Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

by Charles G. Harper

The chancel of St. Mary’s, together with the chapter-house on the north side of it and the Beauchamp Chapel on the south, escaped the fire, and remain uninjured to this day. It is possible to peer through the locked iron gates of the chancel from the nave, which is the only portion of the church that is to be seen without payment, but to see the chapter-house, and the Beauchamp Chapel, to descend to the crypt and to mount the tower, you must pay and pay and pay again. The clergy in all the wide radius of the Shakespeare Country have the keenest scent for sixpences, and would make excellent business men. Better business men than clergymen, for all I know. They have long since learnt to charge and to keep their doors locked until their charges are satisfied; and none understand the business better than those who have the keeping of St. Mary’s at Warwick. But, when you have paid for this and for that and for t’other, and are resting and reading, and possibly making notes in the nave, it is gross, I say, and offensive and blackguardly to be followed up and spied upon and to be asked if you are sketching! “Because if you are it will be half-a-crown.” I will now leave this unsavoury subject, wishing the clergy and churchwardens of St. Mary’s more enlightenment and the people they employ better discretion.

The chancel, or choir, founded by Thomas Beauchamp, twelfth Earl of Warwick, who died 1369, is a stately Perpendicular work, with the altar-tomb of the founder and his wife Katharine, who died the same year, in the middle. His armoured effigy, with crosses crosslet displayed on the breastplate, rests its feet upon a bear, and at the feet of his wife is a lamb. He holds his wife’s hand.

Around the tomb, in niches, are small figures representing members of the family, thirty-six in all. In a grave near by, unmarked by any monument or inscription, lies William Parr, brother of Katharine Parr, last and surviving wife of Henry the Eighth. He was created Marquis of Northampton, and died in 1571, sunk to such poverty that no money was forthcoming to bury him. A few years later, Queen Elizabeth found a trifle, and he was decently interred, but no one ever thought it worth while to mark his resting-place.

Passing the greatly-enriched Easter Sepulchre in the north wall, the Chapter House is entered by a corridor. In the centre of this building stands the enormous monument to Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who was murdered by his man-servant in 1628. “Delaying to reward one Hayward, an antient servant that had spent the most of his time in attendance upon him,” says Dugdale, “he received a mortall stab in the back by the same man, then private with him in his bed-chamber at Brooke House in London, 30th Sept. ann. 1628, who, to consummate the tragedy, went into another room, and, having lockit the dore, pierced his own bowells with a sword.”

The crypt is the oldest part of St. Mary’s, with Norman pillars. It contains the old ducking-stool for scolding women.

The entrance to that most gorgeous relic of old St. Mary’s, the Beauchamp Chapel, which is the principal item in the list of these ecclesiastical showmen, is on the east side of the south transept. The mortuary magnificence of the Beauchamps obscures the dedication of the Chapel to Our Lady, and the generations that have passed since the building of it between the years 1443 and 1464, and its final consecration in 1475, have rightly agreed to style it by the name by which it now, and always has been, popularly known. It reminds one very keenly of the insincere modern cant phrase which forms the dedication of memorial stained-glass windows. “To the Glory of God and to the memory of —,” a shabby sop to the Almighty at which the soul revolts. The very entrance is obviously proprietary, and shows us that this is really the Beauchamp mausoleum.

It is a magnificent entrance, a very highly-enriched work in panelled and sculptured stone, with the Warwick Bear and Ragged Staff on either side, facing the Beauchamp shield of crosses crosslet. Near it, on the wall, and green with neglect, is the fine brass to Thomas Beauchamp, thirteenth Earl of Warwick, who died in 1401, and of his wife Margaret, who died 1406. It seems strange that out of all the money contributed by visitors, and chiefly on account of the Beauchamp monuments, there cannot be some small surplus set aside for a restoration of the altar-tomb on which these figures were placed up to that time when the great fire destroyed it and much of the church. It is not well that so fine an example should remain on a wall; the most unsuitable position for a monumental brass. The Earl, who is given the old original name of the Norman Beauchamps who came over with the Conqueror—“Bellocampo,” meaning “fair field”—is in complete armour, which has, besides the crosses crosslet of the family arms, a decorative border of ragged staves around his helmet. The Countess is habited in an heraldic mantle of crosses crosslet.

This Thomas Beauchamp was not so great or distinguished a man as his son, in whose honour the Beauchamp Chapel was erected.