had been opened to the people by King Charles--had been sold and
divided under Cromwell, ‘James’s Park’ was preserved. The latter was
open only to members of Cromwell’s court and to a few other privileged
persons who lived in Petty France, on the south-east side of the
park. Milton was one of these. Later on a wider permission was given.
Commonwealth ladies ruffled it there, and Cromwell himself paced it
in serious converse with serious men. His wife kept her cows there,
and talked of them with mild congenial spirits. With Charles II. came
courtiers, swains, nymphs, lovers. Some took the Mall, and practised
gallantry openly; others--_chacun avec sa chacune_--resorted to the
welcome shades round Rosamond’s Pond, in the south-west corner of the
park. Under the elms in what is now Pall Mall, or under the limes
which skirted the Mall in the park, all that was gay, and light, and
frivolous, frisked and frolicked; but thoughtful men threaded their
way among them too, and shook their heads at much which some people
would have shut their eyes at. Charles, standing under the park wall
to exchange light talk with Nell Gwynne, who looked down and laughed
upon him from her garden on the other side, was a sight which made
Evelyn groan aloud. It was a type of the general naughtiness which
prevailed. Half the graceless fops and hussies of the comedy of the
period play out their impudent drama in St. James’s Park. In the
comedies of that time the manners of people of quality are reflected.
As has been remarked, how they dressed, talked, and thought; what they
did, and how they did it; what they hoped for, and how they pursued
it: all may be learnt from contemporary comedy. We fully agree with
the judgment which says of the personages, that the fine gentlemen are
such unmitigated rascals, and the women, girls, and matrons are such
unlovely hussies--in rascality and unseemliness quite a match for the
men--that one escapes from their wretched society, and a knowledge
of their one object, and the confidences of the abominable creatures
engaged therein, with a feeling of strong want of purification and of
that ounce of civet by which the imagination may be sweetened.
With all this there was a leaven of what was respectable or harmless.
Charles himself may not seem heroic, but he is at least harmless as we
see him, playing with his dogs, feeding his various birds, large and
small, in Birdcage Walk, or walking to Whitehall, looking fresh from
the dip we are told he had just taken in the canal. Occasionally a
thief who admired the king’s breed of puppies would steal a favourite
as it trotted at the very heels of majesty. ‘Will they never leave
robbing his Majesty?’ is the query at the close of an advertisement,
the opening of which implies how often the king was despoiled: ‘We must
call upon you again for a black dog,’ &c.
When we remember that Charles often walked alone in both the parks, and
that plotters were abroad, we may wonder that he was never molested by
anyone worse than an enthusiast. It was a time when promenading ladies
in the park took no offence at being accosted by gentlemen who were
strangers. On the other hand, ladies saw nothing wrong in taking with
them, in their drives in Hyde Park, some handsome boy who acted as
girl on the stage, or walking with him in the Mall in his histrionic
costume. The great glory of St. James’s was during Charles II.’s reign.
His figure always has the park for a background. When he passed away
the park was seldom visited by a sovereign; but William occasionally
shut himself up on Duck Island, and smoked his pipe as he sat amid
the all but stagnant waters. When the seventeenth century closed St.
James’s belonged to the public, the lower classes of which went thither
to contemplate the leaders of fashion and the gaudiest flowers of
husseydom.
In the last century it was ‘the thing’ for promenaders in Hyde Park
to gaze through the railings, and watch Queen Anne and her ladies
airing their nobility within Kensington Gardens. The most important
park incident of that Queen’s reign was the murderous duel between
the Tory Duke of Hamilton and the Whig Lord Mohun. Their quarrel was
personal and political, and it was embittered by a question as to right
of property. On a gloomy November morning of 1712 they fought with
swords, before it was quite daylight, and with such ferocity--hacking
and rolling over each other on the ground--that, when Mohun dealt the
Duke a mortal stab he himself fell dead on the grass. All the world
went in crowds to the spot, to moralise, eat cakes, drink ale, and cut
poor jokes on the scene of the butchery. No other park duel of the
last century was so sanguinary. It was there that Martin, M.P. for
Camelford, nearly killed Wilkes by shooting him through and through.
