MILESTONES
There are milestones on the Dover Road. Of course. Mr. F’s aunt, inLittle Dorrit, knew something about them, but not much. Her knowledge was general, not particular. We read in Chapter XXIII:—
“A diversion was occasioned here by Mr. F.’s aunt, making the following inexorable and awful statement: ‘There’s milestones on the Dover Road.’ Clennam was disconcerted by this. ‘Let him deny it if he can,’ continued the venomous old lady. He could not deny it. There are milestones on the Dover Road.”
We will not grow excited about this incontrovertible fact. But not many people can say where the first milestone from London on this highway is to be found. Although, in fact, it is at the end of the first mile from the south side of London Bridge, no one in these days would suspect such a relic of surviving in London streets. It stands where the Old Kent Road begins, on the left-hand side as you go south, with an iron plate on it, proclaiming this to be “1 mile from London Bridge.” The stone, greatly battered, stands prominently, on an elevated kerb. Just because we associate milestones with country roads and hedgerows, we look upon this, standing in that crowded urban region, as curious; but when it was first set up, this was on the very verge of the country.
We have heard much of the Old Kent Road in recent years. People who never so much as suspected the existence of it, grew familiar with its name, in the refrain of a comic song dealing with costermongers. The music-halls in 1891 reverberated with the name.But that is all done with. The Old Kent Road is not to be described in a phrase, nor thought of as the coster’s paradise. It is in fact a road of many aspects.
But how to catalogue the kinds of them that dwell here? It cannot well be done. Shopkeepers of every kind and degree; private residents of a more than average decent respectability; publicans, the landlords of public-houses of a prodigious bigness; family doctors—these are the more salient classes of the Old Kent Road. The coster? you ask. Nay, but he does not “inhabit” here. He (shall I phrase it thus?) pervades the road—the “road,”bien entendu, not the houses that line the road—and it is only on Saturday nights, when frugal housewives fare forth, cheapening necessary provisions, that you who seek shall find him, with his booths and shallows, his barrows and crazy trestles; his naphtha-lamps flaring gustily, his voice raucous, his goods striking both eye and nose in no uncertain manner. At such times the kennel becomes a busy mart, where you may purchase most articles of daily food at a price much below the current quotations in shops. Here a shilling possesses the purchasing power of a half-crown expended in the West End, and at thisbon marchéthe artisan’s table is fully furnished forth for a sum which would give the dwellers in mid-London pause.
IN THE OLD KENT ROAD
I have said that the Old Kent Road is eminently respectable; and so it is. But it is also (the natural sequence of respectability) not less eminently dull. It is only when Saturday evening comes, with its street-market commencing as the light dies out of the sky, that this long road becomes really interesting. Then it takes on an aspect of mystery, and is filled with flickering lights and shadows from the yellow gas-lamps and the gusty naphtha-flares that illuminate the dealings of Mr. ’Enery ’Awkins with his clients; and I am quite sure that, if Rembrandt was living now, he would choose such a time and place as the best subject for a picture in all London. One spot inespecial he would select. Taking a tramcar from the “Elephant and Castle,” he would ask the conductor to set him down by the bridge that crosses the Grand Surrey Canal, where the great gasometers of the South London Gas Company rear themselves high in air above mean houses and third-rate shops. Arrived here, he would select, as the best point of view, the broad entrance of a large public-house, outside of which the omnibuses stop in their career between the Borough and New Cross; and it is very likely that the thing which happened to me while sketching here would also befall him; that is to say, some short-sighted or dull-witted old lady would probably dig him in the ribs with the ferrule of her umbrella, and say, “Youngman, how long before your ’bus starts?” And, after all, I suppose one must not be satirical at the expense of that very worthy person the British matron; for, to a superficial glance, a sketch-block may be not unlike an omnibus way-bill; and who but a mad impressionist would see sketchable material in an ugly gasometer? And who other than a reckless Bohemian would be so far indifferent to public opinion as to sketch outside a gin-palace?
SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE OLD KENT ROAD.
The Old Kent Road of from seventy to eighty years ago presented a very different aspect from that with which those are familiar who travel nowadays up and down its great length in tramcars. It was distinctly rural. The few houses that were to be seen here in coaching days were chiefly inns, with swinging signs creaking, and horse-troughs lining the roadside, and the “Kentish Drovers,” that now wears much the same appearance as any other London public-house, was a veritable rustic house of call for countrymen driving their sheep and cattle to London markets. “The Bricklayers’ Arms” (a ’scutcheon, needless to say, unknown to heraldry), “The World Turned Upside Down,” the “Thomas à Becket,” and the “Golden Cross,” at New Cross, were scarcely less rural. It was at the “Golden Cross” that Pitt and Dundas, overtaken on the road from Dover to London by bad weather, put up for the night, and drank seven bottles of port before they went to bed.
