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101 | rge IV. by Chantrey, now in Pall Mall
East, was intended for the top, and cost 9000 guineas, and the bronze
gates are by Samuel Parker. Near that corner of the Park was a stone
where soldiers were shot, and one of the historians of the Park
states that it is still there, only covered over with earth when the
new Cumberland Gate was made in 1822. Apsley Gate at Hyde Park Corner
was designed by Decimus Burton, and put up in 1827, and he planned the
arch forming the entrance to Constitution Hill the following year. The
stags, by Bartolozzi, on Albert Gate, came from the Ranger’s Lodge in
Green Park. Grosvenor Gate was opened about 1724, and Stanhope Gate
some twenty-five years later. All the others are more modern.
Those who wish to pursue the subject further will find such details
more or less accessible in various guide-books. But to every one the
Park, with all its charms, its beauties, and its memories, is open,
and it is certain that the better it is known the more it will be
apprec |
102 | iated.
CHAPTER III
ST. JAMES’S AND GREEN PARKS
_Near this my Muse, what most delights her, sees
A living Gallery of Aged Trees:
Bold sons of Earth, that thrust their Arms so high,
As if once more they would invade the Sky._
* * * * *
_Here Charles contrives the ord’ring of his States;
Here he resolves his neighb’ring Princes’ Fates;_
* * * * *
_A Prince on whom such diff’rent Lights did smile,
Born the divided World to reconcile.
Whatever Heav’n or high extracted Blood
Could promise or foretel, he’ll make it good,
Reform these Nations, and improve them more
Than this fair Park, from what it was before._
--ST. JAMES’S PARK: “Poetical Essay,” by Waller.
The opening history of St. James’s and Green Parks is similar to that
of Hyde Park. They formed part of the same manor in early days, and
became Crown property in He |
103 | nry VIII.’s time. St. James’s Park was
chiefly a marsh. The Thames overflowed its banks nearly every year,
and the low-lying parts were a swamp and the haunt of wild fowl, and
the chief use of the Park was for the sport the wild birds afforded.
The Tyburn flowed through it on its way from where it crossed the
modern Oxford Street to where it joined the Thames, a little west of
where Vauxhall Bridge afterwards stood. It passed right across Green
Park, where the depression of its valley can still be traced between
Half Moon Street and Down Street. The name, St. James’s, originated
with the hospital for lepers, dedicated to St. James, on the site of
the present palace. The exact date of its foundation is lost in the
mists of antiquity, but it was established by the citizens of London,
“before the time of any man’s memorie, for 14 Sisters, maydens,
that were leprous, living chastly and honestly in Divine Service.”
Later, there were further gifts of land and money from the citizens,
and “8 |
104 | brethren to minister Divine Service there” were added to the
foundation. All these gifts were subsequently confirmed by Edward I.,
who granted a fair to be held for seven days, commencing on the eve of
St. James’s Day, in St. James’s Fields, which belonged to the hospital.
The letting out of the land for booths became a source of further
income to the lepers. Stowe shortly tells the subsequent history.
“This Hospital was surrendered to Henry the 8 the 23 of his reigne:
the Sisters being compounded with were allowed Pensions for terme of
their lives, and the King builded there a goodly Mannor, annexing
thereunto a Park, closed about with a wall of brick, now called St.
James’s Parke, serving indifferently to the said Mannor, and to the
Mannor or Palace of Whitehall.” At first sight the summary ejection of
these helpless creatures appears unusually heartless, even for those
days; but leprosy, which during the time of the Crusades had grown to a
formidable extent, was declining in the six |
105 | teenth century in England.
It is probable, therefore, that the poor outcast sisters, possessed of
their pensions, would be able to find shelter in one of the other leper
hospitals, of which there were still a number in the country.
The space between Whitehall and Westminster, acquired from the
Abbey, was turned into an orchard. The site of Montagu House was the
bowling-green of the Palace, which stretched to the river. A high
terrace and flight of steps led to the Privy Garden of Whitehall,
so, except for the Palace and the Westminster group, there were no
buildings between the river and the Park. It requires some stretch of
the imagination to efface the well-known edifices which now surround
it, and to see it in its natural state. Flights of wild birds would
pass from the marshy ground to the river, unchecked by the pile of
Government offices. Behind the Leper Hospital lay fields and scattered
houses. The far-off villages of Knightsbridge and Chelsea would
scarcely come into sight, w |
106 | hile beyond the village of Charing the
walls and towers of the City would loom in the distance. Henry VIII.
made some alterations, and may have partially drained the ground and
stocked it with deer. Old maps show a pond at the west end, near the
present Wellington Barracks, called Rosamund’s Pond. The origin of the
name is uncertain, but “Rosemonsbore, or Rosamund’s Bower,” occurs
in a lease of land near this spot from the Abbey of Westminster as
early as 1520. Hard by was a “mount,” such as was to be seen in every
sixteenth-century garden, probably with an arbour and seat on the top
to overlook the pond. The first mention of St. James’s as a Park is in
1539, on an occasion described in Hall’s Chronicle, when Henry VIII.
held a review of the city militia. “The King himself,” writes the
chronicler, “would see the people of the Citie muster in sufficient
nombre....” Some 15,000, leaving the City after passing by St. Paul’s
Churchyard, went “directly to Westminster and so through the Sanc |
107 | tuary
and round about the Park of St. James, and so up into the fields and
came home through Holborne.”
It was not until James I.’s time that the Park began to be esteemed
as a resort for those attached to the Court. Prince Henry, the elder
brother of Charles I., made the tilting-ring on the site of the present
Horse Guards’ Parade, and brought the enclosure more into vogue for
games. James I. made use of the Park for his own hobbies, one of which
was the encouragement of growing vines and mulberries in England. He
planted considerable vineyards, and in 1609 he sent a circular letter
to the Lords-Lieutenant of each county, ordering them to announce
that the following spring a thousand mulberry trees would be sent to
each county town, and people were required to buy them at the rate of
three-farthings a plant. To further prosecute his plan, the King set an
example by planting a mulberry orchard at the end of St. James’s Park.
The place afterwards became a fashionable tea garden, and Bu |
108 | ckingham
Palace is partly built on the site. The King kept also quite a large
menagerie of beasts and birds presented to him by various crowned
heads, or sent to him by friends and favourites. There are records
of elephants, camels, antelopes, beavers, crocodiles, wild boars,
and sables, besides many kinds of birds. The keepers of the animals
received large salaries, and the cost of the care of these beasts
would frighten the Zoological Society of to-day. No expense was spared
to give the best and most suitable surroundings to the animals. For
instance, as much as £286 was expended in 1618 by Robert Wood, the
keeper of the cormorants, ospreys, and otters, “in building a place to
keep the said cormorants in and making nine fish-ponds on land within
the vine garden at Westminster.” Fish were put in for these creatures,
and a sluice was made to bring water from the Thames to fill the
ponds. These strange beasts and birds and their attendants must have
been a quaint and unusual sight. The |
109 | keepers were dressed in red cloth
(which cost nine shillings a yard), embroidered with “I.R.” in Venice
gold, and must have added to the picturesque appearance of this early
Zoological Garden.
Gradually the Park became more and more a favourite place in which to
stroll. Others were admitted besides the Court circle, the privilege
being first accorded to the tenants of the houses at Westminster.
Milton, who lived at one time in Petty France, near where Queen Anne’s
Gate now stands, planted a tree in the garden overlooking the Park,
which survived until recent times, would be one of those to enjoy the
advantage. Charles I. passed this way on his last journey to Whitehall
on the fatal 30th of January, and tradition says he paused to notice a
tree planted by his brother Henry. During the Commonwealth, the Park
still was resorted to. In the sprightly letters of Dorothy Osborne to
Sir William Temple are some vivid little touches in reference to it.
She writes from the country in March 1654: |
110 | “And hark you, can you tell
me whether the gentleman that lost a crystal box the 1st of February
in St. James’s Park or Old Spring Gardens has found it again or not?
I have a strong curiosity to know.” Again, in June of the same year,
she writes from London, where she was paying a visit: “I’ll swear they
will not allow me time for anything; and to show how absolutely I am
governed, I need but tell you that I am every night in the Park and at
New Spring Gardens, where, though I come with a mask, I cannot escape
being known nor my conversation being admired.”
The most brilliant days of its history began, however, in Charles
II.’s reign. He entirely remodelled it, and began the work soon after
his return from exile, imbued with foreign ideas of gardening. It has
always been supposed that Le Nôtre was responsible for the designs, and
it has often been asserted that he himself came to England to see them
carried out. But close investigation has furnished no proof of this,
and it is practi |
111 | cally certain that, although invited, and allowed by
Louis XIV. to come to England, he never actually did so. Other “French
gardeners” certainly came, and one of them, La Quintinge, made many
English friends, and kept up a correspondence with them after his
return to France. Perrault probably visited London also, and may have
superintended the “French gardeners” who were employed on St. James’s
Park. They transformed the whole place. Avenues--the Mall and “Birdcage
Walk”--were planted. A straight canal passed down the middle, and at
the end, near the present Foreign Office, was the duck decoy. The
“Birdcage Walk” is no fantastic title, for birds were literally kept
there in cages. These were probably aviaries for large birds, and not
little hanging cages, as has been sometimes suggested. A well-known
passage occurs in Evelyn’s Diary, 1664, where he enumerates some of
the birds and beasts he saw during one of his walks through the Park.
The pelican delighted him, although “a melancholy |
112 | waterfowl,” and he
watched the skilful way it devoured fish; and it is not surprising
that he recorded the strange fact that one of the two Balearian cranes
had a wooden leg, made by a soldier, with a joint, so that the bird
could “walk and use it as well as if it had been natural”; and he
speaks with interest of a solan goose, a stork, a milk-white raven,
and “a curious sort of poultry,” besides “deer of several countries,”
antelopes, elk, “Guinea goats, Arabian sheep, etc.” The duck decoy
lay at the south-west end of the long canal, which formed part of the
new French design. This “duck island” was rather a series of small
islands, as it was intersected by canals and reed-covered channels
for catching duck. This was a favourite resort of Charles II., who
has often been described feeding his ducks in St. James’s Park. To
be keeper of the ducks, or “Governor of Duck Island,” was granted to
St. Evremond, an excuse for bestowing a yearly salary on a favourite.
