The Dover Road Part 18

In the London Road approach to Dover, one mile from the centre of the town, there used to stand an old inn called "The Milestone." A hatter's shop now occupies the site; but two old milestones are yet there. One says "70 miles to London: 14 miles to Canterbury," and the other proclaims it to be "1 mile to Dovor."

This old spelling of "Dover" was common until the opening of the railway era; and the coach-bills of the great Dover Road coach-proprietors, Horne, Chaplin, and Gray, spelt the place-name "Dovor," with two "o's," instead of an "o" and an "e."

[Sidenote: "DEAR" DOVER]

It will be expected of me that I should say something of Dover, and I do not intend to disappoint so very reasonable an expectation, although the Dover Road having been traversed, the object of this book is accomplished; and, therefore, any remarks I may have to offer must be informed, not with the prolixity of the local history, nor with the stodgy statistics of the Guide Book, but with conciseness and something of the sympathy which shows that to which but few Guide Books ever attain--the true inwardness of the place. It is quite easy to be contemptuous of Dover, from the visitor's point of view; from other vantage-grounds it is a great deal more easy to acquire a certain enthusiasm for the old Cinque Port, its streets, its piers, its Castle, and the more modern fortifications which cross the Western Heights.

Thy cliffs, dear Dover! harbour and hotel; Thy custom-house, with all its delicate duties; Thy waiters running mucks at every bell; Thy packets, all whose pa.s.sengers are booties To those who upon land or water dwell; And last, not least, to strangers uninstructed, Thy long, long bills, whence nothing is deducted.

sang Byron.

Turning, however, to a consideration of the two other objects of Byron's outburst in _Don Juan_, the hotel and the cliffs, whether Shakespeare's Cliff or those that form so grand a rampart away towards the North Foreland, Byron, we find, was justified in his choice of Dovorian features for due commemoration. For the cliffs, all that is to be said of the white walls of old Albion has been long ago committed to print, and I do not propose to attempt the saying of anything new about them. As for the hotel of which the poet speaks, it was probably the "s.h.i.+p." The "s.h.i.+p," alas! is gone, retired, as many of its landlords were enabled to do, into private life, and the "long, long bills" by which they earned rather more than a modest competency are now produced elsewhere. The "Lord Warden," which was not, unfortunately, built in Byron's time, could probably have afforded him material for another stanza or two, for that huge and supremely hideous building was celebrated at one time for the monumental properties of the bills presented to affrighted guests. Magnificent as were the charges made by rapacious hosts elsewhere, they all paled their ineffectual items before the sublime heights attained by the account rendered to Louis Napoleon when he stayed here.

There are limits even to Princely-Presidential purses and patiences, and few people cared to incur liabilities at the "Lord Warden," which would have brought the shadow of the Bankruptcy Court looming upon the horizon.

As for that most doughty of Lord Wardens of the Cinque Ports, from whose historic office the hotel takes its t.i.tle--I name here, of course, the one and only "Duke of Wellington"--_he_ usually resorted to an unpretending hostelry, the "Royal Oak Commercial Hotel," in Cannon Street, nearly opposite the old Church of St. Mary's, whenever he was called to the town.

