SOMERSET HOUSE.
“And every day there passes by my side,
Up to its western reach, the London tide--
The spring tides of the term. My front looks down
On all the pride and business of the town;
My other fair and more majestic face
For ever gazes on itself below,
In the best mirror that the world can show.”
COWLEY.
That ambitious and rapacious noble the Protector Somerset, brother of
Queen Jane Seymour, and maternal uncle of Edward VI., the owner of more
than two hundred manors,[96] and who boasted that his own friends and
retainers made up an army of ten thousand men, determined to build a
palace in the Strand. For this purpose he demolished the parish church of
St. Mary, and pulled down the houses of the Bishops of Worcester,
Llandaff, and Lichfield. He also began to remove St. Margaret’s, at
Westminster, for building materials, till his masons were driven away by
rioters. He destroyed a chapel in St. Paul’s Churchyard, with a cloister
containing the “Dance of Death,” and a charnel-house, the bones of which
he buried in unconsecrated ground,[97] and finally stole the stones of the
church of St. John of Jerusalem, near Smithfield,[98] and those of Strand
Inn (belonging to the Temple), where Occleve the poet, a contemporary of
Gower and Chaucer, had studied law.
The unwise Protector determined in this building to rival Whitehall and
Hampton Court. It was begun probably about 1549, and no doubt remained
unfinished at his death. He had at that time lavished on it £50,000 of our
present money.
The architect was John of Padua,[99] Henry VIII.’s architect, who built
Longleat, in Wiltshire, the seat of the Marquis of Bath, a magnificent
specimen of the Italian-Elizabethan style, and also the gates of Caius
College, at Cambridge. The Protector is said to have spent at one time
£100 a day in building, every stone he laid bringing him nearer to his own
narrow home. A plan of the house is still preserved in the Soane
Museum.[100]
After the attainder of the duke, when the new palace became the property
of the crown, little was done to complete the building. The screen
prepared for the hall was bought for St. Bride’s, where it was probably
destroyed in the Great Fire.[101] The Protector was a good friend to the
people, but he was weak and ambitious, and the plotters of Ely House had
no difficulty in dragging him to the scaffold. The minority of Edward
brought many of the Strand noblemen to the axe, but the fate of the
admiral and his brother did not deter their neighbours Northumberland,
Raleigh, Norfolk, and Essex.
Elizabeth granted the keeping of Somerset House to her faithful cousin
Lord Hunsdon, for life,[102] and here she frequently would visit him, in a
jewelled farthingale, with Raleigh and Essex in her train.
In 1616 that Scotch Solomon, James I., commanded the place to be called
Denmark House; and his queen kept her gay and not very decent court here,
so that Ben Jonson must have often seen his glorious masques acted in this
palace, to which his coadjutor Inigo Jones built a chapel, and made other
additions. Anne of Denmark and her maids-of-honour kept up here a
continual masquerade,[103] appearing in various dresses, and transforming
themselves to the delight of all whose interest it was to be delighted.
Here too that impetuous queen, Henrietta Maria, resided with her wilful
and extravagant French household, whose insolence irritated and disgusted
the people and offended Charles the First. The king at last, losing
patience, summoned them together one evening and dismissed them all. They
behaved like sutlers at the sack of a town. They claimed fictitious debts;
they invented exorbitant bills; they greedily divided among each other the
queen’s wardrobe and jewels, scarcely leaving her a change of linen. The
king paid nearly £50,000 to get rid of them; Madame St. George alone
claiming several thousand pounds besides jewels.[104] They still delayed
their departure; on which the king, at last roused, wrote the following
imperative letter to Buckingham:--
“STEENIE--I have received your letter by Dick Greame. This is my
answer. I command you to send all the French away to-morrow out of the
town, if you can by fair means (but stick not long in disputing),
otherways force them away--driving them away like so many wild beasts
until ye have shipped them; and the devil go with them. Let me hear no
answer, but of the performance of my command. So I rest
“Your faithful, constant, loving friend,
“C. R.
“Oaking, the seventh of August, 1626.”
As the French invented all sorts of vexatious delays, the yeomen of the
guard at last jostled them out, carting them off in nearly forty coaches.
They arrived at Dover after four days’ tedious travelling, wrangling, and
bewailing. The squib did not burn out without one final detonation. As the
vivacious Madame St. George stepped into the boat, with perhaps some
insolent gesture of adieu, a man in the mob flung a stone at her French
cap. A gallant Englishman who was escorting her instantly quitted his
charge, ran the fellow through the body, and returned to the boat. The man
died on the spot, but no notice, it appears, was taken of the murderer.
In Somerset House, at the Christmas masque of 1632-3, Charles’s
high-spirited queen took part for the last time in a masque. Unfortunately
for Prynne, the next day out came his _Histriomastix_, with a scurrilous
marginal note, “Women actors notorious whores!” for which the stubborn
fanatic lost his ears.
Queen Henrietta had, in Somerset House, an ostentatiously magnificent
Catholic chapel built by Inigo Jones, which became the scene of spectacles
that were gall and wormwood to the Puritans, who were already couching for
their spring.
Their time came in March 1643, when Roundheads, grimly rejoicing, burnt
all the pictures, images, Jesuitical books, and tapestry.[105]
Five of the unhappy queen’s French Roman Catholic servants are entombed in
the cellars of the present building, under the great quiet square.[106]
Here, close to his own handiwork, that distinguished architect, Inigo
Jones, who had lodgings in the palace, died in 1652.
