similar to that seen in the ruins of the House. It is said to be of
foreign make. Bullets have up to recent years been extracted from the
south door of the church, the original oak door in use two hundred and
sixty years ago; and the flint and stone south walls and buttresses bear
vivid witness, in their patching of brick, to the ruin that befell this
part of the building in those troubled times. Strange to say, a
beautiful group of the Virgin and Child still occupies a tabernacle over
the west window, uninjured, although it can scarce have escaped the
notice of the fanatical soldiery. Within the church are memorials of the
loyal Paulets, Marquises of Winchester, and for a period Dukes of
Bolton. Their glory has departed with their great House, and although a
smaller residence was built in the meadows, close at hand, that has
vanished too.
[Sidenote: _THE ‘GREY LADY’_]
When Basing House was laid in ruins the Marquis of Winchester retired to
his hunting lodge of Hawk Wood, to the south of Basingstoke, and,
enlarging it, made the place his residence. His son, created Duke of
Bolton, employed Inigo Jones to build a new house on the site of the
lodge, and this is the present Hackwood Park. The existing house stands
in the midst of dense and tangled woodlands, and although imposing, is a
somewhat gloomy pile, with a ghost story. That bitter lawyer, Richard
Bethell, of whom it was said that he ‘dismissed Hell, with costs, and
took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope
of everlasting damnation,’ when he became Lord Chancellor and was
created Baron Westbury, purchased Hackwood Park, and it was to one of
his friends that the ‘Grey Lady’ of the mansion presented herself. Lord
Westbury and a party of his friends had arrived from town soon after the
purchase, and at a late hour they retired to rest, saying good-night to
one another in the corridor. One of the guests woke up in the middle of
the night and found his room strangely illuminated, with the indistinct
outlines of a human figure visible in the midst of the uncanny glow.
Thinking this some practical joke, and feeling very drowsy, he turned
round and fell off to sleep again, to wake at a later hour and see the
figure of a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress. With more courage than
most people would probably have shown under the circumstances, he,
instead of putting his head under the bed-clothes, jumped out, whereupon
the lady modestly retired. Instead of going to bed again, he sat down
and wrote an account of the occurrence; but when at breakfast Lord
Westbury and his other friends kept continually asking him how he had
slept, his suspicions as to a practical joke having been played upon him
were renewed. He accordingly parried all these queries and said he had
slept excellently, until Lord Westbury said, ‘Now, look here, we saw
that lady dressed in grey follow you into your room last night, you
know!’ Explanations followed, but the story of the ‘Grey Lady’ remains
mysterious to this day.
XVIII
The whereabouts of Basingstoke may be noted from afar by the huge and
odd-looking clock-tower of the Town Hall, added to that building in
1887. Its windy height, visible from many miles around, is also
favourable to the hearing at a distance of its sweet-toned carillons,
modelled on the pattern of the famous peal of Bruges. When the shrieking
of the locomotives at the railway station is hushed, and the wind is
favourable, you may hear those tuneful bells far away over the
melancholy wolds that hem in Basingstoke to the north and west, or
listen to them by the waters of the Loddon eastward, or the undulating
farm-lands of the south.
[Sidenote: _HOLY GHOST CHAPEL_]
We have seen how Old Basing became of prime military importance from its
situation at the point where many roads from the south and west of
England converged and fell into one great highway to London; and from
the same cause is due the commercial prosperity of Basingstoke.
Basingstoke, with a record as a town going back to the time when the
Domesday Book was compiled, is yet a mere modern settlement compared
with the mother-parish of Old Basing; but it was an important place in
the sixteenth century, when silks and woollens were manufactured here.
At later periods this junction of the roads brought a great coaching
trade, and has finally made Basingstoke a railway junction. Silks and
woollens have given place to engineering works and machine-shops, and
the town, with its modern reputation for the manufacture of
agricultural machinery, bids fair at no distant date to become to
Hampshire what Colchester and Ipswich are to Essex and Suffolk.
When the Parliamentary Generals were engaged in the long business of
besieging Basing House, it may well be supposed that the town suffered
greatly at the hands of their soldiery. They, who were experts at
wrecking churches and cathedrals in a few hours, had ample opportunities
for destruction in the four years that business was about. Their
handiwork may be seen to this day--together with that of modern Toms,
Dicks, and Harrys, who have not the excuse of being fanatics--in the
ruined walls of Holy Ghost Chapel on the northern outskirts of the town.
