Part 16
Behind Leicester House, and on part of the ground which once formed Prince Henry Stuart’s military parade ground, there was a riding academy, kept by Major Foubert. In 1682, among the major’s resident pupils and boarders, was a handsome dare-devil young fellow, who was said to be destined for the Church, but who subsequently met his own destiny in quite another direction. His name was Philip Christopher Königsmark (Count, by title), and his furious yet graceful riding must have scared the quieter folks pacing the high road of the fields. He had with him, or rather _he_ was with an elder brother, Count Charles John. This elder Count walked Leicester Fields in somewhat strange company--a German Captain Vratz, Borosky, a Pole, and Lieutenant Stern, a third foreigner. To what purpose they associated was seen after that Sunday evening in February 1682, when three mounted men shot Mr. Thomas Thynne (Tom of Ten Thousand) in his coach, at the bottom of the Haymarket. Tom died of his wounds. Thynne had been shot because he had just married the wealthy child-heiress, Lady Ogle. Count Charles John thought _he_ might obtain the lady if her husband were disposed of. The necessary disposal of him was made by the three men named above, after which they repaired to the Counts lodgings and then scattered; but they were much wanted by the police, and so was the Count; when it was discovered that he had suddenly disappeared from the neighbourhood of the ‘Fields,’ and had gone down the river. He was headed, and taken at Gravesend. The subordinates were also captured. For some time indeed Vratz could not be netted. One morning, however, an armed force broke into a Swedish doctor’s house in Leicester Fields, and soon after they brought out Vratz in custody, to the great delight of the assembled mob. At the trial, the Count was acquitted. His younger brother, Philip, swore to an _alibi_, which proved nothing, and the King influenced the judges! The three hired murderers went to the gallows, and thought little of it. Vratz excused the deed, on the ground of murder not having been intended; ‘besides,’ said this sample of the Leicester Fields foreigner of the seventeenth century, ‘I am a gentleman, and God will deal with me accordingly.’ The two counts left England, and made their names notorious in Continental annals. The French riding-master shut up his school behind Leicester House, and removed to a spot where his name still lives: Foubert’s Passage, in Regent Street, opposite Conduit Street, is the site of the academy where that celebrated teacher once instructed young ladies and gentlemen how to ‘witch the world with noble horsemanship.’
We have spoken of the square being almost in the country. It was not the only one which was considered in the same light. In 1698 the author of a book called ‘Mémoires et Observations faites par un Voyageur en Angleterre,’ printed at the Hague in the above year, thus enumerates the London squares or _places_: ‘Les places qui sont dans Londres, ou pour mieux dire, dans les faubourgs, occupent des espaces qui, joints ensemble, en fourniraient un suffisant pour bâtir une grande ville. Ces places sont toutes environnées de balustrades, qui empêchant que les carrosses n’y passant. Les principales sont celles de Lincoln’s Inn Fields, de Moor Fields, de Southampton ou Blumsbury, de St. James, &c., Covent Garden; de Sohoe, ou Place Royale, du Lion rouge (Red Lyon), du Quarré d’Or (Golden Square), et de Leicester Fields.’
All these are said to be in the _suburbs_. Soho Square was called by fashionable people, King Square. It was only vulgar folk who used the prevailing name of Soho.
From early in Queen Anne’s days till late in those of George I., the representative of the Emperor of Germany resided in Leicester House. It was said that Jacobites found admittance there, for plotting or for refuge. It is certain that the imperial residence was never so tumultuously and joyously surrounded as when Prince Eugene arrived in Leicester Square, in the above Queen’s reign, on a mission from the Emperor, to induce England to join with him in carrying on the war. During his brief stay Leicester Fields was thronged with a cheering mobility and a bowing nobility and gentry, hastening to ‘put a distinguished respect’ on Marlborough’s great comrade, who was almost too modest to support the popular honours put on himself. Bishop Burnet and the Prince gossiping together at their frequent interviews at Leicester House have quite a picturesque aspect.
The imperial chaplain there was often as busy as his master. Here is a sample of one turn of his office:
One evening a man, in apparent hurry, knocked at the door of Leicester House, the imperial ambassador’s residence. He was bent on being married, and he accomplished that on which he was bent. This person was the son of a cavalier squire; he was also a Templar, for a time; but he hated law and Fleet Street, and he set up as near to being a courtier as could be expressed by taking lodgings in Scotland Yard, which was next door to the court then rioting at Whitehall. His name was Fielding, and his business was to drink wine, make love, and live upon pensions from female purses. Three kings honoured the rascal: Charles, James, and William; and one queen did him a good turn. For a long time Beau Fielding was the handsomest ass on the Mall. Ladies looked admiringly and languishingly at him, and the cruel beau murmured, ‘Let them look and die.’ Maidens spoke of him as ‘Adonis!’ and joyous widows hailed him ‘Handsome as Hercules!’ It was a mystery how he lived; how he maintained horses, chariot, and a brace of fellows in bright yellow coats and black sarcenet sashes. They were the Austrian colours; for Fielding thought he was cousin to the House of Hapsburg.
