From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.

by Katharine Lee Bates

TEWKESBURY ABBEY

From the summit of Worcester Beacon and from other of the higher Malvern crests the view ranges, on a clear day, over some fifteen counties and embraces the six momentous battlefields of Shrewsbury, Mortimer's Cross, Edge Hill, Worcester, Evesham and Tewkesbury, and the three cathedrals of Hereford, Worcester, and Gloucester, besides the remnants of six great religious houses of mediæval England,—Great and Little Malvern, Pershore, Evesham, Deerhurst and Tewkesbury. Little Malvern Priory, established in the twelfth century by a band of Benedictine monks from Worcester who sought the wilds that they might emulate the life of hermits, survives only in fragments, but the church of Great Malvern Priory, an earlier outgrowth from Worcester, keeps its Norman interior, with rich treasures of stained glass and miserere carvings. We had passed through the Vale of Evesham toward the close of our long Midland drive and seen the scant relics of its mitred abbey, but we fail to follow the Avon on to Pershore, one of the richest and most powerful of the old monastic foundations. Not only were these monasteries planted in the fairest and most fruitful lands of the county, but a large portion of Worcestershire was owned by them and by the neighbouring abbeys of Gloucestershire. In all this horde of priests one has a special claim to literary remembrance,—Layamon, who dwelt in the hamlet of Ernley, near the junction of the Severn and the Stour. He constitutes an important link in the passing on of the Arthurian legend, which, first related in Latin prose by that entertaining prelate, Geoffrey of Monmouth, had been already rendered into French verse by Wace, the professional chronicler of the Plantagenets. Layamon retold and amplified the story, using the French poem as his basis, but aided by two other works whose identity is doubtful.

"Layamon these books beheld and the leaves he turned. He them with love beheld. Aid him God the Mighty! Quill he took with his fingers, and wrote on book-skin, and the true words set together, and the three books pressed into one."

We could pay only a flying visit to Malvern this summer, but in other summers have resorted thither again and again for the refreshment of the blithe air and pure water and of walking on those turfy hills where many a grateful sojourner has left path or seat to ease the climber's way.

Worcester, too, was familiar ground, and this time we gave but a few hours to the "Faithful City," which paid so dearly for its steadfast loyalty to Charles I. The unspeakable Parliamentarians proved nearly as destructive as the Danes, who, in the ninth century and again in the eleventh, had sacked it with fire and sword. The militant Presbyterians wreaked their piety most of all upon the Cathedral, leaving it roofless, its splendid glass all shattered, its brasses wrenched away, its altars desecrated and torn down. We found the red-brick town upon the Severn brisk and cheerful, with its proud shop-window display of its own products, from the Royal Worcester China to Worcestershire Sauce, with the deeply laden barges that almost hid the river; its lively hop market; and its grunting sows, each with her litter of recalcitrant little pigs, driven in a meandering course through the main street by ruddy boys and girls. The cathedral, whose memories embrace St. Dunstan and St. Wulfstan and that stout-hearted old martyr of Oxford, Bishop Latimer—who had himself once presided at the burning of a friar—uplifted our hearts with its august vista of nave and choir. The crowned tenant of that choir, King John, ought to be troubled in his gilded rest by the proximity of a Prince Arthur, though not the Arthur to whom he did such grievous wrong. The best of the cathedral is, to my thinking, the solemn grace of the crypt, beneath whose light-pillared arches stand about various stone figures of rueful countenance. After their centuries of sunlight, high-niched on the central tower, the Restorer has scornfully dislodged them and dungeoned them down here.

Just below Worcester the Severn is augmented by the Teme, which has valiantly cut its way through the line of western hills to join the court of Sabrina, and at Tewkesbury, on the Gloucester border, it receives its most famous affluent, Shakespeare's Avon. Tewkesbury was new to us, and we lingered there two days, wishing we might make them twenty. As it was we had to forego the delightful trip on the Severn to Deerhurst, an old monastic town whose pre-Norman church is said to be of extremely curious architecture.

Tewkesbury Abbey, which outranks in size ten of the twenty-eight English cathedrals, is one of the most illustrious churches in the United Kingdom. Unlike most of the larger monastic establishments, it was under the control of a succession of great families whose deeds and misdeeds form no small part of the history of England. Fitz-Hamon, kin to the Conqueror, swept away what buildings of the old Saxon abbey he may have found there, and erected the magnificent Norman church which still awes the beholder. The ashes of Fitz-Hamon, who died in 1107, rest near the High Altar. The next lord of Tewkesbury to be buried in the Abbey was Gilbert de Clare, one of the signers of Magna Charta. The name of his father, Richard de Clare, headed the list, and one of the seven copies of the Great Charter was deposited in the Abbey. Every lord of Tewkesbury after Gilbert de Clare was interred in this church, which, for the next two hundred and fifty years, until the lordship of Tewkesbury was absorbed into the Crown, grew ever more splendid with costly monuments. The widow of Gilbert de Clare married the brother of Henry III, Richard, Duke of Cornwall, but although she thus became a countess of many titles and one of the first ladies of the land, she asked, in dying, to be buried beside the husband of her youth in Tewkesbury. To this her second husband would not agree, but he was magnanimous enough to send her poor, homesick heart back to the Abbey in a silver vase, which was duly placed in Earl Gilbert's marble mausoleum.

