Part 13
The royal champions came in with the Conquest. The Norman dukes had theirs in the family of Marmion--ancestors of that Marmion of Sir Walter Scott’s, who commits forgery, like a common knave of more degenerate times. The Conqueror conferred sundry broad lands in England on his champions; among others, the lands adjacent to, as well as the castle of Tamworth. Near this place was the first nunnery established in this country. The occupants were the nuns of St. Edith, at Polesworth. Robert de Marmion used the ladies very “cavalierly,” ejected them from their house, and deprived them of their property. But such victims had a wonderfully clever way of recovering their own.
My readers may possibly remember how a certain Eastern potentate injured the church, disgusted the Christians generally, and irritated especially that Simeon Stylites who sat on the summit of a pillar, night and day, and never moved from his abiding-place. The offender had a vision, in which he not only saw the indignant Simeon, but was cudgelled almost into pulp by the _simulacre_ of that saint. I very much doubt if Simeon himself was in his airy dwelling-place at that particular hour of the night. I was reminded of this by what happened to the duke’s champion, Robert de Marmion. He was roused from a deep sleep by the vision of a stout lady, who announced herself as the wronged St. Edith, and who proceeded to show her opinion of De Marmion’s conduct toward her nuns, by pommelling his ribs with her crosier, until she had covered his side with bruises, and himself with repentance. What strong-armed young monk played St. Edith that night, it is impossible to say; but that he enacted the part successfully, is seen from the fact that Robert brought back the ladies to Polesworth, and made ample restitution of all of which they had been deprived. The nuns, in return, engaged with alacrity to inter all defunct Marmions within the chapter-house of their abbey, for nothing.
With the manor of Tamworth in Warwickshire, Marmion held that of Scrivelsby in Lincolnshire. The latter was held of the King by grand sergeantry, “to perform the office of champion at the King’s coronation.” At his death he was succeeded by a son of the same Christian name, who served the monks of Chester precisely as his sire had treated the nuns at Polesworth. This second Robert fortified his ill-acquired prize--the priory; but happening to fall into one of the newly-made ditches, when inspecting the fortifications, a soldier of the Earl of Chester killed him, without difficulty, as he lay with broken hip and thigh, at the bottom of the fosse. The next successor, a third Robert, was something of a judge, with a dash of the warrior, too, and he divided his estates between two sons, both Roberts, by different mothers. The eldest son and chief possessor, after a bustling and emphatically “battling” life, was succeeded by his son Philip, who fell into some trouble in the reign of Henry III. for presuming to act as a judge or justice of the peace, without being duly commissioned. This Philip was, nevertheless, one of the most faithful servants to a king who found so many faithless; and if honors were heaped upon him in consequence, he fairly merited them all. He was happy, too, in marriage, for he espoused a lady sole heiress to a large estate, and who brought him four daughters, co-heiresses to the paternal and maternal lands of the Marmions and the Kilpecs.
This, however, is wandering. Let us once more return to orderly illustration. In St. George I have shown how pure romance deals with a hero. In the next chapter I will endeavor to show in what spirit the lives and actions of real English heroes have been treated by native historians. In so doing, I will recount the story of Sir Guy of Warwick, after their fashion, with original illustrations and “modern instances.”
SIR GUY OF WARWICK,
AND WHAT BEFELL HIM.
“His desires Are higher than his state, and his deserts Not much short of the most he can desire.” _Chapman’s Byron’s Conspiracy._
The Christian name of Guy was once an exceedingly popular name in the county of York. I have never heard a reason assigned for this, but I think it may have originated in admiration of the deeds and the man whose appellation and reputation have survived to our times. I do not allude to Guy Faux; _that_ young gentleman was the Father of Perverts, but by no means the first of the Guys.
The “Master Guy” of whom I am treating here, or, rather, about to treat, was a youth whose family originally came from Northumberland. That family was, in one sense, more noble than the imperial family of Muscovy, for its members boasted not only of good principles, but of sound teeth.
