THE RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.
The Coverts, now and long since utterly extinct, were once among the most powerful, as they were also among the noblest, in the county. They were of Norman descent, and, to use a well-worn phrase, “came over with the Conqueror”; but they are not found settled here until towards the close of the fifteenth century, being preceded, as lords of the manor, by the Poynings of Poynings, and by the Berkeleys and Stanleys. Sir Walter Covert, to whose ancestors the manor fell by marriage, was the builder of that Slaugham Place whose ruins yet remain to show his idea of what was due to a landed proprietor of his standing. They cover, within their enclosing walls of red brick, which rise from the yet partly filled moat, over three acres of what is now orchard and meadowland. In spring the apple trees bloom pink and white amid the grey and lichen-stained ashlar of the ruined walls and arches of Palladian architecture, and the lush grass grows tall around the cold hearths of the roofless rooms. The noble gateway leads now, not from courtyard to hall, but doorless, with its massive stones wrenched apart by clinging ivy, stands merely as some sort of key to the enigma of ground plan presented by walls ruinated in greater part to the level of the watery turf.
The singular facts of high wall and moat surrounding a mansion of Jacobean build seem to point to an earlier building, contrived with these defences when men thought first of security and afterwards of comfort. Some few mullioned windows of much earlier date than the greater part of the mansion remain to confirm the thought.
That a building of the magnificence attested by these crumbling walls should have been allowed to fall into decay so shortly after its completion is a singular fact. Though the male line of the Coverts failed, and their estates passed, by the marriage of their womankind, into other hands, yet their alienation would not necessarily imply the destruction of their roof-tree. The explanation is to be sought in the situation and defects of the ground upon which Slaugham Place stood: a marshy tract of land, which no builder of to-day would think of selecting as a site for so important a dwelling. Home as it was of swamps and damps, and quashy as it is even now, it must have been in the past the breeding-ground of agues and chills innumerable.
THE ENTRANCE: RUINS OF SLAUGHAM PLACE.
A true exemplar this of that Sussex of which in 1690 a barrister on circuit, whose profession led him by evil chance into this county, writes to his wife: “The Sussex ways are bad and ruinous beyond imagination. I vow ’tis melancholy consideration that mankind will inhabit such a heap of dirt for a poor livelihood. The county is in a sink of about fourteen miles broad, which receives all the water that falls from the long ranges of hills on both sides of it, and not being furnished with convenient draining, is kept moist and soft by the water till the middle of a dry summer, which is only able to make it tolerable to ride for a short time.”
Such soft and shaky earth as this could not bear the weight of so ponderous a structure as was Slaugham Place: the swamps pulled its masonry apart and rotted its fittings. Despairing of victory over the reeking moisture, its owners left it for healthier sites. Then the rapacity of all those neighbouring folk who had need of building material completed the havoc wrought by natural forces, and finally Slaugham Place became what it is to-day. Its clock-tower was pulled down and removed to Cuckfield Park, where it now spans the entrance drive of that romantic spot, and its handsomely carved Jacobean stairway is to-day the pride and glory of the “Star” Hotel at Lewes.
The Coverts are gone; their heraldic shields, in company of an architectural frieze of greyhounds’ and leopards’ heads and skulls of oxen wreathed in drapery, still decorate what remains of the north front of their mansion, and their achievements are repeated upon their tombs within the little church of Slaugham on the hillside. You may, if heraldically versed, learn from their quarterings into what families they married; but the deeds they wrought, and their virtues and their vices, are, for the most part, clean forgotten, even as their name is gone out of the land, who once, as tradition has it, travelled southward from London to the sea on their own manors.
BOLNEY.
The squat, shingled spirelet of Slaugham Church and its decorated architecture mark the spot where many of this knightly race lie buried. In the Covert Chapel is the handsome brass of John Covert, who died in 1503; and in the north wall of the chancel is the canopied altar-tomb of Richard Covert, the much-married, who died in 1547, and is represented, in company of three of his four wives, by little brass effigies, together with a curious brass representing the Saviour rising from the tomb, guarded by armed knights of weirdly-humorous aspect, the more diverting because executed all innocent of joke or irreverence.
