Charles G. Harper

HENLEY—THE BRIDGE AND ITS KEYSTONE-MASKS—REMENHAM—HAMBLEDEN—MEDMENHAM ABBEY AND THE “HELL FIRE CLUB”—HURLEY—BISHAM

Passing Marsh Lock, the town of Henley comes into view, heralded by its tall church tower, with four equal-sized battlemented turrets; a quite unmistakable church tower. The noble five-arched stone bridge here crossing the Thames, built in 1789, at a cost of £10,000, is one of the most completely satisfactory along the whole course of the river. The keystone-masks of the central arch show sculptured faces representing Isis and Thames. Isis appropriately faces up-river, and Thames looks down-stream. These conventionalised heads of a river-god and goddess are really admirable examples of the sculptor’s art. They adorn the title-pages of the present volumes, which display Isis with a woman’s head, and Father Thames, bearded, with little fishes peeping out of the matted hair, and bulrushes decoratively disposed about his temples. These masks were the work of that very accomplished lady, the Honourable Mrs. Anne Seymour Damer, who at the time when Henley bridge was a-building resided at Park Place. She was cousin to Horace Walpole, for whom she carved an eagle so exquisitely that he wrote under it—enthusiastic cousin as he was—Non Praxiteles sed Anna Damer me fecit. One terrible thing, however, stamps the lady irrevocably as a gifted amateur: she gave her work to the bridge authorities. Most reprehensible! The recipients were duly grateful, as witness the Bridge Minutes. True, they do but acknowledge one mask: “May 6, 1785. Ordered that the thanks of the Commissioners be given to the Honourable Mrs. Damer for the very elegant head of the River Thames which she has cut and presented to them for the Keystone of the centre arch of the bridge.”

This conventional head of Father Thames is that made familiar by the eighteenth-century poets, who personified everything possible. It is that Father Thames who

Only, as we see, bulrushes here take the place of his “shining horns.” The head of Isis was a portrait of Miss Freeman of Fawley Court.

Henley is, of course, famed, above all else, for its Regatta, established as an annual event since 1839, following upon an Oxford and Cambridge boat-race here in 1837. It is now pre-eminently the function of the river season, whether we consider it from the point of view of sport or fashion. Here every June the best oarsmanship in the world is displayed over this course of one-and-a-quarter miles: indisputably the best for anything up to that distance, for the regatta is now attended by the best oarsmen of the New World as well as of the Old. The regatta is, from a social and hospitable point of view, very much what the Derby is among horseraces; and the house-boat parties and riverside house-parties for the Henley Week dispense much hospitality and champagne. There is yet another side to the regatta: it is, almost equally with Ascot and Goodwood, recognised as an opportunity for the display of fine dresses. The Oxfordshire bank is at such times the most exclusive, and to the Berkshire shores are principally relegated the pushing, struggling crowds of humbler sportsmen and sightseers. But here, where every point is legally open to all, except where private lawns reach down to the river, the real exclusiveness of Goodwood or Ascot is, of course, impossible. Henley town is at such times anything but exclusive, and is thronged to excess. In these later times of motor-cars it is also apt to be a great deal more dusty than ever it used to be. To see Henley in Regatta Week, and again Henley in any other week, affords an astonishing contrast; for at all other times it is, as a town, among the dullest of the dull, and its broad High Street a synonym for emptiness.

I do not propose in this place to enlarge further upon Henley, but to mention Henley at all and not its famous old coaching-inn by the bridge, the Red Lion, has never yet been done; and shall I be the first to make the omission? No! It is a famous old inn, and of enormous size. Every one knows it as the hostelry where Shenstone the poet, about 1750, scratched with a diamond upon a window the celebrated stanza about “the warmest welcome at an inn,” but that window-pane has long been lost; and it is really doubtful if the inscription was not rather at another Henley: i.e. Henley-in-Arden. I have fully discussed that question elsewhere,[1] and so will not repeat it in this place.

