HAUNTED LONDON

HAUNTED LONDON

BY
WALTER THORNBURY

EDITED BY EDWARD WALFORD, M.A.

TEMPLE BAR, 1761.

ILLUSTRATED BY F. W. FAIRHOLT, F.S.A.

London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1880

[Pg v]

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[Pg vi] 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[Pg vii] 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.

[Pg viii]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.

[Pg ix]

[Pg xiii]

[Pg 1]

HAUNTED LONDON.

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[Pg 2] 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[Pg 3] 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.

[Pg 4]

SHIP YARD, TEMPLE BAR, 1761.

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[Pg 5] 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;[Pg 6] 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[Pg 7] 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[Pg 8] 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[Pg 9] 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[Pg 10] 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.”

[Pg 11]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[Pg 12] 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[Pg 13] 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]

[Pg 14]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[Pg 15] 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[Pg 16] 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[Pg 17] 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[Pg 18] 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[Pg 19] 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.

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]

[Pg 20]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[Pg 21] 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[Pg 22] 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[Pg 23] of Denmark, and was met by the two sheriffs at Temple Bar.

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[Pg 24] 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.

[Pg 25]

ST. CLEMENT’S CHURCH IN THE STRAND, 1753.

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.

[Pg 26]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.

[Pg 27]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[Pg 28] 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[Pg 29] 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[Pg 30] 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[Pg 31] 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[Pg 32] 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[Pg 33] 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[Pg 34] 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[Pg 35] 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[Pg 36] 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.

[Pg 37]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[Pg 38] 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—

[Pg 39] “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[Pg 40] 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.

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[Pg 41] 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]

ARUNDEL HOUSE, 1646.

In the time of James I., in whose reign the earldom was restored to Thomas Howard, Arundel House became a[Pg 42] 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[Pg 43] 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—
[Pg 44]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]

[Pg 45]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.”

[Pg 46]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[Pg 47] “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[Pg 48] 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:—

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,[Pg 49] 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[Pg 50] 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:—

[Pg 51]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 [Pg 52]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[Pg 53] 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[Pg 54] 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[Pg 55] 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.

PENN’S HOUSE, NORFOLK STREET, 1749.

[Pg 56]

SOMERSET HOUSE FROM THE RIVER, 1746.

SOMERSET HOUSE.

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[Pg 57] 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.

[Pg 58]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:—

[Pg 59]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[Pg 60] 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,[Pg 61] 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[Pg 62] 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[Pg 63] 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[Pg 64] 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.

[Pg 65]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[Pg 66] 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,[Pg 67] 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[Pg 68] 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[Pg 69] 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[Pg 70] 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[Pg 71] 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]

[Pg 72]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.

[Pg 73]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[Pg 74] 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]

[Pg 75]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[Pg 76] 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[Pg 77] 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[Pg 78] 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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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.

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”[Pg 81] 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.

[Pg 82]

JACOB TONSON’S BOOK-SHOP, 1742.

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.”[Pg 83] 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[Pg 84] 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[Pg 85] 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[Pg 86] 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.

[Pg 87]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,[Pg 88] 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[Pg 89] 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[Pg 90] 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[Pg 91] 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[Pg 92] 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[Pg 93] 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[Pg 94] 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]

[Pg 95]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[Pg 96] 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[Pg 97] 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[Pg 98] 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 coalition!” said Garrick, when he heard of the friendship; “why, I shall have my old friend to bail out of the Round House.” Beauclerk, says Boswell, “could take more liberties with Johnson than any one I ever saw him with;”[181] but, on the other hand, Beauclerk was not spared.[Pg 99] On one occasion Johnson said to him, “You never open your mouth, sir, without an intention to give pain, and you have often given me pain—not from the power of what you said, but from seeing your intention.” At another time he said, “Thy body is all vice, and thy mind all virtue.”

When the Adelphi was building, Garrick applied for the corner house of Adam Street for his friend Andrew Beckett, the bookseller in the Strand, and he obtained it. In this letter he calls the architects “the dear Adelphi,” and the western house “the corner blessing.” Garrick’s house was for some years occupied by the Royal Literary Fund, but is now a Club.

Garrick promised the brothers, if the request was granted, to make the shop, as old Jacob Tonson’s once was, the rendezvous of the first people in England. “I have,” he says, “a little selfishness in this request. I never go to coffee-houses, seldom to taverns, and should constantly (if this scheme takes place), be at Beckett’s at one at noon and six at night.”[182]

Garrick was a frequent visitor at the house of Mr. Thomas Beckett, the bookseller, in Pall Mall, and he obtained the appointment of sub-librarian at Carlton Palace for the son Andrew, who had written a comedy on the Emile of Rousseau at the age of fourteen, and produced a poem called Theodosius and Constantia. For nearly ten years he wrote for the British and Monthly Reviews. He was born in 1749, and died in 1843. His most useful work is called Shakspere Himself Again, in which he released the original text from much muddy nonsense of commentators. He complained bitterly of Griffiths, of the Monthly Review, having given him only £45 for four or five years’ work—280 articles, produced after reading and condensing 590 volumes; Mr. Griffiths’ annual profit by the Monthly being no less than £2000.

Into a house in John Street the Society of Arts, established in 1753 by Mr. Shipley, an artist, moved, about 1772. This society still give lectures and rewards, and does[Pg 100] about as much good as ever it did. Art must grow wild—it will not thrive in hot-houses. The great room is still adorned with the six large pictures illustrating the “Progress of Society,” painted by poor, half-crazed Barry, the ill-educated artist, who, too proud to paint cabinet pictures, could yet paint nothing larger sound or well.

Shipley, who established the society of Arts in imitation of one already established at Dublin, was originally a drawing-master at Northampton. From its commencement in 1753-4 to 1778 the society distributed in premiums and bounties £24,616. A year after its foundation Josiah Wedgwood began to infuse a classical and purer taste among the proprietors of the Staffordshire potteries,[183] and employed Flaxman to draw some of his designs, and was the first to improve the shape and character of our simplest articles of use.

Mr. Shipley was a brother of the Bishop of St. Asaph, and had studied under a portrait-painter named Phillips. In 1738 the Society of Arts voted their founder a gold medal for his public spirit. His school was continued by a Mr. Pars. He died, aged upwards of ninety, in 1784.[184]

Nollekens, the sculptor, learned drawing there, and Cosway, afterwards the fashionable miniature-painter, was the errand-boy. The house was subsequently inhabited by Rawle, the antiquary, a friend of fat, coarse, clever Captain Grose.[185]

Dr. Ward, the inventor of “Friar’s Balsam,” a celebrated quack doctor ridiculed by Hogarth, left his statue by Carlini to the Society of Arts. The doctor allowed Carlini £100 a year, so that he should work at this statue for life.[186]

This Joshua Ward, celebrated for his drop and pill, by which and his balsam he made a fortune, was the son of a drysalter in Thames Street. Praised by General Churchill and Lord Chief Baron Reynolds, he was called in to prescribe for King George. The king recovering in spite of[Pg 101] the quack, “Spot” Ward was rewarded by a solemn vote of a credulous House of Commons, and he obtained the privilege of being allowed to drive his carriage through St. James’s Park. Ward is conspicuous in one of Hogarth’s caricatures by a claret mark covering half his brazen face.

The housekeeper at the Society of Arts in Haydon’s time (1842) remembered Barry at work on the frescoes that are so deficient in colour and taste, but show such a fine grasp of mind. She said his violence was dreadful, his oaths horrid, and his temper like insanity. In summer he came at five and worked till dark; he then lit his lamp and went on etching till eleven at night. He was seven years at his task. Burke and Johnson called once; but no artist came to see him. He would have almost shot any painter who dared to do so. He had his tea boiled in a quart pot, dined in Porridge Island, and took milk for supper.[187]

Years after Barry lay in state in the great room which his own genius had adorned, and was buried in the Abbey; but few of the Academicians attended his funeral. The Adelphi pictures have been recently lined and restored.

Barry having vainly attempted to decorate St. Paul’s, executed the paintings now at the Society of Arts for his mere expenses, but eventually, one way and another, cleared a considerable sum by them. He painted them, as he said, to prove that Englishmen had a genius for high art, music, and other refinements of life. They are fairly drawn, often elegantly and reasonably well grouped, but bad in colour. The heterogeneous dresses are jumbled together with bad taste—Dr. Burney in a toupee floats among water-nymphs, and William Penn’s wig and hat are ludicrously obtrusive. The perspective is often “out,” and the attitudes are stiff; still, historically speaking, the pictures are large-minded and interesting; and, in spite of his faults, one likes to think of the brave Irishman busy on his scaffold, railing at Reynolds and defying everybody. Barry was really a self-deceiver, like Haydon, and aimed far beyond his powers.

At Osborne’s Hotel, in John Street, the King and Queen[Pg 102] of the Sandwich Islands resided while on a visit to England in the reign of George IV. A comic song written on their arrival was once popular, though now forgotten; and Theodore Hook produced a quaint epigram on their death by small-pox, the point of which was, that one day Death, being hungry, called for “two Sandwiches.” The epigram was not without the unfeeling wit peculiar to that heartless lounger at the clubs, who spent his life amusing the great people, and who died at last a worn-out spendthrift, sans character, sans everything.

Of all London’s charlatans, perhaps the most impudent was Dr. Graham, a Scotchman, whose brother married Catherine Macaulay, the author of a forgotten History of England, much vaunted by Horace Walpole. In or about 1780 this plausible cheat opened what he called a “Temple of Health,” in a central house in the Adelphi Terrace. His rooms were stuffed with glass globes, marble statues, medico-electric apparatus, figures of dragons, stained glass, and other theatrical properties. The air was drugged with incense and strains of music. The priestess of this temple was said to be no less a person than Emma Lyons, afterwards Lady Hamilton, the fatal Cleopatra of Lord Nelson. She had been first a housemaid and afterwards a painter’s model. She was as beautiful as she was vulgar and abandoned. The house was hung with crutches, ear-trumpets, and other trophies.[188] For one night in the celestial bed, that secured a beautiful progeny, this impostor obtained £100; for a supply of his elixir of life £1000 in advance, and for his earth-baths a guinea each. Yet this arrant knave and hypocrite was patronised by half the English nobility. Archenholz, a German traveller, writing about 1784, describes Dr. Graham and his £60,000 celestial bed. He dilates on the vari-coloured transparent glasses, and the rich vases of perfume that filled the impudent quack’s temple, the half-guinea treatises on health, the moonshine admitted into the rooms, and the divine balm at a guinea a bottle.

[Pg 103]A magneto-electric bed, to be slept in for the small sum of £50 a night, was on the second floor, on the right hand of the orchestra, and near the hermitage. Electricity and perfumes were laid on in glass tubes from adjoining reservoirs. The beds (there were two or three at least) rested on six massy transparent columns. The perfumed curtains were of purple and celestial blue, like those of the Grand Turk. Graham was blasphemous enough to call this chamber his “Holy of Holies.” His chief customers were captains of privateers, nabobs, spendthrifts, and old noblemen. The farce concluded in March 1784, when the rooms were shut for ever, and the temple of Apollo, the immense electrical machine, the self-playing organ, and the celestial bed, were sold in open daylight by a ruthless auctioneer.[189]

Bannister “took off” Graham in a farce called The Genius of Nonsense, produced at the Haymarket in 1780. His satin sofas on glass legs, his celestial bed, his two porters in long tawdry greatcoats and immense gold-laced cocked hats, distributing handbills at the door, while his goddess of health was dying of a sore-throat from squalling songs at the top of the staircase, were all hit off by a speaking harlequin, who also caricatured the doctor’s sliding walk and bobbing bows. The younger Colman and Bannister had been to the Temple of Health on purpose to take the quack’s portrait.[190]

Mr. Thomas Hill, the fussy, good-natured Hull of Theodore Hook’s Gilbert Gurney, lived for many years and finally died in the second floor of No. 1 James Street, Adelphi. He was the supposed prototype of the obtrusive Paul Pry. It was Hill’s boast always to have what you wanted. “Cards, sir? Pooh! pooh! Nonsense! thousands of packs in the house.” Liston made the name of Paul Pry proverbial and world-wide.

The names of the four Scotch brothers, John, Robert, James, and William Adam, are preserved by the existing Adelphi Streets. When will any of our streets be named after great thinkers? It is a disgrace to us to allow new districts to be christened, without Government supervision,[Pg 104] by worthless, ignoble, and ridiculous names, confusing in their vulgar repetition. Indifferent kings, and nobles not much better, give their names to half the suburbs of London, while Shakespere is unremembered by the builders, and Spenser and Byron have as yet no brick-and-mortar godchildren.

OLD HOUSES ON THE SITE OF WELLINGTON STREET, 1742.

The eldest of the brothers, Robert Adam, died in 1792, and was buried in the south aisle of Westminster Abbey. His pall was supported by the Duke of Buccleuch, the Earl of Coventry, the Earl of Lauderdale, Lord Stormont, Lord Frederick Campbell, and Mr. Pulteney.

It was told as a joke invented against that fat butt, Sir William Curtis, that at a public dinner some lover of royalty and Terence proposed the healths of George IV. and the[Pg 105] Duke of York as “the Adelphi,” upon which the alderman, who followed with the next toast, determining that the East should not be far behind the West, rose and said that “as they were now on the subject of streets, he would beg to propose Finsbury Square.” But, after all, why should we laugh at the poor alderman because he did not happen to know Greek? That surely is a venial sin.

And here, retracing our steps, we must make an episode and turn back down the Savoy.

[Pg 106]

THE SAVOY FROM THE THAMES, 1650.

THE SAVOY.

“Their leaders, John Ball, Jack Straw, and Wat Tyler, then marched through London, attended by more than twenty thousand men, to the palace of the Savoy, which is a handsome building on the road to Westminster, situated on the banks of the Thames, and belonging to the Duke of Lancaster. They immediately killed the porters, pressed into the house, and set it on fire.”—Froissart’s Chronicles.

A minute’s walk down a turning on the south side of the Strand, and we are in the precinct of an old palace, and standing on royal property.

In a ramble by moonlight one cannot fail to meet under the churchyard trees in the Savoy, John of Gaunt, who[Pg 107] once lived there; John, King of France, who died there; George Wither, the poet, and sweet Mistress Anne Killigrew, who are buried there, and Chaucer, who was married there.

Down that steep, dray-traversed street, now so dull and lonely, kings and bishops, knights and ladies, have paced, and mobs have hurried with sword and fire. Now it is a congeries of pickle warehouses, printing offices, and glass manufactories.

Simon de Montfort, that ambitious Earl of Leicester who married the sister of Henry III., and whose father persecuted the Albigenses, dwelt in the Savoy. Here he must have first won the barons, the people, and the humbler clergy by his opposition to the extortions of the king and the bishops. Here for a time he must have all but reigned, till that fatal August day when he fell at Evesham. Simon was a friend of the monks, and after his death endless miracles were said to have been wrought at his grave,[191] as might have been expected.

The Savoy derives its foreign name from a certain Peter, Earl of Savoy, uncle of Eleanor, the daughter of Raymond, Count of Provence, and queen of that good man, but weak monarch, Henry III. This earl was the leader of that rapacious and insolent train of Frenchmen and Savoyards which followed Queen Eleanor to England, and drove Simon de Montfort and his impetuous barons to rebellion by their hunger for titles, lands, and benefices. In 30 Henry III. the king granted to Peter, Earl of Richmond and Savoy, all those houses in the Strand, adjoining the river, formerly belonging to Brian de Lisle, upon paying yearly to the king’s exchequer, at the Feast of St. Michael, three barbed arrows for all services.

In 1322 an Earl of Lancaster, then master of the Savoy, on the return of the Spensers, formed an alliance with the Scots, and broke out into open rebellion against Edward II. He was taken at Boroughbridge, led to Pontefract, and there beheaded. As he was led to execution on a bridleless pony, the mob pelted him with mud, taunting him as King[Pg 108] Arthur—the royal name he had assumed in his treasonable letters to the Scots.[192]

Earl Peter, in due time growing weary of stormy England, and sighing for his cool Savoy mountains, transferred his mansion to the provost and chapter of Montjoy (Fratres de Monte Jovis) at Havering-atte-Bower, a small village in Essex. At the death of the foolish king, his widow purchased the palace of the Savoy of the Montjoy chapter, as a residence for her son Edmund, afterwards Earl of Lancaster, to whom had been given the chief estates of the defeated Montfort.

His son Henry, Duke of Lancaster, repaired and partly rebuilt the palace, at an expense of upwards of 50,000 marks. From this potent lord it descended to Edward III.’s son, John of Gaunt (Ghent), who lived here in the splendour befitting the son of Edward III., the uncle of Richard II., and the father of a prince hereafter to become Henry IV.

It was in the chapel of this river-side palace (about 1360, Edward III.) that our great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, married Philippa, daughter of a knight of Hainault and sister to a mistress of the Duke’s. He mentions his marriage in his poem of The Dream.[193] He says harmoniously—

“On the morrow,
When every thought and every sorrow
Dislodg’d was out of mine heart,
With every woe and every smart,
Unto a tent prince and princess
Methought brought me and my mistress.
****
With ladies, knighten, and squiers,
And a great host of ministers,
Which tent was church parochial.”

Those marriage bells have long since rung, the smoke of that incense has long since risen to heaven, yet we seldom pass the Savoy without thinking how the poet and his fair Philippa went

[Pg 109] “To holy church’s ordinance,
And after that to dine and dance,
... and divers plays.”

It was to his great patron—“time-honoured” Lancaster, claimant, through his wife, of the throne of Castile—that Chaucer owed all his court favours, his Genoese embassy, his daily pitcher of wine, his wardship, his controllership, and his annuity of twenty marks. It was in this palace he must have imbibed his attachment to Wickliffe, and his hatred of all proud and hypocritical priests.

Buildings seem, like men, to be born under special stars. It was the fate of the Savoy to enjoy a hundred and forty years of splendour, and then to sink into changeless poverty and desolation. It was also its ill fate to be once sacked and once burnt. In 1378, under Richard II., its first punishment overtook it. John Wickliffe, a Yorkshireman, had been appointed rector of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, by the favour of John of Ghent, who was delighted with a speech of Wickliffe in Parliament denying that King John’s tribute to the Pope necessarily bound King Edward III. The Papal bull for Wickliffe’s prosecution did not reach England till the king’s death, but Wickliffe was cited on the 19th of February, 1378, to appear before the Bishop of London at St. Paul’s. In the interval before his appearance he had promised the Parliament, at their request, to prove the legality of its refusal to pay tribute to the Pope.

On the day appointed Wickliffe appeared in Our Lady’s Chapel, accompanied by the Earl Marshall, Percy, and the Duke of Lancaster, who openly encouraged him, to the horror of the populace and the bitter rage of the priests. A quarrel instantly began by Courtenay, the Bishop of London, opposing a motion of the Earl Marshall that Wickliffe should be allowed a seat. The proud duke, pale with anger, whispered fiercely to the bishop that, “rather than take such language from him, he would drag him out of the church by the hair of his head.” The threat was heard by an unfriendly bystander, and it passed round the church in whispers. Rumour, with her thousand babbling tongues, was soon busy[Pg 110] in the churchyard, where the people had assembled, eager for the reformer’s condemnation. They instantly broke forth like hounds which have recovered a scent. It was at once proposed to break into the church and pull the duke from the judgment-seat. When he appeared at the door, he was received with ominous yells, and was chased and pelted by the mob. Furious and beside himself with rage, he instantly proceeded to Westminster, where the Parliament was sitting, and moved that from that day forth all the privileges of the citizens of London should be annulled, that they should no longer elect a mayor or sheriff, and that Lord Percy should possess the entire jurisdiction over them—a severe penalty, it must be owned, for pelting a duke with mud.

The following day, the citizens, hearing of this insolent proposal, snatched up their arms, and swore to take the proud duke’s life. After pillaging the Marshalsea, where Lord Percy resided, they poured down on the Savoy and killed a priest whom they took to be Percy in disguise. They then broke all the furniture and threw it into the Thames, leaving only the bare walls standing. While the mob were shouting at the windows, feeding the river with torrents of spoiled wealth, or cutting the beds and tapestry to pieces, the duke and Lord Percy, who had been dining with John of Ypres, a merchant in the City, escaped in disguise by rowing up the river to Kingston in an open boat. Eventually, at the entreaties of the Bishop of London, who pleaded the sanctity of Lent, the rioters dispersed, having first hung up the duke’s arms in a public place as those of a traitor. The Londoners finally appeased their opponent by carrying to St. Paul’s a huge taper of wax, blazoned with the duke’s arms, which was to burn continually before the image of Our Lady in token of reconciliation.

