WEYBRIDGE
A Georgian village.--The Kembles.--A prophetic lament.--Wey no
more.--The Brooklands bucket.--Exiles.--Riddles of spelling.--A
royal palace.--The Duchess's Monkeys.--Oatlands cedars.--Portmore
Park.--St. George's Hill.--The Leveller's Beanfields.
There is a pleasant melancholy in trying to imagine a Georgian
Weybridge. Fanny Kemble describes the village as she saw it as a girl,
before the railway came. Then, in the twenties, it was "a rural, rather
deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain
of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on
the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former
residence of the Duke of York." Eighty years have gone, and the
deserted-looking village has spread into a town and suburbs covering
more than a square mile of ground; Portmore Park has vanished; Oatlands
is a hotel. The railway has created one more residential neighbourhood.
Fanny Kemble first came to Weybridge as a fifteen-year-old school-girl,
and spent three summers with her family at Eastlands, a little cottage,
still to be seen, on the outskirts of the village, of which she has
written some amusing reminiscences. Charles Kemble, the actor, her
father, used to come down from Saturday to Monday, but had no great
appreciation of country life, or, perhaps, rather of the cottage, which
was too small for him; "he was as nearly as possible too high and too
wide, too long and too large, for every room in the house." But Fanny
Kemble herself and her mother enjoyed the country to the full. Mrs.
Kemble had a passion for fishing, and she and her children used to spend
her days on the banks of the Wey, apparently with the slightest possible
success.
A curious relic remains of the Kembles' Weybridge holidays. This is to
be seen in the Eastlands' cottage garden, and is a semi-circular heap of
earth or sand planted with trees and shrubs. Once, when it was much
larger and higher, it was "the Mound," and was the favourite playground
of the Kemble girls and boys. It grew out of a huge heap of sand which
the landlord refused to move, and which Mrs. Kemble therefore planted
and cut into shape with a walk round the top. Naturally enough,
tradition has grown up round this heap of sand. Fanny Kemble was a
famous actress, and lived here as a child; therefore this mound was a
theatre. It is locally known indeed as "the theatre." But I can find no
evidence that it was ever used as anything of the kind; certainly Fanny
Kemble never refers to it as a theatre, nor as anything else but a
"domestic fortification" and a "delightful playground." To her it is
always "the Mound."
[Illustration: _Weybridge._]
If that charming and brilliant lady could revisit these glimpses of the
moon, what would she say of that infinitely larger "mound" and its
surroundings in the new motor track, with which it is Weybridge's
unhappy fate to be linked to-day? Nearly a square mile of quiet meadow
and forest and hill slashed and scarred and scarped into a saucer of
cement; acres of pine and cedar and oak and rhododendron smashed and
sawn to fragments; the roar of thundering Napiers and Hotchkisses, where
once the reed-warblers climbed the meadowsweet and cuckoos called from
the willows--how would she have addressed the originator of that
staring blatant racecourse? Strangely enough, she saw something of the
kind befall her beloved Weybridge pinewoods sixty-seven years ago, and
wrote of it in her diary. She was staying as a guest at Oatlands, and
found one of her favourite walks among the Brooklands trees destroyed.
Her outcry is prophetic:--
"O Lord King, Lord King (we were riding through the property of the
Earl of Lovelace, then Lord King), if I was one of those bishops
whom you do not love, I would curse, excommunicate and anathematize
you for cutting down all those splendid trees and laying bare those
deep, leafy nooks, the haunts of a thousand _Midsummer Nights'
Dreams_, to the common air and the staring sun. The sight of the
dear old familiar paths brought the tears to my eyes, for, stripped
and thinned of their trees and robbed of their beauty, my memory
restored all their former loveliness. On we went down to Byefleet to
the mill, to Langton's through the sweet, turfy meadows, by hawthorn
hedges musical as sweet...."
Well, she could not do that now. Let an ornithologist poet lament the
change:--
By Brooklands hill but since a year
Untrod the meadows lay,
Unspanned through musk and meadowsweet
Ran olive-bright the Wey.
Blackbirds about that wind and wild
Carolled a roguish choir,
From willow green to willow grey
Kingfishers shot sapphire!
