Certain delightful English towns, with glimpses of the pleasant country between

by William Dean Howells

He sent us later on our way to Great Brington with the assurance that the rector of the church would be waiting us in it to show us the tomb of the Washington buried there. His courtesy was the merit of my friend the genealogist with whom I had exhausted the American origins in London, and who had now come with me into the country for the most important of them all. When we were well started on our drive, that divine September afternoon, we would gladly have had it twelve rather than six miles from Northampton to Great Brington. The road was uncommonly open, or else it was lifted above the wonted level of English roads, and we could see over the tops of the hedges into the fields, instead of making the blindfold progress to which the wayfarer is usually condemned. It was not too late in the year or the day for a song-bird or so, and the wayside roses and hawthorns were so red with hips and haws that we gave them the praise of an American coloring for their foliage till we looked closer and found that the gayety was not of their leaves. Where the leaves felt the fall, they showed it in a sort of rheumatic stiffness, and a paling of their green to a sad gray, or a darkening of it to a yet sadder brown. But we did not notice this till we had turned from the highway, and were driving through Althorp Park. There was a model farm village before our turning, where some nobleman had experimented in making his tenants more comfortable than they could afford, in cottages too uniformly Tudoresque; but at differing distances, in various hollows and on various tops, there were more indigenous hamlets, huddling about the towers of their churches, and showing a red blur of tiles or a dun blur of walls, as we saw them alow or aloft. When we got well into the park there was only the undulation of the wooded surfaces, where wide oaks stood liberally about with an air of happy accident in their informal relation. I should like, for the sake of my romantic page, to put does under them; they were a very fit shelter for does; and I have read that does may sometimes be seen lightly flying from the visitors’ approach through the glades of the park. It was my characteristically commonplace luck to see none, but I hope that in their absence the reader will make no objection to the black and white sheep which I did abundantly see feeding everywhere. It will be remembered, or not unwillingly learned, that sheep were once the ambition, the enthusiasm of the Spencers, who made them early an interest of the region, so that it was the most perverse of fates which kept their greatest flock down to 19,999, when they aimed at 20,000. Still, if they were black-nosed sheep, the lower figure might represent a value greater than 20,000 of the common white-nosed sort. A black nose gives a sheep the touch of character which the species too often lacks: a hardy air of almost goatlike effrontery, yet without the cold-eyed irony of the goat, which forbids the lover of wickedness the sympathy which the black-nosed sheep inspires. A black-nosed lamb affects one more like a bad little boy whose face has not been washed that morning, or for several mornings, than anything else in nature; and it would not be easy to say which was more suggestive of racial innocence mixed with personal depravity. I am not able to say whether a black nose in a sheep adds to the merit of its mutton or its fleece, but I am sure that it adds a piquant charm to its appearance, and I do not know why we have not that variety of sheep in America. I dare say we have.

