UNNOTICED LONDON

CHEYNE ROW

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PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

The following brief account of a few of the things that have interested me in London is not intended for the use of the inveterate sightseer, for whom so many admirable and complete fingerposts to the study of old London have been written, by such experts as Mr. Bell, Mr. Wilfred Whitten, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Ordish and Mr. Hare. It is meant for the people who do not realise one-eighth of the stories packed into the streets of London, the city which, as Sir Walter Besant, that great London lover, once said, has an unbroken history of one thousand years and has never been sacked by an enemy. For, in talking about the extraordinary beauty of London, I became aware of a vast public who have eyes and see not, who thoroughly dislike the idea of sight-seeing yet acknowledge their pleasure in a chance discovery made en route to tea at the Ritz,—people who are appalled at the very idea of entering a museum. Then there are the travellers who say vaguely that when they can find time they really mean to see something of London, but they turn their backs on the greatest city of the world without having seen much more than Bond Street, because they are obsessed by the idea that to see London requires some occult store of knowledge and energy, and their eyes are sealed to the interest and beauty that lie around their path. Finally there are people like the old lady who, when she heard I was writing a book about old London, asked with astonishment, “Is there anything old left in London?”

I hasten to add that I have not tried in the following pages to tell of every interesting place or even of all there is of interest in the places visited,—only enough, I hope, to make people go and see for themselves and have the pleasure of discovering the rest. I am not afraid that if they once go to the Chapter House they will miss any of its beauties: my dread is lest they fail to go there, from the vision of a plethora of things they think they have no time to see. For I want more than anything else to prick the curiosity of the travellers up and down the streets of the city who miss so much pleasure that they might have so easily, because they are not alive to all the interesting and unexpected things that wait for their coming just round the corner.

A little further afield there are so many other treasures waiting to be noticed,—Hogarth’s pleasant house in Chiswick, that, like many another London visitor, I am promising myself to see the first time I have a free Monday, Wednesday or Saturday;—Eltham, with its sunk garden surrounding the remains of the old palace of the English kings, where John of Eltham, Edward II.’s son, was born;—Southwark, with its cathedral and the remains of the Marshalsea Prison that not everyone knows how to find;—and Islington, with the Canonbury Tower and the house in Duncan Street, No. 64, where Lamb lived for four years. But these I must leave regretfully for another day.

In conclusion, I should like to express my thanks to the Montreal Gazette and to the Daily Express for permission to reprint one or two sketches which originally appeared in their pages, and to all those friends for whose kindly help and encouragement I am much indebted.

To
S I R S Q U I R E S P R I G G E

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“Sir, the happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it.”

Dr. Johnson

UNNOTICED LONDON

CHAPTER I
CHELSEA

“I have passed manye landes and manye yles and
contrees, and cherched many full straunge places,....
Now I am comen home to reste.”
Sir John Maundeville.

If a hurried traveller had only time to roam about one of the London boroughs I think he should choose Chelsea, because in that small area of houses built along a mile and a half of the Thames riverside there is much that is typical of quite different phases of London life, from the sixteenth century to the present day.

It lies between the Kings Road and the Embankment, beginning at Lower Sloane Street—Chelsea Bridge Road, and is reached by the district railway to Sloane Square Station or by the No. 11 bus passing the Strand, Trafalgar Square and Victoria: by Nos. 19 or 22 from Hyde Park Corner, and from Kensington by the 31, with its terminus at Limerston Street, and by the Nos. 49 and 49a.

Perhaps the reason why this quarter has always been beloved is because while other districts have had their moment of fame and now live on their past in somnolent content, Chelsea has fallen in and out of fashion with a fine carelessness and has always guarded the creative gift of dwellers of all ranks, so that the name of the little village has been famous for such a diversity of things as literature and custards, art and water-works, china and buns, horticulture and learning.

There is something cosy and charming about the name Chelsea, a good old Anglo-Saxon word that once meant, “The Gravel Isle, Chesel-sey.” It has not become quite so unrecognisable as its neighbour Battersea, but it has no more just cause for converting into “sea” the ey that means island with which it once ended. But you cannot lay down stern rules for a name that has taken the bit between its teeth like Chelsea. It started its career in the Domesday Book as Chelched, and by the time it got to the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More is dating a letter to Henry VIII. “At my pore howse in Chelcith.”

Of the two Thomases whose memory pervades Chelsea, Sir Thomas More is perhaps the most lovable. His son-in-law once said of him: “whom in sixteen years and more, being in his house conversant with him, I could never perceive as much as once in a fume.”

It is in Roper’s Life that you read how his neighbours loved him with reason. Once, when he had been away on a mission to Cambrai in 1528, he went to report to the King at Woodstock, and then heard that part of his house and barns in Chelsea had been burnt. He had no thought of his own loss, but sent to comfort his wife and tell her to find out the extent of his neighbours’ loss and indemnify them as far as possible.

There have been many other saintly men whom one reveres, but surely none with such wide sympathies. He entertained Erasmus with learned talk, but he also entertained John Heywood the playwright and Court jester. He was wise, but he was also witty, and of which modern philosopher could it be told “that when an interlude was performed, he would make one among the players, occasionally coming upon them with surprise, and without rehearsal fall into a character, and support the part by his extemporaneous invention and acquit himself with credit.”

Dear Sir Thomas More of delectable memory—it is good to come across signs that you still live in English hearts, even if they take the form of stucco decorations on a Lyons tea house in Carey Street.

It was Sir Thomas More who first made Chelsea the fashion, though an old Manor house that stood near the church had many lordly owners before Henry VIII. bought it and, following More’s example, built himself the big country mansion of which there are still traces in the basements of the houses on the corner of Cheyne Walk and Oakley Street. The King is also said to have had a hunting lodge near by and part of it still exists at the end of Glebe Place in a small rather dilapidated building.

Sir Thomas More had built his house on the site of the present Beaufort Street and it stood there till Sir Hans Sloane, the Chelsea Baron Haussmann of that day, pulled it down in 1740. The lovely gardens went down to the river. Henry VIII. used to come and dine here, and walk with his arm round the neck of the friend he afterwards brought to the block, and here More received his other famous friends, among them Erasmus, and Holbein, who stayed with him for three years, painting many portraits.

It is pleasant to think that the spirit of More’s hospitality lived again during the war and curiously enough at this very place and in one of his own houses. For though his country home was destroyed, his town house, Crosby Hall, built as the great town mansion of Sir John Crosby, a merchant prince, in 1466, was brought from Bishopsgate piece by piece in 1910, and four years later the marvellous timbered roof looked down on the groups of Belgian fugitives that were sheltered there.

If you ask the porter at More’s Gardens, a big block of flats on the north-east corner of Battersea Bridge, for the key of Crosby Hall, he will unlock a door in an ugly hoarding facing the embankment, close to Chelsea Old Church.

CROSBY HALL

You step through it into a remote space where a mediæval building stands in the midst of the little rock gardens planted by the Belgian refugees to while away their anxious, tedious hours. Many men have passed through the old hall since Sir John Crosby built it, for at different times it had belonged to the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), Sir Thomas More, his son-in-law William Roper, and various ambassadors and nobles. In 1609 it was the home of that Countess of Pembroke whose charms evoked from William Browne the epitaph so often attributed to Ben Jonson:

Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse;
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother;
Death! ere thou hast slain another
Fair and learned and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.

One wonders what they would all have thought of these latest comers to the old mansion which carried on the English tradition of hospitality so well that the poet among the visitors wrote, and you may see his words on a brass tablet opposite the fireplace:

Je sens dans l’air que je respire
Un parfum de Liberté,
Un peu de cette terre hospitalière,
. . . . .
Le sol de l’Angleterre.

The reconstitution of Crosby Hall was never finished; first because of the death of King Edward, who took a great interest in the scheme, and then owing to the war; but there it stands, its perpendicular lines, mullioned windows and oriel and the wonderful oaken roof making it one of the best examples that remain to us of fifteenth-century domestic architecture.

Chelsea is full of memories of every period since Sir Thomas More’s day.

Queen Elizabeth as a child stayed at her father’s manor house here, and later, as a girl of thirteen, she is said to have lived for a time at Sir Thomas More’s house, when it had passed into the hands of her stepmother, Catherine Parr.

The charming Georgian houses of the Cheyne Walk of to-day carry on the tradition of the beautiful Chelsea homes of those times, such as Shrewsbury House which stood on the west side of Oakley Street before it was pulled down in 1813. It was owned by the husband of the famous Bess of Hardwicke, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who guarded Mary Queen of Scots in her captivity.

The delightful little houses in Paradise Row with their dormer windows and tiled roofs were pulled down only a few years ago. Pepys said that one of them was “the prettiest contrived house that ever I saw in my life.” Ormonde Court now reigns in their stead, so there is no trace to-day of the little house in Paradise Row that the fair but frail Duchesse de Mazarin, niece of Anne of Austria’s Cardinal Prime Minister, rented from Lord Cheyne when she had fallen on such evil days that her aristocratic guests used to leave money under their plates to pay for their dinner. She was not the only favourite of Charles II. to have a summer home in Chelsea. Nell Gwynne lived at the Sandford Manor House and the route by which the Merry Monarch rode to visit her is still called the King’s Road.

I hesitate to tell that Nell Gwynne’s very house is still in existence for fear of taxing too much the ready courtesy of the occupants, two members of the staff of The Imperial Gas Works Co., owners of the property, who divide the house between them.