The birds continued after t |
113 | he King, who had found in them a special
recreation, had passed away. In William III.’s time the Park is still
described as “full of very fine walkes and rowes of trees, ponds, and
curious birds, Deer, and some fine Cows.” A Dutch traveller who was
in England from 1693–96 notices the famous old white raven. By that
time the ducks were no longer the fashion, and evidently there was an
inclination to despise the former craze for wild fowl. A Frenchman,
named M. de Sorbiere, visited England about this time, and wrote an
account of his impressions. Some of his adverse criticisms of English
people and institutions got him into trouble. A supposed translation
of his book was published in 1698, and until 1709 was held to be a
correct version. In reality it was a clever skit, and not in the least
like the original. In the true version he describes the Park with its
rows of trees and “admirable prospect” of the suburbs, and mentions
that the King had “erected a tall Pile in the Park, the better |
114 | to make
use of Telescopes, with which Sir Robert Murray shew’d me Saturn and
the Satellites of Jupiter.” Not a word about the ducks. But in the
spurious parody of 1698 there is a humorous description, which shows
how the next generation laughed at the amusements of King Charles II.
“I was at St. James’s Park; there were no Pavillions, nor decoration
of Treilliage and Flowers; but I saw there a vast number of Ducks;
these were a most surprising sight. I could not forbear to say to Mr.
Johnson, who was pleased to accompany me in this Walk, that sure all
the ponds in England had contributed to this profussion of Ducks; which
he took so well, that he ran immediately to an Old Gentleman that
sate in a Chair, and was feeding of ’em. He rose up very obligingly,
embraced me, and saluted me with a Kiss, and invited me to Dinner;
telling me he was infinitely oblig’d to me for flattering the King’s
Ducks.”
Little attention was paid to the wild fowl in the Park after that
date, until the Prince |
115 | Consort took an interest in them. In 1841 he
became the Patron of the Ornithological Society, and the cottage on
Duck Island was built for the Bird-keeper. For some thirty years the
Society flourished, and kept up the supply and cared for the birds in
the Park. In 1867, however, their numbers were greatly reduced, and
the Society sold their collection of birds to H.M. Office of Works,
which has since then had them under its charge. It is pleasant to know
that the old tradition of the wild fowl in that part of the Park is
maintained. Although the duck pond of King Charles’s time must have
looked somewhat different from that of to-day, the birds can be made as
much at home, and they nest peacefully on the modern Duck Island, its
direct descendant. Moorhens and dabchicks, or little grebes, have for
the last twenty years nested in the Park. They used to leave for the
breeding season, but since 1883, when the first moorhen nested, they
have gradually taken to remaining contentedly all throu |
116 | gh the year, and
bring up their young there. Birds seem to choose the Park to rest in,
and many migratory ones have been noticed. Kingfishers have recently
been let out near the site of the ancient bird cages, in the hope that
they may carry on the historic association.
[Illustration: CROCUSES IN EARLY SPRING, ST. JAMES’S PARK]
The cows, which were a part of ancient history, as were the birds,
have not been so fortunate. Although a newspaper clamour in defence
of the cows was raised, the few remaining were finally banished in
1905, when the alterations in the Mall were made. These survivals
standing by the dusty stalls could scarcely be called picturesque;
and although interest undoubtedly was attached to them as venerable
survivals of an old custom, they hardly suggested the rural simplicity
of the days when cows were really pastured in the Park. For over two
centuries grazing was let to the milk-women who sold milk at the end
of the Park, near Whitehall. They paid half-a-crown a we |
117 | ek, and after
1772 three shillings a week, for the right to feed cattle in the Park.
A Frenchman, describing St. James’s at that time, is astonished at
its rural aspect. “In that part nearest Westminster nature appears
in all its rustic simplicity; it is a meadow, regularly intersected
and watered by canals, and with willows and poplars, without any
regard to order. On this side, as well as on that towards St.
James’s Palace, the grass plots are covered with cows and deer, where
they graze or chew the cud, some standing, some lying down upon the
grass.... Agreeably to this rural simplicity, most of these cows are
driven, about noon and evening, to the gate which leads from the Park
to the quarter of Whitehall. Tied to posts at the extremity of the
grass plots, they swill passengers with their milk, which, being drawn
from their udders on the spot, is served, with all cleanliness peculiar
to the English, in little mugs at the rate of a penny a mug.” The
combination of the gay crowd in h |
118 | ooped petticoats, brilliant coats, and
powdered wigs, with the peaceful, green meadows and the browsing deer
and cows, forms an attractive picture.
All this had changed long before the final departure of the cattle,
when the last old woman was pensioned off, and the sheds carted away.
A use was found for the fragments of the concrete foundations of the
last milkmaid’s stall. They were made into a sort of rockery, on which
Alpine plants grow well, to support the bank at the entrance to the new
frame-grounds at Hyde Park.
But to return to Charles II.’s time, when the cows were undisturbed.
The great feature of what Pepys calls the “brave alterations” was the
canal. He mentions more than one visit when the works were in progress.
In October 1660 he went “to walk in St. James’s Park, where we observed
the several engines at work to draw up water, with which sight I was
very much pleased.” The canal, when finished, was 2800 feet long and
100 broad, and ran through the centre of the Park, |
119 | beginning near
the north end of. Rosamund’s Pond. An avenue of trees was planted on
either side, passing down between the canal and the duck decoy to a
semicircular double avenue near the tilting-ground. Deer wandered under
fine old oaks between the canal and the avenues of “the Mall.” These
old trees have gradually disappeared, as much through gales as from the
wanton destruction of the would-be improver. At the hour of Cromwell’s
death, when the storm was so fierce the Royalists said it was due to
fiends coming to claim their own, much havoc was wrought; and from
time to time similar destructions have taken place, one of the most
serious being in November 1703, when part of the wall and over 100 elms
were blown down. Another notable gale was on March 15, 1752, when many
people lost their lives. “In St. James’s Park and the villages about
the metropolis great numbers of trees were demolished.”
The broad pathway, between avenues on the opposite side of the Park
to the Birdcage Walk, n |
120 | ow called the Mall, derives this name from the
game of “paille-maille,” which is known to have been played in France
as early as the thirteenth century, and which was popular in England
in the seventeenth. The locality, however, where it was first played
in James I.’s time was on the northern side of the street, which is
still called from it, Pall Mall. In those days fields stretched away
beyond where now St. James’s Square lies, and a single row of houses
lay between the playground and the Park. As the game became more the
fashion, the coaches and dust were found too disturbing for enjoyment,
and a new ground was laid out, running parallel to the old one, but
within the Park. The game is considered by some to be a forerunner of
croquet, as it was played with a ball (= _pila_) and mallet, the name
being derived from these two words. One or more hoops had to be passed
through, and a peg at the further end touched. The winner was the
player who passed the hoops and reached the peg in the |
121 | fewest number of
strokes. The whole course measured over 600 yards, and was kept brushed
and smooth, and the ground prepared by coating the earth with crushed
shells, which, however, remarked Pepys, “in dry weather turns to dust
and deads the ball.” Both Charles II. and James II. were much addicted
to the game, and the flattering poet Waller eulogises King Charles’s
“matchless” skill:--
“No sooner has he touched the flying ball,
But ’tis already more than half the Mall.”
The Park was by his time a much-frequented spot, and crowds delighted
to watch the King and his courtiers displaying their dexterity.
Charles II. is more intimately connected with St. James’s Park than
any other great personage. He sauntered about, fed his ducks, played
his games, and made love to fair ladies, all with indulgent, friendly
crowds watching. He stood in the “Green Walk,” beneath the trees, to
talk with Nell Gwynn, in her garden “on a terrace on the top of the
wall” overlooking the Park; an |
122 | d shocked John Evelyn, who records, in
his journal, that he heard and saw “a very familiar discourse between
the King and Mrs. Nelly.” Charles’s well-known reply to his brother,
that no one would ever kill him to put James on the throne, was said
in answer to James’s protest that he should not venture to roam about
so much without attendants in the Park. His dogs often accompanied
him, and perhaps, like most of their descendants, these pets had a
sporting instinct, and ran off to chase the deer. Anyhow, they managed
frequently to escape their master’s vigilance, and fell a prey to the
unscrupulous thief, and descriptions of the missing dogs were published
in the Gazette. One, answering to the name Towser, was “liver colour’d
and white spotted”; and a “dogg of His Majestie’s, full of blew spots,
with a white cross on his forehead about the bigness of a tumbler,” was
lost on another occasion.
Charles with his dogs, his ducks, his wit, his engaging manners, his
doubtful morals, is the ce |
123 | ntral figure of many a picture in St. James’s
Park, but it does not often form a background to his Queen. One scene
described by Pepys has much charm. The party, returning from Hyde Park
on horseback with a great crowd of gallants, pass down the Mall; the
Queen, riding hand in hand with the King, looking “mighty pretty” in
her white laced coat and crimson petticoat. Again, on another occasion,
the Queen forms an attractive vision, as she walks with her ladies from
Whitehall to St. James’s dressed from head to foot in silver lace, each
holding an immense green fan to shade themselves from the fierce rays
of the June sun, while a delighted crowd throng round them.
The popularity of the Mall as the rendezvous of all classes lasted for
over a century. Through the reigns of Queen Anne and George I. and II.
all the fashionable world of London congregated there twice daily.
In the morning the promenade took them there from twelve to two, and
after dinner in full dress they thronged thither a |
124 | gain, not to play
the game of paille-maille, which was then out of fashion, but simply
to walk about under the trees and be amused with races, wrestlings,
or an impromptu dance. Every well-known person--courtiers, wits,
beaux, writers, poets, artists, soldiers--and all the beautiful and
fascinating women, great ladies as well as more humble charmers, and
bold adventuresses, were to be seen there daily.
The crowds seem to have been very free in their admiration of some
of the distinguished ladies. When the three lovely Misses Gunning
captivated everybody with their wit and beauty, they had only to appear
in the Mall to be surrounded by admirers. On one occasion they were so
pressed by the curious mob that one of these matchless young charmers
fainted and had to be “carried home in a sedan.”
On looking at an old print of the ladies in their thin dresses walking
in the Mall, it is customary to bemoan the change of climate, to wonder
if our great-great-grand-mothers were supernaturally s |
125 | trong and not
sensitive to cold, or to conclude that they only paraded there in fine
weather. Apparently this last is not the correct solution, for in 1765
they astonished Monsieur Grosley by their disregard of the elements.
He is horrified at the fog. “The smoke,” he writes, “forms a cloud
which envelopes London like a mantle; a cloud which the sun pervades
but rarely; a cloud which, recoiling back upon itself, suffers the sun
to break out only now and then, which casual appearance procures the
Londoners a few of what they call _glorious days_. The great love of
the English for walking defies the badness of other days. On the 26th
April, St. James’s Park, incessantly covered with fogs, smoke, and
rain, that scarce left a possibility of distinguishing objects at a
distance of four steps, was filled with walkers, who were an object of
musing and admiration to me during the whole day.” Few ladies nowadays
fear a little fog or rain, but to walk in it they must be attired in
short skirts, |
126 | thick boots, and warm or mackintosh coats. It must
have been much more distressing in the days of powdered hair, picture
hats, and flimsy garments. No wonder M. Grosley was astounded at the
persistence of the poor draggled ladies.
