ENVOY
The omissions in this imperfect sketch of Elizabethan London are many and obvious. The design has been to show the tangible setting of a jewel rather than the jewel itself; the outward conditions in which the life of a new age was manifested. The background of destruction has been inevitably emphasised; but in Elizabethan London historic memorials existed on every hand. Nothing has been said of Baynard's Castle, its Norman walls rising from the margin of the river to the south of Blackfriars, or of St Bartholomew the Great, or the Charterhouse, or St. Giles's, Cripplegate; although an account of them would have completed the outer ring of our perambulation of the London described by Stow. The whole region westward—Holborn, Fleet Street, the Strand, and Westminster—has been left for another occasion. Here and there, however, we have been able to glance at historic buildings which had survived from earlier ages to witness the changes in London after the Reformation. It was those changes that led to the making of the playhouse and brought the conditions which enfolded the possibility realised in Shakespeare. This has been the point of view in the foregoing pages. A study of characteristics rather than a detailed account has been offered for the consideration of the reader.
[PEPYS'S LONDON]
By Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A.
The growth of population in London was almost stationary for many centuries; as, owing to the generally unhealthy condition of ancient cities, the births seldom exceeded the deaths, and in the case of frequent pestilences the deaths actually exceeded the births. Thus during its early history the walls of London easily contained its inhabitants, although at all times in its history London will be found to have taken a higher rank for healthy sanitary conditions than most of its continental contemporaries. In the later Middle Ages the city overflowed its borders, and its liberties were recognized and marked by Bars. Subsequently nothing was done to bring the further out-growths of London proper within the fold, and in Tudor times we first hear of the suburbs as disreputable quarters, a condemnation which was doubtless just, as the inhabitants mostly consisted of those who were glad to escape the restrictions of life within the city walls.
The first great exodus westwards of the more aristocratic inhabitants of London took place in the reigns of James I. and Charles I.—first to Lincoln's Inn Fields and its neighbourhood, and then to Covent Garden, and both these suburbs were laid out by Inigo Jones, the greatest architect of beautiful street fronts that England has ever produced. It is an eternal disgrace to Londoners that so many of his noble buildings in Lincoln's Inn Fields have been destroyed. The period of construction of these districts is marked by the names of Henrietta and King Streets in Covent Garden, and Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields.
After the Restoration modern London was founded. During the Commonwealth there had been a considerable stagnation in the movement of the population, and when the Royalists returned to England from abroad they found their family mansions in the city unfitted for their habitation, and in consequence established themselves in what is now the city of Westminster. Henry Jermyn, first Earl of St. Albans, began to provide houses for some of them in St. James's Square, and buildings in the district around were rapidly proceeded with.
We have a faithful representation of London, as it appeared at the end of the Commonwealth period, in Newcourt and Faithorne's valuable Plan of London, dated 1658. A long growth of houses north of the Thames is seen stretching from the Tower to the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey. Islington is found at the extreme north of the plan unconnected with the streets of the town, Hoxton connected with the city by Shoreditch, Bethnal Green almost alone, and Stepney at the extreme north-east. South of the Thames there are a few streets close to the river, and a small out-growth from London Bridge along the great southern road containing Southwark and Bermondsey. There is little at Lambeth but the Archbishop's Palace and the great marsh.
On this plan we see what was the condition of the Haymarket and Piccadilly before the Restoration. This was soon to be changed, for between the years 1664 and 1668 were erected three great mansions in the "Road to Reading" (now Piccadilly), viz., Clarendon House (where Bond and Albemarle Streets now stand), Berkeley House (on the site now occupied by Devonshire House), and Burlington House. Piccadilly was the original name of the district after which Piccadilly Hall was called. The latter place was situated at the north-east corner of the Haymarket, nearly opposite to Panton Square, and close by Panton Street, named after Colonel Thomas Panton, the notorious gamester, who purchased Piccadilly Hall from Mrs. Baker, the widow of the original owner.
There is much to be said in favour of associating the name of some well-known man with the London of his time, and thus showing how his descriptions illustrate the chief historical events of his time, with many of which he may have been connected. In the case of Samuel Pepys, we can see with his eyes many of the incidents of the early years of the Restoration period, and thus gain an insight into the inner life of the times. Pepys lived through some of the greatest changes that have passed over London, and in alluding to some of these we may quote his remarks with advantage. His friend, John Evelyn, also refers to many of the same events, and may also be quoted, more particularly as he was specially engaged at different periods of his life in improving several parts of London.
We are truly fortunate in having two such admirable diarists at hand to help us to a proper understanding of the course of events and of the changes that took place in London during their long lives.
When Pepys commenced his Diary on January 1st, 1660, we find him living in a small house in Axe Yard, Westminster, a place which derived its name from a brewhouse on the west side of King Street, called "The Axe." He was then clerk to Mr. (afterwards Sir George) Downing, one of the Four Tellers of the Receipt of the Exchequer, from whom Downing Street obtained its name. Pepys was in the receipt of £50 a year, and his household was not a large one, for it consisted of himself, his wife, and his servant Jane. He let the greater part of the house, and his family lived in the garrets. About 1767 Axe Yard was swept away, and Fludyer Street arose on its site, named after Sir Samuel Fludyer, who was Lord Mayor in 1761. Nearly a century afterwards (1864-65) this street also was swept away (with others) to make room for the Government offices, consisting of the India, Foreign and Colonial Offices, etc., so that all trace of Pepys's residence has now completely passed away.
Macaulay, in the famous third chapter of his History, where he gives a brilliant picture of the state of England in 1685, and clearly describes London under the later Stuarts, writes: "Each of the two cities which made up the capital of England had its own centre of attraction." We may take this sentence as our text, and try to illustrate it by some notices of London life in the city and at the Court end of town. The two extremes were equally familiar to Pepys, and both were seen by him almost daily when he stepped into his boat by the Tower and out of it again at Westminster.
To take the court life first, let us begin with the entry of the King into London on his birthday (May 29th, 1660). The enthusiastic reception of Charles II. is a commonplace of history, and from the Tower to Whitehall joy was exhibited by all that thronged the streets. Evelyn was spectator of the scene, which he describes in his Diary:—
"May 29th. This day his Majestie Charles the Second came to London after a sad and long exile and calamitous suffering both of the King and Church, being 17 yeares. This was also his birthday, and with a triumph of above 20,000 horse and foote, brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy; the wayes strew'd with flowers, the bells ringing, the streetes hung with tapissry, fountaines running with wine; the Maior, Aldermen and all the Companies in their liveries, chaines of gold and banners; Lords and nobles clad in cloth of silver, gold and velvet; the windowes and balconies all set with ladies; trumpets, music and myriads of people flocking, even so far as Rochester, so as they were seven houres in passing the citty, even from 2 in ye afternoon till 9 at night.
"I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and bless'd God. And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebell'd against him; but it was ye Lord's doing, for such a restauration was never mention'd in any history antient or modern, since the returne of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity; nor so joyfull a day and so bright ever seene in this nation, this hapning when to expect or effect it was past all human policy."
One of the brilliant companies of young and comely men in white doublets who took part in the procession was led by Simon Wadlow, the vintner and host of the "Devil" tavern. This was the son of Ben Jonson's Simon Wadlow, "Old Simon the King," who gave his name to Squire Western's favourite song. From Rugge's curious MS. Diurnal we learn how the young women of London were not behind the young men in the desire to join in the public rejoicings:—
"Divers maidens, in behalf of themselves and others, presented a petition to the Lord Mayor of London, wherein they pray his Lordship to grant them leave and liberty to meet his Majesty on the day of his passing through the city; and if their petition be granted that they will all be clad in white waistcoats and crimson petticoats, and other ornaments of triumph and rejoicing."
Pepys was at sea at this time with Sir Edward Montagu, where the sailors had their own rejoicings and fired off three guns, but he enters in his Diary: "This day, it is thought, the King do enter the city of London."
Charles, immediately on his arrival in London, settled himself in the Palace of Whitehall, which was his chief place of residence during the whole of his reign, but although he was very much at home in it, he felt keenly the inconveniences attending its situation by the river side, which caused it frequently to be flooded by high tides.
The King alludes to this trouble in one of his amusingly chatty speeches to the House of Commons on March 1st, 1661-62, when arrangements were being made for the entry of Katharine of Braganza into London. He said:—
"The mention of my wife's arrival puts me in mind to desire you to put that compliment upon her, that her entrance into the town may be with more decency than the ways will now suffer it to be; and for that purpose, I pray you would quickly pass such laws as are before you, in order to the amending those ways, and that she may not find Whitehall surrounded by water."
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A View of London as it appeared before the Great Fire.
From an old print.
| 1 | St. Paul's. |
| 2 | St. Dunstan's. |
| 3 | Temple. |
| 4 | St. Bride's. |
| 5 | St. Andrew's. |
| 6 | Baynard's Castle. |
| 7 | St. Sepulchre's. |
| 8 | Bow Church. |
| 9 | Guildhall. |
| 10 | St. Michael's. |
| 11 | St. Laurence, Poultney. |
| 12 | Old Swan. |
| 13 | London Bridge. |
| 14 | St. Dunstan's East. |
| 15 | Billingsgate. |
| 16 | Custom House. |
| 17 | Tower. |
| 18 | Tower Wharf. |
| 19 | St. Olave's. |
| 20 | St. Saviour's. |
| 21 | Winchester House. |
| 22 | The Globe. |
| 23 | The Bear Garden. |
| 24 | Hampstead. |
| 25 | Highgate. |
| 26 | Hackney. |
In the following year we read in Pepys's Diary a piquant account of the putting out of Lady Castlemaine's kitchen fire on a certain occasion when Charles was engaged to sup with her:—
"October 13th, 1663. My Lady Castlemaine, I hear, is in as great favour as ever, and the King supped with her the very first night he came from Bath: and last night and the night before supped with her; when there being a chine of beef to roast, and the tide rising into their kitchen that it could not be roasted there, and the cook telling her of it, she answered, 'Zounds! she must set the house on fire, but it should be roasted!' So it was carried to Mrs. Sarah's husband's, and there it was roasted."
The last sentence requires an explanation. Mrs. Sarah was Lord Sandwich's housekeeper, and Pepys had found out in November, 1662, that she had just been married, and that her husband was a cook. We are not told his name or where he lived.
Lord Dorset, in the famous song, "To all you ladies now on land," specially alludes to the periodical inundations at the Palace:—
"The King, with wonder and surprise,
Will swear the seas grow bold;
Because the tides will higher rise
Than e'er they did of old;
But let him know it is our tears
Bring floods of grief to Whitehall stairs."
Pepys was a constant visitor to Whitehall, and the Index to the Diary contains over three pages of references to his visits. He refers to Henry VIII.'s Gallery, the Boarded Gallery, the Matted Gallery, the Shield Gallery, and the Vane Room. Lilly, the astrologer, mentions the Guard Room. The Adam and Eve Gallery was so called from a picture by Mabuse, now at Hampton Court. In the Matted Gallery was a ceiling by Holbein, and on a wall in the Privy Chamber a painting of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., with their Queens, by the same artist, of which a copy in small is preserved at Hampton Court. On another wall was a "Dance of Death," also by Holbein, of which Douce has given a description; and in the bedchamber of Charles II. a representation by Joseph Wright of the King's birth, his right to his dominions, and miraculous preservation, with the motto, Terras Astræa revisit.
All these rooms, and most of the lodgings of the many residents, royal and non-royal, were in the portion of the Palace situated on the river side of the road, now known as Whitehall. This road was shut in by two gates erected by Henry VIII. when he enlarged the borders of the Palace after he had taken it from Wolsey. The one at the Westminster end was called the King Street gate, and the other, at the north end, designed by Holbein, was called by his name, and also Whitehall or Cock-pit gate.
It is necessary to remember that Whitehall extended into St. James's Park. The Tilt Yard, where many tournaments and pageants were held in the reigns of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and James I., fronted the Banqueting House, and occupied what is now the Horse Guards' Parade. On the south side of the Tilt Yard was the Cockpit, where Monk, Duke of Albemarle, lived for a time. His name was given to a tavern in the Tilt Yard ("The Monk's Head").
On the north side was Spring Gardens, otherwise the King's Garden, but it subsequently became a place of public entertainment, and after the Restoration it was styled the Old Spring Garden; then the ground was built upon, and the entertainments removed to the New Spring Garden at Lambeth, afterwards called Vauxhall.
The Cockpit was originally used for cock-fighting, but it cannot be definitely said when it ceased to be employed for this cruel sport. It was for a considerable time used as a royal theatre, and Malone wrote:—
"Neither Elizabeth, nor James I., nor Charles I., I believe, ever went to the public theatre, but they frequently ordered plays to be performed at Court, which were represented in the royal theatre called the Cockpit."
Malone is probably incorrect in respect to Elizabeth's use of the Cockpit, for certainly cock-fighting was practised here as late as 1607, as may be seen from the following entry in the State Papers:—
"Aug. 4th, 1607. Warrant to pay 100 marks per annum to William Gateacre for breeding, feeding, etc., the King's game cocks during the life of George Coliner, Cockmaster."[6]
It is, of course, possible that the players and the cocks occupied the place contemporaneously.
The lodgings at the Cockpit were occupied by some well-known men. Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, saw Charles I. pass from St. James's to the scaffold at the Banqueting House from one of his windows, and he died in these apartments on January 23rd, 1650. Oliver Cromwell, when Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, was given, by order of Parliament, "the use of the lodgings called the Cockpit, of the Spring Garden and St. James's House, and the command of St. James's Park," and when Protector, and in possession of Whitehall Palace, he still retained the Cockpit. When in 1657 he relaxed some of the prohibitions against the Theatre, he used the Cockpit stage occasionally for instrumental and vocal music.
A little before the Restoration the apartments were assigned to General Monk, and Charles II. confirmed the arrangement. Here he died, as Duke of Albemarle, on January 3rd, 1670. In 1673 George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, became a resident, and at the Revolution of 1688 the Princess Anne was living here.
There has been some confusion in respect to the references to the Cockpit in Pepys's Diary, as two distinct theatres are referred to under this name. The references before November, 1660, are to the performances of the Duke's Company at the Cockpit in Drury Lane. Here Pepys saw the "Loyal Subject," "Othello," "Wit without Money," and "The Woman's Prize or Tamer Tamed." The subsequent passages in which the Cockpit is referred to apply to the royal theatre attached to Whitehall Palace. Here Pepys saw "The Cardinal," "Claricilla," "Humorous Lieutenant," "Scornful Lady," and the "Valiant Cid." It is useful to remember that the performances at Whitehall were in the evening, and those at the public theatre in the afternoon.
The buildings of the Old Whitefriars Palace by the river side were irregular and unimposing outside, although they were handsome inside. The grand scheme of Inigo Jones for rebuilding initiated by James I., and occasionally entertained by Charles I. and II. and William III., came to nothing, but the noble Banqueting House remains to show what might have been.
The Rev. Dr. Sheppard, in his valuable work on The Old Palace of Whitehall (1902), refers to Grinling Gibbons's statue of James II., which for many years stood in the Privy Garden, and is one of the very few good statues in London. He refers to the temporary removal of the statue to the front of Gwydyr House, and writes: "Since the statue has been removed to its present position an inscription (there was none originally) has been placed on its stone pedestal. It runs as follows:—
JACOBUS SECUNDUS
DEI GRATIA ANGLIÆ SCOTIÆ FRANCIÆ
ET HIBERNIÆ REX.
FIDEI DEFENSOR. ANNO MDCLXXXVI."
This, however, is a mistake, and the inscription runs as follows:—
JACOBUS SECUNDUS
DEI GRATIÆ
ANGLIÆ SCOTIÆ
FRANCIÆ ET
HIBERNIÆ
REX
FIDEI DEFENSOR
ANNO MDCLXXXVI
in capitals, and without any stops.
The present writer remembers well being taken as a little boy to read the inscription and find out the error in the Latin. The statue has since been removed to the front of the new buildings of the Admiralty between the Horse Guards' Parade and Spring Gardens, a very appropriate position for a Lord High Admiral. I am happy to see that the inscription has not been altered, and the incorrect "Dei gratiæ" appears as in my youth.
James Duke of York, after the Restoration, occupied apartments in St. James's Palace, and his Secretary of the Admiralty, Sir William Coventry, had lodgings conveniently near him. The Duke sometimes moved from one palace to the other, as his father, Charles I., had done before him. Henrietta Maria took a fancy to the place, and most of their children were born at St. James's, the Duke being one of these.
James's changes of residence are recorded in Pepys's Diary as follows:—
"Jan. 23rd, 1664-65. Up and with Sir W. Batten and Sir W. Pen to White Hall; but there finding the Duke gone to his lodgings at St. James's for alltogether, his Duchesse being ready to lie in, we to him and there did our usual business."
"May 3rd, 1667. Up and with Sir J. Minnes, W. Batten and W. Pen in the last man's coach to St. James's, and thence up to the Duke of York's chamber, which as it is now fretted at the top, and the chimney-piece made handsome, is one of the noblest and best-proportioned rooms that ever, I think, I saw in my life."
"May 20th, 1668. Up and with Colonell Middleton in a new coach he hath made him, very handsome, to White Hall, where the Duke of York having removed his lodgings for this year to St. James's we walked thither; and there find the Duke of York coming to White Hall, and so back to the Council Chamber, where the Committee of the Navy sat."
In November, 1667, James fell ill of the smallpox in St. James's Palace, when the gallery doors were locked up. On March 31st, 1671, Anne Duchess of York, the daughter of Clarendon, died here. The Princess Mary was married to William Prince of Orange in November, 1677, at eleven o'clock at night, in the Chapel Royal, and on July 28th, 1683, Princess Anne to Prince George of Denmark, when the pair took up their residence at St. James's.
When James came to the crown he went to live at Whitehall Palace, but he frequently stayed at St. James's. On June 9th, 1688, Queen Mary of Modena was taken to the latter place, and on the following day James Francis Edward, afterwards known as "The Pretender," was born in the Old Bedchamber. This room was situated at the east end of the south front. It had three doors, one leading to a private staircase at the head of the bed, and two windows opposite the bed.[7]
The room was pulled down previous to the alterations made in the year 1822.
The anecdote of Charles II. and the chaplains of the Chapel Royal is often quoted, but it is worth repeating, as it shows the ready wit of the great preacher, Dr. South. A daily dinner was prepared at the Palace for the chaplains, and one day the King notified his intention of dining with them. There had been some talk of abolishing this practice, and South seized the opportunity of saying grace to do his best in opposition to the suggestion; so, instead of the regular formula, which was "God save the King and bless the dinner," said "God bless the King and save the dinner." Charles at once cried out, "And it shall be saved."
The Duke of York and the King were fond of wandering about the park at all hours, and as Charles often walked by himself, even as far as the then secluded Constitution Hill, James having expressed fears for his safety, the elder brother made the memorable reply: "No kind of danger, James, for I am sure no man in England will take away my life to make you king."
Pepys tells us on March 16th, 1661-2, that while he was walking in the park he met the King and Duke coming "to see their fowl play."
Cosmo III., Grand Duke of Tuscany (then Hereditary Prince), made a "Tour through England" in 1669, and it will be remembered that Macaulay found the account of his travels a valuable help towards obtaining a picture of the state of England in the middle of the seventeenth century. Cosmo thus describes St. James's Park:—
"A large park enclosed on every side by a wall, and containing a long, straight, and spacious walk, intended for the amusement of the Mall, on each side of which grow large elms whose shade render the promenade in that place in summer infinitely pleasant and agreeable; close to it is a canal of nearly the same length, on which are several species of aquatic birds, brought up and rendered domestic—the work of the Protector Cromwell; the rest of the park is left uncultivated, and forms a wood for the retreat of deer and other quadrupeds."
His Highness was not quite correct in giving the credit of the collection of wild-fowl to Cromwell, as the water-fowl appear to have been kept in the park from the reign of Elizabeth, and the ponds were replenished after the Restoration.
Evelyn gives a long account in his Diary of the zoological collections (February 9th, 1664-65). He says:
"The parke was at this time stored with numerous flocks of severall sorts of ordinary and extraordinary wild fowle, breeding about the Decoy, which for being neere so greate a citty, and among such a concourse of souldiers and people, is a singular and diverting thing. There were also deere of several countries, white; spotted like leopards; antelopes, an elk, red deere, roebucks, staggs, guinea goates, Arabian sheepe, etc. There were withy pots or nests for the wild fowle to lay their eggs in, a little above ye surface of ye water."
Charles II. was a saunterer by nature, and he appears to have been quite happy in the park either chatting with Nell Gwyn, at the end of the garden of her Pall Mall house, in feeding the fowl, or in playing the game of Mall.
This game was popular from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century, and then went out of fashion. At one time there were few large towns without a mall, or prepared ground where the game could be played. There is reason to believe that the game was introduced into England from Scotland on the accession of James VI. to the English throne, because the King names it in his "Basilicon Dōron" among other exercises as suited for his son Henry, who was afterwards Prince of Wales, and about the same time Sir R. Dallington, in his Method of Travel (1598), expresses his surprise that the sport was not then introduced into England.
The game was played in long shaded alleys, and on dry gravel walks. The mall in St. James's Park was nearly half a mile in length, and was kept with the greatest care. Pepys relates how he went to talk with the keeper of the mall, and how he learned the manner of mixing the earth for the floor, over which powdered cockle-shells were strewn. All this required such attention that a special person was employed for the purpose, who was called the cockle-strewer. In dry weather the surface was apt to turn to dust, and consequently to impede the flight of the ball, so that the cockle-strewer's office was by no means a sinecure. Richard Blome, writing in 1673, asserts that this mall was "said to be the best in Christendom," but Evelyn claims the pre-eminence for that at Tours, with its seven rows of tall elms, as "the noblest in Europe for length and shade." The game is praised by Sir R. Dallington "because it is a gentlemanlike sport, not violent, and yields good occasion and opportunity of discourse as they walke from one marke to the other," and Joseph Lauthier, who wrote a treatise on the subject, entitled Le Jeu de Mail, Paris, 1717 (which is now extremely scarce), uses the same form of recommendation.
The chief requisites for the game were mallets, balls, two arches or hoops, one at either end of the mall, and a wooden border marked so as to show the position of the balls when played. The mallets were of different size and form to suit the various players, and Lauthier directs that the weight and height of the mallet should be in proportion to the strength and stature of the player. The balls were of various sizes and weights, and each size had its distinct name. In damp weather, when the soil was heavy, a lighter ball was required than when the soil was sandy. A gauge was used to ascertain its weight, and the weight of the mallet was adjusted to that of the ball. The arch or pass was about two feet high and two inches wide. The one at the west end of St. James's Park remained in its place for many years, and was not cleared away until the beginning of the reign of George III. In playing the game, the mallet was raised above the head and brought down with great force so as to strike the ball to a considerable distance. The poet Waller describes Charles II.'s stroke in the following lines:—
"Here a well-polished Mall gives us joy,
To see our prince his matchless force employ.
No sooner has he touch'd the flying ball,
But 'tis already more than half the Mall;
And such a fury from his arm has got,
As from a smoking culverin 'twere shot."
Considerable skill and practice were required in the player, who, while attempting to make the ball skate along the ground with speed, had to be careful that he did not strike it in such a manner as to raise it from the ground. This is shown by what Charles Cotton writes:—
"But playing with the boy at Mall
(I rue the time and ever shall),
I struck the ball, I know not how,
(For that is not the play, you know),
A pretty height into the air."
This boy was, perhaps, a caddie, for it will be seen that the game was a sort of cross between golf and croquet.
Lauthier describes four ways of playing at pall mall, viz.:—(1) the rouet, or pool game; (2) en partie, a match game; (3) à grands coups, at long shots; and (4) chicane, or hockey. Moreover, he proposes a new game to be played like billiards.
We may now pass from St. James's Park to Hyde Park, which became a place of public resort in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. It was then considered to be quite a country place. Ben Jonson mentions in the Prologue to his comedy, The Staple of News (1625), the number of coaches which congregated there, and Shirley describes the horse-races in his comedy entitled Hide Parke (1637).
The park, being Crown property, was sold by order of Parliament in 1652 for about £17,000 in three lots, the purchasers being Richard Wilcox, John Tracy, and Anthony Deane. Cromwell was a frequent visitor, and on one occasion when he was driving in the park his horses ran away, and he was thrown off his coach.
After the Restoration the park was the daily resort of all the gallantry of the court, and Pepys found driving there very pleasant, although he complained of the dust. The Ring, which is described in Grammont's Memoirs as "the rendezvous of magnificence and beauty," was a small enclosure of trees round which the carriages circulated.
Pepys writes April 4th, 1663:—
"After dinner to Hide Park ... At the Park was the King and in another coach my Lady Castlemaine, they greeting one another at every tour."
This passage is illustrated in Wilson's Memoirs, 1719, where we are told that when the coaches "have turned for some time round one way, they face about and turn t'other."
John Macky, in his Journey through England (1724), affirms that in fine weather he had seen above three hundred coaches at a time making "the Grand Tour."
Cosmo tells of the etiquette which was observed among the company:—
"The King and Queen are often there, and the duke and duchess, towards whom at the first meeting and no more all persons show the usual marks of respect, which are afterwards omitted, although they should chance to meet again ever so often, every one being at full liberty, and under no constraint whatever, and to prevent the confusion and disorder which might arise from the great number of lackies and footmen, these are not permitted to enter Hyde Park, but stop at the gate waiting for their masters."
Oldys refers to a poem, printed in sixteen pages, which was entitled "The Circus, or British Olympicks: a Satyr on the Ring in Hyde Park." He says that the poem satirizes many well-known fops under fictitious names, and he raises the number of coaches seen on a fine evening from Macky's three hundred to a thousand. The Ring was partly destroyed at the time the Serpentine was formed by Caroline, Queen of George II.
Although the Ring has disappeared, Hyde Park has remained from the Restoration period until the present day the most fashionable place in London, but now the whole park has been utilized.
Charles II., in reviving the Stage, specially patronised it himself, and it may be referred to here from its connection with the Court. It has already been noticed that previous monarchs did not visit the public theatres.