There gay and far the Surrey sun
Spread cowslips far and gay,
Lit wide the orchid's purple flame,
The white fire of the May;
And thither stole a happy boat
To hear the ringdoves coo,
To mark again the drumming snipe
Zigzag the April blue:
To watch the darting dragon-flies
Live pine-needles awing--
O Brooklands meadow, there we knew
You first knew all the spring!
And then--the change! Spade, engine, pick,
The gangers' myriad Hun,
A thousand branches' banished shade,
Flat glare of sand and sun.
From pine and stream to steam and stone,
From peace to din and pain,
From old unused to new unuse,
But never Wey again!
The motor course led to at least one interesting discovery. When the
picks were hard at work in the sand, and day and night were enlivened
by steam-engines and casual labourers sleeping off their wages in other
people's summerhouses, there went about a word of a great find. A pot of
copper had been found, some said; of coppers, said others; of Roman gold
coins, there was a rumour, and all the coins exchanged for beer. Perhaps
some coins were found; what certainly was found was a beautifully made
bronze bucket, buried deep below clay and sand in a bed of gravel. It
has been classified by the experts as belonging to a Venetian workshop
of the seventh century B.C.--actually the early days of the Tarquins.
Prehistoric traffic between Britain and Italy may not be an entirely new
idea, but the bucket opens a new chapter.
A few years after the Kembles had given up their cottage Weybridge had
other brilliant visitors. The French Revolution of 1848 drove abroad
thinkers and writers and a royal family, and Weybridge saw most of them.
John Austin, author of _The Province of Jurisprudence Determined_,
settled with his wife at a sober, red brick building near the church,
and there they were visited by Lavergne, and Victor Cousin and de
Remusat and Guizot: Barthelemy St. Hilaire wrote to Mrs. Austin in
1854--"I assure you that Weybridge is the place in England I love best."
There were royal exiles at Claremont near Esher, then, and they came to
mass at the Roman Catholic chapel which fronts the common; Louis
Philippe and Queen Amelie, and the Duchess of Orleans and the Comte de
Paris; there is a monument in the chapel to the Duchess of Nemours, who
died at Claremont in 1857. _Tot luctuosis domus Aurelianensis addita
funeribus_ is the inscription, and the glorious beauty of the white
marble lights the chapel; she was only thirty-four.
Weybridge's church is modern, but the registers and churchwarden's
accounts are old and amusing. The following items, taken at random from
the lengthy and exact copy made by Miss Eleanor Lloyd in the _Surrey
Archaeological Collections_, are pleasant riddles of spelling:--
L _s. d._
1622. Pd for a gally slabs seate for y^e parson 00 01 00
1623. Pd for drinke for the Ringgers upon the Prince came
out of Spain and at other tymes 00 02 08
Pd for 23 Bushells of Lyme and five Bushells of hare 00 11 08
1655. Paid for an hower glass 00 00 06
1658. Rec^d of John Durling for breach of y^e Saboth 00 05 0
Rec^d of several bargemen for breach of y^e Saboth 14 08 6
1659. Rec^d of Adlms Barg for Breach of the Saboth 04 00 0
Rec^d for the Church grass being praised: besides X^s
worth taken away 07 00 0
Edward Ginger Junior
carried away the grass
worth X^s
1667. Item given to the ringers one gunpowder treson day 0 1 0
Item for expenses in going twice to the Justices w^th
the fanattick 0 2 0
Item for Inditing Robert Hone for takinge in an
Inmate and Rich for not cuminge to Church for the
space of that month for y^e fes for the same 0 9 4
1669. paid for buring a pore man that dyed brocklands farm 0 2 6
1671. Rest due to the parrish for the grass this yeare 1 2 9
Mils Bucklands bill not being holy aloud
1697. gave to John Born for a foxes hed 00 03 04
Sept. ye 16 gave ye ringers for Joy of ye pees 00 04 00
for a botel of wine 00 03 02
1701. payd for 3 botells of winde 00 08 03
The political events which brought the ringers joy and shillings seem to
have been the peace of Ryswick and the return of Charles I, then Prince
of Wales, from his journey to Spain in search of a princess. Weybridge
would have always followed royal doings with interest, for Weybridge
history, bound up with its oldest and greatest mansion, goes back to the
kings almost of the middle ages. On the ground, or near it, which now
belongs to the Oatlands Park Hotel, Henry VIII built one of his finest
palaces: Elizabeth followed her father and hunted deer in the park;
James I added to the palace a silkworm room for Anne of Denmark, planted
mulberry trees to feed the silkworms, and bred pheasants to please
himself; Charles I killed his stags and encroached on private ground to
kill more; his youngest son, Prince Henry of Oatlands, was born in the
palace. But Charles was the last English king to hunt at Oatlands. After
the Civil wars the land was disparked, and the palace fell into ruins.
