A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume I Part 3

Horace Walpole has left a description of King George which is worth citation. "The person of the King," he says, "is as perfect in my memory as if I saw him yesterday; it was that of an elderly man, rather pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins; not tall, of an aspect rather good than august, with a dark tie-wig, a plain coat, waistcoat and breeches of snuff-colored cloth, with stockings of the {59} same color, and a blue ribbon over all." George was fond of heavy dining and heavy drinking. He often dined at Sir Robert Walpole's, at Richmond Hill, where he used to drink so much punch that even the d.u.c.h.ess of Kendal endeavored to restrain him, and received in return some coa.r.s.e admonition in German. He was shy and reserved in general, and he detested all the troublesome display of royalty. He hated going to the theatre in state, and he did not even care to show himself in front of the royal box; he preferred to sit in another and less conspicuous box with the d.u.c.h.ess of Kendal and Lady Walsingham. On the whole, it would seem as if the inclination of the English people for the Hanoverian dynasty was about to be tried by the severest test that fate could well ordain. A dull, stolid, and profligate king, fond of drink and of low conversation, without dignity of appearance or manner, without sympathy of any kind with the English people and English ways, and without the slightest knowledge of the English language, was suddenly thrust upon the people and proclaimed their king. Fortunately for the Hanoverian dynasty, the English people, as a whole, had grown into a mood of comparative indifference as to who should rule them so long as they were let alone. It was impossible that a strong feeling of loyalty to any House should burn just then in the breast of the great majority of the English people. Those who were devoted to the Stuarts and those who detested the Stuarts felt strongly on the subject this way or that, and they would therefore admire or detest King George according to their previously acquired political principles. But to the ordinary Englishman it only seemed that England had lately been trying a variety of political systems and a variety of rulers; that one seemed to succeed hardly better than the other; that so long as no great breakdown in the system took place, it mattered little whether a Stuart or a Brunswick was in temporary possession of the throne.

Within a comparatively short s.p.a.ce of time the English Parliament had deposed Charles the First; the Protectorate had been {60} tried under Cromwell; the Restoration had been brought about by the adroitness of Monk; James the Second, a Catholic, had come to the throne, and had been driven off the throne by William the Third; William had established a new dynasty and a new system, which was no sooner established than it had to be succeeded by the introduction to the throne of one of the daughters of the displaced House of Stuart.

England had not had time to become attached, or even reconciled, to any of these succeeding rulers, and the English people in general--the English people outside the circle of courts and Parliament and politics--were well satisfied when George came to the throne to let any one wear the crown who did not make himself and his system absolutely intolerable to the nation.

[Sidenote: 1714--"A King and no King."]

The old-fashioned romantic principle of personal loyalty, unconditional loyalty--the loyalty of Divine right--was already languishing unto death. It was now seen for the last time in effective contrast with what we may call the modern principle of loyalty. The modern principle of loyalty to a sovereign is that which, having decided in favor of monarchical government and of an hereditary succession, resolves to abide by that choice, and for the sake of the principle and of the country to pay all respect and homage to the person of the chosen ruler. But the loyalty which still clung to the fading fortunes of the Stuarts was very different from this, and came into direct contrast with the feelings shown by the majority of the people of England towards the House of Hanover. Though faults and weaknesses beyond number, weaknesses which were even worse than actual faults, tainted the character and corroded the moral fibre of every successive Stuart prince, the devotees of personal loyalty still clung with sentiment and with pa.s.sion to the surviving representatives of the fallen dynasty.

Poets and balladists, singers in the streets and singers on the mountain-side, were, even in these early days of George the First, inspired with songs of loyal homage in favor of the son of James the Second. Men {61} and women in thousands, not only among the wild romantic hills of Scotland, but in prosaic North of England towns, and yet more prosaic London streets and alleys, were ready, if the occasion offered, to die for the Stuart cause. Despite the evidence of their own senses, men and women would still endow any representative of the Stuarts with all the virtues and talents and graces that might become an ideal prince of romance. No one thought in this way of the successors of William the Third. No one had had any particular admiration for Queen Anne, either as a sovereign or as a woman; n.o.body pretended to feel any thrill of sentimental emotion towards portly, stolid, sensual George the First. About the King, personally, hardly anybody cared anything. The ma.s.s of the English people who accepted him and adhered to him did so because they understood that he represented a certain quiet homely principle in politics which would secure tranquillity and stability to the country. They did not ask of him that he should be n.o.ble or gifted or dignified, or even virtuous.

