Chapter 51

We did not of course attempt to climb the Salisbury spire, although there were quite a number of staircases inside the cathedral, and after climbing these, adventurous visitors might ascend by ladders through the timber framework to a door near the top; from that point, however, the cross and the vane could only be reached by steeple-jacks. Like other lofty spires, that of Salisbury had been a source of anxiety and expense from time to time, but the timber used in the building of it had been allowed to remain inside, which had so strengthened it that it was then only a few inches out of the perpendicular. When a new vane was put on in 1762 a small box was discovered in the ball to which the vane was fixed. This box was made of wood, but inside it was another box made of lead, and enclosed in that was found a piece of very old silk--a relic, it was supposed, of the robe of the Virgin Mary, to whom the cathedral was dedicated, and placed there to guard the spire from danger. The casket was carefully resealed and placed in its former position under the ball.

A very large number of tombs stood in the cathedral, including many of former bishops, and we were surprised to find them in such good condition, for they did not appear to have suffered materially in the Civil War. The very oldest were those that had been removed from Old Sarum, but the finest tomb was that of Bishop Giles de Bridport, the Bishop when the new cathedral was completed and consecrated. He died in 1262, and eight carvings on the stone spandrel above him represented the same number of scenes in his career, beginning with his birth and ending with the ascent of his soul into heaven. The figure of a boy in full episcopal robes, found under the seating of the choir in 1680, and named the "Boy Bishop," was an object of special interest, but whether it was a miniature of one of the bishops or intended to represent a "choral bishop," formerly elected annually by the choir, was unknown.

There were also tombs and effigies to the first and second Earls of Salisbury, the first, who died in 1226, being the son of Henry II and Fair Rosamond, of whom we had heard at Woodstock. He was represented in chain armour, on which some of the beautiful ornaments in gold and colour still remained. His son, the second Earl, who went twice to the Holy Land as a Crusader under St. Louis, was also represented in chain armour and cross-legged.

Near this was the tomb of Sir John Cheney, a man of extraordinary size and strength, his thigh-bone measuring 21 inches, whose great armour we had seen in Sir Walter Scott's house at Abbotsford. He was bodyguard to Henry of Richmond at the Battle of Bosworth Field, near which we passed at Atherstone. Sir William Brandon was Richmond's standard-bearer, and was cut down by King Richard himself, who tore his standard from him and, flinging it aside, rode at Sir John Cheney and hurled him from his horse just before he met his own fate.

There are a large number of pillars and windows in Salisbury Cathedral, but as we had no time to stay and count them, we accepted the numbers given by the local poet as being correct, when he wrote:

As many days as in one year there be, So many windows in this Church we see; As many marble pillars here appear As there are hours throughout the fleeting year; (8760) As many gates as moons one year does view. Strange tale to tell; yet not more strange than true.

The Cathedral Close at Salisbury was the finest we had seen both for extent and beauty, the half-mile area of grass and the fine trees giving an inexpressible charm both to the cathedral and its immediate surroundings. The great advantage of this wide open space to us was that we could obtain a magnificent view of the whole cathedral. We had passed many fine cathedrals and other buildings on our walk whose proportions were hidden by the dingy property which closely surrounded them, but Salisbury was quite an exception. True, there were houses in and around the close, but these stood at a respectful distance from the cathedral, and as they had formerly been the town houses of the aristocracy, they contained fine old staircases and panelled rooms with decorated ceilings, which with their beautiful and artistic wrought-iron gates were all well worth seeing. The close was surrounded by battlemented stone walls on three sides and by the River Avon on the fourth, permission having been granted in 1327 by Edward III for the stones from Old Sarum to be used for building the walls of the close at Salisbury; hence numbers of carved Norman stones, fragments of the old cathedral there, could be seen embedded in the masonry. Several gate-houses led into the close, the gates in them being locked regularly every night in accordance with ancient custom. In a niche over one of these, known as the High Street Gate, there was a statue which originally represented James I, but when he died it was made to do duty for Charles I by taking off the head of James and substituting that of Charles, his successor to the throne, with the odd result that the body of James carried the head of Charles!

There were many old buildings in the city, but we had not time to explore them thoroughly. Still there was one known as the Poultry Cross nobody could fail to see whether walking or driving through Salisbury. Although by no means a large erection, it formed one of the most striking objects in the city, and a more beautiful piece of Gothic architecture it would be difficult to imagine. It was formerly called the Yarn Market, and was said to have been erected about the year 1378 by Sir Lawrence de St. Martin as a penance for some breach of ecclesiastical law. It consisted of six arches forming an open hexagon, supported by six columns on heavy foundations, with a central pillar square at the bottom and six-sided at the top--the whole highly ornamented and finished off with an elaborate turret surmounted by a cross. It was mentioned in a deed dated November 2nd, 1335, and formed a feature of great archaeological interest.

