The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events

by Leigh Hunt

ST. JAMES'S PALACE. 1650.

The Tilt Yard, as its name implies, was the chief scene of knightly amusement in the reigns of the Tudors. Here Henry jousted till he grew too fat; and here Elizabeth sat at the receipt of chivalrous adulation. The spot is full of life and colour in the eyes of one's imagination, with heralds and coats of arms, plumed champions, caparisoned steeds, and courts looking on from draperied galleries. The present tranquil exercises on parade may be considered as a remnant of the old military shows. But the people had no admittance within the court grounds, except on favour.

The new park seems to have remained strictly enclosed as a nursery for game till the period of the civil wars of the Commonwealth. A new palace by Inigo Jones was intended to overlook it at Whitehall, of which only the Banqueting House was erected. Charles the First was brought to this house across the Park, from St. James's Palace, in order to suffer death. Cromwell is then discerned in the park grounds taking the air in a sedan; but its popular history does not commence till the Restoration, when Charles the Second, who seems not to have known what to do with the quantity of life and animal spirits that had been suppressed during his exile, took to improving and enjoying it with great vivacity. The walks with him became real walks, for he was a great pedestrian. He had got the habit, perhaps, when he could not afford a horse. He let the people in to see him feed his ducks in the canal, a branch of which, called Duck Island, he pleasantly erected into a "Government" for the French wit and refugee, St. Evremond. He made an aviary on the south-east side of the park, thence called Birdcage Walk; turned the north side into a mall for the enjoyment of the pastimes so called, in which he excelled; introduced skating from Holland on the canal and Rosamond's Pond (which was another branch of it on the south-west); had mistresses in lodgings east and west of him (Cleveland at Whitehall and Nell Gwyn in Pall Mall); and saw, in the course of his reign, new streets rising and old places of entertainment flourishing in other quarters of his favourite district; Spring Gardens (which became famous for the tavern called "Lockett's"), at Charing Cross, and the Mulberry Gardens and noblemen's mansions between Pimlico and Piccadilly. It has been a question whether the site of the Mulberry Gardens was on the spot now occupied by Arlington Street, or on that of the Queen's Palace. We suspect it is difficult to say which, and that they extended along the whole space between the two. Particular sites are too often confounded with places near them; and houses are said to displace one another, which only occupied successive neighbourhoods. By some writers, for instance, the sites of Arlington and Old Buckingham Houses are considered as identical, while others represent them in one another's vicinity. At all events, the Mulberry Gardens appear to have included the site of both those houses. Ladies came there in masks to eat syllabubs, and converse with their lovers. Sedley made them the scene of a play. The whole park, indeed, in Charles's reign, may be said to have been the scene of a play, especially towards evening, when the meetings took place which Sedley and Etherege dramatised. In the morning all was duck-feeding and dog-playing and playing at mall; in the evening all intrigue and assignation. At one time Waller is admiring the King's masterly use of the small stick; at another Pepys is asking questions of the park-keepers, or transported at sight of the court ladies on horseback; at another Evelyn is horrified (though he seems to have sought occasions for such horrors) at overhearing a "very familiar discourse" between his Majesty and that "impudent comedian," Nelly Gwyn, who is standing at her garden-wall at the back of Pall Mall (near the present Marlborough House).

Matters in this respect mended, though not suddenly, at the Revolution. Whitehall Palace was then accidentally burnt down, and that of St. James's becomes one of the chief residences of the sovereign, which it remains till the reign of the present. Swift and Prior are now seen walking for their health in the park,—Swift to get thin, and Prior to get fat. The heroes and hungry debtors of the novelists (for the park was privileged from arrest) make their appearance, the former with their wives or friends, the latter sitting starving on the benches. Staid ladies have Sunday promenades under the eye of staid sovereigns. Something of a new license returns with the first and second Georges; but it comes from Germany, is discreet, and makes little impression. The greatest assignation we read of is an innocent one of Richardson with a Lady Bradshaigh, who is "mighty curious" to know what sort of man he is, and accordingly moves him to describe himself in the formal terms of an advertisement, in order that he may be recognised when she meets him. Goldsmith's Beau Tibbs, who "blasts himself with an air of vivacity" at seeing "nobody in town," is now the pleasantest fellow we encounter in the park for many a day. The ducks, and the dogs, and the birdcages, and Rosamond's Pond, dismal for drowning lovers, have long vanished; and the place begins to look as it used to do forty years ago. The gayest entertainment in it is "the soldiers," with their bands of music; and the most sensual pleasure a glass of milk from the cow. A mad woman (Margaret Nicholson) makes a sensation, by attempting to stab George the Third at the palace door; but all is quiet again, sedate and orderly, even when court-days bring together a crowd of beauties. George the Fourth just lives long enough to turn Buckingham Palace into a toy, and the site of Carlton Gardens into something better. With his successors comes the greatest of all the park improvements—the conversion of the poor fields and canal into a public pleasure-ground and an ornamental piece of water. Upon this King Charles's ducks have returned, equally improved; and if it did but possess a good atmosphere, St. James's Park would now be as complete a place of recreation for the promenaders of its neighbourhood, as it is handsome and well-intended.

