Part 10

The Shrine of St. Amphibalus was discovered in a similar manner, and was also pieced together in the same way. It stands now in a darkling corner of the North Choir Aisle. There have been sceptical antiquaries daring enough to suggest that Amphibalus, the persecuted Christian who was secreted by Alban, with the result that both were martyred, is a myth. No such person, they contend, ever existed. “Amphibalus,” it seems, was really the name of a kind of long cloak worn at that period; and such a cloak was worn by Alban when he was taken to execution. Monkish legends personified it, and it was, thus marvellously changed from an article of clothing into a human being, at length canonized. It is a little shocking to find old clothes admitted into the hierarchy of saints, and considerably lessens the very slight modicum of respect one might entertain for monastic lore.

XIV

If the following story, told by John Wesley in his Diary of 1769, is correct, some people must have queer tastes, and strange stomachs:

“_2nd Aug._—Some friends from London met us at St. Albans. Before dinner we took a walk in the Abbey, one of the most ancient buildings in the kingdom, near a thousand years old; and one of the largest, being 560 feet in length[3] (considerably more than Westminster Abbey) and broad and high in proportion. Near the east end is the tomb and vault of good Duke Humphrey. Some, now living, remember since his body was entire; but after the coffin was opened, so many were anxious to taste the liquor in which it was preserved, that in a little time the corpse was left bare, and soon mouldered away. A few bones are now all that remain.”

[Sidenote: “GOOD” DUKE HUMPHREY]

The Duke Humphrey referred to was Humphrey Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, uncle to Henry the Sixth, who was renowned for his hospitality, and commonly called “The good Duke Humphrey.”

The “goodness” of Duke Humphrey must be, at the very least, an historic doubt. Born in 1391, the youngest son of Henry the Fourth, he was a man of affable and easy manners, cultured, and a patron of literature, and considered by the people a patriot. Those were the days when to be a “patriot” with one party was to be a “traitor” with another, and jealousy on the part of Queen Margaret, consort of his nephew, Henry the Sixth, caused his arrest at Bury St. Edmunds in 1447. The day after his arrest, the Duke died, not without suspicion of foul play; the times being such that the sudden death of any prominent person could never be put down to natural causes; which sufficiently shows the uncomfortable nature of those times. It seems, however, clear that he died from paralysis, brought on through a life of debauchery, and hastened by the shock of his arrest; but, if we may judge by the temper of the age, his death happened in time to prevent the political murder that assuredly would have been committed.

[Sidenote: _IMPOSTURE_]

So much for the “goodness” of the “good Duke,” who, whatever his morals, was, if we are to believe the story told of him by Sir Thomas More, a good deal more keen-witted than most people. It seems that he completely exposed an impostor who claimed to have been born blind, but to have recovered his sight at the shrine of St. Alban. The Duke asked him the colours of the clothes himself and his suite were wearing, and they were readily given by the man, who did not perceive that, had he been born blind, he could not possibly know the names of colours. The answer exposed him, and he was put in the stocks. The story was long a favourite one at St. Albans, and forms a scene in the second part of _King Henry the Sixth_; and by the same token fortifies many in the belief that Bacon, and not Shakespeare, wrote that play.

[Sidenote: _MIRACLES WHILE YOU WAIT_]

_Enter a_ Townsman _of St. Albans, crying_, “A miracle!”

_Gloucester._ What means this noise? Fellow, what miracle dost thou proclaim?

_Towns._ A miracle! a miracle!

_Suffolk._ Come to the king and tell him what miracle.

_Towns._ Forsooth, a blind man at St. Alban’s shrine, Within this half hour, hath received his sight; A man that ne’er saw in his life before.

_K. Henry._ Now, God be praised, that to believing souls Gives light in darkness, comfort in despair!

_Enter the_ Mayor of St. Albans _and his brethren_, bearing Simpcox, _between two in a chair_; SIMPCOX’S Wife _following_.

_Cardinal._ Here comes the townsmen on procession, To present your highness with the man.

_K. Hen._ Great is his comfort in this earthly vale, Although by his sight his sin be multiplied.

