The Hastings Road and the "Happy Springs of Tunbridge"

But presently these are all left behind, and the fields on either side of this modern road with an ancient Roman inflexibility are broken only by the house and grounds of that most beautiful and noble early eighteenth-century mansion, the Rookery, built of the most exquisite red brick.

The Rookery belongs to a time before this fine road came into being: to that time when travellers came painfully up the hill to that open common much dwelt upon by old county historians. Opposite the mansion in those days stood the two polled elms known from time immemorial as Great and Little Beggars’ Bush, and known most unfavourably, for in the shade cast by them at night not merely beggars, but those highwaymen of the meaner sort called footpads, lurked.

Time has a sardonic trick of turning the matter-of-fact descriptions of the old topographers into absurdly misleading statements. Thus, reading Lysons’ description of Bromley, written in 1796, we smile at his remarks that “the Anglo-Saxon Brom-leag signifies a field, or heath, where broom grows,” and that “the great quantity of that plant on all the waste places near the town fully justifies this etymology.”

Bromley Common was in great part enclosed soon after the middle of the eighteenth century, and most of the remaining two hundred and fifty acres were cut up and partitioned in 1822, amid much local satisfaction. With it went the broom near the town; although, to be sure, it is still plentifully to be found on the further commons towards Keston.

A piece of beautiful common-land through which the road runs at the extremity of the parish is still called “Bromley Common.” Down below it, in a hollow, is Lock’s Bottom, a hamlet whose pretty scenery is rather vainly endeavouring to bear up, under the infliction of some commonplace houses and a prominent police-station. There are picturesque alders in front of the “White Lion,” but the blue lamp of the police-station spoils the sentiment of it all. Why, you ask yourself, that in a place by way of being so pretty and so rural? A few steps onward give the answer, in the great workhouse and the casual-ward, and the expectant tramps reclining, more pictorially than they know, by the pond under the tall fir-trees opposite.

XI

The road in the neighbourhood of Lock’s Bottom seems, in the old days, to have been particularly dangerous. It ran, in the middle of the seventeenth century and for long afterwards, through a wide district of unenclosed common-land, and was just one of those lonely highways where the footpads and highwaymen had matters very much their own way.

An unpleasant adventure of this sort happened just here, beside a vanished landmark once known to wayfarers as the “Procession Oak,” to John Evelyn, the diarist, on May 23rd, 1652.

Leaving his wife to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells, he set out on horseback for London. In his “Diary” we learn what befell him on the way:

“The weather being hot, and having sent my man on before me, I rode negligently under favour of the shade till within three miles of Bromley. At a place call’d the Procession Oake, two cut-throates started out, and striking with long staves at the horse and taking hold of the reines, threw me downe, took my sword, and haled me into a deepe thickett some quarter of a mile from the highway, where they might securely rob me, as they soone did. What they got of money was not considerable, but they took two rings, the one an emerald with diamonds, the other an onyx, and a pair of bouckles set with rubies and diamonds, which were of value, and, after all, bound my hands behind me, and my feete, having before pull’d off my bootes; they then set me up against an oake, with most bloudy threats to cutt my throat if I offer’d to crie out or make any noise, for they should be within hearing, I not being the person they looked for. I told them, if they had not basely surpriz’d me, they should not have had so easy a prize, and that it would teach me never to ride neere an hedge, since had I been in the mid-way they durst not have adventur’d on me; at which they cock’d their pistols, and told me they had long guns too, and were fourteen companions. I begg’d for my onyx, and told them it being engraven with my armes would betray them, but nothing prevail’d. My horse’s bridle they slipt, and search’d the saddle, which they pull’d off, but let the horse graze, and then, turning againe, bridled him and tied him to a tree, yet so as he might graze, and thus left me bound. My horse was perhaps not taken because he was mark’d and cropt on both eares, and well known on that roade.

“Left in this manner, grievously was I tormented with flies, ants, and the sunn, nor was my anxiety little how I should get loose in that solitary place, where I could neither heare nor see any creature but my poore horse and a few sheepe stragling in the copse. After neere two houres attempting, I got my hands to turn palm to palm, having been tied back to back, and then it was long before I could slip the cord over my wrists to my thumb, which at last I did, and then soone unbound my feete, and saddling my horse and roaming awhile about, I at last perceiv’d dust to rise, and soone after heard the rattling of a cart, towards which I made, and by the help of two country men I got back into the high way.

