Part 16

Entering the church by the gateway below the tower, we get the first glimpse of the new world as it were that opens upon us, or rather we should say the old world of seven hundred years ago that has passed away. Everything is solemn, grand, and apparently eternal. Those immense pillars that we look upon have lost nothing as yet of their original strength; there is no token that they will ever lose it. Within the porch are the remains of a very elegant pointed arch in the right wall, leading we presume into the cloisters, but of an older date than those glorious Norman pillars to which some, of as peculiarly slender make, belonging to another and opposite arch, appear to have been attached, somewhat we think to the injury of their simple character. One of the most interesting features of the choir is the long-continued aisle, or series of aisles, which entirely encircle it, opening into the former by the spaces between the flat and circular arch-piers of the body of the structure. It is about twelve feet wide, with a pure arched and vaulted ceiling in the simplest and truest Norman style, with windows of different sizes slightly pointed. The pillars against the wall opposite the entrance into the choir are flat. One of the most beautiful little architectural effects of a simple kind that we can conceive is to be found at the north-eastern corner of the aisle. Between two of the grand Norman pillars projecting from the wall is a low postern doorway; and above, rising on each side from the capitals, a peculiarly elegant arch, something like an elongated horse-shoe. The connexion between two styles so strikingly different in most respects as the Moorish, with its fantastic delicacy and variety and richness, and the Norman with its simple (occasionally uncouth) grandeur, was never more apparent. That little picture is alone worth a visit to St. Bartholomew’s.

Let us now enter the Choir, and, ascending the gallery to the side of the organ, gaze on the impressive and characteristic work before us, which seems scarcely less fresh and solid than when Rahere beheld in its vast piers and beautiful arches the realization of the vision for which he had so long yearned. We are standing in the centre of four arches of the most magnificent span, fit bearers of the great tower that they lifted so airily, as it were a thing of nought, into the air. Two of these are round and two slightly pointed. The last (which were originally open and formed the commencement of the transepts) have been referred to as among the various instances of the occasional use of pointed arches by the Normans before their systematic introduction as a style. In each of the spandrels formed by these arches is a small lozenge-shaped panel containing ornaments which bear a striking resemblance to the Grecian honeysuckle, and deserve notice from their singularity. Behind us are arches showing the original continuation of the church into the nave. The roof is very ancient, and not particularly handsome looking. It consists of massy timbers, some of them braced up in the middle, apparently to prevent their falling. Prior Bolton’s elegant oriel window in the second story appears to have been built as a kind of pew or seat, from which the Prior could overlook the canons when he pleased, without their being aware of his presence, as it communicated with his house at the eastern extremity of the church. The piers which support the range of pointed arches forming the uppermost story are pierced longitudinally, so as to leave open a passage all round the upper part of the building. The dimensions of the church are stated somewhat differently by different writers, and we have no means of reconciling the discrepancy. According to Malcolm, the height is about forty feet, the breadth sixty feet, and the length one hundred and thirty-eight feet; to which if we add eighty-seven feet for the length of the nave, we have two hundred and twenty-five feet as the entire length of the Priory church within the walls. Osborne, in his _English Architecture_, gives the height as forty-seven feet, the breadth fifty-seven feet, and the length of the present church one hundred and thirty-two feet. We may here observe that when the fire broke out in 1830, the interior of the church was much injured, and the entire pile had a narrow escape from destruction.

Lastly, and as we began, so should we end, with Rahere, who is the presiding spirit of the place, we find the monument of the founder in the north-eastern corner, almost immediately opposite the beautiful oriel window which Prior Bolton there erected, in order, perhaps that when he sat in it the home of the ashes of his illustrious predecessor might be forever before him. This is a work in every way worthy of the man whom it enshrines. It is one of the most elegant specimens of the pointed style of architecture, consisting mainly of a very highly wrought stonework screen, enclosing a tomb on which Rahere’s effigy extends at full length. The roof of the little chamber, as we may call it, is most exquisitely groined. At what period the monument was erected is uncertain; but the style marks it as of a later date than that of the founder’s decease. But it was most carefully restored by Bolton; and the fact is significant of its antiquity. As the latter found, no doubt, a labour of love in making these reparations, so Time itself seems to have seconded his efforts, and to have shared in the hopes of its builders that a long period of prosperity should be granted to it, by touching it very gently. Here and there the pinnacles have been somewhat diminished of their fair proportions, and that is pretty well the entire extent of the injury the work has experienced. The monument, it must be added, is richly painted as well as sculptured, and shows us the black robes of Rahere and of the monks who are kneeling at his side--the ruddy features of the former, and the splendid coats-of-arms on the front of the tomb below. Each of the monks has a Bible before him, open at the fifty-first chapter of Isaiah. And often and often, no doubt, has Rahere, as he read such verses as that (the third) we are about to transcribe, received fresh accession of strength to complete his arduous task, until what he had first looked upon as holy words of encouragement only became to his rapt fancy a prophecy which he was chosen to fulfil. When others spoke of the all but impossible task (for such it was generally esteemed) he had undertaken, of cleaning and building upon the extensive marsh allotted, he smiled in his heart to think what One had said greater than they:--“The Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody.”

