MPSES C OLD EtfcLisk HOMES BE r - PARK STREET, BRISTOL 1 ^ ** *** GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES BY ELIZABETH BALCH _ 4W * > *,** : WITH FIFTY-ONE ILLUSTRATIONS ILonDo n MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1890 The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY. CONTENTS I. PENSHURST .... II. ARUXDEL CASTLE . . . III. HINCHINGBROOKE . . . IV. ERIDGE CASTI.E .... V. CHISWICK HOUSE . . . VI. BERKELEY CASTLE . . . VII. HIGHCLERE CASTLE . . VIII. OSTERLEY PARK . . . . PAGE I 29 64 99 130 162 196 210 2056075 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE ENTRANCE TO THE CHURCHYARD, PENSHURST 2 QUEEN ELIZABETH 7 LONG GALLERY, PENSHURST PLACE 14 ALGERNON SIDNEY 17 QUEEN ELIZABETH'S DRAWING-ROOM, PENSHURST PLACE. 1646 24 NORMAN GATEWAY, ARUNDEL CASTLE 29 THE COURTYARD, ARUNDEL CASTLE 30 MARY, DUCHESS OF NORFOLK 33 ARUNDEL CASTLE FROM THE PARK 36 PHILIP HOWARD, EARL OF ARUNDEL AND SURREY, U. 1557, D. 1595 39 THE OLD KEEP, ARUNDEL 46 ARUNDEL CASTLE FROM THE RIVER 50 FIREPLACE IN PRESENT DINING-ROOM, ARUNDEL CASTLE 57 THE ENTRANCE DOOR, ARUNDEL CASTLE 60 THE OLD NORMAN GATEWAY, HINCHINGBROOKE 65 ENTRANCE DOOR AND CORNER OF OLD NUNNERY, HINCHINGBROOKE 67 EDWARD, FIRST EARL OF SANDWICH 71 OLIVER CROMWELL 76 CROMWELL'S MOTHER 77 GARDEN VIEW OF HINCHINGBROOKE 89 BALCONY OF LADY SANDWICH'S SITTING-ROOM, HINCHINGBROOKE 90 HINCHINGBROOKE FROM THE PARK 94 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS HINCHINGBROOKE FROM THE TERRACE 97 BRIDGE CASTfeE IOO BRIDGE CASTLE FROM THE LAKE 105 DINING-ROOM, BRIDGE CASTLE IOQ PORTRAIT OF QUEEN ELIZABETH WHEN YOUNG Ill DRAWING-ROOM, BRIDGE CASTLE 124 THE TEMPLE CHISWICK HOUSE 132 PORTRAIT OF ALEXANDER POPE 137 DAVID GARRICK 139 THE GALLERY LOOKING INTO THE CHAPEI 141 CHISWICK HOUSE FROM THE LAKE 153 BERKELEY CASTLE 163 PLAN OF BERKELEY CASTLE 164 ENTRANCE GATE, BERKELEY CASTLE 171 HENRY VIII ' 175 QUEEN MARY 179 EARL OF BERKELEY, HON. CAPTAIN BERKELEY, R.N., COUNTESS OF GRANARD, LADY CRAVEN, LORD CRAVEN, HON. BERKELEY CRAVEN, HON. KEPPEL CRAVEN 183 KEEP AND DUNGEON TOWER, BERKELEY CASTLE 1 88 THE PARK, HIGHCLERE 197 H. HOWARD MOLYNEUX, FOURTH EARL OF CARNARVON 199 NAPOLEON'S CHAIR AND TABLE FROM FONTAINEBLEAU 202 A CORNER OF LIBRARY, SHOWING CHIMNEY-PIECE FROM GREENWICH PALACE . 204 HIGHCLERE CASTLE. SIR CHARLES BARRY, ARCHITECT 205 THOMAS, EARL OF ARUNDEL (THE COLLECTOR OF THE ARUNDELIAN MARBLES) . 208 THE PORTICO, OSTERLEY PARK 212 THE GARDEN FRONT 215 THE DINING-ROOM 2l8 THE STATE BED , 22O THE STABLE COURT . 2 22 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES L PENSHURST 1 SUMMER in the Kentish Weald means a very wealth of luxu- rious beauty in nature, and the approach to Penshurst, the home of the Sidneys, leads through pleasant lanes bordered with hedges where the wild rose and trailing honeysuckle mingle in friendly fashion with shining holly leaves and the blackberry vine, while the sweet-scented air blows softly over hill and vale, and a delicious purple haze rests upon the surrounding landscape. At one point of the way, on the high ridge between Southborough and Bid- borough, a panorama extending over the three counties of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex lies stretched before you an undulating, thickly-wooded country, fair and fertile, slumbering in the noon- 1 The following chapter has been read and revised by Lord De L'Isle, by whose permission the historical portraits are reproduced. B GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES clay sun. The lanes stretch on, and you pass by fields of the sweet pink clover and others again full of the lovely hop vines twining around tall poles, and falling in clusters of a pale sea- ENTRANCE TO THE CHURCHYARD, PENSHURST green colour. A few minutes later the little village is passed, where a glimpse is caught of the gray church tower, after which a sudden turn of the road brings you in view of the grand old place itself, and Penshurst is before you. Far back in feudal times, before the elate of William the PENSHURST Conqueror, a fortified house occupied the site of the present buildings, and during two centuries afterwards it descended in a direct line from father to son in the family of the de Penchesters, from whom in the reign of Edward I. it passed away on account of the failure of male heirs. Sir John de Pulteney was the next to succeed to the posses- sion of Penshurst, and to him is ascribed the greater part of the mansion as it now stands. The crown granted him the right to embattle, or " crenellate," which enables the exact date to be ascertained from the State records. A learned archaeologist has assigned the precise rank which Penshurst holds amongst the ancient baronial mansions of Eng- land, and says that in it we have a nearly perfect example of the house of a wealthy gentleman of the time of Edward III., in the year of our Lord 1341. Such care has been taken in making the restorations needful from time to time, that the air of antiquity has been fully preserved, no one part of the building clashing with another in its effect upon the eye, and as the afternoon shadows of to-day fall across the quadrangle, so have they fallen day after day uninterruptedly since before the Black Prince won his spurs at Crecy, or took captive the French king at Poictiers, and before the chief of English orders of knighthood was founded. In approaching the vast pile, gray with age and stately in its silent dignity, we must remember that we "tread the groves of Arcady " for to the left stands " Sidney's Oak," under which the fair-faced child played in his early years while his poetic tem- perament insensibly absorbed the beauties of nature surrounding * GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES him. A little further on is " Saccharissa's Walk," shaded by the lofty beeches upon whom Waller, the Poet Laureate of the day, calls to impart his passion to the lady of his love : " Ye lofty beeches ! tell this matchless dame, That if together ye fed all one flame, It could not equalize the hundredth part Of what her eyes have kindled in my heart." In friendly rivalry with the beeches stand some noble oaks, and the whole park is richly wooded, while the views from the higher slopes are both varied and extensive, reaching across a pleasant valley to the Medway river in the distance. Penshurst cannot fail to be imposing and beautiful at any season of the year, but only in the ripe summer-time can you see the deep-tinted purple clematis forming a mass of glowing colour against the time-stained walls on the right as you pass through the first court and enter the grand old fourteenth-century hall. One glimpse of this hall will convey a more vivid realization of the life of the olden time than any description which words can give. It was the great centre of family life ; the place where the lord of the manor and his numberless retainers, as well as any chance guests, assembled for the daily midday meal. Upon the raised dais at the end were spread the places for the host and his more honoured guests, perhaps upon a more ornamented table than the long narrow ones along the sides of the hall, which were appropriated to the use of the remainder of the household, and which are among the earliest pieces of furniture in England, PENSHURST 5 being the original ones used at Penshurst. The ancient sideboard or buffet, filled with costly plate which in feudal times would have occupied one end of the dais, is gone, with all its precious orna- ments, but at the opposite end of the dais is the stone staircase leading to the solar, or principal chamber, which has a narrow look-out into the hall. Through this narrow opening the master of the house could call his attendants, and at the same time observe at will the conduct of his retainers as they disported themselves below. The lower chamber beneath this " lord's room " was originally a cellar. At the extreme end of the hall is the music gallery, which is still perfect, and a fine example of oak panelling. Under this gallery is a concealed passage called the screens, where there is a place formerly used for w r ashing the hands before dinner, and where several doors lead to different parts of the building, such as the ancient buttery, or the place for giving out beer and other drinks, and the pantry, where the bread and dry stores were given. Sufficient proof of the antiquity of this part of the house is furnished by the fact that most of the wainscoting and the doors are of split oak, untouched with the plane, having been cut and fitted only by the chisel and hatchet. Behind the minstrels' gallery and over the buttery and pantry are a suite of rooms at present unfurnished and uninhabited, called Saccha- rissa's rooms, which were probably used by that lady when on a visit to Penshurst in later years, after she had married the Earl of Sunderland. In the very centre of the hall stands the hearth, the only one of the kind remaining in England, over which there was at 6 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES an earlier period an opening 1 in the roof, having a small orna- mented turret to cover it, called a smoke louvre. The andirons or " fire-dogs " are two upright standards supporting a long cross-bar, against which on either side huge logs of wood are piled ready for burning. These fire-dogs are marked on the outer sides near the top with the broad arrow of the Sidney arms. The lofty timber roof of the hall, sixty feet in height, is upheld at intervals by odd wooden figures, all of which have part of their legs cut off; they probably rested originally upon stone corbels which in the course of time must have decayed away or have been destroyed, while the smoke from logs which during centuries past have blazed in the great hall has blackened the ribs of the oak roof as well as the upper walls. A peculiar kind of orna- mentation, called Kentish tracery, surrounds the windows, which are crossed with embattled transome bars. Among the few remaining pieces of armour hanging around the walls is a double-handed sword, once the property of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, bearing his cognizance of the bear and ragged staff, with the escutcheon of the double-tailed lion engraved thereon. This sword is mentioned in the catalogue, still preserved amongst the manuscripts at Penshurst, of his effects at Kenilworth, from which catalogue Sir Walter Scott drew largely in his accounts of the festivities given for Queen Elizabeth. Here too is the helmet of Sir William Sidney, in the time of Edward VI., with the original wooden crest of a porcupine still 1 The writer is indebted to the works of Mr. J. H. Parker and Mr. Stephen Thompson for several of the facts here stated. QUEEN ELIZABETH. PENSHURST attached to it ; one of the very few examples of such crested helmets remaining in existence. But the noble collection of the suits of the Sidneys from generation to generation, was stolen some seventy years ago, and disappeared into the hands of energetic collectors, where also the greater part of the Sidney correspondence, for so long preserved in the evidence chamber, also found its way, although much valuable matter still remains. In the court opposite the door of the banqueting hall hangs a large bell on a frame of wood. Inscribed on this bell in raised letters is the following : "Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, at Penshurst, 1649." What warlike tales must have been recounted in this ancient hall, older than Chevy Chase, or Agincourt, or the Wars of the Roses ! How cheery the blazing logs must have looked to the sturdy, steel-clad warriors of those early times, when they found themselves safe home again from the bloody fields where so many of their comrades had been left to sleep the sleep that knows no waking ! How must the battles have been fought over again in eloquent words and with pardonable pride as the flames rose higher and the smoke ascended to the lofty roof where it was caught in the louvre and dispersed by the wind ; and how full of life and movement and warm human hopes and ambitions must the old hall have been in those stirring days when in stern reality the Englishman's home was his castle. And at Yule-time how gay and bright it was with the scarlet holly berries and waxen mistletoe, while the banners waved and the trumpets blazed as c GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES the great Yule log was dragged in by some score of foresters, and the wassail bowl was passed around as with shouts and cheers the health was drunk of the lord of Penshurst. Good old times these, if somewhat rough to the cultivated taste of the nineteenth century ; brave old times, when a man's sword was ready to defend his word, though the latter might be sharper than the fashion of to-day would countenance. Tradition tells us that the Black Prince himself and his young wife, " The Fair Maid of Kent," once graced these Christ- mas revels in the proud Kentish home, and joined at midnight in the good old Christmas carol " God rest you, merry gentlemen," and we would fain believe that tradition is truth. By reversion, descent, or grant from the Crown, Penshurst passed successively into many different hands, and the successors of Sir John de Pulteney left it much as they found it, excepting one, Sir John Devereux, who added a long wing to the house during the reign of Richard II. In the British Museum there is a copy of the grant of the manor of Penshurst to Sir William Sidney, one of the knights of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and a soldier who had fought at Flodden Field. This princely gift was bestowed by the young King Edward VI., in whose house- hold Sir William had successively discharged the duties of cham- berlain, steward, and tutor. Henry Sidney, the son of Sir William, became henchman to the prince at the early age of eight years, and later his beloved companion. It was in Henry Sidney's PENSHURST arms that the young king expired, in his sixteenth year, in 1553. Soon after this Sir Henry retired to the secluded beauty of Penshurst, where he remained quietly with his young wife, Lady Mary, taking no part in the ambitious plans of his father- in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, for placing Lady Jane Grey upon the throne. A picture of this fair girl, whose happiness was so cruelly wrecked and life sacrificed to mad political dreams, hangs in Queen Elizabeth's room at Penshurst, and one fancies in looking at it that the sweet, grave eyes show a foreshadowing of the terrible fate awaiting her. The ruin brought upon all concerned in these ambitious plots is matter of history, and although Sir Henry himself was never suspected of complicity in them, grief came upon Penshurst, where the father, the brother, and the sister-in-law of his wife, Lady Mary, were deeply mourned. All had paid the penalty of death by the hand of the executioner, and still another brother went direct from the Tower only to die at Penshurst. But the terrible gloom which at this time had fallen upon the old place was brightened a few weeks later, November 29th, 1554, by the birth of one whose name is familiar to every English schoolboy as the type of English chivalry the brave and noble Sir Philip Sidney. During the first years of the child's life " Bloody Queen Mary " sat on the throne of England with her fanatical husband, the Spanish Philip ; and wild tales of a cruelty reaching over the length and breadth of the land came to the ears of the serious-faced boy dreaming under the oaks of Penshurst, or beside the banks of the Med- GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES way river in the lovely valley which afterwards he wrote of as Arcadia. Fourteen years later, when the boy had become a man, he was to witness a sight which must have burned itself into his mind as iron scars human flesh the awful sight of the massacre of the Huguenots on the eve of St. Bartholomew. Small wonder that the serious look deepened on Philip Sidney's features, and that life for him meant earnest work, not trifling idleness. He watched the hideous deeds wrought by a weak king at the insti- gation of a vindictive woman, from the windows of the British Embassy, side by side with the ambassador Walsingham, and the cruel sights and cries of those seven days of slaughter were never forgotten until the close of his own short life. Paris became for ever hateful to him, and as speedily as passports could be procured he went to Germany. There it was that he met the man who so strongly influenced his after life, Hubert Languet, but want of space forbids our entering into his relations with this brave old Huguenot relations which only ceased at his death. Philip Sidney travelled into what in those days were literally " far countries," and stored his mind with the beauties and teach- ings of many lands. Full twenty years had gone by since those gloomy days at Penshurst, and the downfall of his mother's family the Dudleys, and now one of the surviving brothers, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had become chief favourite of Queen Elizabeth, and basked in the sunshine of the court, untroubled by any remembrance of Amy Robsart and her tragic fate. Bad as was Leicester himself, he admired his handsome PENSHURST 13 nephew and carried him off to the great revels he gave in honour of the Queen at Kenilworth, which lasted for seventeen days, and were witnessed with keen interest by a village lad called William Shakespeare. The high mental and moral qualities of Philip were far beyond Leicester's powers to appreciate, but his shrewd surmise that the young man would be a success at court, proved correct. After the Kenilworth fetes young Sidney accom- panied the maiden Queen to Chartley Castle, the seat of the Earl of Essex, and there it was that he met Penelope Devereux, whose charms he afterwards celebrated in his sonnets under the name of "Stella." His thwarted attachment for this lady has been told in verse and story, and doubtless added its weight to his passionate longing to become of some use in the world and to do good to his fellows. As a statesman Philip Sidney rendered good service, but when he lost the favour of the Queen he retired from court and spent much of his time at Penshurst, occupied with literary work and correspondence with the Huguenot Languet, and happy in the society of his gifted sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, to whom his Arcadia was dedicated. This same Countess of Pembroke was the lady who inspired Jonson's famous epitaph, considered one of the most perfect ever written : " Underneath this sable hearse, Lies the subject of all verse Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. Death, e'er thou hast slain another Learned, fair, and wise as she, Time shall throw his dart at thee." GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES In 1583 Philip Sidney was knighted by the Queen, and a few months afterwards he married the daughter of his old friend Sir Francis Walsingham. After this he entered Parliament, and later, when war broke out between Spain and the Netherlands, LONG GALLERY, PENSHURST PLACE. England aiding the latter country, he was appointed governor of Flushing, and in 1585 he said farewell to his friends and to Penshurst, which he loved, and left his country never to return. In the following spring his father died, and he became lord of Penshurst, but his duties abroad prevented his returning to the old homestead, and some months later the battle of Zutphen was PENSHURST 15 fought, where that touching incident occurred which to this day is quoted as showing the noble chivalry and Christian kindness of the man, who, when grievously wounded, could give up the water which his parched lips so longed for, to a dying soldier near, with the words, "He has more need of it than I." On the i;th of October, 1586, Philip Sidney's noble spirit passed away, leaving England and the world the poorer for its loss. " Of all the monuments in St. Paul's destroyed by the great fire of London," wrote Dean Milman, "that of Sir Philip Sidney (it was but a tablet of wood) is the one the loss of which I most deplore. His life had all the nobleness of expiring chivalry without its barbarity." Philip Sidney's nature must indeed have been a rare one, for with an amount of information and accomplishments which caused him to be called " the very mirror of knighthood," and led his sovereign to pronounce him " the brightest jewel of her crown," he yet won the friendship and esteem of the most distinguished men and finest spirits of his time, without arousing their jealousy. Sir Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Broke, caused it to be inscribed upon his monument that he was "the friend of Sir Philip Sidney" and foreign countries singled him out for distinc- tion, Poland going so far as to offer him her crown. In his family circle he showed tenderness and devotion, and not many fathers could use the language which Sir Henry Sidney did in writing to his younger son Robert, urging him to adopt Philip as his model in life, and concluding with these words " He has the 16 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES most virtues that I ever found in any man." To readers of the present day both his poetical and prose works possess too much of the stiffness and affectations of the period, yet even with these drawbacks each page proves his genius by the delicacy and brilliancy of his thoughts. When Charles I. went to the scaffold he adapted the words of Philip Sidney's prayer of Pamela, as his own petition to the Supreme Being, quoting the sentence which concludes as follows : " Let the power of my enemies prevail, but prevail not to my destruction. Let my greatness bee their prey ; let my pain bee the sweetness of their revenge ; let them, if so it seems good unto Thee, vex me with more and more punishment, but, O Lord, let never their wickedness have such a hand but that I may carry a pure mind in a pure body ! " Southey tells us to " Tread, As with a pilgrim's reverential thoughts The groves of Penshurst. Sidney here was born Sidney, than whom no gentler, braver man His own delightful genius ever feigned." And had we space we should quote in full rare old Ben Jonson's description of Penshurst and the Sidney family, which is to be found in The Forest, every line of which shows that he knew the place well, and had enjoyed its free hospitality and the society of its gifted inmates. But we must now hasten through the time when Philip's brother, Sir Robert Sidney, afterwards Earl of Leicester, was lord of Penshurst. He died in 1626, and it was his grandson, ALGERNON SIDNEY. PENSHURST '9 Algernon Sidney, whose life was not merely of service to his own country, but was greatly to affect the future of America. The portrait of Algernon Sidney hanging in the " solar " or " lord's room " at Penshurst, represents a countenance somewhat stern, but noble and enthusiastic in expression. The patriot is leaning one arm upon a large book inscribed with the single word " Libertas," and for this word he lived and died. In the back- ground of the picture, filled in after his death, one sees the gloomy walls of the Tower, while in one corner is the headsman's axe. It was in troubled times that the patriot Sidney lived, and when almost a boy he served with his elder brother, Lord Lisle, in Ireland, winning a reputation for "great spirit and resolution." When Charles I. and his Parliament appeared in arms against each other, young Colonel Sidney was found at Marston Moor in the ranks of the Parliamentary army, and at that battle was wounded almost to the death. Later he strongly opposed the despotic policy of Cromwell, but when in spite of his opposition the Roundhead Oliver had made himself Protector, Algernon Sidney, as Philip Sidney before him, sought the quiet of Pens- hurst, and there in the grand old Kentish home he reasoned out his Discourses on Government, which was written at this period, and strolled under the lofty beeches with his beautiful sister Dorothy, the " Saccharissa" of Waller's poems. Still later he left England, knowing that the king's word was not to be trusted, and feeling that his life was not safe in his native land so long as his republican principles remained unchanged. Long years of exile followed weary, hopeless years, which left their indelible 2 o GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES impress upon the man's face and character, and during which he saw only in imagination the great hall of Penshurst, and the sweet spring time coming again and again to the beautiful Kentish Weald, where the fragrant wild honeysuckle covers the hedges, and homelike rural sounds come to the ear as one passes through the pleasant lanes alive with singing birds. Far off in foreign lands he could almost feel again the soft south-west wind as it blew over the breezy Kentish hills, and almost hear the murmur of the Medway flowing through the fair Kentish meadows ; but when 1667 came, other than these pleasant rural sights and sounds were heard where the breezes blew and the river murmured, for the Dutch came uninvited to the land, and De Ruyter with seventy-two ships sailed up the Medway, destroying a number of English men-of-war, after which he calmly retired in safety. Sidney heard of this when in France, and we may be sure his blood boiled at the open affront to his country. A little later, after seventeen long years of exile, he returned to Penshurst, no longer the dashing young soldier of Marston Moor, but a grave, worn man of fifty-five years. At this time his dearest and closest friend was William Penn, and within the gray old walls of Penshurst was discussed the plan of free government for that new world to which the thoughts of the earnest-minded Quaker turned wistfully, as presenting a refreshing contrast to the vices and corruptions of the court of the Stuarts. Minds so noble and pure as those of Algernon Sidney and William Penn were fit instruments to form a plan of government where justice, not tyranny, should be the watchword. PENSHURST It was at Penn's place at Worminghurst that the final system was drawn up, and after consulting together upon every point, and well weighing each clause, Sidney took the document home to Penshurst and once more revised the whole plan, Penn approving of his alterations. Thus Penshurst almost more than any other English house, should possess a peculiar interest for American visitors, since part at least of the constitution of Pennsylvania was composed beneath its ancient roof. In 1682 Penn said good-bye to Algernon Sidney, and the two friends never met again. On a chilly December morning about a year after this parting, and little more than a hundred years since the body of Sir Philip Sidney was landed on Tower Hill after the battle of Zutphen, a motionless headsman stood upon the same spot holding the fatal axe. Pale and silent, with a look of unfaltering courage in his deep expressive eyes, Algernon Sidney stepped upon the platform and laid his head upon the block. "Are you ready, sir?" asks the headsman; "will you rise again ? " " Not till the general resurrection. Strike on." And the head of the patriot rolled in the dust. History tells of the celebrated Rye House Plot, the cruel implication of Sidney, and the infamous trial, one of the most scandalously unjust ever known ; we can only draw the contrast between the ghastly scene on Tower Hill on that dreary winter morning and the meeting which took place about the same time GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES between Penn and the Indian chiefs on the banks of the Dela- ware, where under the free blue sky of heaven, surrounded by the red men grouped under the primeval trees of a wild, free land, the Quaker explained the scroll containing those wise thoughts discussed by Sidney and himself with patriotic enthusiasm in the old English home. As Penn reads again in the new world the words traced by the patriotic hand of Algernon Sidney in the old, heart-broken friends carry back the body and severed head from Tower Hill and reverently bury them in the church at Penshurst. After this the property , of Penshurst descended through the female line to the Bysshe Shelleys, from whom the present pos- sessor is descended, although the family name is still Sidney, the title being Baron De L'Isle and Dudley. In the long gallery at Penshurst hangs a most curious picture of Queen Elizabeth dancing with her favourite Leicester whilst her courtiers stand looking on. To the modern critic the lady's age and rank are hardly suitable to the posture in which she is indulging. A portrait of Leicester himself hangs near by, which however fails to prove him the fascinating hero Elizabeth found him. There are also two portraits of Philip Sidney, one taken when he was a boy, standing with his brother Robert beside him both children being dressed in the odd, stiff costume of the period, the other representing him as a young man, the face noble and pensive, the eyes full of serious thought. Standing among these and many other portraits in the great gallery, one can almost picture the long lines of ancestry follow- PENSHURST 23 ing one after another, who each in turn once trod the stately halls of Penshurst. All the Dudleys and the Sidneys of bygone generations the grim old Constable of Queenborough Castle makes way for the stalwart swordsman of Flodden Field ; the lord of the Marches of Wales and Governor of Ireland leads on the type of chivalry ; the noble lady who helped to dream Arcadia smiles as though no stretch of time separated her from the beauties of to-day ; the enthusiastic patriot helps to secure the cause of freedom in a new foreign land at the very time when the unjust tyranny of his own condemns him to a shameful death. All passed away and gone ! Leaving the very air throbbing with memories as it blows softly over hill and dale, stirring the leaves of the oaks grouped in shadowy masses, and whispering low-toned caresses to the glowing purple flowers which so lovingly clasp the dark walls of Penshurst. Near the long gallery is " Queen Elizabeth's room," where hang two crystal chandeliers, each surmounted by a crown, which were a present to her from Leicester, and in this room also stand the carved furniture covered with rich damask, now worn and faded, and the table worked by the royal fingers of the Queen herself, which were sent to Penshurst at the time of Elizabeth's visit there during one of her royal progresses, and given as a present to Sir Henry Sidney. There is also a tapestry room containing many curiosities, and a small room leading out of this rilled with a rare and valuable collection of old china. After wandering through these state rooms, that which strikes 24 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES one most forcibly is their ancient appearance. They look as if Queen Elizabeth might have occupied them and held her court in them only yesterday. Visions of Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Walsingham, Essex, Leicester all come with startling QUEEN ELIZABETH'S DRAWING-ROOM, PENSHURST PLACE. 