Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The city is the home of those Shrewsbury cakes, famed in The Ingoldshy Legends, and once offered to distinguished visitors, who thought them “delicious,” but if they were then no better than now, we can imagine how poor the living of the proudest was in olden times. Rather than the bakery which professes to be the original Pallin’s, or even the Norman castle from which Henry IV. went out to beat Henry Percy and his Yorkish followers, the gentle reader will wish to see the quaint streets and places in which the timbered houses called Tudor abound beyond the like anywhere else in England. There are whole lengths and breadths of these, some stately and tall, and some so humble and low that you can put your hand on their eaves as you pass, but all so charming and so picturesque that you could wish every house in the town to be like them. Failing this, you must console yourself as best you can by visiting the most beautiful old Abbey Church in the world: how old it is I will not say, and how beautiful I cannot, but it fills the heart with reverence and delight. I will not pretend that the inside is as lovely as the outside: that could not be, and any one outlive the joy of it; but it is within and without adorable. You do not require a late afternoon light on the rich façade, but if you have it you are all the happier in its century-mellowed masonry and’ the old-lace softness of the Gothic window which opens over half its space. From the church you will fancy, inadequately enough, what the whole abbey must have been before it fell into ruin under the hand of Reform. But a relic of the monastic life remains which will repay the enthusiast for going across the way and putting his nose and eyes between the palings of the railroad freight-yard in which it stands, and lingering long upon the sight of it among the grime and dust of the place. It is the pulpit of the refectory where some young brother used to stand to read to the other monks, while they sat at meat, and listened to his prayer and praise, if anything, and not to one another’s talk. That youthful ghost now reads to a spectral brotherhood, not more dead now than then, to all the loveliness of life; and the porters come and go through their shadowy company, pushing their heavy trucks to and from the goods-vans, and from time to time the engines lift their strident voices above the monotonous silence of the reader’s words; and all is very weird and sad; What should have possessed us to drive beyond the Abbey Church to view “the quaint Dun Cow Inn,” heaven knows; but that was what we did, and now I can testify that there is really an image of the Dun Cow standing over its door, and challenging the spectator for any associations he has with it. We had none, but I do not say it is not rich in associations for the better-informed. Even we can suppose Coleridge stopping there, and perhaps not being able to pay for the milk it yielded, and so staying on till the youthful Hazlitt came and ordered the meal — in the essay where he has so divinely rendered the consciousness of “the gentleman in the parlor” waiting for his supper. We must have it that he paid the poet’s bill; otherwise we should have seen him still pent and peering sadly from the window, with the image of the Dun Cow watching relentlessly overhead.

  There are two bridges crossing the Severn at Shrewsbury: the English Bridge and the Welsh Bridge, by which the Briton and the Sassenach respectively went and came during the ages of border warfare before that last battle of the Roses. Now the bridges are used by travellers who wish to drink so deep of the Severn’s beauty (in which the softly wooded shores are glassed as tenderly as a lover in his mistress’ eyes), that they can never go away from Shrewsbury, but must remain glad captives to the witchery of her wandering up-and-down-hill streets, her Tudor houses, her beautiful churches, her enchanting remains of a past rich in insurpassable events and men. I say insurpassable to round my period; but there is no place in England that is not equally insurpassable in these things.

  XIII. NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY

  GREAT BRINGTON is the name of the village neighborhood clustering about the church where, under the floor of the nave, the great-great-grandfather of George Washington lies buried. Little Brington is the village neighborhood, hardly separated from the other, where the Washington family dwelt in a house granted them by their cousin, Earl Spencer, when the events of the Civil War drove them from their ancestral place at Sulgrave. To reach the Bringtons from London you must first go to Northampton, where in his time the first Lawrence Washington was twice mayor. The necessity is not a hardship, for to see Northampton, ever so passingly, is a delight such as only English travel can offer. To drive the six miles from Northampton to the Bringtons is another necessity which is another delight, still richer if not greater. Be chosen by a 28th of September, veiled in a fog with sunny rifts in its veil, for your railroad rim through a level pastoral scene where stemless blotches of trees shelter white blurs of sheep, and vague canal-boats rest cloudily on the unseen waterways, and you have conditions in which, if you are worthy, the hour of your journey will shrink to a few golden minutes. You will be meanwhile kept by the protecting mists from the manifold facts which in England are apt to pierce you with a thousand appeals and reproaches. The many much-storied places will be faded to wraiths of towers and gates and walls, and you will escape to your destination without that torment of regret for not having constantly stopped on the way from which nothing could otherwise deliver you.

