Through East Anglia in a Motor Car Part 7

In this chapter, and those which follow next, I am going to describe a number of journeys taken by motor-car from Colchester as a centre, and one which might have been made from Colchester by car, but was in fact made from London by train for the sake of its destination. That destination was very well worth reaching, even by train; how to reach it by car from Colchester, and what there is to be seen when it is reached shall be told in due course. This particular chapter involves very little travelling, and has been written because it is felt that the motorists, liking to take a holiday on occasion, will like to hear of the antiquities of Colchester, the social peculiarities of Clacton, some old-time stories of Harwich, and something from Lord Avebury about coast changes.

Three or four years ago, it will be remembered, an expeditionary force of horse and foot and artillery, representing imaginary invaders of this country, embarked in transports at Southampton, under Sir John French, with orders to carry out the operation of invading the east coast of England, the point of dis-embarkation being Clacton-on-Sea, supposed to have been left unwatched. In the course of the business of a special correspondent, I saw the tall ships--they were not a bit tall really, but the old phrase clings--steam out of Southampton, and then hurried across country to Colchester to await events. At Colchester, I found myself a welcome pa.s.senger on an official motor-car, a Lanchester, driven by an Army Service Corps driver, and I found myself also, by happy chance, in the company of many soldier friends at the "Old Red Lion," concerning the antiquities and traditions of which it has been found impossible not to make some observations at an earlier stage. There could have been no more delightful task for a conscientious correspondent, for it was his duty to see all he could, and it was sheer pleasure to scour the country to that end; and on the other hand, if he were also an honourable man, his task of writing was of the easiest. There was no censor; but the special correspondents were placed on their honour not to publish anything which could, by any chance, help the other side. Theoretically, I was attached to Sir John French's invading army; in fact, I perambulated the ground occupied by both armies with perfect freedom; and, since it soon became plain that my illuminating remarks would be capable of reaching General Wynne, who was defending England, at the same time as "the rolls and Bohea"--to quote the old _Spectator_--it became manifest at the same time that the less said about military matters the better. Recognition of this fact and of its consequences gave me much leisure, and the farcical character of the manoeuvres on land--for farcical they were universally allowed to be by competent military observers--gave me more. For example, General French, unopposed by previous arrangement, spent some hours of an afternoon in landing his troops, but not much of his stores and baggage, at Clacton, amidst a crowd of trippers and bathers. After resting them for a brief s.p.a.ce, and as darkness began to fall, he began a march upon the fat city of Colchester, over ground not too flat, the distance being some seventeen miles. I, not antic.i.p.ating anything of the sort, since there was no moon, had gone back to Colchester and dinner. Enter, about ten o'clock at night, a breathless comrade to announce that sharp fighting was in progress. Out started a car, not the Lanchester, carrying us both; and within a few miles, but Heaven only knew where, we were in the thick of it. We could see flashes; we could hear the explosion of cordite in all directions; we could hear the tramp of men and horses, and many voices. But, speaking as no warrior at all, I am absolutely convinced that during this engagement, which was one of many, it was beyond the capacity of any man to distinguish friend from foe, to aim his rifle at anything, or even to set his sights.

So I went back to bed at the "Red Lion."

With the dawn I was back again, to find the invaders, or some of them, lying close to the city of Colchester, their guns in positions from which they commanded the city and from which, in the meanwhile, they poured imaginary death and destruction upon the flying defenders. Theoretically, General French had captured the rich city of Colchester. If our mimic war had been real, the main difficulty of Sir John French and his officers would have been to check their fierce and hungry soldiery from sacking the town, looting the provision shops, gorging themselves with Colchester "natives"--for it was September and the oysters were very good--and drinking enormous quant.i.ties of liquor. But mimic war is sometimes a stern business, for the conquerors. The theoretical victors had to rest, as best they could, in an open field in the rain and, for a long time, without tents. Provisions, sufficient but not sumptuous, were supplied to them by the Army Service Corps, and the high authorities, whosoever they were, agreed that an armistice of thirty-six hours was called for by the exhausted condition of both sides. During those thirty-six hours, which begun about two o'clock in the afternoon, if memory serves accurately, a correspondent had no duties to perform.

So, keeping the "Red Lion" for head-quarters, I was free to ramble over one of the most interesting cities in England, architecturally and historically. The "Cups," a hotel more celebrated, was not available, being occupied by the umpiring staff, military grandees generally, and military and naval attaches of many nations. But there was no cause to regret the necessity for abiding at the ancient "Red Lion"; and it was an admirable centre from which to study the city and its characteristic features. To the front, in the High Street, there is much that is distressingly modern. The Town Hall, for example, is the kind of building men accounted "handsome" in 1841, when it took the place of a Moot Hall which had been standing since the Conquest. Most of the buildings near it on the far side of the road from the "Red Lion," including the "Cups," are modern and the epithet "handsome" has doubtless been applied to them also a hundred times and more. No doubt they serve their purposes adequately, but in the full light of day they offend the eye of him who deems himself cultivated. Only when the light grows dim above and a red sunset lends enchantment to the outlines of buildings seen against it, casting details and crude colouring into shade, does the High Street of Colchester look really picturesque; and that effect is the more impressive if one enters the town by the easternmost of the three bridges across the Colne. Then as the car climbs the sharp hill, the picture is unfolded gradually, and one great block of buildings at the end of the street (it is really, I fancy, something connected with the waterworks, but that is of no moment if it be pleasing) looks distinctly romantic and imposing. In full sun the princ.i.p.al street of Colchester fails to please any eye save that which is satisfied by the evidence of an abundant prosperity.