When presently we drove past Althorp house, standing at a dignified remove from our course, which was effectively the highway, I felt in its aspects the modernity which has always been characteristic of the family. It is of that agreeable period when the English architects were beginning to study for country houses the form of domestic classic which the Italian taught those willing to learn of them simplicity and grace at harmony with due state, and which is still the highest type of a noble mansion. The lady of the house more than two centuries back had been the Saccharissa of Suckling’s verse, and her charm remained to my vague associations with the place, where she figured in the revels of happier times, and then in her beneficences to the distressed clergy after the Civil War, when the darker days came to those of the Spencer praying and fighting. There is no reason why she should not be related in these to the Washingtons, who needed if they did not experience her kindness, and if the reader wishes to strain a point and make her more the friend than mistress of that Lucy Washington who was sometime housekeeper at Althorp, I will not be the one to gainsay him. For all me, he may figure these ladies in the priceless library of Althorp: priceless then, but sold in our tunes to Mrs. Rylands at Manchester, for a million and a half, and there made a monument to her husband’s memory. Many bolder things have been feigned than these ladies sitting together among the books, which would be the native air of the rhyme-worn Saccharissa, and discoursing with Mistress Lucy’s kinsman, Lawrence Washington, lately Fellow of Brasenose College, and lecturer and proctor at Oxford, and now rector of Purleigh, whence he was to be wrongfully removed for drunkenness: all with the simultaneity so common in the romance of historical type. How they would thee and thou one another as cousins of the seventeenth-century sort I leave the archæological novelist to inquire, gladly making over to him all my right and title in the affair. If he wishes to lug in the arrest of King Charles by Cornet Joyce of the Parliament forces, he can do it with no great violence, for it really happened hard by at Holmby House, whence the King was fond of coming to enjoy the gardens of Althorp. He can have Saccharissa and Mistress Lucy Washington, and his reverence Mr. Washington, looking down at the incident from a window of the library, and if he is the romanticist I take him for, he will easily have young Lawrence rapt in a vision of his great-great-grandson arresting the kingly power in America. The vision will have all the more fitness, in the reflections it suggests to the ancestor, from the fact, of which he will also be prescient, that both the Washingtons and Spencers, devoted and perhaps unreasoning royalists in their days, were destined to become more and more freed from their superstition, and to stand for greater freedom under different forms, as time went on. In his prophetic rapture, the Reverend Lawrence may have been puzzled to choose among his great-great-grandsons who was to fulfil it, for he was the father of a populous family counting seventeen in the first descent, and he could not have been blamed if he could not know George Washington by name, or identify him in his historical character.

It is this Lawrence Washington whose tablet one goes to revere in the church at Great Brington, where he lies entombed with the mother of his eight sons and nine daughters; and if one arrives at the sort of headland where the church stands on such a September afternoon as ours, and looks out from it over the lovely country undulating about its feet, one must try hard in one’s memory or imagination to match it with a scene of equal beauty. Of like beauty there is none except in some other English scenes like the home of Washington’s ancestors, and it is English in every feature and expression. The fields with their dividing hedges, the farmsteads snuggling in the hollows, the grouped or solitary trees, all softened in a sunny haze, and tented over with the milky-blue sky, form a landscape of which the immediate village, at the left of the headland, is a foreground,

THE CHURCH AT GREAT BRINGTON

Under the floor of the nave was buried the first Lawrence Washington, great-great-grandfather of George Washington

with the human interest without which no picture lives.

I suppose that if I had been given my choice whether to have one of these village houses unroofed, and its simple drama revealed to me, I should have poorly chosen that rather than had the wooden cover lifted from the church floor where it protects the mortuary tablet of Lawrence Washington and his wife from the passing tread. But the rector of the church at Great Brington could not have gratified me in my preference, whereas he could and did lift the lid from the tablet in the nave, and let us read the inscription, and see the armorial bearings, in which the stars and stripes of our flag slept, undreaming of future glory, in the chrysalis arrest of the centuries since they had been the arms of a race of Northamptonshire gentlemen. The rector was in fact waiting for us at the church door, hospitably mindful of the commendation of our Northampton clerical friend, and we saw the edifice to all the advantage that his thoughtful patience could lend us. He had at once some other guests, in the young man and young woman who followed us in with their dog. They recalled themselves to the rector, who received them somewhat austerely, with his eyes hard upon their companion. “Did you mean to bring that animal with you?” he asked, and they pretended that the dog was an interloper, and the young man put him out in as much disgrace as he could bring himself to inflict. Probably there was an understanding between him and the dog; but the whole party took the rector’s reproof with a smiling humility and an unabated interest in the claims of the Washington tablet, and in fact the whole church, upon their attention. They somewhat distracted my own, which is at best an idle sort, easily wandering from Early English architecture to Later English character, and from perpendicular windows to people of any inclination. Yet, the church at Great Brington is most worthy to be studied in detail, for it is “notable even among the famous churches of Northamptonshire,” and it is the fitting last home of Washington’s ancestors.