Part 22 (1/2)

Morton appeared at the conclusion of the disastrous quarrel, and it was reserved for him to put a stop to the deluge of blood that had been ruthlessly shed for so many years,--computed to have cost a hundred thousand lives,--decimating his native land, and by uniting and neutralizing the contending claims, bring it peace. A statesman-like mission of the first importance, and carried out with such consummate wisdom, that it has been aptly said, ”he joined the Roses, that is, he brought about the union of the Houses of York and Lancaster, for that was his doing, and, so far as can now be seen, would not have been done but for him. He made the Tudor dynasty, and his name is buried under his own creation.”

So ends our little story,--such are the momentous issues, that fill the mind's eye, amid this rural quietness, as our steps make homeward.

Evening is approaching, and leaving the interesting precincts of North-Bradley church, our path back to Trowbridge,--discerned afar by its hood of smoke,--leads through some pleasant meadows by way of Suthwyke. Here we halt for a moment to take a final look at the old place, and first home of Stafford in these parts. If deserted, one after another, by its antient possessors, it now appears shorn of the original dignity that man's transitory occupation once conferred upon it, and of which nothing but a memory remains, Nature, unchanging, still continues to adorn it with her charms, and specially so just at present, for the trees in the orchard that skirts the Court are in full bloom, some of them ”white as a sheet with blooth” (as the old Saxon idiom of the west-country peasantry expressively describes it), and others loaded with cl.u.s.ters of variously expanded chalices of all shades of that inimitable pink, the which--for want of other satisfactory description,--we are content to call ”apple-blossom.”

There, across the moat, lived the first Sir Humphrey,--this we know,--but what voice shall come back from the Past, and point us to the site of the cottage, wherein the future Archbishop--his presumed son--first saw the light? All is silent.

Of the last resting-places of the Staffords of Suthwyke, greater certainty exists, and widely divided are they all in death.

The two successive Sir Humphreys, their wives, and a stray descendant, sleep where stood a venerable monastic church, on the sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic, in southern Dorset; the unfortunate, headless Earl, lies in Glas...o...b..ry's great Abbey in central Somerset; but the record of their graves has perished with them. Not so the memorials that perpetuate the memories of the Archbishop's mother and her famous boy. She received honoured burial, presumably amid her native scenes, and, it may be, among her own kindred, here in this little sanctuary in north Wilts; but her distinguished son found sepulture far away in Kent, in the glorious cathedral, whose throne he filled, and among those whose names are entwined with the greatest traditions of the land, and within the precincts of its most sacred place, near where his canonized predecessor meekly met his death at the hands of savage men, and thenceforward named for all time as

”THE TRANSEPT OF THE MARTYRDOM.”

Stranger, who through these dim sepulchral aisles, Strayest in silence 'mid the mighty dead, Lo, History's tongue here Time's fleet ear beguiles, Great memories rise at every footstep's tread;-- Entombed in peace, repose, life's tumult o'er, Two famous prelates from the distant west, One, Suthwyke's son,--though graven found no more, Hear thou his erstwhile record, and request;--

”_Whose dust concealeth thou, O ponderous stone?

Marble declare;--John Stafford was his name;-- In whose seat sat he?--on the Primate's throne, Ill.u.s.trious there, from Bath with mitred fame:-- For Chief so great, pray, now from life laid down, The Virgin born may grant him golden crown._”

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRa.s.s OF SIR JOHN ARUNDELL, ST. COLUMB-MAJOR.]

”THEY DID CAST HIM.”

A pleasantly representative English look has the irregular, disjointed, yet withal eminently picturesque little town of Tisbury, viewed from the acclivity of the railway station.

On the one side a group of cottages, and fine trees planted high on the shoulder of the hill, shews well against the distant sky-line, and patches of houses--broken in their midst by the princ.i.p.al hostelry of the place, staringly obtrusive in the most modern brick and white, perched at the top of the straggling street that leads up to it,--carry the eye across to the further fringe of the elevation on the other side, where an ecclesiastical looking edifice, gabled and pinnacled, cuts into the ether and balances the picture.

