"Horne Tooke," says Mr Smith, "in his Diversions of Purley, derives the word Charing from the Saxon Charan, to turn; and the situation of the original village, on the bend or turning of the Thames, gives probability to this etymology." Every body knows that Charing, now so central a point, was once a little hamlet on the rural high-road between London and Westminster, and that the "Cross" was added to it by Edward the First, who, when escorting his wife's remains from Lincolnshire to Westminster Abbey, erected one at each place where the beloved corpse rested. The first cross, which was of wood, and probably of rude enough manufacture, gave way to one of stone, designed by Cavalini. About the middle of the seventeenth century, that period of puritanical intolerance, this was removed by order of the Commons' House, an order which the royalists took care to ridicule by song and lampoon. According to Lilly the astrologer and quack, the workmen were three months pulling it down, and some of the stones were used for the pavement before Whitehall. Others were made into knife-handles, and Lilly saw some of them which were polished and looked like marble. Those were days in which kingly memorials found as little favour as popish emblems; and after the death of Charles the First, the statue that now stands at Charing Cross, and which had been cast by Le Sueur in 1633 for the Earl of Arundel, was sold and ordered to be broken up. It was bought by one Rivet, a brazier, who, instead of breaking, buried it. This did not prevent the ingenious mechanic from making a large and immediate profit by the effigy of the martyred monarch; for he melted down old brass into knife and fork-handles, and sold them as proceeding from the King's statue. Roundheads and cavaliers all flocked to buy; the former desiring a trophy of their triumph, the latter eager to possess a memento of their lamented sovereign. In 1678, £70,000 was voted by Parliament for the obsequies of Charles I., and for a monument to his memory, and with a portion of this sum, how large a one is not known, the statue was repurchased.
The historian of the streets and houses of a great and ancient city, has, in many ways, a most difficult task to perform. Not only must he read much, observe closely, and diligently inquire, display ingenuity in deduction and judgment in selection, but he must be steadfast to resist temptation. For, assuredly, to the lover of antiquarian and historical lore, the temptation is immense, whilst culling materials from quaint old diaries, black-letter pamphlets, and venerable newspapers, to expatiate and extract at a length wholly inconsistent with the necessary limits of his work. Some writers are at pains to dilate their matter—his chief care must be to compress. What would fairly fill a sheet must be packed into a page—the pith and substance of a volume must be squeezed into a chapter. The diligent compiler should not be slightly considered by the creative and aspiring genius. Like the bee, he forms his small, rich store, from the fragrance of a thousand flowers—adopting the sweet, rejecting the nauseous and insipid. Nor must he dwell too long on any pet and particular blossom, lest what would please in due proportion should cloy by too large an admixture. To vary the metaphor, the writer of such a work as this Antiquarian Ramble, should be a sort of literary Soyer, mixing his materials so skilfully that the flavour of each is preserved, whilst not one unduly predominates. He must not prance off on a hobby, whether architectural, historical, social, or romantic, but relieve his cattle and his readers by jumping lightly and frequently from one saddle to another.
How many books might be written upon the themes briefly glanced at in Mr Smith's book! Let us take, for instance, the places of public executions in London. Charing Cross was for centuries one of them, and its pillory was the most illustrious amongst the many that formerly graced the capital—illustrious by reason of the remarkable evil-doers who underwent ignominy in its wooden and unfriendly embrace. The notorious Titus Oates, and Parsons, the chief contriver of the Cock-Lane Ghost, were exposed in it. To the rough treatment which, in former days, sometimes succeeded exposure in the pillory, the following paragraph, from the Daily Advertiser of the 11th June 1731, abundantly testifies:—"Yesterday Japhet Crook, alias Sir Peter Stranger, stood on the pillory for the space of one hour; after which he was seated in an elbow-chair, and the common hangman cut both his ears off with an incision knife, and showed them to the spectators, afterwards delivered them to Mr Watson, a sheriff's officer; then slit both his nostrils with a pair of scissors, and sear'd them with a hot iron, pursuant to his sentence. He had a surgeon to attend him to the pillory, who immediately applied things necessary to prevent the effusion of blood. He underwent it all with undaunted courage; afterwards went to the Ship tavern at Charing Cross, where he stayed some time; then was carried to the King's Bench Prison, to be confined there for life. During the time he was on the pillory he laughed, and denied the