half the present town of Dover is built was under water. The peculiar site
of Dover can perhaps most readily be noted by one who climbs the bare
chalk hills that bear on their summits the defences known as the Western
Heights. Keeping to rearward of the Citadel, and walking round the
shoulders of these hills, one sees that a deep and narrow valley runs down
to the sea-beach, contracting almost to the likeness of a narrow gorge
where the old town commences, and widening again where it meets the sea.
Here, where the site broadens, and where steep streets give place to
flatness, rolled the tides up the little estuary of the River Dour when
Caesar's triremes anchored off the primitive port, and antiquaries point
out the place, near the present Round Tower Street, where, so late as
1509, a tower was raised, to which vessels lying in the harbour were
moored by iron rings. This is almost the only natural feature of Dover
that has changed during nineteen centuries. Walk to the outmost verge of
the Admiralty Pier and look back upon the town, and you will see it lying
in the hollow, with the gaunt and horrid stucco houses of its "front"
hiding the old streets that crouch behind in narrow ways. You will see the
Castle Hill and the Western Heights, twin eminences guarding the land and
the open roadstead of the Downs; and, although the grey Castle crowns one
cliff and the modern fortifications crest the other, yet, for all the ages
during which man has been burrowing galleries here and piling up stonework
and masonry there, if Caesar could revisit the scene of his ineffectual
descent upon Britain, he would find no difficulty in recognizing it. Only,
the estuary where he beached his vessels is long since silted up and is
buried beneath many feet of the rubble and refuse, the shards and
potsherds that mark the passing of many busy generations. Here, on these
ancient dust-heaps and kitchen-middens stands the chief business street of
Dover, Snargate Street, running parallel with the sea, but now separated
from it by the breadth of the Harbour and many intermediate alleys,
smelling vehemently of tar and stale reminiscences of ocean. Snargate
Street is long and narrow, a model neither of cleanliness nor of
convenience, and it crouches humbly beneath the towering cliffs which rise
on its landward side, cut, carved, and tunnelled; honeycombed with stores,
forts, and galleries, and grimed with the smoke from the clustered
chimneys of the houses below. Other short and frowzy alleys run against
the soiled chalk, and end there with a whimsical abruptness. Elbow room
here is none, and to find it, one ventures upon the Harbour quays, toward
the Docks and the Basins, where little gangways and iron swing-bridges
lead to _culs-de-sac_, or end in sudden and precipitous descents into the
water, causing the unwonted stranger frequently to retrace his steps and
to swear freely. But, if one avoids these cryptic curse-compelling places,
the Harbour is a very interesting place; much more so than the "front,"
where people walk up and down aimlessly, the women dressed to kill, and
glaring at one another as they pass, like strange cats on a roof-top.
Here, instead, is the reality of life, and a variety that is lacking
beyond. In the basins floats generally a strange and fortuitous concourse
of vessels; schooners, yachts, cutters, hoys, smacks, brigantines,
"billy-boys," and steamers of every age, size, and trade, from the neat
passenger-boats, with their decks holystoned to wonderment, to the dirty
ocean-tramp, or the inky, wallowing collier; together with other craft
whose names are unknown to the landsman. Likewise, there are many of the
mercantile marine about. One may not, contrary to general belief, know
these by their dress, for there is no peculiarity in the raiment of the
mercantile Jack--except perhaps for its raggedness, poor fellow--by which
he may be recognized. Rather would one know him by his anxious expression
of countenance and by that inveterate habit of his, ashore, of leaning
heavily against walls and posts, or anything capable of giving support.
You may notice poor Jack's favourite haunts hereabouts by the bare and
burnished appearance of the brick and paint bordering on the Docks, and
situated at a height of about four feet from the ground, where his
shoulders have rubbed immemorially.
