London's Strangest Tales Read online

  Writing about Rochester half a century later, the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) wrote: ‘In a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness.’

  What Johnson leaves out of the portrait is that Rochester was extremely witty and amusing – qualities the king admired above all others and which may explain why Charles forgave Rochester repeatedly for his rudeness, pranks and dishonesties. On one crackpot escapade Rochester pretended to be one Dr Bendo. He set up his stall on Tower Hill and for weeks sold thousands of quack medicines to the London populace. When he was discovered the authorities were only just able to prevent rioting. On another occasion Rochester – an enormously talented poet – wrote of the king:

  Here sits our good and gracious king

  Whose word no man relies on

  Who never did a gracious thing

  Nor ever said a wise one.

  Charles found Rochester so amusing that he even managed to forgive this cutting jibe although it did result in Rochester being banished to his house in the country for some months.

  Rochester was very much Charles II’s ‘all licensed fool’ and the bawdiness of his satirical verse was only matched by the sexually explicit nature of the London plays that Charles encouraged. Plays like The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1640–1716) were all about sexual intrigue; they were amoral and concerned only with wit, intelligence and the pleasures of sex. The extraordinary fact that they could be produced on the London stage at all was entirely down to the power of the king – after he died such plays were banned for a century and more.

  Rochester finally went too far (though he died soon afterwards) when he wrote, again about the king:

  Nor are his high desires above his strength:

  His scepter and his prick are of a length;

  And she may sway the one who plays with th’ other,

  And make him little wiser than his brother.

  Rochester died aged just 33 in 1680, probably from syphilis. He knew that he was considered beyond the pale but made light of it in ‘To the Postboy’:

  ‘Son of a whore, God damn you, can you tell

  A peerless peer the readiest way to Hell?’

  ‘The readiest way, my Lord’s by Rochester.’

  A PITCHED BATTLE WITH THE LAWYERS

  1684

  Whatever one thinks about youngsters misbehaving today – whether they are fighting in the streets, getting drunk or stealing cars – we should remember that it was at least as bad, if not far worse, in medieval and later London.

  Endless ordinances were issued against London apprentices who regularly fought pitched battles against each other – the problem was exacerbated by the intense rivalry between the various guilds who taught their mysteries (their crafts) to apprentices who signed up for a period of training in medicine, leather work or any of the many other trades on which London depended.

  But the London mob, as it was known, was even more fearsome than the unruly apprentices. The mob rose whenever rumour ran through the city that foreigners were up to no good (foreigners were periodically attacked and sometimes even killed) but one of the most bizarre uprisings occurred in 1684 after Nicolas Barbon, the famous property developer, bought the land that is now covered by Red Lion Square a little to the north of Holborn.

  Barbon had grown rich building houses for the newly emerging middle classes – tradesmen and sometimes minor aristocrats who needed to live in or near London but wanted a fashionable address. In earlier periods (unlike today) older houses were shunned in favour of modern new houses – a complete reversal of the current situation where period houses invariably command a premium.

  Problems arose when the lawyers of nearby Gray’s Inn decided that the last thing they wanted was a new housing development on what was then open land to the west of their inn. Thinking the law would invariably side with them, the lawyers of Gray’s Inn went to court to block Barbon’s development but since, then as now, property was nine-tenths of the law, Barbon won. He won because he had bought the land fair and square.

  But the lawyers refused to give up and when Barbon’s workmen began digging the foundations of his new houses the lawyers, several hundred of them, ran out brandishing sticks and clubs and the workmen fled. The lawyers then filled in the trenches dug for the new houses and retreated to their Inn.

  Refusing to be beaten, Barbon hired several dozen of London’s nastiest thugs along with a new batch of workmen. He began work again on the foundations. His heavies hid under tarpaulins in the workmen’s carts and when the lawyers rushed out again the toughs jumped out of the wagons and a running fight began that lasted for most of the morning.

  The lawyers, being essentially desk johnnies, were no match for the professional toughs and Barbon won the day. The lawyers had to accept defeat and Red Lion Square was built. Only one or two houses – much altered – survive from Barbon’s time.

  THE FIELD OF THE FORTY STEPS

  1687

  Stories inevitably outlast the places and people that inspired them; sometimes the stories themselves seem to vanish only to be rediscovered by scholars working in obscure corners of history. In London there are many such stories and one of the most mysterious has its origins on the land behind the site of the British Museum.

  This area is now covered over largely by Senate House and other University of London buildings, but when the museum was plain Montague House, the land where the university now stands was open fields that stretched away to the old Mary Le Bon Road and the hills beyond. But the fields by Montague House became legendary after a bizarre duel; a duel that made the fields famous through thousands of penny dreadfuls sold by itinerant ballad sellers all over London.

  The duel was probably fought in 1687 by two brothers who were in love with the same girl. The girl sat on a grassy bank and watched the brothers as they fought to the death.

  According to the legend no grass grew in the field after the brothers died and ghostly footprints – exactly forty in number – were regularly seen here for decades afterwards.

  A MOUSETRAP ON THE HEAD

  1690

  Until the 1980s there was still a strange little jewellery shop tucked away in a corner of one of the ancient Inns of Court. The shop, known as the Silver Mousetrap, had traded continually from these premises since 1690, but if the survival of a shop that long in London is remarkable then the origin of the shop’s name is even more noteworthy.

  The name dates back to a time when rich fashionable women would spend a day or two having their hair turned into an extraordinary sculpture. First the hair would be piled as high as possible – perhaps with the addition of artificial hair – and then plaster birds might be added to make it look as if birds were nesting in the hair and perhaps a small carved ship or a tree or simply a mass of artificial flowers. Occasionally a mix of all these things and more would be built into the structure of the hair, which was stiffened with flour, chalk dust or arsenic powder.

  The problem with these fabulous creations is that they took so long to make that they had to be slept in for weeks at a time and until the style was changed the hair could not be washed. This led to a serious problem with mice.

  Today, when we have a range of sophisticated chemicals to control mice and other pests, it is difficult to imagine what it was like when there were no really effective ways to control mice, rats, bedbugs and fleas – beds were routinely infested with bugs until the twentieth century and houses collapsed when wood-boring insects had done their work for long enough; walls and ceiling voids were commonly filled with mice which people tended to ignore, since the business of trying to remove or kill them was simply impossible. Even if it had been possible to eliminate a particular infestation newcomers would soon move in to take thei
r place.

  When a woman of fashion slept with her enormous head of firmly fixed hair mice invariably found their way into it, and even for a population that had learned to put up with the presence of various rodents this was too much.

  For a woman embarrassed at the prospect of a mouse popping out of her hair during lunch or supper there was only one solution. A trip to The Silver Mousetrap, where elegant ladylike mousetraps made in silver were available. Having bought two or three of these things the woman of fashion, on retiring for the night, would place them strategically around her head. If the mice came out while she slept they would with any luck be caught in one or other of the traps. Users were warned not to roll about too much in their sleep lest an unwary nose or ear set off one of the traps!

  WHEN PRISON MARRIAGES WERE ALL THE RAGE

  1696

  It is hard to believe now but 15 per cent of all marriages conducted in Britain during most of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were actually conducted in London’s Fleet Prison, or more precisely in what were known as the Rules of the Fleet – an area bounded roughly by Fleet Lane, the Old Bailey, Farringdon Street and Ludgate Hill.

  Today almost none of the maze of alleys and courtyards that once existed here survive. But in the eighteenth century the mass of cheap lodging houses within the Rules of the Fleet provided homes for Fleet prisoners who’d been given special privileges.

  The Fleet was a debtors’ prison but, under the strange rules that dated back to medieval times, debtors who provided suitable security were let out of the prison itself on the understanding that they would not leave the Rules of the Fleet. Here they could live and carry on their jobs and professions until such time as their debts had been paid and they were released. But within the Rules imprisoned clergymen (and there were a surprisingly large number of imprisoned clergymen) were permitted to conduct entirely legal marriages.

  The first Fleet marriage of which records survive took place in 1613 but by the late seventeenth century an odd ecclesiastical law meant that there was an explosion in the number of marriages carried out in the Fleet.

  In 1696 the law changed so that clergymen who married couples without first declaring the banns were prosecuted – as they were beneficed clergymen they might lose their livings. Clergymen in the Fleet were by definition unbeneficed (i.e. they had no parishes) and could not therefore be prosecuted as the law specifically referred to beneficed clergymen, so anyone who wanted to marry without their parents’ permission could do so only at the Fleet.

  Couples arrived in their hundreds and then thousands and there was little the authorities could do. Some have argued that the authorities deliberately left this loophole open to reduce the number of illicit relationships.

  As well as within the prison itself, Fleet marriages took place in coffee houses, lodging rooms and shops of all kinds (from booksellers to bakers). What’s more, it was possible to be married at any time of the day or night, seven days a week throughout the year – the Fleet in early eighteenth-century London had the sort of reputation for marriages that Las Vegas has today.

  More than two hundred and fifty thousand couples are recorded as marrying in the Fleet before the rules changed and the prison was demolished – some of the marriages were no doubt forced or fraudulent but many couples’ motives were entirely honourable. They were merely attracted by the speed and relative cheapness of a Fleet marriage.

  THE BOARD OF THE GREEN CLOTH

  1698

  After a disastrous fire in 1698 that almost completely destroyed the old Palace of Westminster, the monarch and his courtiers moved away, never to return. The Palace – more a collection of haphazard buildings – had covered all the ground from Westminster Hall, which survived the fire, to well beyond the Banqueting House, the only other major part of the old palace that survived the fire.

  In other words the old palace covered much of the road still known as Whitehall today as well as all the land running from it down to the river.

  Because it was home to the king and his court this area was treated as rather special in every respect and this has led to one of London’s strangest survivals – a government body known as the Board of Green Cloth.

  Named after the cloth covering over the table at which it met, the Board of Green Cloth was set up while the court was still at Whitehall and before the fire with the express purpose of licensing pubs, theatres and other places of entertainment within what was known in seventeenth-century England as the Verge of the Court. This meant anywhere within the Palace of Whitehall precincts – and remember taverns could be set up within the precincts of the palace as it was more like a village spread over a wide area than a palace in the sense we understand that term today. But the Verge of the Court also included the area around Whitehall extending well beyond the limits of the palace – but precisely how much of this outside area was defined as being within the Verge of the Court has never really been established.

  The strangest thing about the Board of the Green Cloth is that it still exists and if you apply for a licence for a pub or theatre within the area of its ancient jurisdiction you will still, even today, have to prove to the board that you are a fit person to work within the bounds of a court that vanished more than three centuries ago.

  PIG FAT AND FACE POWDER

  1700

  Among the dottiest people who ever lived in London was Lady Lewson, famed throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century for her bizarre lifestyle.

  Records suggest she was born in 1700 or perhaps 1701 in Essex Street just north of the Strand. Mrs Lewson – or Lady Lewson as she was afterwards known – married a rich elderly merchant when she was just nineteen and moved to his house at Clerkenwell, then a quiet village on the edge of London.

  Her husband died when she was only twenty-six, but from that time until her death in about 1800, she hardly ever left the house. Every day she made sure all the beds in the house were made up, although no one ever came to stay. She was highly superstitious: in over sixty years she never cleaned a window in the house, fearing they would be broken in the process or that the person cleaning them might be injured. And she refused to allow anything to be moved in any room, believing that it might make her catch cold.

  In summer she was sometimes seen reading in her garden in attire which would have been far more appropriate to the fashion of about 1690, with ‘ruffs and cuffs and fardingales’, and she always wore her hair powdered and piled high on her head over a stiff horsehair frame.

  She believed washing was highly dangerous and would lead to some ‘dreadful disorder’. Instead she smeared her face and neck with pig’s fat, on top of which she applied a liberal quantity of pink powder.

  When Lady Lewson died it was the talk of London – her house was opened up to mourners and the curious who found a time capsule unchanged in more than seventy years.

  SHORT TEMPER, EXTRAVAGANT HABITS

  1705

  Wealth and position have always allowed the rich to be madder and more eccentric than the rest of us, but even by the standards of a very eccentric age Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough (1658–1735), stood head and shoulders over other London eccentrics.

  He claimed he had murdered three people and got away with it before he was twenty and whether or not this had more to do with bravado than truth, it is certainly true that he was one of the greatest rakes and libertines of the second half of the seventeenth century; a man of short temper, extravagant habits and utter ruthlessness.

  He inherited his title in early middle age but was furious when he discovered that the title came with no money.

  He joined the army and it was quickly discovered that he had absolutely no regard whatsoever for his own safety – a fact which made him one of the strangest, and bravest, soldiers in British history.

  Stories of his bizarre behaviour and eccentricities are legion, but among the more inexplicable of his actions was the incident that occurred in Covent Garden in the summer of 1682
. He leaped from his coach on seeing a man dressed in brightly coloured clothes. Mordaunt chased the poor man down the street, prodding him with his sword until he fell over into the mud. Satisfied, Mordaunt climbed back into his coach and sent the man he’d assaulted a large sum of money the next day.

  He spent his youth chasing young unmarried woman and much older married women (‘Catch ’em at both ends,’ he used to shout) and though rumour had it that he was never particularly successful (largely because he was short and very ugly), what he lacked in charm he made up for in imagination.

  Once, in middle age and long after he’d become one of Britain’s best-known soldiers, he fell in love with a miller’s daughter while walking in the country. To get close to her he visited her father’s mill the next day wearing workman’s clothing and claiming to be called Richard Copp. He became the miller’s apprentice, paying heavily for the privilege. But the miller’s daughter took absolutely no notice of him – he then discovered she was engaged to someone else anyway.

  For reasons that will never make sense, the Duke of Marlborough – a relative of Mordaunt’s – gave him command of the army sent to Spain to take part in the War of the Spanish Succession (1700–1714) – and this despite the fact that Mordaunt had absolutely no qualifications of any kind as a soldier. As luck would have it, he turned out to be a military mastermind.

  His first great success came at Barcelona where a long siege by the British had ended in stalemate. The problem was that Mordaunt had only a few thousand men where he probably needed at least 30,000. Racking his brains he decided that he’d better raise the siege – Barcelona’s militia, seeing the enemy troops marching away, relaxed their guard and immediately Mordaunt ordered his men to turn round and attack – somehow the city’s defences were breached and with just 1,500 men Mordaunt had soon taken the city. Back in England he was immediately hailed as a genius.