by Walter Thornbury.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.3 #11 (Sep 1867).
I. St. James's Park
London Parks in General.
There is a wicked, old, misogynic, anti-matrimonial epigram, written by we know not what hand, long since gone to dust. We are not sure that we remember it fully; so we cannot say whether we have improved or injured it by paraphrase. It runs somewhat in this way:
"When Milton was in wedlock crossed,
'Twas then his Paradise was lost;
When once more free and unrestrained,
Then was his Paradise regained."
Very clever, is it not, ladies? but still it is very wicked.
This epigram has no business in this place; but the essay-writer is by nature a rambler, whose delight and duty it is to wander from his subject; to have no subject, in fact, but to show his superlative skill in cooking by making good broth out of a flint stone and a sprig of parsley. Yet "the Dougal creature" in this case claims to be allowed some glimmering of reason; for we mean to indicate that the London park is the Paradise regained of the prolétaire, of the street-child, of the nursemaid, of that noble body of men the Household Brigade, of the chivied tramp, of the needy gentleman, of the tired mechanic, of lovers of all ranks, of embryo boating-men, of kite-flying boys, and of the jaded student.
Talk of the lotus-eater on a sea-cliff, watching dreamily the distant sail, or observing the great orange-banded bee, that, when it leaves the little dry purple blossom of the thyme beside one's cheek, leaves a silence that is sleepily intense. Talk of the Sybarite rising from his perfume-bath beneath the myrtle-boughs to throw himself into soft seas of rose-leaves. Neither of them approached the profundity of the enjoyment of that black-visaged tired London prentice in the dirty canvas jacket and paper cap, whom we see throwing himself face downwards on the warm thick grass, not far from the Fagus communis, or "common beech," nearly opposite the entrance to the Green Park—five P.M. of a hot June afternoon. The black-wooled sheep feed near him, careless of the butcher. There is a canary singing its heart out (most thoughtless of prisoners) in the balcony of Spencer House. The grinding roar of the Piccadilly cabs comes faint and muffled through the tepid air; the great white clouds roll and topple on towards Hyde Park; yet no Diana comes to kiss this Endymion till he wakes. Lifeguardsmen pass—scarlet giants, flamingo giraffes, whom no horse could carry—children gambol by, nursery-maids prattle and chatter, public-office men stride home to Brompton or Chelsea, burglars mutter about the next "crib" to be "cracked,"—the happy lad sleeps on in Elysium. He may be idling; the great cylinders may groan for him, the foreman reddens and swears horribly. What recks our boy? Nature has taken him to her welcoming bosom. He dreams of wealth and ease: he is in blue and white, leading his master's daughter to the door of St. George's, Hanover-square. All the office are there (particularly that beast Miggs, who makes him set-up all Badfist's Ms.); but he (boy) is too proud to turn his head towards them. Let the king have his crown, the lord chancellor his wig; pass over to the poet his useless laurels (when they're dry, how they'll burn and crackle!); give the soldier his medals:—this, this alone is true unalloyed happiness—while it lasts. Boxes on the ear, fines, threats, after-time, may come; but they will never take away the pleasure of that stolen afternoon nap, face downwards, in the park.
We English are proud of our Parks; and somebody once called them, anatomically, "the lungs of London." About the only good thing the Prince Regent ever did was to give us another park. No; yes—we had forgotten, but we apologise: there was another good thing; yes, his most gracious majesty invented a new neckcloth. Honour where honour is due; also, Magna est veritas et prœvalebit. It is to our climate, rather than to our glorious Constitution, Magna Charta, Mr. Disraeli, the trial by jury, or Mr. Lowe, that we owe our Parks. The Prado is fine, the Champ de Mars is spacious; but under such suns the grass frizzles and scorches till it becomes like the parsley round a côtelette avec sauce piquante. There are no sunny showers and violet-tinged rainbows to keep the turf flower-sprinkled, lush, and vigorous. Without grass, a park is what a wedding-breakfast would be without champagne—a mockery and a deception. In France and Spain one can only endure a park early in the morning and late in the evening. New York will have a grand park one of these days; but it is very young yet, and the trees are scarcely bigger than those old-fashioned crisp green firs that you meet with in a box of Dutch toys. We have an excruciating, capricious, petulant climate, it must be allowed; still it permits us to have parks, and, as Charles Stuart used to judiciously observe, ours is a climate that allows more walking days in the year than any other; so we have much to be thankful for, however we may suffer from rheumatism.
