Part 11

These hoary relics had a narrow escape of being totally destroyed by those who pulled down the old church; and the work of breaking them into pieces had already begun when the indignant people of the town stopped it. The clamps marking where the broken pillars were mended are clearly to be seen. A stone, really the head of an ancient cross, near by, is said to mark the place where the giant’s thumb is buried.

Penrith has suffered much in its time from wars and tumults, but it was afflicted in a dreadful manner by a great plague which almost depopulated the neighbourhood between September 1597 and January 1599, as an inscription in the church relates. In Penrith itself 2,260 people died, and in Kendal 2,500.

The chief streets of the town have been much modernised, but some old landmarks reward the diligent. The “Prince Charles Restaurant,” a baker’s shop, occupies the mansion where the Young Pretender lodged, and some old Penrith merchants’ houses remain: notably one in Angel Lane, on whose front the old local passion for remembrance, that usually finds expression in dates, initials, and improving maxims, develops into family history and epitaph, as thus:

This acquir^d by Rob^t Miers Merc^t, who was inter^d the 19^{th} of May 1722 His Wy^s Marg^t and Ann Sep^{br} ye 19 rebuilt in y^e y^r 1763 Sep^{br} ye 30 by W. M.

This is mysterious, beyond hope of solution.

On the building now an infants’ school is the inscription “WIL. ROBINSON, CIVISLONDANNO 1670,” oddly spaced, and over the entrance to an alley the initials “R. E. L. 1697,” with sculptured shears above; probably a relic of the Langhorn family, cloth-merchants, whose earliest memento in this sort is the inscription “T. E. L. 1584.”

XXIV

[Sidenote: _TO CARLISLE_]

The Boer War of 1899-1902 has left a wayside memorial at the approach to Penrith, and another, in the shape of a beautiful bronze statue, personifying Victory conferring honour upon the fallen, stands by Middlegate, as you leave for the north. “Scotland Road,” confronting you, indicates the not far distant Border, and then, at the “White Ox” inn, the ways divide: on the right the Old Carlisle Road, on the left the new. Very steep and rough goes the old road for one mile. Prince Charlie marched it, and has my heartfelt sympathy. After passing the “Inglewood” inn, which seems forlornly to wonder what has become of the traffic, it rejoins the existing highway—which runs along the traces of an ancient Roman road—at Stony Beck. To the left hand, near Plumpton station, are some traces of the Roman station of _Voreda_, known as Castlesteads, or Old Penrith. It has yielded many relics. Of the ancient Inglewood Forest, and the alarming wild boars that frequented it, there are no signs, and the road—as excellent a road as one would wish to find—goes with little incident away into Carlisle itself, the Petterill Brook on the left hand. The “Pack Horse” inn stands at the cross-road to Lazonby, where Salkeld toll-gate once stood, and then, two miles from High Hesket, on the left hand, rises the hill known suggestively as Thiefside: the thieves in question, no doubt, the old horse-thieves, cattle-raiders, and moss-trooping vagabonds of the Border. High Hesket is a tiny wayside village of the rough stone houses, generally whitewashed, that henceforward are the feature of the road, through Cumberland and into Dumfriesshire. The church of High Hesket, quite a humble little building, with bellcote in lieu of tower, stands, shamefaced in a coating of compo, by the way, near another dilapidated old “White Ox” inn, once busy with the traffic of a bygone day. The motor-cars disregard it, or merely halt for that last indignity to an inn, a pail of water wherewith to cool their engines. Dropping downhill to Low Hesket, the road comes quickly to Carleton and then, by the frowzy street of Botchergate, into the midst of Carlisle.

