At No. 3, Madame de Stael stayed when on her visit to this country, and here probably posed as untiringly as we know she did at Lansdowne House. Admiral Hawke once lived at No. 7, and next door, at No. 8, David Mallet, for whom is claimed, in common with James Thomson, the authorship of “Rule Britannia,” which was first written as a lyric in that Masque which the joint authors produced for Frederick, Prince of Wales.
Besides Copley, two other artists once resided in George Street; Sir William Beechey and Sir Thomas Phillips; neither perhaps in the first flight, but both untiring wielders of the brush, and in their day successful portrait painters.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s bright eyes and bardolphian face must often have lighted up the street as he listened to the chimes at midnight, at No. 9; and at an earlier day, the somewhat solemn visage of Lord Chancellor Cowper was to be seen here as he passed stately up the steps of No. 13, where his wife may have been penning that valuable diary which has come down to us. The list might be carried on interminably. Only one or two more names, and we must hurry into Hanover Square. The Earl of Albemarle and Lord Stair, of George II.’s day, lived in this street; and in 1762, the witty Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who once, on someone’s hinting that her hands were in need of ablution, replied, “You should see my feet,” and whom Walpole described ungallantly as “always a dirty little thing.” Who else can I pick out? Sir Charles Clarges, in 1726; Colonel Francis Charteris, three years later, and Lord Shelburne, in 1748. These, and how many others, pass by like ghosts and carry us back to “the snows of yesteryear!”
HANOVER SQUARE.
As we look up George Street, the pleasant green oasis of Hanover Square’s central garden faces us, grouped round the great statue of Pitt which Chantry designed, and which was put up in 1831. There is no inscription on the base other than the name and dates of birth and death; but Sydney Smith, for once departing from his usual genial humour, wrote a suggested epitaph for it, so galling and so bitter, that it might have drawn the ghost of the “pilot that weathered the storm” from the shades where such great spirits dwell, and set it wandering with uneasy footsteps round its bronze counterfeit!
The Square was formed between the years 1716 and 1720. Being part of that great property which came to Harley, second Earl of Oxford, through his marriage, in 1713, with the Lady Henrietta Cavendish Holles, heiress of John, Duke of Newcastle. It was at first intended to call it Oxford Square, and only a loyal afterthought was responsible for its present designation. Notwithstanding that it has almost entirely lost that residential character with which it began its fashionable career, there luckily survive some of the original houses—Nos. 17 and 18 being cases in point—but the majority have been rebuilt out of all knowledge. To-day in these are found clubs, fashionable dressmakers, learned societies, anything you will but private residents; but in past times it held its own with any of the West End squares in the celebrity and importance of its inhabitants.
For instance, No. 13, known as Harewood House, which until recently was associated with the Royal Agricultural Society, was built by William Adam for the bibliophilic Duke of Roxburgh. Its present name was given it when the Earl of Harewood purchased it in 1795, and it remained in his family for just upon a century. At what was formerly numbered 15, but now 17, lived Mrs. Jordan, the beautiful and talented actress who fascinated the Duke of Clarence, afterwards William IV. Angelica Kauffmann was employed to decorate the principal ceiling here, and marbles from Italy were used in the formation of the beautiful mantelpieces. Next door (now No. 18), where, in 1824, Sir John Malcolm inaugurated the Oriental Club, was, from 1771, for ten years occupied by Lord Le Despenser, who, as Sir Francis Dashwood, was one of the most notorious of that band of Medmenham monks, whose “Hell Fire Club,” with its orgies, in which John Wilkes was one of the protagonists, was the scandal of the day. When the Oriental Club was formed the house was rebuilt, in 1827, by the Wyatts, for its accommodation.
Another important house in the Square was Downshire House, built in 1793, and once the residence of Lord Hillsborough. To-day it is a Bank; but in 1835 Prince Talleyrand was living here, and its walls may have heard some of the brilliant “mots” which this extraordinary man was wont to enunciate in what Sydney Smith described as “gurgling, not talking.” Yet another celebrated individual is associated with the place, for, after Talleyrand’s departure, Earl Grey, the hero of the great Reform Bill, lived here for a time. Two doors off once resided Lord Palmerston; not the “Pam” of the satirists and whilom Prime Minister, but his father; while later the Duchess of Brunswick, sister of George III., died in the same house in 1813.
If we can call “Lansdowne the polite,” as Pope terms him, a poet, and Ambrose Phillips one (he does to some extent deserve the title), then Hanover Square has been the home of the muses; and indeed, since I can add the name of Thomas Campbell, there should be no doubt about the matter, for all three lived, and two of them died here; the first in 1735, the second fourteen years later. The United Services have also contributed their share of inhabitants, and great ones at that, for not only Field-Marshal Lord Cobham, to whom Pope dedicated his “Characters of Men,” but also Lord Rodney, (who was the first to make use of that manœuvre of “breaking the line,” which Nelson carried into such deadly effect at Trafalgar), and Lord Anson, a hardly less brilliant naval commander, all resided in the precincts of the Square.
Perceval Pott is hardly remembered to-day, but in his time he was a great surgeon; Sir James Clark, physician to the late Queen Victoria, is better known, and as both these benefactors to the ills of humanity lived in the Square, medicine may be said to have been well represented here in the past. Let me make an end of names with that of Mr. Hamilton, whose “single speech,” so full of promise, is invariably associated with him, and who once occupied a house here.