VII.SOME FAMOUS LONDON ACTRESSES.Distance lends enchantment to the view, but the view frequently does not return it, a common practice with borrowers! Distance alone invests the East with a halo of romance and beauty, to which it really can lay no claim. The romance is the invention of Western imagination, and the beauty, if not tawdry, is monstrous. In no respect is this excess of imagination over the reality more apparent than in the eidolon the European forms in his mind of Eastern female beauty. He hears or reads of houris, and nautch-girls, and bayaderes, and the dancing-women of Japan and Burmah; but if ever he sees any of them he will be disenchanted, for awkward figures they are, wrapped up in clothes like so many sacks, twisted and tied over one another—if not old, at least middle-aged women with rings in their noses. Pooh! enough of them! The real beauties the European never gets a sight of, they are shut up in harems. But still he thinks the East the region of beauty, and longs for it, even when he sees beauty in perfection in the West, where alone it is to be found, because in Western lands alone physical and intellectual or perfect beauty exists in combination. And this combination is most frequently seen, as may be surmised from the nature of her avocation, in the actress. Women first appeared on the English stage in 1660. On December 6 in that year, at the performance of 'Othello' at the Duke's Theatre, Lincoln's Inn Fields, the prologue spoken is entitled: 'A prologue to introduce the first woman that came to act on the stage.' Pepys went to see 'The Beggar's Bush' at the same theatre on January 3, 1661, and reports: 'Here the first time that ever I saw a woman come upon the stage.' But the Queen had long before then, namely, in 1633, acted in a pastoral given at Court. The practice having, however, been introduced at the Duke's Theatre, was continued, to the disgust of moralists, who looked upon the 'enormous shamefulness' of female acting as a sinful practice. Even the intelligent and generally liberal-minded Evelyn speaks of the drama as abused to 'an atheistical liberty,' by the circumstance of women being suffered to become performers. In his Diary, October 18, 1666, he writes: 'This night was acted my Lord Broghill's tragedy, called "Mustapha," before their Majesties at Court, at which I was present, very seldom going to the public theatres for many reasons now, as they were abused to an atheistical liberty, foul and indecent women now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act, who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses, and to some their wives, witness ye Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, P. Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them, who fell into their snares, to ye reproach of their noble families, and ruin of both body and soul.' By 'another greater person,' Evelyn no doubt intended the King himself, Charles II., who had at least three avowed mistresses taken from the stage—Madam Davis, Mrs. Knight, and Nell Gwynne. Miss Davis was, according to Pepys, a natural daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. He went to see her perform on March 7, 1666, in 'The English Princess,' and 'little Miss Davis did dance a jigg after the end of the play, and there telling the next day's play, so that it came in by force only to see her dance in boy's clothes.' Mrs. Knight was a famous singer. Kneller painted her portrait. Of Nell Gwynne we shall have occasion to speak further on. At the same theatre Mrs. Davenport, the lady who played the part of Roxalana in 'The Siege of Rhodes,' was taken to be the Earl of Oxford'smisse, as at this time they began to call lewd women, as Evelyn says. But Evelyn evidently was badly informed. Mrs. Davenport for a long time refused the Earl of Oxford's presents and overtures, but, on his offering to marry her, she consented. The ceremony was performed, and they lived together for some time, and then the Earl informed her that the marriage was a sham, and that the mock parson was one of his trumpeters. In vain the deluded woman appealed to the laws, in vain she threw herself at the King's feet to demand justice. She might consider herself lucky to obtain a pension of £300. Pepys saw her afterwards at the theatre, and says: 'Saw the old Roxalana in the chief box, in a velvet gown, as the fashion is, and very handsome, at which I was glad.'Moll Davies was another of the King's favourites, and he is said to have fallen in love with her through her singing 'My Lodging is on the Cold Ground' in 'The Rivals,' a play altered by Davenant from Beaumont and Fletcher's 'The Two Noble Kinsmen.' Pepys frequently mentions her as a rival to Nell Gwynne. She had one daughter by Charles, who was christened Mary Tudor, and was married in 1687 to the son of Sir Francis Ratcliff, who became Earl of Derwentwater. When the King grew tired of her he settled a pension on her of £1,000 a year. It was as a descendant of this Earl that the lady who called herself Amelia, Countess of Derwentwater, in 1868 took possession of the old baronial castle of Devilstone, or Dilston, claiming it and the estates belonging thereto, but then and now vested in Greenwich Hospital, as hers. But the Lords of the Admiralty, in 1870, defeated her claim, and she disappeared from public view.Another famous actress in the days of Charles II. was Margaret Hughes, of whom Prince Rupert became enamoured. At first she pretended to be fiercely virtuous, so as to secure a higher price for her favours. And, in fact, the Prince settled on her Brandenburgh House, near Hammersmith, in which she lived about ten years. The house afterwards became the residence of Queen Caroline, who died there, shortly after which it was demolished.Whatever may be said against women appearing on the stage, there is something more repulsive in men and boys taking female parts in a play, at least, so it seems to our moral feelings, and æsthetically the practice is still more objectionable. Male performers can never represent the spontaneous grace, melting voice, and tender looks of a female, and the ludicrous contretemps the custom frequently caused further showed its absurdity. Thus, on one occasion, Charles II. inquired why the commencement of the play was delayed. The manager stepped forward and craved his Majesty's indulgence, as the queen was not yet shaved. And whatever Prynne might say in his 'Histrio Mastix' against female actors, the practice caught on and became general. Of course, the opposition did not cease at once; even in France it raised its head as late as 1733. A speaker against the stage spoke thus at the Jesuits' College in Paris: 'They (the actresses) do not form the deadly shafts of Cupid, but they level them with the eye, and shoot with the utmost dexterity and skill. Such women I mean as represent destructive love characters.... How artfully do they hurl the most inconsiderable dart! What multitudes are wounded by a single one!' And, indeed, what multitudes have our Nancy Oldfields, Bracegirdles, Gwynnes, Kitty Clives, Perditas, Meltons, and the whole galaxy of theatrical beauties not only wounded, but conquered, and sometimes killed!The life of an actress had many ups and downs—as it has now—in former days. There was the eccentric Charlotte Charke, daughter of Colley Cibber, who for some mysterious reason for many years went in male attire, and who acted on the stage if she could get employment. There was then in Bear Yard, Clare Market, a theatre, occasionally used as a tennis-court and as an auction-room. 'Thither,' she says in her Memoirs, 'I adventured to see if there was any character wanting—a custom very frequent among the gentry who exhibited in that slaughter-house of dramatic poetry. One night, I remember, the "Recruiting Officer" was to be performed.... To my unbounded joy Captain Plume was so unfortunate that he came at five o'clock to say that he did not know a word of his part.... The question being put to me, I immediately replied that I could do such a thing, but was ... resolved to stand upon terms ... one guinea paid in advance, which terms were complied with.'We mentioned above that the life of an actress has many ups and downs even now. In justification of that statement let us quote from theStarof September 12, 1896: 'A pathetic story of an aged lady, who had been a popular actress, but upon whom evil days had come, and who was found dead in a poorly-furnished bedroom in a third-floor back at Whitfield Street, Tottenham Court Road, was told yesterday to the coroner. The old lady was Louisa Marshall, aged seventy, sister of a celebrated clown at Drury Lane, who died before her. She used to teach the piano, and had a small pension from the Musical and Dramatic Sick Fund. The contents of her room, an old piano and some theatrical dresses, were said to be worth fifty shillings at most.' But, as Byron says, let us lay this sheet of sorrow on the shelf, and speak of lively, joyous Nell Gwynne, who drove that amorous Pepys nearly mad. His Diary is full of her. First she is simply 'pretty, witty Nell' (April 3, 1665). On January 23, 1666, Nelly is brought to him in a box at the theatre. 'A most pretty woman.... I kissed her, and so did my wife, and a mighty pretty soul she is.' On March 2, in the same year, 'Nell ... comes in like a young gallant, and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her.' On May 1, 1667, he writes: 'To Westminster. In the way many milkmaids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them, and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodging's door in Drury Lane, in her smock sleeves and bodice, looking upon one. She seemed a mighty pretty creature.' But, according to her ardent admirer, this 'mighty pretty creature' could use mighty strong language too, for he says of her (October 5, 1667): 'But to see how Nell cursed for having so few people in the pit was strange.' And again, on October 26, he reports: 'Nelly and Beck Marshall (one of the great Presbyterian's daughters) falling out the other day, the latter called the other my Lord Buckhurst's mistress. Nell answered her: "I was but one man's mistress, though I was brought up in a disreputable house to fill strong waters to the gentlemen, and you are a mistress to three or four, though a Presbyter's praying daughter."' And Nell may have been right, for Beck Marshall seems to have been a trifle fast. Pepys says, on May 2, 1668: 'To the King's (play) house, where ... the play being over, I did see Beck Marshall come dressed off the stage, and look mighty fine and pretty, and noble; and also Nell, in her boy's clothes, mighty pretty. But, Lord! their confidence, and how many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how confident they are in their talk!' Pepys, in the end, seems to have cooled in his devotion to pretty Nell, for on January 7, 1669, he wrote in his Diary: 'My wife and I to the King's play-house.... We sat in an upper box, and the jade Nell came and sat in the next box, a bold, merry slut, who lay laughing there upon people, and with a comrade of hers, of the Duke's house, that came in to see the play.'Coal Yard, Drury Lane, seems to have been Nell Gwynne's birthplace, a low, disreputable locality, and she died in a fine house on the south side of Pall Mall. Previously to that, she had lived in a house on the north side, whose site is now occupied by the Army and Navy Club. Though Drury Lane in the days of Nell Gwynne was a fashionable locality, it would seem that only to the southern division this epithet could be applied; the northern end, towards Holborn, had a low and mean character, and Coal Yard consisted of miserable tenements. It has recently been rebuilt, and is now called Goldsmith Street. Nell Gwynne died in 1691, and was pompously interred in the parish church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Dr. Tennison, the then Vicar, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, preaching her funeral sermon. This sermon was afterwards brought forward at Court to impede the doctor's preferment; but Queen