[212]. With reference to Lady Castlemaine it must be noted that Clarendon would allow nothing to pass the Great Seal in which she was named. He also opposed her appointment as Lady of the Bedchamber, and forbade his wife to visit her. (“Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In.” Wheatley.)
[213]. Chalmers’ Biographical Dictionary.
[214]. “Reign of Queen Anne.” Justin McCarthy.
[215]. Watford’s “Old and New London”; “The Ghosts of Piccadilly,” G. S. Street.
[216]. He also calls it “without hyperbole the best contrived, the most useful, graceful and magnificent house in England, and I except not Audley End, which, though larger and full of gaudy and barbarous ornament, does not gratify judicious spectatore.”
Rather later than the erection of Clarendon House, the City of London gave the Chancellor a lease of the Conduit Mead, which is now covered by New Bond Street and Brook Street, and from which Conduit Street takes its name.
The building of this magnificent palace, no doubt intended by Clarendon to be a home for his children’s children, excited a positive storm of wrath. The sale of Dunkirk had lately been completed, and the mob chose to believe that the house was built with Dutch money, though there is no proof that Clarendon ever received a penny. Pennant asserts boldly that the stones used in its erection had been intended for the rebuilding of old St Paul’s, long in a half-ruinous state, which work had been set on foot some time before the Great Fire made all such intentions abortive for the moment. Nicknames were freely bestowed. Holland House, in allusion to supposed bribes from the Dutch; Dunkirk House for the same reason; Tangier House, because the Chancellor had obtained the town of Tangier for England, and no one wanted it. His employment, during the Plague, of three hundred workmen on his building operations, though done with the best intentions, only raised another outcry.
In 1667, the unlucky year when the Dutch sailed up to Gravesend, a mob proceeded to break the windows of Clarendon House with the usual fatuous want of reason on such occasions, and setting up a gibbet before the gates, inscribed on it the words:
“Three sights to be seen:
Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren Queen.”