ourselves that the provincial mind is more enlightened? I am afraid not,
and must sorrowfully come to the conclusion that the ignorant authorities
of our country towns would be as ready as ever to demolish their old
monuments, did not their natural shrewdness teach them that, as strangers
come from all quarters of the world to view their historical remains, they
must be regarded in the light of a valuable asset. So far, they are
undoubtedly right. Let them "restore" and tear down the remaining gates
and towers and castles in the provincial towns of England, and they will
prove, in the scarcity of visitors that will follow on their Vandalism,
how valuable, in more senses than one, are the ancient ways.
Canterbury has seen a great deal of this senseless disregard for
antiquity. Six gates, as I have said, were wantonly destroyed, but the
passion for destruction did not stop here. The remains of the Norman
castle were years ago converted into a coal-hole of the local gasworks,
and are still put to that degradation; great stretches of the city walls,
with their watchtowers, were taken down for corn-mills to be built with
their materials; and, worse than all, stupidity of this kind ran riot
among the Dean and Chapter in the thirties. For seven hundred and fifty
years had Lanfranc's north-western tower of the Cathedral stood, while the
south-western had been rebuilt nearly three hundred years before. This
dissimilarity vexed those assembled holders of fat prebends and decanal
loaves and fishes, who drank port and read _The Times_, and had not a
single sensible idea in their meagre brainpans, beyond a notion that one
thing ought to match with another, and that as every Jack should have his
Jill, so also should everything else possess a pendant. How truly British!
[Illustration: WESTGATE, CANTERBURY.]
Well, if these western towers did not match, they must be made to; and so
to find an excuse for pulling down the older one. There is always some
graceless modern architect, with palm itching for five-per-cent.
commissions, who would undertake or advise anything to procure a job, and
the Dean and Chapter found such a man, who conceived Lanfranc's work to
have gone beyond repair. To this creature, Charles Austin, their own
diocesan architect, who should have been earnest to preserve, rather than
to destroy, they gave instructions for the pulling down of the Norman work
and for its replacement by an exact copy of the Perpendicular tower. The
thing was done in 1832. So little beyond repair and so sturdily strong was
that Norman tower, that it was necessary to blow it up with gunpowder. A
German invading Goth and malignant destroyer could do no more.
The work of demolition and the building of the new tower was done at a
cost of L25,000. The architect pocketed L1,250 as commission, and all who
care for architecture have lost one of the very few Norman Cathedral
towers known in England. But then, how exactly those towers match, and how
satisfied must be all good people who would sacrifice everything for the
sake of uniformity!
The main thoroughfare of Canterbury, to which the old West Gate gives
access, has undergone no little rebuilding since the days of gables and
timber fronts, and yet it retains in the aggregate much of that old-world
air for which we reasonably look in a Cathedral city. Long and narrow the
street remains; quaint are many of the buildings that line it. Across it,
under narrow bridges, flow two branches of the little river Stour.
An amusing incident belonged to the "Red Lion."
[Sidenote: THE DUC DE NIVERNAIS]
One of the most outstanding historical figures upon the Dover Road is that
no less kindly than courtly Ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais. That
cultured Frenchman was employed by his sovereign, Louis the Fifteenth, in
negotiating a Treaty of Peace which should conclude that disastrous
contest to France, the Seven Years' War. An exchange of Ambassadors was
effected between Great Britain and France; the Duke of Bedford crossing
the Channel to Calais in the early part of September, 1762, the Duc de
Nivernais voyaging to Dover, and landing there on the morning of
September 11. The elements had been unkind to him, and his passage
occupied no less than five hours; but Nivernais handed over to Captain
Ray, the commander of the _Princess Augusta_ yacht (the vessel in which he
had voyaged and suffered the most horrible pangs of sea-sickness), the sum
of one hundred guineas, to be divided among the crew. Perhaps the
unbounded gratitude with which he found himself again upon the shore--even
though it were not his native land--accounted for the magnitude of this
largesse.
