FROM THE SAVOY TO CHARING CROSS.
Old York House stood on the site of Buckingham and Villiers Streets. In
ancient times, York House had been the inn of the Bishops of Norwich.
Abandoned to the crown, King Henry VIII. gave the place to that gay knight
Charles Brandon, the husband of his beautiful sister Mary, the Queen of
France. When the Church rose again and resumed its scarlet pomp, the house
was given to Queen Mary’s Lord Chancellor, Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of
York, in exchange for Suffolk House in Southwark, which was presented by
Queen Mary to the see of York in recompense for York House, Whitehall,
taken from Wolsey by her father. On the fall of that minister, once more a
change took place, and the house passed to the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas
Bacon, who rented it of the see of York.
In this house the great Francis Bacon was born, on the 22d of January,
1561. York House stood near the royal palace, from which it was parted by
lanes and fields. Its courtyard and great gates opened to the street. The
main front, with its turrets and water stair, faced the river. The garden,
falling by an easy slope to the Thames, commanded a view as far south as
the Lollards’ Tower at Lambeth, as far east as London Bridge. “All the gay
river life[223] swept past the lawn, the salmon-fishers spreading their
nets, the watermen paddling gallants to Bankside, and Shakspere’s theatre,
the city barges rowing past in procession, and the queen herself, with her
train of lords and ladies, shooting by in her journeys from the Tower to
Whitehall Stairs. From the lattice out of which he gazed, the child could
see over the palace roof the pinnacles and crosses of the old abbey.”
The Lord Keeper Pickering died at York House in 1596, and Lord Chancellor
Egerton in 1616 or 1617. In 1588 it is supposed the Earl of Essex tried to
obtain the house, as Archbishop Sandys wrote to Burghley begging him to
resist some such demand. Essex was in ward here for six months, fretting
under the care of Lord Keeper Egerton.
“York House was the scene,” says a clever pleader for a great man’s good
fame, “of Bacon’s gayest hours, and of his sharpest griefs--of his highest
magnificence, and of his profoundest prostration. In it his studious
childhood passed away. In it his father died. On going into France, to the
court of Henry IV., he left it a lively, splendid home; on his return from
that country, he found it a house of misery and death. From its gates he
wandered forth with his widowed mother into the world. Though it passed
into other hands, his connection with it never ceased. Under Egerton its
gates again opened to him. It was the scene of that inquiry into the Irish
treason when he was the queen’s historian. During his courtship of Alice
Barnham, York House was his second home. In one of its chambers he watched
by the sick-bed of Ellesmere, and on Ellesmere’s surrender of the Seals,
presented the dying Chancellor with the coronet of Brackley. It became his
own during his reign as Keeper and Chancellor. From it he dated his great
Instauration; in its banqueting-hall he feasted poets and scholars; from
one of its bed-rooms he wrote his Submission and Confession; in the same
room he received the Earls of Arundel, Pembroke, and Southampton, as
messengers from the House of Lords; there he surrendered the Great Seal.
To regain York House, when it had passed into other hands, was one of the
warmest passions of his heart, and the resolution to retain it against the
eager desires of Buckingham was one of the secret causes of his fall.”
“No,” said the fallen great man; “York House is the house wherein my
father died and wherein I first breathed, and there will I yield my last
breath, if it so please God, and the king will give me leave.”[224]
Some of the saddest and some of the happiest events of Bacon’s life must
have happened in the Strand. From thence he rode, sumptuous in purple
velvet from cap to shoe, along the lanes to Marylebone Chapel, to wed his
bride Alice Barnham.
York House was famous for its aviary, on which Bacon had expended £300. It
was in the garden here that we are told the Chancellor once stood looking
at the fishers below throwing their nets. Bacon offered them so much for a
draught, but they refused. Up came the net with only two or three little
fish; upon which his lordship told them that “hope was a good breakfast,
but an ill supper.”[225]
It was on the death of his friend, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and on his
own installation, that Bacon bought the lease of York House from the
former’s son, the first Earl of Bridgewater. He found the rooms vast and
naked. His friends and votaries furnished the house, giving him books and
drawings, stands of arms, cabinets, jewels, rings, and boxes of money.