St. James's Park in Particular.
The park of eighty-seven acres (shaped like a boy's kite, observes Mr. Cunningham) was originally the snug secluded enclosure of a hospital of St. James, that Spanish saint famous for his white horse, who appeared to the Cid in battle whenever he struck off a Moorish head. Whether this saint became popular before or after King Henry's stately Spanish wife came over from Arragon, topographical history does not inform us. The hospital devoted to the prayers and vigils of fourteen leper women was ruthlessly seized by the rapacious tyrant, who contrived at the same time to detest Luther and hate the Pope; he made a manor of the domain, altered or rebuilt the house, shaped a quasi-palace out of it, annexed the present park and joined it to Whitehall, and ringed it in with a brick wall. We picture the bluff Mormon king, with his pig's eyes, long nose, and square jowl, standing and watching his improvements with the air and straddle, as Leigh Hunt cleverly remarks, of a butcher standing at his door and crying, "Buy, buy, buy!" The poor leper sisters, with their envy at the happiness of the careless outer world, their regret at that envy, their renewed envy, their renewed repentance, gave way to the restless splendour of a palace,—the happiness and the misery that dwell under gilt roofs.
The fore-court of Buckingham Palace was once part of the Park; it is said that Queen Anne allowed the Duke of Buckingham (Dryden's patron) to use it as the approach to his new house, rebuilt by a Dutch architect in 1703. But let us, before we go any farther, chart-out the district whose changes we are humbly attempting to describe. Consider the Park triangular and of the kite-like shape of England. At the broad head stands the Horse Guards, the Admiralty on the left, the new Treasury on the right; at the pointed tail is a very dull and mean palace; on the north, or the Piccadilly side, come the Green Park, Stafford House, St. James's Palace, Marlborough House, Carlton House-terrace, and Carlton-ride; on the south, Queen-square and the Wellington Barracks, the home of the gallant and over-worked Household troops. The north side is the Mall, the south the Birdcage-walk; Storey's-gate is on the south; Spring-gardens borders the north; the great gravelled space before the park-front of the Horse Guards is the Parade. This was formerly part of the Tilt-yard of the old Whitehall Palace, when the road to Westminster was crossed by a gateway. On the spot where the great mortar and the Egyptian cannon now stand, Shakespeare makes Falstaff describe Shallow as getting his head broken by John of Gaunt for crowding forward during a tournament. In the sunset of chivalry in Elizabeth's time, Sir Philip Sidney broke his lances here valiantly; Leicester, Hatton, and Essex rode at the rings here, and performed in tilting pageants, which Spenser and Shakespeare could not fail to have witnessed. Many a young Harry with his beaver up here won the smiles of the Juliets and Rosalinds in the court of the lion-hearted queen.
In the time of Charles I. there were what would now be called "Cremornes" at either end of this Park: at the west end the Mulberry garden, originally planted by the wish of that intolerable pedant and bad king, James I., to encourage the production of English silk; and at the east Spring-gardens, where the reckless gallants danced and revelled during the Protectorate, till Cromwell sternly closed them. After the Restoration both were superseded by Vauxhall.
One cold bitter January day in 1648-9, King Charles, that unwise and promise-breaking monarch, walked down the north side of St. James's Park on his way to a scaffold outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall (opposite the present Horse Guards). Bishop Juxon was by his side, and there were musketeers and partisan-men before and behind him. Whether he deserved death or not for his illegalities, one thing is certain, that his execution was a blunder of the Puritans; for it lost them all the timid people, and it made Charles a martyr. As we believe Fox once cleverly said, "Two men gave King Charles his romantic reputation—his portrait-painter and his headsman." It is said that on his way to where the man in the mask stood grimly waiting for him, Charles,—who certainly died with belief in himself and his cause, and decorously, quietly, and like a gentleman,—calmly pointed out to one of his attendants a tree near Spring-gardens which had been planted by his unfortunate brother, Prince Henry; that hopeful lad who pitied Raleigh in the Tower, and whose death is said to have not been over-lamented by his jealous and debased father.
