West Country History: Dorset

WESTCOUNTRY HISTORY

DORSET

PETA WHALEY

Also available from Westcountry History: Somerset by Muriel Searle

WESTCOUNTRY HISTORY

Dorset Peta Whaley

venton

New paperback edition ©2002 by venton, an imprint of: intellect books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE A previous edition of this book was published as Dorset Through History by Colin Venton ©1977 Peta Whaley. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission. Electronic ISBN 1-84150-840-3/ISBN 1-84150-803-9 Designed, edited and typeset by May Yao and Daniel Carpenter Cover photograph ©2002 May Yao and Daniel Carpenter

Printed and bound by Antony Rowe Ltd, Eastbourne

Contents

1

Shaftesbury and Alfred the Great

7

2

Corfe and Edward the Martyr

15

3

Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

21

4

Corfe Castle and Lady Banks

41

5

The Western Coastal Towns and the Stuarts

47

6

Dorchester, Judge Jefferies and the Bloody Assizes

59

7

Marshwood Vale and the Wordsworths

71

8

Portesham and Nelson’s Hardy

81

9

Tolpuddle and its Martyrs

87

10

Sturminster Newton, Winterborne Came and William Barnes

101

11

Wimborne St. Giles and the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

111

12

Stinsford, Higher Bockampton and Thomas Hardy

125

13

Lawrence of Arabia

135

Bibliography

147

5

1

Shaftesbury and Alfred the Great

SHAFTESBURY stands 700 feet above sea level on a high ridge of upper greensand, which thrusts itself above the beautiful Vale of Blackmoor and the famous Cranborne Chase.

Shaftesbury is unique in Dorset. Most of the county’s towns are built along her river valleys or at their mouths, but Shaftesbury stands high above the countryside. The town, as we know it, was founded by Alfred the Great who built its ancient Abbey — now in ruins — and installed his daughter as its first Abbess. Within the Abbey were found the bones of St. Edward the Martyr, murdered, it is rumoured, by his stepmother. The site of Shaftesbury is far older than the Saxons, however, because here there are remains of earlier earth walls, which may date back 2000 years. It was Alfred who laid the beginnings of the modern town, though all the buildings of his day have long ago disappeared. Most of the old houses are built of limestone and many of the streets are narrow, winding and very steep. There are some fine old houses, Georgian or older, in St. James Street and Bimport. The main items of interest, beside the Abbey, are its four churches, the oldest of which is St. Peter’s. There is also King Alfred’s Kitchen, a medieval house with plastered, timbered walls. The town hall, next to St. Peters’, contains some interesting relics, including a silver seal older than the Spanish Armada and Charters of James I and Charles II.

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Westcountry History: Dorset

Alfred the Great, perhaps the most famous of all the Saxon kings, was born at Wantage in Berkshire in 849. He was the youngest son of King Ethelwulf and Queen Osburgh, his older brothers being Ethelburt, who died in 865 and Ethelred I, whom Alfred succeeded in 871. Alfred’s Wessex was not a peaceful nor peace-loving country lying helpless before the Norsemen. The Saxons were used to war, but they were vulnerable because of their long coastline — the longest in Europe — with many good harbours and hidden bays un-defended and open to the longships of the Norsemen. The Saxons were not a seafaring people like the Vikings, who were daring and experienced sailors. They had no ships with which to repel the fierce invaders, nor to stand as a shield at sea between the coasts of Britain and any marauding enemy. The Norsemen also enjoyed the advantage that if they were beaten badly on land or ran short of supplies they had only to retire to their ships and take to the sea again. Alfred, to whom could be attributed the building of the first English navy, never used his ships for anything else but defence against the invaders. His first encounter with the Danes occurred in the reign of his brother, Ethelred I. A great Danish army emerged from East Anglia in 870 and marched south to meet the Saxons of Wessex. It was probably one of the largest armies ever to invade Britain. Ethelred and Alfred gave battle but were defeated, though they inflicted heavy losses on the enemy. The Vikings moved to Ashdown, in Berkshire, followed by the Saxon army. Ethelred refused to fight until he had heard Mass, but Alfred, young and impatient, decided to lead the attack alone and charged at the head of his men against the second division of the Norsemen. He led the attack with, it is said, “the fury of a young boar”. The battle, however, was a

8

Shaftesbury and Alfred the Great

victory for Alfred, secured chiefly by his bravery. Ethelred I died in 871, while more Danish ships sailed up the Thames and disembarked an army at Reading. Alfred succeeded to the throne of Wessex, but the reign started badly for the young king. In his first year he fought nine battles, all south of the Thames and was defeated in each one. At last he found it necessary to buy off the Vikings for a brief peace. Then a Norse army under a leader called Guthrun, who was already established on the East Coast, where he had his headquarters at Cambridge, marched right into the heart of Wessex. Here he took up his headquarters in a nunnery at Wareham. History does not relate what happened to the nuns. At first Guthrun pretended to treat with Alfred, giving him hostages and promising to leave his kingdom. He soon broke these promises, however. The Norsemen were a treacherous people and the breaking of faith with their enemies meant nothing to them. They waited till nightfall and then slipped past Alfred on their horses and rode towards Exeter. When Alfred realised what had happened he hurried after them, but he was too late to stop them from capturing the town. Then, the Danes suffered a terrible disaster at sea, because a number of their ships ran into a wild storm off Swanage and 120 were sunk or were driven onto the rocks and reefs. Again the Vikings gave Alfred hostages and promised to keep the peace and again they broke their promises. Quite unexpectedly, that winter, Guthrun marched to Chippenham and settled there, conquering all the countryside around. Usually, the Norsemen did not move or fight in the winter and again they took Alfred completely by surprise. The young king only had a small force and was driven to retreat before Guthrun till he reached the Somerset marshes,

9

Westcountry History: Dorset

where he was able to hide. Indeed Alfred seemed to be in desperate straits. He had lost all his kingdom except these inhospitable moors and Guthrun appeared to be invincible. It was while Alfred was hiding in the Somerset moors that the legend grew up about his burning of the cakes. The young king’s position, however, was not as desperate as it seemed. He had retired to the little hill of Athelney, where he stayed with his back to the Quantock Hills, which lay to the northwest. On his northeast flank lay the low ridge of the Polden Hills and beyond them, again to the northeast, the great limestone hump of the Mendips. He fortified Athelney and while he was doing so, a fleet of 23 Danish ships set out from Wales to cross the Severn and suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of a Saxon Army, under the command of a Devon chieftan called Odda. Meanwhile, Alfred, after fortifying Athelney, began ranging out from this little stronghold in minor forays, which grew bolder as time went on. His refusal to give in gave the ordinary people courage and once winter was over he left Athelney and rode to a place called Selwood, where he rallied his subjects round him and raised a large army from the three counties of Wiltshire, Somerset and East Hampshire. They marched to the Norse camp at Chippenham and Guthrun led his forces out to meet them. A fierce battle took place at Edington and the Saxons won a decisive victory. Alfred captured the enemy’s horses and cattle and besieged Guthrun in his stronghold. At last, overcome by cold and hunger, the Viking leader surrendered, giving Alfred the hostages he demanded and even allowing himself to be baptised a Christian. Then he marched back to East Anglia, leaving Alfred as victorious master of Wessex.

10

Shaftesbury and Alfred the Great

Gold Hill, Shaftesbury, Dorset.

This was not, of course, the only battle which Alfred fought, but during his lifetime at least he brought a temporary peace to Wessex by holding off the Danes. He was wise enough also to learn from his enemies, who indeed taught him several lessons. At the start of his reign the Saxon Army was only a temporary one and mainly a peasant army, which would not stay in the field for more than a few weeks at a time, whereas the Vikings were on a permanent war footing, ready to fight at any time at short notice. The Norsemen were also far more mobile and travelled mainly on horseback. When they suffered any reverse or wished for a rest or a peaceful interlude, they retreated to well-prepared and well-built fortified places. Alfred changed all this, because he realised that he could

11

Westcountry History: Dorset

never hope to beat his enemies by using the old Saxon tactics. He divided his forces into two parts, maintaining one part as a fighting force while the other returned to the land. In fact, he created a form of permanent militia. The working force relieved the fighting force at stated intervals, so that the king always had a trained army in the field. Again, copying the Danes, he mounted a part of his militia, thus making his army far more mobile. He also built fortifications all over Wessex, sometimes fortifying old towns, sometimes creating new ones. He then trained the local inhabitants in the use of arms, so that they could defend their centres of population at short notice. He next turned his attention to the building of a navy, though this fleet was only employed as a defensive force. It did not occur to the king to use his ships as an attacking force to keep the Norsemen away from his coasts and harbours. These ships were built to his own design, half as long again as the Danish ships. Meanwhile, in East Anglia, Guthrun, though he had won a kingdom and was now a baptised Christian, still gave shelter and help to any Danish raiders who sailed into his ports, thus undermining the security of Alfred’s Wessex. In fact, though Guthrun had indeed left the Saxons alone, Alfred was still engaged in sporadic fights with his enemies. He finally captured London, which was indeed a great victory. After this he was recognised as Overlord of Saxon England. Even this victory, however, did not bring him permanent peace. All his life was spent warring against the Norsemen, but during his reign at least his kingdom was better organised to withstand invasion. Some mention should be made of Alfred’s private life. In 868 he married Elswith, the daughter of a Lincolnshire chieftain, who bore him four children, three daughters and one

12

Shaftesbury and Alfred the Great

son. His daughters were Aethelflaed, the warlike “Lady of Mercia”, Elgiva, who became the first Abbess of Shaftesbury and Eltrudis, who married Baldwin, Count of Flanders. Alfred’s only son, Edward, succeeded him to the throne of Wessex. In his later years some of Alfred’s military genius seemed to have deserted him, but then he was not only a warrior and a gifted military leader, but also a scholar with a great love of learning. The Norse invasions had plundered the monasteries and destroyed many manuscripts and records of Saxon civilisation. Alfred’s second great task was to give his subjects back their identity and to arouse an interest once again in their own culture, thus saving for posterity the Saxon heritage. He learnt Latin so that he could translate many Latin books into Saxon English. That he was also a very religious man is revealed in his writings. He invited scholars to come over from the Continent and restore the schools which once existed in Wessex. He worked unceasingly to bring literacy and learning back to every freeborn man in his kingdom. He gathered together the collection of annals which later formed the basis of the “ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE”. He also produced a code of laws which, in those fierce and savage times, showed an unusual sense of humanity, providing safeguards for the weak against the strong. Alfred’s legal code was used by later rulers, among them Canute the Great and William the Conqueror, as a foundation for their own codes of laws. In fact, when he died, at fifty, Alfred had saved the civilisation of Saxon England and though indeed invasion after invasion was still to come, ending with England’s final conquest by the Normans, it can be said that Alfred compares well with any of the outstanding rulers of early Europe and fully deserves the name Great.

13

Westcountry History: Dorset

14

Corfe and Edward the Martyr

2

IN the reign of Edward the Martyr only a hunting lodge and a watch tower stood on the conical Corfe hill, which lies in a break in the chalk range of Purbeck Downs.

This hill has been carved out by three small streams, one flowing from Tyneham, now an army tank training area; one coming from Langton, lying across the valley on the limestone hills of southern Purbeck and a third flowing down the side of Brenscombe hill. One part of the range — Nine Barrow Down — runs eastward towards Swanage, while Ballard Down curves westward towards Creech Barrow and Lulworth. The ruins of the present castle are of course of Norman origin. After hunting all day in the royal forest of Purbeck the king would call for refreshment at the lodge, where history places Edward’s murder. The hunting lodge was probably a wooden structure, though the watch tower may have been built of stone. There is some speculation as to why a castle was built at Corfe, but it lies at the gateway to Purbeck with its valuable stone mines and commands the road from Swanage to Dorchester, overlooking miles of countryside from its high vantage point. Also, on the west side of the road across the heath, lie large china clay beds, extensively used by the Romans and also the Saxons.

15

Westcountry History: Dorset

Geologically, the whole Isle of Purbeck has some curious features. There are the extensive Bagshot Beds of the Great Heath, stretching from Poole to Lulworth. The Purbeck Range is chalk, and across the valley to the south lie the stone mines of the Durlstone Hills, once extensively quarried for their limestone and Purbeck marble, used in local building and as far afield as Salisbury and London. Now, however, the whole industry has declined. The Romans used the stone, certainly the Normans did and possibly the Saxons on occasions, though they were not as a rule great builders in stone. Edward the Martyr was born in c. 963 and the date of his murder is fixed as March 18th, 978. His mother was Wulfrida, who was divorced by her husband, King Edgar, and became Abbess of Wilton Abbey. Meanwhile, the king married Elfrida, who bore him a son called Ethelred. On his father’s death in 975 Edward succeeded to the throne of a realm torn by religious quarrels and threatened with civil war; while in the background lurked the ever-present threat of the Danes, who were still invading England a hundred years after Alfred The Great. The powerful figure of the great St. Dunstan, statesman and Archbishop of Canterbury, held the kingdom together for the young prince, though Dunstan’s influence was not strong enough to prevent Edward’s final downfall. Some authors describe Edward as a pleasant, handsome, well-built young man, but others say he was aggressive and bad-tempered. Whichever portrait is true, he did not deserve his tragic death. The religious quarrels which threatened to rend the kingdom were between the secular and regular monastic orders. The seculars were backed by one faction of laymen, the regulars by a rival group.

16

Corfe and Edward the Martyr

This dispute was splitting the Western Church in two. It centred round the fact that the clergy serving the bishops of the various dioceses lived outside the religious communities and worked among the common people. Few of them obeyed any church discipline. Dunstan wanted to reform these diocesan priests and put them under the stricter rules which the regulars obeyed. These orders were more fanatical and did not wish to associate under any consideration with the secular clergy. They wanted to confiscate the latter’s endowments and, in turn, the parish priests strongly resisted any such suggestion. Another cause of dissension concerned the transfer of land to the Church, which brought some powerful noble families to join the diocesan clerks. The monastic orders were supported by Ailwin, Alderman of East Anglia and the secular party was headed by Elphere, Alderman of Mercia. St. Dunstan, as Archbishop of Canterbury and the most powerful man in the kingdom, tried to keep the balance between these two warring religious groups. Many historians agree that Edward’s stepmother, Elfrida, had a hand in his murder. Ethelred would be his brother’s heir if anything should happen to Edward, so she certainly had an excellent motive. One of the religious factions might have been implicated as well, though it will never be known which one. Elphere of Mercia was the man who stepped forward after Edward’s death and took responsibility for ruling the country while Ethelred was still a minor. In spite of Dunstan’s powerful position as Archbishop of Canterbury and his influence in the kingdom, he certainly could not prevent other people from plotting behind his back. On his advice Edward was very generous to his stepmother, giving her the administration of Dorset and presenting her with the beautiful manor house built by King Edgar. When he was

17

Westcountry History: Dorset

hunting in Purbeck he often visited her and Ethelred, who was said to have been very fond of his elder brother. One afternoon the young king called as usual on Elfrida after a day’s hunting. It looks as though his visit was expected because Elfrida’s servants assembled to meet him fully armed, while Ethelred was confined to a room upstairs. The fact that his stepmother’s servants were armed should have warned Edward that something was wrong, but he does not seem to have had any idea of treachery. The story of the actual murder varies. One version relates that Edward, being thirsty, asked for a cup of wine, which Elfrida brought her stepson and while he was drinking, one of her servants stabbed him in the back. Another version states that one of her servants offered him a cup of wine and when the young king held out his hand to take it, the man caught hold of his arm and held it tightly, though Edward tried to wrench it away. While the young man was struggling to free himself another servant grabbed his other arm and stabbed him in the back. Meanwhile, Edward’s horse, frightened by his master’s shouts and struggles, tore his rider loose from the grip of the two servants and galloped off down the hill, with the dying king swaying back and forth in the saddle. At last, weakened by pain and loss of blood, Edward fell out of the saddle. One of his feet caught in a stirrup and he was dragged by the bolting horse to the foot of the hill. Whichever story is true, they agree on the fact that it was at the queen’s house that he was murdered and that it was one of her servants who did the foul deed. The king’s horse freed itself at last from its dead rider and galloped off, leaving the young king’s body lying in the little stream which flowed at the foot of Corfe Hill.

18

Corfe and Edward the Martyr

Elfrida’s servants, who had probably followed the bolting horse, found the murdered king and carried him to a neighbouring cottage where he lay hidden for the night. A couple of days later he was hastily and secretly buried, without a religious service, in a lonely grave near Wareham, probably in the hope that it would never be found. The circumstances of young Edward’s death could not remain hidden forever. When the full facts became known a wave of shock and horror swept the kingdom and even those who might have gained most from his demise felt pity and remorse at his end. When Dunstan crowned young Ethelred as king some months later he foretold that only misfortune could come upon a reign begun by such a foul deed. The curious part of the whole affair was that apparently neither blood money nor revenge were ever demanded. It seems as though no one was sure who was really responsible for the murder. Even Dunstan made no move to uncover the plot or the real assassin. Two years later Elphere, the Alderman of Mercia, found Edward’s remote and hidden grave. He decided to remove the remains of the murdered king and give them a royal funeral. He sent for Wulfrida and Edith, Edward’s mother and sister, and the king’s remains were carried in state to Shaftesbury Abbey, followed by St. Dunstan and all the bishops of the realm, as well as abbots and nobles and a great crowd of country people. The remains were then buried on the north side of the high altar. The murdered king was later canonised by the Church and given the title of Edward the Martyr and March 18th, the day on which he was killed, was solemnised as a holy day.

19

Westcountry History: Dorset

And what of Elfrida? She is said to have retired to a nunnery at Bere Regis to expiate her guilt and later became its Abbess. Meanwhile, St. Dunstan’s prophecy came true. No good came out of Ethelred’s reign. He gained the nickname of Ethelred the Unready and the Danes overran his kingdom. His once proud line died with Edward the Confessor, who bequeathed his kingdom to the great Norman and ended forever Saxon rule over England.

20

3

Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

SHERBORNE is a picturesque old town lying in the centre of the Blackmore Vale and Sir Walter Raleigh apparently loved it, for here he built himself a beautiful little manor house in an idyllic setting. The town itself is a place of narrow, winding streets and ancient, gabled houses clustered round the great Abbey. It is surrounded by rounded, wooded hills and the soil is mainly composed of “inferior” oolite and limestone. Its history goes back to the time of Bishop Aldhelm, or St. Aldhelm, as he is known in the county. He came from Malmesbury to lay the foundations of the Abbey and the ancient public school. The ruins of Sherborne Old Castle stand beside the river Yeo and was built by Roger de Caen, Bishop of Sarum, 1103-1139. Originally the castle was strongly fortified. It was besieged in 1645 by a force under General Fairfax, captured and finally dismantled and the defences destroyed. One version of the tale of Raleigh’s servant thinking he was on fire as he sat smoking in the grounds, is attached to Sherborne Old Castle. It is also claimed by County Cork, southern Ireland, where Raleigh lived for some time. The chief feature of interest in Sherborne itself is the Abbey, which was first built in 706 by St. Aldhelm as a cathedral. It remained one until the building of the Norman Abbey in 1075.

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Westcountry History: Dorset

The tower, the beautifully restored south doorway and part of the transept are all Norman, so are the Lady Chapel and part of Bishop Roger’s Chapel. Sherborne Abbey also has the added interest of being the burial place of Alfred the Great’s two older brothers, whose stone coffins lie behind the high altar. These were discovered not very long ago, Ethelbad’s being found in 1858 and Ethelbert’s in 1925. Now a brass tablet marks the site. The Abbey is well worth one or more visits, preferably with a good guide book. In the town itself some of the old monastic buildings are now incorporated in Sherborne School. The Abbot’s Hall is the boys’ chapel and the 15th century Abbot’s lodging has been turned into studies. Raleigh’s original house — Sherborne Lodge — now forms the centre of a larger mansion, Sherborne Castle, built by the Digbys, who finally acquired the estate. Elizabeth I gave him the lease of Sherborne Old Castle and he went there to live when he was banished from the court after his marriage. Walter Raleigh was born in 1552 to an old Devon family, the Raleighs of Fardell. His father married three times, his third wife being Catherine Champernoun and Walter’s mother. The family were related to some famous old Devon families, such as the Courtenays, the Drakes, the Grenvilles and the Carews. Little is known of young Walter’s actual boyhood and education. He went to Oxford and entered Oriel College in 1566 as a commoner, remaining there for three years without gaining a degree. He seems to have tried the Law next, entering the Middle Temple in 1575. In 1580 he was commissioned as a captain of an infantry company and went to Ireland to help fight the Irish rebels in Munster. He did not like Ireland, however, and at last arranged his recall.

22

Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

Sherborne Castle, once the home of Sir Walter Raleigh.

On his return he was for some reason regarded as an authority on Irish affairs and his advice was sought by the queen and her Privy Council, which must have pleased him immensely, because it gained him access to the Court. How exactly this happened is not revealed. Raleigh was, after all, only a penniless, though adventurous soldier and needed a sponsor to introduce him to the Queen. The Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s great favourite, may have done this for him and once there he could play his own game. He was young and very good-looking and there is no doubt that Her Majesty had a weak spot for handsome, young men. There is, of course, the famous story of the cloak and the puddle, though there is no way of proving it is true. It could of course be just a pretty fairy tale, but it is one with Raleigh’s flair for self-advertisement and publicity.

