Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [541]
Had anything changed in that empty region by the sea? Very little. Medieval kings no longer hunted in the great forests that still stretched from the coast up to Clarendon and beyond. But the deer still inhabited them. Men living in their tiny thatched cottages, in deserted hamlets, still had their ancient rights to gather wood, still lived their quiet and secluded existence. Furze cutters, charcoal burners, small folk who might not see a stranger in months, still held their tiny habitations on scores of miles of heathland to east and west of the little harbour. The little town of Christchurch with its square-towered Norman church and its long since ruined little castle, still nestled at the place where the two rivers Stour and Avon ran together into the harbour, and its people still sometimes used the old Saxon name of Twyneham to describe the place.
One thing had changed. The brown and turbulent waters of the English Channel had drawn a little closer, eating steadily year by year, century by century, into the soft sandy coastline, just as, thousands of years before, it had broken down the ancient barrier of chalk. It had taken a good part of the headland now. The southern end of the old earthwork walls that had protected the Celtic camp were already sliding onto a sand and shingle beach. The low hill at the centre of the headland had been remorselessly attacked by sea and weather too. Seen from a distance from the sea, it now looked at if the hill had been cut from end to end with a knife.
But the long headland and its sand bar was still there, losing its contact with the sea by only a few inches a year, still sheltering the still harbour waters and their mud flats on the inland side, where fishing boats could safely moor, where swans nested and herons stalked the flats or skimmed over the waters.
One thing had changed: the place had acquired a new name. For an antiquarian had hit upon the notion that the old Celtic hillfort was in fact the camp of none other than the legendary Saxon chief Hengist, one of the first of his race to colonise the island. It was spurious history, but popular, and the new and evocative name of Hengistbury Head soon became so firmly attached to the place that people thought it did indeed come from the mists of antiquity.
The harbour was empty. Behind it could be heard the gentle hiss of the sea. The sea was empty too, or so people hoped.
For on the other side of the English Channel in the ports of northern France, a huge armada of transport ships was being prepared. One still night when the sea was calm – as soon as the transports could be well enough organised and defended against the British naval squadrons – they would push out into the Channel, and fall upon the English coast. The people of Christchurch trembled at the thought. As well they might.
For the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, on the French coast, was invincible; against it could only be pitted a small force of British regulars and a half-trained local militia, some of whom carried only pikes.
This was the nightmare of England, caused by the French Revolution.
Of course, there were still those – extreme Whigs and Radicals, men like the brilliant Charles James Fox – who spoke with favour of the new age of liberty, equality and fraternity they believed had begun in France. When the Revolution came, idealistic young men like the poet Wordsworth truly believed they beheld a new and happier dawn. But that was before the terror of the guillotine, the killing of the king and queen and the astonishing conquests of young Bonaparte. Few in England praised the Revolution now. Italy had fallen to the French; Egypt nearly been annexed. If he had not been stopped by Nelson destroying his fleet and supplies, the extraordinary conqueror who modelled himself on Caesar and Alexander would have marched across Asia to India itself.
Worse still, when Bonaparte took the Hapsburg province of the Netherlands the thing England always dreaded most happened