The king then conveyed the property to Digby, Earl of Bristol, the “Earl of Severn” of the slight story of Anna, Lady Baxby, in A Group of Noble Dames. When the Civil War broke out, Sherborne Castle was garrisoned for the king by the Marquis of Hertford, and early besieged by the Earl of Bedford, on behalf of the Parliament. It happened here—as so often it did in their internecine strife—that there were relatives engaged on either side in this siege. The Earl of Bristol’s son, George, Lord Digby, was married to the Lady Anne Russell, sister of the Earl of Bedford. She it was, the “Anna, Lady Baxby,” of the story, who rode out secretly to her brother, and told him that if he were determined to reduce the castle, he “should find his sister’s bones buried in the ruins.” But the investment continued until, finding himself weaker than he had supposed, the marquis offered to surrender on terms. If they were not accepted he proposed, with the Lady Anne’s consent, and indeed at her wish, to station her on the battlements, and let the enemy’s marksmen do their worst. The Earl of Bedford was not proof against this, and it is said, raising the siege, retired.
But this plan would not always work. Three years later, in 1645, when Sir Lewis Dives, the Earl of Bristol’s stepson, was in command, a greater than the Earl of Bedford appeared before Sherborne Castle, and summoned it to surrender. This was Sir Thomas Fairfax, flushed with his successes, and making a clean sweep of the garrisons in the west of England. For sixteen days, his forces sat down in front of the castle, which then surrendered, with its garrison of fifty-five gentlemen and six hundred soldiers. With that surrender came the final ruin, for the castle was “slighted,” or destroyed by gunpowder, its contents and the spoils of “the lodge,” sold to the people of Sherborne. This “Lodge” was the mansion which even then had been built near by, the castle already proving too inconvenient for the ideas of those times. It is the so-called “Castle” of to-day, still the seat of Digbys, collateral and commoner descendants of the old owners. Sir Walter Raleigh built the centre portion of it in 1594, as his arms and the sculptured figures show, and Digbys the later wings. Their crest, the singular one of an ostrich holding a horse-shoe in its beak, is prominent over the entrance to the courtyard. In the park is still shown a stone seat, said to be that on which Sir Walter Raleigh was resting and smoking his first pipe of tobacco, when his pipe was dowsed and he drenched, by the pail of water thrown over him by his faithful retainer, who, not unnaturally, as tobacco was then a thing unknown, imagined his master to be on fire, and, in the expressive words of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade’s reports, “well alight.”
The Lodge, now the “Castle,” was a halting-place of the Prince of Orange on his triumphal march from Tor Bay, in 1688. He slept here a night, and from a printing-press in the house was issued his address to the people of England.
CHAPTER XVIII
SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
It is twenty-six miles from stately Sherborne, the “Sherton Abbas” of The Woodlanders, to where Weymouth sits enthroned on the margin of her circular Bay, and, always supposing that no strong southerly gale is blowing, there is for the cyclist no easier route in all the Hardy Country. Bating the steep rise out of Sherborne and out of the Vale of Blackmore to the chalk uplands at Minterne Magna, it is a route of favourable gradients, with one interval of dead level.
The river Yeo is a small stream, but its valley is deep and wide, as he who, leaving Sherborne, climbs the hills which shut in that valley, shall find. But a reward comes with the easy descent to the long, scattered street of rustic cottages at Long Burton, whence the way lies across a dead level to where, six miles distant from this point, rise the bastions of the mid-Dorset heights, seen distinctly from here: Dogbury, with his convex clump of cresting trees, like a blue-black wig, High Stoy, where the ridge runs bare, with Nettlecomb Tout and Bulbarrow in the hazy distance.
It is a straight, and a marshy and low-lying, as well as a flat road to Holnest, where, beside the road, is Holnest Lodge, belonging to the Erle-Drax family, and one of the seats of that eccentric person, the late J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, of Charborough Park, long a member of Parliament for Wareham, and one of the last of the squires. The old time squires were laws to themselves, and like none others. The product of generations of other many-acred squires of great port-drinking propensities and unbounded local influence, whom all the lickings administered at Eton did not suffice to bring to a proper sense of their intrinsic unimportance, apart from the accidental circumstance that they were the lords of their manors, “old Squire Drax,” as the rustics call him now that he is dead, might from his high-handed ways have formed an excellent model for a dramatist building up a melodrama of the old style. He was “the Squire” to the very nth degree, with so extraordinary an idea of his own importance that here, on the lawn fronting Holnest Lodge, he caused to be erected in his own lifetime a memorial to himself. An inspection of the approach to that residence will convince any one not only that he was very rich, but very mad as well. The sweeping drive is bordered at intervals with statues: Circes, Floras, Ceres, Dianas, and other classical deities, shining whitely and conspicuously against the grass, and leading the eye up to the central point where, on a tall imposing column, guarded by crouching lions, stands the bronze, frock-coated statue of Squire Drax himself. It is all very like a kind of higher-class Rosherville, and exceedingly curious.
One has not progressed far along the dead-level road before another evidence of the Drax swelled head comes in sight. It is a huge building in the Byzantine style, highly elaborated, and decorated in a costly way with polished stones. Its purpose puzzling at first, it is seen on closer approach to stand in a churchyard and to be a mausoleum. Away back from it stands in perspective the little church of Holnest, scarce larger than this gorgeous place prepared by the squire for his rest, and looking really smaller. The rustics dot the i’s and cross the t’s of his eccentricity, telling how he had his coffin made in his lifetime and his funeral rehearsed in front of the house. The more superstitious declare that the mausoleum was built so strongly and substantially in order to foil a certain personage whose desire is rather for the souls than for the bodies of his own; and, to support their dark beliefs, narrate how, canvassing for votes during the progress of an election the squire declared he had always been a Member of Parliament, would always be, and would rather go to the Pit with the initials of M.P. attached to his name than to Heaven without them. Unfortunately, these wonder-mongers halt a little short of the completeness desired by dramatic requirements, and do not proceed to tell us how the election was secured by the agency of a gentlemanly stranger of persuasive manners and club-feet, who, upon the declaration of the poll mysteriously disappeared amid a strong smell of Tandstickör matches.