SWEET HAMPSTEAD.
‘A village revelling in varieties.’
LEIGH HUNT.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: _A Bit of Old Hampstead, New End._]
SWEET HAMPSTEAD
AND ITS ASSOCIATIONS.
BY
MRS. CAROLINE A. WHITE.
‘When shall we see you at sweet Hampstead again?’
CONSTABLE.
LONDON:
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1900.
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
TO THE
CONSERVATORS OF THE HEATH,
AND TO
ALL WHO LOVE ‘SWEET HAMPSTEAD’
FOR ITS OWN SAKE.
THE AUTHOR.
PREFACE.
As illustrating the very common axiom that extremes meet, a preface at
the beginning of a book is, as a matter of course, the last thing that is
written. In the present instance, having stated my reasons for writing
‘Sweet Hampstead’ in the introductory chapter, a preface seems almost
redundant. Moreover, I have an idea that prefaces as a rule are not
popular reading, but literary custom being stronger than private opinion,
I must revoke my heresy.
It is very many years since the thought of writing the story of Hampstead
occurred to me. I found that previous writers had left the most important
period of its local history, and the most interesting personages who had
vitalized it, with little more than a passing reference; and thence it
was that the desire to occupy unbroken ground took possession of me.
But the years alluded to were amongst the busiest of a busy life, when
I was ‘coining my brains for drachmas,’ or their equivalent in British
currency, and had no time for the dreamland of topographical speculation.
The engagements, however, that hindered my design opened up many sources
of material for future use; and as topography is always a literary
mosaic, their diversity tended to enrichment.
Thus it came to pass that the first draft of my book was laid aside,
but never forgotten, for more than thirty years, and has only recently
been reverted to—a task that has been a delight, bringing back—though
sometimes through a mist of tears—images of the past, with pleasant
memories of sunny days that, looked at from the perspective of
eighty-nine years, seem brighter even than sunshine is itself.
From such a pile of years I almost lose the author’s dread of the critic.
Praise or blame are to me now much the same; but, being a woman, I still
prefer the praise.
I cannot close these preliminary words without expressing my obligations
to Mr. P. Forbes for the eight sketches he has permitted to be copied for
the beautifying of the book; to Messrs. Oetzmann for some illustrations
so kindly lent; to Mr. Baines, not only for a similar favour, but for
help from his valuable ‘Records of Hampstead’; and to the proprietors of
the _Municipal Journal_ for the charming picture of the viaduct.
My thanks are also due to Mrs. Rosa Perrins, to Miss Kemp, Miss Quaritch,
and Mr. M. H. Wilkin, who have all kindly assisted me. I also desire to
acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. Lloyd, of Highgate, for information
gathered from his clever lecture on ‘Caen Wood and its Associations.’
To the courtesy and kindness of Mr. G. W. Potter I owe much original
material, and many interesting notes; and I also desire to thank Mr. C.
A. Ward for the personal interest he has taken in my work, and the great
help he has ungrudgingly given me in preparing and correcting it for the
press. I can only add that should my book be found so readable as to
convey to others some share of the pleasure I have felt in writing it, or
lead in more capable hands to future research and a fuller development of
a delightfully interesting topic, ‘Sweet Hampstead’ will have fulfilled
its intention, and I can sing with an unknown poet of the sixteenth
century:
‘Now cease, my lute: this is the laste
Labour that thou and I shall waste,
And ended is that we begun;
Now is this song both sung and past:
My lute, be still, for I am done.’
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 1
I. HAMPSTEAD AND THE HEATH 20
II. THE WAYS TO HAMPSTEAD 41
III. THE DESCENT OF THE MANOR 60
IV. CHURCH ROW AND ST. JOHN’S CHURCH 65
V. FROGNAL AND WEST END 85
VI. WEST END TO CHILD’S HILL AND THE WEST HEATH 107
VII. HEATH STREET TO THE UPPER FLASK AND SPANIARDS 119
VIII. HOLLY-BUSH AND WINDMILL HILLS 143
IX. NORTH END 160
X. FINCHLEY ROAD, CHILD’S HILL, AND NEW END 183
XI. THE VALE OF HEALTH 194
XII. CAEN WOOD 215
XIII. THE GEOLOGY OF THE HEATH 236
XIV. THE PONDS AND WATER-WORKS 241
XV. THE WELL WALK—THE EARLY PERIOD 249
XVI. THE WELL WALK—THE SECOND PERIOD 268
XVII. THE MODERN WELL WALK 292
XVIII. HAMPSTEAD LATER ON 304
XIX. A RETROSPECT 319
XX. THE SUB-MANOR OF BELSIZE 329
XXI. THE HAMLET OF KILBURN 344
APPENDIX:
HEATH HOUSE 354
WENTWORTH PLACE, JOHN STREET 357
VANE HOUSE 359
POND STREET 361
A FRAGMENT OF THE FLORA OF HAMPSTEAD 362
BENEFACTORS OF HAMPSTEAD AND THE CHARITIES 368
THE FATE OF A REFORMER 374
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE HEATH 377
INDEX 384
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
A BIT OF OLD HAMPSTEAD, NEW END _Frontispiece_
SOUTH END ROAD, 1840 3
TUMULUS 5
VIEW OF HIGHGATE AND PONDS 7
VIADUCT 9
JOHN EVELYN 24
HAMPSTEAD FROM PRIMROSE HILL 44
SIR RICHARD STEELE 46
ROSSLYN HOUSE 51
FIELDS NEAR POND STREET, 1840 54
SHEPHERD’S WELL 55
VANE HOUSE, 1800 57
CHURCH ROW, HAMPSTEAD 66
BACK VIEW OF HOUSES, CHURCH ROW 68
MRS. BARBAULD 73
AUSTIN DOBSON 77
PARISH CHURCH, HAMPSTEAD 82
FENTON HOUSE 92
PRIORY LODGE 96
VALE OF HEALTH, LOWER HEATH, 1840 110
LEG OF MUTTON POND 114
WEST END HOUSE 117
SWIFT 121
JACK STRAW’S CASTLE 126
FLAGSTAFF 127
THE SPANIARDS’ GARDEN 128
ERSKINE HOUSE 130
LORD ERSKINE 133
NORTH HEATH 135
FANNY BURNEY 138
BOLTON HOUSE 144
HOLLY-BUSH HILL, 1840 149
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS 151
JOANNA BAILLIE 157
GOLDSMITH 161
NORTH END FROM THE HEATH 163
FENTON HOUSE, 1780 165
FIRS 169
OLD COTTAGES, NORTH END 173
BULL AND BUSH, HAMPSTEAD 174
COTTAGES, NORTH END 179
MADAME PIOZZI 185
HARROW AND WELSH HARP, FROM HAMPSTEAD HEATH 189
SQUIRE’S MOUNT, ABOUT 1840 192
SHELLEY 201
W. HAZLITT 202
HIGHGATE PONDS AND SHEEP 204
COLERIDGE 205
CHARLES LAMB 209
LEIGH HUNT 211
THE VALE OF HEALTH 213
LORD W. MANSFIELD 224
THE SPANIARDS 226
CAEN WOOD HOUSE 229
HOGARTH 230
CHARLES MATHEWS’ HOUSE, HIGHGATE 246
OLD COTTAGES, NORTH END 276
WELL WALK 294
ASSEMBLY AND PUMP ROOMS, WELL WALK 301
DR. JOHNSON 305
JAMES BOSWELL 308
KEATS 317
OLD CHALK FARM 322
JUDGE’S WALK 325
PEPYS 330
BELSIZE LANE, 1850 342
THE GEORGE INN BEFORE 1870 346
‘SWEET HAMPSTEAD’ AND ITS ASSOCIATIONS.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
‘But if the busy town
Attract thee still to toil for power or gold,
Sweetly thou mayst thy vacant hours possess
In Hampstead, courted by the western wind.’
DR. ARMSTRONG.
To the inhabitants of London and its suburbs a history of Hampstead
and the Heath may seem wholly unnecessary. What London lad who has not
fished in and skated on its ponds, played truant in its subrural fields
and lanes, gone bird-nesting in its woods, or spent delightful, orthodox
half-holidays upon the heath?
