A year or two later Dryden published his Essay of Dramatic Poesy. It was really a “recollection in tranquility” of the Charlton talks during these months. Sir Henry Newbolt says of this essay that though
“Dryden describes his style as derived from the refined conversation of the court of Charles II, but his prose is real prose and not merely a superior kind of talk; nor is it merely the stiff and cumbrous older prose loosened and quickened by the infusion of a colloquial element … there is a happy negligence about Dryden’s prose that by no means detracts from the epigrammatic force and brilliance which are its general characteristics.”
The essay preserves the gay atmosphere of these witty young men at Charlton. The epigrams come hot from the forge, though they fit naturally into the formal mode of the essay. In general it gives a completely fair expression of several different points of view, yet there is plenty of prejudice too. Each speaker is given a nom de guerre.
“We cannot read a verse of Cleveland’s,” says Eugenius (Buckhurst), “without making a face at it, as if every word were a pill to swallow; he gives us many times a hard nut to break our teeth, without a kernel for our pains … he is the very Withers of the City. They have bought more editions of his works than would serve to lay under all their pies at the Lord Mayor’s Christmas.”
Licideius (Sedley) speaks of “Clevelandism wresting and torturing a word into another meaning” with “a clownish kind of raillery”.
When they come to compare English plays with those of the Greeks and Romans, the French or the Spanish, it is clear that they are well acquainted with the drama of all civilised people, and Eugenius sums up his views on this by saying that the ancients
“produce nothing so courtly writ or which expresses so much the conversation of a gentleman as Sir John Suckling; nothing so even, sweet, and flowing as Mr Waller; nothing so majestic, so correct as Sir John Denham; nothing so elevated, so copious and full of spirit as Mr Cowley … a thing well said will be wit in all languages, … to express a thing hard and unnaturally is Cleveland’s new way of elocution.”
Comparing French with English plays, Neander (Dryden) says that
“French verses are the coldest I have ever read … their speeches being so many declamations which tire us with the length; so that instead of persuading us to grieve for their imaginary heroes, we are concerned for our own trouble, as we are in tedious visits of bad company; we are in pain till they are gone … As for Comedy, repartee is one of its chiefest graces; the greatest pleasure of the audience is a chase of wit, kept up on both sides, and swiftly managed. And this our forefathers had … to a much higher degree of perfection than the French poets can reasonably hope to reach. We have borrowed nothing from the French. Our plots are weaved in English looms; we endeavour therein to follow the variety and greatness of character which are derived to us from Shakespeare and Fletcher, the copiousness and well-knitting of the intrigues we have from Jonson and for the verse itself, we have English precedents of elder age than any of Corneille’s plays.”
Neander gibes at the efforts of the French to preserve the Three Unities. When they try to keep the Unity of Place, they find it so hard to do that “the street, the window, the two houses, and the closet are made to walk about, and the persons to stand still”.
Nearly three centuries had passed since 1666, when the twentieth Lord Suffolk died heroically in 1941. Writing of him in The Times, a friend asked, “How came such a rare character to be created? Was he a direct throw-back from some ancestor of his heroic line?”
Perhaps the answer is to place this twentieth-century wit into that Restoration party at Charlton, where his predecessors enjoyed themselves so much.
The same friend continues:
“There flashes into my mind an impromptu supper party very late at night when, after a long and exhausting day’s work, Lord Suffolk was in his best form. An erudite Sorbonne professor was treated in rapid fluent French (which Suffolk knew like a native) to a dissertation on pharmacology, lapsing into some Parisian gossip which the professor appeared thoroughly to enjoy. Then, arising from the remark of an army officer, a feat of conjuring produced from hidden shoulder holsters a pair of automatics, lovingly referred to as ‘Oscar’ and ‘ Genevieve’, whose merits were expounded with boyish delight. At later stage, the company were entertained with a masterly and dramatic rendering of a cockney using ‘Rhyming Slang’ and a Chicago gangster conversing in his local idiom. A very extensive knowledge of these argots was another unexpected possession of this most versatile man.”
Though no doubt Lord Suffolk would have been at home with the Restoration dramatists, they would have been out of their depth when he capped their Racine and Corneille with his Chicago gangsters.
