way. There was, on the other hand, many a snug, or unceremonious, or
eccentric party given there. Perhaps the most splendid was that given
in honour of the King of Denmark in 1768. His majesty was fairly
bewildered with the splendour. There was in the court what was called
‘a pantheon,’ illuminated by 4,000 lamps. The King, as he sat down to
supper, at the table to which he had expressly invited twenty guests
out of the hundreds assembled, said to the duke, ‘How did you contrive
to light it all in time?’ ‘I had two hundred lamplighters,’ replied the
duke. ‘That was a stretch,’ wrote candid Mrs. Delany; ‘a dozen could
have done the business;’ which was true.
The duchess, who in early life was, in delicacy of form, like one
of the Graces, became, in her more mature years, fatter than if the
whole three had been rolled into one in her person. With obesity came
‘an exposition to sleep,’ as Bottom has it. At ‘drawing-rooms’ she
no sooner sank on a sofa than she was deep in slumber; but while she
was awake she would make jokes that were laughed at and censured the
next day all over London. Her Grace would sit at a window in Covent
Garden, and be _hail fellow well met_ with every one of a mob of tipsy
and not too cleanly-spoken electors. On these occasions it was said
she ‘signalised herself with intrepidity.’ She could bend, too, with
cleverness to the humours of more hostile mobs; and when the Wilkes
rioters besieged the ducal mansion, she and the duke appeared at a
window, did salutation to their masters, and performed homage to the
demagogue by drinking his health in ale.
Horace Walpole affected to ridicule the ability of the duchess as a
verse writer. At Lady Miller’s at Batheaston some rhyming words were
given out to the company, and anyone who could, was required to add
lines to them so as to make sense with the rhymes furnished for the end
of each line. This sort of dancing in fetters was called _bouts rimés_.
‘On my faith,’ cried Walpole, in 1775, ‘there are _bouts rimés_ on a
buttered muffin by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland.’ It may be
questioned whether anybody could have surmounted the difficulty more
cleverly than her Grace. For example:
The pen which I now take and brandish,
Has long lain useless in my standish.
Know, every maid, from her own patten
To her who shines in glossy satin,
That could they now prepare an oglio
From best receipt of book in folio,
Ever so fine, for all their puffing,
I should prefer a butter’d muffin;
A muffin, Jove himself might feast on,
If eaten with Miller, at Batheaston.
To return to the house itself. There is no doubt that no mansion of
such pretensions and containing such treasures has been so thoroughly
kept from the vulgar eye. There is one exception, however, to this
remark. The Duke (Algernon) who was alive at the period of the first
Exhibition threw open the house in the Strand to the public without
reserve. The public, without being ungrateful, thought it rather a
gloomy residence. Shut in and darkened as it now is by surrounding
buildings--canopied as it now is by clouds of London smoke--it is less
cheerful and airy than the Tower, where the Wizard Earl studied in his
prison room, or counted the turns he made when pacing his prison yard.
The Duke last referred to was in his youth at Algiers under Exmouth,
and in his later years a Lord of the Admiralty. As Lord Prudhoe, he was
a traveller in far-away countries, and he had the faculty of seeing
what he saw, for which many travellers, though they have eyes, are not
qualified. At the pleasant Smithsonian house at Stanwick, when he was
a bachelor, his household was rather remarkable for the plainness of
the female servants. Satirical people used to say the youngest of them
was a grandmother. Others, more charitable or scandalous, asserted
that Lord Prudhoe was looked upon as a father by many in the country
round, who would have been puzzled where else to look for one. It was
his elder brother Hugh (whom Lord Prudhoe succeeded) who represented
England as Ambassador Extraordinary at the coronation of Charles X. at
Rheims. Paris was lost in admiration at the splendour of this embassy,
and never since has the _hôtel_ in the Rue de Bac possessed such a
gathering of royal and noble personages as at the _fêtes_ given there
by the Duke of Northumberland. His sister, Lady Glenlyon, then resided
in a portion of the fine house in the Rue de Bourbon, owned and in part
occupied by the rough but cheery old warrior, the Comte de Lobau. When
that lady was Lady Emily Percy, she was married to the eccentric Lord
James Murray, afterwards Lord Glenlyon. The bridegroom was rather of
an oblivious turn of mind, and it is said that when the wedding morn
arrived, his servant had some difficulty in persuading him that it was
the day on which he had to get up and be married.