Mary, having heard the objection, answered: 'Well, what then? This I have heard before, and it is a proof that the unfortunate woman died a true penitent, who through the course of her life never let the wretched ask in vain.' This was certainly as noble an answer to give on the part of a Queen as it was mean on the part of King Charles II. to say on his deathbed: 'Don't let poor Nelly starve.' Was it not in his power to make provision for her, instead of leaving her to the charity of the world?Another both fortunate and unfortunate actress was Mrs. Montford, whose husband was murdered as he had come to escort Mrs. Bracegirdle, after Captain Hill's attempt at abducting this lady, on her leaving the theatre, of which more hereafter. On Mrs. Montford, or Mountfort—the name is found spelt both ways—Gray wrote his ballad of 'Black-eyed Susan.' Lord Berkeley's partiality for her was so great that at his decease he left her £300 a year, on condition that she did not marry; he also purchased Cowley, near Uxbridge, for her—the place had been the summer residence of Rich, the actor—and from time to time made her presents of considerable sums. She fell in love with a Mr. Booth, a then well-known actor, but, not wishing to lose her annuity, she did not marry him, though she gave him the preference over many others of her suitors. Mrs. Montford had an intimate friend, Miss Santlow, a celebrated dancer; but, through the liberality of one of her admirers, she became possessed of a fortune, which rendered her independent of the stage, upon which Mr. Booth proposed to her, and was accepted. This so affected Mrs. Montford that she became mentally deranged, and was brought from Cowley to London to have the best advice. As she was not violent and had lucid moments, she was not rigorously confined, but suffered to go about the house. One day she asked her attendant what play was to be performed that evening, and was told it was 'Hamlet.' In this piece, whilst she was on the stage, she had always appeared as Ophelia. The recollection struck her, and with the cunning always allied with insanity, she found means to elude the watchfulness of her servants, and to reach the theatre, where she concealed herself till the time when Ophelia was to appear, when she rushed on the stage, pushing the lady who was to act the character aside, and exhibited a more perfect representation of madness than the most consummate mimic art could produce. She was, in truth, Ophelia herself, the very incarnation of madness. Nature having made this last effort, her vital powers failed her. On going off, she prophetically exclaimed: 'It is all over!' As she was being conveyed home, 'she,' in Gray's words, 'like a lily drooping, bowed her head and died.'Lovely Nancy Oldfield, who quitted the bar of the Mitre, in St. James's Market, then kept by her aunt, Mrs. Voss, became, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the great attraction at Drury Lane. Her intimacy with General Churchill, cousin of the great Duke of Marlborough, obtained for her a grave in Westminster Abbey. Persons of rank and distinction contended for the honour of bearing her pall, and her remains lay in state for three days in the Jerusalem Chamber!We referred above to the attempt made by Captain Hill to carry off Mrs. Bracegirdle. Hill had offered her his hand and had been refused. He determined to abduct her by force. He induced his friend Lord Mahun to assist him. A coach was stationed near the Horseshoe Tavern in Drury Lane, with six soldiers to force her into it, which they attempted to do as she came down Drury Lane about ten o'clock at night, accompanied by her mother and brother, and a friend, Mr. Page. The attempt was resisted, a crowd collected, and Hill ordered the soldiers to let the lady go, and she was escorted home by her friends. She then sent for her friend Mr. Montford, who soon after turned the corner of Norfolk Street, where Hill challenged him, as he attributed Mrs. Bracegirdle's rejection of him to her love for Montford, which suspicion, however, was groundless, and ran him through the body before he could draw his sword. Hill made his escape; Montford died from his wounds.Even in more recent days actresses have made good matches. Miss Anna Maria Tree, of Covent Garden, in 1825 married James Bradshaw, of Grosvenor Place; in 1831, Miss Foote, the celebrated actress, became Countess of Harrington; Miss Farren, Countess of Derby; Miss Brunton, Countess of Craven; Miss Bolton became Lady Thurlow; Miss O'Neill married a baronet; Miss Kitty Stephens became Countess of Essex; Miss Campion was taken off the stage by the aged Duke of Devonshire. The list might be greatly extended, even to our own times; but the instances quoted are sufficient to show the prizes ladies may draw in the theatrical matrimonial lottery; and there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.VIII.QUEER CLUBS OF FORMER DAYS.The Virtuoso Club was established by some members of the Royal Society, and held its meetings at a tavern in Cornhill. Its professed object was to 'advance mechanical exercises, and promote useful experiments'; but, according to Ned Ward, their discussions usually ended in a general shindy, and results not to be described by a modern writer. The club claimed the merit of the invention of the barometer; but, for all that, its proceedings afforded fine sport to the satirists: thus, the members were said to aim at making beer without water, living like princes on three-halfpence a day, producing a table by which a husband may discover all the particulars of the tricks his wife may play him. The ridicule showered on the club at last reduced it to a little cynical cabal of half-pint moralists, who continued to meet at the same tavern. Convivially-disposed members of other learned societies have occasionally formed themselves into clubs. Thus some antiquaries, many years since, formed a club styled 'Noviomagians.' Mr. Crofton Croker was its president more than twenty years, and many other distinguished men were members.A number of roistering companions used to hold a club at the Golden Fleece in Cornhill, after which they named their club. Each member on his admission had a characteristic name assigned to him—as Sir Nimmy Sneer, Sir Talkative Do-little, Sir Rumbus Rattle. They eventually adjourned to the Three Tuns, Southwark.The No-Nose Club, whether it ever existed or not, was a horrible idea in itself; it flourished only during the lifetime of its founders.The Club of Beaus was what its name implies—a club of fops and idiots. The only merit they seem to have had was that their habits were always scrupulously clean, though their language usually was filthy. Their meetings were held at an inn in Covent Garden.The Quacks' Club, or Physical Society, was really an offshoot of the College of Physicians, which met at a tavern near the Exchange, where they discussed medical matters. The College of Physicians at that time was in Warwick Lane, where it remained till removed, in 1825, to Trafalgar Square.The Weekly Dancing Club, or Buttock Ball, was held at a tavern in King Street, St. Giles, and was patronized by bullies, libertines, and strumpets; footmen who had robbed their masters and turned gentlemen; chambermaids who had stolen their mistresses' clothes and set up for gentlewomen. Though called a club, it was not really a close assembly, but everyone was admitted on the payment of sixpence, and no questions asked. The Dancing Academy was first established about the year 1710 by a dancing-master over the Coal Yard gateway into Drury Lane, and was so successful that it was removed to the more commodious premises mentioned above. But at last it became such a nuisance that the authorities shut it up. The Coal Yard above mentioned, the last turning on the north-east side of Drury Lane, is said to have been the birthplace of Nell Gwynne.A club cultivating a certain filthy habit, which I can only indicate as one practised by the French peasantry, and as described in one of Zola's novels, was established at a public-house in Cripplegate. The manner in which the proceedings of the club are set forth by their chronicler is as hideous and repulsive as the writer can make it; it could not be reproduced in any modern publication without risk of prosecution, which, indeed, would be well deserved. But the manners of the eighteenth century were excessively coarse.The Man-Killing Club, besides admitting no one to membership who had not killed his man, also bound itself to resist the Sheriff's myrmidons on their making any attempt to serve a writ on or seize one of them. It was founded in the reign of Charles II. by a knot of bullies, broken Life-Guardsmen, and old prize-fighters. Its meetings were held at a low public-house on the back-side of St. Clement's. The good old times!The Surly Club was chiefly composed of master carmen, lightermen, and Billingsgate porters, who held their weekly meetings at a tavern near Billingsgate Dock, where City dames used to treat their journeymen with beakers of punch and new oysters. The object of their meetings was the practice of contradiction and of foul language, that they might not want impudence to abuse passengers on the Thames. This society first established the thumping-post at Billingsgate, to harden its members by whipping never to bridle their tongues from fear of corporeal punishment. Billingsgate language was, as may be supposed, much improved by them.The Atheistical Club met at an inn in Westminster, and its name sufficiently indicates its object, namely, to take the devil's part. A trick was played on them by a man disguising himself in a bear's skin and making them believe he was the devil, which occurrence, it is said, broke up the club. Similar societies were discovered in Wells Street, and at the Angel, in St. Martin's Lane, and the members arrested; but, it turning out that in these cases the devil was less black than he was painted, the charges against them had to be withdrawn. The societies, in fact, were more political, with republican tendencies, inspired by the French Revolution, which was just then at its height, and the worship of Reason seems to have been one of their principles.The Split-farthing Club held its weekly meetings at the Queen's Head in Bishopsgate Street, and was supposed to be composed chiefly of misers and skinflints. If any smoker among them left his box behind him, and wanted to borrow a pipe of tobacco of a brother, it would not be lent without a note of hand, which was generally written round the bowl of a pipe so as to prevent the waste of paper.The Club of Broken Shopkeepers held its meetings at the sign of Tumble-Down Dick, a famous boozing den in the Mint in Southwark, a sanctuary of knaves, sots, and bankrupts, honest or swindling, against arrest for debt. The sign of Tumble-Down Dick was set up in derision of Richard Cromwell, the allusion to his fall from power, or 'tumble-down,' being very common in the satires published after the Restoration. There was a house with the same sign at Brentford. Of course, the professed object of the meetings of the broken shopkeepers was that of driving away and forgetting care; and any new-comer among them, if he had any cash left, was liberally allowed to expend it for the furtherance of the club's object.The Man-Hunting Club was composed chiefly of young limbs of the law; uncultivated youths, though they were law students, formed themselves into an association to hunt men over Lincoln's Inn Fields and the neighbourhood whom they might happen to meet crossing them at ten or eleven o'clock at night. They would be concealed upon the grass in one of the borders of the fields till they heard some single person coming along, when they would spring up with their swords drawn, run towards him, and cry: 'That's he; bloody wounds, that's he!' Usually the person so attacked would run away, when they would pursue him till he took refuge in an alehouse in some neighbouring street. But if the man-hunters encountered a person of courage, ready to fight them, they would sneak off, like the curs they really were. Their meeting-place was at a tavern close to Bear Yard, Clare Market.The Yorkshire Club held its meetings on market-days at an inn in Smithfield. It was composed of sharp country-folk, who assumed the innocence of yokels. The most flourishing members among them, says one authority, were needle-pointed innkeepers; nick and froth victuallers, honest horse chaunters, pious Yorkshire attorneys; the rest good, harmless master hostlers, two or three innocent farriers, who had wormed their masters out of their shops, and themselves into them. When met for business, their deliberations were about horseflesh, blind eyes, spavins, bounders and malinders, and how to disguise defects and get rid of the animals.The Mock-Heroes Club met at an alehouse in Baldwin's Gardens, and was composed chiefly of attorneys' clerks and young shopkeepers. On admission the new member assumed the name of some defunct hero, and ever afterwards was at the meetings called by that name; and as the club held its meetings in the public room, though at a separate table specially reserved for them, this formal and ridiculous way of addressing one another caused no slight amusement to the other persons frequenting the room. In other respects their language was high-flown. Thus, one would face about to his left-hand neighbour, with his right hand charged with a brimming tankard, saying: 'Most noble Scipio, the love and friendship of a soldier to you. The thanks of a brother to my valiant friend Hannibal, whom I cannot but value, though I had the honour to conquer.' 