Читать книгу Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital - Philip Hoare, Philip Hoare - Страница 11

… The shores fringed with oak to the very margin, and studded with the fairest vestiges of magnificence and modern comfort, seem to connect the past with the present, like the wild yet bewitching imagery of a poet’s dream.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD

visiting Southampton Water, 1812

From its shore, the slow-moving estuary seems like the Loch Ness of my dream. The gently rippling surface belies its length and width, a foreshortened trick of the eye as deceptive as the calm surface of the fathomless Scottish lake. It is a liminal space, a place of possibilities, evocative of the deep oceans that lie beyond.

But Southampton Water is an unlikely place to find a sea monster, although occasionally the sinister, half-submerged black bulk of a submarine slips silently out of its military port. Neither sea nor river, this sinuous inlet reaches deep into England’s underbelly like a gynaecologist’s finger. Stoppered at one end by the Isle of Wight, the island is believed to bounce the moon-dragged sea back up the estuary, creating the watery déjà vu of Southampton’s unique double high tides (in fact it is the result of the port’s midway point on the Channel, combined with the Atlantic Pulse and the relative positions of the sun and moon).

Fed by the Atlantic Pulse, it is a fortuitous piece of geography. ‘A seaport without the sea’s terrors, an ocean approach within the threshold of the land,’ extolled one nineteenth-century promoter of its virtues. Here the great Hampshire rivers of the Itchen and the Test conjoin, their chalk-filtered fresh waters mingling in the salt of the seaway. Like the Pool of London at the beginning of Marlow’s journey in Heart of Darkness, in which ‘the sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway’, Southampton Water has always promised adventure and commerce, a country’s past and future. To incomers it was the Gateway to England; to the inhabitants, it became the ‘Gateway to the Empire’. From here too England reaches out into the dark heart of other lands.

Centuries have passed through this inseminal conduit. From Roman barges to ocean liners; from plague ships to Pilgrim Fathers; from French marauders to Hollywood film stars; from Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, laden with Spanish gold for the Virgin Queen, to Goering’s bombers, heavy with a deadlier cargo. Enemies or tourists, missionaries or immigrants, they all entered or left the land here, and in some other age their phantoms are still processing along Southampton Water: the stately red and black hulk of Titanic, crewed by the men of Spike Island; the speed boat piloted by T. E. Lawrence, the doomed hero of Arabia; the flying boat in whose leather seats was strapped the aesthete, the Honourable Stephen Tennant, on course for the tamarisk-lined shores and pink sunsets of the Riviera. Here they pass for ever, these pale, mortal, glamorous ghosts, unobserved by the cars that speed along Weston Shore.

When Weston’s housing estate was built in the 1950s, the council tried to turn the shore into a resort. Like the strand made in the shadow of the Tower of London for Cockneys to swim off, a beach was created and an esplanade was constructed, studded at intervals with shelters built like waiting rooms for a railway which would never come. Old photographs show holiday makers in their Sunday best, strolling the prom, children paddling at the water’s edge.

Nowadays Weston Shore, at the bottom of the hill from Sholing, seems a grey parody of a place. The shelters’ windows were long ago shattered and the beach reclaimed by banks of shingle and scrubby grass. Here the land lies low, and often floods, as if to mark its transition from the city’s edge to the woods ahead, where the road inclines to leave the shore through a tunnel of trees, and from where it rises then falls again, gently and without due ceremony, into the village of Netley. Even now, those few hundred yards act like a timeslip, a fault in the chronology; as though, having passed through this interzone, you have left one world for another. The concrete tower blocks at your back and the ancient woodland ahead only serve to make Netley’s past all the more extraordinary.

Netley extends the tongue of land that begins at Sholing, bounded by the Itchen and Southampton Water on one side and the Hamble river on the other, the borders of Spike Island. Half ceded from the coastline, this peninsula is occupied by villages which long ago lost their discrete identities to new housing and the out-of-town developments spreading along the motorway corridor – the visible symptom of what Nikolaus Pevsner called ‘subtopia’. Subsumed by light industry, yachting marinas and modern estates, it is a place of retreat and recreation; a faithless culture that seems to have no other aim than the nearest shopping opportunity. It is as though England lost its way in this cul-de-sac; as if it gave up keeping the barbarian at bay.

