In the same church with this fixed star rests that comet, Sir Roger l’Estrange. His monument was said to be the grandest in the church. Sir Roger died in 1704, aged eighty-eight.
In 1721, after an ineffectual treaty for Dudley Court, where the parsonage-house had once stood, a piece of ground called Vinegar Yard was purchased for the sum of £2252: 10s. as a burial-ground, hospital, and workhouse for the parish of St. Giles’s. At that time St. Giles’s relieved about 840 persons, at the cost of £4000 a year. Of this number there were 162 over seventy years of age, 126 parents overburthened with children, 183 deserted children and orphans, 70 sick at parish nurses’, and 300 men lame, blind, and mad.
The Earl of Southampton granted land for five almshouses in St. Giles’s in 1656.[641] The site was in Broad Street, nearly at the north end of Monmouth and King Streets, where they stood until 1782, at which period they were pulled down to widen the road. The new almshouses were erected in a close, low, and unhealthy spot in Lewknor’s Lane.
In the year 1661 Mr. William Shelton left lands for a school for fifty children in Parker’s Lane, between Drury Lane and Little Queen Street. The tenements, before he bought them, had been in the occupation of the Dutch ambassador. The premises were poor houses, and a coach-house and stables in the occupation of Lord Halifax. In 1687, the funds proving inadequate, the school was discontinued; but in 1815, after being in abeyance for fifty-three years, it was re-opened in Lloyd’s Court.[642]
The select vestry of St. Giles’s was much badgered in 1828 by the excluded parishioners. There were endless errors in the accounts, and items amounting to £90,000 were found entered only in pencil. The special pleas put in by the attorneys of the vestry covered 175 folios of writing.
Hog Lane, built in 1680, was rechristened in 1762 Crown Street, as an inscription on a stone let into the wall of a house at the corner of Rose Street intimates.[643] Strype calls it a “place not over well built or inhabited.” The Greeks had a church here, afterwards a French refugee place of worship, and subsequently an Independent chapel. It stood on the west side of the lane, a few doors from Compton Street; and its site is now occupied by St. Mary’s Church and clergy-house. Hogarth laid the scene of his “Noon” in Hog Lane, at the door of this chapel; but the houses being reversed in the engraving, the truth of the picture is destroyed. The background contains a view of St. Giles’s Church. The painter delighted in ridiculing the fantastic airs of the poor French gentry, and showed no kindly sympathy with their honest poverty and their sufferings. It was to St. Giles’s that Hogarth came to study poverty and also vice. A scene of his “Harlot’s Progress” is in Drury Lane, close by. Tom Nero, in the “Four Stages of Cruelty,” is a St. Giles’s charity-boy, and we see him in the first stage tormenting a dog near the church. Hogarth’s “Gin Street” is situated in St. Giles’s. The scenes of all the most hideous and painful of his works are in this district.
“Nollekens” Smith, writing of St. Giles’s, says: “I recollect the building of most of the houses at the north end of New Compton Street—so named in compliment to Bishop Compton, Dean of St. Paul’s. I also remember a row of six small almshouses, surrounded by a dwarf brick wall, standing in the middle of High Street. On the left hand of High Street, passing into Tottenham Court Road, there were four handsome brick houses, probably of Queen Anne’s time, with grotesque masks as keystones to the first-floor windows. Nearly on the site of the new “Resurrection Gate,” in which the basso-relievo is, stood a very small old house towards Denmark Street, which used to totter, to the terror of passers by, whenever a heavy carriage rolled through the street.”[644]
Exactly where Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road meet in a right angle, a large circular boundary-stone was let into the pavement. Here when the charity-boys of St. Giles’s walked the boundaries, those who deserved flogging were whipped, in order to impress the parish frontier on their memories.
The Pound originally stood in the middle of the High Street, whence it was removed in 1656 to make way for the almshouses. It had stood there when the village really required a place to imprison straying cattle. The latest pound stood in the broad space where the High Street, Tottenham Court Road, and Oxford Street meet; it occupied a space of about thirty-feet, and was removed in 1768. It must have faced Meux’s Brewery. An old song that celebrates this locality begins—
“At Newgate steps Jack Chance was found,
And bred up near St. Giles’s Pound.”
Criminals on their way to Tyburn used to “halt at the great gate of St. Giles’s Hospital, where a bowl of ale was provided as their last refreshment in this life.”[645] A similar custom prevailed at York, which gave rise to the proverb, “The saddler of Bawtry was hung for leaving his liquor,” meaning that if the impatient man had stopped to drink, his reprieve would have arrived in time.[646]
Bowl Yard was built about 1623, and was then surrounded by gardens. It is a narrow court on the south side of High Street, over against Dyot Street, now George Street. There was probably here a public-house, the Bowl, at which in later time ale was handed to the passing thieves.
Swift, in a spirited ballad describes “clever Tom Clinch,” who rode “stately through Holborn to die in his calling,” stopping at the George for a bottle of sack, and promising to pay for it “when he came back.” No one has sketched the highwayman more perfectly than the Irish prelate. Tom Clinch wears waistcoat, stockings, and breeches of white, and his cap is tied with cherry ribbon. He bows like a beau at the theatre to the ladies in the doors and to the maids in the balconies, who cry, “Lackaday, he’s a proper young man.” He swears at the hawkers crying his last speech, kicks the hangman when he kneels to ask his pardon, makes a short speech exhorting his comrades to ply their calling, and so carelessly and defiantly takes his leave of an ungrateful world.
“Rainy Day” Smith describes,[647] when a boy of eight years old, being taken by Nollekens, the sculptor, to see that notorious highwayman John Rann, alias “Sixteen-string Jack,” on his way to execution at Tyburn, for robbing Dr. Bell, chaplain to the Princess Amelia, in Gunnersbury Lane, near Brentford, in 1774. Rann was a smart fellow, and had been a coachman to Lord Sandwich, who then lived at the south-east corner of Bedford Row, Covent Garden. The undaunted malefactor wore a bright pea-green coat, and carried an immense nosegay, which some mistress of the highwayman had handed him, according to custom, as a last token, from the steps of St. Sepulchre’s Church. The sixteen strings worn by this freebooter at his knees were reported to be in ironical allusion to the number of times he had been acquitted. On their return home, Nollekens, stooping to the boy’s ear, assured him that had his father-in-law, Mr. Justice Welch, been then High Constable, they could have walked all the way to Tyburn beside the cart.[648]
Holborn used to be called “the Heavy Hill” because it led thieves from Newgate to Tyburn. Old fat Ursula, the roast-pig seller in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair talks of ambling afoot to hear Knockhem the footpad groan out of a cart up the Heavy Hill. This was in James I.’s time. Dryden alludes to it in the same way in 1678,[649] and in 1695 Congreve’s Sir Sampson[650] mentions the same doleful procession. In 1709 (Queen Anne) Tom Browne mentions a wily old counsellor in Holborn who used to turn out his clerks every execution day for a profitable holiday, saying, “Go, you young rogues, go to school and improve.”
St. Giles’s was always famous for its inns.[651] One of the oldest of these was the Croche House, or Croche Hose (Cross Hose), so called from its sign—the Crossed Stockings. The sign, still used by hosiers, was a red and white stocking forming a St. Andrew’s Cross. This inn belonged to the hospital cook in 1300, and was given by him to the hospital. It stood at the north of the present entrance to Compton Street, and was probably destroyed before the reign of Henry VIII.
The Swan on the Hop was an inn of Edward III.’s time; it stood eastward of Drury Lane and on the south side of Holborn.[652]
The White Hart is described in Henry VIII.’s time as possessing eighteen acres of pasture. It stood near the Holborn end of Drury Lane, and existed till 1720. In Aggas’s Plan it appears surrounded on three sides by a wall. It was bounded on the east by Little Queen Street, and was divided from Holborn by an embankment. A court afterwards stood on its site.
The Rose is mentioned as early as Edward III.’s reign. It was near Lewknor’s Lane, and stood not far from the White Hart.
The Vine was an inn till 1816. It was on the north side of Holborn, a little to the east of Kingsgate Street. It is supposed to have stood on the site of a vineyard mentioned in Doomsday Book. It was originally a country roadside inn, with fields at the back. It became an infamous nuisance. The house that replaced it was first occupied by a timber-merchant, and afterwards by Probert, the accomplice of Thurtell, who, escaping death for the murder of Mr. Weare, was soon after hanged for horse-stealing in Gloucestershire. It was at this trial that the prisoner’s keeping a gig was adduced as an incontestible proof of his respectability—a fact immortalised, almost to the weariness of a degenerate age, by Mr. Thomas Carlyle. The inn was once called the Kingsgate Tavern, from its having stood near the king’s gate or turnpike in the adjoining street.
The Cock and Pye Inn stood at the west corner of what was once a mere or marshland. The fields surrounding it, now Seven Dials, were called from it the Cock and Pye Fields.
The Maidenhead Inn stood in Dyot Street, and formed part of Lord Mountjoy’s estates in Elizabeth’s time. It was the house for parish meetings in Charles II.’s reign. It then became a resort for mealmen and farmers, and latterly a brandy-shop and beggars’ haunt of the vilest sort. It was finally turned into a stoneyard. Dyot Street, so called after Sir John Dyot, who left it by wish to the poor, though it was afterwards a poor and even dangerous locality, must have been respectable in 1662, when a Presbyterian chapel was built there for Joseph Read, Baxter’s friend, an ejected minister from Worcestershire. Read was taken up under the Conventicles Act in 1677, and endured much persecution, but was restored to his congregation on the accession of James II. From 1684 to 1708 the building was used as a chapel of ease to St. Giles’s Church. At the close of the last century men would hurry along Dyot Street as through a dangerous defile. There was a legend current of a banker’s clerk who, returning from his round, with his book of notes and bills fastened by the usual chain, as he passed down Dyot Street felt a cellar door sinking under him. Conscious of his danger, he made a spring forward, dashed down the street, and escaped the trap set for him by the thieves. It may be added that Dyot Street gave the name to a song sung by Liston in the admirable burlesque of “Bombastes Furioso.”
Irish mendicants—the poorest, dirtiest, and most unimprovable of all beggars—began to crowd into St. Giles’s about the time of Queen Elizabeth.[653]
The increase of London soon attracted country artisans and country beggars. The closing of the monasteries had filled England with herds of sturdy and dangerous vagrants not willing to work, and by no means inclined to starve. The new-comers resorting to the suburbs of London to escape the penalties of infringing the City jurisdiction, the stout-hearted queen ordered all persons within three miles of London gates to forbear from allowing any house to be occupied by more than one family.
A proclamation of 1583 alludes to the very poor and the beggars, who lived “heaped up” in small tenements and let lodgings. A subsequent warning orders the suppression of the great multitude of Irish vagrants, many of whom haunted the courts under pretence of suits; by day they mixed with disbanded soldiers from the Low Countries and other impostors and beggars, and at night committed robberies and outrages. St. Giles’s was then one of the great harbours for these “misdemeaned persons.” On one occasion a mob of these rogues surrounded the queen as she was riding out in the evening to Islington to take the air. That same night Fleetwood, the Recorder, issued warrants, and in the morning went out himself and took seventy-four rogues, including some blind rich usurers, who were all sent to Bridewell for speedy punishment.
James I. pursued the same crusade against vagrants, forbidding new buildings in the suburbs, and ordering all newly raised structures to be pulled down. The beadles had to attend every Sunday at the vestry to report all new inmates, and who lodged them, and to take up all idlers; the constables in 1630 were also required to give notice of such persons to the churchwardens every month. In an entry in St. Giles’s parish books in 1637 “families in cellars” are first mentioned.[654] The locality afterwards became noted for these dens, and “a cellar in St. Giles’s” became a proverbial phrase to signify the lowest poverty.
In 1640 Irishmen are first mentioned by name, and money was paid to take them back again to their native land.
Sir John Fielding, brother of the great novelist, who was an active Westminster magistrate in his time and a great hunter down of highwaymen, in a pamphlet on the increase of crime in London, lays special stress on the vicious poverty of St. Giles’s. He gives a statement on the authority of Mr. Welch, the High Constable of Holborn, of the overcrowding of the miserable lodgings where idle persons and vagabonds were sheltered for twopence a night. One woman alone owned seven of these houses, which were crowded with twopenny beds from cellar to garret. In these beds both sexes, strangers or not, lay promiscuously, the double bed being a halfpenny cheaper. To still more wed vice to poverty, these lodging-house keepers sold gin at a penny a quartern, so that no beggar was so poor that he could not get drunk. No fewer than seventy of these vile houses were found open at all hours, and in one alone, and not the largest, there were counted fifty-eight persons sleeping in an atmosphere loathsome if not actually poisonous.
This Judge Welch was the father of Mrs. Nollekens, and a brave and benevolent man. He was a friend of Dr. Johnson and of Fielding, whom he succeeded in his justiceship, Mr. Welch having on one occasion heard that a notorious highwayman who infested the Marylebone lanes was sleeping in the first floor of a house in Rose Street, Long Acre, he hired the tallest hackney-coach he could find, drove under the thief’s window, ascended the roof, threw up the sash, entered the room, actually dragged the fellow naked out of bed on to the roof of the coach, and in that way carried him down New Street and up St. Martin’s Lane, amidst the huzzas of an immense throng which followed him, to Litchfield Street, Soho.[655]
Archenholz, the German traveller, writing circa 1784, describes the streets of London as crowded with beggars. “These idle people,” says this curious observer, “receive in alms three, four, and even five shillings a day. They have their clubs in the parish of St. Giles’s, where they meet, drink and feed well, read the papers, and talk politics. One of my friends put on one day a ragged coat, and promised a handsome reward to a beggar to introduce him to his club. He found the beggars gay and familiar, and poor only in their rags. One threw down his crutch, another untied a wooden leg, a third took off a grey wig or removed a plaister from a sound eye; then they related their adventures, and planned fresh schemes. The female beggars hire children for sixpence and sometimes even two shillings a day: a very deformed child is worth four shillings.” In the same parish the pickpockets met to dine and exchange or sell snuff-boxes, handkerchiefs, and other stolen property.
