Bayswater.]

Hill, Berkeley Square, taking its course through Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, which was built on the high banks of the said stream, where it ceased to blend with the Tye. We know that as early as the reign of Henry III. there were six fountains in this locality from which water was supplied to the City by means of pipes.

In Lambert's "London and its Environs," published in 1805, we read :-" Bayswater is a hamlet to Paddington, about a mile from London, on the Uxbridge Road. Its public tea-gardens formerly belonged to the celebrated Sir John Hill, who here cultivated the medicinal plants from which he prepared his essences, tinctures, &c." Sir John Hill was the son of a clergyman, born about 1716, and bred as an apothecary. He was employed by Lord Petre and the Duke of Richmond in the arrangement of their botanic gardens in Essex and Sussex; and by their assistance he executed a scheme of travelling over several parts of the kingdom, to collect the most rare plants, accounts of which he published by subscription. But this proved a failure, and showed that he was in advance of his time. His "Vegetable System" extends over twenty-six folio volumes! and for this he was rewarded by a Swedish order of knighthood from the king of that country. It appears that, for a time at least, Sir John Hill, though little better than a charlatan and an empiric, enjoyed the reputation of a great and learned botanist. He was at one time a second-rate actor, and he made an unsuccessful attempt to obtain admission into the Royal Society. Garrick's epigram on him is well known, and has often been quoted :—

"For physic and farces his equal there scarce is; His farces are physic; his physic a farce is." Among the medicines produced by Sir John Hill were his "Water-dock Essence" and his "Balm of Honey." These gardens are now covered by the long range of mansions called Lancaster Gate. They were originally known as the "Physic Garden," and were opened as a place of amusement towards the close of the last century. They were still in existence as gardens as late as 1854, though no longer frequented by pleasure-seekers of the upper classes. It is not a little singular that the gardens at Bayswater are not even mentioned by name, in the article on "Old Suburban Tea Gardens," in Chambers' "Book of Days." Faulkner, writing in 1820, says that within the last few years Bayswater has increased to a "popular neighbourhood."

Craven House, which gave its name to Craven Hill, above mentioned, became the residence of Lord Craven's family some time before 1700, on their removal from Drury Lane. It was borrowed

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(as stated above) by Queen Anne, as a nursery for her son, the little Duke of Gloucester, before she engaged Campden House, where we have already seen her.

Craven Hill is now called Craven Road, the inequality of it having been levelled by filling up the low ground where a small brook once crossed it from north to south. The houses in Craven Road and Craven Hill Gardens stand on the site of a field which was given about the year 1720 in exchange for the "Pest-field," near Golden Square, already mentioned; and it may be the reverse of comforting to the inhabitants to know that, under an old agreement between Lord Craven and the parochial authorities, the plot of ground in question may be taken for the purpose of a burialground, in case London should ever again be visited with the plague; unless, indeed, this liability has been done away with by the Act which enforces extra-mural interments. This land was not used during the cholera of 1849; and at the present time, as we have shown above, a grand London square, called Craven Gardens, alone indicates the site of the Pest-house fields. The property, which belonged in former times to one Jane Upton, and was called Upton Farm, was purchased by the trustees of this charity-estate for £1,570.

In 1821 the Toxophilite Society rented about four acres of ground here, between Sussex Gardens and the Bayswater Road, just opposite the point where Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens meet; they formed then part of quite a rural district, the ground shelving down somewhat steeply on the west to a little brook. A pavilion was erected here for the use of the members, and we are told that "there was space for three pairs of targets, with a range of about 200 yards." The Society held these grounds until 1834, when they removed to their present gardens in the Regent's Park. The exact site of these grounds is preserved in the name of the Archery Tavern in Bathurst Street, leading to Sussex Square.

In the fields a little to the north of Craven Hill, towards Westbourne Green, was the cottage (see page 147) where the Princess of Wales used to throw off the restraints of royal etiquette in the company of her intimate friends.

The district lying between Kensington Gardens and Paddington, a little to the north of Bayswater, was known, till the reign of George IV., as Westbourne Green, and was quite a leafy retreat at the time of that king's accession. That portion of the district lying to the north of Westbourne Grove and Bishop's Road will be best dealt with in our chapter on Paddington; but with regard to West

&c., sprung up between 1860 and 1870, on the site of Hopwood's Nursery Grounds and the Victoria Tea Gardens, which we have mentioned above.

About the year 1861, we may here remark, a novelty, in the way of street railways, was introduced in the Bayswater Road, by Mr. George F. Train, who was at least the pioneer of a useful invention. Permission had been given by the Commissioners of Highways for Mr. Train to lay down the rails for his new conveyance, and the event was inaugurated by a public banquet at St. James's Hall. Notwithstanding the coldness with which the project was at first received, the plan has since been carried out in various parts of London in the tramways.

In the autumn of 1832, when the cholera was spreading death far and wide throughout the land, Dr. Adam Clarke, the author of a well-known Commentary on the Bible, here fell a victim to that fatal malady. He was engaged to preach at Bayswater on Sunday, the 26th of August, and on the Saturday before he was conveyed there in a friend's chaise. He was cheerful on the road, but was tired with his journey and listless in the evening; and when a gentleman asked him to preach a charity sermon for him and fix the day, he replied, "I am not well; I cannot fix a time; I must first see what God is about to do with me." He retired to bed early, not without some of those symptoms that indicated the approach of this awful disease, but which do not appear to have excited any suspicions in himself or in his friends. He rose in the morning ill, and wanting to get home; but before arrangements could be made for his removal, he had sunk into his chair -that icy coldness, by which the complaint is

characterised, had come on, and when the medical men arrived, they pronounced it a clear case of cholera. His wife and most of his children, short as the summons was, gathered about him-he had ever been the most affectionate of husbands and parents-and his looks indicated great satisfaction when he saw them; but he was now nearly speechless. "Am I blue?" however, he said to his son-a question indicating his knowledge of the malady under which he was sinking; and without any effort of nature to rally, he breathed his last.

