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Hampstead, situated in the Hundred of Oussulston and County of Middlesex, is separated from London by St. Pancras and Marylebone, and otherwise bounded by Finchley, Hendon, Willesden, and Paddington.

In the account of the several districts into which the Registrar-General has divided London, Hampstead claims the greatest elevation, standing 400 feet above Trinity high-water mark, a circumstance that, in connection with its gravelly soil, accounts for its dry, salutary air. It contains in its parochial area 2,169 acres.[15]

The early history of Hampstead lies very far back, though for all purposes of respectable antiquity—whether persons or places are concerned—an appearance in Domesday Book is sufficient. Hamestead, in its old, pleasant Saxon name, tells of a yet higher antiquity, and long before the astute Norman (in the language of the Saxon Chronicle) ‘sent forth his men to inquire how many hundred hides of land were in each shire, so that there was not a hide of land in England of which he knew not the possessor, and how much it was worth.’

Long before the existence of this pleasant schedule enabled the Conqueror to parcel out the fairest portions of the land to his favourite retainers, the five hides of land and five manses, or homes, of which this manor consisted, were said to have been given by King Ethelred, the gift being afterwards confirmed by Edward the Confessor, to the Abbey Church of St. Peter at Westminster.[16] These grants are said to be spurious—forged, in fact, by the monks, the mark of a pendent seal attached to one, and the wax adhering to the other, proving too much, such seals not being used in England till after the Conquest. But William, desirous of standing well with the Church, continued the grant of Hamsted to the Abbot of Westminster. At the making of Domesday Book, not another roof had risen on the manor. There were still five manses, the homes of villeynes and bordarii, the first small farmers having certain degrees of personal freedom, but dependent for their ground on several corporal and servile services rendered to the lord; the others, mere labourers, who paid rent in eggs, poultry, etc.

‘“The Abbot holds four hides (arable) land to three ploughs. To the demesne appertain three hides and a half, and there is one plough. The villeynes have one plough, and could employ another. There is one villeyne who has one virgate, and five bordars who have one virgate; and one bondman or slave. The woodlands afford pannage (beech-mast and acorns) for a hundred swine.

‘“The whole is valued at fifty shillings, of which Ranulph Peverel, who held one hide of the land under the Abbot, paid five shillings.”

‘There is nothing more undecided than the presumed value of the hide. Some writers say it represented as much land as employed a plough during the year. Another, that it meant as much land as would maintain a family. Spelman imagined it 100 acres. At one place in Domesday Book 20 acres are called half a hide.

‘“In Maldon in Essex there were five free men holding 10 acres of ground; of these Ranulph Peverel holds 5 acres, and Hugh de Montfort 5 acres; it was in the time of King Edward the Confessor worth tenpence, it is now [at Domesday] worth twelvepence.”’[17]

This Ranulph Peverel, a Norman high in the King’s favour, who held, as Camden tells us, estates in several counties of England, had married the discarded concubine of the Conqueror, the daughter of a Saxon noble, and one of the most lovely women of her time, and had given his own name to the King’s son by her—William Peverel,[18] subsequently Lord of Nottingham, and founder of the famous castle in the Peak—and if it had not been shown that such small portions of land were frequently held by noblemen in those times in different counties, probably as a nucleus to be added to as opportunities arose, one would have been inclined to doubt the identity of the owner of one hide of land at Hamstede with the Peverel whose descendants became so important in the history of England.

The original grant (or presumed grant) of Ethelred gives a certain spot of land, in the place called Hamstede, of five cassati—this word, we read, means hide—in perpetual inheritance, etc.

Very primitive must have been the Hamestead of those days, a group of clay-built or wattled huts, set down in a sheltered clearing, somewhere in the vicinity of the future Chapel of St. Mary, the site of the present parish church, in the district known as Frognal.

The uncleared ground above this settlement rose irregularly to the Heath, with great woods stretching dense and gloomy west, north, south, and east of it, and in places impinging on the sandy skirts of the Heath, originally the upheaved crust of an old sea-bottom, 100 feet deep, but then a waste of wild vert, on a surface of clay, sand, and gravel. These woods, or, rather, the great Forest of Middlesex, extended for centuries later on the east to Enfield Chace, and went crowding on in serried masses westward to the Chiltern Hills. All the surroundings were heavy with timbered shade, and hazardous from the wild beasts lurking there: wolves, boars, stags, and wild-bulls of the indigenous breed only just become extinct in the Craven district—a whole forest region, in fact, instinct with game.

