crowd: certain dubiously-attired, flash-looking, ragged dandies, with
cheap pins in their foul cravats, and long greasy hair floating over
their coat-collars, impress me most unfavourably, and dispose me to
augur ill for the benefit which Manchester or Liverpool may derive from
their visit; and of the moral status of yonder low-browed, bull-necked,
villanous-looking gentleman, who has taken a seat in a remote corner,
between two stern guardians, and who, strive as he may to pull his
coat-cuffs over his wrists, cannot conceal the presence of a pair of neat
shining handcuffs, there cannot, I perpend, exist any reasonable doubt.
But we must take the evil with the good: and we cannot expect perfection,
not even in a Parliamentary Train.
EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.—ST. JAMES’S PARK—THE MALL.
Of the great army of sightseers, there are few but have paid a visit
to Portsmouth, and, under the guidance of a mahogany-faced man in a
pea-jacket, who has invariably served in his youth as coxswain to
Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B., have perambulated from stem to stern, from
quarterdeck to kelson, that famous ship from whose signal halyards flew
out, fifty-three years since, the immortal watchword “England expects
every man to do his duty,” in Trafalgar Bay. We are (or rather were, till
the epoch of the late passport regulations and the war), an ambitious
army of sightseers in this year of questionable grace, ’59; and nothing
less would serve us then for an autumn trip than a picnic in the Street
of Tombs at Pompeii, a moonlight polka among the rank docks and charlocks
and slimy reptiles of the Roman Colosseum, a yacht voyage up the gulf of
Bothnia, or a four days’ jolting in a _telega_ from Moscow to the fair of
Nishni-Novgorod. But in the days of yore, when this old hat was new, and
Manlius was consul, and the eleven hours’ route to the Continent existed
not, we went a-gipsying in a less ostentatious manner. The Lions in the
Tower, the Horns at Highgate, the Spaniards at Hampstead, the Wandering
Minstrel at Beulah Spa; and on highdays and holidays a stage-coach
and pleasure-boat journey to Portsmouth, Southampton, Netley Abbey,
Carisbrook Castle, and the Undercliff; these filled up the simple measure
of our pleasure-gadding. We are improved now-a-days, and go the grand
tour like my lord; and are wiser, and better, and happier—of course.
When in the noble harbour of Portsmouth you have taken your wife, your
sweetheart, or your friend the intelligent foreigner, to whom you wish
to show the glories of England, and when the cicerone of the great
war-ship has told his parrot-tale about admirals’ quarter-galleries and
officers’ gun-rooms; when at last he has taken you into the cabin, and at
the back shown you the sorrowful inscription painted on the stanchion,
“HERE NELSON DIED!” did never a sudden desire come across you to be left
alone—to have the army of sight-seers banished five hundred miles away—to
be allowed to remain there in the silent cabin among the shadows, to muse
on the memory of the great dead, to conjure up mind-pictures of that
closing scene: the cannon booming overhead; the terrified surgeons with
outspread bandages, and probes, and knives, knowing that their skill was
of no avail; the burly shipmen crying like little children; and alone
tranquil and serene among that sorrowful group, peaceful as an infant in
its cradle, the Admiral, his stars and ribbons gleaming in the lantern’s
fitful rays, but never with so strong a light as the gory ghastliness of
his death wound; the brave yellow-haired Admiral, with the puny limbs
and giant’s heart, waiting to die, ready to die, happy to die, thanking
God that he had done his duty to his king, and meekly saying, “Kiss me,
Hardy.”
That inscription in the _Victory’s_ cabin has been to me the source of
meditation frequent and infinitely pleasant. I love to think, walking
in historical streets and houses, that my feet are treading over spots
where men for ever famous have left an imprint of glory. I peer into the
soil, the stones, the planks, to descry the shadowy mark of Hercules’
foot, of the iron-plated sole of the warrior, the sandalled shoon of the
saint, the dainty heel of the brocaded slipper of beauty. Every place
that history or tradition has made her own is to me a field, not of
forty, but of forty thousand footsteps; and I please myself sometimes
with futile wishes that the boundaries of these footsteps might have been
marked by plates of brass and adamant, as Nelson’s death-place is marked
on board his flagship. It were better, perhaps, to leave the exact spot
to imagination; for though I would give something to know the very window
of the Banqueting House from whence Charles Stuart came out to his death,
and the precise spot where he turned to Juxon and uttered his mysterious
injunction “Remember!” I would not care to know the particular branch of
the tree to which Judas affixed his thrice-earned halter when he hanged
himself: I could spare Mr. Dix the trouble of telling me the identical
spot on the tavern table on which the coroner laid his three-cornered
hat when he held his inquest on the worthless impostor Chatterton—a
“marvellous boy” if you will, but one who perished in his miserable folly
and forgery—and I could well exempt the legitimacy-bemused courtiers of
Louis XVIII. from perpetuating, as they did in brass, the few inches of
soil at Calais first pressed on his return to France by the foot of that
gross fat man.
