not at any time largely endowed with picturesqueness, saving only in the
gruesome picture afforded by the horrid legend which accounts for the
family name of Guelph; but the Regent was the great exception. He, at
least, was picturesque; and if there be any who choose to deny it, I will
ask them how it comes that so many novelists dealing with historical
periods have chosen the period of the Regency as so fruitful an era of
romance? The Prince endowed his time with a glamour that has lasted, and
will continue unimpaired. It was he who gave a devil-me-care connotation
to the words "Regent" and "Regency"; and his wild escapades have sufficed
to redeem the Georgian Era from the reproach of unrelieved dulness and
greasy vulgarity.
The reign of George the Third was the culmination of smug and unctuous
_bourgeois_ respectability at Court, from whose weary routine the Prince's
surroundings were entirely different. Himself and his _entourage_ were
dissolute indeed, roystering, drinking, cursing, dicing, visiting
prize-fights on these Downs of Crawley, and hail-fellow-well-met with the
blackguards there gathered together. But whatever his surroundings, they
were never dull, for which saving grace many sins may be excused him.
Thackeray, in his "Four Georges," has little that is pleasant to say of
any one of them, but is astonishingly severe upon this last, both as
Prince and King. For a thorough-going condemnation, commend me to that
book. To the faults of George the Fourth the author is very wide-awake,
nor will he allow him any virtues whatsoever. He will not even concede him
to be a man, as witness this passage: "To make a portrait of him at sight
seemed a matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, his star, his wig,
his countenance simpering under it: with a slate and a piece of chalk, I
could at this very desk perform a recognisable likeness of him. And yet,
after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old
magazines and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there at a public
dinner, there at races, and so forth, you find you have nothing, nothing
but a coat and a wig, and a mask smiling below it; nothing but a great
simulacrum."
Poor fat Adonis!
But Thackeray was obliged reluctantly to acknowledge the grace and charm
of the Fourth George, and to chronicle some of the kind acts he performed,
although at these last he sneered consumedly, because, forsooth, those
thus benefited were quite humble persons. It was not without reason that
Thackeray wrote so intimately of snobs: in those unworthy sneers speaks
one of the race.
One curious little item of praise the author of the "Four Georges" was
constrained to allow the Regent: "Where my Prince did actually distinguish
himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from
Brighton to Carlton House--fifty-six miles."[11]
So the altogether British love of sport compelled this little interlude in
the abuse levelled at the "simulacrum."
XXIV
Modern Crawley is disfigured by the abomination of a busy railway
level-crossing that bars the main road and causes an immeasurable waste of
public time and a deplorable flow of bad language. It affords a very good
idea of the delays and annoyances at the old turnpike-gates, without their
excuse for existence. Beyond it is the Park Lane or Belgravia of
Crawley--the residential and superior modern district of country houses,
each in midst of its own little pleasance.
[Sidenote: PEASE POTTAGE]
The cutting in the rise at Hog's Hill passed, the road goes in a long
incline up to Hand Cross, by Pease Pottage, where there is now a
post-office which spells the name wrongly, "Peas." No one _knows_ how the
place-name originated; but legends explain where facts are wanting, and
tell variously how soldiers in the old days were halted here on their
route-marching and fed with "pease-pottage," the old name for
pease-pudding; or describe how prisoners on the cross-roads, on their way
to trial at the assizes, once held at Horsham and East Grinstead
alternately, were similarly refreshed. Formerly called Pease Pottage Gate,
from a turnpike-gate that spanned the Horsham road, the "Gate" has
latterly been dropped. It is a pretty spot, with a triangular green and
the old "Black Swan" inn still standing at the back. The green is not
improved by the recent addition of a huge and ugly signboard, advertising
the inn as an "hotel." The inquiring mind speculates curiously as to
whether the District Council (or whatever the local governing body may be)
is doing its duty in allowing such a flagrant vulgarity, apart from any
question of legal rights, on common land. Indeed, the larger question
arises, in the gross abuse of advertising notice-boards on this road in
particular, and along others in lesser degree, as to whether the shameful
defacement of natural scenery by such boards erected on land public or
private ought not to be suppressed by law. Nearer Brighton, the beautiful
distant views of the South Downs are utterly damned by gigantic black
hoardings painted in white letters, trumpeting the advantages of the motor
garage of an hotel which here, at least, shall not be named. Much has been
written about the abuse of advertising in America, but Englishmen, sad to
say, have in these latter days outdone, and are outdoing, those crimes,
while America itself is retrieving its reputation.
