Part 2
The second Earl of Bedford was a man of greater honour and sincerity than his father, the Founder. His monument and that of his countess stands beside his parents’ altar-tomb, and is of alabaster bedizened to extremity with painting and gilding. He was the first Francis of the family. The last was the man (Francis, 9th Duke of Bedford) who poisoned himself in 1891.
Earl Francis, perhaps, derived his sincerity from his mother. Both were sincere Protestants, while his father was anything you pleased, so long as he could keep his head on his shoulders and put more money in his pocket. The son’s Protestantism was nearly the undoing of him, for the bloody Gardiner would probably have sent him to the stake had he not escaped to Geneva. When Elizabeth succeeded her sister, he returned and served his Queen well and truly, until his death in 1585. He was succeeded by his grandson, Edward, who in turn was followed by his cousin Francis; “the wise earl,” they call him, perhaps because he found, after being released from his imprisonment in the Tower for his political opinions, that it was more peaceful and profitable to busy himself about the draining of the ill-gotten Russell lands at Whittlesea and Thorney, than to contend with Parliament against the Crown. This is indeed wisdom, and worthy of a Russell and a lawyer; for as a lawyer he had been trained before his succession to the earldom had been thought of. His son William reproduced the shiftiness of the Founder, and lukewarmly sided first with King, then with Parliament, and so continually back and forth during the Civil War. They made him a duke before he died—they, that is to say, the advisers of William the Third—and the price paid for it was the blood of his eldest son. The title was given as a kind of solace for the loss of that son, and must have been a bitter kind of plaister to salve grief. That son, William, had not the canny caution of his race, and deserves to be honoured for the self-neglecting enthusiasm for the Protestant religion which brought him to the block in 1683 for his alleged complicity in the Rye House Plot.
The most elaborate monument here at Chenies is that to his father and mother, but more truly to himself; for that fantastic pile of theatrical statuary, exhibiting the Duke and Countess contorted with paroxysms of grief, leads up, as the central point of this stony emotion, to the portrait head of this unhappy patriot who fell under the headsman’s axe.
There are other Russell monuments here, for the family has rarely been averse from post-mortem glorification; but to make a catalogue of them would be wearisome. Among the latest, and the most unassuming, is the plain slab to Earl Russell,—the Lord John Russell of earlier political struggles,—who died in 1878.
Chenies village, let it at once be said, is utterly disappointing, after one has heard so much of its beauties. “A model village,” no doubt, but how depressing these model villages are! And, indeed, the Russells rule “Chaineys” (as it should be pronounced) with an iron rule. The country in which it is set is beautiful, and at the centre of the village a group of noble trees, with a pretty spring and well-house, may be noticed; but that anyone can admire the would-be Tudor architecture of the cottages, almost all rebuilt by a Duke of Bedford about fifty years ago, is surprising. Yet there are those who affect to do so. The village lies just off the road, to the right; and at its farther end stand the church and the manor-house, close to one another.
“Isenhampton Cheneys” is the real name of the place, but the Cheynes who once were paramount here are long since extinct, and the insistent “B” is now on every cottage, gate-post, and weathercock. The church, rebuilt, has the whole of its north aisle appropriated as the Bedford Chapel, so that, even here, you see how the Russells maintain the feudal idea. Froude, indeed, says the gorgeous monuments here are second only to the tombs of the Mendozas, the proudest race in Spain; but true though that be, he is grossly fulsome when he praises the Russells for their “Liberal” ideas. Truth to tell, the family has ever been content to wear the Liberal mask and yet to treat its unfortunate tenants in a manner that many an old Tory race would have neither the courage nor the wickedness to adopt. Ask of the Russell tenantry what they think, and, receiving your answer, the wonder arises how that family can keep up their curious pretence of being “friends of the people.”
