Highways and Byways in Surrey

Teddington Lock, a mile down stream from Kingston suburbs, joins Surrey to Middlesex and the tide to the tideless river with a vast piece of engineering. Further down, Eel Pie island breaks the stream, a bunch of chairs, tables and trees, where, for all I know, others may still eat and praise eel pie. But the fascination of this stretch of river is on the Surrey bank, where Ham House stands among noble trees. Ham House is not a "show house"; and indeed, considering its nearness to Richmond and London, it would be impossible that it should be. There are limits to the claims which may be made upon owners of historic houses who may also wish to live in them. But Ham House holds other magnets than its pictures and relics of Stuarts and Lauderdales. The guide-books catalogue the pictures, and perhaps I need not copy the catalogues. The real fascination is Ham House with its history, the meeting-place of the great Cabal. But you may see that Ham House from a distance; the house as the Duke of Lauderdale saw it from the river bank, or driving to the door to join his fellow Ministers; the garden front, with its statue of Father Thames, the statue at which Buckingham and Arlington used to stare, perhaps, wondering how much longer their sinister power would be left to them. All that they knew and saw day by day remains—the dull red brick, the wrought iron gate, the quaint statuary of the walls; and round the garden walls and shading the wide lawn behind the house, the trees as later, gentler souls saw them; Thomson, walking from his Richmond cottage, and Hood, strolling under the long avenue of elms.

Petersham has riverside houses which would dignify Georgian aldermen; square red houses set about with wistaria and high garden walls, worthy to be neighbours of Richmond Park; worthy, too, of a handsomer neighbour than Petersham church, an insignificant little building which yet was thought sufficient for the dust of the Duchess of Lauderdale. Outside in the churchyard lies the sailor who sought for the North-west passage and named Vancouver's Island.

Of Richmond Park, and the view from Richmond Terrace, and the departed glories of Richmond's palace which was the palace of Sheen, what should be said? How should the beauty of the view from the Terrace be measured? Scott has set it in the pages of The Heart of Midlothian, and Scott, perhaps, thought it the loveliest and richest of English landscapes. It was "a huge sea of verdure, with crossing and intersecting promontories of massive and tufted groves." It was "tenanted by numberless flocks and herds, which seemed to wander unrestrained and unbounded through the rich pastures. The Thames, here turreted with villas and there garlanded with forests, moved on slowly and placidly, like the mighty monarch of the scene, to whom all its other beauties were but accessories, and bore on its bosom an hundred barks and skiffs, whose white sails and gaily fluttering pennons gave life to the whole." That was the scene which was shown to Jeanie Deans, arrived at Richmond to sue for pardon for her sister, by the Duke of Argyle. "We have nothing like it in Scotland," said the Duke of Argyle. Is that the secret? Is it because it is all that is typical of south country greenness and the peace of broad water and deep woodlands that it made its appeal to the Scot used to grey crags and barren moorland? Or is its chief appeal not to the Scot but to the Londoner, and does the Londoner praise Sir Walter's taste because Sir Walter has praised his? That is part of the story of the beauty of the Richmond view, perhaps. It is so easily found from London. It has all that the Londoner loves to look at. It is the country as he wishes to see it. A glorious stretch of luxuriant woodland, a noble breadth of shining water, sunlight on wide meadows; but above all, setting a difference between this orderly beauty and the wild splendours of some western or northern moorland valley, the presence of befriending, comrade man. The boats, the sails, the swans, the water flashing on the oars; the neighbouring roofs, the patterned flower gardens, the comforts of hotels at hand, the readiness with which it is all won and enjoyed—those are some of the secrets of the ideal. It is the country seen from an outdoor theatre.

Richmond Park itself would be worth visiting for any countryman because of its deer. Deer standing about in the bracken; deer asleep in thick fern under great oaks; deer feeding slowly up wind on a distant slope of green; deer leaping shadows of tree-stems one after another as if the shadows were water, which is one of the deer's prettiest games in the sun: deer trotting off as you try to come nearer to them, with that curious quivering, shaking amble which is born of lissom daintiness and muscles like steel; deer with hot sunlight on their coats—it is the Richmond Park deer which are the creatures to come and see. How many are there? Who should count them? Sixteen hundred fallow deer and fifty red deer, the figures are given; Farnham Park, I think, comes next in Surrey, with three hundred fallow deer.

The great palace has left little more than an archway on Richmond Green. More history belongs to it, or rather to the succession of palaces which have stood at Sheen, which was the old name, than I can deal with. Edward III died at Sheen Palace, unloved and alone. Richard II's queen, Anne of Bohemia, died there seventeen years later, and Richard in his grief threw the palace down. It was rebuilt by Henry V, burnt down in 1497, rebuilt and renamed Richmond by Henry VII; then the Richmond who named it died in his new palace. But the overmastering sense of unhappiness which somehow has set itself about the story of Richmond Palace belongs to the closing days of Elizabeth. Elizabeth's death, and the month that went before it, patch English history like a week of night. She had been so strong, so untiring, so wise in her council chamber and so magnificent in her victorious fleet, and the fortune that followed her like a wind; the life of her body had been so unfailing, she had jested, wittily and coarsely, with so many courtiers; she had commanded the chivalry of young and splendid nobles, she had lived to see one of her favourites die and to send another to the block; and now she herself was dying. She knew it, and she would not hear of death. She was never so ready for the gaiety she could not enjoy. Her strength left her, she was a skeleton; still she sat with her dress unchanged, staring before her, flashing sudden rages at her ministers, rallying at the mention of an heir's name. Beauchamp, heir to the Suffolks, they put forward; she cried out he was the son of a rogue. The King of Scots? they asked; she answered nothing. Dead, propped among her pillows, an old woman in ruff and stays, the memory of her last days shadows Richmond Palace like a drawn blind.