On a "fair" November evening (1652), that dull but worthy and plodding lawyer, Mr. Bulstrode Whitelocke, against whose fat head Mr. Carlyle, in his valuable collection of Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, is never tired of railing, refreshing himself in this Park after his day's dusty toil, met the Lord General Cromwell, who saluted him with more than ordinary courtesy, and desired him to walk aside and hold some private discourse. This private discourse bore on rather an interesting subject, and was indeed almost as full of matter as private discourse well could be. The Cavaliers were plotting in the west, the Fifth-Monarchy men were roaring in Moorfields. The nation was like a jibbing horse, and needed a tighter rein. Cromwell had begun to consider whether he could not serve God and do his work as a king better than as a lord-general. He had persuaded himself, no doubt, that God had called him to endure the calumnies and outcries that would follow such a step of apparent ambition. Even dull Whitelocke was staggered when Cromwell, suddenly fixing his eyes on him, said, "What if a man should take upon him to be king?" But the honest lawyer had the courage to warn the Protector of what he thought a dangerous step, and replied, "I think the remedy would be worse than the disease."
Cromwell was in the habit of sounding men; so he took this hint and refused the crown—who knows with what reluctance? for a crown is hard to refuse, and is not offered to a country gentleman every day—and the next year was chosen Lord Protector. King or no king, shake all our sovereigns in a basket, and you'll not find among the lot a wiser and juster ruler than Oliver.
On that stormy night of September 3, 1658, when Cromwell yielded up his great soul to its Maker, whom it had served so well, the wind dismantled many of the great Henry VIII. trees in St. James's Park, tearing them up by the roots as easily as if they had been radishes, The Puritans listened with dread to that voice of heaven—the storm, and said that the angels were bearing away the great Lord Protector to his rest; but the imprisoned Cavaliers, over their ribald cups in the Gate-House, shouted that the devil had come for old red-nosed Noll at last, and, clashing their pint stoups together exultingly, roared boisterously the gallant and vigorous song still extant, "The king shall enjoy his own again;" while the puritan weavers in adjacent garrets hushed their psalms as the sons of Belial, flushed with wine, grew madder and more riotous, and godly men passing the prison-gate ground threats between their teeth, and talked of Naseby and the crushing charge of the Ironsides that broke Rupert's lines as if they had been cobwebs.
Then came the Restoration, to release the Bromes and Lovelaces, and let the weavers starve in their tavern-attics and Fetter-lane dens. The grave men in drab and gray and black gave way to the belaced and perfumed rakes who had grafted the vices of France upon the follies of England. The swarthy, ill-favoured king, with the cynicism and passions of a dissolute and needy refugee, wanted a park to play at mall in, to stroll about in with his wanton duchesses and reckless courtiers—his Portsmouth, his Cleveland, his Sedley, his Killigrew, and his Rochester.
A good and thoughtful man would have begun his reign in common gratitude by rewarding those who had bled and suffered so deeply for him: Charles began his by building a snow-house and an ice-house to cool his French wine. A wise man would have set to work heart and soul to pacify the country and calm the fears of the Independents: Charles, with his spaniels at his heels, began laying down a Mall and building an aviary for ducks. The nation's head servant had returned to beggar England, to receive alms from France, to degrade and debase us among the nations. No wonder that the Puritans, who saw God's hand in everything, looked on the Plague and the Fire as two angels of vengeance.
Charles sent for Le Notre, the great gardener of Louis Quatorze, who widened three ponds into one, and cut a long straight canal in the formal manner of the age—a hundred feet wide. According to Mr. Peter Cunningham, Dr. Morison, who had been engaged in laying out the gardens of the Duke of Orleans, now the Palais Royal, was also Charles's adviser. He added thirty acres to the Park, and made decoys for ducks in channels cut at the eastern end of the main canal. The triangular insulated meadow between these windings was called Duck Island; and of this Barataria St. Evremont, the French wit, philosophical essayist, and toady of Mazarin's niece, was appointed governor with a salary. In the time of Charles I. there had been a menagerie in the Park, which was then a mere wooded meadow studded with trees, and intersected with simple narrow country footpaths. Hollar gives a view of it in 1644, as a background to his figure of Summer. Poor man, not long after it was beautified he died in the most abject poverty.