About fifty years before, says Archenholz, there had been a pickpockets’ club in St. Giles’s, where the knives and forks were chained to the table and the cloth was nailed on. Rules were, however, decorously observed, and chairmen chosen at their meetings. Not far from this house was a celebrated gin-shop, on the sign-post of which was written, “Here you may get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and straw for nothing.” The cellars of this public-spirited man were never empty.
Archenholz also sketches the conjurors who told fortunes for a shilling. They wore black gowns and false beards, advertised in the newspapers, and painted their houses with magical figures and planetary emblems.[656]
In 1783 Mr. J. T. Smith describes how he made for Mr. Crowle, the illustrator of Pennant, a sketch of Old Simon, a well-known character, who took his station daily under one of the gate piers of the old red and brown brick gateway at the northern end of St. Giles’s Churchyard, which then faced Mr. Remnent’s timber-yard. This man wore several hats, and was remarkable for a long, dirty, yellowish white beard. His chapped fingers were adorned with brass rings. He had several coats and waistcoats—the upper wrap-rascle covering bundles of rags, parcels of books, canisters of bread and cheese, matches, a tinder-box, meat for his dog, scraps from Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and three or four dog’s-eared, thumbed, and greasy numbers of the Gentleman’s Magazine. From these random leaves he gathered much information, which he retailed to persons who stopped to look at him. Simon and his dog lodged under a staircase in an old shattered building in Dyot Street, known as “Rat’s Castle.” It was in this beggars’ rendezvous that Nollekens the sculptor used to seek models for his Grecian Venuses. Rowlandson etched Simon several times in his usual gross but droll manner.[657] There was also a whole-length print of him published by John Seago, with this monumental inscription—“Simon Edy, born at Woodford, near Thrapston, Northamptonshire, in 1709. Died May 18th, 1783.”
Simon had had several dogs, which, one after the other, were stolen, and sent for sale at Islington, or killed for their teeth by men employed by the dentists. The following anecdote is told of his last and most faithful dog:—Rover had been a shepherd’s dog at Harrow, and having its left eye struck out by a bullock’s horn, was left with Simon by its master, a Smithfield drover. The beggar tied him to his arm with a long string, cured him, and then restored him to the drover. After that, the dog would stop at St. Giles’s porch every market-day on its way after the drover to the slaughter-house in Union Street, and receive caresses from the hand which had bathed its wound. Rover would then yelp for joy and gratitude, and scamper off to get up with the erring bullocks. At last poor Simon missed the dog for several weeks; at the end of that time it appeared one morning at his feet, and with its one sorrowful and uplifted eye implored Simon’s protection by licking his tawny beard. His master the drover was dead. Simon was only too glad to adopt Rover, who eventually followed him to his last home.
There was an elegy printed for good-natured, inoffensive old Simon, with a woodcut portrait attached. The Hon. Daines Barrington is said to have never passed the old mendicant without giving him sixpence.
Mr. J. T. Smith, himself afterwards Curator of the Prints at the British Museum, published some curious etchings of beggars and street characters in 1815. Amongst them are ragged men carrying placards of “The Grand Golden Lottery;” strange old-clothesmen in cocked hats and two-tier wigs; itinerant wood-merchants; sellers of toys, such as “young lambs” or live haddock; flying piemen in pig tails and shorts; women in gipsy hats; door-mat sellers; vendors of hot peas, pickled cucumbers, lemons, windmills (toys); and, last and least, Sir Harry Dimsdale, the dwarf Mayor of Garratt.
The condition of the beggars of St. Giles in 1815 we gather pretty accurately from the evidence given by Mr. Sampson Stevenson, overseer of the parish, and by trade an ironmonger at No. 11 King Street, Seven Dials, before a committee of the House of Commons, the Right Honourable George Rose in the chair.
Mr. Stevenson’s shop was not more than a few yards from one of the beggars’ chief rendezvous, and he had therefore been enabled to closely study their habits. The inn had lost its licence, as the landlord encouraged thieves; and he had made inquiries of petition-writers, the highest class of mendicants. He had gone frequently into the bar of the Fountain in King Street, another of their haunts, to watch their goings-on. The pretended sailors never carried anything on their backs, as they only begged or extorted money; but the other rogues, who made it their practice to ask for food and clothing, always carried a knapsack to put it in. They returned laden with shoes and clothes, which they would sell in Monmouth Street. They had been heard to say that they had made three or four shillings a day by begging shoes alone.[658] Their mode of obtaining charity was to go barefoot and scarify their heels so that the blood might show. They went out two or three together, or more, and invariably changed their routes each day. Mr. Stevenson had seen them pull out their money and share it. Victuals, he believed, they threw away; but everything else they sold. They would stop at the Fountain till the house closed, or till they got drunk, began to fight, and were turned out by the publican, who feared the losing his licence. They probably went to even lower places to finish their revel.
“They teach other,” he said, “different modes of extortion. They are of the worst character, and overwhelm you with cursing and abuse if you refuse them money. There is one special rascal, Gannee Manos, who is scarcely three months in the year out of gaol. He always goes barefoot, and scratches his ankles to make them bleed. He is the greatest collector of shoes and clothes, as he goes the most naked to excite compassion.” Another man had been known in the streets for fifteen or twenty years. He generally limped or passed as a cripple; but Mr. Stevenson has seen him fencing and jumping about like a pugilist. He went without a hat, with bare arms, and a canvas bag on his back. He generally began by singing a song, and he carried primroses or something in his hand. He pretended to be scarcely able to move one foot before the other; but if a Bow Street officer or a beadle came in sight, he was off as quick as any one. There was another man, an Irishman who had had a good education, and had been in the medical line; he wrote a beautiful hand, and drew up petitions for beggars at sixpence or a shilling each.
“These men come out by twenties and thirties from the bottom of Dyot Street, and then branch off five or six together. The one who has still some money left starts them with a pint or half a pint of gin. They have all their divisions, and they quarter the town into sections. Some of them collect three, four, or five children, paying sixpence a day for each, and then they go begging in gangs, setting the children crying to excite people’s sympathies. The Irish sometimes have the impudence to bring these children to the board and claim relief, and swear the children are their own. In a short time they are found out; but till the discovery their landlords will swear their story is true. Sometimes, by giving their own country people something, the landlords help to detect them. But even in cases where the children are their own, they will not work when they have once got into the habit of begging. If they will not come into the workhouse, their relief is instantly stopped.
