London (England) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
alighted out of the coach, and went into a poor woman’s house at the
bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen and stuffed the body with snow,
and my Lord did help to do it himself. The snow so chilled him that he
immediately fell so ill that he could not return to his lodgings, but
went to the Earl of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where they put him into
a good bed warmed with a pan, but it was a damp bed, that had not been
laid in for about a year before, which gave him such a cold, that in two
or three days, as I remember, he (Hobbes) told me he died of
suffocation.” The Arundel house here referred to does not seem to be the
Arundel House still existing in Highgate, on the left-hand side as you
come up the main road from Islington. The house now bearing that name is
said to have been a residence of Nell Gwynne, and during that period was
visited by the merry monarch himself. The creation of the title of Duke
of St. Albans, which is related to have been obtained by Nell Gwynne in
so extraordinary a manner from King Charles, is said to have taken place
at this house. A marble bath, surrounded by curious and antique
oak-work, is there associated with her name. As the house is now in the
possession of a celebrated antiquarian, the Rev. James Yates, M.A., it is
to be hoped that it will be as little modernised as possible. More
hallowed memories appertain to the next house we come to.
Andrew Marvel, patriot, was born, 1620, at Kingston-upon-Hull. After
taking his degree of B.A. at Trinity College, Cambridge, he went abroad,
and at Rome he wrote the first of those satirical poems which obtained
him such celebrity. In 1635, Marvel returned to England, rich in the
friendship of Milton, who a couple of years after, thus introduced him to
Bradshaw: “I present to you Mr. Marvel, laying aside those jealousies and
that emulation which mine own condition might suggest to me by bringing
in such a coadjutor.” “It was most likely,” writes Mrs. S. C. Hall,
“during this period that he inhabited the cottage at Highgate, opposite
to the house in which lived part of the family of Cromwell.” How Marvel
became M.P. for his native town—how he was probably the last
representative paid by his constituents, (a much better practice that
than ours of representatives paying their constituents)—how his
“Rehearsal Transposed,” a witty and sarcastic poem, not only humbled
Parker, but, in the language of Bishop Burnet, “the whole party, for from
the king down to the tradesman the book was read with pleasure,”—how he
spurned the smiles of the venal court, and sleeps the sleep of the just
in St. Giles-in-the-Fields, are facts known to all. Mason has made
Marvel the hero of his “Ode to Independence,” and thus alludes to his
incorruptible integrity:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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