Eric Parker

The joining of the ways.—Georgian poke bonnets.—The Castle.—Kings at Farnham.—Poet Soldiers.—A glorious battle.—The Bishop's artillery.—Paradise and the Bull's Eye.—Izaak Walton.—Cobbett's education.—An old alehouse.—Hopgrowers in difficulties.—King Charles's cap.—Elmer's pheasants.

Westernmost of all Surrey towns, Farnham stands at the joining of the ways. Traders from Cornwall, pilgrims from Winchester, horse-dealers driving their ponies from Weyhill Fair, have met on the roads that run into Farnham from the west and south and north. Farnham Castle, for seven centuries a Bishop's palace, links Surrey to the See of Winchester. The Farnham oasthouses and hop-grounds bridge the crossing from the fertile Hampshire border to the Bagshot sands and the wild and sterile moors of Frensham and Hindhead. The town, set in its cultured plot of vines and flower-beds, with its historic castle, its tranquil church, and the Wey watering the pastures under its walls, stands like a garden between the military rigidity of Aldershot and the wind that blows over the Thursley heather.

No town in Surrey has two such old and orderly main streets as Farnham. Here and there modern taste for a noisy pattern has broken the quiet level; a bank has piled up a huge building of timber, handsome but out of keeping; the new Corn Exchange is out of keeping and hideous; and in 1866 municipal enterprise pulled down the old market house, which stood at the junction of the main streets and was a fascinating little building perched on pillars. But much that is ancient and simple in square red brick remains. The plain, low-roofed houses, with their flat faÇades and crumpled, lichened tiles, succeed one another down Castle Street and West Street with a delightful monotony. The elaborate carved and painted doorways, knockers, lunettes, doors and steps are quite a model exhibition. The two streets wear a Georgian air of poke-bonnets and long purse-strings. Or they are Georgian, at all events, once or twice during the day; on a sunny morning before breakfast, perhaps, or when, perhaps in the rain, the endless traffic of wheels quiets for an hour. For Farnham stands on the high road from London, and the motor cars chase the eighteenth century into the side-streets.

Farnham is mostly of one period, and searchers for very old architecture will be disappointed. One of the oldest buildings in the town is a tiny set of almshouses, whose lowly gables line the road under the castle hill. They were built by Andrew Windsor, of the parish of Bentley in Hampshire, in 1619, and were intended, as an inscription on the wall informs you, "For the Habitation and Relief of eight poor Honest Impotent Old Persons." Even with four epithets, the almoners seem to find life supportable.

The greatest and the oldest building is, of course, the castle. It stands nobly on a hill, towards which the street rises like a carriage drive, ending in a flight of steps. Once it must have dominated the town as a fortress, but since Cromwell broke down the keep, Farnham has looked up at a quieter and more episcopal pile—a fine gateway tower, built by Bishop Fox early in the sixteenth century. Much of the castle stands as he rebuilt it after various misfortunes in baronial and other wars, but the front as it looks down on Farnham is less severe. Two imposing cedar trees, out of a group of several, break the line of Fox's massive red brick. Local legend has aged them considerably, for two hundred years is suggested as a modest estimate of their antiquity. As a fact, they cannot be much more than one hundred years old. They were planted by Mrs. North, wife of Bishop North, who held the See from 1781 to 1820, and in an engraving of the castle published in 1792 there is not a sign of them. The cedar is a very fast-growing tree—one of the reasons why it is so brittle. The Farnham cedars are as brittle as any others. I was told that when the present Bishop went abroad early in the year 1908, he was hesitating over cutting off some of the larger branches which shaded the castle wall and would not let it dry. The April snow settled the question for him, and broke the branches he had thought of lopping.

Farnham Castle has entertained many Kings, from Edward I to Queen Victoria. One of its earliest bishops was a king's brother, the great Henry of Blois. Elizabeth was often at the castle, and once, bidding the Duke of Norfolk dine with her there, spoke to him of his intrigue to marry Mary Queen of Scots. According to one story she warned him "to be careful on what pillow he laid his head"; according to another, the Duke assured the Queen that the intrigue was none of his making, and that "he meant never to marry with such a person where he could not be sure of his pillow." He was thinking of Darnley, and that dark February morning with the King stretched dead on the garden grass.