As for the free brotherhood of the lanes and alleys before the plague of
Board schools afflicted them, or the Board of Works stood sponsor for the
preservation of the Heath, what hand’s breadth (of its mile-wide waste)
of its hundreds of acres was there that they did not know and continue
to renew acquaintance with on every recurrence of the high festivals of
Easter and Whitsuntide?
But it is not of ‘’Appy ’Amstead’ that I am about to write, but of that
older Hampstead the materials for the history of which lie scattered
through many books not often read, and in the correspondence of dead men
and women.
Lysons and Park are not for general readers, and such works as William
Howitt’s ‘Northern Heights’ and Baines’s ‘Records of Hampstead’ are not
companionable volumes. Yet I know of no intermediate work between them
and mere guide-books.
Hence it occurred to me that I might fill a vacant place in the
literature of ‘Sweet Hampstead,’ and give to others, without the toil,
the pleasure I have had in recalling forgotten incidents connected with
it, and memories of some of the celebrated men and women who, from the
days of Queen Anne till our own, have added to the intrinsic delights of
the place the charm of their association with it.
When the idea of undertaking ‘this labour of love’ occurred to me, the
window near which I loved to write commanded a last fragmentary view
of Gospel Oak Fields, which divided Hampstead from the parish of St.
Pancras. These fields were even then (early in the sixties) in the
hands of speculative builders, but a few green hedges, a group of elms,
a pollard oak or two—scions, perhaps, of the traditionary one that
for centuries had given its name to these now obliterated _prata et
pasturas_—remained.
Ten years previously the hollow trunk of a very aged tree (fenced round)
was still standing, and was locally said to be the remains of the
original Gospel Oak, one of the many so called, in various counties of
England, from the use made of them by the Preaching Friars, who under
their shade were wont to read and explain the Scriptures to the people.
It was at that time, and for years afterwards, used as a boundary
tree, when once in three years the clergyman, parochial authorities,
and charity children perambulated the boundaries of the parish of St.
Pancras, of which it was the terminus in this direction.
Where Fleet Road is now, the shallow remnant of the once ‘silvery Fleet,’
as Crosby calls it in his ‘Additional Notes,’ written only a very few
years before the period I am writing of, ‘meandered, irrigating those
charming meadows which reach on either side of Kentish Town.’
[Illustration: _South End Road, 1840._]
In my time it crept, a sluggish stream, a mere ditch in dry weather, but
after copious rain it rose suddenly, brimming to its margin, to disappear
at the end of Angler’s Lane by a subterranean channel under part of
Kentish Town, where it once more came to light as a narrow runlet in the
main road that was easily stepped over. There were persons then living
who remembered this portion of the river, a limpid stream flowing by the
west side of Kentish Town towards King’s Cross, for it is not much more
than half a century since it was arched over and built upon.
The fields through which it passed showed signs of its meanderings,
and were still lovely with trees that had figured in many an artist’s
sketch-book, and had thence imparted the refreshment of their pictured
beauty to many a home.
The footpath through these meadows from Kentish Town followed the curve
of an old rivulet scarcely dry in places, the whole course of which was
traceable in the wavering line of aged willows, hollow and splintered,
but putting forth hoar green branches above the exhausted stream that had
once fed their roots.
This was Mary Shelley’s lovely walk from Kentish Town through the fields,
with their fine old elms and rivulets and alder-trees, and a view to the
north of the wooded heights of Highgate. In her time Carlton Road and the
region thereabouts were all meadows.
This path led over the easiest of stiles through a little lane between
hedges of hawthorn and elder by an old nursery garden and cottage where
strawberries and cream were to be had in the season, and a cup of tea at
all times, and so to South End or such portion of it as was not already
changed to railway uses. The houses here were of a humbler description
than those in the Flask Walk, but there were sufficient indications in
little garden-borders, in roses trained about the doors, in vines wholly
untrained, running to an excess of leafiness over walls and roofs, in a
group of straw bee-hives, sheltered in a corner, to show how pretty and
rustic the place had once been. There was the down-trodden, worn-out
Green, with its white palings and rickety turnstile, in itself a protest
to the farther use of it, and lime-trees, out of all proportion to the
small houses you saw between them, large-limbed and flourishing.
An ascending row of houses to the right, on what is now South Hill Park,
occupied the levelled slopes the summits of which when I first knew
the lovely neighbourhood afforded charming views, and not the least
charming that of the eastern outskirts of Hampstead, sweeping up amidst a
profusion of foliage towards the high ground about Squire’s Mount, with a
foreground of water and groups of trees studding the undulating surface,
the fields on the east bounded by the remarkable mound which now bears
the name of Parliament Hill, but was then known by the more striking one
of Traitors’ Hill.
Ainsworth has made it memorable as the scene whence some of the
conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot watched for the explosion of the
Houses of Parliament at the hands of Guy Faux. Park, who refers to
Stukeley’s ‘Itinerary’ on various occasions, takes no notice of this
eminence.
Mr. Lloyd, in his published ‘Lecture on Caen Wood,’ tells us that when
Mr. Bills purchased the estate of Sir James Harrington, amongst the
properties belonging to it was a windmill, ‘which occupied the fine site
of the summit of Parliament Hill, where the trench formed by the removal
of its foundations is still to be traced. It was, doubtless, the Manor
mill.’
[Illustration: _Tumulus._]
At one time it was presumed that, like the mound in the field to the
right of the path to Highgate, which Lord Mansfield caused to be enclosed
and planted with Scotch firs, it was a tumulus. In support of this idea
there is a tradition of Saxon times still extant of this neighbourhood.
Was it not about the skirts of Highgate that Alfred encamped with his
troops to protect the citizens of London, whilst they gathered in the
harvest from the surrounding fields, from Hastings of the Ivory Horn,
who lay with his Danish army beside the Lea, ready to pillage them of
their summer fruits? And might not some great battle have been fought,
and have resulted in the raising of this mound? Alas for romance! When a
few summers ago a child at play in its neighbourhood unearthed the hidden
treasure of some threatened home, buried for safety’s sake in troublous
times, or the booty of some thief, whose after-career interfered with
his return for it, a search into the interior of the mound, under
the direction of the County Council, dispelled the theories of the
antiquaries and the dreams of romancists.[1]
But whatever its origin, the mound adds materially to the visual
enjoyment of the visitor; and the sight of London from its height,
especially at the early dawn of a clear summer’s day, is said to be worth
a midnight pilgrimage to obtain. The air blows over its summit ‘most
sweetly,’ especially in June, blending the scent of the lime blossoms
from the sister villages with the aroma of the hayfields and hedgerows,
where the honeysuckle and wild-rose bloom unmolested.
Facing round, we have Highgate Hill in view, with white modern houses
showing here and there, and others roof-high in the foliage of
surrounding trees. Of the ancient hamlet we see only a ridge of red-tiled
roofs showing in the neighbourhood of the church.
To the north, where the grounds of Caen Wood come sweeping down to the
brimming ponds, on which the swans ‘float double, swan and shadow,’ the
landscape widens into one of rare beauty. Park-like beyond the park, in
its alternations of lawny slope and little dells and groups of trees, it
looks like a portion of the demesne, and not the least picturesque and
lovely part of it.[2]
[Illustration: _View of Highgate and Ponds._]
To the west (a proper pendant to the view of Highgate) our vision closes
with the spire of St. John’s Church, and the town of Hampstead stretching
down a peninsula of houses in a sea of verdure, terminating in the
fast-narrowing strip of green fields between Kentish Town and the St.
John’s Wood estate on this side of Hampstead Road.
I specially remember a bit of landscape in which the red viaduct[3]
in Sir Maryon Wilson’s demesne shows to much advantage on the grassy
foreground between the wooded undulations of the park. It is still
pretty, but ‘with a difference.’ Then a footway crossing the Heath
led through an old gray, weather-beaten gate to a shady path, with a
plantation of young trees on one side, and a hedgerow, redolent in summer
of wild-rose and May, dividing it from a meadow on the other. The remains
of a long-disused tile-kiln stood on the edge of the field, the red earth
of which showed its fitness for such manufacture. This path led through
upland fields to Highgate, and was a charming one, beloved by painter and
poet. The last time I saw it the beauty was devastated, and the meadow
changed into a brickfield, with a view to its conversion into a site for
building on.
