Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
THE BLACK COUNTRY IN DETAIL; ITS CHIEF TOWNS AND CENTRES OF INDUSTRY—DUDLEY, STOURBRIDGE, AND HAGLEY.
HAVING thus given half this volume to a notice of Birmingham, too small a space remains for a description of The Black Country proper, of which it is the metropolis. Doubtless a majority of our English readers have passed through this remarkable district once in their lives, and remember its most striking features. To such any portraiture of it which the most graphic pen could give might be superfluous. But there is one aspect of it which I doubt if half-a-dozen of them ever witnessed; and that I would earnestly commend to their notice.
I had passed through the district on the railway many times by night and day, in summer and winter, during the past twenty years, and had seen it in all the various aspects of the changing seasons. But there was one point of view which I had never enjoyed, and which is the best that can be found in the whole region. This is the tower of Dudley Castle by night. So, having induced Edward Capern. R.P.P., or Rural Postman Poet, to accompany me, with the hope that the scene would stir his muse, and that I might walk in the wake of its inspiration, we took the train for Dudley about sunset, in order to be at the Castle just as "the darkness falls from the wings of night" upon its grey and broken walls. Those lofty and red-tipped wings were dropping it pretty fast as we reached the closed gates, which did not admit people at that late hour. Still, under the gentle persuasion of our importunity, commended to the janitor's heart by the silver accents of a shilling or two, the iron wicket turned inward for us. We ascended half-way up the thickly-wooded steep to a little unique cottage made out of one of the small out-buildings of the Castle, where an aged couple, with their daughter, get up teas and bread and butter for visiters, or furnish hot water for parties a la pic nic. The daughter was away when we knocked at the door, and the old people were not a little surprised at a call so late in the evening. Besides, the old lady was confined to her armchair in the chimney-corner with "rheumaticks," and other ailments, which she described in a pathetic voice, and seemed to wonder that she should be affected by such ills at only seventy-eight. To have tea in this little cottage under the hawthorns, before going up to the night scenery from the Castle tower, was put prominently in our programme, and we encouraged the old man to believe he could get it up for us without his daughter's help, or at least with ours. So we set to work, each doing his part. I manned the toasting-fork, and did the several halves of a couple of muffins in capital style. Capern took to the little black tea-pot and charged it appropriately for two, the old woman throwing in a timely suggestion as to quantity. So we drew up to the little round table before the fire, and had as genial a tea as ever two men enjoyed. All the surroundings were just of the right kind to season the meal with a happy relish. The two small yellow candles and the fire, light filled the low-ceiled room with that bland mixture of illuminated darkness so well suited to stories and snatches of legendary lore.
After our tea in the cottage, we ascended to "where the Castle holds its state" in the gray silence of a grand ruin. We first passed through the deep, massive archway, with its double portcullis, into the green court-yard, to look first at the brave old monument of past centuries and feel or imagine the presence of their spirits revisiting it. And it were well worth such a visit if they were permitted to come back again to the scenes of long ago. As we walked up and down the irregular line of the structure, and heard the echo of our footsteps running in and out of the ruined halls and climbing the winding stairways of the broken towers, we really felt the shadow of an august presence above and around; as if the mighty Past stood before us fresh in its weeds from the funeral of five hundred years. A cold skylight paned the glassless windows of the banquet hall, and shadows of waving treebranches waltzed up and down within the roofless walls of that salon where "brave men and fair women" met in dance when Elizabeth was queen. Passing on towards the great gateway, we stopped before the chapel of the Castle to catch a striking feature. The passing moon was looking into the great window like a broad human face whose smile was light. It was a serene and genial smile, as of one who looks upon a cradle, not a grave; or as of one visiting the trysting-place of happy memories. At least ten thousand Pater Nosters a century had been chaunted or said within those walls, and other invocations and voices of devotion, when that same moon looked in through windows alive with painted images of all the saints,
Having thus communed awhile with the Past, where the castle walls shut away the living Present from the view, we ascended the citadel, or lofty donjon tower, planted upon the highest cliff of the mountainous ridge. The old man of the cottage led the way, and we followed with wary feet, guided by the sense of feeling rather than sight. As we mounted the deep-worn, winding steps, hugging closely the circular wall, at each story a red cross of dull fire-light seemed to be hung up before us as a guidepost to the dark and narrow way. Ascending a step or two, we found it was a slit in the tower for the arrow- men of the olden time, which was now filled with the illumination of the outside world. Winding around several times in the spiral ascent, we caught several sudden peeps of the scenery through these cross-shaped arrow-ports. These stairway glances north, east, south, and west served to sharpen the appetite of our eyes for the grand panorama that burst upon us as we stepped out upon the parapet of the tower, My first thought was of Longfellow as I looked off into the splendid vista— that he might stand on that tower
"At midnight,