“I rode to Coll. Blount’s, a greate justiciarie of the times, who sent out hue and cry immediately. The next morning, sore as my wrists and armes were, I went to London and got 500 tickets printed and dispers’d by an officer of Goldsmiths Hall, and within two daies had tidings of all I had lost, except my sword, which had a silver hilt, and some trifles. The rogues had pawn’d one of my rings for a trifle to a goldsmith’s servant, before the tickets had come to the shop, by which meanes they scap’d; the other ring was bought by a victualler, who brought it to a goldsmith, but be, having seen the ticket, seiz’d the man. I afterwards discharg’d him, on his protestation of innocence. Thus,” he concludes, “did God deliver me from these villains, and not onely so, but restor’d what they tooke, as twice before He had graciously don, both at sea and land ... for which, and many, many signal preservations, I am extreamely oblig’d to give thanks to God my Saviour.”

This incident of impudent highway robbery in midday sufficiently illustrates the general insecurity of the times and the risks that travellers ran.

But let it not be thought that all highwaymen were brutal and lacking in bowels of compassion. We know, from the stirring annals of Hounslow Heath, that a Duval could act a courtly part when a lady was in the case; and here records tell of a very perfect, gentle knight of the road, who could be polite and considerate even to one of his own sex. But hear what the London newspapers of 1773 said: “Last night Mr. Delves, whalebone merchant, being taken ill at Hayes in Kent, and coming to town in a postchaise, was stopped by a highwayman, who robbed him of his money; but finding him greatly indisposed and not able to help himself, civilly wrapped him up warm, wished him better health and a good evening, gave the postboy a shilling, and ordered him to drive gently on.” We do not find that he returned the money. He doubtless thought it enough to rob with civility and to wish the invalid well again.

XII

Beyond this, one comes in a mile to the casual, disjointed, and scattered collection of houses called Farnborough, once a spruce and busy “thoroughfare” hamlet in the days of coaching: now a rather seedy place of resident market-gardeners and tramping hop-pickers. The old “George and Dragon” inn, that in the Queen Annean sort faces you on approach and, as it were, plants its considerable bulk half-way into the road, as though to dare your passing, has been furbished up in the public-house kind, and without difficulty stops the passage of most. It has a portico with pillars painted and grained to resemble real marble; but the veins are too preposterous, and the much more real compo underneath peeps out, like the obvious advertisement in a badly written puff.

If I were an amateur of ugly houses—which the Lord forbid—I would turn to the right-hand here and make for Downe, which is two miles distant. For there, by the pond of that pretty village, stands the hideous mansion in which Darwin lived, and where, in 1882, he died of a chill caught in prowling at night on the lawn with a dark lantern, studying earthworms. A carpenter near by preserves the coffin, with inscription all complete, in which the great naturalist was to have been laid (but for some reason was not), and strangely morbid people, with gruesome ideas of sight-seeing, go numerously to see it.

Keeping, however, to the main road and on to Green Street Green, we cannot altogether avoid the ugly, which appears, very large and brutal, in the Oak Brewery. I am told it is a famous brewing firm, but one willingly forgets their name, and only knows that their buildings are ugly and sooty, and look dry and make one feel thirsty. Perhaps there is more in that than meets the eye.

Green Street Green really has a green: a thing which in a world where New College, Oxford, and the numerous Newports throughout the country are among the oldest of institutions and places, and where villages with the prefix “Great” are almost inevitably among the smallest, was by no means to be counted upon as a certainty. And not only has Green Street Green a green, but it is rather a large and a not unbeautiful specimen. But perhaps its most striking feature is the extraordinary number of old City of London cast-iron posts, indicating the boundaries of the old Coal and Wine Dues area. It seems as though the City, having delimited those bounds in a fifteen-miles radius from London, and come at last, full circle, to Green Street Green, found itself with a surplus stock of posts, and so set them up here, rather than be at the trouble of taking them home again.

It was somewhere near here that, about 1783, a malefactor who had robbed the mail was hanged in chains, upon the scene of his crime. A house was formerly pointed out, with a window bricked up at that time in order to shut out the view of the blackened body of the robber swinging and circling on his gibbet.