XLII
[Sidenote: SHAKESPEARE CLIFF]
Since we are in the way of it, it comes naturally to include Shakespeare
Cliff in this little survey. You reach it from here either by a hideous
contrivance called the Shaft, fashioned in the cliffs that frown down upon
Snargate Street, or by Limekiln Street beyond. Here, on the way, is
Archcliffe Fort, between the Citadel and the sea. They say, who should
know, that it is heavily armed, but it is not at all impressive: old
boots, tin cans, brick-bats, cabbage-stalks, and rusty umbrella-frames
rarely are; and of these there are rich and varied deposits lying in the
fosse, amid the scanty grass where industrious sheep endeavour to earn a
living. Indeed, this is the most eloquent picture of mild-eyed Peace I
have ever seen, and Landseer's painting which shows a sheep snuffling in
the mouth of a dismantled cannon is quite weak beside it.
Looking over the cliff's edge, just beyond, is a view of the beach below,
where the South Eastern Railway runs on a wooden viaduct, entering a
double tunnel through the chalky mass of Shakespeare Cliff, rising sheer
from the sea to a height of three hundred and fifty feet. A narrow
footpath leads to the breezy summit, surmounted by a Coastguard Station,
and here you may gaze, if you have good nerves, over the brink of the
precipice, and listen to the hissing of the pebbles far down below, as the
waves drag them back and forth:
... Here's the place: stand still.
How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half-way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminished to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight; the murmuring surge
That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high; I'll look no more,
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
How eloquent is that passage from _King Lear_!
Just past Shakespeare Cliff come the twin workings of the Channel Tunnel
and the coal-mine, those notorious fiascos which have cost the South
Eastern shareholders so much, and have afforded journalists so large an
amount of good "copy." From the cliff-top, a steep and winding stairway
cut in the chalk leads down to the beach and the Dover coal mine and the
beginnings of the Channel Tunnel. Much money has been sunk in both. Some
day the Tunnel will be completed; but no one expects coal ever to be
commercially mined here.
Turn we, though, from these projects to the Admiralty Pier, that centre of
interest to visitors and Dover folks alike. Some one--I know not whom--has
styled the Admiralty Pier "the pier of the realm," and truly, though you
search these coasts, you shall find nothing to compare with it, as a
pier. Plymouth Breakwater is a great deal more impressive, but then, it is
not a pier, but is set down in midst of a tempestuous Sound, where no one
can get at it without risk and trouble. And the Admiralty Pier owes its
very great fame largely to the ease with which you can reach it and
promenade up and down its almost interminable pavings. Crowds come to see
the boats off or in, and people are always sweeping the seas with
telescopes and field-glasses, finding a perennial joy in so doing,
difficult to be understood. The boats come in, the tidal trains run out
along the huge stone causeway; passengers pallid and cold, muffled up in
overcoats, glancing around with lack-lustre eyes, crawl miserably from the
decks and cabins of the Channel steamers under the amused scrutiny of the
callous crowd, and seat themselves thankfully in the waiting train. Other
steamers wait impatiently, shrieking intermittently; and other trains
bring down intending passengers for the night crossing to France.
Sometimes strange scenes are witnessed on the night mail, when passengers
are streaming from the boat-express across the gangways. Quiet gentlemen
with little luggage and a marked disinclination for the society of their
fellows are discovered, as they lurk in remote corners of the deck,
seeking to sneak quietly out of the "very front door of England," by other
gentlemen--gentlemen with broad shoulders and square-toed boots--who tap
them on the shoulder with an equal absence of fuss or demonstration, and
these quiet gentlemen usually say--not without a certain start of
surprise, you may be sure--"Oh! I'll come quietly." Then the three (for
they are usually two who thus accost one of these undemonstrative and
retiring passengers) step again on to the Admiralty Pier, and apparently
abandon their Continental trip, for they go up to London by the next
train. Sometimes a quiet gentleman refuses to "come quietly" when his
shoulder is tapped, and then those who do the tapping are obliged to
resort to the painful, not to say humiliating, process of snapping a pair
of handcuffs on his wrists, much to the surprise of the passengers. But
whether gentlemen elect to go quietly or to take it fighting is not much
matter: the result is the same. Sometimes these quiet ones came back to
Dover after a while, and were accommodated in free quarters on the Castle
Hill; presently revisiting the harbour as masons under Government employ.