Here is a rubbing, nothing exaggerated, of one of these guardian knights, to bear me up.
FROM A BRASS AT SLAUGHAM.
Another Richard, but twice married, who died in 1579, is commemorated in a large and elaborate monument in the Covert Chapel, whereon are sculptured, in an attitude of prayer, Richard himself, his two wives, six sons, and eight daughters.
Last of the Coverts whose name is perpetuated here is Jane, who deceased in 1586.
HICKSTEAD PLACE.
Beside these things, Slaugham claims some interest as containing the mansion of Ashfold, where once resided Mrs. Matcham, a sister of Nelson. Indeed, it was while staying here that the Admiral received the summons which sped him on his last and most glorious and fatal voyage. Slaugham, too, with St. Leonard’s Forest, contributes a title to the peerage, Lord St. Leonards’ creation being of “Slaugham, in the county of Sussex.”
This route to Brighton is singularly rural and lovely, and particularly beautiful in the way of copses and wooded hollows, whence streamlets trickle away to join the river Adur. Villages lie shyly just off its course, and must be sought, only an occasional inn or smithy, or the lodge-gates of modern estates called into existence since the making of the road in 1813, breaking the solitude. The existence of Bolney itself is only hinted at by the pinnacles of its church tower peering over the topmost branches of distant trees. “Bowlney,” as the countryfolk pronounce the name, is worth a little detour, for it is a compact, picturesque spot that might almost have been designed by an artist with a single thought for pictorial composition, so well do its trees, the houses, old and new, the church, and the “Eight Bells” inn, group for effect.
Down the road, rather over a mile distant from Bolney, and looking so remarkably picturesque from the highway that even the least preoccupied with antiquities must needs stop and admire, is Hickstead Place, a small but beautiful residence, the seat of Miss Davidson, dating from the time of Henry the Seventh, with a curious detached building in two floors, of the same or even somewhat earlier period, on the lawn; remarkable for the large vitrified bricks in its gables, worked into rough crosses and supposed to indicate a former use as a chapel. History, however, is silent that point; but, as the inquirer may discover forhimself, it now fulfils the twin offices of a studio and a lumber room. The parish church of Twineham, little more than a mile away, is of the same period, and built of similar materials. Hickstead Place has been in the same family for close upon four hundred years, and as an old house without much in the way of a history, and with its ancient features largely retained and adapted to modern domestic needs, is a striking example both of the continuity and the placidity of English life. The staircase walls are frescoed in a blue monochrome with sixteenth-century representations of field-sports and hunting scenes, very curious and interesting. The roof is covered with slabs of Horsham stone, and the oak entrance is original. Ancient yews, among them one clipped to resemble a bear sitting on his rump, give an air of distinction to the lawn, completed by a pair of eighteenth-century wrought-iron gates between red brick pillars.
NEWTIMBER PLACE.
Sayers Common is a modern hamlet, of a few scattered houses. Albourne lies away to the right. From here the Vale of Newtimber opens out and the South Downs rise grandly ahead. Noble trees, singly and in groups, grow plentiful; and where they are at their thickest, in the sheltered hollow of the hills, stands Newtimber Place, belonging to Viscount Buxton, a noble mansion with Queen Anne front of red brick and flint, and an Elizabethan back, surrounded by a broad moat of clear water, formed by embanking the beginnings of a little stream that comes willing out of the chalky bosom of the hills. It is a rarely complete and beautiful scene.
Beyond it, above the woods where in spring the fluting blackbird sings of love and the delights of a mossy nest in the sheltered vale, rises Dale Hill, with its old toll-house. It was in the neighbouring Dale Vale that Tom Sayers, afterwards the unconquered champion of England, fought his first fight.
PYECOMBE: JUNCTION OF THE ROADS.