Pratt’s Bottom, the next of the hamlets strung so numerously, like beads, upon this portion of the Hastings Road, is a mile and a half ahead.

It was here, on the night of August 27th, 1841, that the down Hastings Mail met with the first of the two misadventures that befell it on this occasion. The coach had passed through the toll-gate that then stood here, and was going at about eight miles an hour, when it ran over an old woman seated in the middle of the road, helplessly drunk. The apparent truth of the old saying that Providence especially looks after fools, drunkards, and children lost none of its point here, for the coach and horses, in some marvellous way, passed over her without doing her any injury except a slight bruise on the forehead, supposed to have been caused by the drag-chain. By some almost miraculous interposition, the horses seem to have dashed past on either side of her. The coach was stopped, and the passengers and guard, naturally thinking her days were ended by her being run over or kicked to death, got nervously down to remove what they thought was at least a dying, if not an already dead, creature, when they were assailed by a vigorous torrent of abuse. Somewhat relieved by this evidence that she could not be very seriously hurt, they picked her up, and, as she was much too drunk to walk, placed her on the grass by the roadside, out of the way of the traffic. Then the coach started again; but they had not gone beyond two miles when, through the clear air of a very beautiful night, the coachman saw a number of waggons ahead, approaching. He called to the guard to blow his horn, which the guard accordingly did, when the waggons drew off to one side. Unfortunately they were drawn to their off-side, directly into the path of the on-coming mail, which dashed into Barnett’s Tunbridge van, at the head of them. The van was hurled violently into the hedge, and the coach, going off at an angle from this terrific impact, then went full tilt into a hay-wain. The splinter-bar ran under the shafts of the wain and so, happily for the passengers, kept the coach from crashing over; but the shock of the encounter flung the coachman from his seat and the wheels went over his body. He rolled over and moaned piteously, but never spoke again. Carried into the “Polhill Arms,” he shortly expired there.

Rough-and-ready roadside repairs were effected and the coach went on to Riverhead, but the passengers, thoroughly unnerved by the chances and disasters of this ominous night, preferred to walk on to that village, three miles and a half away, where, at the “White Hart,” they rested.

The surviving toll-house at Pratt’s Bottom is neighboured by a signpost which directs to Knockholt, to Sevenoaks, to Chelsfield, and—to the Workhouse: i.e. the workhouse we have just passed at Lock’s Bottom. That way also leads to London, but that is merely an incidental matter.

The gently swelling hills at this point are composed of a stratum of pebbles, mixed with a proportion of flints: the product of vastly remote geological ages. These pebbles have given its Saxon name to the neighbouring village of Chelsfield, which is Cealch-field or Chesilfield = the field of pebbles; just as the not far distant Chelsham and Chiselhurst, with similar pebbles, are, in the same way, Pebble Home and Pebble Wood.

XIII

At Pratt’s Bottom there is an interesting parting of the ways. The straight road on to Sevenoaks, by way of Polhill, is modern, having been made in 1836. Before that time the route lay up along by the dangerously acute turning to the right, where the old toll-house stands, to the weary ascent of Rushmore, or Richmore Hill, and to Knockholt Pound. Ogilby, in his “Britannia” of 1675 shows a map of this road to “Nokeholt,” as he calls it, with “Ye Porcupine inne” on the right-hand, near the summit; and a “Porcupine” inn is there to this day.

At the foot of the rise stands the “Bull’s Head” inn, itself of a considerable age, picturesquely faced by a row of old elms, and just beyond you may notice in the hollow on the right hand, where the modern schools stand, an unreformed piece of the original old road, going very steeply and stonily in a loop, and rejoining the present route a quarter of a mile onwards. A white house, now a farmhouse, just before reaching the “Porcupine,” is still sometimes called by the older rustics “New Stables.” It was a posting-house in the old days. At Knockholt, where, having reached the topmost eyrie of the downs, the road turns left, the “Harrow” inn, that was once the house of call for the carriers and waggoners of the Sevenoaks road, still stands.

When the chronicler of these things has explored the old way to Sevenoaks and the new it remains more than ever a mystery why this circuitous way was ever followed, and why so many generations of travellers should have been content to continue along it when a considerable distance might have been saved, a less arduous climb encountered, and a much less dangerous descent made by following the line of country now covered by the modern road.