'My respects to you, brave Cæsar,' cries one opposite, 'remembering the battle of Pharsalia.' And so on, till they had drunk themselves under the table.The Lying Club, which held its meetings at the Bell Tavern, in Westminster, is said to have been established in 1669. Every member was to wear a blue cap with a red feather in it; before admittance he had to give proof of his powers of mendaciloquence; during club hours, that is, from four to ten p.m., no true word was to be uttered without a preliminary 'By your leave' to the chairman; and if any member told a 'whopper' which the chairman could not beat with a greater, the latter had to surrender his office for that evening. Ned Ward gives some exquisite specimens of the 'whoppers' told by members.The Beggars' Club held its weekly meetings at a boozing ken in Old Street. All the sham cripples, blind men, etc., belonged to it, and there discussed the various stratagems they had adopted to excite public compassion, or intended to adopt for that purpose.About 1735 a number of young gentlemen, who were pretenders to wit, formed themselves into a society, which met at the Rose Tavern, Covent Garden, and which they christened the Scatter-wit Society. But their literary performances were poor specimens of wit, contributed nothing to the reputation of the Rose Tavern as the resort of 'men of parts,' and consequently is not frequently mentioned in the literature of that day.Bob Warden was the younger brother of Mr. Warden, a gentleman who, 'after having given a new turn to Jackanapes Lane, and promoted many useful objects for the good of the public, was undeservedly hanged.' We may explain here that Jackanapes Lane was the original name of Carey Street, north of the Law Courts, and the new turn Mr. Warden gave to it is the western bend connecting it with Portugal Street. Bob Warden, after his brother's death, was apprenticed to a painter, but, thinking more of his palate than his palette, he dropped the latter, and with some money left to him, established a convivial club at the Hill, in the Strand, where all sorts of queer characters, such as ruined gamesters, petticoat-pensioners, Irish captains, sharpers and cheats were welcome. As the meetings took place in a cellar, the club became known as the Cellar Club, and was the forerunner of the Coal Hole and the Lord Chief Baron Nicholson. Bob, amidst his roistering customers, drank himself to death.For about ten years the Mohawks, or Mohocks, kept London in a state of alarm, though they seldom ventured into the City, where the watch was more efficient, but confined themselves chiefly to the neighbourhood of Clare Market, Covent Garden, and the Strand. TheSpectatorsays of them: 'Some of them are celebrated for dexterity in tipping the lion upon them, which is performed by squeezing the nose flat to the face and boring out the eyes with their fingers. Others are called the dancing-masters, and teach their scholars to cut capers by running swords through their legs.... A third sort are the Nimblers, who set women on their heads and commit ... barbarities on them.' Their conduct in the end became so alarming that a reward of £100 was offered by royal proclamation for the apprehension of any one of them. Curious stories were current at various times as to the origin of this society. In the 'Memoirs' of the Marquis of Torcy, Secretary of State to Louis XIV., and a famous diplomatist (born 1665, died 1746), the Duke of Marlborough is said to have suggested to Prince Eugene 'to employ a band of ruffians ... to stroll about the streets by night ... and to insult people by passing along, increasing their licentiousness gradually, so as to commit greater and greater disorders ... that when the inhabitants of London and Westminster were accustomed to the insults of these rioters, it would not be difficult to assassinate those of whom they might wish to be freed, and to cast the whole blame on the band of ruffians.' This project the Prince is reported to have rejected. Swift, in his 'History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne,' attributes the scheme to the Prince himself on his visit to this country, through his hatred of Treasurer Harley. He proposed that 'the Treasurer should be taken off ... that this might easily be done and pass for an effect of chance, if it were preceded by encouraging some proper people to commit small riots in the night. And in several parts of the town a crew of ruffians were accordingly employed about that time, who probably exceeded their commission ... and acted inhuman outrages on many persons, whom they cut and mangled in the face and arms and other parts of their bodies.... This account ... was confirmed beyond all contradiction by several intercepted letters and papers.' It is just possible that popular panic exaggerated the doings of the Mohawks. Perhaps they did not exceed in savagery the drunken frolics then customary at night-time.The Hell Fire Club was an institution of a character similar to that of the Mohawks. It was abolished by an order of the Privy Council in 1721, 'against certain scandalous clubs,' but it must have been revived in the country, for John Wilkes, about 1750, was a notorious member of a club with the above name at Medmenham Abbey, Bucks.The Calves' Head Club for a time had its headquarters at The Cock, an inn long since demolished, in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall. It was one of the many inns at which Pepys was 'mighty merry.' The club is said to have been originated by Milton and other partisans of the Commonwealth; and the author of the 'Secret History of the Calves' Head Club'—probably Ned Ward—gives an account of the melodramatic and diabolical ceremonies observed at their banquets. An axe was hung up in their club-room as a sacred symbol—the destroyer of the tyrant. But the eating and drinking, for which, as Addison says, clubs were instituted, were not neglected by the members. At the banquet held in 1710 there was spent on bread, beer, and ale the sum of £2 10s.; on fifty calves' heads, £5 5s.; on bacon, £1 10s.; on six chickens and two capons, £1; on three joints of veal, 18s.; on butter and flour, 15s.; on oranges, lemons, vinegar, and spices, £1; on oysters and sausages, 15s.; on the use of pewter and linen, £1; and on various other items additional sums, bringing the total up to £18 6s. No wine, it will be noticed, is included in the above bill, but there is no doubt a considerable amount for this item should be added to it.Early in the last century street clubs became common in various parts of London, that is to say, clubs in which the inhabitants of one or two streets met every night to discuss the affairs of the neighbourhood. Out of these, we suppose, arose the Mug House Club, in Long Acre, which soon found imitators in other parts of London. The members—gentlemen, lawyers, and tradesmen—met in a large room. A gentleman nearly ninety years of age was their president. A harp played at the lower end of the room, and now and then a member rose and treated the company to a song. Nothing was drunk but ale, and every gentleman had his own mug, which he chalked on the table as it was brought in.In 1770 some young gentlemen, on returning from the grand tour it was then customary to make after leaving college—a tour which was supposed to lick the young cubs into shape and refine their manners, of course an illusion, since, whilst abroad, they associated chiefly with the scum of English society then swarming on the Continent—some of these young gentlemen, on their return, established in St. James's Street the Savoir Vivre Club, where they held periodical dinners, of which macaroni was a standing dish. This club was the nursery of the Macaronis, a phalanx of mild Hyde Park beaux, who were distinguished for nothing but the ridiculous dress they assumed. An unfinished copy of verses found among Sheridan's papers, and which Thomas Moore considered as the foundation of certain lines in the 'School for Scandal,' delineates the Macaronis in a few masterly strokes:'Then I mount on my palfrey as gay as a lark,And, followed by John, take the dust in Hyde Park.In the way I am met by some smart Macaroni,Who rides by my side on a little bay pony;... as taper and slim as the ponies they ride,Their legs are as slim, and their shoulders no wider,' etc.The Savoir Vivre Club did not outlive the reign of the Macaronis, which lasted about five years, and the club ended its days—the chairmen and linkmen never having understood its foreign appellation—as a public-house bearing the name and sign of The Savoy Weavers. There were, in the last century especially, no end of Small clubs, whose objects in most cases were trivial and ridiculous. Short notice is all they deserve.The Humdrum Club was composed of gentlemen of peaceable dispositions, who were satisfied to meet at a tavern, smoke their pipes, and say nothing till midnight. The Twopenny Club was formed by a number of artisans and mechanics, who met every night, each depositing on his entering the club-room his twopence. If a member swore, his neighbours might kick him on the shins. If a member's wife came to fetch him, she was to speak to him outside the door. In the reign of Charles II. was established the Duellists' Club, to which no one was admitted who had not killed his man. The chronicler of the club naïvely says: 'This club, consisting only of men of honour, did not continue long, most of the members being put to the sword or hanged.'The Everlasting Club, founded in the first decade of the last century, was so called because its hundred members divided the twenty-four hours of day and night among themselves in such a manner that the club was always sitting, no person presuming to rise till he was relieved by his appointed successor, so that a member of the club not on duty himself could always find company, and have his whet or draught, as the rules say, at any time.The tradespeople and workmen of the past seem to have had a passion for clubs; but there is this to be said in their favour, theirs were only drinking clubs. Our modern patrons of low-class clubs establish them for the worse pursuits of gambling and betting.IX.CURIOUS STORIES OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE.In theWeekly Journalof January 2, 1719-20, can be read: 'It was the observation of a witty knight many years ago, that the English people were something like a flight of birds at a barn-door. Shoot among them and kill ever so many, the rest shall return to the same place in a very little time, without any remembrance of the evil that had befallen their fellows.' The pigeons at Monte Carlo, whom the cruel-minded idiots who fire at them have missed, instead of flying at once and for ever from the murderous spot, perch on the cage in which their fellows are kept, and are easily caught again, to be eventually killed. 