Part 17

This is no place to follow his advance step by step. He gained a complete victory at Prestonpans on September 21st and, the way then cleared, he should have pressed forward. But a lack of sufficient recruits, and, much more certainly, the wish to pose and dazzle Edinburgh, as the victor in this first conflict, led the Prince to delay. Had he made a dash into England on the morrow of Prestonpans, his cousin, King George, would in all likelihood have been overthrown. But he wasted precious time, and only left Edinburgh on October 31st, for the advance upon England, He was at Carlisle on November 9th. The opposition there was feeble, and he took the city and passed on. Meanwhile, large forces were moving up from the south to meet him and his Highlanders. Marshal Wade was in Staffordshire with an army, and the Duke of Cumberland was advancing with another. King George in person was proposing to leave London with a third. Many of these troops had been landed from the scene of war with the French in Flanders, in the interval of inaction after Prestonpans.

Prince Charles decided to give battle to Wade in Staffordshire, and advanced through Lancaster and Manchester, to Stockport. News then arrived of the presence of the Duke of Cumberland with his army divided between Lichfield, Coventry, Stafford, and Newcastle-under-Lyme, and the ingenious ruse was contrived of detaching a small column of Highlanders to Congleton, while the main body of the Prince’s force slipped quietly by the English army, on the road to Derby. It was a master-stroke of manœuvring and was entirely successful. The Duke of Cumberland, thus cleverly deceived, hurried up his forces on the evening of December 2nd, going north, while the invaders pushed south, and were installed at Derby on the 4th, where they were rejoined by the detached column.

[Sidenote: _IN THE BALANCE_]

At this juncture the third English army was just setting out from London and had reached Finchley Common. London was thoroughly alarmed: shops were closed, the banks experienced an uneasy time, and more than one of King George’s ministers anxiously debated the problem of whether it were safest to declare for the Stuarts, or to remain loyal to the House of Hanover. King George himself, according to popular rumour, had made every preparation for leaving the country in haste, if it were found necessary. Above all, the French were expected to attempt a landing. All these terrors and doubts resulted in a panic on a day long after remembered as “Black Friday.”

Prince Charles came very near success. He had five thousand men at Derby, and although his ragged Highlanders were looked upon with contempt by the English people, and although his cause by no means met with the popular support he had anticipated, the people, if indeed they did not help him, at any rate did not very actively oppose. Scottish sentiment had, in a manner truly remarkable, survived the fact that the Prince was a Roman Catholic, and that he was quite ignorant, at the time of his landing, of Scottish costume and manners; but the English people looked with disfavour upon one who was almost as much a foreigner as George the Second himself. They loved neither the Hanoverians nor the Stuarts, and were heartily tired of both their houses, whose ambitions were for ever hindering honest men in their business and their pleasures.

Had Prince Charles made haste to advance beyond Derby, he would have been running grave risks, but, with two hostile forces already near him, the position could scarce have been more dangerous; while it was busily rumoured that either the courage or the loyalty, or perhaps both, of the King’s army on Finchley Common were in doubt; and that on the appearance of the invaders they would promptly lay down their arms. Prince Charles, to do him justice, was eager to advance. To retreat, even for a while, would be, he clearly saw, to strike dismay into his supporters, and to weaken his cause. Already his outposts were six miles south of Derby, holding the approaches to Swarkestone Bridge. He was for risking everything. “Rather than go back,” he said, “I would wish to be twenty feet underground.” But the faint-hearts were numerous around him. Not among the clansmen, but amid the leaders did prudence—to call it no worse name—show itself; and prudence prevailed. After heated councils of war, the outposts were withdrawn, and on December 5th the retreat from Derby began.