Lady Cæsar contributed a massive gold chain, and Prince Charles a diamond
ring.
Bacon, when young, had been often taken to court by his father; and the
queen, delighting in the gravity and wisdom of the boy, used to call him
her “young Lord Keeper.” Even then his mind was philosophically observant;
and it is said that he used to leave his playmates in St. James’s Fields
to try and discover the cause of the echo in a certain brick conduit.[226]
At Durham House, on January 22, 1620, the year in which he published his
_magnum opus_, the _Novum Organon_, and a twelvemonth before his disgrace,
Bacon gave a grand banquet to his friends. Ben Jonson was one of the
guests, and is supposed to have himself recited a set of verses, in which
he says--
“Hail th’ happy genius of the ancient pile!
How comes it that all things so about thee smile,--
The fire, the wine, the men?--and in the midst
Thou stand’st as if some mystery thou didst.
“England’s High Chancellor, the destined heir,
In his soft cradle to his father’s chair,
Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full,
Out of their choicest and their richest wool.
’Tis a brave cause of joy. * *
Give me a deep-crowned bowl, that I may sing,
In raising him, the wisdom of my king.”
Who till he dies can boast of having been happy? The year after, the
king’s anger fell like an axe upon the great courtier. Solitary and
comfortless at Gorhambury, Bacon petitioned the Lords in almost abject
terms to be allowed to return to York House, where he could advance his
studies and consult his physicians, creditors, and friends, so that “out
of the carcass of dead and rotten greatness, as out of Samson’s lion,
there may be honey gathered for future times.” Sir Edward Sackville prayed
him in vain to remove his straitest shackles by surrendering York House to
the king’s favourite; and so did his creditor, Mr. Meautys, who, says
Bacon, used him “coarsely,” and meant “to saw him asunder.” “The great
lords,” says Meautys, “long to be in York House. I know your lordship
cannot forget they have such a savage word among them as _fleecing_.” This
word has grown tame in modern times, but it had a terrible significance in
those days, when it hinted at flaying.
An episode about Bacon’s younger days may be pardoned here. The Gray’s Inn
Chambers occupied by Bacon were in Coney Court, looking over the gardens
and past St. Pancras Church to Hampstead Hill. They are no longer
standing. The site of them was No. 1 Gray’s Inn Square. Bacon began to
keep his terms at the age of eighteen, in June 1579. His uncle Burleigh
was bencher in this inn, and his cousins, Robert, Cecil, and Nicholas
Trott, students. In his latter days, when Attorney-General, and even when
Lord Chancellor, he retained a lease of his old rooms in Coney Court. He
was called to the bar when he was twenty-one, in 1582; and as soon as he
was called he appeared in Fleet Street in his serge and bands, as a sign
that he was going to practise for his bread. At the close of his first
session, however, he was raised to the bench. Bacon always remained
attached to Gray’s Inn; he laid out the gardens, planted the elm-trees,
raised the terrace, pulled down and rebuilt the chambers, dressed the dumb
show, led off the dances, and invented the masques.[227]
After Lord Bacon’s disgrace, the first Duke of Buckingham of the Villiers
family borrowed the house from Toby Mathew, the courtly archbishop of
York, in hopes of a final exchange, which did eventually take place.[228]
In 1624, two years before Bacon’s death, a bill was passed to enable the
king to exchange some lands for York House, so coveted by his proud
favourite. Buckingham soon partially pulled down the old mansion, and
lined the walls of his temporary structure with huge mirrors. Here he
entertained the foreign ambassadors. Of all his splendour, the only relic
left is the water gate usually ascribed to Inigo Jones.
This Duke of Buckingham, the “Steenie” of King James, and of Scott’s
_Fortunes of Nigel_, was the younger son of a poor knight, who won James
I. by his personal beauty, vivacity, and accomplishments--by his dancing,
jousting, leaping, and masquerading. At first page, cupbearer, and
gentleman of the bedchamber, he rose to power on the disgrace of Carr.
It was at York House--“Yorschaux,” as he calls it, with the usual
insolence and carelessness of his nation--that Bassompierre visited the
duke in 1626. He praises the mansion as more richly fitted up than any
other he had ever seen.[229] Yet the duke did not live here, but at
Wallingford House, on the site of the Admiralty, keeping York House for
pageants and levees, till Felton’s knife severed his evil soul from his
body, August 23, 1628. His son, the Zimri of Dryden, was born at
Wallingford House.
The “superstitious pictures” at York House were sold in 1645,[230] and the
house given by Cromwell to General Fairfax, whose daughter married the
second and last Duke of Buckingham, of the Villiers line, the favourite of
Charles II., the rival of Rochester, the plotter with Shaftesbury, the
selfish profligate who drove Lee into Bedlam and starved Samuel Butler.
In 1661 the galleries of York House were famous for the antique busts and
statues that had belonged to Rubens on his visit to this country, when he
painted James I. in jackboots being hauled heavenward by a flock of
angels. In the riverside gardens--not far, I presume, from the water
gate--stood John of Bologna’s “Cain and Abel,” which the King of Spain had
given to Prince Charles on his luckless visit to Madrid, and which Charles
had bestowed on his dangerous favourite.[231]
The great rooms, even then emblazoned with the lions and peacocks of the
Villiers and Manners families, were traversed by Evelyn, who describes the
house and gardens as much ruined through neglect. Pepys also, who thrust
his nose into every show-place, went to York House when the Russian
ambassador was there, and rapturously and poetically vows he saw “the
remains of the noble soul of the late Duke of Buckingham appearing in the
house in every place, in the door-cases and the windows,”[232]--odd places
for a noble soul to make its abode!
The Duke of Buckingham, in King Charles’s days, had turned York House into
a treasury of art. He bought Rubens’s private collection of pictures for
£10,000, Sir Henry Wotten having purchased them for him at Venice. He had
seventeen Tintorets, and thirteen works of Paul Veronese. For an “Ecce
Homo” by Titian, containing nineteen figures as large as life, he refused
£7000 from the Earl of Arundel. During the Civil Wars the pictures were
removed by his son to Antwerp, and there sold by auction.
Who can look down Buckingham Street in the twilight, and see the pediment
of the old water gate of the duke’s house, without repeating to himself
the scourging lines of Dryden when he drew Buckingham as Zimri?--
“A man so various that he seem’d to be
Not one but all mankind’s epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by turns, and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.”[233]
In vain Settle eulogised the mercurial and licentious spendthrift.
Settle’s verse is forgotten, but we all remember Pope’s ghastly but
exaggerated picture of the rake’s death in “the worst inn’s worst room”--
“No wit to flatter left of all his store,
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more,
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousand ends.”
The first Duke of Buckingham, to judge by Clarendon, who was the friend of
all friends of absolutism, must have been a man of magnificent generosity
and “flowing courtesy,” a staunch friend, and a desperate and unrelenting
hater; but he was an enemy of the people; and had he survived the knife of
Felton he must have been the first of a faithless king’s bad counsellors
to perish on the scaffold.
[Illustration: THE WATER GATE, 1860.]
The second duke was a base-tempered, shameless profligate, a fickle,
dishonest intriguer, who perished at last, a poor worn-out man, in a
farmer’s house in Yorkshire, from a cold caught while hunting. He was the
author of several obscene lampoons, from which Swift took some hints; and
he was the godfather of a mock tragedy, _The Rehearsal_, in which he was
helped by Martin Clifford and Butler, the author of _Hudibras_, the latter
of whom he left to starve. Baxter, it is true, drops a redeeming word or
two on behalf of the gay scoundrel; but then Buckingham had intrigued with
the Puritans.
