BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - ON ELY
Whatever, keeping its proportion and form, is designed upon a scale much
greater or much less than that of our general experience, produces upon
the mind an effect of phantasy.
A little perfect model of an engine or a ship does not only amuse or
surprise; it rather casts over the imagination something of that veil
through which the world is transfigured, and which I have called "the
wing of Dalua"; the medium of appreciations beyond experience; the
medium of vision, of original passion and of dreams. The principal spell
of childhood returns as we bend over the astonishing details. We are
giants--or there is no secure standard left in our intelligence.
So it is with the common thing built much larger than the million
examples upon which we had based our petty security. It has been always
in the nature of worship that heroes, or the gods made manifest, should
be men, but larger than men. Not tall men or men grander, but men
transcendent: men only in their form; in their dimension so much
superior as to be lifted out of our world. An arch as old as Rome but
not yet ruined, found on the sands of Africa, arrests the traveller in
this fashion. In his modern cities he has seen greater things; but here
in Africa, where men build so squat and punily, cowering under the heat
upon the parched ground, so noble and so considerable a span, carved as
men can carve under sober and temperate skies, catches the mind and
clothes it with a sense of the strange. And of these emotions the
strongest, perhaps, is that which most of those who travel to-day go
seeking; the enchantment of mountains; the air by which we know them
for something utterly different from high hills. Accustomed to the
contour of downs and tors, or to the valleys and long slopes that
introduce a range, we come to some wider horizon and see, far off, a
further line of hills. To hills all the mind is attuned: a moderate
ecstasy. The clouds are above the hills, lying level in the empty sky;
men and their ploughs have visited, it seems, all the land about us;
till, suddenly, faint but hard, a cloud less varied, a greyer portion of
the infinite sky itself, is seen to be permanent above the world. Then
all our grasp of the wide view breaks down. We change. The valleys and
the tiny towns, the unseen mites of men, the gleams or thread of roads,
are prostrate, covering a little watching space before the shrine of
this dominant and towering presence.
It is as though humanity were permitted to break through the vulgar
illusion of daily sense, and to learn in a physical experience how
unreal are all the absolute standards by which we build. It is as though
the vast and the unexpected had a purpose, and that purpose were the
showing to mankind in rare glimpses what places are designed for the
soul--those ultimate places where things common become shadows and fail,
and the divine part in us, which adores and desires, breathes its own
air, and is at last alive.
* * * * *
This awful charm which attaches to the enormous envelops the Causse of
Mende; for its attributes are all of them pushed beyond the ordinary
limit.
Each of the four Causses is a waste; but the Causse of Mende is utterly
bereft of men. Each is a high plateau; but this, I believe, the highest
in feet, and certainly in impression. You stand there as it were upon
the summit of a lonely pedestal, with nothing but a rocky edge around
you. Each is dried up; but the Catisse of Mende is without so much as a
dew-pan or a well; it is wrinkled, horny, and cauterised under the
alternate frost and flame of its fierce open sky, as are the deserts of
the moon. Each of the Causses is silent; but the silence of the Causse
of Mende is scorched and frozen into its stones, and is as old as they:
all around, the torrents which have sawn their black canons upon every
side of the block frame this silence with their rumble. Each of the
Causses casts up above its plain fantastic heaps of rock consonant to
the wild spirit of its isolation; but the Causse of Mende holds a kind
of fortress--a medley so like the ghost of a dead town that, even in
full daylight, you expect the footsteps of men; and by night, as you go
gently, in fear of waking the sleepers, you tread quite certainly among
built houses and spires. This place the peasants of the canons have
called "The Old City"; and no one living will go near it who knows it
well.
The Causses have also this peculiar to them: that the ravines by which
each is cut off are steep and sudden. But the cliffs of the Causse of
Mende are walls. That the chief of these walls may seem the more
terrible, it is turned northwards, so that by day and night it is in
shadow, and falls sheer.
* * * * *
It was when I had abandoned this desolate wonder (but with its influence
strong upon me) that I left the town of Mende, down on the noise of its
river, and began to climb the opposing mountain of the Margeride.
