At Bishop’s Lydeard is a church that is fine enough in itself to wile us from the highway. The bishop who gave it its name was the learned and literary Asser, who has told us himself how King Alfred asked for his friendship, which indeed seems to have been worth having. “He asked me eagerly to devote myself to his service and become his friend, to leave everything I possessed … and he promised he would give me more than an equivalent for it in his own dominions.” This manor of Bishop’s Lydeard was part of the equivalent he gave, when Asser, after some hesitation, left St. David’s and came to be Bishop of Sherborne. Having forsaken the main road to see the splendid tower of this church, and the painted screen and bench-ends, and the tall cross in the churchyard, we may as well drive on a little further to the very foot of the wooded Quantocks, to the church and manor-house of Cothelstone. For many centuries this land was owned by the Stawells, who have left their cross-lozengy above the house-door and in the church; and in later years it became the home of Shelley’s blue-eyed daughter, Ianthe. As we pass the outer gateway, on which two of Jeffreys’ victims swung in Lord Stawell’s despite, we can catch a glimpse of the inner gatehouse and of the red-tiled roof and Jacobean doorway beyond. This is but a fragment of the old manor-house, for when that “loftie proud man,” Sir John, raised four troops for Charles I. he was sent to prison for it, and his house was brought low by Blake.
There is a letter still existing, yellow now with age and very fragile at the folds, in which Sir John’s bailiff writes to him piteously concerning this disaster. “The cruell and base dealyng,” he says, “wch is now acted at Cothelstone doth astonish and amaze all people wch do either see it or heare of it; for they have now taken downe all the Leads of the house … and have already taken downe that part of the house wch is over against my Ladye’s garden.… I am very sorry that ther is occasion gyven me to make soe sadd a relation unto you.… I beseech God to send us better tymes.” It was in the eighteenth century that this restored wing of the old house passed to the Esdailes, ancestors of that Edward Esdaile who married Shelley’s daughter.
Behind the house is the church that was once the private chapel. It has some carved bench-ends and some old glass, but its special features are the two beautiful tombs in the south chapel: the finely carved figures of a fourteenth-century Stawell and his wife, with their painted shields below them, and the still more beautiful Elizabethan tomb with the effigies of marble. In a corner of the churchyard is a white stone “in sweet memory of Ianthe.”
Again we return to our high-road, and this time do not pause till we drive into the market-place of Taunton, the quiet centre of a country-town, where cabbages are bought and sold, and loitering cabmen smoke their pipes without a thought of Monmouth or of Jeffreys. Yet some of these very houses were wreathed with flowers at the coming of the foolish duke: here where the fountain is he stood and smiled while the pious maids of Taunton, made rebels by his handsome face, gave him a Bible, and a fine banner of their own working, “One would have thought the people’s wits were flown away in the flights of their joy.” Here he was proclaimed King James and called King Monmouth, and here his followers paid for their ill-placed devotion in torrents of blood. Into this market-place came Kirke and his Lambs with their victims in chains; and over there at the corner of Fore Street and High Street stood the “White Hart,” whose signpost was the gibbet. Hither came Jeffreys of the sinister face. “He breathed death like a destroying angel,” says Toulmin, “and ensanguined his very ermines with blood. The victims remained unburied; the houses and steeples were covered with their heads, and the trees laden almost as thick with quarters as with leaves.” He went in to his monstrous work through that arch with the embattled towers; and passed on through the inner entrance of yellow stone, where Henry VII.’s shield and Bishop Langton’s are above the door. Within it is the great hall, with the timbered roof and the whitewashed walls that were hung with scarlet while Jeffreys, “mostly drunk,” stormed at his victims of the Bloody Assizes. The little girl—she was hardly more than a child—who had won Monmouth’s easy smiles by her speech among the June flowers in the market-place was ransomed with her schoolfellows; but her sister had seen the Judge’s face, and died of the terror of it.
TAUNTON CASTLE.
Such are some of the memories of quiet, prosperous Taunton. Nor is the rest of its long history much more placid. The eighth-century castle of wood to which King Ina of the West Saxons called his “fatherhood, aldermen, and wisest commons, with the godly men of his kingdom, to consult of great and weighty matters,” only survived for twenty-one years. In the twelfth century the Bishop of Winchester built another, which was improved and enlarged by his successors, and has partly weathered the many storms and stresses of its long experience: Wars of the Roses, invasion by Perkin, and the siege of the Civil War. Taunton held for the Parliament, consistently, but at the first not very stoutly. No sooner did the royalists come near the town, says Clarendon, than two “substantial inhabitants” were sent out to treat with the general; while the garrison settled the matter by departing, like Perkin on a former occasion from the same castle, “with wonderful celerity.” A year later, however, the Parliament took Taunton again, and making Blake its defender, kept it. For Blake, who afterwards summed up a sailor’s duty in memorable words—“It is not for us to mind state affairs, but to keep the foreigners from fooling us”—knew the duty of a soldier too. “As we neither fear your menaces nor accept your proffers,” he answered the summons to surrender, “so we wish you for time to come to desist from all overtures of the like nature unto us.” Wyndham, Goring, Hopton, Grenville, all did their utmost in vain. It remained for Charles II.’s spite to ruin Taunton’s defences. The castle that defied the King was dismantled, and the town-walls utterly wiped away.
Of the Augustinian Priory that was founded by Bishop Giffard of Winchester and supported by so many noteworthy people—by Henry de Blois and the Mohuns, Montacutes and Arundels, William of Wykeham and Jasper Tudor—there is nothing left but a barn, the priory church of St. James, and the splendid chapel of St. Mary Magdalen, now the parish church. The graceful tower from which Macaulay looked out over a land flowing with milk and honey was shortly afterwards taken down, but the present one, with its three tiers of Decorated windows and its pinnacles and parapet, is exactly copied, it is said, from the original.
From Taunton we pass, through pretty undulating country, by way of Hatch Beauchamp to Ilminster. After the wild scenery of Devon this quiet land is not exciting; but there are pleasant woods here and there, and the villages of Somerset need fear no comparisons with any in England. The towns are less attractive, except in the matter of churches. Ilminster, for instance, is clean and old-fashioned, but has no real beauty save the church of yellow stone with the fine tower. When Monmouth made his successful progress through this country in his youth, from hospitable house to flower-strewn town, he came to this church one Sunday morning from White Lackington. He saw the tower with the triple windows and Sir William Wadham’s fifteenth-century transepts; but the nave has been rebuilt since then, and betrays the fact. In the northern transept is the enormous tomb of the builder, inlaid with brasses; and near it is the ponderous but unlovely monument of Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham, founders of Wadham College. They “lie both interr’d under a stately monument,” says Prince, “now much defaced, the greater is the pity, by the rude hands of children and time.”