He was not, as often stated, an Irishman, but the son of a man descended from a thoroughly Sussexian stock. The name of Sayers is well known throughout Sussex, and in particular at Hand Cross, Burgess Hill, and Hurstpierpoint. There is even, as we have already seen, a Sayers Common on the road. Tom Sayers, however, was born at Brighton. He worked as a bricklayer at building the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes Railway: that great viaduct which spans the Brighton Road as you enter the town. He retired in 1860, after his fight with Heenan, and when he died, in 1865, the reputation of prize-fighting died with him.
At the summit of Dale Hill stands Pyecombe, above the junction of roads, on the rounded shoulder of the downs. The little rubbly and flinty churches of Pyecombe, Patcham, Preston, and Clayton are very similar in appearance exteriorly and all are provided with identical towers finished off with a shingled spirelet of insignificant proportions. This little Norman church, consisting of a tiny nave and chancel only, is chiefly interesting as possessing a triple chancel arch and an ancient font.
PATCHAM.
Over the chancel arch hangs a painting of the Royal Arms, painted in the time of George the Third, faded and tawdry, with dandified unicorn and a gamboge lion, all teeth and mane, regarding the congregation on Sundays, and empty benches at other times, with the most amiable of grins. It is quite typical of Pyecombe that those old Royal Arms should still remain; for the place is what it was then, and then it doubtless was what it had been in the days of good Queen Anne, or even of Elizabeth, to go no further back. The grey tower tops the hill as it has done since the Middle Ages, the few cottages cluster about it as of yore, and only those who lived in those humble homes, or reared that church, are gone. Making the circuit of the church, I look upon the stone quoins and the bedded flints of those walls; and as I think how they remain, scarce grizzled by the weathering of countless storms, and how those builders are not merely gone, but are as forgotten as though they had never existed, I could have it in my heart to hate the insensate handiwork of man, to which he has given an existence: the unfeeling walls of stone and flint and mortar that can outlast him and the memory of him by, it may well be, a thousand years.
From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the South Downs into the country of the “deans.” North and South of the Downs are two different countries—so different that if they were inhabited by two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge, it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter. But it is a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty downs, looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.
THE DEANS
The country of the deans is, in general, a barren country. Every one knows Brighton and its neighbourhood to be places where trees are rare enough to be curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are hollows and shallow valleys amid the dry chalky hillsides where little boscages form places for the eye, tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These are the deans. Very often they have been made the sites of villages; and all along this southern aspect of these hills of the Sussex seaboard you will find deans of various qualifications, from East Dean and West Dean, by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course “Dean-ton”) near Newhaven, Rottingdean, Ovingdean, Balsdean, Standean, Roedean, and the two that are strung along these last miles intoBrighton—Pangdean and Withdean. Most of these show the same characteristics of clustered woodlands in a sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty church with stunted spirelet presides over a few large farms and a group of little cottages. Time and circumstance have changed those that do not happen to conform to this general rule; and, as ill luck will have it, our first “dean” is one of these nonconformists.
Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility, standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable.
Why Patcham is not nominally, as it is actually in form and every other circumstance, a “dean” is not clear. There it lies in the vale, just as a dean should and does do; with sheltering ridges about it, and in the hollow the church, the cottages, and the woodlands. Very noble woodlands, too: tall elms with clanging rookeries, and, nestling below them, an old toll-house.
Not soveryold a toll-house, for it was the successor of Preston turnpike-gate which, erected on the outskirts of Brighton town about 1807, was removed north of Withdean in 1854, as the result of an agitation set afoot in 1853, when the Highway Trustees were applying to Parliament for another term of years. It and its legend “NO TRUST,” painted large for all the world to see, and hateful in a world that has ever preferred credit, were a nuisance and a gratuitous satire upon human nature. No one regretted them when their time came, December 31st, 1878; least of all the early cyclists, who had the luxury of payingat Patcham Gate, and yielded their “tuppences” with what grace they might.
