Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

by Charles G. Harper

£1000 a day was spent in the feasting and revelling. Everything was done without stint. The great clock on the keep was stopped. “The Clok Bell sang not a Note all the while her Highness waz thear: the Clok also stood still withall, the handz of both the tablz stood firm and fast, allweys pointing at two a Clok.” The hospitable and symbolical meaning of this was that two o’clock was the banqueting hour.

Every time when the Queen went hunting in the park, classic deities, and heroes and heroines of mythology would appear from woodland glades and recite complimentary poems—greatly to the disadvantage of the sport, it may be supposed. Bear-baiting further enlivened the time, and “nyne persons were cured of the peynful and daungerous deseaz called the King’s Evil.”

Kenilworth passed on the death of Leicester in 1588, to his brother, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and on his decease, two years later, to Robert’s illegitimate son, Sir Robert Dudley, who was long an exile, and died in 1649. It was let to Prince Henry, son of James the First, and on his death to his brother, Prince Charles, who purchased it from Sir Robert’s deserted wife, whom he, when Charles the First, created Duchess Dudley, 1645. After the King’s execution the property was granted by Cromwell to some of his supporters, to whom is due its ruinous condition, for they made the best market they could of its building-stone. On the Restoration in 1660, Charles the Second granted it to the Earl of Clarendon, in whose descendants’ hands it still remains.

The visitor to the Castle almost always makes at once for the keep and the imposing ruins of John o’ Gaunt’s great Banqueting Hall, rising boldly from the mound, partly natural and partly artificial, in the centre of the Castle precincts. He thus follows the natural instincts of sightseers, but the better way, for the full understanding of the scale and ancient strength of the works, is unquestionably to first make the inner circuit of the walls. Standing on Clinton Green before entering the Castle, and facing it from the only side not in ancient times defended by lakes or marshy ground, we are on the bank whence Henry the Third’s soldiers chiefly conducted the siege of 1266. It was the weakest part of the works, because the high natural plateau entirely precluded the possibility of continuing the water defences on this side. All that could be done here by the military engineers of Kenilworth was to excavate the deep chasm which still remains; and across this the besiegers vainly tried to pass, with the aid of bundles of faggots thrown into the hollow, while “Master Philip Porpoise,” who, as the chronicler truly says, “was a quaint man,” stood on the walls, dressed up like the Pope’s Legate, and cursed the King and the real Legate and all the King’s men.

Leicester’s great Gatehouse no longer forms the entrance to the Castle, and is in private occupation. It did not even figure in the great reception of Queen Elizabeth in 1575, for she came the other way, through the Tilt Yard and by Mortimer’s Tower, and across the great Outer Ward: a method of approach especially calculated to enhance the stateliness of the pageant. All Warwickshire, I think, must have witnessed those doings, from the further bank of the widespreading lake, among them Mr. John Shakespeare and his eleven-year-old son, William, whose imagination would have been excited by the fantastic creatures that sported on the water, and by the fireworks and the heathen gods and goddesses: very real to him, because he was not old enough to know how it was all done.

You render your entrance-fee at a narrow gate and are at once free to wander at will. In front is the grassy Outer Ward, and on the right, the keep and the state buildings, with Leicester’s Building, lofty, seamed with fissures and shored up against its falling. The eyeless windows preach a homily on the transient nature of things.

But, leaving these for a while, we skirt along to the left, coming to the ruins of Mortimer’s Tower, which stood on the wall and formed the entrance to the Castle in this direction. It looked out upon the Tilt Yard and the massive dam that penned up the waters of the Great Lake. Just before this tower is reached the Water Tower on the wall will be seen, and may be examined. Near at hand are the Stables and Lunn’s Tower, divided off by a light iron fence and not accessible; being included within the grounds belonging to the occupier of the Gatehouse. But the Stables are seen, clearly enough, and form the most charming colour-scheme within the Castle. They are of fifteenth-century red brick, timber-framed, and of an almost unimaginably delicate and yet vivid red.

Next after Mortimer’s Tower comes a small postern gateway, with its steps formerly leading to the water. Continuing from it and following the wall, we come under the tottering walls of Leicester’s building, on the right, with the massive walls of the state Buildings beyond it. They stand high, upon a mound that formed the limits of the Castle of Saxon and early Norman days, and the grassy walk between them and the outer wall was in those distant times the moat, long before the magnificent scheme of the lake was thought out. Remains of fireplaces and windows in this outer wall show where the wooden buildings that formed barracks for the garrison stood. The walk ends up against an archway leading into the garden, or Plaisance, assigned to Henry the Eighth, through which the outer wall continues past a water-gate called the “King’s Gate,” and so to the Swan Tower, where the circuit is completed, at Clinton Green.

But the Plaisance is not open to the public. The way into the central block of State buildings is through a postern doorway on the right, under the Banqueting Hall. The savage treatment of these noble buildings by Cromwell’s friends has at first sight obscured the nature of this scene; but it is soon perceived that the Hall stood high, upon a basement or undercroft, whose vaulted roof has entirely disappeared, together with that of the Hall itself. This postern doorway therefore led through the basement. The Hall was the work of John o’ Gaunt, about 1350, and was a grand building in the Perpendicular style, ninety feet long and forty-five feet wide. Lofty and deeply-recessed windows, with rich tracery lighted it, and at one end was an exceptionally beautiful oriel window. A portion of this survives, together with two of the others. The entrance from the Inner Court was by a fine flight of stone stairs and through a wide archway still remaining in greatly weather-worn condition, but showing traces of delicately carved work. Inside is the groined porch, with a recess for a porter.