Imagine, though, the condition of the roads, and locomotion upon them, when two Cabinet Ministers could think it not only convenient, but merely prudent, to halt for the night when so near London as New Cross! The Londoner who can take ’bus, tram, or train, and reach the City in less than half-an-hour, can scarce picture the necessity which faced those distinguished travellers.
DEPTFORD
When the old coachmen had got through New Cross Gate, which stood where the “Marquis of Granby” occupies the junction of the Deptford and Lewisham roads, they found themselves in the country, with Deptford, a busy but small and compact place, yet some distance ahead. Also, they had entered the county of Kent. Nowadays, it is difficult for the uninstructed to tell where New Cross ends or Deptford begins, for there is never a break in the houses all the way, while the street presents no attractions whatever; and even though the “good view of part of the Greenwich Railway, the carriages of which may be seen in motion to and fro” (a view which the local guide-book, published in 1837, considered worthy a visit from London), remains to this day, together with several other railways to keep it company, one does not find crowds of visitors hanging on the delirious delights of the several New Cross stations.
The Deptford of to-day is no place for the pilgrim. Instead of reminiscences ofKenilworthand Queen Elizabeth, of Drake and Peter the Great, it is rich in “stores” and “emporiums.” A workhouse stands where Sayes Court afforded shelter under its roof, and amusement in its gardens, for the Czar; the Trinity House of Deptford Strond has been removed to Tower Hill; and perhaps the most remarkable thing in modern Deptford is the Foreign Cattle Market. And yet here Elizabeth knighted Francis Drake, in 1581, on that good ship theGolden Hind, in which he had “compassed the world”; and here, on a site now occupied by cattle and by business premises, was the greatest dockyard in England at the most interesting period of English naval history.
It was at Deptford, they say, in 1593, that Christopher Marlowe, that bright particular star of poesy, was slain, while yet in his thirtieth year. Weknow too little of him, and no portraiture has come down to show us what manner of man this was who wrote divinely and lived (if we may believe the scribes) sottishly, after the manner, indeed, of the fraternity of his fellow-dramatists. It should seem, by some contemporary accounts, that he was killed by a rival in the affections of some saucy baggage; but there were not wanting those who asserted that the poet was assassinated by some myrmidon of the Church, whose priests he lost no opportunity of reviling. To lend some colour to this, there remains a pamphlet, printed in 1618, entitled—whata title!—“The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath Against Hard-hearted and Stiff-necked Sinners.” It says, “We read of one Marlowe, a Cambridge Scholler, who was a poet and a filthy play-maker; this wretch accounted that meeke servant of God, Moses, to be but a conjuror, and our Sweet Saviour to be but a seducer and deceiver of the people. But harken, ye brain-sicke and prophane poets and players, that bewitch idle eares with foolish vanities, what fell upon this prophane wretch; having a quarrell against one whom he met in the street in London, and would have stab’d him; but the partie perceiving his villany prevented him with catching his hands, and turning his own dagger into his braines; and so blaspheming and cursing he yeelded up his stinking breath. Marke this, ye players that live by making fools laugh at sinne and wickedness.”
Leaving “dirty Deptford,” that being the contumeliousconjunctionby which the place has generally been known, any time these last hundred years or so (and far be it from me to deprive any place of its well-merited title, whether good or ill), the road ascends steeply to Blackheath, past some fine oldmansions which, having been built in the days of Queen Anne and the earlier Georges, and having long housed the aristocracy who at one time frequented the place, became afterwards the homes of rich City merchants. Finally, when the “schools for young ladies” are gone which now occupy them, and give so distinct a scholastic air to this suburb, they will doubtless disappear amid a cloud of dust and the clinking of trowels, while on their sites will rise the unchanging pattern of suburban shops!
BLACKHEATH
Blackheath is one of the finest suburbs of London; a town girt round with many particularly beautiful outskirts. Strange to say, it has not been spoiled, and though thickly surrounded with houses, remains as breezy and healthful as ever; perhaps, indeed, since highwayman and footpad have disappeared, and now that duels are unknown, Blackheath may be regarded as even more healthy a spot than it was a hundred years ago.
