_THE WELL WALK—THE EARLY PERIOD._
Every period has produced some specific or other for ‘the thousand
natural shocks that flesh is heir to,’ and during the latter part of the
eighteenth century, and the early years of the present, mineral waters
were the fashionable panacea.
From traditional times the curative properties of the spring in Well Walk
had been known to the inhabitants of Hampstead and the neighbourhood.
It oozed out of the green hillside to the east of the village into a
self-made pool, whose surface was covered with a rust-coloured film that
disclosed its ferruginous nature. But something more than a mere local
reputation must have suggested to the Hon. Susannah Noel the gift of the
‘medicinal spring, together with six acres of heathland lying about and
encompassing it,’ for the sole use and benefit of the poor of Hampstead
for ever. The indenture by which this gift is made on her own part and
that of her infant son, Baptist, Earl of Gainsborough, is dated December,
1698, and is the foundation of what is known as the Wells Charity.
For some time after the date of this indenture, the project seems to have
remained in abeyance, but in the _Postman_ of April 16 and 20, 1700, an
advertisement appears, stating that the Hampstead chalybeate waters are
‘so highly approved by the most eminent physicians, that they are by
direction of the trustees of the Wells aforesaid, for the convenience of
those who yearly drink them in London, carefully bottled up in flasks,
and sent to Mr. Phelps, Apothecary, at the Eagle and Child in Fleet
Street every morning at the rate of 3d. per flask, and if any persons
desire to have them brought to their houses, they will be conveyed to
them upon leaving a note at Mr. Phelps’, aforesaid, at 1d. a flask more.’
Here we have the origin of the names given to the two taverns of Upper
and Lower Flask, and of the Walk in the vicinity of the latter. It is
further stated that ‘the true waters are nowhere else to be procured,
unless they are sent for to the Wells, Hampstead.’
An advertisement in the same newspaper (August 27 and 29 of this year)
sets forth that:
‘By order of the Trustees of Hampstead Mineral Waters, These are to
certify that the Widow Keys is discharged from the Wells, and carries no
more of the said waters, the Trustees now only employing Mr. Adams, a
potter at Holborn Bars, to deliver out the said mineral waters. If any
other person pretends to bring Hampstead waters, they (the purchasers)
are desired to try them, so that they be not cheated. Also, the Trustees
will let the said waters, with six acres of land, by lease or yearly
rent. Such as desire to treat about the same, may meet the Trustees at
Craddock’s Coffee-house, Hampstead, every Saturday from 10 to 12 o’clock
in the morning untill the 29th of September next.’
This same month and year, in the Court Rolls of Hampstead, it is ordered
that ‘the Spring by the purging Well be forthwith brought into the town
of Hampstead, at the parish charge, and yt ye money and profit arising
thereout be applied to the easing of the poors’ rates hereafter to be
made.’
In the early part of 1701, we find the advertisement of the letting of
the Wells, and the land attached to them, reappearing in the _Postman_,
with the effect of attracting a lessee; for soon after we read of
the Wells dwelling-house and tavern, the latter with a very fair
bowling-green attached, without which no gentleman of the period would
have been pleasurably provided for. Subsequently, tea and coffee rooms
and a dancing-room were added, and the new watering-place is announced as
ready to receive company.
May was the pleasant month in which the water-drinking season primitively
began, though later on, from June till Michaelmas, was considered the
best time for taking them. An old advertisement of the opening of the
season reads as follows:
‘These are to acquaint all persons that have occasion to drink Hampstead
waters that the Wells will be opened on Monday next, being the 11th of
May, with very good music for dancing, and will continue every Monday
during the season for water-drinking, and there is complete accommodation
for water-drinkers of both sexes with accomodation of a very good
bowling-green, and very good stabling and coach-house.’[231]
There is a vagueness in the phrasing of this notice that leaves a doubt
whether it is the Wells or the music that will continue every Monday, but
from other sources we learn that ‘very good music for dancing went on all
day long every Monday during the season.’