But I am forgetting, in my remembrances of the charming suburb, that from
the earliest birth of a taste for natural beauty, Hampstead must have had
a special interest for the inhabitants of London.
Beautiful as were the whole range of gently-swelling hills forming the
background of the City, and long subsequent to Tudor times covered with
dense woods, which encroached on the north and east even to its gates,
and came down on the west as far as Tyburn, Hampstead Hill from its
altitude, and the fact, as someone has written, that it ‘closed the gates
of view in that direction,’ must have had an interest beyond the others.
Baines claims for Hampstead that it was a village before 1086; in other
words, that the five manses, or homes of the villani and bordarii on the
original clearing, which are mentioned as existing when Domesday Book was
compiled, constituted a village. In 1410, at the time of the assignment
of Hampstead, together with Hendon, to Henry Lord Scrope of Marsham for
the maintenance of his servants and horses, he being then attending
Parliament on the King’s service, it is included with Hendon, and styled
a town (‘the towns of Hampstead and Hendon’).
[Illustration: _Viaduct._]
But in the reign of Henry VIII. it is again called a village, by which
designation it continued to be called even in our own times, long after
it had outgrown the dimensions of one, just as a beloved child when grown
up retains the pet name given to it in infancy; and truly Hampstead
continues to be the best-beloved of all the City suburbs.
A stone in the north aisle of the old church, dated 1658, recorded that
John Baxter, Gent., had made it incumbent on the owners of a house
‘in Hamstede Streete, where Mr. Netmaker dwelleth’ (no other street
apparently existed to make a prefix necessary), to pay the sum of £3
yearly to the poor of the parish. Someone of importance, no doubt,
occupied the moated mansion and demesne of Caen Wood, and there are
records of other great men and rich City merchants resident in the upland
hamlet. A peep at the parish register,[4] the earliest date in which is
1560, affords us a clue to the growth of the population.
Subsequent to the above date, 1580-89, the baptisms averaged 13³⁄₁₀,
the burials 6⅒. At the close of 1680-89 the baptisms amounted to 33⅗,
the burials to 65⁹⁄₁₀, an excess accounted for by the visitation of the
Plague (1664-65).
Towards the close of the eighteenth century (1790-99) the baptisms
averaged 99⅗, the burials 141⅗,[5] a slow but steady growth, marvellously
increased in modern times.
After the Great Plague, change of air in the summer season became an
article of faith with the inhabitants of London, and an annual sojourn
of some weeks in the country or at the seaside an established custom
with all who could afford it, a custom which resulted on the part of
the wealthy merchants and citizens in the hire or purchase of a country
retreat in one or other of the suburbs.
Hampstead, towards the end of the Commonwealth, combined the advantages
of ‘Air and Hill, and Well and School,’ and these favourable
circumstances, added to its easy distance from London, recommended it to
the City fathers and mothers, and made it, of all the rural villages in
the neighbourhood of town, the most popular.
Though its high-pitched situation precluded at that period, and for a
long time after, such an increase of buildings as lower situations were
afflicted with, its position, fine air, and beautiful prospects made it
much sought, and in the times of the Stuarts many notable persons in
connection with the Court had houses here. Sir Henry Vane built his fine
mansion on what was then called Hampstead Hill, and J. Bills, Esq., son
of the printer to His Majesty, resided at Caen Wood; while my Lord Wotton
had his country-house at Belsize. After the Restoration we find Sir
Geoffrey Palmer, Attorney-General, residing at Hampstead, where he died,
May 1, 1670, and though Pepys does not mention it, Sir George Downing,
Secretary to the Treasury, who so often appears in the ‘Diary,’ and whom
Pepys stigmatizes as a ‘sider with all times and changes,’ resided here,
and had his house broken into and robbed (1685). From the _St. James’s
Gazette_, published by authority, I find that, amongst other articles of
which the thieves deprived Sir George, were the following items: ‘A large
agate about the bigness of a crown piece, with Cupid and Venus and Vulcan
engraved on it. A blue sapphire seal, set in gold, enamelled, with an
old man and woman’s head engraved on it. A pomander,[6] set in gold. A
locket, with fourteen diamonds and a crystal in the middle, engraved with
two Cupids holding a heart over a cypher.’ This catalogue appeals to the
sympathies of every lover of delightful bric-à-brac, but one fears the
advertisement of them failed to recover the charming items, some of which
may even yet find their way to one of the table-cases in South Kensington.
Every year appears to have added to the favour of Hampstead as a summer
resort, a fact that was not lost upon the inhabitants, who were not slow
to realize the benefit of these annual incursions.
Copyholds were readily procurable, and Hampstead was soon dotted about
in various directions with weather-boarded or brick dwellings, so that
by the end of the seventeenth century twelve houses had risen upon the
demesne, two upon the freeholds, and 257 upon the copyholds, besides
cottages, barns, brewhouses, etc., together with a dancing-room, shops,
and other tenements in connection with the Wells.[7]
In the first year of the present century we find that Hampstead possessed
691 houses, which in 1811 had increased to 842, with 5,483 inhabitants,
and there were seventeen houses building, and forty-five unlet.
In 1815, when Britton revisited it, he tells us that Hampstead, from a
beautiful rural village, had become a town, with hundreds of mean houses
(intended for lodging-houses) disposed in narrow courts, squares, and
alleys, many of them uninhabited.
Yet the rate of building mentioned was insignificant compared with its
after-progress. In 1861 the inhabited houses had increased to 4,340, with
385 uninhabited dwellings, and 169 more in course of building, while the
population of the whole parish amounted to a total of 32,271 persons,
a very remarkable feature in the succeeding census of Hampstead, 1871,
being the preponderance of female inhabitants, who exceeded by 711 the
entire population of the previous census in 1861.
If anything can invest these dry details with interest, it is the
contrast they present between the Hampstead of the past and present.
At the census of 1891 the inhabited houses numbered 9,528, with 687
uninhabited, 461 in course of erection, whilst the population in the four
wards comprised in the parish of St. John amounted to 68,425 persons. The
population of Hampstead at the present time (1898) is said to be about
78,000. In thirty years houses and inhabitants had doubled their numbers.
The man who published a book in 1766, called ‘London Improved,’ which
proposed to make the New Road, now Euston Road, the boundary of building
in that direction, ‘otherwise the Hills of Hampstead and Highgate may be
expected to become a considerable part of the suburbs of London,’ wrote
prophetically, for London stretches out its infolding tentacles on all
sides, and is only nominally divided from them. This New Road, as it
continued to be quite recently called, though made under the Act of the
twenty-ninth of George II. (1746) under the control of the Hampstead and
Highgate trust, intersected level fields from Tottenham Court Road to
Battle Bridge.
It takes us a little aside from the story of Hampstead, but is a pleasant
prelude to it, and one can hardly refrain from giving a glance at the
London approach to the beautiful village as it existed at the time of,
and for a considerable period after the opening of the New Road.
Midway on the south side of the road stood the Bowling Green House,
famous for nearly a century previously as a place of rural resort, and
lower down the Brill Tavern, rather more ancient than its rival.
The Old Mother Red Cap public-house (and a nickname for a shrew of the
first quality, whom a recent writer claims as a sutler and camp-follower
of Marlborough’s,[8] but who appears to have kept this house as long ago
as 1676, and to have been widely known by the unpleasant sobriquet of
Mother Damnable, under which name some doggerel verses addressed to her
are preserved in _Caulfield’s Eccentric Magazine_)—the Old Mother Red
Cap, and old St. Pancras Church, were the only interruptions in the view
of Hampstead from Bedford House, Queen Square, and the Foundling, except
some groups of trees near St. Pancras, and in a lane leading from Gray’s
Inn Road to the Bowling-Green House.
Gay and Pope both refer to the Tottenham Fields, and William Blake,
painter and poet, sings of
‘The fields from Islington to Marybone,
To Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood.’