It was already evening, though as yet there were no stars. The air was
fresh, because the year was at that season when it is summer in the
vineyard plains, but winter in the hills. A twilight so coloured and
translucent as to suggest cold spanned like an Aurora the western mouth
of the gully. Upon my eastward and upward way the full moon, not yet
risen, began to throw an uncertain glory over the sky.
This road was made by the French kings when their influence had crept so
far south as to control these mountains. They became despots, and their
despotism, which was everywhere magnificent, engraved itself upon these
untenanted bare rocks. They strengthened and fortified the road. Its
grandeur in so empty and impoverished a land was a boast or a threat of
their power. The Republic succeeded the kings, the Armies succeeded the
Republic, and every experiment succeeded the victories and the breakdown
of the Armies. The road grew stronger all the while, bridging this
desert, and giving pledge that the brain of Paris was able, and more
able, to order the whole of the soil. So then, as I followed it, it
seemed to me to bear in itself, and in its contrast with untamed
surroundings, the history and the character of this one nation out of
the many which live by the tradition of Europe. As I followed it and saw
its exact gradient, its hard and even surface, its square border stones,
and, every hundred yards, its carved mark of the distance done, these
elaborations, standing quite new among the tumbled rocks of a vague
upland, made one certain that Paris had been at work. Very far back (how
far was marked on the milestone) the road had left the swarming gate of
Toulouse. Very far on (how far was marked on the milestone) it was to
cross the Saône by its own bridge, and feed the life of Lyons. In
between it met and surmounted (still civilised, easy, complete) this
barbaric watershed of the Margeride.
As I followed it, law--good law and evil--seemed to go with me up the
mountain side.
There was more sound than on the arid wastes of the Causse. There were
trees, and birds in the trees, moving faintly. The great moon, which had
now risen, shone also upon scanty grass and (from time to time) upon the
trickle of water passing in runnels beneath the road.
The torrent in the depth below roared openly and strong, and, beyond it,
the black wall of the Causse, immense and battlemented above me under
the moon, made what poor life this mountain supported seem for a moment
gracious by comparison. I remembered that sheep and goats and men could
live on the Margeride.
But the Margeride has rightly compelled its 'very few historians to
melancholy or fear.
It is a district, or a mountain range, or a single summit, which cuts
off the east from the west, the Loire from the Gironde: a long, even
barrow of dark stone. Its people are one, suspicious of the plains. Its
line against the sky is also one: no critical height in Europe is so
strict and unbroken. You may see it from a long way east--from the
Velay, or even from the last of the Forèz, and wonder whether it is a
land or a sullen bar of black cloud.
All the world knows how snow, even in mere gullies and streaks, uplifts
a mountain. Well, I have seen the dull roof-tile of the Margeride from
above Puy in spring, when patches of snow still clung to it, and the
snow did no more than it would have done to a plain. It neither raised
nor distinguished this brooding thing.
But it is indeed a barrier. Its rounded top is more formidable than if
it were a ridge of rock; its saddle, broad and indeterminate, deceives
the traveller, with new slight slopes following one upon the other when
the sharp first of the ascent is done.
Already the last edge of the Causse beyond the valley had disappeared,
and already had the great road taken me higher than the buttress which
holds up that table-land, when, thinking I had gained the summit, I
turned a corner in the way and found a vague roll of rising land before
me. Upon this also, under the strong moonlight, I saw the ruin of a
mill. Water, therefore, must have risen behind it. I expected and found
yet another uncertain height, and beyond it a third, and, a mile beyond,
another. This summit was like those random marshy steps which rise
continually and wearily between the sluggish rivers of the prairies.
I passed the fields that gave his title to La Peyrouse. The cold, which
with every hundred feet had increased unnoticed, now first disturbed me.
The wind had risen (for I had come to that last stretch of the glacis,
over which, from beyond the final height, an eastern wind can blow), and
this wind carried I know not what dust of ice, that did not make a
perceptible fall, yet in an hour covered my clothes with tiny spangles,
and stung upon the face like Highland snow in a gale. With that wind and
that fine, powdery frost went no apparent clouds. The sky was still
clear above me. Such rare stars as can conquer the full moon shone
palely; but round the moon herself bent an evanescent halo, like those
one sees over the Channel upon clear nights before a stormy morning. The
spindrift of fine ice had, I think, defined this halo.
How long I climbed through the night I do not know. The summit was but a
slight accident upon a tumbled plain. The ponds stood thick with ice,
the sound of running water had ceased, when the slight downward of the
road through a barren moor and past broad undrained films of frozen bog,
told me that I was on the further northern slope. The wind also was now
roaring over the platform of the watershed, and great patches of
whirling snow lay to the right and left like sand upon the grassy dunes
of a coast.
Through all this loneliness and cold I went down, with the great road
for a companion. Majesty and power were imposed by it upon these savage
wilds. The hours uncalculated, and the long arrears of the night, had
confused my attention; the wind, the little arrows of the ice, the
absence of ploughlands and of men. Those standards of measure which (I
have said) the Causses so easily disturb would not return to me. I took
mile after mile almost unheeding, numbed with cold, demanding sleep, but
ignorant of where might be found the next habitation.
It was in this mood that I noticed on a distant swirl of rocks before me
what might have been roofs and walls; but in that haunted country the
rocks play such tricks as I have told. The moonlight also, which seems
so much too bright upon a lonely heath, fails one altogether when
distinction must be made between distant things, and when men are near.
I did not know that these rocks (or houses) were the high group of
Chateauneuf till I came suddenly upon the long and low house which
stands below it on the road, and is the highway inn for the mountain
town beyond.
I halted for a moment, because no light came from the windows. Just
opposite the house a great tomb marked the fall of some hero. The wind
seemed less violent. The waters of the marshy plain had gathered. They
were no longer frozen, and a little brook ran by. As I waited there,
hesitating, my fatigue came upon me, and I knocked at their great door.
They opened, and light poured upon the road, and the noise of peasants
talking loudly, and the roaring welcome of a fire. In this way I ended
my crossing of these sombre and unrecorded hills.
* * * * *
I that had lost count of hours and of heights in the glamour of the
midnight and of the huge abandoned places of my climb, stepped now into
a hall where the centuries also mingled and lost their order. The
dancing fire filled one of those great pent-house chimneys that witness
to the communal life of the Middle Ages. Around and above it, ironwork
of a hundred years branched from the ingle-nooks to support the drying
meats of the winter provision. A wide board, rude, over-massive, and
shining with long usage, reflected the stone ware and the wine. Chairs,
carved grotesquely, and as old almost as the walls about me, stood round
the comfort of the fire. I saw that the windows were deeper than a man's
arms could reach, and wedge-shaped--made for fighting. I saw that the
beams of the high roof, which the firelight hardly caught, were black
oak and squared enormously, like the ribs of a master-galley, and in the
leaves and garden things that hung from them, in the mighty stones of
the wall, and the beaten earth of the floor, the strong simplicity of
our past, and the promise of our endurance, came upon me.
The peasants sitting about the board and fire had risen, looking at the
door; for strangers were rare, and it was very late as I came out of the
empty cold into that human room. Their dress was ancestral; the master,
as he spoke to me, mixed new words with old. He had phrases that the
Black Prince used when he went riding at arms across the Margeride. He
spoke also of modern things, of the news in the valley from which I had
come, and the railway and Puy below us. They put before me bread and
wine, which I most needed. I sat right up against the blaze. We all
talked high together of the things we knew. For when I had told them
what news there was in the valley, they also answered my questions, into
which I wove as best I could those still living ancient words I had
caught from their mouths. I asked them whose was that great tomb under
the moonlight, at which I had shuddered as I entered their doors. They
told me it was Duguesclin's tomb; for he got his death-wound here under
the walls of the town above them five hundred years ago, and in this
house he had died. Then I asked what stream that was which trickled from
the half-frozen moss, and led down the valley of my next day's journey.
They told me it was called the River Red-cap, and they said that it was
Faëry. I asked them also what was the name of the height over which I
had come; they answered, that the shepherds called it "The King's
House," and that hence, in clear weather, under an eastern wind, one
could see far off, beyond the Velay, that lonely height which is called
"The Chair of God."
