ANGELA DOWN
London is full of wormholes, the sort that if you know where they are and can wriggle through them you can go back in time. One such place is the old quarter of St James. This area was, along with the square mile of the medieval City of London, really all there was to the capital for hundreds of years. Between these districts and around them was rolling countryside and copious wildlife, and although the more dangerous sort had politely withdrawn some time ago, there were still plenty of deer for the hunting.
THE OLD PALACE Quarter was really the old backyard of the Palace of St James and that story starts with the tale of a king’s lust. The king was Henry VIII, who has been described by an eminent British historian as one of our most repellent monarchs. Maybe. Certainly it is said that the build-up of noxious gases in his somewhat corpulent corpse caused it to explode in his coffin, which is a fairly repulsive picture.
Henry’s appetites were prodigious, and one of them was for pretty girls. Anne Boleyn debuted at Court in the 1520s. Her education was French, and French in the English Court meant style, fashion, sophistication. So here was this new girl at Court, exotic with French glamour, with a sharp mind and strong will to go with it, and much before anyone could blink she had most of the men enslaved and most of the women spitting feathers. Of course she was going to come to the attention of the King, and when she did she said no. Imagine! Nobody ever said no to the King. But Anne was playing what might be described as the Long Game, determined to occupy a position rather more elevated than that of king’s mistress. After all, her own sister had been one of those. But there was the irritating fact that the King already had a Queen, having been married for twenty years or so to Catherine of Aragon. They had a surviving daughter but Henry had no legitimate son.
It being human nature to want what we can’t have, Henry’s ardour increased at a ferocious pace. When the Pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine, Henry dumped the Catholic Church and brought in the Reformation. By the time Henry and Anne married in 1533 she was pregnant, and although the marriage actually took place in his Palace of Whitehall, it was to the little Palace of St James that Henry immediately took his bride. He had had it developed from an old leper hospital and used it mainly as a hunting lodge, or, in this instance, a honeymoon lodge.
It was one of a dozen or so residences Henry had within a day’s travel of London. It was set in fields, orchards and parkland, and in the early, halcyon days of their marriage, Henry would ride out at dawn to collect fragrant boughs of blossom for his bride. Apart from the agreeable setting of the hunting lodge it had the major advantage, unlike the Palace of Whitehall, of being well away from the river. Advantage, because the Thames stank. It was the main sewer. There was no underground sanitation and everything, gutters, streams and tributaries, emptied straight into it. Although for centuries it was a very beautiful river frontage, the smell was appalling; it was said that you could smell London from twenty miles away. And stench, delicate reader, would be the first thing you would notice in the city any time before the twentieth century. It wasn’t just from raw sewage in the streams and rivers, the streets full of animals, both domestic and farm, but also smoke from a multitude of open fires, rancid oil in oil lamps, tallow (rendered animal fat) in candles, and butchers and fishmongers whose wares would have been strangers to Health and Safety. Woven through this rich, olfactory tapestry would have been the stink of unwashed bodies. If you were wealthy when you went out, especially if you had to go anywhere near the Thames, you went with your nose wedged in a strongly scented nosegay, or, in the case of Henry VIII’s Cardinal, Wolsey, a hollowed-out orange in which was a sponge soaked in sweet vinegar.
When later in 1533 Anne gave birth, it wasn’t the son that Henry was so desperate for, and it was partly his devastation that allowed the treacherous factions of the Tudor Court to start spreading their poison against the new Queen. By 1536 Anne Boleyn was in the Tower of London awaiting execution. Had she had a son perhaps her fate would have been different.
WHERE TO READ THIS
The prettiest place to read this would be Green Park when the thousands of daffodils are out, but as these days they come out in February this might be a bit chilly. By the time the weather’s warmer the daffs are over, so I would suggest St James’s Park by the lake, so that when you glance up you’ll be endlessly entertained by the many different sorts of sweet little ducks. Or you could sit outside the café next to St James’s Church on Piccadilly, under the trees in the churchyard, the advantage then being if it’s cold you can simply move inside.
St James’s Palace
All that remains of Henry and Anne’s little hunting-lodge palace is the gatehouse – today the clock tower – and inside a poignant H and A entwined above the fireplace in the tapestry-room. St James’s Palace, however, rebuilt and extended, is still very much there at the south end of St James’s Street, a street which certainly existed in some form by the middle of the seventeenth century, although described at the time by the diarist John Evelyn as ‘a quagmire’! Any monarch between Henry VIII and Queen Victoria spent time in St James’s Palace, especially after the Palace of Whitehall burned down in 1698 and the Court became centred at St James’s.
