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Title: Unnoticed London
Author: Elizabeth (E.) Montizambert
Release Date: September 6, 2021 [eBook #66228]
Language: English
Produced by: Chuck Greif and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNNOTICED LONDON ***
UNNOTICED LONDON
[Illustration: CHEYNE ROW]
UNNOTICED
LONDON
BY
E. MONTIZAMBERT
[Illustration]
WITH TWENTY-FOUR
ILLUSTRATIONS
1923
LONDON & TORONTO
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
FIRST EDITION _March 1922_
REPRINTED _May 1922_, _May 1923_
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
The following brief account of a few of the things that have interested
me in London is not intended for the use of the inveterate sightseer,
for whom so many admirable and complete fingerposts to the study of old
London have been written, by such experts as Mr. Bell, Mr. Wilfred
Whitten, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Ordish and Mr. Hare. It is meant for the
people who do not realise one-eighth of the stories packed into the
streets of London, the city which, as Sir Walter Besant, that great
London lover, once said, has an unbroken history of one thousand years
and has never been sacked by an enemy. For, in talking about the
extraordinary beauty of London, I became aware of a vast public who have
eyes and see not, who thoroughly dislike the idea of sight-seeing yet
acknowledge their pleasure in a chance discovery made _en route_ to tea
at the Ritz,--people who are appalled at the very idea of entering a
museum. Then there are the travellers who say vaguely that when they can
find time they really mean to see something of London, but they turn
their backs on the greatest city of the world without having seen much
more than Bond Street, because they are obsessed by the idea that to
see London requires some occult store of knowledge and energy, and their
eyes are sealed to the interest and beauty that lie around their path.
Finally there are people like the old lady who, when she heard I was
writing a book about old London, asked with astonishment, “Is there
anything old left in London?”
I hasten to add that I have not tried in the following pages to tell of
every interesting place or even of all there is of interest in the
places visited,--only enough, I hope, to make people go and see for
themselves and have the pleasure of discovering the rest. I am not
afraid that if they once go to the Chapter House they will miss any of
its beauties: my dread is lest they fail to go there, from the vision of
a plethora of things they think they have no time to see. For I want
more than anything else to prick the curiosity of the travellers up and
down the streets of the city who miss so much pleasure that they might
have so easily, because they are not alive to all the interesting and
unexpected things that wait for their coming just round the corner.
A little further afield there are so many other treasures waiting to be
noticed,--Hogarth’s pleasant house in Chiswick, that, like many another
London visitor, I am promising myself to see the first time I have a
free Monday, Wednesday or Saturday;--Eltham, with its sunk garden
surrounding the remains of the old palace of the English kings, where
John of Eltham, Edward II.’s son, was born;--Southwark, with its
cathedral and the remains of the Marshalsea Prison that not everyone
knows how to find;--and Islington, with the Canonbury Tower and the
house in Duncan Street, No. 64, where Lamb lived for four years. But
these I must leave regretfully for another day.
In conclusion, I should like to express my thanks to the _Montreal
Gazette_ and to the _Daily Express_ for permission to reprint one or two
sketches which originally appeared in their pages, and to all those
friends for whose kindly help and encouragement I am much indebted.
To
SIR SQUIRE SPRIGGE
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. CHELSEA 1
The Chelsea of Sir Thomas More--Crosby Hall--Cheyne
Walk--Sandford Manor--Chelsea
Hospital--Buns--Chelsea Old Church--The
Physic Garden--Ranelagh.
II. KNIGHTSBRIDGE TO SOHO 24
Tattersall’s--Ely House--London Museum--St.
James’s Church--The Haymarket Shoppe--A
King in Soho.
III. TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET 38
The Strand--Charing Cross--Water Gates--The
Adelphi--St. Clement Danes--Savoy
Chapel--Prince Henry’s Room--The Temple.
IV. ROUND ABOUT THE TOWER 68
Roman Baths--London Stone--Great Tower
Street--All Hallows, Barking--St. Olave’s--Roman
Wall--Port of London Authority--Trinity
House--The Crooked Billet--The
Tower.
V. ROUND ABOUT CHEAPSIDE 84
Bow Church--The Old Mansion House--The
Old Watling Restaurant--37, Cheapside--Wood
Street--The City Companies--The Guildhall.
VI. ROUND ABOUT HOLBORN 103
Tyburn--Staple Inn--Tooks Court--Gray’s
Inn--Hatton Garden--Ely Place--St. Sepulchre’s--Panier
Alley.
VII. DOWN CHANCERY LANE 117
Lincoln’s Inn Fields--Soane Museum--Lincoln’s
Inn--Record Office--Moravian Chapel--Nevills
Court--Clifford’s Inn.
VIII. THE CHARTERHOUSE AND ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S 137
Pye Corner--St. Bartholomew’s the Great--St.
John’s Gate--The Charterhouse.
IX. A STROLL IN WHITEHALL AND WESTMINSTER 158
Whitehall--United Services Museum--The
Abbey Cloisters--The Chapter House--Ashburnham
House--Jerusalem Chamber--St.
Margaret’s.
X. MUSEUMS 172
British Museum--Foundling Hospital--South
Kensington--Wallace--Geffrye.
XI. PARKS 197
Hyde Park--Kensington Gardens--Green
Park--St. James’s Park--Regent’s Park--Battersea--Kew.
INDEX 217
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
CHEYNE ROW _Frontispiece_
CROSBY HALL 5
THE OLD SNUFF HOUSE _facing_ 34
WATER GATE, YORK HOUSE _facing_ 46
ST. CLEMENT DANES 51
DR. JOHNSON’S PEW, ST. CLEMENT DANES 54
THE TEMPLE CHURCH, THE ROUND 61
LONDON STONE, CANNON STREET 71
THE TOWER OF LONDON. BYWARD TOWER _facing_ 76
THE TOWER OF LONDON 79
TRAITORS’ GATE, TOWER OF LONDON 81
GUILDHALL _facing_ 96
STAPLE INN 106
GRAY’S INN HALL 108
LINCOLN’S INN _facing_ 117
LINCOLN’S INN GATEWAY 119
RAHERE’S TOMB IN ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH 142
CHURCH OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT 145
ST. JOHN’S GATE, CLERKENWELL 149
THE CHARTERHOUSE FROM THE SQUARE _facing_ 154
UNITED SERVICES’ MUSEUM _facing_ 160
POETS’ CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY 163
FOUNDLING HOSPITAL 181
PETER PAN STATUE IN KENSINGTON GARDENS 205
“Sir, the happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those
who have been in it.”
DR. JOHNSON
UNNOTICED LONDON
CHAPTER I
CHELSEA
“I have passed manye landes and manye yles and
contrees, and cherched many full straunge places,....
Now I am comen home to reste.”
SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE.
If a hurried traveller had only time to roam about one of the London
boroughs I think he should choose Chelsea, because in that small area of
houses built along a mile and a half of the Thames riverside there is
much that is typical of quite different phases of London life, from the
sixteenth century to the present day.
It lies between the Kings Road and the Embankment, beginning at Lower
Sloane Street--Chelsea Bridge Road, and is reached by the district
railway to Sloane Square Station or by the No. 11 bus passing the
Strand, Trafalgar Square and Victoria: by Nos. 19 or 22 from Hyde Park
Corner, and from Kensington by the 31, with its terminus at Limerston
Street, and by the Nos. 49 and 49a.
Perhaps the reason why this quarter has always been beloved is because
while other districts have had their moment of fame and now live on
their past in somnolent content, Chelsea has fallen in and out of
fashion with a fine carelessness and has always guarded the creative
gift of dwellers of all ranks, so that the name of the little village
has been famous for such a diversity of things as literature and
custards, art and water-works, china and buns, horticulture and
learning.
There is something cosy and charming about the name Chelsea, a good old
Anglo-Saxon word that once meant, “The Gravel Isle, Chesel-sey.” It has
not become quite so unrecognisable as its neighbour Battersea, but it
has no more just cause for converting into “sea” the ey that means
island with which it once ended. But you cannot lay down stern rules for
a name that has taken the bit between its teeth like Chelsea. It started
its career in the Domesday Book as Chelched, and by the time it got to
the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More is dating a letter to Henry VIII.
“At my pore howse in Chelcith.”
Of the two Thomases whose memory pervades Chelsea, Sir Thomas More is
perhaps the most lovable. His son-in-law once said of him: “whom in
sixteen years and more, being in his house conversant with him, I could
never perceive as much as once in a fume.”
It is in Roper’s _Life_ that you read how his neighbours loved him with
reason. Once, when he had been away on a mission to Cambrai in 1528, he
went to report to the King at Woodstock, and then heard that part of his
house and barns in Chelsea had been burnt. He had no thought of his own
loss, but sent to comfort his wife and tell her to find out the extent
of his neighbours’ loss and indemnify them as far as possible.
There have been many other saintly men whom one reveres, but surely none
with such wide sympathies. He entertained Erasmus with learned talk, but
he also entertained John Heywood the playwright and Court jester. He was
wise, but he was also witty, and of which modern philosopher could it be
told “that when an interlude was performed, he would make one among the
players, occasionally coming upon them with surprise, and without
rehearsal fall into a character, and support the part by his
extemporaneous invention and acquit himself with credit.”
Dear Sir Thomas More of delectable memory--it is good to come across
signs that you still live in English hearts, even if they take the form
of stucco decorations on a Lyons tea house in Carey Street.
It was Sir Thomas More who first made Chelsea the fashion, though an old
Manor house that stood near the church had many lordly owners before
Henry VIII. bought it and, following More’s example, built himself the
big country mansion of which there are still traces in the basements of
the houses on the corner of Cheyne Walk and Oakley Street. The King is
also said to have had a hunting lodge near by and part of it still
exists at the end of Glebe Place in a small rather dilapidated building.
Sir Thomas More had built his house on the site of the present Beaufort
Street and it stood there till Sir Hans Sloane, the Chelsea Baron
Haussmann of that day, pulled it down in 1740. The lovely gardens went
down to the river. Henry VIII. used to come and dine here, and walk with
his arm round the neck of the friend he afterwards brought to the block,
and here More received his other famous friends, among them Erasmus, and
Holbein, who stayed with him for three years, painting many portraits.
It is pleasant to think that the spirit of More’s hospitality lived
again during the war and curiously enough at this very place and in one
of his own houses. For though his country home was destroyed, his town
house, Crosby Hall, built as the great town mansion of Sir John Crosby,
a merchant prince, in 1466, was brought from Bishopsgate piece by piece
in 1910, and four years later the marvellous timbered roof looked down
on the groups of Belgian fugitives that were sheltered there.
If you ask the porter at More’s Gardens, a big block of flats on the
north-east corner of Battersea Bridge, for the key of Crosby Hall, he
will unlock a door in an ugly hoarding facing the embankment, close to
Chelsea Old Church.
[Illustration: CROSBY HALL]
You step through it into a remote space where a mediæval building stands
in the midst of the little rock gardens planted by the Belgian refugees
to while away their anxious, tedious hours. Many men have passed through
the old hall since Sir John Crosby built it, for at different times it
had belonged to the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), Sir Thomas More,
his son-in-law William Roper, and various ambassadors and nobles. In
1609 it was the home of that Countess of Pembroke whose charms evoked
from William Browne the epitaph so often attributed to Ben Jonson:
Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse;
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother;
Death! ere thou hast slain another
Fair and learned and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.
One wonders what they would all have thought of these latest comers to
the old mansion which carried on the English tradition of hospitality so
well that the poet among the visitors wrote, and you may see his words
on a brass tablet opposite the fireplace:
Je sens dans l’air que je respire
Un parfum de Liberté,
Un peu de cette terre hospitalière,
* * * * *
Le sol de l’Angleterre.
The reconstitution of Crosby Hall was never finished; first because of
the death of King Edward, who took a great interest in the scheme, and
then owing to the war; but there it stands, its perpendicular lines,
mullioned windows and oriel and the wonderful oaken roof making it one
of the best examples that remain to us of fifteenth-century domestic
architecture.
Chelsea is full of memories of every period since Sir Thomas More’s day.
Queen Elizabeth as a child stayed at her father’s manor house here, and
later, as a girl of thirteen, she is said to have lived for a time at
Sir Thomas More’s house, when it had passed into the hands of her
stepmother, Catherine Parr.
The charming Georgian houses of the Cheyne Walk of to-day carry on the
tradition of the beautiful Chelsea homes of those times, such as
Shrewsbury House which stood on the west side of Oakley Street before it
was pulled down in 1813. It was owned by the husband of the famous Bess
of Hardwicke, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who guarded Mary Queen of Scots in
her captivity.
The delightful little houses in Paradise Row with their dormer windows
and tiled roofs were pulled down only a few years ago. Pepys said that
one of them was “the prettiest contrived house that ever I saw in my
life.” Ormonde Court now reigns in their stead, so there is no trace
to-day of the little house in Paradise Row that the fair but frail
Duchesse de Mazarin, niece of Anne of Austria’s Cardinal Prime Minister,
rented from Lord Cheyne when she had fallen on such evil days that her
aristocratic guests used to leave money under their plates to pay for
their dinner. She was not the only favourite of Charles II. to have a
summer home in Chelsea. Nell Gwynne lived at the Sandford Manor House
and the route by which the Merry Monarch rode to visit her is still
called the King’s Road.
I hesitate to tell that Nell Gwynne’s very house is still in existence
for fear of taxing too much the ready courtesy of the occupants, two
members of the staff of The Imperial Gas Works Co., owners of the
property, who divide the house between them.
My kindly guide had disquieting doubts as to whether Nell ever really
lived there, but he admitted that a thimble, unquestionably hers, and a
masonic jewel belonging to the King, were found in the house when it was
being repaired. Thimbles are not usually associated with the memory of
“pretty witty Nellie,” but the Chelsea air may have moved her to
industry. At all events there is the Jacobean house, shorn now of its
top story to lessen the weight on the bulging walls, and with its brick
carving but faintly seen under successive coats of rough plaster. But
not even the Queen Anne door can destroy the picture any lively
imagination may summon of the nonchalant Nell tripping up and down the
same staircase to be seen to-day, its design of six steps and a door
repeated to the top of the house, belying the legend that Charles once
rode his pony up the stairs. The walnut trees Nell planted have
disappeared, but what is left of the old house stands in a pleasant
green hollow, an oasis in the acrid surroundings of a gas factory, the
paling of which separates it from the outside world not a stone’s throw
from unsuspecting passengers on a No. 11 bus.
Joseph Addison lived for a time in the old Manor House, and two of his
letters, written to the Lord Warwick whose mother he afterwards married,
describe the bird concerts in the neighbouring woods.
If anyone wants to know exactly what the place looked like in Nell
Gwynne’s day, a very interesting account of it may be found in a book
written by a French London-lover, called _Fulham Old and New_. It is now
out of print, but may be consulted at the Fulham Public Library, reached
by any of the buses travelling westward along the Fulham Road.
All this is ancient history, of which there is little trace to-day. The
shades of Sir Robert Walpole, Dean Swift, Fielding and Smollett, and
good Dr. Burney, Fanny’s father, who was organist of Chelsea Hospital
and buried in its now closed cemetery, may still haunt Chelsea; but the
actual homes of the people of living memory make a more vivid appeal.
Chelsea still keeps up the reputation of being the haunt of famous
people. Unlike the inhabitants of the Paris Latin Quarter, artists and
poets who have once breathed her air do not remove to more fashionable
Mayfair streets when they have “arrived.”
And what a brilliant band of them were found in the Chelsea of the
nineteenth century! Meredith wrote _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ at
No. 7 Hobury Street; Charles and Henry Kingsley spent their youth in the
old rectory in Church Street when their father was rector of Chelsea Old
Church; George Eliot moved her household gods to No. 4 Cheyne Walk, the
beautiful house where Daniel Maclise, the early Victorian painter, had
lived, only three short weeks before her death; and Cecil Lawson, the
painter of _The Harvest Moon_ in the Tate Gallery, lived at No. 15.
A volume might be written about Cheyne Walk alone; those pleasant
red-brick houses with their wrought-iron railings were the homes of some
of the greatest geniuses of the Victorian age. Turner lived at 118 for
the four years before his death in 1851: Rossetti lived at No. 16 with
Swinburne and W. M. Rossetti. Meredith had some idea of joining this
_ménage_, but recoiled at the sight of Rossetti’s oft-quoted poached
eggs “bleeding to death” on cold bacon very late in the morning. He paid
a quarter’s rent and decided to live by himself. The Rev. Mr. Haweis was
a later tenant of this famous house, which, in spite of popular
tradition, has no connection with Catherine of Braganza. Mrs. Gaskell,
the authoress of _Cranford_, was born at No. 93. Whistler spent twelve
years at No. 96, and here he painted the portraits of his mother and
Carlyle.
The painter had many Chelsea houses, from 101 Cheyne Walk, where he
lived for four years from 1873, to the White House in Tite Street which
he built, and, after his quarrel with the architect, adorned with a
truly Whistlerian inscription, now removed, “Except the Lord build the
house, they labour in vain that build it. This house was built by Mr.
X.”
William de Morgan and Leigh Hunt lived in Chelsea, but the man whose
memory is the most vivid of all this brilliant group was Thomas Carlyle.
His house at 24 Cheyne Row is a memorial museum open to any visitor on
the payment of one shilling, sixpence on Saturday. The house is kept
exactly as it was in the days which Mr. Blunt has so charmingly
described in his book _The Carlyles’ Chelsea Home_.
I can tell no more about it except from hearsay, for the terrible
loneliness of Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges and of Balzac’s in
the Rue Raynouard in Paris dissuaded me from visiting any more houses
turned into museums of their owners’ belongings.
I would rather go to the Chelsea Hospital, that is very much alive with
the presence of remarkably long-lived old men: one of them lived till he
was 123 years and another to 116. They think nothing there of mere
centenarians--they even tell you of one pensioner who had served for
eighty-five years and married at the age of 100. They think that was a
mistake on the whole, but they are secretly proud of it, and also of the
lady warriors--one of them had the domestic-sounding name of Hannah
Snell--who lie buried in the old churchyard among their comrades.
Visitors can see the hospital every week-day from 10 till dusk, except
for an hour from 12.45 to 1.45, and they may attend the chapel services
on Sunday at 11 A.M. and 6.30, when the pensioners in their brave
scarlet coats remind one of Herkomer’s picture. My advice to you, if you
want to see Chelsea Hospital really well, is to enlist one of the
pensioners as guide. He will show you the old leather black-jacks, and
Grinling Gibbons’ statue of Charles II. in a toga, and the colonnades of
the old Wren building, so fine in its severe simplicity--and the flags
in the chapel, so filmy now with age that they look as if a breath of
wind would blow them to pieces--and the old portraits and many other
arresting things. But what he will like best to exhibit will be the
fragments of the bomb that hit one of the buildings during an air-raid.
He won’t allow you to hold on to the belief that Nell Gwynne had
anything to do with the foundation, but he will tell you a lot of
interesting details about the regulations of the Hospital--how very
little like an institution it is, and you will leave the building with
an added respect for Charles II.
After strolling about Chelsea one’s mind turns with insistence to the
thought of buns, “r-r-rare Chelsea buns,” as Swift wrote to Stella.
There is now nothing left but the name of Bunhouse Place, at the corner
of Union Street and the Pimlico Road, of the famous shop where 100,000
buns used to be sold of a Good Friday Eve one hundred and forty years
ago, and where the Georges and their Queens used to drive to fetch their
buns. It was taken down in 1839, but the fasting sightseer--being in
Chelsea and not in Bloomsbury or Bayswater--can easily find other places
to stay his hunger. If he does not belong to the decorative sex--the
phrase is Mr. Wagner’s, not mine--he will doubtless follow that very
knowledgeable guide and betake him to the “Six Bells,” 195 King’s
Road--a short distance from the Chelsea Town Hall, and there find the
comfort that attracts its artist _clientèle_.
There are other restaurants that are much frequented by the artists of
the quarter:--the “Blue Cockatoo,” in Cheyne Walk, near Oakley Street,
and the “Good Intent,” 316 King’s Road, and a new and yet more
attractive one on the corner of Arthur Street with the enticing name of
“The Good Humoured Ladies.”
Chelsea is full of interesting shops. The Chelsea Book Club is on the
Embankment by Church Street--its delights must be sampled to be
realised--and next door there is a queer handmade toy shop called
Pomona--why Pomona?
Across the road is Chelsea Old Church, with its high
seventeenth-century tower. To me its interior is the most satisfying in
London. The spirit of ancient days dwells there, untouched by modern
currents of unrest, and in the tranquil beauty there is no jarring note.
Sir Thomas More was one of its celebrated parishioners--you may see his
monument and the epitaph he wrote himself.
What a pleasant, kindly, independent spirit had this great Chancellor,
who donned the humble surplice of a parish clerk and sang in the choir
unperturbed by the remonstrances of even so great a personage as the
Duke of Norfolk. I always liked the tale of how the latter came to dine
with Sir Thomas in Chelsea and “fortuned to find him at the church in
choir with a surplice on his back singing, and as they went home
together arm in arm, the duke said, ‘God’s Body, God’s Body, my Lord
Chancellor, a parish clerk--a parish clerk! You dishonour the King and
his office!’ And Sir Thomas replied mildly that he did not think the
duke’s master and his would be offended with him for serving God his
Master or thereby count his office dishonoured.”
I love Chelsea Old Church better than any other London church. It has
nothing of the heavy solidity that smacks of broadcloth and thick gold
watch-chains. The congregation on a summer Sunday evening might be met
with in any village in England. The very altar has no pomp of
embroidered frontal and massive ornaments; it looks almost like a
Jacobean dining-room with its simple oaken table and dignified chairs on
either side.
The church is filled with enchanting old treasures--chained Bibles and
old monuments to the great dead who worshipped there, but I cannot find
it in my heart to catalogue them for you as if it were a museum. Enter
those dim walls and see for yourself, and you will love it as did that
lover of England from across the sea whose epitaph is not the least
among the beautiful things of Chelsea Old Church:
In memory of Henry James, Novelist
Born in New York, 1843. Died in Chelsea, 1916
Lover and interpreter of the fine
amenities of brave decisions and generous
loyalties: resident of this parish, who
renounced a cherished citizenship to give his
allegiance to England in the first
year of the Great War.
In other churches with their solemn balconies and air of chill
emptiness, it is difficult to imagine the things that have happened
there in other days. But in Chelsea Old Church, which somehow always
seems peopled with friendly ghosts and never lonely, one can almost see
Henry VIII. being married secretly to Jane Seymour before the public
ceremony, and hear the cadence of Dr. John Donne’s voice as he preached
the funeral oration of the woman he had immortalised in _The Autumnal
Beauty_.
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
I think of all the great people who lie buried here the most fascinating
is this Lady Danvers, George Herbert’s mother, whose “great and harmless
wit, cheerful gravity and obliging behaviour,” attracted so many friends
and among them Dr. Donne. She must have been an adorable mother. I
sometimes wonder if the care of her ten children ever made her late for
church, and if it were some memory of his boyhood days that made her
saintly son write with the cheerful gravity he may have inherited,
Oh be drest,
Stay not for the last pin,
Thus hell doth jest away thy blessings and extremely flout thee
Thy clothes being fast but thy soul loose about thee.
Mrs. Herbert came to live in Chelsea when she married Sir John Danvers,
after she had “brought up her children carefully and put them in good
courses for making their fortunes.” Danvers House, where she and her
husband lived, gave its name to Danvers Street, at the corner of which
Crosby Hall now stands.
THE CHELSEA PHYSIC GARDEN
“God Almighty first planted a garden.”
BACON.
One of the things I like best in Chelsea is the old herb garden, the
Chelsea Physic Garden, that makes a home of peace with its base on the
Embankment and the western angle at the beginning of Cheyne Walk and
the end of the Royal Hospital Road, once called the Queen’s Road in
honour of Catherine of Braganza, Charles II.’s Queen.
My friendship with the garden is based on no intimate acquaintance, for
not to every one is it given to pass the iron gates that guard its
fragrant stillness. If you would do more than gaze through the iron bars
at this enchanted space that dreams away the year round undisturbed, you
must write to the Clerk of the Trustees of the London Parochial
Charities, 3 Temple Gardens, E.C.4, and ask for a ticket of admission to
the most ancient Botanical Garden in England.
Once you have taken the trouble to secure this card you may stroll along
the paths of the Chelsea Physic Garden that are much as they were when
Evelyn went there on 7th August, 1685, to visit “Mr. Wats, keeper of the
Apothecaries’ Garden of Simples at Chelsea,” and admire the innumerable
rarities there, the “tree bearing Jesuit’s bark, which had done such
wonders in Quartan agues.”
The Apothecaries’ Society laid out the garden about two hundred and
fifty years ago. They leased the ground at that time, but later on Sir
Hans Sloane gave them the freehold with one of those quaint conditions
attached that lend a refreshing grace to a legal transaction.
The Apothecaries had to despatch 2000 specimens of distinct plants,
grown in the garden well dried and preserved and sent in batches of 50,
every year to the Royal Society. One would like to know what the Royal
Society did with them, but the most interesting things in history are so
often left out.
In 1899 the garden was handed over to the Trustees of the London
Parochial Charities, who maintain this delectable if deserted London
corner for the teaching of botany and for providing opportunity and
material for botanical investigation.
Perhaps it was the attraction of the Physic Garden that influenced the
choice of the Huguenot market gardeners who settled in Chelsea when they
were driven from their own country by the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes in 1685. It startled me to find that at the time when England was
merry, the Guilds were every bit as dictatorial as the Trades Unions are
to-day. More so, in fact, for while a goodly percentage of our workers
and nearly all our waiters are now said to be foreigners, none of the
foreign workmen of the seventeenth century were allowed to carry on
their trades in London and compete with their English confrères.
So the hatters went to Wandsworth and the silk mercers to Spitalfields,
and the nurserymen chose the village of Chelsea lying two miles out of
London along the river bank.
Their spirits may still hover among the perfumed beauty of the annual
Chelsea Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society. It is held in
the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital once a year at the end of May or the
beginning of June, when the delicate loveliness of the flowers attracts
an immense number of garden lovers.
And now to tell you how to reach the Chelsea Hospital, the Flower Show
and Ranelagh Gardens.
I have never been able to discover whether the extreme reluctance of the
British to give a detailed address is due to a naïve belief that
everyone is born into this world with an intimate knowledge of the
topography of London, or to a malicious delight in puzzling the
ignorant, but I have a deeply-rooted conviction that the maze was an
English invention. So to the stranger bewildered by the laconic
“Chelsea” on the cards of admission to the Flower Show I would say that
it is reached either by the District Railway to Sloane Square station
and then a short walk down Sloane Street to Pimlico Road, or by the 11
or the 46 bus that stops at the corner of Pimlico Road and Lower Sloane
Street.
The Flower Show is one of the most charming events of the London season.
In no other city in the world may you see anything like this meeting of
the great brotherhood of gardeners of every social rank gathered to
admire the gorgeous achievements of the grand masters of the art of
growing flowers; where peeresses humbly consult horny-handed experts and
frivolous young men reveal unsuspected enthusiasms for blue aquilegias.
The adjacent Ranelagh Gardens are often called Chelsea Hospital Gardens,
perhaps to avoid confusion with the grounds of the Ranelagh Club at
Barnes. They are closed to the general public during the three days of
the Flower Show, so if you go to see the flowers you have the added and
unexpected pleasure of wandering through the green glades of Ranelagh
undisturbed by the shouts of the Pimlico children.
There are no flowers in these gardens, but they have a peculiar charm of
their own. There is none of the flatness of Hyde Park--the undulating
paths and quaint bosquets belong to another day when powdered courtiers
pursued fair ladies in the pleasure gardens that were so much the
fashion. The story of Ranelagh is bound up with the history of the
Georgian period. There is not a book of memoirs but mentions this famous
pleasure resort. Walpole said of it, “Nobody goes anywhere else;
everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it that he says
he has ordered all his letters to be directed there.”
It is quite true that everybody went there. Johnson, whom I find as hard
to keep out of the description of any part of London as Mr. Dick found
it to keep King Charles’s head out of his memorial, was very fond of
going to Ranelagh. Boswell says that, to the remark that there was not
half a guinea’s worth of pleasure in seeing Ranelagh, he answered, “No,
but there is half a guinea’s worth of inferiority to other people in not
having seen it.”
There is little left of the actual gardens where Johnson, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Walpole, the beautiful Duchess of
Devonshire, the King of Denmark, the Spanish ambassadors and the entire
English Court used to take part in the merry-making, but you may be sure
they all walked up the broad avenue of trees that once shaded the
brilliant scene. In the seventeenth century the property belonged to
Viscount Ranelagh, an Irish nobleman by whose name the gardens are still
called.
When the estate was bought by a syndicate after his death a huge rotunda
was built with boxes all round. It must have been something like the
Albert Hall, and every night the place was filled with fine ladies and
wits, rubbing shoulders with all classes of society come to gaze at the
attractions and listen to the music. The vogue of Ranelagh lasted many
years and only ended when the rotunda was pulled down at the beginning
of the nineteenth century.
Every now and then one meets pessimistic creatures, usually artists, who
shake their heads and say that Chelsea is going to the dogs--by which
they mean that all the old studios are being taken by speculators with
the intention of converting them into flats.
But the Chelsea of to-day is as charming as it ever was. There are just
as many famous inhabitants. Sargent, Derwent Wood, Augustus John, Glyn
Philpot, Wilson Steer and many another well-known genius, all live
within sound of the “Six Bells” and some studios must have been saved
from the speculator judging from the number of Chelsea addresses in this
year’s Academy catalogue.
CHAPTER II
KNIGHTSBRIDGE TO SOHO
KNIGHTSBRIDGE
“Go where we may--rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.”
MOORE.
Few people think of connecting the name of Knightsbridge with anything
less modern than the big departmental shops, the Barracks or the cosy
houses on the fringe of Mayfair and Belgravia.
