greatly, and is still growing with such giant strides, that it has sent
out, as it were, along the road, all manner of subtle indications of
its advance; together with some not so subtle, in the shape of dusty
roads and horrible houses. For the worst side of Derby is obtruded upon
the London road. You do not come into all this kind of thing at once.
It is a sort of gradual declension. First you notice an uncomfortable
something indefinable, then the hedges begin to be worn and ragged,
and at last disappear altogether. Then you pass a bend in the road—and
there—ah! me—is the inevitable electric tramway, with the conductor and
driver of the waiting car, in the usual uniform modelled on that of a
ship’s petty officer.
But there are two or three things on the way that demand notice.
Nowhere can there be another neighbourhood so prodigal in “astons” as
this. Here, on the road itself, is Alvaston; to the right is Elvaston,
and scattered here, there, and everywhere are Ambaston, Admaston,
Chellaston, Breaston, and Osmaston; with one village simply “Aston”
unadorned.
The very similar names of Alvaston and Elvaston are productive of
infinite trouble to the Post Office and others; but the places are very
different from one another. Alvaston is a place of modern suburban
development; but Elvaston, lying a mile off to the right of the road,
and approached only by difficult byways, is very rural. Hidden away
there, stands Elvaston Castle, seat of the Earl of Harrington, that
unconventional peer who conducts (or until lately did conduct) a
fruit-shop at the corner of Craig’s Court, Charing Cross.
[Illustration: THE TRENT, AND CAVENDISH BRIDGE, FROM SHARDLOW.]
[Sidenote: _PEERS IN TRADE_]
I love the House of Lords and the hereditary principle. Vulgar
Radicals declare the Peers a collection of epileptic degenerates,
company-promoters, guinea-pigs, touts for wine-merchants, and grinders
of the faces of the poor, and point out that many of its members have
been in gaol, and others ought to be; and that some (none quite
recently) have been hanged, and others have been in inebriate asylums,
and will be again; but I should be sorry to see them abolished. They
afford so interesting a spectacle, are so superb an anachronism, and
provide such engrossing scandals for readers of the newspapers that
the public—and the newspaper proprietors—will not easily be persuaded
to part with them at the suggestion of the Gideons of the Radical
party. We love the romance of the House of Lords; and for this reason
we dislike to see its constituent members selling fruit, or, like Lord
Londonderry, Lord Dudley, or Lord Durham, selling coals. Lord Tennyson
sold milk, and that revolted many: an ennobled poet dealing in dairy
produce is an anachronism, and the owner of an historic title entering
into business and exercising all the arts of the commercial man while
clinging to the privileges of his station is a thing that no one can
look upon without sorrow.
Elvaston Castle is an odd place. Exploring in these byways, the
wayfarer comes suddenly to it, as into a courtyard, where the church,
with its tall pinnacled tower, stands to one side and the mansion on
the other, with the courtyard itself littered like the approach to a
farm. Tall piers stand on either side, crested with snarling demi-lions
holding flaming grenades.
For centuries the estate has been in the Stanhope family, created Earls
of Harrington in 1742, and is placed amid very beautiful gardens,
greatly improved about the middle of last century by Charles, fourth
Earl, who married Maria Foote, the actress, and wrought many wonderful
things here; forming that lake which the great Duke of Wellington
declared to be the only natural artificial sheet of water he had ever
seen. The place looks strangely romantic and wild.
An astonishing story is told of an ancestress of the Earl of
Harrington. A Stanhope of olden times died young, and his widow, like
those other brilliant Royalist dames at Corfe Castle and Brampton
Bryan, held Elvaston during a siege by the Parliamentary forces in
1643, commanded by Sir John Gell. In the end, the besiegers wore out
the little defending band at Elvaston, and Sir John Gell, after the
manner of the conquering heroes of that time, did what havoc he could
about the place. He made a woeful wreck of the beautiful garden,
demolished a magnificent monument Lady Stanhope had erected to the
memory of her husband, and at last—insisted upon her marrying him! She
naturally refused so preposterous an idea—and then quite as naturally
agreed to wed this terrific wooer, who literally had stormed his way to
her heart. He was very masculine: there can be no doubt whatever of his
gender; and if it be true that, above all things, a woman loves a manly
man, she had, in Sir John Gell, an ideal mate, for, as the poet says:
’Tis not so much the lover who woos,
As the lover’s _way_ of wooing;
and what a way this Roundhead knight had with him!
