England is a garden in June, July, and August. The Isle of Wight is a fairy parterre, set with such wealth of verdure and bloom as never disappoints nor palls upon the sight. The roads are perfect in stability and smoothness, and whether they lie along the edge of the cliffs, or among fertile plains besprinkled with villages and farm-buildings, with an occasional manor-house or venerable ruin, are everywhere fringed by such hedges as flourish nowhere else so bravely as in the British Isles. The hawthorn was out of flower, but blackberries whose blossoms were pink instead of white, trailing briony, sweet-brier, and, daintiest and most luxuriant of all, wild convolvulus, hung with tiny cups of pale rose-color—healed our regrets that we were too late to see and smell the “May” in its best-loved home.
We lunched at Blackgang Chine, spreading our cloth upon the heather a short distance from the brow of the cliff, the sea rolling so far below us that the surf was a whisper and the strollers upon the beach were pigmies. The breadth—the apparent boundlessness of the view were enhanced by the crystalline purity of the atmosphere. In standing upon the precipice, our backs to the shore, looking seaward beyond the purple “Needles” marking the extremest point of the sunken reef, we had an eerie sense of being suspended between sky and ocean;—a lightness of body and freedom of spirit, a contempt for the laws of gravitation, and for the Tally-Ho as a means of locomotion, that were, we decided after comparing notes among ourselves, the next best thing to being sea-fowl.
The principal objects of interest for the day were Carisbrooke Castle and Arreton. Next to the Heidelberg Schloss, Carisbrooke takes rank, in our recollection of ruins many and castles uncountable, for beauty of situation and for careful preservation of original character without injury to picturesqueness. The moat is cushioned with daisied turf, but we crossed it by a stone bridge of a single span. Over the gateway is carved the Woodville coat-of-arms, supported on each side by the “White Rose” of York. The arch is recessed between two fine, round towers. The massive doors, cross-barred with iron, still hang upon their hinges. Passing these, we were in a grassy court-yard of considerable extent. On our left was the shell of the suite of rooms occupied by Charles I. during his imprisonment here, from November 13, 1647, until the latter part of the next year. Ivy clings and creeps through the empty window-frames, and tapestries walls denuded of the “thick hangings and wainscoting” ordered for the royal captive. The floors of the upper story have fallen and the lower is carpeted with grass. Tufts of a pretty pink flower were springing in all the crevices. Ferns grew rank and tall along the inside of the enclosed space. High up in the wall is the outline of a small window, “blocked up in after alterations,” according to the record. Through this the king endeavored to escape on the night of March 20, 1648. Horses were ready in the neighborhood of the Castle, and a vessel awaited the king upon the shore. A brave royalist came close beneath the window and gave the signal.
“Then”—in the words of this man, the only eye-witness of the scene—“His Majesty put himself forward, but, too late, found himself mistaken.”
Charles had declared, when the size of the aperture was under discussion, “Where my head can pass, my body can follow.”
“He, sticking fast between his breast and shoulders and not able to get backward or forward. Whilst he stuck I heard him groan, but could not come to help him, which, you may imagine, was no small affliction to me. So soon as he was in again—to let me see (as I had to my grief heard) the design was broken—he set a candle in the window. If this unfortunate impediment had not happened, his Majesty had certainly then made a good escape.”
The Stuarts were a burden to the land, as a family; but we wished the window had been a few inches broader, and exile, not the block, the end of fight ’twixt king and parliament, as we walked up and down the tilt-yard converted into a promenade and bowling-green for the prisoner while Colonel Hammond was governor of the Castle. Here Charles paced two hours each day, the wide sea and the free ships below him; in plain sight the cove where the little shallop had lain, at anchor, the night of the attempted rescue.
“He was not at all dejected in his spirits,” we read; “but carried himself with the same majesty he had used to do. His hair was all gray, which, making all others very sad, made it thought that he had sorrow in his countenance which appeared only by that shadow.”
In further evidence of his unbroken spirit in this earliest imprisonment, we have the motto “Dum spiro, spero,” written by himself in a book he was fond of reading. Without divining it, he was getting his breath between two tempests. That in these months all that was truly kingly and good within him was nourished into healthy growth we gather, furthermore, in reading that “The Sacred Scriptures he most delighted in; read often in Sand’s Paraphrase of King David’s Psalms and Herbert’s Divine Poems.” Also, that “Spenser’s Faerie Queen was the alleviation of his spirits after serious studies.”
The Bowling Green is little changed in grade and verdure since the semi-daily promenade of the captive monarch streaked it with narrow paths, and since his orphaned son and daughter played bowls together upon the turf two summers afterward. The sward is velvet of thickest pile. There is an English saying that “it takes a century to make a lawn.” This has had more than two in which to grow and green.