Dr. Gibbons, who resided at Hampstead, was the first physician who
encouraged the drinking of the waters, setting a practical example
himself, and continuing in it till his death (1725). Others of
his profession supported the opinion of their excellence, and the
sale of them in London, as well as their local use, seems to have
largely increased in consequence. Instead of one or two agents, the
advertisements set forth that, being approved by the most eminent
physicians, the said mineral water continues to be brought fresh from
Hampstead Wells every day to Mr. Adams, Glass-seller, near Holborn
Bars; to Mr. Cresset’s at the Sugar-loaf at Charing Cross; to Nando’s
Coffee-house,[232] near Temple Bar; to Sam’s Coffee-house, near Ludgate;
to the Salmon in Stock’s Market; and by Mr. Pratt to the Greyhound in
King Street, Bloomsbury; to Howe’s Coffee-house in Cheapside by the
Half-moon Tavern, and to the Black Posts, Fleet Street.
At this time there was no lack of small but pleasant lodgings to be
had in South End, and on the Lower and Upper Heath, weather-boarded
structures for the most part of the cottage species, some of which
survived till our own time in the Vale of Health and about Squire’s
Mount; one of the ancient customs of the Manor of Hampstead being that
the tenants of their own free will might ‘let, sell, take down, or
remove any of their tenements without any fine or forfeiture to or for
the same to the lord,’ a custom that greatly facilitated the raising of
inexpensive removable dwellings.
A few of the houses in Well Walk in the early part of the century were
probably of this description, and, I suspect, of an earlier date than the
flat-faced, narrow-windowed brick edifices with fan-lighted hall doors
that faced the Walk in the fifties. Instead of that decorous straight
line, I imagine irregularity in the appearance, as well as in the
positions, of the original structures, which followed no fixed plan, but
were added to as wanted.[233]
Neither do I imagine that the tenements which arose between the date of
the advertisement of the letting of the Wells, and that which announces
their opening in the summer of the same year (1701) could have been of
very solid construction. There was no time for the work that English
builders in those days put into the building of brick houses, and
everything shows that the preparation for the convenience of visitors
to the spa must have been of a hurried, and for the most part of a
temporary, nature.
Very soon we read of bun-houses and raffling-shops, which appear to
have been set up over against the Long Room, from which some years
later Steele crossed over to watch the cheating play in one of them. In
deference to the religious wants of the visitors, we find the proprietor
of the Wells building a chapel at his own expense, of which I shall have
more to say farther on.
Happily, the most interesting, from its associations, of the Wells
buildings, the Long Room, still exists in Weatherall Place, a long, low,
white structure when I first knew it, of timber, brick and mortar. It has
been used as a private residence for quite a hundred years, and a late
proprietor, Mr. Routh, has wholly metamorphosed its appearance by having
it cased with red brick.
Sion Chapel, which afterwards became notorious in the history of
Hampstead, was a much-needed and, for some time, decently conducted place
of worship, at which one or other of the many ejected Nonconformist
ministers of the time officiated, for even then the ancient chapel of St.
Mary (now St. John’s) was almost ruinous, and inadequate to the yearly
increasing number of parishioners, and so could afford little, if any,
accommodation for strangers.
From 1701 to 1712-13, that happy period when, as Dr. Gibbons tells
us, the Wells were frequented by ‘as much and as good company as go
yearly to Tunbridge Wells, in Kent,’ the searcher of old newspapers
will find concerts of vocal and instrumental music, as well as other
entertainments, to have been constantly advertised to take place in the
Long Room. The prices of admission to the concerts were one shilling in
the morning, and (except on extraordinary occasions) sixpence in the
evening, when, ‘for the convenience of gentlemen returning to town,’
the concerts commenced at five o’clock. The early hour is suggestive of
the then state of the roads in the suburbs of London. At this period a
stage-coach started for Hampstead every morning, from the Greyhound in
Holborn, and another from the Chequers, returning at night,[234] besides
a carrier daily; but in all probability the coachmen preferred driving
home by daylight, not only on account of the roughness of the roads, but
to avoid running the risk of being stopped by highwaymen on their track,
or at the meeting of the ways at the half-way house, the Old Mother
Red-Cap, a place noted for waylaying the coaches, probably from the
facility of escape which the divergence of three separate roads afforded.
