Hyde Park, Its History and Romance. Mrs. Alec-Tweedie
and then he goes on to say how well he remembers the neighbourhood where Tyburn formerly stood.
“When I came to London in 1840, Connaught Place was nearly the farthest western extension of regular houses along the Bayswater Road. From Albion Street, westwards and northwards, there were open market gardens. Hyde Park Gardens and Square, Oxford and Cambridge Squares, Gloucester and Sussex Squares were just beginning to emerge, and I have played cricket on the site of Westbourne Terrace. At that time a long brick wall ran along the north side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens beside the Bayswater Road, and very dismal and dirty it was. There was no Marble Arch then, and the burial-ground was used daily. Notting Hill Gate, of course, was a “pike.” Working people, servants in livery, and dogs were not allowed in Kensington Gardens. On the occasion of a storm the rule was relaxed, and footmen for once were allowed to bring in the umbrellas!
“My father, who was born in the eighteenth century, as a boy lived in No. 9 Berkeley Street, opposite to the garden of Devonshire House, in the house which my aunt ultimately sold to Prince Louis Napoleon. About the year 1810, the boys would often spend a holiday in Hyde Park, which was then a deer-park, as rural and solitary as Windsor Forest now. Of course, there was neither bridge over the Serpentine nor Powder Magazine. The corner of the Park between Kensington Gardens and the Serpentine was a solitude, where the boys would bring their baskets and picnic.
“Sixty years ago I can remember magnificent forest trees, chestnuts, oaks, and elms, in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, as fine as any in this island. They are nearly all gone. I have seen about a thousand swept away.
“The rows of carriages, often two deep, continued in Hyde Park down to about 1860, as thick as shown in Doyle’s sketches for Pip’s Diary in Punch. Ten or twenty thousand ‘bucks’ or ‘dandies’ hung over the rails on the footpath to look on. And the carriages were so closely packed in line that they could only just walk. On one occasion, about 1856, the throng of carriages to see the muster of the Four-in-Hand Club Drags was so great that the carriages could not be extricated from the line. Many had to remain into the night, and the fine ladies were obliged to descend and walk home in the dusk.
“The famous tearing down of the railings of the Park in 1866 was an accident, and almost a joke. A good-humoured crowd had gathered to see what Mr. Edmond Beales and the Reform League would do when the police stopped them from entering the Park. Mr. Beales turned back and went home, and never knew what happened, as he told me himself, till he reached his home at night. The crowd, seeing no fun, began to amuse themselves with singing and climbing up on the railing, which was hardly strong enough, or high enough, to stop a flock of sheep. Suddenly, with shouts of laughter, the rail fell inwards, and the crowd naturally followed, but without a thought of any concerted action. The people got hot and angry on the following days. But the famous Hyde Park Riot of 1866 was a mere street scramble owing to the rotten state of the old railing.”
These are the words of a living writer, and yet how much is changed. Cricket on the site of Westbourne Terrace seems almost as remote as the hundreds, aye, thousands, of hangings that took place near where the Marble Arch now stands. There stood Tyburn, probably the most gruesome, gory spot in the whole of the British Isles.
The brick wall has long since disappeared, and even the inner railings between the side-walks and the road have almost all gone.
Wisely Tyburn has been swept away by its later rulers. Not a vestige of the name survives to remind the passers-by that it once existed, except on the iron tablet which marks the site of the old turnpike gate, and bears the following inscription:
This iron plate is about 4 feet high, and is a little to the west of the clock-house at the Marble Arch, just opposite Edgware Road. So it was well within the last hundred years that Tyburn Gate disappeared.
Hyde Park, as a place for intrigue, strongly appealed to the dramatist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and has been immortalised by many poets. Ben Jonson speaks of it in the Prologue of The Staple News, and in The World in the Moon (1620). An old ballad in the Roxburgh Collection sings:
“Of all parts of England, Hyde Park hath the name
For coaches and horses and persons of Fame.”
Shirley, too, named one of his plays Hyde Park, and laid his plot within its boundaries. Pepys went to see the performance of the play, and formed a poor opinion of it. Other authors have written of the Park in this sense, as a background for dramatic tales of intrigue; such as Etherage in The Man of Mode (1676), Howard in The English Monsieur (1674), Southerne in The Maid’s Last Prayer (1693), Farquhar in The Constant Couple (1700), and Congreve in The Way of the World (1760).
From those far distant days to the present Hyde Park has never lost its prestige as a meeting-place for all classes of English Society; and the present volume is an attempt to depict its story in a more or less connected form.
Nor must the grim records of Tyburn, so closely associated with the Park, be forgotten. From the date of the first public hanging on the outskirts of the Park in 1196, right down to late in the eighteenth century, a constant succession of unhappy beings were done to death here, sometimes for crimes which in our more merciful days would be hardly punished by a forty-shilling fine; and in the dread days of the religious persecution in the times of the Tudors, this place of heroic martyrdom saw some of the sublimest deaths in the history of our land. Upon hurdles, bound in ignominy, down Snow Hill and along the Oxford Road, just stopping for a last stirrup-cup to speed them upon their way at St. Giles’s Spital, were drawn martyrs and malefactors innumerable.
The doomed Carthusians, the Maid of Kent, heroic Campion, the miserable Dr. Lopez and his Portuguese confederates; priests, protestants, patriots, and rogues, for ages all such took their last look on earth at Hyde Park; first from the rise behind Connaught Terrace, and later from the open space at the corner of the Edgware Road.
Sporting ground, shambles, dwelling-place, scene of intrigue, theatre of Royal magnificence and military display, the Park through the centuries may be said almost to epitomise the history of England, and to the present day it has never ceased to be interesting.
The enormous crowds that frequent the place even now is seen by the fact that it contains about 35,000 chairs, and even that number is often insufficient in the height of the season. Hundreds of long wooden benches, too, are scattered all over the Park, where “Love’s young dream” continues from morn till eve, year in year out. Soldiers from the barracks hard by at Knightsbridge make love to pretty nursemaids; young men from the shops in Bayswater or Kensington whisper sweet nothings into the ears of handsome girls, and, according to the practice favoured by them, sit with their arm round one another’s neck or waist.
Various classes are to be found in Hyde Park. For instance, the élite drive on summer afternoons from five to seven, when four or five rows of motors and carriages moving along at crawling pace is quite a common sight. The fashionable drive used to be from Hyde Park Corner to Knightsbridge Barracks, but every few years fashions change, and during the last two seasons far more carriages were to be found between Hyde Park Corner and the Marble Arch.
Every afternoon when she is in town, the Queen drives round the Park between six and seven. There is no pomp or show. A mounted policeman goes in front to clear the way, and at a distance of fifty yards follows the royal carriage, just an ordinary, high C-spring barouche with red wheels, and a couple of men-servants in black livery with black cockades. Behind the coachman sits the Queen of England. She often has guests with her, but if not, drives alone with a Lady-in-Waiting, generally the Hon. Charlotte Knollys, one of that faithful family attached to the Court, and a Gentleman-in-Waiting opposite.
The carriage passes along at an ordinary trot, and every one bows, the gentlemen raising their hats, in fact keeping them off until the Queen has passed. No woman in Europe knows how to bow more graciously than Queen Alexandra. She is blessed with a long swan-like