If one furnace glowing "redder than the moon behind the old church tower of East Cambridge, as he stood on Charles River Bridge, so impressed his muse, to what inspiration would it have been moved by this sight? I hope he may see it before he dies as we saw it on that night. Some poet, and the best of a nation, should put his genius under the influence of that magnificent spectacle for the space of half an hour. The theme would well befit the laureate of England at the best moments of his inspiration. In figures beyond my prosaic conception, he would describe a scene which cannot be paralleled on the globe. For an unpoetical man like myself, it is difficult to get hold of similes which would enable the reader to picture the scene in his mind. A writer of a military turn of fancy might say that it was the sublimest battle-scene ever enacted on earth; that ten thousand Titans were essaying to breach heaven with a thousand mortars, each charged with a small red-hot hill.. It might look like that not only to General Grant or Sherman, but even to men who never wore a sword. There was an embattled amphitheatre of twenty miles span ridged to the purple clouds. Planted at artillery intervals on this encircling ridge, and at musket-shot spaces in the dark valley between, a thousand batteries, mounted with huge ordnance, white at the mouth with the fury of the bombardment, were pouring their cross-fires of shot and shell into the cloud-works of the lower heavens. Wolverhampton, on the extreme left, stood by her black mortars which shot their red volleys into the night. Coseley and Bilston and Wednesbury replied bomb for bomb, and set the clouds on fire above with their lighted matches. Dudley, Oldbury, Albion, and Smethwick, on the right, plied their heavy breachers at the iron-works on the other side, while West Bromwich and distant Walsall showed that their men were standing as bravely to their guns, and that their guns were charged to the muzzle with the grape and canister of the mine. The canals twisting and crossing through the field of battle, showed by patches in the light like bleeding veins. There were no clouds except of smoke over the scene; but there were large strips of darkness floating with crimson fringes into the red sea, on which the white moon rode like an ermined angel of peace.
For all that glowing empire was peace. Peace has her battle-fields as well as war, and this was her Waterloo. Here she had mustered fifty regiments of her swart veterans, armed with all the weapons of her exhaustless arsenal—with Minié picks and Schneider hammers, and file-edged swords that cut at their sides. Those great-mouthed mortars, belching forth globes of fire, were her huge muzzle-loaders. And all this was the thick of one of her great battles by night—only one of the three hundred a year she fights in that dark valley with the elements. What are all the mines and counter-mines of war compared with the hundreds her sappers have dug fifty fathoms below the visible surface of this battle scene! Where or when did war ever dig such deep trenches or fill them with such battalions, or bring its land and sea forces into action with such united and concentrated power! Here were 10,000 pickmen sending up from holds, 500 feet deep, cartridges for loading the cupola cannon that were reddening the night with their blaze. Here were the deck or surface brigades standing to their batteries, and making each look like the old picture of "The Defence of Gibraltar." There were the Brades Works at the right centre of the line, discharging a thousand spades, hoes, trowels, and pruning-hooks an hour. Further down toward Birmingham there was a well-manned battery that poured forth a shower of bolts and nuts; and Chance's great fortress was all ablaze, with its hot fountains sending out acres of glass to be parcelled into panes of every size. To the right of us, to the left and front of us, the whole amphitheatre was in close action, working out for the world the thousand small arms of peace—cotton hoes for Brazil and harpoons for Behring's Straits, and, for all the countries between, every tool used in honest labour.
The moon rode up with its bland face a little flushed over the scene, and the whole heavens were suffused with the red illumination, as if in honour of human industry. Then at that moment all the church bells of Dudley sent forth a shower of mirthful music, which pattered like silver rain against the purple garments of the night; and the widest streets and the market-place of the town were doubly lighted, while the home-stars of all the houses up to the dark hill-tops, looked like so many constellations, grouped like those we everywhere see by night. It was a scene worthy of a great poet's inspiration, and I hope his pen will some day do better justice to it than mine has done.
Dudley Castle needs only a pen like Sir Walter Scott's to make it famous. For full five hundred years it was inhabited by lords and ladies whose lives and characters might have supplied matter, doubtless, for twenty novels, with facts enough for the web of imagination to be fastened to. But it has never figured in romantic literature; so not one in a hundred of the visiters at Kenilworth ever walks about the walls of this grand old structure. As a fighting castle, it hardly had an equal in England for its commanding elevation and massive walls and towers. Then it meant living as well as fighting; and though it never showed such a palace frontage as Kenilworth, its banquet and other halls, and all its rough, gray storeys, must have commanded a view which few castles in the kingdom could surpass. Standing on the great donjon tower, especially at night, and looking off upon the surrounding scenery, even a sober imagination might fancy the castellated ridge was Mount Olympus, and that the only god at home was Vulcan. The ancients could not have conceived of a more proper throne for the great deity of the hammer. The little fore-shortened mountain wooded from the level fields below to the tops of the walls, is just high enough for the dais of the throne. Then the whole height looks as if a hundred Cyclops had been mining, counter-mining, and undermining it with caverns, half of which have fallen in, leaving gullies and gorges one hundred feet deep, all overgrown with tall trees, showing how long ago the roofage broke down. The winding walks around these green precipices and huge caverns all favour the fancy of Vulcan's throne. Then there is another coincidence that gives the aspect of real fact to the illusion. The Earl of Dudley, who owns the Castle and nearly all that can be seen from it with the naked eye, is a veritable Vulcan in himself. He not only owns many of the coal and iron mines of the district, but is one of the most extensive iron-workers in South Staffordshire. And it is a distinctive peculiarity of his Vulcanic operations, that he works his own minerals exclusively and only. The iron ore, coal, and lime are all his own, taken from his own estates. He entered upon this field of enterprise only about ten years ago, when the iron trade of the district had considerably deteriorated in consequence of a deflection in the quality of the iron produced. With his unlimited capital, and all the machinery and other means it could command, he raised the standard and recovered the prestige, producing an article which brought a higher price than any other branded house in the district realizes. It is a token of a very interesting industrial copartnership or connexion to see a large invoice of iron to an edge-tool-making company in a Massachusetts village, bearing the name and arms of "The Earl of Dudley" as manufacturer. It conveys a good, healthy suggestion, that one of the very wealthiest noblemen in England supplies the hammers of a New England axe factory from his own mines and furnaces worked by himself. And no better test could be applied to the quality of the iron he manufactures than its exclusive use by the Douglas Edge Tool Manufacturing Company in Massachusetts, which probably turns out the best implements of the kind to be found in the world.