Mr. Ashby-Sterry is quite right in his description of the Red Lion, standing red-brickily by the bridge:

Remenham, a mile or so along the Berkshire shore, is typically Berkshire, but with a church still looking starkly new, as the result of “thorough restoration” in 1870. Its semicircular apse, really ancient, does not look it. The tower is of the Henley type, though smaller. Henley church tower, in fact, seems to have set a local fashion in such, for that of Hambleden conforms to the same design. Regatta Island, with its effective temple, marks the old starting-point of the races.

Hambleden is on the Buckinghamshire side; a pretty village situated about one mile distant from the river along the lovely and retired valley of the Hamble. From it the widow of W. H. Smith, of the newspaper and library and bookstall business of W. H. Smith & Son, and of Greenlands, near Henley, takes her title of Viscountess Hambleden. Liberal, Radical, and Separatist journals were never tired of satirically referring to W. H. Smith, when a member of a Unionist Government, as “Old Morality,” deriving that term from the stand he took in the House of Commons upon his “duty to Queen and country.” His idea of his duty in those respects was exactly that of an average responsible business man. He had no axe to grind, no job to perpetrate; and that being so, the nickname of “Old Morality” was in effect a great deal more honourable than those satirists ever suspected. They, indeed, conferred upon him a brevet of which any one might well be proud, and incidentally covered themselves with shame, as men to whom a sense of rightness and of duty towards one’s sovereign and one’s native land was a subject for mirth. But of course these quips and cranks derived from the party notoriously friends of every country save their own.

In the very much restored church of Hambleden, among various tombs, is one in the chancel to Henry, son of the second Lord Sandys, with a quaint inscription, owning some nobility of thought:

The elaborate oak screen under the tower, carved with Renascence designs, is said to have once been part of Cardinal Wolsey’s bedstead. It bears the arms of Christ Church and of Corpus Christi, Oxford; and those of Castile, with the rose badge of York.

At some little distance downstream is Medmenham Abbey. The building, that looks so entirely reverend and worshipful from the opposite shore, is really, in the existing buildings, little enough of the original Abbey that was founded towards the close of the twelfth century by one Hugh de Bolebec. It was never very much of a place, and seems to have been something of a dependency of Bisham Abbey. Just prior to its suppression, Henry the Eighth’s commissioners reported that it had merely two monks, with no servants, and little property, but no debts; but, on the other hand, no goods worth more than £1 3s. 8d., “and the house wholly ruinous.”

Nothing remains of whatever church there may have been, and the only ancient portions are some fragments of the Abbot’s lodgings. The “ruined” tower, the cloisters, and much else are the work of those blasphemous “Franciscans” of the Hell Fire Club who, under the presidency of Francis Dashwood, Lord le Despencer, established themselves here about 1758. There were twelve of these reckless “monks,” who, having built the “cloisters,” reared the now ivy-mantled tower, and painted their licentious motto, “Fay ce que voudras,” over one of the doors, sat down to a series of orgies and debaucheries whose excesses have been perhaps exaggerated by the mystery with which these “monks of Medmenham” chose to veil their doings. Among them were Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, Sir John Dashwood King, John Wilkes, the poet Churchill, and Sir William Stanhope. Paul Whitehead was “secretary” to this precious gang of debauchees.

Devil-worship was said to have been among the impious rites celebrated here; and one of the party seems to have played a particularly horrifying practical joke upon his fellows during the progress of these celebrations. He procured an exceptionally large and hideous monkey and, dressing it in character, let it down the chimney into the room among his friends, who fled in terror, and were for long afterwards convinced that their patron had really come for them. This incident is said to have broken up the fraternity.

The explorer by Thames-side could, until quite recent years, do very much as he liked at Medmenham, and the more or less authentic ruins were open to him; but now they are enclosed within the grounds of a private residence, and a hotel stands beside the ferry. The very small village at the back is to be noted for the highly picturesque grouping of some ancient gabled houses (restored of late) with the little church and a remarkable hill crested by an old red-brick and flint house that looks as though it owned, or ought to own, some romantic story. The hilltop is said to be encircled with the remains of a prehistoric encampment. It is with sorrow that here also one notes the builder’s prejudicial activities. Directly in front of the church, and entirely blocking out the view of it, there has been built a recent red-brick villa, with the result that the effective composition illustrated here is almost wholly destroyed.