fact to the last." Petty punishments these, although barbarous enough, inflicted for paltry crimes upon mean malefactors. Criminals of a far higher grade had, previously to that, paid the penalty of their offences at the Cross of Charing. Hugh Peters, Cromwell's chaplain, was there hung, as were Scrope, Jones, Harrison, and others of the king-killers. Long had been their impunity; but vengeance at last overtook them. To the end they showed the stern fanatical resolution of Oliver's iron followers. "Where is your Good Old Cause?" cried a scoffer to Harrison, as he was led to the scaffold. "Here!" he replied, clapping hand on breast; "I go to seal it with my blood." At the foot of the ladder, which he approached with undaunted mien, his limbs were observed to tremble, and some amongst the mob made a mockery of this weakness. "I judge," said Harrison, "that some do think I am afraid to die, by the shaking I have in my hands and knees. I tell you NO! but it is by reason of much blood that I have lost in the wars, and many wounds I have received in my body, which caused this shaking and weakness in my nerves." And he spoke further, and told the populace how he gloried in that he had done, and how, had he ten thousand lives, he would cheerfully lay them down in the same cause. "After he was hanged, a horrible scene took place. In conformity to the barbarous sentence then, and for many years afterwards, executed upon persons convicted of treason, he was cut down alive and stripped, his belly was cut open, his bowels taken out and burned before his eyes. Harrison, in the madness of his agony, rose up wildly, it is said, and gave the executioner a box on the ear, and then fell down insensible. It was the last effort of matter over mind, and for the time it conquered." The other regicides died with the same firmness and contempt of death. "Their grave and graceful demeanour," says the account in the state trials, "accompanied with courage and cheerfulness, caused great admiration and compassion in the spectators." So much so, and so strong was the sympathy excited, that the government gave orders that no more of them should be executed in the heart of London. Accordingly the remainder suffered at Tyburn.
Upon the old Westminster market-place a most barbarous event occurred in the time of that tyrannical, acetous old virgin, Queen Bess, who assuredly owes her renown and the sort of halo of respect that surrounds her memory, far less to any good qualities of her own, than to the galaxy of great men who flourished during her reign. The glory that encircles her brow is formed of such stars as Cecil, Burleigh and Bacon, Drake and Raleigh, Spencer, Shakspeare, and Sydney. Touching this barbarity, however, enacted by order of good Queen Bess. At the mature age of forty-eight, her majesty took it into her very ordinary-looking old head to negotiate a marriage with the Duke of Anjou. Commissioners came from France to discuss the interesting subject, and were entertained by pageants and tournaments, in which Elizabeth enacted the Queen of Beauty; and subsequently the duke came over himself, as a private gentleman, to pay his court to the last of the Tudors. The duke being a papist, the proposed alliance was very unpopular in England, and one John Stubbs, a barrister of Lincoln's-Inn, wrote a pamphlet against it, entitled, "The Discoverye of a gaping gulphe, whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banns, by letting her Majestye see the sin and punishment thereof." Certain expressions in this imprudent publication greatly angered the Queen; Stubbs and his servant, Page, were brought to trial, and condemned to lose their right hands. This cruel and unusual sentence was carried into effect on the market-place at Westminster, and witnessed by Camden, who gives an account of it. Both sufferers behaved with great fortitude and courage. Their hands were cut off with a butcher's cleaver and mallet, and as soon as Stubbs had lost his, he pulled off his cap with his left, waved it in the air, and cried—"God save the Queen!" He then fainted away. It took two blows to sever Page's hand, but he flinched not, and pointing to the block where it lay, he exclaimed—"I have left there the hand of a true Englishman!" And so he went from the scaffold, says the account, "stoutlie and with great courage."
Amongst spots of sanguinary notoriety, Smithfield, of course, stands prominent. The majority of the two hundred and seventy-seven persons burned for heresy during Mary's short reign, suffered there; and here also, upon two occasions, the horrible punishment of boiling to death, formerly inflicted on poisoners, was witnessed. In France this was the punishment of coiners, and there is still a street at Paris known as the Rue de l'Echaudé. In Stow's Annals it is recorded, that on the fifth of April 1531, "one Richard Rose, a cook, was boiled in Smithfield for poisoning of divers persons, to the number of sixteen or more." Two only of the sixteen died, but the others were never restored to health. If any thing could reconcile us to torture, as a punishment to be inflicted by man on his offending brother, it is such a crime as this.
