by Walter Thornbury.
Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.3 #9 (Jul 1867).
III. Soho-square, Belgrave-square, Cavendish-square, Portman-square and Berkeley-square
There is no square which about night-fall is haunted by more respectable and well-to-do ghosts than Soho-square. The headless Duke of Monmouth alone would give any square a ghostly celebrity; but when you add to this a real drowned admiral of the old school, and a pale lady, in high-heeled shoes and trailing saque, who once gave masquerades to all the fashion of Walpole's time, the man who is ready to utter the most rapping oath in favour of modern spirit-rapping must allow that there is good phantom company in the square.
A finer old square we have not the pleasure of knowing. It is a bric-à-brac square of the good old buhl and rococo age; and no one really should be allowed to occupy a house in it who does not wear cocked-hat, sword, powder, and wig. Hogarth's Rake, there can be no doubt, must by some magnetic attraction have lived in this then fashionable quarter. His dancing-masters, projectors, jockeys, and other excellent society, must, we feel sure, have once haunted these precincts. Their cocked-hats and wigs no doubt threw grotesque shadows on the Soho pavement. His sedan chairmen must have often borne him in the swaying lacquered palanquin past that battered statue of Charles the Second that has stood sentinel in this quarter ever since the accession of King James, when the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth, from the windows of his palace in the centre of the south side, often gazed upon it, and thought how well a crown would grace the worthy son of such a father. Little did he think, as he tossed the curls of his flowing black wig, that some day the not very intellectual head inside that peruke would roll upon the red-splashed planks of a scaffold.
In Cromwell's time, Soho was probably a sour-smelling brick-field. It was even then called Soho; and there is a question whether part of it may not have derived its name from the word "So-ho!" so much used to horses by the men who probably trained and broke-in nags on this spot, as they did also in Lincoln's-inn-fields. In Charles the Second's time, the king who never said a foolish thing, never did an unwiser one than in imitating his grandfather and Queen Elizabeth's vexatious labour of trying to mop back the Atlantic. He forbade by proclamation further building in Soho-fields, as the small houses of squatters were everywhere choking the air of his parks and palaces, and soaking up the water of the conduit that supplied Whitehall. Five years later there were gentlemen patronising Soho. The square was originally called Monmouth-square, from its doomed but greatest inhabitant; afterwards it was named King-square; and lastly, about Pope's time, it became known as Soho. There is a tradition that the word "Soho" was the watchword at the battle in the Somersetshire marshes; the word might have been, and we believe was; but the square never derived its ill-omened name from the admirers of the foolish young rebel. That dépôt of old clothes and other human sloughs, Monmouth-street, on the contrary, was really christened after the misguided Absalom of a very indifferent King David. He put on his fine lace clothes here for three or four years, and several other gentlemen—i.e. Colonel Rumsey, Mr. Pilcher, Mr. Broughton, Sir Henry Inglesby, and the Earl of Stamford—also hung up their plumed hats in Soho-square contemporaneously with the offspring of Lucy Walters, the wanton Welsh girl. In Pope's time, Monmouth House became an auction-room for all the luxuries of the day. Then Lord Bateman (not he of the song) had it, and subsequently Count de Guerchy, the French ambassador; so that the descendants of the French refugees—those pinched, grimacing poor creatures sketched by Hogarth close by—must have often ma foi'd and parbleu'd, and bragged about the King Louis they hated, as they passed the house which contained the delegate of their oppressed country.
Amiable Mr. Evelyn lodged in this fashionable square, and came up to winter here, as the learned Surrey gentleman was right in doing. Gross but clever Shadwell (we say this boldly, and in Dryden's teeth) makes a coxcomb of an alderman induced to take a house in Soho by his termagant city wife, who could not abide to live in the dim unsavouryness of Mark-lane. But let us especially take off our hat to the old square, because of a certain mythical simple-hearted Worcestershire old baronet, who, in Queen Anne's time, distinctly lived in this locality. We refer to the never-to-be-forgotten Sir Roger de Coverley; and we beg to propose his health instantly, "with all the honours," as trumpet-tongued toast-masters sometimes say. Addison's little, bilious, invalid friend, Alexander Pope, mentions Soho, the square with the quaint old name, in one of his exquisitely-finished Dutch pictures.