'Thus the English,' theWeekly Journalconcludes, 'though they have had examples enough in these latter times of people ruined by engaging in projects, yet they still fall in with the next that appears.' And thus the Stock Exchange flourishes. That desolation-spreading upastree was planted in the mephitic morass of the national debt. It is considered deserving of blame in an individual to get into debt, yet sometimes his doing so is unavoidable—his means are insufficient for his wants. But a nation has no excuse for taking credit and getting into debt. There is wealth enough in the country to pay cash for all it requires; and if it borrows money merely to subsidize foreign tyrants to enchain their own subjects, it commits a criminal act. But nearly the whole of our national debt has such an origin, and its poisonous produce is the Stock Exchange. The word 'stock-jobber' was first heard in 1688, when a crowd of companies sprang into existence, and it was then that the Stock Exchange was first established as an independent institution at Jonathan's Coffee-house, in Change Alley, in or about 1698. Before then the brokers had carried on their business in the Royal Exchange. London at that time abounded—at what time does it not?—with new projects and schemes, many of them delusory, consequently the legitimate transactions of the Royal Exchange were inconveniently interfered with by the presence of so many jobbers and brokers—that pernicious spawn of the public funds, as Noortbouck calls them—and they were ordered to leave the Exchange. They just crossed the road and went to Jonathan's, 'and though a public nuisance, they serve the purposes of ministers too well, in propagating a spirit of gaming in Government securities, to be exterminated, as a wholesome policy would dictate.' There, at Jonathan's, 'you will see a fellow in shabby clothes,' as we read in the 'Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London,' 'selling £10,000 or £12,000 in stock, though perhaps he may not be worth at the same time 10s., and with as much zeal as if he were a director, which they call selling a bear-skin.' Thus this latter expression seems very old. The business of stock-jobbing increased, in spite of some feeble repressive attempts on the part of Government in 1720, the House of Commons passing a vote 'that nothing can tend more to the establishment of public credit than preventing the infamous practice of stock-jobbing'; and also passing at the same time an Act enabling persons who had been sufferers thereby to obtain an easy and speedy redress.[#] In spite of this the brokers contrived to thrive to such an extent that they found it necessary to take a more commodious room in Threadneedle Street, to which admission was obtained on payment of sixpence. The Bank Rotunda was at one period the place where bargains in stocks were made; but there the brokers were as great a nuisance as they had been at the Royal Exchange, and were turned out. It was then they took the room in Threadneedle Street, and in the year 1799 they raised £12,150 in 1,263 shares of £50 each, and purchased a site in Capel Court, comprising Mendoza's boxing-room and debating forum and buildings contiguous, on which the present Stock Exchange was erected, and opened in 1801. Capel Court was so called from the London residence of Sir William Capel, Lord Mayor of London in 1504. Within the last decade the building has been considerably enlarged and beautified.[#] An Act passed in 1734 forbade time bargains under a penalty of £500 on brokers and their clients, and of £100 for contracting for the sale of stock of which the person was not possessed. Both these statutes were repealed circa 1860.Stockbrokers are supposed to lead very harassed and restless lives—yes, if they speculate on their own account and with their own money, a folly which no experienced broker ever thinks of committing. He speculates for other people, and with their money, and, well, if before the official hour of opening—viz., eleven o'clock—a chance presents itself of a deal with a customer's stock on the broker's account, by which a little benefit accrues to the latter, the customer knows nothing about it, and what you are ignorant of does not hurt. The broker is, in this respect, very much like the lawyer. Neither the broker nor the lawyer can be expected to share their clients' anxieties concerning investments or disputed interests, and they don't. When either of them leaves his office for his suburban villa or Brighton breezes, he leaves all thoughts of business behind him in the office, considering that the freedom from care he enjoys at home is honestly earned, and no doubt it is—in his estimation.Until within the first quarter of this century a singular custom concerning the admission of Jews to the Stock Exchange was in existence. The number of Jew brokers was limited to twelve, and these could secure the privilege only by a liberal gratuity to the Lord Mayor for the time being. 'During the Mayoralty of Wilkes, one of the Jew brokers was taken seriously ill, and Wilkes is said to have speculated pretty openly on the advantage he would derive from filling up the vacancy. The son of the broker, meeting the Lord Mayor, reproached Wilkes with wishing his father's death. 'My dear fellow,' replied Wilkes, with the sarcastic humour peculiar to him, 'you are in error, for I would rather have all the Jew brokers dead than your father.'The funds are much affected by political events; that goes without saying. Their rise or fall may be very rapid. It was exceptionally so in the early period of the French revolutionary war. In March, 1792, the Three per Cents, were at 96, in 1797 they were as low as 48, the lowest they ever fell to. The possession of prior or exclusive intelligence enables persons to speculate with great success. A broker who casually became acquainted with the failure of Lord Macartney's negotiation with the French Directory, made £16,000 while breakfasting at Batson's Coffee-house, Cornhill, and had he not been timid, might have gained half a million, so great was the fluctuation, owing to the news being entirely unexpected.But the magnates of the money market did not rely on casual intelligence. They left no stone unturned to obtain reliable information in advance even of Government. Thus Sir Henry Furnese, a bank director, paid for constant despatches from Holland, Flanders, France and Germany. He made an enormous haul by his early intelligence of the surrender of Namur in 1695. King William gave him a diamond ring as a reward for early information; yet he was not above fabricating false news, and he had his tricks for influencing the funds. If he wished to buy, his brokers looked gloomy, and, the alarm spread, they concluded their bargains. Marlborough had an annuity of £6,000 from Medina, the Jew, for permission to attend his campaigns. During the troubles of 1745, when the rebels advanced towards London, stocks fell terribly. Sampson Gideon, a famous Jew broker, managed to have the first news of the Pretender's retreat. He hastened to Jonathan's, bought all the stock in the market, spending all his cash, and pledging his name for more. This stroke of business made him a millionaire.During the last years of the French wars a difference of 8 per cent., and even 10 per cent., would occur within an hour, and thus great fortunes might be won or lost within that short time. It was also a period of gigantic frauds, but of these later on.Of all the sons of Maier Amschel Rothschild, Nathan, born in 1777, was undoubtedly the most prominent. Inheriting his father's spirit, he left his home at the early age of twenty-two, and in 1798 opened a small shop as a banker and money-lender at Manchester. He had left Frankfurt, where his father's house had just been knocked into ruins by the bombardment of Marshal Kleber, with only a thousand florins in his pocket. But the cotton interest was just then beginning to develop itself, and Nathan took such clever advantage of the opportunities this offered him, that at the end of five years he came from Manchester to London with a fortune of £200,000, where he became the son-in-law of Levi Barnett Cohen, one of the Jewish City magnates. The report of his Manchester successes had preceded him to the Capital, and he immediately engaged largely in Stock Exchange speculations. Whilst houses of the oldest standing were tottering or falling, owing to the State loan of 1810 having turned out a failure, and the fortunes of the Peninsular War seemed most doubtful, some drafts of Wellington to a considerable amount came over here, and there was no money in the Exchequer to meet them. Nathan Rothschild, satisfied as to England's final victory, purchased the bills at a large discount, and finally found the means of redeeming them at par. It was a splendid speculation, which resulted in his entering into closer intercourse with the Ministry, and he was chiefly employed in transmitting the subsidies which England furnished—most foolishly indeed—to the Continental Powers. The circumstance that Nathan was supplied by his brothers at Frankfurt and elsewhere with the earliest and most reliable intelligence, and his trustworthy connections and arrangements in London, enabled him to turn such knowledge to immediate and profitable account. But there being then neither railways nor telegraphs, news was slow in coming. Nathan trained carrier pigeons, and organized a staff of agents, whose duty it was to follow the march of the armies, and daily and hourly to send reports in cipher, tied under the wings of the pigeons. His agents, by means of fast-sailing boats, taking the shortest routes, indicated by Nathan himself—the mail-boats between Folkestone and Boulogne of the present day follow one of these routes—carried large sums between the coasts of Germany, France, and England. And when events on the Continent were coming to a crisis, Nathan on more than one occasion hurried over to the Continent to watch the course of affairs. It is said that Nathan Rothschild, on June 18, 1815, was on the field of Waterloo,[#] and watched the battle till he saw the French troops in full retreat, when he immediately rode back to Brussels, whence a carriage took him to Ostend. The sea was stormy; in vain Nathan offered 500 francs, 600 francs, 800 francs, to carry him across; at last a poor fisherman risked his life for 2,000 francs, and his frail barque, which carried Cæsar and his fortunes, landed Nathan in the evening at Dover. When he appeared on June 20, leaning against his usual pillar in the Stock Exchange, everything and everybody looked gloomy. He whispered to a few of his most intimate friends that the allied army had been defeated. The dismal news spread like wildfire, and there was a tremendous fall in the funds. Nathan's known agents sold with the rest, but his unknown agents bought every scrap of paper that was to be had. It was not till the afternoon of June 21 that the news of the victory of Waterloo became known. Nathan was the first to inform his friends of the happy event, a quarter of an hour before the news was given to the public. The funds rose faster than they had fallen, and Nathan still leant against his pillar in the southern corner of the Stock Exchange, but richer by about a million sterling. From that day the career of Nathan was one of ever-increasing prosperity; his firm became the agents of all European Governments; he made bargains with the Czar of Russia and with South American Republics, with the Pope and the Sultan. About the morality of the Waterloo episode the less said the better, but peers and princes of the blood, bishops and archbishops, partook of his sumptuous banquets, whilst he calculated to a penny on what a clerk could live!
VII.
SOME FAMOUS LONDON ACTRESSES.
