his friend, the widow. Lord Campden and Sir George Croke united in
insisting that she should return to Lord Lumley the ring she had
accepted, and therewith give him his _coup de grâce_. Ring and letter
were despatched on St. Valentine’s Day, and Lord Lumley made his final
exit. All London was busy with wondering what the next move would
be. It seemed in favour of Sir Edward. Sir Henry Wotton met him in
the presence chamber, and wished him ‘full sail.’ The mother of Sir
Edward’s late wife, accompanied by that deceased wife’s sister, were
indefatigable in lauding Dering’s conjugal virtues in the widow’s ear.
Beneficed clergymen, church dignitaries, London gentlemen, country
squires, met in the best room in the widow’s house and sang the chorus
of his praise. The provoking beauty could not be brought to a decision.
She had made a selection, she said, but she really could not say of
whom. All in good time. And so this singular love affair proceeded,
till the widow consented to grant one more interview, positively for
the last time, to her pertinacious suitor, and failed to perform her
promise.
‘I will go to Sir Heneage Finch,’ cried the perplexed wooer.
It is very clear that all along Finch perplexed Dering quite as much
as the widow did. The Recorder spoke well of Sir Edward to himself and
to his friends, and promised to speak well of him to the widow. And
perhaps he did; but at the same time Sir Heneage did not neglect his
own interests. One morning the bells of St. Dunstan’s in the West,
the fashionable church for marriages, rang out a merry wedding peal.
Dr. Raven came out of prison, where he was some time in durance for
his silly assault, just in time to hear the peal. Sir Edward may be
supposed to have put his head out inquiringly from his window. If so,
he must have enjoyed a pretty sight--that of Sir Heneage Finch, in
holiday array, leading into the beautiful widow Bennett’s house that
most tantalising of fair women, as his bride--Lady Finch! Bow bells
took up the peal, as if to announce to all Cocagne that they had all
the while known what was going on. Cockneydom protested that it had
never expected any other issue to the City comedy. Indeed there was a
double marriage. While the widow had been playing with her suitors, her
niece, pretty Mary Croke, daughter of Sir George, had been indulging
in pretty love passages with Harbottle, afterwards Sir Harbottle
Grimstone, Master of the Rolls. On April 16, 1629, aunt and niece, with
their respective lovers, met at St. Dunstan’s, and were then and there
happily married.
The marriage of Sir Heneage with the fair widow was productive of
two daughters,[1] of whom one, Anne, married that Earl of Conway
so celebrated by Burnet for his ignorance. When a foreign minister
once spoke to him of the Circles of Germany, my lord laughed, and
asked, ‘What have circles to do with affairs of state?’ We may
appropriately add that Mrs. Bennett’s son, Simon, became a man of
immense wealth--wealth which his three daughters carried into as many
noble families, very much to the satisfaction of the latter. But what
of the disappointed lover in this comedy? Well, the curtain went down
merrily for him also. He happened to see pretty Unton Gibbes, daughter
of the Warwickshire Sir Ralph, and Sir Edward, having an alacrity
in falling in love, was ‘over head and ears’ immediately. The lady
went straightway to the same depths. They came up together, happy man
and wife, and lived like young lovers. He was passionately attached
to her to the last; but she survived him full thirty years, finding
solace at the affectionate hands of two sons and two daughters. For
Unton, Sir Edward had one of those pet names which, outside the circle
of love, sound so unlovely. It was NUMPS! ‘My ever dear Numps,’ he
says, in a letter addressed to her from London, in 1640, full of
political intelligence, ‘thy pretious and hearty letter I received
with that ardor that it was written.... I shall not see thee so soon
as I wish.... God preserve my pretty children and send thee ease of
thy troublesome cough.... I thank thee for the length of thy welcome
letters, wherein I confess that I cannot equal thy love;’ and he
ends with ‘Thine, more and more, if possibly,’ &c. One passage of
public news in this letter brings a well-known incident before us.
‘The scaffolds are up in Westminster Hall, and Strafford comes to the
barre on Monday morning.’ Some of Sir Edward’s letters to his wife are
subscribed ‘to thy best self the heart of thine own Edward Dering.’
