Westminster (London, England) -- Description and travel
Anne Oldfield was apprenticed to a seamstress in King Street. Sir Henry
Wootton also lived here; and Ben Jonson says that Spenser died here for
"lack of bread," and that the Earl of Essex sent him "20 pieces" on
hearing of his poverty, but the poet refused them, saying they came too
late. Fletcher wrote of him: "Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor
man, he died." But it seems hardly credible he was so badly off as to be
destitute, for he was at the time a pensioner of the Crown. Thomas Carew
the poet lived in King Street. Most of the taverns in Westminster seem
to have clustered about this street; we have the names of the Bell, the
Boar's Head, and the Rhenish Wine House still handed down as places of
importance. There were innumerable courts and alleys opening out of King
Street. On the west, south of Downing Street, were Axe Yard, Sea Alley,
Bell Yard, Antelope Alley. Gardener's Lane ran parallel with Charles
Street; here Hollar the engraver died in extreme poverty in 1677.
At the north end of King Street stood a second gate, called the King's
Gate, and sometimes the Cockpit Gate. It stood at the corner of what is
now Downing Street. It had four domed towers; on the south side were
pilasters and an entablature enriched with the double rose, the
portcullis, and the royal arms. The gate was removed in 1723.
In the year 1605 a solemn function took place in which the gate played a
part:
"On January 4, 1605, when Prince Charles, Duke of Albany, then only four
years old, was to be created Knight of the Bath, his esquires, the
Earls of Oxford and Essex, with eleven noblemen who were to share in the
honour, tooke their lodgings in the first Gate-house going to
King's-streete, where they were all after supper, at which they sat by
degrees, a row on the one side, with the armes of every of them over the
seate where he was placed; and lodged upon severall pallets in one
chamber, with their armes likewise over them, having their bathes
provided for them in the chamber underneath. The next morning they went
about through the gallory downe into the Parke in their hermits' weedes,
the musitions playing, and the heralds going before them into The Court,
and so into the Chapell, and there after solemn courtesies, like to the
Knights of the Garter, first to the Altar, and then to the Cloath of
Estate, every one took his place in the stalles of the Quier" (Walcott,
p. 58).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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