Once inside the "Red Lion," however, the traveller is in an atmosphere of the old world and, if he pleases to humour his fancy, he may preserve that fancy for quite a long time and over quite a considerable distance. The hotel has a courtyard, as of course. The coffee-room and the bar-parlour, wherein an interesting and characteristic gathering may be found on market days, are on the left hand as one enters from the High Street, and so is the princ.i.p.al entrance. It follows that to reach the main street on emerging from the hotel door, to find commerce, shops, bustle, and activity, a man must turn to the right. If he have no immediate inclination for these things, necessary and valuable as they are in themselves, let him turn to the left instead and pa.s.s through the long stable-yard, threading his way among a series of vehicles, ancient and modern, until he reaches the back gate of the yard. Once through that he will soon find himself in old Colchester, among quiet rows of modest houses, in alleys whose names speak of the Middle Ages, face to face with walls which are manifestly and essentially of Roman construction. Such will inevitably be his environment.

In such an environment, if in any, will he be willing to hear something of the story of Colchester, that most ancient city standing on the hill that is girt to the north, the north-east, and the east by the sluggish waters of the Colne. If he be unwilling, he had better skip the few pages following.

A little of that story has been told before what time it became necessary, or so seemed, to define early in this volume our sceptical att.i.tude towards so-called Roman remains and Roman roads. These are very often of doubtful authenticity, and this very scepticism, this proved scarcity of Roman remains in East Anglia, render the certain truth concerning Colchester the more valuable. The situation, the commanding hill, half-girt by the river, renders it more than probable that our rude forefathers (who really knew a good deal more than the world gave them credit for having known) had a settlement in pre-Roman times on the spot now known as Colchester. No time has been spent in research into that matter for the purposes of this book, for the simple reason that at least enough must needs be said concerning the place after the Romans first knew it. Caesar came, saw, and conquered as usual; and having conquered he went away. For nearly a century after that the Romans were too much engaged over those troubles at home, about which every schoolboy really knows a good deal, to concern themselves over an outlying and unimportant province, and almost everything is uncertain concerning the British history of the period. This is really a pity, because it is clear that King Cun.o.belin, who then ruled at Colchester, already apparently named as Camulodunum, was a progressive prince, and the coins of his period show positively that the Britons under him were by no means ignorant of the peaceful arts. That, very likely, was why they became poor warriors.

In A.D. 43 came the second and most effectual Roman invasion. That extraordinary person the Emperor Claudius, persuaded by a British exile named Berre, who had got the worst of one of the petty quarrels in which the Britons then, like the Welsh later, were constantly engaged, dispatched Aulus Plautius with four legions and some Gallic auxiliaries to reconquer Britain. So much is certain, and there is no doubt that a year sufficed to quell the resistance of south-eastern Britain, although Caradoc, Cun.o.belin's son, held out in the west for a long time. In the next year Claudius himself crossed the Channel--one authority says he brought elephants in his train--and joined Plautius on the north of the Thames.

Shortly afterwards he entered Camulodunum, or Colchester. Did he enter it as having himself conquered, or as an Emperor taking the credit of his general's victories? It is really almost impossible to say. Merivale, having previously mentioned the elephants, says, "At Gessoriac.u.m he embarked for the opposite sh.o.r.es of Cantium (Kent), and speedily reached the legions in their encampment beyond the Thames. The soldiers, long held in leash in expectation of his arrival, were eager to spring upon the foe.

With the Emperor himself at their head, a spectacle not beheld since the days of the valiant Julius, they traversed the level plains of the Trin.o.bantes, which afforded no defensible position, till the natives were compelled to stand at bay before the stockades which encircled their capital, Camulodunum. It is not perhaps too bold a conjecture that the lines which can still be traced from the Colne to a little wooded stream called the Roman river, drawn across the approach to a tract of twenty or thirty square miles, surrounded on every other side by water, indicate the ramparts of this British _oppidum_. Within this enclosed s.p.a.ce there was ample room, not only for the palace of the chief and the cabins of her people, but for the grazing ground of their flocks and herds in seasons of foreign attack; while, resting on the sea in its rear, it commanded the means of reinforcement and, if necessary, of flight. But the fate of the capital was decided by the issue of the encounter which took place before it. The Trin.o.bantes were routed. They surrendered their city and, with it, their national freedom and independence. The victory was complete; the subjection of the enemy a.s.sured. Within sixteen days from his landing in Britain, Claudius had broken a powerful kingdom and accomplished a substantial conquest."

Exactly so, but is not the story a little too complete to gain absolute credit? Is not the historian, justly indignant at the injustice done by Suetonius and others to Claudius, inclined to press down the balance too heavily in his favour? After all, Suetonius says there was no resistance or bloodshed, and that really is much the more probable story. We all know that Claudius, the deformed child who was regarded as an imbecile, the coward who hardly dared to accept power when it was thrust upon him by the Praetorians, showed a remarkable genius for administration, and had the ambition to imitate Augustus. He might easily have been a great general in spite of his gluttony, his vice, and his cruelty. For all that, this rapid entry into Colchester, combined with what we know of his delight in shows, and with the suspicious fact that he brought his elephants with him, gives the whole affair an air of pre-arrangement The chances are that Aulus Plautius did the work and that Claudius took the credit. Certainly he returned to Rome and celebrated a triumph in great style; and on his arch of triumph is an inscription (largely conjectural now) which, says Merivale, shows the estimation in which his exploits were held. It is much more likely to show the view which Claudius wished to be taken, for the incestuous, gluttonous, cowardly, and yet politically sagacious Emperor, had a pretty style in prose. Of course it is just possible that Plautius was doing but ill over his campaign, and that the Emperor with his elephants--tradition says that the Britons were very much afraid of them--turned the scale; but the probability is that the whole affair was what they call a "put-up thing" on the far side of the Atlantic, and that the elephants were brought over simply for the sake of pomp and circ.u.mstance.