This personal connexion with the manufacture of iron is not only laudable but legitimate in the Earl of Dudley. For it runs in the family back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. An illegitimate or half-son of one of the fast and prodigal representatives of the house distinguished himself by the active and successful interest he took in the great industry of the district. His name was Dud Dudley. He had a good deal of the speculative and inventive genius of the celebrated Marquis of Worcester, who was a kind of seer of science in his day. He wrote a book on the subject of coal and iron and other metals, with the title of "Metallum Martis," a work full of quaint and clever thoughts. Up to his day charcoal alone had been used in smelting iron ore, and in the working of iron in all the forges and smithies in the kingdom. The wood of the country was fast disappearing under this great drain, and he assigns a patriotic motive as the strongest that operated upon his mind in developing another species of fuel to save the ship timber, so essential to the nation's defence. He says that when he set his hand to this new enterprise there were nearly 20,000 smiths of all sorts, and many ironworks decayed for want of wood within ten miles of Dudley Castle. As the history of making iron with pit-coal is of such deep interest to all countries, and as the narrative of Dud Dudley, who was an energetic pioneer in the work, is so succinct and graphic, we copy out the following from his "Metallum Martis," a work reproduced with great care and effort by John N. Bagnall, Esq., of West Bromwich, in 1854:
"King James, His Sacred Majesty's Grandfather, and Prince Henry, for the preservation of Wood and Timber in this Island, did in the 9nth year of His Reign, Grant His Letters Pattents of Priviledge unto Simon Sturtevant, Esq., for 3 years for the making of Iron with Pit-cole and Sea-cole for the Preservation of Wood and Timber of Great Brittain so greatly then consumed by Ironworks; This Invention was by King James' command to be at large put in Print, which Book did contain near a quire of paper in quarto, called Simon Sturlevant. His Metallica, Anno 1612, May 22. Printed by George Eld. Cum Privilegio."After Simon Sturtevant could not perform his making of Iron with Pit-cole or Sea-cole, according unto his engagement. King James and Prince Henry caused him to render up his Pattent, and a new Pattent was granted unto John Rovenson. Esq., who was also Enjoyned to write a Book of his Inventions, called Rovenson's Metallica. Printed for Thomas Thorp. Cum Privilegio; May 15, An. 1613.
"After John Rovenson, Esq., had often failed with his Inventions and great undertakings,—Gombleton, Esq., a servant of Queen Ann's, undertook to perform the Invention of making Iron with Pit-cole and Sea-cole; but he being as confident as others did Erect his works at Lambeth, which the Authour viewed; and Gombleton failing, the Learned and Ingenious Doctor JORDEN of Baths, the Authour's Acquaintance, and sundry others obtained Pattents for the making of Iron and smelting of Mines with Pit-cole and Sea-cole, for the Preservation of Wood and Timber, all which Inventions and endeavours to Effect and perfect the said Works have been by many heretofore well known, to have worthily attempted the said Invention though with fruitless success."
"Having seen many of their failings, I held it my duty to endeavour, if it were possible, to Effect and Perfect so laudable and beneficial, and also so much desired Inventions as the making of Iron into cast Works and Bars; and also the Melting. Extracting. Refining, and Reducing all sorts of Mines. Minerals, and Metals, with Pit-cole, Sea-cole, Peat, and Turf, for the preservation of wood and timber, so much exhausted by Iron Works of late."
"Having former knowledge and delight in Iron Works of my Fathers, when I was but a youth; afterwards at 20 years old, was I fetched from Oxford, then of Bayliol Colledge, Anno 1619, to work and manage 3 Iron Works of my Fathers, 1 Furnace and 2 Forges in the Chase of Pensuet, in Worcestershire; but Wood and Charcole growing then scant, and Pit-coles in great quantities abounding near the Furnace, did induce me to alter my Furnace, and to attempt by my new Invention the making of Iron with Pit-cole, assuring myself in my Invention the loss to me could not be greater than others, nor so great, although my success should prove fruitless. But I found such success at first tryal as animated me, for at my tryal or blast. I made fron to profit with Pit-cole, and found Facere est addere Inventioni.
