PICTURESQUE OLD DAYS
When they arrived at a village at nightfall, theycamped under the ample shelter of the great waggon; or, perhaps, if they had anything to squander on mere luxuries, spent sixpence or ninepence on a supper of cold boiled beef and bread, to be followed by a shake-down on straw or hay in the stable-lofts, which were quite commonly put to this use among the second- and third-rate inns of the old times.
Image unavailable: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
Those were the days of the picturesque; if, indeed, Rowlandson and Morland and the other delightfully romantic artists of the period did not invent those roadside scenes. Here, for instance, is Rowlandson’s charming group of three old topers boozing outside the ‘Half Moon.’ I cannot tell you where this ‘Half Moon’ was. Probably the artist imagined it; but at anyrate thekindof place, and scenes of this description, must have existed in his time. Here, you will observe, the landlord has come out with a mug of ‘humming ale’ or ‘nut-brown October’ for the thirsty driver of the curricle, who is apparently going tomarket, if we may judge by the basket of fowls tied on to the back of the conveyance.
Scenes so picturesque as this are not to be observed in our own time, nor are the tramps who yet infest the road, singly or in families, of the engaging appearance of this family party. The human form divine was wondrously gnarled and twisted, or phenomenally fat, a hundred years ago, according to Rowlandson and Gillray. Legs like the trunks of contorted apple-trees, stomachs like terrestrial globes, mouths resembling the mouths of horses, and noses like geographical features on a large scale were the commonplaces of their practice, and this example forms no exception to the general rule.
TREE-PLANTING
The ruin that descended upon Hartley Row in common with other coaching towns and villages, nearly sixty years ago, has long since been lived down, and the long street, although quiet, has much the same cheerful appearance as it must have worn in the heyday of its prosperity. It is a very wide street, fit for the evolutions of many coaches. Pleasant strips of grass now occupy, more or less continuously, one side, and at the western end forks the road to Odiham, through a pretty common with the unusual feature of being planted with oak trees. These oak glades do not look particularly old; but, as it happens, we can ascertain their exact age andat the same time note how slow-growing is the oak tree by a reference to Cobbett’sRural Rides, where, in 1821, he notes their being planted: ‘I perceive that they are planting oaks on the “wastes,” as theAgriculturassescall them, aboutHartley Row; which is very good, because the herbage, after the first year, is rather increased than diminished by the operation; while, in time, the oaks arrive at a timber state, and add to the beauty and thereal wealth, of the country, and to the real and solid wealth of the descendants of the planter who, in every such case, merits unequivocal praise, because he plants for his children’s children. The planter here is Lady Mildmay, who is, it seems, Lady of the Manors about here.’
This planting was accomplished in days before any one so much as dreamt of the time to come, when the navies of the world should be built like tin kettles. Oaks were then planted with a view to being eventually worked up into the ‘wooden walls of Old England,’ among other uses, and the squires who laid out money on the work were animated by the glow of self-satisfaction that warms the breasts of those who can combine patriotism with the provision of a safe deferred investment. Unhappily, the ‘wooden walls’ have long since become a dim memory before these trees have attained their proper timber stage, and now stand, to those who read these facts, as monuments to blighted hopes. But they render this common extremely beautiful, and give it a character all its own. All this is quite apart from the legal aspect of the case; whether, that is to say,the lord of a manor has any right to make plantations of common lands for his own or his descendants’ benefit. Cobbett, it will be perceived, calls these lands ‘wastes,’ following the term conferred upon them by the ‘Agriculturasses’—whoever they may have been. If technically ‘wastes of the manors,’ then the landowner’s right to do as he will is incontestable; but, with the contentious character of Cobbett before one, is it not remarkable that he should praise this planting and not question the right to call the land ‘wastes,’ instead of common? But perhaps Cobbett the tree-planter was contending with Cobbett the agitator, and the tree-planter got the best of it.
Hook, which succeeds Hartley Row, is a hamlet of the smallest size, but that fact does not prevent its possessing two old coaching inns, the ‘White Hart’ and the ‘Old White Hart,’ both very large and very near to one another. The Exeter Road certainly did not lack entertainment for man and beast in those days, with fine hostelries every few miles, either in the towns and villages, or else set down, solitary, amid the downs, like Winterslow Hut.
Nately Scures, whose second name is supposed to derive from the Anglo-Saxonscora, a shaw, or coppice (whence we get such place-names as Shawford, near Winchester; Shaugh Prior on Dartmoor; Shaw, in Berkshire, and many of the ‘scors’ forming the first syllables of place-names all over the country), is a place even smaller than Hook, with a tiny church, one of the many ‘smallest’ churches; standing in a meadow, to which access is had through rick-yards.