The historian who is also a sentimentalist, and looks upon history as a romance, at this point feels keenly disappointed. He cares little for Stuart or Hanoverian, but he feels defrauded of the stirring chapters that would have been added to English history, had Prince Charles pressed on and reached London. Three, at least, of the Georges were so deadly dull, alike in their vices and their less frequent virtues, that a Stuart, even though he developed afterwards all the defects of his race, would have been welcome. But it was not to be, and, after marching into the very middle of England, the invaders marched all the weary way back again; and met disaster miserably in the midst of Scotland. They could have fared no worse, and would have ended more gloriously, in the advance.

[Illustration: “THE BALCONY,” SWARKESTONE.]

[Sidenote: _DISASTER IN RETREAT_]

Some admiration must needs be felt for the villagers near Swarkestone. The Derby militia and amateur soldiers made a strategic movement to the rear on the advance of the Highlanders, but the men of Weston presented an embattled front. In the records of that village we learn the villagers held a council and furbished up their arms for resistance. They sent forth one John Pritchard, as scout, to Derby, to see if the rebels were coming, and despatched on his heels Francis Henshaw and William Dawson, made valiant with three quarts of ale each. William Rose, blacksmith, was paid one shilling “for mending ye towne musquet,” and a further sum of one shilling-and-sixpence was expended upon ammunition for this weapon. Doubtless, the men of Weston would have given a good account of themselves, and it is to be remarked that it was the day after these warlike preparations that Prince Charles began his retreat! Weston rejoiced, and appointed a day of thanksgiving, the village constable contributed half-a-crown thank-offering, and the community got as drunk as funds permitted.

Thus, for many reasons, we look upon Swarkestone Bridge with interest. Causeway and bridge combined extend for three-quarters of a mile; the Trent itself spanned in five arches of 414 feet in all. The causeway, with its many Gothic-arched openings, is obviously very old, and is not improved in appearance by the recent repairs done in blue brick. On the Swarkestone side stands the fine substantial old coaching inn, the “Crewe and Harpur’s Arms,” with the many-quartered shield of arms of the family of Harpur-Crewe, of Calke, near by, prominent over the door, surmounting the motto, _Degenerante genus opprobrium_—“Lineage becomes a disgrace to him who degenerates from it.”

The Harpurs, who settled at Swarkestone in the fifteenth century, came originally from Warwickshire, and flourished here exceedingly, as their monuments in the church, hard by, prove. One, Sir Richard Harpur, 1577, lies in effigy, robed as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and his son, Sir John Harpur, near by. Their old mansion is in ruins close by the church, but in a meadow, still called the “Balcony Field,” remains a curious Jacobean pavilion that would appear to have been the spot whence the ladies of the family and their guests safely watched the sports: the bull-and bear-baiting and other vanished pastimes of a brutal era.

XXVI

[Sidenote: _CAVENDISH BRIDGE_]

Returning to Cavendish Bridge, and crossing it, we enter Derbyshire, whose people have long been unjustly made the subject of the old folk-rhyme:

Derbyshire born, Derbyshire bred, Strong i’ th’ arm, An’ thick i’ th’ ’ead.

The tolls levied at Cavendish Bridge long remained at an almost prohibitive figure. The crossing of the Trent, before the bridge was completed in 1771 at a cost of £3,333, was by means of a ferry-barge, large enough to take vehicles, and the fare for a post-chaise was half-a-crown, which remained the charge for the bridge, as Bray in his tour of 1776 notes.

[Illustration: CAVENDISH BRIDGE.]

Although the bridge was long since freed, the toll-house stands, and on it may still be seen the old notice-board which it seems to have been nobody’s business, in particular, to remove. I am grateful for the fact, for it enables the following particulars to be gleaned:

Tolls taken at this BRIDGE by Virtue of an Act of Parliament being the fame that were taken at the Ferry, viz.:—

_s._ _d._ Coaches, Chariots, Landaus, etc., with 4 wheels, each 2 6 Chaise, Chair, etc.; with 2 wheels 1 0 Waggon, Wain, etc.; with 4 wheels 1 6 Horse, Mule, or Ass, not drawing 0 1

And so forth, through the various classes of traffic, ending with:

_d._ Foot passengers 1 Soldiers (favour’d) 1/2

The Trent, broad and strong, borders the road for the half-mile between the bridge and the village of Shardlow, where the Trent and Mersey Canal runs across the way, and the “Holden Arms,” a church built in the unsatisfactory Gothic of 1838, the “Navigation,” the “Dog and Duck,” and the “Old Crown” inns are huddled; together with a fine old red-brick mansion dated 1686, and bearing the initials R.B.L.