Where Harrington and Ampthill Squares now stand ‘stretched fields of cows
by Welling’s Farm,’[9] the reputed proprietor of 999 ‘milky mothers of
the herd,’ which could never be increased to 1,000, a singular tradition
common to the fields by Clerkenwell, and to the once green pastures
between the Old Kent Road and Peckham. A lady well acquainted with
Hampstead tells me that the same legend existed with regard to a local
cow-keeper, a Mr. Rhodes,[10] in the early years of the present century.
A venerable friend of the writer’s in the fifties, an old inhabitant of
the neighbourhood, remembered that where Francis Street now is there
were fields called Francis’s Fields running up to the Tottenham Court
Road, which few persons cared to pass through after dark. Some houses
then below what is now Shoolbred’s had little gardens with green palings
before them, which she specially remembered from the figures of the
traditional blind beggar and his daughter, who so marvellously escaped
the Great Plague of London, ornamenting one of them. Harrison Ainsworth
has preserved the story in one of his graphically-written novels. A
gentleman tells me that an old lady born in 1800, and only lately
deceased, remembered as a child waiting in the evening at the corner
of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street till a party of six or more
persons collected, when, in fear of footpads, they were convoyed across
the fields to Kentish Town by a watchman.
Camden Town, which had been begun to be built in 1791, consisted for the
most part of one-storied brick or weather-boarded houses, the outlines
of some of which could be traced in my own time, though heightened and
otherwise altered. Other houses, with gardens and orchards lying wide
apart, led up to the half-way house we have just mentioned—the Old Mother
Red Cap—where, at the point where the roads to Hampstead and Highgate
diverge, stood, as it still stands, Brown’s Dairy. A thatched cottage in
those days, with deep eaves, and little leaded, diamond-paned casements
sparkling under them. Over the half-hatch door of this rustic dairy-house
ladies and children from the neighbourhood of the old-fashioned squares
(who took their morning walk through a turnstile at the top of Judd
Street, leading by hawthorn-shaded hedgerows to the open fields), were
wont to refresh themselves with a cup of new milk, or equally innocent
sweet curds and whey.
At the top of Tottenham Court Road, in the fields on the left-hand
side, were the remains of a mansion, the removal of which my old friend
Valentine Bartholomew, the artist, remembered. It gave its name to the
road, and is said to have been a palace of Henry VIII.’s; it was taken
down towards the end of the last century (1791).
On the same side of the way stood a well-known tavern and tea-gardens,
called the Adam and Eve,[11] the bowery arbours, lawns, smooth
bowling-green and garden-alleys of which have been ill-exchanged for the
gin palace opposite its site.
This house is mentioned in the curious trial of Andrew Robinson Bowes,
Esq., and others, in the King’s Bench, May 30, 1787, for conspiracy
against his wife, Lady Strathmore—a postboy, one of the witnesses of the
lady’s forcible abduction, having orders to hire a chaise with excellent
horses, and wait at the Adam and Eve, described as on the road to Barnet.
‘Lady Strathmore, while shopping in Oxford Street, was made prisoner, and
the peace officer who presented the warrant, a creature of her husband’s,
under colour of taking her before Lord Mansfield, had her carriage driven
up the Tottenham Court Road, Mr. Bowes himself on the box, where,
meeting the postboy, he bade him follow in the chaise.’
Twenty-seven years afterwards Leigh Hunt tells us Mr. Bowes was still in
Horsemonger Lane Gaol, expiating, on the debtors’ side of the prison, his
misconduct to his wife, and the non-payment of the fine to which he had
been condemned.
Ponds and pools of water were in those days common in the public ways,
and one in the near neighbourhood of this house became, on an afternoon
of September, 1785, the scene of the following brutal outrage:
A youth was suspected of picking a gentleman’s pocket close to the Adam
and Eve, whereupon some of the by-standers took him to an adjoining pond
and ducked him very severely. A sailor, not satisfied with the discipline
of the crowd, threw him again into the water, and kept him under till he
was drowned.
A little further on to the right of the road there stood in my time a
high mound, covered with grass, beneath which was a reservoir which
supplied the neighbourhood with water; it was removed, if my memory is
correct, about 1846-47, when its site was occupied by one of the earliest
experimental baths and wash-houses, which have since given place to some
sunless houses, under the shadow of the Congregational Church, in what is
known as Tolmer Square.
From this mound the road to Hampstead, a comparatively short period
before the above date, was fringed with pastures to the right, and with
gardens, fields, hedgerows, and orchards on the left, with only two or
three cottages and a roadside alehouse between the Adam and Eve and the
High Street, Camden Town.
Roads, in the present meaning of the word, there had been none subsequent
to Roman times, till the Hanoverian succession. Even when the use of
carriages made them necessary, they resembled those deep country lanes,
not yet unknown in Devonshire and Essex, where in winter the mud imbeds
the wheels of carts or waggons, or were mere pack-horse paths, with a
raised causeway running through the midst, and a deep fosse of mud on
either side. Such a road was that which, in Elizabeth’s time, ran up from
Battle Bridge between the hedgerow banks of Maiden Lane to Green Street
and Highgate, whence a path led by Caen Wood to what was then called
Wildwood Corner, across Hampstead Heath to Pond Street, tree-shaded, with
its wild banks full of primroses and violets in spring, and redolent of
May a little later, but rendered all but impassable in winter from the
rains and overflow of the many rivulets which drained the uplands into
Pancras Vale.
I have before me a view of the ‘Hampstead Road, near Tomkins’ House,’
engraved by Charles White, probably a grandson of Robert White, a
celebrated engraver, who died in 1704. A post-chaise, drawn by two
horses, is depicted labouring up what appears to be a mere rugged track
over rough heath-ground. The dome of St. Paul’s (finished in 1710) and
the City spires and houses appear in the distance but the view exhibits
a primitive and solitary country, only broken by clumps of trees, furze
coverts, and hedgerows, and except a single cottage and the gable of a
house (probably Tomkins’) no other habitation is to be seen.
As late as May, 1736, it is reported in the _London Post_ ‘that Col. de
Veil had committed one of the coachmen who was driving the Hampstead
coach to Newgate, for getting out of the track he was in and assaulting
the Hon. the Lady Cook Winford by driving his coach upon her, whereby he
threw her and her horse into a deep ditch, and she was greatly hurt and
bruised.’
The Hampstead Road was not made till 1772, when George III. was King,
though the summit of the hill had been previously cut down. When Ogilby,
in the time of Charles II. wrote his Guide, St. Giles’ Pound lay in
the open country, and the way to Holborn, like Gray’s Inn Lane, was
a pleasant rustic road. Tottenham Court Road lay between fields and
market-gardens, sprinkled with houses of entertainment, some of which
lingered long after the making of the present road. Gay tells us that
in summer ‘the Tottenham fields with roving beauty swarms,’ and thirty
years later some doggerel verses in Poor Robin’s Almanack inform us under
the head of the month of May:
‘The ladies now, to take the air,
To Stepney or Hyde Park repair;
While many others do resort
For cakes and ale to Tottenham Court.’
In Pennant’s time, Oxford Street, then Oxford Road, had only a few
houses on the north side of it. He remembered it ‘a deep hollow road,
full of sloughs, with here and there a ragged house, the lurking-place
of cut-throats’—a state of things the contrast to which was set forth in
some crude lines of a song that a venerable relative, who died at the age
of ninety-six, has often repeated to me, but of which I only remember—
‘That was the time for games and gambols,
When Oxford Street was covered with brambles,
Ponds, and sloughs, and running water,
Where now there’s nothing but bricks and mortar.’
This semi-rural state of things appears to have lasted west of Holborn
for the first quarter of the present century. When Bedford House was
built (1706), the north side of Queen’s Square was purposely left open
that the inhabitants might enjoy the charming prospect before it,
terminating in the Hampstead and Highgate Hills.
When Portland Place was planned, more than half a century later, the
then Lord Foley insisted on a clause in a lease he held of the Duke of
Portland to prevent the building of any street to intercept the pure air
of Hampstead and Highgate from Foley House, a fact to which the width of
Portland Place is attributable.[12]
Gray, writing from Southampton Row as late as the summer of 1759, tells
his friend Palgrave that ‘his new territories command Bedford Garden, and
all the fields as far as Hampstead and Highgate.’[13]
In contrast with the poet’s triumph in the beauty of his views, we find
Sir Samuel Romilly, many years later, complaining, in a letter to his
sister written from his chambers in Gray’s Inn, ‘that, having but one
row of houses between him and Hampstead, a north-west wind, sharp as the
piercing _bise_, blows full against his windows.’[14]
Long after this date, Rosslyn House and Park could be seen from
Clerkenwell Green, and later still the green heights of Caen Wood were
visible from Bedford Row.