At Knockholt one has come to a very bleak and inhospitable place, as may be seen by that famous landmark, Knockholt Beeches, not far from the ancient route. The Beeches, it is well known, are situated on the loftiest view-point of the North Downs, and form as windy an outlook as it is possible to conceive; but in those days travellers did not travel for the sake of the views on the way.

It is de rigueur among the circles that frequent the site of the Beeches to call it “Knock’olt.” To pronounce the name in any other way would seem to them the sheerest affectation. The spot is, in fact, dedicated by common consent to the beanfeaster on week-days and to the sporting publican on Sundays, who drives his best barmaid out in a flashy trap, and has lunch at the neighbouring inn, known to the vulgar herd as the “Crahn.” Whether it be due to the strong liquors of the “Crown” or to the bracing quality of the breezes I do not know, but the sheer abandonment of the merry-making at the Beeches can excel even that of the ’Eath on a Bank Holiday. “The ’Eath?” you ask. Why, yes; there is only one possible ’Eath in this connection—that of ’Ampstead.

From Knockholt Beeches the eye ranges to the Crystal Palace, the enormity of it a little excused by distance; and the Tower Bridge and the dome of St. Paul’s are easily to be identified. But those familiar objects soon pall, and the yearnful music of the concertina and the mazy dance commonly occupy the all-too-swiftly fading afternoon. ’Arry and ’Arriet exchange hats in the spirit of fellowship that has come down to them from the remote ages when semi-savage ancestors swapped headgear at their feasts to typify equality one with the other; although I suspect that if you told ’Arry and his “donah” that they do what they do because their ancient ancestors were accustomed to do it, they would promptly tell you to “shut it, guv’nor.” And they would properly be resentful, for every one prefers to think “I am I,” self-actuated, automobilous, self-contained, and patterned on no model.

And at last, arms round waists, ’Arriet crowned with a bowler, and ’Arry’s cheeks swept by the “ostridge” feathers of her hat, they go back in the solemn twilight to the waggonettes, singing the latest songs of the Halls.

But to resume the old road, interrupted too long by this interlude.

A stark, forbidding plateau of swede and mangold-wurtzel fields follows from the hamlet of Knockholt Pound, through which the road runs, unfenced, like a footpath. Then it plunges, with little warning, down the southern face of the hills and goes hazardously corkscrewing to the levels, far below. Down there, on the right hand, through the hedges, is Chevening, and you look down, like the rooks and crows, upon the roofs of church and mansion, situated, as Mr. Thomas Hardy would say, in his sesquipedalian fashion, “as in an isometric drawing.”

This, indeed, is the well-known “Madamscourt” Hill, so styled from time immemorial, although the name derives from the estate of Morant’s Court, at the foot. There is, at any rate, no lady in this case, and the direction, cherchez la femme, is entirely out of order.

The cyclist passes in a flash a large white house on the left hand, half-way down, and is too engrossed upon the problem of whether he will succeed in reaching the bottom safely to notice it. The house, now a villa, was in the old days of the road a very fine inn, called the “Star,” and from it the hill is still known to many of the country-folk as “Star Hill.” The exceeding steepness of the hill gave the “Star” the excellent custom it enjoyed until the way was diverted, and thus abolished the jolly days of the old road.

The coaches wagged so slowly to the summit that the passengers commonly walked quicker to the hill-top, and were already enjoying the very choice fare provided when the weary team pulled up at the door. The horses had, of course, to be rested, and as no one in those hospitable days could think of not offering coachman and guard some liquid token of their esteem, it was often a considerable time before the journey was resumed.

Just below the old inn the “Pilgrim’s Way” from Winchester to Canterbury crossed the road, making for Otford, along the sunny southern slopes of the downs.

At last, gaining the level, the old coach-road joins the modern route at the “Rose and Crown,” Dunton Green.

XIV

The present road to Sevenoaks from Pratt’s Bottom is closely neighboured by the South Eastern Railway, running in a deep chalk cutting and then disappearing in the grim mouth of Polhill Tunnel, one and-a-half mile long. The mephitic breath of the tunnel, bellying sulphureously out and flying in noisome wisps over the road, would be a good converting agent for those who, believing in eternal punishment and the Pit, have not yet ordered their lives accordingly; and you who look down there think it rather surprising that railways with dreadful tunnels have not yet been pressed into missionary service by those who will not renounce the traditional Hell of sulphur and fire. Believers, convey your awful examples hither. Bring them to a belief in an Eternity of that, only hotter, and you shall have them instantaneously on their knees, earnestly making resolutions to turn from their wickedness, and live.