If the punishments of our ancestors were cruel, if trials were sometimes over hasty, and small offences often too severely chastised, on the other hand, culprits formerly had facilities of escape now refused to them. The right of sanctuary was enjoyed by various districts and buildings in London. Pennant and many other writers have stigmatised this practice as absurd; Mr Smith defends it upon very reasonable grounds. "In times when every man went armed, when feuds were of hourly occurrence in the streets, when the age had not yet learned the true superiority of right over might, and when private revenge too often usurped the functions of justice, it was essential that there should be places whither the homicide might flee, and find refuge and protection until the violence of angry passions had subsided, and there was a chance of a fair trial for him." Not all sanctuaries, however, gave protection to the murderer, at least in later times. Whitefriars, for instance, once a refuge for all criminals, except traitors, afforded shelter, after the fifteenth century, to debtors only. In 1697 this sanctuary was abolished entirely, at the same time with a dozen others. It is not well ascertained how it acquired the slang name of Alsatia, which is first found in a play of Shadwell's, The Squire of Alsatia. Immortalised by the genius of Scott, no sanctuary will longer be remembered than Whitefriars. It was one of the largest; many others of the privileged districts being limited to a court or alley, a few houses or a church. Thus Ram Alley and Mitre Court in Fleet Street, and Baldwin's Gardens in Gray's Inn Lane, were amongst these refugees of roguery and crime. Whitefriars was much resorted to by poets and players, dancing and fencing masters, and persons of the like vagabond and uncertain professions. The poets and players were attracted by the vicinity of the theatre in Dorset Gardens, built after the fire of London, by Sir Christopher Wren, upon the site of Dorset House, the residence of the Sackvilles. Here Sir William Davenant's company of comedians—the Duke of York's servants, as they were called—performed for a considerable time. It appears, however, that even before the great fire, there was a theatre in that neighbourhood. Malone, in his Prologomena to Shakspeare, quotes a memorandum from the manuscript book of Sir Henry Herbert, master of the revels to King Charles I. It runs thus:—"I committed Cromes, a broker in Long Lane, the 16th of February 1634, to the Marshalsey, for lending a church robe with the name of Jesus upon it to the players in Salisbury Court, to represent a Flamen, a priest of the heathens. Upon his petition of submission and acknowledgement of his faults, I released him the 17th of February 1634."
The ancient sanctuary at Westminster is of historical and Shaksperian celebrity, as the place where Elizabeth Grey, Queen of Edward the Fourth, took refuge, when Warwick the king-maker marched to London to dethrone her husband, and set Henry the Sixth on the throne. It was a stone church, built in the form of a cross, and so strongly, that its demolition, in 1750, was a matter of great difficulty. The precinct of St Martin's-le-Grand was also sanctuary. Many curious particulars respecting it are to be found in Kempe's Historical Notices of the Collegiate Church, or Royal Free Chapel and Sanctuary of St Martin's-le-Grand, London, published in 1825. In the reign of Henry the Fifth, this right of sanctuary gave rise to a great dispute between the Dean of St Martin's and the city authorities. "A soldier, confined in Newgate, was on his way to Guildhall, in charge of an officer of the city, when on passing the south gate of St Martin's, opposite to Newgate Street, five of his comrades rushed out of Panyer Alley, with daggers drawn, rescued him, and fled with him to the holy ground." The sheriff had the sanctuary forced, and sent rescued and rescuers to Newgate. The Dean of St Martin's, indignant at this violation of privilege, complained to the king, who ordered the prisoners to be liberated. Thereat the citizens, ever sticklers for their rights, demurred, and at last it was made a Star-Chamber matter. The dean pleaded his own cause, and that right skilfully and wittily. He denied that the chapel of St Martin's formed any part of the city of London, as claimed by the corporation; quoted a statute of Edward III. constituting St Martin's and Westminster Abbey places of privilege for treason, felony, and debt; and mentioned the curious fact, that "when the King's justices held their sittings in St Martin's Gate, for the trial of prisoners for treason or felony, the accused were placed before them, on the other side of the street, and carefully guarded from advancing forward; for if they ever passed the water-channel which divided the middle of the street, they might claim the saving franchise of the sacred precinct, and the proceedings against them would be immediately annulled." The dean also expressed his wonder that the citizens of London should be the men to impugn his church's liberties, since more than three hundred worshipful members of the corporation had within a few years been glad to claim its privilege. The Star-Chamber decided against the city, and the prisoners were restored to sanctuary. The Savoy was another sanctuary; and it was the custom of the inhabitants to tar and feather those who ventured to follow their debtors thither.