It is not enough to know that Dover is a town of h.o.a.ry antiquity; that Caesar landed here B.C. 55 (or that he did not land here, but at Deal, as the more scholarly antiquaries inform us). It is not sufficient to be floored with such heavy slabs of historical information as those by which we learn that the name of Dover has been arrived at through a long series of British, Roman, and Saxon forms, originating from the little stream called anciently the Dour, that flowed, once upon a time, through the chalk valley of Temple Ewell and Buckland, tinkling cheerfully through the old town and falling into the waves over the pebbles of Dover beach; now, alas! pouring a contaminating flood through sewer-pipes far out to sea. I say, it is not enough to know that the Romans latinized the name to Dubris, that it was variously Doroberniae, Dofris, Dovere, and in the eighteenth century occasionally "Dovor," finally to have the seal set on these changes by its present name. It is not even sufficient to know (although it is highly interesting) that Domesday Book opens with Dover, commencing as it does, "Dovere tempore regis Edwardi." But this last slice of historical provand is more than usually welcome because it gives us a foothold whereon to begin the exploration of the old town. When one comes to reduce the tough and gnarled latinity of Domesday Book to English as we speak it, we find this first entry to recite that King Edward the Confessor held a lien on a portion of the town rents, and that Earl G.o.dwin also partook of what the Radical politics of our own time term "unearned increment." Edward the Confessor was a mild-mannered man and weak. It is, for instance, primarily owing to his unfortunate preference for the foreigner that we owe the Norman invasion and conquest of England; but for all his mildness, it is extremely unlikely that this saintly invertebrate would not have resented the talk of "unearned increment" in his day. He was sufficiently considerate, however, so it would seem, to reduce the rents in his town of Dover, seeing that, although a thriving place, it had had the misfortune to be burned. The entry in Domesday Book goes on to say that here was a Guildhall, and a mill at the entry of the port, much in the way of s.h.i.+pping; and here, at this mention of the port we find our most eloquent text.

[Sidenote: DOVER HARBOUR]

It seems, then, that when Caesar came off here, the site upon which almost half the present town of Dover is built was under water. The peculiar site of Dover can perhaps most readily be noted by one who climbs the bare chalk hills that bear on their summits the defences known as the Western Heights. Keeping to rearward of the Citadel, and walking round the shoulders of these hills, one sees that a deep and narrow valley runs down to the sea-beach, contracting almost to the likeness of a narrow gorge where the old town commences, and widening again where it meets the sea.

Here, where the site broadens, and where steep streets give place to flatness, rolled the tides up the little estuary of the River Dour when Caesar's triremes anch.o.r.ed off the primitive port, and antiquaries point out the place, near the present Round Tower Street, where, so late as 1509, a tower was raised, to which vessels lying in the harbour were moored by iron rings. This is almost the only natural feature of Dover that has changed during nineteen centuries. Walk to the outmost verge of the Admiralty Pier and look back upon the town, and you will see it lying in the hollow, with the gaunt and horrid stucco houses of its "front"

hiding the old streets that crouch behind in narrow ways. You will see the Castle Hill and the Western Heights, twin eminences guarding the land and the open roadstead of the Downs; and, although the grey Castle crowns one cliff and the modern fortifications crest the other, yet, for all the ages during which man has been burrowing galleries here and piling up stonework and masonry there, if Caesar could revisit the scene of his ineffectual descent upon Britain, he would find no difficulty in recognizing it. Only, the estuary where he beached his vessels is long since silted up and is buried beneath many feet of the rubble and refuse, the shards and potsherds that mark the pa.s.sing of many busy generations. Here, on these ancient dust-heaps and kitchen-middens stands the chief business street of Dover, Snargate Street, running parallel with the sea, but now separated from it by the breadth of the Harbour and many intermediate alleys, smelling vehemently of tar and stale reminiscences of ocean. Snargate Street is long and narrow, a model neither of cleanliness nor of convenience, and it crouches humbly beneath the towering cliffs which rise on its landward side, cut, carved, and tunnelled; honeycombed with stores, forts, and galleries, and grimed with the smoke from the cl.u.s.tered chimneys of the houses below. Other short and frowzy alleys run against the soiled chalk, and end there with a whimsical abruptness. Elbow room here is none, and to find it, one ventures upon the Harbour quays, toward the Docks and the Basins, where little gangways and iron swing-bridges lead to _culs-de-sac_, or end in sudden and precipitous descents into the water, causing the unwonted stranger frequently to retrace his steps and to swear freely. But, if one avoids these cryptic curse-compelling places, the Harbour is a very interesting place; much more so than the "front,"

where people walk up and down aimlessly, the women dressed to kill, and glaring at one another as they pa.s.s, like strange cats on a roof-top.

