Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely Part 34

This episcopal connection of Wisbech Castle led to its becoming, in the reign of Elizabeth, the final scene of that pathetic and lingering tragedy, the fate of the old Catholic Hierarchy of England. Such of that hierarchy as were alive at Elizabeth's succession were, with one exception, deposed for refusing the Oath of Supremacy, to the number of fifteen. Shortly afterwards they were imprisoned, not by any process of law but by the Royal fiat, and continued under more or less severe restraint for the rest of their lives. This was wholly on account of their religion. Lord Burghley, a hostile witness (in his _Execution of Justice in England_[251]), testifies to their blameless characters, describing them as "faithful and quiet subjects," "persons of courteous natures," "of great modesty, learning and knowledge,"

"secluded only for their contrary opinions in religion, that savour not (like those of the seminary priests) of treason."

[Footnote 251: This work was published in 1583, to justify the execution of the seminary priests in England. Burghley's point is that quiet Papists were not put to death.]

Yet, though thus inoffensive, their doom was grievously heavy.

Committed, to begin with, to solitary confinement, in what Froude calls "the living death of the Tower" and other London prisons, for three or four years, they were afterwards quartered (singly) on the Protestant prelates, who were stringently ordered by the Council to prevent them from communication, either by word or letter, with anyone, and to see that they had neither paper to write withal, nor books to read (except Protestant ones). Thus deprived of every intellectual, social, and religious solace, "pining away in miserable desolation, tossing and shifting from one keeper to another," they one by one drooped and died. But all remained steadfast to their Faith; and finally the "obstinate" survivors were, in 1580, closely imprisoned, along with others in like case, in Wisbech Castle.

Here they were under the charge of c.o.x, the new Protestant Bishop of Ely, who writes of them as "sworn against Christ," and boasts that "if walls, locks, and doors can separate them from out-practice they shall not want a sufficient provision of each." "Nor let it be thought, as some bishops have reported, that I mind to make trade by over-ruling such wretches." The "trade" was handed over to a favourite servant, to make what he could out of the unhappy prisoners (who, like all prisoners in those days, had to be supported by their friends), subject only to providing out of his takings 80 per annum for the upkeep of two Protestant preachers, "who are well able to set down G.o.d's anger" against Popery. These preachers (amongst whom one regrets to find "Lancelot Andrewes of Pembroke Hall") were ever and anon to pester the "recusants" with denunciatory discourses in the castle hall. "And the recusants shall be conveyed thither by a secret way, without seeing any; and they shall have a secret place for themselves to be in, to hear and not be seen.... This is the holy ordinance of G.o.d."[252]

[Footnote 252: See Bridgett and Knox, _Queen Elizabeth and the Catholic Hierarchy_, p. 197 _et seq._ It may have been these highly specialised discourses which put so fine an edge on Wisbech Protestantism that, in the Civil War, the Parson here was ejected for no more heinous offence than that "he called a G.o.dly Minister (Mr.

Allison) _Brother Redface_."]

Kept with this rigour the Confessors lingered on, year after year, till death set them free. The latest to be released were Thomas Watson, Bishop of Lincoln, who died in 1584, and f.e.c.kenham, the last Abbot of Westminster, who died in 1585. Both are buried (as the Parish Registers testify) in Wisbech churchyard.

The castle was sold by the See of Ely in 1783, and has since been almost wholly pulled down. Nearly at the same date a young man, born at Wisbech, was beginning those efforts which have reflected glory on his native town, and have revolutionised public opinion throughout the civilised world. The man was Thomas Clarkson, and the cause to which he devoted his life was the abolition of slavery. That inst.i.tution, up to his time, was regarded as a very foundation of the earth. Rooted in the furthest past of man's history, and as world-wide as it was ancient, the idea of questioning its place in the eternal fitness of things never occurred even to philanthropists. A virtuous man would treat his slaves kindly; but as for not having such, he would as soon have scrupled at having sheep and oxen, or at employing hired servants.