In the theatrical district of London, Mr Smith lingers long and fondly; for there each house, almost every brick, is rich in reminiscences, not only of players and playhouses, but of wits, poets, and artists. In the burial-ground of St Paul's, Covent-Garden, repose not a few of those who in their lifetime inhabited or frequented the neighbourhood. There lies the author of Hudibras. "Mr Longueville, of the Temple, Butler's steady friend, and who mainly supported him in his latter days, when the ungrateful Stuart upon the throne, whose cause he had so greatly served, had deserted him, was anxious to have buried the poet in Westminster Abbey. He solicited for that purpose the contributions of those wealthy persons, his friends, whom he had heard speak admiringly of Butler's genius, and respectfully of his character, but none would contribute, although he offered to head the list with a considerable sum." So poor Butler was buried in Covent-Garden, privately but decently. He is in good company. Sir Peter Lely, the painter of dames, the man who seemed created on purpose to limn the languishing and voluptuous beauties of Charles the Second's court, is also buried in St Paul's; as are also Wycherley and Southerne, the dramatists; Haines and Macklin, the comedians; Arne, the musician; Strange, the engraver; and Walcot, alias Peter Pindar. Sir Peter Lely lived in Covent-Garden, in very great style. "The original name of the family was Vandervaes; but Sir Peter's father, a gallant fellow, and an officer in the army, having been born at a perfumer's shop, the sign of the Lily, was commonly known by the name of Captain Lily, a name which his son thought to be more euphonious to English ears than Vandervaes, and which he retained when he settled here, slightly altering the spelling." Wycherley, a dandy and a courtier, as well as an author, had lodgings in Bow Street, where Charles II. once visited him when he was ill, and gave him five hundred pounds to go a journey to the south of France for the benefit of his health. When he afterwards married the Countess of Drogheda, a young, rich, and beautiful widow, she went to live with him in Bow Street. She was very jealous, and when he went over to the "Cock" tavern, opposite to his house, he was obliged to make the drawer open the windows, that his lady might see there was no woman in the company. This "Cock" tavern was the great resort of the rakes and mohocks of that day; of Buckhurst, Sedley, Killigrew, and others of the same kidney. In fact, Bow Street was then the Bond Street of London; and the "Cock," its "Long's" or "Clarendon." Dryden, in an epilogue, talks of the "Bow Street beaux," and several contemporary writers have similar allusions. Like most places where the rich congregate, this fashionable quarter was a fine field for the ingenuity of pick-pockets, and especially of wig and sword-stealers, a class of thieves that appeared with full-bottomed periwigs and silver-hilted rapiers. In those days, to keep a man's head decently covered, cost nearly as much as it now does to fill his belly and clothe his back. Wigs were sometimes of the value of forty or fifty pounds. Ten or fifteen pounds was an exceeding "low figure" for these modish incumbrances. Out of respect to such costly head-dress, hats were never put on, but carried under the arm. The wig-stealers could demand no more. Mr Smith quotes a passage from Gay, describing their manœuvres:—
"Nor is thy flaxen wig with safety worn:
High on the shoulder, in a basket borne,
Lurks the sly boy, whose hand, to rapine bred,
Plucks off the curling honours of thy head."
Will's coffeehouse was in Bow Street, and "being the grand resort of wits and critics, it is not surprising," says Mr Smith, "that it should become also the headquarters of envy, slander, and detraction." There was then a lack of printed vehicles for the venting of the evil passions of rival literati; lampoons were circulated in manuscript, and read at Will's. As the acknowledgment of the authorship might sometimes have had disagreeable consequences for the author, a fellow of the name of Julian, who styled himself "Secretary to the Muses," became the mouthpiece of libeller and satirist. He read aloud in the coffee-room the pasquinades that were brought to him, and distributed written copies to all who desired them. Concerning this base fellow, Sir Walter Scott gives some curious particulars in his edition of Dryden's works. There is no record of cudgelings bestowed upon Julian, though it is presumed that he did not escape them. "He is described," says Malone, "as a very drunken fellow, and at one time was confined for a libel." Dryden was a great sufferer from these violent and slanderous attacks—a sufferer, indeed, in more senses than one; for, besides being himself made the subject of venomous lampoons, he was suspected unjustly of having written one, and was waylaid and beaten on his way from Will's to his house in Gerrard Street. A reward of fifty pounds was offered for the apprehension of his assailants, but they remained undiscovered. Lord Rochester was their employer: Lord Mulgrave the real author of the libel.