Hyde Park. What a world of memories is suggested by the name.

Standing right in the heart of London, it is almost the only surviving out-of-door public pleasure resort left in the West-End, wherein fashion may display itself and take exercise, since St. James’s Park has now no social life, and Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, Old Ranelagh, and Cremorne are long since dead.

Gay as it is now in the season with its well-dressed saunterers, its beautiful equipages, its noble trees, and its wide expanse of water, it conjures up dark and evil memories, for the Park has been the scene of stirring events in our national history. Nor is its romantic mystery entirely of the past, even now.

Surrounded by the palaces of the rich, the resort of the favoured ones of the earth, for whose wealth and ostentation it provides a fitting background; it forms also the refuge of the vicious and the destitute, and, alas, its green sward serves as the dormitory of filthy vagrants, whose very existence in this city of boundless wealth is an eyesore and a reproach. There, vice and virtue still jostle each other, poverty and riches, greed and simplicity: there, every creed is expounded, every grievance aired, every nostrum advocated with violent vociferation hard by the spot where, upon the fatal Triple Tree of Tyburn, scores of miserable martyrs went to their doom for daring to put into words the thoughts that were their own.

The Park now extends from Park Lane to Kensington Gardens, and from the Bayswater Road to Knightsbridge; but the creation of Kensington Gardens in the reign of George II.—sheltering the Royal Palace where Queen Victoria was born in 1819—robbed Hyde Park of 300 acres of land. Queen Caroline devoted much time and thought to the formation of the Serpentine and the beautifying of the surroundings of her Palace.

Roughly speaking, Hyde Park is about 3¼ miles round, or covers an extent of 360 acres. This is by no means enormous, not as large as the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, nor as wild as Thier gaarten in Berlin, but there are trees in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens which far surpass in bulk and beauty the trees of either of these Continental rivals. We have in Hyde Park none of the “ancestral statues” such as Berlin has to represent the noble army of the Kaiser’s forebears. Our Park is not quite like the Castellana in Madrid, where fashion drives from the Prado during the dusk, shut up in truly Spanish fashion in closed carriages, or the Prater in Vienna, where so many beautiful women may be seen; nor is it nearly as large as the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, which, however, is more of wild common than cultivated land.

Hyde Park differs from all these; and Hyde Park stands within a huge city, and not a mile or two outside. It is not newly planted or freshly made, and some of the trees within its railings, dating back through many centuries, would be hard to rival in any land. So interesting, indeed, are the trees and shrubs and plants, the birds and beasts, that a list will be found in an appendix.

At an early period in the history of Great Britain, this district must have been part of the vast forest that lay inland from the little British settlement, founded on the banks of the Thames before the Romans landed. These early inhabitants of London lived in rude huts, probably stretching from where the Tower now stands to Dowgate, their simple tenements forming the beginning of the present great throbbing heart of the Empire.

It is probably true that at the time of the Saxons, parts of the Park of to-day were cultivated in the primitive fashion of the race; while the forests afforded good feeding-ground for the hogs which later formed such an important item in the farming operations of our ancestors.

It must be remembered that a forest in ancient times meant not only a thickly wooded area, but also wide open glades and spaces, in which simple homesteads nestled and cattle grazed. In these the Saxons, according to the sparse records of the period, turned their attention to their “wyrt-tun” (plant-enclosure) or “wyrt-geard” (plant-yard), from which probably originated the modern kitchen garden. The leek seems to have been the favourite object of culture as a vegetable, the name leac being a pure Anglo-Saxon word, and in the old MSS. the terms “leac-tun” and “leac-ward” are equivalent to the modern designations “kitchen garden” and “gardener.” The rose and the lily are mentioned; but whether cultivated or not is a matter of uncertainty, for probably the only plants cherished and propagated were those which provided material for food, or had medicinal qualities of value.

Later, as will be seen, an orchard stood in Hyde Park, and in due course many other queer institutions and customs within that field will be disclosed, for Hyde Park has, indeed, had a curious history; so curious that it reads more like fiction than fact.