It happened, fortunately for the fashionable visitors to the Wells, that
the summer meetings of the Kit-Cat Club, which had been instituted a
few years before (though some say after their opening) coincided with
the period of drinking the Hampstead waters, and as people walked after
dinner in those days, some one or other of the witty brotherhood would
often saunter down from the bosky covert of the gardens of the Upper
Flask, or across the Heath from the Bull and Bush, at Wildwood Corner (as
Camden calls North End) to greet their friends in the Long Room or in
the walks, or look in, as Steele was wont to do (with an eye to copy and
the correction of morals), at the cheating play in the raffling-shops,
the proprietors of which appear to have been knaves of the worst order.
Steele took great pleasure in exposing them. It is to such a passing
inquisition that the subscribers to the _Tatler_ in the summer of 1709
owed the witty paper that describes one of these rogues as ‘a person deep
in the practice of the law, who, under the name of his maid Sisly, had
set up this easier way of conveyancing and alienating estates from one
family to another.’
Some years later, the _Spectator_ informs us—probably by the same
hand—that ‘a Count figures amongst this fraternity, who is humorously
described as “the errantist Count of all the Courts of England,” and who,
believing the fair diversion-table at Hampstead to be all foul play, has
vouchsafed to set up another himself, in imitation of it.’ The company,
under these circumstances, became, we may be sure, considerably mixed;
adventurers of both sexes found their way to the upland village, and the
idle and profligate, as well as the invalid and ennuyé, mingled with
personages of rank and fashion at the Wells.
Card-playing went on all day in the Long Room, and dancing pretty well
all night. But, then, card-playing was the general amusement of all
classes in that day. At Hampstead it became a passion, especially with
women, ‘who, possessed by excitement and avarice, and in the hope of
winning seven guineas for one by giving the enamelled ball a graceful
twirl to induce it to fall upon four cards nominated for luck’s sake,
out of two-and-thirty, staked and lost money, diamonds, beauty, and
reputation at the fair diversion,’ as our essayist calls it, all which
had been translated from the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury and Red Lion
Square to the Wells and raffling-shops of Hampstead.
It is not until 1710 that I find in the _Postboy_ (April 18) the
following advertisement:
‘As there are many weddings at Sion Chapel, Hampstead, five
shillings only are required for all the church fees of any
couple that are married there, provided they bring with them a
license, or certificate, according to the Act of Parliament.
Two sermons are continued to be preached in the said chapel
every Sunday, and the place will be given to any clergyman that
is willing to accept of it, if he is approved of.’
In _Read’s Weekly Journal_, September 8, 1716, we come upon this:
‘Sion Chapel at Hampstead, being a private and pleasure place,
many persons of the best fashion have lately been married
there. Now, as a minister is obliged to attend, “This is to
give notice that all persons upon bringing a license, and who
shall keep their wedding dinner in the gardens, only five
shillings will be demanded of them for all fees.”’