The air which gave Bleak Heath its original name, and nipped the ears and made red the noses of the “outsides” who journeyed across it on their way to Dover in the winter months, is healthful and bracing, and is not so bleak as balmy in the days of June, when the sun shines brilliantly, and makes a generous heat to radiate from the old mellow brick wall of Greenwich Park that skirts the heath on its northern side. Outside the gate of that steepest of all parks stood Montagu House, whence the Earl of Chesterfield wrote those famous letters to his son—letters whose precepts, if carefully and consistently followed, would have infallibly sent their recipient to the Devil. Montagu House is gone now, pulled down long ago, and the site where the worldly Dormer wrote, pointing out to his son the way to perdition, is now a part of the Heath. Gone, too, is the garden where the phenomenally vulgar and undignified Princess Caroline of Wales, who lived here from 1797 to 1814, might have been seen, andwasseen one morning, sitting inthe grounds in a gorgeous dress, looped up to the knees, to show the stars with which her petticoats were spangled: with silver wings on her shoulders, and drinking from a pewter pot of porter, after the use and wont, between the acts, of the pantomime fairies of Drury Lane.
GREENWICH OBSERVATORY.
With thisPrincesse au café chantantdisappears the last vestige of royalty hereabouts, and Greenwich, lying down beyond the Park, has only dim memories of Henry the Eighth, and Queen Elizabeth, who was born in the palace of Placentia beside the Thames. If you venture into the Park, and stand upon Observatory Hill, you can at once glimpse London and gain an idea of how plebeian Greenwich has become. But its history is not yet done, and on this very spot, in 1893, a chapter of it was made by a foreign Anarchist who blew himself up in the making; and when the park keepers came and gleaned little pieces of him fromthe November boughs, the incident shaped more picturesquely than any other happening on this spot that I can think of.
ON THE HEATH
As for Blackheath, it seems that when, in older days, people had assignations on the Dover Road, they generally selected this place for the purpose; whether they were kings and emperors that met; or ambassadors, archbishops, rebels, or rival pretenders to the crown, they each and all came here to shake hands and interchange courtesies, or to speak with their enemies in the gate. It is very impressive to find Blackheath thus and so frequently honoured by the great ones of the earth; but it is also not a little embarrassing to the historian who wants to be getting along down the road, and yet desires to tell of all the pageants that here befell, and how the high contending parties variously saluted or sliced one another, as the case might be. Indeed, to write the history of Blackheath would be to despair of ever seeing Dover, and so, instead of beginning with Aulus Plautius, or any of the masterful Roman generals who doubtless had something to say to those cerulean Britons on this spot, I will skip the centuries, and only note the more outstanding and interesting occasions on which the heath has figured largely. Hie we then from the first to the fourteenth century, when, in 1381, Wat, the Tiler of Dartford, encamped here as leader of a hundred thousand insurgents. The fount and origin of this famous rebellion has ever been popularly sought in the historic incident of Dartford, in which the tax-gatherer lost his life; but a discontent had long been smouldering among the people, which needed only an eloquent happening of this nature to be fanned into a flame. The Poll Tax was one of the greatest grievances of the time, and the high rent of land was even more burdensome. The price of land might, perhaps, have been borne with, for it was of gradual growth, and regulated more or less by the law of supply and demand, but the Poll Taxwas a new burden, and one exacted harshly from the people by the nobles among whom the Government had farmed it. Then, too, the state of serfdom in which thevilleinsexisted was odious to them at this lapse of time, when men began to aspire to something better than to be the mere pawns of kings and nobles, sent to fight for feudalism on foreign battlefields, or in fratricidal conflicts at home. The days were drawing to a close when it was possible for kings to issue prescriptions for the seizing of artisans to be set to work on the building of royal palaces and castles; documents couched in this wise: “To our trusty and well-beloved Richard, Earl of Essex: Know ye that it is our pleasure that you do take and seize as many masons, carpenters, braziers, and all kinds of artificers necessary to the reparation of our Castle of Windsor, and that this shall be your warrant for detaining them so long as may be necessary to the completion of the work.”
With grievances old and new, it wanted but little to set the home counties in revolt, and so we find the cause of the Dartford tiler to have been warmly taken up, not only throughout his native Kent, but also, across the river, in Essex. The tiler’s neighbours swore they would protect him from punishment, and, marching to Maidstone, appointed him leader of the commons in Kent. The Canterbury citizens, less enthusiastic, were overawed by the number of the rebels, and several of them slain; five hundred joining in the march to London, while a dissolute itinerant priest, that famous demagogue John Ball, was enlarged from prison and appointed preacher to the throng, rousing them to fury by the rough eloquence and apt illustration with which he enlarged upon his text—
When Adam delved, and Eve span,Who was then the gentleman?
