Hanley Castle

The small town of Upton-on-Severn is situated on the river Severn between Tewkesbury and Worcester. The Romans appear to have chosen it as a site for one of their martial camps, and Roman coins and relics have been found in the field tradition has marked out as "The Camp." In after years the Roman Station became a Saxon ton, or village, and there is the "Saxon's lode" across the Severn to this day. Uptonbury is now Buryfield.

The Saxons loved to create pastures round their villages, and to clear the forest glades of the hazel and the yellow gorse, while nothing attracted them more than a brook which would turn a mill, and whose waters cherished the silver trout and the lissom eel. Just such a place was situated a little more than a mile to the westward of Upton, and in early Saxon times a grange and a mill were erected by the banks of a brook flowing from the Malvern hills, and broad leys were made in the forest for pastures at Hanley, for such the place was called.

With its pleasant surroundings on the borders of a great forest which stretched from Worcester to Gloucester, Hanley became the resort of the wealthier Saxon eorls. The hunting quarters were famous, and there was a good supply of fish from the Severn,--the salmon and shad, the lamprey and lampern, all loved by eorls and ecclesiastics, while the wild woods ever furnished herbs for potting, such as mints and pepperworts, or for surgery, as bloodworts. Later on, at "his manor of Hanley," there lived Brictric Meawe, a gallant Saxon, who was "Lord of the Manor of Gloucester," and attached to the Court of Edward the Confessor. This Eorl had the misfortune to attract the affections of Matilda, daughter of the Earl of Flanders, to which he did not respond, a slight she determined to revenge if only she had the opportunity. In after years the opportunity came. Matilda became the wife of William the Conqueror, and on his conquest of England she caused the unhappy Brictric to be seized at Hanley and imprisoned at Winchester, where he died miserably.

In after times, when Henry the Third was king, the Saxon grange was converted by the De Clares into a Castle, and this became the residence of the "Red Earl," Gilbert de Clare, and his wife, the Princess Joan, daughter of Edward the First. This great king frequently visited Worcester, and we may be sure enjoyed hunting in that Malvern Chase which he granted to his son-in-law. Here also lived the last of the De Clares, who died in the prime of youth, fighting for Edward the Second on the fatal field of Bannockburn.

After this, Hanley Castle became a favourite residence of the Beauchamps. Here Isabel Despenser, herself of royal blood, presented her first husband, Richard Beauchamp, with a daughter, when Henry the Fifth was king (1415). At Hanley Castle she married her second husband, that famous Earl of Warwick who took the standard of Owen Glendower on Shrewsbury battle-field, and who was afterwards guardian of Henry the Sixth and Regent of France. He lies beneath his grand monument at Warwick, she lies by the chapel built to the memory of her first husband in the ancient Abbey of Tewkesbury. At Hanley Castle died their son, who was made Duke of Warwick by Henry the Sixth, and here lived for years his sister Anne, who married Neville the "King-maker" "the great commanding Warwick," "the setter-up and plucker-down of kings." Henry the Seventh appropriated the property of the Beauchamps, and in the days of James the First the Castle of Hanley belonged to the Crown, but was well nigh deserted and neglected. From its situation it could be easily destroyed by cannon, and even the great central Keep must have succumbed in a short time to artillery acting from the broad leys which commanded the Castle from the eastward. Nevertheless it was a place the hunters still loved to visit, and King James often declared that he would himself hunt a stag from his Castle of Hanley in Malvern Chase. He never came, however, and it was rented from the Crown by my father, Miles Forester, who loved the locality on account of its connection with my mother's ancestors, and for its sylvan beauty, its great moat filled with fishes, its keep in which we lived, the shattered turrets which formed the angles, and the connecting galleries now overgrown with ivy and polypody, tower cress, and pennywort.

My father was a younger son of those Foresters who for centuries had settled on the wolds of Shropshire and from whom was descended the famous Robin Hood. He was a well-educated gentleman, had more than a smattering of Greek, could translate easily Virgil and Horace, and was well read in the works of Chaucer, Holinshed, Churchyard, Bacon, and above all in the plays of Master Shakespeare. He was acquainted with Ben Jonson when he was poet laureate, and attended his funeral in Westminster Abbey. He was a Churchman and a royalist to the backbone.

My mother was related to the Earls of Westmoreland and a descendant of that Isabel Despenser who was the great, great grand-daughter of Edward the Third, so she was proud of Hanley Keep, which she declared to have been unjustly appropriated by Henry the Seventh, and was ever ready to discourse upon the daring deeds of Creçy or of Agincourt, or to summon in imagination the forms of knights, who had long since been dust, to the grass-grown tilt-yard in which I played, and where she would expatiate upon the changes that had passed over her kith and kin.

The characters of both my father and mother were more suited to the age of chivalry than to the Court of the pedantic Scotch King, James Stewart, who was ever frightened at the sight of swords and guns, or steel armour, and whose sole idea in granting the honour of knighthood was to obtain the fees that had to be paid for it. Badger-baiting, cock-fighting, and coney hunting had little charm for my father, who ever enjoyed manly exercises, while he detested the wine-bibbing and drunkenness, which too often converted the gentlemen, and even the ladies of King James's Court, into maundering buffoons and tipsy queans.