James I hunted at Farnham regularly, and actually took a lease from Bishop Bilson of the castle, which he found a convenient centre for hunting in the Surrey bailiwick of Windsor Forest. But James was the last of the kings to hunt from Farnham. George III and Queen Charlotte visited the castle because Bishop Thomas had been the King's tutor, but Farnham's entertaining of royalty was nearly at an end. Once, in the last century, Queen Victoria rode there from Aldershot with the Prince Consort, inspected the Bible on which she had taken her oath at the Coronation, admired the castle, and rode back again.

A castle with a keep and a moat, or rather a deep dry ditch, ought to have memories of fighting, and Farnham Castle has seen some sharp skirmishing. It has the distinction of having been twice held by a poet, once for the Parliament and once for the King. George Wither was its first commander, and his command did not increase his reputation either as a man of letters or a man of war. Probably the castle was never worth defending. It was isolated, and its possession, as it turned out, would have helped neither side to control the movements of the other. But Wither thought otherwise. He had made his name as a pastoral poet, author of Fidelia and The Shepherd's Hunting and he now proposed to make another name as a brilliant soldier. He saw all sorts of possibilities in Farnham Castle and when the war broke out and he was made Governor, he began at once building a drawbridge and a sallyport, digging a well, and storing provisions. Unfortunately he had no artillery, without which no self-respecting soldier could be expected to hold a fort, even where, as at Farnham, there was no enemy within shot. Riding up to London, he poured a perfect shower of requests into the unwilling ears of Sir Richard Onslow, who was the chief pillar of the Parliamentary party in Surrey, and at last he got an order for some demi-culverins from the Tower. But his hopes were still to be dashed. The next day came news that Prince Rupert was already in North Surrey, and the demi-culverins were counter-ordered for fear of capture. Then might he have light guns, drakes or falconets, which he could take along by-roads? Sir Richard's answer was that the fortress, since it could not be held, must be abandoned. For this decision Wither afterwards attacked Sir Richard Onslow as a traitor, in two tremendous effusions entitled Se Defendendo and Justitiarius Justificatus, of which the latter landed him in prison and was burnt by the common hangman. Meanwhile, still protesting at being refused his guns, he rode down to his own house at Alton, collected what carts and cattle he could find, took them into Farnham, brought out all the stores and men he could command through Farnham Park, and got them all safely to Kingston. He might have been captured by Rupert; it was really quite an exploit.

So the castle came to the Royalists. They put in command of it Sir John Denham, who in that very same year had published, anonymously, his famous Cooper's Hill. Wither had left behind him three hundred sheep and a hundred oxen, so that the garrison was well victualled, and the poet-Governor ought to have been able to put up a fight against an enemy who had no artillery. Wither would have shown him how to do it. But Sir John had no idea of what a battle should be. One December morning, a few days after he had taken over the command, Sir William Waller, a Parliament General, rode up at the head of his dragoons and demanded surrender. Of course Sir John refused, and Sir William proceeded to fix a petard to the gate, to blow it in. A military genius like Wither would have ordered his men to fire their muskets at the enemy; but all the soldiers on both sides escaped that day. The explosive was securely fastened in position, the gate was shattered, the assailants rushed at the breach, and began at once to pull down the barricade of timber erected inside by the garrison. This done, the garrison surrendered, and the glorious day was over.

But Sir John Denham got the best of Wither in the end. Not long afterwards Wither was taken prisoner by the Royalists, and Denham, who had wisely been set at liberty to rejoin the Royalist forces, begged for his rival's life. Mr. Wither, he pleaded, should not be hanged, for while Wither lived he was not himself the worst poet in England.

