From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.Bates, Katharine Lee
General
From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.
Bates, Katharine Lee
England -- Description and travel
"Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,
The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore;
And to the throng, that on the Cumbrian shore
Her landing hailed, how touchingly she bowed!
And like a star (that, from a heavy cloud
Of pine-tree foliage poised in air, forth darts,
When a soft summer gale at evening parts
The gloom that did its loveliness enshroud)
She smiled; but Time, the old Saturnian seer,
Sighed on the wing as her foot pressed the strand
With step prelusive to a long array
Of woes and degradations hand in hand--
Weeping captivity, and shuddering fear
Stilled by the ensanguined block of Fotheringay!"
Mary was escorted with all courtesy to Cockermouth Castle and thence
to Carlisle, where hospitality soon became imprisonment. Her first
request of Elizabeth was for clothing, and it was in one of the
deep-walled rooms of Queen Mary's Tower, of which only the gateway now
remains, that she impatiently looked on while her ladies opened
Elizabeth's packet to find--"two torn shifts, two pieces of black
velvet, and two pairs of shoes." The parsimony of Queen Bess has a
curious echo in the words of Sir Francis Knollys, who, set to keep
this disquieting guest under close surveillance, was much concerned
when she took to sending to Edinburgh for "coffers of apparell,"
especially as she did not pay the messengers, so that Elizabeth, after
all, was "like to bear the charges" of Mary's vanity. The captive
queen was allowed a semblance of freedom in Carlisle. She walked the
terrace of the outer ward of the castle, went to service in the
cathedral, and sometimes, with her ladies, strolled in the meadows
beside the Eden, or watched her gentlemen play a game of football, or
even hunted the hare, although her warders were in a fever of anxiety
whenever she was on horseback lest she should take it into her wilful,
beautiful head to gallop back to Scotland.
But these frowning towers have more terrible records of captivity.
Under the old Norman keep are hideous black vaults, with the narrowest
of slits for the admission of air and with the walls still showing
the rivet-holes of the chains by which the hapless prisoners were so
heavily fettered.
"Full fifteen stane o' Spanish iron
They hae laid a'right sair on me;
Wi' locks and keys I am fast bound
Into this dungeon dark and dreerie."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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