Part 23

The night of September 22nd heard the shrieks of the tortured king: that they reached the ears of people in the town, who crossed themselves and prayed for the passing soul, is doubtless a statement due to the historian’s sympathy, for the walls are thick. In the morning, the citizens of Bristol were called to gaze upon the distorted features of their dead king, who otherwise bore no sign of violence. All were afraid to bury Isabel’s victim, till the Abbot of Gloucester bravely undertook the task. The next year Isabel and Mortimer actually visited Berkeley, and were entertained by its wealthy lord. The latter kept twelve knights to wait upon him, each of whom was served by two servants and a page. He also had twenty-four esquires, each of whom had a horse and an attendant. There were about three hundred in his household who fed at his board. The Lord of Berkeley was a mighty baron in those days. The blame had to be shifted, however, and so he was brought to an irregular trial before twelve knights, instead of his peers: he was finally acquitted of complicity in the crime in 1330. In that year, his son and successor, Maurice, was born. He fought in Granada and Gascony, and was so desperately wounded at Poictiers in 1366 that he died at Berkeley two years later. His son Thomas was also a warrior who unfurled his banner in Spain, France and Scotland. He entertained Richard II. at Berkeley in 1386, but this did not prevent his voting for Richard’s deposition in favour of Bolingbroke in 1399.

The direct male line fails soon after this and the Berkeley heiress marries a Talbot. A collateral branch comes in and the descendants have rival claims and start what is usually called the longest law-suit on record: it is not finally settled till 1609. In the course of this suit, occurs the last battle that was fought between independent noblemen in England. Lord Lisle of Wotton, the grandson of the great Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, claims Berkeley which is held by William, a fiery youth of nineteen. (Wotton-under-Edge lies under the edge of the hills three miles beyond Nibley Knoll.) On March 22nd, 1470, the Viscount sends a challenge to Berkeley to settle all differences by combat: it is eagerly accepted. There was bustle in the castle that night. The meeting was at Nibley Green. Long Lane still preserves memories of how the men of Berkeley chased the men of Wotton into the churchyard till the grass was heavy with crimson dew. Berkeley far outnumbered Lisle; moreover the latter were taken as they were marching unawares, and an arrow entered their leader’s open visor and a dagger afterwards finished him. The victors proceed to Wotton and sacked Lisle’s house. His widow gave premature birth to a dead son amid the carnage, and the Lisle claims were ended. The Wars of the Roses were still raging and a little affair of that kind passed unnoticed.

Margaret of Anjon rested once at Berkeley in her campaigning. Richard III. created Viscount Berkeley an Earl, but, true to his race, he went over. When Henry of Richmond landed at Milford Haven, Berkeley joined him and, to spite his heir, made over to him his castle and domains. After Bosworth, Henry created him a Marquess, but his avarice induced him to keep the property. In default of heirs male, however, on the death of Edward II., it lapsed to the Berkeley heirs again. The new lord of Berkeley was a mighty hunter and delighted in his beautiful deer park. On one of her progresses, Good Queen Bess paid him a visit. He happened to be absent, but his venison proved useful in victualling the courtly following. Everybody knows what it cost to entertain that locust-swarm! When Lord Henry returned, he was greatly enraged at the havoc, and ordered his park to be disparked rather than let it be a future temptation. Elizabeth heard of this and sent him a quiet hint to “beware of his words and actions, for the Earl of Leicester greatly desired the castle for himself!” One of the rooms in this “Naboth’s vineyard” is still called Queen Elizabeth’s room. Other royal guests who have visited the castle are George IV. and William IV.

The Earls of Berkeley no longer own their ancestral home, in fact they maintain that the title is not rightfully theirs. This celebrated romance of the peerage started with the fifth Earl. Some of his children were born before the only marriage he could prove to the satisfaction of the House of Lords, though he maintained that he and the lady had previously gone through a secret marriage ceremony. The Earl left the castle and estates to his eldest son, and the Crown created him Baron Fitzhardinge. The late Earl of Berkeley never took his seat in the House of Lords nor assumed his title in any way since the decision that set the baton sinister in the escutcheon of the elder sons of the fifth Earl.