And if he writes ‘thine in haste,’ he adds, ‘but heartily,’ and writes
outside, ‘To my best and dearest friend the Lady Dering,’ while my
lady endorses them, ‘From my dearest.’ One letter quaintly begins with
‘My dear and my comfortable Numps, my happiness is (for the greatest
part of it in this world) circuited in the same sphere with thine.
Love and cheerfulness are blessings invaluable, and if perchance some
excentricke motion interpose, all at last (as in the sphaeres) helpe
to make up the harmony. So I hope with us every motion shall helpe the
tune.’ It would seem that, in absence, they encouraged one another from
Scripture. ‘I did presently, as you wished,’ he writes, ‘read over
the 91 Spalme (as you call it). I did think to return you a text, but
am in haste;’ and ‘Thine own, as ever, for ever.’ The same tone makes
musical all his letters, and her own seem to have been attuned to the
same melody. The former are full moreover of most interesting public
intelligence.
For a troubled time Sir Edward was the much perplexed and ill-requited
Lieutenant of Dover Castle. Released from that charge, he was the
happy, intellectual, Kentish squire. Next, his county returned him to
the Long Parliament, and he commenced his career with fierce opposition
to Laud, hoping that ‘His Grace would have more grace, or no Grace at
all.’ Sir Edward was what would now be called an Ultra-Radical. He
was for abolishing bishops and was ill-affected towards royalty. He
took up with the ‘Root and Branch’ party, and they pushed him forward
to the proposing of revolutionary measures; and when he withdrew from
the course which they had forced him to take they loaded him with
execration, and succeeded in turning him out of Parliament for breach
of privilege. Subsequently, he lay hid from the pursuit of Parliament,
and he is said to have disguised himself as a parson and to have
read prayers in a village church. He joined the King. His estate was
sequestered, his house at Surrenden was plundered. At a later period
the Parliament allowed him to enter on signing the Covenant and paying
a composition; but before the affair was concluded the erst lover of
the twenty-thousand-pound widow was, in 1644, laid to rest in Pluckley
churchyard, which neither covenanting nor compounding can ever disturb.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] It was his son, by a former marriage, who became Lord Chancellor
and Earl of Nottingham.
_TO BRIGHTON AND BACK AGAIN._
Some few years ago, philosophers were jostling excursionists in
once gay Brighthelmstone; they discussed the prospects of science,
and united archæology with a considerable amount of picnicking and
claret-cup. We here submit for the general recreation a paper that was
not read at the meeting of the British Association in that town, but
which will be perused in the larger Elsewhere. Its staple commodity
will consist of the anecdotal waifs and strays connected with old
Brighton, which philosophers do not regard, but which have an especial
value and interest of their own. Accordingly we pass by the Druidical
mistletoe, British barrows, Roman coins, and Saxons, Danes, and
Normans, and we come at once to the Brighton of the middle of the last
century, when rumours of wars from abroad connected themselves with a
literary question and song-writing at home.
About the year 1758 fears of invasion caused several camps to be
established on our south coast. There was one at Brighton. Martial
spirit attuned the popular lyre to both warlike and sentimental
strains. One of the airs then composed has remained popular to this
day. ‘The Girl I left behind me’ was originally known by that and also
by a second name, ‘Brighton Camp,’ to which reference is made in the
following verse:--
Oh, ne’er shall I forget the night,
The stars were bright above me,
And gaily lent their silv’ry light,
When first she vow’d to love me.
But now I’m bound to Brighton Camp,
Kind Heaven then pray guide me,
And send me safely back again
To the girl I’ve left behind me.
This air has been claimed as Irish by Moore and by Bunting. The former
took great liberties with the air. Bunting left it as he found it. But
he did not find it till the year 1800, when he heard it played by an
Irish harper named O’Neile. The harper had probably picked it up from
some regimental band leaving their quarters; but it was popular in
England nearly half a century before the date of its first being known
in Ireland.