Now comes a confusing pa.s.sage in the usually sinless "Murray," wherein the author is himself quoting in part from the _Quarterly Review, No. 108_: "Sixteen years later, 'to overawe the disaffected, and to show to the more submissive an image of Roman civilization,' a Roman Colony was founded in the capital of the conquered Trin.o.bantes. 'It was dignified with the name of Claudian, from the Emperor himself, or Victricensis, from the conquest of which it was the symbol, which was also typified by a statue of Victory, erected in its princ.i.p.al place.' The place received indiscriminately the name of Colonia, Camulodunum,--or sometimes Colonia Camulodunum. It was the first Roman Colony founded in Britain. 'Claudius determined to inform the minds of his remotest subjects on the article of his own divinity--and accordingly directed the Colonists of Camulodunum to consecrate to him a temple, and appoint from among themselves an order of priests to minister therein.'" Nothing could be more in this picture, nothing more thoroughly in harmony with the character of Claudius; but the words "sixteen years later" give pause. Sixteen years would bring us to A.D. 60, when Nero wore the purple and misbehaved himself generally; and six years before that Agrippina, who was already more than wife to Claudius, since she was his niece also, became his murderess by the aid of the physician Xenophon. But it is only the date that is wrong. It was in the year 50, six years later, not sixteen, that the successor of Plautius, having been many times worsted by the hard-fighting Silures of South Wales, was ordered to found a colony at Camulodunum.

If Claudius had a political hobby it was the foundation of colonies, which he usually permitted to be known as _Colonia_, "the Colony," simply. Such was Colchester; such was Cologne, founded by him a year later at the asking of Agrippina, who had been born there. But the English Colonia did not quite come up to expectations, for the image of Roman civilization shown by it was not attractive, and its military organization was non-existent. The worn-out veterans, who were the colonists, did not build for themselves a concentrated city, a sort of stationary camp. On the contrary, they settled themselves in the scattered houses of the Britons. "The houses even of the Britons," says Merivale, "were to the rude inmates of the Tent not inconvenient." The Dean of Ely, as he afterwards became, wrote these words somewhere between 1850 and 1860, and had not the chances open to us of knowing that the families of the Britons of this epoch, the period of Cun.o.belin's coinage be it remarked, most likely enjoyed quite comfortable houses. A theatre, too, these colonists constructed, for their own amus.e.m.e.nt. To the question of defences they gave no heed. Caradoc and his fighting Welshmen were far away in South Wales. The Trin.o.bantes around them were quite subdued. The Iceni, to the eastward, owed and paid tribute to Rome through their Prince Prasutagus. The luxury of Neronian Rome was repeated no doubt, on a small scale, in the distant and careless colony.

In A.D. 61 came the ill-treatment of Boadicea, the widow of Prasutagus, already recorded, and the revolt of the Iceni under her leadership. Then, the moment being well chosen, for the Governor was away as before stated, the colonists had bitter cause to rue their previous indolence, for the colony was quite defenceless. As we have seen before, Boadicea and her Britons enjoyed a short-lived but very complete revenge. Dion, indeed, goes into details, making out the Britons to have been, if possible, rather worse than Bashi Bazouks, as painted by the atrocity-monger. The ultimate result, of course, was that the Iceni were wiped out of existence, and the chances are that the Trin.o.bantes also felt the strong wrath of Suetonius.

The steed having been stolen and recaptured, the stable door was locked, so to speak, once and for ever. That is to say, the walls of Colchester were built with such strength that no rising of the kind was likely to succeed again; and that is why in Colchester we have the finest and most complete Roman walls to be found in the kingdom.

Colchester is rich in Roman relics also, to be found stored in museums, and in the form of Roman bricks and tiles built into the walls of the Norman keep to the north of the High Street, and into the ruined walls of St.

Botolph's Priory Church, to the south-east of the town. This same keep, the largest in England, was probably built by Eudo, high steward to William the Conqueror, possibly on the site of the temple of Claudius, but as to that there can be no a.s.surance. What is certain is that much Roman material was incorporated in the rubble of which the very solid walls are made; and this is natural enough when we reflect that Colchester was a real Roman colony for nearly 350 years. The most interesting objects in the Museum, which is housed in the ancient chapel of the castle, are a curious sphinx, two feet high, with the wings of a bird, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a b.i.t.c.h, the head of a woman, and the paws of a lion, squatting over the lacerated carcase of its human prey; the famous Colchester vase and a bust of Caligula, and there have been a number of smaller "finds." Colchester is no doubt derived from _Colonia_ and _castrum_, but it has a legendary connection with King Cole of happy memory, and the princ.i.p.al bastion in Balcon Lane is still known as Colking's Castle. The theory of the Britons, to summarize first and to quote later a _Quarterly_ Reviewer, was that the descendants of Cun.o.belin continued in Colchester under the Romans, and that one of them was Coilus, _alias_ Cole, the same music and liquor-loving potentate who called for his pipe a good many centuries before the uses of the soothing herb were known in this country; of course, his pipe may have been an instrument of so-called music. After the usurpation of Carausius and his successor, Cole or Coel, Duke of Kaer-Coloin (Colchester), surrendered the island to the Romans, "in return for which service he was allowed to retain the nominal sovereignty in Britain, and has become renowned as the 'Old King Cole' of popular song. On his dying soon afterwards, the British legends went on to declare that Constantius the Senator, the representative of the Roman power on the island, received the crown of Coel, but only in virtue of marriage with his daughter Helena; and Colchester has hence enjoyed the reputation of giving birth to Constantine, the first Christian Emperor. There is no trace, however, of Constantius having been in Britain at all before the year 296, at which time his son was twenty-four years old; and the most credible writers a.s.sert that his consort was not a Briton, but a Bithynian.

