Sweet Hampstead and Its AssociationsWhite, Caroline A.
History
Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations
White, Caroline A.
Hampstead (London, England) -- History
Eliza Meteyard, in her ‘Hallowed Spots of Ancient London,’ a book
deserving a better fate than it has met with, tells us that the famous
avenue was the scene of Sir Harry’s arrest. Here on the evening of an
early day in July, 1660, just as the sun was setting, Sir Harry walked
and meditated, as was his wont, till the glowing splendour of the
western sky gradually faded, as did the sounds of the cotter children
at their play, the barking of a sympathetic dog, or some broken scrap
of hymn, and still Sir Harry continued to pace beneath the elm-trees,
the sweetness and the stillness deepening with the twilight, when the
measured tramp of soldiers on the hill, some of whom marched straight
to Vane House, whilst others guarded the exits, struck terror into the
hearts of his humble neighbours, who, before night settled fully down,
saw Sir Harry taken from his home, a prisoner on his way to the Tower,
whence, after two years of torturing uncertainty, and removals from one
place of captivity to another, he came forth on another summer’s day,
June 14, 1662, to die by the hand of the executioner on Tower Hill,
another martyr to the liberties of his country.
Readers will remember Pepys’ hurry to shut up his office that morning,
and get off with his friends to see how the great Commonwealth man would
comport himself on so public and so trying a platform as the scaffold. He
is a witness, amongst others, to the calmness and self-command which the
ill-used enthusiast exhibited in parting from mortality.
POND STREET.
POND STREET—evidently the fashionable street in the eighteenth
century for the reception of visitors of the class dignified as the
‘quality’—appears to have been in the early years of this, the Harley
Street of Hampstead. Here resided Baron Dimsdale, in a house on the
left side of the road going down, the physician who inoculated the
Empress Catherine of Russia for small-pox. It will be remembered, to the
Empress’s credit, that she requested him to leave the country as soon as
possible after the operation, as in the event of her death he would be
held guilty of it.
Dr. Rodd, Dr. Lond, and various other medical men, lived in Pond Street.
I can remember it with a row of trees on the right-hand side of the way
as you entered it from the highroad, and a strip of greensward running
down it—a quiet street of formal appearance, with an air of genteel
frigidity characteristic of its period.
It was in Pond Street that ‘poor Kirkman,’ as Keats sympathetically
calls him, ‘fell amongst thieves,’ who stopped and beat and robbed him
of his watch. He had been visiting the poet at Wentworth Place, and left
about half-past eight in the evening, and was on his way to the London
Road, probably intending to meet the coach there, when he was waylaid,
maltreated and robbed. This was in 1818, so that the middle passage
between Hampstead and the Metropolis was not even then without its danger.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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