Situated in the country of the Fitzwilliam Hunt, it afforded, with its
splendid accommodation for guests and for horses, headquarters for those
who had not a hunting-box of their own, and in those days stabled as many
as a hundred and fifty horses.
[Picture: Sign of the “Haycock.”]
“Young Percival” kept the “Haycock” from about 1826, and drove the
“Regent” between Wansford and Stamford, in place of “old John Barker.”
At that time he had more valour than discretion in driving, and on one
occasion at least nearly brought disaster upon the coach at the famous
bridge by “punishing” a spirited team which had given some trouble at
starting. At the steep and narrow entrance to the bridge they took it in
their heads to resent his double-thonging, the leaders turning round, and
the whole team presently facing towards London instead of Stamford. They
had to be driven back to the “Haycock,” and Barker took them on to
Stamford.
[Picture: Wansford Bridge]
That bridge would have been an exceedingly awkward place for a coach
accident. It is picturesqueness itself, and by consequence not the most
convenient for traffic. Originally built in 1577, with thirteen arches,
it was repaired in 1674, as a Latin inscription carved midway on it
informs the inquiring stranger. In the winter of 1795 an ice-flood
destroyed some of the southernmost arches, which were replaced the
following year by two wider spans, so that Wansford Bridge has now only
ten openings. The northern approach to it from Stamford leads down in a
dangerous, steep, sudden, and narrow curve, intersected by a cross-road.
Now that there is no longer a turnpike gate at this point to bring the
traffic to a slow pace, this descent is fruitful in accidents, and at
least one cyclist has been killed here in an attempt to negotiate this
sharp curve on the descent into the cross-road. An inoffensive cottage
standing at the corner opposite the “Mermaid” inn has received many a
cyclist through its window, and the new masonry of its wall bears witness
to the wreck caused by a heavy wagon hurtling down the hill, carrying
away the side of the house.
The five miles between Wansford and Stamford begin with this long rise,
whose crest was cut through in coaching days, the earth taken being used
to fill up a deep hollow which succeeded, where a little brook trickled
across the road, the coaches fording it. Thence, by what used to be
called in the old road-books “Whitewater Turnpike,” past the few cottages
of Thornhaugh, and so to where the long wall of Burghley Park begins on
the right hand. Here the telegraph poles, that have hitherto so
unfailingly followed the highway, suddenly go off to the right, and into
Stamford by the circuitous Barnack road, in deference to the objections,
or otherwise, of the Marquis of Exeter, against their going through his
park.
The famous Burghley House by Stamford town is not visible from the road,
and is indeed situated a mile within the park, only the gate-house to the
estate being passed in the long descent into that outlying portion of the
town known as Stamford Baron.
There is, amid the works of Tennyson, a curiously romantic poem, “The
Lord of Burleigh,” which on the part of the literary pilgrim will repay
close examination; and this examination will yield some astonishing
results. It is, briefly stated, the story of an Earl masquerading as a
landscape painter and winning the heart and hand of a farmer’s daughter.
He takes her, after the wedding, to see—
“A mansion more majestic
Than all those she saw before;
Many a gallant gay domestic
Bows before him at the door.
And they speak in gentle murmur
When they answer to his call,
While he treads with footstep firmer,
Leading on from hall to hall.
And, while now she wonders blindly,
Nor the meaning can divine,
Proudly turns he round and kindly,
‘All of this is mine and thine.’
Here he lives in state and bounty,
Lord of Burleigh, fair and free,
Not a lord in all the county
Is so great a lord as he.”
The original person from whose doings this poem was written was, in fact,
Henry Cecil, tenth Earl, and afterwards first Marquis, of Exeter. He was
the lord of Burghley House (not “Burleigh Hall”), by Stamford town, and
his descendants are there yet.
Not a landscape painter, but a kind of London man about town and Member
of Parliament for Stamford, 1774–1780, 1784–1790, and then plain Mr.
Henry Cecil (for he did not succeed his uncle in the title until
December, 1793), he is found rather mysteriously wandering about
Shropshire in 1789, calling himself (there is never any accounting for
taste) “Mr. Jones.” He was then a man who had been married fourteen
years, and was thirty-six years of age.
