Part 22

If at Northampton the fog lifts, and the autumnal sun has all the rest of the day to itself, you arrive with unimpaired strength for what you have come to see. Yet with all your energy conserved on the way, you will not be fully equal to the demand upon you. Northampton did not fail to begin with the Britons, and though it was not a permanent Roman station, and lay dormant during the Saxon hierarchy, it revived sufficiently under Saxon rule in the eleventh century to be twice taken and once burnt by the Danish invaders. It suffered under the Normans, but was walled and fortified in the Conqueror’s reign, and began a new life with the inspiration of his oppressions. A picturesque incident of its civil history, which was early a record of resistance to the royal will, was Thomas à Becket’s defiance of Henry II., when the King tried to reduce the proud churchman to the common obedience before the laws. The archbishop, followed by great crowds of the people, appeared as summoned, but when the Earl of Leicester bade him, in the old Norman form, hear the judgment rendered against him, he interrupted with the words, “Son and Earl, hear me first! I forbid you to judge me! I decline your tribunal, and refer my quarrel to the decision of the Pope.” Then he retired, and shortly escaped to Flanders, but coming back to Canterbury, was murdered, as all men know, by four of the King’s knights, at the altar in the cathedral.

Perhaps the feeling of the people was less for the prelate than against the prince, for the first Protestant heresies spread rapidly in Northampton, and the doctrines of Wickliffe had such acceptance that the mayor himself was accused of holding them, and of favoring the spread of Lollardy. In the two great Civil Wars, Northampton stood for the White Rose and then for the Parliament, against the two kings. In 1460, a great battle was fought under the city’s walls; ten thousand of Henry’s “tall Englishmen” were killed or drowned in the river Nene, and Henry himself was brought prisoner into the town. In 1642, the guns of the Puritan garrison “plaid for about two hours” on “the cavaleers and shot about twenty of them” when they attempted to assault the place, which became a rendezvous for the parliamentarians, and sent them frequent aid from its fifteen thousand in their attacks on the neighboring places holding for the King. In 1645, both parties met in force, a little northwest of the town, and Cromwell, who had joined Fairfax, won the battle of Naseby after Fairfax had lost it, and with an overwhelming victory ended the war against Charles.

If any Washingtons were in the fight, as some of so numerous a line might very well have been, it was on the King’s side. They put their faith in princes while they remained in England; it wanted yet a hundred and thirty years, at the remoteness of Virginia, to school them to the final diffidence which they were not the first of the Americans to feel. The slow evolution of the race out of devoted subjects into devoted citizens was accomplished in stuff other than that of the Puritan chief who soon after could “say this of Naseby,--that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men ... I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would by things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance, and God did it.” Yet the faith in poor common men, once kindled in Washington, if not so mixed with piety as Cromwell’s, outlasted that through parliamentary trials as severe as ever it was put to by poor uncommon men.

Non-conformity, civil as well as religious, which the Washingtons were no part of, was the note of Northampton from the first, and to the last it has been represented in Parliament by such bold dissentients as Bradlaugh and Mr. Labouchere. It is the great shoe-town of England, and apparently there is nothing like leather to inspire a manly resistance to the pretensions of authority. But the Washingtons of Northampton were never any part of the revolt against kingly assumptions. The Lawrence Washington who was twice Mayor of Northampton profited by Henry VIII.’s suppression of the monasteries to possess himself of Sulgrave Manor, where his descendants dwelt for a hundred years and more, until 1658, when their discomforts under the Commonwealth, and their failing fortunes, made them glad of the protection of their noble kindred the Spencers at Brington.

It is not clear how the house at Little Brington, which is known as the Washington house, was granted them, or how much it was loan or gift of the Spencers; but it does not greatly matter now. The Washingtons, who had shared the politics of their cousins, were rather passive royalists, but they suffered the adversities of the cause they had chosen, and they did not apparently enjoy the prosperity which the Restoration brought to such of their side as could extort recognition from the

second Charles, as thankless as the first Charles was faithless; and neither the Washingtons who staid in England, nor those who went to Virginia, had ever any profit from their fidelity to the Stuarts. They were gentlemen, who were successful in business when they turned to trade, but in the household records of their noble cousins at their seat of Althorp there is said to be proof of the frequent goodness of the Spencers to the needy Washingtons of Little Brington. If the Washingtons paid for the favor they enjoyed in the ways that poor relations do, it is not to the discredit of either line that a lady of their family should have been at one time housekeeper at Althorp. One fancies, quite gratuitously, that Lucy Washington was a woman of spirit who wished to earn the favor which her people had, whether less or more, from their kinsfolk. Two of the Washingtons elsewhere, who made fortunes, were knighted, but the direct ancestor of our Washington was a clergyman who suffered more than the common misfortunes of the Washingtons at Brington. He was falsely accused of drunkenness at a time when any charge was willingly heard against a royalist clergyman, and was ejected from his rich benefice as a scandalous minister. His character was afterwards cleared, but he had thenceforth only a small living to the end, and probably was, like his kindred at Brington, befriended by the Spencers.

