A high grassy ridge stands up from the plain; and upon it, white and salient against a dark cloud, the spire of a village church. From its belfry, says the sexton, you may spy forty parishes: but more important are the few cottages immediately below. They seem conspicuously inglorious: yet their name is written large in the histories. It speaks of a bright June day when along this ridge—then unenclosed and scattered with broom and heath flowers—the rattle of musketry and outcries of battle rolled from morning to late afternoon, by which time was lost a king with his kingdom. For the village is Naseby. Here, by the market green, the Parliamentarians ranged their baggage. Yonder, on Mill Hill and Broad Moor, with just a hollow between, the two armies faced each other; the royalists with bean-stalks in their hats, their enemies with badges of white linen. To the left, Sulby hedges were lined with Ireton’s dragoons. And the rest is an old story: Rupert, tardily returning from a headlong charge, finds no “cause” left to befriend, no foe to fight. While his men were pillaging, Cromwell has snatched the day. His Majesty is flying through Market-Harborough towards Leicester, and thither along the dusty roads his beaten regiments trail after him, with the Ironsides at their heels, hewing hip and thigh.
NASEBY MONUMENT
An obelisk, set about with thorn-bushes and shaded by oak and birch, marks the battle-field. It rests on a base of rough moss-grown stones, and holds out “a useful lesson to British kings never to exceed the bounds of their just prerogative, and to British subjects never to swerve from the allegiance due to their legitimate monarch.” And the advice is well meant, no doubt; but, as the Watch asked of Dogberry, “How if they will not?”
The Avon from Noseby field to Wolston
Naseby, however, has another boast. Here, beside the monument, we are standing on the water-shed of England. In the fields below rise many little springs, whereof those to the south and east unite to form the Ise brook, which runs into the Nen, and so find their goal in the North Sea; those to the west form the Avon, and seek the British Channel. And it is westward that we turn our faces—we, whom you shall briefly know as P. and Q.; for the business that brings us to Naseby is to find here the source of Shakespeare’s Avon, and so follow its windings downward to the Severn.
