Earl of Bristol.—[p. 264.]
Digby, Earl of Bristol, whom Pepys accuses of losing King Charles his head by breaking off the treaty of Uxbridge, lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. His second daughter, Lady Ann, married the evil Earl of Sutherland. It was Bristol who was base enough to impeach Lord Clarendon for selling Dunkirk and making Charles marry a barren queen. Burnet describes the earl as having become a Roman Catholic in order to be qualified for serving under Don John in Flanders. He was an astrologer,[779] and had the impudence to tell the king he was in danger from his brother. He renounced his new religion openly at Wimbledon,[780] and then fled to France.
Wild House.—[p. 277.]
Wild House, Drury Lane, was formerly the town mansion of the Welds of Lulworth Castle. Short’s Gardens were so called from Dudley Short, Esq., who had a mansion here with fine gardens in the reign of Charles II. In Parker Street, Philip Parker, Esq., had a mansion in 1623.
Craven House, Drury Lane.—[p. 292.]
Pepys frequently mentions Lord Craven as attending the meetings at the Trinity House upon Admiralty business. The old veteran, whom he irreverently calls “a coxcomb,” complimented him on several occasions upon his popularity with the Duke of York. Pennant says that Lord Craven and the Duke of Albemarle “heroically stayed in town during the dreadful pestilence, and, at the hazard of their lives, preserved order in the midst of the terrors of the time.”[781] This fine old Don Quixote happened to be on duty at St. James’s when William’s Dutch troops were coming across the park to take possession. Lord Craven would have opposed their entrance, but his timid master forbidding him to resist, he marched away “with sullen dignity.” The date of the sale of the pest-houses should be 1722, not 1772.
Drury Lane.—[p. 299.]
In the Regency time, and before, Drury Lane was what the Haymarket is now. Oyster shops, low taverns, and singing-rooms of the worst description surrounded the theatre. One of the worst of these, even down to our own times, was “Jessop’s” (“The Finish”)—a great resort of low prize-fighters, gamblers, sporting men, swindlers, spendthrifts, and drunkards. “H.’s” (I veil the infamous name), described in a MS. of Horace Walpole, is now a small, dingy theatrical tailor’s, and in the besmirched back-shop shreds of gilding and smears of colour still show where Colonel Hanger knocked off the heads of champagne bottles, and afterwards, Lord Waterford and such “bloods” squandered their money and their health.
The Savage Club.—[p. 303.]
The Savage Club, which was started at the Crown Tavern in Drury Lane, and then removed to rooms next the Lyceum, and said to have been those once occupied by the Beef-steak Club, is now moored at Evans’s Hotel, Covent Garden. The name of the club has a duplex signification; it refers to Richard Savage the poet, and also to the Bohemian freedom of its members. It includes in its number no small share of the literary talent of the London newspaper and dramatic world.