"After I had made a second blast and tryal, the fesibility of making Iron with Pit-cole and Sea-cole I found by my new invention, the quality to be good and profitable, but the quantity did not exceed 3 Tuns per week. After I had brought my Invention into some perfection, and profitable. I doubted not in the future to have advanced my Invention to make quantity also. Immediately after my second tryal. I wrote unto my Father what I had done, and withall desired him to obtain a Patient for it from King James of Blessed Memory; the Answer to which Letter I shall insert, only to shew the forwardness of King James in this his much animating the Inventor, as he did both Simon Sturtevant, John Rovenson, Doctor Jordaine and others."
* * * "Richard Parkes, à Parks-house, Esq., the Authour's Brother-in-law, about 1 year after the Pattent was granted, did carry for the Author much good merchantable Iron into the Tower, by King James's command to be tryed by all Artists, and they did very well approve of the Iron, and the said Parkshouse had a fowling Gun there made of Pit-cole Iron, with his name gilt upon the Gun, which Gun was taken from him by Colonel Levison, Governour of Dudley Castle, and never restored."
Dud Dudley had to run the gauntlet of bitter jealousies and obstacles on the part of the charcoal men, and shared much of the worst experience of inventors. In addition to these difficulties of contrary dispositions, he encountered a severe disaster the very next year after he obtained his patent, which he thus describes:
"There was so great a Flood that it not only ruinated the Authour's Iron-works, and inventions, but also many other men's Iron-works; and at a Market Town called Sturbridge in Commitate Wigorniæ, alihough the Authour sent with speed to preserve the people from drowning, one resolute man was carried from the Bridge there in the day time, and the nether part of the Town was so deep in water that the people had much ado to preserve their lives in the uppermost rooms of their Houses."
Our author complains that the demolition of his works caused great joy among his rivals, who were very jealous of him because he sold good iron cheaper than they could afford it. They even went so far as to complain to King James that it was not a merchantable article; and when he had rebuilt his works, they prevailed on his majesty to command him with all speed to send all sorts of bar iron up to the Tower of London fit for making carbines, muskets, and great bolts fit for shipping, "which iron being tryed by Artists and Smiths, the iron-masters and iron-mongers were all silenced until the 21st of King James." At that time all monopolies were made null and void by an Act of Parliament; but the indomitable Dud and his father Lord Dudley obtained an exemption for the patent; or rather a renewal of it for fourteen years. Our author says he then "went on cheerfully and made annually great store of iron, good and merchantable, and sold it unto diverse men yet living at twelve pounds per tun; also all sorts of cast-iron wares, as Brewing-Cysterns, Pots, Morters, and better and cheaper than any yet were made in these Nations with charcoles."
But the more successfully he worked his new system, the more unrelenting and fierce grew the opposition he encountered from his rivals of the old charcoal order. They seem to have ousted him from his works in Worcestershire; but nothing daunted, he set up a furnace at Himley, where he produced a quantity of pig iron; but having no forge for working it into bars, he was obliged to sell it in that state to the charcoal ironmasters, who conspired to disparage it in the market. The history of his trials, persecutions, tribulations, and triumphs, as written by himself, is exceedingly interesting, and we would commend it to those who read with admiration the lives of the martyr-heroes of science and scientific industry. As the book is rare we give one more extract from it, showing what such men have had to endure in all ages from those most indebted to their genius and labours. Being thus cramped and thwarted at Himley, he says:
"The Authour erected a new Furnace on purpose 27 foot square, all of stone, at a place called Hasco Bridge, in the parish of Sedgley, and county of Stafford: the Bellows of which Furnace were larger than ordinary Bellows are, in which works he made 7 Tuns of Iron per week, the greatest quantity of Pit-cole Iron that ever yet was made in Great Brittain; near which Furnace the Authour discovered many new Cole-mines 10 yards thick, and Ironmines under it, according to other Cole-works, which Cole-works being brought unto perfection, the Authour was by force thrown out of them, and the Bellows of his new Furnace and Invention by riotous persons cut to pieces, to his no small prejudice and loss of his Invention of making of Iron with Pit-cole, Sea-cole, &c. So that being with Law-Suites and Riots wearied and disable to prosecute his Art and Invention at present, even until the first Pattent was extinct."
Such is part of the story of Dud Dudley, told in his own words. Such was the angry opposition he met in his attempt to utilize the vast deposits of coal, ten yards deep, in the Black Country, in working its iron mines. And this persecution from ironmasters and their men he suffered, when the wood of the district had nearly all been consumed, and when there was not a mile of canal or railway for the importation of charcoal from a distance. Such a sturdy hero, who fought one of the great decisive battles against the forces of pig-headed ignorance, stupidity, and prejudice, deserves a monument. But until he receives that richly-deserved tribute from a grateful and appreciating generation, enriched by his self-sacrifice, we would commend all interested in his memory to the tablet erected in its honour in St. Helen's Church, Worcester. The record of his life and worth is written in epigrammatic Latin, and although it does not refer to his "Pit-cole and Inventions," it gives incisively a few facts of his stormy experience, which we here cite from the original inscription, which might lose some of its covert meanings by translation:
"Dodo Dudley chiliarchi nobilis Edwardi nuper domini de Dudley filius, patri charus et regiæ Majestatis fidissimus sublitus et servus in asserendo regem, in vindicando ecclesiam, in propugiando legem et libertatem anglicanam, sæpe captus, anno 1648, semel condemnatus ct tamen non decollatus, renatum denuo vidit diaclama hic inconcussa semper virtutc senex.Differt non aufert mortem longissima vita,
Sed differt multum cras believe mori.
