Haunted London — Long Acre and its Tributaries Part 2

Benjamin Franklin, when first in England, worked at the printing-office of Mr. Watts, in Little Wild Street, after being employed for twelve months at one Palmer’s, in Bartholomew Close.

He lodged close by in Duke Street, opposite the Roman Catholic Chapel, with a widow, to whom he paid three-and-sixpence weekly.

His landlady was a clergyman’s daughter, who had married a Catholic, and abjured Protestantism.

She and Franklin were much together, as he kept good hours and she was lame and almost confined to her room.

Their frugal supper often consisted of nothing but half an anchovy, a small slice of bread and butter each, and half a pint of ale between them.

On Franklin proposing to leave for cheaper lodgings, she consented to let him retain his room at two shillings a week.

In the attic of the house lived a voluntary nun.

She was a lady who early in life had been sent to the Continent for her health, but unable to bear the climate, had returned home to live in seclusion on £12 a year, devoting the rest of her income to charity, and subsisting, healthy and cheerful, on nothing but water-gruel.

Her presence was thought a blessing to the house, and several tenants in succession had charged her no rent.

She permitted the occasional visits of Franklin and his landlady; and the brave American lad, while he pitied her superstition, felt confirmed in his frugality by her example.

During his first weeks with Mr. Watts, Franklin worked as a pressman, drinking only water while his companions had their five pints of porter daily.

The “Water American,” as he was called, was, however, stronger than his colleagues, and tried to persuade some of them that strong beer was not necessary for strong work.

His argument was that bread contained more materials of strength than beer, and that it was only corn in the beer that produced the strength in the liquid.

Born to be a reformer, Franklin persuaded the _chapel_ to alter some of their laws; he resisted impositions, and conciliated the respect of his fellows.

He worked as a pressman, as he had done in America, for the sake of the exercise.

He used, he tells us, to carry up and down stairs with one hand a large _form_ of type, while the other fifty men required both hands to do the same work.

Franklin’s fellow pressman drank every day a pint of beer before breakfast, a pint with bread and cheese for breakfast, a pint between breakfast and dinner, one at dinner, one again at six in the afternoon, and another after his day’s work; and all this he declared to be necessary to give him strength for the press.

“This custom,” said the King of Common Sense, “seemed to me abominable.

” Franklin, however, failed to make a convert of this man, and he went on paying his four or five shillings a week for the “cursed beverage,” destined probably, poor devil, to remain all his life in a state of voluntary wretchedness, serfdom, and poverty.

A few of the men consented to follow Franklin’s example, and renouncing beer and cheese, to take for breakfast a basin of warm gruel, with butter, toast, and nutmeg.

This did not cost more than a pint of beer--“namely, three halfpence”--and at the same time was more nourishing and kept the head clearer.

Those who gorged themselves with beer would sometimes run up a score and come to the Water American for credit, “their light being out.

” Franklin attended at the great stone table every Saturday evening to take up the little debts, which sometimes amounted to thirty shillings a week.

“This circumstance,” says Franklin in his autobiography, “added to the reputation of my being a tolerable _gabber_--or, in other words, skilful in the art of burlesque--kept up my importance in the ‘chapel.

’ I had, besides, recommended myself to the esteem of my master by my assiduous application to business, never observing ‘Saint’ Monday.

My extraordinary quickness in composing always procured me such work as was most urgent, and which is commonly best paid; and thus my time passed away in a very pleasant manner.

”[504] Franklin, like a truly great man, was quietly proud of the humble origin from which he had risen; and when he came to England as the agent and ambassador of Massachusetts, he paid a visit to his work-room in Wild Street, and going to his old friend the press, said to the two workmen busy at it, “Come, my friends, we will drink together; it is now forty years since I worked like you at this very press as a journeyman printer.

” Wild House stood on the site of Little Wild Street.

