Walter Besant

After the Palace and the Monastery, the City of Refuge, the Sign of the Red Pale, and the Borough at Election-time, we turn to the City streets and the people.

Now, if we include that part of the City lying west and north of Charing Cross and Pall Mall, the part which has been built and occupied since the seventeenth century, we are face to face with nothing less than the history of the British aristocracy during the last two centuries. This history has never been written; it is a work which cannot even be touched upon in these pages: to consider any part of it in a single chapter would be absurd. It belongs, like the history of the House of Commons, to the City of Westminster, because most of its events took place, and most of the people concerned lived, within the limits of that City. Also, like the House of Commons, the quarter where the aristocracy have had their town houses for two hundred years belongs to the national history, and must be treated independently of the City.

The British aristocracy was never so much a Caste apart as during the hundred and fifty years ending about the middle of this century. Their younger sons had quite abandoned the ancient practice of entering the City and going into trade; every kind of money-making, except the collection of rents from land, had become unworthy of a gentleman. No one could buy

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GRIFFINS FROM THE ROOF OF HENRY VII.’S CHAPEL.

or sell and continue to call himself a gentleman. There was a noble Caste and a trading Caste, quite separate and apart. The noble Caste possessed everything worth having; the whole of the land was theirs; all the great offices of state, all the lesser offices worth having, were theirs; the commands in the army and navy were theirs—not only the command of armies and fleets, but also of regiments and men-o’-war; the rich preferments of the Church—the deaneries, canonries, and bishoprics—were theirs; the House of Commons belonged to them (even the popular or radical members belonged to the Caste; in the election which was treated in the last chapter, Fox, the Friend of Liberty, the chosen of the Independent Electors, belonged to the Caste as much as his opponents, Lord Hood and Sir Cecil Wray). Everything was theirs, except the right to trade; they must not trade. To be a banker was to be in trade; the richest merchant was a tradesman as much as the grocer who sold sugar and treacle.

The materials for this history are abundant; there are memoirs, letters, biographies, autobiographies, recollections, in profusion. The life of the Caste during this period of a hundred and fifty years can be fully written. The historian, if we were able to exercise the art of selection, would present a series of highly dramatic chapters; there would be found in them love, jealousy, and intrigue; there would be ambition and cabal; there would be back-stairs interest; there would be Court gossip, and scandal, and whisperings; there would be gaming, racing, coursing, prize-fighting, drinking; there would be young Mohocks and old profligates; there would be ruined rakes and splendid adventurers—in a word, there would be the whole life of pleasure, and the whole life of ambition. It would be, worthily treated, a noble work.

This Caste, which enjoyed all the fruits of the earth, for which the rest of the nation toiled with the pious contentment enjoined by the Church, created for its own separate use a society which was at the same time free and unrestrained, yet courtly and stately. No one not born and bred in the Caste could attain its manners; if an outsider by any accident found himself in this circle, he thought he had got into the wrong paradise, and asked leave to exchange. Again, among the Caste, which, with a few brilliant exceptions, was without learning and without taste, were found all the patrons of art, poetry, and Belles Lettres. Still more remarkable, while the Caste had no religion, it owned the patronage of all the best livings in the Church. And, while it enjoyed an immunity never before claimed by any class of men, from morality, principle, and self-restraint, the Caste was the encouraging and fostering patron of every useful and admirable virtue, such as thrift, fidelity, temperance, industry, perseverance, frugality, and contentment. A wonderful history, indeed—and all of it connected with Westminster!

Of course, another side presents itself. The Caste was brave—its courage was undoubted; it was never without ability of the very highest kind, though a great deal of its ability was allowed to lie waste for want of stimulus; it was proud; if the occasion had arrived—it was very near arriving—the Caste would have faced the mob as dauntlessly as its cousin in France, whom the mob might kill, but could neither terrify nor degrade.

Again, there is the literary side. With the exception of a few names belonging to Fleet Street, and a few belonging to Grub Street, most of our literary history belongs to the quarter lying west of Temple Bar—in other words, to Westminster. One might go from street to street, pointing out the residence of Byron here, and of Moore there, of Swift, of Pope, of Addison. And in this way one could compile a chapter as interesting as a catalogue.

In the same way, the connection of street and noble residents might be carefully noted down, with the same result. This, indeed, has been already done by Jesse. If you read one or two of his chapters, taken almost at random, you will presently feel that your wits are wandering. For instance, here is a passage concerning one of the least distinguished streets in Westminster:

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GRIFFINS FROM THE ROOF OF HENRY VII.’S CHAPEL.

“In Cannon Row stood the magnificent residence of Anne Stanhope, the scorned and turbulent wife of the great Protector, Duke of Somerset. Here, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was the inn or palace of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby. Close by was the mansion of Henry, second Earl of Lincoln, who sat in judgment on Mary Queen of Scots, and who was one of the peers deputed by Queen Elizabeth to arrest the Earl of Essex in his house. Here, in the reign of James I., the Sackvilles, Earls of Dorset, had their town residence; and here, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was the mansion of the great family of the Cliffords, Earls of Cumberland.”

How much, gentle reader, are you likely to remember of such information as this after reading twenty pages of it? How much, indeed, is it desirable to remember? Why encumber the brain with names and titles which are meaningless to your mind, and can restore for you no more of the past life and bygone actors than a handful of Helen’s dust could restore her beauty?

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GRIFFIN FROM THE ROOF OF HENRY VII.’S CHAPEL.

There is, however, another part of Westminster—a part which concerns us more than Caste Land. It is the part which lies around the ancient precincts of the Abbey. Here we touch Westminster; here we are not on land that belongs to the country, nor among people who belong to the country; we are in Westminster proper—in the streets which cannot even now, when all the former spaces of separation are covered up and built over, be called a part of London or a suburb of London. They are Westminster.

These streets possessed, until quite recently, the picturesqueness that belongs to the aged vagrom man. He hardly exists in these days; but one remembers him. He was old—age had lent no touch of reverence or dignity; he was clad in many-colored rags and fluttering duds; he leaned upon a stick; his white locks were the only part of him that presented any appearance of cleanliness; his face was lined and puckered, his features were weatherbeaten and prominent, his eyes were wolfish. He was admirable—in a picture. Such were the streets, such the houses, of Westminster—that part of the City lying round about the Abbey. Those on the west and south of the Abbey are comparatively new streets. In the excellent map by Richard Newcourt showing London and Westminster in the year 1658, we find Tothill Street completely built; Rochester Row does not exist; Great St. Peter Street has a few houses, Great College Street none; St. Anne’s Street has houses with gardens. The crowded part of Westminster in the seventeenth century was that narrow area north of New Palace Yard, of which King Street was the most important thoroughfare. When we consider that this place was a great center of trade long before and long after the building of London Bridge; that for six hundred years it was close to the King’s House, with all his followers, huscarles, archers, or bodyguard—we are not surprised that there has always been about these streets the flavor of the tavern—always the smell of casks and pint pots, of stale beer and yesterday’s wine. Where there are soldiers there are taverns; there also are the minstrels and the music and the girls. It may also be concluded beyond a doubt that the Sanctuary was a thirsty place. Long after Court and Camp and Sanctuary had left the place the name and fame of Westminster for its taverns and its dens remained. These streets were a byword and a reproach well into the present century. One or two streets there were that claimed for a generation or so a kind of respectability. They were the streets lying between New Palace Yard and Whitehall, such as King Street, and Cannon Street, with one or two of later growth,—of seventeenth and eighteenth century respectability,—such as Petty France, Cowley Street, and College Street.

King Street, especially, if one may brave the reproach of cataloguing, is full of history. Here lived Oliver Cromwell; his house is said to have stood on the north side of the Blue Boar’s Head, of which the court still remains. Sir Henry Wootton lived here; one of Caxton’s successors set up his press in this street. It was formerly, as we have already seen, a picturesque and beautiful street, with its gate at either end, its overhanging gables, and its signs. Half a dozen taverns stood in this street—the Swan, the Dog, the Bell, the Blue Boar’s Head, etc. This little street, now so insignificant, was formerly, we are always, by every writer, called upon to observe, the “highway” between London and Westminster. But then nobody went by road who could go by river. The Thames was the highway—not King Street—between London and Westminster; by the Thames the Port of London sent its goods to the Court of Westminster or Whitehall;

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ROOM IN THE KING’S ARMS, TOTHILL STREET, WESTMINSTER.

by the river came down country produce for Court and Abbey. There was doubtless some traffic which found its way along King Street; but for communication between Westminster and all other parts of the country except the City and the Strand, we must remember that there was not only the river, but the old, old road, that which formerly ran down from the North to the marsh at St. James’s Park, and began again on the other side of the river; the marsh was now drained, and the road, no longer a ford, ran across it and formed the most direct entrance to the Court or the Abbey from the North. We must remember, again, that nobody walked who could ride; and that nobody rode who could take boat; walking along streets unpaved, foul with every kind of refuse, muddy after rain, stinking in dry weather, was never pleasant; therefore no one went afoot who could go any other way. The streets which contained shops, such as Cheapside, were kept clean and protected by posts; but King Street was not one of these. Men who rode into Westminster entered either by King Street or by Tothill Street; but no one came afoot if they could come by boat.

In King Street died Spenser “for lack of bread,” said Ben Jonson. But he goes on to add that the dying poet refused money sent him by the Earl of Essex. The story has been accepted without question by almost everyone who writes upon Spenser. Yet it is incredible on the face of it, when one begins to consider, for the simple reason that starving men never do refuse help, even at the last gasp. There is no doubt that in the Irish Rebellion Spenser lost one child, who perished in the flames of the burning house. He escaped, it is said, with his wife. That he was desperately poor at this juncture we need not doubt; that he was wretched is also without doubt; that he died in misery we need not doubt; but if the Earl of Essex sent him money he would certainly have taken it if he was starving; if his wife was with him he would have taken it for her sake if he was dying.

As a matter of fact he was not suffering from want of money; and since the death of an infant does not often kill the child’s father, we need not suppose that he died of heart-break. Nor is it probable that he died of a broken heart over the loss of MSS. He was Sheriff of Cork; he had his estate, which was not lost, although the rebels burned his house—they burned his house because he was Sheriff. He had, besides the estate, a small pension; he had still his wife and his children, and his friends. He was only forty-six years of age, a time when the world is still lying fair and far stretched out before the pilgrim. None the less he died—of what? Of fever caused by the excitement and the trouble of the rebellion; by exposure; by this or by that—he died. He was buried in the Abbey near the resting-place of Chaucer; all the poets wrote elegies and threw them, together with the pens that wrote them, into the grave of “the little man who wore short hair.” And his widow married again and quarreled with her eldest son about the estate; and there were descendants of Edmund Spenser in Ireland until a hundred years ago, when the last one died.

