On an October day, the Surrey
hills standing round about in shadowy distances, the silence of two
centuries is scarcely broken by the rustle of leaves dropping on their
own deep carpet, and the very spirit of a lost cause dwells here,
slowly dying. The house stands backed by a steep wooded hill, beyond
which corn-fields 'clothe the wold and meet the sky;' the mansion is a
grey, two-storied parallelogram flanked by square towers of only
slighter elevation; their projecting bays surmounted by open-work
cornices of leafy tracery in whiter stone.
The tale used to run (one has heard it vaguely in conversation) that
the old house at Godalming is haunted by the ghost of Prince Charlie,
and one naturally asks, 'What is _he_ doing there?' What he was doing
there will appear later.
In 1688, the year of the _Regifugium_, Westbrook Place was sold to
Theophilus Oglethorpe, who had helped to drive
the Whigs
Frae Bothwell Brigs,
and, later, to rout Monmouth at Sedgemoor. This gentleman married
Eleanor Wall, of an Irish family, a Catholic--'a cunning devil,' says
Swift. The pair had five sons and four daughters, about whom county
histories and dictionaries of biography blunder in a helpless fashion.
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