The Brighton Road Part 16

Come, won't you list unto my lay About the fight at Crawley, O!...

with the refrain--

With his filaloo trillaloo, Whack, fal lal de dal di de do!

For the number of rounds and such technical details the curious may be referred to the cla.s.sic pages of "Boxiana" itself.

Martin, originally a baker, and thus of course familiarly known as the "Master of the Rolls," one of the heroes whom all these sporting blades went out to see contend for victory in the ring, died so recently as 1871.

He had long retired from the P.R., and had, upon quitting it, followed the usual practice of retired pugilists, that is to say, he became a publican.

He was landlord successively of the "Crown" at Croydon, and the "Horns"

tavern, Kennington.

As for details of this fight or that upon the same spot from which Hickman, "The Gas-Light Man," came off victor, they are not for these pages. How the combatants "fibbed" and "countered," and did other things equally abstruse to the average reader, you may, who care to, read in the pages of the enthusiastic authorities upon the subject, who spare nothing of all the blows given and received.

This was fine company for the Heir-apparent to keep at Crawley Downs; but see how picturesque he and the crowds that followed in his wake rendered those times. What diversions went forward on the roads--such roads as they were! One chronicler of a fight here says, in all good faith, that on the morning following the "battle," the remains of several carriages, phaetons, and other vehicles were found bestrewing the narrow ways where they had collided in the darkness.

[Sidenote: THE REGENCY]

The House of Hanover, which ended with the death of Queen Victoria, was not at any time largely endowed with picturesqueness, saving only in the gruesome picture afforded by the horrid legend which accounts for the family name of Guelph; but the Regent was the great exception. He, at least, was picturesque; and if there be any who choose to deny it, I will ask them how it comes that so many novelists dealing with historical periods have chosen the period of the Regency as so fruitful an era of romance? The Prince endowed his time with a glamour that has lasted, and will continue unimpaired. It was he who gave a devil-me-care connotation to the words "Regent" and "Regency"; and his wild escapades have sufficed to redeem the Georgian Era from the reproach of unrelieved dulness and greasy vulgarity.

The reign of George the Third was the culmination of smug and unctuous _bourgeois_ respectability at Court, from whose weary routine the Prince's surroundings were entirely different. Himself and his _entourage_ were dissolute indeed, roystering, drinking, cursing, dicing, visiting prize-fights on these Downs of Crawley, and hail-fellow-well-met with the blackguards there gathered together. But whatever his surroundings, they were never dull, for which saving grace many sins may be excused him.

Thackeray, in his "Four Georges," has little that is pleasant to say of any one of them, but is astonis.h.i.+ngly severe upon this last, both as Prince and King. For a thorough-going condemnation, commend me to that book. To the faults of George the Fourth the author is very wide-awake, nor will he allow him any virtues whatsoever. He will not even concede him to be a man, as witness this pa.s.sage: "To make a portrait of him at sight seemed a matter of small difficulty. There is his coat, his star, his wig, his countenance simpering under it: with a slate and a piece of chalk, I could at this very desk perform a recognisable likeness of him. And yet, after reading of him in scores of volumes, hunting him through old magazines and newspapers, having him here at a ball, there at a public dinner, there at races, and so forth, you find you have nothing, nothing but a coat and a wig, and a mask smiling below it; nothing but a great simulacrum."

Poor fat Adonis!

But Thackeray was obliged reluctantly to acknowledge the grace and charm of the Fourth George, and to chronicle some of the kind acts he performed, although at these last he sneered consumedly, because, forsooth, those thus benefited were quite humble persons. It was not without reason that Thackeray wrote so intimately of sn.o.bs: in those unworthy sneers speaks one of the race.

One curious little item of praise the author of the "Four Georges" was constrained to allow the Regent: "Where my Prince did actually distinguish himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from Brighton to Carlton House--fifty-six miles."[11]

So the altogether British love of sport compelled this little interlude in the abuse levelled at the "simulacrum."

XXIV

Modern Crawley is disfigured by the abomination of a busy railway level-crossing that bars the main road and causes an immeasurable waste of public time and a deplorable flow of bad language. It affords a very good idea of the delays and annoyances at the old turnpike-gates, without their excuse for existence. Beyond it is the Park Lane or Belgravia of Crawley--the residential and superior modern district of country houses, each in midst of its own little pleasance.

[Sidenote: PEASE POTTAGE]

The cutting in the rise at Hog's Hill pa.s.sed, the road goes in a long incline up to Hand Cross, by Pease Pottage, where there is now a post-office which spells the name wrongly, "Peas." No one _knows_ how the place-name originated; but legends explain where facts are wanting, and tell variously how soldiers in the old days were halted here on their route-marching and fed with "pease-pottage," the old name for pease-pudding; or describe how prisoners on the cross-roads, on their way to trial at the a.s.sizes, once held at Horsham and East Grinstead alternately, were similarly refreshed. Formerly called Pease Pottage Gate, from a turnpike-gate that spanned the Horsham road, the "Gate" has latterly been dropped. It is a pretty spot, with a triangular green and the old "Black Swan" inn still standing at the back. The green is not improved by the recent addition of a huge and ugly signboard, advertising the inn as an "hotel." The inquiring mind speculates curiously as to whether the District Council (or whatever the local governing body may be) is doing its duty in allowing such a flagrant vulgarity, apart from any question of legal rights, on common land. Indeed, the larger question arises, in the gross abuse of advertising notice-boards on this road in particular, and along others in lesser degree, as to whether the shameful defacement of natural scenery by such boards erected on land public or private ought not to be suppressed by law. Nearer Brighton, the beautiful distant views of the South Downs are utterly d.a.m.ned by gigantic black h.o.a.rdings painted in white letters, trumpeting the advantages of the motor garage of an hotel which here, at least, shall not be named. Much has been written about the abuse of advertising in America, but Englishmen, sad to say, have in these latter days outdone, and are outdoing, those crimes, while America itself is retrieving its reputation.

This is the Forest Ridge of Suss.e.x, where the Forest of St. Leonards still stretches far and wide. Away for miles on the left hand stretch the lovely beechwoods and the hazel undergrowths of Tilgate, Balcombe, and Worth, and on the right the little inferior woodlands extending to Horsham. The ridge is, in addition, a great watershed. From it the Mole and the Medway flow north, and the Arun, the Adur, and the Suss.e.x Ouse south, towards the English Channel. Hand Cross is the summit of the ridge, and the way to it is coming either north or south, a toilsome drag.

At Tilgate Forest Row the scenery becomes park-like, laurel hedges lining the way, giving occasional glimpses of fine estates to right and left.

Here the coachmen used to point out, with becoming awe, the country house where Fauntleroy, the banker, lived, and would tell how he indulged in all manner of unholy orgies in that gloomy-looking mansion in the forest.

Henry Fauntleroy was only thirty-nine years of age when he met the doom then meted out to forgers. As partner in the banking firm of Marsh, Sibbald & Co., of Berners Street, he had entire control of the firm's Stock Exchange business, and, unknown to his partners, had for nine years pursued a consistent course of illegally selling the securities belonging to customers--forging their signatures to transfers. Paying the interest and dividends as usual, the frauds, amounting in all to 70,000, might have remained undiscovered for many years longer; but the credit of the bank, long in a tottering condition, was exhausted in September, 1824, when all was disclosed. Fauntleroy was arrested on the 11th, and on the 14th the bank suspended payment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PEASE POTTAGE.]

The failure of the bank was largely due to the extravagance of the partners, Fauntleroy himself living in fine style as a country gentleman; but the scandalous stories current at the time as to his mode of life were quite disproved, while the partners were clearly shown to have been entirely ignorant of the state of their affairs, which acquits them of complicity, though it does not redound to their credit as business men.

Fauntleroy readily admitted his guilt, and added that he acted thus to prop up the long-standing instability of the firm. He was tried at the Old Bailey October 30th, 1824, sentenced to death, and executed November 30th, in the presence of a crowd of 200,000 persons. He was famed among connoisseurs for the excellence of his claret, and would never disclose its place of origin. Friends who visited him in the condemned cell begged him to confide in them, but he would never do so, and when he died the secret died with him.

No one has ever claimed acquaintance with the ghost of Fauntleroy, with or without his rope; but the road to Hand Cross has long enjoyed--or been afflicted with--the reputation of being haunted. The Hand Cross ghost is, by all accounts, an extremely eccentric, but harmless spook, with peculiar notions in the matter of clothes, and given, when the turnpike-gate stood here, to monkey-tricks with bolts and bars, whereby pikemen were not only scared, but were losers of sundry tolls. Evidently that sprite was the wayfarers' friend.

"Squire Powlett" is another famous phantom of this forest-side, and is more terrifying, being headless, and given to the hateful practice of springing up behind the horseman who ventures this way when night has fallen upon the glades, riding with him to the forest boundary. Motorists and cyclists, however, do not seem to have been troubled. Possibly they have a turn of speed quite beyond the powers of such an old-fas.h.i.+oned spook.

