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  Mordaunt’s great secret was that he was a maverick – on another occasion he heard that his troops were getting nervous about an impending attack and immediately leaped down from his horse, grabbed a pike and joined them in the ranks, an unheard of act for an aristocratic commander at that time.

  He refused to stick to the rules which most commanders accepted. One of these was that the cavalry was always the cavalry and the infantry the infantry – Mordaunt made his cavalry dismount and attack as foot soldiers on one day and the next he’d insist they get back in the saddle to mount a completely different kind of attack.

  As he moved across Spain no city seemed able to defend itself against him and legends about his invincibility grew – until he reached Madrid. Here Mordaunt came up with what he thought was a foolproof plan to take the city but his plan was dismissed as hopeless by Archduke Charles of Austria, the claimant to the Spanish throne who was supported by England, Holland and Germany. Monarchs – even stupid monarchs – always get their way and a furious Mordaunt instantly resigned and set off for an extended holiday in Italy.

  Meanwhile Mordaunt’s replacement – Lord Galway – thought that his military advantage was such that even an idiot could take Madrid. Within a few days of starting his carefully planned offensive he realised that it was not so easy after all – his army of 18,000 men had been utterly defeated and their weapons, baggage, animals and horses taken.

  Mordaunt was delighted at the failure of his replacement, but by this time he’d been sent to Vienna by the British Government Vienna bored him and thereafter he found he simply could not stay in one place for long – over the next few years he continually dashed between Madrid, Copenhagen, Vienna and The Hague. The British Government began to suspect that he wanted the Spanish War of Succession to continue indefinitely because it gave him good reason for his continual travel at government expense.

  Even in old age he was still rushing around like a lunatic – ‘He is the most energetic man who ever lived,’ said a friend. Then, in his late sixties and back in London, he married a penniless actress.

  As he grew older Mordaunt became ever more eccentric – in old age he could be found doing his own shopping in a market at Parson’s Green in West London dressed in his full lord’s regalia. He eventually died from eating – it was said – too many grapes.

  His wife, a former actress, discovered that Mordaunt had written his autobiography – it ran to more than three densely written volumes but in a fit of pique – or maybe she was just overzealous at tidying up – she threw it on the fire.

  BURIED WITH HIS BOOKS

  1705

  London has always bred eccentrics. There is something in the freedom and anonymity the City provides that allows obscure enthusiasms to develop unhindered by the pressure to conform – the sort of pressure that might far more easily be brought to bear in some remote and isolated village.

  Among the less well known of London’s oddball characters is William Edward Chamberlayne. Born in 1616 in Gloucestershire he came to London as a young man. He made his fortune and began to devote more and more time to studying the past – his fame as an antiquarian and author (he wrote a number of books about ancient Rome) spread. When he died in 1705 few were surprised to discover a strange request in his will. He ordered that his heirs would not receive a penny if they failed to ensure that he was buried with all his favourite books, each volume carefully preserved in wax before the interment. The wax was designed to protect the books from the ravages of damp six feet under ground and in his will Chamberlayne explains that he is looking forward to continuing to enjoy his books in another life.

  Today the memorial stone to this strange but rather endearing man can be seen in the churchyard of Chelsea old church. Sadly the large slab has been so weathered by the elements that it is difficult to decipher now, but enough remains to tell the story of this eccentric bibliophile.

  THE CANDLE-STUB SELLER

  1707

  Very few of London’s shops last more than a century, but at least one is far older than that and the story of its origins is both strange and fascinating. Most shops survive by adapting and constantly modernising but Fortnum and Mason has in many ways done just the opposite.

  One of the last of London’s truly old-fashioned stores, Fortnum’s still insists that the staff in its wine shop should wear frock coats.

  The shop’s origins lie in the friendship between William Fortnum, a footman in the royal household, and Hugh Mason, a shopkeeper. As a footman to Queen Anne, one of Fortnum’s jobs was to ensure that the candles in the palace candelabra were regularly replaced. He was allowed the stumps of the old candles and sold these on – candles were very expensive in the eighteenth century and William did a roaring trade with his candle-stump business, though the stumps were mostly sold to the very poor.

  Over the years he spent working in the royal household at St James’s Palace, William learned just how a big house was run, so when he retired he suggested to his friend John Mason that they set up a shop together supplying the nearby palace and the gentry right across Mayfair and Piccadilly.

  The shop, opened near the premises it still occupies today, did so well that the two men quickly expanded the business and bought a big team of horses and carts for deliveries.

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century Fortnum and Mason were famous for importing a vast range of wonderfully exotic foods – many never seen before in England – from the East, largely through the East India Company which was expanding rapidly at that time.

  Explorers and generals took Fortnum’s potted meats and other foods with them and soon the shop’s hampers were being sent all over the world – Queen Victoria famously sent a huge Fortnum’s vat of beef tea to Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) in the Crimea and the explorer William Parry (1790–1855) set off in search of the North West Passage in 1819 with a casket of more than two hundredweight of Fortnum and Mason cocoa powder!

