London has its local traditions as well as the smallest village. There is a foolish story that the sculptor of Charles I. and his steed committed suicide in vexation at having forgotten to put a girth to the horse. The myth has arisen from the supposition of there being no girth, and retailers of such stories, Mr. Leigh Hunt included, did not take the trouble to ascertain whether there was or was not a girth. Unfortunately for the story there is a girth, and it is clearly visible. The pedestal, by some assigned to Marshal, by others to Grinling Gibbons, the great wood-carver, and a Dutchman by birth, is seventeen feet high, and is enriched with the arms of England, trophies of armour, cupids, and palm-branches. It is erected in the centre of a circular area, thirty feet in diameter, raised one step from the roadway, and enclosed with iron rails. The lion and unicorn are much mutilated, and the trophies are honeycombed and corroded by the weather. It has not been generally observed that on the south side of the pedestal two weeping children support a crown of thorns, and that the same emblem is repeated on the opposite side, below the royal arms. In 1727 (1st George II.) that infamous rogue, Edmund Curll, the publisher of all the filth and slander of his age, stood in the pillory at Charing Cross for printing a vile work called _Venus in a Cloyster_. He was not, however, pelted or ill-used; for, with the usual lying and cunning of his reptile nature, he had circulated printed papers telling the people that he stood there for daring to vindicate the memory of Queen Anne. The mob allowed no one to touch him; and when he was taken down they carried him off in triumph to a neighbouring tavern.[386] Archenholz, an observant Prussian officer who was in England in 1784, tells a curious anecdote of the statue at Charing Cross. During the war in which General Braddock was defeated by the French in America, about the time when Minorca was in the enemy’s hands, and poor Byng had just fallen a victim to popular fury, an unhappy Spaniard, who did not know a word of English, and had just arrived in England, was surrounded by a mob near Whitehall, who took him by his dress for a French spy. One of the rabble instantly proposed to mount him on the king’s horse. The idea was adopted. A ladder was brought, and the miserable Spaniard was forced upon its back, to be loaded with insults and pelted with mud. Luckily for the stranger, at that moment a cabinet minister happening to pass by, stopped to inquire the cause of the crowd. On addressing the man in French he discovered the mistake, and informed the mob. They instantly helped the man down, and the minister, taking him in his coach to the Spanish ambassador, apologised in the name of the nation for a mistake that might have been fatal.[387]