers, some of which are already arrived at Windsor, and have taken possession of the Castle". The intruders took the chapel plate of St. George's and coined it into money for the Parliament; they despoiled Wolsey's tomb; and they carried off Edward IV's embroidered surcoat of crimson velvet, wrought with gold and pearls and decorated with rubies, which had hung over his tomb since the opulent funeral of 1483.
NORTH TERRACE AND WINCHESTER TOWER
Prince Rupert attacked the Castle in the same year, 1642, but without success, and in the winter and spring following Essex made it his headquarters and a prison for Royalists, while Rupert flickered here and there about Oxford. At the end of the war Windsor was the strange foil to that notable prayer meeting of the Army officers held some time early in 1648. The Army was uneasy in its relations with people and Parliament; it had cause to fear a revival of royalism; and some officers had thought of laying down their arms, because what they had done, and were willing to do, for the nation was not acceptable to it. Therefore they spent two days together in prayer at Windsor Castle, enquiring when it last was that they could say with confidence: "The presence of the Lord was among us". On the third day the "gracious hand of the Lord" showed them how they had come to their present trouble anduncertainty. It was through their treating with the king and his party, this of course being prompted by their own "conceited wisdom, fear, and want of faith". Thus they were led to loathe their iniquities. They wept for shame of their unbelief and trust in the wisdom of this world, and they arrived at a humble confidence and "a very clear and joint resolution, That it was our duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord's Cause and People in these poor Nations". These are the words written in 1659 by Adjutant Allen, who was at the prayer meeting.
In less than a year, on Christmas Eve, 1648, there was "terrible and bloody news from Windsor". The king was brought from Hurst Castle by Colonel Harrison and ten troops of horse. At the passing of the king the people of Windsor cried: "God bless your majesty and send you long to reign"; and after he entered the Castle the Royalists of the town drank a carouse to their dread sovereign, but were "taken off from that ceremonial and cant-like action" by several files of musketeers, not before several had been wounded and three killed. Charles did not return to Windsor again until he was dead. His body was borne thither without pomp or noise.When the attendant lords—the Duke of Richmond, the Marquis of Hertford, and the Earls of Southampton and Lyndsy—requested that the body might be buried according to the form of the Common Prayer Book, the Governor "expressly, positively, and roughly refused to consent to it, and said it was not lawful; that the Common Prayer Book was put down...." As the coffin was brought to St. George's Chapel, snow fell and gave the black pall the "colour of innocency". Such were the dismal mutations of the Chapel, that the lords scarce knew where they were. "A fellow of the town" showed them the vault of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, and there they laid him. At a later date the vault was opened to receive a nameless child of Queen Anne's. There in the vault just before the altar, John Evelyn in 1654 found "our blessed martyr, King Charles".
Cromwell occasionally lived at Windsor. Charles II used it as his summer lodging, and Nell Gwynn had a house, called Burford House, close to the Castle. The king was at St. George's Feast in 1663 with Lady Castlemaine as well as the queen. Pepys heard that the Duke of Monmouth danced with the queen, his hat in his hand, and that "the king came in and kissed him, and made him put on his hat, which everybody took notice of". Pepysspent a cheerful, carnal day in the Castle and at Eton on February 26, 1665, admiring the Chapel and the banners and the singing and "the most romantique castle that is in the world", and "giving a great deal of money to this and that man and woman". When Evelyn saw the Castle in August, 1670, Prince Rupert was Constable, and "had begun to trim up the keep or high round tower, and handsomely adorned his hall with furniture of arms, which was very singular, ... so disposing the bandoleers, holsters and drums, as to represent festoons, and that without any confusion, trophy-like. From the hall we went into his bed-chamber, and ample rooms hung with tapestry, curious and effeminate pictures so extremely different from the other, which presented nothing but war and horror." The king was hunting the stag, walking in the Park, and planting it with rows of trees. The Castle was "exceedingly ragged and ruinous", and about to be repaired. Wren Italianised the façade, and the Castle was to some extent rebuilt and altogether remodelled into something which later critics considered monotonous and commonplace. The interior was decorated by the carvings of Gibbons and Antonio Verrio's inert and luscious paintings of "Judith and Holofernes", "Leda and the Swan", and the like, which Evelyn, who saw the frescoes ofSt. George's Hall in 1683, admired for their "full and flowing, antique and heroical" style. Gibbons also made the copper statue of the king on horseback, which was newly set up in July, 1680, on its pedestal of white marble, where it still stands. The outer ditches of the Castle were filled in. Terraces were formed on the south and east, and the north terrace was enlarged. The Devil's Tower was given to the Maids of Honour. Charles meant to face the mound of the Round Tower with red brick, but was prevented.
