The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York

A great gap stretches between the time of our road-making hermit and that of Telford—a gap of four hundred and fifty years.  Yet, although Highway Acts were from time to time devised for the betterment of the roads, their condition remained bad, and there was always, since 1386, the crest of Highgate Hill to surmount.

Unless we take this hill-top route to the left we shall not have seen Highgate; nor, in truth, is there much to see, now that the old Gatehouse Tavern is gone, and with it the last outward and visible connection with the days of yore.  The tavern marked the site of the old turnpike-gate that stood here, the lineal successor of the hermit’s original pitch lower down, when the old route to Barnet by Tallingdon Lane, Crouch End, Hornsey Great Park, Muswell Hill, Friern Barnet, and Whetstone was superseded by the new one through the Bishop of London’s estate, by Finchley and Whetstone, in 1386.  It is in the existence at that time of the Bishop’s park that we may perhaps seek with success the origin of the name of “Highgate,” which does not necessarily allude to the very obviously “high” gate situated here—more than 350 feet above sea-level.  No; it was the “haigh” gate, the portal which gave access through the enclosure (haia) with which my Lord Bishop’s domain was presumably surrounded.  Through his land all traffic passed until it emerged on the other side of Whetstone, where, commanding the entrance to Barnet, stood another gate in receipt of tolls, swelling the income of that very business-like ecclesiastic and his successors for hundreds of years.

An initiate had to swear never to drink small beer when he could get strong (unless he preferred small); never to eat brown bread when he could get white (unless he preferred brown); never to kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress (unless he preferred the maid, and in case of doubt he might kiss both); after which he had to kiss the horns or the woman in the company who appeared the fairest, as seemed good to him, the ceremony concluding with the declaration of his privileges as a freeman of Highgate.  Among the well-known privileges were—that if he felt tired when passing through Highgate and saw a pig lying in a ditch, he might kick the pig away and take its place, but if he saw three lying together he must only kick away the middle one and lie between the other two!

X

It was on Highgate Hill that the great Francis, Lord Bacon, whom some believe to have written Shakespeare’s dramas, fell a martyr to his scientific enthusiasm.  Driving up this chilly eminence one winter’s day when the snow lay on the ground, it occurred to him that, from its chemical constituents, snow must possess admirable preservative properties, and he accordingly resolved immediately to put this theory to the proof.  Stopping his carriage at a neighbouring farmhouse, he purchased a fowl and stuffed it carefully with snow.  Being in weak health at the time, he took a chill, and before he could be driven home, became so alarmingly ill that he was obliged to be carried to Lord Arundel’s house at Highgate.  There a damp bed aggravated his seizure, so that in a few days he died, in 1626.

It is peculiarly unfortunate for those who are uncertain about their aspirates that London and its neighbourhood should abound in place-names beginning with the letters “A” and “H.”  Cockneys have ever—or ’ave hever, shall we say?—been afflicted with this difficulty; but they are overcoming the tendency of their forbears to speak of “’Ornsey, ’Ampstead, ’Igit, ’Arrow, ’Omerton, ’Ackney, ’Endon or ’Atfield.”  The classic anecdote in this connection is that of the City Alderman who lived at Highgate, praising his locality to a distinguished guest at a Mayoral banquet.

“Really,” the guest is supposed to have replied, “I haven’t known you long enough to say.”

“I’m not talking of meself,” returned the Alderman, “but of ’Iget on the ’Ill.”

Until 1813 coaches and foot-passengers alike toiled over the Hill, through Highgate village, and by a roundabout road into East End, Finchley, which, with its adjoining hamlets, was until quite recently so greatly cut off from London by these comparatively Alpine heights and the lack of suburban railways, that it was, for all practical purposes, as distant as many other places fifty or sixty miles away, but situated on more level roads or on direct railway routes.  To remedy this the Archway Road was cut direct from the Upper Holloway Road to East End, saving half a mile in the distance to be travelled and a hundred feet in the height to be climbed.

The making of the Archway and the road was no public-spirited act, but the commercial undertaking of a Company, whose total expenses were very large, and, by consequence, the tolls exacted extremely high.  Pedestrians were not chargeable at ordinary toll-gates, but here they had to pay a penny, or go the tedious way over the Hill.  Sixpence was levied on every laden or draught horse.

