And here we come among royal memories. Between Forty Hall and Middleton House stood Elsynge Hall, or Enfield House, in the New Park, where Elizabeth held her court, after spending some of her younger days at the Old Palace. The Maiden Bridge on the stream crossed by the road continuing Baker Street is taken for the scene of Walter Raleigh’s courtier-like offer of his cloak; no Enfield man, at least, will allow the legend to be located elsewhere. A mile further on, across the county border, we should skirt Theobald’s Park—pronounced Tibbald’s—once the princely seat of Elizabeth’s Lord Burleigh, to which James I. took such a fancy that he gave the Salisbury family Hatfield in exchange for it. The park was then ten miles in circuit, the gardens passed for the finest in England, and the house was a stately palace that stood till George III.‘s reign. It had many changes of owner, one, by the irony of fate, being last male descendant of Oliver Cromwell, who carried out a more sweeping exchange with his sovereign. The hunting of Enfield Chase made it a favourite abode with James, and here he died (1625) after nearly being drowned, three years earlier, by a fall from his horse that sent him head foremost into the frozen water of the New River, his boots only sticking up above the ice. Here also the timid King was put in danger from fire as well as water, for White Webbs House, a vanished neighbour of Forty Hall, appears to have been one of the hatching-places of the Gunpowder Plot.
Just within the Middlesex boundary, a road turning left from the well-timbered hamlet of Bull’s Cross leads by the modern mansion of White Webbs Wood in its charming park. In a short mile is reached the “King and Tinker,” an old inn offering a variety among the zoological signs of the neighbourhood—“Spotted Cow,” “Goat,” “Fallow Buck,” and such-like. This sign gives a local habitation and King James’ name to that oft-told tale of a sovereign too familiarly treated by an unsuspecting subject, miller, tanner, tinker, or what not, the first case on record being Alfred’s awkward dealings with a baking house-wife. Opposite the inn stands a little chapel of the Countess of Huntington’s Connection, which seems a natural growth here, since at Cheshunt, not far off, was the college set up by that denomination, removed to Cambridge only the other day. Between the chapel and the inn opens a most charming footway across White Webbs Park, coming out in the Clay Hill suburb of Enfield, a little to the east of the “Rose and Crown,” that boasts itself the scene of one of Dick Turpin’s adventures—his home, indeed, as it was kept by his grandfather.
For straying into Hertfordshire beside Theobald’s Park, one can find excuse in a famous Middlesex monument. Let Viator keep straight on from Bull’s Cross, till a leafy turn round the north side of the park leads him towards the rose-gardens of Waltham Cross. Here, if he have as many grey hairs as his present guide, he may suddenly start and rub his spectacles, when he comes upon the once-familiar arch of Temple Bar, set in the park enclosure, standing outpost sentry over Greater London, grey and massive as ever, and looking as if in the country air it would outlive that flighty griffin that has taken its place at the City boundary. On the other side of Theobald’s might be found a hint of its old neighbour, Charing Cross, for beside the highroad, at the turning off to Waltham Abbey, just outside Middlesex, has been restored a sumptuous Eleanor’s Cross, one of that series erected by Edward I. at each spot where his wife’s body rested on its way from Grantham to Charing.
Enfield does not turn its best face to the Lea Valley, but the stretch of parks and shady roads to the north of it makes one of the pleasantest corners of Middlesex. And if the pedestrian seek a green ramble back to town, I can put him upon one which will show part of the country not so much changed from the days of Lamb’s wanderings. Let him take the Barnet Road, past the Great Northern Railway station and the spired church, a little beyond which, where the road drops from a turning marked “Chase Ridings,” he looks out for a field-path going off to the left. Crossing a brook, it leads him into a bushy lane, past a group of hospital buildings and chimneys that make a landmark. When the suburban skirtings of Eversley Park are reached, turns of the road may be taken to the right, and guide-posts will keep one straight for a mile or so south-west till the north end of Southgate is reached at a joining of five ways. Here, from the road southward for Southgate Green, almost at once a path leads off to the right, by the backs of houses, along a wooded bank, over a meadow, and through a park till it reaches a road dropping down to cross the Pymmes Brook, beyond which is struck the way leading past East Barnet Church to Colney Hatch. A good mile or two to the west of this runs the tram-line of the Great North Road, on the further side of which we now pass to London’s north-western artery.
V
ABOUT WATLING STREET
IT has been fondly held that Watling Street went out over Hampstead and Hendon, and the bit of the City bearing this name would fit in with such an opinion. But the sounder doctrine seems to be that the ancient way, made or improved as the Romans’ great North-Western Road, originally came up from the marshes at Westminster, where the name Horseferry Road tells a tale, and thence took the line of what is now Park Lane, till the building of London Bridge caused it to be diverted into the City. From the Marble Arch this route runs almost straight on to Edgware, and beyond, without much wavering, to the foot of the height on which stands St. Albans.
The Edgware Road is familiar to more Londoners than are aware of its antiquity. It is now too crowded with traffic to stir thoughts of bygone renown; but on one of the motor-buses that urge their wild career through Maida Vale and Kilburn, beyond Brondesbury making the arduous ascent of Shoot-Up Hill, a spur of the Hampstead heights, we can soon get out to the boundary of London County at Cricklewood. On the left hand of the road here a square mile or so of new suburb has sprung up in the last few years, the best part of it being on an estate of All Souls’ College, whose Fellows must fatten in the body, while less lucky gownsmen are like to starve on agricultural depression. It is well to own property at some “Creek in the Wood” so near London; but when my own three acres of pasturage come to be allotted I have my eye on the fields about St. Martin’s or St. Paul’s.
The east side of the road here belongs to the Metropolitan borough of Hampstead. On the west we are in the Middlesex urban district of Willesden, that huge hobbledehoy suburb that as yet in part bears much the same relation to London proper as lignite does to coal; or it may be said to be in process of solidification—“half-baked” is a vulgar epithet on censorious tongues. In the lifetime of a generation this district has increased its population more than sevenfold, while, not to be behind its neighbours, it has set up a debt of nearly a million pounds. The large parish originally consisted of several scattered hamlets—Kilburn, Brondesbury, Cricklewood, Willesden Green, Harlesden, and Church End—which have now run together, though with gaps still shrinking every month. The Kilburn end, indeed, has long been firmly welded on to Paddington. Beside Willesden Green Station may be seen a bit of the original green; but if thereon Willesden should affect “county” airs, let her look back to the fate of Lisson Green and Lisson Grove. Between Kensal Rise and the Public Library in Willesden High Road there is at present a deep, shaded hill lane, barred by a stile, where artists or poets might carry on their business undisturbed. In another year or two this will probably be overflowed from the adjacent brickworks, so as to become “Klondyke Avenue” or “Edward VII. Road.” Would that the builder had first swooped upon that dingy south-western edge, blighted by the smoke of engines and the language of bargees, where Browning may well have seen—
Something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train!
From the misnamed junction at Harlesden, the quarter of Willesden best known to railway travellers, there are still bits of footpath towards Church End, by Roundwood Park, swelling to an eminence that gives a good view of the neighbourhood. Willesden Church, standing in the remotest corner of the parish, had once a noted image of the Virgin, which brought many pilgrims to “Our Lady of Willesden”; and though it has suffered enlargement and restoration, it enshrines interesting monuments, brasses, and other relics of an antiquity that goes back to Norman times, beset by a show of later tombstones, among them that of Charles Reade the novelist.