"And when I flatter let my dirty leaves
Clothe spice, like trunks; or, fluttering in a row,
Befringe the rails of Bedlam and Soho."
But this may only mean the neighbourhood. It was from such rails in the New-road that Macaulay—ardent for old songs and ballads—once bought a sheaf, and bore them home in triumph. A sound of little feet awoke the poet-historian from a deep reverie: he looked round, and was surprised to see a mob of urchins anxiously following him.
"Beg your pardon, guv'nor," said the ringleader, with a regular London touch to his uncombed hair; "but would you tip us a stave or two—if you wouldn't mind, your honour?"
The street-boys had actually mistaken the great writer for an itinerant singer on his way to his special district.
That fussy, chattering Bishop Burnet, the historian and eulogist of King William, lived in this square, and here his lawn sleeves sunned themselves on their ways to court-levees, to attend that cold-blooded hero of Macaulay's. Burnet was Swift's detestation; and nothing can be more racily spiteful than his foot-notes to the somewhat time-serving history, written by a pharisaical man, who nevertheless had the courage to attend good Lord William Russell to the scaffold in Lincoln's-inn-fields. Swift, in his headlong partisanship, forgot the dangers Burnet underwent for conscience-sake. James had tried very hard to slip a halter round Gilbert Burnet's neck; but the Orangeman was too slippery for him, and got off to Holland, into pleasant quarters between the canals.
In Queen Anne's time, a brave Norfolk man, the fine old admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel, honoured the square by residing in it. This was the hero who, when only a lieutenant, anticipating gallant Exmouth, carried into Tripoli the defiance of England at the risk of instant bowstring, and the same night fired and shattered all the Moorish fleet without losing a single English seaman. He also fought grandly at La Hogue and Malaga, and bore the English flag, indeed, high aloft through many days of flame and storm. But, alas, Neptune, the Rex of Rexes, caught him at last, and tossed his vessel against the cruel rocks—the infames scopulos—of Scilly. His body was found on the reefs by the fishermen, and afterwards taken to London and laid in state in the mournful Soho-square house, before solemn interment in Westminster Abbey.
In 1726, that extraordinary Dutch adventurer, Baron de Ripperda, then prime minister and favourite of Philip V. of France, lived in this square in overwhelming magnificence. Two years later he fell, like Wolsey, and lay groaning, stunned by the fall, in Gil Blas's old prison of Segovia. But Ripperda's Dutch heart was too tough to break at a king's frown; so he called himself Osmar, went over to Morocco, succeeded again with the old finesses, became minister in the African court, fell again, and eventually died quietly, years after, at Tetuan, where his moribund eyes could feast on distant Spain and the dreamy outline of his early greatness.
Still later on in history we find Walpole's friend, Field-Marshal Conway, here, discussing the Seven Years' War and his German campaigns with Frederick the Great (robber) against that heroic woman, Rex Maria Theresa. Horace Walpole, with his little nibbling dandyisms, was but a tepid friend; yet he had still heart enough to be almost chivalrously faithful in his attachment to Sir Horace Mann, poor old blind Madame de Deffand, and Henry Seymour Conway, who in the Walpole letters figures almost as a Sir Charles Grandison—a paragon, however, but not a prig, like Richardson's most insufferable hero. Conway is the Achilles of the Walpole letters—the Achilles impiger, acer, but not iracundus.
