respecting which, the reader may have formed the same conception as
ourselves, and imagined it to be the august mansion of some illustrious
grandee, is nothing but a miserable hostelry of the lowest order, a
paltry public-house, or ‘Tom and Jerry shop,’ as we heard an indignant
fellow-traveller contemptuously style it, which has taken the liberty of
assuming this magnificent appellation.” Tradition described how this
house, once called the “Marquis of Granby,” had been resorted to by the
Earl of Denbigh on one occasion when his carriage had broken down, and
that he stayed the night under its roof, and was so grateful for the
attentions of the host that he left some property to that fortunate man,
who thereupon changed the name of his sign to the “Denbigh Hall.” This,
at any rate, was the story told when the London and Birmingham Railway
was first opened. There were those who looked upon it as a myth invented
for the amusement of travellers, and perhaps those sceptics were right,
but let others who are not unwilling to believe the story, hug the apt
reflection that so unusual a sign must have had an unusual origin; and,
so much being granted, let them go a little further and accept the
legend as it is told. The little inn still stands by the wayside.
XXIV
Stony Stratford, a hundred years ago “principally inhabited by
lace-makers, with women and children at almost every door, industriously
employed in this manufacture,” is now perhaps best known for the famous
_non sequitur_ associated with it. “You may well call it Stony
Stratford,” said the tormented traveller, “I was never so bitten with
fleas in my life!” It would be ill questing among the old inns of
“Stony” to discover which of them could claim the doubtful honour of
giving rise to that ancient jest. There are many inns—the “Cock,” the
“Bull,” “George,” “White Swan,” and numerous others—but among them the
“Cock” is easily first in size and architectural dignity. The explorer,
entering the mile-long street of Stony Stratford at “Tram-end,” whence a
hideous steam-tramcar plies to Wolverton, a mile and a half away,
discovers no focus of interest in the long thoroughfare stretching out
before him, excepting in the old red-brick frontage of the “Cock,” with
its handsome wrought-iron sign and beautiful late seventeenth-century
oak doorway, brought, according to tradition, from some old manor-house
near Olney; or “Ony,” as they choose to call it in the neighbourhood. It
was not always so undistinguished a street, for in it stood one of the
twelve crosses erected to mark where the body of Queen Eleanor had
rested on the way from Harby in Northants, to Westminster. It was
wrecked, with others, in 1646.
[Illustration: STONY STRATFORD.]
Stony Stratford and its immediate neighbourhood are intimately concerned
in the events leading up to the tragedy of young King Edward V. and his
brother, murdered in the Tower of London, in 1483. Scarce three miles
beyond the town, and distinctly seen from the Holyhead Road, there
stands an ancient and historic house known as Potterspury Lodge, at the
end of a long and majestic avenue of limes. This was at one time a
hunting-lodge, and borders upon what is left of the sylvan glades of
Whittlebury Forest, once a Royal Chase of the enormous extent of
thirty-two square miles, but shrunken for centuries past into woodlands
of not one quarter the original area. In times long gone by, the Forest
began at the very end of Stony Stratford, and the timorous wayfarer
plunged at once, after crossing the river Ouse, into its dim and tangled
alleys of oaks and thick undergrowth.
[Illustration: QUEEN’S OAK.]
It was when hunting in this wild resort of deer in the short January
days of 1464, that Edward IV. met Elizabeth Woodville, not more than two
hundred yards to the rear of the spot where the old hunting-lodge
stands. The place of meeting is still marked by the ancient and gigantic
tree known far and wide as the “Queen’s Oak,” a gnarled and hollowed
giant, whose trunk measures thirty-one feet round and whose cavernous
interior can, and constantly does in summer-time, seat a tea-party of
three or four persons. It must have been a notable tree when, four
hundred and forty years ago, Edward, a king peculiarly susceptible to
female loveliness, found here the beautiful young widow of Sir John Grey
of Groby, a knight who had been killed in the second battle of St.
Albans, little more than two years before, on the Lancastrian side, and
whose estates had since been confiscated by the Yorkists. The story
tells that the beautiful and distressed lady, anxious to see the King
and to obtain from him the restoration of her lands, was waiting at the
oak when he rode by, and that, not recognising him, she asked where his
Majesty could be found. The probabilities are, however, that she knew
perfectly well to whom she spoke. Edward declared himself to be the one
she sought, and, when she fell upon her knees, raised her up and
escorted her to her home at Grafton. It is a historic instance of
calculating ambition and of love at first sight. On May 1st, then,
Edward was privately married to the fair stranger at Grafton, the only
others present being her stepmother, the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, two
gentlemen, and “a young man to help the priest sing.” Not until the
Michaelmas following was the marriage disclosed.
