From London to Land's End and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman"

The city of Salisbury has two remarkable manufactures carried on in it, and which employ the poor of great part of the country round – namely, fine flannels, and long-cloths for the Turkey trade, called Salisbury whites. The people of Salisbury are gay and rich, and have a flourishing trade; and there is a great deal of good manners and good company among them – I mean, among the citizens, besides what is found among the gentlemen; for there are many good families in Salisbury besides the citizens.

This society has a great addition from the Close – that is to say, the circle of ground walled in adjacent to the cathedral; in which the families of the prebendaries and commons, and others of the clergy belonging to the cathedral, have their houses, as is usual in all cities, where there are cathedral churches. These are so considerable here, and the place so large, that it is (as it is called in general) like another city.

The cathedral is famous for the height of its spire, which is without exception the highest and the handsomest in England, being from the ground 410 feet, and yet the walls so exceeding thin that at the upper part of the spire, upon a view made by the late Sir Christopher Wren, the wall was found to be less than five inches thick; upon which a consultation was had whether the spire, or at least the upper part of it, should be taken down, it being supposed to have received some damage by the great storm in the year 1703; but it was resolved in the negative, and Sir Christopher ordered it to be so strengthened with bands of iron plates as has effectually secured it; and I have heard some of the best architects say it is stronger now than when it was first built.

They tell us here long stories of the great art used in laying the first foundation of this church, the ground being marshy and wet, occasioned by the channels of the rivers; that it was laid upon piles, according to some, and upon woolpacks, according to others. But this is not supposed by those who know that the whole country is one rock of chalk, even from the tops of the highest hills to the bottom of the deepest rivers.

They tell us this church was forty years a-building, and cost an immense sum of money; but it must be acknowledged that the inside of the work is not answerable in the decoration of things to the workmanship without. The painting in the choir is mean, and more like the ordinary method of common drawing-room or tavern painting than that of a church; the carving is good, but very little of it; and it is rather a fine church than finely set off.

The ordinary boast of this building (that there were as many gates as months, as many windows as days, as many marble pillars as hours in the year) is now no recommendation at all. However, the mention of it must be preserved: —

“As many days as in one year there be,So many windows in one church we see;As many marble pillars there appearAs there are hours throughout the fleeting year;As many gates as moons one year do view:Strange tale to tell, yet not more strange than true.”

There are, however, some very fine monuments in this church; particularly one belonging to the noble family of Seymours, since Dukes of Somerset (and ancestors of the present flourishing family), which on a most melancholy occasion has been now lately opened again to receive the body of the late Duchess of Somerset, the happy consort for almost forty years of his Grace the present Duke, and only daughter and heiress of the ancient and noble family of Percy, Earls of Northumberland, whose great estate she brought into the family of Somerset, who now enjoy it.

With her was buried at the same time her Grace’s daughter the Marchioness of Caermarthen (being married to the Marquis of Caermarthen, son and heir-apparent to the Lord of Leeds), who died for grief at the loss of the duchess her mother, and was buried with her; also her second son, the Duke Percy Somerset, who died a few months before, and had been buried in the Abbey church of Westminster, but was ordered to be removed and laid here with the ancestors of his house. And I hear his Grace designs to have a yet more magnificent monument erected in this cathedral for them, just by the other which is there already.

How the Dukes of Somerset came to quit this church for their burying-place, and be laid in Westminster Abbey, that I know not; but it is certain that the present Duke has chosen to have his family laid here with their ancestors, and to that end has caused the corpse of his son, the Lord Percy, as above, and one of his daughters, who had been buried in the Abbey, to be removed and brought down to this vault, which lies in that they call the Virgin Mary’s Chapel, behind the altar. There is, as above, a noble monument for a late Duke and Duchess of Somerset in the place already, with their portraits at full-length, their heads lying upon cushions, the whole perfectly well wrought in fine polished Italian marble, and their sons kneeling by them. Those I suppose to be the father of the great Duke of Somerset, uncle to King Edward IV.; but after this the family lay in Westminster Abbey, where there is also a fine monument for that very duke who was beheaded by Edward VI., and who was the great patron of the Reformation.