Quod ncqueas vitare, fugis:
Nec formidanda est."
Considering his energetic efforts and powerful influence in developing the resources and shaping the great industries of the Black Country, we trust few of our readers will think we have given a notice of disproportionate length to Dud Dudley. His inventions and experiments were of inestimable value to the entire country and to the world; and the present Earl does but deserved honour to this early representative of his house in prosecuting, on such an extensive scale, the enterprise which that remarkable man first set on foot at Himley more than two centuries ago.
Dudley is a goodly town of nine or ten thousand inhabitants, about ten miles west of Birmingham; and is planted high and dry above the levels of the intervening villages. Some portions of it are built upon hills uplifted above the smoke of the valley, but still enveloped thinly with smoke of their own making; for furnaces or forges are planted like redoubts on the ridgy eminences. As nearly every one of the towns and villages in the district is carrying on the iron and coal business in common with all the others, each is nevertheless distinguished by some special branch of manufacture. Perhaps the distinctive speciality of Dudley is Wright's Anvil and Vice factory. The anvil business has been carried on by the Wright family for 200 years. They probably have sent more anvils to the United States within this period than all the other English makers put together, and there are few blacksmiths' shops in America in which their name is not well known. During the last year, they turned out nearly 11,000, and also 9,000 vices. The present head of the house, Mr. Peter Wright, introduced, some years ago, a great improvement, for which he obtained a patent. It simply consists in making the anvil of one solid piece of iron; whereas, by the old system, the different parts were made separately and then welded together. This was a difficult and unsatisfactory process, for frequently the weld would not be perfect in some places, and the hammer and sledge would ere long find out the defect, for the anvil would ring like a cracked bell under their strokes, and after awhile the horn or beck would go sheer by the board. The improvement in making them out of a solid block of iron is a very valuable one indeed, remedying all these defects of the old system. To accomplish this, the grains or threads of the iron, as Dr. Johnson would say, are "reticulated" with remarkable complications. To use a simile which may help some to get an approximate idea of the process, a ball of iron wire as large as a bushel basket is welded in a solid mass; then that is again drawn into thin strips, which are again folded up and welded again, and hammered until a block is formed of the utmost tenacity of which the metal is capable. When the anvil is worked out to its perfect shape, as the French Marshal said of the old Imperial Guard, "Elle meurt mais ne se rend pas;" it may wear out but never breaks. This is not however the exact process; I have used the ball of wire merely as a simile. The raw material is old scrap iron, like old horse-nails, hoops, and the like, that have been passed under the friction of wear and thus been purified and solidified for their new field of usefulness.
Mr. Wright has also obtained a patent for a vice improved in the same way. That is, the box is of solid iron, in which the worm or thread is cut by machinery. This, if anything, is a more valuable improvement than that of the solid anvil; for this box and its thread, under the old system, being only soldered or brazed together, often broke down altogether after being used a while. Indeed. I well remember, when an apprentice to our village blacksmith, a vice-box was brought to the shop nearly every week to be repaired, by having a new worm or thread soldered in; and I know by personal experience what a difficult job it was. Mr. Wright's improvement completely obviates this defect, and his vice deserves all the approbation and use it has gained in the United States.
Chain-making is another manufacture of Dudley, of great perfection and extent. Samuel Lewis, another name well-known by the hardware dealers in America, is one of the oldest and largest manufacturers of the town in this department. He turns out chains of every size and use, from the halter of a ship-of-the-line to that of a Scotch terrier. Hand-made nails constitute another large business, but as it more especially distinguishes other towns, the notice of it may be more properly reserved until we come to speak of them.
It is rather unfortunate for Dudley in one sense that it has so little history. It has a good and even historical name, and the ruins of one of the grandest castles in England. But it seems to be the apanage of one noble family, whose name overshadows or drowns in its illumination all the lesser stars. Doubtless it has given birth, or, what is better, moral and intellectual stature, to men who have made a mark in their day and generation, but it is rather difficult for an outsider to find it; or even the name of any writer, statesman, philanthropist, or patriot who made a reputation that has got into history, or far out into the hearing of the world. Still the whole future is before it, and, under the new spirit of the age, it may yet present a goodly roll of names which the world may have motive to remember pleasantly. The history of the reigning family presents many unique and some very interesting vicissitudes. One of them—George Dudley—was mixed up in Cardinal Pole's plot against Henry VIII, and was caught and kept by Sir William Paget in France, who felt sure of sending him to condign punishment in England. But the sturdy knight was baffled in a manner which he thus piteously describes in a letter to his sovereign:
"This false, traitorous boy Dudley, I being at my supper, and straungers with me, and he having one of his kepars with him, and the dore of the place where he was standing negligently open, made semblant to walk up and down, while his kepar looked upon a booke, and whipping out of the dore, plucked the same after him, and to go so as, before the beastely foole could open the door and folowe him thother, was gone clene out of sight. I made after of all handes, and sent bye-and-bye to all the gates of the town, and kept that night fyve watches in searchie; but all woull not helpe, for in Paris (as they know that have been in it) a thousand false sherews may hyde themselves and not be founde. I beseech your Majestie moost humbly to think nothing els in me but folye, which I assure you. Sir, hath grieved me more thenne would have done the losse of all that ever I have, and take my children withall."
