old furniture and objects of art, and any visitor will be “charmed with
the admirable manner in which the art of the modern furniture has been
adapted to the character of the old house, lending its aid to heighten
rather than to detract from the beauty of the antique carvings and of
the interior.”
A curious legend in connection with the dining-room is that of the
ghost of Lady Trenchard having made its appearance immediately _before_
her death. Anyone, of course, can believe as much or as little as he
likes about the ghost part of the story, but of the fact of the lady’s
suicide there is no doubt. During the ownership of Sir Thomas Trenchard
one of the Judges of Assize came to Wolfeton House to dine; but no
sooner had the company sat down than his lordship, greatly to the
surprise of everyone, ordered his carriage and abruptly left the house.
On their way back to Dorchester he told his marshal that he had seen
standing behind Lady Trenchard’s chair a figure of her ladyship with
her throat cut and her head under her arm. Before the carriage reached
the town a messenger overtook it on horseback with the news that Lady
Trenchard had just committed suicide.
As to the dining-room as it now stands, it may be mentioned that
Wolfeton, like many other old houses of the same period, suffered
greatly at the hands of those who in the last century were wont to pull
down one-half of their houses to repair the other half. This appears
to have happened to Wolfeton House, as, judging from an old engraving
of the house, the dining-hall must have been quite twice, or more than
twice, the size of the present room.
Of the historical anecdotes connected with Wolfeton House, the visit of
the King and Queen of Castile is, perhaps, of the greatest interest.
In the early part of the sixteenth century, Philip, Archduke of
Austria and King of Castile, set forth with a great armada, with
the intention of surprising the King of Aragon, but he had scarcely
left the coast of Flanders when, encountering a violent storm, he
was compelled to put into Weymouth in distress. King Philip and his
Queen were invited to Wolfeton House by Sir Thomas Trenchard, then
High Sheriff, and were hospitably entertained. And with this visit
the origin of the Duke of Bedford’s family is curiously mixed up;
for on the arrival of the King and Queen, Sir Thomas Trenchard,
being unacquainted with the Spanish language, found a difficulty in
conversing with his guests. In his dilemma he had recourse to his
cousin, John Russell, of Kingston Russell, who, being a good linguist,
became a favourite with the King, and was recommended by him to Henry
VII., who appointed him to an office in the royal household. In the
succeeding reign Russell was also popular, and the confiscation of
Church property during this period rendered it possible for Henry VIII.
to bestow upon him extensive lands. And thus was founded the great
Bedford family.
In acknowledgment of his hospitality Sir Thomas Trenchard was presented
by the King and Queen of Castile with some very valuable china vases,
together with their portraits, all of which are now at Bloxworth House,
near Wareham. They also presented to him the carved chimney-piece and
doorway still standing in the drawing-room at Wolfeton House, as before
described.
Engraved copies of the oil-paintings of the King and Queen of Castile
hang on the left-hand side of the staircase, alongside of which is a
Spanish engraving of the poor Queen Joan, when sorrow at the death
of her husband had sent her mad. On their way to the Royal Mausoleum
the funeral _cortège_ had to pass a night at a nunnery. In the middle
of the night the poor mad Queen suddenly asked where they were. “In
a nunnery,” was the reply. “I will not have my husband surrounded by
all these women,” exclaimed the Queen; so the _cortège_ immediately
removed, and spent the remainder of the night, until daylight, in the
open country.
In the ancient gatehouse of Wolfeton the winding staircase of forty-one
oaken steps appears to be quite unique: there are nine stone steps at
the base, twenty-four of oak to the first floor level, and seventeen
leading to the garret above. For years (some think one hundred) this
staircase must have been a complete ruin, as is easily seen by the
decayed state of those steps opposite to the two windows, the wind and
the rain having beaten in on them for many years.
In addition to the King and Queen of Castile, other royal visitors have
from time to time honoured Wolfeton House with their presence, and
during the residence of George III. at Weymouth the King and Queen paid
it frequent visits. On one occasion, when George III. admired a marble
table that used to stand in the drawing-room, the Trenchard of that day
immediately presented it to His Majesty, and the table is now in the
royal dairy at Frogmore, Windsor.