They asked of him two things in especial: first, that he would maintain a steady system of government; and next, that he would in general let the country alone. This is the feeling which must be taken into account if we would understand how it came to pa.s.s that the English people so contentedly accepted a sovereign like George the First. The explanation is not to be found merely in the fact that the Stuarts, as a race, had discredited themselves hopelessly with the moral sentiment of the people of England. The very worst of the Stuarts, Charles the Second, was not any worse as regards moral character than George the First, or than some of the Georges who followed him. In education and in mental capacity he was far superior to any of the Georges. There were many qualities in Charles the Second which, if his fatal love of ease and of amus.e.m.e.nt could have been kept under control, might have made him a successful sovereign, and which, were he in private life, would undoubtedly have made him an {62} eminent man. But the truth is that the old feeling of blind unconditional homage to the sovereign was dying out; it was dying of inanition and old age and natural decay.

Other and stronger forces in political thought were coming up to jostle it aside, even before its death-hour, and to occupy its place. A king was to be in England, for the future, a respected and honored chief magistrate appointed for life and to hereditary office. This new condition of things influenced the feelings and conduct of hundreds of thousands of persons who were not themselves conscious of the change.

This was one great reason why George the First was so easily accepted by the country. The king was in future to be a business king, and not a king of sentiment and romance.

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CHAPTER V.

WHAT THE KING CAME TO.

[Sidenote: 1714--Estimate of population]

The population of these islands at the close of the reign of Queen Anne was probably not more than one-fifth of its present amount. It is not easy to arrive at a precise knowledge with regard to the number of the inhabitants of England at that time, because there was no census taken until 1801. We have, therefore, to be content with calculations founded on the number of houses that paid certain taxes, and on the register of deaths. This is of course not a very exact way of getting at the result, but it enables us to form a tolerably fair general estimate. According to these calculations, then, the population of England and Wales together was something like five millions and a half; the population of Ireland at the same time appears to have been about two millions; that of Scotland little more than one. But the distribution of the population of these countries was very different then from that of the present day. Now the great cities and towns form the numerical strength of England and Scotland at least, but at that time the agricultural districts had a much larger proportion of the population than the towns could boast of. London was then considered a vast and enormous city, but it was only a hamlet when compared with the London which we know. Even then it absorbed more than one-tenth of the whole population of England and Wales. At the beginning of the reign of King George the First, London had a population of about seven hundred thousand, and it is a fact worthy of notice, that rapidly as the {64} population of England has grown between that time and this, the growth of the metropolis has been even greater in proportion. The City and Westminster were, at the beginning of George's reign, and for long after, two distinct and separate towns; between them still lay many wide s.p.a.ces on which men were only beginning to build houses.

Fashion was already moving westward in the metropolis, obeying that curious impulse which seems to prevail in all modern cities, and which makes the West End as eagerly sought after in Paris, in Edinburgh, and in New York, as in London. The life of London centred in St. Paul's and the Exchange; that of Westminster in the Court and the Houses of Parliament. All around the old Houses of Parliament were lanes, squares, streets, and gate-ways covering the wide s.p.a.ces and broad thoroughfares with which we are familiar. Between Parliament Buildings and the two churches of St. Peter and St. Margaret ran a narrow, densely crowded street, known as St. Margaret's Lane. The spot where Parliament Street now opens into Bridge Street was part of an uninterrupted row of houses running down to the water-gate by the river. The market-house of the old Woollen Market stood just where Westminster Bridge begins. The Parliament Houses themselves are as much changed as their surroundings. St. Stephen's Gallery now occupies the site of St. Stephen's Chapel, where the Commons used to sit.

Westminster Hall had rows of little shops or booths ranged all along each wall inside; they had been there for generations, and they certainly did not add either to the beauty or the safety of the ancient hall. In the early part of the seventeenth century some of them took fire and came near to laying in ashes one of the oldest occupied buildings in the world. Luckily, however, the fire was put out with slight damage, but the dangerous little shops were suffered to remain then and for long after.