As Hyde Park, however, its importance really began under Henry VIII., who seized it from the Church. Then it became Hyde Park for the first time; before that it was merely grazing land and ditches of no particular interest, known as “The Manor of Hyde.”

Crown hunting lands were called Forests, Chases, and Parks.

Forests were portions of land consisting both of woodland and pasture circumscribed by certain bounds, within which the right of hunting was reserved exclusively for the King, and subject to a code of special laws, often of great severity, and a special staff of officers—Verderers, Regarders, Agistors, Foresters, and Woodwards.

A Chase was, like a Forest, unenclosed, but it had no special code of laws, offenders being subject to the Civil Law, and its custodians were only keepers and woodwards.

A Park was like a Chase, as to laws and custodians, but was always enclosed by a wall or paling. Later, Parks and Chases could be held by private individuals, but a Forest could only belong to a King.

Situated as Hyde Park now is, right in the heart of the great city, with its seven million inhabitants, it seems well-nigh impossible to picture the same place even half a century ago, standing as it then did on the border of market gardens. Yet such was the case. The Memoirs of a modern artist like William Frith, R.A., painter of the once famous “Derby Day,” and only published at the end of the nineteenth century, speak of the writer’s youthful rambles through the market gardens on which now stands Cromwell Road, adjacent to the Park.

A perfect storehouse of such recollection is Frederic Harrison, historian, essayist, Positivist, and man of letters. In 1907, referring to Hyde Park, he wrote me the following:

“I am more of a boy at seventy-five than I was at fifteen”; and then he goes on to say how well he remembers the neighbourhood where Tyburn formerly stood.

“When I came to London in 1840, Connaught Place was nearly the farthest western extension of regular houses along the Bayswater Road. From Albion Street, westwards and northwards, there were open market gardens. Hyde Park Gardens and Square, Oxford and Cambridge Squares, Gloucester and Sussex Squares were just beginning to emerge, and I have played cricket on the site of Westbourne Terrace. At that time a long brick wall ran along the north side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens beside the Bayswater Road, and very dismal and dirty it was. There was no Marble Arch then, and the burial-ground was used daily. Notting Hill Gate, of course, was a “pike.” Working people, servants in livery, and dogs were not allowed in Kensington Gardens. On the occasion of a storm the rule was relaxed, and footmen for once were allowed to bring in the umbrellas!

“My father, who was born in the eighteenth century, as a boy lived in No. 9 Berkeley Street, opposite to the garden of Devonshire House, in the house which my aunt ultimately sold to Prince Louis Napoleon. About the year 1810, the boys would often spend a holiday in Hyde Park, which was then a deer-park, as rural and solitary as Windsor Forest now. Of course, there was neither bridge over the Serpentine nor Powder Magazine. The corner of the Park between Kensington Gardens and the Serpentine was a solitude, where the boys would bring their baskets and picnic.

“Sixty years ago I can remember magnificent forest trees, chestnuts, oaks, and elms, in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, as fine as any in this island. They are nearly all gone. I have seen about a thousand swept away.

“The rows of carriages, often two deep, continued in Hyde Park down to about 1860, as thick as shown in Doyle’s sketches for Pip’s Diary in Punch. Ten or twenty thousand ‘bucks’ or ‘dandies’ hung over the rails on the footpath to look on. And the carriages were so closely packed in line that they could only just walk. On one occasion, about 1856, the throng of carriages to see the muster of the Four-in-Hand Club Drags was so great that the carriages could not be extricated from the line. Many had to remain into the night, and the fine ladies were obliged to descend and walk home in the dusk.

“The famous tearing down of the railings of the Park in 1866 was an accident, and almost a joke. A good-humoured crowd had gathered to see what Mr. Edmond Beales and the Reform League would do when the police stopped them from entering the Park. Mr. Beales turned back and went home, and never knew what happened, as he told me himself, till he reached his home at night. The crowd, seeing no fun, began to amuse themselves with singing and climbing up on the railing, which was hardly strong enough, or high enough, to stop a flock of sheep. Suddenly, with shouts of laughter, the rail fell inwards, and the crowd naturally followed, but without a thought of any concerted action. The people got hot and angry on the following days. But the famous Hyde Park Riot of 1866 was a mere street scramble owing to the rotten state of the old railing.”