There are two cities in the world, London and Paris, so full of these
footstep memories, so haunted by impalpable ghosts of the traces of
famous deeds, that locomotion, to one of my temperament, becomes a task
very slow, if not painfully difficult, of accomplishment. ’Tis a long
way from the Luxor Obelisk to the Carrousel; but it’s a week’s journey
when you feel inclined to stop at every half-dozen yards’ distance,
questioning yourself and the ministering spirits of your books, pointing
your fingers to the paving-stones, and saying—Here the guillotine stood;
here Louis died; here the daughter of Maria Theresa cast her last glance
at the cupolas of the Tuileries; here Robespierre was hooted; here
Théroigne de Méricourt was scourged; here Napoleon the Great showed
the little king of Rome to the people; here, on the great Carrousel
Place, he, arrayed in the undying gray coat and little hat, reviewed
the veterans of his guard, many and many a time at EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE
MORNING.
[Illustration: EIGHT O’CLOCK A.M.: ST. JAMES’S PARK.]
There! I have brought you round to the subject-matter of this article,
and to the complexion of “Twice Round the Clock” again; and the stroke
is, I flatter myself, felicitous—rivalling Escobar or Dom Calmet in
Jesuitry, Metternich and Menschikoff in diplomacy. You thought doubtless
that I was about to launch into an interminable digression; you may
perhaps have said, scoffingly, that Admiral Lord Nelson, K.C.B.,
Maximillien Robespierre, Charles the First’s head, and the Emperor
Napoleon’s cocked hat, could have nothing whatsoever to do with the Mall
of Saint James’s Park at eight o’clock in the morning. You are mistaken.
The allusions to memorable footsteps were all cunningly devised with a
reference to the great Field of Famous Footsteps—the Mall, which, were
the imprint of those bygone pedal pressures marked out with landmarks,
such as those in the _Victory’s_ cabin, would become a very Field of
the Cloth of Brass. And what better time can there be to muse upon the
traditional glories of the Mall and the fame of its frequenters, than
eight a.m. in sweet summer time?
I grant the clown, the dunderheaded moneyspinner who votes that books
are “rubbish,” the cobweb-brained fop who languidly declares reading
to be a “bore,” will find in the broad smooth Mall, just a Mall, broad
and smooth, and nought else—even as Peter Bell found in a primrose by
the river’s brim a yellow primrose, and nothing more. At eight o’clock
in the morning, to clown, dunderhead, and cobweb-brain, the Mall is a
short cut from Marylebone to Westminster; the water-carts are laying the
dust; mechanics are going to work; there are some government offices in
the distance; two big guns on queer-looking carriages; some scattered
children; a good many birds, making rather a disagreeable noise, in
the green trees; and a few cows being milked in a corner. But come
with me, dweller in the past, lover of ancient and pleasant memories,
hand-and-glove friend of defunct worthies, shadowy acquaintances in
ruffs and peaked beards and point lace. Let us deliver dunderhead and
cobweb-brain to the tormentors, and, sitting on a rustic bench beneath
a spreading tree, summon the Famous Footsteps; summon the dead-and-gone
walkers to pace the Mall again. Here they come! a brave gathering, a
courtly throng, a worshipful assemblage, but oft-times a motley horde
and a fantastic crew. Here is Henry the Eighth’s Mall, a park where
that disreputable monarch indulged in “the games of hare and pheasant,
partridge and heron, for his disport and pastime,” and where he had a
deer killed for the amusement of the “Embassador from Muscovie.” Here is
Saint James’s Park in the reign of clever, shrewish, cruel Queen Bess—a
park only used as an appendage to the tilt-yard and a nursery for deer:
here is the “inward park” (now the inclosure and ornamental water), into
which, so late as the commencement of Charles II.’s reign, access to the
public was denied; and where, in 1660, Master Pepys saw a man “basted”
by the keeper for carrying some people over on his back through the
water. Here is Charles II.’s famous Mall, for the first time broad and
smooth, the park planted and reformed by the celebrated French gardener,
Le Nôtre, laid out with fish-ponds and a decoy for water-fowl; the Mall
itself a vista of half a mile in length, on which the game of Pall Mall
was played, and which, always according to curious Samuel Pepys, who
“discoursed with the keeper of the Pall Mall as he was sweeping it,” was
floored with mixed earth, and over all that cockle-shells, powdered and
spread to keep it fast; which, however, in dry weather, turned to dust
and deadened the ball. In this park of Charles II. was the fantastic
little territory of Duck Island, the ground contained within the channels
of the decoy, and which London Barataria had revenues and laws and
governors appointed by the king. The Duke of Saint Simon’s friend, Saint
Evremond, was one of these governors; Sir John Flock another. Close to
Duck Island was Rosamond’s Pond, a piece of water whose name bore a dim
analogy to the _soubriquet_ with which, in later years, Waterloo Bridge
has been qualified; for it was in Rosamond’s Pond that forsaken women
came in preference, at even-song, to drown themselves. There was the
Birdcage Walk, where Mr. Edward Storey kept his Majesty’s aviary, and
dwelt in the snug little hut recently demolished, known as Storey’s Gate.