_Glo._ Stand by, my masters: bring him near the king; His highness’ pleasure is to talk with him.

_K. Hen._ Good fellow, tell us here the circumstance, That we for thee may glorify the Lord. What, hast thou been long blind and now restored?

_Simpcox._ Born blind, an’t please your grace.

_Wife._ Ay, indeed, was he.

_Suf._ What woman is this?

_Wife._ His wife, an’t like your worship.

_Glo._ Hadst thou been his mother, thou couldst have better told.

_K. Hen._ Where wert thou born?

_Simp._ At Berwick in the north, an’t like your grace.

_K. Hen._ Poor soul, God’s goodness hath been great to thee: Let never day nor night unhallow’d pass, But still remember what the Lord hath done.

_Q. Margaret._ Tell me, good fellow, camest thou here by chance, Or of devotion, to this holy shrine?

_Simp._ God knows, of pure devotion; being call’d A hundred times and oftener, in my sleep, By good St. Alban, who said, “Simpcox, come, Come, offer at my shrine, and I will help thee.”

_Wife._ Most true, forsooth; and many time and oft Myself have heard a voice to call him so.

_Car._ What, art thou lame?

_Simp._ Ay, God Almighty help me!

_Suf._ How camest thou so?

_Simp._ A fall off of a tree.

_Wife._ A plum-tree, master.

_Glo._ How long hast thou been blind?

_Simp._ O, born so, master.

_Glo._ What, and wouldst climb a tree?

_Simp._ But that in all my life, when I was a youth.

_Wife._ Too true; and bought his climbing very dear.

_Glo._ Mass, thou lovedst plums well, that wouldst venture so.

_Simp._ Alas, good master, my wife desired some damsons, And made me climb, with danger of my life.

_Glo._ A subtle knave! but yet it shall not serve.

Let me see thine eyes: wink now: now open them: In my opinion yet thou seest not well.

_Simp._ Yes, master, clear as day, I thank God and St. Alban.

_Glo._ Say’st thou me so? What colour is this cloak of?

_Simp._ Red, master; red as blood.

_Glo._ Why, that’s well said. What colour is my gown of?

_Simp._ Black, forsooth; coal-black as jet.

_K. Hen._ Why then, thou know’st what colour jet is of?

_Suf._ And yet, I think, jet did he never see.

_Glo._ But cloaks, and gowns, before this day a many.

_Wife._ Never, before this day, in all his life.

_Glo._ Tell me, sirrah, what’s my name?

_Simp._ Alas, master, I know not.

_Glo._ What’s his name?

_Simp._ I know not.

_Glo._ Nor his?

_Simp._ No, indeed, master.

_Glo._ What’s thine own name?

_Simp._ Saunder Simpcox, an if it please you, master.

_Glo._ Then, Saunder, sit there, the lyingest knave in Christendom. If thou hadst been born blind, thou mightst as well have known all our names, as thus to name the several colours we do wear. Sight may distinguish of colours, but suddenly to nominate them all, it is impossible. My lords, St. Alban here hath done a miracle; and would ye not think his cunning to be great, that could restore this cripple to his legs again?

_Simp._ O, master, that you could!

_Glo._ My masters of St. Albans, have you not beadles in your town, and things called whips?

_Mayor._ Yes, my lord, if it please your grace.

_Glo._ Then send for one presently.

_May._ Sirrah, go fetch the beadle hither straight.

[_Exit an_ Attendant.

_Glo._ Now fetch me a stool hither by and by. Now, sirrah, if you mean to save yourself from whipping, leap me over this stool and run away.

_Simp._ Alas, master, I am not able to stand alone: You go about to torture me in vain.

_Enter a_ Beadle _with whips_.

_Glo._ Well, sir, we must have you find your legs. Sirrah beadle, whip him till he leap over that same stool.

_Bead._ I will, my lord. Come on, sirrah; off with your doublet quickly.

_Simp._ Alas, master, what shall I do? I am not able to stand.

[_After the_ Beadle _hath hit him once, he leaps over the stool and runs away; and they follow and cry_, “A miracle!”