Low in the valley on the extreme right, some very old, and, evidently from this distance, unmistakably important buildings are gathered together, attesting the presence of the chief domicile of the place in days of yore, and still retaining much of their antient consequence with old gateway, great kitchen, and turreted chimney, and vast barn two hundred feet long, with roof arched and high as a cathedral,--the antient Grange, or Place, and country seat of the Abbess of Shaftesbury.

Thus much for the mid-distance of the scene; an equally representative, and in some peculiarities unique fore-ground is at our feet.

Centrally almost, comes the Church--large, substantial, and well-windowed--with a curious, but now-a-day unfortunately very common, half-antient half-modern look, exhibiting a low ma.s.sive tower rising from its centre, capped with a pseudo-cla.s.sic lantern, pierced with four large, circular, winking clock-face apertures. It stands in a well-kept churchyard, ornamented by some n.o.ble yew trees, and around two sides of it runs a road, skirted with low antient buildings, picturesquely gabled and chimnied, and dating from Tudor times.

Immediately on the right of the church, and jostling, almost vulgarly invading the sacred precincts of the churchyard, which it adjoins, rises the obtrusive bulk of a huge brewery, with accompanying chimney stalk, as big as the church itself, and almost as venerable looking,[36] a pertinent ill.u.s.tration of the contiguity, so often sarcastically a.s.sociated in one of our modern political cries.

[36] Of late it has been considerably rebuilt, and ”dappered up”

as the Dorsets.h.i.+re folk express it, to newness and smartness of appearance.

On the left of the church, but at further distance, and pleasantly situated on an acclivity, is an immense well-built union workhouse, larger than either.

Strange company these, materially and metaphorically, and eminently characteristic of our modern civilization, the brewery and the workhouse, with the church between them, and suggestive of many thoughts;--of clamorous interest too even in this little town, in this pa.s.sing hour, as announcements in large letters attest that meet the eye of the wayfaring man, tarrying here about.

But leaving these present-day regions of noisy morality, and all ”burning questions” akin, to other disciples, be the purpose of our quiet enjoyment to-day of a fairer and more gracious kind, as we note peradventure the career, and seek it may be the a.s.sociation and historic companions.h.i.+p of one who trod the troubled path of life in the past, and endeavour--however imperfectly--to brighten his memory for a season.

A short leisurely stroll from the station leads us by the great shrine dedicated to the Bacchus of our modern Briton, and we halt in front of the gate opening to the path leading to the north porch of the large church immediately before us. But ere we enter, we pause to take a momentary glance at the long line of semi-ecclesiastical, almshouse-looking buildings with Tudor gables and high chimnies that skirt the opposite side of the road, and from one of which the civil custodian of the church, in response to our enquiries, emerges.

From him we learn that the house he dwells in was probably antiently the Priest's dwelling, who was perhaps a monk appointed by the Abbess of Shaftesbury to whom a large part of the manor of Tisbury belonged, if not also the patronage of the benefice. In making some excavations behind it a few years since, the skeletons of several persons were found, on one skull the hair remained very perfect, but subsided to dust the instant it was uncovered, as if shrinking from the sacrilege of the intrusive eye and curiosity of the present. The building may also have been a Cell attached to Shaftesbury Abbey, and this spot the last resting-place of the solitary religious, once resident within it.

The pavement of the path through the churchyard leading to the church is also strongly representative of modern destructive notions, and exhibits,--although it traverses what we should regard from its a.s.sociations as sacred precincts,--a true example of the now-a-day ”way of the world.” It is floored with the older memorial stones of the departed that rest, now un-named, around, and the tear-wrought memories they were charged to perpetuate, callously trod under the foot of man, and in sure process of ruthless obliteration. ”They are only very old stones,” said our cicerone in answer to our protest,--”families all gone and no one to look after them,”--exactly so, thought we with a half-sigh mingling with the echo of the Ploughman's line, ringing a presaging knell over the fate of our possible memory, when, as here, some day and perhaps