A Book about London: its memorable places, its men and women, etc

Front matter

LONDON STORIES ROMANTIC EPISODES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT METROPOLIS BY THE SAME AUTHOR A COMPANION VOLUME A BOOK ABOUT LONDON LONDON STREETS : Their Associations, Historical, Literary, Romantic, and Social Crown 8vo, 3s. 6d. AT ALL LIBRARIES AND BOOKSELLERS A BOOK ABOUT LONDON ITS MEMORABLE PLACES, ITS MEN AND WOMEN, AND ITS HISTORICAL AND LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS BY W. H. DAVENPOKT ADAMS, Author of" Witch, Warlock, and "The White King,'" 11 Good Queen Anne,'* etc. LONDON HENRY AND COMPANY BOUVERIE STREET, E.C. Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Lit, London and Aylesbury. 3n0crfbeO (BY PERMISSION) TO H. W. PRESCOTT, Esq., WITH CORDIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. PREFATORY. — ♦ — 1~T is hoped that in the voluminous literature which London has gathered around it this Book about London, in its two parts, may find a place of its own.

It is not intended as a guide-book, nor as a topographical indicator. It is narrative rather than descriptive. As a rule, people do not care much for minute descriptions 6f places or buildings ; what they chiefly want to know is, the special interest that attaches to them — historical, romantic, literary, or artistic. This I have endeavoured to put forward. From all sources it has been my aim to collect, in the volume en titled " London Streets," the more interesting associations of London, — its traditions that still possess a lingering life, its memories of notable persons and notable events. Much will be found in this division that former writers have overlooked. The references to the localities where great men, or men worthy to be remembered, have lived and died, are particularly numerous, and generally accompanied wdth some illustrative anecdote or detail.

PREFATORY. Narratives of remarkable scenes, events, and incidents are given in the present volume, under the title of ' ' London- Stories ; " each of which is distinct in itself, and has been selected with a view to the illustration of different aspects of London life and history. The two volumes form " A Book about London : " not about commercial, or financial, or fashionable, or architectural London ; but about the London of remarkable men and women, the London of history, the London of romance and legend. I can honestly say that I have spared no pains to ensure accuracy by reference to primary authorities, and by careful study of the results of the latest research. Neces sarily I owe no inconsiderable debt to my predecessors, from some hundred of whom I have borrowed more or less, though not without condensation, abridgement, adaptation, and addition.

Part II

fe>ton'e0 of famous* Hocalittess anti Builofngs. The Devil Tavern 71 The Cock Lane Ghost 75 Hyde Park, and All About it 80 Don Pantaleon SA 85 Pall Mall 95 The Strand .111 The Savoy Palace 127 Round about St. Paul's 132 The Preaching Cross 133 Paul's Walk — Reminiscences 137 Fleet Street Ill Old London Bridge : — The Ferryman's Daughter . . . ... . . 150 The Passage-at-Arms CONTENTS. Old London Bridge, continued The Pageant 163 Edward Osborne 172 Headsiupon London Bridge 173 The Tower : — Historic Associations 177 The Two Princes 185 Lady Jane Grey 207 Murder of Sir Thomas Overbury 218 Lady Arabella Stuart 220 Sir Walter Raleigh - . 225 Strafford and Archbishop Laud 233 Colonel Blood .... .... 240 Lady Nithisdale's Devotion 249 Lords Balmerino and Kilmarnock 252 Lord Lovat ...... 257 Dynamite Explosion ........ 259 Tothill Fields : — A Strange Combat .... ... 261

Part III

»>tocic0 of Crime ano 9£i0aOt)enture. M Reay 269 Duke op Hamilton's Duel with Lord Mohun . . 277 The Poor Player 281 Richard Savage .... 288 Lord Camelford's Fatal Duel 292 Lord Ferrers 298 A Reminiscence op Dyot Street ..... 303 Newgate : its Associations : — Old Patch 3q5 Dr. Dodd and Henry Fauntleroy ... . 321 A Terrible Crime . . . 33g Murder op Lord William Russell 340 The Italian Boy .... . ,343

