GRAVESEND
Gravesend was at one time a place remarkable alike for its tilt-boats and its waterside taverns. The one involved the other, for the boats brought travellers here from London, and here, in the days of bad roads and worse conveyances, they judged it prudent to stay overnight, commencing their journey to Rochester the following morning. To the town of Gravesend belonged the monopoly of conveying passengers to and from London by water, and it was not until steamboats began to ply up and down the reaches of the Thames that this privilege became obsolete. Thus it will be seen that, besides being a place of call for ships, either outward bound or proceeding home, Gravesend was in receipt of much local traffic. The railway has, naturally, taken away a large proportion of this, but has brought it back, tenfold, in the shape of holiday trippers, and the continued growth of the town is sufficient evidence of its prosperity. One first hears of Gravesend in the pages of Domesday Book, where it is called “Gravesham”; but the difficulty of distinctly pronouncing the name led, centuries ago, to the corrupted termination of “end” being adopted, first in speech, and, by insensible degrees, in writing. It has an interesting history, commencing from the time when the compilers of Domesday Book found only a “hyhte,” or landing-place, here, and progressing through the centuries with records of growth, and burnings by the French; with tales of Cabot’s sailing hence in 1553, followed by Frobisher in 1576, to the incorporation of the town in 1568, and the flight of James the Second, a hundred and twenty years later.
Gravesend was not, in the sixteenth century, a model town. Its inhabitants paved, lighted, and cleansed their streets, accordingly as individual preferences, industry, or laziness dictated. Spouts, pipes, and projecting eaves poured dirty water on pedestrians whowere rash enough to walk those streets in rainy weather, and people threw away out of window anything they wished to get rid of, quite regardless of who might be passing underneath; and so, whether fine or wet, those who picked their way carefully along the unpaved thoroughfares, stood an excellent chance of being drenched with something unpleasant. An open gutter ran down the middle of the street, full of rotting refuse; every tradesman hung out signs which sometimes fell down and killed people, and in the night, when the wind blew strong, a concert of squeaking music filled, with sounds not the most pleasant, the ears of people who wanted to go to sleep.
Things were but little less mediæval in the middle of the seventeenth century, although the trade and importance of Gravesend had greatly increased. Troubles arose then on account of the disorderly hackmen, “foreigners and strangers”—any one not a freeman or a burgess was a “foreigner”—who plied between Gravesend and Rochester, and took away the custom that belonged of right to members of Gravesend guilds. Two years later the Corporation of Gravesend was distinctly Roundhead in its sympathies, for in 1649 we find the town mace being altered, the Royal arms removed, and those of the Commonwealth substituted, at a cost of £23 10s.0d.In 1660, things wore a very different complexion, for in that year the Gravesend people welcomed Charles the Second with every demonstration of joy. They had the mace restored to its former condition at a cost, this time, of £17 10s.0d., and allowed the mayor and another £2 5s.7d.for going up to London to see that the work was done properly. They paid £3 10s.0d.for painting the king’s arms; 14s.to one John Phettiplace for “trumpeters and wigs”; and 5s.to Will Charley “for sounding about the country.” Having done this, they all got gloriously drunk at a total cost of £12 15s.8d., of which sum £10 7s.8d.was for wine, and £2 8s.0d.for beer.
RIVERSIDE, GRAVESEND.
It was, indeed, during this latter half of the seventeenth century that Gravesend experienced one of its great periods of prosperity; and so the loyalty was well rewarded. Of this date are many of the fine old red-brick mansions in the older part of the town, together with the Admiralty House, official residence of the Duke of York when Lord High Admiral. To Gravesend he came as James the Second, a prisoner.
Embarking from Whitehall, on December 18, 1688, he reached here as late as nine o’clock at night. The next morning he was conducted hence to Rochester in the charge of a hundred of the Prince of Orange’s Dutch Guards, and a melancholy journey it must have been for him, if his memory took him back to the time when, twenty-eight years before, he came up the road with his brothers, Charles the Second and the Duke of Gloucester, happily returning from exile.
To Gravesend came Royal and distinguished travellers on their way from Dover to London, and hence they embarked for the City and Westminster, escorted, if they were sufficiently Royal or distinguished by the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and the City Guilds, and fitly conducted in a long procession of stately barges by this most impressive entrance to the capital of England. And even ordinary travellers preferred this route. For two reasons: the river-road was much more expeditious than the highway in those pre-MacAdamite days, and by taking it they escaped the too-pressing attentions that awaited them on Shooter’s Hill and Blackheath at the hands of Captains Gibbet and Pick-Purse.
