Читать книгу The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century - Charles Bastide - Страница 6

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"The French," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "are the most travelled people. The English nobility travel, the French nobility do not; the French people travel, the English people do not." Strange as the fact appears, our forefathers in the seventeenth century, even as in the eighteenth, wandered over England as well as Spain or Italy, but they drew up their wills before setting out.

The nobility travelled little; only a royal injunction would cause a gentleman to forsake Versailles; the ambassadors left with reluctance. But there followed a suite of attachés, secretaries, and valets. One day, Secretary Hughes de Lionne had a mind to send his son to London. The young marquis was entrusted to the charge of three grave ambassadors; good advice therefore he did not lack, and we must believe his journey was not altogether distasteful as he was seen to weep when the day came for him to return.[1]

Next to official envoys stood unofficial agents, gentlemen who preferred exile to a more rigorous punishment; lastly, mere adventurers.

Not a few Frenchmen came over to England on business purposes. The Bordeaux wine merchant, the Rouen printer, the Paris glovemaker, could not always trust their English agents when some difficult question arose. Cardinal Mazarin's envoy mentions in his dispatches the "numerous Bordeaux merchants in London, some of whom are Catholics."[2] At the Restoration there existed a kind of French Chamber of Commerce, and, as early as 1663, the ambassadors extol the adroitness of one Dumas, who appears to have played the part of an unofficial consul-general.[3]

But there were travellers by taste as well as by necessity. Long before the word globe-trotter was added to the English language, not a few Frenchmen spent their lives wandering about the world, to satisfy a natural craving for adventure. Men of letters had been known to travel before Voltaire or Regnard. Shall we name Voiture, Boisrobert, Saint-Amant, the author of Moses, an epic ridiculed by Boileau? Saint-Amant celebrated his journey in an amusing poetical skit in which he complains of the climate, the splenetic character of the people, the rudeness of the drama. But most of the travellers preferred to note their impressions in ordinary prose. Some published guides. Those narratives enable us to find out how a Frenchman could journey from Paris to London under the Grand Monarch.

Then, as now, the travellers had the choice between the Calais and Dieppe routes. According to their social status, they would set out in a private coach, on horseback, or in the stage coach. The latter was not yet the diligence, it was a heavy cumbersome vehicle "neither decent nor comfortable," through the canvas cover of which the rain would pour.[4] It took five days to go from Paris to Calais. As travelling by night was out of the question, the traveller would put up at Beaumont-sur-Oise, Poix, Abbeville, Montreuil.

As soon as the traveller had passed the gates of the capital, his adventures began. When the Swiss servant fell off his horse, every one laughed because he received no more consideration than a "stout portmanteau."[5] Then the roads were bad: the coach might upset or stick fast in the mud. Dangers had to be taken into account as well as inconveniences: in November 1662, Ambassador Cominges quaintly congratulated himself upon avoiding "two or three shipwrecks on land," meaning that there were floods between Montreuil and Boulogne.[6] Another danger arose from the highwaymen who infested the country, and, in time of war, no one dreamed of leaving the shelter of a fortress such as Abbeville or Montreuil without getting previous information on the movements of the enemy in Flanders or Artois.[7]

A traveller will always complain of the inns; in the seventeenth century they seem to have been of more than Spartan simplicity: "We were no sooner got into our chambers," writes a distinguished traveller, "but we thought we were come there too soon, as the highway seemed the cleaner and more desirable place. … After supper, we retreated to the place that usually gives relief to all moderate calamities, but our beds were antidotes to sleep: I do not complain of the hardness, but the tangible quality of what was next me, and the savour of all about made me quite forget my supper."[8]

The illustration "On the road to Calais," taken from a contemporary print, gives a good idea of what an inn, the "Tin Pot" at Boulogne or the "Petit Saint-Jean" at Calais, then looked like. The scene is dreary enough, in spite of the picturesque bare-legged turnspit by the roaring wood-fire, the furniture is scanty, there are draughts, and the litter lying about spells slovenliness and discomfort.

