LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.
Lincoln’s Inn, originally belonging to the Black Friars before they
removed Thames-ward, derives its name from Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln,
to whom it was given by Edward I., and whose town house or inn stood on
the same site in the reign of Edward I. Earl Henry died in 1312, the year
in which Gaveston was killed, and his monument was one of the stateliest
in the old church. His arms are still those of the inn and of its
tributaries, Furnival’s and Thavies inns. There is yet extant an old
account of the earl’s bailiff, relating to the sale of the fruit of his
master’s garden. The noble’s table was supplied and the residue sold. The
apples, pears, large nuts, and cherries, the beans, onions, garlic, and
leeks, produced a profit of £9: 2: 3 (about £135 in modern money). The
only flowers were roses. The bailiff, it appears, expended 8s. a year in
purchasing small fry, frogs, and eels, to feed the pike in the pond or
vivary.[665]
Part of the Chancery Lane side of Lincoln’s Inn was in 1217 and 1272 “the
mansion house” of William de Haverhill, treasurer to King Henry III. He
was attainted for treason, and his house and lands were confiscated to the
king, who then gave his house to Ralph Neville, Chancellor of England and
Bishop of Chichester, who built there “a fair house;” and the Bishops of
Chichester inhabited it there till Henry VII.’s time, when they let it to
law students, reserving lodgings for themselves, and it fell into the
hands of Judge Sulyard and other feoffees. This family held it till
Elizabeth’s time, when Sir Edward Sulyard, of Essex, sold the estate to
the Benchers,[666] who then began enlarging their frontier and building.
The plain Tudor gateway with the two side towers soaked with black smoke,
the oldest part of the existing structure, was built in 1518 by Sir Thomas
Lovell, a member of this inn and treasurer of the household to Henry VII.,
when great alterations took place in the inn. What thousands of wise men
and rogues have passed under its murky shadow! None of the original
building is left. The Black Friars’ House fronted the Holborn end of the
Bishop’s Palace.[667] The chambers adjoining the Gate House are of a later
date and it was at these that Mr. Cunningham thinks Ben Jonson
worked.[668]
The chapel, of debased Perpendicular Gothic, was built by Inigo Jones, and
consecrated in 1623, Dr. Donne the poet preaching the consecration sermon.
The stained glass was the work of a Mr. Hale of Fetter Lane. The twelve
apostles, Moses, and the prophets still glow like immortal flowers,
bright as when Donne, or Ussher, watched the light they shed. One of the
windows bears the name of Bernard van Linge, the same man probably who
executed the windows at Wadham College, Oxford.[669] Noy, the
Attorney-General and creature of Charles I., a friend of Laud, and the
proposer of the writ for ship-money, put up the window representing John
the Baptist, rather an ominous saint, surely, in Charles’s time. Noy died
in 1634, before the storm which would certainly have carried his head off.
He left his money to a prodigal son, who was afterwards killed in a
duel,--“Left to be squandered, and I hope no better from him,” says the
dying man, bitterly. It was Noy who decided the curious case of the three
graziers who left their money with their hostess. One of them afterwards
returned and ran off with the money; upon which the other two sued the
woman, denying their consent. Mr. Noy pleaded that the money was ready to
be given up directly the three men came together and claimed it.[670]
Rogers tells this story in his poem of “Italy,” and gives it a romantic
turn.
Laud, always restless for novelties that could look like Rome, and yet not
be Rome, referred to the Lincoln’s Inn windows at his trial. He wondered
at a Mr. Brown objecting to such things, considering he was not of
Lincoln’s Inn, “where Mr. Prynne’s zeal had not yet beaten down the images
of the apostles in the fair windows of that chapel, which windows were set
up new long since the statute of Edward VI.; and it is well known,” says
that enemy of the Puritans, “that I was once resolved to have returned
this upon Mr. Brown in the House of Commons, but changed my mind, lest
thereby I might have set some furious spirit at work to destroy those
harmless goodly windows, to the just dislike of that worthy society.”[671]
The crypt under the chapel rests on many pillars and strong-backed arches,
and, like the cloisters in the Temple, was intended as a place for
student-lawyers to walk in and exchange learning. Butler describes
witnesses of the straw-bail species waiting here for customers,[672] just
as half a century ago they used to haunt the doors of Chancery Lane
gin-shops. On a June day in 1663 Pepys came to walk under the chapel by
appointment, after pacing up and down and admiring the new garden then
constructing.
The great Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England in Henry VIII.’s time,
had chambers at Lincoln’s Inn when he was living in Bucklersbury after his
marriage. This was about 1506. He wrote his _Utopia_ in 1516. King Henry
grew so fond of More’s learned and witty conversation, that he used to
constantly send for him to supper, and would walk in the garden at Chelsea
with his arm round his neck. More was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to
take the oath of succession and acknowledge the legality of the king’s
divorce from Catherine of Arragon. Erasmus, who knew More well, inscribed
the “Nux” of Ovid to his son. More’s skull is still preserved, it is said,
in the vault of St. Dunstan’s Church at Canterbury.[673] More’s daughter,
Margaret Roper, was buried with it in her arms.
Dr. Donne, the divine and poet, whose mother was distantly related to Sir
Thomas More and to Heywood the epigrammatist, was a student at Lincoln’s
Inn in his seventeenth year, but left it to squander his father’s fortune.
He was a friend of Bacon, with whom he lived for five years, and also of
Ben Jonson, who corresponded with him. When young, Donne had written a
thesis to prove that suicide is no sin. “That,” he used to say in later
years, “was written by Jack Donne, not by Dr. Donne.”
This same poet was for two years preacher at Lincoln’s Inn; so was the
charitable and amiable Tillotson in 1663. The latter, after preaching the
doctrine of non-resistance before King Charles II., was nicknamed “Hobbes
in the pulpit;” he and Dr. Burnet both tried in vain to force the same
doctrine on Lord William Russell when he was preparing for death.
Tillotson, who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1691 by King William,
was a valued friend of Locke. Addison considered Tillotson’s three folio
volumes of sermons to be the standard of English, and meant to make them
the ground-work of a dictionary which he had projected. Warburton, a
sterner critic, denies that the sermons are oratorical like Jeremy
Taylor’s, or thoughtful like Barrow’s, but yet confesses them to be clear,
rational, equable,[674] and certainly not without a noble simplicity.
Among the most eminent students of Lincoln’s Inn we must remember Sir
Matthew Hale. After a wild and vain youth, Hale suddenly commenced
studying sixteen hours a day,[675] and became so careless of dress that he
was once seized by a pressgang. The sight of a friend who fell down in a
fit from excessive drinking led to this honest man’s renouncing all
revelry and becoming unchangeably religious. Noy directed him in his
studies; he became a friend of Selden, and was one of the counsel for
Strafford, Laud, and the king himself. Nevertheless, he obtained the
esteem of Cromwell, who was tolerant of all shades of goodness. He died
1675-6. When a nobleman once complained to Charles II. that Hale would not
discuss with him the arguments in his cause then before him, Charles
replied, “Ods fish, man! he would have treated me just the same.”
Lord Chancellor Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere, was of Lincoln’s Inn.
His son became Earl of Bridgewater. He was a friend of Lord Bacon, and had
a celebrated dispute with Chief Justice Coke as to whether “the Chancery
can relieve by subpœna after a judgment at law in the same cause.”
Prudent, discreet, and honest, Ellesmere was esteemed by both Elizabeth
and James, and died at York House in 1617. Bishop Hacket says of him that
“He neither did, spoke, nor thought anything in his life but what deserved
praise.”[676] It is said that many persons used to go to the Chancery
Court only to see and admire his venerable presence.
Sir Henry Spelman was admitted of Lincoln’s Inn. He was a friend of
Dugdale, and one of our earliest students of Anglo-Saxon. He wrote much
on civil law, sacrilege, and tithes. Aubrey tells us that he was thought a
dunce at school, and did not seriously sit down to hard study till he was
about forty. This eminent scholar died in 1641, and was interred with
great solemnity in Westminster Abbey.
Shaftesbury, the subtle and dangerous, and one of the restorers of the
king he afterwards worked so hard to depose, was of Lincoln’s Inn.
Ashmole, the great herald, antiquary, and numismatist, originally a London
attorney, was married in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, in 1668, to the daughter of
his great colleague in topography and heraldry, Sir William Dugdale, the
part compiler of the _Monasticon_.
In the chapel was buried Alexander Brome, a Royalist attorney, a
translator of Horace, and a great writer of sharp songs against “The
Rump,” who died in 1666. Here also--in loving companionship with him only
because dead--rests that irritable Puritan lawyer, William Prynne. He
twice lost an ear in the pillory, besides being branded on the cheek. He
ultimately opposed Cromwell and aided the return of Charles, for which he
was made Keeper of the Tower Records. His works amount to forty folio and
quarto volumes. He left copies of them to the Lincoln’s Inn library.
Needham calls him “the greatest paper-worm that ever crept into a
library.” He died in his Lincoln’s Inn chambers in 1669. Wood computes
that Prynne wrote as much as would amount to a sheet for every day of his
life. His epitaph had been erased when Wood wrote the _Athenæ Oxonienses_
in 1691.
In the same chapel lies Secretary Thurloe, the son of an Essex rector and
the faithful servant of Cromwell. He was admitted of Lincoln’s Inn in
1647, and in 1654 was chosen one of the masters of the upper bench. He
died suddenly in his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn in 1668. Dr. Birch
published several folio volumes of his _State Papers_. He seems to have
been an honest, dull, plodding man. Thurloe’s chambers were at No. 24 in
the south angle of the great court leading out of Chancery Lane, formerly
called the Gatehouse Court, but now Old Buildings--the rooms on the left
hand of the ground-floor. Here Thurloe had chambers from 1645 to 1659.
Cromwell must have often come here to discuss dissolutions of Parliament
and Dutch treaties. State papers sufficient to fill sixty-seven folio
volumes were discovered in a false ceiling in the garret by a clergyman
who had borrowed the chambers of a friend during the long vacation. He
disposed of them to Lord Chancellor Somers.[677] Cautious old Thurloe had
perhaps sown these papers, hoping to reap the harvest under some new
Cromwellian dynasty that never came.
Rushworth the historian was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn. During the Civil
Wars he was assistant clerk to the House of Commons. After the Restoration
he became secretary to the Lord Keeper, but falling into distress, died in
the King’s Bench in 1690. His eight folio volumes of _Historical
Collections_ are specially valuable.[678]
Sir John Denham also studied in this pasturing-ground of English genius;
and here, after squandering all his money in gaming, he wrote an essay
upon the vice that brings its own punishment. In 1641, when his tragedy of
“The Sophy” appeared, Waller said that Denham had broken out like the
Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong. In 1643 appeared his
“Cooper’s Hill” which the lampooners declared the author had bought of a
vicar for forty pounds.[679] He became mad for a short time at the close
of life, and was then ridiculed by Butler, so says Dr. Johnson. He died in
1668, and was interred in Westminster Abbey. Denham and Waller smoothed
the way for Dryden,[680] and founded the Pope school of highly polished
artificial verse. Denham’s noble apostrophe to the river Thames is all but
perfect.
George Wither, one of our fine old poets of a true school, rougher but
more natural than Denham’s, the son of a Hampshire farmer, entered at
Lincoln’s Inn. Sent to the Marshalsea for his just but indiscreet satires,
he turned soldier, fought against the Royalists, and became one of
Cromwell’s dreaded major-generals. He was in Newgate for a long time after
the Restoration, and died in 1667. When taken prisoner by Charles, Sir
John Denham obtained his release on the humorous pretext that, while
Wither lived, he (Denham) would not be the worst poet in England.[681]
In No. 1 New Square, Arthur Murphy, the friend of Dr. Johnson, resided for
twenty-three years. He became a member of the inn in 1757. In 1788 he sold
his chambers, and retired from the bar. As a journalist he was ridiculed
by Wilkes and Churchill. His plays, “The Grecian Daughter” and “Three
Weeks after Marriage,” were successful. He also translated Tacitus and
Sallust. He died in 1805.[682]
Judge Fortescue, a great English lawyer of the time of Henry VI., was a
student of this inn. He wrote his great work, _De Laudibus Legum Angliæ_
to educate Prince Edward when in banishment in Lorraine. This pious,
loyal, and learned man, after being nominal Chancellor, returned to
retirement in England, and acknowledged Edward IV.
The Earl of Mansfield belonged to the same illustrious inn. For elegance
of mind, for honesty and industry, and for eloquence, he stands
unrivalled. The proceedings against Wilkes, and the destruction of his
house in Bloomsbury by the fanatical mob of 1780, were the chief events of
his useful life.
Spencer Perceval was of Lincoln’s Inn. A son of the Earl of Egmont, he
became a student here in 1782. In Parliament he supported Pitt and the war
against Napoleon. In 1801, under the Addington ministry, he became
Attorney-General, and persecuted Peltier for a libel on Bonaparte during
the peace of Amiens. On the death of the Duke of Portland he was raised to
the head of the Treasury, where he continued till May 1812, when he was
shot through the heart in the lobby of the House of Commons by Bellingham,
a bankrupt merchant of Archangel, who considered himself aggrieved because
ministers had not taken his part and claimed redress for his losses from
the Russian Government. Perceval was a shrewd, even-tempered lawyer,
fluent and industrious, who, had time been permitted him, might possibly
have proved more completely than he did his incapacity for high
ministerial command.
George Canning became a student at Lincoln’s Inn in 1781. His father was a
bankrupt wine-merchant who died of a broken heart. His mother was a
provincial actress. His relation, Sheridan, introduced him to Fox, Grey,
and Burke, the latter of whom, it is said, induced him to make politics
his profession. He made his maiden speech, attacking Fox and supporting
Pitt, in 1794. Late in life he gradually began to support some liberal
measures. In 1827 he became First Lord of the Treasury, and died a few
months afterwards in the zenith of his power.
Lord Lyndhurst was also one of the glories of this inn. The trial of Dr.
Watson for treason, in 1817, first gained for this son of an American
painter a reputation which, joined with his prudent conduct in the trial
of Cashman the rioter led to his being appointed Solicitor-General in
1818. From that he rose in rapid succession, to the posts of
Attorney-General, Master of the Rolls, Lord Chancellor, and Lord
Lyndhurst. Old, eccentric, “irrepressible” Sir Charles Wetherell was
Copley’s fellow-advocate in Watson’s case, that ended in the prisoner’s
acquittal.[683] In 1827, when Abbott became Lord Tenterden, Copley
accepted the Great Seal, displacing Lord Eldon, and joined Canning’s
cabinet, becoming Lord Lyndhurst. In 1830 he became Chief Baron of the
Exchequer.
Charles Pepys, Lord Cottenham, born 1781, was called to the bar by the
Society of Lincoln’s Inn in 1804. He was appointed King’s Counsel in 1826,
was made Solicitor-General in 1834, succeeded Sir John Leach as Master of
the Rolls in the same year, and was elevated to the woolsack in 1836. This
Chancellor, who was a very excellent lawyer, was descended from a branch
of the family of Samuel Pepys, author of the celebrated _Diary_.
Sir E. Sugden was a member of Lincoln’s Inn. He was born in the year 1781.
He was the son of a Westminster hairdresser who became rich by inventing a
substitute for hair-powder. He was created Lord St. Leonards on the
formation of a Conservative ministry in 1852, when he accepted the Great
Seal.
Lord Brougham also studied in Lincoln’s Inn. He was born in 1778, and
started the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1802. In 1820 he defended Queen
Caroline; but it would take a volume to follow the career of this
impetuous and versatile genius. His struggles for law-reform, for Catholic
emancipation, for abolition of slavery, for the education of the people,
and for Parliamentary reform, are matters of history. In his old age,
though still vigorous, Lord Brougham grew tamer, and condemned the armed
emancipation of slaves practised by the Northern States in the present
American war. He died at his residence at Cannes in the South of France in
1868.
Cottenham and Campbell were students in Lincoln’s Inn; so was that
eccentric reformer Jeremy Bentham, who was called to the bar in 1722, and
was the son of a Houndsditch attorney; and so was Penn, the founder of
Pennsylvania.
That “luminary of the Irish Church,”[684] Archbishop Ussher, was preacher
at Lincoln’s Inn in 1647, the society giving the good man handsome rooms
ready furnished. He continued to preach there for eight years, till his
eyesight began to fail. He died in 1655, and was buried, by Cromwell’s
permission, with great magnificence, in Erasmus’s chapel in Westminster
Abbey. His library of 10,000 volumes, bought of him by Cromwell’s
officers, was given by Charles II. to Dublin College. Ussher, when only
eighteen, was the David who discomfited in public dispute the learned
Jesuit Fitz-Simons. He saw Charles beheaded from the roof of a house on
the site of the Admiralty.
Dr. Langhorne, the joint translator with his brother of the _Lives of
Plutarch_, was assistant preacher at Lincoln’s Inn. An imitator of
Sterne, and a writer in Griffiths’s _Monthly Review_, he was praised by
Smollett and abused by Churchill. Langhorne’s amiable poem, _The Country
Justice_, was praised by Scott. He died in 1779.
That fiery controversialist Warburton was preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in
1746, and the same year preached and published a sermon on the Highland
rebellion. He was the son of an attorney at Newark-upon-Trent. His _Divine
Legation_ was an effort to show that the absence of allusions in the
writings of Moses to a system of rewards and punishments was a proof of
their divine origin. The book is full of perverse digressions. His edition
of Shakspere is, perhaps, to use a fine expression of Burke, “one of the
poorest maggots that ever crept from the great man’s carcase.” Pope left
half his library to Warburton, who had suggested to him the conclusion of
the _Dunciad_. Wilkes, Bolingbroke, Dr. Louth, and Churchill were all by
turns attacked by this arrogant knight-errant. Warburton died in 1779.
Reginald Heber, afterwards the excellent Bishop of Calcutta, was appointed
preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1822, the year before he sailed for India. In
1826 this good man was found dead in his bath at Trichinopoly. The sudden
death of this energetic missionary was a great loss to East Indian
Christianity. In the “company of the preachers” we must not forget the
excellent Dr. Van Mildert, afterwards Bishop of Durham, and Dr. Thomson
the present Archbishop of York.
In the old times the Lord Chancellor held his sittings in the great hall
of Lincoln’s Inn. Here, too, at the Christmas revels, the King of the
Cockneys administered _his_ laws. Jack Straw, a sort of rebellious rival,
was put down, with all his adherents, as a bad precedent for the Essexes
and Norfolks of the inn, by wary Queen Elizabeth, who always kept a firm
grip on her prerogative. In the same reign absurd sumptuary laws, vainly
trying to fix the quicksilver of fashion, forbade the students to wear
long hair, long beards, large ruffs, huge cloaks, or big spurs. The fine
for wearing a beard of more than a fortnight’s growth was three shillings
and fourpence.[685] In her father’s time beards had been prohibited under
pain of double commons.
In the old hall, replaced by the new Tudor building, stood one of
Hogarth’s most pretentious but worst pictures, “Paul preaching before
Felix,” an ill-drawn and ludicrous caricature of epic work. The society
paid for it. It is now rolled up and hid away with as much contumely as
Kent’s absurdity at St. Clement’s when Hogarth parodied it.
The new hall of Lincoln’s Inn was built by Mr. P. Hardwick, the architect
of the St. Katherine Docks, and was opened by the Queen in person in 1845.