To the north beyond Richmond Hill and the huge hotel, twice burnt down, which looks over the woods and the river, one may come by tramways and railways to Kew and Kew Gardens. Kew, too, once had a palace, or an attempt at a palace. Frederick Prince of Wales, George III's father—the prince who did so much for Surrey cricket, and died, perhaps, from the blow of a cricket ball—lived at Kew House, and so did George III after him. George III pulled down Kew House in 1803, and built another; to be not less royal, George IV pulled that down. A smaller building, vaguely named Kew Palace still, stands in the Gardens; Queen Charlotte died there; you may see the room, and look, if you wish, on the tables and sofas she knew. But the pictures in Kew Palace were not all Queen Charlotte's; they are catalogued to-day, and so are many manuscripts and autograph letters of royal persons which attract careful readers. From remarks which can be overheard in those sombre rooms, many visitors, I think, imagine the paintings of still life, of flowers in vases, odd representations of game and fruit, and so forth, to have been selected and hung in the house as specially suitable for public gardens. The portraits of royal gentlemen in blue and red puzzle them; why should they be shown these at Kew? These are for palaces and galleries; Kew is for a flower show.

What is the chief, the compelling fascination of Kew Gardens? What is it that sets Kew apart, not more beautiful than other gardens, but different from them, with a different attraction peculiarly its own? Is it the sense of change from roaring streets to quiet lawns, noble trees, spaces and scents of grass and flowers? There may be a sense of change, but that is not all the secret, for Kew keeps the same charm for one who has come fresh from the broad aisles and avenues of some great country garden. Is it the rarity and the wealth of the Kew museums and houses—the orchid houses with their strange, lovely, uncanny inflorescences, flowers that have fancies and wilfulnesses, flowers that would people the dark with faces; or the lily-houses and the superb Victoria regia that would cradle a water-baby; or the great palm houses, where you may walk in a gallery among enormous leaves and tropical creepers as if you were back again with your grandfathers in the tree tops? That is an attraction, but it is not all of it. Nor is it the achievement of the gardens in the separate spheres of gardening. The sheets of crocuses in the low March sunlight, and of daffodils shaking in an April wind, add a glory to the spring at Kew, but it is a glory that can belong to other lawns and other vistas of flowers. The Kew rose-garden has a wealth of roses, but it has, too, a wealth of old tree stems and broken branches which a garden meant for nothing but roses would hide. The herbaceous border grows luxuriant phloxes and delphiniums, but the background of glass houses sets a wrong light about it. The rock garden shows more rock and fewer masses of Alpine flowers than other English gardens more lately made, with better knowledge of what wall and rock flowers need.

Then what is the abiding charm? To me, at all events, Kew has much the same appeal as the Londoner finds in Richmond Hill. It is a London garden, the garden of a town, perfectly made for its purpose. It can never, even with its glorious trees and its wide spaces of grass, have the peace or know the spirit of a country garden. Too many feet tread its lawns; too many voices chatter in its walks. It may spread its wild flowers and grow its curious blossoms for those who know where and how to look for them; but its main effects must be of ordered gravel, of shaven grass, of patterned beds, of flowers that will suit artificial lakes and buildings and stone balustrades. The keynote of Kew is by the wide pond, with the smooth green turf and the white stone, and the masses of pansies and heliotrope and brilliant red geraniums. Those are the flowers which suit best the steps down to the water, and the fountains, and the swimming ducks and the birds on the banks. There is the right touch of artificiality about them; the right note of London. The birds are Londoners themselves. The stately brown geese stalk over the lawns careless of poulterers or punt-guns. The cormorant, who most certainly knows he is being watched, dives to show off before admiring children. Even the blackbirds have forgotten their country habits, and will sing when country blackbirds are silent for the year. Once, late in July, I heard four singing in evening sunshine after rain. They would take any countryman back to the days of chestnut blossom and the scent of Surrey may; but that indolent melody, in July sunshine, belongs to London.

CHAPTER XXII

Kingston has kept little of the past. An old alehouse, old almshouses, an old staircase, an old roof or two by the market place, and an old chapel, Lovekyn's, standing apart—the survivals are the loneliest things. Lovekyn's, once a chapel, and now a school, is one of the links. Gibbon was a scholar there, and Gibbon belongs doubly to Surrey; he was born at Putney. But the changes at Kingston have made it almost all new, and the changes have come quickly. Only three or four years ago the quaint, small Harrow Inn had two companions, the Anglers and the Three Compasses, one with a fireside corner to warm ale and tell grandfathers' tales in, the other with traditions of highwaymen and the road. They were pulled down. In Market Place there was once a fine Tudor house, the Castle Inn. The noble staircase remains, a good, thoroughgoing piece of carving of Bacchus and full casks; the house has gone. The church is old enough to have seen these and other losses; but the church is a mixed building; the tower, or most of it, is eighteenth century brick. Only one spot in the open streets of the town, I think, keeps an air of Kingston as the customers of the Castle Inn may have known it, and that is the little byway through which runs the water splash of the Hogsmill river. Cart horses standing in the ford, and bare-legged children fishing for minnows, are what Kingston saw in the old days.