All foreign visitors to London naturally went to see the Mall. Here is
the account of a German baron, describing the man of the world: “He
rises late, dresses himself in a frock (close-fitting garment, without
pockets, and with narrow sleeves), leaves his sword at home, takes
his cane, and goes where he likes. Generally he takes his promenade
in the Park, for that is the exchange for the men of quality. ’Tis
such another place as the Garden of the Tuileries in Paris, only the
Park has a certain beauty of simplicity which cannot be described. The
grand walk is called the Mall. It is full of people at all hours of the
day, but especially in the morning and evening, when their Majesties
often walk there, with the royal family, who are attended only by
half-a-do |
127 | zen Yeomen of the Guard, and permit all persons to walk at the
same time with them.”
A writer in 1727, waxing eloquent on the charms of the Park, gives
up the task of describing it, as “the beauty of the Mall in summer
is almost past description.” “What can be more glorious than to view
the body of the nobility of our three kingdoms in so short a compass,
especially when freed from mixed crowds of saucy fops and city gentry?”
But more often the company was very mixed, and manners peculiar. This
brilliant and motley assembly indulged in all kinds of amusements. Even
the grandest frequenters afforded diversion sometimes to the “saucy
fops.” Wrestling matches between various courtiers attracted crowds,
or a race such as one between the Duke of Grafton and Dr. Garth, of
200 yards, was the excitement of the day. There were odd and original
races got up, and wagers freely staked. Some inhuman parents backed
their baby of eighteen months old to walk the whole length of the Mall
(half a mile) |
128 | in thirty minutes, and the poor little mite performed the
feat in twenty-three minutes. What comments would modern philanthropic
societies have made on such a performance!
A race between a fat cook and a lean footman caused great merriment,
but as the footman was handicapped by carrying 110 lbs., the fat cook
won. Another time it was a hopping-race which engrossed attention--a
man undertook to hop one hundred yards in fifty hops, and succeeded
in doing it in forty-six--and endless variety of similar follies. The
crowds who assembled indulged in every sort of gaiety; “in short, no
freedoms that can be taken here are reckoned indecent; all passes for
raillery and harmless gallantry.”
Although open to all the world for walking, only royal personages or
a few specially favoured people were allowed to drive through. It was
one of the grievances of the Duchess of Marlborough when the Duke was
in disgrace that the privilege of driving her coach and six through
the Park was denied her. The |
129 | remaining restrictions with regard to
carriages have only passed away in very recent years. The notice board
stating that Members of Parliament during the session might drive
through the Park from Great George Street to Marlborough House was
only removed when the road was opened to all traffic in 1887, and
Constitution Hill only became a public highway in 1889. The use of the
road passing under the Horse Guards’ Archway is still restricted to
those who receive special permission from the sovereign.
The Park had never been drained, and had always shown signs of its
marshy origin, and “Duck Island” was really a natural swamp. An
unusually high tide flooded the low-lying end where the Horse Guards’
Parade and the houses of Downing Street with their little gardens now
stand. What state secrets they could divulge had they the power of
speech! The tilting-ground was often in a condition quite unfit for the
exercise of troops, so with a view to preventing this, it was paved
with stone early |
130 | in the eighteenth century. It has always been used
for military displays, and the trooping of the colours on the King’s
birthday takes place on the same ground which witnessed the brilliant
scene when the colours, thirty-eight in number, captured at the battle
of Blenheim were conveyed to Westminster Abbey. On the parade-ground
now stands the gun cast at Seville, used by Soult at Cadiz, and taken
after the battle of Salamanca. Here many an impressive ceremony of
distributing medals, and countless parades, have taken place through
many generations. Here, with the brutality of old days, corporal
punishment was administered, and offending soldiers were flogged in
full view of the merry-making crowds assembled in the Park. Round the
Park lay other marshy lands, also frequently flooded by the Thames, and
it was not surprising that on one occasion an otter found its way from
the river and settled down on Duck Island and there grew fat on the
King’s carp. Sir Robert Walpole sent to Houghton f |
131 | or his otter-hounds,
and an exciting hunt ensued, in which the Duke of Cumberland took part,
and the offending otter was captured.
Rosamund’s Pond had, in the course of time, become stagnant and
unpleasant, and there were frequent complaints of its unsavoury
condition. About 1736 a machine for pumping out water was invented
by a Welshman, and used successfully to empty the pond, and it was
thoroughly cleansed. Thirty years later the same evil began again to be
a nuisance, and it was decided to drain and fill up the pond entirely,
which was accomplished about 1772. The trees on the island were felled,
and those near the bank died from the lack of water, so at first the
absence of the slimy pond must have been disfiguring. The shady walk
near it, known as the Close Walk or the Jacobites’ Walk, must have
disappeared when the trees died. About the same time the swampy moat
round Duck Island was filled up and the canal cleaned out. When these
improvements were completed in 1775 some birds |
132 | were put on the canal.
One of them was a swan called Jack, belonging to Queen Charlotte, which
was reared in the garden of Buckingham House. This bird ruled the roost
for many a day, and was a popular favourite. It lived until 1840, when
some new arrivals, in the shape of Polish geese, pecked and ill-treated
the poor old bird so seriously that he died.
About 1786 fashion began to desert the Mall for the Green Park, and the
crowds which collected there were no longer intermingled with the Court
circle. In a letter to her daughter Madame Roland describes the company
in the Mall as very different from what it was a few years earlier,
for though it was “very brilliant on a Sunday evening, and full of
well-to-do people and well-dressed women, in general they are all
tradespeople and citizens.” A generation later the Mall seems to have
become quite deserted. Sir Richard Phillips, in his morning’s walk
from London to Kew in 1817, bemoans the absence of the gay throng:--
“My spirits sank, an |
133 | d a tear started into my eyes, as I brought to mind
those crowds of beauty, rank, and fashion which, until within these few
years, used to be displayed in the centre Mall of this Park on Sunday
evenings during spring and summer. How often in my youth had I been
the delighted spectator of the enchanted and enchanting assemblage.
Here used to promenade, for one or two hours after dinner, the whole
British world of gaiety, beauty, and splendour. Here could be seen in
one moving mass, extending the whole length of the Mall, 5000 of the
most lovely women in this country of female beauty, all splendidly
attired, and accompanied by as many well-dressed men. What a change,
I exclaimed, has a few years wrought in these once happy and cheerful
personages! How many of those who on this very spot then delighted my
eyes are now mouldering in the silent grave!”
About 1730 Queen Caroline, who was then busy with the alterations in
Hyde Park, turned her attention to what is now known as the Green Park |
134 |
also. It had all formed part of St. James’s Park, and was known as the
Upper Park or Little St. James’s Park. It was enclosed by a brick wall
in 1667 by Charles II., who stocked it with deer. In the centre of
the Park an ice-house was made, at that time a great novelty in this
country, although well known in France and Italy. In his poem on St.
James’s Park Waller alludes to it:--
“Yonder the harvest of cold months laid up
Gives a fresh coolness to the royal cup;
There ice like crystal firm and never lost
Tempers hot July with December’s frost.”
No further alterations were made, except that, in 1681, Charles
effected an exchange of land with the Earl of Arlington, on which,
a few years later, Arlington Street was built. The path which runs
parallel with the backs of these houses was Queen Caroline’s idea,
and she used it frequently herself, and it became known as the
“Queen’s Walk.” The houses overlooking the Park went up in value as
the occupants could en |
135 | joy the sight of the Queen and the Princesses
taking their daily walk. The line of this path is no longer the same,
as a piece was cut off the Park in 1795 and leased to the Duke of
Bridgewater to add to the garden of his house. The Queen also built
a pavilion known as the Queen’s Library in the Park, where she spent
some time after her morning promenades. Although Queen Caroline took
to the Upper Park, the world of fashion did not follow at once, and it
was not until about 1786 that the Green Park for some reason suddenly
became the rage. The only incident of historic interest between this
date and the making of the road was the celebration of the end of the
War of Succession in the spring following the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.
A great pavilion like a Doric temple, 410 feet long and 114 feet high,
was erected near the wall separating the Green Park from St. James’s,
and on the 27th of April a grand display of fireworks was arranged.
A fire, however, broke out just as the performance |
136 | was beginning,
when a grand overture composed by Handel had been performed, and the
King and dense crowds were watching the illuminations. The flames
were got under, but not before much of the temporary building had
been destroyed, and the greater part of the fireworks perished in the
flames, and several fatal and serious accidents further marred the
entertainment.
Near the top of the Park was a reservoir or “fine piece of water”
belonging to the Chelsea Waterworks, and the path round it was included
in the fashionable promenade by those who paraded in the Queen’s Walk
after dinner. Lower down, where there is still a depression, was a
little pond, originally part of the Tyburn stream. The “green stagnant
pool” was abused by a writer in 1731, who regretted that trees had just
been planted near it, which probably meant that the offensive pool
would “not soon be removed.” The prophecy was correct, for it was more
than a hundred years later before this was filled up. The Park wall
ran alo |
137 | ng Piccadilly, and here and there, as was often the case in the
eighteenth century, there were gaps with iron rails, through which
glimpses of the Park could be obtained. Some persons had private keys
to the gates leading into the Park from Piccadilly. Daring robberies
were by no means uncommon, and thieves, having done mischief in the
streets near Piccadilly on more than one occasion, were found to be
provided with keys to the gates, through which they could make their
escape into the Park and elude their pursuers. The Ranger’s Lodge stood
on the northern side, and was rebuilt and done up in 1773. It was made
so attractive that there was great competition, when it was completed,
to be Deputy-ranger and live there. The two stags which now stand
on Albert Gate, Hyde Park, once adorned the gates of this Ranger’s
Lodge. It is described in 1792 as “a very neat lodge surrounded by
a shrubbery, which renders it enchantingly rural.” When George III.
bought Buckingham House, then an old red-br |
138 | ick mansion, he took away
the wall which separated the Green Park from St. James’s, and put a
railing instead. In this wall was another lodge, and a few trees near
it, known as the Wilderness.
The aspect of the Mall has greatly changed since the days when its
fashion was at its height. Then the gardens of St. James’s Palace ran
the whole length of the north side from the Palace towards Whitehall.
Stephen Switzer, writing in 1715, extols the beauty of the garden,
which by his time was cut up and partly built on. “The Royal Garden in
St. James’s Park, part of which is now in the possession of the Right
Honourable Lord Carlton, and the upper part belonging to Marlborough
House, was of that King’s [Charles II.] planting, which were in the
remembrance of most people the finest Lines of Dwarfs perhaps in the
Universe. Mr. London” ... presumed “before Monsieur de la Quintinye,
the famous French gardener, ... to challenge all France with the like,
and if France, why not the whole World?”
