Cleveland Row takes its name from old Cleveland House, and forms the south side of that most curious of “quadrates,” Cleveland Square.
Theodore Hook once lived in the Row, at No. 5; so did Lord Rodney and Sir Sidney Smith; Thomas Grenville, of bibliophilic fame; and Lord Stowell, the great lawyer, and brother of Lord Eldon. George Selwyn died at what was then called, 1, Cleveland Court, in 1791; and Mason, the poet, was residing here at a “Mr. Mennis’s” four and twenty years earlier. Walpole and Townshend had their memorable quarrel, parodied by Grey in his “Beggar’s Opera,” in a room in one of the houses; while Lord Bute, in 1761, moved a portion of the Foreign Office hither from its former locale in the Cockpit at Westminster.
ST. JAMES’S PLACE.
The houses that adjoin Bridgewater House to the north are those of which the entrances are in St. James’s Place and Arlington Street. The most architecturally noticeable is the first we see, Spencer House, in the making of which, the talent of John Vardy, James Stuart, and M. H. Spong was combined. A little further on is the house in which the poet Rogers lived and gave those breakfasts and dinners which have become historic. The contents were so carefully selected and so rich, as treasures of art or literature, that Byron used to say there was not a single object which did “not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor;” and Moore, and Macaulay, and Burney, and a hundred others who were guests here, have left confirmatory praise. Here it was that Byron, invited to meet Moore and Campbell (what a constellation!) would eat nothing but potatoes mashed up in vinegar, and then, ’tis said, went off later to a club in St. James’s Street and made a hearty supper off beefsteaks! Here Chantry, the great sculptor, told his host that it was he who, in the days of his probation as a working carpenter, had made a certain piece of furniture in the dining room; but there would be no end to the recollections clustering about this house if I did not place a curb on my pen. Other poets have lived in St. James’s Place—Addison and Parnell, besides many another well-known personality; Molly Lepel, and Sir John Cope; Secretary Craggs, and Charles James Fox; “Perdita” Robinson, and Sir Francis Burdett; Wilkes, the noisy demagogue, and Warren Hastings, the great pro-consul.
ARLINGTON STREET.
Arlington Street is hardly less interesting. There is the home of the Cecils, where one great Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, could once look across the street at the windows of the house that had sheltered another—Sir Robert Walpole. As the son of the latter once wrote to Montagu: “Nothing can be more dignified than this position.” In the past, as in the present, its houses have been the homes of the illustrious. The street was formed in 1689, and was the property of that Arlington who was one of the “A’s” of the famous (or, shall we say, infamous?) “Cabal.” The Duchess of Cleveland withdrew hither, after the death of Charles had made Cleveland House too costly an abode; the Duchess of Buckingham, wife of that Duke, castigated in Dryden’s best-known lines, and daughter of Fairfax, Cromwell’s henchman; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who resided here with her father, the Duke of Kingston; Pulteney, Earl of Bath—as if he could never get away from his enemy, Sir Robert; and Henry Pelham, who lived at No. 17, in the house built by Kent and now Lord Yarborough’s. At No. 21 Lord Sefton gave his famous dinners with Ude as chef in command; and Lord Wimborne’s house, which is already dwarfed by the neighbouring “Ritz,” once belonged to Lord Camden, then to the Duke of Beaufort, and was subsequently sold to the Duke of Hamilton for £60,000; while John Lothrop Motley was renting Lord Yarborough’s house, from 1869-70, during his term of office as United States Minister.
If we turn back into St. James’s Street and look down that famous thoroughfare two things cannot fail to strike us—one, the effective screen at the bottom formed by the picturesque clock-tower of the Palace which dates from Henry VIII.’s time; the other, the marked declivity in the ground, which is only comparable with Ludgate Hill, in the East, and is considerably steeper than any part of Piccadilly or Knightsbridge, in the West.
ST. JAMES’S STREET.
St. James’s Street is a street of memories, if ever there was one in London; to mention all the interesting people who have lodged in it would make a very fair chapter; to record even the bare outlines of the history of its clubs and coffee-houses would form another. Appropriately is it named “St. James’s Street,” for it is pre-eminently the thoroughfare of this aristocratic quarter. Here may still be seen one or two old shops that recall Georgian days, although the street is undergoing such a metamorphosis of rebuilding that one never knows but that some fine morning their familiar fronts may have disappeared; here survive some of the most exclusive and best known of the Clubs which are the particular characteristic of this quarter; and the unchanged front of the Palace at the lower end is such a dominating note in the picture, that, looking down the street, when one of those mists so beloved of Whistler give atmospheric mystery to the thoroughfare, we may almost expect to see Charles II. sauntering through its portals with Rochester or Sedley; or George II. driving through its gates on his way to Kensington Palace or Richmond Park.
The history of