The Reform Act ended Bletchingley as a borough. It had been bought in the reign of Charles II by Sir Robert Clayton, and was just as flagrant a job as Gatton or Haslemere; generally a Clayton sat for it. In the Clayton era there were not many more than a dozen electors, but the numbers who turned out at an election were remarkable. The inns set out their barrels in the streets, free to all drinkers; the Bletchingley cobbles ran beer. As a disfranchised borough, it ended with a flash of distinction; its last members were Thomas Hyde Villiers and Lord Palmerston. Other Rectors of Bletchingley were gentler souls than Dr. Harris. One of them, William Hampton--he belonged to a remarkable line of Hamptons, seven generations, and all clergymen--left a pretty passage in his will. He bequeathed to his granddaughter, Judith Herat, a plot of ground in Bletchingley, because, as he wrote, "she is very like her mother and beareth the name of her great-grandmother my mother a gratious woman." Another, Thomas Herring, rose to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Not everybody would have recommended him. Swift abused him. Herring preached a sermon in Lincoln's Inn and condemned Gay's _Beggar's Opera_, and Swift went to the attack in the _Intelligencer_. "I should be very sorry that any of the clergy," he wrote "should be so weak as to imitate a Court Chaplain who preached against the _Beggar's Opera_, which probably will do more good than one thousand sermons of so stupid, so injudicious, and so prostitute a divine." Swift would have quarrelled with his biographer, who gives him an engaging character:-- "His person was majestic; he had a gracefulness in his behaviour and gravity in his countenance, that always procured him reverence. His pronunciation was so remarkably sweet and his address so insinuating that his audience immediately on his beginning to speak were prepossessed in his favour." [Illustration: _Bletchingley._]