SAXON KINGS AND MODERN CYCLISTS
I trouble you with these details merely because the stone upon which these kings received their crowns is still in existence in the market-place, enclosed by and mounted on a modern seven-sided pedestal, upon whose every face is carved the name of one of those Seven Kings, fearfully and wonderfully spelled, to the amazement of the thousands of cyclists who pass by and darkly remember to have heard of Edward the Elder and his successors. When they come and read of Eadweard and similar perversions, they go away, more than ever determined to forget all about the pre-Norman monarchs and to confine their attention to those nineteenth-century bounders, the idols of their little purview—I name the “Makers’ Amateurs.”
But this Anglo-Saxon line of kings, from Edward the Elder to Edmund the Martyr and Ethelred, is a great deal more interesting than the professional cyclist. True, you cannot well lay a wager about Athelstan or Edred, who have been dead a considerable time, something, in fact, a little under a thousand years,—and they never played things low down for “records” or took sordid cheques or shared in “gate-money”; but they are still interesting, and made things so lively in their days that some of their doings have been handed down through ten centuries—and that is a kind of “record” in itself!
The Saxons managed to defeat the Danes here in some great battle, half mythical, half historic, and the old Shrovetide game of football that used to be indulged in, within the town, is supposed to have been derived from the (certainly unchivalric) way in which the townsfolk of that dim era indulged in the sport of kicking the decapitated head of the Danish leader about their streets.
However that may have been, here was the chosen spot of Saxon coronation, and here stands the stone within a modern iron railing which is fondly believed to be of Saxon character. This stone is supposed to have been one of thirteen, originally forming a Druidical circle, and invested with a sacred character, if not a godlike power. Indeed, the connection between sacred stones and coronation stones is very close, for at one time kings were heirs of the gods, and not only pretended to Divine right, but were actually regarded as themselves divine. People, however, shed this last superstition, and began to disregard sacred stones at a comparatively early date, and the other twelve deities or sacred objects of Kingston soon disappeared, for when the townsfolk set about rebuilding their original wooden houses with more enduring materials, they quickly broke up the gods and built walls of their fragments.
KINGSTON LOYALTY
Kingston has ever been a place of importance, and its castle (than which no other stronghold in England has so utterly passed away and vanished, even its site being a mere matter of conjecture) was several times captured and recaptured by opposing hosts in the Middle Ages. In later times Kingston became celebrated much in the same way as Yankee Boston leaped into fame; for it was here that the first armed force assembled in the Civil War between Charles I. and his Parliament. Colonel Lunsford and other Royalist officers attempted to seize for the King the store of arms in the town, intending to proceed afterwards to Portsmouth, to hold that fortress in the Royal cause. The King was at that time at Hampton Court. But Lunsford’s enterprise failed, for the Parliament got wind of it and speedily arrested him. By a singular coincidence, Kingston was also the scene of one of the last stands of the Royalists, for, in July 1648, a body of some six hundred men was assembled here under the commands of Lord Holland, the second Duke of Buckingham, and his brother, Lord Francis Villiers.
They set out for Carisbrooke, with the object of releasing the King, who was imprisoned there, but a superior force met them at Reigate, and in the last skirmish that followed their retreat to Kingston, Lord Francis Villiers was slain, in a road between the town and Surbiton Common, at a spot long marked by the tree against whose trunk he stood and fought single-handed a hopeless fight against six Roundheads.
“Here,” says Aubrey, the historian of Surrey, “was slain the beautiful Francis Villiers, at an elm in the hedge of the east side of the lane; where, his horse being killed under him, he turned his back to the elm, and fought most valiantly with half-a-dozen. The enemy, coming on the other side of the hedge, pushed off his helmet and killed him, July 7, 1648, about six or seven o’clock in the afternoon. On the elm, cut down in 1680, was cut an ill-shaped V for Villiers, in memory of him.”
Indeed, Kingston has always been a loyal town, and its people High Tories of a kind that warms my heart towards them when I think of their bravery. Not resting content with appearing in arms against the Parliament, they petitioned in behalf of their King, thereby incurring considerable danger of being “remembered” in no kindly wise by my lords and commons of Puritan sympathies. Their High Toryism and hatred of modernity have been seen in recent times by their objection to having their Corporation reformed, and even in the persecution of cyclists has their bias been shown; but centuries ago these traits took a much less pleasing shape: the whipping and despiteful using of beggars, the ducking of scolds and the plentiful hangings of petty criminals; although, to be sure, there were some kindly souls in the town, as evidenced by the entries given in the parish registers of alms bestowed instead of scourgings, and we have here no such record of brutality as Godalming registers afford. Kingston, being on a well-worn road and itself a considerable place, was in receipt of much custom from wayfarers of every class, travelling to the sea. Here came sea-salts, men-of-war, personages of the highest station, and Dick, Tom, and ragged Harry. The fine old inns that Kingston boasted afford proof of the amount of custom the town enjoyed. Of these, alas! only the “Castle” is left, and that well-known house, going back to Elizabethan times, is cut up into separate tenements.