The teeth and principles of the Romanoffs are known to be in a distressing state of dilapidation.
Well; these Northumbrian Guys having lived extremely fast, and being compelled to compound with their creditors, by plundering the latter, and paying them zero in the pound, migrated southward, and finally settled in Warwickshire. Now, the head of the house had a considerable share of common sense about him, and after much suffering in a state of shabby gentility, he not only sent his daughters out to earn their own livelihood, but, to the intense disgust of his spouse, hired himself as steward to that noble gentleman the Earl of Warwick. “My blood is as good as ever it was,” said he to the fine lady his wife. “It is the blood of an upper servant,” cried she, “and my father’s daughter is the spouse of a flunkey.”
The husband was not discouraged; and he not only opened his office in his patron’s castle but he took his only son with him, and made him his first clerk. This son’s name was Guy; and he was rather given to bird-catching, hare-snaring, and “gentism” generally. He had been a precocious youth from some months previous to his birth, and had given his lady-mother such horrid annoyance, that she was always dreaming of battles, fiery-cars, strong-smelling dragons, and the wrathful Mars. “Well,” she used to remark to her female friends, while the gentlemen were over their wine, “I expect that this boy” (she had made up her mind to that) “will make a noise in the world, draw bills upon his father, and be the terror of maid-servants. Why, do you know----” and here she became confidential, and I do not feel authorized to repeat what she then communicated.
But Master Guy, the “little stranger” alluded to, proved better than was expected. He might have been considerably worse, and yet would not have been so bad as maternal prophecy had depicted him. At eight years ... but I hear you say, “When did all this occur?” Well, it was in a November’s “Morning Post,” that announcement was made of the birth; and as to the year, Master Guy has given it himself in the old metrical romance,
“Two hundred and twenty years and odd, After our Savior Christ his birth, When King Athelstan wore the crown, I livéd here upon the earth.”
At eight years old, I was about to remark, young Guy was the most insufferable puppy of his district. He won all the prizes for athletic sports; and by the time he was sixteen there was not a man in all England who dared accept his challenge to wrestle with both arms, against _him_ using only one.
It was at this time that he kept his father’s books and a leash of hounds, with the latter of which he performed such extraordinary feats, that the Earl of Warwick invited him from the steward’s room to his own table; where Guy’s father changed his plate, and Master Guy twitched him by the beard as he did it.
At the head of the earl’s table sat his daughter “Phillis the Fair,” a lady who, like her namesake in the song, was “sometimes forward, sometimes coy,” and altogether so sweetly smiling and so beguiling, that when the earl asked Guy if he would not come and hunt (the dinner was at 10 A. M.), Guy answered, as the Frenchman did who could not bear the sport, with a _Merci, j’ai été!_ and affecting an iliac seizure, hinted at the necessity of staying at home.
The youth forthwith was carried to bed. Phillis sent him a posset, the earl sent him his own physician; and this learned gentleman, after much perplexity veiled beneath the most affable and confident humbug, wrote a prescription which, if it could do the patient no good would do him no harm. He was a most skilful man, and his patients almost invariably recovered under this treatment. He occasionally sacrificed one or two when a consultation was held, and he was called upon to prescribe _secundum artem_; but he compensated for this professional slaying by, in other cases, leaving matters to Nature, who was the active partner in his firm, and of whose success he was not in the least degree jealous. So, when he had written the prescription, Master Guy fell a discoursing of the passion of love, and _that_ with a completeness and a variety of illustration as though he were the author of the chapter on that subject in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” The doctor heard him to the end, gently rubbing one side of his nose the while with the index-finger of his right hand; and when his patient had concluded, the medical gentleman smiled, hummed “Phillis is my only joy,” and left the room with his head nodding like a Chinese Mandarin’s.