It was not a profitable undertaking, even at these rates, and the tolls had a very decided effect in stemming the advance of Suburbia in this direction.  In 1861, when the abolition of tolls within fifty miles of London was a burning question, the Company owed the Consolidated Fund no less than £13,000.  The Government bought it out for £4,000, receiving £9,000 by instalments spread over fifteen years, after which period the road was to be declared free.  It was accordingly opened free of toll in 1876.  And thus it remained, as in the illustration, until 1897, when it was demolished and the roadway widened.  The present Archway was opened in 1900.

XI

Just where the Great Northern Railway bridge crosses over the road at East End stands the “Old White Lion,” in a pretty wooded dip of the road.  The house was once known, and marked on the maps as the “Dirt House,” from its having been the house of call of the market-wagons on the way to London with produce, and on the way back with loads of dirt and manure.  The wood was also known as “Dirt House Wood.”  It was here also that Horne the coachmaster’s stables were situated.

In 1774, Edmund Burke, travelling to Malton, in Yorkshire, was stopped here by two highwaymen, who robbed him of ten guineas, and his servant of his watch, in the most easy way.  Some of these highwaymen were, indeed, persons who took their calling in an earnest and whole-hearted manner, and doubtless regarded Jack Sheppard as a mere scatterbrain, quite unfitted to be in business for himself.  Thoroughly business-like men were Messrs. Everett and Williams, who entered into a duly drawn and properly attested deed of partnership, by which it was agreed that they should work together on Finchley Common and elsewhere and divide the profits of their labours into equal shares.  Their industry prospered, and the common fund soon reached the very respectable total of £2,000.  But when required to render accounts and to pay over half this amount, Mr. Williams refused; whereupon his partner brought an action-at-law against him, in 1725.  A verdict for £20 was actually obtained, and appealed against by the defendant.  The court then very properly found the matter scandalous, and sentenced Everett to pay costs, the solicitors engaged on either side being fined £50 each for their part in this discreditable affair.  One partner was executed, two years later, at Maidstone, and the other at Tyburn, in 1730.

Of the many names in the long and distinguished roll of road agents who figured here at some time or another in their meteoric careers, it is not possible to say much.  There was the courageous and resourceful Captain Hind, the whimsically nicknamed “Old Mob,” burly Tom Cox, Neddy Wicks, and Claud Duval.  Duval’s proper territory is, however, the Bath Road.

XII

Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here, his first stage out of London on the northern roads.  They were placed here, rather than at Barnet, in order to avoid expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated down the road, near Greenhill Cross.  Whetstone Gate gave travellers going north the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed Finchley Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society of Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.

The road across Finchley Common was in passive alliance with these gentry.  When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly for sake of its now forgotten medicinal waters, he found the highway “torne, plowed, and digged up,” in consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long struggling teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had been a fairly good roadway.  Progress was difficult, even in the best circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost impossible, the highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely at their leisure.

The Trustees were dismayed.  Telford and Macadam supplied rival plans, and both foreshadowed heavy expense.  Telford’s idea was to slice off the top of Barnet Hill, and to run the road through a more or less deep cutting through the street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the houses and the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a cliff.  Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by Macadam prevailed.  It was for the partial filling up of the dip in the road between Prickler’s Hill and the excessively steep entrance into the town, an entrance even now by no means easily graded.  What it must originally have been may readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked road to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where the old roadside houses still stand, among them the “Old Red Lion,” on the site of the inn where Pepys stayed.  The end one of a row of ten or twelve cottages, at the corner of May’s Lane, was once a toll-house.

It was in 1833 that the London and Birmingham Railway obtained its Act, and it was opened throughout on September 7, 1838, the first of the railways which were to contribute to the ruin of Barnet’s great coaching and posting trade.  The annual takings at Whetstone Gate immediately fell to £1,300, but it lingered on until the Trust expired, November 1, 1863.

It is interesting, as showing the growth of road traffic, to compare the figures still available, giving the annual sums at which the tolls at this gate were let in the old days.  Thus, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, they were farmed at £40 per annum, and in 1794 they fetched only £150.  But few vehicles passed then.  Forty years later, no fewer than ninety coaches swept through Whetstone Gate every twenty-four hours!