NELL GWYN'S HOUSE AND HENRY VIII GATEWAY
James II turned the Tomb House into a chapel for the practice of his own religion, and its ceiling was decorated by Verrio. At Windsor he received the Papal Nuncio. On the king's downfall a revolutionary crowd therefore attacked the Chapel, destroyed the windows, and left the interior in ruin. Further alterations planned by William III were not carried out. Queen Anne's work was in the Park. In her reign Swift was often at Windsor with his friend Harley, the Secretary of State, supping with Prior and Arbuthnot, playing twelvepenny picquet and winning seven shillings at it, putting his thumb out of joint by boxing Patrick's ear for carelessness, riding out in the forest on "the finest day in the world"—October 4, 1711—"a noble caravan of us", Maids of Honour, the Duke and Duchessof Shrewsbury, Arbuthnot, and others, some driving, some riding, and Swift on horseback in a coat of light camlet, faced with red velvet, and silver buttons. On September 1, 1711, Swift came to Windsor with a basket of fruit for his friend Lewis from Lord Peterborough's garden at Parson's Green. "I durst not eat any fruit, but one fig," he writes to Stella, and asks, "Does Stella never eat any? What, no apricots at Donnybrook? Nothing but claret and ombre? I envy people maunching and maunching peaches and grapes, and I not daring to eat a bit. My head is pretty well, only a sudden turn any time makes me giddy for a moment, and sometimes it feels very stuffed; but if it grows no worse, I can bear it very well. I take all opportunities of walking; and we have a delicious park here just joining to the castle, and an avenue in the great park very wide, and two miles long, set with a double row of elms on each side. Were you ever at Windsor? I was once a great while ago; but had quite forgotten it."
The two first Georges neglected the Castle—though the second placed there Windsor's last prisoner, the Maréchal de Belleisle—to such an extent that George III had to build the "Queen's Lodge" for himself and his family. This building is immortalized by the king's remark to FannyBurney, a Maid of Honour to his Queen Charlotte, "Was there ever such stuff as much of Shakespeare? ... only of course one must not say so"; but it is now pulled down. St. George's Chapel had been completely neglected, probably because there was no need of it, for many years before George III began to renovate and repave it in 1787. He removed the tracery and glass of the east window, in order to exalt a new picture of the Resurrection in painted glass. The walls were then stained to harmonize with the heavy colouring of this picture, and finally the Chapel was darkened by the blocking up of the clerestory, to destroy the painful contrast between the sunlit walls and the glass. George III also restored the ruined Tomb House and dug a royal vault beneath it. Under George IV the monument to the Princess Charlotte of Wales was placed in the chantry at the west end of the north aisle. Two years before, Wyatville (né Wyatt) began to rebuild the Castle. The incongruous buildings and external additions of the Restoration were removed. The entrance gateway to the upper ward, with its two towers of Lancaster and York, was made. The height of the Round Tower was increased by thirty-nine feet and a flag turret added. The old houses under the Curfew, Garter, and Salisbury towers were cleanedaway. Thus in four years the exterior of the Castle, shaken more free of the little town clambering and clustering about it, was brought to its present state, which may or may not have blasted the hopes of the author of this epigram:
Let restless George who can leave nothing quiet,Change if he will the good old name of Wyatt:But let us hope that their united skillMay not make Windsor Castle Wyatville.
The Tomb House was converted by Queen Victoria and Sir Gilbert Scott into the Albert Memorial Chapel, on the death of the Prince Consort in 1861. As a memorial to the same prince, the mullions were restored to the east window of St. George's Chapel in 1863. Queen Victoria lived much at Windsor, and in her time the interior of the Castle attained its present height of costliness and domesticity. The majesty without and the splendour within answer fully to the expectations usually founded upon a reading of history and a sober loyalty to the Crown.
