XXVII
Alnwick is a town with a great past and a somnolent present. There are yawns at every turn, echoes with every footfall, and grass growing unbidden in the streets. But there are forces of elemental power at Alnwick, little though the stranger suspects them. There have of late years been periods of storm and stress in the columns of the Alnwick Gazette, for instance, respecting the local water-supply, which have drawn forth inappropriately fiery letters from correspondents, together with many mixed metaphors. How is this for impassioned writing?—“The retributive forces of well-balanced justice have, after a dead ebb, returned with a swelling tide, and overtaken the arrogative policy of the freeholders.” But this is nothing to the following striking figure of “the arm of scandalous jobbery steeped to the lips in perfidious dishonour;” a delightful literary image unsurpassed in Ireland itself; or “another hydra of expense arising phoenix-like from the ashes of misgovernment.” Did the word “hydrant,” we wonder, suggest this last period? Is the dulness of Alnwick due to the decay following the corruption hinted at? Perhaps, for, as this publicist next inquires, “How could anything symbolical of greatness, wrapped with ropes of sand, ever and for aye, flourish like the green bay-tree?” Ah! how? It is a difficult question to answer, and so we will leave the question at that.
Alnwick, of course, derives its name from its situation on the romantic Aln: the “wick,” or village on that river. The name is kin to that of many other “wicks,” “weeks,” and “wykes” in England, and has its fellows in such places as High Wycombe; Wykeham (now spelt Wickham) in Hampshire, whence came William of Wykeham; the village of Week, near Winchester; and in the town named simply Wick, in the north of Scotland. Alnwick in these times is a place of a certain grim and lowering picturesqueness. Its grey stone houses are at one with the greyness of the Northumbrian skies, and a general air of barren stoniness impresses the traveller as its chief feature. It is an effect of prisons and jailers which reaches its height in the open space that fronts the barbican of the castle. You look, instinctively, for His Majesty’s prison regulations on the outer walls, and, approaching the gate, expect a warder’s figure at the wicket.
This is no uncongenial aspect of that old fortress. It is rather in the Italian drawing-rooms, the picture-galleries, and the Renaissance luxuries of the interior of the castle that the jarring note is struck and all association with feudal times forgotten. Many a Border moss-trooper has unwillingly passed through this grim barbican, and so left the world for ever; and many more of higher estate have found this old stronghold of the Percies a place of lifelong durance, or have in its dungeons met a secret end. For chivalry was not inconsistent with midnight murder or treachery, and the Percies, centred in their fortress like spiders in their webs, had all the virtues and the vices of chivalric times. Ambitious and powerful, they were alike a bulwark against the Scots and a menace to successive kings of England, and none in those olden times could have approached their castle gate with the equable pulsation of the modern tourist. In those times, instead of finding a broad level open space here, a deep ditch would have been seen and a drawbridge must have been lowered before access was possible. Then possibly the stone figures in violent attitudes that line the battlements, and seem to be casting missiles down upon the heads of visitors, may have been alarming; to-day we only wonder if they could ever have tricked even the most bat-eyed warrior into a belief that they were really living men-at-arms.
The Percies, whose name attaches more than any other to Alnwick, were, strictly speaking, never its owners. The first of that name came over to England with the Conqueror in the person of William de Percy, a younger son of the feudal lord of the village of Percie in Normandy, which still exists to point out to the curious tourist the spot whence this historic family sprang. This William de Percy was nicknamed “Als Gernons,” or “Whiskers,” whence derives the name of Algernon, even now a favourite one with the Smithson-Percies. “Whiskers” was present at the battle of Hastings, and for his aid was granted manors in Hampshire, Lincolnshire, and York, but none in Northumberland. He died in 1086, when with the Crusaders, near Jerusalem. The Percies never became connected in any way with Alnwick, for the family of this William de Percy became extinct in 1166, when Agnes, an only child of his descendant, married Josceline de Lovaine; and it was not until 1309 that the descendant of this Lovaine, who had assumed the Percy name, came into wrongful possession of the vast estates. Alnwick and sixty other baronies in Northumberland had until then been in possession of the de Vescis, of whom Yvo de Vesci was the original Norman owner. His descendant, William de Vesci, who died in 1297, was the last of his line, and appears to have been of a peculiarly trusting disposition. He put a great (and an unfounded) faith in the honesty of churchmen, leaving all his estates to Anthony Bek, Prince-Bishop of Durham, in trust for an infant illegitimate son, until he should come of age. But Bek picked a quarrel with his ward, and in 1309 sold the lands to Henry Percy, who thus became the first Baron Percy of Alnwick.
But let us not do an injustice to the Church. Prince-Bishops were kittle cattle, an amorphous kind of creature. Perhaps his lay half impelled Bek to this knavery, and, following the Scriptural injunction not to let the right hand know what is done by the left, his clerical moiety remained in ignorance of the crime. Heaven be praised, there are no longer any of these Jekyll and Hyde creatures, for the Bishops-Palatine of Durham were abolished two generations or more since.
There were, in the fulness of time, three Barons Percy of Alnwick, and then the Barony was erected into the Earldom of Northumberland. The axe and the sword took heavy toll of this new line, for the Earls of Northumberland seldom died in their beds, and father and son often followed one another in a bloody death, until at length they became extinct with the death of the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland. Of these eleven, only seven died a natural death. There were Percies who fell in battle; others who, rightly or wrongly, met the death of traitors; one was torn to pieces by a mob; and another was obscurely done to death in prison. Nor did only the heads of the family end violently; their sons and other relations led lives as turbulent, and finished as suddenly.
The only child of the eleventh Earl of Northumberland was a daughter, Elizabeth Percy. She married firstly the Earl of Ogle; secondly, Thomas Thynne of Longleat, who was murdered in Pall Mall in 1682 by Count Koningsmarck; and thirdly, the sixth Duke of Somerset; thus bringing the Percy estates into the Seymour family, and the Percy red hair as well.
It was of red-haired Elizabeth Percy, when Duchess of Somerset, that Dean Swift wrote the bitter and diabolically clever lines that are supposed to have lost him all chance of becoming a bishop. He wrote of her as “Carrots”:—