Haunted London — St. Giles's Part 2

In the reign of Charles I. the south aisle of the hospital church was full of rubbish, lumber, and coffin-boards; and Lady Dudley put up a screen to divide the nave from the chancel.

In 1623 the church became so ruinous that it had to be rebuilt at an expense of £2068: 7: 2. Among the subscribers appear the names of the Duchess of Lennox, Sir Anthony Ashleye, Sir John Cotton, and the players at “the Cockpit playhouse.

” The 415 householders of the parish subscribed £1065: 9s.

, the donations ranging from the £250 of the Duchess of Dudley to Mother Parker’s twopence.

Nearly five years elapsed before the new church was consecrated.

On the 9th of June 1628 Pym brought a charge against the rector, Dr. Mainwaring, for having preached two obnoxious sermons, entitled “Religion” and “Allegiance,” and accused the imprudent time-server of persuading citizens to obey illegal commands on pain of damnation, and framing, like Guy Faux, a mischievous plot to alter and subvert the Government.

[630] The third sermon in which Mainwaring defended his two first, the stern Commons found upon inquiry[631] had been printed by special command of the king.

It was as full of mischief as a bomb-shell.

It held that on any exigency all property was transferred to the sovereign; that the consent of Parliament was not necessary for the imposition of taxes; and that the divine laws required compliance with every demand which a prince should make upon his subjects.

For these doctrines the Commons impeached Mainwaring; the sentence pronounced on him was, that he should be imprisoned during the pleasure of the House, that he should be fined £1000, to the king, make submission of his offence, be suspended from lay and ecclesiastical office for three years, and that his sermons be called in and burnt.

On June 20 the courtly preacher came to the House, and on his knees submitted himself in sorrow and repentance for the errors and indiscretions he had been guilty of in preaching the sermons “rashly, scandalously, and unadvisedly.

” He further acknowledged the three sermons to be full of dangerous passages and aspersions, and craved pardon for them of God and the king.

No sooner was the session over than the wilful king pardoned him, promoted him to the deanery of Winchester, and some years after to the bishopric of St. David’s. [632] The new church was consecrated on the 26th of January 1630. Bishop Laud performed the ceremony, and was entertained at the house of a Mr. Speckart, near the church.

There were two tables sufficient to seat thirty-two persons.

The broken churchyard wall was fenced up with boards, the altar hung with green velvet, a rail made to keep the mob from the west door, and a train of constables, armed with bills and halberts, appointed to maintain order if the Puritans became threatening.

The new rector, Dr. Heywood, had been chaplain to Laud, and was probably of the High Church party.

Like his expelled predecessor, he had been chaplain to one of the most arbitrary of kings.

In 1640 the Puritans, gaining strength, petitioned Parliament against him, stating that he had set up crucifixes and images of saints, likewise organs, “with other confused music, etc. , hindering devotion and maintained at the great and needless charge of the parish.

” They described the carved screen as particularly obnoxious, and they objected to the altar rail, the chancel carpet, the purple velvet in the desk, the needlework covers of the books, the tapestry, the lawn cloth, the bone lace of the altar cloths, and the taffeta curtains on the walls.

These “popish and superstitious” ornaments were sold by order of Parliament, all but the plate and the great bell.

The surplices were given away.

The twelve apostles were washed off the organ-loft, and the painted glass was taken down from the windows.

The screen was sold for forty shillings, and the money given to the poor.

The Covenant was framed and hung up in the church, and five shillings given to a pewterer for a new basin cut square on one side for baptisms.

The blue velvet carpet, embroidered cushions, and blue curtains were sold, and so were the communion rails.

In 1647 Lady Dudley’s pew was lined with green baize and supplied with two straw mats.

In 1650 the king’s arms were taken out of the windows, and a sun-dial was substituted.

The organ-loft was let as a pew.

The Restoration soon followed on these paltry excesses of a low-bred fanaticism.

The ringers of St. Giles’s rang a peal for three days running.

The king’s arms in the vestry and the windows were restored.

Galleries were erected for the nobility.

In 1670 a brass chandelier of sixteen branches was bought for the church, and an hour-glass for the pulpit.

In 1718 the old hospital church had become damp and unwholesome.

The grave-ground had risen eight feet, so that the church lay in a pit.

Parliament was therefore petitioned that St. Giles’s should be one of the fifty new churches.

