Part 11

Woburn Abbey was from 1145 until 1537 a home of Cistercian monks whose Abbots do not figure in history. They performed their religious duties and ruled the brethren and brought their land out of a wild state into an excellent agricultural condition. Only the last Abbot of this long line lives in history. This was Robert Hobbs, who, torn by a tender conscience and uncertain in what way to act for the best, first made submission to Henry the Eighth and then threw in his lot with the insurgents of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a movement to re-establish the monasteries and to replace the ejected monks. The unfortunate Abbot, taken in arms, was executed with dramatic completeness, being hanged on an oak-tree in front of his own Abbey.

Ten years later, that luckiest of Russells, John Russell of Kingston Russell in Dorsetshire, who by fortunate circumstance and courtly address rose from the condition of an obscure country squire to be Earl of Bedford, was granted these lands of Woburn and the fabric of the Abbey, together with much other monastic property in different parts of the country. Other families were recipients of many broad acres, but the Russells were gorged to repletion. Burke in 1796 truly declared that “the grants to the House of Russell were so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility”; and the results of those favours are evident to this day in the huge and varied properties of which the Dukes of Bedford are landlords. The great London estates of Bloomsbury and Covent Garden, the lands of Tavistock Abbey, vast districts in the Fens, once the property of Thorney Abbey; and other manors here, there, and everywhere render them really “rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

[Sidenote: _THE RUSSELLS_]

The more superstitious among the Roman Catholics have ever dwelt upon the disasters prophesied to the House of Russell, as the beneficiaries to so enormous a degree of the spoliation of the Church; but let us inquire into the subsequent history of the family.

The first Earl of Bedford died in the fulness of time, in his bed, without anything in the supernatural way affecting him. He was succeeded by his son, who was not so fortunate, for three of his four sons died before him, the third being killed by the Scots, on the Borders. His fourth son, Edward, succeeded him as third Earl. He in turn died, in 1627, childless, and the title and estates fell to his cousin Francis. Believers in judgment awaiting sacrilege began at this period to remember the discredited old legends which had declared that no Earl of Bedford should be succeeded by his eldest son.

The family history from this time began thoroughly to support believers in the supernatural, for Francis, the fourth Earl, had two sons, one of whom died without issue, before his father. The second son, who became the fifth holder of the title, was a man upon whom sorrow laid a heavy hand. His two sons died before him; the eldest unmarried, the second, Lord William Russell, beheaded in 1683 for complicity in the political movement resulting in the Rye House Plot.

That must have been a hollow and barren honour which was conferred upon the bereaved man in 1694, when William the Third created him a Duke, “to solace his excellent father for so great a loss, to celebrate the memory of so noble a son, and to excite his worthy grandson, the heir of such mighty hopes, more cheerfully to emulate and follow the example of his illustrious father.” The fifth Earl and first Duke had often before been offered a dukedom, but had declined; so it would seem that the “solace” could have been little comfort to him. He died in his eighty-seventh year, in 1700, and his grandson, Wriothesley, became second Duke, who died eleven years later, and was followed by his son, Wriothesley, third Duke, who died childless in 1732. His brother stepped into his place, and survived until 1771. He was twice married, but his eldest son died on the day of his birth, the second in infancy, and the third, the Marquis of Tavistock, was killed by a fall in the hunting field, in 1767; and he was therefore followed by his grandson, Francis, the fifth Duke;, killed in 1802 by a blow from a tennis-ball. The sixth Duke was brother of the last. He died in 1839, and his son Francis, the seventh Duke, reigned in his stead until 1861. His son William next enjoyed the title until 1872, when it fell to his cousin, Francis, the ninth Duke, who in 1891, in his seventy-second year, committed suicide by shooting himself, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. An unsuccessful attempt was made to hush up the affair: the first reports to the newspapers declaring that he had died from congestion of the lungs.

[Illustration: WOBURN ABBEY.]