One of the advantages that Ned Ward’s public-house in Red Bull Yard
possessed was ‘commodious rooms, with Hampstead air supplied’; and
I think it is Lysons who quotes the advertisement of a house of
entertainment near Bagnigge Wells, the proprietor of which sets forth as
an inducement for the favour of the public that his windows command fine
views of Hampstead and Highgate Hills.
These details help us to realize the relation of Hampstead to London when
its wooded crest could be seen from such distant points, and it had come
to be regarded as the air-filterer and health invigorator of the whole
district. Even as late as 1820, from the west of Oxford Street to the
skirts of Hampstead Heath, there were green fields and pastures all the
way.
CHAPTER I.
_HAMPSTEAD AND THE HEATH._
Hampstead, situated in the Hundred of Oussulston and County of Middlesex,
is separated from London by St. Pancras and Marylebone, and otherwise
bounded by Finchley, Hendon, Willesden, and Paddington.
In the account of the several districts into which the Registrar-General
has divided London, Hampstead claims the greatest elevation, standing 400
feet above Trinity high-water mark, a circumstance that, in connection
with its gravelly soil, accounts for its dry, salutary air. It contains
in its parochial area 2,169 acres.[15]
The early history of Hampstead lies very far back, though for all
purposes of respectable antiquity—whether persons or places are
concerned—an appearance in Domesday Book is sufficient. Hamestead, in
its old, pleasant Saxon name, tells of a yet higher antiquity, and long
before the astute Norman (in the language of the Saxon Chronicle) ‘sent
forth his men to inquire how many hundred hides of land were in each
shire, so that there was not a hide of land in England of which he knew
not the possessor, and how much it was worth.’
Long before the existence of this pleasant schedule enabled the Conqueror
to parcel out the fairest portions of the land to his favourite
retainers, the five hides of land and five manses, or homes, of which
this manor consisted, were said to have been given by King Ethelred,
the gift being afterwards confirmed by Edward the Confessor, to the
Abbey Church of St. Peter at Westminster.[16] These grants are said
to be spurious—forged, in fact, by the monks, the mark of a pendent
seal attached to one, and the wax adhering to the other, proving too
much, such seals not being used in England till after the Conquest. But
William, desirous of standing well with the Church, continued the grant
of Hamsted to the Abbot of Westminster. At the making of Domesday Book,
not another roof had risen on the manor. There were still five manses,
the homes of villeynes and bordarii, the first small farmers having
certain degrees of personal freedom, but dependent for their ground on
several corporal and servile services rendered to the lord; the others,
mere labourers, who paid rent in eggs, poultry, etc.
‘“The Abbot holds four hides (arable) land to three ploughs. To the
demesne appertain three hides and a half, and there is one plough.
The villeynes have one plough, and could employ another. There is one
villeyne who has one virgate, and five bordars who have one virgate;
and one bondman or slave. The woodlands afford pannage (beech-mast and
acorns) for a hundred swine.
‘“The whole is valued at fifty shillings, of which Ranulph Peverel, who
held one hide of the land under the Abbot, paid five shillings.”
‘There is nothing more undecided than the presumed value of the hide.
Some writers say it represented as much land as employed a plough during
the year. Another, that it meant as much land as would maintain a family.
Spelman imagined it 100 acres. At one place in Domesday Book 20 acres are
called half a hide.
‘“In Maldon in Essex there were five free men holding 10 acres of ground;
of these Ranulph Peverel holds 5 acres, and Hugh de Montfort 5 acres; it
was in the time of King Edward the Confessor worth tenpence, it is now
[at Domesday] worth twelvepence.”’[17]
This Ranulph Peverel, a Norman high in the King’s favour, who held, as
Camden tells us, estates in several counties of England, had married the
discarded concubine of the Conqueror, the daughter of a Saxon noble,
and one of the most lovely women of her time, and had given his own
name to the King’s son by her—William Peverel,[18] subsequently Lord of
Nottingham, and founder of the famous castle in the Peak—and if it had
not been shown that such small portions of land were frequently held by
noblemen in those times in different counties, probably as a nucleus
to be added to as opportunities arose, one would have been inclined to
doubt the identity of the owner of one hide of land at Hamstede with the
Peverel whose descendants became so important in the history of England.
The original grant (or presumed grant) of Ethelred gives a certain spot
of land, in the place called Hamstede, of five _cassati_—this word, we
read, means hide—in perpetual inheritance, etc.
Very primitive must have been the Hamestead of those days, a group of
clay-built or wattled huts, set down in a sheltered clearing, somewhere
in the vicinity of the future Chapel of St. Mary, the site of the present
parish church, in the district known as Frognal.
The uncleared ground above this settlement rose irregularly to the Heath,
with great woods stretching dense and gloomy west, north, south, and
east of it, and in places impinging on the sandy skirts of the Heath,
originally the upheaved crust of an old sea-bottom, 100 feet deep, but
then a waste of wild vert, on a surface of clay, sand, and gravel. These
woods, or, rather, the great Forest of Middlesex, extended for centuries
later on the east to Enfield Chace, and went crowding on in serried
masses westward to the Chiltern Hills. All the surroundings were heavy
with timbered shade, and hazardous from the wild beasts lurking there:
wolves, boars, stags, and wild-bulls of the indigenous breed only just
become extinct in the Craven district—a whole forest region, in fact,
instinct with game.
Fitzstephen, the monk whose charming description of the country on the
north-west of London reads like a prose idyll, tells us that in these
woods were many yew-trees, and Camden, that the forest ‘was full of that
weed of England, the oak,’ whilst the mast, or fruit of the beech, as we
have seen, made part of the value of the manor in Domesday Book. Evelyn
and W. J. Hooker assure us that in these woods grew the hornbeam, elm,
and other indigenous sylva.
During the Saxon Heptarchy, the Roman Verulamium had become St. Albans,
the shrine of the British protomartyr, and a place of great sanctity,
to and from whence pilgrims were constantly moving. I know nothing of
Roman roads, and am therefore quite neutral as regards opinion, but am
aware that modern antiquaries have wholly overturned the belief of their
fathers, and, while quoting Camden as a reliable and careful authority on
other matters, ignore the old antiquary’s belief in the long-descended
tradition that the Wanderers’ Way, or Watling Street, which passed from
Kent to Cardiganshire, cutting through the great forest of Middlesex, in
a straight line from station to station, passed by Hampstead Heath. ‘Not
by the present road through Highgate, which was made by license of the
Bishop of London 300 years ago, but that ancient one, as we gather from
the charters of Edward the Confessor, which passed near Edgware.’
[Illustration: _John Evelyn._]
Old Norden states that on the northern edge of Middlesex the Roman road,
commonly called the Watling Way, enters this county, leading straight
from old Verulamium to London over Hamestead Heath; from whence one has
a curious prospect of a most beautiful city and most pleasant country.
Camden, again, tells us that ‘at the very distance that Antoninus in his
Itinerary placeth Pulloniacæ, to wit, 12 miles from London, and 9 miles
from Verulam, there remaineth some marks of an ancient station, and there
is much rubbish digged up upon a hill which is now called Brockley Hill.’
No doubt Norden, with the fond zeal of a believing antiquary, had traced
the road many a time to Edgworth (Edgware) and so on to Hendon, through
an old lane called Hendon Wante.[19] So completely had this tradition
entered into the faith of people generally that we find it embalmed in
Drayton’s ‘Polyolbion,’ where, to paraphrase his figurative description
of Highgate and Hampstead Hills, he emphatically adds of the latter:
‘Which claims the worthiest place his own,
Since that old Watling once o’er him to pass was known.’
Defoe, too, in his ‘Tour of Great Britain,’ tells us that he ‘went
to Hampstead, from whence he made an excursion to Edgware, a little
market-town on the way to St. Alban’s, for it is _certain_ that this
was formerly the main-road from London to St. Alban’s, being the famous
highroad called Watling Streete, which reached from London to Wales.’
