Cecil, according to a contemporary Life, ‘greatly delighted in making gardens’. Royal visits by Elizabeth cost him many thousands of pounds, but this retreat from the realpolitik of the state, the fabrication of conspiracies, justified paranoia, gave the civil servant scope to construct his paradise garden. On the forest fringe, posthumous fantasies could be played out, an Alhambra of scents, fountains, symmetries. A commissioned painting of Cecil (now in the National Portrait Gallery) places him, absurdly, on a mule: Don Quixote as Sancho Panza. Berobed, ringed, a raddled imago of power. ‘Riding in his garden and walks upon his little mule was his greatest disport.’
James I, resting here at the end of his progress from Scotland, experienced a thrill of recognition. Like romantic novelist Philippa Gregory, he found the discretion of Enfield profoundly erotic. Theobalds Park, according to Gregory, ‘had been laid out by Sir Robert’s father in the bleak elegance of the period. Sharply defined geometric patterns of box hedging enclosed different coloured gravels and stones.’
Tradescant plotted a New Age makeover. ‘He longed to take out the gravel from the enclosed shapes and plant the patterns with herbs, flowers and shrubs. He wanted to see the whole disciplined shape softened and changing every day with foliage and flowers which would bloom and wilt, grow freshly green, and then pale… Tradescant had a picture in his mind’s eye of plants spilling over the hedges, of the thick green of the box containing wildness, fertility, even colour. It was an image that drew on the hedgerow and roadside of the wild country of England and brought that richness into the garden and imposed order upon it.’
The Earl of Salisbury entertained James I for four days at Theobalds, while the new king received the homage of the Lords of Council. Coming from the bleak north, James wanted to take possession of a house and grounds, elegantly planted, artfully laid out, on the side of London in which he was most comfortable. He commandeered Theobalds and a large portion of Enfield Chase, as a kind of dowry. A wall, ten miles in circumference, enclosed his estates.
The circuit of the wall crosses the motorway and cuts through the grounds of Capel Manor, now an horticultural college, garden centre and display of show gardens. The pleasure of walking through the grounds derives from the change of pulse, slowing of breath, coming away from the road gives you. All the usual irritants with which great gardens protect themselves are blessings: they make access difficult. Persistence is rewarded. Capel Manor, like its neighbour Myddelton House, is open to visitors on certain days, at certain times — if those times don’t have to be revised, if there are no plagues or elections on the horizon.
Capel is the first estate you notice, exiting the M25, making the tricky turn into Bullsmoor Lane. Follies, Gothic ruins, are glimpsed over the wall. Ivy-covered John Piper arches floating in sparse woodland. It’s only after you’ve bought your ticket and followed the signs that you recognise these stacks of tumbled masonry as customised fakes, commissioned from William Chambers. Rams and urns and centaur heads among pink rhododendrons. The small area of tolerated ‘wilderness’ is punted as a ‘garden feature’, introduced by William Robinson and other members of the ‘Natural’ school of the late nineteenth century. It doesn’t feel like woodland. A two-minute stroll loops you back to a prospect of the south lawn, the Liriodendron Tree, the famous Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia); the ha-ha which marked the division of the Theobalds and Capel Manor estates.
On a mound that overlooks the motorway is another folly, an open-sided, open-roofed Temple of the Winds. Voices from the gardens are distorted. Children scampering around the maze. Water. Filtered traffic whooo-whooo-whoooing under Bulls Cross Ride.
Capel Manor, promoted under the slogan ‘Where the City meets the Countryside’, has downgraded the paradise theme to a series of botanical rooms, conservatories with the lid lifted off. There is a garden for ‘Physically Challenged People’ and a garden for ‘Visually Impaired People’. There is a Yellow Garden and a Blue Garden (with flowers blessed by the M25 ribbon-cutter). ‘Now this is my type of garden,’ said Margaret Thatcher at a photo-opportunity in 1989. Wisteria sinensis, Brunnera macrophylla, Lirioe muscari and Cynara cardunculus. ‘Blue is one of the “cold” colours, providing a calm and restful feel.’