On the less hallowed north side of the churchyard of Patcham may still with difficulty be spelled the inscription:
Sacred to the memory of DANIEL SCALES,who was unfortunately shot on Thursday evening,November 7th, 1796.Alas! swift flew the fatal lead,Which piercèd through the young man’s head.He instant fell, resigned his breath,And closed his languid eyes in death.All you who do this stone draw near,Oh! pray let fall the pitying tear.From this sad instance may we all,Prepare to meet Jehovah’s call.
It is a relic of those lawless old days of smuggling that are so dear to youthful minds. Youth, like the Irish peasant, is always anarchist and “agin the Government”; and certainly the deeds of derring-do that were wrought by smuggler and Revenue officer alike sometimes stir even middle-aged blood.
OLD DOVECOT, PATCHAM.
Smuggling was rife here. Where, indeed, was it not in those times? and Daniel Scales was the most desperate of a daring gang. The night when he was “unfortunately shot,” he, with many others of the gang, was coming from Brighton laden heavily with smuggled goods, and on the way they fell in with a number of soldiers and excise officers, near this place. The smugglers fled, leaving their casks of liquor to take care of themselves, careful only tomake good their own escape, saving only Daniel Scales, who, met by a “riding officer,” was called upon to surrender himself and his booty, which he refused to do. The officer, who himself had been in early days engaged in many smuggling transactions, but was now a brand plucked from the burning, and zealous for King and Customs, knew that Daniel was “too good a man for him, for they had tried it out before,” so he shot him through the head; and as the bullet, like those in the nursery rhyme, was made of “lead, lead, lead,” Daniel was killed. Alas! poor Daniel.
An ancient manorial pigeon-house or dovecot still remains at Patcham, sturdily built of Sussex flints, banded with brick, and wonderfully buttressed.
PRESTON
Preston is now almost wholly urban, but its Early English church, although patched and altered, still keeps its fresco representing the murder of Thomas à Becket, and that of an angel disputing with the Devil for the possession of a departed soul. The angel, like some celestial grocer, is weighing the shivering soul in the balance, while the Devil, sitting in one scale, makes the unfortunate soul in the other “kick the beam.”
It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town.
It is Brighton’s ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London.
Brighton has renewed its youth. It has had ill fortune as well as good, and went through a middleperiod when, deserted by Royalty, and not yet fully won to a broader popularity, its older houses looked shabby and its newer mean. But that period has passed. What remains of the age of George the Fourth has with the lapse of time and the inevitable changes in taste, become almost archæologically interesting, and the newer Brighton approaches a Parisian magnificence and display. The Pavilion of George the Fourth was the last word in gorgeousness of his time, but it wears an old-maidish appearance of dowdiness in midst of the Brighton of the twentieth century.
PRESTON VIADUCT: ENTRANCE TO BRIGHTON.
The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even if those characteristicsemicircular bayed fronts did not: they are York Place, Hanover Terrace, Gloucester Place, Adelaide this, Caroline that, and Brunswick t’other: all names associated with the late Georgian period.
The Old Steyne was in Florizel’s time the rendezvous of fashion. The “front” and the lawns of Hove have long since usurped that distinction, but the gardens and the old trees of the Old Steyne are more beautiful than ever. They are the only few the town itself can boast.
BRIGHTON
Treeless Brighton has been the derision alike of Doctor Johnson and Tom Hood, to name no others. Johnson, who first visited Brighton in 1770 in the company of the Thrales and Fanny Burney, declared the neighbourhood to be so desolate that “if one had a mind to hang one’s self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope.” At any rate it would have needed a particularly stout tree to serve Johnson’s turn, had he a mind to it. Johnson was an ingrate, and not worthy of the good that Doctor Brighton wrought upon him.
