originating in a fancy of Sir John Vanbrugh,--that professional architect
and amateur dramatist of Queen Anne's time,--for a suburban retreat. He
purchased some land at Esher, between the village and the common, and,
foregoing his usual ponderous style of piling up huge masses of stone
and brickwork, put up quite a small and unpretentious brick house upon it.
Sir John Vanbrugh died in 1726, and posterity seems still in doubt as to
whether he excelled in writing comedies or in designing ponderous palaces
of the type of Blenheim and Castle Howard. Certainly his writings are as
light as his buildings heavy, and though a wit might justly compose an
epitaph for him as an architect,
"Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee,"
the application can extend no further.
[Illustration: Ruins of Wolsey's Palace Esher]
Before he died, Vanbrugh's estate was sold to the Earl of Clare, who added
a banqueting-hall to the architect's modest dwelling, purchased additional
land, and, after the custom greatly honoured in the observance during the
eighteenth century, stole much more from the neighbouring common, until he
brought the palings of the park coterminous (as the political geographers
might say) with the Portsmouth Road. In midst of the land he had thus
filched from the commoners of Esher, the Earl of Clare built a kind of
belvidere on a pleasant eminence overlooking the country-side, and called
it Clare Mount. Thus arose the name of the house and park. Soon
afterwards, however, the Earl was created Duke of Newcastle, and, to
honour his new pomp and circumstance the more, employed Kent, the
celebrated landscape gardener, to re-arrange the grounds and gardens,
until their magnificence called forth this eulogium from Sir Samuel Garth,
a dabbler both in medicine and metre:--
"Oh! who can paint in verse those rising hills,
Those gentle valleys, and their silver rills;
Close groves and opening glades with verdure spread,
Flow'rs sighing sweets, and shrubs that balsams bleed?"
Ah! who indeed? Not Sir Samuel Garth, though, if this be a representative
taste of his quality.
The Claremont that we see now was built by the "heaven-born general,"
Clive, who purchased the estate upon the death of the Duke of Newcastle in
1768. He built, with the aid of Lancelot Brown (Capability Brown his
contemporaries eke-named him), in a grand and massive style that excited
the gaping wonder of the country folk. "The peasantry of Surrey," says
Macaulay, in his "Essay on Clive," "looked with mysterious horror on the
stately house which was rising at Claremont, and whispered that the great
wicked lord had ordered the walls to be made so thick in order to keep out
the devil, who would one day carry him away bodily." This unenviable
reputation for wickedness was the work of Clive's enemies, of whom,
perhaps, from one cause and another, no man has possessed so many. The men
above whose heads his genius and daring had carried him, and the Little
Englanders of that day, both hated the hero of Plassey with a lurid and
vitriolic vehemence. They circulated strange tales of his cruelty and
cupidity in India, until even well-informed people regarded Clive as an
incarnate fiend, and "Capability" Brown even came to wonder that his
conscience allowed him to sleep in the same house with the notorious
Moorshedabad treasure-chest.
[Illustration: LORD CLIVE.]
Clive ended his brief but glorious career, slain by his own hand, in
November 1774, but none the less murdered by the ingratitude of his
country, a country so prolific in heroes that it can afford, for the sport
of factions, to hound them occasionally to ruin and to death, coming
afterwards in recriminating heart-agony to mourn their loss. Clive died,
not yet fifty years of age, killed by constitutional melancholia,
aggravated by disease and the yelpings of politicians, eager to drag down
in the mire the man who gave us India. The arms of Clive still decorate
the pediment of Claremont, the only house, so 'tis said, that "Capability"
Brown ever built, though he altered many.
[Sidenote: _PRINCESS CHARLOTTE_]
In the forty years that succeeded between the death of Clive and the
purchase of the estate by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests,
Claremont had a succession of owners; and upon the marriage of the Prince
Regent's only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, in 1816, it was allotted
to her for a residence. It was in May of that year that the Princess
Charlotte of Wales was married to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the petty
German Duchy that has furnished princelings innumerable for the recruiting
of kingdoms and principalities, and has given the Coburg Loaf its name.