‘It would have been all over with me,’ said Wilkes, ‘only that Martin
used government powder.’ It was in Hyde Park that George Garrick and
Baddeley went out to pistol one another at instigation of a Jewish
lover of Mrs. Baddeley, who hoped that George would kill the lady’s
husband; but the affair ended by the parties dining together. A later
fight was more serious; it occurred in December 1773. One Hugh
Williamson managed to steal the despatches sent by the governors of the
American colonies to Whately, one of the under-secretaries in England.
Dr. Franklin received the stolen property, and sent the documents to
America, where their publication caused the greatest indignation.
Whately’s brother, a banker, expressed his suspicion of an American,
one Temple, being the thief. Temple called Whately out, and the two
pelted each other with shot, and then hacked and thrust at each other
with swords, till Whately was removed in an almost dying state. At that
time neither the thief nor the receiver was known. It was not till
after the fight that Franklin acknowledged that he was the receiver,
and it was not till much later that Hugh Williamson was discovered to
be the thief. In 1780 the popular Lord Shelburne was hit in the groin
in a duel with Colonel Fullarton, of whom, as an _attaché_ to the
English Embassy in Paris, the minister had spoken with great contempt.
The City of London sent every day a ‘How d’ye do?’ to the leader of the
Opposition. Subsequently parsons were not ashamed to do their bit of
murder here, or run the risk of being murdered by another. Parson Bate
fought his co-proprietor of the ‘Morning Post’ without much harm to
either; and Parson Allen stretched his man, Dulany, dead on the turf.
For this feat he suffered half-a-year’s imprisonment in Newgate. But
this penalty did not prevent the Hon. Cosmo Gordon from killing Colonel
Thomas on the same spot, nor weaken the arm of General Stewart in
running his sword into Lord Macartney. When people of quality thought
butchering one another a salve for wounded honour, fools of lower
degree soon followed the example. In June, 1792, one Frizell, weary
of a night’s debauch with other Irish law students, was sarcastically
rebuked for his comparative sobriety by his friend Clarke. The whole
party resorted to Hyde Park, in the beautiful summer dawn, to settle
the question with pistols. In five minutes poor Frizell was lying stark
dead among the buttercups and daisies. His tipsy companions tumbled
the body into a hackney-coach, which was afterwards found standing
in Piccadilly, without coachman or any passenger except the dead law
student, who was beyond giving any account of himself. In August,
1796, Mr. Pride, an American, killed his countryman, Mr. Carpenter, in
the park. In 1797 Colonel King exchanged six shots ineffectually with
Colonel Fitzgerald, a married man, from whom King had only recently
recovered his sister whom Fitzgerald had seduced from her home. Some
time after this duel in the park Fitzgerald went over to Kilworth,
Ireland, in order to gain possession again of the unhappy young lady.
Her brother, who had become Lord Kingsborough, broke into Fitzgerald’s
room for the purpose of chastising him. He would probably have been
slain by the stalwart ruffian but for the timely arrival of his
father, the Earl of Kingston, who, seeing his son’s danger, fired at
Fitzgerald, and killed the rascal on the spot.
But people found life in Hyde Park as well as death. Frost could not
keep them from it in February, nor dust and heat in June. Fashion rode
round and round the Ring, as equestrians do in a circus, to attract
the admiration of spectators. Since hackney-coaches had been forbidden
to enter the park, at the close of William’s reign, because their
crowded inmates used to indulge in loud and rude comments on such
public characters as passed them, the place had become more delightful
to exclusive fashionables. Rogues and hussies, however, had the most
dashing equipages. Camps and reviews--particularly in the Jacobite
period--varied the grand spectacle; and there were crowds who went,
as to a festival, to see a soldier nearly flogged to death or shot
outright. The fine people, with less curiosity, walked meanwhile,
with well-bred indifference, beneath the five rows of walnut trees
which flourished there till 1814, when, by the exigencies of war, they
were all cut down to be converted into gun-stocks. After the West
Bourn was converted into the ‘Serpentine River,’ by order of Queen
Caroline, there was boating on it, as now, but the yachts were ‘for
the diversion of the royal family.’ That good queen, having taken
300 acres of the park, added them to Kensington Gardens. The good
lady would fain have undone the gracious act of Charles I., and would
have made the parks private; but she changed her mind on hearing the
probable cost: Walpole estimated it at _three crowns_. The roads at
this time were a disgrace to the authorities; and when ducal carriages
broke down in the ruts, and commonplace chariots drove through the
panels behind which royalty was seated, the public were comforted, for
they thought that improvement must ensue. Gallantry, meanwhile, did
not care for roads. The sight of Molly Nisbett’s ankle, as she walked
by the Serpentine, so moved Lord Macclesfield’s heart that he ‘fell in
love’ with her, as the phrase goes; but happening to meet her sister
Dorothy when he expected to meet Molly, he fell still more in love with
_her_, and at last married her. Walpole epigrammatically says that the
Countess Dolly was my lord’s mistress--or at least other people’s.
