The Forest (70 page)

That, alas, was as far as it got. A private flotilla was sent to the West Indies with settlers, livestock, even prefabricated houses. It cost the duke ten thousand pounds. The settlement was planted. But the French kicked them out. Nothing more could be done. At Montagu Town the banks had been cleared and smoothed, and the outline of the main street down to the river had been laid down; but that was all. The site reverted, for twenty more years, to silence.

But it was ready for commercial use and, just before mid-century, with the duke’s active encouragement, a use was found.

The British Empire was growing. Conflicts with the rival powers of France and Spain could not be avoided. Britain’s army was negligible but its navy ruled the seas; whenever a conflict threatened, therefore, more ships had to be built and quite often nowadays the building of the hull was farmed out to private contractors. The cleared site on the Beaulieu River was a perfect location. For naval ships there was the timber of the king’s New Forest close by; for merchant shipping there were oak trees in the private estates all around. An ironworks, established at the old monastic fishery of Sowley Pond, supplied any necessary iron. Buckler’s Hard became a shipbuilding yard.

It was never large but often busy. Merchant ships were needed all the time. The naval building came in bursts, each time there was a conflict somewhere: a European dynastic dispute affecting the colonies; the American War of Independence; and now, after the dangerous business of the French Revolution, a threat to every established monarchy in Europe, Britain found itself at war again with France.

On each side of the broad, grassy street that led down to the water, a row of red-brick cottages stood. Behind them lay garden allotments, and further scattered cottages and barns. At the water’s edge, set at an angle to the bank, were five slipways where the ships were built. Down the centre street and on sites all around were huge stacks of timber of various shapes and sizes. The men who worked on the ships were mostly quartered a mile or two away, either in lodgings up at Beaulieu village itself, or over at the western edge of the Montagu estate, at a new, straggling settlement of cottages known as Beaulieu Rails. At Buckler’s Hard itself there was the master builder’s house, a blacksmith’s shop, a store, two little inns, a cobbler’s and cottages for the most senior shipwrights.

Work had started early that bright spring morning. A cheerful column of smoke was rising from the blacksmith’s forge. Mr Henry Adams, the owner of the business, eighty years old but still supervising, had just come out of his master builder’s house; his two sons were at his side; shipwrights were busy at the waterside; men were carrying timber; a cart was standing in front of the Ship Inn.

Yet as Puckle arrived, hours late for work, from Beaulieu Rails, and walked down the street, nobody saw him. The men at the sawpit looked, but they didn’t see him. The women by the village pump didn’t see him. The cobbler, the innkeepers, the timber carriers, the shipwrights – why, even old Mr Adams with eyes like gimlets and his two sharp sons – not one of these good and worthy people saw Puckle as he walked past them. He was completely invisible.

The miracle was made greater yet by the fact that, by the time he stepped on to the vessel under construction at the water’s edge, there wasn’t a single person in the yard who couldn’t have sworn, had you asked them, that Abraham Puckle had been there all morning.

‘That’s the best one, Fanny,’ said the Reverend William Gilpin with approval; and the heiress to the Albion estate smiled with pleasure, as she put the drawing back into her sketching book, because she thought so too.

They were sitting by the window of the library in the vicarage – a big Georgian house with a large beech tree just opposite its front door.

The vicar of Boldre was a handsome old man. A little corpulent, but powerfully built, he and the heiress of Albion House were very fond of each other. The reasons for loving the distinguished clergyman were too obvious to need explanation. His for loving Fanny, whom he had christened himself, were numerous: she was kind and thoughtful for others; she was also lively, intelligent and really drew quite well. He enjoyed her company. Her fair hair had a reddish tint; her eyes were strikingly blue; her complexion was excellent. Had he been, say, thirty years younger and not already happily married – he admitted it frankly, at least to himself – he’d have tried to marry Fanny Albion.