But Derby town is advancing upon Elvaston, and will shortly be upon it,
and the place is in consequence not being maintained in its old style.
Some day, possibly, the Midland Railway may come and cut it up. Already
it has abolished Osmaston Hall, and made the rest of the way into Derby
a grimy, smoke-laden purlieu.
[Illustration: ELVASTON CASTLE.]
XXVII
[Sidenote: _DERVENTIO_]
Derby, or, more strictly, Little Chester, hard by, was the Roman
_Derventio_, a name it derived from the river Derwent, in the days of
the ancient Britons: the _Dwr gwent_, or clear water. When the Saxons
came and settled near the site of _Derventio_, they styled the place
“Northweorthing,” and the Danes, who in turn drove out the Saxons,
named it “Deoraby,” whence the transition to the modern “Derby” is
easy. The modern arms of Derby display a buck _couchant_ in a park, an
allusion to the supposed origin of the Danish place-name, thought to
derive from the Teutonic name, _thier_, for wild beasts, which term
would no doubt include deer. But if this be the correct derivation, it
is an extraordinary coincidence that the first syllable of the Roman
place-name and that of the Danish should be identical.
The untravelled are easily misled as to the appearance of Derby
town. If you were to believe the average guide-book, you would never
visit the place, and would rank it with Swindon or Wolverton, or the
like. It is true that the chief offices and the works of the Midland
Railway are centred here, and that modern Derby is the creation of
these circumstances; but, lapped round and enfolded though it is by
machine-shops and the mean streets of sheer industrialism, ancient
Derby is not altogether to be spoken of in the past tense.
The historical incidents connected with Derby are not many, and they
are nearly all associated with the unhappy House of Stuart, whose
members exhibited so strange an inability to rule themselves that it
remains an odd problem how so ill-balanced a family ever raised itself
to kingly rank.
Derby entertained Charles the First in 1635 and made him and his
followers welcome to the town. They did it in coin and in kind; with
a purse stuffed full of sovereigns, and with gifts of an ox, a calf,
and six sheep. In 1642, when the Civil War was already in progress,
the King was back again, “borrowing” £300. It has ever been an ill
investment, this lending to kings, and Derby never again saw the colour
of its money. I, for one, am not surprised that Derby afterwards
declared for the Parliament.
[Sidenote: _THE RUNAWAY MUSKETEERS_]
The burgesses were still incensed against the Stuarts when Prince
Charlie came in 1745, at the head of his wild Highlanders, in his
futile effort to upset George the Second and regain the throne of his
ancestors; and, for all the brave promises made, of five shillings
down, and five pounds apiece when they reached London, he obtained
only three recruits in the whole town. We have already, at Swarkestone
Bridge, heard at length of this ill-fated rising, but Derby affords
some amusing incidents. The Duke of Devonshire had raised a regiment of
one hundred and fifty men, to oppose the advance of the Highlanders,
and the squires and magistrates of the county, and the corporation
of Derby, had raised a force of six hundred more. Derby apparently
presented an armoured front to the foe, but it was woefully deceptive.
At ten o’clock on the night of December 3rd, when scouts brought
tidings of the enemy’s advance, the drums sounded to the muster and
the warriors fell in. The order was given to march, and they marched
accordingly: out of the back door when the rebels were coming in
at the front. In short, they and the Duke who led them emulated the
example of the “runaway musketeers,” or, like a billiard-player,
uncertain of the game, played for safety. Whether it were policy,
seeing that the invaders were advancing with so bold a front, and
looked like being successful, or whether it were cowardice, seems to
have been a debated point. But it was certainly not military genius.
They were led towards Nottingham, and ravaged the farmhouses for food
and drink as they went, making war on the poultry, and forgetting to
pay.
Meanwhile, horrid reports reached them from Derby. The Pretender had
arrived and had extorted £3,000 from the town. But what sent shivers
of apprehension down their spinal columns was the news that the enemy
had in great numbers attended service and partaken of the Sacrament,
and had then resorted to the cutlers to have their swords sharpened.
This meant business. We may imagine the sigh of relief with which these
warriors heard of the wholly unexpected retreat of the Highlanders, and
that there was not, after all, to be a Battle of Derby.
Industry, and not war, makes up the history of the town, together
with the usual amusement of religious persecution that colours the
old annals of all places. It was at Derby in 1650 that the Society
of Friends first came by the name of “Quakers,” when George Fox was
brought as a sectary before Mr. Justice Bennet. “He was,” says Fox,
“the first who called us quakers, because I bid them tremble at the
word of the Lord.”
[Sidenote: _SILK AND CHINA_]
But soon there were other things to do. in 1717 the art of spinning
silk was introduced to England by John Lombe, who built the first mill
here, and set up machinery whose secrets he had learned in Italy,
until that time the great silk-spinning country. The romantic story is
told of how, determined to discover the closely guarded processes of
manufacture, he visited Italy and in disguise worked at a silk-mill;
returning to England with the information he had acquired, and with
a number of workmen he had succeeded in bribing. His death shortly
afterwards was ascribed to his having been poisoned by an Italian woman
sent over for the purpose by the manufacturers whose secrets he had
surprised.
Calico afterwards became, in addition to silk, an article of Derby
manufacture, but in the popular mind the name of the town is usually
associated with the production of china, the fame of the beautiful
“Crown Derby” porcelain being more widespread than that of silk or
calico. The Royal Crown Derby works, established about 1750, lasted
very nearly a hundred years, being closed in 1848.
Derby was sufficiently important to be able to support a coach to and
from London, so early as 1735, when a conveyance set out every Thursday
from the “George.” This was continued in 1790 to Manchester, and then
went daily; leaving Derby at 3 p.m. and arriving in London at 10
o’clock the following morning. From the “Bell” went another coach,
certainly as early as 1778, when, on March 15th, it was announced
that “the Derby Fly, in one day to London for the summer season, will
set out from the Bell Inn on Sunday next, and will continue to set
out every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings at six o’clock, each
passenger to pay £1 8_s._ and to be allowed 14 lb. weight of luggage.
Performed by Hilliard, Henson, Foster & Co.”
The early importance of the Derby inns as starting and arrival
points for the coaches was somewhat obscured at a later date, when
coaching had grown enormously, leading to the establishment of special
coach-offices in the town, of which Stenson’s General Coach Office, in
Sadler Gate, was the chief. An early notice of the “Bell” is found in
1698, when it was kept by one G. Meynell. In 1702 a “Widow Ward” was
landlady. In 1761 the house and all its eatables and drinkables were
made free to all-comers by Sir Henry Harpur during his Parliamentary
candidature. A few years later, the house was rebuilt by a retired
West India merchant, John Campion, whose initials, and the date 1774,
elaborately done in leadwork, are to be seen to this day on an old
pump, still in working order in the courtyard. The house remained in
the Campion family until about 1865.
The old claret-coloured brick front of the “Bell” looks down upon
Sadler Gate, very much as of old, and its courtyard still echoes with
the sound of prosperous business.
[Sidenote: _HIGH TREASON_]
The curtain of romantic history was rung down at Derby on a most
dramatic situation, so late as 1817, in the executions here for High
Treason.
[Illustration: COURTYARD OF THE “BELL” INN.]
The “high treason” for which Jeremiah Brandreth and his associates were
then executed was a singular incident to have occurred so late as
the nineteenth century. It was nothing less than an attempted rising
against the Government; an armed effort at subverting the existing
order of things that seemed more in keeping with the insurrections
of earlier ages. It certainly never became a formidable movement,
and was really an affair fomented by one Oliver, an agent of the
Sidmouth-Castlereagh administration, which was uneasy at the generally
disturbed state of the country, and fearful that the strong language
indulged in by the Radical agitators among the working class and the
swiftly increasing numbers of factory-workers might, if unchecked,
lead to very serious movements. In this frame of mind, the weak and
criminal Ministers appear to have considered that their best course
was to employ spies who should worm their way into the confidence of
the discontented classes, and actually provoke them into acts of armed
rebellion that would give the Government an opportunity of repressing
them violently.
The headquarters of Oliver, the spy, were at the turbulent and
disaffected town of Nottingham, whence he travelled here and there into
the surrounding districts, posing as a leader of London malcontents,
and making inflammatory speeches. At the “Blackmoor’s Head” and the
“Three Salmons” in Nottingham, he addressed the sullen working-men, and
spoke of a “provisional Government” being formed, and of 70,000 men in
London, ready to rise. Monday, June 9th, 1817, was fixed by him and his
dupes in Derbyshire for a march upon Nottingham, where he declared
they would be met by numerous hands of insurgents from the south, and
together would seize the Castle. The soldiers, he declared, were with
them, to a man.
[Sidenote: _JEREMIAH BRANDRETH_]
Chief among the ardent spirits ready to fall into the snare set by
Oliver was Jeremiah Brandreth, a young man of about twenty-five years
of age, of a dark, bold, and determined character; the very picture, in
appearance and in fiery energy, of a popular leader. His parentage and
place of birth are uncertain. Under the leadership of Brandreth, called
by his followers “the Nottingham Captain,” and afterwards described as
“otherwise John Coke,” a large number of men (according to one account
five hundred) assembled, in the words of the subsequent indictment,
“with force and arms,” “a great multitude of false traitors,” in the
parish of South Wingfield. Among them were agricultural labourers,
weavers, and quarrymen of Wingfield, Pentridge, and neighbouring
parishes, styling themselves “the Regenerators.” Between June 9th and
15th they hovered between these villages, armed with hedge-stakes and
rude pikes, calling at houses and farmsteads to seize any firearms
that could be found, and endeavouring to enlist men. Brandreth became
possessed of a pair of pistols, which he struck in a belt formed of an
apron twisted round his waist. With one of these pistols he shot dead a
farm servant named Robert Walters, during an altercation at Pentridge.
Meanwhile, hearing no tidings of the supposed insurgents who were
to meet them, the undisciplined band grew nervous and disheartened,
and their numbers were rapidly thinned by desertions. At length, when
they entered the county of Nottingham at Eastwood, there were but
forty left. In the interval, the magistrates and the police, probably
informed by Oliver, discovered that something of an unusual nature
was afoot, and the 95th Regiment of Foot, the Yeomanry, and the 15th
Hussars, all ready to hand, were warned to hold themselves prepared for
eventualities. By the 15th of June these tremendous preparations were
seen to be too ridiculously imposing for the purpose of dealing with a
mere dwindling mob; and a mere party of eighteen Hussars was despatched
to capture them. Brandreth and his men, standing despondent upon a hill
at Eastwood, saw them cantering along, and thought them to be some of
the long-expected revolutionaries. They were soon undeceived, and then
fled in panic, throwing away their weapons, such as they were. The
Hussars captured some thirty of them, between Kimberley and Longley
Mill, and lodged them in Nottingham Gaol. Brandreth himself escaped,
and lay in hiding for awhile, but was betrayed by “a friend,” for sake
of the £50 reward offered.
[Illustration: STAGE-COACH TRAVELLING, 1828 (DERBY AND SHEFFIELD).
[_After J. Pollard._
]
[Sidenote: _END OF THE TRAITORS_]
The chief figures in this affair were, to the number of twenty-three,
arraigned before a special Assize held at Derby on October 15th, with
the result that Brandreth, William Turner, and Isaac Ludlam, senior,
were condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Eleven others
were “pardoned,” as the quaint phrase ran, “upon condition of being
transported for life”; three were similarly “pardoned” by being awarded
fourteen years’ transportation; while one had two years’, two a term of
one year, and three a mere six months’.
The three principal offenders were executed at Nuns Green, on November
7th, and were hanged, having merely their heads cut off afterwards; the
Prince Regent “graciously remitting the rest of their sentence.” How
kind!
The unfortunate men took affecting leave of one another, anticipating
being presently in heaven. The hangman, duly masked—he was said to be
one of the Denby colliers—then performed his office, and afterwards cut
off the heads: making so ill a job over Brandreth that his assistant
was fain to complete the work with knives. Thereupon, the executioner,
in the gory old formula, held up the head before the huge assembled
crowd, and, turning right and left, exclaimed, “Behold the head of the
traitor, Jeremiah Brandreth!”
The bodies of the three men were unceremoniously flung into a pit dug
in the churchyard of St. Werburgh, in Friar Gate. A sportive barber,
Pegg by name, then took to masquerading in the churchyard as a ghost,
robed in a sheet, and, scared the inhabitants for some time, until a
bold spirit, throwing a stone at him, hit him with such violence in the
eye that he went half blind for the rest of his life.
