Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 29

CHAPTER x.x.xV

BEDDINGTON AND CARSHALTON

Beddington Hall.--Careful Dissipation.--The Polite Verger.--A punning epitaph.--Actaeon and Artemis for sale.--Carshalton pools.--A dry well.--William Quelche's Apology.--The rudeness of a doctor.--Carshalton's greatest man.--Fighting and spelling.

According to the historians, the springs of the Wandle rose under the walls of Croydon Palace. Croydon has seemingly decided that they shall rise further off, and the Wandle suddenly appears, full flowing, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. You can walk along its bank and watch young Croydon transfer minnows from muddy water to jampots. A mile from the town stands Beddington Hall, now an orphan asylum which sends red-cloaked children out for walks into Croydon, but once the country mansion of the great family of Carew. Nicholas Carew built a house at Beddington in the reign of Edward III, but it was Sir Francis Carew, rebuilding it under Elizabeth, who first brought greatness to Beddington. He entertained the Queen there twice, and the orange garden was famous for many generations of Carews. When Aubrey saw the trees at the end of the seventeenth century, he wrote that they were 'planted in the open ground, where they have throve to admiration for above a whole century; but are preserved, during the winter season, under a moveable Covert.' The hard frost of 1739 killed them.

A later Sir Nicholas Carew rebuilt much of the house, but retained the hall. He was an exact and particular person, and never let his careful dissipation prevent him from keeping a precise record in his account book. One of his pocket-ledgers has found its way into the British museum. Here are some extracts of his expenses:--

s. d.

Pd. my man's Nurse - 7 - For a Pocket-Book 1 16 - For a smelling bottle 1 1 6 F. a table and Books - 3 6 G. (gave) f. verses - 10 - Pd. my french marster 1 13 6 F. fishing tackle - 2 6 G. f. finding my sword - 2 6 Pd. for a gunn 4 - - F. Herrings and oysters - 7 3

Sept. ye 25th 1706. I bought a P^r of Coach Horses 4 years old come five and gave four and thirty pounds for y^m.--N. Carew.

He had a nice taste in wines and tea, and was properly generous to musicians and servants:--

s. d.

Jan. ye 5th 1706/7 for s. candy and liquorish - 2 2 G. ye serv^ts at Soho 2 1 6 F. gr. tea - 12 6 F. bohea tea - 14 0 F. asquebah - 3 0 Sp. at ye Gre(cian) Sp. at Jelly H - 1 6 F. swaring paper - - 3 F. a rasour case 2 15 0 G. ye Harper - 5 - G. ye musick - 1 - G. a poor woman - 1 - G. a fool - 1 -

I have met with occasional difficulties in trying to enter Surrey churches, but Beddington, which is one of the most finely decorated, offered the most prolonged opposition of all. I arrived there about three o'clock in the afternoon, and finding the doors locked, inquired of one who emerged from a stoke-hole where I might get the keys. I might not get them, he replied; the church was being cleaned. But might I not just look round, having come a long way to see the church? I might not: she was cleaning the reredos. Might not one who wished to write about the church enter while she was cleaning the reredos? One might not; much had been written of the church already. Would he be so good as to direct me to the rectory? He would, and did; and as I walked away shouted after me that the rector was certainly out. But I found him in, and very courteous to a stranger; and I learned that, as I had hoped, the rule was that the church should be opened every day. He gave me his card, and wrote a message on it, and with the card I went back to the church. The verger had disappeared. He was neither in the churchyard nor the stoke-hole. A stonemason working in the churchyard came to my a.s.sistance. The verger was in the church and would doubtless open the door if I knocked. I knocked. Nothing happened. The stonemason knocked; indeed, he knocked a great deal. I begged him to stop knocking, for pa.s.sers-by stayed to see what this thing might be, but he was thoroughly interested, and went on knocking. Perhaps he knocked for a quarter of an hour. A young girl came up to tell us that the door would certainly open before half-past four, for that was tea-time. Just then the door opened, and before it was shut again in our faces I just had time to brandish the card. He replied at once--he would let me in by another door. He did so; he never asked to see the card, but went on industriously with his sweeping.

Perhaps no building in Surrey has been more carefully restored than Beddington church, nor more richly decorated. The chancel with its frescoes and mosaics, and the carved and painted roof are probably as fine as anything of the kind in any parish church. But is the result attained the result aimed at? The richness, the glamour of gold and purple and rare woods and stones are there, as they must have been in Solomon's temple. But to me the simplicity and cool quiet of aisles and white pillars sometimes seem to forsake such gorgeousness and glow.