Hood, on the other hand, is jocular in an airier and lighter-hearted fashion. His punning humour (a kind of witticism which Johnson hated with the hatred of a man who delved deep after Greek and Latin roots) is to Johnson’s as the footfall of a cat to the earth-shaking tread of the elephant. His, too, is a manner of gibe that is susceptible of being construed into praise by the townsfolk. “Of all the trees,” says he, “I ever saw, none could be mentioned in the same breath with the magnificent beach at Brighton.”
But though these trees of the Pavilion give a grateful shelter from the glare of the sun and the roughness of the wind, they hide little of the tawdriness of that architectural enormity. The gilding has faded, the tinsel become tarnished, and the whole pile of cupolas and minarets is reduced to one even tint, that is not white nor grey, nor any distinctive shade of any colour. How the preposterous building could everhave been admired (as it undoubtedly was at one time) surpasses belief. Its cost, one shrewdly suspects—it is supposed to have cost over £1,000,000—was what appealed to the imagination.
That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord Hertford whom one recognises as the “Marquis of Steyne” in “Vanity Fair,” admired it, as assuredly did not rough and ready Cobbett, who opines, “A good idea of the building may be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners.”
That is no bad description of this monument of extravagance and bad taste. Begun so early as 1784, it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and rebuildings, completed in 1818, with the exception of the north gate, the work of William the Fourth in 1832.
The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill-informed enthusiasm for Chinese architecture, mingled with that of India and Constantinople, and was built as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the Summer Palace at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. It suffers nowadays, much more than it need do, from the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance with its style, would not only relieve the dull drab monotone, but would go some way to justify the Prince’s taste.
But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of a certain permanence upon the princely and royal favours extended to the town, whose population, numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had grown to 5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the succeeding ten years it had more than doubled itself, being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the modern towns of Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen in the present population of 161,000—the equivalent of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that in the last year of the reign of George the Fourth.
THE PAVILION.
One of the best stories connected with the Pavilion is that told so well in the “Four Georges”:
“And now I have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence and York and the very highest personage in the realm, the great Prince Regent, all play parts.
“The feast was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the scene. In Gilray’s caricatures, and amongst Fox’s jolly associates, there figures a great nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs; but a sort of reconciliation had taken place, and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in Sussex.
“The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a notable scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to drink wine with the Duke—a challenge which the old toper did not refuse. He soon began to see that there was a conspiracy against him; he drank glass for glass: he overthrew many of the brave. At last the first gentleman of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers filled a great glass for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink. ‘Now,’ says he, ‘I will have my carriage and go home.’
“The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof where he had been so generously entertained. ‘No,’ he said; ‘he had had enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him; he would leave the place at once, and never enter its doors more.’
“The carriage was called, and came; but, in the half-hour’s interval, the liquor had proved too potent for the old man; his host’s generous purpose was answered, and the Duke’s old grey head lay stupefied on the table. Nevertheless, when his post-chaise wasannounced, he staggered to it as well as he could, and, stumbling in, bade the postilions drive to Arundel.
“They drove him for half an hour round and round the Pavilion lawn; the poor old man fancied he was going home.
“When he awoke that morning, he was in a bed at the Prince’s hideous house at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence; they have fiddlers there every day, and sometimes buffoons and mountebanks hire the Riding-House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted.”
CHARLES, DUKE OF NORFOLK
Very telling indignation, no doubt, but the gross defect of Thackeray’s “Four Georges” is its want of sincerity. Sympathy is wasted on that Duke, who was one of the filthiest voluptuaries of his age, or of any other since that of Heliogabalus. Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was not merely a bestial drunkard, like his father before him, capable of drinking all his contemporaries under the table; but was a swinish creature in every way. Gorging himself to repletion with food and drink, he would make himself purposely sick, in order to begin again. A contemporary account of him as a member of the Beefsteak Club described him as a man of huge unwieldy fatness, who, having gorged until he had eaten himself into incapacity for speaking or moving, would motion for a bell to be rung, when servants, entering with a litter, would carry him off to bed. It was well written of him:
On Norfolk’s tomb inscribe this placard:He lived a beast and died a blackguard.