No traces of such a road have been found on Hampstead Heath, though
Roman relics and proofs of Roman burial have been discovered there, and
accepted by our oldest antiquaries as strengthening their theory of the
Watling Way having skirted or crossed it. That there was a road from
St. Albans to the Heath is curiously confirmed by an old French folio,
published in Paris (time of Elizabeth), which explains the reasons why
the Romans built a city on the site of the present London,[20] and states
that ‘subsequent to the recall of the legions in consequence of its rapid
growth and absorption of the population and commerce of the other great
cities, it so raised the envy and indignation of their inhabitants, that
the people of St. Albans threatened to come and destroy the rising city
of London, until the Londoners advanced as far as Hampstead Heath, where
they entrenched themselves, and prepared to do battle in defence of
their homes.’ A writer in the _New Monthly Magazine_, commenting on this
extract, says that the remains of the entrenchments are still pointed
out.[21]
Dr. Hughson, writing of the Reed-mote, or six-acre field, formerly to
the north-west of White Conduit House, and which was supposed to have
been the site of a Roman camp, observes ‘that a Roman road[22] passed
this way, we have great reason to believe, for from Old Ford we pass
_Mere_ (vulgarly called Mare Street), Kingsland, Islington, Highbury, the
Hollow-way, Roman Lane, over Hampstead Heath through Hendon to Verulam.’
With the vanishing of the pilgrims’ route over Hampstead Heath, we lose
the reason for the name of the hamlet suggested by Lysons, who supposed
the wearied pilgrims on reaching the heath to exclaim at the sight of
the city at their feet, ‘Hame-sted!’ the place of their home and the end
of their journey. Park believes the homely name was given to it by the
Saxon churls[23] who inhabited it previous to the date of the Domesday
Survey.[24]
In the time of Abbot Leofstan, when Albanus[25] had become a very popular
saint, ‘especially with merchants and traders going beyond sea, who
sought his protection, and made rich offerings at his shrine,’ the state
of the great forest, its ways infested not only with beasts of prey, but
by ‘outlaws, fugitives, and other abandoned beings,’ with the probable
effect of diminishing the revenues of his Church, set the Abbot seriously
to the task of removing these obstructions. He had the woods in part cut
down, rebuilt bridges, repaired rough places, and finally entered into
a contract with a certain knight to defend the highway with two trusty
followers, and be answerable to the Church for anything that might happen
through his neglect.[26]
In the eighth of Henry III., the great Forest of Middlesex was ordered
to be disforested, giving the citizens of London, as Stowe tells us,
‘an opportunity of buying land, and building, whereby the suburbs were
greatly extended.’
But the disforesting appears to have been partial, and the building
limited to the east. Hampstead retained its woods in all their savage
wildness; the paths through them, to the terror of passengers, continued
to be scoured by wild beasts, especially wolves, which had not all been
extirpated when the ‘Boke of St. Alban’s’ was written.[27]
During Henry III.’s reign (1256) we find Richard de Crokesley, Abbot
of Westminster, ‘“assigning the whole produce of Hamestede and Stoke
for the celebration of his anniversary in that monastery by ringing of
bells, giving doles during a whole week, to the amount of 4,000 denarii.
A thousand to as many paupers on the first day, and the same dole to 500
others on the six days following. A feast with wine, a dish of meat and a
double pittance to the monks in the refectory. A Mass by the Convent in
copes, on the anniversary day; and four Masses daily at four different
altars for the repose of his [the Abbot’s] soul for ever!” With many
other daily forms and ceremonies. But the keeping of this commemoration
was found to be so heavy a burden that the monks petitioned the Pope in
less than ten years after the Abbot’s death to dispense with it, and he
very sensibly sent his mandate to Westminster, dated 5 Kal. June, 1267,
declaring that he found these things to abound more in pomp than the good
of souls, and “that it was evident they accorded not with religion, nor
were suitable to religious persons,” and recommending the monks to limit
the mode of commemoration to their ideas of the dead Abbot’s deserts, and
the advantages that had accrued to the monastery by his administration.
Upon which the said manors and revenues became at the free disposal of
the Abbot and Convent of Westminster, towards the welfare of the abbey;
an annual portion of 10 marks being assigned for making such celebration
as that sum would admit of for the said Richard de Crokesley.’[28]
At the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII., by way of a sop to
the Church, created a new bishopric, that of Westminster, giving it for
its diocese the county of Middlesex, of which he deprived London. Great
part of the revenues of the dissolved monastery were settled upon the
new bishopric, the manor and advowson of Hampstead making a portion of
it, but in nine years the new Bishop had alienated his lands to such an
extent that there was scarcely anything left to maintain ‘the port of a
Bishop.’
In this reign, while the Manor of Hampstead was in the hands of the
newly-made Bishop of Westminster, we find that a considerable part of the
woods still covered the ground in this neighbourhood, as well as in that
of Hornsey, and that game was still plentiful in them.
Of this we have proof in the proclamation of the King for the
preservation of his sport in these places:[29]
‘A Proclamacion yt noe p’son interrupt the King’s game of
Partridge or phesaunt.
‘Rex majori et vice comitibus London. Vobis mandamus, etc.
‘Forasmuch as the King’s most Royall Maᵗⁱᵉ is much desirous to
have the games of hare, partridge, phesaunt, and heron p’served
in and about his honor at his palace of Westm’ for his owne
disport and pastime; that is to saye, from his said palace of
Westm’ to St. Gyles in the Fields, and from thence to Islington
to oʳ _Lady of the Oke_, to _Highgate_, to _Hornsey Parke_, to
_Hamsted Heath_, and from thence to his said palace of Westm’
to be preserved and kept for his owne disport, pleasure, and
recreacion; his highness therefore straightlie chargeth and
commandeth, all and singular, his subjects, of what estate,
condicion, so’er they be, that they, ne any of them, doe p’sume
or attempt to hunt, or hawke, or in any means to take or kill
any of the said games, within the precincts aforesaid, as they
tender his favour, and will estchue the ymprisonment of their
bodies and _further punishment at his Ma’ts will and pleasure_.
‘Et hoc sub p’iculo incumbenti nullatenus omittat.
‘Teste mæipso apud Westm’ vij. die Julij anno tricesimo Septimo
Henrici Octavi. (1546.)’
This mandate was issued just six months before the King’s death, when
his physical condition must have totally incapacitated him from the
sport from which he interdicted others, and this in the face of repeated
charters giving the citizens of London a right of free chase in the
forests of Middlesex, Hertfordshire, the Chiltern country, and Kent as
far as the river Cray. This proclamation helps us in imagination to a
view of the then existing condition of the north-western suburbs—fields
from the back of Gray’s Inn right away to Islington, a village of ‘cakes
and cream’ in the midst of meadows; the uplands of Hampstead, Highgate,
and Hornsey still covered with thick woods and coverts filled with game,
whilst between them and the city stretched the open country, with here a
wattled hut, and there a half-timbered house; the clack of mills resonant
beside the willow-shaded Fleet, which had its rise at the foot of
Hampstead Hill, and went running on through Gospel Oak Fields to Kentish
Town and Pancras, and thence by Holborn to its outlet in the Thames at
Blackfriars, where a creek rendered it navigable to Holborn Bridge.
There stood St. Pancras, or ‘Pankeridge,’ as Ben Jonson calls it, the
oldest church in London with the exception of old Paul’s, ‘all alone,
utterly forsaken, and weather-beaten,’ while on the breezy high ground at
Hampstead a windmill or two gave animation to the scene.
During the reign of Henry VIII., a predicted inundation of the city
drove the inhabitants to the hills, and Hampstead Heath appeared
covered with hundreds of little huts and tents in which the credulous
people sheltered themselves. The prediction, of course, failed, and the
prophets only escaped the indignation of their dupes on finding their
fears disappointed by avowing a mistake of a hundred years in their
calculations.
During the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, Hampstead Woods
continued to flourish, coming down on the east to the village of
Cantleowes, or Kentish Town, while on the west they spread by Belsize,
and what is now the Adelaide Road, to St. John’s Wood, where at the
Domesday the Abbess of Barking held wood and pasture of the King for
fifty swine.