1646. distinctness to the mind. The Elizabethan era lies as a dream before you. The furniture is all of the period ; nothing but portraits line the walls, principally those of the Sidney family, whose features occur over and over again side by side with statesmen, beauties, kings and queens of former days. To give a description of all these portraits would be im- PENSHURST 25 possible, but massed together as they are, they read like a painted page of history, and Penshurst with its memories and associations of the past becomes a tempting spot to the antiquary and the student. Opposite the staircase leading to the solar room at the other end of the dais in the great hall is the entrance to the living rooms occupied by the family when at Penshurst. Here modern luxury is agreeably combined with ancient souvenirs. Eastern rugs and Turkey carpets cover the long corridor leading to a centre room or vestibule, where more rare old china is to be found, and some good pictures. In a full-length portrait of William IV. the King is represented in naval uniform, and stands leaning upon a stout stick, around which a cord is twisted. On a table beneath the picture lies the original stick side by side with a gold-headed cane presented a short time since by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales to the present owner of Penshurst. Other valuable por- traits are also in this ante-room. Opening out to the right is a large billiard-room, where are some still rarer bits of old porcelain, and more portraits which look gravely down upon the " players with cue and ball." At the end of this room a door opens into the cosy, comfortable library, where, surrounded by books and all the comforts of the nineteenth century, one finds it difficult to realize all that bygone life of the fourteenth which suffered and enjoyed, lived and loved, just as we do to-day. A low door opens upon a mysterious twisting staircase from the side of this end room. From the left of the vestibule one enters a long drawing- room whose windows open out on to the large velvety lawn called E 26 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES the " President's Court," and beyond are glimpses of spreading oaks and beeches. Here again the old and the new are strangely mingled, for a portrait by Vandyke of the Duke of Richmond hangs over the fireplace, whilst not far from it is one of the present possessor of Penshurst in the dress of a modern English gentle- man. In the former picture the costume chosen by the artist is at least original. The Duke is attired only in his night-shirt, and beside him is a dog having around his neck a string of pearls. This is in allusion to the fact that a robber having secreted himself under the Duke's bed, the faithful animal, who was also in the room at the time, gave the alarm and saved his master from the designs of the thief. As a reward for his fidelity the creature was given the singular gift of a string of pearls, in which his portrait is painted. Carefully preserved in glass cases in this same room are locks of hair of dead and gone Sidneys, that of Philip Sidney being still of the warm ruddy hue seen in his portraits ; and there are miniatures of gallants and beauties who long since have crumbled to dust. All these are looked at with interest for a moment and then forgotten by the eager, bustling people of to-day, far more occupied with their own immediate schemes than with the shadowy past, which neverthe- less is all around and about them in this old, old house. Still further on, and leading out of the large drawing-room, is a room used now as a dining-room, and this apartment opens again into the long corridor, completing the number of actual living rooms in this portion of the house. And outside is the wonderful flower-garden, glowing with PENSHURST 27 colours which mere words are too colourless to paint. It is a perfect specimen of an old Elizabethan garden, with grass walks winding in and out among the flower-beds, and close-clipped yew hedges so high that only part of the brilliant blossoms can be seen at a time. Thus fresh surprises come at every turn as the grassy paths lead on to unexpected rows of plants and flowers of every hue. Groups of the large French daisy, " La Reine Mar- guerite," long rows of carnations of every tint, England's rose in each variety and shade, gaudy, scentless, golden blossoms, and modest mignonette rilling the air with fragrance. Then suddenly the trickling of a fountain is heard, and a tiny silver stream drips over the fresh green ferns all wet and sparkling in the sunshine, whilst still further on one finds climbing hops which twine around their poles as the sun turns, from east to west, and which promise here to soon stretch from branch to branch, and form an arbour across the path, with their feathery tufts falling temptingly above one's head. Still more of the gorgeous purple clematis, and several other sweet old-fashioned climbing plants a very con- fusion of beauty and perfume all around, recalling the garden in Spenser's Fairy Queen. The colouring of it all would be almost too vivid were it not for the soft green of the hedges and walks which tone down the brilliant scarlets and yellows, and royal purples. On the surface of the water of " Diana's Bath," almost in the centre of the garden, lie white and golden lilies among their flat green pads, wafting new perfumes from their starry blossoms, and adding their share to the general sweetness. The flowers are so bright and gay, the gray old pile beside 2 8 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES them so dark and still ; it is the life of the past which knows so much, looking down in silence upon the glowing, perfumed life of a day careless of all save the smiling sunshine or the gentle pattering showers. He who has never thought before, must needs think of all that Time really means, and the years bring forth, as he stands in this garden of beauty and colour and life, and gazes on the grand old monument of ages, the great " Kentish shrine of Penshurst." II. ARUNDEL CASTLE 1 BELONGING TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF NORFOLK, E.M., K.G. " Jockey of Norfolk, be not too bold, For Dickon thy master is bought and sold." ft ALL readers of Shakespeare are familiar with the above quotation, which as a writ- ing he has found upon his tent, John Howard, first Duke of Norfolk, hands to his sovereign King Richard III., just before the battle of Bosworth Field, in 1483. The king tells him that it is " A thing devised by the enemy," NORMAN GATEWAY, ARUNDEL. but later in the day both Richard himself and the duke are among the slain, thus converting the quaint couplet into a fatal prophecy. This same John Howard, created Earl Marshal of England, 1 The following chapter has been read and revised by the Duke of Norfolk, by whose permission the historical portraits are published. GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES was the direct ancestor of the present owner of Arundel Castle, Henry Fitzalan Howard, thirty-fifth Earl of Arundel, and fifteenth Duke of Norfolk ; Premier Duke and Earl, and hereditary Earl Marshal of England. The first mention found of Arundel is in King Alfred's will, THE COURTYARD, ARUNDEL CASTLK. where it is described simply as a manor, although he at one time made it his royal residence. In an entry of Doomesday Book the Castle of Arundel is mentioned as rendering " between the town, and the port, and the customs of the shipping, twelve pounds," and "as being worth thirteen." At the period of the Conquest it was designated the " Honour of Arundel," and as such was given by William the Conqueror to a certain Roger, Baron Montgomery, ARUNDEL CASTLE 31 who commanded the centre division of the victorious army at the battle of Hastings, in return for which services he received the two earldoms of Arundel and Shrewsbury. The venerable keep was even then in existence, but the great Norman gateway, some- times called the clock-tower, with its drawbridge and portcullis, as well as Bevis's Tower, are attributed to Earl Roger, also the immense vault under the east end of the building. To this vault, at present, used as one of the cellars of the castle, were formerly brought not only the military captives of the earls, but all other delinquents within the extensive liberties of the earldom. The vault is entered through a circular arch forming the doorway, and the vaultings are also circular formed by square blocks of chalk, and strengthened by four immense transome ribs of stone. There are two narrow round-headed windows for the purpose of lighting this dismal ancient prison of the castle, and in a corner of the inner division of the apartment there is appa- rently a long stone buttress, which is in fact a secret chamber, doubtless used as a hiding-place in olden times ; there was formerly a trap-door and narrow staircase leading to it from the room above. A curious instance of escape from this prison, as connected with the law of sanctuary, is recorded as having occurred in the year 1404. A person named John Mot had been apprehended and committed on a charge of robbery, but having contrived to elude the vigilance of his keepers, passed the inclosure of the castle, and had nearly succeeded in securing his retreat, when his flight became known, and the constable, accompanied by a party of 32 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES the inhabitants, followed in pursuit. Finding that he was likely to be overtaken, the fugitive fled to the college, and seizing the ring which was attached to the gate, claimed the rights of sanctuary. The constable however seems to have doubted the validity of the claim, and the captive was once more conveyed to his dungeon. Investigations were made and the decision given that the immunities of the Church and the laws of sanctuary had been violated ; so eventually the prisoner was " restored to the Church," whilst each of the parties concerned in the capture was commanded to offer a burning taper at High Mass on Sunday in the collegiate chapel. In the time of Henry I. the " Honour of Arundel," together with its castle, reverted to the Crown, and when in the year 1139 the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I., landed in Eng- land to assert her claim to the throne in opposition to Stephen, she retired at once to Arundel, which was then in possession of the widow of Henry I., stepmother to the empress. Preparations were made for a vigorous defence, and in a few days Stephen appeared beneath the walls. History tells of the negotiations between him and Matilda, resulting in his consent to let her leave Arundel, upon which she promptly joined her adherents in Bristol. Towards the close of the thirteenth century the present entrance to the keep was constructed, while the ancient hall with its appendant buildings on the south-west side of the great area of the castle, was the next addition to the splendour of the edifice. MARY, DUCHESS OF NORFOLK. ARUNDEL CASTLE It is difficult to carry our minds back through seven hundred and eighty-nine years, and to realize that parts of the magni- ficent building which delights our eyes to-day were looked upon by William Rufus when on his return from Normandy he landed at Arundel, and celebrated his Easter at the castle in the year 1079. Later on, in 1302, Edward I. crossed the old drawbridge, over w r hich we drive to-day, into the grand open space between the castle itself and the ancient keep, and passed some time within the walls which, could they only speak, might tell so much. In this keep for many years there existed a peculiar race of owls, which is however now extinct. A sad fate aw r aited the beautiful old castle in the tumultuous period of the seventeenth century. During the absence of its owner abroad it fell, first into the hands of the Parliamentary army, from which in the year 1643 the Royalists determined to dispossess their opponents. The third day after their attack the castle surrendered to the royal arms, but the patient Roundheads bided their time, and while with proud humility they ascribed all their success to the Lord, they finally succeeded by very carnal means in recapturing the place, which, by the time the siege was ended, was reduced almost to a ruin ; it was deserted as a resi- dence, and not until 1720 did Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, make it his occasional abode, repairing from time to time portions of the building. In 1795 a successor to Duke Thomas enlarged and beautified it still more, giving it the grand dimensions it now has. The Baron's Hall which, with its appendant chapel, was designed to commemorate the triumph of the barons over the tyranny of 36 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES King John, was commenced in 1806. The rich stained glass which was formerly in the thirteen original windows of this hall, has all been removed, and ordinary w r hite glass been put in its place. In the large east drawing-room of the castle, which for the ARUNDEL CASTLE FROM THE PARK. moment is used as a dining-room, hang some of the most in- teresting of the family portraits. As a bordering above the tinted walls of this room shields are arranged bearing the emblazoned coats of arms of the house of Howard and its several alliances ; below the pictures hang heavy red plush draperies, suspended from ARUNDEL CASTLE 37 an oak moulding ; the ceiling is of oak, and over the wide, open fireplace are the Howard arms surmounted by a ducal coronet. On the right of this fireplace is a full-length portrait of Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, standing w r ith his Earl- Marshal's baton in his hand. His devotion in behalf of the unhappy Mary Stuart caused him to be accused of high treason, and he was executed in the Tower in 1572, at the early age of thirty-five. His intrigue to establish himself on the Scottish throne by a marriage with Queen Mary cannot be defended. Opposite, on the left of the fireplace, is the sweet girl-face of Mary, daughter of Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel. She was the last of the Fitzalan line, and by her marriage brought the Castle of Arundel into the Howard family, and was wife of Duke Thomas, who was beheaded, and mother of that Philip Howard w r hose life reads like a romance. Knowledge of her son's terrible fate was mercifully spared her, for she died at the early age of seventeen. Beyond these two, at the end of the room, hang portraits of the son of Philip Howard and his wife. The former is repre- sented in a sitting position, and one sees in the distance part of the famous collection called the Arundel Marbles, the most of which are now at Oxford. This nobleman was a great patron of art, and he it was who induced Van Dyck to come to England. At the splendid ceremonial of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine, in 1613, he carried the sword of state, while his wife, the Countess of Arundel, acted as one of the train-bearers to the queen. In consequence of his father's attainder, he was 38 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES deprived of the title of Duke of Norfolk, but was invariably called " the great Earl." Sir Edward Walker, in describing him, says that he "was of a stately presence and gait, so that any man that saw him, though in never so ordinary habit, could not but conclude him to be a great person, his garb and fashion drawing more observation than did the rich apparel of others ; so that it was a common saying of the late Earl of Carlisle ' Here comes the Earl of Arundel in his plain stuff and trunk hose, and his beard in his teeth, that looks more like a nobleman than any of us.' " An indelible stain rests upon the character of this Earl, who from no religious convictions, but in return for worldly advancement, renounced the faith for which his father, Philip Howard, nobly suffered and courageously died. One would have thought that an example as brilliant and touching as that of any of the martyrs of old, might at least have lasted in its effects through one generation ; and one can scarcely believe that the son of a father who had borne so much, could relinquish the belief which supported that father to the end. Yet this man became one of the principal favourites of King James I., and by his abdication of Catholicism was enabled to enjoy the dignities and privileges denied in those days to Roman Catholics. Later, in the reign of Charles I., he incurred the severe displeasure of his sovereign, in that his son, Lord Maltravers, had secretly wedded the Lady Elizabeth Stuart, whom the King had destined as a bride for young Lord Lome. Arundel was promptly sent to the Tower, where he was kept during three months and was only finally released by the clamourings of his brother PHILIP HOWARD, EAKL OF ARUNDEL AND SURREY, B. 1557, D. 1595. ARUNDEL CASTLE 4I peers, who declared the arrest of the Earl during the Session to be an infringement of their privileges. We would fain linger longer in the dining-room, where hang many other portraits, and in the long gallery, with its pictures and statues and rare old cabinets, but we must take a glimpse at least at the grand library, one hundred feet long, built in 1544. To reach it you pass through an attractive apartment called the ante-room, opening out from the hall. This library is indeed worthy the name "grand." Well-filled book-shelves line the walls from floor to ceiling, and a gallery runs around three sides of the room, half-way up, which is reached by a concealed staircase. Wide alcoves in the windows of the gallery form cosy retreats where one can read, or chat, or dream day-dreams. Three fire- places are at distances on the right-hand side of the room, while the large stained-glass window on the left, glowing with heraldic devices, looks out upon the open quadrangle of the castle. At the end of this library, opening from it, is the billiard-room, beyond which again are the north breakfast-room and a second large drawing-room. To these two apartments we shall return later, but for the moment we turn to the right, and leaving the billiard-room mount a solid oak staircase which leads to the upper floor, and to that part of the building called the " Percy Lodgings," a name given so far back as 1279, in the reign of Edward I. It is here that the late duchess's sitting-room, dressing-room, and bed-room are situated ; but attractive as are all three, filled as they are with beautiful old inlaid and painted furniture, curious hangings, and quaint cabinets and curiosities, we must hasten on if 42 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES in the limited space of time allowed us we w r ould see a little more of the house itself before coming to the portrait of Philip Howard the Martyr, and learning the story of his sad and noble life. From these private apartments a long passage way on the north side of the castle leads to the principal upper corridor, and along this passage w 7 ay, opening out upon it, are numerous bed-rooms, which go by the name of the " Hutches." The doors of these rooms are all of oak, with the iron hinges extending across them and forming the ornamentation. We cannot stop now to describe any of the upper rooms, so fascinating is the history of the man represented with grave, earnest eyes, and a serious, rather melancholy cast of countenance. The portrait given of Philip Howard is only a small head, w T ith a stiff ruff of the dress of the period coming high around the throat. He was, as we have already said, son of that Duke of Nor- folk w r ho in 1572 was beheaded in the Tower on account of his loyalty to the cause of the Scottish queen, and he was born at Arundel House on Monday, June 28th, 1557. The following Friday he was baptized with much solemnity in the Royal Chapel of Whitehall, in the presence of the queen and her Spanish husband, with all the principal attendants of the Court. His great-grandmother, the Dowager-Duchess of Norfolk, held him at the font made of gold, and kept in the treasury only for the christening of children of princes of the realm. King Philip himself, who with the Earl of Arundel acted as sponsor on the occasion, conferred his own name upon the infant. W T hilst still very young, Philip Howard, Earl of Surrey, was married to ARUNDEL CASTLE 43 his father's ward, Anne, daughter of Lord Dacres, who, together with her two sisters, was co-heiress to an immense property. Later he became one of Elizabeth's most devoted and flattering courtiers and to please this queen he first neglected and then disowned his wife. During several years he now pursued a course of insane prodigality, which reduced his fortune and alienated his family, when suddenly he seemed to awake as from delirium, withdrew entirely from the frivolities of the Court and the society of his profligate companions, at the same time trying in every way to atone to his wife for his former cruel neglect. Eliza- beth's enmity to the countess was notorious, and this lady's decision to enter the Roman Catholic Church irritated the queen still further against her and the husband who had returned to his allegiance to her. Elizabeth finally imprisoned the countess for over a year, and after his wife's release Philip Howard, who with his brother, Lord William, had decided also to join the ancient faith, determined to leave the country until more quiet times, and to seek an asylum in Flanders. In pursuance of this plan, Momford, the Earl's secretary, was despatched to Hull, with orders to embark at that port and await the arrival of his master. Arundel himself, with his brother and a single attendant, was preparing to commence his journey by a different route ; everything was ready for his departure, and the moment for it approaching, when a message from Elizabeth announced that she was about to honour him with a visit at Arundel House. At the same time Momford was arrested on suspicion of some traitorous design, but managed to escape and return 44 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES in order to tell his master of the dangers surrounding him. It was too late however for his information to be of any practical use to the Earl, as he was obliged to receive his sovereign, which he did with great magnificence. At the conclusion of a sumptuous banquet the queen, having declared her satisfaction, gave Afundel " many thanks for her entertainment," and at the same time informed him that he was a prisoner in his own house. The next morning he was summoned before the Privy Council, and after two separate examinations on the subject of his religion was again remanded to confinement. An effort was also made to implicate him in a recent conspiracy, which however signally failed, and at the end of fifteen weeks the Earl, as well as his uncle and brother, who had likewise been arrested, was discharged. Any attempt to leave the country was now hopeless, but sending for a missionary he was by him received into the Catholic Church. This involved him in new difficulties ; his duties at Court conflicting at every turn with his principles and conscience. Finding that his efforts to avoid these duties so opposed to his present views only provoked the attention and whispers of the Court, he again formed the desperate resolve to fly from the country. Before his departure he determined to acquaint Elizabeth with his motives for his decision, and addressed to her a long and eloquent epistle, in which he re- minded her of the anxiety with which he had sought her con- fidence and the willingness with which he had "made himself a stranger to his own house, to be a continual waiter on her ARUNDEL CASTLE 45 majesty " all of which had failed to insure her favour, or prevent him from incurring unmerited disgrace. He also spoke of the fate of his immediate ancestors, whose innocence had been unable to shield them from the death of traitors ; and reasoning from this example he dwelt with powerful effect upon the appre- hensions which he entertained from the operation of the penal laws. His religion, he added, could not long remain a secret, and if he, rather than " consent to the certain destruction of his body, or the manifest endangering of his soul, willingly separated himself from all the ties which bound him to his native land, he trusted that Elizabeth would at least give him credit for having acted on conscientious motives, and would not visit his conduct with that displeasure which would add bitternesss even to the worst of his sorrows, and amongst all his misfortunes prove the heaviest." This letter was to be placed in the hands of the queen after Arundel's departure for France, but that departure was destined never to be made. The captain of the vessel waiting at Little Hampton in Sussex had received his instructions from the council, and instead of escaping from the country Philip Howard was brought back a prisoner and sent to the Tower. Again efforts were made to implicate him in treasonable practices, and again these efforts signally failed, notwithstanding which he was condemned to pay a fine of ,10,000 to the queen, and to be imprisoned according to the royal pleasure. During this imprisonment fresh charges were brought by the persistent malice of his enemies against the unfortunate Earl of Arundel, 4 6 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES until he was finally brought to trial and sentenced to death. After his condemnation he wrote a spirited letter to Elizabeth, in which he boldly asserted his innocence, and arraigned the HE OLD KEEP, ARUNUE justice of his sentence, added to which he prepared numerous copies of a statement to be scattered among the crowd at the time of his execution, wherein this most emphatic declaration occurs : " Wherefore, for the satisfaction of all men and dis- ARUNDEL CASTLE 47 charge of my conscience before God, I here protest before His Divine Majesty and all the holy court of Heaven, that I have committed no treason, and that the Catholic and Roman faith which I hold is the only cause (so far as I can any way imagine) why either I have been thus long imprisoned, or for which I am now ready to be executed." Public opinion and indignation over the unmerited destiny of Philip Howard was so strong that Elizabeth was compelled to pause in the pursuance of her vengeance against the man she hated, but although for political reasons she concluded to avoid the odium of bringing him to the scaffold, her feminine malice took a frightful form of fresh persecution. Instead of acquainting the prisoner of his reprieve from death, the knowledge of it was studiously kept from him, and for more than six years he lived in the fear and suspense that each footstep he heard might be that of the messenger sent to summon him to his end. Each morning as he rose he knew it to be possible that before night he should be a head- less corpse ; each night as he laid his head upon his pillow he was uncertain whether the morning might not call him to another world. Such was what a Court writer could denominate " the mild severity of Elizabeth ! " Added to this dreadful and wearing uncertainty as to his final fate, every expedient was resorted to in order to render his desolate condition more desolate still. His wife, children, and friends were totally excluded from his presence, and the treatment received by him from his keepers was disgraceful to 48 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES humanity. It was generally supposed that eventually he was poisoned, but whether from anything in his food or from the effects of a bad drain passing under the room where he was confined for eleven years in all, has never been satisfactorily explained. Pro- bably the latter, for the accounts of the time state the stench in his apartment to have been so awful that when visiting him the governors of the Tow r er were unable to remain in the room. Whatever it was, his health towards the last was so affected that after several weeks of suffering Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, "the idol of those that knew him, the admiration of Europe, and the object of the sympathies of the world," perished alone in a gloomy cell of the Tower, on Sunday, the igth of October, 1595. In the present enlightened days of freedom men may well exclaim, " Could such things have been ? " Shortly before his death Arundel made a final appeal to Elizabeth, claiming a former promise made by her that he should see his wife and children before he died ; but to his fond anticipa- tions that the queen would surely keep her royal word, only a verbal answer came, rejecting his prayer, except at the price of his religion. " If he will but once go to the established Church, carrying the sword of state before the sovereign," so ran the message, " his request shall not only be granted, but he shall moreover be restored to his honour and estates, with as much favour as I can show." " On such condition I cannot accept her majesty's offers," was the reply; "and if that be the cause in which I am to perish sorry am I that I have but one life to lose." ARUNDEL CASTLE 49 And it was this man's son, who for mere worldly considerations could apostatize from the faith of his father. " The late attempt of an invasion by the Spaniards," says Carte, "proved fatal to Philip, Earl of Arundel. He was still confined in the Tower when the Spanish Armada entered the Channel, and could not forbear expressing his joy at the news ; he had likewise caused a Mass of the Holy Ghost to be said for its success ; and a course of devotions to be used for twenty-four hours together. These things irritated the queen, he was called to an account for them, as well as for his former offences, which, having been charged on him before as contempt and misde- meanours, were now aggravated, and urged as treasonable matters." Elizabeth's final message, offering him restoration to her favour if he would comply with her request to attend her to the Pro- testant Church, shows that her "irritation" as to the alleged "treasonable matters " was less than her anger at his persistent adherence to his own belief. Even after death the queen's bitter and bigoted hatred pursued the man who at one time had been the brightest and most honoured ornament of her Court, and "for the first earl in her dominions, for the nobleman who had been born to the inherit- ance of all but royalty," she appointed a funeral the charges of which amounted to the meagre sum of four pounds, thirteen shillings, and fourpence. More than this, the most beautiful and most affecting service of religion was prostituted by her minister to the heartless purpose of heaping insults on the grave of her victim. H GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES The third day after his death Philip Howard was buried in the chapel of the Tower, in the same grave where twenty-three years before the headless body of his father had been interred. In the following reign, at the joint request of his widow and his ARUNDEL CASTLE FROM THE RIVER. son, a license was obtained for the removal of the remains, which, inclosed in a small iron chest, reposed for many years in the family vault of the Howards at Arundel Castle ; only within the past few months has this chest been removed to a small chapel situated in the grounds near the castle, which is actually a part of the ARUNDEL CASTLE 51 Protestant parish church, but partitioned off from it. This chapel the present cluke is restoring to its original beauty. Elizabeth's vengeance pursued the widowed countess of Philip Howard to the day of her death ; and a curious letter from that persecuted lady is still preserved at Norfolk House, wherein she appeals to the Lord Treasurer Burleigh for the payment of the slender pension allowed her by the queen, which she only obtained after much trouble and vexation of spirit. Three hundred years have passed since men spoke of the brilliant courtier languishing in foul imprisonment in the Tower, told of his ruined life and lonely death, and now within the past few months the Church of Rome, for whose faith he died a martyr, has declared him "Venerable," a degree which is the first step towards pronouncing him a saint. Surely his life and death have already declared him worthy a saintly crown. The Tower has played a prominent part in the lives of more than one member of the house of Howard. Before Elizabeth chose it as a prison for the brilliant Earl of Arundel, another even more gifted man, Henry, Earl of Surrey, eldest son of the third Duke of Norfolk, also excited the jealousy of a capricious and despotic monarch, and in the reign of Henry VIII. was beheaded on Tower Hill. He is described as being " excellent in arts and in arms ; a man of learning, a genius, and a hero ; of a generous temper and a refined heart, he united all the gallantry and unbroken spirit of a rude age with all the elegance and graces of a polished era." Very literary and an accomplished writer, his songs and sonnets showed rare merit, and as with Sir Philip 52 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Sidney, the finest spirits of his age delighted to call him " friend." Treason was imputed to him upon the most frivolous pretences, the principal of which was his quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor with those of Howard, a custom justified by the practice of his family and the sanction of the heralds. His brave defence served him little, and he was condemned by a jury, not of the peers, because he was not a parliament lord, but by commons, whereupon judgment of death was given and he was executed. His father, the Duke of Norfolk, was imprisoned in the Tower at the same time, and escaped execution merely because the king himself died before signing the death warrant. Yet so powerful were his enemies that when pardon was given by proclamation to all persons for all crimes whatsoever, six names only excepted, he was included in this number, and remained a prisoner until the day Queen Mary made her triumphant entry into London, when, without any pardon or restitution, he was allowed to be Duke of Norfolk, and had his lands restored. In the breakfast- room at Arundel, which is situated between the billiard-room and large north drawing-room, hang two full- length portraits of Edward Howard, eighth earl and eighth duke of his family, and Mary his wife, whom he married in 1727 ; and between the two is a second picture of this celebrated Duchess Mary, who is described as having been "gifted with great talents, easy and dignified in her manners, and singularly insinuating." She was the daughter and co-heir of Edward Blount, of Blagden in Devonshire, Esq., and the first portrait represents her as a young and fine-looking woman, wearing her peeress's robes, her ARUNDEL CASTLE 53 coronet lying on the table beside her ; the other, taken at a much later date, when the fine face has gained in attraction by the great intelligence and strength of character shown in it, amply making up for the loss of its earlier bloom and colouring. A writer of the time tells us that " her house " (Norfolk House) " was the centre of whatever was great and elegant amongst both Catholics and Protestants, and by familiarizing them one with another their prejudices were softened, and their mutual good- will increased." As yet the Catholic Relief Bill had not been passed, and this fact of Duchess Mary endeavouring to amalga- mate the two conflicting parties in the graceful courtesies of social life no slight undertaking in those troublesome times goes far to prove that the chronicler's opinion of her character was correct. The religious views of the day so strongly affected a man's public life, that her husband found himself debarred from all participation in public affairs, and occupied himself with his own estates ; built new Norfolk House, St. James's Square, and rebuilt Worksop Manor in Nottinghamshire, the ancient seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury. When Frederick, Prince of Wales, quarrelled with his father George II., and was turned out of the palace by order of the king, the Duchess of Norfolk offered him and his princess the shelter of old Norfolk House, and there was born the future sovereign George III. Horace W^alpole frequently refers to this duchess in his celebrated letters, in one of which occurs the following passage : " The Duchess of Norfolk has opened her new house ; all the earth was there last Tuesday. You would have thought 54 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES there had been a comet, everybody was gaping in the air and treading on one another's toes. In short, you never saw such a scene of magnificence and taste. The tapestry, the embroidered bed, the illumination, the glasses, the lightness and novelty of the ornaments and the ceilings are delightful. She gives three Tues- days, would that you could be at one ! Somebody asked my Lord Rockingham afterwards at White's what was there ? He said, ' Oh, there was all the company afraid of the duchess, and the duke afraid of all the company.' It was not a bad picture." Extract from letter to Hon. H. S. Conway, from Horace Wai- pole, February I2th, 1756. Later on he speaks of her as "my lord duchess," and at an earlier date, August 26th, 1749, he writes from Strawberry Hill to his friend George Montague, Esq., describing a journey he has made : " At last we got to Arundel Castle, which was visibly built for defence in an impracticable country. It is now only a heap of ruins, with a new indifferent apartment clapt up for the Norfolks when they reside there for a week or a fortnight. Their priest showed us about. There are the walls of a round tower where a garrison held out against Cromwell ; he planted a battery on the top of the church and reduced them. There is a gloomy gateway and dungeons, in one of which I conclude is kept the old w r oman w r ho in the time of the late rebellion offered to show Lord Robert Sutton where arms were hidden at Worksop. The duchess complimented him into dining before his search, and in the meantime the woman was spirited away, and adieu the arms ! There are fine monuments to the old Fitzalans, Earls of Arundel, in the church." ARUNDEL CASTLE 55 Could Horace Walpole see Arundel as it is to-day, would he recognize in the magnificent building forming three sides of a square, on the fourth of which is the "round tower" (or ancient keep), which he mentions, as the " indifferent apartment clapt up for the Norfolks ! " The " gloomy gateway and dungeons " would be the only remaining traces of his description. In still another letter to Sir Horace Mann, Walpole makes an allusion to the two conflicting religious factions which reflects but little credit on either. Speaking of one of the fashionable masquerades he says : " There was a stroke of the monkey last night that will sound ill in the ears of your neighbour the Pope. The heir-apparent of the house of Norfolk (Charles Howard), a drunken old mad fellow, was, though a Catholic, dressed like a cardinal. I hope he was scandalized at the wives of our Bishops." The fair and clever Mary Blount, who seems to have made so strong an impression upon all who knew her, seems also to have shown very early in life that she possessed a will of her own, and had no disinclination for a "lark." It seems that when Edward Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was staying at Ugbrooke, Lord Clifford's place, not far from the home of the Blounts in Devon- shire, he and the heir of Ugbrooke, not caring to keep the early hours of their elders, began the amusements of the evening after good Lord and Lady Clifford were fast sunk in virtuous slumbers. Then it was that the high-spirited Mary, accompanied by her sister, would ride over upon horses with muffled hoofs, and join the merry-making of the two youths anxiously awaiting and 5 6 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES eagerly welcoming their arrival, when together the four would thoroughly enjoy themselves, undisturbed by the proprieties or the slumbering Cliffords. So at least runs the story, and whether it be fact or fiction it ended as well as a fairy tale, for certain it is that one sister married the heir of Ugbrooke, and the other became the famous Duchess Mary so often referred to. Leading out from the breakfast-room is the long north drawing-room, with its heavy peacock-coloured hangings, rich Turkey rugs, and enough valuable curiosities to engage one's attention for days. More pictures too ; one of Philip Howard as a boy, with no foreshadowing of his ruined life in the youthful features, and two quaint portraits to which