AN OLD CASTLE I' AN OLD CASTLE N the west of England, just on the border of Wales, in a sweet and smiling landscape, where, to the east, far as the eye can reach, stretch green, rolling meadows broken by waving fields of yellow grain and fair-blooming orchards, with here and there a cottage or a manor-house "bosomed high in tufted trees," its blue wreath of evening smoke curling slowly up; and where, to the west, rise gentle hills green and smooth to the summit save now and then for a reach of noble forest, and, on the distant horizon, the dim blue outline of the mountains of Wales: in this lovely country lies, at the junction of the broad, shallow rivers Teme and Corve, the sleepy old town of Ludlow. It is not much visited by American sight-seers I take it, though few towns in England are better worth the seeing. The two rivers meet at an acute angle, and the town lies just within the angle. As you enter it from the railway and walk up its quaint and straggling main street, you find yourself slowly climbing a long hill. Halfway up you may stop for a bit of meat and drink at the Three Feathers, a delightfully old hostelry of the sixteenth century. Farther up, as you near the apex of the angle and the junction. of the two rivers, almost at the top of the hill, is the venerable church of St. Lawrence; and a few rods farther, at the very top of the hill, and just at the junction of the rivers, where the steep bluff falls sheer down into the brawling stream below, there stands, noble though in ruin, the Old Castle of Ludlow. The street of the town leads straight up to the castle wall that bars your way. But in the great outer gate is now only an old oaken door, and that is invitingly open all day long. The outer court which you enter is now a broad, smooth lawn, enclosed on three sides by the low curtain walls over which the great beech trees hang their branches. But turning to the right, you face, on the fourth side, the towering wall of the great inner court, or castle proper. Passing over a bridge that spans the old moat, now filled with vines and climbing greenery, you pass through the high-arched gate, under the shadow of the great keep, the rusty teeth of the old portcullis grinning in their socket over you, and enter the inner court. You are in the Middle Ages. The little court of perhaps half an acre is bright and sunny, but there is a sullen stillness in the air, and the grim walls that shut in around you, keeping silent the secret of centuries, will throw a hush upon you as you enter their solemn circuit. Time has laid his hand but gently on this old castle. Its bold masses rise as they rose half a millennium ago, its grand outlines still entire, though softened a little here and there by the gradual touches of decay. Roofs are gone, and the floors are green turf now; ivy has mantled all one side of the court, and the whole is slowly yielding to the tooth of time. But you may still clamber down into the dungeons at the base of the great keep, one of the oldest in England, for it was built only sixteen years after the Conquest, more than eight hundred years ago, and then you can mount by broken stair from story to story till you emerge quite at the top and look out toward the sunny meadow a mile away that was once reddened by the blood of Bosworth battle; or you can pick your way through the mass of noble building on the opposite side of the court,-armories, state-apartments, banqueting hall, clambering up to get a nearer view of some bit of quaint carving, or a glimpse of green landscape framed in some long, narrow window, or to come out now and then into some curious little bower, built in the thickness of the wall, lighted by a tiny slit in the gray stone, and just large enough for a lover, a lady, and a lute. And when you have wearied yourself by your climbing among the ruins you may lie upon the sunny sward in the court and dream away a summer afternoon in mingled reminiscence and imagination of the scenes and the men these walls have looked upon. They could tell you many a story of early English history, of Walter Lacey and Arnold De Lisle and Maid Marian, of Edward III and his cruel mother, Isabella. During all the bloody Wars of the Roses the tide of varying battle surged around this castle, and the turf where you lie was stained again and again by the blood of the red and the white rose. In yonder rooms at the northeast corner lived for a time Edward IV's two sons, before they went up to London to meet that mysterious death in the Tower that every schoolboy has heard of. Hither came some years later sad-faced Catherine of Aragon from her royal parents, Ferdinand and Isabella; yonder tower where she lived for a few short months with her boy husband, Prince Arthur, is still called by her name. Pleasant hour of calm before the storm of her life: for when her husband died, you remember, she went from here to marry his brother, Henry VIII, and her divorce from him turned Europe upside down and made the English Church. But the associations of Ludlow that are of most interest and on which I wish to linger are of yet a little later date. From 1559 till the close of the sixteenth century this castle was an official residence of a noble family which numbered in it some of the greatest names of England's greatest age, and whose list of personal acquaintance comprised almost that whole circle of statesmen, adventurers, and poets whose renown fills The spacious times of great Elizabeth Ludlow Castle was then the seat of the Lord President of Wales, to whom was entrusted a wide jurisdiction over the affairs of that country; and in 1559, shortly after Elizabeth came to the throne, she appointed to that office, Sir Henry Sidney. Sidney and his son-in-law, Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, held the office until 1601. England from 1560 to 1600-what an age it was! We must try to realize it, if we would understand those men whose figures loom so vast upon the scene of history. Never before, perhaps, in the history of the world had fifty years wrought so great changes in any country as had been wrought for England during the fifty years before Henry Sidney took his place at Ludlow. The whole face of the country was changed. The feudal system had mostly passed away. Quiet and peaceful days had come at last. The old castles like this of Ludlow, that had been for four centuries the centers of battle and siege, ceased now to be fortresses any more and were turned into knightly palaces. It was the beginning of modern life, you see. The nobles no longer came to court with two-handed sword and shield, but in satin doublet and velvet cloak, laced with gold and sparkling with jewels. They builded themselves, says the old chronicler, Harrison, fair manor-houses of "brick or hard stone, . . . their rooms large and comelie, . So magnificent and statelie as the basest house of a baron doth often match in our dayes with some honors of princes in old time." Inside these fair and comely houses, though you would find only rushes under your feet as yet, there is gorgeous tapestry of Arras upon the walls, there is costly linen in the presses, there is abundance of silver and gold plate upon the board, to the value, says old Harrison, of two thousand pounds at the least in any nobleman's house (equal, you know, to seventy-five thousand dollars nowadays). You sat in chairs, you sat at tables, whose carved richness and beauty are the despair of modern imitators; and you looked out over the green English country through windows of clear glass newly brought from Flanders or Normandy. And when your imagination can reproduce for you the vision of these noble old rooms, lighted with little diamond-paned windows, with the high, open-timbered roof overhead, the gray walls bright with tapestry and hung with armor, the floor strewn |