One other distinction Guildford owes to its associations with kings. It has been selected as the scene of a remarkable novel by a remarkable writer. Martin Tupper, in his preface to Stephan Langton, takes a devoted public into his confidence as to the manner in which such a book should be, and indeed actually was, completed. He set out to write a historical novel dealing with Guildford in the days of King John, weaving into it various local legends and a love-story of an abbess and an archbishop; he "began the book on November 26, 1857, and finished it in exactly eight weeks, on January 21, 1858, reading for the work included." The list of books which he consulted in Mr. Drummond's library at Albury must be read in full for the mere physical labour of the business to be appreciated; but after such abstruse searchings, to have crammed into ninety thousand words of solid print such a concatenation of murders, arsons, slayings, swoonings, drownings and burnings must always remain a considerable achievement. The story itself is sad stuff.
Apart from palaces, Guildford's history, until comparatively recent times, has been the history of the wool trade and cloth manufacture. The beginnings of the industry go back to the settlement in the south of England, in the reign of Edward III, of Flemish weavers and dyers. Guildford naturally attracted the trade, for sheep could be successfully farmed on the downs, water-power for the fulling-mills could be had from the Wey, and the best fuller's earth in the country was to be had from Nutfield and elsewhere, only a few miles away. The fuller's teazle, and woad for dyeing, also grew, and still grow, I learn from Dr. Williamson, though I have not found either, in the neighbourhood. Before the end of the fourteenth century the cloth industry had come to the dignity of legislation. Nobody might buy cloth before it had been "fulled and fully performed in its nature"; this was to prevent dishonest people from stretching the cloth and so giving the public short measure. Later, under the Tudors, nobody might manufacture cloth except in a market-town where cloth had been manufactured for ten years past. This was no doubt for the convenience of the ulnagers, officers deputed to measure and seal all cloth brought to market. It was highly illegal to stretch cloth in any way. Thomas West, of Guildford, in 1607, was charged with having used "a certain instrument (a tenter) and other engines wherewith 100 cloths of white wool called kerseys, rough and unwrought and made for sale at Guildford, were stretched and strained in breadth and length." On another occasion five clothiers were summoned to answer a charge of having used "a certaine engine called a rope" to stretch their cloth. So important a part of Guildford's life had clothmaking become under Elizabeth that the Corporation required special acknowledgment of the fact from the innkeepers, doubtless because prosperity in the town meant full tankards emptied at the inns. Every alehouse keeper had to have a signboard hung above his door with a woolsack painted on it, under a fine of six-and-eightpence; he had to buy the sign from the hall warden at the Town Hall, and pay two shillings for it. Woolsacks were added to the borough arms. Yet the prosperity of the trade was short-lived, after all. The pride of Guildford's industry fell. Less than fifty years after the alehouse signs swung woolpacks to guide thirsty clothiers, the business came down with a run. Godalming, Farnham, and Wonersh were other flourishing centres of the trade, and in 1630 one Samuel Vassall, the merchant who took the Godalming and Wonersh cloth for shipment abroad, failed his customers. He was under arrest, and no one else could be found to take up his contracts. All the Godalming eggs were in one basket, and Guildford and Farnham suffered in sympathy. Three thousand workers were in distress; it was the beginning of the end. It could not have happened, of course, if Samuel Vassall's failure had been the only difficulty. That would have been got over somehow. But there was another agent at work. The real cause of the destruction of the Surrey cloth industry was the fact that for years the Company of Merchant Adventurers and the London Drapers' Company had been working to get the cloth trade into their own hands, and they had practically succeeded. Godalming held on for a time; but Guildford, Wonersh, and Farnham went under.
Aubrey is not content with so simple an explanation. He scents a swindler. The trade of Wonersh, he writes, "chiefly consisted in making blue cloth for the Canary Islands; the decay and indeed ruin of their trade was their avaricious method of stretching their cloth from 18 yards to 22 or 23, which being discovered abroad, they returned their commodity on their hands and it would sell at no market. The same fraudulent practice caused the decay of the Blews at Guildford." He probably muddled up musty scandals with the effect of pure business competition. He is not the last to make mistakes connected with a vanished trade. There still lingers a superstition at Guildford that Rack Close, not far from the Castle, is the place where unfortunate prisoners (perhaps the Jews whom Martin Tupper describes as suffering agonies of enforced dentistry and other tortures) were stretched upon the rack. It is, of course, the plot of ground on which were set up the wooden racks, or frames, on which the Guildford blue cloth was stretched and dried in the wind and sun.