a peculiarly pathetic story is attached. The boy who is represented in a stiff, old-fashioned blue coat, tightly buttoned and abnormally long-waisted, is a certain Earl of Sutherland, uncle of one of the duchesses of Norfolk. At the early age of seventeen he married the child of fifteen, also dressed in blue, whose picture hangs opposite him Elizabeth Maxwell. Horace Walpole mentions her at the coronation of George III. as a "very pretty figure." When the little child of this youthful couple was a year old, the two parents, almost children themselves, died on the same day from fever, at Bath. The mother of Lord Sutherland was dressing for a ball when she first heard of her son's illness, and at once started off to nurse her darling, scarcely trusting the inexperience of the little child-wife, his only companion. News travelled slowly in those days, and there were no telegrams to meet the anxious mother at each stage of her weary journey. ARUNDEL CASTLE 57 Arrived at Bath she went at once to the principal inn, where there was no accommodation for her ; the place was full, they said, FIREPLACE IN PRESENT DINING-ROOM, ARUNDEL CASTLE. as the morrow was to witness a grand funeral. Poor mother ! the "funeral" was to be that of the boy in blue, looking out I 5 8 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES from his picture to-day in the north drawing-room at Arundel, and of the child-wife hanging opposite to him. Both were carried back to the old home at Sutherland, and buried in the ancient cathedral of Dornach by the broken-hearted mother, who had gone to find her son, and found him thus ! A mural tablet records that " They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and that in death they were not divided." The names of the bedrooms at Arundel Castle could belong to no other house in England, for in virtue of the Dukes of Norfolk being hereditary Earl- Marshals of England, they are called after the officials of the Heralds' College, there being six heralds, four pursuivants, and three kings. The rooms are respectively York, Lancaster, Windsor, Somerset, Chester, and Richmond ; Rouge Croix, Blue Mantle, Portcullis, and Rouge Dragon ; these four latter being the old nurseries, not the bright and cheery suite of rooms situated at the end of the long corridor, now the especial domain of the little Earl of Arundel and Surrey. Those named after the three kings are Garter, Norrey, and Clarenceux. The latter is also sometimes called the " Queen's Room," from the fact that Queen Victoria occupied it at the time of her visit to Arundel in 1846, and in the same way Garter King of Arms' Room is often spoken of as the " Prince Consort's" for a similar reason. The fittings of Her Majesty's apartment were all of white and gold, with heavy crimson and gold damask ; the gilded and awe-inspiring bed having the royal arms of England at the head, and the ducal arms of the house of Howard at the ARUNDEL CASTLE 59 foot. Crowns, the monogram V.R., and the English lion, are upon all articles of furniture, and engravings of different members of the royal family presented by the Queen to the mother of the present Duke of Norfolk, hang around the walls. For the moment these pictures and the actual furniture of the " Queen's Room " have been removed to the York Room. There is also a bedroom called the Earl-Marshal's, situated in the lower gallery, opposite to the entrance of the Baron's Hall. There are so many things to say of this grand " old castle on a hill," yet one so dreads writing an inventory or compiling a catalogue when telling of the numberless objects of interest met with at every turn. From the moment of mounting the steep hill leading from the town itself, and passing beneath the high stone entrance over which are carved the Howard arms, with the lion crest above them, memories seem to crowd about one, and visions become almost bewildering of the many great and gone who so long ago passed part at least of the "fitful fever" of their lives within the stately walls of Arundel. So soon as the drawbridge is crossed, and the ancient gate- way, dark as a tunnel, is traversed, the whole splendour of the exterior of the castle is before you. The broad drive curves up to the entrance door, which when opened discloses the great double staircase leading to the long gallery already described ; walking along this to the end door on the right, past the east drawing-room, you will find yourself in one of the pleasantest parts of the house a corner room from one window of which the silvery Arun can be seen threading its way beside the reedy 6o GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES banks ; from the other one looks down upon what was formerly a moat, and beyond upon a thoroughly English landscape, pleasant y-v THE ENTRANCE DOOR, ARUNDEL CASTLE. fields, and cattle grazing peacefully near spreading trees. In this room, as in several of the lately restored ones of the castle, an ARUNDEL CASTLE 61 oak moulding runs around the walls about half-way up, from which hangs a heavy drapery of old gold-coloured plush reaching to the floor. The deep recess windows have curtains of the same height, which when the windows are open fold back, forming a similar drapery in the recess to that found on the walls. The portraits hang above the line of the moulding, while the ceiling is of carved oak as yet in its natural colour, not darkened by time. The doors of these rooms are singularly fine, of solid oak, with the iron hinges extended across them as in the bedroom doors before referred to, but here the ironwork ornamentation is of a more intricate design. These doors are generally arched in Gothic form, and give an original and at the same time good architectural effect. In this corner room is the same border of emblazoned coats of arms already mentioned as decorating the dining-room, and also the same open, tiled fireplace, whose blazing logs cheer one's eye, notwithstanding the open windows through which the soft Sussex air is pleasant enough, although the month is November. Books and work and a general air of " livableness " prove this bright corner room to be a favourite. With all its magnificence and grandeur Arundel to a peculiar degree possesses this air of home-like comfort, without which any dwelling-place is spoiled, be it cottage or castle ; the crackling wood fires, cozy corners shut off by screens, and tables laden with books, for books are everywhere, the latest and newest as well as the rarest and oldest, all join in adding comfort to splendour. The beautiful chapel, which is but a few steps from the castle 6 2 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES itself, was founded by Richard, Earl of Arundel, in 1380. In 1643 men f Waller's army were quartered in it, and during the time of the Reformation, when the exercise of the Roman Catholic religion was prohibited, the building fell almost to decay. But the fine tombs have been preserved ; amongst others that of Thomas, Earl of Arundel, son of the founder, and his Countess Beatrix, daughter of John I., King of Portugal ; also that of William, Earl of Arundel, and his Countess Joan, sister to Richard Nevill, Earl of Warwick, the " king-maker." A new roof of carved oak, exactly similar to the original one, is now being put into the chapel, which when restored will be precisely as it was originally designed. In addition to this the beautiful church of St. Philip has been built by the present duke, and although called a parish church, it might from its size and dignity almost rank with cathedrals. It stands on the hill of the town of Arundel, not ten minutes' walk from the castle. Leaving the house and passing under the fine St. Mary Gateway, half-covered with ivy, a broad avenue leads to the thickly-wooded park, where in some parts of the drive the trees nearly meet above, forming natural arches of green. To quote Lord Beaconsfield, "the woods were beginning to assume the first fair livery of autumn, when it is beautiful without decay," at the time when we last walked through that lovely park, and the rich colour of the copper beech, the bronze and gold of the oaks and elms, glowed with ruddy tints in the afternoon sunlight. Only the pencil of Turner could do justice to the indescribable softness and tenderness of the landscape, with its broad stretches ARUNDEL CASTLE 63 of emerald turf, and banks of timber sloping gently down to the river Arun gleaming like a silver band between woody hills and grassy shores. Dotted about at intervals under the branching trees are picturesque groups of deer, the antlered stags with their heads raised proudly, the timid hinds keeping close beside them, and the little graceful fawns darting here and there, leaving scarce a trace on the smooth turf as they go. In the spring-time the woody walks, far from the more open part of the park, lead by banks which are one mass of pale yellow primroses, and wild wood-violets, clustering among mosses which cover the banks, and growing close to the trunks of trees which form a leafy screen thick enough to hide from view any ramblers among the fragrant retreats. Even in the winter-time fresh violets are to be found at Arundel, where they are grown in beds under glass, and although plenty of other floral treasures likewise bloom in the castle gardens, it is this sweet-scented Imperial flower which seems peculiarly to belong to the place and is always associated with it. Much longer could we linger in this "old home," and many more things could we describe about it, but want of space prevents us from giving more than that w r hich was promised at first a glimpse. III. HINCHINGBROOKE. 1 BELONGING TO THE EARL OF SANDWICH. IN strong contrast to the ancient grandeur of Penshurst and the stately magnificence of Arundel, yet possessing a distinct charm peculiarly its own, Hinchingbrooke may with justice lay claim to being one of the loveliest of old English homes. Originally a nunnery, it became later the property of the Cromwell family, and since the year 1627 the favourite residence of the Montagus. Post tot nanfragia portum (after many shipwrecks a haven) is the family motto emblazoned among armorial quarterings on the stained glass of the windows through which the sunshine comes dyed in colours of rubies, and amethysts, and gold, and the restful words would almost seem to have been suggested by the calm quiet of the old court into which one enters through an ancient Norman gateway, having three arches, one large and two smaller ones, gray with age and time's softened colouring. This old gateway, partly covered with ivy and creeping plants 1 The following chapter has been read and revised by Lord Sandwich, by whose permission the historical portraits are reproduced. HINCHINGBROOKE which have grown up the walls but do not altogether conceal the mellowed stone work, is embellished and carved with more than ordinary skill. On each side upon projecting pillars stand statues of wild men the size of life. Each holding a tree uprooted, they %tf#F!~<&y. THE OLD NORMAN GATEWAY, HINCHINGBROOKE. are represented as covered with shaggy hair, wearing long beards and moustachios, with no article of dress save a girdle round the waist. These " Wodehouses " or "Green men," for they were known by both names in the olden times, were favourite K 66 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES characters with our ancestors, as well in this country as on the Continent. Froissart mentions them at the court of France in 1392, and they were very commonly displayed in court masques and public processions in England. As a part of ancient state and magnificence, the wild men of Hinchingbrooke are most appropriately placed to watch and ward the principal gate. Although the carving is chipped and defaced, the uncouth- looking figures still guard their post with their sightless stone eyes, and unwieldy clubs, as they have guarded it through centuries. The centre of the court-yard is smooth green grass, and three sides of the quadrangle are formed first by a long low building covered with ivy, having narrow windows, and an indented roof. This is the most ancient part of the house, the only actual remains of the original convent ; it is now used for offices and servants' rooms. The second side is that end of the dwelling where is the entrance door, square and low, and the great bow windows in mullioned stone frames. These windows, as well as those on the other side of the house, are profusely embellished with shields of the family of Cromwell, the arms of Queen Elizabeth, and a variety of heraldic cognizances denoting the honours of the Tudor line ; the falcon, the portcullis, a ton with a branch, and roses of different forms, which are upon the upper cornice of each window. The sombre green of a tall yew hedge forms the third side, whilst the Norman gateway already referred to makes the fourth, com- pleting the quadrangle, and forming a harmonious whole HINCHINGBROOKE 67 in its quiet, subdued beauty, wearing such a reposeful and old-world air. The gallant Edward, first Earl of Sandwich and son of Sir ENTRANCE DOOR AND CORNER OF OLD NUNNERY, HINCHINGBROOKE. Sydney Montagu, was not destined to find a "haven" in this restful old home, although a long life devoted to the service of his country, during which he literally encountered "many ship- 68 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES wrecks," would have seemed fully to entitle him to it. It is this Lord Sandwich to whom Pepys, his secretary, so constantly refers in his celebrated Diary. Although Sir Sydney Montagu never swerved in his allegiance to the royal house, Clarendon tells us that his son, having been emancipated when very young from his father's control, and married into a family which " trod awry," was won over by the " caresses " of Cromwell to take command in his army, Montagu being then little more than twenty years of age. Young as he was he had already fought at the head of his regiment in the battles of Lincoln, Marston Moor, York, Naseby, Bridgewater and Bristol, at the storming of which latter place he showed such gallantry, and displayed such successful diplomacy in his negotiations with Prince Rupert, that his conduct was reported to Parliament with the highest encomiums. Later he became Desborough's colleague in the office of High Admiral, and in 1656 he accompanied the gallant Blake to the Mediterranean, on whose death he succeeded to the sole command of the fleet. The death of Oliver Cromwell soon after this changed the whole face of affairs Montagu resigned his command and retired for a short time into the country, but later he was again appointed Admiral of the fleet conjointly with Monk. Things were now beginning to show a reaction to loyalty, and negotiations were set on foot to restore Charles. On May 23, 1660, we find an account in Pepys's notes of how King Charles II. came on board the ship Naseby, which had already been commanded by the youthful Admiral with honour, and how after dinner the sovereign changed the name of the HINCHINGBROOKE 69 vessel to Charles, a circumstance Dryden tells of in the following lines : "The Naseby^ now no longer England's shame, But better to be lost in Charles his name." After the conclusion of this ceremony Sir Edward Montagu weighed anchor, and set sail with the restored King for England. On June 29, 1660, Pepys mentions that he has been "up to White Hall, where I got my warrant from the Duke to be Clerke of the Acts. Also I got my Lord's warrant from the Secretary for his honour of Earle of Portsmouth, and Viscount Montagu of Hinchingbroke." New titles are added on July 10 of the same year, when Pepys again goes w r ith his " Lord," as he invariably from the first calls his patron, "to the Secretary's to desire the dispatch of his bill to be signed by the King. His bill is to be Earle of Sandwich, Viscount Hinchingbrooke, and Baron of St. Neots." The Admiral seems to have been much tried at times by the over-interference of his colleague Monk, but Clarendon writes that " he was willing to do him all honour in the world, though he will many times express his thoughts of Monk being a thick-skulled fool." Lord Sandwich was devoted to his profession, and took pride in adorning the vessels under his command, where "he received the gentlemen who visited him with great civility" Pepys says, and appears to have been as hospitable when on board his ship as he was at his fine seat at Hinchingbrooke. March 4, 1661, the Diary goes on to say that " My Lord went this morning on his 7 o GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES journey to Hinchingbrooke, the chief business being to look over and determine how, and in what manner his great work of building shall be done." Unfortunately much of this "work of building" was destroyed by fire in 1830. In a glowing account of the " coronafon " day, as Pepys spells it, he mentions that " my Lord Sandwich preceded the King [Charles II] carrying the sceptre." It was on board his ship that Lord Sandwich was invested with the Order of the Garter, " with a dispensation for the other cere- monies of the habit of the Order, and other things, till hereafter, when it can be done." In a glass case which hangs in the " Ship Room" at Hinchingbrooke, and which contains miniatures of the first Lord Sandwich and his wife, is a faded piece of blue ribbon which is that same ribbon of the Garter so proudly described by the faithful Pepys as being put about his Lord's neck by the herald on that famous " Lord's Day," two hundred and twenty-seven years ago. Wet and stained with sea-water it was taken, together with a curious old watch also hanging in the case, from a dead body washed ashore after the battle of Southwold Bay, May, 1672, and the two together were partly the means of identifying the body as that of the brave Admiral of the fleet who had perished in the defence of his country instead of finding a " haven " at his dearly- loved Hinchingbrooke. Lord Sandwich received the office of the Great Wardrobe, and the thanks of Parliament for his services and loyalty. When Charles II. married Katherine, daughter of the King of Portugal, he was chosen to be his Majesty's proxy on the occasion, and sent to bring over the bride. He also accompanied the Duke of York HINCHINGBROOKE EDWARD, FIRST EARL OF SANDWICH. From the Picture by SIR P. LELY at Hinchingbrooke. when he went to fetch the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria. In 1664 the gallant sailor once more put to sea, the fleet in which he 7 2 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES served under the Duke of York being most successful. He was also appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Madrid, and it was during this time that the Queen Regent Mariana, who was most friendly and grateful to the English envoy, presented him with full-length portraits by Herara, of herself and her son, the child-king, which now hang in the long music-room at Hinching- brooke. The Queen is represented as dressed in a religious habit, which was the widow's weeds worn in Spain, the little king, son of Philip IV. of Spain and Mariana of Austria, is a child of four years, with light flowing hair, and dressed in a red coat trimmed with silver. Above him is an eagle with extended wings bearing a sword, while an angel hovers over the child, holding the Spanish crown. The expression of the face is pathetically sad, and too surely foreshadowed the future life of the " Melancholy Monarch " who was one of the most unfortunate Princes that ever inherited a crown. In the year 1672, on a new war breaking out with the Dutch, Lord Sandwich again served under the Duke of York, as Vice- Admiral. It was during this war, in the several battles of which the gallant officer showed even more than his usual bravery, that Edward, first Earl of Sandwich, lost his life. When he saw that it was all over with his ship, the Royal James, he ordered his captain, the officers, his own servants, &c., into the long boat, peremptorily refusing to leave himself in spite of every entreaty, and when the boat pushed off the brave form of the Admiral still stood erect on the quarter-deck of the burning vessel. " Thus perished the man whose noble end to a noble life called forth eulogiums from friend HINCHINGBROOKE 73 and foe." The battle had been fought on May 28, 1672, and "on the 10 of June his body was found off Harwich clad in the uniform he had worn with so much honour, still adorned with the insignia of England's noblest Order, of which he had proved himself so worthy a knight, the gracious form, strange and almost miraculous as it may appear, unblemished in every part save some marks of fire on the face and hands." After a public funeral all that was mortal of Edward Montagu, first Earl of Sandwich, was interred on the North side of the altar in Henry VI I. 's chapel in Westminster Abbey, on July i, 1672. Master Pepys's devotion to "his Lord" was extreme, but one or two amusing notes of the Diary prove that his prudent nature sometimes warred with his desire to do his Lord honour. On January gth, 1663, he writes: "By discourse with my wife thought upon inviting my Lord Sandwich to a dinner shortly. It will cost me at least ten or twelve pounds; but, however, some arguments of prudence I have, which I shall think again upon before I proceed to that expense." The same faithful chronicler suffers great uneasiness at his Lord's predilection for play, and mentions with regret that he lost ^50 to the King at my Lady Castlemaine's. Upon one occasion Lord Sandwich confided to his prudent secretary the startling fact that he was ,10,000 in debt, his income being ,8,000, and in the very midst of the discussion Lady Crewe came into the room to inform his lordship that another son was born to him. Poor Samuel devoutly exclaimed, " May God send my Lord to study the laying up something for it ! " 74 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Not to Lord Sandwich, but to his father, Sir Sydney Montagu, did Sir Oliver Cromwell, uncle and godfather of the Protector, part with Hinchingbrooke, where he had constantly entertained a very costly guest, King James I. His magnificence towards his sovereign led him into financial difficulties which necessitated parting with the beautiful old place. One notable visit is recorded in 1603, when James was on his "progress" to take possession of the throne of England, and is thus described by an old writer of the time : " The 2/th of April the King removed from Burleigh towards Hinchingbrooke, to Sir Oliver Cromwels, and about some halfe mile ere he came there, his majesty was met by the Bayliffe of Huntingdon, w r ho made to him a long oration, and there delivered him the sword which his highnesse gave to the Earle of Southampton to bear before him to master Oliver Cromwels House, where his highnesse and his followers, with all comers, had such entertainment as was not the like in any place before, there was such plentie and varieties of meates and diversitie of wines, and the sellars open at every man's pleasure. . . . Master Cromwell presented his majestic w r ith many rich and acceptable gifts, as a very great and fay re w r rought standing cuppe of gold, goodly horses, deepe mouthed hounds, divers hawkes of excellent wing, and at the remove gave fifty pounds amongst his majestie's officers." It was after this visit that King James is reported to have said to Sir Oliver at parting, " Marry, mon, thou hast treated me better than ony ane syn I left Edinbro'" a compliment which is supposed to have had the rare merit of being true. A large HINCHINGBROOKE 75 apartment, hung with some good bits of old tapestry, is still shown at Hinchingbrooke as James I.'s bedroom. The young Oliver Cromwell, whose father Robert, the brewer, lived in Huntingdon, spent much of his time when a boy at Hinchingbrooke, and as children he and the baby prince Charles played together under the wide-spreading ancient limes, said to be as old as the original nunnery itself. Tradition says that the boys came to blows, as the best of children will, and that upon one occasion Oliver Cromwell caused the royal child's blood to flow, which later was to stain his own name for ever as the man who in stern fanaticism caused the death of his King. The town of Huntingdon abounds with relics of Cromwell. The grammar school w r hich he attended still stands ; the site of the house where he was born is pointed out ; he tumbled into the river Ouse one day and would have been drowned but for the timely efforts of a curate living near Huntingdon who happened to be passing at the time. When in later years Cromwell marched through the place at the head of the Parliamentary army, he curiously enough met this same clergyman, and reminded him of the incident. The man being a strong loyalist made answer in a way little calculated to flatter the " General." " Yes, I well remember it, and wish I had put you in rather than see you in arms against your King." When a baby in his cradle tradition also tells us that a pet monkey carried Oliver Cromwell up to the battlemented roof at Hinchingbrooke, but that despite the terror of the assembled household, ready with mattresses to catch the infant should the animal drop him, the monkey calmly took GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES OLIVER CROMWELL. From the Picture by WALKER at Hinchingbrooke. the child back to his room and laid him again in his bed. As a boy the future ruler of England is said to have been wild and HINCHINGBROOKE 77 CROMWELL'S MOTHER. From the Picture by WALKER at Hinchingbrooke. unruly, often incurring punishment by his wayward conduct and practical jokes. " One Christmas night the revels at H inching- 7 8 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES brooke were interrupted by some unseemly pranks of his conceiving, which called down upon him a sentence from the Master of Misrule that Sir Oliver ordered into immediate exe- cution, viz., that the young recreant should be subjected then and there to a severe ducking in one of the adjoining fishponds." When in 1628 Cromwell was returned as member for Huntingdon, at which time his cousin Hampden also took his seat, his appearance on the occasion was such that the King is said to have exclaimed, " Oddsfish ! that chaplain must be a bishop ; just put me in mind of him next vacancy." Dr. South remarks in his writings: "Who that beheld such a bankrupt, beggarly fellow as Cromwell first entering the Parliament House, with a torn coat, and greasy hat (perhaps neither of them paid for), would have believed that in a few years," &c., &c. It was at this very Parliament that Hampden, Cromwell, and Pym, bore such bold testimony to their political and religious faith, standing firm to their ideas of right. But the history of Cromwell is the history of England. The portrait of the Protector which hangs in the music-room at Hinchingbrooke is an oval half-length, representing him in armour, with a plain-falling collar. The face is dark and stern, but shows character and decision in every line. Towards the end of his life the features grew to have a look of suspicion, his last days being embittered by distrust of all around him, and constant fear of assassination. When the end came, however, he died peaceably in his bed, apparently undisturbed by remembrance of that bloody scaffold erected in front of Whitehall, HINCHINGBROOKE 79 where a King expiated by a shameful death the mistakes of an unfortunate career. The splendid funeral conducted with more than regal pomp which was given to the man who as a boy played under the old limes at Hinchingbrooke with the baby prince, was not to be the final end of his greatness, for upon the accession of Charles II. the Protector's body was dug up and hung upon the " Traitors' Tree." Opposite the portrait of Cromwell at Hinchingbrooke hangs one of General Monk, also a half-length oval, and in armour, with the long hair as worn at the period. Oliver considered Monk one of his best generals, but at one time had doubts of his fidelity, and when he was in command in Scotland the Protector wrote to him in the following curious language : " There be that tell me, there is a certain cunning fellow in Scotland, called George Monk, who is said to lie in wait there to introduce Charles S.tuart ; I pray you use your diligence to apprehend him, and send him up to me." Guizot says of Monk, " C'etait un homme capable de grandes choses, quoiqu'il n'eut pas de grandeur dans Fame." His jealousy of his noble colleague Lord Sandwich greatly bears out the French historian's opinion. Monk was created Duke of Albemarle by Charles II. Between these portraits of Cromwell and Monk is a three- quarter length one of General Ireton, of whom it was said that he "grafted the soldier on the lawyer, and the statesman on the saint." He was a man of undoubted courage, and although a violent republican, and also the son-in-law of Cromwell, he ventured upon more than one occasion to differ from him, and 8o GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES expostulate boldly when he disapproved of the Protector's conduct. To go back to a still earlier reign: Sir Henry Cromwell, father of Sir Oliver, and from the liberality of his largesses called the " Golden Knight," received Queen Elizabeth at Hinchingbrooke in August, 1564, after her visit to the University of Cambridge, but no particular account of the entertainments at the time seems to have been preserved. Henry VIII. originally granted the place to his minister, Sir Richard Williams, who assumed the name of Cromwell, and rose rapidly into favour with his imperious sovereign, obtaining from him a lion's share of rich abbey lands. Before this it was a nunnery to which the nuns of Eltesley in Cambridgeshire are said to have been removed by William the Conqueror, who is therefore reckoned to be the founder of the Priory which was of the Benedictine order, dedicated to St. James. The w r est side of the park still goes by the name of the nun's meadow, and across a tributary of the river Ouse, just outside one of the park gates, is the Nuns' Bridge, a plain structure, venerable-looking, but guiltless of any attempt at architectural beauty. During some of the alterations of the place the bones of several nuns were found under the old part of the house. The great characteristic of Hinchingbrooke, as it now is, is its brightness. Not a gloomy corner exists, save perhaps in the low buildings which were actually a part of the nunnery itself. In all the principal rooms immense windows, both square and circular, let in floods of sunshine, in the cosy library lighting up the wood- HINCHINGBROOKE 81 work, all of which is of oak black with age, richly and elaborately carved by the hand of some great old master. The chimney- piece and massive frame above it are of the same dark oak, heavily carved, and bearing the date 1580 cut in the wood. These pieces were brought from Holland. No pictures are in this room, but well-filled bookshelves reach from the floor almost to the ceiling, where a bordering of heavy gold paper, relieved by a design in dark blue, runs the length of the walls above the bookcases. The upper parts of the windows, one of which is a deep bay directly facing the raised terrace which forms so charming a walk, are of coloured glass having heraldic designs and crests of present members of the Montagu family. Unless during a total eclipse of the sun, the drawing-room, which is entered through the large folding-doors of dark carved oak separating it from the library, could scarcely fail to be bright even without actual sunshine, for one end of it is entirely formed by a wide, high window, formerly the east window of the chapel, while at one side of the room is a second great bay, even larger than that in the library. This drawing-room has not yet been renovated, as have many other parts of the house, but in it are to be found some interesting pictures. On either side of the chimney-piece are low bookshelves let into the walls, above which on the left hang portraits of the Duchesse de Berri, Elizabeth, Countess of Sandwich, and the celebrated Ninon de 1'Enclos. On the right those of Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de. Mazarin, Mary, Queen of James II. of England, and Henrietta Maria, M 82 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Duchess of Orleans. It appears odd to find the picture of an English peeress placed between two such notoriously celebrated characters as Louise d'Orleans, Duchesse de Berri, and Mademoiselle de 1'Enclos ; but it seems that the latter at least, together with the Duchesse de Mazarin, were the lady's chosen friends, and Elizabeth, wife of the third Earl of Sandwich, although a very brilliant member of society, was almost as distinguished for her gallantries as for her wit and cleverness. Pope writes of her: "This lady is both an honour and a disgrace to her native country." She spent much of her time in Paris, and appears to have shared with the two French ladies just referred to the admiration of the witty but profligate Abbe Charles de St. Evreinond, who constantly mentions her in his writings. She died at Paris, at her house in the Rue Vaugirard, Faubourg St. Germain, in 1757. It was when she first went to Paris that Lady Sandwich made the acquaintance of the French beauties whose portraits now adorn the drawing-room at Hinchingbrooke, for at her return to France in 1729 they were all dead. That the pious Mary of Modena, wife of James II., who is said to have "lived a saint, and died in the very odour of sanctity," should be placed in this motley company, seems a trifle hard upon that excellent lady ; perhaps her frame suited theirs. On either side of the end-window one finds Charles V., Emperor of Germany, by Titian, and Prince Rupert, the former of whom spent his life in warfare until his abdication, after which he secluded himself from the world in the convent of San HINCHINGBROOKE 83 Yuste, in Estremadura, where he died. The latter was the imprudent and unlucky, but brave, prince whom Pepys says was "wanting in patience and a seasoned head." Among the many wanderings of his adventurous life he found himself in America, where he remained for some years. It was Prince Rupert who invented mezzotinto, and Horace Walpole relates the following anecdote as the way in which he did it : " Prince Rupert, when in Holland, was one morning attracted by seeing a sentinel vehemently rubbing the barrel of his musket. On approaching and examining the gun, he found that the damp of the early morning had rusted the metal, and this, combined with friction, had produced a kind of arabesque or pattern on the metal like a friezed work eaten in with numerous little dots, part of which the soldier was scraping away. This set the Prince thinking how he could produce a lasting effect of the same kind, and in combination with his friend Vaillant the painter he invented a steel roller cut with tools to make teeth in the manner of a file, or rasp, with projecting points which produced the black ground, and this being scraped away or diminished at pleasure left the gradations of light." Prince Rupert was a messmate of the first Lord Sandwich, and Pepys tells us that in Sir Peter Lely's studio he saw pictures of both the brave sailors ; the present portrait is however by Van Dyck. Another Van Dyck, Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., and a portrait of Edward, first Earl of Sand- wich, when young, complete the list of pictures in this bright, cheerful room, capable of being made one of the most beautiful in the house. 