Charles, reckless with his new-come money, built a small ringfence for deer, laid out a "Physique," or botanic garden, with orange-trees and scarce plants, and filled the old menagerie with tigers, giraffes, elks, and antelopes. He employed three hundred men to work at the canal, rail off the Mall, strew it with powdered cockle-shells, fill up the huge ditches, fell the bushes, level the rising ground, plant lime-trees in avenues, and spread broad gravel walks, in the manner of France.
Energetic in the pursuit of pleasure alone, Charles pressed forward these costly improvements with all the energy Cromwell had expended to daunt Spain, or to save the Vaudois. As late as 1677, the public accounts show large sums spent by Charles on his decoys in the Park, on wiring-in enclosures, spreading reeds and constructing withy-pots for nests; on oatmeal, tares, and hempseed for the birds; and on constructing bridges on Duck Island. When Berenger, a friend of Dr. Johnson, was writing his History of Horsemanship, he found in the ledgers at the King's Mews an annual charge for hempseed; yet none was then ever used there. It was discovered that the item had been regularly made ever since the reign of Charles II., who had required it to feed his ducks. Such are public accounts, and such the care, vigilance, and absence of routine with which they are audited! How many hempseeds there must be in our government books if a Joseph Hume could only overhaul them! Colley Cibber, that very wise old actor, who had seen Charles feeding his ducks and playing with his dogs in St. James's Park, remarks shrewdly in that admirable book, his Apology, that this "indolent amusement" made "the common people adore him, and consequently overlook in him what in a prince of a different temper they might have been out of humour at."
What a lesson for bad kings to be agreeable and free from pride! Here is a king who neglects his friends, rewards his enemies, takes bribes from the French to betray his country, turns Catholic—secretly, allows the Dutch to insult England and destroy half our fleet before our eyes, corrupts the morals of the whole nation;—and yet the fool-rabble adore him, because, forsooth, he walks in public with his dogs and harem, and flings handfuls of hempseed to ducks, gold-fish, and pet cormorants! Well, manners, fortune, and good-nature can save even a rascal from many misfortunes.
Pall-mall, the French game that was such a favourite with Charles, had been common in England even in his grandfather's reign—certainly in his father's. It was a mixture of the principles of golf and hockey. It was played with a sort of croquet-mallet with an elastic handle, and the object was to drive the ball through a hoop hung from the end of a pole. The man who drove it home with the least number of strokes won. Sometimes bets were made as to the number of strokes in which this would be accomplished. Before the Mall in the Park, the game had been played in the street that still bears its name. Waller, that courtly flatterer, who had blown Cromwell's praise bravely upon a trumpet, warbled eulogies to Charles upon the most dulcet of flutes.
Artful flatterer, he sketches in glowing verse "our prince's" matchless force, praises his graceful mien, his strong limbs and lovely shape (not a word about his face, however, which was hard, sinister, swarthy, and deeply-trenched); he paints him for us at the Mall. Princes do everything well—that has been often observed.
"No sooner has he touch'd the flying ball,
But 'tis already more than half the Mall;
And such a fury from his arm hath got,
As from a smoking culverin 'twere shot:
May that ill fate my enemies befal,
To stand before his anger as the ball!"
There is a certain fatality attends insincere verses, and no enemy of Waller's could have wished him to produce a lamer line than the last we have quoted. The court poet, anxious to redeem his puritanism, then goes on to describe the future amusements of the Park: the lovers in the shade, the gallants dancing by the river-side, the bathers in summer, the sliders in winter; the music from the boats answered by the echoes; the flocks of
"new sprung fowl, that shroud
The wanton sailers with a feathery cloud;"
the silver fish gliding by the barges; the ladies angling in the crystal lake, or feasting on the fish they had taken—
"At once victorious with their lines and eyes,
They make the fishes and the men their prize."
A pretty rendering of dum capimus, capimur; the true motto for an angling picnic.
