With these two exceptions, both of which tend to strengthen the legitimate influence of the place, all besides is exactly as it was. You ascend the broad, easy oak stairs; you see the chapel by their side, with all its brocaded seats and cushions; you advance along vast passages, where stand huge chests filled with coals, and having ample crypts in the walls for chips and firewood. Here are none of the modern contrivances to conceal these things; but they stand there before you, with an air of rude abundance, according well with the ancient mixture of baronial state and simplicity. You go on and on, through rooms all hung with rich old tapestry, glowing with pictorial scenes from scriptural or mythological history; all furnished with antique cabinets, massy tables, high chairs covered with crimson velvet or ornamental satin. You behold the very furniture used by Queen Mary; the very bed she worked with her own fingers. But perhaps that spacious gallery, extending along the whole front of the house, gives the imagination a more feudal feeling than all. Its length, nearly two hundred feet; its great height; its stupendous windows, composing nearly the whole front, rattling and wailing as the wind sweeps along them. What a magnificent sough, and even thunder of sound, must fill that wild old place in stormy weather. There you see arranged, high and low, portraits of most of the characters belonging to the family or history of the place, of all degrees of execution. It is not my intention to give any details, either of those or of the furniture; that having been done by Mrs. Jameson with the accuracy and feeling that particularly distinguish her. I aim only at imparting the general effect. It is enough therefore to say that there are “many beautiful women and brave men:” portraits of bluff Harry VIII.; those of the rival queens, Mary and Elizabeth; her keeper, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and his masculine wife, Elizabeth of Hardwick; and the philosophers, Boyle and Hobbs. One interesting particular of Mrs. Jameson’s statement, however, we could not verify:—the tradition of the nocturnal meeting of the rival queens in the gallery. We never heard of it before; nor could we now find, by the most particular inquiries, even among the domestics, any knowledge of such a tradition. It was as new to them as to us; and we therefore set it down as a pleasant poetical tradition of the fair author’s own planting.
The Duke was come hither from Chatsworth, to spend a week, and he seemed to have come in the spirit befitting the place; for there was scarcely more than its usual establishment; scarcely less than its usual quietness perceptible. The Duke himself we had met on the road, and in his absence were shewn through the apartments which he uses on these occasions; and it had a curious effect amid all this staid and sombre antiquity, to find, on a plain oak table in the library, the newspapers of the day; the Athenæum, Court Journal, the Spectator, and Edinburgh Review; the works of Dr. Channing; and Hood’s Tylney Hall, just then published. What an antithesis! what a mighty contrast between the spirit of the past and the present!—the life and stir of the politics and the passing literature of the day, in a place belonging in history, character, and all its appointments, to an age so different, and so long gone by, with all its people and concerns.
Nothing, perhaps, could mark more vividly the vast changes in the manners and circumstances of different ages in England; the wonderful advance in luxury and refinement of the modern ones, than by passing from Hardwick to the old Hall of Haddon, built in 1427, when the feudal system was in its strength; when the manor-house was but one remove from the castle; to visit this with its rude halls, its massive tables, its floors made from the planks of one mighty oak, its ancient arras and quaint stucco-work; and then pass over to Chatsworth, only a few miles distant, where to the past all the splendour of the present has been added; modern architecture, and all its contrivances for domestic convenience, comfort, and elegance; pictures, statuary, books, magnificent furniture, glowing carpets; every thing that the art, wealth, and ingenuity of this great nation can bring together into one princely mansion. But as my limits will not admit of this, I shall content myself with a survey of a more domestic kind, yet connected with the poetical history of our own day—Annesley and Newstead.
CHAPTER VI.
ANNESLEY HALL AND HUCKNALL.
Early in the spring of 1834, I walked over with Charles Pemberton from Nottingham, to see Annesley Hall, the birth-place and patrimony of Mary Chaworth; a place made of immortal interest by the early attachment of Lord Byron to this lady, and by the graphic strength and deep passion with which he has recorded in his poems this most influential circumstance of his youth.