There was the Mulberry Garden, into which the river Tyburn flows, and so
into Tothill Fields and the Thames; and there was Spring Gardens, where
the beaux went to look at the citizens’ wives; and the citizens’ wives, I
hope, to drink chocolate, but I fear to look at the beaux.
But the famous footsteps? See, see in your mind’s eye, Horatio, how the
shadows of the old frequenters of the Mall come trooping along. Here
is the founder of the feast himself, King Charles the Second, witty,
worthless, and good-humoured, tramping along the broad expanse at _eight_
o’clock in the morning, to the despair of his courtiers, who liked not
walking so fast, nor getting up so early. You can’t mistake the king’s
figure; ’tis that swarthy gentleman, with the harshly-marked countenance,
the bushy eyebrows, the lively kindling gray eye, and the black suit and
perriwig. He walks a little in advance of his suite with an easy, rapid
gait, and at his heels follow a little barking multitude of dogs, black,
black and white, or black and tan, with long silky ears and feathery
tails. We may see him again, and on the Mall, but not at eight o’clock
in the morning. It is the afternoon of a July day, and a court cavalcade
comes flaunting in feathers forth from Whitehall. Here is King Charles,
but in a laced and embroidered suit, and mounted on a gaily-caparisoned
charger. He rides with his hand in that of a lady, in a white laced
waistcoat and crimson petticoat, and who, the chroniclers say, with her
hair dressed _à la negligence_, “looks mighty pretty,” but she is very
dark, and not very well favoured, and is a poor Portuguese lady who has
the misfortune to be Queen of England, and to have the merriest and the
worst husband in Europe. Here is La Belle Stuart, with her hat cocked,
and a red plume, looking, with her sweet eye, little Roman nose, and
excellent _taille_, the greatest beauty that the Clerk of the Acts ever
did see in his life. Here is Lady Castlemaine, with a yellow plume, but
in a terrible temper that the king does not take any notice of her, and
in a rage when she finds that no gentleman presses to assist her down
from her horse. Here is “our royal brother,” James Duke of York, scowling
and sulky, on his way through the Park to Hounslow, to enjoy his prime
diversion of the chase, and escorted by a party of the guards in morions
and steel corslets. Memory be good to us! how the shadows gather around!
His Highness Oliver, Lord Protector of this realm, is being borne along
the Mall in a sedan chair. He crouches uneasily in a corner of the
gilded vehicle, as though he feared that Colonel Titus might be lying
_perdu_ under the linden trees, correcting the proof sheets of “Killing
no Murder.” Sir Fopling Flutter bids his coachman take the carriage to
Whitehall, and walks over the park with Belinda. Now, years later, it is
Jonathan Swift leaving his best gown and perriwig at Mrs. Vanhomrigh’s,
then walking up the Mall, by Buckingham House, and so to Chelsea. It is
not a very well-conducted Mall just now, and Swift tells Stella that he
is obliged to come home early through the park, to avoid the Mohocks.