Waller concludes his poem on the Park by briefly describing the fruit-trees bordering the walks and crowning the mounds, and sums up with a pretty allusion to his majesty's new ice-house:
"Yonder the harvest of cold months laid up
Gives a fresh coolness to the royal cup;
There ice, like crystal firm and never lost,
Tempers hot July with December's frost."
Ah, Mr. Waller, Mr. Waller, were your talents given you for such mean purposes as this?
In the parade facing where the Horse Guards now stands, Le Sœur, the sculptor to whom we are indebted for the Charles I. at Charing-cross, erected several bronze statues; the chief of these being a cast of the fighting Gladiator in the Borghese Palace. This vigorous bronze was removed by Queen. Anne from its "mount of stone" to Hampton Court, and from there transplanted by George IV. to the private grounds at Windsor Castle, where it now is. It was on the artificial water in this Park that in 1662 the gallants who had learnt the art in Holland first astonished Messrs. Evelyn and Pepys, and many hundred other gentlemen and citizens, by "sliding on their skeates, which is a very pretty art" (Pepys). The Duke of York rather startled Pepys by venturing on the broken ice. In 1683 the duke wrote to the Prince of Orange, then quiet and watchful in Holland: "Last night it froze so very hard, that this morning the boys began to slide upon the canal in the Park."
Poor James! the boys were on firmer and safer ice than he was.
One cannot help wondering if the London boys then were grave, old-fashioned, and decorous, or just the same sort of restless, turbulent, heartless, noisy rascals that now "knock at the cobbler's door" and go down the hundred-yard slides every winter in the same park.
At this time the Park seems to have been used for all sorts of sporting purposes. In 1662 two young noblemen (one Lord Ormond's son) for a wager ran down a "stout buck" in the presence of the king and court. In 1667 the northern and western wrestlers competed before "a world of lords and other spectators." Mr. Secretary Morice and Lord Gerard were the judges. Heaps of money were bet on the struggle. The western men won.
The papers in Charles II.'s reign contain frequent advertisements for lost spaniels and runaway Blackamoor boys. On Nov. 15, 1671, Towser, a liver-coloured spaniel with white spots, belonging to the Duke of York, was lost in St. James's Park, and five pounds reward offered; and a few days after, a dog with blue spots (the king's) is described as lost. Mr. Cunningham, in his elaborate notes on this Park, prints copies of the committals to Bedlam of two mad persons for threatening King Charles and his queen in this precinct—in one case with a stone, in the other with an orange.
About the end of King William's reign the principal avenues in the Park were the Green walk below the Mall and the park-wall, and the Close walk at the end of Rosamond's pond, at the south-west corner. The Green walk went by the name of Duke Humphrey's Walk, the Close walk by the name of the Jacobite Walk. Here, under the scented umbrage of the limes, the Pretender's adherents met and discussed the latest news from St. Germains, the last importation of louis-d'ors, or the newest plan suggested for stopping the king's coach on its way to Hampton. In the Vernon Correspondence (1696) there is this passage: "It was yesterday the news in the Jacobite Walk in the Park that his lordship not only quitted, but was turned out."
There must have been great adjusting of cravats here in those days of square-toed shoes and red heels, of ribboned sword-hilts and laced cocked-hats. Lady Fanciful, in Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife, mentions the Green walk as a place where scandal was talked; and that coarse but humorous writer, Tom Brown, also sketches the Green walk below the Mall. He points out the bare-headed beau always bowing to ladies, the French fop with his pleated coat and silk breeches, and the cluster of country senators discussing state-affairs and the prices of corn and cattle, disturbed by the noisy milk-folks crying, "A can of milk, ladies; a can of red cow's milk, sir;" and on the way to the Horse Guards, the bird-cage with the wild-fowl, the ducks begging charity, and the blackguard street-boys robbing themselves to relieve the birds. Unchangeable and conservative country! Tom Brown wrote in 1700; it is now, we believe, 1867; six times at Windsor has the cry been heard, Le roi est mort, vive le roi! and yet still at this hour in the Park there are the red cows, the ducks, the street-boys feeding them, the Horse Guards, and the beaux.