“They spend their evenings drinking, after dining at an eating-house. Deserving people never beg: they are ashamed of it. They do not eat broken victuals. They have seldom any lodgings. There are houses where forty or fifty of them sleep. A porter stands at the door and takes the money. In the morning there is a general muster to see they have stolen nothing, and then the doors are unlocked. For threepence they have clean straw, for fourpence something more decent, and for sixpence a bed. These are all professional beggars; they beg every day, even Sundays. They will not work; they get more money by begging. Sometimes during hard frosts they pretend to beg for work; but their children are sent out early by their parents to certain prescribed stations to beg, sometimes with a broom. If they do not bring home more or less according to their size, they are beaten. A large family of children is a revenue to these people.”
When beggars did not get enough for their subsistence, Mr. Stevenson believed that they had a fund amongst themselves, as they so seldom applied for relief. The Irish were generally afraid to apply, for fear of being returned to their own country. Beggars had been heard to brag of getting six, seven, and eight shillings a day, or more; and if one got more than the others, he divided it with the rest. Mr. Stevenson concluded his evidence by saying that there were so many low Irish in St. Giles’s, that out of £30,000 a year collected in that parish by poor-rate, £20,000 went to this low and shifting population, that decreased in summer and increased in winter.
From one or two specimens culled from the London newspapers in 1829 we do not augur much improvement in the character and habits of the St. Giles’s beggars. On the 12th of July 1829 John Driscoll, an old professional mendicant, was brought up at the Marylebone Police-office, charged with begging, annoying respectable persons, and even following fashionably dressed ladies into shops. In his pockets were found a small sum of money, some ham sandwiches, and an invitation ticket signed “Car Durre, chairman.” It requested the favour of Mr. Driscoll’s company on Monday evening next, at seven o’clock, at the Robin Hood, Church Street, St. Giles’s, for the purpose of taking supper with others in his line of calling or profession. Mr. Rawlinson said he supposed that an alderman in chains would grace the beggars’ festive board, but he would at least prevent the prisoner forming one of the party on Monday, and sent him to the House of Correction for fourteen days.[659]
The same day one of those men who chalk “I am starving” on the pavement was also sent to the treadmill for fourteen days. Francis Fisher, the prisoner in question, was one of a gang of forty pavement chalkers. In the evening, “after work,” these men changed their dress, and with their ladies enjoyed themselves over a good supper, brandy and water, and cigars. In the winter time, when they excited more compassion, their average earnings were ten shillings a day. This would make £20 a day for the gang, and no less than £7300 a year.
Monmouth Street is generally supposed to have derived its name from the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II.’s natural son, whose town house stood close by in Soho Square. It was perhaps named from Carey, Earl of Monmouth, who died in 1626, and his son, who died in 1661: they were both parishioners of St. Giles’s.[660] It was early known as the great mart for old clothes, but was superseded in later times by Holy Well Street, which in its turn was displaced by the Minories. Lady Mary Wortley alludes to the lace coats hung up for sale in Monmouth Street like Irish patents. Even Prior, in his pleasant metaphysical poem of “Alma,” says—
“This looks, friend Dick, as Nature had
But exercised the salesman’s trade,
As if she haply had sat down
And cut out clothes for all the town,
Then sent them out to Monmouth Street,
To try what persons they would fit.”
Gay also alludes to this Jewish street in the following distich in his “Trivia”—
“Thames Street gives cheeses, Covent Garden fruits,
Moorfields old books, and Monmouth Street old suits.”
Most of the shops in Monmouth Street were occupied by Jew dealers in 1849, and horse-shoes were then to be seen nailed under the door-steps of the cellars to scare away witches.[661]
Mr. Charles Dickens in his Sketches by Boz, published in 1836-7, describes Seven Dials and Monmouth Street as they then appeared. The maze of streets, the unwholesome atmosphere, the men in fustian spotted with brickdust or whitewash, and chronically leaning against posts, are all painted by this great artist with the accuracy of a Dutch painter. The writer boldly plunges into the region of “first effusions and last dying speeches, hallowed by the names of Catnach and of Pitts,” and carries us at once into a fight between two half-drunk Irish termagants outside a gin-shop. He then takes us to the dirty straggling houses, the dark chandler’s shop, the rag and bone stores, the broker’s den, the bird-fancier’s room as full as Noah’s ark, and completes the picture with a background of dirty men, filthy women, squalid children, fluttering shuttlecocks, noisy battledores, reeking pipes, bad fruit, more than doubtful oysters, attenuated cats, depressed dogs, and anatomised fowls. Every house has, he says, at least a dozen tenants. The man in the shop is in the “baked jemmy” line, or deals in firewood and hearthstones. An Irish labourer and his family occupy the back kitchen, while a jobbing carpet-beater is in the front. In the front one pair there’s another family, and in the back one pair a young woman who takes in tambour-work. In the back attic is a mysterious man who never buys anything but coffee, penny loaves, and ink, and is supposed to write poems for Mr. Warren.[662]
The Monmouth Street inhabitants Mr. Dickens describes as a peaceable, thoughtful, and dirty race, who immure themselves in deep cellars or small back parlours, and seldom come forth till the dusk and cool of the evening, when, seated in chairs on the pavement, smoking their pipes, they watch the gambols of their children as they revel in the gutter, a happy troop of infantine scavengers.
“A Monmouth Street laced coat” was a byword a century ago, but still we find Monmouth Street the same. Pilot coats, double-breasted check waistcoats, low broad-brimmed coachmen’s hats, and skeleton suits, have usurped the place of the old attire; but Monmouth Street, said Charles Dickens, is still “the burial-place of the fashions, and we love to walk among these extensive groves of the illustrious dead, and indulge in the speculations to which they give rise.”[663]
In 1816 there were said to be 2348 Irish people resident in St. Giles’s; but an Irish witness before a committee of the House declared there were 6000 Irish, and 3000 children in the neighbourhood of George Street alone. In 1815 there were 14,164 Irish in the whole of London.[664] The Irish portion of the parish of St. Giles’s was known by the name of the Holy Land in 1829.
THE SEVEN DIALS.
LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS THEATRE, 1821.
CHAPTER XIV.
LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.
Lincoln’s Inn, originally belonging to the Black Friars before they removed Thames-ward, derives its name from Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, to whom it was given by Edward I., and whose town house or inn stood on the same site in the reign of Edward I. Earl Henry died in 1312, the year in which Gaveston was killed, and his monument was one of the stateliest in the old church. His arms are still those of the inn and of its tributaries, Furnival’s and Thavies inns. There is yet extant an old account of the earl’s bailiff, relating to the sale of the fruit of his master’s garden. The noble’s table was supplied and the residue sold. The apples, pears, large nuts, and cherries, the beans, onions, garlic, and leeks, produced a profit of £9: 2: 3 (about £135 in modern money). The only flowers were roses. The bailiff, it appears, expended 8s. a year in purchasing small fry, frogs, and eels, to feed the pike in the pond or vivary.[665]
Part of the Chancery Lane side of Lincoln’s Inn was in 1217 and 1272 “the mansion house” of William de Haverhill, treasurer to King Henry III. He was attainted for treason, and his house and lands were confiscated to the king, who then gave his house to Ralph Neville, Chancellor of England and Bishop of Chichester, who built there “a fair house;” and the Bishops of Chichester inhabited it there till Henry VII.’s time, when they let it to law students, reserving lodgings for themselves, and it fell into the hands of Judge Sulyard and other feoffees. This family held it till Elizabeth’s time, when Sir Edward Sulyard, of Essex, sold the estate to the Benchers,[666] who then began enlarging their frontier and building.