They come here no longer, for the convict prison on the hill is deserted,
and the harbour-works are now carried on with paid labour.
And Britain is proceeding with some energy to rule the waves at Dover, for
the Harbour of Refuge is completed; to the end that the battle-ships, the
merchantmen beating up and down Channel, and the fisher-boats may ride in
some degree of safety, protected from the north-easterly gales that
nowadays strew the Downs and the Goodwin Sands with wrecks. For centuries
this project had been discussed--and shelved in the dusty pigeon-holes of
the Admiralty offices. Raleigh reported in the reign of Elizabeth that "no
promontory, town, or haven in Europe was so well situated for annoying the
enemy, protecting commerce, or sending and receiving despatches from the
Continent;" and works were commenced to replace the pier begun by Henry
the Eighth that had been abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin. But when
Defoe was here the Harbour had fallen back into its old state, half-choked
with shingle cast up by the set of the tides from the westward, and the
piers decayed. "Ill-repaired, dangerous, good for nothing, very chargeable
and little worth," those were the epithets the author of _Robinson Crusoe_
applied to it, and thus it remained until 1847, despite local and
half-hearted attempts to prevent the accumulation of shingle. In that year
the Admiralty Pier was commenced. Meanwhile, the sea, and the tides,
thrust out from Dover Harbour by this mighty arm, are setting in strongly
upon the Castle Cliffs, and that Castle, the survival of six hundred
years of strife and change, is being very slowly but very surely
undermined. And thus it goes round our coasts; turn away the currents that
eat up particular strips of the land or choke up the havens with
sea-drift, and they set with additional fury upon the next unprotected
place, presently to be, at great cost, referred elsewhere. It is a game
that never ends: a game of General Post of which the sea, at least, never
tires.
[Illustration: DOVER CASTLE, FROM THE FOLKESTONE ROAD: SUNRISE.]
XLIII
Dover Castle possesses the longest and most continuous, if not quite the
most stirring, military history of any fortress within these narrow seas.
Described picturesquely by ancient chroniclers as "the very front door of
England," or, as "clavis Angliae et repagulum," it is, and in very truth
has ever been, since its foundation, the main bulwark of Britain against
foreign foes. At what precise period a Castle was first raised here is a
question that has never yet and probably never will be settled. The Romans
built their lighthouse here, with another on the topmost point of the
Western Heights, but the first Castle is not supposed to have been built
before the time of Edward the Confessor, and the first reference to it is
found in that oath which Harold swore to the Duke of Normandy, that he
would yield up to him both the fortress and the well which was contained
in "_castellum Dofris_." Of this building nothing now appears to be left,
and the earliest portion of the present Castle is Henry the Second's Keep.
