Cycle Rides Round London

by Charles G. Harper

But the wise walk down, and, nearing the level, mount again, and wheeling over a switchback canal bridge and a river bridge, come happily into Rickmansworth.

This old town resembles Watford, Ware, and Hertford, but is much prettier. They are four sisters, these Hertfordshire towns, with a strong family likeness but minor differences. Ware is the slippered slut of them, without doubt, and Hertford (if local patriotism will forgive the comparison) the dowdy; Watford the more pretentious; while Rickmansworth is the belle. All are alike in their rivers and canals, their surrounding meads and woodlands, and their breweries.

Green pastures and still waters, hanging woods and old-world ways, render Rickmansworth delightful. One comes into it from Batchworth Heath downhill, and, across its level streets, climbs up again for Chenies, reached past Chorleywood and its common, and a succession of the loveliest parks. Chenies is a place of pilgrimage, for the church is the mausoleum of the Russells, Dukes of Bedford; and if one cannot, in fact, feel any enthusiasm for a family that has exhibited such powers of “getting on in the world,” and has consistently used those powers of self-aggrandisement, while professing Liberal opinions, at least the long and splendid series of their tombs is worth seeing.

The Rozels, as they were originally named, came over, like many other Norman filibusters, with the Conqueror. They did not, for a long while, make any great mark after that event, and history passes them by until 1506. During all those centuries, the Russell genius for getting on lay fallow, and none of them did anything in particular. They just vegetated on their lands in Dorsetshire, at Kingston Russell, near Bridport, until that year, when a quite unexpected happening put the beginnings of promotion in their way. John Russell, heir of the uncultivated bucolic head of the house, had just returned from Continental travels, and had acquired polish and the command of the French, Spanish, and German tongues, accomplishments that would probably have been of no sort of use to him had it not been for the singular happening already hinted at. In the winter of 1506 the Archduke of Austria, voyaging from the Low Countries to Spain, was driven by the fury of the Channel gales into Weymouth. He was most unromantically sea-sick, and landed; although England was at that time no safe place for one of his house. But he preferred the prospect of political imprisonment to the unkindly usage of the seas. Meanwhile, until the king’s pleasure became known, he was sheltered by Sir Thomas Trenchard of Wolveton, near Dorchester; and because Sir Thomas knew no tongue but his own robust, native English, he had his young kinsman, John Russell, over from Kingston Russell, to act as interpreter and entertainer to the distinguished foreigner. Young Russell proved himself so courtly and tactful that when the Archduke visited Henry the Seventh on a friendly invitation to Windsor—where, instead of being clapped into a dungeon, he was royally entreated—he spoke in such high praise of this young Englishman that the king speedily found him a position in the Royal Household. Thus was a career opened up to this most fortunate young man. He was with Henry the Eighth in France, and fought in several battles, losing an eye at the taking of Morlaix and at the same time gaining a knighthood. Diplomacy, which, rather than fighting, is the Russell métier, soon claimed him. Diplomacy, it has been well said, is the art of lying for the advantage of one’s country. Perhaps he had not learned the art sufficiently well, for his great mission to the Continent failed, and he returned, not in disgrace, but, with the inevitable Russell address and luck, to preferment. The times were fatal to honest men, and that Russell survived that troubled era and died in his bed in the reign of Mary, at peace, and ennobled by the title of Earl of Bedford, enriched with the spoils of confiscated religious houses and the lands of attainted and executed friends, is therefore no recommendation of his character, which was that of a cautious time-server and cunning sycophant. He lies here, the Founder of his house, his recumbent effigy beside that of his countess, who brought Cheneys into the family. It is a magnificent monument and the effigies evidently carefully executed likenesses, even down to the small detail of the earl’s eyelid, represented as drooping over the lost eye.

The second Earl of Bedford was a man of greater honour and sincerity than his father, the Founder. His monument and that of his countess stands beside his parents’ altar-tomb, and is of alabaster bedizened to extremity with painting and gilding. He was the first Francis of the family. The last was the man (Francis, 9th Duke of Bedford) who poisoned himself in 1891.

Earl Francis, perhaps, derived his sincerity from his mother. Both were sincere Protestants, while his father was anything you pleased, so long as he could keep his head on his shoulders and put more money in his pocket. The son’s Protestantism was nearly the undoing of him, for the bloody Gardiner would probably have sent him to the stake had he not escaped to Geneva. When Elizabeth succeeded her sister, he returned and served his Queen well and truly, until his death in 1585. He was succeeded by his grandson, Edward, who in turn was followed by his cousin Francis; “the wise earl,” they call him, perhaps because he found, after being released from his imprisonment in the Tower for his political opinions, that it was more peaceful and profitable to busy himself about the draining of the ill-gotten Russell lands at Whittlesea and Thorney, than to contend with Parliament against the Crown. This is indeed wisdom, and worthy of a Russell and a lawyer; for as a lawyer he had been trained before his succession to the earldom had been thought of. His son William reproduced the shiftiness of the Founder, and lukewarmly sided first with King, then with Parliament, and so continually back and forth during the Civil War. They made him a duke before he died—they, that is to say, the advisers of William the Third—and the price paid for it was the blood of his eldest son. The title was given as a kind of solace for the loss of that son, and must have been a bitter kind of plaister to salve grief. That son, William, had not the canny caution of his race, and deserves to be honoured for the self-neglecting enthusiasm for the Protestant religion which brought him to the block in 1683 for his alleged complicity in the Rye House Plot.

The most elaborate monument here at Chenies is that to his father and mother, but more truly to himself; for that fantastic pile of theatrical statuary, exhibiting the Duke and Countess contorted with paroxysms of grief, leads up, as the central point of this stony emotion, to the portrait head of this unhappy patriot who fell under the headsman’s axe.

There are other Russell monuments here, for the family has rarely been averse from post-mortem glorification; but to make a catalogue of them would be wearisome. Among the latest, and the most unassuming, is the plain slab to Earl Russell,—the Lord John Russell of earlier political struggles,—who died in 1878.

Chenies village, let it at once be said, is utterly disappointing, after one has heard so much of its beauties. “A model village,” no doubt, but how depressing these model villages are! And, indeed, the Russells rule “Chaineys” (as it should be pronounced) with an iron rule. The country in which it is set is beautiful, and at the centre of the village a group of noble trees, with a pretty spring and well-house, may be noticed; but that anyone can admire the would-be Tudor architecture of the cottages, almost all rebuilt by a Duke of Bedford about fifty years ago, is surprising. Yet there are those who affect to do so. The village lies just off the road, to the right; and at its farther end stand the church and the manor-house, close to one another.

“Isenhampton Cheneys” is the real name of the place, but the Cheynes who once were paramount here are long since extinct, and the insistent “B” is now on every cottage, gate-post, and weathercock. The church, rebuilt, has the whole of its north aisle appropriated as the Bedford Chapel, so that, even here, you see how the Russells maintain the feudal idea. Froude, indeed, says the gorgeous monuments here are second only to the tombs of the Mendozas, the proudest race in Spain; but true though that be, he is grossly fulsome when he praises the Russells for their “Liberal” ideas. Truth to tell, the family has ever been content to wear the Liberal mask and yet to treat its unfortunate tenants in a manner that many an old Tory race would have neither the courage nor the wickedness to adopt. Ask of the Russell tenantry what they think, and, receiving your answer, the wonder arises how that family can keep up their curious pretence of being “friends of the people.”