The Grevilles, the present Earls of Warwick, have a motto to their coat of arms which is a complete change from the usual swashbuckling braggart sentiments. He was surely a singularly modest man who first adopted it. I wish I could identify him. He must have read well the history of Warwick Castle and have pondered on the successive families of cuckoos who have nested in the old home of the original owners. He selected a quotation from the Metamorphoses of that amorous dove, P. Ovidius Naso—O! quite a proper one, I assure you—Vix ea nostra voco, “I can scarce call these things our own.” Whether he meant the heirlooms, the mace that belonged to the great Richard Neville “the Kingmaker,” the Plantagenet and the Dudley relics, or if he were a contemplative philosopher ruminating on the Law of Entail, by which he was not owner, to do with as he would, but only tenant-for-life, who shall say?
CHAPTER XXVI
Guy’s Cliff—The legend of Guy—Kenilworth and its watersplash—Kenilworth Castle.
Leamington will scarcely interest the holiday-maker in Shakespeare land. From Warwick to Kenilworth is the more natural transition, and it is one of much interest. A mile and a half out of the town is that famous place of popular legend, Guy’s Cliff, where the great mansion, standing beside the river and built in 1822, looks so ancient, and where, on the opposite shore of Avon, stands that mill whose highly picturesque features are a standing dish in railway carriage picture-galleries. The impossible armour of the mythical Guy of Warwick we have already seen in Warwick Castle, and the improbable legend of his hermit life in the riverside cave remains now to be told.
Guy, returning from the Holy Land and successfully engaging as the champion of England against Colbrond, the giant Dane, in combat at Winchester, retraced his steps towards Warwick. There, unknown by any, he three days appeared among the poor at the Castle gate, as one of the thirteen people to whom his wife daily gave alms; and “having rendred thanks to her, he repaired to an Heremite that resided among the shady woods hard by.” The legend forgets to tell us why he did this, and does not explain how it was that this giant fellow, who apparently was eight feet high, was not recognised by his wife and others. Were they all eight feet tall, or thereabouts, at Warwick in those times?
But it would be wasting time to apply the test of intelligent criticism to this mass of accumulated legends, to which many generations have added something. Guy is a mythical hero, built upon the exploits of some early British champion, whose name and real history are as past recall as the facts about King Arthur. But the great fourteenth-century Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who founded the chapel here, seems to have believed in him and in the size of him, for Guy’s mutilated effigy placed here by that great earl, whose faith must have been as robust as his body, is the full eight feet long.
At any rate, here is the cave of the hermit he consulted with, and with whom he resided, unknown still to his friends, until that holy and rheumatic man died. Here he himself died, two years later, A.D. 929, aged seventy. Thus the story seeks to bolster up the wild character of its details by the specious exactness of its dates. “He sent to his Lady their Wedding Ring by a trusty servant, wishing her to take care of his burial; adding also that when she came, she should find him lying dead in the Chapel, before the altar, and moreover, that within xv dayes after, she herself should depart this life.”
Guy’s Cave, excavated in the rock, appears really to have been a hermit’s abode in Saxon times. His name seems, from the early twelfth-century Saxon inscription found here over a hundred years ago, to have been “Guhthi.” It runs “Yd Crist-tu icniecti this i-wihtth, Guhthi”; which has been rendered, “Cast out, thou Christ, from Thy servant this burden, Guhthi.” So romance is not altogether unjustified, and although this misguided anchorite did not appreciate scenery, we at any rate can thus find some historical excuse as well as a scenic one for visiting the spot, with the crowd.
It is a pleasant road, on through Leek Wootton, where the church, after being rebuilt in an odious style in 1792, has been brought more into keeping with later ecclesiastical sentiment. And so the road runs on, to Kenilworth, through the approach called Castle End. Presently, after threading the long street, there in its meadows rises the ruined Castle.
There is no ideal way into Kenilworth nowadays, because the place has become more or less of a town, and numerous Coventry business men make it their suburban home. Thus does Romance disappear, in the daily goings forth and the returnings on their lawful occasions of the residents, and in the spreading of fresh streets and always more cheaply built houses for newer colonies of them. The first jerry-builder at Kenilworth was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose badly bonded additions to the Castle still ruinously show how slightly and hastily he set about the work. But of that anon.