Yet there was a town of Knightsbrigg in the fourteenth century, in
Edward the Third’s day, when the Black Prince and his knights must often
have crossed the Westbourne stream by the bridge built just where the
Albert Gate now stands. Mr. Davis in his _History of Knightsbridge_
gives as the origin of the name the story that “in ancient time certain
knights had occasion to go from London to wage war for some holy
purpose. Light in heart if heavy in arms, they passed through this
district on their way to receive the blessing awarded to the faithful by
the Bishop of London at Fulham. For some cause or other, however, a
quarrel ensued between two of the band, and a combat was determined
upon to decide the dispute. They fought on the bridge which spanned the
stream of the Westbourne, while from its banks the struggle was watched
by their partisans. Both fell, if the legend may be trusted; and the
place was ever after called Knightsbridge in remembrance of their fatal
feud.”
Walking down the Brompton Road from the Knightsbridge Tube station it is
difficult to realise that not a hundred and fifty years ago “the stream
ran open, the streets were unpaved and unlighted, and a Maypole was
still on the village green.”
Yes, a few hundred years ago, on that very triangle of green grass you
see to-day outside Mr. Tattersall’s big gateway, diagonally facing the
Knightsbridge Tube station, men and maidens danced round the maypole on
the Knightsbridge village green.
I have a special weakness for that three-cornered grass plot. People
pass it every day and look scornfully at it--if they look at all. No one
knows that it is all that is left of a piece of Merrie England. Little
by little it has been pared away. The last maypole was taken down at the
end of the eighteenth century, and the watchhouse and pound that Addison
mentions in the _Spectator_ disappeared about a quarter of a century
later. The little bit of green has watched the evolution of the tiny
chapel of the Elizabethan lazar-house that once existed near by into the
stately and uninteresting Holy Trinity Church, and the gradual rise of
the immense departmental shops to take the place of the village silk
mercers of yesterday.
There is a tradition that part of the green was once used as a burial
ground in the time of the Great Plague, but since there is no record of
this gruesome fact, I refuse to believe it.
TATTERSALL’S
“Satirists may say what they please about the rural
enjoyments of a London citizen on Sunday.”
WASHINGTON IRVING.
One was brought up to believe in the country Sunday after-dinner
inspection of property, where unlucky week-end visitors are paraded to
admire their host’s corn and cattle, but I have often wondered what the
English nation did with itself when in town of a Sunday afternoon. I
know now. They go to Tattersall’s and look at the horses to be sold next
day. Tattersall’s on a fine Sunday afternoon in the season is like a big
reception by a not too exclusive hostess. Pretty young girls in charming
frocks make the tour of the stables with their menfolk, and very
horsey-looking people try to persuade their neighbours that they know as
much about horses as the more unobtrusive individuals at whose nod
grooms fly to strip their charges for inspection.
Since Richard Tattersall, the last Duke of Kingston’s training-groom,
opened his auction mart when his patron died in 1773, and founded his
fortunes by buying Highflier for £2500, Tattersall’s has grown into a
national institution with a world-wide reputation. It still belongs to
the same family, but they moved in 1865 from Grosvenor Place to the
present buildings, where every Monday all the year round the auctions
take place, and every Sunday in the season dukes and jockeys, horse
dealers and country squires, society ladies and trainers’ wives, stroll
up and down admiring the horses.
ELY HOUSE
“Queen Bess was Harry’s daughter.”
RUDYARD KIPLING.
As you come out of the Tube station, the view of Dover Street with its
irregular skyline is a very modern one. It looks a rather dull,
uninteresting place, given over to commerce and clubs, but like most of
the Piccadilly and Pall Mall quarter, it is very reminiscent of the
Stuart period. The history goes back to the respectable date of 1642,
when the Clarendon estate was cut up into Dover, Albemarle, Bond and
Stafford streets.
Out of Peckham, that haunt of the prosperous City man of those times,
had come Sir Thomas Bond, the forerunner of the Messrs. Cubitt of 1921,
with his syndicate, dealing death to historical associations and
possessing none of the delicacy of feeling that made John Evelyn turn
his head the other way when he drove by with Lord Clarendon the late
owner.
Evelyn himself lived here, close to the house of Lord Dover, whose name
was given to the street. Pope’s friend, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Lady Byron,
both lodged in Dover Street, but by far the most interesting house is
No. 37, a brick building of unobtrusive, classic simplicity, that has a
story connecting it with the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
You might pass up and down Dover Street many times without noticing the
significant bishop’s mitre, carved in stone halfway up the middle of the
façade. This was once the distinguishing mark of the town house of the
bishops of Ely that they bought in 1772 from the Government in exchange
for all claim on their Hatton Garden property in Ely Place. Nowadays one
thinks of diamond merchants in connection with Hatton Garden, but in
Elizabeth’s day it was the Naboth’s vineyard that she coveted on behalf
of her handsome Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. The bishops were
forced to grant him a lease for the rent of a red rose, ten loads of
hay, and ten pounds, the right to walk in their rival’s gardens whenever
they chose, and to gather twenty baskets of roses every year.
The bone of contention brought no luck to anyone. Hatton was imprudent
enough to borrow the money for improvements from his queen. She insisted
on the bishops conveying the property to her till the sum should be
repaid, and when one of them jibbed at carrying out the terms of this
settlement, the Queen wrote him an Elizabethan epistle:
Proud prelate! I understand you are backward in complying with your
agreement: but I would have you understand that I, who made you
what you are, can unmake you; and if you do not forthwith fulfil
your engagement, by God, I will immediately unfrock you, Elizabeth.
Sir Christopher Hatton was never able to repay his mistress’s loan. It
broke his heart, says an old chronicler, and though the queen relented
at the end, and came to visit him, “there is no pulley can draw up a
heart once cast down, though a Queen herself should set her hand
thereunto.” He died disconsolate, in his coveted palace of Ely, in 1591.
After all these vicissitudes, the diocese got back its property at the
Restoration, but in 1772 they gave up all claim to it in exchange for
the mansion in Dover Street.
The latter is a stately house, with a long marble hall and staircase,
and the bishops of Elizabeth’s day would doubtless be mildly surprised
if they knew that it is now used by the men and women belonging to the
Albemarle Club.
LONDON MUSEUM
“I turned me from that place in humble wise.”
JOHN DRINKWATER.
Quite near Dover Street, if you only knew it, is the one place where you
may read the story of London spread out before you page by page better
than anywhere else. But very few people can even tell you how to find
it.
I once saw Lancaster House called the Cinderella of London
museums--perhaps because it is so charming and so neglected. It is near
no bus route nor railway station, yet this London Carnavalet is not so
very far from the Dover Street Tube station and either of the two routes
by which it is reached from that point are delightful walks. You may
enter Green Park and stroll along the Queen’s Walk till you come to a
passage-way to the left--not the first little narrow one where two
people have to walk Indian file into St. James’s Place, but the second,
that leads through a wider gateway, closed at 10 p.m., into Stable Yard.
Or else you can go down St. James’s Street, past the passage leading
into the quaint little eighteenth-century courtyard of Pickering Place,
towards St. James’s Palace with its beautiful old sixteenth-century
brick gateway in Cleveland Row. Skirt the Palace to the right and you
will come to Stable Yard, and in Stable Yard is Lancaster House.
It is a stately place. Queen Victoria once said to the Duchess of
Sutherland: “I come from my house to your palace,” but shorn of the
groups of chairs and tables and the stately company moving up and down
the magnificent staircase, the yellow and red marble walls seem
cheerless and repellant.
Now and then a little white notice is pasted on the door with the
announcement that the museum, which is usually open on summer Fridays
and Sundays from 2 to 6, and all other days from 10 to 6 and till 4
o’clock in winter, will be closed to the public for an afternoon or
evening. The Government are entertaining distinguished strangers in the
spacious salons, and then Lancaster House lives again for a few hours
the brilliant existence it had in the nineteenth century, when it was
called Stafford House and the Duke of Sutherland dispensed splendid
hospitality there.
Amusing tales of these political parties, and of the guests, and of many
other things, are told in Mr. Arthur Dasent’s delightful _Story of
Stafford House_, that is sold for a modest sum just inside the door.
In 1913 Lord Leverhulme bought the remainder of the lease that expires
in 1940, from the Duke of Sutherland, and handed it over to the trustees
of the London Museum to house the collection of London antiquities then
exhibited in Kensington Palace.
The name of Stafford House was changed to Lancaster House as a
compliment to the King, who is Duke of Lancaster, and in memory of the
generosity of a Lancashire man.
It is an entrancing place, where you can trace this great city’s history
from the time men used flints to the war that is too near for its
souvenirs to be anything but harrowing.
One may walk through the ages, from the Prehistoric room, through
Roman, Saxon and Mediæval rooms, on the ground floor, and, then,
going up the grand staircase, see how men lived in London in Tudor,
seventeenth-century, Cromwellian and Charles II.’s days, and so on,
through the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rooms, to the costume and
Royal rooms, where you pause dumbfounded before the going-away dress of
stiff white silk poplin embroidered with gold that Queen Mary wore the
day of her wedding, 6th July, 1893.
Down on the ground floor, past the Temple Crusader with the Mestrovic
countenance, in the west corridor, is the Gold and Silver Room, with the
beautiful jewellery that some bygone Jacobean jeweller buried in Wood
Street, perhaps when the menace of the Great Fire was upon him.
Of what happened to him there is no trace, and the lovely chains and
rings lay buried for two and a half centuries. They may for all we know
have been stolen and buried by thieves who met their end on Tyburn Tree
before they could enjoy their booty. Admirers of Lalique’s work in the
Place Vendôme will see how this unknown Englishman solved the same
problems of the great French artist 250 years ago. The delicate enamel
chains and lovely cameos and carved chalcedony and glass and onyx are
prettier than many a jeweller’s stock to-day, and they must look
disdainfully across at the case of heavy Victorian atrocities which our
grandmothers wore so complacently.
ST. JAMES’S CHURCH
I do not remember ever seeing anyone cross the paved courtyard of St.
James’s Church, Piccadilly, on a week-day, for though it was one of
Wren’s favourites among the churches he built, and inside there is a
font carved by Grinling Gibbons, it has an air of sanctimonious
respectability that is not very alluring, but the font with its carving
of the Fall of Man, etc., is well worth seeing.
THE HAYMARKET SHOPPE
“Only far memories stray
Of a past once lovely, ...”
WALTER DE LA MARE.
I have asked many people if they know where to find a perfect example of
an eighteenth-century shop, bow windows little flight of steps and all,
a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus--and they look at me in blank
astonishment.
Yet there it stands, at 34 Haymarket, two doors down from Coventry
Street on the left-hand side, its pot-bellied windows filled with quaint
jars and bottles and more modern packages of the upstart cigarette, that
has ousted the honest snuff which was sold there for two hundred years.
It belongs to another day and generation, and through the old doorway
the 20th-century passer-by can see the oaken shelves with their rows of
old wooden boxes and snuff jars that used to contain the “King’s Morning
Mixture,” as supplied to His Majesty King George IV.
The old shop has had many royal customers, and going through the
beautiful Adam screen into the back room, one may be shown, if the
courteous proprietor is not too busy, the accounts of Queen Charlotte,
who bought her snuff here for nineteen years of the Dukes of Cumberland
and Sussex and the Princesses Charlotte and Elizabeth, who also indulged
in the best rappee.
Most of the great names of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century England may
be found in these old ledgers. David Garrick and Inigo Jones were
customers, and so were my Lord Halifax, Lady Shrewsbury and the Duchess
of Grafton. Beau Brummell’s accounts lie, cheek by jowl as he would have
them, with those of the Earl of Dorchester and the Duke of Bedford, and
the long array of famous names of men and women to be found in the
yellowing papers might well have served as a list of guests present at
any brilliant political function of the time.
The snuff-taking of those days has passed with the lace jabots and the
silk knee-breeches, but the fashion died hard, and so recent a figure as
Lord Russell of Killowen was one of the last of the famous snuff-takers.
The twentieth century turns up its nose at what it calls a disgusting
habit, yet it had its graces and was responsible for the creation of the
beautiful boxes and bottles now treasured as heirlooms.
The actual owners of this fascinating shop have carried on the business
in their family
[Illustration: THE OLD SNUFF HOUSE, 34 ST. JAMES’ HAYMARKET]
since 1780, when the founder, M. Fribourg, retired. One of the present
partners, Mr. George Evans, has written a delightful monograph on the
Old Snuff House of Fribourg and Treyer, “At the Rasp and Crown, at the
upper End of the Haymarket, London.” It is a charming book, filled with
illustrations and reminiscences of the leisurely days before the arrival
of the departmental store, when an old-established firm had time to have
intimate courtly relations with its customers.
What Lord Petersham could now change his mind and return 216 pounds of
anything and be urbanely credited with £75 12s.; and do grateful
customers now make presents of gold-lined amboyna snuff boxes to mark
their satisfaction?
If they do, I am as ignorant of the fact as the ordinary pedestrian of
the historical interest of the unnoticed shop he passes daily on his way
to Piccadilly Circus.
A KING IN SOHO
“Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich
And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch.”
GEORGE HERBERT.
Few Londoners can tell you where a king lies buried in Soho. Shelley may
have been thinking of him when he gave his mad invitation to the old
lady in the Highgate bus, to “sit upon the ground and tell sad stories
of the deaths of kings,” but if so his knowledge is not shared by many
people.
If I have made you curious, walk along Coventry Street from Piccadilly
Circus, leaving Leicester Square, that “pouting-place of princes,” on
your right, and turn up Wardour Street past Lisle Street and Gerrard
Street that was fashionable in Charles II.’s day and where Dryden and
Burke and Lord Mohun lived and where Johnson and Reynolds founded the
Literary Club that still exists in another meeting-place. Then, crossing
Shaftesbury Avenue, you will come to the old graveyard at the back of
the church of St. Anne, which is now a playground and only open till
four in the winter months and during the hours of service on Sundays. On
the wall you will find a tablet to the memory of the unlucky Theodore,
King of Corsica, who fled from France, a bankrupt, only to be seized on
his arrival in London and flung into the Fleet prison. “Near this
place,” runs the inscription, “is interred Theodore, King of Corsica,
who died in this neighbourhood Dec. 11, 1756, immediately after leaving
the King’s Bench Prison by the Benefit of the Act of Insolvency. In
consequence of which he registered his Kingdom of Corsica for the use of
his Creditors.” To which Horace Walpole has appended the following
stanza:
The grave, great Teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley-slaves and kings.
But Theodore this moral learned ere dead;
Fate poured its lessons on his living head.
Bestowed a kingdom, but denied him bread.
The kindly soul who bailed out fallen Majesty a fortnight before his
death and then gave him decent burial, was, according to the verger of
St. Anne, an Italian candle merchant from Old Compton Street, on the
site of whose shop is now that excellent non-profiteering restaurant
known as Le Dîner Français. But I prefer, with the Blue Book, to think
that the Samaritan was a tailor, grown rich, perhaps, snipping the
embroidered waistcoats of H.R.H. Frederick, Prince of Wales, when the
latter squabbled with his royal parents and removed in a pettish mood to
Leicester House hard by.
The only other interesting things I could find in this old church were
the tomb of Hazlitt, immediately below King Theodore’s memorial
stone,--the old wooden drain pipes, lately disinterred, that lie on the
Shaftesbury Avenue side of the church, and the tablet within, to the
memory of “The Beloved Mother-in-Law.”
St. Anne’s was built in 1685, a significant year in the annals of this
neighbourhood. It was the date of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
which sent the Huguenots flocking to London, to take up their residence
here, and of the Battle of Sedgemoor, when the Duke of Monmouth, who had
a mansion in the Square, used as his watchword the cry “So Ho!” and
unconsciously christened the whole district.
CHAPTER III
TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET
“For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has
written yet.”
RICHARD JEFFERIES.
One of the most enthralling and endearing things about London is the way
the memory of the great people, whose names are so familiar that you
feel you would know their bearers if you met them, pervades the city and
crops up in such very unexpected places. If business ever took you
through that evil-smelling fishy Lower Thames Street, you would discover
that Chaucer lived there for six years when he was Comptroller of the
Petty Customs in the Port of London. You stroll through the little
Cloisters in Westminster Abbey, of all places in the world, and some one
tells you that Lady Hamilton once lived in the Littlington Tower, when
she was servant to Mr. Hare and had no thought that she would ever
inspire a hero to great victories. You think that when you have seen Sir
Thomas More’s tomb in Chelsea Old Church, and Crosby Hall near by, you
have exhausted the souvenirs of his life, but you find him again in
Westminster Hall, where he was condemned to death--in the Deanery where
he spent two months in charge of the Abbot of Westminster,--in Lincoln’s
Inn--in Milk Street in the City, where he was born, “the brightest star
that ever shone in that Via Lactea”--in the church of St. Lawrence
Jewry where he lectured, and in the Tower where he died.
Dr. Johnson, of course, was ubiquitous. He went everywhere and usually
said something noteworthy about everything. One of the great
difficulties in writing this book has been to refrain from quoting him
too frequently, and Pepys is even worse. The kindly official in the
Clothworkers’ Hall (where I lunched once on a special occasion) said to
me: “Samuel Pepys, Ma’am, Pepys the great Diarist--you may have heard of
him,” and I felt like replying: “My good man, I have been with your
Pepys through Chelsea--and in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, where he was
married--I have seen his portrait at the Royal Society Rooms in
Burlington House and his house in Buckingham Street--the church of St.
Bride, where his birth was registered--St. Lawrence Jewry, where he was
disappointed with Wilkins’ sermon--All Hallows, Barking, that, as he
wrote on the 5th September, 1666, only just escaped the Great Fire--his
parish church of St. Olave’s, where he worshipped, and Hyde Park, where
he used to go driving with his wife.”
THE STRAND
“Through the long Strand together let us stray,
With thee conversing I forget the way.”
GAY.
Of all delightful places to meet memories of famous bygone people, the
most intriguing is the Strand. A superficial glance at this modern
bustling street shows little of the past still clinging about it. But a
little further on you will discover, if you look for them, a bit of
Roman London, a Renaissance chapel, a statue with a history, a lovely
group of eighteenth-century houses, the water gate of a former fine
mansion on the riverside, and a church that links us to the time of the
Danish invasion.
The Londoner would probably tell you that Piccadilly Circus is the
centre of his city; the historian, St. Paul’s; but to the foreigner, the
visitor from overseas, or to the Anglo-Indian back from the East, the
centre will always be Charing Cross.
It has been a starting-point for the traveller from the days when the
little old village of Charing was used as a halting-place on the way to
the City or to the Royal Palace of Westminster. Probably that is the
true derivation of the name; “La Charrynge” meant the Turning, the great
bend where the two roads met, but a prettier tradition derives its name
from Edward I.’s dear queen (“chère Reine”). Another cross to her memory
once stood here, the most beautiful of all those set up by the sorrowing
king wherever her bier rested on its journey from Grantham to
Westminster Abbey. Cromwell’s Parliament, with its passion for
destruction, pulled it down in 1647, and the column which now stands in
the courtyard in front of the station is only a memorial modelled as
far as possible on the original design. It was set up by Barry about
sixty years ago, but it is already so weather-beaten that many people
are under the amiable delusion that it is the very cross erected in
1291.
The exact position of the old cross is now covered by King Charles I. on
horseback, facing the scene of his death in Whitehall, and this statue
has had an even more adventurous history.
It was cast originally in 1633 and after the king’s execution it became
so unpopular that Parliament sold it to a brazier to be melted down.
With an eye to the possibilities of the future that a diplomat might
envy, this man cannily buried the statue and did a roaring trade with
the Royalists in relics supposed to have been made from the fragments.
After the Restoration the statue quietly came to light again, and was
set up in its present position in 1674 with popular rejoicings. Its
tribulations were not yet over. The day of the burning of Her Majesty’s
Theatre, the sword, a real one of the period, that hung at the side, was
broken off, and it has never been replaced.
Another curious thing about this statue lies in the absence of girths to
the saddle or trappings on the horse, and it is said that when this
oversight was pointed out to the sculptor Le Sueur, he was so overcome
with mortification that he committed suicide on the spot.
In the days when London was no bigger than one of our second-rate
provincial towns, Charing Cross was its market square. Here stood the
pillory, even as late as the beginning of the last century; here were
read the Royal proclamations, and here were the booths of the showmen
who dealt in giants and fat ladies,--it was here, too, that Punch made
his first appearance in England in 1666. Where the railway station now
stands was Hungerford Market, and Trafalgar Square occupies the yard of
what were once the Royal Mews, where the king’s falcons were kept till
they were replaced by the king’s horses. It is rather odd that the word
“mews” is now always associated with stables, for it once meant the pens
or coops in which moulting falcons were kept (from the French _muer_--to
moult). Geoffrey Chaucer, who lodged at Westminster, was in his time
Clerk of the King’s Works and of the Royal Mews.
WATER GATES
“In some parts of London we may go back through the
whole English history, perhaps through the history of man.”
LEIGH HUNT.
People seem to think that a great deal of time and energy must be spent
if they wish to see anything of historic London, and they pass by,
unnoticed, many of the most interesting reminders of bygone periods,
just because they may see them every day.
Buckingham Street, leading out of the Strand, is only a stone’s throw
from Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and it is full of historic
memories. What stories the beautiful old water gate at its foot could
tell of the days when the silver Thames washed up and down its grey
stone steps, and of the famous people who used to take boat there!
It was built by my Lord Duke of Buckingham, that hated favourite of
James and Charles the First, who cuts such a sorry figure in English
history books and such a romantic one in the pages of Dumas. He was the
father of the extravagant, erratic George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham,
whom Scott describes in _Peveril of the Peak_, and Pope more pungently:
Who in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.
Lely painted a wonderful portrait of the son. It hangs in the National
Portrait Gallery, but even more interesting is the Vandyck picture of
him with his brother Francis, painted when they were boys, and lately
bought for the National Gallery.
With his father murdered, and his property confiscated by the
Commonwealth and given to General Fairfax, the duke solved his problem
by marrying the General’s daughter and heiress, a solution for which
Cromwell made him pay by a sojourn in the Tower, where he was an
intermittent resident. But in spite of his wife’s fortune the man who,
“was everything by turns and nothing long” was obliged to sell the
magnificent mansion that his father had re-built in 1625 on the site of
the old York House.
The earlier mansion had been the home of the Bishop of Norwich in Henry
VIII.’s time, of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, of the Archbishop of
York, who gave the house its name, and of Sir Francis Bacon who loved
the place and only left it for the Tower.
In 1672 the second York House was sold for £30,000, with the stipulation
that the streets built on the site were to be given the Duke’s names.
They are quite easy to trace: there is George Court, with the George
Tavern, where you may eat your chop to the sound of an orchestra of
singing birds; hard by are Villiers and Duke Streets; “Of” Lane has been
rechristened York Place,--and now we are back in Buckingham Street.
The new quarter soon had famous tenants. John Evelyn lived for a year in
Villiers Street, and forty years later Sir Richard Steele had a house
there. No. 14, Buckingham Street, has been much remodelled since Samuel
Pepys lived there and walked down the steps of the water gate on his way
to visit his friend Mr. Cole in Brentford. There is a tablet on the
house to tell the passer-by that the Earl of Oxford, William Etty and
Clarkson Stanfield, the marine painter, also lived here.
The house opposite looks far more modern, but within the very new outer
walls of the offices of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses are
preserved much of the exquisite carving, ceiling paintings, and
elaborate stucco work that belong to the time when Peter the Great, Czar
of all the Russias, came over to England in 1698 and lodged in these
very rooms. David Hume, Rousseau, Fielding and Black all lived at No.
15, now incorporated in No. 16, but the Dickens lover will ignore these
famous names and only remember that the rooms at the top of the house
are the very ones taken by Miss Betsy Trotwood for David Copperfield.
With the exception perhaps of that Shah of Persia who spent a happy
holiday in England in the reign of the late Queen Victoria, I suppose we
never had a more eccentric royal visitor than Peter the Great. No doubt
that is the reason why the memories of his brief stay here still seem to
cling about so many parts of London. This strange being, half-barbarian,
half-genius, had great ambitions and achieved them. As Voltaire says:
“He gave a polish to his people and was himself a savage; he taught them
the art of war, of which he was himself ignorant; inspired by the sight
of a small boat on the river Moskwa, he erected a powerful fleet and
made himself an expert and active shipwright, pilot, sailor and
commander; he changed the manners, customs and laws of the Russians, and
lives in their memory as the father of his country.”
Ships and shipbuilding were his passion. He went to Holland and worked
in the yards there as a mechanic, calling himself Pieter Timmermann,
until he had mastered the manual part of his craft. Then he came to
England to study the theory of shipbuilding. King William III. placed
the house in Buckingham Street, so conveniently close to the river, at
his disposal, and invited him to Court when he felt inclined. But Pieter
hated crowds and ceremonies and preferred to spend his days in hard work
and his evenings drinking and smoking with boon companions.
At the end of a month, finding himself too far from the dockyards, he
moved to Deptford, and put up at Sayes Court, kindly lent to him by John
Evelyn. He was a dreadful tenant. We all know how Evelyn loved his
garden,--but the Czar and his rough crowd trampled the flower-beds and
spoilt the grass-plots, and trundled wheelbarrows through the diarist’s
pet holly-hedge for exercise. “There is a house full of people _right
nasty_!” wrote Evelyn’s indignant servant to his master. They ate and
drank enormously,--eight bottles of sack after dinner were nothing to
Pieter, and listen to this for a breakfast menu for twenty-one persons:
half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, three
quarts of brandy, six quarts of mulled wine, seven dozen of eggs, with
salad in proportion.
Much of his time, when he was not gathering
[Illustration: WATER GATE, YORK HOUSE]
the vast store of information that he afterwards used to such excellent
advantage, the Czar spent sailing on the river, and in the evening he
would repair with favoured members of his suite to a public-house in
Great Tower Street. The old tavern has been rebuilt, but the name “The
Czar of Muscovy,” and later “The Czar’s Head,” that it adopted as a
compliment to its imperial visitor, is there to this day, and you may
see it close to the city merchant’s house at No. 34 that is noticed in
another chapter.
The “right nasty” people did not stay long, luckily for Evelyn’s peace
of mind, but returned to London for another month or two. Then saying
good-bye to King William, who had certainly treated him very well, the
Czar pressed into his hand a little twist of brown paper, in which was
found a ruby valued at £10,000, and sailed away home for Russia, taking
with him no fewer than 500 English captains, scientists, pilots,
gunners, surgeons, sail-makers, anchor-smiths, coppersmiths and the
like, all ready for adventure in the unknown, according to the tradition
of their race.
To come back to the Strand. It is fairly certain that the rather heavy
and unattractive stone archway and steps at the bottom of Essex Street
(at the other end of the Strand) formed the water gate of old Essex
House, once occupied by the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite.
It compares very badly with the water gate in Buckingham Street, which
was designed by Inigo Jones in 1625, and built by Nicholas Stone the
master mason, who carved one of the lions on its frontage. The London
climate has blurred the outline of the arms of the Villiers family on
the south side, and the motto “Fidei Coticula Crux” on the north, and
the raising of the Embankment now prevents the waters of the Thames from
swirling round the old stone steps. No monarch had passed through the
water gate since the days of Charles II. until Queen Alexandra came to
open the new building in Buckingham Street in 1908. Its glory has
departed, but there it stands, useless, unnoticed and forgotten, yet how
beautiful!
THE ADELPHI
“I like the spirit of this great London which I feel
around me.”
C. BRONTË.
Retracing your steps up Buckingham Street, turn to the right along Duke
Street and John Street, and you will find yourself in the Adelphi, that
oasis of calm quiet so near the roar of the bustling Strand, where
famous authors of the present day like to pitch their luxurious tents.
Note the steep hill up which you climb. This is the roof of the arches
which the brothers Adam built over the site of old Durham House in order
that they might erect their elegant houses on a level with the Strand.
You can still wander in these vaults, if you are lucky enough to find
an open gate; they are curious, and were once a fine rendezvous for evil
characters.
The Duke of Buckingham’s names are not the only ones to be perpetuated
here. The architects, Robert, John, James and William Adam, all had
streets named after them, and they called the whole quarter the Adelphi
because they were brothers.
William Street has lately been rechristened Durham House Street, to
remind us that the Adelphi was built on the site of Durham House, where
Lady Jane Grey was born.
Probably the Adelphi will have to go some day, when a proper bridge for
Charing Cross is built across the river here, but lovers of this little
bit of unspoiled Georgian London will miss its old-world charm and
dignity.
ST. CLEMENT DANES
“Blith be thy chirches, wele sownyng be thy bellis.”
DUNBAR.
Nowadays, looking eastward up the Strand, the eye is caught by the two
churches of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, standing isolated
in the centre of the roadway, whilst the traffic roars past on either
side. In the Middle Ages you would still have seen St. Clement’s, though
half engulfed in a rookery of ill-smelling, crazy old timbered houses,
with so narrow a passage between that coachmen called it the “Straits
of St. Clement’s.” But on the site of St. Mary’s stood a maypole, one
hundred feet high, dear to the heart of the city youth for the
merrymakings that took place around it. Such giddy proceedings vexed the
Puritans, who swept it away in an outburst of righteous indignation, but
old customs die hard, and at the Restoration another and still lordlier
pole was set up with royal approval, and dancing and junketings went on
around it for many a long day.
The church of St. Clement’s takes us back to very ancient history. Some
say that beneath it lie the bones of King Harold and other Danish
invaders. What is pretty certain is that the original church was built,
after the expulsion of the Danes, by the few settlers who, having
married English wives, chose to remain behind, on condition that they
did not stir out of the strip of land that lay between the Isle of
Thorney, now Westminster, and Caer Lud, now Ludgate.
Travellers from all over the world who have shared the common traditions
of childhood, feel a queer sense of kinship when they pass along the
Strand and suddenly hear the old bells ringing out the familiar tune of
“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.” The bells of the
nursery-rhyme are not those of St. Clement Danes, but of the St.
Clement’s, Eastcheap, which for centuries has been in the centre of the
dried fruit trade.
[Illustration: ST. CLEMENT DANES]
The bells were famous even in Shakespeare’s day. “We have heard the
chimes at midnight, Master Shallow,” says Falstaff in _Henry IV_. Those
chimes are gone, but the present peal of ten bells, cast in 1693, is as
famous for its music.
