Part 5

And yet, although we allow this to be truth, to some she must have been winsome and gracious. Not to the lower herd, almost certainly, for people below the rank of knights or dames were never, in those times, thought worthy the least consideration. To those who more nearly approached her own rank she may have been the generous personality she has ever been pictured, although for a true Castilian to be other than insufferably haughty and arrogant would seem, if traditions do not lie, to be against nature. To the King she was evidently all in all, or how explain the existence of so long and elaborate a series of crosses raised to the memory of his _chère reine_? Eighteen years after the famous incident of the poisoned wound the Queen died, on November 28, 1290. She breathed her last on the evening of that day at the village of Harby, in Nottinghamshire, whither she had accompanied the King on a royal progress he had been making through the Eastern Counties during the three preceding months. Parliament in those times was a perambulating body of lawgivers, following of necessity the footsteps of the monarch. The King, therefore, having arranged to stay at his Royal Palace of Clipstone, in Sherwood Forest, at the end of October, Parliament was summoned to meet there on the twenty-seventh of that month. Meanwhile, however, the Queen fell ill of a lingering fever, and for sake of the quiet that could not be obtained in the neighbourhood of the Court she was housed at Harby, twenty miles distant. But not all the care that was hers, nor the syrups and other medicines detailed in the old accounts, procured in haste from the city of Lincoln, five miles away, availed to avert the fatal conclusion of that wasting sickness.

The Queen's body was at once removed to Lincoln Cathedral, and the funeral procession seems to have set out from Lincoln city for Westminster on the fourth day of December. London was not reached until eleven days later, and the entombment at Westminster did not take place until the seventeenth of the month. Travelling was a slow and tedious process then, but not necessarily so slow as this. The reasons for the length of time consumed between Lincoln and Westminster were two, and are found both in the pompous circumstances of the journey and in the circuitous route taken. The ordinary route was by Stamford, Huntingdon, Royston, Puckeridge, and Cheshunt; but it was determined that the august procession should pass through a more frequented part of the country, and through districts where the Queen had been better known. Another object was to take some of the great religious houses on the way, and thus have suitable places at which to rest. The route chosen, therefore, included Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St. Albans, Waltham Abbey, West Cheap, and Charing. At each of these places the Queen's body rested, and at each one was subsequently erected a memorial cross. This is no place for recounting the almsgiving, the endowments of charities and monasteries, and the payments for tapers and masses for the repose of her soul. Let it be understood that all these things were done on a scale of the greatest magnificence, and that the erection of these twelve great crosses was but one feature among many in the means employed to keep her memory alive and her soul in bliss unending. This last, indeed, was the principal reason of their building. In these days one regards the three crosses, that the rage of rabid men and the slower but scarce less sure fury of the elements between them have alone left us of the twelve, as merely beautiful specimens of the wedded arts of Sculpture and Architecture; or as affecting memorials of conjugal love. Those, however, would be erroneous regards. The crosses were to attract by their beauty, no doubt; but their higher purpose was to inspire the devotional sentiment; their presence by the wayside was to implore the passers-by to remember the "Queen of Good Memory," as documents of the time call her, that they might pray for her. Although they bore no inscription, they silently bade the traveller "_Orate pro animâ_," and were, accordingly, consecrated with full religious ceremonies.

The crosses were not of a uniform pattern, although many of them seem to have borne strong likenesses to each other. Nine have so utterly disappeared that not a single stone of them is discoverable at this day, but old prints serve to show, in conjunction with the still existing building accounts, their relative size and importance. The three remaining are those of Geddington, Hardingstone near Northampton, and this of Waltham. Waltham Cross stands seventy feet in height. It cost £95, equal to £1000 of our present money, and was originally built of stone from the quarries of Caen, in Normandy, as the lower stage of the work still shows. The two upper stages and the spirelet were restored and reconstructed in 1832 at a cost of £1200, and again, as recently as 1885-92, at an almost equal expense.

The beautiful old engraving of 1806, reproduced here, proves into what a dilapidated condition the Cross had at that time fallen. It would appear to have been even worse in 1720, when Dr. Stukeley was commissioned by the Society of Antiquaries to see that posts were placed round for its protection; and in 1757 it was in danger of falling, for Lord Monson, the then Lord of the Manor of Cheshunt, was petitioned to build some brickwork round the base and to set up some other posts. A later Lord of the Manor, a certain Sir George Prescott, in 1795, with colossal impudence endeavoured to remove it to his park at Theobalds, and would have done so had not his workmen found the stone too decayed to be displaced.

In the old print already referred to, and in the coaching print of some thirty years later, it will be noticed that a portion of that old coaching hostelry, the Falcon, actually abutted upon the Cross. The inn, indeed, occupied the site of a chantry chapel adjoining, where prayers for the soul of the Queen had been said for some two hundred and fifty years after her death. It may be suspected that those prayers, endowments notwithstanding, had grown somewhat perfunctory after that lapse of time, and the Queen herself little more than a legend; and so, when all Chantries were dissolved under Edward the Sixth, their revenues seized and the mumbling priests ejected, the world was well rid of a hoary piece of humbug. The Falcon was demolished when the latest restoration was brought to a conclusion, and a portion of its site thrown into the roadway, so that the Cross stands once more free from surrounding buildings.

In choosing a stone for those parts to be restored, the gross mistake was made of selecting a brownish-red stone from the Ketton quarries, in Northants. The reason for making this selection was that Caen stone is perishable and that of Ketton particularly durable; but in the result the restored Cross wears to-day a sadly parti-coloured appearance.

XII

THE already named Falcon was not the only hostelry at Waltham Cross. The Four Swans, whose great gallows sign still straddles across the highway, with the four swans themselves represented in effigy against the sky, was the other house. There is always Another in everything, even in Novelettes and on the Stage, where he or she, as the case may happen, is generally accorded a capital letter. That there should always be a rival, that is to say, Another, shows, I suppose, that competition is a heaven-sent condition of affairs, and incidentally that "Trusts" and "Combines" are immoral and a direct challenge to Providence. That, however, is another matter. But, in this case, which is "the other" it would be difficult, if not impossible, to determine. Whether the Falcon or the Four Swans was established first cannot be told with certainty, although if it be true that the Four Swans is built on the site of the ancient manor-house of Cheshunt, it seems likely that to this queer rambling old coaching-inn must be given the honour.

A story used to be told of an adventure here that might have had unpleasant consequences, had it not been for the ready wit of the guard attached to the "York Mail." When the Mail reached the village and drew up in front of the inn, shortly after nine o'clock, a quiet, gentlemanly-looking man took a vacant seat inside, and remained silent and inoffensive until the coach started on its way to Ware, when he suddenly became very talkative. Addressing a lady present with some absurd remarks, the other gentlemen turned upon him and said, if he did not cease they would put him in the road. This was no sooner said than he began to adopt a threatening tone; but no notice was taken of him, as Ware was being neared, when he could be better dealt with than by stopping the coach. When it came to a halt, the guard was beckoned to and told quietly what an odd customer was seated within. The guard looked inside, and at once recognised the strange person as a gentleman of that neighbourhood who had been consigned to a lunatic asylum, and must have escaped. "Ah! Mr. F----," he said, "how are you? Are you going far down the road?" "I'm going," said Mr. F----, "to Stamford to catch that rascal C----, who has stolen my estates." "Why," rejoined the guard, with the well-known promptitude of his class, "you needn't go any farther, I've just seen him in the back parlour, behind the bar." "Have you?" shouted the madman. "By Jove! let me find him," and he leapt out of the coach. "Right away, Bill," sang out the guard, and the Mail was off. How the people at Ware dealt with the poor wretch is not recorded.

As this, so far as Royston, was a part of the original great post-road to Scotland, many royal and noble processions, besides that attendant on the obsequies of Queen Eleanor, passed of necessity through Waltham Cross, and the coaching and posting traffic was of huge dimensions, up to the last days of the road.

Royal processions and progresses have a way, as you read them, of being insufferably dull; hedged about with formula and rule and precedent surrounding the gilded and be-crowned fetish for the time being, who, generally wrapped up warm in selfishness and greed, and dealing out lies and condescension, passes by and affords no interest or amusement to later generations, who merely yawn when they read of the dusty old properties, the tinsel and the gold lace. It is otherwise when the faults and foibles of the fetish are known and can be displayed to show that a monarch is, after all, human; and sometimes even a very poor specimen of humanity. James the First (of England and Sixth of Scotland, as the tender susceptibilities of Scots put it) came up this way to his Kingdom of England, on Elizabeth's death in 1603. He had set out from Edinburgh on the 5th of April, and only arrived in London on the 7th of May. Abundant and overbrimming loyalty had kept him long on the road. The noblemen and gentry of the shires lavished attentions on James and his following, and festive gatherings enlivened every manor-house on the way. Many a squire loaded his estates with encumbrances, in his anxiety to royally entertain the new sovereign and his numerous suite, and the story told of one of their halting-places very eloquently illustrates the sacrifices made. After staying some days with his host, the King remarked upon the disappearance of a particularly fine herd of cattle he had noticed in the park on his arrival, and asked what had become of them? As a matter of fact, they had been all slaughtered for the use of James's hungry Scots, and his host unwillingly told him so. "Then," said the King ungraciously, "it is time we were going"; and so, when the food was exhausted, they went.

