As we are wandering about Pall Mall in a somewhat desultory manner, I make no excuse for turning back from the Athenæum to the large building near by, which up to quite recently, formed an inadequate home for the War Office. That part of it which has a small courtyard in front, in which stood the graceful statue of Sidney Herbert, was rebuilt for the use of the Secretary of State for War; but the most interesting portion is that known as Schomberg House, which was erected in 1650, at the time when Pall Mall was planted with elm trees. It took its name from that Duke of Schomberg who was killed at the Battle of the Boyne, and was much improved by the third and last Duke; but its chief claim to notice lies in the fact that Gainsborough (as Cosway had done before him) lived the last years of his life here, and expired in the second floor room (which is now indicated by a tablet), in 1788, with the well-known exclamation on his lips: “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyck is of the company.”
The house next door (to the west), now the Eagle Insurance Office, is interesting from the fact that it stands on the one-time residence of Nell Gwyn, the gardens of which stretched to the Mall, and here took place that “familiar discourse between the King and Mrs. Nellie, as they call an impudent comedian, she looking out of her garden on a terrace, at the top of the wall, and the King standing on the green walk under it,” which Evelyn has thus recorded, and E. M. Ward, R.A., perpetuated on canvas. This site is the only freehold in Pall Mall, and the story goes that on Charles giving “Mrs. Nellie” a lease of the place, she took the parchment and threw it in his face, intimating at the same time that nothing short of “freehold tenure” was good enough for her.
The two adjoining houses have been, not long since, converted into one, and now form the London residence of T.R.H. the Prince and Princess Christian.
When the great “Sarah of Marlborough” was amazed by, as she called them, her neighbour George’s “orange chests,” she was in residence at the large red brick house, faced with stone, which a grateful nation had presented to her husband (although the Duchess always said it cost him £40,000 to £50,000 out of his own pocket), and which had been erected in 1709, on part of the pheasantry of St. James’s Park, which had been leased by Queen Anne to her old favourite. Here the great Duke, “with the tears of dotage” flowing from his eyes, expired in 1722, and one of the great sights of Pall Mall must have been that almost regal funeral which the Duchess arranged herself, and in which figured that funeral-car which she refused at a later date to lend to the Duchess of Buckingham, because, as she said, no one was worthy to be carried on what had borne the illustrious victor of Blenheim! Some fifty years after her husband’s death, the indomitable old “Sarah,” at the age of 84, was told that she must be blistered or she would die, to which she replied in angry tones, “I won’t be blistered and I won’t die.” She died in the year 1774.
Marlborough House was subsequently purchased (in 1817) by the Crown, as a residence for the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold; and here, after the death of the Princess, the widower lived for some years; so did Queen Adelaide after the decease of William IV., and in 1850, the house was settled on the Prince of Wales (now His Majesty the King); but before he occupied it, its lower apartments had been used for various art exhibitions. The entrance is anything but imposing, and is rendered still more insignificant by the high buildings of the Junior Oxford and Cambridge Club next door, adjoining which are the Guards’ Club and the imposing front of the Oxford and Cambridge itself, the latter of which was built by Smirke in 1836.
On the north side of Pall Mall we get a glimpse of an almost Georgian perspective if we look up the narrow Crown Court, and can for the moment forget its new front and the adjoining elaborate buildings which have been recently erected facing Marlborough House. This Court is one of the few survivors of many, and is shewn on old plans, which, on the other hand, do not give Pall Mall Place (of later construction), a little further east, which passes under one of the windows of No. 51, once the famous headquarters of Dodsley, the publisher. This house then rejoiced in that sign of “Tully’s Head,” appearing on the titles of so many of the best-known works of the eighteenth century which the great Dodsley ushered into the world.
PALL MALL TAVERNS.
Pall Mall has been in the past—for you shall seek long enough for them now—noted for its taverns. There was, for instance, the “Queen’s Arms,” where the sanguinary duel between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun was planned; and the “Star and Garter” (the descendant of which has but recently disappeared), where Lord Byron killed Mr. Chaworth in 1765, and where the first Cricket Club is said to have been founded in 1774, by Sir Horace Mann (a Kent cricketer and Walpole’s correspondent), the Duke of Dorset, and Lord Tankerville, of the Surrey and Hants eleven, and others.
Then there was “Wood’s at the Pell Mell” mentioned by Pepys, where, in 1662, Mr. Jermyn and Captain Howard fought a duel; and the “Sugar Loaf,” the “Golden Pestle and Mortar,” the “Golden Door,” and the “Barber’s Pole”—to mention but these—were signs that might previously have been seen here. The Coffee Houses numbered among them the well-known “Smyrna” of early Georgian days, and the “King’s Arms,” where the “Liberty” or “Rumpsteak Club” met and concerted measures against Sir Robert Walpole.
It was in Pall Mall, near the bottom of the Haymarket, that Thynne was murdered at the instigation of Konigsmarck—a brutal deed which may still be seen commemorated on the tomb of the victim in Westminster Abbey; here, too, the mail from France was robbed at half-past eight on January 7th, 1786, almost in the very faces of the Palace Guard, as Walpole relates with natural astonishment; and here the Gordon Rioters were with difficulty prevented from destroying that Schomberg House we have but recently been gazing at.