From Gretna Green to Land's End Part 5

We tossed crumbs to him all the more gaily for the fancy that his ancestors were among the pensioners of the abbey in the day of its supremacy. For the monks of Furness maintained an honourable reputation for hospitality from that mid-thirteenth-century beginning, when the Grey Brothers from Normandy first erected the grave, strong, simple walls of their Benedictine foundation in this deep and narrow vale, to the bitter end in 1537. Meanwhile they had early discarded the grey habit of the Benedictines for the white of the Cistercians, and their abbot had become "lord of the liberties of Furness,"

exercising an almost regal sway in his peninsula, with power of life and death, with armed forces at command, and with one of the richest incomes of the kingdom under his control. With wealth had come luxury.

The buildings, which filled the whole breadth of the vale, had forgotten their Cistercian austerity in a profusion of ornament.

Within "the strait enclosure," encompa.s.sing church and cloisters, the little syndicate of white-vested monks not only chanted and prayed, transcribed and illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, taught the children of their tenants and entertained the stranger, but planned financial operations on a large scale. For outside this, the holy wall, was another, shutting in over threescore acres of fertile land which the lay brothers, far exceeding the clerical monks in number, kept well tilled. Here were mill, granary, bakehouse, malt-kiln, brewery, fish-pond; and beyond stretched all Furness, where the abbey raised its cattle, sheep and horses, made salt, smelted its iron, and gathered its rents.

Few of the monastic establishments had so much to lose, but Furness was surrendered to the commissioners of Henry VIII with seemingly no resistance. The Earl of Suss.e.x reported to his greedy master that he found the Lord Abbot "of a very facile and ready mynde," while the prior, who had been a monk in that house for fifty years, was "decrepted and aged." Yet it may be noted that of the thirty-three monks whom Suss.e.x found in possession, only thirty signed the deed of surrender. On the fate of the three history is silent, save for a brief entry to the effect that two were imprisoned in Lancaster Castle. There is no record of their liberation. The monks who made their submission were granted small pensions. The abbot received the rectory of Dalton, so near the desecrated abbey that he might have heard, to his torment, the crash of its falling towers. But there is room to hope that in those cruel dungeons of Lancaster two men died because they would not cringe. We do not know, and it was in vain we hunted through the moonlight for the ghost of that mysterious thirty-third, who, too, might have a gallant tale to tell.

The region abounds in points of interest. Romney, the painter, is buried in the churchyard of Dalton, his native place. Beautiful for situation is Conishead Priory, "the Paradise of Furness," once a house of the Black Canons and now a much-vaunted Hydropathic, for, in the stately language of the eighteenth-century antiquary, Thomas West, "aesculapius is seldom invited to Furness, but Hygeia is more necessary than formerly."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TRENT AND MERSEY Ca.n.a.l]

Near the banks of the Duddon stands Broughton Tower, with its legend of how the manor, in possession of the family from time immemorial, was lost by Sir Thomas Broughton--and this was the way of it. In 1487 Lambert Simnel, claiming to be the son of the murdered Clarence, sailed over from Ireland, where he had been crowned by the sister of Richard III, to dispute the new throne of Henry VII. Among his supporters were the Earl of Lincoln, Lord Lovel of Oxfordshire, and Lord Geraldine with an Irish force; but it was the general of his two thousand Burgundian mercenaries, "bold Martin Swart," who is credited with having given name to Swarthmoor, where the invaders encamped. Sir Thomas joined them with a small body of retainers and, in the crushing defeat that followed, was probably left dead upon the field. But legend says that two of the English leaders escaped,--Lord Lovel to his own house in Oxfordshire, where he hid in a secret chamber and perished there of hunger, and Sir Thomas to his faithful tenantry, who for years concealed him in their huts and sheep-folds, and when he died, white-haired, wrapped him in his own conquered banner, and gave him a burial worthy of his race.

But our a.s.sociations with Swarthmoor were of peace and not of war. Our pilgrimage thither was made for the sake of Mistress Fell of Swarthmoor Hall and of George Fox, her second husband, who established hard by what is said to be the first meeting-house of Friends in England. Quitting the train at Lindal, a few miles above the abbey, we found ourselves in the rich iron country, "the Peru of Furness." It must be the reddest land this side of sunset. Even the turnips and potatoes, we were told, come red out of the ground. I know that we tramped amazedly on, over a red road, past red trees and buildings, with a red stream running below, and the uncanniest red men, red from cap to shoe, rising like Satan's own from out the earth to tramp along beside us. The road was deeply hedged, airless and viewless, and we were glad when we had left three miles of it behind, though the village of Swarthmoor, at which we had then arrived, proved to be one of those incredibly squalid English villages that make the heart sick.