The scene opens (thus to put it in dramatic form) on an evening towards
the end of June, 1789, when a stranger knocked at the door of Farmer
Hoggins at Great Bolas in Shropshire, and begged shelter for the night.
He was obviously a gentleman, but called himself by the very plebian name
of “John Jones.” He made himself so agreeable that his stay “for the
night” lasted some weeks, and he returned again in a month or so, taking
up his residence in the village. The attraction which brought him back
to Great Bolas was evidently Sarah Hoggins, the farmer’s daughter, at
that time a girl of sixteen, having been born in June, 1773. He proposed
for Sarah, and on April 17th, 1790, they were married in Great Bolas
Church, the register showing that he married in the name of “John Jones.”
Meanwhile he had purchased land in the village, and built a house which
he called “Bolas Villa.” Gossip grew extremely busy with this mysterious
stranger who had thus descended upon the place, and it was generally
suspected that he was a highwayman in an extensive way of business,
especially as some notable highway robberies happened coincidently with
his appearance.
Early in 1794, “Mr. John Jones,” living thus at Great Bolas, learnt that
his uncle, the ninth Earl of Exeter, had died in December. Telling his
wife they must journey into Northamptonshire, where he had business, they
set out and arrived at “Burghley House, by Stamford town,” and there he
disclosed to her for the first time that he was not “John Jones,” but
Henry Cecil, and now Earl of Exeter.
At what time he broke the news to her that he was already a married man
there is no evidence to show. Strictly speaking, he had made a bigamous
marriage, because, although his wife, one of the Vernons of Hanbury, in
Worcestershire, had eloped on June 14, 1789, with the Reverend William
Sneyd, curate of that place, he had at the time taken no steps to obtain
a divorce.
[Picture: Burghley House, by Stamford Town]
But he had every excuse. He had honestly fallen in love with Sarah
Hoggins after thus meeting her while wandering about the country a few
days after his wife’s flight; and he obtained a divorce by Act of
Parliament in March, 1791. Having done this, he married Sarah Hoggins
secondly some six months later (October 3) in the City of London Church
of St. Mildred, Bread Street, in whose register his name appears as
“Henry Cecil, bachelor.”
Tennyson’s poem is, therefore, rather more romantic than truthful; and
the lines which tell us how she murmured—
“Oh! that he
Were again that landscape painter
Who did win my heart from me,”
have no authority. Nor is there any evidence to warrant the statement
that—
“A trouble weighed upon her
And perplexed her, night and morn,
With the burthen of an honour
Unto which she was not born.”
The poet continues—
“So she droop’d and droop’d before him,
Fading slowly from his side;
Three fair children first she bore him,
Then before her time she died.”
The Countess of Exeter, in fact, died on January 18, 1797, not quite
twenty-four years of age; but not from “the burthen of an honour unto
which she was not born.” Happily, accession to the ranks of the titled
nobility is not fatal, as the marriage of many distinguished ornaments of
the musical comedy stage assure us; and so we must charge the Poet
Laureate with the flunkey thought that blue blood is a kind apart, and
not to be admixed with other strains. This from the poet who wrote—
“Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.”
is unexpected.
She left two sons and one daughter. Her eldest son became second Marquis
of Exeter, his father, the Earl, having been raised a step in the peerage
in 1801.
The enterprising Earl married, thirdly, in 1800, the divorced wife of the
eighth Duke of Hamilton, and died May 1, 1804, aged fifty; but his third
wife survived until January 17, 1837. In the billiard-room of Burghley
House is a portrait-group of “the Lord of Burleigh” and his wife, Sarah
Hoggins, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
“Bolas Villa” was given by the Earl to his godson. It has since been
enlarged, and is now styled “Burghley Villa.” The church of Great Bolas
is a grim-looking brick building of the eighteenth century, when many of
the Shropshire churches in that district were rebuilt.
XXII
STAMFORD compels enthusiasm, from the first glimpse of it on entering, to
the last regretful backward glance on leaving. It is historic,
picturesque, stately, aristocratic, and cleanly, all at once. Its
stone-built mansions and houses are chiefly of the Renaissance period,
from Elizabeth onwards to the time of George the First, and it is in this
sort the most beautiful town in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, and
even in some aspects surpassing them.