About the same time the House of Peers permitted the Protestant service to
be held in Somerset House instead of in Durham House. This drove out the
Quakers and Anabaptists, and prevented the pulling down of the palace and
the making of a street from the garden through the chapel and back-yard up
into the Strand.[107]
The Protector’s palace was the scene of a great and sad event in November
1658; for the body of Cromwell, who had died at Whitehall, lay in state
here for several days. He lay in effigy on a bed of royal crimson velvet,
covered with a velvet gown, a sceptre in his hand, and a crown upon his
head. The Cavaliers, whose spirits were recovering, were very angry at
this foolish display,[108] forgetting that it was not poor Oliver’s own
doing; and the baser people, who follow any impulse of the day, threw dirt
in the night upon the blazoned escutcheon that was displayed over the
great gate of Somerset House.
The year after, an Act was passed to sell all royal property, and Somerset
House was disposed of for £10,000. The Restoration soon stepped in and
annulled the bargain. After the return of the son who so completely
revenged upon us the death of his father, the luckless palace became the
residence of its former inhabitant, now older and gentler--the
queen-mother. She improved and beautified it. The old courtier, Waller,
only fifty-seven at the time, wrote some fulsome verses on the occasion.
He talks of her adorning the town as with a brave revenge, to show--
“That glory came and went with you.”
He mentions also the view from the palace:--
“The fair view her window yields,
The town, the river, and the fields.”
Cowley, the son of a Fleet Street grocer, flew still higher, larded his
flattery with perverted texts, like a Puritanised Cavalier time-server,
and wrote--
“On either side dwells Safety and Delight;
Wealth on the left and Power sits on the right.”
In May 1665, when the queen-mother, who had lived in Somerset House with
her supposed husband, the Earl of St. Albans, took her farewell of England
for a gayer court, Cowley wrote these verses to the setting sun, in hopes
to propitiate the rising sun; for here, too, lived Catherine of Braganza,
the unhappy wife of Charles II.
There were strange scenes at Somerset House even during the queen-mother’s
residence, for the old court gossip Pepys describes being taken one day to
the Presence-chamber.[109] He found the queen not very charming, but still
modest and engaging. Lady Castlemaine was there, Mr. Crofts, a pretty
young spark of fifteen (her illegitimate child), and many great ladies. By
and by in came the king and the Duke and Duchess of York. The conversation
was not a very decorous one; and the young queen said to Charles, “You
lie!” which made good sport, as the chuckling and delighted Pepys remarks,
those being the first English words he had heard her say; and the king
then tried to make her reply, “Confess and be hanged.”
In another place Pepys indignantly describes “a little proud, ugly,
talkative lady crying up the queen-mother’s court as more decorous than
the king’s;” yet the diary-keeper confesses that the former was the better
attended, the old nobility dreading, I suppose, the scandal of
Whitehall.[110]
In 1670 Monk, Duke of Albemarle, having died at his lodgings in the
Cockpit, at Whitehall, lay in state in Somerset House, and was afterwards
buried with almost regal pomp in Henry VII.’s Chapel.
In October 1678, the infamous devisers of the Popish plot connected
Somerset House and the attendants in the Queen’s Chapel with the murder of
a City magistrate, the supposed Protestant martyr, Sir Edmondbury Godfrey,
who was found murdered in a field near Primrose Hill, “between Kilburn and
Hampstead,” as it was then thought necessary to specify. The lying
witnesses, Prance and Bedloe, swore that the justice had been inveigled
into Somerset House under pretence of being wanted to keep the peace
between two servants who were fighting in the yard; that he was then
strangled, his neck broken, and his own sword run through his body. The
corpse was kept four days, then carried in a sedan-chair to Soho, and
afterwards on a horse to Primrose Hill, nearly three miles off. The
secrecy and convenient neighbourhood of the river for hiding a murdered
man seem never to have struck the rogues, who forgot even to “lie like
truth,” so credulous and excited was the multitude.
Waller, says Aubrey, though usually very temperate, was once made drunk at
Somerset House by some courtiers, and had a cruel fall when taking boat at
the water stairs, “’Twas a pity to use such a sweet man so
inhumanly.”[111] Saville used to say that “nobody should keep him company
without drinking but Mr. Waller.”
In 1692 that poor ill-used woman and unhappy wife, Catherine of Braganza,
left Somerset House, and returned thence to Portugal, the home of her
happy childhood and happier youth.
The palace, never the home of very happy inmates, then became a lodging
for foreign kings and ambassadors, and a home for a few noblemen and poor
retainers of the court, much as Hampton Court is now. Lewis de Duras, Earl
of Feversham, the incompetent commander at Sedgemoor, who lies buried at
the Savoy, lived here in 1708; and so did Lady Arlington, the widow of
Secretary Bennet, that butt of Killigrew and Rochester. In the reign of
George III., Charlotte Lennox, the authoress of the _Female Quixote_, had
apartments in Somerset House.
Houses, like men, run their allotted courses. In 1775 the old palace,
which had been settled on the queen-consort in the event of her surviving
the king, was exchanged for Buckingham House; and the Government instantly
began to pull down the river-side palace, and erect new public offices
designed by Sir William Chambers, a Scotch architect, who had given
instruction in his art to George III., when Prince of Wales.
