by Walter Thornbury.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.2 #7 (May 1867).
Bloomsbury-square and Bedford-square
Turning our back resolutely on the eastern squares, we leave behind us regretfully Salisbury-square, although Richardson, in grave full-dress, wrote his Pamela there, within ear-shot of all the jangle of his printing-office; Charterhouse-square, although Addison and Steele ran about there when schoolboys, and, long years after, Thackeray and Leech played at marbles in its dingy precincts; and Lincoln's-innfields, although Smollett's spluttering Duke of Newcastle held state there, and the Sachaverel rioters made bonfires of dissenting pulpits in its enclosure. We should have delighted to have pointed out the lofty fourth floor where Tennyson, in his "golden prime," dreamed of the Caliph Haroun and saw the vision of Fair Women; but our goal is westward, and we may not stop for a moment—not even in Red Lionsquare—to mention the place where Cromwell's body is supposed to have been buried, to prevent the Royalists insulting it, as they afterwards did the supposed Cromwell that they dragged from the Abbey and hung—to their own disgrace—upon the gibbet at Tyburn.
Let our first halt be in Bloomsbury, where great lawyers and physicians once lived.
The story of Bloomsbury-square is soon told, unless its historian wishes not to tell it soon. It was first mapped out by an excellent man, the Earl of Southampton, son of Shakespeare's first patron, and the father of that pure and noble Lady Rachel Russell, who acted as amanuensis in her husband's trial. Evelyn, six years after the Restoration, describes dining with the Lord-Treasurer in "Blomesbury, where he was building a noble square or piazza, a little towne." He says, "his own house stands too low, some noble rooms, a pretty cedar chapell, a naked garden, to the north, but good air." Sir John, marry, good air! Southampton House occupied all the north side of the square, and of course looked out on fields. The square was originally called Southampton-square, but took the name of Bloomsbury from the old district before 1674. The Gazette of that year contained an offer of twenty shillings for the recovery of Lady Baltinglasse's "great old Indian spaniel or mongrel—crop ears, curled all over." The south side was originally named Vernon-street, the east Seymour-row, and the west Arlington-row. Baxter, the excellent divine, was residing in the square in 1681, where his wife died in what he called his "most pleasant and convenient house." This wise and moderate man, who had been a chaplain in the parliamentary army, but had refused to acknowledge Cromwell as Protector, was afterwards offered a bishopric by the king, and persecuted by Judge Jeffreys.
In Queen Anne's time the square was fashionable enough, and silk coats and diamond stars, and blue-ribbons and garters, were seen here as often as anywhere. Pope mentions it favourably:
"In Palace-yard at nine you'll find me there—
Or ten for certain, sir, in Bloomsbury-square."
The Earl of Chesterfield, one of De Grammont's not very reputable gallants, died here in 1713. In 1736 Ralph, an authority on topographical matters, praises the Duke of Bedford's agreeable gardens and his view of the country, which rendered a second retreat from town almost unnecessary. In 1763 another guide describes the square as large, openly situated, and mentions the ducal palace (built from a design by Inigo Jones) as elegant and spacious.
In George the Second's time, when the Duke of Bedford was first Secretary of State, then Keeper of the Privy Seal, and lastly Regent (Lord Justice) during the king's visits to Hanover, there must have been regal state kept here. Junius poured his hottest vials of Greek fire on this overgrown favourite's head. He accuses him of betraying Lord Bute; of selling his country to France; of being surrounded, like Hogarth's prodigal, with jockeys, gamesters, blasphemers, gladiators, and buffoons—that is to say, racing men, men-about-town, prize-fighters, and wits. He declares that Mr. Humphrey, a country attorney, horsewhipped him on Lichfield race-course, and that he gave a rout at Bedford House a fortnight after his son's death. It is also said that the duke, although he had 60,000l. a year, sold all his son's clothes, down even to his slippers, and put the money in his own pocket, to defraud the poor anxious valet.