The new-made Queen came of the old family of Wydvil, Widville, or
Woodville, as it is variously spelled, settled at Grafton certainly
three hundred years before. They now rose at once into favour, and her
father, already Baron, was then created Earl Rivers. It was, however, a
bloody and fatal alliance. Securing the allegiance of the family to the
Yorkists, its firstfruits were the capture and execution of her father
and brother at the obscure battle on Danesmoor, when the King’s
adherents were defeated by a rabble insurrection out of the north. Taken
to Northampton, Earl Rivers and his son, Sir John Woodville, were
beheaded August 12th, 1469.
Edward IV. died early in 1483. His Queen survived him, with two sons and
five daughters. The eldest, Edward, now become Edward V., was but twelve
years of age, and he and his brother, Richard, Duke of York, were under
the guardianship of their maternal uncle, the second Earl Rivers. The
news of his father’s death brought the young King, with an escort of two
thousand horse, from Ludlow Castle towards London. That was the proudest
moment in the history of the Woodvilles. Disliked and feared as they had
been for nearly twenty years, of family aggrandisement they had now
secured supreme power. But they reckoned without the sinister figure of
Richard of Gloucester, the late King’s brother, at that moment hasting
southward from warring with the Scots. The hurried journeys of both
parties toward London read like moves in some bloody game of chess.
Richard of Gloucester, reaching York, had been the first to swear
allegiance to his nephew. That done, he continued southward, receiving
as he went tidings of popular discontent with the Woodville faction. The
news strengthened him in the design, already forming in his mind, of
seizing the Crown for himself. He reached Northampton simultaneously
with the arrival of the young King at Stony Stratford, sixteen miles
away. The next day saw him here, professing loyalty on bended knee, and
at the same time dismissing the King’s attendants and disarming his
escort. It was a clever and a daring move, that, if bungled in the
doing, might have led to another battle, to be counted among the many
fought on English soil.
Everything was now in the usurper’s hands. The boy-King, in tears, and
virtually a prisoner, was taken by him to Northampton, and thence to
London, where all might yet have been well had public opinion
disapproved of what had already been done. But the past insolence and
selfishness of the Woodvilles had earned them a bitter hatred.
The young King’s maternal uncle and guardian had in the meanwhile been
seized and hurried to Pontefract, where he was beheaded, no one raising
a voice in protest. The King himself and his young brother, Richard,
Duke of York, were in custody in the Tower, and it was not until
Gloucester had been offered the Crown by his creatures, and had with
feigned reluctance accepted it, that the nation woke up to an
understanding of the crafty conspiracy in which it had taken a passive
hand. It was then too late, and the horror with which the country soon
learnt that the young King and his brother had been murdered in the
Tower was without avail to overthrow the sanguinary hunchback who now
ruled as Richard III.
Such was the tragedy that overwhelmed the ambition of the Woodvilles,
springing from that May-day marriage of 1464. The Queen, sorrowing in
the Sanctuary at Westminster, had seen her father, her two brothers, and
her two sons cruelly put to death, as a direct consequence of that
alliance. She retired, forlorn, to the seclusion of Bermondsey Abbey;
seeing, it is true, a gleam of happiness in the overthrow of Richard two
years later, and the marriage of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York,
to Henry VII., but dying broken and disappointed, leaving in her will to
her daughters, “my blessing, for worldly goods I have none to bestow.”
XXV
From “Stony’s” mild annals the two fires that in 1736 and 1742 destroyed
great parts of the town stand forth with appropriate luridity. The
second was the more destructive, and was caused by the carelessness of a
servant, who accidentally set some sheets ablaze. The flaming linen,
alighting on a thatched roof, brought about, not only the destruction of
many houses, but also of one of the two churches. The tower, the sole
relic of that unfortunate building, yet remains in the rear of the High
Street, and was for some years rendered conspicuous by an elder-tree
taking root and flourishing on the battlements. The remaining church,
rebuilt, with the exception of the tower in 1776, is a weird and
wonderful eighteenth-century attempt at Gothic. It is the tower of this
church that looks so picturesque from the Market Place, an obscure
square, hidden from those who hurry along the High Street and so through
the town and out at the other end, looking neither to right nor left.