XXVIII
There are picturesque corners in this town of Derby, so contemned by
most writers, sufficient to make the fortune, in the pictorial way,
of many another town. Derby, to an artist, at any rate, is a likeable
place, and such an one is in sympathy with Boswell, who wrote in 1777:
“I felt a pleasure in walking about Derby. There is an immediate
sensation of novelty, and one speculates on the way in which life is
passed in it.”
Ancient and modern rudely jostle here, and the streets run on no
regular plan. It is a provincial town turned industrial, and still
surprised at the change: the any-shaped, no-shaped Market Place, where
Boehm’s bronze statue of Michael Thomas Bass stands, remaining still
in many ways that of an agricultural market town. But, nevertheless,
there has been much pulling down and rebuilding. Among other places,
the house where Joseph Wright—the celebrated painter “Wright of
Derby”—lived, has disappeared, and modern business premises stand on
the site. An iron tablet narrates the facts—but why? Such things do
but advertise the shame and set a seal upon regret. Alas! there is no
modern Joshua to bid time stand still—and for time to obey.
One of the pleasantest features of the town is the fine park called
the Arboretum. Here an interesting relic of the plague that raged
in 1665 is placed. This is the so-called “Headless Cross,” or
Market Stone, removed from Friar Gate, where it served as a means of
communication between the stricken townspeople and the countryfolk,
bringing in provisions. The market folk, coming with their mouths
filled with tobacco, as a disinfectant, placed the meat and vegetables
and dairy-produce they had brought upon the ground and witnessed the
inhabitants drop their money into the hollow in the stone, filled with
vinegar. With these strict precautions it was hoped to escape infection.
[Illustration: “YOUNG MEN AND MAIDENS.”]
[Sidenote: _ALL SAINTS’_]
All Saints’ Church, the most important of the several in the town,
possesses a tall and very beautiful late Perpendicular tower, built
about 1520, according to legend, by the bachelors and spinsters of
Derby. Still further, according to legend, it used to be the custom for
the bachelors to ring the bells whenever a young woman born in the town
was married.
There is, unfortunately, no direct evidence that the tower really was
the work of the bachelors and the spinsters. It was probably built from
the money given by a wealthy townsman, Robert Liversage, a dyer by
trade. A battered inscription, “Young men and maidens,” no doubt gave
rise to the story. It is now generally believed, except by the humblest
people, among whom tales of this romantic kind live longest, that
the inscription was once simply the pious invitation, “Young men and
maidens, old men and children, praise ye the Lord.”
A cathedral-like size and breadth of proportion mark this fine tower,
the product of the last days of Gothic, rising to a height of 174 feet
above the pavement; and the quite humble old houses of the narrow
street do but serve to show it to further advantage. It is heavily
buttressed at the angles, in a manner sufficient to have made Ruskin
storm, had he ever occasion to write of it; for it was his theory that
towers should stand starkly four-square, without the aid of buttresses.
But what would Gothic architecture be without those essential features!
Something new and strange.
[Illustration: ALL SAINTS’.]
[Sidenote: _THE UNHAPPY EARL_]
The tower being so fine, of what nature was the body of the church?
That we cannot know, for it was rebuilt in a classic style by Gibbs,
in 1725, and has the appearance of a great pillared hall, very fine
of its kind, and extraordinarily spacious. It was quite a new church,
not more than twenty years old, when Prince Charlie attended mass here
in the ’45. There are many fine monuments, chiefly from the older
building, among them the elaborate memorial, with coroneted effigy,
of the famous Bess of Hardwick, that scheming, matchmaking, imperious
woman, four times wedded and widowed, whose passion for building and
rebuilding rivalled that for forming matrimonial alliances. She is said
to have erected her own monument, and it is likely enough she did. Her
fourth marriage, in her fiftieth year, to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury,
embittered the existence of that unhappy man. He was custodian of Mary
Queen of Scots. The anxieties of that charge, and a sorry time of it
with his wife, shortened his existence. “Two devils,” he described the
Countess and the prisoned Queen, and it is likely enough he privately
thought Queen Elizabeth, who was for always worrying him, a third.
The quarrels of Earl and Countess were notorious, and the Bishop of
Lichfield wrote him what was intended to be a comforting letter on the
subject. The tenor of it ran that the case certainly was unfortunate,
but, after all, this was the usual lot: