chapel of Ripley, interesting to cyclists by reason of the memorial window
inserted here to the memory of an early cycling hero of the
race-path--Herbert Liddell Cortis--who died, shortly after reaching
Australia, at Carcoar, New South Wales, on December 28, 1885. Interest of
another kind may be found in the architecture of the Earl of Lovelace's
beautiful seat, Ockham Park, that borders the road, just before entering
the village; and in the ruins of Newark Abbey, that lie on the banks of
the Wey, across Ripley Green. But time and tide wait for no man, and the
"New Times" coach is equally impatient of delay. Two minutes suffice for
changing teams at the "Talbot," and off that heir of the coaching age goes
again.
XV.
For six miles the road runs level, from Ripley to Guildford, forming
excellent galloping ground for the horses of the "New Times" coach. All
the way the scenery is pretty, but with no very striking features, and
villas dot the roadside for a considerable distance. On the left hand the
coach passes Clandon Park, and on the right comes Mr. Frederic Harrison's
historic house, Sutton Place, and Stoke Park, that takes its name from the
village of Stoke-next-Guildford.
Past some outlying waste lands and over railway bridges, the coach rattles
down the sharp descent into Guildford town; down the narrow High
Street--the steepest, they say, in England, and certainly the stoniest--to
draw up before the "Angel," punctually at two o'clock.
[Sidenote: _PROVINCIALITY_]
Guildford is no more than thirty miles from London, and yet it remains to
this day as provincial in appearance as ever it could have been in the
olden times of road-travel. Provinciality was the pet bugbear of Matthew
Arnold, but he applied it as a scornful term only to literary and critical
shortcomings. To him the vapourings of modern poetasters would have been
provincialisms, and the narrow-minded criticisms of Mr. George Howells,
who can see nothing in Shakespeare, but perceives a wealth of genius in
his fellow-novelists of the United States, would have been provincialisms
of the worst order.
But the provinciality of places, as distinguished from minds, can be no
reproach in these latter days, when all the great towns, with London at
their head, have grown so large and congested that a sight of God's pure
country and a breath of healthy air are only to be obtained by most
townsfolk with infinite pains and great expenditure of time. It was an
evil day when the great cities of England grew so large that one who
ascended a church steeple in their midst could discover nothing on the
horizon but chimney-pots and bricks-and-mortar; and the best of times were
those when weary citizens took their pleasure after the day's work in the
fields and groves that bordered upon the habitations of men. What are
Progress and Civilization but will-o'-wisps conjured up by the malignity
of the devil to hide the degeneration of the race and the starvation of
the soul, when the outcome of the centuries is the shutting out from the
face of nature of three-fourths of the population? What else than a sorry
jest is the boast of London's five millions of people, when by far the
greater proportion of those five millions never know what country life
means, nor even what is the mitigated rusticity of a provincial town in
whose centre you can open your casement of a morning and welcome the sun
rising in a clear sky, listen to the morning chorus of the birds, and see,
though you be in the very midst of the provincial microcosm, the fields
and hedge-rows, the streams and rural lanes of the country-side?
[Sidenote: _GUILDFORD_]
Guildford, then, is provincial in the best and healthiest sense; for
though your habitat be in the High Street, which here, as in all other
properly-constituted towns, is the very nucleus of the borough, you
need never be longer than ten minutes in leaving the town behind if you
are so minded. Guildford is a town of very individual character. Godalming
folks will tell you that Guildford is "cliquey," by which term I
understand exclusiveness to be meant. It may be so, in fact I believe this
to be one of Guildford's most marked social characteristics; but
exclusiveness implies local patriotism, which is a refreshing spirit for a
Londoner to encounter once in a way. At any rate, he will find no spirit
of this description in what Cobbett satirically termed "the Wen." The
patriotism of Peckham has yet to be discovered; the local enthusiasm of
Camberwell is as rare as the song of the lark in London streets; and the
man who would now praise what was once the country village of "merrie"
Islington is not to be found.
[Illustration: GUILDHALL, GUILDFORD.]
