BARTON MILLS.
Elveden has seen a good many changes in the last hundred years or so. Admiral Viscount Keppel, who purchased the property in 1768, and died in 1786, left it to the fourth Earl of Albemarle, and here was born in 1799, in the old Hall, rebuilt, or rather, remodelled, in 1870, that tough one of that tough and long-lived race of Keppels, George Thomas, the sixth Earl, who as a boy of sixteen fought at Waterloo, and succeeding his elder brother in the title in 1851, died in 1891. It was somewhere about the year of Waterloo that difficulties of sorts befell the Keppels, and Elveden then passed out of their hands into those of the Newtons, an undistinguished family, who held the estate until 1863, when it was purchased by the Maharajah Duleep Singh, and thus became associated with the romance of that dispossessed ruler of Lahore.
Imperial interests in India, and in greater measure the fears of the statesmen of that time, dealt harshly with that Oriental prince; excluded him from his ancestral honours, and made him a life-long stranger to his own people, and to the land of his birth. In exchange for his native rule and glorious sunshine, he was to have an annuity of “not less than £40,000 and not more than £50,000,” for “himself, his family, and dependents,” with domicile in our isle of fogs and mists. How ill the Government kept faith with him may be judged when it is stated that he never at any time received more than £25,000 a year.
Strange to say, he took kindly to our ways, and settled down here as a country gentleman. With the general reduction of rents, and the heavy outlays he had made upon the reconstruction of Elveden Hall, he eventually found it necessary to have recourse to the India Office, for immediate financial aid. As a result, his income was reduced to an annual £12,000.
The Maharajah had early embraced Christianity, and in 1864, in Egypt, had married Miss Bamba Müller. In 1882, after he had vainly striven to bring the Government to a performance of the original compact, and had fruitlessly petitioned Parliament to that end, he sailed for India, but was refused permission to enter. At Aden, from political motives, and also, we may suppose, from indignation at the breach of faith he had experienced, he abjured Christianity, and flung himself into the arms of Russia. Thence he retired to Paris. A few years later he re-embraced the Christian religion, and made his peace personally with Queen Victoria, at Grasse. He died at Paris, in 1893, in his fifty-sixth year.
With that event, the Elveden estate again changed hands, being purchased by Lord Iveagh, then newly raised to the Peerage. He had been disappointed in his earlier purchase of Savernake from the Marquis of Ailesbury, the Courts setting the bargain aside and refusing sanction for the property being alienated from the Bruce family.
ELVEDEN.
Since then, the village of Elveden has been transformed. It is still a village, placed like a settlement in a wild, uncultivated country, with the primeval heath visible from every cottage door, but the black flint cottages have given place everywhere to red brick, and it now lives in the memory of the passing motorist fleeting the lonely road at an illegal thirty miles an hour as a red streak on a brown plain of moorland. The red brick is, no doubt, very smart, but it is distinctly an alien material here, and altogether out of place. It would, indeed, in any earlier period than this of cheap transport facilities, have been impossible, for red bricks are not a local manufacture and the cost of bringing them here would in other times have been altogether prohibitive. The vanished black-flint buildings, constructed of the material found locally, were instinct with the spirit of the place, and looked as though they had grown out of the soil, and were a part of the land.
To a less hurried passenger than a motorist there is much food for reflection in the changed aspect of the village; but reflection is all that will be fed here, for to find a wayside hostelry is a difficult quest, and the traveller who comes, hungry and thirsty, perhaps wet through, from the many miles of wild, inhospitable heath on either side, is like to go on until he reaches Barton Mills or Thetford before he obtains shelter and refreshment, unless, indeed, he would be content with an obscure beerhouse off the road. To suggest a bottle of Guinness’s genuine Dublin brew may, for all one knows, be petit treason at Elveden, and the villagers must, possibly, see to it, lest they grow stout—and allusive!