My kindly guide had disquieting doubts as to whether Nell ever really lived there, but he admitted that a thimble, unquestionably hers, and a masonic jewel belonging to the King, were found in the house when it was being repaired. Thimbles are not usually associated with the memory of “pretty witty Nellie,” but the Chelsea air may have moved her to industry. At all events there is the Jacobean house, shorn now of its top story to lessen the weight on the bulging walls, and with its brick carving but faintly seen under successive coats of rough plaster. But not even the Queen Anne door can destroy the picture any lively imagination may summon of the nonchalant Nell tripping up and down the same staircase to be seen to-day, its design of six steps and a door repeated to the top of the house, belying the legend that Charles once rode his pony up the stairs. The walnut trees Nell planted have disappeared, but what is left of the old house stands in a pleasant green hollow, an oasis in the acrid surroundings of a gas factory, the paling of which separates it from the outside world not a stone’s throw from unsuspecting passengers on a No. 11 bus.

Joseph Addison lived for a time in the old Manor House, and two of his letters, written to the Lord Warwick whose mother he afterwards married, describe the bird concerts in the neighbouring woods.

If anyone wants to know exactly what the place looked like in Nell Gwynne’s day, a very interesting account of it may be found in a book written by a French London-lover, called Fulham Old and New. It is now out of print, but may be consulted at the Fulham Public Library, reached by any of the buses travelling westward along the Fulham Road.

All this is ancient history, of which there is little trace to-day. The shades of Sir Robert Walpole, Dean Swift, Fielding and Smollett, and good Dr. Burney, Fanny’s father, who was organist of Chelsea Hospital and buried in its now closed cemetery, may still haunt Chelsea; but the actual homes of the people of living memory make a more vivid appeal. Chelsea still keeps up the reputation of being the haunt of famous people. Unlike the inhabitants of the Paris Latin Quarter, artists and poets who have once breathed her air do not remove to more fashionable Mayfair streets when they have “arrived.”

And what a brilliant band of them were found in the Chelsea of the nineteenth century! Meredith wrote The Ordeal of Richard Feverel at No. 7 Hobury Street; Charles and Henry Kingsley spent their youth in the old rectory in Church Street when their father was rector of Chelsea Old Church; George Eliot moved her household gods to No. 4 Cheyne Walk, the beautiful house where Daniel Maclise, the early Victorian painter, had lived, only three short weeks before her death; and Cecil Lawson, the painter of The Harvest Moon in the Tate Gallery, lived at No. 15.

A volume might be written about Cheyne Walk alone; those pleasant red-brick houses with their wrought-iron railings were the homes of some of the greatest geniuses of the Victorian age. Turner lived at 118 for the four years before his death in 1851: Rossetti lived at No. 16 with Swinburne and W. M. Rossetti. Meredith had some idea of joining this ménage, but recoiled at the sight of Rossetti’s oft-quoted poached eggs “bleeding to death” on cold bacon very late in the morning. He paid a quarter’s rent and decided to live by himself. The Rev. Mr. Haweis was a later tenant of this famous house, which, in spite of popular tradition, has no connection with Catherine of Braganza. Mrs. Gaskell, the authoress of Cranford, was born at No. 93. Whistler spent twelve years at No. 96, and here he painted the portraits of his mother and Carlyle.

The painter had many Chelsea houses, from 101 Cheyne Walk, where he lived for four years from 1873, to the White House in Tite Street which he built, and, after his quarrel with the architect, adorned with a truly Whistlerian inscription, now removed, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. This house was built by Mr. X.”

William de Morgan and Leigh Hunt lived in Chelsea, but the man whose memory is the most vivid of all this brilliant group was Thomas Carlyle. His house at 24 Cheyne Row is a memorial museum open to any visitor on the payment of one shilling, sixpence on Saturday. The house is kept exactly as it was in the days which Mr. Blunt has so charmingly described in his book The Carlyles’ Chelsea Home.

I can tell no more about it except from hearsay, for the terrible loneliness of Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges and of Balzac’s in the Rue Raynouard in Paris dissuaded me from visiting any more houses turned into museums of their owners’ belongings.

I would rather go to the Chelsea Hospital, that is very much alive with the presence of remarkably long-lived old men: one of them lived till he was 123 years and another to 116. They think nothing there of mere centenarians—they even tell you of one pensioner who had served for eighty-five years and married at the age of 100. They think that was a mistake on the whole, but they are secretly proud of it, and also of the lady warriors—one of them had the domestic-sounding name of Hannah Snell—who lie buried in the old churchyard among their comrades.

Visitors can see the hospital every week-day from 10 till dusk, except for an hour from 12.45 to 1.45, and they may attend the chapel services on Sunday at 11 A.M. and 6.30, when the pensioners in their brave scarlet coats remind one of Herkomer’s picture. My advice to you, if you want to see Chelsea Hospital really well, is to enlist one of the pensioners as guide. He will show you the old leather black-jacks, and Grinling Gibbons’ statue of Charles II. in a toga, and the colonnades of the old Wren building, so fine in its severe simplicity—and the flags in the chapel, so filmy now with age that they look as if a breath of wind would blow them to pieces—and the old portraits and many other arresting things. But what he will like best to exhibit will be the fragments of the bomb that hit one of the buildings during an air-raid. He won’t allow you to hold on to the belief that Nell Gwynne had anything to do with the foundation, but he will tell you a lot of interesting details about the regulations of the Hospital—how very little like an institution it is, and you will leave the building with an added respect for Charles II.

After strolling about Chelsea one’s mind turns with insistence to the thought of buns, “r-r-rare Chelsea buns,” as Swift wrote to Stella. There is now nothing left but the name of Bunhouse Place, at the corner of Union Street and the Pimlico Road, of the famous shop where 100,000 buns used to be sold of a Good Friday Eve one hundred and forty years ago, and where the Georges and their Queens used to drive to fetch their buns. It was taken down in 1839, but the fasting sightseer—being in Chelsea and not in Bloomsbury or Bayswater—can easily find other places to stay his hunger. If he does not belong to the decorative sex—the phrase is Mr. Wagner’s, not mine—he will doubtless follow that very knowledgeable guide and betake him to the “Six Bells,” 195 King’s Road—a short distance from the Chelsea Town Hall, and there find the comfort that attracts its artist clientèle.

There are other restaurants that are much frequented by the artists of the quarter:—the “Blue Cockatoo,” in Cheyne Walk, near Oakley Street, and the “Good Intent,” 316 King’s Road, and a new and yet more attractive one on the corner of Arthur Street with the enticing name of “The Good Humoured Ladies.”

Chelsea is full of interesting shops. The Chelsea Book Club is on the Embankment by Church Street—its delights must be sampled to be realised—and next door there is a queer handmade toy shop called Pomona—why Pomona?

Across the road is Chelsea Old Church, with its high seventeenth-century tower. To me its interior is the most satisfying in London. The spirit of ancient days dwells there, untouched by modern currents of unrest, and in the tranquil beauty there is no jarring note. Sir Thomas More was one of its celebrated parishioners—you may see his monument and the epitaph he wrote himself.

What a pleasant, kindly, independent spirit had this great Chancellor, who donned the humble surplice of a parish clerk and sang in the choir unperturbed by the remonstrances of even so great a personage as the Duke of Norfolk. I always liked the tale of how the latter came to dine with Sir Thomas in Chelsea and “fortuned to find him at the church in choir with a surplice on his back singing, and as they went home together arm in arm, the duke said, ‘God’s Body, God’s Body, my Lord Chancellor, a parish clerk—a parish clerk! You dishonour the King and his office!’ And Sir Thomas replied mildly that he did not think the duke’s master and his would be offended with him for serving God his Master or thereby count his office dishonoured.”

I love Chelsea Old Church better than any other London church. It has nothing of the heavy solidity that smacks of broadcloth and thick gold watch-chains. The congregation on a summer Sunday evening might be met with in any village in England. The very altar has no pomp of embroidered frontal and massive ornaments; it looks almost like a Jacobean dining-room with its simple oaken table and dignified chairs on either side.

The church is filled with enchanting old treasures—chained Bibles and old monuments to the great dead who worshipped there, but I cannot find it in my heart to catalogue them for you as if it were a museum. Enter those dim walls and see for yourself, and you will love it as did that lover of England from across the sea whose epitaph is not the least among the beautiful things of Chelsea Old Church:

In memory of Henry James, Novelist
Born in New York, 1843. Died in Chelsea, 1916
Lover and interpreter of the fine
amenities of brave decisions and generous
loyalties: resident of this parish, who
renounced a cherished citizenship to give his
allegiance to England in the first
year of the Great War.

In other churches with their solemn balconies and air of chill emptiness, it is difficult to imagine the things that have happened there in other days. But in Chelsea Old Church, which somehow always seems peopled with friendly ghosts and never lonely, one can almost see Henry VIII. being married secretly to Jane Seymour before the public ceremony, and hear the cadence of Dr. John Donne’s voice as he preached the funeral oration of the woman he had immortalised in The Autumnal Beauty.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.

I think of all the great people who lie buried here the most fascinating is this Lady Danvers, George Herbert’s mother, whose “great and harmless wit, cheerful gravity and obliging behaviour,” attracted so many friends and among them Dr. Donne. She must have been an adorable mother. I sometimes wonder if the care of her ten children ever made her late for church, and if it were some memory of his boyhood days that made her saintly son write with the cheerful gravity he may have inherited,

Oh be drest,
Stay not for the last pin,
Thus hell doth jest away thy blessings and extremely flout thee
Thy clothes being fast but thy soul loose about thee.

Mrs. Herbert came to live in Chelsea when she married Sir John Danvers, after she had “brought up her children carefully and put them in good courses for making their fortunes.” Danvers House, where she and her husband lived, gave its name to Danvers Street, at the corner of which Crosby Hall now stands.

The Chelsea Physic Garden

“God Almighty first planted a garden.”
Bacon.

One of the things I like best in Chelsea is the old herb garden, the Chelsea Physic Garden, that makes a home of peace with its base on the Embankment and the western angle at the beginning of Cheyne Walk and the end of the Royal Hospital Road, once called the Queen’s Road in honour of Catherine of Braganza, Charles II.’s Queen.

