HENLEY—THE BRIDGE AND ITS KEYSTONE-MASKS—REMENHAM—HAMBLEDEN—MEDMENHAM
ABBEY AND THE “HELL FIRE CLUB”—HURLEY—BISHAM
Passing Marsh Lock, the town of Henley comes into view, heralded by its
tall church tower, with four equal-sized battlemented turrets; a quite
unmistakable church tower. The noble five-arched stone bridge here
crossing the Thames, built in 1789, at a cost of £10,000, is one of the
most completely satisfactory along the whole course of the river. The
keystone-masks of the central arch show sculptured faces representing
Isis and Thames. Isis appropriately faces up-river, and Thames looks
down-stream. These conventionalised heads of a river-god and goddess
are really admirable examples of the sculptor’s art. They adorn the
title-pages of the present volumes, which display Isis with a woman’s
head, and Father Thames, bearded, with little fishes peeping out of the
matted hair, and bulrushes decoratively disposed about his temples. These
masks were the work of that very accomplished lady, the Honourable Mrs.
Anne Seymour Damer, who at the time when Henley bridge was a-building
resided at Park Place. She was cousin to Horace Walpole, for whom she
carved an eagle so exquisitely that he wrote under it—enthusiastic
cousin as he was—_Non Praxiteles sed Anna Damer me fecit_. One terrible
thing, however, stamps the lady irrevocably as a gifted amateur: she
_gave_ her work to the bridge authorities. Most reprehensible! The
recipients were duly grateful, as witness the Bridge Minutes. True, they
do but acknowledge one mask: “May 6, 1785. Ordered that the thanks of the
Commissioners be given to the Honourable Mrs. Damer for the very elegant
head of the River Thames which she has cut and presented to them for the
Keystone of the centre arch of the bridge.”
This conventional head of Father Thames is that made familiar by the
eighteenth-century poets, who personified everything possible. It is that
Father Thames who
“From his oozy bed
… advanced his rev’rend head;
His tresses dropped with dews, and o’er the stream
His shining horns diffused a golden gleam.”
Only, as we see, bulrushes here take the place of his “shining horns.”
The head of Isis was a portrait of Miss Freeman of Fawley Court.
[Illustration: ARCH CARRYING THE ROAD, PARK PLACE.]
[Illustration: REMENHAM CHURCH.]
Henley is, of course, famed, above all else, for its Regatta, established
as an annual event since 1839, following upon an Oxford and Cambridge
boat-race here in 1837. It is now pre-eminently _the_ function of the
river season, whether we consider it from the point of view of sport or
fashion. Here every June the best oarsmanship in the world is displayed
over this course of one-and-a-quarter miles: indisputably the best for
anything up to that distance, for the regatta is now attended by the
best oarsmen of the New World as well as of the Old. The regatta is,
from a social and hospitable point of view, very much what the Derby is
among horseraces; and the house-boat parties and riverside house-parties
for the Henley Week dispense much hospitality and champagne. There is
yet another side to the regatta: it is, almost equally with Ascot and
Goodwood, recognised as an opportunity for the display of fine dresses.
The Oxfordshire bank is at such times the most exclusive, and to the
Berkshire shores are principally relegated the pushing, struggling crowds
of humbler sportsmen and sightseers. But here, where every point is
legally open to all, except where private lawns reach down to the river,
the real exclusiveness of Goodwood or Ascot is, of course, impossible.
Henley town is at such times anything but exclusive, and is thronged to
excess. In these later times of motor-cars it is also apt to be a great
deal more dusty than ever it used to be. To see Henley in Regatta Week,
and again Henley in any other week, affords an astonishing contrast; for
at all other times it is, as a town, among the dullest of the dull, and
its broad High Street a synonym for emptiness.
I do not propose in this place to enlarge further upon Henley, but to
mention Henley at all and not its famous old coaching-inn by the bridge,
the Red Lion, has never yet been done; and shall I be the first to make
the omission? No! It is a famous old inn, and of enormous size. Every
one knows it as the hostelry where Shenstone the poet, about 1750,
scratched with a diamond upon a window the celebrated stanza about “the
warmest welcome at an inn,” but that window-pane has long been lost;
and it is really doubtful if the inscription was not rather at another
Henley: i.e. Henley-in-Arden. I have fully discussed that question
elsewhere,[1] and so will not repeat it in this place.
Mr. Ashby-Sterry is quite right in his description of the Red Lion,
standing red-brickily by the bridge:
“’Tis a finely-toned, picturesque, sunshiny place,
Recalling a dozen old stories;
With a rare British, good-natured, ruddy-hued face,
Suggesting old wines and old Tories.”
Remenham, a mile or so along the Berkshire shore, is typically Berkshire,
but with a church still looking starkly new, as the result of “thorough
restoration” in 1870. Its semicircular apse, really ancient, does not
look it. The tower is of the Henley type, though smaller. Henley church
tower, in fact, seems to have set a local fashion in such, for that of
Hambleden conforms to the same design. Regatta Island, with its effective
temple, marks the old starting-point of the races.
[Illustration: HENLEY-ON-THAMES.]
Hambleden is on the Buckinghamshire side; a pretty village situated about
one mile distant from the river along the lovely and retired valley
of the Hamble. From it the widow of W. H. Smith, of the newspaper and
library and bookstall business of W. H. Smith & Son, and of Greenlands,
near Henley, takes her title of Viscountess Hambleden. Liberal, Radical,
and Separatist journals were never tired of satirically referring to W.
H. Smith, when a member of a Unionist Government, as “Old Morality,”
deriving that term from the stand he took in the House of Commons upon
his “duty to Queen and country.” His idea of his duty in those respects
was exactly that of an average responsible business man. He had no axe
to grind, no job to perpetrate; and that being so, the nickname of “Old
Morality” was in effect a great deal more honourable than those satirists
ever suspected. They, indeed, conferred upon him a brevet of which any
one might well be proud, and incidentally covered themselves with shame,
as men to whom a sense of rightness and of duty towards one’s sovereign
and one’s native land was a subject for mirth. But of course these quips
and cranks derived from the party notoriously friends of every country
save their own.
In the very much restored church of Hambleden, among various tombs, is
one in the chancel to Henry, son of the second Lord Sandys, with a quaint
inscription, owning some nobility of thought:
“Nature cryeth on me so sore,
I cannot, Christ, be too fervent,
Sith he is gone, I have no more,
And yt, O God, I am content.
I believe in the Resurection of Life
To see you again at the last day,
And now, farewell, Elizabeth my wife,
Teach mye children God to obey
But now let us rejoyce in heart
To trymphe never cease
Sith in this life wee only part
To joyce agen in heavenly peace.
Parted to God’s mercy, 1540.”
The elaborate oak screen under the tower, carved with Renascence designs,
is said to have once been part of Cardinal Wolsey’s bedstead. It bears
the arms of Christ Church and of Corpus Christi, Oxford; and those of
Castile, with the rose badge of York.
At some little distance downstream is Medmenham Abbey. The building, that
looks so entirely reverend and worshipful from the opposite shore, is
really, in the existing buildings, little enough of the original Abbey
that was founded towards the close of the twelfth century by one Hugh
de Bolebec. It was never very much of a place, and seems to have been
something of a dependency of Bisham Abbey. Just prior to its suppression,
Henry the Eighth’s commissioners reported that it had merely two monks,
with no servants, and little property, but no debts; but, on the other
hand, no goods worth more than £1 3_s._ 8_d._, “and the house wholly
ruinous.”
[Illustration: REGATTA ISLAND.]
Nothing remains of whatever church there may have been, and the only
ancient portions are some fragments of the Abbot’s lodgings. The “ruined”
tower, the cloisters, and much else are the work of those blasphemous
“Franciscans” of the Hell Fire Club who, under the presidency of
Francis Dashwood, Lord le Despencer, established themselves here about
1758. There were twelve of these reckless “monks,” who, having built
the “cloisters,” reared the now ivy-mantled tower, and painted their
licentious motto, “Fay ce que voudras,” over one of the doors, sat down
to a series of orgies and debaucheries whose excesses have been perhaps
exaggerated by the mystery with which these “monks of Medmenham” chose
to veil their doings. Among them were Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, Sir
John Dashwood King, John Wilkes, the poet Churchill, and Sir William
Stanhope. Paul Whitehead was “secretary” to this precious gang of
debauchees.
[Illustration: MEDMENHAM.]
Devil-worship was said to have been among the impious rites celebrated
here; and one of the party seems to have played a particularly
horrifying practical joke upon his fellows during the progress of these
celebrations. He procured an exceptionally large and hideous monkey and,
dressing it in character, let it down the chimney into the room among
his friends, who fled in terror, and were for long afterwards convinced
that their patron had really come for them. This incident is said to have
broken up the fraternity.
The explorer by Thames-side could, until quite recent years, do very
much as he liked at Medmenham, and the more or less authentic ruins were
open to him; but now they are enclosed within the grounds of a private
residence, and a hotel stands beside the ferry. The very small village
at the back is to be noted for the highly picturesque grouping of some
ancient gabled houses (restored of late) with the little church and a
remarkable hill crested by an old red-brick and flint house that looks
as though it owned, or ought to own, some romantic story. The hilltop
is said to be encircled with the remains of a prehistoric encampment.
It is with sorrow that here also one notes the builder’s prejudicial
activities. Directly in front of the church, and entirely blocking out
the view of it, there has been built a recent red-brick villa, with the
result that the effective composition illustrated here is almost wholly
destroyed.
[Illustration: MEDMENHAM ABBEY.]
The lovely grass-lands over against Medmenham are glorious in June,
before the hay-harvest. One may walk by them, beside the river, all
the way to Hurley. On the left, or Buckinghamshire, bank, the ground
rises into chalk-cliffs, surmounted by the great unoccupied house of
Danesfield, staringly white, popularly said to contain as many windows
as there are days in the year. This is the handiwork of Mr. R. W. Hudson,
of “Hudson’s Soap.”
Hurley, to which we now come, is a historic spot. Here, by the waterside,
was founded in 1087, by Geoffrey de Mandeville, the Benedictine Priory
of Our Lady of Hurley, which remained until 1535, when, in common with
other religious houses, it was suppressed by Henry the Eighth. To the
Lovelace family came the lands and buildings of this establishment, and
here, on the site of it, Sir Richard Lovelace built, with “money gotten
with Francis Drake,” a splendid mansion which he called Lady Place. His
descendant, Richard, Lord Lovelace, was in 1688 one of the somewhat
timorous nobles who met secretly to plot the deposition of James the
Second. They had not the courage, these pusillanimous wretches, to take
the field in arms, as Monmouth and his brave peasants had done, three
years earlier, and must needs find cellars to grope in, and then invite
over that cold, disliked Dutchman, William of Orange, to do for them what
they dared not do for themselves. Macaulay, in his richly-picturesque
language, refers to these meetings, but it will be observed that he calls
those who met here “daring.” They were anything but that.
“This mansion,” he says, “built by his ancestors out of the spoils of
Spanish galleons from the Indies, rose on the ruins of a house of our
Lady in this beautiful valley, through which the Thames, not yet defiled
by the precincts of a great capital, rolls under woods of beech, and
round the gentle hills of Berks. Beneath the stately saloon, adorned by
Italian pencils, was a subterranean vault, in which the bones of ancient
monks had sometimes been found. In this dark chamber some zealous and
daring opponents of the Government held many midnight conferences during
that anxious time when England was impatiently expecting the Protestant
wind.”
This Lady Place no longer exists, for the great house was demolished
in 1836, and the house so-called is of modern build. But the old-time
gardens remain, and the refectory; and here is the old circular
pigeon-house, with the initials on it, “C.R.,” and the date, 1642.
A curious story tells how one of the last occupants of Lady Place was
a brother of Admiral Kempenfelt, and that he and the Admiral planted
two thorn-trees in the garden, in which he took great pride. One day,
returning home, he found that the tree planted by the Admiral had
withered away, and he exclaimed: “I feel sure this is an omen that my
brother is dead.” That evening, August 29, 1782, he received news of the
loss of the _Royal George_.
Hurley church is a long, low building, of nave without aisles, of Norman,
or some say earlier, origin. “It was probably ravaged by the Danes
towards the close of the ninth century,” say the guide-books. This may
have been so, but it could hardly have been worse ravaged by them than
it was by those who “restored” it in 1852 “at a cost of £1,500,” and
incidentally also at the cost of all its real interest.
[Illustration: THE BELL INN, HURLEY.]
The village of Hurley straggles a long way back from the river, in one
scattered, disjointed line of cottages, past the picturesque old Bell
Inn, apparently of fifteenth-century date, heavily framed with stout
oaken timbers.
Below Hurley, leaving behind the ancient red-brick piers of the old-world
gardens of Lady Place, the river opens out to Marlow reach, with Bisham
on the right hand, and the tall crocketed spire of Marlow church closing
the distant view.
“Bisham” is said to have been originally “Bustleham,” but the present
form will be preferred by every one. Strangers call it “Bish-am,” but for
the natives and the people of Marlow the only way is by the elision of
the letter h—“Bis-am”; and thus shall you, being duly informed of this
shibboleth, infallibly detect the stranger in these parts.