Fitzstephen, the monk whose charming description of the country on the north-west of London reads like a prose idyll, tells us that in these woods were many yew-trees, and Camden, that the forest ‘was full of that weed of England, the oak,’ whilst the mast, or fruit of the beech, as we have seen, made part of the value of the manor in Domesday Book. Evelyn and W. J. Hooker assure us that in these woods grew the hornbeam, elm, and other indigenous sylva.

During the Saxon Heptarchy, the Roman Verulamium had become St. Albans, the shrine of the British protomartyr, and a place of great sanctity, to and from whence pilgrims were constantly moving. I know nothing of Roman roads, and am therefore quite neutral as regards opinion, but am aware that modern antiquaries have wholly overturned the belief of their fathers, and, while quoting Camden as a reliable and careful authority on other matters, ignore the old antiquary’s belief in the long-descended tradition that the Wanderers’ Way, or Watling Street, which passed from Kent to Cardiganshire, cutting through the great forest of Middlesex, in a straight line from station to station, passed by Hampstead Heath. ‘Not by the present road through Highgate, which was made by license of the Bishop of London 300 years ago, but that ancient one, as we gather from the charters of Edward the Confessor, which passed near Edgware.’

John Evelyn.

Old Norden states that on the northern edge of Middlesex the Roman road, commonly called the Watling Way, enters this county, leading straight from old Verulamium to London over Hamestead Heath; from whence one has a curious prospect of a most beautiful city and most pleasant country. Camden, again, tells us that ‘at the very distance that Antoninus in his Itinerary placeth Pulloniacæ, to wit, 12 miles from London, and 9 miles from Verulam, there remaineth some marks of an ancient station, and there is much rubbish digged up upon a hill which is now called Brockley Hill.’ No doubt Norden, with the fond zeal of a believing antiquary, had traced the road many a time to Edgworth (Edgware) and so on to Hendon, through an old lane called Hendon Wante.[19] So completely had this tradition entered into the faith of people generally that we find it embalmed in Drayton’s ‘Polyolbion,’ where, to paraphrase his figurative description of Highgate and Hampstead Hills, he emphatically adds of the latter:

‘Which claims the worthiest place his own,

Since that old Watling once o’er him to pass was known.’

Defoe, too, in his ‘Tour of Great Britain,’ tells us that he ‘went to Hampstead, from whence he made an excursion to Edgware, a little market-town on the way to St. Alban’s, for it is certain that this was formerly the main-road from London to St. Alban’s, being the famous highroad called Watling Streete, which reached from London to Wales.’

No traces of such a road have been found on Hampstead Heath, though Roman relics and proofs of Roman burial have been discovered there, and accepted by our oldest antiquaries as strengthening their theory of the Watling Way having skirted or crossed it. That there was a road from St. Albans to the Heath is curiously confirmed by an old French folio, published in Paris (time of Elizabeth), which explains the reasons why the Romans built a city on the site of the present London,[20] and states that ‘subsequent to the recall of the legions in consequence of its rapid growth and absorption of the population and commerce of the other great cities, it so raised the envy and indignation of their inhabitants, that the people of St. Albans threatened to come and destroy the rising city of London, until the Londoners advanced as far as Hampstead Heath, where they entrenched themselves, and prepared to do battle in defence of their homes.’ A writer in the New Monthly Magazine, commenting on this extract, says that the remains of the entrenchments are still pointed out.[21]

Dr. Hughson, writing of the Reed-mote, or six-acre field, formerly to the north-west of White Conduit House, and which was supposed to have been the site of a Roman camp, observes ‘that a Roman road[22] passed this way, we have great reason to believe, for from Old Ford we pass Mere (vulgarly called Mare Street), Kingsland, Islington, Highbury, the Hollow-way, Roman Lane, over Hampstead Heath through Hendon to Verulam.’ With the vanishing of the pilgrims’ route over Hampstead Heath, we lose the reason for the name of the hamlet suggested by Lysons, who supposed the wearied pilgrims on reaching the heath to exclaim at the sight of the city at their feet, ‘Hame-sted!’ the place of their home and the end of their journey. Park believes the homely name was given to it by the Saxon churls[23] who inhabited it previous to the date of the Domesday Survey.[24]