Supercilious as he was, he had an eye to the widows. His literature was in Doctors’ Commons, where he studied the various instances of marital affection manifested by the late husbands of living widows. One day he rose from the perusal of a will with great apparent satisfaction. He had just read how Mr. Deleau had left his relict a town house in Copthall Court, a Surrey mansion at Waddon, and sixty thousand pounds at her own disposal. The handsome Hercules resolved to add himself to the other valuables of which widow Deleau could dispose.
Fielding knew nothing whatever of the widow he so ardently coveted; but he, like love, could find out the way. There was a Mrs. Villars, who had dressed the widow’s hair, and she undertook, for a valuable consideration, to bring the pair gradually together. Fielding was allowed to see the grounds at Waddon. As he passed along, he observed a lady at a window. He put his hand on the left side of his waistcoat, and bowed a superlative beau’s superlative bow; and he was at the high top-gallant of his joy when he saw the graceful lady graciously smile in return for his homage. This little drama was repeated; and at last Mrs. Villars induced the lady to yield so very much all at once as to call with her on Fielding at his lodgings. Three such visits were made, and ardent love was made also on each occasion. On the third coming of Hero to Leander, there was a delicious little banquet, stimulating to generous impulses. The impulses so overcame the lady that she yielded to the urgent appeals of Mrs. Villars and the wooer, and consented to a private marriage in her lover’s chambers. The ecstatic Fielding leapt up from her feet, where he had been kneeling, clapt on his jaunty hat with a slap, buckled his bodkin sword to his side with a hilarious snap, swore there was no time like the present, and that he would himself fetch a priest and be back with him on the very swiftest of the wings of love.
That was the occasion on which, at a rather late hour, Fielding was to be seen knocking at the front door of Leicester House. When the door was opened his first inquiry was after the imperial ambassador’s chaplain. The beau had, in James II.’s days, turned Papist; and when Popery had gone out as William came in, he had not thought it worth while to turn back again, and was nominally a Papist still. When the Roman Catholic chaplain in Leicester House became aware of what his visitor required, he readily assented, and the worthy pair might be seen hastily crossing the square to that bower of love where the bride was waiting. The chaplain satisfied her scruples as to the genuineness of his priestly character, and in a twinkling he buckled beau and belle together in a manner which, as he said, defied all undoing.
‘Undoing?’ exclaimed the lover. ‘I marry my angel with all my heart, soul, body, and everything else!’--and he put a ring on her finger bearing the poesy _Tibi soli_--the sun of his life.
In a few days the bubble burst. The lady turned out to be no rich widow, but a Mrs. Wadsworth, who was given to frolicking, and who thought this the merriest frolic of her light-o’-love life. Fielding, who had passed himself off as a count, had not much to say in his own behalf, and he turned the ‘sun of his life’ out of doors. Whither he could turn he knew right well. He had long served all the purposes of the Duchess of Cleveland, the degraded old mistress of Charles II.; and within three weeks of his being buckled to Mrs. Wadsworth by the Leicester Square priest he married Duchess Barbara. Soon after he thrashed Mrs. Wadsworth in the street for claiming him as her lawful husband, and he beat the Duchess at home for asserting that Mrs. Wadsworth was right. Old Barbara did more. She put two hundred pounds into that lady’s hand, to prosecute Fielding for bigamy, and the Duchess promised her a hundred pounds a year for fifteen years if she succeeded in getting him convicted. And the handsome Hercules was convicted accordingly, at the Old Bailey, and was sentenced to be burnt in the hand; but the rascal produced Queen Anne’s warrant to stay execution. And so ended the Leicester Square wedding.
As long as the Emperor’s envoy lived in Leicester Fields he was the leader of fashion. Crowds assembled to see his ‘turn out.’ Sir Francis Gripe, in the ‘Busy-body,’ tempts Miranda by saying, ‘Thou shalt be the envy of the Ring, for I will carry thee to Hyde Park, and thy equipage shall surpass the what-d’ye-call-’em ambassador’s.’
Leicester House was, luckily, to let when the Prince of Wales quarrelled with his father, George I. In that house the Prince set up a rival court, against attending which the ‘London Gazette’ thundered dreadful prohibitions. But St. James’s was dull; Leicester House was ‘jolly’; and the fields were ‘all alive’ with spectators ‘hooraying’ the arrivals. Within, the stately Princess towered among her graceful maids. With regard to her diminutive husband it was said of his visitors,
In his embroidered coat they found him, With all his strutting dwarfs around him.