It was left for young Clarkson, while a student at Cambridge, to realise that the time was come when, if the human conscience was to make any further progress in enlightenment, this h.o.a.ry iniquity must, root and branch, be abolished. On a steep hillside above Wade Mill, in the road between Cambridge and London, a monument by the wayside still marks the spot where he dismounted from his horse, and, kneeling on the ground in the fervour of youthful enthusiasm, solemnly vowed to G.o.d that for this holy object he would live and, if need be, die.

At once he set to work. Gathering a band of like-minded friends round him (mostly belonging to the so-called Clapham Sect, who were then inaugurating the great Evangelical Revival)--Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, Babington, Thornton, Buxton, Cropper, and the rest--he started an agitation in and out of Parliament, which carried all before it. The Slave Trade was abolished in 1807; on August 1st, 1834, slavery itself ceased throughout the British Empire; the example of Britain was followed by other European Powers; and finally, in 1864, after a last desperate struggle for existence in the American Civil War, it was cast forth from its last stronghold in the United States.

If practised at all now, it is practised under some feigned name and elusive system. No civilised man dare any longer proclaim himself an avowed slave-driver. Well indeed does Clarkson deserve the monument which Wisbech has erected to her glorious son.

At Wisbech, till the reclamation of the neighbouring Washes, Cambridgeshire (or rather the Isle of Ely) possessed an actual strip of seaboard extending from Wisbech town northward to the county boundary between Tydd St. Mary and Tydd St. Giles. This strip was itself reclaimed ground, but of far earlier date, due to the era of Roman civilisation in Britain. The old coast-line, as has been said, is still marked for us by a ma.s.sive embankment extending from Sutton, in Lincolnshire, to Wisbech, and thence to King's Lynn, in Norfolk--an embankment sufficiently old to have given its name to the ancient villages along its course. The designations of Walsoken, West Walton, Walpole St. Peter, and Walpole St. Andrew, all testify to this sea wall having been already in existence when the East Anglians, in the fifth century, first took possession of the land.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Wisbech Church._]

This embankment kept back, to the west and to the east, the tide-water of the Well Stream (see p. 399), a wide inlet of the sea, narrowing southward till it reached its extremity at Wisbech, and forming the estuary for the united outfall of all the Fenland waterways. In later days operations connected with the draining of the fens have diverted nearly the whole volume of the Great Ouse and its tributary streams to fall into the sea at King's Lynn, and have led the Nene straight to Wisbech. But till the thirteenth century was well advanced the Ouse and the Nene joined each other near Outwell, the united river being called the "Well" or "Well Stream." The names of Upwell, Outwell, Welney, &c., still preserve the memory of this old waterway.

The estuary was, of course, tidal, leaving at low water a broad expanse of sands, amidst which the shifting channel of the river was so far broadened out as to be fordable at certain points; thus admitting of pa.s.sage across the whole breadth of the inlet, even where it became five miles wide. The regular track for this pa.s.sage was from the little hamlet of Cross Keys, on the Norfolk coast (the name of which is derived from this circ.u.mstance) to Sutton Crosses, near the village of Long Sutton, on the Lincolnshire side, and is approximately marked for us to-day by the line of the Great Northern Railway between these spots, traversing the level fields and meadows which have (since the year 1830) finally replaced the sands of old.

The conditions of the pa.s.sage were identical with those to be found now at Morecambe Bay. That estuary can also be crossed at low tide; but to do so in safety a good deal of local knowledge is essential.

The right points for fording the river channels must be found, the numerous quicksands must be avoided, while the localities of both fords and quicksands are constantly changing. It is therefore exceedingly rash to make the attempt without guides; for across the level sands of every estuary the tide makes with extreme rapidity, sometimes coming in before the wind faster than any man can hope to outrun it. These guides are professionals, who await on either bank the demand for their services.

All this is exactly what is said of the Well Stream "Washes" in authorities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As late as 1775, though successive reclamations had by that time reduced the breadth of the pa.s.sage by more than half, we hear of the guide "always attending at Cross Keys to conduct pa.s.sengers over, bearing a wand or rod in his hand, probably in imitation of Moses, who held a rod when he conducted the Israelites through the Red Sea." The rod was really used for probing the sand in front, lest it should prove "quick," and also for taking the bearings on the opposite sh.o.r.e by which the course was steered.