The Stone remains; the Stone on which tradition says that the Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned. Once it stood in the chapel of St. Mary, a Saxon building adjoining the church; but St. Mary's Chapel fell in 1730. It was moved to the Market Place; afterwards in 1854, to the open space where it now stands opposite the Court-house; on the very spot, they say, where there was once an Anglo-Saxon palace. The railing which surrounds it has been described as "of Saxon-like design," and perhaps that should suffice. On the pedestal which bears up the Stone are the names of the kings who were crowned on it: Edward the Elder, Ethelstan, Edmund, Edred, Edwig, Edward the Martyr, and Ethelred the Unready. What is the Kings' Stone? A morasteen, the archæologists tell you; one of a circle of stones, on which the chief sat in council with his great men; the predecessors of the Anglo-Saxon chiefs would have been Arch-Druids, perhaps, or pontiff kings, acclaimed by ancient Britons centuries before the Romans set foot in Kent.

Kingston church, if its architecture is confused and much of it modern, has an imposing solemnity about it, and it contains some strange memorials. One is a stone fragment, on which the grateful survivor of an accident and a ruin has painted the words "Life Preserved." She was Hester Hammerton, daughter of Abram Hammerton, sexton of the church, and in 1729 she was helping her father to dig a grave in the churchyard near the Saxon chapel of St. Mary. They dug too near the chapel foundations, and the chapel fell in upon them. The sexton was killed, almost on the spot; his daughter was saved through the jamming of a piece of stone, and survived him as sexton for fifteen years. Another memorial is a brass kept in the vestry; a long screed begins dismally enough—"Ten children in one grave—a dreadful sight"; but the verse is unequal to the opportunity. Another brass shows Robert Skern and his wife Joan; she, according to Manning and Bray, was a daughter of Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III. A fourth monument, said to be in the chancel (but I did not find it), praises Mrs. Mary Morton, daughter of the wife of Robert Honeywood, of Charinge, Kent; she was "the Wonder of her Sex and this Age, for she liv'd to see near 400 issued from her Loynes." So Aubrey describes it, and so, with variations, the local historian. Mrs. Mary Morton died in 1620.

Aubrey has another record of the giants of those days. He had heard of one Wiltshire of the Feathers Inn at Kingston, who was a great thrower. He would stand in the churchyard and throw a stone over the weathercock; "he would also throw a stone over the Thames (by the bridge) and struck the pales on the town side, which (I think) was not so difficult as the other throw. He was then of middle stature, and about thirty years of age." But if he had grown to greater stature? The weathercock of those days is no more, or we might measure the throw.

Kingston has other history besides its coronation stone and its monuments. The Parish Registers have added pictures of its past. Here is one of two poor women allowed to beg at the church:—

Here is a record of a Thames flood, October 9, 1570:—

In the year 1572 Kingston got a new cucking stool; the Kingston scolds had become past bearing. It cost £1 3s. 4d., and as soon as it was finished there was a very shrewish woman ducked in it.

Here are extracts from the burial registers:—

This is hardly a burial:—

Here are items from the churchwarden's accounts. The parish dog whipper had become an institution:—

1561. To fawcon for di yere (half a year) whyppyng of doggs oute of the churche.                                          viijd

1578. To wrighte for beating the dogges out of the churche, for half a yeare.                                                    vjd.

But the morris dance—it was the dances that Kingston would spend money upon. There were two kinds of games which brought gifts to the church, May-games and the Kyngham. What sort of a game the Kyngham was nobody knows, but it brought the churchwardens most of their money: four or five pounds was a good collection. But the expenses could be heavy; there were shoes for the morris dancers, six pairs at 8d. a pair; there was silver paper for the dance, 8d.; and there were for the feast, besides other drinking, a quarter of malt, 4s.; 5 goce (geese), 15d.; eggs, 6d.; lamb, 18d.; sugar, cloves, and mace, 11d.; small raisins, 3d.; saffern, 2d.; vinegar and salt, 3d.; 2 cocks, 18d.; 2 calves, 5s. 8d.; sheep, 12d.; lamb, 16d.; quarter of veal, 8d.; quarter of mutton, 6d.; leg of veal and a neck, 4d. The morris dancers did well, with silver paper and new shoes; but the church kept a feast.

Kingston has the credit of the first and the last battles in the Parliamentary wars, but the claim is a little shaky. There was an affair of outposts between Rupert's cavalry and some Parliamentarian troops between Oatlands and Kingston bridge in the year 1642—after Edgehill—but it was not a battle. The real battle of Kingston came six years later, and ended all the warfare that Surrey saw. That was the battle which crushed Lord Holland's scheme of raising London for the King. We shall meet Lord Holland at Reigate; but the fighting belongs to Kingston. Holland, who had planned a rising on Banstead Downs, and had hoped to capture and hold Reigate Castle, was in full retreat. At Reigate he had feared to hold the position he had taken up; he retreated on Dorking, and from Dorking, pursued by Major Audley of Livesey's Horse, he fled north. On Kingston Common, a little south-east of where Surbiton to-day takes train for London, his horse turned on their enemy; his infantry fell back. From each side a few spurred out, "playing valiantly," Audley writes. But the Royalists were beaten. Lord Francis Villiers, younger brother to the Duke of Buckingham, a boy of great personal beauty, fought alone in their rear. His horse was shot under him; he backed towards an elm, and fought with six of them. They came up behind him, pushed off his helmet and cut him to the ground. Report came to London that he was wounded, and orders were sent out to care for him. But he was found dead, and his pockets were rifled. The evening was the end of the war in Surrey.

