Old and New London Part 25

That excellent man, Howard, visiting Bridewell in 1783, gives it a bad name, in his book on "Prisons." He describes the rooms as offensive, and the prisoners only receiving a penny loaf a day each. The steward received eightpence a day for each prisoner, and a hemp-dresser, paid a salary of 20, had the profit of the culprits' labour. For bedding the prisoners had fresh straw given them once a month. It was the only London prison where either straw or bedding was allowed. No out-door exercise was permitted. In the year 1782 there had been confined in Bridewell 659 prisoners.

In 1790, Pennant describes Bridewell as still having arches and octagonal towers of the old palace remaining, and a magnificent flight of ancient stairs leading to the court of justice. In the next room, where the whipping-stocks were, tradition says sentence of divorce was p.r.o.nounced against Katherine of Arragon.

"The first time," says Pennant, "I visited the place, there was not a single male prisoner, but about twenty females. They were confined on a ground floor, and employed on the beating of hemp. When the door was opened by the keeper, they ran towards it like so many hounds in kennel, and presented a most moving sight. About twenty young creatures, the eldest not exceeding sixteen, many of them with angelic faces divested of every angelic expression, featured with impudence, impenitency, and profligacy, and clothed in the silken tatters of squalid finery. A magisterial--a national--opprobrium! What a disadvantageous contrast to the _Spinhaus_, in Amsterdam, where the confined sit under the eye of a matron, spinning or sewing, in plain and neat dresses provided by the public! No traces of their former lives appear in their countenances; a thorough reformation seems to have been effected, equally to the emolument and the honour of the republic. This is also the place of confinement for disobedient and idle apprentices. They are kept separate, in airy cells, and have an allotted task to be performed in a certain time. They, the men and women, are employed in beating hemp, picking oak.u.m, and packing of goods, and are said to earn their maintenance."

A writer in "Knight's London" (1843) gives a very bad account of Bridewell. "Bridewell, another place of confinement in the City of London, is under the jurisdiction of the governors of Bridewell and Bethlehem Hospitals, but it is supported out of the funds of the hospital. The entrance is in Bridge Street, Blackfriars. The prisoners confined here are persons summarily convicted by the Lord Mayor and aldermen, and are, for the most part, petty pilferers, misdemeanants, vagrants, and refractory apprentices, sentenced to solitary confinement; which term need not terrify the said refractory offenders, for the persons condemned to solitude," says the writer, "can with ease keep up a conversation with each other from morning to night. The total number of persons confined here in 1842 was 1,324, of whom 233 were under seventeen, and 466 were known or reputed thieves. In 1818 no employment was furnished to the prisoners. The men sauntered about from hour to hour in those chambers where the worn blocks still stood and exhibited the marks of the toil of those who are represented in Hogarth's prints.

"The treadmill has been now introduced, and more than five-sixths of the prisoners are sentenced to hard labour, the 'mill' being employed in grinding corn for Bridewell, Bethlehem, and the House of Occupation. The 'Seventh Report of the Inspectors of Prisons on the City Bridewell' is as follows:--'The establishment answers no one object of imprisonment except that of safe custody. It does not correct, deter, nor reform; but we are convinced that the a.s.sociation to which all but the City apprentices are subjected proves highly injurious, counteracts any efforts that can be made for the moral and religious improvement of the prisoners, corrupts the less criminal, and confirms the degradation of the more hardened offenders. The cells in the old part of the prison are greatly superior to those in the adjoining building, which is of comparatively recent erection, but the whole of the arrangements are exceedingly defective. It is quite lamentable to see such an injudicious and unprofitable expenditure as that which was incurred in the erection of this part of the prison.'"

Latterly Bridewell was used as a receptacle for vagrants, and as a temporary lodging for paupers on their way to their respective parishes.

The prisoners sentenced to hard labour were put on a treadmill which ground corn. The other prisoners picked junk. The women cleaned the prison, picked junk, and mended the linen. In 1829 there was built adjoining Bedlam a House of Occupation for young prisoners. It was decided that from the revenue of the Bridewell hospital (12,000) reformatory schools were to be built. The annual number of contumacious apprentices sent to Bridewell rarely exceeded twenty-five, and when Mr.