There are many interesting monuments and bra.s.ses in the church, especially in the Carew chapel, where Carews of Beddington have lain since the fifteenth century. The strangest memorial is the punning epitaph on the steward to Sir Nicholas Carew. He died in 1633, and his name was Greenhill, which inspired his commemorator with a motto for his bra.s.s, "Mors super virides montes," and ten curious lines:--

"Vnder thy feate interrd is here A native born in Oxfordsheere, First, Life and Learning Oxford gaue; Surry to him his death, his graue.

He once a HILL was, fresh and GREENE; Now wither'd is not to bee seene.

Earth in Earth shovel'd up is shut, A HILL into a Hole is put.

But darkesome earth by powre divine Bright at last as ye Sonne may shine."

A mile further west, beyond Wallington, which in spite of embracing villadom still keeps an old inn and a pretty, shaded green, is Carshalton. Carshalton begins magnificently. In the s.p.a.cious days of King George the First there was designed for Carshalton Park a superb dwelling, which Leoni was to have built for the lord of the manor (he built the Onslow house in Clandon Park). But the house was never built.

The gates remain. They formerly guarded the green glades of a deer park.

Now they stand forlornly cheek by jowl with new yellow brick. Actaeon, from one great pillar, gazes on less divine pictures than a G.o.ddess bathing; Artemis, on the other pillar, drapes herself for unseeing eyes.

A papered notice-board lolls against the superb ironwork of the gates.

Hunter and huntress, pillars and wrought iron, are for sale.

Few villages in Surrey are prettier to-day than they were forty years ago. Carshalton is hardly a village, but is it less pretty than it used to be? Let Ruskin decide, from the opening of _The Crown of Wild Olive_.

"Twenty years ago" (he writes in 1870) "there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic, in the world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the sources of the Wandel, and including the low moors of Addington, and the villages of Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant lips of the hand which 'giveth rain from heaven'; no pastures ever lightened in spring-time with more pa.s.sionate blossoming; no sweeter homes ever hallowed the heart of the pa.s.ser-by with their pride of peaceful gladness,--half-hidden--yet full-confessed. The place remains (1870) nearly unchanged in its larger features; but with deliberate mind I say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly in its inner tragic meaning,--not in Pisan Maremma--not by Campagna tomb,--not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan sh.o.r.e,--as the slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness of the English scene: nor is any blasphemy or impiety, any frantic saying, or G.o.dless thought, more appalling to me, using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, than the insolent defiling of those springs by the human herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there with the white grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of the first spreading currents, the human wretches of the place cast their street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes; which, having neither energy to cart away, nor decency enough to dig into the ground, they thus shed into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in all places where G.o.d meant those waters to bring joy and health. And, in a little pool behind some houses farther in the village, where another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria, and bricklayer's refuse, on one side, which the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond: and there, circled and coiled under festering sc.u.m, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the acc.u.mulation of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men with one day's work could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, and make every breath of summer air above them rich with cool balm; and every glittering wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled only of angels, from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor, I suppose, will be; nor will any joy be possible to heart of man, for evermore, about those wells of English waters."

Things are not quite so bad to-day. Ruskin himself had the smaller pool cleaned and set about with stone, and planted with periwinkle and daffodils. The other two larger pools are the care of a district council, which forbids attempts to catch the big trout that cruise in their clear, weedy waters, and otherwise looks after them for a public which may value them more highly than in Ruskin's day, but drops in a great many newspapers. Another so-called well--Anne Boleyn's well; her horse put its foot into soft ground above a spring--is a well no longer.

Iron railings ward off the profane, and narcissus and ivy cl.u.s.ter round its brim, but below, according to the weather, is dust or mud.

At the churchyard gate are the trunks of two ancient but still living elms, to which is fastened a beam beset with hooks, which either hold or once held joints of meat for the butcher's shop behind. The church, which is a strange mixture of old and new, the new being gradually built on to the old, is the resting-place of Gaynesfordes and Ellenbrygges, two of the great old Surrey families, and contains at least one remarkable inscription:

"M.S. Under the middle stone that guards the ashes of a certain fryer, sometime vicar of this place, is raked up the dust of William Quelche, B.D., who ministred in the same since the reformation. His lot was through G.o.d's mercy to burn incense here about 30 years, and ended his course Aprill the 10, an. dni 1654, being aged 64 years."

