ANNALS OF AN OLD MANOR-HOUSE.*
" WHAT a loss the world had, Sir, when you took to litera- ture," said to Dickens an admiring stage-carpenter, who had been watching the novelist from the wings while he played a part in a theatrical performance. When we read Mr. Harrison's book on Sutton Place, it is difficult to repress a similar remark-,—" What a loss the world had when Mr. Harrison took to politics." In all probability, however, Mr. Harrison would hardly take the remark as a compliment. Let it, therefore, be as if it had not been said, for it would indeed be churlish to repay the pleasure Mr. Harrison has given us by his book with any remark which he would regard as disagree- able. Besides, we have a great deal of sympathy with the feeling which makes Englishmen regard politics as the highest and worthiest work of the citizen, and which scouts the notion that the man of letters or the artist is too great and good a being to mix himself up with anything so con- temptible as the affairs of the State. Hence, though we may think personally that Mr. Harrison achieves in literature a great deal more than he does in politics, and so may wish that he would stick to literature, we cannot blame him for giving his best efforts to politics. The talk of giving up to party what was meant for mankind is generally very poor stuff.
Mr. Harrison, in the book before us, undertakes to tell the
story of one of the most beautiful old manor-houses in the South of England,—an old manor-house which, in the first years of its life, had plenty of historic associations. To say that he has acquitted himself admirably in this self-imposed labour of love—such it is, for Mr. Harrison's father was a tenant of Sutton Place for many years, and his mother and brother still live there—is not to say half enough. It is so easy to be trivial, garrulous, dull, pedantic, in a word, uninterestingly antiquarian in describing an old house ; so difficult to be at once living and entertaining, and yet call up the true past of the house and paint a real, not a sham, picture of what it is and was. Mr. Harrison has managed to combine just the right amounts of imagination and learning, and to give their proper places and proportions to the history, the art, the architecture, the heraldry, the genealogy, and that special lore connected with old things, old places, and old families, that wants a specific name. Above all, we feel with Mr. Harrison that he has not merely got up these subjects for the purposes of the book. His knowledge is real, and in the true sense sympathetic. Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII. are not mere names to him, or at most the faded figures on an old tapestry, but real men and women. Hence the historic back- ground against which he shows us the stately house which Sir Richard Weston built for himself by the banks of the Wey, on a knoll overlooking some of the loveliest woods and meadows in England, and in eight of the yew-clad slopes and pastoral solitudes of the North Downs, is clear and vivid. We cannot recall any one book which more powerfully brings before us the fact that the early part of the Tudor epoch was as real a reign of terror as that over which Marat and Robespierre bresided in Paris. It is true that the Tudor terror was less concentrated and more deliberate, but its effects were none the less horrible. Each left almost every visible family in the Kingdom with a long list of those who had lost their heads for reasons of State. Mr. Harrison brings this out well in his introduction; and in the body of his book, he treats the same subject in more detail. After describing bow Sir Richard Weston transmitted the beautiful house he had built, not to his son, but to his grandson, because the King who had granted him his lands had caused his only son to be beheaded on Tower Hill as iraitcr—his treason being an alleged intrigue with Anne Boleyn—Mr. Harrison goes on to tell how the marriage of Sir Richard Weston's grandson brought into still greater pro- minence the tragedies of the " furious revolution" which swept over England in the sixteenth century :— hau" iNrit Henry had married a lady (her portrait still hangs in the hosiffeas family history was yet more tragic than his own, as her who .1=- beeuarmore illustrious. As he was the son of the man daughter of Sir _executed as a traitor in 1536, so she was the Howard, both atttaMas .Arunciell of Wardour and of Margaret d in 1552 in the coup d'aat that struck Aonois of an Old Manor-Hsu c. By Frederic Harrison. Illustrated from Original 11, wings by London: Macmillan and Co. 1893.