CHAPTER XXIII

Surbiton is a growth of seventy years, and was born when the railway came. Once it was called a suburb of Kingston; now it has suburbs of its own. Tramways join it to London; the railway empties Surbiton into London every morning and pours London back again in the evening. Nearly seventy trains a day stop at Surbiton on their way down from Waterloo; nearly eighty stop on their way up. It must be quite inspiriting to lose your train, and to know that you have only three minutes to wait; or to catch the train before your train, or to choose which you will have of two trains. Until you realise these figures, it is difficult to understand why so many people are rushing about late for the train in Surbiton station. They are catching the train before.

But Surbiton is not all villas; or perhaps it is, and it would be truer to say that what is not villas within hail of the station is not Surbiton. Thames Ditton lies rather more than a mile away, and Long Ditton, between Thames Ditton and the railway, straggling, too, beyond the railway. Thames Ditton is rapidly becoming rich and prosperous. A few years ago it was a little, twisting main street, a ferry, an inn or two, and a church, and was flanked by two fine properties, Ember Court and Boyle Farm. Now the villa-builder has got to work, and the old estates are being sliced up into acres and half acres. Ember Court was once a manor belonging to Henry VIII, who hunted over it; later, it was the property of Sir Arthur Onslow, the first Speaker of the House of Commons who earned the title "Great." It is now a racecourse; trotting ponies and American "machines" dash and flash where Mr. Speaker sauntered staidly, and theatre bills flare at the entrance gates. Boyle Farm has fared little better. Once it was the Duchess of Gloucester's, wife of George the Third's brother; a century later, Lord St. Leonards, Lord Chancellor in Lord Derby's first and shortest-lived Ministry, had it. Now the park is criss-crossed with brand new yellow roads. I walked through it while it was still ringing with the builder's hammer; and straying off the gravel, suddenly found myself in the forlornest little place possible—a formal garden, box-trimmed, tiny, deserted; the narrow, carefully-planned beds nothing but weeds, the summerhouse at the side a ruin. A park cut to pieces looks as if it were in anguish. But a garden cries.

The river at Thames Ditton in 1827 saw a festival which was doubtless considered one of the most prodigious affairs of the season. Five young bloods, of whom two were the Lords Castlereagh and Chesterfield of the day, subscribed £500 each to organise an enormous water party, to which, presumably, everybody was invited who was worth inviting. It was a superb occasion, with illuminations, quadrilles on the lawn, singers from the opera, covers for five hundred people, and all adornments proper to such gaiety. Afterwards it came to be known as the Dandies' Fête, and Tom Moore wrote a set of verses about it, which, perhaps, reflect fairly accurately the wit of the company. Here are nine lines out of many:—

"Accordingly, with gay Sultanas,
Rebeccas, Sapphos, Roxalanas—
Circassian slaves, whom Love would pay
Half his maternal realms to ransom;—
Young nuns, whose chief religion lay
In looking most profanely handsome!
Muses in muslin—pastoral maids,
With hats from the Arcade-ian shades;
And fortune-tellers—rich, 'tis plain,
As fortune-hunters, form'd their train."

Moore sent the verses to Mrs. Norton; she, perhaps, was a Circassian or a nun.

But Thames Ditton has had its own poet. He has been dignified by the criticism of Charles Lamb, and his accomplishment was the composing of epitaphs. "What is the reason," Lamb writes to Wordsworth in 1810, "we have no good epitaphs after all?"

The church itself, or at all events the squat and tiny tower, has not altered much since Lamb saw it. But the epitaphs have gone. Search among the ivies and yews of the shady little churchyard will discover a number of flat, weatherworn slabs of stone, but the verses and the signatures have vanished. Fire and the wastepaper man are the common lot of poets, but this "Swan of Thames" has come to his end by rain and hobnails. The only Swan that remains is the inn, whose sign sits comfortably above the front door, white and bright. Few Thames-side inns have a prettier outlook, or look prettier from the river. Sunlight on shining brown boats and quivering willows is a frequent memory of Thames waters, but the Swan lies also opposite a ferry, and a ferry has a hundred fascinations. Old fashioned rowing, running water, hailings and signallings, quiet motion, thriving business, new arrivals; it is all the cheerfullest of riverside traffic. None of the pleasanter services of travel can be more directly rendered and directly paid for than being ferried across a river.

Of Surrey village greens, the Thames Ditton Ground at Giggs Hill has had much to do with Surrey cricket. Giggs Hill cricket has not always been of the most scientific kind, but who shall say it was less enjoyed for that? An old Giggs Hill cricketer tells us how the pitch used to be prepared for a match. "I remember," he says, "seeing the late Harry Stowell with an old beer barrel fixed on a trolley and filled with water, wheeling it across the wicket. He would well douse the pitch, and after running a small garden roller he had borrowed up and down a few times the wicket was ready." This proceeding took place the day before the match, so that batting must occasionally have been a venturesome business. In those days a match meant what it still means in some villages, an adjournment in the evening to the neighbouring inn, a supper, beer, and songs. How many old inns still keep the name "The Jolly Cricketers," and how many for little reason! In later days, Thames Ditton cricket has become scientific enough. The Giggs Hill ground has sent to the Oval cricketers like H.H. Stephenson, who was making centuries for the county in the sixties; in modern times the great Maurice Read, whom Mr. John Shuter has described as having "started a new order among cricket professionals," learned his cricket at Thames Ditton. But the greatest of all Thames Ditton cricketers is, of course, Tom Richardson. He was actually born at Byfleet, but played as a boy at Giggs Hill.