The old portion of St. Nicholas' was in existence in 1227, and in the Chorister's Square was a school established and endowed as far back as the year 1314, to support fourteen choristers and a master to teach them. Their costumes must have been rather picturesque, for they were ordered to be dressed in knee-breeches and claret-coloured coats, with frills at the neck instead of collars.

Quite a number of ancient inns in Salisbury were connected with the old city life, Buckingham being beheaded in the yard of the "Blue Boar Inn" in the market-place, where a new scaffold was provided for the occasion. In 1838 a headless skeleton, believed to be that of Buckingham, was dug out from below the kitchen floor of the inn.

The "King's Arms" was another of the old posting-houses where, when King Charles was hiding on Salisbury Plain in the time of the Civil War, after the Battle of Worcester, a meeting was held under the guidance of Lord Wilmot, at which plans were made to charter a vessel for the conveyance of the King from Southampton to some place on the Continent. Here we saw a curiosity in the shape of a large window on the first floor, from which travellers formerly stepped on and off the top of the stage-coaches, probably because the archway into the yard was too low for the outside passengers to pass under safely. There was also the "Queen's Arms," with its quaint porch in the shape of a shell over the doorway, and the "Haunch of Venison," and others; but in the time of the Commonwealth we might have indulged in the luxury of staying at the Bishop's Palace, for it was sold at that time, and used as an inn. It must have had rough visitors, for when the ecclesiastical authorities regained possession it was in a very dilapidated condition.

One of the oldest coaching-houses in Salisbury in former years was the "George Inn," mentioned in the city records as far back as the year 1406; but the licence had lapsed, and the building was now being used for other purposes. Its quaint elevation, with its old-fashioned bow-windows, was delightful to see, and in the year 1623 it was declared that "all Players from henceforth shall make their plays at the George Inn." This inn seemed to have been a grand place, for Pepys, who stayed there in 1668, wrote in his _Diary_ in his quaint, abrupt, and abbreviated way: "Came to the George Inne, where lay in a silk bed and very good diet"; but when the bill was handed to him for payment, he was "mad" at the charges.

We left Salisbury with regret, and with the thought that we had not seen all that we ought to have seen, but with an inward resolve to pay the ancient city another visit in the future. Walking briskly along the valley of the river Nadder, and taking advantage of a field road, we reached the village of Bemerton. Here George Herbert, "the most devotional of the English poets," was rector from 1630 to 1632, having been presented to the living by Charles I. Herbert was born at Montgomery Castle, near the Shropshire border, and came of a noble family, being a brother of the statesman and writer Lord Herbert of Chirbury, one of the Shropshire Herberts. He restored the parsonage at Bemerton, but did not live long to enjoy it. He seems to have had a presentiment that some one else would have the benefit of it, as he caused the following lines to be engraved above the chimneypiece in the hall, giving good advice to the rector who was to follow him:

If thou chance for to find A new house to thy mind, And built without thy cost. Be good to the poor As God gives thee store And then my labour's not lost.

It was here that he composed most of his hymns, and here he died at what his friend Izaak Walton described in 1632 as "the good and more pleasant than healthful parsonage." A tablet inscribed "G.H. 1633" was all that marked the resting-place of "the sweetest singer that ever sang God's praise." Bemerton, we thought, was a lovely little village, and there was a fig-tree and a medlar-tree in the rectory garden, which Herbert himself was said to have planted with his own hands. Here we record one of his hymns:

Let all the world in every corner sing My God and King! The Heavens are not too high. His praises may thither fly; The earth is not too low, His praises there may grow. Let all the world in every corner sing My God and King!

Let all the world in every corner sing My God and King! The Church with psalms must shout, No door can keep them out; But above all the heart Must bear the longest part. Let all the world in every corner sing My God and King!

The old church of Chirbury belonged to the Herberts, and was noted for its heavy circular pillars supporting the roof, which, with the walls, were so much bent outwards that they gave one the impression that they would fall over; but nearly all the walls in old churches bend that way more or less, a fact which we always attributed to the weight of the heavy roof pressing on them. At one village on our travels, however, we noticed, hanging on one of the pillars in the church, a printed tablet, which cleared up the mystery by informing us that the walls and pillars were built in that way originally to remind us that "Jesus on the cross His head inclined"; and we noticed that even the porches at the entrance to ancient churches were built in the same way, each side leaning outwards.