The country was not eager for the peace which exhausted France desired,
and looked upon Nivernais' commission rather as an attempt to curtail the
glory which England and Englishmen were reaping on land and achieving by
sea; but the French Ambassador was received with a show of enthusiasm and
the discharge of cannon as he landed at Dover, and a crowd of shouting
countrymen cheered him as, bowing his acknowledgments of this reception,
he bowled away in a coach and six horses, accompanied by a retinue of
twelve persons.
Bowled, did I say? Nay: the motion of the ill-hung equipages of that day,
tumbling along over the wretched roads of those times, resembled little
the smooth career of bowls gliding over trimly shaven bowling-greens.
Rather should the motion be described as a series of hesitating lurches
and unexpected jolts; and this in the comparative excellence of the
highways in September!
The Ambassador had started upon his journey from Dover to London as soon
as possible after the early hour of the morning when he had landed from
the "Chops of the Channel"; but he arrived at Canterbury too late for
further progress to be made that day. Therefore he put up in the Cathedral
city, after having had the empty satisfaction, to a traveller in his
exhausted condition, of being received _en grande tenue_ by the garrison.
The "Red Lion" inn was at that time the proper place for a personage of
his quality to lie, and so the Duke with his party stayed there the night.
For that night's lodging for twelve persons, with a frugal supper in which
oysters, fowls, boiled mutton, poached eggs, and fried whiting figure, the
landlord of the "Red Lion" presented an account of over L44. This truly
grand bill has been preserved, not, let us hope, for the emulation of
other hotel-keepers, but by way of a "terrible example." Here it is:--
L _s._ _d._
Tea, coffee, and chocolate 1 4 0
Supper for self and servants 15 10 0
Bread and beer 3 0 0
Fruit 2 15 0
Wine and punch 10 8 8
Wax candles and charcoal 3 0 0
Broken glass and china 2 10 0
Lodging 1 7 0
Tea, coffee, and chocolate 2 0 0
Chaise and horses for the next stage 2 16 0
------------
44 10 8
The Duke paid his account without a murmur, only remarking that innkeepers
at this rate should soon grow rich; but it was, doubtless, with great
relief that he left Canterbury for Rochester, where he dined the next day
for three guineas.
News of this extraordinary bill was soon spread all over England. It was
printed in the newspapers amid other marvels, disasters, and atrocities,
and mine host of the "Red Lion," like Byron, woke up one morning to find
himself famous. He would probably have preferred his native obscurity to
the fierce light of publicity that beat upon him; for the country
gentlemen, scandalized at his rapacity, boycotted his inn, and his brother
innkeepers of Canterbury disowned him. The unfortunate man wrote to the
_St. James's Chronicle_, endeavouring to justify himself, and complaining
bitterly of the harm that had been wrought to his business by the constant
billeting of soldiers upon him. But it was in vain to protest, and so
bitter was the feeling against him that his trade fell off, and he was
ruined in six months.
[Illustration: THE DUC DE NIVERNAIS.]
Meanwhile, the Duc de Nivernais was negotiating for peace at the Court of
Saint James's; and, what with the difficulties of diplomacy and the
rigours of the climate, he passed but a miserable time. "This country," he
wrote, "is a cruel country for negotiation; one needs to have a body and a
spirit of iron," and how little like iron was his frame may perhaps be
judged from this portraiture of him, which shows a wistful-looking,
hollow-cheeked elderly man, with nose and chin and eyes unnaturally
prominent. The caricaturists took a mean advantage of his phenomenal
leanness, and called him the "Duke of Barebones," and a Court witling made
the cruel jest that "the French had sent over the preliminaries of an
ambassador to conclude the preliminaries of a peace." He eventually _did_
conclude a peace, and, returning to Dover, left (how thankfully!) for
France on May 22, 1763. Let us hope that, after all his trials with the
English hotel-keepers and the English climate, he experienced a better
passage across the Channel than when he first crossed it.
