VANE HOUSE.
It is generally believed that the fine old red-brick mansion to the left of the road as you ascend Rosslyn Hill, now the ‘Home of the Soldiers’ Daughters,’ is the veritable house which the unfortunate Sir Harry Vane built for himself on Hampstead Hill, a place in which he had hoped to pass the declining years of his life in peace.
Of the original house only an old staircase leading to the garden exists, but the interior of the mansion has suffered so many changes, both before and after it became the residence of the celebrated Dr. Butler, that, together with the alterations necessary to fit it for its present use, not one of the original apartments remains.
The south wing of the house has been cut off; the northern half is in good repair, and makes a commodious house. It has received the name of Belmont. When Baines wrote the ‘Records of Hampstead’ this was the home of H. J. Griffiths, Esq. The fine avenue of elms that anciently skirted Vane House, some of which were standing in quite recent years, has wholly disappeared.
The gardens and grounds were very extensive and well laid out, but these have been despoiled, though ‘one ancient mulberry-tree survives.’
When the grand old house was converted to its present use, two-thirds of the garden were taken for the children’s playground, and quite recently half an acre of the kitchen garden has been sold for £5,000!
It seems extraordinary that there should be any question as to the identity of the house. Its original owner was executed on June 14, 1662, just thirty years before the birth of Butler, who was born in 1692. The Bishop, who only lived to be sixty, dying in 1752, appears to have resided here for many years, and ornamented the windows with a quantity of painted glass.
One would imagine that a building of such distinction, so strikingly situated, and tenanted from time to time by important personages—it was afterwards the home of Mr. Thomas Neave and of J. Pilgrim, Esq.—without the tragic story attached to it, was not one to be lost sight of in the annals of the then small village. Its history might, one would think, even without the aid of highway and parish books, be fairly trusted to oral tradition from one generation to another, in a period covered by ninety years, from the date of Sir Harry Vane’s execution till the death of Dr. Butler. The architectural characteristics of the building when intact bore out its claim to have been built in the days of the Commonwealth.
Eliza Meteyard, in her ‘Hallowed Spots of Ancient London,’ a book deserving a better fate than it has met with, tells us that the famous avenue was the scene of Sir Harry’s arrest. Here on the evening of an early day in July, 1660, just as the sun was setting, Sir Harry walked and meditated, as was his wont, till the glowing splendour of the western sky gradually faded, as did the sounds of the cotter children at their play, the barking of a sympathetic dog, or some broken scrap of hymn, and still Sir Harry continued to pace beneath the elm-trees, the sweetness and the stillness deepening with the twilight, when the measured tramp of soldiers on the hill, some of whom marched straight to Vane House, whilst others guarded the exits, struck terror into the hearts of his humble neighbours, who, before night settled fully down, saw Sir Harry taken from his home, a prisoner on his way to the Tower, whence, after two years of torturing uncertainty, and removals from one place of captivity to another, he came forth on another summer’s day, June 14, 1662, to die by the hand of the executioner on Tower Hill, another martyr to the liberties of his country.
Readers will remember Pepys’ hurry to shut up his office that morning, and get off with his friends to see how the great Commonwealth man would comport himself on so public and so trying a platform as the scaffold. He is a witness, amongst others, to the calmness and self-command which the ill-used enthusiast exhibited in parting from mortality.