Walmgate, or Watling Gate, Bar is the most picturesque of them on the inner side, for it carries on its stone pillars an Elizabethan house of timber and plaster. But by far the richest in memories is Micklegate Bar. Some of these memories are of a very ghastly kind, for it was here that the heads of "traitors" were set up. It was here that Harry Hotspur's head looked down upon his doubly treacherous old father, the Duke of Northumberland, as that time-server rode out through the gate in perfect friendliness with Henry IV., and found it advisable, no doubt, to ignore the thing that stared above the parapet. Here, in Henry V.'s reign, the head of Lord Scrope of Masham was set up because he favoured the House of York; and here, half a century later, was the head of the Duke of York himself, crowned with paper—to be replaced, almost before Margaret of Anjou had finished laughing at it, by the head of the man who put it here—Clifford the Butcher. The hideous series closed with the followers of Prince Charlie in the Forty-five.
MICKLEGATE BAR, YORK.
Meantime there were other sights to be seen at Micklegate Bar. Richard III., fresh from one coronation and eager for another, was received here "with great pomp and triumph" by the citizens and the clergy "in their richest copes," and passed through this archway with his stolen crown upon his head, followed by his luckless queen and the little boy who was so soon to die. His successor's daughter, Margaret Tudor, entered York very gaily by this gate with five hundred lords and ladies, on her way to her unhappy marriage with James IV. of Scotland. James I. was on his way to Scotland, too, when he rode to Micklegate Bar from Tadcaster, with the sheriffs of York bearing their white rods before him. He waited here while the Mayor, kneeling in the road, presented him with a sword and the city keys, and a cup and a purse, "and made a worthy speech at the delivery of each particular." Still braver was the scene when Charles I. came in, with that strange army that was no army; the army that was commanded by an "amateur general" and was intended to overawe the Scots by pomp. "The progress was more illustrious than the march, and the soldiers were the least part of the army," says Clarendon. This sombre bar was gay enough that day. So splendid a procession has seldom been seen as that which filed through its dark shadow then, all glittering and glowing, while the trainbands of the city, magnificent in scarlet and silver and feathered caps, greeted Charles with a volley, and the civic authorities on their knees greeted him with flattery. It was not many years before another sort of scene was enacted on this spot: when the army of Fairfax—commanded by no amateur—was drawn up in a double line that stretched away from this gate for a mile, and the two Royalist generals who had defended the city so finely, Glenham and Slingsby, marched out between the two lines with the remnant of the garrison, with all the honours of war. That was the most stirring sight, I expect, that Micklegate Bar has seen.
Fairfax and the other victorious generals marched to the Minster and "sang a psalm." What that psalm must have meant to Fairfax we can hardly realise. The siege had lasted for thirteen weeks; more than four thousand of his men had died in the course of it; twenty-two times they had assaulted the walls. He was himself a Yorkshireman, and like all Yorkshiremen, loved and honoured the city that has held so proud a place in English history, and the Minster that is the city's crown. No wonder he marched straight from the gate to the Minster and sang a psalm! What York Minster meant to Fairfax it must in a lesser degree mean to every Englishman. It combines superlative interest with superlative beauty. We may come to it primed with its history—the history that begins with the Roman temple whose foundations are hidden beneath it, the history that includes so many great names; we may know that Paulinus of the seventh century—the tall, majestic man with the hawk-face whom Bede has described for us—built the first church here of wood, and was the first Archbishop of York; that three other churches stood here and were destroyed before the present building was begun in the thirteenth century and slowly rose to its perfection; but when we see it we can remember nothing but its beauty. It completely dominates York. It is impossible to forget its presence for a moment, whether it be dim and blurred in the dawn or flushed with the light of sunset.
Nearly every one, I suppose, has seen it. Nearly every one has felt, on passing through the entrance in the south transept, that breathless sensation of awe that is almost fear, of reverence that is almost worship. The first sight of those immense arches, so absolutely simple, so indescribably majestic, with the lancets of the Five Sisters behind them, is overwhelming. It is only gradually that memory returns, and the great nave slowly fills with the processions of the past, with the weddings and funerals and coronation pageants that have swept by, century after century, to choir or chapter-house. Young Edward III. and Philippa of Hainault were a comely pair when they were married here in the presence of the Parliament and Council, surrounded by the nobles of England and Scotland. Not very many years later their little son was carried to his grave in the north aisle of the choir. Much was spent in alms and masses, many pounds of wax were burnt, many widows watched round the little coffin before William of Hatfield was laid in this tomb where we see his effigy, a slender, boyish figure lying very straightly under the high canopy. In the next century a sinister scene took place here: Richard Crookback mourning for his brother, coming here to hear a requiem sung, with his head full of plots against the dead man's little sons. Very soon he was here again, entering those splendid doors with the iron scrollwork, which lead into the chapter-house where he was crowned for the second time—the chapter-house that Pius II. described as "a fine lightsome chapel, with shining walls and small, thin-waisted pillars quite round." "As the rose is the flower of flowers," said the monks, "so is this the house of houses."
YORK MINSTER.