Haunted London — Somerset House Part 1

SOMERSET HOUSE.

“And every day there passes by my side, Up to its western reach, the London tide-- The spring tides of the term.

My front looks down On all the pride and business of the town;

My other fair and more majestic face For ever gazes on itself below, In the best mirror that the world can show.

” COWLEY.

That ambitious and rapacious noble the Protector Somerset, brother of Queen Jane Seymour, and maternal uncle of Edward VI.

, the owner of more than two hundred manors,[96] and who boasted that his own friends and retainers made up an army of ten thousand men, determined to build a palace in the Strand.

For this purpose he demolished the parish church of St. Mary, and pulled down the houses of the Bishops of Worcester, Llandaff, and Lichfield.

He also began to remove St. Margaret’s, at Westminster, for building materials, till his masons were driven away by rioters.

He destroyed a chapel in St. Paul’s Churchyard, with a cloister containing the “Dance of Death,” and a charnel-house, the bones of which he buried in unconsecrated ground,[97] and finally stole the stones of the church of St. John of Jerusalem, near Smithfield,[98] and those of Strand Inn (belonging to the Temple), where Occleve the poet, a contemporary of Gower and Chaucer, had studied law.

The unwise Protector determined in this building to rival Whitehall and Hampton Court.

It was begun probably about 1549, and no doubt remained unfinished at his death.

He had at that time lavished on it £50,000 of our present money.

The architect was John of Padua,[99] Henry VIII.

’s architect, who built Longleat, in Wiltshire, the seat of the Marquis of Bath, a magnificent specimen of the Italian-Elizabethan style, and also the gates of Caius College, at Cambridge.

The Protector is said to have spent at one time £100 a day in building, every stone he laid bringing him nearer to his own narrow home.

A plan of the house is still preserved in the Soane Museum.

[100] After the attainder of the duke, when the new palace became the property of the crown, little was done to complete the building.

The screen prepared for the hall was bought for St. Bride’s, where it was probably destroyed in the Great Fire.

[101] The Protector was a good friend to the people, but he was weak and ambitious, and the plotters of Ely House had no difficulty in dragging him to the scaffold.

The minority of Edward brought many of the Strand noblemen to the axe, but the fate of the admiral and his brother did not deter their neighbours Northumberland, Raleigh, Norfolk, and Essex.

Elizabeth granted the keeping of Somerset House to her faithful cousin Lord Hunsdon, for life,[102] and here she frequently would visit him, in a jewelled farthingale, with Raleigh and Essex in her train.

In 1616 that Scotch Solomon, James I. , commanded the place to be called Denmark House; and his queen kept her gay and not very decent court here, so that Ben Jonson must have often seen his glorious masques acted in this palace, to which his coadjutor Inigo Jones built a chapel, and made other additions.

Anne of Denmark and her maids-of-honour kept up here a continual masquerade,[103] appearing in various dresses, and transforming themselves to the delight of all whose interest it was to be delighted.

Here too that impetuous queen, Henrietta Maria, resided with her wilful and extravagant French household, whose insolence irritated and disgusted the people and offended Charles the First.

The king at last, losing patience, summoned them together one evening and dismissed them all.

They behaved like sutlers at the sack of a town.

They claimed fictitious debts;

they invented exorbitant bills; they greedily divided among each other the queen’s wardrobe and jewels, scarcely leaving her a change of linen.

The king paid nearly £50,000 to get rid of them; Madame St. George alone claiming several thousand pounds besides jewels.

[104] They still delayed their departure; on which the king, at last roused, wrote the following imperative letter to Buckingham:-- “STEENIE--I have received your letter by Dick Greame.

This is my answer.

I command you to send all the French away to-morrow out of the town, if you can by fair means (but stick not long in disputing), otherways force them away--driving them away like so many wild beasts until ye have shipped them; and the devil go with them.

Let me hear no answer, but of the performance of my command.

So I rest “Your faithful, constant, loving friend, “C. R.

“Oaking, the seventh of August, 1626. ” As the French invented all sorts of vexatious delays, the yeomen of the guard at last jostled them out, carting them off in nearly forty coaches.

They arrived at Dover after four days’ tedious travelling, wrangling, and bewailing.

The squib did not burn out without one final detonation.

As the vivacious Madame St. George stepped into the boat, with perhaps some insolent gesture of adieu, a man in the mob flung a stone at her French cap.

A gallant Englishman who was escorting her instantly quitted his charge, ran the fellow through the body, and returned to the boat.

The man died on the spot, but no notice, it appears, was taken of the murderer.

In Somerset House, at the Christmas masque of 1632-3, Charles’s high-spirited queen took part for the last time in a masque.

Unfortunately for Prynne, the next day out came his _Histriomastix_, with a scurrilous marginal note, “Women actors notorious whores!

” for which the stubborn fanatic lost his ears.