This “very old,” “poor old man” of Thackeray’s misplaced sympathy did not, as a matter of fact, live to a very great age. He died in 1815, aged sixty-nine.
Practical joking was elevated to the status of a fine art at Brighton by the Prince and his merry men. A characteristic story of him is that told of a drive to Brighton races, when he was accompanied in his greatyellow barouche by Townsend, the Bow Street runner, who was present to protect the Prince from insult or robbery at the hands of the multitude. “It was a position,” says my authority, “which gave His Royal Highness an opportunity to practise upon his guardian a somewhat unpleasant joke. Turning suddenly to Townsend, just at the termination of a race, he exclaimed, ‘By Jove, Townsend, I’ve been robbed; I had with me some damson tarts, but they are now gone.’ ‘Gone!’ said Townsend, rising; ‘impossible!’ ‘Yes,’ rejoined the Prince, ‘and you are the purloiner,’ at the same time taking from the seat whereon the officer had been sitting the crushed crust of the asserted missing tarts, and adding, ‘This is a sad blot upon your reputation as a vigilant officer.’ ‘Rather say, your Royal Highness, a sad stain upon my escutcheon,’ added Townsend, raising the gilt-buttoned tails of his blue coat and exhibiting the fruit-stained seat of his nankeen inexpressibles.”
But it was not this practical-joking Prince who first discovered Brighton. It would never have attained its great vogue without him, but it would have been the health resort of a certain circle of fashion—an inferior Bath, in fact. To Dr. Richard Russell—the name sometimes spelt with one “l”—who visited the little village of Brighthelmstone in 1750, belongs the credit of discovering the place to an ailing fashionable world. He died in 1759, long ere the sun of royal splendour first rose upon the fishing-village; but even before the Prince of Wales first visited Brighthelmstone in 1782, it had attained a certain popularity, as the “Brighthelmstone Guide” of July, 1777, attests, in these halting verses:
This town or village of renown,Like London Bridge, half broken down,Few years ago was worse than Wapping,Not fit for a human soul to stop in;But now, like to a worn-out shoe,By patching well, the place will do.You’d wonder much, I’m sure, to seeHow it’s becramm’d with quality.
And so on.
THE CLIFFS, BRIGHTHELMSTONE, 1789.From an aquatint after Rowlandson.
DR. RICHARD RUSSELL.From the portrait by Zoffany.
GUIDES TO BRIGHTON
Brighthelmstone, indeed, has had more Guides written upon it than even Bath has had, and very curious some of them are become in these days. They range from lively to severe, from grave to gay, from the serious screeds of Russell and Dr. Relhan, his successor, to the light and airy, and not too admirablepuffs of to-day. But, however these guides may vary, they all agree in harking back to that shadowy Brighthelm who is supposed to have given his peculiar name to the ancient fisher-village here established time out of mind. In the days when “County Histories” were first let loose, in folio volumes, upon an unoffending land, historians, archæologists, and other interested parties seemed at a loss for the derivation of the place-name, and, rather than confess themselves ignorant of its meaning, they conspired together to invent a Saxon archbishop, who, dying in the odour of sanctity and the ninth century, bequeathed his appellation to what is now known, in a contracted form, as Brighton.
But the man is not known who has unassailable proofs to show of this Brighthelm’s having so honoured the fisher-folk’s hovels with his name.
Thackeray, greatly daring, considering that the Fourth George is the real patron—saint, we can hardly say; let us make it king—of the town, elected to deliver his lectures upon the “Four Georges” at Brighton, among other places, and to that end made, with monumental assurance, a personal application at the Town Hall for the hire of the banqueting-room in the Royal Pavilion.
But one of the Aldermen, who chanced to be present, suggested, with extra-aldermanic wit, that the Town Hall would be equally suitable, intimating at the same time that it was not considered as strictly etiquette to “abuse a man in his own house.” The witty Alderman’s suggestion, we are told, was acted upon, and the Town Hall engaged forthwith.