These are the words of a living writer, and yet how much is changed. Cricket on the site of Westbourne Terrace seems almost as remote as the hundreds, aye, thousands, of hangings that took place near where the Marble Arch now stands. There stood Tyburn, probably the most gruesome, gory spot in the whole of the British Isles.

The brick wall has long since disappeared, and even the inner railings between the side-walks and the road have almost all gone.

Wisely Tyburn has been swept away by its later rulers. Not a vestige of the name survives to remind the passers-by that it once existed, except on the iron tablet which marks the site of the old turnpike gate, and bears the following inscription:

This iron plate is about 4 feet high, and is a little to the west of the clock-house at the Marble Arch, just opposite Edgware Road. So it was well within the last hundred years that Tyburn Gate disappeared.

Hyde Park, as a place for intrigue, strongly appealed to the dramatist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and has been immortalised by many poets. Ben Jonson speaks of it in the Prologue of The Staple News, and in The World in the Moon (1620). An old ballad in the Roxburgh Collection sings:

Shirley, too, named one of his plays Hyde Park, and laid his plot within its boundaries. Pepys went to see the performance of the play, and formed a poor opinion of it. Other authors have written of the Park in this sense, as a background for dramatic tales of intrigue; such as Etherage in The Man of Mode (1676), Howard in The English Monsieur (1674), Southerne in The Maid’s Last Prayer (1693), Farquhar in The Constant Couple (1700), and Congreve in The Way of the World (1760).

From those far distant days to the present Hyde Park has never lost its prestige as a meeting-place for all classes of English Society; and the present volume is an attempt to depict its story in a more or less connected form.

Nor must the grim records of Tyburn, so closely associated with the Park, be forgotten. From the date of the first public hanging on the outskirts of the Park in 1196, right down to late in the eighteenth century, a constant succession of unhappy beings were done to death here, sometimes for crimes which in our more merciful days would be hardly punished by a forty-shilling fine; and in the dread days of the religious persecution in the times of the Tudors, this place of heroic martyrdom saw some of the sublimest deaths in the history of our land. Upon hurdles, bound in ignominy, down Snow Hill and along the Oxford Road, just stopping for a last stirrup-cup to speed them upon their way at St. Giles’s Spital, were drawn martyrs and malefactors innumerable.

The doomed Carthusians, the Maid of Kent, heroic Campion, the miserable Dr. Lopez and his Portuguese confederates; priests, protestants, patriots, and rogues, for ages all such took their last look on earth at Hyde Park; first from the rise behind Connaught Terrace, and later from the open space at the corner of the Edgware Road.

Sporting ground, shambles, dwelling-place, scene of intrigue, theatre of Royal magnificence and military display, the Park through the centuries may be said almost to epitomise the history of England, and to the present day it has never ceased to be interesting.

The enormous crowds that frequent the place even now is seen by the fact that it contains about 35,000 chairs, and even that number is often insufficient in the height of the season. Hundreds of long wooden benches, too, are scattered all over the Park, where “Love’s young dream” continues from morn till eve, year in year out. Soldiers from the barracks hard by at Knightsbridge make love to pretty nursemaids; young men from the shops in Bayswater or Kensington whisper sweet nothings into the ears of handsome girls, and, according to the practice favoured by them, sit with their arm round one another’s neck or waist.

Various classes are to be found in Hyde Park. For instance, the Élite drive on summer afternoons from five to seven, when four or five rows of motors and carriages moving along at crawling pace is quite a common sight. The fashionable drive used to be from Hyde Park Corner to Knightsbridge Barracks, but every few years fashions change, and during the last two seasons far more carriages were to be found between Hyde Park Corner and the Marble Arch.

Every afternoon when she is in town, the Queen drives round the Park between six and seven. There is no pomp or show. A mounted policeman goes in front to clear the way, and at a distance of fifty yards follows the royal carriage, just an ordinary, high C-spring barouche with red wheels, and a couple of men-servants in black livery with black cockades. Behind the coachman sits the Queen of England. She often has guests with her, but if not, drives alone with a Lady-in-Waiting, generally the Hon. Charlotte Knollys, one of that faithful family attached to the Court, and a Gentleman-in-Waiting opposite.

