Hyde Park from Domesday-book to Date

CHAPTER XXIII

Works of art in the Park – Drinking fountain – Marble Arch – Hyde Park Corner – Achilles statue – Walk round the Park – Cemetery of St. George’s, Hanover Square – Sterne’s tomb and burial – Tyburn tree – The Tybourne – People executed – Henrietta Maria’s penance – Locality of the gallows – Princess Charlotte – Gloucester House – Dorchester House – Londonderry House – Apsley House – Allen’s apple stall – The Wellington Arch – Statues of the Duke – St. George’s Hospital, Knightsbridge – A fight on the bridge – Albert Gate and George Hudson – Knightsbridge Barracks.

Works of Art in the Park are conspicuous by their general absence. There is a drinking fountain near the Bayswater Road, a fountain on the site of the Chelsea Waterworks reservoir – the statue of Achilles, the Marble Arch, and the Gate at Hyde Park Corner.

The drinking fountain was dedicated on Feb. 29, 1868, with a great function in which figured the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of Cambridge, Lord Harris, and many other noblemen. This fountain was the gift of the Maharajah of Vizianagram, K.C.S.I., and cost about £1200. The material employed is box-ground stone, the columns being blue pennant, and the bowls polished granite. The form of the fountain is quadrangular, and the style early Gothic. On two sides are the portrait and arms of the Maharajah; and on the remaining two sides the portrait and arms of her Majesty Queen Victoria. On one of the recesses is the following inscription, in old English character: – “This fountain, the gift of the Maharajah Murza Vizeram Gujaputty Raj Munca Sooltan, Bahadoor of Vizianagram, K.C.S.I., was erected by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain Association, 1868.”

The old Cumberland Gate, which was built about 1744, was, as may be seen by a water-colour drawing in the Crace Collection (Port. ix. 75), a very ugly brick construction with wooden gates – but it was removed in 1822, and handsome iron gates substituted for it. But 1851 – which turned Hyde Park topsy-turvy – did away with them, and in their place was erected the present Marble Arch, which was originally the chief entrance to Buckingham Palace. The original estimate for it was £31,000, but that included £6000 for an equestrian statue of George IV., which was to surmount it, but was placed instead in Trafalgar Square. One authority says it cost £80,000, whilst its metal gates cost £3000. It was designed by Nash, the favourite architect of the Regency and reign of George IV., and is an adaptation from the Arch of Constantine at Rome. Flaxman, Westmeath, and Rossi did the ornamentation, and, being of Carrara marble, and kept scrupulously clean, it forms a very effective entrance to the north of the Park.

Its removal was effected with great rapidity – for the foundations were not begun to be dug till the middle of January, 1851. We hear of it in The Times of Feb. 25, that “the Arch is in a very advanced state, and is, in fact, fast approaching towards completion. The works are so far advanced that the massive gates have been fixed in their places, and the whole of the superstructure is in a very forward condition.” And in The Times of April 1, 1851, we read: “On Saturday (March 29) the re-erection of the Marble Arch at Cumberland Gate was completed; and, in the course of the week, the carriage drive will be opened to the public. The blocks of marble of which the Arch is composed have all been fresh polished, and the structure has altogether a very chaste appearance. The upper part of the Arch has been constructed as a police-station, and will contain a reserve of men.”

In 1756, as we may see by a water-colour drawing by Jones (Crace Collection, Port. x. 39), the Piccadilly entrance to Hyde Park consisted only of wooden gates, and so it remained until the present entrance was made from designs by Decimus Burton in 1827. This is a screen of fluted Ionic columns, supporting an entablature. This is divided into three arched entrances for carriages, and two for foot passengers. The frieze, which represents a naval and military triumph, was designed by Henning – and if it were finished as he wanted it, with groups of statuary on the top, it would be very fine. By the way, talking of statuary at this spot, in “A New Guide to London,” 1726, p. 83, we find: “If you please, you may see a great many Statues at the Statuaries at Hyde-Park Corner.”

