|IT is with places as with persons: they often attract us more in their
youth than in their maturer years Apart from the fact that these papers
are confessedly confined to the Eighteenth Century, this threadbare
truth affords a sufficient excuse for speaking of Leicester Square by
its earlier, rather than by its existing name. And, indeed, the abiding
interest of the locality lies more in the past than in the present. Not
even the addition to the inclosure of busts and a Shakespeare fountain,
has been able to regenerate entirely the Leicester Square that most of
us remember, with its gloomy back streets,--its fringe of dingy _cafés_
and _restaurants_,--its ambiguous print and curiosity shops,--its
incorrigibly unacclimatized Alhambra, whose garish Saracenic splendours
scale and peel perpetually in London's _imber edax_. If we call anything
forcibly to mind in connection with the spot, it is a certain central
statue, long the mock of the irreverent,--a statue of the first George,
which had come of old, gilded and magnificent, from 'Timon's Villa' at
Canons, to fall at last upon evil days and evil tongues, to be rudely
spotted with sacrilegious paint, to be crowned with a fool's cap, and,
finally, to present itself to the spectator in the generally dishonoured
and dilapidated condition in which, some twenty years ago, it was
exhibited by the late John O'Connor on the walls of the Royal Academy.
But when, travelling rapidly backwards, past the Empire and the
Alhambra, past Wylde's Globe and the Panopticon, past Burford's Panorama
and Miss Linwood's needlework, we enter the last century, we are in
the Leicester Fields of Reynolds and Hogarth, of Newton and John
Hunter,--the Leicester Fields of Sir George Savile and Frederick, Prince
of Wales, of Colbert and Prince Eugene. This is the Leicester Fields of
which we propose to speak. Leicester Square and its notorieties may be
left to the topographers of the future. *
* The name 'Leicester Square'--it is but right to say--is
also of fairly early date. In 'A Journey through England,'
4th cd., 1724, 1778, the writer, speaking of the space
before Leicester House, says: 'This was till these Fourteen
Years always called Leicester-Fields, but now Leicester-
Square.'' There is, however, abundant evidence that the
older name continued to be freely used throughout the
century. For example, in 1783, Mrs. Hogarth's house is
advertised as 'The Golden Head, in Leicester Fields;' and it
is "at his house in Leicester Fields,' in 1792, that Malone
makes Reynolds die.
It is in Ralph Agas his survey of 592 (or rather in Mr. W. H. Overall's
excellent facsimile) that we make our first acquaintance with the
Fields, then really entitled to their name. According to Agas, the
ground to the north-west of Charing Cross, and immediately to the east
of the present Whitcomb Street (at that time Hedge Lane) was formerly
open pasture land, occupied--in the plan--by a pair of pedestrians
larger than life, a woman laying out clothes, and two nondescript
quadrupeds, of which one is broken-backed beyond the licence of
deformity. The only erections to be discovered are the King's Mews,
clustering together for company at the back of the Cross. Sixty years
later, judging from the map known generally as Faithorne's, the locality
had become more populated.. To the right of St. Martin's Lane it is
thickly crowded with buildings; to the left also a line of houses is
springing up and creeping northward; while in the open space above
referred to stand a couple of lordly mansions. One, on a site which must
have lain to the north of the present Little Newport Street, is Newport
House, the town residence of Mountjoy Blount, Earl of Newport; the
other, which occupies ground now traversed by Leicester Place, is
Leicester House. Its garden at the back extended across the eastern
end of Lisle Street, and its boundary wall to the north was also the
southern boundary wall of the old Military Garden where King James's
son, Prince Henry of Wales--whose gallant and martial presentment you
shall see figured in the forefront of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion--had
been wont to exercise his troops, and make the now-discredited welkin
ring with the shooting-off of chambers, with alarums, and points of war.
Leicester House the first was built about 1632-6 by Robert Sydney, 2nd
Earl of Leicester, the father of Algernon Sydney and of that beautiful
Dorothy, afterwards Countess of Sunderland, whom Van Dyck painted and
Waller 'Petrarchized' as Sacharissa. The site (Swan Close) * was what is
known as Lammas-land, and from the Overseers' books of the Parish of St.
Martin's in the Fields, the Earl seems not only to have paid 'Lamas' for
'the ground that adjoins to the Military Wall,' but also 'for the field
that is before his house'--i.e. Leicester Fields.
* Cunningham failed to identify Swan Close. But from a
letter in the State Paper Office, quoted in 'Temple Bar' for
June, 1874, it would seem that this was the aetual site of
the building.
