Hugh Peters, on his Trial, tells us that he went to Westminster to find out some company to dinner with him, and having walked about an hour in Westminster Hall, and meeting none of his friends to dine with him, he went "to that place called Heaven, and dined there."
When Pride "purged" the Parliament, on Dec. 6, 1648, the forty-one he excepted were shut up for the night in the Hell tavern, kept by a Mr. Duke (Carlyle); and which Dugdale calls "their great victualling-house near Westminster Hall, where they kept them all night without any beds."
Pepys, in his Diary, thus notes his visit: "28 Jan. 1659-60. And so I returned and went to Heaven, where Ludlin and I dined." Six years later, at the time of the Restoration, four days before the King landed, in one of these taverns, Pepys spent the evening with Locke and Purcell, hearing a variety of brave Italian and Spanish songs, and a new canon of Locke's on the words, "Domine salvum fac Regem." "Here, out of the windows," he says, "it was a most pleasant sight to see the City, from one end to the other, with a glory about it, so high was the light of the bonfires, and thick round the City, and the bells rang everywhere."
After all, "Hell" may have been so named from its being a prison of the King's debtors, most probably a very bad one: it was also called the Constabulary. Its Wardenship was valued yearly at the sum of 11s., and Paradise at 4l.
Purgatory appears also to have been an ancient prison, the keys of which, attached to a leathern girdle, says Walcot's Westminster, are still preserved. Herein were kept the ducking-stools for scolds, who were placed in a chair fastened on an iron pivot to the end of a long pole, which was balanced at the middle upon a high trestle, thus allowing the culprit's body to be ducked in the Thames.
"BELLAMY'S KITCHEN."
In a pleasantly written book, entitled A Career in the Commons, we find this sketch of the singular apartment, in the vicinity of the (Old) House of Commons called "the Kitchen." "Mr. Bellamy's beer may be unexceptionable, and his chops and steaks may be unrivalled, but the legislators of England delight in eating a dinner in the place where it is cooked, and in the presence of the very fire where the beef hisses and the gravy runs! Bellamy's kitchen seems, in fact, a portion of the British Constitution. A foreigner, be he a Frenchman, American, or Dutchman, if introduced to the 'kitchen,' would stare with astonishment if you told him that in this plain apartment, with its immense fire, meatscreen, gridirons, and a small tub under the window for washing the glasses, the statesmen of England very often dine, and men, possessed of wealth untold, and with palaces of their own, in which luxury and splendour are visible in every part, are willing to leave their stately dining-halls and powdered attendants, to be waited upon, while eating a chop in Bellamy's kitchen, by two unpretending old women. Bellamy's kitchen, I repeat, is part and parcel of the British Constitution. Baronets who date from the Conquest, and squires of every degree, care nothing for the unassuming character of the 'kitchen,' if the steak be hot and good, if it can be quickly and conveniently dispatched, and the tinkle of the division-bell can be heard while the dinner proceeds. Call England a proud nation, forsooth! Say that the House of Commons is aristocratic! Both the nation and its representatives must be, and are, unquestionable patterns of republican humility, if all the pomp and circumstance of dining can be forgotten in Bellamy's kitchen!"[42]