Guy’s Cliff—The legend of Guy—Kenilworth and its watersplash—Kenilworth Castle.

Leamington will scarcely interest the holiday-maker in Shakespeare land. From Warwick to Kenilworth is the more natural transition, and it is one of much interest. A mile and a half out of the town is that famous place of popular legend, Guy’s Cliff, where the great mansion, standing beside the river and built in 1822, looks so ancient, and where, on the opposite shore of Avon, stands that mill whose highly picturesque features are a standing dish in railway carriage picture-galleries. The impossible armour of the mythical Guy of Warwick we have already seen in Warwick Castle, and the improbable legend of his hermit life in the riverside cave remains now to be told.

Guy, returning from the Holy Land and successfully engaging as the champion of England against Colbrond, the giant Dane, in combat at Winchester, retraced his steps towards Warwick. There, unknown by any, he three days appeared among the poor at the Castle gate, as one of the thirteen people to whom his wife daily gave alms; and “having rendred thanks to her, he repaired to an Heremite that resided among the shady woods hard by.” The legend forgets to tell us why he did this, and does not explain how it was that this giant fellow, who apparently was eight feet high, was not recognised by his wife and others. Were they all eight feet tall, or thereabouts, at Warwick in those times?But it would be wasting time to apply the test of intelligent criticism to this mass of accumulated legends, to which many generations have added something. Guy is a mythical hero, built upon the exploits of some early British champion, whose name and real history are as past recall as the facts about King Arthur. But the great fourteenth-century Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who founded the chapel here, seems to have believed in him and in the size of him, for Guy’s mutilated effigy placed here by that great earl, whose faith must have been as robust as his body, is the full eight feet long.

At any rate, here is the cave of the hermit he consulted with, and with whom he resided, unknown still to his friends, until that holy and rheumatic man died. Here he himself died, two years later, A.D. 929, aged seventy. Thus the story seeks to bolster up the wild character of its details by the specious exactness of its dates. “He sent to his Lady their Wedding Ring by a trusty servant, wishing her to take care of his burial; adding also that when she came, she should find him lying dead in the Chapel, before the altar, and moreover, that within xv dayes after, she herself should depart this life.”

Guy’s Cave, excavated in the rock, appears really to have been a hermit’s abode in Saxon times. His name seems, from the early twelfth-century Saxon inscription found here over a hundred years ago, to have been “Guhthi.” It runs “Yd Crist-tu icniecti this i-wihtth, Guhthi”; which has been rendered, “Cast out, thou Christ, from Thy servant this burden, Guhthi.” So romance is not altogether unjustified, and although this misguided anchorite did not appreciate scenery, we at any rate can thus find some historical excuse as well as a scenic one for visiting the spot, with the crowd.

It is a pleasant road, on through Leek Wootton, where the church, after being rebuilt in an odious style in 1792, has been brought more into keeping with later ecclesiastical sentiment. And so the road runs on, to Kenilworth, through the approach called Castle End. Presently, after threading the long street, there in its meadows rises the ruined Castle.

There is no ideal way into Kenilworth nowadays, because the place has become more or less of a town, and numerous Coventry business men make it their suburban home. Thus does Romance disappear, in the daily goings forth and the returnings on their lawful occasions of the residents, and in the spreading of fresh streets and always more cheaply built houses for newer colonies of them. The first jerry-builder at Kenilworth was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose badly bonded additions to the Castle still ruinously show how slightly and hastily he set about the work. But of that anon.

Castle End is one of those scattered portions of the town that surprise the stranger. He thinks, time and again, that he has seen all Kenilworth, but there is always some more of it. You bear to the left and descend to a broad watersplash that crosses the road beneath densely overarching trees. The people of Kenilworth cling tightly to the preservation of their watersplash, and for several reasons: it is highly picturesque and keeps them in touch with the last elfin echoes of that Romance I have spoken of; the building of a bridge would cost them considerably; and finally they would lose the amusement and speculative interest which has latterly been added to it in these automobile times, when a motor-car may or may not succeed in getting through. For the watersplash is rather a sudden apparition to the motorist strange to the place, and it is a very variable thing. Sometimes it will be a shallow trickle across the road, and at others, when rain has fallen, it will be broad and deep. This is when the people of Kenilworth love to gather on the narrow footbridge at the side and smoke a quiet cigarette, waiting for the coming of the motorist who will presently be in difficulties. It is something of a problem how to pass at such times. If you rush it, as most are tempted to do, you get through at the cost of being swamped with the tremendous spray thrown up; and if you go gently you are probably brought to an inglorious standstill in mid-stream, with the ignominious necessity of wading out and procuring assistance. In any event, an engrossing spectacle is provided.