Park adds that, from these advertisements, Sion Chapel would seem to
have been the prototype of the Fleet and Mayfair marriages, but this is
incorrect. Fleet marriages took place as early as 1704. The honour of
primitive suggestion belongs rather to Gretna Green.[235]
Amongst other popular attractions of Hampstead, though hardly to
the taste of the more refined visitors, was a pleasure fair. In the
_Spectator_ for July 29, 1712 (No. 443, original edition), a notice
appears that Hampstead Fair will be held upon the Flask Walk on Friday,
August 1, and will hold four days. As fairs were annual occurrences, we
must conclude that for four days yearly the rural quiet and beauty of
Hampstead were delivered over to ‘rude mirth and tipsy revelry,’ much as
it is in these days at the holidays of Easter and Whitsuntide.[236]
A triangular bit of waste ground, open in my time at the upper part of
Flask Road, was pointed out to me by an archæological friend as the place
where _anciently_ that earliest institution of social life, the village
pound, and subsequently the stocks and cage, stood, as the after-site
of the fair. The fair (continued for more than thirty years after this
date)—a fair for the sale of gingerbread, toys, sweetmeats, chap-books,
wares such as Autolycus the rogue sold, or affected to sell, the maids.
But a pleasure-fair by no means precluded the presence of unpleasant
company, and here, as at other fairs, to intoxication, rioting, and
uproar, robberies were superadded.
The fair, not being a chartered one, but simply permissive by license
of the Lord or Lady of the Manor, or the Middlesex magistrates, had
frequently been written about and complained of; but the nuisance was
suffered to go on till, at length (as late as 1746), it became so great a
drawback to the comfort of the respectable inhabitants and visitors, that
it was forbidden by the authorities at Hicks’s Hall, a prohibition that
did not prevent an impudent attempt, two years subsequently, to revive
it, on the part of one Thomas Keate, probably the landlord of the Lower
Flask Tavern, who made his purgation in a London newspaper as follows:
‘THE FLASK, HAMPSTEAD,
‘_August 2, 1748_.
‘Whereas I published an advertisement on Saturday last,
declaring a sale of goods and toys to be held at Hampstead,
which advertisement was addressed to persons usually
frequenting Hampstead Fair, and occasioned great numbers of
loose and disorderly people to resort to Hampstead, under the
notion that the Fair suppressed two years since as illegal,
would be revived, and held in the Flask Walk ... I take this
publick opportunity to declare that I am extremely sorry,
that I should ignorantly be engaged to act in opposition to
the Magistrates of the County, in any endeavour to revive
a Fair deemed illegal by authority; and I hope this public
acknowledgment of my error will satisfy their worships, and
declaring that I will desist from any such attempt for the
future.
‘THOMAS KEATE.’
This epistle, as far as I have discovered, is final with regard to
the fair in Flask Walk, though sadly out of chronological order here.
Happily for the lovers of historic Hampstead, the site of the ancient
Pump-house in Well Walk has been discovered, while that of the modern
one is preserved by an inscription on a part of the house now occupying
its place. But the situation of Sion Chapel, of which we completely lose
count after the early advertisements I have transcribed, is not known.
Unfortunately, the easy access to the Wells from London—a walk of
only four or five miles being but an ordinary recreation to persons
unaccustomed, as a rule, to any other mode of locomotion—made it
impossible to maintain the exclusiveness dear to the dignity of the
Ladies Betty, Moll, or Susan, who stepped so stately,
‘Alack! the little heels won’t let them haste!’
under the _then_ young limes shading the Well Walk. This ease of access
bounced into their midst the City madams and pert, Fleet Street
seamstresses, that furnished the fun of Baker’s comedy, a force stronger
in the end than the _Bon ton_, who, after a decade of endurance, forsook
the _Fons Sanitatis_ of Hampstead, and its high-priest, Dr. Gibbons.
But intermediately the proprietor of the Wells had been doing a thriving
business in illicit marriages and frequent wedding-dinners; and Hampstead
had won for itself a quite unenviable notoriety. Play often ran so high
at the gaming-tables that the Justices at the Quarter Sessions at Hicks’s
Hall recommended the great room at Hampstead to the particular attention
of the petty constables and head-boroughs of the parish, to prevent
all unlawful gaming, riots, etc. As for the rest, Baker’s comedy, to
which I have alluded (and which is still extant) offers a very graphic
description. Park has quoted at considerable length from it, but Park
is not often read out of the reading-room of the British Museum, or the
Public Library at Hampstead.