The Park was formerly considered a privileged royal precinct, and it was worth your right hand to brawl or draw your sword against a man under those lime-trees. In 1699 Conway Seymour called Captain Kirk, of my Lord Oxford's regiment, a beau; but they went out of the Park to fight. One had, too, to take care what one said so near the sensitive royal tympanum; for in 1717 a man named Heat was well warmed, by being whipped from Charing-cross to the Piccadilly end of the Haymarket, fined ten groats, and shut up for a month, for shouting in the sacred Park, "God save King James III., and send him a long and prosperous reign!"
In the following year a soldier was whipped in the Park for having drunk the health of the Duke of Ormond and Dr. Sacheverell, and saying "he hoped soon to wear his right master's cloth." The mad Duke of Wharton was also seized by the guard in St. James's Park for recklessly singing the Jacobite air, "The king shall enjoy his own again."
In Queen Anne's reign two men specially interesting to us used often to perambulate the walks where Charles II. had paced to "balance his nerves." The lean, laughing, courtly man is Prior; the burly stern man in the black clerical gown is Swift. The great satirist, in his Journal to Stella, says, "Mr. Prior walks to make himself fat, and I to bring myself down. He has generally a cough, which he only calls a cold. We often walk round the Park together."
In Birdcage Walk let us, then, think of Gulliver, and of the sparkling love-verses to Chloe; it is pleasant to have any special spot associated unmistakably with two such names. It was at this time, when Marlborough was busy with his bayonets and spontoons in Flanders, giving a good account of the French, that the Mall, the northern walk from Spring-gardens to Constitution-hill, was the Rotten-row of the day, the chosen resort of fashion.
Swift, boasting to Stella of his grand friends, says, "His (St. John's) father is a man of pleasure, that walks the Mall and frequents the St. James's Coffee-house and the chocolate-houses; and the young son is principal Secretary of State." Again he says: "In the Mall, in the evening, it is prodigious to see the number of ladies walking." The ladies wore white aprons then; and red-heeled shoes were indispensable. Lady Mary Wortley Montague's white apron figured among the rest. Years afterwards, writing to the Countess of Bute, she derides, half regretfully, the vanity and vexation of those days of triumph when she was beautiful, and not merely clever. Talking of a simple walk in the sun, she says her old share of admiration in the crowded Mall "was generally soured before I slept by the information of my female friends, who seldom failed to tell me it was observed I had showed an inch above my shoe-heels, or some other criticism of equal weight, which was construed affectation, and utterly destroyed all the satisfaction my vanity had given me."
In Queen Anne's time, and later, Rosamond's pond, at the south-west corner of the Park (near the Barracks), was a favourite place of assignation for lovers and duellists. Southerne, Farquhar, and Congreve all mention it. Jilted lovers often drowned themselves in this fashionable sheet of water. Steele mentions it playfully in the Tatler, No. 170, where Philander advertises that if Clorinda, who has shot him through with her eyes, will not meet him at eight at Rosamond's pond, he will incontinently drown himself in that "lake of love," and the coroner of Westminster will be compelled to bring in wilful murder. Under the elms round this pond the old cavalier soldiers used to sit and con over the civil wars, and discuss all the ills that had befallen them since Charles landed at Dover, and landed without a memory for past favours.
It was at the side of Rosamond's pond that Addison saw a quiet country gentleman pulling a handful of oats from his pocket, and with a great deal of benevolent satisfaction feeding the ducks about him. The name of that good-natured country gentleman was Sir Roger de Coverley. There are drawings of the Lethean pond sacred to Venus and Pluto extant, from the hands of J.T. Smith and Chatelain.
Even that arrogant quarrelsome controversialist Bishop Warburton has his joke on "the humours" of the Park; and in writing to Bishop Hurd he says, "I would recommend to our good friend Mason (the poet Gray's friend) a voyage now and then with me round the Park. What can afford nobler hints for pastoral than the cows and the milkwomen at your entrance from Spring-gardens?" In the Mall he was to collect for comedy, farce, and satire; at Rosamond's pond he was to think of disastrous love and elegiac poetry; the Birdcage Walk would inspire the madrigal and sonnet; Duck island give a chance for the georgic or didactic poetry; and its governor Stephen Duck (a poor Wiltshire thresher patronised by Queen Caroline) would instruct Mason in wild-fowl, and help him to sing their praises.
