Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

None of these Percys had yet come into the Strand. The brick house there, which was to be their own through marriage with an heiress, was built in the lifetime of the Earl, whose father, as just mentioned, died in the Tower in 1585. The son, too, was long a prisoner in that gloomy palace and prison. While Lord Northampton was laying the foundations of the future London house of the Percys in 1605, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was being carried into durance. There was a Percy, kinsman to the Earl, who was mixed up with the Gunpowder Plot. For no other reason than relationship with the conspiring Percy, the Earl was shut up in the Tower for life, as his sentence ran, and he was condemned to pay a fine of thirty thousand pounds. The Earl ultimately got off with fifteen years’ imprisonment and a fine of twenty thousand pounds. He was popularly known as the Wizard Earl, because he was a studious recluse, companying only with grave scholars (of whom there were three, known as ‘Percy’s Magi’) and finding relaxation in writing rhymed satires against the Scots.

There was a stone walk in the Tower which, having been paved by the Earl, was known during many years as ‘My Lord of Northumberland’s Walk.’ At one end was an iron shield of his arms; and holes in which he put a peg at every turn he made in his dreary exercise.

One would suppose that the Wizard Earl would have been very grateful to the man who restored him to liberty. Lord Hayes (Viscount Doncaster) was the man. He had married Northumberland’s daughter, Lucy. The marriage had excited the Earl’s anger, as a _low match_, and the proud captive could not ‘stomach’ a benefit for which he was indebted to a son-in-law on whom he looked down. This proud Earl died in 1632. Just ten years after, his son, Algernon Percy, went a-wooing at Suffolk House, in the Strand. It was then inhabited by Elizabeth, the daughter and heiress of Theophilus, Earl of Suffolk, who had died two years previously, in 1640. Algernon Percy and Elizabeth Howard made a merry and magnificent wedding of it, and from the time they were joined together the house of the bride has been known by the bridegroom’s territorial title of Northumberland.

The street close to the house of the Percys, which we now know as Northumberland Street, was then a road leading down to the Thames, and called Hartshorn Lane. Its earlier name was Christopher Alley. At the bottom of the lane the luckless Sir Edmundsbury Godfrey had a stately house, from which he walked many a time and oft to his great wood wharf on the river. But the glory of Hartshorn Lane was and is Ben Jonson. No one can say where rare Ben was born, save that the posthumous child first saw the light in Westminster. ‘Though,’ says Fuller, ‘I cannot, with all my industrious inquiry, find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane, Charing Cross, where his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband.’ Mr. Fowler was a master bricklayer, and did well with his clever stepson. We can in imagination see that sturdy boy crossing the Strand to go to his school within the old church of St. Martin (then still) in the Fields. It is as easy to picture him hastening of a morning early to Westminster, where Camden was second master, and had a keen sense of the stuff that was in the scholar from Hartshorn Lane. Of all the figures that flit about the locality, none attracts our sympathies so warmly as that of the boy who developed into the second dramatic poet of England.

Of the countesses and duchesses of this family, the most singular was the widow of Algernon, the tenth Earl. In her widowhood she removed from the house in the Strand (where she had given a home not only to her husband, but to a brother) to one which occupied the site on which White’s Club now stands. It was called Suffolk House, and the proud lady thereof maintained a semi-regal state beneath the roof and when she went abroad. On such an occasion as paying a visit, her footmen walked bareheaded on either side of her coach, which was followed by a second, in which her women were seated, like so many ladies in waiting! Her state solemnity went so far that she never allowed her son Joscelin’s wife (daughter of an Earl) to be seated in her presence--at least till she had obtained permission to do so.

Joscelin’s wife was, according to Pepys, ‘a beautiful lady indeed.’ They had but one child, the famous heiress, Elizabeth Percy, who at four years of age was left to the guardianship of her proud and wicked old grandmother. Joscelin was dead, and his widow married Ralph, afterwards Duke of Montague. The old Dowager Countess was a matchmaker, and she contracted her granddaughter, at the age of twelve, to Cavendish, Earl of Ogle. Before this couple were of age to live together, Ogle died. In a year or two after, the old matchmaker engaged her victim to Mr. Thomas Thynne, of Longleat; but the young lady had no mind to him. In the Hatton collection of manuscripts there are three letters addressed by a lady of the Brunswick family to Lord and Lady Hatton. They are undated, but they contain a curious reference to part of the present subject, and are thus noticed in the first report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts: ‘Mr. Thinn has proved his marriage with Lady Ogle, but she will not live with him, for fear of being “rotten before she is ripe.” Lord Suffolk, since he lost his wife and daughter, lives with his sister, Northumberland. They have here strange ambassadors--one from the King of Fez, the other from Muscovett. All the town has seen the last; he goes to the play, and stinks so that the ladies are not able to take their muffs from their noses all the play-time. The lampoons that are made of most of the town ladies are so nasty that no woman would read them, else she would have got them for her.’

‘Tom of Ten Thousand,’ as Thynne was called, was murdered (shot dead in his carriage) in Pall Mall (1682) by Königsmark and accomplices, two or three of whom suffered death on the scaffold. Immediately afterwards, the maiden wife of two husbands _really_ married Charles, the proud Duke of Somerset. In the same year, Banks dedicated to her (_Illustrious Princess_, he calls her) his ‘Anna Bullen,’ a tragedy. He says: ‘You have submitted to take a noble partner, as angels have delighted to converse with men;’ and ‘there is so much of divinity and wisdom in your choice, that none but the Almighty ever did the like’ (giving Eve to Adam) ‘with the world and Eden for a dower.’ Then, after more blasphemy, and very free allusions to her condition as a bride, and fulsomeness beyond conception, he scouts the idea of supposing that she ever should die. ‘You look,’ he says, ‘as if you had nothing mortal in you. Your guardian angel scarcely is more a deity than you;’ and so on, in increase of bombast, crowned by the mock humility of ‘my muse still has no other ornament than truth.’