XIII

Barnet was, to many coaching proprietors, the first stage out of London, and the town prospered exceedingly on the coaching and posting traffic of those two great thoroughfares—the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road.  When the Stamford “Regent,” the York “Highflyer,” and the early morning coaches for Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool arrived, the passengers, who had not found time for breakfast before starting, were generally very sharp-set indeed, and the viands already prepared and waiting in the cosy rooms of the old hostelries, disappeared before their onslaught “in less than no time.”  The battle of Barnet was fought over again every morning, but they were not men-at-arms who contended together, nor was the subject of their contention the Crown of England.  They were just famished travellers who struggled to get something to eat and drink before the guard made his appearance at the door, with the fateful cry, “Time’s up, gentlemen; take your seats please.”  When the horn sounded in the yard, desperate men would rush forth with hands full of food, and finish their repasts as best they might on the coach.

The “boys” of the “Green Man” wore blue jackets; those of the “Red Lion,” yellow jackets and black hats.

An inn called the “Green Man” stands on the site of that busy house, but it is of more recent date than the old Whig headquarters.  It may be seen at the fork of roads where the “new” road to St. Albans, driven through the yard of the old “Green Man” in 1826, branches off.

But this white-stuccoed frontage does not hide anything of antiquity, for this is not that original “Red Lion” to which Samuel Pepys resorted.  The house he refers to in his diary is the “Old Red Lion”; down the hill, at the approach to Barnet.  There he “lay” in 1667.  “August 11th, Lord’s Day,” he writes: “Up by four o’clock . . . and got to the wells at Barnet by seven o’clock, and there found many people a-drinking.”  After “drinking three glasses and the women nothing,” the party sojourned “to the Red Lion, where we ’light and went up into the great room, and there drank, and ate some of the best cheesecakes that ever I ate in my life.”

The keenness of the innkeepers who let post-horses during the last few years of the coaching age is scarcely credible.  It was a fierce competition.  The landlord of the “Red Lion” at Barnet thought nothing of forcibly taking out the post-horses from any private carriage passing his house, and putting in a pair of his own, to do the next stage to St. Albans.  This, too, free of charge, in order to prevent the business going to the hated rival.  Mine host of that hotel also had his little ways of drawing custom, and gave a glass of sherry and a sandwich, gratis, to the travellers changing there.  But things did not end here.  The landlord of the “Red Lion,” finding, perhaps, that the sherry and sandwich at the “Green Man” was more attractive than his method, engaged a gang of bruisers to pounce upon passing chaises, and even to haul them out of his rival’s stable-yard.  Evidently a man of wrath, this licensed victualler!  After several contests of this kind, the authorities interfered.  The combatants were bound over to keep the peace, the punching of conks and bread-baskets, and the tapping of claret ceased, and people travelling down the road were actually allowed to decide for themselves which house they would patronise!

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.

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.

Hatfield House, that great historical museum and ancient repository of State secrets, is little seen from the village, nor have we, as wayfarers along the road, much to do with it.  It is by the parish church, its characteristic Hertfordshire extinguisher spire so prominent above the tumbled roofs of Hatfield, that we may glimpse the older parts of the house.  In that church lies its builder, the great Robert Cecil, his effigy, with the Lord Treasurer’s wand of office, recumbent on a slab uplifted by statues emblematic of Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, and Temperance, and a skeleton below, to show that even Lord Treasurers, possessed though they be of all the virtues, are mortal, like less exalted and less virtuous men.

And so in Royal possession the old palace continued until James the First in his turn exchanged it for the estate of Sir Robert Cecil at Theobalds.  Previously it had been the home—the prison, rather of the Princess Elizabeth during her sister Mary’s reign.  The oak is still shown in the park under which she was sitting when the news of Mary’s death and the end, consequently, of the surveillance to which she was subjected, was brought her, November 17, 1588.  (But is tradition truthful here?  Would she have been sitting under an oak in November?)  “It is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes,” she exclaimed, quoting from the Psalms.  Three days later she held her first council in the old palace, and then on the 23rd set out for London.

There was a tragical happening at Hatfield, November 27, 1835, when the house was greatly injured by fire, and the old and eccentric Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury burnt to death, in her eighty-fifth year.  The pious declared it to be a “judgment” for her playing cards on Sunday; but what a number of conflagrations we should have if that were true and Providence consistent in its vengeance!

XV

Welwyn lies in a deep hollow on the little river—or, more correctly speaking, the streamlet—of the Mimram.  Street and houses face you alarmingly as you descend the steep hillside, wondering (if you cycle) if the sharp corner can safely be rounded, or if you must needs dash through door or window of the “White Hart,” once one of the two coaching inns of the village.