It was urged that a good church facing the High Street, the chief thoroughfare for all persons who travelled the Oxford or Hampstead roads, would be a great ornament.

The petitioners also contended that St. Giles’s already spent £5300 a year on the poor, and that a new rate would impoverish many industrious persons.

The Duke of Newcastle, the Lord Chancellor, and other eminent parishioners strenuously supported the petition, which, on the other hand, was warmly opposed by the Archbishop of York, five bishops, and eleven temporal peers.

The opposition contended that the parish was well able to repair the present church; that the fund given for building new churches was never meant to be devoted to rebuilding old ones; and that so far from the parish not requiring church accommodation, St. Giles’s contained 40,000 persons, a number for which three new churches would be barely sufficient.

[633] Eleven years longer the church remained a ruin, when in 1729 the commissioners granted £8000 for a new church, provided that the parish would settle £350 a year on the rector of the new parish of Bloomsbury.

The architect of the new church, opened in 1734, was Henry Flitcroft.

The roof is supported by Ionic pillars of Portland stone.

The steeple is 160 feet high, and consists of a rustic pedestal supporting Doric pilasters;

over the clock is an octangular tower, with three-quarter Ionic columns supporting a balustrade with vases.

The spire is octangular and belled.

This hideous production of Greek rules was much praised by the critics of 1736. They called it “simple and elegant.

” They considered the east end as “pleasing and majestic,” and found nothing in the west to object to but the smallness and poverty of the doors.

The steeple they described as “light, airy, and genteel.

”[634] whether taken with the body of the church or considered as a _separate building_.

In 1827 the clock of St. Giles’s Church was illuminated with gas, and the novelty and utility of the plan “attracted crowds to visit it from the remotest parts of the metropolis.

”[635] St. Giles’s Churchyard was enlarged in 1628, and again soon after the Restoration.

The garden plot from which the new part was divided was called Brown’s Gardens.

In 1670 we find the sexton agreeing, on condition of certain windows he had been allowed to introduce into the side of his house, facing the churchyard, to furnish the rector and churchwardens, every Tuesday se’nnight after Easter, with two fat capons ready dressed.

In 1687 the Resurrection Gate, or Lich Gate, as it was called, and which still exists, was erected at a cost of £185: 14: 6. It stood for many years farther to the west than the old gate, and contains a heap of dully-carved figures in relievo, abridged from Michael Angelo’s “Last Judgment,” and crowded under a large “compass pediment.

” It has lately, however, been replaced in its old position.

This work was much admired and celebrated, but “Nollekens” Smith says that it is poor stuff.

Pennant, always shrewd and vivacious, was one of the first writers who exposed the disgraceful and dangerous condition of the London churchyards.

He describes seeing at St Giles’s a great square pit with rows of coffins piled one upon the other, exposed to sight and smell, awaiting the mortality of the night.

“I turned away,” he says, “disgusted at the scene, and scandalised at the want of police which so little regards the health of the living as to permit so many putrid corpses, packed between some slight boards, dispersing their dangerous effluvia over the capital.

”[636] In 1808 a new burial-ground for St. Giles’s parish was consecrated in St. Pancras’s. It stands in grim loneliness between the Hampstead Road and College Street, Camden Town.

The graves of John Flaxman, the sculptor, and his wife and sister, are marked by an altar tomb of brick, surmounted by a thick slab of Portland stone.

Near it is the ruinous tomb of ingenious, faddling Sir John Soane, the architect to the Bank of England.

It is a work of great pretension, “but cut up into toy-shop prettiness, with all the peculiar defects of his style and manner.

” Two black cypresses mark the grave.

[637] A few eminent persons are buried in the old St. Giles’s Churchyard.

Amongst these, the most illustrious is George Chapman, who produced a fine though rugged translation of the _Iliad_ which is to Pope’s what heart of oak is to veneer, and who died in 1634 aged seventy-seven, and lies buried here.

Inigo Jones generously erected an altar tomb to his memory at his own expense; it is still to be seen in the external southern wall of the church.

The monument is old; but the inscription is only a copy of all that remained visible of the old writing.

That chivalrous visionary, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was also buried here, and so was James Shirley, the dramatist, who died in 1666. The latter was the last of the great ante-Restoration play-writers, and of a thinner fibre than any of the rest, except melancholy Ford.

Richard Pendrell, the Staffordshire farmer, “the preserver and conductor of King Charles II.

after his escape from Worcester Fight,” has an altar tomb to his memory raised in this churchyard.

After the Restoration, Richard came to town, to be in the way, I suppose, of the good things then falling into Cavaliers’ mouths, and probably settled in St. Giles’s to be near the Court.

The story of the Boscobel oak was one with which the swarthy king delighted to buttonhole his courtiers.

Pendrell died in 1671, and had a monument erected to his memory on the south-east side of the church.

The black marble slab of the old tomb forms the base of the present one.

The epitaph is in a strain of fulsome bombast, considering the king who was preserved showed his gratitude to Heaven only by a long career of unblushing vice, and by impoverishing and disgracing the foolish country that called him home.

It begins thus:-- “Hold, passenger!

here’s shrouded in this hearse Unparalleled Pendrell thro’ the universe.

Like when the eastern star from heaven gave light To three lost kings, so he in such dark night To Britain’s monarch, lost by adverse war, On earth appeared a second eastern star.

” The dismal poet ends by assuring the world that Pendrell, the king’s pilot, had gone to heaven to be rewarded for his good steering.

In 1702 a Pendrell was overseer in this parish.

About 1827 a granddaughter of this Richard lived near Covent Garden, and still enjoyed part of the family pension.

In 1827 Mr. John Pendrell, another descendant of Richard, died at Eastbourne.

[638] His son kept an inn at Lewes, and was afterwards clerk at a Brighton hotel.

The only monument at present of interest in the church is a recumbent figure of the Duchess Dudley, the great benefactor of the parish, created a duchess in her own right by Charles I. She died 1669. The monument was preserved by parochial gratitude when the church was rebuilt, in consideration of the duchess’s numerous bequests to the parish.

She was buried at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire.

This pious and charitable lady was the daughter of Sir Thomas Leigh of Stoneleigh, and she married Sir Robert Dudley, son of the great Earl of Leicester, who deserted her and his five daughters, and went and settled in Florence, where he became chamberlain to the Grand Duchess.

Clever and unprincipled as his father, Sir Robert devised plans for draining the country round Pisa, and improving the port of Leghorn.

He was outlawed, and his estates at Kenilworth, etc. were confiscated and sold for a small sum to Prince Henry; but Charles I. generously gave them back to the duchess.

In her funeral sermon, Dr. Boreman says of this good woman: “She was a magazine of experience....

I have often said she was a living chronicle bound up with the thread of a long-spun age.

And in divers incidents and things relating to our parish, I have often appealed to her stupendous memory as to an ancient record....

In short, I would say to any desirous to attain some degree of perfection, ‘Vade ad Sancti Egidii oppidum, et disce Ducinam Dudleyam’--(‘Come to St. Giles, and inquire the character of Lady Dudley’).

”[639] The oldest monument remaining in the churchyard in 1708 was dated 1611. It was a tombstone, “close to the wall on the south side, and near the west end,” and was to the memory of a Mrs. Thornton.

[640] Her husband was the builder of Thornton Alley, which was probably his estate.

The following painful lines were round the margin of the stone:-- “Full south this stone four foot doth lie His father John and grandsire Henry Thornton, of Thornton, in Yorkshire bred, Where lives the fame of Thornton’s being dead.

” Against the east end of the north aisle of the church was the tombstone of Eleanor Steward, who died 1725, aged 123 years and five months.

That good and inflexible patriot, Andrew Marvell, the most poignant satirist of King Charles II.

, died in 1678, and is buried in St. Giles’s. Marvell was Latin secretary to Milton, and in the school of that good man’s house learnt how a true patriot should live.

It is recorded that one day when he was dining in Maiden Lane, one of Charles II.

’s courtiers came to offer him £1000 as a bribe for his silence.

Marvell refused the gift, took off the dish-cover, and showed his visitor the humble half-picked mutton-bone on which he was about to dine.

He was member for Kingston-upon-Hull for nearly twenty years, and was buried at last at the expense of his constituents.

They also voted a sum of money to erect a monument to him with a harmless epitaph; to this, however, the rector of the time, to his own disgrace, refused admittance.

Thompson, the editor of Marvell’s works, searched in vain in 1774 for the patriot’s coffin.

He could find no plate earlier than 1722. In the same church with this fixed star rests that comet, Sir Roger l’Estrange.

His monument was said to be the grandest in the church.

Sir Roger died in 1704, aged eighty-eight.

In 1721, after an ineffectual treaty for Dudley Court, where the parsonage-house had once stood, a piece of ground called Vinegar Yard was purchased for the sum of £2252: 10s.

as a burial-ground, hospital, and workhouse for the parish of St. Giles’s. At that time St. Giles’s relieved about 840 persons, at the cost of £4000 a year.

Of this number there were 162 over seventy years of age, 126 parents overburthened with children, 183 deserted children and orphans, 70 sick at parish nurses’, and 300 men lame, blind, and mad.

The Earl of Southampton granted land for five almshouses in St. Giles’s in 1656. [641] The site was in Broad Street, nearly at the north end of Monmouth and King Streets, where they stood until 1782, at which period they were pulled down to widen the road.

The new almshouses were erected in a close, low, and unhealthy spot in Lewknor’s Lane.

In the year 1661 Mr. William Shelton left lands for a school for fifty children in Parker’s Lane, between Drury Lane and Little Queen Street.

The tenements, before he bought them, had been in the occupation of the Dutch ambassador.

The premises were poor houses, and a coach-house and stables in the occupation of Lord Halifax.

In 1687, the funds proving inadequate, the school was discontinued; but in 1815, after being in abeyance for fifty-three years, it was re-opened in Lloyd’s Court.

[642] The select vestry of St. Giles’s was much badgered in 1828 by the excluded parishioners.

There were endless errors in the accounts, and items amounting to £90,000 were found entered only in pencil.

The special pleas put in by the attorneys of the vestry covered 175 folios of writing.

Hog Lane, built in 1680, was rechristened in 1762 Crown Street, as an inscription on a stone let into the wall of a house at the corner of Rose Street intimates.

[643] Strype calls it a “place not over well built or inhabited.

” The Greeks had a church here, afterwards a French refugee place of worship, and subsequently an Independent chapel.

It stood on the west side of the lane, a few doors from Compton Street; and its site is now occupied by St. Mary’s Church and clergy-house.

Hogarth laid the scene of his “Noon” in Hog Lane, at the door of this chapel; but the houses being reversed in the engraving, the truth of the picture is destroyed.

The background contains a view of St. Giles’s Church.

The painter delighted in ridiculing the fantastic airs of the poor French gentry, and showed no kindly sympathy with their honest poverty and their sufferings.

It was to St. Giles’s that Hogarth came to study poverty and also vice.

A

scene of his “Harlot’s Progress” is in Drury Lane, close by.

Tom Nero, in the “Four Stages of Cruelty,” is a St. Giles’s charity-boy, and we see him in the first stage tormenting a dog near the church.

Hogarth’s “Gin Street” is situated in St. Giles’s. The scenes of all the most hideous and painful of his works are in this district.

“Nollekens” Smith, writing of St. Giles’s, says: “I recollect the building of most of the houses at the north end of New Compton Street--so named in compliment to Bishop Compton, Dean of St. Paul’s. I also remember a row of six small almshouses, surrounded by a dwarf brick wall, standing in the middle of High Street.

On the left hand of High Street, passing into Tottenham Court Road, there were four handsome brick houses, probably of Queen Anne’s time, with grotesque masks as keystones to the first-floor windows.

Nearly on the site of the new “Resurrection Gate,” in which the basso-relievo is, stood a very small old house towards Denmark Street, which used to totter, to the terror of passers by, whenever a heavy carriage rolled through the street.

”[644] Exactly where Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road meet in a right angle, a large circular boundary-stone was let into the pavement.

Here when the charity-boys of St. Giles’s walked the boundaries, those who deserved flogging were whipped, in order to impress the parish frontier on their memories.

The Pound originally stood in the middle of the High Street, whence it was removed in 1656 to make way for the almshouses.

It had stood there when the village really required a place to imprison straying cattle.

The latest pound stood in the broad space where the High Street, Tottenham Court Road, and Oxford Street meet; it occupied a space of about thirty-feet, and was removed in 1768. It must have faced Meux’s Brewery.

An old song that celebrates this locality begins-- “At Newgate steps Jack Chance was found, And bred up near St. Giles’s Pound.

” Criminals on their way to Tyburn used to “halt at the great gate of St. Giles’s Hospital, where a bowl of ale was provided as their last refreshment in this life.

”[645] A similar custom prevailed at York, which gave rise to the proverb, “The saddler of Bawtry was hung for leaving his liquor,” meaning that if the impatient man had stopped to drink, his reprieve would have arrived in time.

[646] Bowl Yard was built about 1623, and was then surrounded by gardens.

It is a narrow court on the south side of High Street, over against Dyot Street, now George Street.

There was probably here a public-house, the Bowl, at which in later time ale was handed to the passing thieves.

Swift, in a spirited ballad describes “clever Tom Clinch,” who rode “stately through Holborn to die in his calling,” stopping at the George for a bottle of sack, and promising to pay for it “_when he came back_.

” No one has sketched the highwayman more perfectly than the Irish prelate.

Tom Clinch wears waistcoat, stockings, and breeches of white, and his cap is tied with cherry ribbon.

He bows like a beau at the theatre to the ladies in the doors and to the maids in the balconies, who cry, “Lackaday, he’s a proper young man.

” He swears at the hawkers crying his last speech, kicks the hangman when he kneels to ask his pardon, makes a short speech exhorting his comrades to ply their calling, and so carelessly and defiantly takes his leave of an ungrateful world.

“Rainy Day” Smith describes,[647] when a boy of eight years old, being taken by Nollekens, the sculptor, to see that notorious highwayman John Rann, alias “Sixteen-string Jack,” on his way to execution at Tyburn, for robbing Dr. Bell, chaplain to the Princess Amelia, in Gunnersbury Lane, near Brentford, in 1774. Rann was a smart fellow, and had been a coachman to Lord Sandwich, who then lived at the south-east corner of Bedford Row, Covent Garden.

The undaunted malefactor wore a bright pea-green coat, and carried an immense nosegay, which some mistress of the highwayman had handed him, according to custom, as a last token, from the steps of St. Sepulchre’s Church.

The sixteen strings worn by this freebooter at his knees were reported to be in ironical allusion to the number of times he had been acquitted.

On their return home, Nollekens, stooping to the boy’s ear, assured him that had his father-in-law, Mr. Justice Welch, been then High Constable, they could have walked all the way to Tyburn beside the cart.

[648] Holborn used to be called “the Heavy Hill” because it led thieves from Newgate to Tyburn.

Old fat Ursula, the roast-pig seller in Ben Jonson’s _Bartholomew Fair_ talks of ambling afoot to hear Knockhem the footpad groan out of a cart up the Heavy Hill.

This was in James I. ’s time.

Dryden alludes to it in the same way in 1678,[649] and in 1695 Congreve’s Sir Sampson[650] mentions the same doleful procession.

In 1709 (Queen Anne) Tom Browne mentions a wily old counsellor in Holborn who used to turn out his clerks every execution day for a profitable holiday, saying, “Go, you young rogues, go to school and improve.

” St. Giles’s was always famous for its inns.

[651] One of the oldest of these was the Croche House, or Croche Hose (Cross Hose), so called from its sign--the Crossed Stockings.

The sign, still used by hosiers, was a red and white stocking forming a St. Andrew’s Cross.

This inn belonged to the hospital cook in 1300, and was given by him to the hospital.

It stood at the north of the present entrance to Compton Street, and was probably destroyed before the reign of Henry VIII.

The Swan on the Hop was an inn of Edward III.

’s time; it stood eastward of Drury Lane and on the south side of Holborn.

[652] The White Hart is described in Henry VIII.

’s time as possessing eighteen acres of pasture.

It stood near the Holborn end of Drury Lane, and existed till 1720. In Aggas’s Plan it appears surrounded on three sides by a wall.

It was bounded on the east by Little Queen Street, and was divided from Holborn by an embankment.

A court afterwards stood on its site.

The Rose is mentioned as early as Edward III.

’s reign.

It was near Lewknor’s Lane, and stood not far from the White Hart.

The Vine was an inn till 1816. It was on the north side of Holborn, a little to the east of Kingsgate Street.

It is supposed to have stood on the site of a vineyard mentioned in Doomsday Book.

It was originally a country roadside inn, with fields at the back.

It became an infamous nuisance.

The house that replaced it was first occupied by a timber-merchant, and afterwards by Probert, the accomplice of Thurtell, who, escaping death for the murder of Mr. Weare, was soon after hanged for horse-stealing in Gloucestershire.