The Duke and Duchess of Somerset lived in the house in the Strand, which continued to be called Northumberland House, as there had long been a _Somerset_ House a little more to the east. Anthony Henley once annoyed the above duke and showed his own ill-manners by addressing a letter ‘to the Duke of Somerset, over against the trunk-shop at Charing Cross.’ The duchess was hardly more respectful when speaking of her suburban mansion, Sion House, Brentford. ‘It’s a hobbledehoy place,’ she said; ‘neither town nor country.’ Of this union came a son, Algernon Seymour, who in 1748 succeeded his father as Duke of Somerset, and in 1749 was created Earl of Northumberland, for a particular reason. He had no sons. His daughter Elizabeth had encouraged the homage of a handsome young fellow of that day, named Smithson. She was told Hugh Smithson had spoken in terms of admiration of her beauty, and she laughingly asked why he did not say as much to herself. Smithson was the son of ‘an apothecary,’ according to the envious, but, in truth, the father had been a physician, and earned a baronetcy, and was of the good old nobility, the landowners, with an estate, still possessed by the family, at Stanwick, in Yorkshire. Hugh Smithson married this Elizabeth Percy, and the earldom of Northumberland, conferred on her father, was to go to her husband, and afterwards to the eldest male heir of this marriage, failing which the dignity was to remain with Elizabeth and her heirs male by any other marriage.

It is at this point that the present line of Smithson-Percys begins. Of the couple who may be called its founders so many severe things have been said, that we may infer that their exalted fortunes and best qualities gave umbrage to persons of small minds or strong prejudices. Walpole’s remark, that in the earl’s lord-lieutenancy in Ireland ‘their vice-majesties scattered pearls and diamonds about the streets,’ is good testimony to their royal liberality. Their taste may not have been unexceptionable, but there was no touch of meanness in it. In 1758 they gave a supper at Northumberland House to Lady Yarmouth, George II.’s old mistress. The chief ornamental piece on the supper table represented a grand _chasse_ at Herrenhausen, at which there was a carriage drawn by six horses, in which was seated an august person wearing a blue ribbon, with a lady at his side. This was not unaptly called ‘the apotheosis of concubinage.’ Of the celebrated countess notices vary. Her delicacy, elegance, and refinement are vouched for by some; her coarseness and vulgarity are asserted by others. When Queen Charlotte came to England, Lady Northumberland was made one of the ladies of the queen’s bed-chamber. Lady Townshend justified it to people who felt or feigned surprise, by remarking, ‘Surely nothing could be more proper. The queen does not understand English, and can anything be more necessary than that she should learn the vulgar tongue?’ One of the countess’s familiar terms for conviviality was ‘junkitaceous,’ but ladies of equal rank had also little slang words of their own, called things by the very plainest names, and spelt _physician_ with an ‘f.’

There is ample testimony on record that the great countess never hesitated at a jest on the score of its coarseness. The earl was distinguished rather for his pomposity than vulgarity, though a vulgar sentiment marked some of both his sayings and doings. For example, when Lord March visited him at Alnwick Castle, the Earl of Northumberland received him at the gates with this queer sort of welcome: ‘I believe, my lord, this is the first time that ever a Douglas and a Percy met here in friendship.’ The censor who said, ‘Think of this from a Smithson to a true Douglas,’ had ample ground for the exclamation. George III. raised the earl and countess to the rank of duke and duchess in 1766. All the earls of older creation were ruffled and angry at the advancement; but the honour had its drawback. The King would not allow the title to descend to an heir by any other wife but the one then alive, who was the true representative of the Percy line.

The old Northumberland House festivals were right royal things in their way. There was, on the other hand, many a snug, or unceremonious, or eccentric party given there. Perhaps the most splendid was that given in honour of the King of Denmark in 1768. His majesty was fairly bewildered with the splendour. There was in the court what was called ‘a pantheon,’ illuminated by 4,000 lamps. The King, as he sat down to supper, at the table to which he had expressly invited twenty guests out of the hundreds assembled, said to the duke, ‘How did you contrive to light it all in time?’ ‘I had two hundred lamplighters,’ replied the duke. ‘That was a stretch,’ wrote candid Mrs. Delany; ‘a dozen could have done the business;’ which was true.

The duchess, who in early life was, in delicacy of form, like one of the Graces, became, in her more mature years, fatter than if the whole three had been rolled into one in her person. With obesity came ‘an exposition to sleep,’ as Bottom has it. At ‘drawing-rooms’ she no sooner sank on a sofa than she was deep in slumber; but while she was awake she would make jokes that were laughed at and censured the next day all over London. Her Grace would sit at a window in Covent Garden, and be _hail fellow well met_ with every one of a mob of tipsy and not too cleanly-spoken electors. On these occasions it was said she ‘signalised herself with intrepidity.’ She could bend, too, with cleverness to the humours of more hostile mobs; and when the Wilkes rioters besieged the ducal mansion, she and the duke appeared at a window, did salutation to their masters, and performed homage to the demagogue by drinking his health in ale.