We leave the good citizens of Colchester in possession of their arms 'a cross intagled between four crowns,' in token of Helena's invention of the Cross of Christ; but we cannot allow that they have any historical t.i.tle to them."

How others may feel in a matter of this kind it is not for me to say, but in me the serene air of superiority with which the ultra-learned brush away a tradition usually excites a suspicion, not wholly dissociated from a desire, that they may be wrong. "The most credible writers" of the _Quarterly_ Reviewer produce no impression on me. It is the kind of expression one would expect of a writer who did not feel inclined to be at the pains of research. Equally, when a presumably learned writer in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says, under the heading "Constantine," "a later tradition, adopted with characteristic credulity by Geoffrey of Monmouth, that Helena was the daughter of a British king, is a pure invention," I reflect that a.s.sertion is not argument, although it often pa.s.ses for such.

After all, this same contemptuous writer can but tell us that Constantine was born in 274 to Constantius and Helena, "the wife of obscure origin (daughter of a _stabularia_, or innkeeper, according to St. Ambrose), whom her husband was compelled to repudiate on attaining the dignity of Caesar."

And when "Helena" is referred to, we find another learned author saying that of her nationality nothing certain is known. Again, the statement that there is no trace of Constantius ever having been in Britain before 296 (at which time, by the way, Constantine was twenty-two, not twenty-four), does not satisfy the court. In 273, the year in which the wanderings of the father of Constantine would be material, Constantius Flavius Valerius was but a young soldier, of Dalmatian origin, in whom n.o.body yet recognized the future Emperor. He was twenty-three years of age, or thereabouts, for so little is known of his early life that the exact year even of his birth is unknown. It was not until nearly twenty years later that, having distinguished himself in Dalmatia, he was adopted and appointed Caesar by Maximian. There was no reason in life why he should not have gone to Britain without attracting notice at the age of twenty-three, every reason why, if he did so, he should visit the flourishing, comfortable, and very accessible colony on the banks of the Colne. There he certainly did not find Coel, or Cole, a reigning sovereign, but he might very possibly have found a "merry old soul" of an innkeeper, who vowed that he was descended from Cun.o.belin, and possessed a charming daughter.

It is not suggested that these things actually happened, but it is most distinctly suggested that, unless the learned can trace the wanderings of the father of Constantine all through 273 and show that he was not in Britain, to say there is no trace of his having been in Britain before 296 is entirely beside the question. Here we have an example of a frequent kind of historical incapacity, that of failing to realize the life of the past.

The dashing young officer might, in fact, have been in Colchester very easily, and if he succ.u.mbed to the charms of the inn-keeper's daughter, the event was not of a kind contrary to human experience. It is for the sceptic to prove an alibi if he desires to upset tradition. Helena may, then, have been the daughter of a Colchester innkeeper, she was certainly the mother of Constantine. Equally certainly, when her son became Emperor, she took a great interest in Britain, which tends to show that she may have been British by birth. It is true that cities in Syria and Bithynia were named Helenopolis after her, and this might be cited in favour of her Bithynian origin, only it could not be more in favour of one than the other, since she could not have been born in two places.

Here let a little confession and explanation be made. The _Quarterly_ Reviewer's statement that the arms of Colchester might be left to it "in token of Helena's invention of the cross of Christ," left me quite in the dark; and the darkness was dispelled in the most commonplace way by reference to books. Helena did not invent the cross of Christ, in one sense of the word, because the Romans had done so before her time. But, according to tradition, she made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and found there the Holy Sepulchre and the true cross of Christ. That is a tradition which I do not attempt to justify, or to criticize beyond saying that the pilgrimage would really be an easy one for the mother of a powerful Emperor who was absolute in Jerusalem, and that the fabric might easily have been sound in Helena's time.

Of the siege of Colchester during the Rebellion, and of the cruel vengeance exacted by Fairfax, under the relentless influence of Ireton, on Lucas and Lisle, mention has been made at an earlier point, but at the moment of mention I was not aware that the populace of Colchester, like that of most of East Anglia, was essentially in sympathy with the Parliament, and had helped its cause over and over again. It was the necessity of war that drove the Royalists--"undaunted Capel" was of their number too--into Colchester, and it may well be that through familiarity with the place Lucas was enabled to make exceptionally capable use of the outlines of the town for purposes of defence. For the Lucases were tenants in fee of the Abbey of St. John, the gate of which still remains, restored it is true.

"The last abbot," says Murray, "was hanged at his own gate for contumacy in refusing to acknowledge the Royal Supremacy." The last owner, whose ancestors had come in by purchase and not by force, faced death hard by with equal resolution and cheerfulness for the cause which he held dear.

