Water Gates
“In some parts of London we may go back through the
whole English history, perhaps through the history of man.”
Leigh Hunt.
People seem to think that a great deal of time and energy must be spent if they wish to see anything of historic London, and they pass by, unnoticed, many of the most interesting reminders of bygone periods, just because they may see them every day.
Buckingham Street, leading out of the Strand, is only a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and it is full of historic memories. What stories the beautiful old water gate at its foot could tell of the days when the silver Thames washed up and down its grey stone steps, and of the famous people who used to take boat there!
It was built by my Lord Duke of Buckingham, that hated favourite of James and Charles the First, who cuts such a sorry figure in English history books and such a romantic one in the pages of Dumas. He was the father of the extravagant, erratic George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whom Scott describes in Peveril of the Peak, and Pope more pungently:
Who in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.
Lely painted a wonderful portrait of the son. It hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, but even more interesting is the Vandyck picture of him with his brother Francis, painted when they were boys, and lately bought for the National Gallery.
With his father murdered, and his property confiscated by the Commonwealth and given to General Fairfax, the duke solved his problem by marrying the General’s daughter and heiress, a solution for which Cromwell made him pay by a sojourn in the Tower, where he was an intermittent resident. But in spite of his wife’s fortune the man who, “was everything by turns and nothing long” was obliged to sell the magnificent mansion that his father had re-built in 1625 on the site of the old York House.
The earlier mansion had been the home of the Bishop of Norwich in Henry VIII.’s time, of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, of the Archbishop of York, who gave the house its name, and of Sir Francis Bacon who loved the place and only left it for the Tower.
In 1672 the second York House was sold for £30,000, with the stipulation that the streets built on the site were to be given the Duke’s names. They are quite easy to trace: there is George Court, with the George Tavern, where you may eat your chop to the sound of an orchestra of singing birds; hard by are Villiers and Duke Streets; “Of” Lane has been rechristened York Place,—and now we are back in Buckingham Street.