REBELS
From Blackheath to London marched this greatrabble. The king, with his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby; the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a hundred knights and sergeants were retired for safety to the Tower, whence they issued by boat to receive the petitions of the insurgents. Ten thousand of them waited at Rotherhithe, and by their fierce yells and threatening appearance so terrified the king’s attendants that, instead of permitting him to land, they took advantage of the tide, and returned. This behaviour disappointed Tyler, who saw no hope of concessions from the king’s advisers. He and his men burst into London, and, joined by the discontented host from Essex and Hertfordshire, under the leadership of one John Rakestraw (who has come down to us through the ages as Jack Straw, and whose camping-ground on Hampstead Heath bears to this day the old inn known as “Jack Straw’s Castle”), plundered the town, burning the Palace of the Savoy and all the buildings and records of the Temple. Fear eventually led the Court party to grant the four chief demands of the people: the abolition of slavery; the reduction of the rent of land to fourpence an acre; free liberty of buying and selling in all fairs and markets; and a general pardon for past offences. Had Tyler and Rakestraw been content with these concessions, it is probable that all would have been well; but their ambition had grown with success, and they trusted to further violence for greater advantage. Rushing into the Tower at the head of four hundred men, they murdered there the Archbishop of Canterbury and five others, and, retaining no less than twenty thousand followers in the City, intercepted the king as he rode out the following morning attended only by sixty horsemen. With boorish insolence, Tyler lay hold of the king’s bridle, when Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, stabbed him in the throat. Falling from his horse, the rebel leader was despatched by an esquire. The courage and tact of the young king are historical, and the way in which he quelled the hostility of theinsurgents, and drew their sympathies to himself, is well known; but the revocation of the charters of emancipation was a piece of faithlessness which makes the inquirer doubtful of the sincerity in which they were first granted, and the less inclined to blame Wat the Tiler for his excesses.
Thus tamely ended this, at one time, most formidable rebellion. The south gateway of London Bridge received its leader’s head, and the lieges who fared by that frowning archway, together with those others who felt no loyalty, were invited to look upon the head of a traitor. But some day Wat the Tiler of Dartford will have his monument, and, truly, there are few figures in our history that so well deserve one, for he was one of the first to stir a hand for the English people against the exactions of a largely alien nobility.
Blackheath witnessed no other warlike gathering for the matter of seventy years; but it was in the meanwhile the scene of many peaceful displays.
And here (says Stowe) came, in 1415, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, with four hundred citizens in scarlet, and with white and red hoods, to receive Henry the Fifth on his return from the victories in France, of which that of Agincourt was the greatest. “The gates and streets of the City were garnished and apparelled with precious cloths of arras, containing the history, triumphs, and princely acts of the kings of England, his progenitors, which was done to the end that the king might understand what remembrance the people would hand to their posterity of these his great victories and triumphs. The conduits in the City ran none other but good sweet wines, and that abundantly. There were also made in the streets many towers and stages, richly adorned, and on the height of them satsmall children, apparelled in semblance of angels, with sweet-tuned voices, singing praises and lauds unto God: for the victorious king would not suffer ditties to be made and sung of his history, for that he would wholly have the praise given unto God; neither would he suffer to be carried before him, nor showed unto the people, his helmet, whereupon his crown of gold was broke and deposed in the field by the violence of the enemy, and great strokes he had received, nor his other armour that in that cruel battle was so sore broke.”
CARDINAL WOLSEY
But perhaps the most remarkable meeting on Blackheath was that which assembled to escort the cardinal’s hat, designed for Wolsey. When that particularly haughty prelate learnt that the insignia of his promotion was on its way from Rome in charge only of an ordinary messenger, he deemed it essential to his importance that a more imposing method of conveyance should be provided. Previously, therefore, to the arrival of the Pope’s messenger on our shores, Wolsey caused him to be met and decked out with robes and trappings suitable to so important an occasion. That glorified pursuivant of Papal authority was, therefore, brought along the road from Dover to Blackheath with the greatest show of deference and consideration, and here, on this waste, thehatwas met by great numbers of the clergy and nobility, who conducted it to London and to Westminster Abbey in great triumph.
