From Paddington to Penzance. Charles G. Harper
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in the river bed. For dessert we dipped the bread into the jam-pot, and thus circumvented the necessity for spoons.
ABOVE HURLEY.
This was at Hurley, after we had passed beautiful Marlow and Bisham, where the ghost of Lady Hoby walks in the abbey, and before we had come to Medmenham.
Here the notorious Medmenham Abbey stands by the waterside, where the river winds and rushes grow thick, and a lovely view it makes, close-hemmed with tall trees, the hills rising in the background and the level meads spreading out, emerald green, in front.
MEDMENHAM ABBEY.
They tell us—those unkind topographers—that the picturesque ruins of the Abbey are a sham; that possibly one single pillar may be a genuine relic of the old religious house that once stood here, but that the arcading, the Tudor windows and the ivy-covered tower, are “ruins” deliberately built. Perhaps they are, but, even so, they are excellent, and those purists are not to be thanked for setting us right, where we might gladly have erred.
They would, too, assuage by exact inquiry the romantic legends of the Hell Fire Club, those “Monks of St. Francis,” as Wilkes and his jolly companions who rioted here were pleased to call themselves. Their horrid rites, their orgies and debauchery, the license of the place, typified by their motto, still extant, “Fay ce que voudras,” are, perhaps, better “taken as read.”
We crept up stream against a swift current, and between heavy rain showers that soaked us and diluted the remains of our picnic to a revolting mess: bread and water, tinned meat and raspberry jam, both sufficiently saturated, are not appetising items. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say there was more jam on the seats and our clothes than in its native pot, but this was at least an open question.
At Hambledon, the lock-keeper let us through in a pelting shower, which ceased directly we were freed from the unsheltered imprisonment of the lock. Have you ever noticed how wet the river looks after rain? how much more watery the water appears? Thus looked Henley Reach as we rowed up it this evening, past that singular eyot called Regatta Island.
VI.
Regatta Island is scarcely a place of beauty. There is a brick and plaster pseudo-temple affair on it that records the most strenuous days of the classic fallacy, when eighteenth-century poets peopled the country side and the river banks with preposterous naiads and other galvanised reproductions of the beautiful and mystic mythology of the ancients. Alas! this is not Arcadia: Great Pan is dead long since, and his nymphs have danced away to an enduring Götterdämmerung. It is well it should be so, for had Pan survived he would have hidden his hairy legs with check trousers, and changed his “woodnotes wild” for the democratic strains of the concertina. In these days of prim and proper County Councils, whose internal rottenness is varnished over with a shiny varnish of prudery, such improper creatures are impossible. This is an age when everything must be properly breeched or sufficiently skirted, and, though the constitution of our Councils be revolutionary, a revolution sans culottes could not hope to win their approval.
A poignant individual, whose melancholy look touched time and place to a deeper pathos, stood by the water’s side, and vulgarised that shoddy temple with an air of one who had drunk too much beer, and was in the lachrymose stage.
Poignant Individual
We passed him by with flashing sculls that sent the watery shadows dancing madly in our wake, and crept up the quiet reach, past the poetically-named Phillis Court; the Wren-built bulk of Fawley; modern-built, yet historical Greenlands, residence of the late Mr. W. H. Smith, that unromantic but sufficiently strenuous upholder of “duty to Queen and country,” and presently came off the slip where many boats lay moored. Henley was quiet enough, not to say dull. Except when the midsummer madness of the Regatta sets all the riverside agog, and sends even garret lodgings up to fabulous prices, the broad stony streets of the town loom blankly to the stranger. The great church of Henley, whose tower, picturesquely turreted, shows to greater advantage at a distance, is of equally generous proportions. It is scarcely interesting, but there is in the graveyard a tomb of a sombre and darkling interest. Here lies, beside her father and mother, Mary Blandy, who, at the time of her trial and execution, was probably the most notorious person within the compass of these islands. The daughter of Mr. Francis Blandy, an attorney-at-law, who in 1750 lived in Henley town, close by the Angel Inn, she became acquainted with a Captain Cranston, who, being in charge of a recruiting party stationed here, was received into the society of the place. Now, Mr. Blandy was a widower, and dotingly fond of his daughter, his only child. Being a rich man as times went, he was anxious to secure for her a footing in county society, then more difficult of access than now. To this end he caused it to be understood that his Molly would have £10,000 by way of dowry, and the prospect of securing this large sum led the captain, who was a married man, to pretend love for her. Although he sprang from an old Scots family, Cranston was a man of extremely dissolute and evil character, and the lawyer, although he knew little or nothing of this, and nothing of the wife in Scotland, disliked and distrusted him, and forbade the engagement into which he and his daughter had entered.
However, Mary Blandy was so infatuated with the man, and so influenced by him, that, to get rid of her father, and to obtain at once both husband and her dowry, she set in train a scheme of slow poisoning that for heartlessness rivals Brinvilliers herself. In November 1750, she began to poison her father, under the instructions of Cranston, who, returning to Scotland, had sent her some pebbles, and powders ostensibly to clean them withal. The powders were composed of arsenic, and were administered in her father’s tea. By March of the following year the poison had its effect in causing her father’s teeth to drop out, whereupon this exceptional daughter “damned him for a toothless old rogue and wished him at hell.”
Several times the servants were nearly killed by having accidentally drunk of the tea prepared for the master of the house, and on each occasion this extraordinary woman nursed them back to health with the tenderest solicitude. At length their suspicions were sufficiently aroused to inform Mr. Blandy secretly. He told his daughter that he suspected he was being poisoned. She confessed to him, and he, incredible as it may appear, forgave her, with admonitions to amend her life, and, above all, to conceal everything, saying, “Poor girl, what will not a love-sick woman do for the man she loves!”
He died the next day, and Mary Blandy escaped the same night from the house, after having vainly attempted to bribe the servants to smuggle her off to London in a post-chaise. Half-way across Henley Bridge she was discovered, and would have been lynched by the inhabitants had she not taken shelter within the Angel Inn, where she was promptly arrested. Taken thence to Oxford, she was tried, found guilty, and condemned to death on the 29th February 1752. She was executed on the 6th April, begging not to be hanged high, “for the sake of decency.”
She asserted her innocence to the last, saying Cranston had told her the powders would do her father no harm. The same mob that had hunted her to the doors of the “Angel,” attended her body from the scene of execution at Oxford Castle, regarding her as a saint. She was buried here in a coffin lined with white satin. Cranston, it is scarcely necessary to add, fled the country.
This slow poisoner, if painter and mezzotinter lie not who have handed down her portraiture to our times, was peculiarly beautiful, with an eighteenth-century grace, a swan neck, and a sweetness of expression that, if any truth there be in views that take the face as index to the mind, would seem to shadow forth nothing but virtues minor and major.
At the “Red Lion” by the bridge we supped and slept, possibly attracted to this particular hostelry by Shenstone’s famous lines—