XV

That the village of Riverhead belongs very largely to Lord Amherst is obvious enough, in the highly ornate terra-cotta tablets on the houses, bearing a gigantic A crowned with an earl’s coronet and ensigned with a shield charged with three spears. Also the “Amherst Arms,” with its sign exhibiting two Red Indians and the motto, “Constantia et Virtute,” proclaims the lordship.

Riverhead is a pretty little village, with a puzzling number of branching roads, situated at the foot of the long steep rises to Sevenoaks. Its name comes from the source of the Darenth being near at hand. The church that looks so picturesque in the illustration is, in fact, a piece of very bad early nineteenth-century Gothic, designed and built in 1831 by Decimus Burton, whose sympathies were entirely with the classic styles, as will be acknowledged when it is said that he it was who designed the Arch and screen at Hyde Park Corner and the lodges at the various gates of Hyde Park.

The corner of Riverhead selected for illustration here includes old and new. The gabled houses on the left are recent; the weathered wall on the right, with the curious little two-spouted fountain, is old; and very old and weather-worn is the almost entirely illegible notice-board declaring that something will be done to somebody doing something or other, followed by “£5.” It is very vague and terrifying.

“Montreal,” a beautiful park on the right hand of the ascent to Sevenoaks, is an historic place, the seat of Lord Amherst (Earl Amherst and Baron Holmesdale), descendant of that great soldier of the eighteenth century, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief.

The estate of Montreal came to this family in the seventeenth century, when a Jeffrey Amherst of that period, a barrister, acquired it. The place, then called “Brooks,” had been a seat of the ancient Colepepper family. The famous soldier was born here, and it is not a little curious to observe that his equally great contemporary, Wolfe, whose most renowned exploits were performed in the same series of campaigns in Canada, was born close at hand, at Westerham.

Amherst was born in 1717, and commenced his career as page to the first Duke of Dorset at Knole, afterwards learning the profession of arms in Germany, then, as now, the military school par excellence. How he fought in the victory of Dettingen or in the defeat of Fontenoy does not concern us here. His chance came when Pitt, alarmed at the policy of the French in Canada, gave him high command in those territories; and he justified the selection.

RIVERHEAD.

He was no kid-glove warrior. Sentiment was no portion of his equipment in the field, and if there were any in his composition he reserved it until his campaigns were fought to a finish.

To some of his doings or proposals the term “methods of barbarism,” shamefully applied by Little Englanders to the rosewater conduct of our modern campaigns in South Africa, might well have been attached. In warfare with the Indians he was so enraged with the atrocities committed by them upon captured officers that he contemplated employing bloodhounds and spreading smallpox among the redskins. That last horror was, fortunately, sternly vetoed, not only for the sake of humanity, but from the very reasonable fear that the scourge, once let loose, might destroy not merely the “noble red man,” but the white man as well.

Probably no one fully informed ever applied to Amherst the term of “dashing.” His methods as a general were calculating and deliberate; he was, indeed, the very antithesis of the meteoric, impulsive Wolfe. Those qualities served his country quite as well, and himself better; for although he was not idolised as a hero, he succeeded, on his return home, in obtaining the post of Commander-in-Chief.

To be regarded as a hero, it is generally considered necessary to be killed in the performance of the heroic deed, which does not seem altogether satisfactory, and is indeed rather discouraging.

However that may be, a grateful country, in the person of George the Third, eventually offered Amherst an earldom. He refused it, and accepted a barony instead. He held the post of Commander-in-Chief for many years, and only resigned, under pressure, in 1795 in favour of the Duke of York, the king’s son, whose military exploits are summed up in the once-popular lines:

The brave old Duke of York,

He had ten thousand men:

He marched them up to the top of a hill,

And marched them down again;

a specimen of minstrelsy which concludes with the obvious statements that—

When they were up, they were up,

And when they were down, they were down,

And when they were half-way up

They were neither up nor down.

Amherst lived but two years after the close of his public career, dying in 1797, at the age of eighty-one.

He it was who, demolishing the old house at Riverhead, built the present exceedingly plain stone mansion, and re-named house and park “Montreal.” There was, in fact, something in the scenery around Sevenoaks that reminded him vividly of those great northern pine-clad territories of America, where he had warred with such distinction against the French and the redskins; and there is a spot on the road from Sevenoaks to Ightham, where the red-stemmed pines grow thick and a mysterious woodland hush enshrouds the place, so keenly reminiscent of the scene of his action at Crown Point in 1759, that he rechristened it by that name. The spot—in the woodlands of Seal Chart—may readily be found to-day, for it is marked by the Crown Point inn, whose sign, the “Sir Jeffrey Amherst,” exhibiting a picture of the warrior himself brooding over the scene of his exploit, depends picturesquely from a tree-trunk.

A tall obelisk, built rather precariously of rubble, stands on a rabbit-infested mound in the park of “Montreal,” in a vista opening from the house, and is itself surrounded by weird pine-trees. It bears long inscriptions reviewing those military operations. One side is dedicated to a “most able statesman” (by whom William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, is indicated), and another commemorates the meeting here of Amherst with his two younger brothers—John, Admiral of the Blue, and William, Lieutenant-General.

It was an era when England was fighting all the world, and had need of such commanders.

The long list of military successes is stupendous:

[2] I.e. Ticonderoga.