"Ay, ay," said another, "her fingers closed on it pretty willingly
methought, when all was done; and methought, too, she weighed them for a
second in her hand, as she would say, I hope they be avoirdupois."
"She needed not, neighbour," said a third; "it is only when the
corporation pay the accounts of a poor handicraft like me, that they put
him off with clipped coin. Well, there is a God above all--little Master
Recorder, since that is the word, will be greater now than ever."
"Come, good neighbour," said the first speaker "be not envious. She is
a good Queen, and a generous; she gave the purse to the Earl of
Leicester."
"I envious?--beshrew thy heart for the word!" replied the handicraft.
"But she will give all to the Earl of Leicester anon, methinks."
"You are turning ill, lady," said Wayland Smith to the Countess of
Leicester, and proposed that she should draw off from the road, and halt
till she recovered. But, subduing her feelings at this and different
speeches to the same purpose, which caught her ear as they passed on,
she insisted that her guide should proceed to Kenilworth with all
the haste which the numerous impediments of their journey permitted.
Meanwhile, Wayland's anxiety at her repeated fits of indisposition, and
her obvious distraction of mind, was hourly increasing, and he became
extremely desirous that, according to her reiterated requests, she
should be safely introduced into the Castle, where, he doubted not, she
was secure of a kind reception, though she seemed unwilling to reveal on
whom she reposed her hopes.
"An I were once rid of this peril," thought he, "and if any man shall
find me playing squire of the body to a damosel-errant, he shall have
leave to beat my brains out with my own sledge-hammer!"
At length the princely Castle appeared, upon improving which, and the
domains around, the Earl of Leicester had, it is said, expended sixty
thousand pounds sterling, a sum equal to half a million of our present
money.
The outer wall of this splendid and gigantic structure enclosed seven
acres, a part of which was occupied by extensive stables, and by a
pleasure garden, with its trim arbours and parterres, and the rest
formed the large base-court or outer yard of the noble Castle. The
lordly structure itself, which rose near the centre of this spacious
enclosure, was composed of a huge pile of magnificent castellated
buildings, apparently of different ages, surrounding an inner court, and
bearing in the names attached to each portion of the magnificent mass,
and in the armorial bearings which were there blazoned, the emblems
of mighty chiefs who had long passed away, and whose history, could
Ambition have lent ear to it, might have read a lesson to the haughty
favourite who had now acquired and was augmenting the fair domain. A
large and massive Keep, which formed the citadel of the Castle, was of
uncertain though great antiquity. It bore the name of Caesar, perhaps
from its resemblance to that in the Tower of London so called. Some
antiquaries ascribe its foundation to the time of Kenelph, from whom the
Castle had its name, a Saxon King of Mercia, and others to an early era
after the Norman Conquest. On the exterior walls frowned the scutcheon
of the Clintons, by whom they were founded in the reign of Henry I.; and
of the yet more redoubted Simon de Montfort, by whom, during the Barons'
wars, Kenilworth was long held out against Henry III. Here Mortimer,
Earl of March, famous alike for his rise and his fall, had once gaily
revelled in Kenilworth, while his dethroned sovereign, Edward
II., languished in its dungeons. Old John of Gaunt, "time-honoured
Lancaster," had widely extended the Castle, erecting that noble and
massive pile which yet bears the name of Lancaster's Buildings; and
Leicester himself had outdone the former possessors, princely and
powerful as they were, by erecting another immense structure, which now
lies crushed under its own ruins, the monument of its owner's ambition.
The external wall of this royal Castle was, on the south and west sides,
adorned and defended by a lake partly artificial, across which Leicester
had constructed a stately bridge, that Elizabeth might enter the Castle
by a path hitherto untrodden, instead of the usual entrance to the
northward, over which he had erected a gatehouse or barbican, which
still exists, and is equal in extent, and superior in architecture, to
the baronial castle of many a northern chief.