300 Pilgrims to Holywell [1898 



' This of course is the true thought of our Government, and has been 

 for at least ten years, but for the first time to-day it is beginning to be 

 avowed. George represents all that is most extreme, most outrageous, 

 in modern English politics, and it marks the decline of the higher tradi- 

 tions to find one like him proclaiming and defending it. I shall not 

 write again to the ' Times,' I should only mar the effect of my last 

 letter, which has certainly been great, and do no good. The dispute 

 between France and England is a dispute between rival card sharpers, 

 and the very best thing that can happen is that they should beat in each 

 other's heads. 



" i&th Oct. — Worked all the morning at ' Satan in Heaven ' [' Satan 

 Absolved']. George has gone up to London. 



" igth Oct. — Made my pilgrimage of thanksgiving to Holywell in 

 drizzle and fog, taking my nurse, Miss Lawrence, with me, and my 

 crutches, which I deposited at the Shrine, bound up with a nightgown 

 and a label thus inscribed : 



" ' Set here in thankful token of a cure from long sickness after 

 bathing in St. Winifred's Well. By her servant W. S. B. October 19, 

 1898.' 



" The scene inside the shrine was the most interesting I ever saw in 

 Europe. Three men were being passed through the water stark naked, 

 but for a slight bathing drawer round the loins, and each time after 

 passing they knelt on the pavement, dripping wet and prayed aloud. A 

 priest was reciting ' Hail Marys,' and at the end of each ' Hail Mary,' 

 ' Holy Winifred, still in an unbelieving age, miraculous.' There were 

 lighted candles and flowers, and the fervour of these naked men, one 

 a mere bag of skin and bones, was tremendous. In the dim light of a 

 foggy day nothing at all congruous to the nineteenth century was 

 visible. It was a thing wholly of the middle ages, the dark ages, the 

 darkest of the dark ages, magnificent, touching — it brought tears to 

 my eyes. I hung up my crutches in a corner with other relics, and 

 placed Sibell's flowers which she had sent as a thank offering on the 

 altar, and knelt for some ten minutes reciting the Penitential Psalms. 



" Outside the shrine I found Father Beauclerk, a young, good-looking 

 Jesuit, but deaf and afflicted with some ailment, perhaps paralytic. He 

 told me that the Town Council of Holywell was about to try its power 

 of closing the Well, and so of preventing the bathing, which has gone 

 on here precisely as it is to-day since the rebuilding of the Shrine in the 

 reign of Henry VII, and doubtless for many hundred years before it. 

 The true legal ownership of the water seems in doubt. The Duke of 

 Westminster is Lord of the Manor, and granted some thirty years ago 

 a long lease to the Town Council, but by some accident never signed it. 

 The Town Council in its turn leased it to the Jesuits, who put up a 

 railing and established a charge of twopence a head for maintenance of 



