No. 12. THE KING'S HEAD INN, SOUTHWARK.
12. The last of the Old King's Head (Water-colour).
This inn was originally the Pope's Head, and the name was changed at the time of the Reformation. In 1534 the Abbot of Waverley, whose town house was not far off, writes, apparently on business, that he will be "at the Pope's Head in Southwark." This was the very year of the separation of the Church of England from Papal headship. Eight years afterwards the house is marked in the Record Office map as the "Kynge's Hed." That the two were one and the same is proved by a deed of 1559, that belonged to the late Mr. G. Eliot Hodgkin, F.S.A., whose family at one time possessed the property. This deed is between John Gresham, uncle of Sir Richard and Lord Mayor in 1547, and John White, Lord Mayor in 1563, on the one side, and Thomas Cure, a notable inhabitant of Southwark, on the other; and the inn is here described as having been "formerly known as the Pope's Hed and now as le kynge's hed abutting on the highway called Longe Southwarke." In 1588 the house came into the possession of the Humble family. John Taylor mentions it as frequented by carriers in 1637; ten years afterwards it belonged to Humble, Lord Ward. A seventeenth-century trade token which was issued from here, reads thus:—
O.—AT . THE . KINGS . HEAD . IN = Bust of Henry VIII.
R.—SOUTHWARKE . GROCER = W. P.
The King's Head was one of the inns burnt down in the fire of 1676, but was rebuilt immediately afterwards. The last fragment of the structure then erected was pulled down in January, 1885. The back of it is shown on the right of drawing No. 3, as the building actually touched the White Hart Inn Yard. Mr. John Timbs, in his "Curiosities of London," remarks that within his recollection the sign was a well-painted half-length of Henry VIII.
(1418 × 1058) D. 15-1896.