York Stairs, the only monument of Zimri’s splendour left, stand now in the
middle of the gardens of the new Embankment. Till the Embankment was made,
the gate was approached by a small enclosed terrace planted with lime
trees. The water gate consists of a central archway and two side windows.
Four rusticated columns support an arched pediment and two couchant lions
holding shields. On a scroll are the Villiers arms. On the street side
rise three arches, flanked by pilasters and an entablature, on which are
four stone globes. Above the keystone of the arches are shields and
anchors. In the centre are the arms of Villiers impaling those of Manners.
The Villiers’ motto, _Fidei coticula crux_, “The cross is the whetstone of
faith,” is inscribed on the frieze. The gate, as it now stands, is
ridiculous, and is almost buried in the soil. It would be a charity to
remove it to a water-side position.
In 1661, on the day of the great affray at the Tower Wharf between the
retinues of the French and Spanish ambassadors, arising out of a dispute
for precedence, Pepys saw the latter return to York House in triumph,
guarded with fifty drawn swords, having killed several Frenchmen. “It is
strange,” says the amusing quidnunc, “to see how all the city did rejoice,
and, indeed, we do naturally all love the Spanish and hate the French.”
Worthy man! the fact was, all time-servers were then agog about the queen
who was expected from Portugal. From York House Pepys went peering about
the French ambassador’s, and found his retainers all like dead men and
shaking their heads. “There are no men in the world,” he says, “of a more
insolent spirit when they do well, and more abject if they miscarry, than
these people are.”[234]
In 1683 the learned and amiable John Evelyn, being then on the Board of
Trade, took a house in Villiers Street for the winter, partly for business
purposes, partly to educate his daughters.[235] Evelyn’s works gave a
valuable impetus to art and agriculture.
Addison’s jovial friend, that delightful writer, Sir Richard Steele, lived
in Villiers Street from 1721 to 1724, after the death of his wife, the
jealous “Prue.” Here he wrote his _Conscious Lovers_. The big,
swarthy-faced ex-trooper, so contrasting with his grave and colder friend
Addison, is a salient personage in the English Temple of Fame.
Duke Street, built circa 1675,[236] was named from the last Duke of
Buckingham. Humphrey Wanley, the great Harleian librarian, lived here, and
the son of Shadwell, the poet and Dryden’s enemy, who was an eminent
physician, and inherited much of his father’s excellent sense.
In 1672 the “chemyst, statesman, and buffoon” Duke of Buckingham sold York
House and gardens for £30,000 to a brewer and woodmonger, who pulled it
down and laid out the present streets, naming them, with due respect to
rank and wealth, even in a rascal, George Street, Villiers Street, Duke
Street, and Buckingham Street. In 1668 their rental was £1359: 10s.[237]
In Charles II.’s time waterworks were started at York Buildings by a
company chartered to supply the West end with water, but they failed,
being in advance of the time. The company, however, did not concentrate
its energies on waterworks; it gave concerts, bought up forfeited estates
in Scotland, and started many wild and eccentric projects, in some of
which Steele figured prominently. The company has long been forgotten,
though kept in memory by a tall water tower, which was standing in the
reign of George III.
In Buckingham Street, built in 1675, Samuel Pepys, the diarist, came to
live in 1684. The house, since rebuilt, was the last on the west side, and
looked on the Thames. It had been his friend Hewer’s before him. A view of
the library shows us the tall plain book-cases, and a central window
looking on the river. Pepys, the son of an army tailor, and as fond of
dress and great people as might be expected of a tailor’s son, was for a
long time Secretary of the Admiralty under Charles II. He was President of
the Royal Society; and it is largely to his five folio books of ballads
that we owe Dr. Percy’s useful compilation, _The Relics of Ancient
Poetry_. Pepys died in 1703, at the house of his friend Hewer, at Clapham.
Pepys’s house (No. 14) became afterwards, in the summer of 1824, the home
of Etty, the painter, and remained so till within a few months of his
death in 1849. Etty first took the ground floor (afterwards occupied by
Mr. Stanfield), then the top floor; the special object of his ambition
being to watch sunsets over the river, which he loved as much as Turner
did, who frequently said, “There is finer scenery on its banks than on
those of any river in Italy.” Its ebb and flow, Etty used to declare, was
like life, and “the view from Lambeth to the Abbey not unlike Venice.” In
those river-side rooms the artists of two generations have
assembled--Fuseli, Flaxman, Holland, Constable, and Hilton--then Turner,
Maclise, Dyce, Herbert, and all the younger race. Etty’s rooms looked on
to a terrace, with a small cottage at one end; the keeper once was a man
named Hewson, supposed to be the original Strap of _Roderick Random_.[238]
An amiable, dreamy genius was the son of the miller and gingerbread-maker
of York.
The witty Earl of Dorset lived in this street in 1681.
Opposite Pepys’s house, and on the east side (left-hand corner), was a
house where Peter the Great lodged when in England. Here, after rowing
about the Thames, watching the boat-building, or pulling to Deptford and
back, this brave half-savage used to return and spend his rough evenings
with Lord Caermarthen, drinking a pint of hot brandy and pepper, after
endless flasks of wine. It was certainly “brandy for heroes” in this case.
Lord Caermarthen was at this time Lord President of the Council, and had
been appointed Peter’s cicerone by King William. The Russian czar was a
hard drinker, and on one occasion is said to have drunk a pint of brandy,
a bottle of sherry, and eight flasks of sack, after which he calmly went
to the play. While in York Buildings, the rough czar was so annoyed with
the vulgar curiosity of intrusive citizens, that he would sometimes rise
from his dinner and leave the room in a rage. Here the Quakers forced
themselves upon him, and presented him with _Barclay’s Apology_, after
which the czar attended their meeting in Gracechurch Street. He once asked
them of what use they were in any kingdom, since they would not bear arms.
On taking his farewell of King William, Peter drew a rough ruby, valued at
£10,000, from his waistcoat pocket, and presented it to him screwed up in
brown paper.[239] He went back just in time to crush the Strelitzes,
imprison his sister Sophia, and wage war on Charles XII. The great
reformer was only twenty-six years old when he visited England.
In 1706 Robert Harley, Esq., afterwards Swift’s great patron and Earl of
Oxford, lived here;[240] and (1785) John Henderson, the actor, died in
this street.
Walter, Lord Hungerford, of Farleigh Castle, Somerset, took the Duke of
Orleans prisoner at Agincourt. He was Lord High Steward of Henry V. and
one of the executors to his will, and Lord High Treasurer in the reign of
Henry VI. This illustrious noble was the son of Sir Thomas de Hungerforde,
who in 51 Edward III. was the first to take the chair as Speaker of the
House of Commons.
Hungerford Market covered the site of the seat of the Hungerford family.
Pepys mentions a fire at the house of old Lady Hungerford in Charles II.’s
time.
Sir Edward (her husband), created a Knight of the Bath at the coronation
of Charles II., pulled down the old mansion and divided it in 1680 into
several houses, enclosing also a market-place. On the north side of the
market-house was a bust of one of the family in a full-bottomed wig.[241]
It grew a disused and ill-favoured place before 1833. When a new market
(Fowler, architect) was opened, it was intended to put an end to the
monopoly of Billingsgate. The old market had at first answered well for
fruit and vegetables, as there was no need of porters from the water side;
but by 1720 Covent Garden had beaten it off.[242] It attempted too much in
rivalling at once Leadenhall and Billingsgate, and failed--only a few
fishmongers lingering on to the last.