In 1630, a row of fishmongers’ stalls, in the middle of the street, over
against Denmark House (Somerset House), was broken down by order of
Government to prevent stalls from growing into sheds, and sheds into
dwelling houses, as had been the case in Old Fish Street, Saint Nicholas
Shambles, and other places.[112]
On the 2d of February, 1659-60, Pepys tells us in his diary, that having
£60 with him of his lord’s money, on his way from London Bridge, and
hearing the noise of guns, he landed at Somerset House, and found the
Strand full of soldiers. Going upstairs to a window, Pepys looked out and
saw the foot face the horse and beat them back, all the while bawling for
a free parliament and money. By and by a drum was heard to sound a march
towards them, and they all got ready again, but the new comers proving of
the same mind, they “made a great deal of joy to see one another.”[113]
This was the beginning of Monk’s change, for the king returned in the
following May. On the 18th of February two soldiers were hanged opposite
Somerset House for a mutiny, of which Pepys was an eye-witness.
The prints of old Somerset House show a long line of battlemented wall
facing the river, and a turreted and partially arcaded front. There is
also a scarce view of the place by Hollar.[114] The river front has two
porticos. The chapel is to the left, and near it are the cloisters of the
Capuchins. The bowling-green seems to be to the right, between the two
rows of trees. The garden is formal. The royal apartments were on the
river side. The only memorial left of the outhouses of the old palace was
the sign of a lion in the wall of a house in the Strand, that is mentioned
in old records.[115]
Dryden describes his two friends, Eugenius and Neander, landing at
Somerset Stairs, and gives us a pleasant picture of the summer evening,
the water on which the moonbeams played looked like floating quicksilver,
and some French people dancing merrily in the open air as the friends walk
onwards to the Piazza.[116]
Of the old views of Somerset House, that of Moss is considered the best.
There is also an early and curious one by Knyff. A picture in Dulwich
Gallery (engraved by Wilkinson) represents the river front before Inigo
Jones had added a chapel for the queen of Charles I.[117]
Sir William Chambers built the present Somerset House. The old palace,
when the clearance for the demolition began, presented a singular
spectacle.[118] At the extremity of the royal apartments two large
folding-doors joined Inigo Jones’s additions to John of Padua’s work. They
opened into a long gallery on the first floor of the water garden wing, at
the lower end of which was another gallery, making an angle which formed
the original river front, and extended to Strand Lane. This old part had
been long shut up, and was supposed to be haunted. The gallery was
panelled and floored with oak. The chandelier chains still hung from the
stucco ceilings. The furniture of the royal apartment was removed into
lumber-rooms by the Royal Academy. There were relics of a throne and
canopy; the crimson velvet curtains for the audience-chamber had faded to
olive colour; and the fringe and lace were there, but a few threads and
spangles had been peeled off them. There were also scattered about in
disorder, broken chairs, stools, couches, screens, and fire-dogs.
In the older apartments much of Edward VI.’s furniture still remained. The
silk hangings of the audience-chamber were in tatters, and so were the
curtains, gilt-leather covers, and painted screens; one gilt chandelier
also remained, and so did the sconces. A door beyond, with difficulty
opened, led into a small tower on the first floor, built by Inigo Jones,
and used as a breakfast-room or dressing-room by Queen Catherine. It was a
beautiful octagonal domed apartment, with a tasteful cornice. The walls
were frescoed, and there were pictures on the ceiling. A door from this
place opened on the staircase and led to a bath-room, lined with marble,
on the ground floor.
The painters of the day compared the ruined palace, characteristically
enough, to the gloomy precincts of the dilapidated castles in Mrs.
Radcliffe’s wax-work romances.
Sir William Chambers completed his work in about five years, clearing two
thousand a year. It cost more than half a million of money. The Strand
front is 135 feet long; the quadrangle 210 feet wide and 296 feet deep.
The main buildings are 54 feet deep and six stories high. They are faced
with Portland stone, now partly sooty black, partly blanched white with
the weather. The basement is adorned with rustic work, Corinthian
pilasters, balustrades, statues, masks, and medallions. The river terrace
was intended in anticipation of the possible embankment of the Thames.
Some critics think Chambers’s great work heavy, others elegant but timid.
There is too much rustic work, and the whole is rather “cut up.” The vases
and niches are unmeaning, and it was a great structural fault to make the
portico columns of the fine river side stand on a brittle-looking arch.
It was to Somerset House that the Royal Academy came after the split in
the St. Martin’s Lane Society. Here West exhibited his respectable
platitudes, Reynolds his grand portraits, and Lawrence his graceful,
brilliant, but meretricious pictures. In the great room of the Academy, at
the top of the building, Reynolds, Opie, Barrie, and Fuseli lectured.
Through the doorway to the right of the vestibule, Reynolds, Wilkie,
Turner, Flaxman, and Chantrey have often stepped. Under that bust of
Michael Angelo almost all our great men from Johnson to Scott must have
passed.
Carlini, an Italian friend of Cipriani, executed the two central statues
on the Strand front of Somerset House, and also three of the nine colossal
key-stone masks--the rivers Dee, Tyne, and Severn. Carlini was one of the
unsuccessful candidates for the Beckford monument in Guildhall. When
Carlini was keeper of the Academy, he used to walk from his house in Soho
to Somerset Place, dressed in a deplorable greatcoat, and with a broken
tobacco pipe in his mouth; but when he went to the great annual Academy
dinner, he would make his way into a chair, full dressed in a purple silk
coat, and scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, with point-lace ruffles, and a
sword and bag.[119] Wilton, the sculptor, executed the two outer figures.