The Lawrence Washington who was Mayor of Northampton and the grantee of Sulgrave, was chosen first in 1532 and last in 1546. The place was then, as it continued to be for a hundred and thirty odd years, the mediæval town of which the visitor now sees only a few relics in here and there an ancient house. Happily most of the old churches escaped the fire that swept away the old dwellings in 1675, and left the modern Northampton to grow up from their ashes the somewhat American-looking town we now find it. The side streets are set with neat brick houses, prevailingly commonplace. One might fancy one’s self, coming towards the Church of All Saints, in the business centre of some minor New England city, but with rather less of glare and noise, and held in a certain abeyance by the presence of the church. All Saints is not one of the churches which escaped the flames; and of the original structure only the Gothic tower is left; the rest, a somewhat vague little history of the city says, “is wholly modern.” But modernity, like some other things, is relative, and a New England town might find a very satisfying antiquity in an edifice which at its latest dates back to Queen Anne, and at its earliest to Charles II. The King gave a thousand tons of timber from his forest of Whittlebury towards the rebuilding of the church, and for this munificence he has been immortalized by sculpture over the centre of a most beautiful and noble Ionic, or Christopher-Wrennish, portico, where he stands in the figure of a Roman centurion, with, naturally, a full-bottomed wig on. Few heroic statues are more amusing, and the spirit of the royal reprobate so travestied might be very probably supposed to share the spectator’s enjoyment. Behind one end of the portico, which extends for eighty feet across the whole front of the church, were once the rooms in which many non-conformists of Northampton were tried for the offence of thinking for themselves in matters of religion, which were then so apt to become matters of politics.

The members of the Corporation were formerly the patrons of the living, and the mayor still has his seat in the church under the arms of the town, and doubtless that official had it in the older building before the fire,

when the mayor was Lawrence Washington. In the wall is a tablet to the memory of a man who was born in the century when Lawrence was twice chosen chief magistrate of Northampton, and who died in the century when George Washington was twice chosen Chief Magistrate of the United States. John Bailes was a button-maker by trade, and if he links the memories of those far-parted Washingtons together, by force of longevity, it is with no merit of his, though it is recorded of him that “he had his hearing, Sight & Memory to ye last.” I leave more mystical inquirers to trace a relationship between the actual civilizations of Northampton and the United States in the presence, beside the church, of a house of refection, liquid rather than solid, calling itself the Geisha Café. If ever the ghost of the Merry Monarch comes to haunt his Roman effigy in the full-bottomed wig, it may humorously linger a moment at the door of the genial resort.

It is mainly through her churches that Northampton has her hold on the American patriot who is also a person of taste, as one must try to be in going from one church to another. The reader who could give as many days to them as I could give minutes, would have a proportional reward, whether from St. Peter’s, unsurpassed for the effect of its rich Norman; or from St. Sepulchre, with the rotunda which marks it one of the four churches remaining in England out of all those built during the Crusades in memory of the Holy Sepulchre. There are other old churches, but perhaps not dating back with these to the ten and eleven hundreds. One, which I cannot now identify, bears tragical witness to the rigor of the times in the scars on the masonry about the height of a man, where certain royalists were stood beside the portal to be shot. The wonder is that the grief ever goes out of such things, but it does, and they who died, and they who did them to death, have long been friends in their children’s children.

It is curious how everything becomes matter of æsthetic interest, if you give it time. We stood looking at the Queen’s Cross, near Northampton, which rises not so very far from the field of Naseby, and with our eyes on the wasted beauty of the shrine, we two Americans begun by a common impulse to say verses from Macaulay’s stalwart ballad of the battle. Our English companion, who was a cleric of high ritualistic type, listened unmoved by any conscience he might have had against the purport of the lines as we rolled them forth, and, for all we could see, he had the same quality of pleasure as ourselves in the adjuration to the Puritans to “bear up another minute” for the coming of “brave Oliver,” and in the supposed narrator’s abhorrence of “the man of blood,” whom brave Oliver presently put to rout.

