Part 18

The “high treason” for which Jeremiah Brandreth and his associates were then executed was a singular incident to have occurred so late as the nineteenth century. It was nothing less than an attempted rising against the Government; an armed effort at subverting the existing order of things that seemed more in keeping with the insurrections of earlier ages. It certainly never became a formidable movement, and was really an affair fomented by one Oliver, an agent of the Sidmouth-Castlereagh administration, which was uneasy at the generally disturbed state of the country, and fearful that the strong language indulged in by the Radical agitators among the working class and the swiftly increasing numbers of factory-workers might, if unchecked, lead to very serious movements. In this frame of mind, the weak and criminal Ministers appear to have considered that their best course was to employ spies who should worm their way into the confidence of the discontented classes, and actually provoke them into acts of armed rebellion that would give the Government an opportunity of repressing them violently.

The headquarters of Oliver, the spy, were at the turbulent and disaffected town of Nottingham, whence he travelled here and there into the surrounding districts, posing as a leader of London malcontents, and making inflammatory speeches. At the “Blackmoor’s Head” and the “Three Salmons” in Nottingham, he addressed the sullen working-men, and spoke of a “provisional Government” being formed, and of 70,000 men in London, ready to rise. Monday, June 9th, 1817, was fixed by him and his dupes in Derbyshire for a march upon Nottingham, where he declared they would be met by numerous hands of insurgents from the south, and together would seize the Castle. The soldiers, he declared, were with them, to a man.

[Sidenote: _JEREMIAH BRANDRETH_]

Chief among the ardent spirits ready to fall into the snare set by Oliver was Jeremiah Brandreth, a young man of about twenty-five years of age, of a dark, bold, and determined character; the very picture, in appearance and in fiery energy, of a popular leader. His parentage and place of birth are uncertain. Under the leadership of Brandreth, called by his followers “the Nottingham Captain,” and afterwards described as “otherwise John Coke,” a large number of men (according to one account five hundred) assembled, in the words of the subsequent indictment, “with force and arms,” “a great multitude of false traitors,” in the parish of South Wingfield. Among them were agricultural labourers, weavers, and quarrymen of Wingfield, Pentridge, and neighbouring parishes, styling themselves “the Regenerators.” Between June 9th and 15th they hovered between these villages, armed with hedge-stakes and rude pikes, calling at houses and farmsteads to seize any firearms that could be found, and endeavouring to enlist men. Brandreth became possessed of a pair of pistols, which he struck in a belt formed of an apron twisted round his waist. With one of these pistols he shot dead a farm servant named Robert Walters, during an altercation at Pentridge. Meanwhile, hearing no tidings of the supposed insurgents who were to meet them, the undisciplined band grew nervous and disheartened, and their numbers were rapidly thinned by desertions. At length, when they entered the county of Nottingham at Eastwood, there were but forty left. In the interval, the magistrates and the police, probably informed by Oliver, discovered that something of an unusual nature was afoot, and the 95th Regiment of Foot, the Yeomanry, and the 15th Hussars, all ready to hand, were warned to hold themselves prepared for eventualities. By the 15th of June these tremendous preparations were seen to be too ridiculously imposing for the purpose of dealing with a mere dwindling mob; and a mere party of eighteen Hussars was despatched to capture them. Brandreth and his men, standing despondent upon a hill at Eastwood, saw them cantering along, and thought them to be some of the long-expected revolutionaries. They were soon undeceived, and then fled in panic, throwing away their weapons, such as they were. The Hussars captured some thirty of them, between Kimberley and Longley Mill, and lodged them in Nottingham Gaol. Brandreth himself escaped, and lay in hiding for awhile, but was betrayed by “a friend,” for sake of the £50 reward offered.

[Illustration: STAGE-COACH TRAVELLING, 1828 (DERBY AND SHEFFIELD).