[Sidenote: _APPROACH TO DERBY_]

It is but seven miles onward to Derby, and the town has grown so greatly, and is still growing with such giant strides, that it has sent out, as it were, along the road, all manner of subtle indications of its advance; together with some not so subtle, in the shape of dusty roads and horrible houses. For the worst side of Derby is obtruded upon the London road. You do not come into all this kind of thing at once. It is a sort of gradual declension. First you notice an uncomfortable something indefinable, then the hedges begin to be worn and ragged, and at last disappear altogether. Then you pass a bend in the road—and there—ah! me—is the inevitable electric tramway, with the conductor and driver of the waiting car, in the usual uniform modelled on that of a ship’s petty officer.

But there are two or three things on the way that demand notice. Nowhere can there be another neighbourhood so prodigal in “astons” as this. Here, on the road itself, is Alvaston; to the right is Elvaston, and scattered here, there, and everywhere are Ambaston, Admaston, Chellaston, Breaston, and Osmaston; with one village simply “Aston” unadorned.

The very similar names of Alvaston and Elvaston are productive of infinite trouble to the Post Office and others; but the places are very different from one another. Alvaston is a place of modern suburban development; but Elvaston, lying a mile off to the right of the road, and approached only by difficult byways, is very rural. Hidden away there, stands Elvaston Castle, seat of the Earl of Harrington, that unconventional peer who conducts (or until lately did conduct) a fruit-shop at the corner of Craig’s Court, Charing Cross.

[Illustration: THE TRENT, AND CAVENDISH BRIDGE, FROM SHARDLOW.]

[Sidenote: _PEERS IN TRADE_]

I love the House of Lords and the hereditary principle. Vulgar Radicals declare the Peers a collection of epileptic degenerates, company-promoters, guinea-pigs, touts for wine-merchants, and grinders of the faces of the poor, and point out that many of its members have been in gaol, and others ought to be; and that some (none quite recently) have been hanged, and others have been in inebriate asylums, and will be again; but I should be sorry to see them abolished. They afford so interesting a spectacle, are so superb an anachronism, and provide such engrossing scandals for readers of the newspapers that the public—and the newspaper proprietors—will not easily be persuaded to part with them at the suggestion of the Gideons of the Radical party. We love the romance of the House of Lords; and for this reason we dislike to see its constituent members selling fruit, or, like Lord Londonderry, Lord Dudley, or Lord Durham, selling coals. Lord Tennyson sold milk, and that revolted many: an ennobled poet dealing in dairy produce is an anachronism, and the owner of an historic title entering into business and exercising all the arts of the commercial man while clinging to the privileges of his station is a thing that no one can look upon without sorrow.

Elvaston Castle is an odd place. Exploring in these byways, the wayfarer comes suddenly to it, as into a courtyard, where the church, with its tall pinnacled tower, stands to one side and the mansion on the other, with the courtyard itself littered like the approach to a farm. Tall piers stand on either side, crested with snarling demi-lions holding flaming grenades.

For centuries the estate has been in the Stanhope family, created Earls of Harrington in 1742, and is placed amid very beautiful gardens, greatly improved about the middle of last century by Charles, fourth Earl, who married Maria Foote, the actress, and wrought many wonderful things here; forming that lake which the great Duke of Wellington declared to be the only natural artificial sheet of water he had ever seen. The place looks strangely romantic and wild.

An astonishing story is told of an ancestress of the Earl of Harrington. A Stanhope of olden times died young, and his widow, like those other brilliant Royalist dames at Corfe Castle and Brampton Bryan, held Elvaston during a siege by the Parliamentary forces in 1643, commanded by Sir John Gell. In the end, the besiegers wore out the little defending band at Elvaston, and Sir John Gell, after the manner of the conquering heroes of that time, did what havoc he could about the place. He made a woeful wreck of the beautiful garden, demolished a magnificent monument Lady Stanhope had erected to the memory of her husband, and at last—insisted upon her marrying him! She naturally refused so preposterous an idea—and then quite as naturally agreed to wed this terrific wooer, who literally had stormed his way to her heart. He was very masculine: there can be no doubt whatever of his gender; and if it be true that, above all things, a woman loves a manly man, she had, in Sir John Gell, an ideal mate, for, as the poet says:

’Tis not so much the lover who woos, As the lover’s _way_ of wooing;

and what a way this Roundhead knight had with him!

But Derby town is advancing upon Elvaston, and will shortly be upon it, and the place is in consequence not being maintained in its old style. Some day, possibly, the Midland Railway may come and cut it up. Already it has abolished Osmaston Hall, and made the rest of the way into Derby a grimy, smoke-laden purlieu.

[Illustration: ELVASTON CASTLE.]

XXVII

[Sidenote: _DERVENTIO_]

Derby, or, more strictly, Little Chester, hard by, was the Roman _Derventio_, a name it derived from the river Derwent, in the days of the ancient Britons: the _Dwr gwent_, or clear water. When the Saxons came and settled near the site of _Derventio_, they styled the place “Northweorthing,” and the Danes, who in turn drove out the Saxons, named it “Deoraby,” whence the transition to the modern “Derby” is easy. The modern arms of Derby display a buck _couchant_ in a park, an allusion to the supposed origin of the Danish place-name, thought to derive from the Teutonic name, _thier_, for wild beasts, which term would no doubt include deer. But if this be the correct derivation, it is an extraordinary coincidence that the first syllable of the Roman place-name and that of the Danish should be identical.

The untravelled are easily misled as to the appearance of Derby town. If you were to believe the average guide-book, you would never visit the place, and would rank it with Swindon or Wolverton, or the like. It is true that the chief offices and the works of the Midland Railway are centred here, and that modern Derby is the creation of these circumstances; but, lapped round and enfolded though it is by machine-shops and the mean streets of sheer industrialism, ancient Derby is not altogether to be spoken of in the past tense.

The historical incidents connected with Derby are not many, and they are nearly all associated with the unhappy House of Stuart, whose members exhibited so strange an inability to rule themselves that it remains an odd problem how so ill-balanced a family ever raised itself to kingly rank.

Derby entertained Charles the First in 1635 and made him and his followers welcome to the town. They did it in coin and in kind; with a purse stuffed full of sovereigns, and with gifts of an ox, a calf, and six sheep. In 1642, when the Civil War was already in progress, the King was back again, “borrowing” £300. It has ever been an ill investment, this lending to kings, and Derby never again saw the colour of its money. I, for one, am not surprised that Derby afterwards declared for the Parliament.

[Sidenote: _THE RUNAWAY MUSKETEERS_]

The burgesses were still incensed against the Stuarts when Prince Charlie came in 1745, at the head of his wild Highlanders, in his futile effort to upset George the Second and regain the throne of his ancestors; and, for all the brave promises made, of five shillings down, and five pounds apiece when they reached London, he obtained only three recruits in the whole town. We have already, at Swarkestone Bridge, heard at length of this ill-fated rising, but Derby affords some amusing incidents. The Duke of Devonshire had raised a regiment of one hundred and fifty men, to oppose the advance of the Highlanders, and the squires and magistrates of the county, and the corporation of Derby, had raised a force of six hundred more. Derby apparently presented an armoured front to the foe, but it was woefully deceptive. At ten o’clock on the night of December 3rd, when scouts brought tidings of the enemy’s advance, the drums sounded to the muster and the warriors fell in. The order was given to march, and they marched accordingly: out of the back door when the rebels were coming in at the front. In short, they and the Duke who led them emulated the example of the “runaway musketeers,” or, like a billiard-player, uncertain of the game, played for safety. Whether it were policy, seeing that the invaders were advancing with so bold a front, and looked like being successful, or whether it were cowardice, seems to have been a debated point. But it was certainly not military genius. They were led towards Nottingham, and ravaged the farmhouses for food and drink as they went, making war on the poultry, and forgetting to pay.