[Sidenote: _CARLISLE_]

Carlisle was the first and stoutest bulwark gainst the northern foe, and maintained that character for close upon sixteen hundred years, from the remote time of the Roman dominion until the union of the kingdoms under James the First. The place, standing as it does upon a rocky bluff, overlooking the levels of the Solway and the Eden, was, it would almost seem, intended by Nature for this office, and here accordingly the Roman wall of Hadrian was traced, running from sea to sea, from Wallsend near Newcastle, to Carlisle, and ending on the Solway Firth at Bowness. Here they found an early Celtic settlement, “Caer Lywelydd”; but it was not the site of Carlisle, but rather Stanwix, its northern suburb, on the opposite bank of the Eden, that formed the Roman military station of _Luguvallum_, _i.e._ the “station on the wall.” What is now Carlisle was the civil settlement. When the Romans withdrew, to defend their decaying Empire nearer home, _Luguvallum_, peopled with half-breed Romano-British, who could not retire with them, made for years a hopeless fight with the savages out of Scotland on the one hand, and with the Saxons on the other. The Saxons, as almost everywhere else, prevailed in the end, and the town became in their tongue, “Caer Luel”; whence the transition to “Carlisle” is one of the easiest.

Carlisle, the great mediæval fortress-town, owes its origin to Rufus. The mighty Conqueror, who subdued most other portions of this land, rested short of Westmoreland and Cumberland, which had then for one hundred and twenty years been accounted Scottish soil; but it was under his generally despised son that these broad lands were won back for England; and the Scottish King Malcolm, invading England on the east coast, in revenge, was slain in 1093, at Alnwick. Peace, however, was not to reign upon these contested lands for yet many a century; but what could be done was accomplished, and Carlisle Castle arose, a grim Norman keep, upon the highest apex of the town. It was in after years enlarged and strengthened, and the strong walls of the city connected with it; and to-day, although the factory-buildings and the smoky chimneys in a distant view of Carlisle show, readily enough, that the city is now a place of commerce, the Norman castle-keep still darkly crowns the scene, sharing its pre-eminence only with the Cathedral.

But in spite of its castle and the stout town walls, Carlisle has been, many more times than can readily be counted, the scene of warfare, and was often sacked and burnt. It was thus ever a place of arms. In all the country round about, men went armed to the plough, and the great lords held their lands from the King under the strictest obligations to military service, and were captained by the Lord Warden, whose duties included the firing of beacons and the mustering of all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Small tenants held their fields and farms under the name of “nag-tenements” and “foot-tenements,” and were bound, according to their degree, to fight mounted or on foot.

When the enemy crossed the Border, there was a stir in the city of Carlisle, like that which accompanies the overturning of an ant-heap. The muckle town-bell was rung, the citizens assembled under arms, and the women manned the walls (if the expression may be allowed) with kettles, boiling-water, and apronfuls of stones.

There was no worse time in this long history than the reign of Henry the Eighth. War with Scotland had brought to that country the crushing defeat of Flodden, where, in the words of the Scottish lament, “The flowers of the forest were a’ weed awa”; but the result was anarchy in the Borders, where thousands of lawless men lived, whom no man could restrain. The Warden’s office was then no light task, and a Scot on the English side, or an Englishman on the Scottish, went in momentary danger of his life. Every man was required to explain his presence, and in the streets of Carlisle none might speak, without leave, to a Scot, and none of that nationality was permitted to live in the city.

[Sidenote: _RAIDERS_]

Carlisle Castle remained at this period, and for long after, a strong place, but nothing is more astonishing than the ease with which raiders often surprised even the stoutest castles. Let us take, for instance, the affair of the “bold Buccleuch” and Kinmont Willie, in the times of Queen Elizabeth. The borders had long been free from war on the larger scale, but the moss-trooping, reiving forays survived in much of their early severity, in spite of the amicable appointment of English and Scottish Lords Wardens, who were supposed to restrain the lawless folk on either side of the debateable lands between the marches. The Wardens’ Courts were strictly conducted in the districts of the Solway, and those assembled at them were guaranteed from violence on either side. But in 1596, when the Court assembled at Kershopeburn to settle grievances in connection with the great raids of the Armstrongs, who had come across from Scotland to the number of three thousand and lifted all the stock for miles around, the feelings of the English were raw. A notable man among these cattle-thieves was this same “Kinmont Willie,” and the English sorely longed to take vengeance upon him. At the Court, he was protected by the rules of that assemblage, but in riding away he was reckless enough to go off alone, and what might have been expected happened. He was captured and consigned to a dungeon in Carlisle Castle.

