CHAPTER IV

PLACES OF RESORT

The places of resort in this century, and especially in the reign of Charles the Second, reveal the existence of a new class: that of the fashionable class, the people who live for amusement. They have grown up by degrees; they inhabit a new town lying between the Inns of Court and Hyde Park, which they have built for themselves; they have made a society composed entirely of themselves, frequenting the same coffee-houses and taverns, belonging to the same sets, and following the same kind of life. They have invented the fashionable saunter; they have made the theatre their own; they have introduced the _salon_ and the reception. They gamble a great deal; they lounge a great deal; they make love a great deal; they drink; they dress extravagantly; they practise affectations; they lay bets; they run races; they live, in a word, exactly the same careless, useless, mischievous life which their successors have continued ever since.

Among the other things which we owe to them is the Park.

The old maps of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries represent the area which is now the Green Park and Hyde Park as green fields; these fields formed part of the manors known as Neyte and Hyde, which belonged to the Abbey of Westminster until the reign of Henry the Eighth, when they fell to the Crown, being exchanged for the Priory of Hurley in Berkshire. Henry the Eighth either stocked the fields with deer, or found deer there and ran a fence round the fields so as to enclose them. During the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries Hyde Park was a Royal hunting-ground. In the reign of Charles the First it was also a racecourse. In Cromwell’s time it was a place for driving and for carriage races; under Charles the Second it became a promenade and a drive, just as it is at the present day.

St. James’s Park came into existence later than Hyde Park.

It began with Spring Gardens, named after a spring which here issued from the ground, but was not enough to feed the fountain which ornamented the gardens. They were not public gardens, though many people were admitted; they contained orchards of fruit-trees, lawns and bowling greens, a bathing pond, and a butt for archery practice. James the First kept some of his menagerie in these gardens. In Charles the First’s reign an ordinary was allowed to be kept here; it was six shillings a head, and all day long there was tippling under the trees with frequent quarrels. Charles was much offended by these unseemly broils and shut up the place. An enterprising barber, however, came to the rescue of the players, and set up a large establishment between St. James’s Street and the Haymarket, where were two bowling greens, a tavern, an ordinary, card tables, and rooms for gaming of all kinds.

Spring Gardens were opened again during the Civil War, with the old customs of drinking; it was, however, provided that the Gardens should be closed on public fast days. In 1654 they were closed altogether; Evelyn (May 10) has an entry:—

“My Lady Gerrard treated us at Mulberry Garden, now the only place of refreshment about the towne for persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated at, Cromwell and his partisans having shut up and seized on Spring Gardens, which, till now, had been the usual rendezvous for the ladies and gallants at this season.”

In 1658 it was open again, for Evelyn “collation’d” there on his way to see a coach race in Hyde Park.

The best account of the Garden is one quoted by Larwood from _A Character of England_[11]:—

“The inclosure is not disagreeable, for the solemness of the grove, the warbling of the birds, and as it opens into the spacious walks of St. James’s. But the company walk in it at such a rate as you would think all the ladies were so many Atalantas contending with their wooers; and there was no appearance that I should prove the Hippomenes who would with very much ado keep pace with them. But, as fast as they run, they stay there so long as if they wanted not time to finish the race; for it is usual here to find some of the young company till midnight; and the thickets of the garden seem to be contrived to all advantages of gallantry, after they have been refreshed with the collation, which is here seldom omitted, at a certain _cabaret_ in the middle of this paradise, where the forbidden fruits are certain trifling tarts, neats-tongues, salacious meats, and bad Rhenish (wine); for which the gallants pay sauce, as indeed they do at all such houses throughout England; for they think it a piece of frugality beneath them to bargain or account for what they eat in any place, however unreasonably imposed upon. But thus those mean fellows are enriched—beggar and insult over the gentlemen. I am assured that this particular host has purchased within few years 5000 livres of annual rent, and well he may, at the rate these prodigals pay” (J. Larwood, _The Story of the London Parks_).

A more detailed description shows us a garden laid out in square beds, each twenty or thirty paces in length and breadth, and surrounded with hedges of red currants, roses, and shrubs; in the beds were growing strawberries and vegetables, the borders were lined with flowers, and fruit-trees were growing up the walls. Pepys took his wife, his two servants, and his boy there on the King’s birthday, 1662.

