Part 13

Whips were made at Daventry a hundred years ago, but it is now a boot-making town, not altogether unpicturesque, in the slatternly sort. Besides its “Wheatsheaf,” there are the “Peacock,” the “Dun Cow,” the “Bear,” and the “Saracen’s Head”—all old; but the palm must be given to the last, containing much black oak, and altogether a great deal more interesting than a casual glance at its commonplace plastered front would disclose. Its courtyard is especially quaint; in red brick, with a large building to one side, now practically disused, but once the busy dining-room of the coaches. It was built probably about 1780: the upper part ornamented with grotesque wooden figures of Jacobean date, evidently the spoils of some demolished building. The whole, overhung with grape-vines, makes a very pretty picture.

One leaves Daventry steeply down hill, through a trampish, out-at-elbows, dirty-children-wallowing-in-the-dust-in-the-middle-of-the-road quarter. Hills again rise to left and right: on the left Catesby Abbey; ahead, the exceedingly steep descent of a mile down Braunston Hill, with Braunston spire, a deserted and ruinated windmill, and leagues upon leagues of distant country, unfolded to the startled eye. The “steep and dangerous descent” was to have been improved by Telford, but the design was never put into execution, and the hill still owns those defects, and hurtling motor-cars and cycles descending at extravagant speeds alarm the propriety of the neighbourhood. In the hollow, 197 feet below the hill-top, stands Braunston Station, the “Old Ship” inn nestling beneath the thunderous girders of the railway-bridge crossing over the road; and on the next rise over the Oxford Canal, a roadside forge and the “Castle” inn, as old as Queen Elizabeth’s day. Here the rising road forks, presenting a puzzle to the stranger, for either has the appearance of a high road. The Holyhead Road, however, bears to the left, that to the right leading in an outrageously steep semi-circle to the long, rustic, stone-built street of Braunston village.

The tower and spire of the fine Decorated church are imposing, but the interior is of little interest—the body of the building, reconstructed some fifty years ago, swept and garnished, and cleared of everything but one old relic: the mail-clad effigy of a splay-footed crusading knight, in the act of violently drawing his sword, thrust in an unobtrusive corner.

XXXVI

Two-and-a-half miles from this point, across country and in the angle formed by the branching of the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road from Weedon, lie the village and the romantic manor-house of Ashby St. Ledgers, the home of Robert Catesby, chief conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot. From Braunston is by no means the best way to Ashby: reached by a long, steep lane, and across six fields and two cross-roads. The only guides on this solitary way are the traveller’s bump of location and a battered sign-post in a cross-road, on one of whose decrepit arms, pointing vaguely through an impenetrable hedge into a ploughed field, the words, “To Ashby St. Ledgers and Crick Station,” can, under favouring circumstances of sunshine, be faintly spelled. A meditative rook, perching on a deserted harrow, typical of solitude, seemed, when the present historian came this way, to hold and keep the secret of the route, only discovered by diligent scouting at the next field-gate.

But Ashby St. Ledgers is worth this effort. At the end of the rather uninteresting village, and closing the view, there suddenly comes the beautiful grouping of old church, gatehouse, and ancient trees, leading to the manor-house itself, glimpsed through the gate—a fine old Elizabethan house, a picturesque pile of terraces, oriel windows and gables, weather-stained and delightfully picturing the orthodox character of a conspirator’s home.

They still show the “Gunpowder Plot Room” over the gateway, and the memorials of Catesby’s ancestors can even now be seen in the church—that Church of St. Leodegarius from whom the place derives its name. There they lie on the floor; monumental brasses of Catesbys, with their cognizance, a black lion, conspicuous where the fury of centuries ago has not hacked the workmanship out of recognition. There lie Sir William Catesby, 1470, and his son, Sir William, taken prisoner at Bosworth Field fifteen years later, _ex parte_ Richard III., and beheaded at Leicester; great-great-great-grandfather of the conspirator, Robert, and a warning, had he lent an ear to the history of his family, against too rashly entering into the bloody politics of those times. That remote ancestor’s fate carried with it the forfeiture of his estates, soon restored to his son; but when Robert Catesby fell in his attempt to destroy King and Parliament, and to subvert the Protestant religion, the property, forfeited again, was never restored.