Part I

»>torfc0 of Historic fecencjs ano C-foents. l>It£ jltorii of ti}$ ir^at yin%m. f I THE Angel of Destruction was abroad, and shook -*- from his sweeping pinions the infection of the Plague. The month of June, in 1665, came in with a heat like that of a f urnace. The previous spring had been remarkable for its want of moisture. The summer followed with a drought not less remarkable. The skies, day after day, were filled with the glory of the sunshine, and the flowers in the gardens and the grass in the meadows withered in the excessive heat. In the winter and spring men's minds had been disturbed by the appearance of strange meteoric phenomena ; and the great comet (as Bishop Burnet says) raised the apprehensions of those who did not enter into just speculations concerning these matters. Gossipping Pepys notes in his Diary that June 7th was the hottest day he had ever felt in his life.

And then he adds the words of ill omen : " This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ' Lord, have mercy upon us ' writ there ; which was a sad sight for me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw." Not that the red cross was an unfamiliar sign to the people of London. The insanitary conditions of the crowded city, huddled between the Thames and the northern heights, and unprovided with any system of drainage, made it the happy hunting-ground of pestilence and disease. In 1 636, the Plague, coming from Europe, had carried off ten thousand victims ; and it continued its devastations annually down to 1647. Then there had been a cessation — an interval of comparative immunity; but in 1665 it was destined to reappear with so hideous an intensity that the memory of it lingers to this day.

Ask any person to repeat the principal events of Charles II.'s reign, and it is certain that among them he will name the Great Plague. Whatever else he forgets, he will not forget that. The Destroying Angel struck down its first victim in the city in the house of Dr. Barnett, a physician, in Fenchurch Street. With laudable self-sacrifice the doctor hastened to display on his door the red cross, which, as a sign that his house was infected, immediately doomed him to solitariness and isolation, and cut him off from his neighbours and neighbourly acts of kindness. This enforced solitude, in the midst of disease and death, was a frightful punishment. George Withers, the poet, who, during the plague of 1625, had undergone it, describes it with a keen recollection of its pains : — " My chamber entertained me all alone.

And in the rooms adjoining lodged none. Yet through the darksome silent night did fly Sometime an uncouth noise ; sometime a cry ; And sometime mournful callings pierced my room, Which came, I neither knew from whence, nor whom. And oft, betwixt awaking and asleep, Their voices who did talk, or pray, or weep, Unto my list'ning ears a passage found, And troubled me by their uncertain sound." But tbe fell disease had appeared some time previously in what was then the suburban parish of St. Giles's-in-the- Fields, — an Order in Council, dated April 26th, directing certain measures to be taken there for arresting its progress. These, of course, proved futile ; and the contagion extended eastward. While there was yet time to escape, the rich and the idle began to hurry into the country. An evil example was set by the King and his Court, who fled from London in July, and retired to Salisbury, leaving the capital in charge of Monk Duke of Albemarle, who faced the Plague as composedly as he had faced the Dutch.

Thereafter a deep despondency settled down upon the inhabitants, whose gloom was increased by the stringent restrictions imposed upon all acts of neighbourliness and good-fellowship. Business was suspended, and nearly all locomotion ; trade and commerce were practically at an end. On June 21st Pepys writes : " I find all the town almost going out of town ; the coaches and waggons being all full of people going into the country," — where, I need hardly say, they were by no means welcome, each new-comer being regarded as a possible source of infection. " How fearful," writes Richard Baxter, " people were thirty or forty, if not an hundred, miles from London, of anything that they bought from any mercer's or draper's shop, or of any person that came to their houses ! How they would shut their doors against their friend ; and if a man passed over the fields, how one would avoid another, as we did in the time of wars ; and how every man was a terror to another !

