Haunted London
by Walter Thornbury · English · Gutenberg #41580 · 1,002,514 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Haunted London
Author: Walter Thornbury
Editor: Edward Walford
Illustrator: F. W. Fairholt
Release date: December 8, 2012 [eBook #41580]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAUNTED LONDON ***
HAUNTED LONDON
DR. JOHNSON’S OPINIONS OF LONDON.--“It is not in the showy evolution of
buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations, that the
wonderful immensity of London consists.... The happiness of London is not
to be conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say
there is more learning and science within the circumference of where we
now sit than in all the rest of the kingdom.... A man stores his mind [in
London] better than anywhere else.... No place cures a man’s vanity or
arrogance so well as London, for no man is either great or good, _per se_,
but as compared with others, not so good or great, and he is sure to find
in the metropolis many his equals and some his superiors.... No man of
letters leaves London without regret.... By seeing London I have seen as
much of life as the world can show.... When a man is tired of London he is
tired of life, for there is in London all life can afford, and [London] is
the fountain of intelligence and pleasure.”--_Boswell’s Life of Johnson._
BOSWELL’S OPINION OF LONDON.--“I have often amused myself with thinking
how different a place London is to different people. They whose narrow
minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit,
view it only through that medium, a politician thinks of it merely as the
seat of government, etc.; but the intellectual man is struck with it _as
comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the
contemplation of which is inexhaustible_.”--_Boswell’s Life of Johnson_
(Croker, 1848), p. 144.
HAUNTED LONDON
BY WALTER THORNBURY
EDITED BY EDWARD WALFORD, M.A.
[Illustration: TEMPLE BAR, 1761.]
_ILLUSTRATED BY F. W. FAIRHOLT, F.S.A._
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1880
PREFACE.
This book deals less with the London of the ghost-stories, the scratching
impostor in Cock Lane, or the apparition of Parson Ford at the Hummums,
than with the London consecrated by manifold traditions--a city every
street and alley of which teems with interesting associations, every
paving-stone of which marks, as it were, the abiding-place of some ancient
legend or biographical story; in short, this London of the present haunted
by the memories of the past.
The slow changes of time, the swifter destructions of improvement, and the
inevitable necessities of modern civilisation, are rapidly remodelling
London.
It took centuries to turn the bright, swift little rivulet of the Fleet
into a fœtid sewer, years to transform the palace at Bridewell into a
prison; but events now move faster: the alliance of money with enterprise,
and the absence of any organised resistance to needful though sometimes
reckless improvements, all combine to hurry forward modern changes.
If an alderman of the last century could arise from his sleep, he would
shudder to see the scars and wounds from which London is now suffering.
Viaducts stalk over our chief roads; great square tubes of iron lie heavy
as nightmares on the breast of Ludgate Hill. In Finsbury and Blackfriars
there are now to be seen yawning chasms as large and ghastly as any that
breaching cannon ever effected in the walls of a besieged city. On every
hand legendary houses, great men’s birthplaces, the haunts of poets, the
scenes of martyrdoms, and the battle-fields of old factions, heave and
totter around us. The tombs of great men, in the chinks of which the
nettles have grown undisturbed ever since the Great Fire, are now being
uprooted. Milton’s house has become part of the _Punch_ office. A printing
machine clanks where Chatterton was buried. Almost every moment some
building worthy of record is shattered by the pickaxes of ruthless
labourers. The noise of falling houses and uprooted streets even now in my
ears tells me how busily Time, the Destroyer and the Improver, is working;
erasing tombstones, blotting out names on street-doors, battering down
narrow thoroughfares, and effacing one by one the memories of the good,
the bad, the illustrious, and the infamous.
A sincere love of the subject, and a strong conviction of the importance
of the preservation of such facts as I have dredged up from the Sea of
Oblivion, have given me heart for my work. The gradual changes of Old
London, and the progress of civilisation westward, are worth noting by all
students of the social history of England. It will be found that many
traits of character, many anecdotes of interest, as illustrating
biography, are essentially connected with the habitations of the great men
who have either been born in London, or have resorted to it as the centre
of progress, art, commerce, government, learning, and culture. The fact of
the residence of a poet, a painter, a lawyer, or even a rogue, at any
definite date, will often serve to point out the social status he either
aimed at or had acquired. It helps also to show the exact relative
distinctions in fashion and popularity of different parts of London at
particular epochs, and contributes to form an illustrated history of
London, proceeding not by mere progression of time, and dealing with the
abstract city--the whole entity of London--but marching through street
after street, and detailing local history by districts at a time.
A century after the martyrs of the Covenant had shed their blood for the
good old cause, an aged man, mounted on a little rough pony, used
periodically to make the tour of their graves; with a humble and pious
care he would scrape out the damp green moss that filled up the letters
once so sharp and clear, cut away the thorny arches of the brambles, tread
down the thick, prickly undergrowth of nettles, and leave the brave names
of the dead men open to the sunlight. It is something like this that I
have sought to do with London traditions.
I have especially avoided, in every case, mixing truth with fiction. I
have never failed to give, where it was practicable, the actual words of
my authorities, rather than run the risk of warping or distorting a
quotation even by accident, or losing the flavour and charm of original
testimony. Aware of the paramount value of sound and verified facts, I
have not stopped to play with words and colours, nor to sketch imaginary
groups and processions. Such pictures are often false and only mislead;
but a fact proved, illustrated, and rendered accessible by index and
heading, is, however unpretentious, a contribution to history, and has
with certain inquirers a value that no time can lesson.
In a comprehensive work, dealing with so many thousand dates, and
introducing on the stage so many human beings, it is almost impossible to
have escaped errors. I can only plead for myself that I have spared no
pains to discover the truth. I have had but one object in view, that of
rendering a walk through London a journey of interest and of pilgrimage to
many shrines.
In some cases I have intentionally passed over, or all but passed over,
outlying streets that I thought belonged more especially to districts
alien to my present plan. Maiden Lane, for example, with its memories of
Voltaire, Marvell, and Turner, belongs rather to a chapter on Covent
Garden, of which it is a palpable appanage; and Chancery Lane I have left
till I come to Fleet Street.
I should be ungrateful indeed if, in conclusion, I did not thank Mr.
Fairholt warmly for his careful and valuable drawings on wood. To that
accomplished antiquary I am indebted, as my readers will see, for several
original sketches of bygone places, and for many curious illustrations
which I should certainly not have obtained without the aid of his learning
and research.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION pp. 1-3
CHAPTER II. TEMPLE BAR.
The Devil Tavern--London Bankers and Goldsmiths--A Whim
of John Bushnell, the Sculptor--Irritating Processions--
The Bonfire at Inner Temple Gate--A Barbarous Custom--
Called to the Bar--A Curious Old Print of 1746--The
White Cockades--An Execution on Kennington Common--
Shenstone’s “Jemmy Dawson”--Counsellor Layer--Dr.
Johnson in the Abbey--The Proclamation of the Peace of
Amiens--The Dispersion of the Armada--City Pageants and
Festivities--The Guildhall--The Guildhall Twin Giants--
Proclamation of War--A Reflection pp. 4-24
CHAPTER III. THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE).
Essex Street--Beheading a Bishop--Exeter Place--The
Gipsy Earl--Running a-muck--Lettice Knollys--A Portrait
of Essex--Robert, Earl of Essex, the Parliamentary
General--The Poisoning of Overbury--An Epicurean
Doctor--Clubable Men--The Grecian--The Templar’s
Lounge--Tom’s Coffee-house--A Princely Collector--“The
Long Strand”--“Honest Shippen”--Boswell’s Enthusiasm--
Sale and the Koran--The Infamous Lord Mohun--A fine
Rebuke--Jacob Tonson pp. 25-55
CHAPTER IV. SOMERSET HOUSE.
The Protector Somerset--Denmark House--The Queen’s
French Servants--The Lying-in-State of Cromwell--Scenes
at Somerset House--Sir Edmondbury Godfrey--Old Somerset
House--Erection of the Modern Building--Carlini’s
Grandeur--A Hive of Red Tapists--Expensive Auditing--The
Royal Society--The Geological and the Antiquarian
Societies--A Legend of Somerset House--St. Martin’s Lane
Academy--An Insult to Engravers--Rebecca’s Practical
Jokes--A Fashionable Man actually Surprised--Lying in
State pp. 56-81
CHAPTER V. THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE, CONTINUED).
The Folly--Fountain Court and Tavern--The Coal-hole--The
Kit-cat Club--Coutts’s Bank--The Eccentric Philosopher--
Old Salisbury House--Robert the Devil--Little Salisbury
House--Toby Matthew--Ivy Bridge--The Strand Exchange--
Durham House--Poor Lady Jane--The Parochial Mind--A
Strange Coalition--Garrick’s Haunt--Shipley’s School of
Art--Barry’s Temper--The Celestial Bed--Sir William
Curtis pp. 82-105
CHAPTER VI. THE SAVOY.
The Earl of Savoy--John Wickliffe--A French King
Prisoner--The Kentish Rebellion--John of Gaunt--The
Hospital of St. John--Cowley’s Regrets--Secret
Marriages--Conference between Church of England and
Presbyterian Divines--An Illegal Sanctuary--A Lampooned
General--A Fat Adonis--John Rennie--Waterloo Bridge--The
Duchy of Lancaster pp. 106-125
CHAPTER VII. FROM THE SAVOY TO CHARING CROSS.
York House--Lord Bacon--“To the Man with an Orchard give
an Apple”--“Steenie”--Buckingham Street--Zimri--York
Stairs--Pepys and Etty--Scenery on the Banks of the
Thames--The London Lodging of Peter the Great--The Czar
and the Quakers--The Hungerford Family--The Suspension
Bridge--Grinling Gibbons--The Two Smiths--Cross
Readings--Northumberland Street--Armed Clergymen pp. 126-145
CHAPTER VIII. THE NORTH SIDE OF THE STRAND (FROM TEMPLE BAR TO CHARING
CROSS).
Faithorne, the Engraver--The Stupendous Arch--The Murder
of Miss Ray--One of Wren’s Churches--Thomas Rymer--Dr.
Johnson at Church--Shallow’s Revelry--Low Comedy
Preachers--New Inn--Alas! poor Yorick!--The first
Hackney Coaches--Doyley--The Beef-steak Club--Beef and
Liberty--Madame Vestris--Old Thomson--Irene in a
Garret--Mathews at the Adelphi--The Bad Points of
Mathew’s Acting--The Old Adelphi--A Riot in a Theatre--
Dr. Johnson’s Eccentricities pp. 146-189
CHAPTER IX. CHARING CROSS.
The Gunpowder Plot--Lord Herbert’s Chivalry--A Schoolboy
Legend--Goldsmith’s Audience--Dobson Buried in a
Garret--Charing--Queen Eleanor--A Brave Ending--
Great-hearted Colonel Jones--King Charles at Charing
Cross--A Turncoat--A Trick of Curll’s--The Cock Lane
Ghost--Savage the Poet--The Mews--The Nelson Column--The
Trafalgar Square Fountains--Want of Pictures of the
English School--Turner’s Pictures--Mrs. Centlivre of
Spring Gardens--Maginn’s Verses--The Hermitage at
Charing Cross--Ben Jonson’s Grace--The Promised Land pp. 190-238
CHAPTER X. ST. MARTIN’S LANE.
A Certain Proof of Insanity--An Eccentric Character--
Experimentum Crucis--St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields--Gibb’s
Opportunity--St. Martin’s Church--Good Company--The
Thames Watermen--Copper Holmes--Old Slaughter’s--
Gardelle the Murderer--Hogarth’s Quack--St. Martin’s
Lane Academy--Hayman’s Jokes--The Old Watch-house and
Stocks--Garrick’s Tricks--An Encourager of Art--John
Wilkes--The Royal Society of Literature--The Artist
Quarter pp. 239-261
CHAPTER XI. LONG ACRE AND ITS TRIBUTARIES.
The Plague--Great Queen Street--Burning Panama--Lord
Herbert’s Poetry--Kneller’s Vanity--Conway House--
Winchester House--Ryan the Actor--An Eminent Scholar and
Antiquary--Miss Pope--The Freemasons’ Hall--Gentleman
Lewis--Franklin’s Self-denial--The Gordon Riots--Colonel
Cromwell--An Eccentric Poetaster--Black Will’s Rough
Repartee--Ned Ward--Prior’s Humble Cell--Stothard--The
Mug-houses--Charles Lamb pp. 262-286
CHAPTER XII. DRURY LANE.
Drury House--Donne’s Vision--Donne in his Shroud--The
Queen of Bohemia--Brave Lord Craven--An Anecdote of
Gondomar--Drury Lane Poets--Nell Gwynn--Zoffany--The
King’s Company--Memoranda by Pepys--Anecdotes of Joe
Haines--Mrs. Oldfield’s Good Sense--The Wonder of the
Town--Quin and Garrick--Barry and Garrick--The Bellamy--
The Siddons--Dicky Suett--Liston’s Hypochondria--The
First Play--Elliston’s Tears--The End of a Man about
Town--Edmund Kean--Grimaldi--Kelly and Malibran--Keeley
and Harley--Scenes at Drury Lane--“Wicked Will
Whiston”--Henley’s Butchers--“Il faut vivre”--Henley’s
Sermons--The Leaden Seals pp. 287-348
CHAPTER XIII. ST. GILES’S.
The Lollards--Cobham’s Death--The Lazar House--Holborn
First Paved--The Mud Deluge--French Protestants--The
Plague Cart--The Plague Time--Brought to his Knees--The
New Church--The Grave of Flaxman--The Thorntons--Hog
Lane--The Tyburn Bowl--The Swan on the Hop--The Irish
Deluge--Sham Abraham--Simon and his Dog--Hiring Babies--
Pavement Chalkers--Monmouth Street pp. 349-386
CHAPTER XIV. LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.
The Earl of Lincoln’s Garden--The Headless Chancellor--
Spelman a late Ripener--Denham and Wither--Lord
Lyndhurst--Warburton and Heber--Ben Jonson the
Bricklayer--A Murder in Whetstone Park--The Dangers of
Lincoln’s Inn Fields--Shelter in St. John’s Wood--Lord
William Russell--A Brave Wife--Pelham--The Caricature of
a Duke--Wilde and Best--Lindsey House--The Dukes of
Ancaster--Skeletons--Lady Fanshawe--Lord Kenyon’s
Latin--The Belzoni Sarcophagus--Sir John Soane--Worthy
Mrs. Chapone--The Duke’s House--Betterton--Mrs.
Bracegirdle--A Riot--Rich’s Pantomime--The Jump pp. 387-442
APPENDIX pp. 443-465
INDEX pp. 467-476
DESCRIPTIVE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
TEMPLE BAR, 1761, from a drawing by S. Wale. The view is
taken from the City side of the Bar, looking through the
arch to Butcher Row and St. Clement’s Church. The sign
projecting from the house to the spectator’s left is that
of the famous Devil Tavern _Vignette on Title_
PAGE
OLD HOUSES, SHIP YARD, TEMPLE BAR, circa 1761, from a plate
in Wilkinson’s _Londina Illustrata_ 4
THE LORD MAYOR’S SHOW. From the picture by Hogarth 19
TEMPLE BAR, 1746, copied from an undated print published soon
after the execution of the rebel adherents of the young
Pretender. The view is surrounded by an emblematic framework,
and contains representations of the heads of Townley and
Fletcher, remarkable as the last so exposed; they remained
there till 1772 23
ST. CLEMENT’S CHURCH AND THE STRAND IN 1753, from a print by
I. Maurer 25
TWO VIEWS OF ARUNDEL HOUSE, 1646, after Hollar. These views,
unique of their kind, are particularly valuable for the
clear idea they give of a noble London mansion of the period.
Arundel House retains many ancient features, particularly in
its dining-hall, which, with the brick residence for the
noble owner, is the only dignified portion of the building.
The rest has the character of an inn-yard--a mere collection
of ill-connected outhouses and stabling. The shed with the
tall square window in the roof was the depository of the
famous collection of pictures and antiques made by the
renowned Earl, part of which still forms the Arundel
Collection at Oxford 40, 41
PENN’S HOUSE, NORFOLK STREET, 1749, from a view by J. Buck.
The view is taken from the river, looking up Norfolk Street
to a range of old houses, still standing, in the Strand.
Penn’s house was the last on the west side of the street (to
the spectator’s left), overlooking the water 55
SOMERSET HOUSE FROM THE RIVER, 1746, from an engraving by I.
Knyff. Upon a barge moored in the river is seen the famous
coffee-house known as “The Folly,” which, originally used as
a musical summer-house, ended in being the resort of depravity 56
STRAND FRONT OF SOMERSET HOUSE, 1777, from a large engraving
after I. Moss 80
JACOB TONSON’S BOOK-SHOP, 1742, from an etching by Benoist.
The shop of this famous bibliopole was opposite Catherine
Street. The view is obtained from the background of the
print representing a burlesque procession of Masons, got up
by some humourist in ridicule of the craft 82
OLD HOUSES IN THE STRAND, 1742, copied from the same print as
the preceding view. These houses stood on the site of the
present Wellington Street 104
THE SAVOY, FROM THE THAMES, IN 1650, after Hollar 106
THE SAVOY CHAPEL, from an original drawing 119
THE SAVOY PRISON, 1793, from an etching by J. T. Smith 125
DURHAM HOUSE, 1790, from an etching by J. T. Smith 126
THE WATER GATE, 1860, from a Sketch 133
YORK STAIRS AND SURROUNDING BUILDINGS, circa 1745, after an
original drawing by Canaletti in the British Museum. This is
one of the few interesting views of Old London sketched by
Canaletti during his short stay in England. It comprises the
famous water-gate designed by Inigo Jones, and the tall
wooden tower of the York Buildings Water Company. The large
mansion behind this (at the south-west corner of Buckingham
Street) was that inhabited by Pepys from 1684, and in which
he entertained the members of the Royal Society during his
presidency. The house at the opposite corner (seen above the
trees) is that in which the Czar Peter the Great resided for
some time, when he visited England for instruction in
shipbuilding 144
CROCKFORD’S FISH-SHOP, from an original sketch 146
THE OLD ROMAN BATH, from a drawing 169
EXETER CHANGE, 1821, from an etching by Cooke 188
TITUS OATES IN THE PILLORY, from an anonymous contemporary
Dutch engraving 190
THE KING’S MEWS, 1750, from a print by I. Maurer. This
building, erected in 1732 at the expense of King George II.,
was pulled down in 1830. In the foreground of this view the
King is represented returning to his carriage after
inspecting his horses 238
BARRACK AND OLD HOUSES on the site of Trafalgar Square in
1826, from an original sketch by F. W. Fairholt. The view is
taken from St. Martin’s Church, looking toward Pall Mall;
the building in the distance, to the left, is the College of
Physicians 239
OLD SLAUGHTER’S COFFEE-HOUSE, 1826, from an original sketch
by F. W. Fairholt 260
SALISBURY AND WORCESTER HOUSES IN 1630, from a drawing by
Hollar in the Pepysian Library, Cambridge 262
LYON’S INN, 1804, from an engraving in Herbert’s _History of
the Inns of Court_ 286
CRAVEN HOUSE, 1790, from an original drawing in the British
Museum 287
DRURY LANE THEATRE, 1806, from an original drawing by Pugin.
This was the _third_ theatre, succeeding Garrick’s. It was
built by Henry Holland, opened March 12, 1794, and burnt down
Feb. 24, 1809. It was never properly finished on the side
toward Catherine Street, where this view was taken 347
CHURCH LANE AND DYOT STREET, from an original sketch by F. W.
Fairholt 349
THE SEVEN DIALS, from an original sketch by F. W. Fairholt 386
LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS THEATRE IN 1821, from an original sketch
by F. W. Fairholt 387
THE BLACK JACK, Portsmouth Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from
an original sketch by F. W. Fairholt. This public-house was
the resort of the actors from the theatre, and among them Joe
Miller, who was buried in the graveyard close by, where the
hospital now stands. The house was also frequented by Jack
Sheppard, and was sometimes termed “The Jump,” from the
circumstance of his having once jumped from one of the
first-floor windows to escape from officers of justice 441
HAUNTED LONDON.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
One day when Fuseli and Haydon were walking together, they reached the
summit of a hill whence they could catch a glimpse of St. Paul’s.
There was the grey dome looming out by fits through rolling drifts of
murky smoke. The two little lion-like men stood watching “the sublime
canopy that shrouds the city of the world.”[1] Now it spread and seethed
like the incense from Moloch’s furnace; now it lifted and thinned into the
purer blue, like the waft of some great sacrifice, or settled down to
deeper and gloomier grandeur over “the vastness of modern Babylon.” That
brown cloud hid a huge ants’ nest teeming with three millions of people.
That dome, with its golden coronet and cross, rose like the globe in an
emperor’s hand--a type of the civilisation, and power, and Christianity of
England.
The hearts of the two men beat faster at the great sight.
“Be George!” said Fuseli, shaking his white hair and stamping his little
foot, “be George! sir, it’s like the smoke of the Israelites making bricks
for the Egyptians.”
“It is grander, Fuseli,” said Haydon, “for it is the smoke of a people who
would _have made the Egyptians make bricks for them_.”
It is of the multitudinous streets of this more than Egyptian city, their
traditions, and their past and present inhabitants, that I would now
write. I shall not pass by many houses where any eminent men dwell or
dwelt, without some biographical anecdote, some epigram, some
illustration; yet I will not stop long at any door, because so many others
await me. I have “set down,” I hope, “nought in malice.” Truth I trust has
been, and truth alone shall be, my object. I shall stay at Charing Cross
to point out the heroism of the dying regicides; I shall pause at
Whitehall to narrate some redeeming traits even in the character of a
wilful king.
The growth of London, and its conquest of suburb after suburb, has roused
the imagination of poets and essayists ever since the days of Queen
Elizabeth.
When James I. forbade the building of fresh houses outside London walls,
he little foresaw the time when the City would become almost impassable;
when practical men would burrow roads under ground, or make subterranean
railways to drain off the choking traffic; when cool-headed people would
seriously propose to have flying bridges thrown over the chief
thoroughfares; when new manners and customs, new diseases, new follies,
new social complications would arise, from the fact of three millions of
men silently agreeing to live together on only eleven square miles of
land; when fish would cease to inhabit the poisoned river; when the roar
of the traffic would render it almost impossible to converse; when, in
fact, London would grow too large for comfort, safety, pleasure, or even
social intercourse.
