which stands Belvedere Tavern, formerly Busby's Folly, and, going up
Penton Street a little way, we come to what was once the site of White
Conduit House, the present White Conduit House, tavern covering a
portion of the old gardens. It took its name from a conduit, built in
the reign of Henry VI., and repaired by Sutton, the founder of the
Charter House. The house was at first small, having only four windows
in front; but in the middle of the last century the then owner could
advertise that 'for the better accommodation of gentlemen and ladies he
had completed a long walk, with a handsome circular fish-pond, a number
of shady, pleasant arbours, enclosed with a fence seven feet high to
prevent being incommoded by people in the fields; hot loaves and butter
every day, milk directly from the cows, coffee, tea, and all manners of
liquors in the greatest perfection; also a handsome long-room, from
whence is the most copious prospects and airy situation of any now in
vogue.' A long poem in praise of the house appeared in the _Gentleman's
Magazine_ in 1760. It was written by William Woty, a Grub Street poet.
A frequent visitor to White Conduit House was Goldsmith, who used to
repair thither with some of his friends, after he had discovered the
place, as he relates in Letter 122 of the 'Citizen of the World.' The
passage, I must confess, does little honour to his genius or his taste,
and I wonder he did not have it expunged from his collected writings.
As is customary with such places of amusement, in course of time the
company did not improve, though in 1826 it was attempted to revive the
reputation of the place, partly by calling it a Minor Vauxhall; but
nightly disturbances and the encouragement of immorality thereby, caused
it to be suppressed by magisterial authority on the proprietor's
application for the renewal of his license. About 1827 the grounds were
let for archery practice, and in 1828 the old house was pulled down and
a new one erected in its place, which was opened in 1829. The new
building was somewhat in the gin-palace style: stucco front, pilasters,
cornices and plate glass. It contained large refreshment rooms, and a
long and lofty ballroom above, where the dancing, if not very refined,
was vigorous. Gentlemen went through country dances with their hats on
and their coats off. Eventually the master of the ceremonies objected
to the hats, and they were left off, as the coats continued to be. In
1849 this elegant place of amusement was demolished and streets built on
its grounds, as also the present White Conduit Tavern.
A former proprietor of White Conduit House, Christopher Bartholomew,
died in positive poverty in Angel Court, Windmill Street, 'at his
lodgings, two pair of stairs room,' as the _Gentleman's Magazine_,
March, 1809, says. He once owned the freehold of White Conduit House
and of the neighbouring Angel inn, and was worth L50,000; but he was
seized with the lottery mania, and paid as much as L1,000 a day for
insurances. By degrees he sank into poverty, but a friend having
supplied him with the means of obtaining a thirty-second share, that
number turned up a prize of L20,000. He purchased an annuity of L60 per
annum, but foolishly disposed of it and lost it all. A few days before
he died he begged a few shillings to buy him necessaries. But does his
fate, and that of many others equally deluded, act as a warning to
anyone? We fear not.
White Conduit House was sold in 1864, by order of the proprietor, in
consequence of ill-health. The lease had then about eighty years to
run, at the rent of L80 per annum. The property fetched L8,990. What
price would it fetch now? Public-houses have gone up tremendously since
then.
Close to White Conduit House was another famous house of entertainment,
that is to say, Copenhagen House, which was opened by a Dane when the
King of Denmark paid a visit to James I., but the house did not attract
much attention till after the Restoration, when the once public-house
became a tea-garden, with the customary amusements, fives-playing being
a favourite. Hazlitt, who was enthusiastic about the game, immortalized
one Cavanagh, an Irish player, who distinguished himself at Copenhagen
House by playing matches for wagers and dinners. The wall against which
they played was that which supported the kitchen chimney, and when the
ball resounded louder than usual the cooks exclaimed, 'Those are the
Irishman's balls!' 'And the joints trembled on their spits,' says
Hazlitt. The next landlord encouraged dog-fighting and bull-baiting, in
consequence of which he lost his license in 1816. The fields around
Copenhagen House, now all built over, were the scene of many riotous
assemblies at the time of the French Revolution, Thelwall, Horne Tooke,
and other sympathizers with France being the chief instigators and
leaders of those meetings.