Thames Ditton's sister, Long Ditton, is probably known by sight by thousands of people who do not know its name. You are looking at the best of Long Ditton when you see Barr's nursery gardens from the train window. There is hardly a month in the year, except in the deep of midwinter, when the Ditton Hill gardens are not full of blossom. They are never more glorious than in May and early June, when the long parterres glow with the tall, late-flowering tulips. Of all flowers which have been added to English gardens in the last twenty years, the great thirty inch tulips seem to me the finest. A giant daffodil can be superb, but it always looks like a giant. But these tulips have the grace of slightness and the majesty of height; their open chalices burn with the heat of jewels and the depth of the heart of wine; and here are ten thousand of them. Perhaps the daffodils, earlier in the year, light the gardens with a fresher lustre; but the tulips have the colour and the glow. Railways have the good luck to run by many nursery gardens; the tulips at Ditton Hill would help the South Western to challenge any line.

On the other side of Thames Ditton ferry lies Hampton Court Park, a noble stretch of ordered green. From the ferry to Hampton Court Bridge is a mile by river, and nearly twice as much by road, which runs through East Molesey. There is little of interest in either of the Moleseys, East or West, but it is worth walking a dull mile or two to look down stream from the Bridge over Henry VIII's palace, with its yews and elms, dark and stately, in the garden beyond the imposing walls. There is a far more comprehensive view of Hampton Court to be had from the railway or the river, but it is still a fine pile of brick seen down stream from the Bridge. Up stream, Hampton Church stands a mile away at the bend of the river, grey in the sunshine; between the church and the bridge is the lock, bright with boats in summer, and the weir, tumbling down a roar of green water to make roach-swims and barbel-swims for patient fishermen. In the road to the left you may catch sight or sound of one of the London coaches, with its white-hatted driver and painted panels, well named the Vivid. Molesey's roads carry away many of the motor cars that run to Hampton Court; but the old Vivid still jangles hopefully after them.

North and west of Molesey runs the ugliest road in Surrey. It begins with the paling running round the Hurst Park racecourse, and it goes on between the ramparts of enormous reservoirs. To stand on the edge of one of these great basins of water (it is strictly forbidden to do so) is to get a new meaning of desolation. They are horribly deep—you can see how deep if you stand above one which is half empty; the sides slope so steeply that if you fell in you could never climb out again, and they are the loneliest stretches of water conceivable. No bird has any need that brings him to water that has no shelter and no food. Once I watched a sunset in November across one of these reservoirs. When the sun sank low the water blackened; the wind drove little waves slapping with foam against the stone bank; a single sea-gull swept up out of the dark and fled away down wind like a scrap of torn paper; it was the most solitary ending a day could have.

The reservoirs by Molesey stretch far back from the river. Nearer the river the birds find them more hospitable. I remember a day in October when I stood watching the martins making one of their last halts on the way south over the reservoirs on the river bank at Surbiton. It was a pouring wet afternoon, there was a high wind, and the rain drove bubbles in the ruffled water and half blotted the greens and greys of blown willows and the russet of thorn berries on the far side of the river. A short trolley line ran down a stone pier from beside the road to the edge of the water, where a barge with a bright brown sail waited; the smoke from a clinker fire built in a pierced bucket swept fitfully about the pier; grimy men loaded a car on the trolley line. Over the grey-blue water hundreds of house-martins dipped and darted and chattered; my umbrella blew inside out, a few scared birds near me tossed up into the sky and fell down again, joining the hundreds circling and curtseying in the wind and the rain.

The road from Molesey runs west to Walton-on-Thames, where you strike the river high enough to find it running through something like real country. Walton has an interesting old manor house and a Norman church a good deal spoiled by restorers. In the vestry, preserved in a cabinet made out of an old beam from the belfry, is a relic of days when women talked too much—a scold's or gossip's bridle. It is a sort of cage shaped to fit the head and made of steel, which time has rusted and blackened. A kind of bit is arranged to go into the scold's mouth and hold her tongue, and according to those who have been voluntarily bridled—nobody can remember a scold in Walton—it answers its purpose admirably. When the bit is in and the bridle properly padlocked the most vixenish can only utter inarticulate murmurs.

Among some curious old brasses in the church is one which commemorates, "John Selwyn 'gent,' Keeper of her Matis Parke of Oteland vnder ye right honorable Charles Howward Lord Admyrall of England his good Lord and Mr." He died on March 22, 1587, and his brass illustrates a remarkable incident. John Selwyn, dressed in a most workmanlike costume like a Scots gillie with a ruff, is shown riding on the back of a stag, into whose throat he is plunging a great hunting-knife. Two stories explain the picture. One, told in the Antiquarian Repertory, is that Selwyn, "in the heat of the chase, suddenly leaped from his horse upon the back of the stag (both running at that time with their utmost speed), and not only kept his seat gracefully in spite of every effort of the affrighted beast, but, drawing his sword, with it guided him toward the Queen, and coming near her presence, plunged it in his throat, so that the animal fell dead at her feet." Another version told locally is that the stag was charging Queen Elizabeth when the keeper rode up, leapt on its back and killed it, but was killed by the stag as it fell. It does not seem impossible. Against the story of the keeper being killed in rescuing the Queen, Mr. F.W. Smith, a local authority, has urged that Queen Elizabeth would hardly have been hunting six weeks after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and also when the Armada was almost on its way. But nobody in England, certainly not Drake, ever stopped doing anything because the Armada was coming, and as for hunting six weeks after the death of Mary Queen of Scots, that would be nothing out of the way for Queen Elizabeth. A huge oak, thirty feet in girth, is spoken of as the tree under which the stag was killed at the Queen's feet, but nobody could tell me where it was. There are many superb oaks in the gardens in Walton and Weybridge. Once the whole district was included in Windsor Park.