But see, he turns, he flies! Shame on those cruel eyes That bore to look on torture and that dare not look on war.

If he had a feeling as to our feeling, it was amusement that after two centuries and a half there should be any feeling about either party in the strife, and doubtless he did not take us too seriously.

He sent us later on our way to Great Brington with the assurance that the rector of the church would be waiting us in it to show us the tomb of the Washington buried there. His courtesy was the merit of my friend the genealogist with whom I had exhausted the American origins in London, and who had now come with me into the country for the most important of them all. When we were well started on our drive, that divine September afternoon, we would gladly have had it twelve rather than six miles from Northampton to Great Brington. The road was uncommonly open, or else it was lifted above the wonted level of English roads, and we could see over the tops of the hedges into the fields, instead of making the blindfold progress to which the wayfarer is usually condemned. It was not too late in the year or the day for a song-bird or so, and the wayside roses and hawthorns were so red with hips and haws that we gave them the praise of an American coloring for their foliage till we looked closer and found that the gayety was not of their leaves. Where the leaves felt the fall, they showed it in a sort of rheumatic stiffness, and a paling of their green to a sad gray, or a darkening of it to a yet sadder brown. But we did not notice this till we had turned from the highway, and were driving through Althorp Park. There was a model farm village before our turning, where some nobleman had experimented in making his tenants more comfortable than they could afford, in cottages too uniformly Tudoresque; but at differing distances, in various hollows and on various tops, there were more indigenous hamlets, huddling about the towers of their churches, and showing a red blur of tiles or a dun blur of walls, as we saw them alow or aloft. When we got well into the park there was only the undulation of the wooded surfaces, where wide oaks stood liberally about with an air of happy accident in their informal relation. I should like, for the sake of my romantic page, to put does under them; they were a very fit shelter for does; and I have read that does may sometimes be seen lightly flying from the visitors’ approach through the glades of the park. It was my characteristically commonplace luck to see none, but I hope that in their absence the reader will make no objection to the black and white sheep which I did abundantly see feeding everywhere. It will be remembered, or not unwillingly learned, that sheep were once the ambition, the enthusiasm of the Spencers, who made them early an interest of the region, so that it was the most perverse of fates which kept their greatest flock down to 19,999, when they aimed at 20,000. Still, if they were black-nosed sheep, the lower figure might represent a value greater than 20,000 of the common white-nosed sort. A black nose gives a sheep the touch of character which the species too often lacks: a hardy air of almost goatlike effrontery, yet without the cold-eyed irony of the goat, which forbids the lover of wickedness the sympathy which the black-nosed sheep inspires. A black-nosed lamb affects one more like a bad little boy whose face has not been washed that morning, or for several mornings, than anything else in nature; and it would not be easy to say which was more suggestive of racial innocence mixed with personal depravity. I am not able to say whether a black nose in a sheep adds to the merit of its mutton or its fleece, but I am sure that it adds a piquant charm to its appearance, and I do not know why we have not that variety of sheep in America. I dare say we have.

When presently we drove past Althorp house, standing at a dignified remove from our course, which was effectively the highway, I felt in its aspects the modernity which has always been characteristic of the family. It is of that agreeable period when the English architects were beginning to study for country houses the form of domestic classic which the Italian taught those willing to learn of them simplicity and grace at harmony with due state, and which is still the highest type of a noble mansion. The lady of the house more than two centuries back had been the Saccharissa of Suckling’s verse, and her charm remained to my vague associations with the place, where she figured in the revels of happier times, and then in her beneficences to the distressed clergy after the Civil War, when the darker days came to those of the Spencer praying and fighting. There is no reason why she should not be related in these to the Washingtons, who needed if they did not experience her kindness, and if the reader wishes to strain a point and make her more the friend than mistress of that Lucy Washington who was sometime housekeeper at Althorp, I will not be the one to gainsay him. For all me, he may figure these ladies in the priceless library of Althorp: priceless then, but sold in our tunes to Mrs. Rylands at Manchester, for a million and a half, and there made a monument to her husband’s memory. Many bolder things have been feigned than these ladies sitting together among the books, which would be the native air of the rhyme-worn Saccharissa, and discoursing with Mistress Lucy’s kinsman, Lawrence Washington, lately Fellow of Brasenose College, and lecturer and proctor at Oxford, and now rector of Purleigh, whence he was to be wrongfully removed for drunkenness: all with the simultaneity so common in the romance of historical type. How they would thee and thou one another as cousins of the seventeenth-century sort I leave the archæological novelist to inquire, gladly making over to him all my right and title in the affair. If he wishes to lug in the arrest of King Charles by Cornet Joyce of the Parliament forces, he can do it with no great violence, for it really happened hard by at Holmby House, whence the King was fond of coming to enjoy the gardens of Althorp. He can have Saccharissa and Mistress Lucy Washington, and his reverence Mr. Washington, looking down at the incident from a window of the library, and if he is the romanticist I take him for, he will easily have young Lawrence rapt in a vision of his great-great-grandson arresting the kingly power in America. The vision will have all the more fitness, in the reflections it suggests to the ancestor, from the fact, of which he will also be prescient, that both the Washingtons and Spencers, devoted and perhaps unreasoning royalists in their days, were destined to become more and more freed from their superstition, and to stand for greater freedom under different forms, as time went on. In his prophetic rapture, the Reverend Lawrence may have been puzzled to choose among his great-great-grandsons who was to fulfil it, for he was the father of a populous family counting seventeen in the first descent, and he could not have been blamed if he could not know George Washington by name, or identify him in his historical character.