KUTB MINAR

G. W. STEEVENS

Delhi is still seamed with the scars of her spoilers, and still jewelled with remnants of the gems they fought for. If you take them in order, you will go first, not into the city, but eleven miles south, to the tower Kutb Minar. Through the dust of the road, rising out of the springing wheat, among the mud-and-mat huts before which squat the brown-limbed peasants, you see the country a litter of broken walls, tumbling towers, rent domes. There are fragments of seven cities built by seven kings before the present Delhi was. Eleven miles of them bring you to the tower and mosque of Kutb.

Kutb-ed-Din was a slave who raised himself to Viceroy of Delhi when the Mussulmans took it, then to Emperor of Hindustan and founder of a dynasty. Whether he or his son or the last of the Hindu kings built the tower, antiquaries are undecided and others careless. It is enough that here is one landmark in Delhi’s history, one splendid monument reared for a symbol of triumph by a victor whom now nobody can certainly identify. It is a colossal, five-storied tower, two hundred and forty feet high, of nearly fifty feet diameter at the base, and tapering to nine feet at the top. Tiny balconies with balustrades mark the junctions of the stories: the three lower are red stone, the two upper--dwarfed just under the sky--faced with white marble. All the red part is fluted into alternate semicircles and right angles, netted all over with tracery, and belted with inscriptions under the balconies. But the details strike you little: the vertical lines of the fluting only give the impression that this is one huge pillar with a red shaft and a white capital--a pillar that might form part of the most tremendous temple in the world, yet stands quite seemly alone by reason of its surpassing bigness.

[Illustration: THE KUTB MINAR, INDIA.]

Pant to the top. It will do you good, though the view is nothing. The country is an infinite green-and-brown chess-board of young corn and fallow, dead-flat on every side, ugly with the complacent plainness of all very rich country. Beyond the sheeny ribbon of the Jumna, north, south, east, west, into the blurred horizon, you can see only land and land and land--a million acres with nothing on them to see--except the wealth of India and the secret of the greatness of Delhi.

Then look down past your toes and you will see the evidence of some of Delhi’s falls. From the ground you will have noticed ruins about you; but there the Kutb Minar dwarfs everything. Now you see that you stand above a field of broken arches, solitary pillars, stumps of towers, and in the middle of what must once have been a town of mosques and tombs. Before it was that, it was a town of Hindu temples and palaces. In the court of the ruined mosque stands a solid wrought-iron pillar--little enough to look at, but curious, because it is at least fifteen hundred years old, and there is nothing else quite like it in the world. It bears a Sanskrit inscription to the effect that this is “the Arm of Fame of Raja Dhava, who conquered his neighbours and won the undivided sovereignty of the earth.”

Poor Raja Dhava! The temples of generations that had already forgotten him are swept utterly away; the mosque of their conquerors stands now only as a few shattered red arches and pillars with defaced flowers wilting on them. Beyond that is the base of what was once to be a tower more than twice as high as the Kutb Minar, but was never even finished. The very tower you stand on has been buffeted by earthquake, and great part of it is mere restoration. And Delhi, which in the year One stood here, has drifted away almost out of sight from the summit and left these forlorn fragments to decay without even the consolation of neighbourhood.

KUTB MINAR

ANDRÉ CHÉVRILLON

I take a carriage to visit the Kutb Minar, the great tower that rears itself up about ten miles from Delhi.

This is Asia’s Appian Way. Ruins from every century, left by three races and three religions, are scattered over a large and dismal plain. The remains of ancient Hindu Delhi, of Afghan Delhi, and of Mogul Delhi, cover a dead expanse of seventy square miles. Slowly, during the flow of centuries, the city has changed its site, as a river changes its bed. As far as the eye can reach, dilapidated domes and broken columns reveal themselves in the midst of the dry brushwood. These yellowish hillocks are the ruins of Indra-Partha, the city of Indra, for which the five brothers of Mahabarata fought three thousand years ago. Farther away a granite pillar, covered with Pali characters, proclaims the edicts of the Buddhist King Asoka. Everywhere, like tombs in a cemetery, the _débris_ of Mongolian art, monumental mausoleums and domes surrounded by kiosks are heaped together, all corroded by time and merged into the uniform tint of the sad and dry vegetation that Nature provides. Several tombs are as large as those of Akbar at Secundra and rise up solitary upon the arid steppe. The blue peacocks that are roaming about are the only living things that haunt the place. Generations have swarmed here and of their living past this almost imperceptible residue is all that is left, just as ancient forests have had to exist in order to make a little piece of coal. The Vedic age, the Brahmanical age, the Buddhist age, the first Mussulman dynasties, the Mogul Empire,--each historical period has left here a small deposit.

