The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries: To-Day and in Days of Old

XIX

VICARS VIGOROUS AND VARIOUS

In a more than usually quiet street, upon the edge of the town, stands the old church of Godalming, dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul, whose tall leaden spire rises with happy effect above the roofs, and gives distant views of Godalming a quiet and impressive dignity all its own among country towns. Vicars of Godalming have not infrequently distinguished themselves; some for piety, one for piety combined with pugnacity, two for literature and learning, and at least one for “pride, idleness, affectation of Popery,” and for refusing to preach. This last-named divine, Dr. Nicholas Andrews, had the misfortune to have been born out of due time, for had he but held the living in the sceptical eighteenth century instead of exactly a hundred years earlier, when piety was particularly aggressive, his passion for fishing on Sunday would have done him no harm. As it happened, however, his era fell in the midst of Puritan times, and the Godalming people of that day were at once godly and vindictive: a combination not at all uncommon even now. At any rate, they petitioned Parliament for the removal of this too ardent fisherman, and he was sequestered accordingly.

The times were altered when the Rev. Samuel Speed, grandson of Speed the historian, held the living. He was, according to Aubrey, a “famous and valiant sea-chaplain and sailor,” whose deeds are handed down to us in the stirring lines of a song “made by Sir John Birkenhead on the sea-fight with the Dutch”; in which we hear of this doughty cleric praying and fighting at one and the same time:—

“His chaplain, he plied his wonted work,
He prayed like a Christian and fought like a Turk;
Crying, ‘Now for the King and the Duke of York,’
With a thump, a thump, thump,” &c.

This worthy was at one time a buccaneer in the West Indies, and later, while he held the living of Godalming, was imprisoned several times for debt. He died, indeed, in gaol, and was buried in London, in the old City church, since demolished, of St. Michael, Queenhithe, in 1682.

Manning, scholar and historian of Surrey, was vicar here, and also the Rev. Antony Warton. Their virtues and their attainments are duly set forth upon cenotaphs within the church, as also is the discovery of a certain cure for consumption by

“Nathaniel Godbold Esqr.
Inventor and Proprietor
of that Excellent Medicine
The Vegetable Balsam
For the cure of Consumption and Asthmas.”

He died in December 1799, aged sixty-nine, and his appreciative relatives caused to be engraved on his epitaph, Hic cineres, ubique Fama; which really is very amusing, because his fame is now-a-days as decayed as are his ashes.

And yet they say these latter days of ours are distinguished above all else by shameless puffery! At least we spare the churches and do not use their walls as advertisement hoardings. And, despite Godbold and his Balsam, consumption still takes heavy toll, and not all the innumerable remedies nor all the Kochs in creation seem able to prevail in any degree against the disease.

NEW GODALMING STATION.

OGLETHORPE

At a short distance from the church, on the edge of a thickly-wooded hill overlooking New Godalming station, stands the house and small estate of Westbrook, once belonging to the Oglethorpes, who settled here from Yorkshire in the seventeenth century. Of this family was that notable octogenarian, General Oglethorpe, the literary discoverer of Dr. Johnson, friend of Whitefield and founder of Georgia. During a long and active life that extended from 1698 to 1785, Oglethorpe had many experiences. He warred with the Indians who threatened the North American Colonies; he was secretary and aide-de-camp to Prince Eugene, when, according to the alliterative poet, that “good prince” bade

“An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery bombard Belgrade.”

He was suspected of Jacobite leanings, and was court-martialled for want of diligence in following up the Pretender’s forces in their retreat from Derby; but he is memorable from a Londoner’s point of view chiefly because he claimed to have, when a young man, shot woodcock on the spot where in his old age rose the fashionable lounge of Regent Street.

Westbrook, too, has some slight connection with the Stuart legend; for General Oglethorpe’s father—Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe—was a devoted partisan of that unlucky House, and it was whispered that one of his sons was the famous child smuggled into Whitehall Palace in a warming-pan, and known afterwards as the Old Pretender.

One of the most pleasing views of Godalming is that from the grounds of Westbrook, above the railway-station, and the station of New Godalming itself and its situation are distinctly picturesque, composing finely with the Frith Hill and the uplands away in the direction of Charterhouse.

And Godalming is celebrated in modern times on two distinct counts: firstly for having been a pioneer in lighting street-lamps by electricity, and secondly for being the new home of Charterhouse School, removed from London in 1870, under the care of the Rev. W. Haig Brown, who still remains head-master of Thomas Sutton’s old foundation. The school-buildings stand on the plateau of a down, at a distance of about a mile from Godalming, and occupy a site of about eighty acres.

Here the Carthusians carry on the traditions of their old home in London, and some of the stones of the old school, deeply carved with the names of by-gone scholars, have been removed from old Charterhouse to the new building, where they are to be seen built into an archway. Charterhouse School numbers five hundred scholars, and its lovely situation, amid the Surrey Hills, together with its finely-planned buildings and spreading grounds, render this amongst the foremost public schools of the time.