This is the Forest Ridge of Sussex, where the Forest of St. Leonards still
stretches far and wide. Away for miles on the left hand stretch the lovely
beechwoods and the hazel undergrowths of Tilgate, Balcombe, and Worth, and
on the right the little inferior woodlands extending to Horsham. The ridge
is, in addition, a great watershed. From it the Mole and the Medway flow
north, and the Arun, the Adur, and the Sussex Ouse south, towards the
English Channel. Hand Cross is the summit of the ridge, and the way to it
is coming either north or south, a toilsome drag.
At Tilgate Forest Row the scenery becomes park-like, laurel hedges lining
the way, giving occasional glimpses of fine estates to right and left.
Here the coachmen used to point out, with becoming awe, the country house
where Fauntleroy, the banker, lived, and would tell how he indulged in all
manner of unholy orgies in that gloomy-looking mansion in the forest.
Henry Fauntleroy was only thirty-nine years of age when he met the doom
then meted out to forgers. As partner in the banking firm of Marsh,
Sibbald & Co., of Berners Street, he had entire control of the firm's
Stock Exchange business, and, unknown to his partners, had for nine years
pursued a consistent course of illegally selling the securities belonging
to customers--forging their signatures to transfers. Paying the interest
and dividends as usual, the frauds, amounting in all to L70,000, might
have remained undiscovered for many years longer; but the credit of the
bank, long in a tottering condition, was exhausted in September, 1824,
when all was disclosed. Fauntleroy was arrested on the 11th, and on the
14th the bank suspended payment.
[Illustration: PEASE POTTAGE.]
The failure of the bank was largely due to the extravagance of the
partners, Fauntleroy himself living in fine style as a country gentleman;
but the scandalous stories current at the time as to his mode of life were
quite disproved, while the partners were clearly shown to have been
entirely ignorant of the state of their affairs, which acquits them of
complicity, though it does not redound to their credit as business men.
Fauntleroy readily admitted his guilt, and added that he acted thus to
prop up the long-standing instability of the firm. He was tried at the Old
Bailey October 30th, 1824, sentenced to death, and executed November 30th,
in the presence of a crowd of 200,000 persons. He was famed among
connoisseurs for the excellence of his claret, and would never disclose
its place of origin. Friends who visited him in the condemned cell begged
him to confide in them, but he would never do so, and when he died the
secret died with him.
No one has ever claimed acquaintance with the ghost of Fauntleroy, with or
without his rope; but the road to Hand Cross has long enjoyed--or been
afflicted with--the reputation of being haunted. The Hand Cross ghost is,
by all accounts, an extremely eccentric, but harmless spook, with peculiar
notions in the matter of clothes, and given, when the turnpike-gate stood
here, to monkey-tricks with bolts and bars, whereby pikemen were not only
scared, but were losers of sundry tolls. Evidently that sprite was the
wayfarers' friend.
"Squire Powlett" is another famous phantom of this forest-side, and is
more terrifying, being headless, and given to the hateful practice of
springing up behind the horseman who ventures this way when night has
fallen upon the glades, riding with him to the forest boundary. Motorists
and cyclists, however, do not seem to have been troubled. Possibly they
have a turn of speed quite beyond the powers of such an old-fashioned
spook.
_Why_ "Squire Powlett" should haunt these nocturnal glades is not so
easily to be guessed. He was not, so far as can be learned, an evildoer,
and he certainly was not beheaded. He was that William Powlett, a captain
in the Horse Grenadiers and a resident in the Forest of St. Leonards, who
seems to have led an exemplary life, and died in 1746, and is buried under
an elaborate monument in West Grinstead Church.
XXV
[Sidenote: HAND CROSS]
Hand Cross is a settlement of forty or fifty houses, situated where
several roads meet, in this delightful land of forests. Its name derives,
of course, from some ancient signpost, or combination of signpost and
wayside cross, existing here in pre-Reformation times, on the lonely
cross-roads. No houses stood here then, and Slaugham village, the nearest
habitation of man, was a mile distant, at the foot of the hill, where,
very little changed or not at all, it may still be sought. Slaugham parish
is very extensive, stretching as far as Crawley; and the hamlet of Hand
Cross, within it, although now larger than the parent village itself, is
only a mere mushroom excrescence called into existence by the road travel
of the last two centuries.