Junius closes his attack with words that seem bitten into copper by the most acrid aqua fortis: "Your friends," he screams to the duke, "will ask, Whither shall this unhappy old man retire? Can he remain in the metropolis, where his life has been so often threatened, and his palace so often attacked? If he retire to Walmer, scorn and mockery await him. He must create a solitude around his estate if he would avoid the face of reproach and derision. At Plymouth his destruction would be more than probable; at Exeter inevitable." Is not this worthy of Tacitus? This tremendous duke died in 1771. Yes; death was unmannerly enough to come even to the Minister-plenipotentiary, the Recorder of Bedford, the Colonel of the Devonshire militia, the President of the Foundling, and the Elder Brother of the Trinity House rolled into one; in the quiet grave he ceased to be envied or detested, and another Duke of Bedford arose to be inveighed against by Burke.
Palaces, like tin-kettles, have their day. In 1800 Bedford House went to the hammer, and soon after the hammer came to it; for, after the sale, it was immediately pulled down. A lucky casual dropper-in, says that sound authority, Mr. Peter Cunningham, bought the furniture and pictures (including Thornhill's copies of Raphael's cartoons, now in the Royal Academy) clear off for a paltry 6000l. The old stem of an acacia which stood in the front court, and which Horace Walpole remembered when young, light, and graceful, and praised in his Essay on Landscape-gardening, was sold at the same time.
That eminent naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, the friend of Ray and Boyle, lived in Bloomsbury-square till 1742, when he went to reside on his own manor of Chelsea. He was rather a grand person to live near; for he was not only President of the College of Physicians and court-physician to that choleric hero of Dettingen, George II., but also the successor of Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society. Of Irish origin, Sloane had studied in Paris and Montpellier, and visited Jamaica as physician to the Duke of Albemarle. Though sneered at by Pope as a potterer over butterflies, Sloane seems to have been an indefatigable student, and a kind-hearted though parsimonious man. He was a friend of that eminent man, Dr. Sydenham, and under his auspices lectured in public on the "Star of the Earth," a supposed specific for hydrophobia now forgotten. He edited for years the Philosophical Transactions (then crude and quaint enough), and he was the first to start a dispensary for the poor; and for this alone we ought to venerate his memory, and to give him a kindly thought when we pass through the old square that knows him no longer. Sir Hans, stingy to himself, was princely to the public; for he gave the Company of Apothecaries the freehold of the Chelsea Botanical Gardens, on condition that the Company should present yearly to the Royal Society fifty new plants, till the number should amount to 2000. This purchase-number was completed in the year 1761.
Sir Hans died, a very old man, in 1752; his body lay in state, and his funeral was a public one, attended by people of all ranks and conditions. This wise and consistent man, unwilling that his cabinet and collections should be scattered to the winds on his death, bequeathed them to the public on condition that 20,000l. should be made good by parliament to his family. This sum, though considered large then, was hardly more than the intrinsic value of the gold and silver medals, the ores and precious stones, the first cost of which had been at least 50,000l. The library alone consisted of 50,000 volumes, 347 of which were illustrated with coloured engravings. There were also 3560 manuscripts. It was half a gift, and parliament gratefully accepted the legacy and fulfilled the conditions. The money was partly raised by a lottery, and Montague House instantly bought to receive the collection. To this purchase we owe that mine of treasures, the British Museum, which, if it increases much more, will in time want a town to itself. In 1845 the Printed-Book Library contained about 300,000 volumes. It was singular that the fine coins and rare books and curiosities from all parts of the world should come back at last and nestle down so near their old dépôt in Bloomsbury-square.
That great overbearing court-physician, Dr. Radcliffe, also lived in Bloomsbury-square, removing there from Bow-street, where Sir Godfrey Kneller had been his neighbour, for fresher air and more quiet. The boisterous, parsimonious son of a Yorkshire yeoman lived to deride the Princess Ann and her bypochondriacal "vapours," and to roughly tell King William, who showed him his dropsical legs, "I would not have your Majesty's two legs for your three kingdoms."