One might write a whole history of church bells, from the time when
Turketul, Abbot of Croyland in Lincolnshire, in the ninth century,
presented his abbey with the great bell GUTHLAC, and added six others
with the rhythmic names of PEGA, BEGA, BETTELIN, BARTHOMEW, TATWIN and
TURKETUL, to make a peal.
In the early monkish days they looked upon bells as the voices of good
angels: they were blessed and dedicated: the passing bell was tolled to
keep off evil spirits from the dead. Henry VIII., that ruthless
iconoclast, cared little for superstition, and in the general
destruction of the religious houses hundreds of old bells were sold or
melted down. But the pious people of those days would point out how the
Bishop of Bangor, who sold his Cathedral bells, was shortly afterwards
stricken with blindness, and that Sir Miles Partridge won the Jesus
Bells of St. Paul’s from King Henry at play and, proceeding to remove
them and have them melted down, was hanged soon after on Tower Hill.
The bells of St. Clement’s were added after the church had been rebuilt
in 1692, under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren, who gave his
services for nothing in his usual generous-hearted way.
[Illustration: Dʳ. Johnson’s Pew in Sᵗ. Clement Dane’s Church]
St. Clement’s is dear to all true Londoners as Dr. Johnson’s church. You
may see the very pew where he sat, and there is something about the
solid, handsome structure that seems to fit the thought of the ponderous
great man who worshipped there Sunday by Sunday, striving “to purify and
fortify his soul and hold real communion with the Highest.” It is a fine
and a prosperous church, and so richly endowed that at one time all the
paupers of the neighbourhood used to flock there for the sake of what
they could get. That they were well looked after, the carefully kept
parish registers bear witness as far back as 1558. There are other
interesting entries in the old registers. You may read of the baptism of
Master Robert Cicill, the sonne of ye L. highe Threasurer of England,
and of the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor with Mary Davies, the child
heiress of Ebury Manor, who brought to her husband all those lands of
Pimlico and Belgravia from whose rents the Dukes of Westminster draw the
bulk of their colossal fortune. Her life story has been published
recently by Mr. Charles T. Gatty in his two-volumed _Mary Davies and the
Manor of Ebury_.
CHAPEL ROYAL OF THE SAVOY
“It is a wonderful place ... this London ... and
what do I know of it?”--LORD BEACONSFIELD.
From St. Mary’s and St. Clement’s it is but a few minutes’ walk back
along the Strand to the Chapel Royal of the Savoy, that once served all
the district, but it is now perhaps the tiniest parish in London west of
Temple Bar. There it stands in its quiet graveyard, all that is left to
remind us of “the fayrest manor in England.” The old palace of the Savoy
was built by Simon de Montfort, that “Cromwell of the Middle Ages,” on
land granted by Henry III. to his wife’s uncle, Peter of Savoy, for
which the said Peter had to pay the not very exorbitant rent of three
barbed arrows. Afterwards it came into the possession of the Dukes of
Lancaster. Here it was, in 1357, that the Black Prince, riding on a
little black hackney, brought his prisoner King John of France, who
stayed here, with brief intervals, till his death, as nobody seemed able
to raise the money for his ransom. And here lived John of Gaunt, with
his numerous household, not least of whom was Geoffrey Chaucer. Later
came Henry IV., who annexed the manor, and since his time it has always
belonged in a particular manner to the reigning house.
Nothing is left, though, to tell of it, save the chapel, which was begun
by Henry VII. in place of a more ancient one fallen into decay,--and
that strange judicial survival, the Court Leet with view of Frankpledge
of the Manor and Liberty of the Savoy. Few people know that once a year
the jury of the Court, headed by the Beadle with his silver-topped and
carved staff of office, solemnly makes the round to inspect the boundary
marks of the Manor. One is in Child’s Bank, another on the Lyceum stage,
one in Burleigh Street, one by Cleopatra’s Needle, another in Middle
Temple Lawn, where many scuffles have taken place in the past between
the jurymen and indignant Benchers and officers of the Inns of Court
concerning the question of trespass. The Court itself, which dates back
to Saxon days, sits annually about Easter time, and still does “what is
usually called everybody’s business, and nobody’s business,” as a
former High Bailiff wrote.
The old Roman Bath in Strand Lane is a little beyond St. Clement Dane’s,
and next to the Tube station. That belongs to a later chapter, but a
short way further, on the same side of the road, is another bit of
unnoticed London.
PRINCE HENRY’S ROOM
“London, thou art the flour of Cities all.”--DUNBAR.
Prince Henry’s room is one of those charming links with the past that
lie unnoticed in the path of thousands who never stop to heed the story.
At No. 17, Fleet Street, close to the ceaseless traffic of the Law
Courts, is an unobtrusive timbered house. Through a low archway you see
an eighteenth-century oaken stairway that leads to a sedate Jacobean
room, where very few people ever come to disturb the peaceful, dignified
atmosphere. The Council of the Duchy of Cornwall is supposed to have
once met here regularly and I believe that from time to time Prince
Henry’s room is now used for the meetings of various associations, but
if you visit it any day between ten and four you will almost certainly
find no one to disturb the ghosts of bygone cavaliers but the war
veteran who passes his days there ruminating on the delinquencies of
historians.
The house is one of the oldest in the City. It was built in 1610, the
year that Henry, the elder son of James I. of England, was created
Prince of Wales; and the room is known as Prince Henry’s room. Look at
the lovely Jacobean art of the panelling on the west wall, and the
decorated plaster ceiling, where in the centre you will find the device
of this lamented “prince of promise,” who died at the early age of
eighteen.
Most people say, “Prince Henry! _who_ was Prince Henry?” and very few
connect the name with that little known prince who steals like a shadow
across the pages of our history books. But his memory deserves to be
kept green if only for the reason that he was a true friend to Sir
Walter Raleigh, that unfortunate Victim of petty-minded James. After one
of his visits to Raleigh in the Garden House of the Tower, Prince Henry
said: “No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.” A stained
glass window sets forth his titles in old French,
Dv. treshavlt. et. trespvissant. Prince. Henry: Filz. Aisne. dv.
Roy. Nre. Seign. Prince. de. Gavles: Duc: de: Cornvaile: et.
Rothsay. Comte: de. Chestre. Chevalier. dv. tresnoble. Ordre. de.
la. Iartierre. enstalle. le. 2. de. Iuliet. 1603.
He was in many ways the prototype of our own Prince of Wales and held
almost as high a place in the affections of his people. He was
everything that a king’s son should be. He was handsome, well-grown and
athletic; he was scholarly and brilliant, having all James’ love of
learning without his folly and effeminacy. If he was a paragon of
erudition, he also loved the practical side of shipbuilding, and he
liked to give and receive hard knocks in the miniature tournaments that
he organised at Whitehall, when he and his friends would engage the
whole evening in mighty battles with sword and pike. And in addition to
all this he seems to have had the generous mind and temper of the truly
great. It is no wonder that his untimely death evoked a cry of mourning
throughout England.
He was playing tennis, threw off his coat and caught a mortal chill.
Everything that the doctors of that day could do was done. They even
applied pigeons to his head and a split cock to his feet. Sir Walter
Raleigh, who loved the youth, sent from his prison in the Tower the
recipe of a potent “quintescence”; it did more good than the pigeons or
the split cock, but could not save him. Prince Henry died in 1612, when
not quite nineteen years of age.
This is what they wrote of him after his death:
Loe! Where he shineth yonder,
A fixed star in heaven;
Whose motion heere came under
None of your planets seaven.
If that the moone should tender
The sunne her love, and marry,
They both would not engender
So great a star as Harry.
THE TEMPLE
“He didn’t understand the whispers of the Temple
fountain though he passed it every day.”--DICKENS.
I know of a public school and university man who has lived all his life
in London and protests that he has never seen Westminster Abbey: there
are certainly hundreds of people who have never seen the Temple.
It would be a marvel to me that anyone should leave London without
having wandered at least once in those courts, if I had not taken so
long to find my own way there. One knows vaguely that it is a charming
place, but going there is postponed for that _fata morgana_, a day of
leisure, that recedes as it is approached, and time passes and the train
whistles and steams slowly out of Euston or Victoria, leaving behind one
of the very loveliest corners in old London,--so easy to reach it one
had but tried.
You have only to turn through the old gatehouse that Wren built in 1684
to wander about in another world,--a world where it is possible to
imagine dear Charles Lamb moving among his guests on a Wednesday
evening, with Mary hovering in the background, or Goldsmith giving those
rackety supper parties at No. 2 Brick Court that disturbed his studious
neighbour Blackstone.
Few places in London are so filled with the memories of brilliant
Englishmen as the Temple. If you want to know all about when and where
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE CHURCH. THE ROUND]
they lived, go to the wigmaker who conducts the Temple affairs from his
little shop in Essex Court, and he will provide you with Mr. Bellot’s
fascinating _Story of the Temple_.
Expert sightseers of course know all about it. They will tell you that
Lamb was born in No. 2, Crown Office Row, and that Thackeray lived at
No. 19; that Goldsmith died at No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple Lane,
and that Johnson’s Buildings are on the site of Dr. Johnson’s rooms in
Inner Temple Lane, and if you share their predilections you can go and
peer at the actual bricks that have once sheltered these great men. But
if you want to feel the real spirit of the place, unhampered by gazing
at any particular pile of bricks and mortar, go to the old Temple Church
on a Sunday morning.
Take any bus along the Strand past Temple Bar, where Dr. Johnson used to
say that if he stationed himself between eleven and four o’clock, every
sixth passer-by was an author,--and go through the second entrance to
the Temple called Inner Temple Lane. Or else take the Underground to the
Temple and, walking along the Embankment, go up the Essex Street steps
and turn into the Temple courts by the first gate you find open, even if
that means going round into Fleet Street.
The service in the Temple is an unforgettable revelation. There is no
reason why psalms should not be sung in every Anglican church in the
world as they are sung in the Temple, but no one seems to have thought
of it, except the Temple choirmaster, who has trained his choristers to
sing the words as if they had a profound meaning.
Has anyone ever found fitting phrases to describe the peculiar beauty of
the Temple Church, with its carved Norman porch, that twelfth-century
Round Church, where nine recumbent Crusaders rest in peace, and gleaming
marble pillars support both the choir and the Round? It must be seen to
be believed, but I pity the traveller who leaves London without seeing
it.
In the courts of the Temple there lie embalmed so many stories of so
many ages, that everyone finds what suits his fancy. You may wander as
Spenser did among
Those bricky towers,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride.
Or you may choose a century later and go to York and Lancastrian times,
and listen to Suffolk saying:
Within the Temple Hall we were too loud,
The garden here is more convenient;
and Richard Duke of York’s reply,
Let him that is a true-born gentleman,
And stands upon the honour of his birth,
If he suppose that I have pleaded truth,
From off this briar pluck a white rose with me:
and the Duke of Somerset:
Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer,
But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.
* * * * *
This brawl to-day,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.
It seems a pity that the Temple authorities do not so far unbend as to
subscribe to the pretty legend by re-planting the gardens with red and
white roses. It would give immense pleasure to countless transatlantic
visitors, whose history books are fairly impartial on York and
Lancastrian questions.
Then there are all the memories of gallant Elizabethan days, when the
queen came and dined with the benchers in the great Middle Temple Hall
and _Twelfth Night_ was first performed here. It was by his dancing at
one of the famous revels that the handsome youth Christopher Hatton
first attracted the notice of Elizabeth, a moment when as our allies
would say he lost a good chance of remaining quiet. The Hall is shown to
visitors before twelve o’clock and after three on week-days and after
church on Sundays. Peter Cunningham says the roof is the best piece of
Elizabethan architecture in London.
What feasts they had there in the days when lawyers had time to make
merry. Here is the account of one old chronicler:
For every feast the steward provided five fat hams with spices and
cakes, and the chief butler seven dozen gilt and silver spoons,
twelve damask table-cloths and twenty candlesticks. The constable
wore gilt armour and a plumed helmet, and bore a pole axe in his
hands. On St. Thomas’s Eve a parliament was held, when the two
youngest brothers, bearing torches, preceded the procession of
benchers, the officers’ names were called and the whole society
passed round the hearth singing a carol. On Christmas Eve the
minstrels, sounding, preceded the dishes, and dinner done, sang a
song at the high table; after dinner the oldest masters of the
revels and other gentlemen sang songs.
It sounds very cheerful and amiable, but it is difficult to imagine our
modern lawyers passing round the hearth singing a carol.
I suppose that the three best-loved dwellers in the Temple were Oliver
Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb, and none of them were lawyers.
Johnson was living in No. 1 Inner Temple Lane when Topham Beauclerk and
Mr. Langton knocked him up at three in the morning to see if he could be
persuaded to finish the night with them, and he came out with a poker,
and his little black wig on, and said when he understood their errand,
“What, is it you, you dogs, I’ll have a frisk with you.”
The story of Goldsmith’s tenancy of the Temple reminds one of the tales
told of Balzac, whose tastes and weaknesses he shared. Always in
financial difficulties, as soon as he made a little money he bought
quantities of clothes and furniture and ran into debt to his tailor,
perhaps for the very red velvet coat with lace ruffles that you may see
to-day in the London Museum at Lancaster House. Goldsmith had many
London lodgings and only came to the Temple in 1764. When he died there
ten years later the staircase of this improvident, extravagant genius
was crowded with the poor he had managed to help. No one seems to know
exactly where he lies buried in the Temple churchyard.
Lamb was a true child of the Temple as he was born there. It may be
heresy, but I have always wished he had not called it “the most elegant
spot in the metropolis”; he loved it more than that, as all readers of
_The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple_ know well.
No one leaves the Temple without pausing in Fountain Court, where Ruth
Pinch used to meet Tom. It is by far the most charming of all the courts
of the Temple. “I lived in Fountain Court for ten years,” wrote Arthur
Symons, “and I thought then and I think still, that it is the most
beautiful place in London.”
CHAPTER IV
ROUND ABOUT THE TOWER
“I do not like the Tower, of any place.”--_Richard III._
Having amused myself many times in Paris by hunting up the pieces of the
old wall that Philippe Auguste built before he departed to the Holy Land
on one of his Crusades, I set out one day to see how much remains of the
wall the Romans built round London.
I discovered some bits of it, but I discovered a great many other things
in the process.
There is very little left of the city that the old Romans called Augusta
and the older Britons Llyn-Din--that some say means “the Lake Fort” and
some “The Hill by the Pool.” In the Guildhall and London museums there
are statues and vases and ornaments and mosaic pavements belonging to
those times, but in the city streets there are hardly any traces to-day
of the Roman occupation. Watling Street, a piece of Roman road that
still bears an Anglo-Saxon name, runs citywards from the back of St.
Paul’s, but that may better be reached from Cheapside. Most of the Roman
wall that remains is now below ground level. The best places to see what
is visible are in St. Olave’s, Hart Street; at Trinity Place, Tower
Hill; at Barber’s bonded warehouses in Cooper’s Row; and at The Roman
Wall House at No. 1, Crutched Friars, a new building whose plans were
altered by the Sadlers’ Company so as to preserve a good specimen of the
old wall in one of the basement rooms.
I began my search for Roman remains in Strand Lane, which lies next door
to the Strand station on the Holborn tube, and can be reached either by
bus along the Strand or by District train to the Temple, whence you go
uphill up Arundel Street and, turning to your left along the Strand,
find it after two or three minutes’ walk. Half-way down the little
winding passage that once led to the waterside there is on the left a
dingy sign, “The Old Roman Bath.”
The English reputation for liking cold baths must have been a legacy
from the Romans. Time was when the venerable cold spring bath was used
daily. David Copperfield had many a cold plunge in it when he was living
in Peter the Great’s house at the lower end of Buckingham Street. But
now it is only open from 11 to 12 on Saturday mornings to the very
occasional visitor who turns aside to look at this 2,000-year-old relic
of the London of the past.
As in the Frigidarium of the Cluny Museum in Paris, it seems as if one
steps back into the world as Julius Cæsar knew it, across the threshold
into the little vaulted chamber where the waters from the spring, once
famed for miraculous cures, flow through the marble walls of the
identical bath used by our Roman conquerors. The Romans contented
themselves with a brick lining that still exists under the marble slabs,
but the latter have an interest of their own, for they came from the
famous bath built in the Earl of Essex’s house near by, which Queen Bess
herself is said to have been the first to use. The spring comes from the
old Holy Well, that gave its name to Holywell Street, on the North side
of the Strand, a street destroyed to make room for Kingsway and Aldwych.
There is a Roman bath of a different kind underneath the Coal Exchange
in Lower Thames Street, but on your way to this from the Temple station
(or bus 13 from the Strand), get out at Cannon Street, where in a sort
of cage against the wall of St. Swithin’s Church, directly opposite the
station, is the very oldest relic in the whole of the city of
London,--London Stone, the stone that the Romans set up to mark the
centre of the city; the starting point from whence they marked the miles
along their branching highways. As long as history has been written in
this land, there has been mention of London Stone. Do you remember how,
in _Henry VI._, Shakespeare makes Jack Cade proclaim himself King of the
City, striking his staff against the block? Once it was a big pillar and
set on the other side of the way, but famous stones are seldom allowed
to rest in peace, and time, the weather, and clumsy mediæval cart-wheels
have chipped and worn it to its present size.
[Illustration: LONDON STONE, CANNON STREET]
Now take the train again, or another 13 bus, and go on to the Monument,
where King William IV. stands on the very spot where Falstaff and Prince
Hal made merry at the “Boar’s Head,” Eastcheap. Going down by the
beautiful column which Sir Christopher Wren built to commemorate the
Great Fire, hard by where it started in Pudding Lane, turn to your left
in Lower Thames Street opposite the church of St. Magnus, and walk along
this unattractive causeway till you come to the Coal Exchange with its
Corinthian porch. You will find the porter through a door up the
side-street of St. Mary-at-Hill. Do not go on Monday, Wednesday or
Friday afternoons, for those are marketdays or whatever the correct term
is on Coal Exchanges, and, as that most agreeable porter explained to
me: “We found it didn’t do, Ma’am; for when the genelmen on the Exchange
see me taking a lady or genelman or it might be a party down below into
the cellar, they naturally says to me ‘What for?’ And when I say ‘Roman
bath,’ they say ‘Roman bath, Jones! Did you say Roman bath? You don’t
mean to say there’s a Roman bath below and me here forty years and never
know it!’ And down they goes with all their friends, all equally
surprised, and business gets neglected. That’s how it is, Ma’am.”
Business in the coal trade has been too much neglected for anyone to
wish to hinder it further, so go on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday
afternoon. It is quite worth the exertion, for this hot-air or sweating
chamber, with its fire-blackened bricks, forming part of an elaborate
system of baths, is even more interesting than the Roman bath in the
Strand.
The Coal Exchange, with its curious rotunda floor of inlaid wood, was
only built in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it has two more
unexpected links with the past. I am indebted to Messrs. Thornbury and
Walford for pointing out that the black oak used in the woodwork is part
of a tree, four or five centuries old, that was discovered in the River
Tyne, and the blade of a dagger in the shield of the City arms is made
of wood from a mulberry tree that Peter the Great planted when he worked
as a shipwright in Deptford Harbour.
Turning up St. Mary’s-at-Hill into Great Tower Street, I found, nearly
opposite All Hallows, Barking, a prosperous merchant’s house still
standing practically untouched, as it was built a year or two after the
Great Fire. At No. 34, an ordinary-looking archway leads into a
courtyard fronting a perfect example of the home of a wealthy citizen of
Charles II.’s time. A flight of steps leads up to the doorway, from
which you catch a glimpse of panelled walls and noble staircase. The
counting-house is on the right, and upstairs are the living rooms where
the merchant lived with his wife and family and servants, in the fashion
of those times. They entertained, too, after the day’s work was done,
for amongst the private papers still treasured here is one complaining
of the excessive noise of carriages and coaches turning in the cobbled
courtyard at night.
It is worth while pushing open the door of the fifteenth-century
perpendicular church of All Hallows, Barking, just opposite, to see the
Norman pillars and the fine brasses. The best one is in front of the
litany desk, and in the corner to the right is a brass to the memory of
William Thynne and his wife.
This is not the Thynne who has such a gruesome monument in Westminster
Abbey, but a more worthy sixteenth-century ancestor, who was “chefe
clerk of the Kechyn of Henry VIII.,” and who published the first edition
of the entire works of Chaucer. Both of them are descendants of that
John of the Inn whose soubriquet became the name of the Bath family.
All Hallows gets its surname from the Abbess of Barking, the head of the
seventh-century Benedictine convent of Barking. She was a powerful
lady,--one of the four abbesses who was a baroness _ex officio_, and she
held the lands of the king by a baronage, furnishing her share of
men-at-arms. Only an old gateway of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, eight
miles out of London by the Fenchurch Street railway, is left of the
nunnery, but All Hallows, which was connected with it, survived the
Great Fire and is still intact.
Turning your back on the old church, and walking up Seething Lane, where
Pepys went to live in 1660 and kept his diary for nine years, you come
to St. Olave’s Church on the corner of Hart Street, where his pretty
young wife was buried. Church manners have vastly changed since Pepys’
day. When a bomb from an avion fell just outside the Verdun Cathedral
one Sunday morning, two months before the big attack, no one turned his
head except one little acolyte, who couldn’t resist a surreptitious grin
at his comrade in the front pew. But listen to Pepys:
6 June, 1666. To our own church, it being the common Fastday, and
it was just before sermon; but Lord! how all the people in the
church stared upon me to see me whisper (the news of the victory
over the Dutch at sea) to Sir John Minnes and my Lady Pen. Anon I
saw people stirring and whispering below, and by and by comes up
the sexton from my Lady Ford to tell me the news, which I had
brought, being now sent into the church by Sir W. Batten in
writing, and passed from pew to pew.
The church of St. Olave’s has a proud history. There are records of the
parish in Henry I.’s day, and in 1283 of a church dedicated to St. Olaf,
an exiled Norwegian. The present building dates from about 1450. It is
one of the eight existing churches that escaped the Great Fire.
The mid-Victorian Vandals who filled up the marble crypt, and removed
the old galleries and square pews, with their candlesticks, have
mercifully left the fine roof intact, and St. Olave’s possesses a number
of quaint Elizabethan treasures. On the door there is one of the few
remaining sanctuary knockers used by a fugitive from justice if he
wanted to claim sanctuary protection: on four of the six bells in the
church peal is engraved “Anthony Bartlet made mee 1662.” The crown on
the weather vane is supposed to commemorate the visit of Queen Elizabeth
in 1554 when she gave silken bell-ropes as a thank-offering for her
release from the Tower, and on the front of the organ gallery are the
wrought-iron hat-stands with which the clergy of those days emphasised
their protest against men wearing their hats in church.
The beautifully wrought iron sword-stands are used to this day when the
Lord Mayor and Sheriffs attend an official service at St. Olave’s. The
old church has been intimately connected with the navy since the days
when the Admiralty lodged in Mark Lane and Crutched Friars, and it is
still the parish church of the Master and Brethren of Trinity House, who
come humbly on foot, _via_ Catherine Court and Seething Lane, to the
annual special service on Trinity Sunday, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, as
Master, making his pilgrimage like the rest.
But for the ordinary visitor who has no part in these ceremonial
happenings the great interest of St. Olave’s lies in the memories
connected with its greatest parishioner, Samuel Pepys, Esq., Secretary
to the Admiralty.
The fame of his _Diary_ has rather obscured Pepys’ well-merited
reputation as an admirable and faithful public servant at a time when
these qualities were rare. He was living at the Navy Office in Seething
Lane in 1666, and it is thanks to his sagacity in ordering all the
workmen from the Royal Dockyards to blow up the intervening houses that
St. Olave’s, Hart Street, Allhallows Staining, and Allhallows Barking
were saved from the Great Fire.
Pepys and his pretty wife are both buried in their parish church of St.
Olave’s. Mrs. Pepys died when she was only twenty-nine, and though he
had teased the jealousy of “my wife, poor wretch,” Pepys ordered her
bust to be carved, not in the usual profile, but with the lovely head
turned so that he could see
[Illustration: THE TOWER OF LONDON. BYWARD TOWER]
it from where he sat in his gallery pew on the other side of the church.
There are other interesting things to be seen at St. Olave’s: the
doorway to the old churchyard that Dickens-lovers will recognise from
his description in the _Uncommercial Traveller_, the carved pulpit and
quaint vestry and several fine old monuments, and, as I mentioned
before, part of the old Roman wall.
If you have no passion for discovering bits of ancient walls, there are
other more beautiful things near the bottom of Seething Lane. One of
them is very new, so new that when I saw it all the scaffolding had not
been removed from the buildings at its base--I mean the great tower of
the Port of London Authority. I hear that Sir Joseph E. Broodbank has
just written a fascinating _History of the Port of London_, that will
waken everyone who has three guineas to spare to the interest of
London’s immense docks and the organisation that has power over seventy
miles of the Thames. The beautiful tower of the new buildings, with its
fine groups of statuary, is worth a special pilgrimage to see. It is not
very far from Trinity House, that unique institution that, as Mr.
Cunningham says, has for its object “the increase and encouragement of
navigation, the regulation of lighthouses and sea marks, and the general
management of matters not immediately connected with the Admiralty.”
The Guild of Trinity House was founded in 1529 by Sir Thomas Spert,
Henry VIII.’s Controller of the Navy and commander of the magnificent
four-master, the _Harry Grace de Dieu_, which took the King to Calais on
his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. You can see exactly what it
looked like in the picture of Henry VIII.’s embarkation at Dover that
hangs in Hampton Court Palace.
One of the delusions I have had when hastening through the streets of
London filled with excitement at the thought of seeing some ancient
place associated with more colourful days than our own, was caused by
Mr. Wagner’s enticing account of the Crooked Billet in his fascinating
book on old London inns.
Alas, the Crooked Billet, at the eastern extremity of Tower Hill, has
nothing left of its former magnificence. The panelled walls and carved
chimney-pieces have been ruthlessly taken away,--some say to that bourne
overseas whither pass so many treasures of the Old World it affects to
despise. There is nothing left but the sordid dirty rooms of slum
tenements, with here and there the remains of a fine ceiling and a few
wall cupboards. The old building that was once a royal palace, and since
the days of Henry VIII. has been a lordly inn, has fallen into the state
of drab degradation that is the forerunner of the pick and shovel of the
_démolisseur_. Only the rich façade remains to remind the passer-by of
its vanished glories!
THE TOWER
Having wandered so long in its neighbourhood, let me hurriedly make the
shamefaced confession that I share Richard III.’s opinion about the
Tower and that I have never seen it. I have skirted it, I have gazed
into its asphalted moat, I have looked with awe on its battlemented
towers,--but I have never crossed the drawbridge.
[Illustration: THE TOWER OF LONDON]
To me it is the storehouse of mistakes--a place redolent with the memory
of bygone blunders--where the great men of the nation, like Sir Thomas
More, Archbishop Cranmer and Sir Walter Raleigh, and innocent,
beautiful things like the little Princes and Lady Jane Grey, were done
to death. There must surely be left something of Lady Jane’s agony when
she saw the headless body of her young husband carried past her on the
morning when she knew that she too was to die--something of the
sickening sense of injustice that great men like Raleigh and More must
have felt as their doom approached.
Of course, for less squeamish people there is an unending interest in
the historical and architectural features of the Tower. It is open every
week-day from ten to six in summer and ten to five in winter, and on
Saturdays the fees to the White Tower and the Jewel House are not
necessary. It is staffed by a constable, a lieutenant, a resident
governor and about 100 yeomen warders called Beefeaters, all of which
information, as well as the fact that the best way to reach it is from
Mark Lane station on the Underground, is writ large in Mr. Muirhead’s
excellent Blue Book on London.
Writ more small are tales that almost make me want to go and see for
myself the place where Charles d’Orleans, the royal French poet, who
wrote such haunting songs as “Dieu qu’il la fait bon regarder,” was held
a prisoner for fifteen long years. Other things it seems besides murders
happened in the Tower,--Henry the Eighth made two of his marriages here,
James the First lived here for a time (a fact that does not mitigate my
distaste for the Tower), and
[Illustration: TRAITOR’S GATE, TOWER OF LONDON
North or Inside View of Traitor’s Gate being the principal entrance of
the Tower of London from the River and through which stole prisoners of
rank and dignity were formerly conveyed to the Tower]
Charles the Second slept here the night before his coronation in 1661.
No monarch has done that since his day. Then, if guide-books may be
believed, there are hundreds of things in the armouries and weapon room
and small-arms room, the cloak on which Wolfe died in far-off Quebec, a
Grinling Gibbons carved head of Charles the Second, and armour and
weapons of every period.
Most of these historic places are sepulchres of bygone crimes, but the
Tower has known tragedy within its walls in these latter hideous years,
for nearly a score of our enemies were put to death there in the Great
War.
One or two of them were brave men, serving their country even as we
served ours; one likes to think that they were treated as such. The
story of Carl Lody has already been published, but I give it again
because it redeems some of the Tower’s tragic history.
I believe he had asked to be allowed to testify to the fair and just
treatment he had received, and when the last moment came the German said
to the Provost-Marshal: “I suppose you wouldn’t care to shake hands with
a spy?” The Englishman replied without hesitation, “I am proud to shake
hands with a brave man.”
CHAPTER V
ROUND ABOUT CHEAPSIDE
“O Cheapside! Cheapside! Truly thou art a wonderful
place for hurry, noise and riches.”--GEORGE BORROW.
Cheapside and Fleet Street have points of resemblance, for they are both
narrow highways to the City, crowded and bustling and full of history,
but Fleet Street, in spite of its literary associations, has not much
attraction. Something of the mud of the old Fleet Ditch still seems to
cling about it, some taint of disreputable Alsatia in Whitefriars, once
the haven of roystering thieves and cut-throats, very different from the
hive of grandiose newspaper offices that it is now.
