CHAPTER XIX DOVER--THE CASTLE AND ROMAN PHAROS--"QUEEN ELIZABETH'S POCKET-PISTOL"--THE WESTERN HEIGHTS

The great and growing town of Dover looks forward to a greater fame than even the historic past has conferred upon it. The measure of Dover’s greatness is not the usual measurement, that of population, for the town numbers only some 44,000. Rather does it lie in its defensible and strategic situation. Dover has ever, from Roman times, been a place of arms, and was, an old chronicler tells us, the “lock and key of the whole kingdom.” That being so, it has always behoved us to make it one of the most strongly fortified places on our coasts. On either side of the deep and narrow valley in which the town lies, the great chalk downs and cliffs rise steeply and massively, and all are in military occupation. The morning drum-beat reverberates from the Western Heights to welcome the rising sun, and the Last Post from the Castle sounds the requiem of the departed day; and in between them the tootling and the fifing, the words of command, the gun-firing, and all the military alarms and excursions of a garrison-town help to convince even the most timid that we are being taken care of.

Dover offered more opportunities for the artist in those far-away days when Hollar made his view of it from near the castle heights. At that time the river Dour flowed visibly into the sea, through a valley so sparsely settled that the ancient church of St. Mary, now almost hidden amid the clustered houses of the thronged town, stood out with a cathedral-like prominence. Hollar shows us the ships clustered at the river mouth, but at an earlier time they ascended far up the valley and anchored where the busiest streets are now found. Leland, somewhat earlier than Hollar, speaking of the Dour and the ancient inland haven, says, “The ground which lyeth up betwixt the hilles is yet, in digging, found wosye”—by which he meant “oozy”; and in modern times there have been discovered, in the course of excavations, relics of Roman occupation, when the inhabitants of the Dour Valley crossed the river and the marshes by boats and wooden causeways.

No one who has not viewed Dover from the sea can have a full appreciation of the majesty of its site. But you must not merely glimpse it from the pier-heads or from a boat. Nothing less than the home-coming from continental travel, when the sentiment of “home” gives an added value to the impressive scene, will serve.

The “white cliffs of Albion” have rightly been the subject of comment and description from the earliest times, for there is nothing in the rest of the whole wide world in the least resembling them. Except for a little of the same chalk formation on the other side of the Channel, at this narrow pass, we in England have a world-monopoly of chalk, and a brave show of bastioned chalky heights the Kentish coast makes. Nowhere else are they so stately as at Dover, for here military art has crowned and set a seal upon the defensible works of nature. But to see those white walls at their best, in whiteness and in rugged grandeur, you must see them from the Channel. Coming across from France, they do indeed gleam milk-white, and the Castle and the Roman pharos beside it seem to be neighbours almost with the clouds. But, examined close at hand, the cliffs of Dover have been plentifully smirched, and I think, from personal observation, that the chalk cliffs of the South Coast are actually at their natural whitest at Seaford, in Sussex.

Dover Castle, that “great fortress, reverend and worshipful,” sits regally on the lofty cliffs and looks (what it has several times proved not to be) impregnable. It occupies a site of thirty-five acres within its ceinture of curtain-walls, studded at intervals with twenty-six defensible towers, of every size and shape. The chief entrance to the Castle precincts is by the great “Constable’s Tower,” also variously styled Fiennes, or Newgate Tower, to distinguish it from the Old Tower, formerly the principal entrance. The others have, for the most part, names sounding as strangely as those of Arthurian romance: Abrancis, or Rokesley Tower; Colton’s; Arthur’s, or North Gate; Armourer’s; Well Tower; Harcourt’s; Chilham, or Culderscot; Hurst; Arsic, or Sayes Tower; Gatton; Peveril’s Gate, also called Beauchamp, or Marshal’s Tower; Porth’s, Gasting’s, or Mary’s Tower; Clopton’s; God’s-foe; Crevecoeur’s, Craville’s, or the Earl of Norfolk’s Tower; Fitzwilliam or St. John’s; Avranches, or Maunsel’s; Veville, or Pincester; Ashfordian Tower; Mamimot, or Mainmouth Tower; Palace, or Subterranean Gate; Suffolk Tower; and the Arsenal Tower. Besides this imposing array there were, and there remain still, profoundly deep ditches outside the walls. In midst of all these outworks, rising bold and massive as the great keep of the Tower of London itself, is the Palace Tower, or Keep. This is not the actual “castellum Dofris” which Harold, under stress and durance, was made to swear on the bones of the saints that he would yield to William Duke of Normandy, “with the well of water in it,” but a later array of buildings; the Keep being Norman work of about 1153. The actual well is the one now arched over and covered up in the north angle of the Keep.

The last occasion on which Dover Castle was the scene of warlike operations was when it was captured from the Royalists on August 1st, 1642. This successful enterprise was the work of a mere merchant, one Drake, and a dozen men, who at dead of night, by means of ropes and scaling-ladders, climbed the cliffs at an “inaccessible” point; as such left unguarded. Seizing the sentinel, the gates were thrown open, and the officer on duty, thinking the invading party was a much larger one, surrendered.