It was at this trial that the prisoner’s keeping a gig was adduced as an incontestible proof of his respectability--a fact immortalised, almost to the weariness of a degenerate age, by Mr. Thomas Carlyle.

The inn was once called the Kingsgate Tavern, from its having stood near the king’s gate or turnpike in the adjoining street.

The Cock and Pye Inn stood at the west corner of what was once a mere or marshland.

The fields surrounding it, now Seven Dials, were called from it the Cock and Pye Fields.

The Maidenhead Inn stood in Dyot Street, and formed part of Lord Mountjoy’s estates in Elizabeth’s time.

It was the house for parish meetings in Charles II.

’s reign.

It then became a resort for mealmen and farmers, and latterly a brandy-shop and beggars’ haunt of the vilest sort.

It was finally turned into a stoneyard.

Dyot Street, so called after Sir John Dyot, who left it by wish to the poor, though it was afterwards a poor and even dangerous locality, must have been respectable in 1662, when a Presbyterian chapel was built there for Joseph Read, Baxter’s friend, an ejected minister from Worcestershire.

Read was taken up under the Conventicles Act in 1677, and endured much persecution, but was restored to his congregation on the accession of James II.

From 1684 to 1708 the building was used as a chapel of ease to St. Giles’s Church.

At the close of the last century men would hurry along Dyot Street as through a dangerous defile.

There was a legend current of a banker’s clerk who, returning from his round, with his book of notes and bills fastened by the usual chain, as he passed down Dyot Street felt a cellar door sinking under him.

Conscious of his danger, he made a spring forward, dashed down the street, and escaped the trap set for him by the thieves.

It may be added that Dyot Street gave the name to a song sung by Liston in the admirable burlesque of “Bombastes Furioso.

” Irish mendicants--the poorest, dirtiest, and most unimprovable of all beggars--began to crowd into St. Giles’s about the time of Queen Elizabeth.

[653] The increase of London soon attracted country artisans and country beggars.

The closing of the monasteries had filled England with herds of sturdy and dangerous vagrants not willing to work, and by no means inclined to starve.

The new-comers resorting to the suburbs of London to escape the penalties of infringing the City jurisdiction, the stout-hearted queen ordered all persons within three miles of London gates to forbear from allowing any house to be occupied by more than one family.

A proclamation of 1583 alludes to the very poor and the beggars, who lived “heaped up” in small tenements and let lodgings.

A subsequent warning orders the suppression of the great multitude of Irish vagrants, many of whom haunted the courts under pretence of suits; by day they mixed with disbanded soldiers from the Low Countries and other impostors and beggars, and at night committed robberies and outrages.

St. Giles’s was then one of the great harbours for these “misdemeaned persons.

” On one occasion a mob of these rogues surrounded the queen as she was riding out in the evening to Islington to take the air.

That same night Fleetwood, the Recorder, issued warrants, and in the morning went out himself and took seventy-four rogues, including some blind rich usurers, who were all sent to Bridewell for speedy punishment.

James I. pursued the same crusade against vagrants, forbidding new buildings in the suburbs, and ordering all newly raised structures to be pulled down.

The beadles had to attend every Sunday at the vestry to report all new inmates, and who lodged them, and to take up all idlers;

the constables in 1630 were also required to give notice of such persons to the churchwardens every month.

In an entry in St. Giles’s parish books in 1637 “families in cellars” are first mentioned.

[654] The locality afterwards became noted for these dens, and “a cellar in St. Giles’s” became a proverbial phrase to signify the lowest poverty.

In 1640 Irishmen are first mentioned by name, and money was paid to take them back again to their native land.

Sir John Fielding, brother of the great novelist, who was an active Westminster magistrate in his time and a great hunter down of highwaymen, in a pamphlet on the increase of crime in London, lays special stress on the vicious poverty of St. Giles’s. He gives a statement on the authority of Mr. Welch, the High Constable of Holborn, of the overcrowding of the miserable lodgings where idle persons and vagabonds were sheltered for twopence a night.

One woman alone owned seven of these houses, which were crowded with twopenny beds from cellar to garret.

In these beds both sexes, strangers or not, lay promiscuously, the double bed being a halfpenny cheaper.

To still more wed vice to poverty, these lodging-house keepers sold gin at a penny a quartern, so that no beggar was so poor that he could not get drunk.

