After his wife’s death, having neglected to pay the fine to the Lord of the Manor, the latter recovered possession by injunction. The antique furniture and articles of vertu, pictures, etc., collected by Thompson, which he had not disposed of, or that were not sold at his death, disappeared during Gregory’s occupation. The very fixtures vanished, chimney-mantels and fire-grates were removed, so that with the exception of a few pieces of painted glass in the guest-chamber over the library, and a few mouldering bits of real carved oak in window fittings, or cornices, nothing remained in proof of the antique taste of the original proprietor of Frognal Priory.
A gate, under the trees on the left as one approached the very handsome porch, the only real thing about the building,[101] led to a pleasant slope once gay with garden-beds and flowering shrubs, where a fountain then choked up had once played, and by which a weeping ash still lingered. The greensward, rough and matted, was dotted about with groups of trees, and there remained in part the raised terrace that had divided this part of the grounds from the kitchen-garden, into which a flight of steps led. Here the ruinous condition of the house was more apparent than within it. Still a niched saint looked calmly down from beneath the cross-surmounted gable of a pseudo-chapel, while the ruined parapet, fissured and broken, threatened soon to bury its share of the sham edifice in a heap of dust.
The late Sir Thomas Wilson desired to utilize the house as an office, but for this purpose it required reparation, and the fear of an heir to Thompson starting up prevented his bestowing any outlay on it till it became too late. Some time after Gregory’s exit Sir Thomas Wilson’s bailiff, to prevent the house and its materials being carried away piecemeal, installed a labourer and his wife as caretakers, who remained in it over twenty years. The man died, leaving certain instructions to the woman, who, old and houseless but for its shelter, standing upon her supposed right after twenty years’ possession, absolutely refused to quit, and set at defiance all peaceable efforts to remove her; and though the lessee of the ground (then being broken up for brickfields) had managed to induct a tenant of his own, the oldest inhabitant was resolute in remaining; the result was intermural war. The old woman, remembering her husband’s injunction, fully believed that the Priory had lapsed to her in right of her twenty years’ free tenancy, and she doubted the power of the Lord of the Manor to remove her. It was not till some time after I had left the neighbourhood, and only by taking legal proceedings, that this too-tenacious inhabitant was expelled.
In these bygone years, on leaving Frognal Priory, if you took the first turning to the right, you found yourself at the entrance to West End Lane, then a really rustic lane, with high hedgerows and sheltering trees.[102]
CHAPTER VI.
WEST END TO CHILD’S HILL AND THE WEST HEATH.
Although lying wide of Hampstead proper, West End is an integral part of the parish of St. John, and the western boundary of the original demesne lands of the manor. It is accessible from the Heath by two or three charming field-paths, and when in the neighbourhood of Frognal Priory, at the period these lines were written, the first turning to the left led straight to it. In those days not even the blank walls and close-clipped garden hedges at the entrance could deprive West End Lane of the character of rusticity.
The ground along which it undulated, the fine old trees that overhung it in places, and the grassy slopes to the left, with their old-fashioned hedgerows broken by elm and oak trees, and brightened in spring and summer with whitethorn and elder bloom, left us a glimpse, as it were, of the lovely aspect of the fields, once stretching away to what were then Kilburn meadows, but which now underlie a town.
The first house to the right at the beginning of the lane was the Ferns, noticeable as having been the residence of the late Henry Bradshaw Fearon, a wealthy wine-merchant of London, a man of ‘large mind, and liberal principles, and a leader of them in others.’ ‘In common with, if not in so prominent a degree as, Lord Brougham, Thomas Campbell, and other men of high standing and influence, he took an active part in the originating and founding of the London University, and, if only on this account, deserves the gratitude of his fellow-citizens.’[103]