That the village of Riverhead belongs very largely to Lord Amherst is obvious enough, in the highly ornate terra-cotta tablets on the houses, bearing a gigantic A crowned with an earl’s coronet and ensigned with a shield charged with three spears. Also the “Amherst Arms,” with its sign exhibiting two Red Indians and the motto, “Constantia et Virtute,” proclaims the lordship.
Riverhead is a pretty little village, with a puzzling number of branching roads, situated at the foot of the long steep rises to Sevenoaks. Its name comes from the source of the Darenth being near at hand. The church that looks so picturesque in the illustration is, in fact, a piece of very bad early nineteenth-century Gothic, designed and built in 1831 by Decimus Burton, whose sympathies were entirely with the classic styles, as will be acknowledged when it is said that he it was who designed the Arch and screen at Hyde Park Corner and the lodges at the various gates of Hyde Park.
The corner of Riverhead selected for illustration here includes old and new. The gabled houses on the left are recent; the weathered wall on the right, with the curious little two-spouted fountain, is old; and very old and weather-worn is the almost entirely illegible notice-board declaring that something will be done to somebody doing something or other, followed by “£5.” It is very vague and terrifying.
“Montreal,” a beautiful park on the right hand of the ascent to Sevenoaks, is an historic place, the seat of Lord Amherst (Earl Amherst and Baron Holmesdale), descendant of that great soldier of the eighteenth century, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief.
The estate of Montreal came to this family in the seventeenth century, when a Jeffrey Amherst of that period, a barrister, acquired it. The place, then called “Brooks,” had been a seat of the ancient Colepepper family. The famous soldier was born here, and it is not a little curious to observe that his equally great contemporary, Wolfe, whose most renowned exploits were performed in the same series of campaigns in Canada, was born close at hand, at Westerham.
Amherst was born in 1717, and commenced his career as page to the first Duke of Dorset at Knole, afterwards learning the profession of arms in Germany, then, as now, the military school par excellence. How he fought in the victory of Dettingen or in the defeat of Fontenoy does not concern us here. His chance came when Pitt, alarmed at the policy of the French in Canada, gave him high command in those territories; and he justified the selection.
RIVERHEAD.
He was no kid-glove warrior. Sentiment was no portion of his equipment in the field, and if there were any in his composition he reserved it until his campaigns were fought to a finish.
To some of his doings or proposals the term “methods of barbarism,” shamefully applied by Little Englanders to the rosewater conduct of our modern campaigns in South Africa, might well have been attached. In warfare with the Indians he was so enraged with the atrocities committed by them upon captured officers that he contemplated employing bloodhounds and spreading smallpox among the redskins. That last horror was, fortunately, sternly vetoed, not only for the sake of humanity, but from the very reasonable fear that the scourge, once let loose, might destroy not merely the “noble red man,” but the white man as well.