Nothing happens here now. But once it did.

In 1826, during one of his ‘rural rides’, William Cobbett called on the Chamberlaynes at Weston Grove, their marine villa on the shores of Southampton Water. The estate is now only discernible by stately cedars among the council houses and the traces of a carriage drive in neighbouring Mayfield Park, but in its brief century of existence it epitomised the area’s Georgian gentility, a time when the eastern banks of the water were studded with such mansions.

William Chamberlayne had built the house, where he lived with his sister, in 1802, on land inherited from his close friend and neighbour, Thomas Lee Dummer of Woolston House. Already a major landowner in the area, Chamberlayne had used his friend’s bequest to extend his domain down to the shore and inland through Sholing’s valleys, where the houses around Church Path were ‘Chamberlayne’s cottages’, humble dwellings for his subjects (as we, living on roads named after our masters, still seemed to be). He had also demolished several houses to ‘improve’ the landscape, in the current parlance. Cobbett, a Tory-turned-radical and famed for his polemics against industrialisation and its consequences for rural England, considered that Chamberlayne ‘and his equally benevolent sister’ had set ‘a striking and a most valuable practical example’ for their fellow land-owners. ‘Here is a whole neighbourhood of labourers living as they ought to live; enjoying that happiness which is the just reward of their toil.’ In such a setting England’s green and pleasant land could be reinvented, the broken connexion between land and man remade.

Yet as Cobbett may have suspected, the threat to that idyll was irrevocable; it had been for some time. In Chamberlayne’s grounds, in the wooded valley which continued from Church Path through his parkland and down to the sea, was Walter Taylor’s mill, a modern, industrialised version of the windmill which stood above it on the hill, its site now surmounted by a stone obelisk. Established in 1762 and powered by the water from Miller’s Pond, there had been a mill here since at least the fourteenth century. Now a new machine had been installed, a circular saw invented by Taylor for cutting ships’ blocks out of hard lignum vitae imported from the West Indies and South America. It was a significant marker in the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s expanding empire: here, in this damp valley where kids now chuck empty Coke cans, the rigging for HMS Victory was made.

Chamberlayne’s estate dominated the peninsula, the ruler of Spike Island in all but title, and Cobbett’s description read like the literary equivalent of a nineteeth-century watercolour:

To those who like water scenes (as nineteen-twentieths of people do) it is the prettiest spot, I believe, in all England … The views from this place are the most beautiful that can be imagined. You see up the water and down the water, to Redbridge one way and out to Spithead the other way. Through the trees, to the right, you see the spires of Southampton, and you have only to walk a mile, over a beautiful lawn and through a not less beautiful wood, to find, in a little dell, surrounded with lofty woods, the venerable ruins … which make part of Mr. Chamberlayne’s estate …

Those venerable ruins represented the old England; a fantasy which would inspire a new cult – that of the gothic. Set back from the sea like a series of theatrical flats behind the green drapery of trees, the medieval remains of Netley Abbey might have been designed as a piece of stage scenery by William Kent, the gothic taste-maker who once planted a dead tree in Kensington Gardens. It was a place which had ever been wreathed in a sense of its own mystery. Throughout its history, it seems, this wooded site had a gloomy, perhaps even a terrible charm.

‘Netley Abbey ought, it seems, to be called Letley Abbey’, wrote Cobbett, ‘the Latin name being Laetus Locus, or Pleasant Place. Letley was made up of an abbreviation of the Laetus and of the Saxon word ley, which meant place, field, or piece of ground.’ But like Spike Island, the provenance of Netley’s name was disputed, its very identity surrounded in myth. Some writers considered Laetus Locus a play on the name of Letelie, which was already recorded in the Domesday Book; others believed that it originated from ‘Natan-leaga, or Leas of Naté, a wooded district extending from the Avon to the Test and Itchen’. Yet other sources attribute another old English meaning to the name: lonely, or desolate place.