Apart from its lovely churches, one seeks not Gothic architecture at
Stamford but the stateliness of classic methods as understood in the
sixteenth and seventeenth century revival. It is this especial
architectural character which gives the town such an air of academic
distinction and leads the stranger to compare it with the great
university towns, even before the fact comes to his knowledge that
Stamford itself was once the seat of a University.
The entrance is of a peculiar stateliness, the broad quiet street
descending, lined with dignified private houses, to where the river
Welland flows beneath the bridge, dividing the counties of Northampton
and Lincoln, and Stamford Baron from Stamford town. On the right hand
rises the fine tower of St. Martin’s, its perforated battlements showing,
lace-like, against the sky, just as when Turner painted his view. Lower
down across the street straddles the sign of the great “George” inn, and
a few steps forward serve to disclose the exquisite picture of St. Mary’s
tower and spire soaring from the rising ground on the other side of the
river. The “distracting bustle of the ‘George,’ which exceeded anything
I ever saw or heard,” as the Reverend Thomas Twining wrote, in 1776, has
long since become a thing of the past, and a certain quiet dignity now
belongs to it, as to Stamford in general.
The “George” is an inn with a history. Charles the First slept there,
August 23, 1645, and a whole train of dignitaries at one time or another.
“Billy the Butcher,” too, returning from Culloden, stayed in the house,
and with his officers celebrated that victory. “Billy the Butcher,” one
regrets to say, was the vulgar nickname by which the people called
William, Duke of Cumberland.
Distinguished foreigners without number have rested here and wondered at
the habits of Englishmen. The foreigner, it is to be feared, never, with
every advantage, really understands us; sometimes, too, he is so perverse
that we find a difficulty in understanding him. Thus, Master Estienne
Perlin, who travelled the roads and sampled the inns of England so far
back as 1558, says we were great drunkards then. He wrote an account of
his travels, and of England, as it appeared to him; and the way in which
he wrestles with the pronunciation of the language is amusing enough.
Thus, according to this traveller, if an Englishman would treat you, he
would say in his language: “Vis dring a’ quarta uin oim gasquim oim
hespaignol oim malvoysi.” This is merely maddening, and it is a positive
relief to know that the meaning of it is, “Will you drink a quart of
Gascony wine, another of Spanish, and another of Malmsey?” According to
this, the Englishman of three hundred years ago mixed his drinks
alarmingly. “In drinking,” continues this amusing foreigner, “they will
say to you, a hundred times, ‘Drind iou,’ which is, ‘I drink to you’; and
you should answer them in their language, ‘Iplaigiou,’ which means ‘I
pledge you.’ If you would thank them in their language, you say, ‘God
tanque artelay.’ When they are drunk,” he concludes, “they will swear by
blood and death that you shall drink all that is in your cup, and will
say to you thus: ‘Bigod sol drind iou agoud uin.’”
[Picture: Entrance to Stamford. (After J. M. W. Turner R.A.)]
Such customs as these must have been excellent business for the “George”
and its contemporaries.
To this inn belongs an incident not paralleled elsewhere. The daughter
of one of its landlords, Margaret, daughter of Bryan Hodgson, married a
bishop! Or, more exactly, one who became a bishop: the Reverend Beilby
Porteous, who at the time of his marriage, in 1765, was vicar of Ruckinge
and Wittersham, in Kent. In 1776 he became Bishop of Chester, and eleven
years later Bishop of London. This was long years before Whincup kept
the house. He reigned here in the full tide of the coaching age, and was
one of the proprietors of the “Stamford Regent.”
Much history has been made at Stamford, from the time when it was the
“stone ford” of the Romans across the Welland, through the long ages of
blood and destruction, stretching, with little intermission, from the
days of Saxon and Danish conflicts to that final clash of arms in 1643,
when Cromwell held the town and besieged Burghley House; and to that
Monday in the first week of May, 1646, when Charles the First, having
slept the night before at the residence of Alderman Wolph (descended from
Wulph, son of King Harold) slipped through a postern-gate in the town
wall, and so escaped for a final few hours as a free man. The gate is
there yet, in the grounds of Barn Hill House, a mansion which, in 1729,
was purchased by Stukeley, the antiquary, vicar of All Saints.
