Famous and Infamous Londoners E-Book

Peter de Loriol

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 365

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Beschreibung

A compilation of thoroughly researched true stories of Londoners through the ages, well known and little known alike - their lives, loves, pastimes and crimes. Their stories weave a tapestry of London through the ages.

Leseprobe

Famous & Infamous

Londoners

PETER DE LORIOL

First published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by

Sutton Publishing Limited

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Peter de Loriol, 2004, 2013

The right of Peter de Loriol to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5424 2

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Foreword

1. Bloody Kilburn

2. Will the Real Falstaff Come Forward?

3. Putney’s Two Devils

4. The Strand Cobbler

5. Hobson’s Choice

6. From Grace to Majesty

7. Keeper of the King’s Beasts

8. Madame Sin

9. Rapunzel’s Tower

10. Beware the Old Mother Redcap!

11. The Gilded Cage

12. Haute Cuisine

13. The Courtier, Conspirator, Wit & Rake of Parsons Green

14. Primrose Hill’s Beauty

15. The Sound of Music

16. The Kat’s Whiskers

17. A Battersea Tale

18. A Man of Distinction

19. A Belsize Affair

20. The French Philosopher

21. The Big Swiss Cheese

22. Strong Man

23. The Monk’s Carpet Factory

24. A Captain by Any Other Name

25. The Norwood Nightingale

26. The Brewer, his Wife & the Lexicographer

27. The Dragoon in Drag

28. My Lord’s Folly

29. The Epicurean Curate

30. And Now for Something Completely Different

31. An American at the Court of King George

32. The Man Who Weighed the World

33. At Death’s Door

34. An Academy of Substance

35. When All the Saints

36. Portrait of a Painter

37. Lady Be Good

38. Fall from Eden

39. Pitt’s Last Embrace

40. Mrs Siddons’s Paddington Idyll

41. A Duel of Wits

42. The Intrigues of Antraigues

43. La Dame Mal Gardée!

44. The Man Who Walked Alone

45. The Doctor & the Bodysnatcher

46. Robert Browning of Camberwell

47. A Death in the House

48. London’s Mother of Christ

49. A Quiet Affair

50. A Ghostly Influence

51. Wellington’s Last Stand

52. By Hook or by Crook

53. The Pineapple Gate Torso

54. Howard’s Way

55. Tooting’s Human Farm

56. Hip! Hip! Hooray!

57. The Bottle, the Artist & the Man

58. The Last of the Romantics

59. Girls Count Too!

60. Reach for the Stars

61. An Inconvenient Way to Die

62. The Lady with the Lamp

63. The Poet Painter

64. Cooking the Books

65. Flushed with Success

66. Tea, Travel & Treasures

67. When Irish Eyes Are Smiling

68. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

69. Play it Again, Sam

70. A Worthy Gentleman

71. The Forbes Road Tragedy

72. Bear Necessity

73. The Beloved Enchanter

74. Ice Cold in the Antarctic

75. The Great Detection

76. High Adventure

77. The Baboo from Bombay

78. A Blighted Spirit

79. Poisoned of Sydenham

80. The Devil Rides Out

81. J’Accuse

82. A Queen for Life

83. Where the Sun Also Rises

84. These Old Shades

85. An Officer and a Gentleman

86. A Magnificent Man & his Flying Machine

87. A Talent to Amuse

88. From a Cygnet to a Swan

89. A Life Before the Mast

90. The Bride in the Bath

91. The Bolshie of Battersea

92. A Moving Picture

93. True to Himself

94. Two’s Company

95. No Sex Please, We’re British

96. Where the Heart is . . .

97. The War of Words

98. Starman

99. Vive De Gaulle!

100. Generating the Computer

Bibliography

Foreword

People – you love them, you hate them, you understand them or you don’t. People are the lifeblood of one’s life and heritage. They make you tick, they make you scream, laugh, cry: their presence and their absence make the individual. Their lives form a rich tapestry through which you live yours. People are the masters – they dictate, they form and they emulate each other. People create the environment, be it village, town or city.

London was created by people, and it is the Londoners, whether native or passing through, who give the visitor their impressions of this great city. D.H. Lawrence, in his unfortunate stay in Hampstead, was to say of London that it was ‘geographically remote and personally very near – of the horrors of the middle distance, war, winter, the town, I would not speak’. Voltaire, the French philosopher, came to London on a sunlit and balmy day. His first impression was to liken the city to the Elysian Fields. He was later to revise his opinion when the winds blew, particularly when ‘the wind was in the East, everyone was very morose and there was murder abroad’. Astonished, he asked the reasons for such extremes of behaviour, and was told that in November and March he would see people hang themselves by the dozen – ‘Everyone’, he wrote, ‘looks stern and crossed and indisposed to form a desperate resolution.’ After all, he was informed, ‘it was in an east wind that Charles I was beheaded and James II dethroned’! Another was to describe the city and its people with venom, saying that ‘if you do not want to dwell with evil-doers, do not live in London’.

