From Cookham, where the lock is set amid wooded scenery, the transition to Cliveden is easy.
Clieveden, Cliefden, Cliveden—you may suit individual taste and fancy in the manner of spelling—looks grandly from the Buckinghamshire heights down on to the Berkshire levels of Cookham and Ray Mead. Perhaps the most beautiful view of all is from Cookham Lock. Ray Mead, that was until twenty years ago just a mead—a beautiful stretch of grass-meadows—is now the name of a long line of villas with pretty frontages and gardens, but deplorable names—“Frou-Frou,” “Sans Souci,” and the like—and inhabited, often enough, as one might suppose by the Frou-frous of musical comedy and their admirers.
COOKHAM CHURCH.
BRAY CHURCH.
Cliveden, sometime “bower of wanton Shrewsbury and of love,” and now residence of the highly respectable and remarkably wealthy Mr. William Waldorf Astor, looks in lordly fashion upon such. With the proceeds of his New York rent-roll that Europeanised American in 1890 purchased the historic place from the first Duke of Westminster, and has resided here and at other of his English seats ever since. Those who are conversant with American newspapers are familiar with the scream every now and again raised against this and other examples of American money being taken and spent abroad. The spectacle of that bird of prey raging because of the dollars riven from it is amusing, but the situation may become internationally serious yet, for when some great financial crisis arises in the United States and money is scarce, it is quite to be expected that the question of the absentee landlords will become acute, and talk of super-taxing and expropriation be heard. I believe this particular Astor is now a naturalised Englishman, and I don’t suppose him to be the only one. Suppose, then, that the Government of the United States at some future time seized the property of such, how would the international situation shape?
Cliveden, when it was thus sold, had not been long in the hands of the Grosvenor family; having been, a generation earlier, the property of the Duke of Sutherland, for whom the present Italianate mansion was built by Sir Charles Barry in 1851, following upon a fire which had destroyed the older house, for the second time in the history of the place. The original fire was in 1795. In the mansion then destroyed the air of “Rule, Britannia,” had first been played in 1740, as an incidental song in Thomson’s masque of Alfred, the music composed by Dr. Arne.