Queen Square, which is now Queen Anne’s Gate, and Petty France, now York Street, represent the respectable side of old Westminster. Peg Woffington lived in Queen Square; so did Bentham. In Petty France Milton lived when he gave up his chambers in Whitehall Palace. His house was taken down a year or two ago. Hazlitt occupied Milton’s house for some years.

GRIFFINS FROM THE ROOF OF HENRY VII.’S CHAPEL.

Another respectable quarter was the group of streets at the back of Dean’s Yard, known as Great College Street, Barton Street, and Cowley Street. There is not anywhere in and about the cities of London and Westminster a more secluded, peaceful retreat than can be found in these three streets. The first, whose upper windows look out upon the broad lawns and noble trees, formerly the garden of the Infirmary, now the garden of the Canons, might be a street in Amsterdam if its ground-floor windows were only higher; under this street still flows the stream which once helped to separate the Isle of Bramble from the marshes and the meadows; halfway down, hidden by stables, stands the old Jewel House of the King’s House of Westminster; at the west end is the modern gateway, still preserving some semblance of its former appearance, the last that is left of the four gateways of the Abbey. It leads into Dean’s Yard, the quietest of squares, and, under ancient gates, into ancient cloisters and covered ways, and the relics and fragments of the Benedictine Abbey. Behind Great College Street stand Barton Street and Cowley Street. And for quiet and solitude these should belong to a city of the dead; or better still, they should be what they pretend to be. For the houses among themselves pretend to be the Cathedral Close; they whisper to the stray traveler: “Seek no farther. This, and none other, is the Close of the Cathedral or Collegiate Church of St. Peter. In this quiet retreat live, we assure you, the canons and the minor canons. Step lightly, lest you disturb their meditations.” There are many such spots about London which thus pretend, and so carry themselves with pride: one such, for instance, is in Bermondsey, affected by the memory of the Abbey and the presence of the Parish Church; and another there is at Hampstead; and in most country towns there is such a quiet, dignified Street; one such street, so quiet, so dignified, stands in Albany, New York State; and one in Boston, Massachusetts.

Once there was a tavern in Barton Street, known to all men by its sign as The Salutation. The excellence of the painting is proved by the fact that in the Commonwealth the same sign without alteration served for a new name—viz., The Soldier and Citizen. After

the Restoration the Soldier once more became an Angel and the Citizen returned to the Virgin Mary. But I think that the tavern languished. Cowley Street was not named after the poet, as one would like to believe, but after the village of Cowley, in Middlesex, by Mr. Booth Barton, who built the two streets. There are other associations about these streets; the name of Keats is mentioned. But they belong to the catalogue. It is enough for us to recall the babbling brook which once ran along the roadway here—on this side of the gray stone wall which still stands, the wall of the Monastery. It ran then through the bending reeds and the tall grasses of the marsh, and so out into the silver Thames; the swans came sailing up the brook, and made nests in the low bank of the eyot. The Abbot’s barge was moored close by the gateway, of which a modern successor still stands; and there were drawn up on the bank the boats in which the Abbot’s fishermen went out to catch salmon and sturgeon in the river. Later on they built these quiet houses along one side, something after the Dutch style; and they hung up before their fronts a curtain of green Virginia creeper, but not to hide from the windows the view of the broad lawns, the flower-beds, and the walnut trees of the garden behind the wall.

This part of Westminster has always been full of taverns; first for the solace of the men-at-arms, afterward for that of the Members of Parliament. The tavern has always been the national place of recreation and rest; for a time, it is true, the coffee-house displaced it, but only for a time—the tavern came back again to favor. The signs of these inns show the date of their erection. There was the White Hart of Richard II.; the Brown Bear of Warwick; the White Swan of Henry V.; the Old Rose of Henry VII. And there were the more common signs: the Blue Boar, the Salutation, the George, the Green Dragon, The Barley Mow, the Heaven tavern, the Fleece. One of the oldest of these taverns, the Cock, remained with its open court and its galleries till twenty years ago, when it was pulled down to make room for the Aquarium. The rafters and timbers of this tavern were of cedar, and the interior was also adorned with many curious carvings.

More remarkable than the taverns, which we have with us everywhere, were the Almshouses of Westminster. Until they were destroyed they were remarkable for their number, for their endowments, and for the quaint pleasantness and beauty of their appearance. You may now look in vain for the old buildings: they are gone; in their place we have the consolidated almshouses and the consolidated schools.

There were almshouses—eight of them—in the Woolstaple, which is now Cannon Street; they looked out upon the river, and the bedesmen turned an honest penny by letting them in lodgings for Parliament men. There were other almshouses founded by Henry VII., outside the Gatehouse in Tothill Street. There was an almshouse for women founded by Lady Margaret in the Almonry. But these were ancient things. Perhaps they disappeared with the Dissolution; perhaps they were “consolidated” the other day. Of the modern almshouses with schools attached, the most important was Emanuel College, a lovely House of Refuge, which stood until yesterday in James Street on the way from Buckingham Gate to Victoria. After leaving the great mansions near the Park one came suddenly upon the low red-brick quadrangle open at one side, with its chapel in the middle and its broad smooth lawn and flower-beds in front—as peaceful a spot as could be found anywhere. It made one glad to think that Dives had really remembered Lazarus; it made one reflect that perhaps money can be put to no better use than to consecrate it to the maintenance of age. And now that College is taken down; soon the site will be covered with residential flats, and Lazarus will retire to his place upon the doorstep. Lazarus is old and worn out in the service of Dives; he ought to be in an almshouse; he has got rheumatism in all his joints; he wants a warm place and a quiet place to lie down and rest in. While this venerable Hospital stood, the world—the world of fashion, the world of pleasure—was reminded of Lazarus. It has disappeared; this means that Lazarus is shoved aside, put out of sight, forgotten; he spends his strength and his skill in the service of the rich man, who knows and thinks nothing about him, and when his strength and his skill fail there is nothing to remind his master that thus and thus should he deal with his old and faithful servant.

