XVI

The long, long ascent to Sevenoaks, which crowns a ridge seven hundred feet above the sea-level, does not lack beauty, lined as it is for a considerable distance with hedgerow elms. But it puts on another kind of beauty at night, for as you come past the railway-station, and look down in the darkness upon the galaxy of red and green signal lights, it seems like a lavish Arabian Nights display of rubies and emeralds spread out there, in the black cutting.

The name of the railway-station, on the other hand, is vulgarity itself. It is known as “Tub’s Hill,” to distinguish it from the other Sevenoaks station known (from the public-house outside) as “Bat and Ball.”

Sevenoaks is greatly indebted to the South Eastern Railway for a matter quite outside railway accommodation. The town had long and vainly been seeking a good water-supply, and was still upon that quest when this branch of the South-Eastern was under construction in 1867. What the town wished to find, and could not, the contractors for the Riverhead Tunnel found, very much against their will. They struck a spring which for a time drowned them out and cost enormous sums to divert; but it gave to the town its present abundant supply.

There can be no place with more divergent roads than those at the entrance to Sevenoaks. They branch off singly, in pairs and triply, acutely and gradually, and all with a specious artfulness leading the unwary anywhere but into the town, and by choice into suburban roads that presently end in wastes of shingle, heaps of building materials, and uncompleted houses.

The old Sevenoaks of coaching days is mostly gone, or disguised out of recognition. There was then a “cage,” or lock-up, in the town, with a pond in front of it and a ducking-stool for nagging wives or scolding neighbours. There was also a toll-gate and a weigh-bridge, where heavy waggons paid according to their showing in tare and tret. Sevenoaks was, in short, fully equipped with the engines of civilisation as understood at that period.

SIGN OF THE “BLACKBOY” INN.

The “Chequers” inn, which still projects a somewhat old-fashioned front beyond the general building line, is a kind of “Jack o’ Both Sides,” for it has another, and quite different, frontage on to the parallel street. It was in those days the starting and arrival point of a coach to and from London, supported by a select few who had business in the metropolis, and from that circumstance was called the “United Friends.” Peacock, the coachman, was said to bear a striking resemblance to Tony Weller, which is not remarkable when we consider that Dickens constructed that plethoric, red-cheeked person from the typical stage-coachman of his age. There were then, in fact, “Tony Wellers,” like “Samivel’s” father, on every road. The coach was jointly owned by Benjamin Worthy Horne, John Stephens, and John Newman.

The “Wheatsheaf” has long since been transformed into offices, and the “Crown,” that once owned a gallows-sign stretching across the road, has been given a modernised grey stucco front, and looks rather like a banking establishment. Among minor inns, the “Blackboy,” displaying the effigy of a little nigger, is of considerable age, and takes its name from the now extinct local Blackboy family who flourished greatly in Sevenoaks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more modern inns include the “Bricklayers’ Arms,” whose device—not granted by the College of Arms—is an ingenious arrangement of plumb-board and trowel.

SIGN OF THE “BRICKLAYERS’ ARMS.”

But all Sevenoaks inns, past or present, yield in interest to the fine old mansion facing the high road near the church, and known as “The Old House.” All details of its history have been lost, and it is only known that it was once the “Three Cats”—probably “The Cats”—inn, celebrated by that late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century poet, Tom Durfey, who was kept by his patron, the sixth Earl of Dorset, at Knole as a mirth-maker and general bacchanalian laureate. You cannot imagine a poet with the Christian name of Tom being other than a bard of the barrel; and as for Tom Durfey, he was the most bacchic songster, and the dirtiest rhymester of all the dirty dogs of his age: which is why he is so reprobated by the good—and so read.

In his song in praise of the “Incomparable Strong Beer of Knoll,” he says:

There’s Adams, in hoping to pleasure his town,

Declares the best French wine is sold at the “Crown,”

And well it may be, for he takes good rates,

And so does my jolly sleek friend at the “Cats.”

But to strong beer my praises must come,

Leave them to isinglass, egg-whites, and stum.

Beer, fine as Burgundy, lifts high my soul

When Joudrain perks up for the honour of Knoll.

The “Cats” of course derived its sign from the arms of the lords of the manor, the Sackvilles of Knole, whose “supporters” are two leopards argent spotted sable, easily to be mistaken by the rustics of a land where leopards are not among the native fauna, for cats. It must have been an aristocrat among inns, for it remains still one of the noblest houses in Sevenoaks, with handsome red brick frontage of the time of William the Third or Queen Anne, with beautiful gardens in the rear, and others, equally beautiful, in front, on the opposite side of the road. It must have ceased to be an inn shortly after Tom Durfey wrote, for it has been in occupation as a private residence of the Austen family since about the middle of the eighteenth century.

Opposite is the very beautiful, characteristically “Queen Anne”-style house, “The Chantry,” standing next the church and on the site of a demolished ecclesiastical building. It has lately been most exquisitely restored.

The church itself, a large building with a tall tower, is of a somewhat uninteresting Perpendicular design. The curious may notice in the churchyard a stone to “Milenda,” wife of one Joseph Kennard.

A monument in the north aisle to William Lambarde, who wrote the “Perambulation of Kent,” and died in 1601, was removed from Greenwich. Among the others, there are singularly modest tablets to the Amhersts. The most important is that to the charitable Lady Boswell, who died 1692, aged apparently thirty-seven, for the inscription says: “During xxxvii years she conversed amõg us mortals.” She left sums for “fifteen of the poorest Children to be instructed in y^e Catechism of ye Church of England,” and for the much more practical purpose of teaching them to “write and cast accompts” and to apprentice them to “handycraft trades or employments.” Her school is a prominent, and very grim, object on entering the town.

OLD MANSION, FORMERLY THE “CATS” INN.

The most famous native of Sevenoaks is undoubtedly the mediæval Sir William Sevenoke, whose career was remarkably romantic. According to all received accounts, he was a foundling, discovered as a baby in the hollow of a tree in the immediate neighbourhood of the town by one Sir William Rumpstede, who named him “William” after himself, and “Sevenoke,” or “Sevenoaks,” after the town; brought him up, and apprenticed him to Hugh de Bois, citizen and ferrer (or ironmonger), of London.

Let us linger a moment to consider how popular in ancient times was this finding of neglected children in casual places by charitable knights. The frequency of it is a little suspicious. The most famous foundling incident (after that of Moses) is the finding, early in the fourteenth century, of one of the ancestors of the Stanleys. According to the legend, Sir Thomas de Latham was walking with his lady, who was childless, in his park, when they drew near to a wild and lonely spot where they found a baby boy, dressed in rich swaddling clothes, in an eagle’s nest. The knight acted astonishment; the good unsuspecting lady looked upon the baby as a present from heaven. It was adopted and educated in the name of Latham, eventually succeeding to his father’s and his adopted mother’s property. In the course of years this foundling’s daughter Isabel married Sir John Stanley, who adopted the Eagle and Child crest still borne by the Earls of Derby.

But to return to William Sevenoke. He became a grocer, and eventually, in 1418, Lord Mayor of London, became Member of Parliament, was knighted, and was granted for coat of arms seven acorns. To him Sevenoaks owes its endowed Grammar School and almshouses. Whether they were descendants of his whose name became corrupted into Sennocke is not quite clear, but it is quite certain that the unlovely name of Snooks derives from a further debasement of it.

SEAL OF SEVENOAKS
GRAMMAR SCHOOL.

The schools and almshouses were rebuilt in 1727, and are generally thought by passing strangers to be a workhouse or a penitentiary. It will thus be gathered that they are not beautiful. If strict discipline may be read into the ancient seal of the school, then it was in old times governed on the principle of Winchester, “learn or be whopped,” for that device exhibits a gigantic, Jove-like master presiding over a number of scholars, evidently in fear of the immense birch he holds in his right hand. A resolute application of the weapon represented here would undoubtedly result in abolishing laziness in the scholar given a taste of it.