Wolsey’s hat, however, comes out of chronological sequence. Let us then put back the clock of history again to the year 1450, when Jack Cade’s rebellion peopled Blackheath with a menacing host. These were the early days of the quarrels of the rival Roses. England was losing—whether by bad generalship or by trend of unavoidable circumstances it matters not—the provinces of France won by Henry the Fifth whose feeble son now reigned; the kinghead around whose ill-balanced kingship raged the quarrels andfamily jealousies of the Dukes of York, Suffolk, Somerset, and Buckingham. The king was unpopular with half his subjects, and all of them raged with wounded pride and grief at the loss of France. The name of Mortimer was a power in the land, and the head of that ancient family was the Duke of York, who had probably the greatest following of feudatory tenants in England. To take advantage both of the prevailing discontent and of the Mortimer prestige came Jack Cade, an Irish adventurer, at the head of twenty thousand followers, and encamped on Blackheath. Cade was undoubtedly the Duke of York’s catspaw, but his sudden success in gaining adherents is something of a mystery; for, although he proclaimed himself a cousin of the duke, he was an obviously ignorant clown, a fact seized upon by Shakespeare with grand effect inHenry VI, part i, act 4, where he makes Cade’s companions to be Dick the Butcher, Smith the Weaver, and others of a like humble estate, whose asides upon Cade’s proclaiming himself a Mortimer and his wife a descendant of the Lacies are very amusing. “My father was a Mortimer,” says Cade, to which Dick the Butcher rejoins, whispering behind his hand, that “he was an honest man, and a good bricklayer;” while as to his wife’s descent from the Lacies, he remarks that “she was, indeed, a pedlar’s daughter, and sold many laces”—a punning speech that, were it the work of a modern dramatist, would be received with a howl of execration.
Cade retired from Blackheath to Sevenoaks on an equal force being sent to oppose him, but there turned at bay upon his pursuers, and the Royal army dispersed, leaving London at the mercy of this rabblement. There the fickle mob wavered and Cade fled, presently to suffer the fate that befell so many in those bloody days.
THE RESTORATION
The last occasion on which Blackheath has figured largely was really romantic. The date 1660, the occasion the Restoration of His Gracious MajestyKing Charles the Second to the throne of his ancestors. Romantic it was because of the home-coming of the interesting exile who had fled, years before, for his life; and was now come, greatly daring, to meet, not only his loyal citizen-subjects here, but to stand again face to face with the veteran regiments of the army which had finally crushed the Royalist hopes at Worcester Fight. No one knew how they would behave. Commanded by Loyalist officers, they were drawn up here to meet the king, but, amid all the rejoicings of the people, that Puritan soldiery looked on, scowling, and not all the personal charm of the king, nor the enthusiasm of the people, could chase away the sadness with which they looked upon the undoing of that work in which they had gained their scars. Charles and his brothers of York and Gloucester moved about, unarmed, graciously acknowledging the shouts of “Long live King Charles!” and receiving old supporters who saw this glorious Restoration with tears of joy running down their cheeks; and their gay demeanour showed their courage, for little was wanting to make the Ironsides declare for the Commonwealth, and, spurring their horses, change this scene of rejoicing to one of blood and dismay. But the moments of suspense were safely passed; the king pressed on to London, and the Restoration was accomplished. It is in the pleasant pages of Woodstock that one reads how the old cavalier, Sir Henry Lee, of Ditchley, “having a complacent smile on his face and a tear swelling to his eye, as he saw the banners wave on in interminable succession,” came here to witness the return of his sovereign. Here, too, came Colonel Everard, and Alice, his wife; Joceline Joliffe, who wielded quarterstaff so well, and with him Mistress Joceline; Wildrake, from Squattlesea-mere, and Beavis, old and feeble, a shadow of the great wolf-hound he had been. To this little company came Charles, and, dismounting, asked for the old knight’s blessing, who, having witnessed this day, was content to die.
And England was “merry England” again. The maypole reappeared upon the village green, ginger was hot i’ the mouth once more, cakes and ale disappeared down hungry and thirsty throats, and none declared eating and drinking to be carnal sins; folks sang songs and danced where had been only the singing of psalms in nasal tones and walking circumspectly; close-cropped polls grew love-locks again, and sad raiment gave place to the revived glories of ancient doublet and hose whose colours mocked the sun for splendour. For ten years had the people gone in a penitential gait that allowed neither gaiety nor enjoyment of any kind to pass unreproved, and now that all England was rejoicing that a pharisaical Puritanism had been overthrown, what wonder that young men and maidens who were too young to recollect the old England that existed before the Commonwealth plunged now into the wildest excesses, aided and abetted by old and middle-aged alike. The pendulum had swung back, and from whining religiosity the people turned to the extreme of licentiousness.
And so at last to leave the historic aspect of Blackheath, which I had begun to fear would detain me until a volume had been made of it. Leaving the heath by the Dover Road, which still follows the old Watling Street, the way is bordered by apparently endless rows of villas, and the outskirts of Kidbrook and Charlton village are passed before one comes to where the fields, bordered by hedgerows, first come in sight, and even these are disfigured by great boards, offering land to be let for building-plots. This is, indeed, a neighbourhood where the incautious stranger takes a villa overlooking meadows, for the sake of the view, and finds, on waking up one fine morning, the builders putting in the foundations of a new house which will eventually hide his prospect; or where, having taken a month’s holiday, he returns, to find a new street round the corner, with a brand new public-house,and a piano-organ playing the latest comic song, where (eheu, fugaces!) meads and orchards gladdened his eyes a few short weeks before.
SHOOTER’S HILL
As one proceeds through Charlton village, past an oddly-named public-house, “The Sun in the Sands,” and the uncharted wilderness of Kidbrook, Shooter’s Hill comes into view, and the long line of “villas” ends. Just beyond the seventh milestone from London is another little public-house, the “Fox under the Hill,” followed shortly by the “Earl of Moira,” overlooked by the great buildings of the new Fever Hospital which the London County Council has set up here, to the disgust of all the dwellers round about. Next to this come the great dismal buildings of the Military Hospital, where soldier-invalids crawl about the courtyards, or, happily convalescent, lean over the balconies, smoking and chatting the hours away. Funerals go frequently hence, for here are always many poor fellows struggling with death, invalided home from the cruel heats of India, and many are the sad little processions that go with slow step and rumbling of gun-carriages to the God’s Acres of East Wickham and Plumstead.
But up among the young oak coppices, the lush grass, and the perennial springs of Shooter’s Hill, all is peaceful and pleasant. You can hear the Woolwich bugles sing softly through the summer air; birds twitter overhead, the robustious crowings of arrogant cocks, the sharp ring of jerry-builders’ trowels comes up from below, the winds whisper among the oaks and rustle like the frou-frou of silk through the foliage of the silver-beeches—while London toils and moils beyond. Distant smoke drives before the wind in earnest of those metropolitan labours, and kindlyobscures many vulgar details; but if you cannot see Jerusalem or Madagascar from here, nor even Saint Paul’s, you can at least view that most commanding object in the landscape near by, Beckton Gasworks, and on another quarter of the horizon shines the Crystal Palace, glittering afar off like a City of the Blest, which indeed it is not, nor anything like it. Directly in front, the sky-line is formed by the elevated table-land of Blackheath, while in mid-distance the few remaining fields of Charlton are seen to be making a gallant stand before the advances of villadom.
Shooter’s Hill was not always a place whereon one could rest in safety. Indeed, it bore for long years a particularly bad name as being the lurking-place of ferocious footpads, cutpurses, highwaymen, cut-throats, and gentry of allied professions who rushed out from these leafy coverts and took liberal toll from wayfarers. Six men were hanged hereabouts, in times not so very remote, for robbery with murder upon the highway; the remains of four of them decorated the summit of the hill, while two others swung gracefully from gibbets beside the Eltham Road. The “Bull” inn, standing at the top of the hill, was in coaching days the first post-house at which travellers stopped and changed horses on their way from London to Dover. The “Bull” has been rebuilt in recent years, but tradition says (and tradition is not always such a liar as some folks would have us believe) that Dick Turpin frequented the road, and that it was at this old house he held the landlady over the fire in order to make her confess where she had hoarded her money. The incident borrows a certain picturesqueness from lapse of time, but, on the whole, it is not to be regretted that the days of barbecued landladies are past.
Our old friend Pepys has something to say of what he did or what was done to him on Shooter’s Hill, under date of April 11, 1661; but it was, at any rate, not a happening of any great note, and moreover, Mr. Pepys’ prattle sometimes becomes tiresome, andso we will pass him by for once in a way. His fellow diarist, Evelyn, was here in 1699, for he writes, under August, “I drank the Shooter’s Hill waters.” A very much more important person, Queen Anne, to wit (who, alas! is dead), is also said to have partaken of the mineral spring which made Shooter’s Hill a minor spa long years ago. The spring is still here, and it is this which makes the summit of Shooter’s Hill so graciously green and refreshing. People no longer come to drink the waters, but he who thirsts by the wayside and sports the blue ribbon, may, an he please, instead of calling at the “Bull,” or the “Red Lion,” across the road, quench his thirst at a drinking-fountain, which is something between a lich-gate and a Swiss châlet, erected here in recent years.