Horace Walpole affected to ridicule the ability of the duchess as a verse writer. At Lady Miller’s at Batheaston some rhyming words were given out to the company, and anyone who could, was required to add lines to them so as to make sense with the rhymes furnished for the end of each line. This sort of dancing in fetters was called _bouts rimés_. ‘On my faith,’ cried Walpole, in 1775, ‘there are _bouts rimés_ on a buttered muffin by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland.’ It may be questioned whether anybody could have surmounted the difficulty more cleverly than her Grace. For example:

The pen which I now take and brandish,
Has long lain useless in my standish.
Know, every maid, from her own patten
To her who shines in glossy satin,
That could they now prepare an oglio
From best receipt of book in folio,
Ever so fine, for all their puffing,
I should prefer a butter’d muffin;
A muffin, Jove himself might feast on,
If eaten with Miller, at Batheaston.

To return to the house itself. There is no doubt that no mansion of such pretensions and containing such treasures has been so thoroughly kept from the vulgar eye. There is one exception, however, to this remark. The Duke (Algernon) who was alive at the period of the first Exhibition threw open the house in the Strand to the public without reserve. The public, without being ungrateful, thought it rather a gloomy residence. Shut in and darkened as it now is by surrounding buildings--canopied as it now is by clouds of London smoke--it is less cheerful and airy than the Tower, where the Wizard Earl studied in his prison room, or counted the turns he made when pacing his prison yard. The Duke last referred to was in his youth at Algiers under Exmouth, and in his later years a Lord of the Admiralty. As Lord Prudhoe, he was a traveller in far-away countries, and he had the faculty of seeing what he saw, for which many travellers, though they have eyes, are not qualified. At the pleasant Smithsonian house at Stanwick, when he was a bachelor, his household was rather remarkable for the plainness of the female servants. Satirical people used to say the youngest of them was a grandmother. Others, more charitable or scandalous, asserted that Lord Prudhoe was looked upon as a father by many in the country round, who would have been puzzled where else to look for one. It was his elder brother Hugh (whom Lord Prudhoe succeeded) who represented England as Ambassador Extraordinary at the coronation of Charles X. at Rheims. Paris was lost in admiration at the splendour of this embassy, and never since has the _hôtel_ in the Rue de Bac possessed such a gathering of royal and noble personages as at the _fêtes_ given there by the Duke of Northumberland. His sister, Lady Glenlyon, then resided in a portion of the fine house in the Rue de Bourbon, owned and in part occupied by the rough but cheery old warrior, the Comte de Lobau. When that lady was Lady Emily Percy, she was married to the eccentric Lord James Murray, afterwards Lord Glenlyon. The bridegroom was rather of an oblivious turn of mind, and it is said that when the wedding morn arrived, his servant had some difficulty in persuading him that it was the day on which he had to get up and be married.

There remains only to be remarked, that as the Percy line has been often represented only by an heiress, there have not been wanting individuals who boasted of male heirship.

Two years after the death of Joscelin Percy in 1670, who died the last male heir of the line, leaving an only child, a daughter, who married the Duke of Somerset, there appeared, supported by the Earl of Anglesea, a most impudent claimant (as next male heir) in the person of James Percy, an Irish trunkmaker. This individual professed to be a descendant of Sir Ingram Percy, who was in the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace,’ and was brother of the sixth earl. The claim was proved to be unfounded; but it may have rested on an _illegitimate_ foundation. As the pretender continued to call himself Earl of Northumberland, Elizabeth, daughter of Joscelin, ‘took the law’ of him. Ultimately he was condemned to be taken into the four law courts in Westminster Hall, with a paper pinned to his breast, bearing these words: ‘The foolish and impudent pretender to the earldom of Northumberland.’

In the succeeding century, the well-known Dr. Percy, Bishop of Dromore, believed himself to be the true male representative of the ancient line of Percy. He built no claims on such belief; but the belief was not only confirmed by genealogists, it was admitted by the second heiress Elizabeth, who married Hugh Smithson. Dr. Percy so far asserted his blood as to let it boil over in wrath against Pennant when the latter described Alnwick Castle in these disparaging words: ‘At Alnwick no remains of chivalry are perceptible; no respectable train of attendants; the furniture and gardens are inconsistent; and nothing, except the numbers of unindustrious poor at the castle gate, excited any one idea of its former circumstances.’

‘Duke and Duchess of Charing Cross,’ or ‘their majesties of Middlesex,’ were the mock titles which Horace Walpole flung at the ducal couple of his day who resided at Northumberland House, London, or at Sion House, Brentford. Walpole accepted and satirised the hospitality of the London house, and he almost hated the ducal host and hostess at Sion, because they seemed to overshadow his mimic feudal state at Strawberry! After all, neither early nor late circumstance connected with Northumberland House is confined to memories of the inmates. Ben Jonson comes out upon us from Hartshorn Lane with more majesty than any of the earls; and greatness has sprung from neighbouring shops, and has flourished as gloriously as any of which Percy can boast. Half a century ago, there was a long low house, a single storey high, the ground floor of which was a saddler’s shop. It was on the west side of the old Golden Cross, and nearly opposite Northumberland House. The worthy saddler founded a noble line. Of four sons, three were distinguished as Sir David, Sir Frederick, and Sir George. Two of the workmen became Lord Mayors of London; and an attorney’s clerk, who used to go in at night and chat with the men, married the granddaughter of a king and became Lord Chancellor.

