Rural Rides Read online

  It is odd enough how differently one is affected by the same sight, under different circumstances. At the ‘Holly-Bush’ at Headly there was a room full of fellows in white smock frocks, drinking and smoking and talking, and I, who was then dry and warm, moralized within myself on their folly in spending their time in such a way. But, when I got down from Hindhead to the public-house at Road-Lane, with my skin soaking and my teeth chattering, I thought just such another group, whom I saw through the window sitting round a good fire with pipes in their mouths, the wisest assembly I had ever set my eyes on. A real Collective Wisdom. And, I most solemnly declare, that I felt a greater veneration for them than I have ever felt even for the Privy Council, notwithstanding the Right Honorable Charles Wynn and the Right Honorable Sir John Sinclair belong to the latter.

  It was now but a step to my friend’s house, where a good fire and a change of clothes soon put all to rights, save and except the having come over Hindhead after all my resolutions. This mortifying circumstance; this having been beaten, lost the guide the three shillings that I had agreed to give him. ‘Either,’ said I, ‘you did not know the way well, or you did: if the former, it was dishonest in you to undertake to guide me: if the latter, you have wilfully led me miles out of my way.’ He grumbled; but off he went. He certainly deserved nothing; for he did not know the way, and he prevented some other man from earning and receiving the money. But, had he not caused me to get upon Hindhead, he would have had the three shillings. I had, at one time, got my hand in my pocket; but the thought of having been beaten pulled it out again.

  Thus ended the most interesting day, as far as I know, that I ever passed in all my life. Hawkley hangers, promontories, and stone-roads will always come into my mind when I see, or hear of, picturesque views. I forgot to mention, that, in going from Hawkley to Greatham, the man, who went to show me the way, told me at a certain fork, ‘that road goes to Selborne’. This put me in mind of a book, which was once recommended to me, but which I never saw, entitled ‘The History and Antiquities of Selborne’,(or something of that sort) written, I think, by a parson of the name of White, brother of Mr White, so long a Bookseller in Fleet-street. This parson had, I think, the living of the parish of Selborne. The book was mentioned to me as a work of great curiosity and interest. But, at that time, the THING was biting so very sharply that one had no attention to bestow on antiquarian researches. Wheat at 39s. a quarter, and South-Down ewes at 125. 6d. have so weakened the THING’S jaws and so filed down its teeth, that I shall now certainly read this book if I can get it. By-the-bye if all the parsons had, for the last thirty years, employed their leisure time in writing the histories of their several parishes, instead of living, as many of them have, engaged in pursuits that I need not here name, neither their situation nor that of their flocks would, perhaps, have been the worse for it at this day.

  Nov. 25. Thursley (Surrey)

  In looking back into Hampshire, I see with pleasure the fanners bestirring themselves to get a County Meeting called. There were, I was told, nearly five hundred names to a Requisition, and those all of land-owners or occupiers. – Precisely what they mean to petition for I do not know; but (and now I address myself to you, Mr CANNING,) if they do not petition for a reform of the Parliament, they will do worse than nothing. You, Sir, have often told us, that the HOUSE, however got together, ‘works well’. Now, as I said in 1817, just before I went to America to get out of the reach of our friend, the Old Doctor13 and to use my long arm; as I said then, in a Letter addressed to Lord Grosvenor, so I say now, show me the inexpediency of reform, and I will hold my tongue. Show us, prove to us, that the House ‘works well’, and I, for my part, give the matter up. It is not the construction or the motions of a machine that I ever look at: all I look after is the effect. When, indeed, I find that the effect is deficient or evil, I look to the construction. And, as I now see, and have for many years seen, evil effect, I seek a remedy in an (duration in the machine. There is now nobody; no, not a single man, out of the regions of Whitehall, who will pretend, that the country can, without the risk of some great and terrible convulsion, go on, even for twelve months longer, unless there be a great change of some sort in the mode of managing the public affairs.

