We were glad that another party who were with us in the grounds were anxious to see an ancient donkey tread the wheel which draws up a bucket from the well, “144 feet deep, with 37 feet of water” in a building at the side of the Castle. While they tarried to applaud “Jacob’s” feat, we had a quiet quarter of an hour in the upper chamber, where, as a roughly-painted board tells us, “The Princess Elizabeth died.”
Who (in America) has not read the narrative, penned by the thirteen-year-old child, “What the King said to me 29th of January last, being the last time I had the happiness to see him”? The heart breaks with the mere reading of the title and the fancy of the trembling fingers that wrote it out.
Her father had said to her, “But, sweetheart, thou wilt forget what I tell thee!” “Then, shedding abundance of tears, I told him that I would write down all he said to me.”
We knew, almost to a word, the naïve recital which was the fulfilment of the pledge. We could not have forgotten at Carisbrooke that her father had given her a Bible, saying: “It had been his great comfort and constant companion through all his sorrows, and he hoped it would be hers.” She had been a prisoner in the Castle less than a week when she was caught in a sudden shower while playing with her little brother, the Duke of Gloucester, on the Bowling Green. The wetting “caused her to take cold, and the next day she complained of headache and feverish distemper.” It was a poor bed-chamber for a king’s daughter (with one window, a mere slit in the wall, and one door), in the which she lay for a fortnight, “her disease growing upon her,” until “after many rare ejaculatory expressions, abundantly demonstrating her unparalleled piety, to the eternal honor of her own memory and the astonishment of those who waited upon her, she took leave of the world on Sunday, the 8th of September, 1650.”
That was the way the chaplain and the physician told the story—such a sorrowful little tale when one strips away the sounding polysyllables and cuts short the windings of the sentences!
The warden’s wife was, we know, one of “those who waited upon her.” Hireling hands ministered to her through her “distemper.” In the scanty retinue that attended her to Carisbrooke was one “Judith Briott, her gentlewoman.” We liked to think she must have loved her gentle little mistress. It is possible her tending was as affectionate as the care she might have had, had the mother, to whom the father had sent his love by the daughter’s hand, been with her instead of in France, toying (some say) with a new lover. Yet the child-heart must have yearned for parents, brothers and sisters. On that Sunday morning, an attendant entering with a bowl of bread-and-milk, discovered that the princess had died alone, her cheek pillowed upon the Bible—her father’s legacy.
That small chamber was a sacred spot where we could not but speak low and step softly. It is utterly dismantled. When draped and furnished it may not have been comfortless. It could never have been luxurious. A branch of ivy had thrust itself in at the window through which her dying eyes looked their last upon the sky. Caput reached up silently and broke off a spray. As I write, it climbs up my window-frame, a thrifty vine, that has taken kindly to voyaging and transplanting. To me it is a more valuable memento than the beautiful photograph of the monument erected to Princess Elizabeth’s memory in the Church of St. Thomas, whither “her body was brought (in a borrowed coach) attended with her few late servants.”
Yet the monument is a noble tribute from royalty to the daughter of a royal line. The young girl lies asleep, one hand fallen to her side, the other laid lightly upon her breast, her check turned to rest upon the open Bible. The face is sweet and womanly; the expression peacefully happy. “A token of respect for her virtues, and sympathy for her misfortunes. By Victoria R., 1856.” So reads the inscription.
Imagination leaped a wide chasm of time and station in passing from the state prison-chamber of Carisbrooke to the thatched cottage of The Dairyman’s Daughter; from the marble sculptured by a queen’s command, to the head-stone reared by one charitable admirer of the humble piety of Elizabeth Walbridge. To reach the grave we had to pass through the parish church of Arreton. It is like a hundred other parish churches scattered among the byways of England. The draught from the interior met us when the door grated upon the hinges, cold, damp, and ill-smelling, a smell that left an earthy taste in the mouth. Beneath the stone flooring the noble dead are packed economically as to room. The sexton, who may have been a trifle younger than the building, spoke a dialect we could hardly translate. The church was his pride, and he was sorely grieved when we would have pushed right onward to the burying-ground.
“Ye mun look at ’e brawsses!” he pleaded so tremulously that we halted to note one, on which was the figure of a man in armor, his feet upon a lion couchant.