DERVENTIO

Derby, or, more strictly, Little Chester, hard by, was the Roman Derventio, a name it derived from the river Derwent, in the days of the ancient Britons: the Dwr gwent, or clear water. When the Saxons came and settled near the site of Derventio, they styled the place “Northweorthing,” and the Danes, who in turn drove out the Saxons, named it “Deoraby,” whence the transition to the modern “Derby” is easy. The modern arms of Derby display a buck couchant in a park, an allusion to the supposed origin of the Danish place-name, thought to derive from the Teutonic name, thier, for wild beasts, which term would no doubt include deer. But if this be the correct derivation, it is an extraordinary coincidence that the first syllable of the Roman place-name and that of the Danish should be identical.

The untravelled are easily misled as to the appearance of Derby town. If you were to believe the average guide-book, you would never visit the place, and would rank it with Swindon or Wolverton, or the like. It is true that the chief offices and the works of the Midland Railway are centred here, and that modern Derby is the creation of these circumstances; but, lapped round and enfolded though it is by machine-shops and the mean streets of sheer industrialism, ancient Derby is not altogether to be spoken of in the past tense.

The historical incidents connected with Derby are not many, and they are nearly all associated with the unhappy House of Stuart, whose members exhibited so strange an inability to rule themselves that it remains an odd problem how so ill-balanced a family ever raised itself to kingly rank.

Derby entertained Charles the First in 1635 and made him and his followers welcome to the town. They did it in coin and in kind; with a purse stuffed full of sovereigns, and with gifts of an ox, a calf, and six sheep. In 1642, when the Civil War was already in progress, the King was back again, “borrowing” £300. It has ever been an ill investment, this lending to kings, and Derby never again saw the colour of its money. I, for one, am not surprised that Derby afterwards declared for the Parliament.

The burgesses were still incensed against the Stuarts when Prince Charlie came in 1745, at the head of his wild Highlanders, in his futile effort to upset George the Second and regain the throne of his ancestors; and, for all the brave promises made, of five shillings down, and five pounds apiece when they reached London, he obtained only three recruits in the whole town. We have already, at Swarkestone Bridge, heard at length of this ill-fated rising, but Derby affords some amusing incidents. The Duke of Devonshire had raised a regiment of one hundred and fifty men, to oppose the advance of the Highlanders, and the squires and magistrates of the county, and the corporation of Derby, had raised a force of six hundred more. Derby apparently presented an armoured front to the foe, but it was woefully deceptive. At ten o’clock on the night of December 3rd, when scouts brought tidings of the enemy’s advance, the drums sounded to the muster and the warriors fell in. The order was given to march, and they marched accordingly: out of the back door when the rebels were coming in at the front. In short, they and the Duke who led them emulated the example of the “runaway musketeers,” or, like a billiard-player, uncertain of the game, played for safety. Whether it were policy, seeing that the invaders were advancing with so bold a front, and looked like being successful, or whether it were cowardice, seems to have been a debated point. But it was certainly not military genius. They were led towards Nottingham, and ravaged the farmhouses for food and drink as they went, making war on the poultry, and forgetting to pay.

Meanwhile, horrid reports reached them from Derby. The Pretender had arrived and had extorted £3,000 from the town. But what sent shivers of apprehension down their spinal columns was the news that the enemy had in great numbers attended service and partaken of the Sacrament, and had then resorted to the cutlers to have their swords sharpened. This meant business. We may imagine the sigh of relief with which these warriors heard of the wholly unexpected retreat of the Highlanders, and that there was not, after all, to be a Battle of Derby.

Industry, and not war, makes up the history of the town, together with the usual amusement of religious persecution that colours the old annals of all places. It was at Derby in 1650 that the Society of Friends first came by the name of “Quakers,” when George Fox was brought as a sectary before Mr. Justice Bennet. “He was,” says Fox, “the first who called us quakers, because I bid them tremble at the word of the Lord.”

But soon there were other things to do. in 1717 the art of spinning silk was introduced to England by John Lombe, who built the first mill here, and set up machinery whose secrets he had learned in Italy, until that time the great silk-spinning country. The romantic story is told of how, determined to discover the closely guarded processes of manufacture, he visited Italy and in disguise worked at a silk-mill; returning to England with the information he had acquired, and with a number of workmen he had succeeded in bribing. His death shortly afterwards was ascribed to his having been poisoned by an Italian woman sent over for the purpose by the manufacturers whose secrets he had surprised.

Calico afterwards became, in addition to silk, an article of Derby manufacture, but in the popular mind the name of the town is usually associated with the production of china, the fame of the beautiful “Crown Derby” porcelain being more widespread than that of silk or calico. The Royal Crown Derby works, established about 1750, lasted very nearly a hundred years, being closed in 1848.

Derby was sufficiently important to be able to support a coach to and from London, so early as 1735, when a conveyance set out every Thursday from the “George.” This was continued in 1790 to Manchester, and then went daily; leaving Derby at 3 p.m. and arriving in London at 10 o’clock the following morning. From the “Bell” went another coach, certainly as early as 1778, when, on March 15th, it was announced that “the Derby Fly, in one day to London for the summer season, will set out from the Bell Inn on Sunday next, and will continue to set out every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings at six o’clock, each passenger to pay £1 8s. and to be allowed 14 lb. weight of luggage. Performed by Hilliard, Henson, Foster & Co.”