  If at Northampton the fog lifts, and the autumnal sun has all the rest of the day to itself, you arrive with unimpaired strength for what you have come to see. Yet with all your energy conserved on the way, you will not be fully equal to the demand upon you. Northampton did not fail to begin with the Britons, and though it was not a permanent Roman station, and lay dormant during the Saxon hierarchy, it revived sufficiently under Saxon rule in the eleventh century to be twice taken and once burnt by the Danish invaders. It suffered under the Normans, but was walled and fortified in the Conqueror’s reign, and began a new life with the inspiration of his oppressions. A picturesque incident of its civil history, which was early a record of resistance to the royal will, was Thomas à Becket’s defiance of Henry II., when the King tried to reduce the proud churchman to the common obedience before the laws. The archbishop, followed by great crowds of the people, appeared as summoned, but when the Earl of Leicester bade him, in the old Norman form, hear the judgment rendered against him, he interrupted with the words, “Son and Earl, hear me first! I forbid you to judge me! I decline your tribunal, and refer my quarrel to the decision of the Pope.” Then he retired, and shortly escaped to Flanders, but coming back to Canterbury, was murdered, as all men know, by four of the King’s knights, at the altar in the cathedral.

  Perhaps the feeling of the people was less for the prelate than against the prince, for the first Protestant heresies spread rapidly in Northampton, and the doctrines of Wickliffe had such acceptance that the mayor himself was accused of holding them, and of favoring the spread of Lollardy. In the two great Civil Wars, Northampton stood for the White Rose and then for the Parliament, against the two kings. In 1460, a great battle was fought under the city’s walls; ten thousand of Henry’s “tall Englishmen” were killed or drowned in the river Nene, and Henry himself was brought prisoner into the town. In 1642, the guns of the Puritan garrison “plaid for about two hours” on “the cavaleers and shot about twenty of them” when they attempted to assault the place, which became a rendezvous for the parliamentarians, and sent them frequent aid from its fifteen thousand in their attacks on the neighboring places holding for the King. In 1645, both parties met in force, a little northwest of the town, and Cromwell, who had joined Fairfax, won the battle of Naseby after Fairfax had lost it, and with an overwhelming victory ended the war against Charles.

  If any Washingtons were in the fight, as some of so numerous a line might very well have been, it was on the King’s side. They put their faith in princes while they remained in England; it wanted yet a hundred and thirty years, at the remoteness of Virginia, to school them to the final diffidence which they were not the first of the Americans to feel. The slow evolution of the race out of devoted subjects into devoted citizens was accomplished in stuff other th
an that of the Puritan chief who soon after could “say this of Naseby, — that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men... I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would by things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance, and God did it.” Yet the faith in poor common men, once kindled in Washington, if not so mixed with piety as Cromwell’s, outlasted that through parliamentary trials as severe as ever it was put to by poor uncommon men.

  Non-conformity, civil as well as religious, which the Washingtons were no part of, was the note of Northampton from the first, and to the last it has been represented in Parliament by such bold dissentients as Bradlaugh and Mr. Labouchere. It is the great shoe-town of England, and apparently there is nothing like leather to inspire a manly resistance to the pretensions of authority. But the Washingtons of Northampton were never any part of the revolt against kingly assumptions. The Lawrence Washington who was twice Mayor of Northampton profited by Henry VIII.’s suppression of the monasteries to possess himself of Sulgrave Manor, where his descendants dwelt for a hundred years and more, until 1658, when their discomforts under the Commonwealth, and their failing fortunes, made them glad of the protection of their noble kindred the Spencers at Brington.

