At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by the light of a full moon which shone in splendour from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the night they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock in the morning. Here the coffin was placed in the church until a start was made again, seven hours later. At last Colchester was reached, at five o'clock in the afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse unguarded in the High Street, while they took their fill at the "Three Cups." Thus, in its squalor and irreverence, the passing of this Queen of England resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or kin.
It had been proposed to complete the journey to Harwich that day, but, after violent disputes in the street between opposing factions, it was agreed to defer the departure until the next morning, and to deposit the coffin meanwhile in St Peter's Church. Inside that sacred building, disputes broke out afresh, one party wishing to affix a plate on the coffin-lid, bearing the inscription, "Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England," while the other vehemently objected. The quarrel was finally settled by agreeing to postpone fixing the plate until after the embarkation.
With the start made the following morning at half-past five, this melancholy procession leaves the Norwich Road, and history goes with it. The tale is done, the colophon reached.
XXIV
If we seek some touchstone by which to test the progress of a century or so in civilisation, there is scarce a better than found in comparison between the condition of the roads in old and modern times. That Waller could, in all sincerity, speak of "vile Essexian roads" is not remarkable: he was a poet, dealt in superlatives and lived in the seventeenth century. But that Arthur Young, a hundred years later, could with equal sincerity, and in more emphatic language, describe Essex roads as "rocky lanes, with ruts of inconceivable depth," is startling. It was in 1768 he penned that indictment, adding that they were so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the sun, and strewn with stones "as big as a horse, and full of abominable holes." It were, he concludes, a misuse of language to call them turnpikes, for they were rich in ponds of liquid dirt; while loose flints and vile grips cut across to drain off the water made the traveller's pilgrimage a weariness.
The modern reader, perusing all these manifold sins and wickednesses of the roads, rather wonders how they could all have been crowded on to such truly vile ways, and if a stone were as big as a horse, how room could have been found beside it for holes, ponds and other objectionable features. But Arthur Young was a truthful man in general.
To-day the Essex high roads are as near perfection as any in the home counties, even though the byways be steep and rough and more than usually winding.
It is in these byways that he who seeks rural Essex shall find. The dramatic suddenness and completeness with which, a few hundred yards from the high road, the sophisticated wayside towns and hamlets are exchanged for the unspoiled rusticity of the original villages is surprising. In these lanes the older rustics talk and think much as their grandfathers did, but the rising generation unhappily do not, and the Essex rustic in general, like his fellows elsewhere, has almost wholly discarded the old dress of the peasantry. Only the very old or the more remote yet wear the smock-frock—the "round frock," or the "gaberdine," as they called it—that was once as honourable a distinction of the ploughmen, herds, or carters as are the uniforms of our soldiers and sailors.
The time is long past since a clean smock-frock, corded breeches, worsted stockings and well-greased lace-up boots formed the approved rural costume for Sundays or holidays, just as the same articles of apparel in a "second-best" condition made the workaday wear. The Sunday costume of the agricultural labourer is now a cheap and clumsy travesty of the clothes worn by townsfolk, and in hideous contrast with his surroundings. Exactly what it is like may be seen on any advertisement hoarding in the outskirts of Chelmsford, Colchester and lesser towns, where pictorial posters bid Giles go to Shoddy's for cheap outfits. Sunday mornings find him flaunting his finery in the village street; his would-be stylish boots creaking, his every article of wear writ large with vulgarity. Often he carries gloves in those large hands of his, rough with honest week-day toil, and a pair may thus last him for years—for he dare not attempt to put them on. Would that he equally purchased his cheap cigars for show and refrained from smoking them!