Car |
139 | lton House, a red-brick building, with the stone portico now in
front of the National Gallery, was built in 1709 on part of this
garden. Some twenty years later, before it was purchased by Frederick,
Prince of Wales, the grounds belonging to the house were laid out by
Kent. Until Carlton House was pulled down in 1827, therefore, the Mall
was bounded on the north by choice gardens. Between the Mall and the
walls of these gardens ran the “Green Walk,” or “Duke Humphrey’s Walk,”
as it was also often called. The origin of the latter name is to be
traced to old St. Paul’s. The monument to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester,
in the centre aisle of old St. Paul’s Cathedral was where “poore
idlers” and “careless mal-contents” congregated--
“Poets of Paules, those of Duke Humfrye’s messe
That feed on nought but graves and emptinesse.”
When Duke Humphrey’s Walk in St. Paul’s was burnt the name became
attached to the walk in St. James’s Park, where idlers also sauntered.
Some writers attri |
140 | bute the transference of the name to the fact that
the arched walk under the trees was like the cathedral aisle. Anyhow
the name clung to this walk in the Park from 1666 and during the
eighteenth century.
When Carlton House became the centre of attraction the Park itself was
in a very neglected state. The canal was turbid, the grass long, and
the seats unpainted. How long it would have remained in this condition
is uncertain had not a new impulse of gardening possessed the whole
nation, and once more it was resolved to alter the entire Park.
The rage for landscape gardening was at its height. Capability Brown
had done his work of destruction, and set the fashion of “copying
nature,” and his successors were following on his lines, but going
much further even than Brown. The sight of a straight canal had become
intolerable. The Serpentine was designed when the idea that it might be
possible to make the banks of artificial sheets of water in anything
but a perfectly straight line was ju |
141 | st dawning, but the canal in St.
James’s Park was transformed when half the stiff ponds and canals in
the kingdom had been twisted and turned into lakes or meres. Brown had
had a hand in the alterations at the time Rosamund’s Pond was removed,
but it was Eyton who planned and executed the work fifty years later.
It was begun in 1827, and a contemporary writer praises the result as
“the best obliteration of avenues” that has been effected. Although he
owns it involved “a tremendous destruction of fine elms,” he is lost
in admiration of the “astounding ingenuity” which “converted a Dutch
canal into a fine flowing river, with incurvated banks, terminated
at one end by a planted island and at the other by a peninsula.” A
permanent bridge was first made across the water about this time.
Previously a temporary one had been made when the Allied Sovereigns
visited London in 1814--a kind of Chinese design by Nash, surmounted
by a pagoda of seven storeys. It was this flimsy edifice which made
Ca |
142 | nova say the thing that struck him most in England was that Waterloo
Bridge was the work of a private company, while this bridge was put up
by the Government. It was on the canal in St. James’s Park that skates
of a modern type first appeared in London. Bone ones were in use much
earlier on Moorfields. Both Evelyn and Pepys saw the new pattern first
in the Park in 1662. Two years later Pepys notes going to the canal
with the Duke of York, “where, though the ice was broken and dangerous,
yet he would go slide upon his scates, which I did not like, but he
slides very well.” Just before the alterations began, and the complete
change of the canal was taken in hand, the Park was lighted with gas
lamps, an innovation which caused much excitement. At the same time
orders were issued to shut the gates by ten every evening. A wit on
this occasion wrote the following lines, which were found stuck up on a
tree:--
“The trees in the Park
Are illumined with gas,
But after it’s da |
143 | rk
No creatures can pass.
“Ye sensible wights
Who govern our fates,
Extinguish your lights
Or open your gates.”
The same lamps inspired another poet, who wrote, just before the
destruction of the avenues took place:--
“Hail, Royal Park! what various charms are thine;
Thy patent lamps pale Cynthia’s rays outshine,
Thy limes and elms with grace majestic grow
All in a row.”
Yet once more has St. James’s Park been subjected to renovation. The
work, which is a memorial to our late beloved Queen Victoria, is not
yet completed, so its description must be imperfect. The design aims at
drawing together the several quarters of the Park towards Buckingham
Palace and a central group of statuary. The Mall is now the scene of
ceaseless traffic, and the sauntering pedestrian is a thing of the
past. A wide road runs at right angles across the Green Park, and so
once again more closely associates the Upper with the Lower St. James’s
|
144 | Park. Probably the greatest praise of the alterations would be to say
that Le Nôtre would have approved them. They seem to complete the
design in a fitting manner, but they banish once and for all time, the
semi-rural character which for so many centuries clung to the Park.
The design includes a series of formal parterres which are filled with
bedding-out plants raised in Hyde Park. In the summer of 1906 they were
planted with scarlet geraniums with an edging of grasses and foliage
and a few golden privets, and on hot July days there were many people
ready to pronounce the arrangement as extremely bad taste. It seemed
a reversion to the days when a startling mass of colour was the only
effect aimed at. As they appeared all through the mild October days,
when a soft foggy light enveloped the world, and the trees looked
dark and dreary, with their leaves, devoid of autumn tints, still
struggling to hold on, the vivid colouring of the beds gave a very
different impression. The charm of th |
145 | e warm red tone against the cold
blue mists must have given a sensation of pleasure to any one sensitive
to such contrasts.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF THE QUEEN VICTORIA MEMORIAL GARDENS, IN
FRONT OF BUCKINGHAM PALACE]
The Park in spring has nothing of the stiff, early Victorian gardening
left. Under the trees crocuses raise their dainty heads, as cheerily as
from out of Alpine snows, and the slopes of grass spangled with a “host
of golden daffodils” are a delight to all beholders.
The palmy days of St. James’s Park may have passed away--no longer
is the fate of nations and the happiness of lives decided under its
ancient elms--but those days have left their mark. Every path, every
tree, every green-sward, could tell its story. The Park is now more
beautiful than it ever was, even though fashion has deserted it. The
last changes are but one more link in the long historic chain. It
brings the Park of the Stuarts, the Mall of the Queen Anne’s age of
letters, down to our own great Quee |
146 | n and the days of Expansion and
Empire. A stroll under its shady trees and by its sparkling water must
be replete with suggestions to the moralist, with thoughts to the poet,
and with an inexpressible charm to the ordinary appreciative Londoner.
CHAPTER IV
REGENT’S PARK
_When Philomel begins to sing
The grass grows green and flowers spring;
Methinks it is a pleasant thing
To walk on Primrose Hill._
--ROXBURGH BALLADS, _c._ 1620.
Regent’s Park has had but a transitory day of fashion, and history has
not crowded it with associations like the other Royal Parks. It is the
largest and one of the most beautiful, yet there is something cold and
less attractive about it. In spring, with its wealth of thorn trees, it
has a delightfully rural appearance, and it possesses many charms on
close acquaintance. Its history as a Royal Park is as ancient as that
of Hyde Park or St. James’s, but it remained a distant country sporting
estate, an |
147 | d only assumed the form of a Park, in the modern sense of the
word, less than a hundred years ago.
In the dim distance of Domesday it formed part of the manor of
Tybourne. Later on the manor became Marylebone or Mary le Bourne, the
Church of St. Mary by the Burn, the brook in question being the Tyburn.
The manor in Domesday is described as part of the lands belonging to
the Abbey of Barking in Essex. In the thirteenth century it was held
by Robert de Vere, and passed by descent through his daughter to the
Earls of Arundel. Later on the manor was divided, and a fourth share
came to Henry V. as heir to the Earls of Derby. The greater part of the
manor was bought by Thomas Hobson, and his son, who was Lord Mayor in
1544, exchanged it with Henry VIII. for some church lands elsewhere.
So it became part of the royal hunting-ground, and the same enactment
concerning the preservation of game applied to Marylebone Park,
situated within the manor, as to Hyde Park. Queen Elizabeth leased part
of |
148 | the manor to a certain Edward Forset, and James I. sold him all the
manor except the part known as Marylebone Park, now Regent’s Park. It
was again sold by the grandson of Edward Forset to John Holles, Duke
of Newcastle, and passed to his daughter, who married Edward Harley,
Earl of Oxford, and through their daughter, who married the second
Earl of Portland, to the Bentinck family. The Park has always remained
Crown property, although it has frequently been let by the reigning
sovereign. Charles I. granted it to Sir G. Strode and J. Wandesford as
a payment of a debt of £2318 for arms and ammunition. It was sold by
Cromwell with all the other royal lands, but after the Restoration it
went back to its former holders till the debt was discharged, and after
that to various other tenants. It was on the expiration of a lease to
the Duke of Portland in 1811 that the laying out of the Park in its
present form commenced.
During the early period incidents connected with it are meagre. It is
fo |
149 | r the most part only in royal accounts that references to Marylebone
Park are found, and they are merely a bare statement of facts. But
that hunting-parties, with all the show and splendour attending them,
took place frequently, is certain. Among the Loseley MSS. occur, in
1554, instructions to Sir Thomas Cawarden, as “Master of the Tents
and Toiles,” to superintend the making of “certaine banquiting houses
of Bowes [= boughs] and other devices of pleasure.” One of these was
made in “Marybone Parke,” and a minute description is given. It was
40 feet long, and “wrought by tymber, brick, and lyme, with their
raunges and other necessary utensyles therto insident, and to the like
accustomed.” Also three “standinges” were made at the same time, “all
of tymber garnished with boughes and flowers, every [one] of them
conteynenge in length 10 foote and in bredth 8 foote, which houses and
standings were so edified, repaired, garnished, decked, and fynyshed
against the Marshall Saint Andrewes com |
150 | ynge thethere by speciale and
straight comandement, as well of the late King as his counsell to
Sir Tho^{s.} Cawarden, Knt. M^{r.} of the said Office of Revels; and
Lawrence Bradshaw, Surveior of the King’s works, exhibited for the
same w^{t.} earnest charge done, wrought and attended between the 27th
of June and the 2 of August in the said year” [4th of Edward VI.].
Employed on the above works for 22 days at all hours, a space to eat
and drink excepted, “Carpenters, bricklayers, 1d. the hour; labourers,
½d. p. hour; plasterers, 11d. a day; painters, 7d. and 6d. a day.”
“Charges for cutting boughs in the wood at Hyde Park for trimming the
banquetting house, gathering rushes, flags, and ivy; painters, taylors
for sewing roof, etc., basket makers working upon windows, total cost,
£169, 7s. 8d.” Only about half of this total was due to the work in
Marylebone, as a similar pavilion, and three other “standings,” were
made in Hyde Park at the same time.