_K. Hen._ O God! seest thou this, and bearest so long?

_Q. Mar._ It made me laugh to see the villain run.

_Glo._ Follow the knave; and take this drab away.

_Wife._ Alas, sir, we did it for pure need.

_Glo._ Let them be whipped through every market-town, till they come to Berwick, from whence they came.

[_Exeunt_ Wife, Beadle, Mayor, _etc._

_Car._ Duke Humphrey has done a miracle to-day.

_Suf._ True; made the lame to leap and fly away.

_Glo._ But you have done more miracles than I; You made in a day, my lord, whole towns to fly.

There are a good many market-towns on the 317 miles between St. Albans and Berwick.

The Duke was buried hard by the shrine of St. Alban, where his magnificent chantry tomb, built by Abbot Wheathampstead, still remains, bearing amid its delicate sculptures the antelope, his badge. The leaden coffin of the Duke was opened in 1703, when the body was found “lying in pickle.”

The once well-known phrase, “dining with Duke Humphrey,” is variously explained. It seems to have originated with a visitor to the Abbey in the late sixteenth century having been accidentally locked in the chantry chapel all night. The humour of it spread to London and found a more poignant note in its application to the beggars and insolvent debtors who, with nothing else to do, paced the aisles of Old St. Paul’s. They went dinnerless, without the will to it, and were said to “dine with Duke Humphrey.”

That famous fourteenth-century traveller and writer of travel-lore, Sir John Mandeville, was, according to his own statement, born at St. Albans: a statement which, coming from such an accomplished liar as he who, more than any other before or since, has made “travellers’ tales” a byword, does not necessarily bear the stamp of truth. Indeed, modern commentators are not altogether satisfied that there ever was such a person as this Mandeville, who, if these carping critics be correct, was so incorrigible a fibber that he lied in saying he was ever born at all! Here we begin to flounder in heroics and the immensities; and the further we inquire, the more marvellous and inexplicable grows the mystery. Whether you take him as a real person, or as a myth, it is equally remarkable that an existent, or a non-existent, body should be buried in two places, as is claimed for Mandeville’s.

[Sidenote: _SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE_]

What purports to be the grave of the famous traveller is shown in this Abbey of St. Alban, near the west end of the nave. A tablet placed on the pillar above it formerly stated that Sir John Mandeville was born here, and here buried in 1372, having commenced his famous travels in 1322, and continued them through the greater part of the world during thirty-four years. There still remains on the pillar the curious black-letter inscription:—

Lo, in this tomb of travellers do ly One rich in nothing but memory, His name was Sir John Mandeville, content, Having seen much mirth, with small confinement; Towards which he travelled ever since his birth, And at last pawned his body to the earth, Which by a statute must in mortgage be Till a Redeemer come to set it free.

This seems very straightforward and matter-of-fact, and might stand, were it not that an equally matter-of-fact tomb, with a long Latin epitaph to the same person, was frequently noted by visitors to the church of the _Frères Guillemins_ in Liège, until 1798, when the church was destroyed, during the troubles of the French Revolution.

Such marvels as these are thoroughly in keeping with this prototype of Munchausen, whose wildest flights of acknowledged fancy do not approach the magnificent fictions of Mandeville, who appropriated all the most stupendously tall stories of Marco Polo and other narrators of the thing that was not, and added a skyscraping superstructure of audacious inventions of his own. Modern writers, with the fear of others who have been there, may well envy Mandeville, who could write of men whose heads grew under their arms, and yet be regarded by his contemporaries as truthful; or could convincingly talk of Ethiopia, after this sort:

“In Ethiope there are such men as have but one foot, and they go so fast that it is a great marvel; and that is a large foot, for the shadow thereof covereth the body from Sun or Rain when they lie upon their backs.”

Every man his own umbrella; what a splendid ideal!