Visible from this entrance is the Achilles Statue – the first public nude statue in England. A great deal of rubbish has been talked about this statue, especially in attributing its original to Pheidias. Whoever was its sculptor, it was a marble statue which formed part of a group on the Quirinal Hill at Rome – which has been christened Achilles for no particular reason, but that it seemed applicable to a monument from the ladies of England to the hero of the day, the great Duke of Wellington. The Pope gave the casts, the Ordnance Office found the metal from captured French cannon, the Government gave the site, and yet it cost £10,000 before it was erected. True, Westmacott furnished it with a sword and shield which were not in the original, and part of the Park wall had to be taken down in order to get it into the Park, an event which took place on June 18, 1822 (the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo). But its beauties were not to be shown on that occasion, as weighing about 33 tons, it required a lot of fixing – but it was unveiled on July 14th. The height of this statue is more than 18 feet – and with the mound, base, plinth, pedestal and statue, it is 36 feet high from the road level. It was soon found necessary to surround it with an iron balustrade, as it became a favourite play place of the little gamins of the Park. On the pedestal is the following inscription: —

This statue was lampooned and caricatured very considerably, but both are somewhat too broad for reproduction nowadays.

Let us now take a walk round the Park – outside – beginning on the North side. All along the Park, till we come to Tyburn, was open fields and market gardens, except the mortuary chapel and cemetery of St. George’s, Hanover Square, and its concomitant, St. George’s Terrace, which we see in Sandby’s camp picture of “The Toilet.” This burial ground was enclosed and consecrated in 1764, and comprises an area of about four acres. It is popularly supposed that Laurence Sterne is buried here – and if you do not believe it, there is a tombstone to testify to the fact. It is near the centre of the west wall of the cemetery, and it bears the following inscription: —

This monumental stone was erected to the memory of the deceased by two Brother Masons, for, although he did not live to be a member of their Society, yet all his incomparable performances evidently prove him to have acted by Rule and Square; they rejoice in this opportunity of perpetuating his high and unapproachable character to after ages. W. & S.

If we analyze the above, and search out the truth of it, we find that Sterne died on March 18th, and was buried in the cemetery on March 22nd, being followed to the grave by only two persons, his publisher, Becket, and Mr. Salt, of the India House. It is, and was, currently believed that two nights after his burial his body was exhumed by the body-snatchers, or “Resurrection Men,” as they were called, and by them sold to M. Collignon, Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge: and the story goes on to show, how among the scientific people the Professor invited to witness his demonstration, there was one who had been personally acquainted with Sterne, and who fainted with horror at the sight of his corpse being thus anatomized. That this story is true is more than probable – exhumation being rife – so much so, that in the St. James’s Chronicle, Nov. 24-26, 1767, it is thus recorded of this very Cemetery: “The Burying-Ground in Oxford Road, belonging to the Parish of St. George’s, Hanover Square, having been lately robbed of several dead Bodies, a Watch was placed there, attended by a large Mastiff Dog, notwithstanding which, on Sunday last, some Villains found Means to steal out another dead Body, and carried off the very Dog.”

Ann Radcliffe, the novelist, who died in 1823, was also buried here.

The old chapel is now pulled down, and a new and much handsomer one erected in its place; whilst the cemetery has been levelled, planted, pathed, and seated, in accordance with modern taste.

Continuing our walk, we come to dread Tyburn, with its fatal tree of which it was written: —

It derives its etymology either from Twy bourne – Two brooks, or the united brooks; or else from Aye-bourne60– t’Aye bourne – which rises in Hampstead, and receiving nine other rills, crossed Oxford Street about Stratford Place, by the Lord Mayor’s Hunting Lodge, now Sedley Place, where conduits were built to receive water from it for the use of the City: which conduits were found in pretty fair repair in Aug., 1875. It ran by Lower Brook Street, which owes its name to it, as does also Hay (Aye) hill – Lansdowne Gardens, Half Moon Street, crossed Piccadilly, where it was spanned by a bridge, and thence into the Green Park, where it formed a pond. Running past Buckingham Palace, it divided and formed Thorney Island – or Westminster – one outfall turning the Abbey Mill.