Charles I spent his last night there in 1649 after the Civil War of the 1640s between the Crown and the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell, before crossing a frozen St James’s Park on a bitter January morning to his public execution in Whitehall. His dog, Rogue, followed at his heels.
With the return of the Court from exile and the restoration of Charles II, the Merry Monarch, in 1660, the English cheered up. They’d found the Puritan ethic of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth a little stringent for their generally and generously convivial tastes. Now with the opening up of the theatres again, and music and dancing back on the agenda, the citizen was as merry as his monarch.
Charles had a soft spot for St James’s Palace and the nearby St James’s Park, so perhaps it was inevitable that someone should notice the ripe potential for development of the area north of the Palace. And the someone who stepped up with a dazzling plan to create a new, fashionable ‘West End’ was Henry Jermyn, the Earl of St Albans. He was a very close friend of the widowed Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria. In fact there was a rumour that they had married in exile. But if that sounds quite dashing, he was also described by a contemporary, the poet Andrew Marvell, as having ‘a drayman’s shoulders and a butcher’s mien’. Not a big fan, then. Nevertheless, there is an elegant, gracious shopping street that still bears his name.
The first part of the new district to be completed was St James’s Square, one of the oldest squares in London, in which by 1700 there were said to live seven dukes and seven earls. At the end of the little Duke of York Street, named after the King’s brother, on the north side of the Square, in 1684 a newly built church had been consecrated: St James’s, Piccadilly. It was designed by the genius Christopher Wren, was acoustically brilliant and typically full of light and air. Since the main entrance to the Church was originally on the south side, it was a very short step for the seven dukes and seven earls on a Sunday morning to rock out of fourteen residences and into their pews. In Sheridan’s 1777 play A Trip to Scarborough (his version of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse), Amanda asks Lord Foppington which church ‘does he most oblige with his presence?’ To which he replies, ‘Oh, St James’s, there’s much the best company.’ Then when asked if ‘there is good preaching too?’ he replies, ‘Why faith, madam, I cannot tell, a man must have very little to do that can give an account of the sermon.’
Maybe it was Charles II’s famously libidinous nature that began to give the area its notoriously licentious reputation. After all, two of his more high-profile mistresses, Barbara Castlemaine and later Nell Gwyn, had residences in the vicinity. Certainly by the middle of the eighteenth century the area had taken over from Covent Garden, known for fruit, flowers, vegetables and the girls who charged, as the centre of excellence, you might say, for the girls. It was to St James’s you went for the most elite establishments. This was the heart of the demimonde, with its classy bordellos, and the more sensational women set up in their own little town houses, conveniently placed not only for the Court but Parliament at Westminster as well.
It was a world that ran on a parallel track to that of polite, respectable London society, and one in which these women had considerable standing and some power. They were the style icons of their day. These were the ladies with the Jimmy Choo shoes and Prada handbags, conspicuous expenditure. They were entirely socially acceptable in public, and when at the opera and theatre usually enjoyed much the same attention as the spectacle on the stage. Indeed, many of them had started their careers on that side of the curtain. Men and women were equally engrossed, although usually for different reasons, the women making mental notes as to what they might, discreetly and tastefully, be able to copy in the way of fashion and coiffeur, and (vital in any age) accessories, especially the sort that catch the light. They were to be seen in the public parks and gardens, and if out riding every detail from the rider’s costume to the equipage of her horse was noted, if not out loud. It was not unknown for people to form an orderly queue to watch one of their own celebrities, Kitty Fisher, eat her dinner in her box in Vauxhall Gardens.
While it is perhaps not possible to describe these women as the first feminists, nevertheless they enjoyed a great deal more autonomy and control over their own lives, especially financially, than their respectable married sisters, who had none whatsoever. Some, but only some, went on to form loving, enduring relationships with their clients, even marriage, although that was no guarantee of an upgrade to polite society. On the contrary, the wrath of the conventionally married sisterhood descended and ensured that the ‘fallen’ woman, even though now upright, remained beyond the pale and never became socially acceptable.
Alongside the development of St James’s racier reputation came the establishment of its peculiarly masculine character and the area’s evolution as the domain of the male. By the early eighteenth century there were coffee houses all over London, at least three on Jermyn Street alone, and they were exclusively male. Tea still being expensive, coffee and chocolate were the popular choices, the chocolate often enriched with egg, sack (a sort of dry, white wine) and spices, so pudding really. The air was also thickly enriched with tobacco smoke. Many of the coffee houses later became gentlemen’s clubs, where not only was hospitality extended to the gentlemen, but fathomless opportunities for gambling, which had become a ferocious addiction of epidemic proportions by the end of the eighteenth century.