There’s a lake, of course. But it’s notable, in this area of springs and rivulets, riverine speculations, that Capel Manor has chosen to market non-liquid water, fake water. This season’s idea is the virtual water garden (a drought fancy which only succeeded in predicting the continual rain that would raise London’s water table and float off anything that wasn’t firmly anchored). The concept of designers Angela Grant and Nigel Jackson was to stimulate those parts of the brain that ‘think water’ — without actually involving that precious resource in the exchange. Diuretic gardening: as sponsored by a ‘cooperative venture’ (Anglian Water, West Water, Yorkshire, Thames Water, Severn Trent). Nifty arrangements of broken slate and silver paper (gallery quality) make up the ‘water conscious’ garden (i.e. the garden that makes us conscious of the absence of water). A notion that is about as much use as handing a dehydrated marathon runner a photograph of a high-energy drink. Or playing a video loop of Ullswater-at-dawn on a Tunisian sand dune.
Princess Elizabeth, the future Virgin Queen, was brought from Hatfield House to Enfield Chase by her ‘keeper’, Sir Thomas Pope. She travelled, according to Nicholas Norden’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, with ‘a retinue of twelve ladies in white satin, on ambling palfreys, and twenty yeomen in green on horseback, that her grace might hunt the hart’.
The forest was a site of enchantment for a green belt monarchy; a theatre for role reversals, sexual travesty, debating schools. ‘The Queen came from Theobalds to Enfield House to dinner, and she had toils set up in the park to shoot at the buck.’ The court stood for wild nature, ecology, the preservation of animals so that they could be killed for sport. The forest, when it is enclosed and exploited, is royalist. Republican sentiment cuts down trees. The major deforestation took place under Cromwell and the Commonwealth. The diarist John Evelyn described the Chase as ‘a solitary desert with 3,000 deer’.
Royal physicians were rewarded with Enfield estates. Trent Park was given by George III to his favourite quack. Elizabeth I presented White Webbs House to her physician, Dr Hucks (or Huicks). Huicks — and the house he occupied — came under grave suspicion in the time of Elizabeth’s successor, James. Guido Vaux (aka Guy Fawkes) was a frequent visitor. Heretics (Catholics) were always shunted out to the fringes, rural and riverside suburbs, while nonconforming fundamentalists clung to the city, plain chapels and places of assembly. Recent aristocrats, royal servants, cash-rich bureaucrats bought into the green girdle, leaving the inner suburbs, Hackney and Hoxton, to argumentative mechanics and tradesmen.
Vaux took White Webbs House and furnished it at his own expense. Garnet the Jesuit stayed with him. The house was reported, by government agents, to be filled with ‘Popish books and relics’; a fiendish warren of ‘trapdoors and passages’. What is now White Webbs Lane was once known as Rome Lane. Terror and counter-terror lived in close proximity: the spymaster on one side of the fence and the heretical assassin on the other.
Walking through Enfield Chase, estate to estate, you notice small streams, channels cut for Sir Hugh Myddelton’s New River. Myddelton was a speculator, water was a resource. By the late Elizabethan period, medieval wells and conduits could not adequately supply the needs of the City. Edmund Colthurst looked to the Hertfordshire springs at Amwell and Chadwell, near Ware. The goldsmith Myddelton exploited Colthurst’s initiative. Born in Wales in 1560, he was MP for Denbigh and jeweller to James I. The dull silver of the River Lea was converted, by labour and promotion, to gold, a personal fortune. Adventurer shares were issued and Colthurst was appointed as overseer of the work, the digging and cutting; the New River would travel forty miles in making the twenty-mile journey to London. It hugged the 100-foot contour line, falling eighteen feet in the course of its travels. It opened at Christmas in 1613. Myddelton was knighted, made a baronet. He prospered. He died in 1631, leaving versions of his name scattered through the suburbs, tracings that can still be followed into town.