Leaving Chenies, and regaining the highway to Amersham, we wheel along until, passing under the Metropolitan Railway at Chalfont Road Station, we take the second turning to the left, leading to Chalfont St. Giles. These three miles form the most exquisite part of the whole tour, from the purely rustic point of view; for they lead down through sweet-scented woodlands where the perfume of the pines and the heavy scent of the bracken (strongly resembling that of ripe strawberries) mingle with the refreshing odour of the soil itself. Nothing breaks the stillness in the daytime save the hoarse “crock-crock” of the pheasants, and, when night comes, the feathered choir from the well-named neighbouring Nightingale Woods tunes up.
Chalfont St. Giles lies down in the valley of the Misbourne, across the high road which runs left and right, and past the Pheasant Inn. It is a place made famous by Milton’s residence here, when he fled London and the Great Plague. The cottage—the “pretty cot,” as he aptly calls it, taken for him by Thomas Ellwood, the Quaker—is still standing, and is the last house on the left-hand side of the long village street. The poet could only have known it to be a “pretty cot” by repute, for he was blind.
Americans, perhaps more than Englishmen, make this a place of pilgrimage; and serious offers were made, not so long since, to purchase the little gabled brick and half-timbered dwelling, and to transport it to the United States. Happily, all fears of such a fate are now at an end; for the parish has purchased the freehold, and has made the cottage a museum, where the literary pilgrim can see the veritable low-browed room where _Paradise Lost_ was written and _Paradise Regained_ suggested, together with the actual writing-table the poet worked at. An interesting collection of early and later editions is to be seen, with Milton portraits, and cannon-balls found in the neighbourhood. No one will grudge the modest sixpence charged for admission by the parish authorities to all who are not parishioners.
The parish church still remains interesting, although three successive restoring architects have been let loose upon it; and there are some really exquisite modern stained-glass windows, as well as some very detestable ones. Their close companionship renders the good an excellent service, but has a very sorry effect on the bad. Notice the very beautiful carved-oak communion rails, which came from one of the side chapels of St. Paul’s Cathedral, given by Francis Hare, Bishop of Chichester and Dean of St. Paul’s. This spoiler of the metropolitan Cathedral is buried here, and a tablet records his dignities. Among other posts, he held that of Chaplain to the great Duke of Marlborough, whose courier, Timothy Lovett, by the way, who died in 1728, aged seventy years, lies in the churchyard, beneath the curious epitaph—
“Italy and Spain Germany and France have been on Earth my weary Dance. So that I own Ye Graves my greatest Friend That to my Travels all has put an end.”
Timothy, it is evident, was not of the touring kind by choice.
Having seen these literary and other landmarks, we can either regain the road, and, passing through Chalfont St. Peter and its picturesque water-splash, where the Misbourne crosses the road by the church, come to the Oxford road, and by the turning to Denham through Uxbridge into Middlesex again; or else, braving a very steep, stony, and winding lane, make for Jordans, that lonely graveyard and meeting-house of the early Quakers, where lies William Penn, founder of the State of Pennsylvania, with many another of his sect. A left-hand fork in the road leads toilsomely in a mile and a half to the solitary shrouded dell where Jordans lies hid, embosomed amid trees. It was precisely for its solitude and comparative inaccessibility that Thomas Ellwood, the friend of Milton, with others of the Society of Friends, purchased Jordans in 1671. They bought it of one William Russell with the original intention of making it merely a burial-ground, but the building of the meeting-house soon followed.
This is the humble, domestic-looking, red brick building the pilgrim suddenly catches sight of when wheeling along the darkling lane. Hepworth Dixon, writing in 1851, says, “the meeting-house is like an old barn in appearance,” but that is scarcely correct. As a matter of fact, it greatly resembles a stable, and indeed is almost precisely identical in appearance with the still-existing range of stables facing Old Palace Green, Kensington; buildings erected at the same period as this.