Giuseppe Ceracchi, who carved some of the heads of the river gods for the
key-stones of the windows of the Strand front of Somerset House, was an
Italian, but it is uncertain whether he was born at Rome or in Corsica. He
gave the accomplished Mrs. Damer (General Conway’s daughter) her first
lessons in sculpture, an art which she afterwards perfected in the studio
of the elder Bacon. Ceracchi executed the only bust in marble that
Reynolds ever sat for. A statue of Mrs. Damer, from a model by him, is now
in the British Museum. This sculptor was guillotined in 1801, for a plot
against Napoleon.[120] He is said to have lost his wits in prison, and to
have mounted the scaffold dressed as a Roman emperor. It was to Mrs. Damer
(the daughter of his old friend) that Horace Walpole, our most French of
memoir-writers, bequeathed his fantastic villa at Strawberry Hill, and its
incongruous but valuable curiosities. She is said to have sent a bust of
Nelson to the Rajah of Tanjore, who wished to spread a taste for English
art in India.
The rooms round the quadrangle are hives of red-tapists. There are about
nine hundred Government clerks nestled away in them, and maintained at an
annual cost to us of about £275,000. There is the office of the Duchy of
Cornwall, and there are the Legacy Duty, the Stamps, Taxes, and Excise
Offices, the Inland Revenue Office, the Registrar General’s Office
(created pursuant to 6 and 7 Will. IV., c. 86), part of the Admiralty and
the Audit Office, and lastly the Will Office.
The east wing of Somerset House, used as King’s College, was built in
1829. The bronze statue of George III., and the fine recumbent figure of
Father Thames, in the chief court, were cast by John Bacon, R.A.
The office for auditing the public accounts existed, under the name of the
Office of the Auditors of the Imprests, as far back as the time of Henry
VIII. The present commission was established in 1785, and the salaries
formerly paid for the passing of accounts are now paid out of the Civil
List, all fees being abolished. The average annual cost of the office for
auditing some three hundred and fifty accounts is £50,000. There are six
commissioners, a secretary, and upwards of a hundred clerks. Almost all
the home and colonial expenditure is examined at this office. Edward
Harley and Arthur Maynwaring (the wit of the Kit-Cat Club) were the two
Auditors of the Imprests in the reign of Queen Anne. The Earl of Oxford,
the collector of MSS., obtained many curious public documents from his
brother. If he had taken the whole the nation would have been a gainer;
for the Government bought his collection for the British Museum, and all
that he left (except what Sir William Musgrave, a commissioner, scraped
together and gave to the British Museum) were barbarously destroyed by
Government, heedless of their historical value. Maynwaring’s fees were
about £2000 a year. The present salary of a commissioner is £1200; the
chairman’s salary is £500. In 1867 the western front of Somerset House was
added; it is from the designs of Pennethorne, to accommodate the clerks of
the Inland Revenue Department.
The Astronomical Society, Geographical Society, and Geological Society,
were for many years sheltered in Somerset House, before removing
westwards.
Hither, in 1782, from Crane Court, came the Royal Society. The entrance
door to the society’s rooms, to the left of the vestibule, is marked out
by the bust of Sir Isaac Newton; Herschel, Davy, and Wollaston, as well as
Walpole and Hallam, must have passed here, for the same door leads to the
apartments of the Society of Antiquaries.
This society, when burnt out of Aldersgate Street by the Great Fire, held
its meetings for a time in Arundel House. At first its doings were
trifling and sometimes absurd. Enthusiasts and pedants often made the
society ludicrous by their aberrations. Charles II. pretended to admire
their Baconic inductions, but must have laughed at Boyle’s essays and
platitudes, and the hope of Wilkins, the Bishop of Chester, of flying to
the moon. Evelyn’s suggestions were unpractical and dilettantish, and
Pepys’s ramblings not over wise. We may be sure that there was food for
laughter, when Butler could thus sketch the occupations of these
philosophers:--
“To measure wind and weigh the air,
To turn a circle to a square,
And in the braying of an ass
Find out the treble and the bass,
If mares neigh _alto_, and a cow
In double diapason low.”
Yet how can we wonder that in the vast gold mines of the new philosophy
our wise men hesitated where first to sink their shafts? Cowley
chivalrously sprang forward to ward off from them the laughter and scorn
of the Rochesters and the Killigrews of the day, and to prove that these
initiative studies were not “impertinent and vain and small,” nothing in
nature being worthless. He ends his fine, rambling ode with the following
noble simile:--
“Lo! when by various turns of the celestial dance,
In many thousand years,
A star so long unknown appears,
Though Heaven itself more beauteous by it grow,
It troubles and alarms the world below;
Does to the wise a star, to fools a meteor show.”[121]
The Royal Society’s traditions belong more to Gresham College than to
Somerset House, the later home of our wise men. It originated in 1645, in
meetings held in Wood Street and Gresham College, suggested by Theodore
Hank, a German of the Palatinate. During the Civil War its discussions
were continued at Oxford. The present entrance-money is £10, and the
annual subscription is £4. The society consists at present of between 700
and 800 fellows, and the anniversary is held every 30th of November, being
St. Andrew’s Day. The Transactions of the society fill upwards of 150
quarto volumes. The first president was Viscount Brouncker, and the
second Sir Joseph Williamson. Mr. William Spottiswoode is the present
president. The society possesses some valuable pictures, including three
portraits of Sir Isaac Newton--one by C. Jervas, presented by the great
philosopher himself, and hung over the president’s chair; a second by D.
C. Marchand, and a third by Vanderbank; two portraits of Halley, by Thomas
Murray and Dahl; two of Hobbes, the great advocate of despotism--one taken
in 1663 (three years after the Restoration), and the other by Gaspars,
presented by Aubrey; Sir Christopher Wren, by Kneller; Wallis, by West;
Flamstead, by Gibson; Robert Boyle, by F. Kerseboom (a good likeness, says
Boyle); Pepys, the cruel expositor of his own weaknesses, by Kneller; Sir
A. Southwell, by the same portrait-painter; Dr. Birch, the great
historical compiler, by Wills (the original of the mezzotint done by Faber
in 1741, and bequeathed by Dr. Birch); Martin Folkes, the great
antiquarian, by Hogarth; Dr. Wollaston, the eccentric discoverer, by
Jackson; and Sir Humphrey Davy, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
Amongst the curiosities of the society are the silver-gilt mace presented
to the society by Charles II. in 1662--(long supposed to be the bauble
which Cromwell treated with such contempt); a solar dial, made by Sir
Isaac Newton himself when a boy; a reflecting telescope, made by Newton in
1671; the precious MS. of the _Principia_ in Newton’s handwriting; a
silvery lock of Newton’s hair; the MS. of the _Parentalia, or Memoirs of
the Family of the Wrens_, written by young Wren; the charter-book of the
society, bound in crimson velvet, and containing the signatures of the
founder and fellows; a Rumford fireplace, one of the earliest in use; and
a marble bust of Mrs. Somerville, the great mathematician and philosopher,
by Chantrey. The society gives annually two gold medals--one the Rumford,
the other the Copley medal, called by Sir Humphrey Davy “the ancient olive
crown of the Royal Society.”
The Geological Society has a museum of specimens and fossils from all
quarters of the globe. The number of its fellows is about 875, and the
time of meeting alternate Wednesday evenings from November till June. It
also publishes a quarterly journal. The entrance-money is six guineas, the
annual subscription two.
The Society of Antiquaries was fairly started in 1707, by Wanley, Bagford,
and Talman, who agreed to meet together every Friday under penalty of
sixpence. It had originated about 1580, when it held its first sittings in
the Heralds’ College; but it did not obtain a charter till 1751, both
Elizabeth and James being afraid of its meddling with royal prerogatives
and illustrious genealogies, and the Civil War having interrupted its
proceedings. Its first meeting was at the Bear Tavern, in the Strand. In
1739 the members were limited to one hundred, and the terms were one
guinea entrance and twelve shillings annually. The society agreed to
discuss antiquarian subjects, and chiefly those relating to English
history prior to James I. In 1751 George II. granted its members a
charter, and in 1777 George III. gave them apartments in Somerset House,
where they continued till their recent removal to Burlington House. The
terms now are eight guineas admission, and four guineas annually. The
_Archæologia_, a journal of the society’s proceedings, commenced in 1770.
The meetings are every Thursday evening from November to June, and the
anniversary meeting is the 23d of April.
The museum of this society contains, among other treasures, the _Household
Book_ of the Duke of Norfolk; a large and valuable collection of early
proclamations and ballads; T. Porter’s unique map of London (Charles I.);
a folding picture in panel, of the “Preaching at Old St. Paul’s in 1616;”
early portraits of Edward IV. and Richard III., engraved for the third
series of _Ellis’s Letters_; a three-quarter portrait of Mary I. with the
monogram of Lucas de Heere, and the date 1546; a curious portrait of the
Marquis of Winchester (who died 1571); the portrait by Sir Antonio More,
of Schorel, a Dutch painter; portraits of antiquaries--Burton, the
Leicestershire antiquary, Peter le Neve, Humphrey Wanley Baker, of St.
John’s College, William Stukeley, George Vertue, and Edward, Earl of
Oxford, presented by Vertue; a Bohemian astronomical clock of gilt brass,
made in 1525 for Sigismund, King of Poland, and bought at the sale of the
effects of James Ferguson, the astronomer; and a spur of gilt brass, found
on Towton field, the scene of the bloody conflict between Edward IV. and
the Lancastrian forces. Upon the shank is engraved the following
posey--“En loial amour tout mon coer.”[122]
The Astronomical Society was instituted in 1820, and received the royal
charter in 1st William IV. The entrance-money is two guineas, and the
annual subscription the same amount. The annual general meeting is the
second Friday in February. A medal is awarded every year. The society has
a small but good mathematical library, and a few astronomical instruments.
A little above the entrance door to “the Stamps and Taxes” there is a
white watch-face let into the wall. Local tradition declares it was left
there in votive gratitude by a labourer who fell from a scaffolding and
was saved by the ribbon of his watch catching in some ornament. It was
really placed there by the Royal Society as a meridian mark for a portable
transit instrument in a window of an ante-room.[123]
A tradition of Nelson belongs to this quiet square. An old clerk at
Somerset House used to describe seeing the hero of the Nile pass on his
way to the Admiralty. Thin and frail, with only one arm, he would enter
the vestibule at a smart pace, and make direct for his goal, pushing
across the rough round stones of the quadrangle, instead of taking, like
others, the smooth pavement. Nelson always took the nearest way to the
object he wished to attain.[124]
The Royal Academy soon found a home in Somerset House. Germs of this
institution are to be found as early as the reign of Charles I., when Sir
Francis Kynaston, a translator of Chaucer into Latin (_circa_ 1636), was
chosen regent of an academy in Covent Garden.[125]
In 1643 that shifty adventurer, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, who had been fellow
ambassador with Rubens in Spain, started some quack establishment of the
same kind at Bethnal Green. He afterwards went to Surinam, was turned out
by the Dutch, came back, designed an ugly house at Hampstead Marshal, in
Berks, and died in 1667.
In 1711 Sir Godfrey Kneller instituted a private art academy, of which he
became president. Hogarth, writing about 1760, says, that sixty years
before some artists had started an academy, but their leaders assuming too
much pomposity, a caricature procession was drawn on the walls of the
studio, upon which the society broke up in dudgeon. Sir James Thornhill,
in 1724, then set up an academy at his own house in Covent Garden, while
others, under Vanderbank, turned a neighbouring meeting-house into a
studio; but these rival confederations broke up at Sir James’s death in
1734.
Hogarth, his son-in-law, opened an academy, under the direction of Mr.
Moser, at the house of a painter named Peter Hyde, in Greyhound Court,
Arundel Street. In 1739 these artists removed to a more commodious house
in Peter’s Court, St. Martin’s Lane, where they continued till 1767, when
they removed to Pall Mall.
In 1738 the Duke of Richmond threw open to art-students his gallery at
Whitehall, closed it again when his absence in the German war prevented
the paying of the premiums, was laughed at, and then re-opened it again.
It lasted some years, and Edwards, author of the _Anecdotes_, studied
there.
In 1753 some artists meeting at the Turk’s Head, Gerrard Street, Soho,
tried ineffectually to organise an academy; but in 1765 they obtained a
charter, and appointed Mr. Lambert president.
In 1760 their first exhibition of pictures was held in the rooms of the
Society of Arts, and in 1761 there were two exhibitions, one at Spring
Gardens: for the latter Hogarth illustrated a catalogue, with a compliment
to the young king and a caricature of rich connoisseurs.
In 1768 eight of the directors of the Spring Gardens Society, indignant at
Mr. Kirby being made president of the society in the place of Mr. Hayman,
resigned; and, co-operating with sixteen others who had been ejected,
secretly founded a new society. Wilton, Chambers, West, Cotes, and Moser,
were the leaders in this scheme, and Reynolds soon joined them, tempted,
it is supposed, by a promise of knighthood.
West was the chief mover in this intrigue. The Archbishop of York, who had
tried to raise £3000 to enable the American artist to abandon
portrait-painting, had gained the royal ear, and West was painting the
“Departure of Regulus” for the king, who was even persuaded and flattered
into drawing up several of the laws of the new society with his own
hand.[126] The king, in the meantime, with unworthy dissimulation,
affected outwardly a complete neutrality between the two camps, presented
the Spring Gardens Society with £100, and even attended their exhibition.
The king’s patronage of the new society was disclosed to honest Mr. Kirby
(father of Mrs. Trimmer, and the artist who had taught the king
perspective) in a very malicious and mortifying manner, and the story was
related to Mr. Galt by West, with a quiet, cold spite, peculiarly his own.
Mr. Kirby came to the palace just as West was submitting his sketch for
“Regulus” to the king. West was a true courtier, and knew well how to make
a patron suggest his own subject. Kirby praised the picture, and hoped Mr.
West intended to exhibit it. The Quaker slily replied that that depended
on his majesty’s pleasure. The king, like a true confederate, immediately
said, “Assuredly I shall be happy to let the work be shown to the public.”
“Then, Mr. West,” said the perhaps too arrogant president, “you will send
it to my exhibition?” “No!” said the king, and the words must have been
thunderbolts to poor Kirby; “it must go to _my_ exhibition.”[127] “Poor
Kirby,” says West, “only two nights before, had declared that the design
of forming such an institution was not contemplated. His colour forsook
him--his countenance became yellow with mortification--he bowed with
profound humility, and instantly retired, _nor did he long survive the
shock_!”
Mr. West is wrong, however, in the last statement, for his rival did not
die till 1774. Mr. Kirby, a most estimable man, was originally a
house-painter at Ipswich. He became acquainted with Gainsborough, was
introduced by Lord Bute to the king, and wrote and edited some valuable
works on perspective, to one of which Hogarth contributed an inimitable
frontispiece.
Sir Robert Strange says that much of this intrigue was carried out by Mr.
Dalton,[128] a print seller in Pall Mall, and the king’s librarian, in
whose rooms the exhibition was held in 1767 and 1768.
Thus an American Quaker, a Swiss, and a Swede--(a gold-chaser, a
coach-painter, an architect, and a third-rate painter, West)--ignobly
established the Royal Academy. Many eminent men refused to join the new
society. Allan Ramsay, Hudson, Scott the marine-painter, and Romney were
opposed to it. Engravers (much to the disgrace of the Academy) were
excluded; and worst of all, one of the new laws forbade any artist to be
eligible to academic honours who did not exhibit his works in the
Academy’s rooms: thus depriving for ever every English artist of the right
to earn money by exhibiting his own works.[129]
The proportion of foreigners in the Academy was very large. The two ladies
who became members (Angelica Kauffmann and Mrs. Moser) were both
Swiss.[130]
The other unlucky society, deprived of its share of the St. Martin’s Lane
casts, etc., and shut out from the Academy, furnished a studio over the
Cyder Cellars in Maiden Lane, struggled on till 1807, and then ceased to
exist.[131]
The Academy, with all its tyranny and injustice, has still been useful to
English art in perpetuating annual exhibitions which attract purchasers.
