Part 7

But this white-stuccoed frontage does not hide anything of antiquity, for this is not that original “Red Lion” to which Samuel Pepys resorted. The house he refers to in his diary is the “Old Red Lion”; down the hill, at the approach to Barnet. There he “lay” in 1667. “August 11th, Lord’s Day,” he writes: “Up by four o’clock . . . and got to the wells at Barnet by seven o’clock, and there found many people a-drinking.” After “drinking three glasses and the women nothing,” the party sojourned “to the Red Lion, where we ’light and went up into the great room, and there drank, and ate some of the best cheesecakes that ever I ate in my life.”

The keenness of the innkeepers who let post-horses during the last few years of the coaching age is scarcely credible. It was a fierce competition. The landlord of the “Red Lion” at Barnet thought nothing of forcibly taking out the post-horses from any private carriage passing his house, and putting in a pair of his own, to do the next stage to St. Albans. This, too, free of charge, in order to prevent the business going to the hated rival. Mine host of that hotel also had his little ways of drawing custom, and gave a glass of sherry and a sandwich, gratis, to the travellers changing there. But things did not end here. The landlord of the “Red Lion,” finding, perhaps, that the sherry and sandwich at the “Green Man” was more attractive than his method, engaged a gang of bruisers to pounce upon passing chaises, and even to haul them out of his rival’s stable-yard. Evidently a man of wrath, this licensed victualler! After several contests of this kind, the authorities interfered. The combatants were bound over to keep the peace, the punching of conks and bread-baskets, and the tapping of claret ceased, and people travelling down the road were actually allowed to decide for themselves which house they would patronise!

XIV

FROM Barnet the road runs across Hadley Green, a broad and picturesque expanse, cursed nowadays with the ubiquitous golfer. Here, where the road divides—the Great North Road to the right and the old Holyhead Road to the left—stands the obelisk known as Hadley Highstone, which serves both as a milestone and as a memorial of the great battle of Barnet, fought here on that cold and miserable Easter Day, April 14, 1471, when Edward the Fourth utterly defeated the Lancastrians under the Earl of Warwick, the “King Maker.” Warwick fell, and the Red Rose was finally crushed. Hadley Green was then a portion of a wide stretch of unenclosed country known as Gladsmoor Heath, extending up to Monken Hadley church, away on the right. The obelisk was erected by Sir Jeremy Sambrooke in 1740 on the spot where Warwick is said to have been slain. There is, however, another spot which aspires to the honour, at Rabley Park, near South Mimms. This also has its monumental pillar, but without inscription. Among the guileless youth of the neighbourhood it is said to mark “the place where a soldier was knocked down,” which is a commonplace way of stating the fact. But who knocked him down, or why, or when, is beyond them when questioned.

Past the lodge gates of Wrotham Park and by Ganwick Corner, where stands the “Duke of York” inn with its bust of that wonderful strategist. He is looking enquiringly south, from his alcove over the front door, as though wondering what has become of all the post-chaises and coaches of old. He is that great commander who managed, according to the well-known rhyme, to march his ten thousand men to the top of a hill and then down again—but he never otherwise distinguished himself—except by the magnitude of his debts.

[Picture: Hadley Green: Site of the Battle of Barnet]