This John of Gaunt, fourth son[194] of Edward III., married Blanche, daughter of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, who died of the plague in 1360, John succeeding to the title in right of his wife. He married his daughter Philippa to the King of Portugal, and his daughter Catharine to the Infant of[Pg 111] Spain. From Henry Plantagenet, fourth Earl and first Duke of Lancaster, the Savoy descended to this John of Ghent, who married that amiable princess, Blanche Plantagenet, daughter and co-heir of Earl Henry.

Into this same king-haunted precinct John of France, after the slaughter at Poitiers, was brought with chivalrous and almost ostentatious humility by the Black Prince. One thousand nine hundred English lances had routed with great slaughter eight thousand French. The lanes and moors of Maupertuis were choked with dead knights; the French king had been wounded, beaten to the ground, and taken prisoner, together with his son Philip, by a gentleman of Artois.[195] Sailing from Bordeaux, the Black Prince arrived at Sandwich with his prisoner, and was received at Southwark by the citizens of London on May 5, 1357. Triumphal arches were erected, and tapestry hung from every window. The King of France rode like a conqueror on a richly trapped cream-coloured horse, while by his side sat the young prince on a small black palfrey. Some hours elapsed before the procession could reach Westminster Hall, where King Edward was surrounded by his prelates, knights, and barons. When John entered, our king arose, embraced him, and led him to a splendid banquet prepared for him. The palace of the Savoy was allotted to King John and his son, till his removal to Windsor.

Here the royal Frenchman may have been when he heard the tidings of the ferocity of the Jacquerie, and of the dreadful riots in his capital. To the Savoy he returned when his son, the Duke of Anjou, broke his parole and fled to Paris, desirous to exculpate himself of this dishonour, and to arrange for a crusade to recover Cyprus from the Turk.[196] To his council, dissuading him from returning, like a second Regulus, to captivity and perhaps death, the king addressed these memorable words—“If honour were banished from every other place, it should at least find an asylum in the breast of kings.”

[Pg 112]John was affectionately received by the chivalrous Edward, and again returned to his old quarters in the Savoy, with his hostages of the blood royal—“the three lords of the fleur-de-lys.” Here he spent several weeks in giving and receiving entertainments; but before he could proceed to business, he was attacked with a dangerous illness, and expired in 1364. His obsequies were performed with regal magnificence, and his corpse was sent with a splendid retinue to be interred at St. Denis.

When treaties are broken by statesmen, or unjust wars declared, let the reader go to the Savoy, and think of that brave promise-keeper, King John of France.

During the latter years of King Edward III., John of Gaunt became very unpopular. “The good Parliament” (1376) remonstrated against the expense of his unsuccessful wars in Spain, Scotland, and France, and against the excessive taxation. The duke imprisoned the Speaker, and banished wise William of Wyckeham from the king’s person, but in vain attempted to alter the law of succession.

In Wat Tyler’s rebellion the duke’s palace was the first to be destroyed. A refusal to pay oppressive poll-tax led to a riot at Fobbing, a village in Essex; from this place the flame spread like wildfire through the whole county, and the people rose, led by a priest named Jack Straw. At Dartford, a tiler bravely beat out the brains of a tax-collector who had insulted his daughter. Kent instantly rose, took Rochester Castle, and massed together at Maidstone, under Wat, a tiler, and Ball, a preacher. In a few days a hundred thousand men, rudely armed with clubs, bills, and bows, poured over Blackheath and hurried on to London.[197] In Southwark they demolished the Marshalsea and the King’s Bench; then they sacked Lambeth Palace, destroyed Newgate, fired the house of the Knights Hospitallers at Clerkenwell, and that of the Knights of St. John at Highbury, and seizing the Tower, beheaded an archbishop and several knights. All Flemings hidden in churches were dragged out and put to death. Yet, with all this intoxication of new[Pg 113] liberty, the claims of these Kentish men were simple and just. They demanded—The abolition of slavery; the reduction of rent to fourpence an acre; the free liberty of buying and selling in all fairs and markets; and lastly a general pardon.

At the great bivouacs at Mile End and on Tower Hill, Wat Tyler’s men required all recruits to swear to be true to King Richard and the Commons, and to admit no monarch of the name of John.[198] This last clause of the oath was aimed at John of Gaunt, to whom the people attributed all their misery. On June 13, 1381, a deluge of billmen, bowmen, artisans, and ploughmen rolled down on the Savoy. The duke was at the time negotiating with the Scots on the Borders, while his castles of Leicester and Tutbury were being plundered. The attack was sudden, and there was no defence. A proclamation had previously been made by Wat Tyler, that, as the common object was justice and not plunder, any one found stealing would be put to death.

For beauty and stateliness of building, as well as all manner of princely furniture, there was, says Holinshed, no palace in the realm comparable to the duke’s house that the Kentish and Essex men burnt and marred. They tore the silken and velvet hangings; they beat up the gold and silver plate, and threw it into the Thames; they crushed the jewels and mortars, and poured the dust into the river. One of the men—unfortunate rogue!—being seen to slip a silver cup into the breast of his doublet, was tossed into the fire and burnt to death, amid shouts and “fell cries.”[199] The cellars were ruthlessly plundered, probably in spite of Wat Tyler, and thirty-two of the poor wretches, buried under beams and stones, were either starved or suffocated. In the wildest of the storm, some barrels were at last found which were supposed to contain money. They were flung into the huge bonfire; in an instant they exploded, blew up the great hall, shook down several houses, killed many men, and reduced the palace to ruins. That was on the 13th; on the 15th, the Essex men had dispersed; and Wat Tyler,[Pg 114] the impetuous reformer, during a conference with the king in Smithfield, was slain by a sudden blow from the sword of Lord Mayor Walworth.

John of Gaunt died at the Bishop of Ely’s palace in Holborn, at Christmas 1398—his old home being now a ruin—and he was buried on the north side of the high altar of Saint Paul’s, beside the Lady Blanche, his first wife. Instantly on his death, the wilful young king, to the rage of the people, seized on all his uncle’s lands, rents, and revenues, and banished the duke’s attorney, who resisted his shameless theft. Amongst this pile of plunder the Savoy must have also passed.

The Savoy had bloomed, and after the bloom came in its due time the “sere and yellow leaf.” The precinct must have remained a waste during the Wars of the Roses;[200] but its blackened ruins preached their silent lesson in vain to the turbulent and tormented Londoners.

In the reign of that dark and wily king, Henry VII., sunshine again fell on the Savoy. That prince, who was fond of erecting convents, founded on the old site a hospital, intended to shelter one hundred poor almsmen. It was not, however, finished when he died, nor was it completed till the fifteenth year of his son’s reign (1524), the year in which the French were driven out of Italy.

The hospital, which was dedicated to John the Baptist, was in the form of a cross, and over the entrance-gate, facing the Strand, was the following insipid inscription:—

“Hospitium hoc inopi turba Savoia vocatum,
Septimus Henricus solo fundavit ab imo.”

The master and four brethren were to be priests and to officiate in turns, standing day and night at the gate to invite in and feed any poor or distressed persons who passed down the river-side road. If those so received were pilgrims or travellers, they were to be dismissed the next morning[Pg 115] with a letter of recommendation to the next hospital, and with money to defray their expenses on the journey.

In the reign of Edward VI., part of the revenues of the new hospital, to the value of six hundred pounds, was transferred to Bridewell prison and Christ’s Hospital school for poor orphan children; for already abuses had crept in, and indiscriminate charity had led to its usual melancholy results. The old palace had become no mere shelter for the deserving poor, but a den of loiterers, sham cripples, and vagabonds of either sex, who begged all day in the fields and came to the Savoy to sleep and sup.[201]

Queen Mary, whose Spanish blood made her a friend to all monastic institutions, re-endowed the unlucky place with fresh lands; but it went on in its old courses till the twelfth year of Elizabeth, who suddenly pounced in her own stern way on the nest of rogues, and, to the terror of sinecurists, deprived Thomas Thurland, then master, of his office, for corruption and embezzlement of the hospital estates.

We hear nothing more of the unlucky and neglected Hospital of St. John till the Restoration, when Dr. Henry Killigrew was appointed master, much to the chagrin and disappointment of the poet Cowley, to whom the sinecure had been promised by Charles I. and Charles II.

Cowley, the clever son of a London stationer, had been secretary to the queen-mother, but returning as a spy to England, was apprehended, and upon that made his peace with Cromwell. This latter fact the Royalists never forgave, and considering his play of The Cutter of Colman Street as caricaturing the old roystering Cavalier officers, they damned his comedy, lampooned him, and gave the Savoy to Killigrew, father of the court wit. Upon this the mortified poet wrote his poem of “The Complaint,”[202] wherein he calls the Savoy the Rachel he had served with “faith and labour for twice seven years and more,” and querulously describes himself as left alone gasping on the naked beach, while all his fellow voyagers had marched up to possess the promised land. The poem, though ludicrously querulous, contains some[Pg 116] lines, such as the following, which are truly beautiful. The muse is reproaching the truant poet.

“Art thou returned at last,” said she,
“To this forsaken place and me,
Thou prodigal who didst so loosely waste,
Of all thy youthful years, the good estate?
Art thou return’d here to repent too late,
And gather husks of learning up at last,
Now the rich harvest-time of life is past,
And winter marches on so fast?”

With this farewell lament Cowley withdrew “from the tumult and business of the world,” to his long-coveted retirement[203] at pleasant, green Chertsey, where, seven years after, he died.

The Savoy, always an abused sinecure, that made the master a rogue and its inmates professional beggars, was finally suppressed in the reign of Queen Anne.[204] It was then used as a barrack for five hundred soldiers, and as a deserters’ prison, till the approaches to Waterloo Bridge rendered its removal necessary.

Savoy Street occupies the site of the old central Henry VII.’s Tudor gate. Coal wharves cover the site of the ancient front of the hospital, and the houses in Lancaster Place, leading to Waterloo Bridge, another part of its area.

In 1661, the year after the restoration of Charles II., a celebrated conference between the Church of England bishops and the Presbyterian divines took place, with very small result, in the Bishop of London’s lodgings in the Savoy. Among the twelve bishops were Sheldon and Gauden, the author of Ikon Basilike: among the Presbyterians Baxter, Calamy, and Reynolds. They were to revise the Liturgy, and to discuss rules and forms of prayer; but there was so much distrust and reserve on both sides, that at the end of two months the conference came to an untimely end.[205] It was the bishops’ hour of triumph, and no[Pg 117] concessions could be expected from them after their many mortifications. In the same year Charles II. established a French church in the Savoy, and Dr. Durel preached the first sermon to the foreign residents in London, July 14, 1661.[206]

In Queen Anne’s time, after its suppression, the Savoy became, like the Clink and Whitefriars, a sanctuary for fraudulent debtors. On one occasion, in 1696, a creditor entering that nest of thieves to demand a debt, was tarred and feathered, carried in a wheelbarrow into the Strand, and there bound to the May-pole; but some constables coming up dispersed the rabble and rescued the tormented man from his persecutors.[207]

Strype, writing about 1720 (George I.), describes the Savoy as a great ruinous building, divided into several apartments. In one a cooper stored his hoops and butts; in another there were rooms for deserters, pressed men, Dutch recruits, and military prisoners. Within the precinct there was the king’s printing-press, where gazettes, proclamations, and Acts of Parliament were printed; and also a German Lutheran church, a French Protestant church, and a Dissenting chapel; besides “harbours for refugees and poor people.”[208] The worthy writer thus describes the hall of the old hospital:—

“In the midst of its buildings is a very spacious hall, the walls three foot broad, of stone without and brick and stone inward. The ceiling is very curiously built with wood, having knobs in one place hanging down, and images of angels holding before their breasts coats of arms, but hardly discoverable. One is a cross gules between four stars, or else mullets. It is covered with lead, but in divers places open to the weather. Towards the east end of the hall is a fair cupola with glass windows, but all broken, which makes it probable the hall was as long again, since cupolas are wont to be built about the middle of great halls.”

[Pg 118]In 1754 (George II.) clandestine marriages were performed at the Savoy church; and the advantages of secrecy, privacy, and access by water were boldly advertised in the papers of the day. The Public Advertiser of January 2, 1754, contains the following impudent and touting advertisement:—

“By Authority.—Marriages performed with the utmost privacy, secrecy, and regularity, at the ancient royal chapel of St. John the Baptist in the Savoy, where regular and authentic registers have been kept from the time of the Reformation (being two hundred years and upwards) to this day. The expense not more than one guinea, the five shilling stamp included. There are five private ways by land to this chapel, and two by water.”

At this time the Savoy was still a large cruciform building, with two rows of mullioned windows facing the Thames; a court to the north of it was called the Friary. The north front, the most ornamented, had large pointed windows and embattled parapets, lozenged with flint.

At the west end, in 1816, stood the guard-house, or military prison, its gateway secured by a strong buttress, and embellished with Henry VII.’s arms and the badges of the rose and the portcullis: above these were two hexagonal oriel windows.

In 1816, when the ruins were to be removed, crowds thronged to see the remains of John of Gaunt’s old palace.[209] The workmen found it difficult to destroy the mossy and ivy-covered walls and the large north window; the masses of flint, stone, and brick being eight or ten feet thick. The screw-jack was powerless to destroy the work of Chaucer’s time. The masons had to dig, pickaxe holes, and loosen the foundations, then to drive crowbars into the windows and fasten ropes to them, so as to pull the stones inwards. The outer buttresses would in any other way have defied armies.

Some of the stone was soft and white. This, according to tradition, was that brought from Caen by Queen Mary.[Pg 119] The industrious costermongers discovered this, and cut it into blocks to sell as hearthstones. A fire about 1777 had thrown down much of the hospital, so that the old level was fifteen or twenty feet deeper. The vaults and subterranean passages were unexplored. The wells were filled up. The workmen then pulled down the German chapel, which stood next Somerset House, and the red-brick house in the Savoy Square that was used for barracks. “The entrance,” says a writer of 1816, “to the Strand or Waterloo Bridge will be spacious, and the houses in the Strand now only stop the opening.”[210]

The Chapel of St. Mary, Savoy, is a late and plain Perpendicular structure, with a fine coloured ceiling. This small, quiet chapel holds a silent congregation of illustrious dead.

THE SAVOY CHAPEL.

Here are interred Sir Robert and Lady Douglas (temp. James I.); the Countess of Dalhousie, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the Tower, and sister to that admirable wife, Mrs. Hutchinson, who died in 1663; William Chaworth, who died in 1582, a member of that Nottinghamshire family, one of whom, Lord Byron’s predecessor, killed in a tavern duel; and Mrs. Anne Killigrew, who died in[Pg 120] 1685, the paintress and poetess on whom Dryden wrote an extravagant but glorious ode, beginning—

“That youngest virgin daughter of the skies,
Made in the last promotion of the blest.”[211]

This accomplished young lady was daughter of Dr. Henry Killigrew, and niece of Thomas Killigrew the wit, of whom Denham, the poet, bitterly said—

“Had Cowley ne’er spoke, Killigrew ne’er writ,
Combined in one they’d made a matchless wit.”

The father of Mistress Killigrew was author of a tragedy called The Conspiracy, which both Ben Jonson and Lord Falkland eulogised. Even old Anthony Wood says, in his own quaint way, that this lady “was a Grace for beauty, and a Muse for wit.”[212]

We must add to this list Sir Richard and Lady Rokeby, who died in 1523, and Gawin Douglas, that good Bishop of Dunkeld who first translated Virgil into Lowland Scotch. He was pensioned by Henry VIII., was a friend of Polydore Virgil, and died of the plague in London in 1521. The brass is on the floor, about three feet south of the stove in the centre of the chapel.[213]

Dr. Cameron, the last victim executed for the daring rebellion of 1745, lies here also in good company among knights and bishops. His monument, by M. L. Watson, was not erected till 1846. Here, too, is that great admiral of Elizabeth—George, third Earl of Cumberland, who used to wear the glove which his queen had given him, set in diamonds, in his tilting helmet. He died in the Duchy House in the Savoy, October 3, 1605; but his bowels alone were buried here, the rest of his body lies at Skipton. He was the father of the brave, proud Countess, who, when Charles II.’s secretary pressed on her notice a candidate for Appleby, wrote that celebrated cannon-shot of a letter:—

Here also there is a tablet to the memory of Richard Lander, the traveller, originally a servant of that energetic discoverer Captain Clapperton, who was the first to cross Africa from Tripoli and Benin. Lander had the honour also of first discovering the course of the Niger. He died in February 1834, from a gunshot-wound, at Fernando Po, aged only thirty-one. Such are the lion-men who extend the frontiers of English commerce.

In the Savoy reposes a true poet, but an unhappy man—George Wither, the satirist and idyllist, who died in 1667, and lies here between the east door and the south end of the chapel.[214] He was one of Cromwell’s major-generals, and had a hard time of it after the Restoration. It was to save Wither’s life that Denham used that humorous petition—“As long as Wither lives I should not be considered the worst poet in England.”

Wither anticipated Wordsworth in simple earnestness and a regard for the humblest subjects. The soldier-poet himself says—

“In my former days of bliss,
Her divine skill taught me this:
That from everything I saw
I could some invention draw,
And raise pleasure to her height
Through the meanest object’s sight,
By the murmur of a spring,
By the least bough’s rustling.”[215]

These charming lines were written when Wither lay in the Marshalsea, imprisoned for writing a satire—Abuses stripped and whipped.

In the same church lies one of the smallest of military heroes—Lewis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, who died in the reign of Queen Anne. He was nephew of the great Turenne, and was one of the few persons present when Charles II. [Pg 122]received extreme unction. He commanded, or rather followed, King James II.’s troops at Sedgemoor, in 1685, and at that momentous crisis “thought only of eating and sleeping.”[216] Upon this shambling general the Duke of Buckingham wrote one of his latest lampoons.[217]

In 1552 the first manufactory of glass in England was established at the old Savoy House. It was here that, in 1658, the Independents met and drew up their famous Declaration of Faith. In 1671 the Royal Society’s publications were printed here. In Dryden’s time, the wounded English sailors who had been mangled by Van Tromp’s and De Ruyter’s shot were nursed here. The good and witty Fuller, who wrote the Worthies lectured here. Half-crazed Alexander Cruden, who compiled the laborious Concordance to the Bible, lived here; and here grinding Jacob Tonson had a warehouse.

In 1843 the Queen repaired the Savoy Chapel, in virtue of her being the patron of it. The duty, indeed, fell upon the Crown, for the chapel stood in the Liberty of the Duchy of Lancaster, and the office of the Duchy is in Lancaster Place, to the right as you approach Waterloo Bridge.

In July 1864 the Savoy Chapel was unfortunately destroyed by a fire occasioned by an explosion of gas. The coloured ceiling, the altar window, containing a figure of St. John the Baptist, and a solitary niche with some tabernacle work at the east end, all perished. It was shortly afterwards restored and decorated afresh throughout, at the cost of Her Majesty.

Mr. George Augustus Sala has admirably sketched the present condition of the Precinct,—its almost solemn silence and its gravity,—its loneliness, as of Juan Fernandez, Norfolk Island, or Key West,[218] although on the very verge of the roaring world of London, and but five minutes’ walk from Temple Bar.

The royal property is chiefly covered now by shops,[Pg 123] public-houses, and printing-offices. The Precinct still retains traditions of the vagabond squatters who, till about the middle of the last century, assumed possession of the ruinous tenements in the Savoy, till the Footguards turned them out, and the houses were pulled down, rebuilt, and let to respectable tenants.

The old churchyard has long since been sealed up by the Board of Health, but the trees and grass still flourish round the old stones. Clean-shaved, nattily dressed actors come to this quiet purlieu to study their parts. Musicians of theatrical orchestras, penny-a-liners, and printers haunt the bar of the Savoy tavern. Those quiet houses with the white door-steps, shining brass plates and green blinds, are inhabited by accountants’ clerks, retired and retiring small tradesmen, and commission agents interested in pale ale, pickles, and Wallsend coals.

“So,” says Mr. Sala, “run the sands of life through this quiet hour-glass; so glides the life away in the old Precinct. At its base a river runs for all the world; at its summit is the brawling, raging Strand; on either side are darkness and poverty and vice, the gloomy Adelphi arches, the Bridge of Sighs that men call Waterloo. But the Precinct troubles itself little with the noise and tumult; it sleeps well through life without its fitful fever.”

