himself to flight in a different direction from his companions. Had this been followed several of them would have probably succeeded in making their escape to the continent. The conspirators, however, adopted another course, which issued in their discomfiture in Staffordshire, where Christopher Wright was also killed.”
CHAPTER V.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and during the earlier part of the reign of King James I., almost all those castellated castles, moated halls, and gabled manor-houses which to-day, still standing more or less perfect, “amidst their tall ancestral trees o’er all the pleasant land,” go to constitute that “old England” which her sons and daughters (and their brethren and kinsfolk beyond the seas) know and love so well; during the reign of Elizabeth and during the earlier part of the reign of James I., these now time-honoured, ivy-clad abodes and dwellings of English men and English women, over whom the grave has long since closed, but who in their day and generation were assuredly among the heroic and the supremely excellent of the earth, were the sheltering, romantic roof-trees of those who clung tenaciously to the ancient religious Faith of the English race.
This Faith was indeed that faith which had been taken and embraced by their “rude forefathers” of long ages ago, in the simple hope and with the pathetic trust that it might “do them good.”[A] And this their hope, they believed and knew, had been not in vain, neither had been their trust betrayed.
[A] See the beautiful apologue of the Saxon nobleman of Deira, delivered in the presence of St. Edwin King of Northumbria; given in Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History.”
In the days of the second Henry Tudor — fons et origo malorum — the fountain-head and well-spring of almost all of England’s many present-day religious and social woes — the men and women of England and Wales knew full well, whether they were of Cymric, Saxon, Scandinavian, or Norman race (or a mixture of all four), that to that assemblage of ideas and emotions, laws and rules, habits and customs, which had come to them from men of foreign blood and alien name, dwelling on the banks of the far-off “yellow Tiber” and under sunny, blue Italian skies — these men and women, I repeat, knew full well that to their religious Faith they owed almost everything that was best and truest and most enduring, either in themselves or their kith and kin.[A]
[A] Yorkshire, being the greatest of English Shires, had among the inhabitants of its hills and dales and “sounding shores,” representatives of the various races which compose the English nation. In the West Riding especially, those of the old Cymric or British stock were to be found. (Indeed, I am told, even now shepherds often count their sheep by the old British numerals.) This strong remnant of the old British race in the West Riding probably accounts for the marvellous gift of song wherewith this division of Yorkshiremen are endowed to this day, just as are the Welsh. In none other portion of England was there such a wealth of stately churches and beautiful monasteries as in Yorkshire, the ancient Deira, whose melodious name once kept ringing in the ears of St. Gregory the Great, of a truth, the best friend the English people ever had. But Yorkshire realised that “before all temples” the One above “preferred the upright heart and pure.” Therefore, canonized saints arose from among her vigorous, keen-minded, yet poetically imaginative sons and daughters. York became sacred to St. Paulinus and St. William; Ripon to St. Wilfrid, the Apostle of Sussex; also to St. Willibrord, the Apostle of Holland; Beverley was hallowed by the presence of St. John of Beverley; Whitby by the Saxon princess St. Hilda, the friend of Caedmon, the father of English poetry. The moors of Lastingham were blest by the presence of St. Chad and St. Cedd; and Knaresbrough by St. Robert, in his leafy stone-cave hard-by the winding Nidd.
Now regard being had to the indisputable fact that for well-nigh a thousand years England had been known abroad as “the Dowry of Mary and the Island of Saints,” by reason of the signal manifestations she had displayed in the way of cathedrals and churches, abbeys and priories, convents and nunneries, hospitals and schools (which arose up and down the length and breadth of the land to Northward and Southward, to East and West,