Smart, in the said comedy, discussing philosophically the social
peculiarities of the Long Room, observes that assemblies so near town
give us examples of all degrees. ‘We have Court ladies, all air and no
dress; City belles, overdressed and no air; and country dames with broad
brown faces like a Stepney bun; besides an endless number of Fleet Street
seamstresses, that dance minuets in their furbeloe scarfs, and whose
clothes hang as loose on them as their reputations.’
Arabella (another character in the same play) observes: ‘Well, this
Hampstead is a charming place; to dance all night at the Wells, and
be treated at Mother Huffs’;[237] to have presents made one at the
raffling-shops,’ etc. Occasional visitors to the Wells on assembly nights
might reasonably desire to dance the day-dawn in for safety’s sake;
and the extension of the hours at the Long Room might possibly have
originated in the perils of getting home from it. The roads, hazardous
even by day, were doubly so after dark, especially in the neighbourhood
of towns. The Hampstead coach had quite recently been stopped and
robbed (1713), although a portion of the Hampstead road was just then
unpleasantly occupied by the body of a murderer hanging in chains,[238]
an object-lesson our forefathers were fond of exhibiting with deterrent
intention, and with about as much practical result as from the suspension
of criminal crows in a harvest-field.
But to return to the Wells. Let us be thankful for the old newspapers
and magazines, that in feeble type and quaintly-worded paragraphs and
advertisements have yet preserved for us faithful transcripts of the
ways and fashions of the times, so that with a file of old _Postboys_,
_Mists_, and _Read’s Weekly Journal_, and the _Lady’s Magazine_, but
little imagination is required to revivify the company in Well Walk (that
focus of fashion whilst fashion clung to it), to reclothe them in the
costumes they wore, and busy them again in all their old occupations and
amusements.
We can see in fancy the large, cumbrous, top-heavy coach toiling up the
steep hill, tacking like a ship against a head-wind, until it landed its
passengers at the coach office, the Bird-in-Hand,[239] or, higher up,
at the Upper Flask. Say that it is the afternoon of a summer’s day in
1713-14. Amongst a crowd of other passengers, a lady in a little flutter
of expectation, her head-dress a lace or muslin hood, with turnover (a
species of fichu) ... and ruffles to match, steps out on the points of
her high-heeled shoes, letting her hoop expand with a grace totally
unknown to the modern wearers of crinoline.[240]
Be sure she has in her netted or embroidered hand-bag a little of the
famous ‘Bavarian red liquor,’ which gave such a ‘delightful blushing
colour to the cheeks pale or white,’ and which is not ‘to be discovered
as other than the natural colour by the most fine sight.’ Nor is she
without a bottle of Hungary, or citron water, for being a fine lady she
must have nerves.
To-morrow what a stir she will create on the Well Walk in her voluminous
brocade or Italian silk gown, shining with gold or silver flowers, and
cut in the latest fashion!
There is no dearth of matters to be discussed by the general company. The
Lottery and the South Sea Scheme are flourishing, and afford interesting
topics for all grades of society; then there is the opera and the
theatres, and the last duel, and, apart from the ladies, the recent
doings at Hendon and Hockley-in-the-Hole.
Should Arbuthnot, or Swift, or Steele, happen to be amongst the crowd of
visitors, Pope, who has already made a name in literature, and, like his
friend Mr. Murray, been early admitted to the fellowship of the wits at
Button’s and the Scriblerus Club, is not likely to find their criticisms
on his recently-published verses wholly favourable, though regarded as
giving great promise, which the ‘little fellow,’ as Johnson subsequently
called him, is bound to make good.
Quite in opposition to Dr. Gibbons’ advice, the ladies, one and all, file
into the tea-room, where the best Bohea at eighteen shillings a pound is
dispensed in diminutive Nankin china cups without handles, to hold and
drink out of which gracefully is in itself a fine art. Pope describes
‘How her red lips affected zephyrs blow
To cool Bohea, and inflame the beau;
While one white finger and a thumb conspire
To lift the cup, and make the world admire.’
