XV
The interest of St. Albans and its surroundings is not easily to be compressed into a few pages. Everywhere are memories, and in most places visible remains, wherewith to fortify imaginations not of a robust order. The walls of Roman Verulamium yet remain in fragmentary condition, to south and west of the Abbey, and close by them stands the village of St. Michael’s, in whose church, sadly spoiled by the late Lord Grimthorpe’s restoring zeal, is the statue of the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, whose genius was probably keen enough to have made him capable of writing Shakespeare’s plays: although, despite the contentions of fanatics to the contrary, he did nothing of the sort. The ruins of his father’s and his own house of Gorhambury are still visible a mile away, in the park, and close to the great ugly eighteenth-century classic mansion of Gorhambury, seat of the present Earl of Verulam.
GORHAMBURY.
GORHAMBURY
To seek Gorhambury on some thymy morning in May, when the pink horse-chestnuts are in bloom, when the air is moist with recent rain and suppressed heat, and a blue haze settles over the wooded landscape, is delightful. Then the scene of the great Chancellor’s pride, and of his despairing retirement, is beautiful indeed. The “wisest, wittiest, meanest of mankind” was housed sufficiently well, as the porch, the best-preserved portion of the building, shows. It is a typical Elizabethan Renaissance building, with panels of marble, and terra-cotta medallion heads of Roman Emperors; but it looks so small and toylike. Propped though it be with brickwork and iron rods, it cannot much longer survive, and the elaborate shield of the royal arms, the defaced statues and shattered columns are surely falling from picturesque into complete ruin. Apart from the chief group of crumbling walls there stands a poor old battered one-legged and headless statue, said to represent Henry the Eighth, but unrecognisable, scored amazingly with the penknives and the initials of generations of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys. The scene of past pomps and vanities is scarcely mournful, as some might find it; the sight of it makes history live again as human experience, not as we read it in the dulled pages of historical exercise.
A field-path across the pleasant water-meadows of the river Ver leads from Gorhambury to Prae Mill House and so on to the road again, and thence to Redbourne, a sleepy village with a sleepy railway-station, fringed with meadows where donkeys and ponies graze and ducks and geese march and countermarch aimlessly, their inevitable later association with green peas and sage-stuffing happily hidden from them. Redbourne is one of those “bourne” places which, without adequate reason, appears to discard the final “e.” According to an emphatic inhabitant, “we spell it with a hen, without a he at the hend.” Through the village and out again upon the broad highway, we come presently to Friar’s Wash, once a water-splash across the road, now a tiny row of cottages and a wayside inn, the “Chequers,” standing beside the little river Ver where the old road of pre-Telford days goes off to the right. Flamstead (i.e. Verlamstead) church on the hilltop, its characteristic Hertfordshire spirelet, with the appearance as though the greater portion had subsided through the roof, looks down upon the quiet scene. Beyond comes Markyate.
MARKYATE CELL.
ROGER, THE HERMIT