In such a place, one must be as wary of one's fellow-travellers as of the rascally innkeepers. "One of the Frenchmen," Locke goes on to say, "who had disbursed for our troop, was, by the natural quickness of his temper, carried beyond the mark, and demanded for our shares more than we thought due, whereupon one of the English desired an account of particulars, not that the whole was so considerable, but to keep a certain custom we had in England not to pay money without knowing for what. Monsieur answered briskly, he would give no account; the other as briskly, that he would have it: this produced a reckoning of the several disbursements, and an abatement of one-fourth of the demand, and a great demonstration of good nature. Monsieur Steward showed afterwards more civility and good nature, after the little contest, than he had done all the journey before."

Those were minor difficulties next to what the traveller had to expect who was bold enough to cross the Channel. In 1609, Beaumont and Fletcher mention not without horror "Dover's dreadful cliffe and the dangers of the merciless Channel 'twixt that and Callis."[9] The passengers crossed on what would appear now a ridiculously small bark, which belonged to the English Post Office. The boat, pompously named "a packet-boat," attempted the passage twice a week, but did not always effect it. Even when the sea was calm the skipper had to wait for the tide before weighing anchor. If the tide turned in the night, the passengers would set up in an inn outside the walls of Calais because the gates closed at sunset, and, as about the same time a huge chain was stretched across the harbour's mouth, they were compelled to reach by means of a small cock-boat the bark anchored in the roads.

At last, the passengers being safely on board, the sails are set. Hardly has the wind carried the packet-boat beyond Cape Grisnez when the swell becomes uncomfortably perceptible. Nowadays we cross the Channel on fast steamers, but progress which has given us speed has not done away with the chief discomfort. Even as we do, so our forefathers dreaded sea-sickness.

Locke, good sailor as he was, rather coarsely jests at his fellow-traveller, the astronomer Römer: "I believe he will sacrifice to Neptune from the depths of his heart or stomach."[10] Those who have experienced the sufferings of a bad passage will sympathise with the Frenchman Gourville. "I went on board the packet-boat," he writes, "to go to Dover; at two or three leagues out at sea, we were beset by a dead calm; as I was very ill, I compelled the sailors to let down a small skiff not ten feet long; and two of them having got into it with their oars, I had trouble enough to find room; hardly had we rowed two leagues, when a gale arose that scared my two sailors. I got to land nevertheless and, no sooner had I drained a glass of canary, than I felt well again."[11] On coming back, Fortune did not favour him. The North Sea that he had thus braved, took her revenge. "I travelled post to Dover where I went on board the packet-boat. The winds being against us, I felt worse than the first time, and it took me three weeks to recover."

The time of crossing varied considerably. "The Strait of Dover," wrote Coulon, "is only seven leagues wide, so that with a fair wind one can cross from one kingdom to the other in three hours."[12] But then the wind was seldom fair. Generally it took twelve or fourteen hours to sail from Calais to Dover. The passengers always had to take the unexpected into account. "At 6 in the evening," Evelyn records in his Diary, "set saile for Calais, the wind not favourable. I was very sea sicke. Coming to an anker about one o'clock; about five in the morning we had a long boate to carry us to land tho' at a good distance; this we willingly enter'd, because two vessells were chasing us, but being now almost at the harbour's mouth, thro' inadvertency there brake in upon us two such heavy seas as had almost sunk the boate, I being neere the middle up in water. Our steeresman, it seems, apprehensive of the danger, was preparing to leape into the sea and trust to swimming, but seeing the vessell emerge, he put her into the pier, and so, God be thanked, we got to Calais, tho' wett."[13] Thus delays were frequent enough; for which fogs, contrary winds, and storms were chiefly responsible. No one appears to have grumbled much at the loss of time: the age was not one of quick travelling, and worse might befall a passenger than tossing about the Channel on a cold night. Many a seventeenth-century packet-boat met with the fate of the White Ship, when it did not fall into the hands of unscrupulous privateers. Under the Protectorate, the packet-boat was escorted by "a pinnace of eight guns";[14] but the improvident Government of Charles ii. left the merchants to guard their ships as well as they might.

