The Thames and his Tributaries
by Charles McKay.
Originally published in Bentley's Miscellany (Richard Bentley) vol.6 (1839).
Twickenham.—The Poet's Grave.—Pope's Grotto.—Relics of Genius.—Strawberry Hill.—Etymology and Chronology.— The Heart of Paul Whitehead.—Swans upon the Thames.—The tragical story of Edwy and Elgiva,—An odd petition of the inhabitants of Kingston.
How simple, neat, quiet, and unassuming are all the village churches of England! It is worth a man's while, whose unlucky destiny compels him to fritter himself away among brick walls for six days of the week, to walk out on a Sunday morning ten or twelve miles to church,—far away from the tumult and the dust, to some secluded hamlet or village, where he may worship his Maker,—not more earnestly, indeed, but more refreshed in mind and body, than he could in one of the more pompous temples of the metropolis, where saucy wealth elbows him still, and where he cannot procure a seat, unless he gives evidence of his gentility by the tender of a shilling. It was not Sunday when we strayed into Twickenham church: but even in its emptiness we could not help contrasting its unostentatious sanctity, its meek elegance, to the more spacious places in town, and forming, but not expressing, a slight wish that we lived in a village. We checked it, however, almost as soon as it was formed, for we thought, after all, that if we lived in a village, we should not so much prize a country walk, or have such affection for a country church as now, when we wander forth from busy London, thirsting after the fresh air, and pining for the verdure and the simplicity of rural spots, and enjoying them so much the more for our long and forced abstinence. Perhaps it was the knowledge that we were at the grave of a great poet that made us take so sudden a liking to village churches in general, and to Twickenham church above all others. It ought not to have been so, we are aware. The mere fact that the remains of a clay creature, of more than common note, was lying within its precincts was no true motive for any additional reverence to the temple of God—but so it was. Even Westminster Abbey itself and all its treasured ashes ought, strictly speaking, to inspire no more awe than the humblest chapel where the Great Spirit is truly worshipped; but the memory of the illustrious dead—a sort of half persuasion that their dim ghosts, though unseen, may be hovering above us, works upon the fancy in spite of the reason, telling us that
"Where'er we tread, 'tis haunted holy ground,"
and forcing us into more solemn reverence than we might otherwise feel. Some such influence it was, no doubt, that impressed us with unwonted awe, as we wandered alone from tomb-stone to tomb-stone in search of the tablet to the memory of Pope. We were without the aid, or, as it very often happens, the impediment of a professional guide to point out to us the "thought-deserving-nesses" (to borrow an expressive German phrase) of the spot. Our eyes, however, soon caught a view of a very large tablet in the gallery, with a Latin inscription, to the memory of Alexander Pope. We ascended accordingly, and found that it was the one erected by the poet to the memory of his father and mother. His own was not far off, and was equally ostentatious as regarded size, being about three times larger than any other tablets in the church. The inscription, also in Latin, bore that it was erected to the Poet's memory by his friend the Bishop of Gloucester. Underneath, in English, follow Pope's own lines, "for one who would not be buried in Westminster Abbey,"
Poeta loquitur.
"Heroes and kings, your distance keep,
In peace let one poor poet sleep,
Who never flatter'd folks like you—
Let Horace blush and Virgil too."
Here again, thought we, is vanity in death. Horace and Virgil were no greater courtiers to rank and wealth than Pope was. In fact, it may be questioned whether they were so much so; for among all the literati of the age, Pope stands pre-eminent for his constant respect to mere title. If he did not flatter heroes, he flattered lords, and would have been sorry indeed if they had kept at a distance from him when he was living. But in every sense the inscription is faulty and singularly inappropriate. While we stood uncovered at the spot, and while these thoughts passed rapidly through our mind, we remembered that the fault of this bad taste, if such it were, was not chargeable upon Pope, but upon his friend the bishop, who had erected the monument. In short, the epitaph was written by Pope in a fit "of that ambitious petulance," (to use the words of Johnson,) "with which he affected to insult the great," and ought never to have been placed upon his grave-stone. With this impression we turned again to the memorial that Pope himself had erected to his parents, and there we found no such evidences of vanity. The inscription was simple and unpretending, and set forth, in terms such as a son should use, the piety and the probity of the honoured dead. So, venting our harmless displeasure upon Warburton, and exonerating Pope from all offence, we strolled down to the river side, where our boatman was awaiting us.