So we talked together, drinking wine and telling each other of many
things, I of the world to which I was compelled to return, and they of
the pastures and the streams, and all the story of Lozère. And, all the
while, not the antiquity alone, but the endurance of Christendom poured
into me from every influence around.
They rose to go to the homes which were their own, without a lord. We
exchanged the last salutations. The wooden soles of their shoes
clattered upon the stone threshold of the door.
The master also rose and left me. I sat there for perhaps an hour,
alone, with the falling fire before me and a vision in my heart.
Though I was here on the very roof and centre of the western land, I
heard the surge of the inner and the roll of the outer sea; the foam
broke against the Hebrides, and made a white margin to the cliffs of
Holy Ireland. The tide poured up beyond our islands to the darkness in
the north. I saw the German towns, and Lombardy, and the light on Rome.
And the great landscape I saw from the summit to which I was exalted was
not of to-day only, but also of yesterday, and perhaps of to-morrow.
Our Europe cannot perish. Her religion--which is also mine--has in it
those victorious energies of defence which neither merchants nor
philosophers can understand, and which are yet the prime condition of
establishment. Europe, though she must always repel attacks from within
and from without, is always secure; the soul of her is a certain spirit,
at once reasonable and chivalric. And the gates of Hell shall not
prevail against it.
She will not dissolve by expansion, nor be broken by internal strains.
She will not suffer that loss of unity which would be for all her
members death, and for her history and meaning and self an utter
oblivion. She will certainly remain.
Her component peoples have merged and have remerged. Her particular,
famous cities have fallen down. Her soldiers have believed the world to
have lost all, because a battle turned against them, Hittin or Leipsic.
Her best has at times grown poor, and her worst rich. Her colonies have
seemed dangerous for a moment from the insolence of their power, and
then again (for a moment) from the contamination of their decline. She
has suffered invasion of every sort; the East has wounded her in arms
and has corrupted her with ideas; her vigorous blood has healed the
wounds at once, and her permanent sanity has turned such corruptions
into innocuous follies. She will certainly remain.
* * * * *
So that old room, by its very age, reminded me, not of decay, but of
unchangeable things.
All this came to me out of the fire; and upon such a scene passed the
pageantry of our astounding history. The armies marching perpetually,
the guns and ring of bronze; I heard the chant of our prayers; and,
though so great a host went by from the Baltic to the passes of the
Pyrenees, the myriads were contained in one figure common to them all.
I was refreshed, as though by the resurrection of something loved and
thought dead. I was no longer afraid of Time.
That night I slept ten hours. Next day, as I swung out into the air, I
knew that whatever Power comforts men had thrown wide open the gates of
morning; and a gale sang strong and clean across that pale blue sky
which mountains have for a neighbour.
I could see the further valley broadening among woods, to the warmer
places; and I went down beside the River Red-cap onwards, whither it
pleased me to go.
Upon the very limit of the Fens, not a hundred feet in height, but very
sharp against the level, there is a lonely little hill. From the edge of
that hill the land seems very vague; the flat line of the horizon is the
only boundary, and that horizon mixes into watery clouds. No countryside
is so formless until one has seen the plan of it set down in a map, but
on studying such a map one understands the scheme of the Fens.
The Wash is in the shape of a keystone with the narrow side towards the
sea and the broad side towards the land. Imagine the Wash prolonged for
twenty or thirty miles inland and broadened considerably as it proceeded
as would a curving fan, or better still, a horseshoe, and you have the
Fens: a horseshoe whose points, as Dugdale says, are the corners of
Lincolnshire and Norfolk.
All around them is land of some little height, and quite dry. It is
oölitic on the east, chalky on the south, and the old towns and the old
roads look from all round this amphitheatre of dry land down upon the
alluvial flats beneath. Peterboro', Cambridge, Lynn, are all just off
the Fens, and the Ermine street runs on the bank which forms their
eastern frontier.
This plain has suffered very various fortunes. How good the land was and
how well inhabited before the ruin of the monasteries is not yet
completely grasped, even by these who love these marshes and who have
written their history. Yet there is physical evidence of what was once
here: masses of trees but just buried, grass lying mown in swathes
beneath the moss-land, the implements of men where now no men can live,
the great buried causeway running right across from east to west.