This latter probably extended to the present Orange Street, so that the
grounds of the old mansion may be roughly said to be bounded by the
Mews on the south, and by the Military Garden on the north. Few memories
cling about the place which belong to Lord Leicester's lifetime. When
not engaged in embassies and the like, he was absent at his other and
more famous seat of Penshurst in Kent, and Leicester House was 'To Let.'
One of the earliest of its illustrious tenants was that quondam 'Queen
of Hearts' (as Howell calls her), the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia,
who, already smitten with her last illness, died there in February,
1662, after a few days' residence, 'in the arms' (says Evelyn) 'of her
nephew the King' [Charles II.]. Another tenant, some years later, was
Charles Colbert, Marquis de Croissy, the French Ambassador, a brother of
Louis the Fourteenth's famous minister and financier; and Pepys records,
under date of 21st October, 1668, that he was to have taken part in
a deputation from the Royal Society to Lord Leicester's distinguished
lessee. But having unhappily been 'mighty merry' at a house-warming of
his friend Batelier, he arrived too late to accompany the rest, and was
fain to console himself (and perhaps to do penance) by carrying his wife
to Cow Lane, Smithfield, in order to inspect a proposed new coach,
with the splendours of which 'she is out of herself for joy almost,'
although, from the sequel, it was not the one ultimately purchased.
Pepys, as will be seen, did not actually enter Leicester House, at all
events upon this occasion. His brother diarist was more fortunate.
Going in October, 1672, to take leave of the second Lady Sunderland
(Sacharissa's daughter-in-law), whose husband had already set out as
ambassador to Paris, grave John Evelyn was entertained by her Ladyship
with the performances of Richardson the fire-eater, who, in those days,
enjoyed a vogue sufficient to justify the record of his prowess in the
'Journal des Sçavans' for 1680. 'He devour'd brimston on glowing coales
before us,' says Evelyn, 'chewing and swallowing them; he mealted a
beere-glasse and eate it quite up; then taking a live coale on his
tongue, he put on it a raw oyster, the coal was blown on with bellows
till it flam'd and sparkl'd in his mouth, and so remain'd till the
oyster gaped and was quite boiled; then he mealted pitch and wax with
sulphur, which he drank downe as it flam'd; I saw it flaming in his
mouth a good while; he also tooke up a thick piece of yron, such as
laundresses use to put in their smoothing-boxes, when it was fiery hot,
held it betweene his teeth, then in his hand, and threw it about like a
stone, but this I observ'd he car'd not to hold very long; then he stood
on a small pot, and bending his body, tooke a glowing yron with his
mouth from betweene his feete, without touching the pot or ground with
his hands; with divers other prodigious feates.' *
* 'Memoirs of John Evelyn,' etc., 1827, ii. pp. 375-6.
Lord Leicester closed a long life in 1677, and many other tenants
afterwards occupied the mansion in the Fields. Under Anne it was the
home of the German Ambassador, or 'Imperial Resident,' who lived in it
far into the reign of the first George. At this time, judging from a
water-colour bird's-eye view in the Crace Collection at the British
Museum, it was a long two-storeyed building, with attics above, a
courtyard in front, and a row of small shops or stalls extending on
either side of its entrance gate. Behind came the garden, stretching
northward, and decorated in the Dutch fashion with formal trees
and statues. Hither, on a Saturday in January, 1712, conveyed
unostentatiously in a hackney coach from Whitehall Stairs, came Eugene
of Savoy, who, by desire of the Emperor Charles VI., had just crossed
from the Hague in Her Majesty's 'Yatcht "Fubs"' (Captain Desborough),
with the intention of preventing, if possible, what Prior calls that
'vile Utrecht Treaty.' His mission was to be fruitless from the outset,
for at the Nore he was greeted with the news of Marlborough's disgrace,
and his presence in England had little or no effect upon the pending
proposals of peace. But for two months he was to be fêted and lionized
by the nobility in a way which modest warrior and discreet diplomatist
as he was--must have taxed his resources as much as a campaign in
Flanders. His admirers mobbed him on all occasions. 'I could not
see Prince Eugene at court to-day,'--writes Swift to Mrs. Johnson at
Dublin,--'the crowd was so great. The Whigs contrive to have a crowd
always about him, and employ the rabble to give the word when he sets
out from any place.' Elsewhere Swift had said--'I hope and believe
he comes too late to do the Whigs any good.' At first His Highness's
appearance prepossessed him. He is not ill-looking, 'but well enough,
and a good shape.' Later on he has revised his opinion. 'I saw Prince
Eugene at court to-day very plain. He is plaguy yellow, and literally
ugly besides.' A great Tory lady, Lady Strafford (wife of that haughty
envoy to the Hague who declined to serve with Prior in the Utrecht
negotiations) goes farther still. She calls him--her Ladyship spells
far worse than Stella--a 'frittfull creature,' and adds, 'the Ladys here
dont admire Prince Eugene, for he seemes to take very little notis
of them,'--a sentiment in which we may perhaps detect a spice of the
'_spreto injuria formho_'
Much, indeed, depends upon the point of view, political and otherwise.