Pepys was an enthusiastic playgoer, and the Diary contains a mass of information respecting the Stage not elsewhere to be found, so that we are able to trace the various advances made in the revival of the Stage from the incipient attempt of Davenant before the Restoration to the improvements in scenery introduced by the rivalry of the two managers, Davenant and Killigrew. Immediately after the Restoration two companies of actors were organized, who performed at two different houses. One theatre was known as the King's House, called by Pepys "The Theatre," and the other as the Duke's House, called by Pepys "The Opera." Sir William Davenant obtained a patent for his company as "The Duke's Servants," named after the Duke of York, and Thomas Killigrew obtained one for "The King's Servants."
Killigrew's Company first performed at the "Red Bull," Clerkenwell, and on November 8th removed to Gibbons's Tennis Court in Bear Yard, which was entered from Vere Street, Clare Market. Here the Company remained till 1663, when they removed to Drury Lane Theatre, which had been built for their reception, and was opened on May 7th.
Davenant's Company first performed at the Cockpit, Drury Lane. They began to play at Salisbury Court Theatre on November 13th, 1660, and went to Cobham House, Blackfriars, on the site afterwards occupied by Apothecaries' Hall, in January, 1661. They then removed to the theatre in Portugal Row, built on the site of Lisle's Tennis Court. Rhodes, a bookseller, who had formerly been wardrobe keeper at the Blackfriars, had managed in 1659 to obtain a licence from the State, and John Downes affirms that his company acted at the Cockpit, but apparently he was acting at the Salisbury Court Theatre before Davenant went there. Killigrew, however, soon succeeded in suppressing Rhodes. Davenant planned a new building in Dorset Gardens, which was close to Salisbury Court, where the former theatre was situated. He died, however, before it was finished, but the company removed there in 1671, and the theatre was opened on the 9th of November with Dryden's play, Sir Martin Mar-all, which he had improved from a rough draft by the Duke of Newcastle. Pepys had seen it seven times in the years 1667-68. The Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre remained shut up until February, 1672, when the King's Company, burnt out of Drury Lane Theatre, made use of it till March, 1674, by which time the new building in Brydges Street, Covent Garden, was ready for their occupation.
When Tom Killigrew died in 1682 the King's and the Duke's companies were united, and the Duke's servants removed from Dorset Gardens to Drury Lane. The two companies performed together for the first time on November 16th.
These constant changes are very confusing, and the recital of them is not very entertaining, but it is necessary to make the matter clear for the proper understanding of the history of the time. The plan of the old theatres, with their platform stage, was no longer of use for the altered arrangements introduced at the Restoration. Successive improvements in the form of the houses were made, but we learn from Pepys that it was some time before the roofing of the building was water-tight.
The public theatres were open in the afternoon, three o'clock being the usual hour for performance, and the plays were therefore partly acted in the summer by daylight. It was thus necessary to have skylights, but these were so slight that heavy rain came and wetted those below. On June 1st, 1664, Pepys wrote:—
"Before the play was done it fell such a storm of hail that we in the middle of the pit were fain to rise, and all the house in a disorder."
Davenant was the original planner of the modern stage and its scenery, but Killigrew did his part in the improvement carried out. He was somewhat jealous of his brother manager, and on one occasion he explained to Pepys what he himself had done:—
"Feb. 12th, 1666-67. The stage is now by his pains a thousand times better and more glorious than ever heretofore. Now, wax candles, and many of them; then not above 3 lbs. of tallow: now all things civil, no rudeness anywhere; then as in a bear garden: then two or three fiddlers, now nine or ten of the best: then nothing but rushes upon the ground, and everything else mean; and now all otherwise; then the Queen seldom and the King never would come; now, not the King only for State but all civil people do think they may come as well as any."
Killigrew complained that "the audience at his house was not above half as much as it used to be before the late fire," but in the following year (February 6th, 1667-8) there were crowds at the other house. Pepys relates:—
"Home to dinner, and my wife being gone before, I to the Duke of York's playhouse; where a new play of Etheridge's called 'She Would if she Could,' and though I was there by two o'clock, there were 1,000 people put back that could not have room in the pit."
Pepys's criticisms on the plays he saw acted at these theatres were not always satisfactory, and often they were contradictory. At the same time he was apparently judicious in the disposal of praise and blame on the actors he saw. Betterton was his ideal of the perfect actor, and, so far as it is possible to judge as to one who lived so long ago, public opinion formed by those capable of judging from contemporary report seems to be in agreement with that of Pepys.
Pepys was a great frequenter of taverns and inns, as were most of his contemporaries. There are about one hundred and thirty London taverns mentioned in the Diary, but time has swept away nearly all of these houses, and it is difficult to find any place which Pepys frequented.
These taverns may be considered as a link between the Court end of London and the city, for Pepys distributed his favours between the two places. King Street, Westminster, was full of inns, and Pepys seems to have frequented them all. Two of them—the "Dog" and the "Sun"—are mentioned in Herrick's address to the shade of "Glorious Ben":—
"Ah, Ben!
Say how or when
Shall we thy guests
Meet at these feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tunne?
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad!
And yet such verse of thine
Outdid the meate, outdid the frolic wine."
The "Three Tuns" at Charing Cross, visited by Pepys, was probably the same house whose sign Herrick changes to "Triple Tun."
Among the Westminster taverns may be mentioned "Heaven" and "Hell," two places of entertainment at Westminster Hall; the "Bull Head" and the "Chequers" and the "Swan" at Charing Cross; the "Cock" in Bow Street and the "Fleece" in York Street, Covent Garden; the "Canary" house by Exeter Change; and the "Blue Balls" in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
The majority of these taverns patronised by Pepys were, however, in the city. There were several "Mitres" in London, but perhaps the most interesting one was that kept in Fenchurch Street by Daniel Rawlinson, a staunch royalist, who, when Charles I. was executed, hung his sign in mourning. Thomas Hearne says that naturally made him suspected by the Roundheads, but "endeared him so much to the Churchmen that he throve amain and got a good estate." His son, Sir Thomas Rawlinson, was Lord Mayor in 1700, and President of Bridewell Hospital. His two grandsons, Thomas and Richard Rawlinson, hold an honourable place in the roll of eminent book collectors. The "Samson" in St. Paul's Churchyard was another famous house, as also the "Dolphin" in Tower Street, a rendezvous of the Navy officers, which provided very good and expensive dinners.
The "Cock" in Threadneedle Street was an old-established house when Pepys visited it on March 7th, 1659-60, and it lasted till 1840, when it was cleared away. In the eighteenth century it was a constant practice for the frequenters of the "Cock" to buy a chop or steak at the butcher's and bring it to be cooked, the charge for which was one penny. Fox's friend, the notorious Duke of Norfolk, known as "Jockey of Norfolk," often bought his chop and brought it here to be cooked, until his rank was discovered.
The meetings of the Royal Society were held at Gresham College in Bishopsgate Street, and then at Arundel House in the Strand, which was lent to the Society by Henry Howard of Norfolk, afterwards Duke of Norfolk. Cosmo of Tuscany visited the latter place for a meeting of the Royal Society, and he gives in his Travels an interesting account of the manner in which the proceedings were carried out.
There are many references in Pepys's Diary to the Lord Mayor and the Rulers of the City, and of the customs carried out there.
The Lord Mayor, aldermen, and common councilmen visited Cosmo, who was staying at Lord St. Alban's mansion in St. James's Square. His Highness, having dined with the King at the Duke of Buckingham's, kept the city magnates waiting for a time, but Colonel Gascoyne, "to make the delay less tedious, had accommodated himself to the national taste by ordering liquor and amusing them with drinking toasts, till it was announced that His Highness was ready to give them audience." The description of the audience is very interesting.
Pepys lived in the city at the Navy Office in Seething Lane (opposite St. Olave's, Hart Street, the church he attended) during the whole of the time he was writing his Diary, but when he was Secretary of the Admiralty he went, in 1684, to live at the end of Buckingham Street, Strand, in a house on the east side which looks on to the river.
Mr. John Eliot Hodgkin possesses the original lease (dated September 30th, 1687) from the governor and company of the New River for a supply of water through a half-inch pipe, and four small cocks of brass led from the main pipe in Villiers Street to Samuel Pepys's house in York Buildings, also a receipt for two quarters' rent for the same.[8]
Two of the greatest calamities that could overtake any city occurred in London during the writing of the Diary, and were fully described by Pepys—viz., the Plague of 1665 and the Fire of 1666. Defoe's most interesting history of the plague year was written in 1722 at second hand, for the writer was only two years old when this scourge overran London. Pepys wrote of what he saw, and as he stuck to his duty during the whole time that the pestilence continued, he saw much that occurred.
England was first visited with the plague in 1348-49, which, since 1833 (when Hecker's work on the Epidemics of the Middle Ages was first published in English), has been styled the Black Death—a translation of the German term "Der Schwarze Tod." This plague had the most momentous effect upon the history of England on account of the fearful mortality it caused. It paralysed industry, and permanently altered the position of the labourer. The statistics of the writers of the Middle Ages are of little value, and the estimates of those who died are various, but the statement that half the population of England died from the plague is probably not far from the truth. From 1348 to 1665 plague was continually occurring in London, but it has not appeared since the last date, except on a small scale. Dr. Creighton gives particulars of the visitations in London in 1603, 1625, and 1665, from which it appears that the mortality in 1665 was more than double that in 1603, and about a third more than that in 1625.
On the 7th of June, 1665, Pepys for the first time saw two or three houses marked with the red cross, and the words "Lord, have mercy upon us" upon the doors, and the sight made him feel so ill-at-ease that he was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew.[9] On the 27th of this month he writes: "The plague encreases mightily."
According to the Bills of Mortality, the total number of deaths in London for the week ending June 27th was 684, of which number 267 were deaths from the plague. The number of deaths rose week by week until September 19th, when the total was 8,297, and the deaths from the plague 7,165. On September 26th the total had fallen to 6,460, and deaths from the plague to 5,533. The number fell gradually, week by week, till October 31st, when the total was 1,388, and the deaths from the plague 1,031. On November 7th there was a rise to 1,787 and 1,414 respectively. On November 14th the numbers had gone down to 1,359 and 1,050 respectively. On December 12th the total had fallen to 442, and deaths from plague to 243. On December 19th there was a rise to 525 and 281 respectively. The total of burials in 1665 was 97,306, of which number the plague claimed 68,596 victims. Most of the inhabitants of London who could get away took the first opportunity of escaping from the town, and in 1665 there were many places that the Londoner could visit with considerable chance of safety. The court went to Oxford, and afterwards came back to Hampton Court before venturing to return to Whitehall. The clergy and the doctors fled with very few exceptions, and several of those who stayed in town doing the duty of others, as well as their own, fell victims to the scourge.
Queen Elizabeth would have none of these removals. Stow says that in the time of the plague of 1563, "a gallows was set up in the Market-place of Windsor to hang all such as should come there from London."
Dr. Hodges, author of Loimologia, enumerates among those who assisted in the dangerous work of restraining the progress of the infection were the learned Dr. Gibson, Regius Professor at Cambridge; Dr. Francis Glisson, Dr. Nathaniel Paget, Dr. Peter Barwick, Dr. Humphrey Brookes, etc. Of those he mentions eight or nine fell in their work, among whom was Dr. William Conyers, to whose goodness and humanity he bears the most honourable testimony. Dr. Alexander Burnett, of Fenchurch Street, one of Pepys's friends, was another of the victims.
Of those to whom honour is due special mention must be made of Monk, Duke of Albemarle, Evelyn, Pepys, Edmond Berry Godfrey; and there were, of course, others.
The Duke of Albemarle stayed at the Cockpit; Evelyn sent his wife and family to Wotton, but he remained in town himself, and had very arduous duties to perform, for he was responsible for finding food and lodging for the prisoners of war, and he found it difficult to get money for these purposes. He tells in his Diary how he was received by Charles II. and the Duke of York on January 29th, 1665-6, when the pestilence had partly abated and the court had ventured from Oxford to Hampton Court. The King
"... ran towards me, and in a most gracious manner gave me his hand to kisse, with many thanks for my care and faithfulnesse in his service in a time of such greate danger, when everybody fled their employment; he told me he was much obliged to me, and said he was several times concerned for me, and the peril I underwent, and did receive my service most acceptably (though in truth I did but do my duty, and O that I had performed it as I ought!) After that his Majesty was pleased to talke with me alone, neere an houre, of severall particulars of my employment and ordered me to attend him againe on the Thursday following at Whitehall. Then the Duke came towards me, and embraced me with much kindnesse, telling me if he had thought my danger would have been so greate, he would not have suffered his Majesty to employ me in that station."
Pepys refers, on May 1st, 1667, to his visit to Sir Robert Viner's, the eminent goldsmith, where he saw "two or three great silver flagons, made with inscriptions as gifts of the King to such and such persons of quality as did stay in town [during] the late plague for keeping things in order in the town, which is a handsome thing." Godfrey was a recipient of a silver tankard, and he was knighted by the King in September, 1666, for his efforts to preserve order in the Great Fire. The remembrance of his death, which had so great an influence on the spread of the "Popish Plot" terror, is greater than that of his public spirit during the plague and the fire.
Pepys lived at Greenwich and Woolwich during the height of the plague, but he was constantly in London. How much these men must have suffered is brought very visibly before us in one of the best letters Pepys ever wrote:
"To Lady Casteret, from Woolwich, Sept. 4, 1655. The absence of the court and emptiness of the city takes away all occasion of news, save only such melancholy stories as would rather sadden than find your ladyship any divertissement in the hearing. I have stayed in the city till about 7,400 died in one week, and of them above 6,000 of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty on the Exchange; till whole families have been swept away; till my very physician, Dr. Burnett, who undertook to secure me against any infection, having survived the month of his own house being shut up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service; lastly, till I could find neither meat nor drink safe, the butchers being everywhere visited, my brewer's house shut up, and my baker, with his whole family, dead of the plague."
The Great Fire of London.
The view shows Ludgate in the foreground, and in the distance St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of St. Mary-le-Bow.
Before the first calamity of pestilence was ended the second calamity of fire commenced. On the night of September 1st, 1666, many houses were destroyed. At three o'clock in the morning of the 2nd (Sunday) his servant Jane awoke Pepys to tell him that a great fire was raging. Not thinking much of the information, he went to sleep again, but when he rose at seven he found that about 300 houses had been burned in the night. He went first to the Tower, and saw the Lieutenant. Then he took boat to Whitehall to see the King. He tells of what he has seen, and says that, unless His Majesty will command houses to be pulled down, nothing can stop the fire. On hearing this the King instructs him to go to the Lord Mayor (Sir Thomas Bludworth) and command him to pull down houses in every direction. The Mayor seems to have been but a poor creature, and when he heard the King's message
"... he cried like a fainting woman, 'Lord! what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses, but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.'"
Fortunately, most of the Londoners were more vigorous than the Mayor. The King and the Duke of York interested themselves in the matter, and did their best to help those who were busy in trying to stop the fire. Evelyn wrote on September 6th:—
"It is not indeede imaginable how extraordinary the vigilance and activity of the King and the Duke was, even labouring in person, and being present to command, order, reward, or encourage workmen, by which he showed his affection to his people and gained theirs."
Sir William Penn and Pepys were ready in resource, and saw to the blowing up of houses to check the spread of the flames, the former bringing workmen out of the dockyards to help in the work. During the period when it was expected that the Navy Office would be destroyed, Pepys sent off his money, plate, and most treasured property to Sir W. Rider, at Bethnal Green, and then he and Penn dug a hole in their garden, in which they put their wine and parmezan cheese.
On the 10th of September, Sir W. Rider let it be known that, as the town is full of the report respecting the wealth in his house, he will be glad if his friends will provide for the safety of their property elsewhere.
On September 5th, when Evelyn went to Whitehall, the King commanded him
"... among the rest to looke after the quenching of Fetter Lane end, to preserve if possible that part of Holborn, whilst the rest of ye gentlemen tooke their several posts, some at one part, some at another (for now they began to bestir themselves and not till now, who hitherto had stood as men intoxicated with their hands acrosse) and began to consider that nothing was likely to put a stop but the blowing up of so many houses as might make a wider gap than any had yet been made by the ordinary method of pulling them downe with engines."
The daily records of the fire and of the movements of the people are most striking. Now we see the river crowded with boats filled with the goods of those who are houseless, and then we pass to Moorfields, where are crowds carrying their belongings about with them, and doing their best to keep these separate till some huts can be built to receive them. Soon paved streets and two-storey houses were seen in Moorfields, the city authorities having let the land on leases for seven years.
The wearied people complained that their feet were "ready to burn" through walking in the streets "among the hot coals."
(September 5th, 1666.) Means were provided to save the unfortunate multitudes from starvation, and on this same day proclamation was made
"... ordering that for the supply of the distressed persons left destitute ... great proportions of bread be brought daily, not only to the former markets, but to those lately ordained. Churches and public places were to be thrown open for the reception of poor people and their goods."
Westminster Hall was filled with "people's goods."
On September 7th Evelyn went towards Islington and Highgate
"... where one might have seen 200,000 people of all ranks and degrees dispers'd and lying along by their heapes of what they could save from the fire, deploring their losse, and tho' ready to perish for hunger and destitution yet not asking one penny for reliefe, which to me appear'd a stranger sight than any I had yet beheld."
The fire was fairly got under on September 7th, but on the previous day Clothworkers' Hall was burning, as it had been for three days and nights, in one volume of flame. This was caused by the cellars being full of oil. How long the streets remained in a dangerous condition may be guessed by Pepys's mention, on May 16th, 1666-7, of the smoke issuing from the cellars in the ruined streets of London.
The fire consumed about five-sixths of the whole city, and outside the walls a space was cleared about equal to an oblong square of a mile and a half in length and half a mile in breadth. Well might Evelyn say, "I went againe to ye ruines for it was no longer a citty" (September 10th, 1666).
The destruction was fearful, and the disappearance of the grand old Cathedral of St. Paul's was among the most to be regretted of the losses. One reads these particulars with a sort of dulled apathy, and it requires such a terribly realistic picture as the following, by Evelyn, to bring the scene home to us in all its magnitude and horror:
"The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonish'd, 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 heat with a long set of faire and warm weather had even ignited the aire and prepared the materials to conceive the fire, which devour'd after an incredible manner houses, furniture, and every thing. 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 seene since the foundation of it, nor be outdon till the universal conflagration thereof. All the skie was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven, and the light seene above 40 miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw 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 a hideous storme and the aire all about so hot and inflam'd that at the last one was not able to approach it, so that they were forc'd to stand still and let ye flames burn on, which they did neere two miles in length and one in breadth. The clouds also of smoke were dismall and reach'd upon computation neer 50 miles in length. Thus I left it this afternoone burning, a resemblance of Sodom, or the last day. It forcibly call'd to mind that passage—non enim hic habemus stabilem civitatem: the ruines resembling the picture of Troy. London was, but is no more."—(Sept. 3rd, 1666.)
Can we be surprised at the bewildered feelings of the people? Rather must we admire the practical and heroic conduct of the homeless multitude. It took long to rebuild the city, but directly anything could be done the workers were up and doing.
An Act of Parliament was passed "for erecting a Judicature for determination of differences touching Houses burned or demolished by reason of the late Fire which happened in London" (18 and 19 Car. II., cap. 7), and Sir Matthew Hale was the moving spirit in the planning it and in carrying out its provisions when it was passed. Burnet affirms that it was through his judgment and foresight "that the whole city was raised out of its ashes without any suits of law" (History of his Own Time, Book ii.). By a subsequent Act (18 and 19 Car. II., cap. 8) the machinery for a satisfactory rebuilding of the city was arranged. The rulings of the judges appointed by these Acts gave general satisfaction, and after a time the city was rebuilt very much on the old lines, and things went on as before.[10] At one time it was supposed that the fire would cause a westward march of trade, but the city asserted the old supremacy when it was rebuilt.
South-West View of Old St. Paul's.
Three great men, thoroughly competent to give valuable advice on the rebuilding of the city, viz., Wren, Robert Hooke, and Evelyn, presented to the King valuable plans for the best mode of arranging the new streets, but none of these schemes was accepted. One cannot but regret that the proposals of the great architect were not carried out.
With the reference to the Plague and the Great Fire we may conclude this brief account of the later Stuart London. The picturesque, but dirty, houses were replaced by healthier and cleaner ones. The West End increased and extended its borders, but the growth to the north of Piccadilly was very gradual. All periods have their chroniclers, but no period has produced such delightful guides to the actual life of the town as the later half of the seventeenth century did in the pages of Evelyn and Pepys. It must ever be a sincere regret to all who love to understand the more intimate side of history that Pepys did not continue his Diary to a later period. We must, however, be grateful for what we possess, and I hope this slight and imperfect sketch of Pepys's London may refresh the memories of my readers as to what the London of that time was really like.
[THE OLD LONDON BRIDGES]
By J. Tavenor-Perry
"London Bridge is broken down,
Dance o'er my Lady Lee.
London Bridge is broken down
With a gay Ladee."
At the beginning of the last century only three bridges spanned the Thames in its course through London, and of these two were scarcely fifty years old; but before the century closed there were no less than thirteen bridges across the river between Battersea and the Pool. The three old bridges have been rebuilt, and even some of the later ones have been reconstructed, whilst one has been removed bodily, and now spans the gorge of the Avon at Bristol. Of all these bridges unfortunately only two are constructed wholly of stone, and can lay claim to any architectural merit; and even one of these two has recently had the happy effect of its graceful arches destroyed by the addition of overhanging pathways. Of the rest, some are frankly utilitarian—mere iron girder railway bridges, with no attempt at decoration beyond gilding the rivets—whilst the others have their iron arches and construction disguised with coarse and meaningless ornaments. One only of the iron bridges is in anyway worthy of its position; in its perfect simplicity and the bold spans of its three arches, Southwark Bridge bears comparison with the best in Europe, but the gradients and approaches are so inconvenient that it is even now threatened with reconstruction.
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Sir John Evelyn's Plan for Rebuilding London after the Great Fire.
Exactly when the first bridge was built across the Thames at London we can only surmise, for even tradition is silent on the subject, and we only know of the existence of one at an early date by very casual references, which, however, do not help us to realise the character of the work. Though no evidence remains of a Roman bridge, it seems unlikely, having regard to the importance of London, and to the fact that the great roads from the south coast converged on a point opposite to it, on the other side of the river, that they should have been left to end there without a bridge to carry them over. The difficulties of building across a great tidal river had not prevented the Romans from bridging the Medway at Rochester, as remains actually discovered have proved; and if no evidences of Roman work were actually met with in the rebuilding of London Bridge or the removal of the old one, this may be due to the fact that each successive bridge—and there have been at least three within historical times—was built some distance further up the stream than its predecessor.
We know, however, with certainty that a bridge was standing in the reign of King Ethelred from the references made to it, and we may fairly assume that this must have been the Roman bridge, at least so far as its main construction was concerned; and, like other Roman bridges standing at that time in Gaul and in other parts of England, it would have consisted merely of piers of masonry, with a wooden roadway passing from one to the other. It was still standing, of sufficient strength for resistance, when the Danes under Canute sailed up the river, who, being unable to force a passage, tradition says—and antiquaries have imagined they could discover traces of it—cut a ship canal through the Surrey marshes from Bermondsey to Battersea, and passed their fleet through that way.
Fig. 1—The Undercroft of St. Thomas of Canterbury on the Bridge.
The history of the bridge only opens with the beginning of the twelfth century. According to tradition, the convent of St. Mary Overie, Southwark, had been originally endowed with the profits of a ferry across the river, and had in consequence undertaken the duty of maintaining the bridge in a proper state of repair when a bridge was built. This convent was refounded in 1106 as a priory of Austin Canons; and it is not a little remarkable, having regard to the duties it had undertaken, that of its founders, who were two Norman Knights, one was William de Pont de l'Arche. At the Norman town, where stood his castle and from which he took his name, was a bridge of twenty-two openings, erected, it was said, by Charles the Bald, but most likely a Roman work, across the Seine at the highest point reached by the tide. It is a further curious coincidence that this same William appears as a witness to a deed executed by Henry I., excusing the manor of Alciston, in Sussex, from paying any dues for the repairs of London Bridge.
It is recorded that in 1136 the bridge was burnt, which may perhaps merely mean that the deck was destroyed, whilst the piers remained sufficiently uninjured to allow of the structure being repaired; but in 1163 it had become so dangerous that Peter of Colechurch undertook the erection of a new bridge, which he constructed of elm timber. This sudden emergence of Peter from obscurity to carry out so important an engineering work is as dramatic as is that of St. Bénezet, who founded the confraternity of Hospitaliers pontifices, which undertook the building of bridges and the establishment of ferries. According to legend, this saint, although then only a young shepherd, essayed to bridge the Rhone at Avignon, and the ruined arches of his great work are still among the sights of that city. Peter may have possessed many more qualifications for building than a shepherd could have acquired, as large ecclesiastical works were in progress in London throughout his life, which he must have observed and perhaps profited by; but this is only surmise, as of his history, except in connection with his great work, we know no more than the fact that he was the chaplain of St. Mary Colechurch. His contemporary, Randulphus de Decito, Dean of London, says that he was a native of the city, so that it is scarcely likely that he had acquired his skill abroad; but we are told that he traversed the country to collect the moneys for his undertaking, and he may thus have obtained some knowledge of the many Roman bridges which still survived, or even have seen the great bridge which Bishop Flambard had recently erected across the Wear at Durham. His selection as the architect of the earlier bridge of 1163 may perhaps not be due in any way to his especial engineering skill, but rather to some intimate connection with the priory of St. Mary Overie, whose canons were primarily responsible for the bridge repairs; indeed, since he is merely described as the chaplain of his church, he may himself have been one of the canons. But be the cause what it may—and it was not his success in erecting this first bridge, for it soon became dilapidated—thirteen years after its erection he started afresh, on a site further up the river, to erect a bridge of stone. In 1176, two years before St. Bénezet began his great bridge at Avignon, he commenced his work, and thirty-three years passed before its completion. Whether the delay was due to lack of funds or the incapacity of the architect we do not know, though probably to both, for before Peter's death King John, who had manifested considerable interest in the new bridge, had urged Peter's dismissal, and, under the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, suggested the appointment of Isembert of Saintes to complete the work. This Isembert was credited with the erection of the great bridge across the Charante at Saintes, although that bridge was undoubtedly a Roman one, and all he appears to have done was to turn arches between the original piers, and make it a stone bridge throughout. The same master was said to have built another bridge at La Rochelle, and had evidently gained much experience in such engineering work; and it is perhaps a misfortune that the King's advice was neglected, as a skilled architect, which Peter certainly was not, might have saved the city of London much eventual loss and trouble. Peter was, however, suffered to continue the bridge until his death in 1205, when a commission of three city merchants completed the work in four years.
