So many illustrious people have lived and died in Curzon Street that pages might easily be filled with their names; but a few must here suffice, and appropriately, as living once at No. 1, since demolished, I find that great actress, Madame Vestris; and at No. 8, the celebrated Miss Berrys, who both died here in 1852, and lie buried in Petersham churchyard. Their house was once taken by Baron Bunsen, who records moving into it in 1841. Sir Henry Holford, the surgeon, who was one of those who gazed on the actual features of Charles I. when that monarch’s coffin was opened, and who left an interesting account of the circumstance, died at a house in Curzon Street, in 1844; and at No. 19, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, drew his last breath, in 1882.
Other residents whose names may be set down were Lord Marchmont, the friend of Pope; Mason, the poet; and Francis Chantry, the sculptor, long before he became famous; Lord Macartney, whose mission to China is to be found recorded in a bulky volume, and who, according to Walpole, occupied here a “charming house—cheap as old clothes,” which once belonged to Lord Carteret.
Opposite Crewe House stands Curzon Chapel, or, as it is as often called, Mayfair Chapel. The original structure dated from 1730, but it was subsequently rebuilt, although it is so plain and ugly that it could not possibly have been improved by the process.
The chapel is notorious for those illegal marriages conducted by the Rev. Alexander Keith, until the scandal was put an end to here by his being unfrocked in 1742. But this action on the part of a justly incensed church did not deter him from carrying on the same practices at another chapel, which he inaugurated close by. What the Church was unable to do, the Law effected, and the subsequent passing of the Marriage Act, in 1754, finally put a stop to Mr. Keith’s illicit activity. It is said that when told that the Bishops would stop his illegal marriages, he replied, “Let them; and I’ll buy two or three acres of ground, and by God, I’ll under-bury them all!”
Of those who took advantage of this short cut to wedlock were the Duke of Chandos, who was married (if the word can be permitted in such a connection) to Mrs. Anne Jeffrey, in 1744; Lord Strange and Lucy Smith, two years later; Lord Kensington and Rachel Hill, in 1749; and Lord George Bentinck and Mary Davies, in 1753.
The year before this last match, occurred the best-remembered of these “splicings,” when the Duke of Hamilton was wedded at half-past twelve o’clock at night to the beautiful Elizabeth Gunning, who lived to be the wife of two and the mother of four dukes. Horace Walpole has left a vivid account of the ceremony, in which a ring torn from a curtain replaced that circlet of gold which is recognised as the more usual type of matrimonial bondage.
HERTFORD AND CHESTERFIELD STREETS.
Hertford Street, formed about 1764, now almost rivals Wimpole Street in the numbers of the medical profession who reside in it; but at an earlier day it was the home of politicians, with here and there a soldier, and here and there a poet; while it was in a house here that the Duke of Cumberland, brother of George III., was married to Mrs. Horton, in 1771.
Sheridan had one of his many residences here, at No. 10, in 1793, and Lord Charlemont, whose wife’s name continues (in booksellers’ catalogues) to be erroneously connected with a notorious translation of Voltaire’s “Pucelle,” was living in the street in 1766. So, too, were Lord Goderich, and the Earl of Mornington, some years later; and, in 1792, died here General Burgoyne, whose surrender to the American forces at Saratoga precipitated that independence which the United States soon after obtained.
The first Earl of Liverpool, father of the Prime Minister, died here in 1808; and Earl Grey was living in this street in 1799; while other politicians who have been former residents were Robert Dundas and Charles Bathurst, Lord Langdale and Bulwer Lytton, the last of whom lived at No. 36 from 1831 to 1834, and here wrote “Paul Clifford,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “Rienzi,” “Alice,” and “Ernest Maltravers.” Lord Sandwich, the well-known “Jemmy Twitcher,” died at No. 11, in 1792, and “Capability Brown,” the great landscape gardener, at another house here, nine years earlier. But perhaps the street’s chief claim to remembrance is the fact that Edward Jenner resided at No. 14, for some years, from about the beginning of 1803. Contrary to expectation, his fees fell off on his setting up here, and, together with the excessive rent he was obliged to pay, and the additional expenses of London life, he found it impossible to continue to reside here. A tablet now marks the house where this benefactor to the human race once fought his double fight against disease and poverty!