OLD TIME TRAVELLERS
Many of these distinguished travellers on this old highway have left written accounts of their doings, and very interesting readings they make. Foremost among the “distinguished” company was Marshal de Bassompierre. He came to England in 1626, on anEmbassy from the King of France, and arrived at Dover on the 2nd of October. There he stayed to recruit, for the sea, as usual, had been unkind, until Sunday, the 4th, departing thence on that day for “Cantorbery,” where he slept the night, going on the Monday as far as “Sitimborne,” and on Tuesday to “Rocheter” and Gravesend, where he was met by the Queen’s barge. Three months later, and he was returning home. On December 1st he began his farewells at the Court of Saint James’s, and bade adieu to, amongst others, such fearful wild fowl as the Earl of Suffolc and the Duke of Boukinkam; this last the dissolute “Steenie”—none other! On the 5th, imagine him at Dover with an equipage of five hundred persons shivering on the brink of the Channel, and stormbound there for fourteen days at a cost of 14,000 crowns.
This imposing company embarked at last, and, after braving winds and sea for a whole day, were compelled to put back again. When theydidfinally set off, they were five days crossing to Calais, and it was found necessary to jettison the Ambassador’s two carriagesen route, in which was, alas! 40,000 francs’ worth of clothes. Also this unfortunate diplomat lost twenty-nine horses, which died of thirst on the voyage.
Another French traveller, Monsieur Jouvin de Rochefort, greatly daring, visited our shores in 1670. He took the ordinary coach for “Gravesine,” in order, as he says, to embark thence for London, passing on his way from Canterbury, Arburtoon, Baten, and Asbery; Grinsrit, Sitingborn, Nieuvetoon, and Renem[2]and coming to Rochester through a strange place called Schatenne, which I don’t find anywhere on the map, but suppose he means Chatham. All along the road he remarked a number of high poles, on the top of which were small kettles, in which fires were lighted to warn the countryside of the robbers who would come inbands and plunder the villages, were it not for the courage of the villagers, who formed themselves into guards. These poles were about a mile distant from each other, and to every one there was a small hut for the person whose business it was to keep the beacons burning. “God be praised,” though, he reached “Gravesine” safely!
Samuel de Sorbière, Historiographer Royal to the King of France, visited our shores in 1663. The normal passage from Calais was three hours, but on this occasion seven hours were consumed in crossing, and although the weather was very fair, the “usual Disorder which those who are not accustomed to the sea are subject to”—but no matter! To make matters worse, contempt and affronts were put upon him in Dover streets by some sons of Belial in the shape of boys who ran after him shouting, “a Monsieur, a Monsieur,” and who, when they had retired to a safe distance, proceeded to the extremely impolite depth of calling him a “French dog,” “which,” says M. de Sorbière, sweepingly, “is the epithet they give us in England.”
Our traveller journeyed to London by wagon, rather than take a post-chaise or even the stage-coach; an extremely undignified thing for an Historiographer Royal to do, one would think. But then, ’twas the way to note the strange customs of these English! The wagon was drawn by six horses, one before another, and beside them walked the wagoner clothed in black and appointed in all things like another Saint George. He had a brave mounteero on his head, and was a merry fellow who fancied he made a figure, and seemed mightily pleased with himself. Arrived at Gravesend, our traveller, for greater expedition, took boat to London, and so an end of him, so far, at least, as these pages are concerned.
M. GROSLEY
But this little crowd of scribbling foreigners who visited England and wrote accounts of their travels in these islands before the locomotive was dreamedof, had much better opportunities of catching impressions than the railway train affords. They came up this way to London, as slowly as the poet’s spring; and, as a rule, they used their opportunities very well. For instance, here is the admirable M. Grosley, a kindly Frenchman who came over from Boulogne in 1765. He gives a most interesting account of his journey along the Dover Road on the 11th April. He embarked upon Captain Meriton’s packet, which arrived, in company with a prodigious number of other ships, three hours before time, off Dover. Here they had to anchor for the tide to serve their landing, and the boisterous winds drove several vessels ashore, while Captain Meriton’s passengers resigned themselves to death. When at length they landed, half dead, an Englishwoman with her very amiable daughter and a tall old Irishman, who pretended to be an officer (and who doubtless “had a way with him”), landed with our traveller, and contrived that he should pay part of their fare, the only trick played upon M. Grosley (I am pleased to say) during his stay in England. The customs officers looked like beggars, but treated this foreigner like a gentleman, as indeed we may suppose he was, for he belonged to the Academy.