Between wide expanses of sweet green pasture, all carefully walled in, with strict warnings against trespa.s.s, ran two or three long, parallel stone streets, swarming with children and filthy beyond excuse. The lambs had s.p.a.ce and cleanliness about them, soft turf to lie upon, pure air to breathe, but the human babies crawled and tumbled on that shamefully dirty pavement, along which a reeking beer wagon was noisily jolting from "public" to "public." Farther down our chosen street, which soon slipped into a lane, there were tidier homes and more sanitary conditions. Yet even Swarthmoor Hall, the fine old Tudor mansion which rose across the fields beyond, had a somewhat uninviting aspect. There were broken panes in the windows, and the cows had made the dooryards too much their own. The present proprietors, who, we were a.s.sured, value the old place highly, and had refused repeated offers for it from the Society of Friends, rent it to a farmer. The housekeeper, not without a little grumbling, admitted us, and showed us about the s.p.a.cious rooms with their dark oak panelling, their richly carven mantels, their windows that look seaward over Morecambe Bay and inland to the Coniston mountains. The hall which Judge Fell--that wise and liberal man, tolerant beyond his time--allowed the Friends to use for their weekly meetings, is a room of goodly proportions, with flagged floor and timbered roof. In the dining-room window stands a simple deal desk once belonging to George Fox, but that upper door through which he used to preach to the throng in orchard and meadow is now walled up. As we, departing, looked back at the house, large, plain, three-storied, covered with grey stucco, we noted how right up on the chimney, in the alien fellowship of the chimney-pots, flourished a goodly green yew, sown by pa.s.sing wind or bird. The housekeeper, who had waxed so gracious that she accompanied us for a few steps on our way, said she had lived in Swarthmoor thirty-four years and had always seen the yew looking much as it did now, but that an old man of the neighbourhood remembered it in his boyhood as only finger-long. It had never, so far as she could tell, been provided by mortal hand with earth or water, but grew by some inner grace, a housetop sign and signal.

Many hallowed memories cl.u.s.ter about that old Elizabethan mansion. It was in 1632 that Judge Fell brought thither his bride, Margaret Askew, sixteen years his junior. She was a descendant of Anne Askew, who, a beautiful woman of twenty-four, thoughtful and truthful, had been burned as a heretic,--one of the closing achievements of the reign of Henry VIII. "I saw her," reports a bystander, "and must needs confess of Mistress Askew, now departed to the Lord, that the day before her execution, and the same day also, she had on an angel's countenance, and a smiling face; though when the hour of darkness came, she was so racked that she could not stand, but was holden up between two serjeants."

It was then that the Lord Chancellor--who previously, when even the callous jailer had refused to rack the delicate body further, had thrown off his gown and worked the torture-engine with his own hands--offered her the king's pardon if she would recant, receiving in reply only the quiet words, "I came not hither to deny my Lord and Master."

It is not easy for us who read to echo the prayer of her who suffered:

"Lord, I Thee desyre, For that they do to me, Let them not taste the hyre Of their inyquyte."

No wonder that Margaret Fell, with such a history in her heart, should have lent a ready ear to the doctrines of the "Children of Light," as the people dubbed them, the "Friends of Truth," as they called themselves, the "Quakers," whose prime contention was for liberty of conscience.

She had been married twenty years when George Fox first appeared at Swarthmoor Hall, where all manner of "lecturing ministers" were hospitably entertained. Three weeks later, Judge Fell, a grave man not far from sixty, was met, as he was riding home from circuit, by successive parties of gentlemen, "a deal of the captains and great ones of the country," who had come out to tell him that his family were "all bewitched." Home he came in wrath, but his wife soothed him as good wives know how,--had the nicest of dinners made ready, and sat by him, chatting of this and that, while he ate.

"At night," says her own account, "George Fox arrived; and after supper, when my husband was sitting in the parlour, I asked if he might come in. My husband said yes. So George walked into the room without any compliment. The family all came in, and presently he began to speak. He spoke very excellently, as ever I heard him; and opened Christ's and the Apostles' practices.... If all England had been there, I thought they could not have denied the truth of these things. And so my husband came to see clearly the truth of what he spake."

The next First-day the meeting of the Friends was held at Swarthmoor Hall on Judge Fell's own invitation, though he himself went, as usual, to "the Steeplehouse." The spirit of persecution was soon abroad, and one day, when the Judge was absent on circuit, Fox, while speaking in the church, was set upon, knocked down, trampled, beaten, and finally whipped out of town. On Judge Fell's return, he dealt with the Friend's a.s.sailants as common rioters. The Judge held, however, his mother's faith to the end, never becoming a member of the Society. He died in the year of Cromwell's death, 1658, and was buried by torchlight under the family pew in Ulverston church. "He was a merciful man to G.o.d's people," wrote his widow, adding that, though not a Friend, he "sought after G.o.d in the best way that was made known to him."

