The title is sufficiently curious, and so are the lines that follow, for which I refer my readers to Lysons, or Park.
I am reminded that Pepys in his Diary records that he and Lady Bill (a well-bred but crooked woman) stood sponsors for a friend’s child. Meanwhile Mr. Bill has been busy with his estate, and has surrounded twenty-five acres of it with a brick wall. In 1661 occurred the strange outbreak[199] of the Fifth Monarchy men, who, being driven out from St. John’s and Hornsey Woods, took refuge in Cane Wood (as it was then written). Here flew their banner, with its wild motto, ‘The King Jesus, with their heads on the gate!’—that gate, as someone writes, that from reign to reign ‘resembled a butchery with the heads and quarters of men.’
Here Venner, preacher and cooper, with his scanty handful of followers, for three days in mid-winter, when Mr. Pepys’ pew was gay with rosemary and bays, kept their woody stronghold, and prayed and starved, till Raresby, ‘who wanted a little action,’ rode out with a band of soldiers and surrounded them. Even then Venner, who fought desperately, would not suffer himself to be taken till he was badly wounded, and most of his party cut down or prisoners. In 1673, much to his wife’s (Lady Pelham) satisfaction, we may be sure, the name of John Bill, Esq., appears in the list of Middlesex gentry, an honour he survived for seven years, dying at Caen Wood in 1680. He was buried in Hampstead Church. Their only daughter—and, I believe, their only child, for in his will he desired that the estate might be sold at the death of his wife—had in the meantime married Captain Francis D’Arcy Savage, and died, his widow, May 23, 1726. She ‘lies buried,’ Park tells us, ‘against the north wall in Barnes churchyard.’
Nine years after the death of Mr. Bill, the estate of Caen Wood was the residence of a Mr. Withers; and some time prior to 1698 Mr. William Bridges, Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, resided here.
When Mackey wrote his ‘Tour through England’ (1720), Ken Wood had become the property of one Dale, an upholsterer, who is said to have bought it out of the ‘Bubbles.’[200] His hold upon it appears to have been quite as fleeting, for he very soon mortgaged it to Lord Hay for £1,575. Fifteen years later we find his lordship bringing an action[201] to foreclose, on the plea that he can neither get principal nor interest from him, and that a second mortgage had been made to William, Lord Forbes, and the mortgagee had suffered the house to go to ruin, had felled a quantity of timber, and committed great waste. The end was that, after being allowed six months to pay £1,907 7s. 6d. (October 24, 1724), the miserable upholsterer found himself absolutely foreclosed of all equity of redemption of the mortgaged property, and shortly after, February, 1725, the same order was made against Lord Forbes, the second mortgagee. ‘This is interesting,’ says Mr. Lloyd, ‘as showing the value of the property 167 years ago. It is set out as a messuage, pleasure-grounds, orchards, kitchen-garden, paddock, and woodlands, with four ponds, covering 22 acres, together with £5 per annum parcel of £15 a year secured upon lease granted to the Governors of the Waterworks. Yet, all this only brought as much as would cover the first mortgage, under £2,000—little more than £100 per acre; and yet within the last three years (1892) some 200 acres of the adjoining bare land has been sold by Lord Mansfield for public purposes at £1,000 per acre! and the vendor was so completely master of the situation as to compel the erection of a fence by the public of something approaching the value of the fee simple of the estate when it was sold by order of the Court in 1724; and doubtless it would have sold for more if cut up for building purposes.’
In the same year that Lord Hay recovered the estate the famous Duke of Argyle purchased it; and at his death he left it to his nephew, Lord Bute.
Horace Walpole, his old schoolfellow, describes him as a man of taste, who he thinks ‘meant well.’ He was said to be the favourite of the Dowager Princess of Wales (mother of George III.), who, according to the above authority, forced the King to employ him. He proved a weak and incompetent Minister, who, in his desire to fuse all parties, offended all. He married the only daughter of the celebrated Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the sometime friend and correspondent of Horace Walpole and Pope, and, Court scandal apart, proved passably amiable in his domestic relations.[202]
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in her letters to her daughter, tells her that she well remembers Caen Wood (she spells it Kane Wood[203]) House, and cannot wish her a more agreeable place. But in those days the house was comparatively insignificant, and the gardens and grounds not nearly so extensive or so well laid out as at present. Neither was it so secluded or self-contained. The road to Highgate at this time came close up to the principal entrance.
A wood called Turner’s Wood adjoined it, which became in 1737 the site of the very original and favourite place of amusement, New Georgia—a tea-drinking house, and pleasure-grounds, with waterworks, and various ingenious contrivances laid out, invented, and executed by a sexagenarian, who appears to have had considerable mechanical skill, and some humour in his application of it. The cottage, on which an inscription set forth that he, Robert Caxton, had built it with his own hands,[204] contained several rooms, in one of which a chair sank on a person sitting in it, while another contained a pillory, into which, when a gentleman put his head, he could only be extricated by a lady kissing him—a grace which the free manners of the times allowed on the part of maids or matrons without the fear of scandal or the police-courts. We learn from contemporary writings that this contrivance became exceedingly popular, and the Connoisseur[205] informs us ‘that it made a favourite Sunday recreation of the citizens to put their necks into the pillory at New Georgia.’[206]
But the close neighbourhood of this popular place of resort could scarcely have added to the charms of Ken Wood or the peace of its noble proprietor, and accordingly, some time subsequent to 1755, ‘for a cause that did him honour’ (the payment of his debts), Lord Bute sold Ken Wood to the then Attorney-General, the erewhile Mr. Murray of the Chicken House.