Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