  It is not clear how the house at Little Brington, which is known as the Washington house, was granted them, or how much it was loan or gift of the Spencers; but it does not greatly matter now. The Washingtons, who had shared the politics of their cousins, were rather passive royalists, but they suffered the adversities of the cause they had chosen, and they did not apparently enjoy the prosperity which the Restoration brought to such of their side as could extort recognition from the second Charles, as thankless as the first Charles was faithless; and neither the Washingtons who staid in England, nor those who went to Virginia, had ever any profit from their fidelity to the Stuarts. They were gentlemen, who were successful in business when they turned to trade, but in the household records of their noble cousins at their seat of Althorp there is said to be proof of the frequent goodness of the Spencers to the needy Washingtons of Little Brington. If the Washingtons paid for the favor they enjoyed in the ways that poor relations do, it is not to the discredit of either line that a lady of their family should have been at one time housekeeper at Althorp. One fancies, quite gratuitously, that Lucy Washington was a woman of spirit who wished to earn the favor which her people had, whether less or more, from their kinsfolk. Two of the Washingtons elsewhere, who made for times, were knighted, but the direct ancestor of our Washington was a clergyman who suffered more than the common misfortunes of the Washingtons at Brington. He was falsely accused of drunkenness at a time when any charge was willingly heard against a royalist clergyman, and was ejected from his rich benefice as a scandalous minister. His character was afterwards cleared, but he had thenceforth only a small living to the end, and probably was, like his kindred at Brington, befriended by the Spencers.

  The Lawrence Washington who was Mayor of Northampton and the grantee of Sulgrave, was chosen first in 1532 and last in 1546. The place was then, as it continued to be for a hundred and thirty odd years, the mediæval town of which the visitor now sees only a few relics in here and there an ancient house. Happily most of the old churches escaped the fire that swept away the old dwellings in 1675, and left the modern Northampton to grow up from their ashes the somewhat American-looking town we now find it. The side streets are set with neat brick houses, prevailingly commonplace. One might fancy one’s self, coming towards the Church of All Saints, in the business centre of some minor New England city, but with rather less of glare and noise, and held in a certain abeyance by the presence of the church. All Saints is not one of the churches which escaped the flames; and of the original structure only the Gothic tower is left; the rest, a somewhat vague little history of the city says, “is wholly modem.” But modernity, like some other things, is relative, and a New England town might find a very satisfying antiquity in an edifice which at its latest dates back to Queen Anne, and at its earliest to Charles II. The King gave a thousand tons of timber from his forest of Whittlebury towards the rebuilding of the church, and for this munificence he has been immortalized by sculpture over the centre of a most beautiful and noble Ionic, or Christopher-Wrennish, portico, where he stands in the figure of a Roman centurion, with, naturally, a full-bottomed wig on. Few heroic statues are more amusing, and the spirit of the royal reprobate so travestied might be very probably supposed to share the spectator’s enjoyment. Behind one end of the portico, which extends for eighty feet across the whole front of the church, were once the rooms in which many non-conformists of Northampton were tried for the offence of thinking for themselves in matters of religion, which were then so apt to become matters of politics.

  The members of the Corporation were formerly the patrons of the living, and the mayor still has his seat in the church under the arms of the town, and doubtless that official had it in the older building before the fire, when the mayor was Lawrence Washington. In the wall is a tablet to the memory of a man who was born in the century when. Lawrence was twice chosen chief magistrate of Northampton, and who died in the century when George Washington was twice chosen Chief Magistrate of the United States. John Bailes was a button-maker by trade, and if he links the memories of those far-parted Washingtons together, by force of longevity, it is with no merit of his, though it is recorded of him that “he had his hearing, Sight & Memory to ye last.” I leave more mystical inquirers to trace a relationship between the actual civilizations of Northampton and the United States in the presence, beside the church, of a house of refection, liquid rather than solid, calling itself the Geisha Café. If ever the ghost of the Merry Monarch comes to haunt his Roman effigy in the full-bottomed wig, it may humorously linger a moment at the door of the genial resort.

