GRAMMAR SCHOOL.
The schools and almshouses were rebuilt in 1727, and are generally thought by passing strangers to be a workhouse or a penitentiary. It will thus be gathered that they are not beautiful. If strict discipline may be read into the ancient seal of the school, then it was in old times governed on the principle of Winchester, “learn or be whopped,” for that device exhibits a gigantic, Jove-like master presiding over a number of scholars, evidently in fear of the immense birch he holds in his right hand. A resolute application of the weapon represented here would undoubtedly result in abolishing laziness in the scholar given a taste of it.
XVII
When you know Sevenoaks well, have learned its geographical situation, and have inquired into its surroundings, you will begin to perceive that it was once very humbly dependent upon the great historic residence of Knole, whose park it on one side fringes. Knole divides with the not far distant Penshurst the reputation of being the finest baronial pile in England. If their ancient lords could return to Penshurst and Knole they would still find there many of the buildings and appointments they knew; and if the less ancient Elizabethans and Jacobeans were permitted to revisit their homes they would see them very much as they were, and so come back without any sense of strangeness.
Knole, of course, takes its name from its hilly situation. There are dim and fragmentary records of a former house, away back in the reign of King John. At that time it belonged to a great historical personage, William Mareschal, Earl of Pembroke, to whom it came as part of his wife’s dowry. Eventually it fell to the family of de Say, who for more than a hundred years ruled the estate, when for an interval it passed into other hands, only to be repurchased by a Fiennes, who was on his mother’s side a de Say. This unfortunate Fiennes had the ill luck to live in the troubled time of Henry the Sixth, and was further unfortunate in attracting the favour of that ill-starred King, who heaped many distinctions upon him, all to his undoing. He was created Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Constable of Dover Castle, member of the King’s Council, Lord Chamberlain, and Lord Treasurer of England; and, in fact, closely resembled in real life Pooh Bah, the “Lord High Everything Else” of The Mikado.
The title of Lord Saye and Sele, which still exists as a barony, re-created in 1603, in the Fiennes family, has a fine sound of irrevocability about it—a kind of “do and dare,” “what I have said I have said” connotation—to which it has really no sort of right. Saye, as we have seen, was a family name, and Sele has in this connection nothing to do with sealing, signing, and delivering as act and deed. It comes from the village of Seal, on the other side of Knole Park.
The amazing prosperity and court favour shown to Lord Saye and Sele raised up many enemies for him, and the King was obliged, first to sequester him from the office of Lord Treasurer, and then to commit him to the Tower of London, merely to secure him from the violence of the discontented people, then seething in the rebellion of Jack Cade, in 1450. That insurrection brought an exciting moment to Sevenoaks, for Cade and his army, pursued by some twenty thousand of the King’s troops from their riotous place of assemblage on Blackheath, turned at bay upon them, and in the disastrous skirmish of Sole Fields, within sight of Knole, slew the King’s commander, Sir Humphrey Stafford. Cade, assuming the armour of the fallen knight, marched to London, where, according to Shakespeare, he struck the historic London Stone with his sword and proclaimed himself “lord of this city.” He did more than that, for he brought the unhappy Lord Saye and Sele forth from his hiding-hole in the Tower, and hacked his head off at the Standard in Cornhill, afterwards offering revolting barbarities to his body.
It was the son of this victim of popular revolt who, six years later, reduced to extremities in the troubles of the time, sold Knole to Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, for a sum representing £2,500 at the present day. The manor-house of that time was old and dilapidated, and Bourchier pulled it down and built the gatehouse and the principal front of the present group of buildings. Thirty years later he died and left Knole to the See; and, with all other archbishops, was ex officio, so to speak, collated to the Realms of the Blest. He was succeeded by Archbishop Morton, who reigned fourteen years; by Henry Dene (two years), by Warham for thirty years; and then by Cranmer, who in 1537, from motives of policy, surrendered it to the Crown.
Politic indeed, for the Archbishops of Canterbury at that time owned no fewer than sixteen palaces, and men were beginning to inquire by what right lords spiritual were so gorged with things temporal; just as in these times of ours the phenomenal wealth of great landowners is beginning to arouse an inconvenient criticism.
Knole came to the Sackvilles, whose collateral descendants still own it, from Queen Elizabeth, who in 1567 gave it to Thomas Sackville, a cousin on her mother’s side. He already owned Buckhurst, and she created him therefore Baron Buckhurst; which is, as every one will acknowledge, a fruity-flavoured title. “Baron Buckhurst:” how finely it trips off the tongue! The Queen gave as a reason for her gift the “keeping him near her court and councils, that he might repair thither on any emergency with more expedition than he could from his seat of Buckhurst in Sussex, the roads to which county were at times impassable.”
Lord Buckhurst was, in fact, a persona grata at court: a man of wit, a poet, a dramatist. Also a man of tact and management, for in his old age, in 1603, he was created Earl of Dorset by Gloriana’s successor, James the First.
And so the descent continued from first to seventh earl, who succeeded like chapters in a history, of which a new volume opened with the seventh earl being created a duke.
The fourth duke, George John Frederick Sackville, came to a tragic end in 1815, in his twenty-second year. He was an adventurous horseman, and on a visit to Lord Powerscourt, in Ireland, fell with his horse in the hunting-field at Killiney. The horse fell on him and crushed in his chest.
They brought his body home with every circumstance of mortuary pomp, as befitted a duke; he lay in state at many inns on the several stages of the Holyhead Road, from Ireland to London, and finally was laid to rest with his fathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in Sussex.
With the widow of his cousin and successor in the title, the fifth and last duke, another volume ended, in 1825.
The ownership of Knole devolved upon Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister of the unfortunate fourth duke. She married the fifth Earl De La Warr, and thus changed the name of the lords of Knole to that of Sackville-West. Her eldest son became in due course Lord De La Warr: to the younger sons she left Knole, and in their favour the barony of Sackville was created, in 1876.
XVIII
The long street of Sevenoaks acts, as it were, the office of screen to the leafy glades, the hills and dells of Knole Park, to which you come along an alley between the houses. It is an extremely large park, and in many places peculiarly beautiful. To set down in this place its acreage and its circumference of six miles would convey a very dim impression of its proportions, but if we say it is two-thirds the size of Richmond Park its extent will be more generally understood. The house itself—if it be no derogation to style Knole merely a house—stands quite half a mile within the park, on a height, and looks, with its ranges of gables, towers, roofs, and chimney-pots, like some mediæval town. Great herds of red and fallow deer browse amid the bracken, or shelter under the great beeches, and regard the many visitors with an amiable and fearless expression, except in the “fence months,” October and November, when they are quite ferocious, and bellow day and night like the bulls of Bashan.
Knole is a “show place.” You may roam where you please in the park, and on most days, within easily ascertainable hours, you can be shown over the vast place on payment of two shillings. You would not be permitted so much in the millionaires’ palaces of democratic America.
In this gigantic place Lord Sackville and his family occupy a small suite of rooms furnished in modern style, and, if you consider it closely, are practically the caretakers of a vast museum of antiquities maintained at their own expense. The place is so extensive, and the maintenance and repairs so costly, that it would require the revenue of one of the great landlords of London to keep it up, and, in addition, to live in fitting state, and the Sackville-Wests have not those resources.
Some day a paternal Government will come to the rescue of owners of historic houses of public interest. There is a widely prevalent idea that all governments are paternal to one class, and act in a dominie and minatory manner to the others. Conservatives, in this belief, play the beneficent father to the aristocracy and their fringe, and waggle weapons of punishment at the lower classes; while the Liberals (in the accepted idea) pat the middle classes and the working men on the head and give them something to go away and play with; and then, turning up their sleeves and selecting a fine birch-rod, bid dukes and earls to come here this instant moment and take their trousers down. It is not really precisely like that, but Sir William Harcourt did something of the kind with his Death Duties. At any rate, those are the respective aspirations of free and enlightened voters on either side.
A fatherly Conservative Government may, therefore, some day be expected to come handsomely to the rescue of the owners of historic mansions: owners with acres of reception-rooms, picture-galleries, and baronial halls; owners with long pedigrees but slim purses, who can scarcely afford even to keep their many windows cleaned, let alone maintain floors and roofs and keep the moth out of priceless ancient tapestries and silken hangings. Such a Government will allocate grants annually to those proprietors who habitually admit sightseers, and who make application for aid; and surely the principle would be just, for it certainly is scarcely fair to the proprietors of such places as Knole, if witness to their good nature, that they should expend their substance chiefly for the delight of the tourist and sightseer.
The next step would be a competitive measure introduced by the inevitable Liberal Government ordained by the well-known fickleness of the electorate, by which all historic mansions would be scheduled and administered as to their “show” parts by a Department responsible for the safe and careful keeping of artistic and historic treasures, endangered by the carelessness, the poverty, or even the uninstructed enthusiasm of their owners. It will all some day come to pass.
It is obvious that a great range of buildings like Knole, covering nearly four acres, dating back, in part, four hundred years, and filled to overcrowding with things precious intrinsically and by association, must involve the existence of a large staff; and it must be at least equally obvious that no lord of Knole could without great physical effort use even a respectable proportion of his three hundred and sixty-five rooms, traverse his fifty-two staircases, or look forth daily from more than ten per cent. of his five hundred and forty windows.
The house stands in what is probably the least attractive portion of the park, where the grass is tough and wiry, and like that of some untended prairie. The long, dark-grey, stone front, pierced with mullioned windows, is like that of an ancient Oxford college. You are personally struck with the resemblance, and, reading the impressions of bygone visitors, you find they have all been impressed in the same way. Every gable is surmounted by the leopard “sejant affronté” of the Sackville coat of arms, looking like so many tomcats obeying the instruction of some unseen drill-master: “Eyes right.”
The sternly walled-in character of Knole would discourage a burglar, just as it was intended to give pause to any hostile visitor; for the times when it was built were halting between the necessity for fortresses and the liking for magnificence and display. Thus Knole partakes of the character of both castle and palace.
XIX
No armed guard meets you now: only a porter. There are many kinds of porters. There is the fish-porter of Billingsgate; there are also the railway-porter and the warehouse-porter, to name none others; but it is unthinkable to class the porter of Knole with these. Porters, I should suppose, by the etymology of their name, to be bearers of burdens, carriers, humpers of grievous loads; but this dignified person is rather of the bank-porter variety, own brother to those of the Bank of England, and carries nothing but a highly respectable suit of clothes and an aristocratic air. I am quite sure he is more dignified than even Lord Sackville himself, and his portly presence, his black swallow-tailed coat, his silk hat, and his red waistcoat give a more soothing effect of the permanence of things than even the grey walls of Knole can manage to impart.
The porter’s lodge itself is a little museum of antiquities. There are the flint-lock muskets, the torch-holders, the brass-bound leather skullcaps, the cartridge-boxes, halberds, and other weapons of offence and defence belonging to the Earls and Dukes of Dorset from Jacobean to Mid-Georgian times: necessary equipments for the bodyguard of my lords and their visitors in those “good” old days. Here, too, you see the ancient horn-lanterns and the silver maces that were part of the display and the feeble illumination of those trains; and on the whole you are very glad that this is the twentieth century, and that these are outworn relics whose use has long since passed.
The gatehouse tower and porter’s lodge lead into the first, or Green Court, one of the seven quadrangles included within the group of buildings, and so called from its lawns and to distinguish it from the next, flagged with pavement, and styled the Stone Court. The first is graced by two classic bronze statues: the “Venus Anadyomene” and the “Gladiator Repellens.” The Stone Court leads by an insignificant loggia, supported on Jacobean pillars, to the Great Hall, built between the years 1603-8 by that magnificent person the first Earl of Dorset, who in all those years gave constant employment to two hundred men, in his alterations and repairs, and spent £20,000 on furnishing a bedroom for the expected visit of James the First to him.
The Great Hall was the banqueting-room. It has a boldly carved oak screen, in the characteristic Jacobean taste, but painted and grained, in some barbaric period, to resemble oak! Oak, you will observe, painted to resemble itself! To paint the lily and to gild refined gold were no greater works of supererogation. It is difficult to understand why it was done, here and elsewhere.
Ascending by the Painted Staircase, you come, in succession, to the Ball-room, the Reynolds Room, the Cartoon Gallery, the King’s Bedroom, the Chapel Room, Organ Room, Brown Gallery, Lady Betty Germaine’s rooms, old Billiard-room, Spangled Bedroom, Crimson Drawing-room, and so forth; seventeen in all, filled with the most wonderful old furniture, gigantic bedsteads, priceless china, paintings by the most revered masters, and portraits of a long dignified line of Sackvilles, Earls and Dukes of Dorset: great gentlemen and great patrons of the arts.
There they hang; rows of them. Grave-faced, dignified personages, whom not all the feminine frippery that characterised masculine costume in Elizabethan, Carolean, and Jacobean times can make look foolish. They look responsible persons, weighted with the mellow gravity that could not well be absent in times when the headsman’s axe was an institution. But they could not all be so wise as they look; something—and that not in small or grudging measure—must be due to courtly palettes. The thought is treason towards the Muse of History, of course; but surely we of this day, rich as we are in the little tin gods of politics, have not the monopoly of them, and may find an invertebrate Balfour or so amid these reverend seigneurs who look so inscrutably wise.
XX
The Dukes of Dorset were not merely men with titles; they were ducal Dukes, who lived up to their strawberry-leaves, and had a ducal way with them; were dukes first and men a very long way after. There are none such now. The mould is broken, the recipe forgotten, the pattern mislaid. How sad! That must be a degenerate age whose dukes are so uncharacteristic of their order; whose aldermen, who macerate on charcoal biscuits, are lean dyspeptics, talk art criticism, and shudder at the idea of a banquet; who are no longer those rotund, well-larded figures of convention that drank incredible quantities of fruity port and turtle-soup. That must be an effete generation whose new-rich no longer strew their way with dropped aitches; whose paupers, instead of skilly, dine royally off the best joints, and eat the finest bread, and when they ask for more—get it. In short, your typical pauper, millionaire, alderman, or duke no longer exists in real life. Even the novelists have learned their lesson and know better. Only on the stage shall you find those outmoded figures still strutting, and even there they are on their last legs. The stage is the last ditch of convention; but the time is at hand when some dramatist will give us a stout and haughty workhouse inmate, a humble and cringing duke, and an alderman virtuoso; and he will be quite as loudly hailed for an emancipator as ever was Robertson.
The Dukes of Dorset lived up to the fine alliteration of their title, and when that became impossible, they died out, like the oxyrhincus and the mastodon, who could not survive their environment. There is scarce a modern duke who, in the spectacular way, is worthy his title. Some are bored men and commonplace; most of them “splendidly null,” as Tennyson might say. I know an undersized duke with a limp and a falsetto voice, who takes photographs with a hand-camera and an apologetic manner; and another with the appearance and carriage of an unsuccessful commercial traveller. They would be ashamed to be ducal in their behaviour; and it is quite certain that their forbears would be ashamed of them.
To view Knole intimately is not given to the many. What are seventeen rooms out of three hundred and sixty-five, even though they be rooms of State! In fact it is rather in the more ordinary rooms, if any of those at Knole can so be styled, that you read its everyday story of old. After all, the Lords of Knole were not always entertaining kings and great nobles. Sometimes they had a “day off,” no less than the British workman of this era of ours, and then they were a thought more easy and less splendid, and occupied the second-best rooms, just as the ordinary Briton of to-day does, when he is not wanting to “show off.”
I am afraid we all want to impress the visitor with a magnificence that is not kept up when he is gone. The lower-class parlour, the drawing-room of the upper strata, are the superstitions not only of to-day, or of one or two classes. They probably go back to the beginning of things, when even Prehistoric Man had his ordinary cave to live in and his extraordinary, in which his wife “received.”
THE SOUTH FRONT, KNOLE.
Photo by C. Essenhigh Corke & Co.
There are thus whole suites of ancient rooms at Knole, now silent and deserted; and overhead, above the long galleries of stately magnificence, are interminable attics, called “wardrobes,” not because of being storerooms of clothes, old or new; but presumably the playrooms of the boys and lads of good family who, after the old English custom, were sent to Knole under wardship of the noble owners, to learn the usages of good society and the duties of chivalrous knights. In short, Knole, and every other castle or stately mansion, was, as it were, a training-college, a seminary of deportment and knightly devoirs; and in them one learned that good form whose inculcation is supposed to be the only value of Oxford and Cambridge at this day.
An odd surviving relic of Knole as a College of Good Manners is the curious contrivance known as the “Dumb Bell,” in that one of these wardrobes styled the “Dumb Bell Gallery.” It very closely resembles the windlass seen over old country wells, with a roller on which is wound a rope that descends through a hole cut in the floor, into the billiard-room. The arms projecting from the roller are iron, tipped with lead. This machine, which appears to date back to about the beginning of the seventeenth century, is thought to have been in the nature of a “home exerciser,” and to have been suggested by the bell-ropes and the exercise of bell-ringing in church towers. Here, however, the athlete could bring up his muscles without being a nuisance to every one within earshot. From this originated the name of those very different objects, used however for the same purpose of exercising—the modern “dumb-bells.”
XXI
And so, farewell Knole, mausoleum of a departed condition of things, treasure-house of art and tradition, puppet-show for the summer throng. One looks for it, topping the sky-line, expectantly, and leaves it with regret; unlike those two tramps seen and heard on this very road by the present writer. One of them listlessly noticed its towers and gables. “Wot’s thet?” he asked his mate: not that he was interested, but for the sake of something to say. How can you be interested in anything when you are footsore but your feet?
“Corsel,” replied the other, shortly; “carm on.” But he need not have bidden his fellow “come on,” for he had not given the “castle” another glance, and had never halted a moment.
The road descending steeply from Sevenoaks and having Knole Park on its left is the coaching highway, improved upon the ancient road. It is steep now, but how much steeper, how rugged and how narrow may be seen towards the bottom of the dip, where a little gate admits through the oaken palings of the park, and leads down a hollow lane whose banks are thickly set with ancient thorns and other trees. It is, or was before the embanked road was made, known locally by the names of “Shangden,” “Shand End,” or “Chene Dene,” in delightful incertitude.
This is the original road, preserved for the last seventy years or so in the bottom, where the modern highway was slightly deviated and constructed at a higher level. It is a surviving portion of that road Archbishop Islip, travelling horseback to Tonbridge in 1362, found so extremely bad. He struggled persistently, but at last fell from his horse and became “wet through all over.” In that pitiable condition he mounted again and rode on, without any change of clothes, and so was seized with paralysis.
An archway under the modern road, seen even more distinctly from a bye-road branching off to the right, was made for the especial purpose of maintaining unbroken the old line of an even more ancient cross-road—a pack-horse way—which crossed the old road from Sevenoaks to Tonbridge in the hollow, at right angles. The arch, however, has long been blocked up with timbering, and the pack-horse route is scarcely discernible in the park and the meadows.
Coming to the next rise, crowned by the “White Hart” inn, a line of seven trees is seen in the hedgerow on the right hand. These are the comparatively modern seven oaks planted at some uncertain time to commemorate those that are supposed to have originated the name of the neighbouring town. There is considerable difference in the size of the trees, and it is thus to be presumed that some of the seven were, from some cause or other, destroyed, and replaced later. The oldest may date back two centuries, the others sixty years or so later. No information exists as to who planted them, or when; even the site of the old original seven oaks that gave the town of Sevenoaks its name, away back in the dark ages, is unknown.
This is the summit of River Hill: a place which figures in an early sixteenth-century trust-fund that offers some entertaining history.
XXII
The road to Hastings, or to Rye, was the beneficiary of a bequest left in 1526 by James Wilford, a successor of those “pious benefactors” who from the earliest times, for the good of their souls less than for love of their kind, had been wont to repair highways, build bridges and causeways, and perform the like services, either by direct gifts or through the intermediary of the Church.
Of the practical piety of James Wilford I think there can be little doubt. In the times when he lived, Reformation was in the air. The religious houses were moribund, and had Henry the Eighth not disestablished and suppressed them, another would have done so. People rather scoffed at the idea of purchasing salvation by bequests, just as you in modern times insure against fire. Wilford, therefore, in that he does not appear to have left his money with any ulterior object of saving his soul, was really more pious than he knew, and perhaps saved it the more certainly. Let us trust he is enjoying the full credit of his good deed.
This public benefactor, a “rippier” of Rye, and said to have been an alderman of London, in his will of 1526 stated that he had actually made the road from River Hill to Northiam church, a length of some twenty-six miles; and for the perpetual repair of the ruinous parts he left an annuity of £7, charged upon the “Saracen’s Head,” Friday Street, Cheapside, belonging to the Merchant Taylors’ Company.
There had been sufficient reasons in his lifetime for him to make or amend this road; for by the term “rippier” a fish-carrier was meant, and James Wilford would appear to constantly have travelled it in his business of supplying London with fish, carried on horseback in panniers. That it should have been possible to convey fish this distance in the early part of the sixteenth century so expeditiously that it arrived in good condition is a somewhat striking testimony to the enterprise of an age commonly thought to have been ignorant of speedy communications.
The Merchant Taylors were by the terms of this will to pay the £7 annually to the executors and relatives bearing the name of Wilford, and after their death were to make payment to the vicar and churchwardens of Rye. In the event of those authorities neglecting their duty of applying the money for the benefit of the road, the annuity was to be paid to the vicar and churchwardens of Northiam; and, should they default, was then to devolve upon Newenden.
These cautious provisions seem to have been prophetic, for Rye did actually at some uncertain time lose the money, which was then received by Northiam until Midsummer, 1799, when, from some dereliction of duty, it passed, as directed, to Newenden. Disputes then appear to have arisen, for in 1804 the Merchant Taylors, not quite sure of their position, refused any longer to pay the amount until a legal decision was arrived at. The whole matter then remained in abeyance, as probably being too small a sum to worry about, until 1819. By that time the twenty years’ accumulation was worth having, and the inhabitants of Rye, Northiam, and Newenden accordingly joined forces and petitioned the Merchant Taylors, praying them to disburse the money to Rye, which was done, the vicar and churchwardens of that town in turn handing it over to the commissioners of the turnpike road from Flimwell to Rye. The sum of £140 was then paid over, from which the Land Tax authorities sweated £28, twenty years’ land-tax, at 28s. a year.
Flimwell is the point where the road to Rye branches from the Hastings Road. Nineteen and a half miles of road, therefore, appear by this decision to have been cut off from these small mercies.
The trifling sum now trickles into the revenue of the Kent County Council.
River Hill was once—in the days of inefficient brake-power—a terror to cyclists. A terror with reason, for it is three-quarters of a mile long, and not straight; and it has notoriously been the scene of many accidents at the two sharp turns in its course—one left and one right. A joint C.T.C. and N.C.U. danger-board at the beginning is supplemented by the notice that it is unrideable without a brake; but that is as may be. When the first chapter of cycling was being enacted, an early wheelman rode it, quite inadvertently, and lived to tell the tale, in picturesque fashion.
In the ancient days of cycling, when it had not long ceased to he “velocipeding” and was still in the intermediate stage of “bicycling,” this greatly daring person decided to ride from Greenwich to Burwash—some fifty miles—on what was then, with the most exquisite appropriateness, called a “bone-shaker.” It was so unusual and adventurous a thing to do that he wrote an account of it, and it duly appears in the records of that time. He thought how splendid a thing it would be to run hundreds of miles about the country at “a speed of from ten to fourteen miles an hour,” as in the advertisements, and so purchased what he thought to be a very camelopard of a machine, with 45-in. wheels.
In two days he had so mastered this fearsome contrivance that he decided to start, and did so, in the evening. He had not gone more than a mile or two when he met a butcher standing in the middle of the road, who continued to stand there until he was run into, when both were upset. The bicyclist was pitched over the handles and cut his knee, and the butcher abused him until the cyclist—I mean the bicyclist—showed fight, when he made off.
By the time this early wheelman had reached Bromley he was almost exhausted, and realised that he, at any rate, was not a fourteen-mile-an-hour rider. There was also, he discovered, an undue proportion of hills to be climbed—a discovery still being re-discovered daily by thousands of his descendants in straddling two wheels.
At Bromley he rested and refreshed; and again, at 9 p.m. at Sevenoaks, where his exertions had given him such an appetite that, when he had finished discussing the cold beef, he dared not look at the waiter. At River Hill—even in these days to be descended with extra caution—the rough road broke his primitive brake, and then at last—oh, happiness!—he found himself going fourteen miles an hour—and a bit over. There was no stopping, and the only thing to be done was to keep in the middle of the road, continually shouting, and in the hope nothing was in the way. Not even nowadays would a cyclist care to descend River Hill in this manner, in the dark, brakeless; but this adventurous one found the level, and, passing through Tunbridge Wells, at last reached his destination with only an incidental attack upon him by a foxhound on the way.
The view from River Hill is delightful, ranging across the wooded valley of the Medway to the heights where Tunbridge Wells is situated. So wooded is it that even Tonbridge itself, near at hand, is invisible, and the little village of Hildenborough—with scarcely more houses to it than there are letters in its name—might be non-existent.
A green, smiling woodland vale: just that. Not a profound, romantic depth, but a widespread, all-embracing view of meadows, corn-fields, parks, and hop-gardens: suave, well-ordered, appealing even more to the farmer than to the landscape-painter. Such is the Weald of Kent. Remote from the vulgar herd, who—
“Gawblimee!”
“What was that? Hark! there it is again.”
“’Strewth! ’Fyaint leff me blooming pipe beyine.”
“Leavyer bloomined beyine nex’ time, fatted.”
“Garn, fatted yer bloomin’ self.”
Hop-pickers, tramping and quarrelling their way down to the Kentish hop-gardens. And not always quarrelling, for their moods are even as those of an April day, wherein sunshine and clouds are for ever alternating. Listen to them as they go “piping down the valley wild, singing songs of pleasant glee”:
Here are your true sentimentalists.
At the foot of the hill lies Hildenborough, a tiny hamlet with a modern church, until comparatively recent years figuring merely as Hilden, or Hilden Green. The meaning of “Hilden” is obvious here. It is simply descriptive of the situation of the place: in the dene, or valley, beneath River Hill.
Borough, as commonly understood, is a ridiculous misnomer in this place, but it appears to have been brought into use as some way of indicating the existence here of a manor separate from, and independent of, Tonbridge, whose suburban houses now begin to mingle with it.
XXIII
The town of Tonbridge lies in the valley of the Medway, and the river itself runs through what is now the centre of the borough. Originally, however, the town was situated on the north bank only; and all that portion—now an intimate part of the place—over the bridge was in the open country.
There are but two bridges across the Medway nowadays, one large and one other very small; but in the early days of Tonbridge there were no fewer than five, for if you look at the maps you will perceive the Medway spreading out from Yalding into five tributaries, like the fingers of your hand, over the two miles’ breadth of flat country between River Hill and the foothills of Hildenborough and the heights of Somerhill and Quarry Hill, on the way to Tunbridge Wells.
According to some authorities, it was to these bridges that Tonbridge owed its name, but it seems probable that those channels were not bridged, but were merely fords, at the time when the town was baptized; and we must seek for the origin of the name rather in “Ton-burig”—the great Saxon “burh” or artificial mound on which the keep of Tonbridge Castle stood from the earliest times, guarding the passage of the river. Thus the place-name should properly have become “Tonbury,” but the bridges in the meanwhile got themselves built and, becoming the most striking feature of the place, crept illegitimately, at a very early period, into the name of it. In this way we find “Tonebridge” mentioned in 1088, and afterwards meet such variants as “Tunebricgia,” “Tunebregge,” “Tunebrugge,” and “Tonebryge.”
Mediæval Tonbridge was a walled town and moated, both as to town in general and castle in particular. It was, accordingly, in its own special way, as strongly defensible as though situated on some craggy height. You could not come into it save by water, and not then except by favour and permission of those who guarded the gates.
This stronghold was successively the lordship of the Fitz Gilberts, the great Earls of Clare, the Earls of Gloucester, and the Staffords and Dukes of Buckingham: all of whom were, in respect of it, chief butlers and stewards of his Grace the Right Reverend Father in God, the Archbishop of Canterbury for the time being. Of those prelates they held the place by the grand sergeantry of serving in those capacities at the enthronisation of their Graces.