The carriage passes along at an ordinary trot, and every one bows, the gentlemen raising their hats, in fact keeping them off until the Queen has passed. No woman in Europe knows how to bow more graciously than Queen Alexandra. She is blessed with a long swan-like neck, exquisitely set upon her shoulders, and whether in her carriage or in a dÉcolletÉe gown at Buckingham Palace, the gracious inclination of her head is a form of queenly bow to be admired.

Her Majesty is always very quietly dressed, never wearing anything outrÉ in fashion. When huge sleeves are worn, hers are of medium size. She is probably the best-gowned woman in Europe, and is certainly one of the most simply dressed. Since the death of her eldest son, in 1892, she has never worn bright colours,—black, white, grey, dark blue, purple, or heliotrope being her favourites.

When the King or Queen is in town, the centre gate of the Marble Arch is thrown open for them to pass through, and the ground is neatly sanded. This rule is also observed at the entrance to Constitution Hill.

Probably the Park is at its fullest in this year of grace 1908 on Sunday between twelve and two; there are practically no carriages; it is the hour of the Prayer-Book Brigade. Everybody has been to Church, and those who have not are said to carry small books in their hands, so that their friends may imagine they have freshly returned from a service. On hot days in May, June, and July, it is delightfully cool beneath the trees from the Achilles Statue to Stanhope Gate, and literally thousands of people sit and chat to their friends at that time. Some walk up and down while looking for acquaintances or waiting for a chair; others go early and pay for their seat, determined to occupy it until it is time to go home to luncheon. Some of the most beautiful women in Europe may be seen in the Park on Sunday.

Of course the place is public, and the crowd is therefore mixed. It is not as aristocratic, for instance, as the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, or the lawn for the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown; but then it is not one day in the year, but any and every Sunday during the warmer months, that these people may be found congregated together. Two o’clock being the ordinary luncheon hour, there is a general exodus a little before that time, and it was amusing in 1906 to notice the people all endeavouring to engage the smart public motor landaulettes and hansoms which plied for hire at Hyde Park Corner for the first time. They were a new invasion—one that quickly found favour in the eyes of the public, followed a year later by taximeter cabs.

After tea on Sundays in the summer the Park fills again. People stroll in to have chats with their friends or rest in the cool shade; and again those thousands of chairs are occupied.

It is curious how the classes divide themselves. Between the Achilles Monument and the Serpentine is a bandstand, round which a certain proportion of the seats are railed off. In the summer evenings excellent music is given, but very few of the upper-ten avail themselves of the privilege which the middle classes so eagerly enjoy. It is a great occasion for shop people and servants, who seem to thoroughly revel in those Sunday Concerts, which each year prove more and more successful.

The year passes in Hyde Park like the figures in a kaleidoscope.

In January, when it is dark in the mornings and cold in the evenings, the riders come out about ten, and the drivers, dwindled in numbers, mostly vacate their vehicles and take a quiet walk before luncheon. All is cold and damp and drear.

Then come the early spring flowers. Yellow, white, or purple crocuses raise their heads in the Park. They are not planted in beds or in stiff rows; but come up in patches of colour in the grass. Here a mass of yellow, there a mass of heliotrope, filling the air with the early cry of spring. These crocuses, in themselves a joy, are quickly followed by daffodils, narcissi, and groups of gorse and broom. Then the leaves unfold upon the trees, laburnum fights pinky-brown copper beech, horse-chestnuts raise their blooms, hawthorn scents the air, and lilac abounds. Then it is that the hyacinth beds become a dream along the precincts of Park Lane, giving forth sweet scents and glorious masses of colour. Flower beds were first instituted in Hyde Park in 1860.

Rhododendrons burst into flower, quickly followed by those gorgeous beds of yellow azalea that we, who love the Park, know so well.

