Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 15

The political events which brought the ringers joy and shillings seem to have been the peace of Ryswick and the return of Charles I, then Prince of Wales, from his journey to Spain in search of a princess. Weybridge would have always followed royal doings with interest, for Weybridge history, bound up with its oldest and greatest mansion, goes back to the kings almost of the middle ages. On the ground, or near it, which now belongs to the Oatlands Park Hotel, Henry VIII built one of his finest palaces: Elizabeth followed her father and hunted deer in the park; James I added to the palace a silkworm room for Anne of Denmark, planted mulberry trees to feed the silkworms, and bred pheasants to please himself; Charles I killed his stags and encroached on private ground to kill more; his youngest son, Prince Henry of Oatlands, was born in the palace. But Charles was the last English king to hunt at Oatlands. After the Civil wars the land was disparked, and the palace fell into ruins.

To-day hardly a vestige remains. Old drawings show it to have been a large, straggling building with one great court and a number of smaller yards and quadrangles, turreted and gabled and quaint with tall and delicate chimneys. The oddest neighbour for Weybridge of to-day! It is not always difficult to re-people an old house, even if it has been greatly altered, with the ghosts of great men who have walked its pa.s.sages and worked in its rooms. But among the newness and smallness of modern building plots there is nothing so hard as to conjure the ghost of a great palace, vibrating with the energy and the obsequiousness, the simplicities and the intrigues of a hunting King and his Court.

Georgian days brought another being as a visitor. Oatlands came to the seventh Earl of Lincoln in 1716, and he built himself a house on the higher ground overlooking a fine stretch of water and many miles of Thameside country. From his son, who had inherited the dukedom of Newcastle, this house was bought by the Duke of York in 1794, but was burnt down the same year, and the royal Duke rebuilt it. He and his d.u.c.h.ess lived there until 1820, when she died. It must have been a curious household. George III brought Queen Charlotte there, and the Court with her; Georgian wits and beauties gathered in the duke's dining-rooms and played cards in his grottoes. Charles Greville was often at Oatlands, and Sheridan and Beau Brummell and Horace Walpole; Mrs. Gwyn came there, and Mrs. Bunbury, Oliver Goldsmith's "Jessamy bride" and "Little Comedy." Both were buried in Weybridge old church.

Samuel Rogers, in his _Table-talk_, gives a quaint picture of the household:--

"I have several times stayed at Oatlands with the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of York--both of them most amiable and agreeable persons. We were generally a company of about fifteen; and our being invited to remain there 'another day' sometimes depended on the ability of our royal host and hostess to raise sufficient money for our entertainment. We used to have all sorts of ridiculous 'fun' as we roamed about the grounds. The d.u.c.h.ess kept (besides a number of dogs, for which there was a regular burial-place) a collection of monkeys, each of which had its own pole with a house at top. One of the visitors (whose name I forget) would single out a particular monkey, and play to it on the fiddle with such fury and perseverance that the poor animal, half distracted, would at last take refuge in the arms of Lord Alvanley.--Monk Lewis was a great favourite at Oatlands. One day after dinner, as the d.u.c.h.ess was leaving the room, she whispered something into Lewis's ear. He was much affected, his eyes filling with tears. We asked what was the matter. 'Oh,' replied Lewis, 'the d.u.c.h.ess spoke so _very_ kindly to me!'--'My dear fellow,' said Colonel Armstrong, 'pray don't cry; I daresay she didn't mean it.'"

The Duke of York died in 1827, and thirty years later Oatlands became a hotel. The building was greatly altered, but the grounds still keep some untouched memorials of the past. One is an extraordinary grotto, built by the Duke of Newcastle, and used by the Duke of York and his friends, according to local tradition, as a card-room, plentifully supplied with wine bottles. It is lined with a profusion of crystal spar and sea sh.e.l.ls; it contains a deep bath, bashfully presided over by a statue of Venus, and the steps leading up to the door are paved with horses' teeth picked up on the battlefield of Waterloo. How the Duke of Newcastle accomplished this feat it is difficult to imagine, for he died in 1794.

Perhaps they belonged to other horses, or perhaps the gallant Duke of York made the addition. He was Commander-in-chief, and the grisly relics may have been sent him as a present.

