The Country of Sir Walter Scott

by Charles S. Olcott

We did not ruin our reputation as travellers by failing to 'wet a cup at the bonny Black Bear,' for that 'excellent inn of the old stamp,' if indeed it ever existed, has disappeared as effectually as its famous landlord, Giles Gosling. Its prototype, bearing the sign of the 'Bear and Ragged Staff,' formerly stood opposite the church, but its bar-room became objectionable to the vicar and, by what a local writer calls 'an impious act of vandalism,' the inn was destroyed.

Cumnor Place has likewise disappeared. The site where it stood appears to be a comparatively small piece of land, near the street, but well covered with large trees. It was not an extensive park with formal walks and avenues, nor was the house itself so large or high as the structure described in the novel. It was a single-story building or series of buildings, forming an enclosure about seventy feet long and fifty feet wide. It was built about 1350 as a country residence for the Abbot of Abingdon and as a sanitarium for the monks. After two centuries its use by the monastery ceased and Cumnor Place passed into the hands of the Court physician, George Owen, who leased it to Anthony Foster. As the servant of Lord Robert Dudley, Foster received into his house the ill-fated Amy Robsart, whom that gentleman had married in 1550. The marriage was not secret, but was celebrated in the presence of the young King, Edward VI, and his Court. It had been arranged by Dudley's father, John, Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, who seems to have had a fondness for match-making, of the kind which promised a profit. He managed to marry his fourth son, Guildford Dudley, to Lady Jane Grey, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII. In the last two years of the reign of Edward VI, Northumberland was virtually the ruler of England. He induced the King to execute a will, disinheriting his two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, who were the legal heirs to the crown, and naming Lady Jane Grey as his successor. The reign of this unfortunate lady, who never desired the throne, lasted but nine days. The rightful Queen, Mary, was restored by the people, and Northumberland, like his father before him, was beheaded in the Tower. His son, Guildford, with Jane Grey, his wife, suffered the same penalty a year later, as the result of another revolt, in which the lady, at least, had no share.

LEICESTER'S BUILDINGS, KENILWORTH

Robert Dudley came near falling a victim to the same fate as his father and grandfather. He took up arms against Queen Mary, was sent to the Tower and condemned to death. But the Queen pardoned him and made him Master of the Ordnance. On the accession of Elizabeth he became Master of the Horse, and thereafter rose rapidly in the royal favour. Elizabeth made him a Knight of the Garter, bestowed upon him the Castle of Kenilworth, the lordship of Denbigh and other rich lands in Warwickshire and Wales. In 1564 the Queen made him Earl of Leicester, and recommended him (perhaps not seriously) as a possible husband of Mary Queen of Scots. The University of Oxford made him their chancellor and the King of France conferred upon him the order of St. Michael. He reached the culmination of the high honours which Elizabeth and others crowded upon him, in the appointment as Lieutenant-General of the army mustered to meet the Spanish invasion, in the year of the great Armada, 1588.

This was the outward show, and it was brilliant enough; but the Earl was like a worm-eaten apple—fair enough to look upon, but rotten to the core—and his private life was thoroughly contemptible. The marriage to Amy Robsart in 1550 was not a happy one. She was never a countess, for Dudley did not become Earl of Leicester until four years after her death. After the favours of Elizabeth began to be showered upon him, Dudley had good reason for concealing this marriage, for the Queen soon began to show a longing to make him her royal husband. In 1560, two years after the accession of Elizabeth, the dead body of Amy was found at the foot of the stairs at Cumnor. All the servants had gone to a neighbouring fair and apparently Anthony Foster was the only person besides Amy at home on that day. It was given out that Amy had accidentally fallen downstairs and broken her neck. She was ostentatiously buried in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, though Lord Dudley was not present at the funeral nor did he again visit Cumnor.

More than twenty years later a pamphlet was published, anonymously, under the title 'Leicester's Commonwealth,' in which the Earl was bitterly attacked as an atheist and a traitor as well as a man of infamous character. He was openly accused of the murder of his wife, and there were not wanting many evidences seeming to corroborate this view. It was alleged that efforts to poison her were made, by direction of the Earl. That Leicester was not incapable of such an act is indicated by the circumstances of his own death. The tradition is that he gave his wife (the third one) a bottle of medicine to be used for faintness. The lady kept it, unused, and later, not knowing it to be poison, administered a dose to her husband, with a fatal result. This lady was the widow of Walter, Earl of Essex, with whom the Earl of Leicester was carrying on an intrigue before her husband's death. There was a quarrel and Essex died suddenly, under some suspicion of poison. Leicester's secret marriage with the widow led to serious accusations against him. According to the author of 'Leicester's Commonwealth,' when the Earl fell in love with Lady Douglas Sheffield (who became his second wife), her husband suddenly died under mysterious circumstances. Leicester had in his employ an Italian physician who was a skilful compounder of poisons. It was said that his cunning and skill enabled him to cause a person to die with the symptoms of any disease he might choose, or to administer a poison so that the victim would expire at whatever hour he might appoint. These weird tales no doubt suggested something of the character of the fraudulent alchemist and astrologer, Alasco.

The stair at the foot of which Amy Robsart's body was found was a narrow winding flight, something like a corkscrew. It has been pointed out that Amy would have had considerable difficulty in hurling herself headlong around the twists and turns of such a staircase with enough force to break her neck. Without definite knowledge of the facts, the most reasonable supposition is that Lord Dudley, having a motive for the crime and being a man of unscrupulous character, would not hesitate to order it committed. His grandfather had been the agent of Henry VII in the infamous extortions which gave that sovereign an enormous fortune; his father had not hesitated to risk the lives of his son and an innocent lady to accomplish his own treasonable purposes, besides directly causing the death of the Duke of Somerset, and indirectly bringing about the execution of the Duke's brother, Lord Seymour. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the scion of this ambitious family, who was himself cherishing no less bold a project than his own marriage with the Queen, should willingly give orders to remove the one great obstacle in his path.

The great festivities at Kenilworth occurred in 1575. Amy Robsart had been dead fifteen years. The Earl of Leicester was none the less entangled, however, for he was at the time married to Lady Sheffield, who strongly maintained the validity of the marriage, though it was denied by the Earl and concealed from the Queen. At the same time, also, the intrigue with the Countess of Essex was in progress. From this it will be seen that although Scott departed from the facts of history in bringing poor Amy to Kenilworth, he nevertheless gave a true picture of the Earl of Leicester's embarrassment in the presence of his Queen. Scott softens the black-hearted villainy of the Earl, by making him an unwilling victim of his own ambition, duped into deeds of infamy by the determination of the conscienceless Richard Varney. He admits that he preferred to make the Earl 'rather the dupe of villains than the unprincipled author of their atrocities,' because in the latter capacity, he would have been a character too disgustingly wicked for the purposes of fiction.