Part 14

At Ross we ought to have taken to the water, for the scenery of the Lower Wye, with its abrupt cliffs, rich woods, and smiling meadows, is one of the prides of England, but we had run so far behind our dates, by the dear fault of Shropshire, that we went on by train. The rail, however, follows the river, and we had--or thought we had--swift glimpses of the romantic ruins of Wilton Castle, one of the old Border keeps, and of Goodrich castle, where Wordsworth met the little maid of "We are Seven." This valley of the Wye, which was to the poet Gray the delight of his eyes and "the very seat of pleasure," yields striking effects in wooded crag and gorge at Symond's Yat, but we enjoyed hardly less the tranquil reaches of green pasture, where the afternoon sunshine still lay so warm that little groups of sheep were cuddled at the foot of every tree. The ancient town of Monmouth, in its nest of hills, reminded us not merely of its royal native, Henry V,

--"Ay, he was born at Monmouth, Captain Gower"--

but of that twelfth-century romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose "History of the Britons," with its fluent account of the doings of hitherto unheard-of kings, especially Arthur the Giant Killer and his false queen Guanhumara, so scandalised his contemporaries that they did not scruple to call him a "shameless and impudent liar" and to report that legions of devils had been seen hovering over his manuscript. About seven miles to the southwest of Monmouth is Raglan Castle, where Charles I took refuge after Naseby. Its gallant lord, the Marquis of Worcester, then in his eighty-fourth year, stood a siege of ten weeks, not capitulating until the loyal little garrison, fast diminishing, was reduced to such extremities that the horses ate their halters for want of forage. I had visited, some fifteen years before, those war-scarred towers, tapestried with marvellous masses of ivy, and from the windows of the Royal Apartments had looked out on that lovely western view in which the harassed Stuart took solace. Lord Herbert, son of the staunch old royalist, invented and constructed a machine, the terror of the peasantry, which has a good claim to be counted the first steam-engine. The so-called Yellow Tower was the scene of his wizard craft. The Great Hall now lies open to wind and weather, and but one wall of the chapel stands, its two stone effigies peeping out from their ivy-curtained niches.

We quitted the train at Tintern, where our stay was all too short, notwithstanding the memory of tranquil weeks spent there in a previous summer. The ruins of Tintern Abbey are of a peculiarly austere and noble beauty. Its foundation dates back to 1131, only three years after the coming of the Cistercians into England. It was the third of their English houses, which came to number nearly two hundred. It stood in its full grace, the Gothic style just leaning toward the Decorated, when the Dissolution struck its uses from it and left it to gradual decay. Roofed by the blue skies of a summer noon, with wooded hills looking in through the unglazed mullions of the windows, or in the glory of the moonlight, the silver lustre flooding empty nave and silent cloisters, and illuming with its searching rays rare bits of carven foliage, Tintern wears perhaps a purer loveliness in its desolation than ever before. Our farewell visit was paid in an early morning hour. In that freshness of the day, those slender pillars and arches delicately wrought presented an aspect more than ever grave and melancholy. There is nothing of the grotesque here, and comparatively little of ornamental detail to distract the mind from the impression of the whole. The rooks that peered over from their lofty perch above the great east window, whose remaining traceries were etched in shadow on the turf, and the bright-eyed little red-breasts that hopped fearlessly about did not, it is true, observe the Cistercian rule of silence; but the shining wings of doves fluttering from one grey wall to another might well have been the embodied prayers of those White Monks who so often chanted matins at the long-since fallen altars.

We went from the Abbey to the train. Still the railroad followed the winding river. A fleeting sight of the towering Wyndcliff reminded me of a by-gone afternoon when, unexpectedly bringing up on a ramble at Moss Cottage, I undertook, quite too late for prudence, a solitary ascent of this inviting steep. From the summit I looked out over mellow-tinted autumnal woods to the looping ribbon of the Wye, the white cliffs known as the Twelve Apostles rising beyond, and still beyond the sail-bearing Severn, with villages and church-towers discernible in the far distance and, best of all, the rose of sunset glowing upon the face of the Black Mountains. It was a sublime vision, but when the western flush had faded out and I must needs descend by that ever-darkening path which took its zigzag course among thick yews and down slippery slabs of slate, I came to the conclusion it was not written that my neck should be broken on this side of the Atlantic.