There remains only to be remarked, that as the Percy line has been
often represented only by an heiress, there have not been wanting
individuals who boasted of male heirship.
Two years after the death of Joscelin Percy in 1670, who died the
last male heir of the line, leaving an only child, a daughter, who
married the Duke of Somerset, there appeared, supported by the Earl of
Anglesea, a most impudent claimant (as next male heir) in the person
of James Percy, an Irish trunkmaker. This individual professed to
be a descendant of Sir Ingram Percy, who was in the ‘Pilgrimage of
Grace,’ and was brother of the sixth earl. The claim was proved to be
unfounded; but it may have rested on an _illegitimate_ foundation.
As the pretender continued to call himself Earl of Northumberland,
Elizabeth, daughter of Joscelin, ‘took the law’ of him. Ultimately he
was condemned to be taken into the four law courts in Westminster Hall,
with a paper pinned to his breast, bearing these words: ‘The foolish
and impudent pretender to the earldom of Northumberland.’
In the succeeding century, the well-known Dr. Percy, Bishop of Dromore,
believed himself to be the true male representative of the ancient line
of Percy. He built no claims on such belief; but the belief was not
only confirmed by genealogists, it was admitted by the second heiress
Elizabeth, who married Hugh Smithson. Dr. Percy so far asserted his
blood as to let it boil over in wrath against Pennant when the latter
described Alnwick Castle in these disparaging words: ‘At Alnwick
no remains of chivalry are perceptible; no respectable train of
attendants; the furniture and gardens are inconsistent; and nothing,
except the numbers of unindustrious poor at the castle gate, excited
any one idea of its former circumstances.’
‘Duke and Duchess of Charing Cross,’ or ‘their majesties of Middlesex,’
were the mock titles which Horace Walpole flung at the ducal couple of
his day who resided at Northumberland House, London, or at Sion House,
Brentford. Walpole accepted and satirised the hospitality of the London
house, and he almost hated the ducal host and hostess at Sion, because
they seemed to overshadow his mimic feudal state at Strawberry! After
all, neither early nor late circumstance connected with Northumberland
House is confined to memories of the inmates. Ben Jonson comes out upon
us from Hartshorn Lane with more majesty than any of the earls; and
greatness has sprung from neighbouring shops, and has flourished as
gloriously as any of which Percy can boast. Half a century ago, there
was a long low house, a single storey high, the ground floor of which
was a saddler’s shop. It was on the west side of the old Golden Cross,
and nearly opposite Northumberland House. The worthy saddler founded
a noble line. Of four sons, three were distinguished as Sir David,
Sir Frederick, and Sir George. Two of the workmen became Lord Mayors
of London; and an attorney’s clerk, who used to go in at night and
chat with the men, married the granddaughter of a king and became Lord
Chancellor.
_LEICESTER FIELDS._
In the reign of James I. there was an open space of ground north of
what is now called Leicester Square (which by some old persons is
still called Leicester Fields), and which was to the London soldiers
and civilians of that day very much what Wormwood Scrubs is to the
military and their admirers of the present time. Prince Henry exercised
his artillery there, and it continued to be a general military
exercise-ground far into the reign of Charles I. People trooped
joyfully over the lammas land paths to witness the favourite spectacle.
The greatest delight was excited by charges of cavalry against lines
or masses of dummies, through which the gallant warriors and steeds
plunged and battled--thus teaching them not to stop short at an
impediment, but to dash right through it.
In 1631 there were unmistakable signs that this land was going to be
built over, and people were aghast at the pace at which London was
growing. Business-like men were measuring and staking; the report
was that the land had been given to Sydney, Earl of Leicester. Too
soon the builders got possession, and the holiday folk with military
proclivities no longer enjoyed their old ecstasy of accompanying the
soldiery to Paggington’s tune of
My masters and friends and good people, draw near.
Why Sydney was allowed to establish himself on the lammas land no one
can tell. All that we know is, that Lord Carlisle wrote from Nonsuch,
in August 1631, to Attorney-General Heath, informing him that it was
the king’s pleasure that Mr. Attorney should prepare a licence to the
Earl of Leicester to build upon a piece of ground called Swan Close, in
St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a house convenient for his habitation.’
The popular idea of Earl of Leicester is Elizabeth’s Robert Dudley.
Well, that earl had a sister, Mary, who married Sir Henry Sydney, of
Penshurst. This couple had a son, whom they called Robert, and whom
King James created at successive periods Baron Sydney, Viscount Lisle,
and Earl of Leicester. And this Earl Robert had a son who, in 1626,
succeeded to the earldom, and to him King Charles, in 1631, gave Swan
Close and some other part of the lammas land, whereon he erected the
once famous Leicester House.
This last Robert was the father of the famous and rather shabby
patriot, Algernon Sydney, also of the handsome Henry. He is still more
famous as having for daughter Dorothy, the ‘Sacharissa’ with whom
Waller pretended to be in love, and he gave his family name to Sydney
Alley. When, some few years later, the Earl of Salisbury (Viscount
Cranbourn) built a house in the neighbourhood, he partly copied the
other earl’s example, and called the road which led to his mansion
Cranbourn Alley.
The lammas land thus given away was land which was open to the poor
after Lammastide. Peter Cunningham quotes two entries from the St.
Martin’s rate-books to this effect: ‘To received of the Honble. Earle
of Leicester for ye Lamas of the ground that adjoins the Military Wall,
3_l._’ The ‘military wall’ was the boundary of the Wormwood Scrubs of
that day. The Earl also had to pay ‘for the lamas of the ground whereon
his house and garden are, and the field that is before his house, near
to Swan Close.’ The field before his house is now Leicester Square,
‘but Swan Close,’ says Peter, ‘is quite unknown.’ Lord Carlisle’s
letter in the State Paper Office states that the house was to be built
‘_upon_ Swan Close.’
It was a palatial mansion, that old Leicester House. It half filled
the northern side of the present square, on the eastern half of that
side. Its noble gardens extended beyond the present Lisle Street. At
first that street reached only to the garden wall of Leicester House.
When the garden itself disappeared the street was lengthened. It was
a street full of ‘quality,’ and foreign ambassadors thought themselves
lodged in a way not to dishonour their masters if they could only
secure a mansion in Lisle Street.
Noble as the mansion was, Robert Sydney Earl of Leicester is the only
earl of his line who lived in it, and his absences were many and of
long continuance. He was a thrifty man, and long before he died, in
1677, he let the house to very responsible tenants. One of these was
Colbert. If the ordinary run of ambassadors were proud to be quartered
in Lisle Street, the proper place for the representative of ‘_L’Etat
c’est moi_,’ and for the leader of civilisation, was the palace in
Leicester Fields; and there France established herself, and there and
in the neighbourhood, in hotels, cafés, restaurants, _charcutiers_,
_commissionnaires_, refugees, and highly-coloured ladies, she has been
ever since.
Colbert probably the more highly approved of the house as it had been
dwelt in already by a queen. On February 7, 1662, the only queen that
ever lived in Drury Lane--the Queen of Bohemia (daughter of James
I.)--removed from Drury House and its pleasant gardens, now occupied by
houses and streets, at the side of the Olympic Theatre, to Leicester
House. Drury House was the residence of Lord Craven, to whom it was
popularly said that the widowed queen had been privately married. Her
occupancy of Leicester House was not a long one, for the queen died
there on the 12th of the same month.
Six years later, in 1668,the French ambassador, Colbert, occupied
Leicester House. Pepys relates how he left a joyous dinner early, on
October 21, to join Lord Brouncker, the president, and other members
of the Royal Society, in paying a formal return visit to Colbert; but
the party had started before Pepys arrived at the Society’s rooms. The
little man hastened after them; but they were ‘gone in’ and ‘up,’ and
Pepys was too late to be admitted. His wife, perhaps, was not sorry,
for he took her to Cow Lane; ‘and there,’ he says, ‘I showed her the
coach which I pitch on, and she is out of herself for joy almost.’
It is easy to guess why the Royal Society honoured themselves by
honouring Colbert. The great Frenchman was something more than a
mere Marquis de Segnelai. Who remembers M. le Marquis? Who does not
know Colbert--the pupil of Mazarin, the astute politician, the sharp
finance-minister, the patron--nay, the pilot--of the arts and sciences
in France? The builder of the French Royal Observatory, and the founder
of the Academies of Painting and Sculpture and of the Sciences in
France, was just the man to pay the first visit to the Royal Society.
Leicester House was nobly tenanted by Colbert, and nobly frequented by
the men of taste and of talent whom he gathered about him beneath its
splendid roof.