But in Cheapside it is easy to call up memories of noisy apprentices and
busy trafficking. Here is the home of the true Cockney, born within the
sound of those bells of Bow Church that still chime as cheerfully as
when Dick Whittington heard them from Highgate Hill, or when they
summoned dilatory citizens to bed at nine o’clock. The very name evokes
the idea of buying and selling, even if one does not know that the old
word “chepe” means a market. It was once the shopping centre of the City
of London, and the names of the streets branching off on either side,
Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane and the rest, are the names of the
various commodities that were sold there. Friday Street was so called
from the fish to be bought there on a Friday. Round about, in Ironmonger
Lane, Bucklersbury, and most of the streets on the northern side, busy
artisans worked at their trades, and if we think it a noisy thoroughfare
nowadays, what must it have been when it was paved with cobblestones and
thronged all day long with an endless stream of horsemen, carts and
coaches, vociferating porters, citizens cheerful or quarrelling as the
case might be, sellers calling their goods on either hand, and the bells
of innumerable churches, priories and religious houses clanging
incessantly to prayer. Always there was something going on in Chepe--a
tournament to see, with stands set up at the side of Bow Church, or
pageants, cavalcades and processions passing by. The London youth of
those days had a diverting life. Read what Chaucer says of the prentice
in Edward III.’s reign:
At every bridale would he sing and hoppe;
He loved bet the taverne than the shoppe--
For when ther eny riding was in Chepe
Out of the shoppe thider wold he lepe,
And til that he had all the sight ysein,
And danced wel, he wold not come agen.
We have most of us read in our history books of the “beau geste” of
Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III., in saving the lives of the
burghers of Calais; this seems to have been a habit that started early
with her. In 1330, just after the birth of the Black Prince, a
tournament was held in Cheapside to celebrate the event, and a fine
wooden tower erected to accommodate the young queen and her ladies. No
sooner had they mounted than it collapsed. There was much screaming and
a scene of terrible confusion, from which they all emerged, however,
more frightened than hurt. The king was so enraged that he ordered the
instant execution of the careless workmen, but Philippa, who might well
have been even more annoyed, at once flung herself on her knees and
pleaded for their pardon until the king forgave them.
But “Safety first” was a motto with King Edward, he wanted no more
wooden scaffoldings. A stone platform was built, just in front of the
old church of St. Mary-le-Bow (making it extremely dark on the street
side), from which he and his court could view the tournaments with minds
at peace; for centuries this was the regular royal stand, whenever there
was a procession or other fine doings in the City. Look at Bow Church,
that glory of Cheapside, the work of Sir Christopher Wren, and, in the
stone gallery running round the graceful steeple, you will see how, ever
mindful of tradition, he commemorated this fact when he built his new
tower to flank the pavement adjoining the site of the old grand-stand.
When I last went into Bow Church I chatted with the lady who was
engaged in scrubbing the floor, and she told me the curious fact that in
this English church in an English city, with its memories stretching
through the ages (for it is built on the site of a much older one and
you may still see the fine old Norman crypt), the Russians in London
were then assembling, Sunday by Sunday, for a service in their own
ritual, St. Mary’s congregation amiably going to another church near by.
The City Churches that were missed so sorely, after the Great Fire, by
the merchants, tradesmen, shopkeepers, apprentices, with their families,
maids and servants, who lived all round about them and dutifully
worshipped there, now stand empty and neglected. Here and there, as in
the tiny fourteenth-century church of St. Ethelburga’s in Bishopsgate
Street, the magnet of eloquent wisdom and sincerity draws men and women
from all over London to worship, so that the seats are never empty, but
in the majority of the City churches, a perfunctory service connotes a
perfunctory congregation of caretakers and their wives, inhabitants of a
quarter that is only populated in the working week-day hours. The best
time to see any of the City churches is at the lunch hour, when they are
sure to be open. In many of them short musical services are then held. I
know few odder sensations than to walk in the City on a Sunday morning
and hear all the sweet bells of the fifty-odd churches calling to prayer
in the silence of the solitary streets. Practical people would pull the
half of them down and devote the money from the sale of their sites to
other much-needed religious purposes. But, even if these little churches
no longer serve their original object, they are still shrines of the
past, each one with some special memory, some special charm, and typical
all together of a great phase of English architecture.
There is little of this past now actually left in busy Cheapside, except
No. 37, of which I shall speak presently, two tiny houses at the corner
of Wood Street, the handsome seventeenth-century façade (restored, of
course) of the Mercers’ Chapel at the corner of Ironmonger Lane at the
Lower Bank end, and No. 73 opposite, that was built by Wren for Sir
William Turner who was Lord Mayor in 1668. It is still known as the Old
Mansion House.
Probably it was his own house and he went on living in it till his
death. Where, then, did the lord mayors stay officially during their
term of office from that time till the present Mansion House was built
in 1739? I am indebted to Mr. Leopold Wagner for supplying the answer by
showing me the way to one of the most fascinating spots in the City.
This third old Mansion House still exists, but in a corner so obscure,
so tucked away, that I have passed within a stone’s throw of it a dozen
times and never had the least suspicion of its existence.
It is at No. 5, Bow Lane, hard by Bow Church, in a narrow passage, with
a sign directing you, if you are fortunate enough to see it, to
Williamson’s Hotel. Follow the passage and you will find yourself remote
from the world, with the quaintest old creeper-clad Restoration house
imaginable surrounding three sides of the courtyard. Yet this quiet spot
was once the hub of civic life,--there is a stone let into the charming
little octagonal-shaped parlour (now called the reading room) that is
supposed to mark the very centre of the City. Here for a few years the
lord mayors after Sir William Turner dwelt in state, and here came
William III. and Mary to dine, and give, as a memento of their visit,
the handsome iron gates, now much corroded and covered with thick green
paint, through which you seek the entrance.
Later on, in the early seventeen hundreds, the original Williamson
started his hotel. It would have been described as “high-class
residential,” had they known those terms, for in those days, when
country squires and their families came up to town, they found the City
as convenient a centre as anywhere. The forty bedrooms, the long salon,
now a bar, where you may see, still hanging on the wall where it has
been for centuries, an ancient map of London Bridge,--the pleasant
rambling up-and-down passages, with their deep embrasures and
window-seats, the low-ceilinged coffee-room with its only bell-pull
marked “Boots,” and elegant little parlour where now no ladies ever
sit,--all speak of a past of consequence.
But nowadays, apart from the birds of passage who pass a night in the
huge station caravanserais, does anyone put up in the City? Only a few
“commercials,” such as I saw lunching at Williamson’s, on the very
excellent “ordinary” of lamb, green peas, new potatoes, cauliflower,
cherry tart and cheese, winding up with coffee, liqueur and a fat cigar,
over which they discuss the latest prices, and the latest sporting news.
Williamson’s, in fact, does not cope with modern notions--“Take it or
leave it” is their motto. The all-invading business girl has not yet
dared to put her nose in here--she would probably create a revolution if
she did. But if you want to get right back into the atmosphere of
Dickens, in a place where electric bells, smart waitresses, music,
flappers and foolish ideas of the value of time are not, conscript a
friend and take a meal at the Old Mansion House.
Coming out into Bow Lane, on the right, at the opposite corner where
Watling Street crosses it, you will find the Old Watling Restaurant, one
of the first houses built in London after the Great Fire: a very
delightful example of its kind, with its dormer windows and heavy-beamed
ceilings.
In Cheapside, at No. 37 at the corner of Friday Street, where Messrs.
Meakers carry on a business appropriate enough to the shop that
tradition assigns to John Gilpin, is another house that claims, on the
insufficient evidence of an undated cutting from the _Builder_, to have
been standing even before the Fire.
Everything goes to refute this story. The very beautiful staircase dates
from the Restoration period, the brickwork is similar to that of other
buildings erected at this time, but, more than this, it is quite certain
that the house stands on the site of the older “Nag’s Head,” a tavern
with an overhanging timbered structure, that may be seen in a print of
Cheapside showing the procession to welcome Marie de Medici when she
came in 1638 to visit her daughter Henrietta Maria. The sign on the
frontage now is no Nag’s Head, but a Chained Swan, once the heraldic
badge of King Henry IV., but debased, like so many other noble devices,
to become the sign of a hostelry. Innkeepers were fond of calling their
houses after the swan, for this poor bird has always had an undeserved
reputation for being fond of strong drink; on the other hand, it holds a
special place in English history, for when Edward III., jousting at
Canterbury in 1349, put on his shield the device of a white swan with
the motto:
Hay, hay, the wythe Swan,
By Gode’s Soule I am thy man,
this was the very first time that the English tongue was used at Court
since the Conquest, and the White Swan made fashionable a language that
has since spread all over the world.
At the sign of the “Chained Swan” is certainly the most interesting
house in Cheapside. Quite probably it was really the first to be erected
in the City after the Fire, as it is a four-storied house of some
importance.
Cross the road to Wood Street, and, if you look through the railings at
the back of the two diminutive shops that are shadowed by the great and
famous plane-tree, you will see that they are built of the same red
brick as No. 37 and bear a tablet with this inscription:
Erected at ye sole Cost and Charges
of ye Parish of St. Peter’s Cheape
Ao. Dni. 1687.
WILLIAM }
HOWARD, }
} _Churchwardens_.
JEREMIAH }
TAVERNER,}
The owners of these little houses are forbidden by their leases to add a
second story, so the tree remains, bringing a breath of the country to
City dwellers, reminding them of Wordsworth’s thrush, whose habit of
continuous singing used to amaze my childhood:
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears
Hangs a thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years.
In Wood Street lived Launcelot Young, that master glazier of peculiar
tastes who, finding the head of James IV., the King of Scots who was
slain at Flodden Field, among a lot of old rubbish in the lumber room
of the Duke of Suffolk’s place at Sheen, took it home with him and kept
it till it lost its novelty.
When I said that there is little to remind one of the past in Cheapside,
I forgot the churches that crop up round every corner. They have a
wealth of memories clustering about them, and the moment you dive into
the narrow courts and passages off the beaten track, you will lose the
sense of modernity. In the dark, queer little lanes, most of them with a
public-house tucked away in some obscure corner, may be found the London
of Dickens’ day, if of no earlier. And what romance in the odd
names--Gutter Lane, by Wood Street, named after Gutheran the Dane, who
lived here before the time of the Conqueror; Huggin Lane that unites
them farther up, called after one Hugan or Hugh; Addle Street, where
King Adel the Saxon had a mansion; Love Lane of dissolute memory.
CITY COMPANIES
“Thy famous Maire, by pryncely governaunce, with
sword of justice thee ruleth prudently.”--DUNBAR.
Wandering in Cheapside, I came across some massive emblazoned
coats-of-arms over great doorways, and found they always announced the
halls of the City Companies of London, those great mediæval trade unions
that survive to-day--so taken for granted by the Londoner that few
people remark their amazing existence.
Yet most of the real history of the old City is bound up with the tale
of the rise to wealth and power of these great companies. They once
numbered a hundred, and about seventy-six still survive. I see that in
one recent guide-book the Pattenmakers are quoted as extinct, but though
this ancient guild, founded in 1300, might be supposed to have received
its deathblow a hundred years ago, when the improvement in the streets
made pattens unnecessary, they are still made for country use and the
company has recently renewed its vitality by association with the rubber
boot and shoe industry.
I like the quaint names of the companies that are now no more. The
occupation of the Bowyers and the Horners is fairly obvious, but who
would guess that the Fletchers were makers of arrows, or the Lorriners
makers of bridles and bits, and I leave you to discover the lugubrious
meaning of the Worshipful Company of Upholders.
They were the trade unions of the Middle Ages, but they had this great
difference, that they were a combination of the masters for the benefit
of their particular industry, whereas now the trade unions are composed
of the workmen, who combine for their own benefit even if it ruins the
industry. Comparisons may be odious but they are inevitable. Our
present trade unions, which seem to be growing almost as powerful as
their forerunners, are exclusively concerned with the question of wages,
but the guilds, whilst jealously guarding the privileges of their
members and craftsmen, not only guaranteed a fixed wage, but
administered even-handed justice as between master and men, and, more
important still, insisted on a high standard of workmanship. Nothing but
the best satisfied them, and they built up the tradition of English
excellence which our present distaste for honest work puts us in a fair
way to lose.
For in this matter we compare badly with our forefathers. Their ruthless
methods might well be copied in this age of the meretricious and shoddy.
In 1311 there was a bonfire in Cheapside (at the instance of the
Hatters’ and Haberdashers’ Company) of forty grey and white and fifteen
black “bad and cheating hats,” which had been seized in the shops of
dishonest traders, and other defective goods were publicly burnt in the
same place from time to time, but so rarely as to show how high was the
usual standard of trade honesty. Nowadays, such seizures would provide
almost enough fuel to tide us through another coal strike.
The City Companies were an autocracy, but, given the conditions of the
time, they were a benevolent autocracy, and the guilds laid the
foundations of the vast commercial wealth which has made London what
she is. For centuries the Lord Mayor, their civic head, has been chosen
almost always from amongst the members of the twelve great companies,
and enjoys a prestige abroad only second to that of the king, as anyone
who has lived in France can testify. Trade in England has always been
honourable. The merchants of the Middle Ages belonged almost exclusively
to families of good position; often they were younger sons of the landed
gentry, for whom a commercial life, in days when there were no
engineers, journalists, or bankers, was the usual opening if they did
not go into the Church or Law. Whittington was the son of a
Gloucestershire knight: Sir Thomas Gresham, that finest type of City
magnate and honoured friend of Elizabeth, came of a good old stock and
was educated at Cambridge. For centuries our kings and queens have been
pleased to come to banquets in the Guildhall and the halls of the
greater companies, though they might not nowadays look favourably upon
that lord mayor with whom Charles II. dined, who became so drunk that
when the king got up to leave he rushed after him and dragged him back,
good-naturedly protesting, “to finish t’other bottle.”
The old power of the guilds has gone, but in what other country would
you find bodies of merchants, each with a vast revenue at its disposal
of which it need give account to no man, using that wealth, generation
after generation,
[Illustration: GUILDHALL]
for the public good instead of for private profit? They spend it either
in maintaining excellent schools or in generous gifts to various
charitable objects, or in subscriptions for the advancement of science
(the City Companies are responsible for the City and Guilds Institute),
but in whatever they do they uphold the best traditions of integrity and
generosity of the City merchant.
The centre of all this civic activity is the Guildhall. From Oxford
Circus a tube to the Bank or any bus along Holborn takes you along
Cheapside and past King Street, at the end of which you see the
Guildhall. If you start from the neighbourhood of Charing Cross any
train to the Mansion House brings you to Queen Victoria Street, out of
which Queen Street, a few minutes’ walk to your right, leads through
directly to King Street.
Of course the great civic event of the year is the well-known and
oft-described procession and the banquet given on the 9th November by
the new lord mayor, chosen on Michaelmas Day, and the sheriffs to the
members of the Cabinet and other distinguished guests. No women are
permitted to be present and to hear the important political speeches
often made at these dinners, but there are other times when their
presence is tolerated. I have seen the big wooden figures of Gog and
Magog in the gallery of the great hall look down on a recruiting meeting
early in the war--on the gathering of one of those organisations that
now and then are the temporary guests of the City Corporation, and on
the ceremony of presenting the Freedom of the City to an overseas Prime
Minister.
The hall is open to the public at the usual hours, 10-5.30, so go in and
nod to Gog and Magog and look at the fifteenth century two-light window
in the south-west corner--the only old one in the hall.
Coming out of the Guildhall on the left is the passage leading to the
Museum and the Library. The latter is a fascinating place, with less red
tape about consulting the books than in any other place of the size in
London. You simply write your name and the book you want on a slip of
paper, and the affair is done. If you seek information on a certain
point, and do not know where to find it, the courteous director and his
no less willing staff take the greatest trouble to help. I went there
lately on such a quest, and book after book was produced for me by three
assistants till the director in charge, who had evidently been doing
some private research on my behalf, appeared triumphantly with the
volume that gave the solution to my problem. It is a long, pleasant
room, as indeed all book-lined rooms must be, with seven book-lined bays
on either side. The collection contains about 200,000 volumes, besides
many manuscripts. If you are a Shakespearean enthusiast you will find
there among its rare treasures, the first, second and fourth folios of
Shakespeare’s plays and a document bearing Shakespeare’s signature.
Naturally the library rather specialises on books about London, and the
museum in the basement beneath (entered from Basinghall Street) is
nearly filled with London relics--Roman antiquities, mediæval
shop-signs, some of the lovely Jacobean jewellery found in Wood Street,
the rest of which is in Lancaster House, instruments of torture from
Newgate, and many other things that tell of the City life in mediæval
days.
Round about and within a few minutes’ walk of the Guildhall cluster the
halls of the City Companies. The most important in the order of
precedence are the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths,
Skinners, Merchant Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners
and Clothworkers. Their halls are not supposed to be open to the general
public, but it is possible to see most of them on application.
The history of the guilds is such a long one that their beginning is
lost in Time’s mist. Mr. Muirhead says that “the chief object of their
foundation was to afford religious and temporal and social fellowship,
and trade supervision and help to the members of their fraternity or
mystery,”--but they were not incorporated till the reign of Edward. Most
of their halls date from the days of Henry VIII., when, grown rich and
powerful, they looked about them for a home and were glad to buy from
the avaricious king the houses of fugitive monks or favourites fallen
into disgrace. But property so acquired was doomed to perish, and in the
Great Fire of 1666 the ancient halls, almost without exception, were
burnt to the ground. “Strange it is to see Clothworkers’ Hall on fire,
these three days and nights in one body of flame, it being the cellar
full of oyle,” says Pepys, who was a Master of the company. They have a
fine collection of gold plate only used at state banquets, with a gold
tray presented by Pepys in 1677 and also an immense loving-cup richly
chased, that is now shown in a glass case on the sideboard, as it began
to show signs of much handling.
The halls were rebuilt afterwards,--some, like the Vintners’ in 68 Upper
Thames Street, and possibly the Haberdashers’ in Gresham Street, by
Wren,--but by the beginning of the eighteen hundreds most of them seem
to have fallen into such disrepair as to require rebuilding again.
One at least, the Merchant Taylors’, the largest hall of all, which
faces Threadneedle Street, stands as originally erected, with its little
crypt beneath it, in the latter part of the fourteenth century, for
though the roof and walls were damaged by the Great Fire, the main
building is still intact. This is a rich and proud company, with its
income of £60,000 a year, and its fine gallery of royalties and
distinguished personages, numbering many kings among its freemen. Yet
not so proud as the Mercers’, first on the list, which will not admit
visitors to its hall in 87 Cheapside. Whittington and Sir Thomas
Gresham were mercers. Within the walls is kept the famous Legh cup
(1499), always used at City banquets and supposed to be one of the
finest pieces of English mediæval plate in existence. The chapel
adjoining the hall, whose handsome front, erected immediately after the
Great Fire, you may inspect at any rate, is on the site of Thomas à
Becket’s house.
Close by in Prince’s Street, opposite the Bank of England, is the hall
of the Grocers, once called the Pepperers, a guild with advanced notions
for the Middle Ages, for they apparently believed in the equality of
women. The wives of the Grocers were members as well, and were even
fined if they were absent from the banquets for any avoidable reason.
“Grocer” is one of those words that have grown less honourable with
time, for a grocer formerly meant one who dealt _en gros_ (wholesale).
The halls of the Goldsmiths’ and the Fishmongers’ Companies have so many
mediæval relics that they well repay a visit, and a card of admission is
usually granted on application. The Goldsmiths are in Foster Lane,
Cheapside, just behind the G.P.O., and amongst their plate you may see
the cup from which Queen Elizabeth is said to have drunk at her
coronation. In the Court Room is an old Roman altar, found when the
present foundations were dug. The Goldsmiths still keep their ancient
privilege of assaying and stamping all articles of gold and silver
manufacture in Great Britain, just as the Fishmongers still have the
less remunerative right to “enter and seize bad fish.” The hall of this
guild is, appropriately enough, on the banks of the river, just at the
north end of London Bridge, and in one of the rooms is a chair made out
of the first pile driven in the construction of Old London Bridge, said
to have been under the water for 650 years.
The hall of the Stationers’ Company in Paternoster Row was stone-faced a
mere 121 years ago, but the attics still have horn-paned windows and
part of it was built before the Great Fire. Visitors are shown the hall
and the old relics, and every good American likes to see the
compositor’s stick that Benjamin Franklin used when he came to London as
a journeyman printer and lived in Bartholomew Close.
Stationers’ Hall is the headquarters of the Royal Literary Fund for
assisting Authors in Distress, and among their treasures are the daggers
used by Col. Blood and his accomplice when they tried to steal the crown
jewels in Charles II.’s reign.
Most of the bare facts about the other chief companies can be found in
any London guide-book, but if a reader wants to know more of these
interesting survivals of the day when the craftsman loved his craft, he
will find a detailed account in Mr. P. H. Ditchfield’s _The City
Companies of London_, 1904, and Mr. George Unwin’s _The Gilds and
Companies of London_.
CHAPTER VI
ROUND ABOUT HOLBORN
“Yet London lacks not poetry,
She has her voices, whose deep tones
Are human laughter and human moans,
And all her beauty, all her glory,
Spring from or blend with man’s strange story.”
MAXWELL GRAY.
Take that chilly-sounding gateway, the Marble Arch, as a _point de
départ_ for a walk some idle afternoon, and I will show you what I found
the day I turned my back on it. It looks as bored by its inactivity as
Théophile Gautier’s Obélisque; perhaps it regrets the days when it faced
Buckingham Palace and feels it came down in the world when it was moved
to its present position some seventy years ago.
And that, too, is another indignity. Very many people ask why the Marble
Arch is stranded all by itself, like a rock from which the flood has
receded. The reason is as simple as most utilitarian things. The press
of traffic at the Marble Arch was so great that the space had to be
widened. It would have been too costly a matter to move the Marble Arch
back, so the park railings were moved and the Arch left high and dry, no
longer a gateway but only an object of interest.
I grant you that at first sight the Oxford Street and Holborn of to-day
have a blatantly modern look. There is little to remind one in the
kaleidoscopic vista of badly-dressed shop windows, gaudy buildings and
dingy offices, that Roman soldiers once tramped along this very road. It
took about a thousand years from the time that Agricola recalled his
Roman legions from England for the discomfort of the Holborn mudholes to
become unendurable, and for Henry V. to follow in 1417 the earlier
example of his French _confrère_ Philippe Auguste and cause the king’s
highway to be paved at his expense. The paving does not seem to have
been kept in good repair, for the garrulous Pepys says, 250 years later,
that the king’s coach was overturned in Holborn.
Travellers along Holborn, at the other end of the social scale, shared
in the royal benefit, for from 1196 to 1783 condemned criminals were
brought in carts from Newgate Prison to Tyburn Tree. Everyone has heard
of the famous gallows, but few people know that the exact spot where it
stood is marked to-day by a triangular stone set in the roadway, almost
opposite the beginning of the Edgware Road. A bronze plate on the
railings of the Park, on the other side of the road, commemorates the
fact, but if both stone and plate elude you, the friendly policeman who
is always on duty here will point them out.
From the Marble Arch to Holborn there is nothing to look at but
interminable shops till you come to the quaint old houses of Staple
Inn, as disdainfully out of keeping with their vulgar surroundings as an
orchid would be in an onion bed.
STAPLE INN
“I went astray in Holborn through an arched entrance,
over which was Staple Inn.”--HAWTHORNE.
Staple Inn is one of the most delicious things in London. Out of the
roar and hurry of Holborn you pass through the old Jacobean gateway with
the façade of oaken beams into the tranquil old-world court where the
noise suddenly dies away, and you can sit peacefully under the shade of
the plane-trees, as far removed from the bustle and racket without the
gate as if you had been suddenly transported a hundred miles on a
magician’s carpet. From a kindly porter may be bought, for one shilling
and sixpence, a delightful little history of this “fayrest Inne of
Chancerie,” where Johnson lived after finishing his _Rasselas_ in a week
to pay for the expenses of his mother’s funeral.
When you are tired of sitting quietly in this “veriest home of peace,”
go across the courtyard to the hall of the Inn and look at the carved
oaken roof and the grotesque ornaments, at the Grinling Gibbons
clock-case and the old stained glass windows, and before you leave
Staple Inn go through the second court and look at the old sunk garden
that is so unconcernedly green in the very heart of this big city. At
the back of the Patent Offices that make the southern boundary of
Staple Inn is Took’s Court--the Cook’s Court where Mr. Snagsby of _Bleak
House_ lived--once a place of those curious semi-prisons called
sponging-houses that were like debtors’ boarding-houses with the bailiff
for the landlord.
[Illustration: Staple Inn]
Took’s Court is a sordid enough place now, and some of it may soon
disappear, but it has a vicarious interest because Sheridan spent some
of the last years of his life in a sponging-house here.
GRAY’S INN
“Whene’er through Gray’s Inn porch I stray
I meet a spirit by the way;
I roam beneath the ancient trees,
And talk with him of mysteries;
He tells me truly what I am--
I walk with mighty Verulam.”
Gray’s Inn, another of the gracious, leisurely London corners that few
of London’s visitors discover, lies to the north of Holborn in the
Gray’s Inn Road. Any of the buses along Holborn will take you there, and
it is only a few minutes’ walk behind Chancery Lane Station on the
Central London Railway. You could once wander in the old gardens more
freely than in the other Inns, and if you slipped his _Essays_ in your
pocket could read what Sir Francis Bacon wrote about gardens in the very
garden that he made. Bacon was once Treasurer of Gray’s Inn and he
interested himself in the laying out of “the purest of human pleasures”
that he found there. Gray’s Inn Gardens used to be as fashionable a
place for a walk as Hyde Park is to-day. Pepys the Chatterer related the
doings of numberless people when he wrote: “When church was done my wife
and I walked to Gray’s Inn to observe fashions of the ladies, because of
my wife’s making some clothes.” Pepys must have gone there very often,
for two months later the frivolous Secretary wrote: “I was very well
pleased with the sight of a fine lady that I have often seen walk in
Gray’s Inn Walks.”
Times have changed and fine ladies are no longer allowed to walk in
Gray’s Inn Gardens, unless indeed they have relations among the benchers
who are complaisant in the matter of keys.
[Illustration: GRAY’S INN HALL]
The Hall is the oldest and most beautiful thing in Gray’s Inn. Queen
Elizabeth once came to a banquet here, and it was here that the _Comedy
of Errors_ was first performed. The old Inn has had many famous names
among its members, the Sydneys, Cecils, Bacons, etc., and a man no less
distinguished in another circle, Jacob Tonson, had his first bookshop
just inside Gray’s Inn Gate.
The old bookseller and publisher’s name has a very modern interest, even
for the London visitor who never turns the pages of Pope or Walpole,
because his house at Barn Elms is now used as the Ranelagh Club. The
people who go out to Ranelagh of a fine afternoon to drink tea and watch
the polo, are following the footsteps of the members of the famous
Kit-Cat Club founded in 1700, it is popularly supposed as an outcome of
the dinners Tonson offered to his patrons. The club, of which Tonson
became secretary, consisted of thirty-nine members--authors, wits and
noblemen--their portraits hang in the halls of the Ranelagh Club to-day.
Tonson published for Addison and Pope, and was the first man to print
cheap editions of Shakespeare. He had innumerable friends, and his
portrait shows him as a genial creature who must have merited the
description of him, written in 1714, that I found in _Old and New
London_:
“While in your early days of reputation,
You for blue garters had not such a passion;
While yet you did not live, as now your trade is,
To drink with noble lords and toast their ladies,
Thou, Jacob Tonson, were to my conceiving,
The cheerfullest, best, honest fellow living.”
Tonson moved from the Gray’s Inn Gateway in 1712 to his more celebrated
bookshop in the Strand that stood on part of the present site of
Somerset House. I hear that another old landmark connected with this
prince of publishers is doomed to disappear, for the Upper Flask, in
Heath Street, Hampstead, that was known in Tonson’s day as the “Upper
Bowling Green House,” used as the summer quarters of the Kit-Cat Club,
may have to give way to the new buildings of some philanthropic
institution.
Gray’s Inn takes its name from the Grays of Wilton. There is a document
registering the transferring in 1505 of the “Manor of Portpoole,
otherwise called Gray’s Inn” from Edmund Lord Gray of Wilton to a Mr.
Denny. The public, alas, are never admitted to the Gardens, but any
visitor may see the Hall on a week-day between the hours of 10 and
12.15.
HATTON GARDEN
“My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn,
I saw good strawberries in your garden there.”
_Richard III._
Staple Inn and Gray’s Inn are not the only old-world souvenirs to be
found in prosaic Holborn. A little further east, on the left-hand side
as one strolls towards the City, lies another sordid street whose name
is redolent of Elizabethan romance.
Hatton Garden, named after the queen’s handsome chancellor and now the
haunt of the diamond and pearl merchant, and also of organgrinders and
ice-cream vendors, is built on the site of the gardens of Ely Palace,
the town house of the Bishops of Ely whose story is noted on another
page. Round the corner is Ely Place, the most astonishing little square
in London.
If you pass this spot on the stroke of the hour after ten o’clock on a
summer’s evening, you may well rub your eyes and wonder if time has been
rolled back and you are suddenly living in the London of two centuries
ago. For the iron gates of the little place are closed, and out of the
tiny porter’s lodge in the middle comes an important person with a
gold-laced hat, who solemnly makes the tour of the square, crying five
or six times, “Past ten o’clock and all’s well!”
The crying of the hours by the night watchman is not the only custom of
this old-world corner, so carefully guarded by the commissioners in
whose hands the rights of Ely Place are vested. The little square, now
given over to law offices and business premises, was once a “sanctuary,”
a place where law-breakers could take refuge and where the civil
authorities had no right of arrest. To this day the caretakers who form
the bulk of the resident population of Ely Place are inordinately proud
of the fact that they are independent of police protection, having their
own standing army of three porters, who take eight-hour turns in
guarding the tranquillity of their self-contained domain.
They even have a public-house of their very own, for in the tiny passage
that connects Ely Place with Hatton Garden is a dim little inn of
dubious antiquity, that takes its name of the “Mitre” from the carved
stone mitre set in the façade which once formed part of the old palace
of the bishops of Ely. The innkeeper is very proud of the remains of a
Methuselah of a cherry-tree now incorporated in one corner of the house.