Lnkor, Jon,, W. Nivon, and (), Forster Hayward.
down the Protector Somerset. Sir Thomas Arundell was a grandson of Grey, Marquis of Dorset, and thus great-grandson of Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII , once Queen-Dowager of France. He was a nephew of that Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, who was beheaded in 1554 ; of Leonard Grey, who was beheaded in 1541; and of Thomas Grey, who was beheaded in 1554 ; he was cousin, therefore, of Lady Jane Grey, who was beheaded with her husband, Guildford Dudley, in the same year, at the accession of Mary. He was a cousin also of Catherine Seymour, the unhappy victim of Elizabeth, who died a prisoner in the Tower in 1567. Indeed, ten of Lady Weston's near relations on the father's side had perished on the scaffold. But on her mother's side the havoc had been even greater. Her mother was attainted, but not actually beheaded, in 1552; her mother's sister was Catherine Howard, the Queen who was executed in 1512; her mother's cousin was Lady Rochford, sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded in the same year ; her mother's cousin also was Anne Boleyn, who had been beheaded along with Sir Henry's father in 1536."
Mr. Harrison goes on with this terrible list, and adds to it some half-dozen more names. As he says, "for two generations from the building of it, the masters and mistresses of Sutton Place had worn mourning in their hearts, if not in their hall, for almost every head that had rolled on Tower Hill." Passages such as this illustrate the truth of the remark which Mr. Harrison tells us was made to him by a well-known histo- rian,—" Sink a shaft, as it were, in some chosen spot in the annals of England, and you will come upon much that is never found in the books of general history." Mr. Harrison's book is such a shaft, and a shaft well and skilfully sunk. Hence it is not too much to say that it has a permanent value as a work of history. Before we leave Mr. Harrison's volume, we must quote his exquisitely written description of the subject of his book. But even his power over words, and his love of the old house, cannot do complete justice to what he describes, or call up for those that have not beheld with their natural eyes, and worshipped at the very spot, the genius loci. Sutton Place must be seen before the charm that works from its old walls can be fully realised :—
" Sutton Place is an ancient manor-house on the banks of the Wey, in Surrey, about four miles from Guildford and as many from Woking; and it was built between 1520-30 by Sir Richard Weston. It was the work of a great building age ; Henry VIII., in the words of the old chronicler, was 'the onlie phcenix of his time for fine and curious masonrie ;' for this was the age of Hampton Court, Christ Church, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cam- bridge, of Thornbury, Hengrave, Grimsthorp, Kenninghall, and Layer Marney. It was built in the first outburst of the new art, which in Europe is called Renascence, when Henry was the successful rival of Francis and the Emperor Charles, and formed the centre of one of the most creative moments in art which our country has ever seen. The house is almost contemporary with seine of those exquisite chdteauce of the age of Francis which are still preserved on the Loire. Like them, it possesses Italian features of a fancy and grace as remote from the Gothic as from the classical world. Like them, as was every fine work of art of that age, it is the embodiment of a single idea, of the personal sense of beauty of some creative genius ; and thus it stands apart in the history of house-building in Europe, a cinque-cento conception in an English Gothic frame. Here the airy and fantastic grace of the Renascence, as we find it at Pavia and Blois, has lighted up a mass of Tudor Gothic. Yet withal there is no single classical feature, nor one that recalls the florid style of the Stuarts. It is as if some prophetic genius in art, saturated with Southern ideas of beauty, had been seeking to develop here a new English style, which should be as little military or Gothic as it should be classical. Had our builders continued on these lines of thought, it is possible that our architecture might never have fallen be- neath the domination of Palladio, and yet might have worked clear of the imitation feudal castle and the mesquin inanity of debased Gothic. But the idea, to whomsoever it belongs, perished with him. Sutton Place remains the single extant production of a peculiar and suggestive type of Renascence Gothic."
It remains to be said that Mr. Harrison's book is illustrated by excellent pictures and plans of the house, and by exquisite reproductions of the armorial achievements in the stained- glass windows. Though the pictures make it unwieldy in size, the book is a very beautiful one, and reflects no little credit on all concerned in its production.
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