When, in 1860, it became necessary for his adopted mother to leave Lime and seek a new home, they long sought the ideal home of their fancy, which they named, in advance, “Holmhurst.” All through that summer they inspected innumerable small estates in the south of England, but none were in the least like that ideal “Holmhurst,” and they were on the point of abandoning the quest for awhile, and going abroad, when a neighbour sent a Hastings paper with the humble advertisement, “At Ore, a house with thirty-six acres of land, to be let or sold.”
“What a horrible place this must be,” I said, “for they cannot find one word of description”; for the very ugliest places we had seen had often been described in the advertisements as “picturesque manorial residences,” “beautiful villas with hanging woods,” &c. But my mother rightly thought that the very simple description was perhaps in itself a reason why we should see it.... Long before we could arrive at Ore, we passed under a grey wall overhung by trees. “It looks almost as if there might be a Holmhurst inside that wall,” I said. Then we reached a gate between two clipped yew-trees, and a board announced, “This house is to be let or sold.” We drove in. It was a lovely day. An arched gateway was open towards the garden, showing a terrace, vases of scarlet geraniums, and a background of blue sea. My mother and I clasped each other’s hands and simultaneously exclaimed—“This is Holmhurst!”
We found that the name of the place was Little Ridge. There were six places called Ridge in the neighbourhood, and it was very desirable to change the name, to prevent confusion at the post-office and elsewhere. Could we call it anything but Holmhurst? Afterwards we discovered that Holmhurst meant an ilex wood, and our great tree is an ilex.
And here they made their home. Ten years later his adopted mother died here, and here he passed out of these shadows and unrealities, suddenly and painlessly, when another thirty-two years had gone, little more than two years after he had, in writing the concluding words of the story of his life, said:
When I look at the dates of births and deaths in our family in the Family Bible, I see that I have already exceeded the age which has usually been allotted to the Hares. Can it be that, while I still feel so young, the evening of life is closing in? Perhaps it may not be so; perhaps long years may still be before me. I hope so; but the lesson should be the same, for “man can do no better than live in eternity’s sunrise.”
It would be unpardonable to leave unmentioned the additions to the house he loved so well and the gardens and shrubberies he delighted in. Still stands the sundial on the lawn, that sundial which had been placed by his great-great-grandfather, Bishop Hare, on his house of the Vatche, at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, and was presented to him in 1859 by the then owners of the Vatche. Still one looks delightfully across these uplands down to the sea, where the craggy ruins of Hastings Castle cut across the horizon, and the streets of Hastings come crawling dimly up out of the vale; but the Hospice in the grounds, where he continually housed and entertained his pensioners, is empty, and the garden-paths have lost their trimness and become overgrown with grass since strangers have come and reduced the staff.
Even Queen Anne, whom he brought down from London and set up in the meadow, looks neglected.
Every Londoner is familiar with the white marble group of figures in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, representing Queen Anne (now, alas! deceased) presiding over four seated effigies, emblematic of England, France, Ireland, and the North American Colonies of her days; but few recollect that this group is not the original of the one sculptured by Bird in 1712. Bird’s work had for many years fallen into a disgraceful state of neglect. Her Majesty’s nose had long been chipped off and her forearms had disappeared, while the four seated figures, with scarce a complete set of limbs among them, more nearly resembled the victims of a railway accident than the highly respectable allegorical group they really were. The whole composition was therefore cleared away, and an entirely new and scrupulously exact replica was made by the afterwards notorious Richard Belt, and placed in its stead.
The battered and grimy original disappeared from public ken, and was wholly forgotten, when Mr. Hare in 1893 discovered its component parts lying in a heap in the City of London stoneyard, on the point of being broken up, and greatly coveted them for the embellishment of Holmhurst. He found that the poor relics were jointly owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the Lord Mayor, and eventually persuaded all those eminent personages to make him a present of the remains, which were removed by road to Holmhurst, “at great expense,” as he says, with the aid of twenty-eight horses, four trucks, four trollies, and sixteen men. He re-erected them in his grounds, at a still greater expense, on a circular stone pedestal, similar to the original, which he had quarried from the outcroppings of stone on this little estate.
XLVIII
Beyond Holmhurst comes the long-drawn parish of Ore, heralded by its modern church, rather overloaded with ornament. It replaces the old church of St. Helen, lying hidden away to the right, across a field and within a belt of trees.
Augustus Hare thought the ruins of the old church “rather picturesque”: an instance of how an everyday familiarity may blunt appreciation, for they are picturesque without any minimising qualification. To the active and enterprising it is no difficult matter to climb the tall locked gate of the enclosure that keeps out the swarming mischievous children that come destructively up out of Hastings, and easy to avoid the plentiful nails and savage barbed wire that would induce others to seek the keys at Ore Place.
It is a melancholy ruin of a fine church in the Perpendicular style, built over five hundred years ago, and left to moulder away because the neighbourhood lusted for the brand new building beside the road, yonder. The roof is entirely gone, and part of the walls, covered in places with ivy. Neglect is the note of the place. A curious relic is fixed on the wall in the tower in the shape of a “pitch-pipe,” an instrument used by parish clerks in the old days to give the key of tunes to congregations. The unusual name of “Lavender” is seen on one of the old tombstones.
Ore is a scattered parish: neither good town nor decent country. The road passes the Hastings cemetery and the isolated suburb of St. Helen’s Down, and comes to the enclosing wall and gates of Coghurst Park, where an elaborately sculptured coat of arms, surmounted by the crest of a hare and hound, looks down with contempt upon the poor specimens of houses that have sprung up opposite.
And then you come to Ore itself, that used to be, not so very long ago, a pleasant place—half village, half suburb. It is now a good deal more like a slum, and the incursion of the electric tramways has not improved it. The tram-lines are to be avoided by bearing to the right, down the long and steeply descending Harold Road, which, like too many of the modern developments of Hastings, is a road of mean and paltry houses, built cheaply and faced with stucco that seems to have been made of dirt, rather than of honest materials. There is a woeful “respectability” about these roads that desolates the stranger. He sees it clinging, ineffectual on insufficient means, to the bayed windows and to the doors, painted and grained to resemble good woods, that will insist upon warping. It resides in the long flights of steps up to those doors, and is on outpost duty at the little brick entrance-piers, too flimsy to hold up the not very great weight of the iron gates that scream dismally on their hinges.
The Old London Road, however, continues down through Halton, and, although it does not get rid of the tram-lines, comes, at the beginning of Hastings, to a very pleasant hollow where the old elms still make an avenue introductory to the town.
This is the most striking part of that valley between the east and west hills in which the Old Town of Hastings lies. It was in the coaching days a supremely beautiful entrance to the town, and travellers of that time never tired of praising it. In front of them, in the V-like cleft, sparkled the sea, with the trees surrounding the hoary red-capped roof of All Saints’ in the foreground, and on either side steep grassy slopes, as yet but thinly built upon. On the left-hand rose the Minnis Rock (“Minnis” is Cantise for a rough, stony common), a stony outcrop on the hillside that was the site of a hermitage until about 1436, when the “new church of All Saints’ of Hastynges” was built, and gave the death-blow to the hermits who had lived there upon the charity of passers-by. The Rock is there to this day, and the rough chambers in it, but they are choked with rubbish. The last occupants were very much post-Reformation anchorites. They were an old couple who left the local workhouse in 1783, and, in a secular way, subsisted upon alms which the original hermits received for religion’s sake.
The modern terrace of High Wickham crowns the Minnis heights at this day, and great masses of houses have encroached upon the natural beauty of the scene; but still there is a very special charm in it.
It is the old town you see there before you, for whose sake we have come these last three miles by the Old London Road: the only Hastings there was, until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The site selected for the town was sheltered, as the traveller viewing it from this point may see. It lay in the deep and not very broad ravine between the East and West Hills, and while the one protected it from the winds of one quarter, the other served the like office in the opposite direction. And through the centuries, the Castle crowning the West Hill kept watch and ward over it against other foes. There you see the few shattered walls of it, against the sky-line, and down in the hollow St. Clement’s, the mother-church of Hastings.
XL
Rising from amid the trees immediately before you, at the entrance to the town and the branching of High Street and All Saints’ Street, is All Saints’ Church, the other of the two old churches of the Old Town. It stands immediately at the foot of that great chalky down which drops sheer to the sea and is known as East Cliff; and its crowded churchyard, hemmed in with grimy houses, runs at a steep angle up the hillside. I am not greatly impressed with the interior of the church, but its tower is altogether admirable. It has that best thing in towers, sturdiness, and with its deeply splayed buttresses, strongly marked stringcourses, and general air of refined emphasis, is the embodiment of strength and beauty. I feel especially grateful to it, for it stands just where it should for pictorial composition, at the head of the old street, and it and the old “White Hart” inn form excellent foils to one another, as Church and Inn should do. They are as antithetic, in the sentiment of the scene, as light and shade are in the rendering of it.
Let those who are desirous of immortal fame see that an eccentric epitaph marks the spot where they lie. There is no surer passport to eternal recollection. Thus, apart from “Old Humphrey,” a local celebrity who lies here, the hundreds of the dear departed might be anonymous for all any one cares; excepting three only. Even the casual, unobservant stranger entering the church can scarce help seeing the epitaph on “John Archdeacon,” who died in 1820, aged nine; but if he did not see it, it is quite certain his attention would soon be drawn that way, for it is a cherished local curiosity:
The name of a modern public-house in the town, the “Kicking Donkey,” near St. Clement’s Church, would appear to have derived from this, although the pictorial sign represents the quite different scene of a seaside holiday-maker trying to keep his seat on the back of a restive jackass.
The second unusual epitaph is to a smuggler:
- This Stone
- Sacred to the memory of
- Joseph Swain, Fisherman
- was erected at the expence of
- the members of the friendly
- Society of Hastings
- in commiseration of his cruel and
- untimely death and as a record of
- the public indignation at the needless
- and sanguinary violence of
- which he was the unoffending Victim
- He was shot by Geo. England, one
- of the Sailors employ’d in the Coast-blockade
- service in open day on the
- 13th March 1821 and almost instantly
- expir’d, in the twenty ninth Year of
- his age leaving a Widow and five
- small children to lament his loss.
The third immortal is Edward Alldridge, “who was Maliciously shot, April 23rd, 1806. Aged 41 years.” It is curious that his son Edward was, according to the same stone, “accidentally shot, May 13th, 1810. Aged 15 years.”
There is little time in this age for brooding over historical celebrities or notorieties, but if Hastings dwelt much upon the past, it could find little pleasure in the recollection that it was the birthplace of Titus Oates, whose baptism is registered in 1619, in the books of All Saints’, of which his father was afterwards rector. Titus was himself curate here.
Much, indeed, might be written of the clergy of All Saints’, but not a large proportion of it to their credit. I do not know if we may fairly include him who was hanged at Tyburn in 1586 for the crime of forging his presentation to the living. He was not properly rector. As he had to be hanged in any case, it seems a pity they did not suspend him from the tower of All Saints’; it would have been much more picturesque. He was practically wasted at Tyburn, where executions were an everyday dish.
Then there was the Reverend Mr. Hinson, royalist, who, busily denouncing the Roundheads in his sermon of Sunday, July 9th, 1643, was told that the subjects of his abuse were in the town, and the stern Colonel Morley even then on the way to make him prisoner. He left his discourse at a loose end and bunked, hooked it, vamoosed, cut his stick, fled, or merely went—just as you please. Only, perhaps, to say he “went” hardly meets the case, for he departed with such celerity that he had not time even to shift his surplice. The Roundheads thereupon occupied the church, made it a dormitory, preached burlesque sermons from the pulpit, and generally behaved like blasphemous blackguards, finally making off with all the surplices they could find.
Mr. Hinson was arrested three days later and lodged in a filthy gaol, with a tinker to match, who was not only dirty but rude, and, declaring he was the elder of the two, and therefore privileged, took the one bench in the place, leaving the curate the cold, cold floor. He had three weeks’ imprisonment at Hastings, and how much beside would have been awarded him in London, whither he was removed, we do not know, for he escaped and joined his King at Oxford, and so is heard of no more.
A tablet in the church to a former rector with the humorous name of Webster Whistler, a connection of Sir Whistler Webster, of Battle Abbey, reminds one of a curious incident. He died at the great age of eighty-four in 1831. A distinguished pluralist, he held the rather distant benefice of Newtimber, on the Brighton Road, in addition to this in Hastings. A quarrel with the squire of Newtimber led to the living of that tiny place being put up to auction in 1817. The clergyman was interested enough to be in London when the sale took place, and to his disgust heard the auctioneer describe Newtimber as held by an infirm and hoary vicar with one foot in the grave, and that consequently the reversion would soon fall in. The Reverend Whistler was then but seventy, and as hale and hearty as a ploughman. He arose in wrath, and so convinced the room of his being good for another twenty years that the advowson found no purchaser.
The much-beneficed Whistler was no ill friend to the smugglers, who then formed a considerable part of the population of Hastings, and passively lent his church to them for a cellar. It was told of him that, hearing movements one night in his garden, and preparing to fire upon those he thought to be burglars, a voice reassured him with the whisper, “Hush, your reverence, it’s the brandy!” It was the smugglers’ thank-offering. The only flaw in this story is the circumstance that the clergyman would not have mistaken his smuggling friends for midnight marauders, for he was used to find such gifts brought to his door. Later, when this kind of friendly understanding became too notorious, the kegs were deposited in the crowded churchyard, and visitors at his table sometimes heard him tell his man to “go and see if there’s any brandy in old Swain”: “old Swain” being one of the numerous clan of that very common name at Hastings, and lying in a table-like tomb which made an excellent and unsuspected cellar.
When this picturesque cleric happened to find his cellar low, he was not averse from hinting at the fact in the texts of his sermons. Discourses upon the “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” and on the miracle of turning water into wine, with applications readily understood by his congregation, rarely failed in their object; for we must by no means suppose that a smuggler was necessarily a lawless and an impious, or even an ungrateful man: and a fervent piety was no bar to “free trading.”
The most striking thing in All Saints’ Church is a curious notice in the belfry, with words and letters running together like those of an ill-read proof: