whom he invited to lay their complaints before him, and there in his
pedantic brow-beating so hammered their hard metal that he tempered it
to the sword soon to be unsheathed against his son; it was there that
Charles began the famous quarrel with his queen which ended in
his deporting Henrietta Maria's French adherents, or, as he wrote
Buckingham, “dryving them away, lyke so many wylde beastes ... and soe
the Devill goe with them”; it was there that more importantly when an
honorable captive of Parliament, he played fast and loose, after the
fashion he was born to, with Cromwell and the other generals who would
have favored his escape, and even his restoration to the throne, if they
could have found any truth in him to rest a treaty on. It was at Hampton
that Cromwell, when the palace became his home, first put on something
of royal state, always with lapses through his _bonhomie_ into
good-fellowship with his officers, and never with any help from his
simple-hearted wife; that the death of his daughter, amid these fitful
glories, broke his heart, and he drooped and sickened to his own end,
which a change to the different air of Whitehall did not delay; that
after the little time of Richard Cromwell's protectorate, Hampton Court
had another royal lord in the second Charles, who repeated history in
a quarrel with his queen, for none of the good reasons which the first
Charles had in the like contention. The father's tergiversations with
Cromwell may be supposed to have given a glamour of kingcraft to his
sojourn later, but the bad part which the son took against his wife was
without one dignifying circumstance. One reads with indignation still
hot how he brought the plain little Portuguese woman there for their
honeymoon, and brightened it for her by thrusting upon her the intimacy
of his mistress Lady Castlemaine; how he was firm for once in his
yielding life, when he compelled Clarendon to the base office of coaxing
and frightening the queen who had trusted the old man as a father; how,
like the godless blackguard he was, the “merry monarch,” swore “before
Almighty God,” in his letter to the chancellor, that he was “resolved to
go through with this matter” of forcing his paramour upon his wife, with
the added threat, “and whomsoever I find my Lady Castlemaine's enemy” in
it, “I do promise upon my word to be his enemy as long as I live.” It
is less wonderful that the unhappy creature whose spirit he broke should
have been crushed, than that the English people, to whom the king's bad
life was an open book, should have suffered him. But perhaps, even this
was less wonderful than their patience with the harsh virtue of the
Puritans. It is not well to be good, or make others be good at the cost
of every ease and grace of life, and though it seems strange and sad
to us republicans that the mighty English commonwealth should have been
supplanted by such a monarchy as that restored in Charles, it may not be
so strange as it was sad. The life which attests itself in the beauties
of Lely and of Kneller on the walls of Hampton Court, when it began to
have its free course was doubtless none the purer for having been frozen
at its source. The world is a long time being saved from itself, and it
has had to go back for many fresh starts. If the beautiful women whose
wickedness is recorded by the court painters in a convention of wanton
looks, rather than by a severally faithful portraiture, can be regarded
simply as a part of the inevitable reaction from a period when men had
allowed women to be better, we shall not have so much difficulty in
showing them mercy. If only after a lapse of twenty years they would not
look so much like old acquaintances who had kept their youth too well,
one need certainly not be shy of them. Even if all the beauties were as
bad as they were painted, there are many other women not ostensibly bad
whose pictures fill Hampton Court; but, knowing what galleries are,
how mortally fatiguing to every fibre, I should not think of making the
reader follow me through the long rooms of the palace, and I will now
own that I even spared myself many details in this second visit of mine.
Historically, as I retrospectively perceived, it never ceases to be most
intimately interesting down to the day of that third George who had his
ears boxed there. The second James had almost as little to do with it as
our last king; he was in such haste to go wrong everywhere else that he
had no time for the place where other sovereigns before and after him
took their pleasure. But William and Mary seemed to give it most of
their leisure; to the great little Dutchman it was almost as dear as if
it were a bit of Holland, and even more to his mind than Kensington. His
queen planted it and kept it to his fancy while he was away fighting the
Stuarts in Ireland; and when she was dead, he continued to pull down
and build up at Hampton Court as long as he lived, laying the sort of
ruthless hand upon its antiquity with which the unsparing present always
touches the past. He sickened towards his end there, and one day his
horse stepping into a mole-hill when the king was hunting (in the park
where the kings from Henry VIII. down had chased the deer), fell with
him and hurt him past surgery; but it was at Kensington that he shortly
afterwards died. Few indeed, if any of the royal dwellers at Hampton
Court breathed their last in air supposed so life-giving by Wolsey when
he made it his seat. They loved it and enjoyed it, and in Queen Anne's
time, when under a dull sovereign the civility of England brightened to
Augustan splendor, the deep-rooted stem of English poetry burst there
into the most exquisite artificial flower which it ever bore; for it
was at Hampton Court that the fact occurred, which the fancy of the
poet fanned to a bloom, as lasting as if it were rouge, in the matchless
numbers of _The Rape of the Lock_.
Such pleasure-parties as that in which the lovely Arabella Fermor lost
her curl under the scissors of Lord Petre, must have had the best of the
gayety, in the time of the first and second Georges, for Pope himself,
writing of it in one of his visits in 1717, described the court life as
one of dull and laborious etiquette. Yet what was fairest and brightest
and wittiest, if not wisest in England graced it, and the names of
Bellenden and Lepell and Montagu, of Harvey and Chesterfield, of Gay and
Pope and Walpole, flash and fade through the air that must have been so
heavy even at Hampton Court in these reigns. After all, it is the common
people who get the best of it when some lordly pleasure-house for which
they have paid comes back to them, as palaces are not unapt finally
to do; and it is not unimaginable that collectively they bring as much
brilliancy and beauty to its free enjoyment as the kings and courtiers
did in their mutually hampered pleasures.
Though the Georges began to divide the palace up into the apartments for
the kind of permanent guests of the state who now inhabit them, it was
not until well into the time of the late queen that the galleries and
gardens were thrown open, without price or restriction, to the public.
Whosever the instinct or inspiration was, the graciousness of it may
probably be attributed to the mother-hearted sovereign whose goodness
gave English monarchy a new lease of life in the affections of her
subjects, and raised loyalty to a part of their religion. I suppose that
actual rags and dirt would not be admitted to Hampton Court, but I doubt
if any misery short of them would be excluded. Our fellow-visitors were
of all types, chiefly of the humbler English, and there were not many
obvious aliens among them. With that passion and pride in their own
which sends them holidaying over the island to every point of historic
or legendary interest, and every scene famous for its beauty, they
strayed about the grounds and garden-paths of Hampton Court and through
the halls of state, and revered the couches and thrones of the dead
kings and queens in their bed-chambers and council-chambers, and perused
the pictures on the walls, and the frescoes in the roofs. Oftenest
they did not seem persons who could bring a cultivated taste to their
enjoyment, but fortunately that was not essential to it, and possibly it
was even greater without that. They could not have got so much hurt from
the baleful beauties of Charles's court without their history as with
it, and where they might not have been protected by their ignorance,
they were saved by their preoccupation with one another, for they mostly
hunted the objects of interest in courting couples.
We were going, after we had shared their sight-seeing, to enjoy the
special privilege of visiting one of the private apartments into which
the palace has been so comfortably divided up. But here, I am sorry to
say, I must close the door in the reader's face, and leave him to cool
his heels (I regret the offensiveness of the expression, but I cannot
help it) on the threshold of the apartment, at the top of the historic
staircase which he will have climbed with us, until we come out again. I
do not mind telling him that nothing could be more charmingly homelike,
and less like the proud discomfort of a palace, than the series of rooms
we saw. For a moment, also, I will allow him to come round into the
little picturesque court, gay with the window-gardens of its quaint
casements, where we can look down upon him from the leads of our
apartment. He ought to feel like a figure in an uncommonly pretty
watercolor, for he certainly looks like one, under the clustering
gables and the jutting lattices. But if he prefers coming to life as
a sight-seer he may join us at the door of Cardinal Wolsey's great
kitchen, now forming part of our hostess's domain. The vast hearth is
there yet, with its crane and spit, and if the cardinal could come back
he might have a dinner cooked at it for Edward VII. with very little
more trouble than for Henry VIII. three or four hundred years ago. “But
what in the world,” the reader may ask me, putting his hand on an old
sedan-chair, which is somewhere in the same basement, if not in the
kitchen itself, “is this?” I answer him, quite easily: “Oh, that is the
Push,” and explain that though now mounted on wheels instead of poles,
the sedan-chair is still in actual use, and any lady-dweller in the
apartments has the right of going to a dinner, or for what I know a
“rout” in it, wherever it can be propelled within the precincts of the
palace.
I suppose it is not taken out into the town, and I do not know that the
ladies of the apartments ever visit there. In spite of this misgiving,
Hampton remains one of the innumerable places in England where I should
like to live always. Its streets follow the Thames, or come and go
from the shores so pleasantly, that there is a sense of the river in it
everywhere; and though I suppose people do not now resort to the place
so much by water as they used, one is quite free to do so if one likes.
We had not thought, however, to hire a waterman with his barge in
coming, and so we poorly went back by the train. I say poorly in a
comparative sense only, for there are many worse things in the world
than running up to London in the cool, the very cool, of an April
evening from Hampton Court. At such an hour you see the glad young
suburban husbands, who have got home for the day, digging in the gardens
at the backs of the pretty houses which your train passes, and the glad
young wives, keeping round after them, and seeing they do not make play
of their work. A neat maid in a cap pushes a garden-roller over the
path, or a perambulator with a never-failing baby in it. The glimpse of
domestic bliss is charming; and then it is such a comfort to get back
to London, which seems to have been waiting, like a great plain, kind
metropolis-mother, to welcome you home again, and ask what you would
rather have for dinner.
XIV
A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY
The invention of Week-Ends is a feat of the English social genius dating
since long after my stay of twenty-odd years ago. Like so many other
English mysteries it is very simple, and consists of dedicating the
waste space of time between Friday afternoon and Monday forenoon to
visits out of town. It is the time when, if you have friends within
reasonable, or even unreasonable reach of London, you are asked down.
Science has ascertained that in this interval of fifty or sixty hours no
one can do anything, and that the time had better be frankly given up to
pleasure.
Yet, for the alien sojourner in London, there are no such intervals
between sights, or perhaps between engagements, and we found a whole
week-end beyond our grasp, though ever so temptingly entreated to spend
it here or there in the country. That was why we were going down to the
place of a friend one Sunday morning instead of a Friday evening and
coming back the same day instead of the next. But we were glad of our
piece of a week-end, and we had reason to be especially grateful for the
Sunday when we had it, for it was one of the most perfect of its kind.
There used to be such Sundays in America when people were young, and I
suppose there are such Sundays there yet for children; but if you are no
longer so very young you will be more apt to find them in England, where
Sunday has been studying, ever since the Romans began to observe it, in
just what proportion to blend the blue and white in its welkin, and to
unite warmth and coolness in its air.
I have no doubt there were multitudes going to church that morning,
but our third-class compartment was filled with people going into the
country for the day; fathers and grandfathers taking the little ones for
an endless time in the fields and woods, which are often free in that
much-owned England, while the may was yet freshly red and white on the
hawthorns in the first week in June. Among our fellow-passengers that
morning a young mother, not much older than her five children, sat with
her youngest in her arms, while the other four perched at the edge of
the seat, two on each side of her, all one stare of blue eyes, one
flare of red cheeks: very still, very good, very sweet; when it came
to lifting them out of the car after her, the public had to help. One's
heart must go with these holiday-makers as they began to leave the
train after the last suburban stations, where they could feel themselves
fairly in the country, and really enter upon their joy. It was such
motherly looking country, and yet young with springtime, and of a breath
that came balmily in at the open car-windows; and the trees stood about
in the meadows near the hedge-rows as if they knew what a good thing it
was to be meadow-trees in England, where not being much good for fuel
or lumber they could stand for ages and ages, and shelter the sheep and
cattle without danger of the axe.
At our own station we found our host's motor waiting for us, and after
waiting for some one else, who did not come by the next train, it
whisked us much sooner than we could have wished over the nine miles of
smooth road stretching to his house. The English are always telling you,
if you are an American, how the Americans think nothing of distances,
and they apparently derive their belief from the fact that it is a
thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and again some two thousand to
San Francisco. In vain you try to explain that we do not step casually
aboard a train for either of those places, or, indeed, without much
moral and material preparation. But perhaps if you did not mind being
shorn of the sort of fairy glamour which you are aware attaches to you
from our supposed contempt of space, you could make out a very pretty
case against them, in convicting them of an even greater indifference
to distances. The lengths to which they will go in giving and accepting
invitations for week-ends are amazing; and a run from London down to
Ultima Thule for a week is thought nothing of, or much less of than a
journey from New York to Bar Harbor. But the one is much more in
the English social scheme than the other is in ours; and perhaps the
distance at which a gentleman will live from his railroad-station in the
country is still more impressive. The American commuter who drives night
and morning two or three miles after leaving and before getting his
train, thinks he is having quite drive enough; if he drives six miles
the late and early guest feels himself badly used; but apparently such
distances are not minded in England. The motor, indeed, has now come to
devour them; but even when they had to be nibbled away by a public fly,
they seem not to have been regarded as evils.
For the stranger they certainly could not be an evil. Every foot, every
inch of the way was delightful, and we only wished that our motor could
have conceived of our pleasure in the wayside things to which custom
had made it indifferent. There were some villages in the course of that
swift flight where we could have willingly spent a week of such Sundays:
villages with gables and thatches and tiles, and flowery door-yards and
kitchen-gardens, such as could not be had for millionaire money with
us, and villagers in their church-going best, whom, as they lived in the
precious scene, our lightning progress suffered us to behold in a sort
of cinematographic shimmer. Clean white shirt-sleeves are the symbol
of our race's rustic Sunday leisure everywhere; and the main difference
that I could note between our own farmer-folk and these was that at home
they would be sitting on the top of rail-fences or stone-walls, and here
they were hanging over gates; you cannot very well sit on the tops of
hedges.
If one part of England can be said to be more charming than another, and
I suppose that there are odds in its loveliness, I think there can be no
doubt but we were that day in one of the most beautiful regions within
an hour's reach of London. We were pretty constantly mounting in our
motor-flight from the station; the uplands opened round us, and began to
roll far away towards the liberal horizon, in undulations that were very
stately. There is something, indeed, in the sufficiency of English downs
which satisfies without surfeiting, and this we had from the windows and
gardened levels of our friends' house even more than from the highroad,
which we suddenly left to approach the place by a way of its own.
Mountains would have been out of key with the landscape; downs were just
right.
I do not know why the house was the more agreeable for being new, and
for being the effect of our friends' immediate and not their
ancestral fancy, quite as it would have been with most of our friends'
country-houses at home. We certainly had not come to England for newness
of any kind, but we liked the gardens and the shrubberies being new; and
my content was absolute when I heard from our friends that they had at
one time thought of building their house of wood: the fact seemed to
restore me from a homesick exile to the wood-built continent which I had
so willingly forsaken only a few weeks before.
But what better do we ever ask of a strange land than that it shall
render us some fleeting image of the nearest and dearest things of home?
What I had reasonably or logically come to England for was nature tamed
to the hand of man; but whenever I came upon a bit of something wild,
something savage-looking, gaunt, huge, rugged, I rejoiced with an
insensate pleasure in its likeness to the roughest aspect of America
that association could conjure up. I dare say that was very stupid, but
it is best to be honest in such matters as well as in some others, and
I will own that when our friends took us the walk over the downs which
they had promised us, nothing could have gladdened me so much as to
enter a secret and solemn wood of immemorial yews by a cart-track
growing fainter and fainter as it left the fields, and finally
forgetting itself altogether in the sombre depths of shade. Then I said
to my soul that it might have been a wood-road in the White Mountains,
mouldering out of memory of the clearing where the young pines and
birches had grown into good-sized trees since the giants of the primeval
forest were slain and dragged out over its snows and mosses.
The masses of the red may and the white may which stood here and there
in the border of the yews, might have been the blossom of the wilding
apple-trees which often guard the approaches to our woods; the parent
hawthorns were as large and of the same lovely tints, but I could recall
nothing that was quite American when once we had plunged into the shadow
of these great yews, and I could not even find their like in the English
literature which is the companion of American nature. I could think only
of the weird tree-shapes which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and
then so mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave Doré, used to
draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as if we were walking through
any of the loneliest of his illustrations. He knew how to be true to
such mediaeval moods of the great mother, and we owe it to his fame to
bear what witness we can to the fact.
The yew-tree's shade in Gray's Elegy had not prepared me for a whole
forest of yews, and I had never imagined them of the vastness I beheld.
The place had its peculiar gloom through the church-yard associations of
the trees, but there was a rich, Thomas Hardyish flavor in the lawless
fact that in times when it was less protected than now, or when its wood
was more employed in furniture-making, predatory emissaries from London
used to come out to the forest by night and lop away great limbs of the
yews, to be sold to the shyer sort of timber-merchants. From time to
time my host put his hand on a broad sawn or chopped surface where a
tree had been so mutilated and had remained in a dry decay without that
endeavor some other trees make to cover the stump with a new growth. The
down, he told us, was a common, and any one might pasture his horse
or his cow or his goose on its grass, and I do not know whose forest
rights, if any one's, were especially violated in these cruel midnight
outrages on the yews; but some one must have had the interest to stop
it.
I would not try to say how far the common extended, or how far its
privileges; but the land about is mostly held in great estates, like
most of the land in England, and no doubt there are signorial rights
which overlie the popular privileges. I fancied a symbol of these in
the game keeper--whom we met coming out of the wood, brown-clad, with
a scarcely touched hat, silently sweeping through the gorse, furtive as
one of the pheasants or hares to which he must have grown akin in his
custody of them. He was the first game-keeper I met in England, and, as
it happened, the last, but he now seems to me to have been so perfect in
his way that I would not for the sake of the books where I have known so
many of his sort, have him the least different from what he was.
The English sun, if you do not walk much in it, is usually cool and
pleasant, but you must not take liberties. By the time we got back to
lunch we could have believed, with no homesick yearning, that we had
been in an American heat. But after lunch, and after the talk filling
the afternoon till afternoon tea-time, which we were to take at a famous
house in the neighborhood, the temperature was all right again; it was
more than all right in the cold current of air which the motor created.
In the course of that post-luncheon talk our host brought out a small
porcelain bust of Washington, in very Continental blue, which he said
was one of great numbers made in that neighborhood at the time of our
Revolution to express the feeling of our English sympathizers in the
struggle which gave English liberty a new lease. One reads of this
sympathy, how wide and high it was, and one knows of it in a way, but
till then, with that witness, I had to own I had not realized it.
The miniature father-of-his-country smiled at our ignorance with his
accustomed blandness, and I hope he will never regret being given to
one of us as a testimony of the amity which had largely endured for our
nation from and through the most difficult times. The gift lent our
day a unique grace, and I could only hope that it might be without a
surprise too painful that our English Washington would look upon the
American Republic of his creation when we got home with him; I doubted
if he would find it altogether his ideal.
The motor-spin was over the high crest of the down to the house where
we were going, I do not know how many miles, for our afternoon tea. The
house was famous, for being the most perfect Tudor house in existence;
but I am not going to transfer the burden of my slight knowledge of its
past to the mind of the reader. I will only say that it came into the
hands of the jovial Henry VIII. through the loss of several of its
owners' heads, a means of acquisition not so distasteful to him as
to them, and after its restitution to the much decapitated family it
continued in their possession till a few years ago. It remains with me a
vision of turrets and gables, perfect in their Tudor kind, rising upon
a gentle level of fields and meadows, with nothing dramatically
picturesque in the view from its straight-browed windows. The present
owner, who showed me through its rooms and gardens hurriedly in
consideration of our early train, has the generous passion of leaving
the old place as nearly as he can in the keeping of its past; and I
was glad to have him to agree with me that the Tudor period was that in
which English domestic comfort had been most effectually studied. But my
satisfaction in this was much heightened by my approval of what he was
simultaneously saying about the prevalent newspaper unwisdom of not
publishing serial fiction: in his own newspaper, he said, he had a story
running all the time.