Eric Parker

Reigate Castle.—De Warenne.—A Swashbuckler and a Swordsman.—The Reigate Caves.—Lord Holland's soldiering.—Pilgrims at the Red Cross.—General of the Royale Navey.—Olde Dutchesse Norf.—"W. W."—Reigate Politics.—The Marble Hall.—The White Hart.—A Race against Time.

Four castles stood along the ridge of the Surrey downs when the barons were at war, and of the four nothing worth the name of a castle remains. Farnham's keep was broken down by Cromwell: Guildford is a shell, Reigate and Bletchingley have disappeared altogether. Betchworth, never fortified for war, was built later than the others, but Betchworth is an insignificant ruin. The kings and the captains have passed, and their buildings have followed them. The castles have gone down with the palaces. Surrey never had a castle like Arundel; but she has not been able to keep even a Pevensey or a Bodiam.

Yet Reigate castle and its owners shaped a great deal of English history. It belonged to the great Earls de Warenne, the rival family to the de Clares through all the early wars and intrigues of the kings and the barons. It stood on the ancient British track, the "Way" which runs east and west across the country. Its place on the Way was within reach of the Roman road, the Stone Street that ran from Chichester to London. Its possessor held the strongest strategic position between London and the coastline, or between Canterbury and Winchester, and when there was any fighting forward the lord of the highway cross roads, the ridge gate, was the first person to be taken into account. The curious thing is that there was so little fighting along the ridge. Reigate Castle never saw a pitched battle. When Louis of France was riding by the ridge to Winchester after King John, Reigate surrendered to the French, and de Warenne only got his castle back by changing sides from John to Louis. That was in 1216, and forty-seven years later, when Simon de Montfort took the baron's army by the ridge to Rochester, Reigate could do no more than watch the army march by. The de Warenne of the day was at Lewes with the king, and when the king had lost all in the battle of Lewes that followed, the lord of Reigate castle fled to France. He came back the next year, and when de Montfort fell at Evesham, Reigate was once more de Warenne's.

The kings must have found this particular de Warenne a little difficult to deal with. He was a bit of a swashbuckler as well as a swordsman, and once when he found himself getting the worst of a lawsuit at Westminster with one Alan de la Zouche, he ran him through the body in the king's own chamber and was off to Reigate before anybody could stop him. King Henry was furious, and sent Prince Edward, the great de Clare, and an archbishop to bid him come out of his castle and be punished. He came out at last, and was fined ten thousand marks for the king and two thousand for Alan de la Zouche. But Prince Edward was not done with him. As Edward the First he held a Court of Assize to inquire into the warrants by which the barons held their lands. De Warenne was asked for his warrant for Reigate. He drew a rusty sword and struck it on the council table. "By this instrument," he said, "do I hold my lands, and by the same I intend to keep them." He kept them, but he had to amend his plea into something a little less swaggering.

Of Reigate Castle not a stone remains. But under the great mound which bore the keep you may see what local tradition has named the Baron's caves, where, as the story goes, the Barons met before the signing of Magna Charta. Martin Tupper, indeed, has written a whole chapter in Stephan Langton describing the interesting scene, though as a mere matter of history it never took place. To begin with, the de Warenne of the day was an adherent of King John, and not of the barons, and in the next place the barons marching to Runemede never came near Reigate at all. Mr. Tupper errs. But the passages and chambers hollowed out of the yellow sandstone are interesting, and so are the rough carvings of heads of horses which ornament the walls. Mr. Malden, the Surrey historian, thinks the caves are merely sand-quarries, sand being valuable for making mortar. It is pleasanter, though probably wholly incorrect, to imagine them as dungeons, or homes of early man, or even cellars. The gardener exhibits them with a candle, and in the dark they can be eerie enough for cave-bears.

Long after the de Warennes' reign was over, Reigate Castle saw more fighting. We met the leaders on both sides at Kingston. It was nearly at the end of the Parliamentary wars, and Lord Holland, commanding the Royalist troops, conceived the idea of a rising near London. There was to be a horse-race on Banstead Downs, to draw the people together, and he was to lead them. Unhappily for his followers, he was a thoroughly incompetent soldier. He hoisted his standard at Kingston, and marched through Dorking to Reigate, where he held the castle and posted his vedettes on Red Hill. Sir Michael Livesey, commanding some Kentish horse for the Parliament, was ordered up from Sevenoaks to meet him; Major Audley, one of Livesey's officers, was moved out from Hounslow, where he had three troops, to clear Banstead Downs. Audley reached Reigate first, and engaged Lord Holland, but found him too strong: he drew off, and Holland, for no soldier's reason, fell back on Dorking. He came on again to Reigate next day, but by that time Livesey and Audley had joined, and when Holland knew who was before him he turned again for Kingston. As we saw, his horse faced the Parliament's troops on Kingston Common, and he died without glory on the scaffold.