Just a hundred and eleven years ago, George II. reviewed, in the park,
Colonel Burgoyne’s troop of light horse; and the Colonel’s son, Sir
John Burgoyne, died only recently, in his ninetieth year. The review
was as nothing compared with a spectacle afforded at a later period
by the Ranger of the park, Lord Orford, who drove a four-in-hand of
reindeer instead of horses. Deer-hunting in the park by the royal
family and privileged persons was not uncommon as late as the latter
half of the last century. There, too, might be seen, on his little
Welsh pony, great Chatham--he who first called the parks the ‘lungs of
London.’ Ugly Wilkes there found willing listeners among the handsomest
of women. The beaux about to make the _grand tour_ took leave of home
by a display in the park, and probably dined with the Sçavoir Vivre
Club, partaking of their favourite dish, from which beaux generally
acquired the name of ‘macaronies.’ The headdresses of the latter were
something like those of women very recently, and were almost as nasty.
The women of that day sailed through the park in head-gear that made
them look top-heavy, and long skirts which might be described in the
words which Scripture applies to the skirts of Jerusalem. Thieves of
every degree were busy among the thoughtless crowd; but gentlemanly
young fellows would gallantly protect strange young ladies across the
park when it grew dusk, and strip them of everything valuable before
they were half across it. A detected thief, however, might think
himself lucky if he escaped undrowned from the Serpentine water and
unsuffocated from the Serpentine mud. Other dangers came from the park.
Rifle practice went on there very actively--so actively that at last
the landlord of the King’s Arms, Paddington, naturally complained at
a ball, intended for the target, having crashed through his windows,
and lodged in the wood of one of the boxes in his tap-room. At this
exercise and at the reviews, the belles of the day used to muster in
Amazonian uniforms corresponding with those of the regiments they
intended to compliment. Blind Lord Derehurst used to ride through the
old grass-road full gallop, but with a friend at his side, whereby he
once came into collision with a furious rider who _could_ see his way.
Both were half killed by the shock; but when the blind lord recovered
the use of his limbs he terrified everybody by galloping about the park
more furiously than ever. When the men took to four-in-hand driving
it was done with a perfection which may be still equalled, but also
with a splendour of appointments which is not followed. The ladies,
too, took up the reins, and condescended even ‘to whistle sweet their
diuretic strains.’ The lady drivers had above a fifty years’ reign,
from the days of Young’s Delia, who, in 1728, smacked the silken thong,
‘graceful as Jehu,’ to the period when Lady Archer ‘tooled’ her four
white horses through the park, and Mrs. Gordon, in 1783, drove her
phaeton and bays almost as rashly as Phaeton himself drove his father’s
chariot and broke down before he got to the end of his course.
In the last century, while the charioteers exhibited themselves in
Hyde Park, the promenaders took possession of that part of St. James’s
known as the Mall. Along a portion of the road, Charles I., had walked
his dolorous way to the scaffold at Whitehall; but he walked it like a
true gentleman. The gay throng that succeeded remembered little of that
King, in connection with the Park. They had lighter things to think
of. At one time the scene was as animated as that of Venice in the old
Carnival time, especially as long as visor-masks were in fashion. The
Mall was the first place in which a newly-appointed chaplain to a lord
fluttered his new black silk scarf, the sign and symbol of his dignity.
His quality was known by the flag he hung out. The scarf had just
been handed to him by my lord’s butler, who kept one or two samples
of the article by him, ready to be delivered to any new chaplain
named by my lord, in return for which the reverend gentleman was
expected to drop into the butler’s hand at least a half-guinea. Even
young officers in the Mall had little, if any, advantage of the young
chaplain, as long as his scarf bore its new lustre, and his address
had the necessary audacity. Old and young men of pleasure lounged in
the Mall and idled in the chocolate houses. The ladies were there in
beautiful, patched, painted, and scented crowds, the soft evening hours
being their particular season. They criticised each other, and each
admired herself. There Prior took the air to make himself fat, and
Swift to make himself thin. There were walks to suit all tastes. That
by Rosamond’s Pond for lovers, sentimental persons, and elegiac poets.
The Green Walk had its scandal-mongers and beaux with their hats,
not on their heads, but under their arms. Now and then a French or a
Frenchified fop was to be seen, as Tom Brown has etched him, with both
his hands in his pockets, carrying all his plaited coat before to show
his silk breeches. Other figures grouped in the park picture included
senators talking, or seeming to talk, of state affairs; milk-people
crying ‘A can of milk, ladies! a can of red cow’s milk, sir!’ St.
James’s Park had also its Close Walk, at the head of Rosamond’s
Pond, in the south-west corner of the park. This got the name of the
Jacobites’ Walk before there was one in Hyde Park. It was the resort
of Tories in the latter years of William’s reign, whereas the Jacobite
Walk in Hyde Park was the favourite conversing ground of the friends
of the old and young Pretenders. The park was manifestly losing its
fashionable aspect when Warburton ridiculed, while pretending to
praise it. What could be more pastoral than the cows and milk-women
near Spring Gardens? Comedy, Farce, Satire, were in all the walks.
Rosamond’s Pond was the resource of hearts ill at ease. Madrigals and
sonnets might best be composed in Birdcage Walk. Georgics and didactic
poetry would find inspiration on Duck Island, for which, however,
Warburton gives the very poor reason, that ‘the governor of it, Stephen
Duck, can both instruct our friend (Mason) in the breed of the wild
fowl and lend him of his genius to sing their generations.’ St. James’s
has grown common, without lacking any people of the high quality that
used to gather there in animated groups. King Charles loitered there
for hours amid his birds, to the great delight of the crowds who
watched him, killing time. Queen Caroline, George II.’s queen, would
fain have had the park to herself, as Elizabeth had, but failing that,
she only visited it in her sedan. But where those great personages
tarried, for pleasure, personages equally great only hurry along, bent
on business. A sovereign drives in the centre of the Mall, to open or
close Parliament, or passes along the side of it on her way to hold a
levee. But even this is a rare sight now. As for peers and senators of
less degree, whichever way they go, they seem bent upon getting out of
the park in the quickest way possible.
On the other hand, it is and almost always has been the business
of pleasure-seekers to linger in Hyde Park. They go thither with
alacrity; tarry with delight; wend their way homeward with regret,
and return to the park with renewed zest. It has ever been so. The
last century ended a long season of park joys; the present century
added to them. People of the highest rank took the dust there, and
seemed to enjoy it. The park had not been desecrated in their eyes
by footmen fighting duels in it, like their masters. Ladies, indeed,
not nicer than jockeys, were lauded for nothing but their riding.
One Amazon of the Row was complimented by being likened to Diana, in
everything but chastity. The greatest beau of the park at the end of
the last century was also the greatest, among a hundred eccentrics,
long after the beginning of this: namely, Beau Brummell. He is more
familiar to us than Colonel Hanger, who spent 900_l._ a year on his
dress--if he really paid his tailor. Republican France influenced Hyde
Park to this extent, that ladies were nearest the French fashion who
wore the least amount of dress. They needed only to show their faces
to be the most attractive, as was often told them, but they heeded it
not, except when they mounted the box to drive four in hand, and even
then they looked as much like young coachmen as dress could make them.