No account of Wolfeton House would be complete without some allusion to
the story of the Roman Catholic priest. In the time of Queen Elizabeth,
when it was the object of the then Government to stamp out in every way
the Papal influence in England, the Weld family had a Roman Catholic
priest concealed at their house at Chideock, in Dorset. Sir Thomas
Trenchard, who then resided at Wolfeton House, and was a personal
friend of Mr. Weld, of Chideock, happened to be High Sheriff of the
county of Dorset for that year, and received orders to go over and
search for the priest therein concealed. On account of his friendship
with Mr. Weld, Sir Thomas, on reaching Chideock, made a most cursory
search, and left with the intention of reporting to the authorities
that he could find no signs of the priest; but, unfortunately, as he
was leaving, the villagers, whose sympathies were Roman, not aware of
his benign intentions, began hooting and calling the High Sheriff and
his constables a pack of blind owls for not being able to find the
concealed priest. “If that’s what you want,” exclaimed Sir Thomas,
losing his temper, “I’ll soon show you I am not so blind as you think!”
and, surrounding the mansion with his constables, a real search was
made, and the poor priest was soon discovered and brought over to
Wolfeton House as a prisoner. The priest, a highly-educated French
gentleman, made himself so agreeable that Sir Thomas Trenchard did all
in his power, by writing to the authorities, to save his life; but the
Government of that day was so desirous of making an example, that all
entreaties were in vain—the poor priest was executed, and, it is said,
was also drawn and quartered in the High Street of Dorchester.
THE LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF DORSET
BY MISS M. JOURDAIN
“Dorset has continued Dorset alone from time immemorial,” and its
special character has been more carefully preserved and fixed than that
of any other English county in the work of two Dorset poets, William
Barnes and Thomas Hardy, one of whom has succeeded, like Mistral in
France, in making its native language a literary medium known beyond
its spoken limits.
Dorset’s earlier poets,[61] however, have not been “local”; and it
is characteristic of Matthew Prior that, in the account drawn up by
himself for Jacobs’ _Lives of the Poets_, he describes his father as a
“citizen of London,” and that though the first entry against his name
on his admission as pensioner at St. John’s College, Cambridge, is
_Dorcestr_, it has been altered by a later hand into _Middlesexiensis_.
In spite of conflicting entries, it is now generally admitted that
Prior, _perennis et fragrans_—the motto upon the modern brass to his
memory in Wimborne Minster[62]—was born at or near Wimborne, in East
Dorset, the son of George Prior, who is said to have been a joiner.
“With regard to the family of Prior, the tradition of Wimborne says
that his father was a carpenter, and one house he lived in is pointed
out: it is close to the present Post Office, and is called the house
in which the poet was born. The other was pulled down, but its site is
known.”[63]
Local tradition makes Prior a pupil at the free Grammar School; and of
the unusually large library of chained books in the old church, one was
said to be a standing testimony to his carelessness—a chained folio
copy of Ralegh’s _History of the World_, in which a hole is said to
have been burned by the boy when dozing over the book by the light of a
smuggled taper. Unfortunately for the floating tradition, it has been
stated that this particular defacement is the work, not of a candle,
but of a red-hot poker. Still more unfortunately, it has been proved
that the _History_, with other books, was placed in the library[64] at
a much later date than Prior’s boyhood.[65]
Almost a century later a poetic “Court” was held at Eastbury, in North
Dorset, by George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, who is not interesting
as a poet[66] himself, but as the cause of poetry in others, the last
of the patrons, a curious, gorgeous, tawdry figure, fit to be seen
through the coloured glass of Macaulay’s ridicule. He was the easy
mark for dedications and compliments from many of the best-known
writers of the day—poets utterly discrowned, and those on whose brows
the laurel grows very thin and brittle; Edward Young, Thomson, and
Fielding mention him; while his Great House at Eastbury is celebrated
by Thomson, Young, and Christopher Pitt,[67] who writes, somewhat
oddly, of this “new Eden in the Wild.” The pleasures of this “Eden”
appear, from an epistle of Pitt, to have been smoking and drinking,
with conversational intervals. Dr. Young (of the _Night Thoughts_) sits
with “his Dodington,”
Charm’d with his flowing Burgundy and wit,
By turns relieving with the circling draught
Each pause of chat and interval of thought;
Or, through the well-glazed tube, from business freed,
Draw the rich spirit of the Indian weed.