HIGHWAYMEN
So long ago as 1767 a project was set afoot for building a town on the summit of Shooter’s Hill, but it came to nothing, which is not at all strange when one considers how constantly the dwellers there would have been obliged to run the gauntlet of the gentlemen whom Americans happily call “road-agents.” And here is a sample of what would happen now and again, taken, not from the romantic pages of “Don Juan,” nor from Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities,” but from the sober and truthful columns of a London paper, under date of 1773. “On Sunday night,” we read, “about ten o’clock, Colonel Craige and his servant were attacked near Shooter’s Hill by two highwaymen, well mounted, who, on the colonel’s declaring he would not be robbed, immediately fired and shot the servant’s horse in the shoulder. On this the footman discharged a pistol, and the assailants rode off with great precipitation.” That they rode off with nothing else shows how effectually the colonel and his servant, by firmly grasping the nettle danger, plucked the flower safety.
DON JUAN
It was by similarly bold conduct that Don Juan put to flight no fewer than four assailants on this very spot. Arrived thus far from Dover, he hadalighted, and was meditatively pacing along the road behind his carriage when—— But there! It had best be read in Byron’s verse, and let no one cry out upon me for quoting “Don Juan,” and say the thing is nothing new, lest I, in turn, call fie upon him for an undue acquaintance with that “wicked” poem—
... Juan now was borne,Just as the day began to wane and darken,O’er the high hill which looks, with pride or scorn,Toward the great city. Ye who have a spark inYour veins of Cockney spirit, smile or mourn,According as you take things well or ill;Bold Britons, we are now on Shooter’s Hill!······A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shippingDirty and dusky, but as wide as eyeCould reach, with here and there a sail just skippingIn sight, then lost amidst the forestryOf masts; a wilderness of steeples peepingOn tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crownOn a fool’s head—and there is London Town!······Don Juan had got out on Shooter’s Hill:Sunset the time, the place the same declivityWhich looks along that vale of good and illWhere London streets ferment in full activity;While everything around was calm and still,Except the creak of wheels, which on their pivot heHeard; and that bee-like, bubbling, busy humOf cities, that boil over with their scum.I say Don Juan, wrapt in contemplation,Walk’d on behind his carriage, o’er the summit,And lost in wonder of so great a nation,Gave way to it, since he could not o’ercome it.“And here,” he cried, “is Freedom’s chosen station;Here peals the people’s voice, nor can entomb itRacks, prisons, inquisitions; resurrectionAwaits it, each new meeting or election.“Here are chaste wives, pure lives; here people payBut what they please; and, if that things be dear,’Tis only that they love to throw awayTheir cash, to show how much they have a year.Here laws are all inviolate; none layTraps for the traveller; every highway’s clear:Here”—here he was interrupted by a knife,With,—“Damn your eyes! Your money or your life!”These freeborn sounds proceeded from four pads,In ambush laid, who had perceived him loiterBehind his carriage; and, like handy lads,Had seized the lucky hour to reconnoitre,In which the heedless gentleman who gadsUpon the road, unless he prove a fighter,May find himself, within that isle of riches,Exposed to lose his life as well as breeches.Juan did not understand a wordOf English, save their shibboleth, “God damn!”And even that he had so rarely heard,He sometimes thought ’twas only their “Salaam,”Or “God be with you!” and ’tis not absurdTo think so; for, half English as I am(To my misfortune), never can I sayI heard them wish “God with you,” save that way.
But if he failed to understand their speech, he interpreted their actions accurately enough, and, drawing a pocket-pistol, shot the foremost in the stomach, who, writhing in agony on the ground, and unable to discriminate between Continental nationalities, called out that “the bloody Frenchman” had killed him. His three companions did not wait to discover that it was not a Frenchman, but a Spaniard. No, they promptly ran away, and left their fellow to die, which he presently did, and Don Juan, after an interview with the coroner, proceeded on his road in wonderment. “Perhaps,” he thought, “it is the country’s wont to welcome foreigners in this way.”
Shooter’s Hill is pictured excellently well inA Tale of Two Cities; the time, “a Friday night, late in November, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five,” the occasion the passing of the Dover Mail. The coachman was “laying on” to the horses like another Macduff, and the near leader of the tired team was shaking its head and everything upon it, as though denying that the coach could be got up the hill at all; while the passengers, having been turned out to walk up the road and ease the horses, splashed miserably in the slush. The time was “ten minutes, good, past eleven,” and the coachman had but just finished addressing the horses in such strange exclamations as “Tst! Yah! Get on with you! My blood!” and other picturesque, not to say lurid, phrases, when sounds were heard along the highway. Sounds of any sort on the road could not at this hour be aught than ominous, and so the passengers, who were just upon the point of re-entering the coach, shivered andwondered if their purses and watches were quite safe which were lying snuglyperduin their boots.