THE CASTLE OF CHILLON

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Further onward we saw a white, ancient-looking group of towers, beneath a mountain, which was so high, and rushed so precipitately down upon this pile of building as quite to dwarf it; besides which, its dingy whiteness had not a very picturesque effect. Nevertheless, this was the Castle of Chillon. It appears to sit right upon the water, and does not rise very loftily above it. I was disappointed in its aspect, having imagined this famous castle as situated upon a rock, a hundred, or for aught I know, a thousand feet above the surface of the lake; but it is quite as impressive a fact--supposing it to be true--that the water is eight hundred feet deep at its base. By this time, the mountains had taken the beautiful lake into their deepest heart; they girdled it quite round with their grandeur and beauty, and, being able to do no more for it, they here withheld it from extending any farther; and here our voyage came to an end. I have never beheld any scene so exquisite; nor do I ask of Heaven to show me any lovelier or nobler one, but only to give me such depth and breadth of sympathy with nature, that I may worthily enjoy this. It is beauty more than enough for poor, perishable mortals. If this be earth, what must Heaven be!

It was nearly eight o’clock when we arrived; and then we had a walk of at least a mile to the Hotel Byron. I had forgot to mention that in the latter part of our voyage there was a shower in some part of the sky, and though none of it fell upon us, we had the benefit of those gentle tears in a rainbow, which arched itself across the lake from mountain to mountain, so that our track lay directly under this triumphal arch. We took it as a good omen, nor were we discouraged, though, after the rainbow had vanished, a few sprinkles of the shower came down.

We found the Hotel Byron very grand indeed, and a good one, too. There was a beautiful moonlight on the lake and hills, but we contented ourselves with looking out of our lofty window, whence, likewise, we had a sidelong glimpse at the white battlements of Chillon, not more than a mile off, on the water’s edge. The castle is wofully in need of a pedestal. If its site were elevated to a height equal to its own it would make a far better appearance. As it now is, it looks, so to speak profanely of what poetry has consecrated, when seen from the water, or along the shore of the lake, very like an old whitewashed factory or mill.

This morning I walked to the Castle of Chillon with J----, who sketches everything he sees, from a wild flower to a castle or a range of mountains. The morning had sunshine thinly scattered through it; but, nevertheless, there was a continual sprinkle, sometimes scarcely perceptible, and then again amounting to a decided drizzle. The road, which is built along on a little elevation above the lake shore, led us past the Castle of Chillon; and we took a side-path, which passes still nearer the castle-gate. The castle stands on an isthmus of gravel, permanently connecting it with the mainland. A wooden bridge covered with a roof, passes from the shore to the arched entrance; and beneath this shelter, which has wooden walls as well as roof and floor, we saw a soldier or _gendarme_, who seemed to act as warder. As it sprinkled rather more freely than at first, I thought of appealing to his hospitality for shelter from the rain, but concluded to pass on.

The castle makes a far better appearance on a nearer view, and from the land, than when seen at a distance and from the water. It is built of stone, and seems to have been anciently covered with plaster, which imparts the whiteness to which Byron does much more than justice, when he speaks of “Chillon’s snow-white battlements.” There is a lofty eternal wall, with a cluster of round towers about it, each crowned with its pyramidal roof of tiles, and from the central portion of the castle rises a square tower, also crowned with its own pyramid to a considerably greater height than the circumjacent ones. The whole are in a close cluster, and make a fine picture of ancient strength when seen at a proper proximity; for I do not think that distance adds anything to the effect. There are hardly any windows, or few, and very small ones, except the loopholes for arrows and for the garrison of the castle to peep from on the sides towards the water; indeed, there are larger windows at least in the upper apartments; but in that direction, no doubt, the castle was considered impregnable. Trees here and there on the land side grow up against the castle wall, on one part of which, moreover, there was a green curtain of ivy spreading from base to battlement. The walls retain their machicolations, and I should judge that nothing had been altered, nor any more work been done upon the old fortress than to keep it in singularly good repair. It was formerly a castle of the Duke of Savoy, and since his sway over the country ceased (three hundred years at least), it has been in the hands of the Swiss government, who still keep some arms and ammunition there.

We passed on, and found the view of it better, as we thought, from a farther point along the road. The raindrops began to spatter down faster, and we took shelter under an impending precipice, where the ledge of rock had been blasted and hewn away to form the road. Our refuge was not a very convenient and comfortable one, so we took advantage of the partial cessation of the shower to turn homeward, but we had not gone far when we met mamma and all her train. As we were close by the castle entrance, we thought it advisable to seek admission, though rather doubtful whether the Swiss _gendarmes_ might not deem it a sin to let us into the castle on Sunday. But he very readily admitted us under his covered drawbridge, and called an old man from within the fortress to show us whatever was to be seen. This latter personage was a staid, rather grim, and Calvinistic-looking old worthy; but he received us without scruple, and forthwith proceeded to usher us into a range of the most dismal dungeons, extending along the basement of the castle, on a level with the surface of the lake. First, if I remember aright, we came to what he said had been a chapel, and which, at all events, looked like an aisle of one, or rather such a crypt as I have seen beneath a cathedral, being a succession of massive pillars supporting groined arches,--a very admirable piece of Gothic architecture. Next, we came to a very dark compartment of the same dungeon range, where he pointed to a sort of bed, or what might serve for a bed, hewn in the solid rock, and this, our guide said, had been the last sleeping-place of condemned prisoners on the night before their execution. The next compartment was still duskier and dismaller than the last, and he bade us cast our eyes up into the obscurity and see a beam, where the condemned ones used to be hanged. I looked and looked, and closed my eyes so as to see the clearer in this horrible duskiness on opening them again. Finally, I thought I discerned the accursed beam, and the rest of the party were certain that they saw it. Next, beyond this, I think, was a stone staircase, steep, rudely cut and narrow, down which the condemned were brought to death; and beyond this, still on the same basement range of the castle, a low and narrow [corridor] through which we passed, and saw a row of seven massive pillars, supporting two parallel series of groined arches, like those in the chapel which we first entered. This was Bonnivard’s prison, and the scene of Byron’s poem.

The arches are dimly lighted by narrow loopholes, pierced through the immensely thick wall, but at such a height above the floor that we could catch no glimpse of land or water, or scarcely of the sky. The prisoner of Chillon could not possibly have seen the island to which Byron alludes, and which is a little way from the shore, exactly opposite the town of Villeneuve. There was light enough in this long, grey, vaulted room, to show us that all the pillars were inscribed with the names of visitors, among which I saw no interesting one, except that of Byron himself, which is cut, in letters an inch long or more, into one of the pillars next to that to which Bonnivard was chained. The letters are deep enough to remain in the pillar as long as the castle stands. Byron seems to have had a fancy for recording his name in this and similar ways; as witness the record which I saw on a tree of Newstead Abbey. In Bonnivard’s pillar there still remains an iron ring, at the height of perhaps three feet from the ground. His chain was fastened to this ring, and his only freedom was to walk round this pillar, about which he is said to have worn a path in the stone pavement of the dungeon; but as the floor is now covered with earth of gravel, I could not satisfy myself whether this be true. Certainly six years with nothing else to do in them save to walk round the pillar, might well suffice to wear away the rock, even with naked feet. This column and all the columns, were cut and hewn in a good style of architecture, and the dungeon arches are not without a certain gloomy beauty. On Bonnivard’s pillar, as well as on all the rest, were many names inscribed; but I thought better of Byron’s delicacy and sensitiveness for not cutting his name into that very pillar. Perhaps, knowing nothing of Bonnivard’s story, he did not know to which column he was chained.