[Sidenote: DOVER CASTLE]
But whatever the size and strength of the Castle that stood here in
Harold's day, it would seem to have been formidable enough to induce
William the Conqueror to seek a landing elsewhere. He landed at Pevensey,
and it was not until after Hastings and the fall of Romney that he turned
and took Dover from the rear. The Castle was then made the seat of
government for Kent, and one of those fierce fighting Bishops, Odo,
half-brother of the Conqueror, installed. The Kentish people, revolting in
1074, endeavoured in vain to seize it; it was held against Stephen, and
eventually surrendered to him; and here within the gloomy walls of the
Saxon stronghold he died in 1154. No sooner was Henry the Second crowned
than his advisers urged the rebuilding of the Castle, and to this period
belong the Keep and the Inner Ward. Sixty years later the fortifications
of Henry's reign received their first shock of war when, England having
been given by the Pope to Louis, the son of Philip Augustus, King of
France, that Prince endeavoured to take the gift. But hateful though John,
King of England, might be, Englishmen were neither content that their
allegiance should be transferred without reference to themselves, nor
willing to become again the prey of invaders. Therefore, they bade Prince
Louis to take the Pope's present if he could, and held Dover Castle
against his forces. England, divided against itself, had permitted Louis
to land, and even to be crowned in London, but the Constable of Dover
Castle at that time, Hubert de Burgh, was a patriot to be won over neither
by threats nor promises, and he held the Castle against all comers. The
siege was undertaken in earnest. Louis sent over to France for all the
artillery that the time could produce. It consisted of battering-rams and
stone-throwing machines, and in this way it was sought to breach the
walls. A wooden shelter for the attacking force was constructed and built
up to the outer walls of the inland face of the Castle, and under cover of
this device the soldiers worked the battering-rams until the defences
shook again. The garrison retorted by flinging heavy stones and fire-balls
on the shelter, and would either have demolished or burnt it had it not
been for an ingenious invention which the French had imported. This
consisted of a series of tall wooden towers called _malvoisins_, and
ill-neighbours, indeed, they were, for they were established on the edge
of the Castle ditch, where, overlooking the outer ward, and being filled
with archers whose practice soon slackened the defenders' fire, they would
soon have brought the siege to a close, had not the death of the English
King removed internal quarrels and aroused a united spirit of patriotism
throughout England which boded ill for the prospects of the French prince.
The invaders retired from London and the southern counties which they had
held, not so much by force of arms as by favour of disaffected Englishmen;
they gave up the siege of Dover Castle, and presently re-embarked for
France.
The struggles between a despotic King and a rapacious nobility which had
caused these troubles in the reign of John were soon resumed, and Dover
Castle became alternately the hold of one party or the other. The most
notable incident in these events was that of 1265, when the Barons held
the Castle and had fourteen knights of the King's party imprisoned in the
Keep. Prince Edward attacked the Castle from without, and the prisoners,
bursting out from their cells and rushing upon their gaolers from within,
forced the garrison to surrender.
It was in the time of Edward the First that Dover Castle reached its full
development. That was the grand era of castle-building in England, when
military engineering was practised without reference to ordnance, and had
attained to a remarkable ingenuity. Like all Edwardian Castles, that of
Dover is concentric and has three wards, enclosed within high curtain
walls strengthened with a great number of defensible towers. The outer
ward had no less than twenty-seven of these towers, among which the
Constable's Tower and gateway is first for size and beauty.
It is a long, steep, and dusty climb to Dover Castle from the town.
Halfway up, the visitor of forty years ago would be attracted by the
tinkling of a small bell, and, looking round, his gaze would fall upon
haggard creatures, gaunt and unkempt, who crouched behind iron bars and
piteously adjured him to "remember the poor debtors." Poor devils!
condemned by the brutality of obsolescent laws to moulder in captivity in
expiation for pitiful debts. But brutal though we were until comparatively
recent years, we must not believe Victor Hugo when he says that in 1820
the grim picturesqueness of the Castle Hill was enhanced by the spectacle
of three malefactors' bodies, tarred and obscene, which swung in the winds
of Heaven. That picturesque detail is more romantic than truthful; but the
man who, like Victor Hugo, could write seriously in another place of the
Firth of Forth as "_la premiere de la quatrieme_" is not to be taken for
either geographer or historian.
All these evidences of a brutal age are gone, and Dover Castle is
remarkable nowadays chiefly for the extraordinary way in which old and new
are grafted one upon another. Side by side with the Norman Keep are modern
magazines and military storehouses, while the curtain walls of the wards
give support to repositories of Royal Artillery shot and shell. Even the
roof of the Keep is put to practical purpose by the War Department, for it
has been vaulted and strengthened to carry a battery of heavy cannon. The
Keep is of three floors; on the third floor are the State apartments in
which Charles the First welcomed his Queen, and where, seventeen years
later, he bade her a sad adieu. They are gloomy rooms, heavy with
suspicion of danger, conspiracy, and intrigue, and are approached by a
staircase flanked with secret guard-rooms; the walls pierced with
arrow-slits, scarcely to be distinguished in the darkness of the place,
even when you are bidden to look for them.