Now, back again, and to walk with decorous Mr. Evelyn, who is much
shocked to see Nelly Gwynne leaning over her garden wall (overhanging the
park),—she lived at 79, Pall Mall—and indulging in familiar discourse
with “Old Rowley.” Now we are in Horace Walpole’s time, and the
macaroni-cynic of Strawberry Hill is gallanting in the Mall with Lady
Caroline Petersham, and pretty Miss Beauclerc, and foolish Mrs. Sparre.
Now Lady Coventry and Walpole’s niece, Lady Waldegrave, are mobbed in
the park for being dressed in an “outlandish” fashion. Now, back and
back again; and the Duchess of Cleveland is walking across the Mall on
a dark night, pursued by three men in masks, who offer her no violence,
but curse her as the cause of England’s misery, and prophesy that she
will one day die in a ditch, like Jane Shore. Forward, hark forward, and
mad Margaret Nicholson attempts the life of George III., as he passes in
his coach through the Mall to open Parliament. Backward, and James II.
walks across the park from St. James’s, where he had slept, to Whitehall,
to be crowned. A very few years after his coronation, the Dutch Guards
of William Prince of Orange marched across from St. James’s to turn the
unlucky Stuart out of Whitehall. And now, backwards and forwards, and
forwards and backwards, the famous shadows mingle in a fantastic reel, a
mad waltz of extinct footsteps. Sir Roger de Coverley and Mr. Spectator
saunter under the limes; Beau Fielding minces by the side of Margaretta;
Beau Tibbs airs his clean linen and lackered sword hilt; Mr. Pope meets
Lady Mary’s sedan, borne by Irish chair-men—the translator of the “Iliad”
grins spitefully over his shoulder and makes faces at Lady Mary’s black
boy; Sir Plume instructs Sir John Burke in the nice conduct of a clouded
cane; Goldsmith’s good-natured man fraternises with Coleman’s “brother
who could eat beef;” Lord Fanny takes off his three-cornered hat to Mr.
Moore, the inventor of the worm powders; Partridge, the almanack maker,
discusses the motions of the heavenly bodies on the banks of Rosamond’s
Pond with Count Algarotti, and becomes so excited that he nearly adds
“one more unfortunate” to the list of Ophelias in Rosamond’s Pond, by
tumbling into the water; Alfieri meets Lord Ligonier—tells him the
measure of his sword, and makes a rendezvous with him for sunset in Hyde
Park; Lord George Gordon passes Westminster to St. James’s, followed by
a mob of yelling, screaming Protestants. Real people dispute the passage
of the Mall with imaginary personages. The encampment of ’Eighty, the
Temple of Concord, and the Humane Society’s drags, are inextricably mixed
up with scenes from Wycherley and Etherege; and pet passages from the
“Trivia” and the “Rape of the Lock.” I must bring myself back to reason
and St. James’s Park, and eight o’clock in the morning. I must deal
henceforth in realities. Here is one.
It is the morning of the 30th of January, 1649, and a King of England
walks across the frozen park, from St. James’s, where he has slept, to
Whitehall, the palace of his fathers. Armed men walk before, armed men
walk behind and around; but they are no guards of honour. They escort a
prisoner to the scaffold. The High Court of Justice has adjudged Charles
Stuart, King of England, a traitor, and has decreed that he shall be
put to death by severing his head from his body. President Bradshaw
has put off his red robe, the man without a name has put on his black
mask; the axe is sharpened, the sawdust spread, the block prepared, the
velvet-covered coffin yawns; on its lid is already the leaden plate with
the inscription, “King Charles, 1649.”
It is not my fault, dear reader, if the spot which your author and
artist to command have selected for illustration of the eighth hour
ante-meridian, be so rich in historical and literary recollections;
that we may fancy every inch of its surface trodden and re-trodden till
the very soil has sunk, by the feet of the departed great; that the
student, and the lover of old lore, must arrest himself perforce at
every tree, and evoke remembrance at every pace. And centuries hence the
Mall of St. James’s Park will be as famous to our descendants for our
deeds as it is now to us for the presence of our ancestors. Is not the
Mall yet one of the most favoured resorts of the British aristocracy?
Do not the carriages of the nobility and gentry rattle over its broad
bosom to dinner parties, to opera, to concerts, and to balls? We have
seen their chariot lamps a hundred times—we humble pedestrians and
plebeians—gleaming among the tufted trees, wills-o’-the-wisp of Belgravia
and Tyburnia. Is not St. James’s Park bounded now as then by high and
mighty buildings: War Office, Admiralty, Stationery Office, Barracks?