George I., fresh from his Yvetôt and the small economy of German princelings, was astonished at the fees and disbursements prevalent among the million compromises of our more complicated civilisation. He used to tell his courtiers this story in broken English: "Mein Gott, dis is a strange country! The first morning after my arrival at St. James's I looked out of the window (lucky fellow!), and saw a park with walls and canal, which they told me vos mine. The next day Lord Chetwynd, the ranger of my park, sent me a brace of carp out of my canal, and I was told I must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynd's servant for bringing my own carp out of my own canal in my own park." Poor man! he could not expand to the abuses and absurdities of his new situation. He liked oysters stale, because he had never before had them fresh; and the follies and abuses he wanted were the abuses and follies of Hanover.
Queen Caroline once spoke arrogantly to bluff Sir Robert Walpole of her intention of shutting up St. James's Park, and converting it into a noble garden to the palace. She asked Horace's father (quite indifferent to her little choleric king) what it might probably cost. Sir Robert replied tartly, "Your majesty, three crowns."
When I think of the Mall, I seem to see generations of men pass before me—Foppingtons, Mirabels, Sir Peter Teazles, Beverleys, Fribbles, Captain Flashes, and Bubb Doddingtons. Hogarth sketched the butterflies of the Mall. On the benches here Isaac Bickerstaff met his political upholsterer; and in one of the leafy sun-dappled walks Goldsmith's Chinese philosopher came across poor pretentious Beau Tibbs, keeping up appearances on very insufficient means,—the poorest of dandies, the most impudent of pretenders.
After Beau Tibbs and Goldsmith rose from their benches facing the water in St. James's Park, nothing else worthy of notice happened there till 1780, the year of the fanatical Lord George Gordon riots. The oaks grown by King Charles from acorns of the Boscobel oak, in which he had taken shelter from the rough puritan horsemen, grew on, careless of kings or queens, rabble or dandies, philosophers, street-boys, or maid-servants; and spread out their brawny limbs and their jagged leaves, and shed their fairy cups and their glossy fruit summer after summer, come sun or storm. Dr. Johnson strode where Addison had paced; Hogarth watched where Swift had paraded. Several generations of grenadiers here trooped their flags, whistled on their fifes, and vibrated their drums. The soldiers of Marlborough gave way to the soldiers of Granby and of Wolf.
The elder Colman, the dramatist, was a kinsman and protégé of the Earl of Bath. His mother resided in a small house close to Rosamond's pond, in which there were then islands forming part of a decoy; and on one of these islands a summer-house, where the old Princess Amelia used to drink tea in the simple-hearted way of those primitive times. The elder Colman, always a man of some pretension, and a writer of sententious and ambitious plays, was English resident at Florence. The younger Colman, that pleasant and witty bon-vivant, tells us that the day he arrived in London from Oxford the Gordon riots were just quelled. An egregious young dandy, he powdered and frizzled his hair, and, in the fullest dress, prepared to start for the Haymarket Theatre, which his father had in 1777 taken from Foote. The sire, with many a silent glance-at his son's costume, determined to mortify his coxcombry, and drily proposed a stroll from their house in Soho-square to the Park, to cool themselves before they entered the theatre. Unwilling and vexed, the impatient dandy took his father's arm. Although indifferent just then to anything but the faces of pretty actresses and the pasteboard scenery of a theatre, the young Oxonian's quick eye could not but perceive the picturesqueness of St. James's Park. The encampment formed during the riots was breaking up, but many white tents still remained under the trees and near the canal. The formal lines were broken by the removal of here and there a tent, and "the effect was uncommonly gay and pleasing."
"During the walk," says George Colman the younger, "we naturally talked of the late dreadful disturbances; and on my inquiring how it affected the theatre, my father told me that on the seventh of June—on which day and night desolation had attained its climax, and London is said to have been seen from one spot blazing in thirty-six different parts—the receipts of his playhouse exceeded twenty pounds."
During the reign of terror the Paris theatres filled. So, while seven prisons were burning, and vomiting out their thieves and murderers on the outraged metropolis, the Londoners went to see Palmer, Edwin Bannister, Digges, and Miss Farren; and Colman's fiddlers went on, like so many Neroes, playing tunes over the flaming town.