However, a crown was levied on passing his luggage by an innkeeper who held thedroit de viscomté. All the inns were crowded with the miserable travellers just landed, and he with whom we are particularly concerned found it necessary to go into the kitchen of his inn and take off, with his own hands, one of thetranches de bœufgrilling on the coals. After this exploit, he cautiously went to bed at six o’clock in the afternoon, for there were not enough beds to go round, and possession was ever nine points of the law! At three in the morning he was called upon to turn out in favour of a new arrival; but, notwithstanding all the rout they made, he held to his four-poster until five, when he was turned out and the game of Box and Cox commenced.
The sole inhabitants of Dover (says our traveller) were sailors, ships’ captains, and innkeepers. The height of the triumphal arches, on which the vast signboards of the inns spanned the narrow streets, and the ridiculous magnificence of the ornaments that headed them, were wonderful as compared with the little post-boys, children of twelve and thirteen years of age, who were starting every minute in sole charge of post-chaises. The great multitude of travellers with which Dover was crowded afforded a reason for dispensing with a police regulation which forbade public conveyances to travel on Sundays, and on that day he set out with seven other passengers in two carriages called (“called,” you notice, like that street in Jerusalem that was “called” straight) “flying machines.” There were six horses to a machine, and they covered the distance to London in one day for one guinea each person; passengers’ servants carried outside at half-price. The coachmen, who were most kindly disposed towards their horses, carried whips, certainly, but they were no more in their hands than the fan is in winter in the hand of a lady; they only served to make a show with, for their horses scarcely ever felt them, so great was the tenderness of the English coachman with his cattle.
But see the peculiar advantages of travelling on Sunday. There were no excisemen anywhere on duty, and even the highwaymen had ceased their labours during the night. The only knights of the road our travellers encountered were dangling from gibbets by the wayside in all the glories of periwigs and full-skirted coats. Unfortunately, the pace was marred by the frequent stoppages made to unload the brandy-kegs at the roadside inns from the boots of the coaches, where they had been stowed away in the absence of the gaugers.
FOREIGNERS ON ENGLAND
Upon their way to Canterbury, the travellers, and our foreigner in particular, had for some time perceived that they were no longer in France, and when at lengththey reached that bourne of pilgrims they were still further impressed with that fact by observing a fat man, who was just arisen from bed, standing at a bay window during the whole time the flying machines changed their Pegasuses; and, as they were unexpected the delay was considerable. But all this while the fat man stood there in his night-shirt, with a velvet cap on his head, contemplating them with folded arms and knitted brow, and with an expression which (in France) was to be seen only on the faces of them that had just buried their dearest friends. Also, the “young persons” of both sexes stood and stared—not to mince matters—like stuck pigs.
The country which they travelled through from Dover to London was (so our traveller thought) in general a bad mixture of sand and chalk. They skirted some lovely woods as well furnished as the best-stocked forests of France—alas! where are those woods now?—and presently passed over commons covered with heath and stray broom, very high and flourishing all the year round. Those wild shrubs were left to the use of the poor of the several different parishes, but their vigour and thickness gave reason to conjecture that there were but few poor people in those parishes. The best lands were then, as now, laid out in hop-gardens.
The wayside inns appealed strongly to our traveller. They were given, whether in town or country, to the making of large accounts, but then see how rich was the English lord who, as a class, frequented them. Anyway, they were possessed of a cleanliness far beyond that to be found in the majority of the best private houses in France. There was only one inn on the road from Paris to Boulogne to be mentioned in the same breath with the English houses, and that was one at Montreuil, frequented by English travellers.
Between Canterbury and Rochester the coaches encountered an obstacle which savours rather of DonQuixote’s adventures than of Sunday travelling in this unromantic country. This was nothing less than a windmill which the country-folk, taking advantage of that usually coachless day, were moving entire. Less fiery than the Don, the travellers outflanked the gigantic obstacle by dragging the coaches into the field beside the road. And of that road, M. Grosley has to say that it was excellent; covered with powdered flints, and well kept, in spite of the exemption from forced labour which the countrymen enjoyed; and here he quotes what Aurelius Victor has to say of the Emperor Vespasian’s vast roadworks in Britain.
The roadways had not long been in this enviable condition; only, indeed, so recently as the days of George the Second had they been rescued from the bad state into which they had been suffered to fall during the civil wars, and, generally speaking, the English knew little or nothing of the art of road-making.
The repairing of the high-roads was at the expense of them that used them. Neither rank nor dignity was exempted from the payment of tolls; the king himself was subject to them, and the turnpike would have been shut against his equipage if none of his officers paid the money before passing by.