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Westcountry History: Dorset

After he had drawn the queen’s attention to himself he rose swiftly in her favour and became her “Water”, as she loved to call him. He was now 39, in the prime of life, tall, accomplished and arrogant. Leicester, too, was now growing old and stout and though he still remained high in the queen’s esteem — the handsome looks, brilliant mind and witty conversation of the younger man were bound to captivate her. Though he found favour in her eyes, however, the other courtiers hated him. His brilliance and arrogance alienated everyone. Raleigh was also a very practical businessman. He meant to gain other more material advantages besides Elizabeth’s favour. In 1583 the queen bestowed on him the lease of part of Durham House in the Strand, the lease of two estates belonging to All Souls College, Oxford and added to these she presented him with the patent for wines. He thus acquired one half of the fines for infringement and a yearly fee of £1 from all vintners for a licence to sell their wines. Raleigh also received a licence to export woollen broadcloth, neither of which concessions made him popular with the established merchants. He was knighted in 1584 and made Lord Warden of the Stannaries upon the Earl of Bedford’s death. This appointment included the regulating of mining privileges in Devon and Cornwall among other duties. Even if most people at Court hated him, Raleigh was respected and loved in the West Country. He undoubtedly made a great deal of money during his life, but much was lost in his unsuccessful attempts to colonise the New World. This dream undoubtedly haunted him for all his life, but he was before his time. Neither Elizabeth nor her Privy Council were ever interested in plans for colonisation. Perhaps Raleigh’s most coveted appointment was as Captain of the Guard, the highest he ever reached in spite of his abilities. He now became personally responsible for Elizabeth’s safety.

24

Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

His first venture to the New World was in 1582, when his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, wanted to find the Northwest passage. Raleigh even designed a new type of ship for it. At the last minute, however, the queen refused her consent for him to go, though she allowed Sir Humphrey Gilbert to sail. The expedition was dogged during the entire voyage by terrible weather and on its return Sir Humphrey’s little ship — the “Squirrel” — sank with all hands in a storm. His half-brother’s death was a heavy blow to Raleigh, but it did not deter him from organising another exploratory expedition. On March 25th 1584 he was given a charter granting him and his heirs the same privileges Gilbert had enjoyed and he sent out ships under the command of one Philip Amadas, who landed on the Carolina Coast in July. Raleigh was not content to wait for the return of this expedition, but started to get a colonising one ready, taking Richard Hakluyt, the great geographer, as a partner. The two men tried to persuade the queen to back their venture entirely, but Elizabeth and her council were only interested in protecting England from Spanish domination. The queen accepted the name Virginia for the future settlement and agreed to supply a ship. Raleigh’s third expedition sailed for the New World on April 9th, but again the queen would not allow her favourite to go with it, so his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, commanded it instead. Again it was a failure and the settlers returned finally to England. Raleigh then realised that he had started this attempt at colonisation on the wrong lines, because the settlers were paid wages and supplied with food and goods from a commissariat. Instead he decided that any new venture must be based on agriculture and the colonists must be genuine farmers who wanted to remain in Virginia.

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Westcountry History: Dorset

Then, in 1586, the handsome, young and brilliant Earl of Essex appeared at Court. He was to be the spoiled darling of Elizabeth’s later years. He was related to the queen through his mother and hers. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was tall, auburn-haired and very good-looking and was welcomed by the courtiers as a dangerous rival to their hated Raleigh. In spite of the advent of Essex and the danger the younger man threatened to his position at Court, Raleigh was immersed in plans for founding another colony in Virginia. The expedition sailed from Plymouth on May 5th 1587 in three ships bearing 150 settlers. Each man was to be given 500 acres and the colony was to have its own government. Again Raleigh did not sail with them, so he chose one John White as Governor of the new settlement. Unfortunately, this new venture failed like the first one. The voyage out was one long disaster and White had to sail back to England to fetch more provisions and salt. He arrived to find the country at war with Spain and though the queen said he could return to Virginia, he could not sail till 1591. When he finally reached the New World the colonists had vanished, their houses and the lighter cannon had disappeared and no trace of them was ever found. To this day the mystery of their fate has never been unravelled. The greatest event of Elizabeth’s reign was undoubtedly the defeat of the Spanish Armada, but it is not certain whether Raleigh took part in this, though he designed a new type of ship for it. It does not seem likely that he was fighting, otherwise he would probably have advertised the fact and claimed his share of glory. After the Armada his influence over the queen began to fade. He was losing his youth, while Essex was in the prime of life though his arrogance was beginning to annoy and irritate Elizabeth. Then, in 1590, Essex secretly married Sir Philip Sidney’s widow, Frances Walsingham, who was also the daughter of

26

Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

Elizabeth’s great minister Walsingham. The marriage could be hidden for a while, but in the autumn her obvious pregnancy forced Essex to announce it and the storm broke. Elizabeth demanded single blessedness from her favourites and any infringement brought her fury down upon the offender. Her anger against Essex was caused by the terrible affront to herself, though she did forgive him eventually. He was diplomatic enough not to push his marriage right under the queen’s nose, though he was obviously very much in love with his wife. Raleigh returned to the queen’s favour for a time because of the marriage of Essex and she presented him in 1592 with the manor of Sherborne, the lease of which she had obtained from the Bishop and Chapter of Salisbury. Raleigh had a great affection for Sherborne. He had often ridden through the district on his journeys from Plymouth to London and he decided to make it his country home. There was, however, another blow coming to the queen. The whole court was now humming with rumours of a love affair between Raleigh and Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the queen’s maids-of-honour. Miss Throckmorton was a tall, fair, graceful girl in her late twenties. The queen suddenly had Raleigh arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. He had fallen deeply in love with the girl. He was 40 now and this was no love of a light-hearted boy. Miss Throckmorton met the same fate as her supposed seducer and was imprisoned in another part of the Tower. Elizabeth was furious, perhaps angrier than she had been with Essex. She had come to regard Raleigh as always faithful to her. He was a mature man of middle age and no fickle boy and possibly his defection was a far greater shock to her than the marriage of Essex.

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Westcountry History: Dorset

There was a good deal of gossip at the court while Raleigh and his lady love languished in the Tower for four years. When they were released, Raleigh and Bess married and were very happy. The queen freed him at last because she couldn’t do without him, not because she had forgiven him. His ships had returned to Dartmouth bringing with them an astounding capture — the Great crown of Portugal the “Madre de Dios”, a seven decker of 1600 tons. She was loaded with a fantastic cargo of 537 tons of spices, an enormous collection of jewels, drugs, silks, carpets, ebony and ivory, which was valued at £141,000, a great fortune in those days. There was a furious outbreak of pillaging, because no such ship had ever been brought to the West Country before. No one could control the looters, partly because they were furious that Raleigh, whom they loved and trusted, was in the Tower. Hawkins sent a letter to the queen that only the prisoner could stop the looting, otherwise she would lose a great deal of money. Elizabeth released Raleigh at once and sent him straightaway to Devon, though he was still guarded by a keeper. He stopped the looting and stealing at once, though for him it was a great humiliation to appear in his own county as a prisoner. He sorted out the whole business and gave the queen more than her share, though this did not soften her heart at all. Then he returned to London and the Tower, but by the winter, however, Elizabeth did relent and freed the two lovers, banishing them to Sherborne and forbidding them the Court. His “Bess” as he always called her, became a devoted and loyal wife, whose future was to be full of sorrow and tribulations, did she but know it. Raleigh was completely faithful to her, which was unusual in those turbulent times. He must indeed have been very much in love, because he knew

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Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

well enough the price he had to pay. Raleigh and Bess both loved Sherborne and Bess must have been quite happy there — though they did not like the old castle, finding it too cold. Eventually, Raleigh built a small manor in the park, nearer the lake. This house is still in existence, though now incorporated into the far greater mansion of the Digby family. Raleigh devoted himself to country pursuits, breeding horses, farming and amusing himself with falconry. In between whiles he returned to London to sit in Parliament. Eleven months after they went to Sherborne Bess bore him a son, whom they named Walter. As the boy began to grow up he showed signs of becoming a sturdy and lively child and Raleigh was very proud of him. His restless nature, however, would not allow him to remain playing the life of a country gentleman for ever. No doubt his Bess would have been perfectly content for him to remain at Sherborne for the rest days. If she could have seen what lay before her, she certainly would have done her utmost to persuade him to do so, but Raleigh was not made that way. He organised another expedition, this time to the mouth of the Orinoco in Guiana, where he believed lay the mysterious city of Manoa, capital of the fabled El Dorado. The expedition sailed from Plymouth on February 6th 1595 and for the first time Raleigh went with it. The queen ignored the whole business. She had not yet forgiven him. They arrived at the mouth of the Orinoco and Raleigh first of all attacked the Spanish city of San Josef and captured the Governor. Then he sailed on up the river in search of Manoa. He was not an explorer and adventurer by nature, though, like Drake or Frobisher and was not used to privation and hardship. He found the heat and the restricted life on board ship tested him to the limit. He was a very brave man — as his later

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Westcountry History: Dorset

brushes with the Spaniards showed — but he had never endured real physical hardship. The ships got lost in a maze of rivers and never found Manoa, which in fact had never existed, so he gave up at last and set sail for home. In spite of all this, however, Raleigh fell in love with the country and foresaw its future as a colony. When he did reach England his many enemies declared he had never been to Guiana at all, but had hidden in some remote part of Cornwall. This so infuriated Raleigh that he wrote a travel classic, “The Discovery of Guiana”, describing the country and the great opportunities it offered for colonising, agriculture and trading. There was not a flicker of interest from the queen or her council, though. They were still occupied with the Spanish threat. Drake and Hawkins were away, privateering in the West Indies and in their absence Raleigh and Essex feared that Spain would launch another Armada. They persuaded the queen to send an expedition to Spain, with themselves in command. This was a great success. Raleigh exhibited his courage and brilliant leadership in the capture of Cadiz. He went out of his way to be friendly and co-operative with Essex, with whom he was usually at loggerheads. Meanwhile, what the victors did not know was that both Drake and Hawkins had died on their voyage to the West Indies, which had ended in failure. When the victors returned to England, however, Raleigh did not regain the queen’s favour, as he had secretly hoped. Instead, Essex got most of the credit for the brilliant victory at Cadiz and the queen was furious because they did not bring back more booty. Then Essex decided he wanted Raleigh to accompany him on another expedition to the Azores. His pleas were added to those of Cecil, who had succeeded his father— the great Burghley — in 1592.

30

Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

Finally, Cecil managed to present Raleigh to the queen and he probably owed to Cecil more than anyone. From now on Raleigh regarded Cecil as a real friend. Neither he nor Essex ever guessed until it was too late what a treacherous little soul lay behind that hunchbacked, delicate exterior. Cecil could never be anyone’s friend. He used men as pawns to further his own ambitions and when they had served their purpose, or became dangerous, he made plans to get rid of them. Raleigh and Essex set sail for Ferral, where a new Armada was being built for the future conquest of England. This was Essex’s expedition, but he was no strategist or skilled commander like Raleigh and the whole affair was a miserable failure. Essex could not keep to one plan of campaign and the whole expedition was one of the most futile ever to leave any English port. During this time the truce between Raleigh and Essex was broken. In fact there was a serious rift, but the final break did not come till 1599. Essex went to Ireland on his last disastrous command and on his return led an equally disastrous and abortive rebellion against the queen. This ended in his trial for treason and death on the scaffold. Raleigh was accused of gloating over the fallen favourite by standing in a window and blowing out clouds of tobacco smoke and making rude comments while Essex went to the scaffold, but this is untrue. As Captain of the Guard — a post which he still held — he had to be present in his official capacity, till angry comments from onlookers drove him away, for Essex was still the people’s darling. Raleigh retired to the Armory, where he could see without being seen. He was very upset when he heard later that Essex had specially asked to see him, so that he could ask his forgiveness, as was the custom of the day. Those who saw him

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Westcountry History: Dorset

after the execution, when he returned to Durham House, remarked that his whole expression was one of sadness and gloom. The queen was now a tired, ailing old woman, who relied more and more on Cecil. She did not know that he had determined on Essex’s execution. In fact, Essex had played right into Cecil’s hands. Up to the very end of his trial the proud and handsome favourite had carried himself as though the whole affair was a farce — he was only 34 when he died. Elizabeth still condescended to meet Raleigh but she no longer felt any affection for him and his own attraction for her had waned. After the death of Essex he was more unpopular than ever. In fact, with the passing of Essex seemed to pass the glory and the high adventure of Elizabeth’s reign. No one could regard hunchbacked, sickly and scheming little Cecil as any sort of hero. Drake, Frobisher, Grenville and Hawkins were dead. The finest flower of the great, adventuring Elizabethans had gone forever and a new age was dawning. Raleigh, however, was still very much alive and though now 49 he was busy making new friends, one of whom was Lord Cobham, who later was to be instrumental in betraying him. Cobham was a rich landowner, a brilliant talker and a very vain and gossipy man. Why Raleigh did not see through him at once is a mystery, because Cobham was also a coward. Raleigh, though he had a brilliant mind, an astute business sense and was a brave and far-sighted commander in war, was an extraordinarily bad judge of character. This was a defect in his own nature. Once he thought a man was his friend he trusted him utterly. Was it sheer stupidity, conceit or just a blind spot? Or was it something childlike and trusting in his nature which he had never outgrown? Whatever it was, it proved in the end his undoing.

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Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

One day an incident occurred which seemed to have no significance at the time, but which was to prove very important in later events. Raleigh was sitting at a table in his library preparing a conveyance of his properties to his eldest son, Walter, and some of his papers were weighted down by a book. Lord Cobham, on a brief visit to his friend, passed through the room and picked up the book, glancing at it quickly. It was by a man called Snagge who questioned the claim of James VI of Scotland to the British throne. Raleigh had borrowed it from Lord Burleigh and never returned it. Now Cobham took it home and never returned it either. In 1602 Cecil began to correspond with James about his coming to the throne, because it was obvious that the queen’s health was now failing altogether. Cecil meant to hold under James the same position of power he held under Elizabeth. He had decided, even before the queen’s death, that Raleigh must be removed. He was as dangerous to his ambitions as Essex had been. So he deliberately poisoned James’s mind against his friend. He even told James that Raleigh was an atheist, one of the most damning things that could be said about anyone in those days. Yet Raleigh still trusted Cecil and believed him to be his friend. At last Elizabeth died on 24th March 1603, after a short illness. Before she had sunk into a coma she named James as her heir and as soon as the new king began his triumphal journey to London Raleigh’s fate was already sealed. No sooner had James reached London than blow after blow fell upon the Raleighs. He recalled all the queen’s monopolies, thus stopping most of their income. Then Raleigh was removed from his post as Captain of the Guard and Durham House was given back to the Bishop of Durham. Finally, in the middle of July, Raleigh was arrested for High Treason and sent to the Tower. His trial for High Treason was a shocking affair, though perhaps no worse than most trials of that period. The verdict had been decided before the proceedings started, the accused

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Westcountry History: Dorset

was allowed no defence, nor was he allowed to call witnesses, and the jury were obliged to bring in a verdict of “Guilty”, because they knew they would be punished if they did not. Vicious abuse and vituperation were hurled against the prisoner during the whole trial and the evidence was falsified. Raleigh bore himself with dignity and restraint, facing his accusers with bravery and calm. There certainly was a plot against the king and Raleigh may have known something about it, but he was innocent of any involvement in it. Not so his friend, Cobham, who proved indeed what a true friend he was. In his terror he laid the entire blame on Raleigh’s shoulders. Then he withdrew that accusation, then retracted his retraction. And Snagge’s wretched book which Cobham had borrowed was brought up in damning evidence. The worst Judas of the whole affair was, of course, Cecil. After the verdict the prisoner faced his judges and heard the terrible words of the barbarous sentence, reserved for those convicted of High Treason. “That you shall be had from hence to the place whence you came, there to remain until the day of execution; and from thence you shall be drawn upon a hurdle through the open streets to the place of execution, there to be hanged and cut down alive, and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off, and thrown into the fire before your eyes; then your head to be stricken off from your body, and your body shall be divided into four quarters, to be disposed of at the king’s pleasure. And God have mercy upon your soul”. Raleigh, in spite of the brave front he had put up before his judges, broke down completely when it was all over. It was no doubt the fearful sentence awaiting him, as well as the strain and the injustice of it all.

34

Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

He was not afraid of death, he had shown that in his life — no man could have been braver at the taking of Cadiz — but faced with such a death as the one for High Treason, how could any man, however brave, die with dignity? James, who really was a coward had a sadistic streak in his character, as mean and craven people often do. He also intensely disliked bloodshed. Cobham and Grey had been sentenced with Raleigh and James allowed the condemned to believe that their execution was inevitable, but he drafted a warrant for a stay of execution to be taken at the very last minute by a groom of the bedchamber to the Governor of the Tower. After the trials all of them had been taken back to the Tower and here Raleigh was imprisoned for 13 years. He was now 51, worried about the future of his wife and son and burdened with debts. Cobham and Grey were broken by their imprisonment, Grey dying in prison in 1614. Cobham was released in 1617, his health gone. He died penniless two years later. Raleigh, however, was of sterner stuff. He was a far more intelligent, brilliant man and his will to live was very strong. Instead, he kept up a barrage of requests for his release and began work on his great book, “THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD”. In the winter 1604-1605 Bess gave birth to a second son, Carew, in a house on Tower Hill, so Raleigh now had two sons to support. Meanwhile, his restless mind had taken up the study of botany and chemistry. Then Queen Anne brought James’s handsome and clever elder son to the Tower to meet the prisoner. Prince Henry did not resemble his father at all and had no love for him and he soon realised what sort of man Raleigh was. He made no effort to conceal how he despised the king by remarking: “No one but my father would keep such a bird in a cage”.

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Westcountry History: Dorset

Raleigh hoped to shape the young prince’s mind and also secure his release by this friendship, but unfortunately Prince Henry died of typhoid in November 1612, caught one day while swimming in the filthy Thames. In 1608 another terrible blow hit the Raleighs. James appropriated Sherborne for his worthless favourite Robert Carr. He was persuaded to pay them £8,000 and a yearly pension of £400 to Bess, though she did not receive this very regularly. Poor Raleigh was now nearly penniless and had to depend upon his devoted wife for money, but as usual she stood by him magnificently. At Prince Henry’s death his interest in his book, “THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD”, died and he never finished it. Time was now removing Raleigh’s enemies. Cecil died in May 1612 of an abdominal tumour, rheumatism and dropsy. He died friendless and alone while he was still only 48. Raleigh now returned to his earlier dream of founding a colony in Guiana and he tried to rouse the king’s interest in this, but James was far more interested in his talk of a gold mine, because as usual he was short of money. Eventually the king released Raleigh on March 19th 1616 and he began to prepare for a voyage to Guiana. He was now 64 and old before his time after all those years in prison. It speaks well for the vitality of his mind that he even contemplated going on another South American voyage, but he was now a sick man, which may account somewhat for the complete failure of his last expedition. Even if he had been in the best of health and vigour, James gave him little chance to succeed. The king was now under the influence of the Spanish ambassador Count Gondomar, to whom he betrayed all Raleigh’s plans as well as a complete list of his ships. He also gave Gondomar a promise that if Raleigh should do anything to

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Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

annoy Spain, he would be sent to Madrid to be hanged. He practically assured by his treachery that the expedition would be a failure, gold mine or not. The irony of the whole affair was that a successful colony had already been established at Jamestown in Virginia, founded on the lines of Raleigh’s experience, his comments and notes. This last expedition to Guiana was a dismal failure from start to finish. Raleigh sailed still under the sentence of death, knowing that if he returned without any gold execution awaited him. Sickness hit the little fleet and dogged them all the way to the Orinoco. They ran into a hurricane, which sank one of the ships. Raleigh was too ill to sail up the Orinoco to find the mine, so he delegated the command to his lifelong friend Laurence Keymis and to his eldest son, Wat. Keymis, however, failed to obey Raleigh’s orders, probably more by accident than design, because he committed suicide on his return when he was faced with his commander’s grief and anger. Wat was killed at the assault on San Thomé and the mine was never found. Raleigh now became so distraught with grief and illness that he lost control of his ships and men. They returned to the Leeward Islands, where the fleet began to break up, his captains deserting him. What was left of his crew were in a state of near mutiny and he had learned also of James’s treachery. Keymis had brought back with him from San Thomé an identical copy of all the information concerning the expedition which Raleigh had given the king. At last he turned and sailed for home, beaten, almost penniless, assailed by grief at his son’s death. He entered Plymouth harbour on 21st June, the very same date he had set out long ago on the voyage which ended in the glorious victory at Cadiz. Here he was met by the ever faithful and loving Bess and he

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Westcountry History: Dorset

was now faced with the sorrowful task of telling her of the death of their eldest son. The King did not arrest Raleigh at once. Actually, James had no case against him, nor had he committed any crime against the Spaniards. Guiana had already been taken possession of in the name of the Queen of England by virtue of a cession of all the native chiefs of the country. If indeed Guiana had been Spanish, the crime was the King’s in allowing the expedition to sail at all, but then neither truth nor justice meant anything to James Stuart. All he wanted was the death of the man he hated. Raleigh and Bess travelled on up to London, but they had hardly passed Ashburton when they met a relative, Sir Lewis Stukeley, who arrested him. As they passed through Sherborne Raleigh is said to have glanced round the smiling countryside and the house he had built and loved and remarked: “All this was mine and it was taken from me unjustly”. Aided falsely by Sir Lewis, he even made one ineffectual attempt to escape to France. He had been urged by Bess several times while they were in Plymouth to take a ship to France, but he had refused. Now betrayed by his cousin, who re-arrested him, he was lodged in the Tower. Ever after that last act of treachery, Stukeley was known as Sir Judas and was dropped by all his friends. He eventually died insane two years later. Raleigh was finally condemned under the old sentence of 1603, but his judges told him he would be beheaded, not hung, drawn and quartered as in the original sentence. James signed the death warrant and stated that the prisoner should be executed the very next morning. On that last night before his end Bess visited her husband once again. They had loved each other devotedly and this was their last meeting. She

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Sherborne and Sir Walter Raleigh

also learned later that she was to be allowed to bury his body where she pleased. That night Raleigh faced his coming death with complete calm and even a touch of ironical humour. The next morning on the scaffold he was so brave and composed that the executioner could not bring himself to strike the fatal blow. When at last he did, he had to strike twice before he severed the victim’s head from his body. So died one of the greatest of the great Elizabethans, on Friday October 29th 1618, 15 years after he had first been condemned to death. It was the Lord Mayor’s Day, but though James hoped to the contrary many people came to watch the execution. When the executioner held up the dead man’s head for all to see, the waiting crowd did not applaud as they usually did. Instead a long, shuddering sigh swept over them and from somewhere in the crowd a man’s voice cried out: “We have not another such head to cut off”. Bess lived on to see the collapse of the Spanish Alliance and James dead and discredited. Perhaps, before she too passed away she may have glimpsed that the future would one day vindicate all that her beloved had been and tried to do.