Not much remains even of the Reigate which Lord Holland's troops saw on that luckless July day in 1648. The Parliament tumbled the old castle in ruins, and as at Bletchingley, anybody who wanted to build a house or a barn helped himself from the stones. To-day the steadiest modern business fills the High Street and Bell Street, the two roads running west and south along which old Reigate lay. Here and there the quaint slope of a red roof, or the lichen on weather-worn tiles, has a hold on the past, and in Slip Shoe Street, itself echoing the days of pilgrimages, care and good paint have preserved the beams of delightful old cottages. The Swan Inn, which may have liquored Holland's cavaliers, has borne much from later builders, but it stands on the old site. Nearly all the rest of old Reigate has gone. The Red Cross Inn, where thirsty pilgrims dropping down from the chalk highway drank ale and rested, has made way for brand-new brick and rough-cast, painted a bright pink. The market which the pilgrims used to find at the western end of the town was moved to the centre cross-roads at the Reformation, and the little chapel at the cross-roads, where the pilgrims said their Aves, came down in George the First's day to make room for what is now called the old Town Hall. It is only two hundred years old, but even it is not as its Georgian builder left it.

What happened to Reigate Church in the early part of the nineteenth century will never be quite known. There were alterations in 1818, and it was restored in 1845; that is to say, much of its beautiful old work was destroyed. But it has kept a few of its Norman pillars, and a reverent rebuilding of much of the fabric by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1873 has left its noble relics enshrined under a fine tower. The vault holds the dust of two of England's greatest men. The first and second Lords Howard of Effingham lie there, each in his day Lord High Admiral of the English navy. Charles, the second Lord Howard, died at Haling House near Croydon, and was buried at dead of night in the family vault on December 23, 1624. Incredible as it sounds, from that day until 1888, the three-hundredth anniversary of the defeat of the Armada, not a single record of the Admiral who met and destroyed it was to be seen in Reigate Church, except the inscription on the coffin in the Howards' vault. Then, at last, the inscription was copied and placed on a brass in the chancel. Its terseness fits the dead man's name:—

Here in the vault beneath
at midnight the Dec. 23: 1624
lyeth the body of Charles Howarde
Earl of Nottingham
Admyrall of
Englande
Generall of Queen Elizabeth's
Royale Navey at sea
Against the
Spanyards Invinsable
Navye
In the Year of our Lord
1589, who departed this
Life at Haling House the 14
Day of December in the
Year of our Lorde, 1624
Aetatis Suae 87

We saw the Howards at Effingham and Great Bookham, and shall find them again at Lingfield. Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower, in the Surrey ArchÆological Collections, has brought together some interesting particulars of the antiquities of the family. The second Duke of Norfolk, who was father of the first Lord Howard of Effingham, and now lies at Lambeth, left a remarkable will. He was, as his epitaph informs us, a "High and Mighty Prince," and he writes of himself in the royal plural. He orders a tomb to be erected before the high altar of Thetford "with pictures of us and Agnes our wife to be set together thereupon." The Lambeth Parish Registers do not read so respectfully. This is the entry recording the passing of the Prince's widow—"Oct. 13, 1545, my Lady Agnes, olde Dutchesse Norf., buried."

Reigate churchyard holds the gravestones of two neighbours in name and place. A Goose and a Gosling are buried side by side.

When Reigate had a castle, it also had a priory. It was founded for Austin Canons by one of the de Warennes, and its first prior was an Adam. After the Dissolution, the Priory estate saw some strangely different owners and guests. The first Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral, had it; Foxe, perhaps meditating his Book of Martyrs, stayed there as tutor to the son of the Earl of Surrey; a century later the manor came to Lord Somers, the great Lord Chancellor of William of Orange; to-day the modern house, built on the site of the old convent, belongs to one of Lord Somers's descendants, Lady Henry Somerset. It holds a famous oak chimney-piece, said to have been brought from Henry VIII's vanished palace of Nonsuch.

Reigate Priory to-day means Reigate cricket, played on the Priory ground. Three of the most famous of all Surrey cricketers belong to the town. Stephen Dingate, first of Surrey players before Beldham, was born there; so was William Caffyn, of the days of the giants Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn, Tom Lockyer and Julius CÆsar; and so, too, was W.W. Read, one of the very few Englishmen familiar to millions by their initials alone. "W.G." and "W.W." belong to the great years of the game.

Politics in Reigate are a mixed memory. Like Gatton, Reigate was a pocket borough, and sent two members to Parliament until 1832, when the two were reduced to one. Even the one disappeared in 1867, when the borough was disfranchised for bribery and treating—a subject of conversation which Mr. Louis Jennings, writing three years later in Field Paths and Green Lanes, notes as dangerous if introduced too suddenly in social circles in the neighbourhood.

But an even more remarkable political record belongs to one of Reigate's neighbours. Gatton, once a borough and now a park, had the privilege granted to its owner in 1451 of sending two members to Parliament. The Copleys of Leigh were lords of the manor in the days of Henry VIII, and Sir Richard Copley was at one time the only inhabitant of the borough, so that his voting power was considerable. When Cobbett was abroad on his Rural Rides, there were Reigate, Gatton, and Bletchingley within a few miles of one another, all of them rotten boroughs, and each of them returning a couple of members. Cobbett, of course, boiled whenever he heard the names; Gatton in particular, was "a very rascally spot of earth." He lived to see a very bad bargain for Gatton's privileges. Lord Monson, in 1830, bought the estate with its votes for two members for £100,000. Two years later, Gatton as a borough was ended by the Reform Bill and all Lord Monson had for his £100,000 was the land.

Lord Monson started with the intention of making Gatton House one of the most superb in the kingdom. He began with the hall, which he built on the lines of the Corsini chapel in the church of San Giovanni in Laterano at Rome, though he did not add the dome. The floor he had laid of coloured marbles, patterned in the most delicate designs; the marble had been designed for Ferdinand VII of Spain, and cost £10,000. The walls and arches are as richly decorated as the floor. There are four frescoes by Joseph Severn; Eleanor of Castile represents Fortitude; Esther, Prudence; Ruth, Meekness; Patience could only be Penelope. The effect of the shining stone and painted arches is of extraordinary brilliance and completeness—the completeness of an unrivalled collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little church fits better with the great trees and the green grass. The building is nothing; the interior has the grace and the light of a cathedral chapel. Lord Monson decorated Gatton Church with the magnificence with which he imagined the hall, but his ideal for the church was quieter. He bought carved wood of the most exquisite workmanship and set it wherever the church could hold it; a pulpit and an altar from Nuremberg, said to be by DÜrer, but the critics dispute it; the elaborately fitted stalls came from a monastery in Ghent, and altar rails from Tongres. Glass for the windows, of deep and glowing colours, he had from Aerschot, near Louvain; the east window, a strange painting, shows the eating of the Passover. One property the little church lacks; Lord Monson never gave it a wooden ceiling, and the ill-shaped stone vault is too white and cold for the stalls.

The great coaching days have many memories of Reigate. The coaches changed horses at the Swan and the White Hart, and at the White Hart to-day's Brighton coach stops, I think, for lunch. But when Shergold wrote his Recollections of Brighton in the Olden Time, he speaks of the inn at which the Brighton coach stopped in the days of the Regency as the King's Arms. Inns have a most confusing habit of changing their names. When John Taylor, the Water Poet, in 1636, made his Catalogue of Taverns in Ten Shires about London, he found some seventy or eighty taverns in Surrey, but out of the forty-nine which he mentions by name, hardly a dozen would answer to their old signboards to-day. The Reigate White Hart in Taylor's day was the Hart.

According to Shergold, Reigate in the old coaching days was the scene of the most romantic episodes imaginable. He is full of comparisons between the easy charm of conversation among riders by coach and the ungracious silences of travelling by rail, and this is what you read about Reigate and the fair who travelled by coach:—

"There was an advantage and an interest in travelling by coach which travelling by rail can never communicate. In the former you saw men and their faces, and acquired some information; in the latter you learn nothing except the number of persons killed or injured by the last accident. A young man who entered the coach at eight o'clock in the morning at Brighton took his seat perhaps opposite a young lady whom he thought pretty and interesting. When he arrived at Cuckfield he began to be in love; at Crawley he was desperately smitten; at Reigate his passion became irretrievable, and when he gave her an arm to ascend the steep ridges of Reigate Hill—a just emblem, by the way, of human life—he declared his passion, and they were married soon after. Nothing of this sort ever occurs on railroads. Sentiment never blooms on the iron soil of these sulky conveyances. A woman was a creature to be looked at, admired, courted, and beloved in a stage-coach; but on a railway a woman is nothing but a package, a bundle of goods committed to the care of the railway company's servants, who take care of the poor thing as they would take care of any other bale of goods. It is said that matches are made in heaven; it may likewise be said that matches more often begin in the old stage-coaches, and that railroads are the antipodes of love."

The road from Reigate to Crawley, one of the straightest and levellest in the south country, was once the scene of a remarkable horse-race. The beginning of it was a discussion at a shooting party in the autumn of 1890 between Lord Lonsdale and Lord Shrewsbury on the pace of trotting and galloping horses. Lord Lonsdale backed himself to drive galloping horses for twenty miles, single, pair, four-in-hand and riding postillion, inside an hour. Lord Shrewsbury wagered against him, but there were difficulties about weather and the date—March 11, 1891—and eventually Lord Shrewsbury withdrew from the match and paid £100 forfeit. Lord Lonsdale then set himself the task alone, and his headquarters were at Reigate; he had fifteen horses in training, fifteen men and thirteen carriages, and the cost of keeping them at Reigate came to £150 a day. The course, a stretch of five miles of road, over which horses were to be driven in the four different styles was measured from Kennersley Manor, three miles south of the White Hart, nearly into Crawley. Snow fell on the tenth, the day before the match; Lord Lonsdale borrowed a snow plough and sent it over the road. At noon on the day of the race the horses and carriages were taken to the course; at five and twenty minutes to one Lord Lonsdale drove up in a pair-horse brougham; at one o'clock to the second he trotted his single horse, War Paint, to the starting-point, and War Paint bounded down the road. War Paint took 13 minutes 39-1/5 seconds over the five miles; it would have been twenty seconds less, but a brewer's dray had blocked the road. The pair-horse was waiting with Blue and Yellow, two Americans, in it; the change took three seconds, and Blue and Yellow galloped back to the start in 12 minutes 51-2/5 seconds. It was the turn for the coach, and it took 36-3/5 seconds to change across; a groom drove the team to the starting point, a yard before it Lord Lonsdale caught up the reins, and the four horses swept up the rise to Crawley again. Fifteen minutes and nine seconds and two-fifths the four horses took; the leaders were Silk and Everton King, the wheelers Conservative and Whitechapel, and they left their driver something over seventeen minutes to ride postillion back. It took 40-2/5 seconds to change from coat and hat for riding, and exactly at seventeen minutes to the hour Lord Lonsdale rode off on Draper, a chestnut, with a bay mare, Violetta, for the pair. Draper and Violetta went over the last five miles in 13 minutes 55-4/5 seconds, and in 56 minutes 55-4/5 seconds the twenty miles were covered. And so the great race ended.

The Pilgrims' Way dropping down like white ribands over the shoulder of the down into Reigate we have already seen. On the other side of the town the high road climbs up again to the crest of the ridge—a road paved and metalled to stand the perpetual wear of shod wheels grating down the hill. At the highest point of the road is one of the finest views in England; one of the finest, Cobbett thought, in all the world. The red roofs of the town cluster among trees below; beyond is all the Weald to the Devil's Dyke and Chanctonbury Ring, best of all landmarks of the Sussex downs. The separate views of the Weald along the chalk ridge have each their own characteristic, from the Hog's Back to the heights above Titsey. For me the view from the hill above Reigate has a double memory; the purple and blue of the downs seen through the stems of the beeches that line the crest, and the shadows thrown by a high summer sun in the parks and fields below. The oaks and elms set themselves in the open grass with little circles of darker green about their feet, like the wooden stands of the trees of a Dutch toy farm.

Redhill joins Reigate to the east, new, red, spreading, a junction of railways, a better sort of Woking. You do not have to wait from nine minutes to three-quarters of an hour every time you come to Redhill. To the schoolboy it has the merit of being a stage on the road from London and the sea.