Another relic of the dead is the cemetery in which the d.u.c.h.ess of York used to bury her cats and dogs and monkeys. There may be, perhaps, thirty or forty little tombstones, each with a name.

Oatlands Park preserves a not very trustworthy legend. In the grounds stand a number of magnificent cedars, and one of them bears a notice by which you are informed that it was one of the first cedars of Lebanon planted in England and was placed where it stands by Prince Henry of Otelands. Neither statement quite fits the facts. If Prince Henry of Oatlands planted the cedar, he must have done so either before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (in which case he would have been hardly three years old, for he was born in 1639), or else in the summer of 1660, the year of the Restoration, and the year in which he died. As a matter of fact, cedars were hardly known at the time, for John Evelyn in his _Sylva_, published in 1664, only mentions them as unsatisfactory seedlings, difficult to grow; and the earliest cedar planted in England is probably the Enfield cedar, which may have been set in the ground by Dr. Uvedale, master of the Grammar-School, about that date. There are, in any case, much finer cedars than the Oatlands Park trees in adjoining private gardens. Probably all of them were planted by the Earl of Lincoln or the Duke of Newcastle early in the eighteenth century.

Another of Weybridge's links with royalty is not quite so reputable.

Portmore Park is the name for a large slice of the town which lies near the river, thickly built over with villas and cut up into new roads.

Once there stood in it Ham House, which with its park was given by James II to his mistress Catherine Sedley, notorious at least as much for her wit as her features. She herself, even with the brilliant eyes which were pretty nearly all she had of good looks, could not understand the king's infatuation. "It cannot be my beauty," she said; "for he must see that I have none; and it cannot be my wit; for he has not enough to know that I have any." Whatever the attraction may have been, he made her Countess of Dorchester and gave her Ham House, and she very prudently married David Colyear, first Lord Portmore. The gates of her park survive her; the house has disappeared.

One great estate still remains, and on its hill the oldest settlement of the neighbourhood. The generosity of the Egerton family throws open to the public, in the woods of St. George's Hill, some hundreds of acres of pine forest and heather. On the summit of the hill stands a large prehistoric camp, where neolithic Wey-siders in Wey beaver-fur and buckskin entrenched their wives and their cattle. There are fifteen or sixteen of these ancient British camps in Surrey or just over the border; this is the largest, and the height and strength of its earthworks are admirable. It is more than three-quarters of a mile in circ.u.mference, and since it is obviously a camp, has naturally been set down as Caesar's. But that is the fate of anything old which looks like a fortification--part of the traditional method of a.s.signing otherwise inexplicable phenomena to their proper agents. Camps are all Caesar's, Cromwell made all the ruins, and all geological wonders belong to the devil.

St. George's Hill, or rather the low-lying ground on the Cobham side of it, was once the scene of a curious agricultural experiment. In the late days of the Parliamentary wars the Levellers sent some thirty men, under leaders named Everard and Winstanley, to seize part of the common land and plant roots and beans. Fairfax sent two troops of horse after them, and the captured Everard made him a speech, in which he claimed that he had had a vision instructing him to dig and plough the earth for the benefit of the poor, and that his mission was to help his oppressed fellow-Israelites back to their rights over all landed and other property. The Digger-Socialist did not give Fairfax much more trouble, for the irate commoners, refusing to be delivered from bondage, drove the Levellers from their common and pulled up the roots and beans.

The Levellers have their poet, and he made them a song with a fine lilt.

Here are the first three stanzas:

You n.o.ble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now, You n.o.ble Diggers all, stand up now, The wast land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name Your digging does disdaine, and persons all defame.

Stand up now, stand up now.

Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now, Your houses they pull down, stand up now.

Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town, But the gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown.

Stand up now, Diggers all.

With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now, stand up now, With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now, Your freedom to withhold, seeing Cavaliers are bold To kill you if they could, and rights from you to hold.

Stand up now, Diggers all.