It is a fine Tudor building of red brick, with stone dressings. The hall
is 120 feet, the library 80 feet long. The contract was taken for £55,000,
but its cost exceeded that sum. The library contains the unique fourth
volume of Prynne’s _Records_, which the society bought for £335 at the
Stow sale in 1849, and all Sir Matthew Hale’s bequests of books and MSS.:
“a treasure,” says that “excellent good man,” as Evelyn calls him[686] in
his will, “that is not fit for every man’s view.” The hall contains a
fresco representing the “Lawgivers of the World,” by Watts. The gardens
were much curtailed by the erection of the hall, and their quietude
destroyed. Ben Jonson talks of the walks under the elms.[687] Steele seems
to have been fond of this garden when he felt meditative. In May 1709, he
says much hurry and business having perplexed him into a mood too
thoughtful for company, instead of the tavern “I went into Lincoln’s Inn
Walk, and having taken a round or two, I sat down, according to the
allowed familiarity of these places, on a bench.” In a more thoughtful
month (November) of the same year he goes again for a solitary walk in the
garden, “a favour that is indulged me by several of the benchers, who are
very intimate friends, and grown old in the neighbourhood.” It was this
bright frosty night, when the whole body of air had been purified into
“bright transparent æther,” that Steele imagined his vision of “The
Return of the Golden Age.”
Brave old Ben Jonson was the son of a Scotch gentleman in Henry VIII.’s
service, who, impoverished by the persecutions of Queen Mary, took orders
late in life. His mother married for the second time a small builder or
master bricklayer. He went to Westminster school, where Camden, the great
antiquary, was his master. A kind patron sent him to Cambridge.[688] He
seems to have left college prematurely, and have come back to London to
work with his father-in-law.[689]
There is an old tradition that he worked at the garden-wall of Lincoln’s
Inn next to Chancery Lane, and that a knight or bencher (Sutton, or
Camden), walking by, hearing him repeat a passage of Homer, entered into
conversation with him, and finding him to have extraordinary wit, sent him
back to college; or, as Fuller quaintly puts it, “some gentlemen pitying
that his parts should be buried under the rubbish of so mean a calling,
did by their bounty manumise him freely to follow his own ingenious
inclinations.”[690]
Gifford sneers at the story, for the poet’s own words to Drummond of
Hawthornden were simply these:--“He could not endure the occupation of a
bricklayer,” and therefore joined Vere in Flanders, probably going with
reinforcements to Ostend in 1591-2.[691] He there fought and slew an
enemy, and stripped him in sight of both armies. On his return, he became
an actor at a Shoreditch theatre. His enemies, the rival satirists,
frequently sneer at the quondam profession of Ben Jonson, and describe him
stamping on the stage as if he were treading mortar. For myself, I admire
brave, truculent old Ben, and delight even in his most crabbed and
pedantic verse, and therefore never pass Lincoln’s Inn garden without
thinking of Shakspere’s honest but rugged friend--“a bear only in the
coat.”
On June 27, 1752, there was a dreadful fire in New Square, which
destroyed countless historical treasures, including Lord Somers’s original
letters and papers.
At No. 2 and afterwards at No. 6 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, which is built
on Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and forms no part of the Inn of court,
lived Sir Samuel Romilly. This “great and amiable man,” as Tom Moore calls
him, killed himself in a fit of melancholy produced by overwork joined to
the loss of his wife, “a simple, gay, unlearned woman.” Sir Samuel was a
stern, reserved man, and she was the only person in the world to whom he
could unbosom himself. When he lost her, he said, “the very vent of his
heart was stopped up.”[692]
It was in Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn, that Benjamin Disraeli, born in
December 1805, much too erratic for Plowden and Coke, used to come to
study conveyancing at the chambers of Mr. Bassevi. He is described as
often arriving with Spenser’s _Faerie Queen_ under his arm, stopping an
hour or two to read, and then leaving. This led, as might be expected, not
to the woolsack but to the authorship of _Coningsby_. His Premiership and
his Patent of Peerage as Lord Beaconsfield, are due to other causes.
Whetstone Park, now a small quiet passage, full of printing-offices and
stables, between Great Turnstile and Gate Street, derived its name from a
vestryman of the time of Charles I. It is now chiefly occupied by mews,
but was once filled by infamous houses and low brandy-shops.
In 1671, the Duke of Monmouth, the Duke of Grafton, and the Duke of St.
Alban’s, three of King Charles II.’s illegitimate sons, killed here a
beadle in a drunken brawl. A street-ballad was written on the occasion,
more full of spite against the corrupt court than of sympathy with the
slain man. In poor doggerel the Catnach of 1671 describes the watch coming
in, disturbed from sleep, to appease their graces--
“Straight rose mortal jars,
’Twixt the night blackguard and (the) silver stars;
Then fell the beadle by a ducal hand,
For daring to pronounce the saucy ‘Stand!’”
Sadly enough, the silly fellow’s death led to a dance at Whitehall being
put off,--
“Disappoints the queen, ‘poor little chuck!’”[693]
and all the brisk courtiers in their gay coats bought with the nation’s
subsidies.
The last two lines are vigorous, sarcastic, and worthy of a humble
imitator of Dryden. The poet sums up--
“Yet shall Whitehall, the innocent and good,
See these men dance, all daubed with lace and blood.”
In 1682 the misnamed “Park” grew so infamous, that a countryman, having
been decoyed into one of the houses and robbed, went into Smithfield and
collected an angry mob of about 500 apprentices, who marched on Whetstone
Park, broke open the houses, and destroyed the furniture. The constables
and watchmen, being outnumbered, sent for the king’s guard, who dispersed
them and took eleven of them. Nevertheless, the next night another mob
stormed the place, again broke in the doors, smashed the windows, and cut
the feather-beds to pieces.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields formed part of the ancient Fickett’s Fields, a plot
of ground of about ten acres, extending formerly from Bell Yard to
Portugal Street and Carey Street. It seems to have been used in the Middle
Ages for jousts and tournaments by the Templars and Knights of St. John of
Jerusalem, to the priory of which last order it belonged till Henry VIII.
dissolved the monasteries, when it was granted to Anthony Stringer. In an
inquest of the time of James I. it is described as having two gates for
horses and carriages at the east end--one gate leading into Chancery Lane,
the other gate at the western end.[694]
Queen Elizabeth, afraid that London was growing unwieldly, issued several
proclamations against further building. James I., still more timid and
conservative, and not thoroughly acquainted with his own capital, issued a
like absurd ukase in 1612, by the desire of the benchers and students of
Lincoln’s Inn, forbidding the erection of new houses in these fields. But
no royal edict can prevent a demand for creating a supply, and as the
building still went on, a commission was appointed in 1618 to lay out the
square in a regular plan. Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, and many noblemen,
judges, and masters in Chancery, were on this commission, and Inigo Jones,
the king’s Surveyor-General, drew up the scheme. The report of this body,
given by Rymer, sets out that in the last sixteen years there had been
more building near and about the City of London than in ages before, and
that as these fields were much surrounded by the dwellings and lodgings of
noblemen and gentlemen of quality, “all small cottages and closes shall be
paid for and removed, and the square shall be reduced,” both for
sweetness, uniformity, and comeliness, as an ornament to the City, and for
the health and recreation of the inhabitants, into walks and partitions,
as Mr. Inigo Jones should in his map devise.[695]
There is a tradition that the area of the square, according to Inigo
Jones’s plan, was to have been made the exact dimensions of the base of
the great pyramid of Geezeh. The tradition is probably true, for the area
of the pyramid is 535,824 square feet, and that of Lincoln’s Inn Fields
550,000.[696] The height of the pyramid was 756 feet.
The plan proved too costly, and the subscriptions began probably to fail;
but in the course of time noblemen and others began to build for
themselves, but without much regard to uniformity.
The elevation of Inigo’s plan for the Fields, painted in oil colours, is
still preserved at Wilton House, near Salisbury. The view is taken from
the south, and the principal feature in the elevation is Lindsey House in
the centre of the west side, whose stone façade, still existing, stands
boldly out from the brick houses which support it on either side. The
internal accommodation of Lindsey House was never good.[697]
These fields in Charles I.’s time became the haunt of wrestlers, bowlers,
beggars, and idle boys; and here, in 1624, Lilly the astrologer, then
servant to a mantua-maker in the Strand, spent his time in bowling with
Wat the cobbler, Dick the blacksmith, and such idle apprentices. Hither,
after the Restoration, came every sort of villain--the Rufflers, or maimed
soldiers, who told lies of Edgehill and Naseby, and who surrounded the
coaches of charitable lords; “Dommerers,” or sham dumb men; “Mumpers,” or
sham broken gentlemen; “Whipjacks,” or sham seamen with bound-up legs;
“Abram-men,” or sham idiots; “Fraters,” or rogues with forged patents;
“Anglers,” wild rogues, “Clapper-dudgeons,”[698] and men with gambling
wheels of fortune.
In Queen Anne’s reign Gay sketches the dangers of night in these fields;
he warns his readers to avoid the lurking thief, by day a beggar, or
else--
“The crutch, which late compassion moved, shall wound
Thy bleeding head, and fell thee to the ground.
Nor trust the linkman,” he adds, “along the lonely wall, or he’ll put out
his light and rob you, but--
“Still keep the public streets where oily rays
That from the crystal lamp o’erspread the ways.”
The south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields was built and named three years
before the Restoration, by Sir William Cowper, James Cowper, and Robert
Henley. In 1668 Portugal Row, as it was called, but not from Charles’s
queen,[699] was extremely fashionable. There were then living here such
noble and noted persons as Lady Arden, William Perpoint, Esq., Sir Charles
Waldegrave, Lady Fitzharding, Lady Diana Curzon, Serjeant Maynard, Lord
Cardigan, Mrs. Anne Heron, Lady Mordant, Richard Adams, Esq., Lady Carr,
Lady Wentworth, Mr. Attorney Montagu, Lady Coventry, Judge Welch, and Lady
Davenant.[700]
Mr. Serjeant Maynard was the brave old Presbyterian lawyer, then
eighty-seven, who replied to the Prince of Orange, when he said that he
must have outlived all the men of law of his time--“Sir, I should have
outlived the law itself had not your highness come over.”
Lady Davenant was the widow of Sir William Davenant, the Oxford
innkeeper’s son, the poet and manager, who, aided by Whitlocke and
Maynard, was allowed in Cromwell’s time to perform operas at a theatre in
Charterhouse Square. After the Restoration he had the theatre in Portugal
Street. He died in 1668, insolvent. His poems were published by his widow,
and dedicated to the Duke of York in 1673.
Lord Cardigan was the father of the infamous Countess of Shrewsbury, who
is said, disguised as a page, to have held her lover the Duke of
Buckingham’s horse while he killed her husband in a duel near Barn Elms.
The Earl of Rochester lived in the house next the Duke’s Theatre,[701]
which stood behind the present College of Surgeons, as Davenant says in
one of his epilogues--
“The prospect of the sea cannot be shown,
Therefore be pleased to think that you are all
Behind the row which men call Portugal.”
In September 1586 Ballard, Babington, and other conspirators against the
life of Queen Elizabeth were put to death in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Babington was a young man of good family, who had been a page to the Earl
of Shrewsbury, and had plotted to rescue Mary and assassinate Elizabeth.
His plot discovered, he had fled to St. John’s Wood for concealment. Seven
of these plotters were hanged on the first day, and seven on the second.
The last seven were allowed to die, by special grace, before being
disembowelled by the executioner.
It was through these fields that, one spring night in 1676-7, Thomas
Sadler, an impudent and well-known thief, rivalling the audacity of Blood,
having with some confederates stolen the mace and purse of Lord Chancellor
Finch from his house in Great Queen Street, bore them in mock procession
on their way to their lodgings in Knightrider Street, Doctors’ Commons.
Sadler was hanged at Tyburn for this theft.
Lord William Russell was son of William, Earl of Bedford, by Lady Ann
Carr, daughter of Carr, Earl of Somerset. He was beheaded in the centre of
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, July 21, 1683, the last year but two of the reign of
King Charles II., for being, as it was alleged, engaged in a plot to
attack the guards and kill the king, on his return from Newmarket races,
at the Rye House Farm, in a by-road near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, about
seventeen miles north-east of London.
The Whig party, in their eagerness to restrain the Papists and exclude the
Duke of York from the throne, had gone too far, and their zeal for the
Dissenters had produced a violent reaction in the High Church party.
Charles and the Duke, taking advantage of the return tide, began to
persecute the Dissenters, denounce Shaftesbury, assail the liberties of
the City, and finally dissolved the Parliament. Soon after this, that
subtle politician, Shaftesbury, finding it impossible to rouse the Duke of
Monmouth, Essex, or Lord Russell, denounced them all as sold and deceived,
and fled to Holland.
After his flight, meetings of his creatures were held at the chambers of
one West, an active talking man. Keeling, a vintner of decaying business,
betrayed the plot, as also did Lord Howard, a man so infamous that Charles
himself said “he would not hang the worst dog he had upon his evidence.”
Keeling and his brother swore that forty men were hired to intercept the
king, but that a fire at Newmarket, which had hastened Charles’s return,
had defeated their plans. Goodenough, an ex-sheriff, had told them that
the Duke of Monmouth and other great men were to raise 4000 soldiers and
£20,000. The brothers also swore that Goodenough had told them that Lord
Russell had joined in the design of killing the king and the duke.
Lord Russell acted with great composure. He would not fly, refused to let
his friends surrender themselves to share his fortunes, and told an
acquaintance that “he was very sensible he should fall a sacrifice.”[702]
When he appeared at the council, the king himself said that “nobody
suspected Lord Russell of any design against his own person, but that he
had good evidence of his being in designs against his government.” The
prisoner denied all knowledge of the intended insurrection, or of the
attempt to surprise the guards.
The infamous Jeffries was one of the counsel for his prosecution. Lord
Russell argued at his trial, that, allowing he had compassed the king’s
death, which he denied, he had been guilty only of a conspiracy to levy
war, which was not treason except by a recent statute of Charles II., the
prosecutions upon which were limited to a certain time, which had
elapsed,[703] so that both law and justice were in this case violated.
The truth seems to be that Lord Russell was a true patriot, of a slow and
sober judgment, a taciturn, good man, of not the quickest intelligence,
who had allowed himself to listen to dangerous and random talk for the
sake of political purposes. He wished to debar the duke from the throne,
but he had never dreamt of accomplishing his purpose by murder. It has
since been discovered that Sidney, doing evil that good might come, had
accepted secret-service money from France, and that Russell himself had
interviews with French agents. Lord John Russell explains away this charge
very well. Charles was degraded enough to take money from France. The
patriots, told that Louis XIV. wished to avoid a war, intrigued with the
French king to maintain peace, fearing that if Charles once raised an army
under any pretence, he would first employ it to obtain absolute power at
home, which it is most probable he would have done.[704] On the whole,
these disingenuous interviews must be lamented; they could not and they
did not lead to good. It has been justly regretted also that Lord Russell
on his trial did not boldly denounce the tyranny of the court, and show
the necessity that had existed for active opposition.
After sentence the condemned man wrote petitions to the king and duke,
which were unjustly sneered at as abject. They really, however, contain no
promise but that of living beyond sea and meddling no more in English
affairs. Of one of them at least, Burnet says it was written at the
earnest solicitation of Lady Rachel; and Lord Russell himself said, with
regret, “This will be printed and sold about the streets as my submission
when I am led out to be hanged.” He lamented to Burnet that his wife beat
every bush and ran about so for his preservation; but he acquiesced in
what she did when he thought it would be afterwards a mitigation of her
sorrow.
When his brave and excellent wife, the daughter of Charles I.’s loyal
servant, Southampton, who was the son of Shakspere’s friend, begged for
her husband’s life, the king replied, “How can I grant that man six weeks,
who would not have granted me six hours?”[705]
There is no scene in history that “goes more directly to the heart,” says
Fox, “than the story of the last days of this excellent man.” The night
before his death it rained hard, and he said, “Such a rain to-morrow will
spoil a great show,” which was a dull thing on a rainy day. He thought a
violent death only the pain of a minute, not equal to that of drawing a
tooth; and he was still of opinion _that the king was limited by law, and
that when he broke through those limits, his subjects might defend
themselves and restrain him_.[706] He then received the sacrament from
Tillotson with much devotion, and parted from his wife with a composed
silence; as soon as she was gone he exclaimed, “The bitterness of death is
past,” saying what a blessing she had been to him, and what a misery it
had been if she had tried to induce him to turn an informer. He slept
soundly that night and rose in a few hours, but would take no care in
dressing. He prayed six or seven times by himself, and drank a little tea
and some sherry. He then wound up his watch, and said, “Now I have done
with time and shall go into eternity.” When told that he should give the
executioner ten guineas, he said, with a smile, that it was a pretty thing
to give a fee to have his head cut off. When the sheriffs came at ten
o’clock, Lord Russell embraced Lord Cavendish, who had offered to change
clothes with him and stay in his place in prison, or to attack the coach
with a troop of horse and carry off his friend; but the noble man would
not listen to either proposal.
In the street some in the crowd wept, while others insulted him. He said,
“I hope I shall quickly see a better assembly.” He then sang, half to
himself, the beginning of the 149th Psalm. As the coach turned into Little
Queen Street, he said, looking at his own house, “I have often turned to
the one hand with great comfort, but now I turn to this with greater,” and
then a tear or two fell from his eyes. As they entered Lincoln’s Inn
Fields he said, “This has been to me a place of sinning, and God now makes
it the place of my punishment.” When he came to the scaffold, he walked
about it four or five times: then he prayed by himself, and also with
Tillotson; then he partly undressed himself, laid his head down without
any change of countenance, and it was cut off in two strokes. Lord
William’s walking-stick and a cotemporary account of his death are kept at
Woburn Abbey.
Lady Rachel Russell, the excellent wife of this patriot, had been his
secretary during the trial. She spent her after-life, not in unwisely
lamenting the inevitable past, but in doing good works, and in educating
her children. Writing two months after the execution to Dr. Fritzwilliams,
this noble woman says:[707] “_Secretly_, my heart mourns and cannot be
comforted, because I have not the dear companion and sharer of all my joys
and sorrows. I want him to talk with, to walk with, to eat and sleep with.
All these things are irksome to me now; all company and meals I could
avoid, if it might be.... When I see my children before me, I remember
the pleasure he took in them: this makes my heart shrink.”
In 1692 Lady Russell appears to have regained her composure. But she had
other trials in store: for in 1711 she lost her only son, the Duke of
Bedford, in the flower of his age, and six months afterwards one of her
daughters died in childbed.
It is said that, in his hour of need, James II. was mean enough to say to
the Duke of Bedford, “My lord, you are an honest man, have great credit,
and can do me signal service.” “Ah, sir,” replied the duke, with a grave
severity, “I am old and feeble now, but I once had a _son_.”
The Sacheverell riots culminated in these now quiet Fields. In 1710 Daniel
Dommaree, a queen’s waterman, Francis Willis, a footman, and George
Purchase, were tried at the Old Bailey for heading a riot during the
Sacheverell trial and pulling down meeting-houses. This Sacheverell was an
ignorant, impudent incendiary, the adopted son of a Marlborough
apothecary, and was impeached by the House of Commons for preaching at St.
Andrew’s, Holborn, sermons denouncing the Revolution of 1688. His sermons
were ordered to be burnt, and he was sentenced to be suspended for three
years. Atterbury helped the mischievous firebrand in his ineffectual
defence, and Swift wrote a most scurrilous letter to Bishop Fleetwood, who
had lamented the excesses of the mob. Sacheverell had been at Oxford with
Addison, who inscribed a poem to him. During the trial, a mob marched from
the Temple, whither they had escorted Sacheverell, pulled down Dr.
Burgess’s meeting-house, and threw the pulpit, sconces, and gallery pews
into a fire in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, some waving curtains on poles,
shouting, “High Church standard!” “Huzza! High Church and Sacheverell!”
“We will have them all down!” They also burnt other meeting-houses in
Leather Lane, Drury Lane, and Fetter Lane, and made bonfires of the
woodwork in the streets. They were eventually dispersed by the
horse-grenadiers and horse-guards and foot. Dommaree was sentenced to
death, but pardoned; Willis was acquitted; and Purchase was pardoned.[708]
Wooden posts and rails stood round the Fields till 1735, when an Act was
passed to enable the inhabitants to make improvements, to put an iron gate
at each corner, and to erect dwarf walls and iron palisades.[709] Before
this time grooms used to break in horses on this spot. One day while
looking at these centaurs, Sir Joseph Jekyll, who had brought a very
obnoxious bill into Parliament in 1736 in order to raise the price of gin,
was mobbed, thrown down, and dangerously trampled on. His initials, “J.
J.,” figure under a gibbet chalked on a wall in one of Hogarth’s
prints.[710] Macaulay’s _History_ contains a very highly coloured picture
of these Fields. A comparison of the passage with the facts from which it
is drawn would be a useful lesson to all historical students who love
truth in its severity.[711]
Newcastle House stands at the north-west angle of the Fields, at the
south-eastern corner of Great Queen Street. It derived its name from John
Holles, Duke of Newcastle, a relative of the noble families of Vere,
Cavendish, and Holles. This duke bought the house before 1708, but died in
1711 without issue, and was succeeded in the house by his nephew, the
leader of the Pelham administration under George II.
The house had been bought by Lord Powis about 1686. It was built for him
by Captain William Winde, a scholar of Webbe’s, the pupil and executor of
Inigo Jones.[712] William Herbert, first Marquis of Powis, was outlawed
and fled to St. Germain’s to James II., who made him Duke of Powis.
Government had thought of buying the house when it was inhabited by the
Lord Keeper, Sir Nathan Wright,[713] and to have settled it officially on
the Great Seal. It was once the residence of Sir John Somers, the Lord
Chancellor.
In 1739 Lady Henrietta Herbert, widow of Lord William Herbert, second son
of the Marquis of Powis, and daughter of James, first Earl of Waldegrave,
was married to Mr. John Beard,[714] who seems to have been a fine singer
and a most charitable, estimable man. Lady Henrietta’s grandmother was the
daughter of James II. by the sister of the great Duke of Marlborough. Dr.
Burner speaks of Beard’s great knowledge of music and of his intelligence
as an actor.[715] In an epitaph on him, still extant, the writer says--
“Whence had that voice such magic to control?
’Twas but the echo of a well-tuned soul;
Through life his morals and his music ran
In symphony, and spoke the virtuous man.
... Go, gentle harmonist! our hopes approve,
To meet and hear thy sacred songs above;
When taught by thee, the stage of life well trod,
We rise to raptures round the throne of God.”
Beard, excellent both in oratorios and serious and comic operas, became
part proprietor of Covent Garden Theatre, and died in 1791.
The Duke of Newcastle’s crowded levées were his pleasure and his triumph.
He generally made people of business wait two or three hours in the
ante-chamber while he trifled with insignificant favourites in his closet.
When at last he entered the levée room, he accosted, hugged, embraced, and
promised everything to everybody with an assumed cordiality and a
degrading familiarity.[716]
“Long” Sir Thomas Robertson was a great intruder on the duke’s time; if
told that he was out, he would come in to look at the clock or play with
the monkey, in hopes of the great man relenting. The servants, at last
tired out with Sir Thomas, concocted a formula of repulses, and the next
time he came the porter, without waiting for his question, began--“Sir,
his grace is gone out, the fire has gone out, the clock stands, and the
monkey is dead.”[717]
Sir Timothy Waldo, on his way from the duke’s dinner-table to his own
carriage, once gave the cook, who was waiting in the hall, a crown. The
rogue returned it, saying he did not take silver. “Oh, don’t you, indeed?”
said Sir Timothy, coolly replacing it in his pocket; “then I don’t give
gold.” Jonas Hanway, the great opponent of tea-drinking, published eight
letters to the duke on this subject,[718] and the custom began from that
time to decline. But Hogarth had already condemned the exaction.
The duke was very profuse in his promises, and a good story is told of the
result of his insincerity. At a Cornish election, the duke had obtained
the turning vote for his candidate by his usual assurances. The elector,
wishing to secure something definite, had asked for a supervisorship of
excise for his son-in-law on the present holder’s death. “The moment he
dies,” said the premier, “set out post-haste for London; drive directly to
my house in the Fields: night or day, sleeping or waking, dead or alive,
thunder at the door; the porter will show you upstairs directly; and the
place is yours.” A few months after the old supervisor died, and up to
London rushed the Cornish elector.
Now that very night the duke had been expecting news of the death of the
King of Spain, and had left orders before he went to bed to have the
courier sent up directly he arrived. The Cornish man, mistaken for this
important messenger, was instantly, to his great delight, shown up to the
duke’s bedroom. “Is he dead?--is he dead?” cried the duke. “Yes, my lord,
yes,” answered the aspirant, promptly. “When did he die?” “The day before
yesterday, at half-past one o’clock, after three weeks in his bed, and
taking a power of doctor’s stuff; and I hope your grace will be as good as
your word, and let my son-in-law succeed him.” “_Succeed him!_” shouted
the duke; “is the man drunk or mad? Where are your despatches?” he
exclaimed, tearing back the bed-curtains; and there, to his vexation,
stood the blundering elector, hat in hand, his stupid red face beaming
with smiles as he kept bowing like a joss. The duke sank back in a
violent fit of laughter, which, like the electric fluid, was in a moment
communicated to his attendants.[719] It is not stated whether the Cornish
man obtained his petition.
There is an agreement in all the stories of the duke, who was thirty years
Secretary of State, and nearly ten years First Lord of the Treasury,
“whether told,” says Macaulay, “by people who were perpetually seeing him
in Parliament and attending his levées in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, or by Grub
Street writers, who had never more than a glimpse of his star through the
windows of his gilded coach.”[720] Smollett and Walpole mixed in different
society, yet they both sketch the duke with the same colours. Smollett’s
Newcastle runs out of his dressing-room with his face covered with
soapsuds to embrace the Moorish envoy. Walpole’s Newcastle pushes his way
into the Duke of Grafton’s sick-room to kiss the old nobleman’s plaisters.
“He was a living, moving, talking caricature. His gait was a shuffling
trot, his utterance a rapid stutter. He was always in a hurry--he was
never in time; he abounded in fulsome caresses and in hysterical tears.
His oratory resembled that of Justice Shallow--it was nonsense
effervescent with animal spirits and impertinence. ‘Oh yes, yes, to be
sure--Annapolis must be defended; troops must be sent to Annapolis. Pray,
where is Annapolis?’--‘Cape Breton an island! Wonderful! Show it me on the
map. So it is, sure enough. My dear sir, you always bring us good news. I
must go and tell the king that Cape Breton is an island.’ His success is a
proof of what may be done by a man who devotes his whole heart and soul to
one object. His love of power was so intense a passion, that it almost
supplied the place of talent. He was jealous even of his own brother.
Under the guise of levity, he was false beyond all example.” “All the able
men of his time ridiculed him as a dunce, a driveller, a child, who never
knew his own mind for an hour together, and yet he overreached them all
round.” If the country had remained at peace, this man might have been at
the head of affairs till a new king came with fresh favourites and a
strong will; “but the inauspicious commencement of the Seven Years’ War
brought on a crisis to which Newcastle was altogether unequal. After a
calm of fifteen years, the spirit of the nation was again stirred to its
inmost depths.”
This is strongly etched, but Macaulay was too fond of caricature for a
real lover of truth. Walpole, recounting this greedy imbecile’s disgrace,
reviews his career much more forcibly, for in a few words he shows us how
great had been the power which this chatterer’s fixed purpose had
attained. The memoir-writer describes the duke as the man “who had begun
the world by heading mobs against the ministers of Queen Anne; who had
braved the heir-apparent, afterwards George I., and forced himself upon
him as godfather to his son; who had recovered that prince’s favour, and
preserved power under him, at the expense of every minister whom that
prince preferred; who had been a rival of another Prince of Wales for the
chancellorship of Cambridge; and who was now buffeted from a fourth court
by a very suitable competitor (Lord Bute), and reduced in his tottery old
age to have recourse to those mobs and that popularity which had raised
him fifty years before.”
Lord Bute was mean enough to compliment the old duke on his retirement.
The duke replied, with a spirit that showed the vitality of his ambition:
“Yes, yes, my lord, I am an old man, but yesterday was my birthday, and I
recollected that Cardinal Fleury _began_ to be prime-minister of France
just at my age.”[721]
Newcastle House, now occupied by the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge, was, for forty years or more, inhabited by Sir Alan Chambre,
one of King George III.’s judges. The society, then lodged in Bartlett’s
Buildings, in Holborn, derived its first name from that place, and at Sir
Alan’s death they purchased the house and site.
About the centre of the west side of the square, in Sir Alan’s time, lived
the Earl and Countess of Portsmouth. The earl was half-witted, but was
always well-conducted and quite producible in society under the guidance
of his countess, a daughter of Lord Grantley.
Near Surgeons’ Hall, at the same epoch, lived the first Lord Wynford, Lord
Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, better known as Serjeant Best. A
quarrel between this irritable lawyer and Serjeant Wilde, afterwards Lord
Chancellor Truro, one of the most stalwart gladiators who ever won a name
and title in the legal arena, gave rise to an epigram, the point of which
was--“That Best was wild, and Wilde was best.”
In 1774, when Lord Clive had rewarded Wedderburn, his defender, with lacs
of rupees and a villa at Mitcham, the lawyer had an elegant house in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, not far from the Duke of Newcastle’s,--“a quarter,”
says Lord Campbell, “which I recollect still the envied resort of legal
magnates.”
Wedderburn, afterwards better known as Lord Chancellor Loughborough, had a
special hatred for Franklin, and loaded him with abuse before a committee
of the Privy Council, for having sent to America letters from the
Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts, urging the Government to employ
military force to suppress the discontents in New England.[722] The effect
of Wedderburn’s brilliant oratory in Parliament was ruined, says Lord
Campbell, by “his character for insincerity.”[723] When George III. heard
of his death, he is reported to have said, “He has not left a greater
knave behind him in my dominions;” upon which Lord Thurlow savagely said,
with his usual oath, “I perceive that his majesty is quite sane at
present.” Wedderburn was a friend of David Hume; his humanity was
eulogised by Dr. Parr, but he was satirised by Churchill in the _Rosciad_.
Montague, Earl of Sandwich, the great patron of Pepys, lived in Lincoln’s
Inn Fields, paying £250 a year rent.[724] Pepys calls it “a fine house,
but deadly dear.”[725] He visits him, February 10, 1663-4, and finds my
lord very high and strange and stately, although Pepys had been bound for
£1000 with him, and the shrewd cit naturally enough did not like my lord
being angry with him and in debt to him at the same time. The earl was a
distant cousin of Pepys, and on his marriage received him and his wife
into his house, and took Pepys with him when he went to bring home Charles
II., when he was elected one of the Council of State and General at Sea.
He brought the queen-mother to England and took her back again. He also
brought the ill-fated queen from Portugal, and became a privy-councillor,
and was sent as ambassador to Spain. He seems to have been not untainted
with the vices of the age. He was in the great battle where Van Tromp was
killed, and in 1668 he took forty-five sail from the Dutch at sea, and
that is the best thing known of him. He died in 1672, and was buried in
great state.
Inigo Jones built only the west side of the square. No. 55 was the
residence of Robert Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, a general of King Charles. It
is described in 1708 as a handsome building of the Ionic order, with a
beautiful and strong Court Gate, formed of six spacious brick piers, with
curious ironwork between them, and on the piers large and beautiful
vases.[726] The open balustrade at the top bore six urns.
The Earl of Lindsey was shot at Edgehill in 1642, when a reckless and
intemperate charge of Rupert had led to the total defeat of the
unsupported foot. His son, Lord Willoughby, was taken in endeavouring to
rescue his father. Clarendon describes the earl as a lavish, generous, yet
punctilious man, of great honour and experience in foreign war. He was
surrounded by Lincolnshire gentlemen, who served in his regiment out of
personal regard for him. He was jealous of Prince Rupert’s interference,
and had made up his mind to die. As he lay bleeding to death he reproved
the officers of the Earl of Essex, many of them his old friends, for their
ingratitude and “foul rebellion.”[727]
The fourth Earl of Lindsey was created Duke of Ancaster, and the house
henceforward bore that now forgotten name. It was subsequently sold to the
proud Duke of Somerset, the same who married the widow of the Mr. Thynne
whom Count Königsmarck murdered.
In the early part of George III.’s reign Lindsey House became a sort of
lodging-house for foreign members of the Moravian persuasion. The
staircase, about 1772, was painted with scenes from the history of the
Herrnhuthers. The most conspicuous figures were those of a negro
catechumen in a white shirt, and a missionary who went over to Algiers to
preach to the galley-slaves, and died in Africa of the plague. There was
also a painting of a Moravian clergyman being saved from a desert rock on
which he had been cast.[728]
Repeated mention of the Berties is made in Horace Walpole’s pleasant
_Letters_. Lord Robert Bertie was third son of Robert the first Duke of
Ancaster and Kesteven. He was a general in the army, a colonel in the
Guards, and a lord of the bedchamber. He married Lady Raymond in 1762, and
died in 1782.
The proud Duke of Somerset, in 1748, left to his eldest daughter, Lady
Frances, married to the Marquis of Granby, three thousand a year, and the
fine house built by Inigo Jones in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which he had
bought of the Duke of Ancaster for the Duchess, hoping that his daughter
would let her mother live with her.[729] In July 1779 the Duke of
Ancaster, dying of drinking and rioting at two-and-twenty, recalls much
scandal to Walpole’s mind. He had been in love with Lady Honoria,
Walpole’s niece; but Horace does not regret the match dropping through,
for he says the duke was of a turbulent nature, and, though of a fine
figure, not noble in manners. Lady Priscilla Elizabeth Bertie, eldest
sister of the duke, married the grandson of Peter Burrell, a merchant, who
became husband of the Lady Great Chamberlain of England, and inherited a
barony and half the Ancaster estate.[730] “The three last duchesses,”
goes on the cruel gossip, “were never sober.” “The present
duchess-dowager,” he adds, “was natural daughter of Panton, a disreputable
horse-jockey of Newmarket. The other duchess was some lady’s woman, or
young lady’s governess.” Mr. Burrell’s daughters married Lord Percy and
the Duke of Hamilton.
In 1791 Walpole writes to Miss Berry to describe the marriage of Lord
Cholmondeley with Lady Georgiana Charlotte Bertie: “The men were in frocks
and white waistcoats. The endowing purse, I believe, has been left off
ever since broad pieces were called in and melted down. We were but
eighteen persons in all.... The poor duchess-mother wept excessively; she
is now left quite alone,--her two daughters married, and her other
children dead. She herself, I fear, is in a very dangerous way. She goes
directly to Spa, where the new married pair are to meet her. We all
separated in an hour and a half.”[731]
Alfred Tennyson in early life had fourth-floor chambers at No. 55, and
there probably his friend Hallam, whose early death he laments in his _In
Memoriam_ spent many an hour with him. There, in the airy regions of
Attica, in a low-roofed room, the single window of which is darkened by a
huge stone balustrade--a gloomy relic of past grandeur--the young poet may
have recited the majestic lines of his “King Arthur,” or the exquisite
lament of “Mariana,” and there he may have immortalised the “plump
head-waiter of the Cock,” in Fleet Street. Mr. John Foster, the author of
many sound and delightful historical biographies, had also chambers in
this house.
No. 68, on the west side, stands on the site of the approach to the
stables of old Newcastle House. Here Judge Le Blanc lived, and at his
death the house was occupied by Mr. Thomas Le Blanc, Master of Trinity
Hall, Cambridge.
At No. 33, on the same side as the Insolvent Debtors’ Court, dwelt Judge
Park, a man much beloved by his friends; in his early days, as a young
and poor Scotch barrister, he had lived in Carey Street till his house
there was burnt down. He used to say that his great ambition in youth had
been to one day live at No. 33 in the Fields, at that time occupied by
Chief Justice Willis; but in later days, as a judge, leaving the former
goal of his ambition, he migrated to Bedford Square, where he died.
Nos. 40 and 42, on the south side, form the Museum of the College of
Surgeons, incorporated in 1800. The Grecian front is a most clever
contrivance by Sir John Soane. The building contains the incomparable
anatomical collection of the eminent John Hunter, bought by the Government
for £15,000 and given to the College of Surgeons on condition of its being
opened to the public. John Hunter died in 1793; and the first courses of
lectures in the new building were delivered by Sir Everard Home and Sir
William Blizard, in 1810. The Museum was built by Barry in 1835, and cost
about £40,000.[732] It is divided into two rooms, the normal and abnormal.
The total number of specimens is upwards of 23,000. The collection is
unequalled in many respects; every article is authentic and in perfect
preservation. The largest human skeleton is that of Charles O’Brien, the
Irish giant, who died in Cockspur Street, Charing Cross, in 1783, aged
twenty-two. It measures eight feet four inches. By its side, in ghastly
contrast, is the bony sketch of Caroline Crachami, a Sicilian dwarf who
died in 1824, aged ten years. There is also a cast of the hand of Patrick
Cotter, another Irish giant, who measured eight feet seven and a half
inches. Nor must we overlook the vast framework of Chunee, the elephant
that went mad with toothache at Exeter Change, and was shot by a company
of riflemen in 1826. The sawn base of the inflamed tusk shows a spicula of
ivory pressing into the nervous pulp. Toothache is always terrible, but
only imagine a square foot of it!
Very curious too, are the jaw of the extinct sabre-toothed tiger, and the
skeleton of a gigantic extinct Irish deer found under a bed of shell-marl
in a peat bog near Limerick. The antlers are seven feet long, eight feet
across, and weigh seventy-six pounds. The height of the animal (measured
from his skull) was seven feet six inches. Amongst other horrors, there is
a cast of the fleshy band that united the Siamese twins, and one of a
woman with a long curved horn growing from her forehead. There are also
many skulls of soldiers perforated and torn with bullets, the lead still
adhering to some of the bony plates of the crania. But the wonder of
wonders is the iron pivot of a trysail-mast that was driven clean through
the chest of a Scarborough lad. The boy recovered in five months, and not
long after went to work again. It is a tough race that rules the sea.
There are also fragments of the skeleton of a rhinoceros discovered in a
limestone cavern at Oreston during the formation of the Plymouth
Breakwater. In a recess from the gallery stands the embalmed body of the
wife of Martin Van Butchell, an impudent Dutch quack doctor. It is
coarsely preserved, and is very loathsome to look at. It was prepared in
1775 by Dr. W. Hunter and Mr. Cruikshank, the vascular system being
injected with oil of turpentine and camphorated spirits of wine, and
powdered nitre and camphor being introduced into the cavities. On the case
containing the body is an advertisement cut from an old newspaper, stating
the conditions which Dr. Van Butchell required of those who came to see
the body of his wife. At the feet of Mrs. Van Butchell is the shrunken
mummy of her pet parrot.
The pictures include the portrait of John Hunter by Reynolds, which Sharp
engraved: it has much faded. There is also a posthumous bust of Hunter by
Flaxman, and one of Clive by Chantrey. Any Fellow of the College can
introduce a visitor, either personally or by written order, the first four
days of the week. In September the Museum is closed. It would be much more
convenient for students if some small sum were charged for admission. It
is now visited but by two or three people a day, when it should be
inspected by hundreds.
That great surgeon, John Hunter, was the son of a small farmer in
Lanarkshire. He was born in 1728, and died in 1793. In early life he went
abroad as an army-surgeon to study gunshot-wounds; and in 1786 he was
appointed deputy surgeon-general to the army. In 1772 he made discoveries
as to the property of the gastric juice. He was the first to use cutting
as a cure for hydrophobia, and to distinguish the various species of
cancer. He kept at his house at Brompton a variety of wild animals for the
purposes of comparative anatomy, was often in danger from their violence,
and as often saved by his own intrepidity. Sir Joseph Banks divided his
collection between Hunter and the British Museum. Unequalled in the
dissecting-room, Hunter was a bad lecturer. He was an irritable man, and
died suddenly during a disputation at St. George’s Hospital which vexed
him. His death is said to have been hastened by fear of death from
hydrophobia, he having cut his hand while dissecting a man who had died of
that mysterious disease. Hunter used to call an operation “opprobrium
medici.”
In Portugal Row, as the southern side of the square used to be called,
lived Sir Richard Fanshawe, the translator of the _Lusiad_ of Camoens, and
of Guarini’s _Pastor Fido_. Sir Richard was our ambassador in Spain; but
Charles, wishing to get rid of Lord Sandwich from the navy, recalled
Fanshawe, on the plea that he had ventured to sign a treaty without
authority. He died in 1666, on the intended day of his return, of a
violent fever, probably caused by vexation at his unmerited disgrace. Sir
Richard appears to have been a religious, faithful man and a good scholar,
but born in unhappy times and to an ill fate. Charles I. had very justly a
great respect for him. His wife was a brave, determined woman, full of
affection, good sense, and equally full of hatred and contempt for Lord
Sandwich, Pepys’s friend, who had supplanted her husband in the embassy.
On one occasion, on their way to Malaga, the Dutch trading vessel in which
she and her husband were was threatened by a Turkish galley which bore
down on them in full sail. The captain, who had rendered his sixty guns
useless by lumbering them up with cargo, resolved to fight for his £30,000
worth of goods, and therefore armed his two hundred men and plied them
with brandy. The decks were partially cleared, and the women ordered below
for fear the Turks might think the vessel a merchant-ship and board it.
Sir Richard, taking his gun, bandolier, and sword, stood with the ship’s
company waiting for the Turks.[733] But we must quote the brave wife’s own
simple words:--“The beast the captain had locked me up in the cabin. I
knocked and called long to no purpose, until at length the cabin-boy came
and opened the door. I, all in tears, desired him to be so good as to give
me the blue thrum cap he wore and his tarred coat, which he did, and I
gave him half-a-crown; and putting them on, and flinging away my
night-clothes, I crept up softly and stood upon the deck by my husband’s
side, as free from fear as, I confess, from discretion; but it was the
effect of that passion which I could never master. By this time the two
vessels were engaged in parley, and so well satisfied with speech and
sight of each other’s forces, that the Turks’ man-of-war tacked about and
we continued our course. But when your father saw me retreat, looking upon
me, he blessed himself and snatched me up in his arms, saying, ‘Good God!
that love can make this change!’ and though he seemingly chid me, he would
laugh at it as often as he remembered that journey.” This same vessel, a
short time after, was blown up in the harbour with the loss of more than a
hundred men and all the lading.[734]
This brave, good woman showed still greater fortitude when her husband
died and left her almost penniless in a strange country. She had only
twenty-eight doubloons with which to bring home her children, and sixty
servants, and the dead body of her husband. She, however, instantly sold
her carriages and a thousand pounds’ worth of plate, and setting apart the
queen’s present of two thousand doubloons for travelling expenses, started
for England. “God,” she says, in her brave, pious way, “did hear, and
see, and help me, and brought my soul out of trouble.”
In 1677 Lady Fanshawe took a house in Holborn Row, the north side of the
square, and spent a year lamenting “the dear remembrances of her past
happiness and fortune; and though she had great graces and favours from
the king and queen and whole court, yet she found at the present no
remedy.”[735]
Lord Kenyon lived at No. 35 in 1805. Jekyll was fond of joking about
Kenyon’s stinginess, and used to say he died of eating apple-pie crust at
breakfast to save the expense of muffins; and that Lord Ellenborough, who
succeeded on Kenyon’s death to the Chief Justiceship, always used to bow
to apple-pie ever afterwards which Jekyll called his “apple-pie-ety.” The
princesses Augusta and Sophia once told Tom Moore, at Lady Donegall’s that
the king used to play tricks on Kenyon and send the despatch-box to him at
a quarter past seven, when it was known the learned lord was in bed to
save candlelight.[736] Lord Ellenborough used to say that the final word
in “Mors janua vitæ” was mis-spelled _vita_ on Kenyon’s tomb to save the
extra cost of the diphthong.[737] George III. used to say to Kenyon, “My
Lord, let us have a little more of your good law, and less of your bad
Latin.”
Lord Campbell, who gives a very pleasant sketch of Chief Justice Kenyon,
with his bad temper and bad Latin, his hatred of newspaper writers and
gamblers, and his wrath against pettifoggers, describes his being taken in
by Horne Tooke, and laughs at his ignorantly-mixed metaphors. He seems to
have been a respectable second-rate lawyer, conscientious and upright. “He
occupied,” says Lord Campbell, “a large gloomy house, in which I have seen
merry doings when it was afterwards transferred to the Verulam Club.” The
tradition of this house was that “it was always Lent in the kitchen and
Passion Week in the parlour.” On some one mentioning the spits in Lord
Kenyon’s kitchen, Jekyll said, “It is irrelevant to talk about the spits,
for nothing _turns_ upon them.” The judge’s ignorance was profound. It is
reported that in a trial for blasphemy the Chief Justice, after citing the
names of several remarkable early Christians, said, “Above all, gentlemen,
need I name to you the Emperor Julian, who was so celebrated for the
practice of every Christian virtue that he was called Julian the
Apostle?”[738] On another occasion, talking of a false witness, he is
supposed to have said, “The allegation is as far from truth as ‘old
Boterium from the northern main’--a line I have heard or met with, God
knows where.”[739]
Lord Erskine lived at No. 36, in 1805, the year before he rose at once to
the peerage and the woolsack, and presided at Lord Melville’s trial. He
did not hold the seals many months, and died in 1823. This great Whig
orator was the youngest son of the Earl of Buchan. He was a midshipman and
an ensign before he became a student at Lincoln’s Inn. He began to be
known in 1778; in 1781 he defended Lord George Gordon, in 1794 Horne
Tooke, Hardy, Thelwall, and afterwards Tom Paine.
The house that contains the Soane Museum, No. 13 on the north side, was
built in 1812, and, consisting of twenty-four small apartments crammed
with curiosities, is in itself a marvel of fantastic ingenuity. Every inch
of space is turned to account. On one side of the picture-room are
cabinets, and on the other movable shutters or screens, on which pictures
are also hung; so that a small area, only thirteen feet long and twelve
broad, contains as much as a gallery forty-five feet long and twenty feet
broad. A Roman altar once stood in the outer court.
It is a disgrace to the trustees that this curious museum is kept so
private, and that such impediments are thrown in the way of visitors. It
is open only two days a week in April, May, and June, but at certain
seasons a third day is granted to foreigners, artists, and people from the
country. To obtain tickets, you are obliged to get, some days before you
visit, a letter from a trustee, or to write to the curator, enter your
name in a book, and leave your card. All this vexatious hindrance and
fuss has the desired effect of preventing many persons from visiting a
museum left, not to the trustees or the curator, but to the nation--to
every Englishman. In order to read the books, copy the pictures, or
examine the plans and drawings, the same tedious and humiliating form must
be gone through.
The gem of all the Soane treasures is an enormous transparent alabaster
sarcophagus, discovered by Belzoni in 1816 in a tomb in the valley of
Beban el Molook, near Thebes. It is nine feet four inches long, three feet
eight inches wide, two feet eight inches deep, and is covered without and
within with beautifully-cut hieroglyphics. It was the greatest discovery
of the runaway Paduan Monk, and was undoubtedly the cenotaph or
sarcophagus of a Pharaoh or Ptolemy. It was discovered in an enormous tomb
of endless chambers, which the Arabs still call “Belzoni’s tomb.” On the
bottom of the case is a full-length figure in relief, of Isis, the
guardian of the dead. Sir John Soane gave £2000 for this sarcophagus to
Mr. Salt, Consul General of Egypt and Belzoni’s employer. The raised lid
is broken into nineteen pieces. The late Sir Gardner Wilkinson considered
this to be the cenotaph of Osirei, the father of Rameses the Great. But
the forgotten king for whom the Soane sarcophagus was really executed was
Seti, surnamed Meni-en-Ptah, the father of Rameses the Great; he is called
by Manetho Séthos.[740] Dr. Lepsius dates the commencement of his reign
B.C. 1439. Dr. Brugsch places it twenty years earlier. Mr. Sharpe, with
that delightful uncertainty characteristic of Egyptian antiquaries, drags
the epoch down two hundred years later. Seti was the father of the Pharaoh
who persecuted the Israelites, and he made war against Syria. His son was
the famous Rameses. All three kings were descended from the Shepherd
Chiefs. The most beautiful fragment in Karnak represents this monarch,
Seti, in his chariot, with a sword like a fish-slice in one hand, while in
the other he clutches the topknots of a group of conquered enemies,
Nubian, Syrian, and Jewish. The work is full of an almost Raphaelesque
grace.
After this come some of Flaxman’s and Banks’s sketches and models, a cast
of the shield of Achilles by the former, and one of the Boothby monument
by the latter. There is also a fine collection of ancient gems and
intaglios, pure in taste and exquisitely cut, and a set of the Napoleon
medals, selected by Denon for the Empress Josephine, and in the finest
possible state. We may also mention Sir Christopher Wren’s watch, some
ivory chairs, and a table from Tippoo Saib’s devastated palace at
Seringapatam, and a richly-mounted pistol taken by Peter the Great from a
Turkish general at Azof in 1696. The latter was given to Napoleon by the
Russian emperor at the treaty of Tilsit in 1807, and was presented by him
to a French officer at St. Helena. The books, too, are of great interest.
Here is the original MS. copy of the _Gierusalemme Liberata_, published at
Ferrara in 1581, and in Tasso’s own handwriting; the first four folio
editions of Shakspere, once the property of that great actor and
Shaksperean student John Philip Kemble; a folio of designs for Elizabethan
and Jacobean houses by the celebrated architect John Thorpe; Fauntleroy
the forger’s illustrated copy of Pennant’s _London_, purchased for six
hundred and fifty guineas; a Commentary on Paul’s Epistles, illuminated by
the laborious Croatian, Giulio Clovio (who died in 1578), for Cardinal
Grimani. Vasari raves about the minute finish of this painter.
The pictures, too, are good. There are three Canalettis full of that Dutch
Venetian’s clear common sense; the finest, a view on the Grand Canal--his
favourite subject--and “The Snake in the Grass,” better known as “Love
unloosing the Zone of Beauty,” by Reynolds. There is a sadly faded replica
of this in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. This one was purchased at
the Marchioness of Thomond’s sale for £500. The “Rake’s Progress,” by
Hogarth, in eight pictures, was purchased by Sir John in 1802 for £598.
These inimitable pictures are incomparable, and display the fine, pure,
sober colour of the great artist, and his broad touch so like that of Jan
Steen.
The Soane collection also boasts of Hogarth’s four “Election” pictures,
purchased at Garrick’s sale for £1732 10s. They are rather dark in tone.
There is also a fine but curious Turner, “Van Tromp’s Barge entering the
Texel;” a portrait by Goma of Napoleon in 1797, when emaciated and
haggard, and a fine miniature of him in 1814, when fat and already on the
decline, both physically and mentally, by Isabey the great
miniature-painter, taken at Elba in 1814. In the dining-room is a portrait
of Soane by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and in the gallery under the dome a bust
of him by Chantrey.
Sir John Soane was the son of a humble Reading bricklayer, and brought up
in Mr. Dance’s office. Carrying off a gold and silver medal at the
Academy, he was sent as travelling student to Rome. In 1791 he obtained a
Government employment, in 1800 enlarged the Bank of England, and in 1806
became Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. He built the
Dulwich Gallery, and in 1826 the Masonic Hall in Great Queen Street. In
1827 he gave £1000 to the Duke of York’s monument. At the close of his
life he left his collection of works of art, valued at £50,000, to the
nation, and died in 1837,[741] leaving his son penniless. In 1835 the
English architects presented Sir John with a splendid medal in token of
their approbation of his conduct and talents.
The Literary Fund Society, instituted in 1790, and incorporated in 1818,
had formerly rooms at No. 4 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The society was
established in order to aid authors of merit and good character who might
be reduced to poverty by unavoidable circumstances, or be deprived of the
power of exertion by enfeebled faculties or old age. George IV. and
William IV. both contributed one hundred guineas a year to its funds, and
this subscription is continued by our present Queen. The society
distributed £1407 in 1846. The average annual amount of subscriptions and
donations is about £1100. The Literary Fund Society moved afterwards to
73 Great Russell Street. Some years ago a split occurred in this society.
Charles Dickens and Mr. C. W. Dilke, the proprietor of the _Athenæum_,
objecting to the wasteful expense of the management, seceded from it; the
result of this secession was the founding of the Guild of Literature, and
the collection of £4000 by means of private theatricals--a sum which,
unfortunately, still lies partly dormant. The Fund is now domiciled in
Bloomsbury.
Both Pepys and Evelyn praise the house of Mr. Povey in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields as a prodigy of elegant comfort and ingenuity. The marqueterie
floors, “the perspective picture in the little closet,” the grotto
cellars, with a well for the wine, the fountains and imitation porphyry
vases, his pictures and the bath at the top of the house, seem to have
been the abstract of all luxurious ease.
Names were first put on doors in London in 1760, some years before the
street-signs were removed. In 1764 houses were first numbered; the
numbering commenced in New Burlington Street, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields was
the second place numbered.
In Carey Street lived that excellent woman Mrs. Hester Chapone, who
afterwards removed to Arundel Street. She was a friend of Mrs. Carter, who
translated Epictetus, and of Mrs. Montagu, the Queen of the Blue
Stockings. She was one of the female admirers who thronged round
Richardson the novelist, and she married a young Templar whom he had
introduced to her. It was a love match, and she had the misfortune of
losing him in less than ten months after their marriage. Her celebrated
letters on _The Improvement of the Mind_, published in 1773, were written
for a favourite niece, who married a Westminster Clergyman and died in
childbed. Though Mrs. Chapone’s letters are now rather dry and
old-fashioned, reminding us of the backboards of a too punctilious age,
they contain some sensible and well-expressed thoughts. Here is a sound
passage:--“Those ladies who pique themselves on the particular excellence
of neatness are very apt to forget that the decent order of the house
should be designed to promote the convenience and pleasure of those who
are to be in it; and that if it is converted into a cause of trouble and
constraint, their husbands’ guests would be happier without it.”[742]
Gibbons’s Tennis Court stood in Vere Street, Clare Market; it was turned
into a theatre by Thomas Killigrew. Ogilby the poet, started a lottery of
books at “the old theatre” in June 1668. He describes the books in his
advertisements as “all of his own designment and composure.”
“The Duke’s Theatre” stood in Portugal Street, at the back of Portugal
Row. It was pulled down in 1835 to make room for the enlargement of the
Museum of the College of Surgeons. Before that it had been the china
warehouse of Messrs. Spode and Copeland.[743] There had been, however,
frailer things than china in the house in Pepys’s time. Here, the year of
the Restoration, came Killigrew with the actors from the Red Bull,
Clerkenwell, and took the name of the King’s Company. Three years later
they moved to Drury Lane. Davenant’s company then came to Portugal Street
in 1662, deserting their theatre, once a granary, in Salisbury Court. They
played here till 1671, when they returned to their old theatre, then
renovated under the management of Charles Davenant and the celebrated
Betterton, the great tragedian. They afterwards united in Drury Lane, and
again fell apart. In 1695 a company, headed by Betterton, with Congreve
for a partner, re-opened the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It then
became celebrated for pantomimes under Rich, the excellent harlequin. On
his removal to Covent Garden it was deserted, re-opened by Gifford from
Goodman’s Fields, and finally ceased to be a theatre about 1737, so that
its whole life did not extend to more than one generation.
Actresses first appeared in London in Prynne’s time. Soon after the
Restoration a lady of Killigrew’s company took the part of Desdemona. In
January 1661 Pepys saw women on the stage at the Cockpit Theatre: the play
was Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Beggars’ Bush.” The prologue to “Othello” in
1660 contains the following line:[744]--
“Our women are defective and so sized,
You’d think they were some of the guard disguised;
For, to speak truth, men act that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen,
With bone so large, and nerve so uncompliant,
That, when you call Desdemona, enter giant.”
The Puritans were now happily in the minority, and so the attempt
succeeded. Davenant did not bring forward his actresses till June 1661,
when he produced his “Siege of Rhodes.” Kynaston, Hart, Burt, and Clun,
famous actors of Charles II.’s time, were all excellent representatives of
female characters.
It was at the Duke’s Theatre, in 1680, that Nell Gwynn who was present,
being reviled by one of the audience, and William Herbert, who had married
a sister of one of the king’s mistresses, taking up Nell’s quarrel--a
sword fight took place between the two factions in the house. This
hot-blooded young gallant Herbert grew up to be Earl of Pembroke and first
plenipotentiary at Ryswick.
The chief ladies at the Duke’s House were Mrs. Davenport, Mrs. Davies, and
Mrs. Saunderson. The first of these ladies, generally known as “Roxalana,”
from a character of that name in the “Siege of Rhodes,” resisted for a
long time the addresses of Aubrey de Vere, the last Earl of Oxford, a
wicked brawling roysterer, and a disgrace to his name, who at last
obtained her hand by the cruel deception of a sham marriage. The pretended
priest was a trumpeter, the witness a kettle-drummer in the king’s
regiment. The poor creature threw herself in vain at the king’s feet and
demanded justice, but gradually grew more composed upon an annuity of a
thousand crowns a year.[745]
As for Mrs. Davies, who danced well and played ill, she won the
susceptible heart of Charles II. by her singing the song, “My lodging is
on the cold, cold ground.” “Through the marriage of the daughter of Lord
Derwentwater with the eighth Lord Petre,” says Dr. Doran, “the blood of
the Stuarts and of Moll Davies still runs in their lineal descendant, the
present and twelfth lord.”[746]
Mrs. Saunderson became the excellent wife of the great actor Betterton.
For about thirty years she played the chief female characters, especially
in Shakspere’s plays, with great success. She taught Queen Anne and her
sister Mary elocution, and after her husband’s death received a pension of
£500 a year from her royal pupil.
In 1664 Pepys went to Portugal Street to see that clever but impudent
impostor, the German Princess, appear after her acquittal at the Old
Bailey for inveigling a young citizen into a marriage, acting her own
character in a comedy immortalising her exploit.