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Westcountry History: Dorset

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4

Corfe Castle and Lady Banks

THE real history of Corfe Castle begins some time after the Norman Conquest. The first part of it to be built was probably the great 12 foot thick wall, which enclosed the crown of the hill, on which stood some defensive buildings. These disappeared finally when the great King’s Tower was built in the early part of the 12th century. The castle was certainly there in the reign of Stephen, because Baldwin de Redvers captured it for Matilda. In the 13th century King John added the Queen’s Tower, with its long hail and chapel. He also strengthened the fortifications by a deep ditch dug across the southern hill where they were weakest. In the latter part of the 13th century more buildings were erected, including the middle bailey with a gateway, the wall tower and large outer bailey. Both Edward III and his grandson, Richard II, added to the defences, so that the castle became almost impregnable. Corfe Castle was a favourite royal residence, especially with King John, but it was also a dreaded prison and it held some distinguished prisoners. John, after the murder of Prince Arthur, who was the son of his elder brother, Geoffry, shut his unfortunate niece, “The Damsel of Brittany”, up in Corfe because she was a potential threat to his throne now her brother was dead.

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Westcountry History: Dorset

She spent the rest of her days in captivity, first at Corfe, where she was later joined in 1209 by the two daughters of the King of Scotland, handed over as hostages. The three young women were kindly treated and even allowed some luxuries. They remained at Corfe till John’s death. The 24 knights who were taken prisoner with Eleanor of Brittany were not so lucky. They were sent to Corfe along with their mistress, incarcerated in the dungeons and all but two starved to death. Another royal prisoner who probably stayed at Corfe was the ill-fated Edward II, imprisoned here for a short period in the custody of Sir John Matravers of Langton Matravers, a village a couple of miles from Swanage. Later he was taken to Berkeley Castle and there brutally murdered. In later reigns the Constable of Corfe Castle was a royal appointee. His appointment was one of considerable importance to the Isle of Purbeck. He was not only guardian of the Royal Castle and commander of the garrison, he was also the civil representative of the government. Though Henry III disafforested Purbeck, the king still retained the hunting rights and it still remained a royal warren. There were strict controls over commerce and land usage which it was the Constable’s duty to enforce. There were also certain powers he wielded over the inhabitants themselves. No Purbeck woman could marry a non-Purbeck man without the Constable’s permission. The “Islanders” also had certain rights which lasted as late as Elizabeth I’s reign. They could not be summoned to Petty Sessions outside the “Island”, and could not be arrested by the Sheriff of Dorset without the consent of the Mayor of Corfe. In 1572 the castle passed out of Royal possession when Elizabeth gave it to Sir Christopher Hatton, making him

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Corfe Castle and Lady Banks

Corfe Castle, Dorset.

Admiral of Purbeck. He spent a good deal of money repairing buildings and trying to make the castle more comfortable to live in. He also obtained certain rights and privileges for the village people. After his death the castle passed through various hands till it was eventually bought by Sir John Bankes in 1635. He was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and though he was a Puritan in sympathy he decided to throw in his lot with the Royalist Cause. Now the last chapter in Corfe’s long history began. Sir John journeyed to York to join the king and left Lady Bankes to take charge of any possible defence of the castle. She was an extremely brave and determined woman, who was to give the Roundheads a good deal of trouble for the next two years.

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In 1643 Parliamentary troops had taken Poole, Wareham and Weymouth, and now only needed Corfe to make the whole of that part of the coast secure. Sir Walter Erle was the first to attack, but he was unsuccessful. He occupied the village, but failed to capture the castle though he made many attempts. He used the church as a headquarters for artillery and even melted down the organ pipes for musket balls. At the approach of some Royalist troops, however, from Prince Maurice’s garrison at Blandford, Sir Walter withdrew, leaving Lady Bankes in triumphant possession of her castle. The Roundheads were not giving up as easily as that, though Corfe remained unmolested till 1645, when a siege was begun under the command of Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper. Lady Bankes still refused to surrender, though she was bombarded by cannon from both hills on either side of the castle. The contemporary artillery, however, was not strong enough to make much impression on those massive walls. Prince Maurice was no longer at Blandford to help her through and in fact she was the sole Royalist outpost between London and Exeter. All the rest of the country was in the hands of the Roundheads. Even then, the castle was so strong that capture seemed as far away as ever and the gallant defenders, with their intrepid woman commander, were finally betrayed by treachery from within, before it fell into Cromwell’s hands. In February 1645 a certain Colonel Pitman in the garrison agreed to betray Lady Bankes in return for a safe conduct out of the castle. He told his mistress he would try and find reinforcements in Somerset and she allowed him to leave. He returned with 100 men disguised as Royalists, but in reality they were Cromwellians from Weymouth. He had made arrangements with the besiegers that as soon as his party were safely inside he would open the gates and let them in, which he did. Heavily outnumbered and betrayed by one of her own men, there was nothing left for Lady Bankes to do but to surrender.

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Corfe Castle and Lady Banks

However, the besiegers must have admired the gallant woman’s courage, because they allowed her and her garrison to leave the castle unharmed, when it was looted and stripped. It was then decided that it must be “slighted”, because it was too formidable a stronghold to be left intact. So the military engineers moved in with their charges of gunpowder and blew up everything they could. So solid were the old walls and so massive the ancient towers, they were kept busy for months, while the village shook and the hills echoed with the explosions. A great deal of the stonework and even parts of the towers were blown down the hillside without disintegrating. They still lie where they have fallen, some of them in the remains of the dry moat, though now they are covered with moss and halfhidden by brambles. When they had finished the Roundheads left Corfe Castle to the jackdaws, the swallows and the wheeling, shrieking swifts, who perch and nest in its once great keep. It still remains a majestic sight, however, towering above the village in its naturally impressive setting. Corfe itself is an unpretentious but pleasant little place, the old houses and cottages built mainly of Purbeck stone with stone tiled roofs. There are some new buildings and some older ones have been restored. Actually the church and not the castle stands in the real centre of the village. It possesses the finest tower in Purbeck, as though the ancient builder was trying to vie with the castle itself. The rest of the church was rebuilt in 1860 and is not particularly interesting. Corfe is crowded in the summer with tourists and artists, who come to explore, to photograph and to paint, till the castle must be the most photographed and painted ruin in the whole of the south of England. The village and castle still belonged to the

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Westcountry History: Dorset

Bankes family until 1982, who maintained the latter in some state of repair. The castle is now run by the National Trust and is open to the public in the summer for a small charge.

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5

The Western Coastal Towns and the Stuarts

BRIDPORT, Charmouth and Lyme Regis are the three chief seaside towns in Western Dorset after Weymouth. The soils of that part of the coast are quite different to central or eastern Dorset. The overriding colour is a warm honey brown, a hue which is repeated in many of the villages and old country manors. Bridport lies on the river Brit, which is heavily alluvial round the river, terminating in flat alluvial meadows at West Bay. Away from the river, the main soil is middle lias and green ammonite beds. Charmouth has a small amount of alluvial clay round the mouth of the Char, beyond that are belemnite arls. The cliffs in the neighbourhood of both towns are high but dangerous to climb or to walk on, because they are subject to many falls. Those at East Bay, Bridport are almost completely sheer. At Lyme Regis the soil changes somewhat and becomes shales, limestones and upper greensand. The cliffs here are also subject to falls and landslides and in one area have even split some houses in half, owing to the shifting of the foundations. All this district is rich in fossils. Bridport, the largest of these coast towns, lies in the flat valley of the Brit, between low rounded green hills. It is a pleasant, bright little town, with a wide main street which suffers in the summer from the usual traffic congestion, as it lies

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Westcountry History: Dorset

on one of the main routes to the southwest. The famous Chesil Beach really begins at West Bay. Here the pebbles are very small, though they increase in size as they approach Portland. The old town hall, a graceful, red brick building, stands at the corner of East and South Streets. South Street itself has some old houses - one is now a museum which holds exhibitions of pictures from the flourishing local Arts Club, very good some of these are too. The Quakers also have a large brick meeting house dating from 1700 and the old parish church lies on the right-hand side of South Street, as one goes on towards West Bay Road. It is crossshaped and stands on the site of an earlier 13th century building. Cables and hawsers were made at Bridport for the Royal Navy and the town used to grow its own flax. There is also a well-established net industry and other light industries, though Bridport is not a truly industrial town. It has, however, quite a thriving tourist trade in the summer. Broadwindsor is a straggling village inland some ten miles from Bridport, lying on the road to Chard in Somerset. The village is overlooked by Lewesdon Hill and Pilsdon Pen, the highest point in Dorset, both hills bordering the northern edge of the lovely Marshwood Vale. Nowadays Broadwindsor is a quiet, rather shabby village, though containing some quaint old houses, including the one facing the old village green, where Charles II once slept. The church is probably the most interesting building here, standing on a hill, very well restored and has three very old bells in its 15th century tower. Charmouth is old, attractive and the farthest western seaside town next to Lyme Regis. The main street runs up a steep hill from sea level. In fact, most of Charmouth is hillside. This main

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The Western Coastal Towns and the Stuarts

street is one of the routes to Exeter and the southwest and in summer is crowded with through traffic, coming on from Bridport. Half a mile away lies the beautiful Charmouth Bay, with the Golden Cap – the highest point on the whole of the South Coast – to the east and Lyme Regis to the west. Charmouth, too, is full of visitors in the summer and many of the lovely, old Georgian houses bordering its main street have now been turned into hotels. The oldest of these is the ancient inn at the foot of Charmouth Hill, on the left hand side as one begins the ascent. It is now called the Queen’s Arms and has two inscriptions by the front door, stating that Catherine of Aragon slept here in 1551 and Charles II a hundred years later on 22nd October 1651. The Queen’s Arms is probably one of the oldest buildings in Charmouth. In the days of Jane Austen, who loved to come here to dream and walk, the old place was two cottages with an enormous chimney. Then it was restored and great beams, some lovely panelling, a huge stone fireplace, a carved ceiling and a beautiful doorway were uncovered. On one side of the door is the carving of a bell and on the other the initials of Thomas Chard, the last Abbot of Forde Abbey. Charmouth once belonged to the Abbey and this old house was the property of the Abbot. On one of the walls of a bedroom upstairs was found the badge of Catherine of Aragon worked in plaster. Lyme Regis is the most westerly town in Dorset, lying as it does right on the Devon border. It is also one of the hilliest of the Dorset seaside towns and seems to be built “all up and down”, as one visitor put it. The coast here is high and beautiful and Lyme is another place which Jane Austen loved and visited. It also possesses the Cobb, a 600 ft. quay of huge proportions, enclosing the little harbour and guarding it from the sea. It is so wide one could

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Westcountry History: Dorset

almost drive a car along it in safety. There has probably been a quay here for 600 years, but it was destroyed in the last century by a tremendous gale, after which the present Cobb was built. The Duke of Monmouth landed here, accompanied, among others, by Daniel Defoe, the author of “ROBINSON CRUSOE”, who luckily for him did not share his leader’s fate. Nor was he executed with other unfortunate rebels in the Bloody Assizes. The old church in Lyme Regis stands on the edge of the cliffs, which are slowly being eroded by sea and weather. Its foundations are Norman, with a Norman arch at the East End and it also possesses a fine, old oak wagon roof. These three seaside towns are intimately connected with two generations of the ill-fated House of Stuart. Charles I made only two brief visits to Dorset. He is said to have slept at the little border village of South Perrott after his victory at Lostwithiel and at Stalbridge and in the ancient manor of Cranborne in 1644, after his defeat at Marston Moor. His visits to Dorset, however, were not filled with the romance and drama which marked those of his son and grandson – Charles II and the Duke of Monmouth. Fleeing after the disastrous battle of Worcester, the first place Charles II stayed at in Dorset was Trent, near Sherborne, the home of a Colonel Wyndham. He arrived here on 17th September 1651, disguised as a servant to one Jane Lane, who rode behind him. The king stayed here till the 22nd, though Colonel Wyndham knew that to shelter him meant death if Charles was discovered. Notices had been posted all over the countryside warning people of this penalty and offering £1000 for Charles’s capture. While he stayed in the house the king lived in Lady Wyndham’s room, next to which was a secret hiding place. This

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The Western Coastal Towns and the Stuarts

had a false floor and here he could hide if Parliamentary troops came to search the house. The household servants knew he was there, but did not betray him. The king left Trent secretly five days later with Lord Wilmot and Miss Juliana Coningsby, Colonel Wyndham’s niece. Charles was disguised as Miss Coningsby’s servant and it was given out that she and Lord Wilmot were eloping and were looking for a boat to take them to the Continent. The little party rode to Charmouth, where they spent the night in the Queen’s Arms hostelry. Lord Wilmot and Miss Coningsby called Charles “William Jackson”, and must have known they also were taking their lives in their hands when they arrived in Charmouth. In fact, they were very nearly caught through the suspicions of the wife of the very skipper who had promised to convey them to France. So the story runs – at Charmouth the fugitives were put in touch with a Mr. Limbry – a local sailor – who promised to take them across the Channel for £60. He told them that the ship’s boat would be at a secret meeting place at midnight to row them to his ship, but he never came nor sent any further message. Actually, he was locked in his bedroom by his wife, who knew that he was taking some passengers with him that night. She had been out in Charmouth earlier that evening and heard a proclamation read, which denounced any who helped the fleeing king or his friends. Though how she had any inkling that her husband’s passengers were indeed the royal fugitive and his companions, history does not relate. When midnight passed the king and his friends became anxious and frightened. They left the inn hurriedly and fled to Bridport, Charles and Juliana going first, followed by Lord Wilmot, whose horse needed a shoe.

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This second mishap again nearly betrayed them. The smith told the ostler in charge of the horse that it had been shod somewhere near Worcester. The ostler reported this curious fact to the parson who, with the smith, went straight to the local magistrate with their suspicions. The magistrate, however, refused to believe them and would not issue a warrant for the arrest of the strangers. This time the ostler took up the matter and went to see the officer in command of the Parliamentary forces in Lyme Regis. This man, on hearing the story, hurried off to Bridport with his troops. Charles and his friends, however, had already left, because the place was full of Cromwell’s soldiers. The fugitives had taken refuge at a local inn and here the king had another narrow escape. So the story runs – while he was attending to their horses in the yard in his role as servant – an ostler attached to the inn claimed Charles’s acquaintance, saying that he was sure he knew him. The king was terrified that the man had guessed his true identity, but he kept his head and asked if the ostler had worked anywhere else besides Bridport. The man replied that he had worked in Exeter and Charles agreed that that was probably where they had met before. After leaving Bridport the little party made for Broadwindsor. The king lodged at the modest little house next to the inn, which bears a tablet fixed to its front wall, stating that Charles II slept here on September 23rd 1651. After his bitter disappointment and narrow escape at Charmouth, however, he cannot have slept very much especially as, half-an-hour after their arrival in Broadwindsor, a company of Cromwell’s troops arrived in the village and billeted themselves at the inn. It was a desperate situation for the king and his friends – but they were saved by one of those odd coincidences which occur now and then – whether they be luck or fate. A dispute arose with the village elders concerning the care of

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The Western Coastal Towns and the Stuarts

a baby born to one of the women camp-followers. The local worthies feared the child would be abandoned and become a charge on the parish and they did not want this to happen. The officers at the inn were called in to settle the argument, which lasted a long time. When they returned to their billets the officers were so tired they went straight to bed. Waiting till everything was quiet Charles and his companions stole out of their lodgings, saddled their horses and rode swiftly away. The king finally returned to Trent, where he remained till October 5th, when he and Lord Wilmot left again secretly and reached Shoreham in Sussex. Here they found a boat which took them to the Continent. Not so fortunate was Charles II’s ill-starred son, the young Duke of Monmouth. He always claimed that he was the king’s legal son, and that his mother had a marriage certificate she kept in a black box – the famous black box of the Monmouth story. It was never found, though his friends and sympathisers searched for it after the duke’s death. Monmouth always said that his mother was the king’s legal wife and had married her at a private ceremony in Holland, though this is probably doubtful. He, himself, James Duke of Monmouth, was born in Rotterdam on April 9th 1649 at the house of one of Lucy’s relatives and spent his early years in that country. Monmouth’s mother, Lucy Walter, was a beautiful Welshwoman. She met Charles II at The Hague when he was living in exile and while she was the mistress of one Colonel Robert Sidney, whose son some people said Monmouth was. She was certainly the king’s companion and mistress during his exile at The Hague. Charles seems to have been very fond of Monmouth and certainly treated him as his son, although publicly and privately he denied he had ever married Lucy.

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Until the Restoration Charles placed his young son in the care of one Lord Crofts, whose name he took and the king did not acknowledge Monmouth publicly until he was betrothed to Anne Scott, Countess of Buccleuch, whom he married in 1665. In 1662, Charles conferred on him the titles of Duke of Orkney, Duke of Monmouth and Knight of the Garter and the young man took the name of Scott on his marriage. In 1670 the king made his son Captain General of his forces and Monmouth proved himself a brave enough soldier fighting on the Continent. Meanwhile, Charles’s Protestant subjects, especially the Dissenters, urged him to legitimise Monmouth, but the king refused to do so. Perhaps he distrusted certain weaknesses in the young duke’s character and decided he would not make a good king. Or perhaps he felt that, as Monmouth’s mother was only a commoner and not of Royal or noble blood, the country would not accept him as king. In fact, Monmouth was banished to Holland several times during his father’s reign for alleged complicity in various plots both against his father and his uncle, James, Duke of York. He is said to have been involved in the famous Rye House Plot, when the king and the Duke of York were to be assassinated as they passed the Rye House tavern on their way back from Newmarket racecourse. Monmouth may or may not have been involved in any plots against his father. Charles II was extremely good to him and Monmouth owed his position in life to the king’s generosity. Against this, of course, the son may have nursed a secret grudge against his father, because he would never acknowledge his legitimacy or accept him as his heir. There is no doubt, however, that a bitter rivalry existed between the young duke and his uncle the Duke of York, which lasted during most of Charles II’s reign.

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Monmouth was also supported strongly by many Protestants among the king’s subjects, who feared a Catholic succession on Charles’s death, especially after his brother, James, married Mary of Modena, who was a Catholic like himself. Monmouth always strenuously denied any guilty involvement in any of these plots. Finally, stripped of all his offices the young duke was banished to Holland for the last time, though this is supposed to have been an act of political necessity and the king never ceased to love his son. The young man is said to have returned to England secretly several times to see his father, bringing with him Lady Henrietta Wentworth, whom he loved devotedly and who was his mistress, sharing his exile. When Charles II died, Monmouth had to make up his mind whether to remain permanently in exile, or to fight for what he believed was his rightful heritage. He chose to fight. He was backed by William of Orange with three ships and some men and money and landed at Lyme Regis on 11th June 1685 – at what is now called Monmouth’s Beach. He left Lyme Regis on June 15th and marched to Bridport, where there was a skirmish with James’s troops. The subsequent story of the invasion is tragedy from beginning to end. Monmouth failed to take Bristol or to rally any of the influential men in Somerset to his side. So he took up his headquarters for the second time at Bridgwater to prepare for the final battle and to train his raw troops, who consisted mainly of West Country peasants and countrymen, armed with scythes and pikes. The battle of Sedgemoor was fought on 5th July 1685. The duke might have won this crucial battle, but a chance musket or pistol shot betrayed the presence of his army to James’s soldiers camped before the village of Westonzoyland. It will never be known whether this shot was an accident or

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treachery, as Monmouth’s men had been ordered to march in complete silence from Bridgwater to Sedgemoor, so that they could attack James’s sleeping troops under the cover of darkness, before their presence was discovered. Then, also the guide who led the duke across the moor to the enemy’s camp led them straight to the edge of the great Bussex rhine, which was too deep to ford. Again it will never be known whether the guide lost his way in the dark or whether he misled the rebel army by design. Whatever the truth, Monmouth lost the one essential factor – surprise – which might have won the battle and the kingdom for him. Lord Grey’s untrained cavalry fell back upon their own infantry, who were later cut to pieces by the enemy cavalry. So ended the fateful Battle of Sedgemoor, the last to be fought on English soil between Englishmen and Englishmen. Even the duke’s flight after Sedgemoor was a disaster. If he had made for Wales instead of Dorset he might have had a better chance of escape. He rode into the Mendips, then changed his mind, turned round at Shepton Mallet and galloped south into Dorset with Lord Grey and Buyse, his German officer. The fugitives reached Shaftesbury and fled into Cranborne Chase, where they had to abandon their beaten horses. They disguised themselves and decided to try and gain Poole or the coast on foot and find a ship which would take them to the Continent. Buyse and Lord Gray were captured first. A reward of £5000 had been offered for Monmouth – dead or alive – so everyone was anxious to find him. On 8th July a woman reported that she had seen two men run into a cornfield. The area was soon full of troops and very soon a soldier reported that he had seen a brown coat showing among

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brambles in a ditch. He caught hold of the coat and pulled Monmouth out of the ditch. The duke was disguised as a shepherd, exhausted and weak from hunger. As soon as the prisoner’s identity was established he was escorted to London, where he was lodged in the Tower. He begged for an audience with his uncle, which was granted, but James was pitiless. Though Monmouth grovelled to him, begged and pleaded for his life, neither his youth nor beauty saved him and he was condemned to death. A week later he met his end bravely enough on Tower Hill. He died on 15th July 1685. The field in which the young duke was captured is still known as Monmouth’s Close. He was lucky, he did at least die a comparatively clean death for those times. He escaped the torture and the hanging which fell upon the unfortunate survivors of his army almost directly after the Battle, especially upon the ignorant countrymen who had followed him. The victors had no mercy whatever and nor had James later, when his full vengeance descended upon the West Country.

