Nooks and Corners of Old England

by Allan Fea

Some three miles to the west of Worsborough is Wentworth Castle (a successor to the older castle, the remains of which stood on the high ground above), called by some Stainborough Hall to distinguish it from Wentworth Woodhouse. The historic house stands high, commanding fine views, but marred by mining chimney-shafts on the adjacent hills. The exterior of the mansion is classic and formal, and exteriorly there is little older than the time of George I.; the interior, however, takes us back another century or more, and the panelled porters' hall and carved black oak staircase were old when powdered wigs were introduced. In Queen Anne's State rooms and in the cosy ante-chambers there are rich tapestries, wonderful old cabinets, and costly china, reminding one of the treasures of Holland House. But the finest room is the picture gallery, one hundred and eighty feet in length and twenty-four feet in breadth, and very lofty. The ceiling represents the sky with large gold stars, and has a curious effect of making it appear much higher than it really is. It belongs to the time of the second Earl of Strafford, who built all this part of the house. The unfortunate first earl looks down from the wall with dark melancholy eyes: a face full of character and determination, and different vastly from the dreamy weakness revealed in the profile of the sovereign who cut his head off. The despotic ruler of Ireland is said to walk the chambers of the castle with his head under his arm, which, strangely enough, seems to be the fashion with decapitated ghosts; and Strafford is a busy ghost, for he has to divide his haunting among two other mansions, Wentworth Woodhouse and Temple Newsam. Here is Oliver, too, who made as great a mistake as Charles did by resorting to the axe. The young Earl of Pembroke looks handsome in his long fair ringlets; and so does the youthful Henrietta, Baroness Wentworth (a pretty childish figure fondling a dog), whose end was every way as tragic as her kinsman's.

Many of the bedrooms are named after birds and flowers, a pretty idea that we have not met elsewhere. The colour blue predominates in those we call to mind, namely, the "Blue-tit room," the "Kingfisher room," the "Peacock room," the "Cornflower room," and the "Forget-me-not room." Just outside the park, near a house that was formerly kept as a menagerie, is a comfortable old-fashioned inn, the "Strafford Arms," the landlord of which was butler to two generations of the Vernon-Wentworths, and in consequence he is quite an authority on genealogical matters; and where his memory does not serve, has Debrett handy at his elbow. Being a Somersetshire man he has brought the hospitality of the western counties with him to the northern heights. He points with pride to the cricket-ground behind the inn, the finest "pitch" in Yorkshire.

TOMB, DARFIELD CHURCH.

Let us avoid the town of Barnsley and turn eastwards towards Darfield, whose interest is centred in its church. The ceilings of the aisles, presumably like the picture gallery at Wentworth Castle, are supposed to represent the heavens, but the colour is inclined to be sea-green, and the clouds and stars are feathery. A fine Perpendicular font is surmounted by an elaborate Jacobean cover; opposite, at the east end of the church, is a fine but rather dilapidated tomb of a fourteenth-century knight and his dame, and the effigy of the latter gives a good idea of the costume of Richard II.'s time. Upon a wooden stand close by there is a chained Bible, and the support looks so light that one would think the whole could be carried off bodily, until one tries its prodigious weight.

Another tomb, of the Willoughbys of Parham, bears upon it some strange devices, including an owl with a crown upon its head. The seventeenth-century oak pews and some earlier ones with carved bench-ends, add considerably to the interest of the interior. The ancient coffer in the vestry, as well as a carved oak chest and chairs, must not pass unnoticed.

Barnborough to the east, and Great Houghton to the north-east, are both famous in their way; the former for a traditional fight between a man and a wild cat, which for ferocity knocked points off the Kilkenny record. The Hall was once the property of Sir Thomas More (another of those beheaded martyrs who are doomed to walk the earth with their heads under their arms), and contains a "priest's hole," which, had it existed in the Chancellor's day, might have tempted him to try and save his life. Great Houghton Hall, the ancient seat of the Roders (a brass to whom may be seen in Darfield church), is now an inn, indeed has been an inn for over half a century. Once having been a stately mansion, it has an air of mystery and romance; and there are rumours that before it lost caste, in the transition stage between private and public life, one of its chambers remained draped in black, in mourning for the Earl of Strafford's beheading on Tower Hill in 1641. It is a huge building of many mullioned windows and pinnacled gables; but within the last two years the upper part of the big bays of the front have been destroyed, and a verandah introduced which spoils this side, and whoever planned this alteration can have had but little reverence for ancient buildings. The rooms on the ground floor are mostly bare; but ascending a wide circular stone staircase, with carved oak arches overhead, there are pleasant surprises in store. You step into the spacious "Picture gallery," devoid of ancestral portraits truly, but with panelled walls and Tudor doorways. The mansion was stripped of its furniture over a century and a half ago, but there are chairs of the Chippendale period to compensate, and a great wardrobe of the Stuart period too big presumably to get outside. Two bedrooms are panelled from floor to ceiling and have fine overmantels, one of which has painted panels depicting "Life" and "Death." But a great portion of the house is dilapidated, and to see its ornamental plaster ceilings one would have to risk disappearing through the floors below, like the demon in the pantomime. Mine host of the "Old Hall Inn" is genuinely sympathetic, and is quite of the opinion that the oak fittings that have been removed would look best in their original position; and this is only natural, for he has lived there all his life, and his mother was born in the house; and he proudly points at the Jacobean pew in the adjacent church where as a child he sat awestruck, holding his grandfather's hand while the good old gentleman took his forty winks. The little church in its cabbage-grown enclosure is quite an untouched gem, with formal array of seventeenth-century pews with knobby ends, a fine carved oak pulpit and sounding-board. Its exterior is non-ecclesiastical in appearance, with rounded stone balustrade ornamentation. While photographing the building an interested party observed that he had lived at Houghton all his life, but had never observed there was a door on that side,—a proof that residents in a place rarely see the most familiar objects. Nevertheless, he discovered the door of the "Old Hall," and entered.