For thousands of years these river valleys had been used as routes into England’s interior, through primeval forest with its wild boar, bear and wolves, and into the uplands; Bronze Age axes and tumuli have been found in Sholing’s heathland. When the Romans came, they set up their military base and strategic port of Clausentum on a bend in the River Itchen, building a tall lighthouse to make plain their dominion. Half a millennium later it would crumble with the rest of their empire in the Dark Ages. When in turn the Saxons built their settlements, Hamwih and Hamtun, on the opposite bank, they would merge to become Suthhamtun, and give their name to the county, Hamtunscire.

In the Viking raids of the ninth and tenth centuries, the inhabitants would retreat behind the remaining Roman walls; those that did not were slain, enslaved, or, in the coy words of one nineteenth-century historian, used by the invaders ‘to satisfy their insatiable cupidity’. Medieval Southampton learned from such lessons, building defences to the north and east, yet leaving the waterside disastrously open to attack. One Sunday morning in 1338, while most of Southampton was at Mass, a fleet of fifty galleys ‘crowded with Normans, Picards, Genoese, and Spaniards’ sailed up the water to launch an ungodly assault. Many died as they came out of St Michael’s Church, clubbed or stabbed on the threshold of their place of worship; others were hanged in their own houses. The invaders took arrogant leisure in their destruction and stayed overnight to burn, rape, pillage and plunder – a fatal mistake, as by that time the King’s men had arrived to drive them back to their ships, killing 300 in the process. Their leader, Carlo Grimaldi, however, escaped to the Mediterranean, where he used the spoils to establish his Monte Carlo principality.

Netley, meanwhile, remained on the sidelines of these events, looking on as its neighbour suffered successive invasions. Set in its woods, the place kept to itself. This uncanny sense of timelessness was marked by the Seaweed Hut which once stood on Weston Shore. A weird dome of worm-eaten wood, draped with turf and seaweed like a maritime haystack of flotsam heaped up on the beach, it was described by the Victoria History of Hampshire in 1903 ‘to be of considerable antiquity’ and celebrated on Edwardian postcards as a local curiosity. Some claimed it was a fishermen’s lookout, shelter and store, or perhaps an old ferry shelter, but to me it resembled nothing so much as a tribal hut.

As children we used to creep inside, the sky showing through the gaps in its roof, the interior dark and damp and smelling of salt and seaweed. I imagined it tenanted by a Father Neptune figure, holding court and garbed in kelp like a sea voyager crossing the Equator, half-hermit, half-warlock. Even to the end, the hut retained its secrets: crumbling and weather-beaten, when it finally fell apart in the 1960s its age was unknown. Roman coins had been discovered in the field behind; perhaps the hut was there to witness the imperial arrivals in their shiny helmets and red tunics, subjugating the natives and their shamanistic rites in the woods. Perhaps it was a Celtic temple, there when Christian missionaries first arrived to battle with the pagan gods of the forest. But whatever dark spirits had occupied this gravelly shore, they were to be firmly supplanted by a new invasion.

Like the old religion, the order of the Cistercians was born in a wood, founded in the Burgundian forest of Cîteaux as a more austere version of the Benedictines. In the late twelfth century the monks crossed the Channel to establish houses in England and, encouraged by King John, founded an abbey at Beaulieu in the New Forest in 1204. Soon after, the Bishop of Winchester commissioned the Cistercian abbots to investigate the site at Netley, and on 25 July 1239, an advance party arrived from Beaulieu, sent from the beautiful place to the sad place across the water – a journey still made by fallow deer, only to be felled by poachers, an ill-return for these animal asylum-seekers.

Cut off as it was by dense woodland from the interior, with the sea the only practicable means of access, it was Netley’s isolation which attracted the ascetic Cistercians. Their order characteristically sought sites ‘of horror – a vast wilderness’, ‘far from the concourse of men’, as they had at Fountains Abbey on the Yorkshire moors. They would go to great lengths in their search for ‘lonely, wooded places’: if the chosen site wasn’t empty enough then, like later landowners, they made it so, evicting the resident population and levelling cottages. As Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford, noted, ‘they make a solitude that they may be solitaries’.

Built out of stone from the Isle of Wight quarry of Quarr, by 1251 the order had run out of money, and work on their new church ground to a halt. To fund its completion, the monks applied for, and were granted, state aid. The result was a rather more sophisticated building, its importance plain from the inscription on the chapel’s foundation stone – ‘H: DI. GRA. REX ANGL.’, ‘Henry, by the grace of God, king of England’ – and the ornate tracery windows modelled on those of Westminster Abbey, which the King had recently rebuilt, in a style which the Cistercians themselves had imported to England. At a time when architecture was an expression of man’s creativity by God’s grace, gothic had become the predominant aesthetic of an age predicated on religion.

One hundred years before, Abbot Suger had built the first gothic structure, the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris: his opus modernum in stained glass and stone. The Cistercians appreciated its sharp pointed arches, functional rib vaults and flying buttresses as a reaction against the ungodly excesses of rounded Romanesque arches and their writhing serpents and mythological beasts. They agreed with the reforming mystic St Bernard of Clairvaux, who declared, ‘What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters … What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, these savage lions, and monstrous creatures? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half-beast, half-man, or these spotted tigers?’ In decrying such ‘semi-human beings’, the serpents and monsters which may still have lurked in the woods and lakes, St Bernard looked to a new image of God, exorcising the creatures in which a ‘crypto-pagan’ people hardly out of the Dark Ages still half-believed. This was the aim of the Cistercians’ misson: to convert this pagan shore. Their new order would convey the clarity of God’s vision, and conquer the mythical denizens of a wild forest.

Gothic was as innovatory and as modern as anything by Mies van der Rohe. Like twentieth-century architecture, its buttresses and pillars openly displayed its technological achievements. Load-bearing ribs – a technique later used in skyscrapers – allowed the thin walls between them to be cut away to let in light. The result was a luminescent box, charged to uplift the human soul into sanctity. As God’s light pierced the ‘cloud of unknowing’ between Heaven and Man, so His holy rays shone through the stained glass set in arches that pointed Heavenwards; rays almost as visible as those emitted by a halo’d Christ in a medieval illumination. Abbot Suger named it the ‘new light’, lux nova; a transcendent vision for those who beheld it, at a time when the sense of sight was regarded as so powerful that it could affect the object at which you looked, and vice versa. To look upon the true image of God, for instance, would, were it possible, mean instant destruction, so He was represented by a colour, ‘the strange blue of twelfth-century glass which seems to filter to our souls the essence of other skies in other worlds’. Light itself was God-given. Thus mediated, Netley’s abbey was also acknowledging its dedicatee, the Blessed Virgin, herself known as the ‘window of Heaven’, fenestra coeli, an image through which, like an icon, the unseeable God might be vouchsafed.

As its aspiring gothic windows pierced the walls like thorns in her son’s heart, their glass stained with the sin of the world, so the chapel impressed its cruciform plan, Christ’s mark, into the Hampshire soil. And by granting the monks ‘free warren in their demesne lands of Netley, Hound, Sotteshall [Satchell] and Sholing’, Henry III’s patronage gave them full authority to impose their Christian order on the land.

It may have been suitably ‘horrible’ as a site, but there were also good economic reasons for the monks’ choice of Netley. Here were lush pastures for their sheep and cattle, fertile land for their crops, and plentiful fish and oysters in Southampton Water, supplemented by the abbey’s own freshwater stewponds. A grange farm was set up, along with a lodge to receive lepers barred from entering Southampton – an isolation ward in which the afflicted could be tended by novice monks in an already isolated site. Thus did the Cistercians reinvent the land in their own image – the image, by association and intent, of God.

The result was a self-sufficient community, maintaining its distance while continuing Christ’s mission in caring for the sick. Its proximity to water was an important spiritual aspect: water held traditional healing powers for the body and the soul, and Netley’s abbey would provide for both. And just as their new settlement sought to express Christ’s message, so the monks emulated their Saviour’s simplicity. They wore white habits and black scapulas without shirts underneath, slept on straw beds, rose at midnight to pray and remained silent for most of their day; they ate no meat unless in sickness, and transgression could result in solitary confinement or flogging. Such a regime was more like that of a prison, a medieval Spike Island, but their ordered lives and monastic traditions set the precedent for the industrialised society to come, just as their beliefs determined the order of life around them.