Those great earls left nothing to chance. They not only walled and embattled their town, and moated it, but on the prehistoric mound by the river they reared a keep and around it built a high wall with towers, and moated that as well. This was their castle; and although the ditches they dug are dried up and filled in, and the walls are for the most part gone, there yet remains the great Gateway of their hold to tell us something of its strength. It is a most worshipful Gateway: strong and tall and massive, so that one cannot, in naming it, do else than give it a capital G. There is scarce a more impressive Gateway in England. It was built somewhere about 1290, in the reign of Edward the First, as the architecture of its great drum-towers shows, and was the last word in massive fortification of that time: the walls ten feet thick and fifty-three feet high, the gloomy entrance arch ribbed with immense ribs of stone, the outer face of the towers relieved only by narrow slits for arrows. The workmanship was superb, and although more than six hundred years have passed since these stones were wrought so well and jointed so neatly, they remain perfect to this day.
There are dungeons in those towers; there is a hidden watergate to the river; there is, in fact, every circumstance of romance. Little wonder that in their Castle the lords of Tonbridge felt sometimes defiant. There was, indeed, one lord, Roger de Clare, who, even before this grim Gateway was built, and before his position could be so secure, felt strong enough to defy his liege, to defy even the great Archbishop, Thomas à Becket himself, and to treat his messenger with contempt. His Grace’s pursuivant came with archiepiscopal parchments, formidably engrossed and alarmingly sealed, but what did that haughty castellan do? He made the unhappy man eat the documents, “especially,” we are told, “the seals.” Well for that miserable man that he came merely from the Archbishop, and not with deeds from the King, given under the Great Seal! He survived the light repast, but he could scarce have stomached such a banquet as that would have made.
It would be an unprofitable exercise to trace the ownership of the Castle through the centuries; “suffice it to say,” as the Early Victorian novelists were wont to remark—that it came in course of time to one John Hooker. In 1797, that worthy demolished most of it, and with the materials thus obtained built the curious house that now adjoins the Gateway, which he probably would have destroyed as well, but that the work would have been very costly.
Later, the house was a school, to which period, doubtless, the bust of the anonymous tutelary genius over the porch belongs. Quite recently, the Castle has been acquired by the town, and in the beautiful gardens there are flower-shows, and, I believe, even a band-stand and penny-in-the-slot machines.
From the Castle the pilgrim naturally seeks the church, expecting to see many and stately memorials of those ancient lords. But he will find no trace of them. At some remote period, even before the church was “thoroughly restored” in 1870, improving besoms came and swept them out of existence. We may well pause here and consider with what astonishing completeness things venerable have vanished from Tonbridge. There was once, for example, south of the town, the Augustinian Priory founded by the de Clares. Wolsey seized its revenues and squelched it, on behalf of his proposed “Cardinal College” at Oxford, and the last few remains were abolished in 1839, when the South Eastern Railway came. The goods-station stands on the site.
Tonbridge church is disappointing, and it is not improved by the large churchyard, filled with dense files of tombstones, around it. They are so many that it is impossible to verify the existence of the scandalous epitaph alleged to be there, on a drunkard:
Beered by public subscription by his hail and stout companions, who deeply lament his absence.
The presumption is that it is a sheer invention, like a very large proportion of such things printed in collections of epitaphs.
XXIV
The general impression of Tonbridge (which elects to spell its “ton” with an “o,” in contradistinction from the “u” of Tunbridge Wells) is one of meanness and squalor. There is the fine Grammar School at the entrance to it, and handsome estates surround the town, but that impression lasts, and seems rather to be intensified by the gradual widening of the High Street and the replacing of the picturesque old houses by flashy modern buildings. That highly sketchable old inn, the “Chequers,” remains, and so does the so-styled “Old Ivy House,” or “Old Toll House,” in East Street, a fine gabled timber-and-plaster building of the fifteenth century, where the Portreeve’s duties, or tolls on cattle and goods entering the town, were paid.
Very observant persons, too, may notice the queer weathervane over the old shop of a firm of furnishing ironmongers, representing an old-fashioned sportsman out with his dog, partridge-shooting. I will not swear it is partridge; it may be grouse, or perhaps even pigeon; but any one will declare it is not a pheasant.
The way out of Tonbridge lies over the railway bridge, past the station, where the banging of trucks and the screaming of whistles are continuous, and South-Eastern trains are, like practical jokers, for ever pretending to go off, just to flurry and excite nervous passengers, and then coming back and casually shunting up and down the sidings when they ought to be miles distant on their journeys; so while away the hours.
Contemplative persons will notice with delight as they pass that the lamp over the station door says “Railway-station.” It is a lesson in the obvious, information for the already fully informed, as little needed as a label on the parish church.
At a very acute angle right and left the roads respectively to Pembury and Tunbridge Wells leave Tonbridge and proceed immediately to climb steep hills out of the Vale of Medway. On the right goes the road to “the Wells,” up Quarry Hill, and to the left, up Somerhill, ascends the Hastings Road. At the summit of this very considerable eminence, where a road on the right-hand leads to Tunbridge Wells, once stood the toll-house, known (incorrectly) as Wood’s Gate. Its real name was Woodgate, the spot where that early traveller, Mr. Samuel Jeake, lost himself so effectually on that January night of long ago.
Tunbridge Wells is not on the direct road to Hastings, but it gave so distinctive a feature to the first half of the road, and lies so near at hand, that it will simply not be disregarded.
XXV
The father of Tunbridge Wells was Dudley, Lord North, a dissolute young nobleman, who in 1605 “fell into a consumption,” and was advised by his doctors to try the country air and that remedy at the present moment so much talked of but little practised, unless empty pockets and the lack of credit compel—the “simple life.”
Suffering from “the pleasures of town,” as to whose nature we need not inquire too closely lest we be shocked, my lord resorted to Eridge, on a visit to Lord Abergavenny. But the bracing air did him little good, and he was returning, despondent, to London in his carriage across the then lonely woods and heaths, when he noticed a pool of water by the way, covered with a slimy mineral scum. The idea occurred to him that here was his remedy. He drank of the water, felt better, and returned as soon as possible, to drink again and be well. He clearly did not deserve his good fortune, for he had no sooner recovered his tone than he “again gave himself up to all the gallantries of the age.” But medicinal waters—fortunately—make no discrimination between the deserving and others, and so, by carefully alternating his debaucheries with spells of fresh air and “taking the waters,” Lord North lived to the age of eighty-five, and died in 1666, an example to his fellows of how much you can dare and do if only you do and dare with discretion.
He published a work to show the advantages of the place to his brother libertines, and in this curious book, entitled “A Forest Promiscuous of Several Seasons’ Production,” he in this manner claims their discovery: “The use of Tunbridge and Epsom waters for health and cure I first made known to London and the King’s people. The Spaw,” that is, the Spa in Belgium, “is a chargeable and inconvenient journey to sick bodies, besides the money it carries out of the kingdom and inconvenience to religion. Much more I could say, but I rather hint than handle—rather open the door to a large prospect than give it.”
Already, in 1630, twenty-four years after his discovery, he had seen the place stamped with the approval of royalty, when Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles the First, stayed six weeks here under canvas. It was then quite uncertain what name would find favour among all those proposed for it. “Queen’s Wells” was suggested, “Frant Wells,” “Speldhurst Wells”; but the circumstances of travel finally resolved the choice. Visitors from London not only approached the health-giving springs by way of Tonbridge, but were originally, in the absolute lack of accommodation, obliged to lodge in that town, nearly six miles distant. Thus the springs, by dint of association, became “Tunbridge Wells,” the spot being actually in the three separate parishes of Speldhurst, Frant, and Tonbridge.
That famous promenade afterwards known as the Pantiles was first made in 1638, when the sloping side of a meadow was levelled and embanked to afford a recreative walk for those who took the waters. Two buildings only stood on the spot, the Ladies’ and the Gentlemen’s Coffee-houses. Things remained very much the same through the long years of the Commonwealth. The “wells” were not deserted, for there were ailing bodies even among the elect; but the coffee-houses were not so gay, and the religious cast that came over the scene was reflected in the names then first given to the encircling hills. The Puritans named them after some fancied resemblance to Jerusalem, and thus Mount Ephraim and Mount Sion were christened, and the neighbouring Calverley is in like manner supposed to derive from “Calvary.”
With the Restoration “the happy springs of Tonbridge” began to grow merry again, and the card-playing, the dicing, the dancing that were all ended under Puritan rule grew again furious. There was still no town, and the men and women of fashion who did not choose to lodge at Tonbridge had to find rustic accommodation in the cottages of Speldhurst. Presently wooden huts on wheels appeared on the common, and were moved from place to place, as the fancy of the fashionables, playing at rustics, dictated.
To add to the Arcadian delights of that most primitive and pleasant period in the existence of Tunbridge Wells, a daily fair went forward at the spring-head. Rosy-cheeked farmers’ daughters brought chickens, cherries, and cream and sold them with great profit to town gallants, much too taken with the unspoiled graces of those rustic beauties to be able to drive bargains; and soon a bazaar became established under the trees, where milliners designed “rustic” dresses at town prices for ruralising London fair ladies. You might lose or win a fortune at basset under those innocent trees, and wind up the summer evening with open-air dances on the green. It was the “open-air life,” if not the simple one, that then prevailed, and for at least a century that was the especial note of Tunbridge Wells. Evelyn describes it as “a very sweet place, private and refreshing,” but that privacy may be questioned, for when houses were so few it was impossible to be other than public, and at a later period, when the town came into existence around the spring, it was especially ordained by the autocratic Nash that “every visitor should live in public.”