Another of the celebrities of Soho-square was that renowned high-priestess of fashion, Mrs. Teresa Cornelys, a German singer, who came to live at Carlisle House on the east side (corner of Sutton-street) in 1763. Her masquerades, balls, and routs were the entertainments of Walpole's time. Her house was at once Almack's and the Alhambra. Mrs. Teresa seems to have been a clever speculative woman, of good manners and infinite tact, reckless of money, and not over encumbered with moral scruples. Her country dance, February 18th, 1763, was eighty couples long. She was a sensible woman, though heedless, no doubt, of anything but the pleasure and whims of her patrons. Mrs. Cornelys at least deserves some gratitude for having encouraged good music; for in 1766 Bach and Able directed her concerts. There is especial record of one of the great masquerades at Carlisle House, Feb. 27, 1770. About eight hundred of the leaders of ton were present at this party, given by the Tuesday-night's Club from the Star and Garter in Pall-mall. Horace Walpole's relatives-were there; the Dowager Countess of Waldegrave as Jane Shore, and the Duchess of Ancaster as Mandane. The most remarkable characters were a Bedlamite run mad for Wilkes and liberty; Adam in flesh-coloured silk; and a double man, half chimney-sweep, half miller. The chief buffoons of the evening were a chimney-sweep and a quack-doctor. The ball began at nine, and ended about two. The mob in the square compelled all persons as they went to the masquerade to keep the windows of their chairs or coaches down, and held up lights to see their dresses better. At a masquerade the next year, the house was illuminated with four thousand wax-lights, while one hundred musicians were scattered through the rooms. Mrs. Cornelys at last got too careless, or too prosperous; for she was frequently prosecuted for riot and disorder at her house. The Pantheon eclipsed her, and her parties grew far less respectable. The rainy day came at last. She became bankrupt in 1772. A confectioner then took the house, and failed also. The tide had turned. Mrs. Cornelys became a vendor of ass's milk at Knightsbridge; and eventually drifted into the Fleet, where she died in 1797. Her son was tutor to Lord Pomfret; her daughter, a professional musician. After these gay summer hours of Mrs. Cornelys' splendour, Carlisle House was a nursery for a thousand bubbles—debating-societies, lecture-rooms, Count Boranlaski's concerts (1783). In 1797 there was a feeble attempt to turn Carlisle House into a town Ranelagh.
But one step back pour mieux sauter. The great Cromwell name, it should not be forgotten, is associated with Soho-square. Mary, Oliver's third daughter, Lady Falconberg, lived once in the White House on the north-east side, now Crosse and Blackwell's sauce-warehouse.
"No sauce would Cromwell stand,
From Spanish or from English hand."
The streets at the back still bear the old proud and once honoured names of Falconberg-street, Falconberg-mews. Sutton-street too records the name of the Falconberg's country seat. Defoe mentions seeing the good old countess with the immortal name—"a curious piece of antiquity, still fresh and gay, though of great age." She died in 1712, a few months before her brother Richard. She left the Soho streets and house, and all she could, away from her husband's family.
George Colman the elder also figures on the family tree of Soho-square. That well-born author, whose good birth is forgotten while his talent lives, resided here; but whether he wrote the Jealous Wife during this residence, I hardly know. In the house, No. 30 (now the Linnean Society), that bold traveller and useful botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, lived to talk of Captain Cook, whose companion he had been; the gout, whose companion (bad luck to it!) he was; and the cabals of the Royal Society. Here, stolid and rather over-bearing Sir Joseph gave his public breakfasts and his famous philosophical Sunday evenings.
A man named Trotter started the Soho Bazaar after the Eastern models in 1815. Like other bazaars, it seems intended for the diffusion of things that nobody can ever manage anyhow to want. And now for a flight south-westward.
In the glorious times of the Regency (glorious for tailors, we mean) the space now covered by the palaces of Belgrave and Eaton squares was a miserable, disreputable, and rather dangerous locality known as "The Five Fields." Here for centuries footpads had lurked to snatch at the wigs and swords of benighted pedestrians, to rob and strip besotted beaux zigzagging home from Covent-Garden revels of their laced coats and purses, and to leave them bruised and stabbed under the scrubby suburban hedges or sooty thorn-trees. The most conspicuous object in this rather dismal neighbourhood—the chief architectural object, we mean—was Ebury chapel, now the centre of a vast congeries of houses, and of small importance to any one but its own congregation and the renters of its pews. The Five Fields were intersected by a road elevated above the meadows on a sort of causeway, as the roads still are in some of those dull marshy nursery-gardens that stretch from Chelsea to Fulham.
