The Sun.
London, England, 1861-08-09 00:00:00

AINSWORTH'S NEW WORK.

The Constable of the Tower. A Historical Ro-
mance. By William Harrison Ainsworth.
Illustrated by John Gilbert. 3 vols. Chapman
and Hall.
Originally appearing as a serial story in Bentley's
Miscellany, occasionally illustrated by the delicate
and facile "pencilling" of John Gilbert—Harrison
Ainsworth's new historical romance has recently
been issued from the press by Messrs. Chapman and
Hall, in its complete form, as a separate publication.
Accordingly as the work appeared in the pages of
the magazine from month to month, we have
analyzed its merits almost chapter by chapter.
Ever since the three exquisite volumes into which it
is now compacted have been lying before us—
tempting us to examine the fiction as a whole, to
weigh it in its entirety in the balance of criticism—
we have eagerly, but until now vainly, looked for
the double opportunity for so doing ; first, for the
leisure for writing, secondly, for due space in our
journal, both of them unprocurable until Parlia-
ment should have been prorogued. At length the
two requisites are within our reach, and we eagerly
grasp at them in order at length that we may
realize in this way a long cherished intention.
Mr. Ainsworth's new story is worthy of the au-
thor's hand as a Master-Romancist. Often as he
has written historic fiction, he has never written
better than throughout these Five Books of The
Constable of the Tower. The production assumes
its place at once among the most brilliantly deli-
neated and highly elaborated narratives of this cha-
racter. It makes a superb triad among the writings
of Harrison Ainsworth, when placed, as we hesitate
not to place it upon the instant, between two old
favourites of ours, owing their existence years ago
to his pen of glamour and fascination— Windsor
Castle and the Tower of London. Clubbing those
three works together, ranging the whole nine vo-
lumes side by side on our bookshelves—nine enthrall-
ing volumes of historic romance, illustrated by the
pencils of Johannot, Gilbert, Delamotte, and Cruik-
shank—it would be difficult (remembering their
contents) not to recognise in their author a combi-
nation of genius and of industry, of fecund fancy
and untiring research, but rarely brought toge-
ther and thus intimately united in the service
of imaginative literature. Otherwise—by how
many of his writings as a Novelist !—Mr. Ains-
worth has vividly enough attested the pre-eminence
of his powers as a romance writer, especially and
peculiarly as one into whose possession have fallen,
so to speak, not only the grimly robe of Mrs. Radcliffe
and the weird wand of Monk Lewis, but together
with those symbols of a mysterious authority over
all the sources of terror and of wonderment, much
of that higher gift of gifts for imparting to the
grizzliest improbabilities a prevailing air of veri-
similitude and of absolute credibility, which is the
secret of the glamour exercised over us by all the
great masters of Romance from Godwin and Matu-
rin down to Henri De Balzac. Who has not long since
recognised the possession of all these gifts and
powers in their very perfection in the author of that
enthralling romance of romances—the story of
ROOK WOOD ? It is said of Mr. Ainsworth that he
has exhausted all the old familiar resources of the
romancist—the trap-doors and the sliding panels,
the wrack, the dungeon, the scaffold, the perillous
feats and hairbreadth 'senses that carry the ro-
mance reader on through " moving incidents by
flood and field" with the speed, let us say, of
Dick Turpin when bestriding Black Bess
on the great north road between York and
London. It is hardly an exaggeration. Yet
his achievements (for they are little less than
achievements) in this way are all so varied in their
nature : they form such startling contrasts when
brought for a moment into comparison ! Instance
tais—the terrific descent from the pillar described
in our author's splendid romance of the Admirable
Crichton, and the wonderful flight down the roaring
current of the Thames in the opening pages of Jack
Shepherd, when the Silent Highway is swept
over by the scourge of that astounding hurricane. It
were superfluous, however, to endeavour nowadays
to illustrate, by examples culled from his volumi-
nous productions, a distinguishing peculiarity long
and long ago so very generally recognised. It is
a peculiarity this which will be found more or less
pervading the whole series of 3,1 r. Ainsworth's effu-
sions as a fictionist. Discoverable, hardly less than
in those famous books of his which we have already
here particularised—in his other remarkable nar-
ratives, some of them historical, others purely the
outpourings of his imagination. Hence, in truth,
the popularity, more or less, appertaining to those
extraordinary narratives, whether reference be
made to Old St. Paul's, with its record of the fire
and plague ; to St. James's, with all its Court in-
trigues, introducing us to people as widely different
us Sacheverel and Marlborough ; and to Guy
Fawkes, with its marvellous Rembrandt glimpses of
the Gunpowder Plot conspirators! Or whether,
on the other hand, allusion be made to the purely
fanciful history of the Miser's Daughter, to the
goblin scenes depicted in those wild annals com-
memorative of The Lancashire Witches, even to the
pages of that tantalising fragment of a Romance
called Auriol ! To say nothing of the allurements
thrown in like manner by Mr. Ainsworth's wizard-
like, and almost, one might say, lurid imagination,
over various passaesea in his more recent fictions—
over the serio-comic incidents of The Flitch. of Bacon
—over the strangely fluctuating fortunes of Vie
Spendthrift—over the singularly interesting, and
some of them wonderfully probable, and others still
more wonderfully improbable, adventures of Mervyn
Clitheroe—over the varied characters flitting to
and fro across those beautiful Sussex downs near
Brighton,with the picturesque gables of "Ovingdean
Grange" in:the midst of its clustering orchards and
shrubberies, filling up the background of that last
alluring picture, vividly sketched in black and
white, by the indefatigable pen of our unwearied
and seemingly inexhaustible Romancist.
