The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries Part 9

Guildford is no more than thirty miles from London, and yet it remains to this day as provincial in appearance as ever it could have been in the olden times of road-travel. Provinciality was the pet bugbear of Matthew Arnold, but he applied it as a scornful term only to literary and critical shortcomings. To him the vapourings of modern poetasters would have been provincialisms, and the narrow-minded criticisms of Mr. George Howells, who can see nothing in Shakespeare, but perceives a wealth of genius in his fellow-novelists of the United States, would have been provincialisms of the worst order.

But the provinciality of places, as distinguished from minds, can be no reproach in these latter days, when all the great towns, with London at their head, have grown so large and congested that a sight of G.o.d's pure country and a breath of healthy air are only to be obtained by most townsfolk with infinite pains and great expenditure of time. It was an evil day when the great cities of England grew so large that one who ascended a church steeple in their midst could discover nothing on the horizon but chimney-pots and bricks-and-mortar; and the best of times were those when weary citizens took their pleasure after the day's work in the fields and groves that bordered upon the habitations of men. What are Progress and Civilization but will-o'-wisps conjured up by the malignity of the devil to hide the degeneration of the race and the starvation of the soul, when the outcome of the centuries is the shutting out from the face of nature of three-fourths of the population? What else than a sorry jest is the boast of London's five millions of people, when by far the greater proportion of those five millions never know what country life means, nor even what is the mitigated rusticity of a provincial town in whose centre you can open your cas.e.m.e.nt of a morning and welcome the sun rising in a clear sky, listen to the morning chorus of the birds, and see, though you be in the very midst of the provincial microcosm, the fields and hedge-rows, the streams and rural lanes of the country-side?

[Sidenote: _GUILDFORD_]

Guildford, then, is provincial in the best and healthiest sense; for though your habitat be in the High Street, which here, as in all other properly-const.i.tuted towns, is the very nucleus of the borough, you need never be longer than ten minutes in leaving the town behind if you are so minded. Guildford is a town of very individual character. G.o.dalming folks will tell you that Guildford is "cliquey," by which term I understand exclusiveness to be meant. It may be so, in fact I believe this to be one of Guildford's most marked social characteristics; but exclusiveness implies local patriotism, which is a refres.h.i.+ng spirit for a Londoner to encounter once in a way. At any rate, he will find no spirit of this description in what Cobbett satirically termed "the Wen." The patriotism of Peckham has yet to be discovered; the local enthusiasm of Camberwell is as rare as the song of the lark in London streets; and the man who would now praise what was once the country village of "merrie"

Islington is not to be found.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GUILDHALL, GUILDFORD.]

It is difficult to pluck even one greatly outstanding incident from Guildford's history wherewith to enliven these pages, for although Guildford possessed a strong and well-placed castle from Norman times, it cannot be said that the annals of the town are at all distinguished by records of battle, murder, and sudden death, or by military prowess. So much the better for Guildford town, you will say, and the expression may be allowed, for this old borough has ever been eminently peaceful and prosperous in the absence of civil or military commotion. Its very name is earnest of trade and merchandise; and the guilds of Guildford were very powerful bodies of traders who dealt in cloths and wool, at one time the chiefest of local products, or in the minor articles that ministered to the wants of those great staple trades.

Meanwhile the guardians of the old Castle, whose keep still dominates Guildford from most points of view, had little enough to do but to keep the place in order for such occasions when the King came a-hunting in the neighbourhood, or progressed past here to some distant part of the realm.

King John seems to have been by far the most frequent royal visitor to Guildford Castle, and almost the last, for the cold comforts of Norman keeps went very early out of fas.h.i.+on with kings and queens, and domestic hearths began to replace dungeon-like apartments in chilly towers as soon as social conditions began to settle down into something remotely resembling tranquillity.