That mine of gold—Belgravia—came into the possession of the fortunate Grosvenor family in 1656, when the daughter and sole heiress of Alexander Davies, Esq., of Ebury, married Sir Thomas Grosvenor, the ancestor of the present Marquis of Westminster, the nobleman who, according to current popular tradition, has a thousand pounds a day and two thousand for Sundays—a numerical legend as probably under as over the mark. This Mr. Davies died in 1663, three years after the Restoration, little conscious of the value of his five pasturing fields. In Queen Elizabeth's time this sumptuous property was just plain Ebury farm, a plot of 430 acres, meadow and pasture, let on lease to a troublesome untoward person named Wharle (how could a man with such a name help being untoward?); and he, to her fardingaled majesty's infinite annoyance, had let out the same to various other scurvy fellows, who insisted on enclosing the arable land, driving out the ploughs and laying down grass, to the hindrance of all pleasant hawking and coursing parties. Nor was this all the big-hearted queen alone cared about; she had a memory for the poor, as our own gracious Sovereign has, and she saw how these enclosures were just so much sheer stark robbery of the poor man's right of common after Lammas-tide.
In the Regency, when Belgrave-square was a ground for hanging-out clothes, all the space between Westminster and Vauxhall bridge was simply known as "Tothill-fields" or "The Downs." It was a dreary tract, by all descriptions (for the writer is not Old Parr), of stunted, dusty, trodden grass, beloved by the bull-baiters, badger-drawers, and dog-fighters, with whose destinies the great Mr. Windham sympathised. Beyond this Campus Martius of the rampant blackguard of prize-fighting days loomed a garden region of cabbage-beds, stagnant ditches fringed with pollard withes. No Penitentiary then at Millbank, no Vauxhall-bridge, no anything, but a haunted house half-way to Chelsea, and a halfpenny hatch that led through a cabbage-plot to a tavern known by the agreeable name of "The Monster." Beyond this came an embankment called the Willow-walk (a convenient place for quiet murder), and at one end of this lived that eminent public character, Mr. William Aberfield, generally known to the sporting peers, thieves, and dog-fanciers of the Regency as "Slender Billy." If we remember a recent pleasant book rightly, Mr. Grantley Berkeley once had the honour of this gentleman's acquaintance, and visited his house to see the great Spanish monkey "Mukako" ("Muchacho") fight Tom Cribb's dogs and cut their throats one after the other—apparently at least—for the gentleman—"genleman" we mean—who really bled the dogs and the peers was Mr. Cribb himself, who had a lancet hidden in his hand, with which, under pretence of rendering the bitten and bruised dogs help, he contrived in a frank, friendly way to open the jugular vein. A good many of the Prince Regent's friends were Slender Billy's also. Mr. Slender Billy died, however, much more regretted than the Regent, being a most useful and trusty member of a gang of forgers. All efforts to induce Billy, when condemned, to disclose the secret of his mates were in vain. He affected the most exquisite simplicity; and when the Bank lawyer begged him to surrender "the plates" with which the notes had been printed, he instantly and without demur handed the man of law the plate from which he had just scraped his prison meal. Child of nature! The Slender creature died with Christian unction, leaving a brace of partridges, which he had not time to dine off, to a Bow-street officer who had been a chief witness against him. The partridges were certainly fine plump birds; but they had one fault—they had been carefully poisoned, and the discovery was made only just in time to save the witness's life. It is gratifying to know that Slender Billy died game, and was loudly cheered as he took his departure from a country for whose aristocracy he had so long catered.
Leaving the Willow-walk in Slender Billy's days, a walk back into Pimlico brought you again into Stretton's-ground and other choice regions, or by Queen-square down a flight of neglected dirty steps into the shady Birdcage-walk.
Belgrave-square, that stronghold of the landed interest and titled wealth, was designed in 1825 by George Basevi, as Mr. Cunningham informs us, and the detached villas were built by H.E. Kendall and others. That fine old soldier, Lord Hill, lived in the house in the southwest corner; and Lieut.-gen. Sir George Murray died in 1846 at No. 5 on the north side. Some of the best names in the "Blue-book" have a local habitation in this honoured square; and when there is an escutcheon nailed up between the windows, it is often blazoned with the proudest badges of heraldry.
