The thanksgiving of the next day, Sunday, held by the Yorkists in the Abbey was one of those services in which the victors in a battle have always adopted the Almighty as a partisan. In the same time-honoured fashion the King of Prussia, delighting in the defeats of the French in the war of 1870–71, was in the habit of exclaiming “Gott mitt uns,” and sending pious telegrams to the Queen, caricatured by the humorist of the time—
“Rejoice with me, my dear Augusta,
We’ve had another awful buster;
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below—
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”
The thanksgiving was followed next day by a ruthless, cold-blooded massacre of those who had been hiding in the town. On the Tuesday the great nobles, leaders in the fight, were executed, and the Yorkist vengeance was complete.
The nodding old gabled houses of Tewkesbury—many of them nodding so amazingly that it is surprising they do not fall—include a number of ancient inns: the “Wheatsheaf” and the “Bell” prominent among them. The “Bell,” hard by the Abbey and the old flour-mills, has a bowling-green and owns associations with Mrs. Craik’s once-popular story, John Halifax, Gentleman: which, I believe, was considered eminently a tale for the young person. “No,” said a bookseller long since, in my own hearing, to a hesitating prospective purchaser, “it is not a novel: it is an improving story, and may be read on Sundays.” I do not know what is read by the young person nowadays, either on Sundays or week-days, but I am quite sure it is not John Halifax, Gentleman, and I am equally sure that the young person will in these times resent any choice made for him or her, and read or not read what he or she chooses. But the monument to Mrs. Craik in the Abbey is inscribed to the author of the book, and as it is evidently a great source of interest to visitors, John Halifax is perhaps not quite so out-of-date as we suppose him to be.
The “Hop Pole” and the “Swan,” in their present form, belong to a later age; the first being the house where Mr. Pickwick and his friends made merry and drank so astonishingly. But the “Old Black Bear,” as you leave the town for Worcester, is easily the most picturesque of all; in itself and in its situation by the rugged old Avon bridge. The sign was, of course, originally that of the “Bear and Ragged Staff.”
CHAPTER XXIII
Clopton House—Billesley—The Home of Shakespeare’s Mother, Wilmcote—Aston Cantlow—Wootton Wawen—Shakespeare Hall, Rowington.
There is a mansion of much local fame rather more than a mile out of Stratford, off the Henley road: the manor-house of Clopton, for long past the seat of the Hodgson family, but formerly that of one of the ancient families of Clopton, who are found not only in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, but in Suffolk as well. Widespread as they once were, I believe that the very name is now extinct.
There is necessarily much mention of the Clopton name in these pages, for Sir Hugh Clopton was the great fifteenth-century benefactor of Stratford. He was a younger son of the owner of this manor. The house has been time and again altered and partly rebuilt, but it still contains portraits of the Cloptons on the great Jacobean staircase, and painted on the walls of an attic, once used as a secret chapel by Roman Catholics, are to this day the black-letter texts upon which Ambrose Rookwood, prominent in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, must have looked. He had rented Clopton House for a time, in order to be conveniently near his friends, and to the meeting-place on Dunsmore, which the conspirators had appointed the scene of their rebellion when King and Parliament should have been blown sky-high by Guy Fawkes’ thirty-two barrels of gunpowder. After the failure of the plot and the arrest of the conspirators, the High Bailiff of Stratford was instructed to seize Ambrose Rookwood’s effects at Clopton House. An inventory of them is preserved in the Birthplace Museum at Stratford, and affords some quaint reading. Chalices, crosses, crucifixes, and a variety of obviously Papist articles, are in company with “an oulde cloake bagge,” whose value was sixpence, and “a white nagge,” twenty shillings. The High Bailiff evidently cleared the house, taking all he could find, for mention is made of “one pair of old boots, 2d. these being the goods of Ambrose Fuller.” There is a further note that Ambrose Fuller had his old boots restored to him; the High Bailiff being presumably unable to find anything treasonable in them.