Chapter XXIV

LET us rest awhile by this sunlit stretch of road, where the red roofs of distant farmsteads alone hint of life; always excepting the humming telegraph wires whispering messages to Edinburgh and the Far North, or perhaps the summer breeze bringing across country the distant echo of a train. If it does, why then the sound renders our solitude the more complete, and gives flight to a lagging imagination. It reminds us that it was here, and not there, three miles away over the meadows in a railway cutting, that the traffic of two kingdoms went, sixty years ago.

These green selvedges of grass that border the highway so delightfully were not then in existence. They were a part of the road itself, which was, for all that, not too wide for the mail-coaches, the stages, the fly-wagons, private chariots, post-chaises, and especially the runaway couples _en route_ for Gretna Green, who travelled along it. “The dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,” quoth Sir Walter Scott, in his diary, when journeying to Abbotsford in 1826. Dull scenically, but not historically. Had it been an unlettered cyclist who had made this criticism, a thousand critical lashes had been his portion—and serve him right; but what shall we say of the author of _Waverley_? Dull! why, the road is thronged with company. One can—any one can who has the will to it—call spirits from the vasty deep with which to people the way. No need to ask, “Will they come?” They cannot choose but do so; they are here.

A strange and motley crowd: the pale ghosts of the ages. From Ostorius Scapula and the Emperors Hadrian, Severus, and Constantine the Great, down through the Middle Ages, they come, mostly engaged in cutting one another’s throats. York and Lancaster, as their fortunes ebbed or flowed, setting up or taking down the heads of traitors; obscure murderers despatching equally obscure victims by the way, and in later times—the farcical mingling with the more tragic humours—we see James the First journeying to his throne, confirmed in his good opinion of himself as a second Solomon by a sycophantic crowd of courtiers; Lord Chancellor Littleton, fleeing from Parliament to Charles the First at York, carrying with him that precious symbol of Royal authority, the Great Seal (the third Great Seal of that reign), made in the year the Long Parliament began to sit; Charles the First, a few years later, conducted by the victorious Parliament to London, and, at the interval of another century, the Rebel Lords. “The ’45,” indeed, made much traffic on this road: the British army going down, with Billy the Butcher at its head, to crush the rebellion, and the prisoners coming up—their last journey, as they knew full well. They were pinioned on the way, for their better custody, and so that Hanoverian heads might sleep the sounder at St. James’s. The Hanoverians themselves rarely came this way, nor would their coming have added greatly to the romance of the road. George the Third passed once. He was a stay-at-home king, and of roads knew little, save of those that led from London to Windsor, or to that western _Ultima Thule_ of his, Weymouth. Indeed, it is said, on what authority it is difficult to determine, that the third George never voyaged out of the kingdom. Even Hanover, beloved of his forbears, he never knew, although the Jacobites ceased not with their brass tokens, to wish him there. {165} His furthest journey is said to have been to York.

His son, afterwards George the Fourth, had occasion to remember this road, for he was upset on it in 1789, when returning from a visit to Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth Woodhouse. Two miles from Newark, a cart overturned his carriage in a narrow part of the highway. It rolled over three times down an incline, and fell to pieces like a box of tricks, but the prince was unhurt.

Of bygone sporting figures with which, in imagination, to people the way we have a crowd. There has always been something in the great length of the road to York, and of its continuation to Edinburgh, that has appealed to sportsmen and all those interested in the speeds of different methods of progression. Pedestrians, horsemen, and coaches—and in recent times cyclists—have competed in their several ways, from an early period until our own day, and the rival railways even have had their races to Edinburgh.

Of these feats, that of Sir Robert Cary, son of Lord Hunsdon, is not the least remarkable. He carried the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death to James at Edinburgh, and was the first to hail him King of England. Riding in furious haste, and with fresh horses wherever he could obtain them, he succeeded in covering the distance in the sixty hours between a Thursday morning and a Saturday night. Again, a very few years later—in May 1606—a certain esquire of James the First’s, John Lepton of York, undertook for a wager to ride on six consecutive days between that city and London. He started from Aldersgate on the 20th of May, and accomplished his task every day before darkness had fallen; “to the greater praise of his strength in acting than to his discretion in undertaking it,” as Fuller remarks. He also, of course, had relays of horses. Among the pedestrians is Ben Jonson, who walked to Scotland, on his visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, starting in June 1618; but he footed it less for sport than from necessity.

When Charles the First was at York, according to Clarendon, it was a frequent occurrence for gentlemen couriers to ride with despatches between that place and London, completing the double journey—400 miles—in thirty-four hours. Thus, a letter sent by the Council in London on the Saturday, midnight, was answered on its arrival at York by the king, and the answer delivered in London at ten o’clock on the Monday morning.