Here, instead, is the reality of life, and a variety that is lacking beyond. In the basins floats generally a strange and fortuitous concourse of vessels; schooners, yachts, cutters, hoys, smacks, brigantines, "billy-boys," and steamers of every age, size, and trade, from the neat pa.s.senger-boats, with their decks holystoned to wonderment, to the dirty ocean-tramp, or the inky, wallowing collier; together with other craft whose names are unknown to the landsman. Likewise, there are many of the mercantile marine about. One may not, contrary to general belief, know these by their dress, for there is no peculiarity in the raiment of the mercantile Jack--except perhaps for its raggedness, poor fellow--by which he may be recognized. Rather would one know him by his anxious expression of countenance and by that inveterate habit of his, ash.o.r.e, of leaning heavily against walls and posts, or anything capable of giving support.

You may notice poor Jack's favourite haunts hereabouts by the bare and burnished appearance of the brick and paint bordering on the Docks, and situated at a height of about four feet from the ground, where his shoulders have rubbed immemorially.

XLII

[Sidenote: SHAKESPEARE CLIFF]

Since we are in the way of it, it comes naturally to include Shakespeare Cliff in this little survey. You reach it from here either by a hideous contrivance called the Shaft, fas.h.i.+oned in the cliffs that frown down upon Snargate Street, or by Limekiln Street beyond. Here, on the way, is Archcliffe Fort, between the Citadel and the sea. They say, who should know, that it is heavily armed, but it is not at all impressive: old boots, tin cans, brick-bats, cabbage-stalks, and rusty umbrella-frames rarely are; and of these there are rich and varied deposits lying in the fosse, amid the scanty gra.s.s where industrious sheep endeavour to earn a living. Indeed, this is the most eloquent picture of mild-eyed Peace I have ever seen, and Landseer's painting which shows a sheep snuffling in the mouth of a dismantled cannon is quite weak beside it.

Looking over the cliff's edge, just beyond, is a view of the beach below, where the South Eastern Railway runs on a wooden viaduct, entering a double tunnel through the chalky ma.s.s of Shakespeare Cliff, rising sheer from the sea to a height of three hundred and fifty feet. A narrow footpath leads to the breezy summit, surmounted by a Coastguard Station, and here you may gaze, if you have good nerves, over the brink of the precipice, and listen to the hissing of the pebbles far down below, as the waves drag them back and forth:

... Here's the place: stand still.

How fearful And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles: half-way down Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head: The fishermen that walk upon the beach Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark, Diminished to her c.o.c.k; her c.o.c.k, a buoy Almost too small for sight; the murmuring surge That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes, Cannot be heard so high; I'll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong.

How eloquent is that pa.s.sage from _King Lear_!

Just past Shakespeare Cliff come the twin workings of the Channel Tunnel and the coal-mine, those notorious fiascos which have cost the South Eastern shareholders so much, and have afforded journalists so large an amount of good "copy." From the cliff-top, a steep and winding stairway cut in the chalk leads down to the beach and the Dover coal mine and the beginnings of the Channel Tunnel. Much money has been sunk in both. Some day the Tunnel will be completed; but no one expects coal ever to be commercially mined here.

Turn we, though, from these projects to the Admiralty Pier, that centre of interest to visitors and Dover folks alike. Some one--I know not whom--has styled the Admiralty Pier "the pier of the realm," and truly, though you search these coasts, you shall find nothing to compare with it, as a pier. Plymouth Breakwater is a great deal more impressive, but then, it is not a pier, but is set down in midst of a tempestuous Sound, where no one can get at it without risk and trouble. And the Admiralty Pier owes its very great fame largely to the ease with which you can reach it and promenade up and down its almost interminable pavings. Crowds come to see the boats off or in, and people are always sweeping the seas with telescopes and field-gla.s.ses, finding a perennial joy in so doing, difficult to be understood. The boats come in, the tidal trains run out along the huge stone causeway; pa.s.sengers pallid and cold, m.u.f.fled up in overcoats, glancing around with lack-l.u.s.tre eyes, crawl miserably from the decks and cabins of the Channel steamers under the amused scrutiny of the callous crowd, and seat themselves thankfully in the waiting train. Other steamers wait impatiently, shrieking intermittently; and other trains bring down intending pa.s.sengers for the night crossing to France.

