Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 28

Reigate churchyard holds the gravestones of two neighbours in name and place. A Goose and a Gosling are buried side by side.

When Reigate had a castle, it also had a priory. It was founded for Austin Canons by one of the de Warennes, and its first prior was an Adam. After the Dissolution, the Priory estate saw some strangely different owners and guests. The first Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral, had it; Foxe, perhaps meditating his _Book of Martyrs_, stayed there as tutor to the son of the Earl of Surrey; a century later the manor came to Lord Somers, the great Lord Chancellor of William of Orange; to-day the modern house, built on the site of the old convent, belongs to one of Lord Somers's descendants, Lady Henry Somerset. It holds a famous oak chimney-piece, said to have been brought from Henry VIII's vanished palace of Nonsuch.

Reigate Priory to-day means Reigate cricket, played on the Priory ground. Three of the most famous of all Surrey cricketers belong to the town. Stephen Dingate, first of Surrey players before Beldham, was born there; so was William Caffyn, of the days of the giants Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn, Tom Lockyer and Julius Caesar; and so, too, was W.W. Read, one of the very few Englishmen familiar to millions by their initials alone. "W.G." and "W.W." belong to the great years of the game.

Politics in Reigate are a mixed memory. Like Gatton, Reigate was a pocket borough, and sent two members to Parliament until 1832, when the two were reduced to one. Even the one disappeared in 1867, when the borough was disfranchised for bribery and treating--a subject of conversation which Mr. Louis Jennings, writing three years later in _Field Paths and Green Lanes_, notes as dangerous if introduced too suddenly in social circles in the neighbourhood.

But an even more remarkable political record belongs to one of Reigate's neighbours. Gatton, once a borough and now a park, had the privilege granted to its owner in 1451 of sending two members to Parliament. The Copleys of Leigh were lords of the manor in the days of Henry VIII, and Sir Richard Copley was at one time the only inhabitant of the borough, so that his voting power was considerable. When Cobbett was abroad on his _Rural Rides_, there were Reigate, Gatton, and Bletchingley within a few miles of one another, all of them rotten boroughs, and each of them returning a couple of members. Cobbett, of course, boiled whenever he heard the names; Gatton in particular, was "a very rascally spot of earth." He lived to see a very bad bargain for Gatton's privileges. Lord Monson, in 1830, bought the estate with its votes for two members for 100,000. Two years later, Gatton as a borough was ended by the Reform Bill and all Lord Monson had for his 100,000 was the land.

Lord Monson started with the intention of making Gatton House one of the most superb in the kingdom. He began with the hall, which he built on the lines of the Corsini chapel in the church of San Giovanni in Laterano at Rome, though he did not add the dome. The floor he had laid of coloured marbles, patterned in the most delicate designs; the marble had been designed for Ferdinand VII of Spain, and cost 10,000. The walls and arches are as richly decorated as the floor. There are four frescoes by Joseph Severn; Eleanor of Castile represents Fort.i.tude; Esther, Prudence; Ruth, Meekness; Patience could only be Penelope. The effect of the s.h.i.+ning stone and painted arches is of extraordinary brilliance and completeness--the completeness of an unrivalled collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little church fits better with the great trees and the green gra.s.s. The building is nothing; the interior has the grace and the light of a cathedral chapel. Lord Monson decorated Gatton Church with the magnificence with which he imagined the hall, but his ideal for the church was quieter. He bought carved wood of the most exquisite workmans.h.i.+p and set it wherever the church could hold it; a pulpit and an altar from Nuremberg, said to be by Durer, but the critics dispute it; the elaborately fitted stalls came from a monastery in Ghent, and altar rails from Tongres. Gla.s.s for the windows, of deep and glowing colours, he had from Aerschot, near Louvain; the east window, a strange painting, shows the eating of the Pa.s.sover. One property the little church lacks; Lord Monson never gave it a wooden ceiling, and the ill-shaped stone vault is too white and cold for the stalls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _View from near Reigate._]

The great coaching days have many memories of Reigate. The coaches changed horses at the Swan and the White Hart, and at the White Hart to-day's Brighton coach stops, I think, for lunch. But when Shergold wrote his _Recollections of Brighton in the Olden Time_, he speaks of the inn at which the Brighton coach stopped in the days of the Regency as the King's Arms. Inns have a most confusing habit of changing their names. When John Taylor, the Water Poet, in 1636, made his _Catalogue of Taverns in Ten s.h.i.+res about London_, he found some seventy or eighty taverns in Surrey, but out of the forty-nine which he mentions by name, hardly a dozen would answer to their old signboards to-day. The Reigate White Hart in Taylor's day was the Hart.