A station, now called “Knockholt,” is planted here. It was formerly styled “Halstead,” from the village of that name, half a mile away; but, to avoid any possibility of confusion with another Halstead, in Essex, it was given this name, although Knockholt is nearly three miles distant.

The felled trees, wooden shanties, and sawmills here beside the road, at May’s Farm, give the place rather the air of some scene of backwoods activity in America.

From here the road gradually rises to the crest of Polhill, on the commanding range of the North Downs. The “Polhill Arms,” standing on the left hand, marks the beginning of the long descent into the Weald, very thoroughly masked and the magnificent view down to Sevenoaks hidden by a dense screen of beeches and firs. Something else is masked by those trees: a great modern fort, with emplacements for heavy guns, built up here for the defence of London, as part of a scheme comprising some sixteen forts forming an irregular circle around the metropolis at a radius of about twenty miles, and designed to check a sudden descent of any possible enemy upon the capital.

London has been held by military experts to be peculiarly open to such a danger; hence the forts of Polhill, Farningham, Dartford, Merstham, Box Hill, Pewley Hill, Esher, and others. But Englishmen, official or otherwise, are so used to considering the likelihood of invasion remote that, although many of the sites for forts have been purchased, it has been found impracticable to obtain sufficient money from Parliament to complete the ring and to thoroughly fortify these approaches. Parliament looks with suspicion upon Service proposals, and since the scandals of the great Boer War those suspicions have been very generally shared by the nation at large, which looks upon the methods of the War Office as those of a war office in comic opera.

It is a tawny-coloured roadway that swoops down from the summit of Polhill, between the sandy banks of a wooded cutting, to Dunton Green. Half-way down, the trees and the cutting give place to open country, and the hill itself goes by another name: that of Sepham Hill.

Down by Dunton Green, looking backwards, the hills, those noble North Downs, are seen to go terracing away beautifully east and west, their great, green, rounded shoulders dimpled with folds and gullies, shaggy here and there with belts of trees, or scarred outrageously with great gashes of chalk-pits, where the lime-burners every day demolish yet another fragment of picturesque scenery and roast it in limekilns, to the end that it may go towards the making of mortar and mean streets. There goes Old England, in mortar, to feed the spreading tentacles of the towns.

Just such a chalk-pit is that huge scar, beside the hill we have just descended, where who shall say how many tons are excavated weekly? What would Ruskin have said of it? Something superlative, without doubt. I think I hear him: “accursed,” “damnable,” he says, and Dr. Samuel Johnson, in the spirit-world, discussing the question with him, decides magisterially, after his wont: “The point is, sir, whether you are to use the materials Nature has given us for the improvement of man’s condition in the world, or to neglect them in order to preserve the savage wastes of a desolate country-side, to gratify the diseased fancies of people who call themselves artists. Sir, let us take a walk down the Elysian equivalent of Fleet Street!”

Dunton Green, formerly Donington, is a rather Cockneyfied hamlet that is at present halting between expansion and a few regretful reminiscences of a past rural state. It is very populous, and the children live and have their playground in the open road.

At Longford, to which we come after Dunton Green, the river Darenth is crossed, at an early stage of its career, by a bridge that long ago superseded the ford. It is still a narrow bridge, with a roadway only twenty feet wide, but it has been already once widened and once renewed, as two tablets, built into the wall on either side, declare:

This Bridge was renewed by order of the Commissioners of Sevenoakes Turnpike.

William Covell, Mason.

And

This Bridge was Widen’d in March a.d. 1813 by order of the Seven Oaks Turnpike Road.

J. Smith, Archt.

The Darenth rises at Westerham, only five miles away; but there is already a sufficient head of water in the infant stream to serve the purpose of a large flour-mill standing here.

Beyond it, a dusty stretch leads into Riverhead, past a strange little outlying group of houses lying back from the road and fronted with the rows of lime-trees that give it the name of Linden Square. Local gossip declares the place to have once been a coaching inn, but exact information is utterly unprocurable.