Young Dudley made his way into Italy, where Bishop Bonner, then on a mission to the Pope, had him arrested and confined in the castle at Milan. But he succeeded in effecting his escape from this duress still more ingeniously, and never was heard of again. Early in the seventeenth century the Ward family was ingrafted upon the old Dudley stock, which had become rather sterile of moral vitality. Lord Edward, Dud's father, was a very fast character, and nearly ruined his estates by loose living. To recover them for his house, he married his granddaughter and heir, Frances, to Humble Ward, the only son of a rich jeweller to the queen of Charles I. This marriage of title to fortune recovered the sinking estate of the Dudley family. The Christian name of this founder of the house of Ward has a puritanic sound and meaning, which would grace the nomenclature of the Long Parliament; still he adhered to Charles, and became a member of "the mongrel parliament" which that sovereign convoked at Oxford in 1644. Having brought the king timely and liberal supplies, and being the husband of the heiress of Lord Dudley, his impoverished Majesty, having neither silver or gold, paid him in the cheap and easy coinage of a title, as Lord Ward. Whether he really received the name of Humble at the font, or at a later stage of his history when his character was fully developed, perhaps may be considered a matter of honest doubt. For, although he adhered to Charles to the last, and was a member of his Oxford parliament; he still managed to live on intimate terms of good and friendly intercourse with his republican neighbours who knew him best. So, when the cause of his unfortunate master broke down, these seemed to have supported his petition to Protector Cromwell, which, dropping his new title, he preferred under the simple, puritanic name of Humble Ward; and, it is just possible, he then assumed it for the first time. To attach himself more closely or apparently to the ascendant cause, he contracted a double marriage between his family and that of Sir William Brereton, the Parliamentary general. So he succeeded in winning all the merit and the profit of fidelity to both Charles and Cromwell, bringing out of the revolution both his title and estates safe and sound. It is an interesting circumstance that the successive generations of his house have never sunk the name of Humble. A brother of the present Earl is Humble Dudley Ward; and doubtless that prefix of humility will be given to many a son on the descending line of the house.
The present Earl of Dudley came into possession of the family estates in 1845. It is said that for twelve years prior to this date, about £80,000 of the income of the property had been invested in real estate, including the princely establishment of Witley Court, in Worcestershire, the Earl's present country residence. It is estimated that his yearly income is the second if not the first in amount received by any nobleman or other gentleman in England. He has been a munificent benefactor to the town of Dudley. No man in the kingdom has done more for his immediate community in the same order of good will and good works. In the first place, he has given the town such a park as no one else had to give, if disposed to do it. It is the Castle Hill already noticed, with all its winding walks, weird caverns and gorges, and avenues between, low-arched with braided hawthorn branches, and whitened and perfumed with the sweet sheen and breath of their spring flowerage. Here are glens made by the pick centuries ago, now overshadowed by the white-armed birch and forest elm, with the interweaving of all the lower trees and shrubs known to the county. Here are look-outs on the thickly wooded edges of the eminence, with rustic seats from which you may get varying aspects of all The Black Country and its Green Border-Land. Then there are the gray and massive walls and towers and bastions of the old Castle, and the green, quiet courtyard within, as pleasant a place as could be for merry children to play and sing to the echoes of their happy voices, stirring the broken walls with the pulse of a new age's life. Never was there a better natural site for a romance, and I wonder some novelist has not made it the scene of one. Doubtless the moral material might be found in the history of the Dudley family.
The special and more immediate gift of the present Earl to the town is the most costly and superb fountain yet erected in England. As a work of art it ranks among the best specimens of the latest school of design and execution. Most of our English readers have doubtless seen engravings of this beautiful structure in the "Art Journal" or "Illustrated London News," and I believe it is generally regarded by connoisseurs as the finest piece of sculpture of the kind that has been presented to any city or town in England. It was consecrated to its public use and ownership with great ceremony on the 17th of October, 1867, the young Countess of Dudley performing the inaugural rite and act with the sweetest grace of good-will. All who were present and saw her put the first draught from the fountain to her lips, and heard the words they uttered in bestowing the gift to the people and their posterity, must have congratulated the Earl in their hearts that he had found in her such a living fountain of domestic happiness, and must have wished him to drink of it to a purer and better life.