It is difficult to pluck even one greatly outstanding incident from
Guildford's history wherewith to enliven these pages, for although
Guildford possessed a strong and well-placed castle from Norman times, it
cannot be said that the annals of the town are at all distinguished by
records of battle, murder, and sudden death, or by military prowess. So
much the better for Guildford town, you will say, and the expression may
be allowed, for this old borough has ever been eminently peaceful and
prosperous in the absence of civil or military commotion. Its very name is
earnest of trade and merchandise; and the guilds of Guildford were very
powerful bodies of traders who dealt in cloths and wool, at one time the
chiefest of local products, or in the minor articles that ministered to
the wants of those great staple trades.
Meanwhile the guardians of the old Castle, whose keep still dominates
Guildford from most points of view, had little enough to do but to keep
the place in order for such occasions when the King came a-hunting in the
neighbourhood, or progressed past here to some distant part of the realm.
King John seems to have been by far the most frequent royal visitor to
Guildford Castle, and almost the last, for the cold comforts of Norman
keeps went very early out of fashion with kings and queens, and domestic
hearths began to replace dungeon-like apartments in chilly towers as soon
as social conditions began to settle down into something remotely
resembling tranquillity.
Guildford Keep stands at this day in gardens belonging to the Corporation,
and free to all. It is of the Norman type, familiarized to many by prints
of such well-known Norman towers as those of Rochester and of Hedingham
Castles, and is at this time a mere shell, open to the sky. Within the
thickness of the walls are staircases by which it is possible to climb to
the summit and gaze thence down upon the red roofs of the town that
cluster so picturesquely beneath. Here, too, is a Norman oratory, whose
narrow walls are covered with names and figures scratched deeply into the
stone, "probably," says a local guide, "the work of prisoners confined
here." But "J. Robinson, 1892," was surely no prisoner within these
bounds, although he should have been who thus carved his undistinguished
name here.
[Illustration: CASTLE ARCH.]
[Sidenote: _THE GUILDHALL_]
Beside the keep there remains but one archway of all the extensive
military works that at one time surrounded the Castle. This is in Quarry
Street, and is known as Castle Arch. The chalk caverns close at hand, and
the vaulted crypt beneath the "Angel," although they have long been looked
upon as dungeons, had, according to the best-informed of local
archaeologists, no connection whatever with the Castle. Perhaps even before
the Castle keep, the delightfully quaint old Guildhall is the most
characteristic feature of Guildford's architecture. Compared with that old
stronghold, the Guildhall is the merest _parvenu_, having been built in
1683; but, comparisons of age apart, there is no parallel to be drawn
between the two. The old tower is four-square and stern, with only the
picturesqueness that romance can find, while the belfried tower and the
boldly-projecting clock that impends massively over the pavements of the
High Street, and gives the time o' day to the good folks of the town, are
the pride of the eye and the delight of the artistic sense of all them
that know how to appreciate at their true aesthetic value those memorials
of the old corporate spirit of business and good-fellowship that have long
since vanished from municipal practice. The legend that may still be read
upon the Corporation mace, of Elizabethan date, is earnest of this
old-time amity. Thus it runs: "Fayre God. Doe Justice. Love thy Brether."
Set against this, the proceedings of the Kingston-upon-Thames Town Council
of some few weeks back make ugly reading, and at the same time illustrate
the new spirit very vividly indeed. You who list to learn may read in the
records for the present year of that old borough, that while one member
of the Council stigmatized another member's statements as falsehoods, the
first rejoined that his accuser was, in plain English, "a liar." Appealed
to by the Mayor to withdraw the offensive expression, he refused, and the
Mayor and Corporation filed out of the Council-chamber, leaving him to his
own reflections.
That the burghers of Guildford were always the best of friends one with
another is not my contention; that the dignity of their ancient
surroundings should conduce to loving-kindness may remain unquestioned.