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6

Dorchester, Judge Jefferies and the Bloody Assizes

THE County town of Dorchester stands on the rolling chalk hills north of Weymouth. These hills run westward, but to the east lies the broad valley of the Frome with its wide alluvial plain, which also borders Dorchester on its immediate northern edge. The 20th century town is a pleasant mixture of the old and the modern, but beneath its traffic filled streets lies a more ancient place, the Roman city of Durnovaria and the main highways out of Dorchester are based on the Roman roads – at least on three sides of the town – if they do not run all the way on the same roadbeds. That going westwards originally ran straight to Eggardon Hill, where there is an Iron Age fort. The modern road turns south to Bridport.

The one to the south runs fairly straight to Weymouth and that to Bere Regis in the east again is pretty straight. In fact, on this road and about a mile out of Dorchester, standing on the right-hand verge as one drives towards Bere Regis, can be seen an old round-topped Roman milestone, its surface worn now by age and weather. The Roman road, however, does not go to Bere Regis but turns off towards Bradbury Rings. All these three roads run through beautiful avenues of elms, though the town council has cut down those on the one to

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Weymouth. These trees were not, of course, planted by the Romans. In Dorchester itself no sizable movement of earth for road making, office or house building, could take place over most of the town or its environs without uncovering some fragment of a Roman pillar, a sculptured head or bust, pieces of pottery, coins or what have you. Remains of Roman walls are still to be seen round parts of the town, especially to the north on the Sherborne Yeovil road. To the south and half a mile from the centre of Dorchester lies Maumbury Rings. This is the remains of a Roman amphitheatre based on an ancient Stone Age Circle, with a central flat space for games, gladiatorial shows and wild beast fights. South of Dorchester and about a quarter-of-a-mile to the west of the main Weymouth-Dorchester road, stand the famous ramparts of Maiden Castle, one of the largest Iron Age Hill Forts in Europe and certainly the largest in the British Isles. The long history of this extraordinary series of ditches and walls – all 100 acres of them – lies now in beautiful order in Dorchester Museum. Maiden Castle has been thoroughly excavated and the whole of one area of the ground floor of the museum is given over to the exhibits of its past history. Another excavated site well worth visiting are the foundations of the Roman Villa in Colliton Park, just north of the County Council Offices and the County Library. The whole area of the villa’s ground floor has been uncovered, with several fine tessellated pavements and an interesting central heating system. Modern Dorchester also has a flourishing market on Wednesdays and Sundays, and an old and famous grammar school – Hardy’s School – now housed in buildings outside the

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Dorchester, Judge Jefferies and the Bloody Assizes

town. This school was founded by another Thomas Hardy, an ancestor of Nelson’s Hardy and possibly of the famous writer, because the two men were collaterals of the same family. Among buildings of interest to the visitor are Judge Jeffreys Restaurant and the Antelope Hotel. The house where the judge lodged is now the restaurant and Jeffrey’s portrait hangs as a sign above the main entrance. This is one of the truly medieval houses left in Dorchester. It has a carved, timber front and sports a little balcony. The Antelope Hotel was the old Assize Court and there is a story that Jeffreys’ ghost can be seen walking along a path linking the restaurant with the hotel. This is an intriguing tale – though possibly untrue – but adds mystery to the old place. It was at the Antelope Hotel that Jeffreys presided over the judicial Commission which tried the rebels captured after Sedgemoor. The table and chair he used in court are now housed in the Town Hall, which was built in 1848. Most people have heard of the Bloody Assizes and of Judge Jeffreys, who will always be associated with the aftermath of the Battle of Sedgemoor in the reign of James II. Most modern historians take a different view of Jeffreys and do not think he was as black as he was painted; nor that he was the roaring, redhanded monster who stormed through the West Country, handing out monstrous punishments to innocent victims of the rebellion and, apparently, if one is to take certain writers seriously, performing the executions himself or, at any rate, being physically present and gloating over the agonies of his victims. The truth, however, is somewhat different. Jeffreys seems to have been the subject of distortion and myth over the centuries, not only in his day, but even as late as 1934, when a legend arose that he was conveyed to Taunton after his capture and executed in the market place and his body, minus its head, taken to Stocklinch and buried in a vault there.

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The whole story seems to have been sparked off because an old vault had been opened at Stocklinch containing a coffin, which was just the right size to hold a headless body. There is no question but that Jeffreys died a natural death in the Tower and was buried in the city of London. We know the disease from which he died and when. In fact, he was a dying man when he was arrested after James II’s flight and he had only a short time to live. His whole character and career has been so blackened by the Whigs and finally by Macaulay, that it has taken a long time to sort out the truth. Macaulay was a brilliant writer, but, in my view, a most biased and unreliable historian. Jeffreys was accused of being a frequenter of brothels and an inveterate womaniser, though probably he was much the same as most young men of his age. He was also later, after he had married, a devoted and apparently tender husband and father. He was said to have come from a coarse, low family. In fact, he belonged to a respectable family of Welsh landed gentry. He was accused of being a roaring drunkard. Actually, he drank because it was the only way he knew of deadening the terrible pain he suffered from his stone, which could cause almost unbearable agony at times. To see Judge Jeffreys in a saner and more objective light one must of course see him in relation to his own time and not only to ours, In fact, to endeavour to put him in proper historical perspective. This is not easy in relation to 17th century justice which, though it seems on the surface the same as today, with juries, robes and rituals, was in reality quite different. Sentences and punishments, which indeed appear to be of unparalleled barbarism judged from our viewpoint today, were accepted as normal in the 17th century. These were not ordered according to the whims of 17th century judges, but were part and parcel of the law of the land. Indeed, many of them were

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still being imposed till the 19th century. As late as 1833 a wretched little boy of nine was sentenced to death by hanging for breaking a window and stealing 2d worth of printers’ ink. Death by gibbeting was indeed abolished in 1834, but not public hangings which were still carried out till 1868. In the 17th century, at the time Judge Jeffreys was practising, the sentence for high treason was the time honoured one of being hung, drawn and quartered. Women were burnt alive. These dreadful sentences remained unaltered till 1814, though the last victims to be so put to death were in 1810. Then disembowelling was abolished and death by hanging alone was substituted. The rest of the savage ritual, however, cutting up of the victim’s body and chopping off his head, was not abolished till 1870. As these sentences were the law of the land 17th century judges had no choice but to pass them on the prisoners before them. It was part of their work. They had very little power to mitigate the universal brutality, though sometimes they may have tried to do so. The prerogative of mercy and of pardon lay with the king and no one else, though of course the judges might recommend clemency. They did not make the country’s laws nor the punishments which were allotted to different crimes. Their sole job was to administer the law as they knew it. Then, too, the judiciary had a different role to that of the modern judge and law courts, who stand separate from the Executive and politics and officiate as a detached and autonomous body. In the days of the Stuarts the presiding judges were royal servants or, as Bacon called them: “Lions under the throne”.

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The great majority of judges held their positions according to the king’s pleasure and if they displeased him, or did not do as he wanted they could be dismissed at once and had to retire into private life or practise as humble attorneys. They were the king’s men. If they were ambitious of course they obeyed the king in order to hold his favour and their positions. There is no doubt that Jeffreys was ambitious, also ruthless, though possibly no more so than many other men of his day. He became very much the king’s man, because upon the king depended his advancement and the furtherance of his own ambitions. There is no doubt that James was the real villain of the piece, but he saw to it that Jeffreys collected the odium which should have been his by right. Kings in those days were not above finding scapegoats, to divert popular fury from themselves for their actions. Be that as it may, Jeffreys’ evil reputation will probably persist as long as histories are written. George Jeffreys came of an old Welsh family which had owned land in Denbighshire for many generations. He was the son of one John Jeffreys of Acton Park and was born in 1648. He was educated at the Grammar School in Shrewsbury, St. Paul’s and at Westminster School in London. In later years he used to relate a strange dream he said he had when he first arrived at Westminster School. In this dream a gipsy told him that he would rise to become the second man in the kingdom, but at the end of his life would encounter misfortune and disgrace. From Westminster School he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, but very little is known about his career at the University. He left Cambridge after a year without gaining a degree. In May 1663 Jeffreys was admitted as a member of the Inner Temple, and soon showed that he had a real gift for the law. He

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was, however, generally short of money and ran into debt and, so the romantic story goes, he decided to better his fortunes by marrying an heiress. Whether it is true or not is difficult to decide. He is said to have courted a rich heiress and used as a gobetween a poor relation who lived in the household as a companion. The heiress’ father discovered the affair, however, locked up his daughter and turned the poor companion out of the house. This girl, Sarah Neesham by name, fled to a friend’s house in Holborn and from there wrote to Jeffreys imploring his help. He called to see her, found her in a state of despair and discovered that she was really much better looking than her rich relative. Thereupon he proposed on the spot, was accepted and married her on 23rd May 1667 at All Hallows, Barking. Sarah was the daughter of the Reverend Thomas Neesham, Rector of Stoke d’Abernon. He had died in 1661 and Sarah brought her husband a dowry of £300, which in those days was a fair sum of money. The marriage seems to have been very happy, until she died in 1678. Jeffreys never forgot his first wife and when he himself was dying he asked to be buried near her. She bore him six children, four boys and two girls, of whom only one boy, the eldest, John, and the two girls survived him. Eighteen months after her death he married again, a Lady Ann Jones, the young widow of a Welsh knight, but this second marriage does not seem to have been a happy one. To succeed in Restoration London it was a case of the survival of the fittest and a man needed influence as well as ability. The last quality Jeffreys possessed in good measure, together with a strong, carrying voice and large, dark eyes, both of which he used to good effect in cross-examination. His personality and his wit began to supply the lack of the first qualification and he started to form influential friendships.

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The most important of these was the immensely rich merchant banker, Sir Robert Clayton, Lord Mayor of London from 167980 and M.P. for the city. Jeffreys was appointed Common Sergeant of London when he was only 26 and the Recorder of the City of London at 33. In fact, since he was admitted a member spite of his shortage of money. At 38 he became Lord of the Inner Temple he never really looked back in Chief Justice of England and Lord Chancellor when he was 40. He was also created Baron Jeffreys of Wem. After the failure of the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685, he was sent to the West Country at the head of a Commission, to try the survivors of the Battle of Sedgemoor and those who had aided Monmouth. When the Commission returned to London after the Bloody Assizes, Jeffreys seems to have become more involved than ever with James II’s schemes to further the Catholic faith in England, though he himself was a staunch Anglican. He sat as President of the notorious Court of Ecclesiastical Commission, which was instrumental in costing James his throne and which brought about Jefferys’ own downfall and imprisonment. With the landing of William of Orange at Torbay on November 15th 1688, James II fled to France, abandoning his Chancellor without any warning and with the utmost callousness. “I am sensible”, James wrote later, “that my Lord Chancellor hath been a very ill man and hath done very ill things” – mostly on his master’s orders. As soon as Jeffreys discovered that the king had gone he fled to Wapping, but he was betrayed by the mate of the ship which was to take him to Hamburg. He was arrested on a warrant for High Treason signed by the Lords of the Council and taken to

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Dorchester, Judge Jefferies and the Bloody Assizes

the Tower. Here he was kept without further charge or trial until his death four months later, mourned by few and probably the most hated man in the kingdom. His chronic disease, stone in the bladder, had grown rapidly worse. He had lived in severe pain for several years and his last days must have ended in agony. In fact, he was already a dying man when he was taken to the Tower. The infection from the bladder had spread to his kidneys and was already destroying them. Probably, if he had not headed the Commission which conducted the Bloody Assizes, Judge Jeffreys would have been unknown except to those who were interested in English legal history and historical trials. The Bloody Assizes, however, brought his name before the world and gave him one of the most infamous places in English history. Actually, he was not the only judge involved in these Assizes. After Sedgemoor James set up a special Commission of five judges, including Chief Baron Sir William Montague, Sir Robert Wright of the Exchequer, Sir Francis Wythens of the King’s Bench and Sir Cresswell Levinz of the Common Pleas. Such a large Commission was needed because over 2600 prisoners were awaiting trial. The Assizes started at Winchester, though here there was only one prisoner charged with high treason – Lady Alice Lisle. She was an old woman in her 70s, and was accused of giving shelter to some of the rebels. As stated before, the punishment for high treason was to be burnt alive, but on Jeffreys’ suggestion Lady Alice was allowed to appeal to the king, who remitted her sentence to one of beheading.

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From Winchester the Commission proceeded to Salisbury and thence to Dorchester and here the real Assizes began, on the fateful day of Saturday September 5th. On the first morning 30 men were tried for high treason and 13 were executed on Monday 7th September by Jack Ketch, the public executioner and his assistant, who was a butcher named Pacha Rose. For men the sentence for high treason was to be hung, drawn and quartered and the two executioners could not cope with more than 13 prisoners in a day, while carrying out these savage sentences. In all, 250 unfortunates were condemned to death in Dorchester alone and of these about 79 were actually executed within the city walls. Gallows were also erected at Lyme Regis, Bridport, Melcombe Regis, Weymouth, Poole and Wareham. Batches of the condemned were allotted to each place to meet their horrible end. Those who were not executed were sentenced to transportation and given by the king to his wife and his favourites. The queen made £1000 on the sale of prisoners to the plantations in the West Indies and elsewhere. Others were sentenced to be whipped through Dorchester or the other market towns. Among these was a woman who refused to pay excise duty on some ale she had brewed. She is said to have remarked that “she would pay no more excise till the Duke of Monmouth was King of England”. Another victim sentenced to a flogging was a man called Holleday, who had acted as a guide to Lord Grey when the latter was fleeing from Sedgemoor. Poor Holleday was ordered to be whipped through Dorchester on the afternoon he was convicted and through Shaftesbury on the next market day. Another unfortunate wretch, a young baker named Wiseman, had read Monmouth’s proclamation publicly in Weymouth. He

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was sentenced to the dreadful punishment of a whipping through Dorchester and the other nine market towns. In reality this amounted to a sentence of death, because no man, however young and strong, could have survived such a punishment. As it was, he nearly died after the second installment of his sentence. The first whipping was comparatively light and brought forth a protest from a sadistic Church of England parson, so that the lash was applied with redoubled severity at the next flogging. The rest of this dreadful sentence was remitted. Among others sentenced to be flogged was the Whig writer, John Tutchin, who, with other Whigs, later wrote an account of the Commission’s circuit called “THE WESTERN MARTYROLOGY OR THE BLOODY ASSIZES”. However, Tutchin never underwent his punishment, because he caught the smallpox which was raging through the West Country prisons. Happily for him his sentence was later remitted. Like Tutchin, many prisoners never endured their punishments because they died of smallpox or of jail fever. This was a virulent form of typhus, which was also rife in the local prisons. Jeffreys’ next court was at Lyme Regis, where 13 men were hanged, among them two youths who were so young and goodlooking that everyone’s heart was wrung with pity. One of these, William Hewling, was carried to his grave after his execution by the most highly-born girls in Lyme. The other, Christopher Battiscombe, was a young barrister who came of a good Dorset family. His sweetheart, so the story runs, literally flung herself at the feet of Jeffreys, but to no avail. When they left Dorset the Commission travelled to Exeter, then to Taunton and finally to Bristol and Wells, then returned

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to London. Though Jeffreys headed the Commission he did not bear the full responsibility alone. It must also be shared with the four other judges. Then, in the case of the 2000 prisoners tried and the 1381 sentenced, no doubt existed at the time in the minds of any of the judges but that they were guilty and therefore they had no option but to pass sentence. Actually, the lists of condemned men were sent to the king and he alone held the prerogative of mercy. The king and Jeffreys were in constant communication during the circuit and James could have pardoned far more men than he did. He should have had the ringleaders executed and forgiven those simple peasants who had followed Monmouth, but he seems to have been determined to let the full weight of his vengeance fall upon the common people of Somerset and Dorset. Possibly of all the Stuarts, James was the most cruel and sadistic, as well as the most stupid. On the other hand, there does not seem much evidence that Jeffreys recommended many to the king for mercy. History has laid the guilt upon Jeffreys and not upon James. The Bloody Assizes made such a searing and traumatic impression upon the West Country, especially upon these two particular counties, that it is doubtful whether indeed the hated name of Jeffreys will ever be forgotten. His great-granddaughter found she could not drive in safety from Bristol to Bridgwater once it was learned she was descended from Judge Jeffreys. In fact, to this day it is quite possible that no descendant of his would like to admit the fact to any man of Dorset or Somerset.

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7

Marshwood Vale and the Wordsworths

GEOLOGICALLY, the Marshwood Vale in West Dorset is mainly lower lias and marls, while Pilsdon Pen is Kimmeredge clay and bears on its summit a hill fort.

It was here at Racedown Farm that William and Dorothy Wordsworth set up their first home together and lived for two years, from October 1795 to 1797. Racedown lay to the west of Pilsdon Pen, the highest point in the county, rising to 909 feet and bordering the northern end of the beautiful Marshwood Vale. Here the poet and his sister lived a free, unfettered existence of the utmost simplicity. Though Dorothy missed her beloved Lakeland Fells, she found in the Pen and its lovely views some compensation for her homesickness. She and her brother rambled over much of the rolling countryside of the Vale; and climbed the slopes of the Pen, from whence one can look right over the Channel or into Devon or Somerset. This part of West Dorset is beautiful country, with steep hills and deep, coombelike valleys – often heavily wooded. Until then both their lives had been unsettled and unhappy. Perhaps William’s childhood had something to do with his restlessness and his later involvement in the politics of Revolutionary France. He was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland on April 17th

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1770. Dorothy was born a year later. They were the children of one John Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law and agent to the Earl of Lonsdale. Their mother was a Miss Anne Cookson, only daughter of a mercer of Penrith. There were five children of the marriage, William being the second son and Dorothy the only daughter. When brother and sister were eight and seven, their mother died. They lost their father six years later and on his death the family were scattered. Richard, the eldest son, and William were sent to the grammar school at Hawkeshead, a village on Esthwaite Water. There they stayed nine years, being joined later by the two younger boys, John and Christopher. William probably had a happier and freer life than Dorothy, who was sent to live with her mother’s parents at Penrith. He and his brothers lodged in the village and after school hours were free to do pretty much as they liked. In 1787, William left school and went to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where his uncle, Dr. Cookson, was a Fellow. He was not a particularly attractive young man, his manners were crude, he was plain with a very large nose and he talked with a strong Northern accent, but he joined wholeheartedly in the social activities of his college. The French Revolution broke out while he was at Cambridge and he was inevitably drawn into the revolutionary fervour which swept through the university. He made two brief visits to France in 1790 and 1792 and gained his degree in 1791, though he had not yet decided what career he would adopt. He became more and more interested in Republican affairs and during this period he seems to have been extremely restless and unsettled. Then he suddenly went to France and found lodgings in Orleans. He might have thought perhaps that if he studied French he could later get a post as a tutor, or perhaps become a

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journalist. He had become friendly with a certain Paul Vallon, the son of a surgeon, and while in Orleans he met Paul’s sister, Annette, with whom he had his first serious love affair. It was intermittent but tempestuous, until finally Annette gave birth to a daughter – whom she named Anne Caroline Wordsworth. On learning of the child’s birth William fled to Paris and then to England. It will never be known why he abandoned Annette in this heartless way. She was a girl of good family and he had loved her a great deal. Perhaps it was a question of money. He had only his allowance and he may have gone to England in such a desperate hurry, to beg his uncle’s permission to marry Annette; or that worthy man, shocked that his difficult nephew should have fallen in love with a French girl, threatened to cut off his allowance altogether, unless William returned to England immediately. No one will ever know the truth because Wordsworth continued to hide and deny the affair for many years. In fact, his conduct over the whole business is not to his credit, though he must have felt remorse and a sense of guilt for treating the French girl so badly. This sense of guilt haunted him, as is shown in some of his poems, “Vaudracour and Julia” and “Salisbury Plain”, which was published under the title of “Guilt and Sorrow”. In 1793 France and England declared war on each other, effectively stopping any further meetings with Annette. This war lasted nine years and William’s love was not great enough to survive such a separation. Other interests and other influences were entering his life. He was becoming attached to his sister, Dorothy, whom until now he had only met at infrequent intervals. Dorothy’s childhood had been far more restricted than her

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brother’s, though the uncertainty of their life after their parents’ death left its mark upon both of them. This feeling was not helped by poverty and dependence upon relatives, but as a young man William was free to go where he liked and free within reason to choose what he wanted to do and to take up what work interested him. It was not so with Dorothy. The lives of young women in those days were very circumscribed. The only careers open to them was that of marriage, to go into domestic service or to be a governess in some rich household. Dorothy’s childhood had been far more restricted and frustrating than her brother’s. It took far more courage for her to throw over the conventions which bound the lives of young women in the 18th century. She was mainly brought up by her maternal grandparents, who were narrow-minded, stupid and showed the sensitive, very intelligent girl no affection whatever. In fact, she was completely repressed. A letter of hers to a girl friend written in 1787 expresses something of the awful narrowness and monotony of her early girlhood. “That while I am in her house I cannot consider myself as at home. I feel like a stranger. You cannot think how gravely and silently I sit with her, and my Gfr (grandfather), you would scarcely know me ... our only conversation is about work, ‘work’, or what sort of servant such a one is, who are her parents, what places she lived in. . . . What my dear Jane can be more uninteresting than such conversation as this? ... notability is preached up to me every day, such as one is, a very ‘sedate’, notable girl, says my Gmr”. It is not surprising that this highly sensitive, lively, imaginative creature, as revealed in her diaries, welcomed and clung to her brother with such a frustrated love, once he was able to offer her a release from this imprisoning and suffocating environment.

