Opening
OLD AND NEW LONDON.
OLD AND NEW
LONDON.
A NARRATIVE OF
ITS HISTORY, ITS PEOPLE, AND ITS PLACES.
Illustrated with Numerous Engravings
FROM THE MOST AUTHENTIC SOURCES.
VOL. I.
CASSELL, PETTER & GALPIN:
LONDON, PARIS & NEW YORK.
[Transcriber's Note: Although the Table of Contents is correct, the chapter heading for Chapter XLIII is used twice and Chapter XLVII missing with chapter headings offset by one in between. These have been corrected in this text document.]
I. ROMAN LONDON
Buried London--Our Early Relations--The Founder of London--A Distinguished Visitor at Romney Marsh--Cæsar re-visits the "Town on the Lake"--The Borders of Old London--Cæsar fails to make much out of the Britons--King Brown--The Derivation of the Name of London--The Queen of the Iceni--London Stone and London Roads--London's Earlier and Newer Walls--The Site of St. Paul's--Fabulous Claims to Idolatrous Renown--Existing Relics of Roman London--Treasures from the Bed of the Thames--What we Tread underfoot in London--A vast Field of Story 16
II. TEMPLE BAR
Temple Bar--The Golgotha of English Traitors--When Temple Bar was made of Wood--Historical Pageants at Temple Bar--The Associations of Temple Bar--Mischievous Processions through Temple Bar--The First Grim Trophy--Rye-House Plot Conspirators 22
III. FLEET STREET:--GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Frays in Fleet Street--Chaucer and the Friar--The Duchess of Gloucester doing Penance for Witchcraft--Riots between Law Students and Citizens--'Prentice Riots--Oates in the Pillory--Entertainments in Fleet Street--Shop Signs--Burning the Boot--Trial of Hardy--Queen Caroline's Funeral 32
IV. FLEET STREET (continued)
Dr. Johnson in Ambuscade at Temple Bar--The First Child--Dryden and Black Will--Rupert's Jewels--Telson's Bank--The Apollo Club at the "Devil"--"Old Sir Simon the King"--"Mull Sack"--Dr. Johnson's Supper to Mrs. Lennox--Will Waterproof at the "Cock"--The Duel at "Dick's Coffee House"--Lintot's Shop--Pope and Warburton--Lamb and the Albion--The Palace of Cardinal Wolsey--Mrs. Salmon's Waxwork--Isaak Walton--Praed's Bank--Murray and Byron--St. Dunstan's--Fleet Street Printers--Hoare's Bank and the "Golden Bottle"--The Real and Spurious "Mitre"--Hone's Trial--Cobbett's Shop--"Peele's Coffee House" 35
V. FLEET STREET (continued)
The "Green Dragon"--Tompion and Pinchbeck--The Record--St. Bride's and its Memories--Punch and his Contributors--The Dispatch--The Daily Telegraph--The "Globe Tavern" and Goldsmith--The Morning Advertiser--The Standard--The London Magazine--A Strange Story--Alderman Waithman--Brutus Billy--Hardham and his "37" 53
Chapter VI
FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--SHIRE LANE AND BELL YARD).
The Kit-Kat Club--The Toast for the Year--Little Lady Mary--Drunken John Sly--Garth's Patients--Club Removed to Barn Elms--Steele at the "Trumpet"--Rogues' Lane--Murder--Beggars' Haunts--Thieves' Dens--Coiners--Theodore Hook in Hemp's Sponging-house--Pope in Bell Yard--Minor Celebrities--Apollo Court 70
VII. FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--CHANCERY LANE)
The Asylum for Jewish Converts--The Rolls Chapel--Ancient Monuments--A Speaker Expelled for Bribery--"Remember Cæsar"--Trampling on a Master of the Rolls--Sir William Grant's Oddities--Sir John Leach--Funeral of Lord Gifford--Mrs. Clark and the Duke of York--Wolsey in his Pomp--Strafford--"Honest Isaak"--The Lord Keeper--Lady Fanshawe--Jack Randal--Serjeants' Inn--An Evening with Hazlitt at the "Southampton"--Charles Lamb--Sheridan--The Sponging Houses--The Law Institute--A Tragical Story 76
VIII. FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES--continued)
Clifford's Inn--Dyer's Chambers--The Settlement after the Great Fire--Peter Wilkins and his Flying Wives--Fetter Lane--Waller's Plot and its Victims--Praise-God Barebone and his Doings--Charles Lamb at School--Hobbes the Philosopher--A Strange Marriage--Mrs. Brownrigge--Paul Whitehead--The Moravians--The Record Office and its Treasures--Rival Poets 92
Chapter IX
FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES--CRANE COURT, JOHNSON'S COURT, BOLT COURT.
Removal of the Royal Society from Gresham College--Opposition to Newton--Objections to Removal--The First Catalogue--Swift's Jeer at the Society--Franklin's Lightning Conductor and King George III.--Sir Hans Sloane insulted--The Scottish Society--Wilkes's Printer--The Delphin Classics--Johnson's Court--Johnson's Opinion on Pope and Dryden--His Removal to Bolt Court--The John Bull--Hook and Terry--Prosecutions for Libel--Hook's Impudence 104
X. FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES
Dr. Johnson in Bolt Court--His Motley Household--His Life there--Still existing--The Gallant "Lumber Troop"--Reform Bill Riots--Sir Claudius Hunter--Cobbett in Bolt Court--The Bird Boy--The Private Soldier--In the House--Dr. Johnson in Gough Square--Busy at the Dictionary--Goldsmith in Wine Office Court--Selling "The Vicar of Wakefield"--Goldsmith's Troubles--Wine Office Court--The Old "Cheshire Cheese" 112
XI. FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES--SHOE LANE
The First Lucifers--Perkins' Steam Gun--A Link between Shakespeare and Shoe Lane--Florio and his Labours--"Cogers' Hall"--Famous "Cogers"--A Saturday Night's Debate--Gunpowder Alley--Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier Poet--"To Althea, from Prison"--Lilly the Astrologer and his Knaveries--A Search for Treasure with Davy Ramsay--Hogarth in Harp Alley--The "Society of Sign Painters"--Hudson, the Song Writer--"Jack Robinson"--The Bishop's Residence--Bangor House--A Strange Story of Unstamped Newspapers--Chatterton's Death--Curious Legend of his Burial--A well-timed Joke 123
XII. FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES--SOUTH
Worthy Mr. Fisher--Lamb's Wednesday Evenings--Persons one would wish to have seen--Ram Alley--Serjeants' Inn--The Daily News--"Memory" Woodfall--A Mug-House Riot--Richardson's Printing Office--Fielding and Richardson--Johnson's Estimate of Richardson--Hogarth and Richardson's Guest--An Egotist Rebuked--The King's "Housewife"--Caleb Colton: his Life, Works, and Sentiments 135
XIII. THE TEMPLE.--GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Origin of the Order of Templars--First Home of the Order--Removal to the Banks of the Thames--Rules of the Order--The Templars at the Crusades, and their Deeds of Valour--Decay and Corruption of the Order--Charges brought against the Knights--Abolition of the Order 147
XIV. THE TEMPLE CHURCH AND PRECINCT
The Temple Church--Its Restorations--Discoveries of Antiquities--The Penitential Cell--Discipline in the Temple--The Tombs of the Templars in the "Round"--William and Gilbert Marshall--Stone Coffins in the Churchyard--Masters of the Temple--The "Judicious" Hooker--Edmund Gibbon, the Historian--The Organ in the Temple Church--The Rival Builders--"Straw Bail"--History of the Precinct--Chaucer and the Friar--His Mention of the Temple--The Serjeants--Erection of New Buildings--The "Roses"--Sumptuary Edicts--The Flying Horse 149
Chapter XV
THE TEMPLE (continued).
The Middle Temple Hall: its Roof, Busts, and Portraits--Manningham's Diary--Fox Hunts in Hall--The Grand Revels--Spenser--Sir J. Davis--A Present to a King--Masques and Royal Visitors at the Temple--Fires in the Temple--The Last Great Revel in the Hall--Temple Anecdotes--The Gordon Riots--John Scott and his Pretty Wife--Colman "Keeping Terms"--Blackstone's "Farewell"--Burke--Sheridan--A Pair of Epigrams--Hare Court--The Barber's Shop--Johnson and the Literary Club--Charles Lamb--Goldsmith: his Life, Troubles, and Extravagances--"Hack Work" for Booksellers--The Deserted Village--She Stoops to Conquer--Goldsmith's Death and Burial 158
Chapter XVI
THE TEMPLE (continued).
Fountain Court and the Temple Fountain--Ruth Pinch--L.E.L.'s Poem--Fig-tree Court--The Inner Temple Library--Paper Buildings--The Temple Gate--Guildford North and Jeffreys--Cowper, the Poet: his Melancholy and Attempted Suicide--A Tragedy in Tanfield Court--Lord Mansfield--"Mr. Murray" and his Client--Lamb's Pictures of the Temple--The Sun-dials--Porson and his Eccentricities--Rules of the Temple--Coke and his Labours--Temple Riots--Scuffles with the Alsatians--Temple Dinners--"Calling" to the Bar--The Temple Gardens--The Chrysanthemums--Sir Matthew Hale's Tree--Revenues of the Temple--Temple Celebrities 171
XVII. WHITEFRIARS
The Present Whitefriars--The Carmelite Convent--Dr. Butts--The Sanctuary--Lord Sanquhar murders the Fencing-Master--His Trial--Bacon and Yelverton--His Execution--Sir Walter Scott's "Fortunes of Nigel"--Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia--A Riot in Whitefriars--Elizabethan Edicts against the Ruffians of Alsatia--Bridewell--A Roman Fortification--A Saxon Palace--Wolsey's Residence--Queen Katherine's Trial--Her Behaviour in Court--Persecution of the first Congregationalists--Granaries and Coal Stores destroyed by the Great Fire--The Flogging in Bridewell--Sermon on Madame Creswell--Hogarth and the "Harlot's Progress"--Pennant's Account of Bridewell--Bridewell in 1843--Its Latter Days--Pictures in the Court Room--Bridewell Dock--The Gas Works--Theatres in Whitefriars--Pepys' Visits to the Theatre--Dryden and the Dorset Gardens Theatre--Davenant--Kynaston--Dorset House--The Poet-Earl 182
XVIII. BLACKFRIARS
Three Norman Fortresses on the Thames' Bank--The Black Parliament--The Trial of Katherine of Arragon--Shakespeare a Blackfriars Manager--The Blackfriars Puritans--The Jesuit Sermon at Hunsdon House--Fatal Accident--Extraordinary Escapes--Queen Elizabeth at Lord Herbert's Marriage--Old Blackfriars Bridge--Johnson and Mylne--Laying of the Stone--The Inscription--A Toll Riot--Failure of the Bridge--The New Bridge--Bridge Street--Sir Richard Phillips and his Works--Painters in Blackfriars--The King's Printing Office--Printing House Square--The Times and its History--Walter's Enterprise--War with the Dispatch--The gigantic Swindling Scheme exposed by the Times--Apothecaries' Hall--Quarrel with the College of Physicians 200
XIX. LUDGATE HILL
An Ugly Bridge and "Ye Belle Savage"--A Radical Publisher--The Principal Gate of London--From a Fortress to a Prison--"Remember the Poor Prisoners"--Relics of Early Times--St. Martin's, Ludgate--The London Coffee House--Celebrated Goldsmiths on Ludgate Hill--Mrs. Rundell's Cookery Book--Stationers' Hall--Old Burgavenny House and its History--Early Days of the Stationers' Company--The Almanacks--An Awkward Misprint--The Hall and its Decorations--The St. Cecilia Festivals--Dryden's "St. Cecilia's Day" and "Alexander's Feast"--Handel's Setting of them--A Modest Poet--Funeral Feasts and Political Banquets--The Company's Plate--Their Charities--The Pictures at Stationers' Hall--The Company's Arms--Famous Masters 220
XX. ST. PAUL'S
London's Chief Sanctuary of Religion--The Site of St. Paul's--The Earliest authenticated Church there--The Shrine of Erkenwald--St. Paul's Burnt and Rebuilt--It becomes the Scene of a Strange Incident--Important Political Meeting within its Walls--The Great Charter published there--St. Paul's and Papal Power in England--Turmoils around the Grand Cathedral--Relics and Chantry Chapels in St. Paul's--Royal Visits to St. Paul's--Richard, Duke of York, and Henry VI.--A Fruitless Reconciliation--Jane Shore's Penance--A Tragedy of the Lollards' Tower--A Royal Marriage--Henry VIII. and Cardinal Wolsey at St. Paul's--"Peter of Westminster"--A Bonfire of Bibles--The Cathedral Clergy Fined--A Miraculous Rood--St. Paul's under Edward VI. and Bishop Ridley--A Protestant Tumult at Paul's Cross--Strange Ceremonials--Queen Elizabeth's Munificence--The Burning of the Spire--Desecration of the Nave--Elizabeth and Dean Nowell--Thanksgiving for the Armada--The "Children of Paul's"--Government Lotteries--Executions in the Churchyard--Inigo Jones's Restorations and the Puritan Parliament--The Great Fire of 1666--Burning of Old St. Paul's, and Destruction of its Monuments--Evelyn's Description of the Fire--Sir Christopher Wren called in 234
Chapter XXI
ST. PAUL'S (continued).
The Rebuilding of St. Paul's--Ill Treatment of its Architect--Cost of the Present Fabric--Royal Visitors--The First Grave in St. Paul's--Monuments in St. Paul's--Nelson's Funeral--Military Heroes in St. Paul's--The Duke of Wellington's Funeral--Other Great Men in St. Paul's--Proposal for the Completion and Decoration of the Building--Dimensions of St. Paul's--Plan of Construction--The Dome, Ball, and Cross--Mr. Horner and his Observatory--Two Narrow Escapes--Sir James Thornhill--Peregrine Falcons on St. Paul's--Nooks and Corners of the Cathedral--The Library, Model Room, and Clock--The Great Bell--A Lucky Error--Curious Story of a Monomaniac--The Poets and the Cathedral--The Festivals of the Charity Schools and of the Sons of the Clergy 249
XXII. ST. PAUL'S CHURCHYARD
St Paul's Churchyard and Literature--Queen Anne's Statue--Execution of a Jesuit in St. Paul's Churchyard--Miracle of the "Face in the Straw"--Wilkinson's Story--Newbery the Bookseller--Paul's Chain--"Cocker"--Chapter House of St. Paul's--St. Paul's Coffee House--Child's Coffee House and the Clergy--Garrick's Club at the "Queen's Arms," and the Company there--"Sir Benjamin" Figgins--Johnson the Bookseller--Hunter and his Guests--Fuseli--Bonnycastle--Kinnaird--Musical Associations of the Churchyard--Jeremiah Clark and his Works--Handel at Meares' Shop--Young the Violin Maker--The "Castle" Concerts--An Old Advertisement--Wren at the "Goose and Gridiron"--St. Paul's School--Famous Paulines--Pepys visiting his Old School--Milton at St. Paul's 262
XXIII. PATERNOSTER ROW
Its Successions of Traders--The House of Longman--Goldsmith at Fault--Tarleton, Actor, Host, and Wit--Ordinaries around St. Paul's: their Rules and Customs--The "Castle"--"Dolly's"--The "Chapter" and its Frequenters--Chatterton and Goldsmith--Dr. Buchan and his Prescriptions--Dr. Gower--Dr. Fordyce--The "Wittinagemot" at the "Chapter"--The "Printing Conger"--Mrs. Turner, the Poisoner--The Church of St. Michael "ad Bladum"--The Boy in Panier Alley 274
XXIV. BAYNARD'S CASTLE AND DOCTORS' COMMONS
Baron Fitzwalter and King John--The Duties of the Chief Bannerer of London--An Old-fashioned Punishment for Treason--Shakesperian Allusions to Baynard's "Castle"--Doctors' Commons and its Five Courts--The Court of Probate Act, 1857--The Court of Arches--The Will Office--Business of the Court--Prerogative Court--Faculty Office--Lord Stowell, the Admiralty Judge--Stories of him--His Marriage--Sir Herbert Jenner Fust--The Court "Rising"--Doctor Lushington--Marriage Licences--Old Weller and the "Touters"--Doctors' Commons at the Present Day 281
XXV. HERALDS' COLLEGE
Early Homes of the Heralds--The Constitution of the Heralds' College--Garter King at Arms--Clarencieux and Norroy--The Pursuivants--Duties and Privileges of Heralds--Good, Bad, and Jovial Heralds--A Notable Norroy King at Arms--The Tragic End of Two Famous Heralds--The College of Arms' Library 294
XXVI. CHEAPSIDE--INTRODUCTORY AND HISTORICAL
Ancient Reminiscences of Cheapside--Stormy Days therein--The Westchepe Market--Something about the Pillory--The Cheapside Conduits--The Goldsmiths' Monopoly--Cheapside Market--Gossip anent Cheapside by Mr. Pepys--A Saxon Rienzi--Anti-Free-Trade Riots in Cheapside--Arrest of the Rioters--A Royal Pardon--Jane Shore 304
XXVII. CHEAPSIDE SHOWS AND PAGEANTS
A Tournament in Cheapside--The Queen in Danger--The Street in Holiday Attire--The Earliest Civic Show on Record--The Water Processions--A Lord Mayor's Show in Queen Elizabeth's Reign--Gossip about Lord Mayors' Shows--Splendid Pageants--Royal Visitors at Lord Mayors' Shows--A Grand Banquet in Guildhall--George III. and the Lord Mayor's Show--The Lord Mayor's State Coach--The Men in Armour--Sir Claudius Hunter and Elliston--Stow and the Midsummer Watch 315
XXVIII. CHEAPSIDE--CENTRAL
Grim Chronicles of Cheapside--Cheapside Cross--Puritanical Intolerance--The Old London Conduits--Mediæval Water-carriers--The Church of St. Mary-le-Bow--"Murder will out"--The "Sound of Bow Bells"--Sir Christopher Wren's Bow Church--Remains of the Old Church--The Seldam--Interesting Houses in Cheapside and their Memories--Goldsmiths' Row--The "Nag's Head" and the Self-consecrated Bishops--Keats' House--Saddlers' Hall--A Prince Disguised--Blackmore, the Poet--Alderman Boydell, the Printseller--His Edition of Shakespeare--"Puck"--The Lottery--Death and Burial 332
XXIX. CHEAPSIDE TRIBUTARIES--SOUTH
The King's Exchange--Friday Street and the Poet Chaucer--The Wednesday Club in Friday Street--William Paterson, Founder of The Bank of England--How Easy it is to Redeem the National Debt--St. Matthew's and St. Margaret Moses--Bread Street and the Bakers' Shops--St. Austin's, Watling Street--Fraternity of St. Austin's--St. Mildred's, Bread Street--The Mitre Tavern--A Priestly Duel--Milton's Birthplace--The "Mermaid"--Sir Walter Raleigh and the Mermaid Club--Thomas Coryatt, the Traveller--Bow Lane--Queen Street--Soper's Lane--A Mercer Knight--St. Bennet Sherehog--Epitaphs in the Church of St. Thomas Apostle--A Charitable Merchant 346
XXX. CHEAPSIDE TRIBUTARIES--NORTH
Goldsmiths' Hall--Its Early Days--Tailors and Goldsmiths at Loggerheads--The Goldsmiths' Company's Charters and Records--Their Great Annual Feast--They receive Queen Margaret of Anjou in State--A Curious Trial of Skill--Civic and State Duties--The Goldsmiths break up the Image of their Patron Saint--The Goldsmiths' Company's Assays--The Ancient Goldsmiths' Feasts--The Goldsmiths at Work--Goldsmiths' Hall at the Present Day--The Portraits--St. Leonard's Church--St. Vedast--Discovery of a Stone Coffin--Coachmakers' Hall 353
XXXI. CHEAPSIDE TRIBUTARIES, NORTH:--WOOD STREET
Wood Street--Pleasant Memories--St. Peter's in Chepe--St. Michael's and St. Mary Staining--St. Alban's, Wood Street--Some Quaint Epitaphs--Wood Street Compter and the Hapless Prisoners therein--Wood Street Painful, Wood Street Cheerful--Thomas Ripley--The Anabaptist Rising--A Remarkable Wine Cooper--St. John Zachary and St. Anne-in-the-Willows--Haberdashers' Hall--Something about the Mercers 364