To-day hardly a vestige remains. Old drawings show it to have been a
large, straggling building with one great court and a number of smaller
yards and quadrangles, turreted and gabled and quaint with tall and
delicate chimneys. The oddest neighbour for Weybridge of to-day! It is
not always difficult to re-people an old house, even if it has been
greatly altered, with the ghosts of great men who have walked its
passages and worked in its rooms. But among the newness and smallness of
modern building plots there is nothing so hard as to conjure the ghost
of a great palace, vibrating with the energy and the obsequiousness, the
simplicities and the intrigues of a hunting King and his Court.
Georgian days brought another being as a visitor. Oatlands came to the
seventh Earl of Lincoln in 1716, and he built himself a house on the
higher ground overlooking a fine stretch of water and many miles of
Thameside country. From his son, who had inherited the dukedom of
Newcastle, this house was bought by the Duke of York in 1794, but was
burnt down the same year, and the royal Duke rebuilt it. He and his
duchess lived there until 1820, when she died. It must have been a
curious household. George III brought Queen Charlotte there, and the
Court with her; Georgian wits and beauties gathered in the duke's
dining-rooms and played cards in his grottoes. Charles Greville was
often at Oatlands, and Sheridan and Beau Brummell and Horace Walpole;
Mrs. Gwyn came there, and Mrs. Bunbury, Oliver Goldsmith's "Jessamy
bride" and "Little Comedy." Both were buried in Weybridge old church.
Samuel Rogers, in his _Table-talk_, gives a quaint picture of the
household:--
"I have several times stayed at Oatlands with the Duke and Duchess
of York--both of them most amiable and agreeable persons. We were
generally a company of about fifteen; and our being invited to
remain there 'another day' sometimes depended on the ability of our
royal host and hostess to raise sufficient money for our
entertainment. We used to have all sorts of ridiculous 'fun' as we
roamed about the grounds. The Duchess kept (besides a number of
dogs, for which there was a regular burial-place) a collection of
monkeys, each of which had its own pole with a house at top. One of
the visitors (whose name I forget) would single out a particular
monkey, and play to it on the fiddle with such fury and perseverance
that the poor animal, half distracted, would at last take refuge in
the arms of Lord Alvanley.--Monk Lewis was a great favourite at
Oatlands. One day after dinner, as the Duchess was leaving the room,
she whispered something into Lewis's ear. He was much affected, his
eyes filling with tears. We asked what was the matter. 'Oh,' replied
Lewis, 'the Duchess spoke so _very_ kindly to me!'--'My dear
fellow,' said Colonel Armstrong, 'pray don't cry; I daresay she
didn't mean it.'"
The Duke of York died in 1827, and thirty years later Oatlands became a
hotel. The building was greatly altered, but the grounds still keep some
untouched memorials of the past. One is an extraordinary grotto, built
by the Duke of Newcastle, and used by the Duke of York and his friends,
according to local tradition, as a card-room, plentifully supplied with
wine bottles. It is lined with a profusion of crystal spar and sea
shells; it contains a deep bath, bashfully presided over by a statue of
Venus, and the steps leading up to the door are paved with horses' teeth
picked up on the battlefield of Waterloo. How the Duke of Newcastle
accomplished this feat it is difficult to imagine, for he died in 1794.
Perhaps they belonged to other horses, or perhaps the gallant Duke of
York made the addition. He was Commander-in-chief, and the grisly relics
may have been sent him as a present.
Another relic of the dead is the cemetery in which the Duchess of York
used to bury her cats and dogs and monkeys. There may be, perhaps,
thirty or forty little tombstones, each with a name.