Let those who throng Brighton now just consider what it was about a
century ago. In 1761 we read that ‘the men of the town were wholly
employed in fishing, and the women in mending their nets.’ There was,
however, a free school in Brighton; and boys of twelve years of age,
who had learned navigation there, obtained very fair wages in the
‘fishery.’ There was a population, fixed and movable, even at that
period. Many of the houses are described as ‘of flint, with windows
and doors frequently adorned with very good brick.’ When Brighton took
its first step forward for the purpose of attracting visitors we may
learn from a contemporary chronicle of 1761, in which we read that
‘Of late the town has become a resort for the drinking of salt water
and for bathing. If the town grows in the next seven years as it has
done in the last seven, there will be no better in England.’ Brighton
then boasted of ‘one or two public rooms that could be equalled only
by those of York.’ People could then put up with what was called
‘accommodation,’ which was of a very uncomfortable character; but
everything was of a free-and-easy quality, and most visitors were
content to take things as they found them.
To this rule, however, there was one notable exception, just where we
should expect to find it.
Nearly a hundred years have elapsed since Dr. Johnson wrote to Boswell,
in November of the year 1776, ‘I was some weeks this autumn at
Brighthelmstone. The place was very dull, and I was not well.’ The fact
is, that Johnson cared little for the beauties of nature. He was like
Charles Lamb, who once being at the summit of a mountain from which
there was a prospect of unsurpassable grandeur, saw nothing but with
his mind’s eye, and that was at the moment directed to the ham and
beef shop at the corner of St. Martin’s Court. In like manner, Johnson
hated prospects and views. We have the authority of Mrs. Piozzi for
recording that Johnson used to say the best garden was the one which
produced the most roots and fruits, and the river most to be prized was
the one which produced the most fish. The Doctor unmercifully laughed
at Shenstone for valuing a stream according to its picturesqueness, and
not its productiveness. Mrs. Piozzi believed that a walk in a wood when
it rained was the only rural image which pleased Johnson. The pleasure
then was perhaps derived from the thought that the rain would swell
the peas, or make the turnips grow, or in some way or other tend to
the comforting of the inward man. The feeling was akin to that of the
epicurean who dwelt fondly on the orient gale which prospered the ship
freighted with sugar for his gooseberry pie. It was that of Southey’s
philosopher, who reverenced pig, and who, feeling a certain amount of
poetry in a fragrant breeze, exclaimed,
O’er yon blossom’d field
Of beans it came, and thoughts of bacon rise.
Johnson detested the very sight of Brighton Downs, ‘because it was a
country so truly desolate,’ he said, ‘that if one had a mind to hang
oneself for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be
difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the rope.’ When the sage
uttered this dictum he had certainly overlooked the subject of mutton.
He forgot how admirable Sussex land was for turnip husbandry, and that
even where the flints lay thickest the corn crops were all the more
luxuriant. He did love forest trees, and might have remembered that
the Sussex oak has no superior. He was fond of milk, and might have
respected the Sussex cows which keep themselves almost beef, while they
give rich milk, if so little of it. Hate the Downs! Let all such people
remember, especially if they have a liking for a haunch of mutton,
that the rot was never known to be caught upon the South Downs; reason
sufficient to authorise an epicure’s respect. We see poetry even in a
Brighton fish shop. Was it not Sir Wilfred himself who made first-rate
fishermen of the primitive Brighton bunglers?
Johnson and Lamb are not the only intellectual persons whose minds
could turn from the contemplation of great to the consideration of
smaller things. When Charles James Fox was with a party viewing the
old master-pieces in the Louvre, he turned from them to bewail the
too great effulgence of the sun. ‘This heat,’ he remarked, ‘will burn
up all my turnips at St. Anne’s.’ So, Thomas Granville, replying to
Rogers, who was referring to the overpowering glory of a sunset at
which they were looking, observed that it was ‘handsome.’
