There are many memories of Whitehall on which we might enlarge; scenes in the later life of Henry VIII.; scenes in the Court of Queen Mary; tilts, feasts, and entertainments by Queen Elizabeth; the death of Charles; the occupation by Cromwell; the mistresses of Charles the Deplorable—with a great many more. These, however, belong to the things already narrated. I have endeavored to recall certain associations which have hitherto belonged to the Book of the Things Left Out; and among them there are none so pleasing and so characteristic as the Masque in the reign of James I.
Now there is nothing left of Elizabeth’s Palace at all; of Charles’s Palace, only the latest and last construction, the Banqueting Hall. When the fires of 1691 and 1697 swept all away except this building, there perished a collection of courts and houses for the most part dingy, without the picturesque appearance of the old Palace, which, if it was crowded and huddled together, was full of lovely mediæval towers, gables, and carved work. Whitehall as a building was without dignity and without nobility. Yet one wishes that it had remained to the present day. Hampton Court, as I have said above, remains to show the world what Whitehall Palace was like.
William III. talked of rebuilding the place; but he died. Queen Anne took up her residence in St. James’s. And Whitehall Palace vanished.
CHAPTER IX.
THE CITY.
In a certain special sense, however, the House of Commons did belong to the City of Westminster for a long time. A great many of the country members lodged in the narrow streets round the Abbey. The reason is plain: there were no streets or houses in the meadows lying north and west of the Houses of Parliament; either the members must lodge in the City of London and take boat for St. Stephen’s, or they must lodge in Westminster itself. It is stated by a writer of the last century that the principal means of support for the people of Westminster were the lodging and entertainment of the members. The monks were gone; Sanctuary was gone; the Court was gone; but the members remained, and so the taverns remained, too, and the ancient reputation of Westminster as a thirsty city was happily uninjured.
In another way Westminster created for itself a new distinction. As a borough it became notorious for the turbulence and the violence of the elections. Its central position, the King’s House always lying within its boundaries, the City of London its near neighbor, naturally caused an election at Westminster to attract more attention than an election at Oxford, say, or Winchester. Again, the electors of Westminster were not, probably, fiercer partisans than those of any other place, nor were their candidates always of greater importance; yet it is certain that for downright bludgeon rowdiness and riot, the rabble at Westminster, when it turned out at election time, was equaled by few towns, and surpassed by none.
Let us observe one point, which is instructive: the rabble had no votes; the butchers, those patriotic thinkers, who paraded the streets with clubs to the music of marrow-bones and cleavers; the chairmen, equal patriots of opposite convictions, who marched to the Way of War and the breaking of heads with their poles—formidable as pike or spear; the jolly sailors, convinced as to the foundations of order, who came along with bludgeons, thirsting for the display of their political principles—none of these brave fellows had any vote. Yet the share they took, the part they played, the influence they exercised in every election, cannot be disputed. The vote, you see, about which nowadays we make such a fuss, is by no means everything; in those days one stout fellow with a cudgel at the bottom of the steps of the hustings might be worth to his party fifty votes a day; he might represent as many voters sent home discouraged, or even persuaded, by a broken head, to a radical change of political principles.