Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
drawbridge to Cæsar’s Tower, and the queen, riding upon it, was greeted by mythological deities, who offered her gifts from vineyard, garden, field, and fen, beginning the ovation where the modern hags had pressed upon us poor pictures, acerb pears and apples.
This, then, was Kenilworth. We strolled into the Banqueting or Great Hall—now floorless—where Elizabeth and Leicester led the minuet on the night when the favorite’s star was highest and brightest; laughing among ourselves, in recalling the Scottish diplomat’s saying that “his queen danced neither so high nor so disposedly” as did the Maiden Monarch. We climbed Mervyn’s Tower in which Amy Robsart had her lodging; looked down into “The Pleasaunce,” a turfy ruin, in its contracted bounds a dismay to us until the surveyor’s chain measured, for our comfort, what must have been the former limits. It is now an irregular area, scarcely more than a strip of ground, and we sought vainly for a nook sufficiently retired to have been the scene of the grotto-meeting between Elizabeth and the deserted wife.
“Of course you are aware that Amy Robsart was never at Kenilworth; that she had been dead two years when Elizabeth visited Leicester here; that he was secretly married again, this time to the beautiful widow of Lord Sheffield, the daughter of Lord William Howard, uncle to the queen?” said Caput, drily.
Argument with an archæologist is as oxygen to fire. We turned upon him, instead, in a crushing body of infidel denial.
“We received, without cavil, your account—and Scott’s—of the torch-light procession, including Elizabeth’s diamonds, after a day’s hunting, and horsemanship; of Leicester’s glittering ‘like a golden image with jewels and cloth of gold.’ We decline to discredit Scott now!”
He shrugged his shoulders; took a commanding position upon the ruined wall; his eyes swept the landscape discontentedly.
“We dwarf the history of Kenilworth to one little week,” he said. “I am tempted to wish that Scott had never written that fiction, splendid as it is. Do you know that Cæsar’s Tower—by the way, it will outlast Leicester’s, whose building, like the founder, lacks integrity—do you know that Cæsar’s Tower was begun early in the twelfth century? that it was the stronghold of Simon de Montfort in his quarrel with Henry III.? Edward Longshanks, then Prince Edward, attacked de Montfort in Sussex, took from him banners and other spoils and drove him back into Kenilworth, which the insurgents held for six months. His father, the Earl of Leicester, met Edward’s army next day on the other side of the Avon—over there!” pointing. “Gazing, as he marched, toward his good castle of Kenilworth, he saw his own banners advancing, and soon perceived that they were borne by the enemy.
“It is over!” said the old warrior. “The Lord have mercy upon our souls, for our bodies are Prince Edward’s!”
“He was killed, fighting like a lion, in the battle that followed. And, all the while, his son, chafing at his inability to help him, lay—the lion’s cub at bay—within these walls. There were Leicesters and Leicesters, although some are apt to ignore all except the basest of the name—the Robert Dudley of whom it was said, ‘that he was the son of a duke, the brother of a king, the grandson of an esquire, and the great-grandson of a carpenter; that the carpenter was the only honest man in the family, and the only one of Leicester’s near relatives who died in his bed.’ Edward II.—poor, favorite-ridden wretch! was a prisoner at Kenilworth after the execution of the Despensers, father and son. He was forced to sign his own deposition in the Great Hall, where you thought of nothing just now but Elizabeth’s dancing. The breaking of the white wand—a part of the ceremonial at a king’s death—by Sir Thomas Blount, before the eyes of the trembling sovereign, is one of the most dramatic events in English history. Another royal imbecile, Henry VI., had an asylum here during Jack Cade’s Rebellion. There was stringent need for such fortresses as Kenilworth and Warwick in those times.”