Thomson’s “Eastbury”—
Seat serene and plain
Where simple Nature reigns,
is as bad, in its way, as Pitt’s “Eden”—serenity, plainness, and simple
nature being the most unlikely characteristics of Dodington,[68] whose
heavy figure was arrayed in gorgeous brocades; and whose equally
magnificent State bed was “garded and re-garded” with gold and silver
embroideries showing by the remains of pocket-holes, button-holes and
loops that they came from old coats and breeches. This great house,
after Dodington’s death, was taken down all but one wing and sold
piecemeal by Earl Temple, his heir.
Henry Fielding, one of the Eastbury circle—he dedicated to Dodington an
epistle on “True Greatness”—was brought up as a boy in the manor-house
at East Stower,[69] where he was taught by the Reverend Mr. Oliver,
curate of the neighbouring village of Motcombe, said to have been
the original of Trulliber, a portrait drawn “in resentment of some
punishment inflicted on him,” according to Hutchins.[70] Fielding was
fortunate in another portrait, for it is generally admitted that the
prototype of Parson Abraham Adams was William Young, Incumbent of
West Stower, who had many of Adams’ eccentricities. As an instance of
Young’s absence of mind, it is said that when chaplain to a regiment
in Flanders he “wandered in a reverie into the enemy’s camp, and was
only aroused from his error by his arrest. The commanding officer,
perceiving the good man’s simplicity, allowed him to return to his
friends.”
At East Stower, too, Fielding lived for a time with his first wife.
William Crowe, though like Fielding only a short time resident in
Dorset, is admitted on the strength of his topographical poem,
_Lewesdon Hill_, of which Rogers thought so much that when travelling
in Italy he made two authors his constant study for versification,
Milton and Crowe.[71] Crowe’s _Lewesdon Hill_ is a perfect example
of an eighteenth century didactic and descriptive poem, with all the
heaviness due to the requirements of an age which, like Horace Walpole,
called for “edification” in its art. As in Goldsmith’s _Traveller_ the
person who speaks the verses sits pensively on an Alpine height, so
Crowe in his poem is supposed to be walking on the top of the hill on
a May morning—a hill, it has been suggested, that Fuller[72] may have
climbed before him, and where the wide prospect, “standing where Moses
stood when the Lord showed him all the land,” may have prompted the
title of his book, _A Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, which he wrote when
at Broadwindsor. Upon this hill, where
The lonely thorn
Bends from the rude south-east with top cut sheer,
Crowe surveys the outspread map of the county—Shipton Hill, Burton
Cliff, Eggardon Hill, the rich Marshwood Vale—in winter
Cold, vapourish, miry, wet,
to the “rampire” of Pillesdon, even the “nameless rivulet” (the
minutest trickle of a stream at the foot of Lewesdon Hill), which, he
rejoices,
Yet flows along
Untainted with the commerce of the world.
William Lisle Bowles, author of faint and forgotten verses, is
remembered by Coleridge’s early admiration for his sonnets. His father,
the Rev. W. Bowles (rector of Uphill), planted and improved Barton Hill
House, in Dorset, which the poet sold. On leaving it the poet wrote
verses full of regret for
These woods, that whispering wave
My father rear’d and _nurst_.
An author unknown outside his county is John Fitzgerald Pennie (buried
July 17th, 1848). He was born at East Lulworth, March 25th, 1782, and
is known as a dramatic writer. He published _Scenes in Palestine,
or Dramatic Sketches from the Bible_, 1825; _Ethelwolf_, a tragedy,
1821, etc. He followed in his early years the profession of an actor,
but after a chequered and unsuccessful career, settled in his native
village and devoted himself to literary pursuits. He published his
autobiography in 1827, _The Tale of a Modern Genius, or the Miseries of
Parnassus_. In 1810 he married Cordelia Elizabeth, daughter of Jerome
Whitfield, a London attorney. He and his wife died within a few days of
each other, and were buried in the same grave.
Wordsworth’s connection with Dorset is of short duration, but is of
interest as occurring at a critical period in his career. On his
receiving Raisley Calvert’s legacy, he was able to live with his sister
Dorothy at a farmhouse at Racedown,[73] which he was allowed to occupy
rent free on condition that the owner might spend a few weeks there
from time to time. It was in the autumn of 1795 that he settled there.
His house is set upon the north-west slope of the “rampire” Pillesdon,
in a hollow among hills cultivated to their summits, or patched with
gorse and broom, which open here and there to allow glimpses of the
sea. The Dorset peasants in Wordsworth’s time were wretchedly poor,
their shapeless cottages “not at all beyond what might be expected in
savage life,” as Dorothy Wordsworth wrote. Very little trace of the
peculiar quality of the place is to be found in Wordsworth’s poems, but
it was here he wrote the first of his poems of country life, modelled
with an experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly
accurate.
It was here that he watched[74] the “unquiet widowhood” of Margaret,
drawing out the hemp which she had wound round her waist like a belt,
and spinning, as she walked backwards before her cottage door. Here, no
doubt, he saw her ruined cottage—there are many crumbling shells and
ruined cottages in the district to-day—with the red stains and tufts of
wool in the corner-stone of the porch where the sheep were permitted to
come and “couch unheeded.” The garden, run wild, too, is to be met with
to-day:
Its matted weeds
Marked with the steps of those, whom, as they passed,
The gooseberry trees that shot in long, lank slips,
Or currants, hanging from their leafless stems
In scanty strings, had tempted to o’erleap
The broken wall. I looked around, and there,
Where two tall hedge-rows of thick alder-boughs
Joined in a cold damp nook, espied a well,
Shrouded with willow-flowers and plumy fern.
Here, too, was Goody Blake’s cabin:—
On a hill’s northern side...
Where from sea-blasts the hawthorns lean
And hoary dews are slow to melt.
“The muffled clamour of the outside world only reached the secluded
farmhouse at Racedown after long delay”—in other words, letters
were delivered there but once a week; and on one occasion at least
Wordsworth asks to have a book franked, otherwise he will “not be able
to release it from the post-office.” A part of this time was given to
gardening, and, no doubt from motives of economy, almost all the meals
consisted of vegetables. “I have been lately living,” he writes, “upon
air and the essence of carrots, cabbages, turnips, and other esculent
vegetables, not excluding parsley.”[75] At another time he sets forth
to warm himself, like Goody Blake, by gathering sticks strewn upon
the road by the gale; and his habit was to take a two hours’ stroll
every morning, and now and then a long expedition on foot. He and his
sister, as the Cumberland peasants said, were “a deal upo’ the road,”
and many times they must have walked more than forty miles in the day.
There is a story still current in the neighbourhood that Wordsworth
once borrowed a horse to ride into Lyme Regis, and returned on foot,
having _forgotten_ the horse! With all its hardships and frugalities,
Dorothy Wordsworth loved Racedown. It was “the place dearest to (her)
recollections upon the whole surface of the island,” and she speaks
warmly of the scenery on Pillesdon, Lewesdon, and the view of the sea
from Lambert’s Castle—which is said by some to be _the_ view of the
county.
Landor’s thought, that “when a language grows up all into stalk, and
its flowers begin to lose somewhat of their character, we must go forth
into the open fields, through the dingles, or among the mountains, for
fresh seed,” would have been endorsed by both Wordsworth and Barnes
alike, but with very different ideas as to what was considered fresh
seed. Barnes’ innovation was an innovation of the letter rather than
the spirit, the literary use of the local dialect which he heard in
his boyhood, and which, he said, was spoken in the greatest purity in
villages and hamlets of the secluded Vale of Blackmore, a valley so
secluded that its life was practically the life of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries until the nineteenth was far advanced. He
attributes his poems’ freedom from “slang and vice” to this seclusion;
but it is as much due to his personal[76] preference of light to
darkness. His rustics are, as a rule, happy people.
[Illustration: WILLIAM BARNES.]