XV

That the village of Riverhead belongs very largely to Lord Amherst is obvious enough, in the highly ornate terra-cotta tablets on the houses, bearing a gigantic A crowned with an earl’s coronet and ensigned with a shield charged with three spears. Also the “Amherst Arms,” with its sign exhibiting two Red Indians and the motto, “Constantia et Virtute,” proclaims the lordship.

Riverhead is a pretty little village, with a puzzling number of branching roads, situated at the foot of the long steep rises to Sevenoaks. Its name comes from the source of the Darenth being near at hand. The church that looks so picturesque in the illustration is, in fact, a piece of very bad early nineteenth-century Gothic, designed and built in 1831 by Decimus Burton, whose sympathies were entirely with the classic styles, as will be acknowledged when it is said that he it was who designed the Arch and screen at Hyde Park Corner and the lodges at the various gates of Hyde Park.

The corner of Riverhead selected for illustration here includes old and new. The gabled houses on the left are recent; the weathered wall on the right, with the curious little two-spouted fountain, is old; and very old and weather-worn is the almost entirely illegible notice-board declaring that something will be done to somebody doing something or other, followed by “£5.” It is very vague and terrifying.

“Montreal,” a beautiful park on the right hand of the ascent to Sevenoaks, is an historic place, the seat of Lord Amherst (Earl Amherst and Baron Holmesdale), descendant of that great soldier of the eighteenth century, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief.

The estate of Montreal came to this family in the seventeenth century, when a Jeffrey Amherst of that period, a barrister, acquired it. The place, then called “Brooks,” had been a seat of the ancient Colepepper family. The famous soldier was born here, and it is not a little curious to observe that his equally great contemporary, Wolfe, whose most renowned exploits were performed in the same series of campaigns in Canada, was born close at hand, at Westerham.

Amherst was born in 1717, and commenced his career as page to the first Duke of Dorset at Knole, afterwards learning the profession of arms in Germany, then, as now, the military school par excellence. How he fought in the victory of Dettingen or in the defeat of Fontenoy does not concern us here. His chance came when Pitt, alarmed at the policy of the French in Canada, gave him high command in those territories; and he justified the selection.

He was no kid-glove warrior. Sentiment was no portion of his equipment in the field, and if there were any in his composition he reserved it until his campaigns were fought to a finish.

To some of his doings or proposals the term “methods of barbarism,” shamefully applied by Little Englanders to the rosewater conduct of our modern campaigns in South Africa, might well have been attached. In warfare with the Indians he was so enraged with the atrocities committed by them upon captured officers that he contemplated employing bloodhounds and spreading smallpox among the redskins. That last horror was, fortunately, sternly vetoed, not only for the sake of humanity, but from the very reasonable fear that the scourge, once let loose, might destroy not merely the “noble red man,” but the white man as well.

Probably no one fully informed ever applied to Amherst the term of “dashing.” His methods as a general were calculating and deliberate; he was, indeed, the very antithesis of the meteoric, impulsive Wolfe. Those qualities served his country quite as well, and himself better; for although he was not idolised as a hero, he succeeded, on his return home, in obtaining the post of Commander-in-Chief.

To be regarded as a hero, it is generally considered necessary to be killed in the performance of the heroic deed, which does not seem altogether satisfactory, and is indeed rather discouraging.

However that may be, a grateful country, in the person of George the Third, eventually offered Amherst an earldom. He refused it, and accepted a barony instead. He held the post of Commander-in-Chief for many years, and only resigned, under pressure, in 1795 in favour of the Duke of York, the king’s son, whose military exploits are summed up in the once-popular lines:

a specimen of minstrelsy which concludes with the obvious statements that—

Amherst lived but two years after the close of his public career, dying in 1797, at the age of eighty-one.

He it was who, demolishing the old house at Riverhead, built the present exceedingly plain stone mansion, and re-named house and park “Montreal.” There was, in fact, something in the scenery around Sevenoaks that reminded him vividly of those great northern pine-clad territories of America, where he had warred with such distinction against the French and the redskins; and there is a spot on the road from Sevenoaks to Ightham, where the red-stemmed pines grow thick and a mysterious woodland hush enshrouds the place, so keenly reminiscent of the scene of his action at Crown Point in 1759, that he rechristened it by that name. The spot—in the woodlands of Seal Chart—may readily be found to-day, for it is marked by the Crown Point inn, whose sign, the “Sir Jeffrey Amherst,” exhibiting a picture of the warrior himself brooding over the scene of his exploit, depends picturesquely from a tree-trunk.