Do not the Duke of York’s steps lead from the Duke of York’s column,
between two _corps de logis_, one occupied by wings—ethereal wings,
though made of brick and stucco, of the House of Carlton, the abode
of George the Great (the great Fritz was called “_der grosse_”) of
England? And the Mall itself? Is it not overlooked by Stafford House,
the palatial; by Marlborough House, the vast and roomy, once sacred to
the memory of the victor of Ramilies and of “Old Sarah!” but now given
up to some people called artists, connected with something called the
English school, and partially used as a livery and bait stable for the
late Duke of Wellington’s funeral car, with its sham trophies and sham
horses? Does not a scion of royalty, no other than his Royal Highness the
Duke of Cambridge, frequently condescend to walk from his lodgings in the
Stable-yard, Saint James’s, across the park to those Horse Guards, whose
affairs he administers with so much ability and success? And, finally,
at the western extremity of the Mall, and on the side where once was the
Mulberry Garden, stands there not now a palace, huge in size, clumsy in
its proportions, grotesque in decoration, mean in gross, frivolous in
detail, infinitely hideous in its general appearance, but above whose
ugly roof floats that grandest and noblest of all banners, the Royal
Standard of England, and whose walls, half hospital, half barrack, as
they remind us of, are hallowed as being part of Buckingham Palace, the
abode of our good, and true, and dear Queen? She lives at the top of the
Mall. She comes out by times on the Mall, in her golden coach, with the
eight cream-coloured horses; her darling little daughter passed along
the Mall to be married; let us hope, and heartily, to see more sons and
daughters yet riding to their weddings through that field of famous
footsteps. Let us hope that we may live to throw up our caps, and cry God
bless them!
Great lords and ladies sweep the Mall no more with hoops and flowing
trains of brocaded paduasoy, nor jingle on the gravel with silver spurs,
nor crunch the minute pebbles with red heels. Broughams and chariots now
convey the salt ones of the earth to their grand assemblies and solemn
merry-makings; and the few aristocrats who may yet pedestrianise within
the precincts, are so plainly attired that you would find it difficult
to distinguish them from plain Brown or Jones walking from Pimlico to
Charing Cross. His Royal Highness strides over from the Stable-yard to
the Horse Guards in a shooting-jacket and tweed trousers, and in wet
weather carries an umbrella. Nay, I have seen another Royal Highness—a
bigger Royal Highness, so to speak, for he is consort to the Queen—riding
under the trees of the Mall on a quiet bay, and dressed in anything but
the first style of fashion. Were it not _scandalum magnatum_ even to
think such a thing, I should say that his Royal Highness’s coat was seedy.
At this early eight o’clock in the morningtide, see—an exception to the
rule, however—perambulating the Mall, a tremendous “swell.” No fictitious
aristocrat, no cheap dandy, no Whitechapel buck or Bermondsey exquisite,
no apprentice who has been to a masquerade disguised as a gentleman, can
this be. Aristocracy is imprinted on every lineament of his moustached
face, in every crease of his superb clothes, in each particular horsehair
of his flowing plume. He is a magnificent creature, over six feet in
height, with a burnished helmet, burnished boots, burnished spurs,
burnished sabre, burnished cuirass—burnished whiskers and moustache.
He shines all over, like a meteor, or a lobster which has been kept
a _little_ too long, in a dark room. He is young, brave, handsome,
and generous; he is the delight of Eaton Square, the cynosure of the
Castor and Pollux Club, the idol of the corps de ballet of her Majesty’s
Theatre, the pet of several most exclusive Puseyite circles in Tyburnia,
the mirror of Tattersall’s, the pillar and patron of Jem Bundy’s ratting,
dog-showing, man-fighting, horse-racing, and general sporting house, in
Cat and Fiddle Court, Dog and Duck Lane, Cripplegate. Cruel country,
cruel fate, that compel Lieutenant Algernon Percy Plantagenet, of the
Royal Life Guards, the handsomest man in his regiment, and heir to £9,000
a year, to be mounting guard at eight o’clock in the morning! He is
mounting guard at present by smoking a cigar (one of Milo’s best) on the
Mall. By and by he will go into his barrack-room and draw caricatures in
charcoal on the whitewashed wall. He will smoke a good deal, yawn a good
deal, and whistle a good deal during the day, and will give a few words
of command. For you see, my son, that we must all earn our bread by the
sweat of our brow, and that the career even of a Plantagenet, with £9,000
a year, is not, throughout, a highway of rose-leaves!