Sometimes strange scenes are witnessed on the night mail, when pa.s.sengers are streaming from the boat-express across the gangways. Quiet gentlemen with little luggage and a marked disinclination for the society of their fellows are discovered, as they lurk in remote corners of the deck, seeking to sneak quietly out of the "very front door of England," by other gentlemen--gentlemen with broad shoulders and square-toed boots--who tap them on the shoulder with an equal absence of fuss or demonstration, and these quiet gentlemen usually say--not without a certain start of surprise, you may be sure--"Oh! I'll come quietly." Then the three (for they are usually two who thus accost one of these undemonstrative and retiring pa.s.sengers) step again on to the Admiralty Pier, and apparently abandon their Continental trip, for they go up to London by the next train. Sometimes a quiet gentleman refuses to "come quietly" when his shoulder is tapped, and then those who do the tapping are obliged to resort to the painful, not to say humiliating, process of snapping a pair of handcuffs on his wrists, much to the surprise of the pa.s.sengers. But whether gentlemen elect to go quietly or to take it fighting is not much matter: the result is the same. Sometimes these quiet ones came back to Dover after a while, and were accommodated in free quarters on the Castle Hill; presently revisiting the harbour as masons under Government employ.

They come here no longer, for the convict prison on the hill is deserted, and the harbour-works are now carried on with paid labour.

And Britain is proceeding with some energy to rule the waves at Dover, for the Harbour of Refuge is completed; to the end that the battle-s.h.i.+ps, the merchantmen beating up and down Channel, and the fisher-boats may ride in some degree of safety, protected from the north-easterly gales that nowadays strew the Downs and the Goodwin Sands with wrecks. For centuries this project had been discussed--and shelved in the dusty pigeon-holes of the Admiralty offices. Raleigh reported in the reign of Elizabeth that "no promontory, town, or haven in Europe was so well situated for annoying the enemy, protecting commerce, or sending and receiving despatches from the Continent;" and works were commenced to replace the pier begun by Henry the Eighth that had been abandoned and allowed to fall into ruin. But when Defoe was here the Harbour had fallen back into its old state, half-choked with s.h.i.+ngle cast up by the set of the tides from the westward, and the piers decayed. "Ill-repaired, dangerous, good for nothing, very chargeable and little worth," those were the epithets the author of _Robinson Crusoe_ applied to it, and thus it remained until 1847, despite local and half-hearted attempts to prevent the acc.u.mulation of s.h.i.+ngle. In that year the Admiralty Pier was commenced. Meanwhile, the sea, and the tides, thrust out from Dover Harbour by this mighty arm, are setting in strongly upon the Castle Cliffs, and that Castle, the survival of six hundred years of strife and change, is being very slowly but very surely undermined. And thus it goes round our coasts; turn away the currents that eat up particular strips of the land or choke up the havens with sea-drift, and they set with additional fury upon the next unprotected place, presently to be, at great cost, referred elsewhere. It is a game that never ends: a game of General Post of which the sea, at least, never tires.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DOVER CASTLE, FROM THE FOLKESTONE ROAD: SUNRISE.]

XLIII

Dover Castle possesses the longest and most continuous, if not quite the most stirring, military history of any fortress within these narrow seas.

Described picturesquely by ancient chroniclers as "the very front door of England," or, as "clavis Angliae et repagulum," it is, and in very truth has ever been, since its foundation, the main bulwark of Britain against foreign foes. At what precise period a Castle was first raised here is a question that has never yet and probably never will be settled. The Romans built their lighthouse here, with another on the topmost point of the Western Heights, but the first Castle is not supposed to have been built before the time of Edward the Confessor, and the first reference to it is found in that oath which Harold swore to the Duke of Normandy, that he would yield up to him both the fortress and the well which was contained in "_castellum Dofris_." Of this building nothing now appears to be left, and the earliest portion of the present Castle is Henry the Second's Keep.