[Sidenote: 1714--Old London]

The Lesser London of that day lives for us in contemporary engravings, in the pages of the _Spectator_ and the {65} _Tatler_, in the poems of Swift and Pope, in the pictures of Hogarth. Hogarth's men and women belong indeed to a later generation than the generation which Bolingbroke dazzled, and Marlborough deceived, and Arbuthnot satirized, and Steele made merry over. But it is only the men and women who are different; the background remains the same. New actors have taken the parts; the costumes are somewhat altered, but the scenes are scarcely changed. There may be a steeple more or a sign-board less in the streets that Hogarth drew than there were when Addison walked them, but practically they are the same, and remained the same for a still later generation. Maps of the time show us how curiously small London was.

There is open country to the north, just beyond Bloomsbury Square; Sadler's Wells is out in the country, so is St. Pancras, so is Tottenham Court, so is Marylebone. At the east Stepney lies far away, a distant hamlet. Beyond Hanover Square to the west stretch fields again, where Tyburn Road became the road to Oxford. There is very little of London south of the river.

The best part of the political and social life of this small London was practically lived in the still smaller area of St. James's, a term which generally includes rather more than is contained within the strict limits of St. James's parish. If some Jacobite gentleman or loyal Hanoverian courtier of the year 1714 could revisit to-day the scenes in which he schemed and quarrelled, he would find himself among the familiar names of strangely unfamiliar places. St. James's Park indeed has not altered out of all recognition since the days when Duke Belair and my Lady Betty and my Lady Rattle walked the Mall between the hours of twelve and two, and quoted from Congreve about laughing at the great world and the small. There were avenues of trees then as now.

Instead of the ornamental water ran a long ca.n.a.l, populous with ducks, which joined a pond called--no one knows why--Rosamund's Pond. This pond was a favorite trysting-place for happy lovers--"the sylvan deities and rural {66} powers of the place, sacred and inviolable to love, often heard lovers' vows repeated by its streams and echoes"--and a convenient water for unhappy lovers to drown themselves in, if we may credit the _Tatler_. St. James's Palace and Marlborough House on its right are scarcely changed; but to the left only Lord G.o.dolphin's house lay between it and the pleasant park where the deer wandered. Farther off, where Buckingham Palace now is, was Buckingham House. It was then a stately country mansion on the road to Chelsea, with semicircular wings and a sweep of iron railings enclosing a s.p.a.cious court, where a fountain played round a Triton driving his sea-horses. On the roof stood statues of Mercury, Liberty, Secrecy, and Equity, and across the front ran an inscription in great gold letters, "_Sic Siti Laetantur Lares_." The household G.o.ds might well delight in so fair a spot and in the music of that "little wilderness full of blackbirds and nightingales," which the bowl-playing Duke who built the house lovingly describes to his friend Shrewsbury.

[Sidenote: 1714--Old London]

Most of the streets in the St. James's region bear the names they bore when King George first came to London. But it is only in name that they are unchanged. The street of streets, St. James's Street, is metamorphosed indeed since the days when grotesque signs swung overhead, and great gilt carriages lumbered up and down from the park, and the chairs of modish ladies crowded up the narrow thoroughfares.

Splendid warriors, fresh from Flanders or the Rhine, clinked their courtly swords against the posts; red-coated country gentlemen jostled their wondering way through the crowd; and the Whig and Tory beaux, with ruffles and rapiers, powder and perfume, haunted the coffee-houses of their factions. Not a house of the old street remains as it was then; not one of the panelled rooms in which minuets were danced by candle-light to the jingle of harpsichord and tinkle of spinet, where wits planned pamphlets and pointed epigrams, where statesmen schemed the overthrow of {67} ministries and even of dynasties, where flushed youth punted away its fortunes or drank away its senses, and staggered out, perhaps, through the little crowd of chairmen and link-boys cl.u.s.tered at the door, to extinguish its foolish flame in a duel at Leicester Fields. All that world is gone; only the name of the street remains, as full in its way of memories and a.s.sociations as the S. P.