To Steele, with his military instincts and quick enthusiasm, the great
Captain, who surprised Cremona and forced the trenches of Turin, comes
surrounded with an aura of hyperbole. 'He who beholds him,' he writes in
'Spectator,' No. 340, 'will easily expect from him anything that is to
be imagined or executed by the Wit or Force of Man. The Prince is of
that Stature which makes a Man most easily become all Parts of Exercise;
has Height to be graceful on Occasions of State and Ceremony, and no
less adapted for Agility and Dispatch: His Aspect is erect and compos'd;
his Eye lively and thoughtful, yet rather vigilant than sparkling: His
Action and Address the most easy imaginable, and his Behaviour in an
Assembly peculiarly graceful in a certain Art of mixing insensibly with
the rest, and becoming one of the Company, instead of receiving the
Courtship of it. The Shape of his Person, and Composure of his Limbs,
are remarkably exact and beautiful.' Burnet, as staunch a Whig as
Steele, writes more moderately, to the same effect. 'I had the honour to
be admitted at several times, to much discourse with him; his Character
is so universally known, that I will say nothing of him, but from what
appeared to myself. He has a most unaffected Modesty, and does scarcely
bear the Acknowledgments, that all the World pay him: He descends to an
easy Equality with those, with whom he converses; and seems to assume
nothing to himself, while he reasons with others: He was treated with
great respect by both Parties; but he put a distinguished Respect on the
Duke of _Marlborough_, with whom he passed most of his Time. * The Queen
used him civilly, but not with the Distinction, that was due to his high
Merit: Nor did he gain much ground with the Ministers.' **
* It was for Marlborough, no doubt, that the Prince sat to
Kneller. The portrait, in which he wears the Order of the
Golden Fleece over a rich coat of armour, and holds a
marshal'? baton, was mezzotinted by John Simon in this very
year 1712
** 'History of His Own Time,' ii. (1731), pp. 589-90.
Eugene's stay at Leicester House was brief; but it must have been fully
occupied. 'Je caressais beaucoup les gens en place,' he writes in his
'Mémoires,' and it is clear that, however attentive he may have been to
his fallen comrade-in-arms of Blenheim and Oudenarde, he did not omit
to pay assiduous court to those in power. 'He has been every day
entertain'd at some great man's,' says gossiping Peter Wentworth. Lord
Portland gives him 'dinner, musick and a dancing' all at once; the Duke
of Shrewsbury has Nicolini to sing for him; the Duke of Buckingham turns
out the militia in his honour. And so forth. He, in his turn, was not
backward in responding. 'Prince Eugene,' says Lady Strafford, 'has given
an order to six ladys and six men. The ladys are the four Marlborough
daughters and the Duchess of Bolton and Lady Berkely. 'Tis a
medall--Cupid on won side with a sword in won hand and a fann in the
othere, and the othere side is Cupid with a bottle in his hand with a
sword run through it. And the motto's are in French which I dare not
write to you but the English "won don't hinder the othere" ["L'un
n'empêche pas l'autre"].' He had arrived in London on January 5, and
he returned to Holland on March 17, carrying with him nothing but the
diamond hiked sword ('very rich and genteele, and the diamonds very
white,' says Lord Berkeley of Stratton), which, at a cost of £5,000, had
been presented to him by Queen Anne. *
* If he received royal gifts, he was also princely in his
acknowledgments. According to Hearne (Dohle, 1889, iii.
329), he paid twenty guineas for Joshua Barnes's quarto
'Homer' of 1711, and fifteen guineas for Wiston's
'Heretical Book.' he also paid thirty guineas for Samuel
Clarke's edition of 'Caesar's Commentaries (Tonson, 1712),'
then just published with a magnificent portrait of
Marlborough, to whom it was dedicated. A large paper copy of
this, sumptuously bound, fetched sixteen guineas at Dr.
Mead's sale of 1754-5; but though it is praised by Addison
in 'Spectator,' No. 367, as doing 'Honour to the English
Press,' Eugene certainly gave too much. Probably he meant to
do so. 'Je fis des présens,' he says ('Mémoires,' 1811, p.
