REIGATE
Reigate Castle.--De Warenne.--A Swashbuckler and a Swordsman.--The
Reigate Caves.--Lord Holland's soldiering.--Pilgrims at the Red
Cross.--General of the Royale Navey.--Olde Dutchesse Norf.--"W.
W."--Reigate Politics.--The Marble Hall.--The White Hart.--A Race
against Time.
Four castles stood along the ridge of the Surrey downs when the barons
were at war, and of the four nothing worth the name of a castle remains.
Farnham's keep was broken down by Cromwell: Guildford is a shell,
Reigate and Bletchingley have disappeared altogether. Betchworth, never
fortified for war, was built later than the others, but Betchworth is an
insignificant ruin. The kings and the captains have passed, and their
buildings have followed them. The castles have gone down with the
palaces. Surrey never had a castle like Arundel; but she has not been
able to keep even a Pevensey or a Bodiam.
Yet Reigate castle and its owners shaped a great deal of English
history. It belonged to the great Earls de Warenne, the rival family to
the de Clares through all the early wars and intrigues of the kings and
the barons. It stood on the ancient British track, the "Way" which runs
east and west across the country. Its place on the Way was within reach
of the Roman road, the Stone Street that ran from Chichester to London.
Its possessor held the strongest strategic position between London and
the coastline, or between Canterbury and Winchester, and when there was
any fighting forward the lord of the highway cross roads, the ridge
gate, was the first person to be taken into account. The curious thing
is that there was so little fighting along the ridge. Reigate Castle
never saw a pitched battle. When Louis of France was riding by the ridge
to Winchester after King John, Reigate surrendered to the French, and de
Warenne only got his castle back by changing sides from John to Louis.
That was in 1216, and forty-seven years later, when Simon de Montfort
took the baron's army by the ridge to Rochester, Reigate could do no
more than watch the army march by. The de Warenne of the day was at
Lewes with the king, and when the king had lost all in the battle of
Lewes that followed, the lord of Reigate castle fled to France. He came
back the next year, and when de Montfort fell at Evesham, Reigate was
once more de Warenne's.
[Illustration: _Reigate._]
The kings must have found this particular de Warenne a little difficult
to deal with. He was a bit of a swashbuckler as well as a swordsman, and
once when he found himself getting the worst of a lawsuit at
Westminster with one Alan de la Zouche, he ran him through the body in
the king's own chamber and was off to Reigate before anybody could stop
him. King Henry was furious, and sent Prince Edward, the great de Clare,
and an archbishop to bid him come out of his castle and be punished. He
came out at last, and was fined ten thousand marks for the king and two
thousand for Alan de la Zouche. But Prince Edward was not done with him.
As Edward the First he held a Court of Assize to inquire into the
warrants by which the barons held their lands. De Warenne was asked for
his warrant for Reigate. He drew a rusty sword and struck it on the
council table. "By this instrument," he said, "do I hold my lands, and
by the same I intend to keep them." He kept them, but he had to amend
his plea into something a little less swaggering.
[Illustration: _A Reigate Byway._]
Of Reigate Castle not a stone remains. But under the great mound which
bore the keep you may see what local tradition has named the Baron's
caves, where, as the story goes, the Barons met before the signing of
Magna Charta. Martin Tupper, indeed, has written a whole chapter in
_Stephan Langton_ describing the interesting scene, though as a mere
matter of history it never took place. To begin with, the de Warenne of
the day was an adherent of King John, and not of the barons, and in the
next place the barons marching to Runemede never came near Reigate at
all. Mr. Tupper errs. But the passages and chambers hollowed out of the
yellow sandstone are interesting, and so are the rough carvings of heads
of horses which ornament the walls. Mr. Malden, the Surrey historian,
thinks the caves are merely sand-quarries, sand being valuable for
making mortar. It is pleasanter, though probably wholly incorrect, to
imagine them as dungeons, or homes of early man, or even cellars. The
gardener exhibits them with a candle, and in the dark they can be eerie
enough for cave-bears.
[Illustration: _Park Lane, near Reigate._]
Long after the de Warennes' reign was over, Reigate Castle saw more
fighting. We met the leaders on both sides at Kingston. It was nearly at
the end of the Parliamentary wars, and Lord Holland, commanding the
Royalist troops, conceived the idea of a rising near London. There was
to be a horse-race on Banstead Downs, to draw the people together, and
he was to lead them. Unhappily for his followers, he was a thoroughly
incompetent soldier. He hoisted his standard at Kingston, and marched
through Dorking to Reigate, where he held the castle and posted his
vedettes on Red Hill. Sir Michael Livesey, commanding some Kentish horse
for the Parliament, was ordered up from Sevenoaks to meet him; Major
Audley, one of Livesey's officers, was moved out from Hounslow, where he
had three troops, to clear Banstead Downs. Audley reached Reigate first,
and engaged Lord Holland, but found him too strong: he drew off, and
Holland, for no soldier's reason, fell back on Dorking. He came on again
to Reigate next day, but by that time Livesey and Audley had joined, and
when Holland knew who was before him he turned again for Kingston. As we
saw, his horse faced the Parliament's troops on Kingston Common, and he
died without glory on the scaffold.
Not much remains even of the Reigate which Lord Holland's troops saw on
that luckless July day in 1648. The Parliament tumbled the old castle in
ruins, and as at Bletchingley, anybody who wanted to build a house or a
barn helped himself from the stones. To-day the steadiest modern
business fills the High Street and Bell Street, the two roads running
west and south along which old Reigate lay. Here and there the quaint
slope of a red roof, or the lichen on weather-worn tiles, has a hold on
the past, and in Slip Shoe Street, itself echoing the days of
pilgrimages, care and good paint have preserved the beams of delightful
old cottages. The Swan Inn, which may have liquored Holland's
cavaliers, has borne much from later builders, but it stands on the old
site. Nearly all the rest of old Reigate has gone. The Red Cross Inn,
where thirsty pilgrims dropping down from the chalk highway drank ale
and rested, has made way for brand-new brick and rough-cast, painted a
bright pink. The market which the pilgrims used to find at the western
end of the town was moved to the centre cross-roads at the Reformation,
and the little chapel at the cross-roads, where the pilgrims said their
Aves, came down in George the First's day to make room for what is now
called the old Town Hall. It is only two hundred years old, but even it
is not as its Georgian builder left it.
[Illustration: _Reigate Heath._]
What happened to Reigate Church in the early part of the nineteenth
century will never be quite known. There were alterations in 1818, and
it was restored in 1845; that is to say, much of its beautiful old work
was destroyed. But it has kept a few of its Norman pillars, and a
reverent rebuilding of much of the fabric by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1873
has left its noble relics enshrined under a fine tower. The vault holds
the dust of two of England's greatest men. The first and second Lords
Howard of Effingham lie there, each in his day Lord High Admiral of the
English navy. Charles, the second Lord Howard, died at Haling House near
Croydon, and was buried at dead of night in the family vault on December
23, 1624. Incredible as it sounds, from that day until 1888, the
three-hundredth anniversary of the defeat of the Armada, not a single
record of the Admiral who met and destroyed it was to be seen in Reigate
Church, except the inscription on the coffin in the Howards' vault.
Then, at last, the inscription was copied and placed on a brass in the
chancel. Its terseness fits the dead man's name:--
Here in the vault beneath
at midnight the Dec. 23: 1624
lyeth the body of Charles Howarde
Earl of Nottingham
Admyrall of
Englande
Generall of Queen Elizabeth's
Royale Navey at sea
Against the
Spanyards Invinsable
Navye
In the Year of our Lord
1589, who departed this
Life at Haling House the 14
Day of December in the
Year of our Lorde, 1624
Aetatis Suae 87
We saw the Howards at Effingham and Great Bookham, and shall find them
again at Lingfield. Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower, in the _Surrey
Archaeological Collections_, has brought together some interesting
particulars of the antiquities of the family. The second Duke of
Norfolk, who was father of the first Lord Howard of Effingham, and now
lies at Lambeth, left a remarkable will. He was, as his epitaph informs
us, a "High and Mighty Prince," and he writes of himself in the royal
plural. He orders a tomb to be erected before the high altar of Thetford
"with pictures of us and Agnes our wife to be set together thereupon."
The Lambeth Parish Registers do not read so respectfully. This is the
entry recording the passing of the Prince's widow--"Oct. 13, 1545, my
Lady Agnes, olde Dutchesse Norf., buried."
Reigate churchyard holds the gravestones of two neighbours in name and
place. A Goose and a Gosling are buried side by side.
When Reigate had a castle, it also had a priory. It was founded for
Austin Canons by one of the de Warennes, and its first prior was an
Adam. After the Dissolution, the Priory estate saw some strangely
different owners and guests. The first Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord
High Admiral, had it; Foxe, perhaps meditating his _Book of Martyrs_,
stayed there as tutor to the son of the Earl of Surrey; a century later
the manor came to Lord Somers, the great Lord Chancellor of William of
Orange; to-day the modern house, built on the site of the old convent,
belongs to one of Lord Somers's descendants, Lady Henry Somerset. It
holds a famous oak chimney-piece, said to have been brought from Henry
VIII's vanished palace of Nonsuch.
Reigate Priory to-day means Reigate cricket, played on the Priory
ground. Three of the most famous of all Surrey cricketers belong to the
town. Stephen Dingate, first of Surrey players before Beldham, was born
there; so was William Caffyn, of the days of the giants Fuller Pilch and
Alfred Mynn, Tom Lockyer and Julius Caesar; and so, too, was W.W. Read,
one of the very few Englishmen familiar to millions by their initials
alone. "W.G." and "W.W." belong to the great years of the game.
Politics in Reigate are a mixed memory. Like Gatton, Reigate was a
pocket borough, and sent two members to Parliament until 1832, when the
two were reduced to one. Even the one disappeared in 1867, when the
borough was disfranchised for bribery and treating--a subject of
conversation which Mr. Louis Jennings, writing three years later in
_Field Paths and Green Lanes_, notes as dangerous if introduced too
suddenly in social circles in the neighbourhood.
But an even more remarkable political record belongs to one of Reigate's
neighbours. Gatton, once a borough and now a park, had the privilege
granted to its owner in 1451 of sending two members to Parliament. The
Copleys of Leigh were lords of the manor in the days of Henry VIII, and
Sir Richard Copley was at one time the only inhabitant of the borough,
so that his voting power was considerable. When Cobbett was abroad on
his _Rural Rides_, there were Reigate, Gatton, and Bletchingley within a
few miles of one another, all of them rotten boroughs, and each of them
returning a couple of members. Cobbett, of course, boiled whenever he
heard the names; Gatton in particular, was "a very rascally spot of
earth." He lived to see a very bad bargain for Gatton's privileges. Lord
Monson, in 1830, bought the estate with its votes for two members for
L100,000. Two years later, Gatton as a borough was ended by the Reform
Bill and all Lord Monson had for his L100,000 was the land.
Lord Monson started with the intention of making Gatton House one of the
most superb in the kingdom. He began with the hall, which he built on
the lines of the Corsini chapel in the church of San Giovanni in
Laterano at Rome, though he did not add the dome. The floor he had laid
of coloured marbles, patterned in the most delicate designs; the marble
had been designed for Ferdinand VII of Spain, and cost L10,000. The
walls and arches are as richly decorated as the floor. There are four
frescoes by Joseph Severn; Eleanor of Castile represents Fortitude;
Esther, Prudence; Ruth, Meekness; Patience could only be Penelope. The
effect of the shining stone and painted arches is of extraordinary
brilliance and completeness--the completeness of an unrivalled
collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the
setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these
exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little
church fits better with the great trees and the green grass. The
building is nothing; the interior has the grace and the light of a
cathedral chapel. Lord Monson decorated Gatton Church with the
magnificence with which he imagined the hall, but his ideal for the
church was quieter. He bought carved wood of the most exquisite
workmanship and set it wherever the church could hold it; a pulpit and
an altar from Nuremberg, said to be by Duerer, but the critics dispute
it; the elaborately fitted stalls came from a monastery in Ghent, and
altar rails from Tongres. Glass for the windows, of deep and glowing
colours, he had from Aerschot, near Louvain; the east window, a strange
painting, shows the eating of the Passover. One property the little
church lacks; Lord Monson never gave it a wooden ceiling, and the
ill-shaped stone vault is too white and cold for the stalls.
[Illustration: _View from near Reigate._]
The great coaching days have many memories of Reigate. The coaches
changed horses at the Swan and the White Hart, and at the White Hart
to-day's Brighton coach stops, I think, for lunch. But when Shergold
wrote his _Recollections of Brighton in the Olden Time_, he speaks of
the inn at which the Brighton coach stopped in the days of the Regency
as the King's Arms. Inns have a most confusing habit of changing their
names. When John Taylor, the Water Poet, in 1636, made his _Catalogue of
Taverns in Ten Shires about London_, he found some seventy or eighty
taverns in Surrey, but out of the forty-nine which he mentions by name,
hardly a dozen would answer to their old signboards to-day. The Reigate
White Hart in Taylor's day was the Hart.
According to Shergold, Reigate in the old coaching days was the scene of
the most romantic episodes imaginable. He is full of comparisons between
the easy charm of conversation among riders by coach and the ungracious
silences of travelling by rail, and this is what you read about Reigate
and the fair who travelled by coach:--
"There was an advantage and an interest in travelling by coach which
travelling by rail can never communicate. In the former you saw men and
their faces, and acquired some information; in the latter you learn
nothing except the number of persons killed or injured by the last
accident. A young man who entered the coach at eight o'clock in the
morning at Brighton took his seat perhaps opposite a young lady whom he
thought pretty and interesting. When he arrived at Cuckfield he began to
be in love; at Crawley he was desperately smitten; at Reigate his
passion became irretrievable, and when he gave her an arm to ascend the
steep ridges of Reigate Hill--a just emblem, by the way, of human
life--he declared his passion, and they were married soon after. Nothing
of this sort ever occurs on railroads. Sentiment never blooms on the
iron soil of these sulky conveyances. A woman was a creature to be
looked at, admired, courted, and beloved in a stage-coach; but on a
railway a woman is nothing but a package, a bundle of goods committed to
the care of the railway company's servants, who take care of the poor
thing as they would take care of any other bale of goods. It is said
that matches are made in heaven; it may likewise be said that matches
more often begin in the old stage-coaches, and that railroads are the
antipodes of love."
The road from Reigate to Crawley, one of the straightest and levellest
in the south country, was once the scene of a remarkable horse-race. The
beginning of it was a discussion at a shooting party in the autumn of
1890 between Lord Lonsdale and Lord Shrewsbury on the pace of trotting
and galloping horses. Lord Lonsdale backed himself to drive galloping
horses for twenty miles, single, pair, four-in-hand and riding
postillion, inside an hour. Lord Shrewsbury wagered against him, but
there were difficulties about weather and the date--March 11, 1891--and
eventually Lord Shrewsbury withdrew from the match and paid L100
forfeit. Lord Lonsdale then set himself the task alone, and his
headquarters were at Reigate; he had fifteen horses in training, fifteen
men and thirteen carriages, and the cost of keeping them at Reigate came
to L150 a day. The course, a stretch of five miles of road, over which
horses were to be driven in the four different styles was measured from
Kennersley Manor, three miles south of the White Hart, nearly into
Crawley. Snow fell on the tenth, the day before the match; Lord Lonsdale
borrowed a snow plough and sent it over the road. At noon on the day of
the race the horses and carriages were taken to the course; at five and
twenty minutes to one Lord Lonsdale drove up in a pair-horse brougham;
at one o'clock to the second he trotted his single horse, War Paint, to
the starting-point, and War Paint bounded down the road. War Paint took
13 minutes 39-1/5 seconds over the five miles; it would have been twenty
seconds less, but a brewer's dray had blocked the road. The pair-horse
was waiting with Blue and Yellow, two Americans, in it; the change took
three seconds, and Blue and Yellow galloped back to the start in 12
minutes 51-2/5 seconds. It was the turn for the coach, and it took
36-3/5 seconds to change across; a groom drove the team to the starting
point, a yard before it Lord Lonsdale caught up the reins, and the four
horses swept up the rise to Crawley again. Fifteen minutes and nine
seconds and two-fifths the four horses took; the leaders were Silk and
Everton King, the wheelers Conservative and Whitechapel, and they left
their driver something over seventeen minutes to ride postillion back.
It took 40-2/5 seconds to change from coat and hat for riding, and
exactly at seventeen minutes to the hour Lord Lonsdale rode off on
Draper, a chestnut, with a bay mare, Violetta, for the pair. Draper and
Violetta went over the last five miles in 13 minutes 55-4/5 seconds, and
in 56 minutes 55-4/5 seconds the twenty miles were covered. And so the
great race ended.
The Pilgrims' Way dropping down like white ribands over the shoulder of
the down into Reigate we have already seen. On the other side of the
town the high road climbs up again to the crest of the ridge--a road
paved and metalled to stand the perpetual wear of shod wheels grating
down the hill. At the highest point of the road is one of the finest
views in England; one of the finest, Cobbett thought, in all the world.
The red roofs of the town cluster among trees below; beyond is all the
Weald to the Devil's Dyke and Chanctonbury Ring, best of all landmarks
of the Sussex downs. The separate views of the Weald along the chalk
ridge have each their own characteristic, from the Hog's Back to the
heights above Titsey. For me the view from the hill above Reigate has a
double memory; the purple and blue of the downs seen through the stems
of the beeches that line the crest, and the shadows thrown by a high
summer sun in the parks and fields below. The oaks and elms set
themselves in the open grass with little circles of darker green about
their feet, like the wooden stands of the trees of a Dutch toy farm.
Redhill joins Reigate to the east, new, red, spreading, a junction of
railways, a better sort of Woking. You do not have to wait from nine
minutes to three-quarters of an hour every time you come to Redhill. To
the schoolboy it has the merit of being a stage on the road from London
and the sea.