Image unavailable: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.
OLD BASING
It is worth while halting a moment to gain a sight of the little church, which is late Norman, and one of the few dedicated to that Norman bishop, Saint Swithun.
Returning to the highway, and coming to the place known to the old coachmen as Mapledurwell Hatch, where that fine old coaching inn, the ‘King’s Head,’ still stands, a road goes off to Old Basing, on the right, while the highway continues in a straight line, rising toward the town of Basingstoke.
The hasty traveller who knows nothing of the delights that await explorers in the byeways, misses a great deal here by keeping strictly to the highroad. If, instead of continuing direct to Basingstoke, this turning to the right hand is taken, it brings one in half a mile to the pretty village of Old Basing, celebrated for one of the most stubborn and protracted defences recorded in history. It was here that the equally crafty and courteous Sir William Paulet, first Marquis of Winchester, and Lord Treasurer during the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, built an immense palace on the site of Basing Castle. There can be little doubt that this magnificent person, who possessed no principles, and so kept place and power through the troublous times that these reigns comprised, must have had his hands in the Royal coffers to some purpose, or else have used his position for the sale of preferments. ‘No oak, but an osier,’ as his contemporaries said, he bowed before the tempests of religious persecution and the whirlwinds of conspiracies which passed him harmlessly by andleft him still peculating. He had become a hoary-headed sinner by the time Elizabeth reigned, or there is no knowing but that he might have become a Prince Consort; for when he entertained Her Majesty here in 1560: ‘By my troth,’ said she, ‘if my Lord Treasurer were but a young man, I could find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in England.’ But she had said this kind of thing of many another.
BASING HOUSE
The successors of this gorgeous nobleman—not being Lords Treasurers—could not afford to keep up so immense a palace, and so demolished a part of it, and found the remainder ample. To this place, fitting alike by its situation at a strategic point on the Western Road, and by the splendidly defensible nature of its site, crowded the King’s Hampshire adherents who were not engaged at Winchester and Southampton at the outbreak of the war between Charles and his Parliament. John, fifth Marquis of Winchester, then ruled. ‘Aimez Loyaulté,’ he wrote with his diamond ring on every window of his great mansion, and, provisioning his cellars, awaited events. As ‘Loyalty’ the house speedily became known to the flying bands of the King’s men who, pursued through the country by the Roundheads, made for its shelter as birds do for trees in a storm. The rebels might hold Basingstoke for a time, and lay siege to Basing House, but troops from Royalist Oxford would come and take the town and reprovision this stronghold. It was a mixed company in this palace-fortress. My lord, loyalist, soldier, amateur of the arts; reposing after the warlikefatigues of the day in a bed whose gorgeous trappings made it worth £1300; witty and brave cavaliers; a company of Roman Catholic priests; men-at-arms, drinking, dicing, and fighting by turns and with equal zest; and such representatives of the arts as Inigo Jones, the architect, and Hollar, the engraver. Gay and careless though they were, they fought well, and slew and were slain to the number of two thousand during this long siege. Sometimes this varied garrison was hard pressed for food, when relief would come in whimsical fashion, as when Colonel Gage and his thousand horsemen appeared with sword in one hand and holding on to a bag of provisions with the other; a fitting contrast with the typical Puritan, a Psalm-book in his left hand and a pike in his right. Basing House, indeed, in the words of Carlyle, ‘long infested the Parliament in these quarters, and was an especial eye-sorrow to the trade of London with the Western parts. It stood siege after siege for four years, ruining poor Colonel This and then poor Colonel That, till the jubilant Royalists had given it the name ofBastingHouse.’
But the end was at hand after Fairfax had reduced the garrisons in the West and the Parliamentary troops could be spared from other places. Cromwell himself was charged with the business of taking ‘Loyalty.’ It was in September that he came to Basingstoke with horse and foot, and established a post of observation on the summit of Winklebury, a hill crowned with prehistoric earthworks that overlooks Worting and the Exeter Road, two miles on the other side of the town.
