Wanderings in London, Piccadilly, Mayfair, and Pall Mall

by E. Beresford Chancellor

But we must quit St. James’s Square, with its historic memories, its ghosts of the great and beautiful; its houses built by the Brettinghams, Storys, Barebones, and Friths, and decorated by the Adams, the Kauffmanns, the Ciprianis, and the Amiconis of a past day; and to do so let us retrace our steps to its north side, where York Street will lead us into Jermyn Street.

JERMYN STREET.

It is not difficult to trace the name of York Street to the Duke of York, who afterwards became an unpopular king; but it requires some effort of the imagination to connect with Apple-tree Yard, in the same street, that orchard of apple-trees for which this spot was famous in the reign of Charles I.

When the Spanish Ambassador was living in St. James’s Square, the chapel connected with the Embassy was situated in York Street, and the building, with the arms of Castile upon it, was standing till so recently as 1877.

Jermyn Street, into which we now turn, is famous. It is as characteristically redolent of the West End as (say) Leadenhall Street is of the East. All sorts and conditions of interesting people have lived or lodged in it; Marlborough, when yet John Churchill, and only a colonel; the Duchess of Richmond, known to readers of De Grammont and students of the later Carolean days, as La Belle Stuart; the haughty Countess of Northumberland; Secretary Craggs and Bishop Berkeley, and Lord Carteret; to say nothing of Verelst, the painter, of whose vanity so many stories are told by Walpole. The great Sir Isaac Newton, until he went to Chelsea; Shenstone, when he could tear himself away from his beloved “Leasowes”; and Gray, who, as Johnson said, would go down to posterity with a thinner volume under his arm than any of the great poets, also resided in Jermyn Street. The latter lodged at Roberts’, the hosiers, or Frisby’s, the oilman’s, as he found convenient (paying not more than half a guinea a week for his rooms), just as Bishop Berkeley had done at an earlier day at Burdon’s, with its sign of “The Golden Globe.”

In the nineteenth century the street may have been enlivened by the jokes of Sidney Smith or the gentle caroling of Tom Moore, for they both sojourned here, the one at No. 81, in 1811, the other at No. 58, fourteen years later. But a greater than either once stayed for a short space in the street; for at one of the many hotels which have flourished and faded here, the great Sir Walter remained for three weeks, after his return from the Continent; and here he lay in that waking dream which had but one dominant expression in its dull monotony, the unconquerable desire to be once again in his “ain hame,” and to hear the busy Tweed rippling over its stones.

ST. JAMES’S CHURCH.

In spite of much rebuilding there yet remains one object here which will help to recall
us to the past—the Church of St. James’s, which fronts both Jermyn Street and Piccadilly. It was erected by Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans, soon after he had begun the development of his neighbouring property. Wren had a hand in it, when it was commenced in 1680, but he concentrated his efforts on the interior, which is extraordinarily light and spacious. Grinling Gibbons was responsible for the beautiful marble font and a portion of the altar; and the organ was originally made for James II. Its rectors have occasionally attained high preferment, no less than three—Tenison, the first; Wake, the second, and Secker, at a later date, reaching the Archbishopric.

Interesting things have happened in this church. Once the minister was ordered not to lay the text on the cushion (as was then the custom) of the Princess Anne, who used to attend here when she was living at Berkeley House, nor “to take any more notice of her than other people,” as old Sarah of Marlborough indignantly records; but the rector refused to do this without an order in writing, which the Crown did not think it expedient to give; Defoe was scandalised at the charges made here for a seat, “where it costs one almost as dear as to see a play”; and in the churchyard Gibbon once stumbled and sprained his foot, but he is careful to particularise the time of the mishap, “between the hours of one and two in the afternoon,” so that there need be no shaking of heads. Gibbon, who was nothing if not “genteel,” selected his church well, for Vanbrugh, in his “Relapse,” makes Lord Foppington say that he always attended St. James’s for “there’s much the best company!”