In February 1666-7 Pepys goes again to the Duke’s Playhouse, and observes
there Rochester the wit and Mrs. Stewart, afterwards Duchess of Richmond,
the same lady whose portrait we retain as Britannia on the old
halfpennies. “It was pleasant,” says the tuft-hunting gossip, “to see how
everybody rose up when my Lord John Butler, the Duke of Ormond’s son, came
into the pit, towards the end of the play, who was a servant to Mrs.
Mallett, and now smiled upon her and she on him.”[747]
The same month, 1667-8, Pepys revisits the Duke’s House to see Etherege’s
new play, “She Would if She Could.” He was there by two o’clock, and yet
already a thousand people had been refused at the pit. The fussy
public-office man, not being able to find his wife, who was there, got
into an eighteenpenny box, and could hardly see or hear. The play done, it
being dark and rainy, Pepys stays in the pit looking for his wife and
waiting for the weather to clear up. And there for an hour and a half sat
also the Duke of Buckingham, Sedley, and Etherege talking; all abusing the
play as silly, dull, and insipid, except the author, who complained of the
actors for not knowing their parts.
In May 1668 Pepys is again at this theatre in the balcony box, where sit
the shameless Lady Castlemaine and her ladies and women; on another
occasion he sits below the same group, and sees the proud lady look like
fire when Moll Davies ogles the king her lover. In another place he
observes how full the pit is, though the seats are two shillings and
sixpence a piece, whereas in his youth he had never gone higher than
twelvepence or eighteenpence.[748]
Kynaston, the greatest of the “boy-actresses,” was chiefly on this stage
from 1659 to 1699. Evadne was his favourite female part. Later in life he
took to heroic characters. Cibber says of him: “He had something of a
formal gravity in his mien, which was attributed to the stately step he
had been so early confined to. But even that in characters of superiority
had its proper graces; it misbecame him not in the part of Leon in
Fletcher’s ‘Rule a Wife,’ which he executed with a determined manliness
and honest authority. He had a piercing eye, and in characters of heroic
life a quick imperious vivacity in his tone of voice that painted the
tyrant truly terrible. There were two plays of Dryden in which he shone
with uncommon lustre; in ‘Arungzebe,’ he played Morat, and in ‘Don
Sebastian’ Muley Moloch. In both these parts he had a fierce lion-like
majesty in his port and utterance that gave the spectator a kind of
trembling admiration.”[749] Kynaston died in 1712, and left a fortune to
his son, a mercer in Covent Garden, whose son became rector of Aldgate.
James Nokes was Kynaston’s contemporary in Portugal Street. Leigh Hunt
calls him something between Liston and Munden. Dryden mentions him, in a
political epistle to Southerne, as indispensable to a play. Cibber says,
“The ridiculous solemnity of his features was enough to have set the whole
bench of Bishops into a titter.” In his ludicrous distresses he sank into
such piteous pusilanimity that one almost pitied him. “When he debated any
matter by himself he would shut up his mouth with a dumb, studious pout,
and roll his full eye into a vacant amazement.”[750] He died in 1692,
leaving a fortune and an estate near Barnet.
But the great star of Portugal Street was Betterton, the Garrick of his
age. His most admired part was Hamlet; but Steele especially dilates on
his Othello. He acted his Hamlet from traditions handed down by Davenant
of Taylor, whom Shakspere himself is said to have instructed. Cibber says
that there was such enchantment in his voice alone that no one cared for
the sense of the words; and he adds, “I never heard a line in tragedy come
from Betterton wherein my judgment, my ear, and my imagination, were not
fully satisfied.” This great man, who created no fewer than 130
characters, was a friend of Dryden, Pope, and Tillotson. Kneller’s
portrait of him is at Knowle;[751] A copy of it by Pope is preserved in
Lord Mansfield’s gallery at Caen Wood. When he died, in 1710, Steele wrote
a “Tatler” upon him, in which he says “he laboured incessantly, and lived
irreproachably. He was the jewel of the English stage.” He killed himself
by driving back the gout in order to perform on his benefit night, and his
widow went mad from grief. Betterton acted as Colonel Jolly in Colman’s
“Cutter of Coleman Street,” as Jaffier in Otway’s _chef d’œuvre_, as fine
gentlemen in Congreve’s vicious but gay comedies, as a hero in Rowe’s
flatulent plays, and as Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s great comedy.
Mrs. Barry was one of the best actresses in Portugal Street. She was the
daughter of an old Cavalier colonel, and was instructed for the stage by
Rochester, whose mistress she became. Dryden pronounced her the best
actress he had ever seen. Her face and colour varied with each passion,
whether heroic or tender. “Her mien and motion,” says Cibber, “were superb
and gracefully majestic, her voice full, clear, and strong.” In scenes of
anger, defiance, or resentment, while she was impetuous and terrible, she
poured out the sentiment with an enchanting harmony. She was so versatile
that she played Lady Brute as well as Zara or Belvidera. For her King
James II. originated the custom of actors’ benefits. After a career of
thirty-eight years on the boards, she died at Acton in 1713. Kneller’s
picture represents her with beautiful eyes, fine hair drawn back from her
forehead, “the face full, fair, and rippling with intellect,”[752] but her
mouth a little awry.[753]
Mrs. Mountfort also appeared in Portugal Street before the two companies
united at Drury Lane in 1682. She was the best of male coxcombs, stage
coquettes, and country dowdies, a vivacious mimic, and of the most
versatile humour. Cibber sketches her admirably as Melantha in “Marriage à
la Mode:”--“She is a fluttering, finished impertinent, with a whole
artillery of airs, eyes, and motions. When the gallant recommended by her
father brings his letter of introduction, down goes her dainty diving body
to the ground, as if she were sinking under the conscious load of her own
attractions; then she launches into a flood of fine language and
compliment, still playing her chest forward in fifty falls, and rising
like a swan upon waving water; and to complete her impertinence, she is so
rapidly fond of her own wit that she will not give her lover leave to
praise it;[754] and at last she swims from him with a promise to return in
a twinkling.”
The virtuous, good, and discreet Mrs. Bracegirdle was another favourite in
Portugal Street. For her Congreve, who affected to be her lover, wrote his
Araminta and Cynthia, his Angelica, his Almeria, and his Millamant in “The
way of the world.” All the town was in love with her youth, cheerful
gaiety, musical voice, the happy graces of her manner, her dark eyes,
brown hair, and expressive, rosy-brown face. Her Statira justified Nat
Lee’s frantic Alexander for all his rant; and “when she acted Millamant,
all the faults, follies, and affectation of that agreeable tyrant were
venially melted down into so many charms and attractions of a conscious
beauty.” Mrs. Bracegirdle was on the stage from 1680 to 1707. She lived
long enough to warn Cibber against envy of Garrick, and died in 1748.
Three of Congreve’s plays, “Love for Love,” “The Mourning Bride,” and “The
Way of the World,” came out in Portugal Street. Steele, in the _Tatler_,
No. 1, mentions “Love for Love” as being acted for Betterton’s
benefit--Mrs. Barry, Mrs. Bracegirdle, and Doggett taking parts. He
describes the stage as covered with gentlemen and ladies, “so that when
the curtain was drawn it discovered even there a very splendid audience.”
“In Dryden’s time,” says Steele, “You used to see songs, epigrams, and
satires in the hands of every person you met [at the theatre]; now you
have only a pack of cards, and instead of the cavils about the turn of the
expression, the elegance of style and the like, the learned now dispute
only about the truth of the game.”
Poor Mountfort, the most handsome, graceful, and ardent of stage lovers,
the most admirable of courtly fops, and the best dancer and singer of the
day, strutted his little hour in Portugal Street till run through the body
by Lord Mohun’s infamous boon companion. His career extended from 1682 to
1695. He was only thirty-three when he died.
The last proprietor of the theatre was Rich, an actor who, failing in
tragedy, turned harlequin and manager, and became celebrated for producing
spectacles, ballets, and pantomimes. Under the name of Lun he revelled as
harlequin, and was admirable in a scene where he was hatched from an egg.
Pope, always sore about theatrical matters, describes this manager’s
pompousness in the _Dunciad_ (book iii.):--
“At ease
’Midst storm of paper fierce hail of pease,
And proud his mistress’ order to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.”
Rich’s great success was the production of Gay’s _Beggars’ Opera_ in
1727-8. This piece brought £2000 to the author, and for a time drove the
Italian Opera into the shade. It ran sixty-three nights the first season,
and then spread to all the great towns in Great Britain. Ladies carried
about the favourite songs engraved on their fan-mounts, and they were also
printed on fire-screens and other furniture. Miss Lavinia Fenton, who
acted Polly, became the idol of the town; engravings of her were sold by
thousands: her life was written, and collections were made of her
jests.[755] Eventually she married the Duke of Bolton. Sir Robert Walpole
laughed at the satire against himself, and “Gay grew rich, and Rich gay,”
as the popular epigram went. Hogarth drew the chief scene with Walker as
Macheath, and Spiller as Mat o’ the Mint. Swift was vexed to find his
Gulliver for the time forgotten.
The custom of allowing young men of fashion to have chairs upon the stage
was an intolerable nuisance to the actors before Garrick. In 1721 it led
to a desperate riot at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. Half-a-dozen
beaux, headed by a tipsy earl, were gathered round the wings, when the
earl reeled across the stage where Macbeth and his lady were then acting,
to speak to a boon companion at the opposite side. Rich the manager, vexed
at the interruption, forbade the earl the house, upon which the earl
struck Rich and Rich the earl. Half-a-dozen swords at once sprang out and
decreed that Rich must die; but Quin and his brother actors rushed to the
rescue with bare blades, charged the coxcombs, and drove them through the
stage-door into the kennel. The beaux returning to the front, rushed into
the boxes, broke the sconces, slashed the hangings, and threatened to burn
the house; upon which doughty Quin and a party of constables and watchmen
flung themselves on the rioters and haled them to prison. The actors,
intimidated, refused to re-open the house till the king granted them a
guard of soldiers, a custom that has not long been discontinued. It was
not till 1780 that the habit of admitting the vulgar, noisy, and turbulent
footmen gratis was abandoned.[756]
Macklin, afterwards the inimitable Shylock and Sir Pertinax, played small
parts at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre till 1731, when a short speech as
Brazencourt, in Fielding’s “Coffee-house Politicians,” betrayed the true
actor. He lived till over a hundred, so long that he did not leave Covent
Garden till after Braham’s appearance, and Braham many of our elder
readers have seen.[757]
Macklin, an Irishman, and in early life a Dragoon officer, was irritable,
restless, and pugnacious; he obtained his first triumph at Drury Lane, as
Shylock in 1741. In stern malignity, no one has surpassed Macklin. His
acting was hard, but manly and weighty, though his features were rather
rigid. He naturally condemned Garrick’s action and gesture as
superabundant. His Sir Pertinax was excellent in its sly and deadly
suppleness. He was also admirable in Lovegold, Scrub, Peachem, Polonius,
and many Irish characters.
Quin was at Portugal Street as early as 1718-19. There he first “delighted
the town by his chivalry as Hotspur, his bluntness as Clytus, his
fieriness as Bajazet, his grandeur as Macbeth, his calm dignity as Brutus,
his unctuousness as Falstaff, his duplicity as Maskwell, and his coarse
drollery as Sir John Brute.”[758] It was just before this, that locked in
a room and compelled to fight, he had killed Bowen, who was jealous of his
acting as Bajazet. When Rich refused to give Quin more than £300 a year,
he joined the Drury Lane company, where he instantly got £500 per annum.
When Rich grew wealthy enough to hire a new theatre in Covent Garden, he
left Portugal Street. Almost the last play acted there was “The
Anatomist,” by Ravenscroft, a second-rate author of Dryden’s time.
The mob attributed the flight of Rich from the old theatre to the
appearance of a devil during the performance of the pantomime of
“Harlequin and Dr. Faustus,” a play in which demons abound. The
supernumerary spirit ascending by the roof instead of leaving by the door
with his paid companions, was believed to have so frightened manager Rich
that, taking the warning against theatrical profanity to heart, he never
had the courage to open the theatre again.[759] The legend is curious, as
it proves that even in 1732 the old Puritan horror of theatricals had not
quite died out, and that at that period the poorer part of the audience
was still ignorant enough to attribute mechanical tricks to supernatural
interference.
Garrick, in one of his prologues, speaks of Rich, under the name of Lun--
“When Lun appeared with matchless art and whim,
He gave the power of speech to every limb;
Though masked and mute, convey’d his quick intent,
And told in frolic gestures all he meant;
But now the motley coat and sword of wood
Require a tongue to make them understood.”
Every motion of Rich meant something. His “statue scene” and “catching the
butterfly” were moving pictures. His “harlequin hatched from an egg by
sun-heat” is highly spoken of; Jackson calls it “a masterpiece of dumb
show.” From the first chipping of the egg, his receiving of motion, his
feeling the ground, his standing upright, to his quick harlequin trip
round the broken egg, every limb had its tongue. Walpole says, “His
pantomimes were full of wit, and coherent, and carried on a story.” Yet
Rich was so ignorant that he called a ‘turban’ a ‘turbot,’ and an
‘adjective’ an ‘adjutant.’
Spiller, who died of apoplexy in Portugal Street, in 1729-30 as he was
playing in the “Rape of Proserpine,” was inimitable in old men. This was
the year that Quin played Macheath for his benefit, and Fielding brought
out his inimitable “Tom Thumb” at the Haymarket, to ridicule the bombast
of Thomson and Young.
King’s College Hospital, which occupies a large portion of the southern
side of Carey Street, is connected with the medical school of King’s
College, and is supported by voluntary contributions. For each guinea a
year a subscriber may recommend one in and two out patients. Contributors
acquire the same right for every donation of ten guineas. Annual
subscribers of three guineas, or donors of thirty guineas, are governors
of the hospital. The house is surrounded by a population of nearly 400,000
persons, of whom about 20,000 annually receive relief. In one year 363
poor married women have been attended in confinements at their own houses.
The last memorial of a gay generation, passed like last year’s swallows,
was a headstone that used to stand in the burial-ground belonging to St.
Clement’s, now the site of King’s College Hospital. The slab rose from
rank green grass that was sprinkled with dead cats, worn-out shoes, and
fragments of tramps’ bonnets; in summer it was half hid by a clump of
sunflowers.[760] It kept dimly alive the memory of Joe Miller, a taciturn
actor, in whose mouth Mottley, the poet put his volume of jokes that had
been raked from every corner of the town. Mottley was a place-seeker and a
writer of stilted tragedies and a bad comedy, for whose benefit night
Queen Caroline, wife of George II., condescended to sell tickets at her
own drawing-room.[761] Miller appears to have been an honest, and stupid
fellow, but some good sayings are embalmed in the rather coarse book which
bears his name. His portrait represents Joe as a broad-nosed man with
large saucer eyes, a big absurd mouth, and a look of comic stolid
surprise. He died in 1738, and the Jest Book was published the year after,
price one shilling.
Joe Miller made his first appearance on the stage in 1715, at Drury Lane,
in Farquhar’s comedy of “A trip to the Jubilee.” He also played Clodpole
in Betterton’s “Amorous Widow,” Sir H. Gubbin in Steele’s “Tender
Husband,” La Foole in Ben Jonson’s “Epicene,” and above all Sir Joseph
Whittol in Congreve’s “Old Bachelor.” Hogarth designed a benefit ticket
for this play. As Ben in “Love for Love,” Cibber cut out Joe Miller. In
1721 Joe opened a booth at Bartholomew Fair with Pinkethman. His last
great success was as the Miller in Dodsley’s farce of “The King and the
Miller of Mansfield.” Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire thresher, afterwards a
popular preacher, wrote his epitaph. Joe Miller’s monument is still
carefully preserved in one of the rooms in King’s College Hospital. John
Mottley, his editor, was the son of a Colonel Mottley, a Jacobite who
followed James into France. His son was placed in the Excise Office, and
grew up a place-hunter. He wrote a bad tragedy called “The Imperial
Captives,” and was promised a commissionership of wine licenses by Lord
Halifax, and a place in the Exchequer by Sir Robert Walpole, but received
nothing from either. He compiled the Jest-Book, it is said partly from the
recollection of the comedian’s conversations,[762] but it is doubtful if
this is true. The compilation (once so useful to diners-out) went through
three editions in 1739, and at about the thirteenth edition was reprinted,
after thirty years, by Barker, of Russell Street, Covent Garden.[763]
The Grange public-house close by, with its picturesque old courtyard, is
mentioned by Davenant, in his “Playhouse to Let,” as an inn patronised by
poets and actors.
The Black Jack public-house in Portsmouth Street was Joe Miller’s
favourite haunt. Some paintings on its walls still testify to the
occasional presence of artists of the last century. This inn used to be
called “The Jump,” from that adroit young scoundrel Jack Sheppard having
once jumped from one of its first-floor windows to escape the armed
emissaries of that still greater thief, the thief-taker, Mr. Jonathan
Wild.
When paviours dig deep under the Strand they find the fossil remains of
antediluvian monsters. A church in the street bears a name that carries us
back to the times of the Saxons and the Danes. In one lane there is a
Roman bath, in another there are the nodding gable-ends of houses at which
Beaumont and Fletcher may have looked, and which Shakspere and Ben Jonson
must have visited. So the Present is built out of the Past. The Strand
teems with associations of every period of history. The story of St.
Giles’s parish alone should embrace the whole records of London vagrancy.
The chronicle of Lincoln’s Inn Fields embraces reminiscences of half our
great lawyers. In the chapter on St. Martin’s Lane I have been glad to
note down some interesting incidents in the careers of many of our
greatest painters. Long Acre leads us to Dryden, Cromwell, Wilson, and
Stothard. At Charing Cross we have stopped to see how brave men can die
for a good cause.
A thorough history of our great city, considered in every aspect, would
almost be a condensed history of the world. I offer these pages to my
readers only as a humble contribution to the history of London.
[Illustration: THE BLACK JACK, PORTSMOUTH STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.]
Our commercial wealth and the vastness of our maritime enterprise is shown
in nothing more than by the distance from which we fetch our commonest
articles of consumption--tea from China, sugar from the West Indies,
coffee from Ceylon, oil from the farthest nooks of Italy, chocolate from
Mexico. An Englishman need not be very rich in order to consume samples
of all these productions of different hemispheres at a single meal.
In the same manner many books of far-divided ages have gone to form the
patchwork of the present volume; I am like the merchant who sends his
ships to collect in different harbours, and across wide and adverse seas,
the materials that he needs. In this busy and overworked age there are
many persons who have no time themselves to make such voyages, no patience
to traverse such seas, even if they possessed the charts: it is for them I
have written, and it is from them I hope for some kind approval.
APPENDIX.
“The West End seems to me one vast cemetery. Hardly a street but has
in it a house once occupied by dear friends with whom I had daily
intercourse: if I stopped and knocked now, who would know or take
interest in me? _The streets to me are peopled with shadows: the city
is as a city of the dead._”--SAMUEL ROGERS.
THE STRAND (SOUTH SIDE).--p. 25.
“I often shed tears in the motley Strand for fulness of joy at such
multitude of life.”--CHARLES LAMB’S _Letters_, vol. i.
