Part 19

William Bass very soon withdrew from the carrying business, which was left to other members of his family and eventually absorbed by the firm of Pickfords, in whose service there remained many years, until his death at an advanced age, a Michael Bass, great-uncle, I believe, of Lord Burton.

Ashbourne, although a town of four thousand inhabitants, is now a very quiet place, and there is little to stir the pulses, except the annual Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday game of football through the streets, between the rival “Uppards” and “Downards” ends. The goals are placed three miles apart at Sturston and Clifton mills, on the Henmore, and there the excited scrimmages in the water, and the consequent duckings, often ending in fights, seem to exhaust all the energies of Ashbourne until the next Shrovetide.

[Illustration: CHURCH STREET, ASHBOURNE.]

Ashbourne has a good many claims to notice. Among them is that of possessing a Grammar School which has twice, through bad management, been reduced to one scholar. According to Cotton, fellow-angler with Izaak Walton, the town held an invidious distinction in his day, being famed for the best malt and notorious for the worst ale in England. Prominent among its features is the church of St. Oswald, “the Pride of the Peak.” It is not near the Peak, but that is immaterial, nor is it, as George Eliot says, “the finest mere parish church in the kingdom”; but it is, at any rate, an exceedingly large and very beautiful building, with a graceful spire rising to a height of 212 feet. Boswell styled it “one of the largest and most luminous churches that I have seen in any town of the same size.” The church was built in the Early English period, as the dedication plate, still existing, proves. There are many very beautiful and interesting monuments here, but none—not even that of Penelope Boothby—more beautiful than the modern stained-glass window erected to one of the Turnbull family. It is a fine piece of varied colouring, notably in the gorgeous blue of the angel’s robe.

[Sidenote: _THE COKAYNES_]

The old lords of Ashbourne, the Cokaynes and the Boothbys are represented plentifully in epitaphs and chiselled stone and marble in the north transept. For more than two centuries—from 1372 to 1592—the Cokaynes ruled, and after them came the Boothbys, for two hundred and fifty years. The Cokayne monuments are very fine, although Ruskin will only allow them to be blundering journeyman attempts at imitating Italian workmanship of the same date. They look, however, very grim old knights and dames who thus lie in stark effigy, in rows, the knights in their chain or plate armour, the dames in their horned or butterfly head-dresses, when compared with the effigy of little Penelope Boothby, the only child of the last of the Boothbys of Ashbourne Hall.

[Sidenote: _PENELOPE BOOTHBY_]

The epitaph reads

To Penelope Only child of Sir Brooke Boothby and Dame Susannah Boothby, Born April 11th, 1785, died March 13th, 1791. She was in form and intellect most exquisite. The unfortunate parents ventured their all in this Frail bark, And the wreck was total.

An inscription beneath runs in English: “I was not in safety, neither had I rest, and the trouble came.” This is repeated in Latin, French, and Italian.

[Illustration: PENELOPE BOOTHBY’s MONUMENT.]

The white marble effigy, showing the child lying on a mattress, one of the most simple and yet most beautiful examples of monumental sculpture, is the work of Thomas Banks, R.A., and is perhaps the most celebrated piece of sculpture in England. I do not know why Sir Brooke chose to express his sorrows chiefly in Italian. Long inscriptions in that language appear on the marble, carefully translated in one of the books for which he was responsible:

All our joys are perished with thee alone, But thou art happy and blessed, my dear Penelope, who, by one touch of Death, hast Escaped so many and so great miseries.

* * * * *

Those that descend into the grave are not concealed from Heaven.

* * * * *

Thy locks of pure shining gold, the lightening of thy angelic smile, which used to make a Paradise on earth, are now become only a little senseless dust.

* * * * *

Beauty, this then is thy last asylum!

Her tomb does not yet contain all: it waits for the rest of its prey:—it will not wait long.

But “hearts do not break, they sting and ache,” and Sir Brooke survived for years afterwards.