The house fell into other hands, and men who were extremely opposite to
philosophers were admitted within its walls _with_ philosophers, who
were expected to admire their handiwork. In October 1672, the grave
Evelyn called at Leicester House to take leave of Lady Sunderland, who
was about to set out for Paris, where Lord Sunderland was the English
ambassador. My lady made Evelyn stay to dinner, and afterwards sent
for Richardson, the famous fire-eater. A few years ago a company of
Orientals, black and white, exhibited certain feats, but they were too
repulsive (generally) to attract. What the members of this company did
was done two hundred years ago in Leicester Square by Richardson alone.
‘He devoured,’ says Evelyn, ‘brimstone on glowing coals before us,
chewing and swallowing them; he melted a large glass and eat it quite
up; then, taking a live coal on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster,
the coal was blowed on with bellows till it flamed and sparkled in his
mouth, and so remained till the oyster gaped and was quite boiled. Then
he melted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he drank down as it flamed.
I saw it flaming in his mouth a good while. He also took up a thick
piece of iron, such as laundresses use to put in their smoothing-boxes,
when it was fiery hot, held it between his teeth, then in his hands,
and threw it about like a stone; but this I observed, that he cared
not to hold very long. Then he stood on a small pot, and bending his
body, took a glowing iron in his mouth from between his feet, without
touching the pot or ground with his hands; with divers other prodigious
feats.’ Such was the singular sort of entertainment provided by a lady
for a gentleman after dinner in the seventeenth century and beneath the
roof of Leicester House.
Meanwhile Little France increased and flourished in and about the
neighbourhood, and ‘foreigners of distinction’ were to be found airing
their nobility in Leicester Square and the Haymarket--almost country
places both.
Behind Leicester House, and on part of the ground which once formed
Prince Henry Stuart’s military parade ground, there was a riding
academy, kept by Major Foubert. In 1682, among the major’s resident
pupils and boarders, was a handsome dare-devil young fellow, who was
said to be destined for the Church, but who subsequently met his own
destiny in quite another direction. His name was Philip Christopher
Königsmark (Count, by title), and his furious yet graceful riding must
have scared the quieter folks pacing the high road of the fields. He
had with him, or rather _he_ was with an elder brother, Count Charles
John. This elder Count walked Leicester Fields in somewhat strange
company--a German Captain Vratz, Borosky, a Pole, and Lieutenant Stern,
a third foreigner. To what purpose they associated was seen after
that Sunday evening in February 1682, when three mounted men shot Mr.
Thomas Thynne (Tom of Ten Thousand) in his coach, at the bottom of the
Haymarket. Tom died of his wounds. Thynne had been shot because he had
just married the wealthy child-heiress, Lady Ogle. Count Charles John
thought _he_ might obtain the lady if her husband were disposed of.
The necessary disposal of him was made by the three men named above,
after which they repaired to the Counts lodgings and then scattered;
but they were much wanted by the police, and so was the Count; when it
was discovered that he had suddenly disappeared from the neighbourhood
of the ‘Fields,’ and had gone down the river. He was headed, and
taken at Gravesend. The subordinates were also captured. For some
time indeed Vratz could not be netted. One morning, however, an armed
force broke into a Swedish doctor’s house in Leicester Fields, and
soon after they brought out Vratz in custody, to the great delight
of the assembled mob. At the trial, the Count was acquitted. His
younger brother, Philip, swore to an _alibi_, which proved nothing,
and the King influenced the judges! The three hired murderers went to
the gallows, and thought little of it. Vratz excused the deed, on
the ground of murder not having been intended; ‘besides,’ said this
sample of the Leicester Fields foreigner of the seventeenth century,
‘I am a gentleman, and God will deal with me accordingly.’ The two
counts left England, and made their names notorious in Continental
annals. The French riding-master shut up his school behind Leicester
House, and removed to a spot where his name still lives: Foubert’s
Passage, in Regent Street, opposite Conduit Street, is the site of the
academy where that celebrated teacher once instructed young ladies and
gentlemen how to ‘witch the world with noble horsemanship.’