No fewer than seventy of these vile houses were found open at all hours, and in one alone, and not the largest, there were counted fifty-eight persons sleeping in an atmosphere loathsome if not actually poisonous.

This Judge Welch was the father of Mrs. Nollekens, and a brave and benevolent man.

He was a friend of Dr. Johnson and of Fielding, whom he succeeded in his justiceship, Mr. Welch having on one occasion heard that a notorious highwayman who infested the Marylebone lanes was sleeping in the first floor of a house in Rose Street, Long Acre, he hired the tallest hackney-coach he could find, drove under the thief’s window, ascended the roof, threw up the sash, entered the room, actually dragged the fellow naked out of bed on to the roof of the coach, and in that way carried him down New Street and up St. Martin’s Lane, amidst the huzzas of an immense throng which followed him, to Litchfield Street, Soho.

[655] Archenholz, the German traveller, writing circa 1784, describes the streets of London as crowded with beggars.

“These idle people,” says this curious observer, “receive in alms three, four, and even five shillings a day.

They have their clubs in the parish of St. Giles’s, where they meet, drink and feed well, read the papers, and talk politics.

One of my friends put on one day a ragged coat, and promised a handsome reward to a beggar to introduce him to his club.

He found the beggars gay and familiar, and poor only in their rags.

One threw down his crutch, another untied a wooden leg, a third took off a grey wig or removed a plaister from a sound eye; then they related their adventures, and planned fresh schemes.

The female beggars hire children for sixpence and sometimes even two shillings a day: a very deformed child is worth four shillings.

” In the same parish the pickpockets met to dine and exchange or sell snuff-boxes, handkerchiefs, and other stolen property.

About fifty years before, says Archenholz, there had been a pickpockets’ club in St. Giles’s, where the knives and forks were chained to the table and the cloth was nailed on.

Rules were, however, decorously observed, and chairmen chosen at their meetings.

Not far from this house was a celebrated gin-shop, on the sign-post of which was written, “Here you may get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, and straw for nothing.

” The cellars of this public-spirited man were never empty.

Archenholz also sketches the conjurors who told fortunes for a shilling.

They wore black gowns and false beards, advertised in the newspapers, and painted their houses with magical figures and planetary emblems.

[656] In 1783 Mr. J.

T.

Smith describes how he made for Mr. Crowle, the illustrator of Pennant, a sketch of Old Simon, a well-known character, who took his station daily under one of the gate piers of the old red and brown brick gateway at the northern end of St. Giles’s Churchyard, which then faced Mr. Remnent’s timber-yard.

This man wore several hats, and was remarkable for a long, dirty, yellowish white beard.

His chapped fingers were adorned with brass rings.

He had several coats and waistcoats--the upper wrap-rascle covering bundles of rags, parcels of books, canisters of bread and cheese, matches, a tinder-box, meat for his dog, scraps from _Fox’s Book of Martyrs_, and three or four dog’s-eared, thumbed, and greasy numbers of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_.

From these random leaves he gathered much information, which he retailed to persons who stopped to look at him.

Simon and his dog lodged under a staircase in an old shattered building in Dyot Street, known as “Rat’s Castle.

” It was in this beggars’ rendezvous that Nollekens the sculptor used to seek models for his Grecian Venuses.

Rowlandson etched Simon several times in his usual gross but droll manner.

[657] There was also a whole-length print of him published by John Seago, with this monumental inscription--“Simon Edy, born at Woodford, near Thrapston, Northamptonshire, in 1709. Died May 18th, 1783. ” Simon had had several dogs, which, one after the other, were stolen, and sent for sale at Islington, or killed for their teeth by men employed by the dentists.

The following anecdote is told of his last and most faithful dog:--Rover had been a shepherd’s dog at Harrow, and having its left eye struck out by a bullock’s horn, was left with Simon by its master, a Smithfield drover.

The beggar tied him to his arm with a long string, cured him, and then restored him to the drover.

After that, the dog would stop at St. Giles’s porch every market-day on its way after the drover to the slaughter-house in Union Street, and receive caresses from the hand which had bathed its wound.

Rover would then yelp for joy and gratitude, and scamper off to get up with the erring bullocks.

At last poor Simon missed the dog for several weeks; at the end of that time it appeared one morning at his feet, and with its one sorrowful and uplifted eye implored Simon’s protection by licking his tawny beard.

His master the drover was dead.