Bound by their vow of silence, protected by royal patronage and geographically removed from the sometimes dangerous nearby port (though trading with it in wool and other produce), the abbey’s monks could remain secure in their wordless isolation, as though their own castle walls, gothic rationality and implicit faith could keep out the barbarian world. They escaped the bloody raids of the 1330s, protected by their religious status and French origins, although not immune to the prevailing sense of instability as the taxation returns for February 1341 noted, being short of ‘8s of their usual value as a good part of the corn land lies left fallow through dread of foreign invasion and the marauding of the king’s sailors’. But then came an invasion no one could ignore.

According to the contemporary historian Henry Knighton of Leicester, the bubonic plague of 1348 entered England through Southampton, via fleas carried on the backs of rats and men up the estuary, injecting the country with its terrible bacillus. Other ports would lay claim to this dubious honour, but a later historian noted that ‘the town suffered much from a destructive pestilence which, beginning in China, had swept over the face of the whole discovered globe, and, entering into this island, spent its first fury in this neighbourhood’. The plague would kill half of Southampton’s population, while upriver at Winchester the townspeople were persuaded to parade around the marketplace reciting the seven penitential psalms three times a week; all to no avail as half its populace too would perish.

As Pasteurella pestis infected the rest of Britain with its flesh-corrupting buboes and noisome stench, culling three million – half the population – Netley’s Cistercians lived on in their lonely place. Around them England was pulled down by the calamity; fields were left untended, entire villages died. The plague was the hell of medieval imagining come to life, an evil miasma that lurked in the air itself, and in turn culture became infected with mortality, disease and decay. It was the plague that gave gothic its darkness: the images of St John’s Apocalypse, memento mori, and most vividly the Dance of Death, a skeleton leading bishops, kings, merchants and beggars alike to their graves in a danse macabre prompted by the shattered nervous systems of the disease’s victims.

Even Netley’s institutional self-sufficiency could not resist the inevitable change – not least the decline in lay-brothers, either from mortality or desertion, attracted by better working conditions to a world in which labour was at a premium. As the devils of disease punished the wicked, the halt in civilisation’s progress became manifest in its buildings. Before the epidemic, gothic had begun to develop a decadent enflorescence of ornate foliage and lascivious curves. The plague curtailed such extravagance (not least by decimating the workforce). It was God’s retribution for Man’s decadence – a moral decay which also appeared to have afflicted Netley, succeeding where the bubonic bacillus had failed. Society became more materialistic and more sceptical, paradoxes which made the religious orders prey both to apostasy and their own sensuality. By the end of the fifteenth century, Pope Sixtus IV had relaxed the rules governing closed orders, and the populace now began to turn against its white-robed neighbours, accusing them of laxity of observance and immorality. When Henry VIII began his move towards reformation, his supporters agreed that such orders had become corrupted by their own privilege.

Yet Netley was hardly a wealthy estate. By 1535 the population of monks had fallen to just seven, with thirty-two staff, £43 worth of plate and jewels, and an annual income of just £100. Establishments of its size were easy targets for suppression – especially by those who might stand to gain from the release of their land and resources – and the 1536 act of Parliament which began the process justified itself ‘forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys, priories and other religious houses of monks, canons and nuns …’

All around England statues and stained glass were smashed and destroyed, and in 1536 the wreckers came to Netley. The abbey’s lucent wonder was demolished by the sons of those who had built it, and with its dissolution, the Cistercians’ lonely place became an empty ruin.

The legend of tunnels running from underneath our school to Netley was irresistible. Ignoring its improbabilities, we crept into the school cellars and in the cobwebby gloom imagined a journey to the centre of the earth, or at least to the ruined abbey, where a workman by the name of Slown was said to have died of fright when he was sent down such a tunnel, his last words being, ‘Block it up! In the name of God!’ Netley bred these myths: the abbot’s treasure trove was said to lay buried in the grounds after the monks’ flight from the Dissolution, jealously guarded by his ghost.

Peter actually lived next to the abbey. I’d met him in my first year at St Mary’s, when he seemed a glamorous figure, with his sophisticated manner, anarchic humour and jet-set air (he had been to New York); he brought out the aspirational in me. Peter lived with his parents in a detached house next to the abbey ruins, and claimed it had been built on the monks’ graveyard, pointing out, as proof, the bumps in the lawn. That was a scary enough story, but the unmade driveway to his house passed the abbey itself, thrilling on moonlit nights with its great broken walls and gothic arches rising out of the trees. In their fantastic ruins you could reinvent yourself as any romantic figure of the past.

For a boy from Sholing, this gothic vision was captivating; the abbey seemed able not only to conjure up the past, but to invite the creation of a new identity – just as the ruins had reinvented themselves.

In 1540 Henry VIII had granted Netley, its buildings and lands – including Sholing – as a reward to his courtier, Sir William Paulet, for good service. To the outspoken William Cobbett, however, this was less good service than political manoeuvring quite equal to the corruption of which the abbey’s former owners had been accused. Paulet, later first Marquis of Winchester, was a nationally important figure: royal minister, Master of the King’s Wards, Comptroller of the Household, Lord Treasurer and sheriff of Hampshire; his mansion at Basing was one of the largest private houses in England. He was also ‘a man the most famous in the whole world for sycophancy, time-serving, and for all those qualities which usually distinguish the favourites of kings like the wife-killer’, said Cobbett.

With the deterioration of relations with France, and Henry VIII’s determination to pursue a glorious war, the King ordered the fortification of Southampton Water. In return for undertaking to build twelve castles along the Solent, Paulet was given certain manors and lands – including those of Netley Abbey. It was a shrewd piece of business. The dissolution of the monasteries freed up valuable building material, and the waterside abbeys of Quarr, Beaulieu and Netley were convenient to plunder and recycle as Henry’s new castles at Yarmouth, Cowes and Hurst. Yet by 1542 – just three years before an invading French fleet of 200 ships would mass off the Isle of Wight – Netley had acquired only a small fort, built on the site of the abbey’s sea gate with stones from its refectory. Evidently Paulet was conserving the rest of the abbey for a palatial dwelling. He created a new grand entrance flanked by polygonal turrets like Hampton Court, then levelled the cloisters to make an open courtyard with a fountain; the nave was turned into one enormous banqueting hall. Thus were the abbey’s holy spaces expanded to make room for Paulet’s ego. Ironically, however, it was this secularisation that helped preserve the holy site: Paulet’s selfish scheming resulted in posterity’s gain.

William Paulet would live through four Tudor reigns, dying in 1572 at the remarkable age of ninety-seven, a testament to the acquisition of riches and his own swiftly-changing political and religious allegiances. In the meantime, Netley continued in its new function as a grand house. In 1560 it passed to Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, son of the Protector Somerset, who that August entertained Elizabeth I on one of her royal progresses, as Southampton’s mayor proudly – or perhaps nervously – observed: ‘The Queenes Maiestees grace came from the Castle of Netley to Southampton on the XIII of August.’

For the next century or so, the building remained somewhere between an abbey, a mansion and a castle, a fortified retreat secure enough for Seymour’s Royalist son to be confined there during the Interregnum. The abbey retained some sacred duties – one of the Seymours was baptised in its chapel in 1665 – although when it became the property of the Earl of Huntingdon, the new owner converted the west end of the chapel into a kitchen and ‘other offices’. But by the eighteenth century, this draughty architectural portmanteau had become decidedly old-fashioned, and its latest owner, the apparently disinterested Sir Berkeley Lucy, began to sell off chunks of the ruins for building materials.

