The faultless nymph, changing her faultless shape
Becomes unhandsome, handsomely to ’scape.
Canterbury’s rejoicings were not renewed until after the Commonwealth had come and run its course, and the Stuarts were free once more to show their curious facility for rendering their House unpopular.
And after the romantic times of that unfortunate family come the stolid annals of Dutch William, Anne, and the unimaginative Georges—a line of sovereigns for whom enthusiasm was impossible. Mean in their vices and contemptible in their virtues, they lived their lives and reigned over England, and posted along the Dover Road on their way to or from beloved Hanover; and no man’s heart beat the faster for their coming, and none sorrowed overmuch for their going. All the Georges, and William the Fourth, too, were here, I believe, and in their train came the lean Keilmanseggs, the fleshly Schwellenbergs, and a variety of greasy Germans, fresh from the terrible voyage over sea; but no one cares in the least either where they went or whither they did not go.
OLD-TIME TRAVELLERS
But they all travelled with what we must now consider a snail’s pace. The wealthiest, the most powerful, could go no faster than horses managed to drag them. When Sir Robert Peel was summoned in haste from Rome by William the Fourth to form a Ministry in 1834, he travelled full speed to London, and the journey took him just within a fortnight. He noted in his journal that he accomplished it in exactly the same time as the Emperor Hadrian had done seventeen hundred years before him. The means of travel at the disposal of both statesmen were identical—post horses.
Another Royal visitor (of a much later date indeed) discovered the “chops of the Channel” to be no respectors of personages. In fact, His Serene Highness Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was come across the water to wed his Cousin, Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland (“Empress of India” was yet in the loom of the future), found his serenity as much disturbed by the roughness of his passage as falls to the lot of most bad sailors, of whatever social stratum. He was, in short, very ill, and unable to proceed any farther that day. On the morrow, Friday, February 7, 1840, he resumed his journey to London, by road, of course, for the railways that serve Dover (and serve it badly, too!) had not as yet been built.
Starting about midday, the father of our future kings reached Canterbury at two o’clock. The inevitable Address was, it is surely scarcely necessary to add, immediately forthcoming, to which the Prince as inevitably “replied graciously”; afterwards attending service in the Cathedral, where, as he could have understood but little of the service, he must have been supremely bored. The Cathedral was thronged with crowds who came not so much in order to pray as to peep at the Princeling whom the young Queen had delighted to honour.
The Prince slept at Canterbury that night, and left, with his suite, en route for Chatham at half-past nine the next morning, pursued by a body of clergymen with an Address. Alarmed at this appalling eagerness on the part of servile Britons to read lengthy orations of which he understood not a word, the Prince gave directions for the cavalcade to drive faster, and so they swept on through Chatham and Rochester, without stopping to hear what the Mayors and Corporations of those places had to say. Those deadly Addresses were, in fact, “taken as read,” and the Mayors, Aldermen and others returned home with their ridiculous parchments, wiser, and, it is to be feared, not only sadder, but less loyal men.
At Dartford, the bridegroom-elect was met by one of the Queen’s carriages, and he thereupon changed from his travelling chariot to enter London in some degree of State. At New Cross an escort of the 14th Dragoons was waiting, and, instead of proceeding along the classic Old Kent Road, and so to the traditional entrance to London by London Bridge, he went to town by way of romantic Peckham and idyllic Camberwell, ending his journey at that dream of architectural beauty, Buckingham Palace. What followed: How the Times waxed violent and denunciatory of Lord Melbourne and the frivolous entourage with which he had surrounded the Queen: how that paper preached homilies, and how all the others, nearly without exception, gushed fulsome nonsense, it is not the business of the present historian to set forth. All he has to do is to remark that with this event closes the history of Royal processions along the Dover Road.
The hilly road to Dover is not remarkable for sporting events, but two may here be noted. On April 1st, 1903, Mr. Walter de Creux-Hutchinson walked from Dover to London Bridge in 14 hrs., 19 mins., 40 secs.; and on September 18th, 1909, A. G. Norman cycled from London to Dover and back in 8 hrs., 8 mins.