Ruins of Wolsey’s Palace Esher
Before he died, Vanbrugh’s estate was sold to the Earl of Clare, who added a banqueting-hall to the architect’s modest dwelling, purchased additional land, and, after the custom greatly honoured in the observance during the eighteenth century, stole much more from the neighbouring common, until he brought the palings of the park coterminous (as the political geographers might say) with the Portsmouth Road. In midst of the land he had thus filched from the commoners of Esher, the Earl of Clare built a kind of belvidere on a pleasant eminence overlooking the country-side, and called it Clare Mount. Thus arose the name of the house and park. Soon afterwards, however, the Earl was created Duke of Newcastle, and, to honour his new pomp and circumstance the more, employed Kent, the celebrated landscape gardener, to re-arrange the grounds and gardens, until their magnificence called forth this eulogium from Sir Samuel Garth, a dabbler both in medicine and metre:—
“Oh! who can paint in verse those rising hills,Those gentle valleys, and their silver rills;Close groves and opening glades with verdure spread,Flow’rs sighing sweets, and shrubs that balsams bleed?”
Ah! who indeed? Not Sir Samuel Garth, though, if this be a representative taste of his quality.
The Claremont that we see now was built by the “heaven-born general,” Clive, who purchased the estate upon the death of the Duke of Newcastle in 1768. He built, with the aid of Lancelot Brown (Capability Brown his contemporaries eke-named him), in a grand and massive style that excited the gaping wonder of the country folk. “The peasantry of Surrey,” says Macaulay, in his “Essay on Clive,” “looked with mysterious horror on the stately house which was rising at Claremont, and whispered that the great wicked lord had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily.” This unenviable reputation for wickedness was the work of Clive’s enemies, of whom, perhaps, from one cause and another, no man has possessed so many. The men above whose heads his genius and daring had carried him, and the Little Englanders of that day, both hated the hero of Plassey with a lurid and vitriolic vehemence. They circulated strange tales of his cruelty and cupidity in India, until even well-informed people regarded Clive as an incarnate fiend, and “Capability” Brown even came to wonder that his conscience allowed him to sleep in the same house with the notorious Moorshedabad treasure-chest.
LORD CLIVE.
Clive ended his brief but glorious career, slain by his own hand, in November 1774, but none the less murdered by the ingratitude of his country, a country so prolific in heroes that it can afford, for the sport of factions, to hound them occasionally to ruin and to death, coming afterwards in recriminating heart-agony to mourn their loss. Clive died, not yet fifty years of age, killed by constitutional melancholia, aggravated by disease and the yelpings of politicians, eager to drag down in the mire the man who gave us India. The arms of Clive still decorate the pediment of Claremont, the only house, so ’tis said, that “Capability” Brown ever built, though he altered many.
PRINCESS CHARLOTTE
In the forty years that succeeded between the death of Clive and the purchase of the estate by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, Claremont had a succession of owners; and upon the marriage of the Prince Regent’s only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, in 1816, it was allotted to her for a residence. It was in May of that year that the Princess Charlotte of Wales was married to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the petty German Duchy that has furnished princelings innumerable for the recruiting of kingdoms and principalities, and has given the Coburg Loaf its name.
But within a year of her marriage the Princess died in child-birth, and was buried in a mausoleum within the park. Then Claremont was for long deserted. There is a much-engraved portrait of the Princess, painted by Chalon, R.A., which shows a pleasant-faced girl, with fine neck and full eyes,—the characteristic eyes of the Guelphs,—and a strongfacial resemblance to her father and grandfather, the Third and Fourth Georges. She is represented as habited in the indecent dress of the period, with ermined robe, and wearing a velvet hat with an immense plume of ostrich feathers. But a much more pleasing portrait is that by an unnamed artist, “a Lady,” reproduced here, which gives a representation of the Princess without those elaborate feathers and showy trappings of Court ceremonial.