At last—reverting to one of those higher kinds
of labour in this beautiful fairyland of fiction (the
dreamland, the cloudland of Imaginative Litera-
ture), in which he had already signally evidenced
at once his capacity and proficiency as a Fabulist—
Harrison Ainsworth has, in this the latest of his
numerous literary productions, completed that His-
torico-Romantic Triad to which we have already
referred as shining out with a sort of triple lustre
from among his eighteen or twenty separate and
some of them world-famous works of imagination.
Placing THE CONSTABLE OF THE TOWER as we do,
and as we have already here intimated, between
" Windsor Castle" and "The Tower of London"—
we recognise in those three historic romances, in
those nine goodly volumes, a superb contribution
towards the elucidation of the events of one of the
most extraordinary epochs in the annals of our
native land. No man has more vividly realised to
himself and to his readers the distinguishing pecu-
liarities of that most memorable period, the very
heart or centre of which is the time during which

the occurrences rel-ated in " The Constable" are
1 supposed to take place. As we took occasion to
remark some few months back, while the story was
in the midst of its periodical appearance in the pages
of Bentley's Miscellany, the title of the narrative
appears to us to be somewhat of a misnomer. For,
interesting though the character of bluff Sir John
Gage (the Constable of the Tower) is undoubtedly
in itself—it is altogether subordinate to many
other characters introduced upon the scene:
the hero of the Romance being; beyond all ques-
tion, that most alluring and admirable study for a
Romancist—the handsome, gifted, daring, ambi-
tious Sir Thomas Seymour ! Afterwards Baron
Seymour of Sudeley, Lord high Admiral of Eng-
land, husband of Henry the Eighth's widow,
Catherine (Parr) the Queen Dowager, the favou-
rite uncle of King Edward VI., the aspirant to
the Protectorship, the affianced lover of the fair
young Princess—afterwards our great Queen—
Elizabeth ! The marvel is that until now 'Sey-
mour has never been chosen as the hero of an
English Historical Romance. Chosen as such,
however, he has been at length in these
enthralling Five Books of The Constable of the
Tower, a work that might more literally have
been designated Ihe Lord High Admiral of _Eng•
land. Designate it how we may, however, the his-
toric romance of " The Constable " with its veritable
hero " The Admiral," are here before us—invested,
each of them, with a not very easily resistible
fascination. Although Mr.Ainsworth has evidenced
by the mere selection of that personage a certain
partiality for all that is noble or better in the ex-
traordinary character of Lord Seymour, he ha• de-
lineated the character and described the career of
that adventurer's intrigue with a candour strangely
dispassionate. Here, in these pages, of which Sey-
mour is the glory and the boast, it is impossible to
recognise anything whatever of that unconscious
infatuation growing up almost unawares in the mind
of almost every historian or biographer who dilates
upon one favourite character selected from the
throng of our bygone fellow-men—that unconscious,
or at any rate only half conscious infatuation ad-
mirably well defined by Lord Macaulay (who un-
wittingly, by the way, evidenced exactly the same
"disease of admiration " in the instance of his own
chosen demi-god King William III.), as the lees Bos-
welliana. Nothing whatever of this same disease of
admiration is displayed anywherethrough these three
volumes of his historical romance of "The Constable"
by Mr. Ainsworth, when treating of the ambition
and the enterprise, the rise and the downfall, the
daring loves and the lamentable death of Seymour
the Admiral. " Arrogant, assuming, and implac-
able—a man of insatiable ambition ;" those are the
expressions of Hume. To Seymour might be applied
many of those marvellous words in which the
master hand of Sallust has touched off to the very
life the nature, the genius, the character of Lucius
Cataline. Might we not remark, in truth, of Sey-
mour, as Sallust observes in the immortal words, in
