Gray Days and Gold in England and Scotland

by William Winter

CHAPTER VII
SHAKESPEARE RELICS AT WORCESTER

Worcester, July 23, 1889.—The present wanderer came lately to The Faithful City, and these words are written in a midnight hour at the Unicorn Hotel. This place is redolent of the wars of the Stuarts, and the moment you enter it your mind is filled with the presence of Charles the Martyr, Charles the Merry, Prince Rupert, and Oliver Cromwell. From the top of Red Hill and the margin of Perry wood,—now sleeping in the starlight or momentarily vocal with the rustle of leaves and the note of half-awakened birds,—Cromwell looked down over the ancient walled city which he had beleaguered. Upon the summit of the great tower of Worcester Cathedral Charles and Rupert held their last council of war. Here was lost, September 3, 1651, the battle that made the Merry Monarch a hunted fugitive and an exile. With a stranger's interest I have rambled on those heights; traversed the battlefield; walked in every part of the cathedral; attended divine service[113] there; revelled in the antiquities of the Edgar Tower; roamed through most of the city streets; traced all that can be traced of the old wall [there is little remaining of it now, and no part that can be walked upon]; explored the royal porcelain works, for which Worcester is rightly famous; viewed several of its old churches and its one theatre, in Angel street; entered its Guildhall, where they preserve a fine piece of artillery and nine suits of black armour that were left by Charles the Second when he fled from Worcester; paced the dusty and empty Trinity Hall, now abandoned and condemned to demolition, where once Queen Elizabeth was feasted; and visited the old Commandery,—a rare piece of antiquity, remaining from the tenth century,—wherein the Duke of Hamilton died, of his wounds, after Cromwell's "crowning mercy," and beneath the floor of which he was laid in a temporary grave. The Commandery is now owned and occupied by a printer of directories and guide-books, the genial and hospitable Mr. Littlebury, and there, as everywhere else in storied Worcester, the arts of peace prevail over all the scenes and all the traces of

"Old, unhappy, far-off things

And battles long ago."

Worcester Cathedral, from the Edgar Tower.

In the Edgar Tower at Worcester they keep the original of the marriage-bond that was given by Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, of Shottery, as a preliminary to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. It is a long, narrow strip of parchment, and it has been glazed and framed. Two seals of light-coloured wax were originally attached to it, dependent by strings, but these have been removed,—apparently for the convenience of the mechanic who put the relic into its present frame. The handwriting is crabbéd and obscure. There are but few persons who can read the handwriting in old documents of this kind, and thousands of such documents exist in the church-archives, and elsewhere, in England, that have never been examined. The bond is for £40, and is a guarantee that there was no impediment to the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. It is dated November 28, 1582; its text authorises the wedding after only once calling the banns in church; and it is supposed that the marriage took place immediately, since the first child of it, Susanna Shakespeare, was baptized in the Church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford on May 26, 1583. No registration of the marriage has been found, but that is no proof that it does not exist. The law is said to have prescribed that three parishes, within the residential diocese, should be designated, in any one of which the marriage might be made; but custom permitted the contracting parties, when they had complied with this requirement, to be married in whatever parish, within the diocese, they might prefer. The three parishes supposed to have been named are Stratford, Bishopton, and Luddington. The registers of two of them have been searched, and searched in vain. The register of the third,—that of Luddington, which is near Shottery, and about three miles southwest of Stratford,—was destroyed, long ago, in a fire that burnt down Luddington church; and conjecture assumes that Shakespeare was married at Luddington. It may be so, but until every old church register in the ancient diocese of Worcester has been examined, the quest of the registration of his marriage ought not to be abandoned. Richard Savage, the learned and diligent librarian of the Shakespeare Birthplace, has long been occupied with this inquiry, and has transcribed several of the old church registers in the vicinity of Stratford. The Rev. Thomas Procter Wadley,[20] another local antiquary, of great learning and incessant industry, has also taken part in this labour. The long-desired entry of the marriage of William and Anne remains undiscovered, but one gratifying and valuable result of these investigations is the disclosure that many of the names used in Shakespeare's works are the names of persons who were residents of Warwickshire in his time. It has pleased various crazy sensation-mongers to ascribe the authorship of Shakespeare's writings to Francis Bacon. This could only be done by ignoring positive evidence,—the evidence, namely, of Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare personally, and who has left a written description of the manner in which Shakespeare composed his plays. Effrontery was to be expected from the advocates of the preposterous Bacon theory; but when they have ignored the positive evidence, and the internal evidence, and the circumstantial evidence, and every other sort of evidence, they have still a serious obstacle to surmount,—an obstacle that the researches of such patient scholars as Mr. Savage and Mr. Wadley are strengthening day by day. The man who wrote Shakespeare's plays knew Warwickshire as it could only be known to a native of it; and there is no proof that Francis Bacon knew it or ever was in it.[21]

The Edgar Tower.