“The King’s Highness, which never ceased to study and take pains both for the advancement of the commonwealth of this his realm of England, of the which he was the only supreme governor, and also for the defence of all the same, was lately informed by his trusty and faithful friends that the cankered and cruel serpent, the Bishop of Rome, by that arch-traitor Reignold Poole, enemy to God’s word and his natural country, had moved and stirred divers great princes and potentates of Christendom to invade the realm of England, and utterly to destroy the whole nation of the same. Wherefore His Majesty, in his own person, without any delay, took very laborious and painful journeys towards the sea-coasts.”
The results of these journeys was the building in 1539 of what Lambarde describes as “castles, platfourmes, and blockhouses in all needfulle places of the Realme.” Some of these we may still see, here and at Walmer, Sandgate, Camber, and along the south coast, far away into Cornwall. These “bulwarks,” as they are styled in the records of the time, were designed by Van Hassenperg, a German military architect, and all bore outwardly much the same appearance, consisting of portly, but low, masonry towers clustered at intervals round a stout curtain-wall and pierced with lunettes for guns. Islanded within the centre of this enclosure was a keep and gun-platform, rising to a somewhat greater height than the outer works. Although of one general appearance, there were minor differences in the outer aspect of these coast defences, and the ground-plan of each was markedly individual. Deal Castle, long since become a private residence, still stands to the west of the town. It wears much the same exterior appearance, although its moat is planted with shrubs.
The narrow alleys that lead on to the beach at Deal, and the ramshackly old houses and hovels from whose windows one might almost indulge in sea-fishing, seem almost like provocative impertinences to the waves, which appear always to be threatening them. But there they remain, the most whimsical of dwellings, with the spars and bowsprits of vessels almost poking in at the windows, greatly to the amusement of summer visitors.
The visitor to Deal who does not partake of at least one Deal “hoffkin” is not considered to have done his duty by the place. There is, however, nothing especially delightful in one of these strangely named articles. A “hoffkin” may be purchased at any baker’s shop, at the price of one penny, and is nothing more than ordinary breadstuff (except that it appears to be a good deal harder, and not so palatable) baked in the shape of a teacake. It is about the size of a saucer, and has a hole in the middle. And why any baker makes such a thing, and how it came by its name, is an unrevealed mystery.
Half a mile north of Deal once stood the castle of Sandown, one of Henry the Eighth’s many shoreward castles. They had no opportunity of fighting the foe, and their history has thus been meagre; but to this fortress of Sandown belonged one grim incident. It was selected as the prison of that convinced regicide, Colonel Hutchinson, sometime member of Parliament for Nottingham, who was at first pardoned on the Restoration, and then, in 1663, arrested and sent to the Tower of London. Removed to a solitary imprisonment here in May 1664, his wife and daughter were only permitted to visit him from Deal. According to the “Memoirs” written by his wife, Sandown Castle was even then a “lamentable old ruined place, not weatherproof, unwholesome and damp,” and he died in four months, September 11th, aged forty-nine, from a fever with which it had infected him.
Sandown Castle is a thing of the past. Only the black memory of it remains. It was gradually undermined by the sea, and fell in massive ruinous blocks of masonry, unsung, unwept, with no story save that of a sordid and cruel and useless revenge.
The Kentish Coast: Deal to Brookland
The explorer who pushes manfully into these sandy wastes will scarce find that they repay him for his trouble and fatigue. A squalor pervades them, in addition to their essential melancholy; and when a kind of golf club-house has been passed and you come upon a small stone with a barely decipherable inscription, set upon a bank that marks where the sands and the marshes begin, and are told that it marks the site of a murder done there, long ago, you feel it to be a fitting place for such a deed. Here a young woman named Mary Bax was murdered in 1784 by a sailor tramping this way, along the old road to Sandwich. A boy roaming in the marshes saw the crime committed, and hid trembling in the rushes of a dyke, for fear that if he were seen he would be served the same. When the man had gone he raised an alarm, and the countryside was roused. The sailor was tracked to Folkestone and captured in the churchyard of St. Eanswythe. The following account of the affair, and of the conviction and execution of the murderer, appeared in the Annual Register for 1784:
“Martin Laas, a sailor, was in April convicted of murdering a young woman at Worde, near Sandwich. Throughout the whole of his trial he treated the witnesses very insultingly, and gave three loud cheers before he was removed from the dock. Upon this, the Judge gave strict orders for him to be chained to the floor of his dungeon, where he afterwards confessed the crime. He said that on August 25th, as he was sitting on a roadside bank near the halfway house, between Deal and Sandwich, Mary Bax passed by, upon which he followed her, and in half a mile stopped her and inquired the way to Sheerness. She told him he was a great way from that place; whereupon he said he had no money, and must have some. She had none, she said, for him. He then pushed her into a ditch, and jumped after her, into the mud and water, which reached to the middle of him. Taking the bundle she was carrying, and removing the shoes from her feet, he made off across the marshes, towards Dover. The shoes he immediately threw away, and hid the bundle near where he was taken.