But what did more good to English art than twenty academies was the king’s
patronage of West, the spread of engraving, and the rise of middle-class
purchasers, who rendered it no longer necessary for artists to depend on
the caprice and folly of rich aristocratic patrons.
One word more about the art oligarchy. The first officers of the new
society were--Reynolds, president; Moser, keeper; Newton, secretary;
Penny, professor of painting; Sandby, professor of architecture; Wale,
professor of perspective; W. Hunter, professor of anatomy; Chambers,
treasurer; and Wilson, librarian. Goldsmith was chosen professor of
history at a later period.
The catalogue of the first exhibition of the Royal Academy contains the
names of only one hundred and thirty pictures: Hayman exhibited scenes
from _Don Quixote_; Rooker some Liverpool views; Reynolds some allegorised
portraits; Miss Kauffmann some of her tame Homeric figures; West his
“Regulus” (that killed Kirby), and a Venus and Adonis; Zuccarelli two
landscapes.
In 1838, the first year after the opening of the National Gallery, 1382
works of art, including busts and architectural designs, were exhibited.
Among the pictures then shown were--Stanfield’s “Chasse Marée off the
Gulf-stream Light,” “The Privy Council,” by Wilkie; portraits of men and
dogs, by Landseer; “The Pifferari,” “Phryne,” and “Banishment of Ovid,” by
Turner; “A Bacchante,” by Etty; “Gaston de Foix,” by Eastlake; Allan’s
“Slave Market,” Leslie’s “Dinner Scene from the Merry Wives of Windsor;”
“A View on the Rhine,” by Callcott; Shee’s portrait of Sir Francis
Burdett; portraits by Pickersgill; Maclise’s “Christmas in the Olden
Time,” and “Olivia and Sophia fitting out Moses for the Fair;” “The
Massacre of the Innocents,” by Hilton; and a picture by Uwins.[132]
Angelica Kauffmann and Biaggio Rebecca helped to decorate the Academy’s
old council-chamber at Somerset House. The paintings still exist. Rebecca
was an eccentric, conceited Italian artist, who decorated several rooms at
Windsor, and offended the worthy precise old king by his practical jokes.
On one occasion, knowing he would meet the king on his way to Windsor with
West, he stuck a paper star on his coat. The next time West came, the king
was curious to know who the foreign nobleman was he had seen--“Person of
distinction, eh? eh?”--and was doubtless vexed at the joke.
Rebecca’s favourite trick was to draw a half-crown on paper, and place it
on the floor of one of the ante-rooms at Windsor, laughing immoderately at
the eagerness with which some fat courtier in full dress, sword and bag,
would run and scuffle to pick it up.[133]
Fuseli took his place as Keeper of the Academy in 1805. Smirke had been
elected, but George III., hearing that he was a democrat, refused to
confirm the appointment. Haydon, who called on Fuseli in Berners Street in
1805, when he had left his father the bookseller at Plymouth, describes
him as “a little white-headed, lion-faced man, in an old flannel
dressing-gown tied round his waist with a piece of rope, and upon his head
the bottom of Mrs. Fuseli’s work-basket.” His gallery was full of
galvanised devils, malicious witches brewing incantations, Satan bridging
chaos or springing upwards like a pyramid of fire, Lady Macbeth, Paolo and
Francesca, Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly.
Elsewhere the impetuous Haydon sketches him vigorously. Fuseli was about
five feet five inches high, had a compact little form, stood firmly at his
easel, painted with his left hand, never held his palette upon his thumb,
but kept it upon his stone slab, and being very near-sighted and too vain
to wear glasses, used to dab his beastly brush into the oil, and sweeping
round the palette in the dark, take up a great lump of white, red, or
blue, and plaster it over a shoulder or a face; then prying close in, he
would turn round and say, “By Gode! dat’s a fine purple! it’s very like
Correggio, by Gode!” and then all of a sudden burst out with a quotation
from Homer, Tasso, Dante, Ovid, Virgil, or the Niebelungen, and say,
“Paint dat!” “I found him,” says Haydon, “a most grotesque mixture of
literature, art, scepticism, indelicacy, profanity, and kindness. He put
me in mind of Archimago in Spenser.”[134]
When Haydon came first to town from Plymouth, he lodged at 342
Strand,[135] near Charing Cross, and close to his fellow-student, the
good-natured, indolent, clever Jackson. The very morning he arrived he
hurried off to the Exhibition, and mistaking the new church in the Strand
for Somerset House, ran up the steps and offered his shilling to a beadle.
When he at last found the right house, Opie’s _Gil Blas_ and Westall’s
_Shipwrecked Sailor Boy_ were all the historical pictures he could find.
Sir Joshua read his first discourse before the Academy in 1769. Barry
commenced his lectures in 1784, ended them in 1798, and was expelled the
Academy in 1799. Opie delivered his lectures in 1807, the year in which he
died. Fuseli began in 1801, and delivered but twelve lectures in all.