Among other monuments of noble men in this cathedral they show you one that is very extraordinary, and to which there hangs a tale. There was in the reign of Philip and Mary a very unhappy murder committed by the then Lord Sturton, or Stourton, a family since extinct, but well known till within a few years in that country.

This Lord Stourton being guilty of the said murder, which also was aggravated with very bad circumstances, could not obtain the usual grace of the Crown (viz., to be beheaded), but Queen Mary positively ordered that, like a common malefactor, he should die at the gallows. After he was hanged, his friends desiring to have him buried at Salisbury, the bishop would not consent that he should be buried in the cathedral unless, as a farther mark of infamy, his friends would submit to this condition – viz., that the silken halter in which he was hanged should be hanged up over his grave in the church as a monument of his crime; which was accordingly done, and there it is to be seen to this day.

The putting this halter up here was not so wonderful to me as it was that the posterity of that lord, who remained in good rank some time after, should never prevail to have that mark of infamy taken off from the memory of their ancestor.

There are several other monuments in this cathedral, as particularly of two noblemen of ancient families in Scotland – one of the name of Hay, and one of the name of Gordon; but they give us nothing of their history, so that we must be content to say there they lie, and that is all.

The cloister, and the chapter-house adjoining to the church, are the finest here of any I have seen in England; the latter is octagon, or eight-square, and is 150 feet in its circumference; the roof bearing all upon one small marble pillar in the centre, which you may shake with your hand; and it is hardly to be imagined it can be any great support to the roof, which makes it the more curious (it is not indeed to be matched, I believe, in Europe).

From hence directing my course to the seaside in pursuit of my first design – viz., of viewing the whole coast of England – I left the great road and went down the east side of the river towards New Forest and Lymington; and here I saw the ancient house and seat of Clarendon, the mansion of the ancient family of Hide, ancestors of the great Earl of Clarendon, and from whence his lordship was honoured with that title, or the house erected into an honour in favour of his family.

But this being a large county, and full of memorable branches of antiquity and modern curiosity, I cannot quit my observations so soon. But being happily fixed, by the favour of a particular friend, at so beautiful a spot of ground as this of Clarendon Park, I made several little excursions from hence to view the northern parts of this county – a county so fruitful of wonders that, though I do not make antiquity my chief search, yet I must not pass it over entirely, where so much of it, and so well worth observation, is to be found, which would look as if I either understood not the value of the study, or expected my readers should be satisfied with a total omission of it.

I have mentioned that this county is generally a vast continued body of high chalky hills, whose tops spread themselves into fruitful and pleasant downs and plains, upon which great flocks of sheep are fed, &c. But the reader is desired to observe these hills and plains are most beautifully intersected and cut through by the course of divers pleasant and profitable rivers; in the course and near the banks of which there always is a chain of fruitful meadows and rich pastures, and those interspersed with innumerable pleasant towns, villages, and houses, and among them many of considerable magnitude. So that, while you view the downs, and think the country wild and uninhabited, yet when you come to descend into these vales you are surprised with the most pleasant and fertile country in England.

There are no less than four of these rivers, which meet all together at or near the city of Salisbury; especially the waters of three of them run through the streets of the city – the Nadder and the Willy and the Avon – and the course of these three lead us through the whole mountainous part of the county. The two first join their waters at Wilton, the shiretown, though a place of no great notice now; and these are the waters which run through the canal and the gardens of Wilton House, the seat of that ornament of nobility and learning, the Earl of Pembroke.