[Illustration: MARKET-PLACE, STONY STRATFORD.]
The town is left behind by way of a long causeway and a bridge spanning
the Ouse, in succession to the “street ford” that once plunged through
it. Once across the river and the canal that runs parallel, and so
uphill into the not unpicturesque village of Old Stratford and the
frontiers of Buckinghamshire—“the historic county of Bucks,” as
Disraeli, posing as a Buckinghamshire farmer in one of his after-dinner
political speeches called it—are crossed and Northamptonshire entered.
Northants is traditionally the “county of squires and spires”; but the
squire as a political force and a great social figure is extinct
nowadays, and let it be said at once that, in all the twenty-three miles
of Northants through which the Holyhead Road takes its way, only one
spire—that of Braunston—is visible: the rest of the churches on the way
have towers, save indeed the freakish, classical church of Daventry,
rejoicing in a steeple.
Potterspury, succeeding to Old Stratford, is a kind of brother village,
as it were, to Paulerspury, a mile away. Potterspury, really owing its
name to an ancient pottery trade in common ware of the kitchen utensil
and flower-pot sort, stands partly facing the old coach-road and partly
down a bye-lane, and is wholly old-world and delightful. One comes into
it under the thickly interlacing branches of tall hedgerow elms that
conspire to cheer the traveller with a perpetual triumphal arch of
welcome. Through this leafy bower one perceives the roadside cottages
dwindling away in perspective along a gentle rise. Graceless the village
looks awhile, for no church meets the gaze. _That_, however, is a long
distance down the bye-lane, and in the neighbourhood of a little inn
with the odd name of the “Blue Ball,” and the still more odd sign
pictured in the accompanying sketch. The blue ball, apparently
representing the world, is placed below a brown heart, the whole
mystical composition semi-circled by the motto “_Cor supra mundum_.” It
is a representation of the triumph of sentiment that would have caused
the Rev. Laurence Sterne to shed tears. “Heart above the world.” How
idyllic!
[Illustration: THE “BLUE BALL.”]
It would be as vain to seek the old potteries that gave its name to
Potterspury as it would be to enquire for any living representatives of
the Paveleys who provided Paulerspury with style and title. The
potteries vanished in times beyond the memory of man, and the sole
relics of the Paveleys are the thirteenth-century wooden effigies of Sir
Laurence de Paveley and his dame in Paulerspury Church.
At some little distance beyond Potterspury, Potterspury Lodge and its
lime avenue come in sight, on the right side of the road. A wonderfully
picturesque old mansion it is, recently restored by the retired
tradesman who has purchased the property. At the rear of the house
stands the historic “Queen’s Oak,” whose story has already been told.
The remaining four miles into Towcester, though hilly, had much of their
difficulties disposed of when Telford came this way with theodolite,
chain, and spirit-level. Plumb Park Hill is not what it was, thanks to
this fifteen-foot cutting and the forty-four high embankment in the
hollow of Cuttle Mill, where the road goes nowadays on a level with the
chimney-pots of old roadside cottages.
At the crest of one of these rises stand Havencote Houses, which it
pleased the compilers of old road-books to name “Heathencott,” and
beyond come the lodges of Sir Thomas Hesketh’s domain—Easton Neston
Park, an originally fine, but now somewhat dreary parade of classical
stone columns forming an open screen, with stone stags couchant, and a
central display of a coat-of-arms supported by weary-looking lions. The
motto, “_Hora e Semper_”—“Now and Always”—bids a futile defiance to
irresistible change.
The lodges on either side are deserted, and their windows boarded up.
Somewhere within the park stand the “great house” and the manorial
church, with monuments of the Fermors, successively Barons Lempster and
Earls of Pomfret, to whom the estates came so long ago as 1527. Those
titles, duly engrossed on their original patents in that manner of
spelling, derive from the towns of Leominster and Pontefract, and prove
the local pronunciation to have been the same then as now. They prove,
in addition, that there was no person then at the Heralds’ College who
could correctly spell the names of those places; but my Lords Lempster
and Pomfret had to take and use the illiterate forms, just as the Earl
of Arlington, whose title, conferred in 1663, came from Harlington in
Middlesex, was made by those ’eralds to write himself with every
signature an ’Arry.
