Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

by Charles G. Harper

Leicester and his magnificence, and all the direct lineage of the Dudleys have disappeared long ago. Leicester himself, and after him his brother Ambrose, died childless, and the patronage of the Hospital passed to their sister Mary, who married Sir Henry Sidney of Penshurst. Thence it has descended to Lord de L’isle and Dudley, the present representative of the Dudleys and the Sidneys.

The entrance is by a stone gateway bearing the inscription “Hospitivm Collegiatvm Roberti Dvdlei Comitis Leycestriæ 1571.” The great Dudley’s picturesque buildings deserve to be better kept, for they are among the daintiest examples of highly enriched half-timbering in England. Passing beneath an archway with a sundial overhead, you enter a small quadrangle with a quaint staircase on one side, and gables with elaborate pierced verge-boards looking down upon the scene. The famous Warwick badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff surmounts the finials and lurks under the eaves, in frequent repetition, together with the Porcupine, that of the Sidneys. On the further side, over the windows of the Master’s Lodge, is the painted inscription, “Honour all men; love the brotherhood; fear God; and honour the King,” a quadripartite injunction which we may confidently affirm, no man ever yet observed. Our own—but much more other people’s—natures will have to be very greatly amended before we are prepared to “honour all men.”

You pay sixpence to be shown over the Hospital, and one of the twelve bedesmen acts as guide to the buildings and the very miscellaneous collections accumulated in them. Nowadays the “blue gown” has become black, and the Bear and Ragged Staff badge is in silver, instead of embroidery. A welcome change has come over their headgear. Instead of the more or less rusty silk hats they wore during the greater part of the nineteenth century, they have now a “beefeater” hat similar to those worn by the Tower warders in London, but wholly in black. The bedesmen no longer dine together as once they did, but each separately in his own quarters, because they could not always obey the injunction to “love the brotherhood,” and grew cantankerous in company, and quarrelled; but here is still the kitchen they have in common, containing many other things one does not expect to find in kitchens; an odd assortment, a Malay kris, a Russian helmet from the stricken fields of the Crimea, an oak cabinet from Kenilworth Castle, and a framed piece of needlework said to have been executed by Lady Robert Dudley, whom “historians” will persist in styling either by her maiden name, Amy Robsart, or else by the title of Countess of Leicester, she having died or been murdered many years before her husband became an Earl. Perhaps we had better emphasise the word said. Beneath that framed piece of needlework is a Saxon—more or less Saxon—chair. A piece of Gibraltar rock, polished, is a further item displaying the catholicity of taste displayed here, together with the muskets with which the inmates of the Hospital were armed when the Chartist rising was supposed to threaten the security of Warwick.

The banqueting hall, a surviving portion of the old Guild buildings, very greatly needs restoration. It has been grossly used and subdivided, the Minstrel Gallery having been taken out of it in order to provide a fine additional room for the Master’s residence; the Master being, of course, a clergyman with a fine fat stipend: the person who has the very best of it at Leicester’s Hospital. In this once-beautiful banqueting hall, with its noble roof of Spanish chestnut, whitened with age, James the First was entertained by Fulke Greville in 1617. Coal-bins and wash-houses now subdivide it.

Flights of stone stairs lead up from the Hospital over the West Gate and into the chapel, a fine spacious building where the twelve old men have to attend every week-day morning at ten o’clock and listen to the perfunctory service read by the Master. In addition to this spiritual treat, they attend service at the parish church on Sundays. There is nothing to say about the interior of the chapel; it was “restored” by Sir Gilbert Scott, and so there would not be.

For dulness and pretentious ugliness combined, the town of Warwick would be difficult to match; and the ugliest and dullest part of it is that main street called Jury Street, stretching between the West Gate and the East. The ugliness is due to the great fire of 1694, which destroyed a great part of the town and necessitated a rebuilding at a period when architects were obsessed with the idea of designing “stately” buildings. What they considered stately we nowadays look upon with a shudder and style heavy and unimaginative.

But the weirdest building in the town is that parish church of St. Mary whose tower looks in the distance so stately. There were once ten churches in Warwick and there are now but two. St. Mary’s was almost entirely destroyed in the great fire, in consequence of the frightened townsfolk storing their furniture in it, for safety. The church itself was not threatened, but some of the articles hurriedly placed in it were alight, and thus it shared the fate of much else.

The rebuilding of St. Mary’s was completed in 1704, as an inscription on the tower informs us. I think those who placed that inscription here intended a Latin pun, a play upon the name of Queen Anne and the word anno, for “year”; for thus it runs: “Annaeauspiciis A° memorabili 1704.” One scarcely knows which is the more deplorable, the building or the pun; the first, probably, because not every one can see the play upon words, but the tower is an outrage impossible to escape.

The bulk and loftiness of it are majestic, but its classic details in a Gothic framework have a curious effect on the beholder. They seem, those unhallowed pagan alcoves, mounting stage by stage toward the skies, like some blasphemous insinuation. The nave and transepts, rebuilt at the same time, are, oddly enough, not nearly so offensive, and it is rather a handsome as well as imposing interior that meets the stranger’s gaze. It may be that it seems so much better because, warned by the outside, one expects so much worse. That familiar ornament in classic architecture, the “egg and dart,” is an incongruous detail when worked into the capitals of columns in which the Gothic feeling predominates, and it sounds quite shocking when described; but here it comes with a pleasing, if scarcely ecclesiastical effect in this fine and well-proportioned interior.