In closing the ghastly story of Tyburn Tree, it is interesting to note that The Times of 9th May 1860 printed a letter from Mr. A. J. B. Beresford-Hope, relating that outside the garden of Arklow House, at the extreme angle of Edgware Road, a pipe was being repaired, and many human bones were dug up, doubtless relics of the bodies buried near the Tyburn gallows. Earlier in the nineteenth century, when digging foundations for houses in Connaught Place, workmen had come on human remains, a whole cartload having been removed. Lady Battersea tells me no trace, whatever, of a burial place was found under their house opposite the Marble Arch when digging the drains about 1880.
In the later executions, the scaffold, the site of which had been changed, was a movable erection, consisting of two uprights and a cross beam. It was only put up on the morning of execution across the roadway, opposite the house at the corner of Upper Bryanston Street and the Edgware Road, wherein the gibbet was kept when not in use.
It is said that the timber of the famous gallows, beneath which so many hundreds—one might almost say thousands—of malefactors made a painful exit from this world, was sold to a carpenter, and used by him in making stands for beer-butts for the cellars of an alehouse hard by.
CHAPTER X
NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRAGMENTS
Meanwhile Hyde Park was the centre of a far wider evolution than that which has been already noticed in eighteenth-century London. A new era had dawned for Britain.
The power of colonisation—which to-day has attained the strength of Imperialism—had, after long infancy, developed into lusty youth clamouring for equal rights, for freedom, for independence.
Clive had fought and conquered at Plassey, Wolfe had won and died at Quebec. Wider issues were at stake, greater demands were made on English politicians, who were confronted by problems such as had never arisen in the world’s history.
In England itself the revival of literature continued, in spite of the thrust of the Westminster Gazette at the Macaronis. Brilliant orators, wily statesmen, long-headed, far-sighted diplomatists sprang to the front to devote their talents and their lives to these far-reaching questions.