My friendship with the garden is based on no intimate acquaintance, for not to every one is it given to pass the iron gates that guard its fragrant stillness. If you would do more than gaze through the iron bars at this enchanted space that dreams away the year round undisturbed, you must write to the Clerk of the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities, 3 Temple Gardens, E.C.4, and ask for a ticket of admission to the most ancient Botanical Garden in England.

Once you have taken the trouble to secure this card you may stroll along the paths of the Chelsea Physic Garden that are much as they were when Evelyn went there on 7th August, 1685, to visit “Mr. Wats, keeper of the Apothecaries’ Garden of Simples at Chelsea,” and admire the innumerable rarities there, the “tree bearing Jesuit’s bark, which had done such wonders in Quartan agues.”

The Apothecaries’ Society laid out the garden about two hundred and fifty years ago. They leased the ground at that time, but later on Sir Hans Sloane gave them the freehold with one of those quaint conditions attached that lend a refreshing grace to a legal transaction.

The Apothecaries had to despatch 2000 specimens of distinct plants, grown in the garden well dried and preserved and sent in batches of 50, every year to the Royal Society. One would like to know what the Royal Society did with them, but the most interesting things in history are so often left out.

In 1899 the garden was handed over to the Trustees of the London Parochial Charities, who maintain this delectable if deserted London corner for the teaching of botany and for providing opportunity and material for botanical investigation.

Perhaps it was the attraction of the Physic Garden that influenced the choice of the Huguenot market gardeners who settled in Chelsea when they were driven from their own country by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It startled me to find that at the time when England was merry, the Guilds were every bit as dictatorial as the Trades Unions are to-day. More so, in fact, for while a goodly percentage of our workers and nearly all our waiters are now said to be foreigners, none of the foreign workmen of the seventeenth century were allowed to carry on their trades in London and compete with their English confrères.

So the hatters went to Wandsworth and the silk mercers to Spitalfields, and the nurserymen chose the village of Chelsea lying two miles out of London along the river bank.

Their spirits may still hover among the perfumed beauty of the annual Chelsea Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society. It is held in the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital once a year at the end of May or the beginning of June, when the delicate loveliness of the flowers attracts an immense number of garden lovers.

And now to tell you how to reach the Chelsea Hospital, the Flower Show and Ranelagh Gardens.

I have never been able to discover whether the extreme reluctance of the British to give a detailed address is due to a naïve belief that everyone is born into this world with an intimate knowledge of the topography of London, or to a malicious delight in puzzling the ignorant, but I have a deeply-rooted conviction that the maze was an English invention. So to the stranger bewildered by the laconic “Chelsea” on the cards of admission to the Flower Show I would say that it is reached either by the District Railway to Sloane Square station and then a short walk down Sloane Street to Pimlico Road, or by the 11 or the 46 bus that stops at the corner of Pimlico Road and Lower Sloane Street.

The Flower Show is one of the most charming events of the London season. In no other city in the world may you see anything like this meeting of the great brotherhood of gardeners of every social rank gathered to admire the gorgeous achievements of the grand masters of the art of growing flowers; where peeresses humbly consult horny-handed experts and frivolous young men reveal unsuspected enthusiasms for blue aquilegias.

The adjacent Ranelagh Gardens are often called Chelsea Hospital Gardens, perhaps to avoid confusion with the grounds of the Ranelagh Club at Barnes. They are closed to the general public during the three days of the Flower Show, so if you go to see the flowers you have the added and unexpected pleasure of wandering through the green glades of Ranelagh undisturbed by the shouts of the Pimlico children.

There are no flowers in these gardens, but they have a peculiar charm of their own. There is none of the flatness of Hyde Park—the undulating paths and quaint bosquets belong to another day when powdered courtiers pursued fair ladies in the pleasure gardens that were so much the fashion. The story of Ranelagh is bound up with the history of the Georgian period. There is not a book of memoirs but mentions this famous pleasure resort. Walpole said of it, “Nobody goes anywhere else; everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed there.”

It is quite true that everybody went there. Johnson, whom I find as hard to keep out of the description of any part of London as Mr. Dick found it to keep King Charles’s head out of his memorial, was very fond of going to Ranelagh. Boswell says that, to the remark that there was not half a guinea’s worth of pleasure in seeing Ranelagh, he answered, “No, but there is half a guinea’s worth of inferiority to other people in not having seen it.”

There is little left of the actual gardens where Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Walpole, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, the King of Denmark, the Spanish ambassadors and the entire English Court used to take part in the merry-making, but you may be sure they all walked up the broad avenue of trees that once shaded the brilliant scene. In the seventeenth century the property belonged to Viscount Ranelagh, an Irish nobleman by whose name the gardens are still called.

When the estate was bought by a syndicate after his death a huge rotunda was built with boxes all round. It must have been something like the Albert Hall, and every night the place was filled with fine ladies and wits, rubbing shoulders with all classes of society come to gaze at the attractions and listen to the music. The vogue of Ranelagh lasted many years and only ended when the rotunda was pulled down at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Every now and then one meets pessimistic creatures, usually artists, who shake their heads and say that Chelsea is going to the dogs—by which they mean that all the old studios are being taken by speculators with the intention of converting them into flats.

But the Chelsea of to-day is as charming as it ever was. There are just as many famous inhabitants. Sargent, Derwent Wood, Augustus John, Glyn Philpot, Wilson Steer and many another well-known genius, all live within sound of the “Six Bells” and some studios must have been saved from the speculator judging from the number of Chelsea addresses in this year’s Academy catalogue.

CHAPTER II
KNIGHTSBRIDGE TO SOHO

Knightsbridge

“Go where we may—rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.”
Moore.

Few people think of connecting the name of Knightsbridge with anything less modern than the big departmental shops, the Barracks or the cosy houses on the fringe of Mayfair and Belgravia.

Yet there was a town of Knightsbrigg in the fourteenth century, in Edward the Third’s day, when the Black Prince and his knights must often have crossed the Westbourne stream by the bridge built just where the Albert Gate now stands. Mr. Davis in his History of Knightsbridge gives as the origin of the name the story that “in ancient time certain knights had occasion to go from London to wage war for some holy purpose. Light in heart if heavy in arms, they passed through this district on their way to receive the blessing awarded to the faithful by the Bishop of London at Fulham. For some cause or other, however, a quarrel ensued between two of the band, and a combat was determined upon to decide the dispute. They fought on the bridge which spanned the stream of the Westbourne, while from its banks the struggle was watched by their partisans. Both fell, if the legend may be trusted; and the place was ever after called Knightsbridge in remembrance of their fatal feud.”

Walking down the Brompton Road from the Knightsbridge Tube station it is difficult to realise that not a hundred and fifty years ago “the stream ran open, the streets were unpaved and unlighted, and a Maypole was still on the village green.”

Yes, a few hundred years ago, on that very triangle of green grass you see to-day outside Mr. Tattersall’s big gateway, diagonally facing the Knightsbridge Tube station, men and maidens danced round the maypole on the Knightsbridge village green.

I have a special weakness for that three-cornered grass plot. People pass it every day and look scornfully at it—if they look at all. No one knows that it is all that is left of a piece of Merrie England. Little by little it has been pared away. The last maypole was taken down at the end of the eighteenth century, and the watchhouse and pound that Addison mentions in the Spectator disappeared about a quarter of a century later. The little bit of green has watched the evolution of the tiny chapel of the Elizabethan lazar-house that once existed near by into the stately and uninteresting Holy Trinity Church, and the gradual rise of the immense departmental shops to take the place of the village silk mercers of yesterday.

There is a tradition that part of the green was once used as a burial ground in the time of the Great Plague, but since there is no record of this gruesome fact, I refuse to believe it.

Tattersall’s

“Satirists may say what they please about the rural
enjoyments of a London citizen on Sunday.”
Washington Irving.

One was brought up to believe in the country Sunday after-dinner inspection of property, where unlucky week-end visitors are paraded to admire their host’s corn and cattle, but I have often wondered what the English nation did with itself when in town of a Sunday afternoon. I know now. They go to Tattersall’s and look at the horses to be sold next day. Tattersall’s on a fine Sunday afternoon in the season is like a big reception by a not too exclusive hostess. Pretty young girls in charming frocks make the tour of the stables with their menfolk, and very horsey-looking people try to persuade their neighbours that they know as much about horses as the more unobtrusive individuals at whose nod grooms fly to strip their charges for inspection.

Since Richard Tattersall, the last Duke of Kingston’s training-groom, opened his auction mart when his patron died in 1773, and founded his fortunes by buying Highflier for £2500, Tattersall’s has grown into a national institution with a world-wide reputation. It still belongs to the same family, but they moved in 1865 from Grosvenor Place to the present buildings, where every Monday all the year round the auctions take place, and every Sunday in the season dukes and jockeys, horse dealers and country squires, society ladies and trainers’ wives, stroll up and down admiring the horses.

Ely House

“Queen Bess was Harry’s daughter.”
Rudyard Kipling.

As you come out of the Tube station, the view of Dover Street with its irregular skyline is a very modern one. It looks a rather dull, uninteresting place, given over to commerce and clubs, but like most of the Piccadilly and Pall Mall quarter, it is very reminiscent of the Stuart period. The history goes back to the respectable date of 1642, when the Clarendon estate was cut up into Dover, Albemarle, Bond and Stafford streets.

Out of Peckham, that haunt of the prosperous City man of those times, had come Sir Thomas Bond, the forerunner of the Messrs. Cubitt of 1921, with his syndicate, dealing death to historical associations and possessing none of the delicacy of feeling that made John Evelyn turn his head the other way when he drove by with Lord Clarendon the late owner.

Evelyn himself lived here, close to the house of Lord Dover, whose name was given to the street. Pope’s friend, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Lady Byron, both lodged in Dover Street, but by far the most interesting house is No. 37, a brick building of unobtrusive, classic simplicity, that has a story connecting it with the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

You might pass up and down Dover Street many times without noticing the significant bishop’s mitre, carved in stone halfway up the middle of the façade. This was once the distinguishing mark of the town house of the bishops of Ely that they bought in 1772 from the Government in exchange for all claim on their Hatton Garden property in Ely Place. Nowadays one thinks of diamond merchants in connection with Hatton Garden, but in Elizabeth’s day it was the Naboth’s vineyard that she coveted on behalf of her handsome Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. The bishops were forced to grant him a lease for the rent of a red rose, ten loads of hay, and ten pounds, the right to walk in their rival’s gardens whenever they chose, and to gather twenty baskets of roses every year.

The bone of contention brought no luck to anyone. Hatton was imprudent enough to borrow the money for improvements from his queen. She insisted on the bishops conveying the property to her till the sum should be repaid, and when one of them jibbed at carrying out the terms of this settlement, the Queen wrote him an Elizabethan epistle:

Proud prelate! I understand you are backward in complying with your agreement: but I would have you understand that I, who made you what you are, can unmake you; and if you do not forthwith fulfil your engagement, by God, I will immediately unfrock you, Elizabeth.

Sir Christopher Hatton was never able to repay his mistress’s loan. It broke his heart, says an old chronicler, and though the queen relented at the end, and came to visit him, “there is no pulley can draw up a heart once cast down, though a Queen herself should set her hand thereunto.” He died disconsolate, in his coveted palace of Ely, in 1591.

After all these vicissitudes, the diocese got back its property at the Restoration, but in 1772 they gave up all claim to it in exchange for the mansion in Dover Street.

The latter is a stately house, with a long marble hall and staircase, and the bishops of Elizabeth’s day would doubtless be mildly surprised if they knew that it is now used by the men and women belonging to the Albemarle Club.

London Museum

“I turned me from that place in humble wise.”
John Drinkwater.

Quite near Dover Street, if you only knew it, is the one place where you may read the story of London spread out before you page by page better than anywhere else. But very few people can even tell you how to find it.

I once saw Lancaster House called the Cinderella of London museums—perhaps because it is so charming and so neglected. It is near no bus route nor railway station, yet this London Carnavalet is not so very far from the Dover Street Tube station and either of the two routes by which it is reached from that point are delightful walks. You may enter Green Park and stroll along the Queen’s Walk till you come to a passage-way to the left—not the first little narrow one where two people have to walk Indian file into St. James’s Place, but the second, that leads through a wider gateway, closed at 10 p.m., into Stable Yard.

Or else you can go down St. James’s Street, past the passage leading into the quaint little eighteenth-century courtyard of Pickering Place, towards St. James’s Palace with its beautiful old sixteenth-century brick gateway in Cleveland Row. Skirt the Palace to the right and you will come to Stable Yard, and in Stable Yard is Lancaster House.

It is a stately place. Queen Victoria once said to the Duchess of Sutherland: “I come from my house to your palace,” but shorn of the groups of chairs and tables and the stately company moving up and down the magnificent staircase, the yellow and red marble walls seem cheerless and repellant.

Now and then a little white notice is pasted on the door with the announcement that the museum, which is usually open on summer Fridays and Sundays from 2 to 6, and all other days from 10 to 6 and till 4 o’clock in winter, will be closed to the public for an afternoon or evening. The Government are entertaining distinguished strangers in the spacious salons, and then Lancaster House lives again for a few hours the brilliant existence it had in the nineteenth century, when it was called Stafford House and the Duke of Sutherland dispensed splendid hospitality there.

Amusing tales of these political parties, and of the guests, and of many other things, are told in Mr. Arthur Dasent’s delightful Story of Stafford House, that is sold for a modest sum just inside the door.

In 1913 Lord Leverhulme bought the remainder of the lease that expires in 1940, from the Duke of Sutherland, and handed it over to the trustees of the London Museum to house the collection of London antiquities then exhibited in Kensington Palace.

The name of Stafford House was changed to Lancaster House as a compliment to the King, who is Duke of Lancaster, and in memory of the generosity of a Lancashire man.

It is an entrancing place, where you can trace this great city’s history from the time men used flints to the war that is too near for its souvenirs to be anything but harrowing.

One may walk through the ages, from the Prehistoric room, through Roman, Saxon and Mediæval rooms, on the ground floor, and, then, going up the grand staircase, see how men lived in London in Tudor, seventeenth-century, Cromwellian and Charles II.’s days, and so on, through the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rooms, to the costume and Royal rooms, where you pause dumbfounded before the going-away dress of stiff white silk poplin embroidered with gold that Queen Mary wore the day of her wedding, 6th July, 1893.

Down on the ground floor, past the Temple Crusader with the Mestrovic countenance, in the west corridor, is the Gold and Silver Room, with the beautiful jewellery that some bygone Jacobean jeweller buried in Wood Street, perhaps when the menace of the Great Fire was upon him.

Of what happened to him there is no trace, and the lovely chains and rings lay buried for two and a half centuries. They may for all we know have been stolen and buried by thieves who met their end on Tyburn Tree before they could enjoy their booty. Admirers of Lalique’s work in the Place Vendôme will see how this unknown Englishman solved the same problems of the great French artist 250 years ago. The delicate enamel chains and lovely cameos and carved chalcedony and glass and onyx are prettier than many a jeweller’s stock to-day, and they must look disdainfully across at the case of heavy Victorian atrocities which our grandmothers wore so complacently.

St. James’s Church

I do not remember ever seeing anyone cross the paved courtyard of St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, on a week-day, for though it was one of Wren’s favourites among the churches he built, and inside there is a font carved by Grinling Gibbons, it has an air of sanctimonious respectability that is not very alluring, but the font with its carving of the Fall of Man, etc., is well worth seeing.

The Haymarket Shoppe

“Only far memories stray
Of a past once lovely, ...”
Walter de la Mare.

I have asked many people if they know where to find a perfect example of an eighteenth-century shop, bow windows little flight of steps and all, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus—and they look at me in blank astonishment.

Yet there it stands, at 34 Haymarket, two doors down from Coventry Street on the left-hand side, its pot-bellied windows filled with quaint jars and bottles and more modern packages of the upstart cigarette, that has ousted the honest snuff which was sold there for two hundred years.

It belongs to another day and generation, and through the old doorway the 20th-century passer-by can see the oaken shelves with their rows of old wooden boxes and snuff jars that used to contain the “King’s Morning Mixture,” as supplied to His Majesty King George IV.

The old shop has had many royal customers, and going through the beautiful Adam screen into the back room, one may be shown, if the courteous proprietor is not too busy, the accounts of Queen Charlotte, who bought her snuff here for nineteen years of the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex and the Princesses Charlotte and Elizabeth, who also indulged in the best rappee.

Most of the great names of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century England may be found in these old ledgers. David Garrick and Inigo Jones were customers, and so were my Lord Halifax, Lady Shrewsbury and the Duchess of Grafton. Beau Brummell’s accounts lie, cheek by jowl as he would have them, with those of the Earl of Dorchester and the Duke of Bedford, and the long array of famous names of men and women to be found in the yellowing papers might well have served as a list of guests present at any brilliant political function of the time.

The snuff-taking of those days has passed with the lace jabots and the silk knee-breeches, but the fashion died hard, and so recent a figure as Lord Russell of Killowen was one of the last of the famous snuff-takers. The twentieth century turns up its nose at what it calls a disgusting habit, yet it had its graces and was responsible for the creation of the beautiful boxes and bottles now treasured as heirlooms.

The actual owners of this fascinating shop have carried on the business in their family

THE OLD SNUFF HOUSE, 34 ST. JAMES’ HAYMARKET

since 1780, when the founder, M. Fribourg, retired. One of the present partners, Mr. George Evans, has written a delightful monograph on the Old Snuff House of Fribourg and Treyer, “At the Rasp and Crown, at the upper End of the Haymarket, London.” It is a charming book, filled with illustrations and reminiscences of the leisurely days before the arrival of the departmental store, when an old-established firm had time to have intimate courtly relations with its customers.

What Lord Petersham could now change his mind and return 216 pounds of anything and be urbanely credited with £75 12s.; and do grateful customers now make presents of gold-lined amboyna snuff boxes to mark their satisfaction?

If they do, I am as ignorant of the fact as the ordinary pedestrian of the historical interest of the unnoticed shop he passes daily on his way to Piccadilly Circus.

A King in Soho

“Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich
And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch.”
George Herbert.

Few Londoners can tell you where a king lies buried in Soho. Shelley may have been thinking of him when he gave his mad invitation to the old lady in the Highgate bus, to “sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings,” but if so his knowledge is not shared by many people.

If I have made you curious, walk along Coventry Street from Piccadilly Circus, leaving Leicester Square, that “pouting-place of princes,” on your right, and turn up Wardour Street past Lisle Street and Gerrard Street that was fashionable in Charles II.’s day and where Dryden and Burke and Lord Mohun lived and where Johnson and Reynolds founded the Literary Club that still exists in another meeting-place. Then, crossing Shaftesbury Avenue, you will come to the old graveyard at the back of the church of St. Anne, which is now a playground and only open till four in the winter months and during the hours of service on Sundays. On the wall you will find a tablet to the memory of the unlucky Theodore, King of Corsica, who fled from France, a bankrupt, only to be seized on his arrival in London and flung into the Fleet prison. “Near this place,” runs the inscription, “is interred Theodore, King of Corsica, who died in this neighbourhood Dec. 11, 1756, immediately after leaving the King’s Bench Prison by the Benefit of the Act of Insolvency. In consequence of which he registered his Kingdom of Corsica for the use of his Creditors.” To which Horace Walpole has appended the following stanza:

The grave, great Teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley-slaves and kings.
But Theodore this moral learned ere dead;
Fate poured its lessons on his living head.
Bestowed a kingdom, but denied him bread.

The kindly soul who bailed out fallen Majesty a fortnight before his death and then gave him decent burial, was, according to the verger of St. Anne, an Italian candle merchant from Old Compton Street, on the site of whose shop is now that excellent non-profiteering restaurant known as Le Dîner Français. But I prefer, with the Blue Book, to think that the Samaritan was a tailor, grown rich, perhaps, snipping the embroidered waistcoats of H.R.H. Frederick, Prince of Wales, when the latter squabbled with his royal parents and removed in a pettish mood to Leicester House hard by.

The only other interesting things I could find in this old church were the tomb of Hazlitt, immediately below King Theodore’s memorial stone,—the old wooden drain pipes, lately disinterred, that lie on the Shaftesbury Avenue side of the church, and the tablet within, to the memory of “The Beloved Mother-in-Law.”

St. Anne’s was built in 1685, a significant year in the annals of this neighbourhood. It was the date of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which sent the Huguenots flocking to London, to take up their residence here, and of the Battle of Sedgemoor, when the Duke of Monmouth, who had a mansion in the Square, used as his watchword the cry “So Ho!” and unconsciously christened the whole district.

CHAPTER III
TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET

“For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has
written yet.”
Richard Jefferies.

One of the most enthralling and endearing things about London is the way the memory of the great people, whose names are so familiar that you feel you would know their bearers if you met them, pervades the city and crops up in such very unexpected places. If business ever took you through that evil-smelling fishy Lower Thames Street, you would discover that Chaucer lived there for six years when he was Comptroller of the Petty Customs in the Port of London. You stroll through the little Cloisters in Westminster Abbey, of all places in the world, and some one tells you that Lady Hamilton once lived in the Littlington Tower, when she was servant to Mr. Hare and had no thought that she would ever inspire a hero to great victories. You think that when you have seen Sir Thomas More’s tomb in Chelsea Old Church, and Crosby Hall near by, you have exhausted the souvenirs of his life, but you find him again in Westminster Hall, where he was condemned to death—in the Deanery where he spent two months in charge of the Abbot of Westminster,—in Lincoln’s Inn—in Milk Street in the City, where he was born, “the brightest star that ever shone in that Via Lactea”—in the church of St. Lawrence Jewry where he lectured, and in the Tower where he died.

Dr. Johnson, of course, was ubiquitous. He went everywhere and usually said something noteworthy about everything. One of the great difficulties in writing this book has been to refrain from quoting him too frequently, and Pepys is even worse. The kindly official in the Clothworkers’ Hall (where I lunched once on a special occasion) said to me: “Samuel Pepys, Ma’am, Pepys the great Diarist—you may have heard of him,” and I felt like replying: “My good man, I have been with your Pepys through Chelsea—and in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, where he was married—I have seen his portrait at the Royal Society Rooms in Burlington House and his house in Buckingham Street—the church of St. Bride, where his birth was registered—St. Lawrence Jewry, where he was disappointed with Wilkins’ sermon—All Hallows, Barking, that, as he wrote on the 5th September, 1666, only just escaped the Great Fire—his parish church of St. Olave’s, where he worshipped, and Hyde Park, where he used to go driving with his wife.”

The Strand

“Through the long Strand together let us stray,
With thee conversing I forget the way.”
Gay.

Of all delightful places to meet memories of famous bygone people, the most intriguing is the Strand. A superficial glance at this modern bustling street shows little of the past still clinging about it. But a little further on you will discover, if you look for them, a bit of Roman London, a Renaissance chapel, a statue with a history, a lovely group of eighteenth-century houses, the water gate of a former fine mansion on the riverside, and a church that links us to the time of the Danish invasion.

The Londoner would probably tell you that Piccadilly Circus is the centre of his city; the historian, St. Paul’s; but to the foreigner, the visitor from overseas, or to the Anglo-Indian back from the East, the centre will always be Charing Cross.

It has been a starting-point for the traveller from the days when the little old village of Charing was used as a halting-place on the way to the City or to the Royal Palace of Westminster. Probably that is the true derivation of the name; “La Charrynge” meant the Turning, the great bend where the two roads met, but a prettier tradition derives its name from Edward I.’s dear queen (“chère Reine”). Another cross to her memory once stood here, the most beautiful of all those set up by the sorrowing king wherever her bier rested on its journey from Grantham to Westminster Abbey. Cromwell’s Parliament, with its passion for destruction, pulled it down in 1647, and the column which now stands in the courtyard in front of the station is only a memorial modelled as far as possible on the original design. It was set up by Barry about sixty years ago, but it is already so weather-beaten that many people are under the amiable delusion that it is the very cross erected in 1291.

The exact position of the old cross is now covered by King Charles I. on horseback, facing the scene of his death in Whitehall, and this statue has had an even more adventurous history.

It was cast originally in 1633 and after the king’s execution it became so unpopular that Parliament sold it to a brazier to be melted down. With an eye to the possibilities of the future that a diplomat might envy, this man cannily buried the statue and did a roaring trade with the Royalists in relics supposed to have been made from the fragments. After the Restoration the statue quietly came to light again, and was set up in its present position in 1674 with popular rejoicings. Its tribulations were not yet over. The day of the burning of Her Majesty’s Theatre, the sword, a real one of the period, that hung at the side, was broken off, and it has never been replaced.

Another curious thing about this statue lies in the absence of girths to the saddle or trappings on the horse, and it is said that when this oversight was pointed out to the sculptor Le Sueur, he was so overcome with mortification that he committed suicide on the spot.

In the days when London was no bigger than one of our second-rate provincial towns, Charing Cross was its market square. Here stood the pillory, even as late as the beginning of the last century; here were read the Royal proclamations, and here were the booths of the showmen who dealt in giants and fat ladies,—it was here, too, that Punch made his first appearance in England in 1666. Where the railway station now stands was Hungerford Market, and Trafalgar Square occupies the yard of what were once the Royal Mews, where the king’s falcons were kept till they were replaced by the king’s horses. It is rather odd that the word “mews” is now always associated with stables, for it once meant the pens or coops in which moulting falcons were kept (from the French muer—to moult). Geoffrey Chaucer, who lodged at Westminster, was in his time Clerk of the King’s Works and of the Royal Mews.

Water Gates

“In some parts of London we may go back through the
whole English history, perhaps through the history of man.”
Leigh Hunt.

People seem to think that a great deal of time and energy must be spent if they wish to see anything of historic London, and they pass by, unnoticed, many of the most interesting reminders of bygone periods, just because they may see them every day.

Buckingham Street, leading out of the Strand, is only a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and it is full of historic memories. What stories the beautiful old water gate at its foot could tell of the days when the silver Thames washed up and down its grey stone steps, and of the famous people who used to take boat there!

It was built by my Lord Duke of Buckingham, that hated favourite of James and Charles the First, who cuts such a sorry figure in English history books and such a romantic one in the pages of Dumas. He was the father of the extravagant, erratic George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whom Scott describes in Peveril of the Peak, and Pope more pungently:

Who in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.

Lely painted a wonderful portrait of the son. It hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, but even more interesting is the Vandyck picture of him with his brother Francis, painted when they were boys, and lately bought for the National Gallery.

With his father murdered, and his property confiscated by the Commonwealth and given to General Fairfax, the duke solved his problem by marrying the General’s daughter and heiress, a solution for which Cromwell made him pay by a sojourn in the Tower, where he was an intermittent resident. But in spite of his wife’s fortune the man who, “was everything by turns and nothing long” was obliged to sell the magnificent mansion that his father had re-built in 1625 on the site of the old York House.

The earlier mansion had been the home of the Bishop of Norwich in Henry VIII.’s time, of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, of the Archbishop of York, who gave the house its name, and of Sir Francis Bacon who loved the place and only left it for the Tower.

In 1672 the second York House was sold for £30,000, with the stipulation that the streets built on the site were to be given the Duke’s names. They are quite easy to trace: there is George Court, with the George Tavern, where you may eat your chop to the sound of an orchestra of singing birds; hard by are Villiers and Duke Streets; “Of” Lane has been rechristened York Place,—and now we are back in Buckingham Street.

The new quarter soon had famous tenants. John Evelyn lived for a year in Villiers Street, and forty years later Sir Richard Steele had a house there. No. 14, Buckingham Street, has been much remodelled since Samuel Pepys lived there and walked down the steps of the water gate on his way to visit his friend Mr. Cole in Brentford. There is a tablet on the house to tell the passer-by that the Earl of Oxford, William Etty and Clarkson Stanfield, the marine painter, also lived here.

The house opposite looks far more modern, but within the very new outer walls of the offices of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses are preserved much of the exquisite carving, ceiling paintings, and elaborate stucco work that belong to the time when Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias, came over to England in 1698 and lodged in these very rooms. David Hume, Rousseau, Fielding and Black all lived at No. 15, now incorporated in No. 16, but the Dickens lover will ignore these famous names and only remember that the rooms at the top of the house are the very ones taken by Miss Betsy Trotwood for David Copperfield.

With the exception perhaps of that Shah of Persia who spent a happy holiday in England in the reign of the late Queen Victoria, I suppose we never had a more eccentric royal visitor than Peter the Great. No doubt that is the reason why the memories of his brief stay here still seem to cling about so many parts of London. This strange being, half-barbarian, half-genius, had great ambitions and achieved them. As Voltaire says: “He gave a polish to his people and was himself a savage; he taught them the art of war, of which he was himself ignorant; inspired by the sight of a small boat on the river Moskwa, he erected a powerful fleet and made himself an expert and active shipwright, pilot, sailor and commander; he changed the manners, customs and laws of the Russians, and lives in their memory as the father of his country.”

Ships and shipbuilding were his passion. He went to Holland and worked in the yards there as a mechanic, calling himself Pieter Timmermann, until he had mastered the manual part of his craft. Then he came to England to study the theory of shipbuilding. King William III. placed the house in Buckingham Street, so conveniently close to the river, at his disposal, and invited him to Court when he felt inclined. But Pieter hated crowds and ceremonies and preferred to spend his days in hard work and his evenings drinking and smoking with boon companions.

At the end of a month, finding himself too far from the dockyards, he moved to Deptford, and put up at Sayes Court, kindly lent to him by John Evelyn. He was a dreadful tenant. We all know how Evelyn loved his garden,—but the Czar and his rough crowd trampled the flower-beds and spoilt the grass-plots, and trundled wheelbarrows through the diarist’s pet holly-hedge for exercise. “There is a house full of people right nasty!” wrote Evelyn’s indignant servant to his master. They ate and drank enormously,—eight bottles of sack after dinner were nothing to Pieter, and listen to this for a breakfast menu for twenty-one persons: half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, three quarts of brandy, six quarts of mulled wine, seven dozen of eggs, with salad in proportion.

Much of his time, when he was not gathering

WATER GATE, YORK HOUSE

the vast store of information that he afterwards used to such excellent advantage, the Czar spent sailing on the river, and in the evening he would repair with favoured members of his suite to a public-house in Great Tower Street. The old tavern has been rebuilt, but the name “The Czar of Muscovy,” and later “The Czar’s Head,” that it adopted as a compliment to its imperial visitor, is there to this day, and you may see it close to the city merchant’s house at No. 34 that is noticed in another chapter.

The “right nasty” people did not stay long, luckily for Evelyn’s peace of mind, but returned to London for another month or two. Then saying good-bye to King William, who had certainly treated him very well, the Czar pressed into his hand a little twist of brown paper, in which was found a ruby valued at £10,000, and sailed away home for Russia, taking with him no fewer than 500 English captains, scientists, pilots, gunners, surgeons, sail-makers, anchor-smiths, coppersmiths and the like, all ready for adventure in the unknown, according to the tradition of their race.

To come back to the Strand. It is fairly certain that the rather heavy and unattractive stone archway and steps at the bottom of Essex Street (at the other end of the Strand) formed the water gate of old Essex House, once occupied by the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite.

It compares very badly with the water gate in Buckingham Street, which was designed by Inigo Jones in 1625, and built by Nicholas Stone the master mason, who carved one of the lions on its frontage. The London climate has blurred the outline of the arms of the Villiers family on the south side, and the motto “Fidei Coticula Crux” on the north, and the raising of the Embankment now prevents the waters of the Thames from swirling round the old stone steps. No monarch had passed through the water gate since the days of Charles II. until Queen Alexandra came to open the new building in Buckingham Street in 1908. Its glory has departed, but there it stands, useless, unnoticed and forgotten, yet how beautiful!

The Adelphi

“I like the spirit of this great London which I feel
around me.”
C. Brontë.

Retracing your steps up Buckingham Street, turn to the right along Duke Street and John Street, and you will find yourself in the Adelphi, that oasis of calm quiet so near the roar of the bustling Strand, where famous authors of the present day like to pitch their luxurious tents. Note the steep hill up which you climb. This is the roof of the arches which the brothers Adam built over the site of old Durham House in order that they might erect their elegant houses on a level with the Strand. You can still wander in these vaults, if you are lucky enough to find an open gate; they are curious, and were once a fine rendezvous for evil characters.

The Duke of Buckingham’s names are not the only ones to be perpetuated here. The architects, Robert, John, James and William Adam, all had streets named after them, and they called the whole quarter the Adelphi because they were brothers.

William Street has lately been rechristened Durham House Street, to remind us that the Adelphi was built on the site of Durham House, where Lady Jane Grey was born.

Probably the Adelphi will have to go some day, when a proper bridge for Charing Cross is built across the river here, but lovers of this little bit of unspoiled Georgian London will miss its old-world charm and dignity.

St. Clement Danes

“Blith be thy chirches, wele sownyng be thy bellis.”
Dunbar.

Nowadays, looking eastward up the Strand, the eye is caught by the two churches of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, standing isolated in the centre of the roadway, whilst the traffic roars past on either side. In the Middle Ages you would still have seen St. Clement’s, though half engulfed in a rookery of ill-smelling, crazy old timbered houses, with so narrow a passage between that coachmen called it the “Straits of St. Clement’s.” But on the site of St. Mary’s stood a maypole, one hundred feet high, dear to the heart of the city youth for the merrymakings that took place around it. Such giddy proceedings vexed the Puritans, who swept it away in an outburst of righteous indignation, but old customs die hard, and at the Restoration another and still lordlier pole was set up with royal approval, and dancing and junketings went on around it for many a long day.

The church of St. Clement’s takes us back to very ancient history. Some say that beneath it lie the bones of King Harold and other Danish invaders. What is pretty certain is that the original church was built, after the expulsion of the Danes, by the few settlers who, having married English wives, chose to remain behind, on condition that they did not stir out of the strip of land that lay between the Isle of Thorney, now Westminster, and Caer Lud, now Ludgate.

Travellers from all over the world who have shared the common traditions of childhood, feel a queer sense of kinship when they pass along the Strand and suddenly hear the old bells ringing out the familiar tune of “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.” The bells of the nursery-rhyme are not those of St. Clement Danes, but of the St. Clement’s, Eastcheap, which for centuries has been in the centre of the dried fruit trade.

ST. CLEMENT DANES

The bells were famous even in Shakespeare’s day. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow,” says Falstaff in Henry IV. Those chimes are gone, but the present peal of ten bells, cast in 1693, is as famous for its music.

One might write a whole history of church bells, from the time when Turketul, Abbot of Croyland in Lincolnshire, in the ninth century, presented his abbey with the great bell Guthlac, and added six others with the rhythmic names of Pega, Bega, Bettelin, Barthomew, Tatwin and Turketul, to make a peal.

In the early monkish days they looked upon bells as the voices of good angels: they were blessed and dedicated: the passing bell was tolled to keep off evil spirits from the dead. Henry VIII., that ruthless iconoclast, cared little for superstition, and in the general destruction of the religious houses hundreds of old bells were sold or melted down. But the pious people of those days would point out how the Bishop of Bangor, who sold his Cathedral bells, was shortly afterwards stricken with blindness, and that Sir Miles Partridge won the Jesus Bells of St. Paul’s from King Henry at play and, proceeding to remove them and have them melted down, was hanged soon after on Tower Hill.

The bells of St. Clement’s were added after the church had been rebuilt in 1692, under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren, who gave his services for nothing in his usual generous-hearted way.

Dʳ. Johnson’s Pew in Sᵗ. Clement Dane’s Church

St. Clement’s is dear to all true Londoners as Dr. Johnson’s church. You may see the very pew where he sat, and there is something about the solid, handsome structure that seems to fit the thought of the ponderous great man who worshipped there Sunday by Sunday, striving “to purify and fortify his soul and hold real communion with the Highest.” It is a fine and a prosperous church, and so richly endowed that at one time all the paupers of the neighbourhood used to flock there for the sake of what they could get. That they were well looked after, the carefully kept parish registers bear witness as far back as 1558. There are other interesting entries in the old registers. You may read of the baptism of Master Robert Cicill, the sonne of ye L. highe Threasurer of England, and of the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor with Mary Davies, the child heiress of Ebury Manor, who brought to her husband all those lands of Pimlico and Belgravia from whose rents the Dukes of Westminster draw the bulk of their colossal fortune. Her life story has been published recently by Mr. Charles T. Gatty in his two-volumed Mary Davies and the Manor of Ebury.

Chapel Royal of the Savoy

“It is a wonderful place ... this London ... and
what do I know of it?”—Lord Beaconsfield.

From St. Mary’s and St. Clement’s it is but a few minutes’ walk back along the Strand to the Chapel Royal of the Savoy, that once served all the district, but it is now perhaps the tiniest parish in London west of Temple Bar. There it stands in its quiet graveyard, all that is left to remind us of “the fayrest manor in England.” The old palace of the Savoy was built by Simon de Montfort, that “Cromwell of the Middle Ages,” on land granted by Henry III. to his wife’s uncle, Peter of Savoy, for which the said Peter had to pay the not very exorbitant rent of three barbed arrows. Afterwards it came into the possession of the Dukes of Lancaster. Here it was, in 1357, that the Black Prince, riding on a little black hackney, brought his prisoner King John of France, who stayed here, with brief intervals, till his death, as nobody seemed able to raise the money for his ransom. And here lived John of Gaunt, with his numerous household, not least of whom was Geoffrey Chaucer. Later came Henry IV., who annexed the manor, and since his time it has always belonged in a particular manner to the reigning house.

Nothing is left, though, to tell of it, save the chapel, which was begun by Henry VII. in place of a more ancient one fallen into decay,—and that strange judicial survival, the Court Leet with view of Frankpledge of the Manor and Liberty of the Savoy. Few people know that once a year the jury of the Court, headed by the Beadle with his silver-topped and carved staff of office, solemnly makes the round to inspect the boundary marks of the Manor. One is in Child’s Bank, another on the Lyceum stage, one in Burleigh Street, one by Cleopatra’s Needle, another in Middle Temple Lawn, where many scuffles have taken place in the past between the jurymen and indignant Benchers and officers of the Inns of Court concerning the question of trespass. The Court itself, which dates back to Saxon days, sits annually about Easter time, and still does “what is usually called everybody’s business, and nobody’s business,” as a former High Bailiff wrote.

The old Roman Bath in Strand Lane is a little beyond St. Clement Dane’s, and next to the Tube station. That belongs to a later chapter, but a short way further, on the same side of the road, is another bit of unnoticed London.

Prince Henry’s Room

“London, thou art the flour of Cities all.”—Dunbar.

Prince Henry’s room is one of those charming links with the past that lie unnoticed in the path of thousands who never stop to heed the story. At No. 17, Fleet Street, close to the ceaseless traffic of the Law Courts, is an unobtrusive timbered house. Through a low archway you see an eighteenth-century oaken stairway that leads to a sedate Jacobean room, where very few people ever come to disturb the peaceful, dignified atmosphere. The Council of the Duchy of Cornwall is supposed to have once met here regularly and I believe that from time to time Prince Henry’s room is now used for the meetings of various associations, but if you visit it any day between ten and four you will almost certainly find no one to disturb the ghosts of bygone cavaliers but the war veteran who passes his days there ruminating on the delinquencies of historians.

The house is one of the oldest in the City. It was built in 1610, the year that Henry, the elder son of James I. of England, was created Prince of Wales; and the room is known as Prince Henry’s room. Look at the lovely Jacobean art of the panelling on the west wall, and the decorated plaster ceiling, where in the centre you will find the device of this lamented “prince of promise,” who died at the early age of eighteen.

Most people say, “Prince Henry! who was Prince Henry?” and very few connect the name with that little known prince who steals like a shadow across the pages of our history books. But his memory deserves to be kept green if only for the reason that he was a true friend to Sir Walter Raleigh, that unfortunate Victim of petty-minded James. After one of his visits to Raleigh in the Garden House of the Tower, Prince Henry said: “No man but my father would keep such a bird in a cage.” A stained glass window sets forth his titles in old French,

Dv. treshavlt. et. trespvissant. Prince. Henry: Filz. Aisne. dv. Roy. Nre. Seign. Prince. de. Gavles: Duc: de: Cornvaile: et. Rothsay. Comte: de. Chestre. Chevalier. dv. tresnoble. Ordre. de. la. Iartierre. enstalle. le. 2. de. Iuliet. 1603.

He was in many ways the prototype of our own Prince of Wales and held almost as high a place in the affections of his people. He was everything that a king’s son should be. He was handsome, well-grown and athletic; he was scholarly and brilliant, having all James’ love of learning without his folly and effeminacy. If he was a paragon of erudition, he also loved the practical side of shipbuilding, and he liked to give and receive hard knocks in the miniature tournaments that he organised at Whitehall, when he and his friends would engage the whole evening in mighty battles with sword and pike. And in addition to all this he seems to have had the generous mind and temper of the truly great. It is no wonder that his untimely death evoked a cry of mourning throughout England.

He was playing tennis, threw off his coat and caught a mortal chill. Everything that the doctors of that day could do was done. They even applied pigeons to his head and a split cock to his feet. Sir Walter Raleigh, who loved the youth, sent from his prison in the Tower the recipe of a potent “quintescence”; it did more good than the pigeons or the split cock, but could not save him. Prince Henry died in 1612, when not quite nineteen years of age.

This is what they wrote of him after his death:

Loe! Where he shineth yonder,
A fixed star in heaven;
Whose motion heere came under
None of your planets seaven.
If that the moone should tender
The sunne her love, and marry,
They both would not engender
So great a star as Harry.

The Temple

“He didn’t understand the whispers of the Temple
fountain though he passed it every day.”—Dickens.

I know of a public school and university man who has lived all his life in London and protests that he has never seen Westminster Abbey: there are certainly hundreds of people who have never seen the Temple.

It would be a marvel to me that anyone should leave London without having wandered at least once in those courts, if I had not taken so long to find my own way there. One knows vaguely that it is a charming place, but going there is postponed for that fata morgana, a day of leisure, that recedes as it is approached, and time passes and the train whistles and steams slowly out of Euston or Victoria, leaving behind one of the very loveliest corners in old London,—so easy to reach it one had but tried.

You have only to turn through the old gatehouse that Wren built in 1684 to wander about in another world,—a world where it is possible to imagine dear Charles Lamb moving among his guests on a Wednesday evening, with Mary hovering in the background, or Goldsmith giving those rackety supper parties at No. 2 Brick Court that disturbed his studious neighbour Blackstone.

Few places in London are so filled with the memories of brilliant Englishmen as the Temple. If you want to know all about when and where

THE TEMPLE CHURCH. THE ROUND

they lived, go to the wigmaker who conducts the Temple affairs from his little shop in Essex Court, and he will provide you with Mr. Bellot’s fascinating Story of the Temple.

Expert sightseers of course know all about it. They will tell you that Lamb was born in No. 2, Crown Office Row, and that Thackeray lived at No. 19; that Goldsmith died at No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple Lane, and that Johnson’s Buildings are on the site of Dr. Johnson’s rooms in Inner Temple Lane, and if you share their predilections you can go and peer at the actual bricks that have once sheltered these great men. But if you want to feel the real spirit of the place, unhampered by gazing at any particular pile of bricks and mortar, go to the old Temple Church on a Sunday morning.

Take any bus along the Strand past Temple Bar, where Dr. Johnson used to say that if he stationed himself between eleven and four o’clock, every sixth passer-by was an author,—and go through the second entrance to the Temple called Inner Temple Lane. Or else take the Underground to the Temple and, walking along the Embankment, go up the Essex Street steps and turn into the Temple courts by the first gate you find open, even if that means going round into Fleet Street.

The service in the Temple is an unforgettable revelation. There is no reason why psalms should not be sung in every Anglican church in the world as they are sung in the Temple, but no one seems to have thought of it, except the Temple choirmaster, who has trained his choristers to sing the words as if they had a profound meaning.

Has anyone ever found fitting phrases to describe the peculiar beauty of the Temple Church, with its carved Norman porch, that twelfth-century Round Church, where nine recumbent Crusaders rest in peace, and gleaming marble pillars support both the choir and the Round? It must be seen to be believed, but I pity the traveller who leaves London without seeing it.

In the courts of the Temple there lie embalmed so many stories of so many ages, that everyone finds what suits his fancy. You may wander as Spenser did among

Those bricky towers,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,
Till they decayed through pride.

Or you may choose a century later and go to York and Lancastrian times, and listen to Suffolk saying:

Within the Temple Hall we were too loud,
The garden here is more convenient;

and Richard Duke of York’s reply,

Let him that is a true-born gentleman,
And stands upon the honour of his birth,
If he suppose that I have pleaded truth,
From off this briar pluck a white rose with me:

and the Duke of Somerset:

Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer,
But dare maintain the party of the truth,
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.
. . . . . . .
This brawl to-day,
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden,
Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
A thousand souls to death and deadly night.

It seems a pity that the Temple authorities do not so far unbend as to subscribe to the pretty legend by re-planting the gardens with red and white roses. It would give immense pleasure to countless transatlantic visitors, whose history books are fairly impartial on York and Lancastrian questions.

Then there are all the memories of gallant Elizabethan days, when the queen came and dined with the benchers in the great Middle Temple Hall and Twelfth Night was first performed here. It was by his dancing at one of the famous revels that the handsome youth Christopher Hatton first attracted the notice of Elizabeth, a moment when as our allies would say he lost a good chance of remaining quiet. The Hall is shown to visitors before twelve o’clock and after three on week-days and after church on Sundays. Peter Cunningham says the roof is the best piece of Elizabethan architecture in London.

What feasts they had there in the days when lawyers had time to make merry. Here is the account of one old chronicler:

For every feast the steward provided five fat hams with spices and cakes, and the chief butler seven dozen gilt and silver spoons, twelve damask table-cloths and twenty candlesticks. The constable wore gilt armour and a plumed helmet, and bore a pole axe in his hands. On St. Thomas’s Eve a parliament was held, when the two youngest brothers, bearing torches, preceded the procession of benchers, the officers’ names were called and the whole society passed round the hearth singing a carol. On Christmas Eve the minstrels, sounding, preceded the dishes, and dinner done, sang a song at the high table; after dinner the oldest masters of the revels and other gentlemen sang songs.

It sounds very cheerful and amiable, but it is difficult to imagine our modern lawyers passing round the hearth singing a carol.

I suppose that the three best-loved dwellers in the Temple were Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb, and none of them were lawyers. Johnson was living in No. 1 Inner Temple Lane when Topham Beauclerk and Mr. Langton knocked him up at three in the morning to see if he could be persuaded to finish the night with them, and he came out with a poker, and his little black wig on, and said when he understood their errand, “What, is it you, you dogs, I’ll have a frisk with you.”

The story of Goldsmith’s tenancy of the Temple reminds one of the tales told of Balzac, whose tastes and weaknesses he shared. Always in financial difficulties, as soon as he made a little money he bought quantities of clothes and furniture and ran into debt to his tailor, perhaps for the very red velvet coat with lace ruffles that you may see to-day in the London Museum at Lancaster House. Goldsmith had many London lodgings and only came to the Temple in 1764. When he died there ten years later the staircase of this improvident, extravagant genius was crowded with the poor he had managed to help. No one seems to know exactly where he lies buried in the Temple churchyard.

Lamb was a true child of the Temple as he was born there. It may be heresy, but I have always wished he had not called it “the most elegant spot in the metropolis”; he loved it more than that, as all readers of The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple know well.

No one leaves the Temple without pausing in Fountain Court, where Ruth Pinch used to meet Tom. It is by far the most charming of all the courts of the Temple. “I lived in Fountain Court for ten years,” wrote Arthur Symons, “and I thought then and I think still, that it is the most beautiful place in London.”

CHAPTER IV
ROUND ABOUT THE TOWER

“I do not like the Tower, of any place.”—Richard III.

Having amused myself many times in Paris by hunting up the pieces of the old wall that Philippe Auguste built before he departed to the Holy Land on one of his Crusades, I set out one day to see how much remains of the wall the Romans built round London.

I discovered some bits of it, but I discovered a great many other things in the process.

There is very little left of the city that the old Romans called Augusta and the older Britons Llyn-Din—that some say means “the Lake Fort” and some “The Hill by the Pool.” In the Guildhall and London museums there are statues and vases and ornaments and mosaic pavements belonging to those times, but in the city streets there are hardly any traces to-day of the Roman occupation. Watling Street, a piece of Roman road that still bears an Anglo-Saxon name, runs citywards from the back of St. Paul’s, but that may better be reached from Cheapside. Most of the Roman wall that remains is now below ground level. The best places to see what is visible are in St. Olave’s, Hart Street; at Trinity Place, Tower Hill; at Barber’s bonded warehouses in Cooper’s Row; and at The Roman Wall House at No. 1, Crutched Friars, a new building whose plans were altered by the Sadlers’ Company so as to preserve a good specimen of the old wall in one of the basement rooms.

I began my search for Roman remains in Strand Lane, which lies next door to the Strand station on the Holborn tube, and can be reached either by bus along the Strand or by District train to the Temple, whence you go uphill up Arundel Street and, turning to your left along the Strand, find it after two or three minutes’ walk. Half-way down the little winding passage that once led to the waterside there is on the left a dingy sign, “The Old Roman Bath.”

The English reputation for liking cold baths must have been a legacy from the Romans. Time was when the venerable cold spring bath was used daily. David Copperfield had many a cold plunge in it when he was living in Peter the Great’s house at the lower end of Buckingham Street. But now it is only open from 11 to 12 on Saturday mornings to the very occasional visitor who turns aside to look at this 2,000-year-old relic of the London of the past.

As in the Frigidarium of the Cluny Museum in Paris, it seems as if one steps back into the world as Julius Cæsar knew it, across the threshold into the little vaulted chamber where the waters from the spring, once famed for miraculous cures, flow through the marble walls of the identical bath used by our Roman conquerors. The Romans contented themselves with a brick lining that still exists under the marble slabs, but the latter have an interest of their own, for they came from the famous bath built in the Earl of Essex’s house near by, which Queen Bess herself is said to have been the first to use. The spring comes from the old Holy Well, that gave its name to Holywell Street, on the North side of the Strand, a street destroyed to make room for Kingsway and Aldwych.

There is a Roman bath of a different kind underneath the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street, but on your way to this from the Temple station (or bus 13 from the Strand), get out at Cannon Street, where in a sort of cage against the wall of St. Swithin’s Church, directly opposite the station, is the very oldest relic in the whole of the city of London,—London Stone, the stone that the Romans set up to mark the centre of the city; the starting point from whence they marked the miles along their branching highways. As long as history has been written in this land, there has been mention of London Stone. Do you remember how, in Henry VI., Shakespeare makes Jack Cade proclaim himself King of the City, striking his staff against the block? Once it was a big pillar and set on the other side of the way, but famous stones are seldom allowed to rest in peace, and time, the weather, and clumsy mediæval cart-wheels have chipped and worn it to its present size.

LONDON STONE, CANNON STREET

Now take the train again, or another 13 bus, and go on to the Monument, where King William IV. stands on the very spot where Falstaff and Prince Hal made merry at the “Boar’s Head,” Eastcheap. Going down by the beautiful column which Sir Christopher Wren built to commemorate the Great Fire, hard by where it started in Pudding Lane, turn to your left in Lower Thames Street opposite the church of St. Magnus, and walk along this unattractive causeway till you come to the Coal Exchange with its Corinthian porch. You will find the porter through a door up the side-street of St. Mary-at-Hill. Do not go on Monday, Wednesday or Friday afternoons, for those are marketdays or whatever the correct term is on Coal Exchanges, and, as that most agreeable porter explained to me: “We found it didn’t do, Ma’am; for when the genelmen on the Exchange see me taking a lady or genelman or it might be a party down below into the cellar, they naturally says to me ‘What for?’ And when I say ‘Roman bath,’ they say ‘Roman bath, Jones! Did you say Roman bath? You don’t mean to say there’s a Roman bath below and me here forty years and never know it!’ And down they goes with all their friends, all equally surprised, and business gets neglected. That’s how it is, Ma’am.”

Business in the coal trade has been too much neglected for anyone to wish to hinder it further, so go on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday afternoon. It is quite worth the exertion, for this hot-air or sweating chamber, with its fire-blackened bricks, forming part of an elaborate system of baths, is even more interesting than the Roman bath in the Strand.

The Coal Exchange, with its curious rotunda floor of inlaid wood, was only built in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it has two more unexpected links with the past. I am indebted to Messrs. Thornbury and Walford for pointing out that the black oak used in the woodwork is part of a tree, four or five centuries old, that was discovered in the River Tyne, and the blade of a dagger in the shield of the City arms is made of wood from a mulberry tree that Peter the Great planted when he worked as a shipwright in Deptford Harbour.

Turning up St. Mary’s-at-Hill into Great Tower Street, I found, nearly opposite All Hallows, Barking, a prosperous merchant’s house still standing practically untouched, as it was built a year or two after the Great Fire. At No. 34, an ordinary-looking archway leads into a courtyard fronting a perfect example of the home of a wealthy citizen of Charles II.’s time. A flight of steps leads up to the doorway, from which you catch a glimpse of panelled walls and noble staircase. The counting-house is on the right, and upstairs are the living rooms where the merchant lived with his wife and family and servants, in the fashion of those times. They entertained, too, after the day’s work was done, for amongst the private papers still treasured here is one complaining of the excessive noise of carriages and coaches turning in the cobbled courtyard at night.

It is worth while pushing open the door of the fifteenth-century perpendicular church of All Hallows, Barking, just opposite, to see the Norman pillars and the fine brasses. The best one is in front of the litany desk, and in the corner to the right is a brass to the memory of William Thynne and his wife.

This is not the Thynne who has such a gruesome monument in Westminster Abbey, but a more worthy sixteenth-century ancestor, who was “chefe clerk of the Kechyn of Henry VIII.,” and who published the first edition of the entire works of Chaucer. Both of them are descendants of that John of the Inn whose soubriquet became the name of the Bath family.

All Hallows gets its surname from the Abbess of Barking, the head of the seventh-century Benedictine convent of Barking. She was a powerful lady,—one of the four abbesses who was a baroness ex officio, and she held the lands of the king by a baronage, furnishing her share of men-at-arms. Only an old gateway of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, eight miles out of London by the Fenchurch Street railway, is left of the nunnery, but All Hallows, which was connected with it, survived the Great Fire and is still intact.

Turning your back on the old church, and walking up Seething Lane, where Pepys went to live in 1660 and kept his diary for nine years, you come to St. Olave’s Church on the corner of Hart Street, where his pretty young wife was buried. Church manners have vastly changed since Pepys’ day. When a bomb from an avion fell just outside the Verdun Cathedral one Sunday morning, two months before the big attack, no one turned his head except one little acolyte, who couldn’t resist a surreptitious grin at his comrade in the front pew. But listen to Pepys:

6 June, 1666. To our own church, it being the common Fastday, and it was just before sermon; but Lord! how all the people in the church stared upon me to see me whisper (the news of the victory over the Dutch at sea) to Sir John Minnes and my Lady Pen. Anon I saw people stirring and whispering below, and by and by comes up the sexton from my Lady Ford to tell me the news, which I had brought, being now sent into the church by Sir W. Batten in writing, and passed from pew to pew.

The church of St. Olave’s has a proud history. There are records of the parish in Henry I.’s day, and in 1283 of a church dedicated to St. Olaf, an exiled Norwegian. The present building dates from about 1450. It is one of the eight existing churches that escaped the Great Fire.

The mid-Victorian Vandals who filled up the marble crypt, and removed the old galleries and square pews, with their candlesticks, have mercifully left the fine roof intact, and St. Olave’s possesses a number of quaint Elizabethan treasures. On the door there is one of the few remaining sanctuary knockers used by a fugitive from justice if he wanted to claim sanctuary protection: on four of the six bells in the church peal is engraved “Anthony Bartlet made mee 1662.” The crown on the weather vane is supposed to commemorate the visit of Queen Elizabeth in 1554 when she gave silken bell-ropes as a thank-offering for her release from the Tower, and on the front of the organ gallery are the wrought-iron hat-stands with which the clergy of those days emphasised their protest against men wearing their hats in church.

The beautifully wrought iron sword-stands are used to this day when the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs attend an official service at St. Olave’s. The old church has been intimately connected with the navy since the days when the Admiralty lodged in Mark Lane and Crutched Friars, and it is still the parish church of the Master and Brethren of Trinity House, who come humbly on foot, via Catherine Court and Seething Lane, to the annual special service on Trinity Sunday, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, as Master, making his pilgrimage like the rest.

But for the ordinary visitor who has no part in these ceremonial happenings the great interest of St. Olave’s lies in the memories connected with its greatest parishioner, Samuel Pepys, Esq., Secretary to the Admiralty.

The fame of his Diary has rather obscured Pepys’ well-merited reputation as an admirable and faithful public servant at a time when these qualities were rare. He was living at the Navy Office in Seething Lane in 1666, and it is thanks to his sagacity in ordering all the workmen from the Royal Dockyards to blow up the intervening houses that St. Olave’s, Hart Street, Allhallows Staining, and Allhallows Barking were saved from the Great Fire.

Pepys and his pretty wife are both buried in their parish church of St. Olave’s. Mrs. Pepys died when she was only twenty-nine, and though he had teased the jealousy of “my wife, poor wretch,” Pepys ordered her bust to be carved, not in the usual profile, but with the lovely head turned so that he could see

THE TOWER OF LONDON. BYWARD TOWER