Hall, the chronicler of Henry VIII.’s |
151 | time, inveighs against the
fashion of making these sumptuous banqueting houses. They were not only
a regal amusement, but the citizens built in their suburban gardens
“many faire Summer houses ... some of them like Mid-summer Pageants,
with Towers, Turrets, and Chimney tops, not so much for use or profit,
as for shew and pleasure, and bewraying the vanity of men’s mindes,
much unlike to the disposition of the ancient Citizens, who delighted
in building of Hospitals and Almes-houses for the poore.” There stood
in Marylebone parish a banqueting house where the Lord Mayor and
aldermen dined when they inspected the conduits of the Tybourne. On
one occasion they hunted a hare before dinner, and after, “they went
to hunt the fox. There was a great cry for a mile, and at length the
hounds killed him at the end of St. Giles.” During this run the hunt
must have skirted the royal preserves of Marylebone. In Elizabeth’s
time a hunting-party on 3rd February 1600 is recorded, in which the
“Ambassa |
152 | dor from the Emperor of Russia and the other Muscovites rode
through the City of London to Marylebone Park, and there hunted at
their pleasure, and shortly after returned homeward.”
Marylebone was a retired spot for duels, and many took place there
down to the time when duelling ceased. The quarrel which led to one
in Elizabeth’s reign is most typical of that age. Sir Charles Blount,
afterwards Earl of Devonshire, handsome and dashing, distinguished
himself in the lists, and won the approbation of Queen Elizabeth.
She presented him with a chessman in gold, which he fastened on his
arm with a crimson ribbon. This aroused the jealousy of Essex, who
said with scorn, “Now I perceive that every fool must have a favour.”
Whereupon Blount challenged him. They met in Marylebone Park, and Essex
was disarmed and wounded in the thigh.
In Mary’s time the Park witnessed a warlike scene in connection with
one of the organised attempts to dethrone the Queen. The indictment of
Sir Nicholas Throgmort |
153 | on for high treason, because he, with Sir Thomas
Wyatt and others, “conspired to depose and destroy the Queen,” states
that “the said Sir Nicholas plotted to take and hold the Tower, levy
war in Kent, Devonshire, etc., and, with Sir Henry Isley and others, on
26 January 1554, rose with 2000 men, marched from Kent to Southwark,
and by Brentford and Marylebone Park to London, the Queen being then
at Westminster, but were overthrown by her army.” The incidents which
centre round this Park are few. Even in the accounts of all the royal
lands it does not often occur. In 1607 one item in the Domestic State
Papers, a list of nine parks, from each of which four bucks were to
be taken, includes Hyde Park, but Marylebone is not mentioned, and in
orders to the keepers it does not often occur.
During the Commonwealth it comes more into notice, from the sad fact
that it was then sold and disparked, and the trees cut down. When
Cromwell sold it to “John Spencer of London, gent.,” the proceeds were
|
154 | settled on Col. Thomas Harrison’s regiment of dragoons for their pay.
The existing Ranger, John Carey, was turned out, and Sir John Ipsley
put in his place. The price given for the Park was £13,215, 6s. 8d.,
which included £130 for deer and £1774 for timber, exclusive of 2976
trees which were marked for the Royal Navy. Cromwell probably knew
the Park and its advantages well, as some years before, when he was a
boy, his uncle had had permission to hunt in any of the royal forests.
The warrant is dated 15th June 1604, “to the lieutenants, wardens,
and keepers of the forests, chases, and parks, to permit Sir Oliver
Cromwell, Knt., Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, to hunt where he shall
think fit.” The work of hewing the timber began at once. On October
19, 1649, the Navy Commissioner was instructed to “repair the crane
at Whitehall for boating timber, which is to go from Marylebone Park
to the yards to build frigates.” Again, Sir Henry Mildmay was ordered
to “confer with Mr. Carter, Survey |
155 | or of Works, for the timber in
Marylebone Park to be brought through Scotland Yard, to be boated there
for use of the navy.” Cromwell converted the Park to other uses, as in
June the same year orders were given to put to grass in Marylebone Park
all the artillery horses “bought by Captain Tomlins for Ireland till
Monday week.” That a number were turned out there for a time is clear
from the further warrant, dated July 12, to “permit William Yarvell,
Carriage Master, to put all the horses provided for Ireland, which
cannot be accommodated in Marylebone Park, into Hyde Park to graze.” No
doubt they found excellent pasture, in spite of the game. Still, the
deer must have been fairly numerous, considering the price paid for
those left when the Park was sold. One hundred of the “best deer” were
first ordered to be removed from there to St. James’s Park, “Colonel
Pride to see to the business.”
At the Restoration the former tenants were reinstated until the debt
was discharged, and John Care |
156 | y was compensated for his loss of the
rangership; but the Park was never re-stocked with deer. It is supposed
that the Queens, Mary and Elizabeth, sometimes resided at the Manor
House belonging to the Manor, which stood at the south side of what
is now Marylebone Road, and was built by Henry VIII. A drawing of the
house in 1700 exists, and it is not the same as Oxford House, with
which it has sometimes been confused, belonging to Lord Oxford, which
contained the celebrated Harleian collection of MSS. Henry VIII.’s
Manor House was pulled down in 1790. It is not until after that date
that anything further has to be recorded of the Park; until then
it remained let out as farms. In 1793 Mr. White, architect to the
Duke of Portland, the tenant of the Park from the Crown, approached
Mr. Fordyce, the Surveyor-General, with his ideas and plans for the
improvement of the whole of the area. During the previous fifty years
the streets and squares between Oxford Street and Marylebone had
been grow |
157 | ing up. Foley House, a large building, stood on the site of
the present Langham Hotel; and in the lease by which the land was
held from the Duke of Portland, it was covenanted that no buildings
should obstruct the view of Marylebone Park from this house. When,
in 1772, the Brothers Adam designed Portland Place, they made it the
entire width of Foley House, so that the agreement was fulfilled to
the letter. In those days the street ended where No. 8 Portland Place
now stands; then came the railings which enclosed Marylebone Fields,
with its buttercup meadows and country lanes and hedgerows. White’s
idea commended itself to Fordyce, and he approached the Treasury on
the subject. The total area, according to the survey in 1794, was 543
ac. 17 p. This was disposed chiefly between three farms of about 288,
133, and 117 acres respectively. From the first all the plans embraced
extensive buildings, as well as a proportion of park. Inspired by
Fordyce, the Treasury offered a prize, not exceedi |
158 | ng £1000, for the
best design, and several were submitted. Fordyce aimed at something
between the most extreme votaries of the landscape school and the
older, debased, formal styles--a compromise which Loudon was at that
time trying to bring into vogue. A “union of the ancient and modern
styles of planting,” he called it, which led by stages to the Italian
parterres and brilliant bedding out of the early Victorian gardens.
Fordyce did not live to see any plan put into execution. At his
death the Surveyor-General of Land Revenues and the Commissioners
of Woods and Forests were amalgamated, and Leverton and Chawner,
architects to the former, and Nash, architect to the latter, submitted
designs--Nash’s being eventually accepted. The other design cut up the
whole ground into ornamental villas with pleasure grounds, with a sort
of village green or central square, with a church in the middle, and a
site for a market and barracks. White’s views were more like Nash’s in
some respects, as he ha |
159 | d artificial water and a drive round the Park.
The lease held by the Duke of Portland fell in, in 1811, and soon after
the work of carrying out Nash’s design was begun by James Morgan. The
Regent’s Park Canal was included in the same plan, and begun in 1812
and finished in 1820. Its length from Paddington to Limehouse is 8¾
miles, and the total fall 84 feet.
[Illustration: AUTUMN IN REGENT’S PARK]
Although the planting and levelling began in 1812, the buildings rose
up slowly. Of the villas in the Park only two were built in 1820, the
rent demanded for the ground being extremely high. But two or three
years later the whole thing was more or less as it is now, so far as
the general outline and buildings are concerned. The cost by May 1826
was £1,533,582, and the estimated probable revenue £36,330. The Prince
Regent took the greatest interest in the proceedings, and Nash’s design
included a site for a palace for him, though even contemporary writers
condemned the suggestion, as the sit |
160 | uation was damp--“the soil was
clay, ... and the view bad.” It was only natural that the Park should
henceforth become the Regent’s, and not Marylebone Park, and the “new
street” to connect it with Carlton House be called Regent Street.
It is difficult to judge Regent’s Park with an unprejudiced eye.
The exaggerated praise it called forth when just completed is only
equalled by the unmeasured censure of the next generation. Of the
houses which surround it the following are two descriptions. The first,
in 1855, calls them “highly-embellished terraces of houses, in which
the Doric and Ionic, the Corinthian, and even the Tuscan orders have
been employed with ornate effect, aided by architectural sculpture.”
Fifty years later the same houses are summed up with very different
epithets: “Most of the ugly terraces which surround it exhibit all
the worst follies of the Grecian architectural mania which disgraced
the beginning of this century”! It may not be a style which commends
itself to mo |
161 | dern taste, but one thing is certain, that having embarked
on classical architecture it was best to stick to it and complete
the whole. It is as much a bit of history, and as typical of the
age, as Elizabethan or Tudor architecture is of theirs, and as such
it is best to treat Regent’s Park as an interesting example of early
nineteenth-century taste.
This ground was country when building was begun, and when one thinks
of the streets and crescents that grow up when the country touches
the town, and the incongruous ugliness of most of them, there is much
to be said for the substantial uniformity of Regent’s Park. What can
be argued from the surroundings of the other parks? Would Regent’s
Park have been improved by the erection of rows of houses of the
Queen Anne’s Mansion type? One cannot help wondering what Stowe would
have thought of such a production, when he instances “a remarkable
punishment of Pride in high buildings,” how a man who built himself
a tower in Lime Street, to overloo |
162 | k his neighbours, was very soon
“tormented with gouts in his joynts, of his hands and legs”--that he
could go no “further than he was led, much lesse was he able to climbe”
his tower! What retribution would he have thought sufficiently severe
for the perpetrators of Park Row Buildings, New York, with their
thirty-two storeys?
Anyhow, Regent’s Park was welcomed by the generation who watched it
grow. A writer in 1823 says: “When first we saw that Marylebone Fields
were enclosed, and that the hedgerow walks which twined through them
were gradually being obliterated and the whole district artificially
laid out, ... we underwent a painful feeling or two.... A few years,
however, have elapsed, and we are not only reconciled to the change
alluded to, but rejoice in it. A noble Park is rapidly rising up, and
a vast space, close to the metropolis, not only preserved from the
encroachment of mean buildings, but laid out with groves, lakes, and
villas, ... while through the place there is a wind |
163 | ing road, which
commands at every turn some fresh feature of an extensive country
prospect.” This enthusiast winds up by saying, “We do not envy the
apathy of the Englishman who can walk through these splendid piles
without feeling his heart swell with national pride.” We may smile at
such high-sounding language, but, after all, it was an innocent form
for national pride to take.
