The young King’s maternal uncle and guardian had in the meanwhile been seized and hurried to Pontefract, where he was beheaded, no one raising a voice in protest. The King himself and his young brother, Richard, Duke of York, were in custody in the Tower, and it was not until Gloucester had been offered the Crown by his creatures, and had with feigned reluctance accepted it, that the nation woke up to an understanding of the crafty conspiracy in which it had taken a passive hand. It was then too late, and the horror with which the country soon learnt that the young King and his brother had been murdered in the Tower was without avail to overthrow the sanguinary hunchback who now ruled as Richard III.
Such was the tragedy that overwhelmed the ambition of the Woodvilles, springing from that May-day marriage of 1464. The Queen, sorrowing in the Sanctuary at Westminster, had seen her father, her two brothers, and her two sons cruelly put to death, as a direct consequence of that alliance. She retired, forlorn, to the seclusion of Bermondsey Abbey; seeing, it is true, a gleam of happiness in the overthrow of Richard two years later, and the marriage of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, to Henry VII., but dying broken and disappointed, leaving in her will to her daughters, “my blessing, for worldly goods I have none to bestow.”
XXV
From “Stony’s” mild annals the two fires that in 1736 and 1742 destroyed great parts of the town stand forth with appropriate luridity. The second was the more destructive, and was caused by the carelessness of a servant, who accidentally set some sheets ablaze. The flaming linen, alighting on a thatched roof, brought about, not only the destruction of many houses, but also of one of the two churches. The tower, the sole relic of that unfortunate building, yet remains in the rear of the High Street, and was for some years rendered conspicuous by an elder-tree taking root and flourishing on the battlements. The remaining church, rebuilt, with the exception of the tower in 1776, is a weird and wonderful eighteenth-century attempt at Gothic. It is the tower of this church that looks so picturesque from the Market Place, an obscure square, hidden from those who hurry along the High Street and so through the town and out at the other end, looking neither to right nor left.
MARKET-PLACE, STONY STRATFORD.
The town is left behind by way of a long causeway and a bridge spanning the Ouse, in succession to the “street ford” that once plunged through it. Once across the river and the canal that runs parallel, and so uphill into the not unpicturesque village of Old Stratford and the frontiers of Buckinghamshire—“the historic county of Bucks,” as Disraeli, posing as a Buckinghamshire farmer in one of his after-dinner political speeches called it—are crossed and Northamptonshire entered. Northants is traditionally the “county of squires and spires”; but the squire as a political force and a great social figure is extinct nowadays, and let it be said at once that, in all the twenty-three miles of Northants through which the Holyhead Road takes its way, only one spire—that of Braunston—is visible: the rest of the churches on the way have towers, save indeed the freakish, classical church of Daventry, rejoicing in a steeple.
Potterspury, succeeding to Old Stratford, is a kind of brother village, as it were, to Paulerspury, a mile away. Potterspury, really owing its name to an ancient pottery trade in common ware of the kitchen utensil and flower-pot sort, stands partly facing the old coach-road and partly down a bye-lane, and is wholly old-world and delightful. One comes into it under the thickly interlacing branches of tall hedgerow elms that conspire to cheer the traveller with a perpetual triumphal arch of welcome. Through this leafy bower one perceives the roadside cottages dwindling away in perspective along a gentle rise. Graceless the village looks awhile, for no church meets the gaze. That, however, is a long distance down the bye-lane, and in the neighbourhood of a little inn with the odd name of the “Blue Ball,” and the still more odd sign pictured in the accompanying sketch. The blue ball, apparently representing the world, is placed below a brown heart, the whole mystical composition semi-circled by the motto “Cor supra mundum.” It is a representation of the triumph of sentiment that would have caused the Rev. Laurence Sterne to shed tears. “Heart above the world.” How idyllic!
THE “BLUE BALL.”