[_After J. Pollard._ ]

[Sidenote: _END OF THE TRAITORS_]

The chief figures in this affair were, to the number of twenty-three, arraigned before a special Assize held at Derby on October 15th, with the result that Brandreth, William Turner, and Isaac Ludlam, senior, were condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Eleven others were “pardoned,” as the quaint phrase ran, “upon condition of being transported for life”; three were similarly “pardoned” by being awarded fourteen years’ transportation; while one had two years’, two a term of one year, and three a mere six months’.

The three principal offenders were executed at Nuns Green, on November 7th, and were hanged, having merely their heads cut off afterwards; the Prince Regent “graciously remitting the rest of their sentence.” How kind!

The unfortunate men took affecting leave of one another, anticipating being presently in heaven. The hangman, duly masked—he was said to be one of the Denby colliers—then performed his office, and afterwards cut off the heads: making so ill a job over Brandreth that his assistant was fain to complete the work with knives. Thereupon, the executioner, in the gory old formula, held up the head before the huge assembled crowd, and, turning right and left, exclaimed, “Behold the head of the traitor, Jeremiah Brandreth!”

The bodies of the three men were unceremoniously flung into a pit dug in the churchyard of St. Werburgh, in Friar Gate. A sportive barber, Pegg by name, then took to masquerading in the churchyard as a ghost, robed in a sheet, and, scared the inhabitants for some time, until a bold spirit, throwing a stone at him, hit him with such violence in the eye that he went half blind for the rest of his life.

XXVIII

There are picturesque corners in this town of Derby, so contemned by most writers, sufficient to make the fortune, in the pictorial way, of many another town. Derby, to an artist, at any rate, is a likeable place, and such an one is in sympathy with Boswell, who wrote in 1777:

“I felt a pleasure in walking about Derby. There is an immediate sensation of novelty, and one speculates on the way in which life is passed in it.”

Ancient and modern rudely jostle here, and the streets run on no regular plan. It is a provincial town turned industrial, and still surprised at the change: the any-shaped, no-shaped Market Place, where Boehm’s bronze statue of Michael Thomas Bass stands, remaining still in many ways that of an agricultural market town. But, nevertheless, there has been much pulling down and rebuilding. Among other places, the house where Joseph Wright—the celebrated painter “Wright of Derby”—lived, has disappeared, and modern business premises stand on the site. An iron tablet narrates the facts—but why? Such things do but advertise the shame and set a seal upon regret. Alas! there is no modern Joshua to bid time stand still—and for time to obey.

One of the pleasantest features of the town is the fine park called the Arboretum. Here an interesting relic of the plague that raged in 1665 is placed. This is the so-called “Headless Cross,” or Market Stone, removed from Friar Gate, where it served as a means of communication between the stricken townspeople and the countryfolk, bringing in provisions. The market folk, coming with their mouths filled with tobacco, as a disinfectant, placed the meat and vegetables and dairy-produce they had brought upon the ground and witnessed the inhabitants drop their money into the hollow in the stone, filled with vinegar. With these strict precautions it was hoped to escape infection.

[Illustration: “YOUNG MEN AND MAIDENS.”]

[Sidenote: _ALL SAINTS’_]

All Saints’ Church, the most important of the several in the town, possesses a tall and very beautiful late Perpendicular tower, built about 1520, according to legend, by the bachelors and spinsters of Derby. Still further, according to legend, it used to be the custom for the bachelors to ring the bells whenever a young woman born in the town was married.

There is, unfortunately, no direct evidence that the tower really was the work of the bachelors and the spinsters. It was probably built from the money given by a wealthy townsman, Robert Liversage, a dyer by trade. A battered inscription, “Young men and maidens,” no doubt gave rise to the story. It is now generally believed, except by the humblest people, among whom tales of this romantic kind live longest, that the inscription was once simply the pious invitation, “Young men and maidens, old men and children, praise ye the Lord.”

A cathedral-like size and breadth of proportion mark this fine tower, the product of the last days of Gothic, rising to a height of 174 feet above the pavement; and the quite humble old houses of the narrow street do but serve to show it to further advantage. It is heavily buttressed at the angles, in a manner sufficient to have made Ruskin storm, had he ever occasion to write of it; for it was his theory that towers should stand starkly four-square, without the aid of buttresses. But what would Gothic architecture be without those essential features! Something new and strange.