The Earl has done other generous things for the town which redound to his credit, and speak well also for the confidence he reposes in the masses of the people. In 1866 there was a local Exhibition of Arts and Industry in Dudley for the benefit of an object of great interest to the people. The most skilful artisans and eminent manufacturers contributed their best specimens to this exposition. The Earl was a distinguished exhibitor in both of his capacities—as one of the largest iron manufacturers in the district and also as one of the wealthiest noblemen of the realm, in possession of the choicest and rarest works of art. He sent from his London and country mansions paintings of the old masters almost beyond a valuation in money. It was generous and confiding in him to hang up these delicate and precious treasures to the view of all the bank-men, pit-men, furnacemen, and forgemen, and nail-makers of the district, believing that not the roughest of them all would lift a soiling finger against the face of a Vandyke, Holbein, or Correggio. These acts and dispositions have very favourably impressed the people of the town and vicinity, while the whole nation was pleasantly affected by his munificent hospitality to the Viceroy of Egypt, when that prince visited London at a time when there was no royal palace vacant or in trim to give him suitable lodging and entertainment.
I have thus given several pages to a notice of the present Lord Dudley and his family, chiefly because he may be considered the Iron Earl of England, and because he manufactures the iron of the best edge-tools in the United States. I have thought that many who use and some who make the axes of the Douglas Manufactory Company of Massachusetts might read these notes and observations, and that they would feel some interest in the name and character of the English nobleman who works his own mines and metals for New England forges.
Having surveyed The Black Country from Dudley Castle, the tourist or visiter of the district should go immediately to another view-tower but a few miles distant, which commands a scenery of remarkable contrast with the iron region of fire and smoke. This is the Clent Hills, in or rather over Hagley. It is doubtful if such a contrast can be found elsewhere in any country. It is a contrast which affects equally all the senses and faculties of enjoyment, and therefore all the more difficult to describe. From the Castle Hill of Dudley Nature has the under-hand, and from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot she is scourged with cat-o'-nine-tails of red-hot wire, and marred and scarred and fretted, and smoked half to death day and night, year and year, even on Sundays. Almost every square inch of her form is reddened, blackened, and distorted by the terrible tractoration of a hot blister. But all this cutaneous eruption is nothing compared with the internal violence and agonies she has to endure. Never was animal being subjected to such merciless and ceaseless vivisection. The very sky and clouds above are moved to sympathy with her sufferings and shed black tears in token of their emotion. When you have sated the eye with this scene, even without being affected with these sentimental fancies, just go over to Hagley and ascend the citadel hill of the Clent range, and you will see what Nature is where she has the upper-hand, and breathes free from the asthma and rheumatism of the other condition. You see her in all the various dresses she has worn from her birth. On this furzy-breathing hill you see the simple and homely dress she wore when man first found her here two thousand years ago or more; and it is all redolent with the thymy odour that perfumed it then. But from this hill-top see what manner of robes she wears all along down into the deep, quiet valley and up its gentle, undulating slopes that meander to the distant horizon. The fingers of the Creator made the first garment for man, but He left to human hands the clothing of naked Nature; and these are the beautiful garments they have worked for her—dresses how varied of green and gold and of every tint the rainbow's pallet can blend and bring to the adornment! Here she reigns in all her peaceful and summer glory over a vast rural domain—a great picture of living and breathing beauty in an encircling frame of emerald, gilded by undulating lines of golden sky.
This lofty watch-tower on the Green Border-Land that divides the regions of coal and corn, is a favourite resort and breathing-ground of miners and forgers and the other sooty workers of The Black Country. On these bald and breezy heights they can quaff the luxury of the happiest and healthiest air that breathes, and disport themselves to their hearts' content in all the wild freedom of the place. One might think that a miner who had grubbed in coal-seams fifty fathoms under-ground for six days in the week, if he was a devout man, would feel himself at "a half-way house on the road to heaven" when standing the seventh on this Beulah hill of a new world. This common pasture for man and beast, which yields such fresh pure air for the one, and sweet though short grazing for the other, contains about 500 acres, all perfectly safe and secure as a common inheritance of the inhabitants of the villages below, and as a field of recreation for the people of the country around.
Hagley Hall, the seat of the Lytteltons, is situated at the foot of this hill, with an extensive and noble park running up to the brow of the eminence. The park is more classical in aspect than the mansion itself, which is a portly, rectangular, modern-looking building externally, looking more like the pretentious house of a retired manufacturer than the country-seat of one of the most scholarly noblemen of England. The founder of this distinguished family, whose very name has a literary sound, or rather the first who attained to a peerage, was Lord George Lyttelton, who was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1757, but who was more thoroughly acquainted with figures of rhetoric than those of arithmetic. He was a man of cultivated and refined taste in literature, art, and nature. He was the author of various works, and produced poems of much merit both on paper and on gardens and lawns of exquisite culture. He was a generous and genial patron of these two kinds of literature, and attracted the companionship, and encouraged the labours, and stimulated the genius of eminent writers and artists. There are several monuments standing among the trees of the park, erected to some of these poets and men of mark. The present Lord Lyttelton, a greater, if not more productive, scholar than the ancestor who first won the title he has inherited, is a man of large and active ability, which he devotes to every good word and work for the well-being of the people, especially the working classes. He is not only a scholar by reputation and past attainments, but as a continuous and active student, who, perhaps, has played a little more with his learning than is meet in this practical age; or translated more from English verse into Greek and Latin than from Greek and Latin into English. Still, he seeks to compensate the community for these literary and unproductive recreations by real, downright labour for the public good, in practical efforts for the education and elevation of the masses. He is Lord-Lieutenant of Worcestershire, and that and every other public duty devolving upon him he performs with assiduous devotion and ability. It may be gratifying to all interested in a name so intimately connected with classical literature to learn the fact, that its present noble incumbent has made ample provision for its perpetuation. I believe he has no less than eight sons and four daughters living, most of them grown up to young manhood and womanhood.