_LEICESTER FIELDS._

In the reign of James I. there was an open space of ground north of what is now called Leicester Square (which by some old persons is still called Leicester Fields), and which was to the London soldiers and civilians of that day very much what Wormwood Scrubs is to the military and their admirers of the present time. Prince Henry exercised his artillery there, and it continued to be a general military exercise-ground far into the reign of Charles I. People trooped joyfully over the lammas land paths to witness the favourite spectacle. The greatest delight was excited by charges of cavalry against lines or masses of dummies, through which the gallant warriors and steeds plunged and battled--thus teaching them not to stop short at an impediment, but to dash right through it.

In 1631 there were unmistakable signs that this land was going to be built over, and people were aghast at the pace at which London was growing. Business-like men were measuring and staking; the report was that the land had been given to Sydney, Earl of Leicester. Too soon the builders got possession, and the holiday folk with military proclivities no longer enjoyed their old ecstasy of accompanying the soldiery to Paggington’s tune of

My masters and friends and good people, draw near.

Why Sydney was allowed to establish himself on the lammas land no one can tell. All that we know is, that Lord Carlisle wrote from Nonsuch, in August 1631, to Attorney-General Heath, informing him that it was the king’s pleasure that Mr. Attorney should prepare a licence to the Earl of Leicester to build upon a piece of ground called Swan Close, in St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a house convenient for his habitation.’

The popular idea of Earl of Leicester is Elizabeth’s Robert Dudley. Well, that earl had a sister, Mary, who married Sir Henry Sydney, of Penshurst. This couple had a son, whom they called Robert, and whom King James created at successive periods Baron Sydney, Viscount Lisle, and Earl of Leicester. And this Earl Robert had a son who, in 1626, succeeded to the earldom, and to him King Charles, in 1631, gave Swan Close and some other part of the lammas land, whereon he erected the once famous Leicester House.

This last Robert was the father of the famous and rather shabby patriot, Algernon Sydney, also of the handsome Henry. He is still more famous as having for daughter Dorothy, the ‘Sacharissa’ with whom Waller pretended to be in love, and he gave his family name to Sydney Alley. When, some few years later, the Earl of Salisbury (Viscount Cranbourn) built a house in the neighbourhood, he partly copied the other earl’s example, and called the road which led to his mansion Cranbourn Alley.

The lammas land thus given away was land which was open to the poor after Lammastide. Peter Cunningham quotes two entries from the St. Martin’s rate-books to this effect: ‘To received of the Honble. Earle of Leicester for ye Lamas of the ground that adjoins the Military Wall, 3_l._’ The ‘military wall’ was the boundary of the Wormwood Scrubs of that day. The Earl also had to pay ‘for the lamas of the ground whereon his house and garden are, and the field that is before his house, near to Swan Close.’ The field before his house is now Leicester Square, ‘but Swan Close,’ says Peter, ‘is quite unknown.’ Lord Carlisle’s letter in the State Paper Office states that the house was to be built ‘_upon_ Swan Close.’

It was a palatial mansion, that old Leicester House. It half filled the northern side of the present square, on the eastern half of that side. Its noble gardens extended beyond the present Lisle Street. At first that street reached only to the garden wall of Leicester House. When the garden itself disappeared the street was lengthened. It was a street full of ‘quality,’ and foreign ambassadors thought themselves lodged in a way not to dishonour their masters if they could only secure a mansion in Lisle Street.

Noble as the mansion was, Robert Sydney Earl of Leicester is the only earl of his line who lived in it, and his absences were many and of long continuance. He was a thrifty man, and long before he died, in 1677, he let the house to very responsible tenants. One of these was Colbert. If the ordinary run of ambassadors were proud to be quartered in Lisle Street, the proper place for the representative of ‘_L’Etat c’est moi_,’ and for the leader of civilisation, was the palace in Leicester Fields; and there France established herself, and there and in the neighbourhood, in hotels, cafés, restaurants, _charcutiers_, _commissionnaires_, refugees, and highly-coloured ladies, she has been ever since.

Colbert probably the more highly approved of the house as it had been dwelt in already by a queen. On February 7, 1662, the only queen that ever lived in Drury Lane--the Queen of Bohemia (daughter of James I.)--removed from Drury House and its pleasant gardens, now occupied by houses and streets, at the side of the Olympic Theatre, to Leicester House. Drury House was the residence of Lord Craven, to whom it was popularly said that the widowed queen had been privately married. Her occupancy of Leicester House was not a long one, for the queen died there on the 12th of the same month.

Six years later, in 1668,the French ambassador, Colbert, occupied Leicester House. Pepys relates how he left a joyous dinner early, on October 21, to join Lord Brouncker, the president, and other members of the Royal Society, in paying a formal return visit to Colbert; but the party had started before Pepys arrived at the Society’s rooms. The little man hastened after them; but they were ‘gone in’ and ‘up,’ and Pepys was too late to be admitted. His wife, perhaps, was not sorry, for he took her to Cow Lane; ‘and there,’ he says, ‘I showed her the coach which I pitch on, and she is out of herself for joy almost.’

It is easy to guess why the Royal Society honoured themselves by honouring Colbert. The great Frenchman was something more than a mere Marquis de Segnelai. Who remembers M. le Marquis? Who does not know Colbert--the pupil of Mazarin, the astute politician, the sharp finance-minister, the patron--nay, the pilot--of the arts and sciences in France? The builder of the French Royal Observatory, and the founder of the Academies of Painting and Sculpture and of the Sciences in France, was just the man to pay the first visit to the Royal Society. Leicester House was nobly tenanted by Colbert, and nobly frequented by the men of taste and of talent whom he gathered about him beneath its splendid roof.

