In the reign of James I. there was an open space of ground north of what is now called Leicester Square (which by some old persons is still called Leicester Fields), and which was to the London soldiers and civilians of that day very much what Wormwood Scrubs is to the military and their admirers of the present time. Prince Henry exercised his artillery there, and it continued to be a general military exercise-ground far into the reign of Charles I. People trooped joyfully over the lammas land paths to witness the favourite spectacle. The greatest delight was excited by charges of cavalry against lines or masses of dummies, through which the gallant warriors and steeds plunged and battled—thus teaching them not to stop short at an impediment, but to dash right through it.
In 1631 there were unmistakable signs that this land was going to be built over, and people were aghast at the pace at which London was growing. Business-like men were measuring and staking; the report was that the land had been given to Sydney, Earl of Leicester. Too soon the builders got possession, and the holiday folk with military proclivities no longer enjoyed their old ecstasy of accompanying the soldiery to Paggington’s tune of
My masters and friends and good people, draw near.
Why Sydney was allowed to establish himself on the lammas land no one can tell. All that we know is, that Lord Carlisle wrote from Nonsuch, in August 1631, to Attorney-General Heath, informing him that it was the king’s pleasure that Mr. Attorney should prepare a licence to the Earl of Leicester to build upon a piece of ground called Swan Close, in St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a house convenient for his habitation.’
The popular idea of Earl of Leicester is Elizabeth’s Robert Dudley. Well, that earl had a sister, Mary, who married Sir Henry Sydney, of Penshurst. This couple had a son, whom they called Robert, and whom King James created at successive periods Baron Sydney, Viscount Lisle, and Earl of Leicester. And this Earl Robert had a son who, in 1626, succeeded to the earldom, and to him King Charles, in 1631, gave Swan Close and some other part of the lammas land, whereon he erected the once famous Leicester House.
This last Robert was the father of the famous and rather shabby patriot, Algernon Sydney, also of the handsome Henry. He is still more famous as having for daughter Dorothy, the ‘Sacharissa’ with whom Waller pretended to be in love, and he gave his family name to Sydney Alley. When, some few years later, the Earl of Salisbury (Viscount Cranbourn) built a house in the neighbourhood, he partly copied the other earl’s example, and called the road which led to his mansion Cranbourn Alley.
The lammas land thus given away was land which was open to the poor after Lammastide. Peter Cunningham quotes two entries from the St. Martin’s rate-books to this effect: ‘To received of the Honble. Earle of Leicester for ye Lamas of the ground that adjoins the Military Wall, 3l.’ The ‘military wall’ was the boundary of the Wormwood Scrubs of that day. The Earl also had to pay ‘for the lamas of the ground whereon his house and garden are, and the field that is before his house, near to Swan Close.’ The field before his house is now Leicester Square, ‘but Swan Close,’ says Peter, ‘is quite unknown.’ Lord Carlisle’s letter in the State Paper Office states that the house was to be built ‘upon Swan Close.’
It was a palatial mansion, that old Leicester House. It half filled the northern side of the present square, on the eastern half of that side. Its noble gardens extended beyond the present Lisle Street. At first that street reached only to the garden wall of Leicester House. When the garden itself disappeared the street was lengthened. It was a street full of ‘quality,’ and foreign ambassadors thought themselves lodged in a way not to dishonour their masters if they could only secure a mansion in Lisle Street.
Noble as the mansion was, Robert Sydney Earl of Leicester is the only earl of his line who lived in it, and his absences were many and of long continuance. He was a thrifty man, and long before he died, in 1677, he let the house to very responsible tenants. One of these was Colbert. If the ordinary run of ambassadors were proud to be quartered in Lisle Street, the proper place for the representative of ‘L’Etat c’est moi,’ and for the leader of civilisation, was the palace in Leicester Fields; and there France established herself, and there and in the neighbourhood, in hotels, cafés, restaurants, charcutiers, commissionnaires, refugees, and highly-coloured ladies, she has been ever since.
Colbert probably the more highly approved of the house as it had been dwelt in already by a queen. On February 7, 1662, the only queen that ever lived in Drury Lane—the Queen of Bohemia (daughter of James I.)—removed from Drury House and its pleasant gardens, now occupied by houses and streets, at the side of the Olympic Theatre, to Leicester House. Drury House was the residence of Lord Craven, to whom it was popularly said that the widowed queen had been privately married. Her occupancy of Leicester House was not a long one, for the queen died there on the 12th of the same month.
Six years later, in 1668,the French ambassador, Colbert, occupied Leicester House. Pepys relates how he left a joyous dinner early, on October 21, to join Lord Brouncker, the president, and other members of the Royal Society, in paying a formal return visit to Colbert; but the party had started before Pepys arrived at the Society’s rooms. The little man hastened after them; but they were ‘gone in’ and ‘up,’ and Pepys was too late to be admitted. His wife, perhaps, was not sorry, for he took her to Cow Lane; ‘and there,’ he says, ‘I showed her the coach which I pitch on, and she is out of herself for joy almost.’
It is easy to guess why the Royal Society honoured themselves by honouring Colbert. The great Frenchman was something more than a mere Marquis de Segnelai. Who remembers M. le Marquis? Who does not know Colbert—the pupil of Mazarin, the astute politician, the sharp finance-minister, the patron—nay, the pilot—of the arts and sciences in France? The builder of the French Royal Observatory, and the founder of the Academies of Painting and Sculpture and of the Sciences in France, was just the man to pay the first visit to the Royal Society. Leicester House was nobly tenanted by Colbert, and nobly frequented by the men of taste and of talent whom he gathered about him beneath its splendid roof.
The house fell into other hands, and men who were extremely opposite to philosophers were admitted within its walls with philosophers, who were expected to admire their handiwork. In October 1672, the grave Evelyn called at Leicester House to take leave of Lady Sunderland, who was about to set out for Paris, where Lord Sunderland was the English ambassador. My lady made Evelyn stay to dinner, and afterwards sent for Richardson, the famous fire-eater. A few years ago a company of Orientals, black and white, exhibited certain feats, but they were too repulsive (generally) to attract. What the members of this company did was done two hundred years ago in Leicester Square by Richardson alone. ‘He devoured,’ says Evelyn, ‘brimstone on glowing coals before us, chewing and swallowing them; he melted a large glass and eat it quite up; then, taking a live coal on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster, the coal was blowed on with bellows till it flamed and sparkled in his mouth, and so remained till the oyster gaped and was quite boiled. Then he melted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he drank down as it flamed. I saw it flaming in his mouth a good while. He also took up a thick piece of iron, such as laundresses use to put in their smoothing-boxes, when it was fiery hot, held it between his teeth, then in his hands, and threw it about like a stone; but this I observed, that he cared not to hold very long. Then he stood on a small pot, and bending his body, took a glowing iron in his mouth from between his feet, without touching the pot or ground with his hands; with divers other prodigious feats.’ Such was the singular sort of entertainment provided by a lady for a gentleman after dinner in the seventeenth century and beneath the roof of Leicester House.
