Henry, the tenth Lord Clifford, was a very small boy when his father, "the Butcher," lost his estates, his cause, and his life, on the blood-red grass of Towton. It was not without reason that John Clifford was surnamed "the Butcher." It was in vain that young Rutland knelt to him for mercy on Wakefield Bridge, "holding up both his hands and making dolorous countenance, for his speech was gone for fear." "By God's blood," snarled Clifford, "thy father slew mine, and so will I do thee and all thy kin!" And he plunged his dagger into the boy's heart. "In this act," says the historian, "the Lord Clifford was accounted a tyrant and no gentleman. With his hands still dyed with the son's blood he savagely cut off the head of the dead father, the busy, plotting head of Richard, Duke of York, and carried it, crowned with paper, 'in great despite and much derision,'" to the Lancastrian Queen. "Madam, your war is done," he cried, "here is your King's ransom!" Margaret of Anjou, for all her manly ways, became rather hysterical at the hideous sight, laughing violently with pale lips; and Clifford's triumph was short. While he lay with an arrow through his throat upon the field of Towton—which we shall see later on—his little son was hurried away to a shepherd's hut in the north, where in the course of twenty-five years or so on the hillside he learnt more than the tending of sheep. He became the gentlest of his line, a lover of learning, a watcher of the skies; and though at last Skipton came back to him, and Brougham, and Pendragon, and many another castle, he lived here quietly in this simple tower above the wooded Wharfe, befriending the poor, reading his books, and now and then reading the stars as well, with his friends the monks of Bolton.
FROM THE ROAD NEAR BARDEN TOWER.
"And ages after he was laid in earth,
The good Lord Clifford was the name he bore."
His descendant, the notable Lady Pembroke, whose initials are so conspicuous at Skipton, expended some of her energy here at Barden. This was one of the six castles she restored, and over the door we may read the inscription she placed there according to her habit, with all her names and titles recorded at length, and a reference to a complimentary text about "the repairer of the breach."
Those who wish to see the famous Strid—and none should miss the sight—may leave their cars by the wayside at a point not very far from Barden Tower; but this is not the course I recommend. The Bolton woods are beautiful beyond description, and it is only by walking or driving through them from the Abbey to the Strid, or even to Barden Tower, that one can fully enjoy their ferny slopes and serried stems, and the little shining streams that slip through them to the Wharfe. George Eliot and George Lewes once spent a whole day wandering together along these paths, and we might follow in their footsteps very happily, I think. Those who prefer to drive must hire carriages, for motors are not admitted to the woods; but the existence of a very nice little hotel at Bolton Bridge makes everything easy.
By one means or another the Strid must be seen. Here the Wharfe is contracted into a narrow cleft, an abrupt chasm between low masses of rock; and the angry river, suddenly straitened in its course, has in its convulsions bitten into the stone till it is riddled with a thousand holes and hollows. When the river is low it is possible to leap across from rock to rock. This is the leap that Alice de Meschines' boy attempted but failed to achieve so many years ago, when the hounds he held in leash hesitated to follow him, and so dragged him back into the torrent. "I will make many a poor man's son my heir," said his mother; and the priory that her parents had founded at Embsay was moved by her to Bolton, and greatly enriched in memory of the drowned Boy of Egremond. Here is the stone from which he leapt, they say, and here the stone he never reached, and both are polished by the feet of those who have been more successful. This legend—and I fear the unkinder "myth" would be the more accurate word—has prompted several poets to make verses, but has signally failed to inspire them.
BOLTON PRIORY.