Q. R. at the head of a munic.i.p.al proclamation in modern Rome.

The streets off St. James's Street, too, retain their ancient names, and nothing more--King Street, Ryder Street, York Street, Jermyn Street, the spelling of which seems to have puzzled last century writers greatly, for they wrote it "Jermyn," "Germain," "Germaine," and even "Germin." St. James's Church, Wren's handiwork, is all that remains from the age of Anne, with "the steeple," says Strype, fondly, "lately finished with a fine spire, which adds much splendor to this end of the town, and also serves as a landmark." Perhaps it sometimes served as a landmark to Richard Steele, reeling happily to the home in "Berry" Street, where his beloved Prue awaited him. St. James's Square has gone through many metamorphoses since it was first built in 1665, and called the Piazza. In 1714 there was a rectangular enclosure in the centre, with four pa.s.sages at the sides, through which the public could come and go as they pleased. In a later generation the inhabitants railed the enclosure round, and set in the middle an oval basin of water, large enough to have a boat upon it. In old engravings we see people gravely punting about on the quaint little pond. The fulness of time filled in the pond, and set up King William the Third instead in the middle of a gra.s.sy circle. It would take too long to enumerate all the changes that our Georgian gentleman would find in the London of his day. Some few, however, are especially worth recording.

He would seek in vain for the "Pikadilly" he knew, with its stately houses and fair gardens. It was almost a country road to the left of St. James's Street, between the Green Park and Hyde Park, {68} with meadows and the distant hills beyond. Going eastward he would find that a Henrietta Street and a King Street still led into Covent Garden; but the Covent Garden of his time was an open place, with a column and a sun-dial in the middle. Handsome dwellings for persons of repute and quality stood on the north side over those arcades which were fondly supposed by Inigo Jones, who laid out the spot, to resemble the Piazza in Venice. Inigo Jones built the church, too, which is to be seen in the "Morning" plate of Hogarth's "Four Times of the Day." This church was destroyed by fire in 1795, and was rebuilt in its present form by Hardwick.

[Sidenote: 1714--Anne's London]

Charing Cross was still a narrow spot where three streets met; what is now Trafalgar Square was covered with houses and the royal mews. St.

Martin's Church was not built by Gibbs for a dozen years later, in 1726. Soho and Seven Dials were fashionable neighborhoods; Mrs.

Theresa Cornelys's house of entertainment, of which we hear so much from the writers of the time of Anne, was considered to be most fashionably situated; amba.s.sadors and peers dwelt in Gerrard Street; Bolingbroke lived in Golden Square. Traces of former splendor still linger about these decayed neighborhoods; paintings by Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth's master and father-in-law, and elaborate marble mantel-pieces, with Corinthian columns and entablatures, still adorn the interiors of some of these houses; bits of quaint Queen Anne architecture and finely wrought iron railings still lend an air of faded gentility to some of the dingy exteriors. Parts of London that are now fashionable had not then come into existence. Grosvenor Square was only begun in 1716, and it was not until 1725 that the new quarter was sufficiently advanced for its creator, Sir Richard Grosvenor, to summon his intending tenants to a "splendid entertainment," at which the new streets and squares were solemnly named.

Though we of to-day have seen a good deal of what are called Anne and Georgian houses, of red brick, {69} curiously gabled, springing up in all directions, we must not suppose that the London of 1714 was chiefly composed of such cheerful buildings. Wren and Vanbrugh would be indeed surprised if they could see the strange works that are now done, if not in their name, at least in the name of the age for which they built their heavy, plain, solid houses. We can learn easily enough from contemporary engravings what the princ.i.p.al London streets and squares were like when George the Elector became George the King. There are not many remains now of Anne's London, but Queen Anne's Gate, some few houses in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, and here and there a house in the City preserve the ordinary architecture of the age of Anne.

Marlborough House bears witness to what it did in the way of more pretentious buildings.

The insides of these houses were scarcely less like the "Queen Anne revival" of our time than the outsides. The rooms were, as a rule, sparingly furnished. There would be a centre-table, some chairs, a settee, a few pictures, a mirror, possibly a spinet or musical instrument of some kind, some shelves, perhaps, for displaying the Chinese and j.a.panese porcelain which every one loved, and, of course, heavy window-curtains. Smaller tables were used for the incessant tea-drinking. Large screens kept off the too frequent draughts.

Handsomely wrought stoves and andirons stood in the wide fireplaces.

The rooms themselves were lofty; the walls of the better kind wainscoted and carved, and the ceilings painted in allegorical designs.