Hidden in a group of obscure cottages stands the old manor-house, partly preserved as a curiosity, partly as an addition to a garden. The house was not improved by an experience for some years as a tenement dwelling, crowded with more families than it should have held. It was rescued from that indignity by its present possessor, Mr. Lowther Bridger. Heavy beams, oak panels, and a fine chimney-piece remain, relics of the Stuart days when John Bradshaw, President of the Council, had the house. Tradition, certainly wrongly, says that Bradshaw signed Charles's death-warrant in the hall. Bradshaw, no doubt, signed it at Westminster. But the association of his name would be enough for village gossip. "The place where they cut off the king's head," is a variant of the story.

Above Walton Bridge are Coway Stakes, where Julius Cæsar is supposed to have crossed the Thames in pursuit of Cassivellaunus, king of the Catuvellauni. The British chief drove sharpened stakes into the bed of the river, to block the ford, and built a palisade along the bank, where he waited for the enemy. They came on, cavalry and infantry, in spite of the stakes. The Catuvellauni would have met them, but fled in horror at the sight of an armoured elephant.

A great cricketer is buried in Walton churchyard, and a great astrologer in the church. The cricketer was Lumpy Stevens, whom we met at Send. The astrologer was William Lilly, author of a yearly publication, Merlinus Anglicus Junior, a sort of Old Moore's Almanac. The prophecies of storms, fires and disasters were as dull reading then as they are now, but one or two entries in his Life and Times, written by himself, are illuminating, especially his record of family amenities, thus:—

Lilly got into trouble with the Parliament men later. He had predicted a town in conflagration, and when the Fire of London occurred in 1666 he was accused of having caused it. He had to appear before a Parliamentary committee specially sitting on the matter, but he was able to satisfy the chairman that he had nothing to do with the fire. He admitted that he had drawn mysterious designs of persons in winding sheets and digging graves, which were to foretell the plague, and of towers and houses on fire, which might have meant the city of London blazing; but he had never fixed the exact year for these things to happen. So the committee let him off. If he had lived till the next century, when William the Third's horse had thrown his rider, and the Jacobite toast was "the little gentleman in black velvet," Lilly could have pointed with pride to other cabalistic drawings in his Merlin One shows a mole walking about under a dragon; another, a mole attacking a crown.

CHAPTER XXIV

Epsom is the centre of the country between the great railway lines. It has its own railway, but it is midway between the lines that run express trains to Brighton and Southampton: Epsom's own expresses only run for two weeks in the year, when the races come round. For the other fifty weeks Epsom is a quiet town of villas, once a village, now nearly a suburb like Esher or Weybridge. Lord Rosebery sometimes lives near the town, at Durdans, and deplores the large numbers of lunatics who are brought to live near the town always. But Epsom is only occasionally ruffled by the lunatics, and has developed a dangerously good train service.

Epsom has the widest and breeziest main street of any Surrey town, and you do not guess the reason until you read the history of the town pretty closely. The story of Epsom, until the two great races that belong to its downs were founded over Lord Derby's wine, is the story of its wells. Before Epsom Salts there was hardly an Epsom to give them a name. There may have been a tiny village where the church stands, but that would be all; the rector preached to a few cottagers. Then, one hot summer day in 1618, the lucky thing happened. Henry Wicker, trying to water his cattle on the common, found a small hole with a spring in it; he enlarged it, and took the cattle to the water, but could not make them drink. Then the doctors were told about it. They used it first, as Pownall the local historian tells you, "as a vulnerary and abstersive," and healed wounds with it; then some labourers accidentally drank it, and Epsom's fortune was made. The doctors agreed; Epsom salts were bitter, diluent, absorbent, soluble, cathartic—everything that salts should be. In two years the wells were enclosed with a wall; in twenty years France and Germany had heard of Epsom, and distinguished foreigners obediently paced the common. But the great days were still to come. As yet few buildings had grown up close to the Wells, merely "a shed to shelter the sickly visitors." Then came the year 1670, when Charles II gave Barbara Villiers his palace of Nonsuch two miles away. She, as careless of a king's gift and as avaricious as a king's mistress should be, turned the palace into cash, and out of its demolished walls the local builder piled up houses by Epsom Wells.

One of Epsom's inns was already built, the King's Head—perhaps the Old King's Head near the church, or an inn on the same site. Pepys was there in 1667, and gives us a glimpse of Nell Gwynne, though she was at Epsom to amuse herself, and was not one of Pepys's party. Pepys went on July 14th (Lord's day); he got up at four in the morning, and talked to Mrs. Turner downstairs while his wife dressed, and got angry with Mrs. Pepys because she was so long about it. They were off in the coach by five, with bottles of wine and beer, and a cold fowl, and talked all the way pleasantly, Pepys writes, and so came "to Epsom, by eight o'clock, to the well; where much company, and I drank the water: they did not but I did drink four pints. And to the town, to the King's Head; and hear that my Lord Buckhurst and Nelly are lodged at the next house, and Sir Charles Sedley with them; and keep a merry house." Lord Buckhurst had just persuaded Nell Gwynne to leave the King's playhouse for a hundred pounds a year and his company: she was to act no more, which saddened Pepys. However, she was back at the playhouse next month, jeered at by the graceful Buckhurst and as poor as ever. She was less exacting than Barbara Villiers: she never had a palace to sell.