The special feature which the plan of the Park embraced, was the
villas, standing in their own pleasure grounds. These were all built in
the same Grecian style--most of them designed by Decimus Burton, who
was also the architect of Cornwall Terrace, the only one not by Nash.
St. Dunstan’s Villa, now belonging to Lord Aldenham, and containing
his precious library, was his work. It was built by the Marquis of
Hertford, and the name is taken from the two giant wooden figures of
Gog and Magog, which formerly stood by St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleet
Street. They had been placed there in 1671, and struck the hours on |
164 | a
large clock (the work of Thomas Harrys), one of the curiosities of the
City. It was with reference to them that Cowper’s lines on a feeble,
uninspired poet were written:--
“When Labour and when Dullness, club in hand,
Like the two figures of St. Dunstan’s stand,
Beating alternately, in measured time,
The clock-work tintinabulum of rhyme,
Exact and regular the sounds will be,
But such mere quarter strokes are not for me.”
Lord Hertford used to be taken to see them as a child, and had a
child’s longing to possess the monsters. Unlike most childish dreams,
he was able, when the church was rebuilt in 1832, to realise it and
to purchase the figures, and remove them to strike the hours in his
new villa. St. John’s Lodge is another of these detached villas, with
a fascinating garden, built by Burton, for Sir Francis Henry Goldsmid;
and also in the inner circle there is South Villa, with an observatory,
erected in 1837 by Mr. George Bishop, from which va |
165 | rious stars and
asteroids were discovered by Dawes and Hinde.
The most interesting of the houses in the park is St. Katharine’s
Lodge, not from any special beauty of its own, but from the sad
association of its history. On the east of the road which encircles
the Park is St. Katharine’s Hospital, built by A. Poynter, a pupil of
Nash, in 1827, when the “act of barbarism” of removing the Hospital
from the East End was committed. The home of the Hospital, with its
church and almshouses, was close to the Tower, and after a peaceful
existence of nearly seven hundred years it was completely swept away to
make room for more docks. There is nothing to redeem the crude look of
uselessness that the new buildings in Regent’s Park present. They seem
out of place, and as if stranded there by accident. Even thirty years
after their removal an official report on the revenues of the hospital
shows some signs of repentance. The writers sum up the increased
income, then about £11,000 a year, and wonder |
166 | if in this far-away spot
it is being put to the best uses; and the report even goes so far as to
suggest its restoration to the populous East End, where the recipients
of the charity would spend their lives in the cure of souls, or as
nurses and mission-women among the poor. Since then, an improvement has
set in as it has become the Central House for Nurses for the Poor,
known as the Jubilee Nurses, as the funds to provide them were raised
by the women of England as a Jubilee Gift to Queen Victoria.
The Hospital of St. Katharine was founded by Queen Matilda, “wife to
King Stephen, by licence of the Prior and Convent of the Holy Trinity
in London, on whose ground she founded it. Elianor the Queene, wife
to King Edward the First, a second Foundresse, appointed to be there,
one Master, three Brethren Chaplaines and three Sisters, ten poore
women, and six poore clerkes. She gave to them the Manor of Clarton in
Wiltshire and Upchurch in Kent, etc. Queene Philip, wife to King Edward
the Th |
167 | ird, 1351, founded a Chauntry there, and gave to that Hospital
tenne pound land by yeere; it was of late time [1598] called a free
Chappell, a Colledge and an Hospital for poore sisters. The Quire which
(of late yeares) was not much inferior to that of Pauls, was dissolved
by Doctor Wilson, a late Master there.” Such is Stowe’s account of the
foundation.
Even in those days the district was becoming crowded, “pestered with
small Tenements,” chiefly owing to the influx from Calais, Hammes, and
Guisnes when those places were lost in Mary’s reign. Many, “wanting
Habitation,” were allowed a “Place belonging to St. Katharine’s.”
The curious name, “Hangman’s Gains,” in that locality was said to be
derived from a corruption of two of the places the refugees came from.
In Henry VIII.’s time a Guild or Fraternity was “founded in the Church
of this Hospital of St. Katharine to the Honour of St. Barbara.”
Katharine of Aragon and Henry VIII. and Cardinal Wolsey belonged to
it, and many other “hon |
168 | ourable persons.” The object was to secure a
home for any “Brother or Sister who fell into Decay of worldly Goods
as by Sekenes or Hurt by the Warrys, or upon Land or See, or by any
other means.” Those belonging to the Fraternity who had paid the full
sum due, namely 10s. 4d., in “money, plate, or any other honest stufe,”
were entitled to fourteen pence a week, house-room and bedding, “and a
woman to wash his clothes and to dresse his mete; and so to continue
Yere by Yere and Weke by Weke durynge his Lyfe,” like a modern benefit
society. The fine old church contained many monuments, some of which
were transferred to the new church when the removal took place. Among
them the effigy of John Holland, Duke of Exeter, and one of his wives,
dating from 1447, reposes under a fine canopy. The stalls and pulpit of
the sixteenth century were also brought to the new building. Thus shorn
of all its associations and all its beauty, the foundation remains,
like a flower ruthlessly transplanted too l |
169 | ate to take root and regain
its former charm.
The Master’s house makes a most delightful residence, and has always
been let. Mr. Marley, the present tenant, who has filled the house
with works of art, has made a very charming garden also, more like an
Italian than an English villa garden, as the view reproduced in this
volume testifies.
Three Societies occupy pieces of ground within the Park. The most
ancient and least well known is the Toxophilite. Archery has for many
hundred years been practised by the citizens of London. The ground
chosen for shooting was chiefly near Islington, Hoxton, and Shoreditch.
To encourage the use of bows and arrows Henry VIII. ordered Sir
Christopher Morris, Master of Ordnance, to form the “Fraternitye or
Guylde of Saint George” about 1537, and these archers used to shoot
in Spital Fields. About the time of the Spanish Armada the Honourable
Artillery Company was formed, which possessed a company of archers,
and for over two hundred years archery was kep |
170 | t alive by this corps,
and, following them, by the Finsbury Archers. Just at the time when the
corps was abolished Sir Ashton Lever formed the Toxophilite Society
in 1781, and the archers of the Honourable Artillery Company became
merged in the new Society, which then shot on Blackheath. George IV.
belonged to it, and it henceforth became the Royal Toxophilite Society,
and settled on ground given to it in Regent’s Park in 1834, where it
remains, as the lineal descendant of the old historic Guild of Archers.
It possesses several interesting relics; a shield given by Queen Mary,
and silver cups of the Georgian period, besides a valuable collection
of bows and arrows. The hall where the members meet, built when the
Society moved to Regent’s Park, and added to since, has beneath it
some curious cellars with underground passages branching off from
them, which it has been suggested may have been part of the outhouses
belonging to the Royal Manor House, which stood not far off, on ground
now |
171 | outside the Park. The large iron hooks that were until recently
in the cellar walls, seemed suggestive of venison from the Park for
the royal table. The ground of the Society is suitably laid out, with
a fine sunk lawn for the archery practice. By an arrangement with the
Toxophilite Society, “the Skating Club” have their own pavilion, and
the lawn is flooded during the winter for their use. There is so much
talk about the change of the climate of England, and of the so-called
old-fashioned winters, that the record kept by this Skating Club since
its foundation in 1830 of the number of skating days in each winter is
instructive. Taking the periods of ten years during the first decade,
1830–40, there was an average of 10.2 skating days per winter. In
1833–34 there were none, in 1837–38 thirty-seven days. Between 1850–60
the average was only 8.5, while the last ten years of the century it
was 16.8. It is difficult to see how any argument could be deduced from
such figures in favour of the |
172 | excess of cold in the good old days! When
the freezing of the Thames is quoted to prove the case, people forget
that the Thames has completely changed. The narrow piers of old London
Bridge no longer get stopped with ice-floes, and the current is much
more rapid now that the whole length is properly embanked. In the days
when coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple Stairs as in 1684, or
when people dwelt on the Thames in tents for weeks in 1740, all the low
land was flooded and the stream wider and more sluggish. The believers
in the hard winters generally maintain the springs were warmer than
now, May Day more like what poets pictured, even allowing the eleven
days later for our equivalent. But in 1614 there was snow a foot deep
in April, and those who went in search of flowers on May Day only got
snowflakes. In 1698, on May 8th, there was a deep fall of snow all over
England, and many other instances might be quoted. So it seems, though
people may grumble now, their ancestors w |
173 | ere no better off.
In the centre of the ground is the Royal Botanical Society of London,
founded in 1839. At one time the Society was greatly in fashion, and
the membership was eagerly sought after. No doubt such will be the
case again, although for some reason the immense advance in gardening
during the last ten years has not met with the response looked for
from this Society, and hence a certain decrease instead of increase in
popularity--a phase which can but be transitory. The botanical portions
of the grounds illustrative of the natural orders were arranged by
James de Carle Sowerby, son of the author of the well-known “English
Botany,” assisted by Dr. Frederick Farre and others, and the ornamental
part of the garden, with the lake, by Marnoch. The designs were
severely criticised by Loudon in the first instance, who prophesied
failure to the garden, but was well satisfied when the modified plans
were announced. Some of the earliest flower shows in the modern sense
were held ther |
174 | e. And this Society was the pioneer in exhibitions of
spring flowers. The first was held in 1862, and was quite a novel
departure, although summer and autumn floral shows had been instituted
for more than thirty years. These exhibitions and fêtes became very
fashionable, and people flocked to them, and numbers joined the
Society. It is always difficult to combine two objects, and this is the
problem the Botanical Society now has to face. It is almost impossible
to keep up the Botanical side and at the same time make a bid for
popular public support by turning the grounds partly into a Tea Garden.
Now that gardening is more the fashion than it has ever been, it is sad
to see this ancient Society taking a back place instead of leading.
It is actual horticulture that now engrosses people, the practical
cultivation of new and rare plants, the raising and hybridising of
florists’ varieties. The time for merely well-kept lawns and artificial
water and a few masses of bright flowers, which wa |
175 | s all the public
asked for in the Sixties, has gone by. A thirst for new flowers, for
strange combinations of colours, for revivals of long-forgotten plants
and curious shrubs, has now taken possession of the large circle of
people who profess to be gardeners. Apart from the question whether the
present fashion has taken the best direction for the advancement of
botany and horticulture, it is evident no society can prosper unless it
directs its attention to suit the popular fancy. No doubt this worthy
Society will realise this, and emerge triumphant from its present
embarrassments.