It argued considerable courage on the lecturer’s part to declaim against George the Fourth anywhere in that town which His Majesty had, by his example, conjured up from almost nothingness. It does not seem that Thackeray was, after all, ill received at Brighton; whence thoughts arise as to the ingratitude and fleeting memories of them that were either in the first or second generation, advantaged by the royal preference for this bleak stretch of shore beneath thebare South Downs, open to every wind that blows. Surely gratitude is well described as a “lively sense of favours to come,” and they, no doubt, considered that the statue they had erected in the Steyne gardens to him was a full discharge of all obligations. Nor is the history of that effigy altogether creditable. It was erected in 1828, as the result of a movement among Brighton tradesfolk in 1820, to honour the memory of one who had incidentally made the fortunes of so many among them; but although the subscription list remained open for eight years and a half, it did not provide the £3.000 agreed upon to be paid to Chantrey, the sculptor of it.
The bronze statue presides to-day over a cab-rank, and the sea-salt breezes have strongly oxidised the face to an arsenical green; insulting, because greenness was not a distinguishing trait in the character of George the Fourth.
LAST OF THE REGENCY.
The surrounding space is saturated with memories of the Regency; but the roysterers are all gone and the recollection of them is dim. Prince and King, the Barrymores—Hellgate, Newgate, and Cripplegate—brothers three; Mrs. Fitzherbert, “the only woman whom George the Fourth ever really loved,” and whom he married; Sir John Lade, the reckless, the frolicsome, historic in so far that he was the first who publicly wore trousers: these, with others innumerable, are long since silent. No more are they heard who with unseemly revelry affronted the midnight moon, or upset the decrepit watchman in his box. Those days and nights are done, nor are they likely to be revived while the Brighton policemen remain so big and muscular.
With the death of George the Fourth the play was played out. William the Fourth occasionally patronised Brighton, but decorum then obtained, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert not only disliked the memory of the last of the Georges, but could not find at the Pavilion the privacy they desired. The Queen therefore sold it to the then Commissioners ofBrighton in 1850, for the sum of £53,000, and never afterwards visited the town.
The Pavilion and the adjoining Castle Square, where one of the old coach booking-offices still survives as a railway receiving-office, are to most people the ultimate expressions of antiquity at Brighton; but there remains one landmark of what was “Brighthelmstone” in the ancient parish church of St. Nicholas, standing upon the topmost eyrie of the town, and overlooking from its crowded and now disused graveyard more than a square mile of crowded roofs below. It is probably the place referred to by a vivacious Frenchman who, a hundred and twenty years ago, summed up “Brigtemstone” as “a miserable village, commanded by a cemetery and surrounded by barren mountains.”
From here you can, with some trouble, catch just a glimpse of the Watery horizon through the grey haze that rises from countless chimney-pots, and never a breeze but blows laden with the scent of soot and smoke. Yet, for all the changed fortune that changeful Time has brought this hoary and grimy place, it has not been deprived of interesting mementoes. You may, with patience, discover the tombstone of Phœbe Hassall, a centenarian of pith and valour, who, in her youthful days, in male attire, joined the army of His Majesty King George the Second and warred with her regiment in many lands; and all around are the resting-places of many celebrities, who, denied a wider fame, have yet their place in local annals; but prominent, in place and in fame, is the tomb of that Captain Tettersell who (it must be owned, for a consideration) sailed away one October morn of 1651 across the Channel, carrying with him the hope of the clouded Royalists aboard his grimy craft.
ST. NICHOLAS, THE OLD PARISH CHURCH OF BRIGHTHELMSTONE.