84 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES In the large entrance hall at Hinchingbrooke many a Yule log has burned in the immense stone fireplace while waits sang their joyous carols on Christmas Eve, the old clock the while ticking out Time's relentless movements with always the same monotonous sound, as though saying over and over again, " You may waste, but you cannot stop me." Near the clock stands a huge carved chest, in which a modern Ginevra might easily hide, and like her unlucky namesake, die. An antlered stag's head is over the entrance door, and curious guns and weapons brought by Captain Cook from the Sandwich Islands, hang crossed upon the walls. The stone floor is covered by a warm-tinted Turkey rug, and a large-sized modern table having a carved oak chair drawn up to it, is in the centre. Over the fireplace hangs the full-length portrait of the late Lord Sandwich, presented by the tenant- farmers of the county of Huntingdonshire and other friends. There are also pictures of Kings George II. and George III., and of several British admirals, and curious models of vessels. Upon a carved oak buffet or side-board stand two immensely tall brass candlesticks evidently intended for a church altar, and facing these, in the grand old window which we have already seen from the outside looking upon the lovely entrance court, stands upon a high pedestal a bronze model of the statue of Frederick the Elector of Brandenburg, the original of which is on the bridge near the palace at Berlin. This bronze was given to the present Earl of Sandwich when as Viscount Hinching- brooke he went with a mission to Berlin in 1862 to invest the late Emperor of Germany, then King of Prussia, with the Order of HINCHINGBROOKE 85 the Garter. To the left of the wide, open fireplace in this great hall stands a beautifully carved prie-dieu. In leaving the hall one passes along a corridor, where on the right is a sort of conservatory filled with plants and singing-birds. On the left is the " Ship Room," so called from the fact that the walls are covered with pictures of ships and the different naval engagements in which the first Lord Sandwich was engaged. Descending five or six steps the principal staircase is on your right, the walls panelled in light varnished oak, the arms of the house of Montagu, surmounted by an Earl's coronet, cut in the panels, while the different armorial bearings of the family arranged on shields of wood are placed just below the large window which lights the staircase from above. Numberless portraits hang upon the walls, but a dear little person in a crimson dress, holding a basket of cherries in her hand, at once appeals to your affections, and one grows to love the quaint, old-fashioned child who was the Honourable Mary Montagu, but who died before the innocent wonder in the wide child-eyes could turn to the knowledge of life and its illusions. The large female figure in a white dress with brown drapery, leaning on an anchor, is Louisa, wife of the sixth Earl of Sand- wich, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence. She was the mother of Harriet, Lady Ashburton, the friend of Carlyle, and of the charming Comtesse \Vale\fski. Comte Walewski held several diplomatic posts, and in 1854 came as French ambassador to England, but was recalled to Paris the ensuing year to take the portfolio of foreign affairs. Seated on a bank putting a wreath of 86 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES flowers around the neck of a lamb is that Countess of Sandwich already mentioned as witty and wicked, who led such a merry life in Paris, and became the friend of the gay French beauties. Descending the staircase again, a door almost facing it leads into a large room often used as a dining-room, where hangs the wonderful portrait of the first Napoleon, painted by Paul de la Roche. The dark, clever face has a melancholy expression, while the penetrating eyes seem to turn and follow you as you turn, never losing their hold upon your imagination if you once study their marvellous depths. The picture is said to have been painted from memory, but if so the painter must surely have been haunted by a likeness more real than one generally obtains from life. The figure is three-quarter length, in uniform, and with the hand thrust into the coat in the favourite Napoleonic attitude, and when lit by two shaded lamps throwing a strong light upon the features, the effect is almost startling, such wonderful depths of expression lie in the speaking countenance. A list of portraits too long to describe are in this most pleasant room, having a large glass door which opens out upon the smooth shaven lawn, but space allows us to select only one from the number. So sad and tragic is the story of Margaret Ray, that we feel bound to relate it. The girl was beautiful, and was, some say, the daughter of a stay-maker in Covent Garden, while others assert that her father was a labourer. Certain it is that John, fourth Earl of Sandwich, struck with her extreme beauty, took her under his protection, educated her, and established her at Hinchingbrooke. His marriage had been an unhappy one, and HINCHINGBROOKE 87 he was for many years separated from his wife. All testimony goes to prove that Miss Ray was remarkable while under his roof for her discreet and circumspect conduct in a most equivocal position, and the wife of the Bishop of Lincoln writes of her : " She was assiduous to please, so excellent and unassuming, I felt it cruel to sit directly opposite her, and yet find it impossible to notice her." But the fastidious Earl was very strict that no one should, as he expressed it, "exceed the boundary line;" therefore at Christmas time, as well as at other frequent entertainments, w r hen Margaret's great musical talent was in constant demand, she appeared among the guests, but no one was allowed to speak to her. Upon one occasion a neighbour, Major Reynolds, brought with him to Hinchingbrooke a brother officer, by name Captain Hackman, who at first sight fell violently in love with the un- fortunate Margaret. Eventually the soldier deserted the army for the Church, obtained a living in Norfolk, and wrote a passionate love-letter to Miss Ray, offering to marry her, and promising protection for her children by Lord Sandwich. This offer was refused with decision, whether from fidelity to her protector or indifference to her adorer we cannot say. Her refusal and a wretched jealousy drove Hackman to the verge of madness. He came to London, watched her movements, followed her one night from Covent Garden Theatre to the very door of her coach, and deliberately discharged a pistol, which he held in his right hand, in the face of the unhappy woman, whilst with a second pistol in his left he shot himself. She died instantly, but her murderer, although wounded, recovered sufficiently to be tried and condemned. 88 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES He made a pathetic speech, in which he vehemently asserted that the murder was a sudden frenzy, only the suicide being premedi- tated. Lord Sandwich was overcome with grief at his loss, and his friend Cradock tells us that upon going to see him he found him terribly depressed, and sitting gazing at the portrait of Miss Ray, doubtless this very picture by Gainsborough, which was pronounced a "speaking likeness." Next to this dining-room where, had we but time, we would linger longer, is the drawing-room, already described, opening into the oak library, and directly opposite the library door, at the other end of the corridor, is the long music-room, where hang the portraits of Cromwell and his generals, and to which we must return presently, as the list of interesting pictures there is by no means exhausted. The view of the house from the entrance court gives no idea of the size and extent of Hinchingbrooke. Just that little corner seems almost as if it lay in an enchanted sleep ; the green grass flecked with shadow and light by the winter's sun ; the convent cells which long years ago were homes of silent prayer, wrapped now in a friendly ivy mantle which conceals the ravages of time ; the deep mullioned windows, the wide hospitable door surmounted by the ancient coronet and family arms carved in stone, harmonizing gracefully with the sombre yew hedge ; and lastly the grand old gateway with its huge quaint figures and the heavy oaken doors which have opened to welcome weary penitents and exiled kings returning to claim their own again, and gay cavaliers, as well as stern men of Cromwell's time, with their gloomy ideas of right. HINCHINGBROOKE Queens and princes, long lists of fair women and brave men all in turn have passed through those massive wooden gates, beneath the grand old arch which still stands as it has stood through hundreds of rolling years. GARDEN VIEW OF HINCHINGBROOKE. Standing on the broad terrace a stretch of lawn lies before you, with spreading cedar trees and luxuriant shrubs ; beyond lies the long, low, irregular side of the house, displaying in its different parts the architectural taste of the earliest as well as the latest N 00 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES period of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the very irregularity of design being peculiar to the era. The large windows are all projecting, and being repeated in the second story make the effect doubly fine. One circular bow window is particularly rich in carved ornaments ; BALCONY OF LADY SANDWICH S SITTING-ROOM, there are sculptured shields and crests of the Cromwell family alliance, and above the window on the exterior is the date "Anno Domini 1602" between the united initials " O.C." on one side, " E. C A." n the other ; the whole surmounted by balustrades, with HINCHINGBROOKE the royal arms of Elizabeth in the centre, supported by the lion and dragon between obelisks and other ornaments both numerous and minute. Upon the cornice of the building adjoining this window, which is part of the old Priory, is the date 1431, and in a corner formed by one of the angles of the house, there is in the second story a short stone balcony, on to which opens one of the windows of Lady Sandwich's sitting-room, one of the brightest and cheeriest rooms possible. The house covers a much larger space of ground than one would at first suppose, while the roofs of different heights, and chimneys of different forms and sizes, give to the whole a singularly picturesque appearance. A large square tower, built by the present owner, adds much to the general effect, and from this tower floats the flag with the arms of the house of Montagu, when the lord of the manor is at home. Upon some parts of the walls of the house ivy has been allowed to grow, the deep green of its shining leaves contrasting well with the time- tinted stone-work, while the two windows facing the short balcony already referred to are literally set in a framework of lovely roses, which in the summer time are one mass of soft yellow bloom against the mellowed colouring of the stone. The billiard-room at Hinchingbrooke is a peculiarly attractive corner, yet must yield the palm to Lord Sandwich's own sitting- room, where is comfort in every sense. Here are found a few choice pictures, among them the portrait of the late Lady Sandwich, with beautiful, loving eyes. Out of this room opens a smaller "den," more given up to hard work and business. In a small apartment near these two, called the garden room, hangs a fine 92 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES portrait of Elizabeth Popham, Viscountess Hinchingbrooke. The up-stairs rooms are bright and comfortable, and in many of them, as well as in the upper corridors, hang valuable pictures, notably those of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who in such romantic fashion ran away with and married " Mistress Mallett," the beauty and heiress of the north, whom the first Lady Sandwich much wished to secure as a wife for her eldest son, Lord Hinching- brooke ; a half-length one of this Lady Sandwich herself ; Mrs. Elizabeth Cromwell, mother of the Protector, and her husband Robert, the brewer, also William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, a copy after Van Dyck. In returning to the large music or ball-room, for it is used for both these purposes, we must again quote our friend Master Samuel Pepys, who so constantly, all through his Diary, alludes to the beautiful Lady Castlemaine, Barbara Villiers, afterwards Duchess of Cleveland, whose charms evidently exercised a wonderful fascination on the devout Samuel. On July loth, 1664, he writes: "My Lady Sandwich showed us my Lady Castlemaine's picture, finely done ; given my Lord ; and a most beautiful picture it is." The portrait, a full length one, is by Sir Peter Lely, and is taken in a sitting position with one arm raised, the head resting on the hand. It is a delicate oval face, with dark hair and eyes, no trace, in the mild and rather dreamy expression, of the imperious and ambitious nature which ruled a king and gave years of anxiety to courtiers. Lord Sandwich's housekeeper, "Sarah," who was in charge of his lodgings in Westminster, evidently furnished Mr. Pepys with abundant gossip, HINCHINGBROOKE 93 amongst other things informing him that " the king supped every night in the week preceding his nuptials with Lady Castlemaine ; likewise, when the whole street was aglow with bonfires the night of the queen's arrival, there was no fire at my lady's door." On the appointment of the ladies of the bedchamber to the queen, Pepys records that " Lady Sandwich was justified in her fear that the king would still keep in with Lady Castlemaine." And for long years afterwards she remained his principal favourite, finally dying at Chiswick in her sixty-ninth year. A portrait of the king (Charles II.) by Lely hangs next to the lovely favourite. Andrew Marvell's bitter satire on this monarch is well known : "Of stature tall, and sable hue, Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew ; Ten years of need he lingered in exile, And fed his father's asses all the while." Opposite this dark king is Edward, first Earl of Sandwich, in robes of the Garter, and near by a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of that William, Duke of Cumberland, who from his cruelty was called " Billy the Butcher." There are also pictures of Louis XIV., le grand monarque, and Maria Theresa, Queen of France, both by Mignard. A large full-length in a Turkish costume represents the celebrated John, fourth Earl of Sandwich, to w T hom Horace Walpole so frequently refers in his letters. Although he never appears friendly to Lord Sandwich in his remarks, he seems constantly compelled to do him justice in his 94 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES public capacity, and in mentioning the famous occasion of Wilkes's libel, he writes : " I do not admire politicians, but when they are excellent in their way, give them their due; no one but Lord Sandwich could have struck a stroke like this." HINCHINGBROOKE FROM THE PARK. It was from an incident connected with Wilkes that Lord Sandwich gained the name of "Jemmy Twitcher," which sobriquet he never afterwards lost He and Wilkes had once been friends, but the latter having composed a scurrilous and disloyal poem, HINCHINGBROOKE 95 the former was so incensed that he procured a copy and read it aloud in the House of Lords. Just at this juncture The Beggar s Opera was being acted, and when Macheath exclaimed, " But that Jemmy Twitcher should peach surprises me !" the chief part of the audience, who were partizans of " Wilkes and Liberty," burst into a round of applause, applying the passage to Lord Sandwich. "Peaching" was more than they proposed to stand from a man whose own private life left much to be desired. It was this same earl who established the unfortunate Margaret Ray at Hinchingbrooke, and, judging from his character, there is a quiet satire in his choosing the dress of a Turk for his portrait. In spite of the stains on his private life he filled successive public posts honourably and well. He spoke with remarkable force in Parliament, and became a Lord of the Admiralty. In 1/46 he was appointed Plenipotentiary to the States-General, and again at the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and it was on this latter occasion that, at a large international dinner, he gave the following witty toast. The different envoys had become poetical as well as loyal in their phraseology ; the Frenchman gave his " Royal Master, the Sun, who illuminates the whole World ;" the Spaniard "his Master, the Moon, scarcely inferior in brilliancy and influence." When Lord Sandwich rose he toasted with all the honours, his "Master, Joshua, who made both the Sun and the Moon to stand still." In any business in which he w r as engaged Lord Sandwich was famed for his regularity, despatch, and industry, and is credited with having invented sandwiches in order to take some nourishment without interrupting his work ; it was this which 96 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES gave rise to the amusing lines written about him and Lord Spencer : "Two noble earls, whom if I quote Some folks might call me sinner ; The one invented half a coat, The other half a dinner." Over the chimney-piece, in this same nobly proportioned music-room, hangs the portrait of Field-Marshal Henry William Paget, first Marquis of Anglesey, K.G., in the uniform of a colonel of the Seventh Hussars. The brave names " Peninsular" and "Waterloo" are written on the frame, and at both places the gallant soldier brilliantly distinguished himself. His daughter, Lady Mary Paget, became Countess of Sandwich and mother of the present earl. Hinchingbrooke can rightly be called a memory-haunted place, filled as it is with recollections of battles and victories by sea and land ; of men and women who have attained the highest pinnacles of earthly glory, and who long hundreds of years agone were filled with passionate human purpose, some for good, and some for evil. Reverently and lovingly have we tried to sketch their lives, so long since passed beyond criticism of praise or blame, and reluctantly do we leave much still unsaid, and turn from the voices calling to us through the corridors of memory. These old manor houses of England are palpable illustrations of centuries of her national life, connected with many names which have passed out of the living world into history. They charm the senses with their pale reminiscences, and one never tires of HINCHINGBROOKE 97 rambling about rooms and corridors bright with the same sunshine which gilded life for those breathing, living realities in the far away past, or shadowy in the long English twilight which lights only their painted images dreaming away the present in quiet corners, where a great calm and peace seem to have settled, after HINCHINGBROOKE FROM THE TERRACE. the yearning and unrest which make life a tragedy to those who feel, whereas, would they but stop to think, it might seem the veriest comedy. On the morning of New Year's Day, 1887, Hinchingbrooke lay a long line of soft dark colour in a white world. The grass in the old courtyard was covered with a pure white veil of new- o GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES fallen snow ; the ivy on the nunnery walls was wreathed in glistening silver ; the leaves of the tall yew hedge were outlined by gleaming threads of white ; all the trees in the park had their leafless skeleton branches wrapped in a feathery frost, while each plant and tiniest shrub were decked in the same pure white, and above all was spread out the clear pale blue of an English sky. Brilliant sunshine kissed each starry snowflake to sparkling beauty, and brightened the whole frosted landscape, whose silvery drapery it had not warmth enough to melt. Over the white meadows, and through the clear still air, came the sound of church bells, softened by distance to a musical melody, and on every side cheery greetings passed from one to another, with friendly wishes for a " Happy New Year." So would we, also, in heartiest sincerity, wish many happy new years to Hinchingbrooke and its owner. IV.^ERIDGE CASTLE BELONGING TO THE MARQUIS OF ABERGAVENNY, K.G. O better place than Eridge could be chosen as an example of the country life and splendid hospitality of an English noble- man of the nineteenth century. All the national sports of the country are to be found within easy reach of it hunting, racing, deer-taking, fishing, and shooting and large is the number of those gener- ously asked to share in these amusements by the present owner of the place. While the greater part of the ivy-covered walls of the castle itself is of comparatively recent date the park, covering an area of some two thousand five hundred acres, is one of the oldest and most beautiful in all England. A description of it in the year 1606 is preserved to us in a letter from Aaron 1 The following chapter has been read and revised by Lord Abergavenny, by whose permission the historical portraits are published. GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Hill to his friend Mr. J. Mallet : " There is a place called Eridge Park belonging to Lord Abergavenny, and an open, old, appro- priated forest of the name of Waterdown, that butted on the park enclosure. There was also near it a house called Eridge House. ERIDGE CASTLE. The park was an assemblage of all nature's beauties, hills, vales, brooks, lawns, groves, thickets, rocks, and waterfalls ; all wildly noble and irregularly amiable." If this account of the beauties of Eridge Park was correct in 1606 it is doubly so now, and so varied is the character of the BRIDGE CASTLE timber and shrubbery that at one point you can drive, or walk, through an avenue of dark pines, still and solemn as the aisle of a cathedral, while a short way beyond you come to branching beeches which border the broad paths, and have a tangle of sweet- smelling undergrowth where the sunshine plays hide and seek with the shadows, and from which hares and rabbits dart out suddenly, scampering across the road only to hide themselves again in like retreats of leafy green. Yet a little further on large oaks stand, each one alone, that no lesser tree may injure its beauty by too close contact, and again stretching away to the left, masses of bracken and feathery ferns form pleasant resting-places for the herds of deer grazing peacefully, with their heads turned tow r ards the breeze, that the first warning of danger may come the more quickly to their sensitive ears. There are in all seven hundred head of deer, one hundred red, the rest fallow. To those who love to find themselves mounted on a well-bred horse, with soft turf under foot and a clear winter sky overhead, there can be no pleasanter way of spending a February morning than in that peculiar form of sport called taking up the deer. One animal is selected from the herd to be placed in a separate part of the park and fattened for venison, and the first preliminary to securing this result is for a chosen few to meet at old Fred the keeper's cottage some distance from the castle ; there will be found some ten or twelve fine Scotch deerhounds, with long gray hair and keen, but cruel eyes. Two or three mounted men take each a hound in leash and station themselves at distances along the line which the deer will probably take, the remainder of the pack being GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES kept in reserve until needed. Then the word to start is given, with many cautions to mind the rabbit holes, and strict injunctions from Lord Abergavenny to ride only on the broad grassy paths, orders which are fairly well obeyed at first, but which are reck- lessly forgotten after the chase has actually begun. Warily the herd of deer are approached by the sportsmen, and closer and closer the graceful animals draw together, scenting danger, and ready for defence. Until now the impatient horses have been held in check but when the huntsman has pointed out the chosen quarry he is separated from the herd, each rider chooses his own line of country, horses are urged to their full speed, rabbit holes are forgotten and grassy paths deserted, while all ride wildly after the flying deer the hounds meanwhile being slipped from leash and joining in the chase. Almost invariably the hunted animal takes to the water, and with antlers raised, and fiery eyes fixed upon his pursuers, he defies them all, men and dogs alike, and stands at bay, a living picture of that which Sir Edwin Landseer has so faithfully por- trayed on canvas. No small skill is now needed to capture the beautiful creature, who is very dangerous in his angry strength, and more than one accident has happened in Eridge Park before the poor beast with slender swift-running legs fast bound, and branching antlers sawn off, is carried triumphantly to that part of the enclosure reserved for such as he, whose free forest life is over and done for. When the rhododendrons are in bloom, long glowing lines of colour lead from the lodge gates at Eridge to the entrance of the castle, where the brave words " Ne vile veils " (incline to nothing BRIDGE CASTLE 103 base), the motto of the Nevills, greet the eye on reaching the stone doorway, guarded by the Nevill bull and ornamented with the rose and the portcullis, which were given as badges to the Nevills by John of Gaunt, and was a distinction conferred upon only two other families in the kingdom. From the absolute impartiality with which their ancestor Warwick the King-maker attached himself at different times to the contending houses of York and Lancaster the Nevills have also the right to quarter both the Red and White Rose. Although from Domesday Book it may be collected that the park and chase were here before the conquest, and although we learn from writers of the time that in 1411 the lordship was in possession of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of. Warwick and Lord of Burgavenny, we find no mention of Eridge as being the family home of the Nevills until about the year 1787, when Henry, second earl and forty-fourth Baron of Abergavenny, made it his principal residence. Even then the castle was not as it is now, but was completed in its present form at a much later date, only the centre part of the house being a portion of the original building mentioned in Aaron Hill's letter. Restored by the second Earl of Aber- gavenny, a curious thing is to be noticed in the fact that the ornamentation of the walls have in many ways been faithfully copied from those of a room at Warwick Castle, represented in one of the portraits of Richard Nevill, Earl of Warwick, bearing the date 1449, and in a second portrait, of the sixth Earl of W T est- moreland taken at Raby Castle in 1569. Thus something at least of those beautiful old homes once the possession of the 104 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Nevllls still remains to them on the walls of Eridge, their present residence. The family of Nevill dates back to a certain Gilbert de Nevill, a Norman chieftain, who is said to have been admiral to William the Conqueror, and from him descends through many illustrious ancestors, and is connected by marriage with all the noblest names of England during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, down to the present time. The first family portrait which one sees on entering the richly-carved oak hall at Eridge, is that of Henry Nevill, 33rd Baron of Abergavenny, who was appointed one of the judges at the trial of the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots. He is represented as a stout, middle-aged man, seated in an arm-chair, and the mild expression of his countenance makes it difficult for us to believe that he was one of those who at that iniquitous trial at Fotheringay condemned the defenceless woman, who alone, without counsel, advisers, or friends, was left to defend herself against the combined weight of the legislative and judicial power of a great kingdom. Some months later, when the final act of the tragedy took place, and Lord Abergavenny was again present, this time as one of the witnesses of Mary Stuart's death, the hapless woman when dividing her jewels amongst those standing around, handed to him a string of pearls which she unclasped from her neck, so soon to be disfigured by the headsman's axe. For many years this necklace was worn in turn by distinguished women of the house of Nevill, several of whose portraits are painted with the pearls of the murdered Queen about their own fair throats. At last a certain lord of Eridge, who surely could have had but a ERIDGE CASTLE slender appreciation for relics, and less than his share of sentiment, sold the famous necklace which had been worn by the ill-fated Mary, and given by her to his ancestor under such pathetic BRIDGE CASTLE FROM THE LAKE. circumstances, and his successors have never been able to recover it. Leaving the entrance hall a narrow passage-way leads to the foot of the principal staircase, where stands a high glass case, in which hangs the identical peer's robe worn by Lord Abergavenny at the execution of Mary Stuart. The colour is unfaded, and is p I0 6 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES still as red as was the unhappy Queen's blood on that dreary morning at Fotheringay. Even the most thoughtless, when passing the curious old mantle hanging soulless in its case, with the two ermine bands which denote the rank of its dead-and-gone wearer, cannot help giving a thought to the scenes it has witnessed, and all that has transpired since it was fashioned and worn. Two steps from where the peer's robe hangs, one pauses to examine a stained glass window where the sunlight streams through the heraldic quarterings of the various families into which the Nevills have intermarried, whose names date back through centuries. Three ancestors of the present Marquis of Abergavenny were at the battle of Agincourt, namely, Lord John de Beauchamp, Lord Le Despencer Burgavenny, and the Earl of Worcester. The direct ancestor of the present head of the family was Ralph de Nevill, first Earl of Westmoreland, who succeeded his father in the possession of his titles and manors in the year 1389. Honours seem to have been heaped upon him by King Richard II. and Henry IV., who made him, amongst other things, Earl Marshal of England ; and when the warlike King Henry V. came to the crown, Earl Ralph was still in favour. This powerful nobleman married first Margaret, daughter of the Earl of Stafford, and secondly Lady Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and he was grandfather to King Edward IV. and King Richard III. Edward Nevill, son of Earl Ralph and Joan Beaufort, by his marriage with Elizabeth Beau- champ became Baron of Burgavenny, and directly from him are the Nevills of Abergavenny descended. BRIDGE CASTLE 107 The elder brother of this Edward Nevill became in right ofhis marriage Earl of Salisbury, and accompanied Henry VI. to Paris when he went to be crowned King of France, the English having overcome the armies of the French in spite of the inspired Jeanne d'Arc, .the maid of Orleans, who so proudly carried to battle the white banner dotted with Fleur-de-lys, bearing the motto " Jesu Maria," and emblazoned with the figure of the Saviour. Before mounting the staircase which leads past the stained glass window so rich in heraldic designs, we must enter the lofty dining hall, where the oak carving of the walls was all executed by work- men on the estate, from timber grown in the park. The walls themselves are painted a dull red, relieved by carvings of the head of the Nevill bull in gilt, and the badges of the portcullis and rose. A border of circular shields, upon which are the quarterings of the Nevill family from 1060 until 1483, runs completely around the walls, below the pictures ; and a large stone fireplace with curious fire-dogs, and surmounted with the Nevill arms, stands at one side. In this room hang many family portraits, but the one claiming our first attention is that of Richard Nevill, Earl of Warwick, com- monly called the King-maker. A strong, resolute face, and eyes which in life must have looked deep behind men's mere expressions, and read clearly their hidden meanings. This Earl of Warwick, and his father Lord Salisbury, are by all historians allowed to have been two of the most powerful nobles who ever flourished in England. The historian Dugdale says : " This is that Richard Nevill who was called the stout Earl of Warwick, and well he might be so-called, in regard he bore such great sway towards the io8 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES latter end of King Henry VI. and part of Edward IV.'s reign." In 1452 first began that struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster, which was called the Wars of the Roses, the Earl of Warwick being at first on the side of York. In Shakspeare's King Henry VI. the following pertinent dialogue between these two shows how well they understood each other : WARWICK. My heart assures me that the Earl of Warwick Shall one day make the Duke of York a king. YORK. And, Nevil, this I do assure myself: Richard shall live to make the Earl of Warwick The greatest man in England but the king. After the defeat of the Yorkists at the battle of St. Alban's, Nevill's father, Lord Salisbury, was carried to York and there beheaded. Richard Plantagenet himself was killed, but Warwick remained the "greatest man in England." He continued fighting for the heir of the Duke of York, the Earl of March, who became Edward IV., while King Henry VI., of the side of Lancaster, was made a prisoner. Every possible honour and distinction was conferred by Edward IV. upon his powerful subject until his influence became unbounded. Hume tells us that no less than 30,000 persons lived daily at his board at the different manors and castles which he possessed in England. The people in general bore him an unlimited affection ; his numerous retainers were more devoted to his will than to the prince or the laws ; and he was the greatest, as well as the last of those mighty barons who formerly overawed the crown, and rendered the people incapable ERIDGE CASTLE 109 of any regular system of civil government. When he was sent to Rouen to treat for peace with the French king, he was received with much enthusiasm, and such court was paid him, that Edward, DINING-ROOM, ERIDGE CASTLE. highly incensed, exclaimed, "Surely not I, but Richard Nevill must be accounted king of England ! " Finally the king grew jealous and quarrelled with him, in consequence of which Warwick sent for his brothers George Nevill, Archbishop of York, and GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES John, Marquis Montagu, and declared to them his determination to restore King Henry to the throne. He first gave his daughter Isabel in marriage to George, Duke of Clarence, the king's brother, in order to attach him to his house ; then he succeeded in taking Edward IV. prisoner, and carried him off to his castle of Middle- ham in Yorkshire, where he left him in the custody of his brother the Archbishop. Eventually the king escaped, and raised another army, when Richard Nevill with the Duke of Clarence fled to Normandy, where he joined King Henry VI. and his Queen. Here he made a solemn treaty to restore Henry, and married his second daughter, Anne, to Edward, Prince of Wales, Henry's son. He actually succeeded in keeping this treaty, and placing Henry VI. again upon the throne, when Edward was in turn compelled to fly to the Continent. It had taken Warwick just eleven days to crush the White Rose of York and cause the Red Rose of Lancaster to bloom again. Less than a year later Edward returned to England, and the opposing houses of York and Lancaster terminated their disputes on Barnet Field, where the powerful Warwick was slain by Sir Roger Kingston. His body was taken to London, and afterwards interred in the monastery of Bisham in Berks, where his father lay buried. Warwick is described by a Burgundian chronicler who knew him well as " le plus soubtil homme de son vivant" A