Wall-papers had only begun to come into use within the last few years of Anne's reign; windows were long and narrow, and small panes were a necessity, as gla.s.s-makers had not yet attained the art of casting large sheets of gla.s.s. The stairs were exceedingly straight; it was mentioned as a recommendation to new houses that two persons could go up-stairs abreast. The rents would seem curiously low to Londoners of our time; houses could be got in Pall Mall for two hundred a year, and in good parts of the town for thirty, forty, and {70} fifty pounds a year. Lady Wentworth, in 1705, describes a house in Golden Square, with gardens, stables, and coach-house, the rent of which was only threescore pounds a year. Pretty riverside houses let at from five to ten pounds a year. Lodgings would seem cheap now, though they were not held so then, for Swift complains of paying eight shillings a week, when he lodged in Bury Street, for a dining-room and bedroom on the first floor.

[Sidenote: 1714--"Not without danger walk these streets"]

There was no general numbering of houses in 1714; that movement of civilization did not take place until 1764. Places were known by their signs, or their vicinity to a sign. "Blue Boars," "Black Swans," and "Red Lions" were in every street, and people lived at the "Red Bodice,"

or over against the "Pestle." The _Tatler_ tells a story of a young man seeking a house in Barbican for a whole day through a mistake in a sign, whose legend read, "This is the Beer," instead of "This is the Bear." Another tried to get into a house at Stocks Market, under the impression that he was at his own lodgings at Charing Cross, being misled by the fact that there was a statue of the King on horseback in each place. Signs were usually very large, and jutted so far out from the houses that in narrow streets they frequently touched one another.

As it was the fashion to have them carefully painted, carved, gilded, and supported by branches of wrought iron, they were often very costly, some being estimated as worth more than a hundred guineas.

The ill-paved streets were too often littered with the refuse which careless householders, reckless of fines, flung into the open way. In wet weather the rain roared along the kennel, converting all the acc.u.mulated filth of the thoroughfare into loathsome mud. The gutter-spouts, which then projected from every house, did not always cast their cataracts clear of the pavement, but sometimes soaked the unlucky pa.s.ser-by who had not kept close to the wall. Umbrellas were the exclusive privilege of women; men never thought of carrying them.

Those whose business or pleasure called them abroad in rainy {71} weather, and who did not own carriages, might hire one of the eight hundred two-horsed hackney carriages; jolting, uncomfortable machines, with perforated tin sashes instead of window-gla.s.ses, and grumbling, ever-dissatisfied drivers. There were very few sedan chairs; these were still a comparative novelty for general use, and their bearers were much abused for their drunkenness, clumsiness, and incivility.

The streets were always crowded. Coaches, chairs, wheelbarrows, fops, chimney-sweeps, porters bearing huge burdens, bullies swaggering with great swords, bailiffs chasing some impecunious poet, cutpurses, funerals, christenings, weddings, and street fights, would seem from some contemporary accounts to be invariably mixed up together in helpless and apparently inextricable confusion. The general bewilderment was made more bewildering by the very babel of street cries bawled from the st.u.r.dy lungs of orange-girls, chair-menders, broom-sellers, ballad-singers, old-clothes men, and wretched representatives of the various jails, raising their plaintive appeal to "remember the poor prisoners." The thoroughfares, however, would have been in still worse condition but for the fact that so much of the pa.s.senger traffic of the metropolis was done by water and not by land.

The wherries on the Thames were as frequent as the gondolas on the ca.n.a.ls of Venice. Across the river, down the river, up the river, pa.s.sengers hurried incessantly in the swift little boats that plied for hire, and were rowed by one man with a pair of sculls, or two men with oars. Despite the numbers of the river steamers at present, and the crowds who take advantage of them, it may well be doubted whether so large a proportion of the pa.s.senger traffic of London is borne by the river in the days of Queen Victoria as there was in the days of Queen Anne.

Darkness and danger ruled the roads at night with all the horrors of the Rome of Juvenal. Oil lamps flickered freely in some of the better streets, but even these were not lit so long as any suggestion of twilight served for {72} an excuse to delay the illumination. When the moon shone they were not lit at all. Link-boys drove a busy trade in lighting belated wanderers to their homes, and saving them from the perils of places where the pavement was taken up or where open sewers yawned. Precaution was needful, for pitfalls of the kind were not always marked by warning lanterns. Footpads roamed about, and worse than footpads. The fear of the Mohocks had not yet faded from civic memories, and there were still wild young men enough to rush through the streets, wrenching off knockers, insulting quiet people, and defying the watch. Indeed the watch were, as a rule, as unwilling to interfere with dangerous revellers as were the billmen of Messina, and seem to have been little better than thieves or Mohocks themselves.

