Eighteenth Century Vignettes
- -
- 100%
- +
That the cost of the refreshments was a fertile topic of discussion is, to cite but one of many witnesses, confirmed by Miss Burney in 'Evelina;' and the popular legend that an expert Vauxhall carver could cover the entire garden (about eleven acres) with slices from one ham, may be accepted as corroborative evidence. Old frequenters, indeed, pretended to remember the particular angle at which the plates had to be carried to prevent their leaf-like contents from becoming the plaything of the winds. But the above picture from the 'Connoisseur,' it must be noted, is a picture of the occasional visitor, – the visitor who made but one annual visit, which was the event of the year. The main supporters of the place were the persons of quality, of whom Walpole gossips so delightfully in his correspondence; and it is to his pages that one must go for a faithful representation of High Life at Vauxhall. In one of his letters to George Montagu, he describes, with his inimitable air of a fine gentleman on a frolic, a party of pleasure at which he has assisted, and which (he considers) exhibits 'the manners of the age.' He tells how he receives a card from Lady Caroline Petersham (the Duke of Grafton's daughter) to go with her to Vauxhall. Thereupon he repairs to her house, and finds 'her and the little Ashe, or the Pollard Ashe, as they call her,' having 'just finished their last layer of red, and looking as handsome as crimson can make them.' Others of the company are the Duke of Kingston, Lord March of Thackeray's 'Virginians,' Mr. Whitehed, 'a pretty Miss Beauclcre, and a very foolish Miss Sparre.' As they 'sail up the Mall,' they encounter cross-grained Lord Petersham (my lady's husband), 'as sulky as a ghost that nobody will speak to first,' and who declines to accompany his wife and her friends. So they march to their barge, which has 'a boat of French horns attending,' and 'little Ashe' sings. After parading up and down the river, they 'debark' at Vauxhall, where at the outset they narrowly escape the excitement of a duel. For a certain Mrs. Lloyd of Spring Gardens (afterwards married to Lord Haddington), seeing Miss Beauclerc and her companion following Lady Petersham, says audibly, 'Poor girls, I am sorry to see them in such bad company,' a remark which 'the foolish Miss Sparre' (she is but fifteen), for the fun of seeing a duel, endeavours to make Lord March resent. But my Lord, who is 'very lively and agreeable,' laughs her out of 'this charming frolic with a great deal of humour.' 'At last,' says Walpole, – and here we may surrender the story to him entirely, – 'we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in the front, with the vizor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly and handsome. She had fetched my brother Orford from the next box, where he was enjoying himself with his petite partie, to help us to mince chickens. We minced seven chickens into a china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp, with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring, and rattling, and laughing, and we every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears. She had brought Betty [Neale] the fruit girl, with hampers of strawberries and cherries from Rogers's, and made her wait upon us, and then made her sup by us at a little table. The conversation was no less lively than the whole transaction. There was a Mr. O'Brien arrived from Ireland, who would get the Duchess of Manchester from Mr. Hussey if she were still at liberty. I took up the biggest hautboy in the dish, and said to Lady Caroline, "Madam, Miss A he desires you would eat this O'Brien strawberry;" she replied immediately.
"I won't, you hussey." You may imagine the laugh this reply occasioned. After the tempest was a little calmed, the Pollard said, "Now, how anybody would spoil this story that was to repeat it and say, I won't, you jade!" In short, the whole air of our party was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to take up the whole attention of the garden; so much so, that from eleven o'clock till half an hour after one we had the whole concourse round our booth; at last they came into the little gardens of each booth on the sides of ours, till Harry Vane took up a bumper and was proceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. It was three o'clock before we got home.'
Whether this 'frisk' in good society included the passage of the Dark Walk, the chronicler has not related. But the Dark Walk, also known as the 'Druid's,' or 'Lovers' Walk,' is almost the only feature of the gardens which now needs to be described. Its position has already been roughly indicated. It was formed by tall overarching trees meeting at the top, in which, in the place's palmiest days, blackbirds, thrushes, and nightingales made their nests. A visit to this selva oscura was the prime ambition of the more inquiring visitor to Vauxhall, either upon the simple ground put forward by the elder Miss Rose in the 'Connoisseur' that it was 'solentary,' or upon the more specious excuse, advanced by the generality, that the music of the Orchestra sounded better through the thick foliage of the trees. But the pretexts for seeking these attractive shades were probably as inexhaustible as Dean Aldrich's reasons for drinking, the last of which was 'any other reason.' In Miss Burney's 'Evelina,' that delightful heroine is decoyed into the Dark Walk by her vulgar friends, the Branghtons.
