The old chapel is now pulled down, and a new and much handsomer one erected in its place; whilst the cemetery has been levelled, planted, pathed, and seated, in accordance with modern taste.

Continuing our walk, we come to dread Tyburn, with its fatal tree of which it was written:—

“Since Laws were made for ev’ry degree
To curb vice in others as well as me,
I wonder we ha’n’t better Company
Upon Tyburn Tree.
. . . . . . . . . .
In short, were Mankind their merits to have,
Could Justice mark out each particular knave,
Two-thirds the Creation would sing the last stave
Upon Tyburn Tree.”

It derives its etymology either from Twy bourne—Two brooks, or the united brooks; or else from Aye-bourne[60]—t’Aye bourne—which rises in Hampstead, and receiving nine other rills, crossed Oxford Street about Stratford Place, by the Lord Mayor’s Hunting Lodge, now Sedley Place, where conduits were built to receive water from it for the use of the City: which conduits were found in pretty fair repair in Aug., 1875. It ran by Lower Brook Street, which owes its name to it, as does also Hay (Aye) hill—Lansdowne Gardens, Half Moon Street, crossed Piccadilly, where it was spanned by a bridge, and thence into the Green Park, where it formed a pond. Running past Buckingham Palace, it divided and formed Thorney Island—or Westminster—one outfall turning the Abbey Mill.

Tyburn has been a place of execution for centuries, the earliest I can find being in “Roger de Wendover,” who mentions that, A.D. 1196, William Fitz-osbert, or Longbeard, was drawn through the City of London, by horses, to the gallows at Tyburn. We hear occasionally of executions there in the 14th and 15th centuries, and Perkin Warbeck was hanged there in 1499—as was also Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, in 1534—but I have no wish to chronicle the people who were here done to death for crime, and religious and political offences, except to mention that the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw, were exhumed, and on Jan. 30, 1661, dragged on sledges to Tyburn, where they were suspended till sunset on the “triple tree.”

That the shape of the Tyburn Gallows was triangular is proved by many quotations, one of which, from Shakespeare’s Loves Labour’s Lost (Act. iv. Sc. 3), will suffice:—

Biron.—Thou mak’st the triumviry, the corner cap of society,
The shape of love’s Tyburn, that hangs up simplicity.

There is a story that Queen Henrietta Maria did penance under the gallows at Tyburn in expiation of the blood of the martyrs who had suffered thereon. That it was a matter of public report there can be no doubt, as we may read in the “Reply of the Commissioners of his Majesty the King of Great Britain, to the proposition presented by Mons. le Maréschal de Bassompierre, Ambassador Extraordinary from his most Christian Majesty.”[61] “They (the Bishop of Mande and his priests) abused the influence which they had acquired over the tender and religious mind of her majesty, so far as to lead her a long way on foot, through a park, the gates of which had been expressly ordered by Count de Tilliers to be kept open, to go in devotion to a place (Tyburn) where it had been the custom to execute the most infamous malefactors and criminals of all sorts, exposed on the entrance of a high road; an act, not only of shame and mockery towards the queen, but of reproach and calumny of the king’s predecessors, of glorious memory, as accusing them of tyranny in having put to death innocent persons, whom these people look upon as martyrs, although, on the contrary, not one of them had been executed on account of religion, but for high treason. And it was this last act, above all, which provoked the royal resentment and anger of his Majesty beyond the bounds of his patience, which, until then, had enabled him to support all the rest; but he could now no longer endure to see in his house, and in his kingdom, people who, even in the person of his dearly beloved consort, had brought such a scandal upon his religion; and violated, in such a manner, the respect due to the sacred memory of so many great monarchs, his illustrious predecessors, upon whom the Pope had never attempted, nor had ever been able, to impose such a mark of indignity, under pretext of penitence, or submission due to his see.”

That Charles I. believed this story, there can be but little doubt, for, on July 12, 1626, he writes to his Ambassador in France: “I can no longer suffer those that I know to be the cause and fomenters of these humours, to be about my wife any longer, which I must do if it were but for one action they made my wife do; which is to make her go to Tyburn in devotion to pray, which action can have no greater invective made against it than the relation.”

Replying to the Commissioners, Bassompierre takes up the cudgels for the Queen, and denies the accusation thus: “The Queen of Great Britain, with the permission of the King, her husband, gained the jubilee at the Chapel of the Fathers of the Oratory at St. James’s (Saint Gemmes) with the devotion suitable to a great Princess, so well born, and so zealous for her religion—which devotions terminated with Vespers; and some time after the heat of the day having passed, she went for a walk in the Park of St. James’, and also in Hyde Park (Hipparc), which adjoins it, as she had, at other times, been accustomed to do, and frequently in the company of the King, her husband; but that she has done so in procession, that there have there been made any prayers, public or private, high or low—that she has approached the gallows within 50 paces—that she has been on her knees, holding a book of Hours or a Chaplet in her hands, is what those that impose these matters do not believe themselves.”