It was through neglect of such expert advice that the Well Stream estuary became the scene of that dramatic episode in English history, which, on the 13th of October in the year 1216, cost King John his treasures and his life. The story is narrated by the contemporary historian Roger of Wendover, and the Barnwell and Coggeshall chroniclers. The whole circ.u.mstances have been most carefully and minutely elaborated by Mr. St. John Hope, through whose kindness I am enabled to use his materials. His able monograph on the subject is to be found in Vol. LX. of "Archaeologia."

John was, in 1216, at death-grips with the Barons, who, in the previous year, had wrung from him the signature of Magna Charta. The rights and wrongs of the quarrel were not so wholly one-sided as is popularly supposed, and the appeal of both parties to the Pope had not sufficed to clear them up. The offer of the Crown by the Barons to Louis, Dauphin of France, was for the moment more successful. Most of England acknowledged him as King, and even the King of Scots came to do homage for his sub-kingdom (as Scotland then was); only a few strongholds, notably Windsor Castle, holding out for John and being besieged by the Barons.

John himself, however, was still at large, and at the head of a small, but very effective, mercenary army of filibusters from all the countries of Europe. He met the situation by a campaign of extraordinary energy; his object being to relieve his invested fortresses by drawing off their a.s.sailants to the defence of their own lands. Incidentally, desire of revenge, and the need of paying his troops by plunder, operated as a further motive for the merciless destruction which, in a series of brilliant and ferocious raids, he meted out to the districts owned by his opponents. The speed of his movements is almost incredible, considering the conditions of travel in the thirteenth century; but they can be traced with accuracy by the still existing entries in the Patent and Close Rolls; for day by day John did not cease to do royal business and to sign the doc.u.ments submitted to him, however far he might have marched since morning. In the eyes of his Continental contemporaries this consuming energy came to be held his chief characteristic. In the "Dittamondo" of the Italian poet, Fazio degli Uberti, written early in the fourteenth century, which gives a brief notice of the successive Kings of England from the Norman Conquest onwards, the one thing mentioned about John is the "hot haste" of his riding.

Hot haste it was, indeed! Week after week the King made his army (which, though small, cannot have numbered fewer than two or three thousand men) cover distances that would be creditable to a solitary bicycle tourist on the macadamised roads of to-day. From Corfe Castle, in Dorsetshire, whither he had retreated on the landing of Louis, he dashed across England (_via_ Bristol) to Cheshire, ravaged that district for over a fortnight, and was back at Corfe within six weeks of setting out. The very next day he was off again, and by a circuitous route of 155 miles (for his enemies' forces barred the direct way) reached Oxford within a week. A few days later another yet more wonderful week of 225 miles carried him from Reading to Lincoln; his daily stages being Bedford (45 miles), Cambridge (30), Castle Hedingham, in Ess.e.x (25), Stamford (70), Rockingham (10), and Lincoln (50). Here he remained ten days, during which he raised the siege of the castle; having also succeeded in relieving Windsor, for the Barons who were attacking it hastily broke up, and marched to Cambridge in hopes of cutting him off at this strategic point--the only place, as we have said,[253] where the Cam was pa.s.sable for an army. It was doubtless to escape this danger that John undertook, on September 19th, the forced march of 70 miles from Hedingham to Stamford, which had perforce to be made _via_ "the Great Bridge" of Cambridge.

[Footnote 253: P. 6.]

Yet another week of marches up and down Lincolnshire, 115 miles in all, brought him round the Wash to Lynn (by way of Wisbech); and then came the great catastrophe.

It was on Wednesday the 12th of October, 1215, that King John, after three days' stay at Lynn, retraced his steps, with his wonted celerity, by way of Wisbech, to Swineshead Abbey near Boston, a distance of over forty miles. Doc.u.ments signed by him on this day at all three places are to be found in the Patent and Close Rolls. His baggage train, which obviously could not have kept up with this pace, he ordered to follow by the direct route across the sands. We read with some surprise that his flying column was accompanied by such a train at all; but the contemporary historians agree in telling us of "carts, waggons, and sumpter horses," loaded with the King's treasures and properties (including even a portable chapel), and with the spoil ama.s.sed during this long raid.