XXVI
Where the park-wall of Easton Neston ends, Towcester—“_vulgo_ Tosseter,”
as Ogilby says, on the Towe, and once the _Lactodorum_ of the
Romans—begins. It is not the best of beginnings, or one calculated to
favourably impress the stranger with the town. On the left hand rises a
terrace of dingy brick houses, whose age is certified by the
inscription, “Jubilee Row, 1809”; their height masked by the raising of
the road in front, in Telford’s improvements of 1820, their social
status evident in the notice on their frontages, “Lodgings for
Travellers”—tramping travellers being understood. Beyond, Towcester
unwinds its one long street of brick, stone, and plaster, with roofs,
tiled, slated, and thatched: a very miscellaneous street. Among the
houses, ancient, modern, and middle-aged; among the few dignified old
stone mansions of golden russet stone, and the older, but more familiar,
gabled plastered houses, that nod as though they could tell a thing or
two worth the hearing; among these and the less interesting brick
dwellings stand the Bickerstaff Almshouses, “rebuilt in the year 1815,”
brick themselves and wholly uninteresting, except for the tablet
preserved from the older buildings:—
Hee that earneth Wages By labour and
care By the Blessing of god may
Have Something to Spare. T. B.
1689.
Only when the Town Hall is reached, at a considerable distance along
this street, may we fairly claim to have entered Towcester. All this
hitherward part is outside the pale, as it were, and looked down upon,
contemned, and sniffed at. It can only be looked down upon in a social,
ungeographical sense, for Towcester from end to end is flat; but those
who would sniff corporeally as well as mentally will not go unrewarded,
considering that the gas-works occupy a very prominent position here.
The Town Hall, built in 1866, when the flighty and Mansard-roofy French
Renaissance was the architectural craze of the moment, turns its back to
this quarter and shoulders the broad street into the semblance of a
narrow lane, emphasising the difference between these social strata.
Emerging from this narrow way, a broad street of inns and shops expands.
On the left is the “Talbot,” an old inn with modern front, and with a
long perspective of stables vanishing down its yard into the dim
distance. The “Talbot,” it is thought, owes its present name to that
Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who fought and died in the Battle of
Northampton, eight miles away, in 1460. As the “Tabard,” it was
purchased in 1440 by Archdeacon Sponne, a charitable Rector of
Towcester, who gave it to the town, its rent to go in relief of
taxation, toward paving, “or for other uses.” The good Archdeacon lies,
under a gorgeous monument, in the church, and a fragment of stained
glass bearing his shield of arms, with his name, “William Sponne”
underneath, still remains in one of the windows of the “Talbot.” In what
was once, in coaching days, the taproom, but now a store for empty boxes
and such lumber, a relic of old times is left, in the wide stone
chimney-piece carved with the figure of that old English hound,
something between a foxhound and blood-hound—the talbot. Beside it is
the date, 1707, together with the initials, “T.O.” and “G.S.” The story
that Dean Swift halted often at the old house on his many journeys is
likely enough, and a chair, said to have been used by him, is still a
cherished relic.
But another, and equally famous, hostelry claims attention. The “Pomfret
Arms,” as it is now named, is the old coaching inn once known as the
“Saracen’s Head,” the inn where Mr. Pickwick stayed the night after the
wet post-chaise journey from Birmingham. “Dry postboys” and fresh horses
had been procured on the way, at the usual stages at Dunchurch and
Daventry; but as, “at the end of each stage it rained harder than it had
done at the beginning,” Mr. Pickwick wisely decided to halt at
Towcester, together with those undesirable companions of his, Bob Sawyer
and Ben Allen.
“There’s beds here,” said Sam Weller, “everything clean and comfortable.
Very good little dinner, sir, they can get ready in half an hour—pair of
fowls, sir, and a weal cutlet; French beans, ’taturs, tarts, and
tidiness. You’d better stop vere you are, sir, if I might recommend.”
At the moment when this conference was proceeding in the rain, the
landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” himself appeared, “to confirm Mr.
Weller’s statement relative to the accommodations of the establishment,
and to back his entreaties with a variety of dismal conjectures
regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of fresh horses being to be
had at the next stage, the dead certainty of its raining all night, the
equally moral certainty of its clearing up in the morning, and other
topics of inducement familiar to innkeepers.”
When the decision to stay was arrived at, “the landlord smiled his
delight,” and issued orders to the waiter. “Lights in the Sun, John;
make up the fire; the gentlemen are wet,” he cried anxiously; although
doubtless, if the gentlemen had gone forward, they might have been
drowned for all he cared.