Meanwhile Little France increased and flourished in and about the neighbourhood, and ‘foreigners of distinction’ were to be found airing their nobility in Leicester Square and the Haymarket—almost country places both.
Behind Leicester House, and on part of the ground which once formed Prince Henry Stuart’s military parade ground, there was a riding academy, kept by Major Foubert. In 1682, among the major’s resident pupils and boarders, was a handsome dare-devil young fellow, who was said to be destined for the Church, but who subsequently met his own destiny in quite another direction. His name was Philip Christopher Königsmark (Count, by title), and his furious yet graceful riding must have scared the quieter folks pacing the high road of the fields. He had with him, or rather he was with an elder brother, Count Charles John. This elder Count walked Leicester Fields in somewhat strange company—a German Captain Vratz, Borosky, a Pole, and Lieutenant Stern, a third foreigner. To what purpose they associated was seen after that Sunday evening in February 1682, when three mounted men shot Mr. Thomas Thynne (Tom of Ten Thousand) in his coach, at the bottom of the Haymarket. Tom died of his wounds. Thynne had been shot because he had just married the wealthy child-heiress, Lady Ogle. Count Charles John thought he might obtain the lady if her husband were disposed of. The necessary disposal of him was made by the three men named above, after which they repaired to the Counts lodgings and then scattered; but they were much wanted by the police, and so was the Count; when it was discovered that he had suddenly disappeared from the neighbourhood of the ‘Fields,’ and had gone down the river. He was headed, and taken at Gravesend. The subordinates were also captured. For some time indeed Vratz could not be netted. One morning, however, an armed force broke into a Swedish doctor’s house in Leicester Fields, and soon after they brought out Vratz in custody, to the great delight of the assembled mob. At the trial, the Count was acquitted. His younger brother, Philip, swore to an alibi, which proved nothing, and the King influenced the judges! The three hired murderers went to the gallows, and thought little of it. Vratz excused the deed, on the ground of murder not having been intended; ‘besides,’ said this sample of the Leicester Fields foreigner of the seventeenth century, ‘I am a gentleman, and God will deal with me accordingly.’ The two counts left England, and made their names notorious in Continental annals. The French riding-master shut up his school behind Leicester House, and removed to a spot where his name still lives: Foubert’s Passage, in Regent Street, opposite Conduit Street, is the site of the academy where that celebrated teacher once instructed young ladies and gentlemen how to ‘witch the world with noble horsemanship.’
We have spoken of the square being almost in the country. It was not the only one which was considered in the same light. In 1698 the author of a book called ‘Mémoires et Observations faites par un Voyageur en Angleterre,’ printed at the Hague in the above year, thus enumerates the London squares or places: ‘Les places qui sont dans Londres, ou pour mieux dire, dans les faubourgs, occupent des espaces qui, joints ensemble, en fourniraient un suffisant pour bâtir une grande ville. Ces places sont toutes environnées de balustrades, qui empêchant que les carrosses n’y passant. Les principales sont celles de Lincoln’s Inn Fields, de Moor Fields, de Southampton ou Blumsbury, de St. James, &c., Covent Garden; de Sohoe, ou Place Royale, du Lion rouge (Red Lyon), du Quarré d’Or (Golden Square), et de Leicester Fields.’
All these are said to be in the suburbs. Soho Square was called by fashionable people, King Square. It was only vulgar folk who used the prevailing name of Soho.
From early in Queen Anne’s days till late in those of George I., the representative of the Emperor of Germany resided in Leicester House. It was said that Jacobites found admittance there, for plotting or for refuge. It is certain that the imperial residence was never so tumultuously and joyously surrounded as when Prince Eugene arrived in Leicester Square, in the above Queen’s reign, on a mission from the Emperor, to induce England to join with him in carrying on the war. During his brief stay Leicester Fields was thronged with a cheering mobility and a bowing nobility and gentry, hastening to ‘put a distinguished respect’ on Marlborough’s great comrade, who was almost too modest to support the popular honours put on himself. Bishop Burnet and the Prince gossiping together at their frequent interviews at Leicester House have quite a picturesque aspect.
The imperial chaplain there was often as busy as his master. Here is a sample of one turn of his office:
One evening a man, in apparent hurry, knocked at the door of Leicester House, the imperial ambassador’s residence. He was bent on being married, and he accomplished that on which he was bent. This person was the son of a cavalier squire; he was also a Templar, for a time; but he hated law and Fleet Street, and he set up as near to being a courtier as could be expressed by taking lodgings in Scotland Yard, which was next door to the court then rioting at Whitehall. His name was Fielding, and his business was to drink wine, make love, and live upon pensions from female purses. Three kings honoured the rascal: Charles, James, and William; and one queen did him a good turn. For a long time Beau Fielding was the handsomest ass on the Mall. Ladies looked admiringly and languishingly at him, and the cruel beau murmured, ‘Let them look and die.’ Maidens spoke of him as ‘Adonis!’ and joyous widows hailed him ‘Handsome as Hercules!’ It was a mystery how he lived; how he maintained horses, chariot, and a brace of fellows in bright yellow coats and black sarcenet sashes. They were the Austrian colours; for Fielding thought he was cousin to the House of Hapsburg.
Supercilious as he was, he had an eye to the widows. His literature was in Doctors’ Commons, where he studied the various instances of marital affection manifested by the late husbands of living widows. One day he rose from the perusal of a will with great apparent satisfaction. He had just read how Mr. Deleau had left his relict a town house in Copthall Court, a Surrey mansion at Waddon, and sixty thousand pounds at her own disposal. The handsome Hercules resolved to add himself to the other valuables of which widow Deleau could dispose.
Fielding knew nothing whatever of the widow he so ardently coveted; but he, like love, could find out the way. There was a Mrs. Villars, who had dressed the widow’s hair, and she undertook, for a valuable consideration, to bring the pair gradually together. Fielding was allowed to see the grounds at Waddon. As he passed along, he observed a lady at a window. He put his hand on the left side of his waistcoat, and bowed a superlative beau’s superlative bow; and he was at the high top-gallant of his joy when he saw the graceful lady graciously smile in return for his homage. This little drama was repeated; and at last Mrs. Villars induced the lady to yield so very much all at once as to call with her on Fielding at his lodgings. Three such visits were made, and ardent love was made also on each occasion. On the third coming of Hero to Leander, there was a delicious little banquet, stimulating to generous impulses. The impulses so overcame the lady that she yielded to the urgent appeals of Mrs. Villars and the wooer, and consented to a private marriage in her lover’s chambers. The ecstatic Fielding leapt up from her feet, where he had been kneeling, clapt on his jaunty hat with a slap, buckled his bodkin sword to his side with a hilarious snap, swore there was no time like the present, and that he would himself fetch a priest and be back with him on the very swiftest of the wings of love.