One cannot be said to have seen anything that a man of curiosity would think worth seeing in this county, and not have been at Wilton House; but not the beautiful building, not the ancient trophy of a great family, not the noble situation, not all the pleasures of the gardens, parks, fountains, hare-warren, or of whatever is rare either in art or nature, are equal to that yet more glorious sight of a noble princely palace constantly filled with its noble and proper inhabitants. The lord and proprietor, who is indeed a true patriarchal monarch, reigns here with an authority agreeable to all his subjects (family); and his reign is made agreeable, by his first practising the most exquisite government of himself, and then guiding all under him by the rules of honour and virtue, being also himself perfectly master of all the needful arts of family government – I mean, needful to make that government both easy and pleasant to those who are under it, and who therefore willingly, and by choice, conform to it.

Here an exalted genius is the instructor, a glorious example the guide, and a gentle well-directed hand the governor and law-giver to the whole; and the family, like a well-governed city, appears happy, flourishing, and regular, groaning under no grievance, pleased with what they enjoy, and enjoying everything which they ought to be pleased with.

Nor is the blessing of this noble resident extended to the family only, but even to all the country round, who in their degree feel the effects of the general beneficence, and where the neighbourhood (however poor) receive all the good they can expect, and are sure to have no injury or oppression.

The canal before the house lies parallel with the road, and receives into it the whole river Willy, or at least is able to do so; it may, indeed, be said that the river is made into a canal. When we come into the courtyards before the house there are several pieces of antiquity to entertain the curious, as particularly a noble column of porphyry, with a marble statue of Venus on the top of it. In Italy, and especially at Rome and Naples, we see a great variety of fine columns, and some of them of excellent workmanship and antiquity; and at some of the courts of the princes of Italy the like is seen, as especially at the court of Florence; but in England I do not remember to have seen anything like this, which, as they told me, is two-and-thirty feet high, and of excellent workmanship, and that it came last from Candia, but formerly from Alexandria. What may belong to the history of it any further, I suppose is not known – at least, they could tell me no more of it who showed it me.

On the left of the court was formerly a large grotto and curious water-works; and in a house, or shed, or part of the building, which opened with two folding-doors, like a coach-house, a large equestrian statue of one of the ancestors of the family in complete armour, as also another of a Roman Emperor in brass. But the last time I had the curiosity to see this house, I missed that part; so that I supposed they were removed.

As the present Earl of Pembroke, the lord of this fine palace, is a nobleman of great personal merit many other ways, so he is a man of learning and reading beyond most men of his lordship’s high rank in this nation, if not in the world; and as his reading has made him a master of antiquity, and judge of such pieces of antiquity as he has had opportunity to meet with in his own travels and otherwise in the world, so it has given him a love of the study, and made him a collector of valuable things, as well in painting as in sculpture, and other excellences of art, as also of nature; insomuch that Wilton House is now a mere museum or a chamber of rarities, and we meet with several things there which are to be found nowhere else in the world.

As his lordship is a great collector of fine paintings, so I know no nobleman’s house in England so prepared, as if built on purpose, to receive them; the largest and the finest pieces that can be imagined extant in the world might have found a place here capable to receive them. I say, they “might have found,” as if they could not now, which is in part true; for at present the whole house is so completely filled that I see no room for any new piece to crowd in without displacing some other fine piece that hung there before. As for the value of the piece that might so offer to succeed the displaced, that the great judge of the whole collection, the earl himself, must determine; and as his judgment is perfectly good, the best picture would be sure to possess the place. In a word, here is without doubt the best, if not the greatest, collection of rarities and paintings that are to be seen together in any one nobleman’s or gentleman’s house in England. The piece of our Saviour washing His disciples’ feet, which they show you in one of the first rooms you go into, must be spoken of by everybody that has any knowledge of painting, and is an admirable piece indeed.

You ascend the great staircase at the upper end of the hall, which is very large; at the foot of the staircase you have a Bacchus as large as life, done in fine Peloponnesian marble, carrying a young Bacchus on his arm, the young one eating grapes, and letting you see by his countenance that he is pleased with the taste of them. Nothing can be done finer, or more lively represent the thing intended – namely, the gust of the appetite, which if it be not a passion, it is an affection which is as much seen in the countenance, perhaps more than any other. One ought to stop every two steps of this staircase, as we go up, to contemplate the vast variety of pictures that cover the walls, and of some of the best masters in Europe; and yet this is but an introduction to what is beyond them.