These high-roads had all along them a little raised bank, two or three feet broad, with a row of wooden posts whose tops were whitewashed so that the coachmen should see them at night. This was for the conveniency of foot-passengers. In places where the road was too narrow to admit of this arrangement, the proprietors of lands adjoining were obliged to give passage through their fields, which were all enclosed with tall hedges or with strong hurdles about four feet high, over which passengers leapt or climbed. Custom had so habituated the village girls to this exercise that they acquitted themselves in it with a peculiar grace and agility. The great attention ofthe English to the conveniency of foot-passengers had several causes. Firstly, they set the highest value upon the lives of their fellow-creatures, and in that peculiar circumstance they sacrificed to pleasure and conveniency. Secondly, their laws were not exclusively made and executed by persons who rode in their chariots. Thirdly, as the English carriages moved as swiftly in the country as slowly in the town, the meeting with persons who were so foolish or so ill-geared as to walk a-foot would have been disastrous to those wayfarers; and in so democratic a country as this the chariot-riders would have had a bad time in store for them for so small a matter as playing, as it were, the secular Juggernaut with pedestrians.
Eventually this moralising Frenchman reached London through Rochester, which place was onelongstreet inhabited solely by ships’ carpenters and dockyard men. At Greenwich, the shores of Thames loomed upon his enraptured gaze, agreeably confounded with long lines of trees and the masts of ships, and then came delightful London, and that haven where he would be—ah! you guess it, do you not? It was Leicester Fields,le Squarr de Leicesterreof a later generation of Frenchmen.
MILTON
Having thus disposed of this company of scribbling foreigners, I will get on to Milton-next-Gravesend, which immediately adjoins the town; especially will I do so because, when the old waterside lanes have been explored, little remains to see besides Gordon’s statue and the little cottage where he used to live. The high-road is not at all interesting, unless indeed a Jubilee clock-tower and a number of private houses of the Regent’s Park order of architecturemay be considered to lend a charmtoit. Just beyond these houses comes Milton: a school, a church, and a public-house standing next one another. The church belongs to the Decorated period, and has a tower built of flints, stone, and chalk. During the last century the churchwardens had the repairing of the nave roof under consideration, and, in order to save twenty pounds on an estimate, they decided to remove the battlements, and to have a slated roof, spanning nave and aisles, and ending in eaves. The thing was done, against the wish of the Vicar and with the approval of the then Bishop of Rochester, and all who pass this way can see how barbarous was the deed. It had not even the merit of economy, for, by the time the work was completed, it had cost the churchwardens several hundreds of pounds more than had been anticipated.
“Trifle not, your time’s but short,” says a very elaborate and complicated sundial over the south porch, looking down upon the road; and, taking the hint, we will proceed at once from Milton Church to the public-house next door. But not for carnal joys; oh no! Only in the interests of this book will we make such a sudden diversion; for, at the rear of the house, on the old bowling-green, is an interesting memorial of one of the jolly fellows who once upon a time gathered here on summer evenings and played a game of bowls when business in the neighbouring town of Gravesend was done for the day.
TO THE MEMORYOf Mr. Alderman Nynn,An honeft Man, and an Excellent Bowler.Cuique est sua Fama.Full forty long Years was theAldermanfeen,The delight of each Bowler, and King of this Greene.As long he remember’d his Art and his Name,Whofe hand was unerring, unrival’d whofe Fame.His Bias was good, and he always was foundTo go the right way and to take enough ground.TheJackto the uttermoft verge he would fendFor theAldermanlov’d a full length at each End.Now mourn ev’ry Eye that hath feen him difplayThe Arts of the Game, and the Wiles of his play;For the great Bowler,Death, at one critical CastHas ended his length, and clofe rubb’d him at laft.F. W. pofuit,MDCCLXXVI.
TO THE MEMORY
Of Mr. Alderman Nynn,
An honeft Man, and an Excellent Bowler.
Cuique est sua Fama.
F. W. pofuit,MDCCLXXVI.
And having duly noted this elegy of a truly admirable man, we may leave Milton, pausing but to look down upon the estuary of the Thames, where the great liners pass to and fro the most distant parts of the world, and also to consider the humours of a hundred years ago, when, as now, Milton was in the corporate jurisdiction of Gravesend, and when it sufficed both to employ one watchman between them. This watchman was also Common Crier, and was supported, not by a salary, but (like a hospital) by voluntary contributions. And he did not do badly by the grateful Gravesenders, for he collected, one year with another, £60, which, added to the market-gardening business he also carried on, must have made quite a comfortable income.
