Part 22

Over the door within the gateway are three escutcheons on stone: (1) An angel holding a T [transcriber; fractur script], and at the points T. E. (2) The arms of Trenchard. A little to the south of the gateway is a building, on which is this inscription: “_Hoc opus constructum fuit An’ Dni._—MCCCCCXXVIII.” The tower, together with the series of rooms connecting the gatehouse westwards to the main house, are comparatively modern, as also is the entrance porch. These buildings form the present north front of the house, and over the porch are sculptured the arms of Weston.

The chapel mentioned by Hutchins as having formerly stood on the north side of the house has long since vanished, but traces of its foundations were discovered during some excavations made about fifty years ago.

Turning to the inside of the house, we find much to interest both the antiquary and the architect.

Before the hall was destroyed and replaced by the present dining-room, over the large chimney-piece there were carved representations of fourteen Kings of England, which, says Hutchins, “are said to resemble the figures in the first edition of Rastell’s _History of England_, ending with Charles I.” Aubrey, in his _Miscellanies_, states that on November 3rd, 1640 (the day on which the Long Parliament began to sit), the sceptre fell from the figure of Charles I. while the family and a large company were at dinner—an ill omen, the full import of which could not have been realised at the time. Opposite to these sculptured monarchs were the figures of an abbot, a soldier, and some esquires. On the screen were the arms and quarterings of the Trenchard family.

From the hall a large stone staircase led to the dining-room, a noble apartment, adorned, says Hutchins, “with a noble bay window, in which stood an octagon marble table on four wooden lions.”

The interior of the western portion of the house—_i.e._, of the part built by Sir George Trenchard, is composed of two storeys, of which the lower seems originally to have constituted a single apartment. Both storeys were very richly decorated; the flat ceiling of the first storey is covered with an arabesque of plaster, embracing foliage and various devices, finishing with large central pendants.

The upper floor had a lofty vaulted ceiling, corresponding with the high pitch of the roof of a similar character. Unfortunately, this ceiling has been utterly destroyed—a dreadful piece of vandalism, as the tracery of the pendants and ceiling must have equalled, or even surpassed, that of the lower rooms. This upper apartment now forms a series of bedrooms, in the centre of which is the original sculptured stone chimney-piece, having under the cornice a large panel, whereon is depicted a figure reclining on a couch surrounded by dancers.

The magnificent carved oak doorway and chimney-piece in the east drawing-room were sent to Sir Thomas Trenchard by Philip and Joanna at the same time that they presented him with their portraits and a china bowl. The following description of the chimney-pieces in the east and west drawing-rooms is given by the county historian:—

Chimney-piece No. 1, in the east drawing-room, the height of the room, consists of an arrangement of entablatures one within the other, the upper and outer cornice being supported by lofty Corinthian pillars with rich capitals; immediately beneath this are two large sunken panels, respectively containing figures of Hope and Justice, separated by male caryatides, which by their different costumes are intended perhaps to typify a citizen, knight, and esquire.

Within the innermost cornice, and immediately surrounding the fireplace, is a series of panels of great interest, displaying rural and hunting scenes, trades, satyrs, heads, etc., quaintly but faithfully carved.

Chimney-piece No. 2, in the west drawing-room, is similar in its general character; the principal subject amongst its decorations represents the contest of the goddesses in the garden of the Hesperides.

One of the most beautiful examples of carving is an inner door-case in the east drawing-room, the arch over which has a richly moulded soffit, and carved heads in the spandrils; over the door, rich Corinthian pillars, flanked by sculptured figures of a king in armour and a queen, support a cornice surmounting a large sunken panel.

In the front of the cornice is a shield bearing the following arms: _Quarterly_—1 and 4, _Trenchard_; 2, _Mohun_; 3, Semée of cross-crosslets, a lion rampant, _Jurdain_.