We heard it all—and with interest, sitting upon the edge of the ivied wall of Mervyn’s Tower, overlooking a land as fair as Beulah, in alternations of hill and vale; of plains golden with grain, and belts and groves of grand old trees; the many-gabled roofs and turrets of great houses rising from the midst of these, straggling villages of red-brick cottages on the skirts of manorial estates indicating the semi-feudal system still prevailing in the land. The Avon gleamed peacefully between the borders tilled by men who never talk, and most of whom have never heard, of the brave Leicester who fought his last battle where they swing their scythes. Yet he was known to the yeomen of his day as “Sir Simon the Righteous.”
“There were Leicesters and Leicesters,” Caput had truly said, and that the proudest and most magnificent of them all was the most worthless. But when we had picked our way down the broken stairs, and sat in the shadow of Cæsar’s Tower, upon the warm sward, watching men drive the stakes and stretch the cords of a marquee, for the use of a party who were to pic-nic on the morrow among the ruins, we said:—
“To-morrow, we will see Leicester’s Hospital and Leicester’s tomb, at Warwick.”
The walk from Leamington to Warwick was one greatly affected by us as a morning and afternoon “constitutional.” It was delightful in itself, and we never wearied of rambling up one street and down another of the town. We never saw Broek, in Holland, but it cannot be cleaner than this Rip Van Winkle of a Warwickshire village, where the very children are too staid and civil—or too devoid of enterprise—to stare at strangers. A house under fifty years of age would be a disreputable innovation. House-leek, and yellow stone-crop, and moss grow upon the roofs; the windows have small panes, clear and bright, and, between parted muslin curtains, each window-sill has its pots of geraniums and gillyflowers.
We bought some buns in a little shop, the mistress of which was a pretty young woman, with the soft English voice one hears even among the lowly, and the punctilious misapplication of h we should, by this time, have ceased to observe.
“The H’earl h’of Leicester’s ’Ospital h’is a most h’interesting h’object,” she assured us, upon our inquiring the shortest way thither. “H’all strangers who h’admire ’istorical relicts make a point h’of visiting the H’earl h’of Leicester’s ’Ospital.”
The street has been regraded, probably laid out and built up since the “ ’istorical relict” was founded, in 1571. We would call it a “Refuge,” the object being to provide a home for the old age of a “Master and twelve brethren,” the latter, invalided or superannuated tenants or soldiers, who had spent their best days in the service of the Leicesters. It was a politic stroke to offer the ease, beer, and tobacco of the Refuge as a reward for hard work and hard fighting. We may be sure Robert Dudley did not overlook this. We may hope—if we can—that he had some charitable promptings to the one good deed of his life.
The Hospital is perched high, as if deposited there by the deluge, upon an Ararat platform of its own. The plastered walls are criss-crossed by chocolate-colored beams; the eaves protrude heavily; odd carvings, such as a boy might make with a pocket-knife, divide the second and third stories. It is a picturesque antique. People in America would speak of it, were it set up in one of our suburban towns, as a “remarkable specimen of the Queen Anne style.” One learns not to say such things where Queen Anne is a creature of yesterday. A curious old structure is the “relict,”—we liked and adopted the word—and so incommodious within we marveled that the brethren, now appointed from Gloucester and Warwickshire, did not “commute,” as did “our twelve poor gentlemen” in Dickens’ Haunted Man. But they still have their “pint”—I need not say of what—a day, and their “pipe o’ baccy,” and keep their coal in a vast, cobwebby hall, in which James I. once dined at a town banquet. They cook their dinners over one big kitchen-fire, but eat them in their own rooms; have daily prayer, each brother using his own prayer-book, in the Gothic chapel over the doorway, the “H’earl of Leicester” staring at them out of the middle of the painted window, and wear blue cloth cloaks in cold weather, or in the street, adorned with silver badges upon the sleeves. These bear the Leicester insignia, the Bear and Ragged Staff, and are said to be the very ones presented by him to the Hospital. Sir Walter Scott is—according to Caput—responsible for the fact that, in the opinion of the ladies of our company, the most valuable articles preserved in the institution