The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries Part 6

"August 20 Item the proctor of Kingsland was here the Sonday being the 20 of August. In the same day was here ij men being robbid on the Seye."

This licensed mendicancy was finally suppressed by the Act of Parliament, pa.s.sed in the thirty-ninth year of Queen Elizabeth's reign, "For the Suppressing of Rogues, Vagabonds, and St.u.r.dy Beggars." It begins by setting forth in detail all those who were considered to come under these designations. These were:--"Persons calling themselves scholars, going about begging; all idle persons going about in any country either begging or using any subtil craft or unlawful games or plays, or feigning knowledge in physionomy or palmestry; patent-gatherers; common players of interludes, other than players belonging to any Baron of the Realm; juglers, tinkers, pedlers, and petty chapmen; and generally all wandering persons using, loytering, and refusing to work for reasonable wages, or pretending to be Egyptians. These are to be taken, adjudged, and deemed rogues, vagabonds, and st.u.r.dy beggars, and on apprehension to be, by appointment of any justice of the peace, &c., being a.s.sisted therein with the advice of the minister and one other of the parish, stripped naked, from the middle upward, and openly whipped until his or her body be b.l.o.o.d.y; and then sent from parish to parish to his or her last residence, and in default of going there within a time limited, to be eftsoons taken and whipped again."

This statute was continued and altered in subsequent reigns, and not repealed until the twelfth year of Queen Anne.

There is an entry in G.o.dalming parish registers, on this very road, which shows that this was no disregarded law. On April 26, 1658, the G.o.dalming authorities seem to have inflicted a peculiarly brutal scourging:--

"Here was taken a vagrant"--says this yellow page, stained with time and grotesque with crabbed writing and singular spelling--"one Mary Parker, Widow, with a Child; and she was wipped according to law, about the age of Thirty years, proper of personage; and she was to goo to the place of her birth, that is, in Grauesend in Kent, and she is limitted to iiij days, and to be caried from t.i.thing to Tything tell she comes to the end of the s{d} jerney."

[Sidenote: _THE 'GOOD OLD TIMES'_]

Oh, those "good old times"!

Other singular entries occur at Kingston. In 1570, for instance, we read that, on October 9--

"Thursday at nyght rose a great winde and rayne that the Temps rosse so hye that they myght row w{t} bott{s} owte of the Temps a gret waye in to the market place and upon a sodayne."

Two years later, a new cucking-stool was made at the expense of the parish. It cost 1 3_s._ 4_d._, and seems to have been freely used. The cucking-stool was a contrivance for the punishment of shrewish women who made such ill use of their tongues as to disturb their neighbours as well as their own families. Wherever there happened to be a pond or watercourse in a parish a post was set up in it; across this post was placed a transverse beam turning on a swivel, with a chair at one end of it, in which when the offender was comfortably placed, that end was turned to the water and let down into it as many times as the occasion was supposed to require.

This new cucking-stool had not long been made when it was brought into use, for, as the registers say--

"1572, August. On Tewsday being the xix day of this monthe of August ---- Downing wyfe to ---- Downinge gravemaker of this parysshe she was sett on a new cukking stolle made of a grett hythe and so browght a bowte the markett place to Temes brydge and ther had iij Duckinges over hed and eres because she was a common scolde and fyghter."

During the next month the registers give the information that, September 8--

"This day in this towne was kept the Sessions of gayle Delyverye and her was hangyd vj persons and seventeene taken for roges and vagabonds and whippid abowte the market place and brent in the ears."

I think these extracts are sufficient to give a portraiture of the place in olden times. For the Kingston of that remote date it were well not to seek: it has gone with the snows of yester-year and the fallen leaves of autumns past. There hangs to-day, in the Kingston Public Library, an old drawing by a former Secretary of the Royal Academy, which, although as a drawing it is as bad as may well be, has become, since the old market-place was rebuilt, very valuable as a piece of doc.u.mentary evidence, showing what Kingston was like in olden times. This is negative praise, but, even so, it is praise to which little of the handiwork of by-past Secretaries of the Royal Academy can attain; for it has ever been the practice of that distinguished body to confer the salaried posts at their disposal upon those of their numerous members who could neither draw nor paint. This old drawing shows dimly what manner of place Kingston was until well on into the last century: the old timbered houses and the projecting signs of the crazy inns making a brave show.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RECRUITING SERGEANT.]

