Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (22 page)

Leather Lane met Holborn on the north side. A famous thoroughfare with a street market even then, its name was probably derived from
leveroun
, an old French word for greyhound which possibly referred to an inn that once stood in the area. Another explanation is that leather-sellers who obtained their raw material from Smithfield Market nearby had established businesses in the area. Shortly after Leather Lane, Gray’s Inn Lane (as it was known until 1862) joined Holborn from the north. This was the main route from the north to the various city markets and therefore always a thoroughfare of considerable importance. Gray’s Inn itself on the north side of Holborn recalled the name of the de Greys who resided in the vicinity in the thirteenth century. This important family numbered among its members Walter de Grey who was Chancellor to King John between 1206 and 1214 and Reginald, the Chief Justice of Chester under Edward I at the time he was trying to subdue the Welsh. In the early fourteenth century the family moved away and Gray’s Inn began its long association with the legal profession although its records of this date back only to 1569. The route through the Holborn area passed innumerable hostelries including on the north side the Black Bull, the Bell, the Three Cups and on the south the Black Swan and the George. These did a roaring trade on Tyburn Fair days.

The Inns of Court were, and indeed still are, training institutions and professional associations for barristers. They began to have a corporate existence in the fifteenth century and played a vital role in the development of a secular legal profession. In this sense the word ‘inn’ means a hostel for barristers and students of the law. The latter lived in and studied a curriculum on aspects of law as well as taking classes in history, music and dancing to round them out and prepare them for a prestigious role in society. The Inns of Chancery were in effect institutions that housed and prepared those aspiring to enter the Inns of Court. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the educational function of the Inns of Chancery was just about defunct. Several of these Inns would have acted as mute witnesses to the procession to Tyburn. Barnard’s Inn was established in 1435 close to Fetter Lane on the south side of Holborn and nearby was Furnival’s Inn (1383), close to Lincoln’s Inn on the north side of Holborn. Staple Inn at the junction of Holborn and Gray’s Inn Lane had been founded in 1378 and had perhaps gained its name because it was at one time a wool warehouse. This point was known as Holborn Bars and marked the western extremity of the City of London. Here tolls and commercial duties were exacted and measures taken to prevent undesirables from entering the City. A gallows once existed at this point.

Innumerable famous men were associated with Gray’s Inn including Archbishops Whitgift and Laud; Sir Nicholas Bacon and Francis Bacon; Thomas Cromwell; Sir Thomas Gresham; William Cecil; Lord Burghley and William Camden, the eminent antiquarian. On the south side of Holborn, the procession would have passed Lincoln’s Inn. Founded in the mid-fourteenth century, it took its name either from Henry de Lacy, 3rd Earl of Lincoln, a close adviser of Edward I, or from one Thomas de Lyncoln described as the King’s Serjeant of Holborn. Lincoln’s Inn is likely to have been on this site since around 1420, when the land on which it now stands was leased from the Bishops of Chichester. The playwright Ben Jonson may have worked as a bricklayer when the Chapel was being built in the 1620s. Leading alumni of Lincoln’s Inn by 1783 included Sir Thomas More; Jeremy Bentham; Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister; John Donne, the metaphysical poet, and David Garrick.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields had long been a popular place of resort and recreation for the citizenry of London. In 1586 Anthony Babington and some of his fellow conspirators were executed there in a fashion so barbaric as to cause even Queen Elizabeth qualms of conscience. Sentenced to death for conspiring to assassinate her and to place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne, they were hanged, drawn and quartered. However, Babington and the first batch of conspirators were still fully conscious when taken down and then eviscerated. Lincoln’s Inn Fields was chosen for this brutal demonstration of the power of the state because a figure of Elizabeth made of wax and stuck with pins was said to have been found there. The area certainly had something of a reputation for harbouring Catholic recusants in the dark days of religious persecution. Close by in Sardinia Street were buildings occupied by the Franciscan Order which were attacked and set on fire by an anti-Catholic mob in 1688 at the time that James II was making his ill-judged attempts to reimpose Roman Catholicism on his subjects. Although the Franciscans had abandoned this building, it was once again wrecked during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780.