A tall obelisk, built rather precariously of rubble, stands on a rabbit-infested mound in the park of “Montreal,” in a vista opening from the house, and is itself surrounded by weird pine-trees. It bears long inscriptions reviewing those military operations. One side is dedicated to a “most able statesman” (by whom William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, is indicated), and another commemorates the meeting here of Amherst with his two younger brothers—John, Admiral of the Blue, and William, Lieutenant-General.

It was an era when England was fighting all the world, and had need of such commanders.

The long list of military successes is stupendous:

• Dedicated
• to that most able
• Statesman
• during whose Administration
• Cape Breton and Canada were conquered,
• and from whose Influence
• the British Arms derived
• a Degree of Lustre
• unparallell’d in past Ages.
• Fort Levi surrendered 25^th August 1760
• Isle au Noix abandoned 28^th August 1760
• Montreal surrendered
• and with it all Canada and
• Ten French Battalions lay’d
• down their Arms 8^th Sept. 1760
• S^t. John’s, Newfoundland
• retaken 18^th Sept. 1762.
• Louisbourg surrendered
• and Six French Battalions
• Prisoners of War, 26^th July 1758
• Port du Quesne taken possession of 24^th Nov. 1758
• Niagara surrendered 25^th July 1759
• Tonderoga2 taken possession of 26^th July 1759
• Crown Point taken possession of 4^th August 1759
• Quebec capitulated 18^th Sept. 1759.
• To commemorate
• the providential and happy meeting
• of three Brothers
• on this, their Paternal Ground
• on the 25^th January 1764
• after a six Years glorious War
• in which the three were successfully engaged
• in various Climes, Seasons and Services.

XVI

The long, long ascent to Sevenoaks, which crowns a ridge seven hundred feet above the sea-level, does not lack beauty, lined as it is for a considerable distance with hedgerow elms. But it puts on another kind of beauty at night, for as you come past the railway-station, and look down in the darkness upon the galaxy of red and green signal lights, it seems like a lavish Arabian Nights display of rubies and emeralds spread out there, in the black cutting.

The name of the railway-station, on the other hand, is vulgarity itself. It is known as “Tub’s Hill,” to distinguish it from the other Sevenoaks station known (from the public-house outside) as “Bat and Ball.”

Sevenoaks is greatly indebted to the South Eastern Railway for a matter quite outside railway accommodation. The town had long and vainly been seeking a good water-supply, and was still upon that quest when this branch of the South-Eastern was under construction in 1867. What the town wished to find, and could not, the contractors for the Riverhead Tunnel found, very much against their will. They struck a spring which for a time drowned them out and cost enormous sums to divert; but it gave to the town its present abundant supply.

There can be no place with more divergent roads than those at the entrance to Sevenoaks. They branch off singly, in pairs and triply, acutely and gradually, and all with a specious artfulness leading the unwary anywhere but into the town, and by choice into suburban roads that presently end in wastes of shingle, heaps of building materials, and uncompleted houses.

The old Sevenoaks of coaching days is mostly gone, or disguised out of recognition. There was then a “cage,” or lock-up, in the town, with a pond in front of it and a ducking-stool for nagging wives or scolding neighbours. There was also a toll-gate and a weigh-bridge, where heavy waggons paid according to their showing in tare and tret. Sevenoaks was, in short, fully equipped with the engines of civilisation as understood at that period.

The “Chequers” inn, which still projects a somewhat old-fashioned front beyond the general building line, is a kind of “Jack o’ Both Sides,” for it has another, and quite different, frontage on to the parallel street. It was in those days the starting and arrival point of a coach to and from London, supported by a select few who had business in the metropolis, and from that circumstance was called the “United Friends.” Peacock, the coachman, was said to bear a striking resemblance to Tony Weller, which is not remarkable when we consider that Dickens constructed that plethoric, red-cheeked person from the typical stage-coachman of his age. There were then, in fact, “Tony Wellers,” like “Samivel’s” father, on every road. The coach was jointly owned by Benjamin Worthy Horne, John Stephens, and John Newman.