When Nonsuch was built up again into Durdans and other houses near the Wells, then came the full tide. Epsom was completed. About the year 1690, Pownall dates the climax: Mr. Parkhurst, lord of the manor, built a ball-room seventy feet long, and the inns sprang up on all sides. "Taverns at that time reputed to be the largest in England were opened; sedan chairs and numbered coaches attended, there was a public breakfast, with dancing and music every morning at the Wells. There was also a ring, as in Hyde Park; and on the downs races were held daily at noon; with cudgelling and wrestling matches, foot races, &c., in the afternoon. The evenings were usually spent in private parties, assemblies or cards; and we may add, that neither Bath nor Tunbridge ever boasted of more noble visitors than Epsom, or exceeded it in splendour, at the time we are describing." So Pownall praises the great days; but they have not left a glamour about Epsom, as the days of Nash and Brummell have shed on Bath.

Why has Epsom so broad a main street? In the great days the open way was narrower. Down the centre of the road as we see it Mr. Parkhurst planted a long walk of elms, and there they stood from James the Second's day till the nineteenth century. Then Sir Joseph Mawbey, lord of the manor, cut them down and sold the timber. He made a good bargain too; for the townpeople were grieved at losing their trees, and to quiet them he promised to give £200 to help build a market-house, but he never did it, and kept the cash. The trunks of the fallen trees must have made a pleasant prospect for the New Inn, the fine red-brick building which in Parkhurst's day was built for a tavern, and which still stands, but has now fallen to shops. But in the days when the city aldermen brought their wives to show off their finery, and the young sparks threw their money about at Epsom, what a bustling, handsome, pursy, turtle-soup sort of place the Wells must have been. John Toland, writing in 1711, describes Epsom Wells at their height. Eudoxa is his mistress, and to Eudoxa he pictures all Epsom's charms. I quote a few passages from a long letter:—

"Here are two bowling-greens with raffling shops and musick for the ladies' diversion, as at Tunbridge; but the ladies do not appear every day on the walks as there. Here you see them, on Saturdays, in the evening, as their husbands come from London; on Sundays at church, and on Mondays in all their splendour, when there are balls in the Long-rooms; and many of them shake their elbows at Passage and Hazard with a good grace."

Surely they never forgave Toland for writing that. Here he writes on the ladies' husbands:—"By the conversation of those that walk there, you would fancy yourself to be this minute on the Exchange, and the next at St. James's; one while in an East India factory, and another while with the army in Flanders, or on board the fleet in the Ocean; nor is there any profession, trade, or calling that you can miss of here, either for your instruction or diversion."

Thus does Toland, unkinder than Pownall, set out the glories of Epsom without comparing them to Bath. But what could be better than the luxury of it all? "You would think yourself in some enchanted camp, to see the peasants ride to every house with the choicest fruits, herbs, roots and flowers; with all sorts of tame and wild fowl, with the rarest fish and venison, and with every kind of butcher's meat, among which Banstead-down mutton is the most relishing dainty. Thus, to see the fresh and artless damsels of the plain, either accompanied by their amorous swains or aged parents, striking their bargains with the nice court and city ladies, who, like queens in a tragedy, display all their finery on benches before their doors (where they hourly censure, and are censured), and to observe how the handsomest of each degree equally admire, envy and cozen one another, is to me one of the chiefest amusements of the place. The ladies who are too lazy, or too stately, but especially those who sit up late at cards have their provisions brought to their bedsides, where they conclude the bargain with the higler; and then—perhaps after a dish of chocolate—take another nap, till what they have thus purchased is got ready for dinner."

One single attraction Toland admits Epsom never had—it lacks a river. "One thing is wanting—and happy is the situation that wants no more; for in this place notwithstanding the medicinal waters, and sufficient of sweetes for domestic use, are not to be heard the precipitant murmurs of impetuous cascades. There are no purling streams in our groves, to tempt the shrill notes of the warbling choristers, whose never-ceasing concerts exceed Bononcini and Corelli."

That was in 1711; Epsom never saw better days in spite of the lack of those miraculous concerts. And in 1715 it had all come to an end. Epsom's glories tumbled like a pack of cards. It was the fault of one man: Pownall has gibbeted the rascal; Epsom fell through the "knavery of Mr. John Livingstone, an apothecary." Mr. Livingstone may have been a knave, but he was also evidently a fool. He began admirably, as a doctor with a speculative eye should do, by building a large house with an assembly room for dancing and music, "and other rooms for raffling, diceing, fairchance (what a perversion of terms!) and all sorts of gaming; together with shops for milliners, jewellers, toymen, etc." He was quite a heathen, for he planted a grove, and he made a bowling-green, and then spoiled it all by sinking a well, putting a pump to it, and calling the place the New Wells. The new water was neither diluent, nor absorbent, nor cathartic, nor anything else that water at a watering-place should be, and the visitors found out the difference. But the end was the maddest thing of all. Somehow or other, John Livingstone got a lease of the old wells, the real, genuine spring. Then he locked up the old wells, and tried to make money with the new. It killed the watering-place.

But Epsom revived—to relapse and revive again. First, it was brought to life again by the South Sea Bubble, which would have brought to life anything, and for a wild short season the quacks and alchemists and Jews came back: the ball rooms and the gaming saloons filled again. New houses were built; "amongst them that of Baron Swasso." To speculate as to who Baron Swasso may have been is agreeable: but the baronial hall could not save Epsom. Even a more powerful attraction than Baron Swasso failed to do so; or, rather, refused to try. She was Miss Wallin, whom the vulgar addressed as Crazy Sally; but she was not so crazy. Miss Wallin was a bone-setter: she could put in a man's shoulder without help, and she was not to be imposed upon. Once a cheat came to her with his head done up in a bandage, and asked her to set his dislocated wrist for him; it was not dislocated, and he wanted to show Miss Wallin up as an impostor. She saw through that, and dislocated his wrist on the spot, telling him to go back to the fools that sent him. Such a woman should have been kept at Epsom; she was worth more than mere cathartic waters. But Epsom could not keep her; she desired more than anything else in the world to marry one Mr. Hill Mapp, who did not and would not live at Epsom. She pursued him, always with an eye on the church, and Mapp capitulated; but they were married in London. Epsom took back Mrs. Mapp, but she could not live for ever.