CHRONIQUES SCANDALEUSES
The circumstances that attended the death of this Princess, to whom the nation looked as their future Queen, were not a little mysterious, and gave rise to many sinister rumours and scandals. Sir Richard Croft, a fashionableaccoucheurof that time, was in attendance upon her with other physicians. He was one who signed the bulletins announcing her steady progress towards recovery after the birth of a dead child; but on the following day the news of the Princess’s death came as a sudden shock upon England, whose people had but recently shared in the joy and happiness of her happy marriage, doubly welcome after the sinister quarrels, estrangements, and espionages that marked the wedded life of the Regent. Scarce had the tidings of the Princess Charlotte’s death at Claremont become public property than all manner of strange whispers became current as to the causes of it. The public mind was, singularly enough, not satisfied with the medical explanations which would ordinarily have been accepted for very truth; but became exercised with vague suspicions of foul play that were only fanned into further life by the mutual recriminations of medicos and lay pamphleteers. Even those who saw no shadow of a crime upon this bad business were ready to cast blame and the bitterest reproaches upon Sir Richard Croft, in whose care the case chiefly lay, for his mistaken treatment. And this was not the first occasion upon which Croft’s conduct had been looked upon with suspicion, for, years previously, a scandalous rumour had been bruited about with regard to two of his noble patients,—the Duchess of Devonshire and an unnamed lady of title,—by which it would seem that he was privy to a supposititious change of children at the Duchess of Devonshire’s accouchement, when it was believed that the Duchess exchanged a girl for her friend’s boy.
PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES.
But on this occasion the affair was much more serious, whether blame attached to him solely for mistaken treatment, or whether scandal whispered at criminal complicity. The Princess Charlotte died on November 6, 1817; three months later—on February 13, 1818—Sir Richard Croft, in despair, shot himself. He was but fifty-six years of age.
Years later—in 1832—when Lady Ann Hamilton’s extraordinary scribblings were published in two volumes under the title of “A Secret History of the Court of England, from 1760 to the Death of George IV.,” these old rumours were crystallized into a definite charge of murder against some nobleman whose name is prudently veiled under a blank. The Princess, says Lady Hamilton, was in a fair way of recovery, and a cup of broth was given her; but after partaking of it she died in convulsions. Thenurse who handed her the cup noticed a dark red sediment at the bottom, and on tasting it found her tongue blistered! This peer, according to Lady Hamilton, acted with the connivance of the King, George III., and his glorified Germanhausfrau, and with the approval of the Princess’s father, the Regent, who, it is asserted in those pages, was heard to say some time previously at Esher that “no child of the Princess Charlotte shall ever sit upon the throne of England.” Lady Ann Hamilton, however, was a malevolent gossip, holding the most extreme Radical views, and as a personal friend and uncompromising partisan of Caroline, Princess of Wales,—that silly and phenomenally undignified woman—was eager to believe anything, no matter how atrocious, of her husband and his people.
No member of the Royal Family was present at the Princess Charlotte’s death-bed. She died, with the sole exception of her husband, Prince Leopold, amid physicians and domestics.
The King and Queen were (says Lady Hamilton) a hundred and eight miles away, and the Regent was either at Carlton House or staying with the Marquis of Hertford (or rather theMarchioness, she adds, in significant italics).
It is said that Lady Ann Hamilton’s writings, published as a “Secret History,” were given to the world, without her knowledge or consent, by a gentleman who had obtained the manuscript. Certain it is that when these two volumes appeared, in 1832, they were suppressed; and some four years later, when some other manuscripts belonging to the authorwere advertised for sale by auction, they were hastily bought up on behalf of a royal personage, and, it is believed, destroyed.
It is difficult to understand the hardihood which asserted at that time that the Princess Charlotte had been the victim of a murderous conspiracy between her nearest relatives; the more especially because her death would not seem to have been any one’s immediate great gain. Had it been of great advantage to any prominent member of the Royal Family, the suspicion might have been better founded, for royalty has no monopoly of virtue, while the temptations of its position are a hundredfold greater than those of lower estate. The history of royal houses shows that murder has frequently altered the line of succession, but surely the House of Brunswick (that heavy and phlegmatic line) never soared to this tragic height, or plumbed such depths of crime in modern times.