By this time the four o’clock sun was making green and gold pillars of the trees in the neighboring wood, and Guy got up, looked at the falling leaves, and thought of the autumn of his hopes. He whistled “Down, derry, down,” with a marked emphasis on the _down_; but suddenly his hopes again sprang up, as he beheld Phillis among her flower-beds, engaged in the healthful occupation which a sublime poet has given to the heroine whom he names, and whose action he describes, when he tells us that
“Miss Dinah was a-walking in her garding one day.”
Guy trussed his points, pulled up his hose, set his bonnet smartly on his head, clapped a bodkin on his thigh, and then walked into the garden with the air of the once young D’Egville in a ballet, looking after a nymph--which indeed was a pursuit he was much given to when he was _old_ D’Egville, and could no longer bound through his ballets, because he was stiff in the joints.
Guy, of course, went down on one knee, and at once plunged into the most fiery style of declaration, but Phillis had not read the Mrs. Chapone of that day for nothing. She brought him back to prose and propriety, and then the two started afresh, and they _did_ talk! Guy felt a little “streaked” at first, but he soon recovered his self-possession, and it would have been edifying for the young mind to have heard how these two pretty things spoke to, and answered each other in moral maxims stolen from the top pages of their copy-books. They poured them out by the score, and the proverbial philosophy they enunciated was really the origin of the book so named by Martin Tupper. He took it all from Phillis and Guy, whose descendants, of the last name, were so famous for their school-books. This I expect Mr. Tupper will (not) mention in his next edition.
After much profitable interchange of this sort of article, the lady gently hinted that Master Guy was not indifferent to her, but that he was of inferior birth, yet of qualities that made him equal with her; adding, that hitherto he had done little but kill other people’s game, whereas there were nobler deeds to be accomplished. And then she bade him go in search of perilous adventures, winding up with the toast and sentiment, “Master Guy, eagles do not care to catch flies.”
Reader, if you have ever seen the prince of pantomimists, Mr. Payne, tear the hair of his theatrical wig in a fit of amorous despair, you may have some idea as to the intensity with which Master Guy illustrated his own desperation. He stamped the ground with such energy that all the hitherto quiet aspens fell a-shaking, and their descendants have ever since maintained the same fashion. Phillis fell a-crying at this demonstration, and softened considerably. After a lapse of five minutes, she had blushingly directed Master Guy to “speak to papa.”
Now, of all horrible interviews, this perhaps is the most horrible. Nelson used to say that there was only one thing on earth which he dreaded, and that was dining with a mayor and corporation. Doubtless it is dreadful, but _what_ is it compared with looking a grave man in the face, who has no sentiment into him, and whose first remark is sure to be, “Well, sir, be good enough to tell me--what can you settle on my daughter? What can you do to secure her happiness?”
“Well,” said Guy, in reply to this stereotyped remark, “I can kill the Dun cow on the heath. _She_ has killed many herself who’ve tried the trick on her; and last night she devoured crops of clover, and twice as many fields of barley on your lordship’s estate.”
“First kill the cow, and then----,” said the earl with a smile; and Shakespeare had the echo of this speech in his ear, when he began the fifth act of his Othello. Now Guy was not easily daunted. If I cared to make a pun, I might easily have said “cowed,” but in a grave and edifying narrative this loose method of writing would be extremely improper. Guy, then, was not a coward--nay, nothing is hidden under the epithet. He tossed a little in bed that night as he thought the matter over, and the next morning made sheets of paper as crumpled as the cow’s horns, as he rejected the plans of assault he had designed upon them, and sat uncertain as to what he should do in behoof of his own fortune. He at length determined to go and visit the terrible animal “incognito.” It is the very word used by one of the biographers of Guy, an anonymous Northumbrian, who published the life on a broad sheet, with a picture of Master Guy which might have frightened the cow, and which is infinitely more ugly. Neither the black-letter poem, the old play, nor the pamphlets or ballads, use the term _incognito_, but all declare that Guy proceeded with much caution, and a steel cuirass over his jerkin. I mention these things, because without correctness my narrative would be worthless. I am not imaginative, and would not embroider a plain suit of fact upon any account.