It is the being on the main road, and on the junction of several routes,
that has made Hand Cross what it is to-day and has deposed Slaugham
itself; just as in towns a by-street being made a main thoroughfare will
make the fortunes of the shops in it and perhaps ruin those of some other
route.
Not that Hand Cross is great, or altogether pleasing to the eye; for,
after all, it is a _parvenu_ of a place, and lacks the Domesday descent
of, for instance, Cuckfield. Now, the _parvenu_, the man of his hands, may
be a very estimable fellow, but his raw prosperity grates upon the nerves.
So it is with Hand Cross, for its prosperity, which has not waned with
the coaching era, has incited to the building of cottages of that cheap
and yellow brick we know so well and loathe so much. Also, though there is
no church, there are two chapels; one of retiring position, the other
conventicle of aggressive and red, red brick. One could find it in one's
heart to forgive the yellow brick; but this red, never. In this ruddy
building is a harmonium. On Sundays the wail of that instrument and the
hooting and ting, tinging of cyclorns and cycling gongs, as cyclists
foregather by the "Red Lion," are the most striking features of the place.
The "Red Lion" is of greater interest than all other buildings at Hand
Cross. It stood here in receipt of coaching custom through all the
roystering days of the Regency as it stands now, prosperous at the hands
of another age of wheels. Shergold tells us that its landlords in olden
times knew more of smuggling than hearsay, and dispensed from many an
anker of brandy that had not rendered duty.
At Hand Cross the ways divide, the Bolney and Hickstead route, opened in
1813, branching off to the right and not merely providing a better
surface, but, with a straighter course, saving from one and a half to two
miles, and avoiding some troublesome rises, becoming in these times the
"record route" for cyclists, pedestrians, and all who seek to speed
between London and Brighton in the quickest possible time. It rejoins the
classic route at Pyecombe.
For the present we will follow the older way, by Cuckfield, down to
Staplefield Common. A lovely vale opens out as one descends the southern
face of the watershed, with an enchanting middle distance of copses,
cottages, and winding roads, the sun slanting on distant ponds, or
transmuting commonplace glazier's work into sparkling diamonds.
At the foot of the hill is Staplefield Common, bisected by the highway,
with recent cottages and modern church, and in the foreground the "Jolly
Farmers" inn. But where are the famous cherry-trees of Staplefield,
under whose boughs the coach passengers of a century ago feasted off the
"black-hearts"; where are the "Dun Cow" and its equally famous
rabbit-puddings and its pretty Miss Finch? Gone, as utterly as though they
had never been.
[Illustration: THE "RED LION," HAND CROSS.]
Three miles of oozy hollows and rises covered with tangled undergrowths of
hazels lead past Slough Green and Whiteman's Green to Cuckfield. From the
hillsides the great Ouse Valley Viaduct of the Brighton line, down towards
Balcombe and Ardingly, is seen stalking across the low-lying meadows,
mellowed by distance to the romantic similitude of an aqueduct of ancient
Rome.
Plentiful traces are yet visible of the rugged old hollow lane that was
the precursor of the present road. In places it is a wayside pool; in
others a hollow, grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled and
fanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumbling banks. The older
rustics know it, if the younger and the passing stranger do not: they tell
you "'tis wheer th' owd hroad tarned arff."
XXVI
The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on no railway, and has no
manufactures or industries of any kind; and since the locomotive ran the
coaches off the road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It was not always
thus, for in those centuries--from the fourteenth until the early part of
the eighteenth--when the beds of Sussex iron-ore were worked and smelted
on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfield was a Black Country, given
over to the manufacture of ironware, from cannon to firebacks.
[Illustration: CUCKFIELD, 1789. _From an aquatint after Rowlandson._]
All this was so long ago that nature has healed the scars made by that
busy time. Wooded hills replace the uplands made bare by the smelters, the
cinder-heaps and mounds of slag are hidden under pastures, the
"hammer-ponds" of the smelteries and foundries have become the resorts of
artists seeking the picturesque, and the descendants of the old
iron-masters, the Burrells and the Sergisons, have for generations past
been numbered among the county families.