Wearied of its old grandeur, pondering, as old men ponder, over its dead kings—for Wat Tyler and his Kentish men need no Riot Act to quiet them now—the Savoy and its crowned ghosts drift on with our methodical planet, meekly awaiting the death-blow that time must some day inflict.

Tait Wilkinson’s father was a minister of the Savoy. Garrick helped to transport him by informing against him for illegally performing the marriage ceremony. In return, Garrick helped forward the son—“an exotic,” as he called him, rather than an actor—but a wonderful mimic, not only of voice and manner, but even of features. He used to reproduce Foote’s imitations of the older actors—as Mathews afterward imitated Wilkinson, who in his time had imitated Foote, to that impudent buffoon’s great vexation.

[Pg 124]The Examiner, whose office is near Waterloo Bridge, was started by Leigh Hunt and his brother John in 1808. It began by boldly asserting the necessity for reform, lampooning the Regent, and attacking the cant and excesses of Methodism. In 1812 both the Hunts were found guilty of having called the Prince Regent “the Prince of Whales” and “a fat Adonis of fifty,” and were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane gaol, and to pay a fine of £500. At a later period, Hazlitt joined the paper, and wrote for it the essays reprinted (in 1817) under the title of The Round Table.[219] Close to it is the office of the Spectator, another paper of the same calibre and class, and more important than the Examiner now, though its early history is not so interesting.

Waterloo Bridge, one of those marvels built by the industrious simple-hearted John Rennie, was opened by the Prince Regent in 1817. Dupin declared it was a colossal monument worthy of Sesostris or the Cæsars; and what most struck Canova in England was that the foolish Chinese Bridge then in St. James’s Park should be the production of the Government, while Waterloo Bridge was the result of mere private enterprise.[220] The bridge did not settle more than a few inches after the centres were struck.

The project of erecting the Strand Bridge, as it was first called, was started by a company in 1809, a joint-stock-fever year. Rennie received £1000 a year for himself and assistants, or £7: 7s. a day, and expenses. The bridge consists of nine arches, of 120 feet span, with piers 20 feet thick, the arches being plain semi-ellipses, with their crowns 30 feet above high water. Over the points of each pier are placed Doric column pilasters, after a design taken from the Temple of Segesta in Sicily. In the construction of the bridge the chief features of Rennie’s management were the following:—The employment of coffer-dams in founding the piers; new methods of constructing, floating, and fixing the centres; the introduction and working of Aberdeen granite to an [Pg 125]extent before unknown; and the adoption of elliptical stone arches of an unusual width.

Nearly all the bur stone was brought to the bridge by one horse, called “Old Jack.” On one occasion the driver, a steady man, but too fond of his morning dram, kept “Old Jack” waiting a longer time than usual at the public-house, upon which he poked his head in at the open door, and gently drew out his master by the coat collar.[221]

Rennie, the architect of the three great London bridges, the engineer of the Plymouth Breakwater and of the London and East India Docks, and a drainer of the Fens, was the son of a small farmer in East Lothian, and was born in 1761.[222]

THE SAVOY PRISON, 1793.

[Pg 126]

DURHAM HOUSE, 1790.

FROM THE SAVOY TO CHARING CROSS.

Old York House stood on the site of Buckingham and Villiers Streets. In ancient times, York House had been the inn of the Bishops of Norwich. Abandoned to the crown, King Henry VIII. gave the place to that gay knight Charles Brandon, the husband of his beautiful sister Mary, the Queen of France. When the Church rose again and resumed its scarlet pomp, the house was given to Queen Mary’s Lord Chancellor, Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, in exchange for Suffolk House in Southwark, which was presented by Queen Mary to the see of York in [Pg 127]recompense for York House, Whitehall, taken from Wolsey by her father. On the fall of that minister, once more a change took place, and the house passed to the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, who rented it of the see of York.

In this house the great Francis Bacon was born, on the 22d of January, 1561. York House stood near the royal palace, from which it was parted by lanes and fields. Its courtyard and great gates opened to the street. The main front, with its turrets and water stair, faced the river. The garden, falling by an easy slope to the Thames, commanded a view as far south as the Lollards’ Tower at Lambeth, as far east as London Bridge. “All the gay river life[223] swept past the lawn, the salmon-fishers spreading their nets, the watermen paddling gallants to Bankside, and Shakspere’s theatre, the city barges rowing past in procession, and the queen herself, with her train of lords and ladies, shooting by in her journeys from the Tower to Whitehall Stairs. From the lattice out of which he gazed, the child could see over the palace roof the pinnacles and crosses of the old abbey.”

The Lord Keeper Pickering died at York House in 1596, and Lord Chancellor Egerton in 1616 or 1617. In 1588 it is supposed the Earl of Essex tried to obtain the house, as Archbishop Sandys wrote to Burghley begging him to resist some such demand. Essex was in ward here for six months, fretting under the care of Lord Keeper Egerton.

“York House was the scene,” says a clever pleader for a great man’s good fame, “of Bacon’s gayest hours, and of his sharpest griefs—of his highest magnificence, and of his profoundest prostration. In it his studious childhood passed away. In it his father died. On going into France, to the court of Henry IV., he left it a lively, splendid home; on his return from that country, he found it a house of misery and death. From its gates he wandered forth with his widowed mother into the world. Though it passed into[Pg 128] other hands, his connection with it never ceased. Under Egerton its gates again opened to him. It was the scene of that inquiry into the Irish treason when he was the queen’s historian. During his courtship of Alice Barnham, York House was his second home. In one of its chambers he watched by the sick-bed of Ellesmere, and on Ellesmere’s surrender of the Seals, presented the dying Chancellor with the coronet of Brackley. It became his own during his reign as Keeper and Chancellor. From it he dated his great Instauration; in its banqueting-hall he feasted poets and scholars; from one of its bed-rooms he wrote his Submission and Confession; in the same room he received the Earls of Arundel, Pembroke, and Southampton, as messengers from the House of Lords; there he surrendered the Great Seal. To regain York House, when it had passed into other hands, was one of the warmest passions of his heart, and the resolution to retain it against the eager desires of Buckingham was one of the secret causes of his fall.”

“No,” said the fallen great man; “York House is the house wherein my father died and wherein I first breathed, and there will I yield my last breath, if it so please God, and the king will give me leave.”[224]

Some of the saddest and some of the happiest events of Bacon’s life must have happened in the Strand. From thence he rode, sumptuous in purple velvet from cap to shoe, along the lanes to Marylebone Chapel, to wed his bride Alice Barnham.

York House was famous for its aviary, on which Bacon had expended £300. It was in the garden here that we are told the Chancellor once stood looking at the fishers below throwing their nets. Bacon offered them so much for a draught, but they refused. Up came the net with only two or three little fish; upon which his lordship told them that “hope was a good breakfast, but an ill supper.”[225]

It was on the death of his friend, Lord Chancellor [Pg 129]Ellesmere, and on his own installation, that Bacon bought the lease of York House from the former’s son, the first Earl of Bridgewater. He found the rooms vast and naked. His friends and votaries furnished the house, giving him books and drawings, stands of arms, cabinets, jewels, rings, and boxes of money. Lady Cæsar contributed a massive gold chain, and Prince Charles a diamond ring.

Bacon, when young, had been often taken to court by his father; and the queen, delighting in the gravity and wisdom of the boy, used to call him her “young Lord Keeper.” Even then his mind was philosophically observant; and it is said that he used to leave his playmates in St. James’s Fields to try and discover the cause of the echo in a certain brick conduit.[226]

At Durham House, on January 22, 1620, the year in which he published his magnum opus, the Novum Organon, and a twelvemonth before his disgrace, Bacon gave a grand banquet to his friends. Ben Jonson was one of the guests, and is supposed to have himself recited a set of verses, in which he says—

“Hail th’ happy genius of the ancient pile!
How comes it that all things so about thee smile,—
The fire, the wine, the men?—and in the midst
Thou stand’st as if some mystery thou didst.

“England’s High Chancellor, the destined heir,
In his soft cradle to his father’s chair,
Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full,
Out of their choicest and their richest wool.
’Tis a brave cause of joy. * *
Give me a deep-crowned bowl, that I may sing,
In raising him, the wisdom of my king.”

Who till he dies can boast of having been happy? The year after, the king’s anger fell like an axe upon the great courtier. Solitary and comfortless at Gorhambury, Bacon petitioned the Lords in almost abject terms to be allowed to return to York House, where he could advance his studies and consult his physicians, creditors, and friends, so that “out of the carcass of dead and rotten greatness, as out of[Pg 130] Samson’s lion, there may be honey gathered for future times.” Sir Edward Sackville prayed him in vain to remove his straitest shackles by surrendering York House to the king’s favourite; and so did his creditor, Mr. Meautys, who, says Bacon, used him “coarsely,” and meant “to saw him asunder.” “The great lords,” says Meautys, “long to be in York House. I know your lordship cannot forget they have such a savage word among them as fleecing.” This word has grown tame in modern times, but it had a terrible significance in those days, when it hinted at flaying.

An episode about Bacon’s younger days may be pardoned here. The Gray’s Inn Chambers occupied by Bacon were in Coney Court, looking over the gardens and past St. Pancras Church to Hampstead Hill. They are no longer standing. The site of them was No. 1 Gray’s Inn Square. Bacon began to keep his terms at the age of eighteen, in June 1579. His uncle Burleigh was bencher in this inn, and his cousins, Robert, Cecil, and Nicholas Trott, students. In his latter days, when Attorney-General, and even when Lord Chancellor, he retained a lease of his old rooms in Coney Court. He was called to the bar when he was twenty-one, in 1582; and as soon as he was called he appeared in Fleet Street in his serge and bands, as a sign that he was going to practise for his bread. At the close of his first session, however, he was raised to the bench. Bacon always remained attached to Gray’s Inn; he laid out the gardens, planted the elm-trees, raised the terrace, pulled down and rebuilt the chambers, dressed the dumb show, led off the dances, and invented the masques.[227]

After Lord Bacon’s disgrace, the first Duke of Buckingham of the Villiers family borrowed the house from Toby Mathew, the courtly archbishop of York, in hopes of a final exchange, which did eventually take place.[228] In 1624, two years before Bacon’s death, a bill was passed to enable the king to exchange some lands for York House, so coveted by his proud favourite. Buckingham soon partially pulled[Pg 131] down the old mansion, and lined the walls of his temporary structure with huge mirrors. Here he entertained the foreign ambassadors. Of all his splendour, the only relic left is the water gate usually ascribed to Inigo Jones.

This Duke of Buckingham, the “Steenie” of King James, and of Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel, was the younger son of a poor knight, who won James I. by his personal beauty, vivacity, and accomplishments—by his dancing, jousting, leaping, and masquerading. At first page, cupbearer, and gentleman of the bedchamber, he rose to power on the disgrace of Carr.

It was at York House—“Yorschaux,” as he calls it, with the usual insolence and carelessness of his nation—that Bassompierre visited the duke in 1626. He praises the mansion as more richly fitted up than any other he had ever seen.[229] Yet the duke did not live here, but at Wallingford House, on the site of the Admiralty, keeping York House for pageants and levees, till Felton’s knife severed his evil soul from his body, August 23, 1628. His son, the Zimri of Dryden, was born at Wallingford House.

The “superstitious pictures” at York House were sold in 1645,[230] and the house given by Cromwell to General Fairfax, whose daughter married the second and last Duke of Buckingham, of the Villiers line, the favourite of Charles II., the rival of Rochester, the plotter with Shaftesbury, the selfish profligate who drove Lee into Bedlam and starved Samuel Butler.

In 1661 the galleries of York House were famous for the antique busts and statues that had belonged to Rubens on his visit to this country, when he painted James I. in jackboots being hauled heavenward by a flock of angels. In the riverside gardens—not far, I presume, from the water gate—stood John of Bologna’s “Cain and Abel,” which the King of Spain had given to Prince Charles on his luckless visit to Madrid, and which Charles had bestowed on his dangerous favourite.[231]

[Pg 132]The great rooms, even then emblazoned with the lions and peacocks of the Villiers and Manners families, were traversed by Evelyn, who describes the house and gardens as much ruined through neglect. Pepys also, who thrust his nose into every show-place, went to York House when the Russian ambassador was there, and rapturously and poetically vows he saw “the remains of the noble soul of the late Duke of Buckingham appearing in the house in every place, in the door-cases and the windows,”[232]—odd places for a noble soul to make its abode!

The Duke of Buckingham, in King Charles’s days, had turned York House into a treasury of art. He bought Rubens’s private collection of pictures for £10,000, Sir Henry Wotten having purchased them for him at Venice. He had seventeen Tintorets, and thirteen works of Paul Veronese. For an “Ecce Homo” by Titian, containing nineteen figures as large as life, he refused £7000 from the Earl of Arundel. During the Civil Wars the pictures were removed by his son to Antwerp, and there sold by auction.

Who can look down Buckingham Street in the twilight, and see the pediment of the old water gate of the duke’s house, without repeating to himself the scourging lines of Dryden when he drew Buckingham as Zimri?—

“A man so various that he seem’d to be
Not one but all mankind’s epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by turns, and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.”[233]

In vain Settle eulogised the mercurial and licentious spendthrift. Settle’s verse is forgotten, but we all remember Pope’s ghastly but exaggerated picture of the rake’s death in “the worst inn’s worst room”—

“No wit to flatter left of all his store,
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more,
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousand ends.”

[Pg 133]The first Duke of Buckingham, to judge by Clarendon, who was the friend of all friends of absolutism, must have been a man of magnificent generosity and “flowing courtesy,” a staunch friend, and a desperate and unrelenting hater; but he was an enemy of the people; and had he survived the knife of Felton he must have been the first of a faithless king’s bad counsellors to perish on the scaffold.

THE WATER GATE, 1860.

The second duke was a base-tempered, shameless profligate, a fickle, dishonest intriguer, who perished at last, a poor worn-out man, in a farmer’s house in Yorkshire, from a cold caught while hunting. He was the author of several obscene lampoons, from which Swift took some hints; and he was the godfather of a mock tragedy, The Rehearsal, in which he was helped by Martin Clifford and Butler, the author of Hudibras, the latter of whom he left to starve.[Pg 134] Baxter, it is true, drops a redeeming word or two on behalf of the gay scoundrel; but then Buckingham had intrigued with the Puritans.

York Stairs, the only monument of Zimri’s splendour left, stand now in the middle of the gardens of the new Embankment. Till the Embankment was made, the gate was approached by a small enclosed terrace planted with lime trees. The water gate consists of a central archway and two side windows. Four rusticated columns support an arched pediment and two couchant lions holding shields. On a scroll are the Villiers arms. On the street side rise three arches, flanked by pilasters and an entablature, on which are four stone globes. Above the keystone of the arches are shields and anchors. In the centre are the arms of Villiers impaling those of Manners. The Villiers’ motto, Fidei coticula crux, “The cross is the whetstone of faith,” is inscribed on the frieze. The gate, as it now stands, is ridiculous, and is almost buried in the soil. It would be a charity to remove it to a water-side position.

In 1661, on the day of the great affray at the Tower Wharf between the retinues of the French and Spanish ambassadors, arising out of a dispute for precedence, Pepys saw the latter return to York House in triumph, guarded with fifty drawn swords, having killed several Frenchmen. “It is strange,” says the amusing quidnunc, “to see how all the city did rejoice, and, indeed, we do naturally all love the Spanish and hate the French.” Worthy man! the fact was, all time-servers were then agog about the queen who was expected from Portugal. From York House Pepys went peering about the French ambassador’s, and found his retainers all like dead men and shaking their heads. “There are no men in the world,” he says, “of a more insolent spirit when they do well, and more abject if they miscarry, than these people are.”[234]

In 1683 the learned and amiable John Evelyn, being then on the Board of Trade, took a house in Villiers Street for the winter, partly for business purposes, partly to educate[Pg 135] his daughters.[235] Evelyn’s works gave a valuable impetus to art and agriculture.

Addison’s jovial friend, that delightful writer, Sir Richard Steele, lived in Villiers Street from 1721 to 1724, after the death of his wife, the jealous “Prue.” Here he wrote his Conscious Lovers. The big, swarthy-faced ex-trooper, so contrasting with his grave and colder friend Addison, is a salient personage in the English Temple of Fame.

Duke Street, built circa 1675,[236] was named from the last Duke of Buckingham. Humphrey Wanley, the great Harleian librarian, lived here, and the son of Shadwell, the poet and Dryden’s enemy, who was an eminent physician, and inherited much of his father’s excellent sense.

In 1672 the “chemyst, statesman, and buffoon” Duke of Buckingham sold York House and gardens for £30,000 to a brewer and woodmonger, who pulled it down and laid out the present streets, naming them, with due respect to rank and wealth, even in a rascal, George Street, Villiers Street, Duke Street, and Buckingham Street. In 1668 their rental was £1359: 10s.[237]

In Charles II.’s time waterworks were started at York Buildings by a company chartered to supply the West end with water, but they failed, being in advance of the time. The company, however, did not concentrate its energies on waterworks; it gave concerts, bought up forfeited estates in Scotland, and started many wild and eccentric projects, in some of which Steele figured prominently. The company has long been forgotten, though kept in memory by a tall water tower, which was standing in the reign of George III.

In Buckingham Street, built in 1675, Samuel Pepys, the diarist, came to live in 1684. The house, since rebuilt, was the last on the west side, and looked on the Thames. It had been his friend Hewer’s before him. A view of the library shows us the tall plain book-cases, and a central window looking on the river. Pepys, the son of an army[Pg 136] tailor, and as fond of dress and great people as might be expected of a tailor’s son, was for a long time Secretary of the Admiralty under Charles II. He was President of the Royal Society; and it is largely to his five folio books of ballads that we owe Dr. Percy’s useful compilation, The Relics of Ancient Poetry. Pepys died in 1703, at the house of his friend Hewer, at Clapham.

Pepys’s house (No. 14) became afterwards, in the summer of 1824, the home of Etty, the painter, and remained so till within a few months of his death in 1849. Etty first took the ground floor (afterwards occupied by Mr. Stanfield), then the top floor; the special object of his ambition being to watch sunsets over the river, which he loved as much as Turner did, who frequently said, “There is finer scenery on its banks than on those of any river in Italy.” Its ebb and flow, Etty used to declare, was like life, and “the view from Lambeth to the Abbey not unlike Venice.” In those river-side rooms the artists of two generations have assembled—Fuseli, Flaxman, Holland, Constable, and Hilton—then Turner, Maclise, Dyce, Herbert, and all the younger race. Etty’s rooms looked on to a terrace, with a small cottage at one end; the keeper once was a man named Hewson, supposed to be the original Strap of Roderick Random.[238] An amiable, dreamy genius was the son of the miller and gingerbread-maker of York.

The witty Earl of Dorset lived in this street in 1681.

Opposite Pepys’s house, and on the east side (left-hand corner), was a house where Peter the Great lodged when in England. Here, after rowing about the Thames, watching the boat-building, or pulling to Deptford and back, this brave half-savage used to return and spend his rough evenings with Lord Caermarthen, drinking a pint of hot brandy and pepper, after endless flasks of wine. It was certainly “brandy for heroes” in this case.

Lord Caermarthen was at this time Lord President of the Council, and had been appointed Peter’s cicerone by[Pg 137] King William. The Russian czar was a hard drinker, and on one occasion is said to have drunk a pint of brandy, a bottle of sherry, and eight flasks of sack, after which he calmly went to the play. While in York Buildings, the rough czar was so annoyed with the vulgar curiosity of intrusive citizens, that he would sometimes rise from his dinner and leave the room in a rage. Here the Quakers forced themselves upon him, and presented him with Barclay’s Apology, after which the czar attended their meeting in Gracechurch Street. He once asked them of what use they were in any kingdom, since they would not bear arms. On taking his farewell of King William, Peter drew a rough ruby, valued at £10,000, from his waistcoat pocket, and presented it to him screwed up in brown paper.[239] He went back just in time to crush the Strelitzes, imprison his sister Sophia, and wage war on Charles XII. The great reformer was only twenty-six years old when he visited England.

In 1706 Robert Harley, Esq., afterwards Swift’s great patron and Earl of Oxford, lived here;[240] and (1785) John Henderson, the actor, died in this street.

