They still show the “Gunpowder Plot Room” over the gateway, and the memorials of Catesby’s ancestors can even now be seen in the church—that Church of St. Leodegarius from whom the place derives its name. There they lie on the floor; monumental brasses of Catesbys, with their cognizance, a black lion, conspicuous where the fury of centuries ago has not hacked the workmanship out of recognition. There lie Sir William Catesby, 1470, and his son, Sir William, taken prisoner at Bosworth Field fifteen years later, ex parte Richard III., and beheaded at Leicester; great-great-great-grandfather of the conspirator, Robert, and a warning, had he lent an ear to the history of his family, against too rashly entering into the bloody politics of those times. That remote ancestor’s fate carried with it the forfeiture of his estates, soon restored to his son; but when Robert Catesby fell in his attempt to destroy King and Parliament, and to subvert the Protestant religion, the property, forfeited again, was never restored.
XXXVII
Retracing our steps to the Holyhead Road again, the “dumpling hills of Northamptonshire,” as Horace Walpole calls them, give place to the long Warwickshire levels. Four miles and a half from Daventry, and just before reaching Willoughby village, lying off the road, the Great Central Railway comes from Rugby, and crosses over on an embankment and a blue-brick-and-iron-girder bridge; a station labelled “Willoughby, for Daventry,” looking up and down the road. Does any one, it may be asked, ever alight for Daventry in this solitary road, four miles and a half distant from that town, on the inducement of that notice? And when the innocent traveller has thus alighted, what does he say when he gets his bearings, and finds himself thus marooned, far away from where he would be?
Possibly he resorts, after being thus scurvily tricked by the railway company, to the “Four Crosses” Inn, a house with a history, standing close by. The old inn of that name, demolished in 1898, faced the bye-road to Willoughby village; the new building fronts the highway. The junction of roads at this point has only three arms, hence the original sign of the “Three Crosses,” changed to four, according to the received story, at the suggestion of Dean Swift, who was a frequent traveller along this road between Dublin and London, riding horseback, with one attendant. The old inn, hardly more than a wayside pot-house, was scarce a fit stopping place for that dignitary; but it is well known that Swift delighted in such places and the odd society to be met in them, and it may have been in some ways more convenient than the usual posting-houses at Daventry and Dunchurch.
THE “FOUR CROSSES,” WILLOUGHBY (DEMOLISHED 1898).
The story runs that on one of his journeys, anxious for breakfast and to be off, he could not hurry the landlady, who tartly told him “he must wait, like other people.” He waited, of necessity, but employed the time in writing with his diamond ring upon one of the panes:—
There are three
Crosses at your door:
Hang up your Wife