But within a year of her marriage the Princess died in child-birth, and
was buried in a mausoleum within the park. Then Claremont was for long
deserted. There is a much-engraved portrait of the Princess, painted by
Chalon, R.A., which shows a pleasant-faced girl, with fine neck and full
eyes,--the characteristic eyes of the Guelphs,--and a strong facial
resemblance to her father and grandfather, the Third and Fourth Georges.
She is represented as habited in the indecent dress of the period, with
ermined robe, and wearing a velvet hat with an immense plume of ostrich
feathers. But a much more pleasing portrait is that by an unnamed artist,
"a Lady," reproduced here, which gives a representation of the Princess
without those elaborate feathers and showy trappings of Court ceremonial.
[Sidenote: _CHRONIQUES SCANDALEUSES_]
The circumstances that attended the death of this Princess, to whom the
nation looked as their future Queen, were not a little mysterious, and
gave rise to many sinister rumours and scandals. Sir Richard Croft, a
fashionable _accoucheur_ of that time, was in attendance upon her with
other physicians. He was one who signed the bulletins announcing her
steady progress towards recovery after the birth of a dead child; but on
the following day the news of the Princess's death came as a sudden shock
upon England, whose people had but recently shared in the joy and
happiness of her happy marriage, doubly welcome after the sinister
quarrels, estrangements, and espionages that marked the wedded life of the
Regent. Scarce had the tidings of the Princess Charlotte's death at
Claremont become public property than all manner of strange whispers
became current as to the causes of it. The public mind was, singularly
enough, not satisfied with the medical explanations which would ordinarily
have been accepted for very truth; but became exercised with vague
suspicions of foul play that were only fanned into further life by the
mutual recriminations of medicos and lay pamphleteers. Even those who
saw no shadow of a crime upon this bad business were ready to cast blame
and the bitterest reproaches upon Sir Richard Croft, in whose care the
case chiefly lay, for his mistaken treatment. And this was not the first
occasion upon which Croft's conduct had been looked upon with suspicion,
for, years previously, a scandalous rumour had been bruited about with
regard to two of his noble patients,--the Duchess of Devonshire and an
unnamed lady of title,--by which it would seem that he was privy to a
supposititious change of children at the Duchess of Devonshire's
accouchement, when it was believed that the Duchess exchanged a girl for
her friend's boy.
[Illustration: PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES.]
But on this occasion the affair was much more serious, whether blame
attached to him solely for mistaken treatment, or whether scandal
whispered at criminal complicity. The Princess Charlotte died on November
6, 1817; three months later--on February 13, 1818--Sir Richard Croft, in
despair, shot himself. He was but fifty-six years of age.
Years later--in 1832--when Lady Ann Hamilton's extraordinary scribblings
were published in two volumes under the title of "A Secret History of the
Court of England, from 1760 to the Death of George IV.," these old rumours
were crystallized into a definite charge of murder against some nobleman
whose name is prudently veiled under a blank. The Princess, says Lady
Hamilton, was in a fair way of recovery, and a cup of broth was given her;
but after partaking of it she died in convulsions. The nurse who handed
her the cup noticed a dark red sediment at the bottom, and on tasting it
found her tongue blistered! This peer, according to Lady Hamilton, acted
with the connivance of the King, George III., and his glorified German
_hausfrau_, and with the approval of the Princess's father, the Regent,
who, it is asserted in those pages, was heard to say some time previously
at Esher that "no child of the Princess Charlotte shall ever sit upon the
throne of England." Lady Ann Hamilton, however, was a malevolent gossip,
holding the most extreme Radical views, and as a personal friend and
uncompromising partisan of Caroline, Princess of Wales,--that silly and
phenomenally undignified woman--was eager to believe anything, no matter
how atrocious, of her husband and his people.
No member of the Royal Family was present at the Princess Charlotte's
death-bed. She died, with the sole exception of her husband, Prince
Leopold, amid physicians and domestics.
The King and Queen were (says Lady Hamilton) a hundred and eight miles
away, and the Regent was either at Carlton House or staying with the
Marquis of Hertford (or rather the _Marchioness_, she adds, in significant
italics).
It is said that Lady Ann Hamilton's writings, published as a "Secret
History," were given to the world, without her knowledge or consent, by a
gentleman who had obtained the manuscript. Certain it is that when these
two volumes appeared, in 1832, they were suppressed; and some four years
later, when some other manuscripts belonging to the author were
advertised for sale by auction, they were hastily bought up on behalf of a
royal personage, and, it is believed, destroyed.