XVI
[Sidenote: _GEORGE ABBOT_]
The greatest of Guildford's worthies was George Abbot, the son of Maurice
Abbot, a clothworker of this town, and his wife Alice. He was born in
1562, the eldest of that "happy ternion of brothers," as Fuller quaintly
describes him and his two younger brothers, who became respectively Bishop
of Salisbury and Lord Mayor of London. The parents of these distinguished
men came very near to martyrdom in the reign of Queen Mary, for they were
both ardent Protestants; but, escaping the fate that befell many others,
they had the happiness of seeing their children rise in the world far
beyond all local expectations. Alice Abbot, indeed, had a singular dream
which foretold that "if she could eat a jack or pike, the first son she
should bring into the world would be a great man." A few days afterwards
(so runs the story) she drew up a pike from the river Wey while filling
buckets for household use; and, in accord with the promptings of her
dream, ate it. "Many people of quality offered themselves to be sponsors
at the baptism of Mistress Alice's son--the future Archbishop," says
Aubrey; and if the dream itself was nothing but the result of a late
supper acting upon a vivid imagination, certainly local interest in
"Mistress Alice's" account of it procured for her firstborn quite an
exceptional degree of favour and consideration. He was educated first at
the Free Grammar School of Guildford, and was sent at the age of sixteen
to Balliol College. Thenceforward his rise was rapid. He studied theology,
and became tutor to the sons of influential personages. Excellent
preferments in the Church became his at an early age, and through many
stages of favour he became Archbishop of Canterbury in his forty-ninth
year. His rise was undoubtedly due to native worth, for Abbot was a
scholar of the foremost rank, and well equipped, both by study and by
force of character, to hold his own in the fierce religious controversies
of his time. He was, moreover, honest, and had little of the truckler or
the time-server in his nature, as his opposition both to James I. and
Charles I. showed, on occasion. It is to his righteous opposition that
Charterhouse School, now down the road at Godalming, owes its very
existence; for, when the cupidity of James I. was aroused over the
provisions of Thomas Sutton's will, and when he attempted to divert that
pious founder's money to his own uses, Abbot withstood the attempt, and
the King was fain to give way--with an ill grace, 'tis true, but
effectually enough.
Abbot was nothing of a courtier, and, indeed, no very pleasant-natured
man. He was sour of aspect and morose; gloomy and fanatic in religion, and
no less swift to send religious opponents to the stake than the Catholic
inquisitors of a generation before his time. He had a strong and militant
affection for the reformed religion, and held a singularly lonely position
between the levelling puritanical-democratic doctrines of the age and the
High Church party. A Calvinistic narrowness distinguished this great man's
public acts, and he was sufficiently Puritan in spirit to look with
disfavour upon, and to absolutely forbid, Sunday sports. His truculent
religious views appeared in a lurid light shortly after he became
Archbishop, when he condemned two Arians to death for what he held to be
"blasphemous heresy." These two unfortunate men, Bartholomew Legate and
Edward Wightman, were burnt in 1614, three years after their sentence, as
the "recompence of their pride and impiety."
Meanwhile, the mind of the Archbishop was liberal enough in other
directions. He could send religious dissenters to a horrible death, and
look back with satisfaction upon his handiwork, while, at the same time,
he was maturing the plans and provisions for the noble almshouse that
still stands in Guildford High Street and bears the honoured name of
Abbot's Hospital.
[Sidenote: _A SAD MISCHANCE_]
In 1619 he laid the first stone of his "Hospital," and three years later
had the satisfaction of seeing it incorporated by Royal Charter; a
satisfaction clouded by an accident that embittered the remainder of his
life. The story of this untoward event illustrates at once the morbid
habit of his mind and the bitter passions of those times. It was in 1621,
while with a hunting party in Bramshill Park, that this thing befell. A
large party had assembled by the invitation of Lord Zouch, and chased the
deer through the glades of that lovely park. The Archbishop drew his bow
at a buck, and at the same time that the arrow sped, a gamekeeper, one
Peter Hawkins, darted forward between the trees, and received the shaft in
his heart.
A coroner's jury returned a verdict by which the accident was attributed
to the man's negligence in exposing himself to danger after having been
warned; but Abbot was greatly distressed, and so heavily did the
occurrence weigh upon him that, to the time of his death, in 1632, he kept
a monthly fast on a Tuesday, the day of the gamekeeper's death. He also
settled an annuity of L20 upon the man's widow.