[Sidenote: _A DUCAL SUICIDE_]

The tenth Duke was a man of bloated and unwieldy proportions, who died suddenly in 1893, and was followed by his brother. It would appear, therefore, to recapitulate, that of the fourteen successive holders of the titles of Earl and Duke of Bedford, five only have been succeeded by their eldest sons. In all, there have been six deaths by various forms of violence, including those of the aged Lord William Russell, murdered in 1840 by his valet, Courvoisier, in Park Lane, and Lord Henry Russell, who was killed on shipboard in 1842, by a block falling on his head.

The Russells are by tradition Liberals in politics, but it is really only an astute abstract Liberalism, calculated to impress the unthinking, that they affect. I think of them, living behind their park walls, in their huge, hideous house, as a succession of bloated spiders, gorged but still unsatisfied, incredibly rich, incredibly wealthy, shamelessly mean: deriving from their London ground-rents an income that emperors might envy, and yet sharing no burdens and doing no work for the State.

The great mansion of Woburn Abbey stands in the middle of a park twelve miles in circumference: that is to say, for purposes of ready comparison, a quarter larger than Richmond Park. Of the Abbey itself nothing is left, and on the site of it stands the vast gloomy building begun by Flitcroft in 1744 for the fourth Duke, and looking more like some public institution of the asylum sort than a residence. It is a veritable treasure-house of art, jealously closed against visitors, except grudgingly, once a year, on the August Bank Holiday; but public paths run through a great portion of the park, lovely with its woody glades, still lakes, and couching fawns.

[Illustration: WOBURN.]

[Sidenote: _WOBURN_]

There is no doubt possible to even the most hurried wayfarer as to who owns the tiny townlet of Woburn, just outside the park. The great old coaching inn, the “Bedford Arms,” proclaims it, alike in its name and in the heraldic signboard, displaying the arms of the Russells and their motto, _Che sara sara_—_i.e._ “What will be, will be.” And, judging from the demeanour of the few people to be seen, the Dukes of Bedford own them too. It is not enough for the Dukes that they reside secluded in the midst of their wide-spreading park. They look with disfavour upon a town at their gates, even though that town be in fact but a village; and in consequence there is no new building in the place. If the prevailing Russell characteristic were not parsimony, there can scarce be any doubt that they would have razed Woburn to the ground; but that would cost something, an excruciating thought to this frugal race. Therefore Woburn remains very much what it was a hundred years ago. Cobblestones of the “petrified kidney” kind pave the road and footpaths, and the shops are of the kind in which Jane Austen might have bought her linen and her groceries. Quaint shop-fronts they are, with windows patterned like the glazed doors of antique bureaus. In short, Woburn is a rare and interesting relic of times past.

Expansion of business is a thing unthinkable here, and some shops, and some of the one-time many inns, have given up in despair. The only new, or comparatively new, things in Woburn are the parish church and the town hall: the last-named built in 1830, and the church in 1868, with alterations in 1890.

It is somewhat difficult to characterise the new church. When you have called it “Early English,” you momentarily think you have the style, but no: there is a florid, alien, meretricious manner in it that refuses classification. The peculiarly chalky white stone of which it is built is not pleasing. At any rate, it was ducally expensive: having cost the eighth Duke £30,000. The chief idea was the greater glorification of future Russells, whose tombs were intended to be placed here; but the constant reminder outside their own park that even Dukes of Bedford must die did not commend itself to others of the clan, and so their historic burial-place at Chenies, in Buckinghamshire, many miles distant, is retained. The angles of the church tower are finished off, against the sky-line, with four devils whose weird aspect, horse-like heads and curled manes impress me more than anything else, unless indeed it be the perfection of the magnificent lawn that slopes steeply to the road.

All the way from sleepy old Woburn to the modern, very much up-to-date, and bustling town of Woburn Sands the road passes through beautiful woodlands, echoing with the voices of pheasants, and rich in the odours of pine and beech and laurel. In midst of this scenery, the half-timbered “Henry the Eighth’s Lodge,” with clipped yew-trees, in shape like so many Stilton cheeses, is very striking. After these solitudes, Woburn Sands comes very much as a surprise, and to some perhaps not altogether a welcome one.

