Cork Street, joining Clifford Street and Burlington Gardens, was named after Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, and its chief feature was the fine house, or, rather one should perhaps say, externally fine house, for Walpole affirms that “all its beauty was outside”—which Lord Burlington designed, in 1723, for Field-Marshal Wade, on whose death, in 1748, it was sold by public auction.
In Cork Street lived Dr. Arbuthnot, the friend of Pope and Swift, and one of the three “Yahoos of T’witnam”; he appears to have come here in 1729, and here he died six years later. Another one-time resident was Mrs. Abigail Masham, who replaced Sarah of Marlborough in the affections and confidence of Queen Anne.
Cork Street has always been notable for its hotels, from the time when Gibbon speaks of the Cork Street Hotel, to the later days of the Burlington, where the Empire-builder, Cecil Rhodes, was wont to put up.
CONDUIT STREET.
Conduit Street can be reached from Savile Row by one the quaintest little alleys in the West End, called Savile Place, a tiny thoroughfare which I never go through without expecting to see a Sedan chair waiting at the other end, and a bewigged and besworded gentleman or a hooped and patched lady passing through on their way to it. If we followed them we should find ourselves in the middle of Conduit Street, but, as for my purpose it is more convenient to enter at its western end, let us pass along Bond Street until we come to this its largest tributary.
The width of Conduit Street is accounted for when we know that it originally consisted of private houses, although you shall seek long enough nowadays ere you find one that has not been transformed into a business establishment of some sort or another. The street was completed in 1713, and takes its name from a conduit of water which stood in what was then known as Conduit Mead, a field of 27 acres, described in the vaguest of vague ways as lying between Piccadilly and Paddington, and of which Lord Clarendon had obtained in 1666 a lease of 99 years at the nominal rental (oh! those rents of former days, are they not alone sufficient to stamp that far-gone period as the “good old times”?) of £8 per annum.
The Chapel of the Trinity, which had been built by Archbishop Tenison, in 1716, and replaced the older wooden chapel, once used by James II. on Hounslow Heath, when his camp was pitched there, but subsequently brought hither and left stranded in what now seems somewhat incongrous surroundings, was standing so late as 1877; but its site has now given place to one of the many tailors’ establishments for which Conduit Street is noted. Evelyn, in an entry in his diary for July 18th, 1691, mentions attending service at the original chapel, then but newly arrived here from Hounslow. One can with difficulty imagine the place surrounded by those fields in which Carew Mildmay, according to Pennant, remembered shooting woodcock, and before Lord Burlington, the first to build here, had set about the development of the property. When, however, houses were erected, they soon found illustrious tenants. The Earls of Macclesfield had their town residence at what is now No. 9 and to-day the headquarters of the Royal Society of British Architects, and other Societies. The notorious Duke of Wharton was also living here, in 1725; so were Boswell and Wilberforce at later dates. One wonders if it was in Conduit Street that poor Sheridan was once found drunk, but, so far as speech was concerned, anything but incapable, and when asked by the Watch whom he might be, hiccuped out, “William Wilberforce”! Delmé Redcliffe died in this street; and at 36, resided Sir Walter Farquhar, the physician whose name has come down to posterity chiefly through the fame of one of his patients, the great William Pitt. Farquhar was not the only doctor of note whose address was in Conduit Street, for Sir Astley Cooper died here, at No. 39, in 1841, and that Dr. Eliotson who once saved Thackeray’s life (and to whom in consequence the novelist dedicated “Pendennis”), lived at No. 37, a house doubly famous (though since rebuilt), having been the residence of George Canning, for a year, as a memorial tablet testifies. But the chief interest in the street, lies in the fact that here, on January 24th, 1749, was born Charles James Fox, perhaps the most remarkable of all the remarkable men who made the later years of George III.’s long reign memorable.
The street had, of course, its taverns or coffee-houses; notably, “The Prince of Wales’s,” where David Williams inaugurated the Royal Literary Fund, in 1772, the year in which Boswell came to lodge here, and the scene of the last of those quarrels which Lord Camelford was never tired of provoking. This terrible fire-eater seems to have at last met more than his match (at one time it was generally supposed that he never would do so) in a Captain Best, and as the result of a dispute about a lady of easy ethics named Simmons, the two went away to the fields behind Holland House, and fought the last duel in which Camelford was ever to take part, in the year of grace 1804. His Lordship had at an earlier date, wantonly insulted the great traveller Vancouver, in the same street; and there was therefore a sort of poetic justice in the coincidence that he should forfeit his life as the result of one more dispute in this locality.
Another tavern in the street had also a gruesome notoriety, for it was from “The Coach and Horses” that Thurtell, the cold-blooded murderer of Weare, drove in that gig, made famous by Carlyle’s celebrated allusion, to pick up and drive into the country his “murdered man”—to apply Keats’s magnificent anticipatory phrase.
MADDOX STREET.