ETON COLLEGE FROM WINDSOR
In the Conqueror's time and before, it must have been hard to say what was Windsor Forest, or what was not, on the south side of the middle course of the Thames. After choosing the mound of Windsor for a castle, William enlarged the Forest so that it included a great part of Berkshire, as far west as Hungerford; some of Buckinghamshire, which is on the north side; parts of Middlesex, Oxfordshire, and Hampshire, and in Surrey both banks of the Wey as far as Guildford. The Forest and the river surrounded and isolated the Castle on every side. The Forest was named after Windsor from early times, but was also sometimes called Oakingham or Wokingham Forest. All this wild virgin country of heath, swamp, tangled wood, and high land held many deer for the king's hunting, and fattened many swine. Partly by the number of swine feeding in it the value of a forest was estimated; and the right to send swine among the acorns of Windsor was retained or acquired by many of the dwellers at the edge of the Forest or within it, from the boor to the nuns of Ankerwyke near Datchet.
Therewere many portions of cultivated land running into the forest or islanded in its midst. Some even of the woods inside the borders, such as Clewer, Bray, Hurley, Bisham, and Finchhampstead, remained under separate ownership, with their own woodwards, though open to admit the king's game. The oaks of the Forest are often mentioned in early records, together with alders, birches, beech, and ash. There are oaks at Cranbourne, and a beech at Smith's Lawn, which are conjectured to have been seedlings at the Conquest, perhaps earlier. Gifts of timber for building were frequently made to religious houses in the neighbourhood and to private men. Six oaks were sent to the Tower in 1276, wherewith to burn lime for the masonry; and the builders of Windsor Castle in William I's, Henry II's, Henry III's, and Edward III's time must have drawn abundantly from the oaks in the clay of the lower lands. The game in the Forest was of many kinds. The red deer was the noblest in appearance, in speed, and in esteem. Fox, otter, badger, wild cat, and hare were also hunted. There were wild cattle as late as 1277, for in that year the Constable of Windsor was ordered to capture and sell them. Among the Forest offences were the carrying away of boughs and felling of trees, the pasturing of sheep, the taking of does with a noose, hunting with greyhounds,hawking at pheasants and partridges. The poachers included labourers, husbandmen, gentlemen, and a rector. A tenth part of the venison, under Henry I, Henry II, and Richard I, was granted to God and St. Mary of Abingdon.
In the reign of Edward I the Chief Forester was under the orders of the Constable of Windsor. Under Edward III the Constable was also Parker of the Great Park, which had gradually been fenced in out of the larger and vaguer extent of the Forest itself. Yet another enclosure was made in 1467 by Edward IV, namely two hundred acres close to Windsor, which were the origin of the "Home Park", once called the "Little Park". There Henry VII and Philip of Castile killed deer "with their own hands, with their crossbows"; even so early was it a notable thing for a sovereign to do what many a man does without thinking about it. Henry VIII loved the chase, and hunted in Windsor Forest all day, from morning until nightfall. He also shot, hawked, fished, and played tennis, and having killed the deer, watched the men who ate quantities of venison for a wager. Elizabeth hunted at Windsor, attended by half a hundred ladies on hackneys, and once, in 1602, shot a great fat stag, and sent it to Archbishop Parker as a gift. It is supposed to have been in her childhood, in her father's reign,that the events which led to the story of Herne the hunter took place:
There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter,Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chainIn a most hideous and dreadful manner.
So speaks Mistress Page in opening her plans for the discomfiture of Falstaff. It is said that a yeoman hanged himself on a tree for fear of the king after hunting in the Forest without leave. The tree was cursed, and a ghostly stag haunted the place and butted at the tree and breathed smoke and fire as it tore the roots. There was also a story that Herne was a keeper and went mad after being gored by a stag. He tied a pair of antlers upon his head, ran naked through the Forest, and hanged himself on the tree, near Shakespeare's Oak in the Home Park, which was called Herne's Oak for centuries, and was blown down in 1863, or, according to another opinion, cut down by George III. Queen Victoria planted the oak which marks the site of the legendary tree.