Guy’s carefulness is to be proved. Here was a cow that had been more destructive than ever Red Riding Hood’s Wolf was--that Count Wolf, who used to snap up young maidens, and lived as careless of respectability as was to be expected of a man once attached to a “marching regiment,” and who turned monk. The cow was twelve feet high, from the hoof to the shoulder, and eighteen feet long, from the neck to the root of the tail. All the dragons ever heard of had never been guilty of such devastation to life and property as this terrible cow. Guy looked at her and did not like her. The cow detected him and rushed at her prey. Guy was active, attacked her in front and rear, as the allies did the forts of Bomarsund; very considerably confused her by burying his battle-axe in her skull; hung on by her tail as she attempted to fly; and finally gave her the _coup de grace_ by passing his rapier rapidly and repeatedly through her especially vulnerable point behind the ear. In proof of the fact, the scene of the conflict still bears the name of Dunsmore Heath, and that is a wider basis of proof than many “facts” stand upon, to which we are required by plodding teachers to give assent.
Besides, there is a rib of this very cow exhibited at Bristol. To be sure it is not a rib now of a cow, but out of reverence to the antiquity of the assertion which allegedly makes it so, I think we are bound to believe what is thus advanced. Not that I do myself, but that is of no consequence. I have a strong idea that the cow was not a cow, but a countess (not a Countess Cowper), who made war in her own right, lived a disreputable life, was as destructive to wealthy young lords as a _Lorette_, and won whole estates by cheating at _écarté_. Guy took a hand, and beat her.
Poor Master Guy, he was as hardly used as ever Jacob was, and much he meditated thereupon in the fields at eventide. The stern earl would by no means give his consent to the marriage of his daughter with the young champion, until the latter had performed some doughtier deeds than this. The boy (he was still in his teens) took heart of grace, divided a crooked sixpence with Phillis, and straightway sailed for Normandy, where he arrived, after meeting as many thieves by the way as if he had walked about for a month in the streets of Dover. But Master Guy killed all _he_ met; there is a foolish judicial, not to say social, prejudice against our doing the same with the bandits of Dover. I can not conjecture why; perhaps they have a privilege under some of the city companies, whereby they are constituted the legal skinners of all sojourners among them, carrying filthy lucre.
Guy met in Normandy with the last person he could have expected to fall in with--no other than the Emperor of Almayne, a marvellously ubiquitous person to be met with in legends, and frequently encountered in the seaports of inland towns. The historians are here a little at issue. One says that Master Guy having found a certain Dorinda tied to the stake, and awaiting a champion who would stake his own life for her rescue, inquired the “antecedents” of the position. Dorinda, it appears, had been as rudely used as young lady possibly could be, “by the Duke of Blois, his son,” and the duke was so enraged at Dorinda’s charge against his favorite Otto, that he condemned her to be burned alive, unless a champion appeared in time to rescue her by defeating the aforesaid Otto in single combat. Guy, of course, transacted the little business successfully; spoiled Otto’s beauty by slashing his nose; and so enchanted Dorinda, that she never accused her champion of doing aught displeasing to her.
Anxious as I am touching the veracity of this narrative, I have recorded what biographers state, though not in their own words. But I must add, that in some of the histories this episode about Dorinda is altogether omitted, and we only hear of Master Guy appearing in panoply at a tournament given by the Emperor of Allemagne, in Normandy--which is much the same, gentle reader, as if I were, at your cost, to give a concert and ball, with a supper from Farrance’s, and all, not in my house, but in yours. Nevertheless, in Normandy the tournament was held, and the paternal Emperor of Allemagne, having then a daughter, Blanche, of whom he wished to get rid, he set her up as the prize of the conquering knight in the tournament.