XXXV
[Sidenote: HENRY THE EIGHTH]
Not all visitors to Canterbury were so evilly entreated as the Duc de
Nivernais. Indeed, the city has been remarkable rather for its lavish and
abounding hospitality than for any attempted over-reaching of the
stranger. But since those strangers were chiefly Kings and Emperors, and
great personages of that kind, perhaps it is little to be wondered at that
the citizens, to say nothing of those greedy time-servers, the Priors and
monks of Christ Church Priory and the Priory of Saint Augustine, rendered
to those great ones of the earth the most abject suit and service. Almost
every English sovereign has been here at some time or another, and many a
foreign potentate besides. Henry the Second, it is true, walked into the
city, barefoot, from Harbledown, and so to the Cathedral, doing abject
penance for the murder of Becket, four years previously, and it seems to
be equally true that as he proceeded to Becket's shrine he was scourged by
the monks on his bare back and shoulders with knotted cords; but I think
they would have laid on harder and with a better will had the penitent not
been of so exalted a station. In short, I have little faith in the
reported rigours of that punishment. A few years later came Henry's son,
Richard Lion Heart, enlarged from his foreign prison. He landed at the
port of Sandwich, and walked barefoot into Canterbury--so inimical was
Saint Thomas to shoe-leather. Edward the First was pious enough to lay the
Crown of Scotland before the Saint's shrine, and another Edward--the Black
Prince--came here, in all humility, with the captive King of France.
Another warrior, as brave and as ill-fated--Henry the Fifth--paid his
devoirs to Becket as he came up the road, fresh from his glorious French
campaigns. Another Henry, the Eighth and last of his name, bowed before
the shrine in 1520, in company with the Emperor Charles the Fifth. On that
occasion he was as fervent a worshipper as could well be desired, and as
sincere as it is possible for a man to be who is at the same time a King
and half a Welshman. No thoughts of spoliation of the Church then passed
his mind. Indeed, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the time made much of
his visit, which seems to have been celebrated in a more than royal
manner, if we may trust the chroniclers.
From Dover the two monarchs rode into Canterbury, preceded by Wolsey, and
followed by a long procession of knights and esquires, men-at-arms and
archers. The clergy, dressed in all the splendour of which the Romish
Church is capable, thronged the streets to welcome the King, and knew as
little about the calamities presently to befall them as fat geese suspect
the significance of Michaelmas Day. Archbishop Warham welcomed the
sovereigns to the Cathedral, and probably thought with a secret joy upon
the ways of Providence which had removed Prince Arthur from this world to
place his younger brother, Henry, upon the throne. For, had Prince Arthur
lived to be King of England, the man whom we know as Henry the Eighth
would have been Archbishop of Canterbury. That was the career designed for
him, and, had Prince Arthur not died, how very differently things might
have been fashioned!
Archbishop Warham could, as it happened, afford to look upon the ways of
Providence with approval, for these events had made him Primate, and he
celebrated his accession to the Primacy with a banquet whose details seem
to belong to the _Arabian Nights_ rather than to sober history. Courses
innumerable (and nasty, too, according to modern ideas) graced the festive
board on this occasion, and the guests who partook of them made pigs of
themselves over what the contemporary historian of these things calls the
"subtylties" that bulked so largely at the feast. To the Duke of
Buckingham, the high steward, fell the honour, or the duty, of serving the
Archbishop with his own hands; and, partly in recognition of his services,
and partly, no doubt, in consideration of his being so great a gourmand,
he was accorded the privilege of staying three days at the new
Archbishop's nearest manor, in order that he might be bled. That seems to
have been the necessary performance after partaking of too many
"subtylties."
But all this while I have been keeping His Most Christian Majesty, Henry
the Eighth, waiting; and, having done so, it is well for me I am not his
contemporary, for men did things so derogatory to his dignity only at the
peril of losing their heads.
Well, eighteen years later, the King, who had knelt before Becket's bones,
was engaged in uprooting the ancient faith, and his fury was naturally
felt more acutely here, on this the most sacred spot of English soil.
Becket was proclaimed a traitor, and in April, 1538, the martyr, dead
three hundred and sixty-eight years, was summoned to appear in Court to
show reason why his shrine should not be destroyed and his name blotted
out from the records of the English Church. Thirty days were allowed
"Thomas Becket" (thus the Royal Proclamation styled him, without title or
handle of any sort to his name) to appear, and when he failed to present
himself, sentence was pronounced against him by default. The sentence was
that his bones should be burnt and scattered to the winds; a poor and
inadequate kind of revenge. More to the point, perhaps, was the spoliation
of the shrine of the Blessed Thomas; for the Royal Commissioners sent to
strip it, loaded twenty-six carts with the valuables that had accumulated
here during all those centuries, in addition to two coffers of jewels and
gold containing the ransom of kings.