XV

The interest of St. Albans and its surroundings is not easily to be compressed into a few pages. Everywhere are memories, and in most places visible remains, wherewith to fortify imaginations not of a robust order. The walls of Roman _Verulamium_ yet remain in fragmentary condition, to south and west of the Abbey, and close by them stands the village of St. Michael’s, in whose church, sadly spoiled by the late Lord Grimthorpe’s restoring zeal, is the statue of the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, whose genius was probably keen enough to have made him capable of writing Shakespeare’s plays: although, despite the contentions of fanatics to the contrary, he did nothing of the sort. The ruins of his father’s and his own house of Gorhambury are still visible a mile away, in the park, and close to the great ugly eighteenth-century classic mansion of Gorhambury, seat of the present Earl of Verulam.

[Illustration: GORHAMBURY.]

[Sidenote: _GORHAMBURY_]

To seek Gorhambury on some thymy morning in May, when the pink horse-chestnuts are in bloom, when the air is moist with recent rain and suppressed heat, and a blue haze settles over the wooded landscape, is delightful. Then the scene of the great Chancellor’s pride, and of his despairing retirement, is beautiful indeed. The “wisest, wittiest, meanest of mankind” was housed sufficiently well, as the porch, the best-preserved portion of the building, shows. It is a typical Elizabethan Renaissance building, with panels of marble, and terra-cotta medallion heads of Roman Emperors; but it looks so small and toylike. Propped though it be with brickwork and iron rods, it cannot much longer survive, and the elaborate shield of the royal arms, the defaced statues and shattered columns are surely falling from picturesque into complete ruin. Apart from the chief group of crumbling walls there stands a poor old battered one-legged and headless statue, said to represent Henry the Eighth, but unrecognisable, scored amazingly with the penknives and the initials of generations of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. The scene of past pomps and vanities is scarcely mournful, as some might find it; the sight of it makes history live again as human experience, not as we read it in the dulled pages of historical exercise.

A field-path across the pleasant water-meadows of the river Ver leads from Gorhambury to Prae Mill House and so on to the road again, and thence to Redbourne, a sleepy village with a sleepy railway-station, fringed with meadows where donkeys and ponies graze and ducks and geese march and countermarch aimlessly, their inevitable later association with green peas and sage-stuffing happily hidden from them. Redbourne is one of those “bourne” places which, without adequate reason, appears to discard the final “e.” According to an emphatic inhabitant, “we spell it with a hen, without a he at the hend.” Through the village and out again upon the broad highway, we come presently to Friar’s Wash, once a water-splash across the road, now a tiny row of cottages and a wayside inn, the “Chequers,” standing beside the little river Ver where the old road of pre-Telford days goes off to the right. Flamstead (_i.e._ Verlamstead) church on the hilltop, its characteristic Hertfordshire spirelet, with the appearance as though the greater portion had subsided through the roof, looks down upon the quiet scene. Beyond comes Markyate.

[Illustration: MARKYATE CELL.]

[Sidenote: _ROGER, THE HERMIT_]

Markyate Street, as it is how, is a wayside village, with a number of more or less decayed coaching and drovers’ and waggoners’ inns in its narrow street. The lovely old mansion of Markyate Cell, beyond, standing removed from the dusty road, in its beautiful park, owes its name to the spot having once been the hermit’s cell of one Roger, a monk of St. Albans, who, returning from pious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was confronted by three angels, who there and then laid the vocation of hermit upon him, and conducted him to this spot, where he lived ever after: not altogether happy, for he suffered constant persecution from the Devil, who, according to Roger’s own account, tried once to drown him, and once set light to his hood. Had he ceased praying, there can be no doubt the worst would have befallen him; but he continued, unmoved, under these most alarming circumstances, and the Enemy was foiled.

After a while in this solitude, a “holy virgin,” Christina by name, came from Huntingdon and settled near by the equally holy Roger, who afforded her religious instruction, until he was called away from this vale of tears, when his body was laid in St. Albans Abbey. Christina established the Benedictine Convent of Markyate Cell, and became first Prioress of it in 1145. The mansion that now stands on the site in the wooded park is a veritable dream of peace and beauty; but there are hiding-holes in it, which sufficiently prove, if proof were wanted, that not always was peace and security the dominant note.