Timbs visited the prison in 1863 he says he found only one lad out of the three thousand apprentices of the great City. In 1868 (says Mr.

n.o.ble) the governors refused to receive a convicted apprentice, for the very excellent reason that there was no cell to receive him.

The old court-room of Bridewell (84 by 29) was a handsome wainscoted room, adorned with a great picture, erroneously attributed to Holbein and representing Edward VI. granting the Royal Charter of Endowment to the Mayor, which now hangs over the western gallery of the hall of Christ's Hospital. It was engraved by Vertue in 1750, and represents an event which happened ten years after the death of the supposed artist.

Beneath this was a cartoon of the Good Samaritan, by Dadd, the young artist of promise who went mad and murdered his father, and who is now confined for life in Broadmoor. The picture is now at Bedlam. There was a fine full-length of swarthy Charles II., by Lely, and full-lengths of George III. and Queen Charlotte, after Reynolds. There were also murky portraits of past presidents, including an equestrian portrait of Sir William Withers (1708). Tables of benefactions also adorned the walls.

In this hall the governors of Bridewell dined annually, each steward contributing 15 towards the expenses, the dinner being dressed in a large kitchen, below, only used for that purpose. The hall and kitchen were taken down in 1862.

In the entrance corridor from Bridge Street (says Mr. Timbs) are the old chapel gates, of fine iron-work, originally presented by the equestrian Sir William Withers, and on the staircase is a bust of the venerable Chamberlain Clarke, who died in his ninety-third year.

The Bridewell prison (whose inmates were sent to Holloway) was pulled down (except the hall, treasurer's house, and offices) in 1863.

Bridewell Dock (now Tudor and William Streets and Chatham Place) was long noted for its taverns, and was a favourite landing-place for the Thames watermen. (n.o.ble.)

The gas-works of Whitefriars are of great size. In 1807 Mr. Winsor, a German, first lit a part of London (Pall Mall) with gas, and in 1809 he applied for a charter. Yet, even as late as 1813, says Mr. n.o.ble, the inquest-men of St. Dunstan's, full of the vulgar prejudice of the day, prosecuted William Sturt, of 183, Fleet Street, for continuing for three months past "the making of gaslight, and making and causing to be made divers large fires of coal and other things," by reason whereof and "divers noisome and offensive stinks and smells and vapours he causes the houses and dwellings near to be unhealthy, for which said nuisance one William Knight, the occupier, was indicted at the sessions." The early users of coffee at the "Rainbow," as we have seen in a previous chapter, underwent the same persecution. Yet Knight went on boldly committing his harmless misdemeanour, and even so far, in the next year (1814), as to start a company and build gas-works on the river's bank at Whitefriars. Gas spoke for itself, and its brilliancy could not be gainsaid. Times have changed. There are now thirteen London companies, producing a rental of a million and a half, using in their manufacture 882,770 tons of coal, and employing a capital of more than five and a half millions. Luckily for the beauty of the Embankment, these gas-works at Whitefriars, with their vast black reservoirs and all their smoke and fire, are about to be removed to Barking, seven miles from London.

The first theatre in Whitefriars seems to have been one built in the hall of the old Whitefriars Monastery. Mr. Collier gives the duration of this theatre as from 1586 to 1613. A memorandum from the ma.n.u.script-book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels to King Charles I., notes that "I committed Cromes, a broker in Long Lane, the 16th of February, 1634, to the Marshalsey, for lending a Church robe, with the name of Jesus upon it, to the players in Salisbury Court, to represent a flamen, a priest of the heathens. Upon his pet.i.tion of submission and acknowledgment of his fault, I released him the 17th February, 1634."

From entries of the Wardmote Inquests of St. Dunstan's, quoted by Mr.

n.o.ble, it appears that the Whitefriars Theatre (erected originally in the precincts of the monastery, to be out of the jurisdiction of the mayor) seems to have become disreputable in 1609, and ruinous in 1619, when it is mentioned that "the rain hath made its way in, and if it be not repaired it must soon be plucked down, or it will fall." The Salisbury Court Theatre, that took its place, was erected about 1629, and the Earl of Dorset somewhat illegally let it for a term of sixty-one years and 950 down, Dorset House being afterwards sold for 4,000. The theatre was destroyed by the Puritan soldiers in 1649, and not rebuilt till the Restoration.

