Volume 3 — KENILWORTH AND WARWICK CASTLES.

ELIHU BURRITT.

[Elihu Burritt, the “Learned Blacksmith,” wrote two works of mingled description and economic observation in the British island, these being “A Walk from John O’Groat’s to Land’s End” and “Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land.” It is from the “green border-land” section of the latter that we take the following description of two of England’s most famous ancient castles.]

Between Coventry and Warwick, in a green, quiet rural district, stands Kenilworth, and Kenilworth is a castle which absorbs into itself all of space, population, and history that belongs to the name. Not only novel-readers, but practical history-readers at a distance, never think of anything but the castle when the name is mentioned or suggested.

Still, there is a goodly, tidy, and comfortable village near the ruins worth visiting, without the lion which attracts so many thousands a year to pay their homage and their admiration—to the genius of Sir Walter Scott. All the ordinary trades of a practical business community are carried on in this village; and a tall, taper chimney of a tannery, as high as any church steeple, smokes its pipe in the face of all the romantic antiquities of the place. Still, the people would probably confess that the principal source of their income is derived from their vested interest in Sir Walter Scott’s “Kenilworth,” not in the real castle walls. Take away that famous novel, and, with all the authenticated history that remains attached to them, not one in five of the visitors they now attract would walk around them with admiration. In fact, they are more a monument to the genius of the great novelist than to the memory of Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester. If any community ever owed a statue to the honor of a benefactor for money value received, the Kenilworths owe one to the celebrated Scotch writer. One might reasonably estimate that his book has been worth ten thousand pounds a year to them for the last quarter of a century or more.

There are observatories, barometer and anemometer stations around the coasts of England, where rain-falls and wind-blows, tide-risings and star-showers are registered. There are other observation-stations where the self-registering offices of human fames and reputations are kept, and where these are measured spontaneously. Go to Stratford and look at the inner walls of Shakespeare’s house and the record kept there, and count the names from the four quarters of the globe written there in homage of the great bard; go to Abbotsford, and consult the day-book of that great memory; go to Olney, and see what manner and multitude of names cover and re-cover the little garden summer-house in which Cowper wrote, and you will have this self-registration of human genius and its appreciation. So at Kenilworth, the visitors’ day-book at the hotel will show how many come from both hemispheres and all their continents to see the scene of Sir Walter Scott’s romance.

I was favored with a bright day on the sunny edge of autumn for my visit, when the very sky imparts a radiance to the ivied ruins of old castles and abbeys. Kenilworth shows its successive ages and uses in the various departments of its structure. From the ground it occupied, one would hardly conceive it to be a fighting castle. But when you come to look at the massive Cæsar’s Tower, you will be impressed with its impregnability in the bow-and-arrow period of English warfare. Its lofty walls hold their frontage and perpendicular lines as true and even as if they were a last-year’s structure. It is seemingly composed of several towers connected by walls sixteen feet thick, perforated by window-holes which look like so many archways. It is built or faced with hewn red sandstone, and is a perfect specimen of mason-work. The Insurgent Barons stood a siege of six months against Henry III. behind these strong walls, and in the reign of Edward I. Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, presided over a grand tournament beneath them.

In a later century the castle passed into the hands of John o’ Gaunt, who added the noble structure called the Lancaster Buildings, or banqueting-hall. This must have been one of the finest specimens of architecture of his time in England, and, in ruins, presents the graceful proportions and embellishments of its structure. Under the régime of that celebrated nobleman the castle began to put on a civilian dress over its coat of mail, and to echo with the music and mirth of dancing and feasting, instead of the clangor of arms.

But Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, completed the transformation into a residential palace. He not only added the wing called the Leicester Buildings, but he renovated and embellished all the old portions of the huge pile. He erected an ante-castle, or a great gate house, which is a noble structure in itself. Never did a subject build, and rebuild, and embellish on such a scale as he did to receive his sovereign.