horrid history is that of the second daughter, Anne, who had been married to Edward, Prince of Wales. Her husband was stabbed in cold blood at the battle of Tewkesbury by Richard, Duke of Gloucester (afterwards King Richard III.), and the PORTRAIT OF QUEEN ELIZABETH WHEN YOUNG. From the Picture at Er'ulge Castle. ERIDGE CASTLE 113 wretched woman deliberately married his murderer. So at least says one historian, but an old chronicler gives a different rendering of the tale. He tells how the Duke of Gloucester being of crafty and cunning mind, found out the Lady Anne Nevill, who was in the city of London disguised as a cook-maid in a mean household, and 'forthwith carried her to the sanctuary of St Martin. The marriage was afterwards celebrated at Westminster by the uncle of the unlucky Lady Anne, George Nevill, Archbishop of York. After the death of Edward his brother Gloucester succeeded to the throne, and the Lady Anne passed in state as Queen of England through the city of London to the Tower. This poor Queen's life and love were bound up in her little boy who died, and after his loss she fell into a lingering decline, which many attributed to poison, and died at Westminster Palace. The historian Green says that " in the three years which followed the battle of Towton, the power of the Nevills over- shadowed that of the Crown," whilst another of the time tells us that the decline of that power must be dated from the day when Elizabeth Woodville married King Edward of England. Of the title of Baron of Burgavenny (or Abergavenny), Leland in the time of Henry VIII. writes "The Lord of Burgavenny is one of the ancyentest Barons of the realme." It is in fact the premier barony of England, and the first who bore the title, Hamelyn de Baalm, was son of one Drew de Baalm, a Norman of distinction who came into England with William the Conqueror, and received from him the higher part of Gwent, situated in the marches of South Wales, which was allowed to him as a barony. Q II4 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES He built the castle of Abergavenny in Wales (now a ruin), and founded the Priory of Abergavenny where he was buried. The name of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick and Baron of Abergavenny, is also a noted one in English history. He figured as a 'hero in many lands, and the Emperor of Germany said of him that " no Christian Prince had another such knight for wisdom, nurture, and manhood, and if all courtesy was lost yet it might be found again in him." Any portrait which may have existed of this ancestor, or of many others whose names are nobly mentioned, is not to be found at Eridge. Either by fire, or from other causes, many valuable pictures have disappeared, and the present collection at the castle is not a large one. There is a full- length portrait of the present Marquis of Abergavenny taken when a young man, and in the uniform of the Life Guards ; also one of the lovely daughter of the famous Jack Robinson. These are the principal pictures of note in the dining-room. From this large apartment a door leads to the library, almost the cosiest and most comfortable room in the house. The windows reaching down to the floor open out on to the terrace, and lovely glimpses of velvety lawns and spreading trees, the still water of the lake, and the varied beauties of the park beyond encircled by the misty Sussex hills, can be seen from them. The room is not grand and lofty, as is the hall just left, but has a low white ceiling ornamented with the portcullis and the rose ; the walls are lined with books, and the impression given by the whole is best expressed by the German word freundlich. It is a homelike, liveable room, not silent with pale dead memories, but echoing cheery words and rippling ERIDGE CASTLE 115 laughter. A room breathing from every corner warm living hopes and fancies, not haunted by buried lives which have naught to do with the present time. Books and photographs, papers and magazines of to-day, lie upon the different tables and near the comfortable sofas and armchairs, while flowers, sweet-scented living flowers, are in every available spot. In the winter time crackling logs send out a cheerful blaze, and the flames seem to leap and dance in sympathetic pleasure as the exciting run of the day is discussed, and the incidents attendant upon the capture of Reynard during the short frosty hours of December daylight are again gone over in the warm glow of the fire. The doings of even Warwick the king-maker have then but scant interest for those who have taken part in the hunt and divided the honours of the day with the good hounds who have "run straight" and "found early." Surely no room in all England can be pleasanter than the library at Eridge after a good day's run with the hounds ; sons and daughters of the house of Nevill are equally keen about "sport," and the doughtiest of their ancestors in their gilded frames may well be proud of the younger generation's prow r ess in the hunting field. Almost regretfully we leave this pleasant apartment with its ruddy glow of firelight, and cheerful life of to-day, although the doing so leads us back to the contemplation of fresh dignities belonging to the house of Nevill, and the history of Lady Cecily Nevill, Duchess of York, is too strange a one to be omitted. An old manuscript in the British Museum gives an account of the honours and alliances connected with that lady's name, so curious n6 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES that we must quote the paragraph in full : " From Lady Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, who was great aunt to Henry Neville, late Lord Abergavenny, and father of John Neville, now Lord Abergavenny, and Prime Baron of England, are lineally descended seven kings of England, three queens of England, four princes of Wales, four kings of Scotland, two queens of Scotland, one queen of Spaine, and one queen of Bohemia ; as also one Prince Elector Palatine of the Rhine." Horace Walpole describes this lady as "a Princess of spotless character." She strongly opposed the marriage of her eldest son, King Edward IV., with his subject, Elizabeth Woodville. We are told that " the Duchess of York was remarkable for her beauty, and still more so for her indomitable pride. In the north she was called the ' Rose of Raby,' but in the neighbour- hood of her baronial residence, Fotheringay Castle, the common people called her ' Proud Cis.' She had a throne room at Fotheringay, where she gave receptions with the state of a queen." It was said of her that "in her good she was not elated, in her evil days she was not cast down." She died after having lived to see "three princes of her body crowned, and four murthered. She was the youngest daughter of Ralph, Lord Nevill of Raby, Staindrop, Branspath, Sherrffhutton, Middleham, and Warkworth, first Earl of Westmoreland, and Earl Marshal of England, and of his wife Lady Joan Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Acquitaine, and King of Castile and Leon, and the sister of King Henry IV. of England, and to Lady Philippa, Queen of Portugal, and to ERIDGE CASTLE 117 Lady Katherine, Queen of Spaine, from whom descended all the Emperors of Germany, the Kings of Spaine, the House of Austria, and most of the princes throughout Christendom now living." In referring to this genealogical record the historian Roland quaintly adds: "the like cannot be said of any other English family." Lady Cicely was sister to that Edward Nevill who married the heiress of the House of Beauchamp, and became Lord Burgavenny, direct ancestor of the present owner of Eridge. All the places named in this curious manuscript belonged at one time to the Nevill family, but the mad ambition and consequent fall of Richard Nevill, the king-maker, together with other reasons of State, lost many lands and possessions for his descendants, and now of all these princely homes Aber- gavenny Castle in Monmouthshire (now a ruin), Birling Place in Kent, and ivy-covered Eridge alone remain to them. Still another place, " the manor of Sculton Burdeleys came to George Nevill, 32nd Baron, and was held of the King in chief by the service of Grand Serjeanty, to be the Chief Larderer when the Kings and Queens of England are crowned ; and the Larderer is entitled to take for the performance of the said service, the fees, profits, and advantages due and accustomed, viz. : the remainder of all the beef, mutton, veal, venison, kid, bacon, with all other kinds of flesh meat, and likewise of fish, salt, and all other things which may remain after dinner in the said office of the Larderer." n8 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES " Mr. Roland, as deputy of the second Earl of Abergavenny, served the office of Chief Larderer at the coronation of King George IV., and took a compensation of 200 guineas in lieu of the remnants of the feast, to which he was entitled as perquisites." During the reign of Henry VI II., the magnificent seat of Raby Castle, Durham, still belonged to the Nevills, and several of the Lords of Burgavenny are buried in the collegiate church of Staindrop, separated from Raby only by a rivulet. A brother of Lord Abergavenny in the time of Henry VIII. was a member of the Privy Council and Secretary of State to the King. It is upon the tomb of his wife, a daughter of Lord Dacre and Dame Anne Graistock buried at Harden in the diocese of Canterbury, that we find the following extraordinary inscription : "O Lord my Saviour and hevenly Maker, Have mercy on Elizabeth Graistock and Baker." The fourth Earl of Westmoreland, also called Ralph Nevill, was one of those who subscribed the letter to Pope Clement VII., intimating to his holiness that unless he complied with the wishes of King Henry VIII. upon the subject of his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, they would shake off the supremacy of Rome. Pending the obtaining of this divorce, Queen Catherine was removed to More, a house in Hertfordshire which had been originally built by George Nevill, Archbishop of York. This Earl's successor, Henry Nevill, was celebrated for his marriages, the third of which scandalized many people in the sixteenth century, and would have shocked many more in the nineteenth, ERIDGE CASTLE 119 for he boldly wedded his deceased wife's sister. For so doing he tells us he had good reasons, among which he mentions the following : I. It is the duty of every man to marry, (i Cor. viii. 2.) II. It is the duty of every man to marry the woman he loveth best. III. That a man should marry the sister of his late wife is a thing not contrary to Scripture, or experience, or common sense. IV. That many a worse hath oft been covered over by the mantle of religion, the dispensation of the Pope, or the will of the King. Stout Henry Nevill goes on to say that his " opynyon " was "gathered out of the Leviticall Lawes, and though there were that quoted the Old Testament against him, such did so to the hindrance of their own cause, for they remembered not the patriarch Jacob, who took unto himself two live sisters' 1 In Swallow's book De Nova Villa, he says in regard to this marriage that " doubtless the earl expected that Elizabeth would remember her own father's exploits in the matrimonial field, and would therefore look leniently at the lesser liberties of her Barons." But he was altogether mistaken. He further quotes a letter from . the Queen addressed to the Archbishop of York, where she writes that she thinks the Earl's proceedings contrary to the law of God, and " such example so suffered a hurt in slandery'g of our realme," concluding the oddly expressed epistle with the following sentence " Our pleasure is in this matter ye shall procede by ye authorite which ye have as Archbishop without notifying to hym [Henry i 2 o GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Nevill] of theis our lettres, written to your Grace under our signett." Marriage with a deceased wife's sister would from this seem to have been a burning question in those days as well as in the present. In the park at Eridge there are the remains of a military station of the Saxon invaders of the county, which retains the name of Saxonbury Hill, and the ruins of an ancient fortification can still be traced on the summit of that hill. It is said that towards the close of the fifth century the Saxons under their famous chief Ella, at the instance of Hengist, King of Kent, invaded England, and settled in Sussex, and this was probably- one of the stations occupied by them. Chroniclers of the time assure us that there can be no doubt as to the fact that from a very early age a large mansion stood upon the site which Eridge now occupies, and that it was used by the family as a residence up to the reign of Charles I. In the time of Charles I. one of the gentlemen of the bed-chamber was a certain Lord Abergavenny, who upon one occasion when in waiting at Whitehall was reading Shakespeare aloud to the king before he slept. His Majesty was very still, and listening attentively, when suddenly he started upright in bed convulsively grasping the book, the while pointing with his hand across the room to some object at which he gazed with wild and horror- stricken eyes, but which was invisible to his attendant. When pressed to explain what it was that had so agitated him, he con- fessed that he thought he saw a vision of the murdered Strafford which had come to reproach him with his broken royal word. ERIDGE CASTLE Several curious spots are to be found in E ridge Park. There yet exists the entrance to a large rocky cavern popularly called the Smugglers' Cave, which was formerly used as a sort of half- way house between New Haven and London, where contraband goods from across the sea were quietly stored until needed. Rumour had it that rare presents of wine, &c., found their way in olden times to the lords of Eridge, who found it prudent to take no notice of the nefarious practices carried on in their wide domains. At another place on the estate called Forge Wood was found the first iron ever used in England. This was smelted by fires fed with oak wood, in which the surrounding country abounded, but so much of it was used and it began so rapidly to disappear, that finally an Act of Parliament was passed to prohibit its further employment, as it was needed for building purposes of the navy. The railings of St. Paul's Cathedral were made from iron found in this place. The oak carvings found in the different rooms at Eridge are of great beauty, some being in the light, natural colour, some dark and stained with time. One apartment goes by the name of the oak room, and the walls, ceiling and chimney-piece, are all of the good old English wood. Upon a rounded " boss" in the centre of the ceiling is carved the date 1533, and small carvings of Scriptural subjects form a broad band around the walls. Over the mantelpiece in this room are six religious pictures, which were carefully walled up during the time of the Reformation. Queer times, those old Reformation days, and more vigorous than persuasive were the means adopted by Elizabeth to enforce the R i22 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES new religion. During the first year of her reign it was made compulsory for every layman or woman " to pay a fine of one shilling each time they failed to attend their parish church, and should any speak against the book of Common Prayer the following terms of imprisonment were ordered : ' For a first offence, six months ; a second, one year ; a third, for life.' After April ist, 1563, it was further ordained that should one maintain in writing the Pope's supremacy in the Church, that one should be declared guilty of high treason ; which meant that the offender, were he a man, should be hung, cut down alive, his breast and stomach cut open, his heart (still palpitating) be drawn out, and then, while yet warm his limbs should be hacked off, dipped in boiling pitch, and exposed over the gates on spikes. If a woman, she should be burned alive." We are told "that these proceedings in the cause of religion failed to increase the love of the Catholics for their Queen, even as the proceedings of her late sister had failed to win the Protestant heart," and we can scarcely wonder at the fact. In spite of all England had suffered during the horrors of the Popish persecution under Bloody Mary, the old faith was still so strong, that it " lay like lees at the bottom of men's hearts, and if the vessel was ever so little stirred it came to the top." Charles Nevill, sixth and last Earl of Westmoreland, was one of those who still clung to the early faith, and who entered heart and soul into the great rising in the north in 1569. He and his companions were furious at the irresolution and timidity which had been shown by that Duke of Norfolk to whom they had looked as a leader, who should have BRIDGE CASTLE 123 married the fair Scottish Queen, and re-established the Church of Rome, but who had only succeeded in losing his head upon which he had thought to place a crown. The sister of this Duke of Norfolk was wife of Charles Nevill, but being a Protestant she had nothing to do with instigating the rebellion in which her husband was so deeply engaged. Wordsworth tells of the number who answered the Earl's summons upon this occasion : " Seven hundred knights, retainers all Of Nevill, at their master's call Had sate together in Raby Hall; Such strength that earldom held of yore, Nor wanted at this time rich store Of well-appointed chivalry." The rising in the north has been treated of in history and song and story, all telling how towards the end poor Lady Westmoreland prayed alone for her lord while "the snow drove wildly and the wind howled dismally around the old tow r ers of Brancepeth and Raby," and how Charles Nevill became an outlaw, and finally died in exile. Queen Elizabeth's progress through Kent, and visit to Eridge in 1573, is thus recorded : "She was at her own house Knowle, for five days, from thence she went to Byrlingham [Birling] the Lord Burgavenny's, where she remained three days ; and then made a visit to Sir Thomas Gresham, at Mayfield, thence to Eridge, another house of Lord Burgavenny's, for six days." It was during this visit to Eridge that good Queen Bess 124 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES received in audience the French Ambassador in order to discuss with him the proposed alliance with the Duke d'Ale^on, brother of Charles IX. of France, the very marriage the disapproving of which lost Sir Philip Sidney Elizabeth's royal favour, and caused his retirement from Court. From Fridge also, at the DRAWING-ROOM, BRIDGE CASTLE. time of this same visit, the Queen issued orders for prolonging and even hardening the imprisonment of her unhappy cousin, Mary Stuart. The letter giving these instructions has been preserved, and was written by Lord Burleigh, whilst acting as Elizabeth's secretary during her visit to Fridge, to the Earl of ERIDGE CASTLE 125 Shrewsbury, at that time keeper of the person of the Scottish Queen. It reads as follows : "By Alexander Bogg, bryning to me your Lordship's letter, I was glad to understand of your Lordship's well doing; and am now commanded to wryte to your Lordship by her Majy', that she is pleased if your Lordship shall think you may without perill conduct the Queene of Scots to ye Well of Buckston, according unto her most earnest desyre, your Lordship shall so doo, using such care and respect for her person to continew in your chardg as hytherto your Lordship hath honorably, happely, and s'visably doone. And when your Lordship shall determyn to remove with the sayd Quene thythar, it were good yt [that] as little forknolledg abrode as may conveniently be gyven, and nevertheless, yt for ye time she shall be there yt all others, being strangers from your Lordship's company, be forbyden to come thythar, during ye time of ye sayd Quene's abode ther. And this I wryte because her Majty. was very unwylling yt she should go thythar, or for the acheving of some furder enterprise to escape ; but on the other part, I told her Majy. that if in very her sickness were to be releved therby, her Majy. could not in honor deny hir to have ye naturall remedy thereof; and so hir Majy. commanded me to wryte to your Lordship yt you might conduct hir thythar, and also to have good respect to hir. And according to this hir Majy's determination : the French Embassador being with her at Eridge, my Lord of Burgeni's houss in Waterdown Forest in Sussex, hath received knolledg from hir Majy. that you shall thus doo. " The second sute of the Embassador was also for a salve-conduct directly for ye Duke of Alanzon to come to the Quene's Majy. now at Dover ; but thereto soch answer is gyven to discomfort a wowar as I think namely he will not come. Suer I am ther is no salve-conduct yet granted. "The Quene's Majy. hath had a hard begynning of a progress in the Weld of Kent : and namely in some part of Sussex, wher surely ar more wonderous rocks and vallyes, and much worss ground, than in ye Peek. New we are bending to Ry, and so afterwards to Dover, where we shall have amends. * * * * * * " Your Lordship's at command, " W. BARGHLEY. "To the Rt. Honorable, my very good Lord, ye Earl of Shrewsbury." 126 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES The allusion in this letter to the uneven state of the ground seems to have been confirmed long years after by Horace Walpole, who in a letter to Richard Beatty, Esq., dated 1752, says : " Pray whenever you travel in Kentish roads, take care of keeping your driver sober." Can we not fancy the haughty queen, secure in the obedience of her subjects, dictating the substance of this letter from Eridge House, where, surrounded by the soft sough of the wind as it blows softly over the Sussex hills, she breathes freedom and life, and enjoys the tranquillizing effect of pleasant rural sights and sounds after the fatigues of royal state ? Little however does Elizabeth heed the hedgerows decked with the wild English rose, or the meadows gleaming with cowslips and buttercups, or the trailing hop wreaths drooping in ripe golden clusters, each passing breeze wafting the surrounding fragrance to her ; nor does she pause to remember that any one of these simple country sights would be a rest to the aching eyes of Mary Stuart, carried from one dreary old castle to another, that perchance the last might prove stronger against all effort to escape. After the letter has been dictated to Burleigh, the Queen turns to the Ambassador of Charles IX., and discusses with him this French alliance, which for the moment pleases her fancy, although she will not yet grant a passport to her foreign wooer that he may plead his cause in person. And the while the great scene-shifter Time laughs low to himself at the one queen plotting for the stricter keeping of her rival, and the other grasping at every hope of relief from the ERIDGE CASTLE 127 weary imprisonment allotted to her. He smiles grimly as through the vista of years he sees the stately tombs in the old stone Abbey of Westminster, so slightly removed the one from the other, and with so little choice between them, and laughs again at the slender difference which will exist in the end for the imperious Elizabeth planning her own safety in the free sunshine of Eridge, and the weeping Mary bewailing her fate in the gloom of Fotheringay. Time sees all this and laughs, as well he may, at mortals. One of the souvenirs of Queen Elizabeth at Eridge is an old music book bearing the date 1591, and supposed to be in the original handwriting of the redoubtable daughter of Henry VIII. She presented it to the Lord Abergavenny who was her host during her visit. And there is a small head in the drawing-room representing her with a more than usually high ruff, and hair the tint of which her most infatuated courtier could not have called auburn, it is so hopelessly, uncompromisingly red. A charming boy, the second Earl of Abergavenny, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and another portrait by the same artist of a certain Sir John Macpherson, also hang in this room, which opens out from the library already described. Further on, beyond the oak room, is the comfortable smoking room whose walls have listened to many a good story in their day, if, as the song-book tells us, walls have ears. A curious set of pictures of the different cavalry regiments in the reign of George II. hang around this after- dinner retreat, the originals of which are at Windsor. Many members of England's royal family have come to 128 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Eridge for pleasure and amusement since the days of Queen Bess and Mary Stuart. When the present sovereign was as yet the Princess Victoria she spent some time at Tunbridge Wells with her mother the Duchess of Kent, and often wandered along the grassy roads of Eridge Park, and read beneath a shady oak near the house itself. In Lady Abergavenny's sitting-room, one of the cheeriest apartments of the house, hangs a small engraving of the Duchess of Kent and her daughter given by her Majesty ; and in the same room is a picture of the lovely twin daughters of the present Marquis, Lady Rose and Lady Violet Nevill, painted with a snowy wintry landscape, and Eridge in the distance. Two portraits of the present Lady Abergavenny, of the mother of the present owner of Eridge, and two quaint pictures of the wife of the Honourable G. Nevill, and her niece Lady Henrietta Nevill, are also to be found amongst the larger pictures ; while photographs, flowers, and books, lazily comfortable chairs, and the delightful arrangement of a thoroughly English room, make the place a peculiarly tempting one. The Prince of Wales, Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Louise, and Princess Mary of Teck have all at different times stayed as guests at the ivy-covered castle ; and poor Prince Louis Napoleon loved Eridge, as every one who shares its kindly hospitality always does love it. Each distinguished guest who comes to Eridge plants a pine, or a cedar tree, on the lawn before the castle door, and the one planted by the young French exile, whose tragic death roused ERIDGE CASTLE 129 sympathy in every heart, stands not far from two bearing the names respectively of Disraeli, 1868, and Earl of Beaconsfield, 1877, each time when he was Prime Minister. There are many older homes in England than Eridge, and many houses more strictly historical, but none more hospitable, more delightful, or more dear. V. CHISWICK HOUSE 1 BELONGING TO THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE, K.G. LITERARY, political, artistic, and social reminiscences all come crowding to one's mind at mention of Lord Burlington's famous villa on the banks of the Thames. There Pope's caustic, bitter witticisms were uttered about all things human or divine ; there died two of England's greatest statesmen, Fox and Canning ; there David Garrick brought his brilliant talent and passionate personal vanity ; there emperors and princes, beauties and celebrities have passed one after another through the long gallery, until the list of famous names comes down to the present time, when a few years since his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales gave his celebrated garden parties in the lovely grounds of Chiswick. It was long years ago, when the building was much smaller than it is now, that Lord Hervey's witticism about Chiswick House made society merry at Lord Burlington's expense. In speaking of it he said, "The house is too small to inhabit, and too large 1 The pictures from the collection at Chiswick House are published by special permission of the Duke of Devonshire. CHISWICK HOUSE 131 to hang on one's watch chain, "and the subject seeming particularly to amuse him, he went further, and in imitation of Martial's lines beginning "Quam bene non habitas ' he indited the following : "Possessed of one great hall for state, Without one room to sleep or eat ; How well you build let flattery tell, " And all mankind how ill you dwell." This great hall, or gallery, runs the whole length of the house, but since Lord Hervey's day many other noble apartments have been added to the villa, which was copied from a Palladian building at Vicenza. It is quite true that comfort was sadly sacrificed to beauty in its original construction, the important part of a kitchen, for example, being omitted entirely, but this is explained by the fact that it was intended to be more of a summer house than an actual dwelling. The kitchen and offices are at some distance from the living rooms, and a most curious miniature railway extends from one to the other. Unless time and distance are very nicely calculated, the dishes for dinner are apt to arrive at uncertain intervals. In a work entitled London and its Environs Described, published in 1761, there is a quaint description of Chiswick House as it then was. The account speaks of it as a " villa which for elegance of taste surpasses everything of its kind in England. The ascent to the house is by a noble flight of steps, on one side of which is the statue I 3 2 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES of Palladio, and on the other that of Inigo Jones. The portico is supported by six fluted columns of the Corinthian order, with a pediment very elegant, and the cornices, frieze, and architrave MFLE CHISWICK HOUSE. as rich as possible. This magnificent front strikes all who behold it with an uncommon pleasure and surprise. The octagonal saloon, finishing at top in a dome through which it is enlightened, is also CHISWICK HOUSE 133 very elegant. The rooms are extremely beautiful, and are finely furnished with pictures of the great masters. It were to be wished this house had been built on a larger scale, that the grandeur might have equalled the elegance." This, and much more of the same kind, is probably the "flattery" which seems to have so much exercised the witty Lord Hervey, but even more sober language must give an agreeable account of the charms of Chiswick, so near to the bustling metropolis for it is only five miles from Hyde Park Corner and yet so surrounded by the beauties of nature that in referring to it Thomson in his Seasons uses the following lines : "Sylvan scenes where art alone pretends To dress her mistress, and disclose her charms." A good many charms of art exist inside the house, if those of nature have it all their own way outside, and Horace Walpole, we are told, "loved to wander among the Vandykes and curios of which the rooms are full." Several of these rooms were added in the form of two commodious wings more useful than ornamental, which, while of immense advantage as regards space, entirely destroy the original classic proportions of the building. In one of these wings is the large drawing-room, where' some of the best pictures hang upon walls of painted cream-coloured satin, having a broad band of dark red velvet about five feet from the floor, upon which are arranged miniatures, medals, seals, and curious old faience. Several portraits by Vandyke, a i 3 4 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES landscape by Salvator Rosa, and a rustic subject with figures by Albano, are to be found in this drawing-room, a bright, sunny apartment having two large windows, one looking out upon the broad avenue which is the approach to the house, and where some of the oldest of the famous cedars stand, the other giving a view of the grassy paths, shaded by more branching cedars, and leading towards the river Thames. The ceiling of the drawing-room is painted and richly gilt. In the dome-shaped, circular room in the centre of the central corridor are busts, and statues, and large pictures of Anne of Austria, Louis XIII., Charles I. and family, and others. Before one portrait of the unfortunate King Charles, whether this particular one is uncertain, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the author of the Confessions ', is said to have paused as he was examining the beauties of Chiswick House, and to have murmured half aloud, "II a 1'air du malheur ! " The celebrated French writer lived for some time in the village of Chiswick, and was often at the villa, and in the gardens of Lord Burlington's " Retreat." It was by the marriage of Lady Charlotte Boyle with Lord Hartington that Chiswick House, as well as Burlington House, became the property of the Dukes of Devonshire. It was during the life of the next Duke that Chiswick perhaps knew its most brilliant phase, when the beauty, talents, and charms of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, gathered around her the most distinguished and agreeable men and women of the day ; Fox, whose conversation the Duchess herself describes in the following language : " He is like a brilliant player at billiards, CHISWICK HOUSE the strokes follow one another piff! paff!" and Sheridan, with his talented wife; also Hare, who had the character of being the wittiest man of his age, as well as many others, who were sure to have been at their best when in company with such women as the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Elizabeth Foster, and Lady Melbourne, all of whom were as witty as they were beautiful. The poet Gray, who was himself a welcome guest at Chiswick, wrote thus of Pope " In Chiswick's bowers Pope unloads the boughs within his reach, The purple vine, blue plum, and blushing peach." Much time was, in fact, passed by the small mis-shapen man under " Chiswick's bowers," and beneath the shade of the grand old cedars of Libanus which were transplanted in the reign of James II. from Sutton Court. There is a peculiar charm in these gardens of Chiswick, where lilac and laburnums scent the air, and where long vistas of green are terminated by a classic temple, or an obelisk, or a statue. The antique busts and marbles, some of the latter in a decidedly damaged condition, once belonged to the celebrated Arundel collection made by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. There are also lions and curious beasts sculptured by Scheemakers, and statues dug up in Adrian's garden at Rome. In one part of the grounds there is a remarkable yew-walk, and in another a place called the wilderness, a clever bit of planting and laying out, the result of which is to make a small piece of ground appear very large. 