At the outbreak of pleasure and vice, after the Restoration, the actors, long starved and crestfallen, brushed up their plumes and burnished their tinsel. Killigrew, that clever buffoon of the Court, opened a new theatre in Drury Lane in 1663, with a play of Beaumont and Fletcher's; and Davenant (supposed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son) opened the little theatre, long disused, in Salisbury Court, the rebuilding of which was commenced in 1660, on the site of the granary of Salisbury House. In time Davenant migrated to the old Tennis Court, in Portugal Street, on the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, and when the Great Fire came it erased the Granary Theatre. In 1671, on Davenant's death, the company (nominally managed by his widow) returned to the new theatre in Salisbury Court, designed by Wren, and decorated, it is said, by Grinling Gibbons. It opened with Dryden's _Sir Martin Marall_, which had already had a run, having been first played in 1668. On Killigrew's death, the King's and Duke's Servants united, and removed to Drury Lane in 1682; so that the Dorset Gardens Theatre only flourished for eleven years in all. It was subsequently let to wrestlers, fencers, and other brawny and wiry performers. The engraving on page 193, taken from Settle's "Empress of Morocco" (1678), represents the stage of the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Wren's new theatre in Dorset Gardens, an engraving of which is given on page 138, fronted the river, and had public stairs for the convenience of those who came by water. There was also an open place before the theatre for the coaches of the "quality."

In 1698 it was used for the drawing of a penny lottery, but in 1703, when it threatened to re-open, Queen Anne finally closed it. It was standing in 1720 (George I.), when Strype drew up the continuation of Stow, but it was shortly after turned into a timber-yard. The New River Company next had their offices there, and in 1814 water was ousted by fire, and the City Gas Works were established in this quarter, with a dismal front to the bright and pleasant Embankment.

Pepys, the indefatigable, was a frequent visitor to the Whitefriars Theatre. A few of his quaint remarks will not be uninteresting:--

"1660.--By water to Salsbury Court Playhouse, where, not liking to sit, we went out again, and by coach to the theatre, &c.--To the playhouse, and there saw _The Changeling_, the first time it hath been acted these twenty years, and it takes exceedingly. Besides, I see the gallants do begin to be tyred with the vanity and pride of the theatre actors, who are indeed grown very proud and rich.

"1661.--To White-fryars, and saw _The Bondman_ acted; an excellent play, and well done; but above all that I ever saw, Betterton do the Bondman the best.

"1661.--After dinner I went to the theatre, where I found so few people (which is strange, and the reason I do not know) that I went out again, and so to Salisbury Court, where the house as full as could be; and it seems it was a new play, _The Queen's Maske_, wherein there are some good humours; among others, a good jeer to the old story of the siege of Troy, making it to be a common country tale. But above all it was strange to see so little a boy as that was to act Cupid, which is one of the greatest parts in it.

"Creed and I to Salisbury Court, and there saw _Love's Quarrell_ acted the first time, but I do not like the design or words..... To Salsbury Court Playhouse, where was acted the first time a simple play, and ill acted, only it was my fortune to sit by a most pretty and most ingenuous lady, which pleased me much."

Dryden, in his prologues, makes frequent mention of the Dorset Gardens Theatre, more especially in the address on the opening of the new Drury Lane, March, 1674. The Whitefriars house, under Davenant, had been the first to introduce regular scenery, and it prided itself on stage pomp and show. The year before, in Shadwell's opera of _The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island_, the machinery was very costly, and one scene, in which the spirits flew away with the wicked duke's table and viands just as the company was sitting down, had excited the town to enthusiasm.

_Psyche_, another opera by Shadwell, perhaps adapted from Moliere's Court spectacle, had succeeded the _Tempest_. St. Andre and his French dancers were probably engaged in Shadwell's piece. The king, whose taste and good sense the poet praises, had recommended simplicity of dress and frugality of ornament. This Dryden took care to well remember. He says:--

"You who each day can theatres behold, Like Nero's palace, s.h.i.+ning all in gold, Our mean, ungilded stage will scorn, we fear, And for the homely room disdain the cheer."

Then he brings in the dictum of the king:--

"Yet if some pride with want may be allowed, We in our plainness may be justly proud: Our royal master willed it should be so; Whate'er he's pleased to own can need no show.

