Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 116, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 May 1911 — ST. JAMES'PARK IN DANGER [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

ST. JAMES'PARK IN DANGER

CM RE AT alarm has been caused > by all lovers of the picturesque ■■ in London by proposals to make decided changes in St. ’ James’ Park, partly in connection with the placing of the King Edward memorial. A storm of protests has arisen and some of the “improvements” doubtless will be abandoned, but the committee in charge adheres to its determination to remove the famous iron suspension bridge and substitute one of stone. This is denounced as a “wickedly Philistine project.” In Norman times what is now St. James’ Park was a lonely expanse of fields and woodlands surrounding a hospital for fourteen lepers. The institution was dedicated to St. James. Many generations of “leper maydens” shook their cups and platters to solicit alms from the wayfarers who passed their solitary abode, before Henry VIII cast covetous eyes upon their woodland domain. He desired to convert it into grounds for Wolsey’s palace of Whitehall, which he had lately appropriated. The leper sisters received notice to quit and were granted a sum in compensation. The hospital was razed to the ground, and upon the site Henry erected the palace, or, as it was then termed, the “Manor House of St. James’.” Thither he brought his new queen, Anne Boleyn, and in the bright spring mornings they rode forth a-Maying with a gay cavalcade over uninterrupted country to Hampstead. St. James’ Park attained its full glory under the Stuarts as a fashionable promenade and a beautiful pleasure ground. The Sieur de la Serre described the palace and ''park in glowing terms when he visited the court of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. He was lost in admiration of the “two great grand gardens” planted with fruit trees and bounded by “a great ’park” filled with deer. Across this same park Charles was taken to Whitehall for execution. After the Restoration, Charles ll,' although he did not occupy St. James’ palace, made a hobby of beautifying the park and gardens. Pepys was an enthusiastic chronicler of the “great and noble alterations,” and was constantly “to the park” to see how they were progressing. He speaks of the engines at work drawing up the water to make the like, of the “Physique Garden” which was planted, of the king's aviary and the wild fowl which he kept, and liked to feed. Skating was first Introduced into this country by the cavaliers of the merry monarch on the canal of St. James’ Park during the severe winter of 1662, and at the St. James’ promenades gentlemen were first seen "wearing muffs.” Smoking was not tolerated fit the park. Charles II and *Cattjprine of Braganza rode there daily in “a /most elegant manner.”, The grand promenade was at the east end of the Mall, in front of the Horse Guards. The Mall was then a smooth hollow walk, bordered by box and used for the game of Mell. which gave It its name. The duke of York made the game fashionable and was the leader in an animated scene of cavaliers chattering, laughing and saluting as they essayed to throw the ball through the iron ring hanging from a post. The park of that period was a beautiful enclosure of grass and trees intersected by winding walkß and traversed by a canal, at one end of which the king had constructed his duck island and decoy. He had also an aviary, which gave the name to Birdcage walk. At the southeast end of the ™wnl was Rosamond’s pond, a notorious place for. assignations, and their corollary, suicides. It was wood-

ed and secluded, and for a period was the scene of more suicides by drowning than any other place in town. The pond was filled up in 1770. Throughout succeeding reigns St. James’ Park, which became more beautiful year by year as the trees in the Mall grew and flourished, remained a fashionable lounge and promenade. There beauty, wit and fashion paraded in t£e days of the early Georges. When St. James’ palace ceased, in the reign of George 111, to be the residence of the monarch, the park began to lose prestige as a place of fashion./ George IV made some improvements to the park, and finally threw it open as a public resort. The roads through it were first lighted with gas in 1822. This period marks the end of the exclusive tenure by the crown of a demesne which had been a private royal pleas-ure-ground since the time of Henry VIII. - *- « ■ The last vestige of its early rural associations disappeared with the milksellers and their cows when they were removed from their historic standing opposite Spring gardens to make way for the widening of the Mall some ten years ago. Gone, too, are the rows of fine old trees, under whose shade many generations of Londoners have watched historic royal processions and the company passing to drawing rooms and levees. A spacious avenue has now been made and new trees are growing apace, but there are some who regret the loss of the restful charm of the dear old Mall of St. James’.

IRON BRIDGE IN ST. JAMES PARK