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The affection of William and Dorothy for each other seems to have been very intense and deep. Possibly the meeting with Coleridge provided another outlet and interest for both brother and sister and they ceased to be quite so involved with each other. Both of them found their new friend fascinating and for a time he became their constant companion and a part of their lives. These two people – together with Annette – wielded the greatest influence on William, though probably Dorothy and Coleridge influenced him the most. There is no doubt also that Dorothy inspired Coleridge as she did her brother. There is also a hint in her diaries that she was attracted to the young man when she first met him, though it is very doubtful whether Coleridge looked at her or thought of her in that way at all. In 1795, Mr. Raisley Calvert – a friend of William’s – died and left him a legacy of £900, which in those days was quite a large sum of money. This gave him financial independence and he was able to afford a home for himself and his sister and to have a tiny income on which to live. He and Dorothy rented Racedown Farm and a new life began for them both. William discovered, in constant companionship with his sister, the real depths and riches of her character. He also met the poet Coleridge for the first time. Possibly Dorothy had more effect on her brother emotionally than Coleridge. From 1794 until she went insane in 1825 she and William were constant and devoted companions, as anyone who has read her diaries can soon discover. She was far more imaginative and observant than he and, as her diaries show, she was also a gifted writer. Wordsworth drew much of his inspiration from her. In spite of her great love for her brother, Dorothy does not seem to have felt any resentment

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or jealousy towards Annette, or later towards Mary Hutchinson, who became his wife. Coleridge probably met William when the latter was on a visit to Bristol. Then he came to stay at Racedown and their friendship deepened. The three became so fascinated with each other’s company that they decided they must live nearer one another. A month after Coleridge’s visit Dorothy and her brother moved from Racedown to a house they found at Alfoxden in Somerset, two miles from Nether Stowey, where Coleridge was living. Though they left Dorset for good their stay at Racedown was a turning point in Wordsworth’s life. Here he grew to know his sister Dorothy intimately and here he made a closer acquaintance with Coleridge and found the intellectual stimulus the latter’s friendship gave him. Here he came to realise that his real life’s work was to be a poet. He did not do his best work at Racedown – that was to come later – but he experimented continually and discovered for the first time the true creative joy to be found in poetry. This intense and perfect relationship between the three friends, however, did not last. There were tensions and stresses within it, caused possibly by its very intensity. The first sign of cleavage came when the Wordsworths and Coleridge went to Germany in 1798, where they separated. Coleridge went to Göttingen University to study metaphysics. William and Dorothy lived in poverty and isolation at Goslar, where in spite of shortage of money, Wordsworth wrote much good poetry. When they returned to England they again lived near each other, Coleridge in Keswick, William and Dorothy at Grasmere. Coleridge’s health, however, was giving him a good deal of trouble and to relieve his symptoms he began to take opium, to

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which he eventually became addicted. It was this habit which caused the final rift between him and the Wordsworth’s. William and Dorothy had settled at Townend, a tiny cottage not far from the lake. It is now open to tourists during the summer months. There is also a museum nearby, which contains many Wordsworthian relics, including some of the poet’s letters. On October 4th, 1802, he married Miss Mary Hutchinson of Penrith, whom he had known on and off since childhood. He brought his bride to live at this little cottage. With his marriage and settlement at Townend the external events of his life may be said to come to an end. Before his marriage, however, William and Dorothy paid a short visit to France to meet Annette and Caroline for the last time, and to make some reparation for the wrong he had done the French girl, though all love between them was now dead. Perhaps William chose Mary Hutchinson as his wife to provide that calm and security he may have needed as a contrast to Annette’s and Dorothy’s loves. Though she inspired her brother with her imagination and superior powers of observation, her sensitive love of Nature, she can never have been a soothing or relaxing companion. Mary seems to have been the opposite and gave William domestic peace. His first children were born at Townend and one wonders, walking through this tiny cottage, with its kitchen partly underground, how the poet managed to do any creative work. The house is small and damp and he had to share it with two women and a growing family. The sitting-room is upstairs; it is not very large, but it was here that he wrote most of his poetry, though he composed it wandering over the fells and mountains of his beloved Lake District.

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The life the young couple led was one of primitive simplicity. They were very poor, but their friends were always welcome. Coleridge and his family often stayed for months at the cottage. Mary and Dorothy gardened and lived on their produce. The description of Townend can best be left to Dorothy, in a letter she wrote dated September 10th 1800: “We have made a lodging room of the parlour below stairs, which has a stone floor (to this day a flight of steps leads up to the garden above), therefore we have covered it all over with matting. We sit in a room above stairs, and we have one lodging room with two single beds, a sort of lumber room and a small low unceiled room, which I have papered with newspapers and in which we have put a small bed. Our servant is an old woman of sixty years of age, whom we took partly out of charity”. Though his life in a modern sense seems peculiarly inhibited and dull, with a crowded home and hardly any domestic privacy, Wordsworth was living amidst the landscape he loved, surrounded by its magical beauty. He had his bitter sorrows too. He lost several children, he saw his friend, Coleridge, sink farther and farther into his drug addiction, and he lost a well-loved brother. In 1825, Dorothy’s chronic and lingering illness began. William was an affectionate father and many allusions to his children occur in his poetry. When his son died his grief was profound and lasting and its hurt and bitterness did not diminish with time. He was a man of deep passions, yet the characteristic calm and serenity of his poetry was the result of a deliberate philosophy and not of a cold nature. He was capable of

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moments of extreme ecstasy, and when the fits of poetic inspiration descended upon him, he was oblivious to everything else. The needs of his growing family forced Wordsworth at last to leave Townend and, after living at Allen Bank and Grasmere Parsonage, he finally settled at Rydal Mount, where he lived till he died in 1850. It was at this last home that recognition came to him. Wordsworth possessed the gift of poetic melody, which is an unconscious one. He did not always make use of his gift, however, and when he lacked it his poetry is pedestrian. This elusive poetic factor was his intermittently for twenty years of his literary life. When it had gone his poems lost all their power. The gift returned to him once in his old age, called back by an especially beautiful sunset and he wrote his lovely “Evening Ode”. “No sound is uttered, but a deep And solemn harmony pervades The hollow vales from steep to steep And pentrates the glades.” Between the years 1830-1840 he passed from being the apostle of a clique to become the most illustrious man of letters in England. His last days were completely tranquil. He died on April 23rd, 1850, and was buried as he wished in Grasmere churchyard. Memories of him linger thickest round the two small lakes of Grasmere and Rydal. On one or other of these lakes he lived for nearly fifty years. Dorothy survived her brother by five years, dying in 1855. Her death, though, was not as peaceful as his, because she had slipped into the dark, twilight world of insanity, and her bright, sensitive mind was clouded at the end of her days.

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8

Portesham and Nelson’s Hardy

THE geology of the area round Portesham and inland from the central part of the Chesil Beach, is rather unusual. There is Kimmeridge clay mixed with a belt of Lower Purbeck sand, varied with Portland stone and a layer of Bagshot beds on the summit of Blackdown Hill.

Portesham is a small, compact, little village clustered round a village green and nestling in an attractive valley at the foot of the Blackdown and Portesham Hills. It stands on the Abbotsbury-Weymouth road, about two miles from the former. On the hills above the village lie some ancient stone monuments belonging to the late Neolithic – or late Stone Age. These are five large stones called the Grey Mare and her colts, the Fallen Circle on Tenant Hill and the Hellstone, a chambered barrow on Blackdown, which has the distinction of being the only one of its kind in Dorset. Portesham Church is old and built of the local grey limestone. It probably looks much the same today as it did to the young Hardy when he was a boy. It had been almost entirely rebuilt several hundred years ago and the old bells, which rang folk to church in the Admiral’s childhood, are still ringing today. The tower arch and chancel doorway are 13th century; one of the nave walls belongs to the 12th century and the screen and

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panelled chancel are 15th century. Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, was a Dorset man born and bred. He was born in 1760 at the great house of Kingston Russell, which stands east of the village of Long Bredy, on the Burton-Bradstock Road. His mother was a Russell and his father was one Joseph Hardy of Portesham. The family was a colateral branch of the Dorset Hardys, who later produced that other Thomas Hardy, the famous novelist and poet. The two were probably distantly related. The family is said to be an old one and originally came from the Channel Islands. Young Thomas Masterman Hardy spent his childhood and early boyhood at Portesham House, a solid, little Georgian Manor facing the village green. One wing was apparently pulled down and its gardens were more extensive than they are today. It is, however, a pleasant enough little house, both inside and out, unpretentious but comfortable – this boyhood home of one of Nelson’s dearest friends. When he was a small child the family moved to Portesham and young Hardy was educated at the Old Grammar School at Milton Abbas. This was destroyed, along with the school buildings, which were pulled down by the then Lord Milton, a somewhat tyrannical peer, in the year 1780 or thereabouts. At 12 Hardy was sent to sea for a year, then returned to school. However, at the end of three years he seems to have tired of school and ran away to sea, joining the merchant marine and serving in the galley and as an ordinary seaman before the mast. Later he joined the Royal Navy, where he received rapid promotion, being made a lieutenant at 21. Actually, his career – apart from the fame Nelson’s friendship brought him – was not undistinguished.

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Portesham House, Weymouth.

Two years after being made a lieutenant the young Hardy met Lord Nelson and they were soon great friends. Once Hardy saved the future Admiral from defeat and capture. In 1796, Nelson met a Spanish squadron while in command of two frigates, with Hardy commanding a captured enemy ship. Nelson realised at once that he was hopelessly outnumbered and Hardy, taking in the situation swiftly, hauled the English flag above that of his prize, so drawing the Spaniards’ fire upon himself, while Nelson escaped. After a sharp fight Hardy and his ship were captured, but Nelson arranged for his exchange later for a Spanish prisoner and he rejoined his friend. Subsequently, Nelson saved Hardy’s life in return. They had a brush with a superior Spanish force and, while they were

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escaping, a seaman from Nelson’s ship fell overboard. Immediately, Hardy jumped into a boat, lowered it and rowed away to save the drowning sailor. “I’ll not lose Hardy! Back the mizzen topsail!” Nelson exclaimed, though the Spanish ships were rapidly overhauling him. The Spaniards were so taken by surprise at Nelson’s unexpected manoeuvre that they beat a hasty retreat. Nelson and Hardy were together at St. Vincent and at the battle of the Nile, when Hardy was made commander of the “Vanguard”. Finally he was appointed Nelson’s flag captain in the “Victory” and they stood together on that famous deck at the Battle of Trafalgar. Suddenly a sniper’s bullet shot from the mizzen top of the French ship “Redoubtable”, struck Nelson and he fell in the moment of victory. “They have done for me at last!” the striken man cried as he was carried below to his great cabin in the high poop of the “Victory”. Hardy was now in command of Nelson’s fleet until he could report to Collingwood. He had to remain on deck though Nelson repeatedly called for him. “How goes the battle, Hardy?” Then in his last moments Nelson gasped: “Kiss me, Hardy.” As his heartbroken friend bent over him, Nelson opened his dying eyes: “Who is that?” he murmered.

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“It is Hardy,” came his friend’s voice, full of grief. “God bless you, Hardy,” Nelson whispered. Though Nelson was dead, Hardy had another 30 years of service in the Navy before him. He was made a baronet and promoted to vice-admiral, then commander in home and American waters and finally he became Governor of Greenwich Hospital. He died in 1839. Nelson obviously cherished a deep and sincere affection for Hardy, which he felt perhaps for no other man. The latter was possibly the perfect foil for Nelson’s genius. Hardy was brave and generous and remained calm in every crisis and he was completely devoted to his superior officer. He never seems to have married nor is there mention of any woman in his life. When he died, his branch of the family died with him. Perhaps his name would never have been famous in the pages of history if it had not been coupled with that of the supreme Naval Commander. However, it would always be remembered in the county of his birth. Dorset has honoured Hardy by placing a tall monument on the heights of Blackdown Hill above the village of Portesham, to commemorate his memory. This stands as a tower 80 feet high. Once, one could climb the spiral staircase onto the balcony which ran all round the top of the tower, giving glorious views of the coast and the Channel. Now, however, the inside of the building is dangerous and the tower is closed to visitors. The area round it, though, is a favourite picnic spot for trippers and others during the summer months.

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Tolpuddle and its Martyrs

9

TOLPUDDLE is a quaint, grey village lying in the valley of the Puddle or Piddle, about seven miles from Dorchester. The soil is mainly upper chalk, with a wide belt of alluvial clay running along each side of the river. The name of the village is said to be of Danish origin. Tolpuddle itself borders each side of the A35 – the main Dorchester-Bournemouth road – which is busy with traffic in the summer. The church is about 800 years old, with some ancient bells and Communion plate. There are the remains of a couple of Norman doorways in the walls and the porch and nave retain their timbered medieval roofs. The old sycamore, known as the Martyr’s Tree, still stands on the village green and under it the village labourers met and decided to ask their employers, the local farmers, for higher wages. The grave of James Hammett – one of the Martyrs – lies in the churchyard and a memorial gateway has been erected before the Wesleyan Chapel. In the village are six cottages built by the Trades Union Congress in 1934. The fate of six men – humble farm labourers in this small Dorset village – has blazoned forever their names across the pages of history as the Tolpuddle Martyrs. These men never sought fame. They were all wretchedly poor and shockingly illpaid, victims of the evil social conditions of their time.

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Yet all through the injustice and darkness of their story their honesty, innocence and dignity shines like a beacon. They put to shame the characters of squire, parson, farmer, magistrate, judge and jury – and even the Government, who were all arraigned against them. They could not have known what lay before them, but at the same time it is possible that even if they had known what their fate would be, their courage and integrity would have remained the same. These six farm labourers, George Loveless and his brother, Joseph, Thomas Standfield and his son, John, James Hammett and young James Brine were hardworking, God-fearing men whose only crime was that they dared to ask their employers for a rise of a few more shillings a week on their pitiful wages. Why then was the whole weight of Government, of the Law, of local squirearchy, magistrates, the Church and the farmers brought to bear upon them? The answer probably lies in the times in which they lived. The aristocracy and landed gentry in the south of England were still afraid that the example of the French Revolution might arouse rebellion in the rural districts. Only four years before there had been a fierce revolt by farm labourers in southeast England. The farm-workers in Dorset were paid less than elsewhere and those in Tolpuddle met under the leadership of George Loveless and decided to ask their employers to pay them the same wage, which was paid in other parts of the country. All of them except James Brine were Methodists and George Loveless was a man of some education and learning, though he was completely self-taught. He and his brother, Joseph, were local preachers and this fact may account for the treacherous behaviour of the Tolpuddle vicar, Dr. Warren. Church of

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England clergymen in those days could be as arrogant towards the poor as any squire or titled landowner. They decided to ask the vicar to help them and he promised to do so. A meeting was arranged at the vicarage between them and the local farmers. During the entire proceedings the labourers behaved with the utmost courtesy and discretion. The farmers promised to pay them 10/- a week from now on. However, they soon showed they had no intention of doing so. So the labourers appealed to a local magistrate, a Mr. W. M. Pitt of Kingston House. They believed that magistrates had the power to arbitrate in wage disputes between employers and their workers. A meeting was called at Dorchester County Hall to settle the dispute. The chairman of the bench was a Mr. James Frampton, a wealthy landowner, who was to figure in subsequent events. He stated that no magistrate had the power to settle wage disputes and all labourers must work for the wages their masters chose to pay. Loveless was indignant and pointed out that an agreement had been reached between him and his friends and their employers. The vicar, Dr. Warren, had told them of his own free will: “I am a witness between you men and your masters that if you will go quietly to your work, you shall receive for your labours as much as any man in the district and if your masters should attempt to run from their word I will undertake to see you righted, so help me God.” The vicar denied flatly that he had ever spoken in this manner. His denial must have been a bad shock for the six friends. The magistrates then told the farmers that they were under no compulsion to pay higher wages, so they reduced the wages to 7/- and threatened to reduce them further to 6/-. The farm labourers then decided to join together for mutual

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protection. They met on the village green, under the leadership of George Loveless, who was obviously a man of outstanding natural talents. He already knew about the Trade Unions formed in London and in the industrial north of England, so he suggested that they should form one of their own. He got in touch with Trade Unionists in London, who sent two delegates to Tolpuddle and in October 1833 he and his friends established “The Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers”. The local landowners and farmers must soon have realised that something was brewing in the village, so they decided to plant one of their stooges amongst the farm workers to find out what was afoot. In December 1833, a labourer named Edward Legge was admitted as a member of the newly-formed union. He went through the usual initiation ceremony and took the solemn oath that all the others had taken. It should be pointed out that this secret oath taking had been adopted by all the Trade Unions, the Friendly Societies, the Orangemen and the Freemasons and there was nothing illegal about it. It had been practised for years with the knowledge and consent of the Government. Edward Legge betrayed his friends, though he had known them all for years. This is borne out by the correspondence which passed later between James Frampton and Lord Melborne, the Home Secretary in the Whig Government. It was Legge’s evidence which led to the arrest of the Tolpuddle men and his evidence which helped to convict them at the trial. On Monday 24th February 1834, as George Loveless left his cottage one cold dawn to go to work, he was met by the local constable who told him that he had a warrant for the arrest of him and his friends. Astonished, George Loveless asked what they had done. The

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A view of Tolpuddle and the Martyr’s Tree.

policeman handed him the warrant and Loveless read it with shock and dismay. It charged him with the administration of an illegal oath. After reading it, Loveless accompanied the constable to the homes of his friends and then the six men tramped the seven miles into Dorchester to begin their long martyrdom. They were taken to Dorchester prison and although they had not been charged with any crime they were stripped, searched, their heads were shaved and they were locked up as though they were dangerous criminals. It is obvious from the following events leading up to their conviction that the verdict was a foregone conclusion. In fact, everything was loaded against them. This is borne out by the actions of the local magistrates, the make-up of the Grand Jury

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and the trial jury – even the choice of judge by the Government. Yet these six men were acting within their rights and the only means found to condemn them, was the dragging up of an old Act passed during the reign of George III to deal with the Mutiny at the Nore. They were imprisoned in Dorchester Castle and then on Saturday, March 15th, they were taken to the County Hall and shut up in a damp and filthy cell, only opened twice a year for the Assize Courts. Meanwhile, the Government nominated the judge to preside over the trial. He was John Williams, K.C., one of their own supporters, who had been made a judge on February 28th 1834, only four days after the arrest of the six labourers. Before they were taken to open trial the prisoners were brought before the Grand Jury, whose business was to decide whether indeed there was any charge to make. The foreman was Mr. W. S. Ponsonby, the Whig M.P. for Dorset County and a brother-in-law of the home Secretary. The rest of the jury was composed of local magistrates, among whom was James Frampton. The trial jury seems to have been selected with great care and was made up entirely of Dorset farmers, who would be in favour of convicting the six men. The only two witnesses called were John Locke, whose father worked at Moreton House as a gardener for Mr. Frampton. He could obviously be relied upon to do and say what his master told him. The other was Edward Legge, the real traitor. The trial took place on Monday, March 17th 1834, but the verdict had already been decided. As George Loveless said