Annesley lies about nine miles north of Nottingham, itself—the scene of his first and most lasting attachment—Newstead, his patrimonial abode—and Hucknall, his burial-place; forming the three points of a triangle, each of whose sides may be about two miles in length. Yet, although Newstead and Hucknall have been visited by shoals of admirers, this place, perhaps altogether the most interesting of the three, has been wholly neglected. Few, or none of them, have thought it worth while to go so little out of their way to see it; perhaps not one in a hundred has known that it was so near; probably to those who inquired about it, it might be replied, “you see that wooded ridge—there lies Annesley. You see all that is worth seeing; it is a poor tumble-down place:” and so they have been satisfied, and have returned in their wisdom to their own place, at a hundred, or a thousand, miles distance. But what is still more remarkable, while Mr. Murray has sent down an artist into this neighbourhood to make drawings of Hucknall church and Newstead for his Life and Poems of Lord Byron; and while others have encompassed sea and land to give us thrice reiterated landscapes illustrative of his biography and writings, and have even presented us with fictitious portraits of the most interesting characters connected with his fortunes,—they have totally passed over Annesley as altogether unworthy of their notice, though it is a spot, at once, full of a melancholy charm; of a sad, yet old English beauty; a spot, where every sod, and stone, and tree, and hearth, is rife with the most strange and touching memories in human existence; and where the genuine likeness of Mary Chaworth, in the most lovely and happy moments of her life, is to be found.
Need I pause a moment to account for this? Does not the discerning public always tread in one track? As sheep follow one leader, and traverse the heath in a long extended line, so does the public follow the first trumpeter of the praises of one place. It has been fashionable to visit Newstead, and it has been visited;—but as Annesley was not at first thought of, it has not been visited at all. Well! we have visited it; and if there be any power in the most melancholy of mortal fortunes—in the retracing the day-dreams of an illustrious spirit—in the gathering of all English feelings round the strongest combination of the glories of nature, with the aspect of decay in the fortunes and habitation of an ancient race, we shall visit it again and again.[13]
[13] Since this was published in the Athenæum in the autumn of 1834, Washington Irving has published his interesting visit to Newstead and Annesley.
That wooded ridge was our landmark from the first step of our journey, and we soon reached Hucknall. The approach to Hucknall is pleasant; the place itself is a long and unpicturesque village. Count Gamba is said to have been struck with its resemblance to Missolonghi. Sixteen years have now passed since the funeral of Lord Byron took place here, and yet it seems to me but as yesterday. His admirers, in after ages, will naturally picture to themselves the church, on that occasion, overflowing with the intelligent and poetical part of the population of the neighbourhood. A poet who had spent a good deal of his boyhood and youth in it—whose patrimonial estate lay here—who had gone hence, and won so splendid a renown—whose life had been a series of circumstances and events as striking and romantic as his poetry—who had finally been cut down in his prime, in so brilliant an attempt to restore the freedom and ancient glory of Greece—would naturally be supposed to come back to the tomb of his ancestors, amidst the confluence of a thousand strongly-excited hearts. But it was not so. There was a considerable number of persons present, but the church was by no means crowded, and the spectators were, with very few exceptions, of that class which is collected, by idle curiosity on the approach of any not very wonderful procession; who would have collected to gaze as much at the funeral of his lordship’s grandfather, or his own, though he had not written a line of poetry, or lifted the sword of freedom;—probably, with threefold eagerness at that of a wealthy cit, because there would have been more of bustle and assuming blazonry about it. With the exception of the undertaker’s hired company; of Sir John Cam Hobhouse, and his lordship’s attorney, Mr. Hanson; his Greek servant Tita, and his old follower Fletcher, the rest of the attendants were the villagers, and a certain number of people from Nottingham, of a similar class, and led by similar motives. There was not a score of those who are called “the respectable” from Nottingham; scarcely one of the gentry of the county. This strange fact can only be accounted for by the circumstance that Nottingham and its vicinity are famous for the manufacture of lace and stockings, but, like many other manufacturing districts, possess no such decided attachment to literature. Many readers there are, undoubtedly, in both town and country, but readers chiefly for pastime—for the filling up of a certain space between and after business—and a laudable way too of so filling it; but not readers from any unconquerable passion for, or attachment to, literature for its own sake. A few literary persons have lived in or about the neighbourhood, but these are the exception; the character of the district is manufacturing and political, but by no means literary, nor ever was; therefore, the strongest feeling with which Lord Byron was regarded there, was a political one. Though an aristocrat in birth and bearing, he was a very thorough radical in principle. Hence, he had only the sympathy of the radicals with him, those consisting chiefly of the working classes. The whigs of the town and the gentry of the county, chiefly tories, regarded him only in a political light, and paid him not the respect of their presence.