The Duchess of Ormond was living there in 1655. [505] On the day when King James II.

escaped from London the mob grew unruly, and assembled in great force to pull down houses where either mass was said or priests lodged.

Don Pietro Ronguillo, the Spanish ambassador, who lived at Wild House, and whom Evelyn mentions as having received him with “extraordinary civility” (March 26, 1681), had not thought it necessary to ask for soldiers, though the rich Roman Catholics had sent him their money and plate as to a sanctuary, and the plate of the Chapel Royal was also in his care.

But the house was sacked without mercy; his noble library perished in the flames; the chapel was demolished; the pictures, rich beds, and furniture were destroyed,--the poor Spaniard making his escape by a back door.

[506] His only comfort was that the sacred Host in his chapel was rescued.

[507] In 1780 another savage and thievish Protestant mob, under Lord George Gordon, assembled in St. George’s Fields to petition Parliament against the Test Act, which relieved Roman Catholics from many vexatious penalties and unjust disabilities on condition of their taking their oaths of allegiance and disbelief in the infamous doctrines of the Jesuits.

The mob assembled on the 2d of June, and jostled and insulted the Peers going to the House of Lords.

The same evening the people demolished the greater part of the Roman Catholic Chapel in Duke Street.

On Monday they stripped the house and shop of Mr. Maberly, of Little Queen Street, who had been a witness at the trial of some rioters.

On Tuesday they passed through Long Acre and burnt Newgate, releasing three hundred prisoners, and the same day destroyed the house of Justice Cox in Great Queen Street.

[508] In these street riots seventy-two private houses and four public gaols were burnt, and more than four hundred rioters perished.

At the above-named chapel Nollekens, the eminent sculptor, was baptized in 1737. The present chapel is much resorted to on Sundays by the Irish poor and foreigners, who live about Drury Lane.

Nicholas Stone, the great monumental sculptor, lived in Long Acre.

In 1619 Inigo Jones began the new Banqueting House at Whitehall, and replaced the one destroyed by fire six months before.

This master mason was Nicholas Stone,[509] the sculptor of the fine monument to Sir Francis Vere in Westminster Abbey.

His pay was 4s.

10d.

a day.

Stone also designed Dr. Donne’s splendid monument in St. Paul’s. Roubilliac was a great admirer of the kneeling knight at the north-west corner of Vere’s tomb.

He used to stand and watch it, and say, “Hush!

hush!

he vill speak presently.

” Mr. J.

T.

Smith seems to think that the Shakspere monument at Stratford is in this sculptor’s manner.

[510] Inigo Jones, who had been fined for having borne arms at the siege of Basing House, joined with Nicholas Stone in burying their money near Inigo’s house in Scotland Yard; but as the Parliament encouraged servants to betray such hidden treasures, the partners removed their money and hid it again with their own hands in Lambeth Marsh.

Oliver Cromwell, when member for Cambridge, lived from 1637 to 1643, on the south side of Long Acre, two doors from Nicholas Stone the sculptor.

John Taylor, the “Water-Poet” an eccentric poetaster, kept a public-house in Phœnix Alley, now Hanover Court, near Long Acre.

He was a Thames waterman, who had fought at the taking of Cadiz, and afterwards travelled to Germany and Scotland as a servant to Sir William Waade.

He was then made collector of the wine-dues for the lieutenant of the Tower, and wrote a life of Old Parr, and sixty-three volumes of satire and jingling doggerel, not altogether without vivacity and vigour.

He called himself “the King’s Water Poet” and “the Queen’s Waterman;” and in 1623 wrote a tract called “The World runs on Wheels”--a violent attack on the use of coaches.

“I dare truly affirm,” says the writer, “that every day in any term (especially if the court be at Whitehall) they do rob us of our livings and carry five hundred and sixty fares daily from us.

” In this quaint pamphlet Taylor gives a humorous account of his once riding in his master’s coach from Whitehall to the Tower.