Such a train would cover at least a mile on any road, and could only move quite slowly, three miles an hour at the very outside. How it kept touch with the column at all is a wonder, and we may be sure that it could never have done so during the forced march from Hedingham on the 19th of September. After that date the occupation of Cambridge by the Baronial forces would effectually bar the way against any attempt to follow in the King's track; and it is highly probable that he, knowing that this would be so, had ordered the train and its escort to make their way instead from Hedingham to Lynn, and that he paid his hurried visit to that place with the sole object of once more getting into touch with them.

However that may be, there is no doubt that the train did set out from Lynn, along the road to Cross Keys, after the King and his troops had ridden off towards Wisbech. It was impossible, however, to attempt the pa.s.sage that same day, for the channel of the Well Stream could only be forded during the hour or so on either side of low-water, which, as calculations show, was on this day about noon. The long line of vehicles had, accordingly, to halt for the night at Cross Keys, for to have attempted the pa.s.sage in the dark (the moon was nearly at the new), would have been simply suicidal.

Next morning, Thursday, October 13th, they woke to find the tide lapping against the old Roman embankment behind which they lay, for it was a spring tide, and at its highest about 6.30 a.m. Rapidly it receded, and by 9 a.m. the wide expanse of the sands would lie bare before them. The moment these were dry enough for the pa.s.sage of carts they would start, for their leaders knew well the urgent necessity for speed. To get such a train across the Well Stream channel in the short s.p.a.ce of two hours they must be at the ford the very moment it was practicable. Every instant was precious, and every driver did his utmost to press on, regardless of the warnings of the guides (if they had any).

But to drive a loaded cart over wet sand is at the best a slow job.

Readers of Sir Walter Scott will remember his vivid description, in _Redgauntlet_, of the difficulties attending such attempts:

"The vehicle, sinking now on one side, now on the other, sometimes sticking absolutely fast and requiring the utmost exertions of the animal which drew it to put it once more in motion, was subjected to jolts in all directions.... There seemed at least five or six people around the cart, some on foot, others on horseback. The former lent a.s.sistance whenever it was in danger of upsetting or sticking fast in the quicksands: the others rode before and acted as guides, often changing the direction of the vehicle as the precarious state of the pa.s.sage required.... Thus the cart was dragged heavily and wearily on, until the nearer roar of the advancing tide excited apprehension of another danger.... A rider hastily fastened his own horse to the shafts of the cart, in order to a.s.sist the exhausted animal which drew it, ... but at length, when, after repeated and hair-breadth escapes, it actually stuck fast in a quicksand, the driver, with an oath, cut the harness, and departed with the horses, splashing over the wet sand and through the shallows as he galloped off."

Multiply all this at least a hundred-fold, throwing in the added turmoil caused by the mult.i.tude of carts jamming and impeding one another, and we can picture something of the scene as that fatal morning advanced and the doomed cavalcade ploughed its way on to destruction. For there was no margin of time; and though the leading vehicles seem to have reached the Well Stream channel, they reached it too late. Already it was unfordable, for such traffic at least as theirs. Some of the carts doubtless tried to make a dash across; but their horses, exhausted by the strenuous effort of the last two hours, were unequal to the tremendous strain of negotiating the soft bottom of the stream. A very few such failures would entirely bar the way to those who were eagerly pressing on behind, and almost in a moment the whole column would be in irremediable confusion. In the struggling press, to turn would be as impossible as to proceed, while momentarily the laden carts, for which the only hope was to be kept going, would, at a standstill, sink deeper, inch by inch, into the ever quickening sand. And then in the midst of the welter, up came the tide, sweeping over the level sands, as spring tides in the Wash do sweep;--and, when the waters once more went down, of all that ma.s.s of treasure and plunder, of all those horses and drivers and carts and waggons not a trace was to be seen. The sands had swallowed all; and to this day they retain their prey. As Shakespeare makes King John say:

"These Lincoln Washes have devoured them."

The expanse of sands is now an expanse of fields and meadows, through which the River Nene is led by a straight cut from Wisbech to the sea.