Then there was Cooper Thornhill, landlord of the “Bell” at Stilton, who for a wager rode to London and back again to Stilton, about 1740. The distance, 154 miles in all, was done in eleven hours thirty-three minutes and forty-six seconds. He had nineteen horses to carry him, and so is no rival of Turpin’s mythical exploit in riding to York on his equally mythical Black Bess; but he was evidently considered a wonderful person, for there was a poem published about him in 1745, entitled “The Stilton Hero: O Tempora! O Mores:” a sixpenny quarto of fourteen pages.

Foster Powell is easily first among the pedestrians. He was an eighteenth century notability, a native of Horsforth, near Leeds, and born in 1734. Articled to an attorney, he remained a solicitor’s clerk, undistinguished in the law, but early famed for his walking powers. In 1764 he backed himself for any amount to walk fifty miles on the Bath Road in seven hours, and having accomplished this, despite his wearing a heavy greatcoat and leather breeches at the time, he visited France and Switzerland, and fairly walked the natives off their legs. It was in 1773 that he performed his first walk from London to York and back, doing the 400 miles in five days and eighteen hours. This was followed by a walk of 100 miles, out and home, on the Bath Road, done in twenty-three hours and a quarter. His three great pedestrian records on the Great North Road in 1788 and twice in 1792 are his most remarkable achievements. Although by this time he had long passed the age at which athletics are commonly indulged in, he performed the London to York and back walk of 1788 in five days twenty hours, and its repetitions of 1792 in five days eighteen hours and five days fifteen hours and a quarter, respectively. The starting and turning-points were Shoreditch Church and York Minster. This last effort probably cost him his life, for he died, aged fifty-nine, early the following year. Powell figures—rightly enough—as one of Wilson and Caulfield’s company of “Remarkable Characters,” in which he is described as about five feet nine inches in height, close-knit body, of a sallow complexion, and of a meagre habit. He lived on a light and spare diet, and generally abstained from drink, only on one of his expeditions partaking of brandy. He took but little sleep, generally five hours.

[Picture: Foster Powell]

Robert Barclay of Ury, born 1731, died 1797, walked from London to Ury, 510 miles, in ten days. He is described as having been well over six feet in height. He married, in 1776, Sarah Ann Allardice, and was the father of the next notable pedestrian.

Captain Barclay of Ury, an eighteenth century stalwart, born in 1779 and living until 1854, walked the whole way from Edinburgh to London and back. He was at the time Member of Parliament for Kincardineshire. Another of his feats of endurance was driving the mail for a wager from London to Aberdeen. He then offered to drive it back for another wager, but Lord Kennedy, who had already lost, was not inclined to renew. Barclay started the “Defiance” coach between Edinburgh and Aberdeen in July 1829. He only once upset it, and thus described the event:—“She fell as easy as if she had fallen on a feather bed, and looking out for a soft place, I alighted comfortably on my feet.” A favourite axiom with him was that no man could claim to be a thoroughly qualified coachman until he had “floored”—that is, upset—his coach; “for till he has done so he cannot know how to get it up again.” Barclay was the claimant of the Earldom of Monteith and Ayr, and it was a source of genuine anxiety with him whether, in the event of his proving his claim, he would have to give up the reins. He consulted his friend the Duke of Gordon on this point. “Why,” replied his Grace, “there is not much difference between an earl and a marquis, and as the Marquis of Waterford drives the Brighton ‘Defiance,’ I see no reason why you may not drive its Aberdeen namesake. At all events, if there be any objection to your being the coachman, there can be none to your being the guard.” Barclay was snubbed!

As for the many great people who were furiously driven back and forth, up and down the road, the historian is dismayed at the prospect of chronicling their whirling flight. Let us respectfully take the most of their performances on trust. There was no occasion for all this haste, save the spirit of the thing, as Byron hints:—

“Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits,
Leavening his blood as cayenne doth a curry,
As going at full speed—no matter where its
Direction be, so ’tis but in a hurry,
And merely for the sake of its own merits;
For the less cause there is for all this flurry,
The greater is the pleasure in arriving
At the great end of travel—which is driving.”

Thus there was Lord Londonderry, who made a speech in the House one night, and the next evening was at his own place in Durham, 250 miles or so away, having travelled down in his “chariot and four.”

There were those, however, who scorned these effeminate methods. Like Barclay of Ury, they walked or rode horseback, long after the introduction of coaches. Foul-mouthed old Lord Monboddo, for instance, a once famous Scots Lord of Session, persisted in the use of the saddle. He journeyed between the two capitals once a year, and continued to do so until well past fourscore years of age. On his last journey to London he could get no further than Dunbar, and when his nephew asked him why he gave up, “Eh, George,” said he, “I find I am noo auchty-four.” He was, in fact, suffering from the incurable disease of “Anno Domini.” He held it unmanly “to sit in a box drawn by brutes.” Would that we could have his shade for a companion on a ’bus ride from Charing Cross to the Bank!

At that period the stage-wagons performed the journey in fourteen days, carrying passengers at a shilling a day.