Half a century ago, Brighton was as destitute of trees as it was in
Johnson’s time. But now, if the Doctor were alive and had a halter,
he would find no difficulty in searching for a branch from which he
might hang, the very bulkiest of acorns. Where formerly only the hardy
tamarisk grew, we may now see, as a local historian (Erredge) points
out, that ‘belts and copses of thriving trees have reared their heads,
and the elm, fir, sycamore, horse-chestnut, larch, beech, hazel, birch,
hawthorn, and the holly, and other evergreens, having, by culture,
become acclimatised, thrive so well as to induce the belief that they
are indigenous to the south-east coast.’
That Brighton should have changed in a certain number of years is a
matter for no surprise at all. The sea rolls its waves over the site
on which the primitive village stood exposed to its fury. The cliffs
which from behind the village looked proudly over the waves have been
in part destroyed by the assailing waters which, it was once thought,
were too remote ever to do them harm. But all this has been the work of
time, and of a very long time. Yet change quite as remarkable has been
accomplished within the lives of many persons still living. They must
be old persons indeed, and must have suffered fourscore years at least
of change of themselves, in order to have been within the periods of
what Brighthelmstone _was_ and what Brighton _is_. What it was towards
the close of the last century, about 1790, when it had ceased to be
the secluded fishing village it once had been, can scarcely now be
realised. It was no uncommon thing for the town to be then visited by
unlicensed rovers of the deep. These thieves, who ranged from Beachy
Head to Selsey Bill, would drop anchor after dark, and send a company
of rascals on shore in a boat, whose mission it was to break into some
rich farmer’s house, or some well-endowed mansion near the coast, and
carry off thence every article of value that was portable and could be
turned to pirate’s use. There was such terror of these water-rats, that
wherever they broke in their coming paralysed honest people, who were
powerless through terror. They bound and gagged the inmates of houses
which they intended to despoil, caroused without limit, and having
plundered the dwelling, staggered down to the beach, and carried on
board their burglarious freight. They would then lift anchor and drop
down along the coast on their way to a place of refuge, or to attack
some other house where there was promise of booty and good cheer. Their
audacity is explicable only on the ground that they had confederates
among the police authorities, if such things were in those early days.
In ancient times, when the French landed there and attacked the town,
the Sussex men turned out with alacrity, and often gave the invaders a
tremendous thrashing. The sons of those Sussex men quailed in presence
of the native rascalry, which was often cruel, but generally avoided
murder.
If any archæologist care about the Druidical name for Brighton--if
indeed there ever was one--or sigh to learn by what classic term the
Romans designated their station on the sea, the care and the sigh are
expended in vain. Let such antiquary console himself by laughing at the
explanation of its later name, handed down from one local historian
to another. Brighthelmstone, as it was called, has not puzzled the
easily-satisfied etymologists. To explain it they invent a Saxon
bishop who never existed, Brighthelm. They both beatify and canonise
him under the title of St. Brighthelm, and having raised him to this
dignity, they erect a _stone_ to commemorate him, or a ‘ton,’ i.e.,
‘town,’ in which he may dwell, and thus we arrive at ‘Brighthelmstone.’
Some etymologists pooh-poohed this derivation altogether, and they
put forth something worse of their own. With them ‘Brighthelmstone’
is born of the shining helms of the Saxon galleys which used (or did
not use) to be off the town! Another party sees in the name simply the
indication that the town once belonged to a warrior whose family name
was Brighthelm. We must frankly confess that one theory is quite as
reasonable as the other.
But, whatever the meaning of the name and whencesoever it came,
there was a universal outcry of alarm and disgust when people in a
hurry, or not much observant of orthography, cut the name down from
a stately three- to a little two-decker. When Brighthelmstone began,
in 1787, to be called Brighton, and _that_ even in print, there was a
howl of reprobation and a general demand to ‘give us back our three
syllables!’ Even Sylvanus Urban in that year moved out of his old ways
into the new-fangled groove, and talked of ‘Brighton’ as if he were a
fashionable young fop wearing a round hat and his own hair, instead of
cocked hat and powder. Sylvanus had announced that a certain Mr. Norman
of Bromley had recently died at ‘Brighton!’ Instantly Mr. Urban was
assailed with an _et tu Brute_ sort of assault. Afflicted archæologists
never thought such a blow could come from St. John’s Gate. One
gentleman remonstrated in a tone of the deepest suffering. He argued
that, if this abbreviating custom be carried on, Brighthelmstone will
not only be wronged, but the world at large, and universal in geography
particular, will be thrown into utter confusion. Foreign nations,
potentates, governments, scholars, foreign humanity generally, we are
told, will be bewildered, and will no longer be able to distinguish
between Brighthelmstone in Sussex and Brighton a village in Yorkshire!