In the time of Abbot Leofstan, when Albanus[25] had become a very popular saint, ‘especially with merchants and traders going beyond sea, who sought his protection, and made rich offerings at his shrine,’ the state of the great forest, its ways infested not only with beasts of prey, but by ‘outlaws, fugitives, and other abandoned beings,’ with the probable effect of diminishing the revenues of his Church, set the Abbot seriously to the task of removing these obstructions. He had the woods in part cut down, rebuilt bridges, repaired rough places, and finally entered into a contract with a certain knight to defend the highway with two trusty followers, and be answerable to the Church for anything that might happen through his neglect.[26]

In the eighth of Henry III., the great Forest of Middlesex was ordered to be disforested, giving the citizens of London, as Stowe tells us, ‘an opportunity of buying land, and building, whereby the suburbs were greatly extended.’

But the disforesting appears to have been partial, and the building limited to the east. Hampstead retained its woods in all their savage wildness; the paths through them, to the terror of passengers, continued to be scoured by wild beasts, especially wolves, which had not all been extirpated when the ‘Boke of St. Alban’s’ was written.[27]

During Henry III.’s reign (1256) we find Richard de Crokesley, Abbot of Westminster, ‘“assigning the whole produce of Hamestede and Stoke for the celebration of his anniversary in that monastery by ringing of bells, giving doles during a whole week, to the amount of 4,000 denarii. A thousand to as many paupers on the first day, and the same dole to 500 others on the six days following. A feast with wine, a dish of meat and a double pittance to the monks in the refectory. A Mass by the Convent in copes, on the anniversary day; and four Masses daily at four different altars for the repose of his [the Abbot’s] soul for ever!” With many other daily forms and ceremonies. But the keeping of this commemoration was found to be so heavy a burden that the monks petitioned the Pope in less than ten years after the Abbot’s death to dispense with it, and he very sensibly sent his mandate to Westminster, dated 5 Kal. June, 1267, declaring that he found these things to abound more in pomp than the good of souls, and “that it was evident they accorded not with religion, nor were suitable to religious persons,” and recommending the monks to limit the mode of commemoration to their ideas of the dead Abbot’s deserts, and the advantages that had accrued to the monastery by his administration. Upon which the said manors and revenues became at the free disposal of the Abbot and Convent of Westminster, towards the welfare of the abbey; an annual portion of 10 marks being assigned for making such celebration as that sum would admit of for the said Richard de Crokesley.’[28]

At the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII., by way of a sop to the Church, created a new bishopric, that of Westminster, giving it for its diocese the county of Middlesex, of which he deprived London. Great part of the revenues of the dissolved monastery were settled upon the new bishopric, the manor and advowson of Hampstead making a portion of it, but in nine years the new Bishop had alienated his lands to such an extent that there was scarcely anything left to maintain ‘the port of a Bishop.’

In this reign, while the Manor of Hampstead was in the hands of the newly-made Bishop of Westminster, we find that a considerable part of the woods still covered the ground in this neighbourhood, as well as in that of Hornsey, and that game was still plentiful in them.

Of this we have proof in the proclamation of the King for the preservation of his sport in these places:[29]

‘A Proclamacion yt noe p’son interrupt the King’s game of Partridge or phesaunt.

‘Rex majori et vice comitibus London. Vobis mandamus, etc.

‘Forasmuch as the King’s most Royall Maᵗⁱᵉ is much desirous to have the games of hare, partridge, phesaunt, and heron p’served in and about his honor at his palace of Westm’ for his owne disport and pastime; that is to saye, from his said palace of Westm’ to St. Gyles in the Fields, and from thence to Islington to oʳ Lady of the Oke, to Highgate, to Hornsey Parke, to Hamsted Heath, and from thence to his said palace of Westm’ to be preserved and kept for his owne disport, pleasure, and recreacion; his highness therefore straightlie chargeth and commandeth, all and singular, his subjects, of what estate, condicion, so’er they be, that they, ne any of them, doe p’sume or attempt to hunt, or hawke, or in any means to take or kill any of the said games, within the precincts aforesaid, as they tender his favour, and will estchue the ymprisonment of their bodies and further punishment at his Ma’ts will and pleasure.

‘Et hoc sub p’iculo incumbenti nullatenus omittat.

‘Teste mæipso apud Westm’ vij. die Julij anno tricesimo Septimo Henrici Octavi. (1546.)’

