Tour in England, Ireland, and France, in the years 1826, 1827, 1828 and 1829. / with remarks on the manners and customs of the inhabitants, and anecdotes of distiguished public characters. In a series of letters by a German Prince.

by Fürst von Hermann Pückler-Muskau

LETTER IX.

Warwick, Dec. 26th, 1826.

Dear Julia,

Now, indeed, for the first time, I am filled with real and unbounded enthusiasm. What I have hitherto described was a smiling country, combined with everything that art and money could produce. I left it with a feeling of satisfaction; and, although I have seen things like it,—nay, even possess them,—not without admiration. But what I saw to-day was more than that,—it was an enchanted palace decked in the most charming garb of poetry, and surrounded by all the majesty of history, the sight of which still fills me with delighted astonishment.

You, accomplished reader of history and memoirs, know better than I that the Earls of Warwick were once the mightiest vassals of England, and that the great Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, boasted of having deposed three kings, and placed as many on the vacant throne. This was his castle, standing ever since the ninth century, and in the possession of the same family since the reign of Elizabeth. A tower of the castle, said to have been built by Beauchamp himself, remains unaltered; and the whole stands colossal and mighty, like an embodied vision of former times.

From a considerable distance you see the dark mass of stone towering above the primæval cedars, chestnuts, oaks and limes. It stands on the rocks on the shore of the Avon, and rises to a perpendicular height of two hundred feet above the level of the water. Two towers of different forms overtop the building itself almost in an equal degree. A ruined pier of a bridge, overhung with trees, stands in the middle of the river, which becoming deeper just at the point where the building begins, forms a foaming waterfall, and turns a mill, which appears only like a low abutment of the castle. Going on, you lose sight of the castle for awhile, and soon find yourself before a high embattled wall, built of large blocks of stone covered by Time with moss and creeping plants. Lofty iron gates slowly unfold to admit you to a deep hollow way blasted in the rock, the stone walls of which are tapestried with the most luxuriant vegetation. The carriage rolled with a heavy dull sound along the smooth rock, which old oaks darkly overshadow. Suddenly, at a turn of the way, the castle starts from the wood into broad open daylight, resting on a soft grassy slope; and the large arch of the entrance dwindles to the size of an insignificant doorway between the two enormous towers, at the foot of which you now stand. A still greater surprise now awaits you when you pass through the second iron gate into the court-yard: it is almost impossible to imagine anything more picturesque, and at the same time more imposing.

Let your fancy conjure up a space about twice as large as the interior of the Colosseum at Rome, and let it transport you into a forest of romantic luxuriance. You now overlook the large court, surrounded by mossy trees and majestic buildings, which, though of every variety of form, combine to create one sublime and connected whole, whose lines now shooting upwards, now falling off into the blue air, with the continually changing beauty of the green earth beneath, produce, not symmetry indeed, but that higher harmony, elsewhere proper to Nature’s own works alone. The first glance at your feet falls on a broad simple carpet of turf, around which a softly winding gravel-walk leads to the entrance and exit of the gigantic edifice. Looking backwards, your eye rests on the two black towers, of which the oldest, called Guy’s Tower, rears its head aloft in solitary threatening majesty, high above all the surrounding foliage, and looks as if cast in one mass of solid iron;—the other, built by Beauchamp, is half hidden by a pine and a chestnut, the noble growth of centuries. Broad-leaved ivy and vines climb along the walls, here twining around the tower, there shooting up to its very summit. On your left lie the inhabited part of the castle, and the chapel, ornamented with many lofty windows of various size and form; while the opposite side of the vast quadrangle, almost entirely without windows, presents only a mighty mass of embattled stone, broken by a few larches of colossal height, and huge arbutuses which have grown to a surprizing size in the shelter they have so long enjoyed. But the sublimest spectacle yet awaits you, when you raise your eyes straight before you. On this fourth side, the ground, which has sunk into a low bushy basin forming the court, and with which the buildings also descend for a considerable space, rises again in the form of a steep conical hill, along the sides of which climb the rugged walls of the castle. This hill, and the keep which crowns it, are thickly overgrown at the top with underwood, which only creeps round the foot of the towers and walls. Behind it, however, rise gigantic venerable trees, towering above all the rock-like structure. Their bare stems seem to float in upper air; while at the very summit of the building rises a daring bridge, set, as it were, on either side within trees; and as the clouds drift across the blue sky, the broadest and most brilliant masses of light break magically from under the towering arch and the dark coronet of trees.

Figure this to yourself;—behold the whole of this magical scene at one glance;—connect with it all its associations;—think that here nine centuries of haughty power, of triumphant victory and destructive overthrow, of bloody deeds and wild greatness,—perhaps too of gentle love and noble magnanimity,—have left, in part, their visible traces, and where they are not, their vague romantic memory;—and then judge with what feelings I could place myself in the situation of the man to whom such recollections are daily suggested by these objects,—recollections which, to him, have all the sanctity of kindred and blood;—the man who still inhabits the very dwelling of that first possessor of the fortress of Warwick, that half-fabulous Guy, who lived a thousand years ago, and whose corroded armour, together with a hundred weapons of renowned ancestors, is preserved in the antique hall. Is there a human being so unpoetical as not to feel that the glories of such memorials, even to this very day, throw a lustre around the feeblest representative of such a race?

To make my description in some degree clear, I annex a ground-plan, which may help your imagination. You must imagine the river at a great depth below the castle-plain, and not visible from the point I have been describing. The first sight of it you catch is from the castle windows, together with the noble park, whose lines of wood blend on every side with the horizon.

You ascend from the court to the dwelling-rooms by only a few steps, first through a passage, and thence into the hall, on each side of which extend the entertaining-rooms in an unbroken line of three hundred and forty feet. Although almost ‘de plein-pied’ with the court, these rooms are more than fifty feet above the Avon, which flows on the other side. From eight to fourteen feet thickness of wall forms, in each window-recess, a complete closet, with the most beautiful varied view over the river, wildly foaming below, and further on flowing through the park in soft windings, till lost in the dim distance. Had I till now, from the first sight of the castle, advanced from surprise to surprise,—all this was surpassed, though in another way, by what awaited me in the interior. I fancied myself transported back into by-gone ages as I entered the gigantic baronial hall,—a perfect picture of Walter Scott’s;—the walls panelled with carved cedar; hung with every kind of knightly accoutrement; spacious enough to feast trains of vassals,—and saw before me a marble chimney-piece under which I could perfectly well walk with my hat on, and stand by the fire, which blazed like a funeral pile from a strange antique iron grate in the form of a basket, three hundred years old. On the side, true to ancient custom, was a stack of oak logs piled up upon a stand of cedar, which was placed on the stone floor partially covered by ‘hautelisse’ carpets. A man-servant dressed in brown, whose dress, with his gold knee-bands, epaulets and trimmings, had a very antique air, fed the mighty fire from time to time with an enormous block. Here, in every circumstance, the difference between the genuine old feudal greatness and the modern imitations was as striking, as that between the moss-grown remains of the weather-beaten fortress and the ruins built yesterday in the garden of some rich contractor. Almost everything in the room was old, stately, and original; nothing tasteless or incongruous, and all preserved with the greatest care and affection. Among them were many rich and rare articles which could no longer be procured,—silk, velvet, gold and silver blended and interwoven. The furniture consists almost entirely either of uncommonly rich gilding, of dark brown carved walnut or oak, or of those antique French ‘commodes’ and cabinets inlaid with brass, the proper name of which I have forgotten. There were also many fine specimens of mosaic, as well as of beautiful marquetry. A fire-screen, with a massy gold frame, consisted of a plate of glass so transparent that it was scarcely distinguishable from the air. To those who love to see the cheerful blaze without being scorched, such a screen is a great luxury. In one of the chambers stands a state bed, presented to one of the Earls of Warwick by Queen Anne; it is of red velvet embroidered, and is still in good preservation. The treasures of art are countless. Among the pictures, there was not one ‘mediocre;’ they are almost all by the first masters: but, beyond this, many of them have a peculiar family interest. There are a great many ancestral portraits by Titian, Van Dyk, and Rubens. The gem of the collection is one of Raphael’s most enchanting pictures, the beautiful Joan of Arragon,—of whom, strangely enough, there are four portraits, each of which is declared to be genuine. Three of them must of course be copies, but are no longer distinguishable from the original. One is at Paris, one at Rome, one at Vienna, and the fourth here. I know them all, and must give unqualified preference to this. There is an enchantment about this splendid woman which is wholly indescribable. An eye leading to the very depths of the soul; queenlike majesty united with the most feminine sensibility; intense passion blended with the sweetest melancholy; and withal, a beauty of form, a transparent delicacy of skin, and a truth, brilliancy and grace of the drapery and ornaments, such as only a divine genius could call into perfect being.