The “Wheatsheaf” has long since been transformed into offices, and the “Crown,” that once owned a gallows-sign stretching across the road, has been given a modernised grey stucco front, and looks rather like a banking establishment. Among minor inns, the “Blackboy,” displaying the effigy of a little nigger, is of considerable age, and takes its name from the now extinct local Blackboy family who flourished greatly in Sevenoaks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more modern inns include the “Bricklayers’ Arms,” whose device—not granted by the College of Arms—is an ingenious arrangement of plumb-board and trowel.

But all Sevenoaks inns, past or present, yield in interest to the fine old mansion facing the high road near the church, and known as “The Old House.” All details of its history have been lost, and it is only known that it was once the “Three Cats”—probably “The Cats”—inn, celebrated by that late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century poet, Tom Durfey, who was kept by his patron, the sixth Earl of Dorset, at Knole as a mirth-maker and general bacchanalian laureate. You cannot imagine a poet with the Christian name of Tom being other than a bard of the barrel; and as for Tom Durfey, he was the most bacchic songster, and the dirtiest rhymester of all the dirty dogs of his age: which is why he is so reprobated by the good—and so read.

In his song in praise of the “Incomparable Strong Beer of Knoll,” he says:

The “Cats” of course derived its sign from the arms of the lords of the manor, the Sackvilles of Knole, whose “supporters” are two leopards argent spotted sable, easily to be mistaken by the rustics of a land where leopards are not among the native fauna, for cats. It must have been an aristocrat among inns, for it remains still one of the noblest houses in Sevenoaks, with handsome red brick frontage of the time of William the Third or Queen Anne, with beautiful gardens in the rear, and others, equally beautiful, in front, on the opposite side of the road. It must have ceased to be an inn shortly after Tom Durfey wrote, for it has been in occupation as a private residence of the Austen family since about the middle of the eighteenth century.

Opposite is the very beautiful, characteristically “Queen Anne”-style house, “The Chantry,” standing next the church and on the site of a demolished ecclesiastical building. It has lately been most exquisitely restored.

The church itself, a large building with a tall tower, is of a somewhat uninteresting Perpendicular design. The curious may notice in the churchyard a stone to “Milenda,” wife of one Joseph Kennard.

A monument in the north aisle to William Lambarde, who wrote the “Perambulation of Kent,” and died in 1601, was removed from Greenwich. Among the others, there are singularly modest tablets to the Amhersts. The most important is that to the charitable Lady Boswell, who died 1692, aged apparently thirty-seven, for the inscription says: “During xxxvii years she conversed amõg us mortals.” She left sums for “fifteen of the poorest Children to be instructed in y^e Catechism of ye Church of England,” and for the much more practical purpose of teaching them to “write and cast accompts” and to apprentice them to “handycraft trades or employments.” Her school is a prominent, and very grim, object on entering the town.

The most famous native of Sevenoaks is undoubtedly the mediæval Sir William Sevenoke, whose career was remarkably romantic. According to all received accounts, he was a foundling, discovered as a baby in the hollow of a tree in the immediate neighbourhood of the town by one Sir William Rumpstede, who named him “William” after himself, and “Sevenoke,” or “Sevenoaks,” after the town; brought him up, and apprenticed him to Hugh de Bois, citizen and ferrer (or ironmonger), of London.

Let us linger a moment to consider how popular in ancient times was this finding of neglected children in casual places by charitable knights. The frequency of it is a little suspicious. The most famous foundling incident (after that of Moses) is the finding, early in the fourteenth century, of one of the ancestors of the Stanleys. According to the legend, Sir Thomas de Latham was walking with his lady, who was childless, in his park, when they drew near to a wild and lonely spot where they found a baby boy, dressed in rich swaddling clothes, in an eagle’s nest. The knight acted astonishment; the good unsuspecting lady looked upon the baby as a present from heaven. It was adopted and educated in the name of Latham, eventually succeeding to his father’s and his adopted mother’s property. In the course of years this foundling’s daughter Isabel married Sir John Stanley, who adopted the Eagle and Child crest still borne by the Earls of Derby.

But to return to William Sevenoke. He became a grocer, and eventually, in 1418, Lord Mayor of London, became Member of Parliament, was knighted, and was granted for coat of arms seven acorns. To him Sevenoaks owes its endowed Grammar School and almshouses. Whether they were descendants of his whose name became corrupted into Sennocke is not quite clear, but it is quite certain that the unlovely name of Snooks derives from a further debasement of it.