Or they stroll off to ransack the raffling-shops for gloves, fans, etc.,
while the gentlemen smoke, play at bowls, or adjourn to cards. In the
Long Room the musicians play, and those who like may dance, or rehearse
their steps and figures for the evening exhibition of them. Some wander
away to the green skirts of Caen Wood, or seek the deep-hedged lanes,
where the elm boughs meet overhead. While others are content to find
their pleasure on the Heath, with its ever-varied, ever-lovely views, or
choose the pleasant shade of its leafy groves, that both diversify the
scene and break the force of the winds that blow upon it. Others, again,
ride or drive to some of the many pretty places, or the seats of friends
in the vicinity, Highgate, and Hornsey, and Colney Hatch being in much
favour with the gentry as sites for country-houses. Then at the orthodox
hour for the promenade, what a flutter of fans, and tapping of fine
snuff-boxes, and lifting of laced or feathered hats, as the company bow,
and curtsey, and smile, and ogle, as they pass and repass in the walks,
the ladies resplendent in ‘stained silks,’ damasks, and flowered satins,
that from the perfection of their texture would, in the parlance of old
folks describing them, have literally stood alone. Nor was the dress of
the gentlemen less superb. Their quaintly-cut, wide-skirted coats, with
great cuffs bound with gold or silver lace, and deep flapped waistcoats
richly embroidered, were often of the most costly materials, accompanied
with flowing cravats—or falls, as they were called—and hanging ruffles of
Mechlin or other lace. Then there were the shoes—the beaux wore them—with
red heels and silver or brilliant buckles; and, again, the sword-hilt,
band, and knot, allowed of a variety of dainty devices, the sword-hilt
being sometimes of plain steel or silver only, but sometimes gilt and
jewelled.
No record remains to us of the great ladies who gave the encouragement
of their presence to the fashion of the Hampstead Wells in those early
years; but we know that Addison, and Garth, and Steele, and Arbuthnot,
Sir Godfrey Kneller, Swift, and all the Kit-Cats, were of the company.
And their presence there has made the Heath and Well Walk classic ground
for all who love the eighteenth century. It was a time of lordly bows,
deep curtseys, stately manners, and coarse speech, and the day of
depraved morality and affected sentiment. Women in want of an expletive
had hardly given up the use of oaths; Her Grace of Marlborough habitually
retained them; and men felt but little restriction in the presence of
women. Indecent equivoke and _double entendre_ were thought witty even
in good society, and judging from Swift’s correspondence with Lady Betty
Germain and Miss Arbuthnot, there was a freedom of speech between the
sexes that astonishes one. Modesty must have been relegated to the fan,
for evidently it was not on guard in the ear any longer.
Away from the temptations, engagements, and frivolities of town life,
as housewives and mothers (to give them their due), these ladies took
an active part in domestic affairs, and taught their children, harshly
enough sometimes, the lesson of dutifulness and obedience—a lesson too
much neglected in modern education. But for a woman to exhibit a love of
learning or a predilection for its pursuit was to incur the suspicion and
contempt of her own sex, and the derision of the other. Ordinarily women
read, in the language of the day, ‘to kill time,’ and this amusement was
chiefly supplied to them by the playwrights or the novels of Fielding or
Mrs. Aphra Behn, works of fiction that taught their readers a new use for
the squabs of the settee or sofa whenever a visitor was announced.
The mission of the essayists who produced the _Spectator_ and _Guardian_
was to purify the manners of the times, to awaken an interest in
literature for its own sake, and to show through the amusing medium of
narrative and anecdote the meanness and wickedness of much that was going
on unconcealed, and yet unnoticed, around them.
It is said that the publication of these works exercised a perceptible
influence on society, and produced a permanent improvement in morals, no
mean mission, nor contemptible result, if they ever effected it.