[Sidenote: THE "REGALE" RUBY]
The King kept some of the jewels for his own personal use. Louis the
Seventh of France had, a few years after the murder of Becket, visited the
Shrine of St. Thomas, and had left there a magnificent ruby. Not merely
had he left it; for the ruby--the "Regale of France," it was called--left
itself, so to speak. In point of fact, it had been suggested to the French
king that he should present that magnificent stone to the Shrine, and he
was objecting to do so, when the great ruby leapt from the ring he was
wearing and affixed itself to the Saint's reliquary, where it remained
"shining so brightly that it was impossible to look steadily at it."
So the visitor went away without that gorgeous stone, marvelling greatly,
as we do, some seven hundred and fifty years after the event.
The ruby, indifferently described as being "as large as a hen's egg," and
"as large as a man's thumb-nail," was appropriated by Henry the Eighth.
Thus did Henry repay the magnificent hospitality extended him years before
at Canterbury. The city saw but little of Royalty for many years
afterwards; and, indeed, it was not until Charles the First came here to
be married in the Cathedral that any great State function revived its past
glories. Then the display made was worthy of local traditions. Feasting
and general jollity prevailed while the newly-wed King and Queen remained
in the city. A few years later, when loyalty was the passion of only a
minority and the King was warring with the Parliament, the Dover Road and
Canterbury witnessed a strange journey. None knew of it, for the matter
was secret. It was, in fact, the smuggling out of the country of the
little Princess Henrietta, away from the custody of the King's enemies.
The French tutor of the Princess afterwards told the story of this escape.
The Countess of Dalkeith was in charge of the little girl at Oatlands, and
resolved at all hazards to restore her to her mother in France. Disguising
herself, this tall and elegant body, one of the handsome Villiers family,
acted the part of a poor French servant, little better than a beggar. She
even fitted herself with a hump, and, carrying a bundle of linen, and with
the Princess dressed in rags, set out by road for Dover, with the girl on
her back, in the character of her little boy Pierre.
On the road, we are told, the Princess indignantly tried to tell everyone
she was not "Pierre," but the Princess. Fortunately, no one understood,
and these strange travellers arrived safely at Dover and crossed to
Calais.
The adventure seems incredible when we consider that the Princess
Henrietta Maria was born June 16, 1644, and that this journey to Dover is
stated to have taken place towards the end of July, 1646. We have to ask
ourselves, "Could a child of two years and a little over one month,
understand and talk like that?" But the source of the story has been
noted; and we are to recollect, as to the authentic date of the adventure,
that Edmund Waller, the courtly poet, on New Year's Day, 1647, presented
the Queen, then in Paris, with a poem on the subject, in which the
Countess of Dalkeith's exploit is referred to:--
The faultless nymph, changing her faultless shape
Becomes unhandsome, handsomely to 'scape.
Canterbury's rejoicings were not renewed until after the Commonwealth had
come and run its course, and the Stuarts were free once more to show their
curious facility for rendering their House unpopular.
And after the romantic times of that unfortunate family come the stolid
annals of Dutch William, Anne, and the unimaginative Georges--a line of
sovereigns for whom enthusiasm was impossible. Mean in their vices and
contemptible in their virtues, they lived their lives and reigned over
England, and posted along the Dover Road on their way to or from beloved
Hanover; and no man's heart beat the faster for their coming, and none
sorrowed overmuch for their going. All the Georges, and William the
Fourth, too, were here, I believe, and in their train came the lean
Keilmanseggs, the fleshly Schwellenbergs, and a variety of greasy Germans,
fresh from the terrible voyage over sea; but no one cares in the least
either where they went or whither they did not go.