But the distinction which surrounds Lord Suffolk’s name comes from the manner of his death, which forever lifted him out of the ranks of amusing talkers in any argot. He died a hero, but before that he had been (unknown to many of his acquaintances) a brilliant scientist and a trusted member of the Intelligence Service.
Lord Suffolk was thirty-five when he was killed, and that comparatively short life had been surprisingly diversified. He had been an officer in the Guards; he had sailed round the world before the mast as a mercantile marine apprentice; he was a rancher in Australia; and at thirty-two he took his degree at the Edinburgh University with first-class honours in pharmacology.
When the war broke out, Suffolk was debarred from “active service by the effects of an attack of rheumatic fever, and this set him the more free for active service of a more individual type. He was already deeply in the world of scientific research, and he knew that, when the war began, the Allies were using a particular and very secret chemical, the only supply of which was in Norway. The Germans attacked this country very much for the sake of that chemical, but when they got there the store had already been removed to Paris. Then came the fall of France, and Suffolk, on his own initiative and with great enterprise, seized the whole supply and got it to Bordeaux. He then went on board a French battleship, demanding an escort and a machine gun. He got them, put them on to a lorry with the precious chemical and safely brought to England the only existing store of this particular material. From then onwards he spent the few months of life that were left to him in destroying unexploded bombs. He was appointed Chief Field Research and Experimental Officer under the Directorate of Scientific Research. He had a small and very efficient team under his command and the work was continuous and extremely dangerous. Suffolk met all hazards with his accustomed coolness, often dictating to his secretary, Miss Mordaunt (who was killed with him) while he was in the act of examining a high explosive. He would smoke a cigarette till he was almost up to the bomb on which he had to work, and then hand it to a soldier to keep for a minute.
Suffolk was engaged on this work for about six months, and then he and his team were killed together. Lord Suffolk received a posthumous award of the George Cross “for conspicuous bravery”.
The Poet Laureate wrote these lines about him after his death:
He loved the bright ship with the lifting wing;
He felt the anguish of the hunted thing;
He dared the danger which besets the guides
Who lead men to the knowledge Nature hides.
Probing and playing with the lightening thus
He and his faithful friends met death for us.
The beauty of a splendid man abides.
CLARENDON FOREST AND PALACE
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a forest as: “The ‘ outside’ wood (i.e. that not fenced in), f. foris, out of doors, I. An extensive tract of land covered with trees and undergrowth, sometimes intermingled with pasture.”
This is still the picture of a forest which comes to the mind of one who has been brought up on Hans Andersen and knows Robin Hood; but in most parts of Europe there is another and more strictly legal aspect of forests. They belonged to the Sovereign, and they were subject to a special code called Forest Law.
Practically all English forests are prehistoric, the New Forest being the only one which was created within the memory of man. Like all the Wiltshire forests, Clarendon was originally part of that unbounded stretch of woodland within which a squirrel could leap from tree to tree without touching ground, and which spread from far north of Swindon to the coasts of Hampshire and Dorset. Certain parts of this area became the great Royal Hunting Ground and in the south of Wessex, Clarendon and Cranborne were the chief of these. Clarendon was from the first the favourite of the Norman kings, and it possessed some sort of a palace from the time of the Conqueror. The whole country still has much of the primeval forest look; although the mediæval buildings which must have given to it its royal state had vanished almost entirely till, in 1933, Professor Tancred Borenius gained the permission of Mrs. Christie Miller, the owner, to excavate the supposed site of the almost legendary palace. It was almost lost in trees and undergrowth, and yet in the six years before the war some very exciting finds were made.
In one of his reports Dr Borenius quotes the phrase with which Lord Macaulay prefaced any very recondite piece of history, “as every schoolboy knows”, and no doubt every schoolboy is driven to know the name of the Constitutions of Clarendon, though he knows little more about them. Perhaps they have something to do with the murder of St Thomas à Becket. The schoolboy would infinitely have preferred more of the day-to-day story of Clarendon Palace, which really was a holiday house for the English kings. It was a paradise of sport and pleasure, of beauty and delight. There was nothing like it in the land. Moreover it was unique for a time because it was quite unfortified. The soldiers were packed away at Old Sarum, within sight, and readily available if called for.
