Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

by Charles G. Harper

Falstaff’s last remark is a play upon the words “Council,” a more or less public body, and “counsel,” private talk. That is to say Shallow will be a fool, and laughed at if he takes so trivial an affair before so weighty a tribunal as the Star Chamber, and would be better advised to seek his friends’ counsel about the affair.

Perhaps the “keeper’s daughter” who was not kissed, was, after all, not kissable, or perhaps the allusion really was an insinuation that Sir Thomas Lucy himself kissed his keeper’s daughter. It was in any event obviously a gibe perfectly easy of comprehension at the time in Stratford and round about, and enshrines some forgotten scandalous gossip.

These are passages that the Baconians boggle at. They cannot be explained away by any ingenuity, and thus form a convincing stand-by for those hardened and unrepentant folk who still believe that Shakespeare wrote his own plays. The play upon the name of Lucy and the luces in the family arms is too direct to be mistaken. Master Shallow is a Justice of the Peace in Gloucestershire, and Sir Thomas Lucy was an ornament of the Bench both in that shire and in Warwickshire. The “dozen white louses,” instead of the three which would match with the number of luces in the Lucy arms, were no doubt a variant introduced by the dramatist in order to keep himself clear of those very Star Chamber proceedings with which Sir John Falstaff was threatened. One might not in those times defame with impunity a man’s coat of arms.

A further objection to the Baconian authorship, if necessary, is to be found in the extreme unlikeliness of Bacon, who himself was armigerous, casting such patent ridicule upon the heraldic achievement of one with whom he had no quarrel. In the case of Shakespeare, the animus is abundantly evident.

The way to Charlecote is over the Clopton Bridge and to the left. It is the Kineton road. Past Tiddington the way goes level, along the beautiful roads shaded by the luxuriant hedgerow timber we expect in these parts; and presently, when we have begun impatiently to wonder when Charlecote will come into view, a lodge and entrance are seen on the left side of the highway.

We hear much of the passing shows of this world, but we have often to marvel at their permanence. The kith and kin of Shakespeare are all gone long ago, but here at Charlecote are still Lucys. There have been Lucys of Charlecote since 1216, and their “old coat” is still displayed over this entrance to the park. They are not, it is true, of the old unmixed blood, and the present family own the name only by adoption, the direct line having been broken in 1786, when a second cousin, the Rev. John Hammond, inherited the property and assumed the name of Lucy. The present owner also, Mr. Fairfax-Lucy, assumed the name on marrying one of the two daughters of Mr. Henry Spenser Lucy, who died in 1890.

There are but three luces, or pikes, in the old coat of the Charlecote Lucys. They are displayed, in herald’s language, thus: “gules, semée of crosses crosslet, three luces hauriant argent;” that is to say, on a red ground sown with silver crosses-crosslet, three silver pike in an upright position, rising to take breath. The family motto is “By truth and diligence.” On old deeds sealed with the Lucy seal the three pike are shown intertwined.

The park, well-wooded, but only about 250 acres in extent, presents a fine picture viewed from these gates, but the mansion is not seen; the chief approach being a considerable distance along the main road, and thence along a public by-road to the village of Charlecote. Crossing a bridge over the Wellesbourne stream which joins the Avon in the park, the locally celebrated “Tumble-down Stile” is immediately on the right hand. This is a wooden fence not by its appearance to be distinguished above any other fence of wood, but so contrived that the stranger unversed in its trick, and seeking to climb over it to the footpath beyond, suddenly finds one end collapsing and himself most likely on the ground. This contrivance, generally understood to have been a freak of the late Mr. Henry Spenser Lucy, keeps the village of Charlecote supplied with a stock of elementary humour all the year round, and is invariably pointed out by fly-men driving visitors from Stratford. Not every one who comes to Shakespeare Land comes with the capacity for fully understanding and being interested in its literary and historic features, but all have the comprehension of this within their reach.