The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries Part 11

[Sidenote: _CHARTERHOUSE_]

Among the _alumni_ of Charterhouse were Addison and Steele; John Wesley, the founder of Methodism; Chief Justice Blackstone, Sir Henry Havelock, Grote, Thackeray, and John Leech. Several of these distinguished Carthusians are represented here, in a fine collection of autographs and ma.n.u.scripts. First, in point of view of general interest, is a collection of drawings and poems in their original MS. by Thackeray. Some thirty of his weird sketches are here, with the ma.n.u.script of "The Newcomes," bound up in five volumes. Here also is Thackeray's Greek Lexicon, covered thickly with school-boy scrawls and scribbles.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARTERHOUSE RELICS.]

Leech, the caricaturist,--one of the most absurdly over-rated men of this century,--was at Charterhouse from 1825 to 1831. Here are two letters from him, written, it would seem, when he was ten years of age, and apparently before he had been taught the use of capital letters. In one to "my dear mama," he seems to have been in a far from happy frame of mind. His "mama" had been to the school, but had not seen him, "me being in the grounds," "That," he adds, "made me still more unhappy." Writing to "my dear papa," young Leech is "happy to say I am promoted, because I know it pleases you very much. allow me to come out to see you on sat.u.r.day because I have a great deal to tell you, and I want some one to a.s.sist me in the exercises because they are a great deal harder."

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOWSER JUG.]

[Sidenote: _'MORTIFYING NEGLECT'_]

There is a very characteristic letter by John Wesley, and close by it a letter by Blackstone, part of which is worth reproducing. Writing on August 28, 1744, Blackstone, then a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, says: "We were last Friday entertained at St. Mary's by a curious sermon from Wesley ye Methodist. Among other equally modest particulars, he informed us (1) that there was not one Christian among all ye heads of houses; (2) that pride, gluttony, avarice, luxury, sensuality, and drunkenness were ye whole characteristics of all Fellows of Colleges, who were useless to proverbial uselessness; lastly, that ye younger part of ye University were a generation of triflers, all of them perjured, and not one of them of any religion at all. His notes were demanded by ye Vice-Chancellor, but on mature deliberation it has been thought better to punish him by mortifying neglect." Which is all very humorous, and the phrase "mortifying neglect"

distinctly good, as showing that the authorities had taken Wesley's measure to a nicety, and were maliciously aware that neglect _would_ mortify a person of his essential vanity a great deal more than persecution.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WESLEY.]

A striking bust of Wesley stands beside a statuette of Thackeray; but among the chiefest articles of interest in the School Museum are the curious objects ill.u.s.trating the rural life of Surrey in the olden times: a primitive hand cider-press, from Bramley, a "pot-hook hanger" from Shamley Green, and a "baby-runner" from Aldfold. Other curiosities are a bust of Nelson, cut by a figure-head carver from the main-beam of the "Victory"; "Gowser" jugs and cups, formerly used by gown boys of Charterhouse, and decorated with the arms and crest of Thomas Sutton, together with his pious motto, _Deo dante dedi_; and an Irish blunderbuss of the most murderous and forbidding aspect.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BUST OF NELSON, CARVED FROM MAIN-BEAM OF THE "VICTORY."]

[Sidenote: _'YE G.o.dS! WHAT GLORIOUS TWISTS'_]

So much for G.o.dalming, its sights and its memories. But we have halted here longer than the most dilatory coach that ever rumbled into the "King's Arms" Hotel, that house of good food and plenty in days when men had robust appet.i.tes, fit to vie with that of Milo the Cretonian. What glorious twists (for instance) must Peter the Great and his suite have possessed when they lodged here, twenty-one of them, all told, on their way from Portsmouth to London;--that is to say, if we are to take this breakfast and this dinner as sample meals:--

_Breakfast._

Half a sheep.

A quarter of lamb.

10 pullets.

12 chickens.

3 quarts of brandy.

6 quarts of mulled wine.

7 dozen of eggs, with salad in proportion.

_Dinner._

5 ribs of beef, weighing 3 stone.

1 sheep.

56-3/4 lbs. of lamb.

1 shoulder of veal, boiled.

1 loin " "

8 rabbits.

2 dozen-and-a-half of sack.

1 " claret.

These details are from a bill now in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, and are earnest of Gargantuan appet.i.tes that have had their day. If only we could compare this fare with the provand supplied to the Allied Sovereigns at the same house by Host Moon when those crowned heads and their suites were travelling to Portsmouth for the rejoicings over the final overthrow of the Corsican Ogre! Their Majesties must have had a zest for their banquets that had been a stranger to them all too long in the terrible years when Napoleon was hunting their armies all over Europe, from Madrid to Moscow.

XX

From G.o.dalming the old coachmen had an easy run until they pa.s.sed the hamlet of Milford, in those days a very small place indeed, but grown now to the importance of a thriving village, standing amid level lands where the road branches to Chichester. Once past Milford, however, they had need of all their skill, for here the road begins to rise in the long five miles ascent of Hindhead, and they found occasion for all their science in saving their cattle in this long and arduous pull through a stretch of country that for ruggedness has scarce its compeer in England.

Up to this point the villages and roadside settlements are numerous; but now we leave the "White Lion" at Mous.h.i.+ll behind, the more ordinary signs of civilization are missing, and long stretches of heath and savage hill-sides become familiar to the eye. On the right of the road lies Thursley Common, a perfectly wild spot occupying high ground covered with sand hummocks and tangled heather, and wearing all the characteristics of mountain scenery. To the left stretches Witley Common, in the direction of artist-haunted Witley and beautiful Haslemere, and in the distance are the sandy hillocks known as the Devil's Jumps.

No road so wild and lonely as the Portsmouth Road, from the time when mail-coaches first travelled along it, in 1784, until recent years, when houses began to spring up in the wildest spots. From Putney Heath to Portsdown Hill the road runs, for more than three-quarters of its length, past ragged heaths, tumbled commons, and waste lands, chiefly unenclosed; and the sombre fir tree, with its brothers, the larch and pine, is the predominant feature of the copses and woodlands that line the way. See what a long list the wayside commons make from London to Portsmouth. To Putney Heath succeeds Wimbledon Common, Ditton Marsh, Fairmile Common, and the commons of Wisley and Peasmarsh, all this side of G.o.dalming; while those of Witley, Hindhead, and Milland, with the bare and open downs of Rake and Chalton, and the remains of Bere Forest, render the remainder of the way one long expanse of free and open land.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEVIL'S PUNCH BOWL.]

[Sidenote: _THE DEVIL'S PUNCH BOWL_]

Hindhead is the culminating-point of all this agriculturally barren, but artistically delightful, country, and to see Hindhead aright requires the grey and tender mists of late autumn. This road, in fact, is seen at its best, from start to finish, in the last days of October or in the first weeks of November, when the red sun sets in the early evening like a huge fiery globe across the wastes and the darkling coppices, and gleams like molten metal between the tall straight trunks of the melancholy fir trees that stand like dumb and monstrous battalions deployed across the tangled crofts. So much has been said and written in praise of Hindhead, that I have known people to come away from it with a disappointed surprise. They looked for a deeper profundity in the Devil's Punch Bowl, and saw but a cup-like depression (marked on the maps as Haccombe Bottom), where they expected to find the beetling cliffs and craggy precipices of the Pyrenees, with, perhaps, the Foul Fiend himself waiting below amid the scrub and the heather for any one more adventurous than his fellows who should essay to climb down and investigate the scene. I will allow that the tourists who come here at mid-day of some blazing summer, and gaze with an air of disappointment at what some reckless writers have called "these awful depths," have a right to their dissatisfaction, for the Punch Bowl is least impressive at such a time, when never a shadow throws aerial perspective into the view, nor mists hide with a delicate artistic perception the prosaic fields which the merely utilitarian instincts and industry of the farmer have created from the surrounding waste. The imagination is curbed at this bald statement of facts under a cloudless sky, and I may confess that a first sight of this famous spot under similar conditions sent me away with no less a sense of disappointment.

But try the same scene on an autumn evening, when a grey-blue haze in the atmosphere meets the white ground-mists, and your imagination has then a free rein. There is no telling at such a time what may be the depths of the Punch Bowl; and as for the houses that stand upon the topmost ridge of Hindhead, why, they wear all the appearance of romantic castles, in which not nineteenth-century villadom dwells, but where dare-devil barons of Rhine-legend, or of the still more terrible Mrs. Radclyffe type, exercise untrammelled their native ferocity, even unto the colophon of the third volume.

The wild grandeur of Hindhead and the gloomy depths of the Devil's Punch Bowl are rendered additionally impressive by the memory of a particularly brutal murder committed here, in 1786, upon an unknown sailor, who was walking to Portsmouth to rejoin his s.h.i.+p.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HINDHEAD. _After J. M. W. Turner._]

[Sidenote: _A WAYSIDE CRIME_]

On the 24th of September in that year three men--Edward Lonegon, Michael Casey, and James Marshall--were tramping to Portsmouth in search of employment, when they met the sailor near Esher. He treated them to drink, and offered to bear the expense of their journey, and they continued together down the road. At the "Red Lion," in Road Lane, beyond G.o.dalming, where they stopped for refreshment, they were observed by two labouring men who chanced to be in the house, and who, later in the day, followed in their footsteps when returning home. On coming to the Devil's Punch Bowl they noticed something lying below, amid the heather, that looked like a dead sheep, but on climbing down to examine it, they found it to be the dead body of the sailor they had seen drinking in the "Red Lion." His villainous companions had knocked him down and killed him, "each agreeing to have two cuts at his throat," and after stripping the body they had rolled it into the hollow.