Meanwhile Margaret Fell had become a leader among the Children of Light. Twice she wrote to Cromwell in behalf of their cause, and again and again to Charles II, with whom she pleaded face to face. Now that her husband's protection was withdrawn, persecution no longer spared her, and she, like Fox and many another of the Society, came to know well the damp and chilly dungeons of Lancaster Castle,--that stern prison of North Lancashire which may be viewed afar off from the ominous height of Weeping Hill.

"Thousands, as toward yon old Lancastrian Towers, A prison's crown, along this way they pa.s.sed, For lingering durance or quick death with shame, From this bare eminence thereon have cast Their first look--blinded as tears fell in showers Shed on their chains."

Refusing, as a Quaker must needs refuse, to take the oath of supremacy, Mistress Fell stood her trial in 1663, her four daughters beside her. Her arguments irritated the judge into exclaiming that she had "an everlasting tongue," and he condemned her to imprisonment for life, with confiscation of all her property to the Crown. But after some five years of Lancaster's grim hospitality she was released, and forthwith set out on a series of visits to those English jails in which Quakers were immured. It was not until eleven years after Judge Fell's death that she married George Fox. The courtship is summarised in Fox's "Journal": "I had seen from the Lord a considerable time before that I should take Margaret Fell to be my wife; and when I first mentioned it to her she felt the answer from G.o.d thereto." Yet after the marriage, as before, they pursued, in the main, their separate paths of preaching, journeying, and imprisonment. It was seven years before illness brought Fox to Swarthmoor, which had been restored to the family, for a brief rest. About a quarter of a mile from the mansion, stood a dwelling-house in its three or four acres of land. This modest estate Fox purchased and gave it "to the Lord, for the service of his sons and daughters and servants called Quakers....

And also my ebony bedstead, with painted curtains, and the great elbow-chair that Robert Widder sent me, and my great sea case with the bottles in it I do give to stand in the house as heirlooms, when the house shall be made use of as a meeting-place, that Friends may have a bed to lie on, a chair to sit on, and a bottle to hold a little water for drink." He adds: "Slate it and pave the way to it and about it, that Friends may go dry to their meeting. You may let any poor, honest Friend live in the house, and so let it be for the Lord's service, to the end of the world."

A deep hawthorn lane, winding to the left, led us to that apostolic meeting-house, well-nigh hidden from the road by its high, grey, ivy-topped wall. We pa.s.sed through a gra.s.sy outer court into an inner enclosure thick-set with larches, hollies, and wild cherry. The paths are paved. Luxuriant ivy curtains porch and wall, and clambers up over the low tower. Above the door is inscribed:

_Ex dono G. F._, 1682.

The meeting-room within is of Quaker plainness, with drab-tinted walls. The settees are hard and narrow, though a few "at the top" are allowed the creature comforts of cushions. Only the posts are left of the ebony bedstead, but two elbow-chairs of carven oak, a curiously capacious and substantial travelling-chest, and a Bible still are shown as Fox's personal belongings. The Bible is a black-letter folio of 1541, the Treacle Bible, open at the third chapter of Jeremiah, where, in the last verse, comes the query: "Is not there any tryacle in Gylyad?"

But Lancashire has other saints no less holy than those dear to Protestant and Quaker memory. Surely martyrs, irrespective of the special phase of the divine idea for which they gladly give up their bodies to torture and to death, are the truest heroes of history.

"For a tear is an intellectual thing, And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King, And the bitter groan of the Martyr's woe Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow."

