The Forest (106 page)

‘My dear Colonel.’ The aristocrat raised his hat and even gave Pride half a nod.

‘My dear Lord Henry.’

‘We are here, I believe,’ Lord Henry smiled at them both, ‘to save the New Forest.’

In the year 1851, the fifteenth of the reign of Queen Victoria, the British Parliament had passed an Act that was to mark the greatest change in the New Forest since the days of William the Conqueror.

They decided to kill all the deer.

Nobody knew exactly how many deer there were: surely seven thousand; perhaps more than ten. Red and fallow, stags and hinds, bucks and does, calves and fawns – they were all to die. The Deer Removal Act was the title by which this measure was to be known.

Of course, it was centuries since, as a deer farm, the New Forest had had any economic justification. The deer culled each year went to the ancient officers, or to landowners whose property lay in the area. Indeed, it was calculated that each deer killed actually cost the Crown the astonishing sum of a hundred pounds! The Forest was an anachronism, its offices were sinecures, its lovely deer served no purpose. But that was not why they were all to die.

They were to die to make way for more trees.

Ever since the first, late medieval coppices, the Crown had taken an interest in its Forest trees. When the merry monarch Charles II had begun his plantations, he had started a more organized approach to the question of timber; but the first time that Parliament had really addressed the subject was an Act of 1698, when it was decided to set up inclosures for growing timber. Stock – deer, cattle and ponies – would be fenced out until the saplings were too well grown to be eaten by them. Then the inclosure would be opened up again for the stock to graze the undergrowth, and a new inclosure made elsewhere. But although some inclosures of oak and beech had been made, the business had never been followed through. Indeed, most of the oaks felled for the naval ships at Buckler’s Hard came from the open Forest, not from plantations. The old medieval woods and heaths stayed very much as they had always been.

Wasn’t it all a shocking waste? The British Empire was expanding, the Industrial Revolution had ushered in a modern world of steam and steel. In the year 1851 the Great Exhibition in London, with its huge Crystal Palace of iron
and glass, was drawing trainloads of eager visitors from all over Britain to see the results of industrial progress on a world-wide scale. In the countryside farm machinery was coming to the land; a huge new programme of inclosure had partitioned the wasteful old communal fields and common wastes into efficient private units. People had been thrown off the land, admittedly, but there were jobs for them in the growing manufacturing towns. Surely it was time to create tidy plantations in the Forest’s unreformed wilderness.

In 1848 a House of Commons Select Committee investigated the Forest. They were shocked by what they found: Forest officials paid for doing nothing; those in charge of the woods selling off timber for themselves; venality, criminality. In short, the place was much as it had been for the last nine hundred years. They saw that reform was needed at once.

They proceeded with a logic which could only evoke admiration. The deer, since they served no purpose, must go. But if the Crown was no longer farming the deer, then it must be compensated. Any voices protesting that by getting rid of the deer the Crown was actually saving itself from a loss, were stifled. The compensation was fixed at fourteen thousand acres to be enclosed for woods – this in addition to the six thousand or so designated, though not all taken up, under the old 1698 Act. Finally, to make the new interest of the Crown very clear, the commoners who shared the Forest were to fall under the control of the Office of Woods. There was no consultation with the commoners. In the brief period before the proposal and the legislation the five greatest landowners in the Forest managed to have the proposed new inclosures reduced to ten thousand acres. Then the measure was whisked through.

Soon after this, the day to day administration of the Forest was placed in the hands of a new Deputy Surveyor. His name was Cumberbatch.

Had he been wrong to bring Pride? Not many people in the Forest had any use for the Office of Woods, but Pride’s loathing of Cumberbatch was legendary. On the other hand, he could be a wonderful witness. The best sort of smallholder the Forest had to offer. It was a risk, of course, but he’d coached his tenant carefully.

Just so long as he kept his temper.

The presence of Lord Henry, by contrast, was deeply reassuring. Not only was Lord Henry’s elevated social position a help, but as the owner of Beaulieu also sat as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, he had real influence at Westminster.

In a way, Albion considered, their situations were similar. When Wyndham Martell had died, he had divided his estates between his three sons: the old Dorset estates going to the oldest son, the land in Kent to the second, and the smaller New Forest estate deriving from Fanny going to Godwin who had taken his mother’s name instead of his father’s as more fitting for the owner of the old Albion inheritance. Large though Wyndham Martell’s possessions had been, those of the duke were vast. Though a descendant of the Stuart kings through the unfortunate Monmouth, as well as being a Montagu, a large part of his ancestry came from the Scottish aristocracy. His lands, north and south of the border, ran to hundreds of thousands of acres. It was a small matter for him to grant his second son the eight thousand acres of the Beaulieu estate as a wedding present; but it was a great matter for the New Forest. For although the duke and his family had always been good landlords of Beaulieu through their stewards, it was hardly the same thing as having an owner in residence; whereas now Lord Henry – as the son of a duke the title of lord was placed as a courtesy before his name – had set about plans for rebuilding the ruined abbey as a family home and was taking a keen interest in the place.

It was time to board the train. The Colonel had given Pride a ticket for the second-class carriage. He and Lord
Henry prepared to step into the first-class and he had just got one foot in through the door when a voice hailing him from further down the platform caused him to turn, start violently and almost lose his balance.

‘Watch out,’ said the voice, cheerfully. ‘You nearly fell down.’

The owner of the voice, who now came with an easy, swinging gait towards them, was in his twenties. He was dressed in a loose velvet coat and a wide felt hat. Under his arm he carried a satchel. These attributes, in addition to his small pointed goatee beard and the long curls of fair hair that reached his shoulders, all suggested that the young gentleman was an artist of some kind.

