Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [601]
For that was the real reason why she had agreed to his suggestion that they visit Cranborne Chase together that day. It was a chance to test her arguments out on him.
They went up Harnham Hill. Looking down on the city, she marvelled at how it was spreading. The new suburbs of which Mr Porters was so proud stretched half way to Old Sarum now. The world was changing.
But Porters was not looking at the view as he pursed his lips. He was brooding about Mason and the bishop.
The great battle that was rocking Salisbury, and that had even caused questions to be raised in Parliament, concerned the city’s schools. There were not enough of them and more must be provided. The question was, what sort of schools and who was to run them? The large community of non-conformists, led by men like Mason, wanted non-denominational schools run by the state boards that the great Education Act of 1870 had provided for. The bishop would not hear of it. He and the Conservatives were determined to provide an Anglican school instead. The bishop would not give way, he declared, as long as he had a penny in his pocket. Besides, Conservatives agreed, why should the ratepayers’ money be used when funds had been offered to supply an Anglican school from private sources?
Bishop Wordsworth was a brilliant and powerful man, one of the remarkable family that had produced in the last century numerous formidable minds including the great poet. Many in Sarum knew of the family dinners when Wordsworth would decide beforehand whether to converse in English, Latin or classical Greek. And no one was surprised that so far the non-conformists of Salisbury had been defeated by the bishop at every turn.
To Jane Shockley it seemed unfair.
“I fear Mason’s business is a mistake. I am sorry, Miss Shockley, that out of motives of kindness you encourage him.” He was jealous of course. Even now, he still wanted to monopolise her. She smiled and ignored the rebuke as the landau slowly crested the hill.
Porters supported the bishop, not because his sympathies were strongly in either direction, but because he was sure that Wordsworth’s case under the Education Act was correct.
“Which is not the point,” Jane had tried to explain to him.
It was certainly useful for Mason to have her on his side: after all, she was a respected lady of the close, on good terms with the bishop. Her presence there would suggest that the non-conformists might yet find unexpected friends.
The whole conservative establishment of the city was against the non-conformists – Swayne, Hammick, the Salisbury Journal. Someone had even tried to persuade old Lord Forest to raise the question in the House of Lords. But since he had sold off his last half chequer of property in Salisbury some years before, he had refused to take any further interest in the place. But they were all wrong. It was daring of Mason to have chosen the White Hart Hotel for his meeting too, she thought, for it was a favourite Conservative meeting place. Yes, there should be fireworks at the meeting tomorrow, and she looked forward to it.
But today they were bound on a very different mission. They were going to Cranborne Chase.
The great sweep of land that lay south west of Sarum had always been a desolate place. Across it, nearly two thousand years before, the Romans had built the road that went to the heart of the territory of the proud Durotriges. A few small settlements had sprung up there in later Saxon times and medieval kings had hunted there. But generally speaking, the place had retained its character from prehistoric times, with a combination of forest, clearing, and bare wilderness dotted with sparse hamlets. It invited few visitors.
And yet, the Chase in recent years had become one of the most extraordinary places in England.
For in the middle of the Chase lay a great estate – some twenty-five thousand acres – recently and unexpectedly inherited by a talented man, known to history as