Beyond such proofs there are the writers who, rare as are the
descriptions of medieval scenery, manage to speak of this. For Henry of
Huntingdon it was a kind of garden. There were many meres in it, but
there were also islands and woods and orchards. William of Malmesbury
writes of it with delight, and mentions even its vines. The meres were
not impassable marshes; for instance, in Domesday you find the Abbot
of Ramsay owning a vessel upon Whittlesea Mere. The whole impression one
gets from the earlier time is that of something like the upper waters of
the rivers in the Broads: much draining and a good many ponds, but most
of the land firm with good deep pastures and a great diversity of woods.
Great catastrophes have certainly overcome this countryside. The
greatest was the anarchy of the sixteenth century; but it is probable
that, coincidently with every grave lesion in the continuity of our
civilisation, the Fens suffered, for they always needed the perpetual
attention of man to keep them (as they so long were, and may be again if
ever our people get back their land and restore a communal life) fully
inhabited, afforested, and cultured.
It is probable that the break-up of the ninth century saw the Fens
partly drowned, and that after the Black Death something of the same
sort happened again, for it is in the latter fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries that you begin to hear of a necessity for reclaiming them.
John of Gaunt had a scheme, and Morton dug a ditch which is still called
"Morton's Leam." I say, every defeat of our civilisation was inflicted
here in the Fens, but it is certain that the principal disaster followed
the suppression of the monasteries.
These great foundations--nourishing hundreds and governing thousands,
based upon the populace, drawn from the populace, and living by the
common life--were scattered throughout the Fens. They were founded on
the "islands" nearest the good land: Thorney, Ramsay, Croyland, Ely--the
nuns of Chatteris.
They dated from the very beginning. Ely was founded within sight of our
conversion, 672. Croyland came even before that, before civilisation and
religion were truly re-established in Britain; Penda's great-nephew gave
it its charter; St Augustine had been dead for little more than a
century when the charter was signed. Even as the monks came to claim
their land they discovered hermits long settled there. Thorney--Ancarig
it was then--was even fifty years older than Croyland. The roots of all
these go back to the beginning of the nation.
Ramsay and Charteris cannot be traced beyond the gulf of the Danish
invasion, but they are members of the group or ring of houses which
clustered round the edge of the dry land and sent out its industry
towards the Wash, making new land; for this ring sent out feelers
eastward, draining the land and recovering it every way, founding cells,
establishing villages. Holbeach, Spalding, Freiston, Holland, and I know
not how much more was their land.
When the monasteries were destroyed their lordship fell into the hands
of that high class--now old, then new--the Cromwells and Russells and
the rest, upon whom has since depended the greatness of the country. The
intensive spirit proper to a teeming but humble population was
forgotten. The extensive economics of the great owners, their love of
distances and of isolation took the place of the old agriculture. Within
a generation the whole land was drowned.
The isolated villages forgot the general civilisation of England; they
came to depend for their living upon the wildfowl of the marshes; here
and there was a little summer pasturing, more rarely a little ploughing
of the rare patches of dry land; but the whole place soon ran wild, and
there Englishmen soon grew to cause an endless trouble to the new
landlords. These, all the while on from the death of Henry to that of
Elizabeth, pursued their vigilance and their accumulations. Their power
rose above the marshes like a slow sun and dried them up at last.
In every inch of England you can find the history of England. You find
it very typically here. The growth of that leisured class which we still
enjoy--the class that in the seventeenth century destroyed the central
government of the Crown, penetrated and refreshed the universities,
acquired for its use and reformed the endowed primary education of the
English, and began a thorough occupation of our public land--the growth
of that leisured class is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in the
history of the Fens, since the Fens had their faith removed from them.
Here is the story of one such family, a family without whose privileges
and public services it would be difficult to conceive modern England.
Their wealth is rooted in the Fens; the growth of that wealth is
parallel to the growth of every fortune by which we are governed.
When the monasteries were despoiled and their farms thrown open to a
gamble, when the water ran in again, the countryside and all its
generations of human effort were drowned, there was raised up for the
restoration of this land the family of Russell.