The defence had been a gallant but a hopeless enterprise. Reduced to the last extremity for lack of provisions, "after feeding on the vilest aliment," worn out by hunger and desperate sallies, surrounded by a hostile population, the leaders must indeed have been weary of life. How they lost it we know; but Ireton was not satisfied with the blood of the leaders. The common soldiers were dispatched to the American plantations, were in fact converted into white slaves by the champions of freedom and of religion; and the unhappy townsfolk, who certainly had no wish to take the Royalist side, although it is probable that many of them felt personal regard for Lucas and his family, were mulcted in the sum of 12,000, a very large sum in those days. "Soon after, a gentleman appearing in the King's presence, clothed in mourning for Sir Charles Lucas; that humane Prince, suddenly recollecting the hard fate of his friends, paid them a tribute, which none of his own unparalleled misfortunes ever extorted from him; He dissolved into a flood of tears." These words, with their peculiar punctuation and their copious capitals, are those not of the stately and partisan Clarendon but of David Hume, whom Adam Smith considered "as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."

_Leviore plectro._ No wise man will go to Colchester without sampling the oysters, for which Colchester has been famous since it was Camulodunum.

They are traditionally the best in the world, although perhaps something may be urged in favour of the Marennes of France (but the green colour is somewhat against them), or of the giant oysters of New Zealand, which were unknown, as New Zealand was, when the tradition of Colchester natives was already ancient.

Our Ipswich oysters most likely came from the celebrated layings in the Colne, so there was no heresy in singing their praises. Many another place, and Whitstable above all others, is famous for its oysters, but only at Colchester are the layings the property of the Corporate body, only on the Colne is the development of our old friend the "succulent bivalve"

officially watched from the time when it is no bigger than "a drop from a tallow candle" to that at which it conforms to the dimensions of the munic.i.p.al model in silver. Only at Colchester is it eaten, or are they eaten, with a just combination of civic ceremony and appreciative abandon.

Colchester oysters, indeed, have but one drawback. They are not, in these days of rapid transport, so cheap as some epicures of scanty purse might desire. For that matter good oysters are seldom to be found at a moderate price in the old world. Australia is the oyster-lover's paradise. There, in any little bay, rock-oysters may be broken off in blocks, opened, and eaten out of hand; and one orders them not by the dozen, but by the plate, which holds eighteen or twenty, at the modest price of one shilling.

Oysters were a distinct consolation during these manoeuvres--be it hoped the military character of the starting point has not pa.s.sed out of mind--to those officers who mourned the futility and the cost of the operations by land: they were a sheer joy to those who were indifferent on the military question. But there were manoeuvres all the same, and they involved many journeys by motor-car and by bicycle to all parts of the surrounding district. The first journey I took by bicycle, fairly early in the morning, to Clacton. A broiling sun poured down upon roads of yielding surface, soaked by a night's rain, and one gained a respect for the little hills which was completely lost in the Lanchester later. They are hills, though, without doubt, and a car of low power would feel them. The descent from the centre of Colchester is sharp, the ascent in returning necessarily the same, and the termination of Wivenhoe spells hill as plainly as Plymouth "Hoe" does, and for the same etymological reason. It is, in fact, a country of pretty little hills, abundantly wooded, until the flat land by the sea-coast is reached. It is to be feared that no halt was made on this or any other occasion to notice the Roman tiles built into the wall of the church at Wivenhoe. In the roadside scenery, however, an eye fresh from Berkshire observed one pleasing characteristic appearing to be singular.

The hedgerow trees were, for the most part, elms, not very tall, for no tree grows to a stately height near the sea in our islands, but very much more beautiful than the loftier elms of Berkshire, save those planted for ornament, in Windsor Park for example. These low elms spread their welcome shade--true, it keeps the surface damp and renders road-preservation difficult--well over the way from either side. There was no doubt they looked better than the ordinary Berkshire elm that, newly mutilated, is bare as a ship's mast for thirty or forty or fifty feet, and has a mere tuft at the top like birch broom, or, clipped a year or two ago, supports the same birch broom upon an apparently solid and most disproportionately thick column of opaque green. The patulous elms, too, exercised their little influence on the manoeuvres, but before explaining it, let the word "patulous," suggested by memory of the first line of Virgil, and incontinently looked for in a dictionary, be justified. It is not merely a botanical term, nor of my coinage. No less a poet than P. Robinson, in no less famous a poem than "Under the Sun," wrote, "The patulous teak, with its great leathern leaves." Perhaps P. Robinson was not famous; it may be noticed that courage is wanting to dub him Peter, Paul, or even Percival; and "Under the Sun" may have been a very minor poem by a quite insignificant writer; but P. Robinson at least knew where to go for a word expressing his exact meaning, and mine, better than any other in the English language. The patulous elms, then, exercised their influence on the manoeuvres. How? Some days later, when General French, not having burned his ships, was in full retreat for them his enemy, General Wynne, sent up a balloon to spy out his movements and those of his troops. Espying that balloon at a distance of some ten miles, we gave chase in the Lanchester and came up to it, just after it had been brought down to earth in the centre of one of the strange crops to be found in this part of Ess.e.x. (It was a crop, as it turned out, of bird-seed, and marked as out of bounds, but balloons as they descend know no law.) The officer of Royal Engineers had been up 1000 feet or more in the balloon; he had scanned the whole country with field-gla.s.ses from a bird's-eye point of view. The country between him and the sea, Layer de la Haye, Layer Breton and the vicinity--he was at Tiptree of jam fame--was full of French's soldiery.

They were marching in column of route within half a mile of him. Yet, by reason of the patulous elms, he had seen nothing of them. We had; but we were non-combatants and neutral, and therefore silent.