Pontefract Castle, so rich in historical associations, is disappointing, because there is so little of it left. It is difficult in these fragmentary but ponderous walls to imagine the fortress as it appeared in the days of Elizabeth. From an ancient print of that time it looks like a fortified city, with curious pinnacles and turrets upon its many towers. The great round towers of the keep had upon the summit quite a collection, like intermediate pawns and castles from a chessboard. The curtain walls connected seven round towers, and there were a multitude of square towers within. There is something very suggestive of the Duncan-Macbeth stronghold in the narrow stairway between those giant rounded towers. It is like a tomb, and one shudders at the thought of the "narrow damp chambers" in the thickness of the wall of the Red Tower, where tradition says King Richard II. was done to death. By the irony of fate it was the lot of many proud barons during some part of their career to occupy the least desirable apartment of their castles; and thus it was with Edward II.'s cousin, Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster, who from his own dungeon was brought forth to be beheaded. In a garden near the highwayman's resort, Ferrybridge, above Pontefract, may be seen a stone coffin which was dug up in a field on the outskirts of the castle, and supposed to be that of the unfortunate earl. At Pontefract, too, Lord Rivers, Sir Thomas Vaughan, Sir Richard Grey, and others were hurried into another world by the Protector Richard; so altogether the castle holds a good record for deeds of darkness, and the creepy feeling one has in that narrow stairway between those massive walls is fully justified by past events. The old castle held out stoutly for the king in the Civil Wars. For many months, in 1645, it stood a desperate siege by Fairfax and General Poyntz before the garrison capitulated. Three years later it was captured again for the Royalists by Colonel Morrice, and held with great gallantry against General Lambert even after the execution of Charles I. In the March following, the stronghold surrendered, saving Morrice and five others who had not shown mercy to Colonel Rainsborough when he fell into their hands. These six had the option of escaping if they could within a week. "The garrison," says Lord Clarendon, "made several sallies to effect the desired escape, in one of which Morrice and another escaped; in another, two more got away; and when the six days were expired and the other two remained in the castle, their friends concealed them so effectually, with a stock of provisions for a month, that rendering the castle and assuring Lambert that the six were all gone, and he was unable to find them after the most diligent search, and had dismantled the castle, they at length got off also." There are still some small chambers hewn out of the solid rock on which the castle is built, reached by a subterranean passage on the north side; and perhaps here was the successful lurking-place. Colonel Morrice and his companion, Cornet Blackburn, were afterwards captured in disguise at Lancaster.

In the pleasure gardens of to-day, with various inscription boards specifying the position of the Clifford Tower, Gascoyne's Tower, the King's Tower, and so forth, we get but a hazy idea of this once practically impregnable fortress, covering an area of seven acres. Concerning Richard II.'s death, it is doubtful whether the truth will ever be arrived at. The story that he escaped, and died nineteen years afterwards in Scotland, is less likely than the supposition that he died from the horrors of starvation; on the other hand, the story of the attack by Sir Piers Exton's assassins is almost strengthened by the evidence of a seventeenth-century tourist, who, prior to its destruction in the Civil War, records: "The highest of the seven towers is the Round Tower, in which that unfortunate prince was enforced to flee round a poste till his barbarous butchers inhumanly deprived him of life. Upon that poste the cruell hackings and fierce blowes doe still remaine." Mr. Andrew Lang perhaps can solve this historic mystery; or perhaps he has already done so? New Hall, close at hand, must have been a grand old house; but it is now roofless, and crumbling to decay. It is a picturesque late-Tudor mansion, with a profusion of mullioned windows and a central bay. The little glass that remains only adds to its forlorn appearance.