We had only an hour at Chepstow, but the picturesque river-town was not new to us, and the hour sufficed to revive our memories of its rock-based old castle overhanging the Wye, the castle where Jeremy Taylor was once imprisoned, and its Norman church with deeply recessed doorway. At Chepstow we took train for Newport, crossing the strip of garden-land that lies between the Wye, the Gloucestershire boundary, and its almost parallel stream, the Usk. West Monmouth is Black Country, forming a part of the South Wales coal-field, and we were not surprised to find Newport a busy harbour, grimy with its exports of coal and iron. We heard a strange tongue spoken all about us and realised that Monmouthshire, nominally English since the time of Henry VIII, is still largely Welsh in manners and in character. The old Newport is much obscured by the new. The castle, where Simon de Montfort took refuge, is in good part hidden behind a flourishing brewery, but the Church of St. Woollos, built high upon Stow Hill, still dominates the scene. This church has a history even older than its fine Norman architecture, for it is told that Harold once plundered the town, desecrating the original sanctuary and breaking open the cheeses, which he found filled with blood. Then he was aghast and repented, but a month later, according to the monastic record, "for that wickedness and other crimes" he fell at Hastings.

Our goal was Caerleon, three miles up the Usk, a quiet little village that was once the capital of South Wales, once the Isca Silurum of the Romans, and once, in the misty realm of romance, that Caerleon-upon-Usk where Arthur was crowned and where the ninth of his twelve great battles was fought. Tennyson's Lancelot relates to spellbound listeners in the Castle of Astolat how

"at Caerleon had he helped his lord, When the strong neighings of the wild White Horse Set every gilded parapet shuddering."

But the "Mabinogion," that treasury of fanciful old Welsh tales, gives, by way of contrast, a naïve and somewhat gaudy picture of the king enjoying his repose:

"King Arthur was at Caerlleon upon Usk; and one day he sat in his chamber; and with him were Owain the son of Urien, and Kynon the son of Clydno, and Kai the son of Kyner; and Gwenhwyar and her hand-maidens at needlework by the window.... In the center of the chamber, King Arthur sat upon a seat of green rushes, over which was spread a covering of flame-coloured satin; and a cushion of red satin was under his elbow.... And the King went to sleep."

If the ghosts of the Second Augustan Legion could return for an hour to this their frontier station, deep in the British wilds, they would find ranged and labelled in a neat museum shards of their pottery, broken votive tablets, fragments of sculptured figures, among them a Medusa whose stony stare might seem to have taken effect, urns whose ashes were long since scattered, bits of mosaic pavement, coins, lamps, needles, hairpins, waifs and strays of their "unconsidered trifles." But the fainter wraith of King Arthur would discover no more than a weedy mound and hollow in a ragged field, where autumnal dandelions keep the only glints of his golden memory. We met there an old labourer stooping beneath the heavy sack upon his shoulder. He told us that the mound was Arthur's Round Table, but as for the hollow--apparently the site of a Roman open amphitheatre--he could only shake his grey head and confide: "They do say as was a grand palace there long ago and one day it all sunk under,--sunk way down into the ground."

The Usk, which has reflected such lost splendours, empties into the broad estuary of the Severn a little lower down than the Wye which rejoins the greater river at Chepstow. The Severn, which has its rising not two miles from the Wye in the Welsh mountains, makes a wider sweep to the east, crossing Shropshire, Worcester, and Gloucester. Worcester, indeed, mainly consists of the Middle Severn valley, with ranges of low hills on either side. This fertile basin abounds, like the Hereford vale of the Wye, in apple-orchards and pear-orchards, hop-gardens and wheat-fields, but the enterprising little shire has developed, too, a number of manufacturing industries. On the north it runs up into the Black Country of Staffordshire; Dudley, Stourbridge, and Oldbury are murky with the smoke and smudge of factory chimneys. Glass is a specialty of Stourbridge, carpets of Kidderminster, salt of Droitwich, and needles and fishhooks of Redditch. Nail-making used to be the bread and beer of ten thousand cottages at the foot of the Clent and Lickey Hills.

But intermingled with its thriving crafts and trades is another wealth of historic associations and natural beauties. In the dense woods which once covered the county, hostile bands have dodged or sought one another from time immemorial, notably during the Civil Wars of Simon de Montfort and of the Roses. Even so late as the Parliamentary War, there remained forest enough to do good service to a fugitive. It was in an oak of Boscobel Wood, on the Salop border, that after the disastrous battle of Worcester

"the younger Charles abode Till all the paths were dim, And far below the Roundhead rode And hummed a surly hymn."

The points of specific literary interest are not many. Little St. Kenelm underwent his martyrdom by the Clent Hills; Richard Baxter ministered for twenty-two years to a rough flock in Kidderminster; Samuel Butler was born in Strensham-on-the-Avon; Samuel Johnson went to school in Stourbridge; and the Leasowes, near by, was the home of Shenstone, who made it one of the most attractive estates in England. But the Malvern Hills keep a great, dim memory, that of the fourteenth-century visionary associated with the West Midland allegory of "Piers Plowman." We are not sure of his name, though we speak of him as Langland; the rugged, vigorous old poem in its three versions may yet be proved to be of composite rather than single authorship; we ourselves, though of Long Will's discipleship, had not faith enough in the personal tradition to visit the reputed birthplace at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire; but on those breezy slopes still seems to linger the wistful presence of a gaunt, "forwandred" clerk who

"In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne, On a May mornynge on Malverne hulles"

dreamed the Easter dream, still unfulfilled on earth, of human brotherhood.

These gracious heights, standing

"Close as brother leans to brother, When they press beneath the eyes Of some father praying blessings From the gifts of Paradise,"

gave hiding for four years to Sir John Oldcastle, the genial Lollard who made merry with Prince Hal, but would not renounce his faith, and was finally given up by the over-orthodox young king to the bishops. Henry V himself was present at the martyrdom, peculiarly revolting, but the worst of it all is that Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, endorsed the Roman Catholic caricature and wronged a true and generous spirit in his ineffaceable portrait of Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal's "old lad of the castle." It must be that Raggedstone Hill, which casts a curse on whomsoever its shadow touches, gloomed with peculiar blackness over the hunted knight. Its ominous shade is said to have stolen on Cardinal Wolsey and on those royal fugitives of the Red Rose, Margaret of Anjou and the hapless young Prince Edward.

From the summit of Worcester Beacon and from other of the higher Malvern crests the view ranges, on a clear day, over some fifteen counties and embraces the six momentous battlefields of Shrewsbury, Mortimer's Cross, Edge Hill, Worcester, Evesham and Tewkesbury, and the three cathedrals of Hereford, Worcester, and Gloucester, besides the remnants of six great religious houses of mediæval England,--Great and Little Malvern, Pershore, Evesham, Deerhurst and Tewkesbury. Little Malvern Priory, established in the twelfth century by a band of Benedictine monks from Worcester who sought the wilds that they might emulate the life of hermits, survives only in fragments, but the church of Great Malvern Priory, an earlier outgrowth from Worcester, keeps its Norman interior, with rich treasures of stained glass and miserere carvings. We had passed through the Vale of Evesham toward the close of our long Midland drive and seen the scant relics of its mitred abbey, but we fail to follow the Avon on to Pershore, one of the richest and most powerful of the old monastic foundations. Not only were these monasteries planted in the fairest and most fruitful lands of the county, but a large portion of Worcestershire was owned by them and by the neighbouring abbeys of Gloucestershire. In all this horde of priests one has a special claim to literary remembrance,--Layamon, who dwelt in the hamlet of Ernley, near the junction of the Severn and the Stour. He constitutes an important link in the passing on of the Arthurian legend, which, first related in Latin prose by that entertaining prelate, Geoffrey of Monmouth, had been already rendered into French verse by Wace, the professional chronicler of the Plantagenets. Layamon retold and amplified the story, using the French poem as his basis, but aided by two other works whose identity is doubtful.

