All this was fresh in our minds when we alighted where Leicester sprang from his charger and knelt at the stirrup of his royal mistress in welcome to his “poor abode.” The grand entrance is gone, and most of the outer wall. There is no vestige of the drawbridge on which was stationed the booby-giant with Flibbertigibbet under his cloak. By the present gateway stands a stately lodge, the one habitable building on the grounds. “R. D.” is carved upon the porch-front, and within it, in divers places. Attached to this is a rear extension, so mean in appearance we were savagely delighted to learn that it was put up in Cromwell’s time. Passing these by the payment of a fee, and shaking ourselves free from the briery hold of the women who assaulted us with petitions to buy unripe fruit, photographs, and “Kenilworth Guides,” we saw a long slope of turf rising to the level, whereon are Cæsar’s and Leicester’s Towers, square masses of masonry, crumbling at top and shrouded, for most of their height, in a peculiarly tough and “stocky” species of ivy. The walls of Cæsar’s Tower—the only portion of the original edifice (founded in the reign of Henry I.) now standing—vary from ten to sixteen feet in thickness. Behind these, on still higher ground, are the ruins of the Great Hall, built by John of Gaunt. In length more than eighty feet, in width more than forty, it is, although roofless, magnificent. The Gothic arches of the windows, lighting it from both sides, are perfect and beautiful in outline. Ivy-clumps hang heavy from oriel and buttress. To the left of this is Mervyn’s, or the Strong Tower, a winding stair leading up to the summit. A broken wall makes a feint of enclosing the castle-grounds, seven acres in area, but it may be scaled or entered through gaps at many points. The moat down which the “Lady of the Lake,” floating “on an illuminated movable island,” seemed to walk on the water to offer Elizabeth “the lake, the lodge, the lord,” is a dry ravine, choked with rubbish, overgrown with grass and nettles. The decline of the hill up which we walked to the principal ruins was the “base court.” A temporary bridge, seventy feet long, was thrown over this from the drawbridge to Cæsar’s Tower, and the queen, riding upon it, was greeted by mythological deities, who offered her gifts from vineyard, garden, field, and fen, beginning the ovation where the modern hags had pressed upon us poor pictures, acerb pears and apples.
This, then, was Kenilworth. We strolled into the Banqueting or Great Hall—now floorless—where Elizabeth and Leicester led the minuet on the night when the favorite’s star was highest and brightest; laughing among ourselves, in recalling the Scottish diplomat’s saying that “his queen danced neither so high nor so disposedly” as did the Maiden Monarch. We climbed Mervyn’s Tower in which Amy Robsart had her lodging; looked down into “The Pleasaunce,” a turfy ruin, in its contracted bounds a dismay to us until the surveyor’s chain measured, for our comfort, what must have been the former limits. It is now an irregular area, scarcely more than a strip of ground, and we sought vainly for a nook sufficiently retired to have been the scene of the grotto-meeting between Elizabeth and the deserted wife.
“Of course you are aware that Amy Robsart was never at Kenilworth; that she had been dead two years when Elizabeth visited Leicester here; that he was secretly married again, this time to the beautiful widow of Lord Sheffield, the daughter of Lord William Howard, uncle to the queen?” said Caput, drily.
Argument with an archæologist is as oxygen to fire. We turned upon him, instead, in a crushing body of infidel denial.
“We received, without cavil, your account—and Scott’s—of the torch-light procession, including Elizabeth’s diamonds, after a day’s hunting, and horsemanship; of Leicester’s glittering ‘like a golden image with jewels and cloth of gold.’ We decline to discredit Scott now!”
He shrugged his shoulders; took a commanding position upon the ruined wall; his eyes swept the landscape discontentedly.
“We dwarf the history of Kenilworth to one little week,” he said. “I am tempted to wish that Scott had never written that fiction, splendid as it is. Do you know that Cæsar’s Tower—by the way, it will outlast Leicester’s, whose building, like the founder, lacks integrity—do you know that Cæsar’s Tower was begun early in the twelfth century? that it was the stronghold of Simon de Montfort in his quarrel with Henry III.? Edward Longshanks, then Prince Edward, attacked de Montfort in Sussex, took from him banners and other spoils and drove him back into Kenilworth, which the insurgents held for six months. His father, the Earl of Leicester, met Edward’s army next day on the other side of the Avon—over there!” pointing. “Gazing, as he marched, toward his good castle of Kenilworth, he saw his own banners advancing, and soon perceived that they were borne by the enemy.
“It is over!” said the old warrior. “The Lord have mercy upon our souls, for our bodies are Prince Edward’s!”
“He was killed, fighting like a lion, in the battle that followed. And, all the while, his son, chafing at his inability to help him, lay,—the lion’s cub at bay,—within these walls. There were Leicesters and Leicesters, although some are apt to ignore all except the basest of the name—the Robert Dudley of whom it was said, ‘that he was the son of a duke, the brother of a king, the grandson of an esquire, and the great-grandson of a carpenter; that the carpenter was the only honest man in the family, and the only one of Leicester’s near relatives who died in his bed.’ Edward II.—poor, favorite-ridden wretch! was a prisoner at Kenilworth after the execution of the Despensers, father and son. He was forced to sign his own deposition in the Great Hall, where you thought of nothing just now but Elizabeth’s dancing. The breaking of the white wand,—a part of the ceremonial at a king’s death—by Sir Thomas Blount, before the eyes of the trembling sovereign, is one of the most dramatic events in English history. Another royal imbecile, Henry VI., had an asylum here during Jack Cade’s Rebellion. There was stringent need for such fortresses as Kenilworth and Warwick in those times.”
We heard it all,—and with interest, sitting upon the edge of the ivied wall of Mervyn’s Tower, overlooking a land as fair as Beulah, in alternations of hill and vale; of plains golden with grain, and belts and groves of grand old trees; the many-gabled roofs and turrets of great houses rising from the midst of these, straggling villages of red-brick cottages on the skirts of manorial estates indicating the semi-feudal system still prevailing in the land. The Avon gleamed peacefully between the borders tilled by men who never talk, and most of whom have never heard, of the brave Leicester who fought his last battle where they swing their scythes. Yet he was known to the yeomen of his day as “Sir Simon the Righteous.”