More recently St. John’s Wood belonged to the Knights Templars. It was
in this wood the unfortunate Babington took refuge from the fury of
Elizabeth till driven forth by hunger.
With this Queen’s successor, and his favourite, Buckingham, Hampstead was
a frequent hunting-ground, and to this day the plateau on the west Heath,
locally known as the King’s Hill, commemorates the spot from which His
Majesty was wont to see the hounds throw off.
In James’s reign and that of his son, Charles I., certain ‘fair edifices’
had arisen on the Heath and its vicinity for the accommodation and
convenience of the Court when hunting and hawking in the neighbourhood.
Of these old houses none exist to add to the archæological interest of
the neighbourhood. It is impossible to imagine a finer foreground for
a hunting or hawking party than the Heath, the natural beauty of the
landscape lending itself most effectively to such scenes.
Who questions the locality of the wicked _bon-mot_ of our Merry Monarch,
who could never resist the temptation of saying a smart thing? When
in the midst of a group of beauties, courtiers, and Churchmen (who
particularly delighted in hawking), he observed of the church of
Harrow-on-the-Hill that it was ‘the only visible Church he knew of.’
Towards the closing years of Charles I.’s reign (1647), the Great Hollow
Elm at Hampstead (figured by Hollar in an engraving preserved amongst
the pamphlets in the King’s Library in the British Museum) became an
object of attraction to visitors. Remarkable for its size and supposed
age, measuring 28 feet immediately above the ground in girth, with
widely-spreading branches, and of great height, a sagacious speculator
about the year 1647 (as appears from some verses addressed to it by
Robert Codrington, of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1653) constructed a
staircase of forty-two steps within the hollow trunk, with sixteen
openings lighting it, which led up to an octagon turret fixed amongst
the branches of the tree 33 feet from the ground. ‘The seat above the
steps six might sit upon, and round about room for fourteen more.’ At
this altitude spectators enjoyed a most glorious view, or, rather, a
succession of them, and found themselves above every object in Middlesex
with the exception of the church spire of Harrow.
From the open tableland on which it appears in the engraving, the great
tree probably stood on the summit of the Heath, where the road now runs
past Jack Straw’s Castle. On the same broadside on which the engraving
appears are certain descriptive verses. This broadside seems to have
been given away to the visitors, and the circumstance of its having been
folded for putting in the pocket, and so worn out, accounts for the few
copies of it in existence.
‘The Great Hollow Elm at Hampstead’ (as the broad sheet describes
it) does not appear to have long survived its singular treatment. No
subsequent records that I have met with mention it; but that it must
have been the object of many a summer’s day pilgrimage to the Heath is
evident, even in Puritan times, when Robert Codrington addressed his
verses to it. In them he mentions the
‘beauteous ladies that have been
These twice three summers in its turret seen.’
In the same year (1647) a poetical stationer, commonly known as Michael
Spark, but who, in moments of aspiration, fancifully called himself
‘Scintilla,’ tells us of a very curious use to which this sylvan upper
chamber was put.
A foreigner, the fellow-countryman of Joannes a Commenius, as he
pedantically styles John Amos Comenius, the Moravian grammarian and
divine, had established a school at Hampstead for a ‘limited number of
young gentlemen,’ the number being restricted to twelve, and these, Mr.
Spark tells us, he spared no pains in training:
‘For he, on top of all (this tree) above the shade,
His scholars, taught; where they such verses made
As spread his honours, and do blaze the fame
Of Hampstead School—I’ll trumpet up the same!’
It is he who lets us into the seeming secret of the birth of the _Wells_,
and sings of the
‘air, and hill, and _well_, and school,’
as if the reputation of each was publicly known and appreciated.
Codrington indirectly tells us that the elm was attempted to be put to
another use ‘by some of the new religion, that would make a preachment
beneath its shade.’
In the reign of Charles II., when the Great Plague was ravaging London
and the Merry Monarch and his merry Court had discreetly withdrawn from
its neighbourhood, Hampstead and the Heath had other experiences, for
hundreds of the wretched citizens who had fled from the city to the
suburbs, driven forth from the village with scythes and pitchforks, lay
down to die in the fields and woods and ditches in the vicinity. This was
the occasion of the obloquy levelled at the Hampstead people by Taylor,
the Water-poet. And as a consequence, having almost wholly escaped the
visitations of 1603, Hampstead suffered considerably in 1665, when the
burials—which in the first year of the plague numbered only seven, and
in the next twenty-three—rose to 214, more than seven times the ordinary
averages of the period.[30]
Twelve months later, when the Great Fire swept out as with the besom of
destruction the germs of the plague, many of the fugitives from London
watched from the Heath the destruction of their homes and property, the
smoke of the city ascending ‘like the smoke of a great furnace,’ a smoke
so dense and fearful that it ‘darkened the sun at noonday, and if at any
time the sun peeped through, it looked as red as blood; through the long
night there was no darkness of night;’ and, to add to these horrors, on
the dreadful Wednesday night ‘the people of London, now of the fields,’
heard the murmur that the French were coming, and though, in the quaint
language of the writer of the ‘City Remembrancer,’ ‘the women, naked
and weak, did quake and tremble, many of the citizens began to stir
themselves like lions or bears bereaved of their whelps, and “Arm! arm!”
resounded through the woods and suburbs.’
These scenes, of which Hampstead Heath has been the centre, have long
since faded out of the traditions of its inhabitants, like those of that
still older night in 1588, when the cresset upon Beacon Hill blazed the
approach of the Armada to its fellow on Hadley Church tower, and thence
from cresset to cresset to the farthest North—scenes full of the tragic
passions of human perplexity and terror.
The General Elections for Middlesex appear to have always taken place on
Hampstead Heath. I read that at one of these meetings of the Middlesex
freemen on the top of Hampstead Hill,[31] 1695, Admiral Lord Edward
Russell made his appearance before the assembled voters, and was
returned without opposition.
These meetings occasioned the assembling of great mobs of rough persons
and much lawlessness, which greatly facilitated the business of
cut-purses and footpads who habitually haunted the Heath. But at the
commencement of 1700, after much trouble on the part of the influential
inhabitants, this nuisance was done away with, only, as it would appear,
to make space for another—for some time previous to 1732 horse-races took
place upon the upper Heath, and were largely attended.[32]
The race-course appears to have been at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle,
where the surface of the Heath, so delved and broken up and caverned by
the sand and gravel diggers in modern times, was then, it is said, level
with North End Hill.
In July, 1736, a paragraph in the _Grub Street Journal_ states that while
the horses were being run on the Hampstead course, a gentleman, about
sixty years of age, was observed hanging almost double over a gate, his
head nearly touching the ground. His horse was grazing near him, and
there had been no foul play; his watch and money were upon him. The dead
man was a Mr. Hill, a teller in the Excise Office.
What an occasion would this incident have afforded for the fiery
declamation and denunciation of the great Nonconformist preacher, George
Whitfield, who three years afterwards writes in his Diary that he took
his station under a tree near the horse-course at Hampstead! He was
preaching there by invitation, and his audience, he tells us, were ‘some
of the politer sort,’ which gave him occasion to speak to their souls of
our spiritual race, and he adds, ‘most were attentive, but others mocked.’
Johnson somewhat cynically said of him that ‘he had known Whitfield at
college before he became better than other people’; but he also said that
‘he believed he sincerely meant well, but had a mixture of politics and
ostentation, while Wesley thought only of religion.’
The races had grown to be so great a nuisance, from the crowds they drew
together and the mischief that ensued, that some time subsequent to 1748
they were put down by the Court of Magistrates.[33]
Except at election times, there had never been such throngs of people or
disorder on the Heath. The effect of the races had been to drive away the
more refined portion of visitors to Hampstead, just at a time of year
when the season was at its high-tide, and the Heath and woods and walks
in their perfection.
