Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

Great Brington is the name of the village neighborhood clustering / about the church where, under the floor of the nave, the / great-great-grandfather of George Washington lies buried. Little / Brington is the village neighborhood, hardly separated from the other, / where the Washington family dwelt in a house granted them by their / cousin, Earl Spencer, when the events of the Civil War drove them from / their ancestral place at Sulgrave. To reach the Bringtons from London / you must first go to Northampton, where in his time the first Lawrence / Washington was twice mayor. The necessity is not a hardship, for to see / Northampton, ever so passingly, is a delight such as only English travel / can offer. To drive the six miles from Northampton to the Bringtons is / another necessity which is another delight, still richer if not greater. / Be chosen by a 28th of September, veiled in a fog with sunny rifts in / its veil, for your railroad run through a level pastoral scene where / stemless blotches of trees shelter white blurs of sheep, and vague / canal-boats rest cloudily on the unseen waterways, and you have / conditions in which, if you are worthy, the hour of your journey will / shrink to a few golden minutes. You will be meanwhile kept by the / protecting mists from the manifold facts which in England are apt to / pierce you with a thousand appeals and reproaches. The many / much-storied places will be faded to wraiths of towers and gates and / walls, and you will escape to your destination without that torment of / regret for not having constantly stopped on the way from which nothing / could otherwise deliver you.

If at Northampton the fog lifts, and the autumnal sun has all the rest / of the day to itself, you arrive with unimpaired strength for what you / have come to see. Yet with all your energy conserved on the way, you / will not be fully equal to the demand upon you. Northampton did not fail / to begin with the Britons, and though it was not a permanent Roman / station, and lay dormant during the Saxon hierarchy, it revived / sufficiently under Saxon rule in the eleventh century to be twice taken / and once burnt by the Danish invaders. It suffered under the Normans, / but was walled and fortified in the Conqueror's reign, and began a new / life with the inspiration of his oppressions. A picturesque incident of / its civil history, which was early a record of resistance to the royal / will, was Thomas à Becket's defiance of Henry II., when the King tried / to reduce the proud churchman to the common obedience before the laws. / The archbishop, followed by great crowds of the people, appeared as / summoned, but when the Earl of Leicester bade him, in the old Norman / form, hear the judgment rendered against him, he interrupted with the / words, "Son and Earl, hear me first! I forbid you to judge me! I decline / your tribunal, and refer my quarrel to the decision of the Pope. " Then / he retired, and shortly escaped to Flanders, but coming back to / Canterbury, was murdered, as all men know, by four of the King's / knights, at the altar in the cathedral.

Perhaps the feeling of the people was less for the prelate than against / the prince, for the first Protestant heresies spread rapidly in / Northampton, and the doctrines of Wickliffe had such acceptance that the / mayor himself was accused of holding them, and of favoring the spread of / Lollardy. In the two great Civil Wars, Northampton stood for the White / Rose and then for the Parliament, against the two kings. In 1460, a / great battle was fought under the city's walls; ten thousand of Henry's / "tall Englishmen" were killed or drowned in the river Nene, and Henry / himself was brought prisoner into the town. In 1642, the guns of the / Puritan garrison "plaid for about two hours" on "the cavaleers and shot / about twenty of them" when they attempted to assault the place, which / became a rendezvous for the parliamentarians, and sent them frequent aid / from its fifteen thousand in their attacks on the neighboring places / holding for the King. In 1645, both parties met in force, a little / northwest of the town, and Cromwell, who had joined Fairfax, won the / battle of Naseby after Fairfax had lost it, and with an overwhelming / victory ended the war against Charles.

If any Washingtons were in the fight, as some of so numerous a line / might very well have been, it was on the King's side. They put their / faith in princes while they remained in England; it wanted yet a hundred / and thirty years, at the remoteness of Virginia, to school them to the / final diffidence which they were not the first of the Americans to feel. / The slow evolution of the race out of devoted subjects into devoted / citizens was accomplished in stuff other than that of the Puritan chief / who soon after could "say this of Naseby, -- that when I saw the enemy / draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor / ignorant men. I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile / out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would by / things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had / great assurance, and God did it. " Yet the faith in poor common men, once / kindled in Washington, if not so mixed with piety as Cromwell's, / outlasted that through parliamentary trials as severe as ever it was put / to by poor uncommon men.