MID-SURREY DOWNS AND COMMONS
Ewell.--A Clear Stream.--Nonsuch Palace.--The Right Use for a King's
Gift.--Cheam.--Satin Haycocks.--A Chained
Anachronism.--Chessington.--Dancing Round the Mulberry Tree.--A
House of Mourning.--A Fool for a present.--Esher.--The great horse
Bendigo.--Macaulay and the Hop-pickers.--Surrey English.--Gypsy boys
selling a pony.
North and south of Epsom are scattered villages on downs and commons;
some, like Ewell and Cheam to the north and east, changing the word
village into town; others, like Walton-on-the-hill and Headley to the
south-west, or Chessington to the north-west, merely groups of cottages
with a church. Epsom is the centre of the Surrey churches which have
been destroyed or disused rather than restored, and the reason for the
destruction of the group is obscure. Some strange infection ran in the
destroyer's brains; Epsom, perhaps, began it; Ewell, Cheam, Headley fell
later; Esher built a new church, but stayed from destroying the old.
Walton, Woodmansterne, and Banstead have been altered almost out of
recognition of what was old; Chessington alone looks upon almost
untroubled centuries.
Ewell almost joins Epsom; Ewell with its old name Etwell, which its
historians tell you means At ye Well; the guess looks too easy. The well
is plain enough to see; Ewell has pools of the clearest water and
springs running fast by the side of the street; it is the most definite
beginning of a river that ever attracted a village to its banks, and it
runs out of the village as the little Hog's Mill river--a stream with a
sparkle in it that deserves a prettier name. But the village which the
stream drew to it has changed. The High Street has kept some of its
older houses, with upper stories jutting out over the road; but the
church which the old houses knew has gone. They pulled it down in the
forties--that unhappy decade for anything ancient and quiet in Surrey
villages; all they left was the tower, a mighty mass of stone and ivy
that stands with its nave reft from it, the forlornest and most
meaningless of ruins. If the tower might stand, why not the nave? They
pulled the nave down, and left the tower standing, so Mr. C.J. Swete,
one of Epsom's historians, tells you, in order that it "should remain to
beautify the landscape." They acted, he observes, "with good taste and
judgment" in so doing. Theirs is that praise.
But Ewell has a greater ruin. Ewell Castle preserves it in Ewell Park;
but when I was at Ewell the Castle and Park were for sale, and I could
find no one who could show it me, or even who knew where it was. Few,
perhaps, have seen it, and there can be little to see, by all accounts,
but what remains is the ruin of Nonsuch Palace--just the foundations of
the banquet hall; that is all that remains of the palace which was to be
incomparable, like no palace a king ever built before, the royalest
building in Christendom. That was what Henry VIII meant to make it, when
he began it in 1538, and he had built most of it when he died nine years
later. It stood unfinished for ten years more; then Mary sold it to the
Earl of Arundell, and he finished it. Elizabeth bought it back, and so
it came a royal palace to the Stuarts; even the Parliamentary wars left
it untouched, and it was the refuge for Charles II's Exchequer at the
fire of London. Pepys has a picture of Nonsuch, just after the
Restoration. "A very noble house," he calls it, "and a delicate park
about it, where just now there was a doe killed for the King, to carry
up to the Court." Two years later he walked in the park and admired the
house and the trees; "a great walk of an elm and a walnut set one after
another in order. And all the house on the outside filled with figures
of stories, and good painting of Rubens' or Holbein's doing. And one
great thing is that most of the house is covered, I mean the posts and
quarters in the walls, with lead, and gilded. I walked also into the
ruined garden." That is Charles II; the doe killed in the park for the
King, the ruined garden. An old print shows Nonsuch in 1582; a great
quadrangle with towers at the corners, and cupolas, which perhaps were
gilt, and bannerets round the cupolas, and countless little windows;
along the face of the building are high Tudor windows with bas-reliefs
between them; in the foreground of the park a great lady rides in a
chariot with gaily caparisoned horses; a greyhound bounds by her side,
spaniels in leash drag a huntsman after the carriage; in the far
distance, beyond the palace, hounds and men hunt a noble stag, pictured
as if the whole airy chase flew round a cupola. It was a great palace,
and it should be standing to-day, with its lead and its gilt and its
Rubenses and Holbeins. But Charles II gave it to Barbara Villiers, and
she knew the right use for a king's gift.
Cheam, east from Ewell by two miles, has kept not the tower of its old
church but its chancel. The little building stands apart in the
churchyard; you may peep through a grille at the tombs and the pedigree
of sixteen generations of Lumleys, and at a palimpsest brass mounted on
a screen. But if Cheam's church has gone, in the village there is still
the White Hall, a gabled Elizabethan house of painted timber; the
daintiest and lightest little place, with tiny ordered lawns under its
white wood, and old-fashioned flowers in the garden and in the windows.