When you are entered the apartments, such variety seizes you every way that you scarce know to which hand to turn yourself. First on one side you see several rooms filled with paintings as before, all so curious, and the variety such, that it is with reluctance that you can turn from them; while looking another way you are called off by a vast collection of busts and pieces of the greatest antiquity of the kind, both Greek and Romans; among these there is one of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in basso-relievo. I never saw anything like what appears here, except in the chamber of rarities at Munich in Bavaria.

Passing these, you come into several large rooms, as if contrived for the reception of the beautiful guests that take them up; one of these is near seventy feet long, and the ceiling twenty-six feet high, with another adjoining of the same height and breadth, but not so long. Those together might be called the Great Gallery of Wilton, and might vie for paintings with the Gallery of Luxembourg, in the Faubourg of Paris.

These two rooms are filled with the family pieces of the house of Herbert, most of them by Lilly or Vandyke; and one in particular outdoes all that I ever met with, either at home or abroad; it is done, as was the mode of painting at that time, after the manner of a family piece of King Charles I., with his queen and children, which before the burning of Whitehall I remember to hang at the east end of the Long Gallery in the palace.

This piece fills the farther end of the great room which I just now mentioned; it contains the Earl of Montgomery, ancestor of the house of Herbert (not then Earls of Pembroke) and his lady, sitting, and as big as life; there are about them their own five sons and one daughter, and their daughter-in-law, who was daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, married to the elder Lord Herbert, their eldest son. It is enough to say of this piece, it is worth the labour of any lover of art to go five hundred miles to see it; and I am informed several gentlemen of quality have come from France almost on purpose. It would be endless to describe the whole set of the family pictures which take up this room, unless we would enter into the roof-tree of the family, and set down a genealogical line of the whole house.

After we have seen this fine range of beauties – for such, indeed, they are – far from being at an end of your surprise, you have three or four rooms still upon the same floor, filled with wonders as before. Nothing can be finer than the pictures themselves, nothing more surprising than the number of them. At length you descend the back stairs, which are in themselves large, though not like the other. However, not a hand’s-breadth is left to crowd a picture in of the smallest size; and even the upper rooms, which might be called garrets, are not naked, but have some very good pieces in them.

Upon the whole, the genius of the noble collector may be seen in this glorious collection, than which, take them together, there is not a finer in any private hand in Europe, and in no hand at all in Britain, private or public.

The gardens are on the south of the house, and extend themselves beyond the river, a branch of which runs through one part of them, and still south of the gardens in the great park, which, extending beyond the vale, mounts the hill opening at the last to the great down, which is properly called, by way of distinction, Salisbury Plain, and leads from the city of Salisbury to Shaftesbury. Here also his lordship has a hare-warren, as it is called, though improperly. It has, indeed, been a sanctuary for the hares for many years; but the gentlemen complain that it mars their game, for that as soon as they put up a hare for their sport, if it be anywhere within two or three miles, away she runs for the warren, and there is an end of their pursuit; on the other hand, it makes all the countrymen turn poachers, and destroy the hares by what means they can. But this is a smaller matter, and of no great import one way or other.

From this pleasant and agreeable day’s work I returned to Clarendon, and the next day took another short tour to the hills to see that celebrated piece of antiquity, the wonderful Stonehenge, being six miles from Salisbury, north, and upon the side of the River Avon, near the town of Amesbury. It is needless that I should enter here into any part of the dispute about which our learned antiquaries have so puzzled themselves that several books (and one of them in folio) have been published about it; some alleging it to be a heathen or pagan temple and altar, or place of sacrifice, as Mr. Jones; others a monument or trophy of victory; others a monument for the dead, as Mr. Aubrey, and the like. Again, some will have it be British, some Danish, some Saxon, some Roman, and some, before them all, Phoenician.