A great treat was in store for us this morning, for we had to pass through Wilton, with its fine park surrounding Wilton House, the magnificent seat of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. Our first impression was that Wilton was one of the pleasantest places we had visited. Wiltshire took its name from the river Wylye, which here joins the Nadder, so that Wilton had been an important place in ancient times, being the third oldest borough in England. Egbert, the Wessex King, had his palace here, and in the great contest with Mercia defeated Beornwulf in 821 at Ellendune. A religious house existed here in very early times. In the reign of Edward I it was recorded that Osborn de Giffard, a relative of the abbess, carried off two of the nuns, and was sentenced for that offence to be stripped naked and to be whipped in the churches of Wilton and Shaftesbury, and as an additional punishment to serve three years in Palestine. In the time of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn wished to give the post of abbess to a friend, but King Henry had scruples on the subject, for the proposed abbess had a somewhat shady reputation; he wrote, "I would not for all the gold in the world clog your conscience nor mine to make her a ruler of a house, which is of so ungodly a demeanour, nor I trust you would not that neither for brother nor sister I should so bestain mine honour or conscience." This we thought to be rather good for such a stern moralist as Henry VIII, but perhaps in his younger days he was a better man than we had been taught to believe.

Wilton suffered along with Old Sarum, as the loss of a road was a serious matter in those days, and Bishop Bingham, who appeared to have been a crafty man, and not at all favourable to the Castellans at Old Sarum, built a bridge over the river in 1244, diverting the main road of Icknield Way so as to make it pass through Salisbury. As Leland wrote, "The changing of this way was the total cause of the ruine of Old Saresbyri and Wiltown, for afore Wiltown had 12 paroche churches or more, and was the head of Wilesher." The town of Wilton was very pleasant and old-fashioned. The chief industry was carpet-making, which originally had been introduced there by French and Flemish weavers driven by persecution from their own country. When we passed through the town the carpet industry was very quiet, but afterwards, besides Wilton carpets, "Axminster" and "Brussels" carpets were manufactured there, water and wool, the essentials, being very plentiful. Its fairs for sheep, horses, and cattle, too, were famous, as many as 100,000 sheep having been known to change owners at one fair.

We were quite astonished when we saw the magnificent church, on a terrace facing our road and approached by a very wide flight of steps. It was quite modern, having been built in 1844 by Lord Herbert of Lea, and had three porches, the central one being magnificently ornamented, the pillars resting on lions sculptured in stone. The tower, quite a hundred feet high, stood away from the church, but was connected with it by a fine cloister with double columns finely worked. The interior of the church was really magnificent, and must have cost an immense sum of money. It had a marble floor and some beautiful stained-glass windows; the pulpit being of Caen stone, supported by columns of black marble enriched with mosaic, which had once formed part of a thirteenth-century shrine at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, some of the stained glass also belonging to the same period.

The great House of Wilton, the seat of the Herberts, had been built in a delightful situation on the site of the old monastery, amidst beautiful gardens and grounds. It was a veritable treasure-house for pictures by the most famous painters, containing a special gallery filled almost exclusively with portraits of the family and others painted by Vandyck. The collection included a good portrait of Prince Rupert,[Footnote: See page 303.] who gave the army of the Parliament such a lively time in the Civil War, and who is said, in spite of his recklessness, to have been one of the best cavalry officers in Europe. Queen Elizabeth stayed three days there in 1573, and described her visit as "both merrie and pleasante." During this visit she presented Sir Philip Sidney, the author of _Arcadia_, with a "locke of her owne hair," which many years afterwards was found in a copy of that book in the library, and attached to it a very indifferent verse in the Queen's handwriting. Charles I, it was said, visited Wilton every summer, and portraits of himself, Henrietta Maria and their children, and some of their Court beauties, were also in the Vandyck gallery.

Wilton Park attracted our attention above all, as the rivers Wylye and Nadder combined to enhance its beauty, and to feed the ornamental lake in front of the Hall. There were some fine cedar trees in the park, and as we had often seen trees of this kind in other grounds through which we had passed, we concluded they dated from the time of the Crusades, and that the crusaders had brought small plants back with them, of which these trees were the result. We were informed, however, that the cedar trees at Wilton had only been planted in the year 1640 by the Earl of Devonshire, who had sent men to collect them at Lebanon in the Holy Land. Thus we were compelled to change our opinion, for the trees we had seen elsewhere were of about the same girth as those at Wilton, and must therefore have been planted at about the same period. The oak trees in the park still retained many of their leaves, although it was now late in the autumn, but they were falling off, and we tried to catch some of them as they fell, though we were not altogether successful. My brother reminded me of a verse he once wrote as an exercise in calligraphy when at school:

Men are like leaves that on the trees do grow, In Summer's prosperous time much love they show, But art thou in adversity, then they Like leaves from trees in Autumn fall away.