The third and best known of the societies is the Zoological one. What
London child has not spent moments of supreme joy mingled with awe on
the back of the forbearing elephant? And there are few grown persons
who do not share with them the delight of an hour’s stroll through the
“Zoo.” More than ever, with the improved aviaries and delightful seal
ponds, is the Zoo attractive. It was the first of the three |
176 | Societies
to settle in the Park, having been there since 1826. Some of the
original buildings were designed by Decimus Burton, who, next to Nash,
is the architect most associated with the Park. The Society was the
idea of Sir Thomas Raffles, who became the first President in 1825.
In three years there were over 12,000 members, and the gardens were
thronged by 30,000 visitors. A pass signed by a member was necessary
for the admission of every party of people, besides the payment of a
shilling each. An abuse of this soon crept in, and people waited at the
gates to attach themselves to the parties entering, and well-dressed
young ladies begged the kindness of members who were seen approaching
the gates. Now only Sunday admittance is dependent on the members. A
Guide to Regent’s Park in 1829 gives engravings of many of the animals,
and shows the summer quarters of the monkeys--most quaint arrangements,
like a pigeon cot on a pole, to which the monkey with chain and ring
was attached, to ra |
177 | ce up and down at will.
[Illustration: STONE VASE IN REGENT’S PARK]
The only alterations of importance after the completion of the Park
were the making of the flower garden, and the filling up of the
artificial water to a uniform depth of 4 feet, after a terrible
accident had occurred in 1867, when the ice broke and forty skaters
lost their lives. The flower-beds are now one of the most attractive
features in the Park, and were originally designed by Nesfield in 1863.
The centre walk continues the line of the “Broad Walk” avenue at its
southern end. In the middle is a fine stone vase supported by griffins,
and other stone ornaments in keeping with the formal style.
The frame-ground in Regent’s Park has to be a spacious one, to produce
all that is required in the way of spring and summer plants. The fogs
are the greatest enemies of the London gardener, and more especially
on the heavier soil of Regent’s Park. Not even the most hardy of the
bedding-out plants will survive the winter, |
178 | unless in frames. Even
wall-flowers and forget-me-nots will perish with a single bad night of
fog, unless under glass. Although, on the other hand, it is surprising
how some species apparently unsuited to withstand the climate will
survive. Among the rock plants growing in a private rock-garden within
the Park _Azalia procumbens_, that precarious Alpine, is perfectly at
home. Clumps of _Cypripedium spectabele_ come up and flower year after
year, and _Arnebia echioides_, the prophet flower, by no means easy to
grow, seems quite established. But to return to the frame-ground, from
whence all the bedding plants emanate. Violas are a special feature
in the Park, and one which is much to be commended, as their season
of beauty is so protracted. They are all struck in frames, one row of
fifty-three lights being devoted to them, in which 23,750 cuttings are
put annually. The green-houses are used for storing plants not only for
the decoration of the Park but for some fourteen other places out |
179 | side.
The Tower, the Law Courts, Mint, Audit Office, the Mercantile Marine
in Poplar, are all supplied from Regent’s Park. The Tate Gallery and
Hertford House have to be catered for also. Whether the visitors to the
Wallace Collection even notice the plants it is impossible to say; they
might miss their absence. But the gardeners have to give these few pots
considerable care, as they will only stand for a very short time
inside the building, and after three weeks’ visit return to hospital.
[Illustration: SPRING IN REGENT’S PARK]
Of late years a considerable alteration has been made in the
arrangement of the beds in the flower-garden of the Park, chiefly with
a view to reducing the bedding and yet obtaining a better effect. Long
herbaceous borders have been substituted for one of the rows of formal
beds, requiring a constant succession of plants. This has necessitated
the removal of some of the flowers shown in the view of this garden
taken in the spring. The loss of these is compensa |
180 | ted by the new
arrangement of beds, separated from the Park by a hedge and flowering
shrubs.
Very few of the old trees remain in Regent’s Park; what became
of them between the time when only a portion were marked for the
navy by Cromwell, and the present day, there is no record as yet
forthcoming. Two elms near the flower-garden are, however, remarkably
fine specimens, as the branches feather on to the ground all round. A
_Paulownia tomentosa_ is well worthy of notice. It must have been one
of the earliest to be planted in this country, and is a large spreading
tree. It stands on what is known as the Mound, near Chester Gate.
Nineteen years ago it flowered, and in the unusually warm autumn of
1906 it was covered with buds of blossom, all ready to expand, when,
alas! the long-delayed frost arrived in October, just too soon for them
to come to perfection. Not far from it is a large tree of _Cotoneaster
frigida_, which has masses of red berries every year.
The railings of Regent’s Park |
181 | have always been of timber, but it
is now threatened to alter this survival of the days when it first
changed from Marylebone Farm. The present timber fence has stood for
forty years, so even from an economical point of view iron, which
requires painting, could not be recommended. It is to be hoped the old
traditional style of fence of this delightful Park may be continued.
To the north of Regent’s Park, and only divided from it by a road,
lies Primrose Hill. This curious conical hill, 216 feet high, so well
known as an open space enjoyed by the public, formerly belonged to Eton
College, but became Crown property about the middle of last century,
and is now under the Office of Works, who keep it in order, and have
done all the planting which has of late years improved this otherwise
bare eminence. Some of the guide-books to London refer to the lines
of Mother Shipton’s prophecy that Primrose Hill “must one day be the
centre of London.” The passage this is supposed to be based on, is t |
182 | hat
which used to be said to foretell railways, and now people see in it a
foreshadowing of motor cars. At one time also the marriage reference
which is in the same poem was applied to Queen Victoria. The lines are
these--
“Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe:
Primrose Hill in London shall be,
And in its centre a Bishop’s see.
* * * * *
The British Olive next shall twine,
In marriage with the German Vine.”
The early editions of the prophecy contain none of these lines except
the two last, which are quoted in the 1687 edition, and are there
interpreted to refer to the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of James
I., and the Elector Palatine. The Primrose Hill lines first made their
appearance in 1877! So, although now quite surrounded by houses, and
well within the County of London, that this would be so in time to
come, was not foretold three hundred years ago.
The delightfully |
183 | rural name dates from the time of Queen Elizabeth, and
is said to be derived from the number of primroses which grew there.
The earlier name was Barrow Hill, from supposed ancient burials. After
the mysterious murder of Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey in October 1678, his
body was found in a ditch at the foot of the hill. At one time the
superstitious thought his ghost haunted the place, and a contemporary
medal has this inscription--
“Godfrey walks up hill after he was dead;
[St.] Denis walks down hill carrying his head.”
The fresh air and pleasant view from the top of the hill, and the
cheery sounds of games, have long ago dispelled all these gloomy
memories.
CHAPTER V
GREENWICH PARK
_Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men,
Where throngs of knights and barons bold
In weeds of peace high triumphs hold,
With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence, and judge the prize
Of wit, or arms, while both contend
|
184 | To win her grace, whom all commend._
--MILTON.
It would not occur to most people to reckon Greenwich among the
London Parks. But it is well within the bounds of the County of
London, and now so easy of access that it should have no difficulty in
substantiating its claim to be one of the most beautiful among them.
Both for natural features and historic interest it is one of the most
fascinating.
Its Spanish chestnuts are among the distinguishing characteristics,
and although smoke is slowly telling on them, numbers of these sturdy
timber trees are still in their prime, and it would be hard to find a
more splendid collection in any part of the country. One of the giants
is 20 feet in girth at 3 feet from the ground, and contains 200 feet of
timber.
Those who are the ready champions of the rights of the people to the
common lands, and who justly inveigh against all encroachments, must
feel bound to admit that, in the case of Greenwich Park, wh |
185 | at they
would call pilfering in other instances is thoroughly justified. The
land which forms the Park was part of Blackheath until Henry VI., in
the fifteenth year of his reign, gave his uncle Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester, licence to enclose 200 acres of the wood and heath “to make
a park in Greenwich.”
The modern history of Greenwich Park may be said to begin in Duke
Humphrey’s time, but it was a favourite resort long before that.
Situated on the high ground above the marshy banks of the river, and
near the Watling Street between London and Dover, Greenwich was found
suitable for country residence in Roman times. On one of the hills in
the Park, with a commanding view over the river, the remains of a Roman
villa have been excavated. Over 300 coins were found, dating from 35
B.C. to A.D. 423. Bronzes, pottery, a tesselated pavement, and the
remains of painted plaster were discovered, showing that it must have
been a villa of “taste and elegance,” and there were indications that
the f |
186 | inal destruction of this charming abode was by fire. A peep into
the past might reveal the last of its Roman occupants flying before the
barbarian Jute.
Doubtless in its prime there would be a garden near the villa--perhaps
a faint imitation of those Roman gardens like Pliny’s. There, “in front
of the portico,” was “a sort of terrace, embellished with various
figures and bounded with a box-hedge,” which descended “by an easy
slope, adorned with the representation of divers animals in box,” to a
soft lawn. There were shady trees and a splashing fountain, and sunny
walks to form “a very pleasing contrast,” where the air was “perfumed
with roses.” The slopes of Greenwich may have presented such a scene in
the days when Roman galleys rowed up the Thames.
In another part of the Park, Roman graves have been found, and other
burying-places of a later date suggest a very different picture from
that of Roman times. These tumuli are very numerous, and although over
twenty remain, a much greate |
187 | r number existed, and have been rifled from
time to time, or excavated, as in 1784, when some fifty were opened,
and braids of human hair, fragments of woollen cloth, and beads were
found. These graves suggest the occupation of these heights by the
Danes, who were encamped there for some three years about 1011. Wild
and lawless must have been the aspect then, and the incident that
stands out prominently is the martyrdom of St. Alphege, the Archbishop,
slain here by the Danes in 1012.
There was probably some royal residence at Greenwich from the time
of Edward I., but it was not until it came to Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester, that the Palace much used in Tudor times was built. This
building faced the Thames, and went by the name of “Placentia” or
“Plaisance,” and round it there was a garden. The royal licence, which
gave the Duke leave to enclose a portion of the heath, provided that
he might also build “Towers of stone and lime.” The tower stood on the
hill now crowned by the Observato |
188 | ry, and was pulled down when Charles
II. had the Observatory erected from designs by Wren in 1675. The plan
included a well 100 feet deep, at the bottom of which the astronomer
Flamsteed could lie and observe the heavens. All through the earlier
history of the Park this tower must have been a conspicuous object.