There is, of course, much else to interest the antiquary in the way of old furniture and objects of art, and any visitor will be “charmed with the admirable manner in which the art of the modern furniture has been adapted to the character of the old house, lending its aid to heighten rather than to detract from the beauty of the antique carvings and of the interior.”

A curious legend in connection with the dining-room is that of the ghost of Lady Trenchard having made its appearance immediately _before_ her death. Anyone, of course, can believe as much or as little as he likes about the ghost part of the story, but of the fact of the lady’s suicide there is no doubt. During the ownership of Sir Thomas Trenchard one of the Judges of Assize came to Wolfeton House to dine; but no sooner had the company sat down than his lordship, greatly to the surprise of everyone, ordered his carriage and abruptly left the house. On their way back to Dorchester he told his marshal that he had seen standing behind Lady Trenchard’s chair a figure of her ladyship with her throat cut and her head under her arm. Before the carriage reached the town a messenger overtook it on horseback with the news that Lady Trenchard had just committed suicide.

As to the dining-room as it now stands, it may be mentioned that Wolfeton, like many other old houses of the same period, suffered greatly at the hands of those who in the last century were wont to pull down one-half of their houses to repair the other half. This appears to have happened to Wolfeton House, as, judging from an old engraving of the house, the dining-hall must have been quite twice, or more than twice, the size of the present room.

Of the historical anecdotes connected with Wolfeton House, the visit of the King and Queen of Castile is, perhaps, of the greatest interest.

In the early part of the sixteenth century, Philip, Archduke of Austria and King of Castile, set forth with a great armada, with the intention of surprising the King of Aragon, but he had scarcely left the coast of Flanders when, encountering a violent storm, he was compelled to put into Weymouth in distress. King Philip and his Queen were invited to Wolfeton House by Sir Thomas Trenchard, then High Sheriff, and were hospitably entertained. And with this visit the origin of the Duke of Bedford’s family is curiously mixed up; for on the arrival of the King and Queen, Sir Thomas Trenchard, being unacquainted with the Spanish language, found a difficulty in conversing with his guests. In his dilemma he had recourse to his cousin, John Russell, of Kingston Russell, who, being a good linguist, became a favourite with the King, and was recommended by him to Henry VII., who appointed him to an office in the royal household. In the succeeding reign Russell was also popular, and the confiscation of Church property during this period rendered it possible for Henry VIII. to bestow upon him extensive lands. And thus was founded the great Bedford family.

In acknowledgment of his hospitality Sir Thomas Trenchard was presented by the King and Queen of Castile with some very valuable china vases, together with their portraits, all of which are now at Bloxworth House, near Wareham. They also presented to him the carved chimney-piece and doorway still standing in the drawing-room at Wolfeton House, as before described.

Engraved copies of the oil-paintings of the King and Queen of Castile hang on the left-hand side of the staircase, alongside of which is a Spanish engraving of the poor Queen Joan, when sorrow at the death of her husband had sent her mad. On their way to the Royal Mausoleum the funeral _cortège_ had to pass a night at a nunnery. In the middle of the night the poor mad Queen suddenly asked where they were. “In a nunnery,” was the reply. “I will not have my husband surrounded by all these women,” exclaimed the Queen; so the _cortège_ immediately removed, and spent the remainder of the night, until daylight, in the open country.

In the ancient gatehouse of Wolfeton the winding staircase of forty-one oaken steps appears to be quite unique: there are nine stone steps at the base, twenty-four of oak to the first floor level, and seventeen leading to the garret above. For years (some think one hundred) this staircase must have been a complete ruin, as is easily seen by the decayed state of those steps opposite to the two windows, the wind and the rain having beaten in on them for many years.

In addition to the King and Queen of Castile, other royal visitors have from time to time honoured Wolfeton House with their presence, and during the residence of George III. at Weymouth the King and Queen paid it frequent visits. On one occasion, when George III. admired a marble table that used to stand in the drawing-room, the Trenchard of that day immediately presented it to His Majesty, and the table is now in the royal dairy at Frogmore, Windsor.