It is difficult to select from what centre to commence a pilgrimage. For
old Roman London we might start from the Exchange or the Tower; for
mediæval London from Chepe or Aldermanbury; for fashionable London from
Charing Cross; for Shaksperean London from the Globe or Blackfriars. Even
then our tours would be circuitous, and sometimes retrograde, and we
should turn and double like hares before the hounds.
I have for several reasons, therefore, and after some consideration,
decided to start from Temple Bar, and walk westward along the Strand to
Charing Cross; then to turn up St. Martin’s Lane, and return by Longacre
and Drury Lane to Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields.
That walk embraces the long line of palaces which once adorned the Strand,
or river-bank street, the countless haunts of artists in St. Martin’s
Lane, the legends of Longacre, the theatrical reminiscences of Drury Lane,
and the old noblemen’s houses in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields. It comprises a
period not so remote as East London, and not so modern as that of the West
End. It brings us acquainted not only with many of the contemporaries of
Shakspere and Dryden, but also with many celebrities of Garrick’s time and
of Dr. Johnson’s age.
If this is not the best point of departure, it has at least much to be
said in its favour, as the loop I have drawn includes nothing intramural,
and comprises a part of London inhabited by persons who lived more within
the times of memoir-writing than those in the farther East,--a district,
too, more within the range of the antiquary than the newer region of the
West.
I trust that in these remarks I have in some degree explained why I have
spent so much time in pouring “old wine into new bottles.”
A preface is too often a pillory made by an author, in which he exposes
himself to a shower of the most unsavoury missiles. I trust that mine may
be considered only as a wayside stone on which I stand to offer a fitting
apology for what I trust is a venial fault.
It is the glory of my old foster-mother, London, I would celebrate; it is
her virtues and her crimes I would record. Her miles of red-tiled roofs,
her quiet green squares, her vast black mountain of a cathedral, her
silver belt of a river, her acres and acres of stony terraces, her
beautiful parks, her tributary fleets, seem to me as so many episodes in
one great epic, the true delineation of which would form a new chapter in
the HISTORY OF MANKIND.
[Illustration: SHIP YARD, TEMPLE BAR, 1761.]
CHAPTER II.
TEMPLE BAR.
Temple Bar, that old dingy gateway of blackened Portland stone which
separates the Strand from Fleet Street, the City from the Shire, and the
Freedom of the City of London from the Liberty of the City of Westminster,
was built by Sir Christopher Wren in the year 1670, four years after the
Great Fire, and ten after the Restoration.
In earlier days there were at this spot only posts, rails, and a chain, as
at Holborn, Smithfield, and Whitechapel. In later times, however, a house
of timber was erected, with a narrow gateway and one passage on the south
side.[2]
The original Bar seems to have crossed Fleet Street, several yards farther
to the east of its successor. In the time of James I. it consisted of an
iron railing with a gate in the middle. A man sat on the spot for many
years after the erection of the new gate, to take toll from all carts
which had not the City arms painted on them.
Temple Bar, if described now in an architect’s catalogue, would be noted
as pierced with two side posterns for foot passengers, and having a
central flattened archway for carriages. In the upper story is an
apartment with semicircular arched windows on the eastern and western
sides, and the whole is crowned with a sweeping pediment.
On the western or Westminster side there are two niches, in which are
placed mean statues of Charles I. and Charles II. in fluttering Roman
robes, and on the east or Fleet Street side there are statues of James I.
and Queen Elizabeth. They are all remarkable for their small feeble heads,
their affected and crinkled drapery, and the piebald look produced by
their projecting hands and feet being washed white by years of rain, while
the rest of their bodies remains a sooty black.
The upper room is held of the City by the partners of the very ancient
firm of Messrs. Child, bankers. There they store their books and records,
as in an old muniment-chamber. The north side ground floor, next to Shire
Lane, was occupied as a barber’s shop from the days of Steele and the
_Tatler_.
The centre slab on the east side of Temple Bar once contained the
following inscription, now all but obliterated:--“Erected in the year
1670, Sir Samuel Sterling, Mayor; continued in the year 1671, Sir Richard
Ford, Lord Mayor; and finished in the year 1672, Sir George Waterman,
Lord Mayor.” It is probable that the corresponding western slab, and also
the smaller one over the postern, once bore inscriptions.
Temple Bar was doomed to destruction by the City as early as 1790, through
the exertions of Alderman Picket. “Threatened men live long,” says an old
Italian proverb. Temple Bar still stands[3] a narrow neck to an immense
decanter; an impeder of traffic, a venerable nuisance, with nothing
interesting but its associations and its dirt. But then let us remember
that as Holborn Hill has tormented horses and drivers ever since the
Conquest, and its steepness is not yet in any way mitigated,[4] we must
not expect hasty reforms in London.
It does not enter into my purpose (unless I walked like a crab, backwards)
to give the history of Child’s bank. Suffice it for me to say that it
stands on part of the site of the old Devil Tavern, kept by old Simon
Wadloe, where Ben Jonson held his club. It was taken down in 1788, and
Child’s Place built in its stead.[5] Alderman Backwell, who was ruined by
the shutting up of the Exchequer in the reign of Charles II., and became a
partner in this, the oldest banking-house in London, was the agent for
Government in the sale of Dunkirk to the French.
Pepys makes frequent allusions to his friend Child, probably one of the
founders of this bank. The Duke of York opposed his interference in
Admiralty matters, and had a quarrel with a gentleman who declared that
whoever impugned Child’s honesty must be a knave. Child wrote an
enlightened work on Indian trade, supporting the interests of the East
India Company.
Apollo Court, exactly opposite the bank, marks a passage that once faced
the Apollo room, from whose windows Ben Jonson must have often glowered
and Herrick laughed.
Archenholz says that in his day there were forty-eight bankers in London.
“The Duke of Marlborough,” writes the Prussian traveller, “had some years
ago in the hands of Child the banker, a fund of ten, fifteen, or twenty
thousand pounds. Drummond had often in his hands several hundred thousand
pounds at one time belonging to the Government.”[6]
In the earliest London Directory (1677),[7] among “the goldsmiths that
keep running cashes,” we find “Richard Blanchard and Child, at the
Marygold in Fleet Street.” The huge marigold (really a sun in full shine),
above four feet high, the original street-sign of the old goldsmiths at
Temple Bar, is still preserved in one of the rooms of Child’s bank.
John Bushnell, the sculptor who executed the statues on Temple Bar, being
compelled by his master, Burman, of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, to marry a
discarded servant-maid, went to Italy, and resided in Rome and Venice, and
in the latter place executed a monument to a Procuratore, representing a
naval engagement between the Venetians and the Turks. His best works are
Cowley’s monument, that of Sir Palmes Fairborne in Westminster Abbey, and
Lord Mordaunt’s statue in Fulham church. He also executed the statues of
Charles I., Charles II., and Sir Thomas Gresham for the Royal Exchange. He
had agreed to complete the set of kings, but Cibber being also engaged,
Bushnell would not finish the six or seven he had begun. Being told by
rival sculptors that he could carve only drapery, and not the naked
figure, he produced a very despicable Alexander the Great.
The next whim of this vain, fantastic, and crazy man, was to prove that
the Trojan Horse could really have been constructed.[8] He therefore had a
wooden horse built with huge timbers, which he proposed to cover with
stucco. The head held twelve men and a table; the eyes served as windows.
Before it was half completed, however, it was demolished by a storm of
wind, and no entreaties of the two vintners who had contracted to use the
horse for a drinking booth could induce the mortified projector to rebuild
the monster, which had already cost him £500. A wiser plan of his, that of
bringing coal to London by sea, also miscarried; and the loss of an estate
in Kent, through an unsuccessful lawsuit, completed the overthrow of
Bushnell’s never very well-balanced brain. He died in 1701, and was buried
at Paddington. His two sons (to one of whom he left £100 a year, and to
the other £60) became recluses, moping in an unfinished house of their
father’s, facing Hyde Park, in the lane leading from Piccadilly to Tyburn,
now Park Lane. This strange abode had neither staircase nor doors, but
there they brooded, sordid and impracticable, saying that the world had
not been worthy of their father. Vertue, in 1728, describes a visit to the
house, which was then choked with unfinished statues and pictures. There
was a ruined cast of an intended brass equestrian statue of Charles II.:
an Alexander and other unfinished kings completed the disconsolate
brotherhood. Against the wall leant a great picture of a classic triumph,
almost obliterated; and on the floor lay a bar of iron, as thick as a
man’s wrist, that had been broken by some forgotten invention of
Bushnell’s.
After the discovery of the absurd Meal-Tub Plot, in 1679, the 17th of
November, the anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth was kept,
according to custom, as a high Protestant festival, and celebrated by an
extraordinary procession, at the expense of the Green-Ribbon Club, a few
citizens, and some gentlemen of the Temple. The bells began to ring out at
three o’clock in the morning; at dusk the procession began at Moorgate,
and passed through Cheapside and Fleet Street, where it ended with a huge
bonfire, “just over against the Inner Temple gate.”[9]
The stormy procession was thus constituted:--
1. Six whifflers, in pioneer caps and red waistcoats, who cleared the
way. 2. A bellman, ringing his bell, and with a doleful voice crying,
“Remember Justice Godfrey.” 3. A dead body, representing the wood-merchant
of Hartshorne Lane (Sir E. Godfrey), in a decent black habit, white
gloves, and the cravat wherewith he was murdered about his neck, with
spots of blood on his wrists, breast, and shirt. This figure was held on a
white horse by a man representing one of the murderers. 4. A priest in a
surplice and cope, embroidered with bones, skulls, and skeletons. He
handed pardons to all who would meritoriously murder Protestants. 5. A
priest, bearing a great silver cross. 6. Four Carmelite friars, in white
and black robes. 7. Four Grey Friars. 8. Six Jesuits with bloody daggers.
9. The waits, playing all the way. 10. Four bishops in purple, with lawn
sleeves, golden crosses on their breasts, and croziers in their hands. 11.
Four other bishops, in full pontificals (copes and surplices), wearing
gilt mitres. 12. Six cardinals, in scarlet robes and caps. 13. The Pope’s
chief physician, with Jesuits’ powder and other still more grotesque
badges of his office. 14. Two priests in surplices, bearing golden
crosses. 15. Then came the centre of all this pageant, the Pope himself,
sitting in a scarlet and gilt fringed chair of state. His feet were on a
cushion, supported by two boys in surplices, with censers and white silk
banners, painted with red crosses and bloody consecrated daggers. His
Holiness wore a scarlet gown, lined with ermine and daubed with gold and
silver lace. On his head he had the triple tiara, and round his neck a
gilt collar, strung with precious stones, beads, Agnus Dei’s, and St.
Peter’s keys. At the back of his chair climbed and whispered the devil,
who hugged and caressed him, and sometimes urged him aloud to kill King
Charles, or to forge a Protestant plot and to fire the city again, for
which purpose he kept a torch ready lit.
The number of spectators in the balconies and windows was computed at two
hundred thousand. A hundred and fifty flambeaux followed the procession by
order, and as many more came as volunteers.
Roger North also describes a fellow with a stentorophonic tube (a
speaking-trumpet), who kept bellowing out--“Abhorrers! abhorrers!”[10]
Lastly came a complaisant, civil gentleman, who was meant to represent
either Sir Roger l’Estrange, or the King of France, or the Duke of York.
“Taking all in good part, he went on his way to the fire.”
At Temple Bar some of the mob had crowned the statue of Elizabeth with
gilt laurel, and placed in her hand a gilt shield with the motto, “The
Protestant Religion and Magna Charta.” A spear leant against her arm, and
the niche was lit with candles and flambeaux, so that, as North said, she
looked like the goddess Pallas, the object of some solemn worship and
sacrifice.
All this time perpetual battles and skirmishes went on between the Whigs
and Tories at the different windows, and thousands of volleys of squibs
were discharged.
When the pope was at last toppled into the fire a prodigious shout was
raised, that spread as far as Somerset House, where the queen then was,
and, as a pamphleteer of the time says, before it ceased, reached
Scotland, France, and even Rome.
From these processions the word MOB (_mobile vulgus_) became introduced
into our language.[11] In 1682, Charles II. tried to prohibit this annual
festival, but it continued nevertheless till the reign of Queen Anne, or
even later.[12]
At Temple Bar, where the houses seemed turned into mountains of heads, and
many fireworks were let off, a man representing the English cardinal
(Philip Howard, brother of the Duke of Norfolk) sang a rude part-song with
other men who personated the people of England. The cardinal first
began:--
“From York to London town we come
To talk of Popish ire,
To reconcile you all to Rome,
And prevent Smithfield fire.”
To which the people replied, valorously:--
“Cease, cease, thou Norfolk cardinal,
See! yonder stands Queen Bess,
Who saved our souls from Popish thrall:
Oh, Bess! Queen Bess! Queen Bess!
“Your Popish plot, and Smithfield threat,
We do not fear at all,
For, lo! beneath Queen Bess’s feet,
You fall! you fall! you fall!
“’Tis true our king’s on t’other side,
A looking t’wards Whitehall,
But could we bring him round about,
He’d counterplot you all.
“Then down with James and up with Charles,
On good Queen Bess’s side,
That all true commons, lords, and earls
May wish him a fruitful bride.
“Now God preserve great Charles our king,
And eke all honest men,
And traitors all to justice bring:
Amen! Amen! Amen!”
It was formerly the barbarous and brutal custom to place the heads and
quarters of traitors upon Temple Bar as scarecrows to all persons who did
not consider William of Orange, or the Elector of Hanover, the rightful
possessors of the English crown.
Sir Thomas Armstrong was the first to help to deck Wren’s new arch. When
Shaftesbury fled in 1683, and the Court had partly discovered his
intrigues with Monmouth and the Duke of Argyle, the more desperate men of
the Exclusion Party plotted to stop the king’s coach as he returned from
Newmarket to London, at the Rye House, a lonely mansion near Hoddesden.
The plot was discovered, and Monmouth escaped to Holland. In the meantime
the informers dragged Russell and Sydney into the scheme, for which they
were falsely put to death. Sir Thomas Armstrong, who had been taken at
Leyden and delivered up to the English Ambassador at the Hague, claimed a
trial as a surrendered outlaw, according to the 6th Edward VI. But Judge
Jeffreys refused him his request, as he had not surrendered voluntarily,
but had been brought by force. Armstrong still claiming the benefit of the
law, the brutal judge replied:--“And the benefit of the law you shall
have, by the grace of God. See that execution be done on Friday next,
according to law.”
Armstrong had sinned deeply against the king. He had sold himself to the
French ambassador, he had urged Monmouth on in his undutiful conduct to
his father, and he had been an active agent in the Rye House Plot. Charles
would listen to no voice in his favour. On the scaffold he denied any
intention of assassinating the king or changing the form of
government.[13]
Sir William Perkins and Sir John Friend were the next unfortunate
gentlemen who lent their heads to crown the Bar. They were rash,
hot-headed Jacobites, who, too eagerly adopting the “ultima ratio” of
political partisans, had planned, in 1696, to stop King William’s coach in
a deep lane between Brentford and Turnham Green, as he returned from
hunting at Richmond. Sir John Friend was a person who had acquired wealth
and credit from mean beginnings, but Perkins was a man of fortune,
violently attached to King James, though as one of the six clerks of
Chancery he had taken the oath to the new Government. Friend owned that he
had been at a treasonable meeting at the King’s Head Tavern in Leadenhall
Street, but denied connivance in the assassination-plot. Perkins made an
artful and vigorous defence, but the judge acted as counsel for the Crown
and guided the jury. They both suffered at Tyburn, three nonjuring
clergymen absolving them, much to the indignation of the loyal
bystanders.[14]
John Evelyn calls the sight of Temple Bar “a dismal sight.”[15] Thank God,
this revolting spectacle of traitors’ heads will never be seen here again.
In 1716 Colonel Henry Oxburgh’s head was added to the quarters of Sir
John Friend (a brewer) and the skull of Sir William Perkins. Oxburgh was a
Lancashire gentleman, who had served in the French army. General Foster
(who escaped from Newgate, in 1716) had made him colonel directly he
joined the Pretender’s army. To him, too, had been entrusted the
humiliating task of proposing capitulation to the king’s troops at
Preston, when the Highlanders, frenzied with despair, were eager to sally
out and cut their way through the enemy’s dragoons. He met death with a
serene temper. A fellow-prisoner described his words as coming “like a
gleam from God. You received comfort,” he says, “from the man you came to
comfort.” Oxburgh was executed at Tyburn, May 14; his body was buried at
St. Giles’, all but his head, and that was placed on Temple Bar two days
afterwards.
A curious print of 1746 represents Temple Bar with the three heads raised
on tall poles or iron rods. The devil looks down in triumph and waves the
rebel banner, on which are three crowns and a coffin, with the motto, “A
crown or a grave.” Underneath are written these wretched verses:
“Observe the banner which would all enslave,
Which ruined traytors did so proudly wave.
The devil seems the project to despise;
A fiend confused from off the trophy flies.
“While trembling rebels at the fabrick gaze,
And dread their fate with horror and amaze,
Let Briton’s sons the _emblematick_ view,
And plainly see what to rebellion’s due.”
A curious little book “by a member of the Inner Temple,” which has
preserved this print, has also embalmed the following stupid and
cold-blooded impromptu on the heads of Oxburgh, Townley, and Fletcher:--
“Three heads here I spy,
Which the glass did draw nigh,
The better to have a good sight;
Triangle they’re placed,
Old, bald, and barefaced,
Not one of them e’er was upright.”[16]
The heads of Fletcher and Townley were put up on Temple Bar August 2,
1746. On August 16, Walpole writes to Montague to say that he had “passed
under the new heads at Temple Bar, where people made a trade of letting
spying-glasses at a halfpenny a look.”
Townley was a young officer about thirty-eight years of age, born at
Wigan, and of a good family. His uncle had been out in 1715, but was
acquitted on his trial. Townley had been fifteen years abroad in the
French army, and was close to the Duke of Berwick when the duke’s head was
shot off at the siege of Philipsburgh. When the Highlanders came into
England he met them near Preston, and received from the young Pretender a
commission to raise a regiment of foot. He had been also commandant at
Carlisle, and directed the sallies from thence.
Fletcher, a young linen chapman at Salford, had been seen pulling off his
hat and shouting when a sergeant and a drummer were beating up for
volunteers at the Manchester Exchange. He had been seen also at Carlisle,
dressed as an officer, with a white cockade in his hat and a plaid sash
round his waist.[17]
Seven other Jacobites were executed on Kennington Common with Fletcher and
Townley. They were unchained from the floor of their room in Southwark new
gaol early in the morning, and having taken coffee, had their irons
knocked off. They were then, at about ten o’clock, put into three sledges,
each drawn by three horses. The executioner, with a drawn scimitar, sat in
the first sledge with Townley; a party of dragoons and a detachment of
foot-guards conducted him to the gallows, near which a pile of faggots and
a block had been placed. While the prisoners were stepping from their
sledges into a cart drawn up beneath a tree, the wood was set on fire, and
the guards formed a circle round the place of execution. The prisoners had
no clergyman, but Mr. Morgan, one of their number, put on his spectacles
and read prayers to them, which they listened and responded to with
devoutness. This lasted above an hour. Each one then threw his
prayer-book and some written papers among the spectators; they also
delivered notes to the sheriff, and then flung their hats into the crowd.
“Six of the hats,” says the quaint contemporary account, “were laced with
gold,--all of these prisoners having been genteelly dressed.” Immediately
after, the executioner took a white cap from each man’s pocket and drew it
over his eyes; then they were turned off. When they had hung about three
minutes, the executioner pulled off their shoes, white stockings, and
breeches, a butcher removing their other clothes. The body of Mr. Townley
was then cut down and laid upon a block, and the butcher seeing some signs
of life remaining, struck it on the breast, then took out the bowels and
the heart, and threw them into the fire. Afterwards, with a cleaver, they
severed the head and placed it with the body in the coffin. When the last
heart, which was Mr. Dawson’s, was tossed into the fire, the executioner
cried, “God save King George!” and the immense multitude gave a great
shout. The heads and bodies were then removed to Southwark gaol to await
the king’s pleasure.
According to another account the bodies were cloven into quarters; and as
the butcher held up each heart he cried, “Behold the heart of a traitor!”
Mr. James Dawson, one of the unhappy men thus cruelly punished, was a
young Lancashire gentleman of fortune, just engaged to be married. The
unhappy lady followed his sledge to the place of execution, and approached
near enough to see the fire kindled and all the other dreadful
preparations. She bore it well till she heard her lover was no more, but
then drew her head back into the coach, and crying out, “My dear, I follow
thee!--I follow thee! Sweet Jesus, receive our souls together!” fell on
the neck of a companion and expired. Shenstone commemorated this
occurrence in a plaintive ballad called “Jemmy Dawson.”
Mr. Dawson is described as “a mighty gay gentleman, who frequented much
the company of the ladies, and was well respected by all his acquaintance
of either sex for his genteel deportment. He was as strenuous for their
vile cause as any one in the rebel army. When he was condemned and double
fettered, he said he did not care if they were to put a ton weight of iron
on him; it would not in the least daunt his resolution.”[18]
On January 20 (between 2 and 3 A.M.), 1766, a man was taken up for
discharging musket-bullets from a steel crossbow at the two remaining
heads upon Temple Bar. On being examined he affected a disorder in his
senses, and said his reason for doing so was “his strong attachment to the
present Government, and that he thought it was not sufficient that a
traitor should merely suffer death; that this provoked his indignation,
and that it had been his constant practice for three nights past to amuse
himself in the same manner. And it is much to be feared,” says the
recorder of the event, “that he is a near relation to one of the unhappy
sufferers.”[19] Upon searching this man, about fifty musket-bullets were
found on him, wrapped up in a paper with a motto--“Eripuit ille vitam.”
“Yesterday,” says a news-writer of the 1st of April, 1772, “one of the
rebel heads on Temple Bar fell down. There is only one head now
remaining.”
The head that fell was probably that of Councillor Layer, executed for
high treason in 1723. The blackened head was blown off the spike during a
violent storm. It was picked up by Mr. John Pearce, an attorney, one of
the Nonjurors of the neighbourhood, who showed it to some friends at a
public-house, under the floor of which it was buried. In the meanwhile Dr.
Rawlinson, a Jacobite antiquarian, having begged for the relic, was
imposed on with another. In his will the doctor desired to be buried with
this head in his right hand,[20] and the request was complied with.
This Dr. Rawlinson, one of the first promoters of the Society of
Antiquaries, and son of a lord mayor of London, died in 1755. His body was
buried in St. Giles’ churchyard, Oxford, and his heart in St. John’s
College. The sale of his effects lasted several days, and produced £1164.
He left upwards of 20,000 pamphlets; his coins he bequeathed to Oxford.
The last of the iron poles or spikes on which the heads of the unfortunate
Jacobite gentlemen were fixed, was removed only at the commencement of the
present century.[21]
The above-named Christopher Layer was a barrister, living in Old
Southampton Buildings, who had engaged in a plot to seize the Bank and the
Tower, to arm the Minters in Southwark, to seize the king, Walpole, and
Lord Cadogan, to place cannon on the terrace of Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields
gardens, and to draw a force of armed men together at the Exchange. The
prisoner had received blank promissory-notes signed in the Pretender’s own
hand, and also treasonable letters full of cant words of the party in
disguised names--such as Mr. Atkins for the Pretender, Mrs. Barbara Smith
for the army, and Mr. Fountaine for himself.
It was proved that, at an audience in Rome, Layer had assured the
Pretender that the South Sea losses had done good to his cause; and the
Pretender and the Pretender’s wife (through their proxies, Lord North and
Grey, and the Duchess of Ormond) had stood as godfather and godmother to
his (Layer’s) daughter’s child.
He was executed at Tyburn in May 1723, and avowed his principles even
under the gallows. His head was taken to Newgate, and the next day fixed
upon Temple Bar; but his quarters were delivered to his relations to be
decently interred.
In April 1773 Boswell dined at Mr. Beauclerk’s with Dr. Johnson, Lord
Charlemont, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and some other members of the Literary
Club--it being the evening when Boswell was to be balloted for as
candidate for admission into that distinguished society.[22] The
conversation turned on Westminster Abbey, and on the new and commendable
practice of erecting monuments to great men in St. Paul’s; upon which the
doctor observed--
“I remember once being with Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey. While we
surveyed the Poets’ Corner, I said to him--
‘Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur illis.’
When we got to Temple Bar he stopped me, pointed to the heads upon it, and
slily whispered--
‘Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur _istis_.’”[23]
This walk must have taken place a year or two before 1773, for in 1772, as
we have seen, the last head but one fell.
O’Keefe, the dramatist, who arrived in England on August 12, 1762, the day
on which the Prince of Wales (afterwards George IV.) was born, describes
the heads of poor Townley and Fletcher as stuck up on high poles, not over
the central archway, but over the side posterns. Parenthetically he
mentions that he had also seen the walls of Cork gaol garnished with
heads, like the ramparts of the seraglio at Constantinople.[24]
O’Keefe tells us that he heard the unpopular peace of 1763 proclaimed at
Temple Bar, and witnessed the heralds in the Strand knock at the city
gate. The duke of Nivernois, the French ambassador on that occasion, was a
very little man, who wore a coat of richly-embroidered blue velvet, and a
small _chapeau_, which set the fashion of the Nivernois hat.[25]
At the proclamation of the short peace of Amiens, the king’s marshal, with
his officers, having ridden down the Strand from Westminster, stopped at
Temple Bar, which was kept shut to show that there commenced the Lord
Mayor’s jurisdiction. The herald’s trumpets were blown thrice; the junior
officer then tapped at the gate with his cane, upon which the City
marshal, in the most unconscious way possible, answered, “Who is there?”
The herald replied, “The officers-of-arms, who seek entrance into the City
to publish his majesty’s proclamation of peace.” On this the gates were
flung open, and the herald alone was admitted, and conducted to the Lord
Mayor. The latter then read the royal warrant, and returning it to the
bearer, ordered the City marshal to open the gate for the whole
procession. The Lord Mayor and aldermen then joined it, and proceeded to
the Royal Exchange, where the proclamation, that was to bid the cannon
cease and chain up the dogs of war, was read for the last time.
[Illustration: THE LORD MAYOR’S SHOW. AFTER HOGARTH.]
The timber work and doors of Temple Bar have been often renewed since
1672. New doors were hung for Nelson’s funeral, when the Bar was to be
closed; and again at the funeral of Wellington, when the plumes and
trophies had to be removed in order that the car might pass through the
gate, which was covered with dull theatrical finery.[26]
The old, black, mud-splashed gates of Temple Bar are also shut whenever
the sovereign has occasion to enter the City. This is an old custom, a
tradition of the times when the city was proud of its privileges, and
sometimes even jealous of royalty. When the cavalcade approaches, a
herald, in his tabard of crimson and gold lace, sounds a trumpet before
the portal of the City; another herald knocks; a parley ensues; the gates
are then thrown open, and the Lord Mayor appearing, kneels and hands the
sword of the city to his sovereign, who graciously returns it.
Stow describes a scene like this in the old days of the “timber house,”
when Queen Elizabeth was on her way to old St. Paul’s to return thanks to
God for the discomfiture of the Armada. The City waits fluted, trumpeted,
and fiddled from the roof of the gate; while below, the Lord Mayor and his
brethren, in scarlet gowns, received and welcomed their brave queen,
delivering up the sword which, after certain speeches, she re-delivered to
the mayor, who, then taking horse, rode onward to St. Paul’s bearing it in
its shining sheath before her.[27]
In the June after the execution of Charles I., when Cromwell had dispersed
the mutinous regiments with his horse, and pistolled or hanged their
leaders, a day of thanksgiving was appointed, and the Parliament, the
Council of State, and the Council of the Army, after endless sermons,
dined together at Grocers’ Hall; on that day Lenthall, the Speaker,
received the sword of state from the mayor at the Bar, and assumed the
functions of royalty.
The same ceremony took place when Queen Anne went to St. Paul’s to return
thanks for the Duke of Marlborough’s victories, and again when George III.
came to return thanks for a recovery from his fit of insanity, and when
Queen Victoria passed on her way to Cornhill to open the Royal Exchange.
Temple Bar naturally does not figure much in the early City pageants,
because, after proceeding to Westminster by water, the mayor and aldermen
usually landed at St. Paul’s Stairs.
It is, we believe, first mentioned in the great festivities when the City
brought poor Anne Boleyn, in 1533, from Greenwich to the Tower, and on the
second day after conducted her through the chief streets and honoured her
with shows. On that day the Fleet Street conduit ran claret, and Temple
Bar was newly painted and repaired; there also stood singing men and
children, till the company rode on to Westminster Hall. The next day was
the coronation.[28]
On the 19th of February 1546-7 the young King Edward VI. passed through
London, the day before his coronation. At the Fleet Street conduit two
hogsheads of wine were given to the people. The gate at Temple Bar was
also painted and fashioned with varicoloured battlements and buttresses,
richly hung with cloth of arras, and garnished with fourteen standards.
There were eight French trumpeters blowing their best, besides a pair of
“regals,” with children singing to the same.[29]
In September 1553 Queen Mary rode through London, the day before her
coronation, in a chariot covered with cloth of tissue, and drawn by six
horses draped with the same. Minstrels played at Ludgate, and the Temple
Bar was newly painted and hung.[30]
But even a greater time came for the old City boundary in January 1558-9,
when Queen Elizabeth went from the Tower to Westminster. Temple Bar was
“finely dressed” up with the two giants--Gog and Magog (now in the
Guildhall)--who held between them a poetical recapitulation of all the
other pageantries, both in Latin and English. On the south side was a
noise of singing children, one of whom, richly attired as a poet, gave the
queen farewell in the name of the whole city.[31]
In 1603 King James, Queen Anne of Denmark, and Prince Henry Frederick
passed through “the honourable City and Chamber” of London, and were
welcomed with pageants. The last arch, that of Temple Bar, represented a
temple of Janus. The principal character was Peace, with War grovelling at
her feet; by her stood Wealth; below sat the four handmaids of
Peace,--Quiet treading on Tumult, Liberty on Servitude, Safety on Danger,
and Felicity on Unhappiness. There was then recited a poetical dialogue by
the Flamen Martialis and the Genius Urbis, written by Ben Jonson.
Here, hitherto, the pageantry had always ceased, but the Strand suburbs
having now greatly increased, there was an additional pageant beyond
Temple Bar, which had been thought of and perfected in only twelve days.
The invention was a rainbow; and the moon, sun, and pleiades advanced
between two magnificent pyramids seventy feet high, on which were drawn
out the king’s pedigrees through both the English and the Scottish
monarchs. A speech composed by Ben Jonson was delivered by Electra.[32]
When Charles II. came through London, according to custom, the day before
his coronation, I suspect that “the fourth arch in Fleet Street” was close
to Temple Bar. It was of the Doric and Ionic orders, and was dedicated to
Plenty, who made a speech, surrounded by Bacchus, Ceres, Flora, Pomona,
and the Winds; but whether the latter were alive or only dummies, I cannot
say.
The _London Gazette_ of February 8, 1665-6, announces the proclamation of
war against France; and Pepys mentions this as also the day on which they
went into mourning at court for the King of Spain. War was proclaimed by
the herald-at-arms and two of his brethren, his majesty’s
sergeants-at-arms, and trumpeters, with the other usual officers before
Whitehall, and afterwards (the Lord Mayor and his brethren assisting) at
Temple Bar, and in other usual parts of the City.
James II., in 1687, honoured Sir John Shorter as Lord Mayor with his
presence at an inaugurative banquet at Guildhall. The king was accompanied
by Prince George of Denmark, and was met by the two sheriffs at Temple
Bar.
[Illustration: TEMPLE BAR, 1746.]
On Lord Mayor’s Day, 1689, when King William and Queen Mary came to the
City to see the show, the City militia regiments lined the street as far
as Temple Bar, and beyond came the red and blue regiments of Middlesex and
Westminster; the soldiers, at regulated distances, holding lighted
flambeaux in their hands, and all the houses being illuminated.[33]
In 1697, when Macaulay’s hero, William III., made a triumphant entry into
London to celebrate the conclusion of the peace of Ryswick, the procession
included fourscore state coaches, each with six horses; the three City
regiments guarded Temple Bar, and beyond them came the liveries of the
several companies, with their banners and ensigns displayed.[34]
George III. in his day, and Queen Victoria in her and our own, passed
through Temple Bar in state more than once, on their way into the City;
the last occasion was on February 1872, when the Queen proceeded to St.
Paul’s to offer thanks for the recovery of her son the Prince of Wales.
Through it also the bodies of Nelson and of Wellington were borne to their
last resting place in St. Paul’s.
On the auspicious entrance into London of the fair Princess Alexandra, the
old gate was hung with tapestry of gold tissue, powdered with crimson
hearts; and very mediæval and gorgeous it looked; but the real days of
pageants are gone by. We shall never again see fountains running wine, nor
maidens blowing gold-leaf into the air, as in the luxurious days of our
Plantagenet kings.
There are many portals in the world loftier and more beautiful than our
dull, black arch of Temple Bar. The Vatican has grander doorways, the
Louvre more stately entrances, but through no gateway in the world have
surely passed onwards to death so many millions of wise and brave men, or
so many thinkers who have urged forward learning and civilisation, and
carried the standard of struggling humanity farther into space.
[Illustration: ST. CLEMENT’S CHURCH IN THE STRAND, 1753.]
CHAPTER III.
THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE).
Essex Street was formerly part of the Outer Temple, the western wing of
the Knight Templars’ quarter. The outer district of these proud and
wealthy Crusaders stretched as far as the present Devereux Court; those
gentler spoilers, the mediæval lawyers, having extended their frontiers
quite as far as their rooted-out predecessors. From the Prior and Canons
of the Holy Sepulchre[35] it was transferred, in the reign of Edward II.
to the Bishops of Exeter, who built a palace here and occupied it till the
reign of Henry VII. or Henry VIII.
The first tenant of Exeter House was the ill-fated Walter Stapleton, Lord
Treasurer of England, a firm adherent to the luckless Edward II., against
his queen and the turbulent barons. In 1326, when Isabella landed from
France to chase the Spensers from her husband’s side, and advanced on
London, the weak king and his evil counsellors fled to the Welsh frontier;
but the bishop held out stoutly for his king, and, as custos of the City
of London, demanded the keys from the Lord Mayor, Hammond Chickwell, to
prevent the treachery of the disaffected city. The watchful populace,
roused by Isabella’s proclamation that had been hung on the new cross in
Cheapside, rose in arms, seized the vacillating mayor, and took the keys.
They next ran to Exeter House, then newly erected, fired the gates, and
burnt all the plate, jewels, money, and goods. The bishop, at that time in
the fields, being almost too proud to show fear, rode straight to the
northern door of St. Paul’s to take sanctuary. There the mob tore him from
his horse, stripped him of his armour, and dragging him to Cheapside,
proclaimed him a traitor, a seducer of the king, and an enemy of their
liberties, and lopping off his head, set it on a pole. The corpse was
buried without funeral service in an old churchyard of the Pied
Friars.[36] His brother and some servants were also beheaded, and their
bleeding and naked bodies thrown on a heap of rubbish by the river side.
Exeter Place was shortly afterwards rebuilt, but the new house seemed a
doomed place, and brought no better fortune to its new owners. Lord Paget,
who changed its name to Paget House, fought at Boulogne under the poet
Earl of Surrey, was ambassador at the court of Charles V., and on his
return obtained a peerage and the garter. He fell with the Protector
Somerset, being accused of having planned the assassination of the Duke of
Northumberland at Paget House. Released from the Tower, he was deprived of
the garter upon the malicious pretence that he was not a gentleman by
blood. Queen Mary, however, restored the fallen man to honour, made him
Lord Privy Seal, and sent him on an embassy.
The next occupier of the unlucky house, Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of
Norfolk, and son of the poet Earl of Surrey, maintained in its chambers an
almost royal magnificence. It was here he was arrested for conspiring,
with the aid of Mary Queen of Scots, the Pope, and the King of Spain, to
marry Mary and restore the Popish religion.
The duke’s ambition and treason were fully proved by his own intercepted
letters; indeed, he himself confessed his guilt, though he had denounced
Mary to Elizabeth as a “notorious adulteress and murderer.” To crown his
rashness, meanness, and treason, he wrote from the Tower the most abject
letters to Elizabeth, imploring her clemency. He was privately beheaded in
1572, but his estates were restored to his children.[37] It was under the
mat, hard by a window in the entry towards the duke’s bedchamber, that the
celebrated alphabet in cipher[38] was hidden, which the duke afterwards
concealed under a roof tile, where it was found, unmasking all his plans.
In the Tower the unhappy plotter had written affecting letters to his son
Philip, bidding him worship God, avoid courts, and beware of ambition.[39]
The warning of the man whose eyes had been opened too late is touching.
The writer, speaking of court life, remarks, “It hath no certainty. Either
a man, by following thereof, hath too much worldly pomp, which in the end
throws him down headlong, or else he liveth there unsatisfied, either that
he cannot obtain to himself that he would, or else that he cannot do for
his friends as his heart desireth.”
Poor Philip did not benefit much by these lessons, but remained simple
Earl of Arundel, was repeatedly committed to the Tower, as by necessity an
ill-wisher to Elizabeth, and eventually died there after ten weary years
of imprisonment. His initials are still to be found on the walls of one of
the chambers in the Beauchamp Tower.
Fools never learn the lessons which Time tries so hard to beat into them.
Plotter succeeds plotter, and the rough lesson of the headsman seldom
teaches the conspirator’s successor to cease from conspiring.
To the Norfolks succeeded Dudley, the false Earl of Leicester, the black
or gipsy earl, as he was called from his swarthy Italian complexion.
Leicester, like the duke before him, plotted with Mary’s Jesuits and
assassins, and at the same time contrived to keep in favour with his own
jealous queen, in spite of all his failures and schemings in Holland, and
his suspected assassinations of his enemies in England. Leicester died of
fever the year of the Armada (1588), on his return from the camp at
Tilbury, leaving Leicester Place to Robert Devereux, his step-son, the
Earl of Essex,[40] who succeeded to his favour at court, but was doomed to
an untimely death.
It was to the great Lord of Kenilworth--that dark, mysterious man, who
perhaps deserved more praise than historians usually give him--that
Spenser dedicated his poem of “Virgil’s Gnat.” In his beautiful
“Prothalamion” on the marriage of Lady Elizabeth and Lady Catherine
Somerset, he speaks somewhat abjectly of Leicester, ingeniously contriving
to remind Essex of his father-in-law’s bounty. “Near to the Temple,” the
needy poet says,
“Stands a stately place,
_Where I gayned giftes_ and the goodly grace
Of that great lord who there was wont to dwell,
Whose want too well now feels my friendless case;
But, ah! here fits not well
Old woes.”
Then the poet goes on to eulogise Essex, who, however, it is supposed,
after all allowed him to die in want. But there is a mystery about
Spenser’s death. He returned from Ireland, beggared and almost
broken-hearted, in October or November 1599, and died in the January
following, just as Essex was preparing to start to Ireland. In that whirl
of ambition, the poor poet may perhaps have been rather overlooked than
wilfully slighted. This at least is certain, that he was buried in
Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer’s tomb, the Earl of Essex defraying the
expenses of his public funeral.
It was in his prison-house near the Temple that the hair-brained Earl of
Essex shut himself sulkily up, when Queen Elizabeth had given him a box on
the ears, after a dispute about the new deputy for Ireland, in which the
earl had shown a petulant violence unworthy of the pupil of Burleigh.
Far too much sympathy has been shown with this rash, imperious, and
unbearable young noble. He was sent to Ireland, and there concluded a
disgraceful, wilful, and traitorous treaty with one of England’s most
inveterate and dangerous enemies. He returned from that “cursedest of all
islands,” as he called it, against express command, and was with
difficulty dissuaded from landing in open rebellion. Generous and frank he
may have been, but his submission to the mild and well-deserved punishment
of confinement to his own house was as base and abject as it was false and
hypocritical.
Alarmed, mortified, and enraged at the duration of his banishment from
court, and at the refusal of a renewed grant for the monopoly of sweet
wines, Essex betook himself to open rebellion, urged on by ill-advisers
and his own reckless impatient spirit. He invited the Puritan preachers to
prayers and sermons; he plotted with the King of Scotland. It was arranged
at secret meetings at Drury House (then Sir Charles Daver’s) to seize
Whitehall and compel the queen to dismiss Cecil and other ministers
hostile to Essex.
Sir Christopher Blount was to seize the palace gates, Davies the hall,
Davers the guard-room and presence-chamber, while Essex, rushing in from
the Mews with some hundred and twenty adherents, was to compel the queen
to assemble a parliament to dismiss his enemies, and to fix the
succession. All these plans were proposed to Essex in writing--the
arch-conspirator was never himself present.
The delay of letters from Scotland led to the premature outbreak of the
plot. An order was at once sent summoning Essex to the council, and the
palace guards were doubled.
On Sunday, February 7, 1601, Essex, fearing instant arrest, assembled his
friends, and determined to arm and sally forth to St. Paul’s Cross, where
the Lord Mayor and aldermen were hearing the sermon, and urge them to
follow him to the palace. On the Lord Keeper and other noblemen coming to
the house to know the cause of the assembly, Essex locked them into a back
parlour, guarded by musketeers, and followed by two hundred gentlemen,
drew his sword and rushed into the street like a madman “running a-muck.”
Temple Bar was opened for him; but at St. Paul’s Cross he found no
meeting. The citizens crowded round him, but did not join his band. When
he reached the house of Sheriff Smith, the crafty Sheriff had stolen away.
In the meantime Lord Burleigh and the Earl of Cumberland, with a herald,
had entered the City and proclaimed Essex a traitor; a thousand pounds
being offered for his apprehension. Despairing of success, the mad earl
then turned towards his own house, and finding Ludgate barricaded by a
strong party of citizens under Sir John Levison, attempted to force his
way, killing two or three citizens, and losing Tracy, a young friend of
his own. Then striking down to Queenhithe, the earl and some fifty
followers who were left took boat for Essex Gardens.
On entering his house, he found that his treacherous confidant, Sir
Ferdinand Gorges, had made terms with the court and released the hostages.
Essex then, by the advice of Lord Sandys, resolved to fortify the place,
hold out to the last extremity, and die sword in hand. In a few minutes,
however, the Lord Admiral’s troops surrounded the building. A parley
ensued between Sir Robert Sidney in the garden, and Essex and his rash
ally, Shakspere’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, who were on the roof.
The earl’s demands were proudly refused, but a respite of two hours was
given him, that the ladies and female servants might retire. About six
the battering train arrived from the Tower, and Essex then wisely
surrendered at discretion.[41]
The night being very dark, and the tide not serving to pass the dangers of
London Bridge, Essex and Southampton were taken by boat to Lambeth Palace,
and the next morning to the Tower.
Essex had fully deserved death. He was executed privately, by his own
request, at the Tower, February 25, 1601. Meyrick, his steward, and Cuffe,
his secretary, were hanged and quartered at Tyburn. Sir Charles Davers and
Sir Christopher Blount perished on Tower Hill. Other prisoners were fined
and imprisoned, and the Earl of Southampton pined in durance till the
accession of James I. (1603).
Among the even older tenants of Essex House, we must not forget that
unhappy woman, the earl’s mother, who, first as Lettice Knollys, then as
Countess of Essex, afterwards as Lady Leicester, and next as wife of Sir
Christopher Blount, was a barb in Elizabeth’s side for thirty years.
Married as a girl to a noble husband, she gave up her honour to a seducer,
and there is reason to think that she consented to the taking of his life.
While Devereux lived, she deceived the queen by a scandalous amour, and,
after his death, by a clandestine marriage with the Earl of Leicester.
While Dudley lived, she wallowed in licentious love with Christopher
Blount, his groom of the horse. When her second husband expired in agony
at Cornbury, not an hour’s gallop from the place in which Amy Robsart
died, she again mortified the queen by a secret union with her last
seducer, Blount. Her children rioted in the same vices. Essex himself,
with his ring of favourites, was not more profligate than his sister
Penelope, Lady Rich.[42]
This sister was the (Platonic?) mistress of Sydney, whose stolen love for
her is pictured in his most voluptuous verse. On his death at Zütphen, she
lived with Lord Montjoy, though her husband, Lord Rich, was still alive.
Nor was her sister Dorothy one whit better. After marrying one husband
secretly and against the canon, she wedded Percy, the wizard Earl of
Northumberland, whom she led the life of a dog, until he indignantly
turned her out of doors.[43] It is not easy, observes Mr. Dixon, except in
Italian story, to find a group of women so depraved and so detestable as
the mother and sisters of the Earl of Essex.
Essex, the rash noble, who died at the untimely age of thirty-three, had a
dangerous, ill-tempered face, if we may judge by More’s portrait of him.
He stooped in walking, danced badly, and was slovenly in his dress;[44]
yet being a generous, frank friend, an impetuous and chivalrous if not
wise soldier, and an enemy of Spain and the Cecils, he became a favourite
of the people. The legend of the ring sent by Essex to the queen,[45] and
maliciously detained by the Countess of Nottingham, we shall presently
discuss. No applications for mercy by Essex (and he made many during his
trial) affect the question of his deserving death. That the queen
consented with regret to the death of Essex, on the other hand, needs no
doubtful legend to serve as proof.
Elizabeth had forgiven the earl’s joining the Cadiz fleet against her
wish, she forgave his secret marriage, she forgave his shameful
abandonment of his Irish command and even his dishonourable treaty with
Tyrone, but she could not forgive an open and flagrant rebellion at a time
when she was so surrounded by enemies.
An historical writer, gifted with an eminently analytical mind, Mr.
Hepworth Dixon, has lately, with great ingenuity, endeavoured to refute
the charges of ingratitude brought against Bacon for his time serving and
(to say the least) undue eagerness in aggravating the crimes of his old
and generous friend. There can be, however, no doubt that Bacon too soon
abandoned the unfortunate Essex, and, moreover, threw the weight of much
misapplied learning into the scale against the prisoner. No minimising of
the favours received by him from Essex can in my mind remove this stain
from Bacon’s reputation.
In Essex House was born a less brilliant but a happier and a more prudent
man--Robert, Earl of Essex, afterwards the well-known Parliamentary
general. A child when his father died on the scaffold, he was placed under
the care of his grandmother, Lady Walsingham, and was afterwards at Eton
under the severe Saville. A good, worthy, heavy lad, brought up a
Presbyterian, he was betrothed when only fourteen to Lady Frances Howard,
daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, who was herself only thirteen.
The earl travelled on the Continent for four years, and on his return was
married at Essex House. It was for this inauspicious marriage that Ben
Jonson wrote one of his most beautiful and gorgeous masques, Inigo Jones
contributing the machinery, and Ferrabosco the music. The rough-grained
poet seems to have been delighted with the success of the entertainment,
for he says, “Nor was there wanting whatsoever might give to the furniture
a complement, either in riches or strangeness of the habits, delicacy of
dances, magnificence of the scene, or divine rapture of music.”[46]
The countess was already, even at this time, the mistress of Robert Carr,
the handsome minion of James I. She obtained a divorce from her husband in
1613, and espoused her infamous lover. The cruel poisoning of Sir Thomas
Overbury for opposing the new marriage followed; and the earl and
countess, found guilty, but spared by the weak king, lingered out their
lives in mutual reproaches and contempt, loathed and neglected by all.
Fate often runs in sequences--the earl was unhappy with his second wife,
from whom he also was divorced.
Essex emerged from a country retirement to turn general for the
Parliament. Just, affable, and prudent, he was a popular man till he
became marked as a moderatist desirous for peace, and was ousted by the
artful “Self-denying Ordinance.” If he had lived it is probable he would
either have lost his head or have fled to France and turned cavalier. His
death during the time that Charles I. remained a prisoner with the Scotch
army at Newcastle saved him from either fate. With him the Presbyterian
moderatists and the House of Peers finally lost even their little
remaining power.
When the earl resigned his commission, the House of Commons went to Essex
House to return their ex-general thanks for his great services. A year
later they followed him to the grave (1646), little perhaps thinking how
bitterly the earl had reproached them for ingratitude, and what plans he
had devised to reform the army and to check Cromwell and Fairfax.[47]
On the earl’s death, his Royalist brother-in-law, the Marquis of Hertford,
attempted to seize his ready money and papers, but was frustrated by the
Parliament.[48]
Whether the next earl, who on being arrested for sharing in the Rye-House
plot destroyed himself at the Tower, lived in his father’s house, I do not
know, but the mansion, so unlucky to its owners, was occupied by families
of rank for some time after the Restoration, and then falling into neglect
and ruin, as fashion began to flow westward, was subdivided, and a street,
called Essex Street, was built on part of its site.
Samuel Patterson, the bookseller and auctioneer, lived in Essex Street, in
1775, in rooms formerly the residence of Sir Orlando Bridgeman. He was
originally a bag-maker. Afterwards Charles Dibdin commenced his
entertainments in these rooms, and here his fine song of “Poor Jack”
became famous.[49] Patterson’s youngest child was Dr. Johnson’s godson,
and became a pupil of Ozias Humphrey.[50] Patterson wrote a book of
travels in Sterne’s manner, but claimed a priority to that strange writer.
George Fordyce, a celebrated epicurean doctor of the eighteenth century,
lived in the same street. For twenty years he dined daily at Dolly’s
Chop-house, and at his solitary meal he always took a tankard of strong
ale, a quarter of a pint of brandy, and a bottle of port. After these
potations, he walked to his house and gave a lecture to his pupils.[51]
Dr. Johnson, the year before he died, formed a club in Essex Street, at
the Essex Head, a tavern kept by an old servant of his friend, Thrale, the
brewer. It was less select than the Literary Club, but cheaper. Johnson,
writing to Sir Joshua Reynolds to join it, says, “the terms are lax and
the expences light--we meet thrice a week, and he who misses forfeits
twopence.”[52] Sir John Hawkins spitefully calls it “a low ale-house
association;” but Windham, Daines Barrington, Horsley, Boswell, and
Brocklesby were members of it; for rich men were less luxurious than they
are now, and enjoyed the sociable freedom of a tavern. Sir Joshua refused
to join, probably because Barry, who had insulted him, and was very
pugnacious, had become a member.[53] It went on happily for many years,
says Boswell, whom Johnson, when he proposed him for election, called “a
clubable man.” Towards the end of his life the great lexicographer grew
more and more afraid of solitude, and a club so near his home was probably
a great convenience to him.
Near Devereux Court are the premises of the well-known tea-dealers,
Messrs. Twining. The graceful recumbent stone figures of Chinamen over the
Strand front have much elegance, and must have come from some good hand.
One of this family was a Colchester rector, and a translator of
Aristotle’s _Poetics_. He was an excellent man, a good linguist and
musician, and a witty companion. He was contemporary with Gray and Mason,
the poets, at Cambridge. In the back parlour is a portrait of the founder
of the house. A century and a half ago ladies used to drive to the door of
Twining’s and drink tiny cups of the new and fashionable beverage as they
sat in their coaches. There is an epigram extant, written either by
Theodore Hook or one of the Smiths; the point of it is, that if you took
away his T, Twining would be Wining.
In 1652 Constantine, the Greek servant of a Levant merchant, opened in
Devereux Court a coffee-house, which became known as “The Grecian.” In
1664-5 advertised his Turkey “coffee bery,” chocolate, “sherbet,” and tea,
as good and cheap, and announced his readiness to give gratuitous
instructions in the art of preparing the said liquors.[54]
In the same year, a Greek named Pasqua Rosee had also established a house
in St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, for the sale of “the coffee drink.”[55]
John Evelyn describes a Greek fellow-student, afterwards Bishop of Smyrna,
drinking coffee when he was at college in about 1637.[56]
In April 1709 Steele, in No. 1 of the _Tatler_, announces that he shall
date all learned articles from the “Grecian,” all gallantry from
“White’s,” all poetry from “Wills’s,” all foreign and domestic news from
“St. James’s.”
In 1710-11 Addison, starting the “_Spectator_ along with Steele,” tells us
his own grave face was well known at the Grecian; and in No. 49 (April
1711), the _Spectator_ describes the spleen and inward laughter with which
he views at the Grecian the young Templars come in, about 8 A.M., either
dressed for Westminster, and with the preoccupied air of assumed business,
or in gay cap, slippers, and particoloured dressing-gowns, rising early to
publish their laziness, and being displaced by busier men towards noon.
Dr. King relates a story of two hot-blooded young gentlemen quarrelling
one evening at this coffee-house about the accent of a Greek word.
Stepping out into Devereux Court, they fought, and one of them being run
through the body, died on the spot.[57] This Dr. King was principal of St.
Mary’s Hall, Oxford, and a staunch Tory. It is he who relates the secret
visit of the Pretender to London. He died in 1763.
Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds topographer, met Dr. Sloane, the secretary of
the Royal Society, by appointment at the Grecian in May 1712; and again in
June he describes retiring to the Grecian after a meeting of the Royal
Society, of which he was a fellow, with the president, Sir Isaac
Newton,[58] Dr. Halley, who published the _Principia_ for Newton, and
Keill, who opposed Leibnitz about the invention of Fluxions, and defended
Newton’s doctrines against the Cartesians. (The Royal Society held its
meetings at this time in Crane Court, Fleet Street.) Roger North,
Attorney-General under James II., who died in 1733, describes in his
_Examen_ the Privy Council Board, as held at the Grecian coffee-house. The
Grecian was closed in 1843, and has been since turned into the Grecian
Chambers. On what was once the front of the coffee-house frequented by
Steele and Addison, there is a bust of Essex, with the date 1676.
In this court, at the house of one Kedder, in 1678, died Marchmont
Needham, a vigorous but unprincipled turncoat and newspaper writer, who
three times during the civil wars changed his principles to save his
worthless neck. He was alternately the author of the _Mercurius
Britannicus_ for the Presbyterians, _Mercurius Pragmaticus_ for the king,
and _Mercurius Politicus_ for the Independents. The great champion of the
late usurper, as the Cavaliers called him, “whose pen, compared with
others’, was as a weaver’s beam,” latterly practised as a physician, but
with small success.[59]
There is a letter of Pope addressed to Fortescue, his “counsel learned in
the law,” at Tom’s coffee-house, in Devereux Court. Fortescue, the poet’s
kind, unpaid lawyer, was afterwards (in 1738) Master of the Rolls. Pope’s
imitation of the first satire of Horace, suggested by Bolingbroke, was
addressed to Mr. Fortescue, and published in 1733. This lawyer was the
author of the droll report in _Scriblerus_ of “Stradling _versus_ Styles,”
wherein Sir John Swale leaves all his black and white horses to one
Stradling, but the question is whether this bequest includes Swale’s
piebald horses. It is finally proved that the horses are all mares.[60]
Dr. Birch, the antiquary, the dull writer but good talker, frequented
Tom’s; and there Akenside--short, thin, pale, strumous, and lame,
scrupulously neat, and somewhat petulant, vain, and irritable--spent his
winter evenings, entangled in disputes and altercations, chiefly on
subjects of literature and politics, that fixed on his character the stamp
of haughtiness and self-conceit, and drew him into disagreeable
situations.[61] Akenside was a contradictory man. By turns he was placid,
irritable; simple, affected; gracious, haughty; magnanimous, mean;
benevolent, yet harsh, and sometimes even brutal. At times he manifested a
childlike docility, and at other times his vanity and arrogance made him
seem almost a madman.[62]
Gay, in his _Trivia_, describes Milford Lane so faithfully that it might
pass for a yesterday’s sketch of the same place. He writes--
“Where the fair columns of St. Clement stand,
Whose straitened bounds incroach upon the Strand;
Where the low pent-house bows the walker’s head,
And the rough pavement wounds the yielding tread;
Where not a post protects the narrow space,
And strung in twines combs dangle in thy face.
Summon at once thy courage--rouse thy care;
Stand firm, look back, be resolute, beware!
Forth issuing from steep lanes, the collier’s steeds
Drag the black load; another cart succeeds;
Team follows team, crowds heap’d on crowds appear.”
Stow mentions Milford Lane, but gives no derivation for its name.[63] The
coarse poem by Henry Savill, commonly attributed to the witty Earl of
Dorset, beginning--
“In Milford Lane, near to St. Clement’s steeple.”[64]
gave the street for a time such a disagreeable notoriety as the pillory
gives to a rogue.
Arundel House, in the Strand, was the old inn or town-house of the Bishops
of Bath, stolen by force in the rough, greedy times of Edward VI., by the
bad Lord Thomas Seymour, the admiral, and the brother of the Protector;
from him it derived the name of Seymour Place, and must have been
conveniently near to the ambitious kinsman who afterwards beheaded him.
This Admiral had married Henry VIII.’s widow, Catherine Parr; and she
dying in childbed, he began to woo, in his coarse boisterous way, the
young Princess Elizabeth, who had been living under the protection of her
mother-in-law, who was indeed generally supposed to have been poisoned by
the admiral. His marriage with Elizabeth would have smoothed his way to
the throne in spite of her father’s cautious will. It was said that
Elizabeth always blushed when she heard his name. He died on the scaffold.
Old Bishop Latimer, in a sermon, declared “he was a wicked man, and the
realm is well rid of him.”[65] It is certain that, whatever were his
plots, he had projected a marriage between Lady Jane Grey and the young
king.
The admiral’s house was bought, on its owner’s fall, by Henry Fitz-Alan,
Earl of Arundel, for the nominal sum of £41: 6: 8, with several other
messuages and lands adjoining.[66] The earl dying in 1579, was succeeded
by his grandson, Philip Howard, son of the Duke of Norfolk, the owner of
Essex House adjoining, who was beheaded for his intrigues with Mary of
Scotland. He died in the Tower in 1598. The house then passed into the
keeping of Robert Cary, Earl of Monmouth,[67] during the minority of
Thomas Howard, Philip’s son.
In Arundel Palace, in 1603, died the Countess of Nottingham, sister of Sir
Robert Cary;[68] she was buried at Chelsea. It is of this countess that
Lady Spelman, a granddaughter of Sir Robert Cary, used to tell the
doubtful legend of the ring[69] given by Queen Elizabeth to Lord Essex,
which an acute writer of the present day believes to be a pure fabrication
of the times of James I.
[Illustration: ARUNDEL HOUSE, 1646.]
The story runs thus:--When the Countess Catherine was dying, she sent to
the Queen to tell her that she had a secret to reveal, without disclosing
which she could not die in peace. The Queen came, and the countess then
told her that when Essex was in the Tower, under sentence of death, he one
morning threw a ring from his window to a boy passing underneath, hiring
him to carry it to his friend Lady Scrope, the countess’s sister, and beg
of her to present it in his name to the queen, who had promised to protect
him whenever he sent her that keepsake, and who was then waiting for some
such sign of his submission. The boy not clearly understanding the
message, brought the ring to the countess, who showed it to her husband,
and he insisted on her keeping it. The countess, having made this
disclosure, begged her majesty’s forgiveness; but the queen answered,
“God may forgive you, but I never can!” and burst from the room in a
paroxysm of rage and grief. From that time Elizabeth became perturbed in
mind, refused to eat or sleep, and died a fortnight after the countess.
Now this is absurd. The queen never repented the death of that wrongheaded
traitor, and really died of a long-standing disease which had well-defined
symptoms.[70]
At Arundel House lodged that grave, wise minister of Henry IV. of France,
the Duc de Sully, then only the Marquis de Rosny. He describes the house
with complacency as fine and commodious, and having a great number of
apartments on the same floor. It was really a mean and low building, but
commanding a fine prospect of the river and Westminster, so fine, indeed,
that Hollar took a view of London from the roof. The first night of his
arrival Sully slept at the French ambassador’s house in Butcher Row
adjoining, a poor house with low rooms, a well staircase lit by a
skylight, and small casements.[71]
[Illustration: ARUNDEL HOUSE, 1646.]
In the time of James I., in whose reign the earldom was restored to Thomas
Howard, Arundel House became a treasury of art. The travelled earl’s
collection comprised thirty-seven statues, one hundred and twenty-eight
busts, and two-hundred and fifty inscribed marbles, exclusive of
sarcophagi, altars, medals, gems, and fragments. Some of his noblest
relics, however, he was not allowed to remove from Rome. Of this proud and
princely amateur of art Lord Clarendon speaks with too obvious prejudice.
He describes him as living in a world of his own, surrounded by strangers,
and though illiterate, willing to be thought a scholar because he was a
collector of works of art. Yet the historian admits that he had an air of
gravity and greatness in his face and bearing. He affected an ancient and
grave dress; but Clarendon asserts that this was all outside, and that his
real disposition was “one of levity,” as he was fond of childish and
despicable amusements. Vansomer’s portraits of the earl and countess
contain views of the statue and picture galleries.[72] This illustrious
nobleman, whom the excellent Evelyn calls “my noble friend,” died in 1646.
At the Restoration his house and marbles were restored to his grandson,
Mr. Henry Howard; the antiquities were then lying scattered about Arundel
Gardens, and were neglected and corroding, blanching with rain, and green
with damp, much to the horror of Evelyn and other antiquaries, who
regarded their fate with alarm and pity.
The old Earl of Arundel (whom Clarendon disliked) had been a collector of
art in a magnificent and princely way. He despatched artist-agents to
Italy, and even to Asia Minor, to buy pictures, drawings, statues, votive
slabs, and gems. William Petty collected sculpture for him at Paros and
Delos, but the collections were lost off Samos in a storm. He collected
Holbein’s and Albert Dürer’s drawings, discovered the genius of Inigo
Jones, and brought Hollar from Prague. He left England just before the
troubles, having received many affronts from Charles’s ministers, who had
neglected to restore his ancient titles, went to Padua, and there died.
The marbles Mr. Evelyn induced Mr. Howard, in 1667, to send to the
University of Oxford; the statues were also given to Oxford by a later
descendant; and the earl’s library (originally part of that of the King of
Hungary) Mr. Evelyn persuaded the Duke of Norfolk to bestow on the Royal
Society.[73]
The old earl was, I suspect, a proud, soured, and a rather arrogant,
formal person. In a certain dispute about a rectory, he once said to King
Charles I.: “Sir, this rectory was an appendant and a manour of mine until
my grandfather unfortunately lost both his life and seven lordships, for
the love he bore to your grandmother.”[74]
After the Great Fire of London, Mr. Howard lent the Royal Society rooms in
his house. In 1678 the palace was taken down, and the present Arundel,
Surrey, Howard, and Norfolk streets were erected in its stead. The few
marbles that remained were removed to Tart Hall, Westminster, and to
Cuper’s Gardens across the river.[75] Tart Hall was the residence of the
Countess of Arundel: Cuper’s Gardens belonged to a gardener of the Earl of
Arundel. The Duke of Norfolk originally intended to build a more
magnificent house on the old site, and even obtained an act of Parliament
for the purpose; but fashion was already setting westward, and the design
was abandoned.[76]
In Arundel Street lived Rymer, the historical antiquary, who died here in
1715; John Anstis, the Garter king-at-arms, resided here in 1715-16;[77]
also Mrs. Porter, the actress, “over against the Blue Ball.”
Gay, in his delightful _Trivia_ sketches the “long Strand,” and pauses to
mourn over the glories of Arundel House. His walk is from “the Temple’s
silent walls,” and he stays to look down at the site of the earl’s
mansion--
----“That narrow street, which steep descends,
Whose building to the shining shore extends;
Here Arundel’s famed structure rear’d its frame--
The street alone retains an empty name;
Where Titian’s glowing paint the canvas warm’d,
And Raphael’s fair design with judgment charm’d,
Now hangs the bellman’s song, and pasted here
The coloured prints of Overton appear;
Where statues breathed, the work of Phidias’ hands,
A wooden pump or lonely watch-house stands;
There Essex’ stately pile adorned the shore;
There Cecil’s, Bedford’s, Villiers’--now no more.”
In the Strand, between Arundel and Norfolk Streets, in the year 1698,
lived Sir Thomas Lyttelton, Speaker of the House of Commons, and father of
Pope’s friend, and the author of the _History of Henry the Second_, a
ponderous and pompous work.
Next door to him lived the father of Bishop Burnet--a remarkable person,
for he was a poor but honest lawyer, born at Edinburgh in 1643. A
bookseller of the same name--a collateral descendant of the bishop whom
Swift hated so cordially--afterwards occupied the house.
At the south-west corner of Norfolk Street, near the river, in his wild
days lodged the Quaker Penn, son of Cromwell’s stout Bristol admiral. He
had been twice beaten and turned out of doors by his father for his
fondness for Nonconformist society and prayer-meetings, and for refusing
to stand uncovered in the presence of Charles II. or of the Duke of York,
of whom later he became the suspected favourite. We do not generally
associate the grave and fanatic Penn with a gay and licentious court, nor
do we portray him to ourselves as slinking away from hawk-eyed bailiffs;
and yet the venerated founder of repudiating Pennsylvania chose this house
when he was sued for debts, as being convenient for slipping unobserved
into a boat. In the eastern entrance he had a peep-hole, through which he
could reconnoitre any suspicious visitor. On one occasion a dun, having
sent in his name and waited an unconscionable time, knocked again. “Will
not thy master see me?” he said to the servant. The knave was at least
candid, for he replied: “Friend, he _has_ seen thee, and he does not like
thee.”[78]
In Norfolk Street, in Penn’s old house, afterwards resided for thirty
years that truly good man, Dr. Richard Brocklesby, who in early life,
during the Seven Years’ War, had practised as an army surgeon. He was a
friend of Burke and Dr. Johnson. To the former he left, or rather gave, a
thousand pounds, and to the latter he offered an annuity of a hundred
pounds a year, to enable him to travel for his health, and also apartments
in his own house for the sake of medical advice, which Johnson
affectionately and gratefully declined. The doctor was one of the most
generous and amiable of men; he attended the poor for nothing, and had
many pensioners. He died the day after returning from a visit to Burke at
Beaconsfield. He had been warned against the fatigue of this journey, but
had replied with true Christian philosophy, “My good friend, where’s the
difference whether I die at a friend’s house, at an inn, or in a
post-chaise? I hope I am prepared for such an event, and perhaps it would
be as well to elude the anticipation of it.”
Dr. Brocklesby was ridiculed by Foote, but Foote attacked virtue quite as
often as vice. He was the physician who had attended Lord Chatham when he
was struck down by illness in the House of Lords, a short time before his
death.
In January 1698 Peter the Great arrived from Holland, and went straight to
a house prepared for him in Norfolk Street, near the water side. On the
following day he was visited by King William and the principal nobility.
Incommoded here by visitors, the Czar removed to Admiral Benbow’s house at
Deptford, where he could live more retired. This Deptford house was Sayes
Place, afterwards the Victualling Office, and had once belonged to the
celebrated John Evelyn.
The “Honest Shippen” of Pope--William Shippen, M.P.--lived also in Norfolk
Street: a brave, honest man, in an age when nearly every politician had
his price. It was of him Sir Robert Walpole remarked “that he would not
say who was corrupted, but he would say who was not corruptible, and that
was Shippen.”
Mortimer, a rough, picturesque painter, who was called “the English
Salvator Rosa,” and imitated that unsatisfactory artist in a coarse,
sketchy kind of way, dwelt in this street.
At No. 21 lived Albany Wallis, a friend and executor of Garrick. In this
street also Addison makes that delightful old country gentleman, Sir Roger
de Coverley, put up before he goes to Soho Square.[79]
At No. 8, in 1795, lived Samuel Ireland, the father of the celebrated
literary impostor; and here were shown to George Chalmers, John Kemble,
and other Shaksperian scholars, the forged plays which the public
ultimately scented out as ridiculous.
In 1796 Mr. W. H. Ireland published a full confession of his forgeries,
fully exonerating his father from all connivance in his foolish fraud,
claiming forgiveness for a boyish deception begun without evil intention
and without any thought of danger. “I should never have gone so far,” he
says, “but that the world praised the papers too much, and thereby
flattered my vanity.”[80] After the failure of “Vortigern,” the father,
Mr. S. Ireland, still credulous, had written a pamphlet, accusing Malone,
his son’s chief assailant, of mean malice and unbearable arrogance.
The true story of the forgery is this. W. H. Ireland, then only eighteen,
was articled to a solicitor in New Inn, where he practised Elizabethan
handwriting for the sake of deceiving credulous antiquaries. A forged deed
exciting the admiration of his father, who was a collector of old tracts
and a worshipper of Shakspere, led him to continue his deceptions, and to
pretend to have discovered a hoard of Shaksperian MSS. A fellow clerk, one
Talbot, afterwards an actor, discovering the forgeries, Ireland made him
an accomplice. They then produced a “Profession of Faith,” signed by
Shakspere, which Dr. Parr and Dr. Warton (brother of the poet) declared
contained “finer things” than all the Church Service. This foolish praise
set the secretive lawyer’s clerk on writing original verse,--a poem to
Anne Hathaway, and the play of “Vortigern,” the most recklessly impudent
of all his impostures. Boswell was the first to propose a certificate to
be signed by all believers in the productions. Dr. Parr, thinking
Boswell’s writing too feeble, drew up another, which was signed by
twenty-one noblemen, authors, and “celebrated literary characters.”
Boswell, characteristically enough, previous to signing his name, fell on
his knees, and, “in a tone of enthusiasm and exultation, thanked God that
he had lived to witness this discovery, and exclaimed that he could now
die in peace.”[81] Lords Kinnaird, Somerset, and Lauderdale were the
noblemen. There were also present Bindley, Valpy, Pinkerton, Pye the poet
laureate, Matthew Wyatt, and the present author’s grandfather, the Rev.
Nathaniel Thornbury, an intimate friend of Jenner and of Dr. Johnson, who
had at this time been twelve years dead. The elder Ireland, in his
pamphlet, alludes to the solemn and awful manner in which, before crowds
of eminent characters, his son attested the genuineness of his forgeries.
“I could not,” says the honest fellow, “suffer myself to cherish the
slightest suspicion of his veracity.”[82]
Singularly enough Mr. Albany Wallis--(a solicitor, I believe), of Norfolk
Street,--who had given to Garrick a mortgage deed bearing Shakspere’s
signature, became the most ardent believer in the unprincipled young
clerk’s deceptions.
The terms agreed upon for Ireland’s forgery of “Vortigern” was £300 down,
and a division of the receipts, deducting charges, for sixty nights. The
play, however, lived only one night, for which the Irelands received their
half, £103. The commentators Malone and Steevens remained sceptical, and
Kemble was suspicious and cold in the cause, though he was to be the hero;
but the gulls and quidnuncs were numerous enough to cram the house, and
that most commonplace of poets, Sir James Bland Burges, wrote the
prologue. The final damnation of the play was secured by a rhapsody of
Vortigern’s, a patch-work thing from “Richard II.” and “Henry IV.” The
fatal line--
“And when the solemn mockery is o’er,”
convulsed the house.[83] Mr. W. H. Ireland in later life was editor of the
_York Herald_, and died in 1835.[84]
Another eminent historical antiquary, Dr. Birch, lived in Norfolk Street.
The son of a Quaker tradesman at Clerkenwell, he became a London clergyman
and an historian, famous for his Sunday evenings’ conversaziones, and was
killed by a fall from his horse in 1766. He seems to have been a most
pleasant, generous, and honest man. He edited Bacon’s _Letters and
Speeches_, and Thurloe’s _State Papers_, etc. His chief work was his
_Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth_. He left books, manuscripts, and
money to the British Museum, for which let all scholars bless the good
man’s memory. He appears to have been a student of boundless industry, as
from the Lambeth Library alone he transcribed with his own hand sixteen
quarto volumes. He was rector of St. Margaret Pattens in Fenchurch Street.
Dr. Birch must have been a kind husband, for his wife on her deathbed
wrote him the following tender letter:--
“This day I return you, my dearest life, my sincere, hearty thanks for
every favour bestowed on your most faithful and obedient wife,
HANNAH BIRCH.”
We leave it to the watchful cynic to remark that the doctor had been
married only one year. It was of this worthy book-worm that Johnson
said--“Yes, sir, he is brisk in conversation, but when he takes up the pen
it benumbs him like a torpedo.”
Strype describes Surrey Street as replenished with good buildings,
especially that of Nevison Fox, Esq., towards the Strand, “which is a
fine, large, and curious house of his own building,” and the two houses
that front the Thames, that on the east side being the Hon. Charles
Howard’s, brother to the Duke of Norfolk. Both of these houses had
pleasant though small gardens towards the Thames.[85]
In 1736 died here George Sale, the useful translator of the Mohammedan
Bible, the Koran, that strange compound of pure prayers and impure
plagiarisms from the laws of Moses. Sale had published his Koran in 1734,
and in the year of his death he joined Paul Whitehead, Dr. Birch, and Mr.
Strutt, in founding a “Society for the Encouragement of Learning.” He
spent many years in writing for the _Universal History_, in which Bayle’s
ten folio volumes were included.
Edward Pierce, a sculptor, son of a painter of altar-pieces and
church-ceilings, and a pupil of Vandyke, lived at the corner of Surrey
Street, and was buried in the Savoy. He helped Sir Christopher Wren to
build St. Clement’s church, and carved the four guardian dragons on the
Monument of London. The statue of Sir William Walworth at the fishmongers’
Hall is from his hand, and so is the bust of Thomas Evans in the hall of
the painters and stainers. He executed also busts of Cromwell, Wren, and
Milton.[86]
The charming actress, Mrs. Bracegirdle, lived in Howard Street. She was
the belle and toast of London; every young man of mode was, or pretended
to be, in love with her; and the wits wrote verses upon her beauty, in
imitation of Sedley and Waller. Congreve tells us that it was the fashion
to avow a tenderness for her. Rowe, in an imitation of an ode of Horace,
urges the Earl of Scarsdale to marry her (though he had a wife living) and
set the town at defiance.
Among this crowd of admirers was a Captain Hill, a half-cracked
man-about-town, a drunken, profligate bully, of low character, and a
friend of the infamous duellist, Lord Mohun. One of Mrs. Bracegirdle’s
favourite parts was Statira, her lover Alexander being her friend and
neighbour, the eminent actor Mountfort. Cibber describes him in this
character as “great, tender, persistent, despairing, transported,
amiable.” Hill, “that dark-souled fellow in the pit,” as Leigh Hunt calls
him, mistook the frantic extravagance of stage-passion for real love, and
in a fit of mad jealousy swore to be revenged on Mountfort, and to carry
off the lady by force. Lord Mohun, always ready for any desperate
mischief, agreed to help him in his design. On the night appointed the
friends dined together, and having changed clothes, went to Drury Lane
Theatre at six o’clock; but as Mrs. Bracegirdle did not act that night,
they next took a coach and drove to her lodgings in Howard Street. They
then, finding that she had gone to supper with a Mr. Page, in Princes
Street, Drury Lane, went to his house and waited till she came out. She
appeared at last at the door, with her mother and brother, Mr. Page
lighting them out.
Hill immediately seized her, and endeavoured, with the aid of some hired
ruffians, to drag her into the coach, where Lord Mohun sat with a loaded
pistol in each hand; but her brother and Mr. Page rushing to the rescue,
and an angry crowd gathering, Hill was forced to let go his hold and
decamp. Mrs. Bracegirdle and her escort then proceeded to her lodgings in
Howard Street, followed by Captain Hill and Lord Mohun on foot. On
knocking at the door, as it was said, to beg Mrs. Bracegirdle’s pardon,
they were refused admittance; upon which they sent for a bottle of wine to
a neighbouring tavern, which they drank in the street, and then began to
patrol up and down with swords drawn, declaring they were waiting to be
revenged on Mountfort the actor. Messengers were instantly despatched to
warn Mountfort, both by Mrs. Bracegirdle’s landlady and his own wife, but
he could not be found. The watch were also sent for, and they begged the
two ruffians to depart peaceably. Lord Mohun replied, “He was a peer of
the realm, that he had been drinking a bottle of wine, but that he was
ready to put up his sword if they particularly desired it: but as for his
friend, he had lost his scabbard.” The cautious watch then went away.
In the meantime the unlucky Mountfort, suspecting no evil, passed down the
street on his way home, heedless of warnings. On coming up to the
swordsmen, a female servant heard the following conversation:--
Lord Mohun embraced Mountfort, and said--
“Mr. Mountfort, your humble servant. I am glad to see you.”
“Who is this?--Lord Mohun?” said Mountfort.
“Yes, it is.”
“What brings your lordship here at this time of night?”
Lord Mohun replied--
“I suppose you were sent for, Mr. Mountfort?”
“No, indeed, I came by chance.”
“Have you not heard of the business of Mrs. Bracegirdle?”
“Pray, my lord,” said Hill, breaking in, “hold your tongue. This is not a
convenient time to discuss this business.”
Hill seemed desirous to go away, and pulled Lord Mohun’s sleeve; but
Mountfort, taking no notice of Hill, continued to address Lord Mohun,
saying he was sorry to see him assisting Captain Hill in such an evil
action, and begging him to forbear.
Hill instantly gave the actor a box on the ear, and on Mountfort demanding
what that was for, attacked him sword in hand, and ran him through before
he had time to draw his weapon. Mountfort died the next day of the wound,
declaring with his last breath that Lord Mohun had offered him no
violence. Hill fled from justice, and Lord Mohun was tried for murder, but
unfortunately acquitted for want of evidence.
That fortunate poet, Congreve, whom Pope declared to be one of the three
most honest-hearted and really good men in the Kit-cat Club, lived for
some time in Howard Street, where he was a neighbour and frequent guest of
Mrs. Bracegirdle.
Congreve, on becoming acquainted with the Duchess of Marlborough, removed
from Howard Street to a better house in Surrey Street, where he died,
January 19, 1729. The career of this son of a Yorkshire officer had been
one long undisturbed triumph. His first play had been revised by Dryden
and praised by Southerne. Besides being commissioner of hackney-coach and
wine licences, he also held a place in the Pipe Office, a post in the
Custom House, and a secretaryship in Jamaica. He never quarrelled with the
wits: both Addison and Steele admired and praised him, and Voltaire
eulogises his comedies.
It was here that Voltaire, while lodging in Maiden Lane, visited the gouty
and nearly blind dramatist, then infirm and on the verge of life. “Mr.
Congreve,” he says, “had one defect, which was his entertaining too mean
an idea of his profession--that of a writer--though it was to this he owed
his fame and fortune. He spoke of his works as of trifles that were
beneath him, and hinted to me in our first conversation that I should
visit him upon no other footing than that of a gentleman who led a life of
plainness and simplicity. I answered, that _had he been so unfortunate as
to be a mere gentleman_ I should never have come to see him; and I was
very much disgusted at so unseasonable a piece of vanity.”
The body of Congreve lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and was
afterwards interred with great solemnity in Henry VII.’s Chapel. The Duke
of Bridgewater and the Earl of Godolphin were amongst those who bore the
pall. The monument was erected by the Duchess of Marlborough, to whom the
favoured poet had left £10,000. Above his body--
“The ancient pillars rear their marble heads
To bear aloft the arch’d and pond’rous roof,
By its own weight made steadfast and immoveable.”[87]
Congreve’s bequest to the duchess of all his property, except £1000,
including £200 to Mrs. Bracegirdle (a legacy afterwards cancelled),
created much scandal. The shameless bookseller, Curll, instantly launched
forth a life of Congreve, professing to be written by one Charles Wilson,
Esq., but generally attributed to Oldmixon. The duchess’s friends were
alarmed, and Arbuthnot interfered. Upon being told that some genuine
letters and essays were to be published in the work, Mrs. Bracegirdle or
the duchess[88] cried out with defiant affectation and a dramatic drawl,
“Not one single sheet of paper, I dare to swear.”
The duchess, who raised a monument in the Abbey to her brilliant but
artificial friend, is said to have had a wax image of him made to place on
her toilette table. “To this she would talk as to the living Mr. Congreve,
with all the freedom of the most _polite_ and unreserved
conversation.”[89]
Strand Lane used formerly to lead to a small landing-pier for wherries,
called Strand Bridge. In Stow’s time the lane passed under a bridge down
to the landing-place.[90] A writer in the _Spectator_ describes how he
landed here on a summer morning, arriving with ten sail of apricot boats,
consigned to Covent Garden,[91] after having first touched at Nine Elms
for melons. In this lane there is a fine Roman bath which, if indeed
Roman, is the most western relic of Roman London, the centre of which was
on the east end of the Royal Exchange.
No. 165 has been long used as a warehouse for the sale of Dr. Anderson’s
pills. Dr. Patrick Anderson was physician to Charles I., and as early as
1649 a man named Inglis sold these quack pills at the Golden Unicorn, over
against the Maypole in the Strand. Tom Brown says, “There are at least a
score of pretenders to Anderson’s Scotch pills, and the Lord knows who has
the true preparation.” Brown died in 1704. Sir Walter Scott used to tell
one of his best stories about these pills. It dwelt on the passion for
them entertained by a certain hypochondriacal Lowland laird. Bland or
rough, old or young, no visitor at his house escaped a dose--“joost ane
leetle Anderson;” and his toady “the doer” used always to swallow a
brace.[92]
The Turk’s Head Coffee-house stood on the site of No. 142 Strand. Dr.
Johnson used to sup at this house to encourage the hostess, who was a
good civil woman, and had not too much business. July 28, 1763, Boswell
mentions supping there with Dr. Johnson; and again, on August 3, in the
same year, just before he set out for his wildgoose chase in Corsica.[93]
No. 132 was the shop of a bookseller named Bathoe. The first circulating
library in London was established here in 1740.
Jacob Tonson, Dryden’s grinding publisher and bookseller, lived at the
Shakspere’s Head, over against Catherine Street, now No. 141 Strand, from
about 1712 till he died, in 1735-6. Tonson seems to have been rough, hard,
and penurious. The poet and publisher were perpetually squabbling, and
Dryden was especially vexed at his trying to force him to dedicate his
translation of Virgil to King William, and when he refused, making the
engraver of the frontispiece aggravate the nose of Æneas till it became “a
hooked promontory,” like that of the Protestant king. It was to Tonson’s
shop at Gray’s Inn, however, that Dryden, on being refused money, probably
sent that terrible triplet to the obdurate bibliopole:--
“With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair,
With two left legs, and Judas-colour’d hair,
And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air.”[94]
“Tell the dog,” said Dryden to his messenger, “that he who wrote those can
write more.” But Tonson was perfectly satisfied with this first shot, and
surrendered at discretion. The irascible poet afterwards accused him of
intercepting his letters to his sons at Rome, and he confessed to
Bolingbroke on one occasion that he was afraid of Tonson’s tongue.[95]
Tonson’s house, since rebuilt, was afterwards occupied by Andrew Millar,
the publisher and friend of Thomson, Fielding, Hume, and Robertson, and
after his death by Thomas Cadell, his apprentice, and the friend and
publisher of Gibbon the historian. The _Seasons_, _Tom Jones_, and the
Histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon were first published at this
house. Millar was a Scotchman, and distinguished his shop by the sign of
Buchanan’s Head, afterwards the badge of Messrs. Blackwood.
The _Illustrated London News_, whose office is near Somerset House, was
started in 1842 by Mr. Herbert Ingram, originally a humble newsvendor at
Northampton; an industrious man, who would run five miles with a newspaper
to oblige an old customer. In the first year he sold a million copies; in
the second, two; and in 1848, three millions. Dr. Mackay, the song-writer,
wrote leaders; Mr. Mark Lemon aided him; Mr. Peter Cunningham collected
his column of weekly chat; Thomas Miller, the basket-maker poet, was also
on his staff. Mr. Ingram obtained a seat in Parliament, and was eventually
drowned in a steamboat collision on Lake Michigan.
[Illustration: PENN’S HOUSE, NORFOLK STREET, 1749.]
[Illustration: SOMERSET HOUSE FROM THE RIVER, 1746.]
CHAPTER IV.
SOMERSET HOUSE.
“And every day there passes by my side,
Up to its western reach, the London tide--
The spring tides of the term. My front looks down
On all the pride and business of the town;
My other fair and more majestic face
For ever gazes on itself below,
In the best mirror that the world can show.”
COWLEY.
That ambitious and rapacious noble the Protector Somerset, brother of
Queen Jane Seymour, and maternal uncle of Edward VI., the owner of more
than two hundred manors,[96] and who boasted that his own friends and
retainers made up an army of ten thousand men, determined to build a
palace in the Strand. For this purpose he demolished the parish church of
St. Mary, and pulled down the houses of the Bishops of Worcester,
Llandaff, and Lichfield. He also began to remove St. Margaret’s, at
Westminster, for building materials, till his masons were driven away by
rioters. He destroyed a chapel in St. Paul’s Churchyard, with a cloister
containing the “Dance of Death,” and a charnel-house, the bones of which
he buried in unconsecrated ground,[97] and finally stole the stones of the
church of St. John of Jerusalem, near Smithfield,[98] and those of Strand
Inn (belonging to the Temple), where Occleve the poet, a contemporary of
Gower and Chaucer, had studied law.
The unwise Protector determined in this building to rival Whitehall and
Hampton Court. It was begun probably about 1549, and no doubt remained
unfinished at his death. He had at that time lavished on it £50,000 of our
present money.
The architect was John of Padua,[99] Henry VIII.’s architect, who built
Longleat, in Wiltshire, the seat of the Marquis of Bath, a magnificent
specimen of the Italian-Elizabethan style, and also the gates of Caius
College, at Cambridge. The Protector is said to have spent at one time
£100 a day in building, every stone he laid bringing him nearer to his own
narrow home. A plan of the house is still preserved in the Soane
Museum.[100]
After the attainder of the duke, when the new palace became the property
of the crown, little was done to complete the building. The screen
prepared for the hall was bought for St. Bride’s, where it was probably
destroyed in the Great Fire.[101] The Protector was a good friend to the
people, but he was weak and ambitious, and the plotters of Ely House had
no difficulty in dragging him to the scaffold. The minority of Edward
brought many of the Strand noblemen to the axe, but the fate of the
admiral and his brother did not deter their neighbours Northumberland,
Raleigh, Norfolk, and Essex.
Elizabeth granted the keeping of Somerset House to her faithful cousin
Lord Hunsdon, for life,[102] and here she frequently would visit him, in a
jewelled farthingale, with Raleigh and Essex in her train.
In 1616 that Scotch Solomon, James I., commanded the place to be called
Denmark House; and his queen kept her gay and not very decent court here,
so that Ben Jonson must have often seen his glorious masques acted in this
palace, to which his coadjutor Inigo Jones built a chapel, and made other
additions. Anne of Denmark and her maids-of-honour kept up here a
continual masquerade,[103] appearing in various dresses, and transforming
themselves to the delight of all whose interest it was to be delighted.
Here too that impetuous queen, Henrietta Maria, resided with her wilful
and extravagant French household, whose insolence irritated and disgusted
the people and offended Charles the First. The king at last, losing
patience, summoned them together one evening and dismissed them all. They
behaved like sutlers at the sack of a town. They claimed fictitious debts;
they invented exorbitant bills; they greedily divided among each other the
queen’s wardrobe and jewels, scarcely leaving her a change of linen. The
king paid nearly £50,000 to get rid of them; Madame St. George alone
claiming several thousand pounds besides jewels.[104] They still delayed
their departure; on which the king, at last roused, wrote the following
imperative letter to Buckingham:--
“STEENIE--I have received your letter by Dick Greame. This is my
answer. I command you to send all the French away to-morrow out of the
town, if you can by fair means (but stick not long in disputing),
otherways force them away--driving them away like so many wild beasts
until ye have shipped them; and the devil go with them. Let me hear no
answer, but of the performance of my command. So I rest
“Your faithful, constant, loving friend,
“C. R.
“Oaking, the seventh of August, 1626.”
As the French invented all sorts of vexatious delays, the yeomen of the
guard at last jostled them out, carting them off in nearly forty coaches.
They arrived at Dover after four days’ tedious travelling, wrangling, and
bewailing. The squib did not burn out without one final detonation. As the
vivacious Madame St. George stepped into the boat, with perhaps some
insolent gesture of adieu, a man in the mob flung a stone at her French
cap. A gallant Englishman who was escorting her instantly quitted his
charge, ran the fellow through the body, and returned to the boat. The man
died on the spot, but no notice, it appears, was taken of the murderer.
In Somerset House, at the Christmas masque of 1632-3, Charles’s
high-spirited queen took part for the last time in a masque. Unfortunately
for Prynne, the next day out came his _Histriomastix_, with a scurrilous
marginal note, “Women actors notorious whores!” for which the stubborn
fanatic lost his ears.
Queen Henrietta had, in Somerset House, an ostentatiously magnificent
Catholic chapel built by Inigo Jones, which became the scene of spectacles
that were gall and wormwood to the Puritans, who were already couching for
their spring.
Their time came in March 1643, when Roundheads, grimly rejoicing, burnt
all the pictures, images, Jesuitical books, and tapestry.[105]
Five of the unhappy queen’s French Roman Catholic servants are entombed in
the cellars of the present building, under the great quiet square.[106]
Here, close to his own handiwork, that distinguished architect, Inigo
Jones, who had lodgings in the palace, died in 1652.
About the same time the House of Peers permitted the Protestant service to
be held in Somerset House instead of in Durham House. This drove out the
Quakers and Anabaptists, and prevented the pulling down of the palace and
the making of a street from the garden through the chapel and back-yard up
into the Strand.[107]
The Protector’s palace was the scene of a great and sad event in November
1658; for the body of Cromwell, who had died at Whitehall, lay in state
here for several days. He lay in effigy on a bed of royal crimson velvet,
covered with a velvet gown, a sceptre in his hand, and a crown upon his
head. The Cavaliers, whose spirits were recovering, were very angry at
this foolish display,[108] forgetting that it was not poor Oliver’s own
doing; and the baser people, who follow any impulse of the day, threw dirt
in the night upon the blazoned escutcheon that was displayed over the
great gate of Somerset House.
The year after, an Act was passed to sell all royal property, and Somerset
House was disposed of for £10,000. The Restoration soon stepped in and
annulled the bargain. After the return of the son who so completely
revenged upon us the death of his father, the luckless palace became the
residence of its former inhabitant, now older and gentler--the
queen-mother. She improved and beautified it. The old courtier, Waller,
only fifty-seven at the time, wrote some fulsome verses on the occasion.
He talks of her adorning the town as with a brave revenge, to show--
“That glory came and went with you.”
He mentions also the view from the palace:--
“The fair view her window yields,
The town, the river, and the fields.”
Cowley, the son of a Fleet Street grocer, flew still higher, larded his
flattery with perverted texts, like a Puritanised Cavalier time-server,
and wrote--
“On either side dwells Safety and Delight;
Wealth on the left and Power sits on the right.”
In May 1665, when the queen-mother, who had lived in Somerset House with
her supposed husband, the Earl of St. Albans, took her farewell of England
for a gayer court, Cowley wrote these verses to the setting sun, in hopes
to propitiate the rising sun; for here, too, lived Catherine of Braganza,
the unhappy wife of Charles II.
There were strange scenes at Somerset House even during the queen-mother’s
residence, for the old court gossip Pepys describes being taken one day to
the Presence-chamber.[109] He found the queen not very charming, but still
modest and engaging. Lady Castlemaine was there, Mr. Crofts, a pretty
young spark of fifteen (her illegitimate child), and many great ladies. By
and by in came the king and the Duke and Duchess of York. The conversation
was not a very decorous one; and the young queen said to Charles, “You
lie!” which made good sport, as the chuckling and delighted Pepys remarks,
those being the first English words he had heard her say; and the king
then tried to make her reply, “Confess and be hanged.”
In another place Pepys indignantly describes “a little proud, ugly,
talkative lady crying up the queen-mother’s court as more decorous than
the king’s;” yet the diary-keeper confesses that the former was the better
attended, the old nobility dreading, I suppose, the scandal of
Whitehall.[110]
In 1670 Monk, Duke of Albemarle, having died at his lodgings in the
Cockpit, at Whitehall, lay in state in Somerset House, and was afterwards
buried with almost regal pomp in Henry VII.’s Chapel.
In October 1678, the infamous devisers of the Popish plot connected
Somerset House and the attendants in the Queen’s Chapel with the murder of
a City magistrate, the supposed Protestant martyr, Sir Edmondbury Godfrey,
who was found murdered in a field near Primrose Hill, “between Kilburn and
Hampstead,” as it was then thought necessary to specify. The lying
witnesses, Prance and Bedloe, swore that the justice had been inveigled
into Somerset House under pretence of being wanted to keep the peace
between two servants who were fighting in the yard; that he was then
strangled, his neck broken, and his own sword run through his body. The
corpse was kept four days, then carried in a sedan-chair to Soho, and
afterwards on a horse to Primrose Hill, nearly three miles off. The
secrecy and convenient neighbourhood of the river for hiding a murdered
man seem never to have struck the rogues, who forgot even to “lie like
truth,” so credulous and excited was the multitude.
Waller, says Aubrey, though usually very temperate, was once made drunk at
Somerset House by some courtiers, and had a cruel fall when taking boat at
the water stairs, “’Twas a pity to use such a sweet man so
inhumanly.”[111] Saville used to say that “nobody should keep him company
without drinking but Mr. Waller.”
In 1692 that poor ill-used woman and unhappy wife, Catherine of Braganza,
left Somerset House, and returned thence to Portugal, the home of her
happy childhood and happier youth.
The palace, never the home of very happy inmates, then became a lodging
for foreign kings and ambassadors, and a home for a few noblemen and poor
retainers of the court, much as Hampton Court is now. Lewis de Duras, Earl
of Feversham, the incompetent commander at Sedgemoor, who lies buried at
the Savoy, lived here in 1708; and so did Lady Arlington, the widow of
Secretary Bennet, that butt of Killigrew and Rochester. In the reign of
George III., Charlotte Lennox, the authoress of the _Female Quixote_, had
apartments in Somerset House.
Houses, like men, run their allotted courses. In 1775 the old palace,
which had been settled on the queen-consort in the event of her surviving
the king, was exchanged for Buckingham House; and the Government instantly
began to pull down the river-side palace, and erect new public offices
designed by Sir William Chambers, a Scotch architect, who had given
instruction in his art to George III., when Prince of Wales.
In 1630, a row of fishmongers’ stalls, in the middle of the street, over
against Denmark House (Somerset House), was broken down by order of
Government to prevent stalls from growing into sheds, and sheds into
dwelling houses, as had been the case in Old Fish Street, Saint Nicholas
Shambles, and other places.[112]
On the 2d of February, 1659-60, Pepys tells us in his diary, that having
£60 with him of his lord’s money, on his way from London Bridge, and
hearing the noise of guns, he landed at Somerset House, and found the
Strand full of soldiers. Going upstairs to a window, Pepys looked out and
saw the foot face the horse and beat them back, all the while bawling for
a free parliament and money. By and by a drum was heard to sound a march
towards them, and they all got ready again, but the new comers proving of
the same mind, they “made a great deal of joy to see one another.”[113]
This was the beginning of Monk’s change, for the king returned in the
following May. On the 18th of February two soldiers were hanged opposite
Somerset House for a mutiny, of which Pepys was an eye-witness.
The prints of old Somerset House show a long line of battlemented wall
facing the river, and a turreted and partially arcaded front. There is
also a scarce view of the place by Hollar.[114] The river front has two
porticos. The chapel is to the left, and near it are the cloisters of the
Capuchins. The bowling-green seems to be to the right, between the two
rows of trees. The garden is formal. The royal apartments were on the
river side. The only memorial left of the outhouses of the old palace was
the sign of a lion in the wall of a house in the Strand, that is mentioned
in old records.[115]
Dryden describes his two friends, Eugenius and Neander, landing at
Somerset Stairs, and gives us a pleasant picture of the summer evening,
the water on which the moonbeams played looked like floating quicksilver,
and some French people dancing merrily in the open air as the friends walk
onwards to the Piazza.[116]
Of the old views of Somerset House, that of Moss is considered the best.
There is also an early and curious one by Knyff. A picture in Dulwich
Gallery (engraved by Wilkinson) represents the river front before Inigo
Jones had added a chapel for the queen of Charles I.[117]
Sir William Chambers built the present Somerset House. The old palace,
when the clearance for the demolition began, presented a singular
spectacle.[118] At the extremity of the royal apartments two large
folding-doors joined Inigo Jones’s additions to John of Padua’s work. They
opened into a long gallery on the first floor of the water garden wing, at
the lower end of which was another gallery, making an angle which formed
the original river front, and extended to Strand Lane. This old part had
been long shut up, and was supposed to be haunted. The gallery was
panelled and floored with oak. The chandelier chains still hung from the
stucco ceilings. The furniture of the royal apartment was removed into
lumber-rooms by the Royal Academy. There were relics of a throne and
canopy; the crimson velvet curtains for the audience-chamber had faded to
olive colour; and the fringe and lace were there, but a few threads and
spangles had been peeled off them. There were also scattered about in
disorder, broken chairs, stools, couches, screens, and fire-dogs.
In the older apartments much of Edward VI.’s furniture still remained. The
silk hangings of the audience-chamber were in tatters, and so were the
curtains, gilt-leather covers, and painted screens; one gilt chandelier
also remained, and so did the sconces. A door beyond, with difficulty
opened, led into a small tower on the first floor, built by Inigo Jones,
and used as a breakfast-room or dressing-room by Queen Catherine. It was a
beautiful octagonal domed apartment, with a tasteful cornice. The walls
were frescoed, and there were pictures on the ceiling. A door from this
place opened on the staircase and led to a bath-room, lined with marble,
on the ground floor.
The painters of the day compared the ruined palace, characteristically
enough, to the gloomy precincts of the dilapidated castles in Mrs.
Radcliffe’s wax-work romances.
Sir William Chambers completed his work in about five years, clearing two
thousand a year. It cost more than half a million of money. The Strand
front is 135 feet long; the quadrangle 210 feet wide and 296 feet deep.
The main buildings are 54 feet deep and six stories high. They are faced
with Portland stone, now partly sooty black, partly blanched white with
the weather. The basement is adorned with rustic work, Corinthian
pilasters, balustrades, statues, masks, and medallions. The river terrace
was intended in anticipation of the possible embankment of the Thames.
Some critics think Chambers’s great work heavy, others elegant but timid.
There is too much rustic work, and the whole is rather “cut up.” The vases
and niches are unmeaning, and it was a great structural fault to make the
portico columns of the fine river side stand on a brittle-looking arch.
It was to Somerset House that the Royal Academy came after the split in
the St. Martin’s Lane Society. Here West exhibited his respectable
platitudes, Reynolds his grand portraits, and Lawrence his graceful,
brilliant, but meretricious pictures. In the great room of the Academy, at
the top of the building, Reynolds, Opie, Barrie, and Fuseli lectured.
Through the doorway to the right of the vestibule, Reynolds, Wilkie,
Turner, Flaxman, and Chantrey have often stepped. Under that bust of
Michael Angelo almost all our great men from Johnson to Scott must have
passed.
Carlini, an Italian friend of Cipriani, executed the two central statues
on the Strand front of Somerset House, and also three of the nine colossal
key-stone masks--the rivers Dee, Tyne, and Severn. Carlini was one of the
unsuccessful candidates for the Beckford monument in Guildhall. When
Carlini was keeper of the Academy, he used to walk from his house in Soho
to Somerset Place, dressed in a deplorable greatcoat, and with a broken
tobacco pipe in his mouth; but when he went to the great annual Academy
dinner, he would make his way into a chair, full dressed in a purple silk
coat, and scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, with point-lace ruffles, and a
sword and bag.[119] Wilton, the sculptor, executed the two outer figures.
Giuseppe Ceracchi, who carved some of the heads of the river gods for the
key-stones of the windows of the Strand front of Somerset House, was an
Italian, but it is uncertain whether he was born at Rome or in Corsica. He
gave the accomplished Mrs. Damer (General Conway’s daughter) her first
lessons in sculpture, an art which she afterwards perfected in the studio
of the elder Bacon. Ceracchi executed the only bust in marble that
Reynolds ever sat for. A statue of Mrs. Damer, from a model by him, is now
in the British Museum. This sculptor was guillotined in 1801, for a plot
against Napoleon.[120] He is said to have lost his wits in prison, and to
have mounted the scaffold dressed as a Roman emperor. It was to Mrs. Damer
(the daughter of his old friend) that Horace Walpole, our most French of
memoir-writers, bequeathed his fantastic villa at Strawberry Hill, and its
incongruous but valuable curiosities. She is said to have sent a bust of
Nelson to the Rajah of Tanjore, who wished to spread a taste for English
art in India.
The rooms round the quadrangle are hives of red-tapists. There are about
nine hundred Government clerks nestled away in them, and maintained at an
annual cost to us of about £275,000. There is the office of the Duchy of
Cornwall, and there are the Legacy Duty, the Stamps, Taxes, and Excise
Offices, the Inland Revenue Office, the Registrar General’s Office
(created pursuant to 6 and 7 Will. IV., c. 86), part of the Admiralty and
the Audit Office, and lastly the Will Office.
The east wing of Somerset House, used as King’s College, was built in
1829. The bronze statue of George III., and the fine recumbent figure of
Father Thames, in the chief court, were cast by John Bacon, R.A.
The office for auditing the public accounts existed, under the name of the
Office of the Auditors of the Imprests, as far back as the time of Henry
VIII. The present commission was established in 1785, and the salaries
formerly paid for the passing of accounts are now paid out of the Civil
List, all fees being abolished. The average annual cost of the office for
auditing some three hundred and fifty accounts is £50,000. There are six
commissioners, a secretary, and upwards of a hundred clerks. Almost all
the home and colonial expenditure is examined at this office. Edward
Harley and Arthur Maynwaring (the wit of the Kit-Cat Club) were the two
Auditors of the Imprests in the reign of Queen Anne. The Earl of Oxford,
the collector of MSS., obtained many curious public documents from his
brother. If he had taken the whole the nation would have been a gainer;
for the Government bought his collection for the British Museum, and all
that he left (except what Sir William Musgrave, a commissioner, scraped
together and gave to the British Museum) were barbarously destroyed by
Government, heedless of their historical value. Maynwaring’s fees were
about £2000 a year. The present salary of a commissioner is £1200; the
chairman’s salary is £500. In 1867 the western front of Somerset House was
added; it is from the designs of Pennethorne, to accommodate the clerks of
the Inland Revenue Department.
The Astronomical Society, Geographical Society, and Geological Society,
were for many years sheltered in Somerset House, before removing
westwards.
Hither, in 1782, from Crane Court, came the Royal Society. The entrance
door to the society’s rooms, to the left of the vestibule, is marked out
by the bust of Sir Isaac Newton; Herschel, Davy, and Wollaston, as well as
Walpole and Hallam, must have passed here, for the same door leads to the
apartments of the Society of Antiquaries.
This society, when burnt out of Aldersgate Street by the Great Fire, held
its meetings for a time in Arundel House. At first its doings were
trifling and sometimes absurd. Enthusiasts and pedants often made the
society ludicrous by their aberrations. Charles II. pretended to admire
their Baconic inductions, but must have laughed at Boyle’s essays and
platitudes, and the hope of Wilkins, the Bishop of Chester, of flying to
the moon. Evelyn’s suggestions were unpractical and dilettantish, and
Pepys’s ramblings not over wise. We may be sure that there was food for
laughter, when Butler could thus sketch the occupations of these
philosophers:--
“To measure wind and weigh the air,
To turn a circle to a square,
And in the braying of an ass
Find out the treble and the bass,
If mares neigh _alto_, and a cow
In double diapason low.”
Yet how can we wonder that in the vast gold mines of the new philosophy
our wise men hesitated where first to sink their shafts? Cowley
chivalrously sprang forward to ward off from them the laughter and scorn
of the Rochesters and the Killigrews of the day, and to prove that these
initiative studies were not “impertinent and vain and small,” nothing in
nature being worthless. He ends his fine, rambling ode with the following
noble simile:--
“Lo! when by various turns of the celestial dance,
In many thousand years,
A star so long unknown appears,
Though Heaven itself more beauteous by it grow,
It troubles and alarms the world below;
Does to the wise a star, to fools a meteor show.”[121]
The Royal Society’s traditions belong more to Gresham College than to
Somerset House, the later home of our wise men. It originated in 1645, in
meetings held in Wood Street and Gresham College, suggested by Theodore
Hank, a German of the Palatinate. During the Civil War its discussions
were continued at Oxford. The present entrance-money is £10, and the
annual subscription is £4. The society consists at present of between 700
and 800 fellows, and the anniversary is held every 30th of November, being
St. Andrew’s Day. The Transactions of the society fill upwards of 150
quarto volumes. The first president was Viscount Brouncker, and the
second Sir Joseph Williamson. Mr. William Spottiswoode is the present
president. The society possesses some valuable pictures, including three
portraits of Sir Isaac Newton--one by C. Jervas, presented by the great
philosopher himself, and hung over the president’s chair; a second by D.
C. Marchand, and a third by Vanderbank; two portraits of Halley, by Thomas
Murray and Dahl; two of Hobbes, the great advocate of despotism--one taken
in 1663 (three years after the Restoration), and the other by Gaspars,
presented by Aubrey; Sir Christopher Wren, by Kneller; Wallis, by West;
Flamstead, by Gibson; Robert Boyle, by F. Kerseboom (a good likeness, says
Boyle); Pepys, the cruel expositor of his own weaknesses, by Kneller; Sir
A. Southwell, by the same portrait-painter; Dr. Birch, the great
historical compiler, by Wills (the original of the mezzotint done by Faber
in 1741, and bequeathed by Dr. Birch); Martin Folkes, the great
antiquarian, by Hogarth; Dr. Wollaston, the eccentric discoverer, by
Jackson; and Sir Humphrey Davy, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Amongst the curiosities of the society are the silver-gilt mace presented
to the society by Charles II. in 1662--(long supposed to be the bauble
which Cromwell treated with such contempt); a solar dial, made by Sir
Isaac Newton himself when a boy; a reflecting telescope, made by Newton in
1671; the precious MS. of the _Principia_ in Newton’s handwriting; a
silvery lock of Newton’s hair; the MS. of the _Parentalia, or Memoirs of
the Family of the Wrens_, written by young Wren; the charter-book of the
society, bound in crimson velvet, and containing the signatures of the
founder and fellows; a Rumford fireplace, one of the earliest in use; and
a marble bust of Mrs. Somerville, the great mathematician and philosopher,
by Chantrey. The society gives annually two gold medals--one the Rumford,
the other the Copley medal, called by Sir Humphrey Davy “the ancient olive
crown of the Royal Society.”
The Geological Society has a museum of specimens and fossils from all
quarters of the globe. The number of its fellows is about 875, and the
time of meeting alternate Wednesday evenings from November till June. It
also publishes a quarterly journal. The entrance-money is six guineas, the
annual subscription two.
The Society of Antiquaries was fairly started in 1707, by Wanley, Bagford,
and Talman, who agreed to meet together every Friday under penalty of
sixpence. It had originated about 1580, when it held its first sittings in
the Heralds’ College; but it did not obtain a charter till 1751, both
Elizabeth and James being afraid of its meddling with royal prerogatives
and illustrious genealogies, and the Civil War having interrupted its
proceedings. Its first meeting was at the Bear Tavern, in the Strand. In
1739 the members were limited to one hundred, and the terms were one
guinea entrance and twelve shillings annually. The society agreed to
discuss antiquarian subjects, and chiefly those relating to English
history prior to James I. In 1751 George II. granted its members a
charter, and in 1777 George III. gave them apartments in Somerset House,
where they continued till their recent removal to Burlington House. The
terms now are eight guineas admission, and four guineas annually. The
_Archæologia_, a journal of the society’s proceedings, commenced in 1770.
The meetings are every Thursday evening from November to June, and the
anniversary meeting is the 23d of April.
The museum of this society contains, among other treasures, the _Household
Book_ of the Duke of Norfolk; a large and valuable collection of early
proclamations and ballads; T. Porter’s unique map of London (Charles I.);
a folding picture in panel, of the “Preaching at Old St. Paul’s in 1616;”
early portraits of Edward IV. and Richard III., engraved for the third
series of _Ellis’s Letters_; a three-quarter portrait of Mary I. with the
monogram of Lucas de Heere, and the date 1546; a curious portrait of the
Marquis of Winchester (who died 1571); the portrait by Sir Antonio More,
of Schorel, a Dutch painter; portraits of antiquaries--Burton, the
Leicestershire antiquary, Peter le Neve, Humphrey Wanley Baker, of St.
John’s College, William Stukeley, George Vertue, and Edward, Earl of
Oxford, presented by Vertue; a Bohemian astronomical clock of gilt brass,
made in 1525 for Sigismund, King of Poland, and bought at the sale of the
effects of James Ferguson, the astronomer; and a spur of gilt brass, found
on Towton field, the scene of the bloody conflict between Edward IV. and
the Lancastrian forces. Upon the shank is engraved the following
posey--“En loial amour tout mon coer.”[122]
The Astronomical Society was instituted in 1820, and received the royal
charter in 1st William IV. The entrance-money is two guineas, and the
annual subscription the same amount. The annual general meeting is the
second Friday in February. A medal is awarded every year. The society has
a small but good mathematical library, and a few astronomical instruments.
A little above the entrance door to “the Stamps and Taxes” there is a
white watch-face let into the wall. Local tradition declares it was left
there in votive gratitude by a labourer who fell from a scaffolding and
was saved by the ribbon of his watch catching in some ornament. It was
really placed there by the Royal Society as a meridian mark for a portable
transit instrument in a window of an ante-room.[123]
A tradition of Nelson belongs to this quiet square. An old clerk at
Somerset House used to describe seeing the hero of the Nile pass on his
way to the Admiralty. Thin and frail, with only one arm, he would enter
the vestibule at a smart pace, and make direct for his goal, pushing
across the rough round stones of the quadrangle, instead of taking, like
others, the smooth pavement. Nelson always took the nearest way to the
object he wished to attain.[124]
The Royal Academy soon found a home in Somerset House. Germs of this
institution are to be found as early as the reign of Charles I., when Sir
Francis Kynaston, a translator of Chaucer into Latin (_circa_ 1636), was
chosen regent of an academy in Covent Garden.[125]
In 1643 that shifty adventurer, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, who had been fellow
ambassador with Rubens in Spain, started some quack establishment of the
same kind at Bethnal Green. He afterwards went to Surinam, was turned out
by the Dutch, came back, designed an ugly house at Hampstead Marshal, in
Berks, and died in 1667.
In 1711 Sir Godfrey Kneller instituted a private art academy, of which he
became president. Hogarth, writing about 1760, says, that sixty years
before some artists had started an academy, but their leaders assuming too
much pomposity, a caricature procession was drawn on the walls of the
studio, upon which the society broke up in dudgeon. Sir James Thornhill,
in 1724, then set up an academy at his own house in Covent Garden, while
others, under Vanderbank, turned a neighbouring meeting-house into a
studio; but these rival confederations broke up at Sir James’s death in
1734.
Hogarth, his son-in-law, opened an academy, under the direction of Mr.
Moser, at the house of a painter named Peter Hyde, in Greyhound Court,
Arundel Street. In 1739 these artists removed to a more commodious house
in Peter’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane, where they continued till 1767, when
they removed to Pall Mall.
In 1738 the Duke of Richmond threw open to art-students his gallery at
Whitehall, closed it again when his absence in the German war prevented
the paying of the premiums, was laughed at, and then re-opened it again.
It lasted some years, and Edwards, author of the _Anecdotes_, studied
there.
In 1753 some artists meeting at the Turk’s Head, Gerrard Street, Soho,
tried ineffectually to organise an academy; but in 1765 they obtained a
charter, and appointed Mr. Lambert president.
In 1760 their first exhibition of pictures was held in the rooms of the
Society of Arts, and in 1761 there were two exhibitions, one at Spring
Gardens: for the latter Hogarth illustrated a catalogue, with a compliment
to the young king and a caricature of rich connoisseurs.
In 1768 eight of the directors of the Spring Gardens Society, indignant at
Mr. Kirby being made president of the society in the place of Mr. Hayman,
resigned; and, co-operating with sixteen others who had been ejected,
secretly founded a new society. Wilton, Chambers, West, Cotes, and Moser,
were the leaders in this scheme, and Reynolds soon joined them, tempted,
it is supposed, by a promise of knighthood.
West was the chief mover in this intrigue. The Archbishop of York, who had
tried to raise £3000 to enable the American artist to abandon
portrait-painting, had gained the royal ear, and West was painting the
“Departure of Regulus” for the king, who was even persuaded and flattered
into drawing up several of the laws of the new society with his own
hand.[126] The king, in the meantime, with unworthy dissimulation,
affected outwardly a complete neutrality between the two camps, presented
the Spring Gardens Society with £100, and even attended their exhibition.
The king’s patronage of the new society was disclosed to honest Mr. Kirby
(father of Mrs. Trimmer, and the artist who had taught the king
perspective) in a very malicious and mortifying manner, and the story was
related to Mr. Galt by West, with a quiet, cold spite, peculiarly his own.
Mr. Kirby came to the palace just as West was submitting his sketch for
“Regulus” to the king. West was a true courtier, and knew well how to make
a patron suggest his own subject. Kirby praised the picture, and hoped Mr.
West intended to exhibit it. The Quaker slily replied that that depended
on his majesty’s pleasure. The king, like a true confederate, immediately
said, “Assuredly I shall be happy to let the work be shown to the public.”
“Then, Mr. West,” said the perhaps too arrogant president, “you will send
it to my exhibition?” “No!” said the king, and the words must have been
thunderbolts to poor Kirby; “it must go to _my_ exhibition.”[127] “Poor
Kirby,” says West, “only two nights before, had declared that the design
of forming such an institution was not contemplated. His colour forsook
him--his countenance became yellow with mortification--he bowed with
profound humility, and instantly retired, _nor did he long survive the
shock_!”
Mr. West is wrong, however, in the last statement, for his rival did not
die till 1774. Mr. Kirby, a most estimable man, was originally a
house-painter at Ipswich. He became acquainted with Gainsborough, was
introduced by Lord Bute to the king, and wrote and edited some valuable
works on perspective, to one of which Hogarth contributed an inimitable
frontispiece.
Sir Robert Strange says that much of this intrigue was carried out by Mr.
Dalton,[128] a print seller in Pall Mall, and the king’s librarian, in
whose rooms the exhibition was held in 1767 and 1768.
Thus an American Quaker, a Swiss, and a Swede--(a gold-chaser, a
coach-painter, an architect, and a third-rate painter, West)--ignobly
established the Royal Academy. Many eminent men refused to join the new
society. Allan Ramsay, Hudson, Scott the marine-painter, and Romney were
opposed to it. Engravers (much to the disgrace of the Academy) were
excluded; and worst of all, one of the new laws forbade any artist to be
eligible to academic honours who did not exhibit his works in the
Academy’s rooms: thus depriving for ever every English artist of the right
to earn money by exhibiting his own works.[129]
The proportion of foreigners in the Academy was very large. The two ladies
who became members (Angelica Kauffmann and Mrs. Moser) were both
Swiss.[130]
The other unlucky society, deprived of its share of the St. Martin’s Lane
casts, etc., and shut out from the Academy, furnished a studio over the
Cyder Cellars in Maiden Lane, struggled on till 1807, and then ceased to
exist.[131]
The Academy, with all its tyranny and injustice, has still been useful to
English art in perpetuating annual exhibitions which attract purchasers.
But what did more good to English art than twenty academies was the king’s
patronage of West, the spread of engraving, and the rise of middle-class
purchasers, who rendered it no longer necessary for artists to depend on
the caprice and folly of rich aristocratic patrons.
One word more about the art oligarchy. The first officers of the new
society were--Reynolds, president; Moser, keeper; Newton, secretary;
Penny, professor of painting; Sandby, professor of architecture; Wale,
professor of perspective; W. Hunter, professor of anatomy; Chambers,
treasurer; and Wilson, librarian. Goldsmith was chosen professor of
history at a later period.
The catalogue of the first exhibition of the Royal Academy contains the
names of only one hundred and thirty pictures: Hayman exhibited scenes
from _Don Quixote_; Rooker some Liverpool views; Reynolds some allegorised
portraits; Miss Kauffmann some of her tame Homeric figures; West his
“Regulus” (that killed Kirby), and a Venus and Adonis; Zuccarelli two
landscapes.
In 1838, the first year after the opening of the National Gallery, 1382
works of art, including busts and architectural designs, were exhibited.
Among the pictures then shown were--Stanfield’s “Chasse Marée off the
Gulf-stream Light,” “The Privy Council,” by Wilkie; portraits of men and
dogs, by Landseer; “The Pifferari,” “Phryne,” and “Banishment of Ovid,” by
Turner; “A Bacchante,” by Etty; “Gaston de Foix,” by Eastlake; Allan’s
“Slave Market,” Leslie’s “Dinner Scene from the Merry Wives of Windsor;”
“A View on the Rhine,” by Callcott; Shee’s portrait of Sir Francis
Burdett; portraits by Pickersgill; Maclise’s “Christmas in the Olden
Time,” and “Olivia and Sophia fitting out Moses for the Fair;” “The
Massacre of the Innocents,” by Hilton; and a picture by Uwins.[132]
Angelica Kauffmann and Biaggio Rebecca helped to decorate the Academy’s
old council-chamber at Somerset House. The paintings still exist. Rebecca
was an eccentric, conceited Italian artist, who decorated several rooms at
Windsor, and offended the worthy precise old king by his practical jokes.
On one occasion, knowing he would meet the king on his way to Windsor with
West, he stuck a paper star on his coat. The next time West came, the king
was curious to know who the foreign nobleman was he had seen--“Person of
distinction, eh? eh?”--and was doubtless vexed at the joke.
Rebecca’s favourite trick was to draw a half-crown on paper, and place it
on the floor of one of the ante-rooms at Windsor, laughing immoderately at
the eagerness with which some fat courtier in full dress, sword and bag,
would run and scuffle to pick it up.[133]
Fuseli took his place as Keeper of the Academy in 1805. Smirke had been
elected, but George III., hearing that he was a democrat, refused to
confirm the appointment. Haydon, who called on Fuseli in Berners Street in
1805, when he had left his father the bookseller at Plymouth, describes
him as “a little white-headed, lion-faced man, in an old flannel
dressing-gown tied round his waist with a piece of rope, and upon his head
the bottom of Mrs. Fuseli’s work-basket.” His gallery was full of
galvanised devils, malicious witches brewing incantations, Satan bridging
chaos or springing upwards like a pyramid of fire, Lady Macbeth, Paolo and
Francesca, Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly.
Elsewhere the impetuous Haydon sketches him vigorously. Fuseli was about
five feet five inches high, had a compact little form, stood firmly at his
easel, painted with his left hand, never held his palette upon his thumb,
but kept it upon his stone slab, and being very near-sighted and too vain
to wear glasses, used to dab his beastly brush into the oil, and sweeping
round the palette in the dark, take up a great lump of white, red, or
blue, and plaster it over a shoulder or a face; then prying close in, he
would turn round and say, “By Gode! dat’s a fine purple! it’s very like
Correggio, by Gode!” and then all of a sudden burst out with a quotation
from Homer, Tasso, Dante, Ovid, Virgil, or the Niebelungen, and say,
“Paint dat!” “I found him,” says Haydon, “a most grotesque mixture of
literature, art, scepticism, indelicacy, profanity, and kindness. He put
me in mind of Archimago in Spenser.”[134]
When Haydon came first to town from Plymouth, he lodged at 342
Strand,[135] near Charing Cross, and close to his fellow-student, the
good-natured, indolent, clever Jackson. The very morning he arrived he
hurried off to the Exhibition, and mistaking the new church in the Strand
for Somerset House, ran up the steps and offered his shilling to a beadle.
When he at last found the right house, Opie’s _Gil Blas_ and Westall’s
_Shipwrecked Sailor Boy_ were all the historical pictures he could find.
Sir Joshua read his first discourse before the Academy in 1769. Barry
commenced his lectures in 1784, ended them in 1798, and was expelled the
Academy in 1799. Opie delivered his lectures in 1807, the year in which he
died. Fuseli began in 1801, and delivered but twelve lectures in all.
It was on St. George’s Day, 1771, that Sir Joshua Reynolds took the chair
at the first annual dinner of the Royal Academy. Dr. Johnson was there,
with Goldsmith and Horace Walpole. Goldsmith got the ear of the company,
but was laughed at by Johnson for professing his enthusiastic belief in
Chatterton’s discovery of ancient poems. Walpole, who had believed in the
poet of Bristol till he was laughed at by Mason and Gray, began to banter
Goldsmith on his opinions, when, as he says, to his surprise and concern,
and the dashing of his mirth, he first heard that the poor lad had been to
London and had destroyed himself. Goldsmith had afterwards a quarrel with
Dr. Percy on the same subject.
One day, while Reynolds was lecturing at Somerset House, the floor
suddenly began to give way. Turner, then a boy, was standing near the
lecturer. Reynolds remained calm, and said afterwards that his only
thought was what a loss to English art the death of that roomful would
have been.
On the death of Mr. Wale, the Professor of Perspective, Sir Joshua was
anxious to have Mr. Bonomi elected to the post, but he was treated with
great disrespect by Mr. Copley and others, who refused to look at Bonomi’s
drawings, which Sir Joshua (as some maintained, contrary to rule) had
produced at Fuseli’s election as Academician. Reynolds at first threatened
to resign the presidency; but thought better of it afterwards.
In the catalogues in 1808 Turner’s name first appeared with the title of
Professor of Perspective attached to it. His lectures were bad, from his
utter want of language, but he took great pains with his diagrams, and his
ideas were often original. On one celebrated occasion Turner arrived in
the lecture-room late, and much perturbed. He dived first into one pocket,
and then into another; at last he ejaculated these memorable words:
“Gentlemen, I’ve been and left my lecture in the hackney-coach!”[136]
In 1779 O’Keefe describes a visit paid to Somerset House to hear Dr.
William Hunter lecture on anatomy. He describes him as a jocose little
man, in “a handsome modest” wig. A skeleton hung on a pivot by his side,
and on his other hand stood a young man half stripped. Every now and then
he paused, to turn to the dead or the living example.[137]
In 1765, when Fuseli was living humbly in Cranbourn Alley, and translating
Winckelmann, he used to visit Smollett, whose _Peregrine Pickle_ he was
then illustrating; and also Falconer, the author of _The Shipwreck_, who,
being poor, was allowed to occupy apartments in Somerset House.[138] The
poet was a mild, inoffensive man, the son of an Edinburgh barber. He had
been apprenticed on board a merchant vessel, after which he entered the
royal navy. In 1762 he published his well-known poem. He went out to India
in 1769, in the _Aurora_, which is supposed to have foundered in the
Mozambique Channel.[139] Falconer was a short thin man, with a
hard-featured, weather-beaten face and a forbidding manner; but he was
cheerful and generous, and much liked by his messmates. That hearty
sea-song, “Cease, rude Boreas,” has been attributed to him.
Fuseli succeeded Barry as Lecturer on Painting in 1799, and became Keeper
on the death of Wilton, the sculptor, in 1803. He died in 1825, aged
eighty-four, and was buried in St. Paul’s, between Reynolds and Opie.
Lawrence, Beechey, Reinagle, Chalon, Jones, and Mulready followed him to
his stately grave. The body had previously been laid in state in Somerset
House, his pictures of “The Lazar House” and “The Bridging of Chaos” being
hung over the coffin.
When Sir Joshua died, in 1792, his body lay in state in a velvet coffin,
in a room hung with sable, in Somerset House. Burke and Barry, Boswell and
Langton, Kemble and John Hunter, Towneley and Angerstein came to witness
the ceremony.
Where events are so interwoven as they are in topographical history, I
hope to be pardoned if I am not always chronological in my arrangement,
for it must be remembered that I have anecdotes to attend to as well as
dates. Let me here, then, dilate on a cruel instance of misused academic
power. My story relates to a young genius as unfortunate as Chatterton,
yet guiltless of his lies and forgeries, who died heart-broken by neglect
more than half a century ago.
[Illustration: SOMERSET HOUSE FROM THE STRAND, 1777.]
Procter, a young Yorkshire clerk, came up to London in 1777, and became a
student of the Royal Academy. In 1783 he carried off a silver medal, and
the next year won the gold medal for an historical picture. When Procter
gained this last prize, his fellow-students, raising him on their
shoulders, bore him downstairs, and then round the quadrangle of Somerset
House, shouting out, “Procter! Procter!” Barry was delighted at this, and
exclaimed with an oath, “Bedad! the lads have caught the true spirit of
the ould Greeks.” Sir Abraham Hume bought Procter’s “Ixion,” which was
praised by Reynolds. His colossal “Diomede” the poor fellow had to break
up, as he had no place to keep it in, and no one would buy it. In 1794 Mr.
West, wishing that Procter should go to Rome as the travelling student,
discovered him, after much inquiry, in poor lodgings in Maiden Lane. A day
or two afterwards he was found dead in his bed. The Academicians had been,
perhaps, just a little too late with their patronage.[140]
And now, when through grey twilight glooms I steal a glance as I pass by
at that grave black figure of the river god, presiding solemn as
Rhadamanthus over the central quadrangle of Somerset House, I sometimes
dream I see little leonine Fuseli, stormy Barry, and courtly Reynolds
pacing together the dim quadrangle that on these autumnal evenings, when
the rifle drills are over, wears so lonely and purgatorial an aspect; and
far away from them, in murky corners, I fancy I hear muttering the ghosts
of Portuguese monks, while scowling at them, stalks by pale Sir
Edmondbury, with a sword run through his shadowy body.
[Illustration: JACOB TONSON’S BOOK-SHOP, 1742.]
CHAPTER V.
THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE, CONTINUED).
On the Thames, off Somerset House, was a timber shed built on a strong
barge, and called “the Folly.” In William III.’s reign it was anchored
higher up the stream, near the Savoy. Tom Brown calls it “a musical
summer-house.” Its real name was “The Royal Diversion.” Queen Mary
honoured it with her presence.[141] It was at first frequented by “persons
of quality,” but latterly it became disreputable, and its orchestra and
refreshment alcoves were haunted by thieves, gamesters, and courtesans.
Near the Savoy stood the palace of the bishops of Carlisle, which was
obtained by exchange with Henry VIII. for Rochester Place at Lambeth. The
English sultan gave it to his lucky favourite, Bedford, who took it as his
residence. In the reign of James I. the Earl of Worcester bought it; and
in 1627 the Duke of Beaufort let it to Lord Clarendon, while his ill-fated
house was building in Piccadilly. It was then rebuilt on a smaller scale
by the duke, and eventually burnt down in 1695.[142] The present Beaufort
Buildings were then erected. Beaufort House, which occupies the site of
one in which Cardinal Beaufort died, is now a printing-office.
Blake, the mystical painter, died in 1828, at No. 3 Fountain Court, after
five years’ residence there. In these dim rooms he believed he saw the
ghost of a flea, Satan himself looking through the bars of the staircase
window, to say nothing of hosts of saints, angels, evil spirits, and
fairies. Here also he wrote verse passionate as Shelley’s and pure and
simple-hearted as Wordsworth’s. Here he engraved, tinted, railed at
Woollett, and raved over his Dante illustrations; for though poor and
unknown, he was yet regal in his exulting self-confidence. Here, just
before his death, the old man sat up in bed, painting, singing, and
rejoicing. He died without a struggle.[143]
The office of the _Sun_ is on this side the Strand. This paper was
established in 1792. Mr. Jerdan left the _Sun_ in 1816, selling his share
for £300. He had quarrelled with the co-proprietor, Mr. John Taylor, who
aspired to a control over him. In 1817 he set up the _Literary Gazette_,
the first exclusive organ of literary men.[144] The first editor of the
_Sun_ got an appointment in the West Indies. The paper was then edited by
Robert Clark, printer of the _London Gazette_, and afterwards by Jerdan,
assisted by Fladgate the facetious lawyer, Mulloch, and John Taylor. After
getting his sop in the pan of £300 a year from Government, that
low-principled satirist, Dr. Wolcot (Peter Pindar), wrote epigrams for it.
Fountain Court was in Strype’s time famous for an adjacent tavern from
which it derived its name. It was well paved, and its houses were
respectably inhabited.[145] The Fountain Tavern was renowned for its good
rooms, excellent vaults, “curious kitchen,” and old wine. The Fountain
Club, of which Pulteney was a member (circa 1737), held its meetings in
this tavern, to oppose that fine old Whig gentleman Sir Robert
Walpole.[146] Sir Charles Hanbury Williams thus mentions it in one of his
lampoons:--
“Then enlarge on his cunning and wit,
Say how he harangued at the Fountain,
Say how the old patriots were bit,
And a mouse was produced by a mountain.”
Here Pulteney may have planned the _Craftsman_ with Bolingbroke, and
perhaps have arranged his duel with Lord Hervey, the “Sporus” of Pope.
Dennis, the critic, mentions in his _Letters_ dining here with Loggen, the
painter, and Wilson, a writer praised by poor Otway in Tonson’s first
_Miscellany_. “After supper,” he says, “we drank Mr. Wycherly’s health by
the name of Captain Wycherly.”[147] This was the dramatist, the celebrated
author of _The Plain Dealer_ and _The Country Wife_.
The great room of the Fountain Tavern was afterwards Akermann’s well-known
picture shop; and is now Simpson’s cigar divan.
Charles Lillie, the perfumer recommended by Steele in the _Tatler_ (Nos.
92, 94), lived next door to the Fountain Tavern. He was burnt out and went
to the east corner of Beaufort Buildings in 1709. Good-natured Steele,
pitying him probably for his losses, praised his Barcelona snuff, and his
orange-flower water prepared according to the Royal Society’s receipt.
The Coal Hole, in this court, was so named by Rhodes, its first landlord,
from its having been originally the resort of coal-heavers. In his and
Edmund Kean’s time it was respectably frequented. It was once the
“Evans’s” of London, famous for steaks and ale; afterwards it sank to a
low den with _poses plastiques_ and ribald sham trials, that used to be
conducted by “Baron” Nicholson, a fat gross man, but not without a certain
unctuous humour, who is now dead.
Edmund Kean, always low in his tastes, used to fly the society of men like
Lord Byron to come hither and smoke and drink. The dress, the ceremony,
and the compulsory good behaviour of respectable society made him silent
and melancholy.[148] He used to say that noblemen talked such nonsense
about the stage, and that only literary men understood the subject.
The Kit-Cat Club was instituted in 1700, and died away about the year
1720. There were originally thirty-nine members, and they increased
gradually to the forty-eight whose portraits Kneller painted for their
secretary, Jacob Tonson, Dryden’s bookseller. Their earliest rendezvous
was at the house of a pastry-cook, one Christopher Cat, in Shire Lane,
near Temple Bar. When he grew wealthier, the club removed with him to the
Fountain Tavern in the Strand. The club derived its name from the
celebrated mutton pie,[149] which had been christened after its
maker.[150] The first members were those Whig patriots who brought about
the Revolution and drove out King James. Their object was the
encouragement of literature and the fine arts, and the diffusion of
loyalty to the House of Hanover. They elected their “toast” for the year
by ballot. The lady’s name, when chosen, was written on the club
drinking-glasses with a diamond. Among the more celebrated of the members
of this club were Kneller, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Addison, Garth, Steele,
Lord Mohun, the Duke of Wharton, Sir Robert Walpole, the Earl of
Burlington, the Earl of Bath, the Earl of Dorset, the Earl of Halifax, the
proud Duke of Somerset, and the Duke of Newcastle.
In summer the Club met at Tonson’s house at Barn Elms in Surrey, or at the
Upper Flask Tavern at Hampstead.[151] There seems to have been always some
doubt about the derivation of the name of the club; for an epigram still
extant, written either by Pope or Arbuthnot, attributes the name to the
fact of the members toasting “old Cats and young kits.” Mr. Defoe mentions
the landlord’s name as Christopher Catt,[152] while Ned Ward says that
though his name was Christopher, he lived at the sign of the Cat and
Fiddle.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was once brought by her father to this club when
a child, and made the toast for the year. “Petted, praised, fondled, and
fed with sweetmeats,” she used to say in her old age that it was the
happiest day of her life![153]
No. 59 is Coutts’s Bank. It was built for Mr. Coutts, in 1768, by the Adam
brothers--to whom we are indebted for the Adelphi. The old house of the
firm, of the date of Queen Anne, was situated in St. Martin’s Lane. The
present house contains some fine marble chimney-pieces of the Cipriani and
Bacon school. The dining-room is hung with quaint Chinese subjects on
paper, sent to Mr. Coutts by Lord Macartney, while on his embassy to
China, in 1792-95. In another room hang portraits of some early friends of
this son of Mammon, including Dr. Armstrong, the poet and physician,
Fuseli’s friend, by Reynolds. The strong rooms consist of cloistered
vaults, wherein the noblemen and rich commoners who bank in the house
deposit patents, title-deeds, and plate of fabulous value.
Mr. Coutts was the son of a Dundee merchant. His first wife was a servant,
a Lancashire labourer’s offspring. He had three daughters, one of whom
became the wife of Sir Francis Burdett, a second Countess of Guilford, and
a third Marchioness of Bute. On becoming acquainted with Miss Mellon, and
inducing her to leave the stage to avoid perpetual insults, Mr. Coutts
bought for her of Sir W. Vane Tempest, a small villa called Holly Lodge,
at the foot of Highgate Hill, for which he gave £25,000. His banking-house
strong rooms alone cost £10,000 building. The first deposit in the
enlarged house was the diamond aigrette that the Grand Signor had placed
in Nelson’s hat. Mr. Coutts, though very charitable, was precise and
exact. On one occasion, there being a deficit of 2s. 10d. in the day’s
accounts, the clerks were detained for hours, or, as is said, all night.
One of Coutts’s clerks, who took the western walk, was discovered to be
missing with £17,000.[154] Rewards were offered, and the town placarded,
but all in vain. The next day, however, the note-case arrived from
Southampton. The clerk’s story was, that on his way through Piccadilly,
being seized with a stupor, he had got into a coach in order to secure the
money. He had remained insensible the whole journey, and had awoke at
Southampton. Mr. Coutts gave him a handsome sum from his private purse,
but dismissed him.
Coutts’s Bank stands on nearly the centre of the site of the “New
Exchange.” When the Adelphi was built in Durham Gardens, Mr. Coutts
purchased a vista to prevent his view being interrupted, stipulating that
the new street leading to the entrance should face this opening; and on
this space, up to the level of the Strand, he built his strong rooms. Some
years after, wishing to enlarge them, he erected over the office a
counting-house and a set of offices extending from William Street to
Robert Street, and threw a stone bridge over William Street to connect the
front and back premises.
Mr. Coutts, late in life, married Harriet Mellon, who, after his death,
became the wife of the Duke of St. Albans, a descendant of Nell Gwynn,
that light-hearted wanton, whom nobody could hate. “Miss Mellon,” says
Leigh Hunt, “was arch and agreeable on the stage; she had no genius; but
then she had fine eyes and a good-humoured mouth.” The same gay writer
describes her when young as bustling about at sea-ports, selling tickets
for her benefit-night; but then, says the kindly apologist for everybody,
she had been left with a mother to support.[155]
Edmund Kean, the great tragedian, was lodging at 21 Cecil Street when,
poor and unknown, he made his first great triumph as Shylock, at Drury
Lane; a few days after, his mantelpiece was strewn with bank-notes, and
his son Charles was seen sitting on the floor playing with a heap of
guineas.[156] This great actor brought the theatre, in sixty-eight nights
of 1814, no less than twenty thousand pounds.
The last house on the west side of Cecil Street was inhabited in 1706 by
Lord Gray, and in 1721-4 by the Archbishop of York. In the opposite house
lived for many years Major-General Sir William Congreve, the inventor of
the rockets which bear his name, and a great friend and companion of
George IV., to whom he is said to have borne a striking personal
resemblance. Sir William was a descendant of Congreve the dramatist; and
he was the inventor of a number of successful projects and contrivances,
among which may be mentioned the engines employed in dredging the Thames.
The east side of Cecil Street is in the Savoy precinct, the west in the
parish of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.
Dr. Wollaston was living in Cecil Street (No. 28) in the year 1800. This
eccentric philosopher, originally a physician, was born in 1766, and died
of brain disease in 1828. He discovered two new metals--palladium and
rhodium--and acquired more than £30,000, by inventing a plan to make
platinum malleable. He improved and invented the camera lucida, and was
the first to demonstrate the identity of galvanism and common
electricity. He carried on his experiments with the simplest instruments,
and never allowed even his most intimate friends to enter his laboratory.
When a foreign philosopher once called on him and asked to see his study,
he instantly produced, in his strange way, a small tray, on which were
some glass tubes and a twopenny blow-pipe. Once, shortly after inspecting
a grand galvanic battery, on meeting a brother philosopher in the street
he led him by the button into a mysterious corner, took from his pocket a
tailor’s thimble, poured into it some liquid from a small phial, and
instantly heated a platinum wire to a white heat.[157]
Salisbury Street, in the Strand, was originally built about 1678, but was
extensively rebuilt by Payne in the early part of the reign of George III.
Old Salisbury House stood on the sites of Salisbury and Cecil Streets,
between Worcester House, now Beaufort Buildings, and Durham House, now the
Adelphi. It was so called after Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and
Lord High Treasurer to James I., who died 1612. Queen Elizabeth was
present at the house-warming. This Cecil was the bad minister of a bad
king. He was Raleigh’s enemy and Bacon’s; he was the foe of reform, and
the friend of Spain, from whom he received bribes, and the slave of vice.
Bacon painted this vicious hunchback in his _Essay on Deformity_. The
house was divided subsequently into Great and Little Salisbury House--the
latter being let to persons of quality. About 1678 it was pulled down, and
Salisbury Street built; but it proved too steep and narrow, and was not a
successful speculation.[158] The other part, next to Great Salisbury House
and over the Long Gallery, was turned into the “Middle Exchange.” This
eventually gave way to Cecil Street,--a fair street, with very good
houses, fit for persons of repute.[159]
On the death of Sackville the poet, Cecil took the white staff, being
already Premier-Secretary. His ambition stretched into every department of
the State. “He built a new palace at Hatfield, and a new Exchange in the
Strand. Countesses intrigued for him. His son married a Howard, his
daughter a Clifford. Ambassadors started for Italy, less to see Doges and
Grand Dukes than to pick up pictures and statues, and bronzes and
hangings, for his vast establishment at Hatfield Chase. His gardeners
travelled through France to buy up mulberries and vines. Salisbury House,
on the Thames, almost rivalled the luxurious villas of the Roman
cardinals; yet, under this blaze of worldly success, Cecil was the most
miserable of men. Friends grudged his rise; his health was broken; the
reins which his ambition drew into his hands were beyond the powers of a
single man to grasp; and the vigour of his frame, wasted by years of
voluptuous licence, failed him at the moment when the strain on his
faculties was at the full.”[160]
In Little Salisbury House lived William Cavendish, third Earl of
Devonshire, and father of the first Duke of Devonshire, one of the leaders
of the great revolution that drove out the Stuarts. Two or three days
after the Restoration, King Charles, passing in his coach through the
Strand, espied Hobbes, that mischievous writer in favour of absolute
power, standing at the door of his patron the earl. The king took off his
hat very kindly to the old man, gave him his hand to kiss, asked after his
health, ordered Cooper to take his portrait, and settled on him a pension
of £100 a year. Hobbes had been an assistant of Bacon, and a friend of Ben
Jonson and of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He had taught Charles II.
mathematics, and corresponded with Descartes.
In the street standing on the site of Sir Robert Cecil’s house was the
residence of the famous Partridge, the cobbler, impudent sham-almanac
maker, and predecessor of our own Moore and Zadkiel, who had foretold the
death of the French king. To expose this noisy charlatan and upset his
ridiculous hap-hazard predictions, Swift with cruel and trenchant malice
reported and lamented his decease in the _Tatler_ (1708), to which he
contributed under the name of Bickerstaff. The article raised a laugh
that has not even quite died away in the present day. Partridge, furious
at his losses and the extinguishing of his ill-earned fame, knocked down a
hawker who passed his stall crying an account of his death. This happening
just as the joke was fading, revived it again, and finally ruined the
almanac of poor Partridge.[161] “The villain,” says the poor outwitted
astrologer, “told the world I was dead, and how I died, and that he was
with me at the time of my death. I thank God, by whose mercy I have my
being, that I am still alive, and, excepting my age, as well as ever I was
in my life.” He actually died in 1715.
A little beyond Cecil Street formerly stood Ivy Bridge, under which there
was a narrow passage to the Thames, once forming a boundary line between
the Duchy of Lancaster and the City of Westminster. Near Ivy Bridge stood
the mansion of the Earls of Rutland. Opposite this spot Old Parr had
lodgings when he came to court to be shown to Charles I., and died of the
visit. Parr was a Shropshire labourer. He was born in 1483, and died aged
152. His grandson lived to 120, and in the year of his death had married a
widow. Parr’s London lodging became afterwards the Queen’s Head
public-house.[162]
Mrs. Siddons was living at 149 Strand, during the time of her earlier
successes. Probably she returned there on that glorious October night of
1782, when she achieved her first great triumph in Southerne’s tragedy of
_Isabella_, when her younger son, who acted with her, burst into tears,
overcome by the reality of the dying scene. “I never heard,” she says,
“such peals of applause in all my life.” She returned home solemnly and
calmly, and sat down to a frugal, neat supper with her father and husband,
in silence uninterrupted, except by exclamations of gladness from Mr.
Siddons.
Durham Street marks the site of old Durham House, built by Hatfield,
Bishop of Durham, in 1345. In Henry IV.’s time wild Prince Hal lodged
there for some nights.
In the reign of Henry VIII. Bishop Tunstall exchanged the house with the
king for one in Thames Street. Here, in 1550, lodged the French
ambassador, M. de Chastillon, and his colleagues.
Edward VI. granted the house to his sister Elizabeth for life, and here
that princess bore the scorn and persecution of Bonner and his spies. On
Mary coming to the throne and finding Tunstall driven from the Strand and
without a shelter, she restored to him Durham House. This Tunstall led a
life of great vicissitudes. Henry VIII. had moved him from London to
Durham; Edward VI. had dissolved his bishopric altogether; Mary had
restored it; and Elizabeth again stripped him in 1559, the year in which
he died.
The virgin queen kept the house some time in her own tenacious hands, but
in 1583 granted it to Raleigh, whom she had loaded with favours, and who,
in 1591, was Captain of the Guard, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and
Lieutenant of Cornwall.
On the death of Queen Elizabeth Raleigh’s sun of fortune set for ever, and
that sly time-server Toby Matthew, Bishop of Durham, claimed the old town
house of the see, relying on Cecil’s help and King James’s dislike to the
great enemy of Spain. Sir Walter opposed him, but the king in council,
1603, recognised the claim, and stripped Raleigh of his possession. The
aggrieved man, in a letter of remonstrance to the Lord Keeper Egerton,
states that he had occupied the house about twenty years, and had expended
on it £2000 out of his own purse.[163] Raleigh did not die at Tower Hill
till 1618; but Durham House was never occupied again either by bishop or
noble, and five years after the stables of the house came down to make way
for the New Exchange.
In Charles I.’s reign the Earl of Pembroke bought Durham Yard from the
Bishop of Durham for £200 a year, and built a handsome street leading to
the river.[164] The river front and the stables remained in ruins till the
Messrs. Adam built the Adelphi on the site of Raleigh’s old turret study.
Ivy Street had been the eastward boundary of the bishop’s domain.[165]
The New Exchange was opened April 11, 1609, in the presence of King James
and his Danish queen. It was built principally through the intervention of
Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who lived close by. It was called by the king
“Britain’s Bourse,” but it could not at first compete with the Royal
Exchange. At the Restoration, however, when Covent Garden grew into a
fashionable quarter, the New Exchange became more frequented than
Gresham’s building in the city.
In the year 1653 (Cromwell), the New Exchange was the scene of a tragedy.
Don Pantaleon de Saa, brother of the Portuguese ambassador, quarrelled
with a gentleman named Giraud, who was flirting with the milliners, and
who had used some contemptuous expression. The Portuguese, bent on
revenge, hired some bravos, who the next day stabbed to death a gentleman
whom they mistook for Mr. Giraud. They were instantly seized, and Don
Pantaleon was found guilty and executed. Singularly enough, the intended
victim perished on the same day on the same scaffold, having in the
meantime been condemned for a plot against the Protector.
There are many legends existing about the New Exchange. Thomas Duffet, an
actor of Charles II.’s time, kept originally a milliner’s shop here. At
the Eagle and Child, in Britain’s Bourse, the first edition of _Othello_
was sold in 1622. At the sign of the “Three Spanish Gypsies” lived Thomas
Radford, who sold wash-balls, powder, and gloves, and taught sempstresses.
His wife, the daughter of John Clarges, a farrier in the Savoy before or
after Radford’s death, married General Monk, became the vulgar Duchess of
Albemarle, and was eventually buried in Westminster Abbey. At the sign of
the Fop’s Head lived, in 1674, Will Cademan, a player and
play-publisher.[166] Henry Herringham, the chief London publisher before
Dryden’s petty tyrant, Tonson, had his shop at the Blue Anchor in the
Lower Walk. Mr. and Mrs. Pepys frequented the New Exchange. Here the
Admiralty clerk’s wife had “a mind to” a petticoat of sarcenet bordered
with black lace, and probably purchased it. Here also, in April, 1664,
Pepys and his friend Creed partook of “a most delicate dish of curds and
cream.”[167] Both Wycherly and Etherege have laid scenes of their comedies
at the New Exchange; and here, too, Dryden’s intriguing Mrs. Brainsick
pretends to visit her “tailor” to try on her new stays.
This Strand Bazaar, in the time of William and Mary, was the scene of the
pretty story of the “White Widow.” For several weeks a sempstress appeared
at one of the stalls, clothed in white, and wearing a white mask. She
excited great curiosity, and all the fashionable world thronged her stall.
This mysterious milliner was at last discovered to be no less a person
than the Duchess of Tyrconnel, widow of Talbot, the Lord Deputy of Ireland
under James II. Unable to obtain a secret access to her family, and almost
starving, she had been compelled to turn shopwoman. Her relatives provided
for her directly the story became known.[168] This duchess was the Frances
Jennings mentioned by Grammont, and sister to Sarah, Duchess of
Marlborough.
This long arcade, leading from the Strand to the water stairs, was divided
into four parts--the outward walk below stairs, the inner walk below
stairs, the outward walk above stairs, and the inner walk above stairs.
The lower walk was a place of assignations. In the upper walk the air rang
with cries of “Gloves or ribands, sir?” “Very good gloves or ribands.”
“Choice of fine essences.”[169] Here Addison used to pace, watching the
fops and fools with a kindly malice.[170] The houses in the Strand, over
against the Exchange door, were often let to rich country families, who
glared from the balconies and stared from the windows.[171]
Soon after the death of Queen Anne the New Exchange became disreputable.
No one would take stalls, so it was pulled down in 1737, and a frontage of
dwelling-houses and shops made to the Strand, facing what is now the
Adelphi Theatre. But we must return for a moment to old Durham House and a
few more of its earlier tenants.
In Henry VIII.’s time Durham House had been the scene of great banquets
given by the challengers after the six days’ tournament that celebrated
the butcher king’s ill-omened marriage with that “Flemish mare,” as he
used ungallantly to call Anne of Cleves. To these sumptuous feasts the
bruised and battered champions, together with all the House of Commons and
Corporation of London, were invited. To reward the challengers, among whom
was Oliver Cromwell’s ancestor, Dick o’ the Diamond, the burly king gave
them each a yearly pension of one hundred marks out of the plundered
revenues of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem.
Later a mint was established at Durham House by Sir William Sherrington,
to aid the Lord Admiral Seymour in his treasonable efforts against his
brother, the Protector, who finally offered him up a victim to his
ambition. Sherrington, however, escaped, and worked the mint for the
equally unfortunate Protector.
But no loss of heads could warn the Strand noblemen. It was here that the
ambitious Duke of Northumberland married his son, Lord Guildford Dudley,
to poor meek-hearted Lady Jane Grey, who, the luckless queen of an hour,
longed only for her Greek books, her good old tutor Ascham, and the quiet
country house where she had been so happy. On that great day for the duke,
Lady Jane’s sister also married Lord Herbert, and Lord Hastings espoused
Lady Catherine Dudley. It was from Durham House that the poor martyr of
ambition, Lady Jane, was escorted in pomp to the Tower, which was so soon
to be her grave.
In 1560 Jean Nicot, a French ambassador, had carried tobacco from Lisbon
to Paris. In 1586[172] Drake brought tobacco from Raleigh’s colony in
Virginia. Raleigh was fond of smoking over his books. His tobacco-box
still existed in 1715; it was of gilt leather, as large as a muff-case,
and contained cases for sixteen pipes.[173] There is a doubtful legend
about Raleigh’s first pipe, the scene of which may be not unfairly laid at
Durham House, where Raleigh then lived.
One day his servant, bringing in a tankard of spiced ale as usual into the
turret study, found Raleigh (it is said) smoking a pipe over his folios.
The clown, seeing smoke issue in clouds from his master’s mouth, dropped
the tankard in a fright, and ran downstairs to shout to the family that
“master was on fire, and that he would be burnt to ashes if they did not
run directly to his help.”[174]
The stalwart, sour-faced Raleigh disported himself at Durham House in a
suit of clothes beset with jewels and valued at sixty thousand
pounds,[175] and in diamond court-shoes valued at six thousand six hundred
pieces of gold. Here he lived with his wife Elizabeth, and his two unlucky
sons Walter and Carew. Here, as he sat in his study in the little turret
that looked over the Thames,[176] he must have written against the
Spaniards, told his adventures in Virginia, and described his discovery of
the gold country of Guiana, his quarrel with Essex at Fayal, and the
capture of the rich caracks laden with gold, pearls, and cochineal.
The estate of Durham Place was purchased from the Earl of Pembroke, about
1760, by four brothers of the name of Adam, sons of an architect at
Kirkaldy, who were patronised by the handsome and much-abused Earl of
Bute, and who built Caen Wood House, near Hampstead, afterwards the wise
Lord Mansfield’s. Robert, the ablest of the brothers, had visited Palmyra,
and was supposed from those gigantic ruins to have borrowed his grand
spirit of construction, as well as much of that trivial ornament which he
might surely have found nearer home. When the brothers Adam began their
work, Durham Yard (the court-yard of Raleigh’s old house) was a tangle of
small sheds, coal-stores, wine-vaults, and lay-stalls. They resolved to
leave the wharves, throw some huge arches over the declivity, connect the
river with the Strand, and over these vaults erect a series of well-built
streets, a noble river terrace, and lofty rooms for the newly-established
Society of Arts.
In July 1768,[177] when the Adelphi Buildings were commenced, the Court
and City were at war, and the citizens, wishing to vex Bute, applied to
Parliament to prevent the brothers encroaching on the river, of which
sable stream the Lord Mayor of London is the conservator, but not the
purifier; but they lost their cause, and the worthy Scotchmen
triumphed.[178]
The Scotch are a patriotic people, and stand bravely by their own folk.
The Adams sent to Scotland for workmen, whose labours they stimulated by
countless bagpipes; but the canny men, finding the bagpipes played their
tunes rather too quick, threw up the work, and Irishmen were then
employed. The joke of the day was, that the Scotchmen took their bagpipes
away with them, but left their _fiddles_![179]
The Adelphi at once became fashionable. Garrick, then getting old, left
his house in Southampton Street to occupy No. 5, the centre building of
the terrace, and lived there till his death in 1779. Singularly enough,
this great and versatile actor had, on first coming to London with his
friend Johnson, started as a wine merchant below in Durham Yard. Here he
must have raved in “Richard,” and wheedled as Abel Drugger; and in the
rooms at No. 5 half the celebrities of his century must have met. He died
in the “first floor back,” and his widow died in the same house as long
after as 1822. The ceiling in the front drawing-room was painted by
Antonio Zucchi. A white marble chimney-piece in the same room is said to
have cost £300.[180] Garrick died after only nine years’ residence in the
new terrace; but his sprightly widow, a theatrical critic to the last,
lived till she was past ninety, still an enthusiast about her husband’s
genius. The first time she re-opened the house after Davy’s death, Dr.
Johnson, Boswell, Sir Joshua, Mrs. Carter, and Mrs. Boscawen were present.
“She looked well,” says Boswell; “and while she cast her eyes on her
husband’s portrait, which was hung over the chimney-piece, said, that
death was now the most agreeable object to her.” Worthy woman! and so she
honestly thought at the time; but she lived exactly forty-three years
longer in the same house.
If there is a spot in London which Johnson’s ghost might be expected to
revisit, it is that quiet and lonely Adelphi Terrace. At night no sound
comes to you but a shout from some passing barge, or the creak of a ship’s
windlass. Here Johnson and Boswell once leant over, looking at the Thames.
The latter said, “I was thinking of two friends we had lost, who once
lived in the buildings behind us, Beauclerk and Garrick.” “Ay, sir,”
replied Johnson, seriously, “and two _such_ friends as cannot be
supplied.” This is a recollection that should for ever hallow the Adelphi
Terrace to us.
The Beauclerk above mentioned was one of the few rakes whom Johnson loved.
He was a friend of Langton, and as such had become intimate with the great
doctor. Topham Beauclerk was a man of acute mind and elegant manners, and
ardently fond of literature. He was of the St. Albans family, and had a
resemblance to swarthy Charles II., a point which pleased his elder
friend. The doctor liked his gay, young manner, and flattered himself much
as women do who marry rakes, that he should reform him in time.
“What a c
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