The old Jacobite bachelor, however, though Queen Anne detested him for his rude candour, got great masses of money in his time, and fees such as Hippocrates or Galen never hoped to have. William III. sent him five hundred guineas from the privy-purse for curing his two favourites Bentinck and Zulestein. For watching our Dutch king's dry cough, Dr. Radcliffe received about 600l. a year. Queen Mary sent him a noble douceur of one thousand guineas for curing her son, the infant Duke of Gloucester. For attending the Earl of Albemarle at Namur the Abernethy of his time secured sixteen hundred guineas, a diamond ring, and the offer of a baronetcy. The Whigs could neither live with him nor without him. Steele and Mandeville laughed at the miserly doctor in the Tatler; but the doctor went on sipping his wine and scraping together his fees, little disturbed by the raillery of the wits or philosophers. The Bull's-Head tavern, in Clare-market (afterwards a haunt of Hogarth's), was a favourite resort of the great doctor. There is perhaps no disease of the mind so contradictory as avarice. This same hard man, who never paid a bill if he could delay the payment, who shunned his poor relations as if they were lepers, occasionally broke out into the most generous and considerate actions. He sent a poor, drunken, broken-down barrister of the Temple, who had been his boon companion at the Bull's-Head revels, five hundred guineas; he left one poor sister, whom he had starved all his life, 1000l, and another 500l, a year. He gave, under an assumed name, 50l. a year for ever to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel ;he sent, in the same humble and truly Christian way, 500l. to the poor forlorn non-juring clergy, and 500l. to the distressed Scotch Episcopal ministers. He maintained the foolish, wrong-headed Obadiah Walker, who had tried to turn half University College to Romanism. He generously helped forward Dr. Mead when a struggling competitor. He sent fifty guineas privately to his old rival Dr. Drake, when that partisan writer was broken and impoverished. Last of all, he heaped his hard-earned thousands on Oxford; gave a splendid east window to University College; left his fine library for the use of the students for ever; and from his imperial gift arose the Radcliffe Infirmary, the Radcliffe Observatory, and the Radcliffe Travelling Fellowships. Such are the contradictions of human nature.
One day, as the doctor alighted from his gilt coach at his door in Bloomsbury-square, a pavior, who had been employed to repair the roadway opposite the house and could not get paid, waylaid him with bow and scrape, and touch of his old cocked-hat. The parsimonious humourist eyed him with a droll malice.
"Why, you born rascal!" he cried, looking contemptuously at the road, "do you pretend to want to be paid for such a piece of work as that? Why, you've gone and spoiled my pavement, and then covered it up with earth to hide the bad work!"
"Doctor," replied the pavior, giving as good as he got, "mine is not the only bad work they put earth over."
The doctor winced, laughed, and paid the man.
The doctor was dying, testily and with a struggle, in 1714, at his country house in the pleasant village of Carshalton, in Surrey, when an order of Council came requesting him to attend Queen Anne, who was dying. The man whom Swift in his bitter way called "a puppy" was too ill to go, satisfied with what he heard of the mode of treatment from Arbuthnot and Mead. The mob was furious with the old surly Jacobite. When the Queen died, the doctor was afraid to go out of his door, and an anonymous letter warned him that thirteen gentlemen had resolved on his assassination, "the ghost of her Majesty crying aloud for blood." Dr. Radcliffe died three months after the Queen, a victim to gout and mental vexation.
The elder Disraeli, that admirable old scholar who left us so many pleasant books on authors' loves and quarrels, lived in Bloomsbury-square, on the west side (the first house from Hart-street, so it was described in 1828). Here that learned old Jewish gentleman, surrounded by his books, brought to a completion his Curiosities of Literature, and made his chirpy sensible notes on Pope's spite and Swift's vitriol, discussed Tasso's madness and Chatterton's forgeries, and was no doubt often visited by his clever son, then with a conveyancer in Lincoln's-inn, attired, as Lady Morgan once described him to us, in eccentric and rather foppish black velvet, and disporting an ivory-topped cane.