Within the roofless walls of the chapel, unroofed by those Roundheads
for the sake of their leaden covering, are two recumbent effigies, sadly
mutilated. Perhaps Sergeant Humility-before-the-Lord Mawworm slashed
them with his pike in his hatred of worldly pomp; but his zeal did not
do the damage wrought on the marble by the recording penknives of the
past fifty years. A stained-glass window, pieced together from the
fragments of those destroyed here, is still to be seen in Basingstoke
Parish Church.
The Exeter Road leaves Basingstoke at its southwestern end, where a fork
of the highway gives a choice to the traveller of continuing to Andover
on the right, or making on the left to Winchester. The first village on
the way to Exeter is Worting, below the shoulder of Battle Down, a
village--nay, a hamlet, let us call it--of a Sundayfied stillness. Yet
Worting has had its bustling times, for here was one of the most famous
coaching inns on the road, the ‘White Hart.’ Another ‘White Hart,’ at
Whitchurch, is scarcely less celebrated in the annals of the road. In
fact, the ‘White Harts’ are so many and so notable on this road that the
historian of the highways becomes almost as ashamed of mentioning them
as of recounting the places which Cromwell stormed, or where Charles the
Second hid; the houses in which Queen Elizabeth slept, or the inns where
Pepys made merry.
[Sidenote: _OVERTON_]
Worting is followed in quick succession by the outskirts of Oakley,
Clerken Green, Deane, Ashe, and Overton. Except Overton, which is a
picturesque village lining the road, of the old coaching, or
‘thoroughfare’ type, these places are all shy and retiring, tucked away
up bye-lanes, with great parks on their borders, in whose midst are very
vast, very hideous country mansions where dwell the local J.P.’s, like
so many Rogers de Coverley in miniature, with churches rebuilt or
restored to their glory and the glory of God, and a general air of
patronage bestowed upon the villagers and wayfarers from the outside
world by those august partners. These parks, with their mile after mile
of palings bordering the road, and their dense foliage overhanging it,
are given over to solitude. An occasional gamekeeper, or a much more
than occasional rabbit or hare, are the only signs of life, with perhaps
the hoarse ‘crock’ of a pheasant’s call from the neighbouring coverts.
The air beneath the overarching trees along the road is stale and
stagnant, and typical of the life here, like the green damp on the
entrance lodges of Hall Place, where heraldic lions, sitting on their
rumps and holding what at a distance look like quart-pots from the
country inn opposite, scowl at one another across the gravelled drive.
It is a relief to emerge from this stifling atmosphere upon the open
road where Overton stands. We are fully entered here into the valley of
the Test, or Anton, a sparkling little stream whose course we follow
henceforward as far as Hurstbourne Priors. Fishermen love Overton and
this valley well, for there is royal sport here among the trout and
grayling, and in the village a choice of those old inns which the angler
appreciates as much as any one. Picturesque Overton is a doubly ruined
village, for it has lost its silk industry, together with the coaching
interest; but like the splendid bankrupts of modern high finance who
fail for millions and continue to live like princes, it continues
cheerful. Perhaps every one in the place made a competency before the
crash, and put it away where no one could touch it!
The valley broadens out delightfully beyond Overton, and the road,
reaching Laverstoke, commands beautiful views over the water-meadows,
and the open park in whose midst stands Laverstoke House, clearly seen
in passing. In this village, in the neat and clean paper-mill by the
road, is made the paper for Bank of England notes. It was so far back as
1719 that this industry was established here by the Portal family,
French Protestants emigrating from their country for conscience’ sake.
Cobbett, who hated paper-money as much as he did the ‘Wen’ in which it
is chiefly current, passed this spot in a fury. He says, with a sad lack
of the prophetic faculty, ‘We passed the mill where the Mother-Bank
paper is made! Thank God! this mill is likely soon to want employment.
Hard by is a pretty park and house, belonging to “_’Squire_” Portal, the
_paper-maker_. The country people, who seldom want for sarcastic
shrewdness, call it “Rag Hall!”’ And again, ‘I hope the time will come
when a monument will be erected where that mill stands, and when on that
monument will be inscribed “_the Curse of England_.” This spot ought to
be held accursed in all time henceforth and for evermore. It has been
the spot from which have sprung more and greater mischief than ever
plagued mankind before.’