It is difficult to understand the hardihood which asserted at that time
that the Princess Charlotte had been the victim of a murderous conspiracy
between her nearest relatives; the more especially because her death would
not seem to have been any one's immediate great gain. Had it been of great
advantage to any prominent member of the Royal Family, the suspicion might
have been better founded, for royalty has no monopoly of virtue, while the
temptations of its position are a hundredfold greater than those of lower
estate. The history of royal houses shows that murder has frequently
altered the line of succession, but surely the House of Brunswick (that
heavy and phlegmatic line) never soared to this tragic height, or plumbed
such depths of crime in modern times.
[Sidenote: _'MR. SMITH'_]
For many years after the death of the Princess Charlotte, Claremont was
closed, the rooms unoccupied, and left in much the condition they were
then. Prince Leopold became, by the death of his wife, life-owner of the
place, but its sad memories led him to leave it for ever. In after years
the Prince became King of the Belgians, and, in 1832, a year after this
advancement, married the eldest daughter of Louis Philippe, King of the
French. Sixteen years later, during the stress of the French Revolution of
1848, that _bourgeois_ King fled from Paris and crossed the Channel as
"Mr. Smith," and his son-in-law placed Claremont at the disposal of the
_emigre malgre lui_. Here he died in 1850. In 1865 the King of the
Belgians died, and Claremont reverted to the Crown. Six years later the
Marquis and Marchioness of Lorne stayed here on the occasion of their
marriage, and when the Queen's youngest son, Prince Leopold, Duke of
Albany, was married, Claremont became his home. But the Duke died in 1884,
and the house is now in the occupation of his widow.
Claremont, indeed, is a place weighted with memories and sad thoughts of
the "might have been." If only the intrepid Clive had lived to take the
field against our rebellious colonists, as it was proposed he should do,
it seems likely that the New England States had yet been ours, and
Washington surely hanged or shot. Then North America had not become the
safe refuge of political murderers commanding sympathetic ears at the
White House, nor had we ever heard of the _scagliola_ fripperies of a
Presidential Reception. But a dull and obstinate King, a stupid ministry,
and incompetent generals combined to lose us those colonies, and death
snatched away untimely the foremost military genius of the time, to leave
statesmen in despair at what they thought was surely the decay of a
glorious Empire.
How changed, too, would have been the succession had the Princess
Charlotte lived! The Sailor King--that most unaffected and heartiest of
monarchs, whom the irreverent witlings of his day called "Silly Billy,"
for no particular reason that I know of--would have still remained Duke of
Clarence, and the Princess Victoria would have been but a mere cousin of
another Queen. But no matter what Fate has in store for other Houses, the
Coburger reaps an advantage, whate'er befalls; and though one is relegated
to a less distinguished career by the death of his consort, another of
that prolific race becomes the husband of a Queen, and the father of our
future Kings.
XIII
But it is a long way yet to Guildford, and eight miles to our next change,
at the "Talbot" Hotel, Ripley; equally with the Esher "Bear" a coaching
inn of long and honourable lineage. Let us then proceed without more ado
down the road.
[Sidenote: _FAIRMILE_]
Fairmile Common is the next place of note, and it is especially notable
from the coaching point of view, by reason of the flatness of the road
that is supposed to be the only level mile between London and Guildford.
Along this Fair Mile, then, the coachmen of by-past generations generally
took the opportunity of "springing" their cattle, and as they were
"sprung" then, so they are to-day, over this best of galloping-grounds,
the said "springing" bringing us, in less than no time, to Cobham Street,
where there is a very fine and large roadside inn indeed, called the
"White Lion." If the coach stopped here, you would be able to verify this
statement by an exploration of the interior, which is as cosy and cheerful
within as it is bare and cold and inhospitable-looking without--at least,
those are my sentiments. But, then, the coach doesn't stop, but goes
dashing round the corner and over the river Mole and up Pain's Hill in the
"twinkling of a bed-post," that somewhat clumsy _facon de parler_.
Now, if you walked leisurely this way, there would be time for talking of
many interesting things. Firstly, as to Fairmile itself, which is worth
lingering over upon a fine summer's day.