Three times Elizabeth was his guest. Her last visit was in July, 1575, and lasted seventeen days. Of the festivities and princely entertainments he prepared for her on this occasion Sir Walter Scott has written with all that natural enthusiasm and predilection with which, perhaps, above all other English novelists, he dilated upon such a subject. His graphic descriptions of these scenes are so familiar to the million that I will not venture to go behind his brilliant fictions in search of actual historical facts of duller interest. The day of such favorites has gone by, like the beauty and glory of this once gorgeous fabric. The sun of Christian morality and civilization has risen to a purer flood of light, and such broad-faced gallantries would now be looked out of countenance in high places....

The facing of the massive and lofty Cæsar’s Tower must be nearly three centuries old, and it is wonderfully perfect. The perpendicular lines from base to battlement are as straight as if the walls were run in a mould; the eye cannot detect a deflection of a hair’s breadth, nor has time been able to eat into the smooth and even surface. I noticed, however, that “the brave old ivy green,” which braids such bandages for the wounds made by time and human violence in abbeys and castles, had wound around the front of this huge tower such a thick spread that it had deadened the skin of the wall and was eating into the solid body of it like a caustic blister. There were men at work on tall ladders, removing this thick green bandage and letting the sun in upon the stone, which had not seen its light for years.

The Gate House is in excellent preservation, and is occupied by a tenant of the Earl of Clarendon. The towers are supported by old pear-trees that clasp their long arms around the stone-work and hug it so tightly that you may see their impress in the wall. It is a pleasant sight, which a poet might make something of, to see them hanging their clusters of luscious fruit up and down, as if, like the idea expressed in Solomon’s Song, they were staying the venerable building with apples and cheering delicacies. Indeed, for its historical associations, as well as for the architectural character disclosed in its picturesque ruins, Kenilworth, perhaps, stands at the very head of all old English castles as an object of popular interest. If a self-registering apparatus could be put in operation at the gate opening to it, which would number and record the human feet, just as some instruments register the rain-drops that fall, doubtless no other castle in England would show such a census of visitors as this.

Warwick Castle! England and all who speak its language owe the successive inheritors of this great living pile of buildings more than they have ever acknowledged; for it is really the only baronial castle that has survived the destruction or decay of all the other monuments of the feudal ages of the same order. We should not know what they were in their day and generation were it not for this. It helps our fancy to fill up the vast breaks in the walls of Kenilworth, Dudley, and Chepstow; to reconstruct their banqueting-halls, their drawing-rooms, galleries, crypts, and kitchens, and to reproduce them entire in their first and fullest grandeur. By the light of Warwick we can not only rebuild and roof the broken walls of these old castles, but bring into the vista of the imagination their interior embellishments, their carved cornices and wainscoting, their luxurious furniture, tapestry, paintings, and other works of art. Thus, Warwick represents to us in its living being and form of to-day the hundreds of castles that were planted over the island in the first century after the Conquest. Schamyl in his native costume and dignity could not represent better at St. Petersburg the leaders of the Circassian race and country than does this grand home and fortress of the Warwicks the embattled citadels of the old English knights.

Warwick Castle, the fortress of one of the stoutest and grimmest of the old English fighting knights, did not put on the armor of nature to help out its own. It did not take advantage of perpendicular rocks or river-sides like Stirling, Edinburgh, or Chepstow. At first thought one might fancy the founders of it selected the location more for fishing than fighting. And now, in these quiet sunny days of peace, with its venerable mane of cedar-trees, it looks like a grand old lion lying down with its paw tenderly over a tired lamb. Or, it basks its broad side on the bank of the Avon, which photographs its walls and towers and turrets every bright day in the centuries. The castle is all intact and entire, with no part clean gone or going to ruin. Inside and out, from end to end, it is the harmonious growth of many ages, and registers them in distinctive illustrations. It shows what can be done by a dozen generations of wealthy men, inheriting an estate that doubles in income every half-century. Here each branch of the wide-spreading family tree has hung in festooned clusters the foliage of its life, genius, and taste. Each has contributed its contingent to the magnificent whole to be handed down to a posterity which should cherish and adorn the heirloom of illustrious ancestors, and send it down the line of the future with added wealth and beauty.