It is strange to read in the struggles between Charles and the Parliament
with what laxity fortresses were often held for either side. Dover Castle
is a case in point. It was held for the King by a small force whose
discipline and courage were so to seek that it needed but the daring of a
Dover merchant and a few followers to capture it. With this exploit ends
the story of the warlike doings here, and all that is left to tell relates
only to Marlborough's French prisoners, who were for years cooped up
within these walls pining and eating away their hearts for very love and
despair of ever reaching _la belle France_, whose outlines they could
dimly see from the narrow embrasures of their foreign prison.
For from Dover Keep the Eye of Faith may discern the coast of France,
twenty-one miles across the Silver Streak; but there be those to whom, if
visible at all, that coast seems like nothing so much as filmy clouds
resting upon the water, and there are but few days when the sun and the
absence of sea-mists enable the Englishman's straining eyes clearly to
discern that land.
The famous well of Dover Castle still exists, enclosed in the massive
walls, and still nearly three hundred feet deep, despite the rubbish and
unmentionable abominations cast into it by the prisoners, who chiefly
occupied the second floor in which are the Norman Chapel and two large
rooms, their walls still bearing traces of the prisoners' handiwork in the
shape of inscriptions. Here is the Armoury, with matchlocks, Brown Besses,
muskets, and rifles; obsolete and in use. Here, too, are the pikes issued
to the peasantry when all England armed to resist Napoleon's threatened
invasion. Down below (you can see it from those embrasures) is "Queen
Elizabeth's Pocket Pistol," familiar, even to those who have never seen
it, by the popular rhyme--
Load me well and keep me clean,
And I'll carry a ball to Calais Green;
and all around are batteries old and new.
The sentry on Dover Keep at night, when all the world is still, has
leisure for contemplation. When the moon rises in solemn majesty on summer
nights and makes a lane of silvery glory across the Channel; when the
winking light from Cape Grisnez shows where the French coast lies, and the
glow from the lighthouse on the Admiralty Pier marks the harbour at his
feet; when Dover lamps burn yellow beside the moonrays, and the high-road
to London lies stark and white in the valley of the Dour, then may the
sentry on his eyrie hear, between the ghostly tapping of the halyards on
the flagstaff, the tramp of the ages. Forty centuries looked down upon the
French in Egypt; the sentry on Dover Castle looks upon nineteen hundred
years of invasion and foreign expeditions. There, where Dover streets now
stand, rode Caesar's galleys and there our ancestors bled for their
country. Down that white highway, so still at this midnight hour, have
marched many generations of archers, men-at-arms, and soldiers of a more
recent era, to return, covered with wounds and glory; and across that
shining sea have sailed fleets innumerable. For a distance of four hundred
feet below him run a series of fortified galleries and platforms, built in
the Castle Keep or excavated through the solid chalk down to sea-level;
while level with him, rise the Western Heights, rich in heavy ordnance,
across the town. Here, then, is the end of the Dover Road, looking out
across the sea; and he must needs be dull of brain who does not perceive
the epic fitness of its ending.
THE END
INDEX.
