‘Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur illis.’
(Perhaps some day our names may mix with theirs). When we got to Temple Bar he stopped me, pointed to the heads upon it, and slyly whispered:—
‘Forsitan et nostrum ... miscebitur Istis.’”
One of the heads was blown down on April 1st, 1772, and the other did not remain much longer. The head of Colonel Towneley is preserved in the chapel at Townely Hall, near Burnley. It is perforated, showing that it had been thrust upon a spike. During a visit on May 21st, 1892, to Towneley Hall by the members of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, the skull was seen, and a note on the subject appears in the Transactions of the Society.
TEMPLE BAR IN DR. JOHNSON’S TIME.
The heads of not a few Scotchmen were spiked on the gates of Carlisle, and some romantic stories have come down to us respecting them. One of these we related in our “Bygone England,” and to make this account more complete we may perhaps be permitted to reproduce it. “A young and beautiful lady,” so runs the tale, “came every morning at sunrise, and every evening at sunset, to look at the head of a comely youth with long yellow hair, till at length the lady and the laddie’s head disappeared.” The incident is the subject of a song, in which the lovesick damsel bewails the fate of her lover. Here are two of the verses:—
“White was the rose in my lover’s hat
As he rowled me in his lowland plaidie;
His heart was true as death in love,
His head was aye in battle ready.
His long, long hair, in yellow hanks,
Wav’d o’er his cheeks sae sweet and ruddy;
But now it waves o’er Carlisle yetts
In dripping ringlets, soil’d and bloody.”