So prodigal was the display made for him that James might almost have thought the country tired of Elizabeth's long rule, and glad to welcome a new monarch. He conferred titles with a lavish hand as he went, and knights-bachelors sprouted up in every town and village like mustard-and-cress after a dewy evening. He came across the Border mild enough, but by degrees rid himself of the humility proper to a King of Scots, and as King of England assumed an imperious air not even inferior to that of Henry the Eighth himself. Such an air sat ill upon James, at once constitutionally weak in body and simultaneously timid and braggart in disposition. The "British Solomon" his toadies called him, and indeed he was in many ways the Superior Person. Educated in all the 'ologies, and accounting himself in especial a master of theology and demonology, he was learned and superstitious at once. Witchcraft he firmly believed possible, and made it a capital offence, and was thus the prime cause of many an ill-favoured old woman or eccentric person being cruelly put to death as warlocks and wizards. The Duke of Sully, better informed than James's satellites, or more candid, pronounced him "the wisest fool in Europe."

At no place was the new monarch so lavishly entertained as at Theobalds, the princely residence of Lord Burleigh, whose estates bordered the road between Waltham Cross and Cheshunt. Who was the original owner of Theobalds, history does not tell us. Doubtless some Saxon notable, Theobald by name, thus immortalised in unilluminative fashion. In the late Elizabeth's time it had been acquired by the great Cecil, dead some six years before the coming of this northern light. Cecil's son, only less great than his father, now ruled, and received James right nobly in those magnificent halls his sire had added, where Elizabeth herself had been royally entertained. Four days he stayed, hunting and feasting, and left with so profound an admiration of the place that he never rested until he had exchanged the Royal Palace of Hatfield for it. Cecil made no bad bargain in the transfer, and in addition secured much favour and many added dignities, ending as Earl of Salisbury.

James's passion for the chase explains his eagerness to secure Theobalds, surrounded in those times by far-reaching and ancient woodlands. Epping Forest and the woods of Waltham lay for miles to the east, and the green alleys of Enfield Chase and Northaw (really "north holt," _i.e._ north wood) to the south and the north-west.

The figure of James is thus prominent on this part of the road. By no means an imposing figure, this King, as he reels in his saddle, or shambles rather than walks, his weak knees threatening a collapse, his thin yellow beard scarce disguising a chin striking the mean between obstinacy and weak irresolution; his wide-staring, watery, light-blue eyes rimmed with red eyelids; and lips running with the thin slobber of the drunkard, or rather of the inveterate tippler, not honestly drunken but grown maudlin, babbling and bubbling like a spring. This poor creature, who pretends to Right Divine, has the tense nerves of a hare; a hunted, hare-like glance too, when not primed and blusterous with Greek wine. He has a ludicrously acute sense of personal danger, and yet chases the deer a-horseback, seated on a padded saddle and plentifully equipped with drink. I see him very plainly, though much of the great domain of Theobalds be disparked, and landmarks grown dim and confused, hunting and halloing in the greenwood, and cursing and raving like a madman when the quarry escapes him--forgetful, in the excitement of the moment, of the Solomonic character he has to sustain--and falling out of his saddle and biting the grass in frenzy.

But James's domestic character bears more scrutiny than that of many of his predecessors. He would have pleased Mr. Squeers, for his "morrils" (in the common and restricted sense) were distinctly good--much better than those of the Hebrew Solomon.

It is quite evident that James delighted in his nickname and failed to discover any hidden vein of sarcasm in it, for in one of the extravagant masques he gave in honour of his father-in-law, Christian the Fourth of Denmark, at Theobalds, he took the part of that incarnation of Wisdom. Conceive the gorgeousness and the scandal of the occasion. Royal James as Solomon, and no less royal Christian, _his_ part not stated, seated on a throne awaiting the Queen of Sheba, coming to offer precious gifts: attendant upon her, Faith, Hope, and Charity. The Queen of Sheba, sad to say, had taken too much to drink, and, there being no one to advise her to "Mind the step!" she tripped over the throne and shot all the gifts, some very treacly and sticky, into the lap of his Danish majesty, who rose and essayed a dance with her, but fell down and had to be taken off to bed, like many a jolly toper before and since. Then the Three Virtues, hiccoughing and staggering, tried their parts, but nature forbade, and they retired very sick. The spectacle of the drunken endeavouring to carry off the drunk must have been vastly entertaining to His Majesty, himself too well seasoned to be quite helpless. It seems probable that, picking an unsteady way among the courtiers who strewed the floor, he saw himself to bed without the aid of chamberlains and grooms-in-waiting and their kind.

James the First and Sixth died at Theobalds in 1625, in the fifty-ninth year of his age, cut off in part by the agency of Greek wine. The halls where he revelled, and where between whiles he piously translated the Psalms, are gone, dismantled under the rule of the Commonwealth, a period especially fatal to Royal Palaces. The site of the Palace is commemorated by "Theobalds Square." The modern mansion of Theobalds is a mile distant.