The bridge which these many years of labour had produced was in every way unsuitable to its position, and mean as compared to similar buildings erected elsewhere. Lacking the skill to form proper foundations, Peter had spread them out into wide piers, which formed an almost continuous dam, through the openings in which the water rushed like a mill-race. The result was that the scour soon affected the stability of the piers, which had to be protected round by masses of masonry and chalk in the form of sterlings, which still further contracted the narrow waterways. The passage of the bridge by boat—"shooting the bridge," it was called—was always a dangerous operation; and a writer of the last century speaks of "the noise of the falling waters, the clamours of the water-men, and the frequent shrieks of drowning wretches," in describing it. So imperfectly built was the bridge that within four years of its completion King John again interfered, and called upon the Corporation properly to repair it; and from this time, or perhaps from Peter's death, when the three merchants were elected to complete the work, the Corporation appears to have taken over the responsibility of the bridge; and for this purpose they were endowed with certain properties, which became the nucleus of the present "Bridge House Estates." The increasing dilapidation of the bridge, the debris of fallen arches, and the rubbish and waste material which was suffered to accumulate, still further impeded the natural flow of the water, and little effort at improvement was ever made. Of the three widest arches of the bridge, which were called the navigable locks, the most important had been the one nearest to the city end, which became known as the "Rock Lock," and it acquired that name on account of a popular delusion that in its fairway was a growing and vegetating rock, which was nothing more than an accumulation of fallen ruins, which caught and held the floating refuse carried to and fro by the tides. And thus year after year the river dam became more solid, and the waterfall increased in height until it was said by one who knew them both that it was almost as safe to attempt the Falls of Niagara as to shoot London Bridge.
As years went by, not only did the waterways become congested, but the roadway above began to be encroached on by houses and other buildings, for which a bridge was most unfitted. Two edifices, however, from the first formed necessary, or at least customary, adjuncts to such a building—the bridge gate and the bridge chapel. It was a Roman custom to erect gates at one end, or in the centre of their bridges—not triumphal arches, but twin gates, such as they built to their walled towns, and such as stood at the end of the bridge at Saintes, when it was altered by Isembert. Such gates as survived in mediæval times were generally fortified, and formed the model for imitation by mediæval builders; and such a gate was erected at the Southwark end of London, which, under its name of Bridge Gate, became one of the principal gates of the city. It was erected directly on one of the main piers, and was therefore of a substantial character, but suffered much in the various attacks made upon London from the Kentish side. In 1436 it collapsed, together with the Southwark end of the bridge, but was rebuilt at the cost of the citizens, chief among whom was Sir John Crosby, the builder of Crosby House; and although the gate was again in great part destroyed by the attack on London made in 1471 by Fauconbridge, one of the towers of Crosby's gate survived until the eighteenth century. In 1577 the tower which stood at the north end of the bridge, and on which were usually displayed the heads of traitors, became so dilapidated that it was taken down, and the heads then on it were transferred to the Bridge Gate, henceforward known as "Traitors' Gate." It was upon the earlier gate that the head of Sir Thomas More was affixed, when heads were so common that even his, as we know from its adventures until buried in the Roper vault at Canterbury, was thrown into the river to make room for a crowd of successors.
Fig. 2—The Surrey End of London Bridge.
Of the chapel, which the founder of the bridge is said to have erected, no account survives; and although it was believed at the time of the destruction of the bridge that his remains were discovered, no satisfactory evidence of their identity was forthcoming. The first chapel must have perished in one of the early misfortunes which befel the fabric, as no trace of any detail which could be referred to the thirteenth century was discovered when the pier on which the chapel stood was removed. The drawings made by Vertue before the last remains were cleared away show a structure which may be assigned to a date but little later than the Chapel Royal of St. Stephen at Westminster, to which, in many particulars, it must have borne a considerable resemblance. It consisted of two storeys, both apparently vaulted, measuring some sixty by twenty feet, with an apsidal termination. The undercroft was nearly twenty feet high, and our illustration ([fig. 1]) of a restoration of it, prepared from Vertue's drawings and dimensions, will give some idea of its beauty. The upper chapel seems to have been similar, but much more lofty, and had an arcade running round the walls under the windows. The buttresses of the exterior were crowned with crocketted pinnacles, and the effect of the whole, standing high above the surging waters of the river, must have been as striking as it was beautiful. The chapel was built on the centre pier of the bridge, on the east side, and the chapels were entered from the roadway, the lower one by a newel staircase, on which was found the holy-water stoup when the bridge was destroyed in the last century. At the Reformation the church was converted into a warehouse, but, thanks to the solidity of its construction, it remained almost intact till it was swept away with the houses in 1756.
Of the other buildings on the bridge there is little to say, for, although they made up a picturesque composition, they were of a most flimsy character, and wanting at the last in any architectural merit. Our illustration ([fig. 2]), taken from an oil painting by Scott, belonging to the Fishmongers' Company, gives the principal group on the Surrey side, and in the sixth plate of Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode we get a view through the open window of another part in the last stage of dilapidation. There was, however, one exception to the commonplace among them, in a timber house, made in Holland, which was known as "Nonsuch House." It was erected, it was said, without nails, and placed athwart the roadway, hanging at the ends far over the river, with towers and spires at the angles, and over the great gate the arms of Queen Elizabeth. The top of the main front was surmounted, at a later date, with a pair of sundials, which bore the, for once, appropriate motto—"Time and Tide wait for no man."
Had old London Bridge survived to this day, its waterfalls would doubtless have been utilized to generate electricity, and the idea of setting the Thames on fire realized in lighting the streets of London by its means; but the value of the force of the falling water was not overlooked by our ancestors. As early as 1582 one Peter Corbis, a Dutchman, erected an engine, worked by the stream, which lifted the water to a reservoir, whence it was distributed by means of leaden pipes through the city. With many alterations and improvements, these water works continued in use until the last century, and it was stated before the House of Commons, in 1820, that more than 26 millions of hogsheads of the pellucid waters of the river were thus daily delivered to the city householders for their domestic use.
Such, shortly, is the history of the fabric, which, after enduring for more than six hundred years, was swept away to make room for the present structure. For any accounts of the many stirring events which occurred on it, or about it, we have no space here. Are they not written in the chronicles of England?
In the Fishmongers' Hall is preserved a valuable memorial of the ancient structure, of which we give an illustration ([fig. 3]) by permission of the Worshipful Company. It consists of a chair with a seat of Purbeck marble, reminiscent in its arrangements of the coronation chair, on which is engraved this inscription:—
"I am the first stone that was put down for the foundation of old London Bridge in June 1176 by a priest named Peter who was vicar of Colechurch in London and I remained there undisturbed safe on the same oak piles this chair is made from till the Revd. William John Jollife curate of Colmer Hampshire took me up in July 1832 when clearing away the old bridge after new London Bridge was completed."
The framework of the chair gives a pictorial chronicle of the city bridges; the top rail of the back shows old London Bridge after the removal of the houses, below which are new London Bridge, Southwark and old Blackfriars Bridges. The arms of the city are carved at the top, whilst the monogram of Peter of Colechurch and the device of the Bridge House Estates complete the decoration. This device, which appears to have been also the old badge of Southwark, was sometimes displayed upon a shield, thus:—Az., an annulet ensigned with a cross patée, Or; interlaced with a saltire enjoined in base, of the second. We give an illustration of this in [figure 5].
Fig. 3—The Foundation Stone Chair.
At the Fishmongers' Hall.
Westminster Bridge seems a very recent structure as compared to that of London, but it is the next in point of date. The growing importance of Westminster as the seat of the Court and Parliament had made the necessity for an approach to the south side of the Thames, independent of the circuitous and narrow ways of London, long apparent. In the reign of Charles II. the question was seriously considered, to the alarm of the Mayor and Corporation of the city, who feared that their vested interests were endangered, and "that London would be destroyed if carts were allowed to cross the Thames elsewhere"; but, knowing their man, they devoted some of their ample funds to secure that monarch's successful opposition to the scheme. In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, when there was no Stuart to buy off, the idea was revived, and in 1739, one Monsieur Labelye, a Swiss engineer—English engineers having, apparently, not sufficient experience—commenced a new stone bridge. His mode of putting in his foundations may have been scientific, but was certainly simple. The bridge piers were partly built in floating barges moored above the place where they were to be permanently erected. The barges were then sunk, their sides knocked out, and the piers completed. It is needless to say that the result was not satisfactory, and for years before the old bridge was pulled down many of its arches were filled up with a picturesque, but inconvenient, mass of shoring. Whether Henry, Earl of Pembroke, who laid the foundation stone, and of whom it was said no nobleman had a purer taste in architecture, was in any way responsible for the design, we cannot tell; but a French traveller of discrimination, who criticised the work after its completion, came to the conclusion that the peculiarly lofty parapets with which the bridge was adorned were so designed that they might check an Englishman's natural propensity to suicide by giving him time for reflection while surmounting such an obstacle. It will be noticed in our illustration ([fig. 4]), which is also taken from a painting by Scott, that the piers are crowned by alcoves, which provided a shelter from the blasts which blew over the river and from the mud scattered from the roadway. These were, doubtless, a survival of the spaces left above the cutwaters of mediæval bridges as refuges for pedestrians from vehicles when the roadways were very narrow, and those who remember the old wooden bridges of Battersea and Putney can appreciate their value.
The city Corporation, which had so strenuously opposed the erection of a bridge at Westminster as unnecessary, set to work, as soon as that became an accomplished fact, to improve their own communications across the river. First, as we have seen, they cleared away the houses and other obstructions on old London Bridge, and next they started to build themselves a new bridge at Blackfriars. The land on both sides of the river at the point selected was very low and most unsuitable for the approaches, that on the north side being close to the mouth of the Fleet ditch, which there formed a creek large enough, in 1307, to form a haven for ships. The new bridge was begun in 1760, from the designs of Robert Mylne, a Scotch architect, who made an unsuccessful attempt to give an architectural effect to the structure by facing the piers with pairs of Ionic columns, standing on the cutwaters. The steep gradients of the bridge, necessitated by the lowness of the banks, made such a decoration peculiarly unsuitable, as each pair of columns had to be differently proportioned in height, although the cornice over them remained of the same depth throughout. But, in spite of its appearance of lightness, the structure was too heavy for its foundations, and for years this bridge rivalled that of Westminster in the picturesqueness of its dilapidation. The piers had been built on platforms of timber, so that when London Bridge was rebuilt, and the river flowed in an unchecked course, these became exposed to the scour and were soon washed out.
Fig. 4—Old Westminster Bridge.
Waterloo Bridge was completed in 1817, and still remains unaltered and as sound as when its builders left it. It is fortunate that the approach on the north side was an easy one, as but a short interval occurred between the Strand, at almost its highest point, and the river bank, which it was easy to fill up, with the result that the bridge passes across the river at a perfect level. The foundations of the piers were properly constructed by means of coffer-dams, and no sign of failure has ever shown itself in its superstructure. The architect repeated the use of the orders, as at Blackfriars, but with a more fortunate result, as, the work being straight throughout, no variations in the proportions were required, and he was wise enough to select the Doric order as more suitable to his purpose, and as suggesting more solidity.
Londoners profess to be somewhat proud of Waterloo Bridge, and it is a tradition among them that Canova, when he saw it, said that it was worth a journey across Europe to see. It, therefore, seems the more incredible that the grandchildren of those who could build such a bridge and appreciate such a man, could have erected, and even affect to admire, such a monstrosity as the Tower Bridge.
The last of the older bridges to be built was that of Southwark, which was the speculation of a private company, who hoped to profit by the continuously congested state of London Bridge; but the steepness of the gradients and the inconvenience of the approaches from the city made it from the first a failure. It was the first bridge in London to be constructed in iron; its model being the great single-span bridge across the Wear at Sunderland. It is in three great arches, the centre one being 240 feet across, or four feet more than that at Sunderland, and the mass of metal is such that an ordinary change of temperature will raise the arches an inch, and summer sunshine much more.
Of the more recent bridges there is nothing to say worth the saying. The Thames, which was the busy and silent highway of our forefathers, is still silent, but busy no longer, and the appearance of its bridges is now no one's concern, since no one sees them. So long as they will safely carry the tramcar or the motor 'bus from side to side, they may become uglier even than they now are, if only that make them a little more cheap.
Fig. 5—Badge of Bridge House Estates.
[THE CLUBS OF LONDON]
By Sir Edward Brabrook, C.B., F.S.A.
These are of many kinds. We suppose they are all more or less the lineal descendants of the taverns and coffee-houses that we associate with the memory of Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, and Samuel Johnson.
"Souls of poets dead and gone,
What elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid tavern?"
The wits' coffee-house, where Claud Halcro carried a parcel for Master Thimblethwaite in order to get a sight of glorious John Dryden. Button's coffee-house, where the "Guardian" set up his Lion's Head. The Cock and the Cheshire Cheese, which resound with Johnson's sonorous echoes. If, indeed, the tavern has developed into the club, that palace of luxury, one can only say, as in the famous transmutation of alphana to equus, "C'est diablement changé sur la route."
Intermediate is the host of clubs meeting occasionally, as the Breakfast Club, and the numerous dining clubs, one of which, the Royal Naval Club, established in 1765, is said to be a renewal of an earlier one dating from 1674. "The Club," which comes down from the time of Johnson and Reynolds, and still uses a notification to a new member drawn up by Gibbon; the Royal Society Club; the X Club, which consisted of ten members of the Athenæum; the Society of Noviomagus, and the Cocked Hat Club, consisting of members of the Society of Antiquaries; the Cosmos Club of the Royal Geographical Society; the Colquhoun Club of the Royal Society of Literature; and a host of others in connection with learned societies, most of which are content to add the word "club" to the name of the society. Of another, but cognate, kind is the famous "Sublime Society of Beef Steaks," which was founded in 1735, and died (of inanition) in 1867. The members were not to exceed twenty-four in number. Beef steaks were to be the only meat for dinner. The broiling began at 2.0, and the tablecloth was removed at 3.30. In 1785 the Prince of Wales, in 1790 the Duke of York, in 1808 the Duke of Sussex, became members. It had a laureate bard in the person of Charles Morris, elected a member in 1785, who died in 1838 at the age of 93 years. In early times the members appeared in the uniform of a blue coat and buff waistcoat, with brass buttons bearing a gridiron and the motto "Beef and Liberty." The hour of meeting became later gradually, till in 1866 it was fixed at 8 o'clock; then the club quickly died out. Founded by John Rich, harlequin and machinist at Covent Garden, it had counted among its members William Hogarth, David Garrick, John Wilkes, John Kemble, William Linley, Henry Brougham (Lord Chancellor), and many other distinguished men. The Ettrick Shepherd gave an account, in 1833, of a visit he paid to this club:—
"They dine solely on beefsteaks—but what glorious beefsteaks! They do not come up all at once—no, nor half-a-dozen times; but up they come at long intervals, thick, tender, and as hot as fire. And during these intervals the members sit drinking their port, and breaking their wicked wit on each other, so that every time a new service of steaks came up, we fell to them with much the same zest as at the beginning. The dinner was a perfect treat—a feast without alloy."
Another somewhat similar club, though on a more modest scale, deserves a cursory notice, inasmuch as it had to do with a state of things that has passed away beyond hope of recovery. About 1870 the August Society of the Wanderers was established with the motto, "Pransuri vagamur." It selected all the remaining old inns at which a dinner could be obtained, and dined at each in succession. It also had a bard, Dr. Joseph Samuel Lavies, and, like the Beefsteaks, has left a poetic record of its convivialities. Of all such records, however, the salt quickly evaporates, and it is as well to leave them unquoted.
Our main object in this chapter is to state a few incidents in the history of some of the great London clubs. The oldest existing club appears to be White's, founded in 1697. Boodle's, Brooks's, the Cocoa Tree, and Arthur's date from 1762 to 1765. Most of the others belong to the nineteenth century. The Guards' Club, which was the first of the service clubs, dates from 1813, but that is confined to officers of the Brigade of Guards. It was soon, however, followed by the establishment of a club for officers of other branches of military service.
We have it on good authority that before that club was founded officers who came to London had no places of call but the old hotels and coffee-houses. On May 31st, 1815, General Lord Lynedoch, Viscount Hill, and others united in the establishment of a General Military Club. On the 24th January, 1816, it was extended to the Navy, and on the 16th February in the same year it adopted the name of the United Service Club. On the 1st March, 1817, the foundation stone of its house in Charles Street was laid. In November, 1828, it entered into occupation of its present house in Pall Mall, and handed over the Charles Street house to the Junior United Service Club. Its premises in Pall Mall were largely extended in 1858-59, and have recently been greatly improved at a cost of £20,000. The Club holds a lease from the Crown to 4th January, 1964. It has a fine collection of eighty-two pictures and busts, many of them of great merit as works of art, others of interest as the only portraits of the originals. The library contains several splendid portraits of Royal personages. The King is the patron of the Club, and, as Prince of Wales, was a member of it. The Prince of Wales, the Duke of Connaught, and Prince Christian, are now members. Ten high officers of state and persons of distinction are honorary members. Twelve kings and thirty princes are foreign honorary members. The number of ordinary members is 1,600, but officers below the rank of Commander in the Royal Navy, or Major in the Army, are not eligible. The entrance fee is £30, and the annual subscription £10. Members have the privilege of introducing guests. Games of hazard are not allowed to be played, or dice to be used. Play is not to exceed 2s. 6d. points at whist, or 10s. per hundred at bridge.
As we have seen, this club shortly became full, and a Junior United Service Club was formed in April, 1827, on the same lines, under the patronage of the Duke of Wellington, but admitted officers of junior rank, and in 1828 entered into occupation of the premises in Charles Street, vacated by the Senior, on payment of £15,000. It erected its new house in 1856 at a cost of £81,000. The entrance fee is £40, and annual subscription eight guineas. It was not many years after its establishment that the list of candidates for membership of the Junior Club became so long that the necessity for the establishment of a third service club was felt. Sir E. Barnes and a few officers, just returned from India, joined in the movement, and in 1838 the Army and Navy Club was opened at the corner of King Street and St. James's Square—the house memorable as the scene of the party given by Mrs. Boehm on the night the news of the Battle of Waterloo arrived. Sir E. Barnes, who was its first president, died the same year. In 1851 the club moved to its present stately building, the site of which includes that of a house granted by Charles II. on the 1st of April, in the seventeenth year of his reign, to Nell Gwynne, where Evelyn saw him in familiar discourse with her. The club possesses a mirror that belonged to her, and a portrait by Sir Peter Lely, which was supposed to be of her, until it was discovered to be one of Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, and is also rich in pictures, statuary, and other works of art—among them, two fine mantelpieces carved by Canova, and a miniature of Lady Hamilton found in Lord Nelson's cabin after his death; it has also autograph letters of Nelson and Wellington. It derives its popular name of the "Rag and Famish" from a tradition that Captain Duff came late one night asking for supper, and being discontented with the bill of fare, called it a rag and famish affair. In memory of the event he designed a button which used to be worn by many members, and bore the device of a ragged man devouring a bone. Napoleon III. was an honorary member of the club, and frequently used it. He presented it with a fine piece of Gobelin tapestry in 1849. The regular number of members is 2,400. The club has a scheme for granting annuities or pensions to its servants.
Of the group of social clubs bearing names derived from the original proprietors of the club-houses—as White's, Boodle's, Brooks's, and Arthur's—Brooks's may be taken as a specimen. A roll of its members from the date of its foundation in 1764 to 1900 has recently been published under the title Memorials of Brooks's, and contains much interesting information. The editors, Messrs. V. A. Williamson, S. Lyttelton and S. Simeon, state that the first London Clubs were instituted with the object of providing the world of fashion with a central office for making wagers, and a registry for recording them. In their early days gambling was unlimited. Brooks's was not political in its origin. The twenty-seven original members included the Dukes of Roxburgh, Portland, and Gordon. In the 136 years 3,465 members have been admitted.
The original house was on or near the site of the present Marlborough Club, and Almack was the first manager or master. About 1774 he was succeeded by Brooks, from whom the club derives its name. He died in 1782, and was succeeded by one Griffin. In 1795 the system was altered, and six managers were appointed. The present house in St. James' Street was constructed in 1889-90, when 2, Park Place, was incorporated with it. The entrance fee in 1791 was five guineas, and was raised successively in 1815, 1881, 1892, and 1901, to nine, fifteen, twenty-five and thirty guineas. The subscription was at first four guineas, raised in 1779 to eight guineas, and in 1791 to ten guineas.
An offshoot of Brooks's is the Fox Club, a dining club, probably a continuation of an earlier Whig Club. Up to 1843 it met at the Clarendon Hotel, and since then at Brooks's. It is said to have been constituted for the purpose of paying Fox's debts, for which his friends, in 1793, raised £70,000. Sir Augustus Keppel Stephenson was the secretary of this club from 1867 until his death in 1904. He was the son of a distinguished member of Brooks's, who had joined that club in 1818, the Fox Club in 1829, was secretary of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, and the last man to wear Hessian boots.
The Travellers' Club dates from 1819, the Union from 1821, and the United University from 1822.
The Union Club is composed of noblemen, members of Parliament, and gentlemen of the first distinction and character who are British subjects, and has 1,250 members. Election is by open voting in the committee. Foreign and Colonial persons of distinction may be made temporary honorary members. The entrance fee is twenty-one guineas; the annual subscription ten guineas.
The United University Club has 1,000 members, of whom 500 belong to Oxford and 500 to Cambridge. The King is a member. Cabinet ministers, bishops, judges, etc., may be admitted without ballot. All members of either University are qualified to be candidates, but only graduates, persons who have resided in college or hall for two years, holders of honorary degrees, and students in civil law of above three years' standing, are qualified to be members. The club has recently rebuilt its house at the corner of Suffolk Street and Pall Mall East.
The Athenæum was originated by Mr. John Wilson Croker, after consultation with Sir Humphry Davy, president of the Royal Society, and was founded in 1824 for the association of individuals known for their scientific or literary attainments, artists of eminence in any class of the fine arts, and noblemen and gentlemen distinguished as liberal patrons of science, literature, or the arts. It is essential to the maintenance of the Athenæum, in conformity with the principles upon which it was originally founded, that the annual introduction of a certain number of persons of distinguished eminence in science, literature, or the arts, or for public services, should be secured. Accordingly, nine persons of such qualifications are elected by the committee each year. The club entrusts this privilege to the committee, in the entire confidence that they will only elect persons who shall have attained to distinguished eminence in science, literature, or the arts, or for public services. The General Committee may also elect princes of the blood Royal, cabinet ministers, bishops, speakers of the House of Commons, judges, and foreign ambassadors, or ministers plenipotentiary of not less than three years' residence at the Court of St. James's, to be extraordinary members; and may invite, as honorary members during temporary residence in England, the heads of foreign missions, foreign members of the Royal Society, and not more than fifteen other foreigners or colonists of distinction. The ordinary members of the club are 1,200 in number. The entrance fee is thirty guineas, and the annual subscription eight guineas. The presidents for the time being of the Royal Society, of the Society of Antiquaries, and of the Royal Academy of Arts, if members, are ex-officio members of the General Committee. An Executive Committee of nine is selected from the General Committee to manage the domestic and other ordinary affairs of the club. No elected member can remain on the General Committee more than three consecutive years, unless he is a member of the Executive Committee, in which case he may be re-elected for a second term of three years. No higher stake than half-a-guinea points shall be played for. No game of mere chance shall be played in the house for money. No member shall make use of the club as an address in any advertisement.
The history of the club has been told by the Rev. J. G. Waugh in an interesting book printed for private circulation in 1900. Its first house was 12, Waterloo Place, where it remained until 1827, when it obtained its present site. Its success was so great that within four months of the preliminary meeting in 1824 it had a list of 506 members, including the then Prime Minister and seven persons who afterwards became Prime Ministers. By 1827 it was full, and had a list of 270 candidates waiting for election. The present house was planned by Decimus Burton, and an attic storey was added to it in 1899-1900. It is a successful building, striking attention by the statue of Minerva over the porch, the frieze, and the noble hall and grand staircase. The hall was re-decorated in 1891 under the direction of Sir L. Alma Tadema. Originally, a soirée was held every Wednesday, to which ladies were admitted. That has long been discontinued, and, as a satirical member observed, "Minerva is kept out in the cold, while her owls are gorging within." Among the members of the club have been the following great actors: Macready, Mathews, Kemble, Terry, Kean, Young, and Irving.
The Oriental Club was also established in 1824, at a meeting held eight days after that at which the Athenæum had been established. Sir John Malcolm presided. The club was intended for the benefit of persons who had been long resident abroad in the service of the Crown, or of the East India Company. By May, 1826, it had 928 members, and in that year it took possession of the site of 18, Hanover Square, and employed Mr. B. D. Wyatt as the architect of its house. Its history has been written by Mr. Alexander F. Baillie, in a book published in 1901. Mr. Wyatt provided a grand staircase, but no smoking-room, and only one billiard-room. At that time and until 1842 the club provided its members gratuitously with snuff at a cost of £25 per year. In 1874 the present smoking-room was opened; and now the handsome drawing-room is a place where those can retire who desire solitude, and the smoking-room and billiard-rooms are overcrowded. The club has a fine library. It claims among its members the prototype of Colonel Newcome. The members have a custom of securing a table for dinner by inverting a plate upon it.
In 1855 the Oriental Club agreed to take over, without entrance fee, the members of the Alfred Club, which had been established in 1808, and was then being dissolved. Nearly 400 members availed themselves of the offer. The history of that club has some points of interest. It was largely intended for literary men, but it is said that Canning, vexed at overhearing a member asking who he was, gave it the nickname of the "Half-read" Club, which stuck to it. Its early career was prosperous, and by 1811 it had 354 candidates and only six vacancies; but its popularity waned. The real cause of its dissolution was the firm conservatism of the committee. They would not recognise the growing demand of accommodation for smokers. The clubhouse, No. 23, Albemarle Street, had been built and arranged in the days when no such accommodation had been considered necessary, and the committee resolutely refused to make any concession to the members who desired to smoke.
