Hucknall-Torkard Church.
The sexton of the church of St. James and the parish clerk of Hucknall-Torkard was Mr. John Brown, and a man of sympathetic intelligence, kind heart, and interesting character I found him to be,—large, dark, stalwart, but gentle alike in manner and feeling, and considerate of his visitor. The pilgrim to the literary shrines of England does not always find the neighbouring inhabitants either sympathetic with his reverence or conscious of especial sanctity or interest appertaining to the relics which they possess; but honest and manly John Brown of Hucknall-Torkard understood both the hallowing charm of the place and the sentiment, not to say the profound emotion, of the traveller who now beheld for the first time the tomb of Byron. This church has been restored and altered since Byron was buried in it, in 1824, yet it retains its fundamental structure and its ancient peculiarities. The tower, a fine specimen of Norman architecture, strongly built, dark and grim, gives indication of great age. It is of a kind often met with in ancient English towns: you may see its brothers at York, Shrewsbury, Canterbury, Worcester, Warwick, and in many places sprinkled over the northern heights of London: but amid its tame surroundings in this little colliery settlement it looms with a peculiar frowning majesty, a certain bleak loneliness, both unique and impressive. The church is of the customary crucial form,—a low stone structure, peak-roofed outside, but arched within, the roof being supported by four great pillars on either side of the centre aisle, and the ceiling being fashioned of heavy timbers[131] forming almost a true arch above the nave. There are four large windows on each side of the church, and two on each side of the chancel, which is beneath a roof somewhat lower than that of the main building. Under the pavement of the chancel and back of the altar rail,—at which it was my privilege to kneel, while gazing upon this sacred spot,—is the grave of Byron.[26] Nothing is written on the stone that covers his sepulchre except the name of BYRON, with the dates of his birth and death, in brass letters, surrounded by a wreath of leaves, in brass, the gift of the King of Greece; and never did a name seem more stately or a place more hallowed. The dust of the poet reposes between that of his mother, on his right hand, and that of his Ada,—"sole daughter of my house and heart,"—on his left. The mother died on August 1, 1811; the daughter, who had by marriage become the Countess of Lovelace, in 1852. "I buried her with my own hands," said the sexton, John Brown, when, after a little time, he rejoined me at the altar rail. "I told them exactly where he was laid, when they wanted to put that brass on the stone; I remembered it well, for I lowered the coffin of the Countess of Lovelace into this vault, and laid her by her father's side." And when presently we went into a little vestry he produced the Register of Burials and displayed the record of that interment, in the following words: "1852. Died at 69 Cumberland Place, London. Buried December 3. Aged thirty-six.—Curtis Jackson." The Byrons were a short-lived race. The poet himself had just turned thirty-six; his mother was only forty-six when she passed away. This name of Curtis Jackson in the register was that of the rector or curate then incumbent but now departed. The register is a long narrow book made of parchment and full of various crabbéd handwritings,—a record similar to those which are so carefully treasured at the church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford; but it is more dilapidated.
Another relic shown by John Brown was a bit of embroidery, presenting the arms of the Byron family. It had been used at Byron's funeral, and thereafter was long kept in the church, though latterly with but little care. When the Rev. Curtis Jackson came there he beheld this frail memorial with pious disapprobation. "He told me," said the sexton, "to take it home and burn it. I did take it home, but I didn't burn it; and when the new rector came he heard of it and asked me to bring it back, and a lady gave the frame to put it in." Framed it is, and likely now to be always preserved in this interesting church; and earnestly do I wish that I could remember, in order that I might speak it with honour, the name of the clergyman who could thus rebuke bigotry, and welcome and treasure in his church that shred of silk which once rested on the coffin of Byron. Still another relic preserved by John Brown is a large piece of cardboard bearing the inscription which is upon the coffin of the poet's mother, and which bore some part in the obsequies of that singular woman,—a creature full of faults, but the parent of a mighty genius, and capable of inspiring deep love. On the night after Byron arrived at Newstead, whither he repaired from London, on receiving news of her illness, only to find her dead, he was found sitting in the dark and sobbing beside the corse. "I had but one friend in the world," he said, "and she is gone." He was soon to publish Childe Harold, and to gain hosts of friends and have the world at his feet; but he spoke what he felt, and he spoke the truth, in that dark room on that desolate night. Thoughts of these things, and of many other strange passages and incidents in his brief, checkered, glorious, lamentable life, thronged into my mind as I stood there, in presence of those relics and so near his dust, while the church grew dark and the silence seemed to deepen in the dusk of the gathering night.