The drawing she had done was a New Forest view, looking across from Beaulieu Heath, past Oakley, to a distant prospect of the Isle of Wight and the hazy sea. It was altogether admirable: the near ground, which in truth had only a shallow undulation, had been judiciously raised at one point and a solitary stricken oak had been added. A small brick kiln nearby had, quite rightly, been expunged. The heath and woodland had a controlled but natural wildness, the sea a pleasant mystery. It was – and this was the highest term of praise he could use – it was picturesque.

If there was one thing – upon earth, that is – that the Reverend William Gilpin believed in, it was the importance of the picturesque. His published
Observations
on the subject had made him famous and was much admired. He had travelled all over Europe in search of the picturesque – to the mountains of Switzerland, the valleys of Italy, the rivers of France – and he had found it. In England, he assured his readers, there were landscapes entirely picturesque. The Lake District in the north was the best area, but there were many others. And his readers were ready to discover them.

The Georgian era was an age of order. The great classical country mansions of the aristocracy, the leaders of taste, had shown the triumph of rational man over nature; their broad parks, designed by Capability Brown, with sweeping lawns and carefully placed woods, had demonstrated how man – at least if he were in possession of a handsome fortune – could tutor nature into a state of graciousness. But as the Age of Reason swept on, people found its dictates a little too ordered, too severe; they looked for more variety. So now the successor to Brown, the genius Repton, had started adding flower gardens and pleasant walks to Brown’s bare parks. People began to see in the natural countryside not a dangerous chaos, but the kindly hand of God. In short, they went for walks outside the park in search of the picturesque, as Gilpin said they should.

He was quite clear about how to recognize the picturesque. It was all a question of choice. The Avon valley, being flat and cultivated, did not appeal to him. For similar reasons the ordered slopes of the Isle of Wight, although admirable as a blue mass in the distance, were, if one actually took the ferry across for a closer inspection, quite intolerable. Open heath, however wild, he found dull; but where there was variety, a contrast of wood and heath, of high ground and low ground – where, in a word, the Almighty had shown good judgement in showing His hand – there the Reverend William Gilpin could smile at his pupil and say, in his deep, sonorous voice: ‘Now that, Fanny, is picturesque.’

But pleased as he was by the drawing she had just shown him, this was nothing to the excitement he felt when, having put it away, she stared meditatively out of the window for a moment or two and then enquired: ‘Have you ever considered whether we should build a ruin at Albion House?’

For if there was one thing in the whole of God’s creation that Mr Gilpin loved above even the countryside it was a ruin.

England had plenty of ruins. There were the castles, of course; but better still, thanks to the break with Rome of which Mr Gilpin’s Church of England was the heir, there were all the ruined monasteries and priories. Near the New Forest were Christchurch and Romsey; across Southampton water a small Cistercian house called Netley, whose waterside ruins certainly qualified as picturesque. And then, of course, there was Beaulieu Abbey itself, whose ruins, despite two centuries of being plundered for stone, were still extensive.

Ruins were part of the natural landscape: they seemed to grow out of the soil. They were places of quiet reflection, mysterious yet safe. They were utterly picturesque. A man who owned a ruin owned its antiquity. For if the hand of time had reduced the buildings of these invisible ancestors, nature had joined in and he was the inheritor of the product. Lost ancestors were appeased; time, death, dissolution – even these former enemies became part of his estate. Often as not, he would build his own mansion close beside it. Thus, for the gentle English classes in the late Age of Enlightenment, even chaos and old night could be set, like a sundial, in a garden.

And if, by chance, no ruin stood nearby, then, in an age when good fortune could accomplish anything, you built one!

Some people favoured classical ruins, as if their classical houses were really built upon the site of some Roman imperial palace. Others favoured the Gothic, as the mock medieval was called, which charmingly echoed the taste for Gothic horror novels that were one of the fashionable amusements just then. There was only one problem.