The De Clares of Tewkesbury, Earls of Gloucester and Hereford, were a warrior race. The second Gilbert, called the Red Earl, fought both with Simon de Montfort, and against him, and the third Gilbert, his son, fell at Bannockburn. By his early death the lordship of Tewkesbury passed from the De Clares, who had held it for nearly a century, to the young earl's brother-in-law, Hugh le Despencer. This new Earl of Gloucester had succeeded Piers Gaveston in the perilous favour of Edward II. When Roger de Mortimer, by the unhallowed aid of Queen Isabel, triumphed over the king, the elder Despencer, a man of ninety, was hanged at Bristol, and his son, Hugh le Despencer, crowned with nettles, was swung from the gallows fifty feet high, in a hubbub of mockeries and rejoicings, at Hereford. His widow collected the scattered quarters of his body, exposed in various towns, and interred them in the Abbey under a richly carved and coloured monument. The Despencers, though no longer Earls of Gloucester, held the lordship of Tewkesbury for wellnigh another hundred years, cherishing and beautifying the fabric of the church and adding lavishly to its memorials of bronze and marble and to its treasure of chalices, copes, and jewels.

Early in the fifteenth century the male line of the Despencers became extinct, and the Lady Isabel, sister of the last Lord Despencer, succeeded to the ecclesiastical honours of the family. Married in the Abbey at the age of eleven to Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Worcester, she was widowed ten years later and found her solace in building an exquisite chapel, known as the Warwick Chantry, in her husband's memory. Her second husband, cousin to the first, was Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, whom she commemorated in the still more elaborate Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick; but she herself chose to lie at Tewkesbury. Her daughter married Warwick the King-maker and became the mother of two fair girls of most pathetic story. The elder, Isabel, was wedded to George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward III,—"false, fleeting, perjur'd Clarence,"—who is supposed to have been murdered in the Tower through the agency of his brother Richard—drowned, the whisper went, in a butt of Malmsey wine. A fortnight earlier his wife and an infant child had died, probably of poison. A son and daughter survived, who, for the royal blood that flowed in their veins, were regarded with uneasiness by the Tudor kings and ultimately sent to the block. The daughter, Margaret Plantagenet, superintended the education of the Princess Mary, and was once described by Henry VIII himself as "the most saintly woman in England." But she was the mother of Cardinal Pole, who had angered the tyrant and was on the Continent out of his reach; so this reverend and gracious lady, at the age of sixty-eight, had her stately head clumsily hacked off by a prentice executioner on Tower Hill, where her innocent brother had perished forty-two years before. The second daughter of the Countess Isabel had an even more pitiful life than her sister's, for her first husband was Prince Edward, the last Lancastrian, and then, after he had been foully slain, she strangely accepted the hand of one of his murderers, Richard of Gloucester, the worst of the Yorkists, by whom she was soon, it would appear, coolly put out of the world. A favourite saying of the county, probably having reference to the extraordinary number and wealth of its religious houses, runs: "As sure as God is in Gloucestershire," but one can hardly read these tragedies of Tewkesbury without feeling that the Devil has been no infrequent sojourner there.

The lamentable Wars of the Roses, which had drenched England with blood, threw up their last red spray against the Abbey. The resolute Queen Margaret and her son had attempted, with an army raised by the Duke of Somerset, to get possession of Gloucester, but they found it already held by the Yorkists and hastened on to Tewkesbury. Still weary from their forced march, they were attacked by Edward at break of a summer dawn (1471) while the monks were chanting matins in the Abbey, and sustained a signal defeat. The place of slaughter is still known as Bloody Meadow. The Duke of Somerset, with a few knights and squires, took refuge within the sacred walls, but Edward and his followers, hot for vengeance, rushed in to slay them even there. The abbot, who had just been celebrating mass, came from the altar and, holding the consecrated host high in his hands, stood between the furious Yorkists and their prey. The war-wrath was for the moment stayed, and Edward gave his word to respect the peace of the sanctuary. But after a service of thanksgiving, the blood-anointed king and his fierce nobles withdrew to a house hard by, where that unhappy younger Edward, the legitimate heir to the throne, was brought a defenceless prisoner into their presence, insulted, assailed, and slain. The rumour went that the king himself had with his gauntleted hand struck the royal youth across the mouth, and in an instant the others, like wild beasts, were upon him, Richard of Gloucester in the front. It is believed that the mangled, boyish body was buried in the Abbey under the central tower.