Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
our feasts of sight-seeing. Caput had, as usual, a crumb of consolation for himself and for us when we had shaken ourselves free from our country-people at the castle-door by taking a different route from theirs through the grounds.
“At any rate, he knew who Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth were, and was not altogether ignorant of Leicester and Kenilworth. We need not be utterly ashamed of him. Only—we will wait until he has been to look at the Warwick Vase before we go in. I can live without hearing its history from his lips.”
A notable race have been the Warwicks in English legends and history, for scores of generations. Princely in magnificence; doughty in war; in love, ardent; in ambition, measureless. Under Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, and Guelph, they have never lacked a man to stand near the throne and maintain worthily their dignity. But, in the long avenue of stateliness there are heads loftier than their fellows. Once in an age, one has stood grandly apart, absorbent of such active interest and living sympathy as we cannot bestow upon family or clan.
As at Carisbrooke, Charles Stuart and his hapless daughter are continually present to our imagination; and the grandmother, whose head, like his, rolled in the sawdust of an English scaffold, glides a pale, lovely shade with us through the passages of Holyrood; as at Kenilworth, we think of Elizabeth, the guest, more than of Leicester, the host, and in Trinity Church at Coventry, pass carelessly by painted windows exquisite in modern workmanship, to seek in an obscure aisle the patched fragment of glass that commemorates the chaste Godiva’s sacrifice for her people—so there was for us one Lord of Warwick Castle, one Hero of Warwickshire. I shall confess to so many sentimental weaknesses, so many historical heresies in the course of this volume, that I may as well divulge this pampered conceit frankly and without apology.
For us—foremost and pre-eminent among the mighty men of the house of Warwick who have “found their hands” for battle and for statecraft since the foundations of Cæsar’s Tower were laid, stands Earl Guy, Goliath and Paladin of the line. Of his deeds of valor, authentic and mythical, the witch at the Lodge has much to tell—the traditionary lore of the district, more.
“I am not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand,”
Shakspeare makes a man of the people say. Sir Guy overthrew and slew the giant Colbrand in the year 926, according to Dugdale. Is not the story of this and a hundred other feats of arms recorded in the “Booke of the most victoryous Prince Guy of Warwick”? When he fell in love with the Lady Lettice—(or Phillis—traditions disagree about the name), the fairest maiden in the kingdom, she set him on to perform other prodigies of valor in the hope of winning her hand. In joust and in battle-field, at home and afar, he wore her colors in his helmet and her image in his heart.
“She appoynted unto Earl Guy many and grievous tasks, all of which he did. And soe in tyme it came to pass that he married her.”
They lived in Warwick Castle, a fortress then, in reality, and of necessity, for a few peaceful years. How many we do not know, only that children were born unto them, and that Lettice, laying aside the naughtiness of early coquetry, grew gentler, more lovable and more fond each day, while Earl Guy waxed silent and morose under the pressure of a mysterious burden, never shared with the wife he adored and had periled his soul to win. Suddenly and secretly he withdrew to the cell of a holy hermit who lived but three miles away, and was lost to the world he had filled with rumors of “derring-doing.” The Countess Lettice, distracted by grief at the disappearance of her lord, and the failure of her efforts to trace the direction of his flight, without a misgiving that while her detectives—who must have been of the dullest—scoured land and sea in search of the missing giant, he was hidden within sight of the turret-windows of Guy’s Tower—withdrew into the seclusion of her castle and gave herself up to works of piety and benevolence. Guy’s children had her tenderest care; next to them her poor tenantry. Upon stated days of the week a crowd of these pensioners presented themselves at her gates and were fed by her servants. Among them came for—some say, twenty, others, forty years, a beggar, bent in figure, with muffled features, in rags, and unaccompanied by so much as a dog, who silently received his dole of the Countess’s charity and went his way challenged by none. We hope, in hearing it, that the Lady Lettice, her fair face the lovelier for the chastening of her great grief, sometimes showed herself to the waiting petitioners. If she did, weeping had surely dulled her vision that she did not recognize Earl Guy under his labored disguise, for he was a Saul even among brawny Saxons and the semi-barbarous islanders. If the eremite had such chance glimpses of his love, they were the only earthly consolation vouchsafed him in the tedious life of mortification and prayer. While Lettice, in her bower among her maidens, prayed for his return, refusing all intercourse with the gay world, her husband divided his time between the cave where he dwelt alone and the oratory of the hermit-monk where he spent whole days in supplication, prone upon the earth.
Poor, tortured, ignorant soul! grand in remorse and in penance as in war and in love! He confessed often to the monk, seldom speaking to him at other times. The priest kept faithfully the dread secrets confided to him. His absolution, if he granted it, did not ease the burdened soul. The end came when the long exile had dried up life and spirit. From his death-bed Earl Guy sent to his wife, by the hand of one of her hinds, a ring she had given him in the days of their wedded joy, “praying her, for Jesu’s sake to visit the wretch from whom it came.” He died in her faithful arms. They were buried, side by side, near his cave.
This is still pointed out to visitors—a darksome recess, partly natural, enlarged by burrowing hands—perhaps by those of the “victoryous Prince Guy.”
I drew from the Leamington Library, one Saturday afternoon, a queer little book, prepared under the auspices of a local archæological society, and treating at some length of recent discoveries in Guy’s Cave by an eminent professor of the comparatively new science of classic archæology. Far up in one corner he had uncovered rude cuttings in the rock, and with infinite patience and ingenuity, obtained an impression of them. The surface of the stone is friable; the letters are such clumsy Runic characters as a warrior of the feudal age would have made had he turned his thoughts to penmanship. The language is a barbarous Anglo-Saxon. But they have made out Lettice’s name, twice repeated, and in another place, Guy’s. This last is appended to a line of prayer for “relief from this heavy”—or “grievous”—“load.”
I read the treatise aloud that evening, excited and triumphant.
“Now, who dare ridicule us for believing in Prince Guy?”
“It all fits in too well,” said candid Prima, sorrowfully.
But the local savans do not discredit the discovery on that account. We drove out to Guy’s Cliff the next afternoon to attend service in the family chapel of the Percys, whose handsome mansion is built hard by. The stables are hewn out of the same rocky ridge in which Guy dug his cell. The chapel occupies the site of the old oratory. The bell was tinkling for the hour of worship as we entered the porch. It is a pretty little building, of gray stone, as are the surrounding offices, and on this occasion was tolerably well filled with servants and tenants of “the Family.” In a front slip sat the worshippers from the Great House—an old lady in widow’s mourning, who was, we were told, Lady Percy, and three portly British matrons, simple in attire and devout in demeanor. A much more august personage, pursy and puffing behind a vast red waistcoat, whom we supposed to be Chief Butler on week days and verger on Sabbath, assigned to us a seat directly back of the ladies, and, what was of more consequence in our eyes, in a line with a niche in which stands a gigantic statue of Earl Guy. This was set up on the site of the oratory, two hundred years after his death, by the first of the Plantagenets, Henry II.
“Our lord, the King, has each day a school for right well-lettered men,” says a chronicler of his reign. “Hence, his conversation that he hath with them is busy discussing of questions. None is more honest than our king in speaking, ne in alms largess. Therefore, as Holy Writ saith, we may say of him—‘His name is a precious ointment, and the alms of him all the church shall take.’ ”
Whether as an erudite antiquarian, or as a pious son of the church he caused this statue to be placed here, History, nor its elder sister, Tradition informs us. We may surmise shrewdly, and less charitably, that repentant visitings