In 1845 a suspension bridge, crossing from Hungerford to Lambeth (built
under Mr. I. K. Brunel’s supervision), was opened. It consisted of three
spans, and two brick towers in the Italian style; the main span, at the
time of its erection, was larger than that of any other in the country,
and only second to that of the bridge at Fribourg. It cost £110,000, and
consumed more than 10,000 tons of iron.[243]
In the same year the bridge was sold to the original proprietors for
£226,000, but the purchase was never carried out. It was replaced in 1864
by a railway bridge, and the market itself was filled up by an enormous
railway station. The market had sunk to zero years before. In 1850 some
rogue of a speculator had opened in it a pretended exhibition of the
surplus articles rejected for want of room from the glass palace in Hyde
Park. It proved a total failure, and swallowed up a vast sum of money and
a fine northern estate or two. Latterly it had become a gratuitous
music-hall, a billiard-room, and a penny-ice house, conducted by an
Italian.
The railway station, built by Mr. Barry, the son of the architect of the
New Houses of Parliament, faces the Strand. It is of a most creditable
design, and the high Mansard roofs, which surmounted the hotel which forms
its front, are of a freer and grander character than those of any modern
London building. A model of the Eleanor Cross has been erected in the
courtyard in front of it. This building is one of the first omens of
better things that we have yet seen in our still terribly mean and ugly
city.
Craven Street was called Spur Alley till 1742.[244] Grinling Gibbons, the
great wood-carver, born at Rotterdam, and whose genius John Evelyn
discovered, lived here after leaving the Belle Sauvage Yard. Here he must
have fashioned those fragile strings of birds and fruit and flowers that
adorn so many city churches, and the houses of so many English noblemen.
At No. 7, in 1775, lodged the great Benjamin Franklin, then no longer a
poor printer, but the envoy of the American colonies. Here Lords Howe and
Stanhope visited him to propose terms from Lords Camden and Chatham, but
unfortunately only in vain.[245] That weak and unfortunate man, the Rev.
Mr. Hackman, who shot Miss Ray, the actress and the mistress of Lord
Sandwich, who had encouraged his suit, lived in this street.
James Smith, one of the authors of the _Rejected Addresses_,--a series of
parodies rivalled only by those of _Bon Gaultier_, lived at No. 27. It was
on his own street that he wrote the well-known epigram--[246]
“In Craven Street, Strand, the attorneys find place,
And ten dark coal barges are moor’d at its base.
Fly, Honesty, fly! seek some safer retreat:
There’s _craft_ in the river and _craft_ in the street.”
But Sir George Rose capped this in return, retorting in extemporaneous
lines, written after dinner:--
“Why should Honesty fly to some safer retreat,
From attorneys and barges?--’od rot ’em!
For the lawyers are _just_ at the top of the street,
And the barges are _just_ at the bottom.”
James Smith, the intellectual hero of this street, the son of a solicitor
to the Ordnance, was born in 1775. In 1802 he joined the staff of the
_Pic-Nic_ newspaper, with Combe, Croker, Cumberland, and that mediocre
poet, Sir James Bland Burgess. It changed its name to the _Cabinet_, and
died in 1803. From 1807 to 1817 James Smith contributed to the _Monthly
Mirror_ his “Horace in London.” In 1812 came out the _Rejected Addresses_,
inimitable parodies by himself and his brother, not merely of the manner
but of the very mode of thought of Wordsworth, Cobbett, Southey,
Coleridge, Crabbe, Lord Byron, Scott, etc. The copyright, originally
offered to Mr. Murray for £20, but declined, was purchased by him in 1819,
after the sixteenth edition, for £131; so much for the foresight of
publishers. The book has since deservedly gone through endless editions,
and has not been approached even by the talented parody writers of
_Punch_. Those who wish to see the story of this publication in detail,
must hunt it up in the edition of the _Addresses_ illustrated by George
Cruickshank.
Mr. Smith was the chief deviser of the substance of the _Entertainments_
of the elder Charles Mathews. He wrote the _Country Cousins_ in 1820, and
in the two succeeding years the _Trip to France_ and the _Trip to
America_. For these last two works the author received a thousand pounds.