Walter, Lord Hungerford, of Farleigh Castle, Somerset, took the Duke of Orleans prisoner at Agincourt. He was Lord High Steward of Henry V. and one of the executors to his will, and Lord High Treasurer in the reign of Henry VI. This illustrious noble was the son of Sir Thomas de Hungerforde, who in 51 Edward III. was the first to take the chair as Speaker of the House of Commons.

Hungerford Market covered the site of the seat of the Hungerford family. Pepys mentions a fire at the house of old Lady Hungerford in Charles II.’s time.

Sir Edward (her husband), created a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Charles II., pulled down the old mansion and divided it in 1680 into several houses, enclosing also a market-place. On the north side of the market-house was a bust of one of the family in a full-bottomed wig.[241] It grew a disused and ill-favoured place[Pg 138] before 1833. When a new market (Fowler, architect) was opened, it was intended to put an end to the monopoly of Billingsgate. The old market had at first answered well for fruit and vegetables, as there was no need of porters from the water side; but by 1720 Covent Garden had beaten it off.[242] It attempted too much in rivalling at once Leadenhall and Billingsgate, and failed—only a few fishmongers lingering on to the last.

In 1845 a suspension bridge, crossing from Hungerford to Lambeth (built under Mr. I. K. Brunel’s supervision), was opened. It consisted of three spans, and two brick towers in the Italian style; the main span, at the time of its erection, was larger than that of any other in the country, and only second to that of the bridge at Fribourg. It cost £110,000, and consumed more than 10,000 tons of iron.[243]

In the same year the bridge was sold to the original proprietors for £226,000, but the purchase was never carried out. It was replaced in 1864 by a railway bridge, and the market itself was filled up by an enormous railway station. The market had sunk to zero years before. In 1850 some rogue of a speculator had opened in it a pretended exhibition of the surplus articles rejected for want of room from the glass palace in Hyde Park. It proved a total failure, and swallowed up a vast sum of money and a fine northern estate or two. Latterly it had become a gratuitous music-hall, a billiard-room, and a penny-ice house, conducted by an Italian.

The railway station, built by Mr. Barry, the son of the architect of the New Houses of Parliament, faces the Strand. It is of a most creditable design, and the high Mansard roofs, which surmounted the hotel which forms its front, are of a freer and grander character than those of any modern London building. A model of the Eleanor Cross has been erected in the courtyard in front of it. This building is one of the first omens of better things that we have yet seen in our still terribly mean and ugly city.

[Pg 139]Craven Street was called Spur Alley till 1742.[244] Grinling Gibbons, the great wood-carver, born at Rotterdam, and whose genius John Evelyn discovered, lived here after leaving the Belle Sauvage Yard. Here he must have fashioned those fragile strings of birds and fruit and flowers that adorn so many city churches, and the houses of so many English noblemen. At No. 7, in 1775, lodged the great Benjamin Franklin, then no longer a poor printer, but the envoy of the American colonies. Here Lords Howe and Stanhope visited him to propose terms from Lords Camden and Chatham, but unfortunately only in vain.[245] That weak and unfortunate man, the Rev. Mr. Hackman, who shot Miss Ray, the actress and the mistress of Lord Sandwich, who had encouraged his suit, lived in this street.

James Smith, one of the authors of the Rejected Addresses,—a series of parodies rivalled only by those of Bon Gaultier, lived at No. 27. It was on his own street that he wrote the well-known epigram—[246]

“In Craven Street, Strand, the attorneys find place,
And ten dark coal barges are moor’d at its base.
Fly, Honesty, fly! seek some safer retreat:
There’s craft in the river and craft in the street.”

But Sir George Rose capped this in return, retorting in extemporaneous lines, written after dinner:—

“Why should Honesty fly to some safer retreat,
From attorneys and barges?—’od rot ’em!
For the lawyers are just at the top of the street,
And the barges are just at the bottom.”

James Smith, the intellectual hero of this street, the son of a solicitor to the Ordnance, was born in 1775. In 1802 he joined the staff of the Pic-Nic newspaper, with Combe, Croker, Cumberland, and that mediocre poet, Sir James Bland Burgess. It changed its name to the Cabinet, and died in 1803. From 1807 to 1817 James Smith [Pg 140]contributed to the Monthly Mirror his “Horace in London.” In 1812 came out the Rejected Addresses, inimitable parodies by himself and his brother, not merely of the manner but of the very mode of thought of Wordsworth, Cobbett, Southey, Coleridge, Crabbe, Lord Byron, Scott, etc. The copyright, originally offered to Mr. Murray for £20, but declined, was purchased by him in 1819, after the sixteenth edition, for £131; so much for the foresight of publishers. The book has since deservedly gone through endless editions, and has not been approached even by the talented parody writers of Punch. Those who wish to see the story of this publication in detail, must hunt it up in the edition of the Addresses illustrated by George Cruickshank.

Mr. Smith was the chief deviser of the substance of the Entertainments of the elder Charles Mathews. He wrote the Country Cousins in 1820, and in the two succeeding years the Trip to France and the Trip to America. For these last two works the author received a thousand pounds. “A thousand pounds!” he used to ejaculate, shrugging his shoulders, “and all for nonsense.”[247]

James Smith was just the man for Mathews, with his slight frameworks of stories filled up with songs, jokes, puns, wild farcical fancies, and merry conceits, and here and there among the motley, with true touches of wit, pathos, and comedy, and faithful traits of life and character, such as only a close observer of society and a sound thinker could pen.

He was lucky enough to obtain a legacy of £300 for a complimentary epigram on Mr. Strahan, the king’s printer. Being patted on the head when a boy by Chief-Justice Mansfield, in Highgate churchyard, and once seeing Horace Walpole on his lawn at Twickenham, were the two chief historical events of Mr. Smith’s quiet life. The four reasons that kept so clever a man employed on mere amateur trifling were these—an indolent disinclination to sustained work, a fear of failure, a dislike to risk a well-earned fame, and a foreboding that literary success might injure his practice as a lawyer. His favourite visits were to Lord Mulgrave’s,[Pg 141] Mr. Croker’s, Lord Abinger’s, Lady Blessington’s, and Lord Harrington’s.

Pretty Lady Blessington used to say of him, that “James Smith, if he had not been a witty man, must have been a great man.” He died in his house in Craven Street, with the calmness of a philosopher, on the 24th of December 1839, in the sixty-fifth year of his age.[248] Fond of society, witty without giving pain, a bachelor, and therefore glad to escape from a solitary home, James Smith seems to have been the model of a diner-out.

Caleb Whitefoord, a wine merchant in Craven Street, and an excellent connoisseur in old pictures, was one of the legacy-hunters who infested the studio of Nollekens, the miserly sculptor of Mortimer Street. He was a foppish dresser, and was remarkable for a dashing three-cornered hat, with a sparkling black button and a loop upon a rosette. He wore a wig with five tiers of curls, of the Garrick cut, and he was one of the last to wear such a monstrosity. This crafty wine merchant used to distribute privately the most whimsical of his Cross Readings, Ship News, and Mistakes of the Press—things in their day very popular, though now surpassed in every number of Punch. Some of the best were the following:—“Yesterday Dr. Pretyman preached at St. James’s,—and performed it with ease in less than sixteen minutes.” “Several changes are talked of at Court,—consisting of 9050 triple bob-majors.” “Dr. Solander will, by Her Majesty’s command, undertake a voyage—round the head-dress of the present month.” “Sunday night.—Many noble families were alarmed—by the constable of the ward, who apprehended them at cards.” A simple-hearted age could laugh heartily at these things: would that we could!

It has often been asserted that Goldsmith’s epitaph on Whitefoord was written by the wine merchant himself, and sent to the editor of the fifth edition of the Poems by a convenient common friend. It is not very pointed, and the length of the epitaph is certainly singular, considering[Pg 142] that the poet dismissed Burke and Reynolds in less than eighteen lines.

Adam built an octagon room in Whitefoord’s house in order to give his pictures an equal light; and Mr. Christie adopted the idea when he fitted up his large room in King Street, St. James’s.[249]

Goldsmith is said to have been intimate with witty, punning Caleb Whitefoord, and certain it is his name is found in the postscript to the poem of Retaliation, written by Oliver on some of his friends at the St. James’s Coffee-house. These were the Burkes, fretful Cumberland, Reynolds, Garrick, and Canon Douglas. In this poem Goldsmith laments that Whitefoord should have confined himself to newspaper essays, and contented himself with the praise of the printer of the Public Advertiser; he thus sums him up:—

“Rare compound of oddity, frolic, and fun,
Who relish’d a joke and rejoiced in a pun;
Whose temper was generous, open, sincere;
A stranger to flattery, a stranger to fear.
******
“Merry Whitefoord, farewell! for thy sake I admit
That a Scot may have humour—I’d almost said wit;
This debt to thy memory I cannot refuse,
Thou best-humour’d man with the worst-humour’d Muse.”

Whitefoord became Vice-President of the Society of Arts.

Anthony Pasquin (Williams), a celebrated art critic and satirist of Dr. Johnson’s time, was articled to Matt Darley, the famous caricaturist of the Strand, to learn engraving.[250]

The old name of Northumberland Street was Hartshorne Lane or Christopher Alley.[251] Here Ben Jonson lived when he was a child, and after his mother had taken a bricklayer for her second husband.

At the bottom of this lane Sir Edmondbury Godfrey had his wood wharf. This fact shows how much history is illustrated by topography, for the residence of the unfortunate[Pg 143] justice explains why it should have been supposed that he had been inveigled into Somerset House.

In 1829 Mr. Wood, who kept a coal wharf, resided in Sir Edmondbury’s old premises at the bottom of Northumberland Street. It was here the court justice’s wood-wharf was, but his house was in Green’s Lane, near Hungerford Market.[252] During the Great Plague Sir Edmondbury had been very active; on one occasion, when his men refused to act, he entered a pest-house alone to apprehend a wretch who had stolen at least a thousand winding-sheets. Four medals were struck on his death. There is also a portrait of the unlucky woodmonger in the waiting-room adjoining the Vestry of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.[253] He wore, it seems, a full black wig, like Charles II.

Three men were tried for his murder—the cushion-man at the Queen’s Chapel, the servant of the treasurer of the chapel, and the porter of Somerset House. The truculent Scroggs tried the accused, and those infamous men, Oates, Prance, and Bedloe, were the false witnesses who murdered them. The prisoners were all executed. Sir Edmondbury’s corpse was embalmed and borne to its funeral at St. Martin’s from Bridewell. The pall was supported by eight knights, all justices of the peace, and the aldermen of London followed the coffin. Twenty-two ministers marched before the body, and a great Protestant mob followed. Dr. William Lloyd preached the funeral sermon from the text 2 Sam. iii. 24. The preacher was guarded in the pulpit by two clergymen armed with “Protestant flails.”

YORK STAIRS, WITH THE HOUSES OF PEPYS AND PETER THE GREAT, AFTER CANALETTI (CIRCA 1745).

In July 1861, No. 16 Northumberland Street, then an old-fashioned, dingy-looking house, with narrow windows, which had been divided into chambers, was the scene of a fight for life and death between Major Murray and Mr. Roberts, a solicitor and bill-discounter; the latter attempted the life of the former for the sake of getting possession of his mistress, to whom he had lent money. Under pretext of advancing a loan to the Grosvenor Hotel Company, of[Pg 144] which the major was a promoter, he decoyed him into a back room on the first floor of No. 16, then shot him in the back of the neck, and immediately after in the right temple. The major, feigning to be dead, waited till Roberts’s back was turned, then springing to his feet attacked him with a pair of tongs, which he broke to pieces over his assailant’s head. He then knocked him down with a bottle which lay near, and escaped through the window, and from thence by a water-pipe to the ground. Roberts died soon afterwards, but Major Murray recovered, and the jury returning a verdict of “Justifiable Homicide,” he was released. The papers described Roberts’s rooms as crowded with dusty Buhl cabinets, inlaid tables, statuettes, and drawings. These were smeared with blood and wine, while on the glass[Pg 145] shades of the ornaments a rain of blood seemed to have fallen.

The embankment, which here is very wide, and includes several acres of garden on the spot where the Thames once flowed, has largely altered the character of the streets below the Strand and the river, destroying the picturesque wharves and spoiling the appearance of the Water Gate, which is half buried in gravel and flowers, like the Sphynx in Egypt. Between it and the Thames now stands Cleopatra’s Needle, brought over to England at great cost of money and life, and set up here in 1878.

[Pg 146]

CROCKFORD’S FISH SHOP.

THE NORTH SIDE OF THE STRAND, FROM TEMPLE BAR TO CHARING CROSS,
WITH DIGRESSIONS ON THE SOUTH.

The upper stratum of the Strand soil is composed of a reddish yellow earth, containing coprolites. Below this runs a seam of leaden-coloured clay, mixed with a few[Pg 147] martial pyrites, calcined-looking lumps of iron and sulphur with a bright silvery fracture.

A petition of the inhabitants of the vicinity of the King’s Palace at Westminster (8 Edward II.) represents the footway from Temple Bar to their neighbourhood as so bad that both rich and poor men received constant damage, especially in the rainy season, the footway being interrupted by bushes and thickets. A tax was accordingly levied for the purpose, and the mayor and sheriffs of London and the bailiff of Westminster were appointed overseers of the repairs.

In the 27th of Edward III. the Knights Templars were called upon to repair[254] “the bridge of the new Temple,” where the lords who attended Parliament took water on their way from the City. Workmen constructing a new sewer in the Strand, in 1802, discovered, eastward of St. Clement’s,[255] a small, one-arched stone bridge, supposed to be the one above alluded to, unless it was an arch thrown over some gully when the Strand was a mere bridle-road.

In James I.’s time, Middleton, the dramatist, describes a lawyer as embracing a young spendthrift, and urging him to riot and excess, telling him to make acquaintance with the Inns of Court gallants, and keep rank with those that spent most; to be lofty and liberal; to lodge in the Strand; in any case, to be remote from the handicraft scent of the City.[256]

It is but right to remind the reader that within the last few years the whole of that part of the north side of the Strand lying between Temple Bar and St. Clement’s Inn, including what was once known as Pickett Street, and extending backward almost as far as Lincoln’s Inn, has been demolished, in order to make room for the new Law Courts, which are now fast rising towards completion.

The house which immediately adjoined Temple Bar on[Pg 148] the north side, to the last a bookseller’s, stood on the site of a small pent-house of lath and plaster, occupied for many years by Crockford as a shell-fish shop. Here this man made a large sum of money, with which he established a gambling club, called by his name, on the west side of St. James’s Street. It was shut up at Crockford’s death in 1844, and, having passed through sundry phases, is now the Devonshire Club. Crockford would never alter his shop in his lifetime; but at his death the quaint pent-house and James I. gable[257] were removed, and a yellow brick front erected.

That great engraver, William Faithorne, after being taken prisoner as a Royalist at Basing in the Civil Wars, went to France, where he was patronised by the Abbé de Marolles. He returned about 1650, and set up a shop—where he sold Italian, Dutch, and English prints, and worked for booksellers—without Temple Bar, at the sign of the Ship, next the Drake and opposite the Palsgrave Head Tavern. He lived here till after 1680. Grief for his son’s misfortunes induced consumption, of which he died in 1691. Flatman wrote verses to his memory. Lady Paston is thought his chef d’œuvre.[258]

Ship Yard, now swept away, had been granted to Sir Christopher Hatton in 1571. Wilkinson gives a fine sketch of an old gable-ended house in Ship Yard, supposed to have been the residence of Elias Ashmole, the celebrated antiquarian. Here, probably, he stored his alchemic books and those treasures of the Tradescants which he gave to Oxford.

In 1813 sundry improvements projected by Alderman Pickett led to the removal of one of the greatest eye-sores in London—Butcher Row. This street of ragged lazar-houses extended in a line from Wych Street to Temple Bar. They were overhanging, drunken-looking, tottering tenements,[259] receptacles of filth, and invitations to the[Pg 149] cholera. In Dr. Johnson’s time they were mostly eating-houses.

This stack of buildings on the west side of Temple Bar was in the form of an acute-angled triangle; the eastern point, nearest the Bar, was formed latterly by a shoemaker’s and a fishmonger’s shop, with wide fronts; its western point being blunted by the intersection of St. Clement’s vestry-room and almshouse. On both sides of it resided bakers, dyers, smiths, combmakers, and tinplate-workers.

The decayed street had been a flesh-market since Queen Elizabeth’s time, when it flourished. A scalemaker’s, a fine-drawer’s, and Betty’s chophouse, were all to be found there.[260] The whole stack was built of wood, and was probably of about the age of Edward VI. The ceilings were low, traversed by huge unwrought beams, and dimly lit by small casement windows. The upper stories overhung the lower, according to the old London plan of widening the footway.

It was at Clifton’s Eating-house, in Butcher Row, in 1763, that that admirable gossip and useful parasite, Boswell, with a tremor of foolish horror, heard Dr. Johnson disputing with a petulant Irishman about the cause of negroes being black.

“Why, sir,” said Johnson, with judicial grandeur, “it has been accounted for in three ways—either by supposing that they were the posterity of Ham, who was cursed; or that God first created two kinds of men, one black and the other white; or that by the heat of the sun the skin is scorched, and so acquires a sooty hue. This matter has been much canvassed among naturalists, but has never been brought to any certain issue.”[261]

What the Irishman’s arguments were, Boswell of course forgot, but as his antagonist became warm and intemperate, Johnson rose and quietly walked away. When he had retired, the Irishman said—“He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity unworthy of a man of[Pg 150] genius.” (This very same evening Boswell and his deity first supped together at the Mitre.) It was here, many years later, that Johnson spent pleasant evenings with his old college friend Edwards,[262] whom he had not seen since the golden days of youth. Edwards, a good, dull, simple-hearted fellow, talked of their age. “Don’t let us discourage one another,” said Johnson, with quiet reproof. It was this same worthy fellow who amused Burke at the club by saying—“You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried in my time to be a philosopher too, but I don’t know how it was, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” This was a wise blunder, worthy of Goldsmith, the prince of wise blunderers.

It was in staggering home from the Bear and Harrow in Butcher Row, through Clare Market, that Lee, the poet, lay down or fell on a bulk, and was stifled in the snow (1692).

Nat Lee was the son of a Hertfordshire rector; a pupil of Dr. Busby, a coadjutor of Dryden, and an unsuccessful actor. He drank himself into Bedlam, where, says Oldys, he wrote a play in twenty-five acts.[263] Two of his maddest lines were—

“I’ve seen an unscrewed spider spin a thought
And walk away upon the wings of angels.”

The Duke of Buckingham, who brought Lee up to town,[264] neglected him, and his extreme poverty no doubt drove him faster to Moorfields. Poor fellow! he was only thirty-five when he died. He is described as stout,[265] handsome, and red faced. The Earl of Pembroke, whose daughter married a son of the brutal Judge Jefferies, was Lee’s chief patron. The poet, when visiting him at Wilton, drank so hard that the butler is said to have been afraid he would empty the cellar. Lee’s poetry, though noisy and ranting, is full of true poetic fire,[266] and in tenderness and passion the critics of his time compared him to Ovid and Otway.

[Pg 151]Thanks to the alderman, whose name is forgotten, though it well deserved to live,—the streets, lanes, and alleys which once blocked up St. Clement’s Church, like so many beggars crowding round a rich man’s door, were swept away, and the present oval railing erected. The enlightened Corporation at the same time built the big, dingy gateway of Clement’s Inn—people at the time called it “stupendous;”[267] and to it were added the restored vestry-room and almshouse. The south side of the Strand was also rebuilt, with loftier and more spacious shops. In the reign of Edward VI. this beginning of the Strand had been a mere loosely-built suburban street, the southern houses, then well inhabited, boasting large gardens.

There is a fatality attending some parts of London. In spite of Alderman Pickett and his stupendous arch of stucco, the new houses on the north side did not take well. They were found to be too large and expensive; they became under-let,[268] and began by degrees to relapse into their old Butcher Row squalor; the tide of humanity setting in towards Westminster flowing away from them to the left. As in some rivers the current, for no obvious reason, sometimes bends away to the one side, leaving on the other a broad bare reach of grey pebble, so the human tide in the Strand has always, in order to avoid the detour of the twin streets (Holywell and Wych), borne away to the left.

It is probable that Palsgrave Place, on the south side, just beyond Child’s bank, in Temple Bar without, marks the site of the Old Palsgrave’s Head Tavern. The Palsgrave was that German prince who was afterwards King of Bohemia, and who married the daughter of James I.