_Why_ "Squire Powlett" should haunt these nocturnal glades is not so easily to be guessed. He was not, so far as can be learned, an evildoer, and he certainly was not beheaded. He was that William Powlett, a captain in the Horse Grenadiers and a resident in the Forest of St. Leonards, who seems to have led an exemplary life, and died in 1746, and is buried under an elaborate monument in West Grinstead Church.

XXV

[Sidenote: HAND CROSS]

Hand Cross is a settlement of forty or fifty houses, situated where several roads meet, in this delightful land of forests. Its name derives, of course, from some ancient signpost, or combination of signpost and wayside cross, existing here in pre-Reformation times, on the lonely cross-roads. No houses stood here then, and Slaugham village, the nearest habitation of man, was a mile distant, at the foot of the hill, where, very little changed or not at all, it may still be sought. Slaugham parish is very extensive, stretching as far as Crawley; and the hamlet of Hand Cross, within it, although now larger than the parent village itself, is only a mere mushroom excrescence called into existence by the road travel of the last two centuries.

It is the being on the main road, and on the junction of several routes, that has made Hand Cross what it is to-day and has deposed Slaugham itself; just as in towns a by-street being made a main thoroughfare will make the fortunes of the shops in it and perhaps ruin those of some other route.

Not that Hand Cross is great, or altogether pleasing to the eye; for, after all, it is a _parvenu_ of a place, and lacks the Domesday descent of, for instance, Cuckfield. Now, the _parvenu_, the man of his hands, may be a very estimable fellow, but his raw prosperity grates upon the nerves.

So it is with Hand Cross, for its prosperity, which has not waned with the coaching era, has incited to the building of cottages of that cheap and yellow brick we know so well and loathe so much. Also, though there is no church, there are two chapels; one of retiring position, the other conventicle of aggressive and red, red brick. One could find it in one's heart to forgive the yellow brick; but this red, never. In this ruddy building is a harmonium. On Sundays the wail of that instrument and the hooting and ting, tinging of cyclorns and cycling gongs, as cyclists foregather by the "Red Lion," are the most striking features of the place.

The "Red Lion" is of greater interest than all other buildings at Hand Cross. It stood here in receipt of coaching custom through all the roystering days of the Regency as it stands now, prosperous at the hands of another age of wheels. Shergold tells us that its landlords in olden times knew more of smuggling than hearsay, and dispensed from many an anker of brandy that had not rendered duty.

At Hand Cross the ways divide, the Bolney and Hickstead route, opened in 1813, branching off to the right and not merely providing a better surface, but, with a straighter course, saving from one and a half to two miles, and avoiding some troublesome rises, becoming in these times the "record route" for cyclists, pedestrians, and all who seek to speed between London and Brighton in the quickest possible time. It rejoins the cla.s.sic route at Pyecombe.

For the present we will follow the older way, by Cuckfield, down to Staplefield Common. A lovely vale opens out as one descends the southern face of the watershed, with an enchanting middle distance of copses, cottages, and winding roads, the sun slanting on distant ponds, or trans.m.u.ting commonplace glazier's work into sparkling diamonds.

At the foot of the hill is Staplefield Common, bisected by the highway, with recent cottages and modern church, and in the foreground the "Jolly Farmers" inn. But where are the famous cherry-trees of Staplefield, under whose boughs the coach pa.s.sengers of a century ago feasted off the "black-hearts"; where are the "Dun Cow" and its equally famous rabbit-puddings and its pretty Miss Finch? Gone, as utterly as though they had never been.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "RED LION," HAND CROSS.]

Three miles of oozy hollows and rises covered with tangled undergrowths of hazels lead past Slough Green and Whiteman's Green to Cuckfield. From the hillsides the great Ouse Valley Viaduct of the Brighton line, down towards Balcombe and Ardingly, is seen stalking across the low-lying meadows, mellowed by distance to the romantic similitude of an aqueduct of ancient Rome.

Plentiful traces are yet visible of the rugged old hollow lane that was the precursor of the present road. In places it is a wayside pool; in others a hollow, grown thickly with trees, with tree-roots, gnarled and fanglike, clutching in desperate hold its crumbling banks. The older rustics know it, if the younger and the pa.s.sing stranger do not: they tell you "'tis wheer th' owd hroad tarned arff."

XXVI

The pleasant old town of Cuckfield stands on no railway, and has no manufactures or industries of any kind; and since the locomotive ran the coaches off the road has been a veritable Sleepy Hollow. It was not always thus, for in those centuries--from the fourteenth until the early part of the eighteenth--when the beds of Suss.e.x iron-ore were worked and smelted on the spot, the neighbourhood of Cuckfield was a Black Country, given over to the manufacture of ironware, from cannon to firebacks.