in the supernatural, for Francis, the fourth Earl, had two sons, one of
whom died without issue, before his father. The second son, who became
the fifth holder of the title, was a man upon whom sorrow laid a heavy
hand. His two sons died before him; the eldest unmarried, the second,
Lord William Russell, beheaded in 1683 for complicity in the political
movement resulting in the Rye House Plot.
That must have been a hollow and barren honour which was conferred upon
the bereaved man in 1694, when William the Third created him a Duke,
“to solace his excellent father for so great a loss, to celebrate the
memory of so noble a son, and to excite his worthy grandson, the heir
of such mighty hopes, more cheerfully to emulate and follow the example
of his illustrious father.” The fifth Earl and first Duke had often
before been offered a dukedom, but had declined; so it would seem that
the “solace” could have been little comfort to him. He died in his
eighty-seventh year, in 1700, and his grandson, Wriothesley, became
second Duke, who died eleven years later, and was followed by his
son, Wriothesley, third Duke, who died childless in 1732. His brother
stepped into his place, and survived until 1771. He was twice married,
but his eldest son died on the day of his birth, the second in infancy,
and the third, the Marquis of Tavistock, was killed by a fall in the
hunting field, in 1767; and he was therefore followed by his grandson,
Francis, the fifth Duke;, killed in 1802 by a blow from a tennis-ball.
The sixth Duke was brother of the last. He died in 1839, and his son
Francis, the seventh Duke, reigned in his stead until 1861. His
son William next enjoyed the title until 1872, when it fell to his
cousin, Francis, the ninth Duke, who in 1891, in his seventy-second
year, committed suicide by shooting himself, under somewhat mysterious
circumstances. An unsuccessful attempt was made to hush up the affair:
the first reports to the newspapers declaring that he had died from
congestion of the lungs.
[Illustration: WOBURN ABBEY.]
[Sidenote: _A DUCAL SUICIDE_]
The tenth Duke was a man of bloated and unwieldy proportions, who died
suddenly in 1893, and was followed by his brother. It would appear,
therefore, to recapitulate, that of the fourteen successive holders of
the titles of Earl and Duke of Bedford, five only have been succeeded
by their eldest sons. In all, there have been six deaths by various
forms of violence, including those of the aged Lord William Russell,
murdered in 1840 by his valet, Courvoisier, in Park Lane, and Lord
Henry Russell, who was killed on shipboard in 1842, by a block falling
on his head.
The Russells are by tradition Liberals in politics, but it is really
only an astute abstract Liberalism, calculated to impress the
unthinking, that they affect. I think of them, living behind their
park walls, in their huge, hideous house, as a succession of bloated
spiders, gorged but still unsatisfied, incredibly rich, incredibly
wealthy, shamelessly mean: deriving from their London ground-rents an
income that emperors might envy, and yet sharing no burdens and doing
no work for the State.
The great mansion of Woburn Abbey stands in the middle of a park
twelve miles in circumference: that is to say, for purposes of ready
comparison, a quarter larger than Richmond Park. Of the Abbey itself
nothing is left, and on the site of it stands the vast gloomy building
begun by Flitcroft in 1744 for the fourth Duke, and looking more like
some public institution of the asylum sort than a residence. It is a
veritable treasure-house of art, jealously closed against visitors,
except grudgingly, once a year, on the August Bank Holiday; but public
paths run through a great portion of the park, lovely with its woody
glades, still lakes, and couching fawns.
[Illustration: WOBURN.]
[Sidenote: _WOBURN_]
There is no doubt possible to even the most hurried wayfarer as to who
owns the tiny townlet of Woburn, just outside the park. The great
old coaching inn, the “Bedford Arms,” proclaims it, alike in its name
and in the heraldic signboard, displaying the arms of the Russells
and their motto, _Che sara sara_—_i.e._ “What will be, will be.” And,
judging from the demeanour of the few people to be seen, the Dukes of
Bedford own them too. It is not enough for the Dukes that they reside
secluded in the midst of their wide-spreading park. They look with
disfavour upon a town at their gates, even though that town be in fact
but a village; and in consequence there is no new building in the
place. If the prevailing Russell characteristic were not parsimony,
there can scarce be any doubt that they would have razed Woburn to the
ground; but that would cost something, an excruciating thought to this
frugal race. Therefore Woburn remains very much what it was a hundred
years ago. Cobblestones of the “petrified kidney” kind pave the road
and footpaths, and the shops are of the kind in which Jane Austen might
have bought her linen and her groceries. Quaint shop-fronts they are,
with windows patterned like the glazed doors of antique bureaus. In
short, Woburn is a rare and interesting relic of times past.
Expansion of business is a thing unthinkable here, and some shops, and
some of the one-time many inns, have given up in despair. The only new,
or comparatively new, things in Woburn are the parish church and the
town hall: the last-named built in 1830, and the church in 1868, with
alterations in 1890.
It is somewhat difficult to characterise the new church. When you have
called it “Early English,” you momentarily think you have the style,
but no: there is a florid, alien, meretricious manner in it that
refuses classification. The peculiarly chalky white stone of which
it is built is not pleasing. At any rate, it was ducally expensive:
having cost the eighth Duke £30,000. The chief idea was the greater
glorification of future Russells, whose tombs were intended to be
placed here; but the constant reminder outside their own park that even
Dukes of Bedford must die did not commend itself to others of the clan,
and so their historic burial-place at Chenies, in Buckinghamshire, many
miles distant, is retained. The angles of the church tower are finished
off, against the sky-line, with four devils whose weird aspect,
horse-like heads and curled manes impress me more than anything else,
unless indeed it be the perfection of the magnificent lawn that slopes
steeply to the road.
All the way from sleepy old Woburn to the modern, very much up-to-date,
and bustling town of Woburn Sands the road passes through beautiful
woodlands, echoing with the voices of pheasants, and rich in the
odours of pine and beech and laurel. In midst of this scenery, the
half-timbered “Henry the Eighth’s Lodge,” with clipped yew-trees, in
shape like so many Stilton cheeses, is very striking. After these
solitudes, Woburn Sands comes very much as a surprise, and to some
perhaps not altogether a welcome one.
[Sidenote: _EX-HOGSTYE END_]
Woburn Sands is an entirely modern name. You will look in vain for it
in the pages of Cary or Paterson, for in the old days of the road the
place was merely an insignificant hamlet known by the unlovely name
of Hogstye End. But things have happened since then. A branch line of
the London and North-Western Railway was constructed, crossing the
road at this point, and with a station at the roadside. Thus brought
into touch with the outer world, the simple souls of Hogstye End arose
as one man, and demanded a new name for the place: and so the title
of Woburn Sands was invented. To-day, the astonished traveller sees a
typical twentieth-century township on the site of Hogstye End: a rosy,
red-brick place, growing at the expense of Woburn itself; and making
strenuous claims to be a health-resort, by reason of the sandy soil and
the wide-spreading fir-woods. The observant traveller will notice a
singular testimony to the belief, until recently prevailing, that the
days of the road were done, in the arrogant behaviour of the railway
company at this point, in actually encroaching upon the main highway
with the out-buildings of their station and the obstructing position of
the gates of their level-crossing, often closed for ten minutes at a
time during shunting operations.
Leaving Woburn Sands, we incidentally leave Bedfordshire and enter
Bucks, coming in seven miles, past the unremarkable villages of
Wavendon and Broughton, to the town of Newport Pagnell.
XVII
Newport Pagnell is not a port nor is it new, and the Paganels who gave
it the second half of its name have been extinct so many centuries that
there are not even any monuments of them left in the church. There is
indeed nothing feudal in the appearance of the little town, and the
very site of the great Norman castle built by Fulke Paganel is obscure.
[Sidenote: _ANOTHER QUEEN ANNE_]
It is a little, lop-sided town, calm and cleanly, with houses,
stone-built and brick, chiefly of Queen Annean and Georgian dates,
situated on the river Ouse. To enter the town, you cross over that not
very broad river by an iron bridge, built in 1810; and there you obtain
the prettiest view in all Newport. Immediately across the bridge is
“Queen Anne’s,” or St. John’s Hospital, looking very new, for it has
recently been rebuilt. One of its many rebuildings was that by Queen
Anne, in 1615: not the Queen Anne who (as the saying goes) is dead, but
another Queen Anne who is, if possible, even more dead: the Anne of
Denmark, who was Queen of James the First. Even the hospitallers who
are still advantaged by her re-founding of the ancient almshouse are in
a state of benighted ignorance as to her identity: they either suppose
her to be the Anne, Queen Regnant, whom we all know; or else frankly
say they “dunno nawthin’ about who she wor,” and might with equal truth
add that they don’t care.
[Illustration: NEWPORT PAGNELL.]
Almost all that remains of the old building is a tablet, with
inscription very difficult to be read, and weirdly misspelled,
imploring:
Alyov good christiams that here dooe pas
By give soome thimg to thes poore people
That im St. Johmns Hospital doeth ly.
1615.
Newport Pagnell has already been referred to as “lop-sided,” a
phenomenon occasioned by the railway station at the western end of
the town. It is not a large station, and it is only the terminus of a
short branch from Wolverton, but it has caused the little building that
has taken place in Newport in the last sixty years to be done almost
exclusively here. Near by, in a house called “The Green,” there once
lived an eccentric medical man, a Dr. Patrick Renny, who was born in
1734, and died here in 1805; being buried, by the terms of his will, in
the garden, where an obelisk over his grave—now entirely overgrown with
ivy, and looking like an ancient tree—may still be seen.
[Sidenote: _JOHN WESLEY_]
In leaving Newport Pagnell, we may depart in imaginary company
with John Wesley, who was riding horseback this way to Northampton
on May 21st, 1742, when he overtook one who eventually proved to
be a Calvinist, “a serious man with whom I immediately fell into
conversation. He presently gave me to know what his opinions were,
therefore I said nothing to contradict them. He was quite uneasy to
know ‘whether I held the doctrines of the decrees as he did’; but I
told him over and over ‘We had better keep to practical things, lest
we should be angry with one another.’ And so we did for two miles, till
he caught me unawares and dragged me into the dispute before I knew
where I was. He then grew warmer and warmer; told me I was rotten at
heart, and supposed I was one of John Wesley’s followers. I told him
‘No, I am John Wesley himself.’ Upon which he would gladly have run
away outright. But being the better mounted of the two, I kept close to
his side and endeavoured to show him his heart till we came into the
street of Northampton.”
Let us hope that Calvinist was duly convinced of error.
To the north, on our road to Northampton, Newport has grown not at all:
for reasons sufficient to the observation of all who pass this way: the
river Ouse and its adjacent wet meadows, over which the road is taken
on a bridge and a causeway, forbidding, even if the parish boundary did
not.
Here is Lathbury, whose church and few houses are to be sought off
the road by turning to the left at a point where a formal red brick
mansion, formerly “Lathbury Inn,” stands. There was some little trouble
here in 1745, when Mrs. Symes, of Lathbury Park, an ardent Jacobite,
refused the Duke of Cumberland and his army a passage through her
estate: with the result (as she did not possess an army of her own)
that they passed through, riotously and destructively, instead of
decently and in good order.
The little church of Lathbury is a singularly beautiful village church,
with oddly diminishing tower walls. The interior, Norman and Early
English, still preserves abundant traces of frescoes of Renaissance
character, with texts and the beautiful Lord’s Prayer. A small brass,
dated 1661, to one Davies, son of a former rector, is placed here,
according to the inscription, so that other “Cambria-Brittaines,”
passing, should see it. “Cambria-Brittaine” appears to be
seventeenth-century pedant’s language for “Welshman.”
[Illustration: LATHBURY CHURCH.]
[Sidenote: _A GUNPOWDER PLOTTER_]
The stable-clocks of Gayhurst and Tyringham chiming from either side
of the road advertise the whereabouts of those places, effectively
hidden though they be in summer by wayside foliage, save for a glimpse
here and there. The historic manor-house of Gayhurst might readily
be missed, were it not for the lodge-gates; and that would be a loss
indeed, for the place is historic in very dramatic sort. The present
house dates back in its oldest portions to 1500, when an Early
Renaissance mansion was erected by the Nevill family, who ended in an
heiress whose marriage brought the estate into the family of Mulso.
It was Thomas Mulso who in the time of Queen Elizabeth remodelled
the house, and, like many another loyal gentleman of that age, gave
it a ground-plan representing the letter E, in compliment to his
sovereign: the end limbs of the E being represented by the wings, and
the middle limb by the projecting porch. Soon again, however, for lack
of heirs male, Gayhurst changed hands, when Mary Mulso married the
handsome young Catholic gentleman, Sir Everard Digby, in 1596. The
old hiding-places, secret chambers, and uncomfortable quarters in the
chimney-flues, with which the house had been thoughtfully provided,
were found very useful in the rash young Sir Everard’s time, for he
was one of the participants in the Gunpowder Plot, and entertained his
fellow-plotters here. Realising the risks he ran, he made over Gayhurst
by deed of gift to his son, Kenelm, then but twelve months old. Thus,
by early application of the Heaven-sent limited-liability principle, he
preserved the estate from the otherwise inevitable confiscation that
awaited unsuccessful treason; and went to the scaffold in January 1606,
easy on that head. And so, in due course, Sir Kenelm came to his own,
and although he endured persecutions and whips and scorns under the
Commonwealth, was not altogether unhappy.
The large edible snails he introduced from the South of France, in
the hope of curing his consumptive wife, Venetia, still have their
descendants in the woods here: the woods that represent those early
boskages whence Gayhurst obtained its original name of Goddeshurst,
which gradually, by way of “Gotehurst”, _i.e._ “God’s Wood”, and
“Gothurst”, has become what it is now.
[Illustration: GAYHURST.]
The Digbys ended in two unmarried sisters, who in 1704 sold their
ancestral home to Sir Nathan Wrighte, Queen Anne’s Keeper of the Seals,
whose monumental effigy, gorgeously robed, lies in the classic church
hard by the house; and the Wrightes themselves parted with it in 1830.
Beside historic associations, Gayhurst has literary memories, for this
is the poet Cowper’s country, and he often visited the Mr. Wrighte of
that age, travelling from Olney, little more than four miles away, to
admire the gardens, the hot-houses, and “the orange-trees, the most
captivating creatures of the kind I ever saw.” But he does not enlarge
upon the interesting Early Renaissance architecture of the older part
of the house, which is very justly admired nowadays. The Queen Anne
additions, comparatively recent as they were in his time, were better
thought of, and the classic church considered exquisite. It was one of
Sir Christopher Wren’s last designs, but the great architect never saw
it built, for he died, aged ninety-two, in 1723, and it was not begun
until the following year.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” EAKLEY LANE.]
[Sidenote: _EAKLEY LANE_]
The Ouse, glinting steel-blue amid the green meadows, is seen away to
the right of the road, on the way to Eakley Lane, winding placidly and
sluggishly along. It is, of course, Cowper’s Ouse:
Ouse, slow-winding through a level plain.
Passing through the village of Stoke Goldington, where the golden-brown
stone of Northamptonshire—the “sugar-stone,” as it is locally styled—is
first noticed in the buildings, Inckley, or Eakley Lane is reached.
“Eakley,” which appears to derive from “Ea” = water, and “lea” = a
meadow, referring to the neighbouring water-meadows of the Ouse, is the
proper name, but the spot was known indifferently by either spelling in
coaching days, when it was notable for two inns, the “Bull’s Head” and
the “George and Dragon.” Both houses are still in existence, but have
long since ceased to be inns.
Old houses that were once inns are indeed remarkably plentiful in
these next few miles. At Horton there stands what was formerly “Horton
Inn,” now a handsome country residence. Obviously it was built in
two separate periods; beginning business in a modest way and then
enlarged to twice its original size. Doubtless further enlargements and
improvements were in contemplation when the era of railways came in and
doomed all such hopes to failure. A spacious drive once led up to the
house, but that was long ago walled in and converted into a garden.
Here we come into Northamptonshire, uphill, into the region that was
once known as Salcey Forest, which, with the Forest of Rockingham to
the east and that of Whittlebury on the west, was in the days of the
Plantagenet kings a portion of a vast chase, in which the red deer were
of far more account than men.
[Illustration: HORTON INN.]
[Sidenote: “_SUGAR-STONE_”]
Northamptonshire, which takes its name from Northampton, the county
town (itself originally merely “Hampton,” and afterwards styled
“North Hampton” for the express purpose of distinguishing it from
Southampton), is an undulating shire of what Horace Walpole was pleased
to style, rather aptly, “dumpling hills.” It is rich in building-stone
of various kinds, largely of that beautiful golden-russet ferruginous
sandstone, already referred to as “sugar-stone”; hence the fine
substantial character of local buildings. Brick is not introduced
largely into the architecture of its towns and villages.
Fuller, who was a native of this shire, writing of it two hundred and
fifty years ago, said there was as little waste ground here as in any
county of England, and compared Northamptonshire with “an apple without
core to be cut out, or rind to be pared away.” His praise was not
extravagant, for the country contains little or nothing in the way of
bleak heath or barren moor.
This “shire of squires and spires” is also in old folk-rhyme that
of “spinsters and springs,” and of “pride, poverty, and puddings,”
ascriptions not readily to be understood, unless they be merely
examples of a rustic passion for alliteration reduced to an absurdity;
for spinsters abound in other shires, and no one surely would seriously
contend that Northamptonshire was favoured above the ordinary in the
matter of springs, conceit, pauperism, and puddings. But the spires
are, at any rate, an indubitable and a beautiful architectural fact.
Passing through Horton, we make a first acquaintance with them at
Piddington, a village of the smallest dimensions with a church of the
largest. Both are situated a few hundred yards off the road, the Early
English church spire peaking up magnificently among the trees, with a
peculiar richness of outline. Restoration recently in progress with
the particularly vivid yellow-brown stone from the Duston quarries,
two miles from Northampton, makes the restored patches stand out with
glaring offensiveness; but Time will remedy that—as all other ills.
[Illustration: PIDDINGTON CHURCH.]
[Sidenote: _HACKLETON_]
Hackleton, a large but rather characterless place, quickly follows
upon Horton and Piddington, and is the last village before reaching
Northampton, five miles away. Its position, the next place out of the
town on the road to London, made it, in the days before railways a very
special halting-place for drovers and the humbler wayfarers, and its
inns were many. Superior to the rest was the “New Inn,” now a private
residence, but for long years after it had retired from trade bearing
on its front the legend “Wines and Spirits: Entertainment for Man and
Beast”; with the not unnatural result that the privacy of the occupants
was frequently invaded by seekers after that entertainment.
Little more than one mile from Northampton town, near by the junction
of the road to Stony Stratford, where the highway assumes a magnificent
breadth, stands on a grassy bank the finest of the famous Eleanor
Crosses, raised by Edward the First to the memory of his Queen, Eleanor
of Castile, who died of a lingering fever at Harby, in Nottinghamshire,
November 28th, 1290. It is placed in a solitary position, on a grassy
selvedge of the road, at a spot in the parish of Hardingstone, close by
the grounds of what was once the Abbey of Delapré, or De Pratis, the
Abbey of the Meadows, founded for an establishment of Cluniac nuns by
Simon of Senlis, the crusading Earl of Northampton, in the late Norman
period.
The dearly loved Queen of Edward the First died in what was then the
remote district of Sherwood Forest, but the King decided that her body
should rest at Westminster Abbey, and so, with impressive deliberation,
the long journey was made.
[Sidenote: _QUEEN ELEANOR_]
Although travelling was a slow and tedious process in those days, it
was not necessarily so slow as this lengthy funeral procession. On
December 4th, the body of the Queen having been previously removed
from Harby to Lincoln Cathedral, the solemn pageant set out for
Westminster, but did not reach London until eleven days later, and
the entombment did not take place in the Abbey until the 17th of the
month. The reasons for the length of time taken are twofold, and are
to be found in the pompous circumstances under which the journey was
taken, and in the circuitous route chosen. The usual route was by way
of Stamford and Huntingdon, and so by Royston and Cheshunt, but it was
intended that the procession should pass through a more frequented line
of country and districts where the Queen had been better known. Another
object was to take some of the greater religious houses on the way, and
thus have suitably dignified places where to rest at the close of every
day. The route chosen was, therefore, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington,
Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St. Albans, Waltham,
West Cheap, and Charing.
The greatest magnificence marked the occasion, and twelve memorial
crosses, of different design, were afterwards erected on the places
where the bier had rested. Charity was given and masses paid for, and
here at Hardingstone, close by the Abbey of Delapré, in whose chapel
the body of the Queen rested for the night, this most beautiful of the
three remaining crosses was erected. “Living, I loved her dearly,”
the King wrote to the Abbot of Cluny, “and dead I shall never cease
to love her”; and so with every care the great officers of State who
accompanied the procession were directed to mark with particular care
those resting-places the King thought sacred, so that no doubt might
arise as to the exact spot where these memorials should be built.