That was the occasion on which, at a rather late hour, Fielding was to be seen knocking at the front door of Leicester House. When the door was opened his first inquiry was after the imperial ambassador’s chaplain. The beau had, in James II.’s days, turned Papist; and when Popery had gone out as William came in, he had not thought it worth while to turn back again, and was nominally a Papist still. When the Roman Catholic chaplain in Leicester House became aware of what his visitor required, he readily assented, and the worthy pair might be seen hastily crossing the square to that bower of love where the bride was waiting. The chaplain satisfied her scruples as to the genuineness of his priestly character, and in a twinkling he buckled beau and belle together in a manner which, as he said, defied all undoing.
‘Undoing?’ exclaimed the lover. ‘I marry my angel with all my heart, soul, body, and everything else!’—and he put a ring on her finger bearing the poesy Tibi soli—the sun of his life.
In a few days the bubble burst. The lady turned out to be no rich widow, but a Mrs. Wadsworth, who was given to frolicking, and who thought this the merriest frolic of her light-o’-love life. Fielding, who had passed himself off as a count, had not much to say in his own behalf, and he turned the ‘sun of his life’ out of doors. Whither he could turn he knew right well. He had long served all the purposes of the Duchess of Cleveland, the degraded old mistress of Charles II.; and within three weeks of his being buckled to Mrs. Wadsworth by the Leicester Square priest he married Duchess Barbara. Soon after he thrashed Mrs. Wadsworth in the street for claiming him as her lawful husband, and he beat the Duchess at home for asserting that Mrs. Wadsworth was right. Old Barbara did more. She put two hundred pounds into that lady’s hand, to prosecute Fielding for bigamy, and the Duchess promised her a hundred pounds a year for fifteen years if she succeeded in getting him convicted. And the handsome Hercules was convicted accordingly, at the Old Bailey, and was sentenced to be burnt in the hand; but the rascal produced Queen Anne’s warrant to stay execution. And so ended the Leicester Square wedding.
As long as the Emperor’s envoy lived in Leicester Fields he was the leader of fashion. Crowds assembled to see his ‘turn out.’ Sir Francis Gripe, in the ‘Busy-body,’ tempts Miranda by saying, ‘Thou shalt be the envy of the Ring, for I will carry thee to Hyde Park, and thy equipage shall surpass the what-d’ye-call-’em ambassador’s.’
Leicester House was, luckily, to let when the Prince of Wales quarrelled with his father, George I. In that house the Prince set up a rival court, against attending which the ‘London Gazette’ thundered dreadful prohibitions. But St. James’s was dull; Leicester House was ‘jolly’; and the fields were ‘all alive’ with spectators ‘hooraying’ the arrivals. Within, the stately Princess towered among her graceful maids. With regard to her diminutive husband it was said of his visitors,
In his embroidered coat they found him,
With all his strutting dwarfs around him.
Most celebrated among the Leicester House maids of honour was the young, bright, silvery-laughing, witty, well-bred girl, who could not only spell, but could construe Cæsar—the maid of whom Chesterfield wrote—
Should the Pope himself go roaming,
He would follow dear Molly Lepell.
And there rattled that other Mary—Mary Bellenden, laughing at all her lovers, the little, faithless Prince himself at the head of them. She would mock him and them with wit of the most audacious sort, and tell stories to the Princess, at which that august lady would laugh behind her fan, while the wildest, and not the least beautiful of the maids would throw back her handsome head, burst into uncontrollable laughter, and then run across to shock prim Miss Meadows, ‘the prude,’ with the same galliard story. Perhaps the most frolicksome nights at Leicester House were when the Princess of Wales was in the card-room, where a dozen tables were occupied by players, while the Prince, in another room, gave topazes and amethysts to be raffled for by the maids of honour, amid fun and laughter, and little astonishment when the prizes were found to be more or less damaged.
It was a sight for a painter to see these, with other beauties, leaving Leicester Fields of a morning to hunt with the Prince near Hampton. Crowds waited to see them return in the evening; and, when they were fairly housed again and dressed for the evening, lovers flocked around the young huntresses. Then Mary Bellenden snubbed her Prince and master, and walked, whispering, with handsome Jack Campbell; and Molly Lepell blushed and laughed encouragingly at the pleasant phrases poured into her ear by John, Lord Hervey. There Sophy Bellenden telegraphed with her fan to Nanty Lowther; and of their love-making came mischief, sorrow, despair, and death. And there were dark-looking Lord Lumley and his Orestes, Philip Dormer Stanhope; and dark Lumley is not stirred to laugh—as the maids of honour do, silently—as Stanhope follows the Princess to the card-room, imitating her walk and even her voice. This was the ‘Chesterfield’ who thought himself a ‘gentleman.’ The Princess leans on Lady Cowper’s shoulder and affects to admire what she really scorns—the rich dress of the beautiful Mary Wortley Montague. On one of the gay nights in Leicester House, when the Princess appeared in a dress of Irish silk—a present from ‘the Irish parson, Swift’—the Prince spoke in such terms of the giver as to induce Lord Peterborough to remark, ‘Swift has now only to chalk his pumps and learn to dance on the tightrope, to be yet a bishop.’
The above are a few samples of life in the royal household in Leicester Square. There, were born, in 1721, the Duke of Cumberland, who was so unjustly called ‘Butcher’; in 1723, Mary, who married the ‘brute’ Prince of Hesse-Cassel; and in 1724, Louisa, who died—one of the unhappy English Queens of Denmark.
After the father of these children had become George II., his eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, established enmity with his sire, and an opposition court at Leicester House, at Carlton House (which he occupied at the same time), and at Kew.
Frederick, Prince of Wales, has been the object of heavy censure, and some of it, no doubt, was well-deserved. But he had good impulses and good tastes. He loved music, and was no mean instrumentalist. He manifested his respect for Shakespeare by proposing that the managers of the two theatres should produce all the great poet’s plays in chronological order, each play to run for a week. The Prince had some feeling for art, and was willing to have his judgment regulated by those competent to subject it to rule.
In June 1749, some tapestry that had belonged to Charles I. was offered to the Prince for sale. He was then at Carlton House, and he forthwith sent for Vertue. The engraver obeyed the summons, and on being ushered into the presence he found a group that might serve for a picture of genre at any time. The Prince and Princess were at table waiting for dessert. Their two eldest sons, George and Edward, then handsome children, stood in waiting, or feigned the service, each with a napkin on his arm. After they had stood awhile in silence, the Prince said to them, ‘This is Mr. Vertue. I have many curious works of his, which you shall see after dinner.’ Carlton House was a store of art treasures. The Prince, with Luke Schaub in attendance and Vertue accompanying, went through them all. He spoke much and listened readily, and parted only to have another art-conference in the following month.