The Abbey of Thorney had been given to these little squires. They were
in possession when, towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, in 1600, was
passed the General Draining Act. It was a generous and a broad Act: it
was to apply not only to the Great Level, but to all the marshes of the
realm. It was soon bent to apply to the family.
Seven years later a Dutchman of the name of Cornelius Vermuyden was sent
for, that the work might be begun. For fifty years this man dug and
intrigued. He was called in to be the engineer; he had the temerity to
compete with the new landlords; he boasted a desire--less legitimate in
an alien than in a courtier--to make a great fortune rapidly. He was
ruined.
All the adventurers who first attempted the draining of the Fens were
ruined--but not that permanent Russell-Francis, the Earl of Bedford,
surnamed "the Incomparable."
The story of Vermuyden by him is intricate, but every Englishman now
living on another man's land should study it. Vermuyden was to drain the
Great Level and to have 95,000 acres for his pains. These acres were in
the occupation--for the matter of that, in great part the ownership--of
a number of English families. It is true the land had lain derelict for
seventy years, bereft of capital since the Reformation, and swamped. It
is true that the occupiers (and owners) were very poor. It is true,
therefore, that they could not properly comprehend a policy that was
designed for the general advantage of the country. They only understood
that the hunting and fishing by which they lived were to stop; that
their land was to be very considerably improved and taken from them. In
their ignorance of ultimate political good they began to show some
considerable impatience.
The cry of the multitude has a way of taking on the forms of stupidity.
The multitude in this case cried out against Vermuyden. They objected to
a foreigner being given so much freehold. "In an anguish of despair"--to
use one chronicler's words--they threw themselves under the protection
of a leader. "That leader was, of course, Francis, Earl of Bedford,
surnamed 'the Incomparable.' He could not hear unmoved the cry of his
fellow-citizens. He yielded to their petition, took means to oust the
Dutchmen, and immediately obtained for himself the grant of the 95,000
acres, by a royal order of 13 January, 1630/1, known as 'the Lynn Law.'"
When he saw the extent of the land and of the water upon it, even his
tenacious spirit was alarmed. He therefore associated with himself in
the expenses thirteen others, all persons of rank and fortune, as was
fitting: alone of the fourteen he preserved his fortune.
The fourteen, then, began the digging of nine drains (if we include the
repair of Morton's Leam); the largest was that fine twenty-one miles
called the old Bedford River, and Charles I, though all in favour of so
great a work, was all in dread of the power it might give to the class
which--as his prophetic conscience told him--was destined to be his
ruin.
There was a contract that the work should be finished in six years: when
the six years were ended it was very far from finished. The King
grumbled; but Francis, Earl of Bedford, belonged to a clique already
half as powerful as the Crown. He threatened, and a new royal order gave
him an extension of time. It was the second of his many victories.
The King refused to forget his defeat, and Francis, Earl of Bedford,
began to show that hatred of absolute government which has made of his
kind the leaders of a happy England. The King did a Stuart thing--he
lost his temper. He said, "You may keep your 95,000 acres, but I shall
tax them"; and he did. Francis, Earl of Bedford, felt in him a growing
passion for just government. He already spoke of freedom; but he had no
leisure wherein to enjoy it, for within two years he departed this life,
of the smallpox, leaving to his son William the legacy of the great
battle for liberty and for the public land.
This change in the Bedford dynasty coincided with the Civil Wars.
William Russell, having led some of the Parliamentary forces at Edge
Hill, was so uncertain which side might ultimately be victorious as to
open secret negotiations with the King. Nothing happened to him, nor
even to his brother, who intrigued later against Cromwell's life. He was
at liberty to return once more and to survey from the walls of the old
abbey the drowned land upon which he had set his heart.
The work of digging could not be carried on during the turmoil of the
time; William, Earl of Bedford, filled his leisure in the framing of an
elaborate bill of costs. It was dated 20 May, 1646, and showed the sums
which he had spent and which had been wasted in the failure to reclaim
the Fens. He stated them at over 90,000, and to this he added, like a
good business man, interest at the rate of 8 per cent, for so many years
as to amount to more than another 30,000.