Few country ladies, unless privileged persons who desired to keep
up their relations with the Court, came to London in those days,
except on urgent occasion. The great trouble and expense the journey
involved, the execrable condition of the roads, and terror of the
highwaymen who infested them, were reasons quite sufficient to
account for the home-staying, which has often been put to their
account as a virtue, and flaunted in the face of their travel-loving
great-great-great-grand-daughters. The principal event in the lives
of many country ladies was the summer visit to one of the fashionable
spas—Bath or Harrogate, Tunbridge or Hampstead Wells—where they met old
friends and renewed acquaintances, picked up the threads of unfinished
family histories, saw dress ‘as worn in the politest circles,’ compared
notes with one another, and acquired the newest information of the world
that lay outside their own, so that on their home-going they became
exemplars and oracles on all social and society matters to those of their
acquaintance who had not had the felicity of visiting the spa.
But to return to Hampstead. The light-hearted indifference to what was
going on around them enabled the fashionable visitors to endure the
scandal of the runaway marriages at Sion Chapel, the hurly-burly of
the four days’ fair, and the company brought together by these doings;
but at last the cheating play at the raffling-shops, and the morals of
Hampstead, became so notorious ‘that persons of character were almost
ashamed to be seen there, even with their own relations,’ and the most
reckless of the rank and file of fashion found it necessary to turn
their backs upon it. Yet, before it reached this last depth of moral
degradation, Hampstead Wells must have exhibited a brilliant epitome
of Bath and Tunbridge. Of course, the behaviour of the company at the
Assembly and Long Room was not lost sight of by the wits and satirists of
the day. The ballad-singers preserved the follies of the Wells in wicked
verse; the playwrights—at least one of them, as we have seen—dramatized
them; and I should not wonder if Baker’s holding of the ‘mirror up to
Nature,’ or the modish pretence of Nature that so often passes for it,
had something to do with the waking up of thoughtful people, and the
falling-off of fashion from the place.
A few people of the upper class, who had learned to love sweet Hampstead
for its own sake, continued, from season to season, to return here for
change of air, so that the better kind of lodging-houses in Pond Street
and elsewhere were not wholly deserted. Neither were the Wells, of which
we have a rather deterrent proof in the following advertisement from the
_Daily Courant_ of June 18, 1718:
‘HAMPSTEAD.—Whereas it has been reported that a robbery has
been committed this season upon the road to Hampstead Mineral
Well, this is to inform ladies and gentlemen that for the
future at half-past ten in the evening, every Monday, Thursday,
and Saturday (being public days), there will be a sufficient
guard, _well armed_, sent by the inhabitants of the said Wells,
to attend the company thence to London.’[241]
Evidently the citizens and their wives, and others of the inhabitants of
London, did not forsake the allurements of the Long Room and the Walks.
Neither did the City seamstresses in their vamped-up fine clothes, nor
the City fop,
‘Who put on belt and sword at Temple Bar.’
The early termination to the evening’s entertainment, in contrast with
the all-night dancing Arabella had enjoyed at the Wells, is noticeable in
the above advertisement, but is by no means attributable to the improved
morals of the place. It appears to have sunk year by year.
The cheating at the gambling-tables led to fighting and riots. Footpads
lurked in the fields and hedges, and highwaymen infested the roads,
making them more than ordinarily perilous for foot-passengers, and adding
greatly to the duties of the magistrates at Hicks’s Hall (the annals of
which would, I imagine, throw considerable light upon the story of the
Hampstead Wells at this intermediate period).
Ten years after the decline of their fashion, many of the buildings in
the Well Walk disappeared, but the tavern, then known as the Whitestone
Inn,[242] the Assembly-room and pump-room (under the same roof), and the
Long Room, with the tea and coffee rooms adjoining it, remained. Dr.