Hucknall-Torkard Church—Interior.
They have for many years kept a book at the church of Hucknall-Torkard [the first one, an album given by Sir John Bowring, containing the record of visitations from 1825 to 1834, disappeared[27] in the latter year, or soon after], in which the visitors write their names; but the catalogue of pilgrims during the last fifty years is not a long one. The votaries of Byron are far less numerous than those of Shakespeare. Custom has made the visit to Stratford "a property of easiness," and Shakespeare is a safe no less than a rightful object of worship. The visit to Hucknall-Torkard is neither so easy nor so agreeable, and it requires some courage to be a votary of Byron,—and to own it. No day passes without bringing its visitor to the Shakespeare cottage and the Shakespeare tomb; many days pass without bringing a stranger to the church of St. James. On the capital of a column near Byron's tomb I saw two mouldering wreaths of laurel, which had hung there for several years; one brought by the Bishop of Norwich, the other by the American poet Joaquin Miller. It was good to see them, and especially to see them close by the tablet of white marble which was placed on that church wall to commemorate the poet, and to be her witness in death, by his loving and beloved sister Augusta Mary Leigh,—a name that is the synonym of noble fidelity, a name that in our day cruel detraction and hideous calumny have done their worst to tarnish. That tablet names him "The Author of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"; and if the conviction of thoughtful men and women throughout the world can be accepted as an authority, no name in the long annals of English literature is more certain of immortality than the name of Byron. People mention the poetry of Spenser and Cowley and Dryden and Cowper, but the poetry of Byron they read. His reputation can afford the absence of all memorial to him in Westminster Abbey, and it can endure the neglect and censure of the precinct of Nottingham. That city rejoices in a stately castle throned upon a rock, and persons who admire the Stuarts may exult in the recollection that there the standard of Charles the First was unfurled, in his fatal war with the Parliament of England; but all that really hallows it for the stranger of to-day and for posterity is its association with the name of Byron. The stranger will look in vain, however, for any adequate sign of his former association with that place. It is difficult even to find prints or photographs of the Byron shrines, in the shops of Nottingham. One dealer, from whom I bought all the Byron pictures that he possessed, was kind enough to explain the situation, in one expressive sentence: "Much more ought to be done here as to Lord Byron's memory, that is the truth; but the fact is, the first families of the county don't approve of him."
When we came again into the churchyard, with its many scattered graves and its quaint stones and crosses leaning every way, and huddled in a strange kind of orderly confusion, the great dark tower stood out bold and solitary in the gloaming, and a chill wind of evening had begun to moan around its pinnacles, and through its mysterious belfry windows, and in the few trees near by, which gave forth a mournful whisper. It was hard to leave the place, and for a long time I stood near the chapel, just above the outer wall of the Byron vault. And there the sexton told me the story of the White Lady,—pointing, as he spoke, to a cottage abutting on the churchyard, one window in which commands a clear view of the place of Byron's grave. [That house has since been removed.] "There she lived," he said, "and there she died, and there," pointing to an unmarked grave near the pathway, about thirty feet from the Byron vault, "I buried her." It is impossible to give his words or to indicate his earnest manner. In brief, this lady, whose past no one knew, had taken up her residence in this cottage long subsequent to the burial of Byron, and had remained there until she died. She was pale, thin, handsome, and she wore white garments. Her face was often to be seen at that window, whether by night or day, and she seemed to be watching the tomb. Once, when masons were repairing the church wall, she was enabled to descend into that vault, and therefrom she obtained a skull, which she declared to be Byron's, and which she scraped, polished, and made perfectly white, and kept always beneath her pillow. It was her request, often made to the sexton, that she might be buried in the churchyard, close to the wall of the poet's tomb. "When at last she died," said John Brown, "they brought that skull to me, and I buried it there in the ground. It was one of the loose skulls from the old vault. She thought it was Byron's, and it pleased her to think so. I might have laid her close to this wall. I don't know why I didn't."
In those words the sexton's story ended. It was only one more of the myriad hints of that romance which the life and poetry of Byron have so widely created and diffused. I glanced around for some relic of the place that might properly be taken away: there was neither an ivy leaf shining upon the wall nor a flower growing in all that ground; but into a crevice of the rock, just above his tomb, the wind had at some time blown a little earth, and in this a few blades of grass were thinly rooted. These I gathered, and still possess, as a memento of an evening at Byron's grave.