XXXVII

Retracing our steps to the Holyhead Road again, the “dumpling hills of Northamptonshire,” as Horace Walpole calls them, give place to the long Warwickshire levels. Four miles and a half from Daventry, and just before reaching Willoughby village, lying off the road, the Great Central Railway comes from Rugby, and crosses over on an embankment and a blue-brick-and-iron-girder bridge; a station labelled “Willoughby, for Daventry,” looking up and down the road. Does any one, it may be asked, ever alight for Daventry in this solitary road, four miles and a half distant from that town, on the inducement of that notice? And when the innocent traveller has thus alighted, what does he say when he gets his bearings, and finds himself thus marooned, far away from where he would be?

Possibly he resorts, after being thus scurvily tricked by the railway company, to the “Four Crosses” Inn, a house with a history, standing close by. The old inn of that name, demolished in 1898, faced the bye-road to Willoughby village; the new building fronts the highway. The junction of roads at this point has only three arms, hence the original sign of the “Three Crosses,” changed to four, according to the received story, at the suggestion of Dean Swift, who was a frequent traveller along this road between Dublin and London, riding horseback, with one attendant. The old inn, hardly more than a wayside pot-house, was scarce a fit stopping place for that dignitary; but it is well known that Swift delighted in such places and the odd society to be met in them, and it may have been in some ways more convenient than the usual posting-houses at Daventry and Dunchurch.

The story runs that on one of his journeys, anxious for breakfast and to be off, he could not hurry the landlady, who tartly told him “he must wait, like other people.” He waited, of necessity, but employed the time in writing with his diamond ring upon one of the panes:—

There are three Crosses at your door: Hang up your Wife And you’l count Four. Swift, D., 1730.[2]

The landlord probably did not hang up his wife, but he certainly seems to have altered his sign.

Footnote 2:

The date is worth notice. All who have ever written on Swift give his last visit to England as 1727. But this flatly contradicts them. Nor is it in order to suppose this inscription a forgery, for it exhibits the characteristic handwriting of the Dean, as seen in his manuscript diary at South Kensington.

The window-pane disappeared from the old inn very soon afterwards, and it is not at all unlikely that the landlady herself saw to it being removed. Certainly it had disappeared in 1819, when some verses in the _Gentlemen’s Magazine_ gave the misquotation of those lines that has been the basis of every incorrect rendering since then. Many years ago the late Mr. Cropper, of Rugby, who was a native of Willoughby, and whose father had kept the “Four Crosses,” purchased the pane of a cottager in the village. It is of the old diamond shape, of green glass, and bears the words quoted above, scratched in a line, bold style.

The distinction is wrongly claimed for the “Four Crosses” Inn at Hatherton, near Cannock, on the Watling Street; a very fine old coaching inn, under whose roof Swift must certainly often have stayed; but as the roads at that point form a complete cross of four arms, the sign must always have been what it is now, and certainly all the evidence points to the Willoughby claim being justified.

Willoughby may on some old maps be found marked as a “spa,” and a little handbook, published in 1828, dealing with the merits of the “New Sulphureous and Saline Baths” that stood opposite the “Four Crosses,” assured all likely and unlikely scrofulous visitors that the waters were just as unpleasing to taste and smell, and inferentially as efficacious, as those of Harrogate itself. Cropper was both proprietor of the new baths and keeper of the inn, somewhat grandiloquently described as the “principal house for the reception of company.” The little shop seen built out from the old “Four Crosses” was a chemist’s, added at that hopeful time. But the Willoughby Spa, although so conveniently situated on the great road, never attracted much custom, and is now quite forgot. The chemist gave up in despair, and his shop was in use as a bar-parlour at the last: the old drug drawers, with their abbreviated Latin labels, remaining until the house was pulled down.