The Strand is three-quarters of a mile long. Van de Wyngerede’s view,
1543, shows straggling houses on the south side, but on the north side all
is open to Covent Garden. There were three water-courses, crossed by
bridges. Haycock’s Ordinary, near Palsgrave Place, was much frequented in
the seventeenth century by Parliament men and town gallants. No. 217 was
the shop of Snow, a wealthy goldsmith who withstood the South Sea Bubble
without injury. Gay describes him during the panic with black pen behind
his ear. He says to Snow--
“Thou stoodst (an Indian king in size and hue);
Thy unexhausted shop was our Peru.”
The Robin Hood Debating Society held its meetings in Essex Street. Burke
spoke here, and Goldsmith was a member. The great Cottonian Library was
kept in Essex House from 1712 to 1730, on the site of the Unitarian
Chapel, built about 1774. Mr. Lindsey, Dr. Disney, Mr. Belsham
(Priestley’s successor) preached here, and after Mr. Belsham the Rev.
Thomas Madge. At George’s Coffee-house, now 213 Strand, Foote describes
the town wits meeting in 1751. Shenstone was a frequenter of this house,
and came here to read pamphlets--the subscription being one shilling. The
Grecian Coffee-house was used by Goldsmith and the Irish and Lancashire
Templars. Milford Lane was so named from an adjacent ford over the Thames.
A windmill stood near St. Mary’s Church, temp. James I. Sir Richard Baker,
the worthy old chronicler whom Sir Roger de Coverley so admired, lived in
this lane in 1632-9. The old houses were taken down in 1852. No. 191 was
the shop of William Godwin, bookseller, the author of _Caleb Williams_,
and the friend of Lamb and Shelley.--Strype mentions the Crown and Anchor
Tavern. Here, in 1710, was instituted the Academy of Ancient Music. Here,
on Fox’s birthday, in 1798, 2000 guests were feasted. Johnson and Boswell
occasionally supped here, and here the Royal Societies were held. In
Surrey Street, in a large garden-house at the east end fronting the river,
lived the Hon. Charles Howard, the eminent chemist who discovered the
process of sugar-refining _in vacuo_.
At No. 169, now the Strand Theatre, Barker, an artist, exhibited the
panorama--his own invention--suggested to him when sketching under an
umbrella on the Calton Hill. No. 217, now a branch of the London and
Westminster Bank, was formerly Paul, Strahan, and Bates’s,[764] who in
1858 disposed of their customers’ securities to the amount of £113,625,
and were sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. The drinking
fountain opposite St. Mary’s Church is a product of a most useful
association. The first fountain erected under its auspices was opened in
April 1859, by Lord John Russell, Lord Carlisle, and Mr. Gurney.--At No.
147 was published the _Sphinx_, and Jan. 2, 1828, No. 1 of the _Athenæum_.
No. 149 is the shop once belonging to Mr. Mawe, the mineralogist, who was
succeeded by James Tennant, Professor of Mineralogy at King’s College. At
No. 132 Strand (site of Wellington Street), the first circulating library
in London was started by a Mr. Wright, in 1740. Opposite Southampton
Street, from 1686 to late in the last century, lived Vaillant, the eminent
foreign bookseller. No. 143 was the site of the first office of the
_Morning Chronicle_ (Perry succeeding Woodfall in 1789). Lord Campbell and
Hazlitt were theatrical critics to this paper. Mr. Dickens was a
parliamentary reporter, Mr. Serjeant Spankie an editor, Campbell the poet
a contributor. On Perry’s death, in 1821, it was purchased by Mr. Clement
for £42,000. The _Mirror_, the first cheap illustrated periodical was also
published at this office. At No. 1 lived Rudolph Ackermann, the German
printseller, who introduced lithography and annuals. He illuminated his
gallery when gas was a novelty. Aaron Hill was born in a dwelling on the
site of the present Beaufort House; Lord Clarendon lived here while his
unlucky western house was building; and here, in 1660, the Duke of York
married the chancellor’s daughter.
The York Buildings Water Company failed in 1731. Hungerford Hall and its
panoramic pictures were burnt in 1854. At No. 18 Strand, in 1776, the
elder Mathews the comedian was born; Dr. Adam Clarke and Rowland Hill used
to visit his father, who was a religious bookseller. No. 7 Craven Street
(Franklin’s old house) was long occupied by the Society for the Relief of
Persons imprisoned for Small Debts. In Northumberland Court, once known as
“Lieutenants’ Lodgings,” Nelson once lodged.
NORFOLK STREET.--p. 44.
Mr. Dickens has sketched Norfolk Street in his own inimitable way.
“Norfolk is a delightful street to lodge in, provided you don’t go lower
down (Mrs. Lirriper dates from No. 81); but of a summer evening, when the
dust and waste paper lie in it, and stray children play in it, and a kind
of gritty calm and bake settles on it, and a peal of church-bells is
practising in the neighbourhood, it is a trifle dull; and never have I
seen it since at such a time, and never shall I see it ever more at such a
time, without seeing the dull June evening when that forlorn young
creature sat at her open corner window on the second, and me at my open
corner window (the other corner) on the third.”[765]
THE STRAND THEATRE.--p. 53.
The Strand Theatre, No. 169, formerly called Punch’s Playhouse, was
altered in 1831 for Rayner, the low comedian, and Mrs. Waylett, the
singer. Here were produced many of Douglas Jerrold’s early plays. Under
Miss Swanborough’s management, Miss Marie Wilton, arch and witty as
Shakspere’s Maria, delighted the town. Here poor Rogers, now dead, was
inimitable in burlesque female characters.
THE SOMERSET COFFEE-HOUSE.--p. 56.
The bold and redoubtable Junius (now pretty well ascertained, after much
inkshed, to be Sir Philip Francis) occasionally left his letters for
Woodfall at the bar of the Somerset Coffee-house at the east corner of the
entrance to King’s College. His other houses of call were the bar of the
New Exchange, and now and then Munday’s in Maiden Lane.
SOMERSET HOUSE.--p. 56.
The School of Design, formerly located in Somerset House, was established
in 1857, under the superintendence of the Board of Trade, for the
improvement of ornamental art, with regard more especially to our staple
English manufactures. The school is now incorporated with the Science and
Art Schools at South Kensington, which have been established, under
Government, in connection with South Kensington Museum.
KING’S COLLEGE.--p. 56.
King’s College and School (to the latter of which the author owes some
gratitude for a portion of his education) form a proprietary institution
that occupies an east wing of Somerset House which was built to receive
it. The college was founded in 1828; its fundamental principle is, that
instruction in religion is an indispensable part of instruction, without
which knowledge “will be conducive neither to the happiness of the
individual nor the welfare of the State.” The college education is divided
into five departments:--1. Theology. 2. General Literature and Science. 3.
Applied Sciences. 4. Medicine. 5. The School. A certificate of good
conduct, signed by his last instructor, is required of each pupil on
entry. The age for admission is from nine to sixteen years. A limited
number of matriculated students can live within the walls. Each proprietor
can nominate two pupils--one to the school, and one to the college. The
museum once contained the celebrated calculating machine of the late Mr.
Charles Babbage. This scientific toy was given by the Commissioners of the
Woods and Forests. It is now at South Kensington. The collection of
mechanical models and philosophical instruments was formed by George III.
and presented to the college by Queen Victoria.
HELMET COURT.--p. 56.
Helmet Court-so called from the Helmet Inn-is over against Somerset House.
The inn is enumerated in a list of houses and taverns made in the reign of
James I.[766] When the King of Denmark came to see his daughter, he was
lodged in Somerset House, and new kitchen-ranges were set up at the Helmet
and the Swan at the expense of the Crown. Henry Condell, a fellow-actor
with Shakspere, left his houses in Helmet Court to “Elizabeth, his
well-beloved wife.”[767]
BEAUFORT BUILDINGS.--p. 83.
Charles Dibdin, born 1745, the author of 1300 songs, gave his musical
entertainments at the Lyceum, and at Scott and Idle’s premises in the
Strand. Latterly, assisted by his pupils, he conducted public musical
soirees at Beaufort Buildings.
COUTTS’S BANK.--p. 86.
Mr. Coutts died in 1822. He was a pallid, sickly, thin old gentleman, who
wore a shabby coat and a brown scratch-wig.[768] He was once stopped in
the street by a good-natured man, who insisted on giving him a guinea. The
banker, however, declined the present with thanks, saying he was in no
“immediate want.” Miss Harriet Mellon first appeared at Drury Lane in
1795, as Lydia Languish. Mr. Coutts married Miss Mellon in 1815. She made
her last appearance at Drury Lane, early in the same year, as Audrey. She
left the bulk of her fortune to Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, whose gold the
_Morning Herald_ once computed at 13 tons, or 107 flour-sacks full. The
sum, £1,800,000, was the exact sum also left by old Jemmy Wood of
Gloucester. Counting a sovereign a minute, it would take ten weeks to
count; and placed sovereign to sovereign, it would reach 24 miles 260
yards.
Coutts’s Bank was founded by George Middleton. Till Coutts’s time it stood
near St. Martin’s Church. Good-natured Gay banked there, and afterwards
Dr. Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, and the Duke of Wellington. The Royal
Family have banked at Coutts’s ever since the reign of Queen Anne.
THE DARK ARCHES.--p. 97.
“The Adelphi arches, many of which are used for cellars and coal-wharfs,
remind one in their grim vastness,” says Mr. Timbs, “of the Etruscan
Cloaca of old Rome.” Beneath the “dry arches” the most abandoned
characters used to lurk; outcasts and vagrants came there to sleep, and
many a street thief escaped from his pursuers in those subterranean haunts
before the introduction of gas-light and a vigilant police. Mr. Egg, that
tragic painter, placed the scene of one of his most pathetic pictures by
this part of what was once the river-bank.
SOCIETY OF ARTS.--p. 99.
Lord Folkestone and Mr. Shipley founded the Society of Arts, at a meeting
at Rawthmell’s Coffee-house, in Catharine Street, in March 1754. It was
proposed to give rewards for the discovery of cobalt and the cultivation
of madder in England. Premiums were also to be given for the best drawings
to a certain number of boys and girls under the age of sixteen. The first
prize, £15, was adjudged by the society to Cosway, then a boy of fifteen.
The society was initiated in Crane Court; from thence it removed to
Craig’s Court, Charing Cross; from there to the Strand, opposite Beaufort
Buildings; and from thence, in 1774, to the Adelphi.
The subjects of Barry’s six pictures in the Council Room are the following
(beginning on the left as you enter):--1. “Orpheus.” The figure of Orpheus
and the heads of the two reclining women are thought fine. 2. “A Grecian
Harvest Home” (the best of the series). 3. “Crowning the Victors at
Olympia.” 4. “Commerce, or the Triumph of the Thames.” (Dr. Burney, the
composer, is composedly floating among tritons and sea-nymphs in his grand
tie-wig and queue.) 5. “The Distribution of Premiums by the Society of
Arts.” (This picture contains a portrait of Dr. Johnson, for which he
sat.) 6. “Elysium, or the State of Final Retribution.”
Barry did pretty well with this work, which occupied him from 1777 to
1783. The society gave him £300 and a gold medal, and also £500, the
profit of two exhibitions-total, £800.
In 1776 the society had proposed to the Academy to decorate the Council
Room, and be reimbursed by the exhibition of the works. Reynolds and the
rest refused, but Barry soon afterwards obtained permission to execute the
whole, stipulating to be paid for his colours and models. Barry at the
time had only sixteen shillings in his pocket. During the progress of the
work the painter, being in want, applied for a small subscription through
Sir George Savile, but in vain. An insolent secretary even objected to his
charge for colours and models. The society afterwards relented and
advanced £100. Barry died poor, neglected, and half crazy, in 1806, aged
sixty-five.
The Adelphi Rooms contain three poor statues (Mars, Venus, and Narcissus)
by Bacon, R.A., a portrait of Lord Romney by Reynolds, and a full-length
portrait of Jacob, Lord Folkestone, the first president, by Gainsborough.
In the ante-room, in a bad light, hangs a characteristic likeness of poor,
wrongheaded Barry. The pictures are to be seen between ten and four any
day but Wednesday and Saturday. The society meets every Wednesday at eight
from October 31 to July 31.
In the Council Room, that parade-ground of learned men, Goldsmith once
made an attempt at a speech, but was obliged to sit down in confusion. Dr.
Johnson once spoke there on “Mechanics,” “with a propriety, perspicuity,
and energy which excited general admiration.”[769]
Jonas Hanway, that worthy old Russian merchant, when he came to see
Barry’s pictures, insisted on leaving a guinea instead of the customary
shilling. The Prince of Wales gave Barry sittings. Timothy Hollis left him
£100. Lord Aldborough declared that the painter had surpassed Raphael.
Lord Romney gave him 100 guineas for a copy of one of the heads, and Dr.
Johnson praised the “grasping mind” in the six pictures.[770]
DUCHY OF LANCASTER.--p. 110.
The Duchy of Lancaster is a liberty (whatever that means) in the Strand.
It belongs to the Crown, the Queen being “Duchess of Lancaster.” It begins
without Temple Bar and runs as far as Cecil Street. The annual revenue of
the duchy is about £75,000.
WATERLOO BRIDGE.--p. 124.
Hood’s exquisite poem, “The Bridge of Sighs,” appeared in “Hood’s
Magazine” in May 1844. The poet’s son informs me that he believes that the
poem was not suggested by any special incident, but that a great many
suicides had been reported in the papers about that time.
“The bleak wind of _March_
Made her tremble and shiver”
marks the date of the writing,
“But not the dark arch
Of the black flowing river.”
The dark arch is that of Waterloo Bridge, a spot frequently selected by
unfortunate women who meditate suicide, on account of its solitude and
privacy.
YORK HOUSE.--p. 135.
After the death of Buckingham, York House was entrusted to the
guardianship of that Flemish adventurer and quack in art, Sir Balthasar
Gerbier, who here quarrelled and would have fought with Gentilleschi, a
Pisan artist who had been invited over by Charles I., and of whom he was
intolerably jealous. Some of Gentilleschi’s work is still preserved at
Marlborough House. The York Buildings Waterworks Company was started in
the 27th year of Charles II. In 1688 there were forty-eight shares. After
the Scotch rebellion in 1715, the company invested large sums in
purchasing forfeited estates, which no Scotchman would buy. The concern
became bankrupt. The residue of the Scotch estates was sold in 1783 for
£102,537.[771]
BUCKINGHAM STREET.--p. 135.
It is always pleasant to recall any scenes on which the light of Mr.
Dickens’s fancy has even momentarily rested. It was to Buckingham Street
that Mr. David Copperfield went with his aunt to take chambers commanding
a view of the river. They were at the top of the house, very near the
fire-escape, with a half-blind entry and a stone-blind pantry.[772]
HUNGERFORD BRIDGE.--p. 138.
The Hungerford Suspension Bridge was purchased in 1860 by a company of
gentlemen, and used in the construction of the bridge across the Avon at
Clifton. This aerial roadway has a span of 703 feet, and is built at the
height of 245 feet. It cost little short of £100,000. A bridge at Clifton
was first suggested in 1753 by Alderman Vick of Bristol, who left a
nest-egg of £1000. The bridge was completed and opened in 1864.
THE GAIETY THEATRE, STRAND (NORTH SIDE).--p. 147.
This elegant and well-appointed theatre, near the corner of Wellington
Street, was built in 1868, from the designs of Mr. C. J. Phillips. It
occupies the site of the Strand Music Hall, a large building which had
been erected in the place of an arcade which the late Lord Exeter had
built here in order to resuscitate the glories of old Exeter ’Change. Both
the arcade and music hall proved disastrous failures, whilst the Gaiety
Theatre, on the other hand, has turned out immensely successful, under the
management of Mr. John Hollingshead.
THE STRAND (NORTH SIDE).--p. 147.
Sir John Denham, the poet, when a student at Lincoln’s Inn, in 1638, in a
drunken frolic blotted out with ink all the Strand signs from Temple Bar
to Charing Cross.
In a house in Butcher Row, Winter, Catesby, Wright, and Guy Fawkes met and
took the sacrament together. Raleigh’s widow lived in Boswell Court, and
also Lord Chief Justice Lyttelton and Sir Richard and Lady Fanshawe; and
in Clement’s Lane resided Sir John Trevor, cousin to Judge Jeffries and
Speaker to the House of Commons. Dr. Johnson’s pew at St. Clement’s is No.
18 in the north gallery; Dr. Croly put up a tablet to his memory. The
_Tatler_, 1710, announces a stage-coach from the One Bell in the Strand
(No. 313) to Dorchester.
No. 317 was the forge kept by the Duchess of Albemarle’s father, and it
faced the Maypole; Aubrey describes it as the corner shop, the first
turning to the right as you come out of the Strand into Drury Lane. Dr.
King died at No. 332, once the _Morning Chronicle_ office. The New Exeter
Change--the site of which is now covered by the Gaiety Theatre and
Restaurant--was designed by Sydney Smirke, with Jacobean frontage. East of
Exeter Change stood the Canary House, mentioned by Dryden as famous for
its sack with the “abricot” flavour. Pepys mentions Cary House, probably
the same place. At No. 352 was born, in 1798, Henry Neale the poet, son of
the map and heraldic engraver. In Exeter Change No. 1 of the _Literary
Gazette_ was published, January 25, 1817. Old Parr lodged at No. 405, the
Queen’s Head public-house. No. 429, built for an insurance office by Mr.
Cockerell, has a fine façade. At No. 448 is the Electric Telegraph Office;
the time signal-ball, liberated by a galvanic current sent from Greenwich,
falls exactly at one, and drops ten feet. The old Golden Cross Hotel stood
farther west than the present. The Lowther Arcade, designed by Witherden
Young, is 245 feet long and 20 feet broad. Here the electric eel and
Perkin’s steam-gun were exhibited about 1838. In 1832 a Society for the
Exhibition of Models had been formed here. In 1831 the skeleton of a whale
was exhibited in a tent in Trafalgar Square; it was 98 feet long, and
Cuvier had estimated it to be nearly a thousand years old.
It should be added that for most of the facts in this note the author is
indebted to that treasure-house of topographical anecdote, _Curiosities of
London_, by J. Timbs, Esq., F.S.A., a book displaying an almost boundless
industry.
THE CROWN AND ANCHOR TAVERN.--p. 152.
The Crown and Anchor Tavern, at the corner of Arundel Street, was for some
years the Whittington Club. Before the alterations it had an entrance from
the Strand, which is now closed, its door being now in Arundel Street.
Douglas Jerrold was one of the earliest promoters of this club, which was
much used by young men of business. In 1873, after having been closed for
some time, it was re-opened as the Temple Club. The King of Clubs was
started about 1801 by Mr. Robert (Bobus) Smith, brother of Sydney, a
friend of Canning’s, and Advocate-General of Calcutta. It sat every
Saturday at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, at that time famous for its
dinners and wine, and a great resort for clubs. Politics were excluded.
One of the chief members was Mr. Richard Sharpe, a partner in a West India
house, and a Parliamentary speaker during Addington’s and Perceval’s
administrations. Mackintosh, Scarlett, Rogers the poetical banker, John
Allen, and M. Dumont, an emigré and friend of the Abbé de Lisle, were also
members. Erskine, too, often dropped in to spend an hour stolen from his
immense and overflowing business. He there told his story of Lord
Loughborough trying to persuade him not to take Tom Paine’s brief. He once
met Curran there. A member of the club describes the ape’s face of the
Irish orator, with the sunken and diminutive eyes that flashed lightning
as he compared poor wronged Ireland to “Niobe palsied with sorrow and
despair over her freedom, and her prosperity struck dead before her.”[773]
WYCH STREET.--p. 164.
“In a horrible little court, branching northward from Wych Street,” writes
Mr. Sala, in an essay written in America, “good old George Cruikshank once
showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison-breaker,
served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter; and on a beam in the
loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his name. * * * Theodore
Hook used to say that “he never passed through Wych Street in a
hackney-coach without being blocked up by a hearse and a coal waggon in
the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord Mayor’s carriage in the rear.”
NEWSPAPER OFFICES.--p. 167.
It is almost impossible to enumerate all the Strand newspaper offices,
present and past. It is, perhaps, sufficient to mention _The Spectator_ (a
very able paper,--office in Waterloo Place); _The London Journal_ (a
cheap, well-conducted paper with an enormous circulation); _The Family
Herald_ (the house formerly of Mr. Leigh, bookseller, a relation of the
elder Mathews, and the first introducer of the _Guides_ that Mr. Murray
has now rendered so complete); _The Illustrated Times_, _The Morning
Post_, _Notes and Queries_, _The Queen_, _Law Times_, _Athenæum_, and
_Field_ (in Wellington Street); _Bell’s Life_, _The Globe_, _Bell’s
Messenger_, _The Observer_, and lastly, _The Pall Mall Gazette_, and _The
Saturday Review_.
THE BEEF-STEAK CLUB.--p. 172.
Bubb Doddington, Aaron Hill, “Leonidas” Glover, Sir Peere Williams (a
youth of promise, shot at the siege of Belleisle), Hoadly, and the elder
Colman (the author of _The Suspicious Husband_), were either guests or
members of this illustrious club, whose origin dates back to Rich’s days
in 1735. Then came the days of Lord Sandwich, Wilkes, Bonnell Thornton,
Arthur Murphy, Churchill, and Tickell. In 1785 the Prince of Wales
(afterwards George IV.) became the twenty-fifth member.
Churchill resigned when the club began to receive him coldly after his
desertion of his wife. Wilkes never visited the club after the
contemptuous rejection of his infamous poem, the _Essay on Woman_. Garrick
was a great ornament of the club; he once dined there dressed in the
character of Ranger. Little Serjeant Prime was another club celebrity of
that period. An anonymous writer describes a meeting of the club in or
about 1799. There were present John Kemble, Cobb of the India House, the
Duke of Clarence, Sir John Cox Hippisley, Charles Morris (the writer of
our best convivial songs), Ferguson of Aberdeen, Mingay, and the Duke of
Norfolk. As the clock struck five, a curtain drew up, discovering the
kitchen through a gridiron grating, over which was inscribed this motto--
“If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly.”
The Duke of Norfolk ate at least three steaks, and then when the cloth was
removed, took the chair on a dais, elevated some steps above the table,
and above which hung the small cocked-hat in which Garrick played Ranger,
and other insignia of the society. He was also invested with an orange
ribbon, to which a silver gridiron was appended. The sound motto “Beef and
Liberty” is inscribed on the buttons of the members. It is the duty of the
junior member at this club to bring up the wine. The writer before quoted
describes seeing Lord Brougham and the Duke of Leinster performing this
subordinate duty. Sir John Hippisley was the man who Windham used to say
was very _nearly_ a clever fellow. Cobb was the author of “First Floor” (a
farce) and of three comic operas--“The Haunted Tower,” “The Siege of
Belgrade,” and “Ramah Drûg.” To the two former Storace set his finest
music.
“Captain” Morris, the author of those delightful songs, “The Town and
Country Life” and “When the Fancy-stirring Bowl wakes the Soul to
Pleasure,” used to brew punch and “out-watch the Bear” at this club till
after his seventy-eighth year. The Duke of Norfolk, at Kemble’s
solicitation, gave the veteran bard a pleasant little Sabine retreat near
Dorking. Jack Richards, the presbyter of the club, was famous for
inflicting long verbal harangues on condemned social culprits.
Another much respected member was old William Linley, Sheridan’s
brother-in-law; nor must we forget Richard Wilson, Lord Eldon’s secretary,
and Mr. Walsh, who had been in early life valet to Lord Chesterfield. The
club secretary, in 1828, was Mr. Henry Stephenson, comptroller to the Duke
of Sussex; and about this time also flourished, either as guests or
members, Lord Viscount Kirkwall, Rowland Stephenson the banker, and Mr.
Denison, then M.P. for Surrey.[774]
A literary friend tells me that the last time he saw Mr. Thackeray was one
evening in Exeter Street. The eminent satirist of snobs was peering about
for the stage door of the Lyceum Theatre, or some other means of entrance
to the Beef-steak Club, with whose members he had been invited to dine.
EXETER CHANGE.--p. 175.
Thomas Clark, “the King of Exeter Change,” took a cutler’s stall here in
1765 with £100 lent him by a stranger. By trade and thrift he grew so rich
that he once returned his income at £6000 a year, and before his death in
1816 he rented the whole ground-floor of the Change. He left nearly half a
million of money, and one of his daughters married Mr. Hamlet, the
celebrated jeweller. Some of the old materials of Exeter House, including
a pair of large Corinthian columns at the east end, were used in building
the Change, which was the speculation of a Dr. Barbon, in the reign of
William and Mary.
TRAFALGAR SQUARE.--p. 221.
The fountains were constructed in 1845, after designs from Sir Charles
Barry.
Morley’s Hotel (1 to 3 at the south-east corner) is much frequented by
American travellers, who may be seen on summer evenings calmly smoking
their cigars outside the chief entrance. The late proprietor, who died a
few years since, left nearly a hundred thousand pounds to the Foundling
and other charities.
THE UNION CLUB.--p. 226.
The Union Club House, which stands on the south-west of Trafalgar Square
and faces Cockspur Street, was built by Sir Robert Smirke, R.A. The club,
consisting of 1000 members, has been in existence forty-four years; its
expenditure is about £10,000 a year. Its trustees are the Earl of
Lonsdale, Viscount Gage, Lord Trimleston, and Sir John Henry Lowther,
Bart. The entrance money is thirty guineas, the annual subscription six
guineas. Mr. Peter Cunningham, writing in 1849, describes the club as “the
resort chiefly of mercantile men of eminence;” but its present members are
of all the professions.
DRUMMOND’S BANK.--p. 227.
This bank is older than Coutts’s. Pope banked there. The Duke of
Sutherland and many of the Scottish nobility bank there.
ST. MARTIN’S LANE.--p. 252.
Roger Payne was a celebrated bookbinder in Duke’s Court, St. Martin’s
Lane, London. This ingenious artist, a native of Windsor Forest, was born
in 1739, and first became initiated into the rudiments of his business
under the auspices of Mr. Pote, bookseller to Eton College. On settling in
the metropolis, about the year 1766, he worked for a short time for Thomas
Osborne, bookseller in Holborn, but principally for _honest_ Thomas Payne,
of the Mews Gate, who, although of the same name, was not related to him.
His talents as an artist, particularly in the finishing department, were
of the first order, and such as, up to his time, had not been developed by
any other of his countrymen. “Roger Payne,” says Dr. Dibdin, “rose like a
star, diffusing lustre on all sides, and rejoicing the hearts of all true
sons of bibliomania.” He succeeded in executing binding with such artistic
taste as to command the admiration and patronage of many noblemen. His
_chef-d’œuvre_ is a large paper copy of Æschylus, translated by the Rev.
Robert Potter, the ornaments and decorations of which are most splendid
and classical. The binding of this book cost Earl Spencer fifteen guineas.
It was by his artistic talents alone that Roger Payne became so celebrated
in his day; for, owing to his excessive indulgence in strong ale, he was
in person a deplorable specimen of humanity. As evidence of this
propensity, his account-book contains the following memorandum of one
day’s expenditure: “For bacon, one halfpenny; for liquor, one shilling.”
Even his trade bills are literary curiosities in their way, and frequently
illustrate his unfortunate propensity. On one delivered to Mr. Evans for
binding Barry’s work on _The Wines of the Ancients_, he wrote:--
“Homer the bard, who sung in highest strains,
Had, festive gift, a goblet for his pains:
Falernian gave Horace, Virgil fire,
And barley-wine my British muse inspire;
Barley-wine, first from Egypt’s learned shore,
Be this the gift to me from Calvert’s store!”
During the latter part of his life, as might have been expected, Roger
Payne was the victim of poverty and disease. He closed his earthly career
at his residence in Duke’s Court on Nov. 20, 1787, and was interred in the
burial-ground of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, at the expense of his worthy
patron, Mr. Thomas Payne. This excellent man had also a portrait taken and
engraved of his namesake at his work in his miserable den, under which Mr.
Bindley wrote the following lines:--
“ROGERUS PAYNE: Natus Vindesor. MDCCXXXIX.; denatus Londin.
MDCCLXXXVII. Effigiem hanc graphicam solertis BIBLIOPEGI Μνημόσυνον
meritis BIBLIOPOLA dedit. Sumptibus Thomæ Payne. [Etch’d and published
by S. Harding, No. 127 Pall Mall, March 1, 1800.”][775]
HEMINGS’ ROW.--p. 252.
Hemings’ Row, St. Martin’s Lane, was originally called Dirty Lane.[776]
The place probably derived its name from John Hemings, an apothecary
living there in 1679. Peter Cunningham writes in 1849: “Upon an old wooden
house at the west end of this street, near the second-floor window, is the
name given above, and the date 1680.”[777]
BEDFORDBURY.--p. 261.
Mr. James Payne, a bookseller of Bedfordbury (perhaps the son of Thomas
Payne), died in Paris in 1809. Mr. Burnet describes him as remarkable for
amenity as for probity and learning. Repeated journeys to Italy, France,
and Germany had enabled him to collect a great number of precious MSS. and
rare first editions, most of which went to enrich Lord Spencer’s
library--the most splendid collection ever made by a private person.[778]
EARL OF BRISTOL.--p. 264.
Digby, Earl of Bristol, whom Pepys accuses of losing King Charles his head
by breaking off the treaty of Uxbridge, lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. His
second daughter, Lady Ann, married the evil Earl of Sutherland. It was
Bristol who was base enough to impeach Lord Clarendon for selling Dunkirk
and making Charles marry a barren queen. Burnet describes the earl as
having become a Roman Catholic in order to be qualified for serving under
Don John in Flanders. He was an astrologer,[779] and had the impudence to
tell the king he was in danger from his brother. He renounced his new
religion openly at Wimbledon,[780] and then fled to France.
WILD HOUSE.--p. 277.
Wild House, Drury Lane, was formerly the town mansion of the Welds of
Lulworth Castle. Short’s Gardens were so called from Dudley Short, Esq.,
who had a mansion here with fine gardens in the reign of Charles II. In
Parker Street, Philip Parker, Esq., had a mansion in 1623.
CRAVEN HOUSE, DRURY LANE.--p. 292.
Pepys frequently mentions Lord Craven as attending the meetings at the
Trinity House upon Admiralty business. The old veteran, whom he
irreverently calls “a coxcomb,” complimented him on several occasions upon
his popularity with the Duke of York. Pennant says that Lord Craven and
the Duke of Albemarle “heroically stayed in town during the dreadful
pestilence, and, at the hazard of their lives, preserved order in the
midst of the terrors of the time.”[781] This fine old Don Quixote happened
to be on duty at St. James’s when William’s Dutch troops were coming
across the park to take possession. Lord Craven would have opposed their
entrance, but his timid master forbidding him to resist, he marched away
“with sullen dignity.” The date of the sale of the pest-houses should be
1722, not 1772.
DRURY LANE.--p. 299.
In the Regency time, and before, Drury Lane was what the Haymarket is now.
Oyster shops, low taverns, and singing-rooms of the worst description
surrounded the theatre. One of the worst of these, even down to our own
times, was “Jessop’s” (“The Finish”)--a great resort of low
prize-fighters, gamblers, sporting men, swindlers, spendthrifts, and
drunkards. “_H.’s_” (I veil the infamous name), described in a MS. of
Horace Walpole, is now a small, dingy theatrical tailor’s, and in the
besmirched back-shop shreds of gilding and smears of colour still show
where Colonel Hanger knocked off the heads of champagne bottles, and
afterwards, Lord Waterford and such “bloods” squandered their money and
their health.
THE SAVAGE CLUB.--p. 303.
The Savage Club, which was started at the Crown Tavern in Drury Lane, and
then removed to rooms next the Lyceum, and said to have been those once
occupied by the Beef-steak Club, is now moored at Evans’s Hotel, Covent
Garden. The name of the club has a duplex signification; it refers to
Richard Savage the poet, and also to the Bohemian freedom of its members.
It includes in its number no small share of the literary talent of the
London newspaper and dramatic world.
CLARE MARKET.--p. 339.
Denzil Street was so called by the Earl of Clare in 1682, in memory of his
uncle Denzil, Lord Holles, who died 1679-80. He was one of the five
members of Parliament whom Charles I. so despotically and so unwisely
attempted to seize. The inscription on the south-west wall of the street
was renewed in 1796.
STREET CHARACTERS.--p. 381.
It would be impossible to recapitulate the street celebrities from
Hogarth’s time to the present day which St. Giles’s has harboured. A
writer in _Notes and Queries_ mentions a man who used to sell dolls’
bedsteads, and who was always said to have been the king’s evidence
against the Cato Street conspirators. Charles Lamb describes, in his own
inimitable way, an old sailor without legs who used to propel his
mutilated body about the streets on a wooden framework supported on
wheels. He was said to have been maimed during the Gordon riots. But I
have now myself to add to the list the most remarkable relic of all. There
is (1868?) to be seen any day in the London streets a gaunt grey-haired
old blind beggar, with hard strongly-marked features and bushy eyebrows.
This is no less a person than Hare the murderer, who years ago aided Burke
in murdering poor mendicants and houseless people in Edinburgh, and
selling their bodies to the surgeons for dissection. Hare, a young man
then, turned king’s evidence and received a pardon. He came to London with
his blood money, and entered himself as a labourer under an assumed name
at a tannery in the suburbs. The men discovering him, threw the wretch
into a steeping-pit, from which he escaped, but with loss of both eyes.
THE SEVEN DIALS.--p. 385.
Evelyn describes going (Oct. 5, 1694) to see the seven new streets in St.
Giles’s, then building by Mr. Neale, who had introduced lotteries in
imitation of those of Venice. The Doric column was removed in July 1773,
in the hope of finding a sum of money supposed to be concealed under the
base. The search was ineffectual; the pillar now ornaments the common at
Weybridge. Gay describes Seven Dials, in his own pleasant, inimitable way
(circa 1712).
“Where fam’d St. Giles’s ancient limits spread,
An inrailed column rears its lofty head,
Here to seven streets seven dials count the day,
And from each other catch the circling ray;
Here oft the peasant, with inquiring face,
Bewildered trudges on from place to place;
He dwells on every sign with stupid gaze,
Enters the narrow alley’s doubtful maze,
Tries every winding court and street in vain,
And doubles o’er his weary steps again.”[782]
Martinus Scriblerus is supposed to have been born in Seven Dials. Horace
Walpole describes the progress of family portraits from the drawing-room
to the parlour, from the parlour to the counting-house, from the
housekeeper’s room to the garret, and from thence to flutter in rags
before a broker’s shop in the Seven Dials.[783] Here Taylor laid the scene
of “Monsieur Tonson.”
“Be gar! there’s Monsieur Tonson come again!”
The celebrated Mr. Catnach, the printer of street ballads, lived in Seven
Dials. He died about 1847.
STREETS IN ST. GILES’S.--p. 385.
In Dyot Street lived Curll’s “Corinna,” Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas, and her
mother.[784] At the Black Horse and Turk’s Head public-houses in this
street, those wretches Haggerty and Holloway, in November 1802, planned
the murder of Mr. Steele on Hounslow Heath, and here they returned after
the perpetration of the crime. At the execution of these murderers at the
Old Bailey, in 1807, twenty-eight persons were trampled to death. The
street was immortalised by a song in _Bombastes Furioso_, an excellent and
boisterous burlesque tragic opera, written by William Barnes Rhodes, a
clerk in the Bank of England. Bainbridge and Breckridge Streets, St.
Giles’s, now no more, were built prior to 1672, and derived their names
from the owners, eminent parishioners in the reign of Charles II. Dyot
Street was inhabited as late as 1803 by Philip Dyot, Esq., a descendant of
Richard Dyot, from whom it derived its name. In 1710 there was a
“Mendicants’ Convivial Club” held at the Welsh’s Head in this street. The
club was founded in 1660, when its meetings were held at the Three Crowns
in the Poultry. Denmark Street was probably built in 1689. Zoffany lived
at No. 9. Bunbury, the caricaturist, laid the scene of his “Sunday Evening
Conversation” in this street. In July 1771 Sir John Murray, the
Pretender’s secretary, was carried off in a coach from his house near St.
Giles’s Church by armed men.[785]
SAINT GILES.--p. 385.
This saint has some scurvy worshippers. Pierce Egan, in his _Life in
London_ (1820), afterwards dramatised, describes the thieves’ kitchens and
beggars’ revels, which men about town in those days thought it “the
correct thing,” as the slang goes, to see and share. “The Rookery” was a
triangular mass of buildings, bounded by Bainbridge, George, and High
Streets. It was swept away by New Oxford Street. The lodgings were
threepence a night. Sir Henry Ellis, in 1813, counted seventeen
horse-shoes nailed to thresholds in Monmouth Street as antidotes against
witches. Jews preponderate in this unsavoury street. Mr. Henry Mayhew
describes a conversation with a St. Giles’s poet who wrote Newgate
ballads, Courvousier’s Lamentation, and elegies. He was paid one shilling
each for them. A parliamentary report of 1848 describes Seven Dials as in
a degraded state. “Vagrants, thieves, sharpers, scavengers, basket-women,
charwomen, army seamstresses, and prostitutes, compose its mass. Infidels,
chartists, socialists, and blasphemers have their head-quarters there.
There are a hundred and fifty shops open on the Sunday. The ragged-school
there is badly situated and uninviting.” Mr. Albert Smith says gin shops
are the only guides in “the dirty labyrinth” of the Seven Dials. The
author once accompanied a Scripture-reader to some of the lowest and
poorest courts and alleys of St. Giles’s. In one bare room, he remembers,
on an earth floor, sat a blind beggar waiting for the return of his boy, a
sweeper, who had been sent out to a street-crossing to try and earn some
bread. In another room there was a poor old lonely woman who had made a
pet of an immense ram. We ended our tour by visiting an Irishwoman who had
been converted from “Popery.” While we were there, some Irish boys
surrounded the house and shouted in at the key-hole, threatening to
denounce her to the priest. When we emerged from this den we were received
with a shower of peculiarly hard small potatoes, a penance which the
author bore somewhat impatiently, while the Scripture-reader, who seemed
accustomed to such rough compliments, took the blows like an early
Christian martyr.
LINCOLN’S INN HALL.--p. 398.
In 1800 or 1801 Mackintosh delivered lectures in the old Lincoln’s Inn
Hall on the “Laws of Nature and Nations.” They were attended by Canning,
Lord Liverpool, and a brilliant audience. They contained a panegyric on
Grotius. In style Mackintosh was measured and monotonous--of the school of
Robertson and Gilbert Stuart. He made one mistake in imputing the doctrine
of the association of ideas to Hobbes, which Coleridge corrected. He
refuted the theories of Godwin in a masterly way.[786]
SERLE STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.--p. 401.