There she is insulted by a gang of rakes, and is rescued by Sir Clement Willoughby, who, apparently under the influence of the genius of the place, proceeds, after certain impertinences, to make her a spasmodic declaration, plentifully punctuated with dashes in this wise, – 'O Miss Anville, – loveliest of women, – forgive me, – my – I beseech you forgive me; – if I have offended – if I have hurt you, – I could kill myself at the thought!' etc. Thus this 'most impetuous of men;' and thus did they make love in Vauxhall's 'green retreats' 'when George was king.' Nor love alone, apparently; for if the old descriptions are strictly accurate in representing some of its frequenters as yelling 'in sounds fully as terrific as the imagined horrors of Cavalcanti's bloodhounds,' there must have been a considerable amount of more than questionable horse-play besides; and the licensing magistrates who, in 1763, bound the proprietors to do away with the 'dark walks,' and to appoint proper watchmen, were no doubt well advised.
From the use of the plural 'walks,' it may be that the prohibition also included the numerous wildernesses which occupied the north of the inclosure, – wildernesses so intricate that, even in the prehistoric era of the place, the most experienced mothers – to use the expressive words of Tom Brown 'of facetious memory' – often 'lost themselves in looking for their daughters.' And this brings us to the final item in our catalogue, the walk which bounded the garden on the north, closing and terminating the four great promenades that traversed it from top to bottom. This, shaded like the rest by trees, had at each end one of the favourite 'scenes.' That to the east was a view in a Chinese garden; that to west, a building with a scaffold and a ladder before it, which at a distance 'often deceived the eye very agreeably.' History has neglected the artist of these ingenious performances. But Hayman had begun with stage decoration, and may perhaps have executed them. Or they may have been from the brush of George Lambert, the well-known scene-painter of Covent Garden, who, like Hayman, was a friend of Hogarth, and is reported to have borne his part in the beautifying of the place.
In the foregoing sketch we have endeavoured to revive some specific idea of the aspect of a forgotten place of amusement, rather than to produce that indefinite patchwork of anecdote which, with a judicious sprinkling of shoe buckles and periwigs, of hoops and gipsy-hats, so often does duty for 'a picture of the time.' But a last word must certainly be devoted to the proprietor and presiding spirit, Jonathan Tyers. Little seems to be known of him before he acquired the site of the old Spring Garden of the 'Spectator' in March, 1728, from one Elizabeth Masters, of London, upon a thirty years' lease. Even then it must have had many of the appurtenances of a public resort, for the deed enumerates a Ham-room and a Milk-house, and there were already primitive alcoves in the shape of tiled arbours entitled Royal George, Ship, Eagle, Phoenix, Checker, and the like. Nay, there were already lofty trees which dated from the seventeenth century and the days of an earlier possessor, the Sir Samuel Morland of Pepys's Diary. The rent whieh Tyers paid was £250. He added music; then by degrees the orchestra and organ, the statues, the pictures, and the other adornments. He opened the garden in June, 1732, with illuminations and a Ridotto al' fresco, at which Frederick, Prince of Wales, was present; and the company, numbering four hundred, wore masks, dominoes, and lawyers' gowns. Order was kept by a detachment of footguards, and the admission ticket was designed by Jack Laguerre, son of the Louis whose muscular saints sprawl, in Pope's verse, upon the ceilings of 'Timon's Villa.' Payment was subsequently made at the gate; but in 1738, apparently with a view to render the attendance somewhat more select, a thousand silver season tickets were issued. In 1752 Tyers purchased part of the estate out and out, and a few years afterwards acquired the remainder. To the last day of his life he retained the keenest interest in the place, and only a few hours before his death caused himself to be carried into the gardens to take a parting look at them. At his country-seat of Denbies near Dorking in Surrey, he had another private garden, in the embellishment of which he must have found an outlet for some otherwise obstructed eccentricity, since it contained a representation of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where, in an alcove, had been depicted, in two compartments, the ends of the infidel and the Christian. According to the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' Tyers passed through the Valley himself in July, 1767. His descendants long continued to manage Vauxhall Gardens. Perhaps the most notable of these was his eldest son Tom, the friend and biographer of Johnson, and the 'Tom Restless' of the 'Idler.'