After Wivenhoe, the route to Clacton-on-Sea chosen that day, through Thorrington and Great Clacton, seemed dull and was very flat. But Clacton-on-Sea was a remarkable sight then, and is always, during the season, a sight quite _sui generis_. Some of the things witnessed that day will probably never be seen again. The long line of transports and cruisers lying a couple of miles out and extending from Great Holland to Clacton, the horse-boats being towed ash.o.r.e, were both quite exceptional. Indeed, the horse-boats will certainly never reappear at Clacton or anywhere else, for a storm broke most of them up a day or two later, and the wreckage was sold by auction on the spot. Nor again, most likely, shall we see the Duke of Connaught and his General Staff, and a brilliant group of foreign attaches, naval and military, standing on Clacton beach amidst a seething crowd of East End trippers, and mountebanks, and n.i.g.g.e.r minstrels, and sh.e.l.l-fish vendors. But Clacton-on-Sea and its casual visitors were true to themselves none the less, and between them they made a quite wonderful spectacle, needing to be seen by the uninitiated before it could be realized, and certainly worth realizing by any easy-going student of human nature.

My expeditions to Clacton-on-Sea were not taken by me in the capacity of motorist simply; indeed, the first of them was made on a bicycle, and the others, for there were several more to follow, in a car, when my knowledge of motoring was embryonic. Yet I found in Clacton-on-Sea one of that peculiar cla.s.s of places which he who follows what may be called public motoring learns to know through the motor-car, and would certainly not have learned to know in any other way. Blackpool is another such place, visited because in several successive years it has broken out into "speed trials,"

and Douglas in the Isle of Man is another, to which motorists go by reason of the Tourist Trophy Race. Blackpool and Douglas are grander in their kind than Clacton. They have more Winter Gardens--I am not sure that Clacton boasts any at all--huge dancing-rooms, constructed and conducted by munic.i.p.al enterprise, in which the dancing is marked by a punctilious decorum and, it may be added, by an excellence of execution, which would put the most famous ball-rooms in London to shame. But all three have two points in common. Every prospect, except that of the houses and public buildings, pleases. At each the sea gleams in the sun or crashes on the beach as the case may be. Each has its parade, esplanade, promenade, call it what you will; and this is crowded, as the beach is also, in the season of the year. At Clacton-on-Sea a few of the buildings are tolerable to the eye, and there is one hotel, not the most pretentious of them, which is more than endurable to look at, and quite reasonably comfortable. It stands facing the sea, and its broad veranda is screened by a dense fig-tree carefully trained. A better vantage ground for a weary wayfarer need not be desired.

From that cool veranda, reflecting that it is every whit as comfortable to sit under somebody else's fig-tree as under one's own, I looked on the pa.s.sing and re-pa.s.sing crowd on the parade, like Dido gazing from her watch-tower at the departing ships of aeneas, but in a very different mood.

In truth the spectacle was both amusing and perplexing. At first sight it seemed for all the world as if hundreds, and even thousands, of smart ladies, of the kind one sees at Ascot or even at Goodwood, had cast aside all prejudices of position, and were consorting with men whom the conventions of society a.s.sign to a lower rank. Dresses and sunshades and hats were all spotlessly clean, colours were subdued and delicate. Closer inspection would no doubt have revealed to the trained eye of a woman that the frocks were ill-made and badly "hung," that the materials were cheap, which is bad, and that they looked cheap, which is worse. To a man it revealed nothing of this, nothing more at first than a vast number of girls, walking well, and some of them quite pretty, in the company of young fellows who, worthy representatives of an excellent cla.s.s as they may have been, were clearly not gentlemen. Their dress alone betrayed that, not by dint of shabbiness, but rather by its excessive and ill-judged smartness.

Then voices became clear; the tw.a.n.g of the male and female c.o.c.kney filled the air as the so-called music of a Jew's-harp, or of an orchestra of Jew's-harps; and finally a closer view revealed the gruesome fact that these dainty creatures were consuming periwinkles, with the aid of a pin, as they walked, were crunching shrimps between their pearly teeth, and getting rid of the superfluous integument by--well, by the usual process of the East End of London, without any help from the hand; in fact, by pure propulsion from pouting lips. Half of the mystery was solved. The elegant nymphs of Clacton-on-Sea were simply East End girls who had made the cheap trip by sea. But the mystery of their attire remained, was indeed doubled.

Where were the "fevvers," the flowing ostrich plumes of many hues, without which the traditional girl of the East End reckons herself disgraced?

Whence had the far more pleasing dresses come? Inquiry made, not of those who wore them, since their powers of repartee are proverbial, elicited the suggestion that all this pretty finery was hired for the day from one or other of the many big drapers at the East End. If so, it can only be said that the taste shown was, on the whole, excellent, and the general effect very good and pleasing. So really was the spectacle. Laughing and talking, eating endless sh.e.l.l-fish, and consuming really very little alcoholic liquor, these young folks strutted and preened themselves in the sun all the livelong day. They even found pennies, hard earned no doubt, to bestow upon the Pierrots and the n.i.g.g.e.r-minstrels who a.s.saulted the ear on all sides. Of noise and jesting there was no end, of disorder no beginning.

Even when, on a later occasion, I slept at Clacton for a night or two to watch the work of re-embarkation, which was as interesting as the manoeuvres were silly, the sounds of revelry by night were few and far between. In fact, Clacton serves its patrons well, and they conduct themselves merrily and yet decently in it. It is a sight well worth seeing, as Blackpool and Douglas are also, once in a while. It might even serve to soothe some of the sympathetic anguish of those who mourn over the monotonous lives of the poor. But this is not to say that, for quiet folk who do not wish to take their pleasure in the East End way, Clacton-on-Sea is a desirable place in which to spend a summer holiday. It is worth while to drive there from Colchester for luncheon, and that is all.