White Hall has the graces of old books, old ladies, old lace. But its
gables and chimneys are not the only happy picture in Cheam. The road
that passes by the left of the house leads to an untouched corner of
little, white wooden cottages, as lowly and as English as anything in
deep Surrey country, and this is nearly town. They will not last long, I
am afraid; the new Cheam buildings are staring at them.
All above Cheam and Ewell are Banstead Downs, once as free and open as
the downs by the Sussex sea, and even now sunny places where you may
walk in fresh winds. But the houses are nearer every year, and they will
be lucky if they escape another asylum; the high ground gives an
opportunity to asylum architects. On Banstead Downs are Lambert's Oaks,
where Lord Derby's roystering guests founded great races with bumpers of
claret, and where Lord Stanley, when he married Lady Betty Hamilton,
gave his famous Fete Champetre, which Horace Walpole guessed would cost
L5,000; Lord Stanley had "bought all the orange-trees round London," and
the haycocks he imagined were to be made of straw-coloured satin.
Banstead itself, like Woodmansterne, its neighbour to the east, has not
much to show of village buildings. Banstead and Woodmansterne churches
have many memorials to the Lamberts, one of the very old Surrey
families; and it is from Garratt's Hall, whose grounds border Banstead
village, that Colonel F.A.H. Lambert dedicates his _Guide to Surrey_, a
valuable little pocket-book, to Admiral Charles Mathew Buckle, head of
another ancient Surrey family. One of the oldest things near Banstead
stands in ground once owned by the Buckle family. Nork House has a field
in which stands Tumble Beacon, a mound which saw the flares run from the
hills of Hampshire to London, when the Armada was breasting the Channel
and Hampshire had caught the signal from Dunkerry and the Lizard. Tumble
Beacon would not light an alarm now; or if it did, it would burn pine
trees and elders and nettles that grow about it, and would scare a
hundred rabbits. How did the trees come there? A beacon should not be
planted; it should stand open and high and free as when the Spaniards
came, and from the same spot where Elizabeth's sailors in the Thames saw
its flame, it should wait for jubilees and coronations to send its fires
roaring up into the night.
Nork, etymologists have guessed, may be corrupted from Noverca--perhaps
it once had a Roman owner. There were Romans who lived on the high
ground near. Walton Heath, south of Banstead on the chalk plateau, has
had the pavement of a Roman villa dug from it; I have been told that you
may still find Roman pavements there, if you know where to dig. But
Walton's chief possession--the village is Walton-on-the-hill, so named
that you may never mistake it for Walton-on-the-Naze or
Walton-on-Thames--is in the church. It is a leaden font, the only leaden
font which Surrey possesses, though England has thirty; and of the
thirty English fonts, Walton's is of as fine workmanship and design as
any. Throned apostles circle the bowl, and bless with the right hand, or
hold a book in the left. The church has some interesting old glass in a
southern window, and, by an oddly deliberate anachronism, a chained
Bible dated 1803. The chain is an old and genuine guard of the printed
word, taken from Salisbury; but why should it chain Georgian printing?
But Walton has long been anachronistic; there is a tomb outside the
chancel, in a recess of the north wall, on which some modern Latin
scholar has set the inscription, "Johannes de Waltune hujus ecclesiae
fundator 1268." The weather has removed part, but the rest is in black
paint.
A neighbouring village, Headley, has separated its new and old more
definitely. The church has been taken down, all but the porch, which
holds a grave and what looks like the sign of an inn; you may just
distinguish the royal arms. The pillars of the old church have fallen,
but where they stood, little clipped box-trees mark the line--a prettier
memorial than a drawn plan to hang in the vestry, but need the old
church have fallen? These level heights, perhaps, provoke
church-building, but how few spires stand on the horizons. Ranmer spire
you may see from half over mid-Surrey, but Ranmer is high on a ridge.
Here you are on a plateau, and the heights see each other no more than
the low ground. Kingswood's is the best seen of the spires on the
plateau; a shining thing, white as the chalk of the ridge.
From Epsom to the north is quiet, empty countryside. Esher is five miles
to the north-west as the crow flies; something more by road, but the
best roads near Esher are the wild pathways of Esher common. Midway
between Epsom and Esher, but among pastures, not in the heather of the
common, is Chessington. Chessington Hall and Chessington Church are deep
in the fields. The Hall may not be to-day quite the simple little
building that Fanny Burney knew, when Samuel Crisp, "Daddy" Crisp, had
it, but the garden and the trees, and the avenue to the church where she
walked and talked over his music with Dr. Burney can be little changed.