The King declared that "an angel might have miscarried in such sort," and
that "no one but a fool or a knave would think worse of a man for such an
accident"; but it suited Abbot's religious rivals and opponents to regard
with public aversion one "whose hands were imbrued with blood"; and his
clergy, who had felt the curb of the Archbishop's discipline too acutely
to let this chance slip, felt or expressed a horror of their spiritual
head ever afterwards. Others even went so far as to refuse ordination at
the hands of a homicide, and bishops-elect scrupled to receive
consecration from him, until the Royal Pardon had been obtained and the
conscience of the Church satisfied.
For all his opposition to James I., the Archbishop lost a good friend when
that pragmatical monarch died, and gained an enemy when Charles I. came to
the throne. The High Church party were then in the ascendant, and Abbot,
from various causes, declined from favour. In 1627 he was sequestered, and
the Archbishopric of Canterbury put into commission of five bishops, of
whom Laud, Abbot's particular enemy, was one.
These misfortunes at length broke Abbot's health, which finally failed in
1632. At the beginning of that year he seemed upon the point of death, but
revived somewhat, and a letter, still preserved, written by an especial
friend at this juncture, hinted at the indecency of those who expected his
end, and says--"If any other prelate gape at his benefice, his Grace
perhaps may eat the goose which shall graze upon his grave."
But death came upon Abbot that same year. He made an edifying end at
Croydon, and was buried, by his own request, in Trinity Church, opposite
the Hospital he had founded in his native town.
Eight years afterwards, the Archbishop's brother, Sir Maurice Abbot,
erected the sumptuous monument there which Pepys admired on one of his
visits to Guildford. It still remains, although the church itself (one of
Guildford's three churches) has been rebuilt.
XVII
[Sidenote: _THE INN-YARD_]
Guildford has many old inns, as befits an old town which lay directly upon
an old coach-road. Of these the chiefest lie in the High Street, and they
are the "Angel," the "Crown," the "White Hart," and the "Red Lion." The
"Red Lion" has a modernized frontage, but within it is the same hostelry
at which Mr. Samuel Pepys stayed, time and again; the others are more
suggestive of the flower of the coaching age and of Pickwickian revels;
but in these latter days the wide race of "commercial gentlemen" and the
somewhat stolid and beefy grazier class are their more usual guests.
Behind their prosperous-looking fronts are the vast stable-yards,
approached from the High Street by yawning archways that "once upon a
time" admitted the coaches, and whence issued the carriages and
post-chaises of a by-gone day; now echoing with the rumble of the omnibus
that plies between the town and the railway-station, laden chiefly with
the sample-boxes of enterprising bagmen. But in that "once upon a time,"
whose chronology finally determined and came to an end in the '40's, there
was a superabundance of coach traffic here.
Hogarth has left a picture of a typical country inn-yard of his time which
shows, better than any amount of unaided description, what manner of
places they were whence started the lumbering stages of last century. No
one has yet identified the picture, reproduced here, with any particular
inn, although some have sought to place it in Essex, because of the
election crowd seen in the background carrying an effigy and a banner
inscribed with the weird, and at first sight incomprehensible, legend "No
Old Baby." A candidate named Child stood for one of the Essex boroughs
about this date, and, according to Hogarth commentators, this group was
intended as an incidental satire upon him. On the other hand, the
likelihood of this being really an inn-yard upon the Portsmouth Road is
seen by the sailor who occupies a somewhat insecure position upon the roof
of the coach beside a French valet, and whose bundle is inscribed
"Centurion." The "Centurion," one of Anson's squadron, put in repeatedly
at Portsmouth, and the sailor is apparently on a journey home, fresh from
the sea and from Anson's command.
The scene is very amusing, and most of the interest centres in the
foreground, where a coach is seen, about to start. An old woman sits
smoking in the rumble-tumble behind, while a traveller looks on and pays
no heed to the post-boy who holds his hat in readiness for a tip. A guest
is about to depart, and the landlord is seen presenting his bill. He seems
to be assuring his customer that his charges are strictly moderate; but,
judging from the sour expression of the latter's face, mine host has been
overcharging him for a good round sum. Meanwhile, the devil's own din is
being sounded by the fat landlady, who is ringing her bell violently for
the chambermaid, and by a noisy fellow who is winding a horn out of window
with all his might. The chambermaid is otherwise engaged, for an amorous
spark is seen to be kissing her in the open doorway.