Fortune and the good nature of a newly made friend favoured me. The transports were discharging horse and foot simultaneously in a long line extending from Clacton, indeed almost from St. Osyth, to a point beyond Great Holland to the north-east. The very idea of a bicycle was repugnant to me when, as luck would have it, I encountered another correspondent who had a Napier at his disposal. Off we whirred, along conventional seaside roads, and up, from the flat ground whereon Clacton-on-Sea stands, climbing a sensible but not difficult acclivity until we had almost reached Great Holland. A little farther on, but unvisited, was Walton-on-the-Naze, another of those parts of the east coast which have suffered from the relentless greed of the sea. Nay, in times past, the sea had gone very near to sacrilege, for it has devoured the lands with which a prebend of St.

Paul's was endowed. But save for him who desires fossils, and coprolites especially, the most uninteresting of all fossils, which may be found in abundance in the cliff, a visit to Walton is not recommended. Walton may be styled Walton-le-Soken, and Kirkby and Thorpe hard by are also finished off by "le-Soken." The expression has its legal and historical interest, for it shows that the lords of each possessed the power of "sac and soc," and, in fact, a power of holding special courts. But this does not serve to make the places themselves at all interesting and, to put it bluntly, this country by the sea in these parts is not attractive. The rest of our day's drive, before we returned to Colchester--the bicycle, I may say, remained at Clacton unmourned until the time came for leaving the district--took us near to a series of bivouacs, of no permanent interest, and as far as St.

Osyth, which lies on the opposite side to Brightlingsea of a little tributary of the Colne, crossed by a ferry. Time was abundant, and it has been matter for frequent regret since that, merely through ignorance of that which was close at hand, I missed seeing the obviously interesting remains of the Priory, in its restored form, and the church, said to date back to St. Osyth herself, who was the wife of Suthred, King of the East Angles. When Suthred flourished I know no more than I do any reason why others should miss that which I, having then no project of this kind formed, omitted. Brightlingsea over the ferry is, by all accounts, not worth a visit, although it was one of the Cinque Ports.

So, as a matter of strict narrative, back I fared that evening to the temporary home at the "Red Lion" and, as has been stated previously, I saw something of the country in the immediate vicinity of Colchester to the south-east by east, and of our soldiery, early the next morning. Later in the day--for a day beginning at 4 a.m. is not short--there was abundant opportunity for making preliminary study of Colchester, and during my stay an immense number of places were seen and many routes were traversed at one time or another. The places were seen and the routes were taken as the tide of battle rolled, or as it was expected to roll, which did not always come to the same thing; but that was an order of visitation dictated by outside circ.u.mstances, and not to be recommended to those who are quite at liberty to follow their own fancy. So, during a leisurely drive of a morning and an afternoon, we will go in the spirit to a number of places, every one of which has been inspected from a motor-car, although not necessarily in the order named.

Between the estuaries of the Colne and the Stour lies a peninsula, part of which has already been treated, and the rest of it is now our subject. It is by no means a mountainous tract. According to a coloured contour map lying before me no single eminence in it is more than two hundred and fifty feet above the sea-level; but it would be a grave mistake to put down this part of Ess.e.x as a flat country. It is, in fact, undulating, and if, to carry on the metaphor, none of the waves are Atlantic rollers, a good many of them are in the nature of short and choppy seas. The Lanchester, which there need be the less hesitation in praising in that the makers in all probability would not construct or deliver its sister machine now, made merry with most of these hills, but of the other cars, of which the name was legion in those days of sham-fighting, we pa.s.sed many crawling up steep little ascents and many others at a standstill. One such hill, at least, we encounter in this drive, between Ardleigh and Manningtree, where the gradient is 1 in 13; hardly a mere nothing even from the standpoint of 1906, but not long since quite worthy to be regarded as a serious obstacle.

Moreover the trees are abundant, the hedges thick and well kept, the land highly cultivated, and the whole is entertaining and restful to the eye, although the curvatures of the roads and the screening hedges call for the exercise of exact care in driving.

We start then from Colchester at such time in the morning as may seem good, and ask for the Ardleigh road. Five miles take us to Ardleigh, and here we come at once upon the industry which has the indirect effect of giving to the scenery of Ess.e.x peculiar characteristics of detail. Between Ardleigh and Dedham--Constable's Dedham--lies the ground cultivated for special purposes by Messrs. Carter, of Holborn, of whom it is but plain truth to say that they are among the most prominent seed-growers of this country.

Many of my little tours in Ess.e.x were made in company with an officer whose duty it had been to mark with flags fields which the foot of the soldier must not trample upon, whose duty it would be afterwards to a.s.sess the compensation to be given to farmers for damage done. One of our early conversations ran somewhat to this effect:

_Author._ "It seems to me you might save a lot of expense next time by placing flags where the troops may go, not in the forbidden ground. You would not need nearly so many flags. How on earth are troops marching along this road to learn anything? No sooner have they thrown out men to feel their way for them and to protect them from being taken in flank, than the men must come back to the road to avoid a patch of common swedes or mangels."

_Compensation Officer._ "Yes, it looks like that; but you must remember these are not ordinary swedes or mangles."

_Author._ "What do you mean? They look pretty commonplace. We should think nothing of walking through roots as good, or better, after partridges at home."

_Compensation Officer._ "Of course we should; but I tell you these are not ordinary roots. They are all being grown for seed; they may be choice kinds produced, for all I know, as the result of years of experiment. You never know what you may come upon next in this seed-growing country. You will find whole fields of Delphinium, Dahlia, Penstemon, Lupin, almost any flowering plant, to say nothing of crops of strange plants, whose very appearance is unknown to you."

