VII
Leaving “dirty Deptford,” that being the contumelious conjunction by which the place has generally been known, any time these last hundred years or so (and far be it from me to deprive any place of its well-merited title, whether good or ill), the road ascends steeply to Blackheath, past some fine old mansions which, having been built in the days of Queen Anne and the earlier Georges, and having long housed the aristocracy who at one time frequented the place, became afterwards the homes of rich City merchants. Finally, when the “schools for young ladies” are gone which now occupy them, and give so distinct a scholastic air to this suburb, they will doubtless disappear amid a cloud of dust and the clinking of trowels, while on their sites will rise the unchanging pattern of suburban shops!
BLACKHEATH
Blackheath is one of the finest suburbs of London; a town girt round with many particularly beautiful outskirts. Strange to say, it has not been spoiled, and though thickly surrounded with houses, remains as breezy and healthful as ever; perhaps, indeed, since highwayman and footpad have disappeared, and now that duels are unknown, Blackheath may be regarded as even more healthy a spot than it was a hundred years ago.
The air which gave Bleak Heath its original name, and nipped the ears and made red the noses of the “outsides” who journeyed across it on their way to Dover in the winter months, is healthful and bracing, and is not so bleak as balmy in the days of June, when the sun shines brilliantly, and makes a generous heat to radiate from the old mellow brick wall of Greenwich Park that skirts the heath on its northern side. Outside the gate of that steepest of all parks stood Montagu House, whence the Earl of Chesterfield wrote those famous letters to his son—letters whose precepts, if carefully and consistently followed, would have infallibly sent their recipient to the Devil. Montagu House is gone now, pulled down long ago, and the site where the worldly Dormer wrote, pointing out to his son the way to perdition, is now a part of the Heath. Gone, too, is the garden where the phenomenally vulgar and undignified Princess Caroline of Wales, who lived here from 1797 to 1814, might have been seen, and was seen one morning, sitting in the grounds in a gorgeous dress, looped up to the knees, to show the stars with which her petticoats were spangled: with silver wings on her shoulders, and drinking from a pewter pot of porter, after the use and wont, between the acts, of the pantomime fairies of Drury Lane.
GREENWICH OBSERVATORY.
With this Princesse au café chantant disappears the last vestige of royalty hereabouts, and Greenwich, lying down beyond the Park, has only dim memories of Henry the Eighth, and Queen Elizabeth, who was born in the palace of Placentia beside the Thames. If you venture into the Park, and stand upon Observatory Hill, you can at once glimpse London and gain an idea of how plebeian Greenwich has become. But its history is not yet done, and on this very spot, in 1893, a chapter of it was made by a foreign Anarchist who blew himself up in the making; and when the park keepers came and gleaned little pieces of him from the November boughs, the incident shaped more picturesquely than any other happening on this spot that I can think of.
ON THE HEATH
As for Blackheath, it seems that when, in older days, people had assignations on the Dover Road, they generally selected this place for the purpose; whether they were kings and emperors that met; or ambassadors, archbishops, rebels, or rival pretenders to the crown, they each and all came here to shake hands and interchange courtesies, or to speak with their enemies in the gate. It is very impressive to find Blackheath thus and so frequently honoured by the great ones of the earth; but it is also not a little embarrassing to the historian who wants to be getting along down the road, and yet desires to tell of all the pageants that here befell, and how the high contending parties variously saluted or sliced one another, as the case might be. Indeed, to write the history of Blackheath would be to despair of ever seeing Dover, and so, instead of beginning with Aulus Plautius, or any of the masterful Roman generals who doubtless had something to say to those cerulean Britons on this spot, I will skip the centuries, and only note the more outstanding and interesting occasions on which the heath has figured largely. Hie we then from the first to the fourteenth century, when, in 1381, Wat, the Tiler of Dartford, encamped here as leader of a hundred thousand insurgents. The fount and origin of this famous rebellion has ever been popularly sought in the historic incident of Dartford, in which the tax-gatherer lost his life; but a discontent had long been smouldering among the people, which needed only an eloquent happening of this nature to be fanned into a flame. The Poll Tax was one of the greatest grievances of the time, and the high rent of land was even more burdensome. The price of land might, perhaps, have been borne with, for it was of gradual growth, and regulated more or less by the law of supply and demand, but the Poll Tax was a new burden, and one exacted harshly from the people by the nobles among whom the Government had farmed it. Then, too, the state of serfdom in which the villeins existed was odious to them at this lapse of time, when men began to aspire to something better than to be the mere pawns of kings and nobles, sent to fight for feudalism on foreign battlefields, or in fratricidal conflicts at home. The days were drawing to a close when it was possible for kings to issue prescriptions for the seizing of artisans to be set to work on the building of royal palaces and castles; documents couched in this wise: “To our trusty and well-beloved Richard, Earl of Essex: Know ye that it is our pleasure that you do take and seize as many masons, carpenters, braziers, and all kinds of artificers necessary to the reparation of our Castle of Windsor, and that this shall be your warrant for detaining them so long as may be necessary to the completion of the work.”
With grievances old and new, it wanted but little to set the home counties in revolt, and so we find the cause of the Dartford tiler to have been warmly taken up, not only throughout his native Kent, but also, across the river, in Essex. The tiler’s neighbours swore they would protect him from punishment, and, marching to Maidstone, appointed him leader of the commons in Kent. The Canterbury citizens, less enthusiastic, were overawed by the number of the rebels, and several of them slain; five hundred joining in the march to London, while a dissolute itinerant priest, that famous demagogue John Ball, was enlarged from prison and appointed preacher to the throng, rousing them to fury by the rough eloquence and apt illustration with which he enlarged upon his text—
When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
REBELS
From Blackheath to London marched this great rabble. The king, with his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby; the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a hundred knights and sergeants were retired for safety to the Tower, whence they issued by boat to receive the petitions of the insurgents. Ten thousand of them waited at Rotherhithe, and by their fierce yells and threatening appearance so terrified the king’s attendants that, instead of permitting him to land, they took advantage of the tide, and returned. This behaviour disappointed Tyler, who saw no hope of concessions from the king’s advisers. He and his men burst into London, and, joined by the discontented host from Essex and Hertfordshire, under the leadership of one John Rakestraw (who has come down to us through the ages as Jack Straw, and whose camping-ground on Hampstead Heath bears to this day the old inn known as “Jack Straw’s Castle”), plundered the town, burning the Palace of the Savoy and all the buildings and records of the Temple. Fear eventually led the Court party to grant the four chief demands of the people: the abolition of slavery; the reduction of the rent of land to fourpence an acre; free liberty of buying and selling in all fairs and markets; and a general pardon for past offences. Had Tyler and Rakestraw been content with these concessions, it is probable that all would have been well; but their ambition had grown with success, and they trusted to further violence for greater advantage. Rushing into the Tower at the head of four hundred men, they murdered there the Archbishop of Canterbury and five others, and, retaining no less than twenty thousand followers in the City, intercepted the king as he rode out the following morning attended only by sixty horsemen. With boorish insolence, Tyler lay hold of the king’s bridle, when Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, stabbed him in the throat. Falling from his horse, the rebel leader was despatched by an esquire. The courage and tact of the young king are historical, and the way in which he quelled the hostility of the insurgents, and drew their sympathies to himself, is well known; but the revocation of the charters of emancipation was a piece of faithlessness which makes the inquirer doubtful of the sincerity in which they were first granted, and the less inclined to blame Wat the Tiler for his excesses.
Thus tamely ended this, at one time, most formidable rebellion. The south gateway of London Bridge received its leader’s head, and the lieges who fared by that frowning archway, together with those others who felt no loyalty, were invited to look upon the head of a traitor. But some day Wat the Tiler of Dartford will have his monument, and, truly, there are few figures in our history that so well deserve one, for he was one of the first to stir a hand for the English people against the exactions of a largely alien nobility.
Blackheath witnessed no other warlike gathering for the matter of seventy years; but it was in the meanwhile the scene of many peaceful displays.