It was at Chessington that Fanny Burney took a packet from the postman
and found herself famous. _Evelina_, which not even her father knew she
had written, had taken the town. All the talk of the great men was of
_Evelina_. Dr. Johnson was praising it; Sir Joshua Reynolds would not
let his meals interrupt him, and took it with him to table. Edmund Burke
had sat through the night to finish it. That was in 1778, and a hundred
and thirty years after that wonderful morning her delight is as
infectious as dance music. "Dr. Johnson's approbation!" she writes in
her diary, "--it almost crazed me with agreeable surprise--it gave me
such a flight of spirits that I danced a jig to Mr. Crisp, without any
preparation, music, or explanation--to his no small amazement and
diversion." She danced round the mulberry tree on the Chessington lawn,
so she told Sir Walter Scott years afterwards.
She was just twenty-six. The mulberry-tree still stands by the window,
and the fields by Chessington are still as green and quiet as when poor
Mr. Crisp, a writer whom a careless world did not want to read, retired
from his disappointments to a home where none but his friends should
find him. He lies in the churchyard, under the shadow of the quaint
little spire that sits on its bells like a candle-snuffer; Dr. Burney
has written an epitaph for him, in the formal Georgian English that was
always somewhere, too, in Fanny Burney's head. It was only the girl in
her that kept it out of _Evelina_; after _Evelina_ the girl survives
almost only in her diary and her letters. The books grow dull.
Esher, beyond Claygate, is three miles to the north-west, and Claremont
borders Esher Common. Claremont is a house of happiness and mourning.
Queen Victoria spent the brightest days of her childhood there; princes
and princesses have lived here and died before their day; a great name
darkens its memories, ennobles its history. The first house at Claremont
was built by Sir John Vanbrugh; afterwards the Duke of Newcastle had it;
on his death Lord Clive bought it, pulled it down, and built the
Claremont of to-day. A hundred thousand pounds he spent on the house and
garden, and in the serenity of his chosen home he should have ended his
days. Envy and persecution prevented that, and Clive of Arcot and
Plassey died in London. Forty-two years later, in 1816, Prince Leopold,
afterwards King of the Belgians, brought his bride, Princess Charlotte,
to Claremont; she died with her baby the next year, a girl of
twenty-one. In 1848 Louis Philippe, a refugee from the Revolution, came
to Claremont; he died there in 1850. Seven years after, in 1857,
Claremont and the countryside were in mourning for the Duchess of
Nemours, a princess of glorious beauty. Queen Amelie died at the house
in 1866. To-day the Duchess of Albany has Claremont; perhaps, as it lies
so near a great highway, it might be worth while to say that it is not
shown to the public.
[Illustration: _Wolsey's Tower, Esher._]
A ruined palace is Claremont's neighbour. The great gateway of the
building stands on the bank of the Mole, in the grounds of Esher Place.
William of Waynflete built it; Wolsey repaired it, and was sent there in
disgrace by his King; the Great Seal had been taken from him. Stow has a
story of the fallen Minister's journey to Esher; Wolsey had left the
river at Putney, and was riding along sadly enough, when a messenger
brought him a kind word from the King. In his joy and relief he looked
round for a present to send back; he fixed on Patch, his fool, and
ordered him to the Court. Patch was all rage and tears, and stormed his
unhappiness at his master. It was no good; he was for Henry, and six
yeomen--it took the tallest Wolsey had--carried him struggling back to
the King.
The Palace did not keep Wolsey long; he was allowed back at Richmond.
After him, in Elizabeth's reign, came Richard Drake, and kept Spanish
grandees prisoners there, taken from the Armada by Sir Francis Drake.
After the Drakes came the Lattons, one of whom, John, held a remarkable
number of offices under William III. Aubrey gives the list:--
In the reign of William III, this John Latton had given him by that
Prince the Honours and Places following--
Equery,
Avener,
Master of the Buck-Beagles,
Master of the Hariers,
Master of the Game 10 miles round Hampton-Court, by particular
patent, distinct from that of Justice in Eyre,
Master of the Lodge at the Old Park at Richmond, with a lease of 30
years from the Crown for the lands thereto belonging,
Steward of the Manor of Richmond,
Keeper of Windsor-House Park,
Head-customer at Plymouth.
All which were conferr'd upon him, without asking for, directly or
indirectly, and were all held together during that reign.