Queen Henrietta had, in Somerset House, an ostentatiously magnificent Catholic chapel built by Inigo Jones, which became the scene of spectacles that were gall and wormwood to the Puritans, who were already couching for their spring.

Their time came in March 1643, when Roundheads, grimly rejoicing, burnt all the pictures, images, Jesuitical books, and tapestry.

[105] Five of the unhappy queen’s French Roman Catholic servants are entombed in the cellars of the present building, under the great quiet square.

[106] Here, close to his own handiwork, that distinguished architect, Inigo Jones, who had lodgings in the palace, died in 1652. About the same time the House of Peers permitted the Protestant service to be held in Somerset House instead of in Durham House.

This drove out the Quakers and Anabaptists, and prevented the pulling down of the palace and the making of a street from the garden through the chapel and back-yard up into the Strand.

[107] The Protector’s palace was the scene of a great and sad event in November 1658; for the body of Cromwell, who had died at Whitehall, lay in state here for several days.

He lay in effigy on a bed of royal crimson velvet, covered with a velvet gown, a sceptre in his hand, and a crown upon his head.

The Cavaliers, whose spirits were recovering, were very angry at this foolish display,[108] forgetting that it was not poor Oliver’s own doing; and the baser people, who follow any impulse of the day, threw dirt in the night upon the blazoned escutcheon that was displayed over the great gate of Somerset House.

The year after, an Act was passed to sell all royal property, and Somerset House was disposed of for £10,000. The Restoration soon stepped in and annulled the bargain.

After the return of the son who so completely revenged upon us the death of his father, the luckless palace became the residence of its former inhabitant, now older and gentler--the queen-mother.

She improved and beautified it.

The old courtier, Waller, only fifty-seven at the time, wrote some fulsome verses on the occasion.

He talks of her adorning the town as with a brave revenge, to show-- “That glory came and went with you.

” He mentions also the view from the palace:-- “The fair view her window yields, The town, the river, and the fields.

” Cowley, the son of a Fleet Street grocer, flew still higher, larded his flattery with perverted texts, like a Puritanised Cavalier time-server, and wrote-- “On either side dwells Safety and Delight;

Wealth on the left and Power sits on the right.

” In May 1665, when the queen-mother, who had lived in Somerset House with her supposed husband, the Earl of St. Albans, took her farewell of England for a gayer court, Cowley wrote these verses to the setting sun, in hopes to propitiate the rising sun; for here, too, lived Catherine of Braganza, the unhappy wife of Charles II.

There were strange scenes at Somerset House even during the queen-mother’s residence, for the old court gossip Pepys describes being taken one day to the Presence-chamber.

[109] He found the queen not very charming, but still modest and engaging.

Lady Castlemaine was there, Mr. Crofts, a pretty young spark of fifteen (her illegitimate child), and many great ladies.

By and by in came the king and the Duke and Duchess of York.

The conversation was not a very decorous one; and the young queen said to Charles, “You lie!

” which made good sport, as the chuckling and delighted Pepys remarks, those being the first English words he had heard her say; and the king then tried to make her reply, “Confess and be hanged.

” In another place Pepys indignantly describes “a little proud, ugly, talkative lady crying up the queen-mother’s court as more decorous than the king’s;” yet the diary-keeper confesses that the former was the better attended, the old nobility dreading, I suppose, the scandal of Whitehall.

[110] In 1670 Monk, Duke of Albemarle, having died at his lodgings in the Cockpit, at Whitehall, lay in state in Somerset House, and was afterwards buried with almost regal pomp in Henry VII.

’s Chapel.

In October 1678, the infamous devisers of the Popish plot connected Somerset House and the attendants in the Queen’s Chapel with the murder of a City magistrate, the supposed Protestant martyr, Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, who was found murdered in a field near Primrose Hill, “between Kilburn and Hampstead,” as it was then thought necessary to specify.

The lying witnesses, Prance and Bedloe, swore that the justice had been inveigled into Somerset House under pretence of being wanted to keep the peace between two servants who were fighting in the yard; that he was then strangled, his neck broken, and his own sword run through his body.

The corpse was kept four days, then carried in a sedan-chair to Soho, and afterwards on a horse to Primrose Hill, nearly three miles off.

The secrecy and convenient neighbourhood of the river for hiding a murdered man seem never to have struck the rogues, who forgot even to “lie like truth,” so credulous and excited was the multitude.

Waller, says Aubrey, though usually very temperate, was once made drunk at Somerset House by some courtiers, and had a cruel fall when taking boat at the water stairs, “’Twas a pity to use such a sweet man so inhumanly.

”[111] Saville used to say that “nobody should keep him company without drinking but Mr. Waller.

” In 1692 that poor ill-used woman and unhappy wife, Catherine of Braganza, left Somerset House, and returned thence to Portugal, the home of her happy childhood and happier youth.