[Illustration: ALL SAINTS’.]

[Sidenote: _THE UNHAPPY EARL_]

The tower being so fine, of what nature was the body of the church? That we cannot know, for it was rebuilt in a classic style by Gibbs, in 1725, and has the appearance of a great pillared hall, very fine of its kind, and extraordinarily spacious. It was quite a new church, not more than twenty years old, when Prince Charlie attended mass here in the ’45. There are many fine monuments, chiefly from the older building, among them the elaborate memorial, with coroneted effigy, of the famous Bess of Hardwick, that scheming, matchmaking, imperious woman, four times wedded and widowed, whose passion for building and rebuilding rivalled that for forming matrimonial alliances. She is said to have erected her own monument, and it is likely enough she did. Her fourth marriage, in her fiftieth year, to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, embittered the existence of that unhappy man. He was custodian of Mary Queen of Scots. The anxieties of that charge, and a sorry time of it with his wife, shortened his existence. “Two devils,” he described the Countess and the prisoned Queen, and it is likely enough he privately thought Queen Elizabeth, who was for always worrying him, a third. The quarrels of Earl and Countess were notorious, and the Bishop of Lichfield wrote him what was intended to be a comforting letter on the subject. The tenor of it ran that the case certainly was unfortunate, but, after all, this was the usual lot:

“Some will say in yʳ L. behalfe tho’ the Countesse is a sharpe and bitter shrewe, and therefore likely enough to shorten yʳ life if shee should kepe yow company: In deede my good Lo. I have heard some say sa; but if shrewdnesse or sharpnesse may be a just cause of sepacion between a man and wiefe, I thinke fewe men in Englande woulde keepe their wives longe; for it is a comon jeste, yet trewe in some sense, that there is but one shrewe in all the worlde, and so ev’y man hathe her, and so ev’y man might be rydd of his wife, that wold be rydd of a shrewe.”

Looking at that proud, arrogant, masterful face, upturned on the monument, you feel sorry, not only for the Earl, but for all who commerced with her.

[Illustration: ST. ALKMUND’s.]

[Sidenote: _A GROTESQUE STATUE_]

Among the many of the Cavendish family who lie here are William, second Earl of Devonshire, and his wife and children. The Earl himself died in 1628, and he and his family were commemorated by a fearful monument, the effigies grotesquely misshapen and clad in what seem to be sheets. In 1877 the horrible thing was destroyed, but the statues themselves remain; the Earl himself, a shortened figure with wide mouth and a combined wistful, comical, and grotesque expression that puzzles the modern beholder with reminiscent feelings. Where, he asks himself, has he seen the like before? and presently the truth is borne in upon him, that the thing might well be a reproduction of the late Mr. Dan Leno.

St. Alkmund’s spire is a fine foil to the grand tower of All Saints’: its grace contrasting with it, as manly strength with feminine beauty. St. Mary’s, its next-door neighbour, the Roman Catholic church, is an unfortunate example of Gothic as understood in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it is only necessary to descend a little way, to the bridge crossing the Derwent, and then to look back, for distance to lend a peculiar enchantment to the scene. From the hump-backed bridge you see the bad details of its ill-informed Gothic abolished in a broad, comprehensive kindly haze of smoke issuant from the clustered chimneys of this slummy but picturesque quarter, and it stands up boldly in the view, with St. Alkmund’s spire on the left, as though inspired with the finest spirit of the fifteenth century. Equally kindly poplar trees, growing courageously from the Derwent banks, come in to aid the view. We will not look too curiously upon the Derwent itself, for although splashing weirs diversify it, factories of divers sorts line its course, and the water is polluted by them; and this, in short, is not the Derwent as understood by poets.

[Illustration: ST. MARY’s BRIDGE.]

[Sidenote: _THE OLD CRAFTSMAN_]

The bridge itself is small and old, and doubtless will in the not distant future give place to a new. Meanwhile it is weathered in a way that artists love, and there are some quite fine lamp-standards on it, designed in the days before gas. Their design and execution are unobtrusive: it is indeed quite a small achievement, and doubtless the smith who wrought these standards, a hundred and fifty years or so ago, did the work in the everyday course of his craft and thought no more about the matter. But he wrought better than he knew. They were not—those old fellows—self-conscious: they did not know they were artists, and did not do like their present-day descendants, stand admiringly before their work and call heaven and earth to witness the supreme artistry of it.

XXIX

The Manchester Road leaves Derby by way of Friar Gate: the town extending rapidly in that direction, too. As I came this way, gangs of navvies were excavating for the new electric tramway, and there I saw, amid the churned mud, a crushed white butterfly; and it seemed to me to typify these developments.

[Sidenote: _KEDLESTON HALL_]

The road onward to Ashbourne is lonely, except for the offshoots sent out in the coaching age by adjacent villages. Thus Mackworth is represented by a wayside fringe of houses, the old village lying below, with its fine church and old castle gate; while Kirk Langley, in like manner, lies to the other side of the road. Quarndon, further off to the right, neighboured by Kedleston Park, is brother to Quorndon in Leicestershire; the only wonder being that the other is written with an “o”: the natural rural disposition being to change an “e” (here the “e” in “quern”) into “a” wherever possible in speech.

There was a time when Quarndon enjoyed a considerable reputation as a spa. It possessed the most frightful sulphureous water, which only expert chemists, past-masters in stinks and nauseous flavours, can match; and a big hotel was built near by the spring, to accommodate invalids; who, however, seem to have presently found the healing waters too awful. Like the famous Lord Derby who suffered from gout, and tasting a special sherry that was recommended to him, remarked that he “preferred the gout,” they rather preferred their ailments than this cure for them. And so the hotel has for the last forty years ceased to be an hotel, and is now a farmhouse—and a very ugly one it is, too.

Dr. Johnson, who was shown Lord Scarsdale’s noble residence of Kedleston Hall, near by, affected not to be impressed by it. He objected to it as “costly but ill-contrived,” and was of opinion that more cost than judgment had gone towards the building. The bedrooms, he justly pointed out, were “small, low, dark, and fitter for a prison than a house of splendour,” and the kitchen was so disposed that the fumes of it were plentifully dispersed over the house, so that you dined sufficiently on the smell in the process of cooking, and were much more than satisfied before you sat at table. Indeed, he thought Kedleston Hall to be nothing better than “a big town-hall.” Robert Adam designed and built it, after the requirements of the age, which delighted in such unhomely homes: and nearly all the great mansions of that period have similar objections: that they are a congeries of mean and awkward rooms, built around a central hall designed to strike neighbours with astonishment and envy. Here the great hall, with its twenty Corinthian columns of pale primrose Elvaston alabaster, is noble enough for an Emperor, but most of the other rooms are mean.

Brailsford, on the way to Ashbourne, still tells in no uncertain way, to those interested in these things, of coaching days. Here still stand the “Rose and Crown,” the “Saracen’s Head,” where the old “Manchester Defiance” changed horses, and a number of farmhouses that were once inns of various grades. And now the scenery grows bold and lovely with thickly wooded hill and dale. Down on the left hand you see a magnificent castellated building of dark limestone, seated in a park where deer are roaming. This is Osmaston Manor, whose grandeur would be calculated to astonish the original Osmund who gave this particular “aston” his name, in far-off Saxon times. It is the seat of Sir Peter Walker, son of Sir A. B. Walker, the first baronet, widely known as the donor of the great Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, where his wealth—his will was proved for three millions sterling—was acquired in the brewing of beer. In the park of Osmaston Manor there roam Chitrali goats and Iceland and Siberian sheep.

The country round about is spangled with another collection of “aston” villages; Ednaston, Edlaston, Ellaston, Hognaston. Muggington is the grotesque name of a place on the right hand of the road.

[Sidenote: _ASHBOURNE_]

A long and steep hill leads down into Ashbourne, but the way was steeper and more winding before this road was cut, in coaching days, replacing the hazardous descent of Spital Hill. “Romantic Ashbourne,” says Canning; and there it lies, far below, in the valley of the Dove, so dwarfed by distance; and the almost sheer look down upon it that the huddled houses look like some sediment, collected at the bottom of the green vale.