136 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES The great conservatories are a feature of the place, with their camelia-house, and their wealth of flowering azaleas, while in surrounding gardens are plants of every known variety. Then the old-fashioned kitchen-garden, having grass walks and gnarled fruit trees growing in fantastic shapes against weather-worn red brick walls, is the very place for a quiet stroll on a summer afternoon before crossing the lawn to the great plane tree upon which is fastened a steel plate engraved with the date 1853, and the name Maria Nicolaiewna, in honour of the daughter of the Emperor Nicholas. One can then continue one's walk by grassy slopes to the Chis, a mere rivulet expanded in the grounds into a sort of tidal pond, part of which has lately been cut off, while the heronry, which was formerly situated on the island, no longer exists. A passing mention must be made of the monument to " Lill," an Italian greyhound, whose faithfulness in life entitled her to a particularly well-turned Latin inscription after death, while her little canine remains rest peacefully under the shade of an ilex-tree in the historic grounds of Chiswick. It was near the old parish church of St. Nicholas, with its mediaeval tower and monuments, that Pope landed, when, having been rowed across from his own villa at Twickenham, six miles distant, he sought the shady retreats of Chiswick, where he might indite a crushing answer to Lord Hervey's witticisms, or make Lady Wortley Montagu's cheek burn over some unmanly attack in return for what he was pleased to call her ''broken friendship." He first met this beautiful and accomplished, but undoubtedly eccentric woman, when in his twenty-sixth year, before he had CHISWICK HOUSE 137 become embittered by life, and at the time when his vanity made him believe that even physical defects would be overlooked by any woman whom the brilliant brain of Alexander Pope singled out for admiration. It was to Lady Mary that he wrote, during her absence abroad, the words so clearly proving this confidence PORTRAIT OF ALEXANDER POPE. From a Picture at Chiswick House. in his personal powers of fascination : " May the last man who left you be the last whom you would wish to leave." A neatly- turned phrase, certainly, containing multum in parvo. To Lady Mary was also addressed his celebrated Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, which is called by Bowles "the most touching, affecting, T 138 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES poetical, impassioned, and most pernicious of all his works." This biographer says of Pope that he " was through life impatient of contradiction, scarcely brooked a dissenting voice, and having been fostered by early patronage, lived afterwards in the sunshine of flattery." He was the most terrible satirist of his age, and after his well-known quarrel with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when Lord Hervey espoused her cause and became Pope's mortal enemy, the poet gave him the contemptuous name of " Lord Fanny." In a caricature by Hogarth in allusion to some local topic of the day, Pope is represented as whitewashing Chiswick House, while the Duke of Chandos's carriage passing is be- spattered with dirt. Hogarth himself, one of the greatest national painters, is buried in the old churchyard of Chiswick parish church. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann, May 29, 1744, Horace Walpole says " Pope is given over with dropsy, which is mounted into his head : in an evening he is not in his senses : the other day at Chiswick he said to my Lady Burlington, ' Look at our Saviour there! how ill they have crucified Him!" The poet died the day after this letter was written : "in the even- ing," says Spence ; "but they did not know the exact time, for his departure was so easy, that it was imperceptible even to the passers by." Upon one occasion not long before his death, and when sickly and failing, Pope was persuaded by his friend Lord Orrery to go and see David Garrick in his great part of Richard III. Fitz- gerald says that "as the actor came from the wing with his usual, " ' Now is the winter of our discontent,' DAVID GARRICK. From the Portrait in Pastel at Chiswick House. CHISWICK HOUSE 141 he could see a little figure in black seated in a side box, whose eyes seem to shoot through him like lightning. For a moment he was disturbed but anxiety gave place to joy and triumph. The THE GALLERY LOOKING INTO THE CHAPEL. house was presently in a roar of delight, the great poet applauding heartily. This was indeed an honour, for Pope had given up theatres." 1 42 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES In a small room leading out of the long gallery at Chiswick hangs a portrait of Pope, and on the staircase a half-length one in pastel of David Garrick, in a wig and a bright blue coat. Two pictures of his wife hang beside him, one an old lady with white hair, the other young and smiling as Lady Bur- lington painted her when as " La Violette " she was all the rage in London. Horace Walpole called her "the finest and most admired dancer in the world ; " and Fitzgerald says in his Life of Garrick that " Two noble sisters, the Countesses of Burlington and Talbot, were competing for her, having her always at their houses. She married Garrick when he was in the hey-day of favour at Drury Lane Theatre, and part of their honeymoon was spent at Chiswick. An amusing anecdote is told of Garrick having been invited to witness some private theatricals at a great country house. After the performance he w r as anxiously questioned as to the merits of the actors, and, seeing that he must say something, he gave it as his opinion that the gentleman who played the king seemed quite at home on the stage. It turned out that his praise had been bestowed upon a scene-shifter from his own theatre who had been brought down from London to superintend the mechanical arrangements, and had taken the part on an emergency." At the time Garrick was playing Hastings in Jane Shore the excitement about Wilkes and liberty was so intense that when the great actor pronounced some lines derogatory to the majesty of the people with the emphasis which would have been laid upon them by a baron or a courtier of the fifteenth century, he found CHISWICK HOUSE 143 it was safer to quarrel with the Lord Chamberlain than with the unofficial censors who watched the stage in the interests of Wilkes and liberty, and was glad to get off with nothing more severe than a friendly admonition. On this same staircase there is a portrait of the lovely and un- happy young Countess of Euston, a daughter of Lady Burlington. Beneath it is printed the following curious inscription : "Lady Dorothy Boyle Born May the 14, 1724. She was the Comfort and Joy of her Parents, The Delight of all who knew her Angelick Temper and the Admiration of all who saw her Beauty. "She was marry'd October ye loth, 1741, and Deliver'd (by Death) from misery, May the 2nd, 1742. " This picture was drawn seven weeks after her Death (from Memory) by her most affectionate Mother, " DOROTHY BURLINGTON." Several other portraits of Lady Euston, who was very un- happily married, are to be found on this same staircase, as well as in other parts of the house. There is here also a charming picture of Charlotte Boyle, Marchioness of Hartington, taken as a child with her dog. On an upper staircase hangs an engraving of Sir Joshua Reynolds's celebrated portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire and her daughter Lady Georgiana Cavendish, the latter a baby on her mother's knee. The Duchess's hand is held out ready to strike that of the child in play. It was in an upper room of the opposite wing of the house that George Canning, the statesman and orator, breathed his last. In a letter to him from the King, dated July iQth, 1827, his i 4 4 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Majesty remarks : "I sincerely hope that you are rapidly recovering from the odious lumbago " and the answer to this, dated the following day, is : " Mr. Canning is deeply sensible of yr. Majesty's kind concern for his health. He has happily left his bed for the first time to-day, and is ordered to go this afternoon to Chiswick (which the Duke of Devonshire has been kind enough to lend him). After a few days of quiet there, he will, with yr. Majesty's kind permission, pay his respects to yr. Majesty some morning towards the end of next week." Canning's biographer (Augustus Granville Stapleton) tells us that " Mr. Canning's health sufficiently improved to enable him to pay the visit promised to the King in this letter. On the 3ist Mr. Canning went to the Foreign Office for the last time, returning to Chiswick in the afternoon. In eight days he was no more!" On that same day, July 3ist, Stapleton's journal says: " I arrived at Chiswick about six ; he was gone to dress, and came out in the garden about half-past. He appeared very languid, complained to me of weakness, and I thought looked dreadfully ill." The journal goes on through August until Sunday the 5th, when it mentions that " when the physician saw him this evening he was in pain and exclaimed, ' My God ! my God ! ' Doctor Farre observed, ' You do right, sir, to call upon your God. I hope that you pray to Him in secret.' "'I do, I do,' was his answer. 'And you ask,' added the doctor, ' for mercy and salvation, through the merits of your Redeemer ? ' " ' Yes,' he replied, ' I do, through the merits of Jesus Christ ! ' CHISWICK HOUSE I45 " The doctor then asked if he had anything to say about his country ; but it was feared the question might excite him, and the subject was dropped." On August 8th, the diary goes on to say, "He passed away so quietly that the exact moment could not be ascertained, but it was between twelve and ten minutes before four " in the morning. " At the early hour of his death, crowds (which subsequently amounted to between three and four thousand persons) had congregated outside the lodge at Chiswick. Sorrow, deep and universal, fell upon them when the fatal termination became known. On the day of the funeral the whole way from Downing Street to the Abbey was lined with spectators, and the space in front of the large western door was densely crowded with people. The short duration of his illness had prevented men's minds being prepared for the worst. He had just attained the highest object of a subject's ambition, and great results were expected ; but it pleased God to bring his days suddenly to an end. The hopes of millions were buried in his grave. The funeral was a private one ; there w r as no choral service ; the solemn silence was more impressive than an organ's peal." At the back of Chantry's marble statue of George Canning in Westminster Abbey the sculptor has engraved these words "Thus Canning stood." On the pedestal of the statue there is an elaborate inscription. Still another great English statesman died at Chiswick, that Charles James Fox whom Trevelyan says, "was the life and soul of the stoutest and most disinterested struggle for principle that u T4 r, GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES ever has been fought out by voice and pen ; " and he quotes the following sentence from a letter from Fox to Lord Rockingham, at a time when the hopes of the colonists had been, to all appearance, finally shattered on Long Island "Above all, my dear Lord, I hope that it will be a point of honour among us all to support the American pretensions in adversity as much as we did in their prosperity, and that we shall never desert those who have acted unsuccessfully upon Whig principles, while we continue to profess our admiration of those who succeeded in the same principles in the year 1688." Grattan declares that " Fox during the American War, Fox in his best days," was the best speaker that he ever heard, and Grattan, as Trevelyan adds, " over and above his experience in the Irish Parliament, had formed his taste on Chatham, and had lived through the great days of Burke, Pitt and Sheridan, to hear Brougham on the Orders in Council, and Canning on the eman- cipation of the Catholics." Horace Walpole declared Charles Fox to be "the phenomenon of the age" ; and we are also told that " within two years of his maiden speech he had contrived to attract to himself an amount of active dislike equal to that which a few, and only a few, great ministers have carried to the grave or to the scaffold as the accumulation of a lifetime." It was said of Fox that when a matter which had not yet been developed into an article of party faith was before the House, no man could predict anything with regard to him, except that he was quite sure to speak. His notion of true gallantry was to treat women as beings who stood on the same intellectual table-land as CHISWICK HOUSE I47 himself ; to give them the very best of his thought and his know- ledge, as well as of his humour and his eloquence ; to invite, and weigh, their advice in seasons of difficulty ; and, if ever they urged him to steps which his judgment or his conscience disapproved, not to elude them with half-contemptuous banter, but to convince them by plain-spoken and serious remonstrance. Madame du Deffand, the celebrated Frenchwoman of whom Horace Walpole so often speaks, did not admire Mr. Fox, or rather, we are told, " if she felt admiration for him it was so tempered by fear, and the impossibility that she found to under- stand him, that the original feeling well-nigh disappeared." In a letter to Walpole she says : "As for the Fox he is hard, bold, and ready, with all the confidence of his merit. He will not spare the time to look well about him, but sees everything at a glance and takes a bird's-eye view of the situation. I am inclined to think that one person is much the same to him as another. It is not from self-sufficiency, for he strikes me as neither vain nor supercilious, but he does not put his mind to yours, and I am satisfied that he never will form any connections except such as arise from play, and perhaps from politics." Such was the opinion of the clever Frenchwoman in regard to the brilliant young English statesman. The generosity of the elder Fox to his son bordered on recklessness, and about this time a goodly amount of his patrimony was thrown away by the younger man at high play with witty and pretty Frenchwomen. In still another of Madame du Deffand's letters she says : " There was play at my house on Sunday till five in the morning, the Fox lost a hundred and fifty i 4 8 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES louis. I fancy this young man will not get off for his stay here under two or three thousand louis." With all his brilliant talents Fox's life was a bitterly dis- appointed one, and in referring to his saying that he "loved all the poets," Trevelyan adds "and well did they repay him his affec- tion. They consoled him for having missed everything upon which his heart was set, and to the attainment of which the labour of his life was directed ; for the loss of power and of fortune ; for his all but permanent exclusion from the privilege of serving his country and the opportunity of benefiting his friends ; even for the extinction of that for which Burke, speaking from long and intimate knowledge of his disposition, most correctly called ' his darling popularity.' " This unquiet life closed in the peaceful retirement of beautiful Chiswick, and in a small, gloomy room, on the left of the long hall, Fox passed quietly away in the year 1806. An en- graving of him still hangs opposite the bed on which he died. These small rooms are a peculiar feature in the arrangement of Chiswick House. There are sometimes two together (the case in this instance), the one opening directly from the hall being a species of sitting-room for the interior bedroom. Upon both sides of the gallery these small apartments occur at intervals, some being hardly more than an alcove, where a rare picture or valuable work of art is to be found, while others again are tolerably- sized rooms ; one goes by the name of the Italian room, and is hung with rich tapestry. It is here that Pope's portrait is to be found, and the apartment is also the one out of which .Mr. Fox's room opens. CHISWICK HOUSE , 49 But other and more cheerful associations than the end of emin- ent men are connected with Chiswick, which has witnessed many a scene of generous hospitality and social brilliancy. A copy of the Illustrated London News, bearing the date June I5th, 1844, contains a long and minute description of an entertainment given by the Duke of Devonshire in honour of the Czar. We can only quote a part : " The superb Palladian villa of the Duke of Devonshire at Chiswick was on Saturday last the scene of one of the most splendid fetes ever celebrated in this or any other country. It was not only honoured by the august presence of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Russia, but also by the King of Saxony, his Royal Highness Prince Albert, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Duchess of Gloucester, and about seven hundred members of the principal noble families of the kingdom. The grounds of the mansion presented a beautiful appearance, the natural attractions of the spot leaving nothing that art could supply. A perfectly novel feature in the arrange- ments for this fete was the introduction of the living giraffes, which last season formed a portion of the collection at the Surrey Zoological Gardens, but are now on the point of shipment for St. Petersburg, and at the Duke's desire were taken to Chiswick. They were placed on a beautiful grassy slope, divided from the company by an ornamental canal that runs through the grounds, where they formed, with their Egyptian keepers, an extremely picturesque, oriental group. The august visitors and their respective suites arrived in six of Her Majesty's carriages, preceded by outriders in state liveries. The Emperor, the King 150 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES of Saxony, and His Royal Highness Prince Albert in the first carnage, escorted by a captain's guard of the I7th Lancers. " Upon the Royal cavalcade entering the grounds, the Russian Imperial Standard was hoisted on the summit of the mansion ; the Royal Standard of Great Britain floating at the same time over the arcade leading to the Italian Gardens." Long columns go on to tell of the brave company who wandered through the beautiful rooms at Chiswick, examining the chef-cCoeuvres of art, and finally adjourned to the lawn under the great cedar trees, passing along the grassy amphitheatre in front of the temple, and by the bridge, the rosery, and the conservatories, in front of which latter His Majesty planted a tree. Those fortunate enough to have been honoured by an invitation to the Prince and Princess of Wales's garden-parties at Chiswick know how well fitted is the place for an out-of-door entertainment, and no previous host at the villa could possibly have been more kindly gracious than the Prince of Wales, no hostess more winning in her loveliness than the Princess ; while the old cedars listened to much the same language in 1876 as they did in 1844 when the beauties were eager for a smile from the ruler of all the Russias ; or at the end of the last century when the lovely Lady Betty Foster, and the equally lovely Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, were toasted as " twin cherries upon one stem." That beautiful Duchess, who is said to have kissed the butcher in her zeal for a vote, but who writes to her mother that it is " very hard " she should have the credit of this action, which CHISWICK HOUSE 15 1 others, and not herself, had performed. Her picture by Gains- borough hangs in the Duchess's dressing-room at Chiswick, just below a portrait of her mother, Countess Spencer. In this same room is a most artistic picture of Mrs. Sheridan with her two children, taken as Saint Cecilia. Chiswick in its day has been, one might almost say, a prison, for after leaving the Tower in 1616, "Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and his beautiful but wicked countess, were taken there to end their days " in poverty, in loneliness, in mutual scorn." Together they had planned and executed the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury the poet, who had been Lord Somerset's dearest friend ; but this was merely one of the several crimes in which they had been partners in guilt, and the story of Lady Frances Howard, daughter of the Countess of Suffolk, is one to be passed over quickly, there being little profit to be obtained in dwelling on it. At the age of thirteen she was married to Robert, Earl of Essex, but very shortly forgot her marriage vows and exercised her fascinations upon more than one of the courtiers surrounding her. He upon whom she finally fixed her fickle affections was a Scotch page, one Robert Carr, who became a favourite of James I. The historian Green tells us that he was as worthless as he was handsome, and without a single claim to distinction save the fancy which the King had taken to him. Yet he rose at a bound to honours which Elizabeth had denied to Raleigh and Drake. He was enrolled among English nobles, and raised to the peerage as Viscount Rochester, becoming at once sole minister, while the Lords of the Council found them- 1 52 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES selves mere cripples. Later on in his account Green adds : "Through the year 1613 all England was looking on with wonder and disgust at his effort to break the marriage of Lord Essex with his wife Frances Howard." Eventually this marriage was broken by a decree of divorce, and Lady Essex set free to marry the favourite. It was at this point that Sir Thomas Overbury, a young man of singular wit and ability, the friend who so far had backed the intrigue, now, for some reason best known to himself, opposed the marriage, By so doing he naturally incurred the dislike of both Lady Essex and the King. Overbury's influence over Rochester was so great that both James and the Howards determined to be rid of him, and the former offered him an embassy if he would leave England. His refusal to do so being construed into an offence against the State, he was committed to the Tower and there kept a close prisoner. A few days after the divorce was pronounced Overbury died, undoubtedly poisoned by the agents of Lady Essex. The famous " White Witch," Ann Turner, and the magician, Forman, brought their united efforts to aid in the gruesome work of quietly removing the man who knew too much of the lives of those interested in his disappearance, and who had determined to set aside the laws of God and man in order to gratify their own guilty passions. We are told that in spite of his high talents Overbury's pride of genius led him into unwise scorn of men who had been schooled to rise by paths more wearisome than his own. A sense of original force, which often as it was tried had never CHISWICK HOUSE yet failed him, gave to the man's native haughtiness an austerity and emphasis hard for those around him to put up with. The Queen complained of him; the King resented his scornful tone ; CHISWICK HOUSE FROM THE LAKE. the citizens wagered their golden angels as to which was the proudest, Raleigh, Overbury, or Lucifer ? The prize was given to Overbury. But whatever his faults might have been his i54 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES death was a cruel and cowardly one. Lady Essex and her lover decided first upon hiring an assassin, and this woman, so young and of so fair an exterior, deliberately sent for one Sir David Wood, a soldier of fortune, who was known to be an enemy of Sir Thomas. Without preamble of any kind she told him that she wished him to kill the poet, and promised him a thousand pounds if he would do so. " The thing is easily done," urged the Countess. " He sups every night at Sir Charles Wilmot's house ; stop his coach, drag him out, and run him through." Lady Essex pledged her own life in return for Wood's safety, but the man had evidently but scant confidence in her promises of protection, for he declined to undertake the deed. The plan of assassination having failed, and Overbury having in the mean- time been lodged in the Tower, the Countess and the "White Witch " decided upon poison as the means for ending his life. How far Rochester himself was implicated in the murder has never transpired, but that he consented to many of the steps which finally led to it, is certain. At the time of Overbury's imprisonment the lieutenant of the Tower was changed, and a ruffianly gambler, Sir Gervase Helwyss by name, was put in his place, whilst Weston, a servant of the woman Turner, was substituted for the keeper, and placed as the poet's personal attendant. At once the prisoner's health became affected, but we are told that " his strong stomach " caused much delay. Lady Essex sent tarts and jellies which were discovered to be poisoned, but these working too slowly for her purpose, she determined to apply to a fellow called James Franklin, an apothecary living in a CHISWICK HOUSE 155 small shop on Tower Hill. This wretch professed to keep a devil, and was said to have poisoned his wife, therefore a hundred and twenty pounds in gold more than reconciled him to the work in hand, and he gave a phial containing a colourless liquid to the man Weston, whom Mrs. Turner instructed how to mix the prisoner's drink. In the meantime Helwyss had begun to have doubts how far he should allow this slow murder to proceed, therefore he detained the phial and poured the drug upon the ground. Eventually a French adventurer was found who obtained the glister which in the end killed the unfortunate Overbury. History says " that the crime remained unknown ; and not a whisper of it broke the King's exultation over his favourite's success." At the close of 1613 Rochester was created Earl of Somerset, and his marriage with Frances Howard, the divorced Lady Essex, a murderess and adulteress, was celebrated in the King's presence with costly pageants which would have befitted the bridal of a Queen. Carr had heard with triumph of Sir Thomas Overbury's death, and the poet had been put underground before his flesh was cold, so fearful were all concerned in the murder that it might be discovered. But before two years had passed the Earl and Countess of Somerset were in their turn prisoners in the Tower, conducted by the new lieutenant, Sir George More, to the very room in which their victim had breathed his last. Lady Somerset shrieked with terror and refused to enter, declaring that Over- bury's ghost would haunt her dreams, and Sir George was forced to take her back to his own apartments, until the Garden House, 156 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES formerly occupied by Sir Walter Raleigh, could be made ready for her. It seems that the apothecary's lad who had supplied the poison, and who had afterwards been spirited away to Flanders, fell ill there, and confessed what he knew of the murder. Trum- ball, the English Resident in Flanders, heard of this, and hastened home with the report ; Winwood, the new Secretary of State, a Puritan opposed to the Howards, worked warily until he had obtained his proofs, when going to James in person, he laid them carefully before him. Just at this time George Villiers had supplanted Somerset in the royal favour, and the King consented to the inquiry which resulted in finding the Earl and his wife guilty of poisoning. The motive for James's extraordinary clemency in pardoning the miserable couple has never been ascertained, but the prevailing opinion is that it was to prevent the disclosure of some discreditable, if not criminal incidents in the private life of that monarch. The Countess confessed her guilt, but Somerset never did. Hepworth Dixon says that the two "came near together once again, but not as man and wife who love and trust each other. The doors of the Bloody Tower and of the Garden House were left ajar, and they were sometimes overheard in angry talk. If Overbury's ghost could have visited them, either by day or night, the murdered man might have felt avenged by a misery so complete. Their dream of State was gone ; their hope of rest not come." After a pardon had been granted them, they went away "to live in some country place, in a small house which had been left them." This house was at Chiswick, but whether CHISWICK HOUSE I57 near the spot of the present building is not known. The ambitious favourite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and his wicked Countess, are supposed to be buried in Chiswick parish church, although all trace of their tombs has been swept away. The famous cedars at Chiswick were not planted then, but in the summer sunshine a blue-eyed child played, and grew to woman- hood, unconscious that a prison had been her birthplace, and a condemned murderess her mother. In Collins's Peerage of England we read that in 1637 William, Lord Russell, afterwards first Duke of Bedford, married Anne, daughter and sole heir of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, by his too celebrated Countess, Frances Howard, the divorced wife of Essex. " Francis, Earl of Bedford," says Pennant, "was so averse to this alliance that he gave his son leave to choose a wife out of any family but that. Opposition usually stimulates desire ; the young couple's affections were only increased. At length the King interfered, and sending the Duke of Lennox to urge the Earl to consent, the match was brought about. Somerset, now reduced to poverty, acted a generous part, selling his house at Chiswick, plate, jewels, and furniture, to raise a fortune for his daughter of ,12,000, which the Earl of Bedford demanded, saying, that "since her affections w r ere settled, he chose rather to undo himself than make her unhappy." It is said that the Lady Anne was ignorant of her mother's dishonour, but that one day she accidentally found a pamphlet which had been left by mistake in a window-seat, and in it she read the whole account. The horror of it so affected her that she is said to have fallen down in a sort of fit, and was found 158 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES senseless with the book open before her. This estimable lady became the mother of that Lord William Russell . who was beheaded for complication in the Rye House Plot. Although the principal actors in the tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury's murder escaped the punishment they so well merited, Ann Turner, the "White Witch," or the "fair demon," as well as others concerned in it, suffered the extreme penalty of the law, and we are told that fine ladies as well as gentlemen went in their coaches to Tyburn to see the hanging. Mrs. Turner had made herself famous in the fashionable world as the inventress of a peculiar yellow starch, and in allusion to this circumstance, Lord Chief Justice Coke, who had not shown himself favourable to her at the trial, declared that as she had invented the yellow- starched ruffs and cuffs, so he hoped that she would be the last by whom they would be worn, and gave orders that she should be hanged in that attire. The sentence was carried out, and from that day the yellow ruff has never again been worn. But all this happened years before Chiswick came into Lord Burlington's hands, so even if the site of Lord Somerset's house was near that of the present, which is doubtful, we may fairly hope that any pernicious influence from such evil lives as those of the Earl and Countess of Somerset has long since faded from the place. Coming down to a still later day, celebrated names continue to attach themselves to Chiswick. On May 17, 1828, we find in Sir Walter Scott's diary the following entry : " A day of busy idleness. Richardson came and breakfasted with me like a good CHISWICK HOUSE I59 fellow. Then I went to Mr. Chantrey. Thereafter, about twelve o'clock, I went to breakfast the second at Lady Shelley's, where there was a great morning party. A young lady begged a lock of my hair, which was not worth refusing. I stipulated for a kiss, which I was permitted to take. From this I went to the Duke of Wellington, who gave me some hints, or rather details. Afterwards I drove out to Chiswick, where I had never been before. A numerous and gay party were assembled to walk and enjoy the beauties of that Palladian home. The place and highly ornamental gardens belonging to it resemble a picture of Watteau. There is some affectation in the picture, but in the ensemble the original looked very well. The Duke of Devonshire received every one with the best possible manners. The scene was dignified by the presence of an immense elephant, who, under the charge of a groom, wandered up and down, giving an air of Asiatic pageantry to the entertainment. I was never before sensible of the dignity which largeness of size and freedom of movement give to this otherwise very ugly animal. As I was to dine at Holland House I did not partake in the magnificent repast which was offered to us, and took myself off about five o'clock. I contrived to make a demi-toilette at Holland House, rather than drive all the way to London." Charles Greville, in his journal of the reign of Queen Victoria, makes the following entries: "June 20, 1841. At Chiswick yesterday morning, a party for the Queen and Prince Albert, who wished to see the place. The Duke of Devonshire, who had resolved to give no entertainment on account of Lady 160 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Burlington's death last year, only invited his own relations, and Normanby and John Russell, the two Secretaries of State, were the only additional guests. It rained half the time, and it was very formal." In June of 1844, he again writes: "On Saturday a breakfast at Chiswick, a beautiful fete, and perfectly successful. Everything that was distinguished in London was collected to see and be seen by the Emperor of Russia. All the statesmen, fine ladies, poets, artists, beauties were collected in the midst of a dis- play of luxury and magnificence, set off by the most delicious weather," &c., &c. This is the same fete about which the Illustrated London News grew so eloquent forty-four years ago, and from whose columns we have already quoted. Garibaldi was at Chiswick as a guest of the Duchess of Sutherland in April, 1864, when he planted a tree on the left side of the broad walk near the cedars ; and Mr. Gladstone, when he went to Chiswick for "rest," is said to have been up, and at work at his Budget, by four o'clock every morning ! The witty Bishop of Oxford, Wilberforce, who met with so sad a death, read prayers in the Dome-room where Jean Jacques had moralized on the fate of Kings ; and Cardinal Manning, looking like a portrait of a Prince of the Roman Church by Bellini or Mantegna, with his purple robes setting off " the ascetic-featured, parchment-hued face, and massive, intellectual brow, and with the highbred manner and gracious deportment befitting a great Church dignitary," baptized the little child of the Marquis of Bute (who is the temporary occupant of Chiswick) CHISWICK HOUSE 161 in the chapel opening out from the long gallery in the month of April, 1886. The great white gates at Chiswick, surmounted by a ducal coronet and the arms of the house of Cavendish, have opened to a long list of names which have echoed far in the world's history, some of them thrilling men to patriotism and national glory ; others soothing to rest or exciting to keenest pleasure by the magic of their pens ; more still adorning life by every social grace and brilliant talent. Many of those who once wandered over the smooth lawns where the cedars cast long- stretching shadows, are now themselves but shadowy memories ; but many also yet people the busy world of to-day, and amidst the rush and whirl of society more than one doubtless looks back with restful pleasure upon the time spent in the cool green freshness and delightful repose of classic, historic, and enjoyable Chiswick. VI. BERKELEY CASTLE BELONGING TO LORD FITZHARDINGE "Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death thro' Berkeley's roof that ring, Shrieks of an agonizing King ! " THE year was 1327, the night a wild and tempestuous one, when through howling winds and rattling rain these shrieks of despair penetrated the thick walls of Berkeley, reaching to the village beyond the castle itself. There frightened men and pious women listened in dismay, praying the while for the parting soul of Edward II. anointed King of England. Finally the cries ceased, the hellish deed was done, the murderers could rest. There was nothing to fear from that still form stretched on the narrow bed in the prison room now become the chamber of death ; and beneath clearing skies, with fitful moonlight touching donjon keep and battlemented walls, Berkeley stood grand, and dark, and silent. 