Potter’s Bar marks where the counties of Middlesex and Hertford join. It is not a place of delirious delights, consisting of stuccoed villas fondly supposed to be Italian, and unfinished roads, and streets in a state of suspended animation. Until 1897, when it was pulled down, an old toll-house, the last in a long succession of toll-houses and toll-bars which had stood here from the earliest times and had given Potter’s Bar its name, occupied the fork of the roads at the north end of the village, commanding the high-road and the road on the right to Northaw. [Picture: Old Toll-House, Potter’s Bar] It was not a beautiful building, but it hinted of old times, and its disappearance is to be regretted. It was taken down because already, in the first twelve months of the new automobile era a car had dashed into it and done most of any demolition necessary. A War Memorial now stands on the site. Between this and Hatfield the road goes in undulating fashion, with the Great Northern Railway on the left hand nearly all the way, but chiefly downhill. Down Little Heath Hill and then half-way up the succeeding incline we come to a cutting which affords a newer and easier road than the hilly route to the left. [Picture: Ganwick Corner] Where this joins the old road again, nearly two miles onward, at Bell Bar, stands the pretty “Swan” inn. The “bar” has, of course, long since disappeared. Immediately ahead is Hatfield Park, stretching away for over three miles. Through the park, by where the present south lodge stands, the highway used to run in former times, and brought wayfarers between the wind and the nobility of the Cecils. Accordingly the road was diverted at the instance of the then Lord Salisbury, and the public no longer offend him, his heirs, executors, or assigns. And now, for ever and a day, those who use the road between Potter’s Bar and Hatfield village must go an extra half mile. This is indeed a free and happy country.

[Picture: Bell Bar]

Hatfield village touches the extremity of wretchedness, just as Hatfield House marks the apogee of late feudal splendour. And yet, amid its tumbledown hovels there are quaintly beautiful old-gabled cottages with bowed and broken-backed red-tiled roofs, delightful to the artistic eye, if from the builder’s and decorator’s point of view sadly out of repair. Motor repair-shops and garages, with their squalid advertisements, have helped to ruin Hatfield, and the railway does its share, running closely to the main road, and, with the station directly opposite the highly elaborate modern wrought-iron gates that lead to Hatfield House, detracting not a little from that state of dignified seclusion by which, as we have just seen, a former Marquis of Salisbury set such store. Let us hope his pale ghost does not revisit his old home. If it does, it must be sorely vexed.

But at any rate, that Marquis who was one of Queen Victoria’s Prime Ministers, sits there in bronze portrait-effigy. He gazes mournfully, directly at the railway booking-office, as one who has long been waiting, without hope, for a train. It is a fine statue, by Sir George Frampton, R.A., and bears the inscription:—

ROBERT ARTHUR TALBOT, Marquess of Salisbury, K.G., G.C.V.O., Three times Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland, 1830–1903. Erected to his memory by his Hertfordshire friends and neighbours in recognition of a great life devoted to the welfare of his country.

Hatfield House, that great historical museum and ancient repository of State secrets, is little seen from the village, nor have we, as wayfarers along the road, much to do with it. It is by the parish church, its characteristic Hertfordshire extinguisher spire so prominent above the tumbled roofs of Hatfield, that we may glimpse the older parts of the house. In that church lies its builder, the great Robert Cecil, his effigy, with the Lord Treasurer’s wand of office, recumbent on a slab uplifted by statues emblematic of Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, and Temperance, and a skeleton below, to show that even Lord Treasurers, possessed though they be of all the virtues, are mortal, like less exalted and less virtuous men.

The house that he built seems sadly out of repair. The history of it is romantic to a degree. Originally the palace of the Bishops of Ely, whose delicate constitutions could not stand the fen-land vapours which enwrapped the neighbourhood of their glorious Cathedral (but perhaps were not harmful to the less dignified clergy!), it remained in their possession until it was coveted by Henry the Eighth, who gave some land at Ely in exchange. So the bishops had, doubtless with an ill grace, to go back to that fertile breeding-ground of agues and rheumatism, and one can well imagine the resident inferior clergy, between their aches and pains, chuckling secretly about this piece of poetic justice.

And so in Royal possession the old palace continued until James the First in his turn exchanged it for the estate of Sir Robert Cecil at Theobalds. Previously it had been the home—the prison, rather of the Princess Elizabeth during her sister Mary’s reign. The oak is still shown in the park under which she was sitting when the news of Mary’s death and the end, consequently, of the surveillance to which she was subjected, was brought her, November 17, 1588. (But is tradition truthful here? Would she have been sitting under an oak in November?) “It is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes,” she exclaimed, quoting from the Psalms. Three days later she held her first council in the old palace, and then on the 23rd set out for London.