“Before I had been drawn twenty yards,” he says, “such a timpany of pride puft me up that I was ready to burst with the wind-cholic of vaine glory.

” He complains particularly of the streets and lanes being blocked with carriages, especially Blackfriars and Fleet Street or the Strand after a masque or play at court; the noise deafening every one and souring the beer, to the injury of the public health.

It is Taylor who mentions that William Boonen, a Dutchman, first introduced coaches into England in 1564, and became Queen Elizabeth’s coachman.

“It is,” he says, “a doubtful question whether the devil brought tobacco into England in a coach, or brought a coach in a fog or mist of tobacco.

” Nor did Taylor rest there, for he presented a petition to James I. , which was submitted to Sir Francis Bacon and other commissioners, to compel all play-houses to stand on the Bankside, so as to give more work to watermen.

In the Civil War, Taylor went to Oxford and wrote ballads for the king.

On his return to London, he settled in Long Acre with a mourning crown for a sign;[511] but the Puritans resenting this emblem, he had his own portrait painted instead with this motto-- “There’s many a head stands for a sign: Then, gentle reader, why not mine?

” Taylor was born in 1580, and died in 1654; and the following epitaph was written on the vain, honest fellow, who was buried at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields:-- “Here lies the Water-poet, honest John, Who rowed on the streams of Helicon;

Where having many rocks and dangers past, He at the haven of Heaven arrived at last.

”[512] From 1682 to 1686 John Dryden lived in Long Acre, on the north side, in a house facing what formerly was Rose Street.

His name appears in the rate-books as “John Dryden, Esq.

”--an unusual distinction--and the sum he paid to the poor varied from 18s.

to £1. [513] It was here he resided when he was beaten, one December evening in 1679, by three ruffians hired by the Earl of Rochester and the Duchess of Portsmouth.

Sir Walter Scott makes the poet live at the time in Gerard Street; but no part of Gerard Street was built in 1679. Rochester had the year before ridiculed Dryden as “Poet Squab,” and believed that Dryden had helped Mulgrave in ridiculing him in his clumsy “Essay on Satire.

” The best lines of this dull poem are these:-- “Of fighting sparks Fame may her pleasure say, But ’tis a bolder thing to run away.

The world may well forgive him all his ill, For every fault does prove his penance still;

Falsely he falls into some dangerous noose, And then as meanly labours to get loose.

” A letter from Rochester to a friend, dated November 21, in the above year, is still extant, in which he names Dryden as the author of the satire, and concludes with the following threat:--“If he (Dryden) falls on me at the blunt, which is his very good weapon in wit, I will forgive him, if you please, and _leave the repartee to Black Will with a cudgel_.

”[514] Dryden offered a reward of fifty pounds for the discovery of the men who cudgelled him, depositing the money in the hands of “Mr. Blanchard, goldsmith, next door to Temple Bar,” but all in vain.

The Rose Alley satire, the Rose Alley ambuscade, and the Dryden salutation, became established jokes with Dryden’s countless enemies.

Even Mulgrave himself, in his _Art of Poetry_ said of Dryden coldly-- “Though praised and punished for another’s rhymes, His own deserve as great applause sometimes.

” And, in a conceited note, the amateur poet described the libel as one for which Dryden had been unjustly “_applauded and wounded_.

” But these lines and this note Mulgrave afterwards suppressed.

Poor Otway, whom Rochester had satirised, and who had accused Dryden of saying of his _Don Carlos_ that, “Egad, there was not a line in it he would be author of,” stood up bravely for Dryden as an honest satirist in these vigorous verses:-- “Poets in honour of the truth should write, With the same spirit brave men for it fight.

* * * * * From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all blockheads have to brains.

” Dryden never took any poetical revenge on Rochester, and in the prefatory essay to his _Juvenal_ he takes credit for that forbearance.

[515] Edward (more generally known as Ned) Ward was the landlord of public-houses alternately in Moorfields, Clerkenwell, Fulwood’s Rents, and Long Acre.