The house fell into other hands, and men who were extremely opposite to philosophers were admitted within its walls _with_ philosophers, who were expected to admire their handiwork. In October 1672, the grave Evelyn called at Leicester House to take leave of Lady Sunderland, who was about to set out for Paris, where Lord Sunderland was the English ambassador. My lady made Evelyn stay to dinner, and afterwards sent for Richardson, the famous fire-eater. A few years ago a company of Orientals, black and white, exhibited certain feats, but they were too repulsive (generally) to attract. What the members of this company did was done two hundred years ago in Leicester Square by Richardson alone. ‘He devoured,’ says Evelyn, ‘brimstone on glowing coals before us, chewing and swallowing them; he melted a large glass and eat it quite up; then, taking a live coal on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster, the coal was blowed on with bellows till it flamed and sparkled in his mouth, and so remained till the oyster gaped and was quite boiled. Then he melted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he drank down as it flamed. I saw it flaming in his mouth a good while. He also took up a thick piece of iron, such as laundresses use to put in their smoothing-boxes, when it was fiery hot, held it between his teeth, then in his hands, and threw it about like a stone; but this I observed, that he cared not to hold very long. Then he stood on a small pot, and bending his body, took a glowing iron in his mouth from between his feet, without touching the pot or ground with his hands; with divers other prodigious feats.’ Such was the singular sort of entertainment provided by a lady for a gentleman after dinner in the seventeenth century and beneath the roof of Leicester House.

Meanwhile Little France increased and flourished in and about the neighbourhood, and ‘foreigners of distinction’ were to be found airing their nobility in Leicester Square and the Haymarket--almost country places both.

Behind Leicester House, and on part of the ground which once formed Prince Henry Stuart’s military parade ground, there was a riding academy, kept by Major Foubert. In 1682, among the major’s resident pupils and boarders, was a handsome dare-devil young fellow, who was said to be destined for the Church, but who subsequently met his own destiny in quite another direction. His name was Philip Christopher Königsmark (Count, by title), and his furious yet graceful riding must have scared the quieter folks pacing the high road of the fields. He had with him, or rather _he_ was with an elder brother, Count Charles John. This elder Count walked Leicester Fields in somewhat strange company--a German Captain Vratz, Borosky, a Pole, and Lieutenant Stern, a third foreigner. To what purpose they associated was seen after that Sunday evening in February 1682, when three mounted men shot Mr. Thomas Thynne (Tom of Ten Thousand) in his coach, at the bottom of the Haymarket. Tom died of his wounds. Thynne had been shot because he had just married the wealthy child-heiress, Lady Ogle. Count Charles John thought _he_ might obtain the lady if her husband were disposed of. The necessary disposal of him was made by the three men named above, after which they repaired to the Counts lodgings and then scattered; but they were much wanted by the police, and so was the Count; when it was discovered that he had suddenly disappeared from the neighbourhood of the ‘Fields,’ and had gone down the river. He was headed, and taken at Gravesend. The subordinates were also captured. For some time indeed Vratz could not be netted. One morning, however, an armed force broke into a Swedish doctor’s house in Leicester Fields, and soon after they brought out Vratz in custody, to the great delight of the assembled mob. At the trial, the Count was acquitted. His younger brother, Philip, swore to an _alibi_, which proved nothing, and the King influenced the judges! The three hired murderers went to the gallows, and thought little of it. Vratz excused the deed, on the ground of murder not having been intended; ‘besides,’ said this sample of the Leicester Fields foreigner of the seventeenth century, ‘I am a gentleman, and God will deal with me accordingly.’ The two counts left England, and made their names notorious in Continental annals. The French riding-master shut up his school behind Leicester House, and removed to a spot where his name still lives: Foubert’s Passage, in Regent Street, opposite Conduit Street, is the site of the academy where that celebrated teacher once instructed young ladies and gentlemen how to ‘witch the world with noble horsemanship.’

We have spoken of the square being almost in the country. It was not the only one which was considered in the same light. In 1698 the author of a book called ‘Mémoires et Observations faites par un Voyageur en Angleterre,’ printed at the Hague in the above year, thus enumerates the London squares or _places_: ‘Les places qui sont dans Londres, ou pour mieux dire, dans les faubourgs, occupent des espaces qui, joints ensemble, en fourniraient un suffisant pour bâtir une grande ville. Ces places sont toutes environnées de balustrades, qui empêchant que les carrosses n’y passant. Les principales sont celles de Lincoln’s Inn Fields, de Moor Fields, de Southampton ou Blumsbury, de St. James, &c., Covent Garden; de Sohoe, ou Place Royale, du Lion rouge (Red Lyon), du Quarré d’Or (Golden Square), et de Leicester Fields.’

All these are said to be in the _suburbs_. Soho Square was called by fashionable people, King Square. It was only vulgar folk who used the prevailing name of Soho.

From early in Queen Anne’s days till late in those of George I., the representative of the Emperor of Germany resided in Leicester House. It was said that Jacobites found admittance there, for plotting or for refuge. It is certain that the imperial residence was never so tumultuously and joyously surrounded as when Prince Eugene arrived in Leicester Square, in the above Queen’s reign, on a mission from the Emperor, to induce England to join with him in carrying on the war. During his brief stay Leicester Fields was thronged with a cheering mobility and a bowing nobility and gentry, hastening to ‘put a distinguished respect’ on Marlborough’s great comrade, who was almost too modest to support the popular honours put on himself. Bishop Burnet and the Prince gossiping together at their frequent interviews at Leicester House have quite a picturesque aspect.