The lovely grass-lands over against Medmenham are glorious in June, before the hay-harvest. One may walk by them, beside the river, all the way to Hurley. On the left, or Buckinghamshire, bank, the ground rises into chalk-cliffs, surmounted by the great unoccupied house of Danesfield, staringly white, popularly said to contain as many windows as there are days in the year. This is the handiwork of Mr. R. W. Hudson, of “Hudson’s Soap.”

Hurley, to which we now come, is a historic spot. Here, by the waterside, was founded in 1087, by Geoffrey de Mandeville, the Benedictine Priory of Our Lady of Hurley, which remained until 1535, when, in common with other religious houses, it was suppressed by Henry the Eighth. To the Lovelace family came the lands and buildings of this establishment, and here, on the site of it, Sir Richard Lovelace built, with “money gotten with Francis Drake,” a splendid mansion which he called Lady Place. His descendant, Richard, Lord Lovelace, was in 1688 one of the somewhat timorous nobles who met secretly to plot the deposition of James the Second. They had not the courage, these pusillanimous wretches, to take the field in arms, as Monmouth and his brave peasants had done, three years earlier, and must needs find cellars to grope in, and then invite over that cold, disliked Dutchman, William of Orange, to do for them what they dared not do for themselves. Macaulay, in his richly-picturesque language, refers to these meetings, but it will be observed that he calls those who met here “daring.” They were anything but that.

“This mansion,” he says, “built by his ancestors out of the spoils of Spanish galleons from the Indies, rose on the ruins of a house of our Lady in this beautiful valley, through which the Thames, not yet defiled by the precincts of a great capital, rolls under woods of beech, and round the gentle hills of Berks. Beneath the stately saloon, adorned by Italian pencils, was a subterranean vault, in which the bones of ancient monks had sometimes been found. In this dark chamber some zealous and daring opponents of the Government held many midnight conferences during that anxious time when England was impatiently expecting the Protestant wind.”

This Lady Place no longer exists, for the great house was demolished in 1836, and the house so-called is of modern build. But the old-time gardens remain, and the refectory; and here is the old circular pigeon-house, with the initials on it, “C.R.,” and the date, 1642.

A curious story tells how one of the last occupants of Lady Place was a brother of Admiral Kempenfelt, and that he and the Admiral planted two thorn-trees in the garden, in which he took great pride. One day, returning home, he found that the tree planted by the Admiral had withered away, and he exclaimed: “I feel sure this is an omen that my brother is dead.” That evening, August 29, 1782, he received news of the loss of the Royal George.

Hurley church is a long, low building, of nave without aisles, of Norman, or some say earlier, origin. “It was probably ravaged by the Danes towards the close of the ninth century,” say the guide-books. This may have been so, but it could hardly have been worse ravaged by them than it was by those who “restored” it in 1852 “at a cost of £1,500,” and incidentally also at the cost of all its real interest.

The village of Hurley straggles a long way back from the river, in one scattered, disjointed line of cottages, past the picturesque old Bell Inn, apparently of fifteenth-century date, heavily framed with stout oaken timbers.

Below Hurley, leaving behind the ancient red-brick piers of the old-world gardens of Lady Place, the river opens out to Marlow reach, with Bisham on the right hand, and the tall crocketed spire of Marlow church closing the distant view.

“Bisham” is said to have been originally “Bustleham,” but the present form will be preferred by every one. Strangers call it “Bish-am,” but for the natives and the people of Marlow the only way is by the elision of the letter h—“Bis-am”; and thus shall you, being duly informed of this shibboleth, infallibly detect the stranger in these parts.