London and the people that live within it: the two are inextricably linked. London would be nothing without people and it is for this reason that I have selected just a over hundred different people, their lives, their loves, their passions, to tell the story of this great city from the twelfth to the twentieth century. Some led blameless normal lives, and some achieved greatness and recognition through their skills or selfless devotion to others, such as Sir Astley Paston Cooper, Bart, and Noel Coward. Some were misguided and committed atrocious crimes, such as James Greenacre and Ronald True. Others were reviled for their apparent difference, like Mother Red Cap. But they all lived in the mass that we today call London.

London’s mass would start in the City, and spread both east and west. The great developments of the seventeenth century following the Great Fire were followed by further development in the eighteenth century, turning the villages of Paddington, Camden and Kilburn into villa developments for the affluent. The arrival of the railways in the nineteenth century was to completely alter the face of London, creating huge areas of building around the newly created railway stations and engulfing whole villages and communities like Canonbury, Hampstead, Highgate, Kensal Green, Kensington, Chelsea, Fulham, Ealing, Brentford, Wimbledon, Wandsworth, Norwood, Norbury, Deptford and Greenwich into the new monster that is present-day London. Beneath our modern London stood, for instance, the mansion and park of the 3rd Earl of Peterborough, wit, raconteur and politician, in Parson’s Green. By Tooting Broadway stood Dr Drouet’s children’s ‘farm’ that was forcibly closed thanks to the writings of the journalist Charles Dickens. Chalk Farm, Camden and Kentish Town, now built up, were the pastoral scenes of duels and murder. Belsize Park, the gateway to Hampstead, was a mansion set in acres of countryside known for its riotous living. Norwood boasted tribes of gypsies in its huge woods, and large mansions of the rich and famous of the day. Southwark, long considered the sin-bin of London where ‘all manners of vice’ were perpetrated, is now an industrious and busy addition to the City.

People have streamed into London for different reasons. Some have fled from the provinces and from the continent, for real crimes or spurious ‘crimes against the state’, such as differences of religious or political opinions. Some came to find employment and fortune. Some stayed, some were murdered, others moved on, only to return. Their lives created London as it is, a vibrant, exciting and sometimes merciless city that continues to enthral and capture the minds of visitors and its people alike.

I would like to thank and acknowledge the following for their assistance and support:

Highbury Local Publications, Bromley Local Archives, the Camden Society, the Clapham Society, the Dulwich Museum, the Dulwich Society, the Ealing Historical Society, the Horniman Museum, the LB Camden Local Studies, the LB Ealing Local Studies, the LB Hammersmith and Fulham Local Studies Centre, the LB Lambeth Minet Archives, the LB Southwark Local Studies, the LB Wandsworth Local Studies for the use of the photograph of Mr Saklatvala and for their continued support, the LB Westminster Archives, the Nightingale Museum, the Norwood Society and the Wandsworth Museum.

I would also like to thank Mike Ashley, author of Starman, for the use of material and the photograph of Algernon Blackwood, and Sarah Hodgson, editorial director of Highbury Local Publications and valued friend, who took the bold step of asking me to write for her magazines many years ago and gave me the idea for this book. Lastly, but most importantly, I would like to thank my sub-editor-in-chief and selfless wife Janey, for her immeasurable and constant devotion, her positivity in times of stress and the time she has taken to correct my errant punctuation and my European capital letters!

I have made every reasonable effort to contact all copyright holders. Any errors that may have occurred are inadvertent and anyone who for any reason has not been contacted is invited to write to the publishers so that a full acknowledgement may be made in subsequent editions of this work.

Peter de Loriol

2004

Bloody Kilburn

STEPHENDE MORTONAND A TWELFTH-CENTURY FRATRICIDE

It is difficult to imagine that the large urban mass consisting mainly of Victorian development that is Kilburn was once a hamlet in the rural parish of Hampstead through which the little bourne or brook, the Kele, meandered. The Kele rose on the southern slopes of Hampstead, ran to Bayswater and fed the Serpentine. The ‘burn’ now forms part of the London sewerage system.

Kilburn remained a rural area well into the nineteenth century. One resident, an impecunious and fervent pedestrian John Pocock, left a diary of the years 1826–30: ‘11 August 1828 from Kilburn to Paddington before breakfast, with my father as far as Soho, on to Limehouse . . . came back to my uncle’s, had tea and came home very tired, having walked nearly 20 miles today’! The road to Kilburn was such that anyone walking even a mile northwards from Oxford Street found himself among fields and farmhouses.

