It occupies a part of the site of Clarendon House, and when that mansion with its grounds of 300 acres was purchased by Bond and others, the street was formed. The west side was the first to be built, being then termed Albemarle Buildings, from the Duke of Albemarle who sold Clarendon House to Bond. Hatton described the street in its early days as being “inhabited by the nobility and gentry.” You shall seek long enough to-day before you find members of either class represented among the inhabitants other than occasionally in the various hotels in the street, or perhaps in chambers above the shops, which is but a repetition of what was the custom at an earlier day, when all sorts of illustrious individuals gave as their addresses the upper parts of business premises which, in the absence of numbers to houses and shops, were sufficiently distinctive; thus, when we read of (say) the “Duke of A., at Mr. Jones’s, hairdressers,” we are not to assume that that capillary artist entertained noble guests in his first floor front, other than in the light of lodgers who paid handsomely for the privilege of being in a fashionable street without having to keep up a fashionable house. But, at first, private houses were as much de rigueur in Bond Street as they are in Brook Street or Grosvenor Street to-day, and one of the earliest titled inhabitants was that Duke of St. Albans, the son of Charles II. and Nell Gwynn, whose title would seem to have been a royal afterthought, according to the well-known story, which tells us that, on one occasion, his mother addressed him as “little bastard,” when Charles, who overheard it, remonstrated with her for the use of the term, whereupon Mistress Eleanor, who probably used the ugly word for a sufficiently good reason, replied that the child had no other name. This, apparently, set the King a-thinking, with the result that shortly afterwards, a patent of nobility was made out for the boy. Although I can’t say in what year the Duke took up his residence here (it was probably about 1720), he died in 1726, and an advertisement in The London Gazette in the following year contains an intimation to the effect that his Grace’s house was then for disposal, in consequence of his decease.
The Court Guide is responsible for the names of other inhabitants, and among them may be noted that Duke of Kingston who married a painfully notorious wife—Miss Chudleigh; and that Countess of Macclesfield who proved such an unnatural mother to Savage, the poet.
In 1708, I find Lords Abingdon, Anglesea, and Coningsby mentioned as living in Old Bond Street; some years later the Countess of Gainsborough resided here; but the street as a residential quarter is more interesting from the fact that Laurence Sterne died, at what is the present No. 41, in 1768. The man whose name was on everyone’s lips, and whose extraordinary work was in everyone’s hands, departed to the land of shades with only two hirelings to bid him Godspeed; and one of these alien hands, that of John Macdonald, a footman, has left the description of that last strange scene. “About this time Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street.... I went to Mr. Sterne’s lodgings; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said, ‘Now it is come’! He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.”
LONG’S HOTEL, BOND STREET.
The ubiquitous Boswell was lodging in Old Bond Street a year after Sterne’s death, and Pascali Paoli, whose name looms largely in Boswell’s “voluminous page,” had already come here some eight years earlier. Gibbon, on his return from Lausanne, also lodged in Bond Street, where he writes: “While coaches were rattling through Bond Street, I have passed many a solitary evening in my lodgings with my books”; while half a century earlier Mrs. Loe, a friend of Lady Wentworth’s, was residing here, in 1710, and we find the old gossip visiting her and subsequently informing her son that “she (Mrs. L.) had ten wax candles, six in one room and fower in a very little one and very fynly furnished,” to her ladyship’s evident astonishment.
At No. 24, the Artists’ Benevolent Institution was housed, in 1814; but this particular building is more interesting still from the fact that, in 1791, it was the residence—one of his many in London—of Sir Thomas Lawrence; while Northcote, the artist, at No. 2, in 1781, and Ozias Humphrey, the miniature painter, at No. 13, in 1796, combine with Lawrence, to represent Art here.
Bond Street, if to a lesser degree than some other thoroughfares close by, has always been noted for its hotels, one of the most famous being Long’s, at Nos. 15 and 16, rebuilt and greatly enlarged in 1888, which was patronised by Sir Walter Scott; and here he met Lord Byron for the last time in 1815; and Stevens’s Hotel, two doors off, where Byron was to be met with in the days when he affected to live a fashionable life and consort with the “Dandies.” Stevens’s was at No. 18, and, having been rebuilt in 1888, is now a jewellers’; another hostelry has also disappeared these 30 years—this was the Clarendon Hotel, at No. 169, which occupied the former town residence of the Dukes of Grafton, where at a later time the great Chatham once lived.
Old Bond Street, which begins at “Stewart’s Corner,” runs into New Bond Street with nothing to mark their division or to indicate that they form, except in name, anything but one continuous thoroughfare. The latter was not, however, formed till about 30 years after its prototype; but it equals it in interest by reason of the illustrious ones who have dwelt in it. Here, for instance, came in 1727, to lodge with his cousin Lancelot, at a house then described as “over against the Crown and Cushion,” the great Dean of St. Patrick’s, whom we have met with in Piccadilly when he was lodging in Pall Mall or Bury Street; here lived a few years later that most delightful of garrulous memoir-writers, Mrs. Delany, the friend of Fanny Burney and Queen Charlotte and of how many others; Lord Coventry, who married one of the beautiful Gunnings, was here, in 1732; so was Lord Craven and Lord Abergavenny; later still George Selwyn cut his jokes in the street and hurried by this way to many a last scene at Tyburn, not far off in the Oxford Road. Dr. Johnson’s ponderous form might have been seen here, rolling along, as he touched all the posts he passed.
Thomson, “who sang the seasons and their change,” and used to lie abed so unconscionable a time o’mornings also lived in New Bond Street, before he flitted to “ambrosial Richmond.”