[Illustration: AN INN-YARD, 1747. _After Hogarth._]
[Sidenote: _COACHES_]
So greatly was Guildford High Street crowded in the old coaching times
that, just about a hundred years ago, it was widened at one point by the
slicing off of a portion from one of Guildford's three churches which
projected inconveniently into the roadway. To gaze upon what is still a
very narrow street, and to remember that this is its "widened" state, is
calculated to impress a stranger with the singular parsimony of our
ancestors, when land was comparatively cheap and considerations of space
presumably not so pressing.
The pressure of traffic here in the Augustan age of coaching will be
better understood when it is learned that not only did the Portsmouth
coaches pass through Guildford, and the numerous local stages that ran no
further than Guildford and Godalming, but that the Southampton coaches
came thus far, and only turned off from this road at a point just beyond
the town. The celebrated "Red Rover" Southampton coach came this way, and
so did the equally famous "Telegraph"; and, leaving Guildford behind, they
pursued their way to Southampton by way of Farnham and Winchester. To this
route belonged many celebrated whips of those times whose names are almost
unmeaning now-a-days; and some of the best of these once well-known
wielders of the whipcord were stopped by Fate and the Railway in the full
force of their careers. Happy the man whose spirit was not too stubborn to
submit gracefully and at once to the new dispensation, and to seek
employment on the rail. Good servants of the road found equally good
places on the railways--if they chose to take them. But (and can you
wonder at it?) they rarely chose to accept, having naturally the bitterest
prejudices against the railways and everything that belonged to them; and
many men wasted their energies and expended their savings in a fruitless
endeavour to compete with steam, when they could have transferred their
allegiance from the road to the rail with honour and profit to themselves
and no less to their employers. John Peers, a well-known coachman, and
driver of the London and Southampton "Telegraph," was reduced by the
coming of the railway to driving an omnibus. From this position, being
scornful and quarrelsome, unable to adapt himself to changed
circumstances, and altogether "above his station," he drifted finally into
the workhouse. A gentleman who had known him well upon the box-seat in
more prosperous days, discovered him in this refuge of the
poverty-stricken and superseded; started a subscription for him amongst
his former patrons, and rescued him from the small mercies and little ease
of the Guardians of the Poor. He was housed upon the road he had driven
over so often in the days before steam had come to ruin the coaching
interest, and there, in due course, he died.
And his was a fate happier than that of most others--coachmen, guards,
post-boys, and ostlers--thrown out of employment by railways, and unable
or unwilling to adapt themselves to new surroundings. Many of these soured
and disappointed men lived on and on in a vain hope of "new-fangled
notions" coming to a speedy and disastrous failure. When accidents
occurred and lives were lost by railway smashes, their faces were lit
up with a wintry joy, and they wagged their heads with an air of profound
wisdom, and said individually, "I told you so!" When the "Railway Mania"
of 1844 and succeeding years collapsed and brought the inevitable
financial crash, they chuckled, and felt by anticipation the ribbons in
their hands again. But though financial disasters came on top of
collisions, and though the system of railway travel seemed for a while
like a bubble on point of bursting, the promise was never fulfilled, and
the old coachmen who actually did drive the roads once more did so as
ministers to the amateur spirit that has since 1863 caused so many coaches
to be put upon the country roads of Old England.
[Illustration: THE "RED ROVER" GUILDFORD AND SOUTHAMPTON COACH.]
XVIII
[Sidenote: _INEPT CRITICISM_]
Directly the river Wey is crossed, either in leaving or entering
Guildford, the road begins to rise steeply. Going towards Godalming, it
brings the traveller in a mile's walk to the ruined chapel of St.
Catherine, standing on a sandstone hill beside the highway, whose red
sides are burrowed by rabbits and sand-martins. The chapel has been ruined
time out of mind, and is to-day but a motive for a sketch. One of Turner's
best plates in his "_Liber Studiorum_" has St. Catherine's Chapel for its
subject, and to the criticism of Turner's work comes the Rev. Mr. Stopford
Brooke, in this wise:--"It is no picturesque place. Turner painted English
life as it was; and the struggle of the poor is uppermost in his mind in
all these rustic subjects ... pathetic feeling is given them by Turner's
anxious kindness."