“Tst! Joe!” calls the coachman, from his box, warningly to the guard.
“What do you say, Tom?”
“I say a horse at a canter coming up,” replies Tom.
“I say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” rejoins the guard, entrenching himself behind his seat, and cocking his blunderbuss, calling out to the passengers at the same time, “Gentlemen, in the King’s name, all of you!”
The mail stopped. The hearts of the passengers within thumped audibly, and if one could not see how they blenched, it was only owing to the obscurity of the mildewy inside of the old Mail. There they sat, in anxious expectancy, amid the disagreeable smell arising from the damp and dirty straw, and the relief they experienced when it was not a highwayman who rode up to them, but only a messenger for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, who sat shivering among the rest, may (in the words of a certain class of novelists) “be better imagined than described.”
There is but one criticism I have to make of this; but it is a serious point. There was no Dover Mail coach in 1775, for the earliest of all mail coaches, that between Bristol and London, was not established before 1784. The mails until then were carried by post-boys on horse-back.
Of Severndroog Castle, built on the crest of Shooter’s Hill during the last century, I shall say nothing, because, for one thing, it is of little interest, and, for another, whatever has to be said about it belongs to the province of the Guide Books, upon whose territory I do not propose to infringe. I want to give a modicum of information with the maximum of amusement, with which declaration of policy I will proceed along the road to Dover.
Directly one comes to the crest of the hill there opens a wide view over the Kentish Weald. Reaches of the Thames are seen, peeping through foliage;distant houses and whitewashed cottages shine clearly miles away, and the spire of Bexley Church closes the view in front, where the road ends dustily. Along this road comes daily and all day a varied procession of tramps. The traveller looks down upon them from this eyrie with wonderment and dismay; the cottagers, the householders and gardeners hereabouts, see them pass with less surprise and additional misgivings, for their gardens, their hen-roosts, clothes-lines and orchards pay tribute to these Ishmaelites to whom the rights of property are but imperfectly known. This is why the gates and doors along the Dover Road are so uniformly and resolutely barred, bolted, chained, and padlocked; for these reasons ferocious dogs roam amid the suburban pleasances, and turn red eyes and foaming mouths toward one who leans across garden-gates to admire the flowers with which the fertile soil of Kent has so liberally spangled every cultivated spot; and to them is due the murderous-looking garnishment of jagged and broken glass with which every wall-top is armed. “Peace must lie down armed” on the Dover Road; the citizen must lock, bolt, and bar his house o’ nights, and does well to exhibit warning placards, “Beware of the Dog!” He does better to tip the policeman occasionally to keep an especially vigilant look-out, and it is not an excess of precaution that so frequently covers the flower-beds with wire-netting.
TRAMPS
There is, indeed, no road to equal the Dover Road for thieves, tramps, cadgers, and miscellaneous vagrants, either for number or depravity. Throughout the year they infest alike the highways and byways of Kent, but the most constant procession of them is to be seen on the great main road between London and the sea. A great deal of begging, some petty pilfering,and a modicum of work in the fruit season and during the hop-harvest suffice to keep them going for the greater part of the year, while the winter months are fleeted in progresses from one casual ward to another in the numerous unions along the road. Phenomenally ragged, bronzed by the sun, unshaven, unshorn, they are met, men, women, and children alike, at every turn, for many miles, especially between Southwark and Canterbury. The sixteen miles’ stretch of road between Canterbury and Dover is comparatively unfrequented by them; but Gravesend, Dartford, Crayford, and Bexley Heath are centres of the most disgraceful mendicancy. “Lodgings for travellers” at fourpence a night, or two shillings a week, are a feature of these places, and how prominent a feature cannot be guessed by any one who has not been there. Whole families on the tramp are to be met with between these places, and long vistas of them are gained along any particularly straight piece of road. They are everything that is dirty and horrible, but they are perfectly happy and quite irreclaimable, many of them being hereditary tramps.
Philanthropic societies inquire into the tramp; classify him, endeavour to cleanse him and restore him to some place in society, but all to no purpose. He is quite satisfied with himself; he likes dirt, and dislikes nothing so much as either moral or physical cleansing. That is one reason why he seeks the shelter of the casual ward only as a last resource. He has to undergo a bath there, and feels as chilly when his top-dressing of grime is removed as you and I would be were we turned naked into the streets. To reform your tramp it would be essential to snare him at a very early age indeed, and, even then, I am not sure but that his natural traits would break out suddenly, like those of any other wild beast kept in captivity.