You can see the whitewashed remains of the tree that may have shaded
good Queen Bess if you peer through the left-hand corner window.
At ten of the clock the iron gate leading into Hatton Garden is duly
fastened, and the “Mitre” is closed to the outside world.
I have kept the best and most amazing of the treasures of Ely Place
until the last.
Walk down the left-hand side of the square to the far corner, and you
will find your way into one of the most beautiful things in London,--a
thirteenth century chapel practically intact. It is so beautiful that if
it were necessary to pay a high entrance fee or write for cards of
admission, it would probably be the Mecca of every artist and
antiquarian. But since it is in London, prodigal of such treasures, and
anyone may walk in and look at its beauty undisturbed at any hour, St.
Etheldreda’s Chapel is only known to a few people.
It was built in the last decade of the thirteenth century by a certain
Bishop de Luda, as the chapel for Ely House, the town residence of the
bishops of Ely.
John of Gaunt took refuge here and must have heard mass within these
very walls. Shakespeare reminds us, in _Richard II._, of John of Gaunt’s
death in Ely House, and it was in these cloisters that Henry VIII. first
met with Cranmer. Queen Elizabeth’s chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton,
worshipped here till his unlucky tenancy of Ely House was ended by his
death in 1591, and so did his nephew’s imperious widow, the famous Lady
Hatton who married and flouted Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer and
rival of Bacon for her hand.
It was at “Elie House in Holborne” in the reign of James I. that the
last mystery play was represented in England, before the Spanish
Ambassador Gondemar, who was a next-door neighbour to Ely Palace. The
later history of the chapel may be briefly told. When the bishops
finally sold the property to the Crown in 1772 and betook themselves to
Dover Street, it was bought by an architect who preserved the chapel for
the use of the residents of the houses he built in Ely Place. Afterwards
it passed through several hands, being finally bought by the Fathers of
Charity from the Welsh Episcopalians in 1871. When the work of
restoration was finished, St. Etheldreda’s, the only pre-Reformation
place of worship restored to the Roman Catholic Church, was reopened on
St. Etheldreda’s Day, the 23rd of June, 1876.
ST. SEPULCHRE’S
“Here lies one conquered that hath conquered kings.”
Epitaph to Capt. John Smith, 1631.
A little further along Holborn, in Giltspur Street, you come to the old
Church of St. Sepulchre, where we meet again the Tyburn prisoners.
Everybody who has heard the _Beggar’s Opera_ (and who has not?) will
remember the picture Polly Peachum draws of Macheath on the road to
Tyburn: “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely
than the nosegay in his hand.” It was at St. Sepulchre’s that the
amorous highwayman would have got his nosegay, on the steps of the
church, for an old benefactor had left money to provide flowers for
every criminal going to be hanged. It was St. Sepulchre’s bell that
tolled the hour of their hanging, and another legacy provided for an
admonition and prayers for the condemned.
There are more cheerful memories connected with the old church. There is
a mention of it in the twelfth century records. It was rebuilt in the
middle of the fifteenth century--the south-west porch still remains a
thing of beauty--and after it was nearly destroyed in the Great Fire in
1666, Wren practically rebuilt the church with its four weathercocks,
whose differences of opinion about the wind gave rise to the saying of
Howell: “Unreasonable people are as hard to reconcile as the vanes of
St. Sepulchre’s tower.”
Two very noteworthy Elizabethans lie buried in St. Sepulchre’s, one a
scholar, the other a brilliant adventurer. The former was Roger Ascham,
the queen’s tutor, and the latter, Captain John Smith, “sometime
Governor of Virginia and Admiral of New England,” of Pocahontas fame.
Captain Smith’s adventures in America have rather overshadowed his
earlier exploits. Mr. Walter Thornbury, in his wonderful _Old and New
London_, tells that he fought in Hungary in 1602, and in three single
combats overcame three Turks and cut off their heads, for which and
other equally brave deeds Sigismund, Duke of Transylvania, gave him his
picture set in gold with a pension of three hundred ducats, and allowed
him to bear three Turks’ heads proper as his shield of arms. Pocahontas,
who you remember found the English climate too much for her, lies buried
in the parish church of St. George, Gravesend. In 1914 the Society of
Virginian Dames placed two stained glass windows to honour her memory.
STONE EFFIGIES
Not the least of the quaint things that the seeing eye may note in
London streets are the small statues and reliefs that give an odd
variety to some of the houses.
At No. 78, Newgate Street, five minutes’ walk from St. Sepulchre’s, and
on the same side of the road, is a bas-relief (probably an old
shop-sign) of a giant and a dwarf. These were William Evans and Sir
Jeffery Hudson, freaks whom it pleased Charles II. to keep about him at
the Court, as readers of _Peveril of the Peak_ will remember.
Just opposite is Panier Alley, so called from the basket-makers who once
lived here. On the left, cased in glass in order to preserve it from the
weather, is a somewhat battered effigy of a fat boy sitting upon a
panier, and, underneath, this inscription:
When ye have sought the citty round,
Yet still this is the highest ground.
August the 27th, 1688.
It was put up a few years after the Great Fire, that landmark in the
history of the City. I am told its claim is not strictly founded on
fact, and that part of Cannon Street is a few feet higher, but one would
like to believe the cherub.
Another bas-relief of a fat boy, at the corner of Cock Lane, even nearer
to St. Sepulchre’s, I mention in another chapter, and there is a quaint
old vintner’s sign of an infant Bacchus on a barrel, to be found at the
junction of Liverpool Street and Manchester Street, in the rather
depressing vicinity of King’s Cross. It is believed to be the only one
of its kind left in London.
[Illustration: LINCOLN’S INN]
CHAPTER VII
DOWN CHANCERY LANE
LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS
“London, Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord
Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”--DICKENS.
The charming rustic-sounding name of Lincoln’s Inn Fields is known to
everyone--did not Mr. Tulkinghorne live there?--but few people stray
into the old square except those who are at odds with their neighbours
and come to consult the men of law living there, as they did in Dickens’
day. The habitués come from Kingsway through Great Queen Street or
Sardinia Street--the stranger takes the Piccadilly Tube to Holborn
Station and, turning to the right along High Holborn, follows the first
passage on the south side of the street that almost manages to conceal
itself behind a protruding house.
This narrow winding Little Turnstile, and the Great Turnstile, a short
distance farther along, are the only entrances from the north to
Lincoln’s Inn Fields. An ugly lane, connecting these two passages and
parallel with Holborn, is dignified by the disconcerting name of
Whetstone Park. To-day it is only a row of stables, but Milton once had
a lodging in one of the houses, that were always squalid and _mal
habitées_, as Dryden’s plays attest.
Coming out of the tortuous Little Turnstile, you enter the spacious
square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The very name is alluring enough to make
anyone want to go there, but there is nothing about the gardens to-day
to show that they are among the oldest in London. They are as trim and
well cared for as if they had been laid out yesterday. “Well cared for”
means that all the pleasant green lawns and shady plane-trees are
jealously railed off from the public, who loll somnolently on the many
benches, their back turned to the lovely green oasis. It does not occur
to any of the Fields’ frequenters to turn some of the seats round, so
that they will have a more refreshing view than the dusty asphalt of the
wide paths or the uninspiring sight of the slumbers of the unemployed,
some of whom look as if they had slipped out of the frames of the
Hogarth pictures in the Soane Museum.
It must be confessed that the interest of Lincoln’s Inn Fields lies not
so much in the gardens--modernised out of every semblance of their
seventeenth-century appearance--as in the beautiful old houses
surrounding them--noble, dignified mansions some of those on the west
side, built by Inigo Jones and once owned by Milords of Lindsay, Somers
and Erskine. At the South Kensington Museum there is a
[Illustration: LINCOLN’S INN GATEWAY]
wonderful panelled staircase, a perfect specimen of its kind, that
formerly graced the hall of No. 35.
Lindsay House, now Nos. 59 and 60, one of the Inigo Jones houses, was
built for the Earl of Lindsay, who died fighting for Charles I. at
Edgehill. Peter Cunningham says that it was called Ancaster House when
the fourth earl was created Duke of Ancaster, and that he sold it to the
proud Duke of Somerset--I do not know why Mr. Cunningham insists on his
pride in italics--who married the widow of the Mr. Thomas Thynne whose
murder by Count Koenigsmarck is so dramatically portrayed on his tomb in
Westminster Abbey.
No. 66, at the corner of Great Queen Street, was once occupied by the
Duke of Newcastle, George II.’s prime minister.
We have travelled far searching for freedom in the last 250 years and
one would like to know how the Wellsian attitude is regarded by the
ghost of the creator of this old house--the Marquis of Powis, who built
it in 1686, before he was outlawed by William and Mary because of his
loyalty to James II. He probably chose the site because it was near the
chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador--the oldest Roman Catholic chapel in
London--where the Roman Catholics used to go when they were deprived of
their churches, and where Fanny Burney was married in 1793. It was
removed, unluckily, in 1910.
There have been poets, too, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, before the men of
law took possession. Milton and Thomas Campbell lived at No. 61 and
Lord Tennyson at No. 58, where, you remember, Mr. Tulkinghorne of _Bleak
House_ had his rooms.
It is a house also haunted with memories of Nell Gwynne, for she had
lodgings here and gave birth to the first Duke of St. Albans, while she
was still acting in the nearby theatre in Portugal Row!
This Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre stood just at the back of the Royal
College of Surgeons, on the south side of the square. Three theatres
called the Duke’s Theatre were successively built on the same spot. The
first one was a pioneer in its way, for it was here that regular stage
scenery was introduced in England and that women’s parts were first
played by women. The ubiquitous Pepys was a regular frequenter of the
theatre, and duly recorded his meeting with Nell Gwynne and that here he
saw _Hamlet_ played for the first time.
Though it is seventy-three years since the last theatre was taken down
to enlarge the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and there is
nothing to be seen of it to-day, I like to keep its memory green because
it was here, on the night of January 29th, 1728, nearly two hundred
years ago, that Lavinia Fenton, the first Polly Peachum, sang herself
into the heart of the Duke of Bolton, when John Rich produced Mr. Gay’s
_Beggar’s Opera_. It ran for sixty-two nights in one season and made
“Gay rich and Rich gay.”
SOANE MUSEUM
“Thus the great city, towered and steepled,
Is doubly peopled,
Haunted by ghosts of the remembered past.”
_London Poems._
There is one museum in London that I do not want to call a museum
because in some ways it is so unlike one. Very few people ever go there.
It is like the palace of the Sleeping Beauty. If you shut your eyes at
the south-west corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and try not to notice the
tentacular Lyons that unblushingly intrudes its smug modern shopfront
into this old-world square, but stroll through the gardens to the north
side, you will see the Soane Museum at No. 13. This is one of the most
curious and neglected corners I have found in London. There are
priceless things here like Hogarth’s _Rake’s Progress_, but for every
hundred visitors who go to the National Gallery of British Art to see
the _Marriage à la Mode_ only one comes to this quaint caravanserai of
all sorts of objects.
Sir John Soane must surely have been the most agreeable bricklayer’s son
who ever made his fortune as a great architect and had a pretty taste in
art. You have only to look at his portrait by Lawrence, one of the last
that great painter finished, to see what a kindly, benevolent man he
was. Why, oh why, did he exact that his collection should remain
unaltered! I know that the guide-books all extol the ingenuity with
which so many things have been fitted into a small space, but if only
one could sweep away the superfluous and unnecessary and rearrange the
house like a perfect specimen of a home of the period, with the great
pictures hung to the best advantage in the largest rooms and the
basement reserved for the sarcophagus in its present place, with the
best of the larger treasures that would be incongruous in the upper
rooms! As it is, you must diligently hunt for what you want to see, for
the delightful catalogue is more useful as a souvenir than a present
help in finding anything.
There are things of human interest, like the watch Queen Anne gave to
Sir Christopher Wren, or the pistol that Peter the Great collared from a
Turkish Bey in 1696, that Alexander I. gave to Napoleon at Tilsit in
1807, and that Sir John Soane provokingly says he purchased under very
peculiar circumstances--or the flamboyant jewel of Charles I. found
among the royal baggage after the battle of Naseby--or Rousseau’s
autograph letter--or those exquisite old books of Hours richly
illuminated and written with such patient skill by some old Flemish monk
five hundred years ago.
But the jewels of this unnoticed casket are the pictures. The courteous
guardians, who all look like retired librarians, show with a certain
melancholy pride the way to the tiny room where hang Turner’s fine
painting of _Van Tromp’s Barge_ and two of his water-colours, Watteau’s
_Les Noces_, and the greatest treasures of the whole collection,
Hogarth’s pictures of _The Rake’s Progress_ and the four big canvases of
_The Election_.
Besides all this there are wonderful Flemish wood carvings and
manuscripts, and, in the crypt, the interesting three-thousand-year-old
tomb of Seti I., King of Egypt, whose inscriptions Sir John did not live
to see deciphered.
There was an air of wistfulness about the place. It had been arranged
with so much loving care, and so few people profit by it though the
reward of going is great.
Perhaps Sir John Soane did not want anybody but art-lovers to see his
collection, or he would surely not have closed it to the public on
Saturday, Sunday and Monday all the year round and for the entire months
of September, December, January and February. It is true that students
and other visitors may apply to the curator for admission at other
times, and foreigners are admitted on presentation of their visiting
card on any day except Sunday and Bank Holidays, but what Londoner, with
richer collections open every day in the week, could be expected to
remember the capriciousness of the guardians of Sir John Soane’s
treasures, who are like the suburban hostess announcing her reception
days as first and third Tuesdays and fifth Friday? In despair of
remembering when the good lady was at home, you would never call on her.
No, if you want to see the Hogarths, my advice is to wrap yourself in
the cloak of a foreigner and present your card at the door of this
neglected London museum between the hours of ten and five.
LINCOLN’S INN
“The Walks of Lincoln’s Inn
Under the Elms.”
BEN JONSON.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields are bordered on the east side by Lincoln’s Inn, but
I like better to approach the old squares by the brick gatehouse in
Chancery Lane. It is the oldest part of Lincoln’s Inn, and a very fine
example of Tudor brickwork. The Sir Thomas Lovel who built it in 1518
put his own arms over the gateway, never dreaming that when his name
would mean nothing to the passer-by, the name of a bricklayer, one Ben
Jonson who worked, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other, at
the adjoining buildings about a hundred years later, would need no coat
of arms to preserve his memory. People like Mr. Muirhead, who see things
in the light of cold reason, argue that in 1617 Jonson was forty-four
and already famous, so he had probably laid down the trowel,--but I
prefer to believe old Fuller, who said Ben Jonson helped in the building
of the new structure in Lincoln’s Inn.
There are four of these old Inns of Court, that have lasted since the
thirteenth century--the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn
and Gray’s Inn. Few visitors to London go out of their way to stroll in
their shady courtyards, but there are not many corners of London where
you can so easily shake off the oppression of the blare of machinery and
recapture the spirit of a time when the study of the law was not thought
incompatible with many pleasanter, more frivolous things.
One old chronicler says: “There is both in the Inns of Court and the
Inns of Chancery, a sort of academy or gymnasium where they learn
singing and all kinds of music, and such other accomplishments and
diversions (which are called revels) as are suitable to their quality
and usually practised at court. All vice is discouraged and banished.
The greatest nobility of the kingdom often place their children in those
Inns of Court--not so much as to make the law their study but to form
their manners.”
I have no predilection for the legal profession, being, like most of my
kind, filled with amazement at the lack of logic and the crass
inconsequences that attend the administration of justice in any country.
In fact I have a fellow-feeling for Peter the Great, who knew his own
mind and had no herd opinions. When he was taken into Westminster Hall,
he inquired who those busy people were in wigs and black gowns. He was
answered, “They are lawyers.” “Lawyers?” said he, with a face of
astonishment. “Why, I have but two in my whole dominions, and I believe
I shall hang one of them the moment I get home.”
I suppose in no country in the world is the study and practice of the
law surrounded with such debonair amenities as in London. Who would not
be a lawyer, since that profession is the Open Sesame to shady gardens,
lodgings in history-haunted rooms, and a prideful possession in such
rare buildings as the Church of the Knights Templars?
Lincoln’s Inn takes its name from a thirteenth century Henry de Lacy,
Earl of Lincoln, who had a mansion in Chancery Lane near the first
church of the Knights Templars. His arms are carved over the brick
gateway, separated from those of the builder, Sir Thomas Lovel, by the
royal arms of England. None of the existing old buildings are later than
Tudor times.
The old Inn has had many illustrious members, lodgers and visitors.
Oliver Cromwell used to come here to see Thurloe, his secretary of
state, who lived at 24 Old Buildings, and there is the story of how he
nearly killed a young clerk he found apparently asleep when he had been
plotting with Thurloe to seize Prince Charles. Thurloe dissuaded him by
passing a lighted candle before the young man’s eyes to prove he was
really asleep, and the clerk lived to warn the prince, who when he
became king paid several visits to Lincoln’s Inn. Both Pepys and Evelyn
record his presence at the “revels,” when learning was encouraged by
indulgence in dancing. In the Admittance Book are the signatures of
Charles II., the Duke of York, Prince Rupert and the Duke of Monmouth,
written in 1671.
Dr. John Donne and Sir Thomas More were both connected with Lincoln’s
Inn. Dr. Donne laid the foundation-stone and preached the consecration
sermon of the chapel that Inigo Jones designed in 1623, since so
disastrously restored. It is built on arches, so you can walk about
under the Gothic roof, as Pepys said he did “by agreement” on the 27th
of June, 1663, but you will not see the six seventeenth-century windows,
for they were shattered by an explosion in October, 1915.
Sir Thomas More has a more intimate connection with the Inn, for his
father and grandfather held the office of butler and steward, and for
their long and faithful services were rewarded by admission into the
Society of Lincoln’s Inn and by the much-prized office of Reader.
The wonderful law library is now housed in the new red-brick hall,
decorated with Watts’ fresco of “The Lawgivers of the World,” but the
old hall built about 400 years ago is still in use, though it, too, has
suffered from the hands of the restorer.
Only the benchers and members of Lincoln’s Inn may use the elm-shaded
gardens. They not only fulfil Pepys’ prophecy that they would be very
pretty, but they had a useful war record, as a memorial tablet shows.
I am told that the Curfew is still rung at Lincoln’s Inn. At a quarter
to nine each evening the chief porter climbs to the tower of the chapel
and when the hour has struck he sounds the curfew fifty times. The bell
used was brought from Cadiz by the Earl of Essex in 1596.
RECORD OFFICE
“Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty.”
WORDSWORTH.
Coming out into Chancery Lane once more and turning down towards Fleet
Street, you will see on your left a huge grey building in Tudor style,
where once stood the House of the Converts.
It was called by that name when Henry III. founded a House in 1232 to
receive converted Jews. I hardly like to tell you that the present name
is the Record Office. It is too pompous and official-sounding, and
perhaps that is why people pass the House of the Converts never
suspecting the presence of the entrancing, memory-evoking things within.
You enter the enchanted room by descending a short flight of stone
steps, after going through a forbidding portal and along a green sward
into a modern grey building in one of the very busiest of the London
streets.
You will know why I call it an enchanted room as soon as you see the
beautiful chapel-like precincts named the House of the Converts nearly
700 years ago, before it was used from Edward III.’s time as the Chapel
of the Rolls.
The stained glass windows give a mellow light to the admirable
Torrigiano monument of a sixteenth century Master of the Rolls and the
delicately carved alabaster tomb of Richard Alington and his wife Jane.
Near by is the recumbent figure of another Master, with the little
figures of his children kneeling below, one of them the little daughter
born on Christmas Day and married when she was only twelve years old, “a
pretty red-headed wench,” to William Cavendish, afterwards Earl of
Devonshire, in the year of grace 1608.
There are all sorts of other treasures in this mysterious room, that is
open to all comers between the hours of two and four, any day in the
week except, alas, Saturday or Sunday.
You may look on the handwriting of “Jane the Quene,” in one of the very
few documents signed by Lady Jane Grey during her nine days’ reign, or
read the pathetic letter written by Mary Queen of Scots to Sir William
Cecil, “Mester Cessilles,” she calls him in the queer Scottish-English
sometimes used by “yowr richt asured good friend, Marie R.”
For here are guarded poignant souvenirs of long-dead men and women, of
whose sorrows and anguish of mind nothing is left but the yellowing
paper covered with the almost illegible writing of their times. You will
find the cry of Sir Philip Sidney to Jaen Wyer the Court surgeon of His
Highness of Cleves, written when he lay dying from his wound at the
battle of Zutphen: “Come, my Weier, come. I am in danger of my life and
I want you here. Neither living or dead shall I be ungrateful. I can
write no more, but I earnestly pray you to make haste. Farewell. At
Arnem. Yours, Ph. Sidney.” And Sir Walter Raleigh’s letter to Queen
Anne, the wife of James the First, where he says: “My extreme shortness
of breath doth grow fast on me, with the dispayre of obtayning so mich
grace to walke with my keeper up the hill within the Tower.”
The letters are not all sorrowful, but they all have the power to
breathe life into the dry bones of history. Not far from the heart-felt
appeal of the great Cardinal Wolsey to Henry VIII., praying for “grace,
mercy, remissyon and pardon,” and signed “Your Graces moste prostrat
poor chapleyn, creature, and bedisman,” is a letter from ten-year-old
William of Orange, quaint letters from Leicester and Essex to their
fickle queen, and a dignified epistle, lamenting the outbreak of war
between France and England, but renouncing his fealty and homage to
Richard II., from a fourteenth century member of that noble Picardie
family whose proud device was:
Roy ne suis,
ne prince ne duc,
ne comte aussy:
Je suis sire de Coucy.
Old letters are not the only treasures in this corner belonging to
another age. There are beautiful fourteenth-century chests, a bulla
carved by Benvenuto Cellini, that prince of goldsmiths and
autobiographers, and indeed the greatest treasure of all, that I have
kept till the last.
One first hears of the Domesday Book in the days when one has visions of
a vast tome with some vague connection with the Day of Judgment. Not
even _Little Arthur_ could dispel the prodigious respect and awe one
felt for it. I confused it with the book in which one’s manifold sins
are recorded, and even mature age does not prevent a little secret
satisfaction that has nothing historical at the sight of those fat,
brown hundreds-of-years-old books that we owe to William the Conqueror’s
Norman love for exact accounts.
The Domesday Books used to be kept in the Chapter House at Westminster
and were only moved to the Record Office in 1839.
NEVILL’S COURT
“Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this
city you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and
squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and
courts.”--DR. JOHNSON.
A stone’s throw from the east end of the Record Office is one of the
most curious unnoticed corners of old London. Go up Fetter Lane, which
is the next turning to Chancery Lane out of Fleet Street, and at No. 34,
close to the Moravian Chapel, you will see a narrow passage called
Nevill’s Court. This passage leads you straight into one of the oldest
bits of London still existing, for here in the very heart of newspaper
land are little ancient seventeenth-century houses with cottage gardens.
They give one the same feeling of unexpectedness as those other queer
little wooden houses with their high gables that you may see in
Collingwood Street, just on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge (I
think it is the third turning to the right). They stand beside the
church, just as they stood nearly three hundred years ago, when the
Thames washed right up to their doorsteps.
At No. 6 Nevill’s Court, secluded in its walled garden, is a big
seventeenth-century house, which must once have been inhabited by
citizens of wealth and position. It is extraordinary that Time and the
Vandal have left it still intact. I think the reason must be that they
have never been able to find it, like those other old houses in Wardrobe
Court near St. Paul’s, whose whereabouts certainly ought to be set as a
problem in a London taxi-driver’s examination.
But before seeking the house, there is something to notice in Nevill’s
Court. The main entrance to the Moravian Chapel is in Fetter Lane, at
No. 33. I once went to the service there at three o’clock on a Sunday
afternoon under the influence of the story of the messenger sent while
Bradbury was preaching, to announce Queen Anne’s death and the safety
of the Protestant succession. I hoped to find something to remind me of
the chapel’s great age: it is the oldest place of Protestant worship in
London, going back to Queen Mary’s day, when persecuted Protestants are
supposed to have met in the sawpit of the carpenter’s yard on this site.
Down the long, narrow passage, I found a bare, uncompromising chapel,
with a high, wooden pulpit, that I looked at with more respect than its
ugliness warranted, remembering that Baxter had preached here in 1672,
and that John Wesley and Whitefield had addressed crowded congregations
during the year Wesley spent with the Moravians between the time that he
left the Church of England and the founding of the Methodist persuasion
in 1740. The boundary line between St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and St.
Dunstan’s in the West is just in front of the pulpit, so the preacher
and his congregation are in different parishes.
The chapel has been used by the Moravian sect since 1738, and as their
lease does not expire for about another 250 years, it is not likely to
change ownership, in spite of the dwindling congregation.
It has been so many times restored and rebuilt that one gets a much
better idea of the antiquity of the building from the back entrance in
Nevill’s Court, for this is the only part that could possibly have
existed before the Great Fire.
CLIFFORD’S INN
“Oh! London! London! our delight,
Great flower that opens but at night.”
R. LE GALLIENNE.
Between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane is the entrance to Clifford’s Inn,
the oldest of all the Inns of Chancery. In January, 1921, big flaunting
notice-boards announced that Clifford’s Inn would be sold by auction,
but no immediate purchaser was found, and this quiet corner is still
unmolested, though by the time this book is printed it may have received
its _coup de grâce_ from the pickaxe.
Go and look at it while you may. It was founded in 1345 and takes its
name from a certain Robert Clifford of Edward II.’s reign. Sir Edward
Coke, the great Elizabethan lawyer, was a member of Clifford’s Inn and
left it for the Middle Temple in 1572.
Some of the Inn survived the Great Fire, and in the crazy-looking little
old hall the judges sat who decided the many boundary disputes after
that catastrophe. At the moment it is the headquarters of some society
“duquel je ne sçais pas le nom.”
Samuel Butler lived at No. 15 Clifford’s Inn for thirty-eight years, and
many an admirer of the genius of the man who wrote _Erewhon_ and _The
Way of all Flesh_ has made a pilgrimage to the quiet corner hidden away
a few yards from bustling Fleet Street.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CHARTERHOUSE AND ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S
“At length they all to mery London came,
To mery London my most kyndley nurse.”
SPENSER.
In days of old, when London’s present meatmarket was the fashionable
jousting-ground of the time, the knights and squires used to ride to
Smithfield up a road still called Giltspur Street, either from the
armourers who dwelt there, or from the jingling of the champions’ spurs
as they clattered by.
Any Holborn bus will take you to the corner of St. Sepulchre’s where the
dismal bell tolled the passing to Newgate of the condemned criminals. On
the right side of Giltspur Street is St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, that
survived the Great Fire only to be rebuilt in 1730. The history of this
great London hospital goes back eight hundred years, for it belonged to
the Priory, but Sir Thomas Gresham’s father persuaded Henry VIII. to
refound the institution in 1546.
There was once a naïve inscription under the statue of the fat boy whose
stone image is still to be seen at the corner where Cock Lane joins
Giltspur Street, on the left. At this point, once known as Pye Corner,
the Fire of London was stopped in 1666 by blowing up the houses, and the
writing underneath the figure of this extremely obese youth reminded the
passer-by that “the Great Fire ... was occasioned by the sin of
gluttony.” I do not know what authority there was for this allegation.
Whoever was responsible for the tablet probably had running in his
muddled head the names of Pye or Pie Corner and Pudding Lane in Thames
Street where the conflagration started. The fact that it was from the
house of a baker that the flames first spread may likewise have
influenced him, though it is unusual to be gluttonous on bread alone.
The Fire gave the moralist good cause for thought. It was an event so
tremendous, so far-reaching, so overwhelming, that it is strange that
the history books of England do not linger over its significance. For in
less than a week practically every landmark that went to make up the
most interesting old mediæval city in the world was swept away. The
ancient cathedral of St. Paul’s, 89 churches, 4 city gates, 460 streets
and 13,200 houses perished in the flames. With the exception, perhaps,
of the burning of Rome, there has never been so terrible a fire. Pepys
wept to see it.
A wonderful account has been left us by Evelyn:
The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonished,
that from the beginning, I know not by what despondency or fate,
they hardly stirr’d to quench it, so that there was nothing heard
or seene but crying out and lamentation, running about like
distracted creatures, without at all attempting to save even their
goods, such a strange consternation there was upon them, so as it
burned both in breadth and length, the Churches, Public Halls,
Exchange, Hospitals, Monuments, and ornaments, leaping after a
prodigious manner from house to house and streete to streete, at
greate distances one from ye other; for ye heate with a long set of
faire and warme weather, had even ignited the air, and prepar’d the
materials to conceive the fire, which devour’d after an incredible
manner, houses, furniture, and everything. Here we saw the Thames
cover’d with goods floating, all the barges and boates laden with
what some had time and courage to save, as, on ye other, ye carts,
&c., carrying out to the fields, which for many miles were strew’d
with moveables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both
people and what goods they could get away. Oh the miserable and
calamitous spectacle! such as haply the world had not seen the like
since the foundation of it, nor to be outdone till the universale
conflagration. All the skie was of a fiery aspect, like the top of
a burning oven, the light seen above forty miles round about for
many nights. God grant my eyes may never behold the like, now
seeing above 10,000 houses all in one flame; the noise and cracking
and thunder of the impetuous flames, ye shrieking of women and
children, the hurry of people, the fall of Towers, Houses, and
Churches, was like an hideous storme, and the aire all about so hot
and inflam’d that at last one was not able to approach it, so that
they were forc’d to stand still and let ye flames burn on, wch they
did for neere two miles in length and one in bredth. The clouds of
smoke were dismall, and reach’d upon computation neer fifty miles
in length. Thus I left it this afternoone burning, a resemblance of
Sodom, or the last day. London was, but is no more!