‘MR. SMITH’
For many years after the death of the Princess Charlotte, Claremont was closed, the rooms unoccupied, and left in much the condition they were then. Prince Leopold became, by the death of his wife, life-owner of the place, but its sad memories led him to leave it for ever. In after years the Prince became King of the Belgians, and, in 1832, a year after this advancement, married the eldest daughter of Louis Philippe, King of the French. Sixteen years later, during the stress of the French Revolution of 1848, thatbourgeoisKing fled from Paris and crossed the Channel as “Mr. Smith,” and his son-in-law placed Claremont at the disposal of theémigrémalgré lui. Here he died in 1850. In 1865 the King of the Belgians died, and Claremont reverted to the Crown. Six years later the Marquis and Marchioness of Lorne stayed here on the occasion of their marriage, and when the Queen’s youngest son, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany, was married, Claremont became his home. But the Duke died in 1884, and the house is now in the occupation of his widow.
Claremont, indeed, is a place weighted with memories and sad thoughts of the “might have been.” If only the intrepid Clive had lived to take the field against our rebellious colonists, as it was proposed he should do, it seems likely that the New England States had yet been ours, and Washington surely hanged or shot. Then North America had not become the safe refuge of political murderers commanding sympathetic ears at the White House, nor had we ever heard of thescagliolafripperies of a Presidential Reception. But a dull and obstinate King, a stupid ministry, and incompetent generals combined to lose us those colonies, and death snatched away untimely the foremost military genius of the time, to leave statesmen in despair at what they thought was surely the decay of a glorious Empire.
How changed, too, would have been the succession had the Princess Charlotte lived! The Sailor King—that most unaffected and heartiest of monarchs, whom the irreverent witlings of his day called “Silly Billy,” for no particular reason that I know of—would have still remained Duke of Clarence, and the Princess Victoria would have been but a mere cousinof another Queen. But no matter what Fate has in store for other Houses, the Coburger reaps an advantage, whate’er befalls; and though one is relegated to a less distinguished career by the death of his consort, another of that prolific race becomes the husband of a Queen, and the father of our future Kings.
But it is a long way yet to Guildford, and eight miles to our next change, at the “Talbot” Hotel, Ripley; equally with the Esher “Bear” a coaching inn of long and honourable lineage. Let us then proceed without more ado down the road.
FAIRMILE
Fairmile Common is the next place of note, and it is especially notable from the coaching point of view, by reason of the flatness of the road that is supposed to be the only level mile between London and Guildford. Along this Fair Mile, then, the coachmen of by-past generations generally took the opportunity of “springing” their cattle, and as they were “sprung” then, so they are to-day, over this best of galloping-grounds, the said “springing” bringing us, in less than no time, to Cobham Street, where there is a very fine and large roadside inn indeed, called the “White Lion.” If the coach stopped here, you would be able to verify this statement by an exploration of the interior, which is as cosy and cheerful within as it is bare and cold and inhospitable-looking without—at least, those are my sentiments. But, then, the coach doesn’t stop, butgoes dashing round the corner and over the river Mole and up Pain’s Hill in the “twinkling of a bed-post,” that somewhat clumsyfaçon de parler.
Now, if you walked leisurely this way, there would be time for talking of many interesting things. Firstly, as to Fairmile itself, which is worth lingering over upon a fine summer’s day.
Fairmile Common is associated, in local tradition, with the following tragedy. Two young brothers of the Vincent family of Stoke D’Abernon, the elder of whom had but just come into possession of his estate, were out on a shooting expedition from that village. They had put up several birds, but had not been able to get a single shot, when the eldest swore with a great oath that he would fire at whatever they next met with. They had gone but little further when the miller of the neighbouring mill passed them and bade them good-day. When he had passed, the younger brother jokingly reminded the elder of his oath, whereupon the latter immediately fired at the miller, who fell dead upon the spot. The murderer escaped to his home, and, by family influence, backed by large sums of money, no effective steps were taken for his arrest. He was concealed upon his estate for some years, when he died from remorse. To commemorate his rash act and his untimely death, a monument was placed in Stoke D’Abernon Church, bearing the “bloody hand” which no doubt gave rise to the whole story.