No. 217 Strand, on the south side, was Snow’s, the goldsmith. Gay has preserved his memory in some pleasant verses. It was, a few years ago, the bank of those most decent of defrauders, Strachan, Paul, and Bates, and through them proved the grave of many a fortune. Next[Pg 152] to it, westwards, is Messrs. Twinings bank, and their still more ancient tea shop.

The Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand (south side), afterwards the Whittington Club, and now the Temple Club, is described by Strype as a “large and curious house,” with good rooms and other conveniences for entertainments.[269] Here Dr. Johnson occasionally supped with Boswell, and bartered his wisdom for the flattering Scotchman’s inanity. In this same tavern the sultan of literature quarrelled with amiable but high-spirited Percy about old Dr. Mounsey; and here, when Sir Joshua Reynolds was gravely and calmly upholding the advantages of wine in stimulating and inspiring conversation, Johnson said, with good-natured irony, “I have heard none of these drunken—nay, drunken is a coarse word—none of these vinous flights!”[270]

St. Clement’s is one of Wren’s fifty churches, and it was built by Edward Pierce, under Wren’s superintendence.[271] It took the place of an old church mentioned by Stow, that had become old and ruinous, and was taken down circa 1682, during the epidemic for church-building after the Great Fire.

This church has many enemies and few friends. One of its bitterest haters calls it a “disgusting fabric,” obtruded dangerously and inconveniently upon the street. A second opponent describes the steeple as fantastic, the portico clumsy and heavy, and the whole pile poor and unmeaning. Even Leigh Hunt abuses it as “incongruous and ungainly.”[272]

There have been great antiquarian discussions as to why the church is called St. Clement’s “Danes.” Some think there was once a massacre of the Danes in this part of the road to Westminster; others declare that Harold Harefoot was buried in the old church; some assert that the Danes, driven out of London by Alfred, were allowed to settle between Thorney Island (Westminster) and Ludgate, and[Pg 153] built a church in the Strand; so, at least, we learn, Recorder Fleetwood told Treasurer Burleigh. The name of Saint Clement was taken from the patron saint of Pope Clement III., the friend of the Templars, who dwelt on the frontier line of the City.

In 1725 there was a great ferment in the parish of St. Clement’s, in consequence of an order from Dr. Gibson, Bishop of London, to remove at once an expensive new altar-piece painted by Kent, a fashionable architectural quack of that day; who, however, with “Capability Brown,” had helped to wean us from the taste for yew trees cut into shapes, Dutch canals, formal avenues, and geometric flower-beds.

Kent was originally a coach-painter in Yorkshire, and was patronised by the Queen, the Duke of Newcastle, and Lord Burlington. He helped to adorn Stowe, Holkham, and Houghton. He was at once architect, painter, and landscape gardener. In the altar-piece, the vile drawing of which even Hogarth found it hard to caricature, the painter was said to have introduced portraits of the Pretender’s wife and children. The “blue print,” published in 1725, was followed by another representing Kent painting Burlington Gate. The altar-piece was removed, but the nobility patronised Kent till he died, twenty years or so afterwards. We owe him, however, some gratitude, if, according to Walpole, he was the father of modern gardening.

The long-limbed picture caricatured by Hogarth was for some years one of the ornaments of the coffee-room of the Crown and Anchor in the Strand. Thence it was removed to the vestry-room of the church, over the old almshouses in the churchyard. After 1803 it was transported to the new vestry-room on the north side of the churchyard.[273]

In the old church Sir Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, was baptized, 1563; as were Sir Charles Sedley, the delightful song-writer and the oracle of the licentious wits of his day, 1638-9; and the Earl of Shaftesbury, the[Pg 154] son of that troublous spirit “Little Sincerity,” and himself the author of the Characteristics.

The church holds some hallowed earth: in St. Clement’s was buried Sir John Roe, who was a friend of Ben Jonson, and died of the plague in the sturdy poet’s arms.

Dr. Donne’s wife, the daughter of Sir George More, and who died in childbed during her husband’s absence at the court of Henri Quatre, was buried here. Her tomb, by Nicholas Stone, was destroyed when the church was rebuilt. Donne, on his return, preached a sermon here on her death, taking the text—“Lo! I am the man that has seen affliction.” John Lowin, the great Shaksperean actor, lies here. He died in 1653. He acted in Ben Jonson’s “Sejanus” in 1605, with Burbage and Shakspere. Tradition reports him to have been the favourite Falstaff, Hamlet, and Henry VIII. of his day.[274] Burbage was the greatest of the Shaksperean tragedians, and Tarleton the drollest of the comedians; but Lowin must have been as versatile as Garrick if he could represent Hamlet’s vacillations, and also convey a sense of Falstaff’s unctuous humour. Poor mad Nat Lee, who died on a bulk in Clare Market close by, was buried at St. Clement’s, 1692; and here also lies poor beggared Otway, who died in 1685. In the same year as Lee, Mountfort, the actor, whom Captain Hill stabbed in a fit of jealousy in Howard Street adjoining, was interred here.

In 1713 Thomas Rymer, the historiographer of William III. and the compiler of the Fœdera and fifty-eight manuscript volumes now in the British Museum, was interred here. He had lived in Arundel Street. In 1729 James Spiller, the comedian of Hogarth’s time, was buried at St. Clement’s. A butcher in Clare Market wrote his epitaph, which was never used. Spiller was the original Mat of the Mint in the “Beggars’ Opera.” His portrait, by Laguerre, was the sign of a public-house in Clare Market.[275]

In this church was probably buried, at the time of the[Pg 155] Plague, Thomas Simon, Cromwell’s celebrated medallist. His name, however, is not on the register.[276]

Mr. Needham, who was buried at St. Clement’s with far better men, was an attorney’s clerk in Gray’s Inn, who, in 1643, commenced a weekly paper. He seems to have been a mischievous, unprincipled hireling, always ready to sell his pen to the best bidder.

It is not for us in these later days to praise a church of the Corinthian order, even though its southern portico be crowned by a dome and propped up with Ionic pillars. Its steeple of the three orders, in spite of its vases and pilasters, does not move me; nor can I, as writers thought it necessary to do thirty years ago,[277] waste a churchwarden’s unreasoning admiration on the wooden cherubim, palm-branches, and shields of the chancel; nor can even the veneered pulpit and cumbrous galleries, or the Tuscan carved wainscot of the altar draw any praise from my reluctant lips.

The arms of the Dukes of Norfolk and the Earls of Arundel and Salisbury, in the south gallery, are worthy of notice, because they show that these noblemen were once inhabitants of the parish.

Among the eminent rectors of St. Clement’s was Dr. George Berkeley, son of the Platonist bishop, the friend of Swift, to whom Pope attributed “every virtue under heaven.” He died in 1798. It was of his father that Atterbury said, he did not think that so much knowledge and so much humility existed in any but the angels and Berkeley.[278]

Dr. Johnson, the great and good, often attended service at St. Clement’s Church. They still point out his seat in the north gallery, near the pulpit. On Good Friday, 1773, Boswell tells us he breakfasted with his tremendous friend (Dr. Levett making tea), and was then taken to church by him. “Dr. Johnson’s behaviour,” he says, “was solemnly devout. I never shall forget the tremulous earnestness with[Pg 156] which he pronounced the awful petition in the Litany, ‘In the hour of death and in the day of judgment, good Lord, deliver us.’”[279]

Eleven years later the doctor writes to Mrs. Thrale, “after a confinement of 129 days, more than the third part of a year, and no inconsiderable part of human life, I this day returned thanks to God in St. Clement’s Church for my recovery—a recovery, in my 75th year, from a distemper which few in the vigour of youth are known to surmount.”

Clement’s Inn (of Chancery), a vassal of the Inner Temple, derives its name from the neighbouring church, and the “fair fountain called Clement’s Well,”[280] the Holy Well of the neighbouring street pump.

Over the gate is graven in stone an anchor without a stock and a capital C couchant upon it.[281] This device has reference to the martyrdom of the guardian saint of the inn, who was tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea by order of the emperor Trajan. Dugdale states that there was an inn here in the reign of Edward II.

There is, indeed, a tradition among antiquaries, that as far back as the Saxon kings there was an inn here for the reception of penitents who came to the Holy Well of St. Clement’s; that a religious house was first established, and finally a church. The Holy Lamb, an inn at the west end of the lane, was perhaps the old Pilgrims’ Inn. In the Tudor times the Clare family, who had a mansion in Clare Market, appears to have occupied the site. From their hands it reverted to the lawyers. As for the well, a pump now enshrines it, and a low dirty street leads up to it. This is mentioned in Henry II.’s time[282] as one of the excellent springs at a small distance from London, whose waters are “sweet, healthful, and clear, and whose runnels murmur over the shining pebbles: they are much [Pg 157]frequented,” says the friend of Archbishop Becket, “both by the scholars from the school (Westminster) and the youth from the City, when on a summer’s evening they are disposed to take an airing.” It was seven centuries ago that the hooded boys used to play round this spring, and at this very moment their descendants are drinking from the ladle or splashing each other with the water, as they fill their great brown pitchers. The spring still feeds the Roman Bath in the Strand already mentioned.

“For men may come, and men may go,
But I flow on for ever.”[283]

The hall of St. Clement’s Inn is situated on the south side of a neat small quadrangle. It is a small Tuscan building, with a large florid Corinthian door and arched windows, and was built in 1715. In the second irregular area there is a garden, with a statue of a kneeling black figure supporting a sun-dial on the east side.[284] It was given to the inn by an Earl of Clare, but when is unknown. It was brought from Italy, and is said to be of bronze, but ingenious persons having determined on making it a blackamoor, it has been painted black. A stupid, ill-rhymed, cumbrous old epigram sneers at the sable son of woe flying from cannibals and seeking mercy in a lawyers’ inn. The first would not have eaten him till they had slain him; but lawyers, it is well known, will eat any man alive.[285]

Poor Hollar, the great German engraver, lived in 1661 just outside the back door of St. Clement’s, “as soon as you come off the steps, and out of that house and dore at your left hand, two payre of stairs, into a little passage right before you.” He was known for “reasons’ sake” to the people of the house only as “the Frenchman limner.” Such was the direction he sent to that gossiping Wiltshire gentleman, John Aubrey.

The inn has very probably reared up a great many[Pg 158] clever men; but it is chiefly renowned for having fostered that inimitable old bragging twaddler and country magistrate, the immortal Justice Shallow. Those chimes that “in a ghostly way by moonlight still bungle through Handel’s psalm tunes, hoarse with age and long vigils”[286] as they are, must surely be the same that Shallow heard. How deliciously the old fellow vapours about his wild times!

“Ha, Cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that this knight and I have seen!—Ha, Sir John, said I well?”

Falstaff—“We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.”

Shal.—“That we have, that we have, that we have; in faith, Sir John, we have; our watchword was—Hem, boys!—Come, let’s to dinner; come, let’s to dinner. Oh, the days that we have seen!—Come, come.”[287]

And before that, how he glories in the impossibility of being detected after bragging fifty-five years! This man, as Falstaff says, “lean as a man cut after supper out of a cheese-paring,” was once mad Shallow, lusty Shallow, as Cousin Silence, his toady, reminds him.

“By the mass,” says again the old country gentleman, “I was called anything, and I would have done anything, indeed, and roundly too. There was I and little John Doit of Staffordshire, and black George Barnes of Staffordshire, and Francis Pickbone, and Will Squele, a Cotswold man: you had not four such swinge-bucklers in all the inns of court again.”

And thus he goes maundering on with dull vivacity about how he played Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s Show at Mile End, and once remained all night revelling in a windmill in St. George’s Fields.

A curious record of Shakspere’s times serves admirably to illustrate Shallow’s boast. In Elizabeth’s time the eastern end of the Strand was the scene of frequent disturbances occasioned by the riotous and unruly students of the inns of court, who paraded the streets at night to[Pg 159] the danger of peaceable passengers. One night in 1582, the Recorder himself, with six of the honest inhabitants, stood by St. Clement’s Church to see the lanterns hung out, and to try and meet some of the brawlers, the Shallows of that time. About seven at night they saw young Mr. Robert Cecil, the Treasurer’s son, pass by the church and salute them civilly, on which they said, “Lo, you may see how a nobleman’s son can use himself, and how he pulleth off his cap to poor men—our Lord bless him!” Upon which the Recorder wrote to his father, like a true courtier, making capital of everything, and said, “Your lordship hath cause to thank God for so virtuous a child.”

Through the gateway in Pickett Street, a narrow street led to New Court, where stood the Independent Meeting House in which the witty Daniel Burgess once preached. The celebrated Lord Bolingbroke was his pupil, and the Earl of Orrery his patron. He died 1712, after being much ridiculed by Swift and Steele for his sermon of The Golden Snuffers, and for his pulpit puns in the manner followed by Rowland Hill and Whitfield. This chapel was gutted during the Sacheverell riots, and repaired by the Government. Two examples of Burgess’s grotesque style will suffice. On one occasion, when he had taken his text from Job, and discoursed on the “Robe of Righteousness,” he said—

“If any of you would have a good and cheap suit, you will go to Monmouth Street; if you want a suit for life, you will go to the Court of Chancery; but if you wish for a suit that will last to eternity, you must go to the Lord Jesus Christ and put on His robe of righteousness.”[288] On another occasion, in the reign of King William, he assigned as a motive for the descendants of Jacob being called Israelites, that God did not choose that His people should be called Jacobites.

Daniel Burgess was succeeded in his chapel by Winter and Bradbury, both celebrated Nonconformists. The latter of these was also a comic preacher, or rather a “buffoon,”[Pg 160] as one of Dr. Doddridge’s correspondents called him. It was said of his sermons that he seemed to consider the Bible to be written only to prove the right of William III. to the throne. He used to deride Dr. Watts’s hymns from the pulpit, and when he gave them out always said—

“Let us sing one of Watts’s whims.”

Bat Pidgeon, the celebrated barber of Addison’s time, lived nearly opposite Norfolk Street. His house bore the sign of the Three Pigeons. This was the corner house of St. Clement’s churchyard, and there Bat, in 1740, cut the boyish locks of Pennant[289]. In those days of wigs there were very few hair-cutters in London.

The father of Miss Ray, the singer, and mistress of old Lord Sandwich, is said to have been a well-known staymaker in Holywell Street, now Booksellers’ Row. His daughter was apprenticed in Clerkenwell, from whence the musical lord took her to load her with a splendid shame. On the day she went to sing at Covent Garden in “Love in a Village,” Hackman, who had left the army for the church, waited for her carriage at the Cannon Coffee-house in Cockspur Street. At the door of the theatre, by the side of the Bedford Coffee-house, Hackman rushed out, and as Miss Ray was being handed from her carriage he shot her through the head, and then attempted his own life[290]. Hackman was hanged at Tyburn, and he died declaring that shooting Miss Ray was the result of a sudden burst of frenzy, for he had planned only suicide in her presence.

The Strand Maypole stood on the site of the present church of St. Mary le Strand, or a little northward towards Maypole Alley, behind the Olympic Theatre. In the thirteenth century a cross had stood on this spot, and there the itinerant justices had sat to administer justice outside the walls. A Maypole stood here as early as 1634[291]. Tradition says it was set up by John Clarges, the Drury Lane blacksmith, and father of General Monk’s vulgar wife.

[Pg 161]The Maypole was Satan’s flag-staff in the eyes of the stern Puritans, who dreaded Christmas pies, cards, and dances. Down it came when Cromwell went up. The Strand Maypole was reared again with exulting ceremony the first May day after the Restoration. The parishioners bought a pole 134 feet high, and the Duke of York, the Lord High Admiral, lent them twelve seamen to help to raise it. It was brought from Scotland Yard with drums, music, and the shouts of the multitude; flags flying, and three men bare-headed carrying crowns.[292] The two halves being joined together with iron bands, and the gilt crown and vane and king’s arms placed on the top, it was raised in about four hours by means of tackle and pulleys. The Strand rang with the people’s shouts, for to them the Maypole was an emblem of the good old times. Then there was a morris dance, with tabor and pipe, the dancers wearing purple scarfs and “half-shirts.” The children laughed, and the old people clapped their hands, for there was not a taller Maypole in Europe. From its summit floated a royal purple streamer; and half way down was a sort of cross-trees or balcony adorned with four crowns and the king’s arms. It bore also a garland of vari-coloured favours, and beneath three great lanterns in honour of the three admirals and all seamen, to give light in dark nights. On this spot, a year before, the butchers of Clare Market had rung a peal with their knives as they burnt an emblematical Rump.[293]

In the year 1677 a fatal duel was fought under the Maypole, which had been snapped by a tempest in 1672.[294] One daybreak Mr. Robert Percival, a notorious duellist, only nineteen years of age, was found dead under the Maypole, with a deep wound in his left breast. His drawn and bloody sword lay beside him. His antagonist was never discovered, though great rewards were offered. The only clue was a hat with a bunch of ribbons in it, suspected to belong to the celebrated Beau Fielding, but it was never[Pg 162] traced home to him. The elder brother, Sir Philip Percival, long after, violently attacked a total stranger whom he met in the streets of Dublin. The spectators parted them. Sir Philip could account for his conduct only by saying he felt urged on by an irresistible conviction that the man he struck at was his brother’s murderer.[295]

The Maypole, disused and decaying, was pulled down in 1713, when a new one, adorned with two gilt balls and a vane, was erected in its stead. In 1718 the pole, being found in the way of the new church, was given to Sir Isaac Newton as a stand for a large French telescope that belonged to his friend Mr. Pound, the rector of Wanstead.

Saint Mary-le-Strand was begun in 1714, and consecrated in 1723-4.[296] It was one of the fifty ordered to be built in Queen Anne’s reign. The old church, pulled down by that Ahab, the Protector Somerset, to make room for his ill-omened new palace, stood considerably nearer to the river.

Gibbs, the shrewd Aberdeen architect, who succeeded to Wren and Vanbrugh, and became famous by building St. Martin’s Church, reared also St. Mary’s. Gibbs, according to Walpole, was a mere plodding mechanic. He certainly wanted originality, simplicity, and grace. St. Mary’s is broken up by unmeaning ornament; the pagoda-like steeple is too high,[297] and crushes the church, instead of as it were blossoming from it. One critic (Mr. Malton) alone is found to call St. Mary’s pleasant and picturesque; but I confess to having looked on it so long that I begin almost to forget its ugliness.

Gibbs himself tells us how he set to work upon this church. It was his first commission after his return from Rome. As the site was a very public one, he was desired to spare no cost in the ornamentation, so he framed it of two orders, making the lower walls (but for the absurd niches to hold nothing) solid, so as to keep out the noises of the[Pg 163] street. There was at first no steeple intended, only a small western campanile, or bell-turret; but, eighty feet from the west front, there was to be erected a column 250 feet high, crowned by a statue of Queen Anne. This absurdity was forgotten at the death of that rather insipid queen, and the stone still lying there, the thrifty parish authorities, unwilling to waste the materials, resolved to build a steeple. The church being already twenty feet from the ground, it was necessary to spread it north and south, and so the church, originally square, became oblong.

Pope calls St. Mary’s Church bitterly the church that—

Collects “the saints of Drury Lane.”[298]

Addison describes his Tory fox-hunter’s horror on seeing a church apparently being demolished, and his agreeable surprise when he found it was really a church being built.[299]

St. Mary’s was the scene of a tragedy during the proclamation of the short peace in 1802. Just as the heralds came abreast of Somerset House, a man on the roof of the church pressed forward too strongly against one of the stone urns, which gave way and fell into the street, striking down three persons: one of these died on the spot; the second, on his way to the hospital; and the third, two days afterwards. A young woman and several others were also seriously injured. The urn, which weighed two hundred pounds, carried away part of the cornice, broke a flag-stone below, and buried itself a foot deep in the earth. The unhappy cause of this mischief fell back on the roof and fainted when he saw the urn fall. He was discharged, no blame being attached to him. It was found that the urn had been fastened by a wooden spike, instead of being clamped with iron.[300]

The church has been lately refitted in an ecclesiastical style, and filled with painted windows. There are no galleries in its interior. The ceiling is encrusted with ornament. It contains a tablet to the memory of James[Pg 164] Bindley, who died in 1818. He was the father of the Society of Antiquaries, and was a great collector of books, prints, and medals.

New Inn, in Wych Street, is an inn of Chancery, appertaining to the Middle Temple. It was originally a public inn, bearing the sign of Our Lady the Virgin, and was bought by Sir John Fineux, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, in the reign of King Edward IV., to place therein the students of the law then lodged in St. George’s Inn, in the little Old Bailey, which was reputed to have been the most ancient of all the inns of Chancery.[301]

Sir Thomas More, the luckless minister of Henry VIII., was a member of this inn till he removed to Lincoln’s Inn. When the Great Seal was taken from this wise man, he talked of descending to “New Inn fare, wherewith many an honest man is well contented.”[302] Addison makes the second best man of his band of friends (after Sir Roger de Coverley) a bachelor Templar; an excellent critic, with whom the time of the play is an hour of business. “Exactly at five he passes through New Inn, crosses through Russell Court, and takes a turn at Wills’s till the play begins. He has his shoes rubbed and his periwig powdered at the barber’s as you go into the Rose.”[303]

Wych Street derives its name from the old name for Drury Lane—via de Aldewych. Till some recent improvements were effected in its tenants, it bore an infamous character, and was one of the disgraces of London.

The Olympic Theatre, in Wych Street, was built in 1805 by Philip Astley, a light horseman, who founded the first amphitheatre in London on the garden ground of old Craven House. It was opened September 18, 1806, as the Olympic Pavilion, and burnt to the ground March 29, 1849. It was built out of the timbers of the captured French man-of-war, La Ville de Paris, in which William IV. went out as midshipman. The masts of the vessel formed the flies,[Pg 165] and were seen still standing amidst the fire after the roof fell in. In 1813 it was leased by Elliston, and called the Little Drury Lane Theatre. Its great days were under the rule of Madame Vestris,[304] who, both as a singer and an actress, contributed to its success. More recently it was under the able and successful management of the late Mr. Frederick Robson. Born at Margate in 1821, he was early in life apprenticed to a copperplate engraver in Bedfordbury. He appeared first, unsuccessfully, at a private theatre in Catherine Street, and played at the Grecian Saloon as a comic singer and low comedian from 1846 to 1849. In 1853 he joined Mr. Farren at the Olympic. He there acquired a great reputation in various pieces—“The Yellow Dwarf,” “To oblige Benson,” “The Lottery Ticket,” and “The Wandering Minstrel,”—the last being an old farce originally written to ridicule the vagaries of Mr. Cochrane.

Lyon’s Inn, an inn of Chancery belonging to the Inner Temple, was originally a hostelry with the sign of the Lion. It was purchased by gentlemen students in Henry VIII.’s time, and converted into an inn of Chancery.[305]

It degenerated into a haunt of bill-discounters and Bohemians of all kinds, good and bad, clever and rascally, and remained a dim, mouldy place till 1861, when it was pulled down. Its site is now occupied by the Globe Theatre. Just before the demolition of the inn, when I visited it, a washerwoman was hanging out wet and flopping clothes on the site of Mr. William Weare’s chambers.

On Friday, 24th of October 1823, Mr. William Weare, of No. 2 Lyon’s Inn, was murdered in Gill’s Hill Lane, Hertfordshire, between Edgware and St. Alban’s. His murderer was Mr. John Thurtell, son of the Mayor of Norwich, and a well-known gambler, betting man, and colleague of prize-fighters. Under pretence of driving him down for a shooting excursion, Thurtell shot Weare with a pistol, and when he leaped out of the chaise, pursued him[Pg 166] and cut his throat. He then sank the body in a pond in the garden of his friend and probable accomplice, Probert, a spirit merchant, and afterwards removed it to a slough on the St. Alban’s road. His confederate, Hunt, a public singer, turned king’s evidence, and was transported for life. Thurtell was hanged at Hertford. He pleaded that Weare had robbed him of £300 with false cards at Blind Hookey, and he had sworn revenge; but it appeared that he had planned several other murders, and all for money. Probert was afterwards hanged in Gloucestershire for horse-stealing.

At the sale of the building materials some Jews were observed to be very eager to acquire the figure of the lion that adorned one of the walls. There were various causes assigned for this eagerness. Some said that a Jew named Lyons had originally founded the inn; others declared that the lion was considered to be an emblem of the Lion of the tribe of Judah. Directly the auctioneer knocked it down the Jewish purchaser drew a knife, mounted the ladder, and struck his weapon into the lion. “S’help me, Bob!” said he, in a tone of disgust, “if they didn’t tell me it was lead, and it’s only stone arter all!”

Gay, who speaks of the dangers of “mazy Drury Lane,” gives Catherine Street a very bad character. He describes the courtesans, with their new-scoured manteaus and riding-hoods or muffled pinners, standing near the tavern doors, or carrying empty bandboxes, and feigning errands to the Change.[306] The street is now almost entirely occupied by newspaper publishers. The Morning Herald, the Court Journal, the Naval and Military Gazette, the Gardener’s Gazette, the Builder, the Weekly Register, and the Court Gazette, all either are or have been published in Catherine Street. Scott’s Sanspareil Theatre was opened here about 1810 for the performance of operettas, dancing, and pantomimes.[307] In September 1741 a man named James Hall was executed at the end of Catherine Street.

The Maypole close to St. Mary’s Church is said to have been the first place in London where hackney coaches[Pg 167] were allowed to stand. Coaches were first introduced into England from Hungary in 1580 by Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel; but for a time they were thought effeminate. The Thames watermen especially railed against them, as might be expected. In the year 1634, a Captain Baily who had accompanied Raleigh in his famous expedition to Guiana, started four hackney coaches, with drivers in liveries, at the Maypole; but as, in the year 1613, sixty hackney coaches from London[308] plied at Stourbridge fair, perhaps there had been coach-stands in the streets before Baily’s time. In 1625 there were only twenty coaches in London; in 1666, under Charles II., the number had so increased that the king issued a proclamation complaining of the coaches blocking up the narrow streets and breaking up the pavement, and forbade coach-stands altogether.

Peter Molyn Tempest, the engraver of “The Cries of London,” published at the end of King William’s reign, lived in the Strand opposite Somerset House. “The Cries” were designed by Marcellus Laroon, a Dutch painter (1653-1702), who painted draperies for Kneller.[309] He was celebrated for his conversation pieces and his knack of imitating the old masters. Tempest’s quaint advertisement of the “Cries” in the London Gazette, May 28 and 31, 1688, runs thus:—

“There is now published the Cryes and Habits of London, lately drawn after the life in great variety of actions, curiously engraved upon fifty copper-plates, fit for the ingenious and lovers of art. Printed and sold by P. Tempest, over against Somerset House, in the Strand.”

The Morning Chronicle, whose office was opposite Somerset House, was started in 1770. It was to Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, that Coleridge, when penniless and about to enlist in a cavalry regiment, sent a poem and a request for a guinea, which he got. Hazlitt was theatrical critic to this paper, succeeding Lord Campbell in the post. In 1810 David Ricardo began his letters on the depreciation[Pg 168] of the currency in the Chronicle. James Perry, whose career we have no room to follow, lived in great style at Tavistock House, the house afterwards occupied for many years by Mr. Charles Dickens. The Sketches by Boz of Charles Dickens first appeared in the columns of the Chronicle. The last Morning Chronicle appeared on Wednesday, March 19, 1862. Latterly the paper was said to have been in the pay of the Emperor of France.

No. 346, at the east corner of Wellington Street, now the office of the Law Times, the Queen, and the Field, was Doyley’s celebrated warehouse for woollen articles. Dryden, in his Kind Keeper, speaks of “Doyley” petticoats; Steele, in his Guardian,[310] of his “Doyley” suit; while Gay, in the Trivia, describes a “Doyley” as a poor defence against the cold.

Doyley’s warehouse stood on the ancient site of Wimbledon House, built by Sir Edward Cecil, son to the first Earl of Exeter, and created Viscount Wimbledon by Charles I. The house was burnt to the ground in 1628, and the day before the viscount had had part of his house at Wimbledon accidentally blown up by gunpowder. Pennant, when a boy, was brought by his mother to a large glass shop, a little beyond Wimbledon House; the old man who kept it remembered Nell Gwynne coming to the shop when he was an apprentice; her footman, a country lad, got fighting in the street with some men who had abused his mistress.[311]

Mr. Doyley was a much respected warehouseman of Dr. Johnson’s time, whose family had resided in their great old house, next to Hodsall the banker’s, at the corner of Wellington Street, ever since Queen Anne’s time. The dessert napkins called Doyleys derived their name from this firm. Mr. Doyley’s house was built by Inigo Jones, and forms a prominent feature in old engravings of the Strand, as it had a covered entrance that ran out like a promontory into the carriage-way. It was pulled down about 1782.[312] Mr. Doyley, a man of humour and a friend of Garrick and[Pg 169] Sterne, was a frequenter of the Precinct Club, held at the Turk’s Head, opposite his own house. The rector of St. Mary’s attended the same club, and enjoyed the seat of honour next the fire.

THE OLD ROMAN BATH, STRAND.

Not far from this stood the Strand Bridge, which crossed the street, and received the streams flowing from the higher grounds down Catharine Street to the Thames. Strand Lane, hard by on the south, famous still for its old Roman bath, passed under the arch, and led to a water stair or landing pier. Addison, in his bright pleasant way, describes landing there one morning with ten sail of apricot boats, after having put in at Nine Elms for melons, consigned by Mr. Cuffe of that place to Sarah Sewell and Company at their stall in Covent Garden.[313]

[Pg 170]The Morning Post, whose office is in Wellington Street, was started in 1772; when almost defunct it was bought in 1796 by Daniel Stuart, and Christie the auctioneer, who gave only £600 for copyright, house, and plant. Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, Wordsworth, and Mackintosh all wrote for Stuart’s paper. Coleridge commenced his political papers in 1797, and on his return from Germany (November 1799) joined the badly-paid staff, but refused to become a parliamentary reporter. Fox declared in the House of Commons that Coleridge’s essays had led to the rupture of the peace of Amiens, an announcement which led to a pursuit by a French frigate, when the poet left Rome, where he then was, and sailed from Leghorn. Lamb wrote facetious paragraphs at sixpence a-piece.[314] The Morning Post soon became second only to the Chronicle, and the great paper for booksellers’ advertisements. It is mentioned by Byron as the organ of the aristocracy and of West End society, and it has maintained that position to the present time with little change.

The Athenæum, whose office is in Wellington Street, is identified with the name of Mr. (afterwards) Sir C. Wentworth Dilke. He was born in 1789, and was originally in the Navy Pay Office. He bought the paper, which had been unsuccessful since 1828 under its originator, that shifty adventurer, Mr. J. S. Buckingham, and also under Mr. John Sterling. Under his care it gradually grew into a sound property, and became what it now is, the Times of weekly papers. Its editor, Mr. Hervey, the author of many well-known poems, was replaced in 1853 by Mr. Hepworth Dixon, under whom it steadily throve, till his retirement in 1871.

A little farther up the street is the office of All the Year Round, a weekly periodical which, in 1859, took the place of Household Words, started by Mr. Charles Dickens in 1850. It contains essays by the best writers of the day, graphic descriptions of current events, and continuous stories. Mrs. Gaskell, Mr. Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade,[Pg 171] Lord Lytton, Mr. Sala, and Mr. Dickens himself, are among those who have published novels in its pages.

The original Lyceum was built in 1765 as an exhibition-room for the Society of Arts, by Mr. James Payne, an architect, on ground once belonging to Exeter House. The society splitting, and the Royal Academy being founded at Somerset House in 1768, the Lyceum Society became insolvent. Mr. Lingham, a breeches-maker, then purchased the room, and let it out to Flockton for his Puppet-show and other amusements. About 1794 Dr. Arnold partly rebuilt it as a theatre, but could not obtain a licence through the opposition of the winter houses.[315] It was next door to the shop of Millar the publisher.

The Lyceum in 1789-94 was the arena of all experimenters—of Charles Dibdin and his “Sans Souci,” of the ex-soldier Astley’s feats of horsemanship, of Cartwright’s “Musical Glasses,” of Philipstal’s successful “Phantasmagoria.” Lonsdale’s “Egyptiana” (paintings of Egyptian scenes, by Porter, Mulready, Pugh, and Cristall), with a lecture, was a failure. Here Ker Porter exhibited his large pictures of Lodi, Acre, and the siege of Seringapatam. Then came Palmer with his “Portraits,” Collins with his “Evening Brush,” Incledon with his “Voyage to India,” Bologna with his “Phantascopia,” and Lloyd with his “Astronomical Exhibition.” Subscription concerts, amateur theatricals, debating societies, and schools of defence were also tried here. One day it was a Roman Catholic chapel; next day the “Panther Mare and Colt,” the “White Negro Girl,” or the “Porcupine Man” held their levee of dupes and gapers in its changeful rooms.[316]

In 1809 Dr. Arnold’s son obtained a licence for an English opera-house. Shortly afterwards the Drury Lane company commenced performing here, their own theatre having been burnt. Mr. T. Sheridan was then manager. In 1815 Mr. Arnold erected the predecessor of the present theatre, on an enlarged scale, at an expense of nearly £80,000, and it was opened in 1816. In 1817 the [Pg 172]experiment of two short performances on the same evening was unsuccessfully tried. On April 1, 1818, Mr. Mathews, the great comedian, began here his entertainment called “Mail-coach Adventures,” which ran forty nights.

The Beef-steak Club was established in the reign of Queen Anne (before 1709).[317] The Spectator mentions it, 1710-11. The club met in a noble room at the top of Covent Garden Theatre, and never partook of any dish but beef-steaks. Their Providore was their president and wore their badge, a small gold gridiron, hung round his neck by a green silk riband.[318] Estcourt had been a tavern-keeper, and is mentioned in a poem of Parnell’s, who was himself too fond of wine. He died in 1712. Steele gives a delightful sketch of him. He had an excellent judgment, he was a great mimic, and he told an anecdote perfectly well. His well-turned compliments were as fine as his smart repartees. “It is to Estcourt’s exquisite talent more than to philosophy,” says Steele, “that I owe the fact that my person is very little of my care, and it is indifferent to me what is said of my shape, my air, my manner, my speech, or my address. It is to poor Estcourt I chiefly owe that I am arrived at the happiness of thinking nothing a diminution of myself but what argues a depravity of my will.”

The kindly essay ends beautifully. “None of those,” says the true-hearted man, “will read this without giving him some sorrow for their abundant mirth, and one gush of tears for so many bursts of laughter. I wish it were any honour to the pleasant creature’s memory that my eyes are too much suffused to let me go on.”

Later, Churchill and Wilkes, those partners in dissoluteness and satire, were members of this social club. After Estcourt, that jolly companion, Beard the singer, became president of this jovial and agreeable company.

It was an old custom at theatres to have a Beef-steak Club that met every Saturday, and to which authors and wits were invited. In 1749 Mr. Sheridan, the manager,[Pg 173] founded one at Dublin. There were fifty or sixty members, chiefly noblemen and members of Parliament, and no performer was admitted but witty Peg Woffington, who wore man’s dress, and was president for a whole season.[319]

A Beef-steak Society was founded in 1735 by John Rich, the great harlequin, and manager of Covent Garden Theatre, and George Lambert, the scene-painter.[320] Lambert, being much visited by authors, wits, and noblemen, whilst painting, and being too hurried to go to a tavern, used to have a steak cooked in the room, inviting his guests to share his snug and savoury but hurried meal. The fun of these accidental and impromptu dinners led to a club being started, which afterwards moved to a more convenient room in the theatre. After many years the place of meeting was changed to the Shakspere Tavern, where Mr. Lambert’s portrait, painted by Hudson, Reynolds’s pompous master, was one of the decorations of the club-room.[321] They then returned to the theatre, but being burned out in 1812, adjourned to the Bedford. Lambert was the merriest of fellows, yet without buffoonery or coarseness. His manners were most engaging, he was social with his equals, and perfectly easy with richer men.[322] He was also a great leader of fun at old Slaughter’s artist-club.

The club throve down to about 1869, when it was dissolved; steaks were perennial as a dish, whatever the wit may have been, to the last. Twenty-four noblemen and gentlemen, each of whom might bring a friend, partook of a five o’clock dinner of steaks in a room of their own behind the scenes at the Lyceum Theatre every Saturday from November till June. They called themselves “The Steaks,” disclaimed the name of “Club,” and dedicated their hours to “Beef and Liberty,” as their ancestors did in the anti-Walpole days.[323]

Their room was a little typical Escurial. The doors, wainscot, and floor, were of stout oak, emblazoned with[Pg 174] gridirons, like a chapel of St. Laurence. The cook was seen at his office through the bars of a vast gridiron, and the original gridiron of the society (the survivor of two terrific fires) held a conspicuous position in the centre of the ceiling. This club descended lineally from Wilkes’s and from Lambert’s. To the end there was Attic salt enough to sprinkle over “the Steaks,” and to justify the old epicure’s lines to the club:—

“He that of honour, wit, and mirth partakes,
May be a fit companion o’er beef-steaks;
His name may be to future times enrolled
In Estcourt’s book, whose gridiron’s framed of gold.”[324]

Its gridiron and other treasures were sold by auction, and fetched fabulous prices.

Dr. William King, the author of the above quoted verses, was an indolent, wrong-headed genius. Some three years after the Restoration he took part against the irascible Bentley in the dispute about the Epistles of Phalaris, satirised Sir Hans Sloane, and supported Sacheverell. He wrote The Art of Cookery, Dialogues of the Dead, The Art of Love, and Greek Mythology for Schools. Recklessly throwing up his Irish Government appointment, he came to London. There Swift got him appointed manager of the Gazette; but being idle, and fond of the bottle, he resigned his office in six months, and went to live at a friend’s house in the garden grounds between Lambeth and Vauxhall. He died in 1712, in lodgings opposite Somerset House, procured for him by his relation, Lord Clarendon. He was buried in the north cloisters of Westminster Abbey, close to his master, Dr. Knipe, to whom he had dedicated his School Mythology.

Mr. T. P. Cooke obtained some of his early triumphs at the Lyceum as Frankenstein, and at the Adelphi as Long Tom Coffin. His serious pantomime in the fantastic monster of Mrs. Shelley’s novel is said to have been highly poetical. He made his début in 1804, at the Royalty Theatre, and[Pg 175] soon afterwards left Astley’s to join Laurent, the manager of the Lyceum. This best of stage seamen since Bannister’s time was born in 1780, and died only recently.

Madame Lucia Elizabeth Vestris had the Lyceum in 1847. This fascinating actress was the daughter of Francesco Bartolozzi, the engraver, and was born in 1797. She married the celebrated dancer, Vestris, in 1813, and in 1813 appeared at the King’s Theatre, in Winter’s opera of “Proserpina.” In 1820, after a wild and disgraceful life in Paris, she appeared at Drury Lane as Lilla, Adela, and Artaxerxes, and exhibited the archness, and vivacity of Storace without her grossness. In a burlesque of “Don Giovanni,” as “Paul” and as “Apollo,” she was much abused by the critics for her wantonness of manner and dress, but she still won her audiences by her sweet and powerful contralto, and by her songs, “The Light Guitar” and “Rise, gentle Moon.” Harley played Leporello to her under Mr. Elliston’s management. After this she took to “first light comedy” and melodrama, and married Mr. Charles Mathews. The theatre was burnt down in 1830, and rebuilt soon afterwards. Madame Vestris herself died in 1856.

“That little crowded nest” of shops and wild beasts,[325] Exeter Change, stood where Burleigh Street now stands, but extended into the main road, so that the footpath of the north side of the Strand ran directly through it.[326] It was built about 1681,[327] and contained two walks below and two walks above stairs, with shops on each side for sempsters, milliners, hosiers, etc. The builders were very sanguine, but the fame of the New Exchange (now the Adelphi) blighted it from the beginning;[328] the shops next the street alone could be let; the rest lay unoccupied. The Land Bank had rooms here. The body of the poet Gay lay in state in an upper room, afterwards used for auctions. In 1721 a Mr. Normand Corry exhibited here a damask bed, with curtains woven by himself; admission two shillings and[Pg 176] sixpence. About 1780 Lord Baltimore’s body lay here in state, preparatory to its interment at Epsom.

This infamous lord, of unsavoury reputation, had married a daughter of the Duke of Bridgewater: he lived on the east side of Russell Square, and was notorious for an unscrupulous profligacy, rivalling even that of the detestable Colonel Charteris. In 1767 his agents decoyed to his house a young woman named Woodcock, a milliner on Tower Hill. After suffering all the cruelty which Lovelace showed to Clarissa, the poor girl was taken to Lord Baltimore’s house at Epsom, where her disgrace was consummated. The rascal and his accomplices were tried at Kingston in 1768, but unfortunately acquitted through an informality in Miss Woodcock’s deposition. The disgraced title has since become extinct.

The last tenants of the upper rooms were Mr. Cross and his wild beasts. The Royal Menagerie was a great show in our fathers’ days. Leigh Hunt mentions that one day at feeding time, passing by the Change, he saw a fine horse pawing the ground, startled at the roar of Cross’s lions and tigers.[329] The vast skeleton of Chunee, the famous elephant, brought to England in 1810, and exhibited here, is to be seen at the College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In 1826, after a return of an annual paroxysm, aggravated by inflammation of the large pulp of one of his tusks, Chunee became dangerous, and it was necessary to kill him. His keeper first threw him buns steeped in prussic acid, but these produced no effect. A company of soldiers was then sent for, and the monster died after upwards of a hundred bullets had pierced him. In the midst of the shower of lead, the poor docile animal knelt down at the well-known voice of his keeper, to turn a vulnerable point to the soldiers. At the College of Surgeons the base of his tusk is still shown, with a spicula of ivory pressing into the pulp.

De Loutherbourg, after Garrick’s retirement, left Covent Garden and exhibited his Eidophusikon in a room over Exeter Change. The stage was about six feet wide and[Pg 177] eight feet deep. The first scene was the view from One-tree Hill in Greenwich Park. The lamps were above the proscenium, and had screens of coloured glass which could be rapidly changed. His best scenes were the loss of the Halsewell East Indiaman and the rising of Pandemonium. A real thunder-storm once breaking out when the shipwreck scene was going on, some of the audience left the room, saying that “the exhibition was presumptuous.” Gainsborough was such a passionate admirer of the Eidophusikon that for a time he spent every evening at Loutherbourg’s exhibition.[330]

Mr. William Clarke, a seller of hardware (steel buttons, buckles, and cutlery), was proprietor of Exeter Change for nearly half a century. He was an honest and kind man, much beloved by his friends, and known to everybody in Johnson’s time. When he became infirm he was allowed by King George the special privilege of riding across St. James’s Park to Buckingham Gate, his house being in Pimlico. He died rich.

Another character of Clarke’s age was old Thomson, a music-seller, and a good-natured humourist. He was deputy organist at St. Michael’s, Cornhill, and had been a pupil of Boyce. His shop was a mere sloping stall, with a little platform behind it for a desk, rows of shelves for old pamphlets and plays, and a chair or two for a crony. Thomson furnished Burney and Hawkins with materials for their histories of music. It was said that there was not an air from the time of Bird that he could not sing. Poor soured Wilson used to be fond of sitting with Thomson and railing at the times. Garrick and Dr. Arne also frequented the shop.[331]

The nine o’clock drum at old Somerset House and the bell rung as a signal for closing Exeter Change were once familiar sounds to old Strand residents: but alas! times are changed; and they are heard no more.

It was in Thomson’s shop that the elder Dibdin (Charles), together with Hubert Stoppelaer, an actor, singer, and[Pg 178] painter, planned the Patagonian Theatre, which was opened in the rooms above. The stage was six feet wide, the puppet actors only ten inches high. Dibdin wrote the pieces, composed the music, helped in the recitations, and accompanied the singers on a small organ. His partner spoke for the puppets and painted the scenes. They brought out “The Padlock” here. The miniature theatre held about 200 people.[332]

Exeter Hall was built by Mr. Deering, in 1831, for various charitable and religious societies that had scruples about holding their meetings in taverns or theatres. It stands a little west of the site of the “old Change.” The front, with its two massy plain Greek pillars, is a good instance of making the most of space, though it still looks as if it were riding “bodkin” between the larger houses. The building contains two halls—one that will hold eight hundred persons, and another, on the upper floor, able to hold three thousand. The latter is a noble room, 131 feet long by 76 wide, and contains the Sacred Harmonic Society’s gigantic organ. There are also nests of offices and committee-rooms. In May the white neckcloths pour into Exeter Hall in perfect regiments.

In the Strand, near Exeter House, lived the beautiful Countess of Carlisle, a beauty of Charles I.’s court, immortalised by Vandyke, Suckling, and Carew. She paid £150 a year rent, equal to £600 of our current money.[333]

Exeter Street had no western outlet when first built; for where the street ends was the back wall of old Bedford House. Dr. Johnson, after his arrival with Garrick from Lichfield, lodged here, in a garret, at the house of Norris, a staymaker. In this garret Johnson wrote part at least of that sonorous tragedy, “Irene.” He used to say he dined well and with good company for eightpence, at the Pine Apple in the street close by. Several of the guests had travelled. They met every day, but did not know each other’s names. The others paid a shilling, and had wine. Johnson paid sixpence for a cut of meat (a penny for bread,[Pg 179] a penny to the waiter), and was served better than the rest, for the waiter that is forgotten is apt also to forget.

In Cecil’s time Bedford House became known as Exeter House. From hence, in 1651, Cromwell, the Council of State, and the House of Commons followed General Popham’s body to its resting-place at Westminster.[334] It was while receiving the sacrament on Christmas Day at the chapel of Exeter House that that excellent gentleman, Evelyn, and his wife were seized by soldiers, warned not to observe any longer the “superstitious time of the Nativity,” and dismissed with pity.

In Exeter House lived that shifty and unscrupulous turncoat, Antony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, the great tormentor of Charles II., and the father of the author of the Characteristics, who was born here 1670-1, and educated by the amiable philosopher Locke. “The wickedest fellow in my dominions,” as Charles II. once called “Little Sincerity,” afterwards removed hence about the time of the Great Fire to Aldersgate Street, in order to be near his City intriguers. After the Great Fire, till new offices could be built, the Court of Arches, the Admiralty Court, etc., were held in Exeter House. The property still belongs to the Cecil family.

That great statesman, Burleigh, Bacon’s uncle, lived on the site of the present Burleigh Street. He was of birth so humble that his father could only be entitled a gentleman by courtesy. Slow but sure of judgment, silent, distrustful of brilliant men, such as Essex and Raleigh, he made himself, by unremitting skill, assiduity, and fidelity, the most trusted and powerful person in Queen Elizabeth’s privy council. Here, fresh from his frets with the rash Essex, the old wily statesman pondered over the fate of Mary of Scotland, or strove for means to foil Philip of Spain and his Armada. Here also lived his eldest son, Sir Thomas Cecil, subsequently the second Lord Burleigh and Earl of Exeter, who died 1622, whose daughter married the heir of Lord Chancellor Hatton, the dancing chancellor. Burleigh Street[Pg 180] replaced the old house in 1678, when Salisbury Street was built.

The “Little Adelphi” Theatre was opened in 1806 under the name of the “Sans Souci” by Mr. John Scott, a celebrated colour-maker, famous for a certain fashionable blue dye. The entertainments (optical and mechanical) were varied by songs, recitations, and dances, the proprietor’s daughter being a clever amateur actress. Its real success did not begin till 1821, when Pierce Egan’s dull and rather vulgar book of London low life, Tom and Jerry, was dramatised—Wrench as Tom, Reeve as Jerry. Subsequently Power, the best Irishman that trod the boards in London, appeared here in melodrama. In 1826 Terry and Yates became joint lessees and managers. Ballantyne and Scott backed up Terry, Sir Walter being always eager for money. Scott eventually had to pay £1750 for the speculative printer; he seems from the outset to have entertained fears of Terry’s failure.[335] Here Keely too made his first hit as Jemmy Green.

In 1839 Mr. Rice, “the original Jim Crow,” was playing at the Adelphi.[336] This Mr. Rice was an American actor who had studied the drolleries of the Negro singers and dancers, especially those of one Jim Crow, an old boatman who hung about the wharfs of Vicksburg, the same town on the Mississippi that has lately stood so severe a siege. He initiated among us negro tunes and negro dances. This was the fatal beginning of those “negro entertainments,” falsely so called.

In 1808 Mr. Mathews gave his first entertainment, “The Mail-coach Adventures,” at Hull. Mr. James Smith had strung together some sketches of character, and written for him those two celebrated comic songs, “The Mail Coach” and “Bartholomew Fair.” In 1818 Mr. Mathews, unfortunately for his peace of mind, sold himself for seven years to a very sharp practiser, Mr. Arnold, of the Lyceum, for £1000 a year, liable to the deduction of £200 fine for any non-appearance. This becoming unbearable, Mr.[Pg 181] Arnold made a new agreement, by which he took to himself £40 every night, and shared the rest with Mr. Mathews, who also paid half the expenses.[337] The shrewd manager made £30,000 by this first speculation. Rivalling Mr. Dibdin, the wonderful mimic appeared in plain evening dress with no other apparent preparation than a drawing-room scene, a small table covered with a green cloth, and two lamps. His first entertainment included “Fond Barney, the Yorkshire Idiot” and the “Song of the Royal Visitors,” full of droll Russian names. In 1819 he produced “The Trip to Paris.” In 1820 he brought out “The Country Cousins,” with the two celebrated comic songs, “The White Horse Cellar,” and “O, what a Town!—what a Wonderful Metropolis!” both full of the most honest and boisterous fun. In 1821 Peake wrote for him the “Polly Packet,” introducing a caricature of Major Thornton, the great sportsman, as Major Longbow. The entertainment was called “Earth, Air, and Water,” and contained the song of “The Steam-Boat.”

In 1824 Mr. Mathews gave his “Trip to America,” with Yankee songs, negro imitations, and that fine bit of pathos, “M. Mallet at the Post-Office.” In 1825 appeared his “memorandum Book,” and in 1826 his “Invitations,” with the “Ruined Yorkshire Gambler (Harry Ardourly),” and “A Civic Water Party.”

In 1828 he opened the Adelphi Theatre in partnership with Mr. Yates, playing the drunken Tinker in Mr. Buckstone’s “May Queen,” and singing that prince of comic songs, “The Humours of a Country Fair,” written for him by his son Charles. Mr. Moncrief wrote his “Spring Meeting for 1829,” and Mr. Peake his “Comic Annual for 1830.” In 1831 his son Charles aided Mr. Peake in producing an entertainment, and again in 1832. In 1833 his health began to fail; he lost much money in bubble companies, and had an action brought against him for £30,000. In 1833 Mr. Peake and Mr. Charles Mathews wrote the “At Home.”[Pg 182] Subsequently the great mimic went to America, whence he returned in 1838, only to die a few months after.[338]

Leigh Hunt praises Mr. Mathews’s valets and old men, but condemns his nervous restlessness and redundance of bodily action. While Munden, Liston, and Fawcett could not conceal their voices, Mathews rivalled Bannister in his powers of mimicry. His delineation of old age was remarkable for its truthfulness and variety. Leigh Hunt confesses that till Mathews acted Sir Fretful Plagiary, he had ranked him as an actor of habits and not of passions, and far inferior to Bannister and Dowton; but the extraordinary blending of vexation and conceit in Sheridan’s caricature of Cumberland proved Mathews, Mr. Hunt allowed, to be an actor who knew the human heart.[339]

In 1820 Hazlitt criticised Mathews’s third entertainment, “The Country Cousins,” a mélange of songs, narrative, ventriloquism, imitations, and character stories. He had left Covent Garden on the ground that he had not sufficiently frequent opportunities for appearing in legitimate comedy. The severe critic says, “Mr. Mathews shines particularly neither as an actor nor a mimic of actors; but his forte is a certain general tact and versatility of comic power. You would say he is a clever performer—you would guess he is a cleverer man. His talents are not pure, but mixed. He is best when he is his own prompter, manager, performer, orchestra, and scene-shifter.”[340]

Hazlitt then goes on to accuse his “subject” of a want of taste, of his gross and often superficial surprises, and of his too restless disquietude to please. “Take from him,” says Hazlitt, “his odd shuffle in the gait, a restless volubility of speech and motion, a sudden suppression of features, or the continued repetition of a cant phrase with unabated vigour, and you reduce him to almost total insignificance.” It should be said that his “shuffle” was rather a “limp.”

As a mimic of other actors, the same writer says Mathews[Pg 183] often failed. He gabbled like Incledon, entangled himself like Tait Wilkinson, croaked like Suett, lisped like Young, but he could make nothing of John Kemble’s “expressive, silver-tongued cadences.” He blames him more especially for turning nature into pantomime and grimace, and dealing too much with worn-out topics, like Cockneyisms, French blunders, or the ignorance of country people in stage-coaches, Margate hoys, and Dover packet-boats. In another place the severe critic, who could be ill-tempered if he chose, blames Mathews for many of his songs, for his meagre jokes, dry as scrapings of “Shabsuger cheese,” and for his immature ventriloquism. “His best imitations,” says Hazlitt, “were founded on his own observation, and on the absurd characteristics of chattering footmen, drunken coachmen, surly travellers, and garrulous old men. His old Scotchwoman, with her pointless story, was a portrait equal to Wilkie or Teniers, as faithful, as simple, as delicately humorous, with a slight dash of pathos, but without one particle of caricature, vulgarity, or ill-nature.” His best broad jokes were these: the abrupt proposal of a mutton-chop to a man who was sea-sick, and the convulsive marks of abhorrence with which he received it; and the tavern beau who was about to swallow a lighted candle for a glass of brandy-and-water as he was going drunk to bed. Poor Wiggins, the fat, hen-pecked husband, who, unwieldy and helpless, is pursued by a rabble of boys, was one of his best characters. Hazlitt mentions also as a stroke of true genius his imitation of a German family, the wife grumbling at her husband returning drunk, and the little child’s paddling across the room to its own bed at its father’s approach.[341]

Terry, who in 1825 joined partnership with Yates, and died in 1829, was a quiet, sensible actor, praised in his Mephistopheles, and even in King Lear. His Peter Teazle was inferior to Farren’s, and his Dr. Cantwell came after Dowton’s.

Yates was born in 1797. He made his début at Covent Garden as Iago in 1818. He was very versatile, and[Pg 184] triumphed alternately in tragedy, comedy, farce, and melodrama. A critic of 1834 says, “Mr. Yates is occasionally capital, and always respectable. In burlesque he is excellent, but a little too broad, and given to an exaggeration which is sometimes vulgar. He is a better buck than fop, and a better rake than either, were he more refined.”

John Reeve was another of the Adelphi celebrities. He was born in 1799, and was originally a clerk at a Fleet Street banking-house. He appeared first at Drury Lane in 1819 as Sylvester Daggerwood. His imitations were pronounced perfect, and he soon rose to great celebrity in broad farce, burlesque, and the comic parts of melodrama. Lord Grizzle, Bombastes, and Pedrillo, were favourite early characters of his. He was considered too heavy for Caleb Quotem, and not quiet enough for Paul Pry. Liston excelled him in the one, and Harley in the other.

Benjamin Webster was born at Bath in 1800. He took the management of the Haymarket in 1837, and built the New Adelphi Theatre in 1858. In melodrama Mr. Webster excels. His best parts are—Lavater, Tartuffe, Belphegor, Triplet, and Pierre Leroux in “The Poor Stroller.” He is excellent in poor authors and strolling players, and achieved a great triumph in Mr. Watts Philips’s play of “The Dead Heart.” He is energetic and forcible, but he has a bad hoarse voice, and he protracts and details his part so elaborately as often to become tedious.

In 1844 Madame Celeste, who in 1837 had appeared at Drury Lane on her return from America, was directress of the Adelphi. She then left and took the Lyceum, which she held until the close of 1860-1.

The old Adelphi closed in June 1858. Although a small and incommodious house, it had long earned a special fame of its own. It began its career with “True Blue Scott,” and went on with Rodwell and Jones during the “Tom and Jerry” mania, when young men about town wrenched off knockers, knocked down old men who were paid to apprehend thieves, and attended beggars’ suppers. Under Terry and Yates, Buckstone and Fitzball produced pieces in which[Pg 185] T. P. Cooke, O. Smith, Wilkinson, and Tyrone Power shone (this actor was drowned in 1841). There also flourished Wright, Paul Bedford, Mrs. Yates, and Mrs. Keeley, in “The Pilot,” “The Flying Dutchman,” “The Wreck Ashore,” “Victorine,” “Rory O’More,” and “Jack Sheppard,”[342]—the last of these a play to be branded as a demoralising apotheosis of a clever thief.

In 1844 Mr. Webster became proprietor of the Adelphi, and Madame Celeste, a good melodramatic actress, became the directress. Then was brought out that crowning triumph of the theatre, “The Green Bushes,” by Mr. Buckstone—a tremendous success.

Among the greatest “hits” at the Adelphi have been of later years Mr. Watts Philips’s “Dead Heart,” a powerful melodrama of the French Revolution period, Miss Bateman’s “Leah,” an American-German play of the old school, and “The Colleen Bawn,” Mr. Boucicault’s clever dramatic version of poor Gerald Griffin’s novel, full of fine melodramatic situations.

The old town house of the Earls of Bedford stood on the site of the present Southampton Street, and was taken down in 1704, in Queen Anne’s reign. It was a large house with a courtyard before it, and a spacious garden with a terrace walk.[343] Before this house was built the Bedford family lived at the opposite side of the Strand, in the Bishop of Carlisle’s inn, which, in 1598, was called Russell or Bedford House.[344] In 1704 the family removed to Bloomsbury. The neighbouring streets were christened by this family. Russell Street bears their family name, and Tavistock Street their second title.

Garrick lived at No. 36 Southampton Street before he went to the Adelphi. In 1755, to give himself some rest, he brought out a magnificent ballet pantomime, called “The Chinese Festival,” composed by “the great Noverre.” Unfortunately for Garrick, war had just broken out between England and France, and the pit and gallery condemned the[Pg 186] Popish dancers in spite of King George II. and the quality. Gentlemen in the boxes drew their swords, leaped down into the pit, and were bruised and beaten. The galleries looked on and pelted both sides. The ladies urged fresh recruits against the pit, and each fresh levy was mauled. The pit broke up benches, tore down hangings, smashed mirrors, split the harpsichords, and storming the stage, cut and slashed the scenery.[345] The rioters then sallied out to Mr. Garrick’s house (now Eastey’s Hotel) in Southampton Street, and broke every window from basement to garret.

Mrs. Oldfield, who lived in Southampton Street, was the daughter of an officer, and so reduced as to be obliged to live with a relation who kept the Mitre Tavern in St. James’s Market. She was overheard by Mr. Farquhar reading a comedy, and recommended by him to Sir John Vanbrugh. She was excellent as Lady Brute and also as Lady Townley. She died in 1730; her body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and was afterwards buried in the Abbey. Lord Hervey and Bubb Doddington supported her pall. Her corpse, by her own request, was richly adorned with lace—a vanity which Pope ridiculed in those bitter lines—

“One would not sure be ugly when one’s dead;
And, Betty, give this cheek a little red.”

In 1712 Arthur Maynwaring, in his will, describes this street as New Southampton Street.

Bedford Street was first so named in 1766 by the Paving Commissioners. The lower part of the street was called Half-Moon Street; after the fire of London it became fashionable with mercers, lacemen, and drapers.[346] The lower part of the street is in the parish of St. Martin’s in the Fields, the upper in that of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. In the overseers’ accounts of St. Martin’s mention is made of the names of persons who were fined in 1665 for drinking on the Lord’s Day at the Half-Moon Tavern in this street, also for carrying linen, for shaving customers, for carrying home venison or a pair of shoes, and for swearing. Sir[Pg 187] Charles Sedley and the Duke of Buckingham were fined by the Puritans in 1657-58 for riding in their coaches on that day.[347] Ned Ward, the witty publican, in his London Spy, mentions the Half-Moon Tavern in this street.

On the eastern side of the same street, in 1645, lived Remigius van Limput, a Dutch painter, who, at the sale of King Charles’s pictures, bought Vandyke’s florid masterpiece, now at Windsor, of the king on horseback. After the Restoration he was compelled to disgorge it. Had this grand picture been the portrait of any better king, Cromwell would not have parted with it.

The witty bulky Quin lived here from 1749 to 1752. It was in 1749 that this great tragedian, reappearing after a retirement, performed in his friend Thomson’s posthumous play of “Coriolanus.” Good-natured Quin had once rescued the fat lazy poet from a sponging-house. It was about this time that the great elocutionist was instructing Prince George in recitation. When, afterwards, as king, he delivered his first speech successfully in Parliament, the actor exclaimed triumphantly, “Sir, it was I taught the boy.”

On the west side, at No. 15, lived Chief “Justice” Richardson, the humourist. He died in 1635. The interior of the house is ancient. Sir Francis Kynaston, an esquire of the body to Charles I., and author of Leoline and Sydanis, lived in this street in 1637. He died in 1642. The Earl of Chesterfield, one of Grammont’s gay and heartless gallants, lived in Bedford Street in 1656. In the same street, in his old age, at the house of his son, a rich silk-mercer, dwelt Kynaston, the great actor of Charles II.’s time, so well known for his female characters. Thomas Sheridan, the lecturer on elocution, the son of Swift’s friend, and the father of the wit and orator, lived in Bedford Street, facing Henrietta Street and the south side of Covent Garden. Here Dr. Johnson often visited him. “One day,” says Mr. Whyte, “we were standing together at the drawing-room window expecting Johnson, who was to dine with us.[348] Mr. Sheridan asked[Pg 188] me could I see the length of the garden. ‘No, sir.’ ‘Take out your opera-glass then: Johnson is coming, you may know him by his gait.’ I perceived him at a good distance, walking along with a peculiar solemnity of deportment, and an awkward, measured sort of step. At that time the broad flagging at each side of the streets was not universally adopted, and stone posts were in fashion to prevent the annoyance of carriages. Upon every post, as he passed along, I could observe he deliberately laid his hand; but missing one of them, when he had got to some distance he seemed suddenly to recollect himself, and immediately returning back, carefully performed the accustomed ceremony, and resumed his former course, not omitting one, till he gained the crossing. This, Mr. Sheridan assured me, however odd it might appear, was his constant practice, but[Pg 189] why or wherefore he could not inform me.” This eccentric habit of Johnson, the result of hypochondriacal nervousness, is also mentioned by Boswell.

EXETER CHANGE, 1821.

Richard Wilson, the great landscape-painter—“Red-nosed Dick,” as he was familiarly called—was a great ally of Mortimer, “the English Salvator.” They used to meet over a pot of porter at the Constitution, Bedford Street. Mortimer, who was a coarse joker, used to make Dr. Arne, the composer of “Rule Britannia,” who had a red face and staring eyes, very angry by telling him that his eyes looked like two oysters just opened for sauce, and put on an oval side dish of beetroot.

Close to the Lowther Arcade there is one of those large cafés that are becoming features in modern London. It was started by an Italian named Carlo Gatti. There you may see refugees of all countries, playing at dominoes, sipping coffee, or groaning over the wrongs of their native land and their own exile. No music is allowed in this large hall, because it might interfere with the week-day services at St. Martin’s Church.

[Pg 190]

TITUS OATES IN THE PILLORY.

CHARING CROSS.

On July 20, 1864, was laid the first stone of the great Thames Embankment, which now forms the wall of our river from Blackfriars to Westminster. A couple of flags fluttered lazily over the stone as a straggling procession of the members of the Metropolitan Board of Works moved down to[Pg 191] the wooden causeway leading to the river. For two years about a thousand men were at work on it night and day. Iron caissons were sunk below the mud, deep in the gravel, and within ten feet of the clay which is the real foundation of London, and the Victoria Embankment rose gradually into being. It was opened by Royalty in the summer of 1870. This scheme, originally sketched out by Wren, was designed by Colonel Trench, M.P., and also by Martin the painter; but it was never carried out until the days of Lord Palmerston and the Metropolitan Board of Works. Its piers, its flights of steps, its broad highway covering a railway, its gardens, its terraces, are complete; and when the buildings along it are finished London may for the first time claim to compare itself in architectural grandeur with Nineveh, Rome, or modern Paris.

Northumberland House, which faced Charing Cross, covering the site of Northumberland Avenue, was a good but dull specimen of Jacobean architecture; it was built by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, son of the poet Earl of Surrey, about 1605.[349] Walpole attributes the building to Bernard Jansen, a Fleming, and an imitator of Dieterling, and to Gerard Christmas, the designer of Aldersgate. Jansen probably built the house, which was of brick, and Christmas added the stone frontispiece, which was profusely ornamented with rich carved scrolls, and an open parapet worked into letters and other devices. John Thorpe is also supposed to have been associated in the work; and plans of both the quadrangles of this enormous palace are preserved among the Soane MSS.[350] Jansen was the architect of Audley End, in Essex, one of the wonders of the age. Thorpe built Burghley. The front was originally 162 feet long, the court 82 feet square; as Inigo Jones has noted in a copy of Palladio preserved at Worcester College, Oxford.

The Earl of Northampton left the house by his will, in 1614, to his nephew, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, who died in 1626. This was the father of the memorable[Pg 192] Frances, Countess of Essex and Somerset; and from him the house took the name of Suffolk House, till the marriage in 1642 of Elizabeth, daughter of Theophilus, second Earl of Suffolk, with Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland, when it changed its name accordingly.

Dorothy, sister of the rash and ungrateful Earl of Essex, whose violence and follies nothing less than the executioner’s axe could cure, married the “wizard” Earl of Northumberland, as he was called, whom “she led the life of a dog, till he indignantly turned her out of doors.” He was afterwards engaged in the Gunpowder Plot, being angry with the Government that had overlooked him. “His name was used and his money spent by the conspirators; one of his servants hired the vault, and procured the lease of Vineyard House. Thomas Percy, his kinsman and steward, supped with him on the very night of the plot. His servant, Sir Dudley Carleton, who hired the house, was thrust into the Tower, and the earl joined him there not long after; but Cecil was either unable or unwilling to touch his life.”[351] Northumberland, with Cobham and Raleigh, had before this engaged in schemes with the French against the Government. Thomas Percy had been beheaded for plotting with Mary. Henry Percy had shot himself while in the Tower, on account of the Throckmorton Conspiracy. Compounding for a fine of £11,000, the earl devoted himself in the Tower to scientific and literary pursuits, and gave annuities to six or seven eminent mathematicians, who ate at his table. In 1611 he was again examined, and finally released in 1617. The king’s favourite, Hay, afterwards Earl of Carlisle, had married the earl’s daughter Lucy against his will, which so irritated him that he was with difficulty persuaded to accept his own release, because it was obtained through the intercession of Hay.

Joceline Percy, son of Algernon, dying in 1670, without issue male, Northumberland House became the property of his only daughter Elizabeth Percy, the heiress of the Percy estates. Her first husband was Henry Cavendish, Earl of[Pg 193] Ogle; her second, Thomas Thynne, of Longleat, in Wilts, who was shot in his coach in Pall Mall, on Sunday, February 12, 1681-2; her third husband was Charles Seymour, the proud Duke of Somerset, who married her in 1682. This lady was twice a widow and three times a wife before the age of seventeen.

The “proud” duke and duchess lived in great state and magnificence at Northumberland House. The duchess died in 1722, and the duke followed in 1748. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Algernon, Earl of Hertford, and the seventh Duke of Somerset, who was created Earl of Northumberland in 1749, with remainder, failing issue male, to his son-in-law, Sir Hugh Smithson, who in 1766 was raised to the dukedom. The lion which country cousins for two centuries remember to have crowned the central gateway of the duke’s house, represented the Percy crest. It is of this stiff-tailed animal, for the exact angle of the tail is treated by heralds as a matter of the most vital importance, that the old story imputed to Sheridan is told. Probably some audacious wit did once collect a London crowd by declaring that its tail wagged—but certainly it was not Sheridan.

Tom Thynne, or, as he was called, “Tom of Ten Thousand,” was shot at the east end of Pall Mall, opposite the Opera Arcade, by Borosky, a Polish soldier urged on by Count Königsmark, a Swedish adventurer, son of one of Gustavus’s old generals, and who was enraged with Thynne for having just married the youthful widow of the Earl of Ogle, Lady Elizabeth Percy. Thynne was a favourite of the Duke of Monmouth. Shaftesbury had been lately released from the Tower, in spite of Dryden’s onslaught on him as “Achitophel,” on the foolish duke as “Absalom,” and on Thynne as “Issachar,” his wealthy western friend. The three murderers were hanged in Pall Mall, but their master strangely escaped, partly owing to the influence of Charles II. The count, who had shown great courage at Tangier against the Moors, and had boarded a Turkish galley at his eminent peril, died in 1686, at the battle of Argos in the Morea. His younger brother was assassinated at[Pg 194] Hanover, on suspicion of an intrigue with Sophia of Zell, the young and beautiful wife of the Elector, afterwards George I. of England.[352]

The Earl of Northampton, Surrey’s son, who built Northumberland House (as Osborne, who loved scandal, says with Spanish gold), seems to have been an unscrupulous time-server, flatterer, and parasite. In 1596 he wrote to Burleigh, and spoke of his reverend awe at his lordship’s “piercing judgment;” yet a year after he writes a plotting letter to Burleigh’s great enemy, Essex, and says: “Your lordship by your last purchase hath almost enraged the dromedary that would have won the Queen of Sheba’s favour by bringing pearls. If you could once be so fortunate in dragging old Leviathan (Burghley) and his rich tortuosum colubrum (Sir Robert Cecil), as the prophet termeth them, out of their den of mischievous device, the better part of the world would prefer your virtue to that of Hercules.” The earl became a toady and creature of the infamous Carr, Earl of Somerset, and is thought to have died just in time to escape prosecution for the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower.[353]

It was shortly before Suffolk House changed its name that it became the scene of one of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s mad Quixotic quarrels. His chivalrous lordship had had sundry ague fits, which had made him so lean and yellow that scarce any man could recognise him. Walking towards Whitehall he one day met a Mr. Emerson, who had spoken very disgraceful words of Lord Herbert’s friend, Sir Robert Harley. Lord Herbert therefore, sensible of the dishonour, took Emerson by his long beard, and then, stepping aside, drew his sword; Captain Thomas Scriven being with Lord Herbert, and divers friends with Mr. Emerson. All who saw the quarrel wondered at the Welsh nobleman, weak and “consumed” as he was, offering to fight; however, Emerson ran and took shelter in Suffolk House, and afterwards complained to the Lords in[Pg 195] Council, who sent for Lord Herbert, the lean, yellow Welsh Quixote, but did not so much reprehend him for defending the honour of his friend as for adventuring to fight, being at the same time in such weak health.[354]

Algernon, the tenth Earl of Northumberland, is called by Clarendon “the proudest man alive.” He had been Lord High Admiral to King Charles I., and was appointed general against the Scotch Covenanters, but, being unable to take the command from ill health, gave up his commission. He gradually fell away from the king’s cause, but nevertheless refused to continue High Admiral against the king’s wish. He treated the Dukes of York and Gloucester and the Princess Elizabeth with “such consideration” that they were removed from his care, and from that time he turned Royalist again.

Sir John Suckling refers to Suffolk House in his exquisite little poem on the wedding of Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, with Lady Margaret Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. The well known poem begins—

“At Charing-cross, hard by the way
Where we (thou know’st) do sell our hay,
There is a house with stairs.”

And then the gay and graceful poet goes on to sketch Lady Margaret—

“Her lips were red, and one was thin,
Compared with that was next her chin.
Some bee had stung it newly.”

And then follows that delightful, fantastic simile, comparing her feet to little mice creeping in and out her petticoat.[355] Sir John was born in 1609.

The oldest part of Northumberland House was the Strand entrance. This was crowned, as stated above, by a frieze or balustrade of large stone letters, probably including the name and titles of the earl and the glorified name of the architect. At the funeral of Anne of Denmark, 1619, a young man, named Appleyard, was killed by the fall of the[Pg 196] letter S[356] from the house, which was then occupied by the Earl of Strafford, Lord Treasurer. The house was originally only three sides of a quadrangle, the river side remaining open to the gardens; but traffic and noise increasing, the quadrangle was completed along the river side and the principal apartments. There is a drawing by Hollar of the house in his time, and another, a century later, by Canaletti. The new front towards the gardens was spoiled by a clumsy stone staircase, which was attributed to Inigo Jones, but probably incorrectly.

The date, 1746, on the façade referred to the repairs made in that year, and the letters “A. S. P. N.” stood for Algernon Somerset, Princeps Northumbriæ. The lion over the gateway was said to be a copy of one by Michael Angelo; it is now at Sion House, Isleworth. The gateway was covered with ornaments and trophies. Double ranges of grotesque pilasters enclosed eight niches on the sides, and there was a bow window and an open arch above the chief gate. Between each of the fourteen niches in the front there were trophies of crossed weapons, and the upper stories had twenty-four windows, in two ranges, and pierced battlements. Each wing terminated in a little cupola, and the angles had rustic quoins. The quadrangle within the gate was simpler and in better taste, and the house was screened from the river by elm trees.[357]

There used to be a schoolboy tradition, prevalent at King’s College in the author’s time, that one of the niches in the front of Northumberland House was of copper and movable. So far the story was true; but the tradition went on to relate how, once upon a time, a certain enemy of the house of Percy obtained secret admission by this niche and murdered one of the dukes, his enemy. History is, however, fortunately, quite silent on this subject.

In February 1762 Horace Walpole and a party of quality set out from Northumberland House to hear the ghost in Cock Lane that Dr. Johnson exposed, and that Hogarth and Churchill ridiculed with pen and pencil. The[Pg 197] Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, and Lord Hertford, all returned from the Opera with Horace Walpole, then changed their dress, and set out in a hackney coach. It rained hard, and the lane and house were “full of mob.” The room of the haunted house, small and miserable, was stuffed with eighty persons, and there was no light but one tallow candle. As clothes-lines hung from the ceiling, Walpole asked drily if there was going to be rope-dancing between the acts. They said the ghost would not come till 7 A.M., when only ’prentices and old women remained. The party stayed till half-past one. The Methodists had promised contributions, provisions were sent in like forage, and the neighbouring taverns and ale-houses were making their fortunes.[358]

On May 14, 1770, poor Chatterton, who suffered so terribly for the deceptions of his ambitious boyhood, writes from the King’s Bench (for the present) that a gentleman who knew him at the Chapter coffee-house, in Paternoster Row—frequented by authors and publishers—would have introduced him to the young Duke of Northumberland as a companion in his intended general tour, “but, alas! I spake no tongue but my own.”[359] But this is taken from a most questionable work, full of fictions and forgeries. Its author was a Bristol man, who afterwards fled to America. He also wrote a series of Conversations with the poets of the Lake school, many of which are too obviously imaginary.

On March 18, 1780, the Strand front of Northumberland House was totally destroyed by fire. The apartments of Dr. Percy, the Duke’s kinsman and chaplain, afterwards Bishop of Dromore and editor of the Reliques of Ancient Poetry were consumed; but great part of his library escaped.

Goldsmith’s simple-hearted ballad of Edwin and Angelina was originally “printed for the amusement of the Countess of Northumberland.” Two years after, Kenrick accused him in the papers of plagiarising it from Percy’s pasticcio[Pg 198] from Shakspere in the Reliques, which was probably written in 1765.[360]

It is probable that Goldsmith often visited Percy, when acting as chaplain at Northumberland House. Sir John Hawkins, indeed, describes meeting the poet waiting for an audience in an outer room. At his own audience Hawkins mentioned that the doctor was waiting. On their way home together, Goldsmith told Hawkins that his lordship said that he had read the Traveller with delight, that he was going as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland, and should be glad, as Goldsmith was an Irishman, to do him any kindness. Hawkins was enraptured at the rich man’s graciousness. But Goldsmith had mentioned only his brother, a clergyman there, who needed help. “As for myself,” he added, bitterly, “I have no dependence on the promises of great men. I look to the booksellers for support; they are my best friends, and I am not inclined to forsake them for others.” “Thus,” says Hawkins, “did this idiot in the affairs of the world trifle with his fortunes and put back the hand that was held out to assist him.” The earl told Percy, after Goldsmith’s death, that had he known how to help the poet he would have done so, or he would have procured him a salary on the Irish establishment that would have allowed him to travel. Let men of the world remember that the poet a few days before had been forced to borrow 15s. 6d. to meet his own wants.

This conversation took place in 1765. In 1771, when Goldsmith was stopping at Bath with his good-natured friend Lord Clare, he blundered by mistake at breakfast time into the next door on the same Parade, where the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland were staying. As he took no notice of them, but threw himself carelessly on a sofa, they supposed there was some mistake, and therefore entered into conversation with him, and when breakfast was served up, invited him to stay and partake of it. The poet, hot, stammering, and irrecoverably confused, withdrew with profuse apologies for his mistake, but not till he had accepted an[Pg 199] invitation to dinner. This story, a parallel to the laughable blunder in She Stoops to Conquer, was told by the duchess herself to Dr. Percy.

It was probably of the first of these interviews that Goldsmith used to give the following account:—

“I dressed myself in the best manner I could, and, after studying some compliments I thought necessary on such an occasion, proceeded to Northumberland House, and acquainted the servants that I had particular business with the duke. They showed me into an ante-chamber, where, after waiting some time, a gentleman, very elegantly dressed, made his appearance. Taking him for the duke, I delivered all the fine things I had composed, in order to compliment him on the honour he had done me; when to my fear and astonishment, he told me I had mistaken him for his master, who would see me immediately. At that instant the duke came into the apartment, and I was so confounded on the occasion that I wanted words barely sufficient to express the sense I entertained of the duke’s politeness, and went away exceedingly chagrined at the blunder I had committed.”[361]

Dr. Waagen, the picture critic, seems to have been rather dazzled at the splendour of Northumberland House. He praises the magnificent staircase, lighted from above and reaching up through three stories, the white marble floors, the balustrades and chandeliers of gilt bronze, the cabinets of Florentine mosaic, and the arabesques of the drawing-room.[362] The great picture of the duke’s collection was the Cornaro family, by Titian; I believe from the Duke of Buckingham’s collection. It is a splendid specimen of the painter’s middle period and golden tone. The faces of the kneeling Cornari are grand, simple, senatorial, and devout. There was also a Saint Sebastian, by Guercino, “clear and careful,” and large as life; a fine Snyders and Vandyke; many copies by Mengs (particularly “The School of Athens”); and a good Schalcken, with his usual candlelight effect. The gem of all the English pictures was one[Pg 200] by Dobson, Vandyke’s noble pupil. It contained the portrait of the painter and those of Sir Balthasar Gerbier, the architect, and Sir Charles Cotterell. The colour is as rich and juicy as Titian’s, the drapery learned and graceful, the faces are full of fire and spirit. Dobson died at the age of thirty-six. Sir Charles was his patron.[363] Vandyke is said to have disinterred Dobson from a garret, and recommended him to the king. Gerbier was a native of Antwerp, a painter, architect, and ambassador. This picture of Dobson was bought at Betterton’s sale for £44.[364] The gallery of the Duke of Northumberland was removed in 1875, when the house was demolished, to Sion House.

Northumberland House was connected with, at all events, one period of English history. In the year 1660, when General Monk was in quarters at Whitehall, the Earl of Northumberland, in the name of the nobility and gentry of England, invited him here to the first conference in which the restoration of the Stuarts was publicly talked of. Algernon Percy, the tenth earl, had been Lord High Admiral under Charles I.

That staunch, brave, crotchety man, Sir Harry Vane the younger (the son of Lord Strafford’s enemy), lived next door to Northumberland House, eastwards, in the Strand. The house in Charles II.’s time became the official residence of the Secretary of State, and Mr. Secretary Nicholas dwelt there, when meetings were held to found a commonwealth and put down that foolish, good-natured, incompetent Richard Cromwell. To the great Protector, Vane was a thorn in the flesh, for he wanted a republic when the nation required a stronger and more compact government. Oliver’s exclamation, “Oh, Sir Harry Vane! Sir Harry Vane!—The Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!” expresses infinite vexation with an impracticable person. Vane was a “Fifth-monarchy man,” and believed in universal salvation. He must have been a good man, or Milton would never have addressed the sonnet to him in which he says—

[Pg 201] “Therefore, on thy firm hand Religion leans
In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son.”

Sir Harry left behind him some very tough and dark treatises on prophecy, and other profound matters that few but angels or fools dare to meddle with.

There is a foolish tradition that Charing Cross was so named originally by Edward I. in memory of his chère reine. Peele, one of the glorious band of Elizabethan dramatists, helped to spread this tradition. He makes King Edward say—

“Erect a rich and stately carved cross,
Whereon her statue shall with glory shine;
And henceforth see you call it Charing Cross.
For why?—the chariest and the choicest queen
That ever did delight my royal eyes
There dwells in darkness.”[365]