All the Scottish side of the Border was immediately in an uproar at this violation of agreements, and Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, Keeper of Liddesdale, was moved to apply for the raider’s release. Buccleuch was a law-abiding person, and would probably have been glad enough to see Kinmont Willie properly hanged on his own side, but this breach of the understanding between the Wardens was an outrage not to be endured.

[Sidenote: _SIEGE OF CARLISLE_]

Lord Scrope, the English Warden, informed him the affair was so important that it must be referred to the Queen; and she in turn ignored it altogether. Buccleuch therefore determined, at whatever cost, to rescue the prisoner, who would otherwise soon have been hanged, and he put himself at the head of two hundred and ten desperate spirits who at night crossed the Esk and silently drew near to Carlisle, two hours before peep o’ day. They had brought with them, on horseback, scaling ladders for the castle walls, and pickaxes, and made a breach by the postern-gate. What were those sentinels doing, who were not alarmed? Sleeping, doubtless. At any rate, the garrison knew nothing until Buccleuch’s men had forced an entrance. The dungeon where the prisoner was immured was known, and he was brought forth, chains and all, and hurried away. The whole party were speedily off again, and into their own country, before pursuit was properly organised.

The last raid took place actually in 1601, when the kingdoms were united by the accession of James the First, and while he was at Berwick, journeying to London. Several hundreds of Scots then came plundering past Carlisle, and many were captured and duly hanged. James, anxious to unite the kingdoms in reality, ordered that the name of “the Border,” standing for centuries of warfare, should give place to “the midlands,” but the new style does not seem ever to have come into general use; and the coming of the Stuarts meant in after years much more trouble for Carlisle and its surroundings; for it was in 1644-5 that the city endured the longest and most severe siege in its history. It was held for the King, and beleaguered for eight months by the Scottish General, Leslie. The citizens paid dearly for their loyalty, and were reduced to eating horses, dogs, and rats. Hungry folks chased errant cats hazardously across roof-tops, in view of the besiegers, who took long shots at them; and even hemp-seed became so dear that only the wealthy could afford it. Money current in the city was coined from silver plate; but there was so little food to purchase that, as a diarist of the time wrote, “the citizens were so shrunk from starvation, they could not choose but laugh at one another, to see their clothes hang upon them as upon men on gibbets.”

It was upon the surrender ending this memorable siege that Carlisle Cathedral suffered so greatly. The visitor who first sets eyes upon the venerable pile finds himself bewildered by its unusual proportions, and has some difficulty in distinguishing which end is east and which west. He has been used, everywhere else, to see the nave of a cathedral much longer than its choir, and to see the building stretching away westward from the central tower five and six times the length of the eastern, or choir, limb. Here, however, when he has definitely settled his bearings, he perceives the choir to be more than thrice the length of the nave.

This present odd aspect of the Cathedral, looking as though it had been twisted bodily round, is entirely owing to the fury with which the soldiery fell upon it, after the siege. Where there were once eight bays to the Early Norman nave, there are now but two: the rest all went as so much rough stone wherewith to repair the walls of the city and to erect guard-houses: a curious reversal of its early use, for it was from the ancient Roman wall that these stones came in Norman times.

[Sidenote: _THE STEEL THAT MAKES AFRAID_]

But Carlisle was not done with trouble, even in the sacrilege of 1645. It escaped in 1715, for the rebels avoided coming to clashes with a fortified city; but it came to know intimately of the much more nearly successful rebellion of 1745. But what use are battlemented walls of stone, if they be manned with faint hearts? After all the brave doings of “merry Carlisle,” it is sad to think how low the martial spirit had sunk by 1745, when the militia, assembled in the city, declined to fight the rebels under Prince Charlie. A bold front would have compelled the invaders to leave Carlisle alone; but the broadswords of the Highlanders had so much of what military historians term “moral effect” that the militiamen positively refused to run the risk of being cleaved by that terrible cold steel. Poor Colonel Durand, in command—if we may still call that a command which will not obey orders—might rave, and implore, and even weep, but it was useless, and the city was surrendered. Prince Charlie was in camp at Brampton, eight miles away, and it must have been a proud moment for him—if a sorry humiliation for some—when mayor and corporation went out to him and on their knees offered the keys of the gates. The next day the Prince entered in triumph, on a milk-white horse, one hundred pipers piping before him. It must have been a fearful moment—for those who did not love the bagpipes.