The love Sir Brooke Boothby bore his little daughter is reflected in many ways. He wrote and printed a considerable volume, _Sorrows Sacred to the Memory of Penelope_; but he was something by way of a literary gent and nursed his grief for the purpose of increasing his output; and even then his tearful cantos made but a few pages, so he filled out the book with other literary exercises. But he did not _sell_ his book: he did not do as did our own modern What’s-his-Name, who wrote a poem on the death of his wife and sold it to an editor.

Even more famous than the celebrated monument to Penelope Boothby is the portrait of her painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1788, and familiar to most people in the engravings after it. The original picture was bought at auction, at the Windus sale of 1859, by the Earl of Dudley, for eleven hundred guineas, and in 1885 it was bought by Mr. Thwaites for no less than £20,000. It was the direct inspiration of Sir John Millais’ equally famous “Cherry Ripe,” painted as a portrait of the little Miss Ramage, who had gone to a fancy-dress ball in the character of Penelope.

The inspiration of the monument itself has been very marked. The “Sleeping Children” by Chantrey in Lichfield Cathedral is due to Mrs. Robinson, the mother of them, asking Sir Francis Chantrey, whom she had commissioned, to base his work on the monument to Penelope. The sculptor accordingly visited Ashbourne and made a sketch from the work of Thomas Banks.

Lichfield then speedily became the object of the hatred and jealousy of the Ashbourne people, who heard with bitter feelings that the group by Chantrey was even better than the figure they so prided themselves upon. So far back as 1829, a visitor told how “the venerable matron that shows the monument” in Ashbourne church said, in reply to a remark that Chantrey’s sculpture was the finer, “Humph! the like of that’s what I hear every day. Hang that fellow Chanty, or Canty, or whatever you call him! I wish he had never been born.”

Ashbourne Hall, the old home of the Boothbys, is now an hotel. It sheltered Prince Charles in 1745, and in the other bedrooms his chief officers quartered. Their names were chalked at the time upon the doors, and the chalk was afterwards painted over carefully in white paint by some Boothby eager to preserve memories of the historic occasion, but no traces of them are now to be seen.

[Sidenote: _PRISONERS OF WAR_]

During the wars with Napoleon, Ashbourne enjoyed a phenomenal prosperity; for, owing largely to its situation in the midst of England, rendering access to the sea rather a long business, the Government made the little town a place where, by 1804, two hundred captured French officers were stationed, on parole. They are said to have spent £30,000 a year in this place. The worst of which they had to complain was their enforced idleness and the obligation to be within bounds at nine o’clock in the evening. They were, in any case, not supposed to go beyond one mile from the town, and if they were late the penalty was a fine of one guinea, to be given to the informer. General Roussambeau was one of the most distinguished of these prisoners. One day he rode far beyond bounds, to Matlock, to meet Lord Macartney and General Boyer. He met them, and with them a humorous person who joked with him at breaking bounds. The Frenchman, incensed at this, promptly sent him a guinea, the informer’s fee, on his return to Ashbourne; whereupon, not willing for the Frenchman to have the last word, the humorist in haste informed the authorities in London, who at once removed Roussambeau to Yaxley, in Huntingdonshire.

But Dr. Johnson is the great figure at Ashbourne. Here he for many years used to visit Dr. Taylor, at the great brick house, still standing, opposite the old Grammar School. It is named simply, and yet arrogantly, “The Mansion.” Tradition tells that the frontage was designed by an Italian architect: probably the dullest dog in his profession, if the solid, stolid, uninspired elevation is the measure of his capabilities. But how beautiful is the garden front, with its two gabled wings and the odd, but distinguished, pavilion between! This unusual feature, containing what is known as the “Octagon Room,” is said to have been built by Dr. Taylor for the purpose of entertaining George the Third.

Dr. Taylor was one of a kind peculiar to the eighteenth century and the first few years of the nineteenth. Low reforming people have so altered the complexion of affairs that his sort are now well-nigh impossible. He was the ideal squarson; with an estate of his own and all manner of pickings from the Church of England, including the rectory of St. Margaret, Westminster, a prebendal stall in the Abbey, and the rectory of Market Bosworth. He was also a Justice of the Peace. He lived in a style befitting these dignities and the emoluments that derived from most of them, and rarely went out without his post-chaise, four horses, and two postilions.

[Sidenote: _THE SQUARSON_]

The tie between Taylor and Dr. Johnson was that of early school-friendship and of a continued acquaintance at Oxford, although, to be sure, when they went up to the University, Taylor as a rich man went of course to Christ Church, and Johnson, equally of course, to Pembroke.

One of Taylor’s hobbies was that of making cascades in his garden, from the Henmore. The observer of to-day who regards the exiguous trickle of that stream with a doubtful eye is of opinion that it must have been ill striving to make cascades out of it, if the flow were no greater then than now. Another hobby was farming, and Dr. Johnson, in his correspondence with Mrs. Thrale, tells how he kept a great bull whose like, he boasted, was not to be found elsewhere in Derbyshire. He was so proud of his bull that he generally, with considerable pains, managed to lead up to the subject of it at table. One day, however, a man called upon Dr. Taylor, on the subject of hiring a farm, and was shown the famous bull, and to Dr. Taylor’s mortification declared he had seen one still larger. He does not seem to have succeeded in hiring that farm, and a year later, Dr. Johnson is found writing to Mrs. Thrale, “We yet hate the man who had seen a bigger bull.”

[Illustration: THE “GREEN MAN AND BLACK’s HEAD,” ASHBOURNE.]

In 1776 Johnson introduced his friend Boswell to Dr. Taylor, and the next year that hero-worshipper was invited, on the instance of Dr. Johnson, to make a longer stay. He remained a fortnight. At his departure for the north he hired a post-chaise at the still-existing “Green Man” inn, which has absorbed the “Black’s Head” since then and added the name of that extinct house to its own. Boswell describes the landlady of the “Green Man” as a “mighty civil gentlewoman.” Indeed she was! She gave him a humble curtsey, and an engraving of her house, upon which she had written: “M. Kilingley’s duty waits upon Mr. Boswell, is exceedingly obliged to him for this favour; whenever he comes this way, hopes for the continuance of the same. Would Mr. Boswell name this house to his extensive acquaintance, it would be a singular favour conferred on one who has it not in her power to make any other return but her most grateful thanks and sincerest prayers for his happiness in time and in blessed eternity. Tuesday morn.” There does not seem to have been an “Amen” at the end of this, but it is certainly a “felt want.”

The gallows sign of the house boldly straddles the narrow street, with the “Green Man” sign pendant from it, and a huge “Black’s Head,” with glaring eyes and a gaudily painted turban, above.

XXXI

[Sidenote: _CHOICE OF ROADS_]

Leaving Ashbourne, the traveller has still a choice of routes to Manchester. He may go by the bleak and lofty road across the Derbyshire moorlands, with scarce a house for many miles to keep him company, by Newhaven Inn, and in the solemn companionship of the Roman road and the prehistoric tumuli, on to Buxton and by Whaley Bridge to Stockport; or he may choose the way by Leek and Macclesfield to Stockport, which is the old mail-coach route, and therefore pre-eminently _the_ Manchester Road. The Buxton route was, however, the earlier of the two, and only fell out of use after 1762, when the road by Leek and Macclesfield was improved and turnpiked. A better surface than that of this route could not be denied, but the stark loneliness of it, its aloofness from most human interests—it runs as it were along the roof of the world—are rather ghastly. How the isolated inns—the “Jug and Glass,” the “Newhaven Inn,” the “Bull-i’-Thorn,” and the “Old Duke of Cumberland”—pick a living it is difficult to tell.

To go back to still earlier times, neither of these routes formed part of the way between London and Manchester, and a writer of historic novels who sought to give us a true romance of this road in, say, the seventeenth century, would need to set his horsemen, who were then your only travellers, jogging along from Manchester to London by way of the roundabout route of Warrington, Great Budworth, Cranage Heath, Holmes Chapel, Brereton, Church Lawton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, whence they would generally proceed by Stone, Lichfield, and Coleshill. That was, with minor divagations suggested by taste and fancy, or by such circumstances as floods or highwaymen, the old original post-road.

[Sidenote: _FEROCITIES_]

The river Dove is crossed at Hanging Bridge, or Mayfield Bridge, where rival inns, one on either side of the water, glower at one another and divide the custom of the contemplative angler and the strenuous pilgrims of the road. It is “Hanging Bridge” because of the legendary execution of rebels here.

The annals of Hanging Bridge are varied by an incident of the ’Forty-five, not yet entirely forgotten, when the innkeeper, in defence of his cellar, was wounded by one of the Highlanders.

It is not so long since the countryfolk ceased talking familiarly of that time; of the farmer who was shot dead by two rebels, to whom he had refused to give up his horse; and of the dreadful fate that befel those stragglers who from one cause or another fell from the ranks of Prince Charlie’s retreating army. I picture the gaunt, ragged Highlander, fallen by the wayside, a stranger in a strange land, understanding nothing of English; and I see the murderous peasantry, revenging themselves upon him for their late terrors, by stringing him up to the nearest tree. Legends tell how these derelicts of the invading army were hanged from signposts, but we may easily disprove that much, for there were not any signposts in 1745. The simple villagers used the trees instead. A horrid story is indeed told of one of the pottery towns, by which it appears that the body of one of these unfortunate clansmen was flayed, and a drum made of his skin.

[Illustration: HANGING BRIDGE.]

The last incident that is at all worth recording here is that of 1819, when Manchester was thirsty for political reform, and thousands of its people incidentally hungering for bread. A march on London was proposed by the “Blanketeers” after the broken-up meeting of “Peterloo,” but extremely hot weather and other discouragements were in their way. Despite opposition, however, five hundred reached Macclesfield, but there they were dispersed by the military, and only one reached Ashbourne. As a threatening demonstration he was not a success.

[Sidenote: _THE MOORS_]

At Mayfield lived none other than Tommy Moore, nearly four years, between 1813 and 1817, and here, inspired by the sweet-toned chimes of Ashbourne, he wrote the familiar verses, _Those Evening Bells_:

Those evening bells! Those evening bells! How many a tale their music tells Of youth and home, and that sweet time When last I heard their soothing chime!

Those joyous hours are passed away, And many a heart that then was gay Within the tomb now darkly dwells, And hears no more those evening bells.

And so ’twill be when I am gone; That tuneful peal will still ring on; While other bards shall walk these dells, And sing your praise, sweet evening bells.

[Illustration: THE MANCHESTER MAILS PASSING ONE ANOTHER NEAR ASHBOURNE.

[_After J. Pollard._ ]

At Mayfield Cottage, in midst of typical English scenery, and with the meadows and the cows coming up to his very door, he wrote that work of supercharged Orientalism, _Lalla Rookh_; and here he first tasted the delights of literary success. Byron had set the fashion in literature and made Eastern subjects pay, and Moore accordingly proposed to take advantage of the prevailing taste and write a poem of giaours, houris, peris, and bul-buls. He knew nothing of Oriental subjects, but that mattered little. Purchasing every available book on the East, he retired to this spot, and, after three years’ studying the library thus acquired, produced that highly successful work. There were great men in those days, but perhaps Longmans were the greatest among them. They agreed to give Moore £3,000 for _Lalla Rookh_ before ever a line of it was written. O! my Anointed Aunt, three thousand of the best, three thousand golden minted quid for so problematical a result.

[Illustration: SWINSCOE.]

[Sidenote: _THE HAMPS AND THE MANIFOLD_]

Here, across Hanging Bridge, the road has left Derbyshire and entered Staffordshire. It goes up a long, long, staggering hill out of the valley of the Dove and comes to some very grim uplands, where the fields have stone walls instead of hedges, and moors presently take the place of fields. The situation is extremely exposed; hence perhaps the name of the neighbouring village of Blore, _i.e._ a blowy, windy place. Swinscoe, or Swinecote, as it is more properly styled, _i.e._ “Swine’s house,” is a lonely hamlet with a background of dense plantations crowning two forbidding hills. Calton Moor succeeds to it, with a farmhouse at the cross-roads, once the Calton Moor Inn, and the scenery now grows wildly beautiful; the road at last descending with alarming steepness to Waterhouses, with a dangerous level crossing of quarry, or other, works at the bottom. Here the river Hamps sings along the valley, on its way to join the river Manifold, disappearing underground, among the limestone rocks, for some miles: the neighbouring village of Waterfall taking its name from this phenomenon. Waterhouses was in the coaching days nothing more than its name implies: a few scattered houses, chiefly inns, where the coaches changed horses, built in modern times beside the river Hamps, bordering the road. Nowadays it has grown considerably, and since the recent opening of the Leek and Manifold Valley Railway, with a Waterhouses station, it has grown very popular with trippers to the wonderful scenery of the neighbourhood. There are limestone rocks, picturesque cliffs, and ancient bridges along the valley of the Manifold, and a cavern dedicated by the superstitious Saxons to their deity, Thor.