‘To build a ruin, Fanny,’ the vicar cautioned her seriously, ‘is a great expense.’ One needed stone in large quantities, expert masons to carve it, a good antiquarian to design it, a landscape artist. Then the stone needed treating to give it a mouldering appearance; then time, for mosses and ivy and lichens to grow in appropriate places. ‘Don’t attempt the thing, Fanny,’ he warned, ‘if you haven’t thirty thousand pounds to spend.’ It was cheaper to build a fine new house. ‘But there is something else I have often thought you could do, to the house itself when it becomes yours,’ he added cheerfully; for it could properly be admitted that, since old Mr Albion was now nearing his ninetieth year, the time of Fanny becoming mistress of the estate could not be far off.

‘What’s that?’

‘Why, you could make it into a Gothic house. You should turn it into Albion Castle. The situation’, he added persuasively, ‘is perfect.’

It was certainly a very pretty idea. In a journey over to Bristol the previous year, Fanny had seen the thing admirably done. An essentially Georgian house could be remodelled, adding a few embellishments here and there, placing mock battlements round its roof, inserting Gothic tracery in the windows and plaster moulding like fan vaulting in the ceilings of some of the rooms. The result was highly agreeable – a picturesque blend of the Roman and Gothic, which especially appealed to families who wished their house to suggest both medieval ancestry and classical taste, or to echo the atmosphere of some of the grandest aristocratic families whose houses were built around the remains of the abbeys they had acquired in Tudor times. These mock fortresses, however small, were often called castles – which also sounded rather grand. Albion House, with its intimate setting in a clearing among the oaks in the middle of the ancient Forest, would make a charming little castle.

‘It could be done,’ Fanny agreed. ‘Indeed, I really think it should.’ She looked thoughtful. ‘I do not think, though,’ she continued slowly, ‘that I should care to attempt such a thing alone. I should want the guiding hand’ – she smiled a little mischievously – ‘or at least the willing co-operation of a husband. Do you not agree?’

William Gilpin bowed his broad, greying head, inwardly cursed fate for making him so old and ventured: ‘Have you anyone in mind, Fanny?’

She should, God knew, have no shortage of suitors. Because of her father’s age and infirmity Fanny had not, by her own choice, made any attempts to show herself in society. But she was not in the least bashful. She was very cheerful. She knew perfectly well, at the age of nineteen, that although not a great heiress, her inheritance would recommend her wherever she went. It was an age when every young man and woman who claimed or aspired to gentility carried their incomes like a price tag round their necks. Every hostess knew the money value of each of her guests. It was probably a more mercenary period in English history than any before or since. And luckily for her, she was well placed in the system.

Whom ought she to marry? There was no single candidate whom neighbourly relations or family interest obliged her to consider. The greatest family in the Forest was that of the old Duke of Montagu, but the Beaulieu estate was split between the families of his two daughters now, who both lived far away; only the steward actually resided at the old abbey ruin. Next, in Fanny’s own estimation, were the most ancient landed families like the Albions. There were still several in the Forest: the Compton family still had Minstead; just north of them a family named Eyre had reputedly been in the region since Norman times; on the eastern side of the Forest, the Mill family, who had done so well in Tudor times when Beaulieu Abbey was dissolved, had a large estate. Then there were the old Lymington families – which really meant the Burrards. And finally came the relative newcomers to the Forest area. There were many of these now, who had come in during the past two generations. They had built splendid classical mansions all the way along the coast from Southampton to Christchurch. Some had high titles; others came from gentry families, having made fortunes in the city or in trade, as had the Morants in sugar, or the Drummonds, from a noble Scottish family, who had become bankers to the king and financed his war in America. Nearly all these newcomers were very rich indeed.

Great mercantile families have often shown a predilection for the sea – no doubt because, for most of human history, trade has always been carried by water. And so it was, during the eighteenth century, that the New Forest had acquired this new layer to its ancient identity – as a pleasant coastline wilderness where the rich could build their mansions and enjoy the sea. It was a view of the world which the old Forest folk, for all their occasional shoreline activities, never entirely understood; and Fanny, coming as she did from the Forest interior, was, despite her genteel education, closer in spirit to the Prides than she was to some of the new landowners. But still, it could not be denied, marriage among them might be considered a desirable outcome. And even if, secretly, she yearned for something else, she didn’t like to say so and didn’t know what it was.