DENTON
A little way beyond Milton, where the road curves round to the right, there will be seen on the left an eighteenth-century mansion, standing in extensive grounds. Immediately within the lodge-gates is what looks like a small church, surrounded by trees. It is older and far more interesting than it seems to be. Until 1901 it was, in fact, a roofless ruin; but it was then restored by Mr. George M. Arnold, who then owned Denton Court, the name of the house. The church, now used as a private chapel by the owner of Denton Court, was in fact Denton Chapel, the place of worship of the parish of Denton, which was ecclesiastically separate from Milton until 1879. Denton is a place so small that few maps condescend to notice it, but it is an ancient place, first named inA.D.950, as “Denetune,” when the manor was given by one Byrhtric to the Priory of St. Andrew at Rochester, which built this chapel of St. Mary. It was on the dissolution of the monasteries in the time of Henry the Eighth that it fell into ruin.
DENTON CHAPEL.
The chapel is of literary interest, for it is the original of Barham’s “Ingoldsby Abbey.” In travelling between Canterbury and London by coach, Barham noticed the ruined walls standing up, silhouetted against the sky, and looking far more important than intrinsically they were; for this was then a cleared space, the new road near by having in 1787 been cut actually through the little churchyard.
Commentators in various editions of theIngoldsby Legendshave stated sceptically “the remains of Ingoldsby Abbey will be found—if found at all—among the ‘Châteaux en Espagne.’” That is not so; for here it is. Barham himself, in a note to the legend “The Ingoldsby Penance,” remarks the ruins are “still to be seen by the side of the high Dover road, about a mile and a half below the town of Gravesend.”
... nearThe great gate Father Thames rolls sun-bright and clear,Cobham woods to the right—on the opposite shoreLaindon Hills in the distance, ten miles off, or more;Then you’ve Milton and Gravesend behind—and beforeYou can see almost all the way down to the Nore.
In Domesday Book Denton is written “Danitune,” and it is generally held that the name comes from the raiding Danes, who certainly troubled this estuary; but it is probably “Dene-town,” the place in the vale; perhaps in contradistinction to Higham, which is not far off.
JOE GARGERY’S FORGE.
CHALK
Chalk is the next place on the road, and Chalk is quite the smallest and most scattered of villages, beginning at the summit of the hill leading out of Milton and ending at Chalk church, which stands on a hillock retired behind a clump of trees nearly a mile down the road, and far away from any house. All the way the road commands long reaches of the Thames and the Essex marshes, and on summer days the singing of the larks high in air above the open fields can be heard.
At Chalk, in 1836, Charles Dickens rented a honeymoon cottage, on his marriage with Catherine Hogarth. Great controversies arose some years ago, following upon what is said to be a wrong identification of the place with a residence called the “Manor House”; and it was stated that the real dwelling in question was the weather-boarded and much humbler cottage at the fork of the old and new roads between Gravesend and Northfleet, still standing, and with a commemorative tablet on it. Opposite is “Joe Gargery’s Forge.”
ANCIENT CARVING—CHALK.
Chalk church is a very much unrestored building of flint and rubble, dating from the thirteenth century. Its south aisle was pulled down at some remote period. There still remains, and in very good preservation, too, a singular Early English carving over the western door representing a grinning countryman holding an immense flagon in his two hands and gazing upward towards a whimsically-contorted figure that seems to be nearly all head and teeth. Between the two is an empty tabernacle which at one time before the destruction of “idolatrous statues” would have held a figure of the Virgin. The two remaining figures probably illustrate the celebration of “Church ales,” a yearly festival formerly common to all English villages, and held on the day sacred to the particular saint to whom the church was dedicated. On these occasions there was used to be general jollity; feasting and drinking; manly sports, such as boxing, wrestling, and games at quarter-staff, would be indulged in, and the day was held as a fair, to which came jugglers and players of interludes and itinerant vendors from far and near. The Church, of course, being the original occasion of the merry-making, looked benignly upon it, and provided the funds for the maltfrom which the so-called “Church ales” were brewed.
SAILORS’ FOLLY. (After Julius Cæsar Ibbetson).
JACK COME HOME AGAIN.