Going considerably northward, we reach Highbury Barn, which, with lands
belonging thereto, was leased in 1482 by the Prior of the monastery of
St. John of Jerusalem to John Mantell, described as citizen and butcher
of London. The property thus leased comprised the Grange place, with
Highbury Barn, a garden, and 'castell Hilles,' two little closures
containing five acres, and a field called Snoresfeld, otherwise
Bushfield. Highbury Barn was at first a small ale and cake house, and as
such is mentioned early in the eighteenth century. Gradually it grew
into a tavern and tea-garden. A Mr. Willoughby, who died in 1785,
increased the business, and his successor added a bowling-green, a
trap-ball ground, and more gardens. The barn could accommodate 2,000
persons at once, and 800 people have been seen dining together, with
seventy geese roasting for them at one fire. Early in this century a
dancing and a dining room were added. Near this house there was, in
1868, found in a field a vase containing nearly 1,000 silver coins,
consisting of silver pennies, groats and half-groats, two gold coins of
Edward III., and an amber rosary. The manor of Highbury having, as we
have seen, belonged to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the coins
may have been buried by them at the time of the insurrection of Wat
Tyler, whose followers destroyed the monastery and also made an attack
on the Prior's house at Highbury. The coins are now in the British
Museum.
But we find we have got to the end of the space allotted to us, and
though we have only, as it were, dipped into the bulk of our subject, we
must defer for some other opportunity the description of the large
number of old tea-gardens still to be noticed. We will here only
indicate the most important of them: Camberwell Grove, Cuper's Gardens,
Chalk Farm, Canonbury House, Cumberland Gardens, Cupid Gardens, Sluice
House, Eel-pie House, St. Helen's, Hornsey Wood, Hoxton, Kilburn Wells,
Mermaid, Marylebone, Montpellier, Ranelagh, Paris Gardens, Shepherd and
Shepherdess, Union Gardens, Yorkshire Stingo, Jew's Harp, Adam and Eve,
Tottenham Court Road; Adam and Eve, St. Pancras; the Brill, Mulberry
Gardens, Springfield, and others of less note.
*XIII.*
*WILLIAM PATERSON AND THE BANK OF ENGLAND.*
Some London streets have strange and unsuitable names; thus you will
find an alley of wretched hovels, with muddy yards, containing nothing
but cabbage-stumps and broken dustbins, called Prospect Place; whilst a
lane adjoining the shambles styles itself Paradise Row. And what a
curious name for a street is that of Threadneedle[#] Street! How came
the street to be so named? However, such is its name, and in this case
it is not inappropriate. For lives there not in that street the Old
Lady who is, year in, year out, everlastingly threading her diamond
needle with gold and silver threads, and working the gorgeous embroidery
of the financial flags of her own and of almost every other country in
the world? Her dwelling is palatial; to be merely admitted into her
parlour is in itself a positive proof of your respectability, for you
gain no entrance thereto unless you are a stockholder; as to her
drawing-room, the glories of Versailles and the Escurial are as
miserable shanties, for _her_ drawing-room contains, leaving alone other
treasures, engravings worth from five pounds each to fifty
thousand--nay, a hundred thousand pounds each. There is no five o'clock
tea there, but plenty of music all day long; its notes, indeed, are
silent, but the gold and silver instruments, whose fascinating and
entrancing sounds have more magic in them than has the finest orchestra,
vocal or instrumental, are audible enough. And as to her cellars, the
treasures the Old Lady keeps there would buy up half a dozen such caves
as that into which Aladdin descended.
[#] Stow calls it Three Needle Street, as Hatton supposes, from such a
sign. It has also been written Thrid Needle and Thred Needle Street,
but our ancestors were not so particular as to spelling as we are.
The reader has by this time discovered who the Old Lady of Threadneedle
Street is--namely, the Bank of England--the most gigantic monetary
establishment in the world, the financial reservoir, the opening or
shutting of whose sluices causes not only the commercial ebb and flow of
east and west, of north and south, but sets in motion or prevents the
'pomp and circumstance of glorious war.'