[Sidenote: CUCKFIELD]
Cuckfield very narrowly escaped being directly on the route of the
Brighton railway, but it pleased the engineers to bring their line no
nearer than Hayward's Heath, some two miles distant. They built a station
there, on the lone heath, "for Cuckfield," with the result, sixty years
later, that the sometime solitude is a town and still growing, while
Cuckfield declines. Hayward's Heath, curiously enough, is, or was until
December, 1894, in the parish of Cuckfield, but the time is at hand when
the two will be joined by the spread of that railway upstart; and then
will be the psychological moment for abolishing the name of Hayward's
Heath--which is a shocking stumbling-block for the aitchless--and adopting
that of the parental "Cookfield."
Meanwhile, I shall drop no sentimental tears over the chance that
Cuckfield lost, sixty years ago, of becoming a railway junction and a
modern town. Of junctions and mushroom towns we have a sufficiency, but of
surviving sweet old country townlets very few.
To see Cuckfield thoroughly demands some little leisure, for although it
is small one must needs have time to assimilate the atmosphere of the
place, if it is to be appreciated at its worth; from the grey old church
with its tall shingled spire and its monuments of Burrells and Sergisons
of Cuckfield Place, to the staid old houses in the quiet streets, and
those two fine old coaching inns, the "Talbot" and the "King's Head."
Rowlandson made a picture of the town in 1789, and it is not wholly unlike
that, even now, but where is that Fair we see in progress in his spirited
rendering? Gone, together with the smart fellow driving the curricle, and
all the other figures of that scene, into the forgotten. There, in one
corner, you see the Recruiting Sergeant and the drummer, impressing with
military glory a typical smock-frocked Hodge, gaping so outrageously that
he seems to be opening his face rather than merely his mouth; the artist's
idea seems to have been that, like a dolphin, he would swallow anything,
either in the way of food or of stories. There are no full-blooded
Sergeant Kites and gaping yokels nowadays.
Cuckfield is evidently feeling, more and more, the altered condition of
affairs. Motorists, who are supposed to bring back prosperity to the road,
do nothing of the kind on the road to Brighton; for those who live at
Brighton or London merely want to reach the other end as quickly as
possible, and, with a legal limit up to twenty miles an hour, can cover
the distance in two hours and a half, and, with an occasional illegal
interval, easily in two hours. Except in case of a breakdown, the wayside
hostelries do not often see the colour of the motorists' money, but they
smell the stink, and are choked with the dust of them, and landlords and
every one else concerned would be only too glad if the project for
building a road between London and Brighton, exclusively for motor
traffic, were likely to be realised. Then ordinary users of the highway
might once more be able to discern the natural scenery of the road, at
present obscured with dust-clouds.
The text for these remarks is furnished by the recent closing, after a
hundred and fifty years or more, of the once chief inn of Cuckfield: the
fine and stately "Talbot," now empty and "To Let"; the hospitable
quotation "You're welcome, what's your will," from _The Merry Wives of
Windsor_ on its fanlight, reading like a bitter mockery.
The interior of Cuckfield Church is crowded with monuments of the
Sergisons and the Burrells. Pride of place is given in the chancel to the
monument of Charles Sergison, who died in 1732, aged 78. It is a very fine
white marble monument, with a figure of Truth gazing into her mirror, and
holding with one hand a medallion partly supported by a Cupid,
displaying a portrait of the lamented Sergison, who, we learn from a
sub-acid inscription, was "Commissioner of the Navy forty-eight years,
till 1719, to the entire satisfaction of the King and his Ministers." "The
civil government of the Navy then being put into military hands, he was
esteemed by them not a fit person to serve any longer." He was, in short,
like those "rulers of the Queen's (or King's) Navee" satirised by Sir W.
S. Gilbert in modern times, and "never went to sea." At the period of his
compulsory retirement it seems to have rather belatedly occurred to the
authorities that such an one could not be well acquainted with the needs
of the Navy; so the "Capacity, Penetration, exact Judgment" of this "true
patriot" were shelved; but, at any rate, he had had his whack, and it was
surely high time for the exact judgment, true patriotism, capacity and
penetration of others to have a chance of making something out of the
nation.
[Illustration: THE ROAD OUT OF CUCKFIELD.]