The palace, never the home of very happy inmates, then became a lodging for foreign kings and ambassadors, and a home for a few noblemen and poor retainers of the court, much as Hampton Court is now.

Lewis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, the incompetent commander at Sedgemoor, who lies buried at the Savoy, lived here in 1708; and so did Lady Arlington, the widow of Secretary Bennet, that butt of Killigrew and Rochester.

In the reign of George III.

, Charlotte Lennox, the authoress of the _Female Quixote_, had apartments in Somerset House.

Houses, like men, run their allotted courses.

In 1775 the old palace, which had been settled on the queen-consort in the event of her surviving the king, was exchanged for Buckingham House; and the Government instantly began to pull down the river-side palace, and erect new public offices designed by Sir William Chambers, a Scotch architect, who had given instruction in his art to George III.

, when Prince of Wales.

In 1630, a row of fishmongers’ stalls, in the middle of the street, over against Denmark House (Somerset House), was broken down by order of Government to prevent stalls from growing into sheds, and sheds into dwelling houses, as had been the case in Old Fish Street, Saint Nicholas Shambles, and other places.

[112] On the 2d of February, 1659-60, Pepys tells us in his diary, that having £60 with him of his lord’s money, on his way from London Bridge, and hearing the noise of guns, he landed at Somerset House, and found the Strand full of soldiers.

Going upstairs to a window, Pepys looked out and saw the foot face the horse and beat them back, all the while bawling for a free parliament and money.

By and by a drum was heard to sound a march towards them, and they all got ready again, but the new comers proving of the same mind, they “made a great deal of joy to see one another.

”[113] This was the beginning of Monk’s change, for the king returned in the following May.

On the 18th of February two soldiers were hanged opposite Somerset House for a mutiny, of which Pepys was an eye-witness.

The prints of old Somerset House show a long line of battlemented wall facing the river, and a turreted and partially arcaded front.

There is also a scarce view of the place by Hollar.

[114] The river front has two porticos.

The chapel is to the left, and near it are the cloisters of the Capuchins.

The bowling-green seems to be to the right, between the two rows of trees.

The garden is formal.

The royal apartments were on the river side.

The only memorial left of the outhouses of the old palace was the sign of a lion in the wall of a house in the Strand, that is mentioned in old records.

[115] Dryden describes his two friends, Eugenius and Neander, landing at Somerset Stairs, and gives us a pleasant picture of the summer evening, the water on which the moonbeams played looked like floating quicksilver, and some French people dancing merrily in the open air as the friends walk onwards to the Piazza.

[116] Of the old views of Somerset House, that of Moss is considered the best.

There is also an early and curious one by Knyff.

A picture in Dulwich Gallery (engraved by Wilkinson) represents the river front before Inigo Jones had added a chapel for the queen of Charles I. [117] Sir William Chambers built the present Somerset House.

The old palace, when the clearance for the demolition began, presented a singular spectacle.

[118] At the extremity of the royal apartments two large folding-doors joined Inigo Jones’s additions to John of Padua’s work.

They opened into a long gallery on the first floor of the water garden wing, at the lower end of which was another gallery, making an angle which formed the original river front, and extended to Strand Lane.

This old part had been long shut up, and was supposed to be haunted.

The gallery was panelled and floored with oak.

The chandelier chains still hung from the stucco ceilings.

The furniture of the royal apartment was removed into lumber-rooms by the Royal Academy.

There were relics of a throne and canopy; the crimson velvet curtains for the audience-chamber had faded to olive colour; and the fringe and lace were there, but a few threads and spangles had been peeled off them.

There were also scattered about in disorder, broken chairs, stools, couches, screens, and fire-dogs.

In the older apartments much of Edward VI.

’s furniture still remained.

The silk hangings of the audience-chamber were in tatters, and so were the curtains, gilt-leather covers, and painted screens; one gilt chandelier also remained, and so did the sconces.

A door beyond, with difficulty opened, led into a small tower on the first floor, built by Inigo Jones, and used as a breakfast-room or dressing-room by Queen Catherine.

It was a beautiful octagonal domed apartment, with a tasteful cornice.

The walls were frescoed, and there were pictures on the ceiling.

A door from this place opened on the staircase and led to a bath-room, lined with marble, on the ground floor.

The painters of the day compared the ruined palace, characteristically enough, to the gloomy precincts of the dilapidated castles in Mrs. Radcliffe’s wax-work romances.

Sir William Chambers completed his work in about five years, clearing two thousand a year.

It cost more than half a million of money.

The Strand front is 135 feet long; the quadrangle 210 feet wide and 296 feet deep.

The main buildings are 54 feet deep and six stories high.

They are faced with Portland stone, now partly sooty black, partly blanched white with the weather.

The basement is adorned with rustic work, Corinthian pilasters, balustrades, statues, masks, and medallions.

