HISTORIC INNS

It can be no matter for surprise that many inns have historic associations. Indeed, when we consider that in olden times the hostelries of town and country touched life at every point, and were once the centre of local life, it becomes rather surprising that not more tragic events, more treaties and conferences, and more plots and conspiracies are associated with such places of public resort.

Strange, mysterious plotters, highwaymen, and great nobles resorted to them, and, coming to things more domestic, there, under the inn’s hospitable roof, town councils not infrequently met in those times before ever “municipal buildings” were dreamed of, and conducted their business over a cheering, and inebriating, cup. Your inn was, in short, then at once your railway-station, club, hotel, reading-room and mart. There were distinct advantages, in the social sense, in all this. It meant good-fellowship when respectable townsfolk were not ashamed to spend a winter evening in the parlour of a representative inn, or play a game of bowls in summer on the bowling-green with which most such houses were once furnished, and the man who now glowers in unneighbourly and solitary way over his hearthstone, would expand, with such opportunities, into as good-natured a fellow as any of the olden time.

THE “REINDEER,” BANBURY.

The inns of Banbury make some historic figure. It was in one of them—the chronicler says not which—that the dispute took place between the two Yorkist commanders, which led to the battle of Danesmoor being lost by their side, in July, 1469.

The occasion was the revolt of the great Earl of Warwick against Edward the Fourth. To intercept Warwick at Northampton the Earl of Pembroke was marching with a force from Gloucestershire, and was joined on the Cotswolds by Lord Stafford of Southwick, newly raised a step in the peerage by being created Earl of Devon. Lord Stafford’s troops numbered six thousand good archers: a very welcome reinforcement; but, even so, the combined forces dared not at once risk an engagement with the rebels at Daventry, and fell back upon Banbury. There a quarrel took place between Lord Stafford and the Earl of Pembroke, all on account of a pretty girl. Says Hall: “The earle of Pembroke putt the Lorde Stafforde out of an Inne, wherein he delighted muche to be, for the loue of a damosell that dwelled in the house: contrary to their mutuall agrement by them taken, which was, that whosoeaver abteined first a lodgyng should not be deceaved nor remoued. After a greate many woordes and crakes, had betwene these twoo capitaines, the lord Stafford of Southwyke, in greate dispite departed with his whole compaignie and band of Archers, leauynge the erle of Pembroke almost desolate in the toune.”

Accordingly, so weakened, the next day the Earl of Pembroke was defeated. He took refuge in Banbury church, but, according to Hall, was dragged forth by the fierce John Clapham, who beheaded him in the porch with his own hands.

Possibly it was at the “Red Lion,” in the High Street, that the damosell lived who caused all the strife between those great lords. If so, it renders that fine old house the more interesting. Modern needs, and a not unreasonable desire to keep incoming guests and their belongings dry, have caused the picturesque courtyard to be roofed in with glass, thus hiding many of its pictorial qualities; but you still enter from the street by a fifteenth-century oaken portal, much blunted by wear and tear and many successive coats of paint and varnish in all those succeeding centuries; yet indubitably still fifteenth-century work.

But the most picturesque inn at Banbury is the “Reindeer.” History is silent as to the why or the how of its acquiring that name, and is indeed dumb in almost every other respect concerning the old house. The “Reindeer,” both in itself and in its situation, is scarcely like the “Red Lion,” an hotel. You look in at the “Reindeer” for a drink and for curiosity only; for the house does not precisely invite guests, and probably does most business on market days, when country folk from neighbouring villages throng the strait and crooked streets of Banbury and put up their traps in its yard and insist on liberally drinking the health of one another. Parson’s Street, indeed, the situation of the “Reindeer,” is a market-street and crowded shopping centre, where brazen-tongued salesmen exhort housewives to “buy, buy, buy”; or indulge in rhapsodical, exclamatory passages in praise of their goods. You are gazing, let us say, outside the “original” Banbury-cake shop, opposite, upon the magpie black and white of the “Reindeer” frontage, when a parrot-like voice is heard exclaiming, in ecstatic rapture, “O what loverly heggs!” and, turning, you perceive, not a grey parrot in a gilded cage, but a white-aproned provision-dealer’s assistant, unfortunately at large. Fleeing into the courtyard of the inn, you still hear faint cries of “There’s ’am!” “O mother! what butter!”

