The house—as old as the early Georgian period—has been altered and raised a story since it was held, probably on lease, by Lord North. It was during his tenancy that his famous brother-in-law, Lord Chatham, when suffering from the agonies of gout, and sometimes, it has been suspected, when only making them a pretext to escape from political vexations and perplexities, was wont to resort thither, sometimes coming all the way from Richmond to find a night’s rest at North End. Lord Mahon, in his ‘History of England,’ gives copies of letters written by the great Minister from this retreat. From one of these we find he was at North End, Hampstead, on Saturday, August 23, 1766, immediately after he became Prime Minister; whilst his last visit here, according to the author of the ‘Northern Heights of London,’ took place some time after March, 1778 (that would be very shortly before his death, which occurred May 11 of that year).
I hope I am not quoting someone else in applying to him that line, ‘Great wits are sure to madness near allied,’[169] but his conduct and eccentricities at times came very near it. He had such a dread of neighbours that he bought up all the houses near his own to ensure his having none. His terror of loud noises and of strangers was excessive, and if in his solitary walks he saw another person on the path approaching him, he would run round corners or down side-paths to avoid a meeting. Even when driving for exercise on the Heath, the blinds of the carriage were close drawn, so that no one might see him.
It cannot be said that in age his looks were in his favour. He was dark, even to swarthiness, with a large hooked nose, and eyes with which ‘he glared at his antagonists, and a scowl with which he overawed them.’
Walpole says he had a black beard which, when suffering with gout, he would leave unshaven for days. But a modern writer, while leaving his portrait intact, transfuses it with genius, and says that ‘with his eagle aspect, and eyes that would blaze a cannon, he commanded the little things that listened to his voice as might an Emperor his legionaries.’ ‘I should not mind what he says,’ exclaimed Lord Holland to his wife; ‘but his eyes!’
There is no doubt that either from physical suffering or mental anxiety he was at times the victim of great prostration and nervous irritability. It may be that at these periods the seclusion and quiet of North End House, with the wooded beauty and fine air of the neighbourhood, may have proved to him in effect what fine music was to the mind of Emerson, at once assuasive and refreshing.
It is probable, too, that these seasons of retirement, in which he withdrew himself even from his family, shutting himself up in a small room, which, with the oriel window belonging to it, was for many years properly left unaltered, enabled him to abstract himself from everything but the political problems of the day, and to map out in his masterful mind the means of coping with difficulties, if not of subjugating them wholly. Mr. Howitt gives the following description of the ‘closet, or room,’ in which Lord Chatham voluntarily imprisoned himself, at which times not even the servant who waited on him was permitted to see him:[170]
‘The opening in the wall from the staircase to the room still remains through which the unhappy man received his meals, or anything else conveyed to him. It is an opening of perhaps 18 inches square, having a door on each side of the wall; the door within had a padlock, which still hangs upon it. When anything was conveyed to him, a knock was made on the outer door, and the articles placed in the recess. When the outer door again closed, the invalid opened the inner door, took what was there, again closed the door, and locked it.’[171]
In all this great man’s afflictive trials it must have comforted him to remember that in the hour of the unfortunate Admiral Byng’s extremity, when women of rank were urging a royal Princess, nothing loath, to be, as they expressed it, ‘for his execution,’ he (Lord Chatham) had been on the side of justice, and had used his utmost influence with the King to procure the Admiral’s pardon, a plea for mercy that must have softened by reflection his own death-bed.[172]
Right opposite the upper end of the garden of North End House, and no doubt close to the highroad in former days, stands an ancient solitary tree, known as the Gibbet Elm, one of two trees between which stood the gallows on which, in the May of 1673, one Jackson, a notorious highwayman, was hung in chains for the murder of Henry Miller on, or near, the spot. There for years from season to season mouldered the skeleton of the murderer, swinging wildly out before the scourging winter winds, with the rusty chain-links creaking, as it were, a ghastly requiem, or in high summer perhaps a nesting-place for birds, such instances of bird-building between the ribs or in the skulls of felons being not uncommon in those days, when gibbets were more plentiful by the waysides than hand-posts. After long years of purgatorial nights and days, Nature would receive into her bosom the time-bleached bones, to make the grass grow greener about the base of the old tree, whose companion was blown down some fifty years ago.
The elm, when I last saw it in 1863-64, was still sound,[173] and, though beaten about and storm-broken, stretched forth its branches a goodly distance, its root