Distance lends enchantment to the view, but the view frequently does not return it, a common practice with borrowers! Distance alone invests the East with a halo of romance and beauty, to which it really can lay no claim. The romance is the invention of Western imagination, and the beauty, if not tawdry, is monstrous. In no respect is this excess of imagination over the reality more apparent than in the eidolon the European forms in his mind of Eastern female beauty. He hears or reads of houris, and nautch-girls, and bayaderes, and the dancing-women of Japan and Burmah; but if ever he sees any of them he will be disenchanted, for awkward figures they are, wrapped up in clothes like so many sacks, twisted and tied over one another—if not old, at least middle-aged women with rings in their noses. Pooh! enough of them! The real beauties the European never gets a sight of, they are shut up in harems. But still he thinks the East the region of beauty, and longs for it, even when he sees beauty in perfection in the West, where alone it is to be found, because in Western lands alone physical and intellectual or perfect beauty exists in combination. And this combination is most frequently seen, as may be surmised from the nature of her avocation, in the actress. Women first appeared on the English stage in 1660. On December 6 in that year, at the performance of 'Othello' at the Duke's Theatre, Lincoln's Inn Fields, the prologue spoken is entitled: 'A prologue to introduce the first woman that came to act on the stage.' Pepys went to see 'The Beggar's Bush' at the same theatre on January 3, 1661, and reports: 'Here the first time that ever I saw a woman come upon the stage.' But the Queen had long before then, namely, in 1633, acted in a pastoral given at Court. The practice having, however, been introduced at the Duke's Theatre, was continued, to the disgust of moralists, who looked upon the 'enormous shamefulness' of female acting as a sinful practice. Even the intelligent and generally liberal-minded Evelyn speaks of the drama as abused to 'an atheistical liberty,' by the circumstance of women being suffered to become performers. In his Diary, October 18, 1666, he writes: 'This night was acted my Lord Broghill's tragedy, called "Mustapha," before their Majesties at Court, at which I was present, very seldom going to the public theatres for many reasons now, as they were abused to an atheistical liberty, foul and indecent women now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act, who, inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses, and to some their wives, witness ye Earl of Oxford, Sir R. Howard, P. Rupert, the Earl of Dorset, and another greater person than any of them, who fell into their snares, to ye reproach of their noble families, and ruin of both body and soul.' By 'another greater person,' Evelyn no doubt intended the King himself, Charles II., who had at least three avowed mistresses taken from the stage—Madam Davis, Mrs. Knight, and Nell Gwynne. Miss Davis was, according to Pepys, a natural daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. He went to see her perform on March 7, 1666, in 'The English Princess,' and 'little Miss Davis did dance a jigg after the end of the play, and there telling the next day's play, so that it came in by force only to see her dance in boy's clothes.' Mrs. Knight was a famous singer. Kneller painted her portrait. Of Nell Gwynne we shall have occasion to speak further on. At the same theatre Mrs. Davenport, the lady who played the part of Roxalana in 'The Siege of Rhodes,' was taken to be the Earl of Oxford'smisse, as at this time they began to call lewd women, as Evelyn says. But Evelyn evidently was badly informed. Mrs. Davenport for a long time refused the Earl of Oxford's presents and overtures, but, on his offering to marry her, she consented. The ceremony was performed, and they lived together for some time, and then the Earl informed her that the marriage was a sham, and that the mock parson was one of his trumpeters. In vain the deluded woman appealed to the laws, in vain she threw herself at the King's feet to demand justice. She might consider herself lucky to obtain a pension of £300. Pepys saw her afterwards at the theatre, and says: 'Saw the old Roxalana in the chief box, in a velvet gown, as the fashion is, and very handsome, at which I was glad.'
Moll Davies was another of the King's favourites, and he is said to have fallen in love with her through her singing 'My Lodging is on the Cold Ground' in 'The Rivals,' a play altered by Davenant from Beaumont and Fletcher's 'The Two Noble Kinsmen.' Pepys frequently mentions her as a rival to Nell Gwynne. She had one daughter by Charles, who was christened Mary Tudor, and was married in 1687 to the son of Sir Francis Ratcliff, who became Earl of Derwentwater. When the King grew tired of her he settled a pension on her of £1,000 a year. It was as a descendant of this Earl that the lady who called herself Amelia, Countess of Derwentwater, in 1868 took possession of the old baronial castle of Devilstone, or Dilston, claiming it and the estates belonging thereto, but then and now vested in Greenwich Hospital, as hers. But the Lords of the Admiralty, in 1870, defeated her claim, and she disappeared from public view.
Another famous actress in the days of Charles II. was Margaret Hughes, of whom Prince Rupert became enamoured. At first she pretended to be fiercely virtuous, so as to secure a higher price for her favours. And, in fact, the Prince settled on her Brandenburgh House, near Hammersmith, in which she lived about ten years. The house afterwards became the residence of Queen Caroline, who died there, shortly after which it was demolished.
Whatever may be said against women appearing on the stage, there is something more repulsive in men and boys taking female parts in a play, at least, so it seems to our moral feelings, and æsthetically the practice is still more objectionable. Male performers can never represent the spontaneous grace, melting voice, and tender looks of a female, and the ludicrous contretemps the custom frequently caused further showed its absurdity. Thus, on one occasion, Charles II. inquired why the commencement of the play was delayed. The manager stepped forward and craved his Majesty's indulgence, as the queen was not yet shaved. And whatever Prynne might say in his 'Histrio Mastix' against female actors, the practice caught on and became general. Of course, the opposition did not cease at once; even in France it raised its head as late as 1733. A speaker against the stage spoke thus at the Jesuits' College in Paris: 'They (the actresses) do not form the deadly shafts of Cupid, but they level them with the eye, and shoot with the utmost dexterity and skill. Such women I mean as represent destructive love characters.... How artfully do they hurl the most inconsiderable dart! What multitudes are wounded by a single one!' And, indeed, what multitudes have our Nancy Oldfields, Bracegirdles, Gwynnes, Kitty Clives, Perditas, Meltons, and the whole galaxy of theatrical beauties not only wounded, but conquered, and sometimes killed!
The life of an actress had many ups and downs—as it has now—in former days. There was the eccentric Charlotte Charke, daughter of Colley Cibber, who for some mysterious reason for many years went in male attire, and who acted on the stage if she could get employment. There was then in Bear Yard, Clare Market, a theatre, occasionally used as a tennis-court and as an auction-room. 'Thither,' she says in her Memoirs, 'I adventured to see if there was any character wanting—a custom very frequent among the gentry who exhibited in that slaughter-house of dramatic poetry. One night, I remember, the "Recruiting Officer" was to be performed.... To my unbounded joy Captain Plume was so unfortunate that he came at five o'clock to say that he did not know a word of his part.... The question being put to me, I immediately replied that I could do such a thing, but was ... resolved to stand upon terms ... one guinea paid in advance, which terms were complied with.'
We mentioned above that the life of an actress has many ups and downs even now. In justification of that statement let us quote from theStarof September 12, 1896: 'A pathetic story of an aged lady, who had been a popular actress, but upon whom evil days had come, and who was found dead in a poorly-furnished bedroom in a third-floor back at Whitfield Street, Tottenham Court Road, was told yesterday to the coroner. The old lady was Louisa Marshall, aged seventy, sister of a celebrated clown at Drury Lane, who died before her. She used to teach the piano, and had a small pension from the Musical and Dramatic Sick Fund. The contents of her room, an old piano and some theatrical dresses, were said to be worth fifty shillings at most.' But, as Byron says, let us lay this sheet of sorrow on the shelf, and speak of lively, joyous Nell Gwynne, who drove that amorous Pepys nearly mad. His Diary is full of her. First she is simply 'pretty, witty Nell' (April 3, 1665). On January 23, 1666, Nelly is brought to him in a box at the theatre. 'A most pretty woman.... I kissed her, and so did my wife, and a mighty pretty soul she is.' On March 2, in the same year, 'Nell ... comes in like a young gallant, and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her.' On May 1, 1667, he writes: 'To Westminster. In the way many milkmaids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them, and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodging's door in Drury Lane, in her smock sleeves and bodice, looking upon one. She seemed a mighty pretty creature.' But, according to her ardent admirer, this 'mighty pretty creature' could use mighty strong language too, for he says of her (October 5, 1667): 'But to see how Nell cursed for having so few people in the pit was strange.' And again, on October 26, he reports: 'Nelly and Beck Marshall (one of the great Presbyterian's daughters) falling out the other day, the latter called the other my Lord Buckhurst's mistress. Nell answered her: "I was but one man's mistress, though I was brought up in a disreputable house to fill strong waters to the gentlemen, and you are a mistress to three or four, though a Presbyter's praying daughter."' And Nell may have been right, for Beck Marshall seems to have been a trifle fast. Pepys says, on May 2, 1668: 'To the King's (play) house, where ... the play being over, I did see Beck Marshall come dressed off the stage, and look mighty fine and pretty, and noble; and also Nell, in her boy's clothes, mighty pretty. But, Lord! their confidence, and how many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how confident they are in their talk!' Pepys, in the end, seems to have cooled in his devotion to pretty Nell, for on January 7, 1669, he wrote in his Diary: 'My wife and I to the King's play-house.... We sat in an upper box, and the jade Nell came and sat in the next box, a bold, merry slut, who lay laughing there upon people, and with a comrade of hers, of the Duke's house, that came in to see the play.'
Coal Yard, Drury Lane, seems to have been Nell Gwynne's birthplace, a low, disreputable locality, and she died in a fine house on the south side of Pall Mall. Previously to that, she had lived in a house on the north side, whose site is now occupied by the Army and Navy Club. Though Drury Lane in the days of Nell Gwynne was a fashionable locality, it would seem that only to the southern division this epithet could be applied; the northern end, towards Holborn, had a low and mean character, and Coal Yard consisted of miserable tenements. It has recently been rebuilt, and is now called Goldsmith Street. Nell Gwynne died in 1691, and was pompously interred in the parish church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Dr. Tennison, the then Vicar, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, preaching her funeral sermon. This sermon was afterwards brought forward at Court to impede the doctor's preferment; but Queen Mary, having heard the objection, answered: 'Well, what then? This I have heard before, and it is a proof that the unfortunate woman died a true penitent, who through the course of her life never let the wretched ask in vain.' This was certainly as noble an answer to give on the part of a Queen as it was mean on the part of King Charles II. to say on his deathbed: 'Don't let poor Nelly starve.' Was it not in his power to make provision for her, instead of leaving her to the charity of the world?