Most celebrated among the Leicester House maids of honour was the young, bright, silvery-laughing, witty, well-bred girl, who could not only spell, but could construe Cæsar--the maid of whom Chesterfield wrote--
Should the Pope himself go roaming, He would follow dear Molly Lepell.
And there rattled that other Mary--Mary Bellenden, laughing at all her lovers, the little, faithless Prince himself at the head of them. She would mock him and them with wit of the most audacious sort, and tell stories to the Princess, at which that august lady would laugh behind her fan, while the wildest, and not the least beautiful of the maids would throw back her handsome head, burst into uncontrollable laughter, and then run across to shock prim Miss Meadows, ‘the prude,’ with the same galliard story. Perhaps the most frolicksome nights at Leicester House were when the Princess of Wales was in the card-room, where a dozen tables were occupied by players, while the Prince, in another room, gave topazes and amethysts to be raffled for by the maids of honour, amid fun and laughter, and little astonishment when the prizes were found to be more or less damaged.
It was a sight for a painter to see these, with other beauties, leaving Leicester Fields of a morning to hunt with the Prince near Hampton. Crowds waited to see them return in the evening; and, when they were fairly housed again and dressed for the evening, lovers flocked around the young huntresses. Then Mary Bellenden snubbed her Prince and master, and walked, whispering, with handsome Jack Campbell; and Molly Lepell blushed and laughed encouragingly at the pleasant phrases poured into her ear by John, Lord Hervey. There Sophy Bellenden telegraphed with her fan to Nanty Lowther; and of _their_ love-making came mischief, sorrow, despair, and death. And there were dark-looking Lord Lumley and his Orestes, Philip Dormer Stanhope; and dark Lumley is not stirred to laugh--as the maids of honour do, silently--as Stanhope follows the Princess to the card-room, imitating her walk and even her voice. This was the ‘Chesterfield’ who thought himself a ‘gentleman.’ The Princess leans on Lady Cowper’s shoulder and affects to admire what she really scorns--the rich dress of the beautiful Mary Wortley Montague. On one of the gay nights in Leicester House, when the Princess appeared in a dress of Irish silk--a present from ‘the Irish parson, Swift’--the Prince spoke in such terms of the giver as to induce Lord Peterborough to remark, ‘Swift has now only to chalk his pumps and learn to dance on the tightrope, to be yet a bishop.’
The above are a few samples of life in the royal household in Leicester Square. There, were born, in 1721, the Duke of Cumberland, who was so unjustly called ‘Butcher’; in 1723, Mary, who married the ‘brute’ Prince of Hesse-Cassel; and in 1724, Louisa, who died--one of the unhappy English Queens of Denmark.
After the father of these children had become George II., his eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, established enmity with his sire, and an opposition court at Leicester House, at Carlton House (which he occupied at the same time), and at Kew.
Frederick, Prince of Wales, has been the object of heavy censure, and some of it, no doubt, was well-deserved. But he had good impulses and good tastes. He loved music, and was no mean instrumentalist. He manifested his respect for Shakespeare by proposing that the managers of the two theatres should produce all the great poet’s plays in chronological order, each play to run for a week. The Prince had some feeling for art, and was willing to have his judgment regulated by those competent to subject it to rule.
In June 1749, some tapestry that had belonged to Charles I. was offered to the Prince for sale. He was then at Carlton House, and he forthwith sent for Vertue. The engraver obeyed the summons, and on being ushered into the presence he found a group that might serve for a picture of _genre_ at any time. The Prince and Princess were at table waiting for dessert. Their two eldest sons, George and Edward, then handsome children, stood in waiting, or feigned the service, each with a napkin on his arm. After they had stood awhile in silence, the Prince said to them, ‘This is Mr. Vertue. I have many curious works of his, which you shall see after dinner.’ Carlton House was a store of art treasures. The Prince, with Luke Schaub in attendance and Vertue accompanying, went through them all. He spoke much and listened readily, and parted only to have another art-conference in the following month.
The illustrious couple were then seated in a pavilion, in Carlton House garden. The Prince showed both knowledge and curiosity with respect to art; and the party adjourned to Leicester House (Leicester Square), where Mr. Vertue was shown all the masterpieces, with great affability on the part of Frederick and his consort. The royal couple soon after exhibited themselves to the admiring people, through whom they were carried in two chairs over Leicester Fields back to Carlton House. Thence the party repaired to Kew, and the engraver, after examining the pictures, dined at the palace, ‘though,’ he says, ‘being entertained there at dinner was not customary to any person that came from London.’