XXXII. CHEAPSIDE TRIBUTARIES, NORTH (continued)
Milk Street--Sir Thomas More--The City of London School--St. Mary Magdalen--Honey Lane--All Hallows' Church--Lawrence Lane and St. Lawrence Church--Ironmonger Lane and Mercers' Hall--The Mercers' Company--Early Life Assurance Companies--The Mercers' Company in Trouble--Mercers' Chapel--St. Thomas Acon--The Mercers' School--Restoration of the Carvings in Mercers' Hall--The Glories of the Mercers' Company--Ironmonger Lane 374
XXXIII. GUILDHALL
The Original Guildhall--A fearful Civic Spectacle--The Value of Land increased by the Great Fire--Guildhall as it was and is--The Statues over the South Porch--Dance's Disfigurements--The Renovation in 1864--The Crypt--Gog and Magog--Shopkeepers in Guildhall--The Cenotaphs in Guildhall--The Court of Aldermen--The City Courts--The Chamberlain's Office--Pictures in the Guildhall--Sir Robert Porter--The Common Council Room--Pictures and Statues--Guildhall Chapel--The New Library and Museum--Some Rare Books--Historical Events in Guildhall--Chaucer in Trouble--Buckingham at Guildhall--Anne Askew's Trial and Death--Surrey--Throckmorton--Garnet--A Grand Banquet 383
XXXIV. THE LORD MAYORS OF LONDON
The First Mayor of London--Portrait of him--Presentation to the King--An Outspoken Mayor--Sir N. Farindon--Sir William Walworth--Origin of the prefix "Lord"--Sir Richard Whittington and his Liberality--Institutions founded by him--Sir Simon Eyre and his Table--A Musical Lord Mayor--Henry VIII. and Gresham--Loyalty of the Lord Mayor and Citizens to Queen Mary--Osborne's Leap into the Thames--Sir W. Craven--Brass Crosby--His Committal to the Tower--A Victory for the Citizens 396
XXXV. THE LORD MAYORS OF LONDON (continued)
John Wilkes: his Birth and Parentage--The North Briton--Duel with Martin--His Expulsion--Personal Appearance--Anecdotes of Wilkes--A Reason for making a Speech--Wilkes and the King--The Lord Mayor at the Gordon Riots--"Soap-suds" versus "Bar"--Sir William Curtis and his Kilt--A Gambling Lord Mayor--Sir William Staines, Bricklayer and Lord Mayor--"Patty-pan" Birch--Sir Matthew Wood--Waithman--Sir Peter Laurie and the "Dregs of the People"--Recent Lord Mayors 410
XXXVI. THE POULTRY
The Early Home of the London Poulterers--Its Mysterious Desertion--Noteworthy Sites in the Poultry--The Birthplace of Tom Hood, Senior--A Pretty Quarrel at the Rose Tavern--A Costly Sign-board--The Three Cranes--The Home of the Dillys--Johnsoniana--St. Mildred's Church, Poultry--Quaint Epitaphs--The Poultry Compter--Attack on Dr. Lamb, the Conjurer--Dekker, the Dramatist--Ned Ward's Description of the Compter--Granville Sharp and the Slave Trade--Important Decision in favour of the Slave--Boyse--Dunton 416
XXXVII. OLD JEWRY
The Old Jewry--Early Settlements of Jews in London and Oxford--Bad Times for the Israelites--Jews' Alms--A King in Debt--Rachel weeping for her Children--Jewish Converts--Wholesale Expulsion of the Chosen People from England--The Rich House of a Rich Citizen--The London Institution, formerly in the Old Jewry--Porsoniana--Nonconformists in the Old Jewry--Samuel Chandler, Richard Price, and James Foster--The Grocers Company--Their Sufferings under the Commonwealth--Almost Bankrupt--Again they Flourish--The Grocers' Hall Garden--Fairfax and the Grocers--A Rich and Generous Grocer--A Warlike Grocer--Walbrook--Bucklersbury 425
XXXVIII. THE MANSION HOUSE
The Palace of the Lord Mayor--The Old Stocks' Market--A Notable Statue of Charles II.--The Mansion House described--The Egyptian Hall--Works of Art in the Mansion House--The Election of the Lord Mayor--Lord Mayor's Day--The Duties of a Lord Mayor--Days of the Year on which the Lord Mayor holds High State--The Patronage of the Lord Mayor--His Powers--The Lieutenancy of the City of London--The Conservancy of the Thames and Medway--The Lord Mayor's Advisers--The Mansion House Household and Expenditure--Theodore Hook--Lord Mayor Scropps--The Lord Mayor's Insignia--The State Barge--The Maria Wood 435
XXXIX. SAXON LONDON
A Glance at Saxon London--The Three Component Parts of Saxon London--The First Saxon Bridge over the Thames--Edward the Confessor at Westminster--City Residences of the Saxon Kings--Political Position of London in Early Times--The first recorded Great Fire of London--The Early Commercial Dignity of London--The Kings of Norway and Denmark besiege London in vain--A great Gemot held in London--Edmund Ironside elected King by the Londoners--Canute besieges them, and is driven off--The Seamen of London--Its Citizens as Electors of Kings 447
XL. THE BANK OF ENGLAND
The Jews and the Lombards--The Goldsmiths the first London Bankers--William Paterson, Founder of the Bank of England--Difficult Parturition of the Bank Bill--Whig Principles of the Bank of England--The Great Company described by Addison--A Crisis at the Bank--Effects of a Silver Re-coinage--Paterson quits the Bank of England--The Ministry resolves that it shall be enlarged--The Credit of the Bank shaken--The Whigs to the Rescue--Effects of the Sacheverell Riots--The South Sea Company--The Cost of a New Charter--Forged Bank Notes--The Foundation of the "Three per Cent. Consols"--Anecdotes relating to the Bank of England and Bank Notes--Description of the Building--Statue of William III.--Bank Clearing House--Dividend Day at the Bank 453
XLI. THE STOCK EXCHANGE
The Kingdom of Change Alley--A William III. Reuter--Stock Exchange Tricks--Bulls and Bears--Thomas Guy, the Hospital Founder--Sir John Barnard, the "Great Commoner"--Sampson Gideon, the famous Jew Broker--Alexander Fordyce--A cruel Quaker Criticism--Stockbrokers and Longevity--The Stock Exchange in 1795--The Money Articles in the London Papers--The Case of Benjamin Walsh, M.P.--The De Berenger Conspiracy--Lord Cochrane unjustly accused--"Ticket Pocketing"--System of Business at the Stock Exchange--"Popgun John"--Nathan Rothschild--Secrecy of his Operations--Rothschild outdone by Stratagem--Grotesque Sketch of Rothschild--Abraham Goldsmid--Vicissitudes of the Stock Exchange--The Spanish Panic of 1835--The Railway Mania--Ricardo's Golden Rules--A Clerical Intruder in Capel Court--Amusements of Stockbrokers--Laws of the Stock Exchange--The Pigeon Express--The "Alley Man"--Purchase of Stock--Eminent Members of the Stock Exchange 473
XLII. THE ROYAL EXCHANGE
The Greshams--Important Negotiations--Building of the Old Exchange--Queen Elizabeth visits it--Its Milliners' Shops--A Resort for Idlers--Access of Nuisances--The various Walks in the Exchange--Shakespeare's Visits to it--Precautions against Fire--Lady Gresham and the Council--The "Eye of London"--Contemporary Allusions--The Royal Exchange during the Plague and the Great Fire--Wren's Design for a New Royal Exchange--The Plan which was ultimately accepted--Addison and Steele upon the Exchange--The Shops of the Second Exchange 494
Chapter XLIII
The Second Exchange on Fire--Chimes Extraordinary--Incidents of the Fire--Sale of Salvage--Designs for the New Building--Details of the Present Exchange--The Ambulatory, or Merchants' Walk--Royal Exchange Assurance Company--"Lloyd's"--Origin of "Lloyd's"--Marine Assurance--Benevolent Contributions of "Lloyd's"--A "Good" and "Bad" Book 503
XLIV. NEIGHBOURHOOD OF THE BANK:--LOTHBURY
Lothbury--Its Former Inhabitants--St. Margaret's Church--Tokenhouse Yard--Origin of the Name--Farthings and Tokens--Silver Halfpence and Pennies--Queen Anne's Farthings--Sir William Petty--Defoe's Account of the Plague in Tokenhouse Yard 513
XLV. THROGMORTON STREET.--THE DRAPERS' COMPANY
Halls of the Drapers' Company--Throgmorton Street and its many Fair Houses--Drapers and Wool Merchants--The Drapers in Olden Times--Milborne's Charity--Dress and Livery--Election Dinner of the Drapers' Company--A Draper's Funeral--Ordinances and Pensions--Fifty-three Draper Mayors--Pageants and Processions of the Drapers--Charters--Details of the present Drapers' Hall--Arms of the Drapers' Company 515
XLVI. BARTHOLOMEW LANE AND LOMBARD STREET
George Robins--His Sale of the Lease of the Olympic--St. Bartholomew's Church--The Lombards and Lombard Street--William de la Pole--Gresham--The Post Office, Lombard Street--Alexander Pope's Father in Plough Court--Lombard Street Tributaries--St. Mary Woolnoth--St. Clement's--Dr. Benjamin Stone--Discovery of Roman Remains--St. Mary Abchurch 522
XLVII. THREADNEEDLE STREET
The Centre of Roman London--St. Benet Fink--The Monks of St. Anthony--The Merchant Taylors--Stow, Antiquary and Tailor--A Magnificent Roll--The Good Deeds of the Merchant Taylors--The Old and the Modern Merchant Taylors' Hall--"Concordia parvæ res crescunt"--Henry VII. enrolled as a Member of the Taylors' Company--A Cavalcade of Archers--The Hall of Commerce in Threadneedle Street--A Painful Reminiscence--The Baltic Coffee-house--St. Anthony's School--The North and South American Coffee-house--The South Sea House--History of the South Sea Bubble--Bubble Companies of the Period--Singular Infatuation of the Public--Bursting of the Bubble--Parliamentary Inquiry into the Company's Affairs--Punishment of the Chief Delinquents--Restoration of Public Credit--The Poets during the Excitement--Charles Lamb's Reverie 531 CHAPTER XLVIII.
CANNON STREET.
London Stone and Jack Cade--Southwark Bridge--Old City Churches--The Salters' Company's Hall, and the Salters' Company's History--Oxford House--Salters' Banquets--Salters' Hall Chapel--A Mysterious Murder in Cannon Street--St. Martin Orgar--King William's Statue--Cannon Street Station 544
XLIX. CANNON STREET TRIBUTARIES AND EASTCHEAP
Budge Row--Cordwainers' Hall--St. Swithin's Church--Founders' Hall--The Oldest Street in London--Tower Royal and the Wat Tyler Mob--The Queen's Wardrobe--St. Antholin's Church--"St. Antlin's Bell"--The London Fire Brigade--Captain Shaw's Statistics--St. Mary Aldermary--A Quaint Epitaph--Crooked Lane--An Early "Gun Accident"--St. Michael's and Sir William Walworth's Epitaph--Gerard's Hall and its History--The Early Closing Movement--St. Mary Woolchurch--Roman Remains in Nicholas Lane--St. Stephen's, Walbrook--Eastcheap and the Cooks' Shops--The "Boar's Head"--Prince Hal and his Companions--A Giant Plum-pudding--Goldsmith at the "Boar's Head"--The Weigh-house Chapel and its Famous Preachers--Reynolds, Clayton, Binney 550
L. THE MONUMENT AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
The Monument--How shall it be fashioned?--Commemorative Inscriptions--The Monument's Place in History--Suicides and the Monument--The Great Fire of London--On the Top of the Monument by Night--The Source of the Fire--A Terrible Description--Miles Coverdale--St. Magnus, London Bridge 565
LI. CHAUCER'S LONDON
London Citizens in the Reigns of Edward III. and Richard II.--The Knight--The Young Bachelor--The Yeoman--The Prioress--The Monk who goes a Hunting--The Merchant--The Poor Clerk--The Franklin--The Shipman--The Poor Parson 575
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE Introduction of Randolph to Ben Jonson (Frontispiece) 40
The Old Wooden Temple Bar 6
Burning the Pope in Effigy at Temple Bar 7
Bridewell in 1666 12
Part of Modern London, showing the Ancient Wall 13
Plan of Roman London 15
Ancient Roman Pavement 18
Part of Old London Wall, near Falcon Square 19
Proclamation of Charles II. at Temple Bar 24
Penance of the Duchess of Gloucester 25
The Room over Temple Bar 30
Titus Oates in the Pillory 31
Dr. Titus Oates 36
Temple Bar and the "Devil Tavern" 37
Temple Bar in Dr. Johnson's Time 42
Mull Sack and Lady Fairfax 43
Mrs. Salmon's Waxwork, Fleet Street 48
St. Dunstan's Clock 49
An Evening with Dr. Johnson at the "Mitre" 54
Old Houses (still standing) in Fleet Street 55
St. Bride's Church, Fleet Street, after the Fire, 1824 60
Waithman's Shop 61
Alderman Waithman, from an Authentic Portrait 66
Group at Hardham's Tobacco Shop 67
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Kit-Kats 72
Bishop Butler 73
Wolsey in Chancery Lane 78
Izaak Walton's House 79
Old Serjeants' Inn 84
Hazlitt 85
Clifford's Inn 90
Execution of Tomkins and Challoner 91
Roasting the Rumps in Fleet Street (from an old Print) 96
Interior of the Moravian Chapel in Fetter Lane 97
House said to have been occupied by Dryden in Fetter Lane 102
A Meeting of the Royal Society in Crane Court 103
The Royal Society's House in Crane Court 108
Theodore E. Hook 109
Dr. Johnson's House in Bolt Court 114
A Tea Party at Dr. Johnson's 115
Gough Square 120
Wine Office Court and the "Cheshire Cheese" 121
Cogers' Hall 126
Lovelace in Prison 127
Bangor House, 1818 132
Old St. Dunstan's Church 133
The Dorset Gardens Theatre, Whitefriars 138
Attack on a Whig Mug-house 139
Fleet Street, the Temple, &c., 1563 144
Fleet Street, the Temple, &c., 1720 145
A Knight Templar 150
Interior of the Temple Church 151
Tombs of Knights Templars 156
The Temple in 1671 157
The Old Hall of the Inner Temple 162
Antiquities of the Temple 163
Oliver Goldsmith 168
Goldsmith's Tomb in 1860 169
The Temple Fountain, from an Old Print 174
A Scuffle between Templars and Alsatians 175
Sun-dial in the Temple 180
The Temple Stairs 181
The Murder of Turner 186
Bridewell, as Rebuilt after the Fire, from an Old Print 187
Beating Hemp in Bridewell, after Hogarth 192
Interior of the Duke's Theatre 193
Baynard's Castle, from a View published in 1790 198
Falling-in of the Chapel at Blackfriars 199
Richard Burbage, from an Original Portrait 204
Laying the Foundation-stone of Blackfriars Bridge 205
Printing House Square and the "Times" Office 210
Blackfriars Old Bridge during its Construction, 1775 211
The College of Physicians, Warwick Lane 216
Outer Court of La Belle Sauvage in 1828 217
The Inner Court of the Belle Sauvage 222
The Mutilated Statues from Lud Gate, 1798 223
Old Lud Gate, from a Print published about 1750 226
Ruins of the Barbican on Ludgate Hill 228
Interior of Stationers' Hall 229
Old St. Paul's, from a View by Hollar 234
Old St. Paul's--the Interior, looking East 235
The Church of St. Faith, the Crypt of Old St. Paul's 240
St. Paul's after the Fall of the Spire 241
The Chapter House of Old St. Paul's 246
Dr. Bourne preaching at Paul's Cross 247
The Rebuilding of St. Paul's 252
The Choir of St. Paul's 253
The Scaffolding and Observatory on St. Paul's in 1848 258
St. Paul's and the Neighbourhood in 1540 259
The Library of St. Paul's 264
The "Face in the Straw," 1613 265
Execution of Father Garnet 270
Old St. Paul's School 271
Richard Tarleton, the Actor 276
Dolly's Coffee House 277
The Figure in Panier Alley 282
The Church of St. Michael ad Bladum 283
The Prerogative Office, Doctors' Commons 288
St. Paul's and Neighbourhood, from Aggas' Plan, 1563 289
Heralds' College (from an Old Print) 294
The Last Heraldic Court (from an Old Picture) 295
Sword, Dagger, and Ring of King James of Scotland 300
Linacre's House 301
Ancient View of Cheapside 307
Beginning of the Riot in Cheapside 312
Cheapside Cross, as it appeared in 1547 313
The Lord Mayor's Procession, from Hogarth 318
The Marriage Procession of Anne Boleyn 319
Figures of Gog and Magog set up in Guildhall 324
The Royal Banquet in Guildhall in 1761 325
The Lord Mayor's Coach 330
The Demolition of Cheapside Cross 331
Old Map of the Ward of Cheap--about 1750 336
The Seal of Bow Church 337
Bow Church, Cheapside, from a View taken about 1750 342
No. 73, Cheapside, from an Old View 343
The Door of Saddlers' Hall 348
Milton's House and Milton's Burial-place 349
Interior of Goldsmiths' Hall 354
Trial of the Pix 355
Exterior of Goldsmiths' Hall 360
Altar of Diana 361
Wood Street Compter, from a View published in 1793 366
The Tree at the Corner of Wood Street 367
Pulpit Hour-glass 370
Interior of St. Michael's, Wood Street 372
Interior of Haberdashers' Hall 373
The "Swan with Two Necks," Lad Lane 378
City of London School 379
Mercers' Chapel, as Rebuilt after the Fire 384
The Crypt of Guildhall 385
The Court of Aldermen, Guildhall 390
Old Front of Guildhall 391
The New Library, Guildhall 396
Sir Richard Whittington 397
Whittington's Almshouses, College Hill 402
Osborne's Leap 403
A Lord Mayor and his Lady 408
Wilkes on his Trial 409
Birch's Shop, Cornhill 414
The Stocks' Market, Site of the Mansion House 415
John Wilkes 420
The Poultry Compter 421
Richard Porson 426
Sir R. Clayton's House, Garden Front 427
Exterior of Grocers' Hall 432
Interior of Grocers' Hall 433
The Mansion House Kitchen 438
The Mansion House in 1750 439
Interior of the Egyptian Hall 444
The "Maria Wood" 445
Broad Street and Cornhill Wards 450
Lord Mayor's Water Procession 451
The Old Bank, looking from the Mansion House 456
Old Patch 457
The Bank Parlour, Exterior View 462
Dividend Day at the Bank 463
The Church of St. Benet Fink 468
Court of the Bank of England 469
"Jonathan's," from an Old Sketch 472
Capel Court 474
The Clearing House 475
The Present Stock Exchange 481
On Change (from an Old Print, about 1800) 487
Inner Court of the First Royal Exchange 492
Sir Thomas Gresham 493
Wren's Plan for Rebuilding London 496
Plan of the Exchange in 1837 497
The First Royal Exchange 498
The Second Royal Exchange, Cornhill 499
The Present Royal Exchange 504
Blackwell Hall in 1812 505
Interior of Lloyd's 510
The Subscription Room at "Lloyd's" 511
Interior of Drapers' Hall 516
Drapers' Hall Garden 517
Cromwell's House, from Aggas's Map 520
Pope's House, Plough Court, Lombard Street 523
St. Mary Woolnoth 528
Interior of Merchant Taylors' Hall 529
Ground Plan of the Church of St. Martin Outwich 534
March of the Archers 535
The Old South Sea House 540
London Stone 541
The Fourth Salters' Hall 546
Cordwainers' Hall 547
St. Antholin's Church, Watling Street 552
The Crypt of Gerard's Hall 553
Old Sign of the "Boar's Head" 558
Exterior of St. Stephen's, Walbrook, in 1700 559
The Weigh-house Chapel 564
Miles Coverdale 565
Wren's Original Design for the Summit of the Monument 570
The Monument and the Church of St. Magnus, 1800 571
LONDON AS IT WAS AND AS IT IS.
