Guildford

“ Guildford, then, is provincial in the best and healthiest sense; for though your habitat be in the High Street, which here, as in all other properly-constituted towns, is the very nucleus of the borough, you need never be longer than ten minutes in leaving the town behind if you are so minded. Guildford is a town of very individual character. ”

“ Why, therefore, on Mr Sadler's principle, should the people of Guildford be more prolific than the people who live within the bills of mortality? And, if the people of Guildford ought, as on Mr Sadler's principle they unquestionably ought, to stand as low in the scale of fecundity as the people of Southwark itself, it follows, most clearly, that they ought to stand far lower than the average obtained by taking all the people of Surrey together. ”

“ The moderate and constitutional counsels of Halifax were timidly and feebly seconded by Francis North, Lord Guildford who had lately been made Keeper of the Great Seal. The character of Guildford has been drawn at full length by his brother Roger North, a most intolerant Tory, a most affected and pedantic writer, but a vigilant observer of all those minute circumstances which throw light on the dispositions of men. ”

“ The old British track probably kept to the northern ridge; the pilgrims who visited Guildford may have left by the same road, but they turned away across the valley to the little chapel of St. Martha, which stands on a hill two miles south-east of the town. The pilgrim's track to the chapel, vanished in parts, becomes plain enough when it crosses the road which now runs from Guildford to Chilworth west of the chapel by perhaps half a mile. Here it is a wide smooth path of the finest down grass, cropped close by rabbits, with which all this breezy hill must be alive by night. ”

“ Here is good brick-earth and garden-ground, and near the town there are some tolerable farms. But at Guildford, seven miles further up the river, commences the rich corn-land of the colony, and the town itself contains six or seven hundred inhabitants. York is forty-eight miles eastward of Guildford; and King George’s Sound, on the coast, where there is another settlement, is about one hundred and fifty miles from York. ”

“ Godalming, four miles away, is a centre in itself, and has its own chapter. But Guildford is the best centre from which to see some of Godalming's neighbours. A good ring is by Shalford through Bramley and Wonersh, returning by Chilworth under St. Martha's. Shalford lies a mile to the south, and with [Pg 96] its old mill, its inn, its white and green cottages, and its stocks, is a charming survival perilously near the Guildford builder. The stocks stand by the churchyard gates, side by side with a curious little shrubbery. ”

“ S.E., is a large middle-class county school. The town has flour mills, iron foundries and breweries, and a large trade in grain; while fairs are held for live stock. There is a manufacture of gunpowder in the neighbouring village of Chilworth. Guildford is a suffragan bishopric in the diocese of Winchester. The borough is under a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. ”

“ Each of the small, yet dignified, eighteenth-century houses, which add such distinction and grace to each Surrey township—Epsom, Leatherhead, Guildford—gave him a comfortable feeling of his country's well-being, of the essential stability of England. Now and again, in some woodland glade where summer still lingered, he would pass by happy groups engaged in black-berrying; while on the road there waited the charabancs, the motor-cycles, the pony-traps, which had brought them. ”

“ Godalming High Street has not kept the grace of Guildford, nor had it ever the width and the air of Epsom or Farnham, but it has more than one building of distinction, and its links with the past are in old inns, timbered stories and forgotten courts. The White Hart still juts its wooden beams over the pavement; the King's Arms, a later building, has a square-set front which has watched many coaches jangle off to Portsmouth. The King's Arms has had more than one king as a guest. The Emperor Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William of Prussia dined there in the year before Waterloo ”

“ That the burghers of Guildford were always the best of friends one with another is not my contention; that the dignity of their ancient surroundings should conduce to loving-kindness may remain unquestioned. ”

“ Godalming folks will tell you that Guildford is “cliquey,” by which term I understand exclusiveness to be meant. It may be so, in fact I believe this to be one of Guildford’s most marked social characteristics; but exclusiveness implies local patriotism, which is a refreshing spirit for a Londoner to encounter once in a way. At any rate, he will find no spirit of this description in what Cobbett satirically termed “the Wen.” The patriotism of Peckham has yet to be discovered; the local enthusiasm of Camberwell is as rare as the song of the lark in London streets ”

