Dingy, twittering little London sparrow that he was, diligent digger-up
of Elizabethan archaisms with which to tune his chirpings, he seems
often to have inspired the warmest of personal admiration. As the
"gentle Elia" one finds him always referred to, and a halo of romance
has been thrown about him and his doings to which neither he nor
they can in reality lay much claim. Romance flies abashed before the
picture of Lamb and his sister diluting down the poet of all time in
the _Tales from Shakespeare_: Charles sipping gin between whiles, and
Mary vigorously snuffing. Nor was his wit of the kindly sort readily
associated with the epithet "gentle." It flowed the more readily after
copious libations of gin-and-water, and resolved itself at such times
into the offensive, if humorous, personalities that were the stock
in trade of early nineteenth-century witlings. His famous witticism
at a card-party on one who had hands not of the cleanest ("If dirt
were trumps, what a hand you'd have") must have been bred of the
juniper berry. Stuttering and blue-lipped the next morning, he was
an object of pity or derision, just according to the charity of those
who beheld him. Carlyle, who knew Lamb in his latter days, draws him
as he was, in one of those unmerciful pen-portraits he could create
so well:--"Charles Lamb and his sister came daily once or oftener; a
very sorry pair of phenomena. Insuperable proclivity to gin in poor
old Lamb. His talk contemptibly small, indicating wondrous ignorance
and shallowness, even when it was serious and good-mannered, which it
seldom was, usually ill-mannered (to a degree), screwed into frosty
artificialities, ghastly make-believe of wit, in fact more like
'diluted insanity' (as I defined it) than anything of real jocosity,
humour, or geniality. A most slender fibre of actual worth in that poor
Charles, abundantly recognisable to me as to others, in his better
times and moods; but he was Cockney to the marrow; and Cockneydom,
shouting 'glorious, marvellous, unparalleled in nature!' all his days
had quite bewildered his poor head, and churned nearly all the sense
out of the poor man. He was the leanest of mankind, tiny black breeches
buttoned to the knee-cap, and no further, surmounting spindle-legs
also in black, face and head fineish, black, bony, lean, and of a
Jew type rather; in the eyes a kind of smoky brightness or confused
sharpness; spoke with a stutter; in walking tottered and shuffled;
emblem of imbecility bodily and spiritual (something of real insanity I
have understood), and yet something too of human, ingenuous, pathetic,
sportfully much enduring. Poor Lamb! he was infinitely astonished at
my wife and her quiet encounter of his too ghastly London wit by a
cheerful native ditto. Adieu, poor Lamb!"
Edmonton Church has lain too near London in all these years to have
escaped many interferences, and the body of it was until recently
piteous with the doings of 1772, when red brick walls and windows of
the factory type replaced its ancient architecture. These have now in
their turn been swept away, and good modern Gothic put in their stead,
already densely covered with ivy. The ancient tower still rises grandly
from the west end, looking down upon a great crowded churchyard; a very
forest of tombstones. Near by is the grave of Charles and Mary Lamb,
with a long set of verses inscribed upon their headstone.
There was once in this churchyard of Edmonton a curious epitaph on one
William Newberry, ostler to the Rose and Crown Inn, who died in 1695
from the effects of unsuitable medicine given him by a fellow-servant
acting as an amateur doctor. The stone was removed by some clerical
prude--
"Hic jacet Newberry, Will
Vitam finivet cum Cochiæ Pill
Quis administravit? Bellamy, Sue
Quantum quantitat nescio, scisne tu?
Ne sutor ultra crepidam."
The feelings of Sue Bellamy will not be envied, but Sue, equally with
William, has long reached beyond all such considerations, and the Rose
and Crown of that day is no more. There is still, however, a Rose
and Crown, and a very fine building it is, with eleven windows in
line and wearing a noble and dignified air. It is genuine Queen Anne
architecture; the older house being rebuilt only ten years after the
ostler was cut off untimely, as may be seen by the tablet on its front,
dated not only 1705, but descending to the small particular of actual
month and day of completion.
X
THE tramway line, progressing through Edmonton in single track, goes on
in hesitating fashion some little distance beyond Edmonton Green, and
terminates in a last feeble, expiring effort on the open road, midway
between Edmonton and Ponder's End; like the railhead of some African
desert line halting on the edge of a perilous country. Where it ends
there stands, solitary, a refreshment house, so like the last outpost
of civilisation that the wayfarer whimsically wonders whether he had
not better provision himself liberally before adventuring into the
flats that lie so stark and forbidding before him.