The Garrick Club was founded in 1831. It was instituted for the general patronage of the drama; for the purpose of combining the use of a club on economical principles with the advantage of a literary society; for bringing together the supporters of the drama; and for the foundation of a national library, with works on costume. The number of members is limited to 650, who pay an entrance fee of twenty guineas, and an annual subscription of ten guineas. The club is more than usually hospitable, as it allows a member to invite three visitors to dinner, and admits the public to see its magnificent collection of dramatic pictures daily from 10 to 1.
The Carlton Club was established in 1832. It is famous as the rallying ground for the Conservative party, the temple of Toryism. From it, and its resources, candidates in that interest derive much encouragement and support, and it may not unreasonably be inferred that some of that encouragement and support is material as well as moral.
The Reform Club was established in 1837, and then held the same position towards the Liberal party. It was instituted for the purpose of promoting the social intercourse of the Reformers of the United Kingdom. All candidates are to declare themselves to be reformers, but no definition of a "reformer" is given. If, however, a member is believed not to be a reformer, fifty members may call a general meeting for his expulsion. Members of Parliament and peers may be admitted by general ballot, with priority of election. The committee elect each year two gentlemen of distinguished eminence for public service, or in science, literature, or arts. The Political Committee of fifty members elect each year two persons who have proved their attachment to the Liberal cause by marked and obvious services. Other members are elected by general ballot, one black ball in ten excluding. The club has 1,400 members. It has a fine library. It has liberal regulations as to the admission of guests, and ladies may be admitted to view the club from 11.0 a.m. to 5.0 p.m. Members may inspect the books and accounts and take extracts from them. The admission fee is £40, and the annual subscription ten guineas.
The Conservative Club was established in 1840, and the National Club in 1845. The object of the National Club is to promote Protestant principles, and to encourage united action among Protestants in political and social questions by establishing a central organisation to obtain and spread information on such questions, by affording facilities for conference thereon, and by providing in the metropolis a central place of meeting to devise the fittest means for promoting the object in view. Its members must hold the doctrines and principles of the reformed faith, as revealed in Holy Scripture, asserted at the Reformation, and generally embodied in the Articles of the Church of England. It has a general committee, house committee, library committee, prayer and religious committee, wine committee, finance committee, and Parliamentary committee. The General Committee has power to elect as honorary members of the club not more than twenty persons distinguished by their zeal and exertions on behalf of the Protestant cause; these are mostly clergymen. All meetings of committees are to be opened with prayer. The household are to attend the reading of the Word of God and prayers morning and evening in the committee room. The Parliamentary committee are to watch all proceedings in Parliament and elsewhere affecting the Protestant principles of the club. Its fundamental principles are declared to be:
(1) The maintenance of the Protestant constitution, succession, and faith.
(2) The recognition of Holy Scripture in national education.
(3) The improvement of the moral and social condition of the people.
The club is singular in having these definite religious purposes, and no doubt has in its time done much for the Protestant cause; but there is a little incongruity between the earnestness of its purpose and the self-indulgence which club life almost necessarily implies; and religious opinion, which claims to be the most stable of all things, is really one of the most fluid. Most men, who think at all, pass through many phases of it in their lives. It would not be surprising if this early earnestness had somewhat cooled down.
Another group of clubs consists of those the members of which are bound together by a common interest in some athletic sport or pursuit—as the Marylebone Cricket Club, which dates from 1787; the Alpine Club, which was founded in 1857; the Hurlingham Club, in 1868; and to these may perhaps be added, as approximating to the same class, the Bath Club, 1894.
The gradual filling up of old clubs, which we observed in the case of the service clubs, and the congested state of their lists of candidates, leading to long delay before an intending member had the chance of election, has led to the establishment of junior clubs; thus, in 1864, the Junior Athenæum and the Junior Carlton were founded.
A further development has been the establishment of clubs for women. The Albemarle Club, founded in 1874, admits both men and women, and adjusts its lists of candidates so as to provide for the election of nearly equal numbers of both.
The Marlborough Club should also be mentioned specially, as it was founded by the King, and no person can be admitted a member except upon His Majesty's special approval.
The Authors' Club was established in 1891 by the late Sir Walter Besant, and is especially noted for its house dinners, at which some person of distinction is invited to be the guest of the club.
Altogether, the clubs of London are very numerous, and we have only been able to draw attention to the peculiarities of a few of them. Like every other human institution, they are subject to continual change, and there are pessimists who go about saying that they are decaying and losing their popularity and their usefulness. The long lists of candidates on the books of the principal clubs do not lend much colour to this suggestion. Social habits alter with every generation of men, and it is possible that many men do not use their clubs in the same way that the founders did, but the fact remains that they do use them, and that clubs still form centres of pleasure and convenience to many.
One particular in which the change of social habits is especially noticeable is with respect to gaming. This, as we have seen, was almost the raison d'être of some of the early clubs, and there are numerous tales of the recklessness with which it was pursued, and the fortunes lost and won at the gaming table. We have quoted from one or two clubs the regulations which now prevail, and similar regulations are adopted in most of the other clubs. Games of chance are wholly prohibited; and limits are provided to the amount that may be staked on games of cards. Each club has also a billiard room.
With respect to smoking, the habitués of clubs have experienced a great change. Formerly the smoking room, if any, was small and far away; now the luxury of the club is concentrated in it, and the question is rather in what rooms smoking is not to be allowed. Very few clubs retain the old tradition that smoking is a thing to be discouraged and kept out of sight.
Other signs of change are the increase in the cost of membership and the later hours for dining. It need hardly be said that the clubs pay great attention to their kitchens. We have it on the authority of Major A. Griffiths (Fortnightly Review, April, 1907) that the salary of the chef is between £200 and £300 a year.
The customs of the clubs with regard to the admission of visitors vary. At one end of the scale is the Athenæum, which will not allow its members to give a stranger even a cup of cold water, and allows of conversation with strangers only in the open hall or in a small room by the side of the doorway. At the other end are clubs which provide special rooms for the entertainment of visitors, and encourage their members to treat their friends hospitably, and to show them what the club is able to do in the matter of cooking and wines.
The social ethics of clubs vary in like manner. In some clubs, notably those of the Bohemian type, but including several which would claim not to belong to that group, mere membership of the club is a sufficient introduction to justify a member in addressing another, and conversation in the common rooms of the club becomes general. This is delightful—within limits: it is not always possible to create by the atmosphere of the club a sentiment that will restrain all its members from sometimes overstepping those bounds of mutual courtesy and consideration which alone can make such general conversation altogether pleasant. The greater clubs go to the opposite extreme, and members of them may meet day after day for many years in perfect unconsciousness of the existence of each other; yet, even in these, the association of those who know each other outside the club, but without its opportunities would rarely meet, though they have similar interests and pursuits, is a very desirable and useful thing. Many an excellent measure, originating in the mind of one member, has been matured by conversation with others, to the general good. So may the Clubs of London continue to prosper and flourish.
[THE INNS OF OLD LONDON]
By Philip Norman, LL.D.
To write a detailed account of London inns and houses of entertainment generally would require not a few pages, but several volumes. The inns, first established to supply the modest wants of an unsophisticated age, came by degrees to fulfil the functions of our modern hotels, railway stations, and parcel offices; they were places of meeting for business and social entertainment—in short, they formed a necessary part of the life of all Londoners, and of all who resorted to London, except the highest and the lowest. The taverns, successors of mediæval cook-shops, were frequented by most of the leading spirits of each generation from Elizabethan times to the early part of the nineteenth century, and their place has now been taken by clubs and restaurants. About these a mass of information is available, also on coffee-houses, a development of the taverns, in which, for the most part, they were gradually merged. As to the various forms of public-house, their whimsical signs alone have amused literary men, and perhaps their readers, from the time of The Spectator until now. In this chapter I propose to confine my remarks to the inns "for receipt of travellers," so often referred to by John Stow in his Survey of London, which, largely established in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, continued on the same sites, mostly until years after the advent of railways had caused a social revolution. These inns, with rare exceptions, had a galleried courtyard, a plan of building also common on the Continent, which came perhaps originally from the East. In such courtyards, as we shall see, during Tudor times theatrical performances often took place, and in form they probably gave a hint to the later theatres.
Before the fifteenth century it was usual for travellers to seek the hospitality of religious houses, the great people being lodged in rooms set apart for them, while the poorer sort found shelter in the guest-house. But as time went on this proved inadequate, and inns on a commercial basis came into existence, being frequented by those who could hardly demand special consideration from the religious houses, and were not fitting recipients of charity. Naturally enough, these inns, when once their usefulness became recognised, were soon to be found in the main thoroughfares leading out of the metropolis, and they were particularly plentiful in Southwark on each side of what we now call the Borough High Street, extending for a quarter of a mile or more from London Bridge along the main road to the south-eastern counties and the Continent. The first thus established, and one of the earliest in this country, had to some extent a religious origin—namely, the
"Gentle hostelrye
That hight the Tabard, fasté by the Belle,"
about which and about the Southwark inns generally I propose now to say a few words, for although well known, they are of such extreme interest that they demand a foremost place in an account of this kind. From the literary point of view the "Tabard" is immortalized, owing to the fact that Chaucer has selected it as the starting-point of his pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. Historically, it may be mentioned that as early as the year 1304 the Abbot and Convent of Hyde, near Winchester, purchased in Southwark two tenements, on the sites of which he built for himself a town dwelling, and at the same time, it is believed, a hostelry for the convenience of travellers. In 1307 he obtained license to build a chapel at or by the inn, and in a later deed we are told that "the abbott's lodginge was wyninge to the backside of the Tabarde and had a garden attached." From that time onwards frequent allusions can be found to this house, the sign of which (a sleeveless coat, such as that worn by heralds) got somehow corrupted into the Talbot, a species of dog, by which it was known for a couple of centuries or more, almost to the time of its final destruction. Although the contrary has been asserted, the inn was undoubtedly burnt in the Great Southwark Fire of 1676, but was rebuilt soon afterwards in the old fashion, and continued to be a picturesque example of architecture until 1875, when the whole was swept away, hop merchants' offices and a modern "old Tabard" now occupying the site.
Equal in interest to the last-named inn was the "White Hart." At the one Chaucer gave life and reality to a fancied scene; at the other occurred an historical event, the bald facts of which Shakespeare has lighted up with a halo of romance. The White Hart appears to have dated from the latter part of the fourteenth century, the sign being a badge of Richard II., derived from his mother, Joan of Kent. In the summer of 1450 it was Jack Cade's headquarters while he was striving to gain possession of London. Hall, in his Chronicle, records this, and adds that he prohibited "murder, rape and robbery by which colour he allured to him the hartes of the common people." It was here, nevertheless, that "one Hawaydyne of sent Martyns was beheaded," and here, during the outbreak, a servant of Sir John Fastolf, who had property in the neighbourhood, was with difficulty saved from assassination. His chattels were pillaged, his wife left with "no more gode but her kyrtyll and her smook," and he thrust into the forefront of a fight then raging on London Bridge, where he was "woundyd and hurt nere hand to death." Cade's success was of short duration; his followers wavered, he said, or might have said, in the words attributed to him by Shakespeare (2 Henry VI., act iv., scene 8), "Hath my sword therefore broken through London gate that you should leave me at the White Hart in Southwark?" The rebellion collapsed, and our inn is not heard of for some generations. Want of space prevents our recording the various vicissitudes through which it passed, and the historic names connected with it, until the time of the Southwark Fire of 1676, when, like the "Tabard," it was burnt down, but rebuilt on the old foundations. In 1720 Strype describes it as large and of considerable trade, and it so continued until the time when Dickens, who was intimately acquainted with the neighbourhood, gave his graphic description of Sam Weller at the White Hart in the tenth chapter of Pickwick. In 1865-66 the south side of the building was replaced by a modern tavern, but the old galleries on the north and east sides remained until 1889, being latterly let out in tenements.
There were several other galleried inns in Southwark, dating at least from the time of Queen Elizabeth, which survived until the nineteenth century, but we only have space briefly to allude to three. The "King's Head" and the "Queen's Head" was each famous in its way. The former had been originally the "Pope's Head," the sign being changed at the Reformation. In 1534 the Abbot of Waverley, whose town house was not far off, writes, apparently on business, that he will be at the "Pope's Head" in Southwark—eight years afterwards it appears as the "King's Head." In a deed belonging to Mr. G. Eliot Hodgkin, F.S.A., the two names are given. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the house belonged to various noteworthy people; among the rest, to Thomas Cure, a local benefactor, and to Humble, Lord Ward. It was burnt in the Great Southwark Fire, and the last fragment of the galleried building, erected immediately afterwards, was pulled down in January, 1885.
The "Queen's Head" was the only one of the Southwark houses we are describing that escaped the Fire of 1676, perhaps owing to the fact that, by way of precaution, a tenement was blown up at the gateway. It stood on the site of a house called the "Crowned or Cross Keys," which in 1529 was an armoury or store-place for the King's harness. In 1558 it had a brew-house attached to it, and had lately been rebuilt. In 1634 the house had become the "Queen's Head," and the owner was John Harvard, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who afterwards migrated to America, and gave his name to Harvard University, Massachusetts. About this time it was frequented by carriers, as we learn from John Taylor, "the water-poet." The main building, destroyed in 1895, was found to be of half-timbered construction, dating perhaps from the sixteenth century. A galleried portion, also of considerable age, survived until the year 1900.
Of another Southwark inn, the "George," we can fortunately speak in the present tense. It seems to have come into existence in the early part of the sixteenth century, and is mentioned with the sign of "St. George" in 1554:—
"St. George that swindg'd the Dragon, and e'er since
Sits on his horseback at mine hostess' door."
The owner in 1558 was Humfrey Colet, or Collet, who had been Member of Parliament for Southwark. Soon after the middle of the seventeenth century, in a book called Musarum Deliciæ, or the Muses' Recreation, compiled by Sir John Mennes (Admiral and Chief Comptroller of the Navy) and Dr. James Smith, appeared some lines, "upon a surfeit caught by drinking bad sack at 'the George' in Southwark." Perhaps the landlord mended his ways; in any case, the rent was shortly afterwards £150 a year—a large sum for those days. The "George" was a great coaching and carriers' inn. Only a fragment of it, but a picturesque one, now exists; it is still galleried, and dates from shortly after the Southwark Fire of 1676. The rest of the building was pulled down in 1889-90. All the inns to which allusion has been made were clustered together on the east side of the Borough High Street, the gateways of those most distant from each other being only about 140 yards apart.
Another leading thoroughfare from London to the east was the road through Aldgate to Whitechapel. Here, though the houses of entertainment were historically far less interesting than those of Southwark, they flourished for many years. Where a modern hotel with the same sign now stands, next to the Metropolitan railway station on the north side of Aldgate High Street, there was once a well-known inn, the "Three Nuns," so called, perhaps, from the contiguity of the nuns of St. Clare, or sorores minores, who gave a name to the Minories. The "Three Nuns" inn is mentioned by Defoe in his Journal of the Plague, which, though it describes events that happened when he was little more than an infant, has an air of authenticity suggesting personal experience. We are told by him that near this inn was the "dreadful gulf—for such it was rather than a pit"—in which, during the Plague of 1665, not less than 1,114 bodies were buried in a fortnight, from the 6th to the 20th of September. Throughout the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries this house was much frequented by coaches and carriers. The late Mr. Edwin Edwards, who etched it in 1871, was told by the landlord that a four-horse coach was then running from there to Southend during the summer months. A painting of the holy nuns still appeared on the sign-board. The house was rebuilt soon after the formation of the Metropolitan Railway. A short distance west of the "Three Nuns," at 31, Aldgate High Street, the premises of Messrs. Adkin and Sons, wholesale tobacconists, occupy the site of the old "Blue Boar" coaching inn, which they replaced in 1861. The sculptured sign of the "Blue Boar," let into the wall in front, was put up at the time of the rebuilding. The former inn, described on a drawing in the Crace collection as the oldest in London, is held by some to be the same as that referred to in an order of the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor, dated from St. James's, September 5th, 1557, wherein he is told to "apprehende and to comitt to safe warde" certain actors who are about to perform in "a lewde Playe called a Sacke full of Newse" at the "Boar's Head" without Aldgate.
A few years ago, at No. 25, the entrance might still be seen of another famous inn called the "Bull," formerly the "Black Bull." Above the gateway was a fine piece of ironwork, and the old painted sign was against the wall of the passage. This house flourished greatly a little before the advent of railways, when Mrs. Anne Nelson, coach proprietor, was the landlady, and could make up nearly two hundred beds there. Most of her business was to Essex and Suffolk, but she also owned the Exeter coach. She must have been landlady on the memorable occasion when Mr. Pickwick arrived in a cab after "two mile o' danger at eightpence," and it was through this very gateway that he and his companions were driven by the elder Weller when they started on their adventurous journey to Ipswich. The house is now wholly destroyed and the yard built over.
A common sign in former days was the "Saracen's Head." We shall have occasion to refer to several in London. One of them stood by Aldgate, just within the limits of the city. Here a block of old buildings is in existence on the south side, which once formed the front of a well-known coaching inn, with this sign. The spacious inn yard remains, the house on the east side of its entrance having fine pilasters. From the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate, coaches plied to Norwich as long ago as 1681, and here there is, or was quite recently, a carrier's booking office.
Another thoroughfare which, within the memory of some who hardly admit that they are past middle age, contained several famous inns, was that leading to the north, and known in its various parts as Gracechurch Street and Bishopsgate Street Within and Without. One of the best known was the "Cross Keys" in Bishopsgate Street, mentioned in the preface to Dodsley's Old Plays as a house at which theatrical performances took place. It was here that, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, Bankes exhibited the extraordinary feats of his horse Marocco. One of them, if we may believe an old jest-book, was to select and draw forth Tarlton with its mouth as "the veriest fool in the company." In more modern times, until the advent of railways, the "Cross Keys" was a noted coaching and carriers' establishment. Destroyed in the Great Fire, and again burnt down in 1734, but rebuilt in the old style, it was still standing on the west side of the street, immediately south of Bell Yard, when Larwood and Hotten published their History of Signboards in 1866. Another inn with this sign stood appropriately near the site of St. Peter's Church in Wood Street, Cheapside, and was pulled down probably about the same time as the more famous house in Gracechurch Street.
Of equal note was the "Spread Eagle," the site of which has mostly been absorbed by the extension of Leadenhall Market. Like the "Cross Keys," it was burnt in the Great Fire, but rebuilt in the old style with an ample galleried yard. In the basement some mediæval arches still remained. At the "Spread Eagle" that original writer George Borrow had been staying with his future wife, Mrs. Mary Clarke, and various friends, when they were married at St. Peter's Church, Cornhill, on April 23rd, 1840, her daughter, Henrietta, signing the register. Before its destruction in 1865 it had been for some time a receiving office of Messrs. Chaplin and Horne. The site, of about 1,200 square feet, was sold for no less a sum than £95,000. Another Gracechurch inn, the "Tabard," which long ago disappeared, had, like the immortal hostelry in Southwark, become the "Talbot," and its site is marked by Talbot Court.
In Bishopsgate Street Within three galleried inns lingered long enough to have been often seen by the writer. These were the "Bull," the "Green Dragon," and the "Four Swans," each with something of a history, and to them might be added the picturesque, though less important, "Vine" and the "Flower Pot," from which last house a seventeenth century trade token was issued. The "Bull," the most southern of these inns, all of which were on the west side of the highway, was at least as old as the latter part of the fifteenth century, for in one of the chronicles of London lately edited by Mr. C. L. Kingsford, I find it, under the date 1498, associated with a painful incident—namely, the execution of the son of a cordwainer, "dwellyng at the Bulle in Bisshoppesgate Strete," for calling himself the Earl of Warwick. Hall gives his name as Ralph Wilford. Anthony Bacon, elder brother of Francis, during the year 1594 hired a lodging in Bishopsgate Street, but the fact of its being near the "Bull," where plays and interludes were performed, so troubled his mother that for her sake he removed to Chelsea. Shortly afterwards, as may be learnt from Tarlton's Jests, the old drama called "The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth" was here played, "wherein the judge was to take a boxe on the eare, and because he was absent that should take the blow, Tarlton himselfe, ever forward to please, tooke upon him to play the judge, besides his own part of the clown." The "Bull" was the house of call of old Hobson, the carrier, to whose rigid rule about the letting of his saddle horses we are supposed to owe the phrase, "Hobson's Choice." Milton wrote his epitaph in the well-known lines beginning:—
"Here lies old Hobson; Death hath broke his girt,
And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt."
In his second edition of Milton's Poems, p. 319, Wharton alludes to Hobson's "portrait in fresco" as having then lately been in existence at the inn, and it is mentioned in The Spectator, No. 509. There is a print of it representing a bearded old man in hat and cloak with a money bag, which in the original painting had the inscription, "The fruitful mother of an hundred more." He bequeathed property for a conduit to supply Cambridge with water; the conduit head still exists, though not in its original position. In 1649, by a Council of War, six Puritan troopers were condemned to death for a mutiny at the "Bull." The house remained till 1866.
Further north, at No. 86, was the "Green Dragon," the last of the galleried inns that survived in Bishopsgate Street. It is mentioned in De Laune's Present State of London, 1681, as a place of resort for coachmen and carriers, and I have before me an advertisement sheet of the early nineteenth century, showing that coaches were then plying from here to Norwich, Yarmouth, Cambridge, Colchester, Ware, Hertford, Brighton, and many other places. There is a capital etching of the house by Edwin Edwards. It was closed in 1877, its site being soon afterwards built over. At the sale of the effects eleven bottles of port wine fetched 37s. 6d. each. The "Four Swans," immediately to the north of the inn last named, although it did not survive so long, remained to the end a more complete specimen of its class, having three tiers of galleries perfect on each side, and two tiers at the west end. The "water-poet" tells us that in 1637 "a waggon or coach" came here once a week from Hertford. Other references to it might be quoted from books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the story told on an advertisement sheet issued by a former landlord about a fight here between Roundheads, led by Ireton, and a troop of Royalists, is apocryphal.
Not far off, in Bishopsgate Street Without, there was until lately a "Two Swan" inn yard, and a "One Swan" with a large yard—an old place of call for carriers and waggons. These lingered on until the general clearance by the Great Eastern Railway Company a few years ago, when the remains of Sir Paul Pindar's mansion, latterly a tavern, were also removed; the finely-carved timber front and a stuccoed ceiling finding their way into the Victoria and Albert Museum. Another old Bishopsgate house was the "White Hart," near St. Botolph's Church, a picturesque building with projecting storeys, and in front the date 1480, but the actual structure was probably much less ancient. It was drawn by J. T. Smith and others early in the nineteenth century, and did not long survive. The site is still marked by White Hart Court. On the opposite side of the way was an inn, the "Dolphin," which, as Stow tells us, was given in 1513 by Margaret Ricroft, widow, with a charge in favour of the Grey Friars. It disappeared in the first half of the eighteenth century. The old "Catherine Wheel," a galleried inn hard by, mentioned by De Laune in 1681, was not entirely destroyed till 1894.
Another road out of London richly furnished with inns was that from Newgate westward. The first one came to was the "Saracen's Head" on Snow Hill, an important house, to which the late Mr. Heckethorn assigned a very early origin. Whether or not it existed in the fourteenth century, as he asserts, it was certainly flourishing when Stow in his Survey described it as "a fair and large inn for receipt of travellers." It continued for centuries to be largely used, and here Nicholas Nickleby and his uncle waited on Squeers, the Yorkshire schoolmaster, whom Dickens must have modelled from various real personages. In a Times advertisement for January 3rd, 1801, I read that "at Mr. Simpson's Academy, Wodencroft Lodge, near Greta Bridge, Yorkshire, young gentlemen are boarded and accurately instructed in the English, Latin, and Greek languages, writing, arithmetic, merchants' accounts, and the most useful branches of the mathematics, at 16 guineas per annum, if under nine years of age, and above that age 17 guineas; French taught by a native of France at 1 guinea extra. Mr. Simpson is now in town, and may be treated with from eleven till two o'clock every day at the 'Saracen's Head,' Snow Hill." In the early part of last century the landlady was Sarah Ann Mountain, coach proprietor, and worthy rival of Mrs. Nelson, of the "Bull" Inn, Aldgate. The "Saracen's Head" disappeared in the early part of 1868, when this neighbourhood was entirely changed by the formation of the Holborn Viaduct. Another Snow Hill inn was the "George," or "George and Dragon," mentioned by Strype as very large and of considerable trade. A sculptured sign from there is in the Guildhall Museum.
In Holborn there were once nine or ten galleried inns. We will only allude to those still in existence within the memory of the writer. The most famous of them, perhaps, was the "George and Blue Boar," originally the "Blue Boar," the site of which is covered by the Inns of Court Hotel. The house is named in the burial register of St. Andrew's, Holborn, as early as 1616, but it is chiefly known from a story related by the Rev. Thomas Morrice, in his Memoir of Roger Earl of Orrery (1742), that Cromwell and Ireton, in the disguise of troopers, here intercepted a letter sewn in the flap of a saddle from Charles I. to his Queen, in which he wrote that he was being courted by the Scotch Presbyterians and the army, and that he thought of closing with the former. Cromwell is supposed to have said, "From that time forward we resolved on his ruin." The writer ventured to ask that excellent historian, Dr. Samuel Gardiner, what he thought of the statement. In August, 1890, he most kindly replied by letter as follows:—"The tale has generally been repudiated without enquiry, and I am rather inclined to believe, at least, in its substantial accuracy. The curious thing is, that there are two lines of tradition about intercepted letters, as it seems to me quite distinct." We may, therefore, without being over credulous, cherish the belief that the picturesque incident referred to was one that actually occurred. There is an advertisement of December 27th, 1779, offering the lease of the "George and Blue Boar," which helps us to realize the value and capacity of an important inn of that period. We are told that it contains forty bedrooms, stabling for fifty-two horses, seven coach-houses, and a dry ride sixty yards long; also that it returns about £2,000 a year. In George Colman the younger's "Heir at Law," act i., scene 2, this house is said by one of the characters to be "in tumble downish kind of a condition," but it survived until 1864, when it made way for the Inns of Court Hotel.