The most ancient and venerable object here—it is the oldest building in England, supposed to have been built A.D. 49—is the Roman pharos, or lighthouse, one of two that once guided the ships of the Roman emperors into the haven that was situated where the Market-place of Dover now stands. The other, of which only the platform and one fragment of stone have been found, was situated on the western heights. The fellow-tower at Boulogne, the Gessoriacum of the Romans, still remains. The rugged, roofless tower of this venerable beacon curiously neighbours the quaint early church of St. Mary-within-the-Castle, itself of great and uncertain age, and both contrast strangely with the modern evidences of casemated batteries and the sentry-go of soldiers. Many generations have tinkered and repaired the Roman pharos, whose original tufa blocks and courses of red tiles still defy the elements and the ravages of mischievous hands, while the casing of flint and pebbles set in concrete, added some two centuries ago, long since began to decay. The Roman windows were altered by Gundulf, and the upper story would seem to be the work of Sir Thomas Erpingham, Constable of Dover Castle in the reign of Henry the Fifth, for his sculptured shield of arms appears on it.

The church of St. Mary in 1860 experienced a narrow escape from complete destruction by the War Office, and was only with difficulty rescued by dint of urgent protests from antiquaries. The Department has experienced the like elsewhere, and doubtless wishes all antiquaries at the devil. The building had at that time been reduced to the condition of a coal-bunker, a process begun about a hundred and fifty years before, when it had been ruthlessly cleared out and converted into a storehouse. Among other ejected objects was the monument of the Earl of Northampton, already noticed at Greenwich. The building was opened again in 1862, after restoration.

The twenty-four-foot long brass cannon within the castle grounds, known as “Queen Elizabeth’s Pocket-pistol,” is by far the best-known and most popular object here. It is not given to every one to appreciate the Roman pharos or the Norman architecture of the keep, but this long, slender piece of ordnance makes a direct and easily understood appeal to the sympathies of the crowd, largely on account of the rhyme associated with it, supposed to be a translation of the inscription in Low Dutch that is to be seen on the cannon itself, amid the arabesque devices that decorate its whole length. This familiar jingle runs thus:

It could, of course, do nothing of the kind, nor anything like it; and the inscription says nothing of the sort. Here it is, in its original grotesqueness:

The literal translation is:

But it has been well put metrically, without departing to any degree from exactness:

This beautiful work, enriched, together with its wheels, with elaborate ornament, was cast at Utrecht in 1544, and presented by the States-General of the Netherlands to Queen Elizabeth, defender of the reformed religion.

It is fitting in the completest degree that Dover should have figured in the quarrel that sent the patriot Englishman Earl Godwin, into revolt and exile. The true story of Godwin and his stand for the rights and liberties of Englishmen is well known to history, but it has never been made sufficiently intimate, and the memory of that great man, blackened by lying Norman monks, suffers to this day. The fame of the weak and alien-loving King Edward the Confessor, has, on the other hand, been well cared for, and he has long been regarded as a saint. The trouble arose from a visit in 1051 of Eustace, Count of Boulogne, a brother-in-law of the King, one of the arrogant Normans who even thus early conceived themselves able to insult and ill-treat the people of that Saxon England they were destined to conquer in the succeeding reign. The outrage was deliberate. Halting his party within a mile of Dover, the Count of Boulogne left the saddle of his travelling palfrey, and, putting on his armour and his helmet adorned with the two long whalebone aigrettes that marked his authority along the seashores of Boulogne, he mounted his war-horse, and, with his followers armed in like manner, entered the town. Arrived there, they thrust themselves, uninvited and undesired guests, upon the chief burgesses. Such was the custom in feudal Normandy, but it was unknown in England, and as greatly resented as unknown. One indignant Englishman promptly thrust out one of these unwelcome guests who had taken veritable “French leave.” In return, the stranger drew his sword and wounded his “host,” but was promptly set upon and slain. When this incident became known Eustace and his party stormed the house, and the brave defender of the sanctity of his hearth was murdered. An armed foray through the town followed, in which the foreigners fared ill, for nineteen of them were slain by the infuriated townsfolk, and the departure of the remainder across sea was prevented. The King was at Gloucester, and to that city Eustace and those who remained of his retinue hastened, to seek revenge. Edward was enraged, and ordered Godwin to waste the town of Dover with fire and sword. That, you perceive, was the quality of the Confessor’s saintliness! Godwin, one of the greatest in the land, himself father-in-law of the King, who had married his daughter Edith, refused to punish without a hearing the men who had merely resented insolence. They should be tried lawfully, and punished only if guilty.

This refusal led directly to Godwin and his son Harold being outlawed, to the raising of rebellion, and eventually to the larger issue, after the death of Edward the Confessor, of the invasion and conquest of England by William of Normandy.

Dover Castle is in most respects, with its pierced and honeycombed cliffs, an up-to-date fortress, but it was realised over a hundred years ago that the corresponding cliffs on the other side of the town required to be fortified; and thus the gun-galleries, the barracks, and the many military developments of the “Western Heights” came into being. One reaches these lofty altitudes most conveniently, but up infinite staircases, by that extremely dirty and dismal specimen of engineering skill, “the Shaft,” in Snargate Street. Some three hundred (or is it 3,000?) steps lead up to those heights, where the Romans had a companion pharos to that on the castle cliffs, and where the Knights Templar founded a twelfth-century church with a round nave, built in imitation of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Here are the foundations, all now left, of that church, the smallest of the “round churches” in England, carefully preserved by the Office of Works, and here King John’s shameful homage to the Pope was made, “Apud Domum MilitiÆ Templi juxta Doveriam,” May 15th, 1213.

The spot is not, nowadays, of romantic appearance. Modern military barracks are utilitarian rather than beautiful. Sometimes they have even a note of squalor.

Some large fragments of concrete, reared up on end in the Drop Redoubt, form what is called the Bredenstone, or Braidenstone, once sometimes called the “Kissing Stone,” for ages an object of traditional veneration; why, none knew. They combined something of the majesty of the unknown, like that belonging to the Coronation Stone in Westminster Abbey, with a good deal of the half-humorous importance of the famous Blarney Stone. Really, they were, and are, after all, remaining portions of the vanished Roman pharos buried in the eighteenth century, when the Drop Redoubt was constructed, on the spot called the “Devil’s Drop.” From time immemorial the Lords Warden of the Cinque Ports had been sworn in upon this Ara CÆsaris, as antiquaries styled it; and after the platform and the “Bredenstone” were exhumed, about 1854, Palmerston was sworn in on the spot, in 1861; and Lord Dufferin in 1891. Lord Salisbury, however, and later holders of the office, were installed in the town, in the grounds of Dover College, on the site of the ancient Priory of St. Martin; but on July 18th, 1914, the old traditional site was resumed, when the new Lord Warden, Earl Beauchamp, was installed on these heights.

In 1823 Cobbett found Dover “like other seaport towns; but really much more clean, and with less blackguard people in it than I ever observed in any seaport before.” Things have changed since then, in a woeful way, and with Dover’s growth has come squalor and dirt.

He visited the Western Heights, to see with his own eyes, as he tells us, “something of the sorts of means that had been made use of to squander away countless millions of money. Here,” he continues, “is a hill containing, probably, a couple of square miles or more, hollowed like a honeycomb. Here are line upon line, trench upon trench, cavern upon cavern, bomb-proof upon bomb-proof; in short, the very sight of the thing convinces you that either madness the most humiliating, or profligacy the most scandalous must have been at work here for years. The question that every man of sense asks, is: What reason had you to suppose that the French would ever come to this hill to attack it, while the rest of the country was so much more easy to assail? However, let any man of good, plain understanding, go and look at the works that have here been performed, and that are now all tumbling into ruin. Let him ask what this cavern was for; what that ditch was for; what this tank was for; and why all these horrible holes and hiding-places at an expense of millions upon millions? Let this scene be brought and placed under the eyes of the people of England, and let them be told that Pitt and Dundas and Perceval had these things done to prevent the country from being conquered; with voice unanimous the nation would instantly exclaim: Let the French, or let the devil take us, rather than let us resort to means of defence like these.

“This is, perhaps, the only set of fortifications in the world ever framed for mere hiding. There is no appearance of any intention to annoy an enemy. It is a parcel of holes made in a hill, to hide Englishmen from Frenchmen. Just as if the Frenchmen would come to this hill! Just as if they would not go (if they came at all) and land in Romney Marsh, or on Pevensey Level, or anywhere else, rather than come to this hill; rather than come to crawl up Shakespeare’s Cliff. All the way along the coast, from this very hill to Portsmouth, or pretty nearly all the way, is a flat. What the devil should they come to this hill for, then? And when you ask this question, they tell you that it is to have an army here behind the French, after they had marched into the country! And for a purpose like this; for a purpose so stupid, so senseless, so mad as this, and withal, so scandalously disgraceful, more brick and stone have been buried in this hill than would go to build a neat new cottage for every labouring man in the counties of Kent and Sussex!”

Cobbett here gives way to a fit of senseless vituperation; the more obviously senseless since this rabid tirade comes only two days later than his ride along the coast from New Romney to Hythe and Folkestone, where of course he encountered the martello towers; erected there for the purpose of guarding those levels against a threatened invasion. He raves at them equally as he raves at the works on the Western Heights, and, in short, behaves on the principle of the Irishman who acted on the policy of “whenever you see a head, hit it.” It is very fine fighting form, but it is the very negation of logic.

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