Unhappily for Cobbett’s wishes and predictions, the mill is still in
existence and is busier than it was when he wrote in 1821. There are as
many as two hundred and fifty people now employed here in the making of
the ‘accursed’ paper.
Now comes Freefolk village, with a wayside drinking-fountain and a tall
cross, with stone seat, furnished with some pious inscription; the whole
erected by a Portal in 1870, and intended to further the honour and
glory of that family. There is plenty water everywhere around, in the
river and its many runlets amid the water-meadows, but the fountain is
dry. Passing tramps are properly sarcastic, and the dry fountain and its
texts, so far from leading in the paths of temperance and godliness, are
the occasion of much blasphemy. But the pious Portals have their
advertisement.
[Sidenote: _NEWMAN AT WHITCHURCH_]
Whitchurch, two miles down the road, is approached past the
much-quarried hills that rise on the right hand and shelter that decayed
little town from the buffetings of the north-easterly winds. If there be
those who are curious to learn what a decayed old coaching town is like,
let them journey to Whitchurch. After much tiresome railway travelling,
and changing at junctions, they will arrive in the fulness of time at
Whitchurch station, whence the omnibus of the ‘White Hart’ will drive
them, rumbling over the stone-pitched streets of the town, to the door
of that quaint inn, in one of whose rooms the future Cardinal Newman
wrote the beginning of the _Lyra Apostolica_:--
Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?
2nd December 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth. He had come
from Oxford that morning by the Oxford-Southampton coach.
‘Here I am,’ he says, writing to his mother, ‘from one till eleven,’
waiting for the down Exeter mail. Think, modern railway traveller, what
would you say were it your lot to wait ten hours, say at Templecombe
Junction, for a connection! Moreover, a bore claiming to be the brother
of an acquaintance claimed to share his room and his society at the
‘White Hart,’ and eventually journeyed to Exeter with him. The future
Cardinal did not like this. He writes: ‘I am practising for the first
time the duty of a traveller, which is sorely against the grain, and
have been talkative and agreeable without end,’ adding (one can almost
imagine the sigh of the retiring scholar!), ‘Now that I have set up for
a man of the world, it is my vocation.’
The latter part of his journey was accomplished at night. Travelling
thus through Devonshire and Cornwall is, he remarks, ‘very striking for
its mysteriousness.’ It was a beautiful night, ‘clear, frosty, and
bright, with a full moon. Mere richness of vegetation is lost by night,
but bold features remain. As I came along, I had the whole train of
pictures so vividly upon my mind that I could have written a most
interesting account of it in the most approved picturesque style of
modern composition, but it has all gone from me now, like a dream.’
‘The night was enlivened by what Herodotus calls a “night engagement”
with a man, called by courtesy a gentleman, on the box. The first act
ended by his calling me a d----d fool. The second by his insisting on
two most hearty shakes of the hand, with the protest that he certainly
did think me very injudicious and ill-timed. I had opened by telling him
he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maidservant stuck
atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain of his giving me the
retort uncourteous.’
There are corridors in the ‘White Hart’ with up and down twilight
passages, in which the guests of another day lost themselves with
promptitude and despatch. There is also a barbarically coloured
coffee-room, snug and comfortable, which looks as though Washington
Irving could have written an eloquent essay around it; and, more
essential than anything else in days of old, a capacious yard with huge
yawning stables. For Whitchurch is at the cross
[Sidenote: _BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION_]
[Illustration: WHITCHURCH.]
roads, along which in one direction went the Exeter mails, while at
right angles goes the road between Southampton, Winchester, Newbury,
Didcot, and Oxford, little used now, but once an important route.
Whitchurch, in the gay old times when few men had votes but every voter
had his price, used to send two members to Parliament. Horrid Reform and
Bribery Acts which, together with the extension of the franchise and the
adoption of secret voting, have brought about the disfranchising of
rotten boroughs and the decay of such home industries as electoral
corruption, personation, and the like, have taken away much of the
prosperity of the town, which, like Andover, used to live royally from
one election to another on the venality of the ‘free and independent.’
