ANOTHER QUEEN ANNE
It is a little, lop-sided town, calm and cleanly, with houses, stone-built and brick, chiefly of Queen Annean and Georgian dates, situated on the river Ouse. To enter the town, you cross over that not very broad river by an iron bridge, built in 1810; and there you obtain the prettiest view in all Newport. Immediately across the bridge is “Queen Anne’s,” or St. John’s Hospital, looking very new, for it has recently been rebuilt. One of its many rebuildings was that by Queen Anne, in 1615: not the Queen Anne who (as the saying goes) is dead, but another Queen Anne who is, if possible, even more dead: the Anne of Denmark, who was Queen of James the First. Even the hospitallers who are still advantaged by her re-founding of the ancient almshouse are in a state of benighted ignorance as to her identity: they either suppose her to be the Anne, Queen Regnant, whom we all know; or else frankly say they “dunno nawthin’ about who she wor,” and might with equal truth add that they don’t care.
NEWPORT PAGNELL.
Almost all that remains of the old building is a tablet, with inscription very difficult to be read, and weirdly misspelled, imploring:
Alyov good christiams that here dooe pas
By give soome thimg to thes poore people
That im St. Johmns Hospital doeth ly.
1615.
Newport Pagnell has already been referred to as “lop-sided,” a phenomenon occasioned by the railway station at the western end of the town. It is not a large station, and it is only the terminus of a short branch from Wolverton, but it has caused the little building that has taken place in Newport in the last sixty years to be done almost exclusively here. Near by, in a house called “The Green,” there once lived an eccentric medical man, a Dr. Patrick Renny, who was born in 1734, and died here in 1805; being buried, by the terms of his will, in the garden, where an obelisk over his grave—now entirely overgrown with ivy, and looking like an ancient tree—may still be seen.