Guildford Keep stands at this day in gardens belonging to the Corporation, and free to all. It is of the Norman type, familiarized to many by prints of such well-known Norman towers as those of Rochester and of Hedingham Castles, and is at this time a mere sh.e.l.l, open to the sky. Within the thickness of the walls are staircases by which it is possible to climb to the summit and gaze thence down upon the red roofs of the town that cl.u.s.ter so picturesquely beneath. Here, too, is a Norman oratory, whose narrow walls are covered with names and figures scratched deeply into the stone, "probably," says a local guide, "the work of prisoners confined here." But "J. Robinson, 1892," was surely no prisoner within these bounds, although he should have been who thus carved his undistinguished name here.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CASTLE ARCH.]

[Sidenote: _THE GUILDHALL_]

Beside the keep there remains but one archway of all the extensive military works that at one time surrounded the Castle. This is in Quarry Street, and is known as Castle Arch. The chalk caverns close at hand, and the vaulted crypt beneath the "Angel," although they have long been looked upon as dungeons, had, according to the best-informed of local archaeologists, no connection whatever with the Castle. Perhaps even before the Castle keep, the delightfully quaint old Guildhall is the most characteristic feature of Guildford's architecture. Compared with that old stronghold, the Guildhall is the merest _parvenu_, having been built in 1683; but, comparisons of age apart, there is no parallel to be drawn between the two. The old tower is four-square and stern, with only the picturesqueness that romance can find, while the belfried tower and the boldly-projecting clock that impends ma.s.sively over the pavements of the High Street, and gives the time o' day to the good folks of the town, are the pride of the eye and the delight of the artistic sense of all them that know how to appreciate at their true aesthetic value those memorials of the old corporate spirit of business and good-fellows.h.i.+p that have long since vanished from munic.i.p.al practice. The legend that may still be read upon the Corporation mace, of Elizabethan date, is earnest of this old-time amity. Thus it runs: "Fayre G.o.d. Doe Justice. Love thy Brether."

Set against this, the proceedings of the Kingston-upon-Thames Town Council of some few weeks back make ugly reading, and at the same time ill.u.s.trate the new spirit very vividly indeed. You who list to learn may read in the records for the present year of that old borough, that while one member of the Council stigmatized another member's statements as falsehoods, the first rejoined that his accuser was, in plain English, "a liar." Appealed to by the Mayor to withdraw the offensive expression, he refused, and the Mayor and Corporation filed out of the Council-chamber, leaving him to his own reflections.

That the burghers of Guildford were always the best of friends one with another is not my contention; that the dignity of their ancient surroundings should conduce to loving-kindness may remain unquestioned.

XVI

[Sidenote: _GEORGE ABBOT_]

The greatest of Guildford's worthies was George Abbot, the son of Maurice Abbot, a clothworker of this town, and his wife Alice. He was born in 1562, the eldest of that "happy ternion of brothers," as Fuller quaintly describes him and his two younger brothers, who became respectively Bishop of Salisbury and Lord Mayor of London. The parents of these distinguished men came very near to martyrdom in the reign of Queen Mary, for they were both ardent Protestants; but, escaping the fate that befell many others, they had the happiness of seeing their children rise in the world far beyond all local expectations. Alice Abbot, indeed, had a singular dream which foretold that "if she could eat a jack or pike, the first son she should bring into the world would be a great man." A few days afterwards (so runs the story) she drew up a pike from the river Wey while filling buckets for household use; and, in accord with the promptings of her dream, ate it. "Many people of quality offered themselves to be sponsors at the baptism of Mistress Alice's son--the future Archbishop," says Aubrey; and if the dream itself was nothing but the result of a late supper acting upon a vivid imagination, certainly local interest in "Mistress Alice's" account of it procured for her firstborn quite an exceptional degree of favour and consideration. He was educated first at the Free Grammar School of Guildford, and was sent at the age of sixteen to Balliol College. Thenceforward his rise was rapid. He studied theology, and became tutor to the sons of influential personages. Excellent preferments in the Church became his at an early age, and through many stages of favour he became Archbishop of Canterbury in his forty-ninth year. His rise was undoubtedly due to native worth, for Abbot was a scholar of the foremost rank, and well equipped, both by study and by force of character, to hold his own in the fierce religious controversies of his time. He was, moreover, honest, and had little of the truckler or the time-server in his nature, as his opposition both to James I. and Charles I. showed, on occasion. It is to his righteous opposition that Charterhouse School, now down the road at G.o.dalming, owes its very existence; for, when the cupidity of James I. was aroused over the provisions of Thomas Sutton's will, and when he attempted to divert that pious founder's money to his own uses, Abbot withstood the attempt, and the King was fain to give way--with an ill grace, 'tis true, but effectually enough.