The imperial chaplain there was often as busy as his master. Here is a sample of one turn of his office:

One evening a man, in apparent hurry, knocked at the door of Leicester House, the imperial ambassador’s residence. He was bent on being married, and he accomplished that on which he was bent. This person was the son of a cavalier squire; he was also a Templar, for a time; but he hated law and Fleet Street, and he set up as near to being a courtier as could be expressed by taking lodgings in Scotland Yard, which was next door to the court then rioting at Whitehall. His name was Fielding, and his business was to drink wine, make love, and live upon pensions from female purses. Three kings honoured the rascal: Charles, James, and William; and one queen did him a good turn. For a long time Beau Fielding was the handsomest ass on the Mall. Ladies looked admiringly and languishingly at him, and the cruel beau murmured, ‘Let them look and die.’ Maidens spoke of him as ‘Adonis!’ and joyous widows hailed him ‘Handsome as Hercules!’ It was a mystery how he lived; how he maintained horses, chariot, and a brace of fellows in bright yellow coats and black sarcenet sashes. They were the Austrian colours; for Fielding thought he was cousin to the House of Hapsburg.

Supercilious as he was, he had an eye to the widows. His literature was in Doctors’ Commons, where he studied the various instances of marital affection manifested by the late husbands of living widows. One day he rose from the perusal of a will with great apparent satisfaction. He had just read how Mr. Deleau had left his relict a town house in Copthall Court, a Surrey mansion at Waddon, and sixty thousand pounds at her own disposal. The handsome Hercules resolved to add himself to the other valuables of which widow Deleau could dispose.

Fielding knew nothing whatever of the widow he so ardently coveted; but he, like love, could find out the way. There was a Mrs. Villars, who had dressed the widow’s hair, and she undertook, for a valuable consideration, to bring the pair gradually together. Fielding was allowed to see the grounds at Waddon. As he passed along, he observed a lady at a window. He put his hand on the left side of his waistcoat, and bowed a superlative beau’s superlative bow; and he was at the high top-gallant of his joy when he saw the graceful lady graciously smile in return for his homage. This little drama was repeated; and at last Mrs. Villars induced the lady to yield so very much all at once as to call with her on Fielding at his lodgings. Three such visits were made, and ardent love was made also on each occasion. On the third coming of Hero to Leander, there was a delicious little banquet, stimulating to generous impulses. The impulses so overcame the lady that she yielded to the urgent appeals of Mrs. Villars and the wooer, and consented to a private marriage in her lover’s chambers. The ecstatic Fielding leapt up from her feet, where he had been kneeling, clapt on his jaunty hat with a slap, buckled his bodkin sword to his side with a hilarious snap, swore there was no time like the present, and that he would himself fetch a priest and be back with him on the very swiftest of the wings of love.

That was the occasion on which, at a rather late hour, Fielding was to be seen knocking at the front door of Leicester House. When the door was opened his first inquiry was after the imperial ambassador’s chaplain. The beau had, in James II.’s days, turned Papist; and when Popery had gone out as William came in, he had not thought it worth while to turn back again, and was nominally a Papist still. When the Roman Catholic chaplain in Leicester House became aware of what his visitor required, he readily assented, and the worthy pair might be seen hastily crossing the square to that bower of love where the bride was waiting. The chaplain satisfied her scruples as to the genuineness of his priestly character, and in a twinkling he buckled beau and belle together in a manner which, as he said, defied all undoing.

‘Undoing?’ exclaimed the lover. ‘I marry my angel with all my heart, soul, body, and everything else!’--and he put a ring on her finger bearing the poesy _Tibi soli_--the sun of his life.

In a few days the bubble burst. The lady turned out to be no rich widow, but a Mrs. Wadsworth, who was given to frolicking, and who thought this the merriest frolic of her light-o’-love life. Fielding, who had passed himself off as a count, had not much to say in his own behalf, and he turned the ‘sun of his life’ out of doors. Whither he could turn he knew right well. He had long served all the purposes of the Duchess of Cleveland, the degraded old mistress of Charles II.; and within three weeks of his being buckled to Mrs. Wadsworth by the Leicester Square priest he married Duchess Barbara. Soon after he thrashed Mrs. Wadsworth in the street for claiming him as her lawful husband, and he beat the Duchess at home for asserting that Mrs. Wadsworth was right. Old Barbara did more. She put two hundred pounds into that lady’s hand, to prosecute Fielding for bigamy, and the Duchess promised her a hundred pounds a year for fifteen years if she succeeded in getting him convicted. And the handsome Hercules was convicted accordingly, at the Old Bailey, and was sentenced to be burnt in the hand; but the rascal produced Queen Anne’s warrant to stay execution. And so ended the Leicester Square wedding.

As long as the Emperor’s envoy lived in Leicester Fields he was the leader of fashion. Crowds assembled to see his ‘turn out.’ Sir Francis Gripe, in the ‘Busy-body,’ tempts Miranda by saying, ‘Thou shalt be the envy of the Ring, for I will carry thee to Hyde Park, and thy equipage shall surpass the what-d’ye-call-’em ambassador’s.’

Leicester House was, luckily, to let when the Prince of Wales quarrelled with his father, George I. In that house the Prince set up a rival court, against attending which the ‘London Gazette’ thundered dreadful prohibitions. But St. James’s was dull; Leicester House was ‘jolly’; and the fields were ‘all alive’ with spectators ‘hooraying’ the arrivals. Within, the stately Princess towered among her graceful maids. With regard to her diminutive husband it was said of his visitors,

In his embroidered coat they found him,
With all his strutting dwarfs around him.

