“There were Leicesters and Leicesters,” Caput had truly said, and that the proudest and most magnificent of them all was the most worthless. But when we had picked our way down the broken stairs, and sat in the shadow of Cæsar’s Tower, upon the warm sward, watching men drive the stakes and stretch the cords of a marquee, for the use of a party who were to pic-nic on the morrow among the ruins, we said:—
“To-morrow, we will see Leicester’s Hospital and Leicester’s tomb, at Warwick.”
The walk from Leamington to Warwick was one greatly affected by us as a morning and afternoon “constitutional.” It was delightful in itself, and we never wearied of rambling up one street and down another of the town. We never saw Broek, in Holland, but it cannot be cleaner than this Rip Van Winkle of a Warwickshire village, where the very children are too staid and civil—or too devoid of enterprise—to stare at strangers. A house under fifty years of age would be a disreputable innovation. House-leek, and yellow stone-crop, and moss grow upon the roofs; the windows have small panes, clear and bright, and, between parted muslin curtains, each window-sill has its pots of geraniums and gillyflowers.
We bought some buns in a little shop, the mistress of which was a pretty young woman, with the soft English voice one hears even among the lowly, and the punctilious misapplication of h we should, by this time, have ceased to observe.
“The H’earl h’of Leicester’s ’Ospital h’is a most h’interesting h’object,” she assured us, upon our inquiring the shortest way thither. “H’all strangers who h’admire ’istorical relicts make a point h’of visiting the H’earl h’of Leicester’s ’Ospital.”
The street has been regraded, probably laid out and built up since the “’istorical relict” was founded, in 1571. We would call it a “Refuge,” the object being to provide a home for the old age of a “Master and twelve brethren,” the latter, invalided or superannuated tenants or soldiers, who had spent their best days in the service of the Leicesters. It was a politic stroke to offer the ease, beer, and tobacco of the Refuge as a reward for hard work and hard fighting. We may be sure Robert Dudley did not overlook this. We may hope—if we can—that he had some charitable promptings to the one good deed of his life.
The Hospital is perched high, as if deposited there by the deluge, upon an Ararat platform of its own. The plastered walls are criss-crossed by chocolate-colored beams; the eaves protrude heavily; odd carvings, such as a boy might make with a pocket-knife, divide the second and third stories. It is a picturesque antique. People in America would speak of it, were it set up in one of our suburban towns, as a “remarkable specimen of the Queen Anne style.” One learns not to say such things where Queen Anne is a creature of yesterday. A curious old structure is the “relict,”—we liked and adopted the word,—and so incommodious within we marveled that the brethren, now appointed from Gloucester and Warwickshire, did not “commute,” as did “our twelve poor gentlemen” in Dickens’ Haunted Man. But they still have their “pint”—I need not say of what—a day, and their “pipe o’ baccy,” and keep their coal in a vast, cobwebby hall, in which James I. once dined at a town banquet. They cook their dinners over one big kitchen-fire, but eat them in their own rooms; have daily prayer, each brother using his own prayer-book, in the Gothic chapel over the doorway, the “H’earl of Leicester” staring at them out of the middle of the painted window, and wear blue cloth cloaks in cold weather, or in the street, adorned with silver badges upon the sleeves. These bear the Leicester insignia, the Bear and Ragged Staff, and are said to be the very ones presented by him to the Hospital. Sir Walter Scott is—according to Caput—responsible for the fact that, in the opinion of the ladies of our company, the most valuable articles preserved in the institution are a bit of discolored satin, embroidered by Amy Robsart (at Cumnor-Hall?) with the arms of her faithless lord, and a sampler whereupon, by the aid of a lively imagination, one can trace her initials.
How much of heart-ache and heart-sinking, of hope deferred, and baffled desire may have been stitched into these faded scraps of stuff that have so long outlasted her and her generation! Needlework has been the chosen confidante of women since Eve, with shaking fingers and tear-blinded eyes, quilted together fig-leaves, in token of the transgression that has kept her daughters incessantly busy upon tablier, panier, and jupon.
From the Hospital we went to St. Mary’s Church. There is a cellary smell in all these old stone churches where slumber the mighty dead, suggestive of must, mould, and cockroaches, and on the hottest day a chill, like that of an ice-house. Our every step was upon a grave; the walls were faced with mortuary brasses and tablets. The grating of the ever-rusty lock and hinges awakened groans and whispers in far recesses; our subdued tones were repeated in dreary sighs and mutterings, as if the crowd below stairs were complaining that wealth and fame could not purchase the repose they were denied in life. Our cicerone in St. Mary’s was a pleasant-faced woman, in a bonnet—of course. We never saw a pew-holder or church-guide of her sex, bonnetless while exercising her profession. Usually, the bonnet was black. It was invariably shabby. St. Paul’s interdict against women uncovering the head in church may have set the fashion. Prudent dread of neuralgias, catarrhs and toothaches would be likely to perpetuate it. The guide here neither evaded nor superadded hs, and we made a grateful note of the novelty. She conducted us first to what we knew in our reading as the “Chapel of Richard Beauchamp.”
“The Beechum Chapel? yes, sir!” said our conductress, leading the way briskly along the aisle, through oratory and chantry up a very worn flight of steps, under a graceful archway to a pavement of black-and-white lozenge-shaped marbles. The Founder sleeps in state second to no lord of high degree in the kingdom, if we except Henry VII. whose chapel in Westminster Abbey is yet more elaborate in design and decoration than that of the opulent “Beechums.” The Bear and Ragged Staff hold their own among the stone sculptures of ceiling and walls. The former is studded with shields embossed with the arms of Warwick, and of Warwick and Beauchamp quartered. The stalls are of dark brown oak, carved richly—blank shields, lions, griffins, muzzled and chained bears being the most prominent devices. The “Great Earl,” in full armor of brass, lies at length upon a gray marble sarcophagus. A brazen hoop-work, in shape exactly resembling the frame of a Conestoga wagon-top, is built above him. Statuettes of copper-gilt mourners, representing their surviving kinsmen and kinswomen, occupy fourteen niches in the upright sides of the tomb. Sword and dagger are at his side; a swan watches at his uncovered head, a griffin and bear at his feet; a casque pillows his head; his hands are raised in prayer. The face is deeply lined and marked of feature, the brows seeming to gather frowningly while we gaze. It is a marvelous effigy. The woman looked amazed, Caput disgusted, when we walked around it once, gave a minute and a half to respectful study of the Earl’s face and armor; smiled involuntarily in the reading of how he had “decessed ful cristenly the last day of April, the yeare of oure lord god AMCCCCXXXIX.”—then inquired abruptly:—“Where is the tomb of Queen Elizabeth’s Leicester?”