At Rushay, William Barnes spent his early days, and he was educated at
the day school at Sturminster Newton. Somewhere along the road from
Bagber to Sturminster was a haunted house, about the exact locality
of which he gave no information beyond that a “dark, gloomy lane led
to it.” He once pointed out the lane to grand-children as the place
their “great-grandfather was riding down, when all at once he saw the
ghost in the form of a fleece of wool, which rolled along mysteriously
by itself till it got under the legs of his horse, and the horse went
lame from that hour, and for ever after.” Barnes was of pure Dorset[77]
stock. His long life was lived almost entirely in Dorset; and when at
Mere, in Wiltshire, a stone’s throw from his own county, he “always
yearned for Dorset and Dorchester.” Latterly he lived near Dorchester,
where, until 1882, “few figures were more familiar to the eye in the
county town of Dorset on a market day than an aged clergyman, quaintly
attired in caped cloak, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather
satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand. He
seemed usually to prefer the middle of the street to the pavement, and
to be thinking of matters which had nothing to do with the scene before
him. He plodded along with a broad, firm tread, notwithstanding the
slight stoop occasioned by years. Every Saturday morning he might have
been seen thus trudging up the narrow South Street, his shoes coated
with mud according to the state of the roads between his rural home and
Dorchester, and a little grey dog at his heels, till he reached the
four crossways in the centre of the town. Halting there, opposite the
public clock, he would pull his old-fashioned watch from its deep fob
and set it with great precision to London time.”
An unusual union of scholar and poet, his little Dutch pictures are
free from the dull undertone of the conventional manner that Burns
occasionally fell into. Indeed, he has more affinity with the Provençal
poet and lexicographer, Mistral, than with Burns or Béranger, with
whom he is usually compared. He is perhaps mistaken in his belief that
the Dorset dialect is “altogether as fit a vehicle of rustic feeling
and thought as the Doric as found in the Idyllics of Theocritus.” But,
after making this exception about the “fitness” of his Doric, there
remains in his clear, untroubled poems of still life, in his unaffected
eclogues, no small affinity with Theocritus. There is a charm in his
limitations; he belongs not to England, but to Dorset; not to Dorset,
but to the Vale of Blackmore, where the slow, green river, his “cloty”
Stour, with its deep pools whence leaps the may-fly undisturbed by
anglers, is the stream dearest to his memory.
Barnes was Mr. Hardy’s near neighbour and personal friend—Mr. Hardy’s
house is less than a mile from the Rectory of Winterborne Came—and both
have been interpreters of the life—especially of the vanished life—and
character of their pastoral county. In every other respect they are as
different as is “Egdon” Heath from Blackmore Vale.
It is difficult to say in what form of topography Mr. Hardy is at his
best within his “kingdom”—his patient and precise creation of a town
such as “Casterbridge” (Dorchester), the architectural individuality of
his great houses, or his knowledge of “those sequestered spots outside
the gates of the world,” and of woodlands and wildernesses. He has the
knowledge with which he credits Angel Clare of “the seasons in their
moods, morning and evening, night and noon, in their temperaments;
winds in their several dispositions; trees, waters, and clouds, shades
and silence, _ignes fatui_; constellations and the voices of inanimate
things.” In most cases, the birthplace of a novelist has no particular
significance in relation to his work. Very often a writer’s county is
like Matthew Prior’s, exchanged for Middlesex. But in the case of Mr.
Hardy it is different. The fact that he was born in a “mere germ of a
village” near Dorchester, and within sound of a heath; that his life
has been spent, for the most part, in Dorset; that he now lives on the
outskirts of Dorchester, and that he comes of a Dorset stock—tracing
his descent, however, from John le Hardy (son of Clement, Governor of
Jersey in 1488), who settled in the West of England before the end of
the fourteenth century—are significant points in his biography.[78] By
the circumstances of birth and lifelong residence the background of his
novels, _Wessex_, has become mainly limited to Dorset (South Wessex),
and especially to the neighbourhood of Dorchester.
The interest of Mr. Hardy’s backgrounds is twofold. There is their
purely artistic interest as intensifying action and character; there is
also their topographical interest. Mr. Hardy’s imaginary kingdom was
so unlike the photographer’s “studio backgrounds” of other novelists
that long before sketch-maps of Wessex were prepared and published in
the uniform edition of his works the identity of many of his scenes
afforded no manner of doubt to Dorset readers. The precision with
which he describes a building or a neighbourhood, notes position,
distance, proportion, has been a clue and a perpetual interest to those
who follow the intricacies of Wessex geography, in spite of Mr. Hardy’s
half-discouragement of those who sought to localise the horizons and
landscapes of his “merely realistic dream country.”