Tyburn has been a place of execution for centuries, the earliest I can find being in “Roger de Wendover,” who mentions that, A.D. 1196, William Fitz-osbert, or Longbeard, was drawn through the City of London, by horses, to the gallows at Tyburn. We hear occasionally of executions there in the 14th and 15th centuries, and Perkin Warbeck was hanged there in 1499 – as was also Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, in 1534 – but I have no wish to chronicle the people who were here done to death for crime, and religious and political offences, except to mention that the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw, were exhumed, and on Jan. 30, 1661, dragged on sledges to Tyburn, where they were suspended till sunset on the “triple tree.”

That the shape of the Tyburn Gallows was triangular is proved by many quotations, one of which, from Shakespeare’s Loves Labour’s Lost (Act. iv. Sc. 3), will suffice: —

Biron.– Thou mak’st the triumviry, the corner cap of society,

The shape of love’s Tyburn, that hangs up simplicity.

There is a story that Queen Henrietta Maria did penance under the gallows at Tyburn in expiation of the blood of the martyrs who had suffered thereon. That it was a matter of public report there can be no doubt, as we may read in the “Reply of the Commissioners of his Majesty the King of Great Britain, to the proposition presented by Mons. le Maréschal de Bassompierre, Ambassador Extraordinary from his most Christian Majesty.”61 “They (the Bishop of Mande and his priests) abused the influence which they had acquired over the tender and religious mind of her majesty, so far as to lead her a long way on foot, through a park, the gates of which had been expressly ordered by Count de Tilliers to be kept open, to go in devotion to a place (Tyburn) where it had been the custom to execute the most infamous malefactors and criminals of all sorts, exposed on the entrance of a high road; an act, not only of shame and mockery towards the queen, but of reproach and calumny of the king’s predecessors, of glorious memory, as accusing them of tyranny in having put to death innocent persons, whom these people look upon as martyrs, although, on the contrary, not one of them had been executed on account of religion, but for high treason. And it was this last act, above all, which provoked the royal resentment and anger of his Majesty beyond the bounds of his patience, which, until then, had enabled him to support all the rest; but he could now no longer endure to see in his house, and in his kingdom, people who, even in the person of his dearly beloved consort, had brought such a scandal upon his religion; and violated, in such a manner, the respect due to the sacred memory of so many great monarchs, his illustrious predecessors, upon whom the Pope had never attempted, nor had ever been able, to impose such a mark of indignity, under pretext of penitence, or submission due to his see.”

That Charles I. believed this story, there can be but little doubt, for, on July 12, 1626, he writes to his Ambassador in France: “I can no longer suffer those that I know to be the cause and fomenters of these humours, to be about my wife any longer, which I must do if it were but for one action they made my wife do; which is to make her go to Tyburn in devotion to pray, which action can have no greater invective made against it than the relation.”

Replying to the Commissioners, Bassompierre takes up the cudgels for the Queen, and denies the accusation thus: “The Queen of Great Britain, with the permission of the King, her husband, gained the jubilee at the Chapel of the Fathers of the Oratory at St. James’s (Saint Gemmes) with the devotion suitable to a great Princess, so well born, and so zealous for her religion – which devotions terminated with Vespers; and some time after the heat of the day having passed, she went for a walk in the Park of St. James’, and also in Hyde Park (Hipparc), which adjoins it, as she had, at other times, been accustomed to do, and frequently in the company of the King, her husband; but that she has done so in procession, that there have there been made any prayers, public or private, high or low – that she has approached the gallows within 50 paces – that she has been on her knees, holding a book of Hours or a Chaplet in her hands, is what those that impose these matters do not believe themselves.”

In the Print Room of the British Museum, in that fine collection of pictures relating to London – Crowle’s interleaved edition of Pennant’s London – is a very fine engraving of the Queen, praying under the gallows by moonlight, assisted by a torch-bearer – a coach and six awaiting her return; but as this picture is manifestly of the last century, it is not worth reproducing in any way.