Once through this ford, you come up to the Castle entrance, on the left. It is a pleasant old part that looks on to the scene of so much feudal state and bygone warlike doings. A group of old red brick and timber cottages, their red brick of the loveliest geranium redness, looks upon a kind of village green. They lean at all kinds of angles, their roofs have skylines like the waves of a troubled sea, in front of each one is a little forecourt garden, and they all supply teas and sell picture-postcards. I do not know what the inhabitants of them do in the winter. Perhaps they come up to London and spend their gains in mad revelry.

It is a hungry and a thirsty business, “doing” Kenilworth Castle conscientiously, and the people of Castle Green and elsewhere in this village-town find their account therein. Even those visitors who do not conscientiously “do” it—and they are by far the larger number, both because most have not the intellectual equipment necessary, and because in the rest the weakness of the flesh prevails over the willingness of the spirit—find copious refreshment necessary. There is in fact, a great deal to be seen, and the interest is sustained throughout. Viewed in a commercial way, it is a very good sixpennyworth. Personally, I consider Ludlow Castle to be somewhat the superior of Kenilworth, and to hold the premier position for a ruined castle; but Kenilworth is first in the estimation of many. It does not make the effective picture that Ludlow forms, crowning its rocky bluff above the river Teme; for Kenilworth stands in perhaps the weakest situation that ever was selected for an ancient fortress, its ruined walls rising from low-lying meadows, and at a distance having the appearance rather of some huge dismantled mansion than a castle.

It is quite easy to deduce the existence of some Saxon lord, Chenil or Kenelm, whose weorth this was, but he is not an historical personage. The first important historic fact that remains to us is the gift of the manor by Henry the First to Geoffrey de Clinton in 1122, but what he found here in the nature of a castle, or what he may have built is alike unknown. From the grandson of this Geoffrey, King John appears to have taken a lease and to have added many outworks to the then existing castle keep, which still remains. That evil figure in English history, travelling almost incessantly about his kingdom, watchful and tyrannical, seems to have been much at Kenilworth, enlarging the bounds of the Castle beyond the original Saxon mound on which the keep and the inner ward are placed, inventing strong dungeons for his victims, and constructing those outer walls which still look out, beyond the original moat. Thus the Castle grew to four times the area it had at first occupied, and as it could not be strengthened by steep approaches, it was safeguarded by artificially constructed water defences. The fortification of Kenilworth Castle was indeed a wonderful triumph of mediÆval military engineering over the disabilities of an unsatisfactory site, and it enabled the disaffected nobles and others in the next reign to sustain a six months’ siege ending only in their surrender through a plague which had broken out among the garrison.

We can still see the nature of these defences, for although the water has been drained away, the circuit of the outer walls, from the Swan Tower on Clinton Green, round to Mortimer’s Tower, the Water Tower, and Lunn’s Tower remains perfect, and marks where the defences on two sides of the Castle enclosure skirted a great lake formed by damming back two small confluent brooks in the hollow meadows in which the Castle stands. The outer walls, now looking upon pastures where cattle graze, then descended sheer into the water; a flight of steps leading down from a postern gate still remaining to show where a boat could then have been launched. This lake was half a mile long, from 90 to 100 yards broad, and from 10 to 12 feet deep.

The siege of 1266 tried the strength of this strong place. The great Simon de Montfort, who fell at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, had been granted the Castle in 1254. He died in the popular cause, fighting against Henry the Third, and his defeated army hurried to Kenilworth. They found no immediate opposition, and garrisoned the place at leisure, being joined there by many powerful adherents and heaping up enormous stores for a lengthy resistance. Both sides knew it would be a stubborn and difficult affair. The King tried at first to come to terms with the garrison, but he does not appear to have gone about it in the most tactful way. It is true that he was prepared to allow the rebels to compound for pardon with a fine, supposing they did so within forty days, but to “pardon” those who think they are in the right and who are still in arms to assert their rights and redress their grievances, seems an unlikely way to end a dispute. The Church was opposed to the popular side, as may always confidently be expected, and helped the King’s cause by damning the insurgents and preparing the tremendous document known to history as the “Dictum de Kenilworth,” otherwise “the Ban.” This was read and published in the church of St. Mary, Warwick. It proclaimed the supreme will of the King, and, inter alia, forbade the people to regard the dead hero and popular idol, de Montfort, as the saint and martyr they were already declaring him to be. The garrison received this with contempt, and the long siege began. Robert of Gloucester, who records it in eloquent but rugged lines, is too quaint and amusing not to be quoted—