The stern, austere character of the original Quakers—Cobbett calls them “unbaptized, buttonless blackguards”—is reflected in the look both of their burial-ground and their meeting-house. Nothing less like a place of worship could be imagined. Many in style—or in the lack of style—like it are to be seen in the New England States of the United States of America, to whose then desolate shores many of the early Quakers carried the creed that made them outcasts in their native land; and the American citizens who throng here in summer must often be struck with the complete likeness of the scene to many Pennsylvanian Quaker places of meeting.
The plot where Penn and many others lie is just an enclosed field, and not until recent years were any memorials placed over some of their resting-places. A dozen small headstones now mark the grave of William Penn, the Founder of the State, and others of his family.
Twice a year is Jordans the scene of Quaker worship, on the fourth Sunday in May and the first Thursday in June, when many of the faith come from long distances to commemorative services.
Leaving Jordans, and striking the road into Beaconsfield, we reach that quietly cheerful town in another two miles, coming into it past Wilton Park, on the Oxford road. The little town that gave Benjamin Disraeli his title is a singularly unpretending place, and is less a town than a very large village. Passing through its yellow, gravelly street, and turning to the left, when a mile and a half out, down the Oxford road, at the hamlet of Holtspur, the way to Wooburn Green and Bourne End lies downhill, along the valley of that little-known tributary of the Thames, the Wye, which, some miles higher up, gives a name to High Wycombe. Bourne End has of late years grown out of all knowledge, being now a place greatly favoured by those outer suburbanites who more especially affect the Thames; so that new villas plentifully dot the meads and the uplands towards Hedsor Woods and Clieveden.
And so across the Thames into Cookham and Berkshire. Frederick Walker discovered Cookham, and painted the common and the geese cackling across it, long before Society had found the Thames. He died untimely, and is buried in the old church close by; and since then Cookham has become more sophisticated—pretty, of course, and equally, of course, delightful, but not the Cookham of the seventies. But if, on the other hand, you did not know the village then, and make its acquaintance only now, you will have no regrets, and will enjoy it the more. There is an odd effort at poetry on a stone in the churchyard, which, perhaps, should not be missed. It tells of the sudden end of William Henry Pullen in 1813, and among other choice lines says—
“Well could he drive the coursers fleet, which oft he’d drove before; When, turning round a narrow street, he fell—to rise no more. No one commanded more respect, obliging, kind, and fair; None charged him with the least neglect, none drove with greater care. He little thought when he arose the fatal fifth of June That morn his life’s career would close and terminate so soon.”
Three parts of the road from Cookham to Maidenhead are exceedingly dull and uninteresting; let us therefore take the towing-path, and cycle along that, ignoring, like everyone else, the absurd prohibition launched a few seasons ago by the Thames Conservancy. Not hurrying—that would be foolishness; for although the river is well-nigh spoiled by Boulter’s Lock, it is still lovely all the way to Cookham, with the most glorious views of Clieveden Woods, rising, tier over tier, on the opposite shore. Here too, of course, have been changes since first Society, and then the Stage, discovered the river a few years ago, and bungalows are built on the meadows; but we must needs be thankful that they were built in these latter days, now that the hideous villas of forty years since are quite impossible.
Nearing Maidenhead, and coming to the Bath road, running right and left, we turn to the right and then down the first road to the left (Oldfield road), then the next two turnings in the same direction, when the old tower of Bray Church comes in sight; that Bray celebrated for its vicar immortalised in the well-known song, who, when reproached with being a religious trimmer and inconstant to his principles, replied, “Not so; for I always keep my principle, which is to live and die the Vicar of Bray.” Simon Alleyn was the name of this worthy, who lived, and was vicar, in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth.
First a Papist, he kept his place by becoming a Protestant, recanting when Mary came to the throne, and again becoming a Protestant under Elizabeth. Called apostate, renegade, turncoat, and denier of Christ, modern times would give him the kindlier name of “opportunist.” At anyrate, his opportunism was successful, for he held office from 1540 to 1588. The ballad originated in 1712, in a song entitled “The Religious Turncoat; or, the Trimming Parson,” which refers to no particular place or person, and has no fewer than eighteen verses, quite distinct from the modern ballad. Thus they run, for example:—
“I lov’d no king in ’Forty-one, When Prelacy went down; A cloak and band I then put on, And preached against the Crown.
