Part 11

That bridge would have been an exceedingly awkward place for a coach accident. It is picturesqueness itself, and by consequence not the most convenient for traffic. Originally built in 1577, with thirteen arches, it was repaired in 1674, as a Latin inscription carved midway on it informs the inquiring stranger. In the winter of 1795 an ice-flood destroyed some of the southernmost arches, which were replaced the following year by two wider spans, so that Wansford Bridge has now only ten openings. The northern approach to it from Stamford leads down in a dangerous, steep, sudden, and narrow curve, intersected by a cross-road. Now that there is no longer a turnpike gate at this point to bring the traffic to a slow pace, this descent is fruitful in accidents, and at least one cyclist has been killed here in an attempt to negotiate this sharp curve on the descent into the cross-road. An inoffensive cottage standing at the corner opposite the “Mermaid” inn has received many a cyclist through its window, and the new masonry of its wall bears witness to the wreck caused by a heavy wagon hurtling down the hill, carrying away the side of the house.

The five miles between Wansford and Stamford begin with this long rise, whose crest was cut through in coaching days, the earth taken being used to fill up a deep hollow which succeeded, where a little brook trickled across the road, the coaches fording it. Thence, by what used to be called in the old road-books “Whitewater Turnpike,” past the few cottages of Thornhaugh, and so to where the long wall of Burghley Park begins on the right hand. Here the telegraph poles, that have hitherto so unfailingly followed the highway, suddenly go off to the right, and into Stamford by the circuitous Barnack road, in deference to the objections, or otherwise, of the Marquis of Exeter, against their going through his park.

The famous Burghley House by Stamford town is not visible from the road, and is indeed situated a mile within the park, only the gate-house to the estate being passed in the long descent into that outlying portion of the town known as Stamford Baron.

There is, amid the works of Tennyson, a curiously romantic poem, “The Lord of Burleigh,” which on the part of the literary pilgrim will repay close examination; and this examination will yield some astonishing results. It is, briefly stated, the story of an Earl masquerading as a landscape painter and winning the heart and hand of a farmer’s daughter. He takes her, after the wedding, to see—

“A mansion more majestic Than all those she saw before; Many a gallant gay domestic Bows before him at the door. And they speak in gentle murmur When they answer to his call, While he treads with footstep firmer, Leading on from hall to hall. And, while now she wonders blindly, Nor the meaning can divine, Proudly turns he round and kindly, ‘All of this is mine and thine.’ Here he lives in state and bounty, Lord of Burleigh, fair and free, Not a lord in all the county Is so great a lord as he.”

The original person from whose doings this poem was written was, in fact, Henry Cecil, tenth Earl, and afterwards first Marquis, of Exeter. He was the lord of Burghley House (not “Burleigh Hall”), by Stamford town, and his descendants are there yet.

Not a landscape painter, but a kind of London man about town and Member of Parliament for Stamford, 1774–1780, 1784–1790, and then plain Mr. Henry Cecil (for he did not succeed his uncle in the title until December, 1793), he is found rather mysteriously wandering about Shropshire in 1789, calling himself (there is never any accounting for taste) “Mr. Jones.” He was then a man who had been married fourteen years, and was thirty-six years of age.

The scene opens (thus to put it in dramatic form) on an evening towards the end of June, 1789, when a stranger knocked at the door of Farmer Hoggins at Great Bolas in Shropshire, and begged shelter for the night. He was obviously a gentleman, but called himself by the very plebian name of “John Jones.” He made himself so agreeable that his stay “for the night” lasted some weeks, and he returned again in a month or so, taking up his residence in the village. The attraction which brought him back to Great Bolas was evidently Sarah Hoggins, the farmer’s daughter, at that time a girl of sixteen, having been born in June, 1773. He proposed for Sarah, and on April 17th, 1790, they were married in Great Bolas Church, the register showing that he married in the name of “John Jones.” Meanwhile he had purchased land in the village, and built a house which he called “Bolas Villa.” Gossip grew extremely busy with this mysterious stranger who had thus descended upon the place, and it was generally suspected that he was a highwayman in an extensive way of business, especially as some notable highway robberies happened coincidently with his appearance.