107); 'ear'--he adds significantly--'on achète beaucoup en
Angleterre.'
After this Leicester House continued to be the home of the German
Resident, apparently one Hoffmann, whom Swift calls a 'puppy.' But he
had also called his predecessor, Count Gallas, a 'fool,' and too much
importance may easily be attached to these flowers of faction. 'Scandal
between Whig and Tory goes for nothing,' said Mrs. Manley of the 'New
Atalantis'--and Mrs. Manley's knowledge was experimental. About 1718,
the house, being again to let, was bought for £6,000 by George Augustus,
Prince of Wales, who had quarrelled with his father; and a residence of
the Prince of Wales it continued for forty years to come.
This was perhaps the gayest time in its history. From the precision and
decorum of St. James's, people flocked eagerly to the drawing-rooms and
receptions of Leicester House, where the fiddles were always going.
'Balls, assemblies and masquerades have taken the place of dull
formal visiting,' writes my Lord Chesterfield, 'and the women are more
agreeable triflers than they were designed. Puns are extremely in vogue,
and the license very great. The variation of three or four letters in a
word breaks no squares, inasmuch, that an indifferent punster may make a
very good figure in the best companies.' He himself was one of the most
brilliant luminaries of that brilliant gathering, delighting the Prince
and Princess by his mimicry and his caustic raillery. Another was that
eccentric Duchess of Buckingham, who passed for the daughter of James
II. by Catherine Sed-ley, Countess of Dorchester, and who always sat in
a darkened chamber, in the deepest mourning, on the anniversary of King
Charles's execution. Thus she was discovered by Lord Hervey, surrounded
by servants in sables, in a room hung with black, and lighted only by
wax candles. But the most attractive figures of the prince's Court are
the youthful maids of honour,--charming, good-humoured Mary Bellenden,
Mary Lepel (to whom a later paper of these 'Vignettes' has been
devoted), * and reckless and volatile Sophia Howe. Pope and Gay
wrote them verses,--these laughing ladies,--and they are often under
contemporary pens.
* See 'Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey,' in 'Eighteenth Century
Vignettes,' 1806, pp. 293-323.
Miss Bellenden married Colonel John Campbell, and became a happy wife;
the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' paired off with John, Lord Hervey, whose
pen-portrait by Pope exhausts the arts of 'conscientious malevolence,'
while poor Sophia Howe fell in love, but did not marry at all, and died
in 1726 of a broken heart.
When, in June, 1727, George II. passed from Leicester House to the
throne of England, another Prince of Wales succeeded him,--though not
immediately,--and maintained the traditions of an opposition Court.
This was Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bubb Dodington, afterwards Lord
Melcombe, was the Chesterfield of this new _régime_, and Miss Chudleigh
and Lady Middlesex, its Bellenden and Lepel. Political intrigue
alternated with gambling and theatricals. One of the _habitués_ was the
dancing master Desnoyers, whom Hogarth ridiculed; and French comedians
made holiday. 'The town,' says a historian of the Square, 'was at this
time full of gaiety--masquerades, ridottos, Ranelagh in full swing,
and the Prince a prominent figure at all, for he loved all sorts
of diversion, from the gipsies at Norwood, the conjurors and
fortune-tellers in the bye-streets about Leicester Fields, and the
bull-baits at Hockley-in-the-Hole, to Amorevoli at the Opera, and the
Faussans in the ballet. When the news came of the Duke of Cumberland
having lost the battle of Fontenoy in May, 1745, the Prince was deep in
preparation for a performance at Leicester House of Congreve's masque
of "The Judgment of Paris," in which he played Paris. He himself wrote a
French song for the part, addressed to the three rival goddesses, acted
by Lady Catherine Hanmer, Lady Fauconberg, and Lady Middlesex, the _dame
régnante_ of the time. It is in the high Regency vein:--=
```'Venez, mes chères Déesses,
````Venez, calmez mon chagrin;
```Aidez, mes belles Princesses,
````A le noyer dans le vin.
```Poussons cette douce ivresse
````Jusqu'an milieu de la nuit,
```Et n'écoutons que la tendresse
````D'un charmant vis-à-vis."'=
'What signifies if Europe has a tyrant more or less, So we but pray
Calliope Our verse and song to bless'---proceeds this Anacreontic
performance; and Walpole copies out its entire five stanzas to send to
Mann at Florence. They miscarry, he says, 'in nothing but the language,
the thoughts and the poetry,'--a judgment which is needlessly severe.
In March, 1751, an end came to these lighthearted junketings, when His
Royal Highness quitted the scene almost precipitately from the breaking
of an abscess in his side, caused by the blow of a cricket-ball at
Cliveden. The Princess and her children continued to live in Leicester
Fields until 1766. Meanwhile, to the accompaniment of trumpets and
kettledrums, the old house witnessed the proclamation of George III.,
and the marriage, in its great drawing-room, of the Princess Augusta
to Ferdinand, Hereditary Prinee of Brunswick, one of the most popular
heroes ever huzzaed to by an English mob. After this last occurrence,
the only important event connected with royalty in the Fields is the
death at Savile House on 29th December, 1765, of one of the princes.
'The King's youngest brother, Prince Frederick,' writes Walpole (with
one of those Gallic affectations of phrase which roused the anger of
Macaulay) 'is dead, of a dropsy and consumption: he was a pretty and
promising boy.'
The Savile House above referred to stood next to Leicester House on the
west. Savile House, too, was not without its memories. It was here
that Peter the Great had boozed with his pot companion, the Marquis of
Caermarthen, who occupied it when the Czar made his famous visit to this
country in 1698. More than one English home bore dirty testimony to the
passage of the imperial savage and his suite, the decorous dwelling of
John Evelyn in particular, at Sayes Court, Deptford, being made 'right
nasty.' There is, however, no special record of any wrong to
Savile House beyond the spilling, down the autocratic throat, of an
'intolerable deal of sack' and peppered brandy. In January, 1718,
the house was taken by the Prince of Wales, and when, a little later,
Leicester House was vacated by Lord Gower, a communication was opened
between the two, the smaller being devoted to the royal children. It
belonged originally to Aylesbury family, and came through them to the
Saviles, one of whom was the Sir George Savile who is by some supposed
to have sat for Goldsmith's Mr. Burchell. Sir George was its tenant
in the riots of '80, when (as Dickens has not failed to remember in
'Barnaby Rudge') it was besieged by the rioters because he had brought
in the Catholic Bill. 'Between Twelve and One O'clock Yesterday morning
[June 6th]--says the 'Public Advertiser'--'a large Body [of rioters]
assembled before Sir George Savile's House in Leicester Fields, and
after breaking all the Windows, destroyed some of the Furniture.' They
were finally dispersed by a party of the Horse Grenadier Guards, but not
before they had torn up all the iron railings in front of the building,
which they afterwards used effectively as weapons of offence. Burke,
who had also supported the Bill, was only saved from a like fate by
the exertions of sixteen soldiers who garrisoned his house in Charles
Street, St. James's Square. With the later use of Savile House, as the
home of Hiss Linwood's Art Needlework, which belongs to the present
century, this paper has nothing to do.
Moreover, we are straying from Leicester House itself. Deserted of
royalty, it passed into the hands of Mr., afterwards Sir Ashton Lever
(grand uncle of Charles Lever the novelist), who transferred to it
in 1771 the miscellaneous collection he had christened the
'Holophusikon'--a name which did not escape the gibes of the
professional jester. His _omnium gatherum_ of natural objects and savage
costumes was, nevertheless, a remarkable one, still more remarkable when
regarded as the work of a single man. It filled sixteen of the rooms at
Leicester House, besides overflowing on the staircases, and included,
not only all the curiosities Cook had brought home from his voyages,
but also a valuable assortment of bows and arrows of all countries
contributed by Mr. Richard Owen Cambridge of Twickenham. *
* See 'Cambridge the Everything,' in 'Eighteenth Century
Vignettes,' 3rd series, 1896, p. 1847 In an outhouse of the
'Holophusikon,' it may be added, were exhibited (stuffed)
Queen Charlotte's elephant and female zebra--two favourites
of royalty, which, during their lifetime, had enjoyed an
exceptional, if not always enviable, notoriety.
Its possessor had been persuaded that his treasures which, in their
first home at Alkrington near Manchester, had enjoyed great popularity,
would be equally successful in London. The result, however, did not
justify the expectation (an admittance of 5s. 3d.. per person must
have been practically prohibitive), and poor Sir Ashton was ultimately
'obligated,' as Tony Lumpkin would say, to apply to Parliament for power
to dispose of his show, as a whole, by lottery. He estimated his outlay
at £50,000. Of 30,000 tickets issued at a guinea each, only 8,000 were
taken up. The lottery was drawn in March, 1780, and the winner was a Mr.
Parkinson, who transferred his prize to the Rotunda at the Southern
or Surrey end of Blackfriars Bridge, changing its name to the Museum
Leverianum. But it was foredoomed to misfortune, and in 1800 was
dispersed under the hammer. A few years after it had crossed the river,
Leicester House in turn disappeared, being pulled down in 1790. *
* A house in Lisle Street, looking down Leicester Place,
still (1897) perpetuates the name, and bears on its façade
in addition the words, 'New Lisle Street, mdccxci.' It is
occupied by a foreign school or schools ('Ecoles de Notre
Dame de France').
In 1791 Lisle Street was continued across its garden; and a little later
still, Leicester Place traversed its site, running parallel to Leicester
Street, which had existed long previously, being described in 1720
'as ordinarily built and inhabited, except the west side, towards the
Fields, where there is a very good house.'
Leicester Place and Leicester Street,--like Leicester Fields
itself,--directly preserve the memory of what Pennant aptly calls the
'pouting-place of Princes.' But there are other traces of Leicester
House in the nomenclature of the neighbourhood which had grown up about
it. One of the family titles survives in 'Lisle Street'; another in
'Sidney Alley.' Bear Street again recalls the Leicester crest, a
bear and ragged staff, while Green Street (one side of which has been
recently rebuilt), according to Wheatley and Cunningham, derives its
name from the colour of the Leicester Mews, which stood to the south
of the Fields. The central inclosure seems to have been first
systematically laid out--though it had long been railed round--about
1737. Eleven years later arrived from Canons (Lord Burlington's seat at
Edgeware) that famous equestrian statue of George I., which Londoners so
well remember. At the time of its erection it was lavishly gilt, and
was one of the popular sights of the Town. By some it was attributed
to Buchard; by others to Van Nost of Piccadilly, then a fashionable
statuary (in lead) like Cheere of Hyde Park Corner. The horse was
modelled upon that by Hubert Le Sour which carries King Charles I. at
Charing Cross.
Considering its prolonged patronage by royalty, Leicester Fields does
not seem to have been particularly favoured by distinguished residents.
Charles Dibdin, the song-writer, once lived in Leicester Place, where in
1796 (on the east side) he built a little theatre, the Sans Souci; * and
Woollett, of whose velvety engravings Mr. Louis Fagan, not many years
ago, prepared an exhaustive catalogue, had also his habitat in Green
Street (No. 11), from the leads of which he was wont--so runs the
story--to discharge a small cannon when he had successfully put the last
touches to a 'Battle of La Hogue,' or a 'Death of General Wolfe.'
* Mr. Tom Taylor ('Leicester Square,' 1874, pp. 306 and 456)
says that Dibdin's Theatre stood nearly on the site of 'The
Feathers,' Hogarth's house of call in the Fields. But if
Leicester Place did not exist until 1796, and then occupied
ground occupied six years before by Leicester House, it is
difficult to connect Hogarth with any tavern in Leicester
Place, as Hogarth died in 1764.
Allan Ramsay (in his youth), Barry, and John Opie all once lodged in
Orange Court (now Street); and here--at No. 13--was born, of a shoemaker
sire and a mother who cried oysters, into a life of many changing
fortunes, that strange Thomas Holcroft of the 'Road to Ruin.' In St.
Martin's Street, next door to the Congregational Chapel on the east
side, lived Sir Isaac Newton from 1710 until January 1725, or two years
before his death at Kensington. Few traditions, however, connect the
abstracted philosopher (he was nearing seventy when he came to the
Fields) with the locality, beyond his visits to Princess Caroline at the
great house opposite. *
* A so-ealled Observatory on the roof, now non-existent, was
for many years exhibited at Newton's. Recent authorities,
however, contend that this was the fabrication of a later
tenant. But it should be noted that Madame D'Arblay, who
also lived in the house, and wrote novels in the room in
question, seems to have had no doubts of the kind. She says
('Memoirs of Dr. Burney,' 1832, i. 290-1) that her father
not only reverently repaired the Observatory when he entered
upon his tenancy of No. 35 [in 1774], but went to the
expense of practically reconstructing it when it was all but
destroyed by the hurricane of 1778.
But there was one member of his household, a few years later, who must
certainly have added to the attractions of the ordinary two-storeyed
building where he superintended the revision of the second and third
editions of the 'Prineipia.' This was his kinswoman,--the 'jolie
niece' of Voltaire,--the 'famous witty Miss Barton' of the 'Gentleman's
Magazine.' At this date she was 'Superintendant of his domestick
Affairs' to Charles, Earl of Halifax, who, dying in 1715, left her
£5,000 and a house, 'as a Token'--so runs the bequest--'of the sincere
Love, Affection, and Esteem I have long had for her Person, and as
a small Recompence for the Pleasure and Happiness I have had in her
Conversation.' This, taken in connection with the fact that, since 1706,
she had been in receipt of an annuity of £200 a year, purchased in
her uncle's name, but for which Halifax was trustee, has led to the
conclusion that the relation between the pair was something closer than
friendship, and that, following other contemporary precedents, they
were privately married. * Be this as it may, Catherine Barton is also
interesting as one of the group of gifted women to whom Swift extended
the privilege of that half-patronising, half-playful, and wholly
unconventional intimacy which is at once the attraction and the enigma
of his relations with the other sex.
* See 'Newton: his Friend: and his Niece,' 1885, by
Professor Augustus de Morgan, which labours, with much
digression, but with infinite ingenuity and erudition, to
establish this satisfactory solution of a problem in which
the good fame of Newton cannot be regarded as entirely
unconcerned.
He met her often in London, though not as often as he wished. 'I love
her better than any-one here,' he tells Stella in April, 1711, 'and see
her seldomer.' He dines with her 'alone at her lodgings'; he goes
with her to other houses; and, Tory though he has become, endures her
vivacious Whiggery.
When, at Halifax's death, Catherine Barton, in all probability, returned
to her uncle's house, Swift had already gone back to Ireland, and there
is no reason for supposing that, although he had lodgings 'in Leicester
Fields' in 1711, he ever visited his friend in St. Martin's Street.
In August, 1717, Mrs. Barton married John Conduitt, M.P., Xewton's
successor as Master of the Mint, and when in town continued to reside
with her husband under Newton's roof. And though Halifax was dead, and
Swift in exile, and Prior 'in the messenger's hand,' there can be little
doubt that during her brief widowhood (?) and second wifehood, those
friends who had clustered about the former toast of the Kit Cats must
still have continued to visit her. The chairs of Lady Worsley and Lady
Betty Germaine must often have waited in the narrow entrance to St.
Martin's Street, while the ladies 'disputed Whig and Tory' with Mrs.
Conduitt, or were interrupted in their _tête-à-tête_ by Gay and his
Duchess. After Sir Isaac--a long while after--the most notable tenant of
the old house was Dr. Charles Burney, author of the 'History of Music,'
and of Fanny Burney. Indeed, it was in this very building--with the
unassuming little chapel on its right where 'Rainy Day' Smith had often
heard Toplady preach--that a mere girl in her teens--no, ungallant
Mr. Croker discovered her to have been actually a young woman of
five-and-twenty--wrote that 'Evelina' which, in 1778, took the Town
by storm. There were panelled rooms and a painted ceiling in the
Newton-Burney house of yore, but it could scarcely be here that the
little person whom in her graver moments Mrs. Piozzi nicknamed the 'Lady
Louisa of Leicester Square' danced round an unmetaphoric mulberry tree
with delight at her success in letters, for there are no traces of a
garden. At present, in this quiet backwater of street traffic, where
Burke and Johnson and Franklin and Reynolds all came formerly to visit
their favourite authoress, nothing is discoverable but a dingy tenement
with dusty upper windows, with a ground floor that is used as a day
school, and a front of stucco'd red brick upon which the blue tablet of
the Society of Arts has something of the forlorn effect of an order of
merit upon a shoeblack.
Turning out of St. Martin's Street on the north another tablet
is discernible in the angle of the Fields to the right upon the
comparatively modern red brick _façade_ of another school, known as
Archbishop Tenison's. Here, at one of the many signs of the 'Golden
Head,' lived William Hogarth. * The golden head in his case was rudely
carved by himself out of pieces of cork glued together, and represented
Van Dyck. To this, says Nichols, succeeded a head in plaster; and
this again, when Nichols wrote in 1782, had been replaced by a bust of
Newton. About the interior of the house very little seems to be known,
but, as it was rated to the poor in 1756 at £60, it must have been
fairly roomy. In the later days, when it formed part of the Sablonière
Hotel, before the hotel made way for the existing school, there were
traditions of a studio, probably far less authentic than those of Sir
Isaac's ob* There was even another, in Hogarth's day, in the Fields
itself. 'At the Golden Head.' on the south side (Hogarth's was on the
east), lived Edward Fisher, the mezzotint engraver, to whom we owe so
many brilliant plates after Reynolds.
Not many years after Hogarth first took the house, the square
was laid out (it had long been railed in), and he is said to have been
often seen walking in the inclosure, wrapped in his red roquelaure, with
his hat cocked on one side like Frederick the Great. His stables, when
he set up the fine coach which Charles Catton decorated for him with the
famous Cyprian crest that figures at the bottom of 'The Bathos,' were
in Nag's Head Yard, Orange Street. He had--as we know--a country box at
Chiswick; but he was at home in Leicester Fields. His friends were about
him. Kind old Captain Coram had lodgings somewhere in the neighbourhood;
Pine, the 'Friar Pine' of 'Calais Gate,' lived in St. Martin's Lane;
beyond that, in Covent Garden and its vicinity, were George Lambert the
scene painter, Saunders Welch the magistrate, Richard Wilson, Fielding,
and a host of intimates. It was in Leicester Fields that Hogarth died.
He had been driven there from Chiswick on the 25th October, 1764,
cheerful, but very weak. 'Receiving an agreeable letter from the
_American Dr. Franklin_,' says Nichols, [he] 'drew up a rough draught of
an answer to it; but going to bed, he was seized with a vomiting, upon
which he rung his bell with such violence that he broke it, and expired
about two hours afterwards in the arms of Mrs. Mary Lewis, who was
called up on his being taken suddenly ill. He is buried in Chiswick
churchyard, where some years subsequently a monument was erected to his
memory, with a well-known epitaph by Garrick. After Hogarth's death his
widow continued to keep up the 'Golden Head,' and Mary Lewis sold his
prints there. Richard Livesay, the engraver, was one of Widow Hogarth's
lodgers, and the Scotch painter, Alexander Runciman, was another. If the
house had any further notable occupants, they may be forgotten.
Mrs. Hogarth herself died in 1789. Six years before her death she had a
next-door neighbour in the Fields, who, in his way, was as illustrious
as Hogarth or Reynolds. This was John Hunter, who, in 1783, became the
tenant of No. 28, * and at once began extending it backward towards
Castle Street (now the Charing Cross Road) to receive his famous museum
of Comparative and Pathological Anatomy.
* At present (1897) being rebuilt by the Alhambra Company as
part of their premises.
Hogarth had then been dead for nearly twenty years; and it is unlikely
that the painter knew much of the young surgeon who was subsequently to
become so celebrated; but he was probably acquainted with his brother,
William Hunter of Covent Garden, who attended Fielding in 1754. William
Hunter had just died when John Hunter came to Leicester Fields. He
lived there ten years in the height of his activity and fame, and it
was during this period that Reynolds painted that portrait of him in a
reverie (now in the Council Room of the College of Surgeons), which was
engraved by William Sharp. He survived Sir Joshua but one year.
The house of Reynolds was at the opposite side of the Square, at No.
47, now Puttick and Simpson's auction rooms. He occupied it from 1760
to 1792. We are accustomed to think of Hogarth and Reynolds as
contemporaries. But Reynolds was in the pride of his prime when he came
to Leicester Fields, while Hogarth was an old and broken man, whose
greatest work was done. Apart from this, there could never have
been much real sympathy between them. Hogarth, whose own efforts as a
portrait-painter were little appreciated in his life time, must have
chafed at the carriages which blocked up the doorway of his more
fortunate brother; while Reynolds, courtly and amiable as he was,
capable of indulgence even to such a caricaturist as Bunbury, could
find for his illustrious neighbour, when he came to deliver his
famous Fourteenth Discourse, no warmer praise than that of 'successful
attention to the ridicule of life.' These things, alas! are the
commonplaces of literature and art. It is pleasanter to think of No.
47 filled with those well-known figures of whom we read in Boswell and
Madame D'Arblay;--with Burke and Johnson and Goldsmith and Gibbon
and Garrick;--with graceful Angelica, and majestic Siddons, and
azure-stockinged Montagu;--with pretty Nelly O'Brien and charming Fanny
Abington;--with all the crowd of distinguished soldiers, sailors,
lawyers and literati who by turns filled the sitter's chair * in the
octagonal painting-room, or were ushered out and in by the silver-laced
footmen.
* This, with the carved easel given to him by Gray's friend
Mason, is preserved at the Royal Academy. His palette is
said to be in the possession of Messrs. Roberson and Co., of
99, Long Acre.
Then there were those wonderful disorderly dinners, where the guests
were so good and the feast so indifferent; where there were always wit
and learning, and seldom enough of knives and forks; where it was an
honour to have talked and listened, and no one remembered to have dined.
Last comes that pathetic picture of Sir Joshua, when his sight had
failed him, wandering sadly in the inclosure with his green shade over
his eyes, and peering wistfully and vainly for the lost canary which had
been wont to perch upon his finger.
When Reynolds died, Burke wrote his eulogy in the very house where
his body lay. The manuscript (which still exists) was blotted with its
writer's tears. Those royal periods in which the great orator spoke of
his lost friend are too familiar to quote. But after Sir Joshua, the
interest seems to fade out of the Fields, and one willingly draws one's
pen through the few remaining names that are written in its chronicles.