Little over a fortnight later Cromwell wrote that ‘Thank God he was able to give a good account of Basing.’ The house was taken by storm on the 14th October, ‘while the garrison was card-playing,’ as the persistent Hampshire legend would have us believe. ‘Clubs are trumps, as when Basing House was taken,’ is still an expression often heard at Hampshire card-parties, and some colour is lent to this story by the poor defence with which the furious onrush of Cromwell’s troops was met. The attacking force lost few men, but a hundred of the defenders were killed, and three hundred more taken prisoners. Then the place caught fire and was utterly burnt, many perishing miserably in the great brick vaults of the house, where they were when the fire reached them. Fuller, that quaint seventeenth-century historian, who had been staying here, had, fortunately, left before the arrival of Cromwell’s expedition. The continual fighting and the booming of the guns had distracted his attention from his work! There were others not so fortunate. Thomas Johnson, a peaceful botanist, was killed, and one Robinson, an actor and unarmed, was slaughtered by Harrison, the fanatic. ‘Cursed is he that doeth the Lord’s work negligently,’ exclaimed the Puritan, as he cut him down. Other soldiers slew the daughter of Dr. Griffith who was charging them with being violent to her father.
Fanaticism and cupidity were fully satisfied on this occasion, save that there were those who grumbled because the lives of the Marquis of Winchester and his lieutenant were spared. The sack of Basing House yielded £200,000 worth of plunder, in objects
THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE
Image unavailable: THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE.THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE.
of art, gold and silver plate, coin, and provisions; and all partook of it, from Cromwell to the rank and file. ‘One soldier had a hundred and twenty pieces of gold for his share, others plate, others jewels.’ No wonder they had, with this dazzling prospect before them, rushed to the assault ‘like a fire-flood.’
They made a rare business of this pillage, taking away the valuables, and selling the provisions to the country folks, who ‘loaded many carts.’ The bricks and building materials were given away, probably because they could not wait for the long business of selling them. ‘Whoever will come for brick or stone shall freely have the same for his pains,’ ran the proclamation, and, considering this, it is quite remarkable that even the existing scanty ruins of Basing House are left.
The area comprised within the defences measures fourteen and a half acres, now a tumbled and tangled stretch of ground, a mass of grassy mounds and hollows, overgrown in places with thickets. These ruins are entered from the road by an old brick gateway, still bearing the ‘three swords in pile’ on a shield, the arms of the Paulets, with ivy overhanging and tall trees behind. A tall curtain wall of brick, with a quaintly peaked-roofed tower at either end, now looks down upon the Basingstoke Canal, which many strangers think is the moat, but though a picturesque addition to the scene, it cannot claim any such historic associations, for it was only constructed close upon a hundred years ago.
Near by is Old Basing church, with square tower built of red brick, similar to that seen in the ruinsof the House. It is said to be of foreign make. Bullets have up to recent years been extracted from the south door of the church, the original oak door in use two hundred and sixty years ago; and the flint and stone south walls and buttresses bear vivid witness, in their patching of brick, to the ruin that befell this part of the building in those troubled times. Strange to say, a beautiful group of the Virgin and Child still occupies a tabernacle over the west window, uninjured, although it can scarce have escaped the notice of the fanatical soldiery. Within the church are memorials of the loyal Paulets, Marquises of Winchester, and for a period Dukes of Bolton. Their glory has departed with their great House, and although a smaller residence was built in the meadows, close at hand, that has vanished too.
THE ‘GREY LADY’
When Basing House was laid in ruins the Marquis of Winchester retired to his hunting lodge of Hawk Wood, to the south of Basingstoke, and, enlarging it, made the place his residence. His son, created Duke of Bolton, employed Inigo Jones to build a new house on the site of the lodge, and this is the present Hackwood Park. The existing house stands in the midst of dense and tangled woodlands, and although imposing, is a somewhat gloomy pile, with a ghost story. That bitter lawyer, Richard Bethell, of whom it was said that he ‘dismissed Hell, with costs, and took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of everlasting damnation,’ when he became Lord Chancellor and was created Baron Westbury, purchased Hackwood Park, and it was to one of his friends that the ‘Grey Lady’ ofthe mansion presented herself. Lord Westbury and a party of his friends had arrived from town soon after the purchase, and at a late hour they retired to rest, saying good-night to one another in the corridor. One of the guests woke up in the middle of the night and found his room strangely illuminated, with the indistinct outlines of a human figure visible in the midst of the uncanny glow. Thinking this some practical joke, and feeling very drowsy, he turned round and fell off to sleep again, to wake at a later hour and see the figure of a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress. With more courage than most people would probably have shown under the circumstances, he, instead of putting his head under the bed-clothes, jumped out, whereupon the lady modestly retired. Instead of going to bed again, he sat down and wrote an account of the occurrence; but when at breakfast Lord Westbury and his other friends kept continually asking him how he had slept, his suspicions as to a practical joke having been played upon him were renewed. He accordingly parried all these queries and said he had slept excellently, until Lord Westbury said, ‘Now, look here, we saw that lady dressed in grey follow you into your room last night, you know!’ Explanations followed, but the story of the ‘Grey Lady’ remains mysterious to this day.
Thewhereabouts of Basingstoke may be noted from afar by the huge and odd-looking clock-tower of the Town Hall, added to that building in 1887. Its windy height, visible from many miles around, is also favourable to the hearing at a distance of its sweet-toned carillons, modelled on the pattern of the famous peal of Bruges. When the shrieking of the locomotives at the railway station is hushed, and the wind is favourable, you may hear those tuneful bells far away over the melancholy wolds that hem in Basingstoke to the north and west, or listen to them by the waters of the Loddon eastward, or the undulating farm-lands of the south.
HOLY GHOST CHAPEL
We have seen how Old Basing became of prime military importance from its situation at the point where many roads from the south and west of England converged and fell into one great highway to London; and from the same cause is due the commercial prosperity of Basingstoke. Basingstoke, with a record as a town going back to the time when the Domesday Book was compiled, is yet a mere modern settlement compared with the mother-parish of Old Basing; but it was an important place in the sixteenth century, when silks and woollens were manufactured here. At later periods this junction of the roads brought a great coaching trade, and has finally made Basingstoke a railway junction. Silks and woollens have given place to engineering works and machine-shops, and the town, with its modern reputation for the manufacture of agriculturalmachinery, bids fair at no distant date to become to Hampshire what Colchester and Ipswich are to Essex and Suffolk.
When the Parliamentary Generals were engaged in the long business of besieging Basing House, it may well be supposed that the town suffered greatly at the hands of their soldiery. They, who were experts at wrecking churches and cathedrals in a few hours, had ample opportunities for destruction in the four years that business was about. Their handiwork may be seen to this day—together with that of modern Toms, Dicks, and Harrys, who have not the excuse of being fanatics—in the ruined walls of Holy Ghost Chapel on the northern outskirts of the town. Within the roofless walls of the chapel, unroofed by those Roundheads for the sake of their leaden covering, are two recumbent effigies, sadly mutilated. Perhaps Sergeant Humility-before-the-Lord Mawworm slashed them with his pike in his hatred of worldly pomp; but his zeal did not do the damage wrought on the marble by the recording penknives of the past fifty years. A stained-glass window, pieced together from the fragments of those destroyed here, is still to be seen in Basingstoke Parish Church.
The Exeter Road leaves Basingstoke at its southwestern end, where a fork of the highway gives a choice to the traveller of continuing to Andover on the right, or making on the left to Winchester. The first village on the way to Exeter is Worting, below the shoulder of Battle Down, a village—nay, a hamlet, let us call it—of a Sundayfied stillness.Yet Worting has had its bustling times, for here was one of the most famous coaching inns on the road, the ‘White Hart.’ Another ‘White Hart,’ at Whitchurch, is scarcely less celebrated in the annals of the road. In fact, the ‘White Harts’ are so many and so notable on this road that the historian of the highways becomes almost as ashamed of mentioning them as of recounting the places which Cromwell stormed, or where Charles the Second hid; the houses in which Queen Elizabeth slept, or the inns where Pepys made merry.
OVERTON
Worting is followed in quick succession by the outskirts of Oakley, Clerken Green, Deane, Ashe, and Overton. Except Overton, which is a picturesque village lining the road, of the old coaching, or ‘thoroughfare’ type, these places are all shy and retiring, tucked away up bye-lanes, with great parks on their borders, in whose midst are very vast, very hideous country mansions where dwell the local J.P.’s, like so many Rogers de Coverley in miniature, with churches rebuilt or restored to their glory and the glory of God, and a general air of patronage bestowed upon the villagers and wayfarers from the outside world by those august partners. These parks, with their mile after mile of palings bordering the road, and their dense foliage overhanging it, are given over to solitude. An occasional gamekeeper, or a much more than occasional rabbit or hare, are the only signs of life, with perhaps the hoarse ‘crock’ of a pheasant’s call from the neighbouring coverts. The air beneath the overarching trees along the road is stale and stagnant, and typical of the lifehere, like the green damp on the entrance lodges of Hall Place, where heraldic lions, sitting on their rumps and holding what at a distance look like quart-pots from the country inn opposite, scowl at one another across the gravelled drive.