According to Shergold, Reigate in the old coaching days was the scene of the most romantic episodes imaginable. He is full of comparisons between the easy charm of conversation among riders by coach and the ungracious silences of travelling by rail, and this is what you read about Reigate and the fair who travelled by coach:--

"There was an advantage and an interest in travelling by coach which travelling by rail can never communicate. In the former you saw men and their faces, and acquired some information; in the latter you learn nothing except the number of persons killed or injured by the last accident. A young man who entered the coach at eight o'clock in the morning at Brighton took his seat perhaps opposite a young lady whom he thought pretty and interesting. When he arrived at Cuckfield he began to be in love; at Crawley he was desperately smitten; at Reigate his pa.s.sion became irretrievable, and when he gave her an arm to ascend the steep ridges of Reigate Hill--a just emblem, by the way, of human life--he declared his pa.s.sion, and they were married soon after. Nothing of this sort ever occurs on railroads. Sentiment never blooms on the iron soil of these sulky conveyances. A woman was a creature to be looked at, admired, courted, and beloved in a stage-coach; but on a railway a woman is nothing but a package, a bundle of goods committed to the care of the railway company's servants, who take care of the poor thing as they would take care of any other bale of goods. It is said that matches are made in heaven; it may likewise be said that matches more often begin in the old stage-coaches, and that railroads are the antipodes of love."

The road from Reigate to Crawley, one of the straightest and levellest in the south country, was once the scene of a remarkable horse-race. The beginning of it was a discussion at a shooting party in the autumn of 1890 between Lord Lonsdale and Lord Shrewsbury on the pace of trotting and galloping horses. Lord Lonsdale backed himself to drive galloping horses for twenty miles, single, pair, four-in-hand and riding postillion, inside an hour. Lord Shrewsbury wagered against him, but there were difficulties about weather and the date--March 11, 1891--and eventually Lord Shrewsbury withdrew from the match and paid 100 forfeit. Lord Lonsdale then set himself the task alone, and his headquarters were at Reigate; he had fifteen horses in training, fifteen men and thirteen carriages, and the cost of keeping them at Reigate came to 150 a day. The course, a stretch of five miles of road, over which horses were to be driven in the four different styles was measured from Kennersley Manor, three miles south of the White Hart, nearly into Crawley. Snow fell on the tenth, the day before the match; Lord Lonsdale borrowed a snow plough and sent it over the road. At noon on the day of the race the horses and carriages were taken to the course; at five and twenty minutes to one Lord Lonsdale drove up in a pair-horse brougham; at one o'clock to the second he trotted his single horse, War Paint, to the starting-point, and War Paint bounded down the road. War Paint took 13 minutes 39-1/5 seconds over the five miles; it would have been twenty seconds less, but a brewer's dray had blocked the road. The pair-horse was waiting with Blue and Yellow, two Americans, in it; the change took three seconds, and Blue and Yellow galloped back to the start in 12 minutes 51-2/5 seconds. It was the turn for the coach, and it took 36-3/5 seconds to change across; a groom drove the team to the starting point, a yard before it Lord Lonsdale caught up the reins, and the four horses swept up the rise to Crawley again. Fifteen minutes and nine seconds and two-fifths the four horses took; the leaders were Silk and Everton King, the wheelers Conservative and Whitechapel, and they left their driver something over seventeen minutes to ride postillion back.

It took 40-2/5 seconds to change from coat and hat for riding, and exactly at seventeen minutes to the hour Lord Lonsdale rode off on Draper, a chestnut, with a bay mare, Violetta, for the pair. Draper and Violetta went over the last five miles in 13 minutes 55-4/5 seconds, and in 56 minutes 55-4/5 seconds the twenty miles were covered. And so the great race ended.

The Pilgrims' Way dropping down like white ribands over the shoulder of the down into Reigate we have already seen. On the other side of the town the high road climbs up again to the crest of the ridge--a road paved and metalled to stand the perpetual wear of shod wheels grating down the hill. At the highest point of the road is one of the finest views in England; one of the finest, Cobbett thought, in all the world.

The red roofs of the town cl.u.s.ter among trees below; beyond is all the Weald to the Devil's d.y.k.e and Chanctonbury Ring, best of all landmarks of the Suss.e.x downs. The separate views of the Weald along the chalk ridge have each their own characteristic, from the Hog's Back to the heights above t.i.tsey. For me the view from the hill above Reigate has a double memory; the purple and blue of the downs seen through the stems of the beeches that line the crest, and the shadows thrown by a high summer sun in the parks and fields below. The oaks and elms set themselves in the open gra.s.s with little circles of darker green about their feet, like the wooden stands of the trees of a Dutch toy farm.

Redhill joins Reigate to the east, new, red, spreading, a junction of railways, a better sort of Woking. You do not have to wait from nine minutes to three-quarters of an hour every time you come to Redhill. To the schoolboy it has the merit of being a stage on the road from London and the sea.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

CROYDON

Croydon Palace.--A Neglected Relic.--Queen Elizabeth's Waiters.--John Whitgift.--Hospital, chapel, and school.--A Record of Cricket.--Macaulay's tyrant.--Izaak Walton differs.--Queen Elizabeth's Little Black Husband.--Croydon colliers.--John Ruskin.--By the Parish Pump.--John Gilpin.

Croydon is best reached by rail. It cannot be called a convenient centre, for one returns to centres, and Croydon has little that would recall a traveller. But it is an easy point of departure either for the country east, by Addington and the Kentish border, or south through Sanderstead to Coulsdon and Chaldon, or west by Beddington and the Carshalton trout ponds to Epsom. You may walk in any direction, except perhaps north, where you will walk into North Croydon. But in Croydon itself there are still two or three things worth seeing.

One is the Archbishop's Palace. An Archbishop's Palace is the very last building which would naturally a.s.sociate itself with the Croydon tram lines and Croydon up-to-dateness, and it is the last building with which Croydon appears to wish to a.s.sociate itself. The Palace stands apart from the bustle of the place, unhonoured, unhappy and ignored. Since the last Archbishop left it in the reign of George II it has served its turn as business premises for a bleacher and a calico-printer; it has been a wash-house, and is now a girls' school. One thing it has never been--of sufficient interest to Croydon to be rescued from sacrilege and neglect, and to take the place which is its due among historic national possessions. Perhaps one should be thankful that the palace of Cranmer, Whitgift and Laud is to-day in no rougher hands than the gentle Sisterhood of a children's day-school.

If Croydon Palace were rightly restored, how fine a relic it might be!

The great banqueting-hall, with its n.o.ble roof of Spanish chestnut, which has even survived the steam and chemistry of a bleacher's vats; the long, panelled gallery where tradition has set Queen Elizabeth dancing; the guard chamber, perhaps built by Archbishop Arundell, who burnt the Lollards; the chapel with its oak stalls, its poppy-head carvings, and the gallery added by the archbishop who stood by Charles the First on the scaffold; if the oak were cleaned and the paint taken from the panels, and if under the mellow brick walls there were set out lawns and flowers; then Croydon might justly boast of its tram lines, its admirable sanitation, and its new Town Hall. It would possess something else.

When Queen Elizabeth lay at Croydon Palace, it was not an easy matter to find room for her train of courtiers. She came in July, 1573, to visit Archbishop Parker, and wished to come again in the following May, with a larger train than before. The steward, entrusted with the task of finding more room where there had never been enough, was in despair, and made out his list of lodgings for the archbishop, or, perhaps, the Queen's chamberlain, to see. The Lord Treasurer was to be "wher he was"; the Lord Admiral "at y^e nether end of the great chamber"; the "maydes of honnor wher they wer"; the "La Stafforde wher she was"; the "gentylmen husshers ther olde" lodging; and so on with a very long list.

But the letter ends in a hopeless puzzle:--

"For the Quen's Wayghters, I cannot as yet fynde anye convenyent romes to place them in, but I will doo the best y^t I can to place them elsewher, but yf y^t please you S^r y^t I doo remove them. The Gromes of the Privye Chamber nor Mr. Drewrye have no other waye to ther chambers but to pas thorowe that waye agayne that my Lady of Oxford should come. I cannot then tell wher to place Mr. Hatton; and for La Carewe here is no place with a chymeney for her, but that she must ley abrode by Mrs. Aparry and the rest of y^e Prvy Chambers.

For Mrs. Shelton here is no romes with chymeneys; I shall stage one chamber without for her. Here is as mutche as I have any wayes able to doo in this house."

Of the great archbishops few, strangely enough, have left memorials behind them at Croydon. Whitgift, Grindal, and Sheldon have their monuments in the church; of the others, Juxon added some carving to the Palace Chapel. Whitgift was the great Croydon archbishop, and did for Croydon what Abbot did for Guildford. He founded a hospital, and endowed a school.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Whitgift's Hospital, Croydon._]

Whitgift's Hospital stands to-day almost as its founder left it. His initials, I.W., worked in patterned brick into a gable, and the motto he chose for the doorway, "Qui dat pauperi nunquam indigebit," face a roaring thoroughfare and flaring shops, but inside the oak doors little can have changed. Weatherbeaten red-brick, mullioned windows looking out over flowers and shaven lawns, tiled roofs and tall chimneys make up a picture of solid goodness which fits well with the archbishop's memory.

The chapel stands open, a dark, simple little place. The oak benches are the same on which the first pensioners sat, and down upon them look curious faded pictures, dingy in black and gold. One is a fine portrait of the founder at his writing-table, with his seal, his sandbox, a bell, quill pens and a compa.s.s (or is it a watch?). Before him lies an open Latin Bible, and he points to his favourite text--_Cast thy bread upon the waters_. On another wall hangs a framed poem in ma.n.u.script, some forty or fifty lines of extravagance in which the archbishop is compared in turn to a straight sound cedar, a lost gem, a pearl, and a "fairest knotlesse Plant," whose death forces the poet to

"Wish, that with a Sea of teares, my Verse Could make an Island of thy honour'd Herse."

Another poet writes a prodigious Latin elegy "containing the briefest summary of the miseries and calamities of the human race." A painter adds a picture of Death digging a grave.

Whitgift's School is an old foundation in a modern building, and has added a record to cricket history. Mr. V.F.S. Crawford, one of the hardest hitters of his day, was a Whitgift boy, and has done remarkable batting as a schoolboy and since. But his most remarkable innings was played at Cane Hill, when he scored 180 out of 215 made while he was in, and reached his first 100 in nineteen minutes.

That the school buildings should be modern is inevitable, for the school outgrew itself forty years ago. But the school house which Whitgift built was pulled down in consequence--an act which doubtless sits lightly enough on Croydon's conscience. Four years ago the Hospital nearly followed the school, the argument being that there was insufficient room for the tram-lines.

Croydon church, like nothing else in the town, became modern by accident. It was burnt down in 1867, and Sir Gilbert Scott rebuilt it into the finest church, perhaps, in the county, next to St. Mary's, Southwark. In the fire the tombs of the archbishops almost disappeared.

Grindal's is no longer to be seen, though possibly some tumbled stones collected into odd corners may be part of it. Sheldon's is a pile of fragments, heaped together behind a railing, charred and broken, hideous with the sculptured skulls, bones, worms, and winged hour-gla.s.ses with which our ancestors grimly decked their graves. Whitgift's monument has been restored and is a striking example of rich and intricate decoration, even if the pomp and colour of it are too garish for a tomb.

One looks at the stern, quiet features of his effigy and wonders what was the truth about the man. Was he what Macaulay has called him--"a narrow-minded, mean, and tyrannical priest, who gained power by servility and adulation, and employed it in persecuting those who agreed with Calvin about Church Government, and those who differed from Calvin touching the doctrine of Reprobation." Could he ever have been rightly described--Macaulay so describes the Master of Trinity who was to be Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of Canterbury--as "in a chrysalis state, putting off the worm and putting on the dragon-fly, a kind of intermediate grub between sycophant and oppressor"? Perhaps Macaulay was naturally unlikely to judge him well. A portrait drawn by one who lived nearer his day is Izaak Walton--another, perhaps a gentler, I.W.:--

"He built a large Alms-house near to his own Palace at Croydon in Surrey, and endowed it with maintenance for a Master and twenty-eight poor men and women; which he visited so often that he knew their names and dispositions; and was so truly humble, that he called them Brothers and Sisters; and whensoever the Queen descended to that lowliness to dine with him at his Palace in Lambeth,--which was very often,--he would usually the next day show the like lowliness to his poor Brothers and Sisters at Croydon, and dine with them at his Hospital; at which time, you may believe there was joy at the table."

Walton thought him a very tactful prelate. He managed Queen Elizabeth admirably, and "by justifiable sacred insinuations, such as St. Paul to Agrippa--'Agrippa, believest thou? I know thou believest,' he wrought himself into so great a degree of favour with her, as, by his pious use of it, hath got both of them a great degree of fame in this world, and of glory in that into which they are now both entered." Queen Elizabeth was devoted to him, and nicknamed him "her little black husband."

Without a licence from her little black husband she would not touch flesh in Lent.

The archbishops left Croydon, in 1758, when Archbishop Hutton died. The line of archbishop tenants of the Palace had been broken in the days of the Commonwealth, when Sir William Brereton, one of the Parliamentary Major-Generals, lived there. He was a soldier of conviction, and was nearly torn in pieces by the mob at Chester, "for ordering a drum to be beat for the parliament." Croydon's historian, Steinman, quotes from a pamphlet of Cavalier days, _The Mystery of the Old Cause briefly unfolded_, a quaint appreciation of him. He was "a notable man at a thanksgiving dinner, having terrible long teeth, and a prodigious stomach, to turn the archbishop's palace at Croydon into a kitchen, also to swallow up that palace and lands at a morsel." Brereton, as a reward for his military services, had been given several sequestrated properties, a chief foresters.h.i.+p, and a seneschals.h.i.+p.

