The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

/>
just been built St. James's Square and Jermyn Street. St. James's

Church had recently been opened for the accommodation of the

inhabitants of this new quarter.116 Golden Square, which was in

the next generation inhabited by lords and ministers of state,

had not yet been begun. Indeed the only dwellings to be seen on

the north of Piccadilly were three or four isolated and almost

rural mansions, of which the most celebrated was the costly pile

erected by CIarendon, and nicknamed Dunkirk House. It had been

purchased after its founder's downfall by the Duke of Albemarle.

The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street still preserve the

memory of the site.


He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded

part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and, was

sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock.117 On the

north the Oxford road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred

yards to the south were the garden walls of a few great houses

which were considered as quite out of town. On the west was a

meadow renowned for a spring from which, long afterwards, Conduit

Street was named. On the east was a field not to be passed

without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in a

place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years

before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the

dead carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly

believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and

could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life. No

foundations were laid there till two generations had passed

without any return of the pestilence, and till the ghastly spot

had long been surrounded by buildings.118


We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of the

streets and squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The

great majority of the houses, indeed. have, since that time, been

wholly, or in great part, rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts

of the capital could be placed before us such as they then were,

we should be disgusted by their squalid appearance, and poisoned

by their noisome atmosphere.


In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the

dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought,

cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the

thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of

Durham.119


The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space where the

rabble congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardigan

House and Winchester House, to hear mountebanks harangue, to see

bears dance, and to set dogs at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every

part of the area. Horses were exercised there. The beggars were

as noisy and importunate as in the worst governed cities of the

Continent. A Lincoln's Inn mumper was a proverb. The whole

fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every charitably

disposed grandee in the neighbourhood, and as soon as his

lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in

crowds to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many

accidents, and of some legal proceedings, till, in the reign of

George the Second, Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, was

knocked down and nearly killed in the middle of the Square. Then

at length palisades were set up, and a pleasant garden laid

out.120


Saint James's Square was a receptacle for all the offal and

cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. At

one time a cudgel player kept the ring there. At another time an

impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a shed for

rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons in which the

first magnates of the realm, Norfolk, Ormond, Kent, and Pembroke,

gave banquets and balls. It was not till these nuisances had

lasted through a whole generation, and till much had been written

about them, that the inhabitants applied to Parliament for

permission to put up rails, and to plant trees.121


When such was the state of the region inhabited by the most

luxurious portion of society, we may easily believe that the

great body of the population suffered what would now be

considered as insupportable grievances. The pavement was

detestable: all foreigners cried shame upon it. The drainage was

so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon became torrents.

Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury with which

these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill,

bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable

filth from the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. This flood

was profusely thrown to right and left by coaches and carts. To

keep as far from the carriage road as possible was therefore the

wish of every pedestrian. The mild and timid gave the wall. The

bold and athletic took it. If two roisterers met they cocked

their hats in each other's faces, and pushed each other about

till the weaker was shoved towards the kennel. If he was a mere

bully he sneaked off, mattering that he should find a time. If he

was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind

Montague House.122


The houses were not numbered. There would indeed have been little

advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen,

porters, and errand boys of London, a very small proportion could

read. It was necessary to use marks which the most ignorant could

understand. The shops were therefore distinguished by painted or

sculptured signs, which gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the

streets. The walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through

an endless succession of Saracens' Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears,

and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer

required for the direction of the common people.


When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking

about London became serious indeed. The garret windows were

opened, and pails were emptied, with little regard to those who

were passing below. Falls, bruises and broken bones were of

constant occurrence. For, till the last year of the reign of

Charles the Second, most of the streets were left in profound

darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with impunity:

yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceable citizens as another

class of ruffians. It was a favourite amusement of dissolute

young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking

windows, upsetting sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude

caresses to pretty women. Several dynasties of these tyrants had,

since the Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns and

Tityre Tus had given place to the Hectors, and the Hectors had

been recently succeeded by the Scourers. At a later period arose

the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and the yet more dreaded name of

Mohawk.123 The machinery for keeping the peace was utterly

contemptible. There was an Act of Common Council which provided

that more than a thousand watchmen should be constantly on the

alert in the city, from sunset to sunrise, and that every

inhabitant should take his turn of duty. But this Act was

negligently executed. Few of those who were summoned left their

homes; and those few generally found it more agreeable to tipple

in alehouses than to pace the streets.124


It ought to be noticed that, in the last year of the reign of

Charles the Second, began a great change in the police of London,

a change which has perhaps added as much to the happiness of the

body of the people as revolutions of much greater fame. An

ingenious projector, named Edward Heming, obtained letters patent

conveying to him, for a term of years, the exclusive right of

lighting up London. He undertook, for a moderate consideration,

to place a light before every tenth door, on moonless nights,

from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and from six to twelve of the clock.

Those who now see the capital all the year round, from dusk to

dawn, blazing with a splendour beside which the illuminations for

La Hogue and Blenheim would have looked pale, may perhaps smile

to think of Heming's lanterns, which glimmered feebly before one

house in ten during a small part of one night in three. But such

was not the feeling of his contemporaries. His scheme was

enthusiastically applauded, and furiously attacked. The friends

of improvement extolled him as the greatest of all the

benefactors of his city. What, they asked, were the boasted

inventions of Archimedes, when compared with the achievement of

the man who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day? In

spite of these eloquent eulogies the cause of darkness was not

left undefended. There were fools in that age who opposed the

introduction of what was called the new light as strenuously as

fools in our age have opposed the introduction of vaccination and

railroads, as strenuously as the fools of an age anterior to the

dawn of history doubtless opposed the introduction of the plough

and of alphabetical writing. Many years after the date of

Heming's patent there were extensive districts in which no lamp

was seen.125


We may easily imagine what, in such times, must have been the

state of the quarters of London which were peopled by the

outcasts of society. Among those quarters one had attained a

scandalous preeminence. On the confines of the City and the

Temple had been founded, in the thirteenth century, a House of

Carmelite Friars, distinguished by their white hoods. The

precinct of this house had, before the Reformation, been a

sanctuary for criminals, and still retained the privilege of

protecting debtors from arrest. Insolvents consequently were to

be found in every dwelling, from cellar to garret. Of these a

large proportion were knaves and libertines, and were followed to

their asylum by women more abandoned than themselves. The civil

power was unable to keep order in a district swarming with such

inhabitants; and thus Whitefriars became the favourite resort of

all who wished to be emancipated from the restraints of the law.

Though the immunities legally belonging to the place extended

only to cases of debt, cheats, false witnesses, forgers, and

highwaymen found refuge there. For amidst a rabble so desperate

no peace officer's life was in safety. At the cry of "Rescue,"

bullies with swords and cudgels, and termagant hags with spits

and broomsticks, poured forth by hundreds; and the intruder was

fortunate if he escaped back into Fleet Street, hustled,

stripped, and pumped upon. Even the warrant of the Chief Justice

of England could not be executed without the help of a company of

musketeers. Such relics of the barbarism of the darkest ages were

to be found within a short walk of the chambers where Somers was

studying history and law,