During Tudor times Greenwich was much lived in by the Sovereign,
and many a gay pageant enlivened the Park. Jousts and tournaments,
Christmas games and May Day frolics, were of yearly recurrence in the
early days of Henry VIII. The Court moved there regularly to “bring in
the May.” A picturesque account is given of one of these merry-makings
by the Venetian Ambassador and his Secretary. The Ambassador was
charmed with the King. “Not only,” he writes, is he “very expert in
arms and of great valour, and most excellent in personal endowment,
but is likewise so gifted and adorned with mental accomplishments of
every sort.” He joined in the May Day proceedings, which must indeed
hav |
189 | e presented a brilliant spectacle, with the oaks and hawthorn, and
all the wild beauty of Greenwich Park, as a background. Katharine
of Aragon, “most excellently attired and very richly, and with her
twenty-five damsels mounted on white palfreys, with housings of the
same fashion most beautifully embroidered in gold,” and followed by
“a number of footmen,” rode out into the wood, where “they found the
King with his guard, all clad in a livery of green with bowers [boughs]
in their hands, and about 100 noblemen on horseback, all gorgeously
arrayed.” “In this wood were certain bowers filled purposely with
singing birds, which carrolled most sweetly.” Music played, and a
banquet under the trees followed, then the procession with the King and
Queen together returned to the Palace. The crowds flocking round them
the Venetian estimated “to exceed ... 25,000 persons.”
Queen Mary was born at Greenwich, and there she was betrothed to
the Dauphin of France. She resided here much during her shor |
190 | t and
troublous reign; and perhaps her fondness for this Palace came from the
association of her early youth, when she was the centre of attraction.
Greenwich cannot always have been pleasant for the Princess Mary, for
here came Anne Boleyn. From Greenwich she was escorted in state to
London by the Lord Mayor, who was summoned by the King to fetch her,
and from Greenwich she was taken up the river, her last melancholy
journey to the Tower. The oak under which Henry VIII. is said to have
danced with her is still standing. It is a huge, old, hollow stem,
though quite dead, kept upright by the ivy. The trunk has a hole 6 feet
in diameter, and it is known as Queen Elizabeth’s Oak, as tradition
also says she took refreshments inside it. It was fitted with a door,
and those who transgressed the rules of the Park were confined in
this original prison. It was at Greenwich that Queen Elizabeth was
born; and to Greenwich Henry brought his fourth bride, when poor Anne
Boleyn’s short-lived favour |
191 | was at an end, and Jane Seymour dead. The
less beautiful Anne of Cleves, who so signally failed to please the
King, was escorted in state from Calais by thirty gentlemen, with their
servants, “in cotes of black velvet with cheines of gold about their
neckes.” On January 3, 1540, the King rode up from the Palace to meet
her on Blackheath with noblemen, knights, and gentlemen, and citizens,
all in velvet with gold chains. The King rode a horse with rich
trappings of gold damask studded with pearls, a coat of purple velvet
slashed with gold, and a bonnet decorated with “unvalued gems.” Anne
came out of her tent on the Heath to meet him, clad in cloth of gold,
and mounted on a horse with trappings embroidered with her arms, a lion
sable. She rode right through the Park from the Black Heath to the
northern gate and round through the town to the Palace, the guns firing
from the Tower in her honour.
It was at Greenwich that the boy king, Edward VI., died, and Mary and
Elizabeth were constant |
192 | ly there. Their state barges bearing them to and
from the Palace must have been no uncommon sight on the Thames. It was
on landing on one of these occasions that the famous episode of Sir
Walter Raleigh laying his cloak in the mud for the Queen to tread on,
happened. One of the many brilliant scenes in the Park took place after
Elizabeth’s accession, when the citizens of London, overjoyed, wished
to give her a very special greeting. It was on July 2, 1559, that “the
City of London entertained the Queen at Greenwich with a muster, each
Company sending out a certain number of men-at-arms” (1400 in all), “to
her great delight.... On the 1st of July they marched out of London in
coats of velvet and chaines of gold, with guns, moris pikes, halberds,
and flags; and so over London Bridge unto the Duke of Suffolk’s Park
in Southwark; where they all mustered before the Lord Mayor, and lay
abroad in St. George’s Fields all that night. The next morning they
removed towards Greenwich to the Court |
193 | there; and thence to Greenwich
Park. Here they tarried till eight of the clock; then they marched down
into the Lawn, and mustered in arms: all the gunners in shirts of mail.
At five of the clock at night the Queen came into the gallery over the
Park Gate, with the Ambassadors, Lords, and Ladies, to a great number.
The Lord Marquis, Lord Admiral, Lord Dudley, and divers other Lords and
Knights, rode to and fro to view them, and to set the two battles in
array to skirmish before the Queen: then came the trumpets to blow on
each part, the drums beating, and the flutes playing. There were given
three onsets in every battle; the guns discharged on one another, the
moris pikes encountered together with great alarm; each ran to their
weapons again, and then they fell together as fast as they could, in
imitation of close fight. All this while the Queen, with the rest of
the Nobles about her, beheld the skirmishings.... After all this, Mr.
Chamberlain, and divers of the Commons of the City and |
194 | the Wiflers,
came before her Grace, who thanked them heartily, and all the City:
whereupon immediately was given the greatest shout as ever was heard,
with hurling up of caps. And the Queen shewed herself very merry. After
this was a running at tilt. And lastly, all departed home to London.”
This fête took place on a Sunday, and the time between the muster and
the fight was probably mostly spent in refreshment. The account for
the supplies of the “Mete and Drynke” for 1st day of July and Sunday
night supper is preserved. They were far from being starved, as, among
other items, 9 geese, 14 capons, 8 chickens, 3 quarters and 2 necks of
mutton, 4 breasts of veal, beside a sirloin of beef, venison pasties, 8
marrow-bones, fresh sturgeon, 3 gallons of cream, and other delicacies
were provided for them. Floral decorations in their honour were not
forgotten, and appear in the accounts--“gely flowers and marygolds for
iii garlands, 7d.; strawynge herbes, 1/4; bowes for the chemneys, 1d.;
flo |
195 | wers for the potts in the wyndowys, 6d.”
There is no end to the gay scenes that the Park and even some of
the most ancient trees have witnessed. “Goodly banquetting houses”
were built of “fir poles decked with birch branches and all manner
of flowers both of the field and garden, as roses, gilly flowers,
lavender, marigold, and all manner of strewing herbs and rushes” (10th
July 1572); and many a brilliant pageant took place under the greenwood
tree as well as in the Palace, where Shakespeare acted before the Queen.
Although the days of sumptuous pageantry ended with Elizabeth, much was
done for Greenwich by the Stuarts. James I. replaced the wooden fence
of the Park by a brick wall, 12 feet high and 2 miles round. At various
times sections have been altered or replaced by iron rails, but the
greater part of the wall remains as completed between 1619–25.
The “Queen’s House,” which is the only portion of the older building
which still exists, was begun under James I., and completed b |
196 | y Inigo
Jones for Queen Henrietta Maria. It was called the House of Delight or
the Queen’s House, and still bears the latter title. Although the sale
does not appear to have been actually completed, Greenwich is among the
Royal Parks the Parliament intended to sell. The deer at the time must
have been numerous and in good condition, for during the Commonwealth
the fear of their being stolen was such, that soldiers were posted
in the tower for their preservation. Not any great change, however,
took place; the Park remained as it was until completely remodelled by
Charles II.
Le Nôtre’s name is associated with the changes at Greenwich, as it is
with those in St. James’s Park, and the style was undoubtedly his;
but it is not at all likely that he ever actually came to England,
but sent some representative who helped to carry out his ideas. The
alterations were under the superintendence of Sir William Boreman,
who became Keeper of the Park about that date. In March 1644 John
Evelyn made a |
197 | note in his Diary about planting some trees at his house
of Sayes Court, Deptford, and adds, “being the same year that the
elms were planted by His Majesty in Greenwich Park.” The avenues and
all the fine sweet chestnuts were planted about this time, besides
coppices and orchards. John Evelyn must have approved of these
avenues, as in his “Sylva” he praises the chestnut for “Avenues to our
Country-houses; they are a magnificent and royal Ornament.” Their nuts
were not appreciated in England. “We give that food to our swine,”
Evelyn continues, “which is amongst the delicacies of Princes in other
Countries; ... doubtless we might propagate their use amongst our
common people ... being a Food so cheap and so lasting.”
A series of terraces sloping down from the tower formed part of the
design, and their outline can still be traced between the Observatory
and the Queen’s House, which faces the hill at the foot. Each terrace
was 40 yards wide, and on either side Scotch firs were planted 24 |
198 |
feet apart. These trees were brought by General Monk from Scotland in
1664, and until forty years ago many were standing, and the line of
the avenue was still traceable; some of the trunks measured 4 feet in
diameter at the ground. Smoke tells so much more on all the coniferous
tribes than on the deciduous trees, that they have all now perished.
The last dead stump had to be felled some ten years ago. The old Palace
was much gone to decay when Charles II. began the alterations, so he
pulled it down with the exception of the Queen’s House, the only part
said to be in good repair, and commenced a vast building designed by
Wren, one wing of which only was completed in his reign.
Pepys, who always did the right and fashionable thing, of course
often went to Greenwich, and mentions many pleasant days there. On
one occasion (June 16, 1662) he went “in the afternoon with all the
children by water to Greenwich, where I showed them the King’s yacht,
the house, and the parke, all very pleasant |
199 | ; and to the taverne,
and had the musique of the house, and so merrily home again.” This
excursion having been so successful, he soon after escorted Lady
Carteret with great pride, “she being very fine, and her page carrying
up her train, she staying a little at my house, and then walked
through the garden, and took water, and went first on board the King’s
pleasure-boat, which pleased her much. Then to Greenwiche Parke; and
with much ado she was able to walk up to the top of the hill, and so
down again, and took boat....” His wife and servants, unencumbered
by the fine clothes and the page, had evidently not minded the steep
ascent as did this “fine” lady, who, however, was “much pleased with
the ramble in every particular of it.”
Greenwich Fair was always a great institution, and as a rule it was a
riotous and disorderly gathering. Two took place each year, in May and
October, and lasted several days. During the seventeenth and following
centuries the fairs were notorious, and final |
200 | ly had to be suppressed in
the middle of the nineteenth.
When William III. altered the building of Charles II. from a palace
to a hospital for seamen in 1694 the Park was kept separate, and the
Ranger lived in the “Queen’s House.” It was not until Princess Sophia
held the office in 1816 that the residence was changed to the house
which still goes by the name of the Ranger’s Lodge, and was lived in
by the last Ranger, Lord Wolseley. This Ranger’s House had formerly
belonged to Lord Chesterfield, and many of the famous letters to his
godson are dated from there. No special feature in the garden, which
was thrown open to the public with the Park in 1898, can be attributed
to him. He was not, as Lord Carnarvon’s memoir of him points out, fond
of the country; though he “took some interest in growing fruit in his
garden at Blackheath, he had no love for his garden like Bacon” or Sir
William Temple. There are some fine trees in the grounds, especially
a copper beech, with a spread 57 feet in |
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