This mandate was issued just six months before the King’s death, when his physical condition must have totally incapacitated him from the sport from which he interdicted others, and this in the face of repeated charters giving the citizens of London a right of free chase in the forests of Middlesex, Hertfordshire, the Chiltern country, and Kent as far as the river Cray. This proclamation helps us in imagination to a view of the then existing condition of the north-western suburbs—fields from the back of Gray’s Inn right away to Islington, a village of ‘cakes and cream’ in the midst of meadows; the uplands of Hampstead, Highgate, and Hornsey still covered with thick woods and coverts filled with game, whilst between them and the city stretched the open country, with here a wattled hut, and there a half-timbered house; the clack of mills resonant beside the willow-shaded Fleet, which had its rise at the foot of Hampstead Hill, and went running on through Gospel Oak Fields to Kentish Town and Pancras, and thence by Holborn to its outlet in the Thames at Blackfriars, where a creek rendered it navigable to Holborn Bridge.

There stood St. Pancras, or ‘Pankeridge,’ as Ben Jonson calls it, the oldest church in London with the exception of old Paul’s, ‘all alone, utterly forsaken, and weather-beaten,’ while on the breezy high ground at Hampstead a windmill or two gave animation to the scene.

During the reign of Henry VIII., a predicted inundation of the city drove the inhabitants to the hills, and Hampstead Heath appeared covered with hundreds of little huts and tents in which the credulous people sheltered themselves. The prediction, of course, failed, and the prophets only escaped the indignation of their dupes on finding their fears disappointed by avowing a mistake of a hundred years in their calculations.

During the reigns of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, Hampstead Woods continued to flourish, coming down on the east to the village of Cantleowes, or Kentish Town, while on the west they spread by Belsize, and what is now the Adelaide Road, to St. John’s Wood, where at the Domesday the Abbess of Barking held wood and pasture of the King for fifty swine.

More recently St. John’s Wood belonged to the Knights Templars. It was in this wood the unfortunate Babington took refuge from the fury of Elizabeth till driven forth by hunger.

With this Queen’s successor, and his favourite, Buckingham, Hampstead was a frequent hunting-ground, and to this day the plateau on the west Heath, locally known as the King’s Hill, commemorates the spot from which His Majesty was wont to see the hounds throw off.

In James’s reign and that of his son, Charles I., certain ‘fair edifices’ had arisen on the Heath and its vicinity for the accommodation and convenience of the Court when hunting and hawking in the neighbourhood. Of these old houses none exist to add to the archæological interest of the neighbourhood. It is impossible to imagine a finer foreground for a hunting or hawking party than the Heath, the natural beauty of the landscape lending itself most effectively to such scenes.

Who questions the locality of the wicked bon-mot of our Merry Monarch, who could never resist the temptation of saying a smart thing? When in the midst of a group of beauties, courtiers, and Churchmen (who particularly delighted in hawking), he observed of the church of Harrow-on-the-Hill that it was ‘the only visible Church he knew of.’

Towards the closing years of Charles I.’s reign (1647), the Great Hollow Elm at Hampstead (figured by Hollar in an engraving preserved amongst the pamphlets in the King’s Library in the British Museum) became an object of attraction to visitors. Remarkable for its size and supposed age, measuring 28 feet immediately above the ground in girth, with widely-spreading branches, and of great height, a sagacious speculator about the year 1647 (as appears from some verses addressed to it by Robert Codrington, of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1653) constructed a staircase of forty-two steps within the hollow trunk, with sixteen openings lighting it, which led up to an octagon turret fixed amongst the branches of the tree 33 feet from the ground. ‘The seat above the steps six might sit upon, and round about room for fourteen more.’ At this altitude spectators enjoyed a most glorious view, or, rather, a succession of them, and found themselves above every object in Middlesex with the exception of the church spire of Harrow.

From the open tableland on which it appears in the engraving, the great tree probably stood on the summit of the Heath, where the road now runs past Jack Straw’s Castle. On the same broadside on which the engraving appears are certain descriptive verses. This broadside seems to have been given away to the visitors, and the circumstance of its having been folded for putting in the pocket, and so worn out, accounts for the few copies of it in existence.

