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from The jilt &c., and Good
stories of man and other animals
Library edition
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1896
Originally from The jilt (1884)
A.D. 1616 -- The "Swan Inn," Knightsbridge, with a pightle of land and three acres of meadow skirting Hyde Park, was leased by the Freeholder, Agmondishain Muscamp, to Giles Broncham, of Knightsbridge, Winifred his wife, and Roger their son; rent £30 a year.
A.D. 1634 -- The same Freeholder leased the above to Richard Callawaie and his son, for their lives; rent £30 a year.
A.D. 1671 -- The above lease was surrendered, and a new one granted to Richard Callawaie, the younger, for forty-two years; rent £42.
October 19 and 20, A.D. 1674 -- The then Freeholder, William Muscamp, Jane his wife, and Ambrose their son, sold the property, subject to Callawaie's lease and a mortgage of £200 to Richard Portress, Baker and Citizen of London, for £680.
December 5, A.D. 1674 -- Portress sold to Robert Cole for a trifling profit.
March 17, A.D. 1682 -- Cole mortgaged the property to Squire Howland, of Streathain, for £200, with forfeiture for ever if not redeemed by payment of £212 on or before September 18, 1682. This marks the tightness of money in those days, and the high interest paid on undeniable security. The terms of the forfeiture were rigorous, and the £212 was not paid; but the mortgagee showed forbearance. He even allowed Cole to divide the security, and sell the odd three acres, in 1684, to Richard Callawaie, for £180. For this sum was then conveyed the site of all the buildings now abutting on Hyde Park, from the "Corner" to opposite Sloane Street, and including, inter alia, nearly the whole of Lord Rosebery's site.
July, A.D. 1686. -- Nicholas Burchade, Goldsmith and Citizen of London, purchased the "Swan" and pightle (subject to Iveson's lease for 21 years at £50 a year). He paid to Howland, the patient mortgagee, £239, 15s.; to Cole and his wife, £700.
But in less than a year he sold to Edward Billing, Tobacconist, for £602, 10s.
Billing may be assumed to have also purchased Callawaie's lot, for though no negotiation either with Burchade or Billing is disclosed in the recitals, Callawaie's interest in the property disappears between 1686 and 1719, and the heirs of Billing are found possessed of the whole property.
A.D. 1701. -- Edward Billing made a will, leaving to his wife the "Swan" and pightle for her life, and this is the first document which defines that property precisely.
July, A.D. 1719. -- James Billing, of Boston, Carpenter, and Mary his wife, sold to John Clarke, Baker, the entire property, for £675, subject to Anne Billing's life-interest in the "Swan."
Some years later, Anne Billing sold her life-interest to Clarke for £29, 10s. per annum.
John Clarke was the first to take a right view of this property and its capabilities.
A.D. 1722. -- He granted a building lease, for sixty-one years, of the three acres, ground-rents £3 per house.
His successor, Jonathan Clarke, followed
suit, and, in A.D. 1776, condemned the
"Swan," and granted the materials, the site, and the
pightle, on building lease, to Ralph Mills, for a much
shorter time than is general now-a-days, on condition of his
building eighteen houses, one of which to be the
Freeholder's, rent free, and Mills paying £59
a year for the other seventeen.
Now in the will of Edward Billing, already
referred to, and dated 1701, the "Swan" and its messuages,
and its pightle, are described as "lying near the
bridge, and bounded west by Sir Hugh Vaughan's lands,
east by the Lazarcot, north by the wall of Hyde Park, and
south by the King's Highway." I should have called it the
Queen's Highway; but you must be born before you can be
consulted in trifles. From this document, coupled with the
building lease of 1776, we can trace the property to a
square foot; the back slum now leading to four houses called
"High Row," together with those houses, covers the area of
the old "Swan Inn." The houses lately called "Albert
Terrace," and numbered correctly, but now called "Albert
Gate," and numbered prophetically, are, with their little
gardens, the pightle.
The "Swan Inn," condemned in 1776, was
demolished in 1778, not 88, as the guide-books say, and the
houses rose. The ground-leases were not a bad bargain for
the builder, since in 1791 I find his tenants paid him
£539 a year; but it was an excellent one for the
Freeholdees family -- the ground-leases expired, and the
last Clarke enjoyed both land and houses gratis. The three
acres of meadow had got into Chancery, and were dispersed
among little Clarkes and devoured by lawyers.
A.D. 1830 -- The last
Clarke died, and left "High Row" and the back slum, erst the
"Swan Inn," and the eighteen houses built on the pightle --
in two undivided moieties -- to a Mr. Franklin, and to his
own housekeeper, Anne Byford. Mrs. Byford was a worthy,
prudent woman, from the county Durham, who had put by money,
and kept it in an obsolete chimney more mulierum. But
now, objecting, like most of us, to an undivided moiety, she
swept her cold chimney, and with the help of her solicitor
and trusty friend, Mr. Charles Hird, she borrowed the
needful, and bought Franklin out, and became sole
proprietor.
The affair was not rosy at first; the leases
were unexpired the rents low, the footway unpaved. She has
told me herself -- for we were, for years, on very friendly
terms -- that she had to trudge through the slush and dirt
to apply for her quarterly rents, and often went home crying
at the hostile reception or excuses she met, instead of her
modest dues. But she held on; she could see the site was
admirable; no other houses of this description had gardens
running to Hyde Park. Intelligence was flowing westward. Men
of substance began to take up every lease at a higher rent,
and to lay out thousands of pounds in improvements.
Between 1860 and 1865 ambitious speculators
sought noble sites, especially for vast hotels; and one fine
day the agent for an enterprising company walked into the
office of Mrs. Byford's solicitor, Mr. Charles Hird,
Portland Chambers, Titchfield Street, and offered five
hundred thousand pounds for "High Row" and "Albert Terrace,"
with its gardens.
In this offer the houses counted as
débris: it was an offer for the site of the
"Swan" and pightle, which between 1616, the year of
Shakespeare's decease, and the date of this munificent
offer, had been so leased, and re-leased, and sold, and
bandied to and fro, generation after generation, for an
old song.
At the date of the above proposal Mrs.
Byford's income from this historical property could not have
exceeded £2500, and the bid was £20,000, per
annum. But a profane Yorkshireman once said to me for my
instruction, "Women are kittle cattle to drive;" and so it
proved in this case. The property was sacred in that brave
woman's heart. It had made her often sorrowful, often glad
and hopeful. She had watched it grow, and looked to see it
grow more and more. It was her child; and she declined half
a million of money for it.
A few years more, and a new customer stepped
upon the scene -- Cupidity.
A first-class builder had his eye upon Albert
Terrace and its pretty little gardens running to Hyde Park.
Said he to himself: "If I could but get hold of these, how.
I would improve them! I'd pull down these irregular
houses, cut up the gardens, and rear noble mansions' to
command Hyde Park, and be occupied by rank and fashion, not
by a scum of artists, authors, physicians, merchants, and
mere ladies and gentlemen, who pay their rent and tradesmen,
but do not drive four-in-hand."
A circumstance favoured this generous design;
the Government of the day had been petitioned sore by
afflicted householders, to remove the barracks from
Knigbtsbridge to some place with fewer cooks and nursemaids
to be corrupted and kitchens pillaged.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer loved economy
and hated deficits; so this canny builder ear-wigged him.
"If you," said he, "will give us the present site of the
condemned barracks, and compulsory sale of 'Albert Terrace,'
under a private Bill, we will build you new barracks for
nothing on any site you choose to give us. It will be pro
bono publico."
This, as presented ex parte, was a
great temptation to a public economist; and the statesman
inclined his ear to it.
The patriotic project leaked out and set the
"Terrace" in a flutter. After-wit is everybody's wit; but
ours had been the forethought to see the value of the
sweetest site in London long before aristocrats, and
plutocrats, and schemers, and builders; and were our mental
inferiors to juggle us out of it on terms quite inadequate
to us?
We held meetings, passed resolutions,
interested our powerful friends, and sent a deputation,
dotted with M.P.s, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The deputation met with rather a chill
reception, and at first buzzed, as deputations will, and
took weak ground, and got laid on their backs more than
once; but when they urged that the scheme had not occurred
to the Government, but had been suggested by a trader --
cloaking lucre with public spirit -- and named the person,
the statesman lost his temper, and they gained their cause.
He rose like a tower, and disposed of them in one of those
curt sentences that are often uttered by big men, seldom by
little deputations. 'Enough, gentlemen; you have said all
you can, and much more than you need have said, or
ought to have said, to me; you keep yours, and
we'll keep ours."