Early in 1794, “Mr. John Jones,” living thus at Great Bolas, learnt that his uncle, the ninth Earl of Exeter, had died in December. Telling his wife they must journey into Northamptonshire, where he had business, they set out and arrived at “Burghley House, by Stamford town,” and there he disclosed to her for the first time that he was not “John Jones,” but Henry Cecil, and now Earl of Exeter.

At what time he broke the news to her that he was already a married man there is no evidence to show. Strictly speaking, he had made a bigamous marriage, because, although his wife, one of the Vernons of Hanbury, in Worcestershire, had eloped on June 14, 1789, with the Reverend William Sneyd, curate of that place, he had at the time taken no steps to obtain a divorce.

[Picture: Burghley House, by Stamford Town]

But he had every excuse. He had honestly fallen in love with Sarah Hoggins after thus meeting her while wandering about the country a few days after his wife’s flight; and he obtained a divorce by Act of Parliament in March, 1791. Having done this, he married Sarah Hoggins secondly some six months later (October 3) in the City of London Church of St. Mildred, Bread Street, in whose register his name appears as “Henry Cecil, bachelor.”

Tennyson’s poem is, therefore, rather more romantic than truthful; and the lines which tell us how she murmured—

“Oh! that he Were again that landscape painter Who did win my heart from me,”

have no authority. Nor is there any evidence to warrant the statement that—

“A trouble weighed upon her And perplexed her, night and morn, With the burthen of an honour Unto which she was not born.”

The poet continues—

“So she droop’d and droop’d before him, Fading slowly from his side; Three fair children first she bore him, Then before her time she died.”

The Countess of Exeter, in fact, died on January 18, 1797, not quite twenty-four years of age; but not from “the burthen of an honour unto which she was not born.” Happily, accession to the ranks of the titled nobility is not fatal, as the marriage of many distinguished ornaments of the musical comedy stage assure us; and so we must charge the Poet Laureate with the flunkey thought that blue blood is a kind apart, and not to be admixed with other strains. This from the poet who wrote—

“Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.”

is unexpected.

She left two sons and one daughter. Her eldest son became second Marquis of Exeter, his father, the Earl, having been raised a step in the peerage in 1801.

The enterprising Earl married, thirdly, in 1800, the divorced wife of the eighth Duke of Hamilton, and died May 1, 1804, aged fifty; but his third wife survived until January 17, 1837. In the billiard-room of Burghley House is a portrait-group of “the Lord of Burleigh” and his wife, Sarah Hoggins, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

“Bolas Villa” was given by the Earl to his godson. It has since been enlarged, and is now styled “Burghley Villa.” The church of Great Bolas is a grim-looking brick building of the eighteenth century, when many of the Shropshire churches in that district were rebuilt.

XXII

STAMFORD compels enthusiasm, from the first glimpse of it on entering, to the last regretful backward glance on leaving. It is historic, picturesque, stately, aristocratic, and cleanly, all at once. Its stone-built mansions and houses are chiefly of the Renaissance period, from Elizabeth onwards to the time of George the First, and it is in this sort the most beautiful town in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, and even in some aspects surpassing them.

Apart from its lovely churches, one seeks not Gothic architecture at Stamford but the stateliness of classic methods as understood in the sixteenth and seventeenth century revival. It is this especial architectural character which gives the town such an air of academic distinction and leads the stranger to compare it with the great university towns, even before the fact comes to his knowledge that Stamford itself was once the seat of a University.

