Eugene Aram's story is really so full of interest that it is worth summarizing, very briefly and without introduction of the "love interest" (as his literary agents have it) with which Bulwer strove to give it human reality. Of quite humble parentage and meagre education, he early showed a passion for learning. Born in 1704, he was a married schoolmaster at Netherdale long before he was thirty, and when he migrated to Knaresborough, still as a schoolmaster, in 1734, he had acquired considerable knowledge of Latin and Greek. At Knaresborough he remained ten years. Then his intimate Daniel Clarke disappeared, having previously been supplied with a large quantity of goods on credit. Nothing worse than a common swindle seems to have been suspected at the time. Suspicion of having been concerned in it fell upon Aram; proceedings were taken against him; his garden was searched; but no evidence was forthcoming and he was discharged. However, he left Knaresborough shortly afterwards, deserting his wife at the same time, and for the next ten years he appears to have wandered about England, acting as usher in all sorts of schools, and studying comparative philology. The definite story finds him next an usher at Lynn, peculiar in manner but, by reason of his attainments probably, an acceptable associate to the cultivated gentlemen of the district.
It would have been well for Aram if, when he left Knaresborough, he had taken away his wife also. The deserted woman, whom the noble novelist found it convenient to forget, had doubtless a feeling of resentment against her husband, and had certainly a long tongue. Talking over her grievances, which really were quite considerable, she had been heard to suggest that her husband and Houseman, "the scoundrel Houseman" of Bulwer, were jointly responsible for the disappearance of Clarke, but her talk was clearly regarded as the scurrilous spite of an angry woman. Then a skeleton was found near Knaresborough, in a place where no recent skeleton had a right to be, and folks began to say that there was some method in Mrs. Aram's madness. There was an inquest, at which she gave evidence; Houseman was arrested and "confronted with the bones." He vowed that they were not the bones of "Dan Clarke," confessed that he had been present while Aram and another man murdered Clarke, and that Clarke's bones had been buried in a well-known cave hard by. In that cave bones were found. Where was Aram? A clue (this is from Mr. Beloe and does not appear in most accounts) was supplied by a Yorkshire horse-dealer, who had seen Aram at Lynn during his travels. So Aram was arrested, as we have seen, tried, convicted and executed, making full confession after conviction, and suggesting, by way of motive, that Clarke had made too successful love to his wife.
Was Eugene Aram guilty or not? To his confession, probably, no serious attention need be paid. The man was highly strung clearly, he had been a penniless prisoner for nearly a year at a time when our prisons were hells upon earth, he had conducted his own defence during an arduous and, from our modern point of view, very unfairly conducted trial, he attempted suicide by opening a vein on the night before his execution, he was desperate, probably not master of himself, and last, perhaps not least, confessions were the custom of the criminals of the age. It has been urged on his behalf that the trial was unfair, from our point of view, since counsel might not be retained for the defence of prisoners in those days nor wives called in defence of their husbands. As to the wife's evidence, if it had been admissible, the story makes it plain that it would have been more likely to be damning than favourable. She had been deserted, she had been left to shift for herself for many years, she had said that Aram knew all about the disappearance of Clarke. It was a distinct advantage to Aram that she could not be called. That he suffered from having to defend himself is in the last degree unlikely. Paley, who travelled all the way from Cambridge to hear his defence, said he had secured his conviction by his own cleverness. The original defence, preserved by Bulwer, is indeed marked by singular ability; but it is not in the very least convincing. I can imagine the jury saying to one another: "If this obviously clever man can think of nothing better than this to say, he is guilty sure enough." Houseman, it might very fairly be said, was not a credible witness. He was, indeed, on his own showing, a most mean and despicable villain; but the strength of the circumstantial evidence, the fact that Aram ran away, that he did not cross-examine Houseman or attempt to overthrow his evidence, and that his defence really amounted to an essay on the fallibility of circumstantial evidence, were quite enough to secure his conviction then, or now. The sympathy felt for Eugene Aram has sprung from the fact that the villain Houseman escaped, and that Aram was an able and a brilliantly learned man. Hume, I believe, said he was a century ahead of his age in Celtic research; but neither the one fact nor the other is inconsistent with a belief that Clarke was murdered, and that Aram was present at the murder.
