ANNESLEY HALL AND HUCKNALL.  
Early in the spring of 1834, I walked over with Charles Pemberton from Nottingham, to see Annesley Hall, the birth-place and patrimony of Mary Chaworth; a place made of immortal interest by the early attachment of Lord Byron to this lady, and by the graphic strength and deep passion with which he has recorded in his poems this most influential circumstance of his youth.
Annesley lies about nine miles north of Nottingham, itself—the scene of his first and most lasting attachment—Newstead, his patrimonial abode—and Hucknall, his burial-place; forming the three points of a triangle, each of whose sides may be about two miles in length. Yet, although Newstead and Hucknall have been visited by shoals of admirers, this place, perhaps altogether the most interesting of the three, has been wholly neglected. Few, or none of them, have thought it worth while to go so little out of their way to see it; perhaps not one in a hundred has known that it was so near; probably to those who inquired about it, it might be replied, “you see that wooded ridge—there lies Annesley. You see all that is worth seeing; it is a poor tumble-down place:” and so they have been satisfied, and have returned in their wisdom to their own place, at a hundred, or a thousand, miles distance. But what is still more remarkable, while Mr. Murray has sent down an artist into this neighbourhood to make drawings of Hucknall church and Newstead for his Life and Poems of Lord Byron; and while others[269] have encompassed sea and land to give us thrice reiterated landscapes illustrative of his biography and writings, and have even presented us with fictitious portraits of the most interesting characters connected with his fortunes,—they have totally passed over Annesley as altogether unworthy of their notice, though it is a spot, at once, full of a melancholy charm; of a sad, yet old English beauty; a spot, where every sod, and stone, and tree, and hearth, is rife with the most strange and touching memories in human existence; and where the genuine likeness of Mary Chaworth, in the most lovely and happy moments of her life, is to be found.
Need I pause a moment to account for this? Does not the discerning public always tread in one track? As sheep follow one leader, and traverse the heath in a long extended line, so does the public follow the first trumpeter of the praises of one place. It has been fashionable to visit Newstead, and it has been visited;—but as Annesley was not at first thought of, it has not been visited at all. Well! we have visited it; and if there be any power in the most melancholy of mortal fortunes—in the retracing the day-dreams of an illustrious spirit—in the gathering of all English feelings round the strongest combination of the glories of nature, with the aspect of decay in the fortunes and habitation of an ancient race, we shall visit it again and again.[13]
[13] Since this was published in the Athen?um in the autumn of 1834, Washington Irving has published his interesting visit to Newstead and Annesley.
That wooded ridge was our landmark from the first step of our journey, and we soon reached Hucknall. The approach to Hucknall is pleasant; the place itself is a long and unpicturesque village. Count Gamba is said to have been struck with its resemblance to Missolonghi. Sixteen years have now passed since the funeral of Lord Byron took place here, and yet it seems to me but as yesterday. His admirers, in after ages, will naturally picture to themselves the church, on that occasion, overflowing with the intelligent and poetical part of the population of the neighbourhood. A poet who had spent a good deal of his boyhood and youth in it—whose patrimonial estate lay here—who had gone hence, and won so splendid a renown—whose life had been a series of circumstances and events as striking and romantic as his poetry—who had finally been cut down in his prime, in so brilliant an[270] attempt to restore the freedom and ancient glory of Greece—would naturally be supposed to come back to the tomb of his ancestors, amidst the confluence of a thousand strongly-excited hearts. But it was not so. There was a considerable number of persons present, but the church was by no means crowded, and the spectators were, with very few exceptions, of that class which is collected, by idle curiosity on the approach of any not very wonderful procession; who would have collected to gaze as much at the funeral of his lordship’s grandfather, or his own, though he had not written a line of poetry, or lifted the sword of freedom;—probably, with threefold eagerness at that of a wealthy cit, because there would have been more of bustle and assuming blazonry about it. With the exception of the undertaker’s hired company; of Sir John Cam Hobhouse, and his lordship’s attorney, Mr. Hanson; his Greek servant Tita, and his old follower Fletcher, the rest of the attendants were the villagers, and a certain number of people from Nottingham, of a similar class, and led by similar motives. There was not a score of those who are called “the respectable” from Nottingham; scarcely one of the gentry of the county. This strange fact can only be accounted for by the circumstance that Nottingham and its vicinity are famous for the manufacture of lace and stockings, but, like many other manufacturing districts, possess no such decided attachment to literature. Many readers there are, undoubtedly, in both town and country, but readers chiefly for pastime—for the filling up of a certain space between and after business—and a laudable way too of so filling it; but not readers from any unconquerable passion for, or attachment to, literature for its own sake. A few literary persons have lived in or about the neighbourhood, but these are the exception; the character of the district is manufacturing and political, but by no means literary, nor ever was; therefore, the strongest feeling with which Lord Byron was regarded there, was a political one. Though an aristocrat in birth and bearing, he was a very thorough radical in principle. Hence, he had only the sympathy of the radicals with him, those consisting chiefly of the working classes. The whigs of the town and the gentry of the county, chiefly tories, regarded him only in a political light, and paid him not the respect of their presence.