Meanwhile, horrid reports reached them from Derby. The Pretender had arrived and had extorted £3,000 from the town. But what sent shivers of apprehension down their spinal columns was the news that the enemy had in great numbers attended service and partaken of the Sacrament, and had then resorted to the cutlers to have their swords sharpened. This meant business. We may imagine the sigh of relief with which these warriors heard of the wholly unexpected retreat of the Highlanders, and that there was not, after all, to be a Battle of Derby.

Industry, and not war, makes up the history of the town, together with the usual amusement of religious persecution that colours the old annals of all places. It was at Derby in 1650 that the Society of Friends first came by the name of “Quakers,” when George Fox was brought as a sectary before Mr. Justice Bennet. “He was,” says Fox, “the first who called us quakers, because I bid them tremble at the word of the Lord.”

[Sidenote: _SILK AND CHINA_]

But soon there were other things to do. in 1717 the art of spinning silk was introduced to England by John Lombe, who built the first mill here, and set up machinery whose secrets he had learned in Italy, until that time the great silk-spinning country. The romantic story is told of how, determined to discover the closely guarded processes of manufacture, he visited Italy and in disguise worked at a silk-mill; returning to England with the information he had acquired, and with a number of workmen he had succeeded in bribing. His death shortly afterwards was ascribed to his having been poisoned by an Italian woman sent over for the purpose by the manufacturers whose secrets he had surprised.

Calico afterwards became, in addition to silk, an article of Derby manufacture, but in the popular mind the name of the town is usually associated with the production of china, the fame of the beautiful “Crown Derby” porcelain being more widespread than that of silk or calico. The Royal Crown Derby works, established about 1750, lasted very nearly a hundred years, being closed in 1848.

Derby was sufficiently important to be able to support a coach to and from London, so early as 1735, when a conveyance set out every Thursday from the “George.” This was continued in 1790 to Manchester, and then went daily; leaving Derby at 3 p.m. and arriving in London at 10 o’clock the following morning. From the “Bell” went another coach, certainly as early as 1778, when, on March 15th, it was announced that “the Derby Fly, in one day to London for the summer season, will set out from the Bell Inn on Sunday next, and will continue to set out every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings at six o’clock, each passenger to pay £1 8_s._ and to be allowed 14 lb. weight of luggage. Performed by Hilliard, Henson, Foster & Co.”

The early importance of the Derby inns as starting and arrival points for the coaches was somewhat obscured at a later date, when coaching had grown enormously, leading to the establishment of special coach-offices in the town, of which Stenson’s General Coach Office, in Sadler Gate, was the chief. An early notice of the “Bell” is found in 1698, when it was kept by one G. Meynell. In 1702 a “Widow Ward” was landlady. In 1761 the house and all its eatables and drinkables were made free to all-comers by Sir Henry Harpur during his Parliamentary candidature. A few years later, the house was rebuilt by a retired West India merchant, John Campion, whose initials, and the date 1774, elaborately done in leadwork, are to be seen to this day on an old pump, still in working order in the courtyard. The house remained in the Campion family until about 1865.

The old claret-coloured brick front of the “Bell” looks down upon Sadler Gate, very much as of old, and its courtyard still echoes with the sound of prosperous business.

[Sidenote: _HIGH TREASON_]

The curtain of romantic history was rung down at Derby on a most dramatic situation, so late as 1817, in the executions here for High Treason.

[Illustration: COURTYARD OF THE “BELL” INN.]