Simon was only too glad to adopt Rover, who eventually followed him to his last home.

There was an elegy printed for good-natured, inoffensive old Simon, with a woodcut portrait attached.

The Hon. Daines Barrington is said to have never passed the old mendicant without giving him sixpence.

Mr. J.

T.

Smith, himself afterwards Curator of the Prints at the British Museum, published some curious etchings of beggars and street characters in 1815. Amongst them are ragged men carrying placards of “The Grand Golden Lottery;” strange old-clothesmen in cocked hats and two-tier wigs;

itinerant wood-merchants; sellers of toys, such as “young lambs” or live haddock; flying piemen in pig tails and shorts; women in gipsy hats;

door-mat sellers; vendors of hot peas, pickled cucumbers, lemons, windmills (toys); and, last and least, Sir Harry Dimsdale, the dwarf Mayor of Garratt.

The condition of the beggars of St. Giles in 1815 we gather pretty accurately from the evidence given by Mr. Sampson Stevenson, overseer of the parish, and by trade an ironmonger at No. 11 King Street, Seven Dials, before a committee of the House of Commons, the Right Honourable George Rose in the chair.

Mr. Stevenson’s shop was not more than a few yards from one of the beggars’ chief rendezvous, and he had therefore been enabled to closely study their habits.

The inn had lost its licence, as the landlord encouraged thieves; and he had made inquiries of petition-writers, the highest class of mendicants.

He had gone frequently into the bar of the Fountain in King Street, another of their haunts, to watch their goings-on.

The pretended sailors never carried anything on their backs, as they only begged or extorted money; but the other rogues, who made it their practice to ask for food and clothing, always carried a knapsack to put it in.

They returned laden with shoes and clothes, which they would sell in Monmouth Street.

They had been heard to say that they had made three or four shillings a day by begging shoes alone.

[658] Their mode of obtaining charity was to go barefoot and scarify their heels so that the blood might show.

They went out two or three together, or more, and invariably changed their routes each day.

Mr. Stevenson had seen them pull out their money and share it.

Victuals, he believed, they threw away; but everything else they sold.

They would stop at the Fountain till the house closed, or till they got drunk, began to fight, and were turned out by the publican, who feared the losing his licence.

They probably went to even lower places to finish their revel.

“They teach other,” he said, “different modes of extortion.

They are of the worst character, and overwhelm you with cursing and abuse if you refuse them money.

There is one special rascal, Gannee Manos, who is scarcely three months in the year out of gaol.

He always goes barefoot, and scratches his ankles to make them bleed.

He is the greatest collector of shoes and clothes, as he goes the most naked to excite compassion.

” Another man had been known in the streets for fifteen or twenty years.

He generally limped or passed as a cripple; but Mr. Stevenson has seen him fencing and jumping about like a pugilist.

He went without a hat, with bare arms, and a canvas bag on his back.

He generally began by singing a song, and he carried primroses or something in his hand.

He pretended to be scarcely able to move one foot before the other; but if a Bow Street officer or a beadle came in sight, he was off as quick as any one.

There was another man, an Irishman who had had a good education, and had been in the medical line; he wrote a beautiful hand, and drew up petitions for beggars at sixpence or a shilling each.

“These men come out by twenties and thirties from the bottom of Dyot Street, and then branch off five or six together.

The one who has still some money left starts them with a pint or half a pint of gin.

They have all their divisions, and they quarter the town into sections.

Some of them collect three, four, or five children, paying sixpence a day for each, and then they go begging in gangs, setting the children crying to excite people’s sympathies.

The Irish sometimes have the impudence to bring these children to the board and claim relief, and swear the children are their own.

In a short time they are found out; but till the discovery their landlords will swear their story is true.

Sometimes, by giving their own country people something, the landlords help to detect them.

But even in cases where the children are their own, they will not work when they have once got into the habit of begging.

If they will not come into the workhouse, their relief is instantly stopped.

“They spend their evenings drinking, after dining at an eating-house.

Deserving people never beg: they are ashamed of it.

They do not eat broken victuals.

They have seldom any lodgings.

There are houses where forty or fifty of them sleep.

A porter stands at the door and takes the money.

In the morning there is a general muster to see they have stolen nothing, and then the doors are unlocked.

For threepence they have clean straw, for fourpence something more decent, and for sixpence a bed.

These are all professional beggars; they beg every day, even Sundays.