"Horne Tooke," says Mr Smith, "in his _Diversions of Purley_, derives the word Charing from the Saxon _Charan_, to turn; and the situation of the original village, on the bend or turning of the Thames, gives probability to this etymology." Every body knows that Charing, now so central a point, was once a little hamlet on the rural high-road between London and Westminster, and that the "Cross" was added to it by Edward the First, who, when escorting his wife's remains from Lincolnshire to Westminster Abbey, erected one at each place where the beloved corpse rested. The first cross, which was of wood, and probably of rude enough manufacture, gave way to one of stone, designed by Cavalini. About the middle of the seventeenth century, that period of puritanical intolerance, this was removed by order of the Commons' House, an order which the royalists took care to ridicule by song and lampoon. According to Lilly the astrologer and quack, the workmen were three months pulling it down, and some of the stones were used for the pavement before Whitehall. Others were made into knife-handles, and Lilly saw some of them which were polished and looked like marble. Those were days in which kingly memorials found as little favour as popish emblems; and after the death of Charles the First, the statue that now stands at Charing Cross, and which had been cast by Le Sueur in 1633 for the Earl of Arundel, was sold and ordered to be broken up. It was bought by one Rivet, a brazier, who, instead of breaking, buried it. This did not prevent the ingenious mechanic from making a large and immediate profit by the effigy of the martyred monarch; for he melted down old brass into knife and fork-handles, and sold them as proceeding from the King's statue. Roundheads and cavaliers all flocked to buy; the former desiring a trophy of their triumph, the latter eager to possess a memento of their lamented sovereign. In 1678, £70,000 was voted by Parliament for the obsequies of Charles I., and for a monument to his memory, and with a portion of this sum, how large a one is not known, the statue was repurchased.