“A thousand pounds!” he used to ejaculate, shrugging his shoulders, “and
all for nonsense.”[247]
James Smith was just the man for Mathews, with his slight frameworks of
stories filled up with songs, jokes, puns, wild farcical fancies, and
merry conceits, and here and there among the motley, with true touches of
wit, pathos, and comedy, and faithful traits of life and character, such
as only a close observer of society and a sound thinker could pen.
He was lucky enough to obtain a legacy of £300 for a complimentary epigram
on Mr. Strahan, the king’s printer. Being patted on the head when a boy by
Chief-Justice Mansfield, in Highgate churchyard, and once seeing Horace
Walpole on his lawn at Twickenham, were the two chief historical events of
Mr. Smith’s quiet life. The four reasons that kept so clever a man
employed on mere amateur trifling were these--an indolent disinclination
to sustained work, a fear of failure, a dislike to risk a well-earned
fame, and a foreboding that literary success might injure his practice as
a lawyer. His favourite visits were to Lord Mulgrave’s, Mr. Croker’s,
Lord Abinger’s, Lady Blessington’s, and Lord Harrington’s.
Pretty Lady Blessington used to say of him, that “James Smith, if he had
not been a _witty_ man, must have been a _great_ man.” He died in his
house in Craven Street, with the calmness of a philosopher, on the 24th of
December 1839, in the sixty-fifth year of his age.[248] Fond of society,
witty without giving pain, a bachelor, and therefore glad to escape from a
solitary home, James Smith seems to have been the model of a diner-out.
Caleb Whitefoord, a wine merchant in Craven Street, and an excellent
connoisseur in old pictures, was one of the legacy-hunters who infested
the studio of Nollekens, the miserly sculptor of Mortimer Street. He was a
foppish dresser, and was remarkable for a dashing three-cornered hat, with
a sparkling black button and a loop upon a rosette. He wore a wig with
five tiers of curls, of the Garrick cut, and he was one of the last to
wear such a monstrosity. This crafty wine merchant used to distribute
privately the most whimsical of his _Cross Readings_, _Ship News_, and
_Mistakes of the Press_--things in their day very popular, though now
surpassed in every number of _Punch_. Some of the best were the
following:--“Yesterday Dr. Pretyman preached at St. James’s,--and
performed it with ease in less than sixteen minutes.” “Several changes are
talked of at Court,--consisting of 9050 triple bob-majors.” “Dr. Solander
will, by Her Majesty’s command, undertake a voyage--round the head-dress
of the present month.” “Sunday night.--Many noble families were
alarmed--by the constable of the ward, who apprehended them at cards.” A
simple-hearted age could laugh heartily at these things: would that we
could!
It has often been asserted that Goldsmith’s epitaph on Whitefoord was
written by the wine merchant himself, and sent to the editor of the fifth
edition of the Poems by a convenient common friend. It is not very
pointed, and the length of the epitaph is certainly singular,
considering that the poet dismissed Burke and Reynolds in less than
eighteen lines.
Adam built an octagon room in Whitefoord’s house in order to give his
pictures an equal light; and Mr. Christie adopted the idea when he fitted
up his large room in King Street, St. James’s.[249]
Goldsmith is said to have been intimate with witty, punning Caleb
Whitefoord, and certain it is his name is found in the postscript to the
poem of _Retaliation_, written by Oliver on some of his friends at the St.
James’s Coffee-house. These were the Burkes, fretful Cumberland, Reynolds,
Garrick, and Canon Douglas. In this poem Goldsmith laments that Whitefoord
should have confined himself to newspaper essays, and contented himself
with the praise of the printer of the _Public Advertiser_; he thus sums
him up:--
“Rare compound of oddity, frolic, and fun,
Who relish’d a joke and rejoiced in a pun;
Whose temper was generous, open, sincere;
A stranger to flattery, a stranger to fear.
* * * * *
“Merry Whitefoord, farewell! for thy sake I admit
That a Scot may have humour--I’d almost said wit;
This debt to thy memory I cannot refuse,
Thou best-humour’d man with the worst-humour’d Muse.”