Writing the history of a vast city like London is like writing a history of the ocean--the area is so vast, its inhabitants are so multifarious, the treasures that lie in its depths so countless. What aspect of the great chameleon city should one select? for, as Boswell, with more than his usual sense, once remarked, "London is to the politician merely a seat of government, to the grazier a cattle market, to the merchant a huge exchange, to the dramatic enthusiast a congeries of theatres, to the man of pleasure an assemblage of taverns." If we follow one path alone, we must neglect other roads equally important; let us, then, consider the metropolis as a whole, for, as Johnson's friend well says, "the intellectual man is struck with London as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible." In histories, in biographies, in scientific records, and in chronicles of the past, however humble, let us gather materials for a record of the great and the wise, the base and the noble, the odd and the witty, who have inhabited London and left their names upon its walls. Wherever the glimmer of the cross of St. Paul's can be seen we shall wander from street to alley, from alley to street, noting almost every event of interest that has taken place there since London was a city.
Had it been our lot to write of London before the Great Fire, we should have only had to visit 65,000 houses. If in Dr. Johnson's time, we might have done like energetic Dr. Birch, and have perambulated the twenty-mile circuit of London in six hours' hard walking; but who now could put a girdle round the metropolis in less than double that time? The houses now grow by streets at a time, and the nearly four million inhabitants would take a lifetime to study. Addison probably knew something of London when he called it "an aggregate of various nations, distinguished from each other by their respective customs, manners, and interests--the St. James's courtiers from the Cheapside citizens, the Temple lawyers from the Smithfield drovers;" but what would the Spectator say now to the 168,701 domestic servants, the 23,517 tailors, the 18,321 carpenters, the 29,780 dressmakers, the 7,002 seamen, the 4,861 publicans, the 6,716 blacksmiths, &c., to which the population returns of thirty years ago depose, whom he would have to observe and visit before he could say he knew all the ways, oddities, humours--the joys and sorrows, in fact--of this great centre of civilisation?
The houses of old London are incrusted as thick with anecdotes, legends, and traditions as an old ship is with barnacles. Strange stories about strange men grow like moss in every crevice of the bricks. Let us, then, roll together like a great snowball the mass of information that time and our predecessors have accumulated, and reduce it to some shape and form. Old London is passing away even as we dip our pen in the ink, and we would fain erect quickly our itinerant photographic machine, and secure some views of it before it passes. Roman London, Saxon London, Norman London, Elizabethan London, Stuart London, Queen Anne's London, we shall in turn rifle to fill our museum, on whose shelves the Roman lamp and the vessel full of tears will stand side by side with Vanessas' fan; the sword-knot of Rochester by the note-book of Goldsmith. The history of London is an epitome of the history of England. Few great men indeed that England has produced but have some associations that connect them with London. To be able to recall these associations in a London walk is a pleasure perpetually renewing, and to all intents inexhaustible.
Let us, then, at once, without longer halting at the gate, seize the pilgrim staff and start upon our voyage of discovery, through a dreamland that will be now Goldsmith's, now Gower's, now Shakespeare's, now Pope's, London. In Cannon Street, by the old central milestone of London, grave Romans will meet us and talk of Cæsar and his legions. In Fleet Street we shall come upon Chaucer beating the malapert Franciscan friar; at Temple Bar, stare upwards at the ghastly Jacobite heads. In Smithfield we shall meet Froissart's knights riding to the tournament; in the Strand see the misguided Earl of Essex defending his house against Queen Elizabeth's troops, who are turning towards him the cannon on the roof of St. Clement's church.
But let us first, rather than glance at scattered pictures in a gallery which is so full of them, measure out, as it were, our future walks, briefly glancing at the special doors where we shall billet our readers. The brief summary will serve to broadly epitomise the subject, and will prove the ceaseless variety of interest which it involves.
We have selected Temple Bar, that old gateway, as a point of departure, because it is the centre, as near as can be, of historical London, and is in itself full of interest. We begin with it as a rude wooden building, which, after the Great Fire, Wren turned into the present arch of stone, with a room above, where Messrs. Childs, the bankers, store their books and archives. The trunk of one of the Rye House conspirators, in Charles II.'s time, first adorned the Bar; and after that, one after the other, many rash Jacobite heads, in 1715 and 1745, arrived at the same bad eminence. In many a royal procession and many a City riot, this gate has figured as a halting-place and a point of defence. The last rebel's head blew down in 1772; and the last spike was not removed till the beginning of the present century. In the Popish Plot days of Charles II. vast processions used to come to Temple Bar to illuminate the supposed statue of Queen Elizabeth, in the south-east niche (though it probably really represents Anne of Denmark); and at great bonfires at the Temple gate the frenzied people burned effigies of the Pope, while thousands of squibs were discharged, with shouts that frightened the Popish Portuguese Queen, at that time living at Somerset House, forsaken by her dissolute scapegrace of a husband.
Turning our faces now towards the old black dome that rises like a half-eclipsed planet over Ludgate Hill, we first pass along Fleet Street, a locality full to overflowing with ancient memorials, and in its modern aspect not less interesting. This street has been from time immemorial the high road for royal processions. Richard II. has passed along here to St. Paul's, his parti-coloured robes jingling with golden bells; and Queen Elizabeth, be-ruffled and be-fardingaled, has glanced at those gable-ends east of St. Dunstan's, as she rode in her cumbrous plumed coach to thank God at St. Paul's for the scattering and shattering of the Armada. Here Cromwell, a king in all but name and twice a king by nature, received the keys of the City, as he rode to Guildhall to preside at the banquet of the obsequious Mayor. William of Orange and Queen Anne both clattered over these stones to return thanks for victories over the French; and old George III. honoured the street when, with his handsome but worthless son, he came to thank God for his partial restoration from that darker region than the valley of the shadow of death, insanity. We recall many odd and pleasant figures in this street; first the old printers who succeeded Caxton, who published for Shakespeare or who timidly speculated in Milton's epic, that great product of a sorry age; next, the old bankers, who, at Child's and Hoare's, laid the foundations of permanent wealth, and from simple City goldsmiths were gradually transformed to great capitalists. Izaak Walton, honest shopkeeper and patient angler, eyes us from his latticed window near Chancery Lane; and close by we see the child Cowley reading the "Fairy Queen" in a window-seat, and already feeling in himself the inspiration of his later years. The lesser celebrities of later times call to us as we pass. Garrick's friend Hardham, of the snuff-shop; and that busy, vain demagogue, Alderman Waithman, whom Cobbett abused because he was not zealous enough for poor hunted Queen Caroline. Then there is the shop where barometers were first sold, the great watchmakers, Tompion and Pinchbeck, to chronicle, and the two churches to notice. St. Dunstan's is interesting for its early preachers, the good Romaine and the pious Baxter; and St. Bride's has anecdotes and legends of its own, and a peal of bells which have in their time excited as much admiration as those giant hammermen at the old St. Dunstan's clock, which are now in Regent's Park. The newspaper offices, too, furnish many curious illustrations of the progress of that great organ of modern civilisation, the press. At the "Devil" we meet Ben Jonson and his club; and at John Murray's old shop we stop to see Byron lunging with his stick at favourite volumes on the shelves, to the bookseller's great but concealed annoyance. Nor do we forget to sketch Dr. Johnson at Temple Bar, bantered by his fellow Jacobite, Goldsmith, about the warning heads upon the gate; at Child's bank pausing to observe the dinnerless authors returning downcast at the rejection of brilliant but fruitless proposals; or stopping with Boswell, one hand upon a street post, to shake the night air with his Cyclopean laughter. Varied as the colours in a kaleidoscope are the figures that will meet us in these perambulations; mutable as an opal are the feelings they arouse. To the man of facts they furnish facts; to the man of imagination, quick-changing fancies; to the man of science, curious memoranda; to the historian, bright-worded details, that vivify old pictures now often dim in tone; to the man of the world, traits of manners; to the general thinker, aspects of feelings and of passions which expand the knowledge of human nature; for all these many-coloured stones are joined by the one golden string of London's history.
But if Fleet Street itself is rich in associations, its side streets, north and south, are yet richer. Here anecdote and story are clustered in even closer compass. In these side binns lies hid the choicest wine, for when Fleet Street had, long since, become two vast rows of shops, authors, wits, poets, and memorable persons of all kinds, still inhabited the "closes" and alleys that branch from the main thoroughfare. Nobles and lawyers long dwelt round St. Dunstan's and St. Bride's. Scholars, poets, and literati of all kind, long sought refuge from the grind and busy roar of commerce in the quiet inns and "closes," north and south. In what was Shire Lane we come upon the great Kit-Kat Club, where Addison, Garth, Steele, and Congreve disported; and we look in on that very evening when the Duke of Kingston, with fatherly pride, brought his little daughter, afterwards Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and, setting her on the table, proposed her as a toast. Following the lane down till it becomes a nest of coiners, thieves, and bullies, we pass on to Bell Yard, to call on Pope's lawyer friend, Fortescue; and in Chancery Lane we are deep among the lawyers again. Ghosts of Jarndyces v. Jarndyces, from the Middle Ages downwards, haunt this thoroughfare, where Wolsey once lived in his pride and state. Izaak Walton dwelt in this lane once upon a time; and that mischievous adviser of Charles I., Earl Strafford, was born here. Hazlitt resided in Southampton Buildings when he fell in love with the tailor's daughter and wrote that most stultifying confession of his vanity and weakness, "The New Pygmalion." Fetter Lane brings us fresh stores of subjects, all essentially connected with the place, deriving an interest from and imparting a new interest to it. Praise-God-Barebones, Dryden, Otway, Baxter, and Mrs. Brownrigg form truly a strange bouquet. By mutual contrast the incongruous group serves, however, to illustrate various epochs of London life, and the background serves to explain the actions and the social position of each and all these motley beings.
In Crane Court, the early home of the Royal Society, Newton is the central personage, and we tarry to sketch the progress of science and to smile at the crudity of its early experiments and theories. In Bolt Court we pause to see a great man die. Here especially Dr. Johnson's figure ever stands like a statue, and we shall find his black servant at the door and his dependents wrangling in the front parlour. Burke and Boswell are on their way to call, and Reynolds is taking coach in the adjoining street. Nor is even Shoe Lane without its associations, for at the north-east end the corpse of poor, dishonoured Chatterton lies still under some neglected rubbish heap; and close by the brilliant Cavalier poet, Lovelace, pined and perished, almost in beggary.
The southern side of Fleet Street is somewhat less noticeable. Still, in Salisbury Square the worthy old printer Richardson, amid the din of a noisy office, wrote his great and pathetic novels; while in Mitre Buildings Charles Lamb held those delightful conversations, so full of quaint and kindly thoughts, which were shared in by Hazlitt and all the odd people Lamb has immortalised in his "Elia"--bibulous Burney, George Dyer, Holcroft, Coleridge, Hone, Godwin, and Leigh Hunt.
Whitefriars and Blackfriars are our next places of pilgrimage, and they open up quite new lines of reading and of thought. Though the Great Fire swept them bare, no district of London has preserved its old lines so closely; and, walking in Whitefriars, we can still stare through the gate that once barred off the brawling Copper Captains of Charles II.'s Alsatia from the contemptuous Templars of King's Bench Walk. Whitefriars was at first a Carmelite convent, founded, before Blackfriars, on land given by Edward I.; the chapter-house was given by Henry VII. to his physician, Dr. Butts (a man mentioned by Shakespeare), and in the reign of Edward VI. the church was demolished. Whitefriars then, though still partially inhabited by great people, soon sank into a sanctuary for runaway bankrupts, cheats, and gamblers. The hall of the monastery was turned into a theatre, where many of Dryden's plays first appeared. The players favoured this quarter, where, in the reign of James I., two henchmen of Lord Sanquire, a revengeful young Scottish nobleman, shot at his own door a poor fencing-master, who had accidentally put out their master's eye several years before in a contest of skill. The two men were hung opposite the Whitefriars gate in Fleet Street. This disreputable and lawless nest of river-side alleys was called Alsatia, from its resemblance to the seat of the war then raging on the frontiers of France, in the dominions of King James's son-in-law, the Prince Palatine. Its roystering bullies and shifty money-lenders are admirably sketched by Shadwell in his Squire of Alsatia, an excellent comedy freely used by Sir Walter Scott in his "Fortunes of Nigel," who has laid several of his strongest scenes in this once scampish region. That great scholar Selden lived in Whitefriars with the Countess Dowager of Kent, whom he was supposed to have married; and, singularly enough, the best edition of his works was printed in Dogwell Court, Whitefriars, by those eminent printers, Bowyer & Son. At the back of Whitefriars we come upon Bridewell, the site of a palace of the Norman kings. Cardinal Wolsey afterwards owned the house, which Henry VIII. reclaimed in his rough and not very scrupulous manner. It was the old palace to which Henry summoned all the priors and abbots of England, and where he first announced his intention of divorcing Katherine of Arragon. After this it fell into decay. The good Ridley, the martyr, begged it of Edward VI. for a workhouse and a school. Hogarth painted the female prisoners here beating hemp under the lash of a cruel turnkey; and Pennant has left a curious sketch of the herd of girls whom he saw run like hounds to be fed when a gaoler entered.
If Whitefriars was inhabited by actors, Blackfriars was equally favoured by players and by painters. The old convent, removed from Holborn, was often used for Parliaments. Charles V. lodged here when he came over to win Henry against Francis; and Burbage, the great player of "Richard the Third," built a theatre in Blackfriars, because the Precinct was out of the jurisdiction of the City, then ill-disposed to the players. Shakespeare had a house here, which he left to his favourite daughter, the deed of conveyance of which sold, in 1841, for £165 15s. He must have thought of his well-known neighbourhood when he wrote the scenes of Henry VIII., where Katherine was divorced and Wolsey fell, for both events were decided in Blackfriars Parliaments. Oliver, the great miniature painter, and Jansen, a favourite portrait painter of James I., lived in Blackfriars, where we shall call upon them; and Vandyke spent nine happy years here by the river side. The most remarkable event connected with Blackfriars is the falling in of the floor of a Roman Catholic private chapel in 1623, by which fifty-nine persons perished, including the priest, to the exultation of the Puritans, who pronounced the event a visitation of Heaven on Popish superstition. Pamphlets of the time, well rummaged by us, describe the scene with curious exactness, and mention the singular escapes of several persons on the "Fatal Vespers," as they were afterwards called.
Leaving the racket of Alsatia and its wild doings behind us, we come next to that great monastery of lawyers, the Temple--like Whitefriars and Blackfriars, also the site of a bygone convent. The warlike Templars came here in their white cloaks and red crosses from their first establishment in Southampton Buildings, and they held it during all the Crusades, in which they fought so valorously against the Paynim, till they grew proud and corrupt, and were suspected of worshipping idols and ridiculing Christianity. Their work done, they perished, and the Knights of St. John took possession of their halls, church, and cloisters. The incoming lawyers became tenants of the Crown, and the parade-ground of the Templars and the river-side terrace and gardens were tenanted by more peaceful occupants. The manners and customs of the lawyers of various ages, their quaint revels, fox-huntings in hall, and dances round the coal fire, deserve special notice; and swarms of anecdotes and odd sayings and doings buzz round us as we write of the various denizens of the Temple--Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Lamb, Coke, Plowden, Jefferies, Cowper, Butler, Parsons, Sheridan, and Tom Moore; and we linger at the pretty little fountain and think of those who have celebrated its praise. Every binn of this cellar of lawyers has its story, and a volume might well be written in recording the toils and struggles, successes and failures, of the illustrious owners of Temple chambers.
Thence we pass to Ludgate, where that old London inn, the "Belle Sauvage," calls up associations of the early days of theatres, especially of Banks and his wonderful performing horse, that walked up one of the towers of Old St. Paul's. Hone's old shop reminds us of the delightful books he published, aided by Lamb and Leigh Hunt. The old entrance of the City, Ludgate, has quite a history of its own. It was a debtors' prison, rebuilt in the time of King John from the remains of demolished Jewish houses, and was enlarged by the widow of Stephen Forster, Lord Mayor in the reign of Henry VI., who, tradition says, had been himself a prisoner in Ludgate, till released by a rich widow, who saw his handsome face through the grate and married him. St. Martin's church, Ludgate, is one of Wren's churches, and is chiefly remarkable for its stolid conceit in always getting in the way of the west front of St. Paul's.
The great Cathedral has been the scene of events that illustrate almost every age of English history. This is the third St. Paul's. The first, falsely supposed to have been built on the site of a Roman temple of Diana, was burnt down in the last year of William the Conqueror. Innumerable events connected with the history of the City happened here, from the killing a bishop at the north door, in the reign of Edward II., to the public exposure of Richard II.'s body after his murder; while at the Cross in the churchyard the authorities of the City, and even our kings, often attended the public sermons, and in the same place the citizens once held their Folkmotes, riotous enough on many an occasion. Great men's tombs abounded in Old St. Paul's--John of Gaunt, Lord Bacon's father, Sir Philip Sydney, Donne, the poet, and Vandyke being very prominent among them. Fired by lightning in Elizabeth's reign, when the Cathedral had become a resort of newsmongers and a thoroughfare for porters and carriers, it was partly rebuilt in Charles I.'s reign by Inigo Jones. The repairs were stopped by the civil wars, when the Puritans seized the funds, pulled down the scaffolding, and turned the church into a cavalry barracks. The Great Fire swept all clear for Wren, who now found a fine field for his genius; but vexatious difficulties embarrassed him at the very outset. His first great plan was rejected, and the Duke of York (afterwards James II.) is said to have insisted on side recesses, that might serve as chantry chapels when the church became Roman Catholic. Wren was accused of delays and chidden for the faults of petty workmen, and, as the Duchess of Marlborough laughingly remarked, was dragged up and down in a basket two or three times a week for a paltry £200 a year. The narrow escape of Sir James Thornhill from falling from a scaffold while painting the dome is a tradition of St. Paul's, matched by the terrible adventure of Mr. Gwyn, who when measuring the dome slid down the convex surface till his foot was stayed by a small projecting lump of lead. This leads us naturally on to the curious monomaniac who believed himself the slave of a demon who lived in the bell of the Cathedral, and whose case is singularly deserving of analysis. We shall give a short sketch of the heroes whose tombs have been admitted into St. Paul's, and having come to those of the great demi-gods of the old wars, Nelson and Wellington, pass to anecdotes about the clock and bells, and arrive at the singular story of the soldier whose life was saved by his proving that he had heard St. Paul's clock strike thirteen. Queen Anne's statue in the churchyard, too, has given rise to epigrams worthy of preservation, and the progress of the restoration will be carefully detailed.