On the accession of Charles the First, a considerable change for the better took place at Court, and lords and ladies, knights and gentlemen became more modest, or at least more quiet in their demeanour. The new King was reported to be zealous for religion and a supporter of the Church party to which both my father and mother belonged.

I was born at Hanley Castle in the year 1622, and was, soon after, baptized, at the parish church, as Richard Plantagenet Forester,--Richard in memory of the great Coeur-de-Lion, and Plantagenet at the request of my mother, in remembrance of that blood which is supposed to circulate in our veins.

Young as I was when she died, I have a distinct remembrance of my mother's earnest face, and of frequent embraces by her loving arms. I can see, as I pen these words, a vision of a mother's smile, which has often come back to me in dreams and waking moments, and has remained with me through a long life. I remember, also, my sister Isabella appearing as a new-born babe, but alas it was an ominous appearance, for her birth was the cause of our mother's death and our father's life-long sorrow. She was christened Isabella Despenser, but the week after our mother was consigned to the tomb, and my father found himself a widower with two small children demanding his care and attention.

After my mother was laid in the grave in the parish church of Hanley, hard by the Castle, my father summoned his only sister, Mistress Tabitha Forester, a maiden lady of forty, to aid him in managing his household and his children. "Sister Tab" was ever kind, although not beautiful to look upon, and had an income of her own and a house in Old Street, in Upton, of considerable dimensions, with steps of stone up to the door, which had a knocker. She was very intimate with the Rector, and was well known to every child as one who always had her pockets, and they were large ones, filled with apples. She was proud of her family and their crest of a bugle-horn, which they bore in memory of their forest homes and huntings in the days of King Canute. She had been even known to dispute with my mother as to the antiquity of the Foresters being greater than that of the Despensers. She was continually asked to be gossip, or godmother, to various babes, and on such occasions wore her "silk calimanco gown," as she wrote soon after the event:--"Ould Mrs. Barclay and myself were gossips, God bless hitt, Amen." At Easter she wore a "double cobweb lawn" and a muff. In winter she was dressed "in a woollen gown, liver coloured and made up with a stomacher." She was charitable, as we learn from her Diary which is now, fortunately for these Memoirs, in my possession.

Aunt Tabitha was acquainted with those good Royalists, Sir Henry Slingsby, Colonel Manley, and Mr. Symonds, the antiquary, who all kept diaries, and thus in the year of our Lord 1628, I find the following entry:--

"1628, Ap. I.--Rachel calfed--a bull calf--bad Rachel." "A pound of shugger to send Mrs. Eaton," and "a yeard and a half of scarlet baize to make her a waistcoate and four yards of red galloon to bind him." "Miles went to Lunnon." "Mem. this yeere, viz. 23 August, 1628, George Duke of Buckingham was killed at Porchmouth by one John ffelton a leiftennant, and the terme before I saw a phesie of his death by the numerall letters in his name."

Thus one of my earliest remembrances was the summoning of my father to London to give evidence respecting the disforesting of Malvern Chase, and the prayers put up by our household for his safe return. Also the distich, which the common people at Upton bandied from mouth to mouth respecting Dr. Lambe, the Duke of Buckingham's physician, who had been tried at Worcester for sorcery,--

"Let Charles and George do what they can,
The Duke shall die like Dr. Lambe."

I can also recall the commotion caused by the disforesting of Malvern Chase, A.D. 1632, and the riots and misdemeanours which arose in consequence. Aunt Tabitha says:--"No more rent oats and rent hens the Lord be thankit, no more shutting up pooching prisners in our Banbury Chamber at Hanley Castle," "no more hanging at Rydde Green." A Forest was Royal property, and therefore differed from a Chase, which could be held by a subject. Thus Malvern Chase was a royal forest until it was granted to Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, by Edward I. Then when Henry VII. took possession of all the Beauchamp and Warwick property, the Chase went to the Crown until the year 1630, when King Charles I. granted one-third of the Chase of Malvern to some of his adherents.

Then came the decree for disafforestation, which was most strenuously opposed by several self-elected "proprietors," who had "squatted on the waste," and who now advanced their claim to be whole and sole proprietors of the cribbed lands. The King wished to sell the Chase to replenish his well-nigh exhausted funds, while those who had " squatted" within the boundaries and enjoyed the privilege of "commoning" were right furious at the proposed enclosures. It ended by King Charles selling one third and allowing the remainder to go for the benefit of the parishes included in the Chase itself. Some of the squatters then became Royalists.