It is a relief to emerge from this stifling atmosphere upon the open road where Overton stands. We are fully entered here into the valley of the Test, or Anton, a sparkling little stream whose course we follow henceforward as far as Hurstbourne Priors. Fishermen love Overton and this valley well, for there is royal sport here among the trout and grayling, and in the village a choice of those old inns which the angler appreciates as much as any one. Picturesque Overton is a doubly ruined village, for it has lost its silk industry, together with the coaching interest; but like the splendid bankrupts of modern high finance who fail for millions and continue to live like princes, it continues cheerful. Perhaps every one in the place made a competency before the crash, and put it away where no one could touch it!
The valley broadens out delightfully beyond Overton, and the road, reaching Laverstoke, commands beautiful views over the water-meadows, and the open park in whose midst stands Laverstoke House, clearly seen in passing. In this village, in the neat and clean paper-mill by the road, is made the paper for Bank of England notes. It was so far back as 1719 that this industry was established here by the Portal family, French Protestants emigrating from their country for conscience’ sake. Cobbett, who hated paper-money as much as he did the ‘Wen’ inwhich it is chiefly current, passed this spot in a fury. He says, with a sad lack of the prophetic faculty, ‘We passed the mill where the Mother-Bank paper is made! Thank God! this mill is likely soon to want employment. Hard by is a pretty park and house, belonging to “’Squire” Portal, thepaper-maker. The country people, who seldom want for sarcastic shrewdness, call it “Rag Hall!”’And again, ‘I hope the time will come when a monument will be erected where that mill stands, and when on that monument will be inscribed “the Curse of England.” This spot ought to be held accursed in all time henceforth and for evermore. It has been the spot from which have sprung more and greater mischief than ever plagued mankind before.’
Unhappily for Cobbett’s wishes and predictions, the mill is still in existence and is busier than it was when he wrote in 1821. There are as many as two hundred and fifty people now employed here in the making of the ‘accursed’ paper.
Now comes Freefolk village, with a wayside drinking-fountain and a tall cross, with stone seat, furnished with some pious inscription; the whole erected by a Portal in 1870, and intended to further the honour and glory of that family. There is plenty water everywhere around, in the river and its many runlets amid the water-meadows, but the fountain is dry. Passing tramps are properly sarcastic, and the dry fountain and its texts, so far from leading in the paths of temperance and godliness, are the occasion of much blasphemy. But the pious Portals have their advertisement.
NEWMAN AT WHITCHURCH
Whitchurch, two miles down the road, is approached past the much-quarried hills that rise on the right hand and shelter that decayed little town from the buffetings of the north-easterly winds. If there be those who are curious to learn what a decayed old coaching town is like, let them journey to Whitchurch. After much tiresome railway travelling, and changing at junctions, they will arrive in the fulness of time at Whitchurch station, whence the omnibus of the ‘White Hart’ will drive them, rumbling over the stone-pitched streets of the town, to the door of that quaint inn, in one of whose rooms the future Cardinal Newman wrote the beginning of theLyra Apostolica:—
Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?
Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?
Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?
2nd December 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth. He had come from Oxford that morning by the Oxford-Southampton coach.
‘Here I am,’ he says, writing to his mother, ‘from one till eleven,’ waiting for the down Exeter mail. Think, modern railway traveller, what would you say were it your lot to wait ten hours, say at Templecombe Junction, for a connection! Moreover, a bore claiming to be the brother of an acquaintance claimed to share his room and his society at the ‘White Hart,’ and eventually journeyed to Exeter with him. The future Cardinal did not like this. He writes: ‘I am practising for the first time the duty of a traveller, which is sorely against the grain, and have been talkative and agreeable without end,’ adding (one can almost imagine the sigh of the retiring scholar!), ‘Nowthat I have set up for a man of the world, it is my vocation.’
The latter part of his journey was accomplished at night. Travelling thus through Devonshire and Cornwall is, he remarks, ‘very striking for its mysteriousness.’ It was a beautiful night, ‘clear, frosty, and bright, with a full moon. Mere richness of vegetation is lost by night, but bold features remain. As I came along, I had the whole train of pictures so vividly upon my mind that I could have written a most interesting account of it in the most approved picturesque style of modern composition, but it has all gone from me now, like a dream.’
‘The night was enlivened by what Herodotus calls a “night engagement” with a man, called by courtesy a gentleman, on the box. The first act ended by his calling me a d——d fool. The second by his insisting on two most hearty shakes of the hand, with the protest that he certainly did think me very injudicious and ill-timed. I had opened by telling him he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maidservant stuck atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain of his giving me the retort uncourteous.’
