Turning suddenly from the Holyhead Road at this not very conspicuous corner, the telegraph-poles that have hitherto made so brave a show are missed, and the Manchester Road, for lack of them, seems of less than the first-class importance it really owns. Solitary runs the road for some miles, the sequence of trees and well-plashed quick-set hedges of this well-cared-for district varied only by the companionable signposts bearing the quaint or sonorous names of places on either side: places to which you do not want to go, and of which you have probably never before heard: but you like the information all the same. For one thing, they are earnest of the fact that the country really is inhabited: which the emptiness of the road would lead one to doubt. You speculate idly as to what manner of place “Simpson” may be: “Eaton Bray” is alluring, “Ellesborough” attractive; but it is still over 360 miles to Glasgow, and the invitation into the byways is resisted.

There is a reason for this apparent—and in some sense real—depopulation. We are here within the radius of the blighting influence exercised by the Dukes of Bedford, whose immense seat of Woburn Abbey we are approaching. And even where the Russell tentacles do not reach, there are numerous other great parks. Away to the right, is, for instance, Wrest Park, one of the finest domains in Bedfordshire. Were there aught in the sound of that name, Wrest in Beds should be an ideal place for the born-tired.

By reason of these great landowners, the district through which the road runs for some ten miles is wholly park-like, and the villages to either side are mere insignificant incidents. There is at Milton Bryant, on the right-hand side of the road, a highly instructive example of the manner in which these influences work. The local Wesleyan chapel, greatly resembling a small barn, stands beside the village pond, and indeed, until recently stood in it, being supported above the water on posts. In that manner the tiny chapel was originally built in 1861, it being impossible to obtain land elsewhere for the purpose.

Now comes the park-wall of Woburn Abbey, skirting the road for two miles. And not merely a wall, but a hedge in front of it, as well. At such pains have their Graces of Bedford been to obtain additional seclusion in a country where you will scarcely ever meet one person in a mile.

On the way to the little town of Woburn, the chief entrance to this great park is passed; the iron gates, painted an agonising blue which in a mere commoner would be shocking bad taste, recessed from the road at the rear of about half an acre of grass-plot. That grass-plot is instructive, for it is earnest of the truly ducal scale on which things are done at Woburn.

Woburn Abbey was from 1145 until 1537 a home of Cistercian monks whose Abbots do not figure in history. They performed their religious duties and ruled the brethren and brought their land out of a wild state into an excellent agricultural condition. Only the last Abbot of this long line lives in history. This was Robert Hobbs, who, torn by a tender conscience and uncertain in what way to act for the best, first made submission to Henry the Eighth and then threw in his lot with the insurgents of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a movement to re-establish the monasteries and to replace the ejected monks. The unfortunate Abbot, taken in arms, was executed with dramatic completeness, being hanged on an oak-tree in front of his own Abbey.

Ten years later, that luckiest of Russells, John Russell of Kingston Russell in Dorsetshire, who by fortunate circumstance and courtly address rose from the condition of an obscure country squire to be Earl of Bedford, was granted these lands of Woburn and the fabric of the Abbey, together with much other monastic property in different parts of the country. Other families were recipients of many broad acres, but the Russells were gorged to repletion. Burke in 1796 truly declared that “the grants to the House of Russell were so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility”; and the results of those favours are evident to this day in the huge and varied properties of which the Dukes of Bedford are landlords. The great London estates of Bloomsbury and Covent Garden, the lands of Tavistock Abbey, vast districts in the Fens, once the property of Thorney Abbey; and other manors here, there, and everywhere render them really “rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

The more superstitious among the Roman Catholics have ever dwelt upon the disasters prophesied to the House of Russell, as the beneficiaries to so enormous a degree of the spoliation of the Church; but let us inquire into the subsequent history of the family.

The first Earl of Bedford died in the fulness of time, in his bed, without anything in the supernatural way affecting him. He was succeeded by his son, who was not so fortunate, for three of his four sons died before him, the third being killed by the Scots, on the Borders. His fourth son, Edward, succeeded him as third Earl. He in turn died, in 1627, childless, and the title and estates fell to his cousin Francis. Believers in judgment awaiting sacrilege began at this period to remember the discredited old legends which had declared that no Earl of Bedford should be succeeded by his eldest son.

The family history from this time began thoroughly to support believers in the supernatural, for Francis, the fourth Earl, had two sons, one of whom died without issue, before his father. The second son, who became the fifth holder of the title, was a man upon whom sorrow laid a heavy hand. His two sons died before him; the eldest unmarried, the second, Lord William Russell, beheaded in 1683 for complicity in the political movement resulting in the Rye House Plot.

That must have been a hollow and barren honour which was conferred upon the bereaved man in 1694, when William the Third created him a Duke, “to solace his excellent father for so great a loss, to celebrate the memory of so noble a son, and to excite his worthy grandson, the heir of such mighty hopes, more cheerfully to emulate and follow the example of his illustrious father.” The fifth Earl and first Duke had often before been offered a dukedom, but had declined; so it would seem that the “solace” could have been little comfort to him. He died in his eighty-seventh year, in 1700, and his grandson, Wriothesley, became second Duke, who died eleven years later, and was followed by his son, Wriothesley, third Duke, who died childless in 1732. His brother stepped into his place, and survived until 1771. He was twice married, but his eldest son died on the day of his birth, the second in infancy, and the third, the Marquis of Tavistock, was killed by a fall in the hunting field, in 1767; and he was therefore followed by his grandson, Francis, the fifth Duke;, killed in 1802 by a blow from a tennis-ball. The sixth Duke was brother of the last. He died in 1839, and his son Francis, the seventh Duke, reigned in his stead until 1861. His son William next enjoyed the title until 1872, when it fell to his cousin, Francis, the ninth Duke, who in 1891, in his seventy-second year, committed suicide by shooting himself, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. An unsuccessful attempt was made to hush up the affair: the first reports to the newspapers declaring that he had died from congestion of the lungs.

The tenth Duke was a man of bloated and unwieldy proportions, who died suddenly in 1893, and was followed by his brother. It would appear, therefore, to recapitulate, that of the fourteen successive holders of the titles of Earl and Duke of Bedford, five only have been succeeded by their eldest sons. In all, there have been six deaths by various forms of violence, including those of the aged Lord William Russell, murdered in 1840 by his valet, Courvoisier, in Park Lane, and Lord Henry Russell, who was killed on shipboard in 1842, by a block falling on his head.

The Russells are by tradition Liberals in politics, but it is really only an astute abstract Liberalism, calculated to impress the unthinking, that they affect. I think of them, living behind their park walls, in their huge, hideous house, as a succession of bloated spiders, gorged but still unsatisfied, incredibly rich, incredibly wealthy, shamelessly mean: deriving from their London ground-rents an income that emperors might envy, and yet sharing no burdens and doing no work for the State.

The great mansion of Woburn Abbey stands in the middle of a park twelve miles in circumference: that is to say, for purposes of ready comparison, a quarter larger than Richmond Park. Of the Abbey itself nothing is left, and on the site of it stands the vast gloomy building begun by Flitcroft in 1744 for the fourth Duke, and looking more like some public institution of the asylum sort than a residence. It is a veritable treasure-house of art, jealously closed against visitors, except grudgingly, once a year, on the August Bank Holiday; but public paths run through a great portion of the park, lovely with its woody glades, still lakes, and couching fawns.

There is no doubt possible to even the most hurried wayfarer as to who owns the tiny townlet of Woburn, just outside the park. The great old coaching inn, the “Bedford Arms,” proclaims it, alike in its name and in the heraldic signboard, displaying the arms of the Russells and their motto, Che sara sara—i.e. “What will be, will be.” And, judging from the demeanour of the few people to be seen, the Dukes of Bedford own them too. It is not enough for the Dukes that they reside secluded in the midst of their wide-spreading park. They look with disfavour upon a town at their gates, even though that town be in fact but a village; and in consequence there is no new building in the place. If the prevailing Russell characteristic were not parsimony, there can scarce be any doubt that they would have razed Woburn to the ground; but that would cost something, an excruciating thought to this frugal race. Therefore Woburn remains very much what it was a hundred years ago. Cobblestones of the “petrified kidney” kind pave the road and footpaths, and the shops are of the kind in which Jane Austen might have bought her linen and her groceries. Quaint shop-fronts they are, with windows patterned like the glazed doors of antique bureaus. In short, Woburn is a rare and interesting relic of times past.

Expansion of business is a thing unthinkable here, and some shops, and some of the one-time many inns, have given up in despair. The only new, or comparatively new, things in Woburn are the parish church and the town hall: the last-named built in 1830, and the church in 1868, with alterations in 1890.

It is somewhat difficult to characterise the new church. When you have called it “Early English,” you momentarily think you have the style, but no: there is a florid, alien, meretricious manner in it that refuses classification. The peculiarly chalky white stone of which it is built is not pleasing. At any rate, it was ducally expensive: having cost the eighth Duke £30,000. The chief idea was the greater glorification of future Russells, whose tombs were intended to be placed here; but the constant reminder outside their own park that even Dukes of Bedford must die did not commend itself to others of the clan, and so their historic burial-place at Chenies, in Buckinghamshire, many miles distant, is retained. The angles of the church tower are finished off, against the sky-line, with four devils whose weird aspect, horse-like heads and curled manes impress me more than anything else, unless indeed it be the perfection of the magnificent lawn that slopes steeply to the road.

All the way from sleepy old Woburn to the modern, very much up-to-date, and bustling town of Woburn Sands the road passes through beautiful woodlands, echoing with the voices of pheasants, and rich in the odours of pine and beech and laurel. In midst of this scenery, the half-timbered “Henry the Eighth’s Lodge,” with clipped yew-trees, in shape like so many Stilton cheeses, is very striking. After these solitudes, Woburn Sands comes very much as a surprise, and to some perhaps not altogether a welcome one.

Woburn Sands is an entirely modern name. You will look in vain for it in the pages of Cary or Paterson, for in the old days of the road the place was merely an insignificant hamlet known by the unlovely name of Hogstye End. But things have happened since then. A branch line of the London and North-Western Railway was constructed, crossing the road at this point, and with a station at the roadside. Thus brought into touch with the outer world, the simple souls of Hogstye End arose as one man, and demanded a new name for the place: and so the title of Woburn Sands was invented. To-day, the astonished traveller sees a typical twentieth-century township on the site of Hogstye End: a rosy, red-brick place, growing at the expense of Woburn itself; and making strenuous claims to be a health-resort, by reason of the sandy soil and the wide-spreading fir-woods. The observant traveller will notice a singular testimony to the belief, until recently prevailing, that the days of the road were done, in the arrogant behaviour of the railway company at this point, in actually encroaching upon the main highway with the out-buildings of their station and the obstructing position of the gates of their level-crossing, often closed for ten minutes at a time during shunting operations.

Leaving Woburn Sands, we incidentally leave Bedfordshire and enter Bucks, coming in seven miles, past the unremarkable villages of Wavendon and Broughton, to the town of Newport Pagnell.