LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

fortress seems to have been reared upon the site of a Roman stronghold, whose walls and conduits are still traceable. After William Rufus came other royal builders, notably Edward I and Richard III. It was in the reign of the first Edward that Carlisle won royal favour by a spirited defence against her Scottish neighbours, the men of Annandale, who, forty thousand strong, marched red-handed across the Border. A Scottish spy within the city set it on fire, but while the men of Carlisle fought the flames, the women scrambled to the walls and, rolling down stones on the assailants and showering them with boiling water, kept them off until an ingenious burgher, venturing out on the platform above the gate, fished up, with a stout hook, the leader of the besiegers and held him high in the air while lances and arrows pierced him through and through. This irregular mode of warfare was too much for the men of Annandale, who marched home in disgust.

      During Edward's wars against Wallace he made Carlisle his headquarters. Twice he held Parliaments there, and it was from Carlisle he set forth, a dying king, on his last expedition against the Scots. In four days he had ridden but six miles, and then breath left the exhausted body. His death was kept secret until his son could reach Carlisle, which witnessed, in that eventful July of 1307, a solemn gathering of the barons of England to mourn above the bier of their great war-lord and pay their homage to the ill-starred Edward II. A quarter century later, Lord Dacre, then captain of Carlisle Castle, opened its gates to a royal fugitive from Scotland, Balliol; and Edward III, taking up the cause of the rejected sovereign, made war, from Carlisle as his headquarters, on the Scots. After the Wars of the Roses, Edward IV committed the north of England to the charge of his brother Gloucester, who bore the titles of Lord Warden of the Marches and Captain of Carlisle Castle. Monster though tradition has made him, Richard III seems to have had a sense of beauty, for Richard's Tower still shows mouldings and other ornamental touches unusual in the northern architecture of the period.

      But the royal memory which most of all casts a glamour over Carlisle Castle is that of Mary, Queen of Scots. Fleeing from her own subjects, she came to England, in 1568, a self-invited guest. She landed from a fishing-boat at Workington, on the Cumberland coast, – a decisive moment which Wordsworth has crystallised in a sonnet:

      "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."

      Rude devices, supposed to be the pastime of captives, are carved upon the walls of a mural chamber, – a chamber which has special significance for the reader of "Waverley," as here, it is said, Major Macdonald, the original of Fergus MacIvor, was confined. For Carlisle Castle was never more cruel than to the Jacobites of 1745. On November 18 Bonny Prince Charlie, preceded by one hundred Highland pipers, had made triumphal entrance into the surrendered city, through which he passed again, on the 21st of December, in retreat. Carlisle was speedily retaken by the English troops, and its garrison, including Jemmy Dawson of Jacobite song, sent in ignominy to London. Even so the cells of the castle were crammed with prisoners, mainly Scots, who were borne to death in batches. Pinioned in the castle courtyard, seated on black hurdles drawn by white horses, with the executioner, axe in hand, crouching behind, they were drawn, to make a Carlisle holiday, under the gloomy arch of the castle gate, through the thronged and staring street, and along the London road to Harraby Hill, where they suffered, one after another, the barbarous penalty for high treason. The ghastly heads were set up on pikes over the castle gates (yetts), as Scotch balladry well remembers.

      "White was the rose in his gay bonnet,

      As he folded me in his broached plaidie;

      His hand, which clasped mine i' the truth o' luve,

      O it was aye in battle ready.

      His lang, lang hair in yellow hanks

      Waved o'er his cheeks sae sweet and ruddy,

      But now they wave o'er Carlisle yetts

      In dripping ringlets clotting bloodie.

      My father's blood's in that flower tap,

      My brother's in that hare-bell's blossom;

      This white rose was steeped in my luve's blude,

      And I'll aye wear it in my bosom.

      "When I cam' first by merrie Carlisle,

      Was ne'er a town sae sweetly seeming;

      The white rose flaunted o'er the wall,

      The thistled banners far were streaming!

      When I cam' next by merrie Carlisle,

      O sad, sad seemed the town, and eerie!

      The auld, auld men came out and wept —

      O, maiden, come ye to seek ye'r dearie?"

      But not all the ballads of Carlisle Castle are tragic. Blithe enough is the one that tells how the Lochmaben harper outwitted the warden, who, when the minstrel, mounted on a grey mare, rode up to the castle gate, invited him in to ply his craft.

      "Then aye he harped, and aye he carped,

      Till a' the lordlings footed the floor;

      But an the music was sae sweet,

      The groom had nae mind o' the stable door.

      "And aye he harped, and aye he carped,

      Till a' the nobles were fast asleep;

      Then quickly he took off his shoon,

      And softly down the stair did creep."

      So he stole into the stable and slipped a halter over the nose of a fine brown stallion belonging to the warden and tied it to the grey mare's tail. Then he turned them

Скачать книгу