No account of Wolfeton House would be complete without some allusion to the story of the Roman Catholic priest. In the time of Queen Elizabeth, when it was the object of the then Government to stamp out in every way the Papal influence in England, the Weld family had a Roman Catholic priest concealed at their house at Chideock, in Dorset. Sir Thomas Trenchard, who then resided at Wolfeton House, and was a personal friend of Mr. Weld, of Chideock, happened to be High Sheriff of the county of Dorset for that year, and received orders to go over and search for the priest therein concealed. On account of his friendship with Mr. Weld, Sir Thomas, on reaching Chideock, made a most cursory search, and left with the intention of reporting to the authorities that he could find no signs of the priest; but, unfortunately, as he was leaving, the villagers, whose sympathies were Roman, not aware of his benign intentions, began hooting and calling the High Sheriff and his constables a pack of blind owls for not being able to find the concealed priest. “If that’s what you want,” exclaimed Sir Thomas, losing his temper, “I’ll soon show you I am not so blind as you think!” and, surrounding the mansion with his constables, a real search was made, and the poor priest was soon discovered and brought over to Wolfeton House as a prisoner. The priest, a highly-educated French gentleman, made himself so agreeable that Sir Thomas Trenchard did all in his power, by writing to the authorities, to save his life; but the Government of that day was so desirous of making an example, that all entreaties were in vain—the poor priest was executed, and, it is said, was also drawn and quartered in the High Street of Dorchester.

THE LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF DORSET

BY MISS M. JOURDAIN

“Dorset has continued Dorset alone from time immemorial,” and its special character has been more carefully preserved and fixed than that of any other English county in the work of two Dorset poets, William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, one of whom has succeeded, like Mistral in France, in making its native language a literary medium known beyond its spoken limits.

Dorset’s earlier poets,[61] however, have not been “local”; and it is characteristic of Matthew Prior that, in the account drawn up by himself for Jacobs’ _Lives of the Poets_, he describes his father as a “citizen of London,” and that though the first entry against his name on his admission as pensioner at St. John’s College, Cambridge, is _Dorcestr_, it has been altered by a later hand into _Middlesexiensis_. In spite of conflicting entries, it is now generally admitted that Prior, _perennis et fragrans_—the motto upon the modern brass to his memory in Wimborne Minster[62]—was born at or near Wimborne, in East Dorset, the son of George Prior, who is said to have been a joiner.

“With regard to the family of Prior, the tradition of Wimborne says that his father was a carpenter, and one house he lived in is pointed out: it is close to the present Post Office, and is called the house in which the poet was born. The other was pulled down, but its site is known.”[63]

Local tradition makes Prior a pupil at the free Grammar School; and of the unusually large library of chained books in the old church, one was said to be a standing testimony to his carelessness—a chained folio copy of Ralegh’s _History of the World_, in which a hole is said to have been burned by the boy when dozing over the book by the light of a smuggled taper. Unfortunately for the floating tradition, it has been stated that this particular defacement is the work, not of a candle, but of a red-hot poker. Still more unfortunately, it has been proved that the _History_, with other books, was placed in the library[64] at a much later date than Prior’s boyhood.[65]

Almost a century later a poetic “Court” was held at Eastbury, in North Dorset, by George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, who is not interesting as a poet[66] himself, but as the cause of poetry in others, the last of the patrons, a curious, gorgeous, tawdry figure, fit to be seen through the coloured glass of Macaulay’s ridicule. He was the easy mark for dedications and compliments from many of the best-known writers of the day—poets utterly discrowned, and those on whose brows the laurel grows very thin and brittle; Edward Young, Thomson, and Fielding mention him; while his Great House at Eastbury is celebrated by Thomson, Young, and Christopher Pitt,[67] who writes, somewhat oddly, of this “new Eden in the Wild.” The pleasures of this “Eden” appear, from an epistle of Pitt, to have been smoking and drinking, with conversational intervals. Dr. Young (of the _Night Thoughts_) sits with “his Dodington,”

Charm’d with his flowing Burgundy and wit, By turns relieving with the circling draught Each pause of chat and interval of thought; Or, through the well-glazed tube, from business freed, Draw the rich spirit of the Indian weed.