Happy the passenger whose title, fortune, family connections or mere impudence secured him a place on one of the royal yachts! He had nothing to fear from the insolence or greed of the seamen, and instead of setting foot on a filthy tar-bespattered deck, he found, according to the Duc de Verneuil, "rooms which were admirably clean with foot carpets and velvet beds."[15]

But the traveller lands on English shores. Hardly has he left the boat when the Custom-House officers are upon him. The alert and courteous officials one meets with nowadays at Dover or Newhaven have little in common with their predecessors of the Restoration. The latter were coarse, ill-clad wretches bent on extorting from the travellers a pay that a needy Government held back. Useless to add, that they readily succumbed to the offer of a bribe. Even the Puritan Custom-House officers had been known for a consideration to wink at a forged pass. "Money to the searchers," observed Evelyn, "was as authentiq as the hand and seale of Bradshaw himselfe."[16]

When the Frenchman has got rid of these, he is confronted by the harbour-master, who demands the payment of a licence to pass over seas. Nor are his troubles at end: he needs must get the governor of the castle to affix his seal to the pass. If that exalted personage is out with the hounds, there is nothing to do but to await his return. There is not even the expedient of visiting the town to while away the time. Dover, in the seventeenth century, far from resembling the picturesque port we know closely nestling in a hollow of the white cliffs, held altogether "in one ill-paved street about a mile long" and lined with "tumbledown houses."[17]

What about the castle? "Built upon a chalky rock, very lofty and looking out to sea. It was formerly called the key to England, and, before cannon came into use, was considered impregnable; but at the present time it is used solely as a prison. It is placed too high for it to endanger any vessel, and by land it could not withstand half a day's regular siege."[18] The harassed traveller must needs bend his steps to an inn, probably the French inn, kept by one Lefort and his capable wife.[19]

Travellers never landed at Folkestone: it was then "a small poor-looking town, inhabited by fishermen."[20] Skippers seldom preferred Rye to Dover, which greatly puzzled Frenchmen. "Rye is built on a hill at the foot of which is a pretty good harbour which might accommodate all kinds of ships; but I cannot imagine why the haven is so neglected. I am sure the French or the Dutch would make it a very convenient haven, being at the mouth of a fine river. The port is blocked up by sandbanks, through the carelessness and idleness of the inhabitants and the selfish disposition of some of their neighbours, who have reclaimed from the sea a great part of the port and turned it into enclosed lands. But that is the people's business and not mine."[21]

At last the Frenchman, all formalities being disposed of, is free to pursue his journey. He may choose between a saddle horse or a coach. According to Chamberlayne, the charge for a horse was threepence a mile, besides fourpence a stage for the guide. The coach cost less: one shilling for five miles.[22] In a few hours the traveller would reach Gravesend and there he would take boat up to London Bridge.

Coulon gives a slightly different route: Dover to Gravesend via Canterbury, Sittingbourne, and Rochester; Gravesend to London via Dartford (spelt by Coulon Datford). By the way, he copies a sixteenth-century guide-book, Jean Bernard's Traité de la Guide des Chemins d'Angleterre (1579).[23]

Travelling is both easier and quicker than in France, but there are dangers to look out for. "Take heed," cautions Jean Bernard, "of a wood called Shuttershyll (Shooter's Hill) or the Archers' Hill, very perilous for travellers and passers-by on account of the thieves and robbers, who would formerly take refuge there." Even under the Merry Monarch, marauders lurked about every main road.

One of the guide-book writers, the Lyonnese Payen, has handed down to us a very curious computation, which it is worth while to transcribe:—