‘The Great Hollow Elm at Hampstead’ (as the broad sheet describes it) does not appear to have long survived its singular treatment. No subsequent records that I have met with mention it; but that it must have been the object of many a summer’s day pilgrimage to the Heath is evident, even in Puritan times, when Robert Codrington addressed his verses to it. In them he mentions the

‘beauteous ladies that have been

These twice three summers in its turret seen.’

In the same year (1647) a poetical stationer, commonly known as Michael Spark, but who, in moments of aspiration, fancifully called himself ‘Scintilla,’ tells us of a very curious use to which this sylvan upper chamber was put.

A foreigner, the fellow-countryman of Joannes a Commenius, as he pedantically styles John Amos Comenius, the Moravian grammarian and divine, had established a school at Hampstead for a ‘limited number of young gentlemen,’ the number being restricted to twelve, and these, Mr. Spark tells us, he spared no pains in training:

‘For he, on top of all (this tree) above the shade,

His scholars, taught; where they such verses made

As spread his honours, and do blaze the fame

Of Hampstead School—I’ll trumpet up the same!’

It is he who lets us into the seeming secret of the birth of the Wells, and sings of the

‘air, and hill, and well, and school,’

as if the reputation of each was publicly known and appreciated. Codrington indirectly tells us that the elm was attempted to be put to another use ‘by some of the new religion, that would make a preachment beneath its shade.’

In the reign of Charles II., when the Great Plague was ravaging London and the Merry Monarch and his merry Court had discreetly withdrawn from its neighbourhood, Hampstead and the Heath had other experiences, for hundreds of the wretched citizens who had fled from the city to the suburbs, driven forth from the village with scythes and pitchforks, lay down to die in the fields and woods and ditches in the vicinity. This was the occasion of the obloquy levelled at the Hampstead people by Taylor, the Water-poet. And as a consequence, having almost wholly escaped the visitations of 1603, Hampstead suffered considerably in 1665, when the burials—which in the first year of the plague numbered only seven, and in the next twenty-three—rose to 214, more than seven times the ordinary averages of the period.[30]

Twelve months later, when the Great Fire swept out as with the besom of destruction the germs of the plague, many of the fugitives from London watched from the Heath the destruction of their homes and property, the smoke of the city ascending ‘like the smoke of a great furnace,’ a smoke so dense and fearful that it ‘darkened the sun at noonday, and if at any time the sun peeped through, it looked as red as blood; through the long night there was no darkness of night;’ and, to add to these horrors, on the dreadful Wednesday night ‘the people of London, now of the fields,’ heard the murmur that the French were coming, and though, in the quaint language of the writer of the ‘City Remembrancer,’ ‘the women, naked and weak, did quake and tremble, many of the citizens began to stir themselves like lions or bears bereaved of their whelps, and “Arm! arm!” resounded through the woods and suburbs.’

These scenes, of which Hampstead Heath has been the centre, have long since faded out of the traditions of its inhabitants, like those of that still older night in 1588, when the cresset upon Beacon Hill blazed the approach of the Armada to its fellow on Hadley Church tower, and thence from cresset to cresset to the farthest North—scenes full of the tragic passions of human perplexity and terror.

The General Elections for Middlesex appear to have always taken place on Hampstead Heath. I read that at one of these meetings of the Middlesex freemen on the top of Hampstead Hill,[31] 1695, Admiral Lord Edward Russell made his appearance before the assembled voters, and was returned without opposition.

These meetings occasioned the assembling of great mobs of rough persons and much lawlessness, which greatly facilitated the business of cut-purses and footpads who habitually haunted the Heath. But at the commencement of 1700, after much trouble on the part of the influential inhabitants, this nuisance was done away with, only, as it would appear, to make space for another—for some time previous to 1732 horse-races took place upon the upper Heath, and were largely attended.[32]

The race-course appears to have been at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle, where the surface of the Heath, so delved and broken up and caverned by the sand and gravel diggers in modern times, was then, it is said, level with North End Hill.

In July, 1736, a paragraph in the Grub Street Journal states that while the horses were being run on the Hampstead course, a gentleman, about sixty years of age, was observed hanging almost double over a gate, his head nearly touching the ground. His horse was grazing near him, and there had been no foul play; his watch and money were upon him. The dead man was a Mr. Hill, a teller in the Excise Office.

