XXVIII
In history, Grantham and its immediate neighbourhood are notable as having witnessed the rise of Oliver Cromwell. At the outbreak of hostilities in March 1643, the town was taken and its fortifications demolished by the Royalists, but was retaken shortly afterwards by the Parliamentary troops under a hitherto undistinguished Cornet of Horse, after some fighting at Gonerby. The rise of this cornet is picturesquely described by De Foe. “About this time,” he says, “it was that we began to hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud, rose out of the East, and spread first into the North, until it shed down a flood that overwhelmed the three kingdoms.” It was on May 22, 1643, that, with twelve troops, Cromwell defeated at Gonerby twenty-four troops of the opposing forces, and thus commenced this meteorological career.
The ascent of Gonerby Hill, where these events took place, is a part of the journey to the North. It begins at the distance of a mile and a quarter beyond Grantham, shortly before reaching the hundred and twelfth milestone from London. For this part of the world it is a remarkable eminence, but although a long continuous climb, it does not come up to the impressive old descriptions of it, and cannot compare with such hills as Reigate Hill, or with Boughton Hill on the Dover Road. The village of Great Gonerby, a poor, out-at-elbows kind of a place, stands on the crest of the hill, with its great spired church as a landmark, a wide, bare street, a little inn with the curious sign of the “Recruiting Sergeant,” and an old posting inn, the “Rutland Arms,” its principal features. Passing through the cutting by which the gradient of the northern side of the hill has been eased, a remarkable view is unfolded of that flat region, fertile as a land of promise, the Vale of Belvoir.
We shall hear presently what Sir Walter Scott has to say of Gonerby Hill, but in the meanwhile let us see how the view from it struck another traveller, the Reverend Thomas Twining, an amiable clergyman of Colchester, who in the eighteenth century was in the habit of taking holidays along the roads, mounted on his horse “Poppet,” and writing letters to his friends, describing what he saw. He was here in 1776.
“You have a view,” says he, “somewhat sublime and striking from its mere extent and suddenness but it is flat as a pancake. The road is through level, moorish, unpleasant ground from the bottom of that hill to Newark, but, as road, excellent.” No guide-book ever pictured a view so vividly as this description, which may stand unaltered to-day.
Gonerby Hill—“Gunnerby” is the correct pronunciation of the word—is something more to us in these pages than merely a hill. It is a place of literary eminence, whose terrors are enshrined in the pages of Scott and Ainsworth. Jeanie Deans, of all the romantic and historic characters that people this historic and romantic road the most prominent, is especially to be identified with this height. Historic she is because there is a substantial basis of truth in the character of Sir Walter Scott’s heroine, and of Effie and many another figure in the Heart of Midlothian. They have fictitious names, but some were real persons. Helen Walker, who died in 1791 and was buried in the churchyard of Irongray, near Dumfries, is the prototype of Jeanie. She had in 1737 walked to London and sought a pardon for her sister, Isabella, condemned to death by the ferocious Scots law on a presumption of having murdered her child. She actually did (as Scott’s heroine is described as having done) seek the Duke of Argyle and through his interest obtain the object of her journey; but Scott is responsible for the embroidery of this simple and affecting story; for he never saw Helen Walker, and she, with Scottish closeness, never described her adventures, being only too anxiously concerned that the story of her sister’s shame should be forgotten.
It is a curious and (admirable or not, as one may personally think it) unusual conscience that would hesitate to stretch a point in evidence when to do so would be to save the life of a loved sister; and more strange still to find so unbending a moralist enduring the toils and dangers of a four-hundred miles’ tramp with the bare possibility of preserving the life of the sinner in view at the end; but to understand the workings of the Scottish conscience is beyond the mental reach of any one who does not chance to be either a Scot or a Presbyterian.
And here let it be said that the Jeanie Deans of the novel is by no means so attractive a heroine as Scott wished to make her. There is heroism in her walk from Scotland to London, and we rejoice when she is fortunate enough to obtain a “cast in a wagon,” or pity her when she falls in with thieves and murderers at Gonerby Hill foot; but when we find her “conforming to the national (that is to say, the English) extravagance of wearing shoes and stockings for the whole day,” we can scarce subdue a snort of contempt at the very superior manner in which she thus yields to the popular prejudice in favour of this extravagance in shoe-leather. Nor is she a particularly lovable figure when she disputes theology with the rector of Willingham, with all the assurance of a Doctor of Divinity and all the narrow-minded bigotry of a Covenanter; coming in these things perilously near the ideal of the perfect prig.
We must here quote the landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” at Newark on Gonerby Hill. He spoke of it as though it were some beetling eminence, resembling at the very least a Snowdon or an Helvellyn. He called it a “high mountain,” and indeed Scott has in putting this phrase into mine host’s mouth made him characteristic of his age.
The year of Jeanie Deans’ romantic expedition was 1737, and then, and for long afterwards, travellers and all who had business with the roads magnified hills in this manner. They disliked hills, and so for that matter did most people, for the appreciation of scenery was not yet born. “When I was young,” said Wordsworth, many years later, “there were no lakes nor mountains,” and it was Thomas Gray, the author of the Elegy, who really was the first to discover beauty instead of terror and desolation in them.