"Layamon these books beheld and the leaves he turned. He them with love beheld. Aid him God the Mighty! Quill he took with his fingers, and wrote on book-skin, and the true words set together, and the three books pressed into one."

We could pay only a flying visit to Malvern this summer, but in other summers have resorted thither again and again for the refreshment of the blithe air and pure water and of walking on those turfy hills where many a grateful sojourner has left path or seat to ease the climber's way.

Worcester, too, was familiar ground, and this time we gave but a few hours to the "Faithful City," which paid so dearly for its steadfast loyalty to Charles I. The unspeakable Parliamentarians proved nearly as destructive as the Danes, who, in the ninth century and again in the eleventh, had sacked it with fire and sword. The militant Presbyterians wreaked their piety most of all upon the Cathedral, leaving it roofless, its splendid glass all shattered, its brasses wrenched away, its altars desecrated and torn down. We found the red-brick town upon the Severn brisk and cheerful, with its proud shop-window display of its own products, from the Royal Worcester China to Worcestershire Sauce, with the deeply laden barges that almost hid the river; its lively hop market; and its grunting sows, each with her litter of recalcitrant little pigs, driven in a meandering course through the main street by ruddy boys and girls. The cathedral, whose memories embrace St. Dunstan and St. Wulfstan and that stout-hearted old martyr of Oxford, Bishop Latimer--who had himself once presided at the burning of a friar--uplifted our hearts with its august vista of nave and choir. The crowned tenant of that choir, King John, ought to be troubled in his gilded rest by the proximity of a Prince Arthur, though not the Arthur to whom he did such grievous wrong. The best of the cathedral is, to my thinking, the solemn grace of the crypt, beneath whose light-pillared arches stand about various stone figures of rueful countenance. After their centuries of sunlight, high-niched on the central tower, the Restorer has scornfully dislodged them and dungeoned them down here.

Just below Worcester the Severn is augmented by the Teme, which has valiantly cut its way through the line of western hills to join the court of Sabrina, and at Tewkesbury, on the Gloucester border, it receives its most famous affluent, Shakespeare's Avon. Tewkesbury was new to us, and we lingered there two days, wishing we might make them twenty. As it was we had to forego the delightful trip on the Severn to Deerhurst, an old monastic town whose pre-Norman church is said to be of extremely curious architecture.

Tewkesbury Abbey, which outranks in size ten of the twenty-eight English cathedrals, is one of the most illustrious churches in the United Kingdom. Unlike most of the larger monastic establishments, it was under the control of a succession of great families whose deeds and misdeeds form no small part of the history of England. Fitz-Hamon, kin to the Conqueror, swept away what buildings of the old Saxon abbey he may have found there, and erected the magnificent Norman church which still awes the beholder. The ashes of Fitz-Hamon, who died in 1107, rest near the High Altar. The next lord of Tewkesbury to be buried in the Abbey was Gilbert de Clare, one of the signers of Magna Charta. The name of his father, Richard de Clare, headed the list, and one of the seven copies of the Great Charter was deposited in the Abbey. Every lord of Tewkesbury after Gilbert de Clare was interred in this church, which, for the next two hundred and fifty years, until the lordship of Tewkesbury was absorbed into the Crown, grew ever more splendid with costly monuments. The widow of Gilbert de Clare married the brother of Henry III, Richard, Duke of Cornwall, but although she thus became a countess of many titles and one of the first ladies of the land, she asked, in dying, to be buried beside the husband of her youth in Tewkesbury. To this her second husband would not agree, but he was magnanimous enough to send her poor, homesick heart back to the Abbey in a silver vase, which was duly placed in Earl Gilbert's marble mausoleum.

