XXXIV
CANTERBURY
The entrance to Canterbury from London is one of the most impressive approaches to a city to be found in all England. The traveller passes through the suburb of Saint Dunstan, by the old parish church that holds the severed head of Sir Thomas More, coming into the city through a street of ancient houses and under the postern arch of West Gate. The great drum towers of West Gate mark the ancient limits of the mediæval city, and guard an opening in the city wall which stood on the further side of the little river Stour. A drawbridge effectually prevented the entrance of an enemy, and when the strongly-guarded gate was closed at nightfall, belated citizens had to stay outside and put up with the inconvenience as best they could, in company with such travellers and pilgrims as arrived late from too much storytelling, feasting, or praying, on the road. For the accommodation of these travellers the suburbs of Saint Dunstan and West Gate arose early without the walls of the city, and several inns—the “Star” and the “Falstaff” among them—remain to show how considerable was the belated company entertained here.
West Gate, as we now see it, is the successor of a much earlier gate, and was built by the ill-fated Simon of Sudbury. It is the only one remaining of all the seven gates of the city, and owes its preservation rather to its convenience as a prison for poor debtors, than to any love our eighteenth-century barbarians had for mediæval architecture. It is to-day a police-station, and thus carries on the frugal and utilitarian traditions which originally spared it in the destruction of much else of beauty and interest.
Ancient buildings are carefully preserved nowadays. Why? Can we flatter ourselves that the provincial mind is more enlightened? I am afraid not, and must sorrowfully come to the conclusion that the ignorant authorities of our country towns would be as ready as ever to demolish their old monuments, did not their natural shrewdness teach them that, as strangers come from all quarters of the world to view their historical remains, they must be regarded in the light of a valuable asset. So far, they are undoubtedly right. Let them “restore” and tear down the remaining gates and towers and castles in the provincial towns of England, and they will prove, in the scarcity of visitors that will follow on their Vandalism, how valuable, in more senses than one, are the ancient ways.
Canterbury has seen a great deal of this senseless disregard for antiquity. Six gates, as I have said, were wantonly destroyed, but the passion for destruction did not stop here. The remains of the Norman castle were years ago converted into a coal-hole of the local gasworks, and are still put to that degradation; great stretches of the city walls, with their watchtowers, were taken down for corn-mills to be built with their materials; and, worse than all, stupidity of this kind ran riot among the Dean and Chapter in the thirties. For seven hundred and fifty years had Lanfranc’s north-western tower of the Cathedral stood, while the south-western had been rebuilt nearly three hundred years before. This dissimilarity vexed those assembled holders of fat prebends and decanal loaves and fishes, who drank port and read The Times, and had not a single sensible idea in their meagre brainpans, beyond a notion that one thing ought to match with another, and that as every Jack should have his Jill, so also should everything else possess a pendant. How truly British!
WESTGATE, CANTERBURY.
Well, if these western towers did not match, they must be made to; and so to find an excuse for pulling down the older one. There is always some graceless modern architect, with palm itching for five-per-cent. commissions, who would undertake or advise anything to procure a job, and the Dean and Chapter found such a man, who conceived Lanfranc’s work to have gone beyond repair. To this creature, Charles Austin, their own diocesan architect, who should have been earnest to preserve, rather than to destroy, they gave instructions for the pulling down of the Norman work and for its replacement by an exact copy of the Perpendicular tower. The thing was done in 1832. So little beyond repair and so sturdily strong was that Norman tower, that it was necessary to blow it up with gunpowder. A German invading Goth and malignant destroyer could do no more.
The work of demolition and the building of the new tower was done at a cost of £25,000. The architect pocketed £1,250 as commission, and all who care for architecture have lost one of the very few Norman Cathedral towers known in England. But then, how exactly those towers match, and how satisfied must be all good people who would sacrifice everything for the sake of uniformity!
The main thoroughfare of Canterbury, to which the old West Gate gives access, has undergone no little rebuilding since the days of gables and timber fronts, and yet it retains in the aggregate much of that old-world air for which we reasonably look in a Cathedral city. Long and narrow the street remains; quaint are many of the buildings that line it. Across it, under narrow bridges, flow two branches of the little river Stour.
An amusing incident belonged to the “Red Lion.”
THE DUC DE NIVERNAIS
One of the most outstanding historical figures upon the Dover Road is that no less kindly than courtly Ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais. That cultured Frenchman was employed by his sovereign, Louis the Fifteenth, in negotiating a Treaty of Peace which should conclude that disastrous contest to France, the Seven Years’ War. An exchange of Ambassadors was effected between Great Britain and France; the Duke of Bedford crossing the Channel to Calais in the early part of September, 1762, the Duc de Nivernais voyaging to Dover, and landing there on the morning of September 11. The elements had been unkind to him, and his passage occupied no less than five hours; but Nivernais handed over to Captain Ray, the commander of the Princess Augusta yacht (the vessel in which he had voyaged and suffered the most horrible pangs of sea-sickness), the sum of one hundred guineas, to be divided among the crew. Perhaps the unbounded gratitude with which he found himself again upon the shore—even though it were not his native land—accounted for the magnitude of this largesse.
The country was not eager for the peace which exhausted France desired, and looked upon Nivernais’ commission rather as an attempt to curtail the glory which England and Englishmen were reaping on land and achieving by sea; but the French Ambassador was received with a show of enthusiasm and the discharge of cannon as he landed at Dover, and a crowd of shouting countrymen cheered him as, bowing his acknowledgments of this reception, he bowled away in a coach and six horses, accompanied by a retinue of twelve persons.
Bowled, did I say? Nay: the motion of the ill-hung equipages of that day, tumbling along over the wretched roads of those times, resembled little the smooth career of bowls gliding over trimly shaven bowling-greens. Rather should the motion be described as a series of hesitating lurches and unexpected jolts; and this in the comparative excellence of the highways in September!
The Ambassador had started upon his journey from Dover to London as soon as possible after the early hour of the morning when he had landed from the “Chops of the Channel”; but he arrived at Canterbury too late for further progress to be made that day. Therefore he put up in the Cathedral city, after having had the empty satisfaction, to a traveller in his exhausted condition, of being received en grande tenue by the garrison.
The “Red Lion” inn was at that time the proper place for a personage of his quality to lie, and so the Duke with his party stayed there the night. For that night’s lodging for twelve persons, with a frugal supper in which oysters, fowls, boiled mutton, poached eggs, and fried whiting figure, the landlord of the “Red Lion” presented an account of over £44. This truly grand bill has been preserved, not, let us hope, for the emulation of other hotel-keepers, but by way of a “terrible example.” Here it is:—
| £ | s. | d. | ||||
| Tea, coffee, and chocolate | 1 | 4 | 0 | |||
| Supper for self and servants | 15 | 10 | 0 | |||
| Bread and beer | 3 | 0 | 0 | |||
| Fruit | 2 | 15 | 0 | |||
| Wine and punch | 10 | 8 | 8 | |||
| Wax candles and charcoal | 3 | 0 | 0 | |||
| Broken glass and china | 2 | 10 | 0 | |||
| Lodging | 1 | 7 | 0 | |||
| Tea, coffee, and chocolate | 2 | 0 | 0 | |||
| Chaise and horses for the next stage | 2 | 16 | 0 | |||
| 44 | 10 | 8 |
The Duke paid his account without a murmur, only remarking that innkeepers at this rate should soon grow rich; but it was, doubtless, with great relief that he left Canterbury for Rochester, where he dined the next day for three guineas.
News of this extraordinary bill was soon spread all over England. It was printed in the newspapers amid other marvels, disasters, and atrocities, and mine host of the “Red Lion,” like Byron, woke up one morning to find himself famous. He would probably have preferred his native obscurity to the fierce light of publicity that beat upon him; for the country gentlemen, scandalized at his rapacity, boycotted his inn, and his brother innkeepers of Canterbury disowned him. The unfortunate man wrote to the St. James’s Chronicle, endeavouring to justify himself, and complaining bitterly of the harm that had been wrought to his business by the constant billeting of soldiers upon him. But it was in vain to protest, and so bitter was the feeling against him that his trade fell off, and he was ruined in six months.
THE DUC DE NIVERNAIS.
Meanwhile, the Duc de Nivernais was negotiating for peace at the Court of Saint James’s; and, what with the difficulties of diplomacy and the rigours of the climate, he passed but a miserable time. “This country,” he wrote, “is a cruel country for negotiation; one needs to have a body and a spirit of iron,” and how little like iron was his frame may perhaps be judged from this portraiture of him, which shows a wistful-looking, hollow-cheeked elderly man, with nose and chin and eyes unnaturally prominent. The caricaturists took a mean advantage of his phenomenal leanness, and called him the “Duke of Barebones,” and a Court witling made the cruel jest that “the French had sent over the preliminaries of an ambassador to conclude the preliminaries of a peace.” He eventually did conclude a peace, and, returning to Dover, left (how thankfully!) for France on May 22, 1763. Let us hope that, after all his trials with the English hotel-keepers and the English climate, he experienced a better passage across the Channel than when he first crossed it.