Alkham, 238
Bapchild, 144, 162
Barham, 233
Barham Downs, 1, 96, 218, 222-233, 236
Barham Family, 233-235
Barham, Rev. Richard Harris, 80, 234
Becket, Thomas a, 13, 18, 19, 95, 134, 151, 186, 194, 197, 207-213, 216,
233
Bell Grove, 44
Bexley, 45
Bexley Heath, 44, 45-47
Blackheath, 18, 24-35
Black Prince, The, 185, 204-207
Black Robin's Corner, 236
Borough, The, 7-18
Bossenden Woods, 179-182
Boughton-under-Blean, 172, 173, 179, 181
Bridge, 217
Broome Park, 236
Buckland, 241
Cade, Jack, 6, 31
Caesar, Julius, 1, 96, 145, 148, 218-226, 244-246
Canterbury, 3, 74, 97, 174, 183, 187-216, 228
Canterbury Pilgrims, 11-18, 172, 183-186, 194-197, 207-213, 216
Caroline, Princess of Wales and Queen, 25, 56
Chalk, 66, 81-86
Charles II, 33, 68, 70, 89, 90, 121
Charlton, 34, 35
Chatham, 126-140, 200
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11, 172, 183, 184
"Church Ales", 82
Clavell, John, 87
Cleves, Anne of, 117-119
Coaches:--
"Blue-eyed Maid", 8
"Defiance", 3
"Eagle", 3
"Express", 3, 4
"Foreign Mail", 3
"Phoenix", 3
"Royal Mail", 3
"Tally-ho", 3, 216
"Telegraph", 3
"Union", 3
"Worthington's Safety", 3
Coaching, 3-5, 23, 39, 45, 58, 92, 216
Coal and Wine Dues, 50
Cobham Park, 61, 97
"Coldharbours", 228-230
Colet, Dean, 185, 209-212
Courtenay's Rebellion, 175-183
Crayford, 47-49
Crook Long, 45
Cycling Records, 201
"Danes" Holes, 46
Dartford, 49-60, 97, 118, 200
Denton, near Canterbury, 233-236
Denton by Gravesend, 79-81
Deptford, 23
Dickens, Charles, 81, 87, 90-93, 102-104, 106, 126, 141
_Don Juan_, 37-39, 213, 243
Dover, 220, 242-257
Drellingore Stream, 239
Dunkirk, 181-183
Elizabeth, Queen, 6, 23, 26, 119
Erasmus, Disiderius, 185, 209-212
Falstaff, Sir John, 87, 93
Faversham, 146, 166, 170-172
Gad's Hill, 86-95
Gravesend, 4, 18, 60, 62, 66-70, 86, 91
Greenhithe, 60, 62, 89
Greenstreet, 163
Greenwich Park, 25
Gundulf, Bishop, 54
Gutteridge Gate, 216
Harbledown, 173, 183-186, 194
Hengist and Horsa, 48
Henry V, 30, 154
Henry VIII, 117-119, 151, 195-197
Hermits, 55, 151-153, 161, 163, 171
Hernhill, 168, 181
Highwaymen, 25, 36-40, 71, 87-90, 217
Hops, 163
Horn's Cross, 62
Huggens' College, 66
_Ingoldsby Legends_, The 80, 134, 234-236
"Ingoldsby Abbey", 80
Inns (mentioned at length):--
"Blue-eyed Maid," Southwark, 8
"Bull," Dartford, 55, 107
"Bull," Rochester, 107
"Bull," Shooter's Hill, 36
"Crispin and Crispianus," Strood, 101, 171
"Crown," Rochester, 119
"Falstaff," Canterbury, 187
"Falstaff," Gad's Hill, 90, 94
"George," Sittingbourne, 155
"George," Southwark, 7, 8
"Golden Cross," New Cross, 22
"Gun," Sittingbourne, 156
"Half Moon," Southwark, 8
"Key," Key Street, 148
"Lion," Sittingbourne, 155, 160
"Lord Nelson," Chalk, 86
"Red Lion," Canterbury, 189-192
"Red Lion," Dunkirk, 181, 182
"Red Lion," Sittingbourne, 154
"Rose," Canterbury, 174, 189
"Rose," Sittingbourne, 155
"Spur," Southwark, 8
"Tabard," Southwark, 8, 12, 13, 18
"White Hart," Sittingbourne, 156, 157
James II, 70, 121, 170
"Jezreel, James Jershom", 137-140
John's Hole, 62
Kearsney, 2, 38, 240
Kent Street, 9
Key Street, 97, 148
Kidbrook, 34, 35
London Bridge, 2, 5-7, 12, 19, 30, 44, 200
Lydden, 238
Marlowe, Christopher, 23
"Milestones on the Dover Road", 19