There are corridors in the ‘White Hart’ with up and down twilight passages, in which the guests of another day lost themselves with promptitude and despatch. There is also a barbarically coloured coffee-room, snug and comfortable, which looks as though Washington Irving could have written an eloquent essay around it; and, more essential than anything else in days of old, a capacious yard with huge yawning stables. For Whitchurch is at the cross
BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION
Image unavailable: WHITCHURCH.WHITCHURCH.
roads, along which in one direction went the Exeter mails, while at right angles goes the road between Southampton, Winchester, Newbury, Didcot, and Oxford, little used now, but once an important route. Whitchurch, in the gay old times when few men had votes but every voter had his price, used to send two members to Parliament. Horrid Reform and Bribery Acts which, together with the extension of the franchise and the adoption of secret voting, have brought about the disfranchising of rotten boroughs and the decay of such home industries as electoral corruption, personation, and the like, have taken away much of the prosperity of the town, which, like Andover, used to live royally from one election to another on the venality of the ‘free and independent.’ But the last visit of the ‘Man in the Moon’ was paid to Whitchurch very many years ago, and not even the oldest inhabitant can recollect the days when cash was given for votes and the electors, gloriously and incapably drunk, were herded together to plump for the candidate with the longest purse.
When it is said that Whitchurch is a tiny town of very steep, narrow, and crooked streets, that it still boasts some vestiges of its old silk industry, and that it is a ‘Borough by prescription,’ all its salient points have been exhausted. Reform has not only reformed away the Parliamentary representation of the town, but has also swept away the municipal authority. Mayor and bailiff are both elected every year, but the offices carry no power nowadays.
Leaving Whitchurch, the road presently comes to the village of Hurstbourne Priors, which stands in ahollow on the Bourne, an affluent of the Anton, and on the verge of the Ancient and Royal Forest of Harewood. Not only does the village stand on the banks of the stream and the edge of the woods, but it also derives the first of its two names from these circumstances, ‘Hurstbourne’ being obviously descriptive of woodlands and brooklet, while the ‘Priors’ is a relic of its old lords of the manor, the abbots of Saint Swithun’s at Winchester. These historic and geographical facts, however, are apt to be lost in the local corruption of the place-name, and that of Hurstbourne Tarrant, a few miles higher up the stream; for they are, according to Hampshire speech, respectively ‘Up Husband’ and ‘Down Husband.’
ANDOVER
The road between this point and Andover, ascending the high ground between the Ann and the Test, is utterly without interest, and brings the traveller down into the town at the south side of the market square without any inducement to linger on the way. Except on the Saturday market-day, Andover is given over to a dreamy quiet. The butchers’ dogs lie blinking sleepily on the thresholds, or on the kerbs, and regard with a pained surprise, rather than with any active resentment, the intrusive passage of a stray customer. Tradesmen’s assistants leisurely open casual crates of goods on the pavements, with long intervals for gossip between the drawing of each nail,and no one objects to the blocking of the footpath. A chance cyclist manœuvres in the empty void of the road in the midst of the square, and collides with no one, for the simple reason that there is nobody to collide with, and one acquaintance talks to another across the wide space and is distinctly heard. Formal but not unpleasing houses front on to this square, together with the usual Town Hall, and a great modern, highly uninteresting Gothic church, erected after the model of Salisbury Cathedral, on the site of the old building.
For fifty-one weeks of the fifty-two that comprise the year, this is the weekly six-days aspect of the place, varied occasionally by the advent of a travelling circus, or the arrival of a route-marching detachment of the Royal Artillery, who park their guns in the square, and may be seen in the stable-yards of the inns on which they are billeted, in various stages of dishevelment, in shirt-sleeves rolled up to elbows, and braces dangling at waists, littering down their horses, or smoking very short and very foul pipes.
All this idyllic quiet is blown to the winds during the week of Weyhill Fair, the October pandemonium held three and a half miles away. Then hordes of cattle-and horse-jobbers, hop growers and buyers, cheese-factors, and the travellers of firms dealing in machinery, seeds, oil-cake, tarpaulins, and half a hundred other everyday agricultural requisites, descend upon the town. Then are dragged out from mysterious receptacles the most antiquated of ‘flys,’ and waggonettes, and nondescript vehicles, to be pressed into the service of conveying visitors to theFair, some three and a half miles from the town. Whence they come, and where they are hidden away afterwards, is more than the stranger can tell, but it is quite certain that their retreat is in some corner where spiders dwell, and earwigs and other weird insects have a home. Add to these facts the all-important one that it is generally possible to walk the distance in a shorter time, and you have a full portraiture of the average Weyhill conveyance.
