There was even an antique chair, but when
our guide was put on his honor as to whether it was one of the
original chairs he answered, "Well, if people wanted a chair!" He
was a rather charmingly quaint, humorous person, with that queer
conscience, and he did not pretend to be moved by the hard
inexorable stoniness of the place which had been a queen's prison
for many years. One must not judge it too severely, though:
bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and Mary Stuart
may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she could
not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that
Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was,
though she never ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof,
of lead or stone, whither her feet must have so often heavily
climbed, and looked out over the lovely landscape which she must
have abhorred; and the wind that blew over it, in late August,
was very cold; far colder than the air of the prison, or the
bower, below.
The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic
duke, and owes its restoration to his pity and his piety.
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