This remote county, especially the north with its perilous bogs and rugged fells, clung to the mother faith. Many of its old families are still Catholic; many a Tudor mansion can show its "priest-hole" from which, perhaps, some hidden Jesuit has been dragged to the dungeon or the scaffold. We journeyed up from Manchester on a sunny afternoon, for love of one of these, to the beautiful valley of the Ribble, rich in manifold traditions. Our time was short, but we climbed to the keep of c.l.i.theroe Castle, ruined for its loyalty to Charles I, and viewed that wide prospect whose most impressive feature is the witch-storied stretch of Pendle Hill. On that long level range the famous witches of Lancashire used to hold their unseemly orgies, hooting and yowling about Malkin Tower, their capital stronghold, whose evil stones were long since cast down and scattered. Peevish neighbours they were, at the best, ready on the least provocation to curse the cow from giving milk and the b.u.t.ter from coming in the churn, but on Pendle Hill the broomstick battalion was believed to dance in uncouth circle about caldrons seething with hideous ingredients and to mould little wax images of their enemies who would peak and pine as these effigies wasted before the flames, or shudder with fierce shoots of agony as red-hot needles were run into the wax. What were honest folk to do? It was bad enough to have the bride-cake s.n.a.t.c.hed away from the wedding-feast and to find your staid Dobbin all in a lather and dead lame at sunrise from his wild gallop, under one of these "secret, black and midnight hags," to Malkin Tower, but when you were saddled and bridled and ridden yourself, when the hare that you had chased and wounded turned suddenly into your own wife panting and covered with blood, when your baby was stolen from the cradle to be served up in the Devil's Sacrament of the Witches' Sabbath, it was time to send for one of King James's "witch-finders." So the poor old crones, doubled up and corded thumb to toe, were flung into the Calder to see whether they would sink or swim, or sent to where the f.a.got-piles awaited them in the courtyard of Lancaster Gaol, or even--so the whisper goes--flung into their own lurid bonfires on Pendle Hill. But still strange shadows, as of furious old arms that scatter curses, are to be seen on those heather-purpled slopes, and from the summit black thunderstorms crash down with supernatural suddenness and pa.s.sion.

Our driver was a subdued old man, with an air of chronic discouragement. He met the simplest questions, about trains, about trees, about climate, with a helpless shake of the head and the humble iteration: "I can't say. I'm no scholard. I never went to school. I can't read." He eyed Pendle Hill, standing blue in a flood of sunshine, with obvious uneasiness, and asked if we thought there really were "such folk as witches." As we drove up the long avenues of Stonyhurst, our goal, that imposing seat of learning seemed to deepen his meek despondency. He murmured on his lofty perch: "I never went to school."

Stonyhurst, the chief Catholic college of England, was originally located at St. Omer's in France. Over sea to St. Omer's the Catholic gentry of Elizabethan times used to send their sons. There the exiled lads vainly chanted litanies for England's conversion, their church door bearing in golden letters the fervent prayer: "_Jesu, Jesu, converte Angliam, fiat, fiat._" The Elizabethan sonneteer, William Habington, who describes "a holy man" as one who erects religion on the Catholic foundation, "knowing it a ruinous madness to build in the air of a private spirit, or on the sands of any new schism," was a St.

Omer's boy. Nineteen of those quaintly uniformed lads, blue-coated, red-vested, leather-trousered, afterwards died on the scaffold or in prison, usually as Jesuit priests who had slipped into England against Elizabethan law.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the strong feeling against the Jesuits led to their banishment from France and finally to the temporary suppression of the order, the school began its wanderings,--from St. Omer's to Bruges, thence to Liege, and at last, in 1794, from Liege to England, where one of the alumni presented the homeless seminary with the fine estate of Stonyhurst. In this secluded, healthful situation there now stands a prosperous college, with dormitories for two hundred students, with well-equipped academic buildings, a preparatory school, and a great farm which of itself maintains the inst.i.tution.

Stonyhurst has many treasures,--illuminated missals, Caxton editions, a St. John's Gospel in Gaelic script said to have been found in the tomb of St. Cuthbert, relics of "Blessed Thomas More," original portraits of the Stuarts,--including the winsome picture of Bonny Prince Charlie as a child,--but the object of our quest was a little ma.n.u.script volume of Robert Southwell's poems. Of course the porter knew nothing about it, though he strove to impart the impression that this was the only matter in the universe on which he was uninformed, and "the teaching fathers" were still absent for their summer holiday; but a gentle old lay brother finally hunted out for us the precious book, choicely bound in vellum and delicately written in an unknown hand, with corrections and insertions in the young priest's own autograph. This Stonyhurst ma.n.u.script gives the best and only complete text for the strange, touching, deeply devotional poems of Father Southwell,--the text on which Grosart's edition rests. It is supposed that they were written out for him by a friend while he lay a prisoner in the Tower, and that in the intervals between the brutalities of torture to which that most sensitive organism was again and again subjected, he put to his book these finishing touches,--only a few months and weeks before he was executed at Tyburn by a blunderer who adjusted the noose so badly that the martyr "several times made the sign of the Cross while he was hanging."

Our eyes filled as we deciphered the faded Elizabethan script:

"G.o.d's spice I was, and pounding was my due; In fading breath my incense savored best; Death was the meane, my kyrnell to renewe; By loppynge shott I upp to heavenly rest.

"Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose; It was no death to me, but to my woe; The budd was opened to lett out the rose, The cheynes unloos'd to let the captive goe."

As we were driving on to Whalley, to pay our tribute of honour to yet one shining memory more, the summit of Pendle Hill suddenly wrapped itself in sable cloud, and its haunting vixens let loose upon us the most vehement pelt of rain, diversified with lightning-jags and thunder-crashes, that it was ever my fortune to be drenched withal.

One of the Lancashire witches is buried in Whalley churchyard under a ma.s.sive slab which is said to heave occasionally. I think I saw it shaking with malicious glee as we came spattering up the flooded path, looking as if we had ourselves been "swum" in the Calder.

Whalley church, one of the most curious and venerable parish churches of England, shelters the ashes of John Paslew, last Abbot of Whalley.

Upon the simple stone are cut a floriated cross and chalice, with the words "_Jesu fili dei miserere mei_." Only the fewest traces, chief of which is a beautiful gateway with groined roof, remain of this great abbey, one of the richest in the north of England, charitable, hospitable, with an especially warm welcome for wandering minstrels.

Its walls have been literally levelled to the ground, like those of the rival Cistercian foundation at Sawley, a few miles above. But the "White Church under the Leigh," believed to have been originally established by the missionary Paulinus in the seventh century, preserves the abbey choir stalls, whose crocketed pinnacles tower to the top of the chancel. Their _misereres_ are full of humour and spirit. An old woman beating her husband with a ladle is one of the domestic scenes that tickled the merry monks of Whalley. We could have lingered long in this ancient church for its wealth of fine oak carving, its pew fashioned like a cage, its heraldic gla.s.s, and, in the churchyard, the three old, old crosses with their interlacing Runic scrolls, one of which, when a witch read it backward, would do her the often very convenient service of making her invisible. But we had time only for the thought of Abbot Paslew, who, refusing to bow to the storm like the Abbot of Furness, had raised a large body of men and gone to arms for the defence of the English monasteries against the royal robber. He was a leader in the revolt of 1537, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Abbot of Sawley, William Trafford, old jealousies forgotten, took the field with him. But monks were no match for Henry VIII's generals, the rebellion was promptly crushed, the Abbot of Sawley was hanged at Lancaster, and Abbot Paslew was taken, with a refinement of vengeance, back to Whalley and gibbeted there, in view of the beautiful abbey over which he had borne sway for thirty years. The country folk had depended upon it for alms, for medical aid, for practical counsel, for spiritual direction, and we may well believe that, as they looked on at the execution, their hearts were hot against the murderers of him who, when he grasped the sword, had a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of Earl of Poverty. The mound where he suffered is well remembered to this day.

The flying hours had been crowded with impressions, tragic, uncanny, pitiful, and we had yet, in going to the station, to run the gantlet of a tipsy town, for it was a holiday. We had found c.l.i.theroe drinking, earlier in the afternoon, and now we found Whalley drunk.

One unsteady individual, wagging his head from side to side and stretching out a pair of wavering arms, tried to bar my progress.

"Wh-where be g-goin'?" he asked.

"To the train," I answered curtly, dodging by.

He sat down on the wall and wept aloud.

"T-to the tr-train! Oh, the L-Lord bl-bless you! The g-good L-Lord bl-bless you all the w-way!"

And the last we saw and heard of him, he was still feebly shaking his hands after us and sobbing maudlin benedictions.

II. CHESHIRE

Drayton the poet once took it upon him to a.s.sure Cheshire that what was true of Lancashire was true also of her:

"Thy natural sister shee--and linkt unto thee so That Lancashire along with Cheshire still doth goe."

From that great backbone of England, the Pennine Range, both these counties fall away to the west, but Cheshire quickly opens into the Shropshire plain. At the northeast it has its share in the treasures of the deep coal-field rent across by the Pennines, and here, too, are valuable beds of copper. In this section of the county cl.u.s.ter the silk towns, among them Macclesfield, the chief seat in England of this manufacture, and Congleton, whose character we will trust has grown more spiritual with time. For in 1617 one of the village wags tugged a bear into the pulpit at the hour of service, and it was a full twelvemonth before the church was reconsecrated and worship resumed. Indeed, the Congleton folk had such a liking for bear-baiting or bear-dancing, or whatever sport it was their town bear afforded them, that when a few years later this poor beast died, it is told that

"living far from G.o.dly fear They sold the Church Bible to buy a bear."

The old Cheshire, everywhere in evidence with its timber-and-plaster houses, distracts the mind from this new industrial Cheshire. We visited Macclesfield, but I forgot its factories, its ribbons and sarcenets, silks and satins and velvets, because of the valiant Leghs.