From Barnet the road runs across Hadley Green, a broad and picturesque expanse, cursed nowadays with the ubiquitous golfer. Here, where the road divides—the Great North Road to the right and the old Holyhead Road to the left—stands the obelisk known as Hadley Highstone, which serves both as a milestone and as a memorial of the great battle of Barnet, fought here on that cold and miserable Easter Day, April 14, 1471, when Edward the Fourth utterly defeated the Lancastrians under the Earl of Warwick, the “King Maker.” Warwick fell, and the Red Rose was finally crushed. Hadley Green was then a portion of a wide stretch of unenclosed country known as Gladsmoor Heath, extending up to Monken Hadley church, away on the right. The obelisk was erected by Sir Jeremy Sambrooke in 1740 on the spot where Warwick is said to have been slain. There is, however, another spot which aspires to the honour, at Rabley Park, near South Mimms. This also has its monumental pillar, but without inscription. Among the guileless youth of the neighbourhood it is said to mark “the place where a soldier was knocked down,” which is a commonplace way of stating the fact. But who knocked him down, or why, or when, is beyond them when questioned.
Past the lodge gates of Wrotham Park and by Ganwick Corner, where stands the “Duke of York” inn with its bust of that wonderful strategist. He is looking enquiringly south, from his alcove over the front door, as though wondering what has become of all the post-chaises and coaches of old. He is that great commander who managed, according to the well-known rhyme, to march his ten thousand men to the top of a hill and then down again—but he never otherwise distinguished himself—except by the magnitude of his debts.
Potter’s Bar marks where the counties of Middlesex and Hertford join. It is not a place of delirious delights, consisting of stuccoed villas fondly supposed to be Italian, and unfinished roads, and streets in a state of suspended animation. Until 1897, when it was pulled down, an old toll-house, the last in a long succession of toll-houses and toll-bars which had stood here from the earliest times and had given Potter’s Bar its name, occupied the fork of the roads at the north end of the village, commanding the high-road and the road on the right to Northaw.
Hatfield village touches the extremity of wretchedness, just as Hatfield House marks the apogee of late feudal splendour. And yet, amid its tumbledown hovels there are quaintly beautiful old-gabled cottages with bowed and broken-backed red-tiled roofs, delightful to the artistic eye, if from the builder’s and decorator’s point of view sadly out of repair. Motor repair-shops and garages, with their squalid advertisements, have helped to ruin Hatfield, and the railway does its share, running closely to the main road, and, with the station directly opposite the highly elaborate modern wrought-iron gates that lead to Hatfield House, detracting not a little from that state of dignified seclusion by which, as we have just seen, a former Marquis of Salisbury set such store. Let us hope his pale ghost does not revisit his old home. If it does, it must be sorely vexed.
But at any rate, that Marquis who was one of Queen Victoria’s Prime Ministers, sits there in bronze portrait-effigy. He gazes mournfully, directly at the railway booking-office, as one who has long been waiting, without hope, for a train. It is a fine statue, by Sir George Frampton, R.A., and bears the inscription:—
ROBERT ARTHUR TALBOT,
Marquess of Salisbury, K.G., G.C.V.O.,
Three times Prime Minister of
Great Britain and Ireland,
1830–1903.
Erected to his memory by his Hertfordshire friends
and neighbours in recognition of a great life devoted
to the welfare of his country.