It was on St. George’s Day, 1771, that Sir Joshua Reynolds took the chair
at the first annual dinner of the Royal Academy. Dr. Johnson was there,
with Goldsmith and Horace Walpole. Goldsmith got the ear of the company,
but was laughed at by Johnson for professing his enthusiastic belief in
Chatterton’s discovery of ancient poems. Walpole, who had believed in the
poet of Bristol till he was laughed at by Mason and Gray, began to banter
Goldsmith on his opinions, when, as he says, to his surprise and concern,
and the dashing of his mirth, he first heard that the poor lad had been to
London and had destroyed himself. Goldsmith had afterwards a quarrel with
Dr. Percy on the same subject.
One day, while Reynolds was lecturing at Somerset House, the floor
suddenly began to give way. Turner, then a boy, was standing near the
lecturer. Reynolds remained calm, and said afterwards that his only
thought was what a loss to English art the death of that roomful would
have been.
On the death of Mr. Wale, the Professor of Perspective, Sir Joshua was
anxious to have Mr. Bonomi elected to the post, but he was treated with
great disrespect by Mr. Copley and others, who refused to look at Bonomi’s
drawings, which Sir Joshua (as some maintained, contrary to rule) had
produced at Fuseli’s election as Academician. Reynolds at first threatened
to resign the presidency; but thought better of it afterwards.
In the catalogues in 1808 Turner’s name first appeared with the title of
Professor of Perspective attached to it. His lectures were bad, from his
utter want of language, but he took great pains with his diagrams, and his
ideas were often original. On one celebrated occasion Turner arrived in
the lecture-room late, and much perturbed. He dived first into one pocket,
and then into another; at last he ejaculated these memorable words:
“Gentlemen, I’ve been and left my lecture in the hackney-coach!”[136]
In 1779 O’Keefe describes a visit paid to Somerset House to hear Dr.
William Hunter lecture on anatomy. He describes him as a jocose little
man, in “a handsome modest” wig. A skeleton hung on a pivot by his side,
and on his other hand stood a young man half stripped. Every now and then
he paused, to turn to the dead or the living example.[137]
In 1765, when Fuseli was living humbly in Cranbourn Alley, and translating
Winckelmann, he used to visit Smollett, whose _Peregrine Pickle_ he was
then illustrating; and also Falconer, the author of _The Shipwreck_, who,
being poor, was allowed to occupy apartments in Somerset House.[138] The
poet was a mild, inoffensive man, the son of an Edinburgh barber. He had
been apprenticed on board a merchant vessel, after which he entered the
royal navy. In 1762 he published his well-known poem. He went out to India
in 1769, in the _Aurora_, which is supposed to have foundered in the
Mozambique Channel.[139] Falconer was a short thin man, with a
hard-featured, weather-beaten face and a forbidding manner; but he was
cheerful and generous, and much liked by his messmates. That hearty
sea-song, “Cease, rude Boreas,” has been attributed to him.
Fuseli succeeded Barry as Lecturer on Painting in 1799, and became Keeper
on the death of Wilton, the sculptor, in 1803. He died in 1825, aged
eighty-four, and was buried in St. Paul’s, between Reynolds and Opie.
Lawrence, Beechey, Reinagle, Chalon, Jones, and Mulready followed him to
his stately grave. The body had previously been laid in state in Somerset
House, his pictures of “The Lazar House” and “The Bridging of Chaos” being
hung over the coffin.
When Sir Joshua died, in 1792, his body lay in state in a velvet coffin,
in a room hung with sable, in Somerset House. Burke and Barry, Boswell and
Langton, Kemble and John Hunter, Towneley and Angerstein came to witness
the ceremony.
Where events are so interwoven as they are in topographical history, I
hope to be pardoned if I am not always chronological in my arrangement,
for it must be remembered that I have anecdotes to attend to as well as
dates. Let me here, then, dilate on a cruel instance of misused academic
power. My story relates to a young genius as unfortunate as Chatterton,
yet guiltless of his lies and forgeries, who died heart-broken by neglect
more than half a century ago.
[Illustration: SOMERSET HOUSE FROM THE STRAND, 1777.]
Procter, a young Yorkshire clerk, came up to London in 1777, and became a
student of the Royal Academy. In 1783 he carried off a silver medal, and
the next year won the gold medal for an historical picture. When Procter
gained this last prize, his fellow-students, raising him on their
shoulders, bore him downstairs, and then round the quadrangle of Somerset
House, shouting out, “Procter! Procter!” Barry was delighted at this, and
exclaimed with an oath, “Bedad! the lads have caught the true spirit of
the ould Greeks.” Sir Abraham Hume bought Procter’s “Ixion,” which was
praised by Reynolds. His colossal “Diomede” the poor fellow had to break
up, as he had no place to keep it in, and no one would buy it. In 1794 Mr.
West, wishing that Procter should go to Rome as the travelling student,
discovered him, after much inquiry, in poor lodgings in Maiden Lane. A day
or two afterwards he was found dead in his bed. The Academicians had been,
perhaps, just a little too late with their patronage.[140]
And now, when through grey twilight glooms I steal a glance as I pass by
at that grave black figure of the river god, presiding solemn as
Rhadamanthus over the central quadrangle of Somerset House, I sometimes
dream I see little leonine Fuseli, stormy Barry, and courtly Reynolds
pacing together the dim quadrangle that on these autumnal evenings, when
the rifle drills are over, wears so lonely and purgatorial an aspect; and
far away from them, in murky corners, I fancy I hear muttering the ghosts
of Portuguese monks, while scowling at them, stalks by pale Sir
Edmondbury, with a sword run through his shadowy body.
[Illustration: JACOB TONSON’S BOOK-SHOP, 1742.]