When Charles returned into the land, The English Crown’s supporter, I shifted off my cloak and band And then became a courtier.
When Royal James began his reign, And Mass was used in common, I shifted off my Faith again, And then became a Roman.”
These verses, it will be noticed, place the trimming story a hundred years later.
The churchyard is entered by a lich-gate with a curious old house over it. In the church itself is a monument to William Goddard, the seventeenth-century founder of Jesus Hospital, and Joyce, his wife. That celebrated old almshouse stands on the road as we leave Bray for Windsor. It is a quaintly gabled, red brick building, with a statue of the founder in an alcove over the entrance. A central courtyard has little dwellings ranged round it, and a rather striking chapel, familiar in Frederick Walker’s famous picture, the “Harbour of Refuge,” painted here in 1871-72. Unfortunately, those who are familiar with that beautiful picture (now in the National Gallery) will be disappointed on seeing the real place, for the painter has quite idealised Jesus Hospital, and has imagined many details that have no existence.
Beyond the hospital, a turning to the left leads to Windsor, past Clewer. Windsor bulks hugely from these levels, with huddled houses and the towering mass of the castle lining a ridge above the Thames; the Round Tower, grim and terrible in other days, merely, in these times, a picturesque adjunct to the landscape.
It seems, indeed, that everywhere in these days the iron gauntlet has given place to the kid glove; persuasion is, nowadays, more a mental than a physical process. Only at Windsor these things take higher ground; here for persuasion in this era read diplomacy, where it had used to be a blood-boltered performance, in whose dramatic course axe and chaplain took prominent parts. The castle survives, its mediæval defences restored for appearance sake, but its State Apartments filled with polite furniture, dreadfully gilded and tawdry. It makes a picture, this historic warren of kings and princes; but alas for picturesqueness, Henry the Eighth’s massive gateway is guarded to-day—not by an appropriate Yeoman of the Guard, but by a constable of that singularly unromantic body—the police!
If one is wise, one does not visit Windsor for the sake of the State Apartments, but for the external view of the castle, set grandly, like a jewel, amid its verdant meads. The meads form the most appropriate foreground; the proper time, either early morning or evening, for then, when the mists cling about the river, and the grass is damp with them, that ancient palace and stronghold, that court and tomb of Royalty, bulks larger than at any other hour, both on sight and mind. And, having thus seen Windsor aright, you cannot but return well pleased.
SURBITON TO LEATHERHEAD
Surbiton, that great modern suburb of Kingston, can conveniently be made the starting-point of many pleasant runs through Surrey. Let us on this occasion start from Surbiton Station, and, making for the high road that runs to Ripley, turn to the left at Long Ditton, where the waterworks are, and so in a mile to the first semblance of rusticity at that well-known inn, the “Angel at Ditton,” as it is generally called by the many cyclists to whom for years this has been a rallying-place; although this is not Ditton at all, and its real name the not very romantically-sounding one of “Gigg’s Hill Green.” We pass the “Angel” on the left; on the right hand stretches the pleasant Green, with roads running away in the same direction to the village of Thames Ditton, a mile away, and worth seeing for those who have the exploring faculty well developed.
But to continue straight ahead, we pass Gigg’s Hill Green only to come to other and larger commons—Ditton Marsh and Littleworth Common respectively—along a road straight and flat for a considerable distance, passing under the long tunnel-like archway of the London and South-Western main line, and emerging from it to a full view of beautiful Esher Hill, a mile and a half away, while away on the left stretch miles of open country. Notice outside a modern, dry, and dusty-looking inn, called the “Orleans Arms,” a tall, circular stone pillar about ten feet in height, with names of towns along the road, and the distances to them, carved on it. This is familiarly known as the “White Lady,” and dates back to the coaching age; for this was the old road to Portsmouth, and was once crowded with traffic.