In the spring of 1750 the people of Hampstead witnessed another instance
of the spontaneity of panic-fear, which sent numbers of people to the
Heath and the high grounds of the other northern suburbs to escape
suffering the fate of the Metropolis, which a mad trooper (‘next to
the Bishop of London’[34]) had predicted should be swallowed up by an
earthquake in the April of this year. The shock of one had been felt
on February 8, and again on March 8, and the proverbial fatality of
the third time led to the belief that a final one would take place on
April 8. When the three months were nearly accomplished, at the end of
which the prophetic trooper had announced the destruction of London,
this ‘frantic terror,’ writes Horace Walpole, on April 2, ‘prevails so
much that within these three days seven hundred and thirty coaches have
been counted passing Hyde Park Corner.’ Several women, he adds, ‘made
themselves earthquake gowns to sit out of doors all night.’ The day
passed, however, without disturbance, and, except that the unfortunate
seer was sent to Bedlam, nothing came of the prediction.
That must have been a grand day on the Heath, mid-winter as it was,
when, roused by Bonaparte’s threatened invasion of England (1803-4), the
Hampstead Association—disbanded about a year before—joined themselves
into a volunteer force, 700 strong, with the public-spirited ex-Lord
Mayor of London, Josiah Boydell, as their Colonel Commandant, and Charles
Holford, Esq., for their Major, and took the oath of allegiance in the
face of heaven and their friends and neighbours on their own beloved
Heath. They then marched to the parish church of St. John’s, where Lady
Alvanley presented them with their colours.
When peace was proclaimed, these were deposited in the church, where they
remained, a trophy of the patriotic spirit that had animated the men of
Hampstead. In later times, when the wisdom of being always prepared for
such defence made itself felt throughout the length and breadth of the
land, the Episcopal Chapel in Well Walk was converted into a drill-room
for the volunteers who fell into rank in the place of their forefathers.
The old colours were now borne from the church, and escorted with full
military honours to the drill-room,[35] where they remained till the
building was taken down, when with similar ceremony they were deposited
in the new drill-hall, Heath Street.
One of the most pathetic incidents in connection with Hampstead Heath is
the remembrance of Charles Lamb and his sister which Talfourd has left
us, ‘mournfully crossing it hand-in-hand, and going on sadly through
the quiet fields to the retreat at Finchley, where the poor sufferer
sought shelter from herself ... whence, after a time, she would return
in her right mind ... a gentle, amiable woman, beloved by all who knew
her,’ but most of all by her brother, whose young manhood was in a
measure blighted by the tragedy of which she who enacted it was wholly
unconscious. He might be said to have devoted himself to her, and in life
they were never parted.
Few even of their contemporaries knew the particulars of that household
tragedy; the reporters of the inquest, with a respectful pity rare in
their craft, withheld the names; and compassion was universally felt for
the naturally inoffensive and all-unconscious perpetrator of it, and for
him, the dutiful son and loving brother, whose affectionate and sensitive
nature suffered in silence the double horror and the double grief. This
is how the ‘Annual Register’ tells the melancholy tale (September 23,
1796):
‘On the afternoon of this day a coroner’s jury sat on the body of a lady
in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from
her daughter the preceding day.... While they were preparing for dinner,
the young lady, in a fit of insanity, seized a case-knife from the table,
and in a menacing way pursued a little girl round the room. On the eager
cry of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her object, and turned
with loud shrieks upon her parent. The little girl by her cries brought
up the landlady, but too late—the mother was lifeless in her chair,
stabbed to the heart, her daughter still wildly standing over her with
the knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side,
himself bleeding from a blow on the forehead from one of the forks she
was throwing distractedly about.’
A few days previously she had exhibited signs of lunacy, from which she
had previously suffered, and her brother—in this lay the self-wounding
sting for such a nature as Elia’s—had endeavoured on the morning of the
occurrence to see Dr. Pitcairn, and had failed. ‘Had that gentleman,’ it
is suggested, ‘seen her, the catastrophe might have been averted.’
What a scene for the young clerk at the India House! He was then only
twenty-one, and, like his unhappy sister, working against the tide
to help the straitened means of their parents. It was elicited at the
inquest that no one could be more affectionate to both father and mother
than the unconscious matricide, and that to the increased attentiveness
which the growing infirmities of the latter required, added to the
pressure of business, was to be ascribed the loss of the daughter’s
reason.
Poor Lamb had himself once suffered from the same sad malady. He has
been censured for sometimes yielding to drinking habits, but the memory
of that one day in his life—the very threshold, rather, as it may be
called—might well plead in merciful extenuation.
At times throughout her life Mary Lamb was subject to fits of mental
aberration, the approach of which she was conscious of, and on these
occasions would request to be taken to the abode at Finchley, where she
found safety and remedial treatment.
One other event in modern times has caused widespread and painful
commotion in association with Hampstead Heath, the suicide of John
Sadleir, Esq., M.P. for Tipperary. I well remember the excitement on
the occasion, and the rapidity with which the story was bruited about.
Early in the morning of Sunday, February 17, 1856, a man was looking
for a strayed donkey amongst the furze-bushes on the south side of the
old watercourse (now obliterated), when he came upon the dead body of a
well-dressed man. A silver cream-ewer and a small bottle lay beside him,
his head resting near an old furze-clump, and his feet almost touching
the water. His hat had fallen off, and his lips gave out the scent of
prussic acid.
There was one extraordinary fact in connection with the case: the soles
of the dress-boots on the feet of the corpse were unsoiled, though the
night had been stormy and the neighbourhood of the watercourse damp
at all times of the year. It was evident he must have alighted from a
vehicle very near the spot, which was some distance down the bank, at
the back of Jack Straw’s Castle. I have not the report of the inquest
to refer to, but the details of the event made a deep impression on
me, and the more so for the mystery surrounding it. I think no cabman
came forward or could be found to give an account of a midnight fare
to Hampstead Heath, and it was midnight or after when his butler heard
him leave the house. The dress and general appearance were identical
with those of Mr. Sadleir, director of the Tipperary Bank (which he
had founded) and chairman of several railways and banking and mining
companies; and if any doubt had existed, there was found on the corpse a
slip of paper, on which, in a hand as bold as his proceedings had been,
and infinitely clearer, was written, ‘John Sadleir, Gloucester Square,
Hyde Park.’ Many knew the handwriting, and though some of the witnesses
observed the great alteration death had made in the countenance, Mr.
Wakeley, the coroner, lifted the eyelids of the dead man, and, having
known him personally, pronounced them the eyes of John Sadleir. At first
it was surmised that insanity from a brain overworked had led to the
fatal act, but it soon became apparent that, to avoid the public scandal
and degradation consequent on his own bad acts, he had voluntarily rushed
out of life.
‘By his scheming and forgeries, the issue of false balance-sheets,
the overissue of railway shares, the pledging of false securities
and obligations, he had deprived widows, single women, army and navy
officers on half-pay, and others equally helpless and unwary, of all they
possessed. The victims of his iniquitous and gigantic frauds were to be
counted by thousands, from shareholders to the poorest depositors, till
at last, hemmed round by an inextricable network of multitudinous crime,
and seeing no means of escape from the near crisis of discovery, he had
stolen by a perilous short-cut out of sight and hearing of the cries and
curses of those who had trusted him, to find oblivion in a suicide’s
grave.’[36]
There were many who firmly believed his apparent death a forgery also,
and long afterwards reports were current that he had been met with in
America, whither his brother, the manager of the Tipperary Bank, had
absconded. It is certain that a large sum of money which John Sadleir had
received only on the day previous to the discovery of the dead body on
Hampstead Heath was not forthcoming, nor was its disappearance in any way
accounted for.
It appears singular why, having possessed himself of the poison, and
knowing its almost instantaneous effect, he should have left his
home, and gone out into the wild, dark night and distant solitude of
Hampstead Heath, to perpetrate the despairing sin of self-murder. Perhaps
the wretched man was goaded by the scorpion-stings of conscience to
affinities closer to the condition of his mind than the conventional and
ill-gotten luxuries around him. The cold damp earth, the sharp furze
spines, the buffeting winds, the all-aloneness—save for the ghosts of
lost opportunities, of great talents turned to infernal uses, of high
respect and honours thrown away—seemed more in sympathy with the fierce
frenzy, the unutterable horror, of his unmasked soul. Assuredly, no more
terrible proof could be required that ‘sooner or later sin is its own
avenger,’ than the suicide of John Sadleir.