Abbey stones had already found their way into local houses and churches, but these came from secular parts of the building, not its consecrated chapel. In 1703 an eminent Southampton builder, Walter Taylor, grandfather of the mill-owning industrialist, made a deal with Lucy ‘for the purchase of so much of its materials as he could carry away in a certain space of time’; other chroniclers record that Sir Berkeley ‘sold the whole fabrick of the chapel’. Taylor’s God-fearing family urged him ‘not to be instrumental in destroying an edifice which had been consecrated to the worship of the Deity’, and although such imprecations did not persuade Taylor to abandon his plans, ‘they dwelt so much on his mind as to occasion a dream one night, that the arch key-stone of the East window fell from its situation, and fractured his skull’. Another version has the ghost of a monk appear to the transgressing developer, threatening him ‘with great mischief if he persisted in his purpose’.

Taylor duly reported his dream to his friend Isaac Watts, schoolmaster and father of the Methodist composer, who, like Taylor, was a Dissenter, and had been gaoled for his beliefs. Watts gave what the Victorian historian William Howitt frowningly described as ‘somewhat Jesuitical advice’, instructing Taylor ‘to have no personal concern in pulling down the building’. Ignoring his friend’s warning, Taylor went ahead and ‘tore off the roof (which was entire, till then) and pulled down great part of the walls’. But,

in an exertion to tear down a board from the window loosed the fatal stone, which fell upon his head, and produced a fracture. The wound was not, at first, deemed to be mortal, but the instrument of the surgeon unhappily slipped, in the operation of extracting a splinter, entered the brain, and caused immediate death.

The moral of the story was plain: human greed invited God’s retribution, and the abbey’s ghosts would avenge the destruction begun by an ungodly king. The tale became part of the growing myth of Netley. Even a century later, William Howitt’s proposal that the tragedy actually benefited the abbey seemed to infer that Taylor had been a sacrifice required for its perpetuation: ‘the accident had the good effect of staying the demolition of the Abbey, which has since been uninjured except by time and tourists’. Netley had again managed to save itself by another lucky circumstance, just as Paulet’s domestic conversion had stopped it falling down. Taylor’s hapless fate – wrapped up in the abbey’s legends – had preserved these crumbling stones.

By the mid-eighteenth century Netley’s ruins had taken on an increasingly feral air, as though Nature had appointed itself as the abbey’s new guardian. Ivy crept up over the walls as if to hold them together, and mature trees grew to create a leafy new canopy for the now roofless nave; descendants of the sheep originally kept by the monks wandered the ruins. Beyond, the grounds ran down to a view of the open water, decoratively framed by more trees. It was a truly picturesque sight, a natural focus for those who sought the sublime sensation of ‘ruins, ivy, owls, moonlight, musing melancholy and life’s passing pageant’.

The century had in turn seen Nature tamed: ‘Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain’, as the poet John Clare wrote from his asylum, driven there by the predations of the enclosures which prevented him from making his living either as farm-worker or poet. And with Nature thus controlled, men could indulge their taste for the sublime and the picturesque, as though England were a panorama spread before them, framed by their own aesthetic. Tiring of ‘improved’ landscapes, they now looked for something more thrilling, and found it in gothic.

Eighteenth-century art historians believed that gothic architecture was inspired by the tall forests of northern Europe; they saw its sacred arches, crockets, spires and columns as stone versions of ancient woodland – the antiquarian James Hall even built a wicker ‘cathedral’ in his garden to demonstrate the ancient provenance of the style. For the rarefied tastes of the eighteenth-century connoisseur, it was a delicious meeting of art and life to be savoured: this gothic abbey returning to its arboreal inspiration, shaped by the deep, dark, mysterious woods themselves, still surrounded by the very pagan spirits which its Cistercian builders had sought to dispel.

When it was built, Netley’s abbey must have stood out from the landscape like a piece of ostentatious modern architecture, but it had now been subsumed by the land, made decrepit by Nature and blunted by Time, and in the process had become a place of myth and legend. And within that myth, the abbey found its new identity by reaching back, through its medieval past, and into the dark ages of Europe’s forested depths – perhaps even to their old gods and rituals, their supernatural mysteries. In an era of cool rationality, Netley reacted by becoming a natural artifice, a set-piece of theatrical bravura composed by Man and framed by Nature – a fantastic escape from that rational age.