The neighbourhood, it will be perceived, does not in these days lend itself to quiet residence, and although, by the evidence of its architecture, the “Reindeer” was doubtless at one time one of the chief hotels of the town, it has long ceased to hold anything like that position.

The old oaken gates and the black-and-white timbering above appear to be the oldest portions of the house: the gates themselves inscribed with the date “1570” on one side, and on the other

“IHON · KNIGHT ? IHONE · KNIGHT ? DAVID HORN.”

The great feature of the inn is, however, the noble oak-panelled chamber known, for whatever inscrutable reason, as the “Globe Room.” Exterior and interior views of it are the merest commonplaces in Banbury. There are, in fact, three things absolutely necessary, nay, almost sacramental, for the stranger to do in Banbury, without having performed the which he is a scorn and a derision. The first of these indispensable performances is the eating, or, at any rate, the buying of Banbury cakes. And here let me add that the Banbury cakes of Banbury have a lightness and a toothsomeness entirely lacking in the specious impostors made elsewhere. Just as there are no other such pork-pies as those of Melton Mowbray, and as Shrewsbury cakes can apparently only be made at Shrewsbury, so the “Banburys” made in other towns are apt to lie as heavy on your chest as a peccadillo upon a tender conscience. But in their native town they disappear, to the accompaniment of cups of tea, with a rapidity alarming to the pocket, if not to the stomach; for they cost “tuppence” apiece, and a hungry pedestrian or cyclist finds no difficulty in demolishing half a dozen of them.

YARD OF THE “REINDEER,” BANBURY.The second of these necessary observances is the viewing of Banbury Cross: not the old original famous Banbury Cross of the nursery rhyme, to which many generations of children have been invited to “ride a cock-horse” to see the tintinnabulatory lady with bells on her fingers and bells on her toes; that cross was destroyed by the Puritans, and the modern one is not even a copy of it, for no man knoweth what the original was like.

The third of these necessary rites is the viewing of the “Globe Room” at the “Reindeer.” What the exterior of that room is like, let the illustration of the courtyard show. The date of its building is still faintly traceable in the figures “1637” on the masonry of the gable. They charge you threepence to view the interior, and if so be you cannot frame to admire the richly decorated plaster ceiling for yourself, the printed notice that a cast has been taken from it, and is to be seen in South Kensington Museum, is calculated to impress the intellectually snobbish. For our own part, seeing things with our own eyes and judging of them comparatively, there seems no very adequate reason for South Kensington acquiring such a cast, unless, indeed, (which is unthinkable) the Department of Science and Art is bent upon copies of all the old ceilings in the country. This is, in short, to say that although the plaster decoration of the “Globe Room” is fine, it is neither so intrinsically fine, nor so original above all others, that it deserves so great an honour. The really supremely fine feature of the room is the beautiful Jacobean panelling in oak, now almost coal-black with age, covering the walls from floor to ceiling, and designed and wrought in unusually thorough and bold style. There is not a finer room of its period in the country, and it may even be questioned (leaving the mere matter of size alone) if there is even another quite so fine or in every detail so perfect.

The reason of this magnificently panelled apartment being added to the older and very much less ornate portion of the inn is obscure; and it will be noted, as a matter of curiosity, that, entered as it is only by a doorway from the open courtyard, the room is not, structurally a part of the house. The name of the “Globe Room” given to it is not explained in any way by the decorations or by its history, which is as obscure as its origin. Tradition says Cromwell “held a council” here, and accordingly, although history does not tell us anything specifically about it, a picture, reproduced in a variety of ways, showing a number of stern and malignant Roundheads interrogating an elegant and angelic-looking Royalist clad in white, and bearing a very strong likeness to Charles the First himself, is one of the commonplaces of the town.

THE GLOBE ROOM, “REINDEER” INN, BANBURY.For one of the most entertaining examples of history enacted at an inn, we must shift the scene to Chester.

Among the ancient inns of that city, long since retired from the innkeeping business is the “Blue Posts,” a house in its day historic by reason of one dramatic incident: an incident so dramatic that it would almost seem to have been borrowed from the stage. It was the year 1558, the last of the reign of Queen Mary, of bloody memory, and Dr. Henry Cole, Dean of St. Paul’s, was come to Chester on his way to Ireland, where he had work to do, in the persecution of the Irish Protestants. He lodged for the night at the “Blue Posts,” in Bridge Street, and in the evening the Mayor of Chester called upon him there.