Thomson’s “Eastbury”—

Seat serene and plain Where simple Nature reigns,

is as bad, in its way, as Pitt’s “Eden”—serenity, plainness, and simple nature being the most unlikely characteristics of Dodington,[68] whose heavy figure was arrayed in gorgeous brocades; and whose equally magnificent State bed was “garded and re-garded” with gold and silver embroideries showing by the remains of pocket-holes, button-holes and loops that they came from old coats and breeches. This great house, after Dodington’s death, was taken down all but one wing and sold piecemeal by Earl Temple, his heir.

Henry Fielding, one of the Eastbury circle—he dedicated to Dodington an epistle on “True Greatness”—was brought up as a boy in the manor-house at East Stower,[69] where he was taught by the Reverend Mr. Oliver, curate of the neighbouring village of Motcombe, said to have been the original of Trulliber, a portrait drawn “in resentment of some punishment inflicted on him,” according to Hutchins.[70] Fielding was fortunate in another portrait, for it is generally admitted that the prototype of Parson Abraham Adams was William Young, Incumbent of West Stower, who had many of Adams’ eccentricities. As an instance of Young’s absence of mind, it is said that when chaplain to a regiment in Flanders he “wandered in a reverie into the enemy’s camp, and was only aroused from his error by his arrest. The commanding officer, perceiving the good man’s simplicity, allowed him to return to his friends.”

At East Stower, too, Fielding lived for a time with his first wife.

William Crowe, though like Fielding only a short time resident in Dorset, is admitted on the strength of his topographical poem, _Lewesdon Hill_, of which Rogers thought so much that when travelling in Italy he made two authors his constant study for versification, Milton and Crowe.[71] Crowe’s _Lewesdon Hill_ is a perfect example of an eighteenth century didactic and descriptive poem, with all the heaviness due to the requirements of an age which, like Horace Walpole, called for “edification” in its art. As in Goldsmith’s _Traveller_ the person who speaks the verses sits pensively on an Alpine height, so Crowe in his poem is supposed to be walking on the top of the hill on a May morning—a hill, it has been suggested, that Fuller[72] may have climbed before him, and where the wide prospect, “standing where Moses stood when the Lord showed him all the land,” may have prompted the title of his book, _A Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, which he wrote when at Broadwindsor. Upon this hill, where

The lonely thorn Bends from the rude south-east with top cut sheer,

Crowe surveys the outspread map of the county—Shipton Hill, Burton Cliff, Eggardon Hill, the rich Marshwood Vale—in winter

Cold, vapourish, miry, wet,

to the “rampire” of Pillesdon, even the “nameless rivulet” (the minutest trickle of a stream at the foot of Lewesdon Hill), which, he rejoices,

Yet flows along Untainted with the commerce of the world.

William Lisle Bowles, author of faint and forgotten verses, is remembered by Coleridge’s early admiration for his sonnets. His father, the Rev. W. Bowles (rector of Uphill), planted and improved Barton Hill House, in Dorset, which the poet sold. On leaving it the poet wrote verses full of regret for

These woods, that whispering wave My father rear’d and _nurst_.

An author unknown outside his county is John Fitzgerald Pennie (buried July 17th, 1848). He was born at East Lulworth, March 25th, 1782, and is known as a dramatic writer. He published _Scenes in Palestine, or Dramatic Sketches from the Bible_, 1825; _Ethelwolf_, a tragedy, 1821, etc. He followed in his early years the profession of an actor, but after a chequered and unsuccessful career, settled in his native village and devoted himself to literary pursuits. He published his autobiography in 1827, _The Tale of a Modern Genius, or the Miseries of Parnassus_. In 1810 he married Cordelia Elizabeth, daughter of Jerome Whitfield, a London attorney. He and his wife died within a few days of each other, and were buried in the same grave.

