Old and New London, A Narrative of its History, its People and its Places. Illustrated with Numerous Engravings from the Most Authentic Sources. vol 3
Thornbury, Walter
1872-78
Chapter XLVI: Whitehall, and its Historical Reminiscences (continued).
Chapter XLVI: Whitehall, and its Historical Reminiscences (continued).
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In the published in , we read, It was not rebuilt, however; and gradually the royal family removed from to , which thenceforward became known as the head-quarters of the English Court. | |
On page there will be found a copy of a curious outline print giving a bird's-eye view of Palace as it appeared after the fire of . In this engraving a sort of lawn, divided into parterres, projects into the river, while modern mansions of the classical style have taken | |
p.370 | the place of the old low semi-Gothic houses which previously figured in the foreground. |
It is true that after the Restoration Charles II. had made a partial at Horace Walpole, in his mentions, as a mark of Charles's taste, that he erected at curious sun-dials. He also collected again a considerable part of the treasures which had been dissipated, and added suites of apartments for the use of his abandoned favourites. James II., too, was occupying at the time of the unexpected invasion by the Dutch. He is reported to have caused the weather-vane, which still remains, to be erected on the roof of the palace, in order that he might judge whether or not the elements were favourable to his enemies. | |
Palace, nevertheless, only now exists as a fragment. says Mr. Edward M. Barry,
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There were in the neighbourhood of this palace; the on the site of the present Privy Council Office, and the other near the junction of and with . The are often confounded together, but the former is the most frequently mentioned in history in connection with distinguished persons. Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, of brothers to whom Shakespeare's Works were dedicated, held the Cock-pit apartments at under the Crown, and from a window of his apartment saw his sovereign, Charles I., walk from St. James's to the scaffold. At his death in -, Oliver Cromwell took possession of the rooms, and here, as Mr. Peter Cunningham tells us, he addressed his letter to his aged mother, Elizabeth Bourchier, giving an account of the battle of Dunbar. Here he was waited upon by a deputation from the Parliament, desiring him to and here Milton and Andrew Marvell, his secretaries, and Waller and Dryden, were his frequent guests. Though averse, by principle, to dramatic entertainments, Oliver Cromwell liked the organ, and took John Hingston, the organist of Charles I., into his own employ. He used often to summon him to play before him at the Cock-pit in , near which he resided. Hingston, it appears, used to have concerts at his own house, at which Cromwell would often be present. In of these musical entertainments Sir Roger L'Estrange happened to be a performer. As he did not leave the room when the Protector entered, his cavalier friends gave him the name of and the name was so serious an annoyance to him after the Restoration, that in he published a pamphlet, entitled in which he clears himself from the charge of Republican tendencies, and relates the affair just as it happened :--
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The great died at on the , after a protracted illness, and amidst the raging of a terrific storm. During his last illness Cromwell became so depressed and debilitated that he would allow no barber to come near him; and his beard, instead of being cut in a certain fashion, grew all over his face. After his death the [extra_illustrations.3.370.1] , having been carefully embalmed, and was afterwards buried with more than regal honours in Henry VII.'s Chapel in . John Evelyn, in his under date of , tells us how that he
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The ultimate fate of Cromwell's body has at different periods given rise to much controversy from the Restoration down to the present time. It is asserted that after the Restoration it was | |
p.371 | taken out of his grave, together with the bodies of Ireton (Cromwell's son-in-law) and Bradshaw; the latter, as President of the High Court of Justice, having pronounced sentence of death on Charles I. The bodies are then said to have been taken in carts to the in , and on the , the anniversary of King Charles's death, to have been removed on sledges to Tyburn, where they were hanged until sunset, and then taken down and beheaded, their bodies buried in a deep pit under the gallows, and their heads stuck upon the top of Hall, where at that time sentinels walked. |
A strong corroboration of the main incidents of this story is to be found in the of the late Mr. Cyrus Redding, and resting on the authority of Horace Smith, of the authors of &c. Redding writes under date about or :-- he adds, It remains, then, on record that persons, both men of the world and of large experience, and yet so different from each other in character as Horace Smith and Cyrus Redding, were satisfied with the evidence brought before them to prove its being genuine nearly years ago. | |
In , , p. , we read that
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According to some authorities, the remains were privately conveyed from and interred next to those of Mrs. Claypole, Oliver Cromwell's favourite daughter, in Northamptonshire, in accordance with his own wish, the funeral in being a mock ceremonial. According to others, the remains were conveyed to the field of Naseby, and interred at midnight in the very spot where he made his last victorious charge, the field being afterwards ploughed over that his enemies might not discover the spot. Another account, indorsed by Heath, the author of the --who, by the way, contradicts himself, as he afterwards goes on to describe the exhumation in the abbey and the subsequent gibbeting--is that as the body was decomposed and corrupt to such an extent that it was impossible either to embalm or publicly bury it, it was encased in lead and flung into the Thames at midnight. Oldmixon adds that it was thrown into To say nothing of the intrinsic improbability of these accounts, of the fact that neither Cromwell nor his friends were likely to anticipate any indignity being offered to his remains, of the difficulty of secretly conveying the corpse either to Northamptonshire or to Naseby, of the physical impossibility of decomposition necessitating a hurried burial in the Thames-though this is certainly the best | |