Brighton in Yorkshire seems to have withdrawn itself modestly from the
world; and if the Emperor of Germany reads of the demise of Brown,
Jones, or Robinson at Brighton, that august person will not be troubled
as to its local whereabout.
If Brighton Camps had their picturesque aspect and a certain connection
with poetry, they had occasional deep shadows to contrast with their
lights. The camp of 1795 is especially remarkable for its dark
colouring. The defenders of the country were left by the circumlocution
office of that day with an insufficient quantity of bread, and with
nasty flour to make it. The hungry Oxford militia plundered a mill,
and having got all they wanted for their own stomachs, they seized
a quantity of corn at Newhaven, not for their half-starved comrades
in camp, but for the pleasure of throwing the whole of it into the
river at that place. Eight of the mutineers were tried, of whom two,
Cooke (called ‘Captain’) and Parish, were sentenced to be shot, the
rest to be flogged. During the eight days of trial the circumlocution
office gave them as little food as when the office drove them to
mutiny through hunger. If it had not been for the morning and evening
supplies passed to them through the bars of their airing ground by
Samaritans of Russell Street, the accused militiamen would not have
lived through the trial to be shot or flogged. The last ceremony was
carried out with much lugubrious pomp. Three of the six men received
an instalment of 300 strokes, equivalent to 2,700 lashes, and the
other three were respited for future punishment. Then came the more
merciful act of putting quickly to death the two men condemned to be
shot. There was indeed much slow circumstance before the two culprits
were fairly in face of the company of their fellow-militiamen selected
to carry out the sentence. For the support and encouragement of the
firing party not to shirk their duty and attempt to run, there was
drawn up behind them a company of artillery, with shotted cannon and
lighted matches, ready to blow the firing party to atoms if they showed
any reluctance to destroy their two comrades. They showed nothing but
alacrity under the circumstances. Cooke and Parish, kneeling composedly
on their own coffins, were shot by what was curiously described as ‘a
delinquent platoon of twelve of their own regiment at the distance
of only six paces,’ and then did not kill both! One, as he lay on
the ground, had to be ‘finished’ by a pistol-shot through the head.
Perhaps the ‘delinquent platoon’ were too hungry to aim steadily. One
thing is sure, namely, that nobody at the circumlocution office was
flogged for famishing the soldiers, nor was the rascal who supplied
the filthy so-called flour hanged. Probably he held the plate at the
next Brighton Charity Sermons, and sneered at the poor folk who only
contributed ‘coppers.’
In the first year of the present century the ‘Crown and Anchor’ in
East Street was proudly known as ‘The Hotel’; but the ‘Ship’ soon
endeavoured to attract fashionable visitors by a dining-room decorated
with ‘The Story of Telemachus’ in bronze on blue. At that time coaches
had not learned to run between Brighton and London in five hours.
In summer the earliest coach left Brighton at 7 A.M., and arrived
in London at 5 P.M. The night coach left at 10 P.M. and was due in
London at 7 the next morning, keeping its time when it could. Then
for crossing ‘the streak of liquid silver,’ there were ‘pacquets’
advertised to run ‘in time of peace’ three times a week, always setting
sail, weather permitting, in the evening. One of these ‘pacquets’
manifested Napoleonic ideas, for it was called the _Buonaparte_
schooner, and it made a great boast of having two cabins, a state room,
and the means of making up twenty beds.
At this period it is amusing to read in a local record that ‘literature
is not neglected in this town; for in Middle Street there is an academy
where young gentlemen are boarded and educated.’ The idea that a
boarding-school necessarily implies literary cultivation has long since
expired.