Bisham village is quite invisible from the river, nor need we trouble to seek it, unless it be for climbing up into the lovely and precipitous Quarry Woods, in the rear. To those who knew Bisham when Fred Walker painted his delightful pictures, and among them, some studies of this village street, there comes, when they think of the Bisham that was and the Bisham that is, a fierce but impotent anger. The humble old red-brick cottages remain, it is true, and their gardens bloom as of yore, but what was once the sweet-smelling gravelly street is now a tarred abomination, smelling evilly, and wearing a squalid and disreputable look. This is the result of the coming of the motor-car, for Bisham is on the well-travelled road between High Wycombe, Great Marlow, Twyford, and Reading, and the village has now the unwelcome choice of two evils: to be half-choked with billows of dust, or to coat its roads with tar compositions.

Of what was originally a Preceptory of the Knights Templars, and then an Augustine Priory, and finally a Benedictine Abbey, nothing is left but the Prior’s lodgings, now the mansion of the Vansittart-Neales, called “the Abbey.” The parish church stands finely by the waterside, encircled by the trees of the park, and there remains a monastic barn. Such are the few relics of the proud home of monks and priors, enriched during hundreds of years by the benefactions of the wicked, endeavouring by means of such gifts to atone sufficiently for their evil lives, and so escape the damnation that surely awaited them.

Such complete destruction is melancholy indeed, when we consider the great historic personages who were buried here: among them the great Nevill, “Warwick the Kingmaker,” slain at last in the course of his tortuous ambitions, in the Battle of Barnet, fought on Easter Day, 1471, and laid at Bisham, hard by his own manor of Marlow.

When the Abbey was finally dissolved, it was granted by Henry the Eighth to Anne of Cleves, his divorced fourth wife, who exchanged it with the Hoby family for a property of theirs in Kent. Here the Princess Elizabeth was resident for three years, during the reign of her half-sister, Mary, really under surveillance; and to that period the greater part of the “Abbey,” as we see it now, is to be referred.

Bisham Abbey is, of course, famed above all other things for the story of the wicked Lady Hoby, who so thrashed her son for spoiling his copy-books with blots that he died. A portrait of her, in the dress of a widow, is still in the house, and her ghost is yet said to haunt the place.[2] She was wife of Sir Thomas Hoby, Ambassador to France, who died in 1566, aged 36. The elaborate altar-tomb in Bisham church to him, and to his half-brother, Sir Philip, with effigies of the two knights, is worth seeing; and the rhymed epitaph written by her worth reading. The early death of the Ambassador, in Paris, was not without suspicion of poison. The sculptured figures of hawks at the feet of the brothers are “hobby”-hawks, a punning allusion to the family name.

Lady Hoby was a grief-stricken widow, and supplicated Heaven, rather quaintly, to “give me back my husband, Thomas,” or that being beyond possibility, to “give me another like Thomas.” She captured another, eight years later, when she married John, Lord Russell; but whether Heaven had thus given her one up to sample we are only left idly to conjecture. At any rate she outlived him too, by many years, and elected to be buried beside her Thomas. An elaborate monument to this fearsome lady discloses her in a wonderful coif, surmounted by a coronet. Before and behind her kneeling figure are the praying effigies of her children. It is recorded that she was particularly interested in mortuary observances, and that she even found it possible to be absorbed, as she lay dying, at the age of 81, in her own funeral rites; corresponding with Sir William Dethick as to precisely the number of mourners and heralds that were her due.

A little monument to two children in Bisham church is the subject of a very old legend to the effect that Queen Elizabeth was their mother! More scandal about Queen Elizabeth!

Bisham passed from the Hobys in 1768 to a family of Mills, who assumed the name; but in 1780 it again changed hands and was sold to the Vansittarts, of whom Sir H. J. Vansittart-Neale is the present representative. The old belief in disaster befalling families who hold property taken from the Church has been curiously warranted here from time to time, in the untimely death of eldest sons or direct heirs, and here indeed, upon entering Bisham church, the stranger is startled by the white marble life-size effigy confronting him of a kneeling boy, in a Norfolk jacket-suit; an inscription declaring it to represent George Kenneth Vansittart-Neale, who died in 1904, aged fourteen.