In a few minutes more we reached the building now known as Pope's villa. The poet's residence itself has been demolished, with the exception of the grotto near which it stood. Much indignation has been lavished upon Lady Howe, who pulled down the original building, and erected the present enlarged edifice by the side of it. She has been accused of barbarism, want of feeling, deadness of soul, Vandalism, and many other offences. We will not join in this mouthing of the pack; because, however much she may have destroyed of the poet's dwelling, she has left the grotto for the reverence of posterity,—by far the most valuable part of it, containing the rooms in which he was accustomed to study, and in which he entertained his friends, his St. John and his Marchmont, with his wisdom and his wit. There was formerly a willow tree overhanging the river, which has also been removed; but with the destruction of this Lady Howe is not chargeable. So numerous were the visiters, and such pilferers were they, where a relic was concerned, that the tree was soon stripped both of leaves and branches. Slips of it were sent for from all parts of the world; and the owner was at last so pestered, that she was obliged in self-defence to uproot the tree, and make a relic of it, which would not entail so much trouble upon its possessor. Nothing but the root now remains, which is safely housed in the grotto: forming a substance too hard to be taken away in little bits by the penknife of the visiter, and too bulky to be carried off entire. Visiters formerly used to play the same tricks with the very stones and spars of the grotto; but, upon inquiry of our guide, we were informed that such was not the case now to any great extent, although occasionally a person is detected trying to notch off a flint or a shell, and a lady holding an open reticule ready to receive it. The grotto was made by Pope about the year 1715. "Being," as Dr. Johnson says, "under the necessity of making a subterraneous passage to a garden on the other side of the road, he adorned it with fossil bodies, and dignified it with the title of a grotto,—a
place of silence and retreat, from which he endeavoured to persuade his friends and himself that cares and passions could be excluded. * * * The excavation was necessary as an entrance to his garden; and, as some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto, where necessity enforced a passage." And quite right too. It was a little spark of the true philosophy, after all; and men in general would be much happier if they would imitate the example, and extract ornaments from all their inconveniences, and good out of all their evils. Some years after its construction, Pope wrote the following lines in reference to his grotto, which some of the guidebooks inform us are actually inscribed upon it. We made diligent search, and were not able to discover them.
"Thou who shalt stop where Thames' translucent wave
Shines, a broad mirror, through the shady cave,
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distil,
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill;
Unpolish'd gems no ray on pride bestow,
And latent metals innocently glow.
Approach! great Nature studiously behold,
And eye the mine, without a wish for gold!
Approach! but awful. Lo! the Egerian grot,
Where, nobly pensive, St. John sat and thought,
Where British sighs from dying Wyndham stole,
And the bright flame was shot through Marchmont's soul.
Let such, such only, tread this sacred floor,
Who dare to love their country and be poor."
Mentally repeating these lines, we entered the grotto, and were first shown by the gardener of Sir Wathen Waller, the present owner of the villa, who officiated as the cicerone, into the cell on the left hand side, which used to be the study. At every convenient place, and wherever the stones presented a surface sufficiently large, visiters had scratched their names; but we noticed none of any note among the defacers. At the end, upon a pedestal, was a plaster bust of the poet. The cell on the right hand side used to be the kitchen,—at least so said our guide,—and in this is placed the root of the willow-tree, with a skull upon it. We took the latter in our hands, and found it to be a plaster cast from the veritable skull of the poet, which was disturbed accidentally a few years ago, upon digging a grave in Twickenham churchyard; it struck us as being remarkably small. The skull was re-buried with due reverence, after the cast had been taken. In this cell the present proprietor has placed a statue of honest John Bunyan, which, when we saw it, put us in mind of the well-known lines upon the spider in amber,
"Not that the thing was either rich or rare,—
One wondered how the devil it came there."
To our mind, it marred the uniformity of the grotto. In that place, Bunyan seemed an intruder upon the privacy of Pope, and we wished the statue of the good Christian had been placed somewhere else, no matter where, and we would have gone to visit it, and paid it all honour.
Though some of the "pointed crystals" alluded to in the lines above quoted still remain, the "sparkling rill" trickles no more. The ingenious contrivance by which the roof was transformed into a sort of camera obscura has been removed, and the fragments of mirrors that still remain have experienced so many of the buffettings of time, that they have lost their original brilliancy, and reflect but indistinct images of the passing objects on the river.
In the garden on the other side of the road, and to which the grotto forms the passage, are two tall cedar-trees, which, according to our friend the gardener, who laid claim to a knowledge of such matters, must be about a hundred years old. If so, they must have been planted in the time of Pope, perhaps by the bard himself. Hitherto, however, they have escaped that reputation, which, if it became general or well-authenticated, might perchance be the means in a short time of denuding them of all their verdure, like their predecessor the willow.
As we walked along the terrace, we noticed more particularly than we did when we entered, the flight of steps leading to the water. This, said we, must be the place where Martha Blount, the best-beloved of the poet, made use of that unfeeling expression about his death, which Johnson has preserved to her eternal discredit. "While he (Pope) was yet capable of amusement and conversation," says the biographer, "as he was one day sitting in the air, with Lord Bolingbroke and Lord Marchmont, he saw his favourite, Martha Blount, at the bottom of the terrace, and asked Lord Bolingbroke to go and hand her up. Bolingbroke, not liking his errand, crossed his legs and sat still; but Lord Marchmont, who was younger and less captious, waited on the lady, who, when he came to her, asked, 'What, is he not dead yet?' It does not appear that this thoughtless and unkind expression ever reached the ear of Pope; but he took her general inattention and neglect of him in his days of sickness and decay, very deeply to heart. She who had sat a loving and enraptured listener, when his faculties were in all their brightness, turned away from him not only with neglect, but with scorn, in the time of his tribulation. How unlike her sex in general,
"Who still are the kindest
When fortune is blindest,
And brightest in love 'mid the darkness of fate."
Alas! poor Pope! alas! for the boasted intellect of our kind. What can be more affecting, or afford more matter for solemn thought, than the last hours of this great man. "On the 6th of May, 1744," says Johnson, "he was all day delirious, which he mentioned four days afterwards as a sufficient humiliation of the vanity of man. He afterwards complained of seeing things as through a curtain, and in false eolours; and one day, in the presence of Dodsley, asked what arm it was that came out of the wall? He said that his greatest inconvenience was inability to think. Bolingbroke sometimes wept over him in this state of helpless decay, and was told by Spence, that Pope, at the intermission of his deliriousness, was always saying something kind either of his present or absent friends, and that his humanity seemed to have survived his understanding." Almost his last expressions were, "There is nothing meritorious but virtue and friendship: friendship itself is only a part of virtue."
We were thinking of these things, and were so wrapt in them, that we hardly noticed that we had re-entered the boat, and were only recalled to a consciousness of surrounding objects by the voice of our boatman, who stopped on his oars, and called out that we were at Strawberry Hill.
This place also has its reminiscences. It was originally a very small house, built about the year 1698, by a coachman and let as a lodging-house. Colley Cibber was at one time a tenant of it, and there wrote one of his comedies,—"The Refusal; or the Lady's Philosophy." It was some years afterwards let on lease to Mrs. Chevenix, a toywoman; from whose possession it came into that of Horace Walpole. The latter amused himself for many years in enlarging and beautifying it, and made quite a plaything of it. Writing to his friend, General Conway, on the 8th of June, 1747, and dating from this place, he says, "You perceive that I have got into a new camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little plaything house that I have got out of this Chevenix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges;
A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
And little fishes wave their wings of gold.
Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually with coaches, and chaises; and barges, as solemn as barons of the exchequer, move under my window. Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensbury. Dowagers, as plenty as flounders, inhabit all around; and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight."
Horace Walpole succeeded in making a very pretty residence of it, and stored it with "fouth of auld nick-nackets," pictures, busts, and antiques of every description. There were scarcely any of his contemporaries eminent for their wit or their learning, who were not at one time or another his guests here. It now belongs to the Earl of Waldegrave.
Between this place and Teddington is the cottage given by Walpole to Mrs. Clive, the actress. At her death he placed an urn in the gardens, with this inscription—
"Ye Smiles and Jests still hover round,
This is Mirth's consecrated ground;
Here lived the laughter-loving dame,
A matchless actress, Clive her name.
The comic Muse with her retired,
And shed a tear when she expired."
Teddington is a small place, chiefly remarkable for the first or last lock upon the Thames, in aid of the navigation. Etymologists found a very satisfactory explanation of the name of this village, and plumed themselves mightily upon their cleverness. The tides flow up no further than Teddington, and therefore, said they, the derivation of the word is obvious, "Tide-ending-town—from whence, by corruption and abbreviation,—Tide-ing-ton—Teddington." This was all very satisfactory: there was not a word to be said against it. Unluckily, however, Mr. Lysons, one of your men of dates and figures; one of those people, whose provoking exactitude so often upsets theories, discovered that the original name of the place was not Teddington, but Totyngton. After this, the etymologists had nothing to say for themselves; "a plain tale put them down," unless, like the French philosopher, in similar circumstances, they consoled themselves with the reflection that it was very unbecoming in a fact to rise up in opposition to their theory.