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The religious world had a high prejudice against him for his manifold sins of speech, opinion, and life; they of course were not there. No party had so much more admiration of genius—conception of the lofty, intellectual achievements of the noble poet, discernment of the abundant qualifying, and, in fact, overbalancing grace and beauty, and even religious sentiment, which breathed through many of his writings—for no man had more ennobling and truly religious feelings rooted in his soul by the contemplation of the magnificence of God’s handiworks in creation; or felt occasionally, more deeply the spiritualizing influence that pervades nature;—no party had so much more of this tone of mind, than of their political or sectarian bias, as to forget all those minor things in his wonderful talent—his early death—his redeeming qualities, and last deeds—and the honour he had conferred, as an everlasting heritage, on this country.
In the evening, after the people who had attended the funeral were dispersed, I went down to the church and entered the vault. There was a reporter from one of the London newspapers copying the inscriptions on the coffins by the light of a lamp; and a great hobble-de-hoy of a farmer’s lad was kneeling on the case that contained the poet’s heart, and lolling on the coffin with his elbows, as he watched the reporter, in a manner that indicated the most perfect absence of all thought of the place where he was, or the person on whose remains he was perched.
In the churchyard, a group of the villagers were eagerly discussing the particulars of the funeral, and the character of the deceased. One man attempted to account for the apparently indifferent manner in which the clergyman performed the burial service, by his having understood that he felt himself disgraced by having to bury an atheist. “An atheist!” exclaimed an old woman, “tell me that he was an atheist! D’ ye think an atheist would be beloved by his servants as this man was? Why, they fret themselves almost to death about him. And d’ ye think they would have made so much of him in foreign parts? Why, they almost worshipped him as a god in Grecia!” giving the final a a sound almost as long as one’s finger. This was conclusive—the wondering auditors had nothing to reply—they quietly withdrew their several ways, and I mine.
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The church was broken into soon after the funeral, and the black cloth with which the pulpit was hung on this occasion, carried away: and this is not the only forcible entry that has been made through Lord Byron’s being buried there; for the clerk told me, that when Moore came to see it with Colonel Wildman, being impatient of the clerk’s arrival, who lives at some distance, the poet had contrived to climb up to a window, open it, and get in, where the worthy bearer of the keys found him, to his great astonishment.
The indifference shewn by the people of Nottingham towards the great poet, would not seem to have abated, if we are to judge by the entries in an album kept by the clerk, and which was presented for that purpose about twelve years ago by Dr. Bowring. The signatures of visiters in 1834 amounted to upwards of eight hundred, amongst which appear the names of people from North and South America, Russia, the Indies, and various other distant places and countries, but few from Nottingham or its shire, who might be supposed to be amongst the best read and best informed portion of its population. This, however, must be allowed, that the names entered in the clerk’s book afford no just criterion of the number or quality of the visiters to the poet’s tomb, as many of the most poetical and refined minds might naturally feel reluctant to place their signatures in such a medley of mawkish sentiment as is always found in such albums. A few clergymen, we, however, were pleased to see, had there placed their names; and some dissenting ministers had ventured so far as to do likewise, and to preach some pretty little sermons over him in the book, which opens thus:
TO THE
Immortal and Illustrious Fame
OF
LORD BYRON,
THE FIRST POET OF THE AGE IN WHICH HE LIVED,
THESE TRIBUTES,
WEAK AND UNWORTHY OF HIM,
BUT IN THEMSELVES SINCERE,
Are Inscribed,
WITH THE DEEPEST REVERENCE.
July, 1825.
 
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At this period no monument—not even so simple a slab as records the death of the humblest villager in the neighbourhood—had been erected to mark the spot in which all that is mortal of the greatest man of our day reposes; and he has been buried more than twelve months.—July, 1825.
So should it be: let o’er this grave
No monumental banners wave;
Let no word speak—no trophy tell
Aught that may break the charming spell,
By which, as on this sacred ground
He kneels, the pilgrim’s heart is bound.
A still, resistless influence,
Unseen, but felt, binds up the sense;
While every whisper seems to breathe
Of the mighty dead who sleeps beneath.
—And though the master-hand is cold,
And though the lyre it once controlled
Rests mute in death; yet from the gloom
Which dwells about this holy tomb,
Silence breathes out more eloquent,
Than epitaph or monument.