You can gather this history around the Kutb: four old Hindu forts, still quite recognizable, once surrounded a large city and some Buddhist temples where the monks in yellow robes with shaven heads walked about peacefully; there remains a large iron post charged with some Sanskrit inscriptions. About the year 1000, over the wall of the Himalayas overflowed the first hordes of the Mussulmans. The city was razed and from the stones of the great temple a mosque was built, the ruins of which now lie around us. Here is a triple colonnade where you recognize the old Buddhist pillars, and the patient, complicated, confused work of the poor Hindu workman, with all of its childish indecency. They are deeply worked, overcharged with chisellings that time has made almost illegible; here and there, figures of a symbolical obscenity appear, a few mutilated by the moral superiority of the conqueror. Little by little, you accustom yourself to read what the eaten away stone has to say, the lines form themselves afresh. You recognize processions of gods surrounded by guards and faithful followers, animals, tigers, lewd monkeys and elephants, which, from a very early period, occupy the Hindu mind. These thousands of stones, which ought to be arranged in irregular chapels and leafy roofs, the Mussulmans have erected into columns, rectangular galleries, or in geometrical and simple rows. Upon the great bare walls, cabalistic numbers and letters that look like the tracks of birds are directed against the unbelievers. Above all, dominating the immense cemetery-like plain, inviolate through time, the Kutb throws its straight rocket of red stone and white marble, two hundred and fifty feet into the sky. Six centuries ago, from its top the sharp chant of the Muezzin broke the silence of the great plain when the sun dropped behind the horizon.

KENILWORTH CASTLE

SIR JAMES D. MACKENZIE

Apart from the great historical interest attaching to these magnificent ruins, they deserve, architecturally, the closest examination and study, containing, as they do, elaborate specimens of the best constructions, in both military and domestic branches, during the different periods of the art in this country. We find first the massive square Norman keep, which had its protecting moat. This was the work of the original grantee, Geoffrey de Clinton, the treasurer and chamberlain of Henry I. Next comes an era, from 1180 to 1187, when we find entries for building and repairs to walls and fortifications; and again, from 1212 to 1216, the castle being then in the hands of King John, vast sums were expended upon the outer line of walls, with their flanking defences of Lunn’s Tower and the Water Tower, and upon a chamber and other accommodation for the King, most of which still remains, though the timber constructions inside and against the walls have, of course, not survived. The next development is in the Late Decorated or Perpendicular style including the ruins of the great Hall and some other buildings at the west end of the inner court still called Lancaster’s Buildings, of the Fourteenth Century, rather late in the reign of Edward III., being some of the additions made by John of Gaunt, after he obtained Kenilworth by his first wife.

[Illustration: KENILWORTH CASTLE, ENGLAND.]

After this portion come the various alterations and insertions of the Elizabethan period, the beautiful gatehouse on the north side, and the towers and works added by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and called the Leicester Buildings. Here are, therefore, examples of four different periods in each of which the particular work is capable of proof by existing documents, showing the gradations and changes which these buildings underwent, according to the requirements of the different ages, in passing from the barbarism of a military despotism to the comforts and splendour of later civilization. It is a magnificent specimen, and one easy of access. As we have said, the Manor of Kenilworth was bestowed by Henry I. upon Geoffrey de Clinton, who founded here a castle and a monastery; deriving, doubtless, from a Norman follower of Duke William, he must have been of worth and eminence among the barons, since besides the Royal posts which he occupied, the King appointed him to the Chief Justiceship of England. He was succeeded by his son Geoffrey, married to Agnes, daughter of Roger, Earl of Warwick, whose son, Henry, parted with Kenilworth, most probably on compulsion, to King John, who made it a Royal residence. One of the rebellious sons of Henry II. had taken possession of it, and held it for a time. Henry III., on his sister, the Princess Eleanor, marrying Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, settled Kenilworth on her for life but in 1254 it was granted for the joint lives of the Earl and Countess of Leicester, and they made their home here. During the Baron’s War which followed, this castle was made the base of operations by de Montfort, who provided it with warlike engines of defence not then known in England, and stores of all sorts, and after the battle of Lewis, Richard, King of the Romans, Henry’s brother, with his youngest son, Edmund, was sent prisoner to Kenilworth, under the care of Leicester’s second son Simon. In 1265, after effecting his escape from the custody of the barons at Hereford, Prince Edward, by a daring night attack, beat up the quarters of young de Montfort at Kenilworth, and took temporary possession of the place, making prisoners thirteen knights bannerets, with their followers, who were unguardedly sleeping in houses around the castle perhaps for the sake of an early bath. Young de Montfort and his pages narrowly escaped capture and only did so by a headlong race “some stark naked, some in breeches or drawers, some in shirts and many with their clothes under their arms.” Departing thence Prince Edward rapidly effected a junction with his friends in the West, and overwhelmed and slaughtered the Earl of Leicester at the battle of Evesham. After this the Royal forces returned to Kenilworth which still held out manfully under the Earl’s second son Simon and underwent a close siege that lasted for six months.

