Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
General
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Description and travel
Henry III. was born here, and always bore the name of Henry of
Winchester; Henry IV. here married Joan of Brittany; Henry VI. came
often hither, his first visit being to study the discipline of Wykeham's
College as a model for his new one at Eton, to supply students to King's
College, Cambridge, as Wykeham's does to his foundation of New College,
Oxford; and happy had it been for this unfortunate monarch had he been a
simple monk in one of the monasteries of a city which he so loved,
enjoying peace, learning and piety, having bitterly to learn:
"That all the rest is held at such a rate
As brings a thousand-fold more care to keep
Than in possession any jot of pleasure."
Henry VIII. made a visit with the Emperor Charles V., and stayed a week
examining its various antiquities and religious institutions; but he
afterward visited them in a more sweeping manner by the suppression of
its monasteries, chantries, etc., so that, says Milner, "these being
dissolved, and the edifices themselves soon after pulled down, or
falling to decay, it must have worn the appearance of a city sacked by a
hostile army." Through his reign and that of Edward VI., the destruction
of the religious houses, and the stripping of the churches, went on to a
degree which must have rendered Winchester an object of ghastly change
and desolation.
"Then," says Milner, "were the precious and curious monuments of piety
and antiquity, the presents of Egbert and Ethelwolph, Canute, and Emma,
unrelentingly rifled and east into the melting-pot for the mere value of
the metal which composed them. Then were the golden tabernacles and
images of the Apostles snatched from the cathedral and other altars,"
and not a few of the less valuable sort of these sacred implements were
to be seen when he wrote (1798), and probably are now, in many private
houses of this city and neighborhood.
The later history of this fine old city is chiefly that of melancholy
and havoc. A royal marriage should be a gay thing; but the marriage of
Bloody Mary here to Philip of Spain awakes no great delight in an
English heart. Here, through her reign and that of Elizabeth, the chief
events were persecutions for religion. James I. made Winchester the
scene of the disgraceful trials of Sir Walter Raleigh, Lords Cobham and
Grey, and their assumed accomplices--trials in which that most vain and
pedantic of tyrants attempted, on the ground of pretended conspiracies,
to wreak his personal spite on some of the best spirits of England.
VI
SCOTLAND
EDINBURGH [Footnote: From "Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh."]
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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