Westminster Abbey was the original landlord. By the Reformation all church establishments including the Nunnery and Priory at Kilburn were secularised. The Priory, established in 1130, was situated in what is now known as St George’s Terrace. It was owned by a succession of families: the Warwicks, the Devonshires, the Howards and finally the Uptons. Ironically 300 years after the dissolution of the monasteries a new Catholic church was built in 1866 in Quex Road. In the twelfth century one Godwin, hermit at Kilburn, gave his hermitage to three nuns, ‘the Holy Virgins of St John the Baptist’. This was not the only medieval association with the area. One darker legend, a ‘crime passionel’ of the Middle Ages, occurred in Kilburn.

Kilburn Priory.

Stephen de Morton, a twelfth-century Kilburn gent, was infatuated with the wife of his brother, Sir Gervaise de Morton. The good lady did not reciprocate and even threatened to tell her husband. Undeterred, Stephen tried again, but the faithful wife would have none of it. He resolved to rid himself of his unwanted sibling and engineered a meeting in a quiet lane. There he stabbed him to death. Sir Gervaise fell on a nearby rock, his lifeblood seeping into it, dyeing it red, and uttering with his dying breath, ‘This stone shall be thy death bed’.

Stephen rushed back to Kilburn with the news that he had found his dead brother’s body. He went so far as to organise a manhunt. Thinking that his brother’s death would make his sister-in-law see sense, he hurried back to his dead brother’s house to woo her, only to be refused yet again. Furious, Stephen had the grieving widow imprisoned in a fetid dungeon and later placed in the local nunnery. He then embarked on a hedonistic lifestyle.

But time did not erase the memory of the dreadful deed. Stephen ordered that his brother’s body be removed to Kilburn and interred in a mausoleum expressly built for it. The mausoleum was made with the stone from the quarry near where he had murdered his brother, one of the stones being the one he had died on.

The moment Stephen set eyes on the finished mausoleum the stone began to seep blood. Horrified, the murderer confessed to the Bishop of London, donated his lands to the Priory at Kilburn and died soon afterwards.

Will the Real Falstaff Come Forward?

SIR JOHN FASTOLFF OF SOUTHWARK

Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff was a rotund, cowardly knight, a comical figure in four of his plays. He had originally intended the unworthy knight to be called Sir John Oldcastle, after a martyred leader of the Lollards. Sir John’s descendants, prominent courtiers, protested, however, so he changed the name to Falstaff, possibly based on the knight, Sir John Fastolff, of Southwark.

Sir John Fastolff (c. 1378–1459) was a completely different person to the comical and hapless knight in Shakespeare’s plays. He was a career soldier from Norfolk who rose to be a governor of Harfleur and the Bastille, Master of the Household of the Duke of Bedford, Regent of France, Lieutenant Governor of Normandy and Governor of Anjou and Maine. He was made a Knight of the Garter in 1426 and defeated the French at the ‘battle of the Herrings’ near Orleans in 1429. He was groundlessly accused of cowardice for retreating at the battle of Patay in 1429, which in fact was the fault of Lord Talbot’s mishandling of the situation. Fastolff demanded an enquiry and was acquitted. The news of his ‘cowardice’ reached England before his acquittal, and the English continued to consider the successful war leader and administrator as a coward. In the end, the only thing the original Fastolff may have had in common with Shakespeare’s burlesque character was his military service.

Despite these accusations, Fastolff continued to serve his king in many important posts; governor of Caen, ambassador and Privy Councillor. Once returned to England in 1440 he divided his time between his castle of Caister in Norfolk and his house at Southwark.

His Southwark house was on the river bank in Stoney Lane (now leading from Tooley Street to Pickleherring Street). It was probably one of the last great houses on the east side of London Bridge. It was large, with its own quay where a small private fleet of boats sailed to and from Caister, Yarmouth and London. He had powerful neighbours, the Abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, and the Abbot of Battle’s mansion with gardens on what is now the other side of Tooley Street.

In 1450 the Commons of Kent, under the leadership of Jack Cade, were reported to be approaching London. Sir John, who had already sent a servant, John Pain, to spy on the rebels, fortified his mansion and filled it with soldiers. John Pain was unmasked by the rebels and instead of being summarily executed he was asked to take a message to the worthy knight, for help and support against the king, and then return to fight for them. Naturally Pain gave a very detailed and succinct account of the size and strength of Jack Cade’s army to his lord. Fastolff then made him return, as part of his promise to Cade, to the rebel army while he and his retinue retreated across the river to the Tower of London.

Jack Cade and his thousands entered London, murdered Lord Saye and Sir James Cromer, the Sheriff of Kent, but stopped short of pillaging. The battle of London Bridge on the night of 5 July 1450 was long and bloody. In turn, the rebels were repulsed to Southwark, then the Londoners were beaten back to the bridge. By the morning both sides agreed to stop fighting until the next day on condition that no Londoner should set foot in Southwark and no Kentish man set foot in London. The rebellion was quickly suppressed.