The illustrious couple were then seated in a pavilion, in Carlton House garden. The Prince showed both knowledge and curiosity with respect to art; and the party adjourned to Leicester House (Leicester Square), where Mr. Vertue was shown all the masterpieces, with great affability on the part of Frederick and his consort. The royal couple soon after exhibited themselves to the admiring people, through whom they were carried in two chairs over Leicester Fields back to Carlton House. Thence the party repaired to Kew, and the engraver, after examining the pictures, dined at the palace, ‘though,’ he says, ‘being entertained there at dinner was not customary to any person that came from London.’
During the tenancy of Frederick, Prince of Wales, Leicester House was the scene of political intrigues and of ordinary private life occurrences: Carlton House was more for state and entertainment. Leicester House and Savile House, which had been added to the former, had their joyous scenes also. The story of the private theatricals carried on in either mansion has been often told. The actors were, for the most part, the Prince’s children. He who was afterwards George III. was among the best of the players, but he had a good master. After his first public address as king, Quin, proud of his pupil, exclaimed, ‘I taught the boy to speak.’ Some contemporary letter-writers could scarcely find lofty phrases enough wherewith to praise these little amateurs. Bubb Doddington, who served the Prince of Wales and lost his money at play to him (‘I’ve nicked Bubb!’ was the cry of the royal gambler, when he rose from the Leicester House card-tables with Bubb’s money in his pocket), Bubb, I say, was not so impressed by the acting of these boys and girls. He rather endured than enjoyed it. On January 11, 1750, all that he records in his diary is, ‘Went to Leicester House to see “Jane Grey” acted by the Prince’s children.’ In the following May, Prince Frederick William was born in Leicester House, ‘the midwife on the bed with the Princess, and Dr. Wilmot standing by,’ and a group of ladies at a short distance. The time was half an hour after midnight. ‘Then the Prince, the ladies, and some of us,’ says Doddington, ‘sat down to breakfast in the next room—then went to prayers, downstairs.’ In June the christening took place, in Leicester House, the Bishop of Oxford officiating. ‘Nobody of either sex was admitted into the room but the actual servants’ (that is, the ladies and gentlemen of the household) ‘except Chief Justice Willes and Sir Luke Schaub.’ Very curious were some of the holiday rejoicings on this occasion. For example, here is a ‘setting out’ from Leicester House to make a day of it, on June 28: ‘Lady Middlesex’ (the Prince’s favourite), ‘Lord Bathurst, Mr. Breton, and I’ (writes Bubb) ‘waited on their Royal Highnesses to Spitalfields, to see the manufactory of silk, and to Mr. Carr’s shop, in the morning. In the afternoon the same company, with Lady Torrington in waiting, went in private coaches to Norwood Forest, to see a settlement of Gipsies. We returned and went to Bettesworth, the conjurer, in hackney coaches.... Not finding him we went in search of the little Dutchman, but were disappointed; and concluded the particularities of this day by supping with Mrs. Cannon, the Princess’s midwife.’ Such was the condescension of royalty and royalty’s servants in the last century!
In March, of the following year, Bubb Doddington went to Leicester House. The Prince told him he ‘had catched cold’ and ‘had been blooded.’ It was the beginning of the end. Alternately a little better and much worse, and then greatly improved, &c., till the night of the 20th. ‘For half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread-and-butter and drank coffee.’ He was ‘suffocated’ in a fit of coughing; ‘the breaking of an abscess in his side destroyed him. His physicians, Wilmot and Lee, knew nothing of his distemper.... Their ignorance, or their knowledge, of his disorder, renders them equally inexcusable for not calling in other assistance.’ How meanly this prince was buried, how shabbily everyone, officially in attendance, was treated, are well known. The only rag of state ceremony allowed this poor Royal Highness was, that his body went in one conveyance and his bowels in another—which was a compliment, no doubt, but hardly one to be thankful for.
The widowed Princess remained in occupation of the mansion in which her husband had died. One of the pleasantest domestic pictures of Leicester House is given by Bubb Doddington, under date November 17, 1753:—
The Princess sent for me to attend her between eight and nine o’clock. I went to Leicester House, expecting a small company and a little musick, but found nobody but her Royal Highness. She made me draw a stool and sit by the fireside. Soon after came in the Prince of Wales and Prince Edward, and then the Lady Augusta, all in an undress, and took their stools and sat round the fire with us. We continued talking of familiar occurrences till between ten and eleven, with the ease and unreservedness and unconstraint, as if one had dropped into a sister’s house that had a family, to pass the evening. It is much to be wished that the Princes conversed familiarly with more people of a certain knowledge of the world.
The Princess, however, did not want for worldly knowledge. About this time the Princess Dowager of Wales was sitting pensive and melancholy, in a room in Leicester House, while the two Princes were playing about her. Edward then said aloud to George, ‘Brother, when we are men, you shall marry, and I will keep a mistress.’ ‘Be quiet, Eddy,’ said his elder brother, ‘we shall have anger presently for your nonsense. There must be no mistresses at all.’ Their mother thereon bade them, somewhat sharply, learn their nouns and pronouns. ‘Can you tell me,’ she asked Prince Edward, ‘what a pronoun is?’ ‘Of course I can,’ replied the ingenuous youth; ‘a pronoun is to a noun what a mistress is to a wife—a substitute and a representative.’
The Princess of Wales continued to maintain a sober and dignified court at Leicester House, and at Carlton House also. She was by no means forgotten. Young and old rendered her full respect. One of the most singular processions crossed the Fields in January 1756. Its object was to pay the homage of a first visit to the court of the Dowager Princess of Wales at Leicester House—the visitors being a newly-married young couple, the Hon. Mr. Spencer and the ex-Miss Poyntz (later Earl and Countess of Spencer). The whole party were contained in two carriages and a ‘sedan chair.’ Inside the first were Earl Cowper and the bridegroom. Hanging on from behind were three footmen in state liveries. In the second carriage were the mother and sister of the bride, with similar human adornments on the outside as with the first carriage. Last, and alone, of course, as became her state, in a new sedan, came the bride, in white and silver, as fine as brocade and trimming could make it. The chair itself was lined with white satin, was preceded by a black page, and was followed by three gorgeous lackeys. Nothing ever was more brilliant than the hundred thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds worn by the bride except her own tears in her beautiful eyes when she first saw them and the begging letter of the lover which accompanied them. As he handed her from the chair, the bridegroom seemed scarcely less be-diamonded than the bride. His shoe-buckles alone had those precious stones in them to the value of thirty thousand pounds. They were decidedly a brilliant pair. Public homage never failed to be paid to the Princess. In June 1763, Mrs. Harris writes to her son (afterwards first Lord Malmesbury) at Oxford: I was yesterday at Leicester House, where there were more people than I thought had been in town.’ In 1766 Leicester House was occupied by William Henry, Duke of Cumberland, the last royal resident of that historical mansion, which was ultimately demolished in the year 1806.
But there were as remarkable inhabitants of other houses as of Leicester House. In 1733 there came into the square a man about whom the world more concerns itself than it does about William Henry, and that man is William Hogarth.
There is no one whom we more readily or more completely identify with Leicester Square than Hogarth. He was born in the Old Bailey in 1697, close to old Leicester House, which, in Pennant’s days, was turned into a coach factory. His father was a schoolmaster, who is, perhaps, to be recognised in the following curious advertisement of the reign of Queen Anne; ‘At Hogarth’s Coffee House, in St. John’s Gate, the midway between Smithfield Bars and Clerkenwell, there will meet daily some learned gentlemen who speak Latin readily, where any gentleman that is either skilled in the language, or desirous to perfect himself in speaking thereof, will be welcome. The Master of the House, in the absence of others, being always ready to entertain gentlemen in that language.’ It was in the above Queen’s reign that Hogarth went, bundle in hand, hope in his heart, and a good deal of sense and nonsense in his head, to Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields, where he was ’prentice bound to Ellis Gamble, the silver-plate engraver. There, among other and nobler works, Hogarth engraved the metal die for the first newspaper stamp (‘one halfpenny’) ever known in England. It was in Little Cranbourne Alley that Hogarth first set up for himself for a brief time, and left his sisters (it is supposed) to succeed him there as keepers of a ‘frock shop.’ Hogarth studied in the street, as Garrick did, and there was no lack of masks and faces in the little France and royal England of the Leicester Fields vicinity. Much as Sir James Thornhill disliked his daughter’s marriage with Hogarth, he helped the young couple to set up house on the east side of Leicester Fields. Thornhill did not, at first, account his son-in-law a painter. ‘They say he can’t paint,’ said Mrs. Hogarth once. ‘It’s a lie. Look at that!’ as she pointed to one of his great works. Another day, as Garrick was leaving the house in the Fields, Ben Ives, Hogarth’s servant, asked him to step into the parlour. Ben showed David a head of Diana, done in chalks. The player and Hogarth’s man knew the model. ‘There, Mr. Garrick!’ exclaimed Ives, ‘there’s a head! and yet they say my master can’t paint a portrait.’ Garrick thought Hogarth had not succeeded in painting the player’s, whereupon the limner dashed a brush across the face and turned it against the wall. It never left Leicester Square till widow Hogarth gave it to widow Garrick.
It was towards the close of Hogarth’s career that James Barry, from Cork—destined to make his mark in art—caught sight of a bustling, active, stout little man, dressed in a sky-blue coat, in Cranbourne Alley, and recognising in him the Hogarth whom he almost worshipped, followed him down the east side of the square towards Hogarth’s house. The latter, however, the owner did not enter, for a fight between two boys was going on at the corner of Castle Street, and Hogarth, who, like the statesman Windham, loved to see such encounters, whether the combatants were boys or men, had joined in the fray. When Barry came up Hogarth was acting ‘second’ to one of the young pugilists, patting him on the back, and giving such questionable aid in heightening the fray as he could furnish in such a phrase as, ‘Damn him if I would take it of him! At him again!’ There is another version, which says that it was Nollekens who pointed out to Northcote the little man in the sky-blue coat, with the remark, ‘Look! that’s Hogarth?’
Hogarth seems to have been one of the first to set his face against the fashion of giving vails to servants by forbidding his own to take them from guests. In those days, not only guests but those who came to a house to spend money, were expected to help to pay the wages of the servants for the performance of a duty which they owed to their master. It was otherwise with Hogarth in Leicester Square. ‘When I sat to Hogarth’ (Cole’s MSS. collections, quoted in Cunningham’s ‘London’) ‘the custom of giving vails to servants was not discontinued. On taking leave of the painter at the door I offered the servant a small gratuity, but the man very politely refused it, telling me it would be as much as the loss of his place if his master knew it. This was so uncommon, and so liberal in a man of Hogarth’s profession at that time of day, that it much struck me, as nothing of the kind had happened to me before.’
Leicester Square will ever be connected with Hogarth at the Golden Head. It was not, at his going there, in a flourishing condition, but it improved. In the year 1735, in Seymour’s ‘Survey,’ Leicester Fields are described as ‘a very handsome open square, railed about and gravelled within. The buildings are very good and well inhabited, and frequented by the gentry. The north and west rows of buildings, which are in St. Anne’s parish, are the best (and may be said to be so still), especially the north, where is Leicester House, the seat of the Earl of Leicester; being a large building with a fair court before it for the reception of coaches, and a fine garden behind it; the south and east sides being in the parish of St. Martin’s.’
Next to this house is another large house, built by Portman Seymour, Esq., which ‘being laid into Leicester House, was inhabited by their present Majesties’ (George II. and Queen Caroline) ‘when Prince and Princess of Wales.’ It was then that it was called ‘the pouting place of princes.’ Lisle Street is then described as coming out of Prince’s Street, and runs up to Leicester Garden wall. Both Lisle and Leicester Streets are ‘large and well-built, and inhabited by gentry.’
In 1737 the ‘Country Journal, or Craftsman,’ for April 16, contained the following acceptable announcement: ‘Leicester Fields is going to be fitted up in a very elegant manner, a new wall and rails to be erected all round, and a basin in the middle, after the manner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and to be done by a voluntary subscription of the inhabitants.’
It was to Hogarth’s house Walpole went, in 1761, to see Hogarth’s picture of Fox. Hogarth said he had promised Fox, if he would only sit as the painter liked, ‘to make as good a picture as Vandyck or Rubens could.’ Walpole was silent. ‘Why, now,’ said the painter, ‘you think this very vain. Why should not a man tell the truth?’ Walpole thought him mad, but Hogarth was sincere. When, after ridiculing the opinions of Freke, the anatomist, some one said, ‘But Freke holds you for as good a portrait-painter as Vandyck,’ ‘There he’s right!’ cried Hogarth. ‘And so, by G——, I am—give me my time, and let me choose my subject.’
If one great object of art be to afford pleasure, Hogarth has attained it, for he has pleased successive generations. If one great end of art be to afford instruction, Hogarth has shown himself well qualified, for he has reached that end; he taught his contemporaries, and he continues teaching, and will continue to teach, through his works. But is the instruction worth having? Is the pleasure legitimate, wholesome, healthy pleasure? Without disparagement to a genius for all that was great in him and his productions, the reply to these questions may sometimes be in the negative. The impulses of the painter were not invariably of noble origin. It is said that the first undoubted sign he gave of having a master-hand arose from his poor landlady asking him for a miserable sum which he owed her for rent. In his wrath he drew her portrait in caricatura. Men saw that it was clever, but vindictive.