THE “LORD NELSON”
There is one other item of interest at Chalk, and that is an old wayside tavern, the “Lord Nelson,” one of those old houses that occupied, during last century, and the first quarter of the nineteenth, a position between the coaching inn and the mere beer-house. This type of tavern is still very largely represented along the Dover Road, although the sailors who chiefly supported them are no longer seen tramping the highways between the seaports. They have, most of them, little arbours and trim gardens with skittle- and bowling-alleys, and here the sailor would sit and drink, spin yarns, or play at bowls; swearingstrange oaths, and telling of many a hard-fought fight. If he had kindred company, there would be, I promise you, a riotous time; for no schoolboy so frolicsome as Jack ashore, and hard-won wages and prize-money, got at the cost of blood and wounds, he spent like water. Nothing was too expensive for him, nor, indeed, expensive enough, and if he was sufficiently fortunate to leave his landing-place with any money at all, he would very likely post up to town with the best on the road, holding, very rightly, that life without experiences was not worth the having. And of experiences he had plenty. He lived like a lord so long as his money lasted, and when he went afloat again he was shipped in a lordly state of drunkenness; but once the anchor was weighed his was a slave’s existence. Not that any word of his hardships escaped him; he took them as inseparable from a seaman’s life; and, indeed, once the first rapture of his home-coming was over, the sea unfailingly claimed him again. And when ashore all his talk was of battles and storms; he damned Bonaparte, believed that one Englishman could thrash three “darned parleyvoos,” despised land-lubbers,and sang “Hearts of Oak” with an unction that was truly admirable. His failings were only those of a free and noble nature, and it is very largely owing to his qualities of courage and tenacity that England stands where she is to-day. Let us not, however, decry, either directly or by implication, the sailors who now man our ships. They live in more peaceful times, and have neither the discomforts nor the hard knocks that were distributed so largely years ago; but they have approved themselves no whit less stalwart than their ancestors who wore pigtails, fought like devils; talked of Rodney, Nelson, Trafalgar, and the Nile, and finally disappeared somewhere about the time of the Battle of Navarino.
THE LIGHT FANTASTIC. BANK HOLIDAY AT CHALK.
It was for the delight and to secure the custom of these very full-blooded heroes that these old taverns with signs so nautical and bowling-greens so enticing were planted so frequently on this very sea-salty road, and now that the humblest traveller finds it cheaper to pay a railway-fare than to walk, they look, many of them, not a little forlorn. As for the “Lord Nelson,” at Chalk, I fear it lies too near London suburbs to last much longer. Already, on Bank Holidays, when the Cockney comes to Gravesend, literally in his thousands, riotous parties adventure thus far, and dance in the dusty highway to sounds of concertina and penny whistle. Their custom will doubtless enrich the place, and presently a gin-palace will be made of what is now a very romantic and unusual inn, grey and time-stained; its red roof-tiles thickly overgrown with moss and house-leek, and its gables bent and bowed with years.
GAD’S HILL
There is little to see or remark upon in the three miles between Chalk and Gad’s Hill. Two old roadsideinns, each claiming to be a “half-way house”; a lane that leads off to the right, towards the village of Shorne; a windmill, without its sails, standing on the brow of a singular hill; these, together with the great numbers of men and women working in the fields, are all the noticeable features of the road until one comes up the long, gradual ascent to the top of Gad’s Hill.
Gad’s Hill is at first distinctly disappointing; perhaps all places of pilgrimage must on acquaintance be necessarily less satisfactory than a lively fancy has painted them. How very often, indeed, does not one exclaim on standing before world-famed sites, “Is this all?”
The stranger comes unawares upon Gad’s Hill. The ascent is so gradual that he is quite unprepared for the shock that awaits him when he comes in sight of a house and two spreading cedars that can scarce be other than Charles Dickens’ home. He has seen them pictured so often that there can surely be no mistake; and yet—— He feels cheated. Is this, then, the famous hill where travellers were wont to be robbed? Is this the place referred to by that seventeenth-century robber turnedlittérateur, John Clavell, who, in his “Recantation of an Ill-led Life,” speaks so magniloquently of—
Gad’s Hill, and thoseRed tops of mountains, where good people loseTheir ill kept purses.
Was it here, then, upon this paltry pimple of a hill that Falstaff and Prince Hal, Poins and the rest of them, robbed the merchants, the franklins, and the flea-bitten carriers, who, Charles’s Wain being over the chimneys of their inn at Rochester, set out early in the morning for London? Was this the spot where Falstaff, brave amid so many confederates, added insult to injury of those travellers by calling them “gorbellied knaves” and “caterpillars,” andwhere Prince Henry, in his turn, alluded to the knight as “fat guts”? Yes, this is the place, but how changed from then! To see Gad’s Hill as it was in those times it would be necessary to sweep away the rows of mean cottages that form quite a hamlet here, together with Gad’s Hill Place, the hedges and enclosures, and to clothe the hillsides with dense woodlands, coming close up to, and overshadowing the highway, which should be full of ruts and sloughs of mud. Then we should have some sort of an idea how terrible the hill could be o’nights when the rogues[3]who lurked in the shadow of the trees pounced upon rich travellers, and, tricked out in
vizards, hoods, disguise,Masks, muzzles, mufflers, patches on their eyes;Those beards, those heads of hair, and that great wenWhich is not natural,
relieved them of their gold.
