THE PRINCE AND THE LONDON OF 1728.
Prince Frederick, accompanied by Colonel Lorne and a single servant,
traversed Germany and Holland as a private gentleman, and embarked at
Helvetsluis for England in the first days of December, 1728.
Never has a tamer arrival of an Heir-apparent been chronicled in
history than this coming of the Prince to London. Here is the brief
notice of it in the _Daily Post_ of the 8th December, 1728:
“Yesterday His Royal Highness Prince Frederick came to Whitechapel
about seven in the evening, and proceeded thence privately in a hackney
coach to St. James’s. His Royal Highness alighted at the Friary, and
walked down to the Queen’s backstairs, and was there conducted to Her
Majesty’s apartment.”
There! no reception of any sort, no guards turning out, no escort, no
tap of drum! It was more like the coming of the Court hairdresser to
curl Her Majesty’s wig!
It is said, however, that his mother received him amiably,--after
fourteen years’ separation! His father, however, treated him with
great harshness. “George,” says Mr. Wilkins, “had an unnatural and
deep-rooted aversion to his eldest son, whom he regarded as necessarily
his enemy.”
Certainly the boy--for he was little more--had come home in a sort of
disgrace, he had been detected in scheming to run away with a young
lady, but he had been checkmated, and the matter was ended. Certainly
if there grew up in the after time a feeling of resentment against his
parents in the Prince’s heart, he had some reason for it. It is agreed
on all hands that he never had a chance, and that which might have
proved a loving nature--and it _was_ a loving nature as will be shown
later on--was warped by ill-treatment and neglect into callousness and
depravity.
To a Prince naturally of a nervous and shy disposition this reception
in a strange land must have been most painful, especially when one
remembers that most of the slights were received from those who ought
to have shown him the most affection and consideration.
Lord Hervey gives an insight into the kind of life he led when he first
arrived. He says:
“Whenever the Prince was in the room with him (_i.e._, the King) it
put one in mind of stories that one has heard of ghosts that appear to
part of the company but are invisible to the rest; and in this manner,
wherever the Prince stood, though the King passed him ever so often,
or ever so near, it always seemed as if the King thought the Prince
filled a void of space.”
According to Mr. Wilkins, “the Prince did not dine in public at St.
James’s the Sunday after his arrival, but the Queen _suffered him_
to hand her into her pew at the Chapel Royal, and this was his first
appearance at the English Court.”
One can imagine those naughty maids-of-honour in their boarded-up pew
in the gallery--perhaps poor Anne Vane there with them--saying anything
but their prayers at their enclosed condition, which prevented them
having a good look at the Prince. But if they did happen to catch a
glimpse of him this is what they saw according to a contemporary letter
of Lady Bristol, who describes him as “the most agreeable young man it
is possible to imagine, without being the least handsome, his person
little, but very well made and genteel, a loveliness in his eyes which
is indescribable, and the most obliging address that can be conceived.”
Her account of him, however, falls far short of that which is generally
accepted as being a description of his appearance in Smollett’s
“Peregrine Pickle,” which depicts him at a Court ball; but as this was
evidently some time after his arrival--as it is an event connected with
his intrigue with Miss Vane--it is quite likely that he may have had
time to add to his stature by natural growth. At a later period he was
distinctly and creditably described as being tall. This is Smollett’s
version:
“He was dressed in a coat of white cloth, faced with blue satin
embroidered with silver, of the same piece with his waistcoat; his
fine hair hung down his back in ringlets below his waist; his hat was
laced with silver and garnished with a white feather; but his person
beggared all description: he was tall and graceful, neither corpulent
nor meagre, his limbs finely proportioned, his countenance open and
majestic, his eyes full of sweetness and vivacity, his teeth regular,
and his pouting lips of the complexion of the damask rose. In short, he
was formed for love and inspired it wherever he appeared; nor was he a
niggard of his talents, but liberally returned it, at least what passed
for such; for he had a flow of gallantry for which many ladies of this
land can vouch from their own experience.”
It must be remembered in reading above description of him, that he
inherited his mother’s beautiful fair hair and complexion.
The Court poets were not behindhand with their fulsome verses
concerning him, of which this is a sample:
“Fresh as a rosebud newly blown and fair
As opening lilies: on whom every eye
With joy and admiration dwells. See, see,
He rides his docile barb with manly grace.
Is it Adonis for the chase arrayed?
Or Britain’s second hope?”
Britain’s first hope apparently was George II.
But probably as regards his appearance when he first came to England,
Lady Bristol was nearest the mark, though there is no doubt that
from this time forward he steadily improved both in stature and in
handsomeness of person. Another description of him which will appear in
due course will give an idea of the dignity and stateliness to which he
attained in his maturer years.
Prince Frederick came from the obscure old town of Hanover with its
narrow streets and tall gabled houses to what was then, as it is
now, one of the great capitals of the world, London. But yet a very
different London to that of our own time. A London of streets narrow
and paved with cobbles, unlit save for a few dim swinging oil lamps
held across the streets by ropes, leaving the intervening spaces in
darkness, so that in winter time a man with a link or torch was an
absolute necessity.
The busy London, the shopping London lay principally between Fleet
Street and the end of Cheapside. Ludgate Hill was an especially
favourite place for dress-buying ladies. As for what we call the “West
End” it did not exist, Westminster being a separate town, and between
it and London City large expanses of waste land.
Mr. Wilkins gives a good account of the Court and its environs. He says:
“The political and fashionable life of London collected round St.