Four hundred years ago, Croydon was the centre of a great Surrey industry. The Croydon colliers were proverbial. They supplied London with coal, that is, charcoal, before the days of "sea-coal," the coal which blackens London smoke to-day. Then it reached London by sea. One Grimes, or Grimme, the greatest of the Croydon colliers, who lived in the reign of Edward VI, was actually sued by an archbishop for creating a nuisance with his smoke. The collier won. He was sufficiently celebrated to become the hero of two sixteenth-century plays, one of which bears his name, _Grim, the Collier of Croydon_. To be "as black as a Croydon collier," was to be as black as a sweep; and "a right Croydon sanguine" was a deep red-brown.

Once Croydon, always Croydon. The first railway line built in the country and sanctioned by Parliament ran from Croydon to Wandsworth. It was part of an original scheme proposed in 1799 for linking up London with Portsmouth by an iron railroad running through Croydon, Reigate, and Arundel. But it was thought best to begin with the part which ran from Croydon to Wandsworth, and perhaps it was as well that the scheme went no further, for it cost 35,000, and was a complete failure. The shareholders lost every penny. One feels it ought to have succeeded. The carriages or trucks were drawn by horses, and the wheels ran along grooved iron rails. Anybody who had a cart which fitted might put it on the rails and let his horse pull it along, if he paid the tolls, which were not heavy. However, its life was short. The Croydon ca.n.a.l, opened in 1809, robbed it of much of its heavy goods traffic, and the London and Brighton railway demolished it altogether. This is how "Felix Summerley" (his real name was Sir Henry Cole, and he liked a good walk with a good dinner at the end of it) described the change in his _Pleasure Excursions_ in 1846.

"A small single line, on which a miserable team of lean mules or donkeys, some thirty years ago, might be seen crawling at the rate of four miles in the hour, with small trucks of stone and lime behind them.... Lean mules no longer crawl leisurely along the little rails with trucks of stone, through Croydon, once perchance during the day, but the whistle and rush of the locomotive, and the whirr of the atmospheric, are now heard all day long."

Felix Summerley must be suspected of admiring the change. One who knew old Croydon well, and admired its changes less, was John Ruskin, who had relations there and visited them as a boy. Of one he writes in _Praeterita_:--

"Of my father's ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother's more than that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the Old King's Head in Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint her Simone Memmi's King's Head, for a sign."

Of his aunt at Croydon he has a pleasant memory:--

"My aunt lived in the little house still standing--or which was so four months ago--the fas.h.i.+onablest in Market Street, having actually two windows over the shop, in the second story; but I never troubled myself about that superior part of the mansion, unless my father happened to be making drawings in Indian ink, when I would sit reverently by and watch; my chosen domains being, at all other times, the shop, the bakehouse, and the stones round the spring of crystal water at the back door (long since let down into the modern sewer); and my chief companion, my aunt's dog, Towser, whom she had taken pity on when he was a snappish, starved vagrant; and made a brave and affectionate dog of: which was the kind of thing she did for every living creature that came in her way, all her life long."

The Old King's Head and the fas.h.i.+onablest house in Market Street have gone. So has much else that Ruskin would have recognised. To guess at what his Croydon was like you may open Steinman's _History_ at a little engraving of Whitgift's Hospital, from a drawing made at the cross-roads. The Hospital stands as it is to-day. Opposite it, a square, two-storied inn stretches over the road a fine carved bracket with a bunch of grapes in iron, proclaiming that here are post horses to be had from Nich: Jayne. A tall-hatted rustic pensively wheels a barrow in the middle of the road opposite the inn; a group of villagers in stout boots, smocks and stockings stands at the street corner; and, precisely on the spot where to-day's tram-lines swing north and west, a lazy-looking person in a straw hat, perhaps a sailor ash.o.r.e, leans against a post within a yard or two of an imposing parish pump.

Croydon tradition claims John Gilpin. He is said to have lived in a farmhouse, which Croydon pulled down in 1897. It was known as Collier's Water Farm, and stood near what is now Thornton Heath Railway Station.

Undoubtedly a John Gilpin lived there; but the author of the local guide-book who a.s.serts that he was Cowper's original refers all inquirers to Dr. Brewer for corroboration; and that admirable sage informs me that Gilpin was Mr. Beyer, an eminent linendraper of Paternoster Row.