One of the most popular aspects of St. James's Park is that of a military and music-playing and milk-drinking spot. The milk-drinkings, and the bands of music, and the parades, are the same as they used to be in our boyish days; and, we were going to add, may they be immortal. But though it is good to make the best of war as long as war cannot be helped, and though music and gold lace, &c., are wonderful helps to that end, yet conscience will not allow us to blink all we know of a very different sort respecting battlefields and days after the battle. We say, therefore, may war turn out to be as mortal, and speedily so, as railroads and growing good-sense can make it; though in the meantime, and the more for that hope, we may be allowed to indulge ourselves as we did when children, in admiring the pretty figures which it cuts in this place—the harmlessness of its glitter and the transports of its beholders. Will anybody who has beheld it when a boy ever forget how his heart leaped within him when, having heard the music before he saw the musicians, he issued hastily from Whitehall on to the parade, and beheld the serene and stately regiment assembled before the colonel, the band playing some noble march, and the officers stepping forwards to the measure with their saluting swords? Will he ever forget the mystical dignity of the band-major, who made signs with his staff; the barbaric, and as it were, Othello-like height and lustre of the turbaned black who tossed the cymbals; the dapper juvenility of the drummers and fifers; and the astounding prematureness of the little boy who played on the triangle? Is it in the nature of human self-respect to forget how this little boy, dressed in a "right earnest" suit of regimentals, and with his hair as veritably powdered and plastered as the best, fetched those amazing strides by the side of Othello, which absolutely "kept up" with his lofty shanks, and made the schoolboy think the higher of his own nature for the possibility? Furthermore, will he ever forget how some regiment of horse used to come over the Park to Whitehall, in the midst of this parade, and pass the foot-soldiers with a sound of clustering magnificence and dancing trumpets? Will he ever forget how the foot then divided itself into companies, and turning about and deploying before the colonel, marched off in the opposite direction, carrying away the school-boy himself and the crowd of spectators with it; and so, now with the brisk drums and fifes, and now with the deeper glories of the band, marched gallantly off for the court-yard of the palace, where it again set up its music-book, and enchanted the crowd with Haydn or Mozart? What a strange mixture, too, was the crowd itself—boys and grown men, gentlemen, vagabonds, maid-servants—there they all went listening, idling, gazing on the ensign or the band-major, keeping pace with the march, and all of them more or less, particularly the maid-servants, doting on the "sogers." We, for one, confess to having drunk deep of the attraction, or the infection, or the balmy reconcilement (whichever the reader pleases to call it). Many a holiday morning have we hastened from our cloisters in the city to go and hear "the music in the park," delighted to make one in the motley crowd, and attending upon the last flourish of the hautboys and clarionets. There we first became acquainted with feelings which we afterwards put into verse (if the recollection be not thought an impertinence); and there, without knowing what it was called, or who it was that wrote it, we carried back with us to school the theme of a glorious composition, which afterwards became a favourite with opera-goers under the title of Non più andrai, the delightful march in Figaro. We suppose it is now, and has ever since been played there, to the martialisation of hundreds of little boys, and the puzzlement of philosophy. Everything in respect to military parade takes place, we believe, in the park just as it used to do, or with little variation. The objects also which you behold, if you look at the parade and its edifices, are the same. The Admiralty, the Treasury, the back of the Minister's house in Downing Street, and the back-front of the solid and not inappropriate building, called the Horse Guards, look as they did fifty years ago; and there also continue to stand the slender Egyptian piece of cannon, and the dumpy Spanish mortar, trophies of the late war with France. The inscriptions, however, on those triumphant memorials contain no account of the sums we are still paying for having waged it.

"The soldiers" and the "milk from the cow" do not at all clash in the minds of boyhood. The juvenile imagination ignores what it pleases, especially as its knowledge is not very great. It no more connects the idea of village massacre with guns and trumpets, than it supposes the fine scarlet coat capable of being ragged and dirty. Virgil may say something about ruined fields, and people compelled to fly for their lives; but this is only part of a "lesson," and the calamities but so many nouns and verbs. The maid-servants, and indeed the fair sex in general, till they become wives and mothers, enjoy the like happy exemption from ugly associations of ideas; and the syllabub is taken under the trees, with a delighted eye to the milk on one side, and the military show on the other.

The late Mr. West, the painter, was so pleased with this pastoral group of cows and milk-drinkers in the park, that he went out of the line of his art to make a picture of it.

Saint James's Palace was not much occupied by the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns. Their principal town residence was Whitehall. The first of the Stuarts may have intended to make St. James's the residence of the Princes of Wales; for he gave it his son Henry, who died there. We have spoken of this prince and his doubtful "promise" already. The best thing known of him is the astonishment he expressed at his father's keeping "such a bird" as Walter Raleigh locked up in a cage.

Charles the First spent the three last days of his life in this palace, occupying himself in devotion, and preparing to fall with dignity;—happy if he had but known how to value the dignity of truth, which would have saved him from the necessity. The Stuarts, unfortunate everywhere in proportion to the gravity of their pretensions, had their customary bad fortune in this palace; at least the male portion of them. James the Second's daughters, who got his throne, were born and married there; but here also was born his son, the first Pretender, whose mother's chamber being situate near some backstairs gave colour to the ridiculous story of his having been a spurious child smuggled into the palace in a warming pan; and here his unlucky and narrow-minded father partly resided when he per force invited his ouster and son-in-law William to take up his abode in it, and received in return notice to quit his throne. The old romantic Lord Craven, who was supposed to have been privately married to James the First's daughter, the luckless Queen of Bohemia, and who was thus destined to witness the whole of the troubles of the English dynasty of the Stuarts, happened to be on duty at St. James's when the Dutch troops were coming across the park to take possession of it. Agreeably to his chivalrous character, and to his habit of taking warlike steps to no purpose, the gallant veteran would have opposed their entrance; but his master forbade him; and he marched away, says Pennant, "with sullen dignity."

"Est-il-possible" got the house after James;—we mean his daughter Anne's husband, George of Denmark, who being no livelier a man than his father-in-law, made no other comment than these three words (Is it possible?) on the accounts given him by the poor King of every successive desertion from his cause. In due time the man of one remark followed the deserters; upon which James observed to one of the few friends left him, "Who do you think is gone now? Little Est-il-possible himself."