Whitefoord became Vice-President of the Society of Arts.
Anthony Pasquin (Williams), a celebrated art critic and satirist of Dr.
Johnson’s time, was articled to Matt Darley, the famous caricaturist of
the Strand, to learn engraving.[250]
The old name of Northumberland Street was Hartshorne Lane or Christopher
Alley.[251] Here Ben Jonson lived when he was a child, and after his
mother had taken a bricklayer for her second husband.
At the bottom of this lane Sir Edmondbury Godfrey had his wood wharf. This
fact shows how much history is illustrated by topography, for the
residence of the unfortunate justice explains why it should have been
supposed that he had been inveigled into Somerset House.
In 1829 Mr. Wood, who kept a coal wharf, resided in Sir Edmondbury’s old
premises at the bottom of Northumberland Street. It was here the court
justice’s wood-wharf was, but his house was in Green’s Lane, near
Hungerford Market.[252] During the Great Plague Sir Edmondbury had been
very active; on one occasion, when his men refused to act, he entered a
pest-house alone to apprehend a wretch who had stolen at least a thousand
winding-sheets. Four medals were struck on his death. There is also a
portrait of the unlucky woodmonger in the waiting-room adjoining the
Vestry of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields.[253] He wore, it seems, a full black
wig, like Charles II.
Three men were tried for his murder--the cushion-man at the Queen’s
Chapel, the servant of the treasurer of the chapel, and the porter of
Somerset House. The truculent Scroggs tried the accused, and those
infamous men, Oates, Prance, and Bedloe, were the false witnesses who
murdered them. The prisoners were all executed. Sir Edmondbury’s corpse
was embalmed and borne to its funeral at St. Martin’s from Bridewell. The
pall was supported by eight knights, all justices of the peace, and the
aldermen of London followed the coffin. Twenty-two ministers marched
before the body, and a great Protestant mob followed. Dr. William Lloyd
preached the funeral sermon from the text 2 Sam. iii. 24. The preacher was
guarded in the pulpit by two clergymen armed with “Protestant flails.”
[Illustration: YORK STAIRS, WITH THE HOUSES OF PEPYS AND PETER THE GREAT,
AFTER CANALETTI (CIRCA 1745).]
In July 1861, No. 16 Northumberland Street, then an old-fashioned,
dingy-looking house, with narrow windows, which had been divided into
chambers, was the scene of a fight for life and death between Major Murray
and Mr. Roberts, a solicitor and bill-discounter; the latter attempted the
life of the former for the sake of getting possession of his mistress, to
whom he had lent money. Under pretext of advancing a loan to the Grosvenor
Hotel Company, of which the major was a promoter, he decoyed him into a
back room on the first floor of No. 16, then shot him in the back of the
neck, and immediately after in the right temple. The major, feigning to be
dead, waited till Roberts’s back was turned, then springing to his feet
attacked him with a pair of tongs, which he broke to pieces over his
assailant’s head. He then knocked him down with a bottle which lay near,
and escaped through the window, and from thence by a water-pipe to the
ground. Roberts died soon afterwards, but Major Murray recovered, and the
jury returning a verdict of “Justifiable Homicide,” he was released. The
papers described Roberts’s rooms as crowded with dusty Buhl cabinets,
inlaid tables, statuettes, and drawings. These were smeared with blood and
wine, while on the glass shades of the ornaments a rain of blood seemed
to have fallen.
The embankment, which here is very wide, and includes several acres of
garden on the spot where the Thames once flowed, has largely altered the
character of the streets below the Strand and the river, destroying the
picturesque wharves and spoiling the appearance of the Water Gate, which
is half buried in gravel and flowers, like the Sphynx in Egypt. Between it
and the Thames now stands Cleopatra’s Needle, brought over to England at
great cost of money and life, and set up here in 1878.
[Illustration: CROCKFORD’S FISH SHOP.]