A group of inns which remained more recently were Ridler's "Bell and Crown," the old "Bell," and the "Black Bull," all on the north side of Holborn. Of these, the most picturesque was the "Bell," about which I have been able to ascertain some curious facts. The earliest notice of it that has come to light was on the 14th of March, 1538, when William Barde sold a messuage with garden called the "Bell," in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, to Richard Hunt, citizen and girdler. The latter, who died in 1569, gave thirty sacks of charcoal yearly for ever, as a charge on the property, to be distributed to thirty poor persons of the parish. After various changes of ownership, in 1679-80 it passed into the hands of Ralph Gregge, and his grandson sold it in 1722 to Christ's Hospital. In the deed of sale three houses are mentioned and described as "formerly one great mansion-house or inn known as the Bell or Blue Bell." About two years before, the front of the premises facing Holborn had been rebuilt, when the sculptured arms of Gregge were let into the wall in front; these arms are now at the Guildhall Museum. The "Bell" became a coaching house of considerable reputation, that part of the business being about the year 1836 in the hands of Messrs. B. W. and H. Horne, who, as coach proprietors, were second only to William Chaplin. For many years, until finally closed in September, 1897, the house was managed by the Bunyer family. It was the last galleried inn on the Middlesex side of the water, the galleries being perhaps as old as the reign of Charles II. A still older portion was a cellar built of stone immediately to the left of the entrance, which might almost have been mediæval. The rest of the building seems to have dated from the early part of the eighteenth century. There is a sympathetic reference to the old "Bell" by William Black in his Strange Adventures of a Phæton. Another noteworthy "Bell" Inn was that in Carter Lane, whence Richard Quyney wrote in 1598 to his "loveing good ffrend and contreyman Mr. Willm Shackespere," the only letter addressed to our greatest poet which is known to exist. There is still a Bell yard connecting Carter Lane with Knightrider Street. The first scene of the Harlot's Progress, by Hogarth, is laid in front of an inn, with the sign of the "Bell" in Wood Street. Above the door are chequers.
A short distance west of the Holborn house was the "Crown" Inn, latterly Ridler's "Bell and Crown," destroyed about 1899. It had been a coaching centre, but years ago the yard was built over, and it flourished to the end as a quiet family hotel. Next to the "Bell" on the east side was the "Black Bull," the front of which, with the carved sign of a bull in a violent state of excitement, remained after the rest of the inn had disappeared, outliving its neighbour for a brief period. It was in existence for a couple of hundred years or more, but future generations will probably only remember it as the house where Mr. Lewson was taken ill, and placed under the tender mercies of Betsy Prig and Mrs. Gamp; whence also, when convalescent, he was assisted into a coach, Mould the undertaker eyeing him with regret as he felt himself baulked of a piece of legitimate business.
A few short years ago if, on leaving this group of Holborn inns, we had turned down Fetter Lane in the direction of Fleet Street, after passing two or three gabled buildings still standing on the right hand side, we should have come to another old hostelry called the "White Horse," of which there is a well-known coloured print from a drawing made by Pollard in 1814, with a coach in front called the Cambridge Telegraph. It gradually fell into decay, became partly a "pub" and partly a common lodging-house, and with its roomy stabling at the back was swept away in 1897-98. Most of the structure was of the eighteenth century, but there were remains of an earlier wooden building. Its northern boundary touched the precinct of Barnard's Inn, an inn of chancery, now disestablished and adapted for the purposes of the Mercers' School.
Continuing our course southward, a short walk would formerly have taken us to the "Bolt-in-Tun," I think the only coaching establishment in Fleet Street, which possessed so many taverns and coffee-houses. The inn was of ancient origin, the White Friars having had a grant of the "Hospitium vocatum Le Bolt en ton" as early as the year 1443. The sign is the well-known rebus on the name of Bolton, the bird-bolt through a tun or barrel, which was the device of a prior of St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield, and may still be seen in the church there, and at Canonbury, where the priors had a country house. The City Press for September 12th, 1882, announces the then impending destruction of the "Bolt-in-Tun," and in the following year we are told that although a remnant of it in Fleet Street exists as a booking office for parcels, by far the larger portion, represented chiefly by the Sussex Hotel, Bouverie Street, which bore on it the date 1692, has just disappeared.
Further east, on Ludgate Hill, La Belle Sauvage Yard, where Messrs. Cassell & Co. carry on their important business, marks the site of an historic house, and perpetuates an error of nomenclature. Its original title, as proved by a document of the year 1452, was "Savage's" Inn, otherwise called the "Bell on the Hoop," but in the seventeenth century a trade token was issued from here, having on it an Indian woman holding a bow and arrow, and in 1676 "Bell Sauvage" Inn, on Ludgate Hill, consisting of about forty rooms, with good cellarage and stabling for about one hundred horses, was to be let. The mistake is repeated in The Spectator, No. 28, where we are told of a beautiful girl who was found in the wilderness, and whose fame was perpetuated in a French romance. As we learn from Howe, in his continuation of Stow's Annals, on a seat outside this inn Sir Thomas Wyat rested, after failing in an attempt to enter the city during his ill-advised rebellion in the reign of Mary Tudor. From Lambarde we gather that this was one of the houses where plays were performed before the time of Shakespeare. Writing in 1576, he says, "Those who go to Paris Garden, the Bell Savage, or the Theatre to behold bear-baiting, interludes, or fence play, must not account of any pleasant spectacle unless first they pay one pennie at the gate, another at the entrie of the scaffold, and a third for quiet standing." Here, as at the "Cross Keys," Gracechurch Street, Bankes exhibited his horse, and here, in 1683, "a very strange beast called a Rhynoceros—the first that ever was in England," could be seen daily. Stow affirms the inn to have been given to the Cutlers' Company by Isabella Savage; but, in fact, the donor was John Craythorne, who conveyed the reversion of it to them in 1568. The sculptured elephant and castle representing their crest is still on a wall in La Belle Sauvage Yard. The inn, which has left its mark in the annals of coaching, was taken down in 1873.
A thoroughfare, formerly containing several fine mansions and various inns for travellers, was Aldersgate Street, the continuation of St. Martin's-le-Grand. There are allusions in print to the "Bell," the "George" (previously the "White Hart"), and to the "Cock" Inn, where, after years of wandering, Fynes Moryson arrived one Sunday morning in 1595; but these all passed away long ago. The last to linger in the neighbourhood was the "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand, finally called the "Queen's" Hotel, absorbed by the General Post Office in 1886. The name is generally supposed to be a corruption of Boulogne Mouth, the entrance to Boulogne Harbour, that town having been taken by Henry VIII. George Steevens, the Shakespearean commentator, seems to have suggested this, and his idea has been generally accepted; but it is more likely that our inn was identical with the house called in 1657 "the Mouth near Aldersgate in London, then the usual meeting-place for Quakers," to which the Body of John Lilburne was conveyed in August of that year. We learn from Ellwood's Autobiography that five years afterwards he was arrested at the "Bull and Mouth," Aldersgate. The house was at its zenith as a coaching centre in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Edward Sherman had become landlord. He rebuilt the old galleried house in 1830. When coaching for business purposes ceased to be, the gateway from St. Martin's-le-Grand was partially blocked up and converted into the main entrance, the inn continuing under its changed name for many years. The sculptured signs were not removed until the destruction of the building. One, which was over the main entrance, is a statuette of a Bull within a gigantic open Mouth; below are bunches of grapes; above, a bust of Edward VI. and the arms of Christ's Hospital, to which institution the ground belonged. Beneath is a tablet inscribed with the following doggerel rhyme:—
"Milo the Cretonian an ox slew with his fist,
And ate it up at one meal, ye Gods what a glorious twist."
Another version of the sign, the Mouth appearing below the Bull, was over what had been a back entrance to the yard in Angel Street. These signs are now both in the Guildhall Museum. I had almost overlooked one house, the "Castle and Falcon," Aldersgate, closed within the last few months, and now destroyed. The structure was uninteresting, but it stood on an old site—that of John Day's printing-house in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. At the present inn on April 12th, 1799, was founded the Church Missionary Society; here also its centenary was celebrated.
Besides being plentiful in the main thoroughfares, important inns, like the churches, were often crammed away in narrow and inconvenient lanes. This was the case with the "Oxford Arms" and the "Bell," both in Warwick Lane. The former was approached by a passage, being bounded on the west by the line of the old city wall, or by a later wall a few feet to the east of it, and touching Amen Corner on the south. It was a fine example of its kind. As was said by a writer in The Athenæum of May 20th, 1876, just before it was destroyed:
"Despite the confusion, the dirt and the decay, he who stands in the yard of this ancient inn may get an excellent idea of what it was like in the days of its prosperity, when not only travellers in coach or saddle rode into or out of the yard, but poor players and mountebanks set up their stage for the entertainment of spectators, who hung over the galleries or looked on from their rooms—a name by which the boxes of a theatre were first known."
The house must have been rebuilt after the Great Fire, which raged over this area. That it existed before is proved by the following odd advertisement of March, 1672-73:
"These are to give notice that Edward Bartlet, Oxford Carrier, hath removed his inn in London from the Swan at Holborn Bridge to the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane, where he did Inn before the Fire. His coaches and waggons going forth on their usual days, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. He hath also a hearse and all things convenient to carry a Corps to any part of England."
The "Bell" Inn, also galleried, was on the east side of Warwick Lane. There Archbishop Leighton died in 1684. As Burnet tells us, he had often said that "if he were to choose a place to die in it should be an Inn; it looked like a pilgrim's going home, to whom this world was all as an Inn, and who was weary of the noise and confusion in it." Thus his desire was fulfilled. There is a view of the old house in Chambers' Book of Days, vol. i., p. 278. It was demolished in 1865, when the value of the unclaimed parcels, some of which had been there many years, is said to have been considerable. According to one statement, the jewellery was worth £700 or £800.
The few remaining inns to which reference will be made may best perhaps be taken in alphabetical order. The old "Angel" Inn, at the end of Wych Street, Strand, already existed in February, 1503, when a letter was directed to Sir Richard Plumpton "at the Angell behind St. Clement's Kirk." From this inn Bishop Hooper was taken to Gloucester in 1554 to be burnt at the stake. A trade token was issued there in 1657. Finally, the business, largely dependent on coaches, faded away; the building was rased to the ground in 1853, and the set of offices called Danes Inn built on the site. These in their turn have now succumbed. The "Axe" in Aldermanbury was a famous carriers' inn. It is mentioned in drunken Barnabee's Journal, and from there the first line of stage waggons from London to Liverpool was established about the middle of the seventeenth century. It took many days to perform the journey.
In Laurence Lane, near the Guildhall, was a noteworthy house called "Blossoms" Inn, which, according to Stow, had "to sign St. Laurence the Deacon in a border of blossoms of flowers." In 1522, when the Emperor Charles V. came to visit Henry VIII. in London, certain inns were set apart for the reception of his retinue, among them "St. Laurence, otherwise called Bosoms Yn, was to have ready XX beddes and a stable for LX horses." In Ben Jonson's Masque of Christmas, presented at Court in 1616, "Tom of Bosomes Inn," apparently a real person, is introduced as representing Mis-rule. That the house was early frequented by carriers is shown in the epistle dedicatory to Have at you at Saffron Walden, 1596:—"Yet have I naturally cherisht and hugt it in my bosome, even as a carrier at Bosome's Inne doth a cheese under his arm." A satirical tract about Bankes and his horse Marocco gives the name of the authors as "John Dande the wiredrawer of Hadley, and Harrie Hunt head ostler of Bosomes inn." There is a view of this famous hostelry in the Crace collection, date 1855; the yard is now a depôt for railway goods.
In 1852 London suffered a sad loss architecturally by the removal of the fine groined crypt of Gerard's Hall, Basing Lane, which dated perhaps from the end of the thirteenth century, and had formed part of the mansion of a famous family of citizens, by name Gysors. In Stow's time it was "a common hostrey for receipt of travellers." He gives a long account of it, mixing fact with fiction. The house and hall were destroyed in the Great Fire, but the crypt escaped, and on it an inn was built with, in front, a carved wooden effigy of that mythical personage, Gerard the Giant, which is now in the Guildhall Museum. On the removal of the crypt the stones were numbered and presented to the Crystal Palace Company, with a view to its erection in their building or grounds. It is said, however, that after a time the stones were used for mending roads.
A rather unimportant-looking inn was the "Nag's Head," on the east side of Whitcomb Street, formerly Hedge Lane, but it is worthy of mention for one or two reasons. We learn from a manuscript note-book, which was in the possession of the late Mr. F. Locker Lampson, that Hogarth in his later days, when he set up a coach and horses, kept them at the "Nag's Head." He was then living on the east side of Leicester Square. According to a pencil note on an old drawing, which belongs to the writer, "this inn did the posting exclusively for the Royal family from George I. to William IV." It was latterly used as a livery stable, but retained its picturesque galleries until, the lease having come to an end, it was closed in 1890. The space remained vacant for some years, and is now covered by the fine publishing office of Messrs. Macmillan & Co.
Two "Saracen's Head" inns have already been described, and though one feels how imperfect this account must of necessity be, and that some houses of note are altogether omitted, I am tempted to mention a third—the house with that sign in Friday Street. It came into the hands of the Merchant Taylors' Company as early as the year 1400, and after several rebuildings was finally swept away in 1844. The adjoining house, said by tradition to have been occupied by Sir Christopher Wren, was destroyed at the same time.
It was in the early thirties of last century that coaching reached its zenith, and perhaps the greatest coaching centre in London was the "Swan with Two Necks," Lad Lane. It was an old inn, mentioned by Machyn as early as 1556. In 1637 carriers from Manchester and other places used to lodge there, but it will be best remembered as it appears in a well-known print during the heyday of its prosperity, the courtyard crowded with life and movement. The gateway was so narrow that it required some horsemanship to drive a fast team out of the said courtyard, and some care on the part of the guard that his horn or bugle basket was not jammed against the gate-post. The proprietor of this establishment was Mr. William Chaplin who, originally a coachman, became perhaps the greatest coach proprietor that ever lived. About 1835 he occupied the yards of no fewer than five famous and important inns in London, to all of which allusion has been made—the "Spread Eagle" and "Cross Keys" in Gracechurch Street, the "Swan with Two Necks," the "White Horse," Fetter Lane, and the "Angel" behind St. Clement's. He had 1,300 horses at work on various roads, and about that time horsed fourteen out of the twenty-seven coaches leaving London every night. When the railways came he bowed to the inevitable, and, in partnership with Mr. Horne, established the great carrying business, which still flourishes on the site of the old "Swan with Two Necks." In 1845 Lad Lane was absorbed by Gresham Street. The origin of the sign has been often discussed, but it is perhaps well to conclude this chapter by adding a few words about it. The swans on the upper reaches of the Thames are owned respectively by the Crown and the Dyers and the Vintners' Company, and, according to ancient custom, the representatives of these several owners make an excursion each year up the river to mark the cygnets. The visitors' mark used to consist of the chevron or letter V and two nicks on the beak. The word nicks has been corrupted into necks, and as the Vintners were often tavern-keepers, the "Swan with Two Necks" became a common sign.
[THE OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES]
By G. L. Apperson, I.S.O.
For something like a century and a half the coffee-houses formed a distinctive feature of London life. The first is said to have been established by a man named Bowman, servant to a Turkey merchant, who opened a coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, in 1652. The honour of being the second has been claimed for the "Rainbow" in Fleet Street, by the Inner Temple Gate, opposite Chancery Lane. Aubrey, speaking of Sir Henry Blount, a beau in the time of Charles II., says: "When coffee first came in, he was a great upholder of it, and had ever since been a constant frequenter of coffee-houses, especially Mr. Farre's, at the 'Rainbow,' by Inner Temple Gate." But according to The Daily Post of May 15th, 1728, "Old Man's" Coffee-house, at Charing Cross, "was the Second that was set up in the Cities of London and Westminster." The question of priority, however, is of no importance. It is quite certain that in a surprisingly short space of time coffee-houses became very numerous. A manuscript of 1659, quoted in The Gentleman's Magazine for 1852 (Part I., pp. 477-9), says that at that date there was
"a Turkish drink to be sould almost in eury street, called Coffee, and another kind of drink called Tee, and also a drink called Chocolate, which was a very harty drink."
Tea made its way slowly; but coffee took the town by storm.
The coffee-houses, as resorts for men of different classes and occupations, survived till the early years of the nineteenth century; but their palmy days were over some time before the end of the eighteenth century. They were at the height of their fame and usefulness from the Restoration till the earlier years of George III.'s reign.
From the description given in The Spectator and other contemporary writings—such as "facetious" Tom Brown's Trip through London of 1728, and the like—it is easy to reconstruct in imagination the interior of one of these resorts as they appeared in the time of Queen Anne. Occasionally the coffee-room, as at the famous "Will's" in Russell Street, Covent Garden, was on the first floor. Tables were disposed about the sanded floor—the erection of boxes did not come in until a later date—while on the walls were numerous flaming advertisements of quack medicines, pills and tinctures, salves and electuaries, which were as abundant then as now, and of other wares which might be bought at the bar. The bar was at the entrance to the temple of coffee and gossip, and was presided over by the predecessors of the modern barmaids—grumbled at in The Spectator as "idols," who there received homage from their admirers, and who paid more attention to customers who flirted with them than to more sober-minded visitors; and described by Tom Brown as "a charming Phillis or two, who invite you by their amorous glances into their smoaky territories."
At the bar messages were left and letters taken in for regular customers. In the early days of Swift's friendship with Addison, Stella was instructed to address her letters to the former under cover to Addison at the "St. James's" Coffee-house, in St. James's Street; but as the friendship between the two men cooled the cover was dispensed with, and the letters were addressed to Swift himself at the coffee-house, where they were placed, doubtless with many others, in the glass frame behind the bar. Stella's handwriting was very like that of her famous correspondent, and one day Harley, afterwards Earl of Oxford, seeing one of Stella's letters in the glass frame and thinking the writing was Swift's, asked the latter, when he met him shortly afterwards, how long he had learned the trick of writing to himself. Swift says he could hardly persuade him that he was mistaken in the writing.
The coffee-houses were the haunts of clubs and coteries almost from the date of their first establishment. Steele, in the familiar introduction to The Tatler, tells us how accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment were to come from "White's" Chocolate-house; poetry from "Will's" Coffee-house; learning from the "Grecian"; and foreign and domestic news from the "St. James's." Nearly fifty years later, Bonnell Thornton, in the first number of The Connoisseur, January 31st, 1754, similarly enumerates some of the leading houses. "White's" was still the fashionable resort; "Garraway's" was for stock-jobbers; "Batson's" for doctors; the "Bedford" for "wits" and men of parts; the "Chapter" for book-sellers; and "St. Paul's" for the clergy. Mackay, in his Journey through England, published in 1724, says that
"about twelve the beau-monde assembles in several chocolate and coffee-houses, the best of which are the Cocoa Tree and White's Chocolate-houses, St. James's, the Smyrna, and the British Coffee-houses; and all these so near one another that in less than an hour you see the company of them all.... I must not forget to tell you that the parties have their different places, where, however, a stranger is always well received; but a Whig will no more go to the Cocoa Tree or Ozinda's than a Tory will be seen at the coffee-house of St. James's. The Scots go generally to the British, and a mixture of all sorts to the Smyrna. There are other little coffee-houses much frequented in this neighbourhood—Young Man's for officers, Old Man's for stock-jobbers, paymasters, and courtiers, and Little Man's for sharpers."
It was only natural that people of similar occupations or tastes should gravitate in their hours of leisure to common social centres, and no one classification, such as that just quoted, can exhaust the subject.
The devotees of whist had their own houses. The game began to be popular about 1730, and some of those who first played scientific whist—possibly including Hoyle himself—were accustomed to meet at the "Crown" Coffee-house in Bedford Row. Other groups soon met at other houses. A pirated edition of Hoyle's Whist, printed at Dublin in 1743, contains an advertisement of "A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, as play'd at Court, White's, and George's Chocolate-houses, at Slaughter's, and the Crown Coffee-houses, etc., etc." At "Rawthmell's" Coffee-house in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, the Society of Arts was founded in 1754. "Old Slaughter's" in St. Martin's Lane was a great resort in the second half of the eighteenth century of artists. Here Roubillac the sculptor, Hogarth, Bourguignon or Gravelot the book illustrator, Moser the keeper of the St. Martin's Lane Academy, Luke Sullivan the engraver, and many others of the fraternity were wont to foregather. Near by was "Young Slaughter's," a meeting-place for scientific and literary men.
R. L. Edgeworth, in his Memoirs (p. 118, Ed. 1844), says:—
"I was introduced by Mr. Keir into a society of literary and scientific men, who used formerly to meet once a week at Jack's Coffee-house [i.e., circa 1780] in London, and afterwards at Young Slaughter's Coffee-house. Without any formal name, this meeting continued for years to be frequented by men of real science and of distinguished merit. John Hunter was our chairman. Sir Joseph Banks, Solander, Sir A. Blagden, Dr. George Fordyce, Milne, Maskelyne, Captain Cook, Sir G. Shuckburgh, Lord Mulgrave, Smeaton and Ramsden, were among our members. Many other gentlemen of talents belonged to this club, but I mention those only with whom I was individually acquainted."
A favourite resort of men of letters during the middle and later years of the eighteenth century was the "Bedford" Coffee-house, under the Piazza, in Covent Garden. This house, it may be said, inherited the tradition from Button's, which that famous coffee-house had taken over from Will's. To the "Bedford" came Fielding, Foote, Garrick, Churchill, Sheridan, Hogarth, and many another man of note. Another haunt of literary men, as well as of book-sellers, was the "Chapter" Coffee-house in Paternoster Row. Chatterton wrote to his mother in May, 1770: "I am quite familiar at the 'Chapter' Coffee-house, and know all the geniuses there." Goldsmith was one of its frequenters. It was here that he came to sup one night as the invited guest of Churchill's friend, Charles Lloyd. The supper was served and enjoyed, whereupon Lloyd, without a penny in his pocket to pay for the meal he had ordered, coolly walked off and left Goldsmith to discharge the reckoning. It was at the same house that Foote, one day when a distressed player passed his hat round the coffee-room circle with an appeal for help, made the malicious remark: "If Garrick hear of this he will certainly send in his hat."
Close by was the "St. Paul's" Coffee-house, where, according to Bonnell Thornton, "tattered crapes," or poor parsons, were wont to ply "for an occasional burial or sermon, with the same regularity as the happier drudges who salute us with the cry of 'Coach, sir,' or 'Chair, your honour.'" The same writer relates how a party of bucks, by a hoaxing proffer of a curacy, "drew all the poor parsons to 'St. Paul's' Coffee-house, where the bucks themselves sat in another box to smoke their rusty wigs and brown cassocks."
Business men gathered at "Jonathan's" and "Garraway's," both in Exchange Alley, where the sale and purchase of stocks and bonds and merchandise of every kind formed the staple talk. The former house was a centre of operations for both bubblers and bubbled in the mania year of 1720. "Lloyd's" Coffee-house was for very many years a famous auction mart.
"Then to Lloyd's coffee-house he never fails,
To read the letters, and attend the sales,"
says the author of The Wealthy Shopkeeper, published in 1700. Addison, in No. 46 of The Spectator, tells how he was accustomed to make notes or "minutes" of anything likely to be useful for future papers, and of how one day he accidentally dropped one of these papers at "Lloyd's Coffee-house, where the auctions are usually kept." It was picked up and passed from hand to hand, to the great amusement of all who saw it. Finally, the "boy of the coffee-house," having in vain asked for the owner of the paper, was made "to get up into the auction pulpit and read it to the whole room." The "Jerusalem" Coffee-house, in Exchange Alley, was for generations the resort of merchants and traders interested in the East.
The doctors met at "Batson's" or "Child's." The pseudonymous author of Don Manoel Gonzales' Voyage to Great Britain, 1745, speaking of the London physicians, says: "You find them at Batson's or Child's Coffee-house usually in the morning, and they visit their patients in the afternoon." The Jacobites had two well-known houses of call—"Bromefield's" Coffee-house in Spring Gardens, and, later, the "Smyrna" in Pall Mall. Mr. J. H. MacMichael, in his valuable book on Charing Cross, 1906, quotes an order "given at their Majesties' Board of Green Cloth at Hampton Court" in 1689, to Sir Christopher Wren, Surveyor of Their Majesties' Works, to have "bricked or otherwise so closed up as you shall judge most fit for the security of their Majesties' Palace of Whitehall" a certain door which led out of Buckingham Court into Spring Garden, because Bromefield's Coffee-house in that court was resorted to by "a great and numerous concourse of Papists and other persons disaffected to the Government." Mr. MacMichael suggests that probably "Bromefield's" was identical with the coffee-house known as "Young Man's." "The Smyrna," in Pall Mall, was the Jacobite resort in Georgian days. It was also a house of many literary associations. Thomson, the poet, there received subscriptions for his Seasons; Swift and Prior and Arbuthnot frequented it. In 1703 Lord Peterborough wrote to Arbuthnot from Spain:—"I would faine save Italy and yett drink tea with you at the Smirna this Winter." But it is impossible to catalogue fully all the different coffee-house centres. The "Grecian" in Devereux Court, Strand, was devoted to learning; barristers frequented "Serle's," at the corner of Serle and Portugal Streets, Lincoln's Inn Fields; the Templars went to "Dick's," and later to the "Grecian"; and so the list might be prolonged.
In the earlier days of the coffee-houses the coterie or club of regular frequenters foregathered by the fire, or in some particular part of the general room, or in an inner room. At "Will's" in Russell Street, Covent Garden, where Mr. Pepys used to drop in to hear the talk, Dryden, the centre of the literary circle which there assembled, had his big arm-chair in winter by the fireside, and in summer on the balcony. Around him gathered many men of letters, including Addison, Wycherley, Congreve, and the juvenile Pope, and all who aspired to be known as "wits." On the outskirts of the charmed circle hovered the more humble and modest frequenters of the coffee-room, who were proud to obtain the honour even of a pinch of snuff from the poet's box. Across the road at "Button's," a trifle later, Addison became the centre of a similar circle, though here the tone was political quite as much as literary. Whig men of letters discussed politics as well as books. Steele, Tickell, Budgell, Rowe, and Ambrose Phillips were among the leading figures in this coterie. Pope was of it for a time, but withdrew after his quarrel with Addison.
Whig politicians met at the "St. James's"; and Addison, in a Spectator of 1712, pictures the scene. A rumour of the death of Louis XIV. had set the tongues going of all the gossips and quidnuncs in town; and the essayist relates how he made a tour of the town to hear how the news was received, and to catch the drift of popular opinion on so momentous an event. In the course of his peregrinations the silent gentleman visited the "St. James's," where he found the whole outer room in a buzz of politics. The quality of the talk improved as he advanced from the door to the upper end of the room; but the most thorough-going politicians were to be found "in the inner room, with the steam of the coffee-pot," and in this sanctum, says the humorist, "I heard the whole Spanish monarchy disposed of, and all the line of Bourbon provided for, in less than a quarter of an hour."
In later days coffee-house clubs became more exclusive. The members of a club or coterie were allotted a room of their own, to which admission ceased to be free and open, and thus was marked the beginning of the transition from the coffee-house of the old style to the club-house of the new. In The Gentleman's Magazine for 1841 (Part II., pp. 265-9) is printed a paper of proposals, dated January 23rd, 1768, for enlarging the accommodation for the club accustomed to meet at Tom's Coffee-house, Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, by taking into the coffee-room the first floor of the adjoining house. Admission to this club was obtained by ballot.
Coffee-houses were frequented for various purposes besides coffee, conversation, and business—professional or otherwise. The refreshments supplied were by no means confined to such innocuous beverages as tea and coffee and chocolate. Wines and spirits were freely consumed—"laced" coffee, or coffee dashed with brandy, being decidedly popular. Swift relates how on the occasion of his christening the child of Elliot, the proprietor of the "St. James's," he sat at the coffee-house among some "scurvy companions" over a bowl of punch so late that when he came home he had no time to write to Stella. The prolonged sittings and too copious libations of the company at Button's Coffee-house gave the feeble and delicate Pope many a headache; and Addison, who was notoriously a hard drinker, did not, we may feel sure, confine himself during those prolonged sittings to coffee.
The coffee-houses were also public reading-rooms. There could be read the newspapers and other periodical publications of the day. When Sir Roger de Coverley entered "Squire's," near Gray's Inn Gate, he "called for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco, a dish of coffee, a wax candle, and The Supplement."
Mackay, in his Journey through England, already quoted, says that "in all the Coffee-houses you have not only the foreign prints, but several English ones with the Foreign Occurrences, besides papers of morality and party disputes." Swift, writing to Stella, November 18th, 1711, says, "Do you read the Spectators? I never do; they never come in my way; I go to no coffee-houses"; and when The Tatler had disappeared, a little earlier, Gay wrote that "the coffee-houses began to be sensible that the Esquire's lucubrations alone had brought them more customers than all their other newspapers put together." Periodical publications were filed for reference; and at all the better houses The London Gazette, and, during the session, the Parliamentary Votes could be seen. At least one house possessed a library. This was the "Chapter," in Paternoster Row, already referred to as a literary haunt. Dr. Thomas Campbell, the author of a Diary of a Visit to England in 1775, which was published at Sydney in 1854, says that he had heard that the "Chapter" was remarkable for a large collection of books and a reading society.
The coffee-houses served as writing-rooms as well as reading-rooms. Many of Steele's numerous love-letters to "dear Prue," the lady who became his wife, the lovely Mary Scurlock, written both before and after his marriage, are dated from the "St. James's," the "Tennis Court," "Button's," or other coffee-house. But a popular coffee-room could hardly have been an ideal place for either reading or writing. A poet of 1690 says that
"The murmuring buzz which thro' the room was sent,
Did bee-hives' noise exactly represent,
And like a bee-hive, too, 'twas filled, and thick,
All tasting of the Honey Politick
Called 'News,' which they all greedily sucked in."
And many years later, Gilly Williams, in a letter to George Selwyn, dated November 1st, 1764, says: "I write this in a full coffee-house, and with such materials, that you have good luck if you can read two lines of it."
A curious proof of the close and intimate way in which the coffee-houses were linked with social life is to be seen in the occasional references, both in dramatic and prose literature, to some of the well-known servants of the coffee-houses. Steele, in the first number of The Tatler, refers familiarly to Humphrey Kidney, the waiter and keeper of book debts at the "St. James's"—he "has the ear of the greatest politicians that come hither"—and when Kidney resigned, it was advertised that he had been "succeeded by John Sowton, to whose place of caterer of messages and first coffee-grinder William Bird is promoted, and Samuel Bardock comes as shoe-cleaner in the room of the said Bird." "Robin, the Porter who waits at Will's Coffee-house," plays a prominent part in a little romance narrated in No. 398 of The Spectator. He is described as "the best man in the town for carrying a billet; the fellow has a thin body, swift step, demure looks, sufficient sense, and knows the town." A waiter of the same name at Locket's, in Spring Gardens, is alluded to in Congreve's The Way of the World, where the fashionable Lady Wishfort, when she threatens to marry a "drawer" (or waiter), says, "I'll send for Robin from Locket's immediately."
The coffee-houses were employed as agencies for the sale of many things other than their own refreshments. Most of them sold the quack medicines that were staringly advertised on their walls. Some sold specific proprietary articles. A newspaper advertisement of 1711 says that the water of Epsom Old Well was "pumped out almost every night, that you may have the new mineral every morning," and that "the water is sold at Sam's Coffee-house in Ludgate Street, Hargrave's at the Temple Gate, Holtford's at the lower end of Queen's Street near Thames Street, and nowhere else in London." A "Ticket of the seal of the Wells" was affixed, so that purchasers "might not be cheated in their waters." The "Royal" Coffee-house at Charing Cross, which flourished in the time of Charles II., sold "Anderson's Pills"—a compound of cloves, jalap, and oil of aniseed. At the same house were to be had tickets for the various county feasts, then popular, which were an anticipation of the annual dinners of county associations so common nowadays.
Razor-strops of a certain make were to be bought in 1705 at John's Coffee-house, Exchange Alley. In 1742 it was advertised that "silver tickets" (season tickets) for Ranelagh Gardens were to be had at any hour of the day at Forrest's Coffee-house, near Charing Cross. "All Sorts of the newest fashion'd Tye Perukes, made of fresh string, Humane Hair, far exceeding any Country Work," were advertised in 1725 as to be bought at Brown's Coffee-house in Spring Gardens.
House agents, professional men, and other folk of more questionable kind, were all wont to advertise that they could be seen by clients at this or that coffee-house. The famous and impudent Mrs. Mapp, "the bone-setter," drove into town daily from Epsom in her own carriage, and was to be seen (and heard) at the "Grecian." Most of the houses were willing to receive letters in answer to advertisements, and from the nature of the latter must often, it is pretty certain, have been assisting parties to fraud and chicanery of various kind. At some houses, besides those like Lloyd's specially devoted to auction business, sales were held. A black boy was advertised to be sold at Denis's Coffee-house in Finch Lane in 1708. In the middle of the eighteenth century sales were often held at the "Apollo" Coffee-house, just within Temple Bar, and facing Temple Gate. Picture sales were usually held at coffee-houses. The catalogue of one such sale, held at the "Barbadoes" Coffee-house in February, 1689/90, contains a glowing address on the art of painting by Millington, the Auctioneer, written in the style made famous later by George Robins. Says the eloquent Millington:
"This incomparable art at the same time informs the Judgment, pleases the Fancy, recreates the Eye, and touches the Soul, entertains the Curious with silent Instruction, by expressing our most noble Passions, and never fails of rewarding its admirers with the greatest Pleasures, so Innocent and Ravishing, that the severest Moralists, the Morosest Stoicks cannot be offended therewith,"
and so on and so on.
Many of the early book sales, too, were held at coffee-houses. The third book auction in England, that of the library of the Rev. William Greenhill, was held on February 18th, 1677/78, "in the House of Ferdinand Stable, Coffee-Seller, at the Sign of the 'Turk's Head,'" in Bread Street. When sales were held elsewhere, catalogues could usually be had at some of the leading coffee-houses.
Besides serving as reading, writing and sale rooms, they seem sometimes to have been used as lecture rooms. William Whiston, in his Memoirs written by himself (1749), says:
"Mr. Addison, with his friend Sir Richard Steele, brought me upon my banishment from Cambridge, to have many astronomical lectures at Mr. Button's coffee-house, near Covent Garden, to the agreeable entertainment of a great number of persons, and the procuring me and my family some comfortable support under my banishment."
Some of the houses, as an additional attraction to visitors, offered exhibitions of collections of curiosities. The most famous collection of this kind was that to be seen for many years at Don Saltero's Coffee-house at Chelsea. Don Saltero, by the way, was simply plain James Salter disguised. Some of his exhibits were supplied by his former master, Sir Hans Sloane, and by other scientific friends and patrons. But mixed with things of genuine interest were to be seen all sorts of rubbish. Steele made fun of the collection in The Tatler. But people came to see the "piece of nun's skin tanned," "Job's tears, which grow on a tree, and of which anodyne necklaces are made," a "waistcoat to prevent sweating," and the many other strange articles which were shown side by side with the wooden shoe (of doubtful authenticity, one would think) which was placed under Mr. Speaker's chair in the time of James II., the King of Morocco's tobacco pipe, Oliver Cromwell's sword, and the like "historical" curiosities; and Mr. Salter had no reason to be dissatisfied with the results of his ingenuity. The most interesting association of this coffee-house, perhaps, is Pennant's story of how it was frequented by Richard Cromwell, the quondam Lord Protector, described in his peaceful age as "a little and very neat old man, with a most placid countenance, the effect of his innocent and unambitious life."
Not far from Don Saltero's was the old Chelsea Bun-house, which also contained a museum. The last relics of this collection were sold in April, 1839, and included a few pictures, plaster casts, a model of the bun-house, another, in cut paper, of St. Mary Redcliff Church, and other things of a still more trumpery character.
Richard Thoresby tells us that when he was in London, in the summer of 1714, he met his "old friend Dr. Sloane at the coffee-house of Mr. Miers, who hath a handsome collection of curiosities in the room where the virtuosi meet." As the name of the proprietor only is given, it is not easy to identify this house, but possibly it was the "Grecian" in Devereux Court, which was a favourite resort of the learned. It was at the "Grecian," by the way, that Goldsmith, in the latter years of his life, was often the life and soul of the Templars who were wont to meet there. In their company he sometimes amused himself with the flute, or with whist—"neither of which he played very well." When he took what he called a "Shoemaker's holiday," Goldsmith, after his day's excursion, "concluded by supping at the 'Grecian' or 'Temple-Exchange' Coffee-house, or at the 'Globe' in Fleet Street."
A word must be said as to the manners of the frequenters of coffee-houses. The author of A Trip through London, 1728, tells of fops who stare you out of countenance, and describes one man as standing with his back to the fire "in a great coffee-house near the Temple," and there spouting poetry—a remarkable specimen, indeed, of the bore; but on the whole the evidence goes to show that bad manners were usually resented by the rest of the company, and that good humour and good manners were marked characteristics of coffee-house life. There were exceptional incidents, of course. A fatal duel once resulted from a heated argument at the "Grecian" about a Greek accent. One day, soon after the first appearance of The Tatler, two or three well-dressed men walked into the coffee-room of the "St. James's," and began in a loud, truculent manner to abuse Steele as the author of that paper. One of them at last swore that he would cut Steele's throat or teach him better manners. Among the company present was Lord Forbes, with two friends, officers of high rank in the army. When the cut-throat had uttered his threat, Lord Forbes said significantly, "In this country you will find it easier to cut a purse than to cut a throat," and with the aid of the military gentlemen the bullies were ignominiously turned out of the house. Many years later, in 1776, the "St. James's" was the scene of a singular act of senseless violence. It is tersely described in a letter from Lord Carlisle to George Selwyn. He writes:
"The Baron de Lingsivy ran a French officer through the body on Thursday for laughing in the St. James's Coffee-house. I find he did not pretend that he himself was laughed at, but at that moment he chose that the world should be grave. The man won't die, and the baron will not be hanged."
Incidents of this kind, however, were of rare occurrence.
But it is impossible to attempt to exhaust the subject of the Old London Coffee-houses in one brief chapter. For a hundred years they focussed the life of the town. Within their hospitable walls men of all classes and occupations, independently, or in clubs and coteries, met not only for refreshment, but for social intercourse—to read and hear the news, to discuss the topics of the day, to entertain and be entertained. This was the chief end they served. Incidentally, as we have seen, they served a number of other subsidiary and more of less useful purposes. They died slowly. Gradually the better-class houses became more exclusive, and were merged in clubs of the modern kind. The inferior houses were driven from public favour by the taverns and public-houses, or, degenerating from their former condition, lingered on as coffee-houses still, but of the lower type, which is not yet quite extinct.
[THE LEARNED SOCIETIES OF LONDON]
By Sir Edward Brabrook, C.B., F.S.A.
In a sense some of the City Guilds are entitled to be called "learned societies"—as the Apothecaries, the Parish Clerks, the Stationers, and the Surgeons—but they are dealt with under their proper head. By the learned societies of London, we mean here those voluntary bodies existing with or without royal patronage, but relying wholly for support on the contributions of their members, which have taken upon themselves the promotion of knowledge in one or more of its branches. The earliest which we have been able to trace is that Society of Antiquaries which was founded in 1572, the fourteenth year of Queen Elizabeth, at the house of Sir Robert Cotton, under the presidency of Archbishop Parker. It counted among its members Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, William Camden, Sir William Dethicke, Garter, William Lambarde, James Ley, Earl of Marlborough, John Stow, Mr. Justice Whitelock, and other antiquaries of distinction. It is said that James I. became alarmed for the arcana of his Government and, as some thought, for the established Church, and accordingly put an end to the existence of the society in 1604.
His grandson, Charles II., founded the Royal Society of London for improving natural knowledge in the year 1660, and thus gave effect to a project which had been in the minds of many learned men for some time, is expounded by Bacon in his scheme of Solomon's house, and is perhaps best embodied in a letter which was addressed by John Evelyn to the Hon. Robert Boyle on September 1, 1659. The first meeting recorded in the journals of the society was held on November 28, 1660, and Evelyn was elected a member on December 26 of that year. Sir R. Moray was the first president. Graunt aptly called the society "The King's Privy Council for Philosophy." Statutes were duly framed by the society, and received the King's approval in January, 1662-3. For many years it held its meetings at Gresham College, with an interval of about four years (1669-1673), when it occupied Chelsea College. Its charters (dated 1662, 1663, and 1669) gave it many privileges, among others that of using a mace, and it was formerly said that the one used by the society was the identical mace or "bauble" of the Long Parliament, but that is an error. The society began in 1663 the excellent practice, which has continued to the present day, of celebrating the anniversary by dining together on St. Andrew's Day (November 30). It began on February 21, 1665-6, the formation of its museum, a catalogue of which was published in 1681. Many of its meetings were devoted to practical experiment; thus, on November 14, 1666, the operation of the transfusion of blood from one dog to another was performed in the presence of the members. In 1671 Isaac Newton sent his reflecting telescope to the society, and on January 11, 1671-2, he was elected a fellow. On April 28, 1686, the manuscript of his Principia was presented to the society, and it was published by the society in the following year. Many great men have been presidents of the society. Among them may be mentioned Sir Christopher Wren, elected president January 12, 1680-1; Samuel Pepys, 1684; Lord Somers, Chancellor of England, 1698; Isaac Newton, 1703; Sir Hans Sloane, on the death of Newton, 1726-7; Martin Folkes, who was also a well-remembered President of the Society of Antiquaries, 1741; the Earl of Macclesfield, 1753; succeeded on his death by the Earl of Morton, 1764; James West, 1768; James Barrow, and shortly afterwards, Sir John Pringle, 1772; Sir Joseph Banks, 1777; Wollaston, 1820; Davies Gilbert, 1826. In 1830, a contested election took place between the Duke of Sussex and Herschel the astronomer, when His Royal Highness was elected by 119 votes to 111.
The Government have frequently availed themselves of the existence of the Royal Society to entrust it with important public duties. On December 12, 1710, the fellows of the society were appointed visitors of the Royal Observatory. On February 7, 1712/3, the King requested the society to supply enquiries for his ambassadors. In 1742, and afterwards, it assisted in the determination of the standards. In 1780 its public services were recognised by the grant of apartments in Somerset House. In 1784 it undertook a geodetical survey. Recently it has been entrusted by Parliament with a sum of £4,000 a year, which it allots towards encouraging scientific research. It has promoted many public movements, such as Arctic expeditions, magnetic observations, and the like. Originally its members were drawn from two classes—the working-men of science and the patrons of science; and the idea is even now maintained by certain privileges in respect of election given to privy councillors and peers; but the recent tendency has been to restrict its fellowship to persons eminent in physical science. The Royal Society Club was founded in 1743, and still flourishes.
After the summary proceedings of James I., in 1604, the antiquaries seem to have allowed the whole of the seventeenth century to pass without any further attempt at organisation, though we learn from Mr. Ashmole that on July 2, 1659, an antiquaries' feast was held, and many renowned antiquaries, such as Dugdale, Spelman, Selden, and Anthony à Wood flourished at that time. On November 5, 1707, three antiquaries met at the "Bear" Tavern in the Strand, and agreed to hold a weekly meeting at the same place on Fridays at 6 o'clock, "and sit till ten at farthest." Other antiquaries joined them, and they removed next year to the "Young Devil" Tavern in Fleet Street, where Le Neve became their president.
THE
ROYAL SOCIETY'S
LETTER.
I have (by Order of the Royal Society) seen and examined the Method used by Mr JOHN MARSHALL, for grinding Glasses; and find that he performs the said Work with greater Ease and Certainty than hitherto has been practised; by means of an Invention which I take to be his own, and New; and whereby he is enabled to make a great number of Optick-Glasses at one time, and all exactly alike; which having reported to the Royal Society, they were pleased to approve thereof, as an Invention of great use; and highly to deserve Encouragement.
Lond. Jan. 18.
1693, 4.
By the Command of the
Royal Society.
EDM. HALLEY.
Note, There are several Persons who pretend to have the Approbation of the ROYAL SOCIETY; but none has, or ever had it, but my self; as my Letter can testifie.
Marshalls True SPECTACLES.
An Early Letter of the Royal Society, dated January 18th, 1693-4.
In 1717 they resolved to form themselves into a society, which is the Society of Antiquaries now existing. Its minutes have been regularly kept since January 1, 1718. The first volume bears the motto:
"Nec veniam antiquis, sed honorem et præmia posci.
"Stukeley, secr., 1726";
and the whole of the volume appears to be in Stukeley's autograph.
In a quaint preliminary memorandum, he enumerates the "antient monuments" the society was to study, as:
"Old Citys, Stations, Camps, public Buildings, Roads, Temples, Abbys, Churches, Statues, Tombs, Busts, Inscriptions, Castles, Ruins, Altars, Ornaments, Utensils, Habits, Seals, Armour, Pourtraits, Medals, Urns, Pavements, Mapps, Charts, Manuscripts, Genealogy, Historys, Observations, Emendations of Books, already published, and whatever may properly belong to the History of Bryttish Antiquitys."
The earlier publications of the society consisted of a series of fine prints engraved by George Vertue. In 1747 it began the issue of Vetusta Monumenta, and in 1770 the first edition of the first volume of Archæologia, or Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity, appeared. The Society's resources were modest. In the year 1736 its income was only £61, but its expenditure was not more than £11, and its accumulated funds amounted to £134. In 1752 it obtained from George II., who declared himself to be the founder and patron of the society, a Royal Charter of Incorporation, reciting that:
"the study of Antiquity and the History of former times, has ever been esteemed highly commendable and usefull, not only to improve the minds of men, but also to incite them to virtuous and noble actions, and such as may hereafter render them famous and worthy examples to late posterity."
The qualifications of a fellow are thus defined in the charter:—
"By how much any persons shall be more excelling in the knowledge of the Antiquities and History of this and other nations; by how much the more they are desirous to promote the Honour, Business, and Emoluments of this Society; and by how much the more eminent they shall be for Piety, Virtue, Integrity, and Loyalty: by so much the more fit and worthy shall such person be judged of being elected and admitted into the said Society."
Like the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries was to have and employ a sergeant-at-mace, and apartments were allotted to it in Somerset House. From this close neighbourhood grew an intimate association between the two societies. Many persons belonged to both, and although the paths of the two societies have since diverged, that is still so in the case of about twenty fellows. A practice grew up of attending each other's meetings. For more than forty years that agreeable form of interchange has ceased, and the societies contemplate each other from opposite corners of the quadrangle of Burlington House. The Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries dined together for many years on St. George's Day, April 23, the day prescribed for their anniversary by the charter; but after a while the custom fell into disuse, and it has only been revived of late years.
In 1753 the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, now called the Royal Society of Arts, was established. It held its first public meeting in March, 1754. It was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1847, and has for its objects:—
"the encouragement of the arts, manufactures, and commerce of the country, by bestowing rewards for such productions, inventions, or improvements as tend to the employment of the poor, to the increase of trade, and to the riches and honour of the kingdom; and for meritorious works in the various departments of the fine arts; for discoveries, inventions and improvements in agriculture, chemistry, mechanics, manufactures, and other useful arts; for the application of such natural and artificial products, whether of home, colonial, or foreign growth and manufacture, as may appear likely to afford fresh objects of industry, and to increase the trade of the realm by extending the sphere of British commerce; and generally to assist in the advancement, development, and practical application of every department of science in connection with the arts, manufactures, and commerce of this country."
Between 1754 and 1783 it distributed £28,434 by way of premiums for inventions. For more than a century and a half the society has devoted itself with unabated zeal to the promotion of its objects—by meetings, examinations, exhibitions, and in many other ways.
On January 13, 1800, the Royal Institution was founded. In the words of one of its most distinguished professors, it has been a fertile source of the popularity of science. By means of its lectures, its laboratories, its libraries, and its rewards for research, it greatly stimulated public interest in scientific pursuits when there were few other bodies in existence capable of doing so. It continues to perform the same useful function, notwithstanding the great increase in the number of specialist societies since it was established. A feature of its lectures is the annual course "adapted to a juvenile auditory." It has appointed as its professors some of the most illustrious scientific men, such as Sir Humphry Davy (up to 1812), Brande (1813 to 1852, and afterwards as honorary professor), Faraday (1852), and Tyndall (1853). The late Prince Consort (Albert the Good) took great interest in its work, and frequently presided at its weekly meetings. It has a Board of Managers, and also a Committee of Visitors, annually elected, and the visitors make an annual report on the state of the institution. After some early pecuniary difficulties it entered on a career of steady prosperity.
In 1807 the Geological Society was founded. The science of geology was very much opposed to popular notions derived from a literal interpretation of the Hebrew cosmogony, and was accordingly unpopular among those who held those notions; but the society steadily pursued its object, and can now look back upon the hundred years of its existence with pride and satisfaction. In one of his presidential addresses Sir Charles Lyell quoted the observation of Hutton, that "We can see neither the beginning nor the end of that vast series of phenomena which it is our business as geologists to investigate." Leonard Horner, another distinguished president, claimed that the society had been a "powerful instrument for the advancement of geological science, a centre of good fellowship, and a band of independent scientific men, who steadily and fearlessly promote the cause of truth." The society grants an annual medal, founded in memory of Wollaston, which has been frequently awarded to foreign geologists of distinction; and it also administers a fund bequeathed by him to promote useful researches in geology.
In November, 1820, Dr. Burgess, the Bishop of St. David's, obtained an audience of King George IV., and laid before him a plan for the establishment of a Royal Society of Literature. The King took so warm an interest in the project as to assign out of his privy purse an annual sum of 1,100 guineas, out of which pensions of 100 guineas each were awarded to ten royal associates of the society, and two medals annually granted to distinguished literary men. Among the royal associates were Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T. R. Malthus, William Roscoe, and Sharon Turner. Among the medallists were Dugald Stewart, Walter Scott, Robert Southey, Washington Irving, and Henry Hallam. Upon September 15, 1825, the society received its Charter of Incorporation, in which its object is defined to be:—
"the advancement of literature by the publication of inedited remains of ancient literature, and of such works as may be of great intrinsic value, but not of that popular character which usually claims the attention of publishers; by the promotion of discoveries in literature; by endeavouring to fix the standard, as far as is practicable, and to preserve the purity of the English language; by the critical improvement of English lexicography; by the reading at public meetings of interesting papers on history, philosophy, poetry, philology, and the arts, and the publication of such of those papers as shall be approved of; by the assigning of honorary rewards to works of great literary merit, and to important discoveries in literature; and by establishing a correspondence with learned men in foreign countries for the purpose of literary enquiry and information."
The first method, the publication of inedited and other works, has been greatly promoted by a bequest to the society of £1,692 from the Rev. Dr. Richards. Out of the income of this fund the Orations of Hyperides, edited by the Rev. Churchill Babington; the Discourses of Philoxenus, by Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge; the Chronicle of Adam of Usk, by Sir E. Maunde Thompson; Coleridge's Christabel, by E. H. Coleridge; and other valuable works have been provided. The Transactions of the society also contain many important papers. On the death of George IV. the annual gift of 100 guineas to each of the ten royal associates was withdrawn. The society now acknowledges literary merit by the award of the diploma of Honorary Fellow. In this capacity many distinguished authors, both in this country and abroad, have been and are associated with the society.
In its early years the society was hotly attacked by Macaulay, who held that its claim to be an appreciator of excellence in literature involved a claim to condemn literature of which it disapproved, and was equivalent to the establishment of a literary star-chamber. He illustrated this by a rather feeble apologue, and nothing in the subsequent history of the society has shown that his apprehensions had any foundation. It has been very modest in the exercise of the functions conferred upon it by its charter, which included the foundation of a college and the appointment of professors. At one time it did appoint a professor of English archæology and history, and it called upon every royal associate on his admission to select some branch of literature on which it should be his duty, once a year at least, to communicate some disquisition or essay. The subject chosen by Coleridge was a characteristic one:—
"The relations of opposition and conjunction, in which the poetry (the Homeric and tragic), the religion, and the mysteries of ancient Greece stood each to the other; with the differences between the sacerdotal and popular religion; and the influences of theology and scholastic logic on the language and literature of Christendom from the 11th century."
In pursuance of this undertaking he communicated a disquisition on the "Prometheus" of Æschylus.
In 1827 the Royal Asiatic Society was founded. As its title implies, it devotes itself to the study of the languages, the literature, the history, and the traditions of the peoples of Asia, especially of those inhabiting our Indian dependency. It has enrolled in its ranks many, if not all, the great Indian administrators and the most distinguished Asiatic scholars. Daughter societies have been established in the three Presidencies, and have contributed to the collection of materials for its work. Its transactions are of acknowledged value and authority. In its rooms at Albemarle Street a library and museum have been collected. Its latest publication is a collection of Baluchi poems by Mr. Longworth Dames, which has also been issued to the members of the Folk-lore Society.
