In March, of the following year, Bubb Doddington went to Leicester House. The Prince told him he ‘had catched cold’ and ‘had been blooded.’ It was the beginning of the end. Alternately a little better and much worse, and then greatly improved, &c., till the night of the 20th. ‘For half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread-and-butter and drank coffee.’ He was ‘suffocated’ in a fit of coughing; ‘the breaking of an abscess in his side destroyed him. His physicians, Wilmot and Lee, knew nothing of his distemper.... Their ignorance, or their knowledge, of his disorder, renders them equally inexcusable for not calling in other assistance.’ How meanly this prince was buried, how shabbily everyone, officially in attendance, was treated, are well known. The only rag of state ceremony allowed this poor Royal Highness was, that his body went in one conveyance and his bowels in another—which was a compliment, no doubt, but hardly one to be thankful for.
The widowed Princess remained in occupation of the mansion in which her husband had died. One of the pleasantest domestic pictures of Leicester House is given by Bubb Doddington, under date November 17, 1753:—
The Princess sent for me to attend her between eight and nine o’clock. I went to Leicester House, expecting a small company and a little musick, but found nobody but her Royal Highness. She made me draw a stool and sit by the fireside. Soon after came in the Prince of Wales and Prince Edward, and then the Lady Augusta, all in an undress, and took their stools and sat round the fire with us. We continued talking of familiar occurrences till between ten and eleven, with the ease and unreservedness and unconstraint, as if one had dropped into a sister’s house that had a family, to pass the evening. It is much to be wished that the Princes conversed familiarly with more people of a certain knowledge of the world.
The Princess, however, did not want for worldly knowledge. About this time the Princess Dowager of Wales was sitting pensive and melancholy, in a room in Leicester House, while the two Princes were playing about her. Edward then said aloud to George, ‘Brother, when we are men, you shall marry, and I will keep a mistress.’ ‘Be quiet, Eddy,’ said his elder brother, ‘we shall have anger presently for your nonsense. There must be no mistresses at all.’ Their mother thereon bade them, somewhat sharply, learn their nouns and pronouns. ‘Can you tell me,’ she asked Prince Edward, ‘what a pronoun is?’ ‘Of course I can,’ replied the ingenuous youth; ‘a pronoun is to a noun what a mistress is to a wife—a substitute and a representative.’
The Princess of Wales continued to maintain a sober and dignified court at Leicester House, and at Carlton House also. She was by no means forgotten. Young and old rendered her full respect. One of the most singular processions crossed the Fields in January 1756. Its object was to pay the homage of a first visit to the court of the Dowager Princess of Wales at Leicester House—the visitors being a newly-married young couple, the Hon. Mr. Spencer and the ex-Miss Poyntz (later Earl and Countess of Spencer). The whole party were contained in two carriages and a ‘sedan chair.’ Inside the first were Earl Cowper and the bridegroom. Hanging on from behind were three footmen in state liveries. In the second carriage were the mother and sister of the bride, with similar human adornments on the outside as with the first carriage. Last, and alone, of course, as became her state, in a new sedan, came the bride, in white and silver, as fine as brocade and trimming could make it. The chair itself was lined with white satin, was preceded by a black page, and was followed by three gorgeous lackeys. Nothing ever was more brilliant than the hundred thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds worn by the bride except her own tears in her beautiful eyes when she first saw them and the begging letter of the lover which accompanied them. As he handed her from the chair, the bridegroom seemed scarcely less be-diamonded than the bride. His shoe-buckles alone had those precious stones in them to the value of thirty thousand pounds. They were decidedly a brilliant pair. Public homage never failed to be paid to the Princess. In June 1763, Mrs. Harris writes to her son (afterwards first Lord Malmesbury) at Oxford: I was yesterday at Leicester House, where there were more people than I thought had been in town.’ In 1766 Leicester House was occupied by William Henry, Duke of Cumberland, the last royal resident of that historical mansion, which was ultimately demolished in the year 1806.
But there were as remarkable inhabitants of other houses as of Leicester House. In 1733 there came into the square a man about whom the world more concerns itself than it does about William Henry, and that man is William Hogarth.
There is no one whom we more readily or more completely identify with Leicester Square than Hogarth. He was born in the Old Bailey in 1697, close to old Leicester House, which, in Pennant’s days, was turned into a coach factory. His father was a schoolmaster, who is, perhaps, to be recognised in the following curious advertisement of the reign of Queen Anne; ‘At Hogarth’s Coffee House, in St. John’s Gate, the midway between Smithfield Bars and Clerkenwell, there will meet daily some learned gentlemen who speak Latin readily, where any gentleman that is either skilled in the language, or desirous to perfect himself in speaking thereof, will be welcome. The Master of the House, in the absence of others, being always ready to entertain gentlemen in that language.’ It was in the above Queen’s reign that Hogarth went, bundle in hand, hope in his heart, and a good deal of sense and nonsense in his head, to Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields, where he was ’prentice bound to Ellis Gamble, the silver-plate engraver. There, among other and nobler works, Hogarth engraved the metal die for the first newspaper stamp (‘one halfpenny’) ever known in England. It was in Little Cranbourne Alley that Hogarth first set up for himself for a brief time, and left his sisters (it is supposed) to succeed him there as keepers of a ‘frock shop.’ Hogarth studied in the street, as Garrick did, and there was no lack of masks and faces in the little France and royal England of the Leicester Fields vicinity. Much as Sir James Thornhill disliked his daughter’s marriage with Hogarth, he helped the young couple to set up house on the east side of Leicester Fields. Thornhill did not, at first, account his son-in-law a painter. ‘They say he can’t paint,’ said Mrs. Hogarth once. ‘It’s a lie. Look at that!’ as she pointed to one of his great works. Another day, as Garrick was leaving the house in the Fields, Ben Ives, Hogarth’s servant, asked him to step into the parlour. Ben showed David a head of Diana, done in chalks. The player and Hogarth’s man knew the model. ‘There, Mr. Garrick!’ exclaimed Ives, ‘there’s a head! and yet they say my master can’t paint a portrait.’ Garrick thought Hogarth had not succeeded in painting the player’s, whereupon the limner dashed a brush across the face and turned it against the wall. It never left Leicester Square till widow Hogarth gave it to widow Garrick.
It was towards the close of Hogarth’s career that James Barry, from Cork—destined to make his mark in art—caught sight of a bustling, active, stout little man, dressed in a sky-blue coat, in Cranbourne Alley, and recognising in him the Hogarth whom he almost worshipped, followed him down the east side of the square towards Hogarth’s house. The latter, however, the owner did not enter, for a fight between two boys was going on at the corner of Castle Street, and Hogarth, who, like the statesman Windham, loved to see such encounters, whether the combatants were boys or men, had joined in the fray. When Barry came up Hogarth was acting ‘second’ to one of the young pugilists, patting him on the back, and giving such questionable aid in heightening the fray as he could furnish in such a phrase as, ‘Damn him if I would take it of him! At him again!’ There is another version, which says that it was Nollekens who pointed out to Northcote the little man in the sky-blue coat, with the remark, ‘Look! that’s Hogarth?’
Hogarth seems to have been one of the first to set his face against the fashion of giving vails to servants by forbidding his own to take them from guests. In those days, not only guests but those who came to a house to spend money, were expected to help to pay the wages of the servants for the performance of a duty which they owed to their master. It was otherwise with Hogarth in Leicester Square. ‘When I sat to Hogarth’ (Cole’s MSS. collections, quoted in Cunningham’s ‘London’) ‘the custom of giving vails to servants was not discontinued. On taking leave of the painter at the door I offered the servant a small gratuity, but the man very politely refused it, telling me it would be as much as the loss of his place if his master knew it. This was so uncommon, and so liberal in a man of Hogarth’s profession at that time of day, that it much struck me, as nothing of the kind had happened to me before.’
Leicester Square will ever be connected with Hogarth at the Golden Head. It was not, at his going there, in a flourishing condition, but it improved. In the year 1735, in Seymour’s ‘Survey,’ Leicester Fields are described as ‘a very handsome open square, railed about and gravelled within. The buildings are very good and well inhabited, and frequented by the gentry. The north and west rows of buildings, which are in St. Anne’s parish, are the best (and may be said to be so still), especially the north, where is Leicester House, the seat of the Earl of Leicester; being a large building with a fair court before it for the reception of coaches, and a fine garden behind it; the south and east sides being in the parish of St. Martin’s.’