“The Blue Posts” Tavern was at No. 59, and was long a favourite resort. Otway mentions it in one of his plays; so does Bishop Cartwright in his diary; and in contemporary newspapers are accounts of those affrays which so frequently disturbed the harmony of these places of recreation.
“The Cock” was probably identical with the tavern bearing this sign in Suffolk Street close by, which Pepys mentions, and which it is likely had something to do with the origin of the name of the adjacent Cockspur Street; while the other taverns must have often afforded refreshment to the various notable people, who once resided in the Haymarket.
One of the greatest of these, who we know loved to take his ease at his inn, was Addison, who, while lodging in an attic over a small shop here, wrote “The Campaign,” at the request of the Government. One day, in after years, a little deformed man with eloquent eyes, fired with enthusiasm, brought a friend to this same attic, and mounting the three pair of stairs, opened the door of the small room, and exclaimed, “In this garret Addison wrote his ‘Campaign’”—it was Pope pointing out the workshop of genius to Harte.
Among various past notable residents, Sir Samuel Garth stands for physic in the Haymarket; his house, from 1699 to 1703, being the sixth door from the top, on the east side; and histrionic art is well represented by Mrs. Oldfield, who was residing close by, from 1714 to 1726. Garth was a poet besides being a physician, and in the former rôle ridiculed apothecaries, about whom he must have known more than most men, in his well-known “Dispensary,” a poem which appeared in the year he came to live here. Nance Oldfield, if not of blameless life, was indisputably a great actress, and I believe the only one who lies in the Abbey, where her remains were buried with much pomp and circumstance.
Painting, as is appropriate in a street which to-day boasts a number of well-known picture shops, is represented by George Morland, who was born here in 1763. The inequality of his work is characteristic of the ups and downs of his reckless life; at one time he was producing masterpieces, at another he was dashing off pot-boilers and tavern signs. One wonders if among the latter was that sign which Broughton, the pugilist, hung outside his public-house between the Haymarket and Cockspur Street, and which represented the champion boxer himself “in his habit as he lived.”
Nearly at the top of the street on the east side is an old tobacconist’s shop (who does not know Fribourg’s?) which, in appearance, carries us back to Georgian days, and shows how much has been lost in picturesqueness by the modern methods of shop-building. Wishart’s, another tobacconist’s, which has, however, unfortunately disappeared, must have looked very much then as Fribourg’s continues to do to-day. But the Haymarket has undergone such a metamorphosis that the latter is the only survival of a past day, if we except the portico of the Haymarket Theatre; and now that a Tube Railway Station has invaded the street, the last touch has been given to it in the way of modernity.
It is, however, appropriate that the spot in which Nance Oldfield once lived should be so associated with the “vagabonds” as is this thoroughfare, for here are the Haymarket Theatre, and His Majesty’s, which latter stands partly on the site of that Haymarket Opera House, Queen’s Theatre, King’s Theatre, and Her Majesty’s Theatre—to give it all its various names—which most of us remember.
THE HAYMARKET THEATRE.
I will say a word about the Haymarket Theatre first, because it still exists, and by its porticoed front helps to recall the Haymarket itself of earlier days.
The present theatre, as we shall see, followed an earlier one which stood not actually on its site, but on ground adjoining it, as may be seen from an old view of this portion of the Haymarket.