“This way, gentlemen,” he continued; “don’t trouble yourselves about the
postboy”—who, poor devil, must have been wet through several times
over—“I’ll send him to you when you ring for him, sir.”
And so the scene changes, from the rain-washed road to a cosy room, with
a waiter laying the cloth for dinner, a cheerful fire burning, and the
tallies lit with wax candles; “everything looked (as everything always
does in all decent English inns) as if the travellers had been expected,
and their comforts prepared for, days beforehand.”
Upon this picture of ease at one’s inn descended the atrabilious rival
editors of the _Eatanswill Gazette_ and the _Eatanswill Independent_,
the organs respectively of “blue” and “buff” shades of political
opinion. Both Pott of the _Gazette_, and Slurk of the _Independent_
found the rival sheet lying on the tables of the inn; but what either of
the editors, or their newspapers, were doing in Northamptonshire
(Eatanswill being an East Anglian town generally identified as Ipswich)
is not clearly specified. Even in these days Suffolk newspapers are not
found at Towcester.
Slurk retired to the kitchen when the inn was closed for the night, to
drink his rum and water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet
luxury of sneering at the rival print; but as it happened, Mr.
Pickwick’s party, accompanied by Pott, also adjourned to that culinary
shrine, to smoke a cigar or so before bed. How the rival editors—the
“unmitigated viper” and the “ungrammatical twaddler”—met and presently
came from oblique taunts to direct abuse of one another, and thence to
blows, let the pages of the _Pickwick Papers_ tell.
The inn itself stands the same as ever, at the end of Towcester’s long
street; but the sign, long since changed, owes its present style to the
Earls of Pomfret, of whom the fifth and last died in 1867. The somewhat
severe frontage, in the golden-brown ferruginous local stone, is the
same as when Dickens knew it, and if the kitchen of that time has now
become the bar and the room called the “Sun” cannot with certainty be
identified, the old coach-archway through the centre of the building
into the stable-yard remains, as do the alcoves above, containing white
plaster statuettes of two very scantily draped classic deities—Venus and
Mars perhaps. They still tell at Towcester the tale of an old
landlady—Mrs. Popple—coming new to the house, and asking the old ostler
what “those disgraceful things” were.
“They carls ’em Junus and Wenus,” he said, “but I don’t rightly knaw the
history on ’em; but there, mum, you’ll find arl about ’em in the Bible.”
XXVII
We shall not be far wrong if we identify Towcester with the town at
which the coach with Tom Brown on board stopped for breakfast, and the
“well-known sporting house,” famous for its breakfasts, with the
“Saracen’s Head.” A half-past seven breakfast, in a low, dark,
wainscoted room, hung with sporting prints; a blazing fire, and a card
of hunting fixtures stuck in the mantel-glass. Twenty minutes for
breakfast, with such a spread as pigeon-pie, ham, cold boiled beef,
kidneys and steak, bacon and eggs, buttered toast and muffins, coffee
and tea, smoking hot—why, an irresolute man would waste some of those
precious minutes in considering where to begin. But the hungry are not
at such a loss, and certainly little Tom Brown could not have been, for
he ate kidney and pigeon-pie and drank coffee till his skin was as tight
as a drum, and then had sufficient time to pay the head waiter in
leisurely manner and to stroll calmly to the door, to see the horses put
to.
And then, all being ready, they are off again. “Let ’em go, Dick!” says
the coachman, and the ostlers fly back, drawing off the horse-cloths
like lightning. Along the High Street goes the “Tally-Ho,” with passing
glimpses into first-floor windows, where the burgesses are seen shaving;
past shops and private houses, where shopboys are cleaning windows and
housemaids doing the steps, and out of the town as the clock strikes
eight.
A very pretty glimpse, this, of the “good old times,” but the coaches
did not always hark away so triumphantly; as, for example, when, on a
day in March, 1829, an axle of the celebrated “Wonder” coach broke in
Towcester street, and the unfortunate coachman was killed in the
inevitable upset. The hilly eight miles or so between Towcester and
Weedon Beck witnessed many thrilling escapades in the coaching sort. One
eminence, rejoicing in the name of Dirt House Hill, was the scene of a
violent collision, in which the Holyhead Mail and the Manchester Mail
came into disastrous contact, June 29th, 1838. It was one of the closing
smashes of the Coaching Age. Here is the official account:—