Dr Borenius discovered in his excavations the whole plan of the Palace, and he found how unlike it was to the modern idea of what a palace should be; it was more like a village or a country town. But as the work went on, what appeared at first to be a disconnected jumble of buildings took a very definite shape. The Rolls office contained documents and accounts dating practically every building. Records and remains fit each other like cup and ball. Dr Borenius writes in the Interim Report of 1935: “ There is certainly nothing quite like it surviving anywhere.… I hope that the day is no longer distant when the life and setting of this great community dignified by the name of Towne as late as the reign of Richard III will be in their essentials rescued from oblivion.”
References to Clarendon keep appearing in the records, all proving for how long it was constantly being used. Before the Conqueror went to Scotland in 1072, he summoned his troops to assemble at Clarendon. Henry I and his Queen must have been there in 1170, for there exists an account for corn, wine and clothing sent to Clarendon from Woodstock for their use in that year. Stephen founded the Augustinian Priory of Ivychurch within the demesne, but after that they have no record of important building at the Palace itself till the reign of Henry II. Then a great deal was done, and the place was evidently beginning to have something palatial about it, as one of the charges is for the transport of some marble columns. But the principal work was done in the time of that really good artist Henry III. He built the Great Hall, the King’s apartments, the Queen’s apartments, sundry chapels, the kitchen, the buttery, the salsary, the larder, the chandlery and the “ Herlebecherie” (a word peculiar to Clarendon). The records also mention at this time many mural paintings, the subjects of which included portraits of kings, hunting pictures, the history of Alexander the Great, a Wheel of Fortune and a Jesse Tree.
The reign of Edward III was another great building period, and then also we hear much of the occupants of the Palace. It was at Clarendon in 1356 that Philip of Navarre did homage to the English king as King of France; and later in the reign Edward came down from London to escape the Plague, bringing with him two royal prisoners, King John of France and King David of Scotland. At this time the three kings are traditionally said to have hunted in the Forest, and the name of the Whaddon Inn, the Three Crowns, is thought to commemorate this.
There was more building in the time of Henry VI, and in 1453 he had at Clarendon his first attack of mental illness. A special suite of rooms was built to accommodate him at this time, and it had its own kitchens and rooms for the attendants. This seems to have been the last building done here, although in Henry VII’s day there was still a “Clerke of oure workeys of oure Manoir and Parke of Clarendon”. He does not seem to have been very active, as about this time the Palace fell into disrepair. Henry VIII preferred his more modern palaces of Hampton Court and Nonsuch, and in the year 1574 Queen Elizabeth hunted in Clarendon Park. A Glamorganshire manuscript says of this:
“On the Saturday, her Highnesse had appoynted to hunt in Claryngton Parke where the said Henry Earl of Pembroke had prepared a very faire and pleasant banquett house of leaves for her to dyne in, but that day happened soe great rayne, that although fenced with arras, yet it could not defend the wet, by means whereof the Queen dyned within the Lodge, and the Lordes dyned in the banquett house. And after dynner, the rayne ceased for a while, during which time many deare, coursed with greyhoundes, were overturned, and, as the time served, great pleasure was shewed.”
The “ Towne” or Palace stood on the crest of the hill with a noble view of the country round. Its material was chiefly flint and timber; and when it was deserted, it became, like Old Sarum, a quarry for all the villages near by. This is why there was so little left when Dr Borenius began his excavations. In 1801 Britton had written of it that: “The habitation of kings is levelled with the dust; and all the proud revelry of a Court has given way to the hooting of the owl and the croaking of the raven. Nothing remains of its former magnificence but ruined walls and heaps of rubbish.”
