And still the corse was bare."
Hampton Lucy.
There are many haunted spots in Warwickshire. The benighted peasant never lingers on Ganerslie Heath,—for there, at midnight, dismal bells have been heard to toll, from Blacklow Hill, the place where Sir Piers Gaveston, the corrupt, handsome, foreign favourite of King Edward the Second, was beheaded, by order of the grim barons whom he had insulted and opposed. The Earl of Warwick led them, whom Gaveston had called the Black Dog of Arden. This was long ago. Everybody knows the historic incident, but no one can so completely realise it as when standing on the place. The scene of the execution is marked by a cross, erected by Mr. Bertie Greathead, bearing this inscription: "In the hollow of this rock was beheaded, on the first day of July 1312, by Barons lawless as himself, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall. In life and death a memorable instance of misrule." [Hollinshed says that the execution occurred on Tuesday, June 20.] No doubt the birds were singing and the green branches of the trees were waving in the summer wind, on that fatal day, just as they are at this moment. Gaveston was a man of much personal beauty and some talent, and only twenty-nine years old. It was a melancholy sacrifice and horrible in the circumstances that attended it. No wonder that doleful thoughts and blood-curdling sounds should come to such as walk on Ganerslie Heath in the lonely hours of the night.
Another haunted place is Clopton—haunted certainly with memories if not with ghosts. In the reign of Henry the Seventh this was the manor of Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London, in 1492, he who built the bridge over the Avon,—across which, many a time, William Shakespeare must have ridden, on his way to Oxford and the capital. The dust of Sir Hugh rests in Stratford church and his mansion has passed through many hands. In our time, it is the residence of Sir Arthur Hodgson,[4] by whom it was purchased in July, 1873. It was my privilege to see Clopton under the guidance of its lord, and a charming and impressive old house it is,—full of quaint objects and fraught with singular associations. They show to you there, among many interesting paintings, the portrait of a lady, with thin figure, delicate features, long light hair, and sensitive countenance, said to be that of Lady Margaret Clopton, who, in the Stuart time, drowned herself, in a dismal well, behind the mansion,—being crazed with grief at the death of her lover, killed in the Civil War. And they show to you the portrait of still another Clopton girl, Lady Charlotte, who is thought to have been accidentally buried alive,—because when it chanced that the family tomb was opened, a few days after her interment, the corse was found to be turned over in its coffin and to present indications that the wretched victim of premature burial had, in her agonized frenzy, gnawed her flesh. Her death was attributed to the plague, and it occurred on the eve of her prospective marriage.
Old Porch of Clopton.
It is the blood-stained corridor of Clopton, however, that most impresses imagination. This is at the top of the house, and access to it is gained by a winding stair of oak boards, uncarpeted, solid, simple, and consonant with the times and manners that it represents. Many years ago a squire of Clopton murdered his butler, in a little bedroom near the top of that staircase, and dragged the body along the corridor, to secrete it. A thin dark stain, seemingly a streak of blood, runs from the door of that bedroom, in the direction of the stairhead, and this is so deeply imprinted in the wood that it cannot be removed. Opening from this corridor, opposite to the room of the murder, is an angular apartment, which in the remote days of Catholic occupancy was used as an oratory.[5] In the early part of the reign of Henry the Sixth, John Carpenter obtained from the Bishop of Worcester permission to establish a chapel at Clopton. In 1885 the walls of that attic chamber were committed to the tender mercies of a paper-hanger, who presently discovered on them several inscriptions, in black letter, but who fortunately mentioned his discoveries before they were obliterated. Richard Savage, the antiquary, was called to examine them, and by him they were restored. The effect of those little patches of letters,—isles of significance in a barren sea of wall-paper,—is that of extreme singularity. Most of them are sentences from the Bible. All of them are devout. One imparts the solemn injunction: "Whether you rise yearlye or goe to bed late, Remember Christ Jesus who died for your sake." [This may be found in John Weever's Funeral Monuments: 1631.] Clopton has a long and various history. One of the most significant facts in its record is that, for about three months, in the year 1605, it was occupied by Ambrose Rokewood, of Coldham Hall, Suffolk, a breeder of race-horses, whom Robert Catesby brought into the ghastly Gunpowder Plot, which so startled the reign of James the First. Hither came Sir Everard Digby, and Thomas and Robert Winter, and the specious Jesuit, Father Garnet, chief hatcher of the conspiracy, with his vile train of sentimental fanatics, on that pilgrimage of sanctification with which he formally prepared for an act of such hideous treachery and wholesale murder as only a religious zealot could ever have conceived. That may have been a time when the little oratory of Clopton was in active use. Things belonging to Rokewood, who was captured at Hewel Grange, and was executed on January 31, 1606, were found in that room, and were seized by the government. Mr. Fisher Tomes, resident proprietor of Clopton from 1825 to 1830, well remembered the inscriptions in the oratory, which in his time were still uncovered. Not many years since it was a bedroom; but one of Sir Arthur Hodgson's guests, who undertook to sleep in it, was, it is said, afterward heard to declare that he wished not ever again to experience the hospitality of that chamber, because the sounds that he had heard, all around the place, throughout that night, were of a most startling description. A house containing many rooms and staircases, a house full of long corridors and winding ways, a house so large that you may get lost in it,—such is Clopton; and it stands in its own large park, removed from other buildings and bowered in trees. To sit in the great hall of that mansion, on a winter midnight, when the snow-laden wind is howling around it, and then to think of the bleak, sinister oratory, and the stealthy, gliding shapes upstairs, invisible to mortal eye, but felt, with a shuddering sense of some unseen presence watching in the dark,—this would be to have quite a sufficient experience of a haunted house. Sir Arthur Hodgson talked of the legends of Clopton with that merry twinkle of the eye which suits well with kindly incredulity. All the same, I thought of Milton's lines—
"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."