As at Carisbrooke, Charles Stuart and his hapless daughter are continually present to our imagination; and the grandmother, whose head, like his, rolled in the sawdust of an English scaffold, glides a pale, lovely shade with us through the passages of Holyrood; as at Kenilworth, we think of Elizabeth, the guest, more than of Leicester, the host, and in Trinity Church at Coventry, pass carelessly by painted windows exquisite in modern workmanship, to seek in an obscure aisle the patched fragment of glass that commemorates the chaste Godiva’s sacrifice for her people,—so there was for us one Lord of Warwick Castle, one Hero of Warwickshire. I shall confess to so many sentimental weaknesses, so many historical heresies in the course of this volume, that I may as well divulge this pampered conceit frankly and without apology.
For us—foremost and pre-eminent among the mighty men of the house of Warwick who have “found their hands” for battle and for statecraft since the foundations of Cæsar’s Tower were laid, stands Earl Guy, Goliath and Paladin of the line. Of his deeds of valor, authentic and mythical, the witch at the Lodge has much to tell—the traditionary lore of the district, more.
“I am not Samson, nor Sir Guy, nor Colbrand,”
Shakspeare makes a man of the people say. Sir Guy overthrew and slew the giant Colbrand in the year 926, according to Dugdale. Is not the story of this and a hundred other feats of arms recorded in the “Booke of the most victoryous Prince Guy of Warwick”? When he fell in love with the Lady Lettice—(or Phillis—traditions disagree about the name), the fairest maiden in the kingdom, she set him on to perform other prodigies of valor in the hope of winning her hand. In joust and in battle-field, at home and afar, he wore her colors in his helmet and her image in his heart.
“She appoynted unto Earl Guy many and grievous tasks, all of which he did. And soe in tyme it came to pass that he married her.”
They lived in Warwick Castle, a fortress then, in reality, and of necessity, for a few peaceful years. How many we do not know, only that children were born unto them, and that Lettice, laying aside the naughtiness of early coquetry, grew gentler, more lovable and more fond each day, while Earl Guy waxed silent and morose under the pressure of a mysterious burden, never shared with the wife he adored and had periled his soul to win. Suddenly and secretly he withdrew to the cell of a holy hermit who lived but three miles away, and was lost to the world he had filled with rumors of “derring-doing.” The Countess Lettice, distracted by grief at the disappearance of her lord, and the failure of her efforts to trace the direction of his flight, without a misgiving that while her detectives—who must have been of the dullest—scoured land and sea in search of the missing giant, he was hidden within sight of the turret-windows of Guy’s Tower—withdrew into the seclusion of her castle and gave herself up to works of piety and benevolence. Guy’s children had her tenderest care; next to them her poor tenantry. Upon stated days of the week a crowd of these pensioners presented themselves at her gates and were fed by her servants. Among them came for—some say, twenty, others, forty years, a beggar, bent in figure, with muffled features, in rags, and unaccompanied by so much as a dog, who silently received his dole of the Countess’s charity and went his way challenged by none. We hope, in hearing it, that the Lady Lettice, her fair face the lovelier for the chastening of her great grief, sometimes showed herself to the waiting petitioners. If she did, weeping had surely dulled her vision that she did not recognize Earl Guy under his labored disguise, for he was a Saul even among brawny Saxons and the semi-barbarous islanders. If the eremite had such chance glimpses of his love, they were the only earthly consolation vouchsafed him in the tedious life of mortification and prayer. While Lettice, in her bower among her maidens, prayed for his return, refusing all intercourse with the gay world, her husband divided his time between the cave where he dwelt alone and the oratory of the hermit-monk where he spent whole days in supplication, prone upon the earth.
Poor, tortured, ignorant soul! grand in remorse and in penance as in war and in love! He confessed often to the monk, seldom speaking to him at other times. The priest kept faithfully the dread secrets confided to him. His absolution, if he granted it, did not ease the burdened soul. The end came when the long exile had dried up life and spirit. From his death-bed Earl Guy sent to his wife, by the hand of one of her hinds, a ring she had given him in the days of their wedded joy, “praying her, for Jesu’s sake to visit the wretch from whom it came.” He died in her faithful arms. They were buried, side by side, near his cave.
This is still pointed out to visitors,—a darksome recess, partly natural, enlarged by burrowing hands,—perhaps by those of the “victoryous Prince Guy.”
I drew from the Leamington Library, one Saturday afternoon, a queer little book, prepared under the auspices of a local archæological society, and treating at some length of recent discoveries in Guy’s Cave by an eminent professor of the comparatively new science of classic archæology. Far up in one corner he had uncovered rude cuttings in the rock, and with infinite patience and ingenuity, obtained an impression of them. The surface of the stone is friable; the letters are such clumsy Runic characters as a warrior of the feudal age would have made had he turned his thoughts to penmanship. The language is a barbarous Anglo-Saxon. But they have made out Lettice’s name, twice repeated, and in another place, Guy’s. This last is appended to a line of prayer for “relief from this heavy”—or “grievous”—“load.”
I read the treatise aloud that evening, excited and triumphant.