The castle keep was never to be held by a successor to Wither and Denham. Sir William Waller blew up one of the walls when he took it from Sir John, and the year before Charles was executed Parliament ordered it to be dismantled altogether. The garrison fell to with enthusiasm, stripped the building of all the lead, wood, and glass they could lay their hands on, and sold the wreck to make up their back pay. At the Restoration, when Bishop Duppa came to the See, he found the castle almost uninhabitable. It cost him more than two thousand pounds to make it fit to live in, and his successor, Bishop Morley, spent even more. He actually laid out ten thousand pounds in improvements, only to meet with John Aubrey's criticism that he had repaired the building "without any regard to the rules of architecture." Doctor Peter Mew, who succeeded Morley, set about improving the castle from outside, and planted the top of the keep, into which the old walls had been tumbled, with fruit trees. Bishop Sumner, who held the See for forty-two years from 1827, turned the orchard into a garden.

Bishop Mew had a double record. He was a soldier as well as a prelate, and he took part in the last battle fought on English soil. When King Monmouth's Mendip miners were making their last stand at Sedgmoor, the end of the fight came with the arrival of King James's artillery. The heavy cannon might never have been drawn to the ground where the battle was raging, for the artillery were unprovided with horses, had not the Bishop offered his coach horses and traces. When they came to Sedgmoor, he himself directed the fire.

The result of the various fortunes and misfortunes of the castle in war, and of the different additions and alterations made by successive Bishops, is naturally rather puzzling. The castle is a medley of the building of eight centuries. Oldest of all is the ruined keep and the framework, or foundations, of the castle buildings; the masonry of the keep is the work of Henry of Blois, and belongs to the twelfth century. Next come three pillars of the old chapel, now used as a servants' hall. I saw it when it was set for a meal, and the severe cleanliness of the white stone above the white tablecloth and glass and cutlery has remained one of the distinctest of my memories of the castle. Next in age is the outer gateway—doubtless the scene of Sir William Waller's explosion—an imposing block of masonry. From each side of the gateway runs the outer wall of the castle, and between the keep and the outer wall what was once a ditch has grown into the Bishop's garden, a sloping stretch of shaven lawn and flower borders, with a fountain and birds bathing in it. The keep itself, almost from the broken parapet to the tumbled stones at the base, is a mixture of wall and rock garden, in which grow all the rock plants worth growing. Perhaps there were wallflowers when Bishop Mew planted his orchard in the keep; but the pasque flower and other rarer blossoms which crowd round the base belong to the gardening of a later day. The level lawn and flower beds of the inner garden of the keep are as serene and shining as those below, and the view to the south over Hindhead and the south downs is finer and freer than from anywhere in the grounds, though there are many fine views from the castle windows. Fanny Burney, who visited Farnham in 1791, only a month released from the trammels of Court life, would certainly have been able, as she tells us she wished, to see the hills above her beloved Norbury. But ladies of the Court were delicate creatures, and she could not climb to the top. "I was ready to fall already, from only ascending the slope to reach the castle," she adds with some humility.

Of all the bishops, Bishop Fox left the most enduring mark on the castle. He built the noble and lofty gateway tower named after him, and certainly altered the look of the castle as Farnham sees it to-day, more than any other Bishop, though what it may have looked like when the boundary walls were all landing can only be guessed. Within, one of the chief restorers was Bishop Morley. The hall, before he made his alterations, was a good deal larger than the present room; you can see the old doorway in the wall of the wide entrance passage. He added the splendid staircases, with their carved oak newels, the work of Grinling Gibbons; and he built the chapel, which also has some fine carving. A later and most princely Bishop, Anthony Thorold, who held the See from 1891 to 1895, laid down a mile and a hundred yards of stair carpet, and repaired an acre and a fifth of roof. He also fitted up rooms for ordination candidates, each room with a name. St. Francis and other saints preside over the slumbers of some; some sleep in Paradise; a Bishop who is an occasional visitor looks out upon the Castle garden from the Bull's Eye.

Bishop Morley, who spent so much money on the Castle, spent very little on himself. A tiny room, almost a cell, is shown as the chamber in which he spent hours in prayer, and in the extreme corner is a stone couch, on which he slept when he allowed himself sleep. He had but one full meal a day, he never warmed himself at a fire, he never married, he was never ill, and was found dead on his bed one morning, at the ripe age of eighty-seven. Starved to death, you are told; the hint is almost of suicide.

Izaak Walton knew Morley, and stayed with him at the castle. He wrote his Lives of Hooker and Herbert under the Bishop's roof, possibly added something to his Life of Donne; the room is shown. I like to think of him sitting through a sunny morning writing gently about the shortcomings of Mrs. Hooker, how she made her poor husband tend the sheep and rock the cradle; or setting down the superb last sentences of the Life, and then taking down his fishing rod and wandering down by the Wey after trout and chub. Perhaps, indeed, he could get a salmon. Among the dues collected by the Bailiffs of the Borough early in the seventeenth century I find the following——

The salmon, presumably, swam with the other "beast ffish" in the Wey.

Farnham's greatest man was not an ecclesiastic, but a politician. William Cobbett, soldier, farmer, Radical, editor of Peter Porcupine and the Weekly Political Register, and author of a diary unequalled of its kind in English writing, was born at Farnham on March 9, 1762. The house in which he was born, once a farmhouse and now the Jolly Farmer inn, stands on the outskirts of the town near the Wey, conspicuous with a white gable. As a boy, he must have been one of the busiest on any farm in the neighbourhood. His father used to boast that he had four boys, of whom the eldest was only fifteen years old—William Cobbett was the third—and yet that they would do as much work as any three men in Farnham. "When I first trudged a field," you read in the The Life of William Cobbett, by Himself, "with my satchel swung over my shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and at the close of day, to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty." He was taught the beginnings of farming at Farnham, and he first ran away from Farnham to be a gardener. He was employed as a boy in the castle grounds, and there he met a man who was a gardener at Kew. They talked, and the eleven-year-old boy was fired to see for himself what gardening could be. Next day he started off, with sixpence-halfpenny in his pocket, and walked all day till he came to Richmond. There he should have had supper; he had threepence left to get it with. But threepence was exactly the price of a little book, The Tale of a Tub, which he spied in a bookseller's window. He bought it, took it into a field near Kew Gardens, and sat down to read; read on till it was dark, tumbled to sleep under a haystack, and woke to ask the head gardener for work. He was given work, but the gardener persuaded him to return home. Ten years later he ran away from Farnham again, and for the last time. He was out on the road to meet some friends on the way to Guildford Fair; the London coach swung by, he swung up behind, and by nine that night was in London with half-a-crown in his pocket. He left London for a soldier, and his Farnham boyhood was over.

Riding by Farnham forty years after, Cobbett showed his son the spot where he received his education. It was easily come by, but he was of opinion that if he had not had it, "if I had been brought up a milksop, with a nurserymaid everlastingly at my heels, I should have been this day as great a fool, as inefficient a mortal, as any of those frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster School, or from any of those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities." The spot is a sandy bank above the Bourne, a little stream, dry in summer, which runs a mile south of Farnham, from Holt Forest to the Wey. This is the education, described in Rural Rides:—

When will Rural Rides be added to the cheap editions? No other book of the open air and open politics mixes the two with such a breezy grip as Cobbett's. One rides with the sturdy old man over the road which he thought the prettiest in England—the four miles between Guildford and Godalming—or across "the most villainous spot God ever made," which was Hindhead, and listens to him praising the bean fields and the turnips here, and the oaks and acacias there, cursing the Wen-devils and place-men and pensioners, the reptiles, toad-eaters and tax-eaters, and yet the sheer honesty and affection of the man shine from every page. There never was such a mixture of execration and the scent of bean-blossom. But Rural Rides remains a book of the library rather than the bookshelf.