That sacred name gives ornament and grace, And, like his stamp, makes basest metal pa.s.s.

'Twere folly now a stately pile to raise, To build a playhouse, while you throw down plays.

While scenes, machines, and empty operas reign, And for the pencil you the pen disdain: While troops of famished Frenchmen hither drive, And laugh at those upon whose alms they live, Old English authors vanish, and give place To these new conquerors of the Norman race."

And when, in 1671, the burnt-out Drury Lane company had removed to the Portugal Street Theatre, Dryden had said, in the same strain,--

"So we expect the lovers, braves, and wits; The gaudy house with scenes will serve for cits."

In another epilogue Dryden alludes sarcastically to the death of Mr.

Scroop, a young rake of fortune, who had just been run through by Sir Thomas Armstrong, a sworn friend of the Duke of Monmouth, in a quarrel at the Dorset Gardens Theatre, and died soon after. This fatal affray took place during the representation of Davenant's adaptation of _Macbeth_.

From Dryden's various prologues and epilogues we cull many sharply-outlined and bright-coloured pictures of the wild and riotous audiences of those evil days. We see again the "hot Burgundians" in the upper boxes wooing the masked beauties, crying "_bon_" to the French dancers and beating cadence to the music that had stirred even the stately Court of Versailles. Again we see the scornful critics, bunched with glistening ribbons, shaking back their cascades of blonde hair, lolling contemptuously on the foremost benches, and "looking big through their curls." There from "Fop's Corner" rises the tipsy laugh, the prattle, and the chatter, as the dukes and lords, the wits and courtiers, practise what Dryden calls "the diving bow," or "the toss and the new French wallow"--the diving bow being especially admired, because it--

"With a shog casts all the hair before, Till he, with full decorum, brings it back, And rises with a water-spaniel's shake."

Nor does the poet fail to recall the affrays in the upper boxes, when some quarrelsome rake was often pinned to the wainscoat by the sword of his insulted rival. Below, at the door, the Flemish horses and the heavy gilded coach, lighted by flambeaux, are waiting for the noisy gallant, and will take back only his corpse.

Of Dryden's coldly licentious comedies and ranting bombastic tragedies a few only seem to have been produced at the Dorset Gardens Theatre. Among these we may mention _Limberham_, _OEdipus_, _Troilus and Cressida_, and _The Spanish Friar_. _Limberham_ was acted at the Duke's Theatre, in Dorset Gardens; because, being a satire upon a Court vice, it was deemed peculiarly calculated for that playhouse. The concourse of the citizens thither is alluded to in the prologue to _Marriage a la Mode_.

Ravenscroft, also, in his epilogue to the play of _Citizen Turned Gentleman_, which was acted at the same theatre, takes occasion to disown the patronage of the more dissolute courtiers, in all probability because they formed the minor part of his audience. The citizens were his great patrons.

In the _Postman_, December 8, 1679, there is the following notice, quoted by Smith:--"At the request of several persons of quality, on Sat.u.r.day next, being the 9th instant, at the theatre in Dorset Gardens, the famous Kentish men, Wm. and Rich. Joy, design to show to the town before they leave it the same tryals of strength, both of them, that Wm.

had the honour of showing before his majesty and their royal highnesses, with several other persons of quality, for which he received a considerable gratuity. The lifting a weight of two thousand two hundred and forty pounds. His holding an extraordinary large cart-horse; and breaking a rope which will bear three thousand five hundred weight.

Beginning exactly at two, and ending at four. The boxes, 4s.; the pit, 2s. 6d.; first gallery, 2s.; upper gallery, 1s. Whereas several scandalous persons have given out that they can do as much as any of the brothers, we do offer to such persons 100 reward, if he can perform the said matters of strength as they do, provided the pretender will forfeit 20 if he doth not. The day it is performed will be affixed a signal-flag on the theatre. No money to be returned after once paid."