The Dean made no secret of his mission. To him it was a labour of love to bring imprisonment and torture, fire and stake, to correct the religious errors of those Protestants over sea. Had he not already distinguished himself by a revolting and bloodthirsty sermon, on the occasion of Cranmer’s sentence of martyrdom?

In conversation with the Mayor, he drew from his travelling valise the Royal commission for his errand. “Here,” he exclaimed, with exultation, “here is that will lash the heretics of Ireland!”

Now, whether the landlady was in the room at the time, or listening at the keyhole—in a manner traditional among landladies—does not appear; but she overheard the conversation, and, having a brother, a Protestant, in Dublin, was alarmed for his safety in particular, and, let us hope, for that of Protestants in general. So, that night, when the Dean was doubtless dreaming of the shackles and gyves, the faggots and the rackings he was bringing to the heretics of Ireland, Mrs. Mottershead, the landlady with the sharp ears, abstracted the fateful commission, and in its stead placed a pack of cards, with the knave of clubs showing satirically at the top. O! daring and witty Mrs. Mottershead!

We may, if gifted with anything like a due sense of humour, well chuckle at the outraged feelings of the Lord President of the Council of Ireland when the Dean, all unconscious, presented him with this unconventional authority. My Lord, however, summoned some humour of his own, wherewith to meet the situation. “Let us,” said he, “have another commission, and we will meanwhile shuffle the cards.”

Crestfallen, the emissary returned, and did actually obtain a new commission, but when again arrived at Chester, and awaiting a fair wind for Ireland, he heard of the Catholic Queen’s death and the accession of her Protestant sister; and so found his way back to London once more.

THE “MUSIC HOUSE,” NORWICH.

The episode would fitly end in the Dean being flung, loaded with chains, into some loathsome dungeon; but although he was, in fact, committed to the Tower in 1560, after having been deprived of all his preferments, such dramatic completeness was lacking. But, at any rate, he was transferred to the Fleet Prison, and, after a long captivity, seems to have died there in 1580.

Meanwhile, virtue was rewarded, in the person of Mrs. Mottershead, who was granted a pension of £40 a year, representing perhaps £500 a year in our own day.

The former “Blue Posts,” where this historic interlude was played, was long since refronted in respectable, but dull, red brick, and is now, or was recently, a boot-shop. But although no hint of its former self is given to the passer-by, those who venture to make a request, are shown a fine upstairs room, with elaborately pargeted ceiling, still known as the “Card Room.”

The “Music House” inn, King Street, Norwich, situated in what is now a poor and densely populated part of that city, has a vaulted cellar of Norman masonry, a vestige of the time when the Norwich Jews were very rich and numerous. The house of which it formed part was then the residence of one Moyses, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew, who in the reign of King John seems to have come, like many of his race, to some mysterious and uncomfortable end, probably in the dungeons of Norwich Castle. In the course of time the famous Paston family came into possession of the house, and in 1633 the great lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, resided here. Shortly afterwards it became the meeting-place of the “city music,” ancestors of modern town bands, who seem to have practised the waits and other performances within, until they had their parts sufficiently perfect to dare inflict them on the city. Hence the sign of the “Music House.”

In the same neighbourhood we have the “Dolphin” inn at Potter Heigham, a place sadly changed in modern times.

Potter Heigham is no longer rural, and the long, long and narrow street leading to it, out of Norwich, is crowded with the waggons and railway-lorries of the old city’s expanding commerce. In midst of all this rumbling of wheels over uneven pavements stands the “Dolphin” inn, the home in his declining days of Bishop Hall, who rented it for some ten years, until his death there, in 1656, in his eighty-second year.

THE “DOLPHIN,” POTTER HEIGHAM.

It was a comparatively new house then, for while you see the date, 1587, over the entrance door and a merchant’s mark and the initials R B on either side, a prominent gable shows the date 1629 done, very large, in vitrified brick.

Still you come grandly into the house, though it be a humble tavern now, between an old pillared entrance, and across a courtyard, and in the house are Jacobean fireplaces, with a fine newel staircase carved in the manner of an old church bench-end, with an heraldic lion and the Gothic foliage known as a “poppy head.” The “Dolphin” would be capable, if it were differently situated, of being converted into a handsome old-world hotel, but the poor and crowded neighbourhood of Potter Heigham forbids anything of that kind, and so it remains humble and unassuming.