The “White Hart” at Welwyn was kept in the “twenties” by “old Barker,” who horsed the Stamford “Regent” a stage on the road, and was, in the language of the coachmen, a “three-cornered old beggar.”  That is to say, he kept a tight hand over the doings of coachmen and guards, did not approve of “shouldering,” and objected to the coachmen giving lessons to gentlemen coachmen, or allowing amateurs to “take the ribbons.”  From the passengers’ point of view this was entirely admirable of “old Barker,” for many an inoffensive traveller’s life had been jeopardised by the driving of unqualified persons.  Colonel Birch Reynardson tells a story of him and of Tom Hennesy, the best known of the “Regent” coachmen—one who could whistle louder, hit a horse harder, and tell a bigger lie than any of his contemporaries.  Hennesy had resigned the reins to him one day between London and Hatfield, but when they neared Welwyn, the accomplished Tom thought he had better resume them.  “It would never do for old Barker to see you driving,” said he.  The words were scarcely out of his mouth before the “three-cornered old beggar” himself appeared, walking up the hill, with the double object of taking a constitutional and of seeing if any “shouldering” was going on.

“Don’t look as if you seed him,” said Tom.  “We’ll make the best of it we can.”

“Good morning, Mr. Barker, sir,” said Tom, with all the impudence he could command.  “Did you ever see a young gentleman take a coach steadier down a hill?  ’Pon my word, sir, he could not have done it better.  He’s a pupil of mine, sir, and I’m blessed if he did not do it capital; don’t you think he did, sir, for you seed him?”  “Hum,” said old Barker; “you know it’s all against the laws.  Supposing anything happened, what then?”  “Well, sir, I did not expect anything would happen, with such horses as these of yours; there’s no better four horses, sir, betwixt London and Stamford; and as for those wheelers, why, they’ll hold anything.”  This, of course, was pouring balm into old Barker’s wounds, which seemed to heal pretty quickly, and he put on a pleasanter face, and said, “Well, Hennesy, you know I don’t like ‘gentlemen coachmen,’ and, above all things, very young ones.  Don’t you do it again.”

Was Hennesy grateful?  Not at all; for, when they had driven away, he said, “Well, he was wonderful civil for him,” and added that if he could only catch him lying drunk in the road, he would run over his neck and kill him, “blessed if he wouldn’t!”

This bold and independent fellow, like many another coachman, came down in the world when railways drove the coaches off the main roads, and was reduced to driving a pair-horse coach between Cambridge and Huntingdon.

More picturesque than the “White Hart” is the “Wellington,” which composes so finely with the red-brick tower of the church, at the further end of the village street, where the road abruptly forks.  It is a street of all kinds and sizes of houses, mostly old and pleasingly grouped.

“Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.”

No one reads Young nowadays, and so every one who sees this, one of the most hackneyed of quotations, ascribes it to Shakespeare.  Alas, poor Young!

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 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.

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.

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.”

When carriages were introduced, the very great personages of the realm “progressed” in them, and had their love of display gratified thereby.  But what they gained in pomp they lost in speed, for at the best of it they rarely travelled at a greater pace than seven miles an hour.

The function of a running footman was to run ahead of his employer’s carriage, to point out the proper turnings to take, or to arrange for his reception at the inns; but as time went on and accommodation increased, he was not of any practical use, and became simply a kind of unnecessary fore-runner, who by his appearance advertised the coming of my lord and upheld my lord’s dignity.  It is said that these ministers to senseless pomp and vanity usually ran at the rate of seven miles an hour, and frequently did sixty miles a day.  The long and highly ornamented staff they carried had a hollow silver ball at the end containing white wine.  Unscrewing it, the footman could refresh himself.  More white wine, mixed with eggs, was given him at the end of his journey, and he must have needed it!  Over the bad and hilly roads of a hundred and fifty years ago, the running footman could readily keep ahead of a carriage; on the flat the horses, of course, had the advantage.

Every one is familiar with the appearance of the old post-chaise, which, according to the painters and the print-sellers, appears to have been used principally for the purpose of spiriting love-lorn couples with the speed of the wind away from all restrictions of home and the Court of Chancery.  A post-chaise was (so it seems nowadays) a rather cumbrous affair, four-wheeled, high, and insecurely hung, with a glass front and a seat to hold three, facing the horses.  The original designers evidently had no prophetic visions as to this especial popularity of post-chaises with errant lovers, nor did they ponder the proverb, “Two’s company, three’s none,” else they would have restricted their accommodation to two, or have enlarged it to four.