“ There was a time when the Lorings had held the country from the North Downs to the Lakes of Frensham, and when their grim castle-keep rising above the green meadows which border the River Wey had been the strongest fortalice betwixt Guildford Castle in the east and Winchester in the west. ”

“ Guildford Castle, of which the keep was always the most prominent, and is now the chief remaining feature, is in position, age, structure, and dimensions a very remarkable fortress.
It is true, indeed, that though of great age, neither the town nor the castle have played any great part in English history. The town was never walled; the castle never stood a siege. No considerable battle was ever witnessed from its towers; no parliament nor great council was ever held within its hall. ”

“ Northwards one looks across the Tillingbourne valley to the Downs, for once surpassed in height by that grand group of sand tops to the south of Gomshall and Dorking.
The tramp who is in no hurry, and has an eye for country, may walk the ten or twelve miles to Guildford by keeping round the heights of the sand ridge above Cranleigh, bearing north-west for Wonersh, where a high-road and a pretty byroad drop into the valley of the Wey. If he turn down too soon on this side, he will be brought up by the line of the Guildford-Brighton railway. ”

“ GUILDFORD, Sir RICHARD (1455?–1506) , master of the ordnance, was the son of Sir John Guildford of Rolvenden in Kent, controller of the household to Edward IV. His ancestry had been settled in Kent and Sussex for at least eight generations. The date of his birth can only be conjectured approximately from the fact that his eldest son was over twenty-eight years old when he died in 1506; for, as men commonly married early in those days, we may presume that he was a father at about twenty-three. ”

“ Eight years afterwards, the Archbishop’s brother, Sir Maurice Abbot, erected the sumptuous monument there which Pepys admired on one of his visits to Guildford. It still remains, although the church itself (one of Guildford’s three churches) has been rebuilt.
[Pg 161]
XVII
THE INN-YARD
Guildford has many old inns, as befits an old town which lay directly upon an old coach-road. Of these the chiefest lie in the High Street, and they are the “Angel,” the “Crown,” the “White Hart,” and the “Red Lion.” The “Red Lion” has a modernized frontage, but within it is the same hostelry at which Mr. ”

“ Elaine and Sir Lancelot’s worthiest love episode, is undiscoverable. The name is unknown outside romance; and though we are assured that it is “now in English called Gilford,” no authority can be found for the assertion. Besides, Guildford in Surrey was rather beyond the borders of the British Kingdom, even granting occasional excursions to Middlesex and Kent. But if Guildford were synonymous with Camelford, as the derivation permits us to believe, then Astolat was none other than Camelford, and at once there are light and order where formerly prevailed obscurity and confusion. ”

“ The ravages of the sweating sickness in 1528 caused the justices in Kent, among whom were Sir Henry Guildford and his brother, Sir Edward, to adjourn the sessions at Deptford, where they met ‘in a croft nigh unto the street,’ from June till October. At the end of June Sir William Compton died of it, and Guildford was his chief executor. On the arrival of Cardinal Campeggio in England at the end of September he was, as controller of the household, much occupied with the preparations for his reception. ”

“ The Chairman, after recapitulating the previous Meetings of the Society, said that "it would appear presumptuous were he to attempt to address any lengthened details concerning the topography and antiquities of Guildford to a Meeting chiefly composed of the inhabitants of the town. Nevertheless," he continued, "I should be entirely unworthy of inhabiting Surrey if I were not aware of the general facts relating to this most eminent and interesting borough. ”

“ The quickest road from Guildford to Chilworth is the railway. The best road is over the downs. The road which Cobbett took when he came from Kensington was over Merrow Downs to Newlands Corner, and it is worth while to climb up Newlands Corner to look at the view as Cobbett saw it, with the pale distances of eight counties on his horizon, and the dark, tall chimneys of the powdermills he detested smoking below him. ”