But the neighbourhood of the square has associations even more interesting than those of wealth and power, or than all the trophies won in the hard old times by strong arms fighting, generally, as even Cobbett allowed, for virtue and for right. At the large house at the corner of Eccleston-street lived that hearty pleasant. genius Sir Francis Chantrey, one of our greatest sculptors in the only branch of the art that Englishmen seem ever likely to excel in—i.e. the naturalistic. Here he lived from 1814 to his death in 1841; and in the studio at the back of the house his intellectual bust of Sir Walter Scott, with that enormous hat full of brain, was executed; even in the stolid colourless marble the wondrous gray eyes of the enchanter seem radiant with their old glamour, and to glow and kindle, as one looks on them, into the little living worlds through which glided past so many dreams, caught ere they vanished, and fixed for ever on paper. Wondrous man! wondrous art! Let us thank God for Sir Walter, and thank God too for the man who invented printing. In these same rooms the kind-hearted man (whose face his friend Turner used to reproduce jokingly by black dots on a round red wafer) thought and clove his exquisite monument of the Sleeping Children, now in Lichfield Cathedral, the sweetest aping of sleep-like death and death's sleep ever wrought out on canvas or in stone. In the same gallery too, amid heaps of modelling clay and blocks of rough Carrara, Chantrey executed his fine thoughtful statue of that intense practical thinker Watt,—a man who looked as if his thoughts went on in sequences of twenty miles each. The noble gallery with the lantern was the contrivance of that most subtly-ingenious architect Sir John Soane. Sir John had no great grasp of mind, but he was the most exquisite economist of space, and his little Chinese puzzles of houses are quite studies of mathematical cleverness. His museum in Lincoln's-inn-fields is exceedingly worth a visit; but it has become a sad close borough, and the great object of its present managers seems to be to keep it as secret and unvisited as possible. It is never advertised, and an entry to it is beset with vulgarly formal and ridiculous processes, which disgust people in this busy and progressive age. Out on such paltry dog-in-the-manger policy, and viva the great Benthamite motto—"The greatest good for the greatest number"! Chantrey, the good shot and the good liver, died in his Eccleston-street drawing-room, quietly, benignly, in his easy-chair; and such a calm death seemed the natural termination of a clever, kind, and honest life.
In No. 27 Lower Belgrave-place, from 1824 to his death in 1842, lived that delightful, vigorous ballad-writer Allan Cunningham, Chantrey's worthy assistant and foreman. Not even Scott's noble
"On Ravelston crags, and on Clermiston's lee,
Died away the last war-notes of Bonny Dundee,"
has a grander trampling "lilt" in it than Cunningham's sailor's song,
"The wet sheet and a flowing sail,
And the wind that follows fast,"
in spite of the cynical criticism that Allan did not quite know that a "sheet" was not a sail, but a rope. But even now, Mr. Cynic, like many other critics, you're too acute. Allan was no fool, whatever you may or may not be; he evidently meant to contrast the dripping rope with the swelling sail.
One of Allan Cunningham's most remarkable books is that which contains a quantity of imitations of old Nithsdale and Galloway ballads, which, by the bye, are about three times as good as most old ballads, excepting, of course, Child Waters and half-a-dozen others. You can count the best on your fingers. There are few so good as those the sculptor's foreman wrote in his bold Roman hand. I do not know whether such tricks are quite fair. They are rather mischievous mystifications, and tend very much to produce antiquarian blunders. They answer one end, however: they teach critics and pedants humility; for they showed there were great and wise men who believed in Ireland's impudent forgeries, as their fathers had done in the Rowley poems and Ossian. The world's old errors reproduce themselves.
Cavendish-square derives its name from Lady Henrietta Cavendish Holles, married in 1713 to Swift's friend, Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, the great book-collector and Tory minister. The ground was laid out in 1717 or 1718, but the bursting of the South-Sea bubble stopped the building for a time. The whole north side of the square was reserved for the palace of that imperial millionnaire, the Duke of Chandos. This was the Timon of Pope's satire, a satire which produced a caricature by Hogarth of the little man of Twickenham whitewashing the gateway of Burlington House, and bespattering the Duke of Chandos's carriage. Pope, afraid of "the libelled person and the pictured shape," never attacked Hogarth for this; and Hogarth, perhaps ashamed of assailing genius, suppressed the print; yet, after all, Pope's satire is spiteful rather than severe. He complains of the formality of the French gardens at the duke's seat, Cannons, near Edgeware,—derides the trees cut like statues, and the statues thick as trees; and sneers at the duke (who must have been very like the invalid poet), as
"A puny insect shivering at a breeze."
Pope hisses at the operatic music in the chapel, and the cumbrous state of the dinner, where he was complaisantly helped to all his antipathies. Determined not to be pleased, and too proud to endure another person's pride, the sour little wasp concludes:
"Treated, caress'd, and tired, I take my leave,
Sick of his civil pride from morn to eve;
I curse such lavish cost and little skill;
And swear no day was ever pass'd so ill."
Pope afterwards tried to prove that Timon was not meant for the Duke of Chandos; then, half owning that it was, he denied that he had shown any ingratitude, as the duke had done no more than subscribe for his Iliad. The glory of Cannons soon passed away, and it afterwards became the property of that not very respectable being, O'Kelly, the owner of the famous Derby-winner, Eclipse. All that now remains of the duke at Cannons is a mouldy, neglected statue in the vault of a country church.
The equestrian statue in the centre of the square is that of the cruel hero of Culloden, the Duke of Cumberland, whose memory is still odious in Scotland. This is the statue that Reynolds, a lover of the ideal, condemned as unsuccessful. Pope's enemy, that slovenly, clever woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, lived in this square, and from here, between 1723 and 1731, dated many letters to the Countess of Mar. At No. 32 (afterwards Sir Martin Archer Shee's) lived Reynolds's rival, the sentimental Romney, who was so fond of reproducing the beautiful face of Lady Hamilton. Romney's predecessor in the house had been its historian, F. Cotes, R.A., once a fashionable portrait-painter. The large house at the corner of Harley-street was first the old Princess Amelia's, then Pope's, lastly Mr. Watson Taylor's. On the west side there lurks behind a high brick rampart Harcourt House, the town residence of the Duke of Portland, lord of the manor of Marylebone.
Portman-square (the north side) was begun about 1764, but it was twenty years before the whole was finished. It derived its name from William Henry Portman, Esq., a Somersetshire gentleman. The Portman property of 270 acres is described in an old lease granted by the last prior of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, in a rural way, as Great Gibbet Field, Hawkfield, Brook Stand, Tassels Croft, Boys' Croft, Furse Croft, and Sheepcott Hawes. The north-west corner house was built by Mrs. Montague, a learned lady, who defended Shakespeare against Voltaire, rather a gratuitous piece of work. Here she held her parties; and from the dress of one of her guests originated the term "blue-stocking."
Berkeley-square is a frontier land between West-end trade and West-end nobility. The east side is half shops, on the northern there is an hotel. Confectioners and stationers here confront peers and baronets. The square was built in 1698, and derived its name from Berkeley House adjoining, Lansdowne House being of later date. If Cavendish-square is consecrated by associations of Pope, Berkeley-square is rendered interesting by recollections of Horace Walpole. No. 44 was the house built by that clever quack, Kent, for Lady Isabella Finch. Walpole thought well of the staircase, and he was a man who had le goût difficile, if any one ever had. At No. 11, Horace Walpole himself died, in 1797. In a letter to Lord Ossory, in 1779, he mentions his pleasure at his new house; Lady Shelburne, "the queen of the palace over against me," having improved the view. At No. 45, that "heaven-born general," Lord Clive, driven mad by cruel parliamentary persecution, killed himself in a frenzy of despair. The Martha Blount flirted with, perhaps beloved, by Pope, died in this square in 1762.