Willoughby legends still linger. They tell even yet, of the cross that stood here in the seventeenth century, and of Cromwell’s soldiery, retreating from Edge Hill, tying a rope round the shaft to pull it down, only being dissuaded by the vicar, who diverted their attention with a foaming beer-jug. It is gone now, however, but the date of its disappearance is uncertain. Gone too are the seventeen hundred acres of common land that once belonged to the parish; but their fate is a matter of precise information. They were enclosed in 1758 and the plunder divided, as by law enacted.

There was once a “New Inn” between Willoughby and Dunchurch, but it no longer tempts the wayfarer; just as there was a toll-gate at Woolscot, not far beyond, that no longer takes tolls. The toll-house remains, as do certain legends of the ways of Rugby boys with the pikeman; boys and man alike long since ferried across the inky Styx by the grim boatmen.

Pikemen acquired a preternaturally acute memory for faces. It is an acquirement that, with the smile of recognition which costs nothing, makes princes more popular and beloved than the exercise of the most austere virtues. Not that pikemen commonly smiled. Suspicion and malevolence sat squarely on their countenances, and when a something that might by an effort be construed as a smile contorted their countenances, it was like that of an alligator who perceives a fine fat nigger within reach of his jaws. A pikeman who took toll of even a thousand persons in the course of a day, might safely be counted upon to recognise each on his return and to pass him without the formality of halting to show the ticket issued in the morning; but let one who had not already paid toll that day attempt to pass with the customary nod of the returning traveller, franked through by his morning’s payment, and he was certain to be stopped and asked for his ticket. Those were the occasions when the pikeman smiled in his most hateful manner. The only places where this cold-blooded grin of triumph may nowadays be seen off the melodramatic stage, are the Old Bailey and other criminal courts; when prosecuting counsel have forged the last link in a chain of conviction.

It was at Woolscot toll-gate that the pikeman on one occasion was paid twice in one day for a gig. Tom Pinner, a well-known coachman who afterwards kept the “Five Ways” tavern at Birmingham, was once visited at Dunchurch by some friends who set out early from Daventry. They had a pleasant day and wound up with dinner. The feast was good, the wines potent, and the guests slept heavily. As they lay thus, the jocular Pinner blacked their faces, and when they had revived a little started them home. When the gig drew up in the flickering light of the toll-gate, they of course could not find their tickets, and the pikeman insisted on toll being paid: he was quite sure no black men had passed that day!

Passing over the streamlet spanned by Rains Bridge, which is probably the “stone bridge” referred to by Ogilby in 1675, as situated at the end of the twelve furlongs’ length of “Dunchurch Lane, bad way,” the exquisite half-mile avenue of majestic elms leading along a gently curving road into Dunchurch is entered. Branches and thick foliage meet overhead and realise the oft-met similitude drawn between cathedral aisles and avenues such as this.

XXXVIII

Dunchurch and the surrounding Dunsmore—at this time tamed somewhat from its ancient wildness and tickled into productiveness and smiling fertility by plough and harrow—were associated, close upon three hundred years ago, with a conspiracy that might well, had it been successful, have added such a page to England’s story whose likeness for horror and ferocity it would perhaps be impossible to match. Dunchurch, in short, has a scenic part in the “Gunpowder Treason and Plot,” that came near to blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, in Parliament assembled, on the famous Fifth of November, 1605. “To blow the Scottish beggars back to their native mountains” was Guy Fawkes’ savagely humorous explanation of the plot, when asked its object by a Scottish nobleman; but its real aim was the avenging of Roman Catholic wrongs and disabilities upon James I., and the Protestants. We have already seen the home of Robert Catesby, the true and original begetter of the plot: and here, at Dunchurch, was to be assembled a great gathering of Roman Catholic noblemen and gentlemen, to take part in a rising to follow upon the success of the blow to be struck in London. Those were times when assemblages of any kind were looked upon with suspicion, and so it was given out that the great preparations being made along the road from London, in providing relays of horses at every stage, were in connection with an elaborate hunting-party on Dunsmore, to which the squire of Ashby St. Ledgers had bidden the whole countryside. Never doubting the success of their design to blow Parliament sky-high, Catesby with three of his fellow-conspirators, Percy, and John and Christopher Wright, left London for Dunchurch on the eve of the fatal Fifth. Fawkes, fanatically courageous, was in his cellar, under the Parliament House: the sinister figure that close upon three hundred anniversary “Guy Fawkes Days” and innumerable ludicrous “guys” have not wholly succeeded in robbing of its dramatic force. There he lurked: booted and spurred, slouch-hatted and cloaked; slow-matches in his pocket, and a dark-lantern behind the door.

Two others of the conspirators remained in town, to watch the success of the dark design. They were Ambrose Rookwood and Thomas Winter. But as the midnight of November 4th, sounded from the clocks of London and ushered in the opening hour of the Fifth, Fawkes was arrested in his hiding-place, and the scheme wrecked. Instantly, as though by magic, the rumours of some calamity narrowly averted, pervaded London, and warned Rookwood and Winter to fly. Had they trusted to the staunchness of Fawkes they and the others would have been safe enough, for that unwilling sponsor of all subsequent “guys” was as secret as the grave, and even under torture made no disclosures until by their own later acts the conspirators had rendered concealment useless. But, panic-stricken, Rookwood and Winter left London behind in the forenoon; Winter for hiding in Worcestershire, Rookwood to overtake and warn Catesby and his companions on the Holyhead Road. He came up with them at Little Brickhill and with laboured breath—for he had ridden headlong—told the tale of how the plot had been discovered. They wasted no time in discussion. If they had hasted before, they journeyed frantically now. By six o’clock, riding through a day of November rain, they had gained Ashby St. Ledgers, casting away their heavy cloaks as they went, together with aught else that might hinder their mad flight. Seventy-eight miles in seven hours was a marvellous ride in those times, and under such conditions. Perhaps some modern cyclist, eager to draw a parallel, will essay the feat under like meteorological conditions.

That evening, after wild and gloomy conference at Ashby, they set out for Dunchurch, making for the “Lion” inn, the head-quarters of the pretended hunting-party, where the young and handsome Sir Everard Digby was in expectation of hearing other news than that which burst upon him when the exhausted and dispirited band drew rein before the old gabled house in the stormy night. The story of their further flight, of how Catesby and Percy died together in the fighting at Holbeach House, does not concern us here, but the old house does. An inn no longer, it still stands, as a farmhouse, in midst of Dunchurch village: a long, low, gabled building, with casement windows and timbered and plastered front; low-ceiled and heavily raftered rooms within. In the rear, beyond the farm-yard, may even yet be seen the remains of a moat, enclosing a wooded patch of ground whose story is vague and formless: relics, these, of times much more ancient than those of the Gunpowder Plot. The “Lion” was an old “pack-horse” inn for many generations afterwards.

Dunchurch, in the old coaching days, was a place of many and good inns: all of them, however, excelled by the “Dun Cow,” almost the sole remaining member of the herd of “White Lions,” “Red Lions,” “Blue Boars,” “Green Men,” and such-like zoological curiosities that once thronged it. There was an excellent reason for such wealth of accommodation, for the village was situated not only on the Holyhead Road, but at the intersection of it by the Oxford and Leicester Road, along which plied a goodly throng of traffic. On that road lies Rugby, three miles away, and along it went, among other forgotten conveyances, the “Regulator”—“young gents calls it the ‘Pig and Whistle,’” remarked the guard of the coach that conveyed young Tom Brown from London to Dunchurch.

Rugby and its famous school have made a vast difference to this village, now postally “Dunchurch, near Rugby,” but formerly the post-town whence the once insignificant village of Rugby—Rugby-under-Dunchurch was served.

The “Dun Cow,” survivor and representative of the jolly days of old, takes its name from the mythical monster of a cow slain, according to confused and contradictory legends, upon Dunsmore by the almost equally mythical Guy of Warwick.