Mr. Quelche was vicar in troublous times, and the distractions of the Civil War led to a hiatus in the parish registers. The fault lay with the parish clerk, but the conscientious Mr. Quelche felt bound to clear himself in the eyes of future ages by a long apology in the Register of baptisms, which begins beseechingly enough:--

"Good Reader tread gently:

For though these vacant yeares may seeme to make me guilty of thy censure, neither will I symply excuse myselfe from all blemishe; yet if thou doe but cast thine eie uppon the former pages and se with what care I have kepte the annalls of mine owne tyme, and rectifyed sundry errors of former times thou wilt beginn to thinke ther is some reason why he that begann to build so well should not be able to make an ende."

But the entries for the years before the war broke out were occasionally a little vague. Here are three full years' records of marriages:--

"1640. A Londoner married mr. Kepps sister of micham on Easter monday.

1641. Mr. Meece married a couple who came from fishsted whose names he could not remember.

1642. Not one marryed woe to y^e vicar."

Some of the names and surnames sound odd:--

Epaphroditus wood. Epaphroditus Wandling. Anne Waweker.

Hevedebar Hill. Wroe. b.u.t.tonshere. Dilc.o.c.k.

Gander. Mustian. Thunderman. Nep. Milfe.

Carshalton House, a ma.s.sive pile of red brick, was built by Sir John Fellowes, one of the directors of the South Sea Bubble. It stands on the site of a house which belonged to the most famous doctor of his day. He was John Radcliffe, founder of the Radcliffe Library, and so much run after as a physician that he felt able to be intolerably rude to his patients, even if they happened to be kings and queens. William the Third never forgave him for telling him that he would not own his Majesty's dropsical legs for the three kingdoms. Queen Anne refused to make him her court physician, but sent for him when she was dying. He would not leave Carshalton, pleading the gout; and he lived and died in angry remorse. The Queen never recovered, and the doctor did not dare to show his face in London.

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

Carshalton's greatest man lies in a nameless grave. Admiral Sir Edward Whitaker, leader of the a.s.sault which first made Gibraltar a British fortress, used to spend his summers at Carshalton, and was buried in Carshalton churchyard, but the slab which marked his grave was moved and lost when the church was enlarged. He was forty-four when with Captain Jumper and Captain Hicks he led his men against the redoubt, and he was as brilliant a fighter as he was a poor speller. I quote from a letter he wrote describing the siege and a.s.sault to his friend Sir Richard Haddock, Comptroller of the Navy, a day or two after the action:--

"There was three small ships in the old mold, one of which annoyed our camp by firing amongst them. One having about 10 guns, lying close to the mold, and just under a great bastion at the north corner of the towne, I proposed to Sir George the burning her in the night. He liked itt: accordingly ordered what boats I would have to my a.s.sistance: and about 12 at night I did itt effectually, w^th the loss of but one man, and 5 or 6 wounded.

_July 23._--At 4 this morning, adm^l Byng began w^th his ships to cannonade, a Dutch rear-adm^l and 5 or 6 ships of thairs along w^th him, w^ch made a n.o.ble noise, being within half shott of the town.

My ship, not being upon service, I desired Sir George to make me his _aducon_ to carry his commands, from tyme to tyme, to adm^l Byng, which he did....

P.S. This is rite all in a hurry, sir, y^t I hope you'le excuse me."

The aide-de-camp had not forgotten the concluding formula of the schoolboy complete letter-writer.

Beyond Carshalton is Sutton, not less exuberant than Croydon. The c.o.c.k Hotel of coaching days has been rebuilt; the railway is convenient for Epsom or London.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

CHALDON TO THE DOWNS

Coulsdon.--A giant Christian prince.--Chaldon.--The Ladder of Life.--The Brig of Whinney Moor.--Chipstead.--Merstham.--A Wizard Rector.--Addington.--The little churches.--Horne Tooke's _Diversions_.

It is possible to escape from Croydon's railway-stations. You can push out from its ringing streets into green and quiet country, and find little old churches within a mile or two of the railway, as undisturbed as if no railway were yet running. You may leave the line at Purley, and within an hour's walk find yourself in the wind on the downs, among Anglo-Saxon barrows and immemorial yews; you may even be able (though not without thought) to exclude from a generous view of hill and valley the enormous lunatic asylums which fate and County Councils have piled and multiplied in this part of Surrey.