Gibbons still lived, and still retained his faith, as did Dr. Arbuthnot
also, in the valuable curative quality of the water, and the invigorating
air of Hampstead, which, when occasion required, he not only recommended
to his friends, but sought himself. In this way it is that we find Gay
here in the summer of 1722, whose friends had ‘brought him,’ as he
says, ‘to Hampstead at a time when his life was despaired of,’ after
the failure of the South Sea Scheme, in which his slender fortune was
invested. Here, in Well Walk, we can imagine him seated, with Pope and
Arbuthnot by him, owing his recovery almost as much to the tenderness of
the author as to the skill of the doctor.
It was during Gay’s stay at Hampstead that he wrote his tragedy of ‘The
Captive,’ which he was requested to read to the Princess of Wales at
Leicester House. On that occasion, when the hour came, and he saw the
Princess and her ladies in expectation, advancing ‘with reverence too
great for any other attention, and pre-resolved to impress Her Royal
Highness as favourably towards the poet as the poem, he quite lost sight
of a footstool in the way, and, stumbling over it, fell against a large
screen, which he overset, and thus made his obeisance in a style that
threw the ladies into no small disorder, and himself into such a state
that but for the good-nature of his royal auditor must have told severely
against the effect of the tragedy,’[243] which was brought out at Drury
Lane, and played on the third night by particular desire of the Princess
of Wales.[244] Think of the good-natured merriment with which Arbuthnot,
‘who was seldom serious but when attacking some great enormity,’ received
the account of his fat friend’s sudden projection into the royal circle;
how Swift must have chuckled over the comicality, Pope and the rest of
the witty brotherhood joining in a loud laugh that none would enjoy more
heartily than the genial-tempered subject of it.
In 1723 I find Mrs. Pendarves writing to Swift that ‘the beautiful Irish
girl, Miss Kelly’ (the _Syren_ of this lady’s letters to her sister)
‘is at Hampstead, quite alone, and she deserves it. She is in a very
expensive way, with her sickness, her servants, and her horses, high
passions, low spirits, and a tyrannous father.’
Not a very pleasing picture of the wilful Irish beauty who paid Hampstead
the compliment to prefer it to more fashionable places. Yet the fair
widow had previously written of Miss Kelly as ‘very harmless, and not at
all _coquet_; she brings in all the news that flies about, and now and
then adds a little of her own.’
This is the lady about whom Lady Betty Germain eight years later writes
to Swift, observing:
‘Miss Kelly was a very pretty girl when she went from hence, and the
beaux show their good taste by liking her. I hear her father is now kind
to her, but if she is not mightily altered, she would give up some of her
airs and equipage to live in England.’
In a letter of a later date, to the Dean, Lady Betty says:
‘Surely your Irish air is very bad for darts, if Miss Kelly’s are blunted
already. Make her cross father let her come here, and we won’t use her so
in England.’
Once more, May 1, 1733, Lady Betty, still writing to Swift, says:
‘I am extremely Miss Kelly’s humble servant, but I will never believe she
is more valued for her beauty and good qualities in Ireland than she was
in England.’
Then comes a bit of ill news concerning the Hibernian beauty:
‘I am heartily sorry for your new friend, Mrs. Kelly, who writes in a
desponding way to Mrs. Chambers (Lady Betty Germain’s niece) about her
health, and talks of going to Spa. This is a melancholy subject, and I
hate to be vexed, so I will say no more of it.’
But she does say some more about it in a letter to the Dean from Knowle
(or, as she spells it, Knole), July 9, 1733:
‘I hear poor Mrs. Kelly is not near so well as she says; and a gentleman
that came from Bristol says she looks dreadfully, and fears that it is
all over with her, and that no mortal could know her. So ends youth and
beauty!’
And so exit the beautiful Miss Kelly, of whom I find no further traces at
Hampstead or elsewhere. Her story, I think, may easily be traced in these
few epistolary extracts: ‘That she belonged to the beau monde is evident,
or she would not have been received into that “old courtiers’” set,’ as
Mrs. Pendarves calls Lady Betty, whose name visitors to Knowle will be
familiar with.[245]