Abbot was nothing of a courtier, and, indeed, no very pleasant-natured man. He was sour of aspect and morose; gloomy and fanatic in religion, and no less swift to send religious opponents to the stake than the Catholic inquisitors of a generation before his time. He had a strong and militant affection for the reformed religion, and held a singularly lonely position between the levelling puritanical-democratic doctrines of the age and the High Church party. A Calvinistic narrowness distinguished this great man's public acts, and he was sufficiently Puritan in spirit to look with disfavour upon, and to absolutely forbid, Sunday sports. His truculent religious views appeared in a lurid light shortly after he became Archbishop, when he condemned two Arians to death for what he held to be "blasphemous heresy." These two unfortunate men, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, were burnt in 1614, three years after their sentence, as the "recompence of their pride and impiety."

Meanwhile, the mind of the Archbishop was liberal enough in other directions. He could send religious dissenters to a horrible death, and look back with satisfaction upon his handiwork, while, at the same time, he was maturing the plans and provisions for the n.o.ble almshouse that still stands in Guildford High Street and bears the honoured name of Abbot's Hospital.

[Sidenote: _A SAD MISCHANCE_]

In 1619 he laid the first stone of his "Hospital," and three years later had the satisfaction of seeing it incorporated by Royal Charter; a satisfaction clouded by an accident that embittered the remainder of his life. The story of this untoward event ill.u.s.trates at once the morbid habit of his mind and the bitter pa.s.sions of those times. It was in 1621, while with a hunting party in Brams.h.i.+ll Park, that this thing befell. A large party had a.s.sembled by the invitation of Lord Zouch, and chased the deer through the glades of that lovely park. The Archbishop drew his bow at a buck, and at the same time that the arrow sped, a gamekeeper, one Peter Hawkins, darted forward between the trees, and received the shaft in his heart.

A coroner's jury returned a verdict by which the accident was attributed to the man's negligence in exposing himself to danger after having been warned; but Abbot was greatly distressed, and so heavily did the occurrence weigh upon him that, to the time of his death, in 1632, he kept a monthly fast on a Tuesday, the day of the gamekeeper's death. He also settled an annuity of 20 upon the man's widow.

The King declared that "an angel might have miscarried in such sort," and that "no one but a fool or a knave would think worse of a man for such an accident"; but it suited Abbot's religious rivals and opponents to regard with public aversion one "whose hands were imbrued with blood"; and his clergy, who had felt the curb of the Archbishop's discipline too acutely to let this chance slip, felt or expressed a horror of their spiritual head ever afterwards. Others even went so far as to refuse ordination at the hands of a homicide, and bishops-elect scrupled to receive consecration from him, until the Royal Pardon had been obtained and the conscience of the Church satisfied.

For all his opposition to James I., the Archbishop lost a good friend when that pragmatical monarch died, and gained an enemy when Charles I. came to the throne. The High Church party were then in the ascendant, and Abbot, from various causes, declined from favour. In 1627 he was sequestered, and the Archbishopric of Canterbury put into commission of five bishops, of whom Laud, Abbot's particular enemy, was one.

These misfortunes at length broke Abbot's health, which finally failed in 1632. At the beginning of that year he seemed upon the point of death, but revived somewhat, and a letter, still preserved, written by an especial friend at this juncture, hinted at the indecency of those who expected his end, and says--"If any other prelate gape at his benefice, his Grace perhaps may eat the goose which shall graze upon his grave."

But death came upon Abbot that same year. He made an edifying end at Croydon, and was buried, by his own request, in Trinity Church, opposite the Hospital he had founded in his native town.

Eight years afterwards, the Archbishop's brother, Sir Maurice Abbot, erected the sumptuous monument there which Pepys admired on one of his visits to Guildford. It still remains, although the church itself (one of Guildford's three churches) has been rebuilt.

XVII

[Sidenote: _THE INN-YARD_]

Guildford has many old inns, as befits an old town which lay directly upon an old coach-road. Of these the chiefest lie in the High Street, and they are the "Angel," the "Crown," the "White Hart," and the "Red Lion." The "Red Lion" has a modernized frontage, but within it is the same hostelry at which Mr. Samuel Pepys stayed, time and again; the others are more suggestive of the flower of the coaching age and of Pickwickian revels; but in these latter days the wide race of "commercial gentlemen" and the somewhat stolid and beefy grazier cla.s.s are their more usual guests.

Behind their prosperous-looking fronts are the vast stable-yards, approached from the High Street by yawning archways that "once upon a time" admitted the coaches, and whence issued the carriages and post-chaises of a by-gone day; now echoing with the rumble of the omnibus that plies between the town and the railway-station, laden chiefly with the sample-boxes of enterprising bagmen. But in that "once upon a time,"

whose chronology finally determined and came to an end in the '40's, there was a superabundance of coach traffic here.

Hogarth has left a picture of a typical country inn-yard of his time which shows, better than any amount of unaided description, what manner of places they were whence started the lumbering stages of last century. No one has yet identified the picture, reproduced here, with any particular inn, although some have sought to place it in Ess.e.x, because of the election crowd seen in the background carrying an effigy and a banner inscribed with the weird, and at first sight incomprehensible, legend "No Old Baby." A candidate named Child stood for one of the Ess.e.x boroughs about this date, and, according to Hogarth commentators, this group was intended as an incidental satire upon him. On the other hand, the likelihood of this being really an inn-yard upon the Portsmouth Road is seen by the sailor who occupies a somewhat insecure position upon the roof of the coach beside a French valet, and whose bundle is inscribed "Centurion." The "Centurion," one of Anson's squadron, put in repeatedly at Portsmouth, and the sailor is apparently on a journey home, fresh from the sea and from Anson's command.

The scene is very amusing, and most of the interest centres in the foreground, where a coach is seen, about to start. An old woman sits smoking in the rumble-tumble behind, while a traveller looks on and pays no heed to the post-boy who holds his hat in readiness for a tip. A guest is about to depart, and the landlord is seen presenting his bill. He seems to be a.s.suring his customer that his charges are strictly moderate; but, judging from the sour expression of the latter's face, mine host has been overcharging him for a good round sum. Meanwhile, the devil's own din is being sounded by the fat landlady, who is ringing her bell violently for the chambermaid, and by a noisy fellow who is winding a horn out of window with all his might. The chambermaid is otherwise engaged, for an amorous spark is seen to be kissing her in the open doorway.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN INN-YARD, 1747. _After Hogarth._]

[Sidenote: _COACHES_]

So greatly was Guildford High Street crowded in the old coaching times that, just about a hundred years ago, it was widened at one point by the slicing off of a portion from one of Guildford's three churches which projected inconveniently into the roadway. To gaze upon what is still a very narrow street, and to remember that this is its "widened" state, is calculated to impress a stranger with the singular parsimony of our ancestors, when land was comparatively cheap and considerations of s.p.a.ce presumably not so pressing.