Visitors could help themselves, apparently, for the servants gathered pinks from the borders. The building of houses about Charing Cross destroyed the rural charm of these gardens; part of them were built upon; a small part still remains at the back of the street now called Spring Gardens.

Evelyn has mentioned the Mulberry Gardens. This place was on the site of Buckingham Palace. James the First in 1609, following the example of Henry the Fourth of France, endeavoured to establish a silk-growing industry. With this object he sent out to the various counties mulberry-trees by the hundred thousand. He enclosed four acres of St. James’s Park, and planted them with mulberry-trees. In Cromwell’s time the Gardens were sold; at the Restoration they returned to the King, who threw them open. They became for a time the fashionable resort; by day the non-decorous took cheese-cakes in their summer houses; at night they were the haunt of “gentlemen and ladies that made love together, till twelve o’clock at night, the pretty leest.” There were arbours for supper parties; there were also dark paths in the “Wilderness.” Dryden used to take Mrs. Reeve, an actress of Killigrew’s Company, to the Mulberry Gardens. The place was closed about the year 1675.

St. James’s Park began as a marshy piece of ground overflowed by the river at high tides, stretching out between St. James’s Hospital and Thorney Island. The Hospital, founded by the citizens of London “before the time of any man’s memory,” was intended to receive fourteen poor sisters, maidens, who were leprous; they were placed in this house to live chastely and honestly in divine service. It was endowed with land sufficient to maintain these unfortunate women in comfort; they possessed as well a brotherhood of six chaplains and two laymen. And in 1290 Edward the First gave them a fair, to be held for seven days, beginning on St. James’s Eve, July 24.

The house is said to be mentioned in an MS. in the Cottonian Library of the year 1100; it was, therefore, certainly the oldest hospital belonging to London.

It was rebuilt in the reign of Henry the Third. In 1450, after there had been many disputes with the Abbey of Westminster over alleged rights of visit, Henry the Sixth placed the house in the perpetual custody of Eton College. Henry the Eighth acquired it by purchase in 1537 and, according to Stow, compounded with the inmates. It has been stated that only one sister received a pension. I think the two statements may be reconciled. Thus the dread of leprosy had by this time vanished. There were very few lepers left in the country, if any. At the hospital of Sherburn, Durham, which originally contained five _convents_ of lepers, of both sexes, _i.e._ sixty-five persons, in 1593 the house contained only men; “sick, or whole, Lepers, or wayfaring.” Surtees, _History of Durham_, says that it would have been difficult, long before, to find a single leper in the country.

What, then, happened at St. James’s? One of two things. Either the sisters were reduced to one, and only one, who would be considered a leper; or that the house, like so many others, had been allowed to depart from its foundation, and had admitted as sisters, women who were not lepers at all.

However, Henry enclosed the ground belonging to the hospital, stocked it with deer, and turned it into a pleasure garden for himself.

James the First kept his menagerie here. Henry, Prince of Wales, ran at the ring and practised horsemanship here.

During the Commonwealth the Park was not sold, but preserved, though the deer seem to have run away. A certain number of people were privileged to walk in the Park.

Then Charles came back, and began at once to improve the Park. He constructed the canal, or ornamental water; he laid out the Mall; he made a rising ground beside Rosamond’s pond; he erected beautiful avenues of trees. More than this, he opened the Park and gave a new place of resort, much finer than it had ever before enjoyed, to the fashionable world of London. The literature of the period is full of the Park and its frequenters.

New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall were formed in imitation of the old, and were named after them. Evelyn mentions the place in 1661, Pepys 1665; he calls it Foxhall. He went there in June and in July; on the latter day he did not find a single guest there. There were, however, plenty of guests at other times. Pepys observes how the young fellows take hold of every woman in the place. He heard the nightingale sing; he heard the fiddles, and the harp, and the Jew’s trump; he heard the talk of the young men—“Lord, their mad talk did make my heart ake.” He had cheese-cakes, syllabubs, and wine in the gardens; and, as at the theatre, he and his wife were not ashamed to be seen when the company was notoriously profligate, and the women notoriously devoid of virtue.