The history of this mighty establishment has often been told, but it
seems to us that but scant justice has as yet been done to its founder,
William Paterson. The injustice done to him, in fact, dates from an
early day, for soon after the foundation of the Bank, of which he
naturally was one of the directors, intrigue drove him from that
position, and envy and obloquy pursued him ever after. But let us
briefly recount his early history.
Born on a farm in Dumfriesshire in 1658 of a family notable in old
Scottish history, he was, at the age of sixteen, transferred to the care
of a kinswoman at Bristol, on whose death he inherited some property.
Bristol was then a great commercial emporium, doing with much legitimate
business a little in the slave trade, and his connection with that town
was afterwards injurious to him, for whilst his friends said that he
visited the New World as a missionary, his enemies asserted that he was
mixed up with slave-dealing, and occasionally indulged in piracy. But
the fact of his marrying the widow of a Puritan minister at Boston is
more in accordance with the statements of his friends than with those of
his enemies. Anderson, the historian of commerce, who as a lad must
have known him in his old age, speaks of him as 'a merchant who had been
much in foreign countries, and had entered far into speculations
relating to commerce and the colonies.'
He was in England in 1681, and, among the various schemes he started, he
took a leading part in the project for bringing water into the north of
London from the Hampstead and Highgate hills. He made a heavy
investment in the City of London Orphans' Fund; in the improved
management and distribution of that charity he took a profound interest,
a fact which leaves no doubt of his philanthropic and public spirit. It
was in 1684 that he first conceived the idea of the Darien scheme, and
though this turned out so unfortunate, he from first to last acted with
rare disinterestedness; his errors were those such as a well-balanced
and generous mind might fall into without reproach. Nor is the failure
of that enterprise to be attributed to him, but to the conduct of
William III., who had sanctioned, but afterwards, at the instigation of
the East India Companies of England and Holland, discouraged and
positively thwarted, it. How deeply he felt the disastrous results of
the expedition is shown by the fact that for a time his mind was
deranged in consequence of it. And who will now deny that Paterson was
right in calling the Isthmus of Panama the 'door of the seas and the key
of the universe'? In 1825 Humboldt recommended the scheme of a canal
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the enterprise of Lesseps will yet
be carried to a successful issue.
However, we have to deal with Paterson chiefly as the founder of the
Bank of England, and with the long and fierce battle he had to fight to
accomplish his object, for there was great opposition to it from
interest and prejudice. Paterson had been long in Holland, and when he
propounded his scheme of a Bank of England, the people objected to it as
coming from Holland; 'they had too many Dutch things already,' just as
now there is a prejudice against things 'made in Germany.' Moreover,
they doubted the stability of the Government of William III. At last,
however, they consented to the Bank, on the express condition that
L1,200,000 should be subscribed and lent to the Government. The money
was subscribed in ten days. The Bank Act was obtained in spite of all
opposition, which perhaps would have prevailed had not Queen Mary,
acting on the instruction of William (then in Flanders), during a six
hours' sitting, carried the point, and the company received their royal
charter of incorporation in July, 1694. Almost as soon as it had been
established the Bank was called upon to assist the Government in the
re-coinage of the silver money. The notes of the new Bank were destined
to fill up the vacuum occasioned by the calling in of the old coin, but
as the notes were payable on demand, they were returned faster than coin
could be obtained from the Mint; a crisis ensued, during which the notes
of the Bank fell to a discount of 20 per cent. But the Bank passed
safely through its difficulties, as also through the troubles caused by
the South Sea Bubble. The opposition in the first crisis was due
chiefly to the goldsmiths, who detested the new corporation because it
interfered with their system of private banking, hitherto monopolized by
them. Paterson's advice was of the greatest assistance in his capacity
of director, yet such was the animus against him that, as we mentioned
above, in 1695 he sold out the stock he held (L2,000), which from the
first was a director's qualification, and retired from his office. But
he did not withdraw from public life. The Darien Expedition already
referred to was organized by him in 1698, and its disastrous results
were, as we have shown, in nowise attributable to him, and this was, in
fact, eventually admitted by the nation, Parliament in 1715 passing an
Act awarding him an indemnity of upwards of L18,000 for his losses in
that enterprise. In other ways Paterson continued to interest himself in
matters affecting the public welfare; he rendered his Sovereign signal
services by the wise and shrewd advice he gave him during the latter
part of his troubled reign; he published many tracts on the management
of the National Debt and the system of auditing public accounts; he was
a zealous advocate of Free Trade, and his views on the subject of
taxation were far ahead of the ideas of his day. His undoubtedly great
talents, his thorough honesty and genuine patriotism, fully entitle him
to the praise given him by his friend Daniel Defoe, as 'a worthy and
noble patriot, one of the most eminent, to whom we owe more than ever he
would tell us, or, I am afraid, we shall ever be sensible of, whatever
fools, madmen, or Jacobites may asperse him with.'