Fairmile Common is associated, in local tradition, with the following
tragedy. Two young brothers of the Vincent family of Stoke D'Abernon, the
elder of whom had but just come into possession of his estate, were out on
a shooting expedition from that village. They had put up several birds,
but had not been able to get a single shot, when the eldest swore with a
great oath that he would fire at whatever they next met with. They had
gone but little further when the miller of the neighbouring mill passed
them and bade them good-day. When he had passed, the younger brother
jokingly reminded the elder of his oath, whereupon the latter immediately
fired at the miller, who fell dead upon the spot. The murderer escaped to
his home, and, by family influence, backed by large sums of money, no
effective steps were taken for his arrest. He was concealed upon his
estate for some years, when he died from remorse. To commemorate his rash
act and his untimely death, a monument was placed in Stoke D'Abernon
Church, bearing the "bloody hand" which no doubt gave rise to the whole
story.
[Sidenote: _COBHAM STREET_]
The red hand of Ulster, badge of honourable distinction, is not
understanded by the country folk, and so, to account for it, the Stoke
D'Abernon villagers have evolved this moving tale. That is my view of the
legend. If you are curious concerning it, why, Stoke D'Abernon is near at
hand, and there, in as charming a village church as you could wish to see,
filled, beside, with archaeological interest, is this memorial. Did space
suffice (which it doesn't) much might be said of Stoke D'Abernon, of
Slyfield Farm, and of Cobham village; which last must on no account be
confounded with Cobham Street. The latter place is, in fact, just an
offshoot (though an old one 'tis true) of the original village, and it
arose out of the large amount of custom that was always going along the
Portsmouth Road in olden times.
[Illustration: COBHAM CHURCHYARD.]
Cobham Street stood here in receipt of this custom and of much patronage
from that very fine high-handed gentleman, the Honourable Charles
Hamilton, who in the reign of George II. filched a large tract of common
land just beyond the other side of the Mole, enclosed it, and by the
expenditure of vast sums of money caused such gardens to blossom here,
such caves and grottoes to be formed, and such cunning dispositions of
statuary to be made (all in the classic taste of the time) that that
carping critic, Horace Walpole, was compelled to a reluctant admiration.
And this was the origin of the estate still known as Pain's Hill.
"'Tis very bad, in man or woman,
To steal a goose from off the common:
But who shall plead that man's excuse
Who steals the common from the goose?"
Thus the metrical moralist. But this was common sport (no joke intended
here!) during last century and in the beginning of this, and if a man
stole a few hundred acres in this way, he was thought none the worse of
for it. For all that, however, the Honourable Charles Hamilton was nothing
more, in fact, than a common thief, with this difference--that the poor
devil who "prigged" a handkerchief was hanged for petty larceny, while the
rich man who stole land on a large scale, and converted it to his own
uses, was hailed as a man of taste and culture, and his robbery commended.
[Illustration: PAIN'S HILL.]
[Sidenote: _WISLEY_]
Pain's Hill looms up finely as one turns the corner of Cobham Street and
crosses the Mole by the successor of the bridge built here by the "Good
Queen Maud," in place of the ford where one of her maids-of-honour was
drowned. There are more inns here, and their humped and bowed roofs make
an excellent composition in a sketch, with the remarkable mop-like trees
of Pain's Hill Park seen in silhouette beyond. To Pain's Hill succeeds
Tartar Hill and Wisley Common; sombre fir trees lining the road and
reflected in the great pond that spreads like some mystic mere over many
acres. The "Huts" Hotel, however, rebuilt and aggressively modern, is not
at all mystic, and neither are the crowds of thirsty, dusty cyclists who
frequent it on summer days.
XIV
[Sidenote: _CYCLING_]
The Portsmouth Road, from London to Ripley, has, any time these last
twenty years, been the most frequented by cyclists of any road in England.