Bisham village is quite invisible from the river, nor need we trouble to
seek it, unless it be for climbing up into the lovely and precipitous
Quarry Woods, in the rear. To those who knew Bisham when Fred Walker
painted his delightful pictures, and among them, some studies of this
village street, there comes, when they think of the Bisham that was and
the Bisham that is, a fierce but impotent anger. The humble old red-brick
cottages remain, it is true, and their gardens bloom as of yore, but
what was once the sweet-smelling gravelly street is now a tarred
abomination, smelling evilly, and wearing a squalid and disreputable
look. This is the result of the coming of the motor-car, for Bisham is
on the well-travelled road between High Wycombe, Great Marlow, Twyford,
and Reading, and the village has now the unwelcome choice of two evils:
to be half-choked with billows of dust, or to coat its roads with tar
compositions.
Of what was originally a Preceptory of the Knights Templars, and then an
Augustine Priory, and finally a Benedictine Abbey, nothing is left but
the Prior’s lodgings, now the mansion of the Vansittart-Neales, called
“the Abbey.” The parish church stands finely by the waterside, encircled
by the trees of the park, and there remains a monastic barn. Such are
the few relics of the proud home of monks and priors, enriched during
hundreds of years by the benefactions of the wicked, endeavouring by
means of such gifts to atone sufficiently for their evil lives, and so
escape the damnation that surely awaited them.
Such complete destruction is melancholy indeed, when we consider the
great historic personages who were buried here: among them the great
Nevill, “Warwick the Kingmaker,” slain at last in the course of his
tortuous ambitions, in the Battle of Barnet, fought on Easter Day, 1471,
and laid at Bisham, hard by his own manor of Marlow.
When the Abbey was finally dissolved, it was granted by Henry the Eighth
to Anne of Cleves, his divorced fourth wife, who exchanged it with the
Hoby family for a property of theirs in Kent. Here the Princess Elizabeth
was resident for three years, during the reign of her half-sister, Mary,
really under surveillance; and to that period the greater part of the
“Abbey,” as we see it now, is to be referred.
[Illustration: BISHAM ABBEY.]
[Illustration: “TOP O’ THE TOWN,” GREAT MARLOW.]
Bisham Abbey is, of course, famed above all other things for the story
of the wicked Lady Hoby, who so thrashed her son for spoiling his
copy-books with blots that he died. A portrait of her, in the dress of
a widow, is still in the house, and her ghost is yet said to haunt the
place.[2] She was wife of Sir Thomas Hoby, Ambassador to France, who died
in 1566, aged 36. The elaborate altar-tomb in Bisham church to him, and
to his half-brother, Sir Philip, with effigies of the two knights, is
worth seeing; and the rhymed epitaph written by her worth reading. The
early death of the Ambassador, in Paris, was not without suspicion of
poison. The sculptured figures of hawks at the feet of the brothers are
“hobby”-hawks, a punning allusion to the family name.
Lady Hoby was a grief-stricken widow, and supplicated Heaven, rather
quaintly, to “give me back my husband, Thomas,” or that being beyond
possibility, to “give me another like Thomas.” She captured another,
eight years later, when she married John, Lord Russell; but whether
Heaven had thus given her one up to sample we are only left idly to
conjecture. At any rate she outlived him too, by many years, and elected
to be buried beside her Thomas. An elaborate monument to this fearsome
lady discloses her in a wonderful coif, surmounted by a coronet.
Before and behind her kneeling figure are the praying effigies of her
children. It is recorded that she was particularly interested in mortuary
observances, and that she even found it possible to be absorbed, as she
lay dying, at the age of 81, in her own funeral rites; corresponding with
Sir William Dethick as to precisely the number of mourners and heralds
that were her due.
A little monument to two children in Bisham church is the subject of a
very old legend to the effect that Queen Elizabeth was their mother! More
scandal about Queen Elizabeth!
Bisham passed from the Hobys in 1768 to a family of Mills, who
assumed the name; but in 1780 it again changed hands and was sold to
the Vansittarts, of whom Sir H. J. Vansittart-Neale is the present
representative. The old belief in disaster befalling families who hold
property taken from the Church has been curiously warranted here from
time to time, in the untimely death of eldest sons or direct heirs, and
here indeed, upon entering Bisham church, the stranger is startled by
the white marble life-size effigy confronting him of a kneeling boy, in
a Norfolk jacket-suit; an inscription declaring it to represent George
Kenneth Vansittart-Neale, who died in 1904, aged fourteen.
[1] _The Old Inns of Old England_, vol. ii., pp. 299-303.
[2] More fully discussed in _Haunted Houses_, pp. 36-42.