“Great was my grief—I could not rest;
God called me hence—He thought it best.
Unhappy marriage was my fate—
I did repent when ’twas too late.”
St. Albans is rich in antiquities. Indeed, you can still trace fragments of the Roman wall which surrounded the place when Albanus met his fate, and down near the river at the foot of cathedral hill is another “oldest house” in England. It is a quaint round structure, built, they say, more than a thousand years ago as a fishing-lodge for the monks, for it stands hard by a lakelike dam in the river. But today it has degenerated into a public house, and the broad-shouldered, black-bearded Irishman who kept the bar was well posted on St. Albans’ antiquities. He showed us the little house and garden and pointed out the Roman earthworks. Nor did he seem in the least disappointed that our patronage was limited to a few post card pictures, and, strange to say, he declined a gratuity. We returned to the George Inn, which enjoyed great prosperity in the coaching days, being on the main road to Holyhead. For four hundred years it had cheered the passing guest and its excellent dinner belied its generally dilapidated appearance. Its proprietors were just removing to the new and pretentious Red Lion over the way, but we did not learn whether this meant the final abandonment of the George.
It was with some difficulty that we located Rye House, which we supposed to be within Broxborne, but which really lies on a byroad two or three miles away. Though in a more or less secluded location, it is apparently the goal of innumerable pilgrims on gala days in the summer, especially Sundays. On the day of our arrival, the grounds were quite deserted and an appropriate quietude hovered over the old manor. Alas, though, we found it shorn of much of its picturesqueness, for it had fallen into the clutches of a large brewer, who was using it as an adjunct to dispose of his product—in fact, the mansion and its beautiful grounds have become little else than a summer beer garden.
Rye House figures in history as the seat of a plot, which contemporaries describe as “horrid,” to kill King Charles II. as he returned from a race meeting in Newmarket in 1683. Unfortunately, perhaps, the plot failed, owing to the king’s return a week earlier than expected, and there was no telephone to advise the Rye House assassins of the change of plan. A penny guide-book gives what purports to be the history of the crime, though I fear most of the romantic features are mythical. It relates how Ruth, the daughter of Rumsey, who devised the plot, listened at the door and learned the plan of the conspirators. Between her father and the king this devoted maiden never hesitated a minute, but hustled her lover away to Newmarket to warn Charles of his impending danger. After great difficulty the youth gained an audience with the king, and it is recorded that Charles only laughed at his story. Here, at least, is a touch of probability—Charles laughed at everything. Finding himself discredited, the lover became desperate; in his loyal zeal “he secretly set fire to the house in which the king resided in two or three places.” Our chronicler, having thus unceremoniously ousted his royal majesty from his comfortable quarters, has him proceed “in disguise” to London, stopping at Rye House, where he confronted and confounded his enemies and bestowed “substantial marks of his favor” upon Ruth Rumsey and her lover. What these substantial marks were our chronicler declareth not—better left to the imagination, anyway, for it would be far more in keeping with the character of Charles to say that he promised substantial marks of his favor and forgot all about it.
So much for Rye House legend. The facts are that the conspirators were apprehended and executed, and quite in accordance with his usual practices, the king made the circumstance an excuse for the removal of numerous of his enemies among the nobility who had nothing whatever to do with the plot. However, Rye House is quiet enough today and its only plots are the innocuous ones hatched over pots of beer in the minds of the trippers who throng it on Sundays and holidays.
The conspirators did not meet at the inn itself, but in the castellated manor house just across the byroad. Of this only a fragment remains, but fortunately this fragment contains the “conspirators’ room,” as might be expected. The enterprising brewer has put this in good repair and has placed on view a number of relics of greater or less degree of merit. Among these is a pair of stupendous jack-boots, which our voluble guide assured us were the “hidentical boots what Holiver Cromwell wore” during a battle in which, as usual, he worsted the Royalists; but the placard above the relics was more modest in its claims, for it only stated that the boots were found on the battlefield. However, if the redoubtable “Holiver” wore these boots or anything like unto them when he met the enemy, one phase of his career may be accounted for—why he never ran away. Among the other curiosities with a real interest is the “Great Bed of Ware,” so famous in its day that Shakespeare immortalized it in his “Twelfth Night.” It is certainly a marvelous creation, some sixteen feet square, with enormous carved posts supporting an imposing canopy. Our guide asserted that in its early days no fewer than twenty-four men had slept in it at one time, and recited, in painful detail, the history of the bed. We inconsiderately interrupted him in the midst of his declamation and he had to start all over again, to his manifest annoyance. Even then he failed to finish, for the shadows were lengthening, and terminating his flow of eloquence with a shilling or two, we were soon speeding swiftly over the beautiful Chigwell road to London.