YARD OF THE “SARACEN’S HEAD,” SOUTHWELL.
For it is historic, in an intimate and a melancholy way. Dismissing in a word the remote visits paid by Edward the First and Edward the Third to Southwell, when they are stated to have lodged at the “Saracen’s Head,” we come to the harassed wanderings of Charles the First over the distracted England of his time. That unhappy King well knew Southwell and the “Saracen’s Head.” They were associated with the opening and the closing scenes of his fight with Parliament and people, for he rested at the inn on August 17th, 1642, on the way to raise the Royal Standard at Nottingham on the 22nd; and at last, on May 5th, 1646, he abandoned the nearly four years’ struggle against fate, surrendering himself here to the Scottish Commissioners. Between those two fateful days he was certainly once at Southwell, and possibly more often.
The story of his last visit has a pathos of its own that we need not be Royalist to perceive. In March, 1646, the King at length saw his hopes to be desperately failing everywhere, even in the loyal West; garrisons of towns, castles, and fortified houses had been compelled to yield, and himself reduced to fleeting, the embarrassed head of an impossible cause, from place to place; bringing upon places and persons devoted to him a common ruin. Friends began to despair of his shifty and untrustworthy policy towards themselves and in negotiations with the enemy, and although their loyalty was hardly ever in doubt, for they were fighting, after all, not merely for the King personally, but for an order of things in which their interests were involved, they had by this time exhausted energies and wealth in a vain effort, and perhaps thought peace at almost any price to be by this time preferable to the uncertainties of civil war, in which the only certainty seemed to be that, whoever eventually won, they must needs in the meanwhile be continually making further sacrifices.
The King was at Oxford when he at length came to a decision by some means to end the struggle; by flight over sea, or by surrendering himself to the enemy: in the hope, in that alternative, that the sanctity of Kingship would enable him by some means to snatch an advantage out of the very jaws of defeat and ruin. The first thought was to take flight from the country, by the port of King’s Lynn, but that was at length abandoned for the idea—a fatal tertium quid, as it proved—of surrendering, not to the English army and the Parliament, but to the Scots, who, he thought, were likely to make better terms for him. The Scottish army was at that time engaged upon the siege of the Royalist castle of Newark, near Southwell; and to Southwell the King, therefore, went from Oxford, in disguise. He left Oxford on April 26th, and, to the last incapable of being straightforward, even toward his own, gave out to his council that he was going to London, to treat with Parliament. On May 3rd he was at Stamford, and came to the “Saracen’s Head” at Southwell at seven o’clock in the morning of May 5th, accompanied by Ashburnham and his chaplain, Dr. Hudson, but travelling with them as Ashburnham’s servant. At the inn he was received by Montreuil, the French Ambassador to Scotland, who had been advised of his coming. The King, believing himself in every sense free, invited the Scottish Commissioners over to dinner at the inn, from the Bishop’s Palace, where they had their quarters; and in what is now the Coffee Room, the negotiations took place that ended in the King’s yielding to the Scots. It would, in any case, have so ended, for the Commissioners came by invitation, as guests to dinner, but were so astonished at finding the King so tamely coming within their grasp that they had not the remotest idea of letting him go again, and would, if needs were, have forcibly detained him. He was removed the same day to the neighbouring Kelham Hall, where he formed the richest prize and the bitterest source of contention between the English and the Scots, and all but caused a further warfare. Eventually, the Scottish Commissioners, true to the national love of money, sold their principles and their prisoner for £400,000 and withdrew themselves and their forces across the border. The story ends tragically, in Westminster, with the execution of the King on January 30th, 1649.
The Coffee Room of the “Saracen’s Head” is a beautiful apartment, formed out of two rooms, and rich in panelling and deeply recessed windows. The bedroom upstairs, where the King is said to have slept, is, in the same manner, formed by abolishing the partition that once made two rooms of it; and there they still show the pilgrims after things of sentimental and historic interest the ancient four-poster bed on which the King slept.
This history seems to have greatly upset Dr. Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand and afterwards of Lichfield, who stayed at the “Saracen’s Head” in 1858, and slept—or rather, failed to sleep—in this historic bed. For my part, although a pilgrim—and a sentimental one at that—I found the four-poster, despite its associations, as inviting to slumber as any other; but then, I had cycled eighty-one miles that day, and—not being a bishop—had nothing on my conscience.
KING CHARLES’ BEDROOM, “SARACEN’S HEAD,” SOUTHWELL.
Dr. Selwyn was so obsessed with the memories of that room and the house that he arose in the middle of the night, and lighted his bedroom candle and wrote a long set of couplets, sentimental, pietistic, and very jingly and inferior. I have a mental picture of him sitting up in bed, or perhaps at the dressing-table in his night-shirt, gruesomely cold on that March night, running his fingers through his hair and gazing at the ceiling for the inspiration which does not seem to have come; for a more uninspired set of verses it would be difficult to find. But you shall judge: