remarkably picturesque from the highway that even the least preoccupied
with antiquities must needs stop and admire, is Hickstead Place, a small
but beautiful residence, the seat of Miss Davidson, dating from the time
of Henry the Seventh, with a curious detached building in two floors, of
the same or even somewhat earlier period, on the lawn; remarkable for the
large vitrified bricks in its gables, worked into rough crosses and
supposed to indicate a former use as a chapel. History, however, is silent
that point; but, as the inquirer may discover for himself, it now
fulfils the twin offices of a studio and a lumber room. The parish church
of Twineham, little more than a mile away, is of the same period, and
built of similar materials. Hickstead Place has been in the same family
for close upon four hundred years, and as an old house without much in the
way of a history, and with its ancient features largely retained and
adapted to modern domestic needs, is a striking example both of the
continuity and the placidity of English life. The staircase walls are
frescoed in a blue monochrome with sixteenth-century representations of
field-sports and hunting scenes, very curious and interesting. The roof is
covered with slabs of Horsham stone, and the oak entrance is original.
Ancient yews, among them one clipped to resemble a bear sitting on his
rump, give an air of distinction to the lawn, completed by a pair of
eighteenth-century wrought-iron gates between red brick pillars.
[Illustration: NEWTIMBER PLACE.]
Sayers Common is a modern hamlet, of a few scattered houses. Albourne lies
away to the right. From here the Vale of Newtimber opens out and the South
Downs rise grandly ahead. Noble trees, singly and in groups, grow
plentiful; and where they are at their thickest, in the sheltered hollow
of the hills, stands Newtimber Place, belonging to Viscount Buxton, a
noble mansion with Queen Anne front of red brick and flint, and an
Elizabethan back, surrounded by a broad moat of clear water, formed by
embanking the beginnings of a little stream that comes willing out of the
chalky bosom of the hills. It is a rarely complete and beautiful scene.
Beyond it, above the woods where in spring the fluting blackbird sings of
love and the delights of a mossy nest in the sheltered vale, rises Dale
Hill, with its old toll-house. It was in the neighbouring Dale Vale that
Tom Sayers, afterwards the unconquered champion of England, fought his
first fight.
[Illustration: PYECOMBE: JUNCTION OF THE ROADS.]
He was not, as often stated, an Irishman, but the son of a man descended
from a thoroughly Sussexian stock. The name of Sayers is well known
throughout Sussex, and in particular at Hand Cross, Burgess Hill, and
Hurstpierpoint. There is even, as we have already seen, a Sayers Common on
the road. Tom Sayers, however, was born at Brighton. He worked as a
bricklayer at building the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes
Railway: that great viaduct which spans the Brighton Road as you enter the
town. He retired in 1860, after his fight with Heenan, and when he died,
in 1865, the reputation of prize-fighting died with him.
At the summit of Dale Hill stands Pyecombe, above the junction of roads,
on the rounded shoulder of the downs. The little rubbly and flinty
churches of Pyecombe, Patcham, Preston, and Clayton are very similar in
appearance exteriorly and all are provided with identical towers finished
off with a shingled spirelet of insignificant proportions. This little
Norman church, consisting of a tiny nave and chancel only, is chiefly
interesting as possessing a triple chancel arch and an ancient font.
[Illustration: PATCHAM.]
Over the chancel arch hangs a painting of the Royal Arms, painted in the
time of George the Third, faded and tawdry, with dandified unicorn and a
gamboge lion, all teeth and mane, regarding the congregation on Sundays,
and empty benches at other times, with the most amiable of grins. It is
quite typical of Pyecombe that those old Royal Arms should still remain;
for the place is what it was then, and then it doubtless was what it had
been in the days of good Queen Anne, or even of Elizabeth, to go no
further back. The grey tower tops the hill as it has done since the Middle
Ages, the few cottages cluster about it as of yore, and only those who
lived in those humble homes, or reared that church, are gone. Making the
circuit of the church, I look upon the stone quoins and the bedded flints
of those walls; and as I think how they remain, scarce grizzled by the
weathering of countless storms, and how those builders are not merely
gone, but are as forgotten as though they had never existed, I could
have it in my heart to hate the insensate handiwork of man, to which he
has given an existence: the unfeeling walls of stone and flint and mortar
that can outlast him and the memory of him by, it may well be, a thousand
years.
XXXIII
From Pyecombe we come through a cleft in the great chalk ridge of the
South Downs into the country of the "deans." North and South of the Downs
are two different countries--so different that if they were inhabited by
two peoples and governed by two rulers and a frontier ran along the ridge,
it would seem no strange thing. But both are England, and not merely
England, but the same county of Sussex. It is a wooded, Wealden district
of deep clay we have left, and a hungry, barren land of chalk we enter.
But it is a sunny land, where the grassy shoulders of the mighty downs,
looking southward, catch and retain the heat, and almost make you believe
Brighton to be named from its bright and lively skies, and not from that
very shadowy Anglo-Saxon saint, Brighthelm.
[Sidenote: THE DEANS]
The country of the deans is, in general, a barren country. Every one knows
Brighton and its neighbourhood to be places where trees are rare enough to
be curiosities, but in this generally treeless land there are hollows and
shallow valleys amid the dry chalky hillsides where little boscages form
places for the eye, tired of much bright dazzling sunlight, to rest. These
are the deans. Very often they have been made the sites of villages; and
all along this southern aspect of these hills of the Sussex seaboard you
will find deans of various qualifications, from East Dean and West Dean,
by Eastbourne, to Denton (which is, of course "Dean-ton") near Newhaven,
Rottingdean, Ovingdean, Balsdean, Standean, Roedean, and the two that are
strung along these last miles into Brighton--Pangdean and Withdean. Most
of these show the same characteristics of clustered woodlands in a
sheltered fold of the hills, where a grey little flinty church with
stunted spirelet presides over a few large farms and a group of little
cottages. Time and circumstance have changed those that do not happen to
conform to this general rule; and, as ill luck will have it, our first
"dean" is one of these nonconformists.
Pangdean is a hamlet situated in that very forbidding spot where the downs
are at their baldest, and where the chalk-heaps turned up in the making of
the Brighton Railway call aloud for the agricultural equivalent of Tatcho
and its rivals. It is little more than an unkempt farm and a roadside pond
of dirty water where acrobatic ducks perform astonishing feats of agility,
standing on their heads and exhibiting their posteriors in the manner of
their kind. But within sight, down the stretch of road, is Patcham, and
beyond it the hamlet of Withdean, more conformable.
Why Patcham is not nominally, as it is actually in form and every other
circumstance, a "dean" is not clear. There it lies in the vale, just as a
dean should and does do; with sheltering ridges about it, and in the
hollow the church, the cottages, and the woodlands. Very noble woodlands,
too: tall elms with clanging rookeries, and, nestling below them, an old
toll-house.
Not so _very_ old a toll-house, for it was the successor of Preston
turnpike-gate which, erected on the outskirts of Brighton town about 1807,
was removed north of Withdean in 1854, as the result of an agitation set
afoot in 1853, when the Highway Trustees were applying to Parliament for
another term of years. It and its legend "NO TRUST," painted large for all
the world to see, and hateful in a world that has ever preferred credit,
were a nuisance and a gratuitous satire upon human nature. No one
regretted them when their time came, December 31st, 1878; least of all the
early cyclists, who had the luxury of paying at Patcham Gate, and yielded
their "tuppences" with what grace they might.
On the less hallowed north side of the churchyard of Patcham may still
with difficulty be spelled the inscription:
Sacred to the memory of DANIEL SCALES,
who was unfortunately shot on Thursday evening,
November 7th, 1796.
Alas! swift flew the fatal lead,
Which pierced through the young man's head.
He instant fell, resigned his breath,
And closed his languid eyes in death.
All you who do this stone draw near,
Oh! pray let fall the pitying tear.
From this sad instance may we all,
Prepare to meet Jehovah's call.
It is a relic of those lawless old days of smuggling that are so dear to
youthful minds. Youth, like the Irish peasant, is always anarchist and
"agin the Government"; and certainly the deeds of derring-do that were
wrought by smuggler and Revenue officer alike sometimes stir even
middle-aged blood.
[Illustration: OLD DOVECOT, PATCHAM.]
Smuggling was rife here. Where, indeed, was it not in those times? and
Daniel Scales was the most desperate of a daring gang. The night when he
was "unfortunately shot," he, with many others of the gang, was coming
from Brighton laden heavily with smuggled goods, and on the way they fell
in with a number of soldiers and excise officers, near this place. The
smugglers fled, leaving their casks of liquor to take care of themselves,
careful only to make good their own escape, saving only Daniel Scales,
who, met by a "riding officer," was called upon to surrender himself and
his booty, which he refused to do. The officer, who himself had been in
early days engaged in many smuggling transactions, but was now a brand
plucked from the burning, and zealous for King and Customs, knew that
Daniel was "too good a man for him, for they had tried it out before," so
he shot him through the head; and as the bullet, like those in the nursery
rhyme, was made of "lead, lead, lead," Daniel was killed. Alas! poor
Daniel.
An ancient manorial pigeon-house or dovecot still remains at Patcham,
sturdily built of Sussex flints, banded with brick, and wonderfully
buttressed.
[Sidenote: PRESTON]
Preston is now almost wholly urban, but its Early English church, although
patched and altered, still keeps its fresco representing the murder of
Thomas a Becket, and that of an angel disputing with the Devil for the
possession of a departed soul. The angel, like some celestial grocer, is
weighing the shivering soul in the balance, while the Devil, sitting in
one scale, makes the unfortunate soul in the other "kick the beam."
XXXIV
It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that
complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through
Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall
elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick
arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town.
It is Brighton's ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter
and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London.
Brighton has renewed its youth. It has had ill fortune as well as good,
and went through a middle period when, deserted by Royalty, and not yet
fully won to a broader popularity, its older houses looked shabby and its
newer mean. But that period has passed. What remains of the age of George
the Fourth has with the lapse of time and the inevitable changes in taste,
become almost archaeologically interesting, and the newer Brighton
approaches a Parisian magnificence and display. The Pavilion of George the
Fourth was the last word in gorgeousness of his time, but it wears an
old-maidish appearance of dowdiness in midst of the Brighton of the
twentieth century.
[Illustration: PRESTON VIADUCT: ENTRANCE TO BRIGHTON.]
The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from
London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a
curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of
the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even
if those characteristic semicircular bayed fronts did not: they are York
Place, Hanover Terrace, Gloucester Place, Adelaide this, Caroline that,
and Brunswick t'other: all names associated with the late Georgian period.
The Old Steyne was in Florizel's time the rendezvous of fashion. The
"front" and the lawns of Hove have long since usurped that distinction,
but the gardens and the old trees of the Old Steyne are more beautiful
than ever. They are the only few the town itself can boast.
[Sidenote: BRIGHTON]
Treeless Brighton has been the derision alike of Doctor Johnson and Tom
Hood, to name no others. Johnson, who first visited Brighton in 1770 in
the company of the Thrales and Fanny Burney, declared the neighbourhood to
be so desolate that "if one had a mind to hang one's self for desperation
at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on
which to fasten a rope." At any rate it would have needed a particularly
stout tree to serve Johnson's turn, had he a mind to it. Johnson was an
ingrate, and not worthy of the good that Doctor Brighton wrought upon him.
Hood, on the other hand, is jocular in an airier and lighter-hearted
fashion. His punning humour (a kind of witticism which Johnson hated with
the hatred of a man who delved deep after Greek and Latin roots) is to
Johnson's as the footfall of a cat to the earth-shaking tread of the
elephant. His, too, is a manner of gibe that is susceptible of being
construed into praise by the townsfolk. "Of all the trees," says he, "I
ever saw, none could be mentioned in the same breath with the magnificent
beach at Brighton."
But though these trees of the Pavilion give a grateful shelter from the
glare of the sun and the roughness of the wind, they hide little of the
tawdriness of that architectural enormity. The gilding has faded, the
tinsel become tarnished, and the whole pile of cupolas and minarets is
reduced to one even tint, that is not white nor grey, nor any distinctive
shade of any colour. How the preposterous building could ever have been
admired (as it undoubtedly was at one time) surpasses belief. Its cost,
one shrewdly suspects--it is supposed to have cost over L1,000,000--was
what appealed to the imagination.
That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord Hertford whom one
recognises as the "Marquis of Steyne" in "Vanity Fair," admired it, as
assuredly did not rough and ready Cobbett, who opines, "A good idea of the
building may be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon
the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners."
That is no bad description of this monument of extravagance and bad taste.
Begun so early as 1784, it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and
rebuildings, completed in 1818, with the exception of the north gate, the
work of William the Fourth in 1832.
The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill-informed enthusiasm for
Chinese architecture, mingled with that of India and Constantinople, and
was built as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the Summer Palace
at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. It suffers nowadays, much more than
it need do, from the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious
scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance with its style,
would not only relieve the dull drab monotone, but would go some way to
justify the Prince's taste.
But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of a certain permanence
upon the princely and royal favours extended to the town, whose
population, numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had grown to
5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the succeeding ten years it had more
than doubled itself, being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian
Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the modern towns of
Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen in the present population of
161,000--the equivalent of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that
in the last year of the reign of George the Fourth.
[Illustration: THE PAVILION.]
One of the best stories connected with the Pavilion is that told so well
in the "Four Georges":
"And now I have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence
and York and the very highest personage in the realm, the great Prince
Regent, all play parts.
"The feast was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the
scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst Fox's jolly associates, there
figures a great nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in
his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with
the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs; but a sort of reconciliation had
taken place, and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine
and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of
Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in
Sussex.
"The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a notable
scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to
drink wine with the Duke--a challenge which the old toper did not refuse.
He soon began to see that there was a conspiracy against him; he drank
glass for glass: he overthrew many of the brave. At last the first
gentleman of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers
filled a great glass for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink.
'Now,' says he, 'I will have my carriage and go home.'
"The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof
where he had been so generously entertained. 'No,' he said; 'he had had
enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him; he would leave
the place at once, and never enter its doors more.'
"The carriage was called, and came; but, in the half-hour's interval, the
liquor had proved too potent for the old man; his host's generous purpose
was answered, and the Duke's old grey head lay stupefied on the table.
Nevertheless, when his post-chaise was announced, he staggered to it as
well as he could, and, stumbling in, bade the postilions drive to Arundel.
"They drove him for half an hour round and round the Pavilion lawn; the
poor old man fancied he was going home.
"When he awoke that morning, he was in a bed at the Prince's hideous house
at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence; they have fiddlers
there every day, and sometimes buffoons and mountebanks hire the
Riding-House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still
there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted."
[Sidenote: CHARLES, DUKE OF NORFOLK]
Very telling indignation, no doubt, but the gross defect of Thackeray's
"Four Georges" is its want of sincerity. Sympathy is wasted on that Duke,
who was one of the filthiest voluptuaries of his age, or of any other
since that of Heliogabalus. Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, was
not merely a bestial drunkard, like his father before him, capable of
drinking all his contemporaries under the table; but was a swinish
creature in every way. Gorging himself to repletion with food and drink,
he would make himself purposely sick, in order to begin again. A
contemporary account of him as a member of the Beefsteak Club described
him as a man of huge unwieldy fatness, who, having gorged until he had
eaten himself into incapacity for speaking or moving, would motion for a
bell to be rung, when servants, entering with a litter, would carry him
off to bed. It was well written of him:
On Norfolk's tomb inscribe this placard:
He lived a beast and died a blackguard.
This "very old," "poor old man" of Thackeray's misplaced sympathy did not,
as a matter of fact, live to a very great age. He died in 1815, aged
sixty-nine.