There is no foundation for the story which asserts of George II. that he professed no love for poetry or painting. This king has been pilloried and pelted, so to speak, with the public contempt for having an independent, and not unjustifiable, opinion of the celebrated picture, the ‘March to Finchley.’ Hogarth had the impertinence to ask permission that he might dedicate the work to the King, and the latter observed, with some reason, that the fellow deserved to be picketed for his insolence. When this picture was presented as worthy of royal patronage, rebellion was afoot and active in the north (1745). The Guards were sent thither, and Hogarth’s work describes them setting out on their first stage to Finchley. The whole description or representation is a gross caricature of the brave men (though they may have sworn as terribly then as they did in Flanders) whose task was to save the kingdom from a great impending calamity. All that is noble is kept out of sight, all that is degrading to the subject, with some slight exceptions, is forced on the view and memory of the spectator. It has been urged by way of apology for this clever but censurable work, that it was not painted at the moment of great popular excitement, but subsequently. This is nothing to the purpose. What is to the purpose is, that Hogarth represented British soldiers as a drunken, skulking, thieving, cowardly horde of ruffians, who must be, to employ an oft-used phrase, more terrible to their friends than their enemies. The painter may have been as good a Whig as the King himself, but he manifested bad taste in asking George II. to show favour to such a subject; and he exhibited worse taste still in dedicating it to the king of Prussia, as a patron of the arts. Hogarth was not disloyal, perhaps, as Wilkes charged him with being, for issuing the print of this picture, but it is a work that, however far removed from the political element now, could not have afforded much gratification to the loyal when it was first exhibited.
Hogarth died in Leicester Square in 1764, and was buried at Chiswick. There was an artist on the opposite side of the square who saw the funeral from his window, and who had higher views of art than Hogarth.
Towards the close of Hogarth’s career Joshua Reynolds took possession of a house on the west side of Leicester Square. In the year in which George III. ascended the throne (1760) Reynolds set up his famous chair of state for his patrons in this historical square.
It has been said that Reynolds, in the days of his progressive triumphs in Leicester Square, thought continually of the glory of his being one day placed by the side of Vandyck and Rubens, and that he entertained no envious idea of being better than Hogarth, Gainsborough, and his old master, Hudson. Reynolds, nevertheless, served all three in much the same way that Dryden served Shakespeare; namely, he disparaged quite as extensively as he praised them. Hogarth, on the east side of Leicester Square, felt no local accession of honour when Reynolds set up his easel on the western side. The new comer was social; the old settler ‘kept himself to himself,’ as the wise saw has it. ‘Study the works of the great masters for ever,’ was, we are told, the utterance of Sir Oracle on the west side. From the east came Hogarth’s utterance, in the assertion, ‘There is only one school, and Nature is the mistress of it.’ For Reynolds’s judgment Hogarth had a certain contempt. ‘The most ignorant people about painting,’ he said to Walpole, ‘are the painters themselves. There’s Reynolds, who certainly has genius; why, but t’other day, he offered a hundred pounds for a picture that I would not hang in my cellar.’ Hogarth undoubtedly qualified his sense with some nonsense: ‘Talk of sense, and study, and all that; why, it is owing to the good sense of the English that they have not painted better.’
It was at one of Reynolds’s suppers in the square that an incident took place which aroused the wit-power of Johnson. The rather plain sister of the artist had been called upon by the company, after supper, as the custom was, to give a toast. She hesitated, and was accordingly required, again according to custom, to give the ugliest man she knew. In a moment the name of Oliver Goldsmith dropped from her lips, and immediately a sympathising lady on the opposite side of the table rose and shook hands with Miss Reynolds across the table. Johnson had heard the expression, and had also marked the pantomimic performance of sympathy, and he capped both by a remark which set the table in a roar, and which was to an effect which cut smartly in three ways. ‘Thus,’ said he, ‘the ancients, on the commencements of their friendships, used to sacrifice a beast betwixt them.’ The affair ends prettily. A few days after the ‘Traveller’ was published Johnson read it aloud from beginning to end to delighted hearers, of whom Miss Reynolds was one. As Johnson closed the book she emphatically remarked, ‘Well, I never more shall think Dr. Goldsmith ugly.’ Miss Reynolds, however, did not get over her idea. Her brother painted the portrait of the new poet, in the Octagon Room in the Square; the mezzotinto engraving of it was speedily all over the town. Miss Reynolds (who, it has been said, used herself to paint portraits with such exact imitation of her brother’s defects and avoidance of his beauties, that everybody but himself laughed at them) thought it marvellous that so much dignity could have been given to the poet’s face and yet so strong a likeness be conveyed; for ‘Dr. Goldsmith’s cast of countenance,’ she proceeds to inform us, ‘and indeed his whole figure from head to foot, impressed every one at first sight with the idea of his being a low mechanic; particularly, I believe, a journeyman tailor.’ This belief was founded on what Goldsmith had himself once said. Coming ruffled into Reynolds’s drawing-room, Goldsmith angrily referred to an insult which his sensitive nature fancied had been put upon him at a neighbouring coffee-house, by ‘a fellow who,’ said Goldsmith, ‘took me, I believe, for a tailor.’ The company laughed more or less demonstratively, and rather confirmed than dispelled the supposition.
Poor Goldsmith’s weaknesses were a good deal played upon by that not too polite company. One afternoon, Burke and a young Irish officer, O’Moore, were crossing the square to Reynolds’s house to dinner. They passed a group who were gaping at, and making admiring remarks upon, some samples of beautiful foreign husseydom, who were looking out of the windows of one of the hotels. Goldsmith was at the skirt of the group, looking on. Burke said to O’Moore, as they passed him unseen, ‘Look at Goldsmith; by-and-by, at Reynolds’s you will see what I make of this.’ At the dinner, Burke treated Goldsmith with such coolness, that Oliver at last asked for an explanation. Burke readily replied that his manner was owing to the monstrous indiscretion on Goldsmith’s part, in the square, of which Burke and Mr. O’Moore had been the witnesses. Poor Goldsmith asked in what way he had been so indiscreet?
‘Why,’ answered Burke, ‘did you not exclaim, on looking up at those women, what stupid beasts the crowd must be for staring with such admiration at those painted Jezebels, while a man of your talent passed by unnoticed?’—‘Surely, my dear friend,’ cried Goldsmith, horror-struck, ‘I did not say so!’—‘If you had not said so,’ retorted Burke, ‘how should I have known it?’—‘That’s true,’ answered Goldsmith, with great humility; ‘I am very sorry; it was very foolish! I do recollect that something of the kind passed through my mind, but I did not think I had uttered it.’
