INTRODUCTION

THE great and all too auspicious induction to Harrison Ainsworth's romance of Windsor Castle is The Merry Wives of Windsor, some lines from which buoyant comedy appear on the original title-page of the story. They give the cue for the entrance of Herne the Hunter, who is used by the romancer to work up the fatality interwoven with the sad true account of Henry the Eighth, Anne Boleyn, and her supplanter. The lines that conjure up the horned figure of Herne are spoken by Mistress Page, in Act iv. Scene 4, when she and Mistress Ford are plotting against Falstaff.

There is an old tale goes, she says, that--

Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner:
You have heard of such a spirit; and well you know,
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth."

Their plot for the fairy-penance and the unhorning of Falstaff is too well known to need repeating, and it has nothing directly to do with Ainsworth's horned man. He loses no time in setting up the tree of destiny in his opening chapter,--" a large, lightning-scathed and solitary oak." The original tree still stood, according to history, till the time of George the Third, who ordered it to be destroyed with others, far gone in decay, in 1796. It was a pollard tree, hollow, and had this huge advantage, that boys could get inside it comfortably. It was in fact some nine or ten paces round its trunk. Ainsworth gives Herne a wilder character than he had in the usually accepted Windsor tradition; in which he was one of the park-keepers who had hung himself in the oak, whereupon his ghost became, according to a common attachment known in folk-lore, its attendant spirit. Something of the elemental wildness associated in Shropshire and Herefordshire lore with "Wild Eric," and with the aerial pack of hounds, the Seven Whistlers, probably helped Ainsworth to make out his magic huntsman's character. In fact he is a mixture of Wild Eric and a Windsor Mephistopheles; and the wonder is that in the story his black wizardry is not given yet fuller effect in the fate of other characters. For the Earl of Surrey, ill-fated hero and delightful love-poet, is taken to Herne's Tree, ominously and deliberately enough, at the opening of the story; yet his evil destiny is not followed up to its tragic close on the scaffold that makes a natural pendant to Anne Boleyn's. Wyatt, again, only survived Surrey by a few years: but in the story the Jane Seymour intrigue, and her triumph at the bloody end of her rival, close the account. The plot being what it was, we may still wonder a little why the formal melodrama does not pursue its subsidiary heroes and poets over the last barriers of sensation, with Herne to pilot them ?

Harrison Ainsworth had a great liking for a historical background; and it is Windsor Castle which is, after all, the chief actor in this drama;-more than Henry VIII., more than Surrey or Wyatt, more than the two fatal queens. We might reasonably end, if we were to follow up the stage suggestion, by calling him distinctly a scene-painter among the novelists; one who looked upon his people as stage- properties, and rarely treated them as a true novelist, or a saga man, would. His picturesque patch of real record, irrupted in the romance, leaves the Castle well in the foreground at the end of his third book, and the latest Windsor historian, Sir Richard R. Holmes, pays him the tribute of saying that his novel mixes up with the Herne legend a fairly accurate account of the history during the early and Tudor times.

For some account of Ainsworth himself, the reader may turn to the preliminary pages of Old Saint Paul's and The Tower of London in this series.

E. R.

The following is a list of the works of William Harrison Ainsworth

Works of Cheviot Tichburn (pseudonym), 1822, 1824; December Tales 1823 Poems (published under pseudonym), 1824; A Summer Evening Tale 1825; Considerations of the best Means of affording immediate Relief to the Operative Classes in the Manufacturing Districts 1826; Sir John Chiverton (? in collaboration with John Parting- ton Aston) 1826; Rookwood, 1834; Crichton, 1837; Jack Sheppard, 1839; Tower of London, 1840; Guy Fawkes, 1841; Old St. Paul's, a Tale of the Plague and Fire of London (from the Sunday Times), 1841; The Miser's Daughter, 1842; Windsor Castle, 1843; St. James's, or the Court of Queen Anne, 1844; Lancashire Witches (from the Sunday Times), 1848; Star Chamber, 1854; James the Second, or the Revolution of 1688, etc., 1854; The Flitch of Bacon, or the Custom of Dunmow, 1854; Ballads, romantic, fantastical, and humorous, 1855; Spendthrift, 1856; Mervyn Clitheroe,1857; The Combat of the Thirty, From a Breton Lay of fourteenth century, with introduction comprising a new chapter of Froissart, by W. H. A., 1859; Ovingdean Grange, A Tale of the South Downs, 1860; Constable of the Tower, 1861; The Lord Mayor of London, or City Life in the Last Century, 1862; Cardinal Pole, 1863; John Law the Projector, 1864; The Spanish Match, or Charles Stuart in Madrid, 1865; Myddleton Pomfret, 1865; Auriol, or the Elixir of Life, 1865; The Constable de Bourbon, 1866; Old Court, 1867; The South Sea Bubble, 1868; Hilary St. Ives, 1869; Talbot Harland, 1870; Tower Hill, 1871; Boscobel, 1872; The Good Old Times, the story of the Manchester Rebels, 1873; Merry England, 1874; The Goldsmith's Wife, 1874; Preston Fight, or the Insurrection of 1715, 1875; Chetwynd Calverley, 1876; The Leaguer of Lathom, a tale of the Civil War in Lancashire, 1876; The Fall of Somerset, 1877; Beatrice Tyldesley, 1878; Beau Nash, 1879)?) or 188o; Auriol and other Tales, 1880; Stanley Brereton, 1881.

Editor of Bentley's Miscellany, 1838-42, 1854, etc. (in which several of his novels first appeared); of Ainsworth's Magazine, 1842-54 (when it was incorporated with Bentley's Miscellany); of New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, vols. 73-247. He also started The Boeatian in 1824, but the magazine only ran through a few numbers. Contributor to Fraser, London Magazine, Edinburgh Magazine, etc.


LIFE-Memoir by Laman Blanchard, the Mirror, 1842; prefixed to later editions of Rookwood; John Evans, Early Life of William Harrison Ainsworth, Manchester Quarterly, 1882; W. E. Axon, William Harrison Ainsworth, A Memoir, 1902.

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