One laurel wreath—the poet’s crown—
Is here by hand unworthy thrown;
One tear that so much worth should die,
Fills, as I kneel, my sorrowing eye;
This is the simple offering,
Poor, but earnest, which I bring.
The tear has dried; the wreath shall fade,
The hand that twined it soon be laid
In cold obstruction—but the fame
Of him who tears and wreath shall claim
From most remote posterity,
While Britain lives, can never die!—J. B.
The following list contains almost all the names that are known to the public, or are distinguished by rank or peculiarity of circumstance:—
The Count Pietro Gamba, Jan. 31st, 1825.
The Duke of Sussex visited Lord Byron’s tomb, October 1824.
Lieut.-Colonel Wildman.
Lieut.-Colonel Charles Lallemand.
The Count de Blankensee, Chamberlain to the King of Prussia, Sept. 7th, 1825.
1825, Sept. 23. William Fletcher visited his ever-to-be-lamented lord and master’s tomb.[274]
10th month. Jeremiah Wiffen, Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire.
1826, July 30. C. R. Pemberton, a wanderer.
1828, Jan. 21. Thomas Moore.
Sept. 12. Sir Francis S. Darwin, and party.
Nov. 21. Lieut.-Colonel D’Aguilar.
——— Eliza D’Aguilar.
Dec. 1. Lieut.-Colonel James Hughes of Llysdulles.
1829, Sept. 3. Lord Byron’s Sister, the Honourable Augusta Mary Leigh, visited this church.
1831, May 17. Rev. Joseph Gilbert, Nottingham.
——— Ann Gilbert (formerly Ann Taylor of Ongar).
Aug. 22. Lieut.-Gen. and Mrs. Need, Fountain Dale.
1832, Jan. 8. M. Van Buren, Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States.
——— Washington Irving.
——— John Van Buren, New York, U. S. America.
Dec. 27. Lady Lammine, Salendale.
1834, Feb. 15. Domingo Maria Ruiz de la Vega, Ex-Deputy of the Spanish Cortes, from Granada.
Feb. 23. J. Bellairs, Esq., visited Newstead Abbey, and Lord Byron’s tomb, such as it is—one of his greatest admirers of the day!
——— W. Arundale, of London, accompanied the said J. B.!
March 8. J. Murray, Jun. Albemarle-street, London.
Although we did not, at this time, enter even the churchyard, thoughts and feelings which had presented themselves in this very spot, on the day of Lord Byron’s funeral, again returned.
His birth, his death, dark fortunes, and brief life,
Wondrous and wild as his impetuous lay,
Passed through my mind; his wanderings, loves, and strife;
I saw him marching on from day to day:
The kilted boy, roaming mid mountains grey;
The noble youth, whose life-blood was a flame,
In the bright land of demi-gods astray;
The monarch of the lyre, whose haughty name
Spread on from shore to shore, the watchword of all fame;
And then, a lifeless form! The spell was broke;
The wizard’s wild enchantment was destroyed;
He who at will did dreadful forms invoke,
And called up beautiful spirits from the void,
Back to the scenes in which he early joyed,
He came but knew it not. In vain earth’s bloom—
In vain the sky’s clear beauty, which oft buoyed
His spirit to delight; an early doom
Brought him in glory’s arms to the awaiting tomb.[275]
He lies—how quietly that heart which yet
Never could slumber, slumbers now for aye!
He lies—where first, love, fame, his young soul set
With passionate power on flame; where gleam the grey
Turrets of Newstead, through the solemn sway
Of verdurous woods; and where that hoary crown
Of lofty trees, “in circular array,”
Shroud Mary’s Hall, who thither may look down,
And think how he loved her, ay, more than his renown.
ANNESLEY HALL.
 
From Hucknall we ascended chiefly through open, wild lands:—to our right the wooded valley of Newstead, every moment spreading itself out more broadly; and before us the forest heights of Annesley, growing more bold and attractive. A wild gusty breeze, and dark flying clouds, added sensibly to the deep solitude and picturesque character of the scene. We soon passed a cottage, having beside it an old brick pillar surmounted with a stone ball, and before it an avenue of lime trees, which appeared some time to have formed the boundary or place of entrance to the park; then a new lodge, and found ourselves at the foot of the steep hill, styled in Byron’s Dream—
A gentle hill,
Green, and of mild declivity.
The greenness and mildness of declivity, however, we afterwards found were on the side by which Byron and Mary Chaworth had ascended it from her house; on this side it is a remarkably barren and extremely steep hill. However, up we went, and on the summit discovered the strict accuracy of his delineation of it.
I saw two beings in the hues of youth,
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green, and of mild declivity; the last,
As ’t were the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs:—the hill
Was crowned with a peculiar diadem
Of trees in circular array, so fixed,
Not by the sport of Nature, but of man.
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A most living landscape it is indeed, including all the objects so vividly here given; amongst them, the most conspicuous, the house of his living ancestors, and the house where he has joined them in death; and extending from the woody skirts of Sherwood Forest to the mill-crowned heights of Nottingham. By the way, a strange mistake of Moore’s here presented itself. Immediately after the passage just quoted, Byron proceeds to speak further of this young pair, and says:—
Even now she loved another,
And on the summit of that hill she stood,
Looking afar, if yet her lover’s steed
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew.
Moore, commenting on this, tells us that the image of the lover’s steed was suggested by the Nottingham race-ground,—a race-ground actually nine miles off, and moreover lying in a hollow and totally hidden from view; had the lady’s eyes, indeed, been so marvellously good as to discern a horse nine miles off! Mary Chaworth, in fact, was looking for her lover’s steed along the road as it winds up the common from Hucknall.
But a stranger discovery soon made us forget this Irish bull. We had no sooner reached the summit of the hill, than to our inexpressible astonishment we found the very trees so strikingly pointed out in this most interesting poem, “the trees in circular array”—cut down! These trees, and none else, cut down! There were the trees crowning the whole length of the “long ridge” standing in their greyness; and there were the stumps of “the trees in circular array” in the earth at our feet! An immediate and irresistible conviction forced itself on our minds; but we write it not; we merely state the fact, that that memorable landmark of love, made interesting to every age by the poetry of passion, had been removed. Our indignation may be imagined when we found that not only had the trees been cut down, but there was an actual attempt to cut down the hill itself, by making a gravel-pit there;—of all places in the world, to think of making a gravel-pit on the top of that steep hill, when it might be got from the bottom of any hill in the neighbourhood. We have since been told that it was the intention of its present proprietor, the husband of Mary Chaworth, to have cut down all the trees upon that hill; but that[277] his design was prevented by the interference of his eldest son, to whom the estate descends by entail; and that he was compelled by the spirited conduct of the son, to plant the hill afresh; but he has complied with the letter, overlooking the spirit of the agreement, in the most perfect style, having planted the sides of the hill all over with fir-trees, so that it will in a short time shroud the place, and smother it completely from the view.[14]
[14] Mentioning the felling of these trees to a mechanic soon afterwards,—“Trees,” I added, “that might be seen so far.” “Seen, sir!” he exclaimed, “those trees were seen all over the world!” He meant through the medium of Byron’s poetry. It was an expression, and accompanied by an energy of feeling, that would have done honour to any man.
The indignation we felt on this occasion, perhaps, made us more sensibly alive to the character of the place. Byron, in some juvenile verses, exclaims—
Hills of Annesley, bleak and barren,
Where my thoughtless childhood strayed,
How the northern tempests warring,
How! above thy tufted shade.
So strongly did the wind drive over this ridge, that we could scarcely make head against it; and remembering to have heard of a temple which formerly crowned this hill, but had been blown down either by tempest or war, we looked amongst the broken ground, and perceived considerable remains of masonry, probably the foundations of the temple: nor can a finer situation for such an erection be imagined.
The trees which crowned “the ridge,” and which, at a distance, appeared large, we soon saw, were of stunted growth, with tops curled, and sturdy, as if accustomed to wrestle with the tempests. An avenue of them stretched away into distant woods. Large decayed branches lay here and there beneath, indicating a solitude and neglect of the place pleasing to the imagination. Before us, across a descending slope—the hill of mild and green declivity—extended, right and left, noble woods; and in the midst of them, in the midst of a smaller crescent of wood, we descried the tall grey chimneys and ivy-covered walls and gables of the old Hall, and the top of the church-tower. We hastened down,—observing on our left, in an old forest-slope, a large herd of deer, which had a good[278] effect,—and struck into a footpath that led directly up towards the house. As we drew nearer, the old building, hung with luxuriant ivy and shrouded among tall trees, far overtopping its tall chimneys; amid shrubberies of wondrous growth of evergreens, among which are conspicuous, three remarkable ilexes, with black-green foliage crowning their short thick black trunks, and with grassy openings sloping down to the warm south; struck us forcibly with its picturesque and silent beauty. We found ourselves now, apparently at the back of a high garden-wall, by the side of which ran a row of lime trees, which seemed at one time to have been pollarded and trained espalier-wise, but had now sent up heads of a luxuriant and fantastic growth. On our other hand, lay a wood, from which the thickets being cleared away, left us ample view of its ivy-mantled trees, and the ground beneath them one green expanse of dog’s-mercury and fresh leaves of the blue-bell. Tufts of primroses were scattered all about, and the wood-anemonies trembled in the wind. But over all, such a mantle of deep silence seemed cast, that it reminded us of some enchanted place in the fairy and for............