All the romance of Westminster City lay in its almshouses and schools. The City of London was fighting the battle of civic freedom; the City of London was finding money to fill the King’s Treasury; the City of London was sending its sails out to the uttermost parts of the earth. This other City, which was not really a city, but only a collection of houses, under the rule of Abbot and of Dean,—which had no trade, which had no municipality, which was a gathering of riffraff and Sanctuary rabble,—presented a continual spectacle of poverty, misery, and crime, lying at the very gate of Abbey and of King’s House. Lazarus, actual or prospective, lived in every house. The Dean

and Chapter had the poor always with them, as their tenants. They had not only the impotent and the worn-out, but also the vicious and the mischievous—the people who would not work. They had but to step outside their gates in order to obtain illustrations for their sermons on the extreme misery which, even in this world, follows such a life. The general wretchedness moved the hearts of many. London itself once had admirable almshouses; but those of Westminster, considering the difference in population, are much more important. The City contained an unparalleled collection of almshouses and free schools. But I do not find any that were founded by the landlords of the City, the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral.

If you walk down Rochester Row, you will find on the west side a large modern building, with a hall and offices on one side of a quadrangle and red-brick houses of pleasing appearance on the other side. These are the consolidated or United Westminster Charities. They pulled down the old almshouses, which were so picturesque and so lovely of aspect: they destroyed the individual character belonging to every one; they rolled them all together, and with the lump sum, subtracting the leakage that went to conveyancers and architects, they built this pile.

Yes, it is very well: the pile is perhaps handsome; but I doubt if there are so many bedesmen in the United Charity as there were in the separate charities. And it is no longer the same thing. Each House formerly had its own garden, in which the almsmen took the air; and its own chapel, in which those on the foundation could remember the founder—Lady Dacre, to wit; or Cornelius Van Dun, Yeoman of the Guard to Henry VIII., Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth (his house stood near the present Town Hall); or Emery Hill, or George Whicher, or Judith Kifford, or Nicholas Butler Palmer. Busts and tablets outside the new buildings commemorate these worthies, but where are their buildings gone? The Almshouses of Westminster are all destroyed, and with them have perished the sentiment and the romance of the streets.

Something still remains; for, with the most laudable desire to destroy whatever can teach or suggest or soften manners or point to heaven, the Charity Commissioners have not been able to destroy one or two of the schools. There were formerly the Grey Coat School, the Green Coat School, the Blue Coat

School, and the Black Coat School. The Grey Coat School has become a school for nearly four hundred girls; their old house still remains for them—a most beautiful monument, built in the seventeenth century for a poorhouse. The great hall in which the paupers formerly lived is now the school hall; above it ran the old low dormitory, now thrown open to the roof; there are paneled old rooms for board rooms; there are broad passages and corridors; there are schoolrooms of later date; and at the back, still uninjured, lie the broad gardens that belong to the time when every house in Westminster had its garden.

In any map of London except those of the actual present,—say, in Crutchley’s of 1838,—there is laid down in its place, just north of Rochester Row (which is now Artillery Place), St. Margaret’s Hospital, otherwise called the Green Coat School. This part of Westminster was once called Palmer’s Village; the Hospital was founded by the parish for the benefit of orphans. Charles II. endowed it; the Duchess of Somerset gave the school a thousand pounds; other benefactions flowed in. Forty years ago the place was thus described by a writer who is not often eloquent in praise (Walcott’s “Westminster”):

“The Hospital of St. Margaret consists of a large quadrangle. Upon the east side are the schoolroom, lavatory, and dormitories. The Master’s house fronts the entrance—a detached building ornamented with a bust of the kingly founder, and the Royal arms painted in colours widely carved and gilded, which were, according to tradition, only preserved from the destructive hands of the Puritans by a thick coating of plaster laid over the obnoxious remembrancers of the rightful dynasty. The south side is formed by the refectory and board room, wainscoted—once, it is said, with old portions of the woodwork which stood in St. Margaret’s chancel—to a considerable height, in large panels, upon which are hung full-length paintings of King Charles II., by Sir Peter Lely, and Emery Hill, an ancient benefactor to the institution, in the manner of the same master. Over the mantelpiece is a beautiful portrait of King Charles I., by Vandyke. The windows command a view of the Hospital Garden, with its fragrant flower-beds and grassy plots—a pleasant relief to the eye wearied with the interminable brick buildings of the outer street, and well attesting the constant care bestowed upon it.

“Upon this foundation are maintained twenty-nine boys, who wear a long green skirt, bound round with a red girdle, similar in form to that worn by the boys of Christ’s Hospital.”

Where is this lovely place now? It is gone. On its site are some branches of the Army and Navy Stores. Think what a city loses by the destruction of such a place! The daily object-lesson in our duty to the friendless and the helpless; the memory of bygone worthies; the sentiment of brotherhood. That is one way of considering the loss. Another way is to think of it as a place of singular beauty, of such beauty as we cannot possibly reproduce. And we have willfully and needlessly destroyed it! It is a national disaster of the gravest, the most irreparable kind, that such monuments as old almshouses, old City churches, old schools, old gates, old foundations of any kind, should be given over to any body of men, with permission to tear down and destroy at their will, and under pretense of benefiting the parish. Can one benefit a man by destroying his memory? Can one

improve a parish by cutting off its connection with the past?

There is one other endowed school not yet destroyed. It is the Blue Coat School, first opened in 1688 for boys. In the year 1709 the present school buildings were erected. They consist of a charming red-brick hall with the figure of a scholar over the porch; a little garden full of greenery is at the back; at one side is the master’s residence, a two-storied house covered all over with a curtain of Virginia creeper; another little garden, full of such flowers as will grow in the London air, is behind this house. But master and boys, when they look around them, begin to tremble, for their place is old, it is beautiful, it adorns the street, it is sacred to the memory of two hundred years of Boy—thirty generations of Boy. It is still most useful—therefore one feels certain that it is doomed; it must soon go, to make room for residential flats and mansions fifteen stories high; it must, we have no doubt, follow the other monuments of the Past, and be absorbed into Consolidated Schools. If there were any other reason wanted for the destruction of the School, it is the tradition that Wren built it.

To my mind Westminster possesses, apart from the Abbey, but one Church—that of St. Margaret’s. Other modern churches there are, but one does not heed them: they are things of to-day; even St. John’s and St. Martin’s are but of yesterday. St. Margaret’s is eight hundred years old; if not built by the Confessor, it was built—that is to say, the first church on this site was built—soon after his death. The history of St. Margaret’s Church must be told by an ecclesiastic; we need only remember that Caxton lies buried here; there is a tablet to his memory put up in 1820 by the Roxburgh Club. Raleigh is buried here—within the chancel. James Harrington, author of “Oceana,” is buried here. John Skelton, with whom we have conversed in Sanctuary, is buried here. Here Milton was married to Katharine Woodcock, who died in childbirth a year later:

In the churchyard of St. Margaret’s were interred the remains of those persons who were turned out of the Abbey at the Restoration: the mother of Cromwell; his daughter; Admiral Blake, whose remains ought to have been taken back again long ago; and in this church, or this churchyard, have been buried a crowd of persons illustrious and of high degree in their generation, whose deeds have not survived them and whose memory is only kept alive by the monuments on the walls and nothing else. It is a church filled with monuments: it reminds one of such a

church as the Grey Friars’ in the City, which was crowded with tombs of the illustrious Forgotten.

Not far from the church is the old-new Burial Ground, in the Horseferry Road. It is now a public garden, and a pleasant garden, with seats and asphalted paths and beds of grass and flowers. Against the wall are ranged the tombstones of the obscure Forgotten. I suppose it makes very little difference to a man whether he has a headstone provided for him against the wall of a public garden, or a tablet—nay, a monument—against the wall of St. Margaret’s Church, as soon as he is properly and completely forgotten.

St. Margaret’s, then, is the only church of which one thinks in connection with Westminster. There is one scene, one little drama, enacted or partly enacted in this church, which perhaps may belong to the pen of the layman. It is the famous case brought before a Court of Chivalry in the year 1387, to decide the dispute between Sir Richard le Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor respecting the right of either party to a certain coat-of-arms. This was no common case: it was the alleged violation of a family possession, a family distinction. The case was considered so important that more than three hundred witnesses were called. They are nearly all shadows and empty names now; but one there is who stands out prominent: his name is Geoffrey Chaucer.

The following is the evidence given by the poet in this great heraldic case:

“Geoffrey Chaucer, Esquire, forty years of age and more, having borne arms for twenty-eight years, produced for the side of Sir Richard le Scrope, sworn and examined. Asked if the arms Azure with a bend Or belonged or ought to belong to the said Richard of right and inheritance, said, ‘Yes’; for he had seen him thus armed in France before the city of Retters, and Sir Henry le Scrope with the same arms with a white label and a banner, and the said Sir Richard with the complete arms—Azure and a bend Or; and thus had he seen them armed during the whole time that the said Geoffrey was present. Asked why he knew that the said arms belonged to the said Sir Richard, said that he had heard speech of old knights and squires, and that they had always continued their possession of the said arms, and for all his time reputed for these arms in common fame and public ways. And also he said that he had seen the same arms on banners, on windows, on paintings, on robes, commonly called the arms of Le Scrope. Asked if he had ever heard who was the first ancestor of the said Sir Richard, who first bore the said arms, said ‘No’; but that he had never heard of any, but that they had come of an old stock and of old gentlefolk, and had held the same arms. Asked if he had ever heard of any interruption or challenge made by Sir Robert Grosvenor, or by his ancestors, or by any one in his name, to the said Sir Richard or to any of his ancestors, said ‘No’; but that he was once in Friday Street in London, and as he went along the street he saw hanging out a new sign made of the said arms, and he asked what house was this that had hung out the arms of Scrope; and one other replied, and said, ‘Not so: and they are not hung out for the arms of Scrope, nor painted for those arms, but they are painted and put up there for a knight of the County of Chester, a man named Robert Grosvenor’; and that this was the first time that ever he heard tell of

Sir Robert Grosvenor or his ancestors or anybody bearing the name of Grosvenor.”

The case, at which between three or four hundred witnesses were heard, was finally decided by “Thomas Fitz au Roy, Duc de Gloucestre, Counte de Bukyngham et Dessex, Constable Dengleterre,” who, after due care and deliberation, and the weighing of all the evidence, and consultation with wise and discreet persons, finally adjudged “les dites armes d’azure ove une bend dor avoir estÉ et estre les armes du dit Richard Lescrop.” And so ended this great case, which somehow puts the poet before us more clearly than even his “Canterbury Pilgrims.”

And so we come back to the streets proper of Westminster—i. e., the slums on the west and south of the Monastery.

There have always been slums here, even before the Sanctuary rabble and after. The streets lying about Tothill Lane, however, which were slums from the beginning, only began in the sixteenth century. The map of Anthony Van den Wyngeerde (A.D. 1543) shows only a few houses standing round about the Sanctuary in the northwest corner of the inclosure; there is a crowd of houses between King Street and the river, and on the west there is nothing but open country: that part of the City which contained the most infamous dens and the vilest ruffians, which was called the “Desert” of Westminster, lying to the south of Tothill Fields, grew up and ran to waste and seed in the course of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth we reaped the harvest of that seed; at the end of the nineteenth we are still pulling up the weeds and planting new flowers and sowing better seed.

The “Desert” was bounded on the north by Tothill Street, Broadway, and Petty France, all with their courts—their sweet and desirable courts; its southern boundary was the Horseferry Road; the Abbey lay along the east; and the western marsh was the fringe of Tothill Fields, now marked by Rochester Row, or perhaps Francis Street. A little remains—here a court, there a bit of street—to mark what the place was like.

Hear what was written about Westminster so late as the year 1839 (Bardsley on “Westminster Improvements”): “Thorney Island consisted chiefly of narrow, dirty streets lined with wretched dwellings, and of numerous miserable courts and alleys, situate in the environs of the Palace and Abbey, where in the olden time the many lawless characters claiming sanctuary found shelter; and so great had been the force of long custom that the houses continued to be rebuilt, century after century, in a miserable manner for the reception of similar degraded outcasts. The inhabitants of these courts and alleys are stated in the reign of Queen Elizabeth ‘to be the most part of no trade or mystery, to be poor, and many of them wholly given to vice and idleness.’ And in James I.’s time ‘almost every fourth house is an alehouse, harbouring all sorts of lewde and badde people.’ And again: ‘In these narrow streets, and in their close and insalubrious lanes, courts, and alleys, where squalid misery and poverty struggle with filth and wretchedness, where vice reigns unchecked, and in the atmosphere of which the worst diseases are generated and diffused.’”

In the little space of a thousand feet by twelve hundred, the courts were sometimes so narrow that the people could shake hands across; the tenements were

sometimes built of boards nailed together; there were no sanitary arrangements at all; there was no drainage; typhus always held possession; and actually under the very shadow of the Cathedral were gathered together the most dangerous and most villainous wretches in the whole country. Old Pye Street, Orchard Street, Duck Lane, the Almonry, and St. Anne’s Street were the homes of the professional street beggar and the professional thief. No respectable person could venture with safety into these streets.

They are now quite safe; the people are rough to look at, but they are no longer thieves and cut-throats by calling. Let us take a short, a very short walk about the Desert. Alas! its glories are gone; the place is not even picturesque: Vice, we know, is sometimes picturesque, even in its most hideous mien. Orchard Street has one side pulled down, and the other side presents a squalid, dilapidated appearance in gray brick; it was once a fit entrance for the most wicked part of London. The streets into which it leads—Great St. Anne’s Street, Pye Street, Peter Street, Duck Lane (now St. Matthew Street) are all transformed. Huge barracks of lodging-houses stand over the dark and malodorous courts; the place is now no doubt tolerably virtuous, but the artist turns from it with a shudder. There was a time when these streets were country lanes, having few houses, and no courts; at this time many pleasant, ingenious, and interesting persons lived in this quarter. For example, Herrick the poet and Purcell the musician lived in St. Anne’s Street. But we have already condemned the catalogue of connections. He who seriously studies the streets learns the associations as he goes along.

Outside these streets stretched Tothill Fields and Five Fields. These fields were to Westminster much as Smithfield and Moorfields were to the City of London. Anything out of the common could be done in Tothill Fields. To begin with, they were a pleasant place for walking; in the spring they were full of flowers—the cuckoo flower, the marsh mallow,

the spurge, the willow herb, the wild parsley, are enumerated; they contained ponds and streams; in the streams grew watercress, always a favorite “sallet” of the people; in the ponds there were ducks—the Westminster boys used to hire dogs to worry the ducks; it is not stated who paid for those ducks. On the north side of the Fields was St. James’s Park, with its decoy and Rosamond’s Pond, a rectangular pool lying across what is now Birdcage Walk, opposite the Wellington Barracks. Later on, market gardens were laid out in these low-lying meadows.

Tournaments were held in the Fields—not the ordinary exercises or displays of the tilt yard, but the grander occasions, as in 1226 at the coronation of Queen Eleanor. Here, in the same reign, but later, the Prior of Beverley entertained the Kings and Queens of England and Scotland, the King’s son, and many great Lords, in tents erected on the field.

Executions were carried out in the Fields, as when was taken Margaret Gourdemains, “a witch of Eye beside Westminster,”—was it Battersea (“Peter’s Ey”)? or was it Chelsea (“Shingle Ey”)?—“whose sorcerie and witchcraft Dame Eleanour Cobham had long time used, and by her medicines and drinks enforced the Duke of Gloucester to love her and after to wed her.” Necromancers were punished here. In the reign of Edward III. a man was taken practicing magic with a dead man’s hand, and carried to Tothill, where his dead man’s hand was burned before his face.

Here was held the ordeal of battle. Stow relates one such trial. The dispute was about a manor in the Isle of Harty. The plaintiffs, two in number, appointed their champion, and the defendant his. The latter was a “Master of Defense,” which does not seem quite fair upon the other, who was only a “big, broad, strong set fellow.” Before the day appointed for the fight an agreement was arrived at between the parties; only, “for the defendant’s assurance,” the order for the fight should be observed, the plaintiffs not putting in an appearance, so that the case should be judged against them in default. The lists were twenty-one yards square, set with scaffolds crowded with people—for who would not go out to see two men trying to kill each other? The Master of Defense, to whom the proceedings were an excellent advertisement, rode through London at seven in the morning in splendid attire, having the gauntlet borne before him; he entered Westminster Hall, but made no long stay there, going back to King Street, and so through the Sanctuary and Tothill Street to the lists, where he waited for the Judge. At ten the Court of Common Pleas removed to the lists. Then the combatants stood face to face, bare-footed, bare-legged, bare-headed, with their doublet sleeves turned back, ready for the fight; and all hearts beat faster, and the ladies caught their breath and gasped, and their color came and went. Then the Judge gave order that every person must keep his place and give no help or encouragement by word or by weapon to the combatants. Next—this was the last of the tedious preliminaries: when would they begin?—each champion took oath: “This hear you Justices, that I this day neither eate, drunk, nor have upon me neither bone, stone, nor glasse, or any enchantment, sorcerie, or witchcraft, where-through the power of the word of God might be increased or diminished and the devil’s power increased; and that my appeal is true, so help me God, and His saints, and by this booke.”

Alas! instead of giving the word to fight it out, the Lord Chief Justice remarked that the plaintiffs were not present; that there could be no fight without them; and that the estate consequently went to the defendant. Then with sad faces and heavy hearts the company dispersed. No fight, after all—nobody killed! To be sure, the Master of Defense invited the “big, broad, strong set fellow” to play with him half a score blows; but the latter refused, saying he had come to fight and not to play.

A great Fair was held in these Fields on St. Edward’s Day (October 12), and for fifteen days afterward. It was instituted by Henry III., in the hope of doing some mischief to the City of London. The Fair continued, but after the first year it seems to have done no harm to the trade of London. It continued, in fact, into the present century, when it was an ordinary fair of booths and shows, with Richardson’s Theater—like Greenwich Fair or Portsdown Fair. All these Fairs were alike. The two latter I can remember. Unfortunately my visits to these renowned Fairs took place in the afternoon; the real fun of the Fair, I believe, took place in the evening. I remember a great crowd pushing and fighting and springing rattles on each other; and I remember the performers outside Richardson’s marching about in magnificent costumes; the band playing; the clown tumbling; the columbine, a true fairy if ever there was one, gracefully pirouetting; then all forming into line for a dance; and after the dance the play in the tent behind. Such a Fair was that of Tothill Fields, at night the resort of all the ruffians of Westminster and Lambeth and half London. At least, however, while they were at the Fair they were out of other mischief. The exact site on which this Fair was held does not appear; but since it continued for the first quarter of this century at least, we may look for the place which was the last to be built upon. In Crutchley’s map of 1834 there are fields between the Vauxhall Bridge Road and James Street—that is, northwest of Rochester Row. There are also fields south of Vauxhall Bridge Road toward Chelsea. The former site seems the more probable.

Of course so fine a situation as Tothill Fields for the favorite diversions of a sporting people could not be neglected. Hither resorted all the lovers of those old English games, cock-fighting, bear-baiting, bull-baiting, cock-throwing, dog-fighting, and prize-fighting. There were horse races. These sports were continued well into this century. The Earl of Albemarle in his “Recollections” speaks of these sports. The Westminster boys of his time haunted the houses called the Seven Chimneys or the Five Houses,—they were the old pesthouses,—which were the resort of the bullbaiters, the dog-fanciers, and other gentry of cognate pursuits. Among them was the unfortunate Heberfield, commonly known as “Slender Billy,” who seems to have been a good-tempered, easy-going person, without the least tincture of morals. The following is the strange and shameful story of his end:

He got into trouble for assisting the escape of a certain French general who was on parole; took him probably to the south coast,—Lyme Regis, Rousdon, or Charmouth,—and introduced him to a smuggler who ran him across. He was caught, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment in Newgate. Unhappily for him, the Bank of England was just then suffering heavy losses from forgeries. They badly wanted to hang somebody,—no matter who,—somebody, in order to deter others from forging notes. The story is quite amazing, as Lord Albemarle tells it. Can we conceive the Governing Body of the Bank of England meeting together and resolving to entrap some miserable wretch into passing the forged notes, so that by getting him hanged others would be deterred? This is what Lord Albemarle says they did:

“The Solicitors of the Bank accordingly took into their pay a confederate of Heberfield’s named Barry. Through this man’s agency Heberfield was easily inveigled into passing forged notes provided by the Solicitors of the Bank themselves. On the evidence of Barry, Heberfield was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Newgate for forgery on January 12, 1812.”

The saddest of all the memories connected with Tothill Fields is that of the triumphal entry of Cromwell into London after the “crowning mercy” of Worcester. He brought with him the miserable prisoners he had taken on that field. There were four thousand of them in all. They camped at Mile End Green when Cromwell drove into London; the next day they were marched right through the City and along the Strand to Westminster, and so to Tothill Fields. On the way they received alms, oatmeal, and biscuit from any who were moved of their pity to bestow something upon them. So they lay in the marshy fields, where many died, until they were sold as slaves to the merchants of Guinea. In Mr. J. E. Smith’s “History of the Church of St. John the Evangelist” there is an entry which tells its own story. It is from the Church-wardens’ Accounts of 1652-53:

“Paid to Thomas Wright for 67 load of soyle laid on the graves in Tothill Fields, wherein 1200 Scotch prisoners, taken at the ffight at Worcester, were buried, and for other paines taken with his teame of horsse about amending the Sanctuary Highway when General Ireton was buried. XXXS.”

How many of the remaining two thousand eight hundred ever got home again? Chance once threw into my hands a tract which showed the hard treatment and the barbarities to which Monmouth’s convicts in Barbadoes were subjected: most of these were men of respectable family, to whom money might be sent for their exemption from work in the fields, or even for their redemption. But these other poor fellows were absolutely friendless and penniless. And they were going to the Guinea Coast, the Gold Coast, the white man’s grave! One hopes that the mortality on their arrival was swifter and more extensive than even the mortality in Tothill Fields, because death was certainly the best thing that could happen to them.

When these papers first appeared I received a letter of expostulation from a reader. He said that the streets of Westminster were not all so disreputable as I seemed to think. He said:

“Westminster only became a slum within this hundred years. The old Westminster workhouse had been the mansion of Sir John Pye. Sir Francis Burdett was born in Orchard Street, and Admiral Kempenfeldt who went down in the Royal George had his house there, and not so very long ago a pear tree bloomed annually in his garden. The father of Henry Boys, organist of St. John’s, about 1830 to 1840, was a bullion worker and carried on his business for many years and up to the thirties in Great St. Anne’s Lane. My grandmother was born, 1770, in Peter Street, at the corner of Duck Lane. She told me that all that neighbourhood was very respectable in her girlhood, Duck Lane being the only exception. She attributed the downfall of the locality to the cheap houses that were built at that time in New Peter Street. Towards the end of the century there was only one shop in Strutton Ground: all the rest being public-houses. My mother was born in 1802 in Marlborough House, Peter Street, then the premises of the Cudbear Company. She used to recall Brown’s Gardens in her young days, that were between St. Peter Street and the Horseferry Road. They were nursery gardens. Palmer’s village was a collection of houses for workmen, built about the beginning of this century or the end of last, between Emanuel Hospital and Brewer’s Green, and accessible through an archway leading from the latter.”

I am glad to print this protest. I have, however, given my authorities for what I have stated. It is quite possible that respectable streets and good houses existed side by side with the slums. There are always respectable streets and great houses in every neighborhood, just as among associations of the greatest villains there are always some with redeeming traits. Among the residents of Westminster our friend might have mentioned Lord Grey of Wilton, Cornelius Van Dur, Yeoman of the Guard to four sovereigns, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, and Dick Turpin.

Hear, however, further from Mr. William Bardell, writing in 1839.

“Another of the peculiarities which this district presents is the number of middle-men it contains: these generally possess themselves of a house or houses, with gardens, large or small as it may happen; here they erect, in open defiance of all building or sewers acts, a number of tenements of the most wretched description, and to which the only access is by a passage through one of the front houses; in process of time these become lanes, or courts, or alleys, or places, or buildings, or yards. These tenements are divided into separate rooms, and let weekly by the middle-man, who subsists upon his beneficial interest in the concern; and so numerous are the houses of this description in the district, that considerably more than one-half of the number proposed to be removed are let to weekly lodgers; but these places, most of them old, and very slightly built, frequently with boards held together by iron hoops, are so utterly destitute of every convenience, that the heretofore pleasant gardens of Tothill are most terrible nuisances.

“It is in these narrow streets, and in these close and insalubrious lanes, courts, and alleys, where squalid misery and poverty struggle with filth and wretchedness, where vice reigns unchecked, and in the atmosphere of which the worst diseases are generated and diffused. That uncleanness and impurity are an unerring index, pointing out the situation where the malignancy of epidemics more or less exists, is a truth known and admitted from the earliest ages.”

“Dr. Wright, the assiduous and highly-intelligent medical officer to the parish, stated before the same Committee, ‘that fever is exceedingly prevalent, and had been very general in the months of April and May.’ The Doctor had upwards of thirty cases of typhus fever in one court containing four houses; most of which cases it is probable would have terminated fatally had the sufferers not been removed from that locality; ‘that fever is propagated and continued in these miserable courts long after the ravages of epidemics have ceased in more open parts.’

“Mr. Cubitt also has stated, that ‘the ground between the Almonry and the western end of Palmer’s village is occupied by the worst possible description of inhabitants. The land is exceedingly badly drained, or rather not drained; and there being no proper outlets for the water, a great deal of bad air must pass off by evaporation from the quantity of stagnant water upon the surface and in the cesspools.’”

Here we make an end: it is not a Survey of Westminster to which you have been invited; it is but this side and that side of the many-sided life of this remarkable City, which is, as was pointed out at the beginning, unlike any other city in the world, in having no citizens, but only residents or tenants; no municipal life; which welcomed all the scum, riffraff, and ribauderie of the country, and gave them harbor; which has always belonged to the Church, yet has never been expected to have any morals; always its streets and courts have been crammed with thieves and drabs, gamesters, sporting men, cheats, and bullies; and beside the streets always stood the stately Monastery, the quiet cloister, the noble Church, the splendid Court, the gallant following of king and noble, and the gathering of grave and responsible knights and burgesses assembled to carry on the affairs of the country. I have invited you to restore Thorney as it was long ago, the stepping-stone and halting-place of all the trade of the island, busy and noisy; the life of the Benedictine in his monastery; the consecration of the Anchorite; the strange life of the mediÆval Sanctuary;

THE WESTMINSTER TOBACCO BOX.