The entrance is of a peculiar stateliness, the broad quiet street descending, lined with dignified private houses, to where the river Welland flows beneath the bridge, dividing the counties of Northampton and Lincoln, and Stamford Baron from Stamford town. On the right hand rises the fine tower of St. Martin’s, its perforated battlements showing, lace-like, against the sky, just as when Turner painted his view. Lower down across the street straddles the sign of the great “George” inn, and a few steps forward serve to disclose the exquisite picture of St. Mary’s tower and spire soaring from the rising ground on the other side of the river. The “distracting bustle of the ‘George,’ which exceeded anything I ever saw or heard,” as the Reverend Thomas Twining wrote, in 1776, has long since become a thing of the past, and a certain quiet dignity now belongs to it, as to Stamford in general.

The “George” is an inn with a history. Charles the First slept there, August 23, 1645, and a whole train of dignitaries at one time or another. “Billy the Butcher,” too, returning from Culloden, stayed in the house, and with his officers celebrated that victory. “Billy the Butcher,” one regrets to say, was the vulgar nickname by which the people called William, Duke of Cumberland.

Distinguished foreigners without number have rested here and wondered at the habits of Englishmen. The foreigner, it is to be feared, never, with every advantage, really understands us; sometimes, too, he is so perverse that we find a difficulty in understanding him. Thus, Master Estienne Perlin, who travelled the roads and sampled the inns of England so far back as 1558, says we were great drunkards then. He wrote an account of his travels, and of England, as it appeared to him; and the way in which he wrestles with the pronunciation of the language is amusing enough. Thus, according to this traveller, if an Englishman would treat you, he would say in his language: “Vis dring a’ quarta uin oim gasquim oim hespaignol oim malvoysi.” This is merely maddening, and it is a positive relief to know that the meaning of it is, “Will you drink a quart of Gascony wine, another of Spanish, and another of Malmsey?” According to this, the Englishman of three hundred years ago mixed his drinks alarmingly. “In drinking,” continues this amusing foreigner, “they will say to you, a hundred times, ‘Drind iou,’ which is, ‘I drink to you’; and you should answer them in their language, ‘Iplaigiou,’ which means ‘I pledge you.’ If you would thank them in their language, you say, ‘God tanque artelay.’ When they are drunk,” he concludes, “they will swear by blood and death that you shall drink all that is in your cup, and will say to you thus: ‘Bigod sol drind iou agoud uin.’”

[Picture: Entrance to Stamford. (After J. M. W. Turner R.A.)]

Such customs as these must have been excellent business for the “George” and its contemporaries.

To this inn belongs an incident not paralleled elsewhere. The daughter of one of its landlords, Margaret, daughter of Bryan Hodgson, married a bishop! Or, more exactly, one who became a bishop: the Reverend Beilby Porteous, who at the time of his marriage, in 1765, was vicar of Ruckinge and Wittersham, in Kent. In 1776 he became Bishop of Chester, and eleven years later Bishop of London. This was long years before Whincup kept the house. He reigned here in the full tide of the coaching age, and was one of the proprietors of the “Stamford Regent.”

Much history has been made at Stamford, from the time when it was the “stone ford” of the Romans across the Welland, through the long ages of blood and destruction, stretching, with little intermission, from the days of Saxon and Danish conflicts to that final clash of arms in 1643, when Cromwell held the town and besieged Burghley House; and to that Monday in the first week of May, 1646, when Charles the First, having slept the night before at the residence of Alderman Wolph (descended from Wulph, son of King Harold) slipped through a postern-gate in the town wall, and so escaped for a final few hours as a free man. The gate is there yet, in the grounds of Barn Hill House, a mansion which, in 1729, was purchased by Stukeley, the antiquary, vicar of All Saints.

Here is no place to tell of the Councils and Parliaments held at Stamford; but, as justifying the academic air the town still holds, it must be said that it was indeed the home of a University, long centuries ago. It was following the early quarrels of Oxford University and Oxford town that a body of students left that seat of learning, in 1260, and set up a temporary home at Northampton. Political troubles drove them, six years later, to Stamford, where they founded several Colleges and Halls, which were already flourishing when, in 1333, the northern students at Oxford, disgusted with the alleged favouritism shown to the southerners, left in a body and found a welcome at Stamford. Liberty in those days was construed as permission given the strong to oppress the weak, and so when Oxford University and Oxford town jointly petitioned the king to forbid the seceders learning where they listed, those unhappy students were promptly arrested and sent back to suck wisdom from _alma mater_ on the Isis. Oxford and Cambridge both agreed not to recognise degrees conferred by Stamford, and at length, by 1463, this University was strangled.

The actual relics of those times are few. Chief in point of interest is the old Brasenose Gate, the only fragment of the College of that name, said to have been founded by students from Brasenose College, Oxford. Here remained until recent years the ancient bronze knocker, in the form of a lion’s head with a massive ring in its mouth, brought, according to the legend, from the Oxford college. This knocker certainly belongs to a period not later than the thirteenth century, and may have been conveyed away. Whether it was the original “brazen nose,” said to have originated the odd name of the College, or whether that name arose from the _brassen-huis_, or brew-house, whose site the original College was built upon, is one of those mysteries of derivation never likely to be solved. During the last years of its stay at Stamford, the knocker was kept in a house adjoining, until it and the house were purchased by Brasenose College, Oxford, in whose Common Room the ancient relic now occupies a place of honour.

[Picture: Stamford]

Stamford was attached to the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses, and had occasion to regret the fact; for it offered an especial mark to the victorious Lancastrians in 1461, after the battle of St. Albans, when Sir Andrew Trollope, with the triple ferocity of the _trois loups_ from which the name derives, fell upon the town and pillaged and burnt it. Eight churches, two castles, and the town walls, together with many hundreds of houses, were destroyed, and Stamford has never recovered its ancient importance since then. It is enough for us that it is among the stateliest of towns, stone-built and dignified; with its beautiful churches of St. Mary, All Saints, and St. Martin; its old almshouses and mansions, not exactly matched in all England.

The histories tell of a long list of famous men, natives of Stamford; but the mere mental capacity or personal bravery shown by these great ones is sardonically overshadowed by the physical greatness of quite another kind of person, who, although not even a native of Stamford, has, by his dying here, shed an especial lustre upon the town.

[Picture: Daniel Lambert] Far transcending the fame of all other personages is that of Daniel Lambert, the Fat Man. In the computation of avoirdupois and of the tape-measure, this was the greatest figure that ever travelled the Great North Road. No king or noble can vie with him, nor are saintly shrines more zealously visited than his grave in the old churchyard of St. Martin’s. While the tomb of that great Cecil, the Lord Treasurer Burghley, within the church, remains often unvisited, photographs of Daniel Lambert and of his epitaph meet the traveller at every turn.

Although destined to this undying fame, and to pothouse canonisation, Daniel’s career was short, as that epitaph tells us:—

“In Remembrance of That Prodigy in Nature DANIEL LAMBERT who was possessed of An exalted and convivial mind And in personal greatness Had no Competitor He measured three feet, one inch, round the leg Nine feet, four inches, round the body And Weighed Fifty-two stone Eleven pounds He departed this life On the 21st of June 1809 Aged 39 years.”

His diet is said to have been plain, and the quantity moderate, and he never drank anything stronger than water. His countenance was manly and intelligent, and he had a melodious tenor voice. For some years before his death he had toured the country, exhibiting himself, and visited London on two occasions. The weights and measurements quoted on his tombstone were taken at Huntingdon only the day before his death. In the evening he arrived at the “Waggon and Horses,” Stamford, in good health, in preparation for “receiving company” during Stamford Races, but before nine o’clock the next morning was dead in the room on the ground floor which he had taken because of his inability to go upstairs. For many years two of his suits were shown at the inn, seven men often succeeding in squeezing themselves within the mighty embrace of his waistcoat, without bursting a button. The “Waggon and Horses” has long since given place to a school, and so here is a place of pilgrimage the less; but Daniel’s fame is immortal, for he lives as the sign of many an inn and refreshment-house, whose proprietors use him as an advertisement of the plenteous fare to be obtained within, regardless of the fact that his immense bulk was due rather to a dropsical habit than to much eating or drinking.

XXIII

THE road, mounting steeply out of Stamford, reaches a fine, elevated track commanding wide views. This is the spot chosen by Forrest for his painting of the old “Highflyer” London, York, and Edinburgh coach which ran from 1788 to 1840. In less than two miles the road crosses the border of Lincolnshire, traversing for six miles an outlying corner of little Rutland, the smallest county in England, and entering Lincolnshire again on passing Stretton. Great Casterton, at the foot of the hill two and a quarter miles from Stamford, is in Rutland. It is said to be situated on the Guash, but that stream and the bridge over it, from which the old road-books often called the village “Bridge Casterton,” are not readily glimpsed.

It is a pretty stone-built village, with a well preserved Early English church beside the road. “Greatness,” either as a village or as the site of a Roman “castrum” (whence derives the “Caster”-ton) has long ceased to be a characteristic of this pleasant spot, and the ancient Roman camp is now visible only in some grassy banks where the rathe primrose grows.

Just beyond Casterton, coyly hiding down a lane to the left, is the little village of Tickencote, preserving in its name some prehistoric goat-farm, “Tyccen-cote” meaning in the Anglo-Saxon nothing more nor less than “goat’s-home.” Of more tangible interest is the splendid Norman church, of small size but extraordinary elaboration; a darkling building with heavy chancel arch covered with those zigzags, lozenges, birds’ heads, and tooth-mouldings so beloved by Norman architects, and with a “Norman” nave built in 1792 to replace that portion of the building destroyed many years before. The pseudo-Norman work of our own day is, almost without exception, vile, and that of the eighteenth century was worse, but here is an example of such faithful copying of existing portions that now, since a hundred years and more have passed and the first freshness of the new masonry gone, it is difficult to distinguish the really old work from the copy.

[Picture: The “Highflyer,” 1840 (After Forrest)]

Returning to the highroad, a further two miles bring us to Horn Lane, the site of a vanished turnpike gate, and to the coppices and roadside trees of Bloody Oaks, where the battle of Empingham was fought, March 13, 1470, between the forces of Edward the Fourth and the hastily assembled Lincolnshire levies of Sir Robert Welles and Sir Thomas de la Launde, fighting, _not_ for the Lancastrian cause, as so often stated, but in an insurrection fomented by the Earl of Warwick, whose object was to raise Edward’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, to the throne. It was a massacre, rather than a battle, for Edward’s army was both more numerous and better equipped, and the rebels soon broke and fled. Flinging away their weapons, and even portions of their clothing, as they went, the fight was readily named “Losecoat Field.” The captured leaders paid for their ineffectual treason with their blood, for they were executed at Stamford.

[Picture: Bloody Oaks]

The country folks have quite forgotten Losecoat Field, and think the woodlands of Bloody Oaks were so named from the execution of John Bowland, a highwayman who was gibbeted at Empingham Corner in 1769.

Greetham spire now rises away to the left, and shows where that village lies hid. Here, away from the village and facing the highroad, stood, and stands still, the “Greetham Inn.” It is now a farmhouse, and has lost its stables, its projecting bar-parlour, and its entrance archway. Once, however, it was one of the foremost inns and posting-houses on the road. Marked on old Ordnance maps as the “Oak,” it seems to have been really named the “New Inn,” if we may judge from an inscription cut on stone under the eaves: “This is the New Inn, 1786.” However this may have been, it was known to travellers, coachmen, and postboys along the road only as “Greetham Inn.” Towards the last it was kept by one of the Percivals of Wansford. At that time no fewer than forty-four coaches—twenty-two up and the same number down—changed here and at the “Black Bull,” Witham Common, every twenty-four hours.