Then he turned his back on them, and that was
rude, and has all my sympathy; for is there a more galling,
disgusting, unnatural, intolerable thing than to be forced
by our own bosom traitors -- our justice, probity, our
honour, and our conscience -- to hear reason against
ourselves?
The deputation went one way, and baffled
cupidity another, lamenting the scarcity of patriotism, and
the sacrifice of £100,000 to such bugbears as Meum.
and Teum, and respect for the rights of the weak.
Peace blessed the little Terrace for three or
four years, and then,
"The mouthing patriot with an itching palm,"
rendered foxier by defeat, attacked the historical site
with admirable craft and plausibility, and a new alley,
seldom defeated in this country -- Flunkeyism.
The first act of the new comedy was played by
architects and surveyors. They called on us, and showed us
their plans for building "noble mansions" eleven stories
high, on the site of our houses and gardens, and hinted at a
fair remuneration if we would consent and make way for our
superiors. See Ahab's first proposal to Naboth.
We declined, and the second act commenced.
The architects, surveyors, and agents vanished entirely, and
the leading actor appeared, with his drawn sword, a private
Bill. He was a patriot peer, whose estates were in
Yorkshire; from that far country came this benevolent being
to confer a disinterested boon on the little village of
Knightsbridge.
The Bill was entitled
"Albert Terrace, Knightsbridge, Improvement
Act."
It is a masterpiece in its way, and very instructive as a
warning to all public men to look keenly and distrustfully
below the surface of every private Bill.
The Preamble stated that the new
road, hereinafter described, from the high-road
Knightsbridge into Hyde Park, would be of great public and
local advantage.
That the Right Honourable Henry Stapleton,
Baron Beaumont (hereinafter called the undertaker), was
willing to construct the said new road, at his own expense,
if authorised to acquire certain lands, buildings, and
property for that purpose.
And that this could not be effected without
the consent of Parliament.
The Bill, amidst a number of
colourless clauses, slily inserted that the undertaker of
this road (which ought clearly to have been a continuation
of Sloane Street straight as a bee-line) might deviate, not
eastward into his own property and justice, but westward,
like a ram's horn, into the bulk of Anne Byford's houses.
And instead of asking for the
unconstitutional power of compulsory purchase, clause 10
proposed that the power of compulsory purchase should
not be exercised after three years from the passing
of this Act.
The abuse might be forced on them. Their only
anxiety was to guard against the abuse of the abuse.
Briefly, a cannier, more innocent-looking,
yet subtle and treacherous composition, never emanated from
a Machiavelian pen.
It offered something to every class of
society; a new public road into the Park, good for the
people and the aristocracy; a few private houses that stood
in the way, or nearly in the way, of the public road, to be
turned into noble mansions, good for the plutocracy and the
shopkeepers; and the projector a Peer, good for the national
flunkeyism.
For the first time I was seriously alarmed,
and prepared to fight; for what says Sydney Smith, the
wisest as well as wittiest man of his day. "Equal rights to
unequal possessions, that is what Englishmen will come out
and fight for."
I fired my first shot; wrote on my front
wall, in huge letters,
NABOTH'S VINEYARD.
The discharge produced a limited effiect. I
had assumed too hastily that all the world was familiar with
that ancient history of personal cupidity and spoliation
pro bono publico, and would apply it to the modern
situation, with which it had two leading features in common.
The deportment of my neighbours surprised me. They stopped,
read, scratched their heads, and went away bewildered. I
observed their dumb play, and sent my people to catch their
comments, if any. Alas! these made it very clear that
Knightsbridge thumbs not the archives of Samaria.
One old Clo' smiled supercilious, and we
always suspected him of applying my text; but it was only
suspicion, and counterbalanced by native
naïveté; a little tradesman was bustling
eastward to make money, saw the inscription, stopped a
moment, and said to his companion, "Nabob's vinegar!
Why, it looks like a gentleman's house."
However, as a Sphinx's riddle, set, by a
popular maniac, on a wall, it roused a little of that
mysterious interest which still waits upon the unknown, and
awakened vague expectation.
Then I prepared my petition to the House, and
took grave objection to the Bill, with an obsequious
sobriety as fictitious as the patriotism of the Bill.
But I consoled myself for this unnatural
restraint by preparing a little Parliamentary Bill of my
own, papered and printed and indorsed in exact imitation of
the other Bill only worded on the reverse principle of
calling things by their right names. The Bill was entitled,
"Knightsbridge Spoliation Act," and described as follows:
A BILL.