In the days of the De Clares and the Beauchamps, Malvern Chase was the home of the wild boar, the stag, the hare, and the coney, while many birds and squirrels found shelter in the great trees and masses of foliage which stretched away for miles. Here and there was a great turf glade and a forest pool stir-rounded by dells of greenery, but this was now all at an end, for down came the forest trees, and farms and peasants' houses were erected on the haunts of the deer and the wild boar. Great commons and long downs succeeded to dense hush, and the partridge and hare took the place of the stag and hind. Where our forefathers hunted the wild boar we laid springes for partridges, and the coney burrowed in the haunts of the badger.

Hanley Church stood upon the Ley above the Castle. There had been a Saxon edifice of wood upon the same site, then a Norman building of stone, and after that the De Clares built the present church in the days when Edward I. and II. were kings. The old Rector was a minister who had been exemplary in life, and faithful in duty, and was actually staggered when, in after years, he was told by some of his neighbours that loyalty was a crime against his country. Poor old man, he lived long enough to find the use of his loved Prayer-Book made penal, and the highest of our Church Festivals abolished. But my earlier years passed happily before these things came upon us. My father was a lover and observer of nature, and a roamer in the woods, or among the Malvern hills, in search of the stag, which still frequented certain haunts where was once the Chase. Like Izaac Walton he knew the craft of the angler, and would sometimes take me to the silver Wye or sparkling Teme. We had hounds that would hunt a roebuck and a fox, or track a deer; and as Longdon Marshes were still a sure find for a heron, we kept a good cast of Stackpole falcons. But my love of woodcraft and hillside roaming was not allowed to interfere with my education, and daily I proceeded to Upton-on-Severn and pursued a course of study under my father's friend, a learned scholar known as "Master Kelly." Master Kelly had the reputation of being the wisest man in all our neighbourhood, as Madam Penelope Lechmere had the credit of being the wisest woman. He was a grandson of the spiritualist, John Kelly, who in the days of Queen Elizabeth was the associate of the still more famous Dr. Dee, once Rector of Upton, and report said that some of his ancestor's mysterious powers had been transmitted to our friend. At all events many feared him. He was a somewhat weird-looking man, but strong and sturdy, and he lived at a lone house by the Severn, known as the "Waterside," and one strange habit was to pace the great Severn meadow, "The Hamme," for hours together on a starlight night, when he was supposed to be casting horoscopes by the aid of the planets, and communing with those spiritual powers which control the destiny of men.

Circumstances had thrown Kelly much into the company of my father, who could appreciate the deep lore of the scholar, while he enjoyed his exquisite performances on the fife and flageolet. His old, gabled, timbered house contained some queer things which had descended to him from his ancestor, the "Magician," and some collected by himself during years of travel. A stuffed crocodile from the Nile grinned fearfully from a ledge above the door of the apartment he usually occupied. Stone beetles and bottled asps were there, and a dried toad from the Indies that might have died of small-pox, so covered was it with great pustules. A mariner's compass of the date of the 14th century, one of the first ever used, lay by the side of a wheel clock of the 11th century, and a Spanish chart of Arabic numeration of the same date; while a parchment of arithmetic on the date of 1253, when the modern system was first introduced into England, hung against the door. There was ring money of the ancient Britons, silver Edwards, and gold Richards, and a tract of Pelagius, the monk of Bangor, lay inside a pamphlet just issued by Archbishop Laud. A tiger's head occupied the centre of the mantel-piece, flanked by two human skulls, and at one end of the room a curtain concealed a recess containing the perfect skeleton of a man.

The usual dress of Master Kelly was somewhat antiquated, and partook more of the fashion of Queen Elizabeth than of the days of King Charles, but his long scholar's gown was made of the best materials. As warlike times drew on, he often changed the scholar's garb for that of a Cavalier, but at home he ever wore the gown and a velvet skull cap. That he was a philosopher and man of science may be gathered from Aunt Tabitha's diary, date "1634 the 8 Novr." "Mem. This winter in the end of Janry. did fall the greatest snowe that was seen in the memory of man, and it was soe extreme colde & violent & tempestuous, that divers going home from mrket and elsewhere weere smothered & starved to death. And in August following a greate quantitie of the same snowe and ice did remayne at Brockington quarre, & divers went purposely to see it, & yet it was a most extreme hott summer." "Mem. The Earl of Worcester came to Handley Castle. He spends his leesure hrs in philosophicall persuits, & I beleeve came to see Master Kelly's fizzing & spitting machine that he keeps soe secret & makes such a fuss about."

Often and often John Kelly accompanied me to our Castle of Hanley, if such it could be called, when more than two-thirds were ruined towers and shattered chambers. As I grew older I was often permitted to be present with my Aunt Tabitha, when he and my father held long and earnest conferences respecting the troubles which now began to manifest themselves throughout the whole kingdom. It was evident that King Charles was now surrounded by a number of rebellious subjects. Indeed, "Sister Tab's " Diary contains the following note:--"Mem. This was the wettest summer that ever was known, & in the midst of harvest not one dry day in a fortnight, & wee had 8 floods betweene Midsummer & Micls. "Mem. Pym & Hampden, Strode & Prynne, traitors all, & worst is Prynne. How I should like to dress them all downe with Roman stingeing nettles."