Sir Walter Scott, who here adopts the close account given by Laneham, one of the Queen’s retinue during her reception at Kenilworth, and merely edits him, describes the appearance of the Hall, “hung with the richest tapestry, misty with perfumes, and sounding to strains of soft and delicious music. From the highly carved oaken roof hung a superb chandelier of gilt bronze, formed like a spread eagle, whose outstretched wings supported three male and three female figures, grasping a pair of branches in each hand. The Hall was thus illuminated by twenty-four torches of wax. At the upper end of this splendid apartment was a State canopy, overshadowing a royal throne, and beside it was a door which opened to a long suite of apartments, decorated with the utmost magnificence for the Queen and her ladies, when it should be her pleasure to be private.”
This magnificence curiously contrasts with the primitive nature of the sanitary arrangements seen in the adjoining towers and in the keep. The Strong Tower and the Kitchen Tower fill up the space between the Banqueting Hall and the keep; the first named, appropriately enough, from having been a prison. The walls of its not unpleasant, though small rooms, still bear some rudely-scratched coats of arms of those who were detained here. Their imprisonment cannot have been so hopeless as that of King John’s victims, in the dungeons of the keep.
The keep is called “Cæsar’s Tower,” but the Romans had never any association with Kenilworth. It would better be styled “Clinton’s.” Like all the buildings, it is of a dull, brownish red stone. An angle-turret shows where the clock was placed: that clock whose hands always stood hospitably at the banqueting hour in those seventeen days of Elizabethan revel.
Leaving Kenilworth for Coventry, the church is on the right. Its west doorway is a fine but much-decayed work of the Norman period, from the ruins of the Augustinian Priory close by. It is a much-restored church, and does not come up to the expectations raised by a sight of its octagonal tower and spire. The only object of interest within is a pig of lead built into the tower wall, bearing the mark of one of Henry the Eighth’s travelling Commissioners inquiring into the suppression of the religious houses. It would seem to be one of a number cast from the lead off the Priory roofs.
Kenilworth at last left behind, a gradual rise brings the traveller to the turning to Stoneleigh village. It is “Gibbet Hill.” The ill-omened name comes from an example of the law’s ancient practice of hanging up murderers to the public view, very much in the manner of those gamekeepers who nail up the bodies of the jays, the rats, the weasels and other “vermin.” The criminals whose carcases swung and rattled here in their chains were three in number; Moses Baker, a weaver of Coventry, and Edward Drury and Robert Leslie, two dragoons of Lord Pembroke’s regiment, quartered in that city. They had on March 18th, 1765, murdered a farmer, one Thomas Edwards, at a place called Whoberley, just outside Coventry. Their bodies hung until their clothes rotted; and then, one by one, their bones fell from their chains and enclosing cages. But the gibbet and the terror of it remained until 1820, when the weathered timber, scored with thousands of the rusty nails which had been driven into it, so that no one should climb the post, was removed to do service in the cow byre of a neighbouring farm.
This melancholy history apart, the road is a pleasant one; broad, and lined with wide grassy edges and magnificent elms. It was even more pleasant before the motor manufacturing firms of Coventry began the practice of testing their new cars along it, and was then the pride of the district. It leads across Stivichall Common into the city of Coventry, over that railway bridge referred to by Tennyson in his poem, Godiva—
“I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires.”
I remember a first reading of that poem, and the difficulty of really believing Tennyson meant a railway train. It seemed incredible that he could in such a nineteenth-century fashion introduce an eleventh-century subject. The “train” one imagined at first to be a train in the middle-ages sense, a procession or pageant, and the person who waited for it to be, not Tennyson himself, but some imaginary person indulging in historical speculation. But no, he was modern, like his own King Arthur.
Here the “three tall spires” first come into view, and the city of Coventry is entered, past the Green and up Hertford Street.