The Disraeli house had been the residence of its original builder, Mr. Isaac Ware, the architect, whose rise and progress is interesting. A gentleman of taste and fortune in Hogarth's time, riding one day past Whitehall, observed a sickly little chimney-sweeper intent on drawing the street-front of Whitehall on one of its own basement-stones, constantly running into the street, defiant of the coaches, to see the next point of the elevation. The gentleman called the young artist to his carriage. The boy, crouching in fear, burst into tears, and begged the gentleman would not tell his master, for he would wipe all the mess off directly. The gentleman encouraged the boy, threw him a shilling, and ascertained his master's name. He instantly went to Charles's-court in the Strand, where the master-sweeper lived, and asked about the lad. The master said he was a very good boy, but so weakly that he was of little use. He laughed about the boy's "chalking," and showed his own walls, which were covered with sketches of the portico of St. Martin's Church. The generous gentleman was struck by this. He purchased the rest of the boy's apprenticeship, gave him an excellent education, sent him to Italy to see Palladio's and Sansovino's masterpieces, and, upon his return, employed him and introduced him to his friends as an architect. His bust by vivacious Roubilliac is one of that clever Frenchman's best productions in portraiture. Mr. Ware (that was the boy's name) compiled a folio Palladio, became a man of property, and a friend of Hogarth's and all the celebrities and "elect" of his day, and built himself a country mansion at Westbourne (Bayswater), where Mr. Cockerell, the architect, afterwards resided. He was a frequenter of old Slaughter's coffee-house in St. Martin's-lane, once the rendezvous of Dryden and Pope.
The habitués of Slaughter's at that time were Gravelot, a drawing-master in the Strand, whose illustrations to Shakespeare were engraved by Grignon; Gwynn, Dr. Johnson's friend, the architect who competed with Milne for the building of Blackfriars-bridge; Roubilliac, the sculptor; Hudson, that miserable portrait-painter who was Reynolds' first master; McArdell and Sullivan, Hogarth's engravers; Gardelle, the French miniature-painter, afterwards hung in the Haymarket for murdering and burning his landlady, Mrs. King; old Moser, the keeper of the St. Martin's-lane drawing-academy; that neglected genius, poor Richard Wilson, the famous landscape-painter; Parry, the blind Welsh harper, a great draught-player; Nathaniel Smith, father of Nollekens Smith, the malicious but delightful writer of The Book for a Rainy Day; and Rawle, the friend of Captain Grose the antiquary, Burns's ally. Ware became a learned, powdered, punctilious old gentleman; but it is said that his skin retained the stain of soot till his dying day.
The great Lord Mansfield resided in the north end of the east side of Bloomsbury-square. This fourth son of Lord Stormont, born in 1705, had in 1737, when still unrecognised by government, the honour of having an imitation of the sixth epistle of Horace dedicated to him by Pope, who admired his graceful manner and aristocratic accomplishments. The little poet of Twickenham had given Murray instruction in the art of elocution, and had recognised the keen and comprehensive intellect and the clear cool judgment that afterwards raised him to the highest honours of the law, only to become a target for the poisoned arrows of Junius and the hatred and rage of the anti-Catholic mob. Cibber, often a match for his little scorpion of an antagonist, cleverly parodied the bathos of Pope's two lame lines:
"Graced as thou art with all the power of words,
So known, so honour'd at the House of Lords."
Cibber substituted for them:
"Persuasion tips his tongue where'er he talks,
And he has chambers in the King's Bench walks."
Shortly after this unfortunate eulogy the handsome young lawyer was married to Lady Betty Finch, daughter of Daniel Earl of Nottingham; and in 1742 was made Solicitor-general, and began rapidly to mount the ladder of preferment.
So just and urbane was this great lawyer, whom Lord Chatham eulogised as superior to Somers and Holt, and whom even Bishop Warburton commended, that he was praised for his eloquence and learning by Lord Lovat, though that eloquence brought the old rebel's head to the block. Although condemned by the old lawyers of his time as an innovator and despiser of precedent, Lord Mansfield was hated by the people as an opponent of Wilkes and a Catholic-relief and Divine-right advocate.