[Sidenote: _THE RECRUITING SERGEANT_]

I should suppose it was at Kingston that John Collett conceived the idea of his picture of "The Recruiting Sergeant," reproduced here; for the wagon that stands in the road is labelled "Portsmouth Common Stage Waggon," and the sign of the "Three Jolly Butchers" is clearly a reminiscence of the "Jolly Butchers" at Clattern Bridge.

The recruiting sergeant was a scarcely less familiar figure on the road than the stage-coach a hundred years ago, and a figure, too, that has ever been seized upon by painters and writers alike for sentimental reasons.

Has he not been made notorious as "Sergeant Kite," the unscrupulous ruffian who inveigled the country yokel into drink and the acceptance of the King's shilling at the roadside inn? Evidently the painter of this picture was a sentimentalist who regarded the recruiting sergeant in the worst light. The composition and the figures are alike theatrical and conventional. The weeping sweetheart is a figure borrowed from the stage, and so are the two other prominent actors, the Sergeant and the Recruit.

The other figures are interesting. In the wagon a fellow is in the act of kissing a girl, while an old woman belabours him about the head. Two children are fearfully feeling the edge of a halberd in the foreground, while a distressed dame--possibly the Recruit's mother--is being comforted by some women friends.

At Kingston we had better take Mr. Shoolbred's "New Times" coach to Guildford. That is to say, if we can find a seat; for this popular drive is patronized so extensively that booking is brisk throughout the coaching season. At eleven o'clock punctually, on every week-day forenoon in the heyday of the year, the "New Times" starts from the "Berkeley" Hotel, Piccadilly. The fame of this sole survivor of the Guildford coaches is of no mere mushroom growth, for it is now over twenty years since Mr. Walter Shoolbred first drove his own teams over this road, so that to-day he is become an inst.i.tution. Time was (and that but a few years since) when a Portsmouth coach was the delight of the road; but Captain Hargreaves'

"Rocket" no longer enlivens the way, and, below Guildford, the Portsmouth Road is unexploited. To-day we fare no farther behind our four-in-hand than Mr. Shoolbred can take us, and he has the route entirely to himself.

[Sidenote: _DITTON MARSH_]

It is but rarely that this "well-appointed coach"--to speak after the manner of advertis.e.m.e.nts--leaves London without a full load or an admiring crowd of onlookers to witness its departure, and you feel yourself (wrongly, it may well be) an essential part of the performance, as, perched on the box-seat beside the driver, you are driven through the thronging traffic of a May morning in Piccadilly. Not until the streets of London are left behind us do the clean-limbed chestnuts of our team have the opportunity of showing their paces; but Kingston Vale is done smartly, and Kingston itself reached at 12.8. Presently we are out upon Ditton Marsh, flat and broad and sombre, and we bowl along here at a fine round pace until we reach the foot of the ascent where, outside a roadside public-house--the "Orleans Arms"--stands a huge stone post, a century old, carved with the names and distances of many towns and villages, and known as the "White Lady" milestone.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ROAD AND RAIL: DITTON MARSH, NIGHT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. WALTER SHOOLBRED.]

Away to the right lies Thames Ditton, beloved of Theodore Hook and a certain "lazy minstrel," well known to fame in these days, Mr. Ashby Sterry. There also lived at Ditton, during the early part of this present century, that eminent lawyer, Sir Edward Sugden, afterwards Lord St.

Leonards, and Lord Chancellor of England. His career was an example of the rise of worth, for he was the son of a hairdresser in Duke Street, Piccadilly, and won his way by the sole aid of his own bright intellect.

But, on the other hand, he remains the most dreadful example of the man who draws his own will, and thus gives rise to wasteful litigation with his testamentary incoherencies. He was also the victim of a particularly odious witticism while living here. It shall be recounted, to the perpetual infamy and dishonour of the man who uttered it. Theodore Hook and Croker were on one occasion the guests of Sir Edward Sugden at Boyle Farm. They were admiring a very beautiful vase that stood in the hall, and Sir Edward told them it was a copy of the celebrated Warwick vase. "Yes,"

said Croker, "it is extremely handsome; but don't you think a facsimile of the Barberini vase would have been more appropriate to the place?" I do not remember to have heard if Sugden kicked his unmannerly guest: if he did _not_, I regret the omission.

On the way to Esher, up the hillside, the coach pa.s.ses the entrance-gates of Sandown Park, that most fashionable of race-courses, opened in 1870, and ever since then the "ladies' race-course" _par excellence_. Those ornamental iron gates that face the road have a history: they came from Baron Albert Grant's mansion, Kensington House, that stood where now Kensington Court faces the Gardens and the old Palace.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "NEW TIMES" GUILDFORD COACH.]