On September 26, 1831, the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its first meeting at York. It originated in a letter addressed by Sir David Brewster to Professor Phillips, as secretary to the York Philosophical Society. The statement of its objects appended to its rules, as drawn up by the Rev. William Vernon Harcourt, is as follows:—
"The Association contemplates no interference with the ground occupied by other institutions. Its objects are:—To give a stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific inquiry—to promote the intercourse of those, who cultivate science in different parts of the British Empire, with one another and with foreign philosophers—to obtain a more general attention to the objects of science, and a removal of any disadvantages of a public kind which impede its progress."
The association was well described by the late Mr. Spottiswoode as "general in its comprehensiveness; special in its sectional arrangement." The general business of its meetings consists (1) in receiving and discussing communications upon scientific subjects at the various sections into which it is divided; (2) in distributing, under the advice of a Committee of Recommendations, the funds arising from the subscriptions of members and associates; and (3) in electing a council upon whom devolves the conduct of affairs until the next meeting. Although the meetings are held in all parts of the United Kingdom, and have been held in Canada and South Africa, the British Association may be correctly described as a London learned society, as its headquarters are in London, where the council meets and directs its continuous activities. One principal feature of its work, that of the Research Committees, which, either with or without a grant of money, pursue special enquiries with the view of reporting to the next annual meeting, continues throughout the year. The original designation of what are now the sections was "Committees of Sciences," and these were—(1) mathematics and general physics, (2) chemistry and mineralogy, (3) geology and geography, (4) zoology and botany, (5) anatomy and physiology, (6) statistics. The sectional arrangement was begun in 1835, and the sections are now constituted as follows—(a) mathematical and physical science, (b) chemistry, (c) geology, (d) zoology, (e) geography, (f) economic science and statistics, (g) engineering, (h) anthropology, (i) physiology, (k) botany, (l) educational science. At each annual meeting, which lasts a week, the president of the next meeting is chosen, but the previous president remains in office until the first day (Wednesday) of that meeting, when he introduces his successor, who delivers an address. Many memorable addresses have been delivered by the distinguished men who have held that office. Each section has also a president, chosen for the year, and he delivers an address at the opening of the proceedings of his section. These addresses usually relate to the progress during the year, or during recent years, of the science dealt with by the section, or to some interesting matter developed by the personal researches of the president himself. Men of eminence in the various sciences are generally selected for and willingly accept the office of Sectional President. The meetings of the British Association have been called a "Parliament of Science," and its influence in promoting scientific movements and rendering science popular has been very great.
In 1833 the Royal Geographical Society was founded. It may fairly be called the most popular of all the special societies, having about 4,000 members. It is also one of the most wealthy, having an income of about £10,000 a year. It has accumulated a fine series of maps, and a large library of geographical literature. Its quarterly journal is a store-house of the most recent information relating to geographical exploration. By medals and other rewards to explorers, by prizes awarded in schools and training colleges, by the loan of instruments to travellers, by the preparation of codes of instruction for their use, and in many other ways, it applies its resources to the extension of geographical knowledge. It has taken an active part in the promotion of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. As geographical researches are matters of great public interest, its meetings are sometimes important social functions, as on a recent occasion, when a foreign prince was the lecturer, and our King attended and spoke.
On March 15, 1834, the Statistical Society (now Royal Statistical) was founded. It was one of the first fruits of the activity of the British Association, which established a Statistical Committee at the Cambridge meeting in 1833, with Babbage as president. Their report recommended the formation of a society for the careful collection, arrangement, discussion, and publication of facts bearing on or illustrating the complex relations of modern society in its social, economical, and political aspects, especially facts which can be stated numerically and arranged in tables. The first president was the Marquis of Lansdowne, and among his successors have been many statesmen, such as Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and Lord Goschen; authorities on finance, as Lord Overstone, Mr. Newmarch, and Lord Avebury; and eminent writers on statistics, as Dr. Farr, Sir Robert Giffen, and the Right Hon. Charles Booth. As becomes the orderly mind of a statistician, the society has been very regular in its publications, having for seventy years issued a yearly volume in quarterly parts, which form a veritable mine of statistical information.
The society presents a Guy medal (in memory of Dr. W. A. Guy) to the authors of valuable papers or to others who have promoted its work, and a Howard medal (in memory of the great philanthropist) to the author of the best essay on a prescribed subject, generally having relation to the public health. It has accumulated a fine library of about 40,000 volumes of a special character, containing the statistical publications of all civilised countries. It has conducted some special enquiries—as into medical charities, the production and consumption of meat and milk, and the farm school system of the Continent—upon which it has published reports.
Among recent developments of statistical method in which the society has taken part may be mentioned the use of index-numbers for affording a standard of comparison between statistics of different years, and a means of correction of errors that would otherwise arise; and the increasing use of the higher mathematical analysis in determining the probabilities of error and defining the curves of frequency in statistical observations. Professor Edgeworth, Messrs. Bowley, Yule, Hooker, and others, have made contributions to the Journal of the society on these matters.
In 1844 an Ethnological Society was established, under the presidency of Sir Charles Malcolm. Dr. Richard King, the founder, became its secretary. In 1846 Dr. J. C. Prichard became president, and he and Dr. King fulfilled respectively the same functions in an ethnological sub-section of the section of zoology of the British Association, which then met for the first time. In Prichard's first anniversary address to the society, he defines ethnology as "the history of human races or of the various tribes of men who constitute the population of the world. It comprehends all that can be learned as to their origin and relations to each other." Prichard died in 1848, and Sir C. Malcolm resumed the presidency, which he held until his death on November 12, 1851. In that year ethnology was transferred from the zoological to the geographical section of the British Association. Sir B. C. Brodie became the next president of the society. He retired in 1854, and was succeeded by Sir James Clark. The fourth and last volume of the first series of the society's Journal was published in 1856, and a series of Transactions begun in 1861. At that time Mr. John Crawfurd was president of the society, and he retained the office until his death in 1868, when he was succeeded by Professor Huxley.
In 1862 Dr. James Hunt, the Honorary Foreign Secretary of the Ethnological Society, withdrew from it, and founded the Anthropological Society of London, which held its first meeting on February 24, 1863, under his presidency. In his inaugural address, he defined anthropology as the science of the whole nature of man, and ethnology as the history or science of nations or races. The new society was active and aggressive. It published translations of works of such writers as Broca, Pouchet, Vogt, and Waitz, and of the famous treatise of Blumenbach. Some of the papers read before it attracted much attention, and were thought to have a political bias. Many men whose names were well known in the scientific world adhered to the Ethnological Society, and that society, under Mr. Crawfurd, entered upon a more active career. The rivalry between the two societies was prosecuted with great vigour until January, 1871, when Professor Huxley effected an amalgamation between them.
The title of the combined societies was agreed upon as the "Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland," to which, in 1907, has been added by the King's command the prefix "Royal." In 1871 the department of ethnology in the section of biology in the British Association became the department of anthropology, and in 1884 anthropology became a section of itself. This was the final recognition by the Parliament of Science that Hunt had fought for twenty years before. In the interval, the claim of anthropology to this recognition had been established by many great works, such as Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, Darwin's Descent of Man, Tylor's Early History of Mankind, and Lubbock's Prehistoric Times. Besides its annual Journal, the Anthropological Institute publishes a monthly periodical entitled Man, and it has issued several separate monographs. In 1878 the branch of anthropology, aptly termed "Folk-lore" by the late Mr. W. J. Thoms, became so popular as to call for the establishment of a separate society, which publishes a quarterly journal entitled Folk-lore, and has annually issued one or more volumes of collections of folk-lore.
In 1844 a new departure was taken by the establishment of the British Archæological Association, a body which was intended to take the same place with regard to archæology that the British Association occupied with regard to science, holding meetings in various parts of the country where there existed objects of specially archæological interest. It held its first meeting at Canterbury, under the presidency of Lord Albert Conyngham (afterwards Lord Londesborough), and arranged its work in four sections—primæval, mediæval, architectural, and historical. Before a second meeting could be held, violent dissensions arose, and the association split into two. In the result honours were divided between the two bodies, those who retained the leadership of Lord Albert retaining also the title of British Archæological Association; while those who had for their president the Marquis of Northampton retained the control of the Archæological Journal, and adopted the title of "Archæological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland," to which has since been prefixed the word "Royal." Both bodies still exist, though the causes of controversy have long died out.
Shortly afterwards, County Archæological Societies in London and greater London began to be formed. In 1846 the Sussex Society, in 1853 the Essex Society, in 1854 the Surrey Society, in 1855 the London and Middlesex Society, and in 1857 the Kent Society were established. Each of these societies has published transactions and other works of solid value. In each the annual or more frequent excursion to places of archæological interest within the county is an essential feature, tending to the dissemination of knowledge and to the preservation of antiquities, and affording the advantages of social intercourse. Societies have also been established for the like purposes within more restricted areas, as in Hampstead, Battersea, Balham, Lewisham, Whitechapel, and elsewhere.
Of merely publishing societies, the Percy, the Camden, the Shakespeare, and the Arundel have run their course; but many others, as the Roxburgh, the Harleian, the New Palæographic, and the Palæontological still exist to delight their subscribers with the reproduction of rare works.
In this summary account of the principal Learned Societies of London it has not been possible to include many societies of great importance, such as the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, the numerous societies connected with other professional pursuits, the Linnæan, Zoological, Botanical, and other societies devoted to natural history; the Royal Astronomical Society, which has important public functions; the Royal Academy, and other institutions devoted to art. The roll of Learned Societies is being constantly increased. Among recent additions may be mentioned the British Academy for Historical Studies, and the Sociological Society.
[LITERARY SHRINES OF OLD LONDON]
By Elsie M. Lang
From the Borough to St. James's
Leigh Hunt was of opinion that "one of the best secrets of enjoyment is the art of cultivating pleasant associations," and, with his example before us, we will endeavour to recall some of those that are to be met with on a walk from the Borough to St. James's, from one of the poorest parts of our city to one of the richest. The Borough, dusty, noisy, toil-worn as it is, is yet, he tells us, "the most classical ground in the metropolis." From the "Tabard" inn—now only a memory, though its contemporary, the "George," hard by, gives us some idea of its look in mediæval times—there rode forth, one bright spring morning, "Sir Jeffrey Chaucer" and "nyne and twenty" pilgrims "in a companye ... to wenden on (a) pilgrimage to Caunterbury with ful devout courage." A fellow-poet of Chaucer's, John Gower, lies buried close at hand in Southwark Cathedral, "under a tomb of stone, with his image of stone also over him." He was one of the earliest benefactors of this church, then known as St. Mary Overy, and founded therein a chantry, where masses should be said for the benefit of his soul. Stones in the pavement of the choir likewise commemorate John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, and Edmund Shakespeare, who lie in unmarked graves somewhere within the precincts of the cathedral.
Not a stone's throw from the Borough is the Bankside, extending from Blackfriars Bridge out beyond Southwark, a mean and dirty thoroughfare, with the grey Thames on one side, and on the other dull houses, grimy warehouses, and gloomy offices. How changed from the semi-rural resort of Elizabethan days, when swans floated on the river, and magnificent barges, laden with gaily dressed nobles and their attendants, were continually passing by! Great must have been the pleasure traffic then, for according to Taylor, "the Water Poet," who plied his trade as waterman and wrote his verses on the Bankside in the early days of Elizabeth's successor, "the number of watermen and those that live and are maintained by them, and by the labour of the oar and scull, between the bridge of Windsor and Gravesend, cannot be fewer than forty thousand; the cause of the greater half of which multitude hath been the players playing on the Bankside." Besides the players, the brilliant band of dramatists who shed lustre on the reign of the maiden Queen frequented it, not only on account of the pleasantness of its situation, but because of the near proximity of the theatres, for the Globe, the Rose, and the Hope all stood on the site now occupied by the brewery of Messrs. Barclay and Perkins, while the Swan was not far off. It is a well-authenticated fact that both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson played at the Globe, and patronised the "Falcon" tavern, the name of which still lingers in Falcon Dock and Falcon Wharf, Nos. 79 and 80, Bankside; and while in the meantime they were producing their masterpieces, Chapman, Dekker, and Middleton were at the height of their fame, Beaumont and Fletcher about to begin their career, and Philip Massinger was newly arrived in town. Some of these Bankside dramatists were well born and rich—such as Francis Beaumont, whose father was a Knight and a Justice of the Common Pleas; and John Fletcher, who was a son of the Bishop of London. Others were of obscure birth and penniless—like Ben Jonson, who had been forced to follow the trade of a bricklayer, and Dekker and Marston, whom he twitted "with their defective doublet and ravelled satin sleeves," and Philip Massinger, who in early days went about begging urgently for the loan of £5. But whatever they had or lacked, certain it is that their common art levelled all barriers between them, for though the chief of all the friendships on the Bankside was that of Beaumont and Fletcher—between whom was "a wonderful consimilarity of fancy ... which caused the dearnesse of friendship between them so that they lived together on the Bankside ... (and had) the same cloaths and cloaks between them"—yet Massinger collaborated with Fletcher in at least thirteen plays, with Dekker in one, and with Ford in two, while Dekker was occasionally associated with Middleton, and Middleton with Webster and Drayton. But the Elizabethan dramatists did not confine themselves to the Bankside; on certain nights they repaired to the "Mermaid" tavern, which used to stand on the south side of Cheapside, between Bread and Friday Streets, to attend the meetings of the famous Mermaid Club, said to have been founded by Sir Walter Raleigh. Here were to be found Shakespeare, Spenser, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Carew, Donne, and many others, in eager witty converse. Beaumont well described the brilliancy of these gatherings in his poem to Ben Jonson:—
"What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! Heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that everyone from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life."
Another favourite haunt of theirs was the "Boar's Head," which stood on the spot now marked by the statue of William IV., at the junction of Eastcheap and Gracechurch Street. At this tavern Falstaff and Prince Hal concocted many of their wildest pranks. In later days the Elizabethan poets and dramatists, led by Ben Jonson, went even further afield—to the "Devil" tavern, which stood at No. 1, Fleet Street, where they held their meetings in a room called the "Apollo," the chief adornments of which, a bust of Apollo and a board with an inscription, "Welcome to the oracle of Apollo," are still to be seen in an upper room of Messrs. Child's Bank, which now occupies the site. Ben Jonson tells us that "the first speech in my 'Catiline,' spoken to Scylla's Ghost, was writ after I had parted with my friends at the 'Devil' tavern; I had drank well that night, and had brave notions."
We have records of the deaths of two at least of these dramatists on the Bankside—viz., that of Philip Massinger, who died "in his own house, near the play-house on the Bankside," in 1639; and Fletcher, "who dyed of the plague on the 19th of August, 1625." "The parish clerk," says Aubrey, "told me that he was his (Fletcher's) Taylor, and that Mr. Fletcher staying for a suit of cloathes before he retired into the country, Death stopped his journey and laid him low there."
Cheapside, so named from the Chepe, or old London market, along the south side of the site of which it runs, has been a place of barter ever since the reign of Henry VI., when a market was held there daily for the sale of every known commodity. It is easy to see where the vendors of some of the articles had their stands by the names of the surrounding streets—Bread Street, Fish Street, Milk Street, etc. Later on the stalls were transformed into permanent shops, with a dwelling-place for their owners above, and a fair-sized garden at the back. Despite the commercial spirit that has always pervaded this region, it has given birth to two famous poets—the sweet songster Herrick, who sings in one of his poems of
"The golden Cheapside where the earth
Of Julia Herrick gave to me my birth,"
golden, perhaps, having reference to his father, who was a goldsmith; and greater still, John Milton, who first saw the light in Bread Street, at the sign of the "Spread Eagle," in a house which was afterwards destroyed in the Great Fire. It must have been a house of comfortable dimensions, for it covered the site now occupied by Nos. 58 to 63, the business premises of a firm who exhibit a bust of Milton, with an inscription, in a room on their top floor. Milton's father, moreover, had grown rich in his profession, which was that of a scrivener, had been made a Judge, and knighted five years before the birth of his son, so it is evident the poet began life in easy circumstances. He was baptised in All Hallows, a church in Bread Street destroyed in 1897. In Bow Church there is a tablet in memory of Milton, which was taken from All Hallows. When he was ten years of age he began to go to Paul's School, which stood in those days on the east side of St. Paul's Churchyard, between Watling Street and Cheapside. Aubrey records that "when he went to schoole, when he was very young, he studied very hard, and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night, and his father ordered the mayde to sitt up for him, and at these years (ten) he composed many copies of verses which might well have become a riper age." He continued at this school, the old site of which is marked by a tablet on a warehouse, until he was sixteen. Some twenty years later Samuel Pepys was a pupil at Paul's School, and later on in life witnessed its destruction in the Great Fire. Milton would seem to have always cherished a great affection for the city, for after his return from his travels he seldom lived beyond the sound of Bow Bells, once only venturing as far as Westminster; and when he died he was buried in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, in the same grave as his father. Indeed, the city proper was the birthplace of several poets, for was not Pope born in Lombard Street, Gray in Cornhill, and Edmund Spenser in East Smithfield, while Lord Macaulay spent his earlier years in Birchin Lane?
Cheapside, with the Cross, as they appeared in 1660.
In the narrow confines of Paternoster Row, where the tall fronts of the houses are so close together that only a thin strip of sky is visible between them, Charlotte Brontë and her sister Anne, fresh from the rugged solitudes of their bleak Yorkshire moors, awoke on the morning of their first visit to the great capital of which they had so often dreamed, and, looking out of the dim windows of the Chapter Coffee-house, saw "the risen sun struggling through the fog, and overhead above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds ... a solemn orbed mass dark blue and dim the dome" (of St. Paul's).
Fleet Street has always been the haunt of the "knights of the pen," and even in these modern days the names of newspapers stare at the passer-by on every side, while at every step he jostles an ink-stained satellite of some great journal. But although these ink-stained ones are to be met with in Fleet Street at every hour of the day and night, they do not live there like the writers of old time—Michael Drayton, for instance, who "lived at ye baye-windowe house next the east end of St. Dunstan's Church"; and Izaak Walton, who kept a linen-draper's shop "in a house two doors west of the end of Chancery Lane," and on his infrequent holidays went a-fishing in the River Lea at Tottenham High Cross. Abraham Cowley, again, was born over his father's grocer's shop, which "abutted on Sargeants' Inn," and here, as a little child, he devoured the Faerie Queen, and was made "irrecoverably a poet." James Shirley lived near the Inner Temple Lane; John Locke in Dorset Court. In Salisbury Square, formerly Salisbury Court, Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, the precursor of Spenser, John Dryden, and Samuel Richardson, all had a residence at one time or another. Richardson built a large printing establishment on the site now occupied by Lloyd's newspaper offices, where he continued to carry on business many years after he had removed his private residence to the West End. He was buried, moreover, in St. Bride's Church in 1761, a large stone in the nave between pews 12 and 13 recording the fact. But greatest and most constant of Fleet Street habitués was Dr. Johnson. For ten years he lived at 17, Gough Square, busy in an upper room upon his great Dictionary. Here he lost his "beloved Tetty," to whose memory he ever remained faithful. "All his affection had been concentrated on her. He had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter." Although twenty years his senior, with a complexion reddened and coarsened by the too liberal use of both paint and strong cordials, yet "to him she was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady Mary." On leaving Gough Square he lived for a few years in the Temple, where he received his first visit from Boswell, and made the acquaintance of Oliver Goldsmith. The latter was then living at 6, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, where Johnson, visiting him one morning in response to an urgent message, found that "his landlady had arrested him for his rent." He showed Johnson his MS. of the just-completed Vicar of Wakefield, which he looked into, and instantly comprehending its merit, went out and sold it to a bookseller for sixty pounds. In 1765 Johnson returned to Fleet Street, and lived for eleven years at 7, Johnson's Court. Here Boswell dined with him for the first time on Easter Day, 1773, and found to his surprise "everything in very good order." Walking up the Court one day in company with Topham Beauclerk, Boswell confessed to him that he "had a veneration" for it, because the great doctor lived there, and was much gratified to learn that Beauclerk felt the same "reverential enthusiasm." In later years Dickens stole up this Court one dark December evening, and, with beating heart, dropped his first original MS. into the letter-box of The Monthly Magazine, the office of which stood on the site now occupied by Mr. Henry Sell's premises. No. 8, Bolt Court, was the next and last residence of Dr. Johnson; here, on December 13th, 1784, he met the inevitable crisis, for which he had always felt an indescribable terror and loathing, and passed peacefully and happily away. Johnson had always had a great predilection for club or tavern life, partly because it enabled him to escape for a while from the hypochondria which always dogged his footsteps. He loved nothing so much as to gather kindred spirits around him and spend long evenings in congenial conversation. He would sit, "the Jupiter of a little circle, sometimes indeed nodding approbation, but always prompt on the slightest contradiction to launch the thunders of rebuke and sarcasm." There was not much expense attached to these gatherings, for it is recorded of one of the clubs he founded that the outlay was not to exceed sixpence per person an evening, with a fine of twopence for those who did not attend. Among the Fleet Street haunts thus frequently resorted to by Dr. Johnson and his friends were the "Cocke," patronised in former years by Pepys, and in later years by Thackeray, Dickens, and Tennyson; the "Cheshire Cheese," the only house of the kind which remains as it was in Dr. Johnson's day; the "Mitre," also formerly patronised by Pepys; and the "Devil," where the poets laureate had been wont to repair and read their birthday odes. St. Clement Danes, too, is connected with Johnson, for, in spite of his love of festivity, he was devout, and regularly attended this church, occupying pew No. 18 in the north gallery, now marked by a brass plate. Boswell records that "he carried me with him to the church of St. Clement Danes, where he had his seat, and his behaviour was, as I had imagined to myself, solemnly devout."
One more memory of Fleet Street before we leave it, in connection with Dick's Coffee-house, which used to stand at Nos. 7 and 8. In December, 1763, the poet Cowper, then a student in the Inner Temple, was appointed Clerk of the Journals of the House of Lords. Delicate, shy, intensely sensitive, and with a strong predisposition to insanity, the dread of these onerous public duties disturbed the balance of his morbid brain. His madness broke out one morning at Dick's, as he himself afterwards narrated. He said:
"At breakfast I read the newspaper, and in it a letter, which the further I perused it the more closely engaged my attention. I cannot now recollect the purport of it; but before I had finished it, it appeared demonstratively true to me that it was a libel or satire upon me. The author appeared to be acquainted with my purpose of self-destruction, and to have written that letter on purpose to secure and hasten the execution of it. My mind probably at this time began to be disordered; however it was, I was certainly given to a strong delusion. I said within myself, 'Your cruelty shall be gratified, you shall have your revenge,' and flinging down the paper in a fit of strong passion, I rushed hastily out of the room, directing my way towards the fields, where I intended to find some lane to die in, or if not, determined to poison myself in a ditch, when I could meet with one sufficiently retired."
This paroxysm ended in Cowper trying to hang himself, but, the rope breaking, he went down to the Thames to the Custom House Quay and threatened to drown himself. This attempt, however, also failed, and friends interfering, he was removed to an asylum, where he remained eighteen months.
From Fleet Street it is but a step to the Temple, with its grey quiet corners full of echoing memories, stretching back even to the days of Shakespeare, whose Twelfth Night was performed before an audience of his contemporaries in the self-same Middle Temple Hall that still confronts us. The names of Henry Fielding, Edmund Burke, John Gower, Thomas Shadwell, William Wycherley, Nicholas Rowe, Francis Beaumont, William Congreve, John Horne Tooke, Thomas Day, Tom Moore, Sheridan, George Colman, jun., Marston, and Ford, are all upon the Temple rolls and each must in his day have been a familiar figure among the ancient buildings. But Charles Lamb is the presiding genius of the place.
"I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple," he tells us. "Its church, its halls, its garden, its fountains, its river ... these are my oldest recollections. Indeed it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time, the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses. What a cheerful liberal look hath that portion of it, which from three sides, overlooks the greater gardens, that goodly pile ... confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure) right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden foot.... A man would give something to have been born in such a place."
When Lamb was twenty-five years of age he went back to live in the Temple, at 16, Mitre Court Buildings, in an "attic storey for the air." His bed faced the river, and by "perking on my haunches and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck I can see," he wrote to a friend, "the white sails glide by the bottom of King's Bench Walk as I lie in my bed." Here he passed nine happy years, and then, after a short stay in Southampton Buildings, he returned to the Temple for the second time, to 4, Inner Temple Lane, fully intending to pass the remainder of his life within its precincts. His new set of chambers "looked out upon a gloomy churchyard-like court, called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it." But fate intervened, and he and his sister soon after left the Temple, never to return. It was no easy parting, however, for he wrote in after years, "I thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench.... We never can strike root so deep in any other ground."
It was when Dr. Johnson had a set of chambers on the first floor of No. 1, Inner Temple Lane, that Boswell first went to see him. Boswell wrote:
"He received me very courteously, but it must be confessed that his apartment, furniture, and morning dress were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty, he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig which was too small for his head, his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up, and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly peculiarities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk."
Boswell, indeed, conceived so violent an admiration for him that he took rooms in Farrar's Buildings in order to be near him. Oliver Goldsmith seems to have followed his example, for he went to lodge first in 2, Garden Court, and afterwards in 2, Brick Court, on the right-hand side, looking out over the Temple Garden. Thackeray, who, years afterwards, lodged in the same set of rooms, wrote:
"I have been many a time in the Chambers in the Temple which were his, and passed up the staircase, which Johnson and Burke and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind Goldsmith—the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous of men was dead within the black oak door."
A stone slab with the inscription, "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith," was placed on the north side of Temple Church, as near as possible to the spot where he is supposed to have been buried.
No. 2, Fountain Court, was the last house of William Blake, the poet-painter, the seer of visions, who had a set of rooms on the first floor, from whence a glimpse of the river was to be obtained. It was very poorly furnished, though always clean and orderly, and decorated only with his own pictures, but to the eager young disciples who flocked around him it was "the house of the Interpreter." When he lay there upon his death-bed, at the close of a blazing August day in 1827, beautiful songs in praise of his Creator fell from his lips, and as his wife, his faithful companion of forty-five years of struggle and stress, drew near to catch them more distinctly, he told her with a smile, "My beloved! they are not mine! no, they are not mine!"