[Sidenote: _EX-HOGSTYE END_]

Woburn Sands is an entirely modern name. You will look in vain for it in the pages of Cary or Paterson, for in the old days of the road the place was merely an insignificant hamlet known by the unlovely name of Hogstye End. But things have happened since then. A branch line of the London and North-Western Railway was constructed, crossing the road at this point, and with a station at the roadside. Thus brought into touch with the outer world, the simple souls of Hogstye End arose as one man, and demanded a new name for the place: and so the title of Woburn Sands was invented. To-day, the astonished traveller sees a typical twentieth-century township on the site of Hogstye End: a rosy, red-brick place, growing at the expense of Woburn itself; and making strenuous claims to be a health-resort, by reason of the sandy soil and the wide-spreading fir-woods. The observant traveller will notice a singular testimony to the belief, until recently prevailing, that the days of the road were done, in the arrogant behaviour of the railway company at this point, in actually encroaching upon the main highway with the out-buildings of their station and the obstructing position of the gates of their level-crossing, often closed for ten minutes at a time during shunting operations.

Leaving Woburn Sands, we incidentally leave Bedfordshire and enter Bucks, coming in seven miles, past the unremarkable villages of Wavendon and Broughton, to the town of Newport Pagnell.

XVII

Newport Pagnell is not a port nor is it new, and the Paganels who gave it the second half of its name have been extinct so many centuries that there are not even any monuments of them left in the church. There is indeed nothing feudal in the appearance of the little town, and the very site of the great Norman castle built by Fulke Paganel is obscure.

[Sidenote: _ANOTHER QUEEN ANNE_]

It is a little, lop-sided town, calm and cleanly, with houses, stone-built and brick, chiefly of Queen Annean and Georgian dates, situated on the river Ouse. To enter the town, you cross over that not very broad river by an iron bridge, built in 1810; and there you obtain the prettiest view in all Newport. Immediately across the bridge is “Queen Anne’s,” or St. John’s Hospital, looking very new, for it has recently been rebuilt. One of its many rebuildings was that by Queen Anne, in 1615: not the Queen Anne who (as the saying goes) is dead, but another Queen Anne who is, if possible, even more dead: the Anne of Denmark, who was Queen of James the First. Even the hospitallers who are still advantaged by her re-founding of the ancient almshouse are in a state of benighted ignorance as to her identity: they either suppose her to be the Anne, Queen Regnant, whom we all know; or else frankly say they “dunno nawthin’ about who she wor,” and might with equal truth add that they don’t care.

[Illustration: NEWPORT PAGNELL.]

Almost all that remains of the old building is a tablet, with inscription very difficult to be read, and weirdly misspelled, imploring:

Alyov good christiams that here dooe pas By give soome thimg to thes poore people That im St. Johmns Hospital doeth ly.

1615.

Newport Pagnell has already been referred to as “lop-sided,” a phenomenon occasioned by the railway station at the western end of the town. It is not a large station, and it is only the terminus of a short branch from Wolverton, but it has caused the little building that has taken place in Newport in the last sixty years to be done almost exclusively here. Near by, in a house called “The Green,” there once lived an eccentric medical man, a Dr. Patrick Renny, who was born in 1734, and died here in 1805; being buried, by the terms of his will, in the garden, where an obelisk over his grave—now entirely overgrown with ivy, and looking like an ancient tree—may still be seen.

[Sidenote: _JOHN WESLEY_]

In leaving Newport Pagnell, we may depart in imaginary company with John Wesley, who was riding horseback this way to Northampton on May 21st, 1742, when he overtook one who eventually proved to be a Calvinist, “a serious man with whom I immediately fell into conversation. He presently gave me to know what his opinions were, therefore I said nothing to contradict them. He was quite uneasy to know ‘whether I held the doctrines of the decrees as he did’; but I told him over and over ‘We had better keep to practical things, lest we should be angry with one another.’ And so we did for two miles, till he caught me unawares and dragged me into the dispute before I knew where I was. He then grew warmer and warmer; told me I was rotten at heart, and supposed I was one of John Wesley’s followers. I told him ‘No, I am John Wesley himself.’ Upon which he would gladly have run away outright. But being the better mounted of the two, I kept close to his side and endeavoured to show him his heart till we came into the street of Northampton.”

Let us hope that Calvinist was duly convinced of error.

To the north, on our road to Northampton, Newport has grown not at all: for reasons sufficient to the observation of all who pass this way: the river Ouse and its adjacent wet meadows, over which the road is taken on a bridge and a causeway, forbidding, even if the parish boundary did not.

Here is Lathbury, whose church and few houses are to be sought off the road by turning to the left at a point where a formal red brick mansion, formerly “Lathbury Inn,” stands. There was some little trouble here in 1745, when Mrs. Symes, of Lathbury Park, an ardent Jacobite, refused the Duke of Cumberland and his army a passage through her estate: with the result (as she did not possess an army of her own) that they passed through, riotously and destructively, instead of decently and in good order.

The little church of Lathbury is a singularly beautiful village church, with oddly diminishing tower walls. The interior, Norman and Early English, still preserves abundant traces of frescoes of Renaissance character, with texts and the beautiful Lord’s Prayer. A small brass, dated 1661, to one Davies, son of a former rector, is placed here, according to the inscription, so that other “Cambria-Brittaines,” passing, should see it. “Cambria-Brittaine” appears to be seventeenth-century pedant’s language for “Welshman.”

[Illustration: LATHBURY CHURCH.]

[Sidenote: _A GUNPOWDER PLOTTER_]

The stable-clocks of Gayhurst and Tyringham chiming from either side of the road advertise the whereabouts of those places, effectively hidden though they be in summer by wayside foliage, save for a glimpse here and there. The historic manor-house of Gayhurst might readily be missed, were it not for the lodge-gates; and that would be a loss indeed, for the place is historic in very dramatic sort. The present house dates back in its oldest portions to 1500, when an Early Renaissance mansion was erected by the Nevill family, who ended in an heiress whose marriage brought the estate into the family of Mulso. It was Thomas Mulso who in the time of Queen Elizabeth remodelled the house, and, like many another loyal gentleman of that age, gave it a ground-plan representing the letter E, in compliment to his sovereign: the end limbs of the E being represented by the wings, and the middle limb by the projecting porch. Soon again, however, for lack of heirs male, Gayhurst changed hands, when Mary Mulso married the handsome young Catholic gentleman, Sir Everard Digby, in 1596. The old hiding-places, secret chambers, and uncomfortable quarters in the chimney-flues, with which the house had been thoughtfully provided, were found very useful in the rash young Sir Everard’s time, for he was one of the participants in the Gunpowder Plot, and entertained his fellow-plotters here. Realising the risks he ran, he made over Gayhurst by deed of gift to his son, Kenelm, then but twelve months old. Thus, by early application of the Heaven-sent limited-liability principle, he preserved the estate from the otherwise inevitable confiscation that awaited unsuccessful treason; and went to the scaffold in January 1606, easy on that head. And so, in due course, Sir Kenelm came to his own, and although he endured persecutions and whips and scorns under the Commonwealth, was not altogether unhappy.

The large edible snails he introduced from the South of France, in the hope of curing his consumptive wife, Venetia, still have their descendants in the woods here: the woods that represent those early boskages whence Gayhurst obtained its original name of Goddeshurst, which gradually, by way of “Gotehurst”, _i.e._ “God’s Wood”, and “Gothurst”, has become what it is now.

[Illustration: GAYHURST.]

The Digbys ended in two unmarried sisters, who in 1704 sold their ancestral home to Sir Nathan Wrighte, Queen Anne’s Keeper of the Seals, whose monumental effigy, gorgeously robed, lies in the classic church hard by the house; and the Wrightes themselves parted with it in 1830.

