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.”
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.”
To coachmen, who were adepts in the art of what the slangy call “spoofing,” and were always ready—in earlier slang phrase—to “take a rise out of” strangers, the Six Hills afforded an excellent opportunity of practising a diluted form of wit, and often brought them a glass of brandy or rum-and-milk at the next pull-up, in payment of the bets they would make with the most innocent-looking passenger, that he could not tell which two of the hills were furthest apart. They are, as nearly as possible, equi-distant; but strangers would select one couple or another, according to their fancy; whereupon the coachman would triumphantly point out that the first and the last were, as a matter of fact, the most widely divided. This perhaps does not exhibit coaching wit in a strikingly robust light; but a very weak kind of jocularity served to pass the weary hours of travel in our grandfathers’ days.
