WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS   NEW YORK JAMES POTT & CO. LONDON: EVELEIGH NASH 1908 Introduction A Royal Hunting-Ground Vagaries of Monarchs Under the Commonwealth Fashion and Frivolity Masks and Patches In Georgian Days Early Chronicles of Tyburn Beneath the Triple Tree Nineteenth-Century Fragments Duels in the Park The People’s Park Nature in the Park The Evolution of the Carriage List of Trees, Shrubs, and Plants in Hyde Park Index Masks and Patches In Georgian Days Early Chronicles of

The following books have been consulted in the compilation of this volume:— Stow’s “Annals.” Hollinshed’s “Chronicles.” Baker’s “Chronicle.” Whitelock’s “Memorials of English Affairs.” Northuek. Macaulay’s “History of England.” Hume’s “History of England.” Lingard’s “History of England.” Craik and Macfarlane’s “Pictorial History of England.” Domesday Book. Translated by Sir Henry James. “The Chronicle of the Greyfriars.” (Camden Society.) Lyttelton’s “History of Henry II. ” Gilbert Burnett’s “Hi

Hyde Park. What a world of memories is suggested by the name. Standing right in the heart of London, it is almost the only surviving out-of-door public pleasure resort left in the West-End, wherein fashion may display itself and take exercise, since St. James’s Park has now no social life, and Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, Old Ranelagh, and Cremorne are long since dead. Gay as it is now in the season with its well-dressed saunterers, its beautiful equipages, its noble trees, and its wide expanse of

Hyde Park in its present guise is essentially modern. It preserves nothing of that old-world air which makes the lawn of Hampton Court and the formal gardens of Windsor Castle so delightful. Rotten Row as a tan ride has been laid out in the memory of people still living. The Marble Arch on its present site is Victorian. Burton’s Arch, and the screen at Hyde Park Corner, are but a little earlier. Queen Caroline, consort of George II. , formed the Serpentine. Queen Anne planted avenues of stately

Queen Mary has not come down to us in a social light. The very idea of her as a Society personage seems grotesque. “Bloody Mary” she was in her own time, and as such she will probably always be known. She rarely went far afield, and her only association with Hyde Park seems to have been the unusual number of people she hanged at Tyburn. The park was still far remote from the town. Streets did not creep up to its precincts until quite a century and a half later. When Sir Thomas Wyatt marched with

As soon as the death of Charles I. upon the scaffold under the windows of Whitehall Banqueting House left the Regicides in undisputed possession of the Royal lands, new difficulties arose. No one knew what to do with them. Hyde Park entered upon a period of unexampled vicissitude. No doubt the sterner section of the Puritans, who had now gained the upper hand, looked upon all the gallantries and follies of which the Park had been a centre as so much devilment, and would gladly have seen the plac

Great changes came over Hyde Park with the arrival of Charles II. in England. All the purchases of Royal Lands were annulled as unlawful and the property was seized for the Crown. As the new King, once he had made his position secure, showed no desire to prevent his subjects sharing with himself the enjoyment of the parks, the step was most popular. Anthony Deane’s “porters with long staves”—presumably to trounce intruders who did not pay for entrance—were swept away, and again the public were f

A Well-known story relates that one day Charles II. was returning from Hyde Park, where he was just as fond of walking as James Duke of York was of riding. He was attended by two courtiers only, and was crossing at Hyde Park Corner when he met James coming home from the hunt on Hounslow Heath. The Duke of York was driving in great style in his coach, with an escort of Royal Horse Guards. He stopped, stepped from his carriage to greet the King, and remonstrated with him for putting himself in dan

Society from the time of the Revolution had gradually drifted into an independent existence, and was no longer dominated by the influence of the Court. The hatred entertained by Queen Mary, the Consort of William III. , towards the supporters of her father was probably responsible for this in a great measure. The Jacobites in their turn entered into intrigue. As Queen Anne’s reign drew to a close, often beneath those old trees in Hyde Park, meetings were arranged under the very eyes of the Whigs

Of all the fashionable folk who roll by in their carriages from the West-end to Hyde Park, and enter by the gates at Marble Arch to join the gay throng, so full of life and animation; of all the hurrying populace who pass in omnibuses or on foot towards Bayswater, or turn the sharp corner where the traffic flows in an unceasing stream up the Edgware Road,—how many, I wonder, ever pause at the three cross roads to give a moment’s thought to the fact that this was Tyburn? How many among them are e

Exactly the date at which the dreaded instrument at Tyburn assumed the form of the “Triple Tree” cannot be told. As has already been said, there is reason to believe that a permanent structure—“the common gallows” of the time—was set up in the district known as Tyburn in the closing years of the fourteenth century; and that the site was a little more eastward, beyond the present area of the Park, than the later place of execution. What particular plan the earlier structure took can only be surmi

Meanwhile Hyde Park was the centre of a far wider evolution than that which has been already noticed in eighteenth-century London. A new era had dawned for Britain. The power of colonisation—which to-day has attained the strength of Imperialism—had, after long infancy, developed into lusty youth clamouring for equal rights, for freedom, for independence. Clive had fought and conquered at Plassey, Wolfe had won and died at Quebec. Wider issues were at stake, greater demands were made on English p

I have already referred to the custom of duelling—a phase of Society which became so prominent in the romance of Hyde Park, where many a tragic encounter and bitter quarrel were fought out, that it demands a short chapter to itself. Duelling really came down to us as a relic of barbarism. It was among the northern tribes of Europe that it originated, and was introduced into England by the Normans under the “Trial by Combat.” From the Trial by Combat, which Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott have d

The London Parks strike different people in different ways, and certainly a bailiff of the late well-known Yorkshire squire, Sir Tatton Sykes, looked upon them with different eyes from the ordinary mortal. Sir Tatton sent him to London to see the sights, and on his return asked him what he thought of London. “Lots o’ houses,” he said, “and I found some pretty good pasture, only it was a bit scattered.” This was the way he summed up the beautiful squares and parks of London. It is extraordinary h

Not long ago I came across, in the Vienna Neue Freie Presse , some passages in which an Austrian gentleman described the fascinations of Hyde Park as it appears to a foreigner. He sees it in an aspect that is perhaps rarely revealed to ourselves, as the “most original park in Europe.” “Hyde Park,” he says, “is flat and poor—an English heath with only something approaching to a garden it its gates. Its charm is its vastness, its irregularity, the rest which it affords the eye with its seemingly e

Such a reformation in vehicular traffic has taken place in Hyde Park in the first years of the twentieth century, that it seems worth tracing roughly the means of progression from the Roman car of two thousand years ago to the electric landaulette of to-day, and from the pack-horse to the snorting motor cycles. Practically, every surviving method of locomotion has heralded its earliest votaries within the precincts of the Park, where the foot-propelled “hobby-horse” proved the forerunner of the