They are freely accused of being ever ready to levy black-mail upon those who walked abroad at night by raising ingenious accusations of insobriety and insisting upon being bought off, or conveying their victim to the round-house.

[Sidenote: 1714--Clubs]

The Fleet Ditch, which is almost as much of a myth to our generation as the stream of black Cocytus itself, was an unsavory reality still in the London which George the First entered. It was a tributary of the Thames, which, rising somewhere among the gentle hills of Hampstead, sought out the river and found it at Blackfriars. At one time it was used for the conveyance of coals into the city, and colliers of moderate size used to ascend it for a short distance. But towards the end of Anne's reign, and indeed for long before, it had become a mere trickling puddle, discharging its filth and refuse and sewage into the river, and poisoning the air around it.

May Fair was still, and for many years later, celebrated in the now fashionable quarter which bears its name. The fair lasted for six weeks, and left about six months' demoralization behind it. "Smock races"--that is to say, races run by young women for a prize of a laced chemise, the compet.i.tors sometimes being attired only in their smocks--were still to be seen in Pall Mall and {73} various other places. This popular amus.e.m.e.nt was kept up in London until 1733, and lingered in country places to a much later time. Bartholomew Fair was scarcely less popular, or less renowned for its specialty of roast sucking-pig, than in the days when Ben Jonson's Master Little-Wit, and his wife Win-the-Fight, made acquaintance with its wild humors. There is a colored print of about this time which gives a sufficiently vivid presentment of the fair. At Lee and Harper's booth the tragedy of "Judith and Holofernes" is announced by a great glaring, painted cloth, while the platform is occupied by a gentleman in Roman armor and a lady in Eastern attire, who are no doubt the princ.i.p.al characters of the play. A gaudy Harlequin and his brother Scaramouch invite the attention of the pa.s.sers-by. In another booth rope-dancing of men and women is offered to the less tragically minded, and in yet another the world-renowned Faux displays the announcement of his conjuring marvels.

A peep-show of the siege of Gibraltar allures the patriotic.

Toy-shops, presided over by attractive damsels, lure the light-hearted, and the light-fingered too, for many an intelligent pickpocket seizes the opportunity to rifle the pocket of some too occupied customer.

There is a revolving swing, and go-carts are drawn by dogs for the delight of children. Hucksters go about selling gin, aniseed, and fruits, and large booths offer meat, cider, punch, and skittles. The place is thronged with visitors and beggars. A portly figure in a scarlet coat and wearing an order is said to be no less a person than Sir Robert Walpole, who is rumored to have occasionally honored the fair with his presence.

Few of the clubs that play so important a part in the history of last-century London had come into existence in 1714. The most famous of them either were not yet founded, or lived only as coffee or chocolate houses. There had been literary a.s.sociations like the "Scriblerus" Club, which was started by Swift, and was finally dissolved by the quarrels of Oxford and Bolingbroke. The {74} "Sat.u.r.day" and "Brothers" Clubs had been political societies, at both of which Swift was all powerful, but they, too, were no more. The "Kit-Kat" Club, of mystic origin and enigmatic name, with all its loyalty to Hanover and all its memories of bright toasts, of Steele, Addison, and G.o.dfrey Kneller, had pa.s.sed away in 1709, and met no more in Shire Lane, off Fleet Street, or at the "Upper Flask" Inn at Hampstead. It had not lived in vain, according to Walpole, who declared that its patriots had saved the country. Within its rooms the evil-omened Lord Mohun had broken the gilded emblem of the crown off his chair. Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, who was secretary to the club, querulously insisted that the man who would do that would cut a man's throat, and Lord Mohun's fatal career fully justified Tonson's judgment. If the Kit-Kat patriots had saved the country, the Tory patriots of the October Club were no less prepared to do the same. The October Club came first into importance in the latest years of Anne, although it had existed since the last decade of the seventeenth century. The stout Tory squires met together in the "Bell" Tavern, in narrow, dirty King Street, Westminster, to drink October ale, under Dahl's portrait of Queen Anne, and to trouble with their fierce, uncompromising Jacobitism the fluctuating purposes of Harley and the crafty counsels of St. John. The genius of Swift tempered their hot zeal with the cool air of his "advice." Then the wilder spirits seceded, and formed the March Club, which retained all the angry Jacobinism of the parent body, but lost all its importance. There were wilder a.s.sociations, like the h.e.l.l-fire Club, which, under the presidency of the Duke of Wharton, was distinguished for the desperate attempts it made to justify its name. But it was, like its president, short lived and soon forgotten. There are fantastic rumors of a Calves' Head Club, organized in mockery of all kings, and especially of the royal martyrs. It was said by obscure pamphleteers to be founded by John Milton; but whether the body ever had any real existence seems now to be uncertain.

