In the long street of Hounslow the road forks at a spot once grimly marked by the gibbets of highwaymen. The right branch is the Bath Road, soon passing an inn which proclaims itself the half-way house between London and Windsor, and in two miles crossing the Crane to Cranford. This is not the Cranford of Mrs. Gaskell’s delightful story, but a very pleasant village in its way, perhaps the prettiest place on the road, which had Thomas Fuller for rector—that learned, loyal, and humorous divine who, as the inscription on his tomb recorded in his own vein of wit, sought after immortality while immortalizing the worthies of England. The Church, with its monuments, is enclosed in the park of Cranford House, where once stood a Templar preceptory that became a seat of the Berkeleys, whose old nobility flared into a Georgian scandal now growing dim. Thus the autobiographical sportsman, Granville Berkeley, came to be partly brought up here, and has many tales to tell of highwaymen adventures, including that legend of a Bishop who took to the road and was “taken ill” on Hounslow Heath, being fatally shot through the body. This master of hounds could remember the county as dotted with heaths—Harlington Common, Hillingdon Heath, and others—which at one time stretched almost continuously down to the Thames, and across it seemed to piece together the evil repute of Hounslow and Bagshot. But he lived to lament how “corn-fields have sprung up in lieu of furze-bushes; villas have filled the swampy gravel-pits where, as a boy, I have shot snipes; and blooming gardens have banished the bullrushes”; nor will the Spectator’s young warriors now make havoc among the plovers’ eggs, which used to be noted spoil on Hounslow Heath.
Another notability of the neighbourhood was Lord Bolingbroke, Pope’s “noble St. John,” of whose seat, Dawley Court, the name at least is preserved near Harlington Church. A little off the high-road, to the right, are the villages of Harlington, and Harmondsworth or Harmsworth, both with interesting old churches, and the latter boasting the largest church-barn in England. Between them lie the woods of Sipson. On the other side, opposite the by-road from Harlington, could once be traced the outlines of a Roman camp, one of the many connected with Cæsar’s name. Then at Longford is reached the Colne, hereabout, on the flat edge of Middlesex, splitting itself into tame branches, harnessed to industry. Two of these are artificial, one known as the Duke of Northumberland’s River, the other as the Queen’s, the Cardinal’s, or sometimes as the Longford River, formed by Wolsey to supply the waters of Hampton Court. Down the stream keeping the main name, one can find lanes and footpaths by Stanwell, Runnymede rifle-range, and Staines Moor to the Thames at Staines; and in favour of this walk it may at least be said that it implies no hill-climbing. On the Slough road we must hold on as far as Colnbrook to get out of Middlesex.
The straight road to Staines is of course by the great south-western highway that forked to the left in Hounslow, keeping parallel to the South-Western Railway, through a country much given up once to commons, now to market gardens, which have the name of nursing a not idyllic class of labourers. The chief places on the railway are Feltham and Ashford, between which appears to astonished passengers the rigging of a ship on dry land, planted here to instruct the boys of a large industrial school; and other institutions help to swell the population of this vicinity. On the road the most notable spot is Bedfont, its ancient Church enshrining curious frescoes apparently of Stephen’s reign, the churchyard famed for two yews trimmed into the likeness of peacocks, in which a wholesome legend, as interpreted by Tom Hood, sees two sisters thus transformed as punishment for their vanity.
And where two haughty maidens used to be
In pride of place, where plumy death had trod,
Trailing their gorgeous velvets wantonly,
Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod,
There, gentle stranger, thou mayst only see
Two sombre peacocks.
Another interesting church, with an elaborate Knyvett monument, is in the pretty village of Stanwell close by, where the spire stands not quite straight, about a mile to the right of the highroad. Bedfont is understood to have been the old limit of Windsor Park; and the neighbourhood has still some fine trees, as well as market-gardens; but the straight road’s best prospect shows ahead in the Cooper’s Hill ridge on the edge of Surrey, which it enters by the bridge at Staines.
This border town of three counties may be more pleasantly reached by the Thames, to whose devious curves the road makes a chord often travelled by Cobbett on the way to his beloved Surrey and Hampshire; then its scenery might shape his slander of Middlesex as “all ugly,” while his detestation of commons provoked him to call Hounslow Heath “a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in look,” yet “only a little worse than the general run.” It would be the shrinking heaths rather than the spreading fields that moved him to such sweeping condemnation; and if his burly ghost still jogs along the Staines road, it might want nothing but a few acres of “Cobbett’s corn” to take this part of Middlesex for an earthy paradise.
VIII
THE THAMES BANK
WE come now to the south-western corner of Middlesex, presenting a thick fringe of beauty and interest along the crooked course of the Thames. The beauty, indeed, is mainly artificial, the ground being in general flat, traversed by sluggish streams, and often apt to revert to the condition of a flooded marsh till banked in by dykes of habitation and ornamentation that make most of this river-edge one line of garden suburb. When we abuse London for defiling the country, let us not forget how plain-featured country may be disguised and pranked out under the fancy-dress of parks, gardens, pleasure-grounds and playgrounds, to be reckoned among the manufactures of a great city. Here, indeed, a champaign face of nature smiles rather for Pope and Bolingbroke than for Wordsworth and Tennyson.
We have already touched the Thames at Brentford, and since inner London ended with Hammersmith, something might have been said of the green tongue of Chiswick and the quaint village of Strand-on-the-Green, below Kew Bridge, only in part overlaid by an extension of suburban Gunnersbury. Then above Syon Park and Isleworth Church, at one mouth of the Crane, the villas of St. Margaret’s make a transpontine dependency of Richmond, almost joined also to the spread of Twickenham. At this latter town I take up my tale of the riverside.
Twickenham has been growing so fast along its tram-lines that it seems in danger of becoming a commonplace extension of London; but it cannot forget days of dignity when Queens, Princes, and poets were at home here. Katherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr, and Katherine of Braganza are supposed to have occupied the manor-house that once stood beside the Church, where lie buried Pope, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Kitty Clive the actress, and Admiral Byron, that “Foul-weather Jack” whose story of the Wager’s wreck gave so many hints to his grandson’s verse. Queen Anne, whose death is such a well-authenticated fact in history, was born at Twickenham, as was her sister Queen Mary. The only one of Anne’s seventeen children that struggled on to any prospect of surviving her, the poor little Duke of Gloucester, was brought from Kensington to Twickenham, as to the seaside, for change of air after an illness. In the next century, Horace Walpole speaks of the place as the “Baiae of Great Britain,” and quotes someone as declaring that “we have more coaches here than in half France.” Among Pope’s noble neighbours was the traveller of epistolary renown, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose friendship with the poet went so sour in the end. Some of the fine cedars hereabouts are said to have been raised from cones sent by her from the East. Another householder of rank was that Lord Ferrers, hanged for murder, according to the legend, in a silk rope, driven to the gallows in his own coach and six, which nowadays would probably have taken the road to Broadmoor Asylum. Writers whose works are now in every gentleman’s library, but not in Mudie’s, such as Richard Owen Cambridge, who seemed to his contemporaries a universal genius, and that other poet whose fortune was to be “born a Whitehead and baptized a Paul,” could once be counted among the notabilities of a place which, under the shadow of Pope’s renown, has housed more enduring names, from Fielding to Dickens. But for the long list of its celebrities and associations, the reader must be referred to such local chronicles as R. S. Cobbett’s Memorials of Twickenham.