1 The following chapter has been read and revised by Lord Fitzhardinge, by whose permission the historical portraits are published. BERKELEY CASTLE 163 Forty-three years before this fatal night King Edward I., in answer to the petition of his Welsh subjects that he would appoint a prince to rule over them who was native born, whose character was free from reproach, and who could speak the Welsh language, BERKELEY CASTI.E. snatched his newly-born son from his cradle and presented him to them as their ruler. He was, the King assured them, a Welshman by birth, his character was unimpeachable, and he could speak neither English nor French, but, if they pleased, the first word he i6 4 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES did speak should be Welsh. The chieftains accepted their prince, and kissed his baby hand in token of submission, and it was this first Prince of Wales who was murdered at Berkeley. The weakness of Edward II. as King, combined with his favouritism first for Piers Gaveston, and later for the Spencers, father and son, alienated the affections of the whole nation ; while PLAN OF BERKELEY CASTLE. A. The Keep. B. Thorpe's Tower, c. Ancient Chapel, now the Evidence Room (Well underneath). D. Dungeon Chamber. EEE. Bed Chambers. FF. State Rooms. G. Nowhere. HUH. Drawing Rooms. I. The Chapel. J. Ante-room. K. The Great Hall. L. Lobby. M. Still-room. N. Kitchen. oooo. Scullery and Larders, Bed-rooms over. P. Bath room. Q. Billiard-room. R. King Edward's Room. s. Well. in his domestic relations he was not more happy, as he lost en- tirely the love of his wife. This Queen, Isabelle, sister of the King of France, lived openly with her favourite, Roger Mortimer, and collected around her all the English malcontents, with a few foreign auxiliaries, determining to dethrone her husband. London opened its gates to the disloyal Queen, and Thomas, Lord BERKELEY CASTLE 165 Berkeley, joined her standard. To this lord she restored the castle of Berkeley which the King had granted to the younger Spencer. Edward escaped to Wales, but was eventually captured by the Queen's party, imprisoned, and forced to resign his crown. Towards the spring of 1326-7 he was given into the custody of Lord Berkeley, Sir John Maltravers, and Sir Thomas Gourney, and piteous are the accounts of the cruel night journeys over the marsh ground lying by the River Severn, which he was forced to take lest the people might see and recognize him. By order of Roger Mortimer, and contrary to the orders of Parliament, the wretched monarch was removed from Kenilworth and the custody of the Earl of Lancaster to Berkeley Castle, and God help the wretch, be he prince or peasant, left to the mercy of his enemies within those walls ! Lord Berkeley received his royal prisoner with courtesy, and it is asserted by some that the King was first lodged in the com- fortable apartment called to-day the Prince of Wales's room, in consequence of its being the one occupied by his Royal Highness when he is a visitor at Berkeley. The walls of this room are hung with tapestry, apparently the oldest in the castle, and on the black and gold four-post bedstead are carved the letters " E.S.B." and the date " 1666." Only one picture hangs here, a portrait of Queen Mary, consort of William III. Smaller rooms used as bath-room, dressing-room, &c., open out from the principal apart- ment, and a few years since, when the flooring outside needed repairs, a dungeon was discovered, which has been again covered 1 66 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES over. But if the murdered King slept in this apartment it was not for long. Lord Berkeley, being inclined to treat him too well, was commanded to deliver up the government of his castle to his two colleagues, Maltravers and Gourney, which he did with " heavy cheere," perceiving that violence was intended towards the person of the King, after which he reluctantly departed to one of his other dwellings. Then began the horrible tortures of the helpless old man who had lost his crown, and was destined to lose his life. His brutal gaolers first shut him up in the dungeon room, a half-circular, totally dark room in the centre of the castle, built over an under- ground prison twenty-eight feet deep ; and into this latter place they threw a quantity of dead carcasses, hoping to poison him by the stench. This treatment not having the desired effect, they removed him to the small inner room on the wall, originally a guard-room, and there on St. Matthew's day, September 2ist, 1327, he was finally murdered in the most barbarous manner. Feather beds having failed to smother him, even as foul odours had been powerless to poison, a long slender iron instrument was heated red-hot and run through his body, while boiling lead was poured into it. This iron instrument is still preserved at Berkeley. The unfortunate King is said to have "ended his life with a lamentable loud cry heard by many both of the towne and the castle." Certain inhabitants of Bristol and Gloucester were sent for to view the body, but finding no marks of violence upon it, testified that Edward II. died a natural death. "The pious and loyal monks of St. Peter, in Gloucester, voluntarily undertook the BERKELEY CASTLE 167 charge of the funeral, which the abbots of Malmesbury and Kingswood in Wiltshire, and of St. Augustine in Bristol, had declined doing for fear of offending the reigning authorities ; and John Tokey, Abbot of the Church of St. Peter, himself brought the dead body of the murdered King from the castle of Berkeley to the church of the monastery, where it was received and buried with every honourable rite." It is asserted that on account of this Christian burial, and owing to the fact that Thomas Lord Berkeley refrained from personal cruelty to his unhappy prisoner, the ghost of the murdered monarch has never haunted Berkeley Castle. The small room where Edward uttered that last "lamentable cry " remains unchanged ; the curtained bed of its royal occupant and the narrow couch of his attendant are worm-eaten with age ; while the once elaborately embroidered hangings of Arras tapestry covering the walls and furniture are faded and discoloured : but all is peaceful. No ghostly form flits back and forward upon the narrow covered walk, where a sentry, deaf to the sighs of the lonely prisoner, paced in the starlight five hundred and sixty-three years ago ; and just opposite the door of the tiny cell which inclosed so much human misery, a gaudy scented wall-flower to-day wooes the sunshine so rigorously excluded from the eyes of the captive King in days gone by. It is with pleasure we learn that in the fourth year of Edward III., Roger Mortimer, then " Earle of Marche," was condemned by Parliament for treason and executed. Thomas Lord Berkeley was by this same Parliament called to answer for the death of Edward, who had been committed to his charge as Lord of 1 68 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Berkeley. During a space of seven years judgment upon his conduct was postponed from Parliament to Parliament, until finally he was pronounced guiltless of all save " some fault of negligence." It was to this lord that Queen Isabelle restored Berkeley Castle after the King had granted it to the younger Spencer, and at the time she did so her Majesty paid a personal visit to the place. In referring to this visit a chronicler of the time mentions that Lord Thomas seems to have been of a wary disposition, for although finding himself to stand well with the Queen and Roger Mortimer, her minion, and his own father-in-law, he scarcely trusted to their friendliness, and whilst entertaining them well and loyally at Berkeley, he placed the castle under the custody of old family servants whom he knew could be trusted ; and although supplying the place with all that was necessary for the entertain- ment of such guests, he at the same time laid in a sufficient store to withstand a siege. The account quaintly adds that " what he found in the castle of Berkeley of the treasure or goods of Hugh Spencer, the younger, Earl of Gloucester, who held the same since his father's commitment, hee had more discretion than to committ to any writinge that might tell me three hundred yeares after of what value or condition they were." The castle of Berkeley was built out of the ruins of a nunnery destroyed in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and a terrible tale is told of a certain Earl Godwyn, a " notable and subtle man," who determined at any cost to obtain the fair lands for himself. In order to do this, he sent his handsome nephew to the convent, BERKELEY CASTLE 169 where he was to feign illness, but was in reality to reward the care and hospitality of the nuns by leading them from the straight and narrow path of virtue to the broad one of destruction. Having accomplished this unholy result, his uncle, the earl, petitioned the King for the convent lands, on the ground that the nuns were unfit to possess them. Berkeley became his, and he settled it upon his wife Gueda, but she refused to eat anything coming from a manor so dishonourably obtained, and another house had to be bought for her. Doomsday Book alludes to this account. The keep was the part of the building first erected in the time of Robert Fitzhardinge, mentioned in Doomsday Book as " sonne to the King of Denmarke, the first ancestor or ' stock-father ' of this noble family of the Berkeleys." To him and his heirs for ever Henry II., son of the Empress Maude, gave the barony of Berkeley, and he at once proceeded to build the ancient keep. In shape it is a circle, of which the continuous form is broken by semi-circular towers. The entrance is the usual sidelong flight of steps, over which is the guard-room already described as the place where Edward II. was murdered. From the passage or landing- place above the stairs, you turn abruptly to the west and enter the grand doorway, a fine Norman arch ; proceeding to the left, or south, you arrive at the Dungeon Tower. It does not appear to have contained more than one habitable furnished room, beneath which is the vault, or prison. The dungeon chamber is shaped like the letter D, that is, it follows the curves of the towers, having neither window nor chimney. Even the z i yo GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES outer wall is flanked by the sidelong stairs, and is thus unassail- able from without. In the floor of this gloomy chamber is a trap door, opening to the dungeon below already mentioned, which goes down to the very foundation of the castle. A little further south is another tower, called the Ladies' Hold, where in time of assault the women of the family retired for safety. This tower consists of chamber upon chamber, the upper one of all opening on the leads above the gateway, from which there is a magnificent prospect over the adjacent country. These leads formed the promenade of the ladies, and occasionally of the state prisoners. Going around the inside of the keep, west- ward, one comes to Thorpe's Tower, so called from a family of that name who held their estate by the tenure of guarding it. This is of later date than the keep itself, being counted of the year 1342, and from this tower floats the flag bearing the family arms. The fourth, or Northern Tower, was an ancient chapel, now used as the evidence room. Berkeley Castle was one of the places of rendezvous for the barons in rebellion against King John, therefore that King seized it, made a prison of it, and devoted the lands to the support of the garrison at Bristol. He was a guest at Berkeley during four days in 1216, and in 1255 King Henry III. was entertained by Maurice, the second Lord Berkeley, who greatly beautified the grounds of the castle with walks and gardens. A great breach in the outer wall of the keep was made by the order of Cromwell when the castle was given back to George Lord Berkeley after the civil war. During this war both castle BERKELEY CASTLE 171 and town were at first occupied by the Parliament, but afterwards continued in the royal possession until the capture in 1645. I n one of the publications of the day, the Perfect Diurnal, occurs the following : " Berkeley Castle is besieged by Colonel Morgan, Governor of Gloucester, and Sir Thomas Fairfax has sent a ENTRANCE GATE, BERKELEY CASTLE. regiment to assist him, and they doubt to carry it suddenly." Different entries follow as the siege goes on, until in a letter we read : " This day, September 26, being Friday, Berkeley is surrendered, the soldiers to march out without arms." After passing through the outer courtyard at Berkeley, where 1 72 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES to-day hangs a large and curious Chinese bell taken from a Buddhist temple at Tszekee, near Ningpo, you pass under a second arched gateway cut in the lofty walls of the castle. On the inner side of this gateway grooves for the portcullis are still visible, as in several of the rooms primitive bolts are still to be found in a recess in the wall. These bolts are massive bars of wood having an iron ring at one end which fastens into a corresponding hook, and when drawn across the door prove a formidable opposition to the opening of it. Facing this gate- way inside the inner court is the Great Hall with its steep roof and four deep mullioned windows of stained glass. This is acknowledged to be one of the finest baronial halls in England, The roof is of the time of Edward III., arched almost in a half- circle, with ribs of wood supporting it, the whole best described by the remark of a gallant naval officer who, w 7 hen a guest at Berkeley, declared it to be like a ship turned bottom upwards. At the upper end of the room is the raised dais formerly reserved for the lord of the manor, and his more favoured guests, and over the fireplace hang two tattered banners carried at Culloden by the regiment under command of the twenty-second Baron of Berkeley. The skin of a famous bull called the " Duke of Connaught," which belonged to the present Lord Fitzhardinge, is spread upon the floor of this raised dais. The length of this hall, now used as the dining-room of the family, is sixty-two feet, its width thirty-two feet, and its height thirty-two and a half feet. The four large stained glass windows on the right contain the armorial bearings of the House of Berkeley from the year 1115 to 1785, and those BERKELEY CASTLE 173 opposite cut in the thickness of the wall look out over the rich meadows surrounding the castle, and on to the terraced walks beneath. On the walls of this dining-room hang several family portraits, also a number of stags' heads shot by Lord Fitzhardinge in Scotland. The chandelier over the dinner table is made of the antlers of stags. From the upper end of the great hall a broad staircase of old oak leads to the chapel and the drawing-rooms. On the wall by the staircase among other portraits is one of Sir Francis Drake, and some curious but wofully uncomfortable furniture, brought by that enterprising explorer from distant lands and presented to Queen Elizabeth, stands on the landing. For practical use it could have suited the Virgin Queen only in her most austere and virtuous moods. A fine portrait of Frederick Augustus, fifth Earl of Berkeley, by P. Battoni ; of the Countess of Tyrconnel, and of Charles II., both by Sir Peter Lely ; and the Earl and Countess of Berkeley, by Hoppner, also hang here. The chapel of the castle is interesting but not beautiful. The roof is the old original one, and some ancient tiles are let in among more modern ones around the floor of the chancel. An ivory inlaid chair stands near the chancel, given by Queen Anne to her governess, a certain Viscountess Fitzhardinge. The family pew, or, more correctly speaking, the wide gallery built at the end of the chapel, half way up between floor and roof, the entrance to which is through the drawing-room, is of more recent date than the rest of the chapel. The carving of one of 174 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES the columns supporting the wall is that of a nun's head, on which is squatted an enormous toad. A similar decoration is found upon a column in Berkeley Church, and refers to the legend of a toad "of an incredible bignes," which in the time of King Henry VII. was drawn out of the dungeon in the keep. The chronicler says that "In the deepe dry dust" in the bottom of this dungeon it had doubtless lived divers hundreds of years. The " portraiture " of this overgrown beast Smyth says he saw 'drawne in colours upon the doore of the great hall, since by pargettors washed out, or out-worn by time." The word pargettor occurs several times upon the gravestones in Berkeley churchyard, and was the ancient term for plasterer. On either side of this outer door of the great hall stand two ribs of a whale captured in the River Severn in 1620. The chapel was endowed with special privileges by a Bull obtained from Pope Urban II., by the ninth Lord of Berkeley, which Bull "for greater infallibility" is also under the seals of eleven cardinals, there being at that time three rival Popes in the Church. Some old inscriptions in black letter are still indistinctly visible on the wall under the arched passage, or cloister, near the windows, and also on the timbers of the roof.. These are extracts from the Book of Revelation translated by the venerable John Trevisa, Vicar of Berkeley between the years 1350 and 1412, and chaplain to the Lord of Berkeley of that period. When staying at Berkeley one must be careful of the innumer- able steps leading from room to room. No two apartments in HENRY VIII. From the Picture by HOLBEIN at Berkeley Castle. BERKELEY CASTLE 177 the castle are on a level one with the other. It may be only a few inches which marks the inequality of the floors, or it may be several well defined steps, but the unwary are safe to come to grief sooner or later. The newest part of the house was built in Henry VIII.'s time, a fine apartment used by him as a dining-room, but now called the great drawing-room. Original panel portraits are on either side of the large fireplace, Queen Mary I. and Elizabeth, while the head of Henry VIII. himself, by Holbein, stands on an easel over the portrait of his falconer, Robert Cheseman, which latter picture was only discovered a few years ago. Several full-length portraits are in this room, some of unknown personages, and among them a fine one of George, eighteenth Lord Berkeley, by Janssens. Over the fireplace hangs a most curious picture painted for Charles II. by Danckert, showing Whitehall as it was during the reign of that monarch. The ceiling of the room is a dark orange colour, slightly arched, with cross beams of varnished oak in squares, and on one side of the room is a deep recess window with low wide couch, and queer old engravings on the wall, and still queerer jars and vases of pottery and metal filled with flowers, but not in the ordinary sense of the word. Flowers at Berkeley mean a luxuriance of fragrance, of beauty, and of colour rarely met with, and in arrangement never excelled. They are a passion with Lady Fitzhardinge, whose singularly good taste pervades every arrangement of the rooms of the castle, and taste of a high order is needed to combine without incongruity the comforts and prettiness of the present day, with the ancient stateliness of a A A i 7 8 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES grand old home such as Berkeley is. Very few could have accomplished the task successfully. Near the recess window is a case full of valuable miniatures, snuff-boxes and curiosities, among them a lovely head of Louise de la Valliere, and an original Vernis Martin. On a table lies a dagger, the handle of blood-stone, which was found at the bottom of the dungeon. Royal visitors have always been frequent at Berkeley, and upon one occasion when Henry VII. came there for a ten days' stay, Lady Anne Berkeley is said to have taken down the hall at Wotton House and made the roof of the great kitchen in the castle. When in 1572 Queen Elizabeth made a lengthened visit there with Lady Betty Germaine and the all-fascinating Leicester, she made herself almost too much at home, for on the return of Lord Berkeley, who was absent at the time, and unaware of the honour done his house, he found that "a stately herd of red deere " in the park adjoining called The Worthy, had visibly de- creased in numbers. He promptly removed them to a more distant inclosure, exclaiming " No more bucks for Queen Bess ! " An indiscreet remark which in course of time reached the ears of the Queen. Later a friendly intimation is said to have been sent the irascible nobleman, to the effect that her majesty had heard that he was not over pleased at the remarkably good sport she had enjoyed in his park, but that it would be well for him " to carry a wary watch over his words and actions, lest that Earle (meaning Leicester) who had induced her to visit the castle, and had purposely caused the slaughter of the deer, might perhaps QUEEN MARY. From the Piclttre at Berkeley Castle. BERKELEY CASTLE ,81 entertain further designs against his head and his castle, to which latter he had taken no small liking." In the tapestry drawing-room, leading out of Henry VIII.'s dining-room, is a side case in one of the windows containing some curious old relics. One of the most interesting is a tiny jewelled book not two inches square, of gold and black enamel, with red and green inserted, and on one side a head in cameo. This Elizabeth used to wear at her girdle, and in it she had written : "the prayer of Kinge Edward VI. which he made the VI. of July, 1553, and the VII. yere of his range, in hours before his dethe." The prayer itself, and the account of it, are in two distinctly different handwritings. It is however known that the Queen used not only two, but four different ones, for reasons best known to herself. In this same rare collection of curiosities is a miniature ship made of gold and seed-pearls, having two rose diamonds as port-holes. In it are two figures supposed to be Sir Francis Drake and " Eame," although the latter might represent anything else. This ornament the explorer gave to his sovereign, and she is said to have worn it also at her girdle. The tapestry in this room represents Earth, Air, and Water ; the fourth subject, Fire, is at Sion House. The carved oaken mantelshelf reaches nearly to the ceiling, and two gold maces are suspended near it, one of the time of Charles II., the other of George I. When a law of Parliament was passed that only boroughs containing a certain number of inhabitants were to have mayors, these maces were returned to the Berkeley family. A third and smaller one also of 182 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES gold, and having a seal at one end, is of the fourteenth century, and was found in the evidence chamber. The table in the centre of the room is made of wood from the Royal George sunk off Spithead in 1782. Upon an easel stands a case of valuable miniatures, among them portraits of Queen Elizabeth, her cousin Lady Betty Hunsden, Charles I., Cromwell, Cardinal Mazarin, and others of persons unknown. Several family portraits are here, one being of the present Lord Fitzhardinge in the uniform of the Yeomanry, presented by the county ; and flowers everywhere, in a profusion almost bewildering. More steps, and one enters the music-room, so-called from the fact that an organ stands at one end. The most curious thing here is a clock of lapis-lazuli with carnelian centre, and raised fruits and flowers of Florentine mosaic. More curious than the clock however is the history of she who gave it, the beautiful Lady Craven, who became the Margravine of Anspach. She was the youngest daughter of Augustus, fourth Earl of Berkeley, born December, 1750. Her sister married the Earl of Granard, and in Lord Fitzhardinge's " den " at Berkeley there is a lovely picture of Lady Granard standing with Lord Craven and Lord Berkeley behind her, while Lady Craven, a handkerchief tied over her head, and three little children peeping out from her dress, comes disguised as a gipsy to tell her sister's fortune. In her memoirs she coolly writes : " It is a matter of regret to me, that there is no picture of me which has done me justice, nor is even like me." She also speaks frequently of her life at the castle, and her fancy EARL OF BERKELEY, HON. CAPT. BERKELEY, R.N., COUNTESS OF GRANARD, LADY CRAVEN, LORD CRAVEN, HON. BERKELEY CRAVtN, HON. KEIM'EL CRAVEN. From a Picture by OZIAS HUMPHREY, 1780, at Berkeley Castle. BERKELEY CASTLE 185 for going to the different cheese farms during the summers spent there. So cheese-making must have been carried on at Berkeley then as successfully as it is now. The lady's life with her lord was not a happy one, and she took her youngest son and for many years travelled on the Continent, where she met with various and varied adventures. From Paris she writes a touching account of the unfortunate Queen Marie Antoinette, telling an incident in her life not generally known. " Out of her private purse she had given five hundred louis to the poor, and for the moment the people seemed to recognize and do justice to her humanity. They raised a pyramid of snow to her honour at the extremity of the Rue Coq St. Honore, with these verses inscribed on it : " ' Reine, dont la bonte surpasse les appas, Pres du Roi bienfaisant occupe ici ta place ; Si ce monument frele est de neige et de glace, Nos cceurs pour toi ne le sont pas.'" Bitter the irony of the sentiment melting in snow, even as all things became bitter when applied to this most unhappy of queens. Many of Lady Craven's remarks are pithy and shrewd, as for instance when speaking of the King of Poland, to whom she was presented at Warsaw, she regrets the fact of his being a sovereign, "for it was impossible that the many disagreeable persons and circumstances that surround royalty should not deprive it of the society of those who are valuable." Whether she would have elected to provide the King with her B B ,86 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES own society, as later she provided the Margrave of Anspach, she does not say. Certainly however in this latter case she overcame all difficulties, and seems to have been the friend of the long- suffering Margravine at the same time that she stood in a very equivocal position to the Margrave, whom she afterwards married, when she had become a widow and he a widower. Her brother, Lord Berkeley, strongly objected to her second marriage as he had before objected to her irregular mode of life, but in neither case had his opinion much weight. Lady Craven declared that Dr. Jenner had at one time saved her life, and this was the second occasion upon which that eminent physician became intimately connected with the private annals of the Berkeley family. Dr. Jenner was born at Berkeley during the period his father was vicar of Berkeley Church, and to this day the summer-house is pointed out where the discoverer of vaccination kept the historic cow from which was obtained the first vaccine virus ever used. Jenner's life is only another commentary upon the old saying that a prophet is of small account in his own country. Not only was England among the last to be convinced of the incalculable value of his discovery, but while foreign countries were sending him proofs and testimonials of the reverent esteem in which they held him, and the great gift he had bestowed upon the world, his countrymen disputed in Parliament the amount to be granted to him in recognition of his successful discovery. In Vienna vacci- nation was welcomed as the God-send it has since been proved to be, for small-pox had been the curse of the country and of the House of Hapsburg. BERKELEY CASTLE 187 All Europe and the United States adopted vaccination ; President Jefferson and his sons-in-law setting the example in 1 80 1 of vaccinating in their own families. The great Napoleon was so sensible of Jenner's claims, and of the benefit he had conferred upon mankind, that upon one occasion when he was about to reject a petition for the liberation of a British subject, Josephine merely mentioned the name of Jenner, when the Emperor paused and exclaimed, "Jenner! Ah, we can refuse nothing to that man." But all advanced strides in science are bound to meet with bitter opposition, which in the case of vaccination took sometimes the most ludicrous forms. One writer tells us that "opposing doctors detected resemblances to ox-faces produced in children, as they alleged, by vaccination. A lady complained that since her daughter was vaccinated she coughed like a cow, and had grown hairy all over her body ; and in one country district vaccination had to be discontinued, because it was asserted that those who had been inoculated in that manner bellowed like bulls." It is easy to imagine how such petty and irritating opposition weighed upon the noble spirit of Jenner. The Countess of Berkeley very strongly advocated vaccination, and to the extent of her power promoted Jenner's success ; and to Berkeley, his early home, the man's heart turned longingly in those vexed days when his spirit was harassed with the wrangling over a second Parliamentary grant. To a friend he writes : " Cheltenham is much improved since you saw it. It is too gay for me. I still like my rustic haunt, old Berkeley, best, where we are all going in about a i88 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES fortnight.'' It was at his " old Berkeley" that he died and was buried. Dr. Jenner was the witness at a private marriage in the KEEP AND DUNGEON TOWER, BERKELEY CASTLE. Berkeley family, which caused dire confusion in its genealogical records. His bust stands on a little landing just below the gallery pew of the chapel at Berkeley. BERKELEY CASTLE 189 Only one of the bedrooms at Berkeley Castle is said to be haunted. It is the blue room, where the walls are hung with tapestry, and where the beautiful panel portrait of the Queen of Bohemia hangs over the fireplace. In a corner of this picture a shadowy hand holds out a crown from the clouds above, under which is written "Then this." It was in the time of the ambitious William Lord Berkeley, who in return for a marquisate gave up the grand old castle to King Henry VII., that on Nibely Green, a spot near the castle itself, Viscount Lisle came to his death after a lengthy feud with the Lord of Berkeley. But before Black Will the forester fired the fatal shot which is said to have killed him, Lord Lisle swore a bitter oath to Lord Berkeley that he would for ever haunt his home, and the tradition is that he appears to any one inhabiting the blue room in the uncom- fortable guise of a gory corpse carrying his detached head under his arm. This Marquis of Berkeley, who could willingly part with his beautiful castle for an empty title, was the happy possessor of three wives, of whom it is said " The first hee loved not, nor shee him ; the second hee loved entirely both living and dead ; the third hee loved ; and shee overruled him for her own ends, to the advancement of herselfe and her kindred." The great state bedroom, now Lady Fitzhardinge's room, was the one occupied by Queen Elizabeth ; the little state-room next to it, by King James. In both these the bed stands in a raised recess, and fine tapestries cover the walls. Another bedroom goes by the name of Darius' tent, while one is called Sir Francis Drake's room, and still another the dungeon chamber. Not one 1 90 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES is without interest, but it would take more space than we have at our command to describe all. The great kitchen ; the beer cellar, with its huge vats marked by different dates ; the stables where are many horses born and bred on the estate ; the well-kept kennels, for Lord Fitzhardinge is M. F. H., and as keen a sports- man as any of his ancestors, albeit they were renowned for their love of sport ; the fruit and flower gardens, and terrace walk surrounding the castle, where the guns on the battlemented walls are in odd contrast to the peacefully blooming blossoms around them ; every part of Berkeley would well repay a far more careful examination than we have time to give. Each nook and corner is filled with historical reminiscences, from the entrance gate to the outer court, where was formerly the drawbridge, to the walk upon the leads, having odd little towers at intervals intended for the sentries on guard to look out across the surrounding country. On a clear day the view from these leads is magnificent, stretching across the broad vale of Berkeley, the meadows green with a greenness unsurpassed in England, from a peculiar rich- ness of the soil which gives to the grass a wondrous depth and luxuriance of colour. The Cotswold Hills rise abruptly in broken lines, and beyond, the broad Severn gleams like a band of light in the distance ; while further still is the dark Forest of Dean, gloomy and sombre. The town of Gloucester is sometimes visible to very keen-sighted eyes. A most peculiar effect is produced by the fact that the tower of Berkeley Church is quite separate from the building itself, standing alone some fifty yards distant. Alice in Wonderland BERKELEY CASTLE i 9I graphically remarks that she has often seen a cat without a grin, but never before a grin without a cat ; and if applied in sufficient reverence, the sentiment applies fairly .well to this churchless tower. The reason given for the phenomenon is that archers from the tower, had it been in its natural position on the church, could easily have fired into the castle. The present church is not the first known to have existed on this spot, and the south door and font are probably the only remains of the one built prior to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The various styles of archi- tecture indicate the dates of this building. The clustered pillars and foliated capitals of the arcades, with the central part of the west front, are evidently of the period of Edward I., while the difference in the window tracery in the north and south aisles shows that they again are of different and later periods. The beautiful chapel of the Berkeley family was erected between the years 1417 and 1463, and contains some fine monuments. The west door of the church still shows marks of hostile bullets, and also the holes pierced for musketry by those besieged within its walls when stormed and taken by the Parliamentarians. A massive wooden bar, such as closed some of the doors in the castle, is also found across the door of the church. Among the old tombstones in the churchyard, with their quaint inscriptions, is one bearing the modern date 1849, to the memory of Arthur Moffatt, of Yorkshire, and the words of the American poet, Longfellow, are written beneath "Look not mournfully into the past." 192 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Two epitaphs are worthy of notice, one in honour of "THOMAS PEIRCE, " Five times Mayor of this Towne, Died Feb. 25, 1665, aged 77." "Here lyeth Thomas Peirce whom no man taught, Yet he in Iron Brasse and Silver wrought ; He Jacks and Clocks and Watches (with art) made, And mended too, when others work did fade. Of Berkeley five times Maior this artist was, And yet this Maior this artist was but grasse ! When his own watch was downe, on the last day, He that made watches had not made a key To winde it up; but uselesse it must lie Until he rise again, no more to die." The other written by Dean Swift, who at the time was chaplain to Charles, Earl of Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices of Ire- land " Here lies the Earl of Suffolk's Fool, Men called him Dicky Pearce ; His folly served to make Folks laugh, When wit and mirth were scarce. Poor Dick, alas ! is dead and gone, What signifies to cry? Dickeys enough are still behind, To laugh at bye and bye. "Buried June i8th, 1728, aged 63." This particular fool is said to have been lent by his master to Lord Berkeley, and to have died while at the castle. The custom of having Domestic Fools attached to noble families w r as a curious BERKELEY CASTLE 193 one, and so many as ten different classes of them are mentioned by an old writer. He says they