XXX

The approach to Ashbourne, when you have descended the hill, is not romantic, consisting as it does of the long squalid street of Compton, rich in “lodgings for travellers,” _i.e._ tramps; and with the little two-arched bridge, spanning the Henmore stream, lined with men and boys diligently occupied in doing nothing, with great zest and complete content.

The road at the end of Compton, which to all intents and purposes is Ashbourne, takes a puzzling right and left-angle turn; and there you are in the long street of the town, with the market-place, lining the side of a hill, and the “Green Man,” at one end, and the church at the other.

The town stands at a junction of roads that was once of considerable importance. Going forward to Manchester, there is a choice of routes; by way of Buxton, or by Leek, and thus the coaching traffic of Ashbourne was considerable.

Canning, in his _Loves of the Triangles_, a sly parody of Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s admired _Loves of the Plants_, celebrates Ashbourne and the “Derby Dilly” which ran through it:

So down thy hill, romantic Ashbourne, glides The Derby Dilly, carrying three insides, One in each corner sits and lolls at ease, With folded arms, propt back, and outstretched knees; While the press’d Bodkin, pinch’d and squeezed to death, Sweats in the mid-most place, and scolds, and pants for breath.

Canning, who was a friend of the Boothbys of Ashbourne Hall, probably wrote this there.

The “Derby Dilly” was the current name for the “Diligence,” or light post-coach, that ran in those days between Manchester and Derby, through Ashbourne, and continued to run in this remote district long after railways had elsewhere displaced coaches. To understand the allusions in Canning’s verse, it is necessary to explain that these “diligences” afforded less accommodation than that of an ordinary coach. They carried no outsides, and three insides only, who sat on one seat, facing the horses. The peculiar defects of the “diligence,” from the point of view of the middle passenger, are obvious enough.

It was long thought that railways would never succeed in penetrating into the Peak district, and the “Derby Dilly” maintained its existence until 1858, when the impossible came to pass. Then also the strictly local mail-coach, the Manchester and Derby Mail, was withdrawn; its last journey being on Saturday, October 2nd, 1858.

[Sidenote: _PICKFORD AND CO._]

But, indeed, these sixty miles between Derby and Manchester must needs be of a peculiar interest to the student of traffic and its growth, for it was in this district that the carrying firm of Pickford & Co. had its beginnings, so far back as three hundred years ago. It was some time early in the seventeenth century that the original firm of pack-horse carriers began, from whose descendants, the Pickfords, by purchase; or otherwise, acquired the business, about 1730. From pack-horses, the goods came at last to be carried by waggons, and about 1770 we find Matthew Pickford established at Manchester, with his scope of operations extending to London, to which his “Flying Waggon” travelled in the then unprecedented time of four days and a half; and so the already historic firm continued until 1817, when Joseph Baxendale was admitted to the old firm of Matthew and Thomas Pickford. He soon acquired control of the business and bought out the Pickfords, and although the name has ever since been retained, the firm still remains the property of his descendants.

Great fortunes have been made in the carrying business, and Baxendales, Suttons, and others have, almost unsuspected, amassed amazing wealth; but not every carrier was satisfied with his lot, and one, at least, saw a more excellent way. This was William Bass, who, about the middle of the eighteenth century, was a carrier between Burton-on-Trent, Ashbourne, and Derby. The greater part of his business was done in the carrying of Burton ale for Benjamin Printon, who had, a good many years earlier, begun brewing for the trade. He had started with three men, but the fame of his beer grew, and induced others to set up. Bass, impressed greatly with the increase of his carrying, caused entirely by the beer trade, planned a way to brew and carry his own beer, and accordingly set up as a brewer at Burton. There is no need to enlarge upon the history of the great firm of Bass & Co., probably now the largest firm of brewers in England, thus founded by William Bass, grandfather of the present head of the firm, Michael Arthur Bass, created Baron Burton in 1886.