Site of Sir John Fastolff’s house on Tooley Street.

Fastolff’s servant, Pain, fought on the bridge for the rebels and was one of the lucky ones to be captured and imprisoned. He was tortured and his jailers tried to force him to admit that his master had tried to fight against the king – but he would not admit to anything.

Fastolff, disgusted at his enemies’ antics, repaired to his Castle of Caister, rarely setting foot in Southwark again. It was his misfortune that he had been the scapegoat of his senior officer’s ineptitude while in France – something he was never to live down.

Putney’s Two Devils

THOMAS CROMWELL OF PUTNEY AND OLIVER CROMWELL

It’s ironic that two men who shaped modern Britain had two things in common: Putney, and the fact that they were related. Were it not for one, the other would have never been. One was a lawyer whose logical mind and incisive reasoning made his King the Head of State in both temporal and spiritual matters. The other was a progressive politician whose ‘vision’ of England was shared by many and whose leadership led to a regicide, the formation of an almost ‘republican’ Britain and the basis of the world’s most proficient army.

Cromwell is a name we associate with the execution of Charles I, one of the most austere periods in British history and with the ‘Puritans’, Yet Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) owed his original position, as a scion of one of Huntingdonshire’s leading gentry to the munificence of his great-great-great-granduncle Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485–1540).

Thomas Cromwell was the son of a Putney brewer, reputedly born on Bowling Green Hill. His rise from the articulate, intelligent son of an inebriated local businessman to Henry VIII’s supremely proficient administrator and legal adviser and the instrument of his monarch’s secession from the Church of Rome to secure a divorce from Katherine of Aragon, thereby securing for his king complete control of the Kingdom without interference from the Vatican theocracy, was nothing short of brilliant.

Thomas Cromwell, the ‘Hammer of the Monks’, became hugely wealthy on the caprice of a king. This son of Putney became Lord Great Chamberlain, Lord of the Manor of Wimbledon (which included Putney) and was created Earl of Essex by a grateful king for arranging his marriage to Anne of Cleves. Unfortunately a swift ascent in the king’s service made him many enemies and Henry’s fury at being presented with such an ugly wife gave them a weapon. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London and executed on the whim of his monarch – a whim the despondent monarch later bitterly regretted.

Thomas Cromwell’s niece, Katherine, married Morgan Williams of Putney, bringing him a substantial dowry provided mostly by her uncle. The Williams, in the second generation, dropped their patronymic for Cromwell and settled as substantial country gentry in Huntingdonshire, also acquiring lands in Fulham, notably a property called Passors.

Morgan Williams’ great-great-grandson, Oliver Cromwell (pictured), the future ‘Lord Protector’, was the son of a younger son. He was to become a tenant farmer before using family connections to become an MP. He converted to an extreme form of Protestantism in his early years, and this totally changed his life. His religious beliefs would motivate the rest of his life and colour his judgement, particularly when he became Lord Protector. In one instance he tried to have tennis abolished as it was associated with the excesses of the Court. He also tried to clamp down on Christmas celebrations, Saints’ Days and Holy Days as these were marked with sexual excesses. Yet he himself was known for a few pertinent incidents with some of his junior officers.

He joined the Army in 1640 at the beginning of the Civil War and was on active service in 1642, becoming Lieutenant General in 1643. He believed that he and his troops had been chosen by God to perform his will. By 1647 King Charles was under guard at Hampton Court and relations between Parliament and the army had become very strained. Cromwell decided to place his army between them and he chose Putney for a council of war. It met at St Mary’s Church in September 1647 and thrashed out some remarkably democratic doctrines such as ‘the poorest in England hath a life to live as the greatest’ and ‘a man is not bound to a system of government which he hath not had any hand in setting over him’. These ‘Putney debates’ were to last until 11 November under Cromwell’s chairmanship. It was also in Putney that the politically conscious Cromwell and his officers thrashed out their template for the future of the constitution – a republic or a monarchy. It was in 1649 when Charles’ head fell off the execution block, a ‘cruel necessity’ as Cromwell saw it, that England chose a republic.

The Strand Cobbler

HENRY VIII’S FRIENDSHIP WITH HIS LOCAL COBBLER

Henry VIII (1491–1547), when not attending to his wives or to affairs of state, would surreptitiously disguise himself and walk the streets of London at dead of night. Ostensibly, he would do this to check to see if the City constables were doing their job, but it was also freedom from his duties – a boon! He noticed a jolly, whistling cobbler who set up his stall early in the mornings on the Strand. Very early one morning, bored and needing someone to chat with, Henry deftly broke one of his heels and approached the cobbler’s stall.