Emerging from the dungeon-vaults, our guide led us through other parts of the castle, showing us the Duke of Savoy’s kitchen, with a fireplace at least twelve feet long; also the judgment-hall, or some such place, hung round with the coats-of-arms of some officers or other, and having at one end a wooden post, reaching from floor to ceiling, and having upon it the marks of fire. By means of this post contumacious prisoners were put to a dreadful torture, being drawn up by cords and pulleys, while their limbs were scorched by a fire underneath. We also saw a chapel or two, one of which is still in good and sanctified condition, and was to be used this very day, our guide told us, for religious purposes. We saw, moreover, the Duke’s private chamber, with a part of the bedstead on which he used to sleep, and be haunted with horrible dreams, no doubt, and the ghosts of wretches whom he had tortured and hanged; likewise the bedchamber of his duchess, that had in its window two stone seats, where, directly over the head of Bonnivard, the ducal pair might look out on the beautiful scene of lake and mountains, and feel the warmth of the blessed sun. Under this window, the guide said, the water of the lake is eight hundred feet in depth; an immense profundity, indeed, for an inland lake, but it is not very difficult to believe that the mountain at the foot of which Chillon stands may descend so far beneath the water. In other parts of the lake and not distant, more than nine hundred feet have been sounded. I looked out of the duchess’s window, and could certainly see no appearance of a bottom in the light blue water.

The last thing that the guide showed us was a trap-door, or opening, beneath a crazy old floor. Looking down into this aperture we saw three stone steps, which we should have taken to be the beginning of a flight of stairs that descended into a dungeon, or series of dungeons, such as we had already seen. But inspecting them more closely, we saw that the third step terminated the flight, and beyond was a dark vacancy. Three steps a person would grope down, planting his uncertain foot on a dimly seen stone; the fourth step would be in the empty air.

ROCCA MALATESTIANA

CHARLES YRIARTE

The name of Malatesta illuminates every step in Rimini. The fortification that serves to enclose the town, strengthened by towers of defence and by windows that resemble our modern casements, is certainly due to them. The celebrated fortress known under the name of Rocca Malatestiana still commands the city, although it is now dismantled and converted into a prison, and upon the square, San Francesco, there rises the Temple of the Malatestas (Tempio Malatestiano), the purest building, perhaps, of the most beautiful period of Italian art, upon the pediment of which you read the pompous inscription: “To Immortal God Sigismond Malatesta, son of Pandolphe.”

In 1294, Malatesta da Verucchio built the castle upon the same site, and he made of it at once a sumptuous residence and a solid fortress to which was given the name of Gattolo dei Malatesta. It is from there that Verucchio dates his will. The great Ghiberti, the sculptor of the “Gates of Paradise,” tells us, in his _Commentaries_ that in 1400 he made some enamels for the apartments and that he painted some frescoes. Alas! nothing of these remains for us. In 1446, comes Sigismond, son of Pandolphe, the great warrior and conqueror, he who has been nicknamed Poliorcète, skilful in making fortifications, pupil and soon the rival of Roberto Valturco, the celebrated author of the volume of _Re Militari_; he battered down the Gattolo, or, at least, he changed it from roof to basement at the moment when the discovery of artillery had changed all the conditions of the attack and defence of old castles. It was during this transformation that the frescoes and all the ornamentation, of which Ghiberti speaks, disappeared. Two superb inscriptions, one Gothic, the other of the first half of the Fifteenth Century, surmounted by the escutcheon of the Malatestas with the helmet crowned by elephants’ heads and the chess-board, are sure guarantees of these serious modifications. In order that they should be proved with more certainty, Matteo de’ Pasti, a pensioner of the lord of Rimini, struck, by order of his master, the superb commemorative medal representing the Rocca Malatestiana. Piero della Francesca, the great artist to whom we owe the greater number of the beautiful portraits of the Bentivoglios, the Montefeltros, and the Malatestas, brings us, in his turn, an unexceptionable proof,--the day when, in the temple of San Francesco of Rimini, the pantheon of the Malatesta family, he represents the lord of Rimini kneeling before Saint Sigismond, and gives the view of the Rocca as a background for his precious fresco.

So imposing a mass should certainly have triumphed over time, but it has been disfigured at the pleasure of succeeding generations. Upon the ground where we walk while regarding the present façade, is dug the first enclosure, a large moat a hundred feet wide and thirty-five feet deep, to-day filled up and forming a platform. We find no longer the six towers, eighty feet high, destroyed by Urbain VIII. (1625), who has also given his name to the building for more than a century,--Castello Urbano. Finally, in 1826, the first circuit was razed, and, the moat having already disappeared, they did away with the drawbridge. It is nothing more than a prison, through the gratings of which we see the red caps of the prisoners who come to gaze upon a bit of blue sky.

Another tradition insists that the Malatestas, sons of Verucchio, lived, during the lifetime of their father, in a dwelling near the old gate of San Andrea; but the house designated, dating at most from the last centuries, belonged to the Graziani, and to-day it serves as the residence for the family of the Ugolini Micheli. One sees how difficult it is to establish anything even after long inquiry; however, the conclusion of the historian, Tonini, must also be our own: the cruel scene must have taken place in Rimini, and probably in the Gattolo de Santa Colomba, that is to say in the fortress known to-day under the name of Rocca Malatestiana, a residence greatly disfigured and modified, where it would be impossible to identify the exact spot of the murder, but which, according to a number of chronicles, was at the moment this murder was accomplished, a princely residence, “containing noble apartments,” with the exterior appearance of a castle.

Since Francesca was born in Ravenna, why has posterity unanimously designated her under the name of Francesca da Rimini? Logically she should be Francesca da Ravenna; but she lived in Rimini as the wife of Giovanni Malatesta, and it was there that she expiated her crime, or her weakness, by death; it was there that her tomb was made, and posterity will therefore forever call her by the name of Francesca da Rimini. Moreover, if we sum up the opinions of the chroniclers and historians, it is understood by the most of them that the deed was accomplished in this town, and they doubt it so little that the idea never occurs to them to support a contrary opinion. Marco Battaglia, Benvenuto da Imola, Fra Giovanni da Serravalle, and Baldo di Branchi furnish proofs that might be considered as negative; but if they do not cite the name of Rimini, it never occurs to them to mention any other town. As for Jacopo Della Lana, Gradinego and Boccaccio, all three name the city of the Malatestas, and later, when Silvio Pellico and many other dramatic poets of other nations will write their dramas, their poems, or their stories, they will not hesitate to place the scene in the same city. Count Odoardo Fabri will not do otherwise, and if Lord Byron had realized the plan he conceived and which he made known to Murray, his publisher, in the letters which are now in everybody’s hands, Rimini would still be the scene. Is it necessary to speak of our compatriot, M. Auguste Thomas, the composer of _Mignon_, who having written the score of _Francesca da Rimini_, dedicated it to M. Tonini, the librarian of the Gambalunghiana.

Francesca then is not Francesca da Ravenna, she is and she will ever remain “Francesca da Rimini.”

She belongs to the history of this town, or if you prefer, to its legend. It is in vain to turn over the leaves of the archives, you cannot deprive the city of the Malatestas of its touching picture.

Before formulating our conclusions we will note, merely for the curiosity of the fact, a singular document taken from a volume printed in Rimini in 1581, by Simbeni, entitled _Il Vermicello della seta_, signed under the name Giovanni Andrea Corsucci da Sascorbaro, and cited by Luigi Tonini:

“A few days ago in the church of Saint Augustin, in Rimini, they found in a marble sepulchre Paolo Malatesta and Francesca, daughter of Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, who were put to death by Lancilotto, son of Malatesta, lord of Rimini, brother of the said Paolo found under the accomplishment of a dishonest deed, and both miserably killed with the blows of a poignard, as Petrarch describes in his _Triumph of Love_. Their clothes were of silk, and, although they had been shut up in this sepulchre for so many years, they were found in a perfect state of preservation.”