The pressure of traffic here in the Augustan age of coaching will be better understood when it is learned that not only did the Portsmouth coaches pa.s.s through Guildford, and the numerous local stages that ran no further than Guildford and G.o.dalming, but that the Southampton coaches came thus far, and only turned off from this road at a point just beyond the town. The celebrated "Red Rover" Southampton coach came this way, and so did the equally famous "Telegraph"; and, leaving Guildford behind, they pursued their way to Southampton by way of Farnham and Winchester. To this route belonged many celebrated whips of those times whose names are almost unmeaning now-a-days; and some of the best of these once well-known wielders of the whipcord were stopped by Fate and the Railway in the full force of their careers. Happy the man whose spirit was not too stubborn to submit gracefully and at once to the new dispensation, and to seek employment on the rail. Good servants of the road found equally good places on the railways--if they chose to take them. But (and can you wonder at it?) they rarely chose to accept, having naturally the bitterest prejudices against the railways and everything that belonged to them; and many men wasted their energies and expended their savings in a fruitless endeavour to compete with steam, when they could have transferred their allegiance from the road to the rail with honour and profit to themselves and no less to their employers. John Peers, a well-known coachman, and driver of the London and Southampton "Telegraph," was reduced by the coming of the railway to driving an omnibus. From this position, being scornful and quarrelsome, unable to adapt himself to changed circ.u.mstances, and altogether "above his station," he drifted finally into the workhouse. A gentleman who had known him well upon the box-seat in more prosperous days, discovered him in this refuge of the poverty-stricken and superseded; started a subscription for him amongst his former patrons, and rescued him from the small mercies and little ease of the Guardians of the Poor. He was housed upon the road he had driven over so often in the days before steam had come to ruin the coaching interest, and there, in due course, he died.

And his was a fate happier than that of most others--coachmen, guards, post-boys, and ostlers--thrown out of employment by railways, and unable or unwilling to adapt themselves to new surroundings. Many of these soured and disappointed men lived on and on in a vain hope of "new-fangled notions" coming to a speedy and disastrous failure. When accidents occurred and lives were lost by railway smashes, their faces were lit up with a wintry joy, and they wagged their heads with an air of profound wisdom, and said individually, "I told you so!" When the "Railway Mania"

of 1844 and succeeding years collapsed and brought the inevitable financial crash, they chuckled, and felt by antic.i.p.ation the ribbons in their hands again. But though financial disasters came on top of collisions, and though the system of railway travel seemed for a while like a bubble on point of bursting, the promise was never fulfilled, and the old coachmen who actually did drive the roads once more did so as ministers to the amateur spirit that has since 1863 caused so many coaches to be put upon the country roads of Old England.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "RED ROVER" GUILDFORD AND SOUTHAMPTON COACH.]

XVIII

[Sidenote: _INEPT CRITICISM_]

Directly the river Wey is crossed, either in leaving or entering Guildford, the road begins to rise steeply. Going towards G.o.dalming, it brings the traveller in a mile's walk to the ruined chapel of St.

Catherine, standing on a sandstone hill beside the highway, whose red sides are burrowed by rabbits and sand-martins. The chapel has been ruined time out of mind, and is to-day but a motive for a sketch. One of Turner's best plates in his "_Liber Studiorum_" has St. Catherine's Chapel for its subject, and to the criticism of Turner's work comes the Rev. Mr. Stopford Brooke, in this wise:--"It is no picturesque place. Turner painted English life as it was; and the struggle of the poor is uppermost in his mind in all these rustic subjects ... pathetic feeling is given them by Turner's anxious kindness."

No picturesque place! Where, then, do you find picturesqueness if not here? And as for Turner, the man who dares to say that he "painted English life as it was," dares much. It is the chiefest glory of Turner that he painted or drew or etched things, not as they were, but as they might, could, should, or would be under an artist's direction. He was, in short, an idealist, and cared nothing for "actuality," and perhaps even less for the "struggle of the poor." It is possible to read anything you please into Turner's work, for it is chiefly of the frankest impressionism; but to say that _he_ felt and did all these things is criticism of the most inept Penny Reading order. Turner was an artist of the rarest and most generous equipment, and he _had_ to do what he did, and never reasoned _why_ he did it. Ruskin surprised him with what he read into his work; how much more, then, would he have been astonished at Mr. Stopford Brooke's "Notes on the _Liber Studiorum_," had he lived to read them! But angels and ministers of grace defend us from ministers of religion who essay art criticism!