[W. D. Haydon.
BUILDWAS ABBEY.
MADELEY COURT.
About a mile beyond Buildwas is Ironbridge, named from the first bridge ever built in England of iron, which here spans the Severn at a height of forty feet, by a single arch of a hundred feet in width. It was the work of Abraham Darby, the third of his name, and was finished in 1779. A gradient of 1 in 10 takes us through Ironbridge, and less than two miles further on is Madeley, which appears at first sight the very type of all that is unromantic, a prey to coal-dust and miners; yet if we turn off the main road to the left we shall presently find, hidden in a hollow near Madeley Court Station, as poetic a spot as we shall see in many a day’s journey. Perhaps its very contrast to its surroundings adds to its charm; perhaps to some it may not seem charming at all, but merely a tumble-down, ill-kept house. But to others this little nook, with the weather-stained, crumbling walls and tiled gables of the Court House, the swinging ivy, the still pond, the bulrushes and water-lilies, and the red-and-black timbered barn that once sheltered a fugitive king, are a “faery land forlorn,” the very home of glamour and romance. Here Charles II. arrived one night, dressed in green breeches and a noggen shirt. He was tired and hungry, his hands and face were smudged with soot, and he answered to the name of William Jones. He was refreshed in this house, and spent the next day in the barn with Richard Penderel, one of the five brothers to whom he owed his safety. When night fell he walked to Boscobel.
It was hours before he was there, whereas we, if we were as much hurried as he was, might be there in half an hour or so. But though there is nothing to keep us at Shifnal we must pause at Tong, where there are some especially pretty timbered cottages and a church that is really remarkable, for it contains a collection of tombs which I should imagine to be unequalled in a village church. They are those of the Vernon family, and among them is that of Dame Margaret Stanley, the sister of Dorothy Vernon, of Haddon Hall. Charles Dickens said himself that it was of Tong Village he was thinking when he wrote the end of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” and those to whom Little Nell appeals may think of her and her grandfather in the porch of this church. Some of us, however, will take more interest in the shot-marks that have scarred the northern wall ever since the days of the Civil War.
In a park near the village stands the astonishing structure called Tong Castle. It was once a real castle of stone; in the sixteenth century Sir Henry Vernon rebuilt it of brick; in the eighteenth a new owner thought that Moorish cupolas would make a pretty finish to it. When, in 1643, it was in the possession of the Parliamentarians, it was said on that account to be a “great eye-sore to his Majesty’s good subjects who pass’d yt road.” For other reasons it is so still.
A writer of the seventeenth century describes Boscobel as “a very obscure habitation, situate in a kind of wilderness”; and no doubt it was to this obscurity that Charles II. owed his safety. Even to-day it is wonderfully isolated, and we reach it by a series of rather circuitous by-roads; but we can drive right up to the house, and leave our car in a safe enclosure, while we walk a hundred yards to the Royal Oak—not the original “asylum of the most potent prince King Charles II. ... the oak beloved by Jove,”[1] which was mostly made into snuff-boxes and other treasures for the loyal—but an oak grown from an acorn of that “fortunate tree.” When Charles reached Boscobel at three o’clock in the morning he was taken into the big panelled room that we shall presently see, and was refreshed with bread and cheese and a posset of milk and beer. Colonel Carlis, another fugitive from Worcester, “pulled off his Majesty’s shoos, which were full of gravel, and stockens which were very wet,” and at daybreak went with him into the wood, where they both climbed into the oak—here, where we are standing—with a cushion for his Majesty to sit on. Here, for a great part of the day, the tired King slept with his head on Colonel Carlis’s knee. “He bore all these hardships and afflictions with incomparable patience,” says a contemporary historian. At night he was hidden in the house, buried beneath the garret floor in a box-like priest’s-hole, with a load of cheese on the lid. We may climb the stairs and see it; get into it if we will—and ask ourselves if, after spending a night in it, we should be as lighthearted as this man who at any moment might lose his life and had already lost everything else. In the morning he called for a frying-pan and butter, and, having first despatched Colonel Carlis with a dagger to slaughter a neighbour’s sheep, he gaily cooked himself some mutton collops, while the Colonel, “being but under-cook (and that honour enough too), made the fire and turned the collops in the pan.”
From Boscobel we strike due north to Ivetsey Bank, where we shall find an inn capable of providing a good, if homely, luncheon or tea. Thence sixteen miles on Watling Street will bring us without a pause (unberufen!) through Wellington to the point where we left the main road on our outward journey. It is worth while, by the way, to avoid the unpleasant bit of road through Oakengates by striking across to the main road from Shifnal; to do which we must take a turn in St. George’s, where a lamp-post stands out prominently. We enter Shrewsbury, as we left it, by the London Road.