{75}

[Sidenote: 1714--Coffee-houses]

Next to the clubs came the "mug-houses." The mug-houses were political a.s.sociations of a humbler order, where men met together to drink beer and denounce the Whigs or Tories, according to their convictions. But at this time the coffee-houses occupied the most important position in social life. There were a great many of them, each with some special a.s.sociation which still keeps it in men's memories. At Garraway's, in Change Alley, tea was first retailed at the high prices which then made tea a luxury. The "Rainbow," in Fleet Street, the second coffee-house opened in London, is mentioned in the _Spectator_; the first was Bowman's, in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill. Lloyd's, in Lombard Street, was dear to Steele and Addison. At Don Saltero's, by the river at Chelsea, Mr. Salter exhibited his collection of curiosities and delighted himself, and no one else, by playing the fiddle. At the "Smyrna" Prior and Swift were wont to receive their acquaintances.

From the "St. James's," the last house but one on the south-west corner of St. James's Street, the _Tatler_ dated its foreign and domestic news, and conferred fame on its waiter, Mr. Kidney, "who has long conversed with and filled tea for the most consummate politicians." It was the head-quarters of Whigs and officers of the Guards; letters from Stella were left here for Swift, and here in later years originated Goldsmith's "Retaliation." Will's, at the north corner of Russell Street and Bow Street, famous for its memories of Dryden and for the _Tatler's_ dramatic criticisms, had ceased to exist in 1714. Its place was taken by b.u.t.ton's, at the other side of Russell Street, started by Addison in 1712. Here, later, was the lion-head letter-box for the _Guardian_, designed by Hogarth. At Child's, in St. Paul's Church-yard, the _Spectator_ often smoked a pipe. Sir Roger de Coverley was beloved at Squire's, near Gray's Inn Gate. Slaughter's, in St. Martin's Lane, was often honored by the presence first of Dryden, and then of Pope. Serle's, near Lincoln's Inn, was cherished by the law. At the "Grecian," in Devereux Court, Strand, learned men met and {76} quarrelled; a fatal duel was once fought in consequence of an argument there over the accent on a Greek word. At the "Grecian,"

too, Steele amused himself by putting the action of Homer's "Iliad"

into an exact journal and planning his "Temple of Fame." From White's chocolate-house, which afterwards became the famous club, came Mr.

Isaac Bickerstaff's "Accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment." The "Cocoa Tree" was the Tory coffee-house, in St.

James's Street. Ozinda's chocolate-house, next to St. James's Palace, was also a Tory resort, and its owner was arrested in 1715 for supposed complicity in Jacobite conspiracy.

[Sidenote: 1714--Humors of the time]

To these coffee and chocolate houses came all the wit and all the fashion of London. Men of letters and statesmen, men of the robe and men of the sword, lawyers, dandies, poets, and philosophers, met there to discuss politics, literature, scandal, and the play. There were often very strange figures among the motley crowd behind the red-curtained windows of a St. James's coffee-house. The gentleman who made himself so agreeable to the bar-maid or who chatted so affably about the conduct of the allies or the latest news from Sweden, might meet you again later on if your road lay at all outside town, and imperiously request you to stand and deliver. But of all the varied a.s.sembly the strangest figures must have been the beaux and exquisites, in all their various degrees of "dappers," "fops," "smart fellows,"

"pretty fellows," and "very pretty fellows." They made a brave show in many-colored splendor of attire, heavily scented with orange-flower water, civet-violet, or musk, with large falbala periwigs, or long, powdered duvilliers, with snuff-boxes and perspective gla.s.ses perpetually in their hands, and dragon or right Jamree canes, curiously clouded and amber headed, dangling by a blue ribbon from the wrist or the coat-b.u.t.ton. The staff was as essential to an early Georgian gentleman as to an Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the cane-carrying custom incurred the frequent attacks of the satirists.