From this point it is a mile of continuous, though gentle, rise to Esher village—Sandown Park racecourse on the right, under the hill. Notice the very highly ornamental iron gates and railings of the park: a romantic history belongs to them. They came from Baron Grant’s palatial mansion of Kensington House, built but never occupied, and then demolished, which stood in Kensington Gore.
Kensington House is now quite forgot, and on its site rise the stately houses of Kensington Court. It was in 1873 that Baron Grant, bloated with the money of the widow and the orphan, plundered from them in his Emma Mine and other rascally schemes, purchased the dirty slum at Kensington then known as the “Rookery,” and set about building a lordly pleasure-house on its site. Just as it was finished, his career of predatory finance was checked, and he never occupied the vast building. For years it remained tenantless, and was then demolished. “Grant,” as he called himself, died obscurely in 1899. He had in his time been the cause of the public losing over £20,000,000 sterling. The _Daily News_ spoke of him as an Irishman, but it will readily be conceded that his real name of Gottheimer is not strikingly Hibernian. He was, it is true, born in Dublin. So was Dean Swift: but, as the Dean himself remarked, to be born in a stable does not prove one to be a horse.
Although “Grant” died obscurely, and his name and his schemes had long before that time become discredited, it must not be supposed that he was personally ruined with the wreck of his projects. Not at all. He lived and died very comfortably circumstanced, while many of his creditors remained unsatisfied. He could pay debts when he chose, but when he chose not to, there were no means of compelling him. Where have we heard the same story in recent years?
Esher, up along the hill, is a pretty village, with many and varied associations and an extraordinary number of curious relics. It is a charmingly rural place, with a humble old church behind an old coaching inn, and a new church, not at all humble, across the way. The old church and the old inn—the “Bear,” they call it—are both extremely interesting. In the hall of the inn, placed within a glass case, secure from the touch of the vulgar, are the huge boots worn by the post-boy who drove Louis Philippe, the fugitive King of the French, to Claremont in 1848. They are huge jack-boots closely resembling the type worn by Marlborough and his troopers at Blenheim, Ramilies, and Malplaquet.
“Mr. Smith”—for under that plebeian disguise the Citizen King fled from Paris—resided at Claremont by favour of Queen Victoria, and died there two years later.
Claremont is an ominous place, with a tragical cast to its story. Most of those connected with it have been unfortunate, if not before they sought the shelter of its ill-omened roof, certainly afterwards. Clive, the “heaven-born general,” who built it, shot himself; the newly married only child of George the Fourth—the ill-fated Princess Charlotte—died there, under somewhat mysterious circumstances; and the Duke of Albany, who had not long been in residence, died untimely in the south of France, in 1884.
The old church of Esher, long since disused and kept locked and given over to spiders and dust, has a Royal Pew, built for the use of the Princess Charlotte and the Claremont household in 1816. It is a huge structure, in comparison with the size of the little church, and designed in the worst possible classic taste; wearing, indeed, more the appearance of an opera-box than anything else.
The authorities (whoever they may be) charge a shilling for viewing this derelict church. It is distinctly not worth the money, because the architecture is contemptible, and all the interesting monuments have been removed to the modern building, on a quite different site, across the road.
It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the death of the Princess Charlotte in her eighteenth year made a vast difference in English history—or, at least, English Court history. Had she survived, there would have been no William the Fourth, and Queen Victoria would never have been queen. Think of it! No Victorian Era, no Victoria Station, no Victoria Embankment, no Victoria in Australia, no Victoria in Vancouver Island; and, in short, none of those thousand things and places “Victoria” and “Victorian” we are surrounded with. None of those, and certainly no Albert Halls, memorials, streets, and places commemorative of that paragon of men.