Everyone who has passed through St. James's Park remembers the great black howitzer mounted on a dragon, that stares at you with its one black eye as you cross the Parade, just opposite the Horse Guards. There is a legend of great interest about that mortar which is thus calmly spending its old age. Heaven knows it is a gun that has seen the world; its youth was noisy and riotous enough, in all conscience. It was cast for the French in Seville, and by a Spaniard. It carried a hollow globe of iron, of the enormous weight of 108 pounds, a distance of 6220 yards. It was taken by us when the French raised the siege of Cadiz in 1810, the year after Wellington pushed the last French thief out of Portugal, and smote Napoleon's robbers hip and thigh at the battle of Talavera. Soult had besieged Cadiz; and English troops helped the suspicious Junta, with the Duke of Albuquerque, to defend the beautiful city.
The heavy artillery of the French was at Fort Matagorda, two miles from the town, and thence they fired on all Spanish or English vessels entering Puntal roads. This thunderer now in the Park was posted on Santa Maria, opposite Cadiz, and it was the only French piece of ordnance that could toss shot or shell that immense distance across the blue waters of the bay into the city. An enormous shell from this gun was once seen to fall in the very centre of the great promenade of Cadiz, the Plaza di San Antonio, when it was crowded with rank and fashion; mantillas and fans were fluttered, and there was much pretty screaming and clinging to the dauntless sex, but no one was injured.
The Egyptian gun has also its history. It is connected with one of the most desperate and extraordinary conspiracies organised in this country since the Rye-House Plot, nor did even the Cato-street Conspiracy excel it in the singularity of its details. In 1802, the year after the signing of the Peace of Amiens, a Colonel Despard, who had served in the Spanish Main with Lord Nelson, and had earned a high character for courage and loyalty as his Majesty's Superintendant at Honduras, organised a plot. He had been chief engineer, and distinguished himself in the St. Juan expedition; but in spite of all arduous and dangerous services had been passed over, forgotten, and contumeliously neglected by the government. This had rankled in the heart of the brave and fierce Irishman, and he had devoted his time since to denouncing the government and attending meetings of dangerous political societies, till he had found his way into Coldbath-Fields Prison, the Habeas Corpus Act being then suspended, and justice for the time in abeyance. Like Thistlewood, Despard returned to the daylight ten times more bitter and violent than ever. He became a professional conspirator. By the magnetic attraction of evil he drew together forty or fifty disaffected soldiers and turbulent labourers, chiefly Irish. Their places of meeting were the Flying Horse, Newington, and the Oakley Arms, Lambeth. These men soon seduced other soldiers into the treasonable association, and to all new proselytes formal oaths were administered. Except the unfortunate and misguided colonel, all the conspirators were of the lowest class. Their plan was, on the day when the king opened the Parliament to attack him and put him to death. The maddest and most inconceivable part of the scheme was that one of the gang named Wood, a soldier, was to get himself posted that day as sentinel at the great gun in the Park. He was to secretly load it, arrange the exact level, fire at the king's coach as it passed through the Park, and blow it to atoms. This insane scheme Colonel Despard strongly approved. He said to his men, "The king must be put to death: I have weighed the matter well, and my heart is callous." After the gun was fired, the mail-coaches were to be stopped, as a signal to the country that the revolt had taken place. The Tower was then to be surprised, and the arms there secured and distributed.
The colonel and six of his band were hung for this treason. The colonel appeared on the drop of the Surrey Gaol very well dressed—in a blue double-breasted coat and gilt buttons; two waistcoats, one creamcolour, one scarlet; gray breeches, long boots, and a brown surtout. The dead bodies were all beheaded. The colonel was buried at the north door of St. Paul's Cathedral.
In our next chapter, before moving westward, we hope to give a sketch of the great rejoicings in St. James's Park when the Allies were in London; by which our readers will be enabled to see the way in which kings, emperors, and heroes visiting England were then welcomed, and to compare it, to their own pride or mortification, with the manner in which we have lately fêted les braves Belges, the Viceroy of Egypt, and the Sultan of Turkey.