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later: “The greater part of the evidence against us ... was put into the mouths of the witnesses by the judge.” The sentence had also been decided beforehand. Seven years transportation over the seas. The judge told them that they were being punished not for what they had done, but as a warning and an example to others! Such was justice just over a hundred years ago. The six accused met the dreadful sentence with quiet dignity. As soon as it had been passed George Loveless wrote down the following verses: “God is our Guide! From field, from wave, From plough, from anvil and from loom, We come, our country’s right to save and speak the tyrant faction’s doom; We raise the watchword ‘Liberty.’ We will, we will, we will be free! God is our Guide! No swords we draw; We kindle not wor’s battle fires, By reason, union, justice, law, We claim the birthright of our sires; We kindle not war’s battle fires, We will, we will, we will be free! He is supposed to have been the author of this poem, but there is some evidence to show that the verses had been used several years before at Union meetings in the Midlands. After their trial the six men were hurried to Dorchester Jail and then to the dreaded prison hulks in Portsmouth harbour. Loveless, however, was too ill to travel and was left in Dorchester. His brother was taken to the “Leviathan”, and the other four men to the “York”. These hulks were old wooden warships, which were used as floating prisons and life aboard them was utterly degrading in

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its filth and misery. The prisoners were always chained from ankle to waist and these chains were never removed. The walls of the hulks, the prisoners’ clothes, their bodies and their beds were infested with vermin. From time to time terrible epidemics swept these floating hells. Punishments were savage – the worst perhaps being the severe floggings. These ended with the brine bath, in which the unfortunate sufferer was revived in appalling pain by the application of salt water to his torn and mangled back. Later, public outcry caused the use of these hulks as prisons to be abandoned. On March 29th the two Standfields, Hammett and Brine were transferred by lighter to the convict ship “Surrey” lying at Spithead. Here they were later joined by Joseph Loveless. George Loveless was still too ill to travel, so he remained in Dorchester Prison till April 5th. He did not know then that the authorities intended he should never join his brother or his friends. They were sailing to New South Wales. Loveless was destined for Tasmania. The five who had sailed in the “Surrey” were landed on the site of what is now the great city of Sydney, while Loveless arrived in Tasmania. All new convicts in Australia were the property of the governor, who often “assigned” them to settlers when he did not need them for Government work. If the convict was lucky to find a kindly master, he was all right, but often the settlers were quite indifferent to the health or welfare of the wretched men “assigned” to them. The law stated that the convict should receive a small wage and he should get enough to eat. As many of these settlers, however, lived in remote parts of the bush, they did not worry unduly about obeying the rules. The unfortunate convict knew only too well that if he did

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complain, he would probably receive a severe flogging. There existed also penal settlements where convicts were sent when they tried to escape, or assaulted their masters or overseers. Some of these places were so appalling that men seldom came out of them alive. George Loveless was assigned to the Governor’s farm at New Town, Tasmania. There he was asked by a local magistrate to send for his wife and children, but Loveless refused to do this as long as he remained a convict. Pressure was also put on him by the Governor and at last he gave in, fearing a flogging and wrote to his wife, Betsy, on January 27th 1836. Then on February 5th 1836 he was given his liberty and allowed to seek work on his own. However, without friends or money it was difficult to find any, till at last he was offered a job by a Major de Gillern at Glenayr, with who he stayed for the rest of his time in Tasmania. Joseph Loveless, Thomas Standfield, his son, John, James Hammett and James Brine were lodged first in Hyde Park Barracks and then assigned to their various masters. Of all the friends, Thomas was having the worst time. He was older than the rest and he had neither youth, strength nor stamina to stand up to the bad conditions under which they all lived. John Standfield, on the other hand, was working under better conditions and his lot was bearable. Then he was suddenly arrested in January 1836 and taken to prison at Maitland. Here he was joined by his father and they were sent back to Sydney, where they were later joined by Joseph Loveless and James Brine who, at 20, was the youngest of them all. After he had been in Sydney a short time young Brine was suddenly put on a ship sailing for Norfolk Island, which was the

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worst of all the penal settlements and in which nearly all the prisoners died. Fortunately, a storm got up and blew the ship back to Newcastle and young Brine was returned to Sydney. The Australian authorities had already received a notification from the British Government that a conditional pardon had been granted the five men and they were to be freed as soon as two years had passed. This had happened because back in England a gathering tide of anger and protest at the fate of these six innocent men was sweeping the country, especially among the trade unions. Petitions poured into Parliament and M.P.’s began to interest themselves in the case. At first the Establishment was hostile, then indifferent, but the agitation swelled in volume till at last – with a change of Government – the new Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, stated that King William IV had granted a free pardon to all the six friends. And what of the wives and children of the Martyrs? Local persecution did not stop with the trial, but pursued their families. They were evicted from their cottages, refused Parish Relief and had to depend upon the help of their relatives and friends to escape starvation. However, money had been raised throughout the country and was sent to Tolpuddle to relieve those unfortunate victims in their dire distress. In the spring of 1836, while George Loveless was still at Glenayr, he read in the ‘LONDON DESPATCH’ which Major de Gillern had given him, that the Home Secretary had stated that all the six men were to be pardoned and given free passages back to England. The Governor of Tasmania offered Loveless a passage home

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in the “Eliphstone”, which was sailing shortly. Loveless, however, had already written to his wife asking her to join him, so he begged to be allowed to remain in Tasmania till he heard from her. At first this request was refused, but he persisted till permission was granted for him to wait. He received a letter from Betsy on 23rd December 1836, in which she said she was not coming to Tasmania. Loveless then sailed for England on January 30th 1837 on the “Encline”. The Australian Government’s treatment of the two Standfields and Joseph Loveless was as inexplicable as that of young James Brine. One morning they were called into the office of the Principal Superintendent, who told them that a conditional pardon would be given them after they had served three years of their sentence. This was not true, but for some reason the Australian authorities seemed very reluctant to free them and decided to send them to the penal settlement at Port Macquarie, New South Wales. As this place had a very bad reputation the four friends petitioned to be returned to their former masters. It will never really be known why the Australian Government was so dilatory in sending the Tolpuddle men back to England. Part of the explanation might be, that both the Governors of New South Wales and of Tasmania apparently had their own troubles and other problems on their minds, beside the fate of the six convicts. Governor Arthur of Tasmania was a martinet and was under attack from the press and from individual settlers, because of his dictatorial ways. He was also due to leave the colony at the end of October 1836. The Governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, also had his own worries. He was involved in a quarrel with his Treasurer and tendered his resignation in January 1837.

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Then, too, bureaucratic communication in Australia between one department and another was very slow. So there might well have been a time-lag between receiving the free pardon and telling the convicts about it. Though even these facts do not seem to cover the whole story. John Standfield, meanwhile, had written to George Loveless and heard from him that a full pardon had been granted them. George also told them how to secure a free passage home. Joseph Loveless, however, had been transferred to another farm about 50 miles from Sydney and he knew nothing of the free pardon. A friend told him in December 1836 that a notice of this had appeared in one of the local newspapers. So at last the four men sailed from Sydney on September llth 1837, in the ship “John Barry”. Meanwhile, James Hammett was still in the Colony. His friends did not know where he was, nor had they heard a word from him since they had landed in Australia. He did not return to England till August 1839 and never said very much about his experiences in Australia. He had always been a very reserved and quiet man. The other five friends went back to Tolpuddle for a while, but they did not stay there. James Frampton was still very much in the ascendant among the Dorset magistrates and very hostile towards the Trade Union Movement. Tolpuddle was also much the same as when they left it. There was widespread unemployment and most farm workers were still paid miserable wages. Two farms had been leased in Essex for the six friends by the Dorchester Labourers’ Farm Tribute. One was Fenners Farm, together with 43 acres near the village of Tilegate Green, High Laver. The other was a farm of 80 acres, New House Farm near the village of Greensted.

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Father and son Standfield, along with their families, moved into Fenners Farm. George and Joseph Loveless with their families and, accompanied by young James Brine, took possession of New House Farm. The bonds were further strengthened when James married Elizabeth Standfield. Meanwhile, Hammett arrived to join the New House Farm household for a short time, but he left in 1841 and returned to Tolpuddle, where he remained till his death. He did not resume his old trade of an agricultural labourer, but became a building worker instead. The Standfields, Brine and Lovelesses, continued to interest themselves in the Chartist movement, which they had first joined on their return to England. Their activities aroused much hostility in the neighbourhood, especially with the two Church of England parsons of both villages. Church of England clergymen of the last century – at any rate in country districts – do not seem to have had very much sympathy with the struggles and aspirations of the poor. Then in 1844, for a reason which will never be known, the three families decided to emigrate to Canada. Their silence on the subject seems to have been deliberate. Perhaps it was the hostility with which they were met in their involvement with the Chartist Movement. Perhaps it was the notoriety which still pursued them wherever they went. They might have felt they could live more peacefully in Canada, where they were unknown. Whatever the reason for which they went, they remained for good and they prospered in the country of their choice. They died there and their descendants still live in the country.

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Sturminster Newton, Winterborne Came and William Barnes

STURMINSTER Newton, where William Barnes went to school, is an ancient town with a fine old six-arched bridge over the Stour, joining Sturminster with Newton on the other side of the river.

The geology of this area is mainly coralline limestone sands, but on both sides of the Stour is a wide bed of alluvial clay. The history of the town dates back 1000 years. The Saxons were here and have left behind the ruins of an old fort or king’s palace. The poet was born at Rushay Farm, near Sturminster, though the farmhouse has gone now. Sturminster church is probably much as he remembered it as a boy, with its 500 year old wagon roof and medieval tower. It also contains an oak lectern erected in Barnes’ memory. Sturminster market place probably looks much the same as it did in his childhood, with the old stone steps of the broken cross where he played as a boy. Winterborne Came, where the poet died, lies on Wareham road, about a couple of miles out of Dorchester, in pretty rolling country. The geology is mainly chalk and valley gravel. The church has some 15th century windows, a Jacobean pulpit and a lovely old screen. The Rectory is still there, a pleasing thatched house in a long garden, probably not much changed since the poet’s day. There is no village, only some old barns

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and buildings, a farmhouse, the church and the Rectory, all part of the old Came House estate. The Barnes family was probably an old one of Dorset Yeoman stock, but they had fallen on hard times when William was born in 1801 and were very poor. He was one of a large family and his father’s farm at Rushay was too small to support them, so Barnes Senior had to work for better-off neighbours to supplement their income. William was one of five sons and one daughter and his mother seems to have been a refined and artistic woman. Unfortunately, she died when he was five. Possibly he inherited his sensitivity and poetic gifts from her. Certainly he never forgot her, though he could not have remembered a great deal about her. He was a delicate child and she seems to have worried about his future, but he grew up eventually into a fine, tall man. The boy early showed a decided artistic bent and he was also a very intelligent youngster with a great love of books. However, as one of a large family whose parents were poor, he had to go to work early, so he left school while still in his teens and entered a Sturminster solicitor’s office as an engraving clerk. He was allowed to continue with his drawing and he attracted the interest of the local vicar, who taught him the beginnings of Greek and Latin. Fortunately for him, under these circumstances his education did not finish when he left school. He also attended classes in music at the local Institute, where he was able to study under a gifted teacher named Mr. Spinney. William decided as he grew older that he did not want to stay in a small place like Sturminster, but wished to try his wings in the larger world beyond the confines of this quiet country town. He went to Dorchester in 1818 and obtained a position in the

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office of a Mr. Thomas Coombs, an old-established firm in the town. Here again someone took an interest in the gifted young man. This time it was the Reverend W. Rickman, Rector of Holy Trinity Church and Headmaster of Hardy’s School. This clergyman introduced him to archaeology as well as encouraging him to continue with his engraving. Young Barnes now started writing poetry and in a couple of years was being published in ‘THE WEEKLY EXAMINER’, a Dorset paper. Also in 1820 he published his first slim volume of poems, which was dedicated to a Miss Julia Miles. One day, so the story runs, while still only 18, William saw alighting from a stage-coach in Dorchester High Street a young woman with whom he fell instantly in love. She was slim, with curly brown hair and blue eyes and she was full of vibrant life. This lovely girl was a Miss Julia Miles, daughter of an excise officer. William did not make her acquaintance, however, till sometime later, but her parents frowned on him as a suitor. They probably considered him far too young and his worldly prospects as a humble clerk in a solicitor’s office were, after all, rather bleak. He soon realised that he would have to better himself if he was ever to marry his Julia. He was deeply in love with her and he remained so all his life. He decided to try schoolmastering instead and resigned from his post with Mr. Coombs and moved to Mere, in Wiltshire, where he bought a school which had been run by a Mr. Robertson, who had since died. At first sight this did not appear to offer any better prospects than his job as a clerk. The late schoolmaster had conducted his school in a loft and by the time he had died the number of pupils had dwindled to ten. William had to set to work and build the

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school up again. After a while his pupils increased to 24, while he still carried on with his engraving to supplement his income. Then he was lucky and obtained the lease of the Old Chantry House, which had six rooms upstairs and a large garden. So now he could further increase his school by taking in boarders. William had to wait seven years altogether for his Julia, but at last they were married at the Parish Church, Nailsea, a Somerset village about ten miles from Bristol, where she and her parents were now living. The wedding was on 19th July, 1827, and William took his bride home to Mere. Julia was enthusiastic about the school and soon was a great help, as she was a good organiser, while William began to study languages in order to become a more proficient teacher. He added French, Italian and German to his Latin and Greek. Some writers have liked to portray him as an uncouth, unpolished farmer’s son, which could not be farther from the truth. He was instead a sensitive, intellectual and artistic young man of many parts, very highly gifted indeed. In spite of their lack of money the young couple seem to have had a pleasant enough social life. They must have been an attractive pair, William with his many gifts and Julia with her lively beauty and they made many friends. Their first child, Laura, was born in 1829 and their second, Julia in 1833. In fact, Julia presented her husband with six children in all, four daughters and two sons, William and Egbert. In 1833, Julia’s father was killed when he was thrown from his gig and her mother left Nailsea, to make her home with the young couple at Mere. She proved to be an unexpected asset in running the domestic side of the school.

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Whitcombe Church, near Dorchester. William Barnes’ first parish.

William was happy enough but secretly he was homesick for Dorset and also he felt he needed more scope for his talents, as well as his future plans. So he and Julia gave up the school at Mere and with his children and his mother-in-law, the entire family moved to Dorchester, where they started another school. They settled first in Downgate Street then, as the school began to grow, they moved to larger premises in South Street. In some ways Barnes’ methods of teaching were before his time. He was a firm disbeliever in corporal punishment or of applying too many restrictions down on his pupils, though he was very down on one thing – lying – which he would not tolerate. Besides his teaching activities he continued to write, mainly articles and poetry and in 1844 his second book of poems was published by the ‘DORSET COUNTY CHRONICLE’. This

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was a happy, active time for him and Julia. His school was a success, his literary efforts were being published and he also began to lecture extensively. Though in one way his life may be said to have been confined to one place and therefore narrow in outlook, in other ways his horizons had widened out. This type of life could also lead to a greater concentration of talent. His simplicity and his deep, abiding love of the county which had bred him, gave to his poetry a freshness and charm and a faithfulness to rural life, which was all its own. William Barnes will never remain anything but a minor poet, but now and then out of the pages of his verse a single poem will shine with startling beauty, in content, in music and in form. It has often been wondered why he chose to write in dialect, instead of ordinary English, when his poetry would have been available to a far wider audience. Perhaps the explanation given by Dorset’s other famous writer and poet, Thomas Hardy, might explain this attitude. “He (Barnes) himself simply said he could not help it, no doubt feeling his idylls to be extemporisation or impulse, without provision or power of appraisement on his own part.” William himself also gave his own reasons, which are to be found in the preface to his Philological Grammar. Philology was the poet’s other passion, but his works nowadays are probably of little value to modern specialists or students of the language. In 1837 Barnes’ name was included in the books of St. John’s College, Cambridge “as a ten years’ man”, though he did not receive his degree of B.D. until 1850. He was also among those who were instrumental in founding the Dorset County Museum, which was first housed in 1845 in Back South Street, while Barnes and the Reverend Bingham

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were appointed its honorary secretaries. This is now one of the most important provincial museums in the country, because of its valuable collections of prehistoric and historic objects. In 1847 William was ordained as a deacon and accepted the living of Whitcombe from his friend and patron, Captain Darner of Came House. This was a tiny parish just outside Dorchester, next to the living of Came. A year later he was ordained as a priest. And then in 1852 he suffered a crushing blow in the death of his adored wife, Julia, a blow from which he never fully recovered, though he himself was to live for another 30 years. Julia had been ailing for some little time and her health deteriorated altogether. The doctors of those days could do nothing for her and she died on 21st June 1852, at 11 o’clock in the morning. She left behind a heartbroken husband and six children, Laura and Julia who were 23 and 20 respectively, Lucy and Isabel 16 and 14, and the two boys, William Miles 12 and little Egbert who was only nine. Mrs. Miles went on running the house and the domestic side of the school for her son-in-law, but, unfortunately, she, too, died a year after Julia. This left only William’s two older daughters to cope with everything – the school, the home, their father and the four younger children, a formidable enough task for two young girls. There is little doubt that the decline of Barnes’ school really started after Julia’s death, though of course this decline did not show immediately. His early prosperous years had come to an end and ahead of him lay grief, loneliness and ebbing fortunes. In 1853 his ‘PHILOLOGICAL GRAMMAR’ was published, for which he received the princely sum of £5. In fact, neither his books nor

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his poetry brought him in a steady income and when his “GRAMMAR” was published he was in bad financial trouble. He had a large family and big expenses to meet and the education of his sons to consider. The number of his pupils began to dwindle and in fact his debts and disappointments weighed so heavily on the spirits of this gentle man, that he once remarked bitterly to one of his daughters: “They might be putting up a statue to me one day when I am dead, when all I want now is leave to live – I asked for bread and they gave me a stone.” At last, ten years after Julia’s death, the poet was to find some measure of freedom from financial worry when in 1862 Captain Damer gave him the living of the little cottage rectory of Winterborne Came. Here William spent the last 23 years of his life in peace and security. This meant, though, that he had to give up his school. As rector of Winterborne Came and of Whitcombe he could not teach and carry on the work of two parishes as well. He also had a steady income, though minute by modern standards, as well as a comfortable rectory and a good garden. These last years were passed surrounded by friends, of whom Thomas Hardy was perhaps the closest. Now, too, at last his poetry began to bring him a measure of fame and a just recognition. Some of his friends were famous people from abroad as well as at home. It was not, however, only the literary famous who were drawn to this gentle and learned man. His parishioners and less fortunate neighbours found in him a sympathetic friend, listening to their troubles, perplexities and joys and trying to help them where he could. One of his parishioners once remarked: “We do all of us love the passon, that we do, he be so plain.”

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In fact, it was William Barnes’ love of humanity as well as his love of nature, which inspired his poetry. He was not blind to the social evils of his day and lectured and wrote about them. His fame had even spread to the United States. He was indeed someone of whom Dorset could justly be proud, not only for his poetry but also for his personality and character. He was also very fortunate in having the love and care of his eldest daughter, Laura, for she looked after the house and helped him with his scattered parish. On 27th July 1885 Barnes drove to Dorchester for the last time to see the decorations and the preparations for the visit of the Volunteers. His interest in everything was still keen, but his strength was failing now. He was at last confined to his room, though his friends still came to visit him. He was almost entirely crippled and unable to leave his bed, but he had his devoted Laura to look after him. He died peacefully in his sleep on 7th October 1886 and was buried in the little churchyard of Winterborne Came. A statue of William Barnes by the sculptor Roscoe Mullins stands at the top of High West St., Dorchester, front of St. Peter’s Church. On a bronze plaque fixed to the base is written: “William Barnes 1801-1886. But now I hope his kindly feace Is gone to vind a better pleace; But still, wi’ vo’k a-left behind He’ll always be a-kept in mind.”

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Wimborne St. Giles and the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

WIMBORNE St. Giles lies between Wimborne and Gussage All Saints, and is a pretty, quiet village clustering round a wide green, with picturesque alms houses standing next to the church and the park gates.

The church, into one side of which the almshouses are built – rather an unusual combination – has been much restored. It contains the bust of the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury and there is a picture of a robin by the altar, the bird having chosen that spot for making a nest while the church was being restored. An inscription reads: “Here while the respond of the arcade of 1887 was building a robin nested, and again during the building of the new arcade after the fire of 1908.” (Surely not the same robin?) The river Allen runs through the park, which also contains a large lake and an avenue 1000 yards long leads up to Giles House, the Elizabethan home of the Earls of Shaftesbury. The geology of this area is mainly chalk. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, was one of the great social reformers of the 19th century and a man with some strange contradictions of character. He was a Tory in politics, he came of an old and respected family, owning large estates in Dorset, he was a rigid and narrow Evangelical

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Christian and he threw a possibly brilliant political career away in his zeal for social reform. He was haunted by lack of self-confidence, introverted, deeply religious and extremely ambitious. He was moved by a deep compassion for the poor and outcast children of society, who lived and worked in the first evil days of the Industrial Revolution. Poverty shocked and angered him, yet he accepted the political and social order of his day without question. The conditions under which women and children worked in the factories and mines stand as a terrible indictment upon the whole of the social system of 19th century England. Lord Shaftesbury and his fellow reformers had to attack this system root and branch. He not only made a dent in it, he radically altered it in many ways and he was particularly concerned with the children. Perhaps the key to this and to the contradictions in his character lie in his own childhood. Anthony Ashley-Cooper was born on 28th April 1801, the son and heir of the 6th Earl of Shaftesbury. His father must have been a forbidding parent, immersed in public affairs and quite uninterested in his son. His mother was a daughter of the Duke of Marlborough, equally indifferent to her children, but for a different reason. As the mistress of a great house and daughter of a far greater one, she led the gay life of a titled woman of fashion. The children were neglected by their parents and left to the care of servants, an all-too common picture in aristocratic households of the 19th century. However, Lady Shaftesbury’s maid Maria Mellis, who had accompanied her mistress when the latter married Lord Shaftesbury, became devoted to the shy, sensitive little boy. Maria probably gave him the only love and care he was to know in his lonely, affection-starved childhood. She also gave him a lasting and sincere belief in her religion.