Another both fortunate and unfortunate actress was Mrs. Montford, whose husband was murdered as he had come to escort Mrs. Bracegirdle, after Captain Hill's attempt at abducting this lady, on her leaving the theatre, of which more hereafter. On Mrs. Montford, or Mountfort—the name is found spelt both ways—Gray wrote his ballad of 'Black-eyed Susan.' Lord Berkeley's partiality for her was so great that at his decease he left her £300 a year, on condition that she did not marry; he also purchased Cowley, near Uxbridge, for her—the place had been the summer residence of Rich, the actor—and from time to time made her presents of considerable sums. She fell in love with a Mr. Booth, a then well-known actor, but, not wishing to lose her annuity, she did not marry him, though she gave him the preference over many others of her suitors. Mrs. Montford had an intimate friend, Miss Santlow, a celebrated dancer; but, through the liberality of one of her admirers, she became possessed of a fortune, which rendered her independent of the stage, upon which Mr. Booth proposed to her, and was accepted. This so affected Mrs. Montford that she became mentally deranged, and was brought from Cowley to London to have the best advice. As she was not violent and had lucid moments, she was not rigorously confined, but suffered to go about the house. One day she asked her attendant what play was to be performed that evening, and was told it was 'Hamlet.' In this piece, whilst she was on the stage, she had always appeared as Ophelia. The recollection struck her, and with the cunning always allied with insanity, she found means to elude the watchfulness of her servants, and to reach the theatre, where she concealed herself till the time when Ophelia was to appear, when she rushed on the stage, pushing the lady who was to act the character aside, and exhibited a more perfect representation of madness than the most consummate mimic art could produce. She was, in truth, Ophelia herself, the very incarnation of madness. Nature having made this last effort, her vital powers failed her. On going off, she prophetically exclaimed: 'It is all over!' As she was being conveyed home, 'she,' in Gray's words, 'like a lily drooping, bowed her head and died.'
Lovely Nancy Oldfield, who quitted the bar of the Mitre, in St. James's Market, then kept by her aunt, Mrs. Voss, became, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the great attraction at Drury Lane. Her intimacy with General Churchill, cousin of the great Duke of Marlborough, obtained for her a grave in Westminster Abbey. Persons of rank and distinction contended for the honour of bearing her pall, and her remains lay in state for three days in the Jerusalem Chamber!
We referred above to the attempt made by Captain Hill to carry off Mrs. Bracegirdle. Hill had offered her his hand and had been refused. He determined to abduct her by force. He induced his friend Lord Mahun to assist him. A coach was stationed near the Horseshoe Tavern in Drury Lane, with six soldiers to force her into it, which they attempted to do as she came down Drury Lane about ten o'clock at night, accompanied by her mother and brother, and a friend, Mr. Page. The attempt was resisted, a crowd collected, and Hill ordered the soldiers to let the lady go, and she was escorted home by her friends. She then sent for her friend Mr. Montford, who soon after turned the corner of Norfolk Street, where Hill challenged him, as he attributed Mrs. Bracegirdle's rejection of him to her love for Montford, which suspicion, however, was groundless, and ran him through the body before he could draw his sword. Hill made his escape; Montford died from his wounds.
Even in more recent days actresses have made good matches. Miss Anna Maria Tree, of Covent Garden, in 1825 married James Bradshaw, of Grosvenor Place; in 1831, Miss Foote, the celebrated actress, became Countess of Harrington; Miss Farren, Countess of Derby; Miss Brunton, Countess of Craven; Miss Bolton became Lady Thurlow; Miss O'Neill married a baronet; Miss Kitty Stephens became Countess of Essex; Miss Campion was taken off the stage by the aged Duke of Devonshire. The list might be greatly extended, even to our own times; but the instances quoted are sufficient to show the prizes ladies may draw in the theatrical matrimonial lottery; and there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it.
VIII.
QUEER CLUBS OF FORMER DAYS.
The Virtuoso Club was established by some members of the Royal Society, and held its meetings at a tavern in Cornhill. Its professed object was to 'advance mechanical exercises, and promote useful experiments'; but, according to Ned Ward, their discussions usually ended in a general shindy, and results not to be described by a modern writer. The club claimed the merit of the invention of the barometer; but, for all that, its proceedings afforded fine sport to the satirists: thus, the members were said to aim at making beer without water, living like princes on three-halfpence a day, producing a table by which a husband may discover all the particulars of the tricks his wife may play him. The ridicule showered on the club at last reduced it to a little cynical cabal of half-pint moralists, who continued to meet at the same tavern. Convivially-disposed members of other learned societies have occasionally formed themselves into clubs. Thus some antiquaries, many years since, formed a club styled 'Noviomagians.' Mr. Crofton Croker was its president more than twenty years, and many other distinguished men were members.
A number of roistering companions used to hold a club at the Golden Fleece in Cornhill, after which they named their club. Each member on his admission had a characteristic name assigned to him—as Sir Nimmy Sneer, Sir Talkative Do-little, Sir Rumbus Rattle. They eventually adjourned to the Three Tuns, Southwark.
The No-Nose Club, whether it ever existed or not, was a horrible idea in itself; it flourished only during the lifetime of its founders.
The Club of Beaus was what its name implies—a club of fops and idiots. The only merit they seem to have had was that their habits were always scrupulously clean, though their language usually was filthy. Their meetings were held at an inn in Covent Garden.
The Quacks' Club, or Physical Society, was really an offshoot of the College of Physicians, which met at a tavern near the Exchange, where they discussed medical matters. The College of Physicians at that time was in Warwick Lane, where it remained till removed, in 1825, to Trafalgar Square.
The Weekly Dancing Club, or Buttock Ball, was held at a tavern in King Street, St. Giles, and was patronized by bullies, libertines, and strumpets; footmen who had robbed their masters and turned gentlemen; chambermaids who had stolen their mistresses' clothes and set up for gentlewomen. Though called a club, it was not really a close assembly, but everyone was admitted on the payment of sixpence, and no questions asked. The Dancing Academy was first established about the year 1710 by a dancing-master over the Coal Yard gateway into Drury Lane, and was so successful that it was removed to the more commodious premises mentioned above. But at last it became such a nuisance that the authorities shut it up. The Coal Yard above mentioned, the last turning on the north-east side of Drury Lane, is said to have been the birthplace of Nell Gwynne.
A club cultivating a certain filthy habit, which I can only indicate as one practised by the French peasantry, and as described in one of Zola's novels, was established at a public-house in Cripplegate. The manner in which the proceedings of the club are set forth by their chronicler is as hideous and repulsive as the writer can make it; it could not be reproduced in any modern publication without risk of prosecution, which, indeed, would be well deserved. But the manners of the eighteenth century were excessively coarse.
The Man-Killing Club, besides admitting no one to membership who had not killed his man, also bound itself to resist the Sheriff's myrmidons on their making any attempt to serve a writ on or seize one of them. It was founded in the reign of Charles II. by a knot of bullies, broken Life-Guardsmen, and old prize-fighters. Its meetings were held at a low public-house on the back-side of St. Clement's. The good old times!
The Surly Club was chiefly composed of master carmen, lightermen, and Billingsgate porters, who held their weekly meetings at a tavern near Billingsgate Dock, where City dames used to treat their journeymen with beakers of punch and new oysters. The object of their meetings was the practice of contradiction and of foul language, that they might not want impudence to abuse passengers on the Thames. This society first established the thumping-post at Billingsgate, to harden its members by whipping never to bridle their tongues from fear of corporeal punishment. Billingsgate language was, as may be supposed, much improved by them.
The Atheistical Club met at an inn in Westminster, and its name sufficiently indicates its object, namely, to take the devil's part. A trick was played on them by a man disguising himself in a bear's skin and making them believe he was the devil, which occurrence, it is said, broke up the club. Similar societies were discovered in Wells Street, and at the Angel, in St. Martin's Lane, and the members arrested; but, it turning out that in these cases the devil was less black than he was painted, the charges against them had to be withdrawn. The societies, in fact, were more political, with republican tendencies, inspired by the French Revolution, which was just then at its height, and the worship of Reason seems to have been one of their principles.
The Split-farthing Club held its weekly meetings at the Queen's Head in Bishopsgate Street, and was supposed to be composed chiefly of misers and skinflints. If any smoker among them left his box behind him, and wanted to borrow a pipe of tobacco of a brother, it would not be lent without a note of hand, which was generally written round the bowl of a pipe so as to prevent the waste of paper.
The Club of Broken Shopkeepers held its meetings at the sign of Tumble-Down Dick, a famous boozing den in the Mint in Southwark, a sanctuary of knaves, sots, and bankrupts, honest or swindling, against arrest for debt. The sign of Tumble-Down Dick was set up in derision of Richard Cromwell, the allusion to his fall from power, or 'tumble-down,' being very common in the satires published after the Restoration. There was a house with the same sign at Brentford. Of course, the professed object of the meetings of the broken shopkeepers was that of driving away and forgetting care; and any new-comer among them, if he had any cash left, was liberally allowed to expend it for the furtherance of the club's object.
The Man-Hunting Club was composed chiefly of young limbs of the law; uncultivated youths, though they were law students, formed themselves into an association to hunt men over Lincoln's Inn Fields and the neighbourhood whom they might happen to meet crossing them at ten or eleven o'clock at night. They would be concealed upon the grass in one of the borders of the fields till they heard some single person coming along, when they would spring up with their swords drawn, run towards him, and cry: 'That's he; bloody wounds, that's he!' Usually the person so attacked would run away, when they would pursue him till he took refuge in an alehouse in some neighbouring street. But if the man-hunters encountered a person of courage, ready to fight them, they would sneak off, like the curs they really were. Their meeting-place was at a tavern close to Bear Yard, Clare Market.