For other purposes, under the pretext of a
new private carriage drive into the Park, to be called a
public road.
The Preamble.
Whereas the sites of certain houses and
gardens, called Albert Terrace, Knightsbridge, are known to
be of great value to building speculators, and attempts to
appropriate them have been made from time to time, but have
failed for want of the proper varnish; and whereas the
owners of the said sites are merchants, physicians, authors,
and commoners, and to transfer their property by force to a
speculating lord and his builders would be a great advantage
to the said speculators, and also of great local advantage
-- to an estate in Yorkshire.
And whereas the tradespeople who conceived
this Bill are builders, architects, and agents, and their
names might lack lustre, and even rouse suspicion, a
nobleman, hereinafter described as the "Patriot Peer," will
represent the shop, and is willing to relieve the rightful
owners of the sites aforenamed, by compulsory purchase, and
to build flats one hundred feet high, and let them to flats
at £50 a room, and gain £200,000 clear profit,
provided he may construct a new drive into the Park at the
cost to himself of £80, or thereabouts, and bear ever
after the style and title of "the Patriot Peer."
And since great men no longer despoil their
neighbours in the name of God, as in the days of King Ahab
and Mr. Cromwell, but in the name of the public, it is
expedient to dedicate this new carriage drive to the public;
the said drive not to traverse the Park, and no cab, cart,
or other vehicle such as the public uses, will be allowed to
travel on it.
The new drive and the foot-paths together
shall be only forty-four feet wide, but whether the
foot-paths shall be ten feet, twenty, or thirty, is to be
left to the discretion of the private Lawgiver.
As this carriage drive of unlimited
narrowness is to be used only by the narrowest class in the
kingdom, it shall be dedicated to all classes, and this
phraseology shall be often repeated, since reiteration
passes with many for truth. The drive, during construction,
to be called "Patriot's Road," and when finished, "Oligarch
Alley," or "Plutocrat Lane."
And so on, with perfect justice, but a
bitterness not worth reviving.
Then for once I deviated from my habits, and
appealed in person to leading men in both Houses, who are
accessible to me, though I never intrude on them.
Finding me so busy, some friends of the
measure, out of good nature, advised me not to waste my
valuable time, and proved to me that it was no use. Albert
Terrace was an eyesore long recognised; all the tradespeople
in the district and three hundred ladies and gentlemen of
distinction -- dukes, earls, marquises, countesses,
viscountesses, and ladies -- had promised to support the
Bill with their signatures to a petition.
Flunkeyism is mighty in this island. I knew,
I trembled, I persisted.
I sounded the nearest Tory member. He would
not go into the merits, but said there was a serious
objection to the Bill as it stood. It would interfere with
the Queen's wall.
Unfortunately this was a detail the
projectors could alter, and yet trample on such comparative
trifles as the law of England and the great rights of little
people.
Next I called upon a Liberal -- my neighbour
Sir Henry James. I had a slight acquaintance with him
through his beating me often at whist, and always at
repartee, in a certain club. I now took a mean revenge by
begging him to read my papers.
He looked aghast, and hoped they were not
long.
"Not so long as your briefs," said I
sourly.
Then this master of fence looked away, and
muttered, as if in soliloquy, I'm paid for reading
that rubbish." He added, with a sigh, "There! leave
them with me."
The very next morning he invited me to call
on him, and I found him completely master of the subject and
every detail.
He summed up by saying kindly, "Really I
don't wonder at your being indignant, for it is a purely
private speculation, and the road is a blind. I think you
can defeat it in committee; but that would cost you a good
deal of money."
I asked him if it could not be stopped on the
road to committee.
He said that was always difficult with
private Bills. "However," said he, "if the persons
interested are disposed to confide the matter to me, I will
see if I can do anything in so clear a case."
You may guess whether I jumped at this or
not.
As a proof how these private Bills are
smuggled through Parliament, it turned out that the Bill in
question had already been read once, and none of us knew it,
and the second reading was coming on in a few days.
Sir Henry James lost no time either. He rose
in the House and asked the member for Chelsea whether he was
aware of a Bill called "Knightsbridge Improvement Acts," and
had the Government looked into it.
The honourable member replied that they had,
and he would go so far as to say did not approve it.
