THE STRAND.
Temple Bar, that narrow neck through which the struggling sands find their way with difficulty from the Strand and the Fleet portions of the great hour-glass, and which is looked on by shallow readers as a relic of hoar antiquity, dates only from 1670, four years after the great fire. It forms the point of junction between the cities of London and Westminster, and in early times was only provided with posts, rails, and a chain. These were succeeded by a wooden house with a narrow gate-way and a passage on one side. The present structure is incumbered with the statues of Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., and Charles II., all distinguished, according to Mr. Thornbury, by feeble heads, crimped drapery, and feet and hands kept whitish by the rain, the non-projecting portions of the bodies rejoicing in more than a century of dark atmospheric deposits.
Mr. Thornbury's selection includes the long line of palaces that once adorned the Strand or River-bank street, the haunts of artists in St. Martin's lane, the traditions of Long Acre, the reminiscences connected with Drury lane, and the old houses of the nobility in Lincoln's-Inn Fields.
One of the most remarkable of the fine buildings of the Strand is that which bears the name of the ambitious brother of Jane Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, who boasted that he could muster retainers to the number of 10,000. To erect his palace, which, by the way, was unfinished at his death, he demolished the parish church of St. Mary, and pulled down the houses of the bishops of Worcester, Llandaff, and Lichfield. He would also have appropriated St. Margaret's at Westminster, but the mob would not sanction the sacrilege. "Moreover, he destroyed a chapel in St. Paul's Church-yard, with a cloister containing the Dance of Death, and a charnel-house (burying the bones in unconsecrated ground)." To crown his acts of rapine he stole the stone of a church of St. John near Smithfield. It is not worth mentioning the carrying away of the stone of the Strand Inn, it being the property of the lawyers, who could afford to be robbed.
The Danish consort of our Solomon I. here delighted all who had no objection to spectacles, in which the handsome queen and her ladies masqueraded to their own and their admirers' content. Rare Ben Jonson was surely elated by the lists of royal and noble personages who presented his masques. From this same noble residence Charles I. had some trouble in dislodging the Gallic followers of his sturdy queen, with whom his hard-headed and wooden-shoe-abhorring subjects had come to be at deadly feud. As they were rather too tedious in "shifting the halter, and traversing the cart," the poor king was obliged to write thus to Buckingham:
"STEENIE,—I have received your letter by Dick Greame. This is my answer. I command you to send all the French away to-morrow out of the town, if you can by fair means (but stick not long in disputing), otherwise force them away, driving them away like so many wild beasts until you have shipped them, and the—go with them! Let me hear no answer but of the performance of my command. So I rest, "Your faithful, constant, loving friend, C. R. "Oaking, the seventh of August, 1626."
"The French inventing all sorts of vexatious delays, the yeomen of the guard at last jostled them out, carting them off in nearly forty coaches. They arrived at Dover after four days' tedious travelling, wrangling and bewailing."
Queen Henrietta taking part in a masque at Christmas in 1632-3, and Prynne's Histriomastix happening to be published the next day, the poor man lost his ears for an uncomplimentary remark on women-actors, which was found in the margin, though it could not possibly have been written with any reference to the queen's appearance on that occasion.
To Somerset House returned Henrietta Maria after the restoration, and there the garrulous Pepys paid his respects to her as well as to Madame Castlemaine. "By-and-by, in came the king and Duke and Duchess of York. The conversation was not a very decorous one, and the young queen (Catherine of Braganza) said to Charles, 'you lie,' which made good sport, as the chuckling and delighted Pepys remarks, those being the first English words he had heard her say; and the king then tried to make her reply, 'confess and be hanged.'"
The most striking object in the old days of the Strand was the new Maypole which replaced the old one taken down by Oliver's Parliament. It was of cedar wood, 134 feet high, and stood in front of the church of St. Mary. It was brought in two pieces from below Bridge, the splicing made secure by iron bands, three crowns fastened toward its top, and then the tall article was raised by twelve sailors to a vertical position, and firmly imbedded. The operation was happily accomplished under the superintendence of the Duke of York in four hours. Then sounded trumpets and drums; and morris-dancers in motley attire, and enlivened by the music of pipe and tabor, danced in glee around it, while thousands of throats became hoarse with loyal shouting. James would have found little enjoyment in the general glee, if he could at the moment have had a prophetic glimpse of his wife, with her infant son folded to her breast, pacing along the river bank in doubt and fear, and watching for the friendly boat that was to convey her from the unfriendly city.
When the pole that succeeded this was obliged to abdicate, it was presented to Sir Isaac Newton, who again presented it to the rector of Wanstead, and in Wanstead park it helped to support the largest telescope then known.
From this memorable if unedifying goal, Pope started the racers in the Dunciad:
"Amidst the area wide they took their stand,
Where the tall maypole once o'erlooked the Strand;
But now, as Anne and piety ordain,
A church collects the saints of Drury lane."
In the old palace of the Savoy once lived John of Gaunt; John, King of France, the Black Prince's captive, died there; George Wither, the poet, is buried there; and there also was Geoffry Chaucer married. Simon, earl of Montfort, once lived within its precincts; but where kings, archbishops, and high nobles once walked and held high council, pickles are now sold, printing types set up, and glass rolled out and spun.
Wat Tyler's mob being forbidden to plunder, and supposing a couple of barrels to contain money, flung them into a great fire. The money, alas, was gunpowder, as in the Dunleary ballad, and blew up the great hall, shook down the neighboring houses, killed sundry of the social reformers, and reduced the palace to ruins.
Henry VII. instituted within its precincts a house of refuge for every indigent person passing down the River-side-road, and by a natural process of abuse the poor wayfarers derived little advantages from it. Loiterers, sham cripples, and vagabonds of both sexes begged abroad all day, and came in the evening to the Savoy to sup and sleep. Edward VI. transferred a good portion of its revenue to Bridewell Prison and Christ's Hospital. Mary replaced the charity on its old footing, much to the enjoyment of inveterate beggars; but Elizabeth in her turn disagreeably surprised the lazy inmates and the corrupt governor, and they had to look out for victims in other quarters.
The building had not lost its privilege of sheltering imposture and knavery in the last century, having served as an asylum for fraudulent debtors in Queen Anne's time; it became the darling haunt of such chaplains as Mr. Lever's Reverend Paul; and in 1754 we find in the Public Advertiser this precious document put forth by them:
"BY AUTHORITY.—Marriages performed with the utmost privacy, secrecy, and regularity, at the ancient royal chapel of St. John the Baptist in the Savoy, where regular and authentic registers have been kept from the time of the reformation (being two hundred years and upward) to this day, the expense not being more than one guinea, the five-shilling stamp included. There are five private ways to this chapel by land, and two by water."
Wither, the Cromwellian poet, who had a hard time of it after the restoration, lies in the Savoy. Denman, petitioning for his life, used this ingenious device: "As long as Wither lives, I shall not be considered the worst poet in England."
It is not easy to a passenger sauntering or hurrying down the Strand at this day, admiring the facade of Somerset House, glancing into the windows of rich shops, elbowing his way through an eager and bustling crowd, and having his ears stunned by the thundering rumble of cabs, busses, and wagons, to fancy it once a sandy and marshy road, and the footpath very disagreeable to the feet, and interfered with by bushes and thickets. Three water-courses from the northern fields found their way across it to the river, and these were spanned by three bridges. The building of Westminster Abbey encouraged the erection of the first houses along the River-side-way, but the bad state of the road made a subject for a petition so late as the reign of Edward II.