Most celebrated among the Leicester House maids of honour was the young, bright, silvery-laughing, witty, well-bred girl, who could not only spell, but could construe Cæsar--the maid of whom Chesterfield wrote--

Should the Pope himself go roaming,
He would follow dear Molly Lepell.

And there rattled that other Mary--Mary Bellenden, laughing at all her lovers, the little, faithless Prince himself at the head of them. She would mock him and them with wit of the most audacious sort, and tell stories to the Princess, at which that august lady would laugh behind her fan, while the wildest, and not the least beautiful of the maids would throw back her handsome head, burst into uncontrollable laughter, and then run across to shock prim Miss Meadows, ‘the prude,’ with the same galliard story. Perhaps the most frolicksome nights at Leicester House were when the Princess of Wales was in the card-room, where a dozen tables were occupied by players, while the Prince, in another room, gave topazes and amethysts to be raffled for by the maids of honour, amid fun and laughter, and little astonishment when the prizes were found to be more or less damaged.

It was a sight for a painter to see these, with other beauties, leaving Leicester Fields of a morning to hunt with the Prince near Hampton. Crowds waited to see them return in the evening; and, when they were fairly housed again and dressed for the evening, lovers flocked around the young huntresses. Then Mary Bellenden snubbed her Prince and master, and walked, whispering, with handsome Jack Campbell; and Molly Lepell blushed and laughed encouragingly at the pleasant phrases poured into her ear by John, Lord Hervey. There Sophy Bellenden telegraphed with her fan to Nanty Lowther; and of _their_ love-making came mischief, sorrow, despair, and death. And there were dark-looking Lord Lumley and his Orestes, Philip Dormer Stanhope; and dark Lumley is not stirred to laugh--as the maids of honour do, silently--as Stanhope follows the Princess to the card-room, imitating her walk and even her voice. This was the ‘Chesterfield’ who thought himself a ‘gentleman.’ The Princess leans on Lady Cowper’s shoulder and affects to admire what she really scorns--the rich dress of the beautiful Mary Wortley Montague. On one of the gay nights in Leicester House, when the Princess appeared in a dress of Irish silk--a present from ‘the Irish parson, Swift’--the Prince spoke in such terms of the giver as to induce Lord Peterborough to remark, ‘Swift has now only to chalk his pumps and learn to dance on the tightrope, to be yet a bishop.’

The above are a few samples of life in the royal household in Leicester Square. There, were born, in 1721, the Duke of Cumberland, who was so unjustly called ‘Butcher’; in 1723, Mary, who married the ‘brute’ Prince of Hesse-Cassel; and in 1724, Louisa, who died--one of the unhappy English Queens of Denmark.

After the father of these children had become George II., his eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, established enmity with his sire, and an opposition court at Leicester House, at Carlton House (which he occupied at the same time), and at Kew.

Frederick, Prince of Wales, has been the object of heavy censure, and some of it, no doubt, was well-deserved. But he had good impulses and good tastes. He loved music, and was no mean instrumentalist. He manifested his respect for Shakespeare by proposing that the managers of the two theatres should produce all the great poet’s plays in chronological order, each play to run for a week. The Prince had some feeling for art, and was willing to have his judgment regulated by those competent to subject it to rule.

In June 1749, some tapestry that had belonged to Charles I. was offered to the Prince for sale. He was then at Carlton House, and he forthwith sent for Vertue. The engraver obeyed the summons, and on being ushered into the presence he found a group that might serve for a picture of _genre_ at any time. The Prince and Princess were at table waiting for dessert. Their two eldest sons, George and Edward, then handsome children, stood in waiting, or feigned the service, each with a napkin on his arm. After they had stood awhile in silence, the Prince said to them, ‘This is Mr. Vertue. I have many curious works of his, which you shall see after dinner.’ Carlton House was a store of art treasures. The Prince, with Luke Schaub in attendance and Vertue accompanying, went through them all. He spoke much and listened readily, and parted only to have another art-conference in the following month.

The illustrious couple were then seated in a pavilion, in Carlton House garden. The Prince showed both knowledge and curiosity with respect to art; and the party adjourned to Leicester House (Leicester Square), where Mr. Vertue was shown all the masterpieces, with great affability on the part of Frederick and his consort. The royal couple soon after exhibited themselves to the admiring people, through whom they were carried in two chairs over Leicester Fields back to Carlton House. Thence the party repaired to Kew, and the engraver, after examining the pictures, dined at the palace, ‘though,’ he says, ‘being entertained there at dinner was not customary to any person that came from London.’

