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.
[Illustration: THE ROMAN URN, CHESHUNT.]
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."
[Illustration: CHESHUNT GREAT HOUSE.]
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.
[Illustration: CHARLES THE FIRST'S ROCKING-HORSE.]
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.
The traveller along the highroad has left Broxbourne behind before
he has quite discovered he has reached it, and comes into Hoddesdon
unawares. Broxbourne, where the "brocks," or badgers, were once
plentiful enough to give a name to the little stream running into the
Lea, is indeed a much more shy and retiring place than those who on
Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays visit the tea-gardens aforesaid have
any idea of. This is by way of a testimonial. Hoddesdon, too, which
to be sure is not a tiny village like Broxbourne, but quite a little
town, is altogether delightful. It has not been modernised, and its
inhabitants still obtain their water in pailsful from the public pump
in the middle of the broad street, which remains much as it was when
the Cambridge "Telegraph" came through, and when the Newmarket and
Bishop Stortford traffic branched off to the right in the midst. To
this day most of its old inns remain, clustering round the fork of the
roads: the Bull, its gabled porch and projecting sign quickening the
traveller's pace as he sees it afar; the Salisbury Arms, the Maiden's
Head, the Swan.
The Bull is a famous house, finding, as it does, a mention in Prior's
"Down Hall." It was in 1715 that Matthew Prior, one of the most notable
poets of his day, and sometime Ambassador at the Court of Versailles,
travelled this road to Down Hall, near Hatfield Broadoak. His "chariot"
halted at the Bull, as he tells us--
"Into an old inn did this equipage roll,
At a town they call Hodsdon, the sign of the Bull,
Near a nymph with an urn that divides the highway,
And into a puddle throws mother of tea."
Nymph and urn and puddle are gone long since, and where they were placed
there stands at this day the ugly modern building that Hoddesdon
folk call the "Clock House": really a fire-engine house with a
clock-tower; the tower surmounted by a weather-vane oddly conjoining
the characteristics of a fiddler, a sagittarius, and a dolphin. Inquiry
fails to discover what it symbolises. Before ever the nymph or the
present building occupied this site, there stood here the wayside
chapel of St. Catherine, whose ancient bell hangs in the clock-tower.
[Illustration: HODDESDON.]
Prior writes as though the Bull had long been familiar to him, but his
intimate touches of the life and character of an inn came, doubtless,
from his own youthful observation; for his uncle had been landlord of
the Rummer at Charing Cross, where as a boy he had been a waiter and
general help. Doubtless he had heard many an old frequenter of the
Rummer put questions similar to these he asks:--
"'Come here, my sweet landlady! how do you do?
Where's Cic'ly so cleanly, and Prudence, and Sue?
And where is the widow that lived here below?
And the other that sang, about eight years ago?
And where is your sister, so mild and so dear,
Whose voice to her maids like a trumpet was clear?'
'By my troth,' she replies, 'you grow younger, I think.
And pray, sir, what wine does the gentleman drink?
But now, let me die, sir, or live upon trust,
If I know to which question to answer you first,
For things since I saw you most strangely have varied--
The ostler is hanged, and the widow is married;
And Prue left a child for the parish to nurse;
And Cic'ly went off with a gentleman's purse;
And as to my sister, so mild and so dear,
She has lain in the churchyard full many a year.'"
What a sorry catalogue of changes and disasters!
A mile or more distant, along the Bishop Stortford road, is the
gatehouse of the famous Rye House, its clustered red-brick chimneys and
thick walls still left to remind the historically-minded of that Rye
House Plot of 1681 which was to have ended Charles the Second, and his
brother, the Duke of York, on their way past from Newmarket to London.
Although the Bishop Stortford road does not concern us, the house is
alluded to in these pages because it now contains that notorious piece
of furniture, the Great Bed of Ware.
Hoddesdon gives place to Amwell, steeply downhill. The village is
properly "Great Amwell," but no one who knows his Lamb would think
of calling it so, although there is a "Little Amwell" close at hand.
To the Lambs it was just "Amwell," and that is sufficient for us.
Moreover, like so many places named "Great," it is now really very
small. It is, however, exceedingly beautiful, with that peculiarly
park-like beauty characteristic of Hertfordshire. The old church,
also of the characteristically Hertfordshire type, stands, charmingly
embowered amid trees, on a bank overlooking the smoothly-gliding stream
of the New River, new-born from its source in the Chadwell Spring, and
hurrying along on its beneficent mission toward the smoke and fog
of London. Two islands divide the stream; one of them containing a
monument to Sir Hugh Myddelton, and a stone with lines from Scott, the
"Quaker poet of Amwell," commencing--
"Amwell, perpetual be thy stream,
Nor e'er thy spring be less."
An aspiration which, let us hope, will be fulfilled.
XIV
ALTHOUGH to hurry past spots so interesting and so beautiful looks
much like the act of a Vandal, our business is with the road, and
linger we must not; and so, downhill again, by the woods of Charley--or
"Charl-eye" as the country folk insist on calling them--we come to a
vantage-point overlooking Ware; an old town of many maltings, of the
famous Bed aforesaid, and of Johnny Gilpin's ride. Fortunate are those
who come thus in view of Ware upon some still golden afternoon of
summer, when the chimes from the old church-tower are spelling out the
notes of that sentimental old song, "Believe me, if all those endearing
young charms." Time and tune conspire to render Ware romantic.
The town takes its name from the weir or dam built across the Lea by
invading Danes in the year 896. Coming up the Lea in a great flotilla
of what historians call ships, more correctly perhaps to be named
sailing-barges, they halted here, and, designing a fort beside the
dam they built, imagined themselves secure. Around them in the Lea
valley between Ware and Hertford stretched the great lake their dam had
created, and all King Alfred's men could not by force dislodge them.
Can you not find it possible to imagine that great King--that King
truly great in counsels both of war and peace, that contriver and man
of his hands--on these Amwell heights and looking down upon that Danish
fortress and its ceinture of still water, with twice a hundred prows
lying there, proudly secure? Truly, despite the dark incertitude of
history on these doings, we may clearly see that monarch. He knits his
brows and looks upon the country spread out beneath him: just as you
may look down to-day upon the valley where the Lea and the railway run,
side by side. He--we have said it with meaning--is a contriver; has
brains of some quality beneath that brow; will not waste his men in
making glorious but wasteful attacks upon the foe: they shall work--so
he wills it--not merely fight; or, working, fight the better for King
and Country. Accordingly, his army is set to digging a great channel
down this selfsame valley; a channel whose purport those Danes, lying
there, do by no means comprehend; nor, I think, many even in this host
of the great Alfred himself; for the spy has ever watched upon the
doings of armies, and he who keeps his own counsel is always justified
of his reticence.
[Illustration: WARE.]
This great ditch, then, excavated over against the camp and harbour
of the sea-rovers, is therefore inexplicable, and doubtless the subject
of much jest among the enemy: jesting that dies away presently, when,
the excavation completed, it is found to touch the river above and
below the weir, and indeed to be designed to drain away the Lea from
its old channel and so steal away those cherished water-defences.
With what rejoicings Alfred turned the stream into this artificial
course we know not, nor anything of the Saxon advance when the old
channel ran dry and the Danish war-fleet presently lay stranded; the
black hulls canted in all manner of ridiculous and ineffective angles;
the sails with the cognisance of the raven on them flapping a farewell
to the element they were to know no more. Only this we know, that the
Danish host were forced to fly across the country to Cambridge and the
fens; those unfailing resorts of fugitives in the long ago.
Alfred probably burnt the deserted fleet; but there may yet lie,
somewhere in this pleasant valley between Hertford and Ware, deep down
in immemorial ooze and silt, the remains of those hapless craft.
Ware, seen from a distance, is a place of singular picturesqueness;
its Dutch-like mass of mellow red roofs endowed with a skyline whose
fantastic appearance is due to the clustered cowls of the fourscore
malthouses that give the old town a highly individual character. Here,
as elsewhere, the sunset hour touches the scene to an unearthly beauty:
only here those slanting cowls assume the last note of melodramatic
significance, to which, ordinarily, in the broad eye of day, they are
by no means entitled; being just so many ventilators to buildings in
whose dark recesses is carried on the merely commercial work of drying
the malt of which it is fondly assumed our beer is made.
The town, when you come to it, resolves itself into zigzag streets,
coal-dust, and bargees. It is a very back-door kind of entrance you
find, coming downhill, past a railway goods-yard and a smelly waterside
with wharves and litter, where solemn horses stolidly drag barges and
railway-trucks, and modern Izaak Waltons, sublime in faith, diligently
"fysshe with an angle," with ill results. What they seek, these hapless
sportsmen, is known only to themselves. Is it the festive tiddler,
dear to infantile fisherfolk, or do they whip the water for the lordly
trout, the ferocious pike, the grey mullet, or the carp? I know not;
but what they find is the Old Boot, the discarded hat, the derelict
gamp; in short, the miscellaneous floatable refuse of Hertford. To see
one of these brothers of the angle carefully playing what ultimately
discloses itself as a ragged umbrella affords one of the choicest five
minutes that life has to offer.
Crossing an iron bridge over this fishful stream, you are in Ware.
To the left stands the old Saracen's Head, now a little out of date
and dreamy, for it is the veritable house where the principal coaches
changed horses, and it has remained outwardly the same ever since. Here
it was that the Great Bed of Ware stood for many years, conferring
fame upon the town until 1869, when it was spirited away to the Rye
House, there to be made a show of.