regard to Cataline :—" Nobili genere natus, fuit
magna vi et aninzi et corporis, sed ingenio malo
pravoque. . . . . Animus audax, subdolus,

varius, cujus rei Tibet simulator ac dissimulator,
alieni appetens, suiprofusus, ardens in cupiditatibus,
satis eloquentice, sapientice parum." All this—
together with physical gifts and graces to which
Cataline could not lay claim—Seymour being the
handsomest man of his time, and one endowed (as
the loves of Catherine and Elizabeth sufficiently
well evidenced), with an almost irresistible charm
of fascination. Yet so calm, so uninfatuated is
Mr. Ainsworth, in his regard, while here
treating of Seymour's ambition and Sey-
mour's character, that sometimes even we
scarcely think justice is done to the Lord High
Admiral. For example—the novelist who has here
chosen Seymour as his hero takes for granted,
accepts as absolutely proven and as henceforth not
to be for an instant contravened, the gailt imputed
to the Lord High Admiral in respect to his supposed
complicity with the Master of the Mint at Bristol
—Sherington, here called by Mr. Ainsworth
Sharington. Our novelist takes for granted, we
say, accepts as absolutely proven, the charge made
against Seymour of having (for a given sum) con-
nived at Sherington's misdeeds in clipping the coin,
issuing base testoons, and falsifying the entries in
the books of his department. Although it is as yet
doubtful to this day whether Sherington was not
in reality a double-dyed rascal actually " suborned
to calumniate Seymour as the price of his own
life "—" a suspicion," observes Lingard (vol. v., p.
279, last Edition), "a suspicion which was almost
converted into certainty when that offender (i.e.,
Sherington) was not only pardoned but restored to
his former appointment, and found still to possess
a considerable fortune." However, we mention this
one instance merely as affording what may with
truth be called " proof positive," that in delineating
his hero, Seymour,',Mr. Ainsworth has not had his
judgment blurred at any rate by the feverish influ-
ence of the lues Boswelliana. We have followed
the incidents of the story so carefully from month
to month as the narrative has appeared in its first
or piecemeal form in Bentley's Miscellany, that we
have nothing further left to say here in regard to the
plot of the romance, a plot the thread of which, if
we may so express it, has been carefully and dex-
terously woven into the meshes of history. The
result of Mr. Ainsworth's art in so weaving it,
being in effect that in The Constable of the Tower
we have as it were a gorgeous specimen from his
practised hand of the tapestry of historico-romantic
literature. Among the personages whose forms
and features are here recognisable are not only the
dying monarch and the boy-king his successor,
not only the Protector Somerset and his ambitious
brother the Admiral, not only the young Princesses
(afterwards Queens) Mary and Elizabeth, besides
the Queen Dowager, Catherine Parr, but together
with these the various personages peopling the
Courts of Henry VIII. and Edward Vl.—Cranmer,
Archbishop of Canterbury; Wriothesley, the Lord
Chancellor; the Earl of Hertford, the Great Cham-
berlain; Lord Russell, the Privy Seal; Sir
Anthony Brown, the Master of the Horse, and so
forth. The Constable appearing as a matter of
course, and even of right on his part, as nomi-
nally the central figure upon the canvass. Upon
the very threshold of the story, so to speak, the
reader's attention is arrested, being held spell-bound
thence to the very Finis. " The curtain," says the
novelist at the outset, " was about to descend upon
ens of the most tremendous dramas ever enacted in
real life—a drama which those who witnessed it be-
held with wonder and awe. The sun of royalty,
which had scorched all it fell upon by the fierceness
of its mid-day beams, was fast sinking into seas
lighted up by lurid fires, and deeply stained by
blood." Shortly after which comes that terrible
picture of the Royal Bluebeard at the close of his evil
reign; Harrison Ainsworth depicting the bloated
mass of sensuality then called and yet remembered
with horror as