It is a pity that Sir Joshua never records the names of his own guests; but his parties were so much swelled by invitations given on the spur of the moment, that it would have been impossible for him to set down beforehand more than the nucleus of his scrambling and unceremonious, but most enjoyable, dinners. Whether the famous Leicester Square dinners deserved to be called enjoyable, is a question which anyone may decide for himself, after reading the accounts given of them at a period when the supervision of Reynolds’s sister, Frances, could no longer be given to them. The table, made to hold seven or eight, was often made to hold twice the number. When the guests were at last packed, the deficiency of knives, forks, plates, and glasses made itself felt. Everyone called, as he wanted, for bread, wine, or beer, and lustily, or there was little chance of being served.
There had once, Courtenay says, been sets of decanters and glasses provided to furnish the table and enable the guests to help themselves. These had gone the way of all glass, and had not been replaced; but though the dinner might be careless and inelegant, and the servants awkward and too few, Courtenay admits that their shortcomings only enhanced the singular pleasure of the entertainment. The wine, cookery, and dishes were but little attended to; nor was the fish or venison ever talked of or recommended. Amidst the convivial, animated bustle of his guests, Sir Joshua sat perfectly composed; protected partly by his deafness, partly by his equanimity; always attentive, by help of his trumpet, to what was said, never minding what was eaten or drunk, but leaving everyone to scramble for himself. Peers, temporal and spiritual, statesmen, physicians, lawyers, actors, men of letters, painters, musicians, made up the motley group, ‘and played their parts,’ says Courtenay, ‘without dissonance or discord.’ Dinner was served precisely at five, whether all the company had arrived or not. Sir Joshua never kept many guests waiting for one, whatever his rank or consequence. ‘His friends and intimate acquaintance,’ concludes Courtenay, ‘will ever love his memory, and will ever regret those social hours and the cheerfulness of that irregular, convivial table, which no one has attempted to revive or imitate, or was indeed qualified to supply.’
Reynolds had a room in which his copyists, his pupils, and his drapery-men worked. Among them was one of the cleverest and most unfortunate of artists. Seldom is the name of Peter Toms now heard, but he once sat in Hudson’s studio with young Reynolds, and in the studio of Sir Joshua, as the better artist’s obedient humble servant; that is to say, he painted his employer’s draperies, and probably a good deal more, for Toms was a very fair portrait-painter. Peter worked too for various other great artists, and a purchaser of any picture of that time cannot be certain whether much of it is not from Toms’s imitative hand. Peter’s lack of original power did not keep him out of the Royal Academy, though in his day he was but a second-class artist. He belonged, too, to the Herald’s Office, as the painters of the Tudor period often did, and after filling in the canvasses of his masters in England, he went to Ireland on his own account and in reliance on the patronage of the Lord-Lieutenant, the Duke of Northumberland. Toms, however, found that the Irish refused to submit their physiognomies to his limning, and he waited for them to change their opinion of him in vain. Finally, he lost heart and hope. His vocation was gone; but in the London garret within which he took refuge he seems to have given himself a chance for life or death. Pencil in one hand and razor in the other, he made an effort to paint a picture, and apparently failed in accomplishing it, for he swept the razor across his throat, and was found the next morning stark dead by the side of the work which seems to have smitten him with despair.
Reynolds saw the ceremony of proclaiming George III. king in front of Savile House, where the monarch had resided while he was Prince of Wales. Into his own house came and went, for years, all the lofty virtues, vices, and rich nothingnesses of Reynolds’s time, to be painted. From his window he looked with pride on his gaudy carriage (the Seasons, limned on the panels, were by his own drapery man, Catton), in which he used to send his sister out for a daily drive. From the same window he saw Savile House gutted by the ‘No Popery’ rioters of 1780; fire has since swept all that was left of Page’s house on the north side of the Square; and in 1787 Reynolds looked on a newcomer to the Fields, Lawrence, afterwards Sir Thomas, who set up his easel against Sir Joshua’s, but who was not then strong enough to make such pretence. Some of the most characteristic groups of those days were to be seen clustered round the itinerant quack doctors—fellows who lied with a power that Orton, Luie, and even the ‘coachers’ of Luie, might envy. Leicester Square, in Reynolds’s days alone, would furnish matter for two or three volumes. We have only space to say further of Sir Joshua, that he died here in 1792, lay in state in Somerset House, and that as the funeral procession was on its way to St. Paul’s (with its first part in the Cathedral before the last part was clear of Somerset House) one of the occupants in one of the many mourning coaches said to a companion, ‘There is now, sir, a fine opening for a portrait-painter.’
While Reynolds was ‘glorifying’ the Fields, that is to say, about the year 1783, John Hunter, the great anatomist, enthroned science in Leicester Square. His house, nearly opposite Reynolds’s, was next door to that once occupied by Hogarth, on the east side, but north of the painter’s dwelling. Hunter was then fifty-five years old. Like his eminent brother, William, John Hunter had a very respectable amount of self-appreciation, quite justifiably.
The governing body of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital had failed, through ignorance or favouritism, to recognise his ability and to reward his assiduity. But John Hunter was of too noble a spirit to be daunted or even depressed; and St. George’s Hospital honoured itself by bestowing on him the modest office of house-surgeon. It was thirty years after this that John Hunter settled himself in Leicester Square. There he spent three thousand pounds in the erection of a building in the rear of his house for the reception of a collection in comparative anatomy. Before this was completed he spent upon it many thousands of pounds,—it is said ninety thousand guineas! With him to work was to live. Dr. Garthshore entered the museum in the Square early one morning, and found Hunter already busily occupied. ‘Why, John,’ said the physician, ‘you are always at work!’ ‘I am,’ replied the surgeon; ‘and when I am dead you will not meet very soon with another John Hunter!’ He accused his great brother William of claiming the merit of surgical discoveries which John had made; and when a friend, talking to him, at his door in the Square, on his ‘Treatise on the Teeth,’ remarked that it would be answered by medical men simply to make their names known, Hunter rather unhandsomely observed: ‘Aye, we have all of us vermin that live upon us.’ Lavater took correct measure of the famous surgeon when he remarked, on seeing the portrait of Hunter: ‘That is the portrait of a man who thinks for himself!’
After John Hunter’s death his collection was purchased by Government for fifteen thousand pounds. It was removed from Leicester Square to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to the College of Surgeons, where it still forms a chief portion of the anatomical and pathological museum in that institution. The site of the Hunterian Museum in Leicester Square has been swallowed up by the Alhambra, where less profitable study of comparative anatomy may now be made by all who are interested in such pursuit. A similar destiny followed the other Hunterian Museum—that established by William Hunter, in Great Windmill Street, at the top of the Haymarket, where he built an amphitheatre and museum, with a spacious dwelling-house attached. In the dwelling-house Joanna Baillie passed some of her holiday and early days in London. She came from her native Scottish heath, and the only open moor like unto it where she could snatch a semblance of fresh air was the neighbouring inclosure of Leicester Square! William Hunter left his gigantic and valuable collection to his nephew, Dr. Baillie, for thirty years, to pass then to the University of Glasgow, where William himself had studied divinity, before the results of freedom of thought (both the Hunters would think for themselves) induced him to turn to the study of medicine. The Hunterian Museum in Windmill Street, after serving various purposes, became known as the Argyll Rooms, where human anatomy (it is believed) was liberally exhibited under magisterial license and the supervision of a severely moral police.