A tragical little story belongs to the humble old “Nag’s Head” inn at Thame, formerly the “King’s Head.” The old sign of it was used as a gallows for a Parliamentary rebel who had deserted his side and joined the King, and was so unlucky as to be captured. Those Puritans had a grim humour. One of the condemned man’s executioners, before turning him off, turned his face, bound with a handkerchief, to the sign, with the words: “Nay, sir, you must speak one word with the King before you go. You are blindfold, and he cannot see, and by and by you shall both come down together.” And then he was hoisted up.

There is another historic house at Thame, for it was into the yard of the “Greyhound” in that town that John Hampden came, lying mortally wounded upon the neck of his horse, from the skirmish of Chalgrove Field, on June 18th, 1643. He had unwillingly taken arms against oppression and iniquitous taxation, and was thus at the outset killed. No enemy’s bullet laid him low: it was his own pistol, overloaded by a careless servant, that, exploding, shattered his hand. He died, on the 24th, of lockjaw.

The front of the house has been rebuilt, and the yard somewhat altered, since the patriot rode in at that tragical time; but the house is in essentials the inn of his day. Long since ceased to be an inn, it is now occupied as a furnishing ironmonger’s shop and warehouse.

THE “NAG’S HEAD,” THAME.

The “Crown and Treaty House” inn at Uxbridge, long known to would-be beery rustics by the affectionately wistful name of the “Crown and Treat Ye,” is a genuinely historic house. It stands away beyond the tramway terminus, facing the road at the very extremity of Uxbridge town, as you cross canal and river and so leave Middlesex for Buckinghamshire; and although very much of its real antiquity is disguised by modern paint and plaster, it is in fact the surviving portion of the great mansion built in 1575 by one of the Bennet family, and, at the opening of the war between King and Parliament, in the occupation of one “Mr. Carr.”

The meeting here of leading spirits on either side of the contending forces was well meant. It began January 20th, 1645, and was convened for the purpose of “taking into consideration the grievances of which each party complained, and to propose those remedies which might be mutually agreeable.” Unfortunately, little sincerity attended the actual meeting. The King’s party were unyielding, and the military successes of the Parliament rendered the leaders of that side ill-disposed to give away in talk that which they had won in the field. Moreover, like most conferences in which religious as well as political questions were the subjects of discussion, those debates only further inflamed mutual hatreds and further sundered the already wide points of disagreement.

YARD OF THE “GREYHOUND,” THAME.

There were sixteen commissioners on either side, and for three weeks they argued without coming to any settlement. Neither side would give way, for either was convinced of its ability to finally crush the other by force of arms. Much blood had already been shed, indecisively, and passions ran high. Uxbridge was selected as a kind of half-way house between London, held strongly by the Parliament, and Oxford, as strongly held for the King; and when the empty verbiage was done, the propositions put forth scouted, and the pretensions disallowed, the parties separated, falling back respectively to London and to Oxford, to recommence those hostilities for which they were spoiling. Treaty, therefore, there was not: only an ominous truce between Right Divine and People’s Will.

The Earl of Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, gives an interesting account of these fruitless meetings:

“There was,” he says, “a good house at the end of the town which was provided for the Treaty. Above was a fair room in the middle of the house, handsomely dressed up for the Commissioners to sit in; a large square table being placed in the middle with seats for the Commissioners; one side being sufficient for those of either party: and a rail for those who should be thought necessary to be present, which went round. There were many other rooms on either side of this great room for the Commissioners to retire to, when they thought fit to consult by themselves, and there being good stairs at either end of the house they never went through each other’s quarters, nor met, but in the great room.”

Neither side used the house, except for these meetings, the Royalists being appropriately accommodated at the “Crown,” which then stood in the middle of the High Street, in the centre of the town, opposite the still-existing “White Horse,” and the Parliament people at the “George.”

THE “CROWN AND TREATY,” UXBRIDGE.