The plain Tudor gateway with the two side towers soaked with black smoke, the oldest part of the existing structure, was built in 1518 by Sir Thomas Lovell, a member of this inn and treasurer of the household to Henry VII., when great alterations took place in the inn. What thousands of wise men and rogues have passed under its murky shadow! None of the original building is left. The Black Friars’ House fronted the Holborn end of the Bishop’s Palace.[667] The chambers adjoining the Gate House are of a later date and it was at these that Mr. Cunningham thinks Ben Jonson worked.[668]
The chapel, of debased Perpendicular Gothic, was built by Inigo Jones, and consecrated in 1623, Dr. Donne the poet preaching the consecration sermon. The stained glass was the work of a Mr. Hale of Fetter Lane. The twelve apostles, Moses, and the prophets still glow like immortal flowers, bright as when Donne, or Ussher, watched the light they shed. One of the windows bears the name of Bernard van Linge, the same man probably who executed the windows at Wadham College, Oxford.[669] Noy, the Attorney-General and creature of Charles I., a friend of Laud, and the proposer of the writ for ship-money, put up the window representing John the Baptist, rather an ominous saint, surely, in Charles’s time. Noy died in 1634, before the storm which would certainly have carried his head off. He left his money to a prodigal son, who was afterwards killed in a duel,—“Left to be squandered, and I hope no better from him,” says the dying man, bitterly. It was Noy who decided the curious case of the three graziers who left their money with their hostess. One of them afterwards returned and ran off with the money; upon which the other two sued the woman, denying their consent. Mr. Noy pleaded that the money was ready to be given up directly the three men came together and claimed it.[670] Rogers tells this story in his poem of “Italy,” and gives it a romantic turn.
Laud, always restless for novelties that could look like Rome, and yet not be Rome, referred to the Lincoln’s Inn windows at his trial. He wondered at a Mr. Brown objecting to such things, considering he was not of Lincoln’s Inn, “where Mr. Prynne’s zeal had not yet beaten down the images of the apostles in the fair windows of that chapel, which windows were set up new long since the statute of Edward VI.; and it is well known,” says that enemy of the Puritans, “that I was once resolved to have returned this upon Mr. Brown in the House of Commons, but changed my mind, lest thereby I might have set some furious spirit at work to destroy those harmless goodly windows, to the just dislike of that worthy society.”[671]
The crypt under the chapel rests on many pillars and strong-backed arches, and, like the cloisters in the Temple, was intended as a place for student-lawyers to walk in and exchange learning. Butler describes witnesses of the straw-bail species waiting here for customers,[672] just as half a century ago they used to haunt the doors of Chancery Lane gin-shops. On a June day in 1663 Pepys came to walk under the chapel by appointment, after pacing up and down and admiring the new garden then constructing.
The great Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England in Henry VIII.’s time, had chambers at Lincoln’s Inn when he was living in Bucklersbury after his marriage. This was about 1506. He wrote his Utopia in 1516. King Henry grew so fond of More’s learned and witty conversation, that he used to constantly send for him to supper, and would walk in the garden at Chelsea with his arm round his neck. More was beheaded in 1535 for refusing to take the oath of succession and acknowledge the legality of the king’s divorce from Catherine of Arragon. Erasmus, who knew More well, inscribed the “Nux” of Ovid to his son. More’s skull is still preserved, it is said, in the vault of St. Dunstan’s Church at Canterbury.[673] More’s daughter, Margaret Roper, was buried with it in her arms.
Dr. Donne, the divine and poet, whose mother was distantly related to Sir Thomas More and to Heywood the epigrammatist, was a student at Lincoln’s Inn in his seventeenth year, but left it to squander his father’s fortune. He was a friend of Bacon, with whom he lived for five years, and also of Ben Jonson, who corresponded with him. When young, Donne had written a thesis to prove that suicide is no sin. “That,” he used to say in later years, “was written by Jack Donne, not by Dr. Donne.”
This same poet was for two years preacher at Lincoln’s Inn; so was the charitable and amiable Tillotson in 1663. The latter, after preaching the doctrine of non-resistance before King Charles II., was nicknamed “Hobbes in the pulpit;” he and Dr. Burnet both tried in vain to force the same doctrine on Lord William Russell when he was preparing for death. Tillotson, who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1691 by King William, was a valued friend of Locke. Addison considered Tillotson’s three folio volumes of sermons to be the standard of English, and meant to make them the ground-work of a dictionary which he had projected. Warburton, a sterner critic, denies that the sermons are oratorical like Jeremy Taylor’s, or thoughtful like Barrow’s, but yet confesses them to be clear, rational, equable,[674] and certainly not without a noble simplicity.
Among the most eminent students of Lincoln’s Inn we must remember Sir Matthew Hale. After a wild and vain youth, Hale suddenly commenced studying sixteen hours a day,[675] and became so careless of dress that he was once seized by a pressgang. The sight of a friend who fell down in a fit from excessive drinking led to this honest man’s renouncing all revelry and becoming unchangeably religious. Noy directed him in his studies; he became a friend of Selden, and was one of the counsel for Strafford, Laud, and the king himself. Nevertheless, he obtained the esteem of Cromwell, who was tolerant of all shades of goodness. He died 1675-6. When a nobleman once complained to Charles II. that Hale would not discuss with him the arguments in his cause then before him, Charles replied, “Ods fish, man! he would have treated me just the same.”
Lord Chancellor Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere, was of Lincoln’s Inn. His son became Earl of Bridgewater. He was a friend of Lord Bacon, and had a celebrated dispute with Chief Justice Coke as to whether “the Chancery can relieve by subpœna after a judgment at law in the same cause.” Prudent, discreet, and honest, Ellesmere was esteemed by both Elizabeth and James, and died at York House in 1617. Bishop Hacket says of him that “He neither did, spoke, nor thought anything in his life but what deserved praise.”[676] It is said that many persons used to go to the Chancery Court only to see and admire his venerable presence.
Sir Henry Spelman was admitted of Lincoln’s Inn. He was a friend of Dugdale, and one of our earliest students of Anglo-Saxon. He wrote much on civil law, sacrilege, and tithes. Aubrey tells us that he was thought a dunce at school, and did not seriously sit down to hard study till he was about forty. This eminent scholar died in 1641, and was interred with great solemnity in Westminster Abbey.
Shaftesbury, the subtle and dangerous, and one of the restorers of the king he afterwards worked so hard to depose, was of Lincoln’s Inn.
Ashmole, the great herald, antiquary, and numismatist, originally a London attorney, was married in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, in 1668, to the daughter of his great colleague in topography and heraldry, Sir William Dugdale, the part compiler of the Monasticon.
In the chapel was buried Alexander Brome, a Royalist attorney, a translator of Horace, and a great writer of sharp songs against “The Rump,” who died in 1666. Here also—in loving companionship with him only because dead—rests that irritable Puritan lawyer, William Prynne. He twice lost an ear in the pillory, besides being branded on the cheek. He ultimately opposed Cromwell and aided the return of Charles, for which he was made Keeper of the Tower Records. His works amount to forty folio and quarto volumes. He left copies of them to the Lincoln’s Inn library. Needham calls him “the greatest paper-worm that ever crept into a library.” He died in his Lincoln’s Inn chambers in 1669. Wood computes that Prynne wrote as much as would amount to a sheet for every day of his life. His epitaph had been erased when Wood wrote the Athenæ Oxonienses in 1691.
In the same chapel lies Secretary Thurloe, the son of an Essex rector and the faithful servant of Cromwell. He was admitted of Lincoln’s Inn in 1647, and in 1654 was chosen one of the masters of the upper bench. He died suddenly in his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn in 1668. Dr. Birch published several folio volumes of his State Papers. He seems to have been an honest, dull, plodding man. Thurloe’s chambers were at No. 24 in the south angle of the great court leading out of Chancery Lane, formerly called the Gatehouse Court, but now Old Buildings—the rooms on the left hand of the ground-floor. Here Thurloe had chambers from 1645 to 1659. Cromwell must have often come here to discuss dissolutions of Parliament and Dutch treaties. State papers sufficient to fill sixty-seven folio volumes were discovered in a false ceiling in the garret by a clergyman who had borrowed the chambers of a friend during the long vacation. He disposed of them to Lord Chancellor Somers.[677] Cautious old Thurloe had perhaps sown these papers, hoping to reap the harvest under some new Cromwellian dynasty that never came.
Rushworth the historian was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn. During the Civil Wars he was assistant clerk to the House of Commons. After the Restoration he became secretary to the Lord Keeper, but falling into distress, died in the King’s Bench in 1690. His eight folio volumes of Historical Collections are specially valuable.[678]
Sir John Denham also studied in this pasturing-ground of English genius; and here, after squandering all his money in gaming, he wrote an essay upon the vice that brings its own punishment. In 1641, when his tragedy of “The Sophy” appeared, Waller said that Denham had broken out like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong. In 1643 appeared his “Cooper’s Hill” which the lampooners declared the author had bought of a vicar for forty pounds.[679] He became mad for a short time at the close of life, and was then ridiculed by Butler, so says Dr. Johnson. He died in 1668, and was interred in Westminster Abbey. Denham and Waller smoothed the way for Dryden,[680] and founded the Pope school of highly polished artificial verse. Denham’s noble apostrophe to the river Thames is all but perfect.
George Wither, one of our fine old poets of a true school, rougher but more natural than Denham’s, the son of a Hampshire farmer, entered at Lincoln’s Inn. Sent to the Marshalsea for his just but indiscreet satires, he turned soldier, fought against the Royalists, and became one of Cromwell’s dreaded major-generals. He was in Newgate for a long time after the Restoration, and died in 1667. When taken prisoner by Charles, Sir John Denham obtained his release on the humorous pretext that, while Wither lived, he (Denham) would not be the worst poet in England.[681]
In No. 1 New Square, Arthur Murphy, the friend of Dr. Johnson, resided for twenty-three years. He became a member of the inn in 1757. In 1788 he sold his chambers, and retired from the bar. As a journalist he was ridiculed by Wilkes and Churchill. His plays, “The Grecian Daughter” and “Three Weeks after Marriage,” were successful. He also translated Tacitus and Sallust. He died in 1805.[682]
Judge Fortescue, a great English lawyer of the time of Henry VI., was a student of this inn. He wrote his great work, De Laudibus Legum Angliæ to educate Prince Edward when in banishment in Lorraine. This pious, loyal, and learned man, after being nominal Chancellor, returned to retirement in England, and acknowledged Edward IV.
The Earl of Mansfield belonged to the same illustrious inn. For elegance of mind, for honesty and industry, and for eloquence, he stands unrivalled. The proceedings against Wilkes, and the destruction of his house in Bloomsbury by the fanatical mob of 1780, were the chief events of his useful life.
Spencer Perceval was of Lincoln’s Inn. A son of the Earl of Egmont, he became a student here in 1782. In Parliament he supported Pitt and the war against Napoleon. In 1801, under the Addington ministry, he became Attorney-General, and persecuted Peltier for a libel on Bonaparte during the peace of Amiens. On the death of the Duke of Portland he was raised to the head of the Treasury, where he continued till May 1812, when he was shot through the heart in the lobby of the House of Commons by Bellingham, a bankrupt merchant of Archangel, who considered himself aggrieved because ministers had not taken his part and claimed redress for his losses from the Russian Government. Perceval was a shrewd, even-tempered lawyer, fluent and industrious, who, had time been permitted him, might possibly have proved more completely than he did his incapacity for high ministerial command.
George Canning became a student at Lincoln’s Inn in 1781. His father was a bankrupt wine-merchant who died of a broken heart. His mother was a provincial actress. His relation, Sheridan, introduced him to Fox, Grey, and Burke, the latter of whom, it is said, induced him to make politics his profession. He made his maiden speech, attacking Fox and supporting Pitt, in 1794. Late in life he gradually began to support some liberal measures. In 1827 he became First Lord of the Treasury, and died a few months afterwards in the zenith of his power.
Lord Lyndhurst was also one of the glories of this inn. The trial of Dr. Watson for treason, in 1817, first gained for this son of an American painter a reputation which, joined with his prudent conduct in the trial of Cashman the rioter led to his being appointed Solicitor-General in 1818. From that he rose in rapid succession, to the posts of Attorney-General, Master of the Rolls, Lord Chancellor, and Lord Lyndhurst. Old, eccentric, “irrepressible” Sir Charles Wetherell was Copley’s fellow-advocate in Watson’s case, that ended in the prisoner’s acquittal.[683] In 1827, when Abbott became Lord Tenterden, Copley accepted the Great Seal, displacing Lord Eldon, and joined Canning’s cabinet, becoming Lord Lyndhurst. In 1830 he became Chief Baron of the Exchequer.
Charles Pepys, Lord Cottenham, born 1781, was called to the bar by the Society of Lincoln’s Inn in 1804. He was appointed King’s Counsel in 1826, was made Solicitor-General in 1834, succeeded Sir John Leach as Master of the Rolls in the same year, and was elevated to the woolsack in 1836. This Chancellor, who was a very excellent lawyer, was descended from a branch of the family of Samuel Pepys, author of the celebrated Diary.
