XXVII
Alnwick is a town with a great past and a somnolent present. There are yawns at every turn, echoes with every footfall, and grass growing unbidden in the streets. But there are forces of elemental power at Alnwick, little though the stranger suspects them. There have of late years been periods of storm and stress in the columns of the Alnwick Gazette, for instance, respecting the local water-supply, which have drawn forth inappropriately fiery letters from correspondents, together with many mixed metaphors. How is this for impassioned writing?—“The retributive forces of well-balanced justice have, after a dead ebb, returned with a swelling tide, and overtaken the arrogative policy of the freeholders.” But this is nothing to the following striking figure of “the arm of scandalous jobbery steeped to the lips in perfidious dishonour;” a delightful literary image unsurpassed in Ireland itself; or “another hydra of expense arising phoenix-like from the ashes of misgovernment.” Did the word “hydrant,” we wonder, suggest this last period? Is the dulness of Alnwick due to the decay following the corruption hinted at? Perhaps, for, as this publicist next inquires, “How could anything symbolical of greatness, wrapped with ropes of sand, ever and for aye, flourish like the green bay-tree?” Ah! how? It is a difficult question to answer, and so we will leave the question at that.
Alnwick, of course, derives its name from its situation on the romantic Aln: the “wick,” or village on that river. The name is kin to that of many other “wicks,” “weeks,” and “wykes” in England, and has its fellows in such places as High Wycombe; Wykeham (now spelt Wickham) in Hampshire, whence came William of Wykeham; the village of Week, near Winchester; and in the town named simply Wick, in the north of Scotland. Alnwick in these times is a place of a certain grim and lowering picturesqueness. Its grey stone houses are at one with the greyness of the Northumbrian skies, and a general air of barren stoniness impresses the traveller as its chief feature. It is an effect of prisons and jailers which reaches its height in the open space that fronts the barbican of the castle. You look, instinctively, for His Majesty’s prison regulations on the outer walls, and, approaching the gate, expect a warder’s figure at the wicket.
This is no uncongenial aspect of that old fortress. It is rather in the Italian drawing-rooms, the picture-galleries, and the Renaissance luxuries of the interior of the castle that the jarring note is struck and all association with feudal times forgotten. Many a Border moss-trooper has unwillingly passed through this grim barbican, and so left the world for ever; and many more of higher estate have found this old stronghold of the Percies a place of lifelong durance, or have in its dungeons met a secret end. For chivalry was not inconsistent with midnight murder or treachery, and the Percies, centred in their fortress like spiders in their webs, had all the virtues and the vices of chivalric times. Ambitious and powerful, they were alike a bulwark against the Scots and a menace to successive kings of England, and none in those olden times could have approached their castle gate with the equable pulsation of the modern tourist. In those times, instead of finding a broad level open space here, a deep ditch would have been seen and a drawbridge must have been lowered before access was possible. Then possibly the stone figures in violent attitudes that line the battlements, and seem to be casting missiles down upon the heads of visitors, may have been alarming; to-day we only wonder if they could ever have tricked even the most bat-eyed warrior into a belief that they were really living men-at-arms.
The Percies, whose name attaches more than any other to Alnwick, were, strictly speaking, never its owners. The first of that name came over to England with the Conqueror in the person of William de Percy, a younger son of the feudal lord of the village of Percie in Normandy, which still exists to point out to the curious tourist the spot whence this historic family sprang. This William de Percy was nicknamed “Als Gernons,” or “Whiskers,” whence derives the name of Algernon, even now a favourite one with the Smithson-Percies. “Whiskers” was present at the battle of Hastings, and for his aid was granted manors in Hampshire, Lincolnshire, and York, but none in Northumberland. He died in 1086, when with the Crusaders, near Jerusalem. The Percies never became connected in any way with Alnwick, for the family of this William de Percy became extinct in 1166, when Agnes, an only child of his descendant, married Josceline de Lovaine; and it was not until 1309 that the descendant of this Lovaine, who had assumed the Percy name, came into wrongful possession of the vast estates. Alnwick and sixty other baronies in Northumberland had until then been in possession of the de Vescis, of whom Yvo de Vesci was the original Norman owner. His descendant, William de Vesci, who died in 1297, was the last of his line, and appears to have been of a peculiarly trusting disposition. He put a great (and an unfounded) faith in the honesty of churchmen, leaving all his estates to Anthony Bek, Prince-Bishop of Durham, in trust for an infant illegitimate son, until he should come of age. But Bek picked a quarrel with his ward, and in 1309 sold the lands to Henry Percy, who thus became the first Baron Percy of Alnwick.