In those times the highway out of Uxbridge, ceasing to be broad and straight, left the High Street of Uxbridge by a sharp turning to the right and went in a narrow way called Johnson’s Row to the crossing of the Colne, which was effected to the north of the present bridge and was made in two stages by wooden bridges, using the still-surviving island in the middle of the river as a kind of natural pier or abutment. The road therefore crossed, in a more or less direct fashion, from immediately in front of the “Swan and Bottle” inn to where the present flour-mill stands, cautiously using that very considerable island on the way. The modern road, with its bridge of seven arches, on the other hand, boldly spans the river at its widest part, and seeks no help midway. It is all very clear and palpable to you who stand on the bridge and see how the road across it swoops round, at a very noticeable angle, to join the older road at the flour-mill; but Johnson’s Row was demolished 1905-6, to make an approach to the new railway-station, and the old landmarks are growing obscured. It was the making of this road in 1785 that changed the fortunes of the Treaty House. The new highway was cut through its gardens, and the house itself brought from private life and a dignified seclusion to face the wayfaring world. What else, then, could it do but become an inn?

THE “TREATY ROOM,” “CROWN AND TREATY,” UXBRIDGE.]The house, although even now not small, was once much larger. Its least imposing front is turned to the street and is not improved by the modern appointments of a public-house. The great feature of the building is the room on the first floor, called, with what appears to be insufficient warranty, the “Treaty Room,” the real place of meeting having been, apparently, the front room, now divided by a partition into two. It was doubtless its being immeasurably the finest room in the house that led to the so-called “Treaty Room” being selected for that honour. It is, in fact, a noble apartment, greatly neglected for these many years past, but grand in spite of indifference and decay. There are smeary picture-postcards of it to be purchased in Uxbridge, and it has been photographed by enthusiastic visitors times without number, generally without success; for it is a dark interior, and the wood-carving is shallow and does not yield sufficient pictorial light and shade for the cameras to do it justice. It should be added, by way of comparative criticism, that, although this panelling is itself so fine, it does not for a moment compare with the bold and effective work of the “Globe Room” at the “Reindeer,” Banbury. There you have a massiveness of construction and a breadth of design almost architectural: here there are no bold projections, and the recurrent flat pilasters are covered with an intricate Renaissance scroll and strap-work, which, although in itself good, is too small in scale to be highly effective.

THE “RED LION,” HILLINGDON.

The “Red Lion” at Hillingdon, near Uxbridge, has its small share in the troubled story of the Stuarts, although, to be sure, its plastered front is a thought too modern-looking. Here Charles the First, escaping from the besieged city of Oxford, lay the first night of his distracted wanderings through England that led him eventually to the end of his armed resistance, at Southwell.

THE “THREE CROWNS,” CHAGFORD.

The “Three Crowns” at Chagford, South Devon, now a favourite old-world haunt of tourists visiting Dartmoor, illustrates still another incident in that internecine warfare. It was originally a manor-house built in the time of Henry the Eighth by Sir John Whyddon, a native of Chagford, who went to London to seek his fortune, and, as a lawyer, found it. He became a Judge of the King’s Bench, was knighted, and we are gravely told that he was the first judge to ride to Westminster on a horse: his predecessors, and his learned contemporary brethren, had gone on mules.In the troubled times of the Civil War, when Royalist and Roundhead disturbed even these remote nooks of the country, Chagford was attacked by the Royalists under Sir John Berkeley. In the street-fighting, according to Clarendon, “they lost Sidney Godolphin, a young gentleman of incomparable parts. He received a mortal shot by a musket, a little above the knee, of which he died on the instant, leaving the misfortune of his death upon a place which could never otherwise have had a mention in the world.” Ay! but that was written in days long before the appreciation of picturesque scenery had brought troops of visitors to Chagford.

Young Godolphin bled to death on a stone seat of what is now, as Charles Kingsley wrote, “a beautiful old mullioned and gabled Perpendicular inn.”

What was once the “great hall” of the old mansion is now a schoolroom. Both face the church, on the other side of the narrow street, as an old manor-house should do, and in summer time the gossipers lounge and talk, and interpolate their gossiping with loud horse-laughs, far into the night, greatly to the annoyance of visitors. Have I not heard, with these ears, the raising of a sash at some incredible hour, and the voice of some native of Bawston or N’York, exclaiming indignantly, “See yur, you darned skunks, clear out of it!” whereupon, with cat-calls and insults in the patois of Devonshire, fortunately not with ease to be understood by strangers from the U.S., that village convention has dispersed.

Many historic memories linger around that ancient and beautiful house, the “Saracen’s Head” at Southwell, in the Sherwood Forest district of Nottinghamshire. Southwell, whose hoary Minster has in modern times become a cathedral, has fallen into a dreamless slumber since the last of the coaches left the road, and as the traveller comes into its quiet streets, in whose midst the great Norman church stands solemnly, like some grey architectural ghost, he feels that he has come into a place whose last days of activity ended considerably over half a century ago.

The “Saracen’s Head” was built in that interesting, but vague, period of “ever so long ago”; the nearest attempt at determining its age to which most chroniclers dare commit themselves. Whether the existing house is the same building as that of this name conveyed by the Archbishop of York in 1396 to John Fysher and his wife Margaret, does not appear, but there seems very little reason to doubt that, although greatly altered and added to from time to time, the present “Saracen’s Head” is, essentially, in its ancient timbering, the identical structure.

The frontage of the inn, now as ever the chief inn of Southwell, little indicates its great age, for it is covered with a coat of grey plaster, and, were it not for the enormously substantial oaken doors of the coach-entrance, and the peep through the archway of the old courtyard, the casual wayfarer might pass the historic house by.

YARD OF THE “SARACEN’S HEAD,” SOUTHWELL.

For it is historic, in an intimate and a melancholy way. Dismissing in a word the remote visits paid by Edward the First and Edward the Third to Southwell, when they are stated to have lodged at the “Saracen’s Head,” we come to the harassed wanderings of Charles the First over the distracted England of his time. That unhappy King well knew Southwell and the “Saracen’s Head.” They were associated with the opening and the closing scenes of his fight with Parliament and people, for he rested at the inn on August 17th, 1642, on the way to raise the Royal Standard at Nottingham on the 22nd; and at last, on May 5th, 1646, he abandoned the nearly four years’ struggle against fate, surrendering himself here to the Scottish Commissioners. Between those two fateful days he was certainly once at Southwell, and possibly more often.

The story of his last visit has a pathos of its own that we need not be Royalist to perceive. In March, 1646, the King at length saw his hopes to be desperately failing everywhere, even in the loyal West; garrisons of towns, castles, and fortified houses had been compelled to yield, and himself reduced to fleeting, the embarrassed head of an impossible cause, from place to place; bringing upon places and persons devoted to him a common ruin. Friends began to despair of his shifty and untrustworthy policy towards themselves and in negotiations with the enemy, and although their loyalty was hardly ever in doubt, for they were fighting, after all, not merely for the King personally, but for an order of things in which their interests were involved, they had by this time exhausted energies and wealth in a vain effort, and perhaps thought peace at almost any price to be by this time preferable to the uncertainties of civil war, in which the only certainty seemed to be that, whoever eventually won, they must needs in the meanwhile be continually making further sacrifices.

The King was at Oxford when he at length came to a decision by some means to end the struggle; by flight over sea, or by surrendering himself to the enemy: in the hope, in that alternative, that the sanctity of Kingship would enable him by some means to snatch an advantage out of the very jaws of defeat and ruin. The first thought was to take flight from the country, by the port of King’s Lynn, but that was at length abandoned for the idea—a fatal tertium quid, as it proved—of surrendering, not to the English army and the Parliament, but to the Scots, who, he thought, were likely to make better terms for him. The Scottish army was at that time engaged upon the siege of the Royalist castle of Newark, near Southwell; and to Southwell the King, therefore, went from Oxford, in disguise. He left Oxford on April 26th, and, to the last incapable of being straightforward, even toward his own, gave out to his council that he was going to London, to treat with Parliament. On May 3rd he was at Stamford, and came to the “Saracen’s Head” at Southwell at seven o’clock in the morning of May 5th, accompanied by Ashburnham and his chaplain, Dr. Hudson, but travelling with them as Ashburnham’s servant. At the inn he was received by Montreuil, the French Ambassador to Scotland, who had been advised of his coming. The King, believing himself in every sense free, invited the Scottish Commissioners over to dinner at the inn, from the Bishop’s Palace, where they had their quarters; and in what is now the Coffee Room, the negotiations took place that ended in the King’s yielding to the Scots. It would, in any case, have so ended, for the Commissioners came by invitation, as guests to dinner, but were so astonished at finding the King so tamely coming within their grasp that they had not the remotest idea of letting him go again, and would, if needs were, have forcibly detained him. He was removed the same day to the neighbouring Kelham Hall, where he formed the richest prize and the bitterest source of contention between the English and the Scots, and all but caused a further warfare. Eventually, the Scottish Commissioners, true to the national love of money, sold their principles and their prisoner for £400,000 and withdrew themselves and their forces across the border. The story ends tragically, in Westminster, with the execution of the King on January 30th, 1649.

The Coffee Room of the “Saracen’s Head” is a beautiful apartment, formed out of two rooms, and rich in panelling and deeply recessed windows. The bedroom upstairs, where the King is said to have slept, is, in the same manner, formed by abolishing the partition that once made two rooms of it; and there they still show the pilgrims after things of sentimental and historic interest the ancient four-poster bed on which the King slept.

This history seems to have greatly upset Dr. Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand and afterwards of Lichfield, who stayed at the “Saracen’s Head” in 1858, and slept—or rather, failed to sleep—in this historic bed. For my part, although a pilgrim—and a sentimental one at that—I found the four-poster, despite its associations, as inviting to slumber as any other; but then, I had cycled eighty-one miles that day, and—not being a bishop—had nothing on my conscience.

KING CHARLES’ BEDROOM, “SARACEN’S HEAD,” SOUTHWELL.

Dr. Selwyn was so obsessed with the memories of that room and the house that he arose in the middle of the night, and lighted his bedroom candle and wrote a long set of couplets, sentimental, pietistic, and very jingly and inferior. I have a mental picture of him sitting up in bed, or perhaps at the dressing-table in his night-shirt, gruesomely cold on that March night, running his fingers through his hair and gazing at the ceiling for the inspiration which does not seem to have come; for a more uninspired set of verses it would be difficult to find. But you shall judge:

Byron had stayed often at the inn, many years before, and in 1807 wrote an impromptu on the death of a local carrier, John Adams, who travelled to and from the house, and lived drunk and died drunk:

It will already have been noticed that the Stuarts and their troubles contributed most of the historic associations belonging to our old hostelries; and we have not yet quite done with them. The incidents of Charles the Second’s flight in 1651, after the battle of Worcester, include a halt of one night at the “Sun,” Cirencester, the well-known escape from the “Queen’s Arms,” an inn—that is an inn no longer—at Charmouth, and visits to the “George” at Bridport, and a house of the same name at Broadwindsor. The “King’s Arms” at Salisbury is associated with meetings and conferences of the King’s supporters, who, while he lay in hiding at Heale House, considered there the best way of conducting him to the coast and safety. The route chosen lay through Mere, where, at the “George” inn (rebuilt in the eighteenth century) Colonel Phelips and Charles, travelling as his servant, Will Jackson, called. The Colonel, an acquaintance of the landlord, descended into the cellar of the inn, to sample the liquors of the house, while “Will Jackson” stood respectfully aside. Mine host, however, was an hospitable man, and, turning to the servant, with jug and glass, said, “Thou lookest an honest fellow—here’s a health to the King!” The “honest fellow,” whether taken aback by the suddenness of it, or acting an unwilling part, made some difficulty in replying; whereupon the landlord mildly took the Colonel to task for the kind of man he had brought.

THE “COCK AND PYMAT.”

From another “George”—the “George” at Brighthelmstone, in after years styled the “King’s Head”—the King escaped to France.

Nor even yet have we quite done with the hapless Stuarts, of whom undoubtedly Charles the Second was the most fortunate.

One of the most historic of inns was the famous “Cock and Pymat” at Whittington, near Chesterfield. It is now only to be spoken of in the past tense because, although there is still an inn of that name at Whittington, it is not the famous “Revolution House” itself, but only a modern building to which the old sign of the “Cock and Magpie”—for that is the plain English of “Pymat”—has been transferred.

Whittington in these times is a very grim and unlovely village, in the dismal colliery district of Chesterfield, whose wicked-looking crooked spire gives an air of diablerie to its immediate surroundings; but two centuries and a quarter ago, when James the Second was on the throne, and busily engaged in undermining the religious and Parliamentary liberties of the realm, it was a tiny collection of houses on a lonely moor, and an ideal place for meetings of conspirators. There and then those very mild and constitutional plotters who, despite their mildness, did actually succeed in overturning that already insecure monarch, met and formulated their demands.

The house in which they gathered was then an inn so noted for its fine home-brewed ale that packmen and others made it a regular place of call, and often, we are told, went considerable distances out of their way, rather than miss a draught of the genuine Whittington nut-brown.

The bold men who met in the room still known as the “Plotting Parlour” had nothing in common with such plotters as Guy Fawkes. Their methods were rather those of debating societies than of misguided persons with dark lanthorns and slow matches; but those were times when even the mildest debater who ever rose to a point of order would have been in danger of his life; and so undoubtedly the little gathering that met here in 1688—William, fourth Earl of Devonshire, Sir Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, afterwards Duke of Leeds, and John D’Arcy—were bold men and brave.

They drew up a complaint, moderately worded, and appended to it a sturdy resolution. They declared that “invasions had been made of late Years on our Religion and Laws, without the consent of Parliament, freely and duly chosen,” and begged King James to grant again the constitutional right, hardly won by our forefathers, of a free Parliament. “But,” they added, “if, to the great Misfortune and Ruin of these Kingdoms it prove otherwise, we further declare that we will to our utmost defend the Protestant religion, the Laws of the Kingdom, and the Rights and Liberties of the People.”

The Stuarts, although a romantic, were a wrong-headed and a stiff-necked race. They must needs for ever be trying conclusions with their stubborn heads against every brick wall within reach, and would never bow before the storms of their own raising. James, true to his blood, would no more yield than would any other of his house; and in that same year came the Prince of Orange and brushed him lightly aside.

The chair in which the Earl (afterwards Duke) of Devonshire presided at the “Cock and Pymat” was long since transferred to Hardwick Hall, and in the course of years the greater part of the old inn was demolished, the remaining portion being now a private house.

PORCH OF THE “RED LION,” HIGH WYCOMBE.

The porch of that chief hotel of High Wycombe, the “Red Lion,” has become in these last generations historic; but while we may find, throughout the country, inns associated with the entirely fictitious incidents of novels displaying notices of their fame, there is not yet even the most modest of tablets affixed to the front of the “Red Lion,” to inform the present generation that from the roof of the projecting portico Benjamin Disraeli, afterwards Prime Minister of England, made his first political speech. Thrice, and every time unsuccessfully—twice in 1832, and in 1834—he sought to enter Parliament as Member for this town. He made a public entry on June 3rd, 1832, and spoke from beside the lion that, still very red and fierce, stands to this day on the roof of the portico. He appeared there in the dandified costume of his youth—tightly strapped trousers, frock-coat very tight in the waist and very full and spreading in the skirts—and made a picturesque figure as, in the excitement of his harangue to the free and independent electors, he from time to time flung back the long black curls of his luxuriant hair. Mr. D’Israeli—as he then spelled his name—appeared as an independent candidate, and was proposed by a Tory and seconded by a Radical. He polled little more than half the number of votes cast for his opponent, and how small was the electorate in those days of a restricted franchise we may see from this election return:

Among inns of highly dubious historic associations may be mentioned the “White Hart” at Somerton, Somerset: that gaunt and cold-looking town built of the local grey-blue limestone that so utterly destroys the summery implication of the place-name.

THE “WHITE HART,” SOMERTON.

The inn claims to have been partly built of the stones of Somerton Castle, and a tiny opening, about the size of a pocket-handkerchief, in the gable of the small and not otherwise particularly interesting house, is pointed out as the window of “King John’s Prison.” The “King John” in question was not our own shabby and lying Lackland, but an infinitely finer fellow—if one may so greatly dare as to name a king a “fellow”—King John of France, taken prisoner at the battle of Poictiers and held to ransom in England. But there appears to be a considerable deal of confusion in the statement that the French King was ever in custody in Somersetshire, for it was from the Castle of Hertford to Somerton Castle in Lincolnshire that he was removed, for greater security, in 1359. But those grave authorities, the county histories of Somerset and Lincolnshire, alike claim to have had the custody of that illustrious prisoner, in the 33rd year of Edward the Third, at their respective Somertons, and the antiquaries of either narrate how one Sir Saier de Rochford was granted two shillings a day for the keeping of him.

Apart from this unfounded claim, the “White Hart” is pictorially remarkable for its White Hart effigy, of an enormous size in proportion to that of the house.