For this defect art and association amply atone. On the southern side of the Mole, not far from the underground portion of its course—"the Swallow" as it is called—stand the charming and storied seats of Esher and Claremont.
Esher was an ancient residence of the bishops of Winchester. Wolsey made it for a time his retreat after being ousted from Hampton Court. A retreat it was to him in every sense. He dismissed his servants and all state, and cultivated the deepest despondency. His inexorable master, however, looked down on him, from his ravished towers hard by, unmoved, and, as the sequel in a few years proved, unsatisfied in his greed. Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, was called upon for a contribution. He loyally surrendered to the king the whole estate of Esher, a splendid mansion with all appurtenances and a park a mile in diameter. Henry annexed Esher to Hampton Court, and continued his research for new subjects of spoliation. His daughter Mary gave Esher back to the see of Winchester. Elizabeth bought it and bestowed it on Lord Howard of Effingham, who well earned it by his services against the Armada. Of the families who subsequently owned the place, the Pelhams are the most noted. Now it has passed from their hands. That which has alone been preserved of the palace of Wolsey is an embattled gatehouse that looks into the sluggish Mole, and joins it mayhap in musing over "the days that we have seen."
Claremont, its next neighbor, unites, with equal or greater charms of landscape, in preaching the old story of the decadence of the great. Lord Clive, the Indian conqueror and speculator, built the house from the designs of Capability Browne at a cost of over a hundred thousand pounds. His dwelling and his monument remain to represent Clive. After him, two or three occupants removed, came Leopold of Belgium, with his bride, the Princess Charlotte, pet and hope of the British nation. Their stay was more transient still—a year only, when death dissipated their dream and cleared the way to the throne for Victoria. Leopold continued to hold the property, and it became a generation later the asylum of Louis Philippe. To an ordinary mind the miseries of any one condemned to make this lovely spot his home are not apt to present themselves as the acme of despair. A sensation of relief and lulling repose would be more reasonably expected, especially after so stormy a career as that of Louis. The change from restless and capricious Paris to dewy shades and luxurious halls in the heart of changeless and impregnable England ought, on common principles, to have promoted the content and prolonged the life of the old king. Possibly it did, but if so, the French had not many months' escape from a second Orleans regency, for the exile's experience of Claremont was brief. We may wander over his lawns, and reshape to ourselves his reveries. Then we may forget the man who lost an empire as we look up at the cenotaph of him who conquered one. Both brought grist to Miller Bull, the fortunate and practical-minded owner of such vast water-privileges. His water-power seems proof against all floods, while the corn of all nations must come to his door. Standing under these drooping elms, by this lazy stream, we hear none of the clatter of the great mill, and we cease to dream of affixing a period to its noiseless and effective work.
If we are not tired of parks for today, five minutes by rail will carry us west to Oatlands Park, with its appended, and more or less dependent, village of Walton-upon-Thames. But a surfeit even of English country-houses and their pleasances is a possible thing; and nowhere are they more abundant than within an hour's walk of our present locality. So, taking Ashley Park, Burwood Park, Pains Hill and many others, as well as the Coway Stakes—said by one school of antiquarians to have been planted in the Thames by Cæsar, and by another to be the relics of a fish-weir—Walton Church and Bradshaw's house, for granted, we shall turn to the east and finish the purlieus of Hampton with a glance at the old Saxon town of Kingston-on-Thames. Probably an ardent Kingstonian would indignantly disown the impression our three words are apt to give of the place. It is a rapidly—growing town, and "Egbert, the first king of all England," who held a council at "Kyningestun, famosa ilia locus," in 838, would be at a loss to find his way through its streets could he revisit it. It has the population of a Saxon county. Viewed from the massive bridge, with the church-tower rising above an expanse of sightly buildings, it possesses the least possible resemblance to the cluster of wattled huts that may be presumed to have sheltered Egbert and his peers.
A more solid memento of the Saxons is preserved in the King's Stone. This has been of late years set up in the centre of the town, surrounded with an iron railing, and made visible to all comers, skeptical or otherwise. Tradition credits it with having been that upon which the kings of Wessex were crowned, as those of Scotland down to Longshanks, and after him the English, were on the red sandstone palladium of Scone. From the list of ante-Norman monarchs said to have received the sceptre upon it the poetically inclined visitor will select for chief interest Edwy, whose coronation was celebrated in great state in his seventeenth year. How he fell in love with and married secretly his cousin Elgiva; how Saint Dunstan and his equally saintly though not regularly beatified ally, Odo, archbishop of Canterbury, indignant at a step taken against their fulminations and protests, and jealous of the fair queen, tore her from his arms, burnt with hot iron the bloom out of her cheeks, and finally put her to death with the most cruel tortures; and how her broken-hearted boy-lord, dethroned and hunted, died before reaching twenty,—is a standing dish of the pathetic. Unfortunately, the story, handed down to us with much detail, appears to be true. We must not accept it, however, as an average illustration of life in that age of England. The five hundred years before the Conquest do not equal, in the bloody character of their annals, the like period succeeding it. Barbarous enough the Anglo-Saxons were, but wanton cruelty does not seem to have been one of their traits. To produce it some access of religious fury was usually requisite. It was on the church doors that the skins of their Danish invaders were nailed.