Gray’s Inn Gardens was another place of resort, probably for lawyers and their ladies. For the people of Holborn and Fleet Street there were the Lamb’s Conduit Fields. These spacious fields extended from Tottenham Court Road to Gray’s Inn Road, and as far to the north as what is now the Euston Road. There were no houses upon them in the seventeenth century except Lamb’s Conduit, erected in 1577. For the City there were the Moor fields, then enclosed, planted with trees and surrounded by shops; there were the Hoxton Fields, the Spa Fields of Clerkenwell, and the White Conduit Fields. It was the especial happiness of London at this time that from any part of the City the open country was accessible within a quarter of an hour. All around these fields sprang up places of amusement, pleasure gardens, and taverns, which I have described fully in considering the eighteenth century.

In the City itself the favourite resorts were, for the young men, the galleries of the Royal Exchange, which were occupied by shops for the sale of gloves, ribbons, laces, fans, scent, and such things. The shops were served by girls, whose pretty faces and ready tongues were the chief attraction for the young fellows, who went there to flirt rather than to buy. Some of the younger citizens also found the Piazza of Covent Garden a convenient place to lounge and saunter. There were attractions in the Piazzas, too, of the other sex. There was also the interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The coffee-houses quickly became a place of resort for the graver citizen in the evening. He would not go to the theatre, where the exhibition of actresses still offended his sense of propriety; he had formerly gone to the tavern, but a dish of coffee was far more wholesome than a bowl of punch, and discourse among men who were sober was much more instructive than that of men who were drunk.

Of course, there were still left plenty of those who stuck to the tavern and despised these new inventions of tea and coffee. Indeed, for business purposes the tavern continued to be used. Transactions of all kinds were conducted in a private room at a tavern, over a bottle. If a customer came up to London, the shopkeeper took him to the tavern when, in the Rose or the Sun, they performed their business. The coffee-house never took the place of the tavern in that respect. The most extraordinary secrecy was expected and maintained on either side over the smallest matter of trade. The number of taverns was then very great. They literally lined the two most important arteries, that from St. George’s, Southwark, to Bishopsgate Street Without, and that between the Royal Exchange and the Strand.

I have before me a pamphlet in doggerel verse of the year 1671 called _The Search after Claret Wine: A Visitation of the Vintners_.

The following is the dedication which enumerates the favourite wines:—

“To all Lovers, Admirers and Doters on Claret, (Who tho’ at Deaths-Door, yet can hardly forbear it) Who can Miracles credit, and fancy Red-Port To be Sprightly Puntack, and the best of the sort; To all Mornings-draught Men, who drink bitter Wine, To create a false Stomach against they’r to Dine; To all Tavern-kitchen Frequenters and Haunters, Who go thither to hear Mistress Cooks foolish Banters To Partake of a Dumpling, or Sop in the Pan; A Large Rummer Drank up, troop as fast as they can; To all sober Half-Pint Men, and serious Sippers; To all old Maudlin Drinkers, and 12 a Clock Bibbers; To all Drinking Committees, Knots, Clubs, Corporations Who while others are snoaring, they’r settling the Nations; To all the brisk Beaus who think Life but a Play, Who make Day like the Night, and turn Night into Day; To all Lovers of Red and White-Port, Syracuse, Barcelona, Navarr, or Canary’s sweet Juice; To all Alicant Tasters, and Malaga-Sots, To all Friends to Straw-Bottles, and Nicking Quart-Pots, To all Bacchus his Friends, who have Taverns frequented, This following Poem is Humbly Presented.”

The searchers after claret spend two days visiting the taverns and find none. I suppose that the war with France had caused a stoppage of the supply. In the same way, during the long war with France, 1793–1815, the people forgot their old taste for claret; when they drank it at all, it was heavy stuff. They visit eighty-eight taverns between Whitechapel and Temple Bar and at Westminster, and this without going out of the main streets. Many of these taverns are still remembered by the tokens which they issued for copper money. Most of these taverns were not hostels, and did not provide lodgings; they were taverns and nothing more; they were frequented, as has been said, by tradesmen during the day; in the evening there were societies, clubs, and trades, which held their meetings in the taverns. For instance, in the Mitre, Cheapside, afterwards called the Goose and Gridiron, the Society of Musicians met and gave their concerts. At the Cock and the Devil of Fleet Street the lawyers thronged.