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Certainly he never forgot her. Then, as was customary for the heirs of great names, he was sent away to boarding school at the age of seven. The establishment was at Chiswick and was called a school for the sons of gentlemen. It is not possible in this century to realise how terrible some of these boarding or preparatory schools really were. Dickens has described one in ‘NICHOLAS NICKELBY’ and the picture he draws is possibly no exaggeration. They were places of dirt, hunger, squalor and brutality, which was the daily portion of the shrinking, helpless juniors and new boys. Here, during his first term the sensitive, small boy learnt how savage life could be. He probably never forgot his early experiences, but instead of brutalising him as they did many of the boys, the school may well have given him insight later into the more appalling sufferings of the children of the poor. At this school he also received an additional blow on learning of the death of his one friend in the world, Maria Mellis. This must have added to his misery, homesickness and loneliness. However, he managed to survive somehow and after his twelfth birthday he was sent to Harrow, where he seems to have been fairly happy. He spent most of his holidays at Wimborne St. Giles, which he loved. His father had now inherited the title and estates from his brother who died in 1811. Anthony was now Lord Ashley. In 1816 the boy was sent to Derbyshire for two years to live with a clergyman, who was to tutor him for Oxford. Anthony had always suffered from fits of depression and lack of selfconfidence, but he seems to have overcome some of this when he went to Christ Church, Oxford in 1819. He worked hard enough and because he was modest and extremely good looking, he had many admiring acquaintances, but few close friends.

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He did not know what he wanted to be – though science tempted him – he had a clear mind with a passion for facts, which was later to help him in his work as a social reformer. However, in the end he followed the family tradition and entered politics as a Tory, to which political party he remained faithful all his life. He became an M.P. in 1826, being elected as Member for Woodstock, a pocket borough belonging to his uncle the Duke of Marlborough. Anthony was still very diffident and he found public speaking difficult, though there were others who did not share his low opinion of himself. When Wellington’s government fell in 1827 and Canning became Prime Minister, he asked young Lord Ashley to accept office under him. A Bill was introduced into the new Parliament to amend the law dealing with the treatment of the insane. A Commission, of which young Ashley was a member, had already been appointed to enquire into the subject. Though he did not know it at the time, he was already beginning his life’s work of social reform. Next he accepted the Chairmanship of the newly-formed body of Commissioners of Lunacy, which he held till his death. About this time Ashley also fell desperately in love with Lady Emily, daughter of Lord Cowper and a niece of Lord Melbourne. She was one of the loveliest girls of the London Season and she also fell deeply in love with this handsome but strangely serious young man. They were married in June 1830. In 1831 the Tory Government was defeated over the Reform Bill and there was a general election. Ashley was returned as an anti-reformist for Dorset. The Reform Bill was finally passed in 1832, but Michael Sadler, champion of the Rights of Man, was beaten in the election at Hull by Thomas B. Macaulay, and the reformers had no one now in Parliament to help them. Then the Reverend Bull, their member in London, remembered the exceptional manner in which young Ashley

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The Church and Almshouses, Wimborne St. Giles, near Wimborne. Ancestral home of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.

had supported the cause of the Insane in 1828, so when Parliament met again he called on Ashley and asked him if he would help with the factory reforms that he and his friends were determined to bring about. In the manufacturing towns which had sprung up in the industrial north, the factories were based on nothing less than child slave labour. Children under six worked 15 hours a day and were often beaten or put into baths of cold water to keep them awake. Thousands in a single town were hopelessly crippled before they grew up. In districts where there were many factories, as many young people died under 20 as the rest of the country put together. These children were needed in the factories to feed the spinners’ and weavers’ machines. Very many of them were

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orphans from workhouses or they were put into the mills by their starkly poor parents. They became deformed after a few years, broken in spirit, often too worn out to eat or sleep and with no time left for school or play. Other men of course had advocated reforms long before Ashley, among whom were Sir Robert Peel, father of the great Peel, John Hobhouse, John Fielden, Richard Oastler, Cobbett and Dr. Bell. At first Ashley was completely ignorant of the conditions in the factories and it was not till he went north to visit the manufacturing towns and see them for himself, that he realised with pity and horror what was really going on. In 1832 his committee’s report was published, to be read by the rest of the country with shock and dismay. Many of these working children had to walk 15 or 20 miles a day to and from work, starting before dawn, too sleepy to eat any breakfast and toiling for 12 hours or more. One witness said he had three children, the youngest only eight, who worked in a mill from 3 a.m. till 10 p.m. at night. In March 1833 Ashley introduced the first of his Bills to limit the hours of work of these youngsters, stating that no one between the ages of nine and 18 were to work more than ten hours daily and eight on Saturdays, with no night work for those under 21 and no employment at all for any child under nine years old. Mill owners who failed to abide by these rules were to be penalised on the third offence. This Bill met with great opposition from the factory owners, who had increased their M.P.s in the reformed Parliament. The chief part of the Bill, its stipulations concerning hours of work, was defeated. In fact, as Cobbett remarked in bitter cynicism, it appeared that England’s defences were not her Navy, nor the

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Bank but “30,000 little girls,” for if they worked two hours a day less “our manufacturing superiority would depart from us.” The Bill did pass in the end and became the first Factory Act of 1833. Though Ashley did not get his ten hour day he did get his other reforms, including one that inspectors were to be appointed to see that all the provisions of the Act were properly enforced. Ashley then turned his attention to the silk, woollen and pin making industries. All these he had seen for himself, following his custom of acquainting himself with all the essential facts. He demanded the appointment of two Commissions of Enquiry, one into the working of the 1833 Act and the other to look into the mines and other industries. In the pin making factories, he declared, children went to work at the age of five and were exhausted by the time they reached 15, living as best they could on “plunder, prostitution and pauperism.” In May 1842 the report on child and female labour in the mines was published by the Royal Commission, shocking the Commons. Women and children were treated no better than beasts of burden. The women worked naked to the waist, harnessed to trucks, often for 18 hours a day. Seven was the usual age for small children to be sent to the mines and their main function was to replace the ponies, when the galleries grew too low for these animals to get through. The children were fastened to the coal trucks by chains between their legs and dragged them along the dark, dripping galleries. Other children sat in the darkness all day opening and closing the trap doors for the coal wagons. These trap doors were also the only means of ventilating the mines. Young teenage girls worked side by side with the miners, who were often naked. These girls were called “hurriers” and sometimes suffered cruel headaches, because they pushed their

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way with their heads through the very low passages. They wore skull caps but they often lost all their hair. Sexual intercourse frequently took place between the colliers and their girl companions, when they were working on lonely seams. Babies were born down in the mines and those girls who got married continued to work in the mines while they were pregnant. Many of their luckless infants were still-born. Children and adults were often under the control of the “butties” – or middlemen – who could be very brutal, because there was no one over them to see that they did not abuse their powers. The children frequently suffered from lung and skin complaints, and the over-use of certain muscles deformed their poor, little bodies. In June 1842 Ashley introduced his Bill to forbid women and all boys under 13 from working in the mines. It was passed through the Commons, but met intense opposition from the mine owning peers in the Lords, led by Lord Londonderry. They passed the Bill at last, but with many amendments, including lowering the age of employment for boys to ten. Ashley wrote later of the peers: “Never have I seen such a display of selfishness, frigidity to every human sentiment, such ready and happy self-delusion.” He also spent a great deal of time serving on public bodies, enquiring into the lives lived by the poor. He was very careful to see conditions for himself and to gather all the facts he could before he decided to act. One of his next activities was a Bill to improve the lunacy laws. Since the latter part of the 18th century, Magistrates and Justices had the power to confine any dangerous or incurable lunatic. Because there were so few asylums their powers had often been abused. It was still felt to be a disgrace to have anyone mentally ill in the family, and those who were better off might be taken away to some private asylum and literally never heard of again.

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The only place of incarceration for the poor was the workhouse, where the unfortunate lunatic was often teased and sometimes even tortured. If he was fortunate enough to be left alone he might spend his life chained like a savage dog to a piece of furniture or in an outhouse or solitary shed. The descriptions of some of the conditions under which these unfortunate people were kept, both in workhouses and in private asylums, are unbelievable. Hundreds of respectable Londoners thought it quite amusing to visit Bedlam, where they were charged 2d to watch the mad unfortunates behind bars. As well as Ashley there was a Mr. George Rose, a Vice President of the Board of Trade, who exposed the dreadful conditions in some of the public asylums. Ashley and his fellow reformers fought from 1828 till 1845, when at last they were able to introduce a Bill which later became known as “The Magna Carta of the Insane”. When this became law the New Act stated that all lunatic asylums should come under the control of Commissioners. That is – all except Bedlam, where vested interests were too strong and it was another eight years before that institution too became subject to the Commissioners’ control. Every county had to provide or build asylums, which were to have regular doctors, while case books were to be kept for every patient. There were regulations too to prevent illegal detention. For better-off patients the certificates of two doctors were required, but for poorer people and paupers a Poor Law Official or magistrate as well as a doctor had to see the patient. In August 1845 blight was reported on the Kent potato crop and the harvest was damaged, because September was continually wet. People were starving, especially in Ireland where the potato was the staple crop. Peel announced that the

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Corn Laws must be repealed. Ashley, however, was not in favour of this. He wanted gradual abolition instead, so he felt bound to resign. He left his Bill for the introduction of the 10 hour day in the hands of John Fielden, the M.P. for Oldham, who was himself a rich mill owner. However, that did not prevent him from taking the Bill over from Ashley, though he had everything to lose if it was passed, while Ashley had not. In fact Fielden supported it with such energy that Ashley, though out of office, at last saw his Bill become law after its third reading in 1847. The 10 hour day was a fact at last, but the mill owners soon found a way to get round this by instituting a relay system, which kept young people hanging about in the factories while they were not working. Curiously, Ashley did nothing to stop this disgraceful evasion. It was not till 1874 that the 10 hour day became a real act and not one in name only. Ashley spent the rest of his time visiting the London slums and studying the dire poverty there for himself. He was shocked and horrified by what he saw – men, women and children living like animals in overcrowded and filthy surroundings, hungry and subject to epidemics of disease. He was asked to become Chairman of the new Central Board of Health, and he agreed though he realised that this would undoubtedly involve him in “trouble, anxiety, reproach, abuse, unpopularity”. He decided that action must be taken immediately to abolish the back to back, vermin ridden houses permeated with the stink of ancient sewers. His vision was perhaps in some ways longer than the other reformers of his day. He wanted to produce, not only better and healthier working conditions, but healthier and happier people. Those reformers in 1840 who worked with him, realised the truth of his ideal that “Good drainage, good ventilation, good and healthy houses and an ample supply of cold water” were

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essentials to health. His life now was suddenly touched by personal tragedy. His much loved second son, Francis, died of pneumonia at Harrow. The boy’s death caused deep and bitter grief to both his parents, but especially to his father. In 1851 Ashley’s own father died and he inherited the title and could now turn his attention to Wimborne St. Giles. It is another curious contradiction in his character that though he did so much for the women and children of the industrial north and the London slums, he thought so little about alleviating the lot of the agricultural labourers, whose whole existence, financial and otherwise, had been rendered far worse by the passing of the Enclosure Acts and the theft of their Common Lands. He did try to found schools for the illiterate village children and even sold some family pictures to start some of these. He also tried to alleviate the local farm workers’ lives by forbidding the farmers to pay their men’s wages in kind instead of with money. These reforms, however, were only in his own villages, not in the countryside at large. He then turned his attention to the orphaned or deserted children of London, who slept where they could, earned their living mainly by stealing or picking pockets, selling matches or sweeping crossings. For these wild, deserted children he started his ragged schools. He next tried to help the wretched little chimney sweeps, whose lives were so vividly portrayed in Charles Kingsley’s book ‘THE WATER BABIES’. In 1847 a master-sweep in Manchester was sentenced to be transported for ten years for the manslaughter of a boy of seven, who worked as his apprentice. The child had protested and screamed when his master had sent him up a chimney for the second time, and when he came down again he was

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unconscious. The sweep beat him to bring him round and the boy died. In Nottingham in 1850, a young boy was chimey above a roaring fire and though he was alive he died later of his dreadful burns. As accidents little chimney sweeps were also particularly virulent form of skin cancer.

jammed in a brought down well as these subject to a

In spite of these horrible casualties housewives still insisted on having their chimneys swept by these little boys, instead of by the newly invented chimney brushes. This stupidity, ignorance and selfishness was first exposed by a man called Jonas Hanway. Then Shaftesbury took up the battle but it was not until a press campaign started in 1875, that he was able to bring in his Bill laying down that every Master Sweep should be licensed each year, and boys should not be allowed up chimneys, the licence being revoked if this happened. Though Shaftesbury did nothing to help the farm labourer he did alleviate the lives of the Field Gangs, who worked mainly in the East Midlands and who were composed of children and young girls. They worked under the control of a gang-master, who was often as brutal as the mine “butties”. Shaftesbury got a Commission set up, called the Children’s Employment Commission, to enquire into the conditions under which these young people worked. He received their report in 1867. Some children had to walk 16 miles to work a 9 1/2 hour day. The death rate in this industry was very high and they suffered badly from rheumatism and rheumatic disorders even in their teens. Immorality was also rife and many girls, only children of 13 and 14, became pregnant. Shaftesbury introduced a Bill in 1867 to forbid the

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employment of children under eight years and of all girls under 11. No girl under 18 was to work in a public gang. The landed interests were too strong for him, and the first Bill was thrown out. It was not till 1873, when Gladstone was Prime Minister, that his second Bill was passed. He then began a crusade to help the children employed in the brickyards and got the Factory Acts extended to cover them as well. He and his helpers had established the principle that later Governments were to carry on – that it was the right and duty of the State to interfere with companies, or individuals, who were exploiting or ill-using any citizen for profit. Shaftesbury was now 70 and tired out with a lifetime of work for social betterment, though he had only made a beginning. His last years might have passed in peace and contentment, but instead they were harrowed by grief and personal loss. Palmerston, his friend and step-father-in-law died in 1865, and his two loved daughters, Mary and Constance, fell ill with that all-too common scourge of the 19th century – tuberculosis. Mary died first and then came the most terrible blow of all. His adored and loving wife, Minnie, who had supported him through everything during all their married life, became very ill. She was worn out with nursing the two girls and fighting the hopeless battle for their lives. The doctors told Shaftesbury that her illness might prove fatal and in fact she died on October 16th 1872. That day he wrote in his diary: “To-night will be a terrible event. I must omit from my prayers the name of my precious Minnie”. After her funeral at Wimborne St. Giles, Shaftesbury took up the task of nursing Constance, but she, too, died in December. His last years passed quietly enough and he celebrated his 80th birthday in 1881. The event was honoured by the Ragged School Union at a large meeting in the Guildhall.

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For the next four years he was often in bad pain and worried constantly whether he would be able to get through his engagements. The summer of 1885 was very hot and tiring for an old man in London and his family persuaded him to take a holiday at Folkestone. His married daughter, Vea, now living in Ireland, came over to help her spinster sister, Hilda, to look after their father. Then in the autumn the old man caught a bad cold and became really ill. He was now very weak and, though he worried about being away from home, he died quietly and without pain on 1st October. The last thing he said to his daughters was: “Thank you”. Lord Shaftesbury wished to be buried at Wimborne St. Giles, where lay his beloved Minnie, but the Government wanted him buried in Westminster Abbey, so a compromise was reached: The funeral service was held at the Abbey, attended not only by the notables of the day, but by the ordinary people of London, who stood outside mourning for their friend. One man among them with a black band round his arm cried out: “Our Earl’s gone! God Almighty knows he loved us and we loved him! We shan’t see his like again.” After the funeral the coffin was taken to Wimborne St. Giles and buried with the rest of his family and next to his beloved wife. That unknown man’s genuine cry of grief could be left as a fitting epitaph.

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12

Stinsford, Higher Bockampton and Thomas Hardy

THE geology of Higher Bockampton, where Thomas Hardy was born, and of the Stinsford area, is mainly chalk and valley gravel and lies at the very edge of the Bagshot beds of the Great Heath.

Stinsford is a tiny village just outside Dorchester, a short way from the Salibury road. It contains a small, grey church which serves five scattered hamlets, of which Higher Bockampton is one. Here other generations of Hardys lie buried, including the author’s father. The church contains a memorial window to the writer and some of the original Norman stonework. The tower is panelled inside with 16th century oak panels from Kingston manor. The old musicians’ gallery has gone, but the stairway to the rood loft is still there and the 500 year old arcade with its leafy capitals. There is also a battered 13th century font and a white marble vase font dating from the 18th century. Standing on a bank in the narrow lane near Hardy’s birthplace is a ten foot high, rough-hewn column of Cornish granite, decorated with bronze laurel leaves and bearing an inscription which reads: “Thomas Hardy, O.M., was born in the adjacent cottage, 2nd June 1840, and in it he wrote ‘UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE’ and ‘FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD’. This

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monument is erected by a few American admirers.” In Dorchester a statue of him by Eric Kennington – the famous sculptor – is placed at the junction of High West Street and the Grove. It pictures Hardy sitting with his hat on his knees in a contemplative pose. This statue was first unveiled by the poet’s friend, Sir James Barrie. Thomas Hardy came of an Old Dorset family which had known better days, but at the time of his birth their fortunes had sadly declined. Originally they had emigrated from the Channel Islands to Dorset. In Elizabeth I’s reign a Thomas Hardy founded Hardy’s School, now the famous grammar school in Dorchester. Higher Bockhampton House is a pleasant thatched dwelling, larger than a cottage and not as big as a farmhouse. It has a fairly large front garden facing west and is backed by beautiful old beeches. The house is now the property of the National Trust, whose booklet states that it was built in 1800 by John Hardy of Puddletown. At the time of his son’s birth, Thomas Hardy senior was a master builder and stone-mason, who seems to have been pretty successful for those days and sometimes employed as many as 15 men. When Hardy was a child, the sitting-room had the deep inglehook so often found in old houses and a great beam across the ceiling. Both these objects are mentioned in ‘UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE’. This room had a stone floor which was kept sanded and here the Hardys often held dances, leading with their fiddles. They were a very musical family and music meant a great deal to young Thomas and was necessary to him all his life. It could move him to tears or raise him to ecstasy. For 40 years his

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Higher Bockampton, near Stinsford, Dorchester. Thomas Hardy’s birthplace.

father and grandfather had been leaders of the village choir and played the fiddle in Stinsford Church. In childhood Thomas could play the violin before he went to school and he also loved dancing. He was born in the central bedroom of the house and seemed so lifeless the doctor believed him dead. The midwife refused to accept this verdict, however, picked up the baby and found he was alive. He was very frail and remained so for the early part of his childhood. In the bedroom which he shared with his younger brother, Henry, Thomas did much of his early writings, including many of his first poems. He seems to have been a very precocious child. It is said that he “learnt to read almost before he could walk.” Like so many famous men he owed a great deal to his mother. She was a sensitive, well-read woman who loved

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poetry and literature and encouraged her son to read as much as possible. The lady of the Manor, Mrs. Julia Augusta Martin, who lived in Kingston Maurward House, took the boy under her wing and an almost passionate affection sprang up between her and young Thomas. He was obviously a very bright and attractive child and Mrs. Martin had no children of her own. She claimed that she taught him to read. In 1845 he first attended a school in Lower Bockhampton which Mrs. Martin had started. He was still so frail that he was not allowed to walk to school. Then in 1849 he was taken away from Lower Bockhampton and sent to a day school in Dorchester, without apparently consulting Mrs. Martin. Here perhaps one might guess at some feminine jealousy. Whatever the cause, this treatment of the lady of the Manor was certainly rather brusque. Besides being a stonemason and master builder, the elder Thomas did repairs on the Kingston Maurward estate, but he lost this work about the time his son changed his school, though whether this dismissal was due to the above event is not known. The walk to and from his new school was very good for young Thomas’s health and he began to throw off his earlier delicacy and grow strong like other children. He had been transferred to this school mainly because the headmaster, Mr. Isaac Last, was a Latin scholar and very good at teaching the language to his pupils. Besides learning Latin, Hardy played the fiddle at local weddings and dances, taught in the local Sunday School and read Dumas’ ‘PÈRE’ and Harrison Ainsworth. He also acted as amanuensis for the local girls and wrote letters for them to their lovers in India. The world of Thomas Hardy’s childhood is very far away

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from ours. His England was still largely a rural country where the various classes continued to inhabit an apparently unchanging hierarchy, though of course not even a rural culture is impervious to change, whether in ideas or machinery or ways of life. When young Thomas was seven the railway came to Dorchester and new machines were gradually appearing in the countryside. As a child Hardy was solitary and shy and often went for long, lonely rambles, learning to love Dorset’s familiar face and its wild creatures. Of course his boyhood was not without its meetings with the tragic and brutal side of life. Death, disease and social cruelty and injustice, were common enough in his childhood and such things could not fail to impinge upon everyone, even a child living in sheltered surroundings. The boy never forgot the shock he felt when he saw a young farm labourer – a mere child – lying dead of starvation under a hedge; nor when he watched the execution by hanging of another young farmer’s boy with weights attached to his feet to help him to die quickly. Such incidents were common enough, but to a sensitive, imaginative nature the shock could still be as great. As Hardy remarked later: “Nothing my father ever said drove the tragedy of life so deeply into my mind.” His own boyhood, however, seems to have been happy enough on the whole and he certainly appears to have enjoyed his new school in Dorchester. He also made a friendship which later was to have a great influence on his life. This new friend was the gentle Dorset poet, the Reverend William Barnes, who ran a school not very far from Mr. Last’s. Barnes was of course years older than Hardy, but he certainly had a good deal to do in awakening in the young adolescent an interest in literature and intellectual pursuits and also aroused in him a love of

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poetry. The friendship between the much older man and the young lad was to continue until Barnes’s death. Thomas left school at 16 and became the pupil of a local architect, a Mr. John Hicks of Dorchester, entering his office in July 1856. It seems that he actually did more reading in the office than drawing. He seems to have received some encouragement from Mr. Hicks himself, who was a highly cultured man. In 1862 Thomas decided he would like to study architecture in more advanced detail, so on April 17th he left Mr. Hicks’ office and went to London. He was given two letters of introduction, one to a Mr. John Norton of Old Bond Street, who was also an architect. Mr. Norton welcomed the young man and recommended him to a Mr. Arthur Blomfield, who agreed to take him as a pupil. Thomas stayed in London studying architecture for 5five years altogether and, while in the city, he also began to write. His childhood benefactress, Mrs. Martin of Kingston Maurward, was also living in London and he remembered to call on her, though of course the affection they had felt for one another during his childhood had long ago died. Mrs. Martin did not recognise in this young man of 21 the precocious little boy she had loved so much. She too had changed, but she asked him to call again. Hardy said he would, but he soon became immersed in the busy life of the great city and forgot, though he did write to her now and then. Actually he never saw her again. Then in 1867 his health began to fail. City life and city air did not suit him. So, when Mr. Hicks wrote to say he needed a well-trained assistant to help with church restoration, Hardy decided to offer himself for the work and returned to his native Dorchester.