Steadfastly regarding the old inn, and with its back turned upon the church, the white marble effigy of “the Right Honble. Lord John Douglas Montagu Douglas Scott” cuts a ludicrous figure in the centre of the village. The work of an Associate of the Royal Academy, it simply serves to point to what depths the art of sculpture had descended in the early Sixties, when it was wrought. The inscription states that Lord Douglas Scott died in 1860, and that the statue “was erected by his tenantry in affectionate memory of him.” The clothes worn at that period give, of course, their own element of grotesqueness to the statue; but the heavy mass of fringed drapery that Lord John is represented to be carrying under his arm has occasioned the derisive query, “Who stole the altar-cloth?”

Dunchurch, besides being a sweetly pretty place, rejoices in a number of minor curiosities. The beautiful church has one, in the eccentric monument of Thomas Newcombe, King’s Printer in the reigns of Charles II., James II., and William III. It is in the shape of folding-doors of white marble. In the churchyard, too, he who searches in the right place will discover the epitaph of Daniel Goode, who died in 1751, “A Ged year 25.” The advice given is better than the jingle to which it is set:—

To all young men That me survive Who dyed at less Than twenty-five, I do this Good Advice declare: That they live in God’s faith and fear.

Other relics are grouped well in sight of one another. The battered village cross, for instance, with a little marble slab fixed on its shaft, bearing the arms of that Duchess of Buccleuch, who in 1810 restored it; and the village “cage,” or lock-up, under a spreading elm, with the stocks close adjoining, for the accommodation or discomfort of two. The lock-up was for the detention of such malefactors as might trouble Dunchurch—the stocks for misdemeanants only. An Act of 1606 imposed six hours of the stocks and a fine of five shillings for drunkenness; and from that time forward and until the opening years of the nineteenth century this peculiar form of punishment was common throughout England. His personal popularity, or the want of it, made all the difference between misery and comparative comfort to the misdemeanant undergoing six hours in the stocks. The jolly toper, overcome in his cups and sent to penance by some Puritan maw-worm of a justice, had both the moral and bodily support of his boon companions, and left durance probably more drunken than he had been on the occasion that led to his conviction: the sturdy vagrant, smiter, rapscallion, or casual rogue who happened to be in ill-odour with the village endured bitter things. Jibes, stones, cabbage-stalks, ancient eggs, and dead dogs and cats, deceased weeks before, were hurled at the wretch, who was lucky if he had not received severe personal injuries before his time was up, and the beadle or the parish constable came to release him.

XXXIX

It would be difficult nowadays to discover any one to agree with Pennant, the antiquary, who in 1782 could find it possible to write of the superbly wooded road across Dunsmore Heath as a “tedious avenue of elms and firs.” The adjective is altogether indefensible. Six miles of smooth and level highway, bordered here by noble pines, and there by equally noble elms, invite the traveller to linger by the roadside from Dunchurch to Ryton-on-Dunsmore. It is a stretch of country not only beautiful but interesting, alike for its history and traditions. The Heath, long since enclosed and under cultivation, but once the haunt of fabled monsters, and, at a later period, of desperate highwaymen, is a level tract of land dotted with villages that all add to their names the title of “upon-Dunsmore,” as a kind of terrific dignity. Through the midst of this sometime wilderness goes the high-road, beautiful always, but singularly lovely in the eyes of the traveller who, advancing in a north-westerly direction, sees the setting sun glaring redly between the wizard arms of the pines. Many of those exquisite trees are of great age. The avenue, in fact—the Ong Avenue, as it was originally called—was planted in 1740, by John, second Duke of Montague. Some of the firs have decayed, but happily their places will be taken in due course by the saplings planted of late years. The elms are, most of them, in worse case, and are being generally cut down to half their height by cautious road surveyors. The elm, that, without warning, rots at the heart and collapses in a moment, is the most treacherous of trees; and, some day, those that are left here will suddenly fall and be the death of the unhappy cyclist, farmer, or tramp who happens to be passing at the time.