This sleepy old place, older by many more centuries than the oldest house remaining here can give any hint of, was not always so quiet. There were alarums and excursions (ending, however, with not so much as a cut finger) when James the Second, falling back from Salisbury before the advance of his son-in-law, William of Orange, halted here. There might have been a battle in Andover’s streets, or under the shadow of Bury Hill, had James put a bolder front on the business; but instead of cutting up William’s Dutchmen, he just dined overnight, and hearing in the morning that his other son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, had slunk off with Lords Ormond and Drumlanrig, went off himself, strategically to the rear. He was an obstinate and ridiculous bigot, and a quite unlovable monarch, but he had a power of sarcasm. ‘What,’ said he, hearing of the Prince’s desertion, and bitterly mimicking the absurd intonation of that recreant’s French catch-phrase, ‘is “Est-il possible?” gone too? Truly, a good trooper would have been a greater loss.’
OLD ELECTIONS
After these events, that era of bribery and corruption set in, which is mistakenly supposed to havebeen brought to an end through the agency of the several Reform Acts, passed by well-meaning Legislatures to secure the purity of Parliamentary elections. As if treating, and the crossing of horny hands with gold were the only ways of corrupting a constituency that the wit of man, or the address of a candidate, could discover! The palm no longer receives the coin; but who has not heard of the modern art of ‘nursing a constituency,’ by which the candidate, eager for Parliamentary honours, sits down before a town, or a county division, subscribes liberally to hospitals and horticultural societies, cricket and football clubs, opens bazaars, and presides at Young Men’s Christian Associations, thereby winning the votes which would in other days have been acquired by palming the men and kissing all the babies? This tea-fight business gives us no picturesque situations like that in which Charles James Fox figured. Fox was canvassing personally, and called upon one of the bluff and blunt order of voters, who listened to his eloquence, and remarked, ‘Sir, I admire your abilities, but damn your principles!’ To which Fox supplied the obvious retort, ‘Sir, I admire your sincerity, but damn your manners!’
Andover no longer sends a representative to Parliament, but in the brave old days it elected two. With a knowledge of the wholesale purchasing of votes that then went on, it will readily be perceived that Andover, with two members to elect, must have been a place flowing with milk and honey; or, less metaphorically, a happy hunting-ground for guineas and free drinks. It was somewhere about a hundredand fifty years ago that Sir Francis Blake Delaval, a prominent rake and practical humorist of the period, was canvassing Andover. One voter amid the venal herd was, to all appearance, proof against all temptations. Money, wine, place, flattery had no seductions for this stoic. The baffled candidate was beside himself in his endeavours to discover the man’s weak point; for of course it was an age in which votes were so openly bought and sold that the saying ‘Every man has his price’ was implicitly believed. Only whatwasthis particular voter’s figure? Strange to say, he had no weakness for money, but was possessed with an inordinate desire to see a fire-eater, and doubted if there existed people endowed with that remarkable power. ‘Off went Delaval to London, and returned with Angelo in a post-chaise. Angelo exerted all his genius. Fire poured from his mouth and nostrils—fire which melted that iron nature, and sent it off cheerfully to poll for Delaval!’
This was that same Delaval whose attorney sent him the following bill of costs after one of his contests:—
To being thrown out of the window of the George Inn, Andover; to my leg being thereby broken; to surgeon’s bill, and loss of time and business; all in the service of Sir Francis Delaval, £500.
To being thrown out of the window of the George Inn, Andover; to my leg being thereby broken; to surgeon’s bill, and loss of time and business; all in the service of Sir Francis Delaval, £500.
And cheap too.
PRACTICAL JOKING
They kept this sort of thing up for many years; not always, however, throwing solicitors out of hotel windows; although rival political factions often expressed their determination to throw one another’s candidate in the Anton, after the fashion of the billsposted in the town during a contest in the ’40’s, which announced in displayed type—
LORD HUNTINGTOWER FOR EVER!SIR JOHN POLLEN IN THE RIVER!!CATCHING FISH FOR HIS LORDSHIP’S DINNER!!!
History does not satisfy us on the point whether or not those furious partisans carried out their threat; or whether, if they did, their victim afforded good bait.
This Lord Huntingtower was the eldest son of the late Earl of Dysart, and a well-matched companion of the late Marquis of Waterford. Roaming the country-side on dark nights, mounted on stilts, with sheets over their clothes and hollowed turnips on their heads with scooped-out holes for eyes and mouth, and lit with candles, they frightened many a timid rustic out of his dull wits. In daytime they played practical jokes on the tradesfolk of Andover. For example, entering a little general shop in the town, Lord Huntingtower asked for a pound of treacle. ‘Where shall I put it?’ asked the old woman who kept the shop, seeing that the usual basin was not forthcoming.