James’s and the Mall. St. James’s Park was the fashionable promenade;
it was lined with avenues of trees, and ornamented with a long canal
and a duck pond. St. James’s Palace was much as it is now, and old
Marlborough House (the residence at that time of Sarah, Duchess of
Marlborough) occupied the site of the present one; but on the site of
Buckingham Palace stood Buckingham House, the seat of the powerful Duke
of Buckingham, a stately mansion which the Duke had built in a ‘little
wilderness full of blackbirds and nightingales.’ In St. James’s Street
were the most frequented and fashionable coffee and chocolate houses,
and also a few select ‘mug houses.’ Quaint signs, elaborately painted,
carved and gilded, overhung the streets and largely took the place of
numbers; houses were known as ‘The Blue Boar,’ ‘The Pig and Whistle,’
‘The Merry Maidens,’ ‘The Red Bodice,’ and so forth.”
Piccadilly was practically a country road with a few mansions here and
there. It ended in Hyde Park, then a wild heath.
Marylebone on the west, and Stepney on the east, were distinct villages
some distance away; while as for the south, London appears to have
ended at London Bridge, although the “Old Tabard” Inn in the Borough
must certainly have existed at that time.
Bloomsbury, Soho and Seven Dials were fashionable suburbs, occupying,
perhaps, much the same position as Kensington did fifty years ago.
Grosvenor Square had been begun some twelve years, and was probably
fairly covered by houses.
The most popular and agreeable mode of communication between London and
the Court was by the Thames, and a stately barge with liveried rowers
was as much a part of a nobleman’s equipment as his carriage or his
“chair.” Very pretty must have been the appearance of the Thames at
that time, although there was no Thames Embankment to view it from.
The streets at night were manifestly unsafe, being infested by a
description of drunken young blackguards known as “Mohocks,” who
apparently “squared” the equally drunken watchmen, and insulted women
with impunity.
The public conveyance seems to have been of much the same description
as that which one recollects in one’s youth in the shape of the
ancient growler, musty and full of damp straw to keep the feet warm,
but represented then by a rumbling old disused coach, very mouldy,
with straw as above, and in which it must have been a great treat to
traverse the irregular cobbles of the metropolitan streets. But with
all its drawbacks London of 1728 rose immeasurably superior to London
of the twentieth century in one respect, and one respect only. It had
no fogs.
The streets apparently rang with more or less agreeable cries
of itinerant traders, among which the still familiar cry of the
milkman--or perhaps milk-girl--and the tinkle of the muffin bell must
even then have been well established. There were, however, other
street cries which are unknown to us in the present day, those of
the professional rat-catcher and the street gambler, which latter
apparently stood in the gutter and rattled a dice-box as an invitation
to passers by to come and have a throw, an invitation which, in all
probability, ended in disaster to the unwary who accepted it.
Drunkenness, too, was very rife among all classes, the following
inscription on a public-house being a fair sample of the tastes of the
people:
“Drunk for one penny.
Dead drunk for two pence.
Clean straw for nothing.”[16]
As regards the time for meals in fashionable circles in those days,
there was really little difference between those times and our own
except that the meals were called by different names.
Dinner was taken in the middle of the day or a little later, which
would very well correspond to our luncheon. As for the afternoon, why
ladies of quality did very much the same then as they do now; they
were trotted about in their sedan-chairs or coaches from one friend’s
house to another drinking “dishes” of tea at each and destroying their
nervous systems just as they do in 1911. Supper was the most pleasant
meal of the day, and might well be set down to correspond with the very
late dinner hour of the fashionable world at the present time.
So the world--the _beau monde_ at any rate--has gone on for nearly two
hundred years with but very little variation in its feeding time at any
rate.
Very much the same might be said of the life in St. James’s Street as
it is lived at the present time. There was no electric light, but the
scene must have been very much more brilliant especially at night. The
men-about-town of those days dressed in silks, satins, and velvets of
varied colours, heavily laced with gold. Their sword hilts were either
of gold or silver and very often jewelled. They carried in their hands
long canes frequently jewelled too, and to add to the stateliness of
their appearance they either wore white wigs or had their own hair
powdered. The coffee and chocolate houses of St. James’s Street of
those days, when full of their patrons, must have presented scenes
worth looking upon. White’s Chocolate House was the principal, and the
Cocoa Tree its rival, both represented at the present time by clubs
of almost identical names. Of clubs, as we understand them, there
were none in the year 1728, if we except such as the “October Club”
and the “Hell Fire Club,” the former composed of old Jacobite squires
who probably met at an inn, and the latter the drunken desecrators of
Medmenhain Abbey on the Thames, neither of which societies had a club
house as we understand it.
As for the ladies, they outrivalled the sterner sex, as they should
do, in the splendour of their attire. They wore powder, patches and
hoops--the latter a revival apparently of Elizabeth’s day--which grew
in size with the progression of the Georges, until fashion took a
sudden revulsion in the days of the last, and left them off altogether,
which was considered at the time highly indelicate.
In the earlier period referred to ladies did not scruple to walk abroad
with their dresses even more than _decolletée_, a custom which possibly
was not long persevered in on account of the climate. Ladies of the
present day will rejoice to hear that enormous muffs were carried.
To sum up this topic so interesting to the softer sex, ladies at that
time wore just as many furs and feathers, silks and satins, jewels and
fine laces, as they do at the present day, and the craving after them,
the debts incurred in their procuring, wrought them, possibly, quite
as much harm, and were the cause, no doubt, of just as many broken
marriage vows.
The world is very much the same at all times, except that now and then
we take on a little extra enamel, which we call civilization, to hide
our natural barbarism for a time, as the Greeks and the Romans and the
Egyptians before them did--these latter even to having their hollow
teeth gold-crowned as we do--until some upheaval from within, or a
crushing blow from without, breaks the thin crust, and leaves us just
the natural savages we were at first.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] From the “Old Whig” newspaper 26 Feb., 1736. This inscription was
afterwards introduced by Hogarth in his caricature of Gin Lane. Wilkins.