Among the most celebrated residents of Teddington were the Earl of Leicester, the favourite of Elizabeth; Penn the Quaker; and Paul Whitehead the poet. The last is buried in Teddington church, with the exception of his heart, which was removed to High Wycombe, and deposited in a mausoleum belonging to his patron, the Lord le Despencer. Paul bequeathed fifty pounds for the urn which was to contain it. The ceremony of depositing it in the mausoleum was very curious. It was attended from the house by a military procession, and a choir of vocalists. Dr. Arne composed a piece of music for the occasion to the following poetry—we beg pardon, words—which were sung as the urn was deposited:—
"From earth to heaven Paul Whitehead's soul is fled!
Refulgent glories beam about his head!
His Muse concording with resounding strings,
Gives angel's words to praise the King of Kings."
The ceremony itself was sufficiently absurd; but these lines were the topping absurdity of all.
At this place we dismissed our boatman; and, landing on the Surrey shore, walked on towards Kingston, sometimes stopping by the river's brink to watch the minnows at the bottom of the water, (for it is as clear as crystal,) scudding away in shoals as we approached them, and sometimes in idle mood watching the swans disporting themselves, or turning over the leaves of our favourite Spencer, to find the lines which describe them:—
"See the fair swans on Thamis' lovely side,
The which do trim their pennons silver bright;
In shining ranks they down the water's glide;
Oft have mine eyes devoured the gallant sight!"
There are great numbers of these birds upon the river. They are under the special guardianship of the Lord Mayor of London, who annually, either by himself or deputy, goes up the river in his state barge, accompanied by the Vintners and Dyers, to mark the young ones—which ceremony bears the name of swan-hopping. The legislature has often made these swans its peculiar care. By an act of Edward IV. it was declared a felony, punishable with imprisonment for a year and a day, and a fine at the king's will, to steal their eggs. A curious custom at one time existed with regard to the stealing of these birds, which is mentioned in Coke's reports. Whoever stole a swan, lawfully marked, in any open or common river, was mulcted in the following manner:—The swan was taken and hung by the beak from the roof of any house, so that the feet just touched the ground. Wheat was then poured over the head of the swan, until there was a pyramid of it from the floor sufficient to cover and hide the bird completely. A like quantity of wheat, or its value, was the fine to be paid to the owner.
Upon our arrival at the very ancient town of Kingston we proceeded straight to the market-place, the spot where, nearly a thousand years ago, the old Saxon monarchs of England were crowned in sight of all the people. Egbert, the first king of all England, held a grand council here in the year 838; and, in the records of that event, the town is styled "Kyngngeston, that famous place." The following is a list of the kings crowned here,—most of them on a raised platform in the open air, and the rest in the church. Edward the Elder, in the year 900; Athelstan, in 925; Edmund, in 940; Edred, in 946; Edwy, in 955; Edward the Martyr, in 975; and Ethelred, in 978. Kingston, although the fact has been overlooked by nearly every writer, was the scene of one of the most romantic incidents in early English history—the loves and misfortunes of Edwy and Elgiva. It gives one but a poor notion of the value of history, or the fidelity of historians, to consult about a dozen writers for a record of the same event. Your hero, or principal personage, is called a monster by one, a saint by another, or a fool by a third: the actions of his life are exaggerated in their good parts by one, and in
their evil by the next; while another, perhaps, dismisses him and his whole career as altogether insignificant and unworthy of notice. It is a hard matter to get at the truth, even upon the most trivial point, and you are tempted to sweep your dozen of historians from your table at a blow of your hand, and whistle the chorus of the old ballad, "Tunta-ra-rara—rogues all!" Upon reading the touching history of King Edwy and his bride, as recorded in Hume, we turned to Osborne, Stowe, Grafton, Holinshed, Harding, William of Malmesbury, Fabian, Rapin, and others; but the only facts that seemed to be really well established were, that Edwy was king of England, and that he banished Saint Dunstan from his dominions. All the rest was a mass of confusion. A chaos of antagonist opinions, assertions, and denials, or a most scandalous conflict, in which Hatred, Superstition, Revenge, Self-interest, Party Motives, Carelessness, and Indolence, all set upon poor Truth, shouting and hallooing, with a view to prevent her voice from being heard at all amid their hub-bub. To Hume's account, therefore, we adhered; not because it is the most interesting and romantic, but because it is the most fair and probable, merely supplying such particulars of the scene of the tragedy as he has left unnoticed.