The early importance of the Derby inns as starting and arrival points for the coaches was somewhat obscured at a later date, when coaching had grown enormously, leading to the establishment of special coach-offices in the town, of which Stenson’s General Coach Office, in Sadler Gate, was the chief. An early notice of the “Bell” is found in 1698, when it was kept by one G. Meynell. In 1702 a “Widow Ward” was landlady. In 1761 the house and all its eatables and drinkables were made free to all-comers by Sir Henry Harpur during his Parliamentary candidature. A few years later, the house was rebuilt by a retired West India merchant, John Campion, whose initials, and the date 1774, elaborately done in leadwork, are to be seen to this day on an old pump, still in working order in the courtyard. The house remained in the Campion family until about 1865.

The old claret-coloured brick front of the “Bell” looks down upon Sadler Gate, very much as of old, and its courtyard still echoes with the sound of prosperous business.

The curtain of romantic history was rung down at Derby on a most dramatic situation, so late as 1817, in the executions here for High Treason.

The “high treason” for which Jeremiah Brandreth and his associates were then executed was a singular incident to have occurred so late as the nineteenth century. It was nothing less than an attempted rising against the Government; an armed effort at subverting the existing order of things that seemed more in keeping with the insurrections of earlier ages. It certainly never became a formidable movement, and was really an affair fomented by one Oliver, an agent of the Sidmouth-Castlereagh administration, which was uneasy at the generally disturbed state of the country, and fearful that the strong language indulged in by the Radical agitators among the working class and the swiftly increasing numbers of factory-workers might, if unchecked, lead to very serious movements. In this frame of mind, the weak and criminal Ministers appear to have considered that their best course was to employ spies who should worm their way into the confidence of the discontented classes, and actually provoke them into acts of armed rebellion that would give the Government an opportunity of repressing them violently.

The headquarters of Oliver, the spy, were at the turbulent and disaffected town of Nottingham, whence he travelled here and there into the surrounding districts, posing as a leader of London malcontents, and making inflammatory speeches. At the “Blackmoor’s Head” and the “Three Salmons” in Nottingham, he addressed the sullen working-men, and spoke of a “provisional Government” being formed, and of 70,000 men in London, ready to rise. Monday, June 9th, 1817, was fixed by him and his dupes in Derbyshire for a march upon Nottingham, where he declared they would be met by numerous hands of insurgents from the south, and together would seize the Castle. The soldiers, he declared, were with them, to a man.

Chief among the ardent spirits ready to fall into the snare set by Oliver was Jeremiah Brandreth, a young man of about twenty-five years of age, of a dark, bold, and determined character; the very picture, in appearance and in fiery energy, of a popular leader. His parentage and place of birth are uncertain. Under the leadership of Brandreth, called by his followers “the Nottingham Captain,” and afterwards described as “otherwise John Coke,” a large number of men (according to one account five hundred) assembled, in the words of the subsequent indictment, “with force and arms,” “a great multitude of false traitors,” in the parish of South Wingfield. Among them were agricultural labourers, weavers, and quarrymen of Wingfield, Pentridge, and neighbouring parishes, styling themselves “the Regenerators.” Between June 9th and 15th they hovered between these villages, armed with hedge-stakes and rude pikes, calling at houses and farmsteads to seize any firearms that could be found, and endeavouring to enlist men. Brandreth became possessed of a pair of pistols, which he struck in a belt formed of an apron twisted round his waist. With one of these pistols he shot dead a farm servant named Robert Walters, during an altercation at Pentridge. Meanwhile, hearing no tidings of the supposed insurgents who were to meet them, the undisciplined band grew nervous and disheartened, and their numbers were rapidly thinned by desertions. At length, when they entered the county of Nottingham at Eastwood, there were but forty left. In the interval, the magistrates and the police, probably informed by Oliver, discovered that something of an unusual nature was afoot, and the 95th Regiment of Foot, the Yeomanry, and the 15th Hussars, all ready to hand, were warned to hold themselves prepared for eventualities. By the 15th of June these tremendous preparations were seen to be too ridiculously imposing for the purpose of dealing with a mere dwindling mob; and a mere party of eighteen Hussars was despatched to capture them. Brandreth and his men, standing despondent upon a hill at Eastwood, saw them cantering along, and thought them to be some of the long-expected revolutionaries. They were soon undeceived, and then fled in panic, throwing away their weapons, such as they were. The Hussars captured some thirty of them, between Kimberley and Longley Mill, and lodged them in Nottingham Gaol. Brandreth himself escaped, and lay in hiding for awhile, but was betrayed by “a friend,” for sake of the £50 reward offered.

The chief figures in this affair were, to the number of twenty-three, arraigned before a special Assize held at Derby on October 15th, with the result that Brandreth, William Turner, and Isaac Ludlam, senior, were condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Eleven others were “pardoned,” as the quaint phrase ran, “upon condition of being transported for life”; three were similarly “pardoned” by being awarded fourteen years’ transportation; while one had two years’, two a term of one year, and three a mere six months’.

The three principal offenders were executed at Nuns Green, on November 7th, and were hanged, having merely their heads cut off afterwards; the Prince Regent “graciously remitting the rest of their sentence.” How kind!

The unfortunate men took affecting leave of one another, anticipating being presently in heaven. The hangman, duly masked—he was said to be one of the Denby colliers—then performed his office, and afterwards cut off the heads: making so ill a job over Brandreth that his assistant was fain to complete the work with knives. Thereupon, the executioner, in the gory old formula, held up the head before the huge assembled crowd, and, turning right and left, exclaimed, “Behold the head of the traitor, Jeremiah Brandreth!”

The bodies of the three men were unceremoniously flung into a pit dug in the churchyard of St. Werburgh, in Friar Gate. A sportive barber, Pegg by name, then took to masquerading in the churchyard as a ghost, robed in a sheet, and, scared the inhabitants for some time, until a bold spirit, throwing a stone at him, hit him with such violence in the eye that he went half blind for the rest of his life.