Wordsworth’s connection with Dorset is of short duration, but is of interest as occurring at a critical period in his career. On his receiving Raisley Calvert’s legacy, he was able to live with his sister Dorothy at a farmhouse at Racedown,[73] which he was allowed to occupy rent free on condition that the owner might spend a few weeks there from time to time. It was in the autumn of 1795 that he settled there. His house is set upon the north-west slope of the “rampire” Pillesdon, in a hollow among hills cultivated to their summits, or patched with gorse and broom, which open here and there to allow glimpses of the sea. The Dorset peasants in Wordsworth’s time were wretchedly poor, their shapeless cottages “not at all beyond what might be expected in savage life,” as Dorothy Wordsworth wrote. Very little trace of the peculiar quality of the place is to be found in Wordsworth’s poems, but it was here he wrote the first of his poems of country life, modelled with an experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly accurate.

It was here that he watched[74] the “unquiet widowhood” of Margaret, drawing out the hemp which she had wound round her waist like a belt, and spinning, as she walked backwards before her cottage door. Here, no doubt, he saw her ruined cottage—there are many crumbling shells and ruined cottages in the district to-day—with the red stains and tufts of wool in the corner-stone of the porch where the sheep were permitted to come and “couch unheeded.” The garden, run wild, too, is to be met with to-day:

Its matted weeds Marked with the steps of those, whom, as they passed, The gooseberry trees that shot in long, lank slips, Or currants, hanging from their leafless stems In scanty strings, had tempted to o’erleap The broken wall. I looked around, and there, Where two tall hedge-rows of thick alder-boughs Joined in a cold damp nook, espied a well, Shrouded with willow-flowers and plumy fern.

Here, too, was Goody Blake’s cabin:—

On a hill’s northern side... Where from sea-blasts the hawthorns lean And hoary dews are slow to melt.

“The muffled clamour of the outside world only reached the secluded farmhouse at Racedown after long delay”—in other words, letters were delivered there but once a week; and on one occasion at least Wordsworth asks to have a book franked, otherwise he will “not be able to release it from the post-office.” A part of this time was given to gardening, and, no doubt from motives of economy, almost all the meals consisted of vegetables. “I have been lately living,” he writes, “upon air and the essence of carrots, cabbages, turnips, and other esculent vegetables, not excluding parsley.”[75] At another time he sets forth to warm himself, like Goody Blake, by gathering sticks strewn upon the road by the gale; and his habit was to take a two hours’ stroll every morning, and now and then a long expedition on foot. He and his sister, as the Cumberland peasants said, were “a deal upo’ the road,” and many times they must have walked more than forty miles in the day. There is a story still current in the neighbourhood that Wordsworth once borrowed a horse to ride into Lyme Regis, and returned on foot, having _forgotten_ the horse! With all its hardships and frugalities, Dorothy Wordsworth loved Racedown. It was “the place dearest to (her) recollections upon the whole surface of the island,” and she speaks warmly of the scenery on Pillesdon, Lewesdon, and the view of the sea from Lambert’s Castle—which is said by some to be _the_ view of the county.

Landor’s thought, that “when a language grows up all into stalk, and its flowers begin to lose somewhat of their character, we must go forth into the open fields, through the dingles, or among the mountains, for fresh seed,” would have been endorsed by both Wordsworth and Barnes alike, but with very different ideas as to what was considered fresh seed. Barnes’ innovation was an innovation of the letter rather than the spirit, the literary use of the local dialect which he heard in his boyhood, and which, he said, was spoken in the greatest purity in villages and hamlets of the secluded Vale of Blackmore, a valley so secluded that its life was practically the life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the nineteenth was far advanced. He attributes his poems’ freedom from “slang and vice” to this seclusion; but it is as much due to his personal[76] preference of light to darkness. His rustics are, as a rule, happy people.