_Author._ "Did the great men of the War Office know all this when they decided to hold manoeuvres here? If so, it seems to me, they made a foolish choice of their ground, because, while the value of the training is reduced by the necessary cramping of movement, the compensation payable is sure to be out of all reason."

And the Compensation Officer answered never a word, for the purposes of this book, but probably he thought the more. His description of the country was justified abundantly. The very gra.s.s might be, very likely was, being grown for special lawn seed, and, over and over again, one pa.s.sed acres of early autumnal flowers in full bloom, which set an eager gardener (for man may be gardener and motorist) thinking of additions to be made to his own distant plot. On we fared, breasting that hill of 1 in 13, and in 2-3/4 miles we are at Manningtree. Now, Manningtree is ancient, and it has a history.

"Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted _Manningtree_ ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years?"

Thus, in the first part of _King Henry IV_ (Act ii. scene 4), does Harry of Monmouth, speaking of Falstaff, but himself in the character of his own father, address himself. Argal, the cattle sold at Manningtree Fair had a great name even in Shakespeare's day. Manningtree also was, as may be seen from a memorial slab in the church, connected with Thomas Tusser, the agricultural poet of the sixteenth century, who, after being educated at King's College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, rejected music, for which he had been trained, for farming on the banks of the Stour. This was "an employment," says a superior person, "which he seems to have regarded as combining the chief essentials of human felicity." Well, there are worse occupations than farming, and the production of indifferent music is one of them. It is pleasant to muse over Tusser's tablet at Manningtree, to reflect that he probably was a practical and improving farmer, else a tablet would hardly have been erected at Manningtree in memory of a man who was buried at St. Paul's, and to hope that to him, at least in part, was due that fame of the Manningtree oxen which made Shakespeare select them as typical. That Shakespeare and Tusser ever met in the flesh is unlikely, for Tusser died in 1580, and even that strange tribe the Baconians admit that Shakespeare was born in 1564 and remained at Stratford Grammar School until he was fifteen. Less creditably connected with Manningtree was Matthew Hopkins, the "witchfinder," appointed as such by Parliament in 1644--by the Parliament of Westminster presumably, not by that of Oxford, for Charles held a Parliament at Oxford in that year--and celebrated in _Hudibras_. His was the fate of Phalaris, for at last, having "hanged three-score of them in a shire," he was tried in the same brutal fashion which he had applied to others, and perished in like fashion. We have no right, after quite modern experience in Ireland, to be very contemptuous towards our forefathers in respect of their belief in witches; but still it is a little startling to be compelled to realize that they set Hopkins and his fellow-commissioners to their task in a year so full of grim realities as that of Marston Moor, of Cropredy Bridge, and of the Duke of Newcastle's departure in despair from the kingdom.

It has been well to reach Manningtree by the fairly good road from Colchester; but we must go to the westward a little, and cross the Stour, leaving Ess.e.x and our peninsula for a while if we would not miss perhaps the most precious a.s.sociation of the valley of the Stour. It is East Bergholt, the birthplace of John Constable, the miller's son, and here we are in the country which he once had the pleasure of hearing described in his presence by a complete stranger as "Constable's country." This was the more strange in that, like many another artist before him and since his day--the word "artist" is used in its widest sense--he was not appreciated at his full worth while he lived among men. A few days or a week spent in Constable's country, by painters or by those who aspire to know something of the spirit of landscape painting, are now to be regarded as time spent pleasantly, profitably, and naturally by men and women of cultivated taste; but the stranger on the Ipswich coach who said in his hearing, "This is Constable's country," was in advance of the average taste of his generation, for, although Constable was appreciated in France before those of his own race were awake to his merits, it is one of the cruel ironies of fate that, when the great landscape painter died, his studio was full of unsold pictures. His case, unlike that of Thomas Gainsborough, whom we shall meet soon, was one in which a stolid parent did his best to choke the spring of artistic spirit in its efforts to express itself in form and colour. It was also one compelling the quotation, "G.o.d fulfils Himself in many ways." He showed his leanings in early boy-hood, doubtless in the usual manner, when he was a pupil in the grammar school at Dedham, in Ess.e.x and close by--the tower of Dedham Church is a prominent object in many of his landscapes. Again, what country-bred man does not remember how, when the plumber was called in (he was usually painter and glazier too), undiluted joy was to be obtained from watching him at work, from working his divine putty into fantastic shapes, from unlicensed meddling with his brushes and paints? John Constable, too, watched his father's plumber, one Dunthune, to some purpose, and Dunthune was no ordinary plumber. He knew something of landscape painting, and is said to have inspired the boy to that habit of studying in the open air which, in all probability, stood in little need of inspiration. In this is nothing of unnatural novelty. Was not John Crome, of Norwich, apprenticed to a coach and sign-painter, or, as some have it, to a house-painter? The wonder is rather that more house-painters do not develop some measure of artistic proficiency.

Constable's father, however, had no sympathy for his son's budding genius.

The boy, leaving school early, as we reckon now, was set to the task of watching a windmill, and here was one of the many ways in which G.o.d fulfilled Himself. Compelled to study the face of the sky with minutest care, the boy acquired that intimate familiarity with it, that joy "in gleaming showers, and breezy sunshine after rain, and grey mists of summer showers" (to quote Mr. H. W. Nevinson's words in an article he has most likely forgotten), which was the basis of his fame. Fuseli might sneer at the painter of "great-coat weather," but Fuseli had the reputation of a cynical wit to keep up. Englishmen will hail Constable for all time now as the faithful translator and revealer of the inner spirit of landscape.