He was born in 1667, and died 1731. He was a High Tory, and fond of the society of poets and authors.

[516] Attacked in the _Dunciad_, he turned _Don Quixote_ into Hudibrastic verse, and wrote endless songs, lampoons, coarse clever satires, and _Dialogues on Matrimony_ (1710).

The father of Pepys’s long-suffering wife lived in Long Acre; and the bustling official describes, with a stultifying exactitude, his horror at a visit which he found himself forced to pay to a house surrounded by taverns.

Dr. Arbuthnot, in a letter to Mr. Watkins, gives Bessy Cox--a woman in Long Acre whom Prior would have married when her husband died--a detestable character.

The infatuated poet left his estate between his old servant Jonathan Drift, and this woman, who boasted that she was the poet’s Emma,--another virago, Flanders Jane, being his Chloe.

[517] It is said of this careless, pleasant poet, that after spending an intellectual evening with Oxford, Bolingbroke, Pope, and Swift, in order to unbend, he would smoke a pipe and drink a bottle of ale with a common soldier and his wife in Long Acre.

Cibber calls the man a butcher;[518] other writers make him a cobbler or a tavern-keeper, which is more likely.

The shameless husband is said to have been proud of the poet’s preference for his wife.

Pope, who was remorseless at the failings of friends, calls the woman a wretch, and said to Spence, “Prior was not a right good man;

he used to bury himself for whole days and nights together with this poor mean creature, and often drank hard.

” This person, who perhaps is misrepresented--and where there is a doubt the prisoner at the bar should always have the benefit of it--was the Venus of the poet’s verse.

To her Prior wrote, after Walpole tried to impeach him:-- “From public noise and faction’s strife, From all the busy ills of life, Take me, my Chloe, to thy breast, And lull my wearied soul to rest.

“For ever in this humble cell [ale-house] Let thee and I [me], my fair one, dwell;

None enter else but Love, and he Shall bar the door and keep the key.

” Prior was the son of a joiner,[519] and was brought up, as before mentioned, by his uncle, a tavern-keeper at Charing Cross, where the clever waiter’s knowledge of Horace led to his being sent to college by the Earl of Dorset.

Abandoning literature, he finally became our ambassador to France.

He died in retirement in 1721. It was in a poor shoemaker’s small window in Long Acre,--half of it devoted to boots, half to pictures--that poor starving Wilson’s fine classical landscapes were exposed, often vainly, for sale.

Here, from his miserable garret in Tottenham Court Road, the great painter, peevish and soured by neglect, would come swearing at his rivals Barret and Smith of Chichester.

I can imagine him, with his tall, burly figure, his red face, and his enormous nose, striding out of the shop, thirsting for porter, and muttering that, if the pictures of Wright of Derby had fire, his had air.

Yet this great painter, whose works are so majestic and glowing, so fresh, airy, broad, and harmonious, was all but starved.

The king refused to purchase his “Kew Gardens,” and the very pawnbrokers grew weary of taking his Tivolis and Niobes as pledges, far preferring violins, flat-irons, or telescopes.

It was in Long Acre that that delightful idyllic painter, Stothard, was born in 1755. His father, a Yorkshireman, kept an inn in the street.

[520] Sent for his health into Yorkshire, and placed with an old lady who had some choice engravings, he began to draw.

The first subject that he ever painted was executed with an oyster-shell full of black paint, borrowed from the village plumber and glazier.

This little man was the father of many a Watteau lover and tripping Boccaccio nymph.

That genial and graceful artist, who illustrated Chaucer, _Robinson Crusoe_, and _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, had the road to fame pointed out to him first by that little black man.

On the accession of King George I. the Tories had such sway over the London mobs, that the friends of the Protestant succession resolved to found cheap tavern clubs in various parts of the City in order that well-affected tradesmen might meet to keep up their spirit of loyalty, and serve as focus-points of resistance in case of Tory tumults.