  It is mainly through her churches that Northampton has her hold on the American patriot who is also a person of taste, as one must try to be in going from one church to another. The reader who could give as many days to them as I could give minutes, would have a proportional reward, whether from St. Peter’s, unsurpassed for the effect of its rich Norman; or from St. Sepulchre, with the rotunda which marks it one of the four churches remaining in England out of all those built during the Crusades in memory of the Holy Sepulchre. There are other old churches, but perhaps not dating back with these to the ten and eleven hundreds. One, which I cannot now identify, bears tragical witness to the rigor of the times in the scars on the masonry about the height of a man, where certain royalists were stood beside the portal to be shot. The wonder is that the grief ever goes out of such things, but it does, and they who died, and they who did them to death, have long been friends in their children’s children.

  It is curious how everything becomes matter of æsthetic interest, if you give it time. We stood looking at the Queen’s Cross, near Northampton, which rises not so very far from the field of Naseby, and with our eyes on the wasted beauty of the shrine, we two Americans begun by a common impulse to say verses from Macaulay’s stalwart ballad of the battle. Our English companion, who was a cleric of high ritualistic type, listened unmoved by any conscience he might have had against the purport of the lines as we rolled them forth, and, for all we could see, he had the same quality of pleasure as ourselves in the adjuration to the Puritans to “bear up another minute” for the coming of “brave Oliver,” and in the supposed narrator’s abhorrence of “the man of blood,” whom brave Oliver presently put to rout.

  But see, he turns, he flies! Shame on those cruel eyes That bore to look on torture and that dare not look on war.

  If he had a feeling as to our feeling, it was amusement that after two centuries and a half there should be any feeling about either party in the strife, and doubtless he did not take us too seriously.

  He sent us later on our way to Great Brington with the assurance that the
rector of the church would be waiting us in it to show us the tomb of the Washington buried there. His courtesy was the merit of my friend the genealogist with whom I had exhausted the American origins in London, and who had now come with me into the country for the most important of them all. When we were well started on our drive, that divine September afternoon, we would gladly have had it twelve rather than six miles from Northampton to Great Brington. The road was uncommonly open, or else it was lifted above the wonted level of English roads, and we could see over the tops of the hedges into the fields, instead of making the blindfold progress to which the wayfarer is usually condemned. It was not too late in the year or the day for a song-bird or so, and the wayside roses and hawthorns were so red with hips and haws that we gave them the praise of an American coloring for their foliage till we looked closer and found that the gayety was not of their leaves. Where the leaves felt the fall, they showed it in a sort of rheumatic stiffness, and a paling of their green to a sad gray, or a darkening of it to a yet sadder brown. But we did not notice this till we had turned from the highway, and were driving through Althorp Park. There was a model farm village before our turning, where some nobleman had experimented in making his tenants more comfortable than they could afford, in cottages too uniformly Tudoresque; but at differing distances, in various hollows and on various tops, there were more indigenous hamlets, huddling about the towers of their churches, and showing a red blur of tiles or a dun blur of walls, as we saw them alow or aloft. When we got well into the park there was only the undulation of the wooded surfaces, where wide oaks stood liberally about with an air of happy accident in their informal relation. I should like, for the sake of my romantic page, to put does under them; they were a very fit shelter for does; and I have read that does may sometimes be seen lightly flying from the visitors’ approach through the glades of the park. It was my characteristically commonplace luck to see none, but I hope that in their absence the reader will make no objection to the black and white sheep which I did abundantly see feeding everywhere. It will be remembered, or not unwillingly learned, that sheep were once the ambition, the enthusiasm of the Spencers, who made them early an interest of the region, so that it was the most perverse of fates which kept their greatest flock down to 19,999, when they aimed at 20,000.. Still, if they were black-nosed sheep, the lower figure might represent a value greater than 20,000 of the common white-nosed sort. A black nose gives a sheep the touch of character which the species too often lacks: a hardy air of almost goatlike effrontery, yet without the cold-eyed irony of the goat, which forbids the lover of wickedness the sympathy which the black-nosed sheep inspires. A black-nosed lamb affects one more like a bad little boy whose face has not been washed that morning, or for several mornings, than anything else in nature; and it would not be easy to say which was more suggestive of racial innocence mixed with personal depravity. I am not able to say whether a black nose in a sheep adds to the merit of its mutton or its fleece, but I am sure that it adds a piquant charm to its appearance, and I do not know why we have not that variety of sheep in America. I dare say we have.