George the Second, at St. James’s, began to reconsider his position at hearing of this signal failure of his sworn protectors, and many excellent, though time-serving, people in high places began to explain away the disagreeable things they had said of the Stuarts. But in a few weeks, as we know, the Highlanders were retreating; and, trimming their sails anew, politicians and witlings were repeating again their protestations of loyalty to the House of Hanover, and refurbishing that old quotation from Revelation, chapter xvii. verse 11, first current in 1715, by which they affected to believe that James the Second of England and Seventh of Scotland, and his son, the Pretender (_de jure_ James the Third and Eighth) were the subjects of prophecy: “And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.”

An ingenious find, it must be allowed, and sufficient, providing no one else could refer to Revelation and find another quotation, a little destructive of the first. But such an one was actually to hand in the preceding verse, which very curiously says, “And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.” There were those excellent Whigs who, reading this, were not entirely happy until events demonstrated that the rebellion was absolutely hopeless.

The Duke of Cumberland with ease retook the city, and captured with it Prince Charlie’s devoted rear-guard: the brave Colonel Townely and his 120 men of the Manchester Regiment, together with over two hundred Highlanders, and some few Frenchmen. They were lodged in the Cathedral, and thence taken in a long melancholy procession to London, there, according to their degree, to be beheaded as gentlemen, or hanged like common malefactors. They rode, tied hand and foot, or walked, roped together, the whole bitter way.

[Sidenote: _THE CASTLE DUNGEONS_]

The Duke was not greatly impressed with the military value of the castle. He called it “an old hen-coop,” but it held securely enough the other miserable prisoners who were sent into Carlisle after Culloden. Four hundred of them awaited their doom in the grim dungeons, throughout the hot weather of 1746, and in October the executions began. Ninety-six fell to the hangman, and others were transported beyond seas. In batches of half-a-dozen or a dozen at a time, they were called forth from their captivity and drawn on hurdles to that Hanoverian Golgotha, Gallows Hill, south of the city, where they were hanged and afterwards quartered, in the bloody-minded old way; their heads afterwards set upon poles over the Scotch Gate.

You may see relics of that savage time, even now, in the cell fashioned in the thick eastern wall of the keep: the prison occupied by Macdonald of Keppoch. He whiled away the tedium of imprisonment by decorating the walls with designs, executed with a nail, and there they still remain. At this day Carlisle Castle is a somewhat shabby military depôt. The outer bailey is a parade-ground skirted with barracks, and the inner ward and keep are War Office storehouses. But it is in the unexpected modern surroundings of the public library that the most tragical memento of that time brings the hazards of rebellion with greatest vividness before you. This is a plaster cast of a monument erected to Dr. Archibald Campbell in the Savoy Chapel, London. The Chapel was largely destroyed by fire in 1864, and with it the marble monument. The unfortunate doctor was a non-combatant who acted as surgeon to the rebels at Culloden, and escaped abroad from that disastrous field. He returned, after seven years, to his Scottish home, thinking he might then safely do so; but was informed against and executed.

XXV

[Sidenote: _CARLISLE COACHING_]

The greatest figure in the coaching world up north was Teather, who was principal contractor for mails and stage-coaches in all that lengthy territory of 166 miles between Lancaster and Glasgow. The careers of the Teathers reflect the fortunes of the road. John Teather, the father, was originally landlord of the “Royal Oak,” Keswick, which does not stand on the main route to the north; but he left the comparative obscurity of that Lakeland town for the bustling activities of Carlisle, and from that strategic coaching position worked the coaches sixty-five miles south to Lancaster, and 101 miles north, to Glasgow.

Eight mails entered and left Carlisle daily, and seven stage-coaches; and eighty horses were kept for the proper working of them. Teather and his son managed this important business: the younger succeeding to it in 1837 and, in the general wreck brought about by railway extension, living to end where his father had begun, as landlord of the “Royal Oak” at Keswick.

With the coming of the nineteenth century, some steps were taken to make Carlisle a port. It was thought that a ship-canal from a place called Fisher’s Cross on the Solway, to Carlisle, a distance of twelve miles, would make the ancient city a place of commercial importance; and accordingly the canal was cut, 1819-23, at a cost of £90,000, and Fisher’s Cross was dignified by the new name of “Port Carlisle.” The enterprise never paid its way, any steps that might in after years have been taken to improve the position being rendered impossible by the coming of railways; while the irony of fate long ago overtook the canal, in its conversion into a railway.

It was in December 1846 that the first railway ran into Carlisle from the south. This was the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, long since absorbed into the London and North-Western. In September 1847 the Caledonian Railway, from Carlisle to Moffat, carried on the new methods another stage, and in the following February it was further extended to Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was necessarily the death-blow of the coaches along the main route. My old friend, Mr. W. H. Duignan, of Walsall, who remembers that time, travelled from Carlisle to Glasgow by the last mail-coach. He went to the “Bush” hotel and booked a seat for the occasion.

The bookkeeper remarked, when he gave his name, “I think I have often booked you before, sir, have I not?”

“Yes,” the traveller replied.

“Then, sir,” rejoined the clerk, refusing the money, “Mr.——”—mentioning the name of the hotel-keeper—“will feel it a pleasure if you will accept a seat, and order anything you please, at his expense.”

My friend declared that was the most gentlemanly-dying mail he ever knew.

The “Bush” has since been rebuilt, but at Corby Castle, some two miles away, in what was once the “Haunted Room,” there hangs in a frame an interesting pane of glass from one of its windows, inscribed by no less notable a traveller than Hume, the historian, with the satirical verse, reflecting upon the “Bush,” the Cathedral, and Carlisle in general:

Here chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl; Here godless boys God’s glories squall; Here heads of Scotchmen guard the wall, But Corby’s walks atone for all.

Sir Walter Scott saw this in 1825, and humorously remarked in a letter to his friend Morritt upon “Hume’s poetical works.”

[Sidenote: _A RAILWAY CENTRE_]

The reason that made Carlisle in early days the key of military dispositions, and in later times so important a coaching centre, acted even more powerfully in making it the busy centre of many railway systems that it is to-day. Carlisle has ever stood squarely in the way of those who would pass on the west between England and Scotland. To-day, the rival railways all run into one joint station: and there the London and North-Western, the Midland, and their respective allies, the Caledonian, the North British, and the Glasgow and South-Western, after many a Parliamentary battle in the past, compose their differences.

The chief coaching-business was ruined thus early, but the branch coaches yet remained, and the last coach—that to Edinburgh by Hawick—did not leave Carlisle on its final journey until August 31st, 1862. Coaching history, however, is as little illustrated in Carlisle by visible remains as the ancient story of the place, for while the “Bush” has been rebuilt, the rival inn, the “Crown and Mitre,” in Castle Street, has declined to the state of a coffee-tavern, and the “Blue Bell,” in Scotch Street, has obviously seen its best days.

If you seek frowning gateways, embattled walls, and the like, sufficient to clothe the stirring story of Carlisle, you will be freezing in the cold shade of disappointment, for the streets of Carlisle are wide, many of the houses are modern, and railways are very much to the fore. The Cathedral is obscurely placed, and almost the only picturesque nook is the alley called St. Alban’s Row. Even the old upping-blocks that used to stand so plentifully by the kerbstones for the convenience of horsemen, and were a feature of Carlisle, have disappeared. Only the odd names of the streets and alleys occasionally remain: among them Rickergate, Whippery, and Durham Ox Lane.

[Sidenote: _“MERRY” CARLISLE_]