Here is no place to tell of the Councils and Parliaments held at
Stamford; but, as justifying the academic air the town still holds, it
must be said that it was indeed the home of a University, long centuries
ago. It was following the early quarrels of Oxford University and Oxford
town that a body of students left that seat of learning, in 1260, and set
up a temporary home at Northampton. Political troubles drove them, six
years later, to Stamford, where they founded several Colleges and Halls,
which were already flourishing when, in 1333, the northern students at
Oxford, disgusted with the alleged favouritism shown to the southerners,
left in a body and found a welcome at Stamford. Liberty in those days
was construed as permission given the strong to oppress the weak, and so
when Oxford University and Oxford town jointly petitioned the king to
forbid the seceders learning where they listed, those unhappy students
were promptly arrested and sent back to suck wisdom from _alma mater_ on
the Isis. Oxford and Cambridge both agreed not to recognise degrees
conferred by Stamford, and at length, by 1463, this University was
strangled.
The actual relics of those times are few. Chief in point of interest is
the old Brasenose Gate, the only fragment of the College of that name,
said to have been founded by students from Brasenose College, Oxford.
Here remained until recent years the ancient bronze knocker, in the form
of a lion’s head with a massive ring in its mouth, brought, according to
the legend, from the Oxford college. This knocker certainly belongs to a
period not later than the thirteenth century, and may have been conveyed
away. Whether it was the original “brazen nose,” said to have originated
the odd name of the College, or whether that name arose from the
_brassen-huis_, or brew-house, whose site the original College was built
upon, is one of those mysteries of derivation never likely to be solved.
During the last years of its stay at Stamford, the knocker was kept in a
house adjoining, until it and the house were purchased by Brasenose
College, Oxford, in whose Common Room the ancient relic now occupies a
place of honour.
[Picture: Stamford]
Stamford was attached to the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses, and
had occasion to regret the fact; for it offered an especial mark to the
victorious Lancastrians in 1461, after the battle of St. Albans, when Sir
Andrew Trollope, with the triple ferocity of the _trois loups_ from which
the name derives, fell upon the town and pillaged and burnt it. Eight
churches, two castles, and the town walls, together with many hundreds of
houses, were destroyed, and Stamford has never recovered its ancient
importance since then. It is enough for us that it is among the
stateliest of towns, stone-built and dignified; with its beautiful
churches of St. Mary, All Saints, and St. Martin; its old almshouses and
mansions, not exactly matched in all England.
The histories tell of a long list of famous men, natives of Stamford; but
the mere mental capacity or personal bravery shown by these great ones is
sardonically overshadowed by the physical greatness of quite another kind
of person, who, although not even a native of Stamford, has, by his dying
here, shed an especial lustre upon the town.
[Picture: Daniel Lambert] Far transcending the fame of all other
personages is that of Daniel Lambert, the Fat Man. In the computation of
avoirdupois and of the tape-measure, this was the greatest figure that
ever travelled the Great North Road. No king or noble can vie with him,
nor are saintly shrines more zealously visited than his grave in the old
churchyard of St. Martin’s. While the tomb of that great Cecil, the Lord
Treasurer Burghley, within the church, remains often unvisited,
photographs of Daniel Lambert and of his epitaph meet the traveller at
every turn.
Although destined to this undying fame, and to pothouse canonisation,
Daniel’s career was short, as that epitaph tells us:—
“In Remembrance of
That Prodigy in Nature
DANIEL LAMBERT
who was possessed of
An exalted and convivial mind
And in personal greatness
Had no Competitor
He measured three feet, one inch, round the leg
Nine feet, four inches, round the body
And Weighed
Fifty-two stone Eleven pounds
He departed this life
On the 21st of June
1809
Aged 39 years.”
His diet is said to have been plain, and the quantity moderate, and he
never drank anything stronger than water. His countenance was manly and
intelligent, and he had a melodious tenor voice. For some years before
his death he had toured the country, exhibiting himself, and visited
London on two occasions. The weights and measurements quoted on his
tombstone were taken at Huntingdon only the day before his death. In the
evening he arrived at the “Waggon and Horses,” Stamford, in good health,
in preparation for “receiving company” during Stamford Races, but before
nine o’clock the next morning was dead in the room on the ground floor
which he had taken because of his inability to go upstairs. For many
years two of his suits were shown at the inn, seven men often succeeding
in squeezing themselves within the mighty embrace of his waistcoat,
without bursting a button. The “Waggon and Horses” has long since given
place to a school, and so here is a place of pilgrimage the less; but
Daniel’s fame is immortal, for he lives as the sign of many an inn and
refreshment-house, whose proprietors use him as an advertisement of the
plenteous fare to be obtained within, regardless of the fact that his
immense bulk was due rather to a dropsical habit than to much eating or
drinking.