  Sadly Fortnum and Mason’s beautiful old shop was rebuilt in the 1920s, but an elaborate clock made in the 1960s and fitted to the Piccadilly front of the store commemorates its Georgian origins. It shows the figures of Mr Fortnum and Mr Mason and when the clock strikes the hour the two figures step out and bow to each other. The figure in the red coat is Fortnum – red being the colour of the dress of footmen of the royal household.

  Traditions in the shop also hark back two centuries and more – the man in charge of the bakery, for example, is known even today as the ‘Groom of the Pastry’.

  ST MARY IN THE ROADWAY

  1712

  Tourists are often baffled when they visit the Church of St Mary Le Strand. Why on earth, they ask, is this church built right in the middle of the roadway? The answer is that when the church was first built traffic flowed easily around it because the Strand was a mere lane with only light horse and foot traffic going steadily between Charing Cross and Westminster to the west and the City and Ludgate Hill to the east. Indeed so quiet was the street that until the middle decades of the nineteenth century St Mary Le Strand still had a graveyard, but it was so small that every inch of ground down to a depth of eight feet was filled with bodies. Between 1830 and 1840 so many extra bodies were being placed in the ground each week that the church officials ran out of room and rotting bodies and coffins were left piled up above ground. The situation reached crisis point because the Thames had become so polluted by this time that there were repeated cholera outbreaks. Large numbers died – but the old tradition was that people who lived in a specific area or parish had to be buried in their parish church (an absurd situation given London’s vast population) so those who lived near St Mary Le Strand had to be buried in its churchyard even though there was no longer any room.

  By the late 1840s the government decided that enough was enough and they cleared the graves and widened the road to leave the church as we see it today, but having cleared the ground outside the church the authorities made another extraordinary discovery – in the sealed va
ults beneath the church and stretching out under the old graveyard there were hundreds of bodies no one had expected to find. In fact, there were so many that when the vault walls were breached so much gas escaped – gas from centuries of decomposing bodies – that the whole area had to be cordoned off for several weeks to allow the lethal fumes to escape.

  Many other strange tales swirl around St Mary Le Strand – the world’s first cab rank was set up here in 1625 just in front of the church, for example, and when the present building was erected during Queen Anne’s reign there was an extraordinary plan to build a vast monument to her. The planned column was to be the tallest in London at two hundred and fifty feet, but when Anne died in 1714 the idea was quietly shelved.

  Perhaps most bizarre of all is the fact that the original church on the site – built in the twelfth century – was stolen stone by stone by Lord Protector Somerset in 1548. Somerset was so keen that his new palace (on the site of the present eighteenth-century Somerset House) should be lavish that he also demolished a chapel at St Paul’s and a large part of the priory of St John at Clerkenwell. He needed building materials for his new palace and simply helped himself – even the church was not powerful enough to stop him. But the church had its revenge. In 1551 he fell from grace and was executed on Tower Hill in 1552.

  The present church was built for Anglican worship but visitors always remark on the fact that it has the sumptuousness and style of a Roman Catholic church – the explanation for this is that James Gibbs (1682–1754), the architect, was a secret Catholic who before taking up architecture as a profession had trained for the priesthood. When the church commissioned St Mary’s they no doubt welcomed the lavish design but had no idea about of the architect’s secret allegiances.

  DOG LATIN

  1715

  Nothing better illustrates the British obsession with religion than the decision of the English Parliament in 1689 to ask the Dutch Prince William of Orange (1650–1702) – who couldn’t speak a word of English and was eccentric to the point of lunacy – to come to London and become King of England.

  The job of monarch had become vacant after James II – favoured with an equally eccentric ancestry – fled the country because Parliament didn’t like his obsession with Catholicism. The two men were closely related – they also shared the not overly attractive characteristic of short, thin, rickety legs – and their histories reveal how Parliament’s strength and importance had increased since Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall in 1649.

  The king’s duty now was to behave in ways that suited Parliament not, as in previous centuries, the other way round and so to some extent all that was needed was a compliant king who didn’t spend too much money. The fact that William of Orange didn’t speak a word of English may well in this respect have been one of his greatest virtues, but it did lead to at least one bizarre circumstance.

  The Act of Settlement of 1701, which made it impossible for a Catholic to become King or Queen of England, hit a few problems when the childless Queen Anne died in 1714 so yet another German Prince was invited over, his sole qualification once again being that he could not speak English.

  George’s I’s Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745) did not speak a word of German, but protocol demanded that the two men meet regularly to discuss affairs of state. The only way they could do it was to speak to each other in Latin. Both had a smattering of the language but communication was poor – so much so that the two men often left their meetings convinced they had discussed entirely different subjects!

  A BANK WITH A WOOLLY MAMMOTH

  1717

  On the south side of Trafalgar Square close to Admiralty Arch are the London premises of Drummonds Bank, one of the oldest banks in the world. Although Drummonds is now part of the Royal Bank of Scotland it kept its own traditions largely intact until well into the 1970s.

  The bank has been here since 1717, but when it started few would have guessed that it would still be in business two centuries later. In fact at the outset it looked as if the bank would barely last a year – the main problem was that Andrew Drummond, who founded the bank, was a Scotsman and the Scots were not at all popular in London in 1717, just two years after the Jacobite Rebellion. The London Scots, including Drummonds, survived an initial period of discrimination only to hit further serious problems in 1745 when another Jacobite Rising led to dozens of prominent English merchants and aristocrats withdrawing their money from Drummonds. However, word got about in London that Drummond was in trouble through no fault of his own and hundreds of Scotsmen who had previously banked elsewhere or did not use a bank at all moved their money to Drummonds as a sign of solidarity. The boost was enough to transform Drummonds and keep them going well into the twentieth century, despite numerous banking crises over the years.

  Right up until the 1970s anyone who entered the Admiralty Arch branch would have felt as if they were stepping back at least a century – a longcase clock ticked quietly in the entrance hall, Victorian and earlier furniture stood sedately here and there and the grand central table always offered customers a range of quill pens. These were carefully sharpened each week by a member of staff.

  For reasons now lost in the mists of history, Drummonds also once housed a museum of fossils discovered in Trafalgar Square. If you arrived a little early for your meeting with the bank manager it was customary to ask an attendant if it might be possible to look at the museum. You were then led through a door into a room that housed a prehistoric lion, a rhinoceros and a woolly mammoth!

  THE CHURCH THAT WENT TO AMERICA

  1724

  The early churches of New England and indeed right across America are much admired for the simple elegance of their design, but it is a little-known fact that their design is based almost entirely on the design of London’s St Martin in the Fields.

  What sounds like a delightfully eccentric name today refers to the fact that when the church was completed in 1724 it stood in agricultural land on the edge of the village of Charing – in other words it really was in the fields rather than in the town.

  But the design of St Martin’s shocked the citizens of London because however traditional it may now look it was revolutionary in eighteenth-century eyes. Until St Martin’s was built it was accepted practice to place the steeple at the east end of the church not the west end, but architect James Gibbs (1682–1754) decided to turn the thing on its head and build the steeple where we see it today. He also built it above an imposing portico that looks like the grand entrance to an ancient temple.

  Critics and architects marvelled at the audaciousness of the new church and despite the innate conservatism of churchgoers and the church authorities the new design soon became very popular – so much so that several members of Gibbs’s architectural practice were enticed to America by the offer of large sums of money. With the design of St Martin’s packed in their saddle bags they moved west as the American settlers moved west, building identical or near identical copies of St Martin’s as they went.

  THE MEANEST MAN IN SOUTHWARK

  1730

  Many men and women become obsessed with making and keeping money but few allow their passion for cash to take over their whole lives.

  An exception to that rule was John Elwes, who was born in about 1730 into a family of notorious misers. Elwes became so famous for his penny-pinching ways that after his death dozens of books, pamphlets and broadsheets were published detailing his extraordinary career.

  The Elwes family had lived in Southwark for generations. They made their money – and they were vastly wealthy – from brewing, yet John Elwes’s mother is said to have died from malnutrition.

  Although John was by all accounts an exceptionally bright child, he rarely opened a book after leaving school; in fact as the desire to make money grew he gave up everything else, including riding, which had been a passion in his youth.

  In his twenties he began to visit his uncle, Sir Harvey Elwes, but he always changed into rags before he
reached the house, so terrified was he that his uncle, a famous miser, would be offended at his decent clothes and disinherit him.

  Later, when he himself was bitten by the miser’s bug, he refused to educate his own sons because he thought it would give them grand ideas about spending money rather than keeping it.

  The two men, uncle and nephew, would sit by a fire made with one stick and completely in the dark, sharing a glass of wine until bedtime; they would then creep upstairs, still in the dark, to save the cost of a candle.

  When he came into his inheritance John became fanatically stingy. He would walk from one end of London to the other in the heaviest rain rather than part with sixpence for a coach; he ate maggot-infested meat; he would never light a fire to dry his clothes; he wore a wig that had been thrown into a ditch by a beggar, and a coat that had gone green with age – it had belonged to a long-dead ancestor and had been found blocking a hole in the wall of the house. When he rode to London – he was an MP for more than ten years – he would always carry an egg or two in his pocket and sleep in a hedge rather than pay the cost of lodgings, and he always rode his horse on the grass verge instead of on the road for fear that his horse’s shoes would wear out too quickly. He owned houses all over London as well as an estate in Suffolk, but took a few pieces of furniture with him each time he travelled about rather than furnish each house.

  Yet in spite of this parsimony he rarely collected a gambling debt if it was owed to him by someone he liked, and he was himself a very keen gambler, parting with thousands at a go when the mood took him. He could also be enormously generous and considerate; for example, he once rode sixty miles to help two elderly spinsters threatened by an ecclesiastical court. He died in 1789 at the age of fifty-nine and was buried in the graveyard at Southwark Cathedral. He left more than three-quarters of a million pounds to his two sons.