Passing out into the Strand, we are confronted by the Law Courts. In former days this site was occupied by a network of streets, one of which was Shire Lane, where the members of the Kit Cat Club first held their gatherings, and toasted Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when, as a child of seven, enthroned on her proud father's knee, she spent "the happiest hour of her life," overwhelmed with caresses, compliments, and sweetmeats. The famous "Grecian" stood in Devereux Court, and the "Fountain" where Johnson, on his first arrival in London, read his tragedy Irene to his fellow-traveller Garrick, on the site since occupied by Simpson's for several generations. The Strand "Turk's Head" was at No. 142, and patronised by Johnson, because "the mistress of it is a good civil woman and has not much business"; and the "Coal Hole," immortalised by Thackeray as the "Cave of Harmony" in The Newcomes, where Terry's Theatre now uprears its front. But the chief literary association of the Strand is that of Congreve, who spent his last years in Surrey Street, "almost blind with cataracts," and "never rid of the gout," but looking, as Swift wrote to Stella, "young and fresh and cheerful as ever." He had always been a favourite with society, and Surrey Street was thronged by his visitors, among whom were four of the most beautiful women of the day—Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Oldfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Henrietta Duchess of Marlborough. Voltaire, too, who greatly admired his work, sought him out when staying at the "White Peruke," Covent Garden, and was much disgusted by the affectation with which Congreve begged to be regarded as a man of fashion, who produced airy trifles for the amusement of his idle hours. "If you had been so unfortunate as to have been a mere gentleman," said Voltaire, "I should never have taken the trouble of coming to see you." In spite of the looseness of his life, Congreve had early acquired habits of frugality, and continuing to practise them when the need for economy had disappeared, he contrived to amass a fortune of £10,000, which, on his death in 1789, he bequeathed to the Duchess of Marlborough, his latest infatuation. This sum, which would have restored the fallen fortunes of his nearest relatives, was a mere nothing to the wealthy beauty, who expended it in the purchase of a magnificent diamond necklace, which she continually wore in memory of the dead dramatist.
The whole of Covent Garden is classic ground, from its association with the wits of Dryden's time, when Bow Street and Tavistock Street were in turn regarded as the Bond Street of the fashionable world. Edmund Waller, William Wycherley, and Henry Fielding, each lived in Bow Street. In Russell Street stood the three great coffee-houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Wills', Button's, and Tom's. Wills' stood at No. 21, at the corner of Russell Street and Bow Street; here Pepys stopped one February evening on his way to fetch his wife, and heard much "witty and pleasant discourse"; here Dryden had his special arm-chair, in winter by the fire, and in summer on the balcony, and was always ready to arbitrate in any literary dispute. It is said that Pope, before he was twelve years old, persuaded his friends to bring him here, so that he might gaze upon the aged Dryden, the hero of his childish imagination. Dr. Johnson, Addison, Steele, and Smollett were all regular visitors. Button's, which stood on the south side of Russell Street, and Tom's at No. 17, were equally popular, and the Bedford Coffee-house "under the piazza in Covent Garden" was another favourite resort.
It was in Russell Street, in the bookshop of Thomas Davies, the actor, that Boswell had his eagerly desired first meeting with Dr. Johnson, which he describes as follows:—
"At last, on Monday, the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies' back parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson came unexpectedly into the shop, and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass door in the room in which we were sitting advancing towards us, he announced his awful approach to me somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost: 'Look, my lord, he comes.'"
In St. Paul's, Covent Garden, were buried Samuel Butler, author of Hudibras, Mrs. Centlivre, Thomas Southerne, John Wolcot, and Wycherley, but when the church was burned down in 1786 all trace of their graves disappeared.
One other literary memory before we leave the Strand; it is connected with what was once No. 30, Hungerford Stairs (now part of Villiers Street), where stood Warren's blacking factory, in which the child Dickens passed days of miserable drudgery, labelling pots of blacking for a few shillings a week. He describes it in David Copperfield, under the name of "Murdstone and Grimsby's warehouse, down in Blackfriars." It was "a crazy old house, with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats."
Pall Mall, the centre of club-land, in the eighteenth century was the "ordinary residence of all strangers," probably on account of its proximity to the fashionable chocolate and coffee-houses (the forerunners of the clubs), which, as Defoe wrote, "were all so close together that in an hour you could see the company at them all." In Pall Mall itself were the "Smyrna," the "King's Arms," and the "Star and Garter." At the "King's Arms" the Kit Cat Club met when it had quitted its quarters in Shire Lane, and at the "Star and Garter" the "Brothers" were presided over by Swift. The "Tully's Head," a bookshop kept by the wonderful Robert Dodsley, footman, poet, dramatist, and publisher, was another favourite lounging place of the times.
In Charing Cross were the "Rummer," at No. 45, kept by the uncle of Matthew Prior; Lockett's, two doors off; the "Turk's Head," next door to No. 17; and the British Coffee-house, which stood on the site now occupied by the offices of the London County Council.
In St. James's Street the great coffee and chocolate-houses positively elbowed each other up and down, just as the clubs which succeeded them do in the present day. The "Thatched House," where the Literary Club, founded by Dr. Johnson, held its meetings under the presidency of Swift and his contemporaries; the "St. James's," where Addison "appeared on Sunday nights," and "Swift was a notable figure," for "those who frequented the place had been astonished day after day, by the entry of a clergyman, unknown to any there, who laid his hat on the table, and strode up and down the room with rapid steps, heeding no one, and absorbed in his own thoughts. His strange manner earned him, unknown as he was to all, the name of the "mad parson""; White's, to which Colley Cibber was the only English actor ever admitted; and the "Cocoa Tree," nicknamed the "Wits' Coffee-house," which, in Gibbon's time, afforded "every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the finest men in the kingdom, in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat or a sandwich and drinking a glass of punch."
Lord Byron was the most romantic literary figure connected with St. James's Street. His first home in London, after his youthful days, was at No. 8, where he went to live after the publication of his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. From this house the proud and gloomy young man set forth to take his seat in the House of Lords as a peer of the realm. Moore wrote:
"In a state more alone and unfriended, perhaps, than any youth of his high station had ever before been reduced to on such an occasion—not having a single individual of his own class, either to take him by the hand as friend, or acknowledge him as an acquaintance."
But this state of affairs was not to endure. On February 29th, 1812, Childe Harold appeared.
"The effect was electric; his fame had not to wait for any of the ordinary gradations, but seemed to spring up like the palace of a fairy tale—in a night.... From morning till night flattering testimonies of his success reached him; the highest in the land besieged his door, and he who had been so friendless found himself the idol of London society."
Perhaps we cannot do better than end these literary associations of club-land with a few words about a man who in his time was one of its most brilliant figures—Theodore Hook. When he was released from the King's Bench prison, with his debt to the Crown still hanging over him,
"he took a large and handsome house in Cleveland Row. Here he gave dinners on an extensive scale, and became a member of all the best clubs, particularly frequenting those where high play was the rule. His visiting book included all that was loftiest and gayest and in every sense most distinguished in London society. The editor of John Bull, the fashionable novelist, the wittiest and most vivid talker of the time, his presence was not only everywhere welcome but everywhere coveted and clamoured for. But the whirl of extravagant dissipation emptied his pocket, fevered his brain, and shortened the precious hours in which alone his subsistence could be gained."
In the height of his social triumphs there always hung inexorably over him the Damocles sword of debt. When at last he gave way under the strain, and went into comparative retirement at Fulham, the number of dinners at the Athenæum Club, where he had always had a particular table kept for him near the door (nicknamed Temperance Corner), fell off by upwards of three hundred per annum.
These are a few out of the many literary memories that we may encounter in an afternoon's stroll from the Borough to St. James's, along one of the great city's busiest highways; others, indeed, there are, meeting us at every corner, but space forbids our dwelling upon them, and regretfully we must pass them by.
[CROSBY HALL]
By the Editor
Few old mansions in the city of London could rival the ancient dwelling-place of the brave old knight, Sir John Crosby. Its architectural beauties and historical associations endeared it to all lovers of old London, and many a groan was heard when its fate was doomed, and the decree went forth that it was to be numbered among the departed glories of the city. Unhappily, the hand of the destroyer could not be stayed, and the earnest hope had to be abandoned that many a generation of Londoners might be permitted to see this relic of ancient civic life, and to realise from this example the kind of dwelling-place wherein the city merchants of olden days made their homes, and the salient features of mediæval domestic architecture. Shorn of its former magnificence, reduced to a fraction of its original size, it retained evidences of its ancient state and grandeur, and every stone and timber told of its departed glories, and of the great events of which Crosby Hall had been the scene. It has been associated with many a name that shines forth in the annals of English history, and imagination could again people the desolate hall with a gay company of courtiers and conspirators, of knights and dames, of city merchants gorgeous in their liveries of "scarlet and green," or "murrey and plunket," when pomp and pageantry, tragedy and death, dark councils and mirth, and gaiety and revellings followed each other through the portals of the mansion in one long and varied procession. It will be our pleasure to recall some of these scenes which were enacted long ago, and to tell of the royal, noble, and important personages who made this house their home.
Many people who live in our great overgrown modern London—who dwell in the West End, and never wander further east than Drury Lane Theatre or St. Pancras Station—have never seen Crosby Hall, and know not where it stood. If you go along Cheapside and to the end of Cornhill, and then turn to the left, up Bishopsgate, the old house stood on the right hand side; or you may approach along Holborn and London Wall. Alas! the pilgrimage is no longer possible. Bishopsgate is historic ground. The name is derived from the ancient gate of the city that was built, according to Stow, by some Bishop of London, "though now unknown when or by whom, for ease of passengers toward the east, and by north, as into Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, &c." Some authorities name Bishop Erkenwald, son of King Offa, as the first builder of Bishopsgate, and state that Bishop William, the Norman, repaired the gate in the time of his namesake, the Conqueror. Henry III. confirmed to the German merchants of the Hanse certain liberties and privileges, which were also confirmed by Edward I. in the tenth year of his reign, when it was discovered that the merchants were bound to repair the gate. Thereupon Gerald Marbod, alderman of the Hanse, and other Hanse merchants, granted 210 marks sterling to the Mayor and citizens, and covenanted that they and their successors should from time to time repair the gate. In 1479, in the reign of Edward IV., it was entirely rebuilt by these merchants, and was a fine structure adorned with the effigies of two bishops, probably those named above, and with two other figures supposed to represent King Alfred and Alred, Earl of Mercia, to whom Alfred entrusted the care of the gate. This repair was probably necessary on account of the assault of the bastard Falconbridge on this and other gates of the city, who shot arrows and guns into London, fired the suburbs, and burnt more than three-score houses. The gate has been frequently repaired and rebuilt, its last appearance being very modern, with a bishop's mitre on the key-stone of the arch, and surmounted by the city arms with guarding griffins. London "improvements" have banished the gate, as they have so many other interesting features of the city.
The neighbourhood is interesting. Foremost among the attractions of Bishopsgate Street is the beautiful church of St. Helen, formerly the church of the Nunnery of St. Helen, the Westminster of the city, where lie so many illustrious merchants and knights and dames, and amongst them the founder of Crosby Hall and other owners of the mansion. The church is closely associated with the hall. There in that fine house they lived. There in the church hard by their bodies sleep, and their gorgeous tombs and inscriptions tell the story of their deeds. St. Helen's Church was one of the few which escaped destruction at the Great Fire of London. There was an early Saxon church here, but the earliest parts of the existing building date back to the thirteenth century. There are some blocked-up lancet windows of the transept, a staircase doorway in the south-east corner, another doorway which led from the nun's choir into the convent, and a lancet window. There is a Renaissance porch, the work of Inigo Jones, erected in 1663. The main part of the structure is Decorated and Perpendicular, the fifteenth century work being due to the builder of Crosby Hall, who left 500 marks for its restoration and improvement. The whole church possesses many interesting features, of which want of space prevents a full description.
Crosby Hall.
Sir John Crosby determined to seek a site for his house close to this church and the Nunnery of St. Helen, and in 1466 obtained a lease from Alice Ashford, prioress of the Nunnery, of some lands and tenements for a period of ninety-nine years for the yearly rent of £11 6s. 8d. Doubtless many good citizens of London in the present day would like to make so good a bargain.
Sir John Crosby, whose honoured name is preserved to this day by the noble house which he built, was a worthy and eminent citizen of London—one of the men who laid the foundations of English trade and commercial pre-eminence. He attained to great wealth, and his actions and his bequests prove that he was a very worthy man. Some idle story stated that, like the famous Dick Whittington, he was of humble origin and unknown parentage. Stow says: "I hold it a fable said of him, to be named Crosby, from his being found by a cross." A very pretty conceit! He was discovered, when an infant, or having attained the age of boyhood, sleeping on the steps of the market cross at Cheapside or Charing; and the sympathetic folk who found him there named him Cross-by! Our ancestors, like ourselves, loved a romance, a nice cheerful story of a poor boy attaining to rank and opulence, marrying his master's daughter and doing brave deeds for his King and country. The notable career of Sir Richard Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London, was so embellished with romantic incident. He was no poor man's son who begged his way to London, accompanied by his favourite cat. Was he not the youngest son of Sir William Whittington, the owner of Pauntley Manor in Gloucestershire, and of Solers Hope, Hereford? and was not his famous cat the name of his ship which brought him wealth and affluence? Or shall we accept the story of the sale of the cat to the King of Barbary? So the legend of the foundling Crosby is equally a fable, woven by the skilful imaginations of our Elizabethan forefathers. Sir John came of goodly parentage. There was a Johan de Crosbie, King's Clerk in Chancery, in the time of Edward II.; a Sir John Crosbie, Knight, and Alderman of London, in the reign of Edward III.; and a John Crosby, Esquire, and servant of King Henry IV., who gave to him the wardship of Joan, daughter and sole heir of John Jordaine, Fishmonger—i.e., a member of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers of the City of London. This John Crosby was, according to Stow, either the father or grandfather of the builder of Crosby Hall.
The family held the manor and advowson of the church of Hanworth-on-the-Thames, not far from Hampton Court. This manor was owned by the Sir John Crosbie who lived in the time of King Edward III., and after his death it was placed in the hands of a certain Thomas Rigby for safe custody until John Crosbie, the son and heir of the knight, should have grown up to man's estate and attained his majority. This estate seems afterwards to have passed into the hands of King Henry VIII., who, on account of its pleasant situation, delighted in it above any other of his houses.
The father of the founder of the Hall was a friend of Henry Lord Scrope, of Masham, the unfortunate nobleman who was beheaded at Southampton for complicity in a plot against the life of Henry V. He bequeathed to his friend, John Crosbie, "a woollen gown without furs and one hundred shillings."
Bene natus, bene vestitus, and doubtless modice doctus, the qualifications of an All Souls' Fellow, John Crosby began his career, embarking in trade and commerce, and undertaking the duties of a worthy citizen of London. The palmy days of commercial enterprise inaugurated by King Henry VII. had not yet set in. Before his time the trade between England and the Continent was much more in the hands of foreigners than of English merchants. English trading ships going abroad to sell English goods and bring back cargoes of foreign commodities were few in number. The English merchant usually stayed at home, and sold his wares to the strangers who came each year to London and the other trading ports, or bartered them for the produce of other lands, with which their ships were freighted. The German Hanse merchants, the Flemish traders, the Lombards, and many others, enjoyed great privileges in their commerce with England. But, in spite of this, men like Crosby were able to amass wealth and make large profits. Sir John's dealings extended far into other countries, and he had important connections with the Friscobaldi of Florence, who with the Medici were the great bankers and engrossers of the commerce of Europe.
Of the great merchants who laid the foundations of our English commerce we often know little more than their names, the offices they held, with a meagre catalogue of their most philanthropic labours and their wills. It is possible, however, to gather a little more information concerning the owner of Crosby Place. The records at Guildhall tell us that in 1466, the seventh year of Edward IV., John Crosby, Grocer, was elected with three others a Member of Parliament. He was also elected in the same year one of the auditors of the City and Bridge House. In 1468 we find him elected Alderman of Broad Street Ward, and two years later Sheriff of London. He took a prominent part in the old city life of London, and was a prominent member of two of the old City Companies, the Grocers and the Woolmen. Of the former he twice served the office of warden, and preserved a strong affection for his company, bequeathing to it by his will considerable gifts. The honourable and important post of Mayor of the Staple at Calais was also conferred upon him.
He seems to have been a brave and valiant man, as well as a successful trader and good citizen. During his time the safety of the City of London was endangered owing to the attack of Thomas Nevil, the bastard Lord Falconbridge, to which reference has already been made. Stow tells the story graphically. This filibusterer came with his rebel company and a great navy of ships near to the Tower—
"Whereupon the mayor and aldermen fortified all along the Thames side, from Baynard's Castle to the Tower, with armed men, guns and other instruments of war, to resist the invasion of the mariners, whereby the Thames side was safely preserved and kept by the aldermen and other citizens that assembled thither in great numbers. Whereupon the rebels, being denied passage through the city that way, set upon Aeldgate, Bishopsgate, Criplegate, Aeldersgate, London Bridge, and along the river of Thames, shooting arrows and guns into the city, fired the suburbs, and burnt more than three score houses. And farther, on Sunday, the eleventh of May, five thousand of them assaulting Aeldgate, won the bulwarks, and entered the city; but the portclose being let down, such as had entered were slain, and Robert Basset, portcullis alderman of Aeldgate ward, with the recorder, commanded in the name of God to draw up the portclose; which being done, they issued out, and with sharp shot and fierce fight, put their enemies back so far as St. Bottolph's Church, by which time Earl Rivers, and lieutenant of the Tower, was come with a fresh company, which joining together discomfited the rebels, and put them to flight, whom the said Rober, Basset with the other citizens chased to the Mile's End, and from thence, some to Poplar, some to Stratford, slew many, and took many of them prisoners. In which space the Bastard, having assayed other places on the water side, and little prevailed, fled toward his ships."
In this determined defence of the city against a formidable attack, John Crosbie took a leading part, bravely contending against the forces of the foe and fighting fiercely. Twelve aldermen with the recorder were knighted in the field by King Edward IV., and amongst those so honoured were the Lord Mayor of London, William Taylor, and John Crosby. Our hero was no carpet knight, no poor-spirited tradesman and man of peace. Like many other famous citizens of his age, he could don his armour and fight for his King and country, and proved himself a gallant leader of a citizen army, the best sort of army in the world. He was a devoted adherent of the House of York, and a favourite of Edward IV., who sent him on an important embassage to the Duke of Burgundy, who had married Elizabeth of York, the King's sister. The secret object of the mission was an alliance against Francis I. of France. The embassy was also sent to the Duke of Brittany with the same object, and also to secure the persons of the Earls of Richmond and Pembroke, who had taken refuge in France, and there felt themselves secure. The future Richard III. was nearly persuaded to return to England; his foot was almost on the ship's deck, when, fortunately for him, his voyage was prevented. If he had continued his journey he would never have worn a crown, as he would have lacked a head whereon to place it.
Sir John Crosby not long before his death began to build the beautiful house in Bishopsgate "in the place of certain tenements, with their appurtenances let to him by Alice Ashfield, Prioress of St. Helen's.... This house he built of stone and timber, very large and beautiful, and the highest at that time in London," as Stow records. The whole structure was known as Crosby Place, and rivalled the dimensions of a palace. All that remained of this magnificent building was the Hall, together with the Council Room and an ante-room, forming two sides of a quadrangle. It was built of stone, and measured 54 feet by 27 feet, and was 40 feet in height. The Hall was lighted by a series of eight Perpendicular windows on one side and six on the other, and by a beautifully-constructed octagonal bay window. It had a fine roof of exquisite workmanship richly ornamented, and a wide chimney. Much of the original stone pavement had vanished. The Council Chamber was nearly as large as the hall, being only 14 feet less in length.
Crosby Hall has been the scene of many notable historic scenes. In the play of "Edward IV." by Heywood, Sir John Crosby figures as Lord Mayor of London, a position which he never occupied, and the King dines with him and the Alderman after the defeat of the rebel Falconbridge at Crosby Hall. He had just received the honour of knighthood, and thus muses:—
"Ay, marry, Crosby! this befits thee well.
But some will marvel that, with scarlet gown,
I wear a gilded rapier by my side."
It is quite possible that the King thus dined with his favourite, but there is no historical account that confirms the poet's play. The builder did not long enjoy his beautiful house, and died in 1475, leaving a second wife and a daughter by his first wife, whom he seemed to have loved with a more ardent affection than his second spouse. Soon after his death the man whom he tried to trap in France, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, came to reside here, and made it the scene of endless plots and conspiracies against his luckless nephews and his many enemies. Crosby Place is frequently alluded to by Shakespeare in his play, "Richard the Third." Gloucester tells Catesby to report to him at Crosby Place the treacherous murder of the Princes in the Tower, and he bids the Lady Anne to "presently repair to Crosby Place."
St. Paul's Cathedral, with Lord Mayor's Show on the water.
Engraved by Pugh, 1804.
The house in 1502 passed into the possession of Sir Bartholomew Reed, Lord Mayor, and then to John Best, Alderman, from whom it was purchased by Sir Thomas More, the famous Lord Chancellor. Doubtless it was in the chambers of Crosby Place that he wrote his Utopia. He sold the lease to his beloved friend, Antonio Bonvisi, an Italian gentleman, who had long lived in England; and when the Dissolution of Monasteries took place, and the possessions of the Priory of St. Helen's were seized by the Crown, the King allowed the Italian to retain possession of Crosby Place. We need not record all its worthy owners. It was frequently used as a fitting place for the lodging of foreign ambassadors, and here Sir John Spencer, having restored the house, kept his mayoralty in 1594. Enormously wealthy, he lived in great splendour and entertained lavishly. He was a great favourite of Queen Elizabeth. It was not from Crosby Hall, but from his house at Canonbury, that his only daughter effected her escape in a baker's basket in order to wed the handsome Lord Compton. Terrible was the father's wrath, and everyone knows the charming story of the Queen's tactful intervention, how she induced Sir John to stand as sponsor with her for an unknown boy, whom Sir John declared should be the heir of all his wealth, and how this boy was, of course, Lady Compton's child, and how a full reconciliation was effected. It is a very pretty story. It is not so pleasant to read of the disastrous effect of the possession of so much wealth had on the brain of Lord Compton, when he came into possession of his lady's riches. She was a little vixenish, spoilt and exacting, if she really intended seriously the literal meaning of that well-known letter which she wrote setting forth her needs and requirements. It is too long to quote. Lord Compton was created Earl of Northampton, and that precious child of his when he grew to man's estate was killed fighting for the Royalist cause in the Civil War.
During that disastrous time Crosby became a prison for Royalists, and later on a great part of the house was destroyed by fire, and its ancient glories departed. For a hundred years the Hall was used as a Nonconformist chapel. In 1778 part of the premises was converted into a place of business by Messrs. Holmes and Hall, the rest being used as private dwellings. It provided a model for the banqueting-hall of Arundel Castle, and some of the carved stones of the Council Chamber were removed to Henley-upon-Thames to adorn a dairy. Alien buildings soon covered the site of the destroyed portion of the old house. In 1831 it was left forlorn and untenanted, and in a state of considerable decay. Then arose a considerable excitement, of which the struggle of the present year reminds us. Crosby Hall was doomed. But zealous lovers of the antiquities of the city determined to try to save it. An appeal was made, and a restoration fund started, though, like many other restoration funds, it proved itself inadequate. A benevolent lady, Miss Hackett, gallantly came to the rescue, and practically saved Crosby Hall. Her idea was to convert it into a lecture hall for the Gresham Professors; but this plan came to nothing, though the building was repaired, the south wall of the Throne and Council Chambers being rebuilt. Then a company was formed to take over Miss Hackett's interest, and the Crosby Hall Literary and Scientific Institution was formed, but that scheme came to nothing. Then it was bought by Messrs. F. Gordon & Co., who restored the building, attached to it an annex of half-timbered construction, and converted the premises into a restaurant. Thus it remained for several years. Recently the site was acquired by a banking company, and its demolition was threatened. Immediate action was taken by Sir Vesey Strong, the Lord Mayor, and others, to save the building. The fight was fought strenuously and bravely. Apathy was found in some quarters where it would least have been expected, and all efforts were fruitless. It is deplorable to have to record that the last of the mansions of the old city magnates has been allowed to disappear, and that Crosby Hall is now only a memory.
[THE PAGEANT OF LONDON]
By the Editor
We have stated in the Preface that London needs no pageant or special spectacular display in order to set forth its wonderful attractions. London is in itself a pageant, far more interesting than any theatrical representation; and in this final chapter we will enumerate some of those other features of Old London life which have not found description in the preceding pictures. We will "stand by and let the pageant pass," or, rather, pass along the streets and make our own pageant.
The great city is always changing its appearance, and travellers who have not seen it for several years scarcely know where they are when visiting some of the transformed localities. But however great the change, the city still exercises its powerful fascination on all who have once felt its strangely magnetic force, its singular attractiveness. Though the London County Council have effected amazing "improvements," constructing a street which nobody wants and nobody uses, and spending millions in widening Piccadilly; though private enterprise pulls down ancient dwellings and rears huge hotels and business premises in their places—it is still possible to conjure up the memories of the past, and to picture to ourselves the multitudinous scenes of historic interest which Old London has witnessed. Learned writers have already in these volumes enabled us to transport ourselves at will to the London of bygone times—to the mediæval city, with its monasteries, its churches, its palaces, its tragedies; to Elizabethan London, bright and gay, with young life pulsing through its veins; to the London of Pepys, with its merry-makings, its coarseness, and its vice. In this concluding chapter we will recall some other memories, and try to fill the background to the picture.
Westminster, the rival city, the city of the court, with its abbey and its hall, we have not attempted to include in our survey. She must be left in solitary state until, perhaps, a new volume of this series may presume to describe her graces and perfections. The ever-growing suburbs of the great city, the West End, the fashionable quarter, Southern London across the river, with Lambeth and its memories of archbishops—all this, and much else that deserves an honoured place in the chronicles of the metropolis, we must perforce omit in our survey. Some of the stories are too modern to please the taste of those who revel in the past; and if the curious reader detects omissions, he may console himself by referring to some of the countless other books and guides which the attractions of London are ever forcing industrious scribes to produce.