[Sidenote: DOVER CASTLE]

But whatever the size and strength of the Castle that stood here in Harold's day, it would seem to have been formidable enough to induce William the Conqueror to seek a landing elsewhere. He landed at Pevensey, and it was not until after Hastings and the fall of Romney that he turned and took Dover from the rear. The Castle was then made the seat of government for Kent, and one of those fierce fighting Bishops, Odo, half-brother of the Conqueror, installed. The Kentish people, revolting in 1074, endeavoured in vain to seize it; it was held against Stephen, and eventually surrendered to him; and here within the gloomy walls of the Saxon stronghold he died in 1154. No sooner was Henry the Second crowned than his advisers urged the rebuilding of the Castle, and to this period belong the Keep and the Inner Ward. Sixty years later the fortifications of Henry's reign received their first shock of war when, England having been given by the Pope to Louis, the son of Philip Augustus, King of France, that Prince endeavoured to take the gift. But hateful though John, King of England, might be, Englishmen were neither content that their allegiance should be transferred without reference to themselves, nor willing to become again the prey of invaders. Therefore, they bade Prince Louis to take the Pope's present if he could, and held Dover Castle against his forces. England, divided against itself, had permitted Louis to land, and even to be crowned in London, but the Constable of Dover Castle at that time, Hubert de Burgh, was a patriot to be won over neither by threats nor promises, and he held the Castle against all comers. The siege was undertaken in earnest. Louis sent over to France for all the artillery that the time could produce. It consisted of battering-rams and stone-throwing machines, and in this way it was sought to breach the walls. A wooden shelter for the attacking force was constructed and built up to the outer walls of the inland face of the Castle, and under cover of this device the soldiers worked the battering-rams until the defences shook again. The garrison retorted by flinging heavy stones and fire-b.a.l.l.s on the shelter, and would either have demolished or burnt it had it not been for an ingenious invention which the French had imported. This consisted of a series of tall wooden towers called _malvoisins_, and ill-neighbours, indeed, they were, for they were established on the edge of the Castle ditch, where, overlooking the outer ward, and being filled with archers whose practice soon slackened the defenders' fire, they would soon have brought the siege to a close, had not the death of the English King removed internal quarrels and aroused a united spirit of patriotism throughout England which boded ill for the prospects of the French prince.

The invaders retired from London and the southern counties which they had held, not so much by force of arms as by favour of disaffected Englishmen; they gave up the siege of Dover Castle, and presently re-embarked for France.

The struggles between a despotic King and a rapacious n.o.bility which had caused these troubles in the reign of John were soon resumed, and Dover Castle became alternately the hold of one party or the other. The most notable incident in these events was that of 1265, when the Barons held the Castle and had fourteen knights of the King's party imprisoned in the Keep. Prince Edward attacked the Castle from without, and the prisoners, bursting out from their cells and rus.h.i.+ng upon their gaolers from within, forced the garrison to surrender.

It was in the time of Edward the First that Dover Castle reached its full development. That was the grand era of castle-building in England, when military engineering was practised without reference to ordnance, and had attained to a remarkable ingenuity. Like all Edwardian Castles, that of Dover is concentric and has three wards, enclosed within high curtain walls strengthened with a great number of defensible towers. The outer ward had no less than twenty-seven of these towers, among which the Constable's Tower and gateway is first for size and beauty.

It is a long, steep, and dusty climb to Dover Castle from the town.

Halfway up, the visitor of forty years ago would be attracted by the tinkling of a small bell, and, looking round, his gaze would fall upon haggard creatures, gaunt and unkempt, who crouched behind iron bars and piteously adjured him to "remember the poor debtors." Poor devils!

condemned by the brutality of obsolescent laws to moulder in captivity in expiation for pitiful debts. But brutal though we were until comparatively recent years, we must not believe Victor Hugo when he says that in 1820 the grim picturesqueness of the Castle Hill was enhanced by the spectacle of three malefactors' bodies, tarred and obscene, which swung in the winds of Heaven. That picturesque detail is more romantic than truthful; but the man who, like Victor Hugo, could write seriously in another place of the Firth of Forth as "_la premiere de la quatrieme_" is not to be taken for either geographer or historian.