Such are the reflections one may carry about the narrow streets of Lynn, and sometimes, of an evening, one may go to the theatre, but my one experience of that was not inviting. The maxim ne coram populo was more flagrantly trodden underfoot surely than ever before, when, in a play called (I think) Slaves of the Harem, a full-blooded and genuine African went through with a bowstring the gestures of executing an erring lady on the stage (who in her turn made appropriate grimaces) to the uproarious delight of an audience which insisted on encoring the scene. On the other hand, time spent in talking with the people in warm bar-parlours of an evening, or among the mariners who idle on the quay by day, as mariners always have and always will, is apt to be rewarded by no means ill. Among the sea-faring men, at any rate, hardy fishermen for the most part, the feeling that one may be talking to lineal descendants of Vikings soon deepens into conviction. They are fine seamen, too, these men of the east coast, and the Navy depends upon them not a little; but very prudently, and without saying anything about it, it is arranged that the same ship's company shall never be part east and part west countrymen.
It was fore-ordained that this portion of a chapter should end with a drive. It is a drive to be taken very shortly in print, and quite easily by road over Fen country, not needing to be described anew, to a cathedral city situate geographically in the Midlands—that is to say, to Peterborough. Now Peterborough is in Northamptonshire, and Northamptonshire sounds Midland as Midland can be. On what pretext is Peterborough introduced? Really none is needed; our brief detour is but an illustration of the truth that county boundaries, apart from the matters of police and road-making, have no more meaning for the motorist than they had for the Romans. Peterborough is easily accessible from Lynn, viâ Wisbech, by thirty-five miles of flat road. Its cathedral dominates the Fens from the west as Ely dominates their southern and central parts; it has been intimately associated with their troubled history in the past. The cathedral too, although by no means to be reckoned amongst the most majestic to be found in England, is very fine in itself, and exceptionally interesting and suggestive. I had written "instructive," but that is usually a word raising expectation of tedious discourse. As a matter of fact, little shall be written about Peterborough Cathedral, although many personal impressions might be moulded into one. Go to see Peterborough Cathedral. Remember that it is one of the three Norman cathedrals of England; that the first church on this site was built in the closing years of the seventh century, and rased to the ground by the Danes; that the second was burned in the twelfth century; that the greater part of the present structure was 120 years in the building before it was consecrated in the thirteenth century; that the central tower was rebuilt in the fourteenth century, and that the nineteenth century saw a great deal of necessary work done. Remembering this, you will surely depart reluctantly, convinced that of all our English books in stone none contains more chapters than that entitled Peterborough Cathedral, that in no edifice can the student of architecture who inspects with the advantage of special knowledge, or the fairly cultivated man who lacks that special knowledge, find more details of genuine charm and interest. Here you can trace developments, early Norman vaulting in the aisles, exquisite fan-vaulting—it is peculiar to England—in the choir, clustered piers to columns. Here you may follow the differences in character and arrangement between a monastic cathedral, such as Peterborough was, served by regular clergy and monks, and one of the old foundation, like St. Paul's, which, being served by secular clergy, was not affected by the reforms of Henry VIII. You may see, too, traces of the iconoclastic zeal of Cromwell's followers, often credited with the misdeeds of others. In spite of them, too, you may realize, not more forcibly than elsewhere perhaps, but still in full force, that which has been remarkably well put by Professor Banister Fletcher and Mr. Banister F. Fletcher in their Comparative Architecture. "The place in the national life which the mediæval cathedrals occupied was an important one, and must be realized if we would understand how they were regarded. In the absence of books, and of people able to read them, cathedrals were erected and decorated partly as a means of popular education, the sculpture and the painted glass reflecting the incidents of Bible history from the Creation to the redemption of mankind, the sculptured forms and brilliant colouring rendering them easily understood by the people. The virtues and vices, with their symbols, were also displayed, either in glass or statuary, along with their reward or punishment. Saints and angels told of the better life, and the various handicrafts, both of peace and war, were mirrored in imperishable stone or coloured glass. They, to a large extent, took the place in our social state since occupied by such modern institutions as the Board School, Free Library, Museum, Picture Gallery, and Concert Hall. They were the history books of the period. Architecture then as now was also the grand chronicle of secular history, past and present, in which Kings, Nobles, and Knights were represented."