Cheapside, famous from the Saxon days, next invites our wandering feet. The north side remained an open field as late as Edward III.'s reign, and tournaments were held there. The knights, whose deeds Froissart has immortalised, broke spears there, in the presence of the Queen and her ladies, who smiled on their champions from a wooden tower erected across the street. Afterwards a stone shed was raised for the same sights, and there Henry VIII., disguised as a yeoman, with a halbert on his shoulder, came on one occasion to see the great City procession of the night watch by torchlight on St. John's Eve. Wren afterwards, when he rebuilt Bow Church, provided a balcony in the tower for the Royal Family to witness similar pageants. Old Bow Church, we must not forget to record, was seized in the reign of Richard I. by Longbeard, the desperate ringleader of a Saxon rising, who was besieged there, and eventually burned out and put to death. The great Cross of Cheapside recalls many interesting associations, for it was one of the nine Eleanor crosses. Regilt for many coronations, it was eventually pulled down by the Puritans during the civil wars. Then there was the Standard, near Bow Church, where Wat Tyler and Jack Cade beheaded several objectionable nobles and citizens; and the great Conduit at the east end--each with its memorable history. But the great feature of Cheapside is, after all, Guildhall. This is the hall that Whittington paved and where Walworth once ruled. In Guildhall Lady Jane Grey and her husband were tried; here the Jesuit Garnet was arraigned for his share in the Gunpowder Plot; here it was Charles I. appealed to the Common Council to arrest Hampden and the other patriots who had fled from his eager claws into the friendly City; and here, in the spot still sacred to liberty, the Lords and Parliament declared for the Prince of Orange. To pass this spot without some salient anecdotes of the various Lord Mayors would be a disgrace; and the banquets themselves, from that of Whittington, when he threw Henry V.'s bonds for £60,000 into a spice bonfire, to those in the present reign, deserve some notice and comment. The curiosities of Guildhall in themselves are not to be lightly passed over, for they record many vicissitudes of the great City; and Gog and Magog are personages of importance only secondary to that of Lord Mayor, and not in any way to be disregarded. The Mansion House, built in 1789, leads us to much chat about "gold chains, warm furs, broad banners and broad faces;" for a folio might be well filled with curious anecdotes of the Lord Mayors of various ages--from Sir John Norman, who first went in procession to Westminster by water, to Sir John Shorter (James II.), who was killed by a fall from his horse as he stopped at Newgate, according to custom, to take a tankard of wine, nutmeg, and sugar. There is a word to say of many a celebrity in the long roll of Mayors--more especially of Beckford, who is said to have startled George III. by a violent patriotic remonstrance, and of the notorious John Wilkes, that ugly demagogue, who led the City in many an attack on the King and his unwise Ministers.
The tributaries of Cheapside also abound in interest, and mark various stages in the history of the great City. Bread Street was the bread market of the time of Edward I., and is especially honoured for being the birthplace of Milton; and in Milk Street (the old milk market) Sir Thomas More was born. Gutter Lane reminds us of its first Danish owner; and many other turnings have their memorable legends and traditions.
The Halls of the City Companies, the great hospitals, and Gothic schools, will each by turn detain us; and we shall not forget to call at the Bank, the South-Sea House, and other great proofs of past commercial folly and present wealth. The Bank, projected by a Scotch theorist in 1691 (William III.), after many migrations, settled down in Threadneedle Street in 1734. It has a history of its own, and we shall see during the Gordon Riots the old pewter inkstands melted down for bullets, and, prodigy of prodigies! Wilkes himself rushing out to seize the cowardly ringleaders!
By many old houses of good pedigree and by several City churches worthy a visit, we come at last to the Monument, which Wren erected and which Cibber decorated. This pillar, which Pope compared to "a tall bully," once bore an inscription that greatly offended the Court. It attributed the Great Fire of London, which began close by there, to the Popish faction; but the words were erased in 1831. Littleton, who compiled the Dictionary, once wrote a Latin inscription for the Monument, which contained the names of seven Lord Mayors in one word:--
"Fordo-Watermanno-Harrisono-Hookero-Vinero-Sheldono-Davisonam."
But the learned production was, singularly enough, never used. The word, which Littleton called "an heptastic vocable," comprehended the names of the seven Lord Mayors in whose mayoralties the Monument was begun, continued, and completed.
On London Bridge we might linger for many chapters. The first bridge thrown over the Thames was a wooden one, erected by the nuns of St. Mary's Monastery, a convent of sisters endowed by the daughter of a rich Thames ferryman. The bridge figures as a fortified place in the early Danish invasions, and the Norwegian Prince Olaf nearly dragged it to pieces in trying to dispossess the Danes, who held it in 1008. It was swept away in a flood, and its successor was burnt. In the reign of Henry II., Pious Peter, a chaplain of St. Mary Colechurch, in the Poultry, built a stone bridge a little further west, and the king helped him with the proceeds of a tax on wool, which gave rise to the old saying that "London Bridge was built upon woolpacks." Peter's bridge was a curious structure, with nineteen pointed arches and a drawbridge. There was a fortified gatehouse at each end, and a gothic chapel towards the centre, dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, the spurious martyr of Canterbury. In Queen Elizabeth's reign there were shops on either side, with flat roofs, arbours, and gardens, and at the south end rose a great four-storey wooden house, brought from Holland, which was covered with carving and gilding. In the Middle Ages, London Bridge was the scene of affrays of all kinds. Soon after it was built, the houses upon it caught fire at both ends, and 3,000 persons perished, wedged in among the flames. Henry III. was driven back here by the rebellious De Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Wat Tyler entered the City by London Bridge; and, later, Richard II. was received here with gorgeous ceremonies. It was the scene of one of Henry V.'s greatest triumphs, and also of his stately funeral procession. Jack Cade seized London Bridge, and as he passed slashed in two the ropes of the drawbridge, though soon after his head was stuck on the gatehouse. From this bridge the rebel Wyatt was driven by the guns of the Tower; and in Elizabeth's reign water-works were erected on the bridge. There was a great conflagration on the bridge in 1632, and eventually the Great Fire almost destroyed it. In the Middle Ages countless rebels' heads were stuck on the gate-houses of London Bridge. Brave Wallace's was placed there; and so were the heads of Henry VIII.'s victims--Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Sir Thomas More, the latter trophy being carried off by the stratagem of his brave daughter. Garnet, the Gunpowder-Plot Jesuit, also contributed to the ghastly triumphs of justice. Several celebrated painters, including Hogarth, lived at one time or another on the bridge; and Swift and Pope used to frequent the shop of a witty bookseller, who lived under the northern gate. One or two celebrated suicides have taken place at London Bridge, and among these we may mention that of Sir William Temple's son, who was Secretary of War, and Eustace Budgell, a broken-down author, who left behind him as an apology the following sophism:--
"What Cato did and Addison approved of cannot be wrong."
Pleasanter is it to remember the anecdote of the brave apprentice, who leaped into the Thames from the window of a house on the bridge to save his master's infant daughter, whom a careless nurse had dropped into the river. When the girl grew up, many noble suitors came, but the generous father was obdurate. "No," said the honest citizen; "Osborne saved her, and Osborne shall have her." And so he had; and Osborne's great grandson throve and became the first Duke of Leeds. The frequent loss of lives in shooting the arches of the old bridge, where the fall was at times five feet, led at last to a cry for a new bridge, and one was commenced in 1824. Rennie designed it, and in 1831 William IV. and Queen Adelaide opened it. One hundred and twenty thousand tons of stone went to its formation. The old bridge was not entirely removed till 1832, when the bones of the builder, Pious Peter of Colechurch, were found in the crypt of the central chapel, where tradition had declared they lay. The iron of the piles of the old bridge was bought by a cutler in the Strand, and produced steel of the highest quality. Part of the old stone was purchased by Alderman Harmer, to build his house, Ingress Abbey, near Greenhithe.
Southwark, a Roman station and cemetery, is by no means without a history. It was burned by William the Conqueror, and had been the scene of battle against the Danes. It possessed palaces, monasteries, a mint, and fortifications. The Bishops of Winchester and Rochester once lived here in splendour; and the locality boasted its four Elizabethan theatres. The Globe was Shakespeare's summer theatre, and here it was that his greatest triumphs were attained. What was acted there is best told by making Shakespeare's share in the management distinctly understood; nor can we leave Southwark without visiting the "Tabard Inn," from whence Chaucer's nine-and-twenty jovial pilgrims set out for Canterbury.
The Tower rises next before our eyes; and as we pass under its battlements the grimmest and most tragic scenes of English history seem again rising before us. Whether Cæsar first built a tower here or William the Conqueror, may never be decided; but one thing is certain, that more tears have been shed within these walls than anywhere else in London. Every stone has its story. Here Wallace, in chains, thought of Scotland; here Queen Anne Boleyn placed her white hands round her slender neck, and said the headsman would have little trouble. Here Catharine Howard, Sir Thomas More, Cranmer, Northumberland, Lady Jane Grey, Wyatt, and the Earl of Essex all perished. Here, Clarence was drowned in a butt of wine and the two boy princes were murdered. Many victims of kings, many kingly victims, have here perished. Many patriots have here sighed for liberty. The poisoning of Overbury is a mystery of the Tower, the perusal of which never wearies though the dark secret be unsolvable; and we can never cease to sympathise with that brave woman, the Countess of Nithsdale, who risked her life to save her husband's. From Laud and Strafford we turn to Eliot and Hutchinson--for Cavaliers and Puritans were both by turns prisoners in the Tower. From Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney we come down in the chronicle of suffering to the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745; from them to Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, Burdett, and, last of all the Tower prisoners, to the infamous Thistlewood.
Leaving the crimson scaffold on Tower Hill, we return as sightseers to glance over the armoury and to catch the sparkle of the Royal jewels. Here is the identical crown that that daring villain Blood stole and the heart-shaped ruby that the Black Prince once wore; here we see the swords, sceptres, and diadems of many of our monarchs. In the armoury are suits on which many lances have splintered and swords struck; the imperishable steel clothes of many a dead king are here, unchanged since the owners doffed them. This suit was the Earl of Leicester's--the "Kenilworth" earl, for see his cognizance of the bear and ragged staff on the horse's chanfron. This richly-gilt suit was worn by James I.'s ill-starred son, Prince Henry, whom many thought was poisoned by Buckingham; and this quaint mask, with ram's horns and spectacles, belonged to Will Somers, Henry VIII.'s jester.
From the Tower we break away into the far east, among the old clothes shops, the bird markets, the costermongers, and the weavers of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. We are far from jewels here and Court splendour, and we come to plain working people and their homely ways. Spitalfields was the site of a priory of Augustine canons, however, and has ancient traditions of its own. The weavers, of French origin, are an interesting race--we shall have to sketch their sayings and doings; and we shall search Whitechapel diligently for old houses and odd people. The district may not furnish so many interesting scenes and anecdotes as the West End, but it is well worthy of study from many modern points of view.
Smithfield and Holborn are regions fertile in associations. Smithfield, that broad plain, the scene of so many martyrdoms, tournaments, and executions, forms an interesting subject for a diversified chapter. In this market-place the ruffians of Henry VIII.'s time met to fight out their quarrels with sword and buckler. Here the brave Wallace was executed like a common robber; and here "the gentle Mortimer" was led to a shameful death. The spot was the scene of great jousts in Edward III.'s chivalrous reign, when, after the battle of Poictiers, the Kings of France and Scotland came seven days running to see spears shivered and "the Lady of the Sun" bestow the prizes of valour. In this same field Walworth slew the rebel Wat Tyler, who had treated Richard II. with insolence, and by this prompt blow dispersed the insurgents, who had grown so dangerously strong. In Henry VIII.'s reign poisoners were boiled to death in Smithfield; and in cruel Mary's reign the Protestant martyrs were burned in the same place. "Of the two hundred and seventy-seven persons burnt for heresy in Mary's reign," says a modern antiquary, "the greater number perished in Smithfield;" and ashes and charred bodies have been dug up opposite to the gateway of Bartholomew's Church and at the west end of Long Lane. After the Great Fire the houseless citizens were sheltered here in tents. Over against the corner where the Great Fire abated is Cock Lane, the scene of the rapping ghost, in which Dr. Johnson believed and concerning which Goldsmith wrote a catchpenny pamphlet.
Holborn and its tributaries come next, and are by no means deficient in legends and matter of general interest. "The original name of the street was the Hollow Bourne," says a modern etymologist, "not the Old Bourne;" it was not paved till the reign of Henry V. The ride up "the Heavy Hill" from Newgate to Tyburn has been sketched by Hogarth and sung by Swift. In Ely Place once lived the Bishop of Ely; and in Hatton Garden resided Queen Elizabeth's favourite, the dancing chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. In Furnival's Inn Dickens wrote "Pickwick." In Barnard's Inn died the last of the alchemists. In Staple's Inn Dr. Johnson wrote "Rasselas," to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. In Brooke Street, where Chatterton poisoned himself, lived Lord Brooke, a poet and statesman, who was a patron of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, and who was assassinated by a servant whose name he had omitted in his will. Milton lived for some time in a house in Holborn that opened at the back on Lincoln's Inn Fields. Fox Court leads us to the curious inquiry whether Savage, the poet, was a conscious or an unconscious impostor; and at the Blue Boar Inn Cromwell and Ireton discovered by stratagem the treacherous letter of King Charles to his queen, that rendered Cromwell for ever the King's enemy. These are only a few of the countless associations of Holborn.
Newgate is a gloomy but an interesting subject for us. Many wild faces have stared through its bars since, in King John's time, it became a City prison. We shall look in on Sarah Malcolm, Mrs. Brownrigg, Jack Sheppard, Governor Wall, and other interesting criminals; we shall stand at Wren's elbow when he designs the new prison, and follow the Gordon Rioters when they storm in over the burning walls.
The Strand stands next to Fleet Street as a central point of old memories. It is not merely full, it positively teems. For centuries it was a fashionable street, and noblemen inhabited the south side especially, for the sake of the river. In Essex Street, on a part of the Temple, Queen Elizabeth's rash favourite (the Earl of Essex) was besieged, after his hopeless foray into the City. In Arundel Street lived the Earls of Arundel; in Buckingham Street Charles I.'s greedy favourite began a palace. There were royal palaces, too, in the Strand, for at the Savoy lived John of Gaunt; and Somerset House was built by the Protector Somerset with the stones of the churches he had pulled down. Henrietta Maria (Charles I.'s Queen) and poor neglected Catherine of Braganza dwelt at Somerset House; and it was here that Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, the zealous Protestant magistrate, was supposed to have been murdered. There is, too, the history of Lord Burleigh's house (in Cecil Street) to record; and Northumberland House still stands to recall to us its many noble inmates. On the other side of the Strand we have to note Butcher Row (now pulled down), where the Gunpowder Plot conspirators met; Exeter House, where Lord Burleigh's wily son lived; and, finally, Exeter 'Change, where the poet Gay lay in state. Nor shall we forget Cross's menagerie and the elephant Chunee; nor omit mention of many of the eccentric old shopkeepers who once inhabited the 'Change. At Charing Cross we shall stop to see the old Cromwellians die bravely, and to stare at the pillory, where in their time many incomparable scoundrels ignominiously stood. The Nelson Column and the surrounding statues have stories of their own; and St. Martin's Lane is specially interesting as the haunt of half the painters of the early Georgian era. There are anecdotes of Hogarth and his friends to be picked up here in abundance, and the locality generally deserves exploration, from the quaintness and cleverness of its former inhabitants.
In Covent Garden we break fresh ground. We found St. Martin's Lane full of artists, Guildhall full of aldermen, the Strand full of noblemen--the old monastic garden will prove to be crowded with actors. We shall trace the market from the first few sheds under the wall of Bedford House to the present grand temple of Flora and Pomona. We shall see Evans's a new mansion, inhabited by Ben Jonson's friend and patron, Sir Kenelm Digby, alternately tenanted by Sir Harry Vane, Denzil Holles (one of the five refractory members whom Charles I. went to the House of Commons so imprudently to seize), and Admiral Russell, who defeated the French at La Hogue. The ghost of Parson Ford, in which Johnson believed, awaits us at the doorway of the Hummums. There are several duels to witness in the Piazza; Dryden to call upon as he sits, the arbiter of wits, by the fireside at Will's Coffee House; Addison is to be found at Button's; at the "Bedford" we shall meet Garrick and Quin, and stop a moment at Tom King's, close to St. Paul's portico, to watch Hogarth's revellers fight with swords and shovels, that frosty morning that the painter sketched the prim old maid going to early service. We shall look in at the Tavistock to see Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller at work at portraits of beauties of the Carolean and Jacobean Courts; remembering that in the same rooms Sir James Thornhill afterwards painted, and poor Richard Wilson produced those fine landscapes which so few had the taste to buy. The old hustings deserve a word, and we shall have to record the lamentable murder of Miss Ray by her lover, at the north-east angle of the square. The neighbourhood of Covent Garden, too, is rife with stories of great actors and painters, and nearly every house furnishes its quota of anecdote.
The history of Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres supplies us with endless anecdotes of actors, and with humorous and pathetic narratives that embrace the whole region both of tragedy and comedy. Quin's jokes, Garrick's weaknesses, the celebrated O.P. riots, contrast with the miserable end of some popular favourites and the caprices of genius. The oddities of Munden, the humour of Liston, only serve to render the gloom of Kean's downfall more terrible, and to show the wreck and ruin of many unhappy men, equally wilful though less gifted. There is a perennial charm about theatrical stories, and the history of these theatres must be illustrated by many a sketch of the loves and rivalries of actors, their fantastic tricks, their practical jokes, their gay progress to success or ruin. Changes of popular taste are marked by the change of character in the pieces that have been performed in various ages; and the history of the two theatres will include various illustrative sketches of dramatic writers, as well as actors. There was a vast interval in literature between the tragedies of Addison and Murphey and the comedies of Holcroft, O'Keefe, and Morton; the descent to modern melodrama and burlesque must be traced through various gradations, and the reasons shown for the many modifications both classes of entertainments have undergone.
Westminster, from the night St. Peter came over from Lambeth in the fisherman's boat, and chose a site for the Abbey in the midst of Thorney Island, to the present day, has been a spot where the pilgrim to historic shrines loves to linger. Need we remind our readers that Edward the Confessor built the Abbey, or that William the Conqueror was crowned here, the ceremony ending in tumult and blood? How vast the store of facts from which we have to cull! We see the Jews being beaten nearly to death for daring to attend the coronation of Richard I.; we observe Edward I. watching the sacred stone of Scotland being placed beneath his coronation chair; we behold for the first time, at Richard II.'s coronation, the champion riding into the Hall, to challenge all who refuse allegiance; we see, at the funeral of Anne of Bohemia, Richard beating the Earl of Arundel for wishing to leave before the service is over. We hear the Te Deum that is sung for the victory of Agincourt, and watch Henry VI. selecting a site for a resting-place; we hear for the last time, at the coronation of Henry VIII., the sanction of the Pope bestowed upon an English monarch; we pity poor Queen Caroline attempting to enter the Abbey to see her worthless husband crowned; and we view the last coronation, and draw auguries of a purer if not a happier age. The old Hall, too; could we neglect that ancient chamber, where Charles I. was sentenced to death, and where Cromwell was throned in almost regal splendour? We must see it in all its special moments; when the seven bishops were acquitted, and the shout of joy shook London as with an earthquake; and when the rebel lords were tried. We must hear Lord Byron tried for his duel with Mr. Chaworth, and mad Lord Ferrers condemned for shooting his steward. We shall get a side-view of the shameless Duchess of Kingston, and hear Burke and Sheridan grow eloquent over the misdeeds of Warren Hastings.
The parks now draw us westward, and we wander through them: in St. James's seeing Charles II. feeding his ducks or playing "pall-mall;" in Hyde Park observing the fashions and extravagancies of many generations. Romeo Coates will whisk past us in his fantastic chariot, and the beaus and oddities of many generations will pace past us in review. There will be celebrated duels to describe, and various strange follies to deride. We shall see Cromwell thrown from his coach, and shall witness the foot-races that Pepys describes. Dryden's gallants and masked ladies will receive some mention; and we shall tell of bygone encampments and of many events now almost forgotten.
Kensington will recall many anecdotes of William of Orange, his beloved Queen, stupid Prince George of Denmark, and George II., who all died at the palace, the old seat of the Finches. We are sure to find good company in the gardens. Still as when Tickell sang, every walk
"Seems from afar a moving tulip bed, Where rich brocades and glossy damasks glow, And chintz, the rival of the showery bow."
There is Newton's house at South Kensington to visit, and Wilkie's and Mrs. Inchbald's; and, above all, there is Holland House, the scene of the delightful Whig coteries of Tom Moore's time. Here Addison lived to regret his marriage with a lady of rank, and here he died. At Kensington Charles James Fox spent his youth.
And now Chelsea brings us pleasant recollections of Sir Thomas More, Swift, Sir Robert Walpole, and Atterbury. "Chelsith," Sir Thomas More used to call it when Holbein was lodging in his house and King Henry, who afterwards beheaded his old friend, used to come to dinner, and after dinner walk round the fair garden with his arm round his host's neck. More was fond of walking on the flat roof of his gatehouse, which commanded a pleasant prospect of the Thames and the fields beyond. Let us hope the tradition is not true that he used to bind heretics to a tree in his garden. In 1717 Chelsea only contained 350 houses, and these in 1725 had grown to 1,350. There is Cheyne Walk, so called from the Lords Cheyne, owners of the manor; and we must not forget Don Saltero and his famous coffee-house, the oddities of which Steele pleasantly sketched in the Tatler. The Don was famous for his skill in brewing punch and for his excellent playing on the fiddle. Saltero was a barber, who drew teeth, drew customers, wrote verses, and collected curiosities.
"Some relics of the Sheban queen And fragments of the famed Bob Crusoe."
Swift lodged at Chelsea, over against the Jacobite Bishop Atterbury, who so nearly lost his head. In one of his delightful letters to Stella Swift describes "the Old Original Chelsea Bun House," and the r-r-r-r-rare Chelsea buns. He used to leave his best gown and perriwig at Mrs. Vanhomrig's, in Suffolk Street, then walk up Pall Mall, through the park, out at Buckingham House, and on to Chelsea, a little beyond the church (5,748 steps), he says, in less than an hour, which was leisurely walking even for the contemplative and observant dean. Smollet laid a scene of his "Humphrey Clinker" in Chelsea, where he lived for some time.
The Princess Elizabeth, when a girl, lived at Chelsea, with that dangerous man, with whom she is said to have fallen in love, the Lord Admiral Seymour, afterwards beheaded. He was the second husband of Katherine Parr, one of the many wives of Elizabeth's father. Cremorne was, in Walpole's days, the villa of Lord Cremorne, an Irish nobleman; and near here, at a river-side cottage died, in miserly and cynical obscurity, the greatest of our modern landscape painters, Turner. Then there is Chelsea Hospital to visit. This hospital was built by Wren; Charles II., it is said at Nell Gwynn's suggestion, originated the good work, which was finished by William and Mary. Dr. Arbuthnot, that good man so beloved by the Pope set, was physician here, and the Rev. Philip Francis, who translated Horace, was chaplain. Nor can we leave Chelsea without remembering Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection of antiquities, sold for £20,000, formed the first nucleus of the British Museum, and who resided at Chelsea; nor shall we forget the Chelsea china manufactory, one of the earliest porcelain manufactories in England, patronized by George II., who brought over German artificers from Brunswick and Saxony. In the reign of Louis XV. the French manufacturers began to regard it with jealousy and petitioned their king for special privileges. Ranelagh, too, that old pleasure-garden which Dr. Johnson declared was "the finest thing he had ever seen," deserves a word; Horace Walpole was constantly there, though at first, he owns, he preferred Vauxhall; and Lord Chesterfield was so fond of it that he used to say he should order all his letters to be directed there.
The West End squares are pleasant spots for our purpose, and at many doors we shall have to make a call. In Landsdowne House (in Berkeley Square) it is supposed by many that Lord Shelburne, Colonel Barre, and Dunning wrote "Junius"; certain it is that the Marquis of Landsdowne, in 1809, acknowledged the possession of the secret, but died the following week, before he could disclose it. Here, in 1774, that persecuted philosopher, Dr. Priestley, the librarian to Lord Shelburne, discovered oxygen. In this square Horace Walpole (that delightful letter-writer) died and Lord Clive destroyed himself. Then there is Grosvenor Square, where that fat, easy-going Minister, Lord North, lived, where Wilkes the notorious resided, and where the Cato-Street conspirators planned to kill all the Cabinet Ministers, who had been invited to dinner by the Earl of Harrowby. In Hanover Square we visit Lord Rodney, &c. In St. James's Square we recall William III. coming to the Earl of Romney's to see fireworks let off and, later, the Prince Regent, from a balcony, displaying to the people the Eagles captured at Waterloo. Queen Caroline resided here during her trial, and many of Charles II.'s frail beauties also resided in the same spot. In Cavendish Square we stop to describe the splendid projects of that great Duke of Chandos whom Pope ridiculed. Nor are the lesser squares by any means devoid of interest.
In Pall Mall the laziest gleaner of London traditions might find a harvest. On the site of Carlton House--the Prince Regent's palace--were, in the reign of Henry VI., monastic buildings, in which (reign of Henry VIII.) Erasmus afterwards resided. They were pulled down at the Reformation. Nell Gwynn lived here, and so did Sir William Temple, Swift's early patron, the pious Boyle, and that poor puff-ball of vanity and pretence--Bubb Doddington. Here we have to record the unhappy duel at the "Star and Garter" tavern between Lord Byron and Mr. Chaworth, and the murder of Mr. Thynne by his rival, Count Köningsmark. There is Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery to notice, and Dodsley's shop, which Burke, Johnson, and Garrick so often visited. There is also the origin of the Royal Academy, at a house opposite Market Lane, to chronicle, many club-houses to visit, and curious memorabilia of all kinds to be sifted, selected, contrasted, mounted, and placed in sequence for view.
Then comes Marylebone, formerly a suburb, famous only for its hunting park (now Regent's Park), its gardens, and its bowling-greens. In Queen Elizabeth's time the Russian ambassadors were sent to hunt in Marylebone Park; Cromwell sold it--deer, timber, and all--for £13,000. The Marylebone Bowling Greens, which preceded the gardens, were at first the resort of noblemen and gentlemen, but eventually highwaymen began to frequent them. The Duke of Buckingham (whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu glances at in the line,
"Some dukes at Marybone bowl time away")
used, at an annual dinner to the frequenters of the gardens, to give the agreeable toast,--"May as many of us as remain unhanged next spring meet here again." Eventually burlettas were produced--one written by Chatterton; and Dr. Arne conducted Handel's music. Marylebone, in the time of Hogarth, was a favourite place for prize fights and back-sword combats, the great champion being Figg, that bullet-headed man with the bald, plaistered head, whom Hogarth has represented mounting grim sentry in his "Southwark Fair." The great building at Marylebone began between 1718 and 1729. In 1739 there were only 577 houses in the parish; in 1851 there were 16,669. In many of the nooks and corners of Marylebone we shall find curious facts and stories worth the unravelling.
The eastern squares, in Bloomsbury and St. Pancras, are regions not by any means to be lightly passed by. Bloomsbury Square was built by the Earl of Southampton, about the time of the Restoration, and was thought one of the wonders of England. Baxter lived here when he was tormented by Judge Jefferies; Sir Hans Sloane was one of its inhabitants; so was that great physician, Dr. Radcliffe. The burning of Mansfield House by Lord George Gordon's rioters has to be minutely described. In Russell Square we visit the houses of Sir Thomas Lawrence and of Judge Talfourd, and search for that celebrated spot in London legend, "The Field of the Forty Footsteps," where two brothers, it is said, killed each other in a duel for a lady, who sat by watching the fight. Then there is Red Lion Square, where tradition says some faithful adherents, at the Restoration, buried the body of Cromwell, to prevent its desecration at Tyburn; and we have to cull some stories of a good old inhabitant, Jonas Hanway, the great promoter of many of the London charities, the first man who habitually used an umbrella and Dr. Johnson's spirited opponent on the important question of tea. Soho Square, too, has many a tradition, for the Duke of Monmouth lived there in great splendour; and in Hogarth's time Mrs. Cornelys made the square celebrated by her masquerades, which in time became disreputable. Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Sir Joseph Banks, and Burnet, the historian, were all inhabitants of this locality.
Islington brings us back to days when Henry VIII. came there to hawk the partridge and the heron, and when the London citizens wandered out across the northern fields to drink milk and eat cheesecakes. The old houses abound in legends of Sir Walter Raleigh, Topham, the strong man, George Morland, the artist, and Henderson, the actor. At Canonbury, the old tower of the country house of the Prior of St. Bartholomew recalls to us Goldsmith, who used to come there to hide from his creditors, go to bed early, and write steadily.
At Highgate and Hampstead we shall scour the northern uplands of London by no means in vain, as we shall find Belsize House, in Charles II.'s time, openly besieged by robbers and, long afterwards, highwaymen swarming in the same locality. The chalybeate wells of Hampstead lead us on to the Heath, where wolves were to be found in the twelfth century and highwaymen as late as 1803. Good company awaits us at pleasant Hampstead--Lord Erskine, Lord Chatham, Keats, Akenside, Leigh Hunt, and Sir Fowell Buxton; Booth, Wilkes, and Colley Cibber; Mrs. Barbauld, honest Dick Steele, and Joanna Baillie. As for Highgate, for ages a mere hamlet, a forest, it once boasted a bishop's palace, and there we gather, with free hand, memories of Sacheverell, Rowe, Dr. Watts, Hogarth, Coleridge, and Lord Mansfield; Ireton, Marvell, and Dick Whittington, the worthy demi-god of London apprentices to the end of time.
Lambeth, where Harold was crowned, can hold its own in interest with any part of London--for it once possessed two ecclesiastical palaces and many places of amusement. Lambeth Palace itself is a spot of extreme interest. Here Wat Tyler's men dragged off Archbishop Sudbury to execution; here, when Laud was seized, the Parliamentary soldiers turned the palace into a prison for Royalists and demolished the great hall. Outside the walls of the church James II.'s Queen cowered in the December rain with her child, till a coach could be brought from the neighbouring inn to convey her to Gravesend to take ship for France. The Gordon rioters attacked the palace in 1780, but were driven off by a detachment of Guards. The Lollards' Tower has to be visited, and the sayings and doings of a long line of prelates to be reviewed. Vauxhall brings us back to the days when Walpole went with Lady Caroline Petersham and helped to stew chickens in a china dish over a lamp; or we go further back and accompany Addison and the worthy Sir Roger de Coverley, and join them over a glass of Burton ale and a slice of hung beef.
Astley's Amphitheatre recalls to us many amusing stories of that old soldier, Ducrow, and of his friends and rivals, which join on very naturally to those other theatrical traditions to which Drury Lane and Covent Garden have already led us.
So we mean to roam from flower to flower, over as varied a garden as the imagination can well conceive. There have been brave workers before us in the field, and we shall build upon good foundations. We hope to be catholic in our selections; we shall prune away only the superfluous; we shall condense anecdotes only where we think we can make them pithier and racier. We will neglect no fact that is interesting, and blend together all that old Time can give us bearing upon London. Street by street we shall delve and rake for illustrative story, despising no book, however humble, no pamphlet, however obscure, if it only throws some light on the celebrities of London, its topographical history, its manners and customs. Such is a brief summary of our plan.
St. Paul's rises before us with its great black dome and stately row of sable columns; the Tower, with its central citadel, flanked by the spear-like masts of the river shipping; the great world of roofs spreads below us as we launch upon our venturous voyage of discovery. From Boadicea leading on her scythed chariots at Battle Bridge to Queen Victoria in the Thanksgiving procession of yesterday is a long period over which to range. We have whole generations of Londoners to defile before us--painted Britons, hooded Saxons, mailed Crusaders, Chaucer's men in hoods, friars, citizens, warriors, Shakespeare's friends, Johnson's companions, Goldsmith's jovial "Bohemians," Hogarth's fellow-painters, soldiers, lawyers, statesmen, merchants. Nevertheless, at our spells they will gather from the four winds, and at our command march off to their old billets in their old houses, where we may best cross-examine them and collect their impressions of the life of their times.
The subject is as entertaining as any dream Imagination ever evoked and as varied as human nature. Its classification is a certain bond of union, and will act as an excellent cement for the multiform stones with which we shall rear our building. Lists of names, dry pedigrees, rows of dates, we leave to the herald and the topographer; but we shall pass by little that can throw light on the history of London in any generation, and we shall dwell more especially on the events of the later centuries, because they are more akin to us and are bound to us by closer sympathies.
I. ROMAN LONDON
Buried London--Our Early Relations--The Founder of London--A distinguished Visitor at Romney Marsh--Cæsar re-visits the "Town on the Lake"--The Borders of Old London--Cæsar fails to make much out of the Britons--King Brown--The Derivation of the name of London--The Queen of the Iceni--London Stone and London Roads--London's Earlier and Newer Walls--The Site of St. Paul's--Fabulous Claims to Idolatrous Renown--Existing Relics of Roman London--Treasures from the Bed of the Thames--What we Tread underfoot in London--A vast Field of Story.
Eighteen feet below the level of Cheapside lies hidden Roman London, and deeper even than that is buried the earlier London of those savage charioteers who, long ages ago, bravely confronted the legions of Rome. In nearly all parts of the City there have been discovered tesselated pavements, Roman tombs, lamps, vases, sandals, keys, ornaments, weapons, coins, and statues of the ancient Roman gods. So the present has grown up upon the ashes of the past.
Trees that are to live long grow slowly. Slow and stately as an oak London grew and grew, till now nearly four million souls represent its leaves. Our London is very old. Centuries before Christ there probably came the first few half-naked fishermen and hunters, who reared, with flint axes and such rude tools, some miserable huts on the rising ground that, forming the north bank of the Thames, slopes to the river some sixty miles from where it joins the sea. According to some, the river spread out like a vast lake between the Surrey and the Essex hills in those times when the half-savage first settlers found the low slopes of the future London places of health and defence amid a vast and dismal region of fen, swamp, and forest. The heroism and the cruelties, the hopes and fears of those poor barbarians, darkness never to be removed has hidden from us for ever. In later days monkish historians, whom Milton afterwards followed, ignored these poor early relations of ours and invented, as a more fitting ancestor of Englishmen, Brute, a fugitive nephew of Æneas of Troy. But, stroll on where we will, the pertinacious savage, with his limbs stained blue and his flint axe red with blood, is a ghost not easily to be exorcised from the banks of the Thames, and in some Welsh veins his blood no doubt flows at this very day. The founder of London had no historian to record his hopes--a place where big salmon were to be found, and plenty of wild boars were to be met with, was probably his highest ambition. How he bartered with Phoenicians or Gauls for amber or iron no Druid has recorded. How he slew the foraging Belgæ, or was slain by them and dispossessed, no bard has sung. Whether he was generous and heroic as the New Zealander, or apelike and thievish as the Bushman, no ethnologist has yet proved. The very ashes of the founder of London have long since turned to earth, air, and water.
No doubt the few huts that formed early London were fought for over and over again, as wolves wrangle round a carcass. On Cornhill there probably dwelt petty kings who warred with the kings of Ludgate; and in Southwark there lurked or burrowed other chiefs who, perhaps by intrigue or force, struggled for centuries to get a foothold in Thames Street. But of such infusoria History (glorying only in offenders, criminals, and robbers on the largest scale) justly pays no heed. This alone we know, that the early rulers of London before the Christian era passed away like the wild beasts they fought and slew, and their very names have perished. One line of an old blind Greek poet might have immortalised them among the motley nations that crowded into Troy or swarmed under its walls; but, alas for them, that line was never written! No, Founder of London! thy name was written on fluid ooze of the marsh, and the first tide that washed over it from the Nore obliterated it for ever. Yet, perhaps even now thou sleepest as quietly fathoms deep in soft mud, in some still nook of Barking Creek, as if all the world was ringing with thy glory.
But descending quick to the lower but safer and firmer ground of fact, let us cautiously drive our first pile into the shaky morass of early London history.
A learned modern antiquary, Thomas Lewin, Esq., has proved, as nearly as such things can be proved, that Julius Cæsar and 8,000 men, who had sailed from Boulogne, landed near Romney Marsh about half-past five o'clock on Sunday the 27th of August, 55 years before the birth of our Saviour. Centuries before that very remarkable August day on which the brave standard-bearer of Cæsar's Tenth Legion sprang from his gilt galley into the sea and, eagle in hand, advanced against the javelins of the painted Britons who lined the shore, there is now no doubt London was already existing as a British town of some importance, and known to the fishermen and merchants of the Gauls and Belgians. Strabo, a Greek geographer who flourished in the reign of Augustus, speaks of British merchants as bringing to the Seine and the Rhine shiploads of corn, cattle, iron, hides, slaves, and dogs, and taking back brass, ivory, amber ornaments, and vessels of glass. By these merchants the desirability of such a depôt as London, with its great and always navigable river, could not have been long overlooked.
In Cæsar's second and longer invasion in the next year (54 B.C.), when his 28 many-oared triremes and 560 transports, &c., in all 800, poured on the same Kentish coast 21,000 legionaries and 2,000 cavalry, there is little doubt that his strong foot left its imprint near that cluster of stockaded huts (more resembling a New Zealand pah than a modern English town) perhaps already called London--Llyn-don, the "town on the lake." After a battle at Challock Wood, Cæsar and his men crossed the Thames, as is supposed, at Coway Stakes, an ancient ford a little above Walton and below Weybridge. Cassivellaunus, King of Hertfordshire and Middlesex, had just slain in war Immanuent, King of Essex, and had driven out his son Mandubert. The Trinobantes, Mandubert's subjects, joined the Roman spearmen against the 4,000 scythed chariots of Cassivellaunus and the Catyeuchlani. Straight as the flight of an arrow was Cæsar's march upon the capital of Cassivellaunus, a city the barbaric name of which he either forgot or disregarded, but which he merely says was "protected by woods and marshes." This place north of the Thames has usually been thought to be Verulamium (St. Alban's); but it was far more likely London, as the Cassi, whose capital Verulamium was, were among the traitorous tribes who joined Cæsar against their oppressor Cassivellaunus. Moreover, Cæsar's brief description of the spot perfectly applies to Roman London, for ages protected on the north by a vast forest, full of deer and wild boars, and which, even as late as the reign of Henry II., covered a great region, and has now shrunk into the not very wild districts of St. John's Wood and Caen Wood. On the north the town found a natural moat in the broad fens of Moorfields, Finsbury, and Houndsditch, while on the south ran the Fleet and the Old Bourne. Indeed, according to that credulous old enthusiast Stukeley, Cæsar, marching from Staines to London, encamped on the site of Old St. Pancras Church, round which edifice Stukeley found evident traces of a great Prætorian camp. However, whether Cassivellaunus, the King of Middlesex and Hertfordshire, had his capital at London or St. Alban's, this much at least is certain, that the legionaries carried their eagles swiftly over his stockades of earth and fallen trees, drove off the blue-stained warriors, and swept off the half-wild cattle stored up by the Britons. Shortly after, Cæsar returned to Gaul, having heard while in Britain of the death of his favourite daughter Julia, the wife of Pompey, his great rival. His camp at Richborough or Sandwich was far distant, the dreaded equinoctial gales were at hand, and Gaul, he knew, might at any moment of his absence start into a flame. His inglorious campaign had lasted just four months and a half--his first had been far shorter. As Cæsar himself wrote to Cicero, our rude island was defended by stupendous rocks, there was not a scrap of the gold that had been reported, and the only prospect of booty was in slaves, from whom there could be expected neither "skill in letters nor in music." In sober truth, all Cæsar had won from the people of Kent and Hertfordshire had been blows and buffets, for there were men in Britain even then. The prowess of the British charioteers became a standing joke in Rome against the soldiers of Cæsar. Horace and Tibullus both speak of the Briton as unconquered. The steel bow the strong Roman hand had for a moment bent, quickly relapsed to its old shape the moment Cæsar, mounting his tall galley, turned his eyes towards Gaul.
The Mandubert who sought Cæsar's help is by some thought to be the son of the semi-fabulous King Lud (King Brown), the mythical founder of London, and, according to Milton, who, as we have said, follows the old historians, a descendant of Brute of Troy. The successor of the warlike Cassivellaunus had his capital at St. Alban's; his son Cunobelin (Shakespeare's Cymbeline)--a name which seems to glow with perpetual sunshine as we write it--had a palace at Colchester; and the son of Cunobelin was the famed Caradoc, or Caractacus, that hero of the Silures, who struggled bravely for nine long years against the generals of Rome.
Celtic etymologists differ, as etymologists usually do, about the derivation of the name of London. Lon, or Long, meant, they say, either a lake, a wood, a populous place, a plain, or a ship-town. This last conjecture is, however, now the most generally received, as it at once gives the modern pronunciation, to which Llyn-don would never have assimilated. The first British town was indeed a simple Celtic hill fortress, formed first on Tower Hill, and afterwards continued to Cornhill and Ludgate. It was moated on the south by the river, which it controlled; by fens on the north; and on the east by the marshy low ground of Wapping. It was a high, dry, and fortified point of communication between the river and the inland country of Essex and Hertfordshire, a safe sixty miles from the sea, and central as a depôt and meeting-place for the tribes of Kent and Middlesex.
Hitherto the London about which we have been conjecturing has been a mere cloud city. The first mention of real London is by Tacitus, who, writing in the reign of Nero (A.D. 62, more than a century after the landing of Cæsar), in that style of his so full of vigour and so sharp in outline, that it seems fit rather to be engraved on steel than written on perishable paper, says that Londinium, though not, indeed, dignified with the name of colony, was a place highly celebrated for the number of its merchants and the confluence of traffic. In the year 62 London was probably still without walls, and its inhabitants were not Roman citizens, like those of Verulamium (St. Alban's). When the Britons, roused by the wrongs of the fierce Boadicea (Queen of the Iceni, the people of Norfolk and Suffolk), bore down on London, her back still "bleeding from the Roman rods," she slew in London and Verulamium alone 70,000 citizens and allies of Rome; impaling many beautiful and well-born women, amid revelling sacrifices, in the grove of Andate, the British Goddess of Victory. It is supposed that after this reckless slaughter the tigress and her savage followers burned the cluster of wooden houses that then formed London to the ground. Certain it is, that when deep sections were made for a sewer in Lombard Street in 1786, the lowest stratum consisted of tesselated Roman pavements, their coloured dice laying scattered like flower leaves, and above that of a thick layer of wood ashes, as of the débris of charred wooden buildings. This ruin the Romans avenged by the slaughter of 80,000 Britons in a butchering fight, generally believed to have taken place at King's Cross (otherwise Battle Bridge), after which the fugitive Boadicea, in rage and despair, took poison and perished.
London probably soon sprang, phoenix-like, from the fire, though history leaves it in darkness to enjoy a lull of 200 years. In the early part of the second century Ptolemy, the geographer, speaks of it as a city of the Kentish people; but Mr. Craik very ingeniously conjectures that the Greek writer took his information from Phoenician works descriptive of Britain, written before even the invasion of Cæsar. Theodosius, a general of the Emperor Valentinian, who saved London from gathered hordes of Scots, Picts, Franks, and Saxons, is supposed to have repaired the walls of London, which had been first built by the Emperor Constantine early in the fourth century. In the reign of Theodosius, London, now called Augusta, became one of the chief, if not the chief, of the seventy Roman cities in Britain. In the famous "Itinerary" of Antoninus (about the end of the third century) London stands as the goal or starting-point of seven out of the fifteen great central Roman roads in England. Camden considers the London Stone, now enshrined in the south wall of St. Swithin's Church, Cannon Street, to have been the central milestone of Roman England, from which all the chief roads radiated, and by which the distances were reckoned. Wren supposed that Watling Street, of which Cannon Street is a part, was the High Street of Roman London. Another street ran west along Holborn from Cheapside, and from Cheapside probably north. A northern road ran by Aldgate, and probably Bishopsgate. The road from Dover came either over a bridge near the site of the present London Bridge, or higher up at Dowgate, from Stoney Street on the Surrey side.
Early Roman London was scarcely larger than Hyde Park. Mr. Roach Smith, the best of all authorities on the subject, gives its length from the Tower to Ludgate, east and west, at about a mile; and north and south, that is from London Wall to the Thames, at about half a mile. The earliest Roman city was even smaller, for Roman sepulchres have been found in Bow Lane, Moorgate Street, Bishopsgate Within, which must at that time have been beyond the walls. The Roman cemeteries of Smithfield, St. Paul's, Whitechapel, the Minories, and Spitalfields, are of later dates, and are in all cases beyond the old line of circumvallation, according to the sound Roman custom fixed by law. The earlier London Mr. Roach Smith describes as an irregular space, the five main gates corresponding with Bridgegate, Ludgate, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate, and Aldgate. The north wall followed for some part the course of Cornhill and Leadenhall Street; the eastern Billiter Street and Mark Lane; the southern Thames Street; and the western the east side of Walbrook. Of the larger Roman wall, there were within the memory of man huge, shapeless masses, with trees growing upon them, opposite what is now Finsbury Circus. In 1852 a piece of Roman wall on Tower Hill was rescued from the improvers, and built into some stables and outhouses; but not before a careful sketch had been effected by the late Mr. Fairholt, one of the best of our antiquarian draughtsmen. The later Roman London was in general outline the same in shape and size as the London of the Saxons and Normans. The newer walls Pennant calculates at 3 miles 165 feet in circumference, they were 22 feet high, and guarded with forty lofty towers. At the end of the last century large portions of the old Roman wall were traceable in many places, but time has devoured almost the last morsels of that great pièce de résistance. In 1763 Mr. Gough made a drawing of a square Roman tower (one of three) then standing in Houndsditch. It was built in alternate layers of massive square stones and red tiles. The old loophole for the sentinel had been enlarged into a square latticed window. In 1857, while digging foundations for houses on the north-east side of Aldermanbury Postern, the workmen came on a portion of the Roman wall strengthened by blind arches. All that now substantially remains of the old fortification is a bastion in St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate; a fragment in St. Martin's Court, off Ludgate Hill; another portion exists in the Old Bailey, concealed behind houses; and a fourth, near George Street, Tower Hill. Portions of the wall have, however, been also broached in Falcon Square (one of which we have engraved), Bush Lane, Scott's Yard, and Cornhill, and others built in cellars and warehouses from opposite the Tower and Cripplegate.
The line of the Roman walls ran from the Tower straight to Aldgate; there making an angle, it continued to Bishopsgate. From there it turned eastward to St. Giles's Churchyard, where it veered south to Falcon Square. At this point it continued west to Aldersgate, running under Christ's Hospital, and onward to Giltspur Street. There forming an angle, it proceeded directly to Ludgate towards the Thames, passing to the south of St. Andrew's Church. The wall then crossed Addle Street, and took a course along Upper and Lower Thames Street towards the Tower. In Thames Street the wall has been found built on oaken piles; on these was laid a stratum of chalk and stones, and over this a course of large, hewn sandstones, cemented with quicklime, sand, and pounded tile. The body of the wall was constructed of ragstone, flint, and lime, bonded at intervals with courses of plain and curve-edged tiles.
That Roman London grew slowly there is abundant proof. In building the new Exchange, the workmen came on a gravel-pit full of oyster-shells, cattle bones, old sandals, and shattered pottery. No coin found there being later than Severus indicates that this ground was bare waste outside the original city until at least the latter part of the third century. How far Roman London eventually spread its advancing waves of houses may be seen from the fact that Roman wall-paintings, indicating villas of men of wealth and position, have been found on both sides of High Street, Southwark, almost up to St. George's Church; while one of the outlying Roman cemeteries bordered the Kent Road.
From the horns of cattle having been dug up in St. Paul's Churchyard, the monks, ever eager to discover traces of that Paganism with which they amalgamated Christianity, conjectured that a temple of Diana once stood on the site of St. Paul's. A stone altar, with a rude figure of the amazon goddess sculptured upon it, was indeed discovered in making the foundations for Goldsmiths' Hall, Cheapside; but this was a mere votive or private altar, and proves nothing; and the ox bones, if any, found at St. Paul's, were merely refuse thrown into a rubbish-heap outside the old walls. As to the Temple of Apollo, supposed to have been replaced by Westminster Abbey, that is merely an invention of rival monks to glorify Thorney Island, and to render its antiquity equal to the fabulous claims of St. Paul's. Nor is there any positive proof that shrines to British gods ever stood on either place, though that they may have done so is not at all improbable.
The existing relics of Roman London are far more valuable and more numerous than is generally supposed. Innumerable tesselated pavements, masterpieces of artistic industry and taste, have been found in the City. A few of these should be noted. In 1854 part of the pavement of a room, twenty-eight feet square, was discovered, when the Excise Office was pulled down, between Bishopsgate Street and Broad Street. The central subject was supposed to be the Rape of Europa. A few years before another pavement was met with near the same spot. In 1841 two pavements were dug up under the French Protestant Church in Threadneedle Street. The best of these we have engraved. In 1792 a circular pavement was found in the same locality; and there has also been dug up in the same street a curious female head, the size of life, formed of coloured stones and glass. In 1805 a beautiful Roman pavement was disinterred on the south-west angle of the Bank of England, near the gate opening into Lothbury, and is now in the British Museum. In 1803 a fine specimen of pavement was found in front of the East-India House, Leadenhall Street, the central design being Bacchus reclining on a panther. In this pavement twenty distinct tints had been successfully used. Other pavements have been cut through in Crosby Square, Bartholemew Lane, Fenchurch Street, and College Street. The soil, according to Mr. Roach Smith, seems to have risen over them at the rate of nearly a foot a century.
The statuary found in London should also not be forgotten. One of the most remarkable pieces was a colossal bronze head of the Emperor Hadrian, dredged up from the Thames a little below London Bridge. It is now in the British Museum. A colossal bronze hand, thirteen inches long, was also found in Thames Street, near the Tower. In 1857, near London Bridge, the dredgers found a beautiful bronze Apollino, a Mercury of exquisite design, a priest of Cybele, and a figure supposed to be Jupiter. The Apollino and Mercury are masterpieces of ideal beauty and grace. In 1842 a chef d'oeuvre was dug out near the old Roman wall in Queen Street, Cheapside. It was the bronze stooping figure of an archer. It has silver eyes; and the perfect expression and anatomy display the highest art.
In 1825 a graceful little silver figure of the child Harpocrates, the God of Silence, looped with a gold chain, was found in the Thames, and is now in the British Museum. In 1839 a pair of gold armlets were dug up in Queen Street, Cheapside. In a kiln in St. Paul's Churchyard, in 1677, there were found lamps, bottles, urns, and dishes. Among other relics of Roman London drifted down by time we may instance articles of red glazed pottery, tiles, glass cups, window glass, bath scrapers, gold hairpins, enamelled clasps, sandals, writing tablets, bronze spoons, forks, distaffs, bells, dice, and millstones. As for coins, which the Romans seem to have hid in every conceivable nook, Mr. Roach Smith says that within twenty years upwards of 2,000 were, to his own knowledge, found in London, chiefly in the bed of the Thames. Only one Greek coin, as far as we know, has ever been met with in London excavations.
The Romans left deep footprints wherever they trod. Many of our London streets still follow the lines they first laid down. The river bank still heaves beneath the ruins of their palaces. London Stone, as we have already shown, still stands to mark the starting-point of the great roads that they designed. In a lane out of the Strand there still exists a bath where their sinewy youth laved their limbs, dusty from the chariot races at the Campus Martius at Finsbury. The pavements trodden by the feet of Hadrian and Constantine still lie buried under the restless wheels that roll over our City streets. The ramparts the legionaries guarded have not yet quite crumbled to dust, though the rude people they conquered have themselves long since grown into conquerors. Roman London now exists only in fragments, invisible save to the prying antiquary. As the seed is to be found hanging to the root of the ripe wheat, so some filaments of the first germ of London, of the British hut and the Roman villa, still exist hidden under the foundations of the busy city that now teems with thousands of inhabitants. We tread under foot daily the pride of our old oppressors.
II. TEMPLE BAR
Temple Bar--The Golgotha of English Traitors--When Temple Bar was made of Wood--Historical Pageants at Temple Bar--The Associations of Temple Bar--Mischievous Processions through Temple Bar--The First grim Trophy--Rye-House Plot Conspirators.
Temple Bar was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren, in 1670-72, soon after the Great Fire had swept away eighty-nine London churches, four out of the seven City gates, 460 streets, and 13,200 houses, and had destroyed fifteen of the twenty-six wards, and laid waste 436 acres of buildings, from the Tower eastward to the Inner Temple westward.
The old black gateway, once the dreaded Golgotha of English traitors, separates, it should be remembered, the Strand from Fleet Street, the city from the shire, and the Freedom of the City of London from the Liberty of the City of Westminster. As Hatton (1708--Queen Anne) says,--"This gate opens not immediately into the City itself, but into the Liberty or Freedom thereof." We need hardly say that nothing can be more erroneous than the ordinary London supposition that Temple Bar ever formed part of the City fortifications. Mr. Gilbert à Beckett, laughing at this tradition, once said in Punch: "Temple Bar has always seemed to me a weak point in the fortifications of London. Bless you, the besieging army would never stay to bombard it--they would dash through the barber's."
The Great Fire never reached nearer Temple Bar than the Inner Temple, on the south side of Fleet Street, and St. Dunstan's Church, on the north.
The Bar is of Portland stone, which London smoke alternately blackens and calcines; and each façade has four Corinthian pilasters, an entablature, and an arched pediment. On the west (Strand) side, in two niches, stand, as eternal sentries, Charles I. and Charles II., in Roman costume. Charles I. has long ago lost his bâton, as he once deliberately lost his head. Over the keystone of the central arch there used to be the royal arms. On the east side are James I. and Elizabeth (by many able writers supposed to be Anne of Denmark, James I.'s queen). She is pointing her white finger at Child's; while he, looking down on the passing cabs, seems to say, "I am nearly tired of standing; suppose we go to Whitehall, and sit down a bit?"
The slab over the eastern side of the arch bears the following inscription, now all but smoothed down by time:--
"Erected in the year 1670, Sir Samuel Starling, Mayor; continued in the year 1671, Sir Richard Ford, Lord Mayor; and finished in the year, 1672, Sir George Waterman, Lord Mayor."
All these persons were friends of Pepys.
The upper part of the Bar is flanked by scrolls, but the fruit and flowers once sculptured on the pediment, and the supporters of the royal arms over the posterns, have crumbled away. In the centre of each façade is a semicircular-headed, ecclesiastical-looking window, that casts a dim horny light into a room above the gate, held of the City, at an annual rent of some £50, by Messrs. Childs, the bankers, as a sort of muniment-room for their old account-books. There is here preserved, among other costlier treasures of Mammon, the private account-book of Charles II. The original Child was a friend of Pepys, and is mentioned by him as quarrelling with the Duke of York on Admiralty matters. The Child who succeeded him was a friend of Pope, and all but led him into the South-Sea Bubble speculation.
Those affected, mean statues, with the crinkly drapery, were the work of a vain, half-crazed sculptor named John Bushnell, who died mad in 1701. Bushnell, who had visited Rome and Venice, executed Cowley's monument in Westminster Abbey, and the statues of Charles I., Charles II., and Gresham, in the Old Exchange.
There is no extant historical account of Temple Bar in which the following passage from Strype (George I.) is not to be found embedded like a fossil; it is, in fact, nearly all we London topographers know of the early history of the Bar:--"Anciently," says Strype, "there were only posts, rails, and a chain, such as are now in Holborn, Smithfield, and Whitechapel bars. Afterwards there was a house of timber erected across the street, with a narrow gateway and an entry on the south side of it under the house." This structure is to be seen in the bird's-eye view of London, 1601 (Elizabeth), and in Hollar's seven-sheet map of London (Charles II.)
The date of the erection of the "wooden house" is not to be ascertained; but there is the house plain enough in a view of London to which Maitland affixes the date about 1560 (the second year of Elizabeth), so we may perhaps safely put it down as early as Edward VI. or Henry VIII. Indeed, if a certain scrap of history is correct--i.e., that bluff King Hal once threatened, if a certain Bill did not pass the Commons a little quicker, to fix the heads of several refractory M.P.s on the top of Temple Bar--we must suppose the old City toll-gate to be as old as the early Tudors.
After Simon de Montfort's death, at the battle of Evesham, 1265, Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., punished the rebellious Londoners, who had befriended Montfort, by taking away all their street chains and bars, and locking them up in the Tower.
The earliest known documentary and historical notice of Temple Bar is in 1327, the first year of Edward III.; and in the thirty-fourth year of the same reign we find, at an inquisition before the mayor, twelve witnesses deposing that the commonalty of the City had, time out of mind, had free ingress and egress from the City to Thames and from Thames to the City, through the great gate of the Templars situate within Temple Bar. This referred to some dispute about the right of way through the Temple, built in the reign of Henry I. In 1384 Richard II. granted a licence for paving Strand Street from Temple Bar to the Savoy, and collecting tolls to cover such charges.