Everyone lent a hand; even King Charles came down from Whitehall and
worked hard beside his meanest subject--doing something useful for once
in a way. But it was a case of saving what one could and fleeing. Some
stacked their treasures in the churches (the booksellers of Paternoster
Row stored their books in St. Paul’s), but of the churches nothing was
left. Some buried their valuables underground and perhaps recovered them
two years afterwards, when the last of the rubbish was cleared away. By
the end of that fatal September the whole of the large district of
Moorfields, north of the city, was one vast camp of the homeless, and
there they stayed in shacks and shelters till the city was rebuilt, much
as the unfortunate people of devastated France were living during the
years of the Great War.
The trade of London ceased for a time; there were no shops, the
merchants had lost their goods, the warehouses were gutted, all records
of debts and commercial transactions were destroyed, there were no
schools, no almshouses.
Yet in four short years the English, with the same dogged energy that
they were putting recently into the making of trenches and dugouts, had
practically rebuilt their capital city. The churches, of course, took a
long time to finish; the beautiful and numerous halls of the City
Companies were not replaced in a day, but nearly 10,000 houses were up,
and since those seventeenth-century workmen were just Englishmen, with
no foreigners at hand to tell them to “ca’ canny,” everything was in a
fair way to completion.
As for Sir Christopher Wren, that amazing architect who stamped the
impress of his genius on the great city as we know it, who shall give
him enough honour? He designed and erected over forty public buildings,
amongst them the lovely and unique cluster of churches that lie around
St. Paul’s, yet for this work he was rewarded by the miserable salary of
£100 a year, with £200 a year for the rebuilding of the great cathedral.
ST. BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT
“The citye of London that is to me so dere and sweete.”
CHAUCER.
Opposite St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is Smithfield, new and blatant, and
smelling hideously of raw meat. Take courage and go on northwards, for
in a few minutes you will come to the most wonderful old church in
London--older than any other except the chapel in the White Tower. There
is something about the almost primitive simplicity of its massive stone
pillars that carries one back more directly to the times of the Norman
conquerors than a thousand long descriptions gathered from history
books.
What you see is only the choir and transept of a much larger church
built for the Priory of St. Bartholomew by the founder Rahere in or
about the year 1102. His tomb is on the left as you enter, and high up
on the right is the lovely oriel window where Prior Bolton, who died in
1532, could sit or kneel at his ease, without even the trouble of coming
downstairs from his house, and look down into the church he did so much
to rebuild and restore.
[Illustration: RAHERE’S TOMB IN ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH]
St. Bartholomew’s has had a turbulent history. There is the dramatic
story of Archbishop Boniface of Lambeth Palace, a Savoyard who took it
into his crafty head that he would like to annex the offertory of St.
Bartholomew’s. On a certain Sunday morning he set out from Lambeth, with
a train of attendants with mail armour under their robes. The
description of what happened is delicious in Matthew Paris’s words, as
quoted by Stowe:
Amongst other memorable matters, touching this priorie, one is of
an Archbishop’s Visitation, which Matthew Paris hath thus. Boniface
(sayeth he) Archbishoppe of Canterbury, in his Visitation came to
this priorie, where being received with procession in the most
solemne wise, hee said that hee passed not upon the honor, but came
to visite them, to whom the Canons aunswered that they having a
learned Bishop, ought not in contempt of him to be visited by any
other; which aunswere so much offended the Archbishop that he
forthwithe fell on the Supprior, and smote him on the face, saying,
indeede, indeede, dooth it become you English Traytors so to
aunswere mee, thus raging with oaths not to bee recited, hee rent
in peeces the rich Cope of the Supprior, and trode it under his
feete, and thrust him against a pillar of the Chauncell with such
violence, that hee had almost killed him: but the Canons seeing
their supprior thus almost slayne, came and plucked off the
Archbishoppe with such force that they overthrewe him backwardes,
whereby they might see that he was armed and prepared to fight, the
Archbishoppe’s men seeing theyr master downe, being all strangers
and their master’s countrimen born at Prowence, fell upon the
canons, beat them, tare them, and trod them under feete, at length
the Canons getting away as well as they could, ran bloody and myry,
rent and torne, to the Bishoppe of London to complaine, who had
them goe to the king at Westminster, and tell him thereof,
whereupon some of them went thether, the rest were not able, they
were so sore hurt, but when they came to Westminster, the king
would neither heare nor see them, so they returned without
redresse, in the mean season the whole Citie was in an uprore, and
ready to have rung the Common bell, and to have hewed the
Archbishoppe into small pieces, who was secretly crept to Lambhith,
where they sought him, and not knowing him by sight, sayd to
themselves, where is this Ruffian, that cruell smiter, hee is no
winner of soules, but an exactor of money, whome neyther God, nor
any lawfull or free election, did bring to this promotion, but the
king did unlawfully intrude him, being utterly unlearned, a
stranger borne, and having a wife etc: but the Archbishop conveyed
himselfe over, and went to the king with a great complaint against
the Canons, whereas himself was guilty.
But in spite of Henry III.’s refusal to see the outraged sub-prior and
his loyal canons they had their revenge in time.
The final result of that little Sunday morning jaunt of Archbishop
Boniface was that he was obliged to build the chapel of Lambeth Palace
about the year 1247 as a penance for having tried to encroach on the
right of the holy Prior of St. Bartholomew’s.
The quaint gateway by which one enters the scene of the exploits of
these energetic churchmen adds a special charm to the place. The timbers
of the old Elizabethan house above it were only discovered in 1915, when
some of the tiles that long concealed them were loosened.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT]
ST. JOHN’S GATE
“For knighthood is not in the feats of Warre,
As for to fight in quarrel right or wrong.
But in a cause which truth can not defarre.”
STEPHEN HAWES.
Not very far away, stretching across St. John’s Lane, on the other side
of Smithfield and the Charterhouse Road, is another gate, dating from
1504, with the arms of Prior Docwra, Who built it, above the archway.
This was once the south entrance of the great Priory of the Knights
Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, one of the richest
and most powerful of the religious houses that spread over London in the
Middle Ages. With the exception of this gate and of the Norman crypt in
the church of St. John adjoining (the keys are at the caretaker’s, 112
Clerkenwell Road), nothing is left of that great monastery that the
people grew to hate for its pride. When Wat Tyler led his band of
peasants to burn and pillage, they burnt and pillaged with special zest
the manors of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, wherever they found
them, and particularly the priory in London, incidentally beheading the
Grand Prior. The buildings rose again and lasted till the reign of
Edward VI., when they were blown up and pulled down and some of the
stone used to build the Somerset House of the day.
But the old gate still stands, austere and turret-crowned, and we may
still “behold it with reverence,” like Dr. Johnson. The modern
representatives of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which devotes
itself to ambulance and hospital work and did admirable service in the
war, went back in 1887 to live within its ancient walls.
There are many things of interest in the gatehouse that make the trouble
of writing to the secretary of the Order for permission to see them
worth while. There are relics from Malta and Rhodes, an Elizabethan
chimneypiece in the chancery, and other souvenirs, but the coffer that
contains these treasures is more interesting than anything it holds, and
that every passer-by may see.
THE CHARTERHOUSE
“I never think of London, which I love, without thinking of that
palace which David built for Bathsheba.”--LOWELL.
Coming back to Charterhouse Street and turning to the left, five
minutes’ walk will bring you to Charterhouse Square, where you can find
one of the most lovely and gracious things in all London.
People often bewail the passing of old London without knowing that
within this short distance from Holborn Circus they can see a perfect
specimen of a sixteenth-century nobleman’s house. There it stands, only
needing the addition of a little furniture of the period, that
[Illustration: Sᵗ. John’s Gate Clerkenwell Residence of Edward Cave]
would never be missed from South Kensington Museum, and you could see
exactly how my Lord Howard lived when he entertained--and plotted
against--his royal mistress three hundred years ago.
One does not like to think of the number of people who leave London
without ever having seen the Charterhouse. It is one of the most
beautiful places in all London, and its story is packed with romance,
intrigue, adventure and benevolence.
The tale falls into three parts. It is begun by that gallant Hainaulter,
Sir Walter de Manny, as the English called Walter, Lord of Mausny near
Valenciennes, who came over to England in the train of Philippa of
Hainault.
According to Froissart he was a “very gentil parfyte knighte,” and when
he saw the ghastly heaps of dead bodies of plague-stricken people lying
in the streets in 1349, he bought from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital a
piece of land called No Man’s Land and caused the dead to be decently
buried there. Their bodies at rest, he had thought for their souls, and
on March 25, 1349, he laid the foundation-stone of a chapel where the
relations might pray for their dead. Twenty years later Sir Walter Manny
laid another stone, that of the first cell for the Carthusian monks he
brought over from France. The wives and sisters of the dead had prayed
so long in the chapel that the right could not be taken from them, so
for once the strict Carthusian rule was relaxed and a special place was
set apart for the womenkind to come and pray.
Sir Walter Manny died in 1372. He was buried at the foot of the step of
the great altar in the chapel that may be seen to-day, and in the
Charterhouse his Carthusian monks prayed according to the tenets of
their faith for a hundred and sixty-five years more before the last
prior, John Houghton, having been hung on Tyburn Tree, and many of the
brothers tortured, the rest submitted to the king’s will. The House of
the Salutation of the Mother of God in the Charterhouse near London was
dissolved shortly afterwards.
The second phase of the Charterhouse story is a very different one.
Twice during the following years it was prepared for the coming of a
fair queen, whose head was bowed on Tower Hill instead of in the old
chapel.
Charterhouse was granted to that wily old courtier, Sir Edward North, in
1545, and eight years later he “conveyed” it to John Dudley, Earl of
Northumberland, the father-in-law of Lady Jane Grey. The Earl of
Northumberland never wanted it for himself, as he had already Durham
House in the Adelphi, but there was his son Guildford with his fair
young wife to be lodged fittingly. So he brought up much furniture from
Kenilworth and stored it hard by, little dreaming that his bold plans
would miscarry and that he would die on Tower Hill a year before the
children whose home he had planned shared the same fate.
North was granted the Charterhouse again by Queen Mary, and when
Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 she stayed six days there before
her coronation.
Three years later she paid the old house another visit, but North died
in 1564 and Charterhouse passed into the hands of crafty, brilliant,
fickle Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk.
* * * * *
Once more Charterhouse, now known as Howard House, was to be prepared
for a royal mistress, and in a royal manner.
The new owner, buoyed with hopes of a marriage with Mary, Queen of
Scots, began to put his new house in order. He added the screen in the
great hall and the “Tarrass Walk,” the lovely tapestry room, the
duchess’s withdrawing-room and the magnificent great staircase.
* * * * *
On the 6th of August, 1568, Elizabeth came in state from Hampton Court
to Howard House, to pay a visit to her disloyal servant, already
plotting against her and arranging the duchess’s salon for her rival.
The air was thick with intrigue, and by the autumn the rumour of the
marriage with Mary had reached Elizabeth. Norfolk denied it, but a year
later the truth came out, and he spent some time in the Tower, to be
released, under surveillance, when the Black Death threatened that
district.
He had learned no lesson. Either a devouring ambition or the attraction
of the most fascinating woman in Europe lured him on. Plots and
counterplots were hatched in the long gallery that now forms part of the
upper-story quarters of the Master and Registrar of Charterhouse. Mary’s
emissaries were seized--one of them, called Bailly, has carved the
lesson these events taught him in the Beauchamp Room in the Tower--and
the luckless queen was betrayed in her turn, even as Elizabeth had been,
by the man who so short a time before had decorated the Charterhouse to
receive her as a bride.
He told, like a coward, the place where her cipher was hidden under a
tile in the Charterhouse, but nothing could save his own neck, and he
followed his father and his two girl cousins, Anne Boleyn and Katherine
Howard, in June 1572.
* * * * *
The next owner of Howard House, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was only
a boy of fifteen when he inherited his father’s property, but he was of
sterner stuff, for he refused to abjure the Roman Catholic faith he had
embraced, even to see his wife and children, before he died, worn out,
and under sentence of death, in 1595. Elizabeth had kept him prisoner in
the Beauchamp Tower for ten years, and it
[Illustration: THE CHARTERHOUSE FROM THE SQUARE]
was there, in 1587, that he carved the words, “The more suffering for
Christ in this world, so much the more glory with Christ in the life to
come.”
He had lived very little at the Charterhouse, and when it passed into
the hands of his half-brother Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, the
fortunes of the old house changed with the advent of the great English
Admiral who could swear with truth “‘Fore God I am no coward,” when he
was admiral of the squadron at Flores in the Azores, “and the little
_Revenge_ ran on right into the heart of the foe.”
Lord Thomas Howard was one of the honoured, trusted servants of
Elizabeth, and she came once more in 1603, not long before her death, to
pay him a visit in the Charterhouse.
In a few months James I. came there, even as she had done, to spend the
days before his coronation as the guest of the son of the man who had
been his mother’s false suitor.
But brave Lord Thomas Howard was building a new house at Audley End, and
needing money he sold Howard House for £13,000 to Sir Thomas Sutton. The
brilliant days of the Charterhouse as a nobleman’s mansion were at an
end--another chapter was concluded and the third phase of the story was
to begin.
Sir Thomas Sutton, the new owner, was the Lord Rhondda of the sixteenth
century. He was a Lincolnshire man with a wide knowledge of men and
things, whose military profession never prevented his having a keen eye
for business. He made a large fortune before he died in 1611, leaving
the provision to found a hospital for eighty impoverished gentlemen and
a school for forty boys, under the name of the Hospital of King James in
Charterhouse.
There was much discussion, “about it and about,” before Sir Thomas
Sutton’s chosen trustees could carry out his wishes. James I., true son
of his father Darnley, had to be placated by a _pourboire_ of £10,000,
and even Bacon, jealous at not being among the trustees, tried to
belittle the bequest and advise that the money should be used for his
master’s benefit instead of for the poor. Sir Edward Coke, Lady Hatton’s
husband, steered the hospital through the shoals that surrounded its
launching and the more dangerous peril of the king’s genial idea that
the Charterhouse revenues might fitly be used to pay for his army. The
Charterhouse was founded, and for three hundred years the school has
produced great Englishmen and the hospital harboured men who have found
that in the evening of a working life the stars do not always appear.
Among the Charterhouse scholars have been the bearers of great names
such as Lovelace and Crashaw, Addison and Steele, John Wesley, Sir Henry
Havelock, Thackeray, Leech, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Lord Alverstone and
many others. The school was removed in 1872 to Godalming, and the
buildings were taken over by the Merchant Taylors’ Company for their
boys’ school.
The hospital for the poor brothers no longer harbours eighty men. Their
number is reduced to sixty owing to the depreciation in the value of Sir
Thomas Sutton’s land and the fact that since the Charterhouse has always
been considered a wealthy foundation no further bequests have ever been
made to bring the number once more up to the four score of the founder’s
intention.
That, briefly told, is the dramatic tale of the Charterhouse. You will
readily believe it all if you take the District Railway to Aldersgate
Street and go and see the Charterhouse for yourself. Its beauty is
unimpaired by time. The Guesten Hall where the poor brethren take their
meals, the great sixteenth century carved staircase, the chapel where
Colonel Newcome sat, the false duke’s arcade, and the old gatehouse--all
are there and many more things to recall the most dramatic pages of
England’s history.
CHAPTER IX
A STROLL IN WHITEHALL AND WESTMINSTER
“And all that passes inter nos,
May be proclaimed at Charing Cross.”
SWIFT.
Dr. Johnson once said, “Why, sir, Fleet Street has a very animated
appearance, but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing
Cross.”
Certainly Charing Cross is the best of all starting-points for exploring
expeditions, and by Charing Cross I mean the south-east corner of
Trafalgar Square.
From there you may wander along the Strand, or north into Bloomsbury, or
through Cockspur Street into the realms of Mayfair, or southward to the
Thames, and in every direction there are unnoticed stories to be found.
UNITED SERVICES MUSEUM
“More kindly love have I to that place than to any other in
yerth.”--CHAUCER.
One day I turned my back on Charing Cross to go to St. Margaret’s _via_
Whitehall, blissfully unconscious of the fact that it happened to be
Saturday and that the church closes its doors every day at 4 p.m. and
for all day on Saturdays.
At the corner of the Horse Guards Avenue I paused undecided, having
taken months to summon up courage to pass the giant at the entrance to
the United Services Museum!
He snorts with such a supercilious sniff at the would-be visitor that
you have to remember it may possibly be only the good-natured contempt
of one service for another, and that the Orion’s figurehead may really
be elevating his nose at the Horse Guards across the way, on which I
notice that Spencer Compton, 8th Duke of Devonshire (b. 1833, d. 1908)
also bends a grave and somewhat disapproving eye from his elevated
statue in the middle of the road.
Mr. Street, in his delicious _Ghosts of Piccadilly_, says, “There is
ever a Devonshire filling his eminent position, calm, retiring,
imperturbable, and never an amusing thing to tell of any one of them,”
and this statue tells you to believe him.
To come back to the United Services Museum--a thing that far too few
people do, for it is one of London’s many buried treasures--don’t be
misled by any optimistic guide-book that tells you the admission is
sixpence. That is only true on Saturday afternoon; at other times you
part with a shilling unless you are a soldier or sailor in uniform, or
one of the many troops of schoolchildren that are admitted free every
week.
There are myriads of things to delight any childish heart--cunningly
contrived models of ships, plans of battles, the actual walking-stick
and snuff-box of Sir Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell’s sword, the very
bugle that sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade, a room devoted to
souvenirs of Lord Wolseley, and rows of other treasures with heroic
stories of brave men.
I have yet to find a museum without a Napoleonic souvenir, and here
there is a startling one--“Marengo’s” skeleton. You are so engrossed by
the relics of General Wolfe and Nelson and Wellington and other heroes,
that you almost forget what you came to see--the Old Banqueting Hall
where they are lodged, the beautiful Palladian structure that Inigo
Jones built in 1622--all that is now left of the old palace of
Whitehall.
The nine ceiling paintings that Rubens did at Charles I.’s request look
as fresh as if they had been painted yesterday, having been restored too
many times. Rubens got £3000 for them, while Wren only received £100 a
year for rebuilding all the City churches and £200 a year for rebuilding
St. Paul’s--but Wren was an Englishman and Rubens a foreigner.
The Banqueting Hall was all that James I. accomplished of the great
palace he meant to let Inigo Jones build for him in Whitehall, and just
outside the hall Charles I. met his death, a short distance from the
statue where
Comely and calm he rides
Hard by his own Whitehall.
A little crowd clusters every morning at
[Illustration: UNITED SERVICES MUSEUM]
eleven to see the guard relieved at the Horse Guards, now the office of
the C.I.C. of the Home Forces.
On the king’s birthday, June 3rd, the Trooping of the Colour at the
Horse Guards is an unforgettable pageant.
The English have not, like the French, the courteous custom of saluting
their flag, but on this occasion every civilian head is bared as the
drums beat and swords flash, and the uplifted colours are borne slowly
round the parade ground to the strains of _God Save the King_ and the
old regimental marches, played by the band of the Life Guards in their
magnificent uniforms.
It is a gallant sight, and a goodly thing to see.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY
“It is a wonderful place ... a nation, not a city.”
Even more than of the British Museum I feel that it would be an
impertinence to speak of Westminster Abbey as a London corner unnoticed
by Londoners,--and yet I have known people who have left London and gone
back across the seas with never a thought for the cloisters nor a
“memorie” of Jane Lister, “dear childe,” who lies buried there, people
who may have perfunctorily “done” the Abbey with a guide but have never
lingered there at the uncrowded hours till the exquisite beauty of its
many corners has become a possession they can carry away with them.
I can make no attempt to point out the manifold interest of the Abbey,
but there are certain places that I love that I would not willingly let
anyone miss.
There is no need to write of the interior. No one was ever known to miss
the Poets’ Corner, or the Coronation Chair, or Henry VII.’s Chapel, or
the Chapel of Edward the Confessor, but I have known people who visited
Westminster Abbey and missed seeing the Chapter House.
To miss seeing that thirteenth-century octagonal room is a calamity. It
is not only very beautiful, with a beauty that reminds you at once of
the Sainte Chapelle, but there is an atmosphere about it that takes you
back through the centuries to the time when Simon de Montfort was laying
the foundations of constitutional government, and the first parliament
of twenty-three barons, one hundred and twenty ecclesiastics, two
knights from each shire and two burghers from each town met in this very
room.
The House of Commons was born within these grey walls nearly five and a
half centuries ago, when the Commons were told to go to “leur ancienne
place en la maison du Chapitre de l’Abbeye de Westminster.” The members
met here till they moved to the Chapel of St. Stephen, within the walls
of Westminster Palace, in 1547.
Turn your back on the ugly cases of the seals
[Illustration: POETS’ CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY]
and charters that should have been removed to the Record Office with the
rest of the public records that were stored here since Elizabethan days,
and look instead at the faint fourteenth-century mural decoration of
Christ surrounded by the Christian virtues. Even the unsightly cases
cannot destroy the sense of the lovely proportions of the
shaft-supported roof and the arcaded walls with the six noble windows,
filled with glass none the less beautiful because it happens to be
modern, and all the more interesting because it honours the memory of
that great lover of Westminster, Dean Stanley.
When Edward the Confessor about 1050 built the first round Chapter House
on this spot for his Benedictine monks to transact the business of their
monastery, they little thought to what varied uses it would be put. The
present octagonal room has seen the age-long struggle of the people for
their liberties. It was damaged in the Civil Wars and suffered from
repairs in the eighteenth century. It has had its painted walls
concealed by unsightly cupboards, when the public records were stored
there. It has housed the Domesday Book till it and the records were
removed in 1862, and now that it has been restored as nearly as possible
to its old beauty, it exists, spacious and dignified as ever, to remind
the passing visitor of the value of tradition and the history of a great
nation.
A few steps farther along the cloister is another less well-known
corner, the Chapel of the Pyx--not so ecclesiastical a chamber as it
sounds, “pyx” meaning only a chest or box where the standard of
references for testing the coins of the realm used to be kept. Nowadays
they make these tests at the hall of the ancient Company of Goldsmiths,
at the corner of Foster Lane and Gresham Street.
Long ago the king’s treasure was kept here, and only the king and my
Lord Chancellor and the Abbot of Westminster had the keys, a fact that
was very inconvenient when a robbery occurred, as at least one abbot
found to his cost. He and forty of his monks saw the inside of the Tower
in consequence, but punishment was not always so light, as the pieces of
human skin still to be seen nailed to the door will show.
Inside the seven-locked door with its gruesome lining, that is only
opened to visitors on Tuesdays and Fridays, you find a low vaulted room
supported by rounded Romanesque arches on thick short pillars, and a
stone altar--the earliest in the Abbey.
After leaving the Chapel of the Pyx, stroll along the Norman cloister to
the left, past the Norman undercroft, where, if you have a mind to pay a
small fee to the verger in the Poets’ Corner, you can see any day in the
week the quaint effigies that used to be carried at royal funerals.
Through the dark entry you come to the Little Cloister, a part of the
old monastery, that ought only to be seen on a hot summer’s day, for in
the winter-time it is dreary and your thoughts tend to turn to the smug
ingratitude that allowed the woman Nelson loved to die in poverty,--for
she once lived in the tower built by Abbot Littlington and originally
the bell tower of the church.
Turn back through the south walk of the Great Cloister and come into the
Deanery Yard.
It is customary to write to the dean for permission to see the Jerusalem
Chamber, but, if you go without this formality and he happens to be
absent, the caretaker will show it to you and tell quite unique stories
which I will not steal his thunder by repeating.
You go through the sixteenth-century Jericho Room first, and it too is
interesting, with its linenfold deal panelling. It is the ante-room to
the Jerusalem Chamber, and is now used as a sort of vestry room for the
cathedral. In the Jerusalem Chamber, as every schoolboy knows, King
Henry IV. died in 1413. I refuse to quote Shakespeare on this occasion.
It is a fine fourteenth-century cedar-panelled room, and the light
through fragments of very ancient glass in the windows shines on early
seventeenth-century tapestries and a very old mediæval portrait of
Richard II. It is a gracious place, but when the authors of the Revised
Version of the Bible worked here in 1870, it failed to inspire them with
the same sense of the beauty of words that made their predecessors
produce the finest literature in the world.
Many famous men have lain in state in the Jerusalem Room before their
interment in the Abbey--Congreve and Addison were both honoured in this
way, and that seventeenth-century poet-diplomatist, Matthew Prior, who
was so esteemed by Louis XIV. that he sent him a bust by the great
Coysevox. With one of those piquant inconsistencies that enliven
history, Nance Oldfield, Mrs. Bracegirdle’s rival, also lay in state in
the Jerusalem Chamber before she was buried in the Abbey. Mrs.
Bracegirdle lies in front of the entrance to the Chapter House, but
Nance Oldfield was the only actress honoured by burial within the Abbey
walls.
The Jerusalem Chamber was originally the drawing-room of the Abbot of
Westminster, and in James the First’s day a banquet was given here to
the French Ambassadors who came over to arrange the marriage of Prince
Charles and the daughter of Henri IV.
ASHBURNHAM HOUSE
“If ever princess put all princes down,
For temperance, prowess, prudence, equity;
This, this was she, that, in despite of death,
Lives still admired, adored, Elizabeth!”
ANON.
Coming out of Dean’s Court and passing through the gateway in the east
side of Dean’s Yard, you find another enticing and little-known corner
in Westminster School in Little Dean’s Yard.
Every monastery had to have its school, so the monks of St. Peter’s
started theirs--the forerunner of the Westminster School or St. Peter’s
College founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1560. Ben Jonson went to school
here, and so did George Herbert and Dryden and Cowper and Southey,
Hakluyt of _Voyages_ fame, and Wren and Locke and Warren Hastings and
many other famous men I do not know, including Prior.
The school sergeant at the lodge will show the Edward III. College Hall,
with its minstrel gallery and oaken tables made from the beams of the
Spanish Armada. Forty years ago the school annexed Ashburnham House,
another interesting unnoticed corner that can be seen any Saturday
afternoon, on application to the hall porter. This charming house was
built in the seventeenth century by Webb, a famous disciple of Inigo
Jones. Alas, his celebrated staircase is given over to dust and spiders,
and only restored to a semblance of its former beauty on state
occasions, such as Founders’ Day in November or at Christmas, when the
boys perform their well-known Latin plays.
There are many interesting things about the school and the buildings
that I leave untold, so go and see for yourself this quiet backwater of
London.
ST. MARGARET’S CHURCH
“That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise Thee may not cease.”
GEORGE HERBERT.
St. Margaret’s Church, open till four except on a Saturday, is
interesting not only for its architectural beauty, but for its many
associations, and since 1916 it has had a deepened interest for the
British Dominions beyond the Seas, as it was then created their parish
church.
Pepys, who simply refuses to be left out of anything, was married here
to his pretty wife, of whom he was so proud that she need not have been
jealous of Mrs. Knipp.
In the chancel lies Sir Walter Raleigh, buried in St. Margaret’s after
his execution in front of Westminster Palace in 1618. Admiral Blake lies
in the churchyard, and there is a fine window in his honour on the north
side.
The celebrated east window has had a career that is not without its
comic side. It was originally sent over to England by Ferdinand and
Isabella of Spain as a betrothal gift to Prince Arthur, the eldest son
of Henry VII., with whom they had arranged the marriage of their
daughter Catherine.
Before the window arrived the bridegroom had died, and Henry VIII., who
married the bride, did not want a window with a portrait of Prince
Arthur and Catherine. He sent it to Waltham Abbey, and from that time
its history is a moving one.
At the dissolution of the monasteries, the last abbot sent the window to
New Hall in Essex, later bought by the Villiers family, who buried it.
At the Restoration General Monk set it up again till its next owner took
it down, and had the window packed away in a case till he found a
purchaser for fifteen guineas. In 1758 the churchwardens of St.
Margaret’s bought back the window for four hundred guineas, but its
troubles were not ended.
The Dean and Chapter of Westminster thought the window a superstitious
image, and it was only after a lawsuit lasting seven years that the
churchwardens were allowed to keep their window.
As usual, I have not told of half the beauty and interest of this
fifteenth-century parish church, only of enough, I hope, to make a
reader go and discover the rest for himself, but let him take thought to
go before four o’clock and not on a Saturday.
CHAPTER X
MUSEUMS
BRITISH MUSEUM
“O place! O people! Manners! framed to please
All nations, customs, kindreds, languages!”
HERRICK.
I am rather diffident about putting any name on this chapter, for no one
would ever think of calling the British Museum an unnoticed place. It
has what the newspapers call a world-wide reputation. Its very name
smacks of solid worth with nothing unexpected about it. It is an
institution looming large and august, its massive masonry dominating
Bloomsbury as its reputation does the universe, and absorbing an
unending queue of earnest-minded people intent on storing their minds
with knowledge.
And yet, every time my frivolous feet have strayed through that solemn
portico, I have longed to tell the thousands of people who never dream
of coming so far north as Great Russell Street, W.C. 1, of unexpected
things they could find there if they would. I remember as a small person
being made to recite the names of the seven wonders of the world, and I
used to repeat solemnly, “The Temple of Mausolaus at Halicarnassus--the
Pyramid of Cheops--the Lighthouse of Alexandria--the Colossus of
Rhodes--the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis--the Statue of Jupiter at
Olympus, and the Temple of Diana at Ephesus”--with a considerable amount
of annoyance that I could never hope to see these ancient splendours.
When I found the remains of two of them in the British Museum, I felt,
like the Queen of Sheba, that the half had not been told to me, and
since that first moment of delighted surprise how many unexpected things
I have found there which make me long to say to all the unwitting London
visitors, “Don’t be put off by the solemnity of its name and the
distance from Bond Street, but go, only go, and you will be rewarded.”
The proper way to make friends with a museum, as with people, is to get
to know it slowly, or its very excellences will give you a surfeited
memory. I once avoided the beautiful old Cluny Museum in Paris for many
years, because I had been oppressed by the fact that it contained 11,000
objects of interest. No one had shown me how to ignore their number and
get to love the very walls of Cardinal Jacques d’Amboise’s stately
house, by never crossing the sunny courtyard to see more than one sort
of exhibit at a time.