At one mile before Dunstable we leave Hertfordshire and enter Bedfordshire. It was a standing joke with all the coach-guards to ask their passengers “What comes after Herts?” and to answer, before their victims had time to reply, “Beds, if the Herts are serious enough.” Fortunately, even the weakest jokes that would be anæmic enough by the fireside seem quite robust in the fresh air; and the tedium of a long journey was such that even this wretched specimen was not usually resented.

Dunstable’s long and very broad chief street was until quite recently a pleasant gravelled stretch of road, but since fast motor-cars have come in crowds upon the highway, the townsfolk, in an attempt to save themselves from the dust they raise, have been obliged to resort to the expedient of treating the thoroughfare with a tarry preparation; with the result that the dust nuisance has not been thoroughly abolished, and instead of the old, cleanly-looking surface there is an ugly, coaly-looking way, smelling abominably.

Of Dunstable, or “Dunstaple” as it was formerly written, you may read more fully in the HOLYHEAD ROAD; but attention may here be drawn to the old seal of the town, in which one of the once favourite punning allusions is found: here in a double-barrelled form, the representation of a horseshoe standing both for the mythical stable of the legendary robber, Dun, and for a staple, or hasp.

[Sidenote: _HOCKLIFFE_]

And so at last, through Dunstable town and out by the deep cutting that carries the road on the level, through the chalk downs, we come to Hockliffe, where the Holyhead Road goes off by itself, straight ahead, and the Manchester and Glasgow Road turns sharply to the right, continuing henceforward an independent course.

To compare small things with greater, Hockliffe was to the coaches to and from the north-west of England very much what Rugby Junction is now. Onward swept the coaches for Coventry, Birmingham, and Holyhead, while the traffic for Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow bore away to Woburn.

XVI

Turning suddenly from the Holyhead Road at this not very conspicuous corner, the telegraph-poles that have hitherto made so brave a show are missed, and the Manchester Road, for lack of them, seems of less than the first-class importance it really owns. Solitary runs the road for some miles, the sequence of trees and well-plashed quick-set hedges of this well-cared-for district varied only by the companionable signposts bearing the quaint or sonorous names of places on either side: places to which you do not want to go, and of which you have probably never before heard: but you like the information all the same. For one thing, they are earnest of the fact that the country really is inhabited: which the emptiness of the road would lead one to doubt. You speculate idly as to what manner of place “Simpson” may be: “Eaton Bray” is alluring, “Ellesborough” attractive; but it is still over 360 miles to Glasgow, and the invitation into the byways is resisted.

There is a reason for this apparent—and in some sense real—depopulation. We are here within the radius of the blighting influence exercised by the Dukes of Bedford, whose immense seat of Woburn Abbey we are approaching. And even where the Russell tentacles do not reach, there are numerous other great parks. Away to the right, is, for instance, Wrest Park, one of the finest domains in Bedfordshire. Were there aught in the sound of that name, Wrest in Beds should be an ideal place for the born-tired.

[Sidenote: _THE EARTH IS THE LORDS’_]

By reason of these great landowners, the district through which the road runs for some ten miles is wholly park-like, and the villages to either side are mere insignificant incidents. There is at Milton Bryant, on the right-hand side of the road, a highly instructive example of the manner in which these influences work. The local Wesleyan chapel, greatly resembling a small barn, stands beside the village pond, and indeed, until recently stood in it, being supported above the water on posts. In that manner the tiny chapel was originally built in 1861, it being impossible to obtain land elsewhere for the purpose.

Now comes the park-wall of Woburn Abbey, skirting the road for two miles. And not merely a wall, but a hedge in front of it, as well. At such pains have their Graces of Bedford been to obtain additional seclusion in a country where you will scarcely ever meet one person in a mile.

On the way to the little town of Woburn, the chief entrance to this great park is passed; the iron gates, painted an agonising blue which in a mere commoner would be shocking bad taste, recessed from the road at the rear of about half an acre of grass-plot. That grass-plot is instructive, for it is earnest of the truly ducal scale on which things are done at Woburn.