gentry. When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly for sake of its now
forgotten medicinal waters, he found the highway “torne, plowed, and
digged up,” in consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long
struggling teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had
been a fairly good roadway. Progress was difficult, even in the best
circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost impossible, the
highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely at their leisure.
The road remained more or less in this condition up to the early years of
the nineteenth century. This was partly owing to the mistaken local
patriotism which had prevented the remodelling of it in 1754, when the
rustics of Whetstone routed the surveyor and his labourers at the point
of the pitchfork. Better counsels prevailed in the first decade of the
new era, and the eight miles of highway under the control of the
Whetstone and Highgate Turnpike Trust rose in 1810 to be considered as
good as any in the kingdom. It then became possible, for the first time
in its history, for the Barnet stage to leave for London and to reach its
destination without the necessity of stopping on the way for tea. The
Trustees were naturally pleased with their road, and so in 1823 received
with some surprise, under the new Act for the improvement of the line of
road from London to Holyhead, a demand for the reconstruction of the
highway between Prickler’s Hill and the southern end of Barnet town.
They pointed out how greatly superior their portion of the road was to
others, but to no purpose. The Government admitted the excellence of the
surface, but boggled at the severity of the gradient, and practically
insisted on its being reduced.
The Trustees were dismayed. Telford and Macadam supplied rival plans,
and both foreshadowed heavy expense. Telford’s idea was to slice off the
top of Barnet Hill, and to run the road through a more or less deep
cutting through the street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the
houses and the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a
cliff. Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by Macadam prevailed.
It was for the partial filling up of the dip in the road between
Prickler’s Hill and the excessively steep entrance into the town, an
entrance even now by no means easily graded. What it must originally
have been may readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked
road to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where the
old roadside houses still stand, among them the “Old Red Lion,” on the
site of the inn where Pepys stayed. The end one of a row of ten or
twelve cottages, at the corner of May’s Lane, was once a toll-house.
The work of making the new road, begun in 1823, was not completed until
four years later, at a cost of £17,000. A large portion of this heavy
sum went in compensation to the Sons of the Clergy Corporation, for land
taken. The cost of these improvements came eventually, of course, out of
the pockets of travellers along the road. On this Trust they were
mulcted severely, for the Trustees, finding the existing tolls to be
utterly inadequate to their expenses, obtained powers in 1830 to increase
them. They considered themselves hardly treated in being obliged to
undertake such costly works on the eve of the London and Birmingham
Railway being constructed—a railway which would have the effect of
withdrawing traffic from the road, and reducing receipts at the
toll-gates to a minimum; but the end, although not far off, was not yet,
and on the 3rd of July they succeeded in letting the tolls by auction for
one year at the handsome sum of £7,530. Accordingly they commenced to
pay off their debts, and succeeded in liquidating the whole of them by
the beginning of 1842, notwithstanding two successive reductions of tolls
in 1835 and 1841.
It was in 1833 that the London and Birmingham Railway obtained its Act,
and it was opened throughout on September 7, 1838, the first of the
railways which were to contribute to the ruin of Barnet’s great coaching
and posting trade. The annual takings at Whetstone Gate immediately fell
to £1,300, but it lingered on until the Trust expired, November 1, 1863.
It is interesting, as showing the growth of road traffic, to compare the
figures still available, giving the annual sums at which the tolls at
this gate were let in the old days. Thus, in Queen Elizabeth’s time,
they were farmed at £40 per annum, and in 1794 they fetched only £150.
But few vehicles passed then. Forty years later, no fewer than ninety
coaches swept through Whetstone Gate every twenty-four hours!
XIII
BARNET, or Chipping Barnet, or High Barnet, as it is variously called,
stands on the summit of a steep and high ridge running east and west. On
the east the height of Muswell Hill, now suburban and crowned
conspicuously with that unfortunate place of entertainment, the Alexandra
Palace, is prominent; and on the west are Totteridge and the range of
hills stretching away to Elstree. Other Barnets, old and new, are
plentiful: East and Friern Barnet, and the modern suburb of New Barnet.
Chipping Barnet derives the first part of its name from its ancient
chepe, or weekly market, granted by Henry the Second, and its more common
prefix of “High,” from its situation on the ridge just mentioned.
Barnet was, to many coaching proprietors, the first stage out of London,
and the town prospered exceedingly on the coaching and posting traffic of
those two great thoroughfares—the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road.
When the Stamford “Regent,” the York “Highflyer,” and the early morning
coaches for Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool arrived, the
passengers, who had not found time for breakfast before starting, were
generally very sharp-set indeed, and the viands already prepared and
waiting in the cosy rooms of the old hostelries, disappeared before their
onslaught “in less than no time.” The battle of Barnet was fought over
again every morning, but they were not men-at-arms who contended
together, nor was the subject of their contention the Crown of England.
They were just famished travellers who struggled to get something to eat
and drink before the guard made his appearance at the door, with the
fateful cry, “Time’s up, gentlemen; take your seats please.” When the
horn sounded in the yard, desperate men would rush forth with hands full
of food, and finish their repasts as best they might on the coach.
[Picture: High Street, Barnet]
The two principal inns were the “Red Lion” and the “Green Man.” It was,
and is now in some degree, a town of inns, but these were the
headquarters of the two great political parties. Neither was a
“coaching” inn, for they despised trafficking with ordinary travellers,
and devoted themselves wholly to the posting business. The “Red Lion”
was originally the “Antelope.” Standing in the most favourable position
for intercepting the stream of post-chaises from London, it generally
secured the pick of business going that way, unless indeed the political
bias of gentlemen going down into the country forbade them to hire
post-horses at a Tory house. In that case, they went to the “Green Man,”
further on, which was Whig. And perhaps, in sacrificing to politics,
they got inferior horses! The “Green Man” placed in midst of the town,
was in receipt of the up traffic, and was the largest establishment,
keeping twenty-six pairs of horses and eleven postboys, against the
eighteen pairs and eight postboys of the “Red Lion”; and it is recorded
that between May 9th and 11th, when, on May 10th, 1808, two celebrated
prizefighters, Gully and Gregson, fought at Beechwood Park, Sir John
Sebright’s place down the road, near Flamstead, no fewer than one hundred
and eighty-seven pairs were changed. Those three days formed a record
time for the “Green Man,” according to these figures:—
Posting £141 17 10½
Bills in the house 54 19 0
Bills in the yard 14 10 0
£211 6 10½
The “boys” of the “Green Man” wore blue jackets; those of the “Red Lion,”
yellow jackets and black hats.
An inn called the “Green Man” stands on the site of that busy house, but
it is of more recent date than the old Whig headquarters. It may be seen
at the fork of roads where the “new” road to St. Albans, driven through
the yard of the old “Green Man” in 1826, branches off.
Thus the “Red Lion” remains, long after the eclipse of its rival. Its
frontage is impressive by size rather than beauty. With a range of
fifteen windows in line, and its fiercely-whiskered red lion balancing
himself at the end of a prodigiously long wrought-iron sign, it is
eloquent of the old days. The lion turns his head north, gazing away
from the direction in which his chief customers came.
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.