What an occasion would this incident have afforded for the fiery declamation and denunciation of the great Nonconformist preacher, George Whitfield, who three years afterwards writes in his Diary that he took his station under a tree near the horse-course at Hampstead! He was preaching there by invitation, and his audience, he tells us, were ‘some of the politer sort,’ which gave him occasion to speak to their souls of our spiritual race, and he adds, ‘most were attentive, but others mocked.’

Johnson somewhat cynically said of him that ‘he had known Whitfield at college before he became better than other people’; but he also said that ‘he believed he sincerely meant well, but had a mixture of politics and ostentation, while Wesley thought only of religion.’

The races had grown to be so great a nuisance, from the crowds they drew together and the mischief that ensued, that some time subsequent to 1748 they were put down by the Court of Magistrates.[33]

Except at election times, there had never been such throngs of people or disorder on the Heath. The effect of the races had been to drive away the more refined portion of visitors to Hampstead, just at a time of year when the season was at its high-tide, and the Heath and woods and walks in their perfection.

In the spring of 1750 the people of Hampstead witnessed another instance of the spontaneity of panic-fear, which sent numbers of people to the Heath and the high grounds of the other northern suburbs to escape suffering the fate of the Metropolis, which a mad trooper (‘next to the Bishop of London’[34]) had predicted should be swallowed up by an earthquake in the April of this year. The shock of one had been felt on February 8, and again on March 8, and the proverbial fatality of the third time led to the belief that a final one would take place on April 8. When the three months were nearly accomplished, at the end of which the prophetic trooper had announced the destruction of London, this ‘frantic terror,’ writes Horace Walpole, on April 2, ‘prevails so much that within these three days seven hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner.’ Several women, he adds, ‘made themselves earthquake gowns to sit out of doors all night.’ The day passed, however, without disturbance, and, except that the unfortunate seer was sent to Bedlam, nothing came of the prediction.

That must have been a grand day on the Heath, mid-winter as it was, when, roused by Bonaparte’s threatened invasion of England (1803-4), the Hampstead Association—disbanded about a year before—joined themselves into a volunteer force, 700 strong, with the public-spirited ex-Lord Mayor of London, Josiah Boydell, as their Colonel Commandant, and Charles Holford, Esq., for their Major, and took the oath of allegiance in the face of heaven and their friends and neighbours on their own beloved Heath. They then marched to the parish church of St. John’s, where Lady Alvanley presented them with their colours.

When peace was proclaimed, these were deposited in the church, where they remained, a trophy of the patriotic spirit that had animated the men of Hampstead. In later times, when the wisdom of being always prepared for such defence made itself felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, the Episcopal Chapel in Well Walk was converted into a drill-room for the volunteers who fell into rank in the place of their forefathers. The old colours were now borne from the church, and escorted with full military honours to the drill-room,[35] where they remained till the building was taken down, when with similar ceremony they were deposited in the new drill-hall, Heath Street.

One of the most pathetic incidents in connection with Hampstead Heath is the remembrance of Charles Lamb and his sister which Talfourd has left us, ‘mournfully crossing it hand-in-hand, and going on sadly through the quiet fields to the retreat at Finchley, where the poor sufferer sought shelter from herself ... whence, after a time, she would return in her right mind ... a gentle, amiable woman, beloved by all who knew her,’ but most of all by her brother, whose young manhood was in a measure blighted by the tragedy of which she who enacted it was wholly unconscious. He might be said to have devoted himself to her, and in life they were never parted.

Few even of their contemporaries knew the particulars of that household tragedy; the reporters of the inquest, with a respectful pity rare in their craft, withheld the names; and compassion was universally felt for the naturally inoffensive and all-unconscious perpetrator of it, and for him, the dutiful son and loving brother, whose affectionate and sensitive nature suffered in silence the double horror and the double grief. This is how the ‘Annual Register’ tells the melancholy tale (September 23, 1796):

‘On the afternoon of this day a coroner’s jury sat on the body of a lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day.... While they were preparing for dinner, the young lady, in a fit of insanity, seized a case-knife from the table, and in a menacing way pursued a little girl round the room. On the eager cry of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her object, and turned with loud shrieks upon her parent. The little girl by her cries brought up the landlady, but too late—the mother was lifeless in her chair, stabbed to the heart, her daughter still wildly standing over her with the knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding from a blow on the forehead from one of the forks she was throwing distractedly about.’