During the tenancy of Frederick, Prince of Wales, Leicester House was the scene of political intrigues and of ordinary private life occurrences: Carlton House was more for state and entertainment. Leicester House and Savile House, which had been added to the former, had their joyous scenes also. The story of the private theatricals carried on in either mansion has been often told. The actors were, for the most part, the Prince’s children. He who was afterwards George III. was among the best of the players, but he had a good master. After his first public address as king, Quin, proud of his pupil, exclaimed, ‘I taught the boy to speak.’ Some contemporary letter-writers could scarcely find lofty phrases enough wherewith to praise these little amateurs. Bubb Doddington, who served the Prince of Wales and lost his money at play to him (‘I’ve nicked Bubb!’ was the cry of the royal gambler, when he rose from the Leicester House card-tables with Bubb’s money in his pocket), Bubb, I say, was not so impressed by the acting of these boys and girls. He rather endured than enjoyed it. On January 11, 1750, all that he records in his diary is, ‘Went to Leicester House to see “Jane Grey” acted by the Prince’s children.’ In the following May, Prince Frederick William was born in Leicester House, ‘the midwife on the bed with the Princess, and Dr. Wilmot standing by,’ and a group of ladies at a short distance. The time was half an hour after midnight. ‘Then the Prince, the ladies, and some of us,’ says Doddington, ‘sat down to breakfast in the next room--then went to prayers, downstairs.’ In June the christening took place, in Leicester House, the Bishop of Oxford officiating. ‘Nobody of either sex was admitted into the room but the actual servants’ (that is, the ladies and gentlemen of the household) ‘except Chief Justice Willes and Sir Luke Schaub.’ Very curious were some of the holiday rejoicings on this occasion. For example, here is a ‘setting out’ from Leicester House to make a day of it, on June 28: ‘Lady Middlesex’ (the Prince’s favourite), ‘Lord Bathurst, Mr. Breton, and I’ (writes Bubb) ‘waited on their Royal Highnesses to Spitalfields, to see the manufactory of silk, and to Mr. Carr’s shop, in the morning. In the afternoon the same company, with Lady Torrington in waiting, went in private coaches to Norwood Forest, to see a settlement of Gipsies. We returned and went to Bettesworth, the conjurer, in hackney coaches.... Not finding him we went in search of the little Dutchman, but were disappointed; and concluded the particularities of this day by supping with Mrs. Cannon, the Princess’s midwife.’ Such was the condescension of royalty and royalty’s servants in the last century!

In March, of the following year, Bubb Doddington went to Leicester House. The Prince told him he ‘had catched cold’ and ‘had been blooded.’ It was the beginning of the end. Alternately a little better and much worse, and then greatly improved, &c., till the night of the 20th. ‘For half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread-and-butter and drank coffee.’ He was ‘suffocated’ in a fit of coughing; ‘the breaking of an abscess in his side destroyed him. His physicians, Wilmot and Lee, knew nothing of his distemper.... Their ignorance, or their knowledge, of his disorder, renders them equally inexcusable for not calling in other assistance.’ How meanly this prince was buried, how shabbily everyone, officially in attendance, was treated, are well known. The only rag of state ceremony allowed this poor Royal Highness was, that his body went in one conveyance and his bowels in another--which was a compliment, no doubt, but hardly one to be thankful for.

The widowed Princess remained in occupation of the mansion in which her husband had died. One of the pleasantest domestic pictures of Leicester House is given by Bubb Doddington, under date November 17, 1753:--

The Princess sent for me to attend her between eight and nine
o’clock. I went to Leicester House, expecting a small company and
a little musick, but found nobody but her Royal Highness. She made
me draw a stool and sit by the fireside. Soon after came in the
Prince of Wales and Prince Edward, and then the Lady Augusta, all
in an undress, and took their stools and sat round the fire with
us. We continued talking of familiar occurrences till between ten
and eleven, with the ease and unreservedness and unconstraint,
as if one had dropped into a sister’s house that had a family,
to pass the evening. It is much to be wished that the Princes
conversed familiarly with more people of a certain knowledge of
the world.

The Princess, however, did not want for worldly knowledge. About this time the Princess Dowager of Wales was sitting pensive and melancholy, in a room in Leicester House, while the two Princes were playing about her. Edward then said aloud to George, ‘Brother, when we are men, you shall marry, and I will keep a mistress.’ ‘Be quiet, Eddy,’ said his elder brother, ‘we shall have anger presently for your nonsense. There must be no mistresses at all.’ Their mother thereon bade them, somewhat sharply, learn their nouns and pronouns. ‘Can you tell me,’ she asked Prince Edward, ‘what a pronoun is?’ ‘Of course I can,’ replied the ingenuous youth; ‘a pronoun is to a noun what a mistress is to a wife--a substitute and a representative.’

The Princess of Wales continued to maintain a sober and dignified court at Leicester House, and at Carlton House also. She was by no means forgotten. Young and old rendered her full respect. One of the most singular processions crossed the Fields in January 1756. Its object was to pay the homage of a first visit to the court of the Dowager Princess of Wales at Leicester House--the visitors being a newly-married young couple, the Hon. Mr. Spencer and the ex-Miss Poyntz (later Earl and Countess of Spencer). The whole party were contained in two carriages and a ‘sedan chair.’ Inside the first were Earl Cowper and the bridegroom. Hanging on from behind were three footmen in state liveries. In the second carriage were the mother and sister of the bride, with similar human adornments on the outside as with the first carriage. Last, and alone, of course, as became her state, in a new sedan, came the bride, in white and silver, as fine as brocade and trimming could make it. The chair itself was lined with white satin, was preceded by a black page, and was followed by three gorgeous lackeys. Nothing ever was more brilliant than the hundred thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds worn by the bride except her own tears in her beautiful eyes when she first saw them and the begging letter of the lover which accompanied them. As he handed her from the chair, the bridegroom seemed scarcely less be-diamonded than the bride. His shoe-buckles alone had those precious stones in them to the value of thirty thousand pounds. They were decidedly a brilliant pair. Public homage never failed to be paid to the Princess. In June 1763, Mrs. Harris writes to her son (afterwards first Lord Malmesbury) at Oxford: I was yesterday at Leicester House, where there were more people than I thought had been in town.’ In 1766 Leicester House was occupied by William Henry, Duke of Cumberland, the last royal resident of that historical mansion, which was ultimately demolished in the year 1806.

But there were as remarkable inhabitants of other houses as of Leicester House. In 1733 there came into the square a man about whom the world more concerns itself than it does about William Henry, and that man is William Hogarth.