We cannot attempt to give a history of the Bank of England in our
limited space, but a short account of the Bank building may not unfitly
close this notice of the founder of the establishment. The business was
originally started at Mercers' Hall, and next removed to, and for many
years carried on at, Grocers' Hall in the Poultry. In August, 1732, the
governors and directors laid the first stone of their new building in
Threadneedle Street, on the site of the house and garden formerly
belonging to Sir John Houblon, the first Governor of the Bank. At first
the buildings comprised only the centre of the principal or south front,
the Hall, Bullion Court, and the Courtyard, and were surrounded by St.
Christopher-le-Stocks Church, three taverns, and several private houses.
From the year 1766 onwards considerable additions were made to the
building. All the adjoining houses on the east side to Bartholomew
Lane, and those occupying the west side of that lane almost to Lothbury,
were taken down, and their places occupied by offices of the Bank. The
south side buildings, forming the eastern continuation of the
establishment, presented a range of fluted columns in pairs, with arched
intervals between, pointing out where windows should have been placed,
which, however, were filled up with stone. This necessitated the rooms
within being lighted by small glass domes in the roof, a circumstance
much complained of at the time by the clerks as injuriously affecting
their eyes. It was intended to extend the facade on the western side by
taking down the Church of St. Christopher, which by the removal of that
part of Threadneedle Street had been deprived of a great part of its
parish. Noorthouck, who wrote in 1773, says: 'How far so extensive a
plan may answer the vast expense it will call for to complete it is a
question proper for the consideration of those who are immediately
concerned; an indifferent spectator cannot view this expanded fabric
without comparing it with the growth of public debts negotiated here,
and trembling more for the safety of the one than of the other.' Could
he see the Bank now, covering nearly four acres of ground, what would he
say?
One Ralph, architect, whose 'Critical Review of the Buildings, Statues,
and Ornaments in and about London' was published in 1783, says: 'The
building erected for the Bank is liable to the very same objection, in
point of place, with the Royal Exchange, and even in a greater, too. It
is monstrously crowded on the eye, and unless the opposite houses could
be pulled down, and a view obtained into Cornhill, we might as well be
entertained with a prospect of the model through a microscope. As to
the structure itself, it is grand ... only the architect seems to be
rather too fond of decoration; this appears pretty eminently by the
weight of his cornices ... rather too heavy for the building.' The
objectionable buildings here referred to were the triangular block of
houses which formerly stood in front of the old Royal Exchange, but was
removed on the building of the new.
At the beginning of this century the Bank on the south side was of the
same extent as now; on the east side also it extended to Lothbury, on
the west it reached to about half the length of the present Princes
Street, which, however, then did not proceed in a straight line, as it
does now, but took a sharp turn to north-east, coming into Lothbury at a
point nearly opposite St. Margaret's Church, and thus cutting off a
corner of the Bank site, which would otherwise have been nearly square.
