TONBRIDGE CASTLE.
This stronghold was successively the lordship of the Fitz Gilberts, the great Earls of Clare, the Earls of Gloucester, and the Staffords and Dukes of Buckingham: all of whom were, in respect of it, chief butlers and stewards of his Grace the Right Reverend Father in God, the Archbishop of Canterbury for the time being. Of those prelates they held the place by the grand sergeantry of serving in those capacities at the enthronisation of their Graces.
Those great earls left nothing to chance. They not only walled and embattled their town, and moated it, but on the prehistoric mound by the river they reared a keep and around it built a high wall with towers, and moated that as well. This was their castle; and although the ditches they dug are dried up and filled in, and the walls are for the most part gone, there yet remains the great Gateway of their hold to tell us something of its strength. It is a most worshipful Gateway: strong and tall and massive, so that one cannot, in naming it, do else than give it a capital G. There is scarce a more impressive Gateway in England. It was built somewhere about 1290, in the reign of Edward the First, as the architecture of its great drum-towers shows, and was the last word in massive fortification of that time: the walls ten feet thick and fifty-three feet high, the gloomy entrance arch ribbed with immense ribs of stone, the outer face of the towers relieved only by narrow slits for arrows. The workmanship was superb, and although more than six hundred years have passed since these stones were wrought so well and jointed so neatly, they remain perfect to this day.
There are dungeons in those towers; there is a hidden watergate to the river; there is, in fact, every circumstance of romance. Little wonder that in their Castle the lords of Tonbridge felt sometimes defiant. There was, indeed, one lord, Roger de Clare, who, even before this grim Gateway was built, and before his position could be so secure, felt strong enough to defy his liege, to defy even the great Archbishop, Thomas à Becket himself, and to treat his messenger with contempt. His Grace’s pursuivant came with archiepiscopal parchments, formidably engrossed and alarmingly sealed, but what did that haughty castellan do? He made the unhappy man eat the documents, “especially,” we are told, “the seals.” Well for that miserable man that he came merely from the Archbishop, and not with deeds from the King, given under the Great Seal! He survived the light repast, but he could scarce have stomached such a banquet as that would have made.
It would be an unprofitable exercise to trace the ownership of the Castle through the centuries; “suffice it to say,” as the Early Victorian novelists were wont to remark—that it came in course of time to one John Hooker. In 1797, that worthy demolished most of it, and with the materials thus obtained built the curious house that now adjoins the Gateway, which he probably would have destroyed as well, but that the work would have been very costly.
Later, the house was a school, to which period, doubtless, the bust of the anonymous tutelary genius over the porch belongs. Quite recently, the Castle has been acquired by the town, and in the beautiful gardens there are flower-shows, and, I believe, even a band-stand and penny-in-the-slot machines.
From the Castle the pilgrim naturally seeks the church, expecting to see many and stately memorials of those ancient lords. But he will find no trace of them. At some remote period, even before the church was “thoroughly restored” in 1870, improving besoms came and swept them out of existence. We may well pause here and consider with what astonishing completeness things venerable have vanished from Tonbridge. There was once, for example, south of the town, the Augustinian Priory founded by the de Clares. Wolsey seized its revenues and squelched it, on behalf of his proposed “Cardinal College” at Oxford, and the last few remains were abolished in 1839, when the South Eastern Railway came. The goods-station stands on the site.
Tonbridge church is disappointing, and it is not improved by the large churchyard, filled with dense files of tombstones, around it. They are so many that it is impossible to verify the existence of the scandalous epitaph alleged to be there, on a drunkard:
Hail!