In 1683 the execution of Lord William Russell had taken place in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He had been implicated in the Rye House Plot, a hare-brained scheme to block the road close to Rye House outside Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire and assassinate Charles II and the Duke of York when they were forced to stop at the obstacle. These plans were rendered meaningless when the intended victims passed by considerably earlier than expected. In 1711 Newcastle House at the corner of Great Queen Street became the home of Thomas Pelham-Holles, later better known as the Duke of Newcastle and a Whig Prime Minister. As Prime Minister he was obviously in a position to dispense favours. One man, by the name of Sir Thomas Robinson, frequently called round to curry favour and the Duke tired of having to receive him. He instructed his servants to tell Robinson whenever he called that their master was out. This did not deter him and he coolly invited himself into the kitchen to wait for the moment when the Duke might become available. While he was waiting, he apparently kept glancing at the clock and playing with a pet monkey. This behaviour irritated the Duke and so the household servants were eventually instructed to send Robinson away with a flea in his ear after reciting this neat little epigram: ‘Sir, his Grace has gone out, the clock has stopped and the monkey is dead’.

Continuing along Holborn, the procession now approached the dominant bulk of St Giles-in-the-Fields which originated as the chapel of a leper hospital founded in 1101 by Matilda, the Queen of Henry I. The chapel only became a parish church in 1547 after the hospital was dissolved by Henry VIII. In a ruinous state in the early 1620s, the church was rebuilt only to deteriorate again to the extent that money had to be raised for its total rebuilding. This was carried out by the comparatively obscure Henry Flitcroft between 1730 and 1734. Flitcroft was better known as a gardener than as an architect but he drew extensively on what might be called the ‘Wren and Gibbs’ tradition which had provided the City with so many handsome rebuilt churches after the Great Fire. St Giles was only subsumed within the encroaching urban spread of London in the earlier part of the eighteenth century and indeed some areas of the parish especially in the north were still not fully developed by the 1780s. The church and the small rural settlement around it were therefore something of a landmark on the road to Tyburn.

In much earlier times there had been a gallows standing at the north-western end of St Giles High Street. This location had been chosen as suitably distant from London and Westminster but as the built-up districts spread northwards and westwards, hangings were moved to Tyburn, which was still a rural spot. It was entirely appropriate that the church was dedicated to St Giles because he was the patron saint of the indigent, of cripples, outcasts and social pariahs and there were many of these among the wretched felons who passed this way while travelling to Tyburn. At the gate of the former hospital the procession would stop briefly while the condemned criminals were presented with a bowl of ale. When St Giles itself had been the end of the journey from Newgate this had been literally their last refreshment but when executions were moved to Tyburn an enterprising publican set up a tavern called the Bowl. According to some accounts the present Angel in St Giles High Street is a reincarnation of the Bowl. The landlord and his successors provided ale free to the felons and did a brisk trade with the crowds on the days of Tyburn Fair. Jack Sheppard is said to have partaken of a drink at this point. He was unable to finish it and is reputed to have quipped with those around him, ‘Give the remainder to Jonathan Wild’. The Crown was another inn said to have dispensed drinks at St Giles. A sense of solemnity suitable for the processions was lent by the tolling of its great bell. Money to pay for this custom had been provided through the munificence of Alice Dudley, the saintly daughter-in-law of Robert Dudley, the less-thansaintly Earl of Leicester, in the 1640s.

Eventually the procession got on its way once more, passing out of St Giles to the junction with the Tottenham Court Road. This led north to what had once been the manor of Tothele or Tottenheale. By the 1780s the open countryside there was being threatened by the new east to west road that had been built around the northern extremities of London from Islington and the Battle Bridge area towards Marylebone and Paddington. The procession continued westwards along what had become known as Oxford Street. This was a very ancient road, long used for commerce and by armies marching westwards. On old maps it is sometimes indicated as the ‘Road to Oxford’, as ‘Tyburn Road’, ‘Tyburn Way’ or ‘Tyburn Lane’ and indeed various other names. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the eastern portion had acquired the name ‘Oxford Street’ because land on the north side of the road had been bought by Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford. Residential property for the rich was spreading along both sides of Oxford Street but it was fronted by high quality shops catering for the affluent inhabitants of this growing residential quarter. One conspicuous building roughly half way between Tottenham Court Road and Tyburn was the Oxford Market built in the early eighteenth century to serve these new residential districts. It was now possible to see the countryside ahead and the procession began to pass through a quarter of London which was either recently constructed or still being developed. Completely open country, however, was only reached when the procession arrived at Tyburn. As recently as the 1700s, the way to Tyburn passing through this area was described as ‘a deep hollow road and full of sloughs; with here and there a ragged house, the lurking place of cutthroats’.