This street derived its name from a Mr. Henry Serle, who died intestate
circa 1690, much in debt, and with lands heavily mortgaged. He purchased
the property from the executors of Sir John Birkenhead, the conductor of
the Royalist paper, _Mercurius Aulicus_, during the Civil War, a writer
whose poetry Lawes set to music, and who died in 1679. New Square was
formerly called Serle’s Court, and the arms of Serle are over the Carey
Street gateway. The second edition of _Barnaby’s Journal_ was printed in
1716, for one Illidge, under Serle’s Gate, Lincoln’s Inn, New Square.[787]
Addison seems to have visited Serle’s Coffee-house, to study from some
quiet nook the “humours” of the young barristers. There is a letter extant
from Akenside, the poet, addressed to Jeremiah Dyson, that excellent
friend and patron who defended him from the attacks of Warburton at
Serle’s Coffee-house.
CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY.--p. 414.
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, now at 66 Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, had apartments in 1714 at No. 6 Serle’s Court. This society was
founded by Dr. Bray and four friends on the 8th of March 1699, and it
celebrated its third jubilee, or 150th anniversary, in 1849. The society
assists schools and colonial churches, and is said to have distributed
more than a hundred millions of Bibles and Prayer-books since its
foundation.
THE SOANE MUSEUM.--p. 424.
The following squib is said to have been placed under the plates at an
Academic dinner:--
“THE MODERN GOTH.
“Glory to thee, great artist soul of taste
For mending pigsties where a plank’s displaced,
Whose towering genius plans from deep research
Houses and temples fit for Master Birch
To grace his shop on that important day
When huge twelfth-cakes are raised in bright array.
Each pastry pillar shows thy vast design;
Hail! then, to thee, and all great works of thine.
Come, let me place thee in the foremost rank
With him whose dulness discomposed the Bank.”
The writer then, apostrophising Wren, adds--
“Oh, had he lived to see thy blessed work,
To see pilasters scored like loins of pork,
To see the orders in confusion move,
Scrolls fixed below and pedestals above,
To see defiance hurled at Rome and Greece,
Old Wren had never left the world in peace.
Look where I will--above, below is shown
A pure disordered order of thy own;
Where lines and circles curiously unite
A base compounded, compound composite,
A thing from which in turn it may be said,
Each lab’ring mason turns abash’d his head;
Which Holland reprobates and Dance derides,
While tasteful Wyatt holds his aching sides.”[788]
Soane foolishly brought an action against the bitter writer; but Lord
Kenyon directed the jury to find for the defendant on the ground that the
satire was not personal.
INDEX.
Abingdon, Mrs., “Nosegay Fan,” 318
Adam, the Brothers, their design, 96;
joke against their Scotch workmen, 103
Adam, Robert, death and funeral of, 104
Addison, the “Cato” of, 311;
Booth’s representation of “Cato,” _ib._
Adelphi, site of the, 97;
the residence of Garrick, _ib._;
Johnson and Boswell at, 98;
prowlers in its arches, 448
Adelphi Rooms, the, 449
Adelphi Theatre, first success of, 180;
Terry and Yates as its lessees, _ib._;
appearance of “Jim Crow” in, _ib._;
the elder Mathews manager of, _ib._;
last great successes at, 185
Akenside, at Tom’s Coffee-house, 38
Albemarle, Duke of. _See_ Monk
Albemarle, Duchess of, 93;
anecdotes of, 301
“All the Year Round,” 170
Ambassador, Spanish, attack of an anti-Catholic mob on his house, 277
Ambassadors, French and Spanish, affray between the retainers of, 134
Amiens, proclamation of peace of, 18
Anderson, Dr. Patrick, his Scotch pills, 53;
story of Sir Walter Scott relating to, _ib._
Anne of Denmark, her masques and masquerades in Somerset House, 58;
accident at the funeral of, 195
Anstis, John, Garter King at Arms, 43
Antiquaries, Society of, 70
Apollo Court and Room, 6
Armstrong, Sir Thomas, 11
Arnold, Dr., and the Lyceum, 171
Art, English, institutions for promoting, 75
Arts, the Society of, its place of meeting, 99;
Barry’s paintings, 100, 449;
premiums and bounties distributed by, _ib._;
Barry at work on its frescoes, 101;
foundation and object of, 449;
Barry’s application to, _ib._
Artists’ Club in Clare Market, 346
Arundel House, Strand, 39;
occupants of, 40;
death of the Countess of Nottingham in, 41;
the Marquis of Rosney’s description of, _ib._;
Thomas Howard’s treasures of art in, 42;
neglect of antiquities in, _ib._;
rooms lent to the Royal Society in, 43;
streets erected on the site of, _ib._;
Gay’s remarks on its glories, _ib._
Arundel Street, Strand, its residents, 43, 164
Astronomical Society, 71
“Athenæum” (Newspaper), 170
Atterbury, Bishop, 155
Bacon, Lord, his ingratitude, 32;
birthplace of, 127;
events of his life connected with York House, 127-8;
anecdotes of his early life, 128;
verses addressed to him at Durham House, 129;
his early legal studies, 130
Balmerino, Lord, an anecdote of, 234
Baltimore, Lord, infamous conduct of, 176
Banks. _See_ Coutts, Child, and Drummond
Bannister, Jack, 325
Barrow, Dr. Isaac, the death of, 232
Barry, his violence, 101;
his diligence at work, _ib._;
his paintings in the Council Room of the Society of Arts, _ib._;
effect produced by his paintings, 449;
his poverty and death, _ib._
Barry, Mrs., her theatrical career, 433
Barry, Spanger, an actor, 315
Basing House, an adventure at, 279
Beard, singer and actor, 249
Beauclerk, Topham, 98
Beaufort, House, Strand, 83, 447
Beckett, Andrew, works of, 99
Beckett, Thomas, bookseller, 99
Bedford, the Earls of, the old town house of, 185;
streets named after his family, _ib._
Bedford Street once fashionable, 186;
Half Moon Tavern in, _ib._;
residents of, 187;
Constitution Tavern in, 197
Bedfordbury, 236, 459
Beefsteak Club, 172;
badge of, _ib._;
members of, 173;
Peg Woffington, president of one at Dublin, _ib._;
another started by Rich and Lambert, _ib._;
its place of meeting, _ib._;
distinguished members of, 454;
sale of its effects, 174
Bell, Mr. Jacob, 225
Bellamy, George Anne, actress, 317
Berkeley, Dr., 155
Bermudas, the Justice Overdo’s allusion to, 235
Berties, the, 417
Betterton, the “Garrick” of his age, 433;
the parts he represented, _ib._;
his death, _ib._
Betty, Master, 321
Billington, Mrs., 333
Bindley, James, father of the Society of Antiquaries, his burial-place,
164
Birch, Dr., the antiquary, 36;
his books and literary remains, 48;
Dr. Johnson’s remark on, _ib._
Birkenhead, Sir John, 245
Bishop, operas produced by, 334
Black Jack, 348, 440
Blake, the mystical painter, 83
Blemund’s Ditch, 353
Bohemia, the Queen of, 293;
reports concerning, 295;
Sir Henry Wotton’s lines to, _ib._;
memorial of her husband, 296
Boleyn, Anne, at Temple Bar, 21
Bonomi, 78
Booksellers, their shops the haunts of wits and poets, 219
Booth, Barton, 311
Boswell, James, admitted into the Literary Club, 17;
the supposed Shaksperean MSS., 47.
Bowl-yard, its name, 373
Boydell, Alderman, 258
Bracegirdle, Mrs., 49;
her abduction, 50;
her charity, 347;
her popularity, 434
Braham, John, 333
Bristol, Earl of, 264;
particulars concerning, 459
Britain’s Bourse. _See_ Exchange
Brocklesby, Dr. Richard, friend of Burke and Johnson, 45;
attends Lord Chatham when he fainted in the House of Lords, _ib._
Brougham, Lord, 396
Buckingham, the first Duke of, 130;
his residences, _ib._;
patronage of art, 131;
Dryden’s lines on, 132;
Pope’s lines on, _ib._;
Clarendon’s view of his character, 133
Buckingham, the second Duke of, 133
Buckingham Street, 135;
distinguished residents in, 136, 137;
Mr. David Copperfield’s visit to, 451
Bull’s Head, the, Clare Market, 346
Burgess, Dr., a witty preacher, 159;
successors of, _ib._
Burleigh, Lord, his residence, 179
Burleigh Street, site of, 179
Burley, Sir Simon, 218
Burnet, Bishop, 44
Burton St. Lazar, 350
Bushnell, John, the sculptor, 7, 8
Butcher Row, 148;
Lee’s death in, 150
“Cabinet” Newspaper, _see_ “Pic-Nic”
Caermarthan, Lord, 136
Cameron, Dr., burial place of, 120
Canary House, 452
Canning, George, 395
Carey Street, 428
Carlini, 65
Carlisle, the Countess of, 178
Catherine of Braganza, 61;
her return to Portugal, 62
Catherine Street, its newspapers and theatre in, 166;
Gay’s description of, _ib._
Cavalini Pietro, works attributed to, 203
Cavendish, William, Earl of Devonshire, 90
Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury, 89, 153
Cecil Street, its residents, 88
Celeste, Madam, 184
Centlivre, Mrs., 230;
her hatred to the Jacobites, 231;
Pope’s dislike to, _ib._;
Leigh Hunt’s treatment of, 232
Ceracchi, Giuseppe, 66
Chambers, Sir William, 65
Chapone, Mrs. Hester, 428
Charing, village of, 201;
population under Edward I., _ib._;
the Falconry or Mews at, 218
Charing Cross, tradition concerning, 201;
Peele’s lines on, 202;
tradition of Queen Eleanor connected with, _ib._;
erection and demolition of, 204;
a Royalist ballad on, _ib._;
executions at, 205;
introduction of Punch into England at, 208;
Titus Oates, in the pillory at, _ib._;
the royal statue at, 209;
Waller’s lines on the statue, 210;
Andrew Marvell’s lines on the Cross, 211;
loss of parts of, 212;
a tradition concerning, _ib._;
the pedestal of, _ib._;
a rogue exposed in the pillory at, _ib._;
punishment of Japhet Crook at, 213;
old prints of, 215;
poetical eulogiums of, _ib._;
coffee-houses in the neighbourhood of, 226;
Locket’s ordinary at, 227;
Milton’s lodging at, 232;
other memoranda, 248;
a strange scene at, _ib._;
a remark of Dr. Johnson’s on, 234;
site of the post office at, _ib._;
ancient hospital at, 235;
former improvements at, _ib._;
the “Swan,” and verses by Johnson, 236
Charing Cross Hospital, 233
Charles I., letter written by, 58;
his statue at Charing Cross, 209;
strange story regarding the statue of, 212
Charles II., his progress through London, his coronation, 22;
the two courts in the reign of, 61
Chatterton, 80;
story concerning, 197
Chaucer, his marriage, 108;
favours obtained, 109;
royal post held by, 218
Chesterfield, Earl of, 187
Child’s Bank, 6
Christian Knowledge, Society for Promoting, 414, 464
Chunee, the elephant, 95, 419
Cibber, Colley, 312;
characters originated by, 316;
his success as actor and manager, _ib._
Cibber, Theophilus, his fate, 317;
his wife, _ib._
Clare House Court, 298
Clare Market, 339;
Orator Henley’s appearances in, _ib._;
artists’ club at the Bull’s Head in, 346;
Mrs. Bracegirdle’s visits to, 347
Clarges, John, farrier, 93, 301
Clarke, William, proprietor of Exeter Change, 177
Clement’s Inn, 156;
a tradition concerning, _ib._;
the hall of, 157;
the New Court and Independent Meeting-house in, 159
Clement’s, St., Church, improvements round, 152;
general dislike to, _ib._;
a ferment in the parish of, 153;
distinguished men baptized and buried in, _ib._;
adornments of, 155;
Dr. Johnson’s attendance in, _ib._
Clement’s, St., Well, 156;
Cleopatra’s Needle, 145
Clifton, bridge over the Avon at, 451
Clifton’s Eating-house, 149
Clinch, Tom, the highwayman, 373
Clive, Kitty, 315
Coaches and coach-stands, 166, 167
Coal Hole, the, 85
Cobb, the upholsterer, anecdote of, 258
Cock and Pye Fields, 356
Cock Lane ghost, the, 196;
the contriver of, 214
Cockpit, or Phoenix Theatre, its site, 304;
Puritan violence against, _ib._;
its reopening at the Restoration, 305
Coffee, 36
Coffee-houses, 36;
mentioned by Steele in the _Tatler_, _ib._
Coleridge, S. T., 170
Commons, House of, 101
Congreve, William, 53;
Pope’s declaration regarding, 51;
the successful career of, _ib._;
Voltaire’s visit to, _ib._;
Curll’s life of, 52
Congreve, Sir William, 88
Conway, Lord, memoranda of, 270
Cooke, George Frederick, 321
Cooke, T. P., 174
Cottenham, Lord, 395
Coutts’s Bank, the strong room of, 86, 87;
the first deposit in, 87;
story of one of the clerks of, _ib._;
the site of, and additions to, _ib._
Coutts, Thomas, his origin, and marriage, 86;
anecdote of, 448
Covent Garden, 93
Covent Garden Theatre and Sheridan, 328
Coventry, Secretary, 245
Cowley, enmity of the Royalists to, 115;
occasion of “The Complaint” by, _ib._;
beautiful lines by, 116;
his death at Chertsey, _ib._
Cox, Bessy, 282
Craig’s Court, Charing Cross, 227
Craven, Lord, his life, etc., 294;
miniature Heidelberg erected by, _ib._;
his services to the Queen of Bohemia, 295;
patronage of literature, _ib._;
employment in King William’s reign, 296;
Miss Benger’s estimate of, _ib._;
Quixotic character of, 460
Craven Buildings, fresco portrait at, 297
Craven House, 292, 459
Craven Street, residents of, 139;
diplomatic consultation in, _ib._;
epigrams by James Smith and Sir George Rose on it, _ib._
“Cries of London,” the, 167
Crockford, his shop in the Strand, 148;
his club, _ib._
Cromwell, Oliver, residences of, 226, 279
Crook, Japhet, his punishment, 213;
lines by Pope on, 214
Crouch, Mrs., the singer, 333
Crowle, _bon mot_ on Judge Page by, 217
Crown and Anchor, the, 152, 153;
the great room of, 444
Cumberland, George, Earl of, 120
Cuper’s Gardens, 43
Curl, Edmund, 212
Curtis, Mrs., visits Mrs. Siddons, 91
Davenant, Lady, 404
Davenant, the actor, 429
Davies, Moll, 430
Dawson, Jemmy, 15
Denham, Sir John, works written by, 393;
a drunken frolic of, 452
Denzil Street, 460
Deptford, and Peter the Great in, 45
Design, the School of, 446
De Sully, Duc, 41
Devereux Court, 36;
duel in, _ib._;
death of Marchmont Needham in, 37;
relic of Pope at Tom’s Coffee-house, _ib._
Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 28;
Spenser’s relation to, _ib._;
his house near the Temple, 29;
his plot against Elizabeth, _ib._;
his running a-muck in the City, and flight to Essex Gardens, 30;
his capture and death 31;
his mother and sister, 32;
his crimes, 34
Devonshire Club, 148
Dibdin, Charles, his entertainments, 34
Dickens, Charles, 170;
on Seven Dials and Monmouth Street, 385;
Digby, Sir Kenelm, 241;
Ben Jonson’s lines on, _ib._
Dilke, Sir C. Wentworth, 170
Disraeli, B., 400
Dobson, Vandyke’s protégé, 200
Dodd, the actor, 328
Doggett, the actor, 310
Donne, Dr., the tomb of his wife, 154;
his want of self-respect, 289;
strange circumstance recorded, 290;
vision seen by, _ib._;
conceits of, 291;
his picture in his shroud, 292;
a divine and a poet, 390
Dowton, the actor, 323
Doyley, 168
Drinking-fountains, the first, 445
Drummond’s Bank, 227, 457
Drury family, 288
Drury House, secret meetings there arranged by Essex, 29;
outbreak decided on at, 288;
site of, 237
Drury Lane, origin of its name, 288;
residents in, 297 _et seq._;
a strange scene in, 298;
a duel in, _ib._;
pictures of, 299;
the poor poet’s home in, _ib._;
its bad repute during the Regency, 460
Drury Lane Theatre, 305;
Pepys’s visits to, 306;
scuffle in the king’s presence in, _ib._;
distinguished actresses of, 309 _et seq._;
plays produced at, _ib._;
Garrick’s first appearance at, 313;
Dr. Johnson’s address on its re-opening, 322;
a riot in 1740 in, 324;
Charles Lamb’s description of, 324, 325;
the rebuilding of, 329;
competitive poems for the opening of, 330;
Byron’s opening address at, _ib._;
statue over its entrance, _ib._;
pecuniary statements relating to, _ib._;
revival of its fortunes by Edmund Kean, 331;
Grimaldi at, 334;
various actors of, _ib._;
pictures of royalty at, 338;
recent productions at, _ib._
Drury, Sir Robert, 288
Dryden, his lines on the death of Buckingham, 132;
his squabbles with Jacob Tonson, 54;
attack on, 280;
established jokes against, _ib._;
Mulgrave’s lines on, 281;
Otway’s defence of, _ib._
Dudley, Sir Robert, 369
Dudley, Duchess of, 369
Duke Street, 135
Duke’s Theatre, 429
Durham House, residents of, 92;
sufferings of the Princess Elizabeth in, _ib._;
its last occupants, _ib._;
banquets given by Henry VII. at, _ib._;
mint established at, 95;
Lady Jane Grey’s marriage in, _ib._;
the scene of an old legend, 96;
Raleigh in his turret study at, _ib._;
purchased by the brothers Adam, _ib._
Durham Street, 91
Dyot Street, 462
Eccentrics, club of, 259
Edward III., 110;
his conduct on the death of John of Gaunt, 114
Edward VI. at Temple Bar, 21
Egerton, Lord Chancellor, 391
Eleanor Cross, model of, 138
Eleanor, Queen, crosses in memory of, 138, 202;
tombs of, 203;
the preservation of her body, 204
Elizabeth, Queen, procession on the anniversary of her accession, 9;
adornment of her statue at Temple Bar, 10;
her reception at Temple Bar, 21;
the plot of Essex against, 29;
her relations with Admiral Seymour, 39;
story of the Essex ring, 40;
her favour for Raleigh, 92
Ellesmere. _See_ Egerton
Elliston, Robert William, 326;
stories told of, 327
Epigram, an, a legacy gained by, 139
Erskine, Lord, 424
Essex House, 29;
occupants of, 31;
the Parliamentary general a resident in, 33
Essex, Robert, Earl of, Ben Jonson’s masque on his marriage, 33;
divorce of his countess, and her marriage with Robert Carr, _ib._;
general for the Parliament, _ib._;
attempts to seize his papers, 34
Essex Street, Strand, 25;
residents in, 34;
Johnson’s club at the Essex Head, 35;
Unitarian chapel in, 443;
memoranda of, _ib._
Estcourt, 452;
Steele’s compliments to, 180
Etherage, Sir George, 301;
play by, 431
Etty, residence of, 136
Evans’s Hotel, Covent Garden, 460
Evelyn, John, 134
“Examiner,” the, 123
Exchange, the New, 93;
a tragedy in, _ib._;
legends about, _ib._;
the White Widow, 94;
the walks of, _ib._;
a frequenter of, _ib._;
its destruction, 95
Exeter Change, 175;
exhibitions in, _ib._;
last tenants of, 176
Exeter Hall, 178