Sir E. Sugden was a member of Lincoln’s Inn. He was born in the year 1781. He was the son of a Westminster hairdresser who became rich by inventing a substitute for hair-powder. He was created Lord St. Leonards on the formation of a Conservative ministry in 1852, when he accepted the Great Seal.
Lord Brougham also studied in Lincoln’s Inn. He was born in 1778, and started the Edinburgh Review in 1802. In 1820 he defended Queen Caroline; but it would take a volume to follow the career of this impetuous and versatile genius. His struggles for law-reform, for Catholic emancipation, for abolition of slavery, for the education of the people, and for Parliamentary reform, are matters of history. In his old age, though still vigorous, Lord Brougham grew tamer, and condemned the armed emancipation of slaves practised by the Northern States in the present American war. He died at his residence at Cannes in the South of France in 1868.
Cottenham and Campbell were students in Lincoln’s Inn; so was that eccentric reformer Jeremy Bentham, who was called to the bar in 1722, and was the son of a Houndsditch attorney; and so was Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.
That “luminary of the Irish Church,”[684] Archbishop Ussher, was preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1647, the society giving the good man handsome rooms ready furnished. He continued to preach there for eight years, till his eyesight began to fail. He died in 1655, and was buried, by Cromwell’s permission, with great magnificence, in Erasmus’s chapel in Westminster Abbey. His library of 10,000 volumes, bought of him by Cromwell’s officers, was given by Charles II. to Dublin College. Ussher, when only eighteen, was the David who discomfited in public dispute the learned Jesuit Fitz-Simons. He saw Charles beheaded from the roof of a house on the site of the Admiralty.
Dr. Langhorne, the joint translator with his brother of the Lives of Plutarch, was assistant preacher at Lincoln’s Inn. An imitator of Sterne, and a writer in Griffiths’s Monthly Review, he was praised by Smollett and abused by Churchill. Langhorne’s amiable poem, The Country Justice, was praised by Scott. He died in 1779.
That fiery controversialist Warburton was preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1746, and the same year preached and published a sermon on the Highland rebellion. He was the son of an attorney at Newark-upon-Trent. His Divine Legation was an effort to show that the absence of allusions in the writings of Moses to a system of rewards and punishments was a proof of their divine origin. The book is full of perverse digressions. His edition of Shakspere is, perhaps, to use a fine expression of Burke, “one of the poorest maggots that ever crept from the great man’s carcase.” Pope left half his library to Warburton, who had suggested to him the conclusion of the Dunciad. Wilkes, Bolingbroke, Dr. Louth, and Churchill were all by turns attacked by this arrogant knight-errant. Warburton died in 1779.
Reginald Heber, afterwards the excellent Bishop of Calcutta, was appointed preacher at Lincoln’s Inn in 1822, the year before he sailed for India. In 1826 this good man was found dead in his bath at Trichinopoly. The sudden death of this energetic missionary was a great loss to East Indian Christianity. In the “company of the preachers” we must not forget the excellent Dr. Van Mildert, afterwards Bishop of Durham, and Dr. Thomson the present Archbishop of York.
In the old times the Lord Chancellor held his sittings in the great hall of Lincoln’s Inn. Here, too, at the Christmas revels, the King of the Cockneys administered his laws. Jack Straw, a sort of rebellious rival, was put down, with all his adherents, as a bad precedent for the Essexes and Norfolks of the inn, by wary Queen Elizabeth, who always kept a firm grip on her prerogative. In the same reign absurd sumptuary laws, vainly trying to fix the quicksilver of fashion, forbade the students to wear long hair, long beards, large ruffs, huge cloaks, or big spurs. The fine for wearing a beard of more than a fortnight’s growth was three shillings and fourpence.[685] In her father’s time beards had been prohibited under pain of double commons.
In the old hall, replaced by the new Tudor building, stood one of Hogarth’s most pretentious but worst pictures, “Paul preaching before Felix,” an ill-drawn and ludicrous caricature of epic work. The society paid for it. It is now rolled up and hid away with as much contumely as Kent’s absurdity at St. Clement’s when Hogarth parodied it.
The new hall of Lincoln’s Inn was built by Mr. P. Hardwick, the architect of the St. Katherine Docks, and was opened by the Queen in person in 1845. It is a fine Tudor building of red brick, with stone dressings. The hall is 120 feet, the library 80 feet long. The contract was taken for £55,000, but its cost exceeded that sum. The library contains the unique fourth volume of Prynne’s Records, which the society bought for £335 at the Stow sale in 1849, and all Sir Matthew Hale’s bequests of books and MSS.: “a treasure,” says that “excellent good man,” as Evelyn calls him[686] in his will, “that is not fit for every man’s view.” The hall contains a fresco representing the “Lawgivers of the World,” by Watts. The gardens were much curtailed by the erection of the hall, and their quietude destroyed. Ben Jonson talks of the walks under the elms.[687] Steele seems to have been fond of this garden when he felt meditative. In May 1709, he says much hurry and business having perplexed him into a mood too thoughtful for company, instead of the tavern “I went into Lincoln’s Inn Walk, and having taken a round or two, I sat down, according to the allowed familiarity of these places, on a bench.” In a more thoughtful month (November) of the same year he goes again for a solitary walk in the garden, “a favour that is indulged me by several of the benchers, who are very intimate friends, and grown old in the neighbourhood.” It was this bright frosty night, when the whole body of air had been purified into “bright transparent æther,” that Steele imagined his vision of “The Return of the Golden Age.”
Brave old Ben Jonson was the son of a Scotch gentleman in Henry VIII.’s service, who, impoverished by the persecutions of Queen Mary, took orders late in life. His mother married for the second time a small builder or master bricklayer. He went to Westminster school, where Camden, the great antiquary, was his master. A kind patron sent him to Cambridge.[688] He seems to have left college prematurely, and have come back to London to work with his father-in-law.[689]
There is an old tradition that he worked at the garden-wall of Lincoln’s Inn next to Chancery Lane, and that a knight or bencher (Sutton, or Camden), walking by, hearing him repeat a passage of Homer, entered into conversation with him, and finding him to have extraordinary wit, sent him back to college; or, as Fuller quaintly puts it, “some gentlemen pitying that his parts should be buried under the rubbish of so mean a calling, did by their bounty manumise him freely to follow his own ingenious inclinations.”[690]
Gifford sneers at the story, for the poet’s own words to Drummond of Hawthornden were simply these:—“He could not endure the occupation of a bricklayer,” and therefore joined Vere in Flanders, probably going with reinforcements to Ostend in 1591-2.[691] He there fought and slew an enemy, and stripped him in sight of both armies. On his return, he became an actor at a Shoreditch theatre. His enemies, the rival satirists, frequently sneer at the quondam profession of Ben Jonson, and describe him stamping on the stage as if he were treading mortar. For myself, I admire brave, truculent old Ben, and delight even in his most crabbed and pedantic verse, and therefore never pass Lincoln’s Inn garden without thinking of Shakspere’s honest but rugged friend—“a bear only in the coat.”