p.372 p.373 | authenticated theory--there is, as we shall see, every reason to believe that he was actually interred near his mother and his daughter in the Abbey. , there is the fact that none of the leading men of the day had any suspicion that the funeral procession, of which we have many elaborate accounts, was a mock ceremonial. Secondly, Cromwell would naturally desire to lie with his mother and daughter in the national mausoleum among those whom he must have looked on as his royal predecessors. Thirdly, Noble, a trustworthy and sensible historian, distinctly says, in his memoirs of the that the body was deposited in , under a magnificent hearse of wax, on the spot subsequently occupied by the tomb of the Duke of Buckingham, adding that at the Restoration Of this Noble gives a fac-simile. He then goes on to say that he saw the receipt of the money paid to John Lewis, a mason, for exhuming the bodies of |
Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. This account is corroborated by the following passage in a work entitled, by Thomas Cromwell :-- &c. says a writer in the for , he adds, On the opposite side, however, we have the testimony of those who actually inspected Cromwell's head on the spikes. (), writes Pepys; arid in the diary of a M. Sainthill, a Spanish ambassador of the time, quoted in , series , vol. iii., we find the following entry:
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With reference to the above subject, it may be added that in the register-book of the parish of Deddington, in Oxfordshire, there is the following somewhat singular entry:--
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It may be remembered that in Cromwell returned from to , with the keys of the in his pocket, after having dissolved the Parliament, as he subsequently explained to the Parliament assembled in the Council Chamber here. | |
George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, was the next tenant of the Cock-pit at , shortly before the Restoration. These apartments were confirmed to the Duke by Charles II., and he died here in . We have already given our readers a good deal of information respecting the private relations of the Duke in our account of the Strand. Then came to reside here George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who died in . After the disastrous fire in , in , the Cock-pit was converted into offices for the Privy Council; and in , in the Council Chamber, Guiscard assassinated that noble collector of books and patron of men of letters-Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. The Cock-pit retained its original name long after the change of its use, for the minutes of the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury were dated from the as late as the year , if not later. The () refers to the Council Chamber as
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Here is a graphic description of Court life at in the gay days of our Stuart kings:-- wrote Grace and Philip Wharton in their
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Some account of the carried on at the Cock-pit in former times, and of cock-fighting in general, may not be out of place here. Fitzstephen, who wrote the life of Archbishop Becket, in the reign of Henry II., is the of our writers that mentions cock-fighting, describing it as the sport of school-boys on Shrove Tuesday. The Cock-pit, it appears, was the school, and the master was the comptroller and director of the sport. From this time, at least, the diversion, however absurd and even impious, was continued among us. It was followed, though disapproved and prohibited, in the year of Edward III.; also in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth. It has been by some called a royal diversion, and, as every knows, the [extra_illustrations.3.374.1] was erected by a crowned head, for the more magnificent celebration of the sport. It was | |
p.375 | prohibited, however, by of the Acts of Oliver Cromwell, . |
British cocks are mentioned by Caesar; but the actual notice of cock-fighting, as an established sport of the Londoners, occurs in Fitzstephen, who traces it back to the reign of Henry II. From Edward III. down to the days of the Regencywhen the late Lord Lonsdale treated the allied sovereigns in to an exhibition of it--and, perhaps, we may say even to our own time, it has been a fashionable amusement with a certain set of individuals. Henry VIII., as everybody knows, added a cock-pit to his new palace at ; and even the learned pedant, James I., if we are correctly informed, used to go to witness the sport twice a week. | |
says Defoe, in his (),
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That cock-fighting was the original appropriation of the pit of our theatres has been supposed by some who support their view by such quotations as the following:--
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In the , , is given an English epigram, by Sir Charles Sedley, wherein the following lines, which imply, as it would seem, as if the cock had suffered this annual barbarity by way of punishment for crime :
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Cock-fighting, it would appear, was peculiarly an English amusement in the and eighteenth centuries. The characteristics of this brutal sport may be gathered from the remark of a contemporary writer, who, addressing, a friend in Paris, tells him that it is worth while to come to England, if it be only to see an election and a cock-pit match.
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says Stow,
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It remains only to add that there were in the century, in London and its suburbs, a variety of places where the sport of cock-fighting was practised: the best known were the Royal Cock-pit, in the ; in , St. Giles'; in at the New , in St. George's-in-the-East, and in Old , over . Cock-pits, therefore, in the good old Stuart times, must have been pretty evenly distributed among all classes of the community. The Royal Cock-pit, it will be remembered, afforded to Hogarth characters for what has been epigrammatically and wittily termed
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We have said that very little, indeed nothing, of old retains. From the -fitth volume of the we learn that the last portion of it, an embattled doorway of the Tudor date and style, was removed in . years or so previously a stone apartment with a groined roof, no doubt a portion of the old palace, was discovered by Mr. Sidney Smirke, F.S.A., in the basement of Cromwell House, in Yard; and it seems probable, on referring to Fisher's plan (of which we have given a copy on p. ), that it formed part of the winecellar. Its identity was established by a doorway, bearing in its spandrils the arms of Wolsey and of the see of York. | |
Footnotes: [extra_illustrations.3.370.1] body lay in state at Somerset House [extra_illustrations.3.374.1] Cock-pit at Whitehall [] Cock Fight in the time of Charles I. |