His altar-tomb stands without the southern doorway of the church, and reads curiously to modern ears. That not one of all the many who have had occasion to print it has transcribed the quaintness of that epitaph aright seems a strange thing, but so it is:
P.M.S.Captain NICHOLAS TETTERSELL, through whose Prudence ualour an Loyalty Charles the second King of England & after he had escaped the sword of his merciless rebells and his fforses received a fatall ouerthrowe at Worcester Septr3d1651, was ffaithfully preserued & conueyed into ffrance. Departed this life the 26thday of Iuly 1674.——>——>——>Within this monument doth lye,Approued Ffaith, honorand Loyalty.In this Cold Clay he hath now tane up his station,At once preserued yeChurch, the Crowne and nation.When Charles yeGreate was nothing but a breathThis ualiant soule stept betweene him & death.Usurpers threats nor tyrant rebells frowneCould not afrright his duty to the Crowne;Which glorious act of his Church & state,Eight princes in one day did GratulateProfessing all to him in debt to beeAs all the world are to his memorySince Earth Could not Reward his worth have given,Hee now receiues it from the King of heauen.
P.M.S.
Captain NICHOLAS TETTERSELL, through whose Prudence ualour an Loyalty Charles the second King of England & after he had escaped the sword of his merciless rebells and his fforses received a fatall ouerthrowe at Worcester Septr3d1651, was ffaithfully preserued & conueyed into ffrance. Departed this life the 26thday of Iuly 1674.
——>——>——>
Within this monument doth lye,Approued Ffaith, honorand Loyalty.In this Cold Clay he hath now tane up his station,At once preserued yeChurch, the Crowne and nation.When Charles yeGreate was nothing but a breathThis ualiant soule stept betweene him & death.Usurpers threats nor tyrant rebells frowneCould not afrright his duty to the Crowne;Which glorious act of his Church & state,Eight princes in one day did GratulateProfessing all to him in debt to beeAs all the world are to his memorySince Earth Could not Reward his worth have given,Hee now receiues it from the King of heauen.
The escape of Charles the Second, after many perilous adventures, belongs to the larger sphere of English history. Driven, after the disastrous result of Worcester Fight, to wander, a fugitive, through the land, he sought the coast from the extreme west of Dorsetshire, and only when he reached Sussex did he find it possible to embark and sail across the Channel to France. Hunted by relentless Roundheads, and sheltered on his way only by a few faithful adherents, who in their loyalty risked everything for him, he at length, with his small party, reached the village of Brighthelmstone and lodged at the inn then called the “George.”
THE AQUARIUM, BEFORE DESTRUCTION OF THE CHAIN PIER.
That evening, after much negotiation, Colonel Gunter, the King’s companion, arranged with Nicholas Tettersell, master of a small trading craft, to convey the King across to Fécamp, to sail in the early hours of the following morning, October 14th. How they sailed, and the account of their wanderings, are fully set forth in the “narrative” of Colonel Gunter.
A new era for Brighton and the Brighton Road opened in November, 1896, with the coming of the motor-car. Already the old period of the coaching inns had waned, and that of gigantic and palatial hotels, much more luxurious than anything ever imagined by the builders of the Pavilion, had dawned; and then, as though to fitly emphasize the transition, the old Chain Pier made a dramatic end.
The Chain Pier just missed belonging to the Georgian era, for it was not begun until October, 1822, but, opened the following year, it had so long been a feature of Brighton—and so peculiar a feature—that it had come, with many, to typify the town, quite as much as the Pavilion itself. It was, moreover, additionally remarkable as being the first pleasure-pier built in England. It had long been failing and, condemned as dangerous, would soon have been demolished; but the storm of December 4th, 1896, spared that trouble. It was standing when day closed in, but when the next morning dawned, its place was vacant.
Since then, those who have long known Brighton have never visited it without a sense of loss; and the Palace Pier, opposite the Aquarium, does not fill the void. It is a vulgarity for one thing, and for another typifies the Hebraic week-end, when the sons and daughters of Judah descend upon the town. Moreover, it is absolutely uncharacteristic, and has its counterparts in many other places.
But Brighton itself is eternal. It suffers change, it grows continually; but while the sea remains and the air is clean and the sun shines, it, and the road to it, will be the most popular resorts in England.