The river terrace was intended in anticipation of the possible embankment of the Thames.

Some critics think Chambers’s great work heavy, others elegant but timid.

There is too much rustic work, and the whole is rather “cut up.

” The vases and niches are unmeaning, and it was a great structural fault to make the portico columns of the fine river side stand on a brittle-looking arch.

It was to Somerset House that the Royal Academy came after the split in the St. Martin’s Lane Society.

Here West exhibited his respectable platitudes, Reynolds his grand portraits, and Lawrence his graceful, brilliant, but meretricious pictures.

In the great room of the Academy, at the top of the building, Reynolds, Opie, Barrie, and Fuseli lectured.

Through the doorway to the right of the vestibule, Reynolds, Wilkie, Turner, Flaxman, and Chantrey have often stepped.

Under that bust of Michael Angelo almost all our great men from Johnson to Scott must have passed.

Carlini, an Italian friend of Cipriani, executed the two central statues on the Strand front of Somerset House, and also three of the nine colossal key-stone masks--the rivers Dee, Tyne, and Severn.

Carlini was one of the unsuccessful candidates for the Beckford monument in Guildhall.

When Carlini was keeper of the Academy, he used to walk from his house in Soho to Somerset Place, dressed in a deplorable greatcoat, and with a broken tobacco pipe in his mouth; but when he went to the great annual Academy dinner, he would make his way into a chair, full dressed in a purple silk coat, and scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, with point-lace ruffles, and a sword and bag.

[119] Wilton, the sculptor, executed the two outer figures.

Giuseppe Ceracchi, who carved some of the heads of the river gods for the key-stones of the windows of the Strand front of Somerset House, was an Italian, but it is uncertain whether he was born at Rome or in Corsica.

He gave the accomplished Mrs. Damer (General Conway’s daughter) her first lessons in sculpture, an art which she afterwards perfected in the studio of the elder Bacon.

Ceracchi executed the only bust in marble that Reynolds ever sat for.

A statue of Mrs. Damer, from a model by him, is now in the British Museum.

This sculptor was guillotined in 1801, for a plot against Napoleon.

[120] He is said to have lost his wits in prison, and to have mounted the scaffold dressed as a Roman emperor.

It was to Mrs. Damer (the daughter of his old friend) that Horace Walpole, our most French of memoir-writers, bequeathed his fantastic villa at Strawberry Hill, and its incongruous but valuable curiosities.

She is said to have sent a bust of Nelson to the Rajah of Tanjore, who wished to spread a taste for English art in India.

The rooms round the quadrangle are hives of red-tapists.

There are about nine hundred Government clerks nestled away in them, and maintained at an annual cost to us of about £275,000. There is the office of the Duchy of Cornwall, and there are the Legacy Duty, the Stamps, Taxes, and Excise Offices, the Inland Revenue Office, the Registrar General’s Office (created pursuant to 6 and 7 Will.

IV.

, c. 86), part of the Admiralty and the Audit Office, and lastly the Will Office.

The east wing of Somerset House, used as King’s College, was built in 1829. The bronze statue of George III.

, and the fine recumbent figure of Father Thames, in the chief court, were cast by John Bacon, R. A.

The office for auditing the public accounts existed, under the name of the Office of the Auditors of the Imprests, as far back as the time of Henry VIII.

The present commission was established in 1785, and the salaries formerly paid for the passing of accounts are now paid out of the Civil List, all fees being abolished.

The average annual cost of the office for auditing some three hundred and fifty accounts is £50,000. There are six commissioners, a secretary, and upwards of a hundred clerks.

Almost all the home and colonial expenditure is examined at this office.

Edward Harley and Arthur Maynwaring (the wit of the Kit-Cat Club) were the two Auditors of the Imprests in the reign of Queen Anne.

The Earl of Oxford, the collector of MSS.

, obtained many curious public documents from his brother.

If he had taken the whole the nation would have been a gainer;

for the Government bought his collection for the British Museum, and all that he left (except what Sir William Musgrave, a commissioner, scraped together and gave to the British Museum) were barbarously destroyed by Government, heedless of their historical value.

Maynwaring’s fees were about £2000 a year.

The present salary of a commissioner is £1200; the chairman’s salary is £500. In 1867 the western front of Somerset House was added; it is from the designs of Pennethorne, to accommodate the clerks of the Inland Revenue Department.

The Astronomical Society, Geographical Society, and Geological Society, were for many years sheltered in Somerset House, before removing westwards.

Hither, in 1782, from Crane Court, came the Royal Society.

The entrance door to the society’s rooms, to the left of the vestibule, is marked out by the bust of Sir Isaac Newton; Herschel, Davy, and Wollaston, as well as Walpole and Hallam, must have passed here, for the same door leads to the apartments of the Society of Antiquaries.