From the Thames slope of Cooper’s Hill, where “Denham’s Seat” makes a view-point across the river, expands a wider landscape over the flat fields of Bucks and Middlesex, watered by the branching Colne. The spire to the north marks a village known on maps as Wyrardisbury, but to men as Wraysbury; then a mile beyond, across the railway, comes Horton, home of Milton’s youth. But the scene of greatest fame lies in the foreground, at our feet, for this wide riverside meadow, degraded to a race-course as it has been, is Runnymede, on which King John was forced to sign the first great charter
of our liberties. Some would have that historic stage to be Magna Charta island off the west end of the mede, where a stone is shown as the table of signing; but no Surrey patriot can allow such a pretension on the part of Buckinghamshire, while it may be that the king had his quarters at the Benedictine Nunnery of Ankerwyke on the other bank, if not at the old house in Staines pretending to that honour. It is remarkable what a number of places in many parts of England claim to have housed or lodged a so unpopular and worthless sovereign.
Above Runnymede, dropping off the ridge of Cooper’s Hill, one may come down to the pleasant town of Egham, its one long street lying a mile back from the river; but its accretions straggle on towards the bank, where the tow-path leads by havens of boating men and “Anglers’ Rests” to the bridge of Staines. This is a Middlesex town, the older part of it also lying back from the Thames, upon the Colne, whose damp flats form a somewhat dreary background, not enlivened by the banks of a huge reservoir for thirsty London. But Staines has a name on the Thames through its ancient stone, marking the limit of London City’s jurisdiction, thirty-six miles up the river. There may be Londoners who never heard of this stone, which made the goal of a Lord Mayor’s progress eighty years ago, to be celebrated by his Lordship’s chaplain in a most amusing style, by no means meant to be amusing. Having spared the reader Akenside’s inscription for the column on Runnymede, I have half a mind to inflict upon him some account of this expedition, as raised to all the dignity of history, and all the interest of exploration, in the reverend gentleman’s now rare volume. But it might seem too like ancient history to a generation of impatient readers, who know the Lord Mayor’s State barge only from the heading of their Illustrated London News, and perhaps do not know how the Corporation’s Admiralship has passed into the farther reaching hands of the Thames Conservancy. “Suffice it, therefore, to say that though the party were three successive days—two of which included fifteen hours—upon the water; yet, such was the fine and ever-varying nature of the home scenery around them, which was itself sufficient to engross the attention, as the Thames made its azure sweeps round slopes of meadow land; so diversified were the occupations of reading, working, and conversation—conversation which, always easy and intelligent, was often such as to discover memories containing ample registers of miscellaneous snatches and fragments of sentiments, both in prose and verse, which were sometimes applied with considerable tact and address to passing scenes; so well and interestingly, in short, were the several successive hours filled up”—that one must break off the chronicler’s long-winded sentence with his own admission, that “it would be difficult and tedious to detail all the particulars” of that civic voyage.
I do not aspire to emulate this author’s stilted gait on the trip from Staines to London, but I invite the reader to plod with me along the tow-path; that, as he is aware, will pass from one side to another, a matter hardly understood by an observant American writer, who made note how “one shore of the Thames, sometimes the right, sometimes the left, it seems, belongs to the public.” From the Bells of Ouseley to Staines Bridge the tow-path has been in Surrey; now it crosses to the pleasant river front of the town, the Surrey side being blocked by private paradises and boating-houses. To Chertsey, the next Surrey town, we might, indeed, cut across by a road that at one point comes close to the river; but the more inviting way is the path on the Middlesex bank, and at one of the locks we may have the luck to catch a steamboat plying in summer between Kingston and Oxford on a river, of which that old poet might say more emphatically in our generation:—
Though with those streams, he no resemblance hold,
Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold;
His genuine and less guilty wealth to explore,
Search not his bottom, but survey his shore.