Esher Palace as John Latton knew it survives now only in old prints;
they show a long wing on each side of William of Waynflete's gateway.
Opposite the palace a pleasure-boat, half dinghy, half barge, asks for
passengers; on the bank a fashionably dressed lady holds a long fishing
rod hopefully over the river, shaded by an enormous parasol.
Esher itself is scattered round a village green and a long broad street.
By the green is the modern church, and in the churchyard a strange tomb.
Lord Esher, the late Master of the Rolls, lies in white marble with Lady
Esher; Lord Esher designed the tomb in his lifetime, and would pass it
on his way to church. But the real Esher lies away from the village
green, along the main road to Portsmouth--a road edged with trees and
strips of grass; behind the trees stand the little, low, one-storied red
houses, and Esher's fine inn, the Bear. The Bear has been rebuilt, but
it has kept the air of a coaching inn; in the hall there is a vast pair
of boots, once worn by the postillion of Louis Philippe.
Esher's old church lies behind the Bear, the saddest little deserted
place. Sorrels and grasses wave about its forgotten graves; you open the
church door, and you are back in the days of Waterloo. The pews are
square and high, the pulpit is a three-decker, the paint is that
peculiar yellow dun which belongs to Georgian and early Victorian
aesthetics. But the value of the church is that it is untouched. No
restorer has laid a hand on the mouldering baize which lines the pews;
no one has knocked down the hideous galleries; nobody has broken into
the gallery pew in which, warmed by a fireplace and chimney in winter,
the little Princess Victoria of Kent used to sit when she was allowed to
visit Claremont. You may see at Esher, better than in any other Surrey
church, the surroundings in which our Georgian great-grandfathers
worshipped; the service might almost have ended yesterday--there should
be a forgotten prayer-book somewhere under a seat, praying for the
health of his gracious Majesty King William. Or there might be in the
body of the church; not in the Queen's pew. I think American visitors
have been there.
To racing people Esher is Sandown, and Sandown is what all travellers
see from the railway. Of the smaller racecourses few can be prettier;
the long flank of a green hill, the white pavilion under dark pines, and
the curving course picked out with fresh painted railings and green
canvas--it is as spick and span as a lawn. Either in the summer, for the
Eclipse Stakes, or in the spring for the steeplechases, most of the
great English racehorses go to Sandown. Bendigo won the Eclipse Stakes
of L10,000 for Mr. Hedworth Barclay in 1886--the first time any horse
won so huge a stake. Bendigo is surely one of the great names. Even
those who know least about horse-racing may talk of Bendigo; Bendigo
whom the crowd loved, Bendigo who never failed them, Bendigo who carried
9 stone 7 lb., and won the Jubilee Stakes at Kempton in 1887. I have for
Bendigo the affection of a schoolfellow.
What is Surrey English? Lord Macaulay heard it at Esher. He was walking
from Esher to Ditton Marsh, he writes on September 22nd, 1854, and he
listened to it in a public-house:--
"A shower came on. Afraid for my chest, I turned into a small ale-house,
and called for a glass of ginger beer. I found there a party of
hop-pickers, come back from the neighbourhood of Farnham. They had had
but a bad season, and were returning, nearly walked off their legs. I
liked their looks, and thought their English remarkably good for their
rank of life. It was in truth Surrey English, the English of the suburbs
of London, which is to the Somersetshire and Yorkshire what Castilian is
to the Andalusian, or Tuscan to Neapolitan. The poor people had a
foaming pot before them; but as soon as they heard the price, they rose
and were going to leave it untouched. They could not, they said, afford
so much. It was but fourpence halfpenny. I laid the money down, and
their delight and gratitude quite affected me. Two more of the party
soon arrived. I ordered another pot, and when the rain was over, left
them, followed by more blessings than ever, I believe, were purchased
for ninepence."
Perhaps the English of the Surrey suburbs was different in Macaulay's
days. There is little dialect left anywhere to distinguish Surrey
English from any other; even the gypsies speak the English of the
suburbs of London. There are still gypsies on Esher common; I came
across quite a settlement once, walking over the common to Cobham on a
sunny morning after late April snow. The common was patched with
sparkling white and blue; the snow lay in blue shadows unmelted under
the gorse bushes, and among the gorse and sodden bracken twenty ponies
snuffed for grass. Three gypsy boys shuffled through the fern near them.
What did they do with the ponies? I asked, and the eldest told me they
sold them; they were good ponies; he was voluble in suburban English.
What did they fetch? That depended. What was that one worth?--it was a
small chestnut creature with a child's pink pinafore for a halter. "Ah!
That one," he began, and his eyes became inscrutable. He would have sold
it well.