COBHAM STREET
The red hand of Ulster, badge of honourable distinction, is not understanded by the country folk, and so, to account for it, the Stoke D’Abernonvillagers have evolved this moving tale. That is my view of the legend. If you are curious concerning it, why, Stoke D’Abernon is near at hand, and there, in as charming a village church as you could wish to see, filled, beside, with archæological interest, is this memorial. Did space suffice (which it doesn’t) much might be said of Stoke D’Abernon, of Slyfield Farm, and of Cobham village; which last must on no account be confounded with Cobham Street. The latter place is, in fact, just an offshoot (though an old one ’tis true) of the original village, and it arose out of the large amount of custom that was always going along the Portsmouth Road in olden times.
COBHAM CHURCHYARD.
Cobham Street stood here in receipt of this custom and of much patronage from that very fine high-handed gentleman, the Honourable Charles Hamilton,who in the reign of George II. filched a large tract of common land just beyond the other side of the Mole, enclosed it, and by the expenditure of vast sums of money caused such gardens to blossom here, such caves and grottoes to be formed, and such cunning dispositions of statuary to be made (all in the classic taste of the time) that that carping critic, Horace Walpole, was compelled to a reluctant admiration. And this was the origin of the estate still known as Pain’s Hill.
“’Tis very bad, in man or woman,To steal a goose from off the common:But who shall plead that man’s excuseWho steals the common from the goose?”
Thus the metrical moralist. But this was common sport (no joke intended here!) during last century and in the beginning of this, and if a man stole a few hundred acres in this way, he was thought none the worse of for it. For all that, however, the Honourable Charles Hamilton was nothing more, in fact, than a common thief, with this difference—that the poor devil who “prigged” a handkerchief was hanged for petty larceny, while the rich man who stole land on a large scale, and converted it to his own uses, was hailed as a man of taste and culture, and his robbery commended.
PAIN’S HILL.
WISLEY
Pain’s Hill looms up finely as one turns the corner of Cobham Street and crosses the Mole by the successor of the bridge built here by the “Good Queen Maud,” in place of the ford where one of her maids-of-honour was drowned. There are more inns here, and their humped and bowed roofs make an excellentcomposition in a sketch, with the remarkable mop-like trees of Pain’s Hill Park seen in silhouette beyond. To Pain’s Hill succeeds Tartar Hill and Wisley Common; sombre fir trees lining the road and reflected in the great pond that spreads like some mystic mere over many acres. The “Huts” Hotel, however, rebuilt and aggressively modern, is not at all mystic, and neither are the crowds of thirsty, dusty cyclists who frequent it on summer days.
CYCLING
The Portsmouth Road, from London to Ripley, has, any time these last twenty years, been the most frequented by cyclists of any road in England. The “Ripley Road,” as it is generally known among wheelmen, is throughout the year, but more especially in the spring and summer months, alive with cycles and noisy with the ringing of cycle-bells. On Saturday afternoons, and on fine Sundays, an almost inconceivable number take a journey down these twenty-three miles from London, and back again in the evening; calling at the “Angel,” at Ditton, on the way, and taking tea at their Mecca, the “Anchor,” at Ripley. The road is excellent for cycling, but so also are a number of others, equally accessible, around London, and it must be acknowledged that the “Ripley Road” is as much favoured by a singular freak of fashion in cycling, and as illogically, as a particular walk in Hyde Park is affected by Society on Sundays. But in cycling circles (apt phrase!) it is quite the correct thing to be seen at Ditton or at Ripley on a Sunday, and every one who is any one in that sport and pastime, be-devilled as it is now-a-days with shady professionalism and the transparently subsidized performances of the makers’ amateurs, must be there. The “Ripley Road,” now-a-days, is, in fact, the stalking-ground of self-advertising long-distance riders, of cliquey and boisterous club-men, and of the immodest women who wear breeches awheel. The tourist, and the man who only has a fancy for the cycle as ameans of healthful exercise, and does not join the membership of a club, give the “Ripley Road” a wide berth.