As against the King, the trick was a good one; but, like many another
financier, William, Earl of Bedford, was shortsighted. The more anxious
the King grew to pay out public money to the Russells, the less able he
grew to do so, till at last he lost not only the shadow of power over
the treasury, but life itself; and William, Earl of Bedford, brought in
his bill to the Commonwealth.
Cromwell was of the same class, and knew the trick too well. He gave
the family leave to prosecute their digging to forget their demand for
money. The Act was passed at noon. Bedford was sent for at seven o'clock
the next morning and ordered to attend upon Cromwell, "and make thankful
acknowledgments." He did so.
The works began once more. The common people, in their simplicity, rose
as they had so often risen before, against a benefit they could not
comprehend; but they no longer had a Stuart to deal with. To their
extreme surprise they were put down "with the aid of the military."
Then, for all the world as in the promotion of a modern company, the
consulting engineer of the original promotors reappears. The Russells
had patched it up with Vermuyden, and the work was resumed a third time.
There was, however, this difficulty, that though Englishmen might
properly be constrained at this moment to love an orderly and godly
life, and to relinquish their property when it was to the public good
that they should do so, yet it would have been abhorrent to the whole
spirit of the Commonwealth to enslave them even for a work of national
advantage. A labour difficulty arose, and the works were in grave peril.
Those whose petty envy may be pleased at the entanglement of William,
Earl of Bedford, have forgotten the destiny which maintains our great
families. In the worst of the crisis the battle of Dunbar was fought;
166 Scotch prisoners (and later 500 more) were indentured out to dig the
ditches, and it was printed and posted in the end of 1651 that it was
"death without mercy" for any to attempt to escape.
The respite was not for long. Heaven, as though to try the patience of
its chosen agent, raised up a new obstacle before the great patriot.
Peace was made, and the Scotch prisoners were sent home. It was but the
passing frown which makes the succeeding smiles of the Deity more
gracious. At that very moment Blake was defeating the Dutch upon the
seas, and these excellent prisoners, laborious, and (by an accident
which clearly shows the finger of Divine providence) especially
acquainted with the digging of ditches, arrived in considerable
numbers, chained, and were handed over to the Premier House. At the same
time it was ordered by the Lord Protector that when the 95,000 acres
should at last be dry, any Protestant, even though he were a foreigner,
might buy. Two years later an unfortunate peace compelled the return of
the Dutch prisoners; but the work was done, and the Earl of Bedford
returned thanks in his cathedral.
Restored to the leisure which is necessary for political action, the
Russells actively intrigued for the return of the Stuarts, and pointed
out (when Charles II was well upon his throne) how necessary it was for
the Fens that their old, if irregular, privileges should be confirmed.
It was argued for the Crown that 10,000 acres of land had been quietly
absorbed by the Family while there was no king in England: but there
happened in this case what happened in every other since the upper
class, the natural leaders of the people, had curbed the tyranny of the
King--Charles capitulated. Then followed (of course) popular rising; it
was quelled. Before their long struggle for freedom against the Stuart
dynasty was ended, the peasants had been taught their place, Vermuyden
was out of the way, the ditches were all dug, the land acquired.
All the world knows the great part played by the House in the
emancipation of England from the yoke of James II. The martyrdom of Lord
William may have cast upon the Family a passing cloud; but whatever
compensation the perishable things of this world can afford, they
received and accepted. In 1694, having assisted at the destruction of
yet another form of government, the Earl of Bedford was made Duke, and
on 7 September, 1700, his great work now entirely accomplished, he
departed this life peacefully in his eighty-seventh year. It was once
more in their cathedral that the funeral service was preached by a Dr.
Freeman, chaplain of no less than the King himself. I have read the
sermon in its entirety. It closes with the fine phrase that William the
fifth Earl and the first Duke of Bedford had sought throughout the whole
of a laborious and patriotic life a crown not corruptible but
incorruptible.
It was precisely a century since the Family had set out in its quest
for that hundred square miles of land. Through four reigns, a bloody
civil war, three revolutions and innumerable treasons, it had maintained
its purpose, and at last it reached its goal.
"Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem."
BELLOC-HILLS AND THE SEA - ON ELY