Oatlands Park preserves a not very trustworthy legend. In the grounds
stand a number of magnificent cedars, and one of them bears a notice by
which you are informed that it was one of the first cedars of Lebanon
planted in England and was placed where it stands by Prince Henry of
Otelands. Neither statement quite fits the facts. If Prince Henry of
Oatlands planted the cedar, he must have done so either before the
outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (in which case he would have been
hardly three years old, for he was born in 1639), or else in the summer
of 1660, the year of the Restoration, and the year in which he died. As
a matter of fact, cedars were hardly known at the time, for John Evelyn
in his _Sylva_, published in 1664, only mentions them as unsatisfactory
seedlings, difficult to grow; and the earliest cedar planted in England
is probably the Enfield cedar, which may have been set in the ground by
Dr. Uvedale, master of the Grammar-School, about that date. There are,
in any case, much finer cedars than the Oatlands Park trees in adjoining
private gardens. Probably all of them were planted by the Earl of
Lincoln or the Duke of Newcastle early in the eighteenth century.
Another of Weybridge's links with royalty is not quite so reputable.
Portmore Park is the name for a large slice of the town which lies near
the river, thickly built over with villas and cut up into new roads.
Once there stood in it Ham House, which with its park was given by James
II to his mistress Catherine Sedley, notorious at least as much for her
wit as her features. She herself, even with the brilliant eyes which
were pretty nearly all she had of good looks, could not understand the
king's infatuation. "It cannot be my beauty," she said; "for he must see
that I have none; and it cannot be my wit; for he has not enough to know
that I have any." Whatever the attraction may have been, he made her
Countess of Dorchester and gave her Ham House, and she very prudently
married David Colyear, first Lord Portmore. The gates of her park
survive her; the house has disappeared.
One great estate still remains, and on its hill the oldest settlement of
the neighbourhood. The generosity of the Egerton family throws open to
the public, in the woods of St. George's Hill, some hundreds of acres of
pine forest and heather. On the summit of the hill stands a large
prehistoric camp, where neolithic Wey-siders in Wey beaver-fur and
buckskin entrenched their wives and their cattle. There are fifteen or
sixteen of these ancient British camps in Surrey or just over the
border; this is the largest, and the height and strength of its
earthworks are admirable. It is more than three-quarters of a mile in
circumference, and since it is obviously a camp, has naturally been set
down as Caesar's. But that is the fate of anything old which looks like a
fortification--part of the traditional method of assigning otherwise
inexplicable phenomena to their proper agents. Camps are all Caesar's,
Cromwell made all the ruins, and all geological wonders belong to the
devil.
St. George's Hill, or rather the low-lying ground on the Cobham side of
it, was once the scene of a curious agricultural experiment. In the late
days of the Parliamentary wars the Levellers sent some thirty men, under
leaders named Everard and Winstanley, to seize part of the common land
and plant roots and beans. Fairfax sent two troops of horse after them,
and the captured Everard made him a speech, in which he claimed that he
had had a vision instructing him to dig and plough the earth for the
benefit of the poor, and that his mission was to help his oppressed
fellow-Israelites back to their rights over all landed and other
property. The Digger-Socialist did not give Fairfax much more trouble,
for the irate commoners, refusing to be delivered from bondage, drove
the Levellers from their common and pulled up the roots and beans.
The Levellers have their poet, and he made them a song with a fine lilt.
Here are the first three stanzas:
You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The wast land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name
Your digging does disdaine, and persons all defame.
Stand up now, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,
But the gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown.
Stand up now, Diggers all.
With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now, stand up now,
With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now,
Your freedom to withhold, seeing Cavaliers are bold
To kill you if they could, and rights from you to hold.
Stand up now, Diggers all.
Although not one of the highest of Surrey hills, St. George's Hill
provides a series of delightful glimpses of distant scenery through the
trees. Windsor Castle stands up like a battleship on the horizon to the
north-west, twelve miles away: west lie the rolling open spaces of
Chobham Common and Bagshot Heath; south-west Guildford and Godalming
stand over the shining valley of the Wey; Ranmer Church spire marks
Dorking to the south: Leatherhead, Epsom, and the Crystal Palace almost
complete the ring. I have never seen St. Paul's. But the abiding charm
of St. George's Hill is not the view, which is surpassed by a dozen
others. It is the deep quiet of the place; the sound of the wind in the
trees, even on windless days, like the sound of the sea in a shell; the
scented pine-needle carpet, crinkling in the sun; the bracken and
bluebells of May, and the crimsons and purples of June's profuse
rhododendrons.