The Yorkshire Club held its meetings on market-days at an inn in Smithfield. It was composed of sharp country-folk, who assumed the innocence of yokels. The most flourishing members among them, says one authority, were needle-pointed innkeepers; nick and froth victuallers, honest horse chaunters, pious Yorkshire attorneys; the rest good, harmless master hostlers, two or three innocent farriers, who had wormed their masters out of their shops, and themselves into them. When met for business, their deliberations were about horseflesh, blind eyes, spavins, bounders and malinders, and how to disguise defects and get rid of the animals.
The Mock-Heroes Club met at an alehouse in Baldwin's Gardens, and was composed chiefly of attorneys' clerks and young shopkeepers. On admission the new member assumed the name of some defunct hero, and ever afterwards was at the meetings called by that name; and as the club held its meetings in the public room, though at a separate table specially reserved for them, this formal and ridiculous way of addressing one another caused no slight amusement to the other persons frequenting the room. In other respects their language was high-flown. Thus, one would face about to his left-hand neighbour, with his right hand charged with a brimming tankard, saying: 'Most noble Scipio, the love and friendship of a soldier to you. The thanks of a brother to my valiant friend Hannibal, whom I cannot but value, though I had the honour to conquer.' 'My respects to you, brave Cæsar,' cries one opposite, 'remembering the battle of Pharsalia.' And so on, till they had drunk themselves under the table.
The Lying Club, which held its meetings at the Bell Tavern, in Westminster, is said to have been established in 1669. Every member was to wear a blue cap with a red feather in it; before admittance he had to give proof of his powers of mendaciloquence; during club hours, that is, from four to ten p.m., no true word was to be uttered without a preliminary 'By your leave' to the chairman; and if any member told a 'whopper' which the chairman could not beat with a greater, the latter had to surrender his office for that evening. Ned Ward gives some exquisite specimens of the 'whoppers' told by members.
The Beggars' Club held its weekly meetings at a boozing ken in Old Street. All the sham cripples, blind men, etc., belonged to it, and there discussed the various stratagems they had adopted to excite public compassion, or intended to adopt for that purpose.
About 1735 a number of young gentlemen, who were pretenders to wit, formed themselves into a society, which met at the Rose Tavern, Covent Garden, and which they christened the Scatter-wit Society. But their literary performances were poor specimens of wit, contributed nothing to the reputation of the Rose Tavern as the resort of 'men of parts,' and consequently is not frequently mentioned in the literature of that day.
Bob Warden was the younger brother of Mr. Warden, a gentleman who, 'after having given a new turn to Jackanapes Lane, and promoted many useful objects for the good of the public, was undeservedly hanged.' We may explain here that Jackanapes Lane was the original name of Carey Street, north of the Law Courts, and the new turn Mr. Warden gave to it is the western bend connecting it with Portugal Street. Bob Warden, after his brother's death, was apprenticed to a painter, but, thinking more of his palate than his palette, he dropped the latter, and with some money left to him, established a convivial club at the Hill, in the Strand, where all sorts of queer characters, such as ruined gamesters, petticoat-pensioners, Irish captains, sharpers and cheats were welcome. As the meetings took place in a cellar, the club became known as the Cellar Club, and was the forerunner of the Coal Hole and the Lord Chief Baron Nicholson. Bob, amidst his roistering customers, drank himself to death.
For about ten years the Mohawks, or Mohocks, kept London in a state of alarm, though they seldom ventured into the City, where the watch was more efficient, but confined themselves chiefly to the neighbourhood of Clare Market, Covent Garden, and the Strand. TheSpectatorsays of them: 'Some of them are celebrated for dexterity in tipping the lion upon them, which is performed by squeezing the nose flat to the face and boring out the eyes with their fingers. Others are called the dancing-masters, and teach their scholars to cut capers by running swords through their legs.... A third sort are the Nimblers, who set women on their heads and commit ... barbarities on them.' Their conduct in the end became so alarming that a reward of £100 was offered by royal proclamation for the apprehension of any one of them. Curious stories were current at various times as to the origin of this society. In the 'Memoirs' of the Marquis of Torcy, Secretary of State to Louis XIV., and a famous diplomatist (born 1665, died 1746), the Duke of Marlborough is said to have suggested to Prince Eugene 'to employ a band of ruffians ... to stroll about the streets by night ... and to insult people by passing along, increasing their licentiousness gradually, so as to commit greater and greater disorders ... that when the inhabitants of London and Westminster were accustomed to the insults of these rioters, it would not be difficult to assassinate those of whom they might wish to be freed, and to cast the whole blame on the band of ruffians.' This project the Prince is reported to have rejected. Swift, in his 'History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne,' attributes the scheme to the Prince himself on his visit to this country, through his hatred of Treasurer Harley. He proposed that 'the Treasurer should be taken off ... that this might easily be done and pass for an effect of chance, if it were preceded by encouraging some proper people to commit small riots in the night. And in several parts of the town a crew of ruffians were accordingly employed about that time, who probably exceeded their commission ... and acted inhuman outrages on many persons, whom they cut and mangled in the face and arms and other parts of their bodies.... This account ... was confirmed beyond all contradiction by several intercepted letters and papers.' It is just possible that popular panic exaggerated the doings of the Mohawks. Perhaps they did not exceed in savagery the drunken frolics then customary at night-time.
The Hell Fire Club was an institution of a character similar to that of the Mohawks. It was abolished by an order of the Privy Council in 1721, 'against certain scandalous clubs,' but it must have been revived in the country, for John Wilkes, about 1750, was a notorious member of a club with the above name at Medmenham Abbey, Bucks.
The Calves' Head Club for a time had its headquarters at The Cock, an inn long since demolished, in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall. It was one of the many inns at which Pepys was 'mighty merry.' The club is said to have been originated by Milton and other partisans of the Commonwealth; and the author of the 'Secret History of the Calves' Head Club'—probably Ned Ward—gives an account of the melodramatic and diabolical ceremonies observed at their banquets. An axe was hung up in their club-room as a sacred symbol—the destroyer of the tyrant. But the eating and drinking, for which, as Addison says, clubs were instituted, were not neglected by the members. At the banquet held in 1710 there was spent on bread, beer, and ale the sum of £2 10s.; on fifty calves' heads, £5 5s.; on bacon, £1 10s.; on six chickens and two capons, £1; on three joints of veal, 18s.; on butter and flour, 15s.; on oranges, lemons, vinegar, and spices, £1; on oysters and sausages, 15s.; on the use of pewter and linen, £1; and on various other items additional sums, bringing the total up to £18 6s. No wine, it will be noticed, is included in the above bill, but there is no doubt a considerable amount for this item should be added to it.
Early in the last century street clubs became common in various parts of London, that is to say, clubs in which the inhabitants of one or two streets met every night to discuss the affairs of the neighbourhood. Out of these, we suppose, arose the Mug House Club, in Long Acre, which soon found imitators in other parts of London. The members—gentlemen, lawyers, and tradesmen—met in a large room. A gentleman nearly ninety years of age was their president. A harp played at the lower end of the room, and now and then a member rose and treated the company to a song. Nothing was drunk but ale, and every gentleman had his own mug, which he chalked on the table as it was brought in.
In 1770 some young gentlemen, on returning from the grand tour it was then customary to make after leaving college—a tour which was supposed to lick the young cubs into shape and refine their manners, of course an illusion, since, whilst abroad, they associated chiefly with the scum of English society then swarming on the Continent—some of these young gentlemen, on their return, established in St. James's Street the Savoir Vivre Club, where they held periodical dinners, of which macaroni was a standing dish. This club was the nursery of the Macaronis, a phalanx of mild Hyde Park beaux, who were distinguished for nothing but the ridiculous dress they assumed. An unfinished copy of verses found among Sheridan's papers, and which Thomas Moore considered as the foundation of certain lines in the 'School for Scandal,' delineates the Macaronis in a few masterly strokes:
'Then I mount on my palfrey as gay as a lark,And, followed by John, take the dust in Hyde Park.In the way I am met by some smart Macaroni,Who rides by my side on a little bay pony;... as taper and slim as the ponies they ride,Their legs are as slim, and their shoulders no wider,' etc.
'Then I mount on my palfrey as gay as a lark,And, followed by John, take the dust in Hyde Park.In the way I am met by some smart Macaroni,Who rides by my side on a little bay pony;... as taper and slim as the ponies they ride,Their legs are as slim, and their shoulders no wider,' etc.
'Then I mount on my palfrey as gay as a lark,
And, followed by John, take the dust in Hyde Park.
In the way I am met by some smart Macaroni,
Who rides by my side on a little bay pony;
... as taper and slim as the ponies they ride,
Their legs are as slim, and their shoulders no wider,' etc.
The Savoir Vivre Club did not outlive the reign of the Macaronis, which lasted about five years, and the club ended its days—the chairmen and linkmen never having understood its foreign appellation—as a public-house bearing the name and sign of The Savoy Weavers. There were, in the last century especially, no end of Small clubs, whose objects in most cases were trivial and ridiculous. Short notice is all they deserve.
The Humdrum Club was composed of gentlemen of peaceable dispositions, who were satisfied to meet at a tavern, smoke their pipes, and say nothing till midnight. The Twopenny Club was formed by a number of artisans and mechanics, who met every night, each depositing on his entering the club-room his twopence. If a member swore, his neighbours might kick him on the shins. If a member's wife came to fetch him, she was to speak to him outside the door. In the reign of Charles II. was established the Duellists' Club, to which no one was admitted who had not killed his man. The chronicler of the club naïvely says: 'This club, consisting only of men of honour, did not continue long, most of the members being put to the sword or hanged.'
The Everlasting Club, founded in the first decade of the last century, was so called because its hundred members divided the twenty-four hours of day and night among themselves in such a manner that the club was always sitting, no person presuming to rise till he was relieved by his appointed successor, so that a member of the club not on duty himself could always find company, and have his whet or draught, as the rules say, at any time.
The tradespeople and workmen of the past seem to have had a passion for clubs; but there is this to be said in their favour, theirs were only drinking clubs. Our modern patrons of low-class clubs establish them for the worse pursuits of gambling and betting.
IX.
CURIOUS STORIES OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE.
