CHAPTER IV
UNDER THE COMMONWEALTH
As soon as the death of Charles I. upon the scaffold under the windows of Whitehall Banqueting House left the Regicides in undisputed possession of the Royal lands, new difficulties arose.
No one knew what to do with them. Hyde Park entered upon a period of unexampled vicissitude. No doubt the sterner section of the Puritans, who had now gained the upper hand, looked upon all the gallantries and follies of which the Park had been a centre as so much devilment, and would gladly have seen the place swept away.
It was a time when bartering was keen, and money sorely needed for the service of the State. The spacious Park grounds must have been a tempting bait to offer for sale. On the other hand, a numerous body of the citizens would have been quite content to seize the Royal Parks for their own unrestricted use, and were strongly adverse to their being handed over for enclosure by the farmer or for destruction by the builder.
For the moment, at least, the parks were saved. About three months after the Royal tragedy the Council took the whole matter under their consideration, with the result that the record of their proceedings contains the following important decision:
“To report to the House that the Council think Whitehall House, St. James’s Park, St. James’s House, Somerset House, Hampton Court, and the Home Park, Theobalds, and the Park, Windsor, and the Little Park next the House, Greenwich House and Park, and Hyde Park, ought to be kept for the public use of the Commonwealth, and not sold.”
The Parliament, however, undertook the care of its new acquisitions with bad grace. It was continually selling portions of its patrimony, and where sales could not be effected it freely destroyed. Nothing seems to have been done for Hyde Park while its ultimate fate remained in suspense; meanwhile the populace used it for their own amusement. Gradually the cover for game became less good as the invasion extended. New areas were converted into grass lands.
The Park lost for ever its characteristics as a game preserve, which for so long it had retained.
Wars and alarms continued to be the public state. Soon great preparations were made for Cromwell’s departure for Ireland, and a grant was given to William Yarvell, a carriage master, to put all the horses provided for the campaign which could not be accommodated in Marylebone into Hyde Park to graze. Again, in the following year, a notice appears in the State Papers that Colonel Hammond received two hundred horses, and was told to turn them out to grass, but this permission was withdrawn the same year.