Although not one of the highest of Surrey hills, St. George's Hill provides a series of delightful glimpses of distant scenery through the trees. Windsor Castle stands up like a battleship on the horizon to the north-west, twelve miles away: west lie the rolling open s.p.a.ces of Chobham Common and Bagshot Heath; south-west Guildford and G.o.dalming stand over the shining valley of the Wey; Ranmer Church spire marks Dorking to the south: Leatherhead, Epsom, and the Crystal Palace almost complete the ring. I have never seen St. Paul's. But the abiding charm of St. George's Hill is not the view, which is surpa.s.sed by a dozen others. It is the deep quiet of the place; the sound of the wind in the trees, even on windless days, like the sound of the sea in a sh.e.l.l; the scented pine-needle carpet, crinkling in the sun; the bracken and bluebells of May, and the crimsons and purples of June's profuse rhododendrons.

CHAPTER XVIII

NORTH TO RUNEMEDE

Virginia Water.--Ruined Temples.--Grebes and Pheasants.--Bishop's Gate.--Sh.e.l.ley's "Alastor."--"Perdita" at Englefield Green.--Mrs.

Oliphant's Neighbours.--Runemede rolled.--Egham's Almshouses.--Sir John Denham.--Frightful Monuments.--King Charles and the grateful stag.--The quiet of Thorpe.--The Crouch Oak.--Love Philtres.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Ruins at Virginia Water._]

There is no better way of roaming through north-west Surrey than to take the train to Virginia Water station, which is as near as you can get to the county boundary by the railway, and then to set out almost along the boundary northwards till the Thames turns the road south again at Runemede. Virginia Water itself lies more than a mile from the station, and is not at its best on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays. On quieter week days there is no lovelier stretch of woodland lake-water. It is, of course, not a natural sheet, but its designer had skill enough to know what would not look unnatural. He was Thomas Sandby, Royal Academician and Deputy-Ranger of Windsor Park, and one of the great landscape gardeners of Georgian days. He planned the lake for the Duke of c.u.mberland, Ranger of Windsor Park after Culloden, and he made it by choking back a number of small streams that trickled through a reedy marsh, and so spreading a single floor of shining water over the whole valley. The trees, or most of them, that stand about the banks have grown since the Duke saw the water. There are old oaks on the northern sh.o.r.e, but the southern and eastern sides were planted with spruce and other conifers at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, when all that remained of the victor of Culloden was his horrible nickname and his obelisk above the lake. The trees are glorious in December or June, when the green leaf is high on the beeches or the copper leaf strewn below them, and in any month of the year the thick, deep moss of the open glades is a carpet to delight to walk upon. But not all Sandby's landscape gardening has an equal charm. The cascade which drains the outflow of the water is a pretentious pile which no doubt filled the eye of the royal Ranger, and perhaps would have pleased John Evelyn, but it suits a simpler taste very little. But "the ruins"--it is their vague and proper name--are worse. Once, on the southern sh.o.r.e, stood a cla.s.sical temple. It was the genuine article; the pillars were brought direct from Tripoli; the Ranger of the day (for they were added after the c.u.mberland era) liked to have them there, and thought that the beauty of English woodlands was enhanced by a pagan altar and Greek porticoes. Northern rains and northern ivy have done their work, and "the ruins" remain--capitals, columns, and pedestals shouting a thousand c.o.c.kney scribbles, tumbled headlong under laurel and yew.

Like other large stretches of Surrey water, the lake has become the home of wildfowl once pa.s.sing from the stage of rarity to extinction, but now increasing and more often seen. The reeds that line parts of the sh.o.r.e are the happy homes of coots and water hens, but mallards and ducks are common on the water, and I have watched more than one pair of great grebes, conspicuous on the level lake with their gleaming necks and chestnut ruffs, swimming and diving close in the sh.o.r.e.

Padlocked gates prevent you from walking precisely as you please from the north-east of the lake through Windsor Park, and it is not impossible to miss the right path through the trees. But if you are walking north from the lake it is worth while to make your way to the c.u.mberland obelisk--a gaunt column which the cl.u.s.tering ivy and shrubs at its base will some day topple down among the gra.s.s and heather--and to reach the Bishop's Gate through the single narrow stretch of Windsor Great Park that lies in Surrey. In winter, pheasants crouch under the brushwood or splutter through the trees; in summer the rhododendrons scent and empurple the woodland rides.

Below Bishop's Gate, which is a yard or two over the Berkshire border, lies the little hamlet of the same name where Sh.e.l.ley, the year before his marriage to Mary G.o.dwin, spent a happy summer and wrote "Alastor."

