DCXLI. Earl Granville, K.G., at Walmer Castle.
S you step out of the railway carriage that has brought you at leisurely speed to Deal, you cannot help thinking of another arrival that, at the time, created even more attention on the part of the inhabitants. You, bent on a visit to the genial Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, arrive from landward.
Julius Cæsar
came by sea; And yet, so narrow is the world, and so recurrent its movements, you both arrive at the same town!
As you walk down Beach Street, reading the Commentaries, which you have brought down in your coat-tail pocket, you recognise the "plain and open shore" which Cæsar describes as being reached after passing the cliffs of Dover.
Here he landed, now many years ago, and your host who, eager for your coming, even now stands on the top of the great round tower that dominates his castle-home, can look upon the very spot on which the Conqueror stepped ashore. Presently he takes you to see the marks of the intrenchment, plainly visible to this day. With heightened colour and dramatic gesture the belted Earl tells how, on the fourth night after the arrival of the Roman fleet, that great storm which ever comes to Britain's aid in such emergencies, arose, wrecking J. Cæsar's galleys, and driving them far up the shingly beach.
"What's to be done now?" Cæsar's quartermaster asked.
"Done?" said J. Cæsar in the colloquial Latin of the day. "Why, haul the fleet up on to the beach."
So they brought the ships ashore; Cæsar intrenched them within a camp, and remained there till the weather improved. Your host presses upon your acceptance a handful of soil from the tumuli.
"Cæsar's foot may have pressed it," he says, as you, with a perhaps exaggerated appearance of pleasurable interest, pocket the dust, being careful to turn your pocket inside out as soon as you are beyond sight of the castle on your homeward way.
As your hansom pulls up abruptly under the shadow of the ancient castle, you find your further progress stopped by a fosse, across which is haughtily flung a sixteenth-century drawbridge. Henry the Eighth, in a rare moment of leisure from domestic affairs, built Walmer Castle for the defence of the coast. You are much struck with the architectural design, which resembles in some degree a mass of blancmange turned out of a mould. Four round lunettes of stone, wearily worked by hands now cold, stand four-square to all the winds that blow. In the middle is a great round tower, with a cistern on the top, and underneath an arched cavern which you are pleased to learn is bomb-proof. As you cross the drawbridge, you feel bound to admit that the prospect is not inviting. It seems as if you were going to prison instead of to visit, at his marine residence, one of the most courtly and (peradventure) the most hospitable noblemen of his age. The severe stonework frowns upon you; the portholes stare, and you almost wish that, regardless of expense, you had kept your hansom waiting.
But all uneasiness vanishes as you cross the reverberating stone floor, and pass into the apartments fronting the sea. You feel as if you had journeyed into a new world, a sunnier clime. Your host, with outstretched hand, welcomes you to Walmer, and makes kindly inquiries as to the incidents of your journey.
"It is, I expect, very cold in London," he says, with his genial smile; "you will find it Walmer here."
You protest that varieties of temperature are of very inconsiderable concern to you, and, throwing yourself on the walnut couch by the recess window, daintily draped with orange-and-blue chintz, you gaze forth on the varied scene without. The stately ships go on to their haven under the hill; the ever-changing procession presses on, homeward or outward bound; and, beyond, the unbroken, treacherous barrier of the Goodwin Sands.
"It's strange you should choose that place," your host says, in his soft, liquid tones; "that was the favourite corner of a former predecessor in the honourable office I now hold. In the first year of this century, as you know, William Pitt was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and, tradition says, used, when he came down here, to sit at that very window by the hour, gazing across the Downs towards the coast of France, where his great enemy was preparing for a descent on the British coast."
Naturally pleased by this coincidence, you endeavour to make your eyes flash as you look across the sea (you remember to have read somewhere that Pitt had "an eagle eye;" perhaps two, but only one is mentioned); try and think what Pitt looked like generally, and what he did with his arms, which you finally decide to fold across your chest, though conscious that you more resemble Napoleon crossing the Alps than the Great Commoner sitting at his drawing-room window in Walmer Castle.
Your host is pardonably proud of his Arboretum, which he has set out on the roof where, in Tudor times, the cistern flaunted the breeze. Here, bared to the winter sun, droops the long fronds of the Fucus spungiosus nodosus. Close by is a specimen of that rare plant the Fucus Dealensis pedicularis rubrifolio. Here, too, is the Rhamnoides fructifera foliis satiris, rarely seen so far north. Here, coyly hang the narrow leaves of the Silene conoidea; and here, slowly rocking in the S.S.W. wind, is the sand willow (Salix arenaria). You fancy that somewhere you have seen a finer Hippophae rhamnoides, but the Dianthus cariophyllus, with its pleasant smell of cloves, well deserved the look of appreciation which your host bends upon it. Here, too, are the Geranium maritinum, and the wallflower-scented Hottonia palustris and even the humble Brassica oleracea.
"I have gathered them all in this district myself," your host says, opening the violet velvet smoking-jacket (for which he has exchanged the warlike garb he usually wears at Walmer) and casually displaying the belt that marks his earldom.
You would like to ask whether a belted Earl ever wears braces, but whilst you are thinking of how so delicate a question may be framed, Granville, George, Leveson-Gower, Earl Granville, Knight of the Garter and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, relates, with that never failing flow of natural humour which so greatly endears him to Lord Salisbury, the story of his chequered career, since he left Christchurch, Oxford, now more than half a century ago and became Attaché to the Embassy at Paris. The narrative which is full of point, agreeably occupies the time up to half-past one, when the beating of a huge drum announces luncheon. You make a feint of at once leaving, and Lord Granville, with that almost excessive politeness which distinguishes him, hesitates to oppose your apparent inclination.
As you pass out, skirting the piece of old ordnance dragged from the sea in 1775, near the Goodwin Sands, by some fishermen who were sweeping for anchors in the Gull-stream, you reach the conclusion, that politeness may sometimes be carried too far. "Deale," notes Leland, in his interesting Itinerary, "is half a myle fro the shore of the sea, a Finssheher village iii myles or more above Sandwich." That is all very well for Deal; but a gentleman of healthy habits, who left London at ten o'clock this morning would, as the afternoon advances, certainly not be so much as three miles above a sandwich if it were offered.
Pleased with this quaint conceit, in which there is peradventure some little humour, you drop in at a confectioner's, and fortify yourself with a nineteenth-century bun, with which you trifle whilst the train tarries.
A Sporting Correspondent, who says "he isn't in the know," asks "what we think of Garter for the Derby?" A word to the wise is sufficient. "Garter" rhymes to "Starter." The Motto of the Garter is, Honi soit qui mal y pense. We have spoken.