The king asked the cobbler if he could re-heel his shoe. Very obligingly the cobbler told him he would do it in a trice – would the gentleman care to take a seat? This Henry duly did and, thirsty, asked if there were a local inn where he could find himself something to drink. Yes, indeed, there was one very near, open to all the carriers. The king borrowed a pair of shoes from the cobbler, asking him to bring the repaired shoe to him at the inn.

On his arrival at the inn with the mended shoe the cobbler affirmed that the shoe was well and truly mended and, when asked the price, twopence, the king gave him sixpence for his service and honesty and asked him to join him in a drink or two. The cobbler was happy to do so.

They both became merry, sang songs, told jokes and had a good time. The king told the cobbler his name, Harry Tudor, said he was well known at his place of work, the king’s Court, and he would be very happy to see him if he cared to visit. All he needed to do was ask for him and someone would bring him to him. The cobbler, completely unaware of his king’s name let alone his new friend’s identity, was very touched by this token of friendship and, doffing his hat, told Henry that he was one of the most honest men he had met and he would definitely visit him – would he care to return to his humble abode to share some strong but tasty home brew? This he did until the cobbler’s wife, Joan, told the cobbler he must do some work. The king left slightly the worse for wear and reiterated his offer.

Westminster Palace.

The cobbler took the king up on this suggestion, and dressed in his best clothes arrived at Court to ask the Yeomen of the Guard if they knew one Harry Tudor. Yes, they did. He asked if he could see his friend, and one led him through the sumptuous apartments. The cobbler thought that the yeoman had misheard. His drinking companion couldn’t possibly be living here. He stopped the yeoman and told him that he must have made a mistake – his friend was a plain, honest, merry fellow with whom he had had a few jars recently; his name was Harry Tudor and he might be a lord’s servant. The yeoman replied that he knew Harry Tudor very well and the cobbler should follow him. So he was led to the room where the king was with his courtiers. He announced that ‘one enquires for Harry Tudor’. The poor cobbler took fright and scuttled away, only to be caught and brought before the king.

He recounted his story. The king then asked him if anyone in the room looked like his drinking companion – well, the king looked vaguely like him but it couldn’t be him. Would he recognise his friend if he saw him? Oh yes. Then why didn’t he look for him in his cellar? The cobbler was conducted to the cellars.

The king put on his disguise and went to meet his friend. The cobbler recognised him immediately and told him the trouble he had in finding him. Harry Tudor then asked for a glass and wine and they both toasted the cobbler and the king. They quaffed more and the cobbler started singing and making Henry laugh. Some nobles came to see what the din was. The king was in the cellar, plainly clothed, drunk as a lord and laughing with a servant! They asked if there were a problem. It was only then that the cobbler realised who Harry Tudor was and begged forgiveness, to which the king replied that there was nothing to forgive!

Hobson’s Choice

THOMAS HOBSON OF CAMBRIDGE WHO FREQUENTED THE BLACK BULL IN BISHOPSGATE

Slowly old phrases are being replaced by hip new ones. The English language reinvents itself and evolves as the generations pass. Some of the choice phrases of yesteryear are tucked away in some book of phrase and fable and referred to when a particularly hard crossword is being puzzled over or when one wants to confound others by new-found erudition or to impress.

Such sayings or phrases as ‘How now, brown cow?’ or ‘Hobson’s Choice’ have all but gone through the proverbial window of obsolete language. Yet there is always a story behind these sayings, and such is the case with ‘Hobson’s Choice’. . .

The story begins, strangely enough, in the Black Bull Inn at Bishopsgate, where up to 1810 people might have noticed a strange fresco. The fresco was of an old, bearded, honest and earnest-looking man in Puritan garb, wearing a large felt hat, a long cloak and a ruff around his neck. A hundred-pound bag, on which is written ‘the fruitful mother of a hundred more’ hangs from his arm – showing that he was an astute businessman. The gentleman in question was Thomas Hobson (1544–1630), official carrier (a postman before the post office was invented) to the University of Cambridge. He had inherited this post from his father, together with his cart and eight horses. He carried everything from letters to humans from Cambridge to London.

The Black Bull Inn was the recognised hostelry for Cambridge carriers and one most frequently used by patrons of the stage in Elizabethan and Stuart times. Here plays and musical performances were staged and the inn’s patrons could view them comfortably from the building’s many galleries.

Thomas Hobson.

Hobson became rich through astute reasoning – he purchased about forty horses and then rented them out, and became the first person to be recorded as such. ‘Observing that the scholars rid hard, his manner was to keep a large stable of horses, with boots, bridles and whips to furnish the gentlemen at once without going from college to college to borrow’, said Steele of the Spectator. He also stabled his horses at the Black Bull Inn.

