The great Lord Chatham once stayed several weeks at the _Castle Inn_. He was detained there on his way back to London from Bath, by a relapse of gout. His own suite demanded twenty rooms, and the exigencies of State during that time strained the resources of the hotel to the utmost. He required the whole staff, waiters, ostlers and boot-boys to wear his livery. Mr. Stanley Weyman has seized on just this critical moment, and has woven round the _Castle Inn_ the sweetest and most enthralling of his many novels.
Other romances of real life are associated with it. Driving through Marlborough and halting at the _Castle Inn_, a certain Duke of Chandos heard screams in the inn-yard. Hastening to the spot he found a beautiful girl being brutally beaten by an ostler. When the Duke interfered, the ostler declared that the young woman was his wife, and therefore that he had an indefeasible right to beat her. However, he was willing to compromise the matter by selling his wife for £20. The Duke paid the money, took the young woman away, and, so we are told, afterwards made her Duchess of Chandos.
[Illustration: Old Coaching Inns, St Albans]
Water has continued to flow under the bridge that spans the Kennett for many generations since Sir George Soane sat on the parapet and wooed Julia, the college porter’s daughter. The old Bath Road knows no more the coaches, curricles, wigs and hoops, holstered saddles or the beaux and fine ladies, and gentleman’s gentlemen whose environment they were. We drift half-unconsciously into the language of the novelist who has recalled these old days so vividly. The _Castle Inn_ is now part of Marlborough College, founded in 1843. The _Rose Inn_ at Wokingham has been refronted since “With pluvial patter for refrain,” Gay, Pope, Swift and Arbuthnot spent a rainy afternoon there vying their verses in praise of Molly Moy, the fair daughter of their host, who in spite of her beauty lived to be an old maid of seventy. Yet the wayfarer will discover that innkeeper’s daughters are as pretty as they were in the days gone by. Romance is not the exclusive property of any one generation. Where youth and beauty are to be found there lurks the romance; and it belongs as much to the inns of our own time as when highwaymen, patches, puffs, wigs, and knee breeches were the prevailing fashion.