But let us not do an injustice to the Church. Prince-Bishops were kittle cattle, an amorphous kind of creature. Perhaps his lay half impelled Bek to this knavery, and, following the Scriptural injunction not to let the right hand know what is done by the left, his clerical moiety remained in ignorance of the crime. Heaven be praised, there are no longer any of these Jekyll and Hyde creatures, for the Bishops-Palatine of Durham were abolished two generations or more since.
There were, in the fulness of time, three Barons Percy of Alnwick, and then the Barony was erected into the Earldom of Northumberland. The axe and the sword took heavy toll of this new line, for the Earls of Northumberland seldom died in their beds, and father and son often followed one another in a bloody death, until at length they became extinct with the death of the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland. Of these eleven, only seven died a natural death. There were Percies who fell in battle; others who, rightly or wrongly, met the death of traitors; one was torn to pieces by a mob; and another was obscurely done to death in prison. Nor did only the heads of the family end violently; their sons and other relations led lives as turbulent, and finished as suddenly.
The only child of the eleventh Earl of Northumberland was a daughter, Elizabeth Percy. She married firstly the Earl of Ogle; secondly, Thomas Thynne of Longleat, who was murdered in Pall Mall in 1682 by Count Koningsmarck; and thirdly, the sixth Duke of Somerset; thus bringing the Percy estates into the Seymour family, and the Percy red hair as well.
It was of red-haired Elizabeth Percy, when Duchess of Somerset, that Dean Swift wrote the bitter and diabolically clever lines that are supposed to have lost him all chance of becoming a bishop. He wrote of her as “Carrots”:—
Beware of carrots from Northumberland,
Carrots sown Thynne a deep root may get,
If so be they are in Sumer set;
Their cunnings mark thou; for I have been told
They assassin when young and poison when old.
Root out those carrots, O thou whose name
Is backwards and forwards always the same.
The one whose name was backwards and forwards alike was Queen Anne, for Swift’s purpose “Anna.” It will be noticed that Swift not very obscurely hints that Elizabeth Percy connived at murder.
Her eldest son, the seventh Duke of Somerset, had, curiously enough, only one child, a daughter. She married “the handsomest man of his time,” Sir Hugh Smithson, in 1740, and thus the property came into the hands of the present holders.
This most fortunate, as well as most handsome, fellow was Sir Hugh Smithson, one of a family of Yorkshire squires whose ancestor gained a baronetcy, created 1660, for his services to the Stuarts. Sir Hugh, horn 1714, a son of Langdale Smithson, and grandson of another Sir Hugh, the third baronet, had little early prospect of much position in life. He was a younger son, and, like many another such, he went into trade. He was an apothecary. Having succeeded as fourth baronet to position and wealth, and with what he had made in commerce, the “handsomest man” made this very handsome marriage. He had the aristocratic instinct, and, discarding his old name, took that of Percy, to which, of course, he had no sort of right.
For him in 1749 was revived the old title, Earl of Northumberland, together with that of Baron Warkworth. In 1766 he became further, Duke of Northumberland and Earl Percy, and died 1786.
The name of Percy is one to conjure with. The Lovaines, who had assumed it, made it famous in the annals of chivalry, with a thousand deeds of derring-do in the debateable lands. Smithson, too, is a good name. It at least tells of descent from an honest craftsman, and Sir Hugh’s knighted ancestor had, obviously, done nothing to be ashamed of. Unfortunately for Sir Hugh and his successors, this unwarranted assumption of an historic name took place so well within the historic period that it is never likely to be forgotten. George the Third, who also had the instinct of aristocracy, kept the fact well in mind, and when, sorely against his will, he was obliged to confer the Dukedom of Northumberland upon this ex-apothecary, consoled himself by vowing that he should never obtain the Order of the Garter. The duke personally solicited a blue ribbon from the king, and observed that he was “the first Percy who has been refused the Garter.” “You forget,” replied his Majesty, “that you are the first Smithson who has ever asked for it.”
The huge and historic stronghold of Alnwick had by this time become ruinous, and the Smithson duke was for a while uncertain whether to reside here or at Warkworth. Alnwick, however, found favour with him, and he set to work to render it a place worthy of one of his quality. To this end he wrought havoc with the feudal antiquities of the castle, pulling down the ancient chapel and several of the towers, filling up the moats, plastering the walls and ceilings, enlarging arrow-slits into great windows, and playing the very devil with the place. The military history of the castle, as expressed in the picturesque irregularity of successive alterations and additions during many centuries, was swept away by his zeal for uniformity, and the interior rooms were remodelled in the taste of that age, to serve for a residence, to such an extent that only the outer walls retained even the appearance of a castle. When Pennant wrote of it in 1767, he said:—“You look in vain for any marks of the grandeur of the feudal age; for trophies won by a family eminent in our annals for military prowess and deeds of chivalry; for halls hung with helms and hauberks” (good alliteration, that! but rash for Cockney repetition), “or with the spoils of the chase; for extensive forests or for venerable oaks. The apartments are large, and lately finished with a most incompatible elegance. The gardens are equally inconsistent, trim in the highest degree, and more adapted to a villa near London than to the ancient seat of a great baron.” It was to this criticism of “trimness” that Bishop Percy objected. Discussing Pennant with Dr. Johnson, he could not sit quietly and hear him praise a man who had spoken so disrespectfully of Alnwick Castle and the Duke’s pleasure-grounds, and he eagerly opposed the Doctor, evidently with some heat, for Johnson said, “He has done what he intended; he has made you very angry.” To which the Bishop replied, “He has said the garden is trim, which is representing it like a citizen’s parterre, when the truth is, there is a very large extent of fine turf and gravel walks.”
“According to your own account, sir,” rejoined Johnson, “Pennant is right. It is trim. Here is grass cut close and gravel rolled smooth. Is not that trim? The extent is nothing against that; a mile may be as trim as a square yard.” The Bishop was vanquished.
All the sham Gothic alterations made at a huge outlay by the first Duke (with the exception of one room, which remains to show how atrocious his style was) were swept away by Algernon, the fourth Duke, about 1855, and at a still greater cost replaced internally with an interminable series of salons in the Italian style. Externally, the castle is a mediæval fortress; internally it is an Italian palace. These works cost over £300,000, and serve to show the measure of ducal folly. Make a man a duke and give him an income commensurate, and he goes mad and builds and rebuilds, burying himself in masonry like a maggot in a cheese. But it is good for trade; and perhaps that is why Providence allows a duke to be created now and then.
This magnificence for a long time created its own Nemesis, and the Dukes of Northumberland, in their gigantic castle, were worse off in one respect than a clerk in London suburbs in a six-roomed, nine-inch walled, jerry-built “villa” at £30 a year. They could never get a hot dinner! The kitchen is large enough, and the fireplace so huge that the fire cannot be made up without shovelling on a ton of coals; but the dining-room is so far away, and the communication was so bad (involving going across courtyards open to the sky) that everything was cold before it reached table. This has been remedied, and my lords dukes now have their food sent to them along rails on trolleys—just as they feed the beasts at the Zoo.
The Dukes of Northumberland are well titled. They are autocrats in that county, owning as they do 181,616 of its acres, and drawing a rental of £161,874. Some of them have been insufferably egotistical. The “Brislec” Tower, built on the neighbouring height of Brislaw by the first Duke, is evidence sufficient to prove that. It is a monument by himself to his own doings, and invites the pilgrim, in a long bombastical inscription, to “Look around, behold,” and marvel at the plantations with which he caused the bare hillsides to be covered.
But the most prominent memorial in Alnwick is the well-named “Farmers’ Folly,” erected to the second Duke in 1816. Entering or leaving the town, it is a most striking object: a pillar 85 feet in height with the Percy lion on its summit. What did the second Duke do to deserve this? Did he serve his country in war? Was he a statesman? Was he benevolent to the tenants who erected it? Not at all. Here is the story.
When the nineteenth century dawned we were at war with France, and wheat and all kinds of produce were at enormously enhanced prices. The farmers, therefore, began to do very well. Their banking-accounts swelled, and some of them were on the way to realise small fortunes. The Duke saw this and sorrowed because they found it possible to do more than exist, and accordingly he added to their rents, doubling in almost every instance—and in many others quadrupling—them. But when the country entered on the long peace that followed Waterloo, and prices fell enormously, the unfortunate farmers found it impossible to pay their way under these added burdens. Mark the ducal generosity! As they could not pay, he reduced the rents by twenty-five per cent.! Like a draper at his annual sale, he effected a “great reduction,” an “alarming sacrifice,” by taking off a percentage of what he had already imposed. How noble! Then the tenants, the grateful fellows, subscribed to build the column, which is inscribed: “To Hugh, Duke of Northumberland, by a grateful and united tenantry.” Having done this, they went into bankruptcy and the workhouse, or emigrated, or just gave up their farms because they could not carry on any longer. The money they had subscribed did not suffice to complete this testimonial to Duke Hugh’s benevolence, and so—a comic opera touch—he subscribed the rest, and finished it himself. What humorists these Smithsons are!