A few days previously she had exhibited signs of lunacy, from which she had previously suffered, and her brother—in this lay the self-wounding sting for such a nature as Elia’s—had endeavoured on the morning of the occurrence to see Dr. Pitcairn, and had failed. ‘Had that gentleman,’ it is suggested, ‘seen her, the catastrophe might have been averted.’

What a scene for the young clerk at the India House! He was then only twenty-one, and, like his unhappy sister, working against the tide to help the straitened means of their parents. It was elicited at the inquest that no one could be more affectionate to both father and mother than the unconscious matricide, and that to the increased attentiveness which the growing infirmities of the latter required, added to the pressure of business, was to be ascribed the loss of the daughter’s reason.

Poor Lamb had himself once suffered from the same sad malady. He has been censured for sometimes yielding to drinking habits, but the memory of that one day in his life—the very threshold, rather, as it may be called—might well plead in merciful extenuation.

At times throughout her life Mary Lamb was subject to fits of mental aberration, the approach of which she was conscious of, and on these occasions would request to be taken to the abode at Finchley, where she found safety and remedial treatment.

One other event in modern times has caused widespread and painful commotion in association with Hampstead Heath, the suicide of John Sadleir, Esq., M.P. for Tipperary. I well remember the excitement on the occasion, and the rapidity with which the story was bruited about. Early in the morning of Sunday, February 17, 1856, a man was looking for a strayed donkey amongst the furze-bushes on the south side of the old watercourse (now obliterated), when he came upon the dead body of a well-dressed man. A silver cream-ewer and a small bottle lay beside him, his head resting near an old furze-clump, and his feet almost touching the water. His hat had fallen off, and his lips gave out the scent of prussic acid.

There was one extraordinary fact in connection with the case: the soles of the dress-boots on the feet of the corpse were unsoiled, though the night had been stormy and the neighbourhood of the watercourse damp at all times of the year. It was evident he must have alighted from a vehicle very near the spot, which was some distance down the bank, at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle. I have not the report of the inquest to refer to, but the details of the event made a deep impression on me, and the more so for the mystery surrounding it. I think no cabman came forward or could be found to give an account of a midnight fare to Hampstead Heath, and it was midnight or after when his butler heard him leave the house. The dress and general appearance were identical with those of Mr. Sadleir, director of the Tipperary Bank (which he had founded) and chairman of several railways and banking and mining companies; and if any doubt had existed, there was found on the corpse a slip of paper, on which, in a hand as bold as his proceedings had been, and infinitely clearer, was written, ‘John Sadleir, Gloucester Square, Hyde Park.’ Many knew the handwriting, and though some of the witnesses observed the great alteration death had made in the countenance, Mr. Wakeley, the coroner, lifted the eyelids of the dead man, and, having known him personally, pronounced them the eyes of John Sadleir. At first it was surmised that insanity from a brain overworked had led to the fatal act, but it soon became apparent that, to avoid the public scandal and degradation consequent on his own bad acts, he had voluntarily rushed out of life.

‘By his scheming and forgeries, the issue of false balance-sheets, the overissue of railway shares, the pledging of false securities and obligations, he had deprived widows, single women, army and navy officers on half-pay, and others equally helpless and unwary, of all they possessed. The victims of his iniquitous and gigantic frauds were to be counted by thousands, from shareholders to the poorest depositors, till at last, hemmed round by an inextricable network of multitudinous crime, and seeing no means of escape from the near crisis of discovery, he had stolen by a perilous short-cut out of sight and hearing of the cries and curses of those who had trusted him, to find oblivion in a suicide’s grave.’[36]

There were many who firmly believed his apparent death a forgery also, and long afterwards reports were current that he had been met with in America, whither his brother, the manager of the Tipperary Bank, had absconded. It is certain that a large sum of money which John Sadleir had received only on the day previous to the discovery of the dead body on Hampstead Heath was not forthcoming, nor was its disappearance in any way accounted for.

It appears singular why, having possessed himself of the poison, and knowing its almost instantaneous effect, he should have left his home, and gone out into the wild, dark night and distant solitude of Hampstead Heath, to perpetrate the despairing sin of self-murder. Perhaps the wretched man was goaded by the scorpion-stings of conscience to affinities closer to the condition of his mind than the conventional and ill-gotten luxuries around him. The cold damp earth, the sharp furze spines, the buffeting winds, the all-aloneness—save for the ghosts of lost opportunities, of great talents turned to infernal uses, of high respect and honours thrown away—seemed more in sympