THE “BERKELEY ARMS.”
CRANFORD ROUND HOUSE
Cranford Park, near by, was a seat of the Earls of Berkeley, and is now the residence of Lord Fitzhardinge, who is de facto “Earl of Berkeley.” But the romantic scandals which arose from the fifth Earl having eventually married a servant in his household, after she had borne him several children, caused so much litigation about the succession to the title that, although one of his sons, the Hon. Thomas Moreton Fitzhardinge-Berkeley, was declared by a decision of the House of Lords to be legitimate, he never assumed the title, for the reason that the barring of his elder brother reflected upon his mother’s good name. The whole affair is exceedingly involved and mysterious, and it is therefore quite in order that Cranford House should have the reputation of being haunted.
The house is a large rambling pile in the midst of the Park, overlooking the sullen ornamental waters formed from the river Crane. The ancient parish church stands close by. The chief or garden front of the house is curiously like one of the old-fashioned houses that give so distinctive a character to Park Lane, in London; having a double-bayed front with verandahs. The aspect of such a house standing in the open country is weird in the extreme.
CRANFORD HOUSE.
THE CRANFORD GHOST
It was the Hon. Grantley Berkeley who first drew attention to the “haunted” character of the house. He tells, in his “Recollections,” how one night when he and his brother had returned home late, they went down into the kitchen in search of some supper, all the rest of the household having retired to rest long before, and distinctly saw the tall figure of an elderly woman walk across the kitchen. Thinking it was one of the maids, they spoke to her, but she vanished into thin air, and a search discovered nothing at all. The obvious comment here is that people returning home late at night in those times very frequently saw things that had no existence. The narrator’s father, however, used to describe how he saw a man in the stable-yard, and thinking he was some unauthorized visitor in the Servants’ Hall, asked him what he was doing there. The man “vanished” without a reply; to which the rejoinder may well be made that he might do so and yet be no ghost; the motive force being a sight of the horsewhip which the Earl was carrying.
Cranford deserves notice from the literary pilgrim from the circumstance that Dr. Thomas Fuller, the Fuller of the much-quoted “Worthies of England,” was chaplain to George, Lord Berkeley, who presented him to the rectory in 1658. He lies buried in the chancel of the church.
Harlington Corner is the name of the spot, half a mile down the road, where one of the many old roadside hostelries stands by a branch road leading on the right to Harlington, and on the left to East Bedfont, on the Exeter Road. The Corner, besides leading to Harlington, was also the “junction” for Uxbridge, and here the slow stages set down or took up passengers for that town. The fast coaches did not stop here, or were supposed not to do so. Some of them, however, in defiance of time-bills, halted at the “Magpies”—by arrangement, of course, with the innkeeper—much to the profit of that house. One of these venal drivers was neatly caught by Mr. Chaplin, of the once well-known coaching firm of Chaplin and Horne. The coachman had with him on the box seat that day a particularly genial passenger, who proved also to have a very intimate knowledge of horseflesh. Pulling up at the “Magpies,” where tables were spread, showing that the coach was expected as a matter of course, he winked at his passenger and invited him to refresh. Then, when all was, as the poet would say, “merry as a marriage-bell,” the unknown, like another “Hawkshaw the Detective,” revealed himself. He was Chaplin! The coachman drove that coach no more!