“ DUDLEY, Lord GUILDFORD (d. 1554) , husband of Lady Jane Grey, was the fourth son of the powerful John Dudley [q. v.] , duke of Northumberland. When the duke was at the height of his power, in Edward VI's reign, Lord Guildford was his only unmarried son. In July 1552 the duke determined on a match between him and Margaret Clifford, grandniece of Henry VIII and daughter of Henry, first earl of Cumberland [q. v.] Edward VI interested himself in the scheme, and wrote on the subject to both the Duke of Northumberland and the Earl of Cumberland. ”

“ Surrey is not of great historical importance, except its northern border, the southern part having been forest and waste land, long uninhabited and almost impassable for an army. Guildford, though the county town, and often the seat of the court under John and Henry III., was of little importance beside Southwark, the centre of trade and commerce, the residence of many ecclesiastical dignitaries, a frequent point of attack on London, and a centre for rebellions and riots. ”

“ Duke of Somerset, who died in 1748, the roads in Sussex were in so bad a state, that, in order to arrive at Guildford from Petworth, travellers were obliged to make from the nearest point of the great road leading from Portsmouth to London. This was a work of so much difficulty, as to occupy the whole day; and the duke had a house at Guildford which was regularly used as a resting-place for the night by any of his family travelling to London. ”

“ Opposition always made the girl more spirited. Guildford lost was more to be desired than Guildford idle and only waiting for her to reclaim and restore it. This dominant stranger interested in another woman--Carolina lifted her chin. ”

“ Whatever happened, I was to start on Good Friday. I was now deciding that I would go [29] through Salisbury, and over the Plain to West Lavington, and thence either through Devizes or through Trowbridge and Bradford. Salisbury was to be reached by Guildford, Farnham, Alton, Alresford, but perhaps not Winchester—for I could follow down the Itchen to King’s Worthy, and then cross those twenty miles of railwayless country by way of Stockbridge, visiting thus Hazlitt’s Winterslow. To Guildford there were several possible ways. ”

“ James secretly hated him, and determined to associate a more unscrupulous man with him in the functions of his office. This was his most obedient and most unflinching creature, the lord chief justice Jeffreys, of whose unexampled villainies we shall soon hear too much. Guildford was by the overbearing Jeffreys at once thrust back into the mere routine of a judge in equity, and all his state functions and patronage were usurped by this daring man. ”

“ Here is a navigable river and fine meadows. Here are woods and downs. Here is something of everything but fat marshes and their skeleton-making agues. The vale all the way down to Chilworth from Reigate is very delightful." He has as many praises for the neighbourhood on the other side. "Everybody that has been from Godalming to Guildford knows that there is hardly another such a pretty four miles in all England. The road is good; the soil is good; the houses are neat; the people are neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows, all are beautiful. ”

“ Lord Leycester would take a bumper of claret—the cellars were celebrated for the Chateau Margaux. To-night it seemed as if he had taken an additional one, for there was a deeper color on his face, and a brighter light in his eyes than usual; the light which used to shine there in his school-days, when there was some piece of wildness on, more mad than usual. Lord Guildford came [79] in leaning lightly upon his arm, and he was talking to him in a low voice.
"One of the most beautiful faces I have ever seen, Ley: not your regular cut-out-to-pattern kind of face, but fresh and—and—natural. ”

“ This I said, having discovered how greatly false she spoke, for 'twas not on York Road, but by Guildford, that the affair happened, and I would swear that she had heard not a word of it, which, nevertheless, she might very well have done, seeing that it was notorious in the town at that time.
"I am always glad to meet a famous man," said she.
"No more than I a handsome lady," said I. "And to show how deeply I am in earnest, I will forego half the account and all the jewels for a salutation from miss there." ”