  Could you see and hear what I have seen and heard during this Rural Ride, you would no longer say, that the House ‘works well’. Mrs Canning and your children are dear to you; but, Sir, not more dear than are to them the wives and children of, perhaps, two hundred thousand men, who, by the Acts of this same House, see those wives and children doomed to beggary, and to beggary too never thought of, never regarded as more likely than a blowing up of the earth or a falling of the sun. It was reserved for this ‘working well’ House to make the fire-sides of farmers scenes of gloom. These fire-sides, in which I have always so delighted, I now approach with pain. I was, not long ago, sitting round the fire with as worthy and as industrious a man as all England contains. There was his son, about 19 years of age; two daughters, from 15 to 18; and a little boy sitting on the father’s knee. I knew, but not from him, that there was a mortgage on his farm. I was anxious to induce him to sell without delay. With this view I, in an hypothetical and round-about way, approached his case and at last, I came to final consequences. The deep and deeper gloom on a countenance, once so cheerful, told me what was passing in his breast, when, turning away my looks in order to seem not to perceive the effect of my words, I saw the eyes of his wife full of tears. She had made the application; and there were her children before her! And, am I to be banished for life if I express what I felt upon this occasion! And, does this House, then, ‘work well’? How many men, of the most industrious, the most upright, the most exemplary, upon the face of the earth, have been, by this one Act of this House, driven to despair, ending in madness or self-murder, or both! Nay, how many scores! And, yet, are we to be banished for life, if we endeavour to show, that this House does not ‘work well’?– However, banish or banish not, these facts are notorious: the House made all the Loans which constitute the debt: the House contracted for the Dead Weight: the House put a stop to gold-payments in 1797: the House unanimously passed Peel’s Bill. Here are all the causes of the ruin, the misery, the anguish, the despair and the madness and self-murders. Here they are all. They have all been acts of this House; and yet, we are to be banished if we say, in words suitable to the subject, that this House does not ‘work well’!

  This one Act, I mean this Banishment Act,14 would be enough, with posterity, to characterize this House. When they read (and can believe what they read) that it actually passed a law to banish for life any one who should write, print, or publish any thing having a TENDENCY to bring it into CONTEMPT: when posterity shall read this, and believe it, they will want nothing more to enable them to say what sort of an assembly it was! It was delightful, too, that they should pass this law just after they had passed Peel’s Bill! Oh, God! thou art just! As to reform, it must come. Let what else will happen, it must come. Whether before, or after, all the estates be transferred, I cannot say. But, this I know very well; that the later it come, the deeper will it go.

  I shall, of course, go on remarking, as occasion offers, upon what is done by and said in this present House; but, I know that it can do nothing efficient for the relief of the country. I have seen some men of late, who seem to think, that even a reform, enacted, or begun, by this House, would be an evil; and that it would be better to let the whole thing go on, and produce its natural consequence. I am not of this opinion: I am for a reform as soon as possible, even though it be not, at first, precisely what I could wish; because, if the debt blow up before the reform take place, confusion and uproar there must be; and, I do not want to see confusion and uproar. I am for a reform of some son, and soon; but, when I say of some sort, I do not mean of Lord John Russell’s sort; I do not mean a reform in the Lopez way. In short, what I want, is, to see the men changed. I want to see other men in the House; and as to who those other men should be, I really should not b
e very nice. I have seen the Tierneys, the Bankeses, the Wilberforces, the Michael Angelo Taylors, the Lambs, the Lowthers, the Davis Giddies, the Sir John Sebrights, the Sir Francis Burdetts, the Hobhouses, old or young, Whitbreads the same, the Lord Johns and the Lord Williams and the Lord Henries and the Lord Charleses, and, in short, all the whole family; I have seen them all there, all the same faces and names, all my life time; I see that neither adjournment nor prorogation nor dissolution makes any change in the men; and caprice, let it be if you like, I want to see a change in the men. These have done enough in all conscience; or, at least, they have done enough to satisfy me. I want to see some fresh faces, and to hear a change of some sort or other in the sounds. A ‘hear, hear’, coining everlastingly from the same mouths, is what I, for my part, am tired of.

  I am aware that this is not what the ‘great reformers’ in the House mean. They mean, on the contrary, no such thing as a change of men. They mean that Lopez should sit there for ever; or, at least, till succeeded by a legitimate heir. I believe that Sir Francis Burdett, for instance, has not the smallest idea of an Act of Parliament ever being made without his assistance, if he chooses to assist, which is not very frequently the case. I believe that he looks upon a seat in the House as being his property; and that the other seat is, and ought to be, held as a sort of leasehold or copyhold under him. My idea of reform, therefore; my change of faces and of names and of sounds, will appear quite horrible to him. However, I think the nation begins to be very much of my way of thinking; and this I am very sure of, that we shall never see that change in the management of affairs, which we most of us want to see, unless there be a pretty complete change of men.

  Some people will blame me for speaking out so broadly upon this subject. But I think it the best way to disguise nothing; to do what is right; to be sincere; and to let come what will.

  Nov. 26 to 28. Godalming

  I came here to meet my son, who was to return to London when we had done our business. – The turnips are pretty good all over the country, except upon the very thin soils on the chalk. At Thursley they are very good, and so they are upon all these nice light and good lands round about Godalming.

  This is a very pretty country. You see few prettier spots than this. The chain of little hills that run along to the South and South-East of Godalming, and the soil, which is a good loam upon a sand-stone bottom, run down on the South side, into what is called the Weald. This Weald is a bed of clay, in which nothing grows well but oak trees. It is first the Weald of Surrey and then the Weald of Sussex. It runs along on the South of Dorking, Reigate, Bletchingley, Godstone, and then winds away down into Kent. In no part of it, as far as I have observed, do the oaks grow finer than between the sand hill on the South of Godstone and a place called Fellbridge, where the county of Surrey terminates on the road to East Grinstead.

  At Godalming we heard some account of a lawsuit between Mr Holme Sumner and his tenant, Mr Nash; but the particulars I must reserve till I have them in black and white.

  In all parts of the country, I hear of landlords that begin to squeak, which is a certain proof that they begin to feel the bottom of their tenant’s pockets. No man can pay rent; I mean any rent at all, except out of capital; or, except under some peculiar circumstances, such as having a farm near a spot where the fundholders are building houses. When I was in Hampshire, I heard of terrible breakings up in the Isle of Wight. They say, that the general rout is very near at hand there. I heard of one farmer, who held a farm at seven hundred pounds a-year, who paid his rent annually, and punctually, who had, of course, seven hundred pounds to pay to his landlord last Michaelmas; but who, before Michaelmas came, thrashed out and sold (the harvest being so early) the whole of his corn; sold off his stock, bit by bit; got the very goods out of his house, leaving only a bed and some trifling things; sailed with a fair wind over to France with his family; put his mother-in-law into the house to keep possession of the house and farm, and to prevent the landlord from entering upon the land for a year or better, unless he would pay to the mother-in-law a certain sum of money! Doubtless the landlord had already sucked away about three or four times seven hundred pounds from this farmer. He would not be able to enter upon this farm without a process that would cost him some money, and without the farm being pretty well stocked with thistles and docks, and perhaps laid half to common. Farmers on the coast opposite France are not so firmly bounden as those in the interior. Some hundreds of these will have carried their allegiance, their capital (what they have left), and their skill, to go and grease the fat sow, our old friends the Bourbons. I hear of a sharp, greedy, hungry shark of a landlord, who says that ‘some law must be passed’; that ‘Parliament must do something to prevent this!’ There is a pretty fool for you! There is a great jackass (I beg the real jackass’s pardon) to imagine that the people at Westminster can do any thing to prevent the French from suffering people to come with their money to settle in France! This fool does not know, perhaps, that there are Members of Parliament that live in France more than they do in England. I have heard of one, who not only lives there, but carries on vineyards there, and is never absent from them, except when he comes over ‘to attend to his duties in Parliament’. He perhaps sells his wine at the same time, and that being genuine, doubtless brings him a good price; so that the occupations harmonize together very well. The Isle of Wight must be rather peculiarly distressed; for it was the scene of monstrous expenditure. When the pure Whigs were in power,15 in 1806, it was proved to them and to the Parliament, that in several instances, a barn in the Isle of Wight was rented by the ‘envy of surrounding nations’ for more money than the rest of the whole farm! These barns were wanted as barracks; and, indeed, such things were carried on in that Island as never could have been carried on under any thing that was not absolutely ‘the admiration of the world’.16 These sweet pickings, caused, doubtless, a great rise in the rent of the farms; so that, in this Island, there is not only the depression of price, and a greater depression than any where else, but also the loss of the pickings, and these together leave the tenants but this simple choice: beggary or flight; and as most of them have had a pretty deal of capital, and will be likely to have some left as yet, they will, as they perceive the danger, naturally flee for succour to the Bourbons. This is, indeed, something new in the History of English Agriculture; and were not Mr Canning so positive to the contrary, one would almost imagine that the thing which has produced it does not work so very well. However, that gentleman seems resolved to prevent us, by his King of Bohemia and his two Red Lions, from having any change in this thing; and therefore the landlords, in the Isle of Wight, as well as elsewhere, must make the best of the matter.

  November 29

  Went on to Guildford, where I slept. Every body, 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. Nothing wild and bold, to be sure: but exceedingly pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion, as it happened to be with me.