It is indeed an uninviting waste. On it the gipsy caravans halt; here
the sanguine speculative builder projects a street of cheap houses and
generally leaves derelict "carcases" of buildings behind him; here
the brick-maker and the market-gardener contend with one another, and
the shooters of rubbish bring their convoys of dust, dirt, and old
tins from afar. On the skyline ahead are factory chimneys, and to the
east--the only gracious note in the whole scene--the wooded hills of
Essex, across the malodorous Lea.
This desolate tract is bounded by the settlement of Ponder's End, an
old roadside hamlet. "Ponder's End," says Lamb, "emblematic name, how
beautiful!" Sarcasm that, doubtless, for of what it is emblematic, and
where lies the beauty of either place or name, who shall discover? The
name has a heavily ruminative or contemplative sound, a little out of
key with its modern note. For even Ponder's End has been rudely stirred
up by the pitchfork of progress and bidden go forward, and new terraces
of houses and shops--no, not _shops_, nothing so vulgar; "business
premises" if you please--have sprung up, and the oldest inhabitant is
distraught with the changes that have befallen. Where he plodded in
the mud there are pavements; the ditch into whose unsavoury depths he
has fallen many a time when returning late from the old Two Brewers
is filled up, and the Two Brewers itself has changed from a roadside
tavern to something resplendent in plate-glass and brilliant fittings.
Our typical ancient and his friends, the market-gardening folk and
the loutish waggoners, are afraid to enter. Nay, even the name of the
village or hamlet, or urban district, or whatever the exact slang
term of the Local Government Board for its modern status may be, is
not unlikely to see a change, for to the newer inhabitants it sounds
derogatory to be a Ponder's Ender.
To this succeeds another strip of sparsely-settled land, and you think
that here, at last, the country is gained. Vain thought! Enfield
Highway, a populous mile-length, dispels all such ideas, and even
Enfield Wash, where the travellers of old were content to be drenched
in the frequent floods, so long as they actually escaped with their
lives, is suburban and commonplace. The stretch of road between the
Wash and Waltham Cross still goes by the shivery name of Freezywater.
Enfield Highway, like Ponder's End, was until quite recently stodged
in sloughs, and resolutely old-world; almost as old world indeed
as when, in 1755, Mr. Spencer, the Lord Spencer of a few years
later, came up from the shires in great state with his bride. Their
procession consisted of three chariots, each drawn by six horses and
escorted by two hundred horsemen. At sight of this cavalcade the whole
neighbourhood was up in arms. The timid fled, the Jacobites rejoiced
and ran off to ring the church bells in a merry peal, while loyal folks
and brave armed themselves with pitchforks, pokers, and spades; for all
thought the Pretender had come again and was marching on London.
At Waltham Cross, formerly entered through a toll-gate, Middlesex
is left behind and Hertfordshire gained. The name of Waltham Cross
probably does not at this period inspire anyone with dread, but that
was the feeling with which travellers approached it at any time between
1698 and 1780; for this was in all those years a neighbourhood where
highwaymen robbed and slew with impunity. Here was the favourite lurk
of those desperate disbanded soldiers who on the Peace of Ryswick,
finding pay and occupation gone, banded together, and, building huts
in the coverts of Epping Forest, came forth even in broad daylight,
and, to the number of thirty, armed with swords and pistols, held
up the traffic on this and the surrounding roads. Even when that
formidable gang was disposed of by calling out the Dragoon Guards
in a regular campaign against them, there were others, for in 1722
a London morning paper stated that the turnpike-men from Shoreditch
to Cheshunt had been furnished with speaking-trumpets, "as well to
give notice to Passengers as to each other in case any Highwaymen or
footpads are out," and the satisfactory report is added, "we don't find
that any robbery has been committed in that quarter since they have
been furnished with them, which has been these two months." Was it not
hereabouts, too, that Turpin first met Tom King, and, taking him for an
ordinary citizen, proposed to rob him? Ay, and in that self-same Epping
Forest, whose woodlands may even yet be seen, away to the right-hand,
Turpin had his cave. Even so late as 1775 the Norwich stage was
attacked one December morning by seven highwaymen, three of whom the
guard shot dead. He would perhaps have finished the whole of them had
his ammunition not failed and he in turn been shot, when the coach was
robbed at leisure by the surviving desperadoes.
XI
IF the traveller does not know what to expect on approaching Waltham
Cross, then the cross, standing in the centre of the road, must needs
be a pleasant surprise to him, even though he presently discovers
that they have done a great deal in recent times to spoil it; "they"
meaning the usual pastors and masters, the furbishers and titivators
of things ancient and worshipful, applying to such things their own
little nostrums and programmes. But, woefully re-restored though it
be, its crockets and pinnacles and panellings patched with a stone
whose colour does not match with that of the old work, one can still
find it possible to look upon it with reverence, for among the ancient
wayside memorials of our storied land the beautiful Eleanor Crosses
stand foremost, both for their artistic and their historic interest.
More than any others, they hold the sentiment and the imagination of
the wayfarer, and their architecture is more complex. The story that
belongs to them is one long since taken to the warm hearts of the
people, and cherished as among the most touching in all the history of
the realm--a realm rich in stories of a peculiarly heart-compelling
kind.
It is that of Eleanor of Castile, Queen of Edward the First, who
accompanied him to Palestine in 1270, on his Crusade against the
Infidel. History tells how, on the evening of June 17, 1272, the King
was seated alone and unarmed in a tent of the camp before Acre. It was
his birthday, but birthdays find scant celebration in the tented field,
and Edward on that day was engaged in the sterner business of receiving
proposals of surrender from the besieged. He had given audience to a
messenger from the Emir of Jaffa, who, having delivered the letter he
had brought, stood waiting. Bending low, in answering a question the
King had put to him, he suddenly put his hand to his belt, as though to
produce other letters; but, instead, drew a poisoned dagger and struck
at the King with it. Edward endeavoured to shield himself, but received
a deep wound in the arm; then, as the man endeavoured to strike again,
giving him a kick that felled him to the ground, he wrenched away the
would-be assassin's dagger and plunged it into his body. When the
King's attendants came rushing in, the man was dead. Fortunate for
him it was that he died so simply, for the imaginations of those who
dispensed the rough justice of the time were sufficiently fertile to
have devised many novel and exquisitely painful variations of torture
for such an one.
The King's wound was serious, and although all the drugs and balsams
in the limited pharmacopoeia of those times were administered, it grew
worse. Then it was, according to the pretty story universally received,
that the Queen, finding the efforts of physicians vain, sucked the
poison from the wounded arm of her lord to such good purpose that he
recovered, and sat his charger again within fifteen days.
Medical criticism on this recorded action of the poison could scarce
fail of being destructive, and indeed it is not to be expected that
the story of Eleanor of Castile would be left unassailed in these
days, when history is treated scientifically, and when all the old and
gracious stories are being explained away or resolved into something
repellent and utterly commonplace. Modern historians have told us that
William Tell is a myth, and that, consequently, the famous incident
of the apple could never have occurred. Robin Hood, they say, was
equally imaginary, or if any real person existed on whom that figure of
endearing romance was built up, he had more the attributes of a footpad
than those of the chivalrous outlaw those legends have made him. They
would even take from us Dick Whittington and his cat. In fact, all
these romantic people are classed with King Arthur, Jack the Giant
Killer, and Little Red Riding Hood. It is not a little cruel thus to
demolish these glamorous figures, but historians since Macaulay have
been merciless. It is, therefore, not surprising to read that Eleanor,
instead of being heroic was a very woman, and was led "weeping and
wailing" from the scene when the surgeons declared that the King's hurt
was incurable, unless the whole of the poisoned flesh were cut away.
The cure, says an old chronicler, was effected by the surgeons, and the
romantic story has in recent times been declared "utterly unworthy of
credit."
Alas! too, for the gentle and tender character that has ever been
ascribed to Eleanor of Castile; for we read that "though pious and
virtuous, she was rather grasping," causing scandal by taking part
with Jewish usurers in cozening Christians out of their estates.
Ancient records, done on rolls of sheepskin in mediæval dog-Latin,
and preserved in the Record Office for all men to see--and read if
they can--tell how hard a landlord she was, and how Archbishop Peckham
interfered on behalf of her unfortunate tenants, telling her that
reparation for wrongs done must precede absolution.
[Illustration: WALTHAM CROSS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.]
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.
[Illustration: WALTHAM CROSS.]
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.
[Illustration: THE "HULL MAIL" AT WALTHAM CROSS.
[_From a Print after J. Pollard._]]
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.