So as not to tire one horse out, or seem to favour one particular mount, Hobson insisted that the horses should be taken in strict rotation – ‘the horse nearest the door should start the first in course, this or none’. This would be his stock saying so that ‘Hobson’s Choice’ became a byword where the choice is apparent rather than real, since there is no alternative.

Judging by the frequent allusions to this worthy gentleman, he must have been one of the celebrities of the day. He had several portraits painted, one of which showed one of his horses, and his saddle and bridle were preserved in Cambridge Town Hall all through the nineteenth century. He became a friend to the great and the good. One such luminary was the poet John Milton, who penned two epitaphs to his old friend, one of which reads:

Rest that gives all men life, gave him his death, And too much breathing, put him out of breath.

Milton, an otherwise sober individual, indulged in a whole series of puns on Hobson and his trade. He wrote ‘his wain was his increase’ and ‘If I mayn’t carry, sure I’ll ne’er be fetched’. His last word was that ‘He died for heaviness that his cart was light’ – but then he had no choice!

From Grace to Majesty

PRINCESS ELIZABETH’SINCARCERATION IN HIGHGATE

The Old Hall, off South Grove in Highgate, consists of two distinct but adjoining parts, one Tudor and the other seventeenth-century. It is the most historically important house in the area. It was originally called Arundel House. Named after its seventeenth-century owners, the Earls of Arundel, it had previously belonged to the Cornwallis family. ‘Cornwalleis Esquire, hath a very faire house from which he may beholde with greite delight the staitlie citie of London, Westminter, Greenwych, the famous river Thamesyse and the country towards the south very farr’, said John Norden in 1593.

It was in this house that the young Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Bess, was briefly imprisoned before her eventual incarceration in the Tower. Henry VIII, in his libidinous and material ambitions, had created a Protestant state and had fathered seven children by three of his six unfortunate wives. Only three of these children survived him, of whom Elizabeth was one.

The sickly infant and only son King Edward VI, ‘God’s Imp’, succeeded him. Edward became very much the puppet of the ruling faction and a fanatical Protestant, whose Protestant legacy relied on his having children, but he died childless in 1553 leaving the succession open to his half-sister Mary, a fanatical Roman Catholic.

Princess Elizabeth.

Mary’s re-establishment of Catholicism and her betrothal to Philip of Spain produced an immediate backlash from the Protestant faction. The Earl of Devonshire and Sir Thomas Wyatt joined forces and led a failed insurrection to prevent the marriage.

Meanwhile the young Elizabeth was having a hard childhood. She had never known her mother’s love, for her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been beheaded, and Elizabeth had carried the stigma of bastardy, had faced terror and suspicion during her brother’s reign and the ignominy of continued suspicion by her sister. Popular and Protestant, Elizabeth was implicated, whether rightly or not, in Wyatt’s rebellion. Thus Sir Thomas Cornwallis, Treasurer of Calais and Comptroller of Queen Mary’s Household, was ordered with two other knights to arrest the 21-year-old princess and bring her to London. Cornwallis and a retinue of 250 arrived at Ashridge House in Hertfordshire the day after Wyatt’s arrest. It was late at night. Despite the princess’s pleas to wait until daybreak because she was unwell, the emissaries ‘came rushing into her Grace’s chamber unbidden’. Their orders were to bring her back ‘quick or dead’. Elizabeth protested that she was not well enough to travel but they would tolerate no opposition, informing her that she was to be ready at 9 the next morning. They had brought the queen’s litter to carry her.

She was carried ‘faint and feeble’ from Ashridge to Redbourn. They reached St Albans the next day and by the third day they had travelled as far as Mimms. By the fourth day the party had reached Sir Thomas Cornwallis’s house in Highgate, but by now the princess’s condition had deteriorated so much that they had to stay there that night and the following day.

When they eventually reached Whitehall, Mary refused to see her. Elizabeth was sent to the Tower in terror by the embittered and angry queen. She bravely told her warders that she was no traitor, ‘but as true a woman to the Queen’s Majesty as any’. Mary suspected much and didn’t believe Elizabeth when she swore that while Sir Thomas Wyatt may have written to her, she had never received anything from him.

There was no evidence, thus no justification for a trial and no warrant for incarceration. After a terrifying eight weeks in the Tower she was moved to Woodstock in Oxfordshire where she remained until 1555.

Three years later, a completely different woman returned to Highgate. The new Queen Elizabeth rode in her carriage from Hatfield House to London for her coronation. She was met at Highgate by the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Sheriffs, ‘who conducted her Majesty in great pomp to the City; where she was received with great acclamation both from Protestants and Papists, who seemed to vie with each other in their demonstrations of joy’!

