Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
much of heart-ache and heart-sinking, of hope deferred, and baffled desire may have been stitched into these faded scraps of stuff that have so long outlasted her and her generation! Needlework has been the chosen confidante of women since Eve, with shaking fingers and tear-blinded eyes, quilted together fig-leaves, in token of the transgression that has kept her daughters incessantly busy upon tablier, panier, and jupon.
From the Hospital we went to St. Mary’s Church. There is a cellary smell in all these old stone churches where slumber the mighty dead, suggestive of must, mould, and cockroaches, and on the hottest day a chill, like that of an ice-house. Our every step was upon a grave; the walls were faced with mortuary brasses and tablets. The grating of the ever-rusty lock and hinges awakened groans and whispers in far recesses; our subdued tones were repeated in dreary sighs and mutterings, as if the crowd below stairs were complaining that wealth and fame could not purchase the repose they were denied in life. Our cicerone in St. Mary’s was a pleasant-faced woman, in a bonnet—of course. We never saw a pew-holder or church-guide of her sex, bonnetless while exercising her profession. Usually, the bonnet was black. It was invariably shabby. St. Paul’s interdict against women uncovering the head in church may have set the fashion. Prudent dread of neuralgias, catarrhs and toothaches would be likely to perpetuate it. The guide here neither evaded nor superadded hs, and we made a grateful note of the novelty. She conducted us first to what we knew in our reading as the “Chapel of Richard Beauchamp.”
“The Beechum Chapel? yes, sir!” said our conductress, leading the way briskly along the aisle, through oratory and chantry up a very worn flight of steps, under a graceful archway to a pavement of black-and-white lozenge-shaped marbles. The Founder sleeps in state second to no lord of high degree in the kingdom, if we except Henry VII. whose chapel in Westminster Abbey is yet more elaborate in design and decoration than that of the opulent “Beechums.” The Bear and Ragged Staff hold their own among the stone sculptures of ceiling and walls. The former is studded with shields embossed with the arms of Warwick, and of Warwick and Beauchamp quartered. The stalls are of dark brown oak, carved richly—blank shields, lions, griffins, muzzled and chained bears being the most prominent devices. The “Great Earl,” in full armor of brass, lies at length upon a gray marble sarcophagus. A brazen hoop-work, in shape exactly resembling the frame of a Conestoga wagon-top, is built above him. Statuettes of copper-gilt mourners, representing their surviving kinsmen and kinswomen, occupy fourteen niches in the upright sides of the tomb. Sword and dagger are at his side; a swan watches at his uncovered head, a griffin and bear at his feet; a casque pillows his head; his hands are raised in prayer. The face is deeply lined and marked of feature, the brows seeming to gather frowningly while we gaze. It is a marvelous effigy. The woman looked amazed, Caput disgusted, when we walked around it once, gave a minute and a half to respectful study of the Earl’s face and armor; smiled involuntarily in the reading of how he had “decessed ful cristenly the last day of April, the yeare of oure lord god AMCCCCXXXIX.”—then inquired abruptly:—“Where is the tomb of Queen Elizabeth’s Leicester?”
As a general, Leicester was a notorious failure; in statecraft, a bungler; as a man, he was a transgressor of every law, human and divine; as a conqueror of women’s hearts, he had no peer in his day, and we cannot withhold from him this pitiful meed of honor—if honor it be—when we read that “his most sorrowful wife Lætitia, through a sense of conjugal love and fidelity, hath put up this monument to the best and dearest of husbands.”
“By Jove!” said Dux, again.
“She ought to speak well of him!” retorted Caput. “He murdered her first husband, and repudiated his second wife Douglas Howard (Lady Sheffield) in order to espouse Lettice, not to mention the fact that he had tried ineffectually about the time of the Kenilworth fête, to rid himself of No. 2 by poison. He was a hero of determined measures. Witness the trifling episode of Amy Robsart to which the Earl is indebted for our visit to-day.”
We stood our ground in calm disdain of the thrust; were not to be diverted from our steadfast contemplation of the King of Hearts. That his superb physique was not overpraised by contemporaries, the yellow marble bears satisfactory evidence, yet the chief charm of his face was said to be his eyes. The forehead is lofty; the head nobly-shaped; the nose aquiline; the mouth, even under the heavy moustache, was, we could see, feminine in mould and sweetness. His hands, joined in death, as they seldom were in life, in mute prayer upon his breast, are of patrician beauty. He is clad in full armor, and wears the orders bestowed upon him by his royal and doating mistress. He was sadly out of favor with her at the time of his death in 1588. She survived him fifteen years. If she had turned aside in one of her famous “progresses” to look upon this altar-tomb, would she have smiled, sobbed or sworn upon reading that his third countess had written him down a model Benedict? His sorrowful Lætitia dragged on the load of life for forty-six years after her Leicester’s decease, and now lies by his side also with uplifted praying hands. She is a prim matron, richly bedight “with ruff and cuff and farthingales and things.” The chaste contour and placidity of her features confuse us as to her identity with the “light o’ love” who winked at the murder that made her the wife of Lady Douglas Howard’s husband. The exemplary couple are encompassed by a high and handsomely wrought iron fence; canopied by a sort of temple-front supported by four Corinthian pillars. It is almost unnecessary to remark that the ubiquitous Bear and Ragged Staff mounts guard above this. A few yards away is the statue of a pretty little boy, well-grown for his three years; his chubby cheeks encircled by a lace-frilled cap; an embroidered vestment reaching to his feet. He lies like father and mother, prone on his back, upon a flat tombstone.
“The noble Impe Robert of Dudley,” reads the inscription, with a list of other titles too numerous and ponderous to be jotted down or recollected. The only legitimate son of Amy’s, Douglas’, Elizabeth’s, Lettice’s—Every-woman’s Leicester, and because he stood in the way of the succession of some forgotten uncle or cousin, poisoned to order, by his nurse! “The pity of it!” says First thought at the sight of the innocent baby-face. Second thought—“How well for himself and his kind that his father’s and mother’s son did not mature into manhood!”
Leicester left another boy, the son of Lady Douglas, whom he cast off after she refused to die of the poison that “left her bald.” Warwickshire traditions are rife with stories of her and her child who also bore his father’s name. Miss Strickland adverts to one, still repeated by the gossips of Old Warwick, in which the disowned wife, with disheveled hair and streaming tears, rocks young Robert in her arms, crooning the ballad we mothers have often sung without dreaming of its plaintive origin:—
“Balow my baby, lie still and sleep!
It grieves me sair to see thee weep.”
To this Robert his father bequeathed Kenilworth and its estates in the same will that denied his legitimacy. The heir assumed the title of Earl of Warwick, but “the crown”—alias, Elizabeth—laid claim to and repossessed herself of castle and lands.
Thus, the Hospital is the sole remaining “relict” of the man who turned Queen Bess’s wits out of doors, and while her madness lasted, procured for himself the titles and honors set in array in the Latin epitaph upon his monument.
In another chapel—a much humbler one, octagonal in shape, is the tomb of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. He selected the chamber as the one in which he desired to be buried, and wrote the epitaph:
“Fulke Greville, Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Counsellor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney.”
Upon the sarcophagus were the rusty helmet, sword and other pieces of armor he had worn without fear and without reproach;—a record in Old English outweighing with righteous and thoughtful people, the fulsome Latinity of Leicester’s Grecian altar and the labored magnificence of the “Beechum Chapel.”
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