Practical joking was elevated to the status of a fine art at Brighton by
the Prince and his merry men. A characteristic story of him is that told
of a drive to Brighton races, when he was accompanied in his great yellow
barouche by Townsend, the Bow Street runner, who was present to protect
the Prince from insult or robbery at the hands of the multitude. "It was a
position," says my authority, "which gave His Royal Highness an
opportunity to practise upon his guardian a somewhat unpleasant joke.
Turning suddenly to Townsend, just at the termination of a race, he
exclaimed, 'By Jove, Townsend, I've been robbed; I had with me some damson
tarts, but they are now gone.' 'Gone!' said Townsend, rising;
'impossible!' 'Yes,' rejoined the Prince, 'and you are the purloiner,' at
the same time taking from the seat whereon the officer had been sitting
the crushed crust of the asserted missing tarts, and adding, 'This is a
sad blot upon your reputation as a vigilant officer.' 'Rather say, your
Royal Highness, a sad stain upon my escutcheon,' added Townsend, raising
the gilt-buttoned tails of his blue coat and exhibiting the fruit-stained
seat of his nankeen inexpressibles."
XXXV
But it was not this practical-joking Prince who first discovered Brighton.
It would never have attained its great vogue without him, but it would
have been the health resort of a certain circle of fashion--an inferior
Bath, in fact. To Dr. Richard Russell--the name sometimes spelt with one
"l"--who visited the little village of Brighthelmstone in 1750, belongs
the credit of discovering the place to an ailing fashionable world. He
died in 1759, long ere the sun of royal splendour first rose upon the
fishing-village; but even before the Prince of Wales first visited
Brighthelmstone in 1782, it had attained a certain popularity, as the
"Brighthelmstone Guide" of July, 1777, attests, in these halting verses:
This town or village of renown,
Like London Bridge, half broken down,
Few years ago was worse than Wapping,
Not fit for a human soul to stop in;
But now, like to a worn-out shoe,
By patching well, the place will do.
You'd wonder much, I'm sure, to see
How it's becramm'd with quality.
And so on.
[Illustration: THE CLIFFS, BRIGHTHELMSTONE, 1789. _From an aquatint after
Rowlandson._]
[Illustration: DR. RICHARD RUSSELL. _From the portrait by Zoffany._]
[Sidenote: GUIDES TO BRIGHTON]
Brighthelmstone, indeed, has had more Guides written upon it than even
Bath has had, and very curious some of them are become in these days. They
range from lively to severe, from grave to gay, from the serious screeds
of Russell and Dr. Relhan, his successor, to the light and airy, and not
too admirable puffs of to-day. But, however these guides may vary, they
all agree in harking back to that shadowy Brighthelm who is supposed to
have given his peculiar name to the ancient fisher-village here
established time out of mind. In the days when "County Histories" were
first let loose, in folio volumes, upon an unoffending land, historians,
archaeologists, and other interested parties seemed at a loss for the
derivation of the place-name, and, rather than confess themselves ignorant
of its meaning, they conspired together to invent a Saxon archbishop, who,
dying in the odour of sanctity and the ninth century, bequeathed his
appellation to what is now known, in a contracted form, as Brighton.
But the man is not known who has unassailable proofs to show of this
Brighthelm's having so honoured the fisher-folk's hovels with his name.
Thackeray, greatly daring, considering that the Fourth George is the real
patron--saint, we can hardly say; let us make it king--of the town,
elected to deliver his lectures upon the "Four Georges" at Brighton, among
other places, and to that end made, with monumental assurance, a personal
application at the Town Hall for the hire of the banqueting-room in the
Royal Pavilion.
But one of the Aldermen, who chanced to be present, suggested, with
extra-aldermanic wit, that the Town Hall would be equally suitable,
intimating at the same time that it was not considered as strictly
etiquette to "abuse a man in his own house." The witty Alderman's
suggestion, we are told, was acted upon, and the Town Hall engaged
forthwith.