In 1681 Dr. Davenant seems, by rather unfair tactics, to have bought off and pensioned both Hart and Kynaston from the King's Company, and so to have greatly weakened his rivals. Of these two actors some short notice may not be uninteresting. Hart had been a Cavalier captain during the Civil Wars, and was a pupil of Robinson, the actor, who was shot down at the taking of Basing House. Hart was a tragedian who excelled in parts that required a certain heroic and chivalrous dignity. As a youth, before the Restoration, when boys played female parts, Hart was successful as the d.u.c.h.ess, in s.h.i.+rley's _Cardinal_. In Charles's time he played Oth.e.l.lo, by the king's command, and rivalled Betterton's Hamlet at the other house. He created the part of Alexander, was excellent as Brutus, and terribly and vigorously wicked as Ben Jonson's Cataline. Rymer, says Dr. Doran, styled Hart and Mohun the aesopus and Roscius of their time. As Amintor and Melanthus, in _The Maid's Tragedy_, they were incomparable. Pepys is loud too in his praises of Hart. His salary, was, however, at the most, 3 a week, though he realised 1,000 yearly after he became a shareholder of the theatre.

Hart died in 1683, within a year of his being bought off.

Kynaston, in his way, was also a celebrity. As a handsome boy he had been renowned for playing heroines, and he afterwards acquired celebrity by his dignified impersonation of kings and tyrants. Betterton, the greatest of all the Charles II. actors, also played occasionally at Dorset Gardens. Pope knew him; Dryden was his friend; Kneller painted him. He was probably the greatest Hamlet that ever appeared; and Cibber sums up all eulogy of him when he says, "I never heard a line in tragedy come from Betterton wherein my judgment, my ear, and my imagination were not fully satisfied, which since his time I cannot equally say of any one actor whatsoever." The enchantment of his voice was such, adds the same excellent dramatic critic, that the mult.i.tude no more cared for sense in the words he spoke, "than our musical connoiseurs think it essential in the celebrated airs of an Italian opera."

Even when Whitefriars was at its grandest, and plumes moved about its narrow river-side streets, Dorset House was its central and most stately mansion. It was originally a mansion with gardens, belonging to a Bishop of Winchester; but about the year 1217 (Henry III.) a lease was granted by William, Abbot of Westminster, to Richard, Bishop of Sarum, at the yearly rent of twenty s.h.i.+llings, the Abbot retaining the advowson of St.

Bride's Church, and promising to impart to the said bishop any needful ecclesiastical advice. It afterwards fell into the hands of the Sackvilles, held at first by a long lease from the see, but was eventually alienated by the good Bishop Jewel. A grant in 1611 (James I.) confirmed the manor of Salisbury Court to Richard, Earl of Dorset.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAYNARD'S CASTLE, FROM A VIEW PUBLISHED IN 1790 (_see page 200_).]

The Earl of Dorset, to whom Bishop Jewel alienated the Whitefriars House, was the father of the poet, Thomas Sackville, Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth. The bishop received in exchange for the famous old house a piece of land near Cricklade, in Wilts.h.i.+re. The poet earl was that wise old statesman who began "The Mirror for Magistrates," an allegorical poem of gloomy power, in which the poet intended to make all the great statesmen of England since the Conquest pa.s.s one by one to tell their troublous stories. He, however, only lived to write one legend--that of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. One of his finest and most Holbeinesque pa.s.sages relates to old age:--

"And next in order sad, Old Age we found; His beard all h.o.a.r, his eyes hollow and blind; With drooping cheer still poring on the ground, As on the place where Nature him a.s.signed To rest, when that the sisters had untwined His vital thread, and ended with their knife The fleeting course of fast declining life.

Crooked-back'd he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed, Went on three feet, and sometimes crept on four, With old lame bones, that rattled by his side; His scalp all pil'd, and he with eld forelore, His wither'd fist still knocking at death's door; Fumbling and drivelling, as he draws his breath; For brief, the shape and messenger of death."

At the Restoration, the Marquis of Newcastle,--the author of a magnificent book on horsemans.h.i.+p--and his pedantic wife, whom Scott has sketched so well in "Peveril of the Peak," inhabited a part of Dorset House; but whether Great Dorset House or Little Dorset House, topographers do not record. "Great Dorset House," says Mr. Peter Cunningham, quoting Lady Anne Clifford's "Memoirs," "was the jointure house of Cicely Baker, Dowager Countess of Dorset, who died in it in 1615 (James I.)."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FALLING IN OF THE CHAPEL AT BLACKFRIARS (_see page 202_).]

CHAPTER XVIII.