In 1780, when this wise and good man, whom Swift had mentioned with praise and whom even disappointed suitors had hardly been found to blame, had grown old, the attempt to relieve the Roman Catholics from a ponderous weight of tyrannical penal laws exposed him to the full storm of popular hatred. On June 2d that crack-brained, mischievous fanatic, Lord George Gordon, led his sixty thousand enthusiasts and scoundrels, conspicuous by their blue cockades, from St. George'sfields—where Bedlam now is, and ought to have been then—to Westminster. That day Lord Mansfield's coach was pelted in Parliament-street, the old lawyer's robes torn and his wig disordered. On the same day the mob, bearing blue flags and roaring "No Popery," burnt and plundered the chapels of the Sardinian and Bavarian ambassadors; and but for General Conway's threat to pass his sword through Lord George on the first rioter bursting in, there might have been a massacre of the members of both Houses of Parliament. On the 3d and 4th there were riots in Moorfields, but the military were not called upon to act. On the 5th the storm rose higher. Sir George Saville's house in Leicester-fields was sacked, and all the furniture burnt before the door. The houses of two tradesmen who had been active witnesses against the rioters were also gutted, and Catholic chapels in Wapping and Smithfield; and the trappings and wreck brought in procession to Lord George Gordon's house in Welbeck-street, and then burnt in the adjacent fields. On the 6th the mob again surrounded Westminster, and wounded Lord Sandwich and destroyed his carriage. While Burke was recommending defensive associations, and Fox was urging the expulsion of Lord George Gordon, whose blue cockade had been all but pulled from his hat by Colonel Herbert, the mob was attacking the minister's house in Downing-street; but was repelled by the military, as it was at the Temple-gate by its own fears and the derision of the Templars. The shouting rascals with the blue cockades now divided themselves into bands, levying contributions and attacking houses on whose doors or shutters "No Popery" had not been chalked. On foot and on horseback all the villany of London advanced towards the prisons, eager to release their incarcerated friends. Newgate and Clerkenwell, the Compters, the Fleet, the King's Bench, the Marshalsea, and Southwark Gaol disembogued their felons, murderers, and debtors to swell the army of thieves and incendiaries.
Twenty or thirty fires blazed in different parts of London. The blue cockades, mad with stolen drink, were burning and plundering wherever caprice or suspicion led them. The first pretext had been almost forgotten. Honesty was cowed.
Sir John Fielding's house in Bow-street was sacked; and then the cry of the blue cockades was "Lord Mansfield's!" This was very early on the 7th. The attack had been foreseen; but Lord Mansfield, unwilling to exasperate the true Protestants, had refused to surround the house with foot-guards, but placed the soldiers in ambuscade in St. George's Church away from observation, but ready for action. When the blue cockades, however, came, they poured into the usually quiet square in such a deluge that all attempts to disperse them would have been useless. While the rioters pelted the windows and drove at the barred hall-door with crowbars and heavy sledge-hammers, the old earl, wrapped in a cloak and leading his countess, escaped by a backdoor, and sought shelter at the palace. The door soon yawned open before the crushing and furious blows, and the rioters poured in, shouting "No Popery" and "Death to thieves." The yelling Protestants broke looking-glasses, slashed pictures, tossed sofas and tables out of window, and carried out the books to feed the bonfires that soon turned the windows of the frightened square crimson as with ghastly daybreak. Men, women, and children joined in the work of destruction.
Men who said books could do no harm, and who expressed regret, were threatened with being thrown from the windows into the fires. One fanatic was seen tossing silver dishes and handfuls of guineas into the flames, and thanking God that there would be less to be spent on masses. The books included all the law Mss. and notes collected during Lord Mansfield's whole lifetime. No guineas could replace these.