And not only rogues of low estate, but others of birth and education, pursued this hazardous industry, so that Shakespeare, when he made the Prince of Wales and Sir John Falstaff appear as highwaymen on this scene, was not altogether drawing upon his imagination. Thus, when the Danish Ambassador was set upon and plundered here in 1656, they were not poor illiterates who sent him a letter the next day in which they took occasion to assure him that “the same necessity that enforc’t ye Tartars to breake ye wall of China compelled them to wait on him at Gad’s Hill.” But travellers did not always tamely submit to be robbed and cudgelled, as you shall see in these extracts from Gravesend registers—“1586, September 29th daye, was a thiefe yt was slayne, buryed;” and, again, “1590, Marche, the 17th daie, was a theefe yt was at Gad’shill wounded to deathe, called Robert Writs, buried.”
MURDER
Gad’s Hill is not only memorable for the robberiescommitted on its miry ways. Its story rises to tragic heights with the murder, on the night of October 15, 1661, of no less a person than a foreign Prince, Cossuma Albertus, Prince of Transylvania. This unfortunate Prince, who was on a visit to England to seek aid from Charles the Second against the Germans, was approaching Rochester, apparently on his return to the Continent, when his coach stuck fast in the October mud of Gad’s Hill. He had already experienced the villainous nature of our highways, and so, knowing that it would be impossible to proceed further that evening, he resigned himself to sleeping a night on the road. Having wrapped himself up as warmly as possible, he fell off to sleep, whereupon his coachman, one Isaac Jacob, a Jew, took his sword and stabbed him to the heart, and, calling upon the footman, this precious pair completed the tragedy by dragging the body out of the coach, and, cutting off the head, flinging the mutilated remains in a neighbouring ditch.
The first tidings of this inhuman murder were brought to a Rochester physician, who, riding past the spot some days afterwards, was horrified by his dog bringing him a human arm in his mouth. Meanwhile the murderers had possessed themselves of the Prince’s clothes, together with a large sum of money he had with him, and, dragging the coach out of the ruts, had driven back to Greenhithe, where they left coach and horses to be called for. Not long afterwards, they were arrested in London, and, being brought before the Lord Mayor, the footman made a full confession. The trial took place at Maidstone, where Isaac Jacob, coachman, and Casimirus Karsagi, footman, were sentenced to death, the first being hanged in chains at the scene of the crime. The body of the ill-fated Prince of Transylvania was buried in the nave of Rochester Cathedral.
Sixteen years later, we come to the exploits of that ingenious highwayman, Master Nicks, who, onemorning in 1676, so early as four o’clock, committed a robbery on this essentially “bad eminence,” upon the person of a gentleman, who, from some unexplained reason, was crossing the hill at that unearthly hour. This, by the way, seems to disprove the wisdom of the early worm, who, to be caught, must of necessity be up still earlier than that ornithological Solon, the early bird. ’Tis a nice point.
However, Master Nicks, who was mounted on a bay mare, effectually despoiled the traveller and rode away, reaching York on the afternoon of the same day. Dismounting there at an inn, he changed his riding-clothes and repaired to the bowling-green, where he found the Lord Mayor of York playing bowls with several other tradesmen. The artful rogue, in order to fix himself, the date, and the hour in that magistrate’s memory, made a bet with him upon the game, took an opportunity to ask him the time, and by some means contrived to give him occasion to bear in mind the day of the month, in case he should chance to be arrested on suspicion of the affair. Sure enough, he was apprehended some time later, and when put upon his trial the jury acquitted him, as they held it impossible for a man to be at two places so remote in one day. After his acquittal, all danger being past, he confessed the truth of the matter to the judge, already doubtful of the jury’s wisdom, and the affair coming to the knowledge of Charles the Second, his Majesty eke-named this speedy road-agent “Swiftnicks.” This name conceals the identity of John, or William, Nevison, who was executed on Knavesmire, York, in 1685. His exploit in thus riding from near Rochester to York is the original of the later, inferior and wholly fictitious story of Dick Turpin’s ride from London to York, on Black Bess; an exploit never performed by him.