Guildford was singularly happy in its lack of history during the Parliamentary wars. The battles over Farnham Castle we have seen. Guildford Castle was not thought worth holding. Surrey gentlemen and Surrey towns had been as backward as the rest of England in supplying Charles with his ship-money; but during the whole of the war not a shot was fired within hearing of the county capital. There was a question of safeguarding the powdermills at Chilworth, and these were secured for the Parliamentary Army. Otherwise, Guildford heard nothing more of the war than the rattle of accoutrements; there were a few levies stationed in the town, and a troop or two of horse rode through it. Perhaps Guildford's unhappiest memory of war is an echo of Sedgmoor, forty years later. The Duke of Monmouth, leaving his colliers and ploughmen to do their best against the King's cannon, had ridden off the field into Hampshire, turned his horse loose at Cranbourne Chase, and tried to hide himself in some rough ground near Ringwood. Lord Lumley and Sir William Portman were after him with the Militia; there was a reward of five thousand pounds on his head, and for a day and a night he was hunted through undergrowth and standing crops. Dogs were run through the high oats and peas, and except oats and peas he had nothing to eat. He was caught in the morning, shivering and grey-bearded, in a ditch; two days later, he was on his way from Ringwood to London, his coach guarded by strong bodies of troops, and sitting opposite him in the coach an officer whose orders were to stab him if there was an attempt at rescue. So they rode into Guildford on a Saturday afternoon, and that night the terrified prisoner lay under the roof of Abbot's Hospital. Perhaps he slept; perhaps he could only stride about the room feverishly scribbling letters of abject entreaty to the King and the great courtiers; staring wild-eyed at the early July sunlight beyond the hospital chimneys, and wondering whether he should see another Sunday dawn. It was his last; on the Wednesday morning his head was hacked from his shoulders.
Abbot's Hospital has pleasanter memories. Foremost must be the memory of its founder, Guildford's greatest citizen, the stern, kindly old Archbishop Abbot, son of a poor clothworker of the town, scholar of Balliol College, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, and predecessor to Laud in the See of Canterbury. It was a great career, and, according to an old family story, it had a curious beginning. Aubrey gives this version:—
"His mother, when she was with child of him, dreamt, that if she should eat a Jack or Pike, her son in her womb would be a great man, upon this she was indefatigable to satisfy her longing, as well as her dream: she first enquired out for the fish; but accidentally taking up some of the river water (that runs close by the house) in a pail, she took up the much desired banquet, dress'd it, and devour'd it almost all: This odd affair made no small noise in the neighbourhood, and the curiosity of it made several people of quality offer themselves to be sponsors at the baptismal fount when she was delivered; this their poverty accepted joyfully, and three were chosen, who maintained him at school, and at the university afterwards."
Abbot's Hospital, Guildford.
The great archbishop's days ended in gloom. He was shooting deer in Lord Zouch's park at Bramshill, and by an unlucky accident killed a keeper, one Peter Hawkins. Kingsley has pictured the scene:—
"I went the other day" (he writes in a letter from Eversley) "to Bramshill Park, the home of the seigneur de pays here, Sir John Cope. And there I saw the very tree where an ancestor of mine, Archbishop Abbot, in James the First's time, shot the keeper by accident! I sat under the tree, and it all seemed to me like a present reality. I could fancy the noble old man, very different then from his picture as it hangs in our dining room at Chelsea. I could fancy the deer sweeping by, and the rattle of the cross-bow, and the white splinters sparkling off the fated tree as the bolt glanced and turned—and then the death shriek, and the stagger, and the heavy fall of the sturdy forester—and the bow dropping from the old man's hands, and the blood sinking to his heart in one chilling rush, and his glorious features collapsing into that look of changeless and rigid sorrow, which haunted me in the portrait upon the wall in childhood. He never smiled again!"