London (England) -- History -- 17th century; London (England) -- Social life and customs -- 17th century
What, then, happened at St. James’s? One of two things. Either the
sisters were reduced to one, and only one, who would be considered a
leper; or that the house, like so many others, had been allowed to
depart from its foundation, and had admitted as sisters, women who were
not lepers at all.
However, Henry enclosed the ground belonging to the hospital, stocked
it with deer, and turned it into a pleasure garden for himself.
James the First kept his menagerie here. Henry, Prince of Wales, ran at
the ring and practised horsemanship here.
During the Commonwealth the Park was not sold, but preserved, though
the deer seem to have run away. A certain number of people were
privileged to walk in the Park.
Then Charles came back, and began at once to improve the Park. He
constructed the canal, or ornamental water; he laid out the Mall; he
made a rising ground beside Rosamond’s pond; he erected beautiful
avenues of trees. More than this, he opened the Park and gave a new
place of resort, much finer than it had ever before enjoyed, to the
fashionable world of London. The literature of the period is full of
the Park and its frequenters.
New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall were formed in imitation of the old,
and were named after them. Evelyn mentions the place in 1661, Pepys
1665; he calls it Foxhall. He went there in June and in July; on the
latter day he did not find a single guest there. There were, however,
plenty of guests at other times. Pepys observes how the young fellows
take hold of every woman in the place. He heard the nightingale sing;
he heard the fiddles, and the harp, and the Jew’s trump; he heard the
talk of the young men—“Lord, their mad talk did make my heart ake.” He
had cheese-cakes, syllabubs, and wine in the gardens; and, as at the
theatre, he and his wife were not ashamed to be seen when the company
was notoriously profligate, and the women notoriously devoid of virtue.
Gray’s Inn Gardens was another place of resort, probably for lawyers
and their ladies. For the people of Holborn and Fleet Street there
were the Lamb’s Conduit Fields. These spacious fields extended from
Tottenham Court Road to Gray’s Inn Road, and as far to the north as
what is now the Euston Road. There were no houses upon them in the
seventeenth century except Lamb’s Conduit, erected in 1577. For the
City there were the Moor fields, then enclosed, planted with trees
and surrounded by shops; there were the Hoxton Fields, the Spa Fields
of Clerkenwell, and the White Conduit Fields. It was the especial
happiness of London at this time that from any part of the City the
open country was accessible within a quarter of an hour. All around
these fields sprang up places of amusement, pleasure gardens, and
taverns, which I have described fully in considering the eighteenth
century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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