One of the most interesting features of the school is its museum, housed in a building of semi-ecclesiastical aspect, built recently in the grounds. Here are many relics of old times and old scholars, together with the more usual collections of a country museum: stuffed birds, chipped flints, and miscellaneous antiquities; or, to quote the sarcastic Peter Pindar:—

“More broken pans, more gods, more mugs;
Old snivel-bottles, jordans, and old jugs;
More saucepans, lamps, and candlesticks, and kettles;
In short, all sorts of culinary metals!”

CHARTERHOUSE

Among the alumni of Charterhouse were Addison and Steele; John Wesley, the founder of Methodism; Chief Justice Blackstone, Sir Henry Havelock, Grote, Thackeray, and John Leech. Several of these distinguished Carthusians are represented here, in a fine collection of autographs and manuscripts. First, in point of view of general interest, is a collection of drawings and poems in their original MS. by Thackeray. Some thirty of his weird sketches are here, with the manuscript of “The Newcomes,” bound up in five volumes. Here also is Thackeray’s Greek Lexicon, covered thickly with school-boy scrawls and scribbles.

CHARTERHOUSE RELICS.

Leech, the caricaturist,—one of the most absurdly over-rated men of this century,—was at Charterhouse from 1825 to 1831. Here are two letters from him, written, it would seem, when he was ten years of age, and apparently before he had been taught the use of capital letters. In one to “my dear mama,” he seems to have been in a far from happy frame of mind. His “mama” had been to the school, but had not seen him, “me being in the grounds,” “That,” he adds, “made me still more unhappy.” Writing to “my dear papa,” young Leech is “happy to say I am promoted, because I know it pleases you very much. allow me to come out to see you on saturday because I have a great deal to tell you, and I want some one to assist me in the exercises because they are a great deal harder.”

GOWSER JUG.

‘MORTIFYING NEGLECT’

There is a very characteristic letter by John Wesley, and close by it a letter by Blackstone, part of which is worth reproducing. Writing on August 28, 1744, Blackstone, then a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, says: “We were last Friday entertained at St. Mary’s by a curious sermon from Wesley ye Methodist. Among other equally modest particulars, he informed us (1) that there was not one Christian among all ye heads of houses; (2) that pride, gluttony, avarice, luxury, sensuality, and drunkenness were ye whole characteristics of all Fellows of Colleges, who were useless to proverbial uselessness; lastly, that ye younger part of ye University were a generation of triflers, all of them perjured, and not one of them of any religion at all. His notes were demanded by ye Vice-Chancellor, but on mature deliberation it has been thought better to punish him by mortifying neglect.” Which is all very humorous, and the phrase “mortifying neglect” distinctly good, as showing that the authorities had taken Wesley’s measure to a nicety, and were maliciously aware that neglect would mortify a person of his essential vanity a great deal more than persecution.

WESLEY.

A striking bust of Wesley stands beside a statuette of Thackeray; but among the chiefest articles of interest in the School Museum are the curious objects illustrating the rural life of Surrey in the olden times: a primitive hand cider-press, from Bramley, a “pot-hook hanger” from Shamley Green, and a “baby-runner” from Aldfold. Other curiosities are a bust of Nelson, cut by a figure-head carver from the main-beam of the “Victory”; “Gowser” jugs and cups, formerly used by gown boys of Charterhouse, and decorated with the arms and crest of Thomas Sutton, together with his pious motto, Deo dante dedi; and an Irish blunderbuss of the most murderous and forbidding aspect.

BUST OF NELSON,
CARVED FROM MAIN-BEAM OF THE “VICTORY.”

‘YE GODS! WHAT GLORIOUS TWISTS’

So much for Godalming, its sights and its memories. But we have halted here longer than the most dilatory coach that ever rumbled into the “King’s Arms” Hotel, that house of good food and plenty in days when men had robust appetites, fit to vie with that of Milo the Cretonian. What glorious twists (for instance) must Peter the Great and his suite have possessed when they lodged here, twenty-one of them, all told, on their way from Portsmouth to London;—that is to say, if we are to take this breakfast and this dinner as sample meals:—

Breakfast.
Half a sheep.
A quarter of lamb.
10 pullets.
12 chickens.
3 quarts of brandy.
6 quarts of mulled wine.
7 dozen of eggs,
with salad in proportion.
Dinner.
5 ribs of beef, weighing 3 stone.
1 sheep.
56¾ lbs. of lamb.
1 shoulder of veal, boiled.
1 loin""
8 rabbits.
2 dozen-and-a-half of sack.
1"claret.

These details are from a bill now in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, and are earnest of Gargantuan appetites that have had their day. If only we could compare this fare with the provand supplied to the Allied Sovereigns at the same house by Host Moon when those crowned heads and their suites were travelling to Portsmouth for the rejoicings over the final overthrow of the Corsican Ogre! Their Majesties must have had a zest for their banquets that had been a stranger to them all too long in the terrible years when Napoleon was hunting their armies all over Europe, from Madrid to Moscow.

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