On June 27, 1752, there was a dreadful fire in New Square, which destroyed countless historical treasures, including Lord Somers’s original letters and papers.
At No. 2 and afterwards at No. 6 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, which is built on Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and forms no part of the Inn of court, lived Sir Samuel Romilly. This “great and amiable man,” as Tom Moore calls him, killed himself in a fit of melancholy produced by overwork joined to the loss of his wife, “a simple, gay, unlearned woman.” Sir Samuel was a stern, reserved man, and she was the only person in the world to whom he could unbosom himself. When he lost her, he said, “the very vent of his heart was stopped up.”[692]
It was in Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn, that Benjamin Disraeli, born in December 1805, much too erratic for Plowden and Coke, used to come to study conveyancing at the chambers of Mr. Bassevi. He is described as often arriving with Spenser’s Faerie Queen under his arm, stopping an hour or two to read, and then leaving. This led, as might be expected, not to the woolsack but to the authorship of Coningsby. His Premiership and his Patent of Peerage as Lord Beaconsfield, are due to other causes.
Whetstone Park, now a small quiet passage, full of printing-offices and stables, between Great Turnstile and Gate Street, derived its name from a vestryman of the time of Charles I. It is now chiefly occupied by mews, but was once filled by infamous houses and low brandy-shops.
In 1671, the Duke of Monmouth, the Duke of Grafton, and the Duke of St. Alban’s, three of King Charles II.’s illegitimate sons, killed here a beadle in a drunken brawl. A street-ballad was written on the occasion, more full of spite against the corrupt court than of sympathy with the slain man. In poor doggerel the Catnach of 1671 describes the watch coming in, disturbed from sleep, to appease their graces—
“Straight rose mortal jars,
’Twixt the night blackguard and (the) silver stars;
Then fell the beadle by a ducal hand,
For daring to pronounce the saucy ‘Stand!’”
Sadly enough, the silly fellow’s death led to a dance at Whitehall being put off,—
“Disappoints the queen, ‘poor little chuck!’”[693]
and all the brisk courtiers in their gay coats bought with the nation’s subsidies.
The last two lines are vigorous, sarcastic, and worthy of a humble imitator of Dryden. The poet sums up—
“Yet shall Whitehall, the innocent and good,
See these men dance, all daubed with lace and blood.”
In 1682 the misnamed “Park” grew so infamous, that a countryman, having been decoyed into one of the houses and robbed, went into Smithfield and collected an angry mob of about 500 apprentices, who marched on Whetstone Park, broke open the houses, and destroyed the furniture. The constables and watchmen, being outnumbered, sent for the king’s guard, who dispersed them and took eleven of them. Nevertheless, the next night another mob stormed the place, again broke in the doors, smashed the windows, and cut the feather-beds to pieces.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields formed part of the ancient Fickett’s Fields, a plot of ground of about ten acres, extending formerly from Bell Yard to Portugal Street and Carey Street. It seems to have been used in the Middle Ages for jousts and tournaments by the Templars and Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, to the priory of which last order it belonged till Henry VIII. dissolved the monasteries, when it was granted to Anthony Stringer. In an inquest of the time of James I. it is described as having two gates for horses and carriages at the east end—one gate leading into Chancery Lane, the other gate at the western end.[694]
Queen Elizabeth, afraid that London was growing unwieldly, issued several proclamations against further building. James I., still more timid and conservative, and not thoroughly acquainted with his own capital, issued a like absurd ukase in 1612, by the desire of the benchers and students of Lincoln’s Inn, forbidding the erection of new houses in these fields. But no royal edict can prevent a demand for creating a supply, and as the building still went on, a commission was appointed in 1618 to lay out the square in a regular plan. Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, and many noblemen, judges, and masters in Chancery, were on this commission, and Inigo Jones, the king’s Surveyor-General, drew up the scheme. The report of this body, given by Rymer, sets out that in the last sixteen years there had been more building near and about the City of London than in ages before, and that as these fields were much surrounded by the dwellings and lodgings of noblemen and gentlemen of quality, “all small cottages and closes shall be paid for and removed, and the square shall be reduced,” both for sweetness, uniformity, and comeliness, as an ornament to the City, and for the health and recreation of the inhabitants, into walks and partitions, as Mr. Inigo Jones should in his map devise.[695]
There is a tradition that the area of the square, according to Inigo Jones’s plan, was to have been made the exact dimensions of the base of the great pyramid of Geezeh. The tradition is probably true, for the area of the pyramid is 535,824 square feet, and that of Lincoln’s Inn Fields 550,000.[696] The height of the pyramid was 756 feet.
The plan proved too costly, and the subscriptions began probably to fail; but in the course of time noblemen and others began to build for themselves, but without much regard to uniformity.
The elevation of Inigo’s plan for the Fields, painted in oil colours, is still preserved at Wilton House, near Salisbury. The view is taken from the south, and the principal feature in the elevation is Lindsey House in the centre of the west side, whose stone façade, still existing, stands boldly out from the brick houses which support it on either side. The internal accommodation of Lindsey House was never good.[697]
These fields in Charles I.’s time became the haunt of wrestlers, bowlers, beggars, and idle boys; and here, in 1624, Lilly the astrologer, then servant to a mantua-maker in the Strand, spent his time in bowling with Wat the cobbler, Dick the blacksmith, and such idle apprentices. Hither, after the Restoration, came every sort of villain—the Rufflers, or maimed soldiers, who told lies of Edgehill and Naseby, and who surrounded the coaches of charitable lords; “Dommerers,” or sham dumb men; “Mumpers,” or sham broken gentlemen; “Whipjacks,” or sham seamen with bound-up legs; “Abram-men,” or sham idiots; “Fraters,” or rogues with forged patents; “Anglers,” wild rogues, “Clapper-dudgeons,”[698] and men with gambling wheels of fortune.
In Queen Anne’s reign Gay sketches the dangers of night in these fields; he warns his readers to avoid the lurking thief, by day a beggar, or else—
“The crutch, which late compassion moved, shall wound
Thy bleeding head, and fell thee to the ground.
Nor trust the linkman,” he adds, “along the lonely wall, or he’ll put out his light and rob you, but—
“Still keep the public streets where oily rays
That from the crystal lamp o’erspread the ways.”
The south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields was built and named three years before the Restoration, by Sir William Cowper, James Cowper, and Robert Henley. In 1668 Portugal Row, as it was called, but not from Charles’s queen,[699] was extremely fashionable. There were then living here such noble and noted persons as Lady Arden, William Perpoint, Esq., Sir Charles Waldegrave, Lady Fitzharding, Lady Diana Curzon, Serjeant Maynard, Lord Cardigan, Mrs. Anne Heron, Lady Mordant, Richard Adams, Esq., Lady Carr, Lady Wentworth, Mr. Attorney Montagu, Lady Coventry, Judge Welch, and Lady Davenant.[700]