During the tenancy of Frederick, Prince of Wales, Leicester House was the scene of political intrigues and of ordinary private life occurrences: Carlton House was more for state and entertainment. Leicester House and Savile House, which had been added to the former, had their joyous scenes also. The story of the private theatricals carried on in either mansion has been often told. The actors were, for the most part, the Prince’s children. He who was afterwards George III. was among the best of the players, but he had a good master. After his first public address as king, Quin, proud of his pupil, exclaimed, ‘I taught the boy to speak.’ Some contemporary letter-writers could scarcely find lofty phrases enough wherewith to praise these little amateurs. Bubb Doddington, who served the Prince of Wales and lost his money at play to him (‘I’ve nicked Bubb!’ was the cry of the royal gambler, when he rose from the Leicester House card-tables with Bubb’s money in his pocket), Bubb, I say, was not so impressed by the
## acting of these boys and girls. He rather endured than enjoyed it.
On January 11, 1750, all that he records in his diary is, ‘Went to Leicester House to see “Jane Grey” acted by the Prince’s children.’ In the following May, Prince Frederick William was born in Leicester House, ‘the midwife on the bed with the Princess, and Dr. Wilmot standing by,’ and a group of ladies at a short distance. The time was half an hour after midnight. ‘Then the Prince, the ladies, and some of us,’ says Doddington, ‘sat down to breakfast in the next room--then went to prayers, downstairs.’ In June the christening took place, in Leicester House, the Bishop of Oxford officiating. ‘Nobody of either sex was admitted into the room but the actual servants’ (that is, the ladies and gentlemen of the household) ‘except Chief Justice Willes and Sir Luke Schaub.’ Very curious were some of the holiday rejoicings on this occasion. For example, here is a ‘setting out’ from Leicester House to make a day of it, on June 28: ‘Lady Middlesex’ (the Prince’s favourite), ‘Lord Bathurst, Mr. Breton, and I’ (writes Bubb) ‘waited on their Royal Highnesses to Spitalfields, to see the manufactory of silk, and to Mr. Carr’s shop, in the morning. In the afternoon the same company, with Lady Torrington in waiting, went in private coaches to Norwood Forest, to see a settlement of Gipsies. We returned and went to Bettesworth, the conjurer, in hackney coaches.... Not finding him we went in search of the little Dutchman, but were disappointed; and concluded the particularities of this day by supping with Mrs. Cannon, the Princess’s midwife.’ Such was the condescension of royalty and royalty’s servants in the last century!
In March, of the following year, Bubb Doddington went to Leicester House. The Prince told him he ‘had catched cold’ and ‘had been blooded.’ It was the beginning of the end. Alternately a little better and much worse, and then greatly improved, &c., till the night of the 20th. ‘For half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread-and-butter and drank coffee.’ He was ‘suffocated’ in a fit of coughing; ‘the breaking of an abscess in his side destroyed him. His physicians, Wilmot and Lee, knew nothing of his distemper.... Their ignorance, or their knowledge, of his disorder, renders them equally inexcusable for not calling in other assistance.’ How meanly this prince was buried, how shabbily everyone, officially in attendance, was treated, are well known. The only rag of state ceremony allowed this poor Royal Highness was, that his body went in one conveyance and his bowels in another--which was a compliment, no doubt, but hardly one to be thankful for.
The widowed Princess remained in occupation of the mansion in which her husband had died. One of the pleasantest domestic pictures of Leicester House is given by Bubb Doddington, under date November 17, 1753:--
The Princess sent for me to attend her between eight and nine o’clock. I went to Leicester House, expecting a small company and a little musick, but found nobody but her Royal Highness. She made me draw a stool and sit by the fireside. Soon after came in the Prince of Wales and Prince Edward, and then the Lady Augusta, all in an undress, and took their stools and sat round the fire with us. We continued talking of familiar occurrences till between ten and eleven, with the ease and unreservedness and unconstraint, as if one had dropped into a sister’s house that had a family, to pass the evening. It is much to be wished that the Princes conversed familiarly with more people of a certain knowledge of the world.
The Princess, however, did not want for worldly knowledge. About this time the Princess Dowager of Wales was sitting pensive and melancholy, in a room in Leicester House, while the two Princes were playing about her. Edward then said aloud to George, ‘Brother, when we are men, you shall marry, and I will keep a mistress.’ ‘Be quiet, Eddy,’ said his elder brother, ‘we shall have anger presently for your nonsense. There must be no mistresses at all.’ Their mother thereon bade them, somewhat sharply, learn their nouns and pronouns. ‘Can you tell me,’ she asked Prince Edward, ‘what a pronoun is?’ ‘Of course I can,’ replied the ingenuous youth; ‘a pronoun is to a noun what a mistress is to a wife--a substitute and a representative.’