Where the gallows stood is still a moot point – but evidence points that No. 49, Connaught Square was built on its site, and in the lease of the house from the Bishop of London it is so expressed. Against this a correspondent in “Notes and Queries” (2 S. x. 198) says, “that the late Mr. Lawford, the bookseller of Saville Passage, told me that he had been informed by a very old gentleman who frequented his shop, that the Tyburn Tree stood as nearly as possible to the public house in the Edgware Road, now known by the sign of the ‘Hoppoles,’ which is at the corner of Upper Seymour Street; he having several times witnessed executions there. Amongst them, Dr. Dodd’s, which had made a strong impression on his memory, on account of the celebrity of the culprit, and because, when the hangman was going to put the halter round the doctor’s neck, the latter removed his wig, showing his bald shaved head; and a shower of rain coming on at the same time, someone on the platform hastily put up an umbrella, and held it over the head of the man who had but a minute to live, as if in fear that he might catch cold.”

Another correspondent (4 S. xi. 98) practically endorses this site. He says: “The potence itself was in Upper Bryanston Street, a few doors from Edgware Road, on the northern side. The whole of this side of the street is occupied by squalid tenements and sheds, now (Feb. 1, 1873) in the course of demolition, and on the site of one of these, under the level of the present street, is to be seen a massive brickwork pillar, in the centre of which is a large socket, evidently for one of the pillars of the old gallows. An ancient house at the corner of Upper Bryanston Street and Edgware Road, which has been pulled down within the last few weeks was described to me as the only one existing in the neighbourhood when executions took place at Tyburn, and from the balcony in front of which the Sheriffs of London used to take their official view of the proceedings.”

The date of the last hanging at Tyburn was Nov. 7, 1783.

A curious thing connected with Tyburn was the “Tyburn Ticket.” In the Morning Herald, March 17, 1802, is this advertisement: “Wanted, one or two Tyburn Tickets, for the Parish of St. George’s, Hanover Square. Any person or persons having the same to dispose of may hear of a purchaser,” etc. These tickets were granted to a prosecutor who succeeded in getting a felon convicted, and they carried with them the privilege of immunity from serving all parochial offices. They were transferable by sale (but only once), and the purchaser enjoyed its privileges. They were abolished in 1818. They had a considerable pecuniary value, and, in the year of their abolition, one was sold for £280.

Tyburnia is that part of London bounded south by the Bayswater Road, east by the Edgware Road, and the west includes Lancaster Gate.

There was a Turnpike called Tyburn Gate which commanded the Edgware and Uxbridge Roads; and close by, on the north side of the Bayswater Road – from the corner of the Edgware Road – is Connaught Terrace; No. 7 of which was, in 1814, the residence of Queen Caroline – wife of George IV. It was here, and to her mother, that the Princess Charlotte ran, rather than live at Carlton House, or marry the Prince of Orange. Then there was great consternation, and the Lord Chancellor, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and others, came to reason with her, but she would none of them, and not even her kind uncle, the Duke of Sussex, could prevail with her to go back.

Lord Brougham was more successful, and this is a portion of his account of how he managed the wayward girl: “We then conversed upon the subject with the others, and after a long discussion on that and her lesser grievances, she took me aside, and asked me what, upon the whole, I advised her to do. I said at once, ‘Return to Warwick House, or Carlton House, and on no account to pass a night out of her own house.’ She was extremely affected and cried, asking if I, too, refused to stand by her. I said, quite the contrary, and that as to the marriage, I gave no opinion, except that she must follow her own inclination entirely, but that her returning home was absolutely necessary; and in this all the rest fully agreed – her mother, the Duke of Sussex, Miss Mercer and Lady Charlotte Lindsay, for whom she had a great respect and regard. I said, that however painful it was to me, the necessity was so clear, and so strong, that I had not the least hesitation in advising it. She again and again begged me to consider her situation, and to think whether, looking to that, it was absolutely necessary she should return.