At Winkhill Bridge, down the road, we had bid good-bye to the Hamps, and then came on a hill-top to what used to be known, perversely enough, as “Bottom” inn, now called the “Green Man.” The green man himself, in the guise of an archer, appears on the sign. Cross-roads go off, left to Cheadle, famed in Limerick-lore for a young lady, a needle, and a beadle, and right to Hartington, passing on the way the hamlet of Onecote, whose name gives a fine opening for cheap wits.

[Illustration: WATERHOUSES.]

It is now chiefly downhill to the town of Leek, the “metropolis of the moorlands,” as it has been called, but a metropolis only in a very restricted sense, for its inhabitants number only about 15,000. The sombre, rocky moors of this wildest corner of Staffordshire surround it, and indeed have given the place its name, which comes from the Cymric “llech”: a rock. A tall, mouldering cross in the churchyard of the old parish church, covered with ancient Celtic devices, bears witness to the immemorial antiquity of the settlement.

[Illustration: BOTTOM INN: THE “GREEN MAN.”]

[Sidenote: _THE LABEL-LICKING LIFE_]

Leek, however, is a surprise to most travellers from the south; being a forerunner, a preliminary specimen in Staffordshire, of the typical Lancashire manufacturing town. Cobbles and setts and clogs, with factories and tall chimney-stacks, are its chiefest features, and the spinning of silk thread its principal business. The public in general know nothing of Leek, but it was discovered not many months ago by a Radical newspaper on the look-out for a sensation. It may be taken as a certain, sure thing that when a newspaper in these times wants a sensation, it is bound to have it, and this is how it was served up:

THE LABEL-LICKERS

How the Child Workers in Factories Earn a Pittance

MACHINES TOO SLOW

But why not use the thing for all it was alliteratively worth, “The Little Label Lickers of Leek.”

It was not much of a sensation, after all: resolving itself simply into the facts that among the hundreds of girls employed in the silk-thread factories there are many whose business is to pack and label the reels. They are paid a wage that is, it is true, almost incredibly small: one “full-timer” earning, by this account, only 2_s._ 9_d._ in five days, but others up to 10_s._ Among them there are many who refuse to use the mechanical dampers ready to hand, preferring, for sake of extra speed, to lick the labels. This is done with a speed bewildering to any one who has not himself licked and stuck labels for a living. One girl boxed-up twenty-five gross of reels and licked and stuck a like number of labels in a working day of nine hours and a half. It will be observed that no one was obliged to deal with the labels in this way, and that in some factories the use of a damper was even compulsory; but look at the “scare” headlines to be got!

[Illustration: LEEK.]

In common with all other towns that witnessed the march of the Highlanders, and their subsequent retreat, in 1715, Leek long cherished memories of that time. It was an era from which everything else was dated. It was also an era in which the keeping of diaries was the resort of contemplative people, whose observations, entertaining in themselves, are additionally amusing by reason of the diarists’ quaint notions of grammar and spelling. Thus, Squire Mountford, of “the Grange,” is found remarking upon Prince Charlie’s forces as composed of “some very fine men and good horses, but the greater part was such poor, shabby, lowsy, deminutive creatures as never seen in England—one half of ’em without breches; some rid without sadles and halters ... they were expecting the duck’s army would be with them.” By “the duck” we are to understand the Duke of Cumberland, who, sure enough, _was_ with them, later on.