The incident thus related, says Forster, "may excuse the comment attached to it. Indeed, the charge of idiotcy in the affairs of the Hawkins-world may even add to the pleasure with which we contemplate that older-world picture beside it, of frank simplicity and brotherly affection. This poor poet, who, incomprehensibly to the Middlesex magistrate, would thus gently have turned aside to the assistance of his poorer brother the hand held out to assist himself, had only a few days before been obliged to borrow fifteen shillings and six-pence 'in Fleet Street,' of one of those 'best friends' with whose support he is now fain to be contented." The duke of these anecdotes was Sir Hugh Smithson (1715-1786), the first Duke of Northumberland of the third creation. He married, in 1774, Elizabeth Seymour, the heiress of the Percy property.
The front of Northumberland House was 162 feet in length, the court being 81 feet square. The coping along the Strand front "was a border of capital letters," and, at the funeral of Queen Anne of Denmark, in May 1619, a young man in the crowd was killed by the letter "S," which had been pushed off by the too eager spectators on the roof. There were many famous pictures at Northumberland House. On June 9, 1658, Evelyn records: "I went to see the Earl of Northumberland's pictures, whereof that of the Venetian Senators was one of the best of Titian's, and another of Andrea del Sarto, viz., a Madona, Christ, St John, and an Old Woman, etc., a St Catherine of Da Vinci, with divers portraits of Van Dyke; a Nativity of Georgioni; the last of our blessed Kings (Charles I.) and the Duke of York, by Lely; a roserie by the famous Jesuits of Bruxelles, and severall more. This was in Suffolk House: the new front towards the gardens is tollerable, were it not drown'd by a too massie and clomsie pair of stayres of stone, without any neate invention."
Fire threatened to destroy the house on more than one occasion. In March, 1780, an outbreak occurred about five o'clock in the morning, "and raged till eight, in which time it burnt from the east end, where it began, to the west. Among the apartments consumed are those of Dr Percy, Bishop of Carlisle. We are happy to inform our readers that the greatest part of the doctor's invaluable library is fortunately preserved." The famous lion which delighted Londoners for a century and a quarter was placed in his proud position in 1752. It was cast in lead, from a model by Carter, and was twelve feet in length. There is a pleasant fiction to the effect that the noble brute, when first placed upon his pedestal, had his head towards Carlton House and St James's Palace, but afterwards upon some rebuff experienced by one of the dukes of Northumberland turned his face towards the city of London. The lion was subsequently removed to Syon House, Isleworth, the Middlesex seat of the Northumberlands. "The vestibule of the interior was eighty-two feet long, and more than twelve feet in breadth, ornamented with Doric columns. Each end communicated with a staircase, leading to the principal apartments facing the garden and the Thames. They consisted of several spacious rooms fitted up in the most elegant manner, embellished with paintings, among which might be found the well-known 'Cornaro Family,' by Titian, a work well worthy of its reputation, and for which Algernon, Earl of Northumberland, is stated to have given Vandyck 1000 guineas, and a wonderful vase, which now has a story of its own; 'St Sebastian Bound,' by Guercino; 'The Adoration of the Shepherds,' by Bassano; and others by well-known masters. The great feature of the house was the ball-room, or grand gallery, upwards of 100 feet in length, in which were placed large and very fine copies by Mengs, after Raphael's 'School of Athens,' in the Vatican, of the size of the originals; also the 'Assembly of the Gods,' and the 'Marriage of Cupid and Psyche,' in the Farnesina; the 'Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne,' from Caracci's picture in the Farnese Palace; and 'Apollo driving the Chariot of the Sun,' from Reni's fresco in the Villa Rospigliosi, at Rome. These celebrated works, and the decoration of the noble apartment, constituted it one of the landmarks of high art in the metropolis. The grand staircase consisted of a centre flight of thirteen moulded vein marble steps, and two flights of sixteen steps, with centre landing twenty-two feet by six feet, two circular plinths, and a handsome and richly-gilt ormolu scroll balustrade, with moulded Spanish mahogany hand-rail. The mansion contained nearly 150 rooms for the private use of the family."[66]
The destruction of Northumberland House was due to the necessity of a direct thoroughfare from Charing Cross to the Embankment. As early as 1866, the Metropolitan Board of Works—the predecessor of the London County Council—had perceived the need, and had suggested a new street through the site of Northumberland House and its grounds. "The Duke of Northumberland of that day, however, set his face determinedly against any interference with his ancestral mansion, and his opposition received much support from members of both Houses of Parliament, and from those who looked with disfavour on a proposal to destroy the last of the palaces of the English nobles which three centuries ago stood on the south side of the Strand now occupied by the streets leading from it to the river. The Metropolitan Board was forced to yield to the resistance which then and for several years after was offered to every attempt to get power to take Northumberland House. Eventually the necessities of the case were so strongly pressed that further resistance was abandoned, and the Board having, in 1872, learned that the present Duke of Northumberland was willing to sell his property, an agreement was in the year 1873 concluded and ratified by Parliament, under which the Board acquired his Grace's property upon payment of £500,000, the Board at the same time obtaining power to make the new street."[67] The opposition of the owner of Northumberland House to the destruction of this historical property was natural enough, and many otherwise uninterested persons lamented the proposed demolition. The Duke of Northumberland—the sixth duke of his creation—writing in 1866, said: "The Duke of Northumberland is naturally desirous that this great historical house, commenced by a Howard, continued by a Percy, and completed by a Seymour, which has been the residence of his ancestors for two centuries and a half, should continue to be the residence of his descendants; but the Metropolitan Board of Works are desirous that this house, which, with its garden, is one of the landmarks of London, and is probably the oldest residential house in the metropolis, should be destroyed."
The sale was concluded in June, 1874, and, in September and October of that year, "the fine old mansion underwent its final stage of degradation." Its materials were sold by auction. The lots consisted of 3,000,000 bricks, the grand marble staircase, the elaborate ornamentation of the various apartments and corridors, and lead to the weight of 400 tons. The sale realised but £6500, and of this sum the great staircase—subsequently removed to No. 49 Prince's Gate—brought £360. Some of the pictures had been removed to Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, others to the ducal town residence, No. 2 Grosvenor Place. "The progress of wealth and luxury," said a writer in the Standard at the time of the projected demolition, "has long since dimmed the splendours of what was once the proudest of the London houses of the English nobility. The march of fashion westward had left it isolated amidst an uncongenial neighbourhood of small shops. Commerce had overtaken and overwhelmed it, so that it stood somewhat abruptly in the full stream of London life, making it too violent a contrast with the surrounding houses, and destroying whatever of felicity there might have been in the situation. In the days when the Strand was but a road between London and Westminster, lined with private houses of the great and noble on either side, and with gardens going down to the river, it might have been an abode fit even for the proud Earls of Northumberland, to whom it descended. But with the Thames Embankment on one side, and Trafalgar Square on the other, with omnibuses perpetually passing its front door, Northumberland House was a standing anachronism, if not an impediment, which was destined to succumb to the influence of time and the Metropolitan Board of Works." It may be added that during the Great Exhibition of 1851, the public were admitted by ticket to view the house at the rate of ten thousand a week.
Northumberland Avenue was opened in March, 1876. It is 950 feet long and 84 feet wide, the width between the pavements being 60 feet. The Strand portion of the house is marked by the Grand Hotel, the opening of which, in 1880, was considered of so much importance that its initiation was attended by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, who was accompanied by the sheriffs. Two other of the Gordon hotels in this Avenue, the Métropole and Victoria, opened in 1885 and 1887 respectively, indicate the site of the extensive gardens of Northumberland House. The handsome building of the Constitutional Club, the offices of the Royal Colonial Institute, and the headquarters of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, are also in Northumberland Avenue.
Craven Street, which still retains much of its old-world air, is chiefly notable for the fact that Benjamin Franklin lived here, at No. 7, at the house of Mrs Margaret Stevenson, during the entire period of his visits to London as agent for the House of Assembly, Philadelphia, and "other provinces." Leigh Hunt, speaking of this circumstance, says: "What a change along the shores of the Thames in a few years (for two centuries are less than two years in the lapse of time), from the residence of a set of haughty nobles, who never dreamt that a tradesman could be anything but a tradesman, to that of a yeoman's son, and a printer, who was one of the founders of a great state!" He was visited here in February, 1755, by William Pitt (the first Earl of Chatham, 1708-1788), and, wrote Franklin, "He stayed with me near two hours, his equipage waiting at the door." The house, which is marked by a tablet, is now a private hotel.
Mark Akenside, the poet and physician, was visited in this street, on January 22, 1761—at which time he was physician to Queen Charlotte—by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Heinrich Heine, during his stay in England, April 23 to August 8, 1827, lodged at No. 32 Craven Street. A notorious resident of this street was James Hackman (1752-1779), incumbent of Wiveton, Norfolk. He fell in love with Martha Ray, who was the mother of nine children, of whom Lord Sandwich was the father. His passion was so great that, as the lady would not marry him, he shot her dead on the night of April 7, 1779, in the piazza of Covent Garden Theatre. He turned the pistol upon himself, but without fatal effect. He was hanged at Tyburn twelve days later.
A more interesting resident was James Smith, one of the authors of the Rejected Addresses, who lived for many years at No. 27, where he died on December 24, 1839. This remarkable literary character, the son of a solicitor to the Ordnance, was born in 1775. At the age of twenty-seven he had made his mark in Fleet Street, and, from 1807 to 1817, the articles to the Monthly Mirror entitled "Horace in London" were written by him. In 1812, with his younger brother, Horatio, he published the Rejected Addresses, in which Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and other writers were parodied with admirable felicity. He wrote many of the "Entertainments" for Charles Mathews the Elder, including Country Cousins in 1820, and the Trip to France and the Trip to America in the two succeeding years. For the last two sketches he received a thousand pounds. "A thousand pounds!" he used to exclaim, with a shrug of the shoulders, "and all for nonsense."[68] He was lucky enough to obtain a legacy of £300 for a complimentary epigram on Mr Strachan, the King's printer. Being patted on the head when a boy by Chief-Justice Mansfield, in Highgate churchyard, and once seeing Horace Walpole on his lawn at Twickenham, were the two chief historical events of Mr Smith's quiet life. The four reasons that kept so clever a man employed on mere amateur trifling were these—an indolent disinclination to sustained work, a fear of failure, a dislike to risk a well-earned fame, and a foreboding that literary success might injure his practice as a lawyer. His favourite visits were to Lord Mulgrave's, Mr Croker's, Lord Abinger's, Lady Blessington's, and Lord Harrington's. Pretty Lady Blessington used to say of him, that "James Smith, if he had not been a witty man, must have been a great man. He died in his house in Craven Street, with the calmness of a philosopher, on the 24th of December, 1839, in the sixty-fifth year of his age."[69] It was on his own street that he wrote the well-known epigram:
"In Craven Street, Strand, ten attorneys find place,
And ten dark coal-barges are moor'd at its base;
Fly, Honesty, fly! seek some safer retreat,
For there's craft in the river, and craft in the street."[70]