On going from Dudley to Hagley, the main road passes through Stourbridge, or Sturbridge, as it is generally pronounced by the common people of the town and vicinity. The early settlers of Massachusetts, in reproducing the central counties of England in that State in name, called a goodly town in their Worcester county Sturbridge, after this on the Stour. So that must have been the usual pronunciation two centuries ago. Stourbridge sustains a very important relation not only to all the iron and other metal works of England, but of the United States and other countries. Its fire-clay is the best yet found in the world, and its value to furnace and forge can hardly be over-estimated. Its fire-bricks and crucibles are the hardiest salamanders of endurance ever submitted to the test of fire. They are as well-known to the metal factories on both sides of the Atlantic as the Bath brick is to the kitchens of Christendom. It is one of the rich and complete provisions of nature that distinguish this remarkable district. If this material had to be imported from France, it would have enhanced the cost of the production and working of iron and other metals. But the excellent qualities and exhaustless abundance of the fire-clay attracted to the town and introduced into the district a manufacture of vast importance in addition to the metal trade. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an ill wind to the Protestants of France, and very grievous, but it blew fortunes to England and other countries. There was a general hegira of the best French artists from before the face and force of religious persecution, and thousands of every craft found asylum and employment in Great Britain. And they well and richly repaid the realm for both. They planted in English towns nearly all the artistic trades of the country. A family by the name of Hennezel, with several relatives of the name of Tyttery and Tyzak, settled down in Stourbridge in 1557, and commenced there the manufacture of glass, selecting the locality chiefly because of its excellent fire-clay for melting-pots. Others of the same family established the same business at Newcastle-on-Tyne. Thus a single family of French refugees introduced into England this important manufacture, while others planted the ribbon trade at Coventry and silk-weaving in Spitalfields. From the Hennezels' day to this. Stourbridge has been distinguished for the perfection and extent of its glass manufacture, in which there are about a dozen houses engaged. As a proof of the excellence to which they have raised the art, one of these firms. Messrs. Walker and Son, received and executed an order from the Sultan for a chandelier which cost nearly £10,000. The oriental potentate, who owns and fleeces an immense flock of human sheep, penned in hovels and pastured in cheaply-made wilds, was so pleased with this great work of art and industry, as to order a spiral stairway of glass from the same firm, to ascend from the hall-floor of his palace to its dome. But the Messrs. Walker declined to undertake a job of such dimensions, difficulty, and expense, especially as no inconsiderable part of the work would have been in fitting the stairway to the palace after the glass part had been all cast and cut to the pattern. The cost would not have been less than £100,000, a sum which the holders of Ottoman bonds would have preferred to have seen put to more reproductive use. The French connexion with this manufacture of glass is still continued and even enlarged. The sand most used comes from Fontainbleau and vicinity, and costs on delivery about £1. 4s. 6d, per ton. Thus the genius that first established the manufacture at Stourbridge and the raw material that now supplies it, the town and district owe to France. The manufacture of iron is also carried on extensively in Stourbridge. William Foster and Co, are one of the largest houses in the kingdom, employing nearly 5,000 hands in all their works.
The town, which contains about 8,000 inhabitants, has a venerable antiquity, and possesses several institutions founded in the olden time, of much value to the community. Chief among these is the Old Swinford Hospital, founded by Lord Foley, which houses, clothes, feeds, and educates about 130 boys, taken in at seven and kept till they are over fourteen years of age. They are then apprenticed to different trades and the premium is paid for them. If they behave and do well, at the end of their apprenticeship they are furnished with certain sums of money to aid them in setting up businesses for themselves. This is an excellent institution: it is one of the thousand acorns planted here and there over the kingdom a century ago, which have grown into great outspreading oaks of strength, refuge, and protection for thousands of poor men's children of this generation. The school is always full, as it is sure to be; and the property on which it is founded is constantly increasing; for the oak is watered and fostered by the busy industries of the district, and the pick-men, forge-men, and furnace-men at their toil strengthen and lengthen its branches. A rich and everlasting blessing be on all such acorn-planters. One could almost wish that they might be allowed to revisit the earth and see the trees of their planting at their full growth and worth. Still thousands do see these trees at their growth, and can go forth and plant acorns by sight which the good men of the olden years planted by faith, without knowing, as we know, what would come of it.