" The selfishness latent in human nature came conspicuously to the surface under these terrible conditions. The sick were left to suffer and die unattended ; even the ministers of religion, with too few exceptions, took fright at the red cross. " London," says Defoe, " might well be said to be all in tears; the mourners did not go about the streets, indeed, for nobody put on black, or make a formal dress of mourning for their nearest friends, but the voice of mourning was truly heard in the streets: the shrieks of women and children at the windows and doors of their houses, where their nearest relatives were perhaps dying or just dead, were so frequent to be heard, as we passed the streets, that it was enough to pierce the stoutest heart in the world to hear them. Tears and lamentations were seen in almost every house, especially in the first part of the visitation, for towards the latter end men's hearts were hardened, and death was so always before their eyes jhat they did not so much concern themselves for the loss of their friends, expecting that themselves should be summoned the next hour." yr Daniel Defoe's " Journal of the Plague Year " is a terribly realistic narrative.

In one sense it is fictitious, for he was a child of four years in 1665, and could not have seen the sights he describes as if from personal observation ; but in substance it may be accepted as authentic, for it is evidently based upon the relations he had gathered from the lips of survivors. Another very striking account is that which we owe to one of the Nonconforming clergy, the Rev. Thomas Vincent, who bravely stuck to the post of duty in the plague-stricken city. Writing in August, when the deaths were four and five thousand a week, he : " Now people fall as thick as the leaves in autumn when they are shaken by a mighty wind. Now there is a dismal solitude in London streets ; every day looks with the face of a Sabbath Day, observed with a greater solemnity than it used to be in this city.

Now shops aie shut in, people rare, and very few that walk about, insomuch that the grass begins to spring up in some places, and a deep silence in every place, especially within the walls. No prancing horses, no rattling coaches, no calling in customers or offering wares, no London cries sounding in the ears. If any voice be heard, it is the groans of dying persons breathing forth their last, and the funeral knells of those that are ready to be carried to their graves. Now shutting up of visited houses (there being so many) is at an end, and most of the well are mingled among the sick, which otherwise would have got no help. Now, in some places, where the people did generally stay, not one house in a hu>- dred but what is affected, and in many houses half the family is swept away; in some, from the eldest to the youngest : few escape but with the death of one or two.

Never did so many husbands and wives die together ; never did so many parents carry their children with them to the grave, and go together into the same house under the eaith, who had lived together in the same house upon it. Now the nights are too short to bury the dead ; the whole day, though at so great a length, is hardly sufficient to light the dead that fall therein into their graves." London, as I have hinted, was virtually put into quaran tine by the terrified rustics, who, at a distance of even forty and fifty miles from the capital, were afraid to purchase anything that came from its marts, or to allow any of its inhabitants to enter their houses. Even in the city itself, business transactions were conducted with the nicest pre cautions. Persons who bought a joint of meat in the market would not receive it from the butcher's hands, but took it off the hooks themselves.

On the other hand, the butcher would not touch their money, but required them to drop it into a jar of vinegar which he kept for the purpose. The buyers took care to carry small coins to make up any odd sum, that they might be under no necessity of taking change. In their hands were bottles filled with scents and perfumes, and every other precaution was em ployed against infection that ingenuity could invent or money purchase. But as these were not available for the poor, they had to run all hazards as best they could. As is always the case, the grotesque mingled with the terrible, and quacks did a large business in " the only true plague water " and " the infallible preventive pills." Among those who neglected their duty during this sharp experience were, unfortunately, the national clergy — " most of the Conforming ministers," says Baxter, " leaving their flocks in the hour of most urgent need ; " but the Nonconforming clergy remained steadfastly at the post of danger, which was also the post of honour.