I think I hear you remark something as to the heathenness of the custom. But it is a custom sacred to these times; and our neighbors (for of course neither you nor I could condescend to such manners) get up evening tournaments of whist, quadrilles, and a variety of singing--of every variety but the good and intelligible, and at these modern tournaments given for the express purpose which that respectable old gentleman, the Emperor of Allemagne, had in view when he opened his lists; the “girls” are the prizes of the carpet-knights. So gentlemen, _faites votre jeu_, as the philosopher who presided at Frescati’s used to say--_faites votre jeu, Messieurs_; and go in and win. Perhaps if you read Cowper, you may be the better armed against loss in such a conflict.
I need not say that Master Guy’s good sword, which gleamed like lightning in the arena, and rained blows faster than ever Mr. Blanchard rained them, in terrific Coburg combats, upon the vulnerable crest of Mr. Bradley--won for him the peerless prize--to say nothing of a dog and a falcon thrown in. Master Guy rather ungallantly declined having the lady, though her father would have given him _carte blanche_; he looked at her, muttered her name, and then murmured, “Blanche, as thou art, yet art thou black-a-moor, compared with my Phillis;”--and with this unchivalric avowal, for it was a part of chivalry to say a thing and think another, he returned to England, carrying with him the “Spaniel King’s Charls,” as French authors write it, and the falcon, with a ring and a perch, like a huge parroquet.
Master Guy entered Warwick in a “brougham,” as we now might say, and sorely was he put to it with the uneasy bird. At every lurch of the vehicle, out flapped the wings, elongated was the neck, and Master Guy had to play at “dodge” with the falcon, who was intent upon darting his terrific beak into the cavalier’s nose. At length, however, the castle was safely reached; the presents were deposited at the feet of Phillis the Fair, and Guy hoped, like the Peri, and also like that gentle spirit to be disappointed, that the gates of paradise were about to open. But not so, Phillis warmly praised his little regard for that pert minx, Blanche, or _Blanc d’Espagne_, as she wickedly added; and she patted the spaniel, and offered sugar to the falcon; and, after the dinner to which Guy _was_ invited, she intimated in whispers, that they were both “too young as yet” (not that she believed so), and that more deeds must be done by Guy, ere the lawyers would be summoned by her papa to achieve some of their own.
The youthful Guy went forth “reluctant but resolved,” and he _would_ have sung as he went along,
“Elle a quinze ans, moi j’en ai seize,”
of Sedaine and Grétry, only neither poet nor composer, nor the opera of _Richard Cœur de Lion_, had yet appeared to gladden heart and ear. But the sentiment was there, and perhaps Sedaine knew of it when he penned the words. However this may be, Master Guy, though soft of heart, was not so of arm, for on this present cause of errantry he enacted such deeds that their very enumeration makes one breathless. His single sword cleared whole forests of hordes of brigands, through whose sides his trenchant blade passed as easily as the sabre, when held by Corporal Sutton, through a dead sheep. Our hero was by no means particular as to what he did, provided he was doing something; nor what cause he fought for, provided there were a cause and a fight. Thus we find him aiding the Duke of Louvain against his old friend the Emperor of Allemagne. He led the Duke’s forces, slew thousands upon thousands of the enemy, and, as though he had the luck of a modern Muscovite army, did not lose more than “one man,” with slight damage to the helmet of a second.
Master Guy, not yet twenty, surpassed the man whom Mr. Thiers calls “_ce pur Anglais_,” Mr. Pitt, for he became a prime minister ere he had attained his majority. In that capacity he negotiated a peace for the Duke with the Emperor. The two potentates were so satisfied with the negotiator, that out of compliment they offered him the command of their united fleet against the Pagan Soldan of Byzantium. They did not at all expect that he would accept it; but then they were not aware that Master Guy had much of the spirit which Sidney Smith, in after-years, discerned in Lord John Russell--and the enterprising Guy accepted the command of the entire fleet, with quite an entire confidence.