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.”