Keeper of the King’s Beasts

THE ACTOR-MANAGER EDWARD ALLEYN’S SURPRISING SIDELINE

Edward Alleyn (1566–1626), the Elizabethan actor-manager and future founder of Dulwich College, was by the 1590s a widely respected actor and head of his company. The critics of the day said, ‘not Roscius nor Aesop, those tragedians admyred before Christ was borne, could ever perform more in action than famous Ned Allen’.

In 1594 he and his father-in-law, Philip Henslowe, became joint lessees of the Paris Bear Garden (an open theatre used for bear baiting) on Bankside, alongside the Globe, the Rose, the Fortune and the Swan theatres. This part of Southwark was the West End of its day, where the theatres flourished alongside other places of entertainment such as the semi-official whorehouses that straddled the South Bank and the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Bankside and all that it seemed to represent was regarded by the more puritanical as ‘Pleasure that was sin’. Sometimes, however, sin’s a pleasure – and indeed it was for Ned Allen and his partner. It was a goldmine!

The European traveller, Paul Hentzner, alluded to this pleasuredome of delights in 1597 where:

without the city are some theatres, where actors do represent almost everyday some tragedy or comedy . . . these are concluded with excellent music, a variety of dances amid the excessive applause of those that are present. There is also another place, built in the form of a theatre, which serves for the baiting of bulls and of bears; they are fastened behind, and then worried by great English Bull-dogs, but not without great risk to the dogs from the horns of the one, and the teeth of the other; and it sometimes happens they are killed on the spot: fresh ones are immediately supplied in the places of those that are wounded or tired. To this entertainment there often follows that of whipping a blinded bear, which is performed by five or six men, standing circularly with whips . . . and at these spectacles the English are constantly smoking tobacco.

The Bear Garden.

Flags were flown all around the Bear Garden before the performances and the bears’ keeper and a musician marched the bears through the streets. One of Alleyn’s own advertisements for the show is preserved in Dulwich.

Royalty patronised the gardens. Queen Elizabeth and the French ambassador witnessed bull and bear baiting in 1599, as did James I later. It was also the scene of an accident which did much to create Sunday as the ‘Sabbath’. A packed scaffolding structure collapsed, killing many of its occupants. The Lord Mayor, a Puritan, sent a formal notice to Lord Burleigh, as ‘a judgement of heaven for the violation of the Sabbath’, confusing the seventh day of the week with the first.

Despite his Puritan education James I legalised many of these amusements and published the Book of Sport. His was a benign reign for the upwardly mobile Alleyn, as Alleyn and Henslowe, anxious to make even more money out of their garden, cultivated the monarch. They provided him with dogs for his favourite sport, lion baiting. Alleyn became the ‘Keeper of the King’s wild beasts, or Master of the Royal Bear Garden’, and enjoyed further this lucrative post and the business it brought him. Some say that his yearly revenue from the Bear Garden alone was £500 (about £50,000 nowadays) and this was only the takings at the entrance! It didn’t account for the food and drink supplied by the clever Alleyn.

But the business did not prove as profitable as the King’s Master considered it should. Alleyn and Henslowe asked for larger and larger fees and privileges. In 1605 he was already purchasing tracts of land in Dulwich and in 1606 Alleyn engaged the carpenter Peter Streete (who had built the Globe Theatre in 1593 and the Fortune in 1599) to rebuild the Paris Garden in June 1606. It was to be completed by September but was only finished the following January.

Alleyn was to retain this sideline until shortly before his death when he sold his share to his father-in-law. By then its profits and those of his theatre had been heavily invested in his memorial, Dulwich College!

Madame Sin

ELIZABETH HOLLAND, QUEEN OF VICE IN SOUTHWARK

Southwark, confusingly called Borough, has been part of London’s history for the last 2,000 years. It has contributed in the field of transport, industry and all forms of entertainment.

Southwark High Street was, throughout the Roman occupation, the principal road in the country. All the way from the coast the route was lined with inns and, as the number of travellers increased, so did the inns; and with the inns, one or more prostitutes laid on by mine host or an equally astute businessman. Some of the ladies were independent and were known by such quaint names as ‘noctiluces’ (night-moths). Others, the twopenny whores, were known as ‘diabolares’, diabolical in the extreme. Southwark was the Trastevere (red light) quarter of London, where the ships would disgorge their panting seamen. It continued to be so for another seventeen centuries, at least!