Though prohibited by a penal law, they made their way into the empty pulpits, preached to the scanty congregations who had the courage to assemble and listen to them, visited the sick, and relieved the distressed. As the fashionable physicians followed the example of the clergy, we may reasonably suppose that the professional classes, like the higher, had been emasculated and degraded by the corrupt influences of the Court. Some of the incidents recorded by Pepys have a peculiarly grim character. On August 2nd, as he went on his way to Deptford, his journey was shortened by a Mr. Mann's narrative of a Mr. John Wright's maid-servant, who, having been smitten with the Plague, was removed to an outhouse, under charge of a nurse, but, during the latter's temporary absence, got out of the window and ran away.

" The nurse coming and knocking, and having no answer, believed she was dead. and went and told Mr. Wright so ; who and his lady were in a great strait what to do to get her buried. At last, resolved to go to Burntwood [Brentwood] hard by, being in the parish, and there get people to do it. Bat they would not ; so he went home full of trouble, and in the way met the wench walking over the common, which frighted him worse than before, and was forced to send people to take her, which he did ; and they got one of the pest-coaches, and put her into it, to carry her to a pest-house. And, passing in a narrow lane, Sir Anthony Browne, with his brother and some friends in a coach, met this coach with the curtains drawn close. The brother, being a young man, and believing there might be some lady in it that would not be seen, and the way being narrow, he thrust his head out of his own into her coach, and there saw somebody looking very ill, and in a silk dress, and struck mightily."

Is not this a ghastly picture 1 On another August evening he goes from Brentford to Queenhithe, for he cannot induce his waterman to take him elsewhere, for fear of the Plague. " Thence," he says, with a lanthorn — in great fear of meeting " dead corpses " on their way to the grave pits — but happily he meets none, though the glimmer of torchlight, indicating the progress of a funeral party, is visible now and then in the distance. Afterwards he walks to Greenwich. In his path he comes upon a coffin with a dead body in it, a victim of the epidemic, lying in an open door because there is no one to give it burial ; though the parish has set a watch all day and night to prevent any person from approaching it. " This disease," he exclaims, " makes us harder to one another than we are to dogs !

" On August 3rd he records that everybody's looks and discourse in the street are of death and nothing else, and that so few people are going up and down that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken. And on the following day he writes that 6,104 persons died of the Plague in London " this week." At least, that is the number reported, but there is reason to believe the actual number was nearly ten thousand ; partly from the poor that could not be taken notice of, and partly from the Quakers and others who would not have any bell rung for them. There can be little doubt that the very precautions taken to prevent the spread of the contagion tended to increase its virulence. The terror-stricken aspect of the city and its appalling gloom, the isolation of sufferers, the conversion of houses into so many little fortresses shut up and barricaded against the invisible enemy, the rattle of the death-carts and the clang of the death-bells and the cry " Bring out your dead !

" the entire extinction of every public interest and amusement, so that the popular mind was incessantly and continuously directed towards the subject of the Plague and its attendant horrors, — were just the conditions under which an epidemic flourishes, because they scare the timid and the feeble, and by acting injuriously on their nervous system predispose them to fall under its influence. It is well known that, when cholera has attacked the British army in India, its ravages have immediately been checked by putting the army in motion. The excitement of new duties, new interests, and new scenes has proved an effective prophylactic. Hero I may introduce the story of the Drunken Piper, as related by Defoe. He says he heard it from one John Hayward, under-sexton of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, and as it is told by other authorities with some slight variation, we may accept it, I think, as authentic.

" The fellow was not blind," says Defoe (as he is sometimes said to have been), " but an ignorant, weak, poor man, and usually walked his rounds about ten o'clock at night, and went piping along from door to door, and the people usually took him in at the public-houses where they knew him, and would give him drink aud victuals, and sometimes farthings ; and he, in return, would pipe and sing and talk simply, which diverted the people, and thus he lived. During the Plague the poor piper went about as usual, but was almost starved ; and when anybody asked how he did, he would answer, ' the dead-cart had not taken him yet, but had promised to call for him next week ! ' It happened one night that this poor fellow, having been feasted more bountifully than common, fell fast asleep, and was laid all along upon the top of a bulk or stall, in the street near London Wall, towards Cripplegate, and that upon the same bulk or stall the people of some house hearing a bell, which they always rung before the cart came, had laid a body, really dead of the Plague, just by him, thinking, too, that this poor fellow had been a dead body as the other was, and laid there by some of the neighbours.