XXIII
THE road, mounting steeply out of Stamford, reaches a fine, elevated
track commanding wide views. This is the spot chosen by Forrest for his
painting of the old “Highflyer” London, York, and Edinburgh coach which
ran from 1788 to 1840. In less than two miles the road crosses the
border of Lincolnshire, traversing for six miles an outlying corner of
little Rutland, the smallest county in England, and entering Lincolnshire
again on passing Stretton. Great Casterton, at the foot of the hill two
and a quarter miles from Stamford, is in Rutland. It is said to be
situated on the Guash, but that stream and the bridge over it, from which
the old road-books often called the village “Bridge Casterton,” are not
readily glimpsed.
It is a pretty stone-built village, with a well preserved Early English
church beside the road. “Greatness,” either as a village or as the site
of a Roman “castrum” (whence derives the “Caster”-ton) has long ceased to
be a characteristic of this pleasant spot, and the ancient Roman camp is
now visible only in some grassy banks where the rathe primrose grows.
Just beyond Casterton, coyly hiding down a lane to the left, is the
little village of Tickencote, preserving in its name some prehistoric
goat-farm, “Tyccen-cote” meaning in the Anglo-Saxon nothing more nor less
than “goat’s-home.” Of more tangible interest is the splendid Norman
church, of small size but extraordinary elaboration; a darkling building
with heavy chancel arch covered with those zigzags, lozenges, birds’
heads, and tooth-mouldings so beloved by Norman architects, and with a
“Norman” nave built in 1792 to replace that portion of the building
destroyed many years before. The pseudo-Norman work of our own day is,
almost without exception, vile, and that of the eighteenth century was
worse, but here is an example of such faithful copying of existing
portions that now, since a hundred years and more have passed and the
first freshness of the new masonry gone, it is difficult to distinguish
the really old work from the copy.
[Picture: The “Highflyer,” 1840 (After Forrest)]
Returning to the highroad, a further two miles bring us to Horn Lane, the
site of a vanished turnpike gate, and to the coppices and roadside trees
of Bloody Oaks, where the battle of Empingham was fought, March 13, 1470,
between the forces of Edward the Fourth and the hastily assembled
Lincolnshire levies of Sir Robert Welles and Sir Thomas de la Launde,
fighting, _not_ for the Lancastrian cause, as so often stated, but in an
insurrection fomented by the Earl of Warwick, whose object was to raise
Edward’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, to the throne. It was a
massacre, rather than a battle, for Edward’s army was both more numerous
and better equipped, and the rebels soon broke and fled. Flinging away
their weapons, and even portions of their clothing, as they went, the
fight was readily named “Losecoat Field.” The captured leaders paid for
their ineffectual treason with their blood, for they were executed at
Stamford.
[Picture: Bloody Oaks]
The country folks have quite forgotten Losecoat Field, and think the
woodlands of Bloody Oaks were so named from the execution of John
Bowland, a highwayman who was gibbeted at Empingham Corner in 1769.
Greetham spire now rises away to the left, and shows where that village
lies hid. Here, away from the village and facing the highroad, stood,
and stands still, the “Greetham Inn.” It is now a farmhouse, and has
lost its stables, its projecting bar-parlour, and its entrance archway.
Once, however, it was one of the foremost inns and posting-houses on the
road. Marked on old Ordnance maps as the “Oak,” it seems to have been
really named the “New Inn,” if we may judge from an inscription cut on
stone under the eaves: “This is the New Inn, 1786.” However this may
have been, it was known to travellers, coachmen, and postboys along the
road only as “Greetham Inn.” Towards the last it was kept by one of the
Percivals of Wansford. At that time no fewer than forty-four
coaches—twenty-two up and the same number down—changed here and at the
“Black Bull,” Witham Common, every twenty-four hours.