But the last visit of the ‘Man in the Moon’ was paid to Whitchurch very
many years ago, and not even the oldest inhabitant can recollect the
days when cash was given for votes and the electors, gloriously and
incapably drunk, were herded together to plump for the candidate with
the longest purse.
When it is said that Whitchurch is a tiny town of very steep, narrow,
and crooked streets, that it still boasts some vestiges of its old silk
industry, and that it is a ‘Borough by prescription,’ all its salient
points have been exhausted. Reform has not only reformed away the
Parliamentary representation of the town, but has also swept away the
municipal authority. Mayor and bailiff are both elected every year, but
the offices carry no power nowadays.
Leaving Whitchurch, the road presently comes to the village of
Hurstbourne Priors, which stands in a hollow on the Bourne, an affluent
of the Anton, and on the verge of the Ancient and Royal Forest of
Harewood. Not only does the village stand on the banks of the stream and
the edge of the woods, but it also derives the first of its two names
from these circumstances, ‘Hurstbourne’ being obviously descriptive of
woodlands and brooklet, while the ‘Priors’ is a relic of its old lords
of the manor, the abbots of Saint Swithun’s at Winchester. These
historic and geographical facts, however, are apt to be lost in the
local corruption of the place-name, and that of Hurstbourne Tarrant, a
few miles higher up the stream; for they are, according to Hampshire
speech, respectively ‘Up Husband’ and ‘Down Husband.’
XIX
[Sidenote: _ANDOVER_]
The road between this point and Andover, ascending the high ground
between the Ann and the Test, is utterly without interest, and brings
the traveller down into the town at the south side of the market square
without any inducement to linger on the way. Except on the Saturday
market-day, Andover is given over to a dreamy quiet. The butchers’ dogs
lie blinking sleepily on the thresholds, or on the kerbs, and regard
with a pained surprise, rather than with any active resentment, the
intrusive passage of a stray customer. Tradesmen’s assistants leisurely
open casual crates of goods on the pavements, with long intervals for
gossip between the drawing of each nail, and no one objects to the
blocking of the footpath. A chance cyclist manœuvres in the empty
void of the road in the midst of the square, and collides with no one,
for the simple reason that there is nobody to collide with, and one
acquaintance talks to another across the wide space and is distinctly
heard. Formal but not unpleasing houses front on to this square,
together with the usual Town Hall, and a great modern, highly
uninteresting Gothic church, erected after the model of Salisbury
Cathedral, on the site of the old building.
For fifty-one weeks of the fifty-two that comprise the year, this is the
weekly six-days aspect of the place, varied occasionally by the advent
of a travelling circus, or the arrival of a route-marching detachment of
the Royal Artillery, who park their guns in the square, and may be seen
in the stable-yards of the inns on which they are billeted, in various
stages of dishevelment, in shirt-sleeves rolled up to elbows, and braces
dangling at waists, littering down their horses, or smoking very short
and very foul pipes.
All this idyllic quiet is blown to the winds during the week of Weyhill
Fair, the October pandemonium held three and a half miles away. Then
hordes of cattle-and horse-jobbers, hop growers and buyers,
cheese-factors, and the travellers of firms dealing in machinery, seeds,
oil-cake, tarpaulins, and half a hundred other everyday agricultural
requisites, descend upon the town. Then are dragged out from mysterious
receptacles the most antiquated of ‘flys,’ and waggonettes, and
nondescript vehicles, to be pressed into the service of conveying
visitors to the Fair, some three and a half miles from the town. Whence
they come, and where they are hidden away afterwards, is more than the
stranger can tell, but it is quite certain that their retreat is in some
corner where spiders dwell, and earwigs and other weird insects have a
home. Add to these facts the all-important one that it is generally
possible to walk the distance in a shorter time, and you have a full
portraiture of the average Weyhill conveyance.
This sleepy old place, older by many more centuries than the oldest
house remaining here can give any hint of, was not always so quiet.
There were alarums and excursions (ending, however, with not so much as
a cut finger) when James the Second, falling back from Salisbury before
the advance of his son-in-law, William of Orange, halted here. There
might have been a battle in Andover’s streets, or under the shadow of
Bury Hill, had James put a bolder front on the business; but instead of
cutting up William’s Dutchmen, he just dined overnight, and hearing in
the morning that his other son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, had
slunk off with Lords Ormond and Drumlanrig, went off himself,
strategically to the rear. He was an obstinate and ridiculous bigot, and
a quite unlovable monarch, but he had a power of sarcasm. ‘What,’ said
he, hearing of the Prince’s desertion, and bitterly mimicking the absurd
intonation of that recreant’s French catch-phrase, ‘is “_Est-il
possible?_” gone too? Truly, a good trooper would have been a greater
loss.’
