The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike

by Charles G. Harper

BOUGHTON

Boughton-under-Blean is perhaps the neatest, quietest, longest, and most cheerfully picturesque village on the Dover Road. It lies near the foot of the hill. Half-way up is the church.

In the churchyard of Boughton there is a great yew-tree whose girth at three feet from the ground was taken by the vicar in 1894. It was then 9 ft. 9 in. The age of this tree is exactly known, for a seventeenth century vicar, the Reverend John Johnson, recorded, “the little yew-tree by the south doer was sett in 1695.” The yew, therefore, expands one foot in sixty-one years.

One or two country houses with large gardens and trimly cut hedges occupy the crest of the hill; and just beyond, on the level plateau of Dunkirk, is the church, built in 1840, as some means toward civilizing the untutored savages the villagers of this beautiful county had become under the neglect of that Christian Church whose Metropolitan Cathedral rises proudly beyond the hillside village of Harbledown, less than three miles away. God in His goodness has blessed with a boundless fertility the fair land of Kent, so that old Michael Drayton merely expressed facts when he wrote that rapturous eulogy—

O famous Kent!
What county hath this isle that can compare with thee?
That hath within thyself as much as thou canst wish;
Thy rabbits, venison, fruits, thy sorts of fowl and fish;
As what with strength compares, thy hay, thy corn,
Nor anything doth want that anywhere is good.

But, long after the first quarter of the nineteenth century had passed, this part of Kent was peopled with a peasantry compared with whom the Hindoos and the Chinese, who were even then receiving the warm attention of missionary zealots, were highly civilized and enlightened. The very county in which Augustine had landed and reintroduced Christianity thirteen hundred years before was neglected and ignored by the port-drinking parsons and prebendal wine-butts who drew fat incomes from the Church and starved the souls of dwellers under its very shadow; and the kindly fruits of this fertile land, with its furred and feathered game, brought no prosperity to the people. “The earth is the Squire’s and the fulness thereof” was an emendation of Holy Writ scored deeply in every yokel’s brain; and here, whither a fervent piety had brought uncounted thousands of pilgrims in the by-past centuries, the country-folk lived from youth to age, Godless and unlettered. The Era of Reform had dawned on England, sweeping away much, both good and evil, but these dark districts of Kent remained the same, save for a slowly growing feeling of discontent. The New Poor Law naturally fostered this feeling in a country where every other peasant lived in old age upon Outdoor Relief—and thought it the most reasonable way of ending a life of toil. By this new dispensation it became necessary for a poor man to break up his home and go into the “Union” before relief could be afforded him; and thus the Poors’ Rates were raised and the feelings of ratepayers and peasantry embittered simultaneously. A man who felt no shame in receiving his half-crown or five shillings a week from the parish, experienced bitter degradation in becoming an inmate of what is now generally known as “the House,” then hateful under the current name of “the Bastille,” or “Bastyle,” as the English peasant pronounced the word.

“COURTENAY”

To this neglected corner of England came a romantic and mysterious stranger in 1832. No one knew whence or how had come to Canterbury the picturesquely dressed man of commanding height and handsome face who, staying at the “Rose Hotel” in the High Street, soon attracted attention by his manner and the Eastern style of dress he affected. That he was fabulously rich, and that his name was Baron Rothschild were the common reports of the then somewhat dull Cathedral city, eager to dwell upon any subject that made for gossip; but it presently appeared, by his own accounts, that he was “Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay,” Knight of Malta and King of Jerusalem. This extraordinary man, besides possessing the advantages of a handsome face and a fine presence, was gifted with a singularly persuasive eloquence; and professing himself to be the friend of the people, oppressed by a selfish aristocracy and a stupid Government, he aroused the wildest enthusiasm in a political campaign upon which he presently embarked, with the object of standing as Parliamentary candidate for the City of Canterbury. His charm of manner; the affability with which he would converse with the meanest peasant; and the really clever political discourses he wrote for a periodical leaflet called the Lion which he had printed and published, created a number of partisans who flocked round him as he rode through Canterbury and the surrounding villages; or crowded the High Street in a state of the wildest enthusiasm when he harangued them from the balcony of the “Rose.” He polled over nine hundred votes in the Conservative interest at the election, and thus came within an easy distance of becoming a member of Parliament. His indiscreet championship of some fishermen, who were being prosecuted by the Revenue officials for smuggling, gave political and social enemies the looked-for opportunity to injure a man who was so dangerous to the squires of Kent. He was prosecuted in turn, on a charge of perjury, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. From the County Gaol he was transferred to a lunatic asylum, and only liberated in the spring of 1838, on the assurances of friends in the vicinity of Canterbury that they would take charge of him.

Religious mania seems to have attacked the weak brain of this excitable enthusiast while in confinement, and his conduct presently became more eccentric than before. Roaming in the country villages, preaching religious and political salvation to the small farmers, the cottagers, and poor agricultural labourers of Kent, he aroused greater enthusiasm and personal love than before. He had always represented himself to be a member of the Courtenay family, whose head, the Earl of Devon, claims descent from Palæologus, King of Jerusalem in early Crusading times; and, in addition, he announced himself as the rightful heir to a number of important estates in Kent and neighbouring counties. He let it be known that he, the noble Sir William Courtenay, Knight of Malta, and rightful King of Jerusalem, was not too proud to partake of food and shelter at the board and under the roof of the poorest. When he came in power, and claimed his rights, the oppressed should live freely on the land; the cruel New Poor Law that shut unfortunate men and women out from the world in “Bastilles,” as though Poverty were a crime, and separated man and wife, whom God had declared by his handmaid, the Church, man should not put asunder, should be abrogated; and the workers should have a share in the products of their toil. The people largely responded to these advances; and poor folk, together with a number of the class who had earned themselves a small competency, and a few moneyed people, believed thoroughly in Courtenay. He was now a man whom many held to have been persecuted and imprisoned for his championship of the people, and they loved him for it, many of them with a whole-souled devotion that culminated in worship. Courtenay’s extraordinary facial resemblance to the traditional appearance of the Saviour, and, finally, his ultimate assumption of the character of the Messiah, led many people to believe that Christ was actually come on earth to commence His promised reign; and entertainment, encouragement, and monetary contributions attended on their belief.