COLNBROOK, A DECAYED COACHING TOWN.
This gory legend does not render Colnbrook the more attractive to the stranger, but the Colnbrook folks are proud of it. Like the Fat Boy in “Pickwick,” they “wants to make yer flesh creep,” and would have one believe that the present “Ostrich” is the identical building—which it isn’t.
Another cherished tradition of Colnbrook is that King John stayed here on his journey to Runneymede to sign the famous Magna Charta, the “Palladium of English Liberties,” as phrase-makers are pleased to call it. They still show the stranger “King John’s Palace,” a quaint house which looks on to the road, and is not so old as John’s time by some three hundred years. That, however, by no means discredits the story to the good folks of Colnbrook.
A better ascertained historical event is the rising in favour of the deposed Richard the Second in 1400, when forty thousand men from the West Country lay encamped by the Colne, prepared to descend upon Windsor and London, to seize the usurper, Henry the Fourth. But Henry, fleeing from Windsor, raised an army in London; and between the rumours of his coming and treachery in their own ranks, the partisans of Richard faded away.
XVII
TO SLOUGH
The long stretches of the Bath Road between this and Slough are nowadays enlivened by few incidents or interesting places, although during the last century, and well on into this, the highway was lively enough with Royalties and their escorts, journeying between Windsor and St. James’s. The route taken on these occasions was generally through Datchet, and so on to the Bath Road just here. An old print of this period shows us how George the Third used to travel on this road to London, or to the unkingly domestic life at Kew Palace, where the farmer-like reputation of that not very brilliant monarch was sustained on boiled mutton and turnips, and improving books.