It is this Lawrence Washington whose tablet one goes to revere in the church at Great Brington, where he lies entombed with the mother of his eight sons and nine daughters; and if one arrives at the sort of headland where the church stands on such a September afternoon as ours, and looks out from it over the lovely country undulating about its feet, one must try hard in one’s memory or imagination to match it with a scene of equal beauty. Of like beauty there is none except in some other English scenes like the home of Washington’s ancestors, and it is English in every feature and expression. The fields with their dividing hedges, the farmsteads snuggling in the hollows, the grouped or solitary trees, all softened in a sunny haze, and tented over with the milky-blue sky, form a landscape of which the immediate village, at the left of the headland, is a foreground,

with the human interest without which no picture lives.

I suppose that if I had been given my choice whether to have one of these village houses unroofed, and its simple drama revealed to me, I should have poorly chosen that rather than had the wooden cover lifted from the church floor where it protects the mortuary tablet of Lawrence Washington and his wife from the passing tread. But the rector of the church at Great Brington could not have gratified me in my preference, whereas he could and did lift the lid from the tablet in the nave, and let us read the inscription, and see the armorial bearings, in which the stars and stripes of our flag slept, undreaming of future glory, in the chrysalis arrest of the centuries since they had been the arms of a race of Northamptonshire gentlemen. The rector was in fact waiting for us at the church door, hospitably mindful of the commendation of our Northampton clerical friend, and we saw the edifice to all the advantage that his thoughtful patience could lend us. He had at once some other guests, in the young man and young woman who followed us in with their dog. They recalled themselves to the rector, who received them somewhat austerely, with his eyes hard upon their companion. “Did you mean to bring that animal with you?” he asked, and they pretended that the dog was an interloper, and the young man put him out in as much disgrace as he could bring himself to inflict. Probably there was an understanding between him and the dog; but the whole party took the rector’s reproof with a smiling humility and an unabated interest in the claims of the Washington tablet, and in fact the whole church, upon their attention. They somewhat distracted my own, which is at best an idle sort, easily wandering from Early English architecture to Later English character, and from perpendicular windows to people of any inclination. Yet, the church at Great Brington is most worthy to be studied in detail, for it is “notable even among the famous churches of Northamptonshire,” and it is the fitting last home of Washington’s ancestors.

I bring myself with some difficulty to own that the specific knowledge I have on this point, and several others in this vague narration, I owe to an agreeable sketch of “The Homes of the Washingtons” by Mr. John Leyland. But if I did not own it, some one would find me out, and it is best to confess my obligation together with my gratitude. I wish I had had the sketch with me at the time of my visit to Great Brington church, but I had not, and I lingered about in the church-yard, after we came out and the rector must leave us, under the spell of a quiet and in the keeping of associations unalloyed by information. For this reason I am unable to attribute its true significance to the old cross which stands apart from the church, and guides and guards the way to the place of graves beside it. I must own that at first glance it has somewhat the effect of an old-fashioned sign-post at an inn yard, and perhaps that were no bad symbol of the welcome the peaceful place holds for the life-weary wayfarers who lie down to their rest in it. Great Brington remains to me an impression of cottage streets,--doubtless provided with some shops. But when we had taken leave of the rector, and looked our last at the elegy-breathing church-yard, with its turf heaving in many a mouldering heap as if in decasyllabic quatrains, we drove away to see the Washington house in Little Brington.