Eliza Meteyard, in her ‘Hallowed Spots of Ancient London,’ a book deserving a better fate than it has met with, tells us that the famous avenue was the scene of Sir Harry’s arrest. Here on the evening of an early day in July, 1660, just as the sun was setting, Sir Harry walked and meditated, as was his wont, till the glowing splendour of the western sky gradually faded, as did the sounds of the cotter children at their play, the barking of a sympathetic dog, or some broken scrap of hymn, and still Sir Harry continued to pace beneath the elm-trees, the sweetness and the stillness deepening with the twilight, when the measured tramp of soldiers on the hill, some of whom marched straight to Vane House, whilst others guarded the exits, struck terror into the hearts of his humble neighbours, who, before night settled fully down, saw Sir Harry taken from his home, a prisoner on his way to the Tower, whence, after two years of torturing uncertainty, and removals from one place of captivity to another, he came forth on another summer’s day, June 14, 1662, to die by the hand of the executioner on Tower Hill, another martyr to the liberties of his country.
Readers will remember Pepys’ hurry to shut up his office that morning, and get off with his friends to see how the great Commonwealth man would comport himself on so public and so trying a platform as the scaffold. He is a witness, amongst others, to the calmness and self-command which the ill-used enthusiast exhibited in parting from mortality.
POND STREET.
Pond Street—evidently the fashionable street in the eighteenth century for the reception of visitors of the class dignified as the ‘quality’—appears to have been in the early years of this, the Harley Street of Hampstead. Here resided Baron Dimsdale, in a house on the left side of the road going down, the physician who inoculated the Empress Catherine of Russia for small-pox. It will be remembered, to the Empress’s credit, that she requested him to leave the country as soon as possible after the operation, as in the event of her death he would be held guilty of it.
Dr. Rodd, Dr. Lond, and various other medical men, lived in Pond Street.
I can remember it with a row of trees on the right-hand side of the way as you entered it from the highroad, and a strip of greensward running down it—a quiet street of formal appearance, with an air of genteel frigidity characteristic of its period.
It was in Pond Street that ‘poor Kirkman,’ as Keats sympathetically calls him, ‘fell amongst thieves,’ who stopped and beat and robbed him of his watch. He had been visiting the poet at Wentworth Place, and left about half-past eight in the evening, and was on his way to the London Road, probably intending to meet the coach there, when he was waylaid, maltreated and robbed. This was in 1818, so that the middle passage between Hampstead and the Metropolis was not even then without its danger.
Keats, writing to his brother some days after the event, tells him he had been to see Kirkman, who had not recovered of his bruises.