The new quarter soon had famous tenants. John Evelyn lived for a year in Villiers Street, and forty years later Sir Richard Steele had a house there. No. 14, Buckingham Street, has been much remodelled since Samuel Pepys lived there and walked down the steps of the water gate on his way to visit his friend Mr. Cole in Brentford. There is a tablet on the house to tell the passer-by that the Earl of Oxford, William Etty and Clarkson Stanfield, the marine painter, also lived here.
The house opposite looks far more modern, but within the very new outer walls of the offices of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses are preserved much of the exquisite carving, ceiling paintings, and elaborate stucco work that belong to the time when Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias, came over to England in 1698 and lodged in these very rooms. David Hume, Rousseau, Fielding and Black all lived at No. 15, now incorporated in No. 16, but the Dickens lover will ignore these famous names and only remember that the rooms at the top of the house are the very ones taken by Miss Betsy Trotwood for David Copperfield.
With the exception perhaps of that Shah of Persia who spent a happy holiday in England in the reign of the late Queen Victoria, I suppose we never had a more eccentric royal visitor than Peter the Great. No doubt that is the reason why the memories of his brief stay here still seem to cling about so many parts of London. This strange being, half-barbarian, half-genius, had great ambitions and achieved them. As Voltaire says: “He gave a polish to his people and was himself a savage; he taught them the art of war, of which he was himself ignorant; inspired by the sight of a small boat on the river Moskwa, he erected a powerful fleet and made himself an expert and active shipwright, pilot, sailor and commander; he changed the manners, customs and laws of the Russians, and lives in their memory as the father of his country.”
Ships and shipbuilding were his passion. He went to Holland and worked in the yards there as a mechanic, calling himself Pieter Timmermann, until he had mastered the manual part of his craft. Then he came to England to study the theory of shipbuilding. King William III. placed the house in Buckingham Street, so conveniently close to the river, at his disposal, and invited him to Court when he felt inclined. But Pieter hated crowds and ceremonies and preferred to spend his days in hard work and his evenings drinking and smoking with boon companions.
At the end of a month, finding himself too far from the dockyards, he moved to Deptford, and put up at Sayes Court, kindly lent to him by John Evelyn. He was a dreadful tenant. We all know how Evelyn loved his garden,—but the Czar and his rough crowd trampled the flower-beds and spoilt the grass-plots, and trundled wheelbarrows through the diarist’s pet holly-hedge for exercise. “There is a house full of people right nasty!” wrote Evelyn’s indignant servant to his master. They ate and drank enormously,—eight bottles of sack after dinner were nothing to Pieter, and listen to this for a breakfast menu for twenty-one persons: half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, three quarts of brandy, six quarts of mulled wine, seven dozen of eggs, with salad in proportion.
Much of his time, when he was not gathering
WATER GATE, YORK HOUSE
the vast store of information that he afterwards used to such excellent advantage, the Czar spent sailing on the river, and in the evening he would repair with favoured members of his suite to a public-house in Great Tower Street. The old tavern has been rebuilt, but the name “The Czar of Muscovy,” and later “The Czar’s Head,” that it adopted as a compliment to its imperial visitor, is there to this day, and you may see it close to the city merchant’s house at No. 34 that is noticed in another chapter.