With such an anchorage to moor a family name and estate to, there is no wonder that both should attach their being, life, and treasures to it with a proud ambition of perpetuity. The name holds on as everlastingly as the estate. For the poorest man on earth must have some distant relation, and the richest man’s son would take the name of the twentieth cousin to inherit the title and castle of Warwick. However thin and attenuated may be the line of blood relationship between these families, the favored heir to this baronial rank and wealth gathers within his coronet all the memories and distinctions and even relationships of his predecessors all the way back to the Conquest. He is the heir of all of them; Saxon, Dane, and Norman converge into his status and blend in his being....

The great body of the castle itself, viewed detached from its grand surrounding walls and towers, presents no very salient features. It is a long range of buildings, with a straight front on the river. It never had the imposing or varied frontage of Dudley Castle in its day, or the palace halls that flanked the great tower of Kenilworth. But in its large straight suite of lofty apartments you have a museum of objects illustrating the tastes, habits, fashions, luxuries, and arts of all the ages and generations which those massive walls have seen. Passing from end to end, you may gauge English history for seven centuries with an observing glance through these objects. Here the white-winged dove of Peace has made her nest in the rusty and battered helmet of grim-visaged war.

On entering the Great Hall one is deeply impressed with its capacious faculty of hospitable entertainment. Truly, if tables were ever spread from end to end, a regiment of guests must have sat down to the banquet. It is sixty-two feet in length by forty in breadth, and the roofage of it is lofty and done in elaborate Gothic, rich in carving and other ornament. Here are the coronets and shields of all the earls back to Henry de Newburgh, who seem to look down upon the company below through their cognizances, as if represented in and countenancing all the generous hospitalities their living heir is disposed to give. The walls are wainscoted with the brave old English oak, far advanced in its seeming transformation into ebony. All you ever read in romance or veritable history about walls hung with armor of crusaders and other knightly raiders, interspersed with spoils of the chase, is here realized in full; and you see that even Sir Walter Scott has not exaggerated the fact in this respect. Conspicuous on the genealogical tree of these weapons and outfittings for war is the helmet usually worn, says the loyal guide-book, by the usurper Cromwell. Here, too, is the doublet in which Lord Brooke was killed at Lichfield, in 1643.

Three great Gothic windows are set out in deep recesses, as if to embrace and welcome the first and last light of the day, and to soften and diffuse it, a tinted smile, over the spacious apartment and its embellishments. But if the outside world smiles inward through these great windows so graciously, their outward vision opens upon a scene of exquisite beauty, which few can be found to equal. Here a vista deploys before the view full of all the attractions that nature and art can give to a landscape. What a pier-glass is to the richest drawing-room, the gentle and classic Avon is to this variegated scenery, as a portion of it, and as a reflecting medium of all its other features. It meanders through the landscape as a limpid hem to lawn, field, grove, garden, and forest, now flashing a silver radiance, now one of gold, upon the robe it adorns, just as the sun’s rays vary in their fall and flood. Right before the face and eyes of the castle, the river forms a great brooch of emerald, or a little green island, which may be taken for its coat of arms, or cognizance, much older and nobler than any hung up in the Great Hall. Then the soft and level river, looking half asleep, or checking its flow in the presence of these human antiquities, just below them arises and stands on its feet, showing a stature one hundred feet high in a cascade that sings a kind of lullaby to the by-gone ages whose spirits haunt the castle.

It was in these grounds that, in 1846, I saw for the first time a real cedar of Lebanon, and I never shall forget the impression it made upon me. Here they stood, grand and venerable, with their long low arms extended as if pronouncing “a benediction after prayer” upon the green lawn that mirrored their august entourage. Here they stood, singing the same old song they sang to David on Mount Lebanon. It was a mere fancy; but I listened to the soughing murmur with the thought that they were reciting to each other some of his best psalms of praise and thanksgiving.