But when, early in this century, Princes Street was extended in a
straight line to Lothbury, the condensed portion of the street, together
with a block of houses on the west side of it, were added to the Bank
site, and the Bank assumed its present shape. But great architectural
improvements had in the meantime been introduced. The original or
central portion, eighty feet in length, which was of the Ionic order
raised on a rusticated basement, was altered to what it now is; the
attic seen on it was added in 1850. This original portion was from the
design of George Sampson. The east and west wings were added by Sir
Robert Taylor, after whom Sir John Soane was appointed the Bank
architect, and he rebuilt many of those parts constructed by Sampson and
Taylor; and on Sir John's death in 1837 Mr. Cockerell succeeded him in
the position. He again greatly modified many features of the building.
The eighty feet of the original south side now extend to 365 feet; the
length of the west side is 440 feet, of the north side 410 feet, and of
the east side 245 feet. Both internally and externally classical models
have been followed. The hall known as the Three Per Cent. Consol (three
per cent., alas! gone) Office, ninety feet long by fifty wide, is
designed from models of the Roman baths, as are the Dividend and Bank
Stock Offices. The chief cashier's office is forty-five feet by thirty,
and designed after the Temple of the Sun and Moon at Rome. The Court
Room of the composite order, about sixty feet long and thirty-one wide,
is lighted by large Venetian windows on the south, overlooking what once
was the churchyard of St. Christopher's Church, and into which in 1852 a
fountain was placed, which throws a single jet, thirty feet high,
amongst the branches of two of the finest lime-trees in London. The
north side of the Court Room is remarkable for three exquisite
chimney-pieces of statuary marble. The original Rotunda was roofed in
with timber, but in 1794 it was found advisable to take it down, and the
present Rotunda was built, which measures fifty-seven feet in diameter,
and about the same in height; it is of incombustible material, as are
all the offices erected by Sir John Soane. There are a number of courts
within the outer walls of the buildings; they are all of great
architectural beauty; the one entered from Lothbury is truly
magnificent. It has screens of fluted Corinthian columns, supporting a
lofty entablature, surmounted by vases. This part of the edifice was
copied from the beautiful temple of the Sybils, near Tivoli. A noble
arch, an imitation of the arch of Constantine at Rome, gives access to
the Bullion Court, in which is another row of Corinthian columns,
supporting an entablature, decorated with statues representing the four
quarters of the globe. The north-west corner of the Bank is modelled on
the temple of Vesta at Rome. We have yet to mention the Old Lady's
Drawing-Room, or the pay-office, where bank-notes are issued, or
exchanged for cash. It is a fine hall, seventy-nine feet long by forty
wide, and we have left the mention of it to the last because it suggests
to us some particular reflections. We have seen that Paterson was the
real founder of the Bank of England, and we may take this opportunity of
adding that Charles Montague and Michael Godfrey are entitled to share
in Paterson's glory for the assistance they lent him in this
undertaking; but the Bank ignores its founder, and had not even a
portrait of him till Mr. James Hogg, the founder of _London Society_,
presented them with one. In the Pay Hall stands the statue of William
III., and in the Latin inscription underneath he is called 'founder of
the Bank.' It is the old story: when a prize is taken at sea the
biggest share of it, the lion's share, goes to the 'Flag'; the real
fighters must put up with the leavings.
Let us end with another philosophical reflection. _Facts are more
astounding than fiction_, as we will show by two facts. Gaboriau's
novel 'La Degringolade' (The Downfall), in one of its earliest chapters
describes the opening of a grave in the Parisian cemetery of Montmartre,
to discover whether it contains the body of a certain person or not.
The coffin is found to be empty. This is a fiction, but are we not
likely to see its realization shortly? Paul Feval's romance 'Les
Mysteres de Londres' gives a long account of the fictitious attempt of
some villains to get at the treasures in the cellars of the Bank of
England by digging a tunnel under Threadneedle Street; they are, of
course, foiled in the end. But now, according to accounts published at
the end of the month of November, 1898, in the _Daily Mail_, the tunnel
is actually dug by a railway company, and so close to the walls of the
Bank as to actually compel its governors and directors to call in the
assistance of Sir John Wolfe Barry to advise means to avert the danger
which threatens the building, already affected by the excavations.
Truly _fact is stranger than fiction_.
*XIV.*
*THE OLD DOCTORS.*