Passing by Shortgrove Park and Uttlesford Bridge, the dirty and dismal station of Audley End is noticed, down the left-hand road we take, on the way to discover what manner of place “Wendens Ambo” may be. To the present historian nothing is more attractive than a place with an odd name, and he has gone unconscionable distances out of his way, often to find the most unusual names enshrining the most commonplace towns and villages. But not always. Here, for example, Wendens Ambo is a quaint, old-world place, characteristically Essexian. In the churchyard is a tombstone to William Nicholson, who died, aged 104, in 1886. He had been midshipman on Nelson’s Vanguard.

There are, or were, it seems, two Wendens—Great and Little. Their name derives from that Anglo-Saxon deity, Woden, who gives us the name of our Wednesday, i.e., “Woden’s day.” In 1662 the ruined church of Little Wenden was cleared away and the two parishes united. Great Wenden swallowed Little Wenden, and altered its name to the present Latinised form, thus proclaiming that the present church does for the two: Wendens Ambo meaning, when properly Englished, Both Wendens, and incorrectly written “Wenden’s” in the possessive case, as though the place were Ambo, belonging to some manorial Wenden:—Wenden, his Ambo.

Audley End Station takes its name from that great palace a mile distant, whose site was given to Lord Chancellor Audley by Henry VIII. in 1538. The Abbey of Walden then stood here; an ancient foundation built, like most monastic establishments, in a pleasant vale, beside a fishful stream. It was a noble piece of spoil, and probably the richest of all the plundered monastic tit-bits that came the artful Chancellor’s way. He was thus a great receiver of stolen property, but put a portion of his gains, at least, to good use, for he founded Magdalene College, Cambridge, as the epitaph on his tomb, in the course of surely one of the most shockingly bad puns in existence, tells us. The founder of “M—audley—n” College lies, indeed, in the beautiful church of Saffron Walden, within sight of Audley End, and there you shall read how—

The great pile of Audley End was not, however, reared in his time, and although when it arose it was given his name, which it still bears, it speedily, for lack of heirs of his blood, came into altogether alien hands. His daughter was sole heiress. She married, at the age of fourteen, Lord Henry Dudley, and when he died, became wife of the widowed fourth Duke of Norfolk. She died at the age of twenty-three, and the Duke then married for the third time, became for the third time a widower, and finally closed his career in the approved way by dabbling in conspiracy and getting beheaded for it. His son, that Lord Thomas Howard who so signally helped to destroy the Spanish Armada, was restored to the estates, made Lord High Treasurer and created successively Baron Howard de Walden and Earl of Suffolk. It was he who built the vastly spacious and vastly costly house of Audley End, of which the existing building, large though it be, is only a portion. In 1721, and again in 1749, great ranges of it were taken down by the then owners, unable to bear the enormous expense of maintaining so huge a place. The building and furnishing of Audley End are said to have cost the Lord High Treasurer not less than £200,000. He began the works in 1603, and not until thirteen years later were they completed. Well might James I., who visited the incomplete palace, declare, with sarcastic meaning, that “it was too much for a King, though it might do very well for a Lord Treasurer.” It was not an ill-founded belief that the treasury chests of the nation had been laid under contribution for the benefit of my Lord’s building extravagances. His wife, too, was credited in public opinion with receiving bribes from the Constable of Castile, and the saying thus arose that “Audley End was built with Spanish gold.” Whatever may be the truth of those charges, certainly this magnificent man rather overdid his magnificence, with the result that his descendants could not live in the place, and the third Earl sold it to Charles II. in 1666. At that time the King, who had already become a great patron of the Turf at Newmarket, had no adequate lodging there, and was easily persuaded to buy Audley End for £50,000. That easy-going monarch probably purchased Lord Suffolk’s white elephant more for the sake of relieving him of the burden of it than for any liking himself had taken to a place twenty miles away from Newmarket Heath, and therefore not in those times particularly convenient for seeing the races. Only £30,000 of the purchase money was ever paid: the rest remained on mortgage. For some few occasions Audley End was used by the Court, but chiefly by the more reputable section of it. Here, while Charles was housed at Newmarket with courtiers of an infamous stamp, the Queen and her household led a country life so remarkable for its dulness that on one occasion, in October, 1670, to save themselves from dying of ennui, they are found going in disguise to Saffron Walden fair. A curious contemporary letter tells of this interlude:—

“Last week there was a Faire neare Audley End, the Queen, the Dutchess of Richmond and the Dutchess of Buckingham had a frolick to disguise themselves like country-lasses, in red petticoates, wastcoates, etc., and soe goe see the Faire. Sir Bernard Gascoign, on a cart-jade, rode before the Queen, another stranger before Dutchesse of Buckingham, and M^r. Roper before Richmond. They all soe overdone it in their disguise, which look’d soe much more like the Antiques than Country volk, that as soon as they came to the Faire the people began to goe after them; but the Queen, going to a booth, to buy a pair of yellow stockings for her sweet hart, and Sir Bernard asking for a pair of gloves, stitcht with blue, for his sweet hart, they were soon, by their gebrish, found to be strangers, which drew a bigger flock about them. One amongst them had seen the Queen at dinner, knew her, and was proud of her knowledge: this soon brought all the Faire into a crowd, to stare at the Queen. But thus discovered, they, as soon as they could, got to their horses; but as many of the Faire as had horses got up with their wives, children, sweet harts, or neighbours behind them, to get as much gape as they could till they brought them to the Court gate. Thus, by ill conduct, was a merry frolick turned into a pennance.”

The Earl of Suffolk and his successors did not do so badly over this incompleted purchase, for to one of their kin was given the care of the place, together with the salaried post of Housekeeper and Keeper of the Wardrobe, and at last, in 1701, when it became evident that no King or Queen was ever likely to reside here, Audley End was reconveyed to the fifth Earl of Suffolk, on the easy terms of his undertaking to relinquish his claims to the outstanding £20,000. The Earls of Suffolk ended in 1745, when the tenth of that title died and was illegally succeeded in the property by his kinsman, the Earl of Effingham, from whom the Countess of Portsmouth, one of the two daughters and co-heiresses of Lord Griffin, who were the true but dispossessed owners, bought the house and estate. Her heir was her nephew, John Griffin Whitwell, who in 1788 became Baron Braybrooke. Again, on his death, childless, the property changed hands, coming into possession of the Nevilles, who still own it and the Braybrooke title.

That account tells something of the quick changes and varied fortunes of Audley End, but only a lengthy disquisition could describe its appearance and contents. Pepys in 1669 made something of an attempt, but the most convincing part of his discourse is that where he describes how the housekeeper “took us into the cellar, where we drank most admirable drink, a health to the King. Here I played on my flageolet, there being an excellent echo.” But the still more excellent echo seems to have been that echo of the first drink with which he refreshed himself after his flageolet-playing. He was here again, and once more in the cellars where it is not surprising that he found “much good liquors. And indeed the cellars are fine; and here my wife and I did sing, to my great content. And then to the garden, and there did eat many grapes, and took some with us.”

There is little use describing the contents of Audley End at second-hand, which is the only way it can be done, for the Braybrookes have excluded the public. But there are exceptionally fine views of the exterior from the high road, and from the slip road into Saffron Walden. From this last the fine bridge over the Cam comes effectively into the picture, but seen from the high road, the great house not only stands nakedly disclosed, across bare pastures, with never an intervening hedge or tree, but looks coldly inhospitable and desolate, even although the extensive stone front is designed in the rich Jacobean style. The prominent, copper-covered cupolas are a bright green.

But if Audley End does by no means look homely, the scenery is delightful. The road passes through an open common on the left, planted with park-like clumps of trees, and with the pretty feature of green alleys cut through dense coppices. Ahead, down the road, the red-brick gabled stables of the mansion, older than the mansion itself, lend a ruddy and cheerful tone. Beyond them the lodge-gates are passed: modern additions, with the great stone bull’s heads of the Nevilles’ crest surmounting the piers, and on the roof-ridge of the lodge an heraldic griffin ramped up on his hinder part and holding two daggers in his paws. He is a would-be impressive griffin, but his singularly apologetic attitude, like that of a French poodle on his hind legs, begging for biscuits and conscious all the while that he is making a fool of himself, is only laughable.