MRS. LYNN LINTON
One presently becomes more tolerant of Gad’s Hill, for, coming to Charles Dickens’ house and the old “Falstaff” inn, almost opposite, there opens a viewover the surrounding country that is really fine, and the road goes down, too, towards Strood, in a manner eminently picturesque. The story is well known of how, even when but a “queer small boy,” Dickens always had a great desire to, some day, be the owner of the place, and how his father, who would take him past here on country walks from Chatham, told him that if he “were to be very persevering, and were to work hard,” he might some day come to live in it; but it is not equally a matter of common knowledge that the house had been also the object of an equal affection, years before, to the Reverend Mr. Lynn, father of Mrs. Lynn Linton, who tells us how her early years were spent here, and how, when her father died, it was she who sold the estate to the novelist. She gives also a most picturesque account of Gad’s Hill in those times. The coaches were still running when Mrs. Lynn Linton, as a girl, lived here.
“Gad’s Hill House stands a little way back from the road. The grand highway between London and Dover, not to speak of between Gravesend and Rochester, it was as gay as an approach to a metropolis. Ninety-two public coaches and pleasure-vans used to pass in the day, not counting the private carriages of the grandees posting luxuriously to Dover for Paris and the grand tour. Soldiers marching or riding to or from Chatham and Gravesend, to embark for India, or on their return journey home; ships’ companies paid off that morning, and cruising past the gates, shouting and singing and comporting themselves in a generally terrifying manner, being, for the most part, half-seas over, and a trifle beyond; gipsies and travelling tinkers; sturdy beggars with stumps and crutches; savoyards with white mice, and organ-men with a wonderful wax doll, two-headed and superbly dressed, in front of their machines; chimney-sweepers, with a couple of shivering, little, half-naked climbing boys carrying their bags and brushes; and costermongers, whose small, flat carts were drawn by big dogs, werealso among the accidents and circumstances of the time.... Old Mr. Weller[4]was a real person, and we knew him. He was ‘Old Chumley’ in the flesh, and drove the stage daily from Rochester to London, and back again.”
GAD’S HILL PLACE. RESIDENCE OF CHARLES DICKENS.
DICKENS
It was here, then, that Dickens lived from 1856 to his death, on June 9, 1870, and thus Gad’s Hill is, for many, doubly a place of pilgrimage. And, truly, the whole course of the Dover Road is rich in memories of him and of the characters he drew with such a flow of sentimentality; and sentiment is more to the Englishman than is generally supposed. Hence that amazing popularity which is only just now being critically inquired into, weighed and appraised. Dickens was a man of commanding genius. His observation was acute, and he reproduced with so photographic a fidelity the life and times of his early years that the “manners and customs of the English,” during the first third of the nineteenth century, find no suchluminous exponent as he. When, if indeed ever, thePickwick Paperscease to amuse, they will still afford by far the most valuable evidence that could possibly exist as to the ways and thoughts, the social life and the conditions of travel, that immediately preceded the railway era. Superficial critics may hold that the most humorous book of the century is but a succession of scenes, with little real sequence and no plot; they may also say that Mr. Pickwick, Messrs. Tupman, Snodgrass, Winkle, and the rest of that glorious company, were “idiots,” but for genuine fun and frolic that book is still pre-eminent, and none of the “new humorists,” with their theories and criticisms of the “old humour,” have approached within a continent or so of it. Not that Dickens’ methods were irreproachable. It was his pleasure in all his books to give his characters allusive names by which you were supposed to recognise their attributes at once. It is thus upon the stage, in pantomime or farce, that the clown’s painted grin and the low-comedian’s ill-fitting clothes, red hair, and redder nose, proclaim their qualities before a word is spoken, and when Dickens calls a pompous fraud “Pecksniff,” a vulgar Cockney clerk “Guppy,” or a shifty, irresponsible, resourceful person “Swiveller,” we know at once, before we read any further, pretty much what their characters will be like. This, of course, is not art; it is an entirely indefeasible attempt to claim your sympathies or excite your aversions at the outset, independently of the greater or less success with which the author portrays their habits afterwards. We must, however, do Dickens the justice both to allow that he needed no such adventitious aids to the understanding of his characters, and to recognise that this kind of nomenclature was not peculiarly his own, but very largely the literary fashion of his time.
The pranks of Falstaff and Prince Hal, whose doings were to be “argument for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest for ever,” are commemorated, in afashion, by a large roadside inn, the “Falstaff,” standing nearly opposite Gad’s Hill Place, the successor, built in the time of Queen Anne, of a lonely beerhouse, the resort of characters more than questionable; more than kin to highwaymen, and much less than kind to unprotected wayfarers.