A few monuments are hidden behind the organ, among them one to Guy
Carleton, "son of George, Lord Bishop of Chichester." He, it seems, "died
of a consumption, cl=c=l=c=cxxiv," which appears to be the highly esoteric
way of writing 1624. "_Mors vitae initium_" he tells us, and illustrates it
with the pleasing fancy of a skull mounted on an hour-glass, with ears of
wheat sprouting from the eyeless sockets. Other equally pleasant devices,
encircled with fragments of Greek, are plentiful, the whole concluding
with the announcement that "The end of all things is at hand." Holding
that opinion, it would seem to have been hardly worth while to erect the
monument, but in the result it survives to show what a very gross mistake
he made.
Two illustrations of the quiet annals of Cuckfield, widely different in
point of time, are the old clock and the wall-plate memorial to one Frank
Bleach of the Royal Sussex Volunteer Company, who died at Bloemfontein in
1901. The ancient hand-wrought clock, made in 1667 by Isaac Leney,
probably of Cuckfield, finally stopped in 1867, and was taken down in
1873. After lying as lumber in the belfry for many years, it was in 1904
fixed on the interior wall of the tower.
XXVII
[Sidenote: "ROOKWOOD"]
Cuckfield Place, acknowledged by Harrison Ainsworth to be the original of
his "Rookwood," stands immediately outside the town, and is visible, in
midst of the park, from the road. That romantic home of ghostly tradition
is fittingly approached by a long and lofty avenue of limes, where stands
the clock-tower entrance-gate, removed from Slaugham Place.
Beyond it the picturesquely broken surface of the park stretches,
beautifully wooded and populated with herds of deer, the grey, many-gabled
mansion looking down upon the whole.
[Sidenote: AINSWORTH]
"Rookwood," the fantastic and gory tale that first gave Harrison Ainsworth
a vogue, was commenced in 1831, but not completed until 1834. Ainsworth
died at Reigate, January 3, 1882. Thus in his preface he acknowledges his
model:
"The supernatural occurrence forming the groundwork of one of the ballads
which I have made the harbinger of doom to the house of Rookwood, is
ascribed by popular superstition to a family resident in Sussex, upon
whose estate the fatal tree (a gigantic lime, with mighty arms and huge
girth of trunk, as described in the song) is still carefully preserved.
Cuckfield Place, to which this singular piece of timber is attached, is, I
may state for the benefit of the curious, the real Rookwood Hall; for I
have not drawn upon imagination, but upon memory in describing the seat
and domains of that fated family. The general features of the venerable
structure, several of its chambers, the old garden, and, in particular,
the noble park, with its spreading prospects, its picturesque views of the
hall, 'like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe' (as the poet Shelley once observed of
the same scene), its deep glades, through which the deer come lightly
tripping down, its uplands, slopes, brooks, brakes, coverts, and groves
are carefully delineated."
[Illustration: CUCKFIELD PLACE.]
"Like Mrs. Radcliffe!" That romance is indeed written in the peculiar
convention which obtained with her, with Horace Walpole, with Maturin, and
"Monk" Lewis; a convention of Gothic gloom and superstition, delighting in
gore and apparitions, responsible for the "Mysteries of Udolpho," "The
Italian," "The Monk," and other highly seasoned reading of the early years
of the nineteenth century. Ainsworth deliberately modelled his manner upon
Mrs. Radcliffe, changing the scenes of his desperate deeds from her
favourite Italy to our own land. His pages abound in apparitions,
death-watches, highwaymen, "pistols for two and breakfasts for one,"
daggers, poison-bowls, and burials alive, and, with a little literary
ability added to his horribles, his would be a really hair-raising
romance. But the blood he ladles out so plentifully is only coloured
water; his spectres are only illuminated turnips on broomsticks; his
verses so deplorable, his witticisms so hobnailed that even schoolboys
refuse any longer to be thrilled. He "wants to make yer blood run cold,"
but he not infrequently raises a hearty laugh instead. It would be
impossible to burlesque "Rookwood"; it burlesques itself, and shall be
allowed to do so here, from the point where Alan Rookwood visits the
family vault, to his tragic end:
[Illustration: THE CLOCK-TOWER AND HAUNTED AVENUE, CUCKFIELD PLACE.]
[Illustration: HARRISON AINSWORTH. _From the Fraser portrait._]