Beside historic associations, Gayhurst has literary memories, for this is the poet Cowper’s country, and he often visited the Mr. Wrighte of that age, travelling from Olney, little more than four miles away, to admire the gardens, the hot-houses, and “the orange-trees, the most captivating creatures of the kind I ever saw.” But he does not enlarge upon the interesting Early Renaissance architecture of the older part of the house, which is very justly admired nowadays. The Queen Anne additions, comparatively recent as they were in his time, were better thought of, and the classic church considered exquisite. It was one of Sir Christopher Wren’s last designs, but the great architect never saw it built, for he died, aged ninety-two, in 1723, and it was not begun until the following year.

[Illustration: THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” EAKLEY LANE.]

[Sidenote: _EAKLEY LANE_]

The Ouse, glinting steel-blue amid the green meadows, is seen away to the right of the road, on the way to Eakley Lane, winding placidly and sluggishly along. It is, of course, Cowper’s Ouse:

Ouse, slow-winding through a level plain.

Passing through the village of Stoke Goldington, where the golden-brown stone of Northamptonshire—the “sugar-stone,” as it is locally styled—is first noticed in the buildings, Inckley, or Eakley Lane is reached. “Eakley,” which appears to derive from “Ea” = water, and “lea” = a meadow, referring to the neighbouring water-meadows of the Ouse, is the proper name, but the spot was known indifferently by either spelling in coaching days, when it was notable for two inns, the “Bull’s Head” and the “George and Dragon.” Both houses are still in existence, but have long since ceased to be inns.

Old houses that were once inns are indeed remarkably plentiful in these next few miles. At Horton there stands what was formerly “Horton Inn,” now a handsome country residence. Obviously it was built in two separate periods; beginning business in a modest way and then enlarged to twice its original size. Doubtless further enlargements and improvements were in contemplation when the era of railways came in and doomed all such hopes to failure. A spacious drive once led up to the house, but that was long ago walled in and converted into a garden.

Here we come into Northamptonshire, uphill, into the region that was once known as Salcey Forest, which, with the Forest of Rockingham to the east and that of Whittlebury on the west, was in the days of the Plantagenet kings a portion of a vast chase, in which the red deer were of far more account than men.

[Illustration: HORTON INN.]

[Sidenote: “_SUGAR-STONE_”]

Northamptonshire, which takes its name from Northampton, the county town (itself originally merely “Hampton,” and afterwards styled “North Hampton” for the express purpose of distinguishing it from Southampton), is an undulating shire of what Horace Walpole was pleased to style, rather aptly, “dumpling hills.” It is rich in building-stone of various kinds, largely of that beautiful golden-russet ferruginous sandstone, already referred to as “sugar-stone”; hence the fine substantial character of local buildings. Brick is not introduced largely into the architecture of its towns and villages.

Fuller, who was a native of this shire, writing of it two hundred and fifty years ago, said there was as little waste ground here as in any county of England, and compared Northamptonshire with “an apple without core to be cut out, or rind to be pared away.” His praise was not extravagant, for the country contains little or nothing in the way of bleak heath or barren moor.

This “shire of squires and spires” is also in old folk-rhyme that of “spinsters and springs,” and of “pride, poverty, and puddings,” ascriptions not readily to be understood, unless they be merely examples of a rustic passion for alliteration reduced to an absurdity; for spinsters abound in other shires, and no one surely would seriously contend that Northamptonshire was favoured above the ordinary in the matter of springs, conceit, pauperism, and puddings. But the spires are, at any rate, an indubitable and a beautiful architectural fact.

Passing through Horton, we make a first acquaintance with them at Piddington, a village of the smallest dimensions with a church of the largest. Both are situated a few hundred yards off the road, the Early English church spire peaking up magnificently among the trees, with a peculiar richness of outline. Restoration recently in progress with the particularly vivid yellow-brown stone from the Duston quarries, two miles from Northampton, makes the restored patches stand out with glaring offensiveness; but Time will remedy that—as all other ills.

[Illustration: PIDDINGTON CHURCH.]

[Sidenote: _HACKLETON_]