XXI. AT LEICESTER FIELDS
IT is with places as with persons: they often attract us more in their youth than in their maturer years Apart from the fact that these papers are confessedly confined to the Eighteenth Century, this threadbare truth affords a sufficient excuse for speaking of Leicester Square by its earlier, rather than by its existing name. And, indeed, the abiding interest of the locality lies more in the past than in the present. Not even the addition to the inclosure of busts and a Shakespeare fountain, has been able to regenerate entirely the Leicester Square that most of us remember, with its gloomy back streets, – its fringe of dingy cafés and restaurants, – its ambiguous print and curiosity shops, – its incorrigibly unacclimatized Alhambra, whose garish Saracenic splendours scale and peel perpetually in London's imber edax. If we call anything forcibly to mind in connection with the spot, it is a certain central statue, long the mock of the irreverent, – a statue of the first George, which had come of old, gilded and magnificent, from 'Timon's Villa' at Canons, to fall at last upon evil days and evil tongues, to be rudely spotted with sacrilegious paint, to be crowned with a fool's cap, and, finally, to present itself to the spectator in the generally dishonoured and dilapidated condition in which, some twenty years ago, it was exhibited by the late John O'Connor on the walls of the Royal Academy. But when, travelling rapidly backwards, past the Empire and the Alhambra, past Wylde's Globe and the Panopticon, past Burford's Panorama and Miss Linwood's needlework, we enter the last century, we are in the Leicester Fields of Reynolds and Hogarth, of Newton and John Hunter, – the Leicester Fields of Sir George Savile and Frederick, Prince of Wales, of Colbert and Prince Eugene. This is the Leicester Fields of which we propose to speak. Leicester Square and its notorieties may be left to the topographers of the future. 44
It is in Ralph Agas his survey of 592 (or rather in Mr. W. H. Overall's excellent facsimile) that we make our first acquaintance with the Fields, then really entitled to their name. According to Agas, the ground to the north-west of Charing Cross, and immediately to the east of the present Whitcomb Street (at that time Hedge Lane) was formerly open pasture land, occupied – in the plan – by a pair of pedestrians larger than life, a woman laying out clothes, and two nondescript quadrupeds, of which one is broken-backed beyond the licence of deformity. The only erections to be discovered are the King's Mews, clustering together for company at the back of the Cross. Sixty years later, judging from the map known generally as Faithorne's, the locality had become more populated.. To the right of St. Martin's Lane it is thickly crowded with buildings; to the left also a line of houses is springing up and creeping northward; while in the open space above referred to stand a couple of lordly mansions. One, on a site which must have lain to the north of the present Little Newport Street, is Newport House, the town residence of Mountjoy Blount, Earl of Newport; the other, which occupies ground now traversed by Leicester Place, is Leicester House. Its garden at the back extended across the eastern end of Lisle Street, and its boundary wall to the north was also the southern boundary wall of the old Military Garden where King James's son, Prince Henry of Wales – whose gallant and martial presentment you shall see figured in the forefront of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion – had been wont to exercise his troops, and make the now-discredited welkin ring with the shooting-off of chambers, with alarums, and points of war.
Leicester House the first was built about 1632-6 by Robert Sydney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, the father of Algernon Sydney and of that beautiful Dorothy, afterwards Countess of Sunderland, whom Van Dyck painted and Waller 'Petrarchized' as Sacharissa. The site (Swan Close) 45 was what is known as Lammas-land, and from the Overseers' books of the Parish of St. Martin's in the Fields, the Earl seems not only to have paid 'Lamas' for 'the ground that adjoins to the Military Wall,' but also 'for the field that is before his house' – i.e. Leicester Fields.
This latter probably extended to the present Orange Street, so that the grounds of the old mansion may be roughly said to be bounded by the Mews on the south, and by the Military Garden on the north. Few memories cling about the place which belong to Lord Leicester's lifetime. When not engaged in embassies and the like, he was absent at his other and more famous seat of Penshurst in Kent, and Leicester House was 'To Let.' One of the earliest of its illustrious tenants was that quondam 'Queen of Hearts' (as Howell calls her), the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, who, already smitten with her last illness, died there in February, 1662, after a few days' residence, 'in the arms' (says Evelyn) 'of her nephew the King' [Charles II.]. Another tenant, some years later, was Charles Colbert, Marquis de Croissy, the French Ambassador, a brother of Louis the Fourteenth's famous minister and financier; and Pepys records, under date of 21st October, 1668, that he was to have taken part in a deputation from the Royal Society to Lord Leicester's distinguished lessee. But having unhappily been 'mighty merry' at a house-warming of his friend Batelier, he arrived too late to accompany the rest, and was fain to console himself (and perhaps to do penance) by carrying his wife to Cow Lane, Smithfield, in order to inspect a proposed new coach, with the splendours of which 'she is out of herself for joy almost,' although, from the sequel, it was not the one ultimately purchased.