Leicester Square has been remarkable for its exhibitions. Richardson, the fire-eater, exhibited privately at Leicester House in 1672. A century later there was a public exhibition on that spot of quite another quality. The proprietor was Sir Ashton Lever, a Lancashire gentleman, educated at Oxford. As a country squire he formed and possessed the most extensive and beautiful aviary in the kingdom. Therewith, Sir Ashton collected animals and curiosities from all quarters of the world. This was the nucleus of the ‘museum’ subsequently brought to Leicester Fields. Among the curiosities was a striking likeness of George III. ‘cut in cannel coal;’ also Indian-ink drawings and portraits; baskets of flowers cut in paper, and wonderful for their accuracy; costumes of all ages and nations, and a collection of warlike weapons which disgusted a timid beholder, who describes them in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ (May 1773) as ‘desperate, diabolical instruments of destruction, invented, no doubt, by the devil himself.’ Soon after this, this wonderful collection was exhibited in Leicester House. There was a burst of wonder, as Pennant calls it, for a little while after the opening; but the ill-cultivated world soon grew indifferent to being instructed; and Sir Ashton got permission, with some difficulty, from Parliament, to dispose of the whole collection by lottery. Sir William Hamilton, Baron Dimsdale, and Mr. Pennant stated to the Committee of the House of Commons that they had never seen a collection of such inestimable value. ‘Sir Ashton Lever’s lottery tickets,’ says an advertisement of January 28, 1785, ‘are now on sale at Leicester House every day (Sundays excepted), from Nine in the morning till Six in the evening, at One Guinea each; and as each ticket will admit four persons, either together or separately, to view the Museum, no one will hereafter be admitted but by the Lottery Tickets, excepting those who have already annual admission.’ It is added that the whole was to be disposed of owing ‘to the very large sum expended in making it, and not from the deficiency of the daily receipts (as is generally imagined), which have annually increased; the average amount for the last three years being 1833l. per annum.’ It sounds odd that a ‘concern’ is got rid of because it was yearly growing more profitable!
Thirty-six thousand guinea-tickets were offered for sale. Only eight thousand were sold. Of these Mr. Parkinson purchased two, and with one of those two acquired the whole collection, against the other purchasers and the twenty-two thousand chances held by Sir Ashton. Mr. Parkinson built an edifice for his valuable prize in Blackfriars Road, and for years, one of the things to be done was ‘to go to the Rotunda.’ In 1806, the famous museum was dispersed by auction. The Surrey Institution next occupied the premises, which subsequently became public drinking-rooms and meeting place for tippling patriots, who would fain destroy the Constitution of England as well as their own.
But ‘man or woman, good my lord,’ let whosoever may be named in connection with Leicester Square, there is one who must not be omitted, namely, Miss Linwood. Penelope worked at her needle to no valuable purpose. Miss Linwood was more like Arachne in her work, and something better in her fortune. The dyer’s daughter of Colophon chose for her subjects the various loves of Jupiter with various ladies whom poets and painters have immortalised; and grew so proud of her work that, for challenging Minerva to do better, the goddess changed her into a spider. The Birmingham lady plied her needle from the time she could hold one till the time her ancient hand lost its cunning. At thirteen she worked pictures in worsted better than some artists could paint them. No needlework, ancient or modern, ever equalled (if experts may be trusted) the work of this lady, who found time to do as much as if she had not to fulfil, as she did faithfully, the duties of a boarding-school mistress. King, Queen, Court, and ‘Quality’ generally visited Savile House, Leicester Fields, where Miss Linwood’s works were exhibited, and were profitable to the exhibitor to the very last. They were, for the most part, copies of great pictures by great masters, modern as well as ancient. Among them was a Carlo Dolci, valued at three thousand guineas. Miss Linwood, in her later days, retired to Leicester, but she used to come up annually to look at her own Exhibition. It had been open about half a century when the lady, in her ninetieth year, caught cold on her journey, and died of it at Leicester in 1844. She left her Carlo Dolci to Queen Victoria. Her other works, sold by auction, barely realised a thousand pounds; but the art of selling art by auction was not then discovered.
In 1788, a middle-aged Irishman from county Meath, named Robert Barker, got admission to Reynolds, to show him a half-circle view from the Calton Hill, near Edinburgh, which Barker had painted in water-colours on the spot. The poor but accomplished artist had been unsuccessful as a portrait-painter in Dublin and Edinburgh. But he had studied perspective closely, an idea had struck him, and he came with it to Reynolds. The latter admired, but thought it impracticable. The Irishman thought otherwise. Barker exhibited circular views from nature, in London and also in the provinces, with indifferent success. At last, in 1793, on part of the old site of Leicester House, a building arose which was called the Panorama, and in which was exhibited a view of the Russian fleet at Spithead. The spectator was on board a ship in the midst of the scene and the view was all around him. King George and Queen Charlotte led the fashionable world to this most original exhibition. For many years there was a succession of magnificent views of foreign capitals, tracts of country, ancient cities, polar regions, battles, &c., exhibited; and ‘Have you been to the new panorama?’ was as naturally a spring question as ‘Have you been to the Academy?’ or the Opera? The exhibition of the ‘Stern Realities of Waterloo’ alone realised a little fortune, and ‘Pandemonium,’ painted by Mr. Henry Selous, was one of the latest of the great successes.
At the north-east corner of Leicester Square, the Barkers, father and son, achieved what is called ‘a handsome competency.’ At the death of the latter, Robert Burford succeeded him, and, for a time, did well; but ‘Fashion’ wanted a new sensation. The panoramas in Leicester Square and the Strand, admirable as they were, ceased to draw the public; and courteous, lady-like, little Miss Burford, the proprietress, was compelled to withdraw, utterly shipwrecked. She used to receive her visitors like a true lady welcoming thorough ladies and gentlemen. The end was sad indeed, for the last heard of this aged gentlewoman was that she was enduring life by needle-work, rarely got and scantily paid, in a lodging, the modest rent of which, duly paid, kept her short of necessary food. An attempt was made to obtain her election to the ‘United Kingdom Beneficent Association,’ but with what result we are unable to record.
Shadows of old Leicester Square figures come up in crowds, demanding recognition. They must be allowed to pass—to make a ‘march past,’ as it were; as they glide by we take note of Mirabeau and Marat, Holcroft, Opie, Edmund Kean, and Mulready, with countless others, to indite the roll of whose names only would alone require a volume.