These are the words of a living writer, and yet how much is changed. Cricket on the site of Westbourne Terrace seems almost as remote as the hundreds, aye, thousands, of hangings that took place near where the Marble Arch now stands. There stood Tyburn, probably the most gruesome, gory spot in the whole of the British Isles.
The brick wall has long since disappeared, and even the inner railings between the side-walks and the road have almost all gone.
Wisely Tyburn has been swept away by its later rulers. Not a vestige of the name survives to remind the passers-by that it once existed, except on the iron tablet which marks the site of the old turnpike gate, and bears the following inscription:
This iron plate is about 4 feet high, and is a little to the west of the clock-house at the Marble Arch, just opposite Edgware Road. So it was well within the last hundred years that Tyburn Gate disappeared.
Hyde Park, as a place for intrigue, strongly appealed to the dramatist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and has been immortalised by many poets. Ben Jonson speaks of it in the Prologue of The Staple News, and in The World in the Moon (1620). An old ballad in the Roxburgh Collection sings:
“Of all parts of England, Hyde Park hath the name
For coaches and horses and persons of Fame.”
Shirley, too, named one of his plays Hyde Park, and laid his plot within its boundaries. Pepys went to see the performance of the play, and formed a poor opinion of it. Other authors have written of the Park in this sense, as a background for dramatic tales of intrigue; such as Etherage in The Man of Mode (1676), Howard in The English Monsieur (1674), Southerne in The Maid’s Last Prayer (1693), Farquhar in The Constant Couple (1700), and Congreve in The Way of the World (1760).