In theWeekly Journalof January 2, 1719-20, can be read: 'It was the observation of a witty knight many years ago, that the English people were something like a flight of birds at a barn-door. Shoot among them and kill ever so many, the rest shall return to the same place in a very little time, without any remembrance of the evil that had befallen their fellows.' The pigeons at Monte Carlo, whom the cruel-minded idiots who fire at them have missed, instead of flying at once and for ever from the murderous spot, perch on the cage in which their fellows are kept, and are easily caught again, to be eventually killed. 'Thus the English,' theWeekly Journalconcludes, 'though they have had examples enough in these latter times of people ruined by engaging in projects, yet they still fall in with the next that appears.' And thus the Stock Exchange flourishes. That desolation-spreading upastree was planted in the mephitic morass of the national debt. It is considered deserving of blame in an individual to get into debt, yet sometimes his doing so is unavoidable—his means are insufficient for his wants. But a nation has no excuse for taking credit and getting into debt. There is wealth enough in the country to pay cash for all it requires; and if it borrows money merely to subsidize foreign tyrants to enchain their own subjects, it commits a criminal act. But nearly the whole of our national debt has such an origin, and its poisonous produce is the Stock Exchange. The word 'stock-jobber' was first heard in 1688, when a crowd of companies sprang into existence, and it was then that the Stock Exchange was first established as an independent institution at Jonathan's Coffee-house, in Change Alley, in or about 1698. Before then the brokers had carried on their business in the Royal Exchange. London at that time abounded—at what time does it not?—with new projects and schemes, many of them delusory, consequently the legitimate transactions of the Royal Exchange were inconveniently interfered with by the presence of so many jobbers and brokers—that pernicious spawn of the public funds, as Noortbouck calls them—and they were ordered to leave the Exchange. They just crossed the road and went to Jonathan's, 'and though a public nuisance, they serve the purposes of ministers too well, in propagating a spirit of gaming in Government securities, to be exterminated, as a wholesome policy would dictate.' There, at Jonathan's, 'you will see a fellow in shabby clothes,' as we read in the 'Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London,' 'selling £10,000 or £12,000 in stock, though perhaps he may not be worth at the same time 10s., and with as much zeal as if he were a director, which they call selling a bear-skin.' Thus this latter expression seems very old. The business of stock-jobbing increased, in spite of some feeble repressive attempts on the part of Government in 1720, the House of Commons passing a vote 'that nothing can tend more to the establishment of public credit than preventing the infamous practice of stock-jobbing'; and also passing at the same time an Act enabling persons who had been sufferers thereby to obtain an easy and speedy redress.[#] In spite of this the brokers contrived to thrive to such an extent that they found it necessary to take a more commodious room in Threadneedle Street, to which admission was obtained on payment of sixpence. The Bank Rotunda was at one period the place where bargains in stocks were made; but there the brokers were as great a nuisance as they had been at the Royal Exchange, and were turned out. It was then they took the room in Threadneedle Street, and in the year 1799 they raised £12,150 in 1,263 shares of £50 each, and purchased a site in Capel Court, comprising Mendoza's boxing-room and debating forum and buildings contiguous, on which the present Stock Exchange was erected, and opened in 1801. Capel Court was so called from the London residence of Sir William Capel, Lord Mayor of London in 1504. Within the last decade the building has been considerably enlarged and beautified.
[#] An Act passed in 1734 forbade time bargains under a penalty of £500 on brokers and their clients, and of £100 for contracting for the sale of stock of which the person was not possessed. Both these statutes were repealed circa 1860.
Stockbrokers are supposed to lead very harassed and restless lives—yes, if they speculate on their own account and with their own money, a folly which no experienced broker ever thinks of committing. He speculates for other people, and with their money, and, well, if before the official hour of opening—viz., eleven o'clock—a chance presents itself of a deal with a customer's stock on the broker's account, by which a little benefit accrues to the latter, the customer knows nothing about it, and what you are ignorant of does not hurt. The broker is, in this respect, very much like the lawyer. Neither the broker nor the lawyer can be expected to share their clients' anxieties concerning investments or disputed interests, and they don't. When either of them leaves his office for his suburban villa or Brighton breezes, he leaves all thoughts of business behind him in the office, considering that the freedom from care he enjoys at home is honestly earned, and no doubt it is—in his estimation.
Until within the first quarter of this century a singular custom concerning the admission of Jews to the Stock Exchange was in existence. The number of Jew brokers was limited to twelve, and these could secure the privilege only by a liberal gratuity to the Lord Mayor for the time being. 'During the Mayoralty of Wilkes, one of the Jew brokers was taken seriously ill, and Wilkes is said to have speculated pretty openly on the advantage he would derive from filling up the vacancy. The son of the broker, meeting the Lord Mayor, reproached Wilkes with wishing his father's death. 'My dear fellow,' replied Wilkes, with the sarcastic humour peculiar to him, 'you are in error, for I would rather have all the Jew brokers dead than your father.'
The funds are much affected by political events; that goes without saying. Their rise or fall may be very rapid. It was exceptionally so in the early period of the French revolutionary war. In March, 1792, the Three per Cents, were at 96, in 1797 they were as low as 48, the lowest they ever fell to. The possession of prior or exclusive intelligence enables persons to speculate with great success. A broker who casually became acquainted with the failure of Lord Macartney's negotiation with the French Directory, made £16,000 while breakfasting at Batson's Coffee-house, Cornhill, and had he not been timid, might have gained half a million, so great was the fluctuation, owing to the news being entirely unexpected.
But the magnates of the money market did not rely on casual intelligence. They left no stone unturned to obtain reliable information in advance even of Government. Thus Sir Henry Furnese, a bank director, paid for constant despatches from Holland, Flanders, France and Germany. He made an enormous haul by his early intelligence of the surrender of Namur in 1695. King William gave him a diamond ring as a reward for early information; yet he was not above fabricating false news, and he had his tricks for influencing the funds. If he wished to buy, his brokers looked gloomy, and, the alarm spread, they concluded their bargains. Marlborough had an annuity of £6,000 from Medina, the Jew, for permission to attend his campaigns. During the troubles of 1745, when the rebels advanced towards London, stocks fell terribly. Sampson Gideon, a famous Jew broker, managed to have the first news of the Pretender's retreat. He hastened to Jonathan's, bought all the stock in the market, spending all his cash, and pledging his name for more. This stroke of business made him a millionaire.
During the last years of the French wars a difference of 8 per cent., and even 10 per cent., would occur within an hour, and thus great fortunes might be won or lost within that short time. It was also a period of gigantic frauds, but of these later on.
Of all the sons of Maier Amschel Rothschild, Nathan, born in 1777, was undoubtedly the most prominent. Inheriting his father's spirit, he left his home at the early age of twenty-two, and in 1798 opened a small shop as a banker and money-lender at Manchester. He had left Frankfurt, where his father's house had just been knocked into ruins by the bombardment of Marshal Kleber, with only a thousand florins in his pocket. But the cotton interest was just then beginning to develop itself, and Nathan took such clever advantage of the opportunities this offered him, that at the end of five years he came from Manchester to London with a fortune of £200,000, where he became the son-in-law of Levi Barnett Cohen, one of the Jewish City magnates. The report of his Manchester successes had preceded him to the Capital, and he immediately engaged largely in Stock Exchange speculations. Whilst houses of the oldest standing were tottering or falling, owing to the State loan of 1810 having turned out a failure, and the fortunes of the Peninsular War seemed most doubtful, some drafts of Wellington to a considerable amount came over here, and there was no money in the Exchequer to meet them. Nathan Rothschild, satisfied as to England's final victory, purchased the bills at a large discount, and finally found the means of redeeming them at par. It was a splendid speculation, which resulted in his entering into closer intercourse with the Ministry, and he was chiefly employed in transmitting the subsidies which England furnished—most foolishly indeed—to the Continental Powers. The circumstance that Nathan was supplied by his brothers at Frankfurt and elsewhere with the earliest and most reliable intelligence, and his trustworthy connections and arrangements in London, enabled him to turn such knowledge to immediate and profitable account. But there being then neither railways nor telegraphs, news was slow in coming. Nathan trained carrier pigeons, and organized a staff of agents, whose duty it was to follow the march of the armies, and daily and hourly to send reports in cipher, tied under the wings of the pigeons. His agents, by means of fast-sailing boats, taking the shortest routes, indicated by Nathan himself—the mail-boats between Folkestone and Boulogne of the present day follow one of these routes—carried large sums between the coasts of Germany, France, and England. And when events on the Continent were coming to a crisis, Nathan on more than one occasion hurried over to the Continent to watch the course of affairs. It is said that Nathan Rothschild, on June 18, 1815, was on the field of Waterloo,[#] and watched the battle till he saw the French troops in full retreat, when he immediately rode back to Brussels, whence a carriage took him to Ostend. The sea was stormy; in vain Nathan offered 500 francs, 600 francs, 800 francs, to carry him across; at last a poor fisherman risked his life for 2,000 francs, and his frail barque, which carried Cæsar and his fortunes, landed Nathan in the evening at Dover. When he appeared on June 20, leaning against his usual pillar in the Stock Exchange, everything and everybody looked gloomy. He whispered to a few of his most intimate friends that the allied army had been defeated. The dismal news spread like wildfire, and there was a tremendous fall in the funds. Nathan's known agents sold with the rest, but his unknown agents bought every scrap of paper that was to be had. It was not till the afternoon of June 21 that the news of the victory of Waterloo became known. Nathan was the first to inform his friends of the happy event, a quarter of an hour before the news was given to the public. The funds rose faster than they had fallen, and Nathan still leant against his pillar in the southern corner of the Stock Exchange, but richer by about a million sterling. From that day the career of Nathan was one of ever-increasing prosperity; his firm became the agents of all European Governments; he made bargains with the Czar of Russia and with South American Republics, with the Pope and the Sultan. About the morality of the Waterloo episode the less said the better, but peers and princes of the blood, bishops and archbishops, partook of his sumptuous banquets, whilst he calculated to a penny on what a clerk could live!