After Mrs. Mapp, the end came quickly. Sea-bathing finished the little town altogether; "the modern delightful practice of sea-bathing," as Pownall puts it with tolerance. He does not give up hope, even in 1825; he hopes that the medical profession will still give the wells a trial, and believes that the waters will be found worthy. After that he comes to the consideration of Epsom's races.

Water ended Epsom in 1715; wine began Epsom again in 1780. A party of gentlemen, drinking at Lord Derby's table at Lambert's Oaks, a house on the high ground above the town, lifted their glasses to the glories of horse-racing. They founded two races, one, in 1779, for three-year-old fillies; another, in 1780, for three-year-old colts and fillies. They named the races after their host and the house where they drank, and Epsom was made again. The Derby and the Oaks became national institutions. Before that roystering party, the downs had seen racing, but had not seen a racing crowd. Charles II had run his horses on Epsom and Banstead downs; perhaps his horse now and then bore away the silver bell, which was the first and simple prize when horses began racing. Queen Anne may have entered a colt or two at Epsom: her consort, Prince George of Denmark, loved horse-racing and drank Epsom waters. Greatest of all memories of the Turf, Eclipse lived for years by Epsom downs, and won poor little races for an obscure commoner. He would have won any race he could have been asked by a king, but it was the fate of the finest racehorse ever foaled to live before the Derby was founded, and before he could race another horse worthy to pass the starting post with him. Pownall, in his History of Epsom, has a pleasant passage extolling Eclipse's merits. He writes in 1825: he has studied, he tells us, Lawrence's History of the Horse and Bingley's British Quadrupeds, and this is the result:—

"Eclipse was withheld from the course till he was five years of age, and was first tried at Epsom. He had considerable length of waist, and stood over a large space of ground, in which particular he was an opposite form to the flying Childers, a short backed, compact horse, whose reach lay in his lower limbs; but, from the shape of his body, we are inclined to believe that Eclipse would have beaten Childers in a race over a mile course with equal weights. He once ran four miles in eight minutes, carrying twelve stone, and with this weight Eclipse won eleven King's plates.[A] He was never beaten, never had a whip flourished over him, or felt the tickling of a spur; nor was he ever for a moment distressed by the speed or rate of a competitor; out-footing, out-striding, and out-lasting (says Mr. Lawrence) every horse which started against him."

Eclipse, like Homer, had many birthplaces. Mr. Theodore Cook, who has written authoritatively of him where others have guessed or accepted tradition, has been informed of more than seven; and, in collecting details of relics of the great horse, he has been supplied with evidence that Eclipse possessed no fewer than six "undoubted" skeletons, nine "authentic" feet, sufficient "genuine" hair to have stuffed the largest armchair in Newmarket, and "certified" portions of skin which would easily have carpeted the yard at Tattersall's. There never was such an omnipresent animal.

After 1780, the horse-racing crowd grew. In Pownall's time, when the Derby and Oaks had not been established forty-five years, the Derby attracted some sixty subscribers, and the Oaks about forty, of fifty guineas apiece, and Epsom was full to overflowing. The watering-place has become a circus. The race week brings down all London. "At an early hour in the morning, persons of all ranks, and carriages innumerable, are seen pouring into the town at every inlet. All the accommodations and provisions that the surrounding villages can supply are put in requisition." The royal family would come to look on; sixty thousand spectators, Pownall thinks, met on the downs.

But Pownall has nothing to say of the road. The road must have been the thing to see; not as we see it to-day, when motor cars start for the course before lunch instead of before breakfast, and luxurious railway trains draw decadent race-goers to Tattenham Corner. In the real Derby days all racing men that were men drove to Epsom, early in the morning, by the road. Four-in-hand coaches travelled level in the pack and the dust by costermongers' donkeys; at every inn there were touts and tipsters, haunting creatures with secrets of betting; they knew what would win outright and what would certainly lose; the Duke's trainer had whispered to them, the swindling Captain had tipped them the wink; you merely had to pay for the knowledge. Wayside strips of green were turned into cocoanut shies, wherever a man might wish to shy at nuts; clowns on stilts stalked in chequered blue; bare-legged boys and girls turned amazing Catherine wheels. There was the hill to finish with by the course, and the plaudits of the crowd for him who took his team up in spanking style. They still drive four-in-hand coaches up the hill; but the motor-horn follows the coach-horn.

Frith has made the Victorian Derby day immortal; a less well-known hand has written of what Frith painted. The author who signed himself "Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing scenes in the forties, has set down in his Bye-lanes and Downs of England a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of a gibbet"—similia similibus, you might suppose reading the list of heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace'; my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon Sunflower, the Assassin, and the flash grazier; the Dollar, hellite, billiard-marker, and bacon-factor; the ringletted O'Bluster, double-jointed publican, Leather lungs, and Handsome Jack contrasted in the pig's skin; and, ye Centaurs! what seats were there!" It must have been a sight for proper men to see. Not the veriest tailor would walk on Derby day. He "would mount a mis-teached hippogriff, and risk the chance of a purl, rather than not show at the covert-side." Who, indeed, would not bestride a steed when he might meet the Assassin and the O'Bluster in the ring? But there were others:—