[Sidenote: OLD-TIME TRAVELLERS]
But they all travelled with what we must now consider a snail's pace. The
wealthiest, the most powerful, could go no faster than horses managed to
drag them. When Sir Robert Peel was summoned in haste from Rome by William
the Fourth to form a Ministry in 1834, he travelled full speed to London,
and the journey took him just within a fortnight. He noted in his journal
that he accomplished it in exactly the same time as the Emperor Hadrian
had done seventeen hundred years before him. The means of travel at the
disposal of both statesmen were identical--post horses.
Another Royal visitor (of a much later date indeed) discovered the "chops
of the Channel" to be no respectors of personages. In fact, His Serene
Highness Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was come across the water
to wed his Cousin, Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland ("Empress
of India" was yet in the loom of the future), found his serenity as much
disturbed by the roughness of his passage as falls to the lot of most bad
sailors, of whatever social stratum. He was, in short, very ill, and
unable to proceed any farther that day. On the morrow, Friday, February 7,
1840, he resumed his journey to London, by road, of course, for the
railways that serve Dover (and serve it badly, too!) had not as yet been
built.
Starting about midday, the father of our future kings reached Canterbury
at two o'clock. The inevitable Address was, it is surely scarcely
necessary to add, immediately forthcoming, to which the Prince as
inevitably "replied graciously"; afterwards attending service in the
Cathedral, where, as he could have understood but little of the service,
he must have been supremely bored. The Cathedral was thronged with crowds
who came not so much in order to pray as to peep at the Princeling whom
the young Queen had delighted to honour.
The Prince slept at Canterbury that night, and left, with his suite, _en
route_ for Chatham at half-past nine the next morning, pursued by a body
of clergymen with an Address. Alarmed at this appalling eagerness on the
part of servile Britons to read lengthy orations of which he understood
not a word, the Prince gave directions for the cavalcade to drive faster,
and so they swept on through Chatham and Rochester, without stopping to
hear what the Mayors and Corporations of those places had to say. Those
deadly Addresses were, in fact, "taken as read," and the Mayors, Aldermen
and others returned home with their ridiculous parchments, wiser, and, it
is to be feared, not only sadder, but less loyal men.
At Dartford, the bridegroom-elect was met by one of the Queen's carriages,
and he thereupon changed from his travelling chariot to enter London in
some degree of State. At New Cross an escort of the 14th Dragoons was
waiting, and, instead of proceeding along the classic Old Kent Road, and
so to the traditional entrance to London by London Bridge, he went to town
by way of romantic Peckham and idyllic Camberwell, ending his journey at
that dream of architectural beauty, Buckingham Palace. What followed: How
the _Times_ waxed violent and denunciatory of Lord Melbourne and the
frivolous _entourage_ with which he had surrounded the Queen: how that
paper preached homilies, and how all the others, nearly without exception,
gushed fulsome nonsense, it is not the business of the present historian
to set forth. All he has to do is to remark that with this event closes
the history of Royal processions along the Dover Road.
The hilly road to Dover is not remarkable for sporting events, but two may
here be noted. On April 1st, 1903, Mr. Walter de Creux-Hutchinson walked
from Dover to London Bridge in 14 hrs., 19 mins., 40 secs.; and on
September 18th, 1909, A. G. Norman cycled from London to Dover and back in
8 hrs., 8 mins.
XXXVI
[Sidenote: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL]
The chief point of interest in Canterbury is, of course, the Cathedral,
the bourne to which countless pilgrims came from all parts of the
civilized world to gain the goodwill and intercedence of that thrice
sacred and potent Saint Thomas whose peculiar sanctity over-topped by far
that of any other English martyr, and whose shrine possessed scarce less
efficacy than that of the most renowned Continental resorts of the pious.
But long before Becket's day the Metropolitan Cathedral of Canterbury had
arisen. The establishment of the See dates from the time when Augustine
landed at Ebbsfleet, in the Isle of Thanet, in A.D. 596, and, marching at
the head of his forty Benedictine monks, held a conference with Ethelbert,
King of Kent, by whose favour he was allowed to preach Christianity to the
Saxons. Thus was the Cross of Christ re-introduced to these islands where
it had flourished centuries before among the Romans and the Romanized
British.