We have spoken of the square being almost in the country. It was not
the only one which was considered in the same light. In 1698 the author
of a book called ‘Mémoires et Observations faites par un Voyageur en
Angleterre,’ printed at the Hague in the above year, thus enumerates
the London squares or _places_: ‘Les places qui sont dans Londres, ou
pour mieux dire, dans les faubourgs, occupent des espaces qui, joints
ensemble, en fourniraient un suffisant pour bâtir une grande ville. Ces
places sont toutes environnées de balustrades, qui empêchant que les
carrosses n’y passant. Les principales sont celles de Lincoln’s Inn
Fields, de Moor Fields, de Southampton ou Blumsbury, de St. James, &c.,
Covent Garden; de Sohoe, ou Place Royale, du Lion rouge (Red Lyon), du
Quarré d’Or (Golden Square), et de Leicester Fields.’
All these are said to be in the _suburbs_. Soho Square was called by
fashionable people, King Square. It was only vulgar folk who used the
prevailing name of Soho.
From early in Queen Anne’s days till late in those of George I., the
representative of the Emperor of Germany resided in Leicester House.
It was said that Jacobites found admittance there, for plotting or
for refuge. It is certain that the imperial residence was never so
tumultuously and joyously surrounded as when Prince Eugene arrived in
Leicester Square, in the above Queen’s reign, on a mission from the
Emperor, to induce England to join with him in carrying on the war.
During his brief stay Leicester Fields was thronged with a cheering
mobility and a bowing nobility and gentry, hastening to ‘put a
distinguished respect’ on Marlborough’s great comrade, who was almost
too modest to support the popular honours put on himself. Bishop Burnet
and the Prince gossiping together at their frequent interviews at
Leicester House have quite a picturesque aspect.
The imperial chaplain there was often as busy as his master. Here is a
sample of one turn of his office:
One evening a man, in apparent hurry, knocked at the door of Leicester
House, the imperial ambassador’s residence. He was bent on being
married, and he accomplished that on which he was bent. This person was
the son of a cavalier squire; he was also a Templar, for a time; but he
hated law and Fleet Street, and he set up as near to being a courtier
as could be expressed by taking lodgings in Scotland Yard, which
was next door to the court then rioting at Whitehall. His name was
Fielding, and his business was to drink wine, make love, and live upon
pensions from female purses. Three kings honoured the rascal: Charles,
James, and William; and one queen did him a good turn. For a long
time Beau Fielding was the handsomest ass on the Mall. Ladies looked
admiringly and languishingly at him, and the cruel beau murmured, ‘Let
them look and die.’ Maidens spoke of him as ‘Adonis!’ and joyous widows
hailed him ‘Handsome as Hercules!’ It was a mystery how he lived; how
he maintained horses, chariot, and a brace of fellows in bright yellow
coats and black sarcenet sashes. They were the Austrian colours; for
Fielding thought he was cousin to the House of Hapsburg.
Supercilious as he was, he had an eye to the widows. His literature was
in Doctors’ Commons, where he studied the various instances of marital
affection manifested by the late husbands of living widows. One day
he rose from the perusal of a will with great apparent satisfaction.
He had just read how Mr. Deleau had left his relict a town house in
Copthall Court, a Surrey mansion at Waddon, and sixty thousand pounds
at her own disposal. The handsome Hercules resolved to add himself to
the other valuables of which widow Deleau could dispose.
Fielding knew nothing whatever of the widow he so ardently coveted;
but he, like love, could find out the way. There was a Mrs. Villars,
who had dressed the widow’s hair, and she undertook, for a valuable
consideration, to bring the pair gradually together. Fielding was
allowed to see the grounds at Waddon. As he passed along, he observed
a lady at a window. He put his hand on the left side of his waistcoat,
and bowed a superlative beau’s superlative bow; and he was at the high
top-gallant of his joy when he saw the graceful lady graciously smile
in return for his homage. This little drama was repeated; and at last
Mrs. Villars induced the lady to yield so very much all at once as to
call with her on Fielding at his lodgings. Three such visits were made,
and ardent love was made also on each occasion. On the third coming of
Hero to Leander, there was a delicious little banquet, stimulating to
generous impulses. The impulses so overcame the lady that she yielded
to the urgent appeals of Mrs. Villars and the wooer, and consented to a
private marriage in her lover’s chambers. The ecstatic Fielding leapt
up from her feet, where he had been kneeling, clapt on his jaunty hat
with a slap, buckled his bodkin sword to his side with a hilarious
snap, swore there was no time like the present, and that he would
himself fetch a priest and be back with him on the very swiftest of the
wings of love.