There are relics of the great queen at Hatfield House: a pair of her stockings and the garden hat she was wearing when the great news came to her. But the house is nearly all of a later date, for when Sir Robert Cecil obtained it in exchange for Theobalds, he pulled down the greater part of the old palace and built the present striking Jacobean building, magnificent and impressive, and perhaps not the less impressive for being also somewhat gloomy. This is no place to recount the glories of its picture-galleries and its noble state-rooms, or of the long line of the exalted and the great who have been entertained here. Moreover, the great are not uncommonly the dullest of dull dogs. It is rather with those of less estate, and with travellers, that in these pages we shall find our account. Pepys, for instance, whom we need not object to call the natural man (for does not Scripture tell us that the human heart in a natural state is “desperately wicked”? and Samuel was no Puritan), who was here lusting to steal somebody’s dog, as he acknowledged in that very outspoken _Diary_ of his:—“Would fain have stolen a pretty dog that followed me, but could not, which troubled me.”

There was a tragical happening at Hatfield, November 27, 1835, when the house was greatly injured by fire, and the old and eccentric Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury burnt to death, in her eighty-fifth year. The pious declared it to be a “judgment” for her playing cards on Sunday; but what a number of conflagrations we should have if that were true and Providence consistent in its vengeance!

XV

LEAVING Hatfield and its memories behind, we come, past the tree-shaded hamlet of Stanborough, to the long gradual rise of Digswell Hill, beautifully engineered over the uplands rising from the marshy banks of the little river Lea. Off to the left, at the foot of the hill, goes the old road at a wide tangent, and with a decidedly abrupt plunge down into the water-meadows, crossing the Lea by Lemsford Mills, and rejoining the newer road on an equally abrupt and difficult rise half-way up the hill, by the wall of Brockett Hall Park. It was here that Brickwall turnpike gate was situated in the old days. The brick wall of the park that gave the gate its name is still there and a very old, substantial, and beautifully lichened red-brick wall it is—but the gate and the toll-board and the toll-house have all vanished. Digswell Hill is beautiful, and so is Ayot Green, at the summit, with its giant trees and humble cottages stretching away on the left to the Ayot villages. Not so the “Red Lion” close by. More beautiful still—and steeper—is the descent into Welwyn, beneath over-arching trees and rugged banks, down from which secluded rustic summer-houses look upon the traffic of the highway.

Welwyn lies in a deep hollow on the little river—or, more correctly speaking, the streamlet—of the Mimram. Street and houses face you alarmingly as you descend the steep hillside, wondering (if you cycle) if the sharp corner can safely be rounded, or if you must needs dash through door or window of the “White Hart,” once one of the two coaching inns of the village.

The “White Hart” at Welwyn was kept in the “twenties” by “old Barker,” who horsed the Stamford “Regent” a stage on the road, and was, in the language of the coachmen, a “three-cornered old beggar.” That is to say, he kept a tight hand over the doings of coachmen and guards, did not approve of “shouldering,” and objected to the coachmen giving lessons to gentlemen coachmen, or allowing amateurs to “take the ribbons.” From the passengers’ point of view this was entirely admirable of “old Barker,” for many an inoffensive traveller’s life had been jeopardised by the driving of unqualified persons. Colonel Birch Reynardson tells a story of him and of Tom Hennesy, the best known of the “Regent” coachmen—one who could whistle louder, hit a horse harder, and tell a bigger lie than any of his contemporaries. Hennesy had resigned the reins to him one day between London and Hatfield, but when they neared Welwyn, the accomplished Tom thought he had better resume them. “It would never do for old Barker to see you driving,” said he. The words were scarcely out of his mouth before the “three-cornered old beggar” himself appeared, walking up the hill, with the double object of taking a constitutional and of seeing if any “shouldering” was going on.

“Don’t look as if you seed him,” said Tom. “We’ll make the best of it we can.”

[Picture: Welwyn]

Down they went to the inn door, where the fresh team was standing. By the time the horses had been got out of the coach, old Barker, who had turned back, looking anything but pleasant, was upon them.

“Good morning, Mr. Barker, sir,” said Tom, with all the impudence he could command. “Did you ever see a young gentleman take a coach steadier down a hill? ’Pon my word, sir, he could not have done it better. He’s a pupil of mine, sir, and I’m blessed if he did not do it capital; don’t you think he did, sir, for you seed him?” “Hum,” said old Barker; “you know it’s all against the laws. Supposing anything happened, what then?” “Well, sir, I did not expect anything _would_ happen, with such horses as these of yours; there’s no better four horses, sir, betwixt London and Stamford; and as for those wheelers, why, they’ll hold anything.” This, of course, was pouring balm into old Barker’s wounds, which seemed to heal pretty quickly, and he put on a pleasanter face, and said, “Well, Hennesy, you know I don’t like ‘gentlemen coachmen,’ and, above all things, very _young_ ones. Don’t you do it again.”

Was Hennesy grateful? Not at all; for, when they had driven away, he said, “Well, he was wonderful civil for _him_,” and added that if he could only catch him lying drunk in the road, he would run over his neck and kill him, “blessed if he wouldn’t!”

This bold and independent fellow, like many another coachman, came down in the world when railways drove the coaches off the main roads, and was reduced to driving a pair-horse coach between Cambridge and Huntingdon.

More picturesque than the “White Hart” is the “Wellington,” which composes so finely with the red-brick tower of the church, at the further end of the village street, where the road abruptly forks. It is a street of all kinds and sizes of houses, mostly old and pleasingly grouped.

But Welwyn has other claims upon the tourist. It was the home for many years of Young, author of the once-popular _Night Thoughts_. Who reads that sombre work now? He was rector here from 1730 until 1765, when he died, but lives as a warning to those who inevitably identify an author with his books. His work, _The Complaint_, _or_, _Night Thoughts on Life_, _Death_, _and Immortality_, is dour reading, but he was so little of a sombre man that we find him not infrequently in the company of, and a fellow spirit among, the convivial men of his time. This was only a product of his “sensibility,” that curious quality peculiar to the eighteenth century, and did not necessarily prove him a weeping philosopher. He had, indeed, a mental agility which could with ease fly from the most depressing disquisitions on the silent tomb, to the proper compounding of a stiff jorum of punch. Young, on his appointment to Welwyn, married Lady Elizabeth (“Betty”) Lee, daughter of the Earl of Lichfield. He found the rectory too small (or perhaps not good enough for her ladyship), and so purchased a more imposing house called the “Guessons”—anciently the “Guest House” of some abbey. With it he bought land, and planted the lime-tree avenue which still remains a memorial of him. There is a votive urn here, erected by Mr. Johnes-Knight, a succeeding rector; but probably the most enduring memorial of Young is the very first line of the _Night Thoughts_, the fine expression:—

“Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.”

No one reads Young nowadays, and so every one who sees this, one of the most hackneyed of quotations, ascribes it to Shakespeare. Alas, poor Young!

Young erected a sundial in his garden here, with the motto, “_Eheu_, _fugaces_!” “Alas, how fleeting!” It was not long before some midnight robbers came, and, carrying it off, justified the inscription. Nowadays, besides the avenue and the votive urn, all that remains to tell of him is the tablet to his memory on the south wall of the aisle.

Knebworth Park, with mansion and an ancient parish church full of monuments to Strodes, Robinsons and Lyttons, is just off to the left. There is no Lytton blood in the Earls “of” Lytton, who are not of Litton, near Tideswell, in Derbyshire, whence came the now extinct Lytton family. The whole assumption is romantic rather than warranted by facts.