VIRGINIA WATER
In Elizabeth's reign the first systematic planting was begun by Lord Burleigh. Thirteen acres near Cranbourne Tower were sown with oaks which werenever pollarded, like most other trees in the Forest, to provide browsing for the deer. This planting in 1580 was to supply the navy, especially in case the Spaniards should destroy the oaks of the Forest of Dean, as they had planned to do. Since that date a more or less contemporary record of successive plantings has been made, and where the planter has been a royal or distinguished personage, his or her name is attached to the recording plate.
James I hunted in the Forest, closed the Little Park against the public, and turned out some wild pigs, of which a few are still left. In his time the circumference of the unenclosed Forest on the Berkshire side of the river measured seventy-seven miles and a half, and here ran the red deer. The Home Park of two hundred and eighty acres held two hundred and forty fallow deer, and the Great Park of three thousand six hundred and fifty acres held eighteen hundred. Charles I also hunted there, and at the beginning of the Civil War deer were lawlessly killed and the pales of the Park destroyed. Bulstrode Whitelocke was Constable of the Castle and Keeper of the Forest under the Commonwealth, but could not keep down the poaching. Charles II and William III planted the Long Walk.
Queen Anne hunted in a chaise, and Swift, in 1711, says that she was hunting until four in theafternoon, and covered more than forty miles. She planted with oaks the ride known by her name. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was Ranger for many years, and has to be gratefully remembered for protecting the trees against Walpole when he was in need of money. Though the first two Georges did nothing for the Castle except by neglecting it, in their reigns there were several plantings of trees. The avenue of lime trees east of Cumberland Lodge was made under George I. Under George II were formed some of the plantations round about the heathery Smith's Lawn at the south end of the Park: these were the first to be shaped according to the lines of the ground, and not circular or in parallelograms as before; and it is said that some of this work was given, for lack of anything else, to soldiers raised against the Rebellion of 1745. In the time of George II thirteen-hundred red deer ran in the Forest. By 1806 they numbered only three hundred, though as late as 1813 the Forest was fifty-six miles and a half in circumference, and included Wokingham and a great part of Bagshot Heath. The Forest was still unenclosed, but squatters had been steadily enlarging their pieces of land by carrying forward their ditches at the time of scouring them, while parishes within the boundaries had raised money by allowing persons to encloseand acquire portions of the common land. In 1817 awards were given, settling the claims of various occupants, and the Forest, or every tract of it which retained that title, was enclosed and the deer driven into the Great Park. This is now eighteen hundred acres in extent, and holds a thousand fallow deer and a hundred red deer, Cranbourne Park holding a small herd of white deer.
Though crossed by public footpaths and roads, it is at most times and places clear that the Park is the front garden of Windsor Castle. There is even a sense of privacy unintentionally disturbed at spots here and there where the family grief or rejoicing of royalty has been celebrated by planting a tree—as when Queen Victoria planted an oak to mark the place where the Prince Consort finished his last day's shooting, November 23, 1861. Yet the Park is about six miles in length from the Castle southward to Virginia Water, and at most points from two to three miles wide. Considering this extent, it has no great effect of space. This is due to the lack of any great quality of art or nature in the Park. Its outline has no natural wholeness, and the boundaries, marked by fences and walls and several lodges, are not easily forgotten. The eighteen hundred acres have little grace of undulation or natural variety; and they are made up of a number of separatebut not integral parts, so that it is not one but many. Curiosity, admiration, respect, and surprise follow one another too rapidly for any but the first and last to be satisfied. There are a thousand excellent or notable things—some due to chance and antiquity, some to deliberation and design—but the Park as a whole has no supremacy over others of the same or even less extent. I have no sooner admired the exquisite giant birches, or the craggy vast oaks, or the perfectly formed younger ones, than I come to lines of rhododendrons, the symbols of very modern riches, or to lines of venerable stately trees which are not satisfying except on the rare occasions when they overhang some human stateliness or splendour. The Park was grand and stern under Plantagenets or Tudors, when the poet could say of it—
No Forest, of them all, so fit as she doth stand,When Princes, for their sports, her pleasures will command,No Wood-nymph as herself such troops hath ever seen,Nor can such quarries boast as have in Windsor been;
it was sweet and gallant under Stuarts and early Hanoverians. But the charm is faded and the grandeur confounded, and the Park should either be artistically treated as a whole, or allowed a century of nature and wise neglect, if these qualities are to return in a measure worthy of its repute and history.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.