Where that cut is crossed by the Great Northern Railway (which, as has been said, runs almost along the line of the old crossing-track) is the traditional spot of the disaster, and Mr. St. John Hope believes that excavation might there bring to light some of its relics, even after the lapse of so many years.

Matthew Paris (in his _Historia Anglorum_), writing in the generation following the catastrophe, tells us that John himself was on the scene and barely escaped from the rising waters. But he, as we have seen, was the previous night (and the next) at Swineshead Abbey. It is just possible that, with his astounding energy, he may have ridden in the morning with a few attendants to Long Sutton (a distance of twenty miles, as before the reclamation of the fens travellers from Boston thither would have to go round by Spalding), and thence across the sands, to overlook in person the pa.s.sage of the Well Stream. If so, he may well, in the confusion, have been surprised by the tide and have barely escaped by hard riding. Anyhow the catastrophe cost him his life; for this heart-breaking blow, coming on top of his three months'

herculean exertions, brought on a feverish attack that very night. Ill as he was, he was on horseback again by dawn, and rode fifteen miles to Sleaford. Next day he struggled on twenty miles to Newark, where "the disease increasing, he received the counsel of Confession and the Eucharist from the Abbot of Croxton," and died that same evening (October 18th), fairly burnt out by his own consuming and tireless energy. If ever King did, he "died standing."

"Foul as h.e.l.l is, it is defiled by the fouler presence of John." Such is the uncompromising verdict of the inimical chronicler; and such (in less trenchant phraseology) has been very much the verdict of popular historians even to our own day. But it was a verdict by no means universally accepted by contemporaries. John did not, like William Rufus, receive what Professor Freeman calls "the distinction of a popular excommunication." For Rufus no prayer was said, no psalm was sung, no Ma.s.s was offered. All men felt that prayer was hopeless.

But John was buried in peace; and it speedily appeared that the cause for which he stood was the cause which (more especially when the weight of his own personal unpopularity was removed) most commended itself to the heart of England. Men had no desire to see the English Crown become an appanage for the heir to the French monarchy. And so Louis rapidly found. Within nine days of his father's death the infant Henry the Third was crowned at Gloucester,--with his mother's bracelet, in default of the proper crown (which, however, is not likely to be amongst the treasures lost in the Wash, as many histories a.s.sume); and within six months men were flocking "as to a Holy War,"

from all parts of the country, to take part in that decisive battle known as "the Fair of Lincoln," which crushed, once and for all, the foreign intrusion, and established irrevocably the claim of the native-born ruler to succeed his father on the throne of England.

And with this stirring story we take our leave of the Highways and Byways of Cambridgeshire, the stage of so many a story, the home of so many a memory; the scene--to those who have eyes to see--of so much quiet loveliness; where the Present is ever brooded over by the Past, and where on the anvils of Thought and Science the Future is ever being shaped. We have explored the County from end to end, we have mounted her uplands, we have traversed her fens, we have clambered her earthworks, we have entered her churches. Her Manor-houses have told us their tale of struggle, her Colleges have borne their witness to the growth of knowledge. We have been able to

"Watch Time's full river as it flows";

and the pathos of all that has come and gone stands out before us, as a record more thrilling than the most daring romance, as a theme more inspiring than the n.o.blest poem. We bid good-bye to the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely feeling that no hue of dulness attaches to them, as is commonly supposed by the unappreciative crowd, but that rather the footprints of the past which abound within their borders give promise of a future that shall not be unworthy of what has gone before.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Old Court of Corpus._]

ADDENDA.

Attention should have been called to two remarkable ecclesiastical inscriptions, on the Eastern and Western borders of our district respectively.

In the upland churchyard of Castle Camps (p. 206), hard by the Priest's Door into the Chancel, a tombstone has the following epitaph:

Mors Mortis Morti mortem nisi morte dedisset aeternae Vitae janua clausa foret.

["Except the Death of Death Death's death by death had been Ne'er would Eternal Life with door unshut be seen."]

And in the church of Fen Stanton, low down amid the Ouse meadows near St. Ives, is the following ancient rebus (also hard by the Priest's Door):

QV A D T M P OS NGVIS IRVS RISTI VLCEDINE AVIT H SA M X D L