Trenches were cut on the land side of the castle and huge wooden towers, holding slingers and archers, were advanced against the wall, while barges, transported overland from Chester maintained the attack across the castle lake; but the garrison which numbered 1,200 men, met these assaults with the mangonels and other engines of de Montfort, and only gave in when reduced by famine, when, with the surrender of Kenilworth, the Civil War came to an end in December, 1265.

Having thus recovered possession of the fortress, King Henry bestowed it and the manor upon his youngest son Edmund, whom he created, two years later, Earl of Lancaster. In 1279, under the encouragement of that martial prince, Edward I., a very magnificent tournament was held at Kenilworth, under Mortimer, Earl of March, for the space of three days, at which, besides the sports of tilting and the barriers, the new military game of the Round Table was introduced. King Edward II., after his flight and capture, was brought a prisoner here to meet the commission appointed by Parliament, from whose lips he received the announcement of his deposition in favour of his son, at hearing which he fell senseless to the ground. Of the presence chamber, where this mournful scene was enacted, little remains but fragments of walls and two large bay windows festooned with ivy. The unfortunate King was shortly after, on December 5, removed hence to his hideous doom at Berkeley Castle on January 25. On the accession of Edward III., the castle again became the seat of baronial splendour under the Earls of Lancaster, the third of whom, Henry, was created Duke of Lancaster, but dying s. p. male (35 Edward III.), his two daughters became heirs to his great estates: Blanche, the younger, inheriting Kenilworth and bringing it, and afterwards, on her sister’s death the whole property of her father, in marriage to John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III., who shortly after revived in him the title of Duke of Lancaster. The wealth thus obtained from his father enabled in great measure the duke’s son and heir, Henry of Bolingbroke, in later days to oust his cousin, Richard II., from the throne, and to take his place thereon as King Henry IV., being greatly driven thereto by the King’s treatment of him in regard to Kenilworth.

The range called Lancaster Buildings was caused to be erected by John of Gaunt between his accession to the property and his death in 1399. They lie on the south side of the inner quadrangle and there is a tower with three stories of arches adjoining the hall on the north, also of this date; the same origin is given to the Strong, or Mervin’s Tower, as it is called by Sir Walter Scott. The ancient garden of the castle was situated near the north-east angle of the outer wall, where the Swan Tower meets the lake and wet ditch on the north.

Of course on Henry IV. succeeding, the crown resumed the ownership of the fortress, and thus it continued, often enlivened by the visits of royalty, until the days of Elizabeth, who bestowed it on her favourite, Robert Dudley, fifth son of the Duke of Northumberland, with all the royalties thereto belonging. Without enlarging on the history of this courtier, it is enough to say that he seems to have expended the enormous emoluments derived from the many dignities with which Elizabeth overwhelmed him in his lavish outlay upon Kenilworth. The additions and alterations made there by this Dudley involved an expenditure of £60,000--an incredible sum in those days. He erected the great gatehouse on the north, also the mass of square rooms from the north-east angle of the upper court, the buildings, called after him, and the gallery and lower gatehouse towers, together with a great range of stabling. He removed the Norman windows from the keep, replacing them by more modern ones; and it is evident that the great object of his outlay was to provide magnificent accommodation for the entertainment of his Queen and her Court.

This reception took place in July, 1575, and the festivities were continued for seventeen days during which every sort of prodigal extravagance possible at that age was indulged in. It cost Leicester £1,000 a day. At his death he bequeathed the castle to his brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, for life, and afterwards to his own son Sir Robert Dudley, upon whose birth and legitimacy the father (who is certainly one of the dark characters in English history) chose to throw doubts.