‘Going to London?’ he enquired amiably.

The Colonel did not reply, but his jaw set and his hand clenched as though he were about to slash a Russian with his sabre.

‘I’m going up to look at some pictures,’ the young man continued, then, glancing at Lord Henry: ‘Have we met?’

And now, if only to stop this infuriating flow, Colonel Albion turned to face the young man. ‘I have nothing to say to you, Sir,’ he roared. ‘Good day!’ And he hurled himself forward into the carriage as furiously as if it were a Russian battery.

‘Suit yourself,’ said the young man cheerfully, and went to another door. The engine at the front, no doubt in sympathy with the Colonel, let out a huge huff of steam.

Only some time later when the engine was puffing them with a busy rattle towards the environs of Southampton, did Lord Henry venture to enquire: ‘Who was that young man?’

And now poor Albion buried his face in his hands and through gritted teeth informed him: ‘That, Sir, was my son-in-law.’

‘Ah,’ Lord Henry enquired no more. He had heard of Minimus Furzey.

It wasn’t long before Albion saw their game. The Committee Room was crowded. Cumberbatch and his friends, the Forest landowners, everyone was there; and sitting behind the long table facing the room were ten men, law lords or peers of the realm, every one. He saw their game by the way they looked at him.

Colonel Albion had always felt rather proud of the fact that he was descended from two of the most ancient families in southern England. He wasn’t arrogant about it but there was a satisfaction in knowing that no one, not the mightiest in the land, could ever tell him he wasn’t a gentleman or that he didn’t belong. He was also proud of the fact that, though he had purchased his captaincy, he had advanced to the rank of colonel entirely on his merits. His social place amongst the Forest gentry was as solid as a castle on a rock.

But the aristocrats who faced him now were of a different sort. Their families mightn’t be as ancient, but they didn’t care. Their estates were far larger; they belonged to that more rarefied club that governed the country. And to them – they were too polite to say so but he saw it in their eyes – he was just a florid-faced squire.

‘Colonel Albion, you are a Commissioner, are you not, of the Deer Removal Act?’

‘I am.’ There were thirteen Commissioners whose job it was to oversee the working of the Deer Removal Act and, in particular, to approve any new inclosures. Three came from the Office of Woods, including Cumberbatch, then there were the four verderers, chosen by the county, though their power was only a shadow of what it had been in medieval times. The rest were the gentlemen or freeholders who held rights of commoning on the Forest. Albion, with extensive rights and numerous tenants, was a natural person to sit on the Commission.

‘And why, Colonel, in your view, has there grown up such opposition to the Crown?’

Opposition? Of course there had been opposition: fences
broken, young plantations set on fire. These were the ways the poorer Forest folk let you know their feelings and frankly he didn’t blame them. Cumberbatch might like to characterize this as a rebellion against the monarch, but he wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

‘There has been opposition to the Office of Woods,’ he said calmly, ‘but the New Forest Commoners like myself are loyal Englishmen and have always enjoyed the special protection of the Crown. Until recently,’ he added.

‘Colonel, would you care to summarize what, in your view, have been the causes of the bad feeling in the Forest since the Deer Removal Act?’

‘Certainly.’ He might have been only a bluff soldier and country squire, he might have missed the Oxford education that his father Wyndham had enjoyed, but the statement of Colonel Godwin Albion to the Committee of the House of Lords would have made his father proud. It was concise, accurate and elegant. ‘My statement falls into two parts,’ he explained. ‘The first is political, the second material.’

It was a melancholy tale.

Why, the Colonel used to wonder, had they chosen Cumberbatch? He was far too young, only in his early twenties when he first arrived. He looked and behaved like a pugilist in the ring. He knew nothing about the Forest and cared even less. And straight away he had attacked the Forest folk with a vengeance.

His first assault had been absurd. In the days when the Forest was an actively managed deer preserve, the commoners were supposed to keep their stock off the Forest during the fence month, when the deer gave birth, and throughout the winter heyning, as the cold months were called, when food was scarce. Not that these rules had been enforced for decades. It was generally assumed that the fees the commoners paid entitled them to year-round grazing. And with the deer gone there was no possible reason to apply these medieval rules anyway. Yet no sooner had he
arrived than Cumberbatch had tried to order all the stock off the Forest during these times. It was a senseless harassment which, if followed up, would have ruined most of the commoners.

Yet that had only been the beginning. Next, a new register of commoners’ rights had been compiled – essentially an update of the old register of 1670 – but with one great difference. Almost every right of common claimed, from the big claims like those of the Albion estate down to those of the smallest freeholder, was now disputed by the Crown.

‘Your Lordships, this could only lead any reasonable person to conclude that the intention was to destroy the commoners. The legal costs alone have been crippling. Yet even this is overshadowed by one other business.’

Despite the fact that the Deer Removal Act had made sweeping changes, many people still expected more drastic change to come. The reasoning was simple: if the Office of Woods and the commoners couldn’t agree about how to share the Forest, then why not partition the whole place once and for all? The commoners could have their land, the Office of Woods their inclosures, and they need never trouble each other again – the big problem being to ensure that one side did not get all the best land at the expense of the other.

‘I refer, of course,’ Albion went on, ‘to Mr Cumberbatch’s famous letter.’

Famous. Infamous. It was perhaps unfair that this document – a private letter to his superiors pointing out the most advantageous position for them to take – should have been made public. But in 1854 it had been published in a report on the Forest and everyone had read it. The point that the young Deputy Surveyor made was clever and brutal. Since there was a good chance the Forest would end by being partitioned, he argued, the Office of Woods should make all its inclosures as fast as possible, on the best land.
With that land, for all practical purposes, withdrawn from the equation, the commoners’ future share was bound to be worth far less.