The gentlemen’s clubs still stand along Pall Mall and St James’s Street and the area even today has a unique personality: gentlemanly, gracious, moneyed. It’s a bit like being in the presence of an elderly but still elegant relative, who, though now sedate enough and beautifully mannered, you know has this rollicking, roaring past. St James’s has charm, and that lies partly in the beguiling nature of the shops. Although only a stone’s throw or two away from the brash chaos of Oxford Street’s high-street fashion chain stores, here the shops are independent, individual and old-fashioned but in a really good way. There’s the dowager-duchess of department stores, Fortnum and Mason, on Piccadilly, 300 years old but still glamorous, whose fabulous, dreamlike window displays have long been an attraction in themselves. Fortnum’s was built on candle-wax. William Fortnum, a footman in service to Queen Anne, made the most of the Queen’s desire to have fresh candles every night in the palace by replacing the previous night’s supply with new candles, and selling on the more serviceable candle-ends to the ladies of the bedchamber. Eventually he’d made enough to be able to open a modest establishment on Piccadilly with his landlord, Mr Mason.
Fortnum’s is known for its tea. Queen Victoria in the 1850s especially requested that the store send crates of its famously recuperative beef tea to Miss Florence Nightingale in Scutari. And so some of the soldiers who survived the ghastly battlefields of the Crimean War were helped to claw their way out of the jaws of death by the Lady with the Lamp and Fortnum and Mason’s beef tea. It’s about the only type of tea you can’t get there these days.
Up close – Old Palace Quarter
The oldest gentlemen’s club in this area, Whites, stands at the top of St James’s Street near Piccadilly. It was started by an Italian, Francesco Bianco. One of its most famous members was George Brummell, better known as Beau. He used to sit in Whites’ renowned bow window so that passers-by in the street could benefit from his fashion choices, it being well known at the time that his taste in all things sartorial was unequalled and unchallengeable, sort of the Kate Moss of his day. One of his fashion tips was to have one’s boots polished in champagne, the soles as highly as the uppers, and it was so he didn’t have to put glassy sole to street that he required the sedan-chair bearers to take him right into the club.
Behind Fortnum’s in Jermyn Street is Floris, the gorgeous perfumier, started in 1730 by a Minorcan, Juan Famenias Floris, attempting to re-create the scents of his Mediterranean island and still run today by his direct descendants. A couple of doors along is Paxton and Whitfield, cheesemongers for over two hundred years, and scattered all along the street are the shirt and suit makers. On St James’s Street is John Lobb, crafter of beautiful hand-made boots and shoes since the middle of the nineteenth century; Lock and Co., hat makers since the end of the seventeenth century; and at the bottom of the street Truefitt and Hill, suppliers of gentlemen’s shaving and grooming requisites and toiletries since 1805. Some of their products were found in the wreck of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Turn around from Truefitt and Hill and there is the place where it all started – St James’s Palace. Ambassadors are still accredited to the Court of St James, but Queen Victoria removed the Court from there to Buckingham Palace. It had been her uncle, George IV, who seems to have been determined to introduce a note of vulgarity into royal residences by commissioning the grandiose enlargement of Buckingham House, but he died before his vision of grandeur was completed and it was his niece who first occupied it as a monarch. It was he who, as Prince of Wales, in 1795 was married in the Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace. He and his bride, Caroline of Brunswick, disliked each other intensely. In fact so dismayed was he by her appearance at their first meeting he said to an aide: ‘Harris, I am not well. Pray get me a glass of brandy.’ It may have been a personal hygiene problem. At some point someone was dispatched to suggest tactfully that she might change her stockings more often. Anyway, her reluctant bridegroom on their wedding night drank himself senseless and spent the night with his head in the bedroom fireplace. Presumably it was a warm night. At some point he rallied, because nine months later Caroline gave birth. It was her only child.
St James’s Palace is still used from time to time as a royal residence. Prince Charles moved in after his separation from Princess Diana, although after his grandmother’s death he moved next door to her old place, Clarence House. It was in the Chapel Royal that Diana’s body lay between her being brought back from Paris and the night before the funeral. But it’s a more muted place today, being mostly grace-and-favour apartments for members of the royal household and administration.
Looking now at the old palace, with its Tudor gatehouse and the changes of brick on either side, set as it is between the pretty serenity of St James’s Park on one side and Green Park on the other, one can only wonder at the quiet and unquiet lives lived within its walls.