"Shall you oppose it?" asked Sir Henry James.
And as the other did not reply, "Because, if not, we shall."
He then gave notice that before this Bill was allowed to go
into committee he wished to put certain questions to the
promoters, and named next Thursday.
Then I lent my humble co-operation by a
letter to the Daily Telegraph entitled "Private
Bills and Public Wrongs."
One unfair advantage of private Bills is that
their opponents can't get one-tenth part of the House of
Commons to be there and discuss them; so this letter of mine
was intended as a whip to secure a House at that early hour,
when there never is a House, but only a handful, chiefly
partisans of the oppressive measure. It had an effect; there
were a good many independent members present when Sir Henry
James rose to question the promoters of the Knightsbridge
Improvement Bill.
He was met in a way that contrasted curiously
with the advice I had received -- not to run my head against
a stone wall, with three hundred noble signatures written on
it. A member, instructed by the promoters, popped up and
anticipated all Sir James's questions with one prudent
reply, The Bill is withdrawn.
Thus fell, by the mere wind of a good
lawyer's sword, that pregnable edifice of patriotic
spoliation; and Anne Byford, who in this business
represented the virtues of the nation, the self-denial and
economy which purchase from a willing vendor, with Abraham
for a precedent, Moses for a guide, and the law of England
for a title, and the fortitude which retains, in hard times,
till value increases, and cupidity burns to reap where it
never sowed, was not juggled out of her child for one-tenth
part of the sum she had refused from a straightforward
bidder.
So much for the past history of the "Swan"
and pightle. There is more to come, and soon. The projectors
of the defeated Bill had made large purchases of land close
by Albert Terrace, and this was thrown upon their hands at a
heavy loss for years. But now, I am happy to say, they have
sold it to the Earl of Rosebery for £120,000, so says
report.
Even if they have, what has been will be; in
fifty years' time this transaction will be called buying the
best site in London for an old song.
Meantime, siege and blockade having failed, a
mine is due by all the laws of war. So a new Metropolitan
Company proposes this very year to run under the unfortunate
terrace, propel the trains with a patent that, like all
recent patents, will often be out of order, and stop them
with another patent that will seldom be in order. Item, to
stifle and smash the public a good deal more than they are
smashed and stifled at present (which seems superfluous);
the motive, public spirit, as before; the instrument, a
private Bill -- Anathema sit in sæcula
sæculorum.
While the moles are at work below, Lord
Rosebery will rear "a noble mansion;" by that expression
every builder and every snob in London means a pile of
stucco, huge and hideous.
Then flunkeyism will say, "Are a Peer and his
palace to be shouldered by cribs?" and cupidity will demand
a line of "noble mansions," and no garden, in place of
Albert Terrace and its pretty gardens -- a rus in
urbe a thousand times more beautiful and a hundred
thousand times more rare, whatever idiots, snobs, builders,
and beasts may think, than monotonous piles of stucco -- and
that engine of worse than Oriental despotism, the private
Bill, will be ready to hand. The rest is in the womb of
time.
But my pages are devoted to the past, not to
the doubtful future. What I have related is the documentary,
pecuniary, political, and private history of the "Swan" and
pightle. Now many places have a long prosaic history, and a
short romantic one. The chronic history of Waterloo field is
to be ploughed, and sowed, and reaped, and mowed; yet once
in a way these acts of husbandry were diversified with a
great battle, where hosts decided the fate of Empires. After
that, agriculture resumed its sullen sway, and even heroes
submitted, and fattened the field their valour had
glorified.
Second-rate horses compete, every year, on
Egham turf, and will while the turf endures. But one day the
competing horses on that sward were a King and his Barons,
and they contended over the constitution, and the Cup
was Magna Charta. This double history belongs to small
places as well as great, to Culloden and Agincourt, and to
the narrow steps leading from Berkeley Street to Curzon
Street, Mayfair, down which, with head lowered to his saddle
bow the desperate Turpin spurred his horse, with the Bow
Street runners on each side; but no man ever did it before,
nor will again.
Even so, amidst all these prosaic pamphlets
and papers, leases and releases, mortgages, conveyances, and
testaments, ignoring so calmly every incident not bearing on
title, there happened within the area of the "Swan" and its
pightle a romantic story, which I hope will reward my
friends who have waded through my prose; for, besides some
minor attractions, it is a tale of Blood.
(End.)