I shall suppose it, as the majority of all writers do, to be a monument for the dead, and the rather because men’s bones have been frequently dug up in the ground near them. The common opinion that no man could ever count them, that a baker carried a basket of bread and laid a loaf upon every stone, and yet never could make out the same number twice, this I take as a mere country fiction, and a ridiculous one too. The reason why they cannot easily be told is that many of them lie half or part buried in the ground; and a piece here and a piece there only appearing above the grass, it cannot be known easily which belong to one stone and which to another, or which are separate stones, and which are joined underground to one another; otherwise, as to those which appear, they are easy to be told, and I have seen them told four times after one another, beginning every time at a different place, and every time they amounted to seventy-two in all; but then this was counting every piece of a stone of bulk which appeared above the surface of the earth, and was not evidently part of and adjoining to another, to be a distinct and separate body or stone by itself.

The form of this monument is not only described but delineated in most authors, and, indeed, it is hard to know the first but by the last. The figure was at first circular, and there were at least four rows or circles within one another. The main stones were placed upright, and they were joined on the top by cross-stones, laid from one to another, and fastened with vast mortises and tenons. Length of time has so decayed them that not only most of the cross-stones which lay on the top are fallen down, but many of the upright also, notwithstanding the weight of them is so prodigious great. How they came thither, or from whence (no stones of that kind being now to be found in that part of England near it) is still the mystery, for they are of such immense bulk that no engines or carriages which we have in use in this age could stir them.

Doubtless they had some method in former days in foreign countries, as well as here, to move heavier weights than we find practicable now. How else did Solomon’s workmen build the battlement or additional wall to support the precipice of Mount Moriah, on which the Temple was built, which was all built of stones of Parian marble, each stone being forty cubits long and fourteen cubits broad, and eight cubits high or thick, which, reckoning each cubit at two feet and a half of our measure (as the learned agree to do), was one hundred feet long, thirty-five feet broad, and twenty feet thick?

These stones at Stonehenge, as Mr. Camden describes them, and in which others agree, were very large, though not so large – the upright stones twenty-four feet high, seven feet broad, sixteen feet round, and weigh twelve tons each; and the cross-stones on the top, which he calls coronets, were six or seven tons. But this does not seem equal; for if the cross-stones weighed six or seven tons, the others, as they appear now, were at least five or six times as big, and must weigh in proportion; and therefore I must think their judgment much nearer the case who judge the upright stones at sixteen tons or thereabouts (supposing them to stand a great way into the earth, as it is not doubted but they do), and the coronets or cross-stones at about two tons, which is very large too, and as much as their bulk can be thought to allow.

Upon the whole, we must take them as our ancestors have done – namely, for an erection or building so ancient that no history has handed down to us the original. As we find it, then, uncertain, we must leave it so. It is indeed a reverend piece of antiquity, and it is a great loss that the true history of it is not known. But since it is not, I think the making so many conjectures at the reality, when they know lots can but guess at it, and, above all, the insisting so long and warmly on their private opinions, is but amusing themselves and us with a doubt, which perhaps lies the deeper for their search into it.

The downs and plains in this part of England being so open, and the surface so little subject to alteration, there are more remains of antiquity to be seen upon them than in other places. For example, I think they tell us there are three-and-fifty ancient encampments or fortifications to be seen in this one county – some whereof are exceeding plain to be seen; some of one form, some of another; some of one nation, some of another – British, Danish, Saxon, Roman – as at Ebb Down, Burywood, Oldburgh Hill, Cummerford, Roundway Down, St. Ann’s Hill, Bratton Castle, Clay Hill, Stournton Park, Whitecole Hill, Battlebury, Scrathbury, Tanesbury, Frippsbury, Southbury Hill, Amesbury, Great Bodwin, Easterley, Merdon, Aubery, Martenscil Hill, Barbury Castle, and many more.