" Accordingly, when John Hay ward, with his bell and the cart, came along, finding two dead bodies lie upon the stall, they took them up -with the instruments they used, and threw them into the cart, and all this while the piper slept soundly. From hence they passed along, and took in other dead bodies, till, as honest John Hayward told me, they almost buried him alive in the cart, yet all this while he slept soundly. At length the cart came to the place where the bodies were to be thrown into the ground, which, as I do remember, was at Mount Mill, and as the cart usually stopped some time before they were ready to shoot out the melancholy load they had in it, as soon as the cart stopped the fellow awakened, and struggled a little to get his head out from among the dead bodies, when raising himself up in the cart, he called out ' Hey ! where am 1 1 ' This frightened the fellow that attended about the work; but, after some pause, John Hayward, recovering himself, said, ' Lord, bless us ! there's somebody in the cart not quite dead.' So another called to him and said, ' Who are you ? ' The fellow answered, ' I am the poor piper.

Where am I ? ' ' Where are you ? ' says Hayward ; ' why you are in the dead-cart, and we are a-going to bury you.' ' But I an't dead, though, am I ? ' says the piper, which made them laugh a little, though, as John said, they were heartily frightened at first ; so they helped the poor fellow down, and he went about his business." According to another version of the story, the piper, on coming to himself, "set up his pipes," and so terrified the buriers that they all ran away. As the cold weather approached, the epidemic rapidly decreased. Public confidence revived, shops were opened. The town filled again ; and the king and queen returned. By the end of April 1666 the Plague was virtually extinct, after having carried off upwards of a hunched thousand victims. I)lt0 JSiarij ofj % ©reat t%m. Whoever has climbed the three hundred and forty-five steps of black marble which lead to its summit, and there, from the railed-in balcony or gallery, enjoyed the wonderful prospect it commands of our imperial city, will not readily forget the Monument, — the lofty and shapely column erected by the citizens of London " in perpetual remembrance " of the Great Fire of 1666.

It is not, perhaps, a beautiful view ; one can hardly find much attractiveness in a congeries of house-tops, though the lines of many of the church spires and steeples (chiefly Sir Christopher Wren's) which soar above them are full of grace, and the swelling dome of St. Paul's is always an enchantment. It is scarcely sublime or magnificent ; but the mass of buildings so densely packed, and lying half-obscured in a sea of vapour, is, as I have said, wonderful. Looking eastward, our gaze rests, in the first place, on the grey keep of the Tower and the cloud of historic memories that seems to hover above it ; then we observe the Mint, the Custom House, and the throng of masts in the river. Immediately in front of us rises the graceful spire of St. Dunstan-in-the-East ; and beyond are more masts, and far away the green range of the low Kentish hills.

Turning more to the south, our eyes run over the chimneys innumerable of Southwark and the lofty warehouses which line Bankside, — recently lifted into the region of romance by Mr. Walter Besant, and at all times dear to us from its associations with Shakespeare and the great Elizabethans ; while the lofty tower of St. Mary Overies forms a landmark not to be easily overlooked. Still pursuing our survey, we range up the misty Thames to the magnificent pile of Westminster's ancient Abbey, which holds so much honoured dust ; we watch the progress of barge and steamer and wherry up and down the stream ; and we linger at the numerous bridges that connect the two vast sections of the world's metropolis. To the westward the great feature is, of course, St. Paul's, with its gracefully proportioned structure, surmounted by cupola and cross, rising apparently to an almost dizzy elevation, and finding a broad-spread foundation in the aggregate of houses crowded round it.

On railway terminus and monster hotel and the terraced embankment we cannot tarry ; but com plete our examination with a rapid glance over roofs and towers and spires to the northward, where the view is bounded by the rising grounds beyond Hampstead and Highgate, and in the north-east by the green breadths of Epping Forest. The Monument, as every schoolboy knows, — to use a classic phrase, justified in this instance by its veracity, — was the work of Sir Christopher Wren, and is a memorial of the Great Fire. It stands on the east side of New Fish Street Hill, on the site of St. Margaret's Church, which had perished in the conflagration. As it now stands, it does not reproduce Wren's original design, which, if carried out would have given us a column somewhat inferior in dia meter, but more appropriate to its purpose.

" For, as the Romans expressed in relievo on the pedestals and round the shafts of their columns the history of such accidents and incidents as were intended to be thereby commemorated, so this monument of the conflagration and restoration of the City of London was represented by a pillar in flames ; the flames blazing from the loopholes of the shaft (which were to give light to the stairs within) being figured in brass-work gilt ; and on the top there was a Phœnix rising from her ashes, in brass gilt likewise." Even in Wren's second design — the present pillar — an alteration was made by the authorities. Wren had intended to place on its summit a colossal statue, in brass gilt, of the King, as founder of the new city; or else the erect figure of a woman crowned with laurels, and holding a sword and cap of maintenance, as symbolical of the wealth and greatness of restored London.

But Wren's employers took the flames from the sides of his column, and placed them on its top, in a kind of glorified bunch. The Monument was erected between 1676 and 1677, at an expense of about £14,500, and forms an elegant fluted column of stone, of the Doric order. Its height from the pavement, including the flaming crest, is 202 feet ; * the pedestal is 40 feet high and 21 feet square; the plinth, 27 feet square. The greatest diameter of the interior shaft is 15 feet. On the completion of the Monument, Cibber, the sculptor of the two powerful allegorical figures on the gates of old Bedlam, was called in to adorn the west or front of the pedestal with appropriate sculpture ; but in this he was not successful. The design is confused; Charles II. figures in it, and there are three females, representing Liberty, Genius, and Science, and labourers and implements of * The exact distance, it is said, from the house where the Fire first broke out. building, and newly-raised houses, and Envy underneath an arched cell blowing flames from his destructive jaws.

On the north and south sides are inscriptions by Dr. Thomas Gale, Dean of York, describing the destruction of the city and its restoration ; on the east are the names of the lord mayors who held office during its erection ; underneath which was originally a fourth inscription, attributing the Great Fire to " the treachery and malice of the Popish faction." This was cut away during the reign of James II., and restored in that of William III.; finally erased (January 26th, 1831), by order of the Corporation. It is to this inscription Pope refers in the well-known Une : " where London's column, Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies." A scarce engraving, in the collection of the Society of Antiquarians, " printed and sold by W. Sherwin, att his shope in Barbican, next doore to ye Green Dragon," bears the following " poetical " inscription : — " The Pickture of ye most famous City of London, as it appeared iu y° night ; in the Hight of its ruinous condition by Fire, Sept. 2, 1666.

"In Forty-one London was very sick Of Tumult and Disorder ; Lunatick. In Sixty-five (y° Fatall Yeare) this City Was Plagued w"> Tumours and had few to pity. " In this Prodigious Yeare, a Burning Fever Did seize our Mother and of Breath bereave her : She both in Lechery (and Flames) did Burne ; Her ashes lye in a neglected Vrne, Till that her Sons doe expiate her Crime By serving King and Country in this time. However, her Scorch&d Carkas don't dispise ; A Phœnix from her ashes will arise." Melancholy associations cling to the Monument from the number of unhappy persons who at different times have committed suicide by throwing themselves from its gallery. The sad list runs as follows : William Green, weaver, June 26th, 1750; John Craddock, baker, July 7th, 1780; Lyon Levy, diamond merchant, January 18th, 1810; and three others at more recent dates.