There had been vain attempts to contain or even eradicate prostitution in London for many centuries. London’s ban on this game within its walls was effective, it seems, as by far the largest number of prostitutes was clustered in St Katherine’s, Bishopsgate, Cock Lane and around Holborn and Fleet Street in the fourteenth century. In 1339 London officially sanctioned prostitution in two districts; Cock Lane and Bankside. This area of Southwark was already notorious for its string of licensed brothels known as the Stews. The Southwark poll tax returns of 1381 identified seven men as being Stewmongers. These were the proprietors of the Bankside Stewhouses in the diocese of Winchester. By 1506 the Stewhouses had increased to eighteen. The Bishops of Winchester tacitly sanctioned their existence and regulated them through their officers. One record shows that the bishops tried to uphold the civil liberties of the whores because ‘olde customes that hath been usyd’ were being disregarded ‘to the gret displeasure of God . . . and utter undoing to all his pouere tenantis . . . and also to the gret multiplicacion of orrible synne upon the single women which ought to have thyre free goyng and commyng ate theire owne libertees’.

Many regulations were enforced upon the prostitutes: the Stewholders had to be married men; they were forbidden to sell anything other than their whores’ services; the prostitutes were forbidden to eat in their Stews’ houses; the Stew-holders and their wives were forbidden to hinder a prostitute’s comings and goings, and finally a prostitute was required to ‘ly still with’ a man until morning and was taxed like everybody else.

Bankhouses in Southwark.

One gentlewoman, Elizabeth Holland, was the most successful madam London has ever seen. She was born into county affluence in Elizabeth I’s reign. She was a beautiful and over-indulged child who became an imperious nymphomaniac. She married but her extramarital liaisons weren’t tolerated. She then became the mistress of an Italian and opened a de luxe brothel in the City, but was charged with ‘depravities and debaucheries’ in 1597.

Rich and powerful friends enabled her to open the Hollands Leaguer, the most exclusive, expensive and luxurious ‘Howse of Obscenities’ ever in Britain. Her slogan was ‘chastity is clene oute-of-date, a mere obsolete thynge’. Her bawdy house was a great mansion set in extensive grounds and only accessible over a drawbridge, right next to Bankside. Here she made a fortune and lived in splendour for thirty years, entertaining all creeds and races. A contemporary ballad jested:

I am a profest courtesan

What live by people’s sinne.

With half a dozen Punckes I keep,

I have grete coming in.

By the seventeenth century London was a bawdy city basking in the golden sunset of the Stuart monarchy. Thomas Nashe, the poet and playwright, performed so unsuccessfully that his inamorata was compelled to use an imported French device, a dildo. He also mentioned that there were ‘sixpenny whorehouses next dore to the Magistrate’ which couldn’t have carried on ‘if brybory did nott bestir the magistrates . . . Dishoneste Strumpettes . . . and everie one of them claimed to be a Gentlewoman’.

Rapunzel’s Tower

MISS SPENCER’S ELOPEMENT FROM CANONBURY TOWER

Highbury and Islington tube station is the gate to one of the most remarkable areas of London. Dilapidated eighteenth-century terraced houses survive side by side with modern blocks, and hidden elderly gems wink at me from around the corners. But I’m not looking for these! Cross over to Canonbury Place and the hubbub of the traffic on the main road disappears, leaving the visitor breathless with the knowledge that here time stands still. Here stand exquisite seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses around an impeccably manicured fenced garden. It was here that I asked a young lady if she knew of Canonbury Tower – my goal. The answer was a polite ‘No’, but maybe the tower in the far corner might resolve my unwelcome intrusion? Aha! A huge tower with massive oak doors! Its neighbour, Canonbury House, a handsome eighteenth-century mansion, has a tablet on its garden wall. This told me all. The story of Eliza Spencer’s elopement in the late seventeenth century unfolded.

Canonbury Tower.

The square red-brick sixteenth-century tower stands empty and defiant. It is, so tradition dictates, the remnant of the country retreat that Prior Bolton built in the early sixteenth century. The original house covered what is now Canonbury Place. Yet what remains seems to date from the tenure of Sir John Spencer, 1570–1609, who was a cloth worker from Suffolk. He became an alderman and eventually a Lord Mayor of the City of London – his wealth was legendary. His City residence was Crosby Hall, now transported to Chelsea Embankment. He was to make many alterations to his new country retreat, especially when Queen Elizabeth visited in 1581.

Sir John had an only daughter, Eliza or Elizabeth. Eliza, as the daughter of a rich man, was a perfect fruit to be plucked by a cash-strapped gent. The young man in question was a near neighbour, Lord Compton, profligate but a charmer. Spencer had other ideas and forbade his daughter to see him. She refused so he held her a virtual prisoner in her own home. Spencer attempted to show that she had been contracted in marriage to a son of Sir Arthur Henningham. He then tried to beat her into submission. The authorities had her placed in safekeeping while lawyers tried to settle the matter. One document put it that ‘if the obstinate and self-willed fellow shold persist in his doggedness and geve her nothing, the poore Lord should have a warme catch’. He held her prisoner in Canonbury Tower in 1599 as a last resort.