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. The house that he built seems sadly out of repair. The history of it is romantic to a degree. Originally the palace of the Bishops of Ely, whose delicate constitutions could not stand the fen-land vapours which enwrapped the neighbourhood of their glorious Cathedral (but perhaps were not harmful to the less dignified clergy!), it remained in their possession until it was coveted by Henry the Eighth, who gave some land at Ely in exchange. So the bishops had, doubtless with an ill grace, to go back to that fertile breeding-ground of agues and rheumatism, and one can well imagine the resident inferior clergy, between their aches and pains, chuckling secretly about this piece of poetic justice. 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.