All these evidences of a brutal age are gone, and Dover Castle is remarkable nowadays chiefly for the extraordinary way in which old and new are grafted one upon another. Side by side with the Norman Keep are modern magazines and military storehouses, while the curtain walls of the wards give support to repositories of Royal Artillery shot and sh.e.l.l. Even the roof of the Keep is put to practical purpose by the War Department, for it has been vaulted and strengthened to carry a battery of heavy cannon. The Keep is of three floors; on the third floor are the State apartments in which Charles the First welcomed his Queen, and where, seventeen years later, he bade her a sad adieu. They are gloomy rooms, heavy with suspicion of danger, conspiracy, and intrigue, and are approached by a staircase flanked with secret guard-rooms; the walls pierced with arrow-slits, scarcely to be distinguished in the darkness of the place, even when you are bidden to look for them.

It is strange to read in the struggles between Charles and the Parliament with what laxity fortresses were often held for either side. Dover Castle is a case in point. It was held for the King by a small force whose discipline and courage were so to seek that it needed but the daring of a Dover merchant and a few followers to capture it. With this exploit ends the story of the warlike doings here, and all that is left to tell relates only to Marlborough's French prisoners, who were for years cooped up within these walls pining and eating away their hearts for very love and despair of ever reaching _la belle France_, whose outlines they could dimly see from the narrow embrasures of their foreign prison.

For from Dover Keep the Eye of Faith may discern the coast of France, twenty-one miles across the Silver Streak; but there be those to whom, if visible at all, that coast seems like nothing so much as filmy clouds resting upon the water, and there are but few days when the sun and the absence of sea-mists enable the Englishman's straining eyes clearly to discern that land.

The famous well of Dover Castle still exists, enclosed in the ma.s.sive walls, and still nearly three hundred feet deep, despite the rubbish and unmentionable abominations cast into it by the prisoners, who chiefly occupied the second floor in which are the Norman Chapel and two large rooms, their walls still bearing traces of the prisoners' handiwork in the shape of inscriptions. Here is the Armoury, with matchlocks, Brown Besses, muskets, and rifles; obsolete and in use. Here, too, are the pikes issued to the peasantry when all England armed to resist Napoleon's threatened invasion. Down below (you can see it from those embrasures) is "Queen Elizabeth's Pocket Pistol," familiar, even to those who have never seen it, by the popular rhyme--

Load me well and keep me clean, And I'll carry a ball to Calais Green;

and all around are batteries old and new.

The sentry on Dover Keep at night, when all the world is still, has leisure for contemplation. When the moon rises in solemn majesty on summer nights and makes a lane of silvery glory across the Channel; when the winking light from Cape Grisnez shows where the French coast lies, and the glow from the lighthouse on the Admiralty Pier marks the harbour at his feet; when Dover lamps burn yellow beside the moonrays, and the high-road to London lies stark and white in the valley of the Dour, then may the sentry on his eyrie hear, between the ghostly tapping of the halyards on the flagstaff, the tramp of the ages. Forty centuries looked down upon the French in Egypt; the sentry on Dover Castle looks upon nineteen hundred years of invasion and foreign expeditions. There, where Dover streets now stand, rode Caesar's galleys and there our ancestors bled for their country. Down that white highway, so still at this midnight hour, have marched many generations of archers, men-at-arms, and soldiers of a more recent era, to return, covered with wounds and glory; and across that s.h.i.+ning sea have sailed fleets innumerable. For a distance of four hundred feet below him run a series of fortified galleries and platforms, built in the Castle Keep or excavated through the solid chalk down to sea-level; while level with him, rise the Western Heights, rich in heavy ordnance, across the town. Here, then, is the end of the Dover Road, looking out across the sea; and he must needs be dull of brain who does not perceive the epic fitness of its ending.

THE END