An alarm was raised, and the three murderers were overtaken at the hamlet of Sheet, near Petersfield, where they were actually selling the clothes of their victim in a public-house. Arrested here, they were tried at the Spring a.s.sizes of 1787, held at Kingston-on-Thames, were sentenced to death, and hanged on April 7, their bodies being afterwards gibbeted on Hindhead, the scene of their crime. For years afterwards the place was known as Gibbet Hill, and, indeed, the country folk still speak of it by that name. The tall post of the gibbet appears in Turner's view of Hindhead in the "_Liber Studiorum_," and the road is shown winding amid the downs, with a coach in the distance. Turner's view must be accepted with all reserve, _as a view_, for he never sank the artist in the mere topographical draughtsman; and the gibbet is quite an effort of his imagination, for even so early as Gilbert White's time, it was shattered in a terrific thunderstorm, as the old naturalist relates.

But although Turner has exaggerated the ruggedness of Hindhead in his picture, the place is not at all gracious or suave. Cobbett roundly declared that it was "certainly the most villainous spot that G.o.d ever made"; and how wild it was in the seventeenth century, before even the old high-road was in existence, we may gather from an entry in Pepys' Diary of August 6, 1668: "So to coach again, and got to Liphook, late over Hindhead, having an old man, a guide, in the coach with us; but got thither with great fear of being out of our way, it being ten at night."

Hindhead was in the direct line of signalling semaph.o.r.es between Greenwich and Portsmouth before the days of the electric telegraph, and every day at one o'clock the time was pa.s.sed down from the Observatory. People used to set their watches by the waving semaph.o.r.e arms.

Until 1826 the old Portsmouth Road went along the very summit of Hindhead, and its course, although deeply rutted and much overgrown with gra.s.s, can still be readily traced near by the great cross of Cornish granite, erected here, 345 feet above the deepest depths of the Devil's Punch Bowl, by Sir William Erle, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, in 1851, in memory of the murdered sailor. The Latin inscriptions, _In luce spes, Post tenebras lux_, and others, do not seem particularly appropriate to either the place or the occasion.

The old highway followed the very brink of the Punch Bowl, and was in winter-time extremely dangerous for coaches. To avoid the chance of accident a new roadway was constructed some sixty feet lower, with a substantial earthen embankment on the outer side, to prevent any unlooked-for descent into this precipitous gulf.

[Sidenote: _THURSLEY_]

The headstone which was set up to mark the spot where the sailor was murdered has been removed, and placed beside this newer road, where its position renders its legend peculiarly vivid and terrible, although it is couched only in the plainest and least affected of phrases. One side is shown in the ill.u.s.tration, the other repeats the date of its erection, and invokes a curse upon "the man who injureth or removeth this stone"; but whether or no the man who thus invites the wrath of heaven would have included the Ordnance Surveyors, I cannot say. Certainly _they_ have "injured this stone" by carving upon it the Governmental "broad arrow."

The body of the murdered sailor was buried at the little village of Thursley, some two miles distant, and there, in the churchyard, shadowed by dark fir trees, stands a gruesome tombstone, an unconscionable product of local art, with a carving in relief of the three murderers in the act of dispatching their victim. Beneath this melodrama, the circ.u.mstances are recounted at great length, and some halting verses conclude the mournful narration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TOMBSTONE, THURSLEY.]

[Sidenote: _'THE KING CAN DO NO WRONG!'_]

Thursley itself is situated on an old road that branches from the newer highway upon entering Witley Common, and rejoins the ordinary route near the "Royal Huts" Hotel. The village is rarely visited by strangers. The old church stands in a commanding position, overlooking a wide tract of country, including the Hog's Back, by Guildford, and the scattered ponds of Frensham. An old sun-dial on the tower has the inscription _Hora pars vitae_, and, like most of our clocks and watches, perpetuates in the numeral "IIII" the long-exploded fiction of the infallibility of kings. I wonder if any one remembers the origin of the subst.i.tution of "IIII" for "IV" on nearly all the dials, whether sun-dials or clock-faces, of civilization? Here is the story. The first clock that kept anything like accurate time was constructed by a certain Henry Vick, in 1370. It was made to the order of Charles V. of France, who was known as "the Wise."

Wise he certainly was, in some respects; but Roman numerals were not within the sum of his knowledge. When Vick brought the King his clock, he looked at its movements awhile. "Yes," said he, at length, "it works very well; but you have got the figures on the dial wrong." "Surely never, your Majesty," said Vick. "Yes," replied the King, "that IV should be IIII." "But your Majesty is wrong," rejoined that not very tactful clockmaker. "Wrong!" answered outraged majesty, "I am never wrong! Take it away and correct the error." Vick did as he was commanded, and so to this day we have IIII where we should really have IV.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THURSLEY CHURCH.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUN-DIAL, THURSLEY.]