Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/148

138[January 9, 1869] the ape sprang upon the back of one of the sceptics, who, believing it to be the prince of evil himself, fell on his knees and began to shout and pray. The club never rallied afterwards.

Swift away, after this short resting, to where the blue smoke rises over Reading, like the smoke from a witch's caldron. Let the crow alight first on the abbey gateway. This abbey, founded by Henry the First, and endowed with the privilege of coining, attained a great name among the English abbeys by the "incorrupt hand" of St. James the apostle, presented to it by Henry the First. After working thousands of miracles, raising cripples, curing blindness—after millions of pilgrimages had been made to it, and it had been for centuries incensed and glorified, this wonderful hand was lost at the Dissolution. Some worshipper, who still venerated it, hid it under ground, where it was found years afterwards, and is now preserved at Danesfield by a Roman Catholic family. It will for ever remain a moot point, however, whether the hand at Danesfield is the original hand of St. James, or a mere mummy hand, such as mediæval thieves used as candlesticks and talismans. "Hands of glory" the rascals called them.

This hand of St. James made the fortune of the abbey at Reading, and was an open hand, no doubt, to receive all current coin from the groat to the broad piece. Bells rung, incense fumed, priests bore the cross, and acolytes the thurible in the abbey at Reading, encouraged by the éclat of the incorruptible hand. Henry the First always delighted in the abbey. He held a parliament here; and here he received Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, who, safe out of reach of Saracen's arrow and sabre, presented the king with the somewhat nominal gifts of the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and the royal banners of the sacred city, and urged Henry to a foray on the Infidel. The king was true to Reading till his death; for when the stewed lampreys of Rouen hurried him from the world, his heart, tongue, brains, and bowels were buried in France, and the rest of his royal remains forwarded to Reading, where his first queen, "the good Queen Molde," lay already, and his second wife Adeliza afterwards joined him. The abbey became quite a royal cemetery after the eldest son of Henry the Second was buried here. At the Dissolution, when royal tombs were destroyed and the bones "thrown out," the relics were beaten about by the sextons' spades and tossed anywhere. The poorest rubbish heap of Reading had some of them to feed its nettles. At the same period Hugh Farringdon, the abbot, was so contumacious and stubborn, and so put out the royal tyrant by his prate about popes, councils, and decretals, that the king, flying out at last, had him hanged, drawn, and quartered, and then turned the abbey into a palace, which was destroyed at the great rebellion: the ruins remaining as a stone quarry for ages. On the last abbot but one, King Henry the Seventh played a trick. One day the king, hunting near Windsor, lost his way, and, riding on to Reading, passed himself off to the unsuspicious abbot as one of the yeomen of the guard. A noble sirloin of beef was placed before him; on this he plied so well his knife and fork that the abbot was delighted, and watched him with placid admiration. "Well fare thy heart," he said; "for here, in a cup of sack, I do remember the health of his grace your master; I would give a hundred pounds on condition that I could feed so lustily on beef as you do. Alas! my weak and squeezie stomach could hardly digest the wing of a small rabbit or chicken." The king was silent, pledged him, and left him undiscovered. Soon after, armed men beat at the abbey gate, and the squeezie abbot was hurried to the Tower. The abbot was there kept some weeks a close prisoner, and nurtured on bread and water; his body was empty of food, Fuller says, and his mind full of fears. He could not, resolve it how he may, imagine how he had incurred the king's displeasure. At last, the abbot's fast having been long enough, a sirloin of beef was set before the delighted man, and he soon verified the proverb that two hungry meals make a glutton. Suddenly in sprang the king out of a lobby where he had been in ambuscade. "My lord," quoth his majesty, "deposit presently your hundred pounds in gold, or else no going hence all the days of your life. I have been your physician to cure you of your squeezie stomach, and now I want the fee which I have deserved." The abbot put down the money at once, and returned to Reading, lighter in purse, but also lighter in heart.

The town, long celebrated for its cloth trade, was besieged by Essex and the Parliamentarians in 1643. The Puritan entrenchments are still visible in the valley. Ten days the townspeople, encouraged by Sir A. Ashton, bore the cannonade and then surrendered; but the greatest alarm in the town was in 1688, when the Reading men got into their heads a notion that the rough-handed Irish soldiers of King James were coming to massacre the inhabitants during divine service. The panic received the name of "The Irish Cry."

Archbishop Laud was the son of a Reading clothier, and the charities he founded still exist. John Bunyan used, in the days of his persecutions, after his twelve years and a half in dismal Bedford jail, sometimes to pass through Reading, where he was known, on his way to visit secret Baptist congregations, disguised as a carter, and carrying a whip. He is said here to have caught the fever of which he died.

Perched on the tall flint tower of St. Lawrence (a church once memorable for a silver gridiron, and a portion of St. Lawrence), the crow remembers that at this church Queen Elizabeth would attend service, looking sharply after the preacher's doctrine. A portentous object to a nervous clergyman, that stiff old lady in the ruff and jewelled stomacher must have been, glowering at him from under the