Pepys, as will be seen, did not actually enter Leicester House, at all events upon this occasion. His brother diarist was more fortunate. Going in October, 1672, to take leave of the second Lady Sunderland (Sacharissa's daughter-in-law), whose husband had already set out as ambassador to Paris, grave John Evelyn was entertained by her Ladyship with the performances of Richardson the fire-eater, who, in those days, enjoyed a vogue sufficient to justify the record of his prowess in the 'Journal des Sçavans' for 1680. 'He devour'd brimston on glowing coales before us,' says Evelyn, 'chewing and swallowing them; he mealted a beere-glasse and eate it quite up; then taking a live coale on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster, the coal was blown on with bellows till it flam'd and sparkl'd in his mouth, and so remain'd till the oyster gaped and was quite boiled; then he mealted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he drank downe as it flam'd; I saw it flaming in his mouth a good while; he also tooke up a thick piece of yron, such as laundresses use to put in their smoothing-boxes, when it was fiery hot, held it betweene his teeth, then in his hand, and threw it about like a stone, but this I observ'd he car'd not to hold very long; then he stood on a small pot, and bending his body, tooke a glowing yron with his mouth from betweene his feete, without touching the pot or ground with his hands; with divers other prodigious feates.' 46
Lord Leicester closed a long life in 1677, and many other tenants afterwards occupied the mansion in the Fields. Under Anne it was the home of the German Ambassador, or 'Imperial Resident,' who lived in it far into the reign of the first George. At this time, judging from a water-colour bird's-eye view in the Crace Collection at the British Museum, it was a long two-storeyed building, with attics above, a courtyard in front, and a row of small shops or stalls extending on either side of its entrance gate. Behind came the garden, stretching northward, and decorated in the Dutch fashion with formal trees and statues. Hither, on a Saturday in January, 1712, conveyed unostentatiously in a hackney coach from Whitehall Stairs, came Eugene of Savoy, who, by desire of the Emperor Charles VI., had just crossed from the Hague in Her Majesty's 'Yatcht "Fubs"' (Captain Desborough), with the intention of preventing, if possible, what Prior calls that 'vile Utrecht Treaty.' His mission was to be fruitless from the outset, for at the Nore he was greeted with the news of Marlborough's disgrace, and his presence in England had little or no effect upon the pending proposals of peace. But for two months he was to be fêted and lionized by the nobility in a way which modest warrior and discreet diplomatist as he was – must have taxed his resources as much as a campaign in Flanders. His admirers mobbed him on all occasions. 'I could not see Prince Eugene at court to-day,' – writes Swift to Mrs. Johnson at Dublin, – 'the crowd was so great. The Whigs contrive to have a crowd always about him, and employ the rabble to give the word when he sets out from any place.' Elsewhere Swift had said – 'I hope and believe he comes too late to do the Whigs any good.' At first His Highness's appearance prepossessed him. He is not ill-looking, 'but well enough, and a good shape.' Later on he has revised his opinion. 'I saw Prince Eugene at court to-day very plain. He is plaguy yellow, and literally ugly besides.' A great Tory lady, Lady Strafford (wife of that haughty envoy to the Hague who declined to serve with Prior in the Utrecht negotiations) goes farther still. She calls him – her Ladyship spells far worse than Stella – a 'frittfull creature,' and adds, 'the Ladys here dont admire Prince Eugene, for he seemes to take very little notis of them,' – a sentiment in which we may perhaps detect a spice of the 'spreto injuria formho'
Much, indeed, depends upon the point of view, political and otherwise. To Steele, with his military instincts and quick enthusiasm, the great Captain, who surprised Cremona and forced the trenches of Turin, comes surrounded with an aura of hyperbole. 'He who beholds him,' he writes in 'Spectator,' No. 340, 'will easily expect from him anything that is to be imagined or executed by the Wit or Force of Man. The Prince is of that Stature which makes a Man most easily become all Parts of Exercise; has Height to be graceful on Occasions of State and Ceremony, and no less adapted for Agility and Dispatch: His Aspect is erect and compos'd; his Eye lively and thoughtful, yet rather vigilant than sparkling: His Action and Address the most easy imaginable, and his Behaviour in an Assembly peculiarly graceful in a certain Art of mixing insensibly with the rest, and becoming one of the Company, instead of receiving the Courtship of it. The Shape of his Person, and Composure of his Limbs, are remarkably exact and beautiful.' Burnet, as staunch a Whig as Steele, writes more moderately, to the same effect. 