were generally " silly by nature, yet cunning and sarcastical, or any servant of a shrewd and witty disposition who treated his master with great familiarity in order to produce stage effect." Under Number V. of the list he quaintly adds: ''The Female Fool, generally an idiot." Number VIII. was " the Fool in the Ancient Mysteries and Moralities. This was Vice, whose office it was to tease the Devil ; " and so on through a number of odd definitions. " The Domestic Fool (solitary instances excepted) went out of fashion in the seventeenth century, through national disturbances and puritanical habits. Whipping was their punishment when they behaved ill." Just back of the churchyard at Berkeley, on the way to the gardens, and separated from consecrated ground by a narrow fence, are a row of little graves with modest tombstones, under the shade of branching trees. Trusted, true-hearted dogs, who have lived their faithful lives, rest here almost within " God's Acre," given careful burial after death by the master and mistress generously good to them in life ; and we often wondered whether the dogs of all breeds and sizes who invariably accompany the Lord of Berkeley and his guests in their walks to the different points of view, or to see the great oak mentioned in Doomsday Book, can know what tender care will be taken of their bodies after their trusty, little loving hearts have ceased to beat. Luther himself went only one step further, in that he promised his favour- ite dog that in the general resurrection it should have a golden tail. c c i 9 4 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES With the legend of the witch of Berkeley, supposed to have lived in the reign of Edward the Confessor, our account of one of England's grandest homes must close, willingly as we would linger longer within its haunted walls, steeped and saturated as they are with tales that are told and lives long since lived. Old William of Malmesbury tells us that this famous witch of Berkeley "put no moderation to her sins, because she was as yet on this side of old age, although beating on the door of it with a near foot." Trouble coming to her as it does to all mortals, her son dying and his family being ruined, she fell ill, and summoned her surviving children, a monk and a nun, to come to her. She confessed herself to have been a great sinner, but relied pretty comfortably upon their piety to make things better for her. What her occult knowledge taught her might be the ultimate fate of her body, after the soul had gone to its just reward, she knew best, but her instructions for its preserva- tion were singular. She directed that it be sewn in a stag's hide, and afterwards placed in a stone sarcophagus, the cover of which was to be fastened with lead and iron. In addition three iron chains of great weight were to fasten the stone, and there was to be psalm-singing for fifty nights, and the same number of masses in the days. If for three nights these pre- cautions could keep the body at rest, on the fourth it was to be buried in the ground. But it was no use ; vows, prayers, and tears were equally of no avail, while the strongly-bolted door gave way easily to the devils, who broke through the band of singing choirs and tore asunder the two chains at the ex- BERKELEY CASTLE 195 tremities of the stone, the middle one resisting their force. This was on the first two nights ; on the third the whole monastery seemed shaken to its foundation, and a tall, terrible man dashed the doors in pieces, advanced to the coffin, and calling the woman by name commanded her to arise. Upon her answering she could not on account of her chains, "You shall be loosed," said he, "and to your evil ;" and immediately he broke the chain with as much ease as pack-thread. He also kicked off the lid of the coffin, and having taken her by the hand, drew her out of the church in the sight of them all. " Before the door stood a proud black horse neighing, with iron hooks projecting over his whole back. The woman was put upon the beast, and soon disappeared from the eyes of the spectators. Her supplicating cries for help were heard for nearly four miles." So much for the account of the Berkeley witch in the old chronicle. But witches and murderers trouble Berkeley no more. Only the truest hospitality welcomes guests fortunate enough to find themselves inside those battlemented walls, whence none depart without feeling that the past has much to teach, even while the present gives so much to enjoy. VII. HIGHCLERE CASTLE BELONGING TO THE EARL OF CARNARVON IF any spot on earth can boast possession of trees which in virtue of their beauty and profusion, variegated forms, styles and species, stately grandeur and graceful loveliness, have the right to speak with tongues of eloquence, it is the park at Highclere. Cedars black with age are more reticent in their speech than the beeches and the limes ; perhaps they have learned to look upon life in more sober fashion ; while the lordly oaks, perfect specimens as they are, count less in numbers than one would expect. This fact seems to authenticate a reputed remark of the grandfather of the late Lord Carnarvon, to the effect that he would keep the beeches in the park, but would plant no oaks, as he did not propose that any spendthrift descendant should cut them down ! Could it have been the speech of the second Earl of Carnarvon (of the Dormer line) which suggested this remark ? he whose portrait when a boy, painted by Vandyck, hangs in Lord Carnarvon's study at Highclere. He was rather a butterfly HIGHCLERE CASTLE 197 courtier in the time of Charles II., and he is reported to have said that "trees were an excrescence provided by nature for the payment of debts." If the saying is true, then this noble lord had certainly no ear attuned to the "tongues in trees." All their THE PARK, HIGHCLERE. whisperings and friendly confidences were lost for him, wasted utterly upon an imagination that could rise no higher than the clanking tongues of men. At all times a genealogical descent is puzzling. Extraneous 198 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES branches, interlineal marriages, and outside creations, have reduced the task in respect to the Herbert family to a simple impossibility, the only sense in which the word simple can be applied to the subject. The Herberts have been a clan rather than a family, and in every age noted for great intellectual capacity. When Henry, third Earl of Carnarvon, whilst still Lord Porchester, married Henrietta Howard, daughter of Lord Henry Howard, and niece of the twelfth Duke of Norfolk, the alliance was spoken of as a union of the blood of the Howards with the hereditary genius of the Herberts, who themselves date back to Charlemagne, the great Duke of Brabant, King of France, and Emperor of the Romans. A large stone bust of this imperial and kingly ancestor stands amongst the shrubbery near the garden, with the shadow of the beech trees falling on his stone crown and unseeing stone eyes. But only the younger branch of the Herberts have to do with Highclere; the elder branch, the Earls of Pembroke, have for their family seat Wilton, near Salisbury. The first mention of Highclere in connection with the Pembroke branch of the family is in 1684, when Thomas, Earl of Pembroke, married Margaret, the only daughter and heiress of Sir Robert Sawyer, of High Cleer in county South- ampton. In still earlier days Highclere Castle had been a stronghold of the bishops of Winchester, and its massive walls still attest to its strength as a place of defence. It was only in 1841 that it was restored to its present style of Elizabethan, or, more strictly speaking, Jacobean style of architecture. The house is built of Bath-stone, greyish in colour, with a mellow yellowish HIGHCLERE CASTLE 199 tinge running through it, which seems to have been called forth by the floods of sunshine which for so long have poured down upon ] H. HOWARD MOLYNEUX, FOURTH EARL OF CARNARVON. From a Drawing made in 1860 by GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. the place*. The building stands well in a broad expanse of green, which upon all sides slopes gradually into rising hills and lovely GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES undulations, with lakes lying calmly here and there, reflecting the summer and autumn foliage as the succeeding seasons pass away. A magnificent view is obtained from a place called Beacon Hill in near neighbourhood to the castle, and distinct remains of an ancient encampment is found at its summit. Six counties can be seen from this spot, and the stretch of richly timbered land, rising and falling in an endless succession of hills and valleys, well repays the somewhat steep climb up the side of Beacon, even if the summer day be warm. And after the climb the great centre hall at Highclere, built in the eleventh or twelfth century, and originally part of the palace of the bishops of Winchester, is a charming spot in which to rest. One passes from the arched entrance hall, having stone and marble pillars on either side, into a large almost square apartment, the roof of which is Gothic in form, of oak, with ground-glass windows. A wide, hospitable fireplace is on one side ; opposite it the oak staircase is visible through a triple arch. It is on this staircase that the full-length portrait, by Phillips, of the first Earl of Pembroke hangs, one of the greatest statesmen of Henry VIII.'s time. The dog represented in the picture is thought to be the one who followed his master to his grave in St. Paul's Cathedral, where he pined away and died. The sunshine streaming through the large staircase window gilds the arms of the different families with whom the Herberts have intermarried, these arms, illuminated on shields, forming a border to the stamped leather of quaint design which covers the walls. All the peculiar charm and comfort of an English country- HIGHCLERE CASTLE 201 house room is found in this hall, all the delightful arrangement and disposition of furniture so essentially English. In a glass case on one of the tables are several interesting relics, among them two ivory billiard cues with the Herbert arms introduced in the design, which belonged to that gifted Countess of Pembroke who was Sir Philip Sidney's sister. To tell a ghost story in such a cosy, cheery place, at once reduces a ghost to a very harmless thing indeed. Yet the tale of a ghost claimed by Highclere is often related to credulous guests He was such a disturbing ghost that a council of clergymen was called to lay his restless spirit. Only eleven divines assembled, an insufficient number for the emergency, therefore the evil spirit speedily returned from the deep well where he had been banished, and became more rampageous than ever. A second time the clerical council was called together, upon this occasion twelve in number, and all concerned hoped that after they had solemnly laid the ghost to rest within the trunk of an old yew tree near the house that there he would remain for ever. And for a time he was quiet ; but one stormy night amid wild thunder and lightning the demon escaped, and became if possible more mischievous than before. Then a more distant spot was chosen whence to banish the unruly spirit no less a place than the Red Sea ; but this latest spell laid upon him could continue for only a hundred years, and a most uncomfortable uncertainty exists as to whether or no those hundred years have expired. Therefore at any moment the tur- bulent ghost may reappear at Highclere, and the only regret of the writer is that he did not elect to do so during her visit at the castle. D I) GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Hardly a less restless spirit than the ghost has a memento in the long library leading from the centre hall at Highclere, where an armchair of inlaid mahogany and bronze stands before a writ- ing-table, both being in the best style of the First Empire. The wooden arms of the chair are deeply marked and cut, and the hand leaving these marks of haughty impatience which could NAPOLEON'S CHAIR AND TABLE FROM FOXTAINEBI.EAU. ill brook an instant's opposition was the hand of the great Napoleon. Both chair- and table came from the Council Chamber, Fontainebleau, and there is good reason for believing that both were used when the Code NapoUon was compiled and written. It was an odd sensation to sit and write where the man of destiny once sat and wrote ; and to pause and think, in the dreamy silence of the great room, where the monotonous ticking of the clock HIGHCLERE CASTLE 203 and the humming of summer insects in the June sunshine helped instead of hindered thought of all that had been since he so wrote. But with Napoleon for a theme where might one not wander ? Too far from Highclere, charming as it is ; so at once all reminiscences aroused by the old worn chair and well used table must be peremptorily dismissed. Another plainer table of walnut, which was used by the Emperor Napoleon when at St. Helena, stands in the smaller room at the end of the library. From this room a spiral iron staircase leads to a second library above, where is a curious picture of Allan Ramsay, supposed to have been painted by himself. The rare and valuable books are such as one would expect to find in the collection of a man in- heriting the literary tastes and genius of the Herberts, as the late owner of Highclere did in a marked degree. Out of old Greenwich Palace comes the library chimney-piece of carved wood and gilt, and the one portrait in the room hangs over this chimney-piece. It is that of Henry, first Earl of Carnarvon, by Romney. He was the son of Major- General William Herbert, and grandson of Margaret Sawyer, the heiress of Highclere, and of the eighth Earl of Pembroke. In 1780 he was created Baron Porchester of Highclere, and in 1793 Earl of Carnarvon. An account of the times says : " As Colonel Herbert, and member for Wilton, he was present in the House of Commons during the Gordon Riots, and when Lord George Gordon took his seat with a blue cockade, the House being meanwhile besieged by the mob, Colonel Herbert declared with great spirit that he could not sit and vote in that House whilst he saw a noble lord 204 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES in it with the ensign of riot in his hat, and threatened if he would not take it out he would walk across the House and A CORNER OF LIBRARY, SHOWING CHIMNEY-PIECE FROM GREENWICH PALACE. do so for him. Whereupon Lord George put the cockade in his pocket." The music- room at Highclere, opening out of the library, is HIGHCLERE CASTLE 205 hung with wonderfully beautiful silken tapestry worked upon a gold ground. Amongst some family miniatures on a table in this room lies a small framed sketch of a dog, standing on his hind legs, and holding a cup in his mouth. The sketch is signed HIGHCLERE CASTI.E. SIR CHARLES BARRY, ARCHITECT. E. Landseer, and a paper pinned to the picture states that it was drawn by him for Lady Mary Fox. Some of the best pictures at Highclere are to be found in the drawing-room : the charming Wood Gatherers, by Gains- 206 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES borough ; the delightful portrait of the first Countess of Carnarvon with her child, by Sir Joshua Reynolds ; and that picture, also by Sir Joshua, of Colonel Acland and Lord Sidney shooting deer, the two friends whose friendship was ended before the painting was completed. As neither would have the picture it was bought by tht second Lord Carnarvon. In the dining-room are one of Vandyck's celebrated portraits of Charles I. on a white horse; William, Earl of Pembroke, the friend of Shakespeare ; Margaret Sawyer, the handsome heiress of Highclere ; a group of the Earl of Pembroke and his family ; and many others. Every one who has read the Antiquary remembers the incident told by Sir Walter Scott of old Elspeth. A very similar one can be related of the old nurse of the Hon. Captain Charles Herbert, whose portrait hangs on the stone staircase. He was drowned at sea in 1812, and thirty years afterwards Molly Docker, his nurse, died at High- clere. Her last words were : " The captain's in the drawing-room waiting for you, my lady." The following account, which explains the memorial tablet to Charles Herbert in Highclere Church, is best given in the late Lord Carnarvon's own words : " In the earlier part of the sixteenth century, Charles Herbert, the eldest son of Philip, fourth Earl of Pembroke, after being betrothed to the daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, was sent out to Italy as a youth in order to obtain some of the science and knowledge that was then the almost exclusive property of that country. He was kindly received at the Papal Court, and subsequently went to a castle in Lunigiana possessed by the Malaspinas. Whilst there he was seized with fever and died ; and, the family holding him in great honour, he was buried in the little HIGHCLERE CASTLE 207 chapel in the castle and a tablet put up to his memory. The common legend amongst the peasantry ran that he was buried in a lead ccffin and his heart placed in a golden cup. So matters rested till the French Revolution when the country was overrun by French troops. The report reached their ears, and a detachment was sent to ransack the tomb. They found the body in a silver not a lead coffin, and the heart in a bronze and not a gold cup. They melted the metal into bullets, carried away the bronze cup, and scattered about the castle the bones, which were for some time a plaything for the children of the persons who, on the exappropriation of the Malaspinas, became the owners of the castle. "In 1883 a friend told me these circumstances, and said that the bones were still preserved by a very old man who had acquired them at or very shortly after the desecration of the tomb. I begged my friend on his return to Italy to spare no trouble or expense in obtaining them ; and after a long negotiation, during which of course the value of these bones rose to an extortionate figure, and after many other curious difficulties and objections, the remains of my unfortunate relative were shipped at night on board a small steamer ; and after being nearly lost in a storm off the west coast of Africa, they arrived by a very circuitous passage at Liverpool. They were brought on thence to Highclere, and buried in one of the family vaults in the presence of a great part of the parish. "Thus, after two centuries and a half, the mortal remains of this young man buried in Italy, torn from their resting place by French revolutionists, preserved by the merest accident by a stranger, after a series of difficulties and adventures which I have not enumerated, were brought to England ; and, though not buried in his own home, were interred within thirty miles of it, and amongst the bodies of his own name and race.'' Among some old papers discovered at Longleat, the Marquis of Bath's place, is one entitled, " Mister John Kyngesmylle, his account of Ihgecler." We are told that this "is a survey or report of the place evidently sent to be submitted to Protector Somerset for his consideration as to purchase." But the writing and spelling of Mister John leave much to be desired, and it 208 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES is just as well that other accounts of the beautiful old home in Hampshire can be obtained. For those having a culte for trees, they must always come first in any mention of the place, THOMAS, EARL OF ARUNDEL (THE COLLECTOR OF THE ARUNDELIAN MARBLES). From a Contemporary Miniature. but to lovers of flowers they might perhaps stand second to the wonderful collection of rhododendrons and azaleas which is cele- brated throughout England for its extent and beauty. Not only HIGHCLERE CASTLE 209 near the house and in the park proper are there groups of scented colour in extraordinary profusion, but all along the drive to Milford Lake and pretty Milford House hundreds of bushes are found glowing with blossoms varying in tints from the palest cream to deepest orange, or from faint lilac to a royal purple. Some of these shrubs are American, and there is quite a large collection at Highclere of American plants and trees. Exclama- tions fail, and one is reduced to silence when in the midst of the lavish loveliness of the flowers, the varied beauty of the trees and foliage. But after all is not silence the truest form of any deep appreciation ? !: i: VIIL OSTERLEY PARK BELONGING TO THE EARL OF JERSEY THE original <( Manor of Osterlee " belonged to one John de Osterlee in the time of Edward I., and after passing through several hands, being held as church lands by the Prior and Convent of Sheen, and again by the Abbess and Convent of Syon, after twice reverting to the crown, it eventually became the property of the merchant prince, Sir Thomas Gresham, in 1570. The mansion constructed by him was, we are told, widely celebrated for its splendour, and its splendid hospitality. To it, amongst others, came that universal visitor Queen Eliza- beth, in all the dignity of rufif and farthingale. In her honour there was feasting, and dancing, and various exhibitions held in high esteem at the time, and so loyal was the knight her host, that when her Majesty expressed the opinion that the court in front of the house was too large, and "would appear more handsome if divided with a wall in the middle," a wall was straightway erected, silently, during the night, while the maiden Queen slept. On her awakening she was astonished OSTERLEY PARK to find her suggestion solidly realized, the court was divided by a wall of stone. Whether her appreciation of this prompt deference to her ideas was shown in equally substantial fashion we are not told, but on the other hand we learn that Sir Thomas paid the penalty which mortals generally incur when they incon- venience themselves in order to please others. There were those not slow to find a cutting witticism wherewith to describe the knightly action, and courtiers laughed loudly when the wits remarked that "any house is more easily divided than united." Some well-known domestic differences existing in the Gresham family sharpened the saying into painful meaning, and added a piquant zest to the words, but this only heightened the enjoy- ment of the wits, and made their laughter more hearty. After the death of Lady Gresham, Sir Edward Coke, the Earl of Desmond, Sir William Waller, and Dr. Nicholas Barbon, in turn resided at Osterley, which was by the last-named occupant mortgaged to Sir Francis Child, Lord Mayor of London, and the first banker who gave up the goldsmith's business, these two branches being in olden times almost invariably united under the same firm. For many years Messrs. Child and Co. were tenants of the chamber over Temple Bar. There is a good portrait of Sir Francis Child at Osterley, taken in his Lord Mayor's robes, and bearing the date 1699, but not until 1711 did Osterley itself pass into his hands. From him the place descended to Robert Child, Esq., who strongly objected to giving his beautiful daughter in marriage to the wild and impecunious young Earl of Westmoreland. One day this GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES ardent lover proposed a question to the father of the girl he meant to win for his wife, if pluck and determination could THE PORTICO. secure her, and very dexterously did he avail himself of the answer. " Child," said the younger man to the elder, " I wish for your opinion on the following case : Suppose that you were in OSTERLEY PARK 213 love with a girl, and her father refused his consent to the union, what should you do ? " "Why! run away with her, to be sure," replied the banker promptly; and the young nobleman took him at his word. In true old-fashioned style he came to Berkeley Square in a post- chaise and four, and eloped with the lovely heiress who smiles at one to-day from the walls of the gallery at Osterley, in the charming portrait painted by Romney. The girl's indignant father followed the runaways so quickly, and so nearly overtook them that Lord Westmoreland stood up in his carriage and shot the leading horse of Mr. Child's chaise, which stopped the pursuit long enough for the lovers to get over the Border, and to be married at Gretna Green. Very wrathful was the father at being outwitted by his deter- mined son-in-law, and he vowed that no son and heir of Lord Westmoreland should inherit his fortune. The whole of it, with Osterley included, was left by will to his child's eldest daughter, that Lady Sarah Fane who on May 23rd, 1804, married George Villiers, fifth Earl of Jersey. By his marriage, Lord Jersey became the head of the oldest bank in England, which still flourishes, although Temple Bar is gone and the Villiers family bear the additional surname of Child. Long before Osterley came into the possession of the Earls of Jersey, when it was still the residence of Sir Thomas Gresham, the wealthy city knight, a poor little homeless scion of royalty, the Lady Mary Grey, was an unwilling prisoner, there entertained by a most unwilling host. This was in 1569. She was small 2i 4 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES almost to dwarfishness, this troublesome little Tudor princess, but the royal will of King Edward VI. had entailed the regal succession of England and Ireland upon her and her posterity, in the event of her elder sisters dying without heirs, therefore she was an important personage. We all know how these sisters died; the noble Lady Jane Grey, "Jane the Quene," upon the scaffold, a victim to the mad ambition of others ; and the Lady Katherine Grey, wife of the Earl of Hertford, at Sir Owen Hopton's residence in Suffolk, after long years of imprison- ment, a victim of Elizabeth's jealous state policy. It is said that Sir Thomas Gresham added princely bribes to earnest entreaties that he might be relieved of his royal guest, but in spite of both the Lady Mary was left during several years in his charge, either at Gresham House or at Osterley. From this latter place, after the death of her husband, Thomas Keyes, the luckless prisoner wrote to Lord Burghley "that as God had taken away the cause of her Majesty's displeasure, she begged to be restored to her favour, that great and long-desired jewel." But all the knight's entreaties, all his wife's impatience at this unwished-for addition to the household, all the letters of the Lady Mary herself, were unavailing, and Osterley was not always, whilst used as a prison house, quite the peaceful retreat that it now looks. After seven long years of durance under the charge of first one and then another unwilling gaoler, poor little Lady Mary Grey was allowed a freedom she scarcely knew the use of, and at last she died, destitute and obscure, yet nevertheless heiress by OSTERLEY PARK 2I 5 the unrepealed Act of Parliament Settlement, to the royal crown of England. Some of the old tapestry at Osterley, hanging in a side THE GARDEN FRONT. corridor, represents the three elements, air, earth, and water ; fire, the fourth element, is missing. One entire room is decorated with rose Gobelin. The colouring of this Gobelin 216 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES tapestry is as perfect to-day as when it was first brought from France, although that date was 1775. In design the carpet of the room corresponds with the decorations of the ceiling, an idea which Adam was particularly fond of carrying out. Delicate medallions are painted on the ceiling, the work of Angelica Kauffmann, and small painted medallions are introduced among the carvings of the white marble mantelpiece. In one corner of this room stands an ebony and silver table supporting a large silver-framed mirror, which are said to have been used by Queen Elizabeth, and were given to the Countess of Shrewsbury by George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham. A rare inlaid cabinet is near this, and on a large table a rose-coloured satin tablecover with rich Indian embroidery harmonizes well with the rose tapestry of an earlier date. While Angelica Kauffmann painted the medallions on the ceiling in this room, her husband, Zucchi, was busy with his brush in the large dining-room, where the peculiar style of the Adam decorations has full play. The walls of this apartment are in tints of the tenderest green and the very palest pink, these colours being panelled by delicate scroll-work and artistic designs in the white composition which was known only to the Adam brothers. Three large pictures, and several smaller ones, all being scenes and landscapes by Zucchi, are framed in this white scroll-work, while the same curving lines, with grapes and vine leaves, outline the pink and green panels of the ceiling, the design of which corresponds with the design of the neutral- tinted carpet. The tiny scroll pattern of the window mouldings OSTERLEY PARK 2I? are repeated in the ornamentation of the mahogany doors with their artistic brass locks, and are again found in the design of the buffets and side tables, where the ram's head is introduced, which recurs more than once in both furniture and ornaments. Even the tablecloths were made to correspond in their woven patterns, and some are still in use bearing the date 1779. This careful and minute arrangement of detail is found only in an "Adam house,"^the style of which is equivalent to the Louis XVI. style in France, although some years anterior to it. Osterley is supposed to be the purest specimen of this style extant in England, the house where the ideas of the Adam brothers found their fullest vent. The outside of the house is of dark-red brick built in the form of a quadrangle, the centre of which is an open court. The large portico preceding this open court is reached by a broad flight of stone steps, and is supported by twelve Ionic columns of gray stone. The roofing of the portico, as well as the end walls, is richly decorated with scrolls and artistic designs executed in the same white composition of which Adam was almost inordinately fond. Upon leaving the portico, and crossing the open court, one reaches the great hall of entrance, where the white decorations upon a grayish-blue ground of the walls and ceiling at once sug- gest those of the celebrated Wedgwood china. Statues here stand in niches, and marble busts on pedestals ; quaint old couches covered with green leather, the white wood-work carved in classical patterns introducing the ram's head, which is found frequently throughout the house, stand as uncompromising relics of earlier F ]' 2l8 GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES days when soft cushioned lounging divans were unknown. The floor of the hall is of tiled marble. Out of the hall runs the lona o PUB DINING-ROOM. gallery 130 feet in length, at one end of which hangs a portrait of the first Duke of Buckingham, by Rubens, that celebrated George Yilliers who was the favourite of Charles II., and whose OSTERLEY PARK 2 i 9 elder half-brother was the ancestor of the Earls of Jersey. Opposite this picture at the other end of the gallery is a Vandyck portrait of Charles I. on a white horse, almost identical with the one at Highclere Castle. It is said that six of these particular portraits of the unfortunate King are in existence, one of them being the property of her Majesty Queen Victoria. The lovely Sarah, Countess of Westmoreland, already mentioned, painted by Romney, hangs opposite her husband, by the same artist, but the picture of the celebrated Countess of Jersey, daughter of Lady Westmoreland, is to be found in Lord Jersey's room. Lord Byron sang of her beauty, and Mr. Greville writes of her " vivacity, spirit, and good nature," as well as of " her funny good qualities." Lady Jersey was in her day a great social power, and was one of the famous committee who decided upon the rights of admission to Almack's, for which more qualifications were needed than most people possess for admission to heaven. Lord Malmesbury in his diary speaks of Lady Jersey as "a most remarkable woman, and almost a European personage, for no crowned head or representative of royalty ever landed in England without immediately calling upon her, and being found in her salon during his stay." It is in the drawing-room at Osterley that we find the crimson and gold frieze which Horace Walpole wrote of as having been taken from the Palace of the Sun, but which, with parts of the design of the ceiling, was in reality copied from the Acropolis at Greece. There is more colour in this room than in any other apartment of the house, always excepting the tapestry room, but GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES colour so wonderfully blended that no one tint offends the eye. Pale blues and pinks, and a lovely mellow golden-green with which the greens of to-day cannot be made to harmonize, and THE STATE BED. dark red and gold, all blend curiously one with another. More carved mahogany doors are here, more quaint artistic locks in brass, and a wide silver grate with silver fire-dogs, the chairs that ' make harmony," and softly-coloured brocades and damasks. OSTERLEY PARK But no crude sketch in black and white can give any idea of this rainbow-hued colouring, formed of tints and tones and shades, with graceful curving lines, and tender touches of artistic skill displayed everywhere, in this spot " worthy of Eve before the Fall." A portrait of Mr. Child, by Romney, is the principal picture in the drawing-room. All pure and almost cold is the white and green of Lady Jersey's own room, with its large bed having a dome not unlike the Napoleon tomb at the Invalides, and slender, flower-painted posts, and delicate silken hangings. Over the carved white marble chimneypiece hangs one of the many beautiful mirrors to be found in all the rooms of the house, where cupids support the Child crest of an eagle. Of all these mirrors perhaps the best is the one in Mrs. Child's dressing-room, where the lovely face of Lady Westmoreland as a child, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, is framed with the glass in carved white wood. Picture and setting are perfect in their purity and grace. Beside those already mentioned there is a Pompeiian room painted by Angelica Kauffmann, which is now used as a school- room ; and Lord Jersey's room, hung in pale yellow, and having slender-legged Chippendale chairs and tables ; and the staircase, above which is the ceiling painted by Rubens, with the apotheosis of William Prince of Orange, assassinated at Delft, in 1584. It was Robert Child who brought this painting from Holland. In the hall below the staircase hang three curious lamps, in the forms of rams' heads. And last but not least comes the cool, quiet library. GLIMPSES OF OLD ENGLISH HOMES Green is here again the prevailing colour, while all the woodwork and the bookcases, as well as the frames and decorations, are of THE STABLE COURT. carved white wood. More pictures by Zucchi, of pastoral sub- jects, and singularly soft in colouring, adorn both w r alls and ceiling. Amongst the curious things at Osterley must be mentioned a OSTERLEY PARK 223 great silver bath, or wine-cooler for both uses have been sug- gested as possible for the massive round bowl-shaped dish weigh- ing i, 680 ounces, having the royal arms of England in the centre, and the arms of the Childs on shields supported by lions. There are said to be eleven such baths of different designs in England. There are no picturesque undulations in the park, but the very monotony of the stretching green where the cattle feed peacefully produces a restful, almost dreamy sensation in its quiet seclusion, enclosed by a belt of further trees which stand like sentinels between the drowsy quiet of the place and the restless roar of the great city only nine miles away. RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNG AY. '#