In 1842, when the road, as an institution, was at an end, the “Castle” was without a tenant, for no one was mad enough to entertain the thought of taking a new lease of it as an inn, and the house was much too large to be easily let for private occupation. At that time a site, and if possible a suitable building also, were being sought by a number of influential persons for the purpose of founding a cheap school for the sons of the clergy: and here was discovered the very place to fit their ideal. The neighbourhood was rural and select, and was so far removed from any disturbing influence that the nearest railway-station was a dozen miles away, at Swindon: the site was extensive and the building large, handsome, and convenient. Here, accordingly, what is now Marlborough College was opened, with two hundred boys, in August, 1843.
Many changes have taken place since then. The original red-brick mansion, designed by Inigo Jones or by his son-in-law, Webb, stands yet, but is neighboured by many new blocks of scholastic buildings, and the enormously large courtyard which in the old days looked upon the Bath Road, and was a place of evolution for post-chaises and coaches, is planted with an avenue, down whose leafy alley you see the striking pillared entrance of what was successively mansion and inn. Inside they show you what was once the bar, a darkling little cubicle of a place, now used as a masters’ lavatory, and a noble oak staircase of astonishingly substantial proportions, together with a number of fine rooms.
GARDEN FRONT, “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.
It was at the “excellent inn at Chapel House,” on the read to Worcester and Lichfield, that Dr. Johnson, in 1776, was led by the comfort of his surroundings to hold forth to Boswell upon “the felicity of England in its taverns and inns”; triumphing over the French for not having in any perfection the tavern life.
The occasion was one well calculated to arouse enthusiasm for the well-known comforts of the old-time English hostelry. He had come, with the faithful Boswell, by post-chaise from Oxford, on the way to Birmingham; it was the inclement season of spring, the way was long, and the wind, blowing across the bleak Oxfordshire downs, was cold. Welcome, then, the blazing fire of the “Shakespeare’s Head”—for that was the real name of the house—and doubly welcome that dinner for which they had halted. Can we wonder that the worthy Doctor was eloquent? I think not. “There is no private house,” said he, “in which people can enjoy themselves so well as in a capital tavern.... No man but a very impudent dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as if it were his own; whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome; and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is provided as by a good tavern or inn.”
The “Chapel House” inn took its name from a wayside chapel formerly standing here, anciently belonging to the neighbouring Priory of Cold Norton. At a later period, when education began to spread and the roads were travelled by scholars and others on their way to and from Oxford, Brasenose College took over the conduct of it, both as an oratory and a guest-house for the succour of wayfarers along these then unenclosed and absolutely lonely downs. A priest was maintained here until 1547. Afterwards the site seems to have been occupied by a mansion built by William Fitzalan, of Over Norton: a house that gave place in its turn to the inn.
Few ever knew “Chapel House” inn by its real name. It doubtless obtained the title from surviving traditions of Shakespeare having partaken of the hospitality of the old guest-house, on his journeys between Stratford-on-Avon and London. It is, indeed, singular how such traditions survive in this neighbourhood, the “Crown” at Oxford being traditionally the successor of the house where Shakespeare usually inned, and an old Elizabethan mansion at Grendon Underwood, formerly an inn, a halting-place when he chose another route and went by that village and Aylesbury to London.
But guests at “Chapel House” no more knew the inn as the “Shakespeare’s Head” than travellers on the Exeter Road would have recognised “Winterslow Hut” by its proper title of the “Pheasant.” And now the great coaching- and posting-inn has gone the way of all those other inns and taverns where Doctor Johnson—that greatest of Samuels since the patriarch—genuinely dined and supped and drank. Sad it is to think that all the festive shrines frequented by him to whom a tavern chair was “the throne of human felicity” have disappeared, and that only inns that were contemporary with him, and would have Johnsonian associations had he ever entered them, survive to trade on that slender thread of might-have-been.
As usual with the fine old roadside hostelries of this class, the coming of the railway spelled ruin for it. The great house shrank, as it were, into itself; its fires of life burnt low, the outer rooms became empty of furniture, of carpets, of everything save memories. The stable-yards grew silent; grass sprouted between the cobbles, spiders wreathed the windows in webs; the very rats, with tears in their eyes for the vanished days of plenteous corn and offal, were reduced to eating one another, and the last representative died of starvation, with “sorrow’s crown of sorrow”—which we know to be the remembrance of happier days—embittering his last moments.