'I had the honour to be admitted at several times, to much discourse with him; his Character is so universally known, that I will say nothing of him, but from what appeared to myself. He has a most unaffected Modesty, and does scarcely bear the Acknowledgments, that all the World pay him: He descends to an easy Equality with those, with whom he converses; and seems to assume nothing to himself, while he reasons with others: He was treated with great respect by both Parties; but he put a distinguished Respect on the Duke of Marlborough, with whom he passed most of his Time. 47 The Queen used him civilly, but not with the Distinction, that was due to his high Merit: Nor did he gain much ground with the Ministers.' 48
Eugene's stay at Leicester House was brief; but it must have been fully occupied. 'Je caressais beaucoup les gens en place,' he writes in his 'Mémoires,' and it is clear that, however attentive he may have been to his fallen comrade-in-arms of Blenheim and Oudenarde, he did not omit to pay assiduous court to those in power. 'He has been every day entertain'd at some great man's,' says gossiping Peter Wentworth. Lord Portland gives him 'dinner, musick and a dancing' all at once; the Duke of Shrewsbury has Nicolini to sing for him; the Duke of Buckingham turns out the militia in his honour. And so forth. He, in his turn, was not backward in responding. 'Prince Eugene,' says Lady Strafford, 'has given an order to six ladys and six men. The ladys are the four Marlborough daughters and the Duchess of Bolton and Lady Berkely. 'Tis a medall – Cupid on won side with a sword in won hand and a fann in the othere, and the othere side is Cupid with a bottle in his hand with a sword run through it. And the motto's are in French which I dare not write to you but the English "won don't hinder the othere" ["L'un n'empêche pas l'autre"].' He had arrived in London on January 5, and he returned to Holland on March 17, carrying with him nothing but the diamond hiked sword ('very rich and genteele, and the diamonds very white,' says Lord Berkeley of Stratton), which, at a cost of £5,000, had been presented to him by Queen Anne. 49
After this Leicester House continued to be the home of the German Resident, apparently one Hoffmann, whom Swift calls a 'puppy.' But he had also called his predecessor, Count Gallas, a 'fool,' and too much importance may easily be attached to these flowers of faction. 'Scandal between Whig and Tory goes for nothing,' said Mrs. Manley of the 'New Atalantis' – and Mrs. Manley's knowledge was experimental. About 1718, the house, being again to let, was bought for £6,000 by George Augustus, Prince of Wales, who had quarrelled with his father; and a residence of the Prince of Wales it continued for forty years to come.
This was perhaps the gayest time in its history. From the precision and decorum of St. James's, people flocked eagerly to the drawing-rooms and receptions of Leicester House, where the fiddles were always going. 'Balls, assemblies and masquerades have taken the place of dull formal visiting,' writes my Lord Chesterfield, 'and the women are more agreeable triflers than they were designed. Puns are extremely in vogue, and the license very great. The variation of three or four letters in a word breaks no squares, inasmuch, that an indifferent punster may make a very good figure in the best companies.' He himself was one of the most brilliant luminaries of that brilliant gathering, delighting the Prince and Princess by his mimicry and his caustic raillery. Another was that eccentric Duchess of Buckingham, who passed for the daughter of James II. by Catherine Sed-ley, Countess of Dorchester, and who always sat in a darkened chamber, in the deepest mourning, on the anniversary of King Charles's execution. Thus she was discovered by Lord Hervey, surrounded by servants in sables, in a room hung with black, and lighted only by wax candles. But the most attractive figures of the prince's Court are the youthful maids of honour, – charming, good-humoured Mary Bellenden, Mary Lepel (to whom a later paper of these 'Vignettes' has been devoted), 50 and reckless and volatile Sophia Howe. Pope and Gay wrote them verses, – these laughing ladies, – and they are often under contemporary pens.