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Once back in the country he regained his health with the fresh air and regular exercise walking back and forth to work. During this time he began to think seriously about his writing. He had written a good deal of poetry while he was in London. Some of these poems were destroyed and others that were stored away were not found and published for nearly 30 years. In February 1868 Hardy went down to Cornwall to study the church of St. Juliot, near Boscastle with a view to its restoration. While he was staying there he met Emma Gifford, the girl who eventually became his first wife. She was the younger daughter of a Mr. J. Attersall Gifford, a solicitor in Plymouth. She seems to have attracted Hardy the first time he met her. She was “so living” as he put it. About this time he also published his first book, bearing the title of ‘DESPERATE’. He then started work on his second novel ‘UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE’, which seems to have been well received upon its publication. A ‘PAIR OF BLUE EYES’ followed, then ‘FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD’ and, in 1872, he and Emma Gifford were married at St. Peter’s Church, Paddington. The bride’s uncle, Dr. E. Hamilton Gifford, Canon of Worcester, conducted the ceremony and the bridal pair went for a Continental honeymoon. On their return Hardy settled down to make a living from his pen. He also began to write poetry again. The young couple moved to London and here he fell ill once more. The doctor diagnosed an internal hemorrhage and said he must stay in bed for a while. He did not waste his time, however, but dictated ‘THE TRUMPET MAJOR’ to his wife. They returned to Dorset in 1883 where, though they did not know it at the time, they were to remain for the rest of their lives. They eventually bought a plot of land a mile out of

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Dorchester. On this they built Max Gate, the house which was to become their permanent home. Max Gate was not very far from Game Rectory, where Hardy’s lifelong friend, Dr. William Barnes, was now living. After the house was finished, he wrote ‘THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE’ and in 1891 ‘TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES’, which is probably his most famous and successful novel. Oddly enough, ‘TESS’ was the last novel he was to write. It was an immense success and the fame of the book spread to America and Asia, as well as to Europe. To this day Hardy is a bestseller in Japan. A year after its publication Hardy’s father, the master builder, died at the old house at Bockhampton and his son was very upset that he was not present at his deathbed. Hardy published ‘WESSEX POEMS’ in 1899 and, from that time onwards, most of his literary output was devoted to poetry. The author, now a famous and successful man, was awarded the O.M. just after the death of Edward VII. He was presented with the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1912 and, in the autumn of the same year, his wife’s health suddenly began to deteriorate and she complained about her heart. Hardy called in a doctor, who said she was not seriously ill, but suggested she was not eating enough as she suffered from bad indigestion. In spite of this diagnosis, however, her heart did fail and she died peacefully on 27th November 1912. Emma Hardy seems to have predicted her own death the year before in her ‘REMINISCENCES’. She wrote that she felt she had only a short time to live, though at the time she did not appear to be ailing in any way. After his wife’s death Hardy was given the honorary degree

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of D.Litt at Cambridge in 1913. In 1914 – the year of the outbreak of the lst World War – he married again. His second wife had been his secretary and now became Florence Emily Hardy. He had no children by either of his marriages, though of course on the event of his second marriage he was well on into his 70s. During the war he wrote several popular war poems and the ‘SELECTED POEMS OF THOS. HARDY’ were published by Macmillan in their ‘GOLDEN TREASURY’ series. In 1920 he received another honour – the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Oxford. He had not only gained a great deal of fame but was also friends with other famous literary men, James Barrie, Walter de la Mare, both of whom were frequent visitors to Max Gate; the Bernard Shaws and T. E. Lawrence among others. The author’s years were now beginning to tell on him and he fell ill on December llth 1928. His illness did not, however, seem very serious at first and he got up and went as usual to his study to write. Once there he found he could not work, something which had never happened before and from that day onwards his vitality waned rapidly. After Christmas he found that he could no longer go up and down stairs. The weather was very cold and deep snow fell and this cold spell was an added drain upon his strength. Then, as sometimes happens, on January 11th he suddenly rallied and his strength returned for a while, though it did not last. In the evening he had a sudden fatal heart attack, though he had never had heart trouble before and he died shortly afterwards. Thomas Hardy’s ashes lie in the Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, but his heart is buried in his first wife’s grave in Stinsford churchyard, besides his own kinsfolk.

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13

THOMAS Edward Lawrence was born at Tremadoc in Carnarvonshire on August 16th 1888 – the second of five brothers. His father was descended from Irish-Protestant landed gentry and his mother was of Highland stock. She was also a strict Calvinist, a solitary by nature and did not like her sons making friends with their neighbours. This upbringing might account in some degree for his own personality though, being one of five brothers, he certainly can never have been alone as a child. He and his brothers were probably illegitimate, and his mother might have discouraged them from making friends because she was ashamed of her status and theirs. The family left Wales during T. E.’s very early childhood and travelled about a great deal, living in Scotland, the Channel Islands and France among other places. However, when he was eight years old they settled permanently in Oxford, where he went to school, winning a series of scholarships. T. E. was a precocious child with a remarkable memory and never found lessons any trouble. Like all his brothers he received a devout religious upbringing but he did not remain a Christian after leaving school. He seems to have become agnostic, or what was called in those days a “rationalist”. In his early years at School T. E. soon showed his interest in

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archaeology and spent all his spare time hunting for fragments of Roman and Medieval pottery. He also developed a life-long interest in castles and when he was older he spent his holidays touring France, studying all the castles he could find. This second interest stimulated a further one in military history and archaeology. He was very short for his age. It was thought he had never grown since he had broken a bone in his foot at school, while rescuing a small boy who was being bullied. In fact, he always remained a very small man. There may well have been another reason for his short stature. When he was in his late teens T. E. won an exhibition at Jesus College, Oxford, but he refused to take part in the ordinary college and university life. He spent most of his time reading and possessed a phenomenal gift of absorbing rapidly everything he read. He was very clever mechanically and was always the one to mend anything round the house – including anything electrical. He was also, in spite of his small size, exceedingly strong, but he had no interest in games. All he cared about were archaeological finds and exploring ancient castles, and his exercise consisted of walking or cycling in furthering these interests. It was while T. E. was arranging some of his finds in the Ashmolean museum with the help of the assistant keeper that he met D. G. Hogarth, who had just been appointed the museum’s keeper and who later became one of his great friends. Lawrence extended his study of medieval castles to Wales and then decided to go to Syria to study the Crusader Castles there, so he obtained permission from Lord Curzon to visit Turkey.

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He went to Syria in June 1909 and walked his way round the ancient castles. He was perfectly happy, though his visit ended by being robbed, beaten and left dead by Kurds. However, he recovered finally and two results of this trip were – the thesis he wrote for his finals, in which he took a first class in the Honours School of History and a deep and lasting love of the silence and loneliness of the desert. In 1910 T. E. joined Hogarth in a tour of Palestine, Syria and Nazareth. In March Hogarth started excavations at Carchemish, where Lawrence became the main photographer and where he was to remain till 1914. When Hogarth left the dig, T. E. stayed on with Campbell Thomson and then with Leonard Woolley. While on a walk to Urfa in July 1911, when the dig was closed, he fell very ill with dysentery and fever. If it had not been for the care and nursing of Sheikh Hamoudi, who was the foreman on the dig, he might have died. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. In fact, T. E. had quickly made friends with the Arabs employed on the dig. They respected him and admired his courage and he gave them love and respect in turn. At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, in which two of his brothers were killed, Lawrence went to the map department of the War Office to produce a badly wanted map of Sinai. In December 1914 he, Woolley and Newcomb were ordered to Egypt to become a valuable link between Military Intelligence, the Arab Bureau and the Survey of Egypt. T. E.’s appearance caused some shock among members of the regular Army, who asked who this extraordinary little pipsqueak might be. It wasn’t till they realised the outsize personality which lay behind his unconventional dress and pintsized appearance that they changed their opinion of him. His experiences during the War are recorded in his own books ‘REVOLT IN THE DESERT’ and ‘THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM’. Probably no one could have

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described them better. However, the opinion of one regular soldier who was to become famous in the 2nd World War, is worth quoting: “The quickening of Sherif Hussein’s family revolt into the movement that poured into Damascus was something that no one else could have achieved, even with unlimited gold; it was a spiritual even more than a physical exploit ... he had read more and thought more on military history and the military art than probably any Great Commander” (Field Marshal Lord Wavell.) In a series of brilliant guerilla campaigns Lawrence succeeded in uniting all the Arab tribes and he and they together rolled back the Turkish Army and swept into Damascus. T. E. was of course backed by British gold, but he had no need to bribe the revolting Arabs. They loved him, they followed him, they believed him. Such great names in the Arab world as Feisal, Auda, Ibn Saud, Tallal and their followers, were united into an efficient guerilla force. All this, however, was not achieved without its personal toll upon T. E. He was badly injured in a plane crash; he was wounded and he had bouts of fever. Then he was kidnapped by the soldiers of the Bey of Deraa, flogged and sexually assaulted by the brutal Turks. There were also the daily privations of the campaigns to bear – but all this shows how enormous was his extraordinary vitality, in spite of being so small, so slight in build and so youthful looking. Lawrence, like every great man, had many enemies. Regular soldiers disliked him because of his unconventionality and lack of respect for military authority. Then, too, he had many friends, some in high places like Churchill. He had been given permission by the British Government to

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guarantee certain concessions to the Arabs in return for their services and support. Those promises eventually were not kept, but one thing future historians could be sure of – was that the Arabs did not blame Lawrence, nor foster any bad feeling towards him. They knew him too well, even though they did not know the politicians. These had given definite promises of selfgovernment for the Arabs, who as T. E. said: “believed in persons, not in institutions.” And yet he put more than half the blame for this betrayal upon himself. He said he knew from the beginning that these promises, once the war was won, would be nothing but dead paper. He hoped, though, once the campaign had started that he would lead the Arabs to victory, so establishing themselves in such a firm position that even the Great Powers would have to accede to their claims. In fact, after the war was over the reality was quite different. In an article he had written at the request of a daily newspaper, Lawrence said “our government is worse than the old Turkish system”. At last Winston Churchill was called in to clear up the mess caused by the broken promises of the politicians and for a while all was well and peace settled upon the Arab world. Now T. E. felt his work was done and, refusing Churchill’s offers of a permanent post in the Foreign Office or a Governorship, he resigned and disappeared. He felt he shared part of the guilt in that breaking of faith, though it did not worry the politicians. The expulsion of Feisal from the throne of Syria by the French was the final blow to this brave and sensitive man. He joined the Air Force under the name of Ross and spent his

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first spell of service at Oxbridge depot, but this enrolment was ended abruptly when he was recognised by a fellow officer, who had known him during the war and who sold the news to the press. The Air Ministry was a new branch of the Services and probably jealous of their image and the subsequent publicity was distasteful to them. So T. E. was expelled in February 1923, because he was too famous to be allowed to remain as a ranker. One of his biographers and a great friend, the war historian, Liddell Hart, admits he cannot fathom all the reasons why Lawrence joined the Air Force as an airman. After his expulsion he wrote to Lord Trenchard and asked to be enlisted again in some remote station. Trenchard could do nothing there, but he and other friends in the War Office helped T. E. to join the Tank Corps in March 1923, under the name of Shaw. He was sent to Bovington Camp in Dorset, where he was employed in the Quartermaster’s stores. T. E. now bought his little cottage at Clouds Hill and a powerful motor bike. This was to become an abiding joy to this strange, lonely man, because he discovered in himself a great passion and love of speed. After a year’s service in the Army he again applied to be allowed to re-enlist in the Air Force, but was again refused. Then a change of Government brought him better luck. The Conservatives were returned to power and he was transferred to the Air Force in 1925, where he was told he could remain for the rest of his service – seven years of active service and five years on the reserve list. T. E. was then sent to Cranwell in Lincolnshire, where a new cadet college for the Air Force had been established. Here he became an Aircraft Hand – a general purpose unskilled man in B-Flight, but another threat of trouble arose, this time not from

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Moreton Church, Moreton. Burial place of Lawrence of Arabia.

his superiors but from his mates. They knew his identity and many of them regarded him with hostility as an official spy. He eventually won them over by his complete unselfconsciousness and his puckish sense of humour. He had a knack of getting on with other men because he liked them. In his spare time at Cranwell he finished his final revision of the ‘SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM’. Then Lawrence was sent to India in December 1926, being posted to Karachi. He did not like India very much apparently, because his pay did not go very far and he was forced to impose restriction upon his own movements which he found irksome. He did this because if his presence in India became public it might embarrass the Indian Government. The authorities at home did not think so, apparently, because

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after 18 months in India they posted T. E. to the frontier, a far more conspicuous place than Karachi. It was one of the most lonely R.A.F. stations in India, as well as being one of the smallest, a brick and earth fort behind barbed wire with Afghanistan only 10 miles away. For Lawrence, however, it was a rest cure, though for others in this remote spot it was mainly boredom. He had worked very hard in Karachi and was glad to relax and spent his time translating Ovid. Alas, he was not to be allowed to relax for very long. Persecution came in the shape of the usual nosey journalist. The westernizing King Amanullah of Afghanistan faced a rebellion of his more conservative subjects – “and,” said the journalist, “the presence of the uncrowned King of Arabia at the head of the British Secret Service” was of course too good a story to miss. Members of the English Labour party really believed that Lawrence was at the bottom of this rebellion, in partnership with the Indian Government. So there was nothing else to do but to send him home. However, he need not have been rushed out of the country quite so rapidly, so that he had to leave most of his personal possessions behind. When he reached England T. E. was sent to Plymouth, which was a flying boat station, where his superior officer was Wing Commander Sydney Smith, who became one of his personal friends. Lord Thomson had now been returned as Air Minister and he had never forgiven Lawrence for refusing his request to write a history of the Royal Air Force. He made up his mind to get him out of the Air Force and T. E. was served with a notice of expulsion. This time, however, some of his influential friends took up his case and he was told he could remain in the Service.

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For the last two years Lawrence had been trying to interest the Air Ministry in the idea of providing the Air Force – especially sea planes – with air-sea rescue types of fast motor boats. His enthusiasm and persistence finally won them over to the idea and in 1931 experimental boats were made and he was employed in testing them – perhaps one of the happiest times of his life since the war. When he had completed his term of service T. E. decided to settle down at Clouds Hill, which had been partly ruined when he first bought it. He re-roofed it himself and improved the interior till it was as comfortable as he could make it. Then he took his discharge at Bridlington and went to live permanently in Dorset. Though he was restless and did not know what he would do next, he admitted to Mrs. Hardy in a letter that he was very tired. On May 13th 1935 he rode into Bovington Camp to send his last message – a telegram to Henry Williamson. On his return he swerved suddenly to avoid two boys on bicycles and the next moment his motor-cycle was weaving and turning over and over along the road, while Lawrence lay unconscious, blood all over his face. There was only one other witness to the accident, who said that T. E. had just passed a black car before he drew out to avoid the boys. They, however, swore they had never seen a car. His death, like his life, is touched with mystery. Another version is that there was only one boy – a butchers’ boy – though David Garnett agrees with Liddell Hart that there were two boys on bicycles and further adds that they were concealed in a dip in the road. However it was caused, Lawrence was fatally injured. He was picked up by a passing Army lorry and taken to a military hospital. Though they knew it was hopeless, no effort was spared by the doctors and nursing staff to save his life. His vitality was so great that he lingered for six days before he

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finally died of pneumonia and heart failure on Sunday May 19th 1935, at the age of 47. T. E. was buried at Moreton Church on May 21st 1935, but Eric Kennington sculptured a bust of him which was placed in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, while Clouds Hill has been given to the National Trust and is now open to the public. Perhaps after all this was the way he would have wished to go. No lingering for him into a lonely old age, though somehow one feels that with someone so vital as he, old age would have found it difficult to conquer him. He was a thinker and a lover of his fellow men. He was also a superb strategist and military commander, immensely widely read, a vivid and compelling writer and a beloved friend. The magic of his name has faded now but something of his fame still lingers. Because he was unmarried and seemed uninterested in women, it has been suggested that Lawrence was homosexual. Yet, curiously enough he seemed to have had plenty of women friends. A careful study of the ‘SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM’ brings out one curious point. T. E. intensely disliked any kind of physical contact, even in such situations as hand-tohand fighting. History has occasionally thrown up men of profound and deep intellect and wisdom, in whom the physical and material sides of life are subordinated to the mental, intellectual and spiritual. They are natural ascetics – not induced. T. E. might possibly have been one such man. He was himself completely indifferent to most of the material sides of life. Why not go to the Arabs for the last verdict on Lawrence. Probably they knew him more intimately than any member of his own race. When Sheikh Hamoudi heard of his death, he walked up and down his stone-flagged hall in Aleppo, broken-

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hearted with grief. “Oh! If only he had died in battle!” he is said to have exclaimed. “I have lost my son, but I do not grieve for him as I do for Lawrence ... I am counted brave, the bravest of my tribe; my heart is iron, but his was steel. A man whose hand was never closed, but open. Tell them ... tell them in England what I say. Of manhood the man, in freedom free; a mind without equal; I can see no flaw in him.” That must stand as T. E.’s final epitaph. That verdict, given by a man of a different faith and culture, must remain. It cannot be reversed.

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Bibliography

Dorset by Arthur Mee. Conquest of England by Eric Linklater. Anglo-Saxon England by Sir Frank Stenton. Sherborne Castle by Charles Lines. Sherborne, Old Castle, Dorset by Peter White. Sir Walter Raleigh by Willard, M. Wallace. Dorset, the Isle of Purbeck by Rena Gardiner. The King’s England, Thomas Hardy’s Country by Arthur Mee. Dorset by John Hyams. The Life, Progresses and Rebellion of James, Duke of Monmouth by George Roberts. Sedgemoor and Avalon by Desmond Hawkins. The Monmouth Episode by Bryan Little. Jeffreys by P. J. Helm. Judge Jeffreys by H. Montgomery Hyde. Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time by A. S. Byatt. Dorothy Wordsworth journals edited by Ernest de Selincourt. William and Dorthy Wordsworth, the Letters edited by Ernest deSelincourt. Memorials of Old Dorset edited by Thomas Perkins. Nelson and his World by Tom Pocock. The Life of William Barnes by Lucy Scott. Lord Shaftesbury by J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond. Lord Shaftesbury by Florence M. G. Higham. Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardly.

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Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Selected Poems by Thomas Hardy. The Life of Thomas Hardy by Florence Emily Hardy. Revolt in the Desert by T. E. Lawrence. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. The Essential T. E. Lawrence selected by David Garnett. With Lawrence of Arabia by Lowell Thomas. T. E. Lawrence in Arabia and After by Liddell Hart. The Book of the Martyrs of Tolpuddle published by the Trade & Union Council.

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DORSET Thomas Hardy was born there, Sir Walter Raleigh chose to live there and Lawrence of Arabia is buried there. With so many great figures shaping its history, it is unsurprising that Dorset should provide such fascinating stories from eminent leaders like Alfred the Great and Charles II to notable writers such as Wordsworth and Barnes.

Peta Whaley lives in Shaftsbury in Dorset. She is a member of the London Writer’s Circle, the Society of Civil Service Authors, the Clader Valley Poets’ Society, and she also helped to found the Dorset Poetry Society.

www.intellectbooks.com/westcountry

Cover photo: Portland Bill Lighthouse

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