Defoe, a staunch Whig, describes one of these assemblies in Long Acre, which probably suggested the rest.

At the Mughouse Club in Long Acre, about a hundred gentlemen, lawyers, and tradesmen met in a large room, at seven o’clock on Wednesday and Saturday evenings in the winter, and broke up soon after ten.

A grave old gentleman, “in his own grey hairs,”[521] and within a few months of ninety, was the president, and sat in an “armed” chair, raised some steps above the rest of the company, to keep the room in order.

A harp was played all the time at the lower end of the room, and every now and then one of the company rose and entertained the rest with a song.

Nothing was drunk but ale, and every one chalked his score on the table beside him.

What with the songs and drinking healths from one table to another, there was no room for politics or anything that could sour conversation.

The members of these clubs retired when they pleased, as from a coffee-house.

Old Sir Hans Sloane’s coach, made by John Aubrey, Queen Anne’s coachmaker, in Long Acre, and given to him by her for curing her of a fit of the gout, was given by Sir Hans to his old butler, who set up the White Horse Inn behind Chelsea Church, where it remained for half a century.

[522] Charles Catton, one of the early Academicians, was originally a coach and sign painter.

He painted a lion as a sign for his friend, a celebrated coachmaker, at that time living in Long Acre.

[523] A sign painted by Clarkson, that hung at the north-east corner of Little Russell Street about 1780, was said to have cost £500, and crowds used to collect to look at it.

Lord William Russell was led from Holborn into Little Queen Street on his way to the scaffold in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

As the coach turned into this street, Lord Russell said to Tillotson, “I have often turned to the other hand with great comfort, but I now turn to this with greater.

” He referred to Southampton House, on the opposite side of Holborn, which he inherited through his brave and good wife, the grand-daughter of Shakspere’s early patron.

In the year 1796 Charles Lamb resided with his father, mother, aunt, and sister in lodgings at No. 7 Little Queen Street, a house, I believe, removed to make way for the church.

Southey describes a call which he made on them there in 1794-5. The father had once published a small quarto volume of poetry, of which “The Sparrow’s Wedding” was his favourite, and Charles used to delight him by reading this to him when he was in his dotage.

In 1797 Lamb published his first verses.

His father, the ex-servant and companion of an old Bencher in the Temple, was sinking into the grave; his mother had lost the use of her limbs, and his sister was employed by day in needlework, and by night in watching her mother.

Lamb, just twenty-one years old, was a clerk in the India House.

On the 22d of September[524] Miss Lamb, who had been deranged some years before by nervous fatigue, seized a case-knife while dinner was preparing, chased a little girl, her apprentice, round the room, and on her mother calling to her to forbear, stabbed her to the heart.

Lamb arrived only in time to snatch the knife from his sister’s hand.

He had that morning been to consult a doctor, but had not found him at home.

The verdict at the inquest was “Insanity,” and Mary Lamb was sent to a mad-house, where she soon recovered her reason.

Poor Lamb’s father and aunt did not long survive.

Not long after, Lamb himself was for six weeks confined in an asylum.

There is extant a terrible letter in which he describes rushing from a party of friends who were supping with him soon after the horrible catastrophe, and in an agony of regret falling on his knees by his mother’s coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven for forgetting her so soon.

[525] There is no doubt that poor Lamb played the sot over his nightly grog; but he had a noble soul, and let us be lenient with such a man-- “Be to his faults a little blind, And to his virtues very kind.

” He abandoned her whom he loved, together with all meaner ambitions, and drudged his years away as a poor, ignoble clerk, in order to maintain his half-crazed sister; for this purpose--true knight that he was, though he never drew sword--he gave all that he had--HIS LIFE!

Peace, then!

peace be to his ashes!

[Illustration: LYON’S INN, 1804. ] [Illustration: CRAVEN HOUSE, 1790] CHAPTER XII.