Nothing conduces more to appreciation of the full meaning of a passage than the laborious process of copying, and having now performed that process I am moved to protest that these few lines, while they leave to the understanding the purely ecclesiastical significance of mediæval architecture, and are absolutely free from rhetorical artifice, are more pregnant with meaning than many pages of moving eloquence. So we leave Peterborough and, if the mood seizes us, make a detour of eight miles to Crowland before returning to Peterborough. This, personally I cannot speak for; but there are some remains of the historic abbey.
PART II
The end of these wanderings is now close in sight, and the thought fills him who writes with feelings in which regret predominates over relief. He would be a cold-blooded person indeed who, after much travel in East Anglia had revealed to him many beauties new to him, besides refreshing acquaintance with those seen before, after steeping himself, to the best of his ability and opportunities, in the history and legends of the district, should not have developed a very warm appreciation of the variety and character of both. But it is needless to say this over and over again, in various forms of words, in vain imitation of Matthew Arnold's method of compelling attention, and there is the less excuse for anything of the kind in that our last drive, or drives, take us through an exceptionally large number of storied places, and through some of the most breezy and fascinating of Norfolk scenery.
We will begin, if you please, by going to Castle Rising, lying 3-1/2 miles N.N.E. of Lynn, and there we must stop for quite a long time. Despite the local saying "Rising was a seaport town when Lynn was but a marsh," there is a good deal of doubt about its early history. Concerning its later history there is none at all. The sand just silted up the harbour, the port became a mere memory, and of all the "rotten boroughs" disfranchised by the Reform Act of 1832 none perished more deservedly than Castle Rising, where the voters were reduced to two. Was it of Castle Rising (it was certainly of some "rotten borough" in East Anglia) that I read how the nobleman who kept it in his pocket mockingly caused a waiter to represent it in Parliament? It was in days at any rate when a waiter, as a member of the "best club in the world," would have seemed a great deal more out of place than he would in these days of sectional representation. Let us consider first what there is to see. Over a bridge and through a Norman gate-house one enters an almost circular space surrounded by a very high earth bank and a deep ditch. Inside the commanding object is the keep, its Norman windows full of character, its walls nine feet thick; the chapel and part of the constable's lodgings also remain. The hall and gallery remain in part; everything else is utterly perished. Still, Rising is an impressive monument of the olden time. How long have the earthworks occupied their present position? At one period antiquaries of repute placed a Roman "camp" here, calling some of the earthworks Roman. "But," writes Mr. Haverfield, "this is most unlikely and no Roman remains have ever been found here." It is true a coin of Constantine the Great was once dug up in the neighbourhood; but this would be vague at best, and one coin goes no further as an argument of a Roman camp than a sixpence dropped by an explorer does to prove a British settlement in the heart of Thibet. Mound and ditch may have been British, but there is no suggestion of evidence to prove it. They are not in the least likely to have been Roman; for the Romans had little, if any, fighting in these parts, and the defence of this portion of the "Saxon shore" was, as we shall see shortly, provided for by the fortification of Brancaster. After all, why should not William d'Albini, first Earl of Arundel, who at any rate began the building of the castle, have caused the mound to be heaped up and the ditch scooped out in the closing years of the twelfth century? It was a period when Norman nobles were not unduly particular as to the manner in which they extorted work, and it may well have seemed to him desirable to make a position, naturally strong, all but impregnable.
The most interesting of the early Lords was Robert de Montalt, who had a feud and a lawsuit with the people of Lynn. Lynn, it is pretty clear, had ceased to be a marsh by that time, and the two communities were far too adjacent to one another for friendly feeling to subsist. De Montalt, too, claimed certain rights in connection with the tolbooth and tolls of Lynn, which were not to the taste of the free and independent burghers of Lynn. It so fell out that one day de Montalt and his followers were in Lynn when they were espied by the burghers. Thereupon Nicholas de Northampton and others raised the town against them, chased them to "his dwelling-house"—surely hardly Castle Rising—besieged it, broke open the doors, beat him and his men, stripped them of weapons, money and jewels to the value of £40, kept him in durance for two days, and released him only upon his solemn promise in the market-place to relinquish all actions against the Mayor and all claims against the Corporation. De Montalt made his promise and departed; but he certainly did not keep the spirit of the compact extorted from him by duress, for he had the law of the Corporation of Lynn, secured judgment for £6000, a huge sum in those days, and, more than that, he actually got £4000, for which he compromised, and Lynn was taxed for years to pay the money by instalments. Of a surety Robert de Montalt laughed best over that quarrel.