Such was the man who, restored to office and lately created an earl by
the title of Chatham, lay ill at Bath in the spring of '67. The passage
of time, the course of events, the ravages of gout, in a degree the
acceptance of a title, had robbed his popularity of its first gloss. But
his name was still a name to conjure with in England. He was still the
idol of the City. Crowds still ran to see him where he passed. His gaunt
figure racked with gout, his eagle nose, his piercing eyes, were still
England's picture of a minister. His curricle, his troop of servants,
the very state he kept, the ceremony with which he travelled, all
pleased the popular fancy. When it was known that he was well enough to
leave Bath, and would lie a night at the Castle Inn at Marlborough, his
suite requiring twenty rooms, even that great hostelry, then reputed one
of the best, as it was certainly the most splendid in England, and
capable, it was said, of serving a dinner of twenty-four covers on
silver, was in an uproar. The landlord, who knew the tastes of half the
peerage, and which bin Lord Sandwich preferred, and which Mr. Rigby, in
which rooms the Duchess or Lady Betty liked to lie, what Mr. Walpole
took with his supper, and which shades the Princess Amelia preferred for
her card-table--even he, who had taken his glass of wine with a score of
dukes, from Cumberland the Great to Bedford the Little, was put to it;
the notice being short, and the house somewhat full.
Fortunately the Castle Inn, on the road between London and the west,
was a place of call, not of residence. Formerly a favourite residence of
the Seymour family, and built, if tradition does not lie, by a pupil of
Inigo Jones, it stood--and for the house, still stands--in a snug fold
of the downs, at the end of the long High Street of Marlborough; at the
precise point where the route to Salisbury debouches from the Old Bath
Road. A long-fronted, stately mansion of brick, bosomed in trees, and
jealous of its historic past--it had sheltered William of Orange--it
presented to the north and the road, from which it was distant some
hundred yards, a grand pillared portico flanked by projecting wings. At
that portico, and before those long rows of shapely windows, forty
coaches, we are told, changed horses every day. Beside the western wing
of the house a green sugarloaf mound, reputed to be of Druidical origin,
rose above the trees; it was accessible by a steep winding path, and
crowned at the date of this story by a curious summer-house. Travellers
from the west who merely passed on the coach, caught, if they looked
back as they entered the town, a glimpse of groves and lawns laid out by
the best taste of the day, between the southern front and the river. To
these a doorway and a flight of stone steps, corresponding in position
with the portico in the middle of the north front, conducted the
visitor, who, if a man of feeling, was equally surprised and charmed to
find in these shady retreats, stretching to the banks of the Kennet, a
silence and beauty excelled in few noblemen's gardens. In a word, while
the north front of the house hummed with the revolving wheels, and
echoed the chatter of half the fashionable world bound for the Bath or
the great western port of Bristol, the south front reflected the taste
of that Lady Hertford who had made these glades and trim walks her
principal hobby.