The De Clares of Tewkesbury, Earls of Gloucester and Hereford, were a warrior race. The second Gilbert, called the Red Earl, fought both with Simon de Montfort, and against him, and the third Gilbert, his son, fell at Bannockburn. By his early death the lordship of Tewkesbury passed from the De Clares, who had held it for nearly a century, to the young earl's brother-in-law, Hugh le Despencer. This new Earl of Gloucester had succeeded Piers Gaveston in the perilous favour of Edward II. When Roger de Mortimer, by the unhallowed aid of Queen Isabel, triumphed over the king, the elder Despencer, a man of ninety, was hanged at Bristol, and his son, Hugh le Despencer, crowned with nettles, was swung from the gallows fifty feet high, in a hubbub of mockeries and rejoicings, at Hereford. His widow collected the scattered quarters of his body, exposed in various towns, and interred them in the Abbey under a richly carved and coloured monument. The Despencers, though no longer Earls of Gloucester, held the lordship of Tewkesbury for wellnigh another hundred years, cherishing and beautifying the fabric of the church and adding lavishly to its memorials of bronze and marble and to its treasure of chalices, copes, and jewels.

Early in the fifteenth century the male line of the Despencers became extinct, and the Lady Isabel, sister of the last Lord Despencer, succeeded to the ecclesiastical honours of the family. Married in the Abbey at the age of eleven to Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Worcester, she was widowed ten years later and found her solace in building an exquisite chapel, known as the Warwick Chantry, in her husband's memory. Her second husband, cousin to the first, was Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, whom she commemorated in the still more elaborate Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick; but she herself chose to lie at Tewkesbury. Her daughter married Warwick the King-maker and became the mother of two fair girls of most pathetic story. The elder, Isabel, was wedded to George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward III,--"false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence,"--who is supposed to have been murdered in the Tower through the agency of his brother Richard--drowned, the whisper went, in a butt of Malmsey wine. A fortnight earlier his wife and an infant child had died, probably of poison. A son and daughter survived, who, for the royal blood that flowed in their veins, were regarded with uneasiness by the Tudor kings and ultimately sent to the block. The daughter, Margaret Plantagenet, superintended the education of the Princess Mary, and was once described by Henry VIII himself as "the most saintly woman in England." But she was the mother of Cardinal Pole, who had angered the tyrant and was on the Continent out of his reach; so this reverend and gracious lady, at the age of sixty-eight, had her stately head clumsily hacked off by a prentice executioner on Tower Hill, where her innocent brother had perished forty-two years before. The second daughter of the Countess Isabel had an even more pitiful life than her sister's, for her first husband was Prince Edward, the last Lancastrian, and then, after he had been foully slain, she strangely accepted the hand of one of his murderers, Richard of Gloucester, the worst of the Yorkists, by whom she was soon, it would appear, coolly put out of the world. A favourite saying of the county, probably having reference to the extraordinary number and wealth of its religious houses, runs: "As sure as God is in Gloucestershire," but one can hardly read these tragedies of Tewkesbury without feeling that the Devil has been no infrequent sojourner there.

The lamentable Wars of the Roses, which had drenched England with blood, threw up their last red spray against the Abbey. The resolute Queen Margaret and her son had attempted, with an army raised by the Duke of Somerset, to get possession of Gloucester, but they found it already held by the Yorkists and hastened on to Tewkesbury. Still weary from their forced march, they were attacked by Edward at break of a summer dawn (1471) while the monks were chanting matins in the Abbey, and sustained a signal defeat. The place of slaughter is still known as Bloody Meadow. The Duke of Somerset, with a few knights and squires, took refuge within the sacred walls, but Edward and his followers, hot for vengeance, rushed in to slay them even there. The abbot, who had just been celebrating mass, came from the altar and, holding the consecrated host high in his hands, stood between the furious Yorkists and their prey. The war-wrath was for the moment stayed, and Edward gave his word to respect the peace of the sanctuary. But after a service of thanksgiving, the blood-anointed king and his fierce nobles withdrew to a house hard by, where that unhappy younger Edward, the legitimate heir to the throne, was brought a defenceless prisoner into their presence, insulted, assailed, and slain. The rumour went that the king himself had with his gauntleted hand struck the royal youth across the mouth, and in an instant the others, like wild beasts, were upon him, Richard of Gloucester in the front. It is believed that the mangled, boyish body was buried in the Abbey under the central tower.