On leaving the junction with Tottenham Court Road, the procession had skirted the northern extremity of the Soho area. The word ‘Soho’ was a hunting cry and indeed this area had been used for hunting purposes until building development started in the seventeenth century. A number of mansions with large grounds such as Monmouth House and Leicester House had been a feature of the area but by the 1670s and 1680s the district was changing and a mix of humble housing and small industrial workshops had appeared. The area attracted foreign immigrants in large numbers, especially French Huguenots, who bestowed on it the cosmopolitan character that had already become one of its distinguishing characteristics by the middle of the eighteenth century. It had also become a somewhat bohemian quarter, attracting considerable numbers of artists, some on their way to fame and glory but most going nowhere at all. Parts of Soho such as Dean Street, Wardour Street and Poland Street were slowly losing their exclusive cachet by the 1780s. Dean Street had been built in the 1680s and at first had numbered many titled families among its inhabitants before Huguenots began moving in, while Wardour Street was becoming the haunt of antique dealers and furniture-makers, but Poland Street managed to maintain its relative exclusivity rather longer. The street took its name from the King of Poland tavern which stood at its junction with Oxford Street and which the procession would have passed on its way to Tyburn. Berwick Street to the west, built slightly later, was probably named after the Duke of Berwick, an illegitimate son of James II, and seems to have attracted French immigrants from the start – so much so, in fact, that there were two French churches in the street.

Large-scale planned development had taken place in the Mayfair district bounded by Oxford Street to the north and Hyde Park to the west and centred on Grosvenor Square. In 1735 Grosvenor Street was described as ‘a spacious well-built street, inhabited chiefly by people of distinction’. At that time about a third of its inhabitants were titled. The ‘Grosvenor Estate’ as it came to be known encompassed land acquired in 1677 when Sir Thomas Grosvenor, a baronet from Cheshire, made an advantageous marriage to a Mary Davies. She was the heiress of a nouveau riche London scrivener who had inherited substantial amounts of undeveloped land close to Westminster. The wedding took place in 1677 when Mary was just twelve years of age. The match ensured Grosvenor’s own and his family’s future prosperity but Mary’s subsequent behaviour must have caused him a few headaches. In 1685 she announced to her stunned family that she had decided to convert to Catholicism. As if this were not bad enough for a staunchly Protestant family, Mary then began to display signs of increasing mental instability, one of her favourite activities being to lock her servants into cupboards. This excitement apart, development of the area on land where the May Fair had once been held was largely completed in the 1770s. Ned Ward in his
The London Spy
provided a rather jaundiced view of the May Fair: ‘In all the multitudes that I ever beheld, I never in my life saw such a number of lazy rascals, and so hateful a throng of beggarly, sluttish strumpets, who were a scandal to the Creation’.

To the north of Oxford Street busy periods of building activity had culminated in the development of the area around Portland Place, Cavendish Square and Wigmore Street on the Portman and Portland estates among others. These districts to the north and others south of Oxford Street, were composed of high-class, elegant residential property and their development had begun early in the eighteenth century. Portland Place can with some justification be described as the grandest street of eighteenth-century London and it had been laid out by Robert and James Adam around 1778. It is said to owe its remarkable width to a promise made to Lord Foley that the view northwards from his house that blocked the southern end of the street would never be obscured. The land in this area lent itself to comprehensive development because, unlike much land in the east of the City, it was divided into large estates mostly owned by a very small number of individuals. They needed little encouragement to embark on the lucrative development of this land for fashionable housing. There would have been a piquant contrast between the refined and affluent appearance of the inhabitants of these streets and squares and the rag-tag and bobtail who turned out in substantial numbers to watch or follow the procession to Tyburn. The influential residents of the increasingly fashionable West End may well have been morbidly fascinated by the sight of the procession and the hangings but they did not like the regular presence in their neighbourhood of large numbers of boisterous, uncouth and often drunken members of the
hoi polloi
.