In May 1685 that consummate scoundrel Titus Oates came to the pillory at Charing Cross. He had been condemned to pay a thousand marks fine, to be stripped of his gown, to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn, from Aldgate to Newgate, and to stand in the pillory at the Royal Exchange and before Westminster Hall. He was also condemned to stand one hour in the pillory at Charing Cross every 10th of August, and there an eye-witness describes seeing him in 1688.[377]
In 1666 and 1667 an Italian puppet-player set up his booth at Charing Cross, and there and then probably introduced “Punch and Judy” into England. He paid a small rent to the overseers of St. Martin’s parish, and is called in their books “Punchinello.” In 1668 we learn that a Mr. Devone erected a small playhouse in the same place.[378]
There is still extant a song written to ridicule the long delay in setting up the king’s statue, and it contains an allusion to “Punch”—
“What can the mistry be, why Charing Cross
These five months continues still blinded with board?
Dear Wheeler, impart—wee are all att a loss,
Unless Punchinello is to be restored.”[379]
The royal statue at Charing Cross is the work of Hubert Le Sœur, a Frenchman and a pupil of the famous John of Bologna, the sculptor of the “Rape of the Sabines” in the Loggia at Florence. Le Sœur’s copy of the “Fighting Gladiator,” which is praised by Peacham in his “Compleat Gentleman,” once at the head of the canal in St. James’s Park, is now at Hampton Court. Le Sœur also executed the monuments of Sir George Villiers, and Sir Thomas Richardson the judge, in Westminster Abbey.
The original contract for the brazen equestrian statue, a foot larger than life, is dated 1630. The sculptor was to receive £600. The agreement was drawn up by Sir Balthasar Gerbier for the purchaser, the Lord High Treasurer Weston. Yet the existing statue was not cast till 1633, and the above-mentioned agreement speaks of it as to be erected in the Lord Treasurer’s garden at Roehampton; so that the agreement may not refer to the same work, although it certainly specifies that the sculptor shall “take advice of his Maj. riders of greate horses, as well for the shape of the horse and action as for the graceful shape and action of his Maj. figure on the same.”[380]
The present statue was cast in 1633, on a piece of ground near the church in Covent Garden, and not being actually erected when the Civil War broke out, it was sold by the Parliament to John Rivet, a brazier, living at “the Dial, near Holburn Conduit,” with strict orders to break it up. But the man, being a shrewd Royalist, produced some fragments of old brass, and hid the statue underground till the Restoration. Rivet refusing to deliver up the statue after Charles’s return, a replevin was served upon him to compel its surrender. The dispute, however, lasted many years, and he probably pleaded compensation. The statue was erected in its present position about 1674, by an order from the Earl of Danby, afterwards Duke of Leeds. Le Sœur died, it is supposed, before the statue was erected.
Horace Walpole, who praises the “commanding grace of the figure,” and the “exquisite form of the horse,”[381] incorrectly says, “The statue was made at the expense of the family of Howard, Lord Arundel, who have still the receipt to show by whom and for whom it was cast.”
There is still extant a very rare large sheet print of the statue, engraved in the manner and time of Faithorne, but without name or date. The inscription beneath it describes the statue as almost ten feet high, and as “preserved underground,” with great hazard, charge, and care, by John Rivet, a brazier.[382]
John Rivet may have been a patriot, but he was certainly a shrewd one. To secure his concealed treasure he had manufactured a large quantity of brass handles for knives and forks, and advertised them as being forged from the destroyed statue. They sold well; the Royalists bought them as sad and precious relics; the Puritans as mementos of their triumph. He doubled his prices, and still his shop was crowded with eager customers, so that in a short time he realised a considerable fortune.[383]