[Sidenote: _OLD ELECTIONS_]
After these events, that era of bribery and corruption set in, which is
mistakenly supposed to have been brought to an end through the agency
of the several Reform Acts, passed by well-meaning Legislatures to
secure the purity of Parliamentary elections. As if treating, and the
crossing of horny hands with gold were the only ways of corrupting a
constituency that the wit of man, or the address of a candidate, could
discover! The palm no longer receives the coin; but who has not heard of
the modern art of ‘nursing a constituency,’ by which the candidate,
eager for Parliamentary honours, sits down before a town, or a county
division, subscribes liberally to hospitals and horticultural societies,
cricket and football clubs, opens bazaars, and presides at Young Men’s
Christian Associations, thereby winning the votes which would in other
days have been acquired by palming the men and kissing all the babies?
This tea-fight business gives us no picturesque situations like that in
which Charles James Fox figured. Fox was canvassing personally, and
called upon one of the bluff and blunt order of voters, who listened to
his eloquence, and remarked, ‘Sir, I admire your abilities, but damn
your principles!’ To which Fox supplied the obvious retort, ‘Sir, I
admire your sincerity, but damn your manners!’
Andover no longer sends a representative to Parliament, but in the brave
old days it elected two. With a knowledge of the wholesale purchasing of
votes that then went on, it will readily be perceived that Andover, with
two members to elect, must have been a place flowing with milk and
honey; or, less metaphorically, a happy hunting-ground for guineas and
free drinks. It was somewhere about a hundred and fifty years ago that
Sir Francis Blake Delaval, a prominent rake and practical humorist of
the period, was canvassing Andover. One voter amid the venal herd was,
to all appearance, proof against all temptations. Money, wine, place,
flattery had no seductions for this stoic. The baffled candidate was
beside himself in his endeavours to discover the man’s weak point; for
of course it was an age in which votes were so openly bought and sold
that the saying ‘Every man has his price’ was implicitly believed. Only
what _was_ this particular voter’s figure? Strange to say, he had no
weakness for money, but was possessed with an inordinate desire to see a
fire-eater, and doubted if there existed people endowed with that
remarkable power. ‘Off went Delaval to London, and returned with Angelo
in a post-chaise. Angelo exerted all his genius. Fire poured from his
mouth and nostrils--fire which melted that iron nature, and sent it off
cheerfully to poll for Delaval!’
This was that same Delaval whose attorney sent him the following bill of
costs after one of his contests:--
To being thrown out of the window of the George Inn, Andover; to my
leg being thereby broken; to surgeon’s bill, and loss of time and
business; all in the service of Sir Francis Delaval, £500.
And cheap too.
[Sidenote: _PRACTICAL JOKING_]
They kept this sort of thing up for many years; not always, however,
throwing solicitors out of hotel windows; although rival political
factions often expressed their determination to throw one another’s
candidate in the Anton, after the fashion of the bills posted in the
town during a contest in the ’40’s, which announced in displayed type--
LORD HUNTINGTOWER FOR EVER!
SIR JOHN POLLEN IN THE RIVER!!
CATCHING FISH FOR HIS LORDSHIP’S DINNER!!!
History does not satisfy us on the point whether or not those furious
partisans carried out their threat; or whether, if they did, their
victim afforded good bait.
This Lord Huntingtower was the eldest son of the late Earl of Dysart,
and a well-matched companion of the late Marquis of Waterford. Roaming
the country-side on dark nights, mounted on stilts, with sheets over
their clothes and hollowed turnips on their heads with scooped-out holes
for eyes and mouth, and lit with candles, they frightened many a timid
rustic out of his dull wits. In daytime they played practical jokes on
the tradesfolk of Andover. For example, entering a little general shop
in the town, Lord Huntingtower asked for a pound of treacle. ‘Where
shall I put it?’ asked the old woman who kept the shop, seeing that the
usual basin was not forthcoming.