The bedding plants for Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, and St. James’s Park are largely supplied from the nursery gardens near the Ranger’s Lodge in the centre of the Park itself, and not from Kew, as is ordinarily supposed.

In the autumn these plants are given away to the poor of the parishes who care to apply for them.

People have returned to town. The hunting is over; the Riviera has ceased to attract. Egypt is too hot. The Academy and Opera are open, and the London Season has begun.

Certain hours are given up to certain things, and the first occupants of the Park in the early morning are the members of the Liver Brigade. As a child at the age of seven, and for ten years after that, I rode with my father every morning at half-past seven in Rotten Row, returning to breakfast, to change my habit, and go to school; and for nearly ten years more I did the same with my husband, going—instead of to school, on my return—to the kitchen to order the dinner. My acquaintance with Hyde Park is, therefore, not imaginary, but real—very real.

The Liver Brigade in the Park is a regular London institution. Judges, barristers, surgeons, physicians, actors, writers, African millionaires, and German Jews all ride in the morning between half-past seven and ten o’clock. Many of them are known to each other, consequently friendly greetings and pleasant chats are exchanged while the Liver Brigade take exercise, knowing well that on their return home to bath and breakfast they will have to settle down to the Law Courts, Chambers, or the Consulting-room for the rest of the day. That hour’s ride in the morning has been the salvation of many a brain-weary man and woman.

In the eighties and nineties the people dressed most smartly. I well remember my tight-fitting habit and tall silk hat, my white stock in winter, or high collar and white tie in summer. The menfolk wore silk hats and black hunting coats, smart breeches and high patent boots. All this is changed; a go-as-you-please air has overtaken the riders. The women wear loose coats with sack backs, cotton shirts, sailor hats, billycocks—anything and everything that brings comfort, even if it deprives them of grace. The men don caps and tweeds, brown boots and putties, in fact, any rough-and-tumble country kit.

No sooner has the Liver Brigade departed than the Park is given over to the babies and nurses. In the summer these women are entirely dressed in white piquÉ, and in winter in grey cloth or flannel. There are literally hundreds—one might say thousands—of nurses and aristocratic babies disporting themselves every day in Hyde Park. The infants go home fairly early to their midday sleep, at which hour the governesses and bigger children, having accomplished their morning’s work, come out to the Park, which by twelve o’clock is given over to older childhood.

These are the regular habituÉs, but there are others who are constant visitors to Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. There are men and women who, year in year out, come daily with their little bags of crumbs to feed the birds,—people who are followed by whole flocks of sparrows and pigeons, or, nearer the Serpentine, by ducks and swans.

Except in the height of the season, men and women no longer dress smartly in the Park. The magnificent horses, high-steppers with well-arched necks and splendid paces, are rapidly being superseded by the motor-car. Instead of beautifully dressed ladies and smartly groomed men in silk hats and frock coats, sitting in carriages, women smothered in veils and hideous goggles, and men looking more like cut-throat villains than gentlemen, are seen dashing through the Park in motors. No more unbecoming attire was ever invented for men and women than the modern motor get-up.

Ten weeks complete the great social event known as the London season. No sooner has July dawned than palms and canes, semi-tropical flowers and plants, appear upon the scene. Their pots are so cleverly planted that the date palm, the sugarcane, and the sweet corn of the Indies really look as if they were growing out of the grass itself, and convert Hyde Park into a semi-tropical botanical garden for a couple of months. Then station-omnibuses laden with babies and bundles begin to ply our streets, and day by day the crowd grows thinner in the Park. By August only foreigners with Baedekers are to be found where Society fluttered but a short time before. Then come autumn tints, winter fogs, and utter desolation.

And thus from generation to generation Hyde Park has been the playground of London’s rich and poor, the wide theatre upon which their tragedies and comedies have been enacted, the forum in which many public liberties have been demanded, the scene where national triumphs have been celebrated.

To write fully the history of a space so crowded with pregnant memories would be too great a task for any one pen, nor could a single book hope to hold one tithe of the interesting memories which throng these precincts; but I trust that the rapid survey given in the following pages, of some of the famous happenings and curious traditions connected with the place, may not be unwelcome to those who now adorn Hyde Park.