The historical pageants that have taken place at Temple Bar deserve a notice, however short. On the 5th of November, 1422, the corpse of that brave and chivalrous king, the hero of Agincourt, Henry V., was borne to its rest at Westminster Abbey by the chief citizens and nobles, and every doorway from Southwark to Temple Bar had its mournful torch-bearer. In 1502-3 the hearse of Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII., halted at Temple Bar, on its way from the Tower to Westminster, and at the Bar the Abbots of Westminster and Bermondsey blessed the corpse, and the Earl of Derby and a large company of nobles joined the sable funeral throng. After sorrow came joy, and after joy sorrow--Ita vita. In the next reign poor Anne Boleyn, radiant with happiness and triumph, came through the Bar (May 31, 1534), on her way to the Tower, to be welcomed by the clamorous citizens, the day before her ill-starred coronation. Temple Bar on that occasion was new painted and repaired, and near it stood singing men and children--the Fleet Street conduit all the time running claret. The old gate figures more conspicuously the day before the coronation of that wondrous child, Edward VI. Two hogsheads of wine were then ladled out to the thirsty mob, and the gate at Temple Bar was painted with battlements and buttresses, richly hung with cloth of Arras, and all in a flutter with "fourteen standard flags." There were eight French trumpeters blowing their best, besides "a pair of regals," with children singing to the same. In September, 1553, when Edward's cold-hearted half-sister, Mary Tudor, came through the City, according to ancient English custom, the day before her coronation, she did not ride on horseback, as Edward had done, but sat in a chariot covered with cloth of tissue and drawn by six horses draped with the same. Minstrels piped and trumpeted at Ludgate, and Temple Bar was newly painted and hung.
Old Temple Bar, the background to many historical scenes, figures in the rash rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt. When he had fought his way down Piccadilly to the Strand, Temple Bar was thrown open to him, or forced open by him; but when he had been repulsed at Ludgate he was hemmed in by cavalry at Temple Bar, where he surrendered. This foolish revolt led to the death of innocent Lady Jane Grey, and brought sixty brave gentlemen to the scaffold and the gallows.
On Elizabeth's procession from the Tower before her coronation, January, 1559, Gogmagog the Albion, and Corineus the Briton, the two Guildhall giants, stood on the Bar; and on the south side there were chorister lads, one of whom, richly attired as a page, bade the queen farewell in the name of the whole City. In 1588, the glorious year that the Armada was defeated, Elizabeth passed through the Bar on her way to return thanks to God solemnly at St. Paul's. The City waits stood in triumph on the roof of the gate. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen, in scarlet gowns, welcomed the queen and delivered up the City sword, then on her return they took horse and rode before her. The City Companies lined the north side of the street, the lawyers and gentlemen of the Inns of Court the south. Among the latter stood a person afterwards not altogether unknown, one Francis Bacon, who displayed his wit by saying to a friend, "Mark the courtiers! Those who bow first to the citizens are in debt; those who bow first to us are at law!"
In 1601, when the Earl of Essex made his insane attempt to rouse the City to rebellion, Temple Bar, we are told, was thrown open to him; but Ludgate being closed against him on his retreat from Cheapside, he came back by boat to Essex House, where he surrendered after a short and useless resistance.
King James made his first public entry into his royal City of London, with his consort and son Henry, upon the 15th of March, 1603-4. The king was mounted upon a white genet, ambling through the crowded streets under a canopy held by eight gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, as representatives of the Barons of the Cinque Ports, and passed under six arches of triumph, to take his leave at the Temple of Janus, erected for the occasion at Temple Bar. This edifice was fifty-seven feet high, proportioned in every respect like a temple.
In June, 1649 (the year of the execution of Charles), Cromwell and the Parliament dined at Guildhall in state, and the mayor, says Whitelocke, delivered up the sword to the Speaker, at Temple Bar, as he had before done to King Charles.
Philips, Milton's nephew, who wrote the continuation of Baker's Chronicle, describes the ceremony at Temple Bar on the proclamation of Charles II. The old oak gates being shut, the king-at-arms, with tabard on and trumpet before him, knocked and gravely demanded entrance. The Lord Mayor appointed some one to ask who knocked. The king-at-arms replied, that if they would open the wicket, and let the Lord Mayor come thither, he would to him deliver his message. The Lord Mayor then appeared, tremendous in crimson velvet gown, and on horseback, of all things in the world, the trumpets sounding as the gallant knight pricked forth to demand of the herald, who he was and what was his message. The bold herald, with his hat on, answered, regardless of Lindley Murray, who was yet unknown, "We are the herald-at-arms appointed and commanded by the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament, and demand an entrance into the famous City of London, to proclaim Charles II. King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, and we expect your speedy answer to our demand." An alderman then replied, "The message is accepted," and the gates were thrown open.
When William III. came to see the City and the Lord Mayor's Show in 1689, the City militia, holding lighted flambeaux, lined Fleet Street as far as Temple Bar.
The shadow of every monarch and popular hero since Charles II.'s time has rested for at least a passing moment at the old gateway. Queen Anne passed here to return thanks at St. Paul's for the victory of Blenheim. Here Marlborough's coach ominously broke down in 1714, when he returned in triumph from his voluntary exile.
George III. passed through Temple Bar, young and happy, the year after his coronation, and again when, old and almost broken-hearted, he returned thanks for his partial recovery from insanity; and in our time that graceless son of his, the Prince Regent, came through the Bar in 1814, to thank God at St. Paul's for the downfall of Bonaparte.
On the 9th November, 1837, the accession of Queen Victoria, Alderman Kelly, picturesque in scarlet gown, Spanish hat, and black feathers, presented the City sword to the Queen at Temple Bar; Alderman Cowan was ready with the same weapon in 1844, when the Queen opened the new Royal Exchange; but in 1851, when her Majesty once more visited the City, the old ceremony was (wrongly, we think) dispensed with.
At the funeral of Lord Nelson, the honoured corpse, followed by downcast old sailors, was met at the Bar by the Lord Mayor and the Corporation; and the Great Duke's funeral car, and the long train of representative soldiers, rested at the Bar, which was hung with black velvet.
A few earlier associations connected with the present Bar deserve a moment or two's recollection. On February 12th, when General Monk--"Honest George," as his old Cromwellian soldiers used to call him--entered London, dislodged the "Rump" Parliament, and prepared for the Restoration of Charles II., bonfires were lit, the City bells rung, and London broke into a sudden flame of joy. Pepys, walking homeward about ten o'clock, says:--"The common joy was everywhere to be seen. The number of bonfires--there being fourteen between St. Dunstan's and Temple Bar, and at Strand Bridge, east of Catherine Street, I could at one time tell thirty-one fires."
On November 17, 1679, the year after the sham Popish Plot concocted by those matchless scoundrels, Titus Oates, an expelled naval chaplain, and Bedloe, a swindler and thief, Temple Bar was made the spot for a great mob pilgrimage, on the anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth. The ceremonial is supposed to have been organised by that restless plotter against a Popish succession, Lord Shaftesbury, and the gentlemen of the Green Ribbon Club, whose tavern, the "King's Head," was at the corner of Chancery Lane, opposite the Inner Temple gate. To scare and vex the Papists, the church bells began to clash out as early as three o'clock on the morning of that dangerous day. At dusk the procession of several thousand half-crazed torch-bearers started from Moorgate, along Bishopsgate Street, and down Houndsditch and Aldgate (passing Shaftesbury's house imagine the roar of the monster mob, the wave of torches, and the fiery fountains of squibs at that point!), then through Leadenhall Street and Cornhill, by the Royal Exchange, along Cheapside and on to Temple Bar, where the bonfire awaited the puppets. In a torrent of fire the noisy Protestants passed through the exulting City, making the Papists cower and shudder in their garrets and cellars, and before the flaming deluge opened a storm of shouting people. This procession consisted of fifteen groups of priests, Jesuits, and friars, two following a man on a horse, holding up before him a dummy, dressed to represent Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, a Protestant justice and wood merchant, supposed to have been murdered by Roman Catholics at Somerset House. It was attended by a body-guard of 150 swordbearers and a man roaring a political cry of the time through a brazen speaking-trumpet. The great bonfire was built up mountain high opposite the Inner Temple gate. Some zealous Protestants, by pre-arrangement, had crowned the prim and meagre statue of Elizabeth (still on the east side of the Bar) with a wreath of gilt laurel, and placed under her hand (that now points to Child's Bank) a golden glistening shield, with the motto, "The Protestant Religion and Magna Charta," inscribed upon it. Several lighted torches were stuck before her niche. Lastly, amidst a fiery shower of squibs from every door and window, the Pope and his companions were toppled into the huge bonfire, with shouts that reached almost to Charing Cross.
These mischievous processions were continued till the reign of George I. There was to have been a magnificent one on November 17, 1711, when the Whigs were dreading the contemplated peace with the French and the return of Marlborough. But the Tories, declaring that the Kit-Kat Club was urging the mob to destroy the house of Harley, the Minister, and to tear him to pieces, seized on the wax figures in Drury Lane, and forbade the ceremony.
As early as two years after the Restoration, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, a restless architectural quack and adventurer of those days, wrote a pamphlet proposing a sumptuous gate at Temple Bar, and the levelling of the Fleet Valley. After the Great Fire Charles II. himself hurried the erection of the Bar, and promised money to carry out the work. During the Great Fire, Temple Bar was one of the stations for constables, 100 firemen, and 30 soldiers.
The Rye-House Plot brought the first trophy to the Golgotha of the Bar, in 1684, twelve years after its erection. Sir Thomas Armstrong was deep in the scheme. If the discreditable witnesses examined against Lord William Russell are to be believed, a plot had been concocted by a few desperate men to assassinate "the Blackbird and the Goldfinch"--as the conspirators called the King and the Duke of York--as they were in their coach on their way from Newmarket to London. This plan seems to have been the suggestion of Rumbold, a maltster, who lived in a lonely moated farmhouse, called Rye House, about eighteen miles from London, near the river Ware, close to a by-road that leads from Bishop Stortford to Hoddesdon. Charles II. had a violent hatred to Armstrong, who had been his Gentleman of the Horse, and was supposed to have incited his illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, to rebellion. Sir Thomas was hanged at Tyburn. After the body had hung half an hour, the hangman cut it down, stripped it, lopped off the head, threw the heart into a fire, and divided the body into four parts. The fore-quarter (after being boiled in pitch at Newgate) was set on Temple Bar, the head was placed on Westminster Hall, and the rest of the body was sent to Stafford, which town Sir Thomas represented in Parliament.
Eleven years after, the heads of two more traitors--this time conspirators against William III.--joined the relic of Armstrong. Sir John Friend was a rich brewer at Aldgate. Parkyns was an old Warwickshire county gentleman. The plotters had several plans. One was to attack Kensington Palace at night, scale the outer wall, and storm or fire the building; another was to kill William on a Sunday, as he drove from Kensington to the chapel at St. James's Palace. The murderers agreed to assemble near where Apsley House now stands. Just as the royal coach passed from Hyde Park across to the Green Park, thirty conspirators agreed to fall on the twenty-five guards, and butcher the king before he could leap out of his carriage. These two Jacobite gentlemen died bravely, proclaiming their entire loyalty to King James and the "Prince of Wales."
The unfortunate gentlemen who took a moody pleasure in drinking "the squeezing of the rotten Orange" had long passed on their doleful journey from Newgate to Tyburn before the ghastly procession of the brave and unlucky men of the rising in 1715 began its mournful march.[1]
Sir Bernard Burke mentions a tradition that the head of the young Earl of Derwentwater was exposed on Temple Bar in 1716, and that his wife drove in a cart under the arch while a man hired for the purpose threw down to her the beloved head from the parapet above. But the story is entirely untrue, and is only a version of the way in which the head of Sir Thomas More was removed by his son-in-law and daughter from London Bridge, where that cruel tyrant Henry VIII. had placed it. Some years ago, when the Earl of Derwentwater's coffin was found in the family vault, the head was lying safe with the body. In 1716 there was, however, a traitor's head spiked on the Bar--that of Colonel John Oxburgh, the victim of mistaken fidelity to a bad cause. He was a brave Lancashire gentleman, who had surrendered with his forces at Preston. He displayed signal courage and resignation in prison, forgetting himself to comfort others.
The next victim was Mr. Christopher Layer, a young Norfolk man and a Jacobite barrister, living in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. He plunged deeply into the Atterbury Plot of 1722, and, with Lords North and Grey, enlisted men, hired officers, and, taking advantage of the universal misery caused by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, planned a general rising against George I. The scheme was, with four distinct bodies of Jacobites, to seize the Tower and the Bank, to arrest the king and the prince, and capture or kill Lord Cadogan, one of the Ministers. At the trial it was proved that Layer had been over to Rome, and had seen the Pretender, who, by proxy, had stood godfather to his child. Troops were to be sent from France; barricades were to be thrown up all over London. The Jacobites had calculated that the Government had only 14,000 men to meet them--3,000 of these would be wanted to guard London, 3,000 for Scotland, and 2,000 for the garrisons. The original design had been to take advantage of the king's departure for Hanover, and, in the words of one of the conspirators, the Jacobites were fully convinced that "they should walk King George out before Lady-day." Layer was hanged at Tyburn, and his head fixed upon Temple Bar.
Years after, one stormy night in 1753, the rebel's skull blew down, and was picked up by a non-juring attorney, named Pierce, who preserved it as a relic of the Jacobite martyr. It is said that Dr. Richard Rawlinson, an eminent antiquary, obtained what he thought was Layer's head, and desired in his will that it should be placed in his right hand when he was buried. Another version of the story is, that a spurious skull was foisted upon Rawlinson, who died happy in the possession of the doubtful treasure. Rawlinson was bantered by Addison for his pedantry, in one of the Tatlers, and was praised by Dr. Johnson for his learning.
The 1745 rebellion brought the heads of fresh victims to the Bar, and this was the last triumph of barbarous justice. Colonel Francis Townley's was the sixth head; Fletcher's (his fellow-officer), the seventh and last. The Earls of Kilmarnock and Cromarty, Lord Balmerino, and thirty-seven other rebels (thirty-six of them having been captured in Carlisle) were tried the same session. Townley was a man of about fifty-four years of age, nephew of Mr. Townley of Townley Hall, in Lancashire (the "Townley Marbles" family), who had been tried and acquitted in 1715, though many of his men were found guilty and executed. The nephew had gone over to France in 1727, and obtained a commission from the French king, whom he served for fifteen years, being at the siege of Philipsburg, and close to the Duke of Berwick when that general's head was shot off. About 1740, Townley stole over to England to see his friends and to plot against the Hanover family; and as soon as the rebels came into England, he met them between Lancaster and Preston, and came with them to Manchester. At the trial Roger M'Donald, an officer's servant, deposed to seeing Townley on the retreat from Derby, and between Lancaster and Preston riding at the head of the Manchester regiment on a bay horse. He had a white cockade in his hat and wore a plaid sash.
George Fletcher, who was tried at the same time as Townley, was a rash young chapman, who managed his widowed mother's provision shop "at Salford, just over the bridge in Manchester." His mother had begged him on her knees to keep out of the rebellion, even offering him a thousand pounds for his own pocket, if he would stay at home. He bought a captain's commission of Murray, the Pretender's secretary, for fifty pounds; wore the smart white cockade and a Highland plaid sash lined with white silk; and headed the very first captain's guard mounted for the Pretender at Carlisle. A Manchester man deposed to seeing at the Exchange a sergeant, with a drum, beating up for volunteers for the Manchester regiment.
Fletcher, Townley, and seven other unfortunate Jacobites were hanged on Kennington Common. Before the carts drove away, the men flung their prayer-books, written speeches, and gold-laced hats gaily to the crowd. Mr. James (Jemmy) Dawson, the hero of Shenstone's touching ballad, was one of the nine. As soon as they were dead the hangman cut down the bodies, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered them, throwing the hearts into the fire. A monster--a fighting-man of the day, named Buckhorse--is said to have actually eaten a piece of Townley's flesh, to show his loyalty. Before the ghastly scene was over, the heart of one unhappy spectator had already broken. The lady to whom James Dawson was engaged to be married followed the rebels to the common, and even came near enough to see, with pallid face, the fire kindling, the axe, the coffins, and all the other dreadful preparations. She bore up bravely, until she heard her lover was no more. Then she drew her head back into the coach, and crying out, "My dear, I follow thee--I follow thee! Lord God, receive our souls, I pray Thee!" fell on the neck of a companion and expired. Mr. Dawson had behaved gallantly in prison, saying, "He did not care if they put a ton weight of iron upon him, it would not daunt him."
A curious old print of 1746, full of vulgar triumph, reproduces a "Temple Bar, the City Golgotha," representing the Bar with three heads on the top of it, spiked on long iron rods. The devil looks down in ribald triumph from above, and waves a rebel banner, on which, besides three coffins and a crown, is the motto, "A crown or a grave." Underneath are written these patriotic but doggrel lines:--
"Observe the banner which would all enslave, Which misled traytors did so proudly wave: The devil seems the project to surprise; A fiend confused from off the trophy flies.
While trembling rebels at the fabric gaze, And dread their fate with horror and amaze, Let Britain's sons the emblematic view, And plainly see what is rebellion's due."
The heads of Fletcher and Townley were put on the Bar August 12, 1746. On August 15th Horace Walpole, writing to a friend, says he had just been roaming in the City, and "passed under the new heads on Temple Bar, where people make a trade of letting spy-glasses at a halfpenny a look." According to Mr. J.T. Smith, an old man living in 1825 remembered the last heads on Temple Bar being visible through a telescope across the space between the Bar and Leicester Fields.
Between two and three A.M., on the morning of January 20, 1766, a mysterious man was arrested by the watch as he was discharging, by the dim light, musket bullets at the two heads then remaining upon Temple Bar. On being questioned by the puzzled magistrate, he affected a disorder in his senses, and craftily declared that the patriotic reason for his eccentric conduct was his strong attachment to the present Government, and that he thought it not sufficient that a traitor should merely suffer death; that this provoked his indignation, and it had been his constant practice for three nights past to amuse himself in the same manner. "And it is much to be feared," says the past record of the event, "that the man is a near relation to one of the unhappy sufferers." Upon searching this very suspicious marksman, about fifty musket bullets were found on him, wrapped up in a paper on which was written the motto, "Eripuit ille vitam."
After this, history leaves the heads of the unhappy Jacobites--those lips that love had kissed, those cheeks children had patted--to moulder on in the sun and in the rain, till the last day of March, 1772, when one of them (Townley or Fletcher) fell. The last stormy gust of March threw it down, and a short time after a strong wind blew down the other; and against the sky no more relics remained of a barbarous and unchristian revenge. In April, 1773, Boswell, whom we all despise and all like, dined at courtly Mr. Beauclerk's with Dr. Johnson, Lord Charlemont (Hogarth's friend), Sir Joshua Reynolds, and other members of the literary club, in Gerrard Street, Soho, it being the awful evening when Boswell was to be balloted for. The conversation turned on the new and commendable practice of erecting monuments to great men in St. Paul's. The Doctor observed: "I remember once being with Goldsmith in Westminster Abbey. Whilst we stood at Poet's Corner, I said to him,--
"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."--OVID.
When we got to Temple Bar he stopped me, and pointing to the heads upon it, slily whispered,--
"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."
This anecdote, so full of clever, arch wit, is sufficient to endear the old gateway to all lovers of Johnson and of Goldsmith.
According to Mr. Timbs, in his "London and Westminster," Mrs. Black, the wife of the editor of the Morning Chronicle, when asked if she remembered any heads on Temple Bar, used to reply, in her brusque, hearty way, "Boys, I recollect the scene well! I have seen on that Temple Bar, about which you ask, two human heads--real heads--traitors' heads--spiked on iron poles. There were two; I saw one fall (March 31, 1772). Women shrieked as it fell; men, as I have heard, shrieked. One woman near me fainted. Yes, boys, I recollect seeing human heads upon Temple Bar."
The cruel-looking spikes were removed early in the present century. The panelled oak gates have often been renewed, though certainly shutting them too often never wore them out.
As early as 1790 Alderman Pickett (who built the St. Clement's arch), with other subversive reformers, tried to pull down Temple Bar. It was pronounced unworthy of form, of no antiquity, an ambuscade for pickpockets, and a record of only the dark and crimson pages of history.
A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, in 1813 chronicling the clearance away of some hovels encroaching upon the building, says: "It will not be surprising if certain amateurs, busy in improving the architectural concerns of the City, should at length request of their brethren to allow the Bar or grand gate of entrance into the City of London to stand, after they have so repeatedly sought to obtain its destruction." In 1852 a proposal for its repair and restoration was defeated in the Common Council; and twelve months later, a number of bankers, merchants, and traders set their hands to a petition for its removal altogether, as serving no practical purpose, as it impeded ventilation and retarded improvements. Since then Mr. Heywood has proposed to make a circus at Temple Bar, leaving the archway in the centre; and Mr. W. Burges, the architect, suggested a new arch in keeping with the new Law Courts opposite.
It is a singular fact that the "Parentalia," a chronicle of Wren's works written by Wren's clever son, contains hardly anything about Temple Bar. According to Mr. Noble, the Wren manuscripts in the British Museum, Wren's ledger in the Bodleian, and the Record Office documents, are equally silent; but from a folio at the Guildhall, entitled "Expenses of Public Buildings after the Great Fire," it would appear that the Bar cost altogether £1,397 10s.; Bushnell, the sculptor, receiving out of this sum £480 for his four stone monarchs. The mason was John Marshall, who carved the pedestal of the statue of Charles I. at Charing Cross and worked on the Monument in Fish Street Hill. In 1636 Inigo Jones had designed a new arch, the plan of which still exists. Wren, it is said, took his design of the Bar from an old temple at Rome.
The old Bar is now a mere piece of useless and disused armour. Once a protection, then an ornament, it has now become an obstruction--the too-narrow neck of a large decanter--a bone in the throat of Fleet Street. Yet still we have a lingering fondness for the old barrier that we have seen draped in black for a dead hero and glittering with gold in honour of a young bride. We have shared the sunshine that brightened it and the gloom that has darkened it, and we feel for it a species of friendship, in which it mutely shares. To us there seems to be a dignity in its dirt and pathos in the mud that bespatters its patient old face, as, like a sturdy fortress, it holds out against all its enemies, and Charles I. and II., and Elizabeth and James I. keep a bright look-out day and night for all attacks. Nevertheless, it must go in time, we fear. Poor old Temple Bar, we shall miss you when you are gone!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Amongst these we must not forget Joseph Sullivan, who was executed at Tyburn for high treason, for enlisting men in the service of the Pretender. In the collection of broadsides belonging to the Society of Antiquaries there is one of great interest, entitled "Perkins against Perkin, a dialogue between Sir William Perkins and Major Sulliviane, the two loggerheads upon Temple Bar, concerning the present juncture of affaires." Date uncertain.
III. FLEET STREET--GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Frays in Fleet Street--Chaucer and the Friar--The Duchess of Gloucester doing Penance for Witchcraft--Riots between Law Students and Citizens--'Prentice Riots--Oates in the Pillory--Entertainments in Fleet Street--Shop Signs--Burning the Boot--Trial of Hardy--Queen Caroline's Funeral.
Alas, for the changes of time! The Fleet, that little, quick-flowing stream, once so bright and clear, is now a sewer! but its name remains immortalised by the street called after it.
Although, according to a modern antiquary, a Roman amphitheatre once stood on the site of the Fleet Prison, and Roman citizens were certainly interred outside Ludgate, we know but little whether Roman buildings ever stood on the west side of the City gates. Stow, however, describes a stone pavement supported on piles being found, in 1595, near the Fleet Street end of Chancery Lane; so that we may presume the soil of the neighbourhood was originally marshy. The first British settlers there must probably have been restless spirits, impatient of the high rents and insufficient room inside the City walls and willing, for economy, to risk the forays of any Saxon pirates who chose to steal up the river on a dusky night and sack the outlying cabins of London.
There were certainly rough doings in Fleet Street in the Middle Ages, for the City chronicles tell us of much blood spilt there and of many deeds of violence. In 1228 (Henry III.) we find, for instance, one Henry de Buke slaying a man named Le Ireis, le Tylor, of Fleet Bridge, then fleeing to the church of St. Mary, Southwark, and there claiming sanctuary. In 1311 (Edward II.) five of the king's not very respectable or law-fearing household were arrested in Fleet Street for a burglary; and though the weak king demanded them (they were perhaps servants of his Gascon favourite, Piers Gaveston, whom the barons afterwards killed), the City refused to give them up, and they probably had short shrive. In the same reign, when the Strand was full of bushes and thickets, Fleet Street could hardly have been much better. Still, the shops in Fleet Street were, no doubt, even in Edward II.'s reign, of importance, for we find, in 1321, a Fleet Street bootmaker supplying the luxurious king with "six pairs of boots, with tassels of silk and drops of silver-gilt, the price of each pair being 5s." In Richard II.'s reign it is especially mentioned that Wat Tyler's fierce Kentish men sacked the Savoy church, part of the Temple, and destroyed two forges which had been originally erected on each side of St. Dunstan's church by the Knight Templars. The Priory of St. John of Jerusalem had paid a rent of 15s. for these forges, which same rent was given for more than a century after their destruction.
The poet Chaucer is said to have beaten a saucy Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, and to have been fined 2s. for the offence by the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple; so Speight had heard from one who had seen the entry in the records of the Inner Temple.
In King Henry IV.'s reign another crime disturbed Fleet Street. A Fleet Street goldsmith was murdered by ruffians in the Strand, and his body thrown under the Temple Stairs.
In 1440 (Henry VI.) a strange procession startled London citizens. Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, did penance through Fleet Street for witchcraft practised against the king. She and certain priests and necromancers had, it was said, melted a wax figure of young King Henry before a slow fire, praying that as that figure melted his life might melt also. Of the duchess's confederates, the Witch of Ely, was burned at Smithfield, a canon of Westminster died in the Tower, and a third culprit was hung, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. The duchess was brought from Westminster, and landed at the Temple Stairs, from whence, with a tall wax taper in her hand, she walked bareheaded to St. Paul's, where she offered at the high altar. Another day she did penance at Christ Church, Aldgate; a third day at St. Michael's, Cornhill, the Lord Mayor, sheriffs, and most of the Corporation following. She was then banished to the Isle of Man, and her ghost they say still haunts Peel Castle.
And now, in the long panorama of years, there rises in Fleet Street a clash of swords and a clatter of bucklers. In 1441 (Henry VI.) the general effervescence of the times spread beyond Ludgate, and there was a great affray in Fleet Street between the hot-blooded youths of the Inns of Court and the citizens, which lasted two days; the chief man in the riot was one of Clifford's Inn, named Harbottle; and this irrepressible Harbottle and his fellows only the appearance of the mayor and sheriffs could quiet. In 1458 (in the same reign) there was a more serious riot of the same kind; the students were then driven back by archers from the Conduit near Shoe Lane to their several inns, and some slain, including "the Queen's attornie," who certainly ought to have known better and kept closer to his parchments. Even the king's meek nature was roused at this, he committed the principal governors of Furnival's, Clifford's, and Barnard's inns, to the castle of Hertford, and sent for several aldermen to Windsor Castle, where he either rated or imprisoned them, or both.
Fleet Street often figures in the chronicles of Elizabeth's reign. On one visit it is particularly said that she often graciously stopped her coach to speak to the poor; and a green branch of rosemary given to her by a poor woman near Fleet Bridge was seen, not without marvellous wonder of such as knew the presenter, when her Majesty reached Westminster. In the same reign we are told that the young Earl of Oxford, after attending his father's funeral in Essex, rode through Fleet Street to Westminster, attended by seven score horsemen, all in black. Such was the splendid and proud profusion of Elizabeth's nobles.
James's reign was a stormy one for Fleet Street. Many a time the ready 'prentices snatched their clubs (as we read in "The Fortunes of Nigel"), and, vaulting over their counters, joined in the fray that surged past their shops. In 1621 particularly, three 'prentices having abused Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, as he passed their master's door in Fenchurch Street, the king ordered the riotous youths to be whipped from Aldgate to Temple Bar. In Fleet Street, however, the apprentices rose in force, and shouting "Rescue!" quickly released the lads and beat the marshalmen. If there had been any resistance, another thousand sturdy 'prentices would soon have carried on the war.
Nor did Charles's reign bring any quiet to Fleet Street, for then the Templars began to lug out their swords. On the 12th of January, 1627, the Templars, having chosen a Mr. Palmer as their Lord of Misrule, went out late at night into Fleet Street to collect his rents. At every door the jovial collectors winded the Temple horn, and if at the second blast the door was not courteously opened, my lord cried majestically, "Give fire, gunner," and a sturdy smith burst the pannels open with a huge sledge-hammer. The horrified Lord Mayor being appealed to soon arrived, attended by the watch of the ward and men armed with halberts. At eleven o'clock on the Sunday night the two monarchs came into collision in Hare Alley (now Hare Court). The Lord of Misrule bade my Lord Mayor come to him, but Palmer, omitting to take off his hat, the halberts flew sharply round him, his subjects were soundly beaten, and he was dragged off to the Compter. There, with soiled finery, the new year's king was kept two days in durance, the attorney-general at last fetching the fallen monarch away in his own coach. At a court masque soon afterwards the king made the two rival potentates join hands; but the King of Misrule had, nevertheless, to refund all the five shillings' he had exacted, and repair all the Fleet Street doors his too handy gunner had destroyed. The very next year the quarrelsome street broke again into a rage, and four persons lost their lives. Of the rioters, two were executed within the week. One of these was John Stanford, of the duke's chamber, and the other Captain Nicholas Ashurst. The quarrel was about politics, and the courtiers seem to have been the offenders.
In Charles II.'s time the pillory was sometimes set up at the Temple gate; and here the wretch Titus Oates stood, amidst showers of unsavoury eggs and the curses of those who had learnt to see the horror of his crimes. Well said Judge Withers to this man, "I never pronounce criminal sentence but with some compassion; but you are such a villain and hardened sinner, that I can find no sentiment of compassion for you." The pillory had no fixed place, for in 1670 we find a Scotchman suffering at the Chancery Lane end for telling a victualler that his house would be fired by the Papists; and the next year a man stood upon the pillory at the end of Shoe Lane for insulting Lord Ambassador Coventry as he was starting for Sweden.
In the reign of Queen Anne those pests of the London streets, the "Mohocks," seem to have infested Fleet Street. These drunken desperadoes--the predecessors of the roysterers who, in the times of the Regency, "boxed the Charlies," broke windows, and stole knockers--used to find a cruel pleasure in surrounding a quiet homeward-bound citizen and pricking him with their swords. Addison makes worthy Sir Roger de Coverley as much afraid of these night-birds as Swift himself; and the old baronet congratulates himself on escaping from the clutches of "the emperor and his black men," who had followed him half-way down Fleet Street. He, however, boasts that he threw them out at the end of Norfolk Street, where he doubled the corner, and scuttled safely into his quiet lodgings.
From Elizabethan times downwards, Fleet Street was a favourite haunt of showmen. Concerning these popular exhibitions Mr. Noble has, with great industry, collected the following curious enumeration:--
"Ben Jonson," says our trusty authority, "in Every Man in his Humour, speaks of 'a new motion of the city of Nineveh, with Jonas and the whale, at Fleet Bridge.' In 1611 'the Fleet Street mandrakes' were to be seen for a penny; and years later the giants of St. Dunstan's clock caused the street to be blocked up, and people to lose their time, their temper, and their money. During Queen Anne's reign, however, the wonders of Fleet Street were at their height. In 1702 a model of Amsterdam, thirty feet long by twenty feet wide, which had taken twelve years in making, was exhibited in Bell Yard; a child, fourteen years old, without thighs or legs, and eighteen inches high, was to be seen 'at the "Eagle and Child," a grocer's shop, near Shoe Lane;' a great Lincolnshire ox, nineteen hands high, four yards long, as lately shown at Cambridge, was on view 'at the "White Horse," where the great elephant was seen;' and 'between the "Queen's Head" and "Crooked Billet," near Fleet Bridge,' were exhibited daily 'two strange, wonderful, and remarkable monstrous creatures--an old she-dromedary, seven feet high and ten feet long, lately arrived from Tartary, and her young one; being the greatest rarity and novelty that ever was seen in the three kingdomes before.' In 1710, at the 'Duke of Marlborough's Head,' in Fleet Street (by Shoe Lane), was exhibited the 'moving picture' mentioned in the Tatler; and here, in 1711, 'the great posture-master of Europe,' eclipsing the deceased Clarke and Higgins, greatly startled sight-seeing London. 'He extends his body into all deformed shapes; makes his hip and shoulder-bones meet together; lays his head upon the ground, and turns his body round twice or thrice, without stirring his face from the spot; stands upon one leg, and extends the other in a perpendicular line half a yard above his head; and extends his body from a table with his head a foot below his heels, having nothing to balance his body but his feet; with several other postures too tedious to mention.'
"And here, in 1718, De Hightrehight, the fire-eater, ate burning coals, swallowed flaming brimstone, and sucked a red-hot poker, five times a day!
"What will my billiard-loving friends say to the St. Dunstan's Inquest of the year 1720? 'Item, we present Thomas Bruce, for suffering a gaming-table (called a billiard-table, where people commonly frequent and game) to be kept in his house.' A score of years later, at the end of Wine Office Court, was exhibited an automaton clock, with three figures or statues, which at the word of command poured out red or white wine, represented a grocer shutting up his shop and a blackamoor who struck upon a bell the number of times asked. Giants and dwarfs were special features in Fleet Street. At the 'Rummer,' in Three Kings' Court, was to be seen an Essex woman, named Gordon, not nineteen years old, though seven feet high, who died in 1737. At the 'Blew Boar and Green Tree' was on view an Italian giantess, above seven feet, weighing 425 lbs., who had been seen by ten reigning sovereigns. In 1768 died, in Shire Lane, Edward Bamford, another giant, seven feet four inches in height, who was buried in St. Dunstan's, though £200 was offered for his body for dissection. At the 'Globe,' in 1717, was shown Matthew Buckinger, a German dwarf, born in 1674, without hands, legs, feet, or thighs, twenty-nine inches high; yet can write, thread a needle, shuffle a pack of cards, play skittles, &c. A facsimile of his writing is among the Harleian MSS. And in 1712 appeared the Black Prince and his wife, each three feet high; and a Turkey horse, two feet odd high and twelve years old, in a box. Modern times have seen giants and dwarfs, but have they really equalled these? In 1822 the exhibition of a mermaid here was put a stop to by the Lord Chamberlain."
In old times Fleet Street was rendered picturesque, not only by its many gable-ended houses adorned with quaint carvings and plaster stamped in patterns, but also by the countless signs, gay with gilding and painted with strange devices, which hung above the shop-fronts. Heraldry exhausted all its stores to furnish emblems for different trades. Lions blue and red, falcons, and dragons of all colours, alternated with heads of John the Baptist, flying pigs, and hogs in armour. On a windy day these huge masses of painted timber creaked and waved overhead, to the terror of nervous pedestrians, nor were accidents by any means rare. On the 2nd of December, 1718 (George I.), a signboard opposite Bride Lane, Fleet Street, having loosened the brickwork by its weight and movement, suddenly gave way, fell, and brought the house down with it, killing four persons, one of whom was the queen's jeweller. It was not, however, till 1761 (George III.) that these dangerous signboards were ordered to be placed flat against the walls of the houses.
When Dr. Johnson said, "Come and let us take a walk down Fleet Street," he proposed a no very easy task. The streets in his early days, in London, had no side-pavements, and were roughly paved, with detestable gutters running down the centre. From these gutters the jumbling coaches of those days liberally scattered the mud on the unoffending pedestrians who happened to be crossing at the time. The sedan-chairs, too, were awkward impediments, and choleric people were disposed to fight for the wall. In 1766, when Lord Eldon came to London as a schoolboy, and put up at that humble hostelry the "White Horse," in Fetter Lane, he describes coming home from Drury Lane with his brother in a sedan. Turning out of Fleet Street into Fetter Lane, some rough fellows pushed against the chair at the corner and upset it, in their eagerness to pass first. Dr. Johnson's curious nervous habit of touching every street-post he passed was cured in 1766, by the laying down of side-pavements. On that occasion it is said two English paviours in Fleet Street bet that they would pave more in a day than four Scotchmen could. By three o'clock the Englishmen had got so much ahead that they went into a public-house for refreshment, and, afterwards returning to their work, won the wager.
In the Wilkes' riot of 1763, the mob burnt a large jack-boot in the centre of Fleet Street, in ridicule of Lord Bute; but a more serious affray took place in this street in 1769, when the noisy Wilkites closed the Bar, to stop a procession of 600 loyal citizens en route to St. James's to present an address denouncing all attempts to spread sedition and uproot the constitution. The carriages were pelted with stones, and the City marshal, who tried to open the gates, was bedaubed with mud. Mr. Boehm and other loyalists took shelter in "Nando's Coffee House." About 150 of the frightened citizens, passing up Chancery Lane, got to the palace by a devious way, a hearse with two white horses and two black following them to St. James's Palace. Even there the Riot Act had to be read and the Guards sent for. When Mr. Boehm fled into "Nando's," in his alarm, he sent home his carriage containing the address. The mob searched the vehicle, but could not find the paper, upon which Mr. Boehm hastened to the Court, and arrived just in time with the important document.
The treason trials of 1794 brought more noise and trouble to Fleet Street. Hardy, the secretary to the London Corresponding Society, was a shoemaker at No. 161; and during the trial of this approver of the French Revolution, Mr. John Scott (afterwards Lord Eldon) was in great danger from a Fleet Street crowd. "The mob," he says, "kept thickening round me till I came to Fleet Street, one of the worst parts that I had to pass through, and the cries began to be rather threatening. 'Down with him!' 'Now is the time, lads; do for him!' and various others, horrible enough; but I stood up, and spoke as loud as I could: 'You may do for me, if you like; but, remember, there will be another Attorney-General before eight o'clock to-morrow morning, and the king will not allow the trials to be stopped.' Upon this one man shouted out, 'Say you so? you are right to tell us. Let us give him three cheers, my lads!' So they actually cheered me, and I got safe to my own door."
There was great consternation in Fleet Street in November, 1820, when Queen Caroline, attended by 700 persons on horseback, passed publicly through it to return thanks at St. Paul's. Many alarmed people barricaded their doors and windows. Still greater was the alarm in August, 1821, when the queen's funeral procession went by, after the deplorable fight with the Horse Guards at Cumberland Gate, when two of the rioters were killed.
With this rapid sketch of a few of the events in the history of Fleet Street, we begin our patient peregrination from house to house.