Chapter XI: Part 11

When presently we drove past Althorp house, standing at a dignified remove from our course, which was effectively the highway, I felt in its aspects the modernity which has always been characteristic of the family. It is of that agreeable period when the English architects were beginning to study for country houses the form of domestic classic which the Italian taught those willing to learn of them simplicity and grace at harmony with due state, and which is still the highest type of a noble mansion. The lady of the house more than two centuries back had been the Saccharissa of Suckling’s verse, and her charm remained to my vague associations with the place, where she figured in the revels of happier times, and then in her beneficences to the distressed clergy after the Civil War, when the darker days came to those of the Spencer praying and fighting. There is no reason why she should not be related in these to the Washingtons, who needed if they did not experience her kindness, and if the reader wishes to strain a point and make her more the friend than mistress of that Lucy Washington who was sometime housekeeper at Althorp, I will not be the one to gainsay him. For all me, he may figure these ladies in the priceless library of Althorp: priceless then, but sold in our tunes to Mrs. Rylands at Manchester, for a million and a half, and there made a monument to her husband’s memory. Many bolder things have been feigned than these ladies sitting together among the books, which would be the native air of the rhyme-worn Saccharissa, and discoursing with Mistress Lucy’s kinsman, Lawrence Washington, lately Fellow of Brasenose College, and lecturer and proctor at Oxford, and now rector of Purleigh, whence he was to be wrongfully removed for drunkenness: all with the simultaneity so common in the romance of historical type. How they would thee and thou one another as cousins of the seventeenth-century sort I leave the archæological novelist to inquire, gladly making over to him all my right and title in the affair. If he wishes to lug in the arrest of King Charles by Cornet Joyce of the Parliament forces, he can do it with no great violence, for it really happened hard by at Holmby House, whence the King was fond of coming to enjoy the gardens of Althorp. He can have Saccharissa and Mistress Lucy Washington, and his reverence Mr. Washington, looking down at the incident from a window of the library, and if he is the romanticist I take him for, he will easily have young Lawrence rapt in a vision of his great-great-grandson arresting the kingly power in America. The vision will have all the more fitness, in the reflections it suggests to the ancestor, from the fact, of which he will also be prescient, that both the Washingtons and Spencers, devoted and perhaps unreasoning royalists in their days, were destined to become more and more freed from their superstition, and to stand for greater freedom under different forms, as time went on. In his prophetic rapture, the Reverend Lawrence may have been puzzled to choose among his great-great-grandsons who was to fulfil it, for he was the father of a populous family counting seventeen in the first descent, and he could not have been blamed if he could not know George Washington by name, or identify him in his historical character.

It is this Lawrence Washington whose tablet one goes to revere in the church at Great Brington, where he lies entombed with the mother of his eight sons and nine daughters; and if one arrives at the sort of headland where the church stands on such a September afternoon as ours, and looks out from it over the lovely country undulating about its feet, one must try hard in one’s memory or imagination to match it with a scene of equal beauty. Of like beauty there is none except in some other English scenes like the home of Washington’s ancestors, and it is English in every feature and expression. The fields with their dividing hedges, the farmsteads snuggling in the hollows, the grouped or solitary trees, all softened in a sunny haze, and tented over with the milky-blue sky, form a landscape of which the immediate village, at the left of the headland, is a foreground,

Under the floor of the nave was buried the first Lawrence Washington, great-great-grandfather of George Washington]

with the human interest without which no picture lives.

I suppose that if I had been given my choice whether to have one of these village houses unroofed, and its simple drama revealed to me, I should have poorly chosen that rather than had the wooden cover lifted from the church floor where it protects the mortuary tablet of Lawrence Washington and his wife from the passing tread. But the rector of the church at Great Brington could not have gratified me in my preference, whereas he could and did lift the lid from the tablet in the nave, and let us read the inscription, and see the armorial bearings, in which the stars and stripes of our flag slept, undreaming of future glory, in the chrysalis arrest of the centuries since they had been the arms of a race of Northamptonshire gentlemen. The rector was in fact waiting for us at the church door, hospitably mindful of the commendation of our Northampton clerical friend, and we saw the edifice to all the advantage that his thoughtful patience could lend us. He had at once some other guests, in the young man and young woman who followed us in with their dog. They recalled themselves to the rector, who received them somewhat austerely, with his eyes hard upon their companion. “Did you mean to bring that animal with you?” he asked, and they pretended that the dog was an interloper, and the young man put him out in as much disgrace as he could bring himself to inflict. Probably there was an understanding between him and the dog; but the whole party took the rector’s reproof with a smiling humility and an unabated interest in the claims of the Washington tablet, and in fact the whole church, upon their attention. They somewhat distracted my own, which is at best an idle sort, easily wandering from Early English architecture to Later English character, and from perpendicular windows to people of any inclination. Yet, the church at Great Brington is most worthy to be studied in detail, for it is “notable even among the famous churches of Northamptonshire,” and it is the fitting last home of Washington’s ancestors.