For years, on succeeding Sundays, Martin Von Butchell, the eccentric
doctor, was there, beard and all, on his painted pony, a very good
advertisement for the doctor. When death overtook the old man, who had
an idea he was immortal, he was more missed than Romeo Coates, with
his lofty phaeton, in shape and colour of a sea-shell, and his crest
of a cock, with its motto, ‘While I live I’ll crow.’ The park, without
Von Butchell and his variously painted pony, may be compared to the
Haymarket stage without Compton.
All sorts of oddities were to be seen there, on the old-fashioned
Sundays. A Polish countess proved to be a Drury Lane ballet-girl;
a magnificent lady turned out to be a lady’s maid; and real ladies
stooped to copy the fashions set by the counterfeits. But space fails
to permit us to do more than refer to the dainty Petersham, the curled
Geramb, the Four-in-hand and the Tandem clubs, the dandies who ruled
when the _men_ were at the wars, and the men who came back with the
Don Cossacks and the allied sovereigns, and showed themselves in Hyde
Park, as a proof that heroes were again upon the throne of fashion.
The throne still exists and a full and splendid gathering is around
it, on court days. In its way, Hyde Park is one of the most attractive
of sights, when the season is at its brightest, and the Somebodies
are there, with their kinsfolk eager to admire and imitate them. From
royalty downwards, indeed, every class is to be seen in that moving
panorama. Princes and mechanics, princesses and flower-girls, every
grade is there, and not the least remarkable are those Anonymas, who
dress with such exquisite propriety lest they should be mistaken for
modest women.
_SOME SCOTSWOMEN._
In the poetry of no nation are the ‘lasses’ more exquisitely courted
than in that of Scotland. But old women, with one or two exceptions
only, come off with ungallant treatment. This incivility may perhaps
have been born of the suspicion that old women had a strong tendency
towards growing into witches. On the other hand, witchery was common
enough with the younger wenches. There are few things more remarkable
in social history than the existence of women in Scotland who professed
to be witches, and the cruel punishments inflicted, not only on women
who were professed, but on those also who were suspected witches.
There was a grossly immoral side to this story, and the immorality was
just the attractive part to individuals who could but practise it under
the character of warlocks and witches. The latter, combined with the
devil, established a reign of licentiousness in spite of all laws. We
believe that the women and the devil did really, in a certain sense,
come together, that is, in some cases. The fiend usually went abroad by
night. He had a strong kindness for young witches only. Take all as
merely human elements, and we know what wicked human nature could make
of them. It cannot be doubted that many a licentious scoundrel passed
himself off as the devil, and promised supernatural powers to all young
witches who would obey him. Hallucinations would come of it; and desire
to be witches, with power to severely punish all enemies, would spread
among people of diseased minds. The fact that this devil was a worse
sort of Don Giovanni, a hard drinker, and that he often piped while the
young witches danced, in cutty sarks, or without sarks at all, were
circumstances which tend to show a depraved humanity taking advantage
of a humanity too weak to resist. Moreover, generally speaking, the
devil had little regard for old witches. Nevertheless, these hags
sometimes went to the stake asserting their might of sorcery. When
they recanted, or urged their complete guiltlessness, they were not
believed. In some instances they were proud of belonging to the Amazons
of Hell.
The supernatural hags were long in dying out. Even Norna of the
Fitful Head was not the last of the mystic queens of storm and rulers
of the winds. _’Tis sixty years since_, and a woman was then living
in Stromness, an old weird woman, who sold winds to mariners at a
remarkably low figure. For the small charge of sixpence, ‘awfu’
Bessie Miller’ would sell a wind to a skipper from any point of the
compass he chose to have it. One relic of youthful beauty added dread
fascination to this storm-witch. The bright blue eyes, that in their
time had been the lode-stars of many a laddie’s heart, were bright and
blue as ever. All else was old age in its most withered aspect, and the
eyes were as two dazzling lights in a skull. The calm or storm vendors
have ceased to be; but in the Orkneys there are old women who still
earn an ‘honest penny’ by controlling nature; there is not a pain--from
the first that a child can cause, to the last a mortal endures in
getting well-rid of his mortality--but these crones profess to relieve.
We learn too, on competent authority, that old Orkney women still
retain an unaccountable aversion to turbot, and avoid naming it when
crossing sounds and bays in boats.