I think this plan is even more applicable to the British Museum, that
great collection, partly bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane and opened to the
public in 1759. There are two things the hurried visitor can do so as to
carry away the possession of a definite memory of one phase of the
treasures contained in the vast building in Great Russell Street. He may
choose to go there at the hours of 12 or 3 P.M. and follow one of the
two expert lecturers who conduct people each day to see a different
group of exhibits and listen to their story. (Lists of these lectures
are given at the door.) Or he may choose for himself the sort of thing
he finds most interesting and sternly traverse the other rooms intent
only on the objects of his choice. In either case he is luckier than the
visitors in the early days of the museum’s existence, who were herded in
companies of only fifteen for a two hours’ visit.
To-day one is diffident about directing any choice; as the old guardian
said, “Most people ’as their fancies!” They may lie in the direction of
the mummy rooms, where the prehistoric man, so startlingly like a
modern, crouches in his grave, with his stone flints within reach, or in
the room of gold ornaments and gems, where lie the necklaces that rose
and fell on breasts dead these thousand years, necklaces that differ
nowise from the amethyst and jade trinkets to be seen in Bond Street
to-day.
Or you may like best to stroll in that pleasant place the King’s
Library--a long, gracious apartment where the sunlight gilds the warm
brown of the lovely tooled bindings of George III.’s books.
Into this spacious room come all sorts of people--small boys in
knickerbockers anxious to consult the postage stamp collections,
artists to pore over delicately illuminated pages of fifteenth-century
manuscripts, students to worship at the shrine of first editions of
Shakespeare and Spenser, and people who are touched with the human
interest of poignant letters like that of Mary Queen of Scots to “ma
bonne sœur et cousine Elizabeth.”
But when I am fancy-free, and come to the British Museum, perhaps with
only an hour to spare and no very definite idea about what I want to
see, I choose one of two courses. Either I spend the entire hour in
walking briskly through the galleries and taking a sort of bird’s-eye
view of the different kinds of treasures that the museum guards, without
making an attempt at intimacy with any one of them--or I turn to the
left of the big entrance hall, pass through the Roman and Greco-Roman
rooms and spend the whole time in the western wing, because there I can
see the art of three great nations of the ancient world and the greatest
of all the museum’s treasures--the Elgin Marbles. In the galleries
surrounding them are the stupendous sculptures of Egypt and Assyria;
statues of the Egyptian kings who lived 3000 years ago; colossal bulls,
human-headed, that once guarded the gate of the palace that belonged to
the father of one Sennacherib, King of Assyria, who “came up against all
the defenced cities of Judah and took them,” and fragments from his own
great palace of Nineveh.
Théophile Gautier’s words:
Tout passe.--L’art robuste
Seul a l’étérnité:
Le buste
Survit à la cité,
come into one’s mind, for the bas-reliefs show the effect of the fire of
the Babylonians and Medes when they destroyed “Nineveh that great city”
in 609 B.C., yet they survived and the city is as dust! What a people
they must have been, the folk who built the Lycian tombs, you can see
best when you are half-way down the steps into the Mausoleum room, where
lie the tremendous fragments of one of the seven wonders of the ancient
world--the tomb that his wife and sister built for Mausolos, Prince of
Caria, in a little town in Asia Minor some 2275 years ago.
Traces of another of the seven wonders are in the Ephesus room, where
remains of the vast Temple of Artemis, “Diana of the Ephesians,” are
gathered, and this room leads to the greatest wonder of them all, the
pediment groups of statues from the Parthenon at Athens, that most of us
call _tout court_ the Elgin Marbles.
I believe that a great many people have a vague idea that Thomas Bruce,
seventh Earl of Elgin, did a little “scrounging” when he was British
ambassador to the Porte in 1801, and that our possession of these
sculptures is due to a mixture of luck and audacity.
It is really due to the common sense, artistic perception and
generosity of a statesman who at great inconvenience and a cost to
himself of £70,000, only half of which sum he later received from the
English Government, removed the treasures that were daily being
destroyed by the Turkish bombardment and that, but for his action, would
have been irretrievably lost to the world.
One does not need to be an artist nor learned in artistic lore to feel
the peculiar charm of the Elgin Marbles. I have seen quite ignorant
people approach them with unseeing eyes and some flippancy about their
mutilation on the lips, but after a few minutes’ contemplation,
something of the calm beauty of the pose, the benignant sweep of the
drapery, damp with the sea-spray, the mystery of those nostalgic
figures, penetrates the onlooker and the work of Pheidias and his
craftsmen has wrought its spell.
Now and then the official lecturer tells the story of what they had in
their minds when they carved those noble statues, carved every inch of
them, even the parts they thought would never again be seen by any human
eye once they were placed on the pediment of the Great Temple, and you
come away feeling that your eyes have been opened to a great beauty and
the truth of it sinks into the soul.
It is not possible in these brief notes to mention more than a very few
of the unnoticed treasures in the British Museum. As the old porter
said, there is something to interest everyone.
If you search you may come across the manuscript of Rupert Brooke’s
immortal sonnet, the toys small children played with 2000 years ago,
Mrs. Delany’s curious paper flowers in the students’ room of the print
collection and many, many other things to draw you there.
FOUNDLING HOSPITAL
“O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town,
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own!”
BLAKE.
Not far from the British Museum is the Foundling Hospital in Guilford
Street. One hears of it vaguely as an orphan asylum where the children
wear quaint costumes that may be seen at the service in the chapel on
Sunday mornings, when the singing attracts many visitors.
But there are more reasons than that to take you to this corner off the
beaten track of the West End. For one thing, it may not be there very
long. Already there are rumours that the Foundling Hospital may be moved
to the country and one more link with eighteenth-century London be
snapped.
Institutions as a rule are about as dull to see as to live in, but the
Foundling Hospital is an exception. Handel, Hogarth and Dickens all gave
tangible proof that they loved the place, and people from all over the
world come to see it, attracted either by the reputation of the choir,
the fame of the pictures in the museum, or the pathetic interest of the
children, who indeed look merry, healthy little creatures.
Its story is almost too well known to need repetition: A
seventeenth-century sea-captain, living during the latter half of his
life in Rotherhithe, was distressed by the sight of deserted children he
saw on his way to and from the city. It took good Captain Thomas Coram
seventeen years of hard work to turn his dream of a well-endowed
hospital for deserted children into a reality, but in 1739 he got a
royal charter and a house was opened for them in Hatton Garden. The
Foundling Hospital, as we know it, was begun in 1742.
Hogarth has painted a wonderful portrait of the founder, and looking at
the cheerful benevolent face one can understand why he wrote, “The
portrait I painted with the utmost pleasure and in which I particularly
wished to excel was that of Captain Coram for the Foundling Hospital.”
The kindly eyes that Hogarth drew were forever seeing something to be
done for his fellow men, for the Foundling Hospital was only one of the
old sea-captain’s philanthropies, to which he literally gave away all he
had. In his old age, when he was asked if he would mind accepting a
pension collected from his friends, he said quite simply, “I have not
wasted the little wealth of which I was formerly possessed in
self-indulgence or vain expenses, and am not ashamed to confess that in
this my old age I am poor.” He accepted a pension of a little more than
£100, and is buried in the vaults under the Foundling Hospital Chapel.
That is the story of Thomas Coram, whose statue is at the entrance gate
and whose name is remembered in Great Coram Street and Little Coram
Street.
The best time to see the hospital is at the Sunday morning service at
eleven o’clock, and the easiest way to reach it is by the tube to
Russell Square. Turn to the right on leaving the tube and walk down
Grenville Street and Guilford Street, and the Foundling Hospital will be
seen to the left.
Go up to the gallery if you want to see the children seated on each side
of the organ, dressed in the quaint costume that has never altered since
it was decreed by the founder.
Dickens, who loved the hospital and had a seat in the chapel during the
ten years he lived in Bloomsbury, makes Mrs. Meagles say in _Little
Dorrit_:
Oh, dear, dear, ... when I saw all those children ranged tier above
tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on
earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any
wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces,
wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn
world.
But the rules of the Foundling Hospital have changed since Thomas
Coram’s time. Only the children of known mothers are now received, and
[Illustration: FOUNDLING HOSPITAL]
if later in life the mother marries and can prove that she is able to
support her child, she can claim it again. The children are never
allowed to be adopted. They are sent to foster-mothers in the country
when first received, and only come to the hospital when they are six.
The girls with few exceptions are trained for domestic service and the
boys as regimental bandsmen, if they show talent, or they are
apprenticed to different trades when they are fourteen.
There is something infinitely touching in the sight of these rows of
small creatures, chanting with their trained treble voices, “Let me
never be confounded,” when life had confounded them at its very gates.
But seeing them later on, as every Sunday morning visitor is allowed to
do, happily eating their dinners in their pleasant rooms, it is obvious
that the life of the little brown-coated boy or white-capped girl in
Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital has many things in its favour. One may
compare their lot with that of more sophisticated children in the London
slums, for whom it is necessary to have a society for their protection
from the parents who have ill-treated over 100,000 in England in the
last year.
One does not ordinarily associate a foundling hospital with the fine
arts, but, as I said before, this is an exception. Hogarth not only
painted the founder’s portrait and one or two other pictures that he
gave to the hospital, but he persuaded his friends to do likewise. Sir
Joshua Reynolds gave a portrait of Lord Dartmouth, Gainsborough a view
of Charterhouse, Kneller a portrait of Handel, and the exhibition of
these gifts, including a beautiful cartoon of Raphael’s _Massacre of the
Innocents_, was a forerunner of the exhibitions of the Royal Academy.
The pictures alone are worth going to Guilford Street to see. Some of
them are in the picture gallery with the cases holding tokens that in
the old days before 1760 used to be left to identify the foundling. In
the board-room, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful rooms
in London, hangs Hogarth’s _March to Finchley_, of which I believe there
is a copy in the ugly “Adam and Eve” public-house, built on the site of
the “Adam and Eve” Inn of the picture, at the corner of the Tottenham
Court Road and Euston Road.
The tale of how the hospital came to get the picture is rather quaint.
Hogarth painted soldiers marching to Finchley in a state that their
French _confrères_ would call “_débraillés_.” He then asked George II.
to buy it, but that monarch--the last English king to go into
battle--was so enraged at this presentation of his soldiers, that he
indignantly refused, and Hogarth, not being able to dispose of the
picture elsewhere, issued lottery tickets for it. About sixty tickets
were left on his hands, so he gave them to his favourite hospital, which
won the picture, and there it is to-day.
The careful training of the child choir, and the choice of a musical
career for the boys whenever possible, is only carrying on one of the
earliest traditions, for Handel rivalled Hogarth in his interest and his
gifts to the Foundling Hospital. He used to conduct performances of the
_Messiah_ in the chapel to crowded audiences, and as he induced the
performers to give their services, the proceeds that he handed over
sometimes amounted to nearly £1,000. In a glass case is carefully
preserved the gift the great master bestowed on the hospital of the MS.
of his oratorio, and near by is the autograph copy of the number of
_Good Words_ containing the story Dickens wrote about the Foundling
Hospital.
In the secretary’s room is a fine old Jacobean oak table but lately
retrieved from the kitchen premises where it had been in use for
centuries.
SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM
“Were I a physician I would prescribe nothing but Recipe,
CCCLXV drachm. Londin.”--WALPOLE.
One of the nicest things about the South Kensington Museum is the lively
way it keeps in touch with what happens to be interesting Londoners at
the moment.
Is there a loan exhibition of Spanish pictures at Burlington House, at
once everything Spanish that the Museum possesses is gathered together
so that the different phases of Spanish art may be conveniently noted,
and there is nearly always some extra little exhibition of special
interest, either in celebration of the centenary of some great artist or
to introduce the work of some foreigner of outstanding merit like
Mestrovic.
The lectures given here daily by expert guides at 12 and 3 p.m. would
probably be crowded if they cost a guinea. With that curious apathy
towards what is not expensive that is one of our less pleasing
attributes, only a few people take advantage of these pleasant scholarly
talks. If they were known to be very exclusive and costly, the thousands
of excellent people with modest incomes and no occupation who live in
Bloomsbury and Earl’s Court boarding-houses, would sigh for the
privilege of sharing these hour-long strolls through the museum, when
the lecturer gives no disconnected account of individual objects but
deftly traces the development of the art of different countries and
ages, illustrating his teaching by the treasures under his care.
I think this apathy is largely due to lack of initiative and
imagination, as well as to the aforesaid deeply-rooted idea that what
costs nothing cannot be worth much. I have found so many people who have
never heard of these lectures that another cause of the small attendance
may be that the news of their existence is not sufficiently widely
spread.
There is, alas, no one at Claridge’s or the Ritz or the Savoy to tell
mothers who bring their girls over here to buy clothes and do the
theatres, that there is also a way open to them to gain something that
will still be theirs when the memory of the play has faded--in most
cases let us hope so--and the clothes have been cast aside--since no one
nowadays wears clothes long enough to wear them out.
The South Kensington Museum is the finest museum of applied art in the
world. That is why it is the Mecca of students who come here to study
and draw inspiration from the lovely things fashioned by our forefathers
in gold and silver and bronze and leather, in silk and lace and precious
stones, in the furnishings and decorations of the houses and persons of
other times and other nations. There are paintings and sculpture as
well: the Raphael cartoons are one of the glories of the place.
There is something, indeed, to appeal to everyone’s taste in this most
marvellous museum. For the little schoolgirls who seem to throng the
place in cohorts, in the charge of apathetic teachers, there are the
dolls and dolls’ houses that their great-grandmothers played with--the
former as delicately waxen and elegantly dressed as any to be found
to-day. Furniture lovers may study here the finest specimens of every
period, from the handsome Jacobean chairs and settles that harmonise so
well with the background of panelled walls and decorated ceilings taken
from old English houses, to the marvellous ornate escritoires, toilet
tables and gilt couches of French royal palaces. There is less
formality about the English furniture, but it was not more comfortable;
and the heavy projecting carvings even on the back of the little
children’s chairs may well have been the reason for the erect bearings
used for odious comparisons in one’s youth. They say that the beds of
our forefathers were comfortable. That may be true, but they were
certainly depressing, and the state bed from Boughton House,
Northampton, in which William III. slept, with its dingy hangings and
horrible hearse-like plumes, reaching into the lofty roof, makes you
thankful for the airier ideas of to-day.
For book-lovers there are upstairs the old, old missals and books of
hours, illuminated with such skill and patience by monks in mediæval
monasteries--some with colours almost as perfect, the ink as black, the
paper as white as when they were first executed in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. As marvellous, and perhaps even more exquisite as
works of art, are the slender Persian volumes, love-poems and prayers,
inscribed in delicate characters of the East, with pictures of shahs and
houris, and leather covers, so wonderfully embossed and inlaid and
beautifully coloured that no description could give the faintest idea of
their perfection.
Even people who are not musicians love the gallery where musical
instruments of the past stand silent in their cases: guitars that
troubadours in parti-coloured hose twanged dolorously to their
lady-loves; virginals belonging to Queen Elizabeth and that other
Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, who was a daughter of James I.; the
harpsichord that Handel bequeathed to George II.; the great harp of the
famous blind Welsh harper. Zithers are there, and other instruments of
cunning workmanship, lovely to see and with names as melodious as the
sounds they once gave forth: dulcimers and clavicords, lutes and
ceteras, pandores and clavecins. Here are the spinets of our
grandmothers, and what must be the veritable father of the hurdy-gurdy,
and a little pianino made by Chappell more than one hundred years ago,
so small that you could carry it about from place to place.
Then there is the jewellery--bracelets, girdles, necklaces, earrings,
rings chosen and worn by “Flora la Belle Rommaine” and her sisters of
other ages and countries, but so like, both in design and execution, the
work of the modern goldsmith.
There is an interesting and beautiful collection of the peasant
jewellery of continental countries--wonderful gilt crowns of Russian and
Norwegian brides and curious rings of gigantic size and significant
names, charm rings, motto rings, incantation rings, iconigraphic rings,
Gnostic rings and rings with all sorts of devices.
These are only a tithe of the treasures in the Victoria and Albert
Museum that can easily be reached by District Railway and Inner Circle
to South Kensington Station or by the Piccadilly Tube and the Brompton
Road.
WALLACE COLLECTION
“Ce qui nous a tous profondément touchés, c’est moins la grandeur
de vos largesses, qui ont été immenses, que la bonne grâce
spirituelle avec laquelle vous les avez faites.”
SARCEY.
People say vaguely, “The Wallace Collection? Oh, yes, I really must go
some day; I’ve heard of it so many times,” and the “some day” recedes
and London is left behind and that most delightful place remains unseen.
And yet this treasure-house is so easy to reach. The shopper at Debenham
and Freebody’s need only turn up Duke Street at the corner where Wigmore
Street embraces Lower Seymour Street, and there is Manchester House at
the far side of Manchester Square.
If you have only a short time to spend there, give it all to the French
pictures. They are the _pièce de résistance_ of the Wallace Collection,
gathered by two men who loved France and spent most of their lives
there. The story of the Hertfords who made the Wallace Collection is
almost as interesting as anything in their house. The first Marquess of
Hertford had thirteen children, and the portraits he asked Reynolds to
paint of two of his daughters (Nos. 31 and 33) were the nucleus of the
collection. The second marquess only added Reynolds’ “Nelly O’Brien” and
the Romney “Perdita.”
His son was the celebrated Marquess of Hertford whose meteoric career
enlivened the first half of the last century--the original of both
Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne and Lord Beaconsfield’s Coningsby, whose
wealth, wit and reckless egoism provided food for gossip for many a
year. It was for him that Decimus Burton built St. Dunstan’s in Regent’s
Park, and he filled it with _objets d’art_ of all kinds, and a number of
pictures, chiefly of the Dutch school.
His son, Richard Seymour-Conway, fourth Marquess of Hertford, spent his
life in amassing, with the help of Sir Richard Wallace, the collection
that is now the property of the British nation. M. Yriarte, a French art
expert who knew this eccentric nobleman well, published an account of
his curious life in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for September 1900, but it
is not possible to give the details now.
Sir Richard Wallace inherited his wealth and his pictures. His name is
legendary here in England, but in Paris it is a household word, for
every thirsty street urchin calls the graceful bronze drinking fountains
he put all over the city “un Vallace.”
M. Francisque Sarcey, who never met Sir Richard Wallace, has expressed
in the dedication of his _Le Siège de Paris_ something of the feeling
Parisians had for this Englishman who stayed in the city, sharing their
perils and discomforts and proving his sympathy by immense gifts.
Luckily for us, his friendship did not induce him to leave the Hertford
Collection to France. He had always shared his father’s passion for
collecting, and began to buy pictures as a young man. The Corot,
Rousseau’s lovely _Forest Glade_, and the enchanting fresco on plaster
of a _Boy Reading_ by the Milanese artist Foppa, are among the works he
bought.
To come back to the French pictures: there is no example of Chardin’s
work (to see “Le Bénédicité” you must go to the Louvre), but there are
eight pictures by his pupil Fragonard, and if the Louvre has “The Music
Lesson,” Hertford House has the “Gardens of the Villa d’Este.”
I think the Fragonards must be seen if there is time for nothing else;
not because Fragonard is a greater artist than the others, but because
his work may be better studied here than in his own country.
There is a lovely interior of Fragonard’s in the National Gallery, and a
“Lady with a Dog” in the Tennant Collection, 34 Queen Anne’s Gate, but I
am informed that the present occupiers of the Glenconner mansion do not
follow the generous custom of the owners in admitting the public on
Wednesdays and Saturdays from two to six.
The eccentric Marquess’s statement, “I only like pleasing pictures,”
perhaps accounts for the number of Greuze canvases--over a score; but
the collection is particularly rich in eighteenth-century French
painters--Largillière, Watteau, Nattier, Lancret, Vernet, Van Loo,
Boucher, etc.
If you have time for two visits, spend the second with the Dutch
pictures, where the Rembrandt portraits almost console me for the
absence of Vermeer’s. One must go to the National Gallery to see the
“Lady at the Virginal.”
Among the fifty-seven artists represented, there are many old friends,
Frans Hals, Brouwer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dou, Terborch, Wouverman with
his inevitable white horse, six of the excellent Ruysdaels--that somehow
never give me as much pleasure as Metsu’s charming pictures--Hobbema,
the Flemish Teniers, and eight Rubens (he is more likeable here than in
the Louvre).
Of course there are numberless other treasures. A very complete
catalogue will tell you all about them, but I hope I have made you want
to go and buy that catalogue.
GEFFRYE MUSEUM
“So I set out on my walk to see the wonders of the big city, and,
as chance would have it, I directed my course to the East.”--G.
BORROW.
I have never met anyone who knew of this Benjamin among museums--it was
only opened the year the war came upon us--except the man of learning
who told me that, tucked away in the heart of the manufacturing district
of Shoreditch, there was a wonderful collection of period furniture
arranged in an old almshouse. So one day I climbed into a 22 bus at
Piccadilly Circus and asked the conductor to discard me at the Geffrye
Museum in the Kingsland Road. We travelled for miles along streets where
every second shop seemed to be a cabinet-maker’s, and then stopped
conveniently at the very gate of the quiet, spacious courtyard where
elderly people were taking the air on the old oak benches. It was past
six of the clock on a warm evening in June, but a misguided guide-book
had said the museum was open till eight in summer.
That halcyon arrangement disappeared with the fashion of the eight-hour
day, and the museum now closes at six o’clock like its older
_confrères_. It is also closed on Sunday morning and all Monday.
The people who used to live in the fourteen quaint little brick
almshouses have been transferred to a building in the country, and the
London County Council has bought this property for their museum from the
Ironmongers’ Company, from whose seventeenth-century “Master,” Sir
Robert Geffrye, it takes its name. It is a fascinating place; like a
rather badly arranged old curiosity shop. There are old staircases--one
from Boswell’s house in Queen Street is the most beautiful--and lovely
panelled rooms and all sorts of things that demonstrate how beautiful
interior decoration was before the age of machine-made furniture.
There is a charming room from New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, and many other
interesting exhibits including a beautiful lacquered Chinese palanquin,
but what I liked best were the fragile, unbelievable wood carvings of
Grinling Gibbons.
If there were nothing else to see in the Geffrye Museum, it would be
worth while to go to look at what a master hand can do with a block of
wood. Evelyn thought Grinling Gibbons “the greatest master both of
invention and rarenesse of work that the world ever had in any age.”
I had cherished the mistaken belief that Gibbons was an Englishman for
so long that it was with regret I found that this great artist was born
in Rotterdam and only came to England in 1667 when he was twenty-four
years old.
It is many long years since I was first shown some of Grinling Gibbons’
marvellous work--so many that only the effect it had on me remains,
while the date and place have gone from me. I never willingly miss
seeing what his hand has carved, and if any reader of these pages is in
the habit of coming to London often and making friends on each trip with
another of the men of genius who have given the city its proud record, I
can tell them where they may study the wizardlike work of this master
craftsman and great artist.
The most magnificent piece of work he carved is in the choir of St.
Paul’s, but there are long festoons of flowers in St. Mary Abchurch, in
Abchurch Yard, off Abchurch Lane, a turning out of Cannon Street. In
old St. Mary Abchurch you will also find a wonderful painted dome by Sir
James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law, whose house in Dean Street,
Soho, has only lately been pulled down. St. James’s, Piccadilly, that
suave building that breathes mid-Victorian portliness, broadcloth and
self-satisfaction, has a lovely marble font carved by Grinling Gibbons,
but the cover was stolen. Later research has destroyed the widely-spread
belief that Grinling Gibbons carved the pedestal for King Charles I.’s
statue in Trafalgar Square, but over the mantelpiece in the vestry of
St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, between Great Tower Street and Lower Thames
Street, you will find another carving.
The rest I will leave you to hunt out for yourself. Some of it is in
unlikely places, one of them not a hundred miles from Clifford’s Inn. I
do not know if there is any trace of the pot of flowers Grinling Gibbons
carved when he lived in Belle Sauvage Court on Ludgate Hill, and which
Walpole said “shook surprisingly with the motion of the coaches that
passed by.”
He lived for forty-three years in Bow Street, Covent Garden. The house
fell down, says an old record, in 1701, “but by a genial providence none
of the family were killed,” and they seem to have propped up their
house, for they went on living there till Grinling Gibbons died in
1721.
CHAPTER XI
PARKS
HYDE PARK
“Is there a more gay and graceful spectacle in the world than Hyde
Park ... in the merry month of May or June?”--BEACONSFIELD.
The London parks certainly do not deserve the epithet “unnoticed,” but I
have met few people who knew anything about their story. Foreigners
coming to London for the first time always exclaim at their beauty, but
the Londoners take them as a matter of course, and hardly anyone stops
to inquire their history or even the reason for their names. Yet much of
the city’s history is bound up with that of the parks, and their story
is a mirror of the changing fashions of London.
Hyde Park, for instance--that vast space of 390 acres in the very heart
of the city, enjoyed by prince and plutocrat and pauper with equal
freedom so long as they keep on their feet, for the rule of the roadway
is not so democratic--what a tale it could tell of the brave sights it
has seen since it was first enclosed in 1592! Before Charles I.’s time
the park, that took its name from the Manor of Hyde, was only to be
enjoyed by the king and court, who hunted and hawked there; but in
Stuart days there were foot and horse races and drives and merry-making.
It has always been a favourite haunt of Mayfair. Evelyn used to “take
the aire in Hide Park,” very annoyed at having to pay one shilling and
sixpence for the privilege, and so did Pepys, obviously gratified that
his wife attracted attention. De Gramont, the witty observer of Charles
II.’s court, is quoted as saying: “Hyde Park everyone knows is the
promenade of London--the promenade of beauty and fashion.”
In the days of Charles II. all the world went to the Ring, a circular
course of about 350 yards laid out by the Merry Monarch, between the
Ranger’s Cottage and the present tea-house. How fashionable the drive
was Pepys tells us when he says: “Took up my wife and Deb and to the
park, where being in a hackney and they undressed, was ashamed to go
into the Tour but went round the park and so with pleasure home.”
In those days there was a cake-house, where cheese-cakes, syllabub and
tarts were sold--refreshments probably more attractive than those of
to-day.
Places of refreshment might so easily add enormously to the amenities of
the London parks and gardens if good food, attractively and quickly
provided, could be obtained. Nature has furnished an exquisite
background for a sylvan meal, but anyone who has ordered tea at one of
these places carries away a regret for what might have been. Perhaps
that is why it has never been fashionable to take tea in the park since
the Georgian days when people stood on chairs to see the beautiful Miss
Gunnings pass by.
The latest fashions were always worn first in Hyde Park. The daring of
any Paris _mannequin_ at the Grand Prix pales before the effect made by
the Lady Caroline Campbell of George III.’s reign, who “displayed in
Hyde Park the other day a feather four feet higher than her bonnet.”
In Victorian days the smart world strolled on the south walk between
Hyde Park Corner and Alexandra Gate, but to-day that is given over to
the curious strata of society, vomited up from a volcanic war, that now
fill the stalls in the theatres and the restaurants that used to call
themselves exclusive.
Fashion is slowly retiring--first to the part of the park opposite Park
Lane and then to the northern side opposite Lancaster Gate. Perhaps it
is making the tour, and when the profiteer and his family have
discovered that they are in sole possession of this south-east part of
the park, they will move off and the wheel will turn once more.
Why the big statue close to Hyde Park Corner is called the Achilles
Statue is one of London’s mysteries for which there is no more reason
than the nursemaid had when she familiarly designated Watts’ “Physical
Energy” in Kensington Gardens as “The Galloping Major.” “Achilles” is a
copy of one of the horse trainers of the Monte Cavallo in Rome. The Pope
gave the cast, the Ordnance Department gave the metal of the cannon
taken in the battles of Salamanca, Vittoria, Toulouse and Waterloo, and
the women of England subscribed £10,000 to this memorial of the Iron
Duke and his comrades-in-arms. Where Achilles comes in, I do not know.
Each of the great London parks is associated with some special English
sovereign. Charles II. is the godfather of St. James’s Park; Regent’s
Park, like Regent Street, was planned for the glorification of the man
who was afterwards George IV.; Battersea is associated with Prince
Albert the Good, and we owe Kew to the Princess Augusta, mother of
George III.
Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens owe their allegiance to Queen Caroline,
George II.’s queen. It was she who converted the ponds and the
Westbourne stream into the fifty acres of water of the Serpentine which,
now derived from the Thames, feeds the ornamental water in Buckingham
Palace Gardens and St. James’s Park. The king thought she was doing it
all out of her own purse and smiled at all her schemes, little dreaming
that with Walpole’s aid she was letting him in for some £20,000--a fact
he only discovered after her death.
Unfortunate Parisians, who are obliged to skirt the Tuileries gardens,
closed inexorably at seven o’clock on a summer evening, envy the
Londoner who may enjoy the leafy cool of his parks till long after dark,
the carriage entrances not being closed till midnight.
You may see an extraordinary number of quite different phases of English
life in Hyde Park. There are the loafers, including the errand boys and
that mysterious class of people who seem to have nothing to do in life
but “invite their soul” at eleven o’clock of a fine morning. Unless they
are content with a bench, the peace has made this feat more expensive
than it used to be, for when the price of everything else was happily
falling, the rusty individual who was wont to interrupt true lovers’
conversations by heartlessly demanding a penny, was suddenly inspired to
double the price of the chairs that have been hired in the park for the
last hundred years.
Then there is the gallant sight of Rotten Row, named from the Route du
Roi that William III. used when he rode from Whitehall to Kensington.
The present Rotten Row was made by George I. when he wanted a shorter
cut through the park. The best time to see the riders is the early
morning, and the bathers have to get up still earlier if they want to
plunge into the Serpentine, for the bathing is over at 8.30 a.m.
In the afternoon the Hyde Park orator comes into his own and the whole
of the Marble Arch corner turns into a factory for letting off steam. It
is let off by the partisans of different religions who vociferate side
by side, each demonstrating that his particular set of tenets is the
only means to salvation. It is let off by socialists and communists and
bolsheviks, and everyone who fancies he can alter the existing
conditions to his own advantage,--and behind all these fiery-tongued
speechmakers stand the placid good-natured policemen who look on with
all the indulgence of a kindly nurse towards a fractious child,
answering an amused inquiry with a paternal: “It don’t ’urt anyone and
it does them a power of good to get it off their chests!”
Among the phases to be noticed are the picnic parties who come to the
park prepared to make a day of it, and the children of every class of
society, and the nursemaids whose very name reminds one of his Majesty’s
forces both military and naval, who are also ardent patrons of the park.
There are many minor points of interest,--the queer little dogs’
cemetery near the Victoria Gate on the north side, the dell, a
sub-tropical garden near the east end of the Serpentine not far from the
fountain with the charming Artemis statue--but the most delightful way
to see the park at its very best is to go there in the early morning
carrying a picnic breakfast and take a boat at the boathouse south of
the rangers’ lodge. I have always envied the park ranger who lives in
this mansion. The first of his race was appointed by Henry VIII. at the
princely salary of sixpence a day, but when this was objected to by the
Government economy enthusiasts of that time, it was reduced to
fourpence.
The tiny stone cottages of the keepers, with the classic architecture
that makes them look so ridiculously important, are not really the
smallest houses in London. I think that honour must surely belong to the
porter’s lodge at the Fetter Lane entrance to the Record Office, unless
you count as a house No. 10, Hyde Park Place. Though it certainly has a
street door all to itself, it has only one room.
The park authority, so careless when it is a matter of eating and
drinking, is careful to provide more artistic pleasures for the Hyde
Park crowds. Bands play there on many summer evenings--the announcements
are made in the Press--and now and then the League of Arts arranges an
entertainment, when thousands of people flock to see the Morris dancing
or some old play performed with a background of green trees.
KENSINGTON GARDENS
“Sometimes a child will cross the glade.”
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Henry James once expressed the opinion that the view from the bridge
that crosses the Serpentine where Hyde Park joins Kensington Gardens has
an “extraordinary nobleness,” and there is something indescribably
beautiful and unexpected about it. The grey buildings in the distance
look like some palace of the _fata morgana_ over the shimmering water.
I do not know if Sir James Barrie is responsible for the feeling that
you would not be surprised at anything that might happen in Kensington
Gardens. Who would be bold enough to assert that when the last child has
left the Peter Pan statue the squirrels do not come and play with their
stone brothers? Kensington Gardens are the paradise of the child and the
flower lover. There are ugly things in it, of course, like the Albert
Memorial, though everyone does not think it ugly: I was once startled at
hearing that souvenir of Victorian taste fervently admired by some
fellow bus passengers. But the Serpentine, and the Round Pond on a sunny
morning when the fleet is engaged in serious manœuvres--and the Broad
Walk: Wren’s orangery--the lovely sunk garden with its pleached walk of
lime trees with the avenue Queen Caroline planted--and above all, the
Flower Walk in the sunlit air after a shower,--if visitors to London
have time for nothing else they should carry away a memory of Kensington
Gardens.
GREEN PARK AND ST. JAMES’S
“Satirists may say what they please about the rural enjoyments of a
London citizen on Sunday.”--W. IRVING.
Walking along Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner on the “sulky” side, as
Mr. Street calls it in his charming _Ghosts of Piccadilly_, many
[Illustration: PETER PAN STATUE IN KENSINGTON GARDENS]
people wonder at the meaning of the ledge on the curb of the pavement
nearly opposite the entrance to 128, Piccadilly. It owes its existence
to a benevolent old clubman who, from his comfortable window armchair,
noticed the porters bearing heavy burdens on their backs and toiling up
the slope of Piccadilly. The ledge was fixed at the right height, so
that they might rest their burdens without unfastening them.
Green Park was once much larger than its present sixty acres or so, but
George III. took some of it in 1767 to enlarge the gardens of old
Buckingham House. It is now the happy hunting-ground of the gentlemen
who love to lie full length on the grass--the not inconsiderable army of
people who would dread communism if they ever thought about anything,
and would bitterly regret under any other régime the halcyon days when
the out-of-work dole of a benevolent government of bourgeois permitted
these free Britons to lounge at peace.
Their presence is perhaps the reason why the Green Park is not a
fashionable rendezvous, like Hyde Park, although some of the great
London houses, Stafford House, Bridgewater House, Spencer House, etc.,
border it on the east side. The wrought iron and gilded gates bearing
the Cavendish crest and motto that were formerly used as the entrance to
Devonshire House have now been placed in Green Park opposite the
building they guarded so long. These beautiful old gates have had a
chequered history. Seven generations ago, in the eighteenth century,
they began their existence at Turnham Green, where they guarded the
approach to the house of the second Lord Egmont and bore the arms of the
Perceval family. The house changed owners and was pulled down, and in
1838 the gates were bought by the sixth Duke of Devonshire for his
Chiswick house. They stayed there for fifty-nine years, before they came
to spend a brief quarter of a century watching the ebb and flow of
Piccadilly.
The Duke of Devonshire already had beautiful gates at Chiswick when he
bought these, for the Earl of Burlington who got the house in 1727 and
whose daughter and sole heiress married a Duke of Devonshire, was also a
connoisseur in gates, and had begged a beautiful pair of Inigo Jones
design from Sir Hans Sloane, who did not appreciate them. When they were
being moved, Pope wrote:
_Passenger._ Oh Gate! how cam’st thou here?
_Gate._ I was brought from Chelsea last year,
Battered with wind and weather;
Inigo Jones put me together,
Sir Hans Sloane
Let me alone,
So Burlington brought me hither.
Green Park has another gate, part of which I am sure is unnoticed, for
how many people know that in the Wellington Arch at the top of
Constitution Hill, at the upper end of the Green Park, sixteen
policemen and an inspector have their happy home. Their special task is
to direct the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, no easy matter in the season
or when the king and queen and other notabilities come driving out to
take the air. From their bedroom in the Arch they can climb on to the
wide flat top, and under the shadow of the splendid group of Peace in
her flying chariot, look over a wonderful vista of park and palace and
highway.
ST. JAMES’S PARK
“La beauté de Londres n’est pas dans ses monuments mais dans son
immensité.”--ZOLA.
What would old Lenôtre, Louis XIV.’s court gardener, who laid out St.
James’s Park, think if he could see his handiwork to-day? He would make
a witty jest of it, perhaps, for he was a charming old man of a
guileless simplicity that made him beloved of everyone, even in the most
artificial court in Europe. Charles II. invited the famous French
landscape gardener, who had created Versailles out of a sandhill, to
come and transform the swampy meadow that adjoined the palace Henry
VIII. had fashioned out of the twelfth-century Lepers Hospital,
dedicated to St. James the Less, which has given its name to the palace
and park.
St. James’s has always been a very royal park since the days when the
young Princess Elizabeth rode through it from her father’s new palace
to the court at Whitehall, attended “with a very honourable confluence
of noble and worshipful persons of both sexes.” Charles I. took his last
walk through it on his way to the scaffold in Whitehall. Charles II.
spent much of his time playing with his dogs and feeding his ducks
there, and he planted some of the oaks from the acorns of the royal oak
at Boscobel. His aviary on the south side is still remembered in the
name of Birdcage Walk, and the tradition is carried on by the aquatic
birds that again haunt the ornamental water as before the war.
Walpole in his reminiscences quotes George I. as saying:
This is a strange country. The first morning after my arrival at
St. James’s, I looked out of the window, and saw a park with walls,
canal, etc., which they told me were mine. The next day, Lord
Chetwynd the Ranger of _my_ Park, sent me a fine brace of carp out
of _my_ canal; and I was told I must give five guineas to Lord
Chetwynd’s servant for bringing me _my own_ carp out of _my own_
canal _in my own garden_.
I always loved, too, the reply of Walpole’s father to Queen Caroline
when she asked how much it would cost to close St. James’s Park for the
royal use and he answered, “only three crowns, Madam.”
REGENT’S PARK
“London is before all things an incomparable background.”--F. M.
HUEFFER.
Regent’s Park to most people spells the Zoo, the place where one may see
the best menagerie in the world. It is the successor of Marylebone Park,
a royal hunting-ground until Cromwell’s day. It was laid out in its
present style after 1812 by Nash, the man who designed Regent Street,
and named after the Prince Regent, who thought he would build a country
house here.
It is so far removed from Mayfair that its glories have been neglected,
but now that fashion has drifted north of Hyde Park and even Bloomsbury
is having its recrudescence, Regent’s Park may wake up any day and find
itself famous. It is beautifully laid out and tended, and garden lovers
from other lands will like it immensely if they take a tube to Baker
Street and spend an hour or so there, either boating on the lovely lake
or walking in the gardens.
The Royal Botanic Gardens, enclosed by a circular walk, are reached from
York Street by a road running north between Bedford Women’s College and
the Toxophilite Society (which ordinary people are content to call the
Archery Club). It is only open to the general public on Mondays and
Saturdays on payment of one shilling.
On this west side of the park is St. Dunstan’s Lodge, the home of Mr.
and Mrs. Otto Kahn, who gave their house for some years to the late Sir
Arthur Pearson for his hostel for the education of the blind.
It was once the home of the Marquess of Hertford, who was the original
of Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne in _Vanity Fair_
BATTERSEA PARK
“It takes London of all cities to give you such an impression of
the country.”--HENRY JAMES.
Battersea Park is another of London’s lovely gardens. It takes its name
from the old parish and manor of Battersea, a gradual corruption of the
Patricesy or Peter’s Isle, by which it was known in Domesday Book as
belonging to the Abbey of St. Peter at Westminster.
There is nothing very interesting historically about the park, as it was
only laid out in 1852, on Battersea Fields, the scene of a duel in 1829
between the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Winchelsea, but it is
one of the favourite parks of London and the only one that fringes the
borders of the Thames. It has a lovely sunk garden, that is a dream of
beauty in the summer time, and letters are always appearing in the
papers about the birds that nest among its trees. Four of the 188 acres
are laid out as a sub-tropical garden. There is a lake with rowing
boats to hire, and arrangements are made for cricket and other sports.
If the park has no history, one can find curious bits of old London
quite close to it by turning out of the west gate and asking the way to
Church Road, off the Battersea Bridge Road, and near the river. First
there is the old church of St. Mary’s, ugly enough in itself, but it was
where William Blake was married, and where Turner used to sketch the
wonderful effects on the Thames. Lovers of quaint epitaphs will find a
delicious one composed by himself to the famous Henry St. John, Lord
Bolingbroke, who “was Secretary of State under Queen Anne and in the
days of King George I. and King George II. something more and better.”
Lord Bolingbroke was a true Battersea man, for he was born there in 1678
and died in 1751. His second wife, who shares the honour of his
monument, was a niece of Madame de Maintenon. Battersea has been closely
connected with the St. John family for four hundred years, though they
sold their manor to the Spencers in 1763. A bit of it may still be seen
in the adjoining flour mills, where, I believe, it is possible to see
the wonderful ceiling and staircase, and the lovely cedar-panelled room
overlooking the river, where Pope wrote his _Essay on Man_.
KEW GARDENS
“Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London).”
ALFRED NOYES.
Kew is too far afield to be called unnoticed London, but it is the most
wonderful of all the London gardens and so easy to reach that to miss it
would be a matter for perpetual regret.
Anyone can tell you the way to get there: either from Waterloo to Kew
Bridge, when you will have to walk across the bridge to get to the main
entrance of the gardens, or by the District Railway to Kew Gardens
station, or by tram from Hammersmith.
There is so much to see there that over-much direction destroys the
greatest pleasure of finding out what you like best, and everyone has
his own opinion as to what time of the year the gardens are most
beautiful. The poet loves “Kew in lilac-time,” the lover of gorgeous
colour goes down to see the regiments of tulips, massed as they are
nowhere else outside Holland. Kew in rhododendron and azalea time ought
not to be missed, but I think the loveliest sight of all is Kew in
bluebell time, when it looks as if a bit of the sky had fallen
earthwards on either side of the Queen’s Walk, and in the middle of the
wilderness you come across the deserted little ivy-clad cottage, the sea
of blue sweeping up to the very door to which no pathway now leads.
It was once the Queen’s Cottage, built by George III. for Queen
Charlotte, in the days when they led the domestic existence that Fanny
Burney described in her _Diary_; but no one now uses it and it stands
there with a mute air of resignation at its fallen fortunes, little
dreaming how much its unexpected beauty adds to the pleasure of the
discoverer of this lovely corner.
Kew, like the other parks, had its royal origin. Its founder was the
Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, the wife of Frederick Prince of Wales,
who, eight years after her husband’s death, interested herself in the
laying out of the exotic garden at Kew that was the nucleus of the vast
collection of 24,000 different varieties of plants.
Kew has always been beloved by artists. Sir Peter Lely had a house at
Kew Green and Johann Zoffany the painter, whose fame has so lately been
augmented by the publication of his life and memoirs, lived in Zoffany
House at Strand-on-the-Green, a delightful old-world riverside village
close to Kew Bridge. He is buried in the early eighteenth-century church
of St. Ann, where Gainsborough also lies.
And now come back to London and I will show you a Lilliputian park I am
sure you have never noticed. It is so tiny; long ago it was the
churchyard of St. Botolph without Aldersgate, dedicated to that kindly
patron of all travellers, but now it is a charming retreat with an
additional attraction that I leave you to discover, and because it is so
close to the General Post Office it is always called The Postman’s
Park.
There are other lovely unnoticed oases of green round about London town;
Brockwell Park with its fine old walled garden, and Dulwich and
Southwark. Their tales must wait for another time, for now it only
remains for me to say with Pope:
Dear, damn’d, distracting town, farewell.
INDEX
“Achilles” Statue, 199, 200
“Adam and Eve” public-house, 184
Adam, the brothers, 48, 49
Addison, 10, 25, 109, 156, 168
Adelphi, 48, 49
Admiralty, old home of, 76
Albert Memorial, 204
Albert, Prince, 200
All Hallows, Barking, 73, 74
Anne, Queen, 124, 135
Apothecaries’ Society, 18
Ascham, Roger, 115
Ashburnham House, 169
Augusta, Princess, 200, 215
Bacon, Sir Francis, 107, 113, 156
Barking, Convent of, 74
Battersea Manor, 213
Baxter, 135
Bedford, Duke of, 34
_Beggar’s Opera_, 114, 122
Bells of St. Clement’s, 50, 53, 54
Bess of Hardwicke, 8
Bible, revisers of, 167
Birdcage Walk, 210
Black Prince, 24, 56, 86
Blackstone, 60
Blake, Admiral, 170
Blake, William, 213
Bolingbroke, Lord, 213
Bond, Sir Thomas, 27
Boniface, Archbishop, 142, 144
Botanic Gardens, Royal, 211
Bracegirdle, Mrs., 168
Brompton Road, 25
Brooke, Rupert, MS. of, 178
Browne, William, 7
Brummell, Beau, 34
Buckingham, Dukes of, 43, 44
Buckingham Street, 42-46
Buns and Bunhill Place, 14
Burke, 36
Burney, Dr., 10
Burney, Fanny, 10, 121, 215
Butler, Samuel, 136
Campbell, Lady Caroline, 199
Campbell, Thomas, 122
Caroline, Queen, 200, 204, 210
Carthusian Monks, 151, 152
Catherine of Braganza, 11, 18
Cellini, Benvenuto, 133
Charing Cross, 40-42, 158
Charles I., 210;
statue of, 41, 160, 196
Charles II., 9, 13, 83, 96, 116, 128, 129, 139, 198, 200, 209, 210
Charlotte, Queen, 34, 215
Charterhouse:
as mansion, 148, 151-5;
as school and hospital, 155-7;
features, 157
Charterhouse scholars, 156
Chaucer, 38, 42, 56, 73, 85
Cheapside, 84, 85, 90-93
Chelsea:
Belgian refugees, 4, 7;
buns, 14;
Burney, Dr., 10;
Carlyle’s house, 12;
Charles II., 9, 11;
Cheyne Walk, 8, 11, 12;
communications, 1, 20;
Crosby Hall, 4, 7, 8, 17;
Danvers, Lady, 17;
famous inhabitants, 10-12, 22, 23;
Flower Show, 19, 20;
Gwynne, Nell, 8-10, 13;
Hospital and pensioners, 10, 12;
James, Henry, 13, 16;
King’s Road, 9;
More’s Gardens, 4;
More, Sir Thomas, 2-4, 7, 8, 15;
Old Church, 14-17;
Paradise Row, 8;
Physic Garden, 17-19;
Ranelagh Gardens, 21, 22;
restaurants, 14;
Sandford Manor House, 9, 10;
shops, 14;
studios, 23
Chesterfield, Lord, 21
Church bells, lore of, 53, 75, 84
Churches:
All Hallows, Barking, 73, 74;
Bow, 84-87;
Chelsea Old Church, 14-17;
Holy Trinity, Knightsbridge, 26;
Moravian Chapel, Nevill’s Court, 134, 135;
St. Anne’s, Soho, 36, 37;
St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, 141-4;
St. Clement Danes, 49, 50, 53-55;
St. Clement’s, Eastcheap, 50;
St. Ethelburga’s, 87;
St. Etheldreda’s Chapel, 112-14;
St. James’s, Piccadilly, 33;
St. Margaret’s, Westminster, 170, 171;
St. Mary-le-Strand, 46;
St. Mary’s, Battersea, 213;
St. Olave’s, 74-77;
St. Supulchre’s, Holborn, 114, 115, 137;
Temple, 63, 64
Cicill, Master Robert, 55
City churches, 87, 88, 93
City Companies, 93-102:
Bowyers, 94;
Clothworkers, 99, 100;
Drapers, 99;
Fishmongers, 99, 101, 102;
Fletchers, 94;
Goldsmiths, 99, 101, 102, 166;
Grocers, 99, 101;
Hatters and Haberdashers, 95, 99, 100;
Horners, 94;
Ironmongers, 99, 194;
Lorriners, 94;
Mercers, 99, 100, 101;
Merchant Taylors, 99, 100, 157;
Pattenmakers, 94;
Salters, 99;
Skinners, 99;
Stationers, 102;
Upholders, 94;
Vintners, 99, 100
City Guilds and their halls, 99-102
Clifford’s Inn, 136
Coal Exchange, 71, 72
Cockney, true home of, 84
Coke, Sir Edward, 113, 136, 156
Collingwood Street, 134
Commons, first meeting-place of, 162
Congreve, 168
Coram, Captain Thomas, 179-80
Court Leet, 56, 57
Cranmer, Archbishop, 79, 113
Cromwell, Oliver, 128, 160
“Crooked Billet” inn, 78
Curfew at Lincoln’s Inn, 130
“Czar’s Head” tavern, 47
Davies, Mary, 55
Delaney, Mrs., 178
De Montfort, Simon, 162
De Morgan, William, 12
Devonshire, Duchess of, 22
Devonshire House gates, 207, 208
Dickens, 178, 180, 185
Dickensian London, 45, 67, 69, 77, 93, 106, 117, 122
Domesday Book, 2, 133, 165
Donne, Dr. 16, 17, 129
Dorchester, Earl of, 34
Dover Street, 27, 28, 29
Dryden, 36, 169
Durham House, 48, 49, 152
Dutch pictures, 191, 193
Ebury, Manor of, 55
Edward III., 85, 86, 91
Elgin Marbles, 175-7
Eliot, George, 11
Elizabeth, Queen, 8, 28, 29, 65, 70, 75, 101, 108, 153-5, 209
Ely, Bishops of, 28, 29
Ely Place, an old-world corner, 111, 112
Erasmus, 4
Essex, Earl of, 47, 132
Evans, William, 116
Evelyn, John, 18, 27, 28, 44, 46, 47, 128, 198
Felton, Lavinia, 122
Fielding, 10, 45
Fire, the Great:
devastating effects, 138, 140;
Evelyn’s account, 138, 139;
origin, 138;
Pepys and, 76, 100, 138;
rapid reconstruction, 140, 101
Fleet Street, 57, 58, 84
Flemish carvings, 125;
MSS., 124, 125;
pictures, 193
Flowers for criminals, 114
Foundling Hospital, 178-80, 183-85
Fragonard, pictures by, 192
Franklin, Benjamin, 102
French pictures, 192
Furniture, 187, 188, 193, 194
Gainsborough, 184, 215
Garrick, David, 34
Gaskell, Mrs., 11
Gaunt, John of, 56, 113
Geffrye, Sir Robert, 194
George I., 210
George II., 184, 189
George III., 207, 215
George IV., 33, 200
Gibbons, Grinling, carvings by, 13, 33, 83, 105, 160, 195, 196
Giltspur Street, 114, 137
Gog and Magog, 97, 98
Goldsmith, Oliver, 22, 60, 63, 66, 67
Grafton, Duchess of, 34
Gray’s Inn, 107-10
Gresham, Sir Thomas, 94, 101
Greuze, pictures by, 192
Grey, Lady Jane, 49, 80, 131, 138, 152
Grosvenor, Sir Thomas, 55
Guildhall, 97, 98;
Library, 98, 99;
Museum, 99
Gwynne, Nell, 9, 10, 13, 122
Halifax, Lord, 34
Hamilton, Lady, 38
Handel, 178, 184, 185, 189
Hatton, Christopher, 28, 29, 65, 113
Hatton Garden, 28, 29, 110, 111, 179
Haweis, Rev. H. R., 11
Haymarket Shoppe, 33, 35
Hazlitt, 37
Henry III., 130, 144
Henry IV., 91, 167
Henry VIII., 3, 4, 16, 53, 77, 78, 80, 99, 100, 113, 132, 170, 209
Henry, Prince of Wales, 58, 59
Herbert, George, 17, 169
Hertford, Marquesses of, 190, 191, 212
Heywood, John, 3
Hobbema, pictures by, 193
Hogarth, 123, 125, 178, 179, 183, 184
Holbein, 4
Holywell Street, 70
Horse Guards, 159, 161
House of the Converts, 130, 131
Howard, Lord Thomas, 155
Howard, Philip, 154, 155
Howard, Thomas, 153
Hudson, Sir Jeffrey, 116
Huguenots, 19, 37
Hume, David, 45
Hungerford Market, 42
Hunt, Leigh, 12
Hyde Park orators, 201, 202
Inns of Court, 126, 127
James I., 58, 80, 155, 156, 160
Jewellery collections, 189
Jewellery, Jacobean, 32, 99
Johnson, Dr., 21, 22, 36, 39, 54, 63, 66, 105, 148, 158
Jones, Inigo, 34, 48, 118, 121, 129, 160, 169, 208
Jonson, Ben, 7, 126, 169
Kew Gardens, seasons of, 214
Kingsland Road, 194
Kingsley, Charles and Henry, 11
Kit-Cat Club, 109, 110
Kneller, 184
Knights Hospitallers of St. John, 147, 148
Knightsbridge, 24-26
Knockers, sanctuary, 75
Lamb, Charles, 60, 63, 66, 67
Lambeth Palace, 144
Lancaster House (London Museum), 29-32
Lawson, Cecil, 11
Lectures, museum, 174;
their value, 186
Legh Cup, 101
Leicester House, 37
Lely, Sir Peter, 215
Lenôtre, 209
Leverhulme, Lord, 31
Libraries:
Guildhall, 98, 99;
King’s, 174, 175;
Lincoln’s Inn, 129
Lincoln’s Inn:
entrance, 126;
history and features, 128-30
Lincoln’s Inn Fields:
gardens, 117, 118;
houses, 118, 121, 122;
theatre, 122
Lindsay House, 121
Loafers, park, 201, 207
Lody, Charles, 83
London Bridge, relics of, 89, 102
London Parochial Charities, 18, 19
London Stone, 70
Lord Mayor, prestige of, 96;
procession and banquet, 97
Lovel, Sir Thomas, 126, 128
Maclise, David, 11
Manny, Sir Walter, 151, 152
Mansion Houses, 88-90
MSS., illuminated, 124, 188
Marble Arch, 103
Mary, Queen, going-away dress of, 32
Mary Queen of Scots, 8, 131, 153, 154, 175
Maypoles, 25, 50
Mazarin, Duchess de, 8, 9
Medici, Marie de, 91
Mercers’ Chapel, 88
Merchant’s House, seventeenth century, 73
Meredith, George, 11
Mews, Royal, 42
Milton, 118, 122
“Mitre” Inn, 112
Mohun, Lord, 36
Monmouth, Duke of, 37, 129
Monument, 71
More, Sir Thomas, 2-4, 7, 15, 38, 79, 80, 129
Museum houses, 12
Museum, how to see, 173
Museums:
British, 172-178;
Geffrye, 193-96;
Guildhall, 99;
London, 29-32;
Royal College of Surgeons, 122;
Soane, 123-26;
South Kensington, 118, 185-89;
United Services’, 158-60;
Wallace Collection, 190-93
Musical instruments, 188, 189
Napoleonic souvenirs, 124, 160
Nash, 211
Nevill’s Court, 133-35
Norfolk, Duke of, 15
North, Sir Edward, 152, 153
Oldfield, Nance, 168
Old Watling Restaurant, 90
Orleans, Charles d’, 80
Panier Alley, 116
Parish registers, 55
Parks:
Battersea, 212, 213;
Brockwell, 216;
Green, 207-9;
Hyde:
dogs’ cemetery, 202;
life, 199, 201, 202;
lodges, 202, 203;
music and dancing, 203;
mysterious statues, 199, 200;
past and present, 197-99;
Serpentine, 200, 201;
Kensington Gardens, 203, 204;
Kew Gardens, 214, 215;
Postman’s, 215;
Regent’s, 211, 212;
St. James’s, 209, 210
Paving of London, 104
Pearson, Sir Arthur, 212
Pembroke, Countess of, 7
Pepys, 8, 39, 44, 74, 75, 76, 77, 100, 104, 107, 122, 128, 129, 170, 198
Persian MSS., 188
Peter Pan Statue, 204
Peter the Great, 45-7, 72, 124, 127, 128
Petersham, Lord, 35
Philippa, Queen, 85, 86
Pickering Place, 30
Plane tree, Wood Street, 92
Pope, 28, 109, 208, 213, 216
Port of London Authority’s tower, 77
Prince Henry’s Room, 57, 58
Princes, the Little, 80
Prior, Matthew, 168, 169
Punch, 42
Pye Corner, 138
Queen’s Cottage, Kew, 214, 215
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 58, 59, 79, 80, 132, 170
Ranelagh Club, 21, 109
Ranelagh Gardens, 21, 22
Raphael cartoons, 184, 187
Record Office treasures, 130-33
Refreshments, park, 198, 199
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 22, 36, 183, 184, 190
Richard II., 132, 167
Roman baths, 57, 66, 69, 70, 72
Roman London, 68-70, 72, 77
Romney, 190
Roper, William, 2, 7
Roses, York and Lancaster, 64, 65
Rossetti, the brothers, 11
Rotten Row, 201
Rousseau, 45, 124
Royalty and parks, 200
Rubens, paintings by, 160, 193
Russell, Lord, of Killowen, 34
Russians in Bow Church, 87
St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 137
St. Dunstan’s Lodge, 212
St. James’s Palace, 30
St. John’s Gate, 147, 148
Savoy Chapel Royal and Manor, 55, 56
Sayes Court, Deptford, 46
Sculpture in British Museum, 175-7
Seething Lane, 74, 76, 77
Serpentine bathers, 201
Shakespearean London, 53, 64, 65, 70, 71, 110, 113, 167
Shrewsbury, Lady, 34
Sidney, Sir Philip, 132
Sloane, Sir Hans, 4, 18, 173, 208
Smith, Captain John, 115
Smithfield, 137, 141
Snuff-takers, 33, 34
Soane Museum, peculiarities of, 123-26
Soane, Sir John, 123-25
Soho, a king’s grave in, 35, 37
Spenser, 64
Stanley, Dean, 165
Staple Inn, Holborn, 105, 106
Steele, Sir Richard, 44, 156
Stone effigies, 115, 116, 137, 138
Strand, 40, 42, 47, 49
Strand Lane, 57, 69
Street names, lore of, 85, 93
Sutherland, Duke of, 31
Sutton, Sir Thomas, 155, 156
Swan, device and sign, 91, 92
Swift, 14
Symons, Arthur, 67
Tattersall’s, 26, 27
Temple:
Church, 63, 64;
entrances, 60, 63;
Fountain Court, 67;
Hall, 65;
memories, 60, 63, 64-67
Tennant Collection, 192
Tennyson, Lord, 122
Thackeray, 63, 156, 191, 212
Thornhill, Sir James, 196
Thynne, Thomas, 121
Thynne, William, 73, 74
Tonson, Jacob, publisher, 109, 110
Took’s Court, 106
Tower of London, 79, 80, 83
Trade unions, past and present, 94, 95
Trafalgar Square, 42
Trinity House, 76-78
Turner, 11, 124, 213
Turner, Sir William, 88, 89
Tyburn, 104, 114, 152
Tyler, Wat, 147
Wallace, Sir Richard, 191
Walpole, Horace, 10, 21, 22, 36, 109, 196, 200, 210
War relics of the services, 160
Wardrobe Court, 134
Water Gates:
Buckingham Street, 43, 48;
Essex House, 47
Watling Street, 68, 90
Watteau, 125
Watts’s “Lawgivers” fresco, 129;
“Physical Energy” statue, 200
Webb, 169
Wellington Arch, 208, 209
Wesley and Whitefield, 135
Westbourne Stream, 24, 25, 200
Westminster Abbey:
Chapel of the Pyx, 165, 166;
Chapter House, 162, 165;
funeral effigies, 166;
Jericho Room, 167;
Jerusalem Chamber, 167, 168;
Little Cloister, 166, 167
Westminster, Dukes of, 55
Westminster School, 168, 169
Whistler, 11, 12
Whitehall Palace, remains of, 160
Whittington, 84, 96, 101
William III., 46, 89, 121, 188
Williamson’s Hotel, 89, 90
Window, east, of St. Margaret’s, 170, 171
Wolsey, Cardinal, 132
Wonders, World’s, in British Museum, 176
Wood Street, 32, 92, 93
Woodwork, old, 72
Wren, Sir Christopher, 33, 53, 54, 60, 71, 86, 88,
100, 114, 124, 141, 160, 169, 204
York House and its tenants, 44
Young, Launcelot, 92, 93
Zoffany, Johann, 215
Zoological Gardens, 211
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