XIII

AN inn bearing the odd name of the Roman Urn stands by the wayside on entering the hamlet of Cheshunt called Crossbrook Street. An urn in a niche of the wall over the front door bears the inscription "Via Una," and is witness to the finds of Roman remains close by. It gives point to the old belief that Cheshunt itself was a station on that Roman road, the Ermine Street.

Turners Hill, Cheshunt, and Cheshunt Wash are all one loosely-joined stretch of houses: recent houses, houses not so recent, dignified old mansions, and undignified second- and third-rate shops. It is an effect of shabbiness, of a halting two ways, between remaining as it was and developing into a modern suburb. The road itself shares this uncertainty, for it is neither a good country highway nor a decent town street, being bumpy macadam and gravel alternating, and full of holes. Cheshunt's modern fame is for roses, and the nurseries where they are cultivated spread far and wide. Its ancient fame was not so pleasing, for the Wash, when the Lea was in flood, made Cheshunt a place to be dreaded, as we learn from the diary of Ralph Thoresby, who travelled prayerfully this way between 1680 and 1720. Coming up from Yorkshire to London on one occasion, he found the washes upon the road near Ware swollen to such a height that travellers had to swim for their lives, one poor higgler being drowned. Thoresby prudently waited until some country-people came and conducted him over the meadows, to avoid the deepest part of Cheshunt Wash. Even so, he tells how "we rode to the saddle-skirts for a considerable way, but got safe to Waltham Cross."

Cheshunt possesses a local curiosity in the shape of "Cheshunt Great House," a lonely mansion of red brick, standing in a meadow within what was once a moated enclosure. It is a gloomy old place belonging to the time of Henry the Seventh, but altered and patched to such a degree that even the genuine parts of it look only doubtfully authentic. A large central hall with hammer-beam carved roof is the feature of the interior, hung with tapestry, suits of armour, and portraits of historic personages, in which are mixed together real antiquities and forgeries of such age that _they_ even are antique. Among them is a rude and battered rocking-horse, said to have been used by Charles the First when an infant.

Obviously Cheshunt Great House should be haunted, and is! Cardinal Wolsey's is the unquiet shade that disturbs the midnight hours beneath this roof, lamenting the more or less authentic murders he is said to have perpetrated here. There is not, of course, the slightest foundation for these wild stories, and the great Cardinal, so far as Cheshunt is concerned, leaves the court without a stain on his character.

But we must hasten onward to Ware, halted, however, in half a mile, at Turnford, a place forgotten by most map-makers. Writers of guide-books, too, pass it coldly by. And indeed, if you be of the hurrying sort, you may well pass and never know the individual existence of the hamlet; so close are Cheshunt on the one hand and Wormley on the other. As the poet remarks--

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air";

and Turnford is a modest place, consisting, all told, of an old residence or so, a farmstead, and the Bull Inn: the sign showing a bull's head with a remarkably coy expression. One no longer splashes through the ford that gave the place its name; a bridge has long since replaced it.

Why, it may be asked, linger over Turnford? Because here, in some lowly cot not now to be identified, somewhere about the year 1700, was born, of the usual poor but honest parents, one who might have been truly great in his profession had not the accursed shears of Fate cut him off before he had time to develop himself. I speak of "Dr." William Shelton, apothecary and highwayman. William was at an early age apprenticed to an apothecary at Enfield, and presently distinguished himself in an endeavour to elope with the apothecary's sister, an elderly charmer by no means averse from being run away with. The attempt miscarried, and our poor friend was soundly cudgelled for his pains. His second enterprise, the carrying off of a widow's daughter, was more fortunate. The runaways were married at the Fleet, and afterwards settled at Enfield, where, with the aid of his wife's fortune, Shelton eked out a living while trying to develop a practice. Tiring, after a while, of this, he obtained an appointment as surgeon in Antigua, but although generally liked in that island, he was obliged to return home on account of some wild escapades. He then settled in succession at Buntingford and Braughing, but doctors were at a discount at those places, and so, like many another wild spirit, he took to the road. A good horse and a reliable pair of pistols did more for him than his dispensary, and he prospered for a little while. There is no knowing to what eminence he might have risen--for he robbed with grace and courtesy--had not the authorities seized him one evil day. He made a dignified exit at Tyburn in 1732.

At Wormley, a roadside village of nondescript character, the New River is crossed, bringing us into Broxbourne, lying in a dip of the road, with that famous Cockney resort, Broxbourne Gardens, off to the right, by the river Lea. The Gardens themselves are as popular as ever, but the medicinal spring--the "rotten-egg water" is the eloquently descriptive name of it--has fallen into neglect.