I bring myself with some difficulty to own that the specific knowledge I have on this point, and several others in this vague narration, I owe to an agreeable sketch of “The Homes of the Washingtons” by Mr. John Leyland. But if I did not own it, some one would find me out, and it is best to confess my obligation together with my gratitude. I wish I had had the sketch with me at the time of my visit to Great Brington church, but I had not, and I lingered about in the church-yard, after we came out and the rector must leave us, under the spell of a quiet and in the keeping of associations unalloyed by information. For this reason I am unable to attribute its true significance to the old cross which stands apart from the church, and guides and guards the way to the place of graves beside it. I must own that at first glance it has somewhat the effect of an old-fashioned sign-post at an inn yard, and perhaps that were no bad symbol of the welcome the peaceful place holds for the life-weary wayfarers who lie down to their rest in it. Great Brington remains to me an impression of cottage streets,--doubtless provided with some shops. But when we had taken leave of the rector, and looked our last at the elegy-breathing church-yard, with its turf heaving in many a mouldering heap as if in decasyllabic quatrains, we drove away to see the Washington house in Little Brington.

When you come to it, or do not come to it, you find Little Brington nothing but a dwindling Great Brington, or a wider and more shopless dispersion of its cottages on one long street, which is really the highroad back to Northampton. Some bad little boys hung on to the rear of our carriage, and other little boys, quite as bad, I dare say, ran beside us, and invited our driver to “Cut be’oind, cut be’oind!” probably in the very accents, mellow and rounded, of our ancestral Washingtons. They all dropped away before we stopped at the gate of the very simple house where these Washingtons dwelt. It is a thatched stone house, of a Tudor touch in architecture, with rooms on each side of the front door and a tablet over that, lettered with the text, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: blessed be the name of the Lord.” Perhaps in other times it was of the dignity of a manor-house, but now it was inhabited by decent farmfolk, and very neatly kept. The farmwife who let us go up-stairs and down and all through it was a friendly soul, but apparently puzzled by our interest in it, and I fancied not many pilgrims worshipped at that shrine. It was rather ruder and humbler within than without; the flooring was rough, and the whitewashed walls of the little chambers were roughly plastered; neither these nor the living-rooms below had the beauty or interest of many colonial houses in New England. There was a little vegetable-gardened space behind the house, and a low stable, or some sort of shed, and on the comb of the roof an English true robin redbreast perched, darkly outlined against the clear September sky, and swelled his little red throat, and sang and sang. It was very pretty, and he sang much better than the big awkward thrush which we call a robin at home.

Our lovely day which had begun so dim, was waning in a sweet translucency, and we drove back to Northampton over gentle uplands through afternoon influences of a rich peacefulness. The road-side hedgerows now kept us from seeing much beyond them, but they were red, like those we passed in coming, with haws and wild rosepips, which we again took for a flush of American autumn in their leaves; but the trees were really of a sober yellow, with here and there, on a house wall, a flame of Japanese ivy or Virginia creeper. The way was dotted with shoe-hands, men and girls, going home early from the unprosperous shops which our driver said were running only half-time. But even on half-pay they earned so much more than they could on the land that the farmers, desperate for help, could pay only a nominal rent. Much of the land was sign-boarded for sale, and this and the unusual number of wooden cottages gave us a very home feeling. In our illusion, we easily took for crows the rooks sailing over the fields.

THE END

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FOOTNOTE:

[A] BATH.

Rules laid down by Richard Nash, Esq., M.C., put up by Authority in the Pump Room and observed at Bath Assemblies during his reign.

I.

“That a visit of ceremony at coming to Bath, and another going away, is all that is expected or desired by Ladies of Quality and Fashion--except Impertinents.

II.

“That Ladies coming to the Ball appoint a Time for their Footmens coming to wait on them Home, to prevent Disturbances and Inconveniences to Themselves and Others.

III.

“That Gentlemen of Fashion never appearing in a Morning before the Ladies in Gowns and Caps shew Breeding and Respect.

IV.

“That no Person take it ill that any one goes to another’s Play or breakfast and not to theirs;--except Captious by Nature.

V.

“That no Gentleman give his Tickets for the Balls to any but Gentlewomen;--N. B. Unless he has none of his Acquaintance.

VI.

“That Gentlemen crowding before the Ladies at the Ball, shew ill Manners; and that none do so for the Future;--except such as respect nobody but themselves.

VII.

“That no Gentleman or Lady take it ill that another Dances before them;--except such as have no Pretence to dance at all.

VIII.

“That the Elder Ladies and Children be contented with a Second Bench at the Ball, as being past, or not come to Perfection.

IX.

“That the younger Ladies take notice how many Eyes observe them;--This don’t extend to the Have-at-all’s.

X.

“That all whisperers of Lies and Scandal be taken for their Authors.

XI.

“That all Repeaters of such Lies and Scandal be shun’d by all Company;--except such as have been guilty of the same Crime.

“_N. B.--Several Men of no Character, Old Women and Young Ones of Questioned Reputation, are great Authors of Lies in this place, being of the sect of LEVELLERS._”

Date 1707.