Perhaps the feeling of the people was less for the prelate than against the prince, for the first Protestant heresies spread rapidly in Northampton, and the doctrines of Wickliffe had such acceptance that the mayor himself was accused of holding them, and of favoring the spread of Lollardy. In the two great Civil Wars, Northampton stood for the White Rose and then for the Parliament, against the two kings. In 1460, a great battle was fought under the city’s walls; ten thousand of Henry’s “tall Englishmen” were killed or drowned in the river Nene, and Henry himself was brought prisoner into the town. In 1642, the guns of the Puritan garrison “plaid for about two hours” on “the cavaleers and shot about twenty of them” when they attempted to assault the place, which became a rendezvous for the parliamentarians, and sent them frequent aid from its fifteen thousand in their attacks on the neighboring places holding for the King. In 1645, both parties met in force, a little northwest of the town, and Cromwell, who had joined Fairfax, won the battle of Naseby after Fairfax had lost it, and with an overwhelming victory ended the war against Charles.
If any Washingtons were in the fight, as some of so numerous a line might very well have been, it was on the King’s side. They put their faith in princes while they remained in England; it wanted yet a hundred and thirty years, at the remoteness of Virginia, to school them to the final diffidence which they were not the first of the Americans to feel. The slow evolution of the race out of devoted subjects into devoted citizens was accomplished in stuff other than that of the Puritan chief who soon after could “say this of Naseby,—that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men ... I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would by things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance, and God did it.” Yet the faith in poor common men, once kindled in Washington, if not so mixed with piety as Cromwell’s, outlasted that through parliamentary trials as severe as ever it was put to by poor uncommon men.
Non-conformity, civil as well as religious, which the Washingtons were no part of, was the note of Northampton from the first, and to the last it has been represented in Parliament by such bold dissentients as Bradlaugh and Mr. Labouchere. It is the great shoe-town of England, and apparently there is nothing like leather to inspire a manly resistance to the pretensions of authority. But the Washingtons of Northampton were never any part of the revolt against kingly assumptions. The Lawrence Washington who was twice Mayor of Northampton profited by Henry VIII.’s suppression of the monasteries to possess himself of Sulgrave Manor, where his descendants dwelt for a hundred years and more, until 1658, when their discomforts under the Commonwealth, and their failing fortunes, made them glad of the protection of their noble kindred the Spencers at Brington.
It is not clear how the house at Little Brington, which is known as the Washington house, was granted them, or how much it was loan or gift of the Spencers; but it does not greatly matter now. The Washingtons, who had shared the politics of their cousins, were rather passive royalists, but they suffered the adversities of the cause they had chosen, and they did not apparently enjoy the prosperity which the Restoration brought to such of their side as could extort recognition from the
THE WASHINGTON HOUSE AT LITTLE BRINGTON
second Charles, as thankless as the first Charles was faithless; and neither the Washingtons who staid in England, nor those who went to Virginia, had ever any profit from their fidelity to the Stuarts. They were gentlemen, who were successful in business when they turned to trade, but in the household records of their noble cousins at their seat of Althorp there is said to be proof of the frequent goodness of the Spencers to the needy Washingtons of Little Brington. If the Washingtons paid for the favor they enjoyed in the ways that poor relations do, it is not to the discredit of either line that a lady of their family should have been at one time housekeeper at Althorp. One fancies, quite gratuitously, that Lucy Washington was a woman of spirit who wished to earn the favor which her people had, whether less or more, from their kinsfolk. Two of the Washingtons elsewhere, who made fortunes, were knighted, but the direct ancestor of our Washington was a clergyman who suffered more than the common misfortunes of the Washingtons at Brington. He was falsely accused of drunkenness at a time when any charge was willingly heard against a royalist clergyman, and was ejected from his rich benefice as a scandalous minister. His character was afterwards cleared, but he had thenceforth only a small living to the end, and probably was, like his kindred at Brington, befriended by the Spencers.
The Lawrence Washington who was Mayor of Northampton and the grantee of Sulgrave, was chosen first in 1532 and last in 1546. The place was then, as it continued to be for a hundred and thirty odd years, the mediæval town of which the visitor now sees only a few relics in here and there an ancient house. Happily most of the old churches escaped the fire that swept away the old dwellings in 1675, and left the modern Northampton to grow up from their ashes the somewhat American-looking town we now find it. The side streets are set with neat brick houses, prevailingly commonplace. One might fancy one’s self, coming towards the Church of All Saints, in the business centre of some minor New England city, but with rather less of glare and noise, and held in a certain abeyance by the presence of the church. All Saints is not one of the churches which escaped the flames; and of the original structure only the Gothic tower is left; the rest, a somewhat vague little history of the city says, “is wholly modern.” But modernity, like some other things, is relative, and a New England town might find a very satisfying antiquity in an edifice which at its latest dates back to Queen Anne, and at its earliest to Charles II. The King gave a thousand tons of timber from his forest of Whittlebury towards the rebuilding of the church, and for this munificence he has been immortalized by sculpture over the centre of a most beautiful and noble Ionic, or Christopher-Wrennish, portico, where he stands in the figure of a Roman centurion, with, naturally, a full-bottomed wig on. Few heroic statues are more amusing, and the spirit of the royal reprobate so travestied might be very probably supposed to share the spectator’s enjoyment. Behind one end of the portico, which extends for eighty feet across the whole front of the church, were once the rooms in which many non-conformists of Northampton were tried for the offence of thinking for themselves in matters of religion, which were then so apt to become matters of politics.