On the north side of the Bayswater Road, about. a quarter of a mile from the site of Tyburn Turnpike, is a dreary burial-ground, of about an acre, with a chapel of the plainest description, belonging to the parish of St. George, Hanover Square. In this burial-ground was deposited, in 1768, the body of Laurence Sterne, the author of "Tristram Shandy," who had died in poverty at his lodgings in Bond Street, as we have already stated. But the body was afterwards taken up by some of the "resurrection men," and sent to Cambridge to the professor of anatomy for dissection. Such, at all events, is the story told by Sir J. Prior, in his "Life of Malone." His grave here is marked by a plain upright stone, with an epitaph clumsily expressed, "a perpetual memorial of the bad taste

of his brother masons."

Among other eminent persons buried here were Mr. J. T. Smith, the author of "The Book for a Rainy Day," and many other antiquarian works on London; Mrs. Radcliffe, the author of "The Mysteries of Udolpho;" and last, not least, General Sir Thomas Picton, who fell at Waterloo ; but in 1859 his body was removed, and re-interred in St. Paul's Cathedral.

The little river Tyburn, or Tybourn, whence the district derives its name, consisted of two arms, one of which, as already stated, crossed Oxford Street, near Stratford Place; while the other, further to the west, followed nearly the course of the present Westbourne Terrace and the Serpentine. Five hundred years ago, or less, it was a pleasant brook enough, with rows of elms growing on its banks. These trees were a place of execution in those days; and Roger de Mortimer, the paramour of Queen Eleanor, widow of Edward II., was dragged thither on a hurdle, and hung and quartered, his body being exposed there for several days. Elm's Lane, Bayswater, now swept away, preserved down to our own time the memory of these fatal elms, which are to be regarded as the original "Tyburn Trees." It was at a subsequent time that the place of execution was removed nearer to London, the corner of the Edgware Road. Here it became a fixture for centuries; here many notable and many notorious persons have "died in their shoes," to use a favourite cant expression. Here suffered the "Holy Maid of Kent;" Mrs. Turner, the poisoner, and the inventor of the starched ruff which adorns so many portraits of fair ladies of other days; Felton, the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham; a batch of the parliamentary regicides; some dozens of Roman Catholic priests, condemned as "traitors;" a long line of illustrious highwaymen, such as Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild; Lord Ferrers, the murderer of his steward; Dr. Dodd, for forgery; and last, not least, Mother Brownrigg, the same

“Who whipped three female 'prentices to death,
And hid them in the coal-hole."

An absurd derivation of the name has been suggested, as though it was from the words "tie" and "burn," though some countenance is given to the derivation by the fact that traitors were strung or "tied" up first, and afterwards "burnt." But the real origin is from the little brook, or burn, which ran by the spot, as above mentioned.

The gallows were removed hither (as we have seen) from opposite to St. Giles's Pound; but there had been occasional executions here earlier: for instance, it is upon record that Judge Tressilian and Nicholas Brembre, or Brambre, were hung here in A.D. 1388. Mr. Dobré was at great pains to discover the record of an earlier execution here, but failed.

The complete history of the neighbourhood of "Tyburn Tree" has still to be written, though the materials are far from scanty; for between the Reformation and the reign of George III., few

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years elapsed in which Roman Catholic priests, and even laymen, were not sent thither to suffer, nominally as "traitors," but in reality because they were the adherents of a proscribed and persecuted faith, and refused, at the bidding of an earthly sovereign, to abandon their belief in the Pope as the spiritual head of Christendom. Here, too, during the same period, almost as many men of a different stamp paid the last penalty of the law for violating other enactments-highwaymen, robbers, forgers, and murderers. The highwaymen generally went to the scaffold merrily and jauntily, as men who had all their lives faced the chance of a violent death, and were not afraid to meet it at Tyburn. As they passed along the streets in the fatal cart, gaily dressed in their best clothes, young women in the crowd would present them with nosegays, and in the eyes of the assembled multitudes their deaths were regarded as almost as glorious as those of the Roman Catholic "confessors" were esteemed by their co-religionists.

Our readers will not, of course, forget the lines in the song of "Macheath," in the Beggar's Opera, which thus refer to Tyburn :

"Since laws were made for every degree,
To curb vice in others as well as in me,
I wonder we ha'nt better company
'Neath Tyburn Tree."

One of the earliest executions on this spot was that of "Sir Roger Bolinbroke, the conjuror" (A.D. 1440), who suffered for high treason, in conjunction with the Duchess of Gloucester, as recorded by Shakespeare.* From the Harleian MSS., No. 585, we learn his fate in detail. On the same day on which he was condemned at Guildhall, he was drawn from the Tower to Tyburn, and there hanged, beheaded, and quartered, his head being set up on London Bridge, and his four quarters being disposed of in like manner at Hereford, Oxford, York, and Cambridge.

Here was executed, in the fifteenth century, Fisher, a skinner, already mentioned + by us as the man who released Sir John Oldcastle when a prisoner in the Tower.

Here, in 1534, were executed Elizabeth Barton, the so-called "Holy Maid of Kent," who had prophesied the speedy death of Henry VIII.; several of her supporters suffered with her.

Here, too, a few years later, suffered Sir Thomas Percy, Aske, D'Arcy, Bigod, Sir John Bulmer, and the Abbot of Jewaux, for the share they had taken in a foreign pilgrimage and in a last desperate effort to restore the Catholic religion in England.

See Henry VI., part ii., act 1, sc. 2. † See Vol. II., p. 65.