Knebworth is a place of much combined beauty and historic interest, together with a great deal of vulgar and uninteresting sham. It has been described as “a sham-old house, with a sham lake, sham heraldic monsters, and sham-ancient portraits.” Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton—“Bulwig,” as someone, to his intense annoyance, called him—was intensely fond of Gothic architecture and ornamentation; fond of it in an undiscriminating, Early Victorian, uninstructed way, and he stuck his house of Knebworth all over with gimcrackery that he fondly thought to be mediæval. Crockets, tourelles, pinnacles and grotesque gargoyles were added in wholesale fashion, and in a very carpenterish way. One might almost say they were _wafered_ on. They were not carved out of stone, but moulded cheaply in plaster, and in his son’s time were always falling. As they fell, they were relegated to the nearest dustheap, and their places remained vacant. A visitor to the second Lord Lytton tells, apropos of these things, how he was walking on the terrace with his host, when the gardener came up and said, “If you please, my lord, another of them bloody monkeys has fallen down in the night.” It was, of course, one more of “Bulwig’s” quasi-Gothic abominations come to its doom.

The Earls Lytton are neither baronial Bulwers nor ancient lordly Lyttons. Their real name is the very much more plebian one of Wiggett. So far back as 1756, William Wiggett assumed the name of Bulwer on his marriage with a Sarah of that ilk. His youngest son, the novelist, the child of another wife, who had been an Elizabeth Warburton, added the name of Lytton to his own on succeeding to his mother’s property of Knebworth.

But that does not at once bring us to the Lytton connection. For that, we must quote the late Augustus J. C. Hare, who was an adept at relationships to the remotest degree. He had hundreds of cousins of his own, and knew who was everybody else’s twentieth or thirtieth cousin. He tells us that this Elizabeth Warburton’s very remote connection with the real Lyttons lay in the fact that “her grandfather, John Robinson, was cousin (maternally) to Lytton Strode, who was great-nephew of a Sir William Lytton, who died childless in 1704.” It will be allowed that the connection _is_ remote; practically indeed, non-existent.

Nor is the name of Bulwer as distinguished as the novelist wished it to appear. He sought to range it with Bölver, one of the war-titles of the Norse god, Odin; but it really derived from some plebian cattle-driver, or Bullward.

The road rises steeply out of Welwyn, in the direction of Stevenage. Here some of the coaches had a narrow escape from destruction at the hands of unknown miscreants, ancestors of the criminal lunatics who place obstacles upon the railways in our times. Our murderous larrikins had their counterparts in the old days, in those who placed gates across the roads, so that the coaches should run into them in the darkness. An incident of this kind happened here on the night of June 5, 1805, when two gates were found set up in the main road, and another at Welwyn Green. Fortunately, no accident resulted, and the ruffians, who doubtless were waiting the result of their work, must have gone home disappointed.

From the beautiful expanse of gorsy and wooded hillside common above the village may be glimpsed the great red-brick viaduct of Welwyn, carrying the main line of the Great Northern Railway across the wide and deep valley of the Mimram, an insignificant stream for such a channel. Woolmer Green and Broadwater, between this point and Stevenage, are modern and uninteresting hamlets, created out of nothingness by the speculative builder and the handy situation of Knebworth station, beside the road, which now begins to give another example of its flatness.

Leisurely wayfarers will notice the old half-timbered cottage at the entrance to the churchyard. On its side wall are hung two stout long poles with formidable hooks attached. These are old fire-appliances, used in the days of thatched roofs, for pulling off the whole of the blazing thatch. Travellers, leisured or otherwise, will scarce be able to miss seeing the great and offensive boards hereabouts, advertising a new suburban or “Garden Suburb” settlement in course of building away to the right, since 1920; blessed and boomed by Lord Northcliffe, and apparently to be given the name of “Daily Mail.” Horrible!

The entrance to Stevenage is signalised by a group of new and commonplace cottages elbowing the famous Six Hills, a series of sepulchral barrows of prehistoric date, beside the highway. These six grassy mounds might not unreasonably be passed unthinkingly by the uninstructed, or taken for grass-grown heaps of refuse. Centuries of wear and weather have had their effect, and they do not look very monumental now; but they were once remarkable enough to give the place its name, Stevenage deriving from the Saxon “_stigenhaght_,” or “hills by the highway.”