From the Great Hall you have a vista of state rooms on one side, and private or family rooms on the other, extending in a straight line for three hundred and thirty-three feet. All these apartments, large and small, are adorned and enriched with specimens of high art and high labor, collected by all the families that have owned and occupied the estate. In some respects each room, if not the museum, is the mirror, of its age. Armor and articles of luxurious or antique furniture divide with pictures of the same dates the admiration of the visitor. Here is the celebrated painting of Charles I. by Vandyke, for which Sir Joshua Reynolds offered to pay five hundred guineas in his time. How much it would bring under the hammer to-day those who know the existing furore for the old masters may easily estimate. And all the old masters are here, represented each in several of the pictures that made their fame. In fact, a national gallery of paintings, of creditable number and variety, might be filled from the treasures of art exhibited in these splendid apartments. Here figure Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Salvator Rosa, Guido, Murillo, David, and other great artists of different ages, schools, and countries.

Then, as the framework of all these pictures, you see the artistry of the chisel, or carved work in wood and stone of contemporary schools in that department. Then the garnered treasures collected by these various branches of the family, purchased in different centuries and countries, are arranged in happy taste and harmony with the pictorial adornments. Wardrobes, cabinets, tables, and all the articles of luxurious furniture found in palaces, English or Continental, modern or ancient, are here in all their variety and curious workmanship.

The “Kenilworth Buffet,” a work which attracted so much admiration in the Great Exhibition of 1851, is a masterpiece of design and execution. It is Kenilworth and its romantic history, with the principal acts and actors of its Elizabethan drama, carved in oak from a tree that stood a green, tall sentinel of nature at the time to witness the festive scenes. Even Elizabeth’s meeting with Amy Robsart, and her interview with Leicester after the exposure of his faithlessness, are done to the life by the carver’s chisel.

Two objects connected with Warwick Castle every one, young or old, who visits it, will remember perhaps most distinctively. They are the “Guy’s porridge-pot” and the great marble Vase. Both are of prodigious capacity, the very Gog and Magog of all hollow-ware. The Irishman who called the donkey the father of all rabbits would call this large porridge-pot the father of all kettles. Its history cannot be got out of it by the grave and solemn thumpings that the old woman gives its massive sides. So it is ascribed to the great Guy’s time and to his personal use. As ornithologists deduce the size and habits of some prehistoric bird by a single foot-track in petrified clay, so the size, strength, and other capacities of that legendary giant are deduced from the size of this remarkable pot. The analogy might seem reasonable to many simple-minded people. Surely no man could be less than eight feet and a half high who needed such a kettle for cooking for himself and family, even if his children were nearly as large as himself. And this is the size accorded to that prehistoric hero. He was one of those amphibious beings who, like King Arthur, have lived in the misty border-land of history, half substance and half shadow, but projecting a full human outline upon the spectrum of by-gone centuries.

The history of the Great Vase is more ancient and uncertain still. It is of white marble, executed in the purest Grecian order of conception and art. It is truly a mighty goblet, with two handles of intertwisted vine-branches and wreathed and crowned with the tendrils, leaves, and clusters of the vineyard. It was fished up from the bottom of a lake near Tivoli by the British ambassador then at Naples, from whom it passed into the hands of the father of the present earl, who conveyed it to England and placed it in its present position.

The high and solid walls that enclose the castle and their great towers impress you with the realities of the ages they represent. Erected before gunpowder had been brought into the field of battle, they still look as if the builders anticipated its introduction and power, and they would stand a heavy battering now, old as they are, by common cannon. In a word, Warwick Castle is a structure which must grow more and more interesting from decade to decade. It is the only feudal palace left intact in England. It was ranked among the very best of them when they were all alive and strong over the land. It is associated with a name that stands among the first in the Norman aristocracy. Its location in itself is deeply interesting. Shakespeare breathed an inspiration upon the little Avon that laves its foundations, and gave to its name an immortality more vital and beautiful than the Tiber’s. All these aspects and associations are becoming more and more widely appreciated; and the footfall of visitors from distant countries crossing the threshold will grow more and more frequent as the readers of English history and romance increase in both hemispheres.