The Priory of Ivychurch (called in the Wiltshire Assize Roll of 1224 the Monastery of Hederose) is within the Forest, but it is almost one of which it may be said, “Heureux ceux qui n’ont pas d’histoire”. Its records are mostly relating to the institution of masses for the souls of relatives and benefactors or they are regulations about the raising and care of herbs. Henry III gave it “Free pannage for 20 pigs and their young of one year” on condition that “the said pigs be ringed so that they cannot dig”. A more tragic reference to the Priory is the Signification sent in 1349 (the year of the Black Death) by the King to the Bishop of Salisbury notifying him “ that Brother James of Groundewell, Canon of the Monastery of Ivychurch of the King’s patronage wherein a college of 13 Canons regular hath hitherto been held, had come to the King and brought him the news of the death of the Prior of that place and all the other Canons there except himself, so that the Prior cannot be elected as usual”. The King appointed Brother James to be Prior of the empty priory, but he too died within the year.
At the Dissolution there were only four priests and one novice, but the “ Church, Mansion and outhouses were in a very good state, with much newe buylding of stone and breke”. The first and second Lord Pembrokes were successively Wardens for life of the Forest of Clarendon, and Ivychurch was leased to them. They made a dwelling-house of it, and Aubrey says, “ The Right Honourable Mary Countess of Pembroke much delighted in this place”, and her brother Philip Sidney “spent much, if not most, of his time at Wilton and at Ivychurch near Salisbury, which did then belong to this family”.
Aubrey remarks on the beauty of the view from Ivychurch. The same can be said today, although the old buildings have been demolished, and all that remains is a farm cottage with some mediæval carved stones built into the wall. In the seventeenth century Clarendon passed through the hands of several families, beginning with Hyde who was made Lord Clarendon. On February 22nd, 1663, in a conversation with Mr Alsopp, the King’s Brewer, Mr Pepys was told:
“that whereas the late King did mortgage Clarendon to somebody for £20,000 and this (King) to have given it to the Duke of Albemarle; and he sold it to my Lord Chancellor, whose title of Earldome is fetched from thence; the King hath this day sent his order to the Privy Seale for the payment of
this £20,000 to my Lord Chancellor, to clear the mortgage.”
The Duke of Albemarle’s successors bequeathed it to John Granville, Earl of Bath; from whose heirs it was purchased in the year 1713 by Benjamin Bathurst, in whose family it remained for nearly two hundred years. The present house was built about 1750. An entry in the Policy Register of the Sun Insurance Office is as follows: “ 6 and 3—1753. Peter Bathurst of Clarendon Park near Sarum in the County of Wilts Esqr. On his new dwelling only, situate as aforesaid Brick Stone Leaded and tiled Exclusive of all manners of Out houses or adjoining Buildings not exceeding Two Thousand pounds.”
Clarendon Park is now in the occupation of the family of Christie Miller. The house contains many fine pictures and a part of the famous Britwell Library collected by Mr Christie Miller some years ago. Charles I’s travelling library of sixty books is among its treasures.
FONTHILL, ITS OWNERS AND ITS BUILDERS
Fonthill Houses are almost as itinerant as gypsy caravans, although the two resemble each other in no other way. Fonthill is said to have been a “Baronial Seat from the time of the Conquest”, but the search for the house in the intervening centuries will find it again and again in a fresh situation. In Domesday “ Funtell” is mentioned as part of the possessions of Berenger Gifford, and it subsequently passed through the hands, among others, of the families of Mauduit, Demoleyns, Hungerford, Wenlock, Mervyn, Castlehaven and Cottington. In 1754 it was bought by Alderman Beckford. Presumably these earlier families had some house or houses to live in, but the first of which we have any record is one built probably by a member of the Mervyn family. There is a painting at Fonthill purporting to be a picture of it in 1556. It is in the fashion of that day, so it may have been modernised a little. It was built round three sides of a quadrangle, the fourth being occupied by a sort of screen or cloister, the centre of which was the main entrance to the house. The fate of this mansion is unknown, or whether any other was erected between it and the one which the alderman found on the estate. From tradition, some few pictures and the name of the “Jones Lodge” which is still the approach to the house, it appears that this house was designed by Inigo Jones, who we know was in Wiltshire working for Lord Pembroke at Wilton. Probably Cottington found that the old house was beyond repair, and built a new one in the new style. If there were two houses, their ground plan was almost similar, but the rear of the one became the front of the other and the main part of the house was set in front of the court and turned towards the south.
Wiltshire Page 26