King Edwy, in his seventeenth year, was crowned with great magnificence in the market-place of Kingston. He was of a handsome figure and a most amiable disposition. Before his accession he had been smitten with the charms of Elgiva, a noble lady, his kinswoman, whom he married secretly, in spite of the fulminations of Saint Dunstan, and Odo, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had represented to him that their relationship was too near to allow of their union. Upon the day of his coronation a grand feast was prepared for all the nobles; but the king, disliking their rade merriment and drunkenness, took an early opportunity to withdraw, and spend the remainder of the day in the more congenial society of his best-beloved Elgiva. The nobles, after he was gone, expressed great dissatisfaction at the indignity with which they were treated in being abandoned by their entertainer; and Saint Dunstan, best known to posterity as the devil's nose pincher, was deputed by the rest to bring back the monarch to the table. Saint Dunstan, who was in all probability drunk at the time, readily undertook the mission, and accompanied by Odo, the archbishop of Canterbury, who was also highly indignant at the disrespect Edwy had shown to the church, rushed into the royal apartment, and found the king dallying with his bride. The brutal Dunstan immediately tore him from her arms, and, applying an opprobrious epithet to the queen, dragged the young monarch by Sen into the banquetting-hall of the nobles. It was not to be expected that any woman, however mild her temper, could forgive so deep an insult as this, and Elgiva exercised all the influence she possessed over her husband's mind to bring about the ruin of the presuming and unmannerly priest. An opportunity was soon found; charges were brought against him, from which he could not clear himself, and he was finally banished from the kingdom, and forced to take refuge in Flanders. But the Archbishop of Canterbury still remained behind. The unhappy Elgiva, in espousing the king, had gained to herself a host of troubles and of enemies; and, instead of intimidating, had only embittered the latter by the means she had adopted. Intrigues were fomented against the young couple, who had loved so well, but so unwisely. The queen, all fresh in youth, and all radiant in her beauty, was seized by the archbishop, at the head of a party of ruffians, and held forcibly upon the ground, while a wretch with a hot iron burnt her "damask cheeks" to obliterate the traces of that transcendent loveliness which had set enmity between the civil and ecclesiastical power. She was then carried away to the sea-coast, and hidden for some days, till an opportunity was found to convey her to Ireland. She remained in that country for some months, when she effected her escape. The scars on her face had healed; the brutal work had not been effectually done, and she shone in as great beauty as ever, and was hastening to Kingston, to the embraces of her royal spouse, when she was intercepted at Gloucester by the spies of the relentless archbishop. At this time revolt was openly declared against the authority of Edwy, and, to show him how strong and how reckless the conspirators were, the archbishop gave orders that the unhappy princess should be put to death by the most horrible tortures which could be devised. It was finally resolved that she should be hamstrung. The cruel sentence was carried into execution, and the poor queen was left to linger on a couch of straw, without nourishment or attendance of any sort, until death put a period to her sufferings a few days afterwards. Edwy was soon afterwards deposed. He did not long survive his Elgiva: crownless, and what to him was worse—wifeless, he died of a broken heart before he attained his twentieth year.
Portraits of all these old Saxon kings, and of Edwy among the rest, used formerly to adorn the walls of Kingston Church, and we procured admission into the sacred edifice with the full expectation of seeing them, upon the faith of two or three guide-books which we had consulted. We ascertained, however, that our guides were not to be trusted, the portraits having been removed to Windsor Castle more than a century ago.
We also made inquiry after another relic—the stone upon which these old monarchs were crowned, and which formerly stood in the market-place. We were informed that it was at present in the safe custody of the mayor, where it will remain until the new town-hall
is built; in which it is proposed to set apart an honourable place for it. This may be now considered the only relic—and that but a poor one, which Kingston possesses of all its former grandeur. Part of the chapel in which the coronation ceremony was sometimes performed, fell down in the year 1730, and has not been rebuilt in its former style, but merely patched up to keep the wind and the rain out. The site of the chapel is the same; but the original edifice, which saw the inauguration of Athelstan and Edwy must have long since disappeared.
Kingston at one time sent members to parliament; but the practice of election, very different to what it is now, imposing upon the constituent body, and not upon the candidates, the necessity of spending money, the good people grumbled at the expense, and finally prayed to be relieved from it for evermore by a formal petition to King Edward III. Their prayer was granted; and Kingston, penny-wise and pound-foolish, has dwindled away into a very inconsiderable place.
A small, but very clear stream, called the Hog's Mill river, runs into the Thames at Kingston. It takes its rise near Ewell, and is much frequented by anglers.