“Thy lawing!” exclaimed that “more rough” person; “Heaven help thee, wench! what ca’st thou that?”
“It is—I was wanting to ken what was to pay.”
“Pay? Lord help thee!—why, nought, woman—we hae drawn no liquor but a gill o’ beer, and the “Saracen’s Head” can spare a mouthful o’ meat to a stranger like thee, that cannot speak Christian language.”
Alas! whatever your language, the more smooth innkeepers of Newark, in our times, do not do business on this principle.
The “Clinton Arms” has seen many changes of name. It was originally the “Talbot,” and as such is mentioned in 1341. At a later date it became the “Kingston Arms.” Byron often stayed there, and writes from London in 1807, “The ‘Kingston Arms’ is my inn.” It was also the inn, during the election contest of 1832, of Mr. Gladstone, soliciting for the first time the suffrages of “free and independent” electors, who duly returned him, in the Tory interest. Newark thus gave him an opportunity in Parliament of defending his father as a slave-owner, and of whetting his youthful eloquence to a keen edge in extolling the principle of slave-owning. The Newarkers were long proud of having returned the “statesman” to the House, but history will perhaps deny him that title. It has been denied, and the term of “egotistical politician” found to fit better. He set a fashion in surrender, and his country reaped shame while he lived; but the bitterest harvest-home of his methods has come, after his death, in the red vintage of English blood. It was when standing for this pocket-borough of the Duke of Newcastle’s that Gladstone gave an early and characteristic specimen of his peculiarly Jesuitical ways of thought. He took the mail-coach on a Sunday from Newark for London, and beguiled the tedium of the journey and the Sabbath by discussing the question of Sunday travelling with a Tory companion. Not merely did he severely condemn the practice, but he also gave some tracts to his fellow-traveller! He gives the facts himself: it is no outsider’s satire. Thus, in one moment of confidence, he reveals not only what he is, but what he will be. He implicitly announces that he is a law unto himself and that those things are permitted to him which in others must be deadly sins. In the very moment of crime he can present an accomplice with a tract, and glow with all the fervour of one helped to save a lost soul.
The “Ram,” another old inn, is still standing, opposite the castle, on Beast Market Hill. George Eliot stayed here in September 1868, “seeing some charming quiet landscapes” along the Trent. Quiet, undoubtedly.
Ridge, the printer and bookseller, Byron’s first publisher, who issued his Hours of Idleness, carried on business in a fine old house still standing at a corner of the square, and the house-door and the brass knocker at which the new-fledged poet knocked exist to-day.
XXX
By Beast Market Hill, past the castle and over the bridge, one leaves Newark for the north. Level crossings of the railways now and again bedevil the way, which is flat so far as the eye can reach—and much farther, and the meadows on either side are intersected by runlets and marshes, the road carried over them by a succession of red-brick bridges. At a distance of one and a half miles, the true Trent is crossed by a wooden bridge, and South Muskham reached, where the level-crossing gates take the place of the old turnpike.