‘P-pup-pup-put it in my hat,’ said my Lord, who stuttered in yard-lengths, holding out his ‘topper.’ The pound of treacle was accordingly poured into the Lincoln and Bennett, and the next instant it was on the shopkeeper’s head.
This was the manner in which Lord Huntingtower endeared himself to the people—those, that is to say, who were not the victims of his pleasantries.
That kind of person is quite extinct now. They should have (but unfortunately they have not) a stuffed specimen in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington; because he is numbered with the Dodo, the Plesiosaurus, and the Mastodon. The Marquis of Winchester who flourished at the same period as my Lords Huntingtower and Waterford was of the same stamp. He had the fiery Port Countenance which was the sign of the three-bottle man, and his life and the deeds that he did are still fondly remembered at Andover, for his country-house was at Amport, in the immediate neighbourhood. He was the Premier Marquis of England, and although up to his neck in mortgages and writs, an extremely Great Personage. Let us, therefore, take our hats off as humbly as we know how to do.
When he was at his country-place he worshipped at the little village church of Amport. Sometimes he did not worship, but slept, lulled off to the Land of Nod by the roaring fire he kept in his room-like pew. On one occasion it chanced that he was wide awake, and, like the illustrious Sir Roger de Coverley, leant upon the door of that pew, and gazed around to satisfy himself that all his tenantry were present. Then an awful thing happened, the hinges of the door broke, and it fell with a great clatter to the ground, and the Marquis with it. He said ‘Damn!’ with great fervour and unction, and everybody laughed. No one thought it—as they should have done—shocking, which shows the depravity of the age.
THE MARQUIS AND THE SQUIRE
There is no doubt whatever about that depravity, which, like the worm in the bud, has wrought ruinamong our manners since then. How sad it is that we are not now content to call upon Providence to
Bless the squire and his relationsAnd keep us in our proper stations;
Bless the squire and his relationsAnd keep us in our proper stations;
Bless the squire and his relationsAnd keep us in our proper stations;
but are all too intent upon ‘getting on,’ to defer to rank, or take a spell at the delightful occupations of tuft-hunting and boot-licking! Even in those days this horrid decadence had begun to manifest itself, as you will see by the story of this same Marquis and Mr. Assheton Smith of Tedworth Park. Mr. Smith could (as the saying goes) have ‘bought up’ the impoverished Marquis of Winchester several times over, and not have felt any strain upon his resources. Moreover, he was a Squire of great consideration in these parts, and as Master of the Tedworth Hunt, something of a rival in importance. For which things, and more, the Marquis hated him, and on one occasion took an opportunity of reproving him publicly before the whole field, in the fine florid language of which he had so ready a command. Possibly Mr. Smith had committed the unpardonable indignity of showing my lord the way over a particularly stiff fence he was hesitating at. At any rate the language of the Premier Marquis was violent, and contained some reference to the disparity between their respective ranks. But the Squire was ready with his retort. He said, ‘Anyhow, I’d sooner be a rich Squire than a poor Marquis!’ The field smiled, because the reduced circumstances of the Marquis of Winchester had been notorious ever since his father had been secretly buried at midnight in the familyvault at Amport, for fear the bailiffs should seize the body for debt.
There are, for good or ill, no such sportsmen nowadays as there were in the times before railways came and brought more competition into existence, making life a business and a struggle, instead of the light-hearted and irresponsible game that the sporting squires at least found it. Noble sportsmen do not nowadays, when detained by stress of weather in a country inn, while away the tedium of the afternoon by backing the raindrops racing down the window-panes and betting fortunes on the result. No, that very real bogey, ‘agricultural depression,’ has stopped that kind of full-blooded prank, and the titled in these progressive times find their account on the ‘front page’ of company-promoters’ swindles instead. They barter good names for gold, and lick the boots of wealthy rogues, instead of kicking their bodies. Where their fathers scorned to go the sons delight to be. Would the fathers have done the like had ‘agricultural depression’ come earlier?
The noblemen and the sporting squires of old lived in one mad whirl of excitement. They gambled on every incident in their lives, and sometimes even on their death-beds; like the old gamester who, when the doctor told him he would be dead the next morning, offered to bet him that he would not! We are not told whether or not the medical man backed his professional opinion.