It was his brother Anthony who really made the Shirleys famous. He had graduated at Oxford in 1581, and having, as he said, "acquired those learnings which were fit for a gentleman's ornament," he went to the Low Countries with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was present at the battle of Zutphen, where Sir Philip Sidney fell. In 1591 he was in Normandy with the Earl of Essex, whom he devotedly followed, in support of Henry of Navarre, who made him a knight of St Michael. For accepting a foreign knighthood without her leave, Elizabeth locked him up in the Fleet, and only let him out when he promised to retire from the Order. This he actually did, but his title stuck to him, and he was always known as Sir Anthony. He then married Elizabeth Devereux, a first cousin of his patron, the Earl of Essex; but the marriage was unfortunate; he could not abide his wife, and in order to "occupy his mind from thinking of her vainest words," in 1595 he fitted out with Essex's aid and his father's a buccaneering expedition to the Gulf of Guinea. But in something less than two years after the most amazing adventures he came home to Wiston under the Downs, "alive but poor," and with his passion for adventure in nowise abated. In 1597 he accompanied Essex on the "Islands voyage," but, seeking more paying adventure, in the winter of 1598 he consented at Essex's suggestion to lead a little company of English adventurers to assist Cesare D'Este to regain his Duchy of Ferrara, then in the hands of the Pope. He set forth, but upon reaching Venice found that Cesare had submitted. Again he was out of employment; but it was upon the quays of Venice that he conceived the most astonishing enterprise that even an Englishman has ever undertaken. He proposed to set out for Persia with the object of persuading the Shah to ally himself with Christendom against the Turk, and hoped also to establish commercial relations between England and Persia. Upon this astonishing Crusade he left Venice with his brother Robert and twenty-five Englishmen disappointed of a row in Ferrara, on May 29, 1599, for Constantinople. Thence he went on to Aleppo, and so down the Euphrates, to Babylon, to Isapahan and Kazveen, where he met the Shah Abbas the Great. There, thanks to the Shah's two Christian wives, he had a good reception; the rank of Prince was conferred upon him, and he won the concession, for all Christians, of the right, not only to trade freely, but to practise their religion in Persia. For five months he remained at the court of the Shah, and then returned to Europe as his ambassador to invite all Christian powers to ally themselves with Persia against the Turk. He went first to Moscow, where he was, however, treated with contempt, as was his mission. He went to Prague and was well received. At last, in 1601, after visiting Nuremberg, Augsburg, Munich, Innsbruck, and Trent, he arrived in Rome, and, professing enthusiasm for the Faith his father had repudiated, was well received. The truth was, he was in grave money difficulties, and indeed in 1603 was arrested by the Venetians and imprisoned "in a certain obscure island near unto Scio." The English Government, however, came to his aid and obtained his release, but refused him permission to return to England. He went to Prague, and thence on the business of the Emperor to Morocco. There he was received in great state and remained five months. Before leaving, however, he released certain Portuguese whom he found in slavery, and sailed with them for Lisbon, where he hoped to reimburse himself for their ransom. In this he was disappointed, so on he went to Madrid, where he was made very much of and promised the Order of Sant'Iago. In the service now of Spain, he went to Naples in 1607, after a visit to the Emperor at Prague where he was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. He seems to have travelled considerably in Southern Italy, and after a brief visit, to obtain money, to Madrid, set out for Sicily in command of a fleet to attack the Moors and Turks. He achieved nothing and was dismissed. In 1611 he appeared again in Madrid in utter poverty, but the King took compassion upon him and gave him a pension, and in Madrid he remained writing an account of his adventures till he died in beggary. The English ambassador notes in 1619, "The poor man sometimes comes to my house and is as full of vanity as ever he was, making himself believe that he shall one day be a great prince." It might indeed seem a long road from Wiston under the Downs to the Gulf of Guinea, the Quays of Venice, Constantinople, the Euphrates, Babylon, Moscow, Prague, Rome, and Morocco, to die at last a beggar in purse, but in heart a great Prince in Madrid.
Now, when I had been reminded of all this, I was directed to visit Buncton Chapel to the north of Wiston Park, where I found indeed some Norman work in the nave and chancel arch. And so I went on my way through the failing afternoon by that beautiful road within sight of the high Downs to the Washington Inn, where I slept, for it is a quiet place not to be passed by.
And on the morrow I went on my way, still through as fair a country as is to be found in all South England, through Storrington, and so by way of Parham Park, with its noble Elizabethan house and little church with the last leaden font in Sussex, a work of the fourteenth century, to Amberley in the meads of the Arun, a dear and beautiful place.
Amberley boasts a Castle and stands right in the mouth of one of those gaps in the Downs as Bramber does, the gap of the Arun, and it might well be thought that Amberley held this pass. As a fact she did not. That gap is held by Arundel; the Castle at Amberley was a palace of the Bishop of Chichester, granted to the Bishop of Selsey long before the Conquest; it was only castellated in the fourteenth century. It is none the less an interesting ruin, very picturesque, with remains of a chapel, while the beautiful house built within the castle walls early in the sixteenth century is altogether lovely. And as for the church, I can never hope to tell of all its interest and beauty. Certainly a Norman church once stood here, of which the nave of that we see was part, as was the very noble chancel arch; but the chancel itself, the south aisle, and the tower are of the thirteenth century, while the south door is very early Decorated, most beautifully carved. There is not surely in all Sussex a more delightful spot than this lying so quietly in the meads, with its beautiful church, its ruined castle, and fine old Elizabethan house, where Arun bends slowly and lazily towards the Downs and the sea.
It was with real regret that on that May morning I left Amberley, turning often to look back at it, and last from the great seven-arched bridge over the Arun, whence one may look down stream upon the wooded slopes of Arundel Park. Then I went on up the road that winds through the steep village of Houghton swiftly up on to the Downs, wooded here very nobly, and so at the top of Rewell Hill I turned to the left and made my way through the noble park to the little town of Arundel.
Now I cannot say why, but in spite of its seduction, which is full of splendour, of its noble history and great buildings, I have never been able to love Arundel. One is there always I feel too much in the shadow of that mighty Castle which for the most part is not old at all, too much in the power of that great new church that surely was never built by English hands, which has altogether blotted out the older sanctuary, and which, Catholic though it be, has never won my affection. Arundel itself is all in the shadow of these two things, each of which is too big for it, too heavy for free laughter and light- heartedness. So it seems to me.
All I can find in Arundel that pleases me lies in the little town itself, and in the old church of which one half, the chancel, has been closed to all who do not hold the Duke's written permission to enter it—as though the house of God, even though it be the property of a Catholic duke, were not by nature as it were free to all. And so there is a kind of sorrowfulness about Arundel that spoils my pleasure in it, yes, even in the very noble remains of the old Castle that are hidden away within the sham Gothic affair of 1791. Even in the beautiful old church, of which one half is closed, even in the steep little town which might have been as gay as Rye, I felt, overwhelmed by the new Castle and the new church, neither of which has any antiquity, tradition, or beauty.
The old Castle, with its great circular Norman keep within the huge sham "fortress" of the eighteenth century, beneath which the town lies like one afraid to ask for mercy, should not be left unvisited, for it was probably built by that Roger de Montgomery, who led the Breton centre at Hastings, and has thus nearly a thousand years of history behind it, to say nothing of three sieges, that of 1102, when it was surrendered to Henry I., that of 1139, when Stephen there held Matilda prisoner and allowed her to pass out, and that of 1643, when Waller took it after seventeen days.