[Sidenote: _'ESHER'S STEEP'_]

At Esher we make our second change, at that old-fashioned hostelry the "Bear," and are shown those religiously preserved boots worn by the post-boy who drove Philippe Egalite to Claremont in 1848, when escaping "the red fool-fury of the Seine," then at flood-tide. These are boots indeed, and more resemble the huge jack-boots in which Marlborough's soldiers won Ramilies and Malplaquet, than nineteenth-century foot-gear.

The "Bear" is one of the finest of the old inns that ornament this old road, and its stables, large enough, as the proprietor says, to hold a hundred horses, are a sight to see.

Esher is a pleasant village, prettily rural, with a humble old church behind that old coaching inn the "Bear," and a newer church, not at all humble, across the way. Nearly all the monuments have been removed to the new building; the most notable among them an elaborate memorial to Richard Drake, Equerry to Queen Elizabeth, and father of the famous Sir Francis Drake, who caused it to be placed in the old church. Some minor literary lights, too, are buried here, among them Samuel Warren, Q.C., Recorder of Hull and Master in Lunacy, who was born in 1807. This literary character and legal luminary (of no great brilliancy, indeed) lived until 1877, when his feeble flicker was finally dowsed in death. The injunction "de mortuis" is kindly, but I cannot refrain from remarking here that I have seen this shining light of law and letters characterized in print as a "pompous a.s.s." What else but pompous could he possibly have been after his remarkable training, first for a degree in medicine, and, secondly, for the bar? Such a career as this would be sufficient to turn any man of average intelligence and more than average conceit into a third-rate Johnson--such a man, in fact, as Warren became. Add to these advantages (or disadvantages, you are free to choose your epithet) that of an author successful more by hitting the bull's-eye of public taste than by intrinsic merit, and you will wonder the less at his self-sufficient mental att.i.tude.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BOOTS AT THE "BEAR."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "BEAR," ESHER.]

[Sidenote: _PRIGGERY_]

Warren was the author of such one-time extremely popular works as "Ten Thousand a Year" and the "Diary of a Late Physician": applauded to the echo in their day--a day that is done. He is additionally famous, however, on another and very different count. His vanity was monumental, and he possessed a prig's delight in recounting details of the social functions to which he was used to be invited by the notabilities of his day.

A good anecdote survives of this unpleasing trait in Warren's character.

Let us howk it up again, and send it forth with a new lease of life.

Warren, it would seem, was narrating to Douglas Jerrold,[2] with much oily circ.u.mstantiality, the splendid details of one of the dinners to which he had been bidden in the mansions of the great. He constantly referred to the unusual fact of no fish having been served at one of these feasts, and asked Jerrold what explanation he thought could be offered of so strange an omission. The reply was worthy of that wounding and blackguardly wit for which Jerrold was so notorious; a form of ill-natured satire that seems never to have brought him the sound thrashing he so richly deserved.

"Perhaps they ate it all up-stairs," said he.

XI

And now, before we proceed further along the Portsmouth Road, we must "change here" for Dorking, a coach-route greatly favoured of late years, both by Mr. Rumney's "Tally-ho" coach, and Mr. E. Brown's "Perseverance,"

by way of a relief from their accustomed haunts, to St. Albans and elsewhere. The "Perseverance" (which, alas! no longer perseveres) left Northumberland Avenue at eleven a.m., and came down the old route until Surbiton was pa.s.sed, when it turned off by way of Hook and Telegraph Hill, by Prince's Coverts to Leatherhead, and so into Dorking.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "TALLY-HO" HAMPTON COURT AND DORKING COACH.]

[Sidenote: _THE 'TALLY-HO'_]

Mr. Rumney's "Wonder"--bah! what do I say?--I _should_ say that gentleman's "Tally-ho" ran to Dorking in 1892, what time the "Perseverance" also ran thither, and a fine seven-and-sixpenny ride it was, there and back. By "there and back" I do not name the route between London and the old Surrey town. Oh no; Mr. Rumney's was quite an original idea. He gave Londoners the benefit of a country drive throughout, and ran between the sweet rurality of Hampton Court and Dorking. At 11.10 every morning he started from the "Mitre" Hotel, and so, across Hampton Bridge, to Ditton and Claremont, and thence to Dorking, where, at the "White Horse"----

But I antic.i.p.ate, as the Early Victorian novelists were wont to say. I will quote an account of the journey that appeared in one of the weekly papers at the time, and have the less hesitation in quoting therefrom, because I wrote the article myself, and if a man may not quote himself, who, in Heaven's name, _may_ he quote?