The frequenters of this road became in 1894 such an unmitigated nuisance and source of danger to the public in passing through Kingston-on-Thames, that the local bench of magistrates were obliged to institute proceedings against a number of cyclists for furious driving, and for riding machines without lights or bells. According to the evidence given by an inspector of police, no fewer than twenty thousand cyclists passed through Kingston on Whit Sunday, 1894.
FAME UP-TO-DATE.
Coaching men hate the cyclist with a bitter hatred, and he will ever be to them abête noirof the blackest hue. It may not be generally known that the contumelious expression of “cads on castors,” which has become so widespread that it has almost obtained the popularity of a proverb, originated with Edmund Yates; but he was really the author of that scornful epithet, whose apt alliteration will probably never be forgotten, though the “castors” be evolved into hitherto undreamed-of patterns, and the race of cads who earned the appellation be dead and gone. The expression “cads on castors” will, with that other humorous epithet, “Brompton boilers,” achieve immortality when cycling is obsolete, and the corrugated iron roofs of the Bethnal Green Museum are rusted away. The objectionable phrase of “bounders on box-seats,” which some cycling journalists have flung back at their coaching critics has not run to anything like the popularity of the other, and moreapt, effort of alliterative conciseness; for the prejudices of the lieges have, up to now, been chiefly in favour of the whips and horsey men to whom the cycle is the “poor man’s horse,” and therefore to be condemned. Will the sport and pastime of cycling ever become aristocratic? It is to be feared or hoped (accordingly as you admire or detest the cycle) that it will never win to this regard: at least, not while the road-racing clubs and individual cyclists continue to render the Queen’s highway dangerous for all other travellers; not so long as that peculiar species of Fame, which is more properly Notoriety, continues to be trumpeted abroad concerning the doings of racing cyclists who strive, not for the English love of sport, but for the cheques awarded them by the long-headed manufacturers whose machines they ride—and advertise.
THE “ANCHOR,” RIPLEY.
RIPLEY
But cycling has brought much prosperity to Ripley village and its two antiquated inns, the “Talbot” and the “Anchor.” A few years ago, indeed (before cycling had become so popular), the “Talbot” was closed and given over to solitude and mice, but now-a-days one may be as well served there as at any country hostel you please to mention. The company, however, of the “Talbot” is not exclusively made up of wheelmen of the gregarious (or club) species, and a decent tourist who is neither a scorcher nor a wearer of badges, nor anything else of the “attached” variety, may rest himself there with quiet and comfort, except on high days and Bank holidays: on which occasions the quiet and peaceable man generally stays at home, preferring solitude to the over-much company he would find on the road.
But if you wish to see the club-wheelman in his most characteristic moods, why then the “Anchor” is your inn, for in the low-ceiled rooms that lurk dimly behind the queer, white-washed gables of that old house, cycling clubmen foregather in any number, limited only by the capacity of the inn. The place is given over to cyclists, and beside the road, behind the house, or on the broad common upon which this roadside village fronts, their machines are stacked as thickly as in the store-rooms of some manufactory.
HERBERT LIDDELL CORTIS.
At the further end of the village stands the ancient but much-restored chapel of Ripley, interesting to cyclists by reason of the memorial window inserted here to the memory of an early cycling hero of the race-path—Herbert Liddell Cortis—who died, shortly after reaching Australia, at Carcoar, New South Wales, on December 28, 1885. Interest of another kind may be found in the architecture of the Earl of Lovelace’s beautiful seat, Ockham Park, that borders the road, just before entering the village; and in the ruins of Newark Abbey, that lie on the banks of the Wey, across Ripley Green. But time and tide wait for no man, and the “New Times” coach is equally impatient of delay. Two minutes suffice for changing teams at the “Talbot,” and off that heir of the coaching age goes again.
For six miles the road runs level, from Ripley to Guildford, forming excellent galloping ground for the horses of the “New Times” coach. All the way the scenery is pretty, but with no very striking features, and villas dot the roadside for a considerable distance. On the left hand the coach passes Clandon Park, and on the right comes Mr. Frederic Harrison’s historic house, Sutton Place, and Stoke Park, that takes its name from the village of Stoke-next-Guildford.
Past some outlying waste lands and over railway bridges, the coach rattles down the sharp descent into Guildford town; down the narrow High Street—the steepest, they say, in England, and certainly the stoniest—to draw up before the “Angel,” punctually at two o’clock.
PROVINCIALITY
Guildford is no more than thirty miles from London, and yet it remains to this day as provincial in appearance as ever it could have been in the olden times of road-travel. Provinciality was the pet bugbear of Matthew Arnold, but he applied it as a scornful term only to literary and critical shortcomings. To him the vapourings of modern poetasters would have been provincialisms, and the narrow-minded criticisms of Mr. George Howells, who can see nothing in Shakespeare, but perceives a wealth of genius in his fellow-novelists of the United States, would have been provincialisms of the worst order.
But the provinciality of places, as distinguishedfrom minds, can be no reproach in these latter days, when all the great towns, with London at their head, have grown so large and congested that a sight of God’s pure country and a breath of healthy air are only to be obtained by most townsfolk with infinite pains and great expenditure of time. It was an evil day when the great cities of England grew so large that one who ascended a church steeple in their midst could discover nothing on the horizon but chimney-pots and bricks-and-mortar; and the best of times were those when weary citizens took their pleasure after the day’s work in the fields and groves that bordered upon the habitations of men. What are Progress and Civilization but will-o’-wisps conjured up by the malignity of the devil to hide the degeneration of the race and the starvation of the soul, when the outcome of the centuries is the shutting out from the face of nature of three-fourths of the population? What else than a sorry jest is the boast of London’s five millions of people, when by far the greater proportion of those five millions never know what country life means, nor even what is the mitigated rusticity of a provincial town in whose centre you can open your casement of a morning and welcome the sun rising in a clear sky, listen to the morning chorus of the birds, and see, though you be in the very midst of the provincial microcosm, the fields and hedge-rows, the streams and rural lanes of the country-side?
GUILDHALL, GUILDFORD.
GUILDFORD
Guildford, then, is provincial in the best and healthiest sense; for though your habitat be in the High Street, which here, as in all other properly-constituted towns, is the very nucleus of the borough, you need never be longer than ten minutes in leaving the town behind if you are so minded. Guildford is a town of very individual character. Godalming folks will tell you that Guildford is “cliquey,” by which term I understand exclusiveness to be meant. It may be so, in fact I believe this to be one of Guildford’s most marked social characteristics; but exclusiveness implies local patriotism, which is a refreshing spirit for a Londoner to encounter once in a way. At any rate, he will find no spirit of this description in what Cobbett satirically termed “the Wen.” The patriotism of Peckham has yet to be discovered; the local enthusiasm of Camberwell is as rare as the song of the lark in London streets; and the man who would now praise what was once the country village of “merrie” Islington is not to be found.
It is difficult to pluck even one greatly outstanding incident from Guildford’s history wherewith to enliven these pages, for although Guildford possessed a strong and well-placed castle from Norman times, it cannot be said that the annals of the town are at all distinguished by records of battle, murder, and sudden death, or by military prowess. So much the better for Guildford town, you will say, and the expression may be allowed, for this old borough has ever been eminently peaceful and prosperous in the absence of civil or military commotion. Its very name is earnest of trade and merchandise; and the guilds of Guildford were very powerful bodies of traders who dealt in cloths and wool, at one time the chiefest of local products, or in the minor articlesthat ministered to the wants of those great staple trades.
Meanwhile the guardians of the old Castle, whose keep still dominates Guildford from most points of view, had little enough to do but to keep the place in order for such occasions when the King came a-hunting in the neighbourhood, or progressed past here to some distant part of the realm. King John seems to have been by far the most frequent royal visitor to Guildford Castle, and almost the last, for the cold comforts of Norman keeps went very early out of fashion with kings and queens, and domestic hearths began to replace dungeon-like apartments in chilly towers as soon as social conditions began to settle down into something remotely resembling tranquillity.
Guildford Keep stands at this day in gardens belonging to the Corporation, and free to all. It is of the Norman type, familiarized to many by prints of such well-known Norman towers as those of Rochester and of Hedingham Castles, and is at this time a mere shell, open to the sky. Within the thickness of the walls are staircases by which it is possible to climb to the summit and gaze thence down upon the red roofs of the town that cluster so picturesquely beneath. Here, too, is a Norman oratory, whose narrow walls are covered with names and figures scratched deeply into the stone, “probably,” says a local guide, “the work of prisoners confined here.” But “J. Robinson, 1892,” was surely no prisoner within these bounds, although he should have been who thus carved his undistinguished name here.
CASTLE ARCH.
THE GUILDHALL
Beside the keep there remains but one archway of all the extensive military works that at one time surrounded the Castle. This is in Quarry Street, and is known as Castle Arch. The chalk caverns close at hand, and the vaulted crypt beneath the “Angel,” although they have long been looked upon as dungeons, had, according to the best-informed of local archæologists, no connection whatever with the Castle. Perhaps even before the Castle keep, the delightfully quaint old Guildhall is the most characteristic feature of Guildford’s architecture. Compared with that old stronghold, the Guildhall is the merestparvenu, having been built in 1683; but, comparisons of age apart, there is no parallel to be drawn between the two. The old tower is four-square and stern, with only the picturesqueness that romance can find, while the belfried tower and the boldly-projecting clock that impends massively over the pavements of the High Street, and gives the time o’ day to the good folks of the town, are the pride of the eye and the delight of the artistic sense of all them that know how to appreciate at their true æsthetic value those memorials of the old corporate spirit of business and good-fellowship that have long since vanished from municipal practice. The legend that may still be read upon the Corporation mace, of Elizabethan date, is earnest of this old-time amity. Thus it runs: “Fayre God. Doe Justice. Love thy Brether.” Set against this, the proceedings of the Kingston-upon-Thames Town Council of some few weeks back make ugly reading, and at the same time illustrate the new spirit very vividly indeed. You who list to learn may read in the records forthe present year of that old borough, that while one member of the Council stigmatized another member’s statements as falsehoods, the first rejoined that his accuser was, in plain English, “a liar.” Appealed to by the Mayor to withdraw the offensive expression, he refused, and the Mayor and Corporation filed out of the Council-chamber, leaving him to his own reflections.
That the burghers of Guildford were always the best of friends one with another is not my contention; that the dignity of their ancient surroundings should conduce to loving-kindness may remain unquestioned.
GEORGE ABBOT
The greatest of Guildford’s worthies was George Abbot, the son of Maurice Abbot, a clothworker of this town, and his wife Alice. He was born in 1562, the eldest of that “happy ternion of brothers,” as Fuller quaintly describes him and his two younger brothers, who became respectively Bishop of Salisbury and Lord Mayor of London. The parents of these distinguished men came very near to martyrdom in the reign of Queen Mary, for they were both ardent Protestants; but, escaping the fate that befell many others, they had the happiness of seeing their children rise in the world far beyond all local expectations. Alice Abbot, indeed, had a singular dream which foretold that “if she could eat a jack or pike, the first son she should bring into the world would be a greatman.” A few days afterwards (so runs the story) she drew up a pike from the river Wey while filling buckets for household use; and, in accord with the promptings of her dream, ate it. “Many people of quality offered themselves to be sponsors at the baptism of Mistress Alice’s son—the future Archbishop,” says Aubrey; and if the dream itself was nothing but the result of a late supper acting upon a vivid imagination, certainly local interest in “Mistress Alice’s” account of it procured for her firstborn quite an exceptional degree of favour and consideration. He was educated first at the Free Grammar School of Guildford, and was sent at the age of sixteen to Balliol College. Thenceforward his rise was rapid. He studied theology, and became tutor to the sons of influential personages. Excellent preferments in the Church became his at an early age, and through many stages of favour he became Archbishop of Canterbury in his forty-ninth year. His rise was undoubtedly due to native worth, for Abbot was a scholar of the foremost rank, and well equipped, both by study and by force of character, to hold his own in the fierce religious controversies of his time. He was, moreover, honest, and had little of the truckler or the time-server in his nature, as his opposition both to James I. and Charles I. showed, on occasion. It is to his righteous opposition that Charterhouse School, now down the road at Godalming, owes its very existence; for, when the cupidity of James I. was aroused over the provisions of Thomas Sutton’s will, and when he attempted to divert that pious founder’s money to his own uses, Abbot withstood the attempt, and the King was fainto give way—with an ill grace, ’tis true, but effectually enough.
Abbot was nothing of a courtier, and, indeed, no very pleasant-natured man. He was sour of aspect and morose; gloomy and fanatic in religion, and no less swift to send religious opponents to the stake than the Catholic inquisitors of a generation before his time. He had a strong and militant affection for the reformed religion, and held a singularly lonely position between the levelling puritanical-democratic doctrines of the age and the High Church party. A Calvinistic narrowness distinguished this great man’s public acts, and he was sufficiently Puritan in spirit to look with disfavour upon, and to absolutely forbid, Sunday sports. His truculent religious views appeared in a lurid light shortly after he became Archbishop, when he condemned two Arians to death for what he held to be “blasphemous heresy.” These two unfortunate men, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, were burnt in 1614, three years after their sentence, as the “recompence of their pride and impiety.”
Meanwhile, the mind of the Archbishop was liberal enough in other directions. He could send religious dissenters to a horrible death, and look back with satisfaction upon his handiwork, while, at the same time, he was maturing the plans and provisions for the noble almshouse that still stands in Guildford High Street and bears the honoured name of Abbot’s Hospital.
A SAD MISCHANCE
In 1619 he laid the first stone of his “Hospital,” and three years later had the satisfaction of seeingit incorporated by Royal Charter; a satisfaction clouded by an accident that embittered the remainder of his life. The story of this untoward event illustrates at once the morbid habit of his mind and the bitter passions of those times. It was in 1621, while with a hunting party in Bramshill Park, that this thing befell. A large party had assembled by the invitation of Lord Zouch, and chased the deer through the glades of that lovely park. The Archbishop drew his bow at a buck, and at the same time that the arrow sped, a gamekeeper, one Peter Hawkins, darted forward between the trees, and received the shaft in his heart.
A coroner’s jury returned a verdict by which the accident was attributed to the man’s negligence in exposing himself to danger after having been warned; but Abbot was greatly distressed, and so heavily did the occurrence weigh upon him that, to the time of his death, in 1632, he kept a monthly fast on a Tuesday, the day of the gamekeeper’s death. He also settled an annuity of £20 upon the man’s widow.
The King declared that “an angel might have miscarried in such sort,” and that “no one but a fool or a knave would think worse of a man for such an accident”; but it suited Abbot’s religious rivals and opponents to regard with public aversion one “whose hands were imbrued with blood”; and his clergy, who had felt the curb of the Archbishop’s discipline too acutely to let this chance slip, felt or expressed a horror of their spiritual head ever afterwards. Others even went so far as to refuse ordination at the handsof a homicide, and bishops-elect scrupled to receive consecration from him, until the Royal Pardon had been obtained and the conscience of the Church satisfied.
For all his opposition to James I., the Archbishop lost a good friend when that pragmatical monarch died, and gained an enemy when Charles I. came to the throne. The High Church party were then in the ascendant, and Abbot, from various causes, declined from favour. In 1627 he was sequestered, and the Archbishopric of Canterbury put into commission of five bishops, of whom Laud, Abbot’s particular enemy, was one.
These misfortunes at length broke Abbot’s health, which finally failed in 1632. At the beginning of that year he seemed upon the point of death, but revived somewhat, and a letter, still preserved, written by an especial friend at this juncture, hinted at the indecency of those who expected his end, and says—“If any other prelate gape at his benefice, his Grace perhaps may eat the goose which shall graze upon his grave.”
But death came upon Abbot that same year. He made an edifying end at Croydon, and was buried, by his own request, in Trinity Church, opposite the Hospital he had founded in his native town.
Eight years afterwards, the Archbishop’s brother, Sir Maurice Abbot, erected the sumptuous monument there which Pepys admired on one of his visits to Guildford. It still remains, although the church itself (one of Guildford’s three churches) has been rebuilt.