Farnham has two other authors, one a native and one a friend. Miss Ada Bayly, known to her readers as Edna Lyall, made Farnham her holiday home since she was four years old, and set the scenes of two of her novels in the town. Even better known by his work, if not by his name, is Augustus Toplady, the author of the hymn, "Rock of Ages." Toplady was born in a little house in West Street, now pulled down, in 1740. He wrote much that was bitter; all that is remembered is his hymn.

Every town on the Portsmouth road has its old coaching inn, and Farnham's is the Bush. It stands modestly aloof; you must walk under an arch to finds its oldest walls and its wistaria. It was not always the best inn in Farnham. In 1604, in the account of the Borough, the receipts of the Bailiffs are thus recorded:—

The Bush is not mentioned by name; it was a mere alehouse. Soon it became a full-grown inn, and the Georg, the Whit Hart and the Anteolop paled their ineffectual hearths.

Farnham was once the greatest market in England for wheat. Now the chief industry is hops. Farnham hops are some of the best grown, and have always fetched long prices. In Cobbett's day, Kentish hops averaged five pounds a hundredweight, and Hampshire hops were about the same price; Farnham hops fetched seven pounds. English hops to-day average perhaps less than five pounds a hundred, and the hopgrower is in distress. Eighty years ago he was being ruined. Cobbett makes up his accounts, writing at Chilworth on Sept. 25, 1822:—

Hop-buyers and sellers in those days met in the old Market House, and were doubtless familiar with the queer inscription, still remembered by middle-aged Farnham farmers. John Clark built the Market House in 1566, and wrote on it his riddle:—

"You who don't like me, give money to mend me,
You who do like me, give money to end me."

The Local Board of 1866, looking round for some worthy object on which to spend their money, liked the old house so well that they ended its existence on the spot.

No parish church is more difficult to drive up to than St. Andrew's at Farnham. If you know the way you can come to a corner of the churchyard by a side street, but Farnham goes to church chiefly by alleys and footpaths. The churchyard is more striking than the church, much of which is new. The thick turf, shaven and level, runs to the foot of mossy brick walls; an avenue of pollarded elms leads from the south door; all round stand little, old red houses. Six o'clock on a sunny autumn evening is the time to wait in Farnham churchyard. Every three hours the mellow, feeble bells ring a chime which suits September twilight:—

"Life let us cherish
While yet the taper glows,
And the fresh floweret
Pluck ere it close.
Away with every toil and care,
And cease the rankling thorn to wear;
With manful hearts life's conflict meet,
Till Death sounds the retreat."

Vernon House, a Tudor building changed from its old name, Culver Hall, and altered so as to front on West Street, has an unhappy memory of the Parliament wars. Charles the First lodged there one December night, a closely guarded prisoner on his way from Hurst Castle to Windsor. A month later he was to leave Windsor for Whitehall. He had little to give his host, and gave him all he had. It was a white morning cap of quilted silk, which Mr. George Vernon, inheriting from his grandfather, left in 1732 to his grandson, "desiring it may always go to the next heir male of my family, as a testimony of our steadfast loyalty and adherence to the Crown, which is the only bounty my family ever received for all the losses and expenses they sustained for the royal cause, which amounted to several thousands of pounds."

I had nearly forgotten Farnham's painter. He was Stephen Elmer, and a picture of his, "The Last Supper," hangs in the church tower. But his forte was painting fish and game, dead and alive. In a curious old pamphlet, "The Earwig, or An Old Woman's Remarks on the present Exhibition of Pictures of the Royal Academy—a critical pamphlet published in Fleet Street, 1781, I find the following entries. Of the painters and subjects, Mr. Elmer and Mrs. Robinson belong to Surrey. The rest supply the setting:—

The National Gallery lacks an Elmer: private collectors may be luckier. Mr. J.E. Harting, to whom all Surrey naturalists owe a debt, reminds me that many of Elmer's best pictures were engraved to illustrate Daniel's Rural Sports, and that it was Elmer who painted the picture of the hybrid between a blackcock and a pheasant which readers of Selborne will remember was sent by Lord Stawell to Gilbert White. "It had been found by the spaniels of one of his keepers in a coppice, and shot on the wing."