He was supposed to be dying of consumption, and was to live as much as he could in the open air; and from Bishop's Gate he began an expedition up the Thames, which took a fortnight of the warm July of 1815. He began "Alastor" in the glades of Windsor Park in the summer, and that strange and brooding poem is full of the splendour of the Windsor forest. The poet, "led by love, or dream, or G.o.d," sought the "dearest haunt" of Nature:--

"More dark And dark the shades acc.u.mulate. The oak, Expanding its immense and knotty arms, Embraces the light beech. The pyramids Of the tall cedar overarching frame Most solemn domes within, and far below, Like clouds suspended in an emerald sky, The ash and the acacia floating hang Tremulous and pale. Like restless serpents, clothed In rainbow and in fire, the parasites, Starred with ten thousand blossoms, flow around The gray trunks, and, as gamesome infants' eyes, With gentle meanings, and most innocent wiles, Fold their beams round the hearts of those that love, These twine their tendrils with the wedded boughs Uniting their close union; the woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue light of day, And the night's noontide clearness, mutable As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns Beneath these canopies extend their swells, Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms Minute yet beautiful."

This is a corner of Surrey, indeed, which is full of links with writers and poets. Hardly a mile to the east of Bishop's Gate is Englefield Green, a high and breezy common surrounded by delightful old houses.

Poor "Perdita," Mrs. Robinson, died in one of them, deserted and forgotten by the Prince for whom she had thought her name well lost.

To a later generation Englefield became familiar, if unvisited, through Mrs. Oliphant's _Neighbours on the Green_. Two of her friends in real life who lived there were Richard Holt Hutton, essayist and theologian, and one of the greatest of English journalists; and Sir George Chesney, author of _The Battle of Dorking_, whom we are to meet on the scene of one of his. .h.i.therto bloodless battlefields. Other neighbours, perhaps even better known, survive in the half-fiction of Mrs. Oliphant's pages.

But the most enthusiastic admirer of the neighbourhood was a poet, Sir John Denham. What would the author of the poem in praise of Cooper's Hill say to some of the buildings which crown that "airy mountain"

to-day? For Englefield Green stands on Cooper's Hill as Sir John saw it, and to him the common must have been part of the hill itself. To us Cooper's Hill has become less a hill than a college, and will become a hill again. The buildings of the College, started with the brightest hopes to provide a special education for the Indian Civil Service in 1870, and closed as a failure in 1905, stand untenanted and unhappy, fenced about with placards. There is no building quite so depressing as an empty school.

On a day of light mists one may see the view from the hill as Denham knew it, and as it was seen and known by Surrey n.o.bles long before his day. For below the hill lies Runemede, and it needs the filmy gauze of mist to spread the meadows and trees of the Thames banks into a green carpet, untouched with the mark of the builder and the roadmaker. But Runemede is not seen best from the hill. Best, I think, you can measure that broad green floor by coming on it as King John might have come had he ridden or rowed from Windsor. Then it stretches suddenly before you, a level plain of springing gra.s.s, a single rich hayfield in June, as perhaps John looked out over it on the day he sealed the Charter. The meadow and the river can have changed little in seven hundred years, and perhaps the farming of the meadow is not wholly different. But I shall always remember the shock with which once I came upon Runemede on an open day in March, when the farmers' men were out over all the fields with the horses and the farm machinery. Runemede was being rolled.

South of that great meadow, Egham stands opposite Staines, separated by the river and a mile of dull road. Egham may have once had attractions, but they have nearly all disappeared. Nothing old or quiet could live near the Holloway College. A building of such appalling pretensions sears its neighbourhood like a hot iron. The town takes colour from its flamboyant arrogance; the local builder studs his rough-cast with gla.s.s, red and green and blue. Two old almshouses stand by the main street of the town; one, a lowly set of cottage rooms, built by Sir John Denham in 1624, crouches quietly apart; the other, two hundred years younger, but still good Georgian brick, stands behind a gateway in grounds which, when I saw them last, were a miracle of untidiness. The almshouses, were rebuilt in 1828, when perhaps the gra.s.s round them was mown also.

Epitaphs and monuments can be dull enough, but no one could call the monuments dull which family piety has erected in Egham church to the memory of Sir John Denham, father of the poet. Sir John, clothed in a shroud, quits his tomb at the Last Trump; below him, among skeletons and skulls, two grisly corpses writhe to the light. It is edifying to conceive the satisfaction with which Sir John's descendants must have feasted on such horrors every Sunday. A gentler memory lives on a stone erected "to the most dutiful, engaging, and tender child of seven years old. Miss Sarah Honywood"; and a finer epitaph is Garrick's, written to the memory of Thomas Beighton, a former vicar:--

"He had no foe, and CAMDEN was his friend."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Entering Egham._]

Sir John Denham, the poet and unsuccessful defender of Farnham Castle in the Parliamentary Wars, lived at the house which is now the vicarage, and from its windows looked out on the long rising slope of Cooper's Hill. He has been laughed at for his description of the hill as an "airy mountain," but three hundred years ago, before the hill was cut up with hedges and ditches, and when he could look across open gra.s.s to its foot, Cooper's Hill may well have seemed higher than to-day. It is higher than St. Anne's Hill, after all, and can make an imposing break on the horizon.

Here is Runemede as Sir John Denham saw it from Cooper's Hill:--

"There lies a spatious and a fertile Greene, Where from the woods, the _Dryades_ oft meet The Nayades, and with their nimble feet, Soft dances lead, although their airie shape All but a quicke Poeticke sight escape, There _Faunus_ and _Sylva.n.u.s_ keepe their Courts, And thither all the horrid hoast resorts, When like the Elixar, with his evening beames, The sunne has turn'd to gold the silver streames.

Here have I seene our _Charles_, when great affaires Give leave to slacken, and unbend his cares, Chacing the royall Stagge, the gallant beast, Rowz'd with the noyse 'twixt hope and feare distrest, Resolv's 'tis better to avoyd, than meet His danger, trusting to his winged feet."

Which he does, a most moving business, until at last the gallant animal turns. He stands at bay--

"Till _Charles_ from his unerring hand lets flie A mortall shaft, then glad, and proud to dye By such a wound he fals, the Chrystall flood Dying he dyes, and purples with his blood."

Between Egham and Thorpe to the south is one of the few fine Elizabethan houses in the county, pleasantly named Great Fosters. But even Great Fosters, with all the charm of its gables, its chimneys and its mullioned windows, does not stand in quite such sharp contrast to the garishness of the Holloway buildings as the little village of Thorpe itself. Thorpe has been little written about. It lacks its sacred bard.

But neither Shere, nor Gomshall, nor Thursley, nor Chiddingfold, which have been compared and criticised as the most beautiful of all Surrey villages, can surpa.s.s Thorpe for richness of peace of ancient homes and quiet brooding over the past. Enter Thorpe from the north by the fields, and you will walk by lanes over which a hundred years have pa.s.sed without adding a tile or a tree to cottages or cottage gardens; and in Thorpe itself you can sit near the church on the edge of a stone stile, and look round at walls and roofs which might surely have sheltered Sir John Denham himself, walking by Thorpe to Chertsey. The stile stands across an ancient right of way, which crosses the fields; a straight line from the churchyard to Chertsey. John de Rutherwyk, doubtless, often walked or rode that lonely byway; perhaps it was he who raised the level path dry and well-drained out of the swampy, snipe-haunted meadows that lay between the little church and the great Abbey.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Thorpe._]

South of Chertsey to the Wey is rather uninteresting country. Addlestone lies between Chertsey and Weybridge, though not in a direct line, and was the home for years of two octogenarian authors, each of whom had a pension from the State, and who between them wrote or edited over five hundred books--Samuel Carter Hall and his wife Anna Maria Fielding. Both are buried at Addlestone; so is f.a.n.n.y Kemble's mother, Mrs. Charles Kemble, who as Mademoiselle Decamp had delighted French theatres. But Addlestone's great possession is still living, the huge Crouch Oak which spreads vast branches over ground where Wycliff is said to have preached, and Queen Elizabeth to have dined. Once the Crouch Oak stood to mark the bounds of Windsor Forest; and up to years not long gone by love-lorn young women gathered its bark to boil down into philtres to ensnare the hearts of unwilling swains.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Crouch Oak, Addlestone._]