The ringleaders kept urging the mob, who were emptying the larder and cellars, to go to the Bank, where there was a million of money to pay them for their pains; and shouted the names of obnoxious houses, and the Guards would not act, as the magistrates had run away. When the ringleaders cried, "Push forward, boys! No Popery!" the officer only took off his hat and said, "I will not hurt a hair of your heads; but you must disperse."
The attack began at half-past twelve. At five o'clock the soldiers fired on the mob; and having burnt the Bloomsbury house down, they rushed shouting down Holborn towards the Langdales', two Roman Catholic distillers, near the bridge that then crossed the Fleet at the bottom of the hill. The rioters, maddened with greedy draughts of spirits snatched from the vats or lapped from shattered casks, set fire to the distilleries, and soon floods of liquid flame rolled into the Fleet and swept along the roadway. Dozens of howling wretches perished in this fiery sea, or fought for the deadly plunder, and shouted "No Popery" even when the soldiers' bayonets were at their breasts.
The great pyramid of flame that rose above the ruins and shone on ten thousand drunken and maniacal faces also lit to the spot the Northumberland Militia and a detachment of Colonel Holroyd's regiment, who instantly shot all rioters found breaking into or firing houses. The mob dispersed before the quick fire of the soldiers, and were driven back over Blackfriars bridge, many falling from the balustrades. Two attacks on the Bank were also repulsed, aswell as an attempt to cut the leading water-pipes. A ringleader on a roof opposite the Fleet was shot down; a standard-bearer, carrying trophies from Newgate, was killed in Cheapside. The Light-horse sabred down a hundred wretches; the Association troops and Guards mowed down as many more with their steady rolling fire. The rioters tried to gather up their dead, shouted, and then fled. Wilkes arrested many seditious persons. In the morning there were soldiers bivouacked in St. James's-park, Lincoln's-innfields, and the Museum-gardens. Two days after, that mischievous madman, Lord George, was committed to the Tower. He eventually turned Jew, and died in Newgate.
In Parliament Lord Mansfield laid down the law as to military interference as calmly and dispassionately as if he had not lost a dish. All persons—soldiers or civilians—were bound to apprehend any persons engaged in breaches of the peace or treason. If soldiers in doing so exceeded their powers, they must be tried by common and statute law. The metropolis was not under martial law, and the soldiers had no more power since the riot than before.
There was great sympathy shown by the House for Lord Mansfield's cruel injuries. When he observed that he had formed his opinion without the aid of books—for "indeed I have no books to consult"—the House felt the pathos of the words, and seemed to deplore the loss he had sustained, Adolphus tells us, as a national misfortune and disgrace. Eight years after, this great lawyer resigned his appointment, and Erskine delivered a warm-hearted address from the Bar on his retirement. He died calmly in 1793, and was buried near the Earl of Chatham in Westminster Abbey. What a congress of the great and good meet under that consecrated pavement, mixed with strange oddities and some scoundrelism!
In Bloomsbury-square, a recent agreeable chronicler of the lawyers says, our grandfathers used to lounge and peep at the house of Mr. Edward Law (afterwards Lord Ellenborough) in hopes of seeing his beautiful wife (née Townly) appear in her balcony to water the flowers. She was the belle of the square, and the delight of legal London. On becoming a peer and chief-justice, Law moved to St. James's-square; the first common-law judge, Lord Campbell says, who left the old legal quarters for the West-end.
Lord Chief-Justice Willes, one of Hogarth's owlish judges, lived in Bloomsbury-square, and died there in 1761.
We must be in a hurry indeed, and under great press of sail, if we ever pass by Westmacott's ponderous bronze seated statue of Charles James Fox without stopping for a moment. It is so beefy, so like a fat aldermanic Cæsar of the Lower Empire. We have seen its great round head periwigged with snow, scorching with a coup de soleil under a July sun, and buzzed about by autumn leaves. In all weathers it is irresistibly droll. What, that Roman senator, the Charles James Fox of Gilray, with the swarthy gross face and the portentous black eyebrows? Where is the collarless coat, the little three-cornered hat that he pinched as he denounced Pitt? where is the deep-flapped waistcoat and the knee—? Is this bronze Cato, stolid and grave, the Fox whom Gibbon describes as playing knee-deep in soiled cards for twenty-two consecutive hours, and placidly losing 500l. an hour? Is this sable butcher the gamester who won 4000l. in one night, and declared that the greatest pleasure in life, after winning at cards, was losing?—this Rhadamanthus the punster, the dice-rattler, the card-shuffler, who, after a Waterloo of a night at hazard or faro, was found by Beauclerk cosily reading Herodotus? This Pluto in soot cannot be the reckless genius who used to have to borrow guineas from the waiters at Brookes's, and was even dunned by his (sedan) chairmen. Impossible! This is a Roman, not an English orator; our gorge rises at him first, and then our laughter.
When that malignant and narrow-minded man John Wilson Croker pretended one day in parliament to be sublimely ignorant of where one of the Bloomsbury-squares lay, the property in that district, it is said, instantly sunk in value. Such is the cowardice of our middle-class nature. Theodore Hook, son of a writer of Vauxhall songs, having tuft-hunted and joked himself into high society, turned round and tried to prove his gentility by deriding the middle class, from the lowest grade of which he had sprung. After all, it was only deriding the new money to flatter the pride of the old. Greengrocers, butlers with poddy gloves, grooms brought in from the stable to wait, penny tarts for dessert—cheap ostentation, sometimes mean in its forms of display—was meanly satirised by this man, who loved to toady great people. He obtained at last an appointment, from which he retired disgraced; and died at last a worn-out, sottish, beggared, forlorn old rake, neglected and despised. But let him alone; he is forgotten now, and we have learned to hold at its true worth those dishonest political partisans who prompted Hook to his clever flippancy, and left him at last to perish in poverty and neglect.
Bedford-square derived its name from the adjoining Bedford House.
Lord Eldon's changes of residence mark his several steps up the ladder. First in Cursitor-street, close to the detestable sponging-house with the barred windows and chained door, not long since pulled down. There he took the Newcastle banker's daughter, Bessie, almost a child, loving and frugal. A step westward, and he goes to Carey-street, going out to market himself in Clare-market. A few more successful steady . years of hard thought and patient industry, and we find him in a large roomy house, No. 42 Gower-street, where he lived when Sir John Scott; and as attorney-general he conducted, in 1794, the unsuccessful, and to him rather humiliating, prosecutions of those stubborn liberals, Hardy, Horne Tooke, and Thelwall, whom Erskine delivered from the legal tormenter.
A step higher, and Lord Eldon has a house in Bedford-square, No. 6, with more room to breathe in after the sulphurous smell of lying parchments and the fetid heat of the Chancery-court. Here his Chinese Toryism revelled in the triumphs of Pitt, Perceval, and Sidmouth; here he spread his ægis over that noisy sufferer the Princess of Wales, and collected the evidence that was to expose the neglect, perfidy, and infamy of her heartless husband. In that house, according to the old king's prompting, the good-for-nothing prince was spoken of as a hopeless Absalom and a cruel persecutor of injured innocence.
In his Bedford-square house, in June 1808, the dubitating chancellor entertained the coarse, reckless Princess at a grand banquet, that must have made the rather shy, unsocial, and penurious Lady Eldon (who had not the courage to be present) shudder and fret. Alas for the stability of things! A few years later, and at the same table sat the portly and flaxen-wigged Regent, presiding at a still more splendid feast. The Regent had changed quickly; his vices now were mere exuberances of life and spirit, his mean detractions were accusations only too lamentably true. Selfish prudence and selfish profligacy were allies now; the Princess, after all, was a shameless, impudent, abandoned woman. Wrongs! what wrongs had a woman whose favourites were her valet and dragoman? Such, no doubt, was the turn the Bedfordsquare conversation took when the greatest friend of tailors who ever lived, and the man who contrived to live longest with the smallest pin's-head of a heart to diffuse his circulation, spread a halo of high life over fortunate, consecrated Bedford-square.
In April 1815 a mastership of Chancery became vacant by the death of Mr. Morris. Lord Eldon was importuned by the Prince Regent to appoint his brilliant and witty friend Jekyll to the vacant post. The chancellor doubted and delayed as usual, He was afraid of the scandal that would be occasioned by the appointment of a mere popular bon vivant. The Prince, accustomed to no opposition to his wishes, either from his own conscience or that of others, grew impatient and angry. One day in June he called on the stubborn lord chancellor and requested to see him. Lord Eldon had the gout, was confined to his bedroom, and could not be seen even by the Prince. The Regent saw how the wind lay, and what had brought on the gout. He instantly decided on his course: he waved back the frightened footman and the astonished butler, and skipped upstairs to the chancellor's bedroom; there, with a mocking bow, he threw himself into an easy-chair and sighed heavily.
"Ah, poor Lady Eldon!" he said.
"Why do you say poor Lady Eldon, your royal highness?"
"Because I do not mean to leave this room, Eldon, till you have given Jekyll that appointment."
On the 23d of June the old lawyers of the Temple groaned to hear of Jekyll's appointment. The labour and the responsibilities of office, however, altered the witty man of the world, and he became a decorous master, holding his power laughingly but respectably. Old age and sickness led him from the court, which he had by no means disgraced.
On the day after his retirement (so my friend Mr. Jeaffreson says, in his delightful book about lawyers), the veteran met Eldon, his old but long-since reconciled enemy, and said, with pleasant and thoughtful triumph:
"Yesterday, Lord Chancellor, I was your master; to-day I am my own."
Lord Eldon at last obeyed the great law of London migration, and moved westward to Hamilton-place, Piccadilly, where Queen Caroline's friends threatened to oust him by taking the adjoining house for the clamorous woman and her tagrag levées.
In 1815, when that incredibly mischievous Corn Bill was passed to keep up high prices for the farmers and make bread dear for the poor, the old square saw another riot. Lord Eldon, always on the wrong and the strong side, and against the people and necessary reforms, had resisted any further discussion on the bill, and roused the mob to an unusual state of irritation. On the evening of March 6th the chancellor's house was fiercely attacked, the windows smashed, the iron rails plucked up. The old lawyer, however, had not carried a musket in the "Devil's Own" for nothing. He had already sent a footman for the Grenadiers on duty at the British Museum, and they marched in at the back entrance in Bedford-square just as the rioters came shouting in through the broken panels of the front door. They paused when they saw the bayonets keen and ready. Lord Eldon knew the human mind: he shouted to a supposed ambuscade in the back rooms,
"Guards, reserve your fire."
The mob (according to the old gentleman's story, after his second bottle of port) instantly fell back. The chancellor sprang forward, and dragged in two of the ringleaders.
"If you don't mind what you're about, lads," said the for once prompt chancellor, "you'll all come to be hanged."
"Perhaps so, old chap," replied one of the graceless rascals; "but I think it looks just now as if you'd be hung first."
Satisfied with his generalship, yet still distrustful of the rioters, Lord Eldon now made a masterly retreat by a back way to the British Museum under the protection of the soldiers, who were perhaps unwilling to leave the Museum long undefended. Even if the gates were forced, escape would be easy in that vast burrow. The mob, however, was satisfied with its protest, and soon dispersed.
The next day the Duke of Wellington called on Lord Eldon to congratulate his old Tory friend on having baffled and outgeneralled the rabble.
Great men can afford to pay absurd compliments. The Duke was pleased and flattering.
"I am glad, my lord," he said, "that I left the field before you began to act the general, or you would certainly have beaten me in that career."
It is pleasant to think of the tenacious, handsome old lawyer as we pass through Bedford-square, for he was a man of strong fibre, and a sound though not adaptable brain. He shed courtly tears with George IV. when Peel and Wellington deserted the Anti-Catholic Emancipation cause, and he made many a Chancery suitor shed tears by his delays. But he was an honest man, and acted according to his lights; and he was a decorous, pure-hearted man in a somewhat demoralised and disreputable age.