But after autumn and winter have done their worst there are still some bushes, plants, or trees that retain their leaves to cheer the traveller on his way. Buckingham, who was beheaded at Salisbury, was at one time a fugitive, and hid himself in a hole near the top of a precipitous rock, now covered over with bushes and known only to the initiated as "Buckingham's Cave." My brother was travelling one winter's day in search of this cave, and passed for miles through a wood chiefly composed of oak trees that were then leafless. The only foliage that arrested his attention was that of the ivy, holly, and yew, and these evergreens looked so beautiful that he occasionally stopped to admire them without exactly knowing the reason why; after leaving the great wood he reached a secluded village far away from what was called civilisation, where he inquired the way to "Buckingham's Cave" from a man who turned out to be the village wheelwright. In the course of conversation the man informed him that he occasionally wrote poetry for a local newspaper with a large circulation in that and the adjoining counties. He complained strongly that the editor of the paper had omitted one verse from the last poem he had sent up; which did not surprise my brother, who inwardly considered he might safely have omitted the remainder. But when the wheelwright showed him the poem he was so pleased that he asked permission to copy the verses.

The fairest flower that ever bloomed With those of bright array In Seasons' changeful course is doomed To fade and die away; While yonder's something to be seen-- It is the lovely evergreen!

The pretty flowers in summer-time Bring beauty to our land, And lovely are the forest trees-- In verdure green they stand; But while we gaze upon the scene We scarcely see the evergreen!

But lo! the wintry blast comes on, And quickly falls the snow; And where are all the beauties gone That bloom'd a while ago? While yonder stands through winter keen The lovely-looking evergreen!

Our lives are like a fading flower, And soon they pass away, And earthly joys may last an hour To disappear at close of day; But Saints in Heaven abide serene And lasting, like the evergreen!

My brother felt that here he had found one of nature's poets, and no longer wondered why he had admired the evergreen trees and bushes when he came through the forest.

In about two miles after leaving Wilton we parted company with the River Nadder, and walked along the road which passes over the downs to Shaftesbury. On our way we came in sight of the village of Compton Chamberlain, and of Compton House and park, which had been for centuries the seat of the Penruddocke family. It was Colonel John Penruddocke who led the famous "forlorn hope" in the time of the Commonwealth in 1655. He and another champion, with 200 followers, rode into Salisbury, where, overcoming the guards, they released the prisoners from the gaol, and seizing the two judges of assize proclaimed Charles II King, just as Booth did in Cheshire. The people of the city did not rise, as they anticipated, so Penruddocke and his companions dispersed and rode away to different parts of the country; eventually they were all taken prisoners and placed in the Tower of London. Penruddocke was examined personally by Cromwell at Whitehall, and it was thought for a time that he might be pardoned, but ultimately he was sent to the scaffold. He compared the steps leading up to the scaffold to Jacob's ladder, the feet on earth but the top reaching to heaven; and taking off his doublet he said, "I am putting off these old rags of mine to be clad with the new robes of the righteousness of Jesus Christ." The farewell letters between him and his wife were full of tenderness and love, and what he had done was doubtless under the inspiration of strong religious convictions. It was said that it was his insurrection that led to the division of the country into military districts, which have continued ever since. The lace cap he wore on the scaffold, blood-stained and showing the marks of the axe, was still preserved, as well as his sword, and the beautiful letters that passed between him and his wife, and the Colonel's portrait was still to be seen at the mansion.

About a mile before reaching Shaftesbury we left Wiltshire and entered the county of Dorset, of which Shaftesbury was said to be the most interesting town from an antiquarian point of view. Here the downs terminate abruptly, leaving the town standing 700 feet above the sea level on the extreme point, with precipices on three sides. Across the far-famed Blackmoor Vale we could quite easily see Stourton Tower, standing on the top of Kingsettle Hill, although it was twelve miles distant. The tower marked the spot where, in 879, King Alfred raised his standard against the Danes, and was built in 1766, the inscription on it reading:

Alfred the Great A.D. 879 on this summit erected his standard against Danish invaders. To him we owe the origin of Juries, the establishment of a Militia, the creation of a Naval Force. Alfred, the light of a benighted age, was a Philosopher, and a Christian, the father of his people, the founder of the English monarchy and liberty.

In the gardens near that tower the three counties of Dorset, Somerset, and Wilts meet; and here in a grotto, where the water runs from a jar under the arm of a figure of Neptune, rises the River Stour, whose acquaintance we were to form later in its sixty-mile run through Dorset.