“The king anon at midsummer, with strength and with gin
To Kenilworth y-went, the castle to win;
He swore he would not thence until he were within.
So long they sped badly that they might as well bliue [272a]
None of their gates those within ever close would.
Open they stood, night and day, come in whoso would.
Out they smite well oft, when men too nigh came,
And slew fast on either half and prisoners name; [272b]
And then bought they them back with ransom. Such life long did last:
With mangonels and engines each upon the other cast.
The Legate and the Archbishop with them also nome; [272c]
Two other bishops, and to Kenilworth come,
To make accord between the King and the disinherited also,
And them of the Castle, if it might be y-do [272d]
But the disinherited would not do all after the King [272e]
Nor they of the Castle any the more, nor stand to their liking, [272f]
The Legate with his red cope amansed tho [272g]
Them that in the castle were, and full many mo [272i]
All that helped them, or were of their rede, [272j]
Or to them consented, in will or in deed.
They of the Castle held it in great despite.
Copes and other cloathes they let make them of white
And Master Philip Porpoise, that was a quaint man,
Clerk, and hardy in his deeds, and their chirurgian,
They made a mock Legate, in this cope of white,
Against the others’ rede, to do the Legate a despite,
And he stood as Legate upon the Castle wall,
And amansed King and Legate and their men all
Such game lasted long among them in such strife,
But much good was it not, to soul or to life.”

There was never another siege of Kenilworth. It passed through many hands, and among others to John o’ Gaunt, whose manors are found numerously, all over the country. In his time the great Banqueting Hall, the most beautiful feature of the Castle, was added, and it became not only a fortress, but a stately palace as well. But the most stately and gorgeous times were yet to be. Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, who aspired to become King-Consort, received a grant of it in 1563, and was created Earl of Leicester the following year. The monopolies and rich offices of State showered upon him by the Queen had already made him an enormously wealthy man, and he determined to entertain his Sovereign here with unparalleled splendour. To this end he established an army of workmen here, who treated the place very much in the way adopted by any suddenly enriched millionaire of modern times towards the out-of-date mansion he has purchased. The narrow openings in the massive walls of the Norman keep were enlarged and great mullioned windows inserted; the vast Gatehouse still standing and now used as a private residence was built; and the lofty block of buildings added that still bears his name. Many other works, but of less spectacular nature, were undertaken at this time.

Dudley had known many changes of fortune, and had been a prisoner in the Tower only ten years earlier, with his father and four brothers, on a charge of high treason; narrowly escaping execution. Now an astonishing freak of chance had made him perhaps the most powerful, as well as the wealthiest, man in the country. Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Kenilworth, details Leicester’s magnificence and the unparalleled grandeur of the entertainments given here to Queen Elizabeth in 1575, and introduces his wife Amy Robsart, Lady Robert Dudley, as Countess of Leicester into the scenes of his story. But in 1560, four years before he had received his earldom, his wife had perished mysteriously at Cumnor Place in Berkshire, murdered, it has been supposed, at his instigation, to clear the way for that projected marriage with Queen Elizabeth which never took place. Leicester, when he entertained the Queen here so royally, had no “encumbrances,” to limit his ambitions.

How the Queen was received here and entertained for seventeen days is fully, and on the whole tediously, narrated by a remembrancer then present, but a short extract will tell us something of the quality of these revels. On her Majesty’s approach she was met by a girl in character as “one of the ten sibills, cumly clad in a pall of white sylk,” who recited a “proper poezie in English rime and meeter, the which her Majestie benignly accepted and passed foorth unto the next gate of the Brayz, which for the length, largenes, and use, they call now the Tylt-Yard; whear a porter, tall of person, and wrapt also in sylke, with a club and keiz of quantitee according, had a rough speech full of passions, in meeter aptly made to the purpose.” Presently when the Queen came to the inner gate “a person representing the Lady of the Lake, famous in King Arthurz Book, with two Nymphes waiting uppon her, arrayed all in sylks, attended her highness comming,” the Lady of the Lake then coming ashore from the moat, and reciting a “well-penned meeter.” After this, coming to the Castle gate, a Latin poem was read to her by a poet clad in a “long ceruleous Garment, with a Bay Garland on his head, and a skrol in his hand. So, passing into the inner court, her Majesty, (that never rides but alone) thear set doun from her palfrey, was conveied up to her chamber, when after did follo a great peal of Gunz and lightning by Fyr work.”

£1000 a day was spent in the feasting and revelling. Everything was done without stint. The great clock on the keep was stopped. “The Clok Bell sang not a Note all the while her Highness waz thear: the Clok also stood still withall, the handz of both the tablz stood firm and fast, allweys pointing at two a Clok.” The hospitable and symbolical meaning of this was that two o’clock was the banqueting hour.

