In 1694, in the reign of William III., a Mr. Neale, a lottery promoter, took on lease the Cock and Pye Fields--then the resort of gambling boys, thieves, and beggars, and a sink of filth and cesspools--and built the neighbouring streets, placing in the centre a Doric pillar with seven dials on it; afterwards a clock was added.[622] This same Mr. Thomas Neale took a large piece of ground on the north side of Piccadilly from Sir Thomas Clarges, agreeing to lay out £10,000 in building; but he failed to carry out his design, and Sir Walter Clarges, after great trouble, got the lease out of his hands, and Clarges Street was then built.[623] In 1697 many hundreds of the 14,000 French refugees who fled from Louis XIV.’s dragoons after the cruel revocation of the Edict of Nantes settled about Long Acre, the Seven Dials, and Soho. In Strype’s time (Queen Anne’s reign), Stacie Street, Kendrick Yard, Vinegar Yard, and Phoenix Street, were mostly occupied by poor French people; indigent marquises and starving countesses. In the reign of Queen Anne, St. Giles’s increased with great rapidity--St. Giles’s Street and Broad Street from the Pound to Drury Lane, the south-east side of Tottenham Court Road, Crown Street, the Seven Dials, and Castle Street were completed; the south side of Holborn was also finished from Broad Street to a little east of Great Turnstile, and, on the north side, the street spread to two doors east of the Vine Tavern.[624] The Irish had already begun to debase St. Giles’s; the French refugees completed the degradation and hopelessness, and spread like a mud deluge towards Soho. In 1640 there are in the parish books several entries of money paid to soldiers and distressed men who had lost everything they had in Ireland:-- Paid to a poor Irishman, and to a prisoner come over from Dunkirk £0 1 0 Paid for a shroud for an Irishman that died at Brickils 0 2 6 In 1640, 1642, and 1647, there constantly occur donations to poor Irish ministers and plundered Irish. Clothes were sent by the parish into Ireland. There is one entry-- Paid to a poor gentleman undone by the burning of a city in Ireland; having licence from the lords to collect £0 3 0 The following entries are also curious and characteristic:-- 1642.--To Mrs. Mabb, a poet’s wife, her husband being dead £0 1 0 Paid to Goody Parish, to buy her boys two shirts; and Charles, their father, a waterman at Chiswick, to keep him at £20 a year from Christmas 0 3 0 1648.--Gave to the Lady Pigot, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, poor and deserving relief 0 2 6 1670.--Given to the Lady Thornbury, being poor and indigent 0 10 0