CHAPTER VI
GRANTHAM

Cromwell’s Letter—The George and the Angel—The Elections—Fox’s Grammar School—The Church of St. Wolfram—The Market Place.

The usual way of reaching Grantham is by the Great Northern main line—all expresses stop here. It is 105 miles from London, and often the only stop between that and York. After the levels of Huntingdonshire and the brief sight of Peterborough Cathedral, across the river Nene, the line enters Lincolnshire near Tallington, after which it follows up the valley of the river Glen, then climbs the wold and, just beyond Bassingthorpe tunnel, crosses the Ermine Street and runs down the Witham Valley into Grantham. Viewed from the train the town looks a mass of ugly red brick houses with slate roofs, but the magnificent tower and spire soon come into sight, and one feels that this must be indeed a church worth visiting.

Coming, as we prefer to do, by road, the view is better; for there is a background of hill and woodland with the fine park of Belton and the commanding height of Syston Hall beyond to the north-east; and to the left you see the Great North Road climbing up Gonerby Hill to a height of 200 feet above the town.

THE MANOR AND THE GEORGE

Grantham has no Roman associations, nor did it grow up round a feudal castle or a great abbey; for, though a castle of some kind must once have stood on the west side near the junction of the Mowbeck and the Witham, the only proof of it is the name Castlegate and a reference in an old deed to “Castle Dyke.” That the town was once walled, the streets called Watergate, Castlegate, Swinegate, Spittalgate sufficiently attest, but no trace of wall now exists. The name Spittalgate points to the existence of a leper hospital, and I see from Miss Rotha Clay’s interesting and exhaustive book, “The Mediæval Hospitals of England,” that there have been two at Grantham—St. Margaret’s, founded in 1328, and St. Leonard’s in 1428.

The flat pastoral valley watered by the Wytham, then called in that neighbourhood the Granta, as the Cam was at Cambridge, seems to have been its own recommendation to an agricultural people; and the fact that the manor was from the time of Edward the Confessor an appanage of the queen, and remained all through the times of the Norman kings and their successors down to William III. a Crown property, used as a dower for the queen consort of the time, was no doubt some benefit to it. Even when the town was bestowed, as, for instance, by King John on the Earl of Warren who also owned Stamford, or by Edward I., who knew Grantham well, on Aylmer Valence Earl of Pembroke, it was looked on as inalienable from the Crown to which it always reverted. In the reign of Edward III., on August 3, 1359, King John of France, captured at Poictiers, slept at Grantham on his way from Hereford to Somerton Castle in custody of Lord d’Eyncourt and a company of forty-four knights and men-at-arms. In 1420 Henry V. allotted it as a dower to Katherine of France. In 1460 Edward IV. headed the procession which brought from Pontefract to Fotheringay for burial the body of his father Richard Duke of York, who was killed at the battle of Wakefield. In 1461 he granted the lordship and the manor to his mother Cicely Duchess of York, and the grant, it is interesting to know, included the inn called “le George.”

In 1503 Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII., passed with her attendant cavalcade through Grantham on her way to meet her affianced bridegroom,[3] James IV., King of Scotland. She arrived in state, and was met by a fine civic and ecclesiastical procession which conducted her the last few miles into and out of the town, and she lay all “Sounday the 9ᵗʰ day of the monneth of Jully in the sayde towne of Grauntham.”

OLIVER CROMWELL

In 1642 the town was taken by Colonel Charles Cavendish for Charles I., but his success was wiped out next year by Cromwell. Defoe in his “Memoir of a Cavalier,” writing of this, says “About this time it was that we began to hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud, rose out of the East and spread first into the North, till it shed down a flood that overwhelmed the three Kingdoms.... The first action in which we heard of his exploits and which emblazoned his character was at Grantham.” Cromwell was with the Earl of Manchester, but was in command of his own regiment of horse. Where the battle actually took place is uncertain, but probably on Gonerby Moor. We happen to have Cromwell’s own account of the skirmish—see vol. I., p. 177, of ‘Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,’ by Carlyle. It was written to some official, and is the first letter of Cromwell’s ever published in the newspapers:—