Every time when the Queen went hunting in the park, classic deities, and heroes and heroines of mythology would appear from woodland glades and recite complimentary poems—greatly to the disadvantage of the sport, it may be supposed. Bear-baiting further enlivened the time, and “nyne persons were cured of the peynful and daungerous deseaz called the King’s Evil.”

Kenilworth passed on the death of Leicester in 1588, to his brother, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and on his decease, two years later, to Robert’s illegitimate son, Sir Robert Dudley, who was long an exile, and died in 1649. It was let to Prince Henry, son of James the First, and on his death to his brother, Prince Charles, who purchased it from Sir Robert’s deserted wife, whom he, when Charles the First, created Duchess Dudley, 1645. After the King’s execution the property was granted by Cromwell to some of his supporters, to whom is due its ruinous condition, for they made the best market they could of its building-stone. On the Restoration in 1660, Charles the Second granted it to the Earl of Clarendon, in whose descendants’ hands it still remains.

The visitor to the Castle almost always makes at once for the keep and the imposing ruins of John o’ Gaunt’s great Banqueting Hall, rising boldly from the mound, partly natural and partly artificial, in the centre of the Castle precincts. He thus follows the natural instincts of sightseers, but the better way, for the full understanding of the scale and ancient strength of the works, is unquestionably to first make the inner circuit of the walls. Standing on Clinton Green before entering the Castle, and facing it from the only side not in ancient times defended by lakes or marshy ground, we are on the bank whence Henry the Third’s soldiers chiefly conducted the siege of 1266. It was the weakest part of the works, because the high natural plateau entirely precluded the possibility of continuing the water defences on this side. All that could be done here by the military engineers of Kenilworth was to excavate the deep chasm which still remains; and across this the besiegers vainly tried to pass, with the aid of bundles of faggots thrown into the hollow, while “Master Philip Porpoise,” who, as the chronicler truly says, “was a quaint man,” stood on the walls, dressed up like the Pope’s Legate, and cursed the King and the real Legate and all the King’s men.

Leicester’s great Gatehouse no longer forms the entrance to the Castle, and is in private occupation. It did not even figure in the great reception of Queen Elizabeth in 1575, for she came the other way, through the Tilt Yard and by Mortimer’s Tower, and across the great Outer Ward: a method of approach especially calculated to enhance the stateliness of the pageant. All Warwickshire, I think, must have witnessed those doings, from the further bank of the widespreading lake, among them Mr. John Shakespeare and his eleven-year-old son, William, whose imagination would have been excited by the fantastic creatures that sported on the water, and by the fireworks and the heathen gods and goddesses: very real to him, because he was not old enough to know how it was all done.

You render your entrance-fee at a narrow gate and are at once free to wander at will. In front is the grassy Outer Ward, and on the right, the keep and the state buildings, with Leicester’s Building, lofty, seamed with fissures and shored up against its falling. The eyeless windows preach a homily on the transient nature of things.

But, leaving these for a while, we skirt along to the left, coming to the ruins of Mortimer’s Tower, which stood on the wall and formed the entrance to the Castle in this direction. It looked out upon the Tilt Yard and the massive dam that penned up the waters of the Great Lake. Just before this tower is reached the Water Tower on the wall will be seen, and may be examined. Near at hand are the Stables and Lunn’s Tower, divided off by a light iron fence and not accessible; being included within the grounds belonging to the occupier of the Gatehouse. But the Stables are seen, clearly enough, and form the most charming colour-scheme within the Castle. They are of fifteenth-century red brick, timber-framed, and of an almost unimaginably delicate and yet vivid red.

Next after Mortimer’s Tower comes a small postern gateway, with its steps formerly leading to the water. Continuing from it and following the wall, we come under the tottering walls of Leicester’s building, on the right, with the massive walls of the state Buildings beyond it. They stand high, upon a mound that formed the limits of the Castle of Saxon and early Norman days, and the grassy walk between them and the outer wall was in those distant times the moat, long before the magnificent scheme of the lake was thought out. Remains of fireplaces and windows in this outer wall show where the wooden buildings that formed barracks for the garrison stood. The walk ends up against an archway leading into the garden, or Plaisance, assigned to Henry the Eighth, through which the outer wall continues past a water-gate called the “King’s Gate,” and so to the Swan Tower, where the circuit is completed, at Clinton Green.

Kenilworth Castle: Ruins of the Banqueting Hall

But the Plaisance is not open to the public. The way into the central block of State buildings is through a postern doorway on the right, under the Banqueting Hall. The savage treatment of these noble buildings by Cromwell’s friends has at first sight obscured the nature of this scene; but it is soon perceived that the Hall stood high, upon a basement or undercroft, whose vaulted roof has entirely disappeared, together with that of the Hall itself. This postern doorway therefore led through the basement. The Hall was the work of John o’ Gaunt, about 1350, and was a grand building in the Perpendicular style, ninety feet long and forty-five feet wide. Lofty and deeply-recessed windows, with rich tracery lighted it, and at one end was an exceptionally beautiful oriel window. A portion of this survives, together with two of the others. The entrance from the Inner Court was by a fine flight of stone stairs and through a wide archway still remaining in greatly weather-worn condition, but showing traces of delicately carved work. Inside is the groined porch, with a recess for a porter.

Sir Walter Scott, who here adopts the close account given by Laneham, one of the Queen’s retinue during her reception at Kenilworth, and merely edits him, describes the appearance of the Hall, “hung with the richest tapestry, misty with perfumes, and sounding to strains of soft and delicious music. From the highly carved oaken roof hung a superb chandelier of gilt bronze, formed like a spread eagle, whose outstretched wings supported three male and three female figures, grasping a pair of branches in each hand. The Hall was thus illuminated by twenty-four torches of wax. At the upper end of this splendid apartment was a State canopy, overshadowing a royal throne, and beside it was a door which opened to a long suite of apartments, decorated with the utmost magnificence for the Queen and her ladies, when it should be her pleasure to be private.”This magnificence curiously contrasts with the primitive nature of the sanitary arrangements seen in the adjoining towers and in the keep. The Strong Tower and the Kitchen Tower fill up the space between the Banqueting Hall and the keep; the first named, appropriately enough, from having been a prison. The walls of its not unpleasant, though small rooms, still bear some rudely-scratched coats of arms of those who were detained here. Their imprisonment cannot have been so hopeless as that of King John’s victims, in the dungeons of the keep.

The keep is called “CÆsar’s Tower,” but the Romans had never any association with Kenilworth. It would better be styled “Clinton’s.” Like all the buildings, it is of a dull, brownish red stone. An angle-turret shows where the clock was placed: that clock whose hands always stood hospitably at the banqueting hour in those seventeen days of Elizabethan revel.

Leaving Kenilworth for Coventry, the church is on the right. Its west doorway is a fine but much-decayed work of the Norman period, from the ruins of the Augustinian Priory close by. It is a much-restored church, and does not come up to the expectations raised by a sight of its octagonal tower and spire. The only object of interest within is a pig of lead built into the tower wall, bearing the mark of one of Henry the Eighth’s travelling Commissioners inquiring into the suppression of the religious houses. It would seem to be one of a number cast from the lead off the Priory roofs.

Kenilworth at last left behind, a gradual rise brings the traveller to the turning to Stoneleigh village. It is “Gibbet Hill.” The ill-omened name comes from an example of the law’s ancient practice of hanging up murderers to the public view, very much in the manner of those gamekeepers who nail up the bodies of the jays, the rats, the weasels and other “vermin.” The criminals whose carcases swung and rattled here in their chains were three in number; Moses Baker, a weaver of Coventry, and Edward Drury and Robert Leslie, two dragoons of Lord Pembroke’s regiment, quartered in that city. They had on March 18th, 1765, murdered a farmer, one Thomas Edwards, at a place called Whoberley, just outside Coventry. Their bodies hung until their clothes rotted; and then, one by one, their bones fell from their chains and enclosing cages. But the gibbet and the terror of it remained until 1820, when the weathered timber, scored with thousands of the rusty nails which had been driven into it, so that no one should climb the post, was removed to do service in the cow byre of a neighbouring farm.

This melancholy history apart, the road is a pleasant one; broad, and lined with wide grassy edges and magnificent elms. It was even more pleasant before the motor manufacturing firms of Coventry began the practice of testing their new cars along it, and was then the pride of the district. It leads across Stivichall Common into the city of Coventry, over that railway bridge referred to by Tennyson in his poem, Godiva—

“I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge,
To watch the three tall spires.”

I remember a first reading of that poem, and the difficulty of really believing Tennyson meant a railway train. It seemed incredible that he could in such a nineteenth-century fashion introduce an eleventh-century subject. The “train” one imagined at first to be a train in the middle-ages sense, a procession or pageant, and the person who waited for it to be, not Tennyson himself, but some imaginary person indulging in historical speculation. But no, he was modern, like his own King Arthur.

Here the “three tall spires” first come into view, and the city of Coventry is entered, past the Green and up Hertford Street.