The "Ripley Road," as it is generally known among wheelmen, is throughout
the year, but more especially in the spring and summer months, alive with
cycles and noisy with the ringing of cycle-bells. On Saturday afternoons,
and on fine Sundays, an almost inconceivable number take a journey down
these twenty-three miles from London, and back again in the evening;
calling at the "Angel," at Ditton, on the way, and taking tea at their
Mecca, the "Anchor," at Ripley. The road is excellent for cycling, but so
also are a number of others, equally accessible, around London, and it
must be acknowledged that the "Ripley Road" is as much favoured by a
singular freak of fashion in cycling, and as illogically, as a particular
walk in Hyde Park is affected by Society on Sundays. But in cycling
circles (apt phrase!) it is quite the correct thing to be seen at Ditton
or at Ripley on a Sunday, and every one who is any one in that sport and
pastime, be-devilled as it is now-a-days with shady professionalism and
the transparently subsidized performances of the makers' amateurs, must be
there. The "Ripley Road," now-a-days, is, in fact, the stalking-ground of
self-advertising long-distance riders, of cliquey and boisterous club-men,
and of the immodest women who wear breeches awheel. The tourist, and the
man who only has a fancy for the cycle as a means of healthful exercise,
and does not join the membership of a club, give the "Ripley Road" a wide
berth.
The frequenters of this road became in 1894 such an unmitigated nuisance
and source of danger to the public in passing through Kingston-on-Thames,
that the local bench of magistrates were obliged to institute proceedings
against a number of cyclists for furious driving, and for riding machines
without lights or bells. According to the evidence given by an inspector
of police, no fewer than twenty thousand cyclists passed through Kingston
on Whit Sunday, 1894.
[Illustration: FAME UP-TO-DATE.]
Coaching men hate the cyclist with a bitter hatred, and he will ever be to
them a _bete noir_ of the blackest hue. It may not be generally known that
the contumelious expression of "cads on castors," which has become so
widespread that it has almost obtained the popularity of a proverb,
originated with Edmund Yates; but he was really the author of that
scornful epithet, whose apt alliteration will probably never be forgotten,
though the "castors" be evolved into hitherto undreamed-of patterns, and
the race of cads who earned the appellation be dead and gone. The
expression "cads on castors" will, with that other humorous epithet,
"Brompton boilers," achieve immortality when cycling is obsolete, and the
corrugated iron roofs of the Bethnal Green Museum are rusted away. The
objectionable phrase of "bounders on box-seats," which some cycling
journalists have flung back at their coaching critics has not run to
anything like the popularity of the other, and more apt, effort of
alliterative conciseness; for the prejudices of the lieges have, up to
now, been chiefly in favour of the whips and horsey men to whom the cycle
is the "poor man's horse," and therefore to be condemned. Will the sport
and pastime of cycling ever become aristocratic? It is to be feared or
hoped (accordingly as you admire or detest the cycle) that it will never
win to this regard: at least, not while the road-racing clubs and
individual cyclists continue to render the Queen's highway dangerous for
all other travellers; not so long as that peculiar species of Fame, which
is more properly Notoriety, continues to be trumpeted abroad concerning
the doings of racing cyclists who strive, not for the English love of
sport, but for the cheques awarded them by the long-headed manufacturers
whose machines they ride--and advertise.
[Illustration: THE "ANCHOR," RIPLEY.]
[Sidenote: _RIPLEY_]
But cycling has brought much prosperity to Ripley village and its two
antiquated inns, the "Talbot" and the "Anchor." A few years ago, indeed
(before cycling had become so popular), the "Talbot" was closed and given
over to solitude and mice, but now-a-days one may be as well served there
as at any country hostel you please to mention. The company, however, of
the "Talbot" is not exclusively made up of wheelmen of the gregarious (or
club) species, and a decent tourist who is neither a scorcher nor a wearer
of badges, nor anything else of the "attached" variety, may rest himself
there with quiet and comfort, except on high days and Bank holidays: on
which occasions the quiet and peaceable man generally stays at home,
preferring solitude to the over-much company he would find on the road.
But if you wish to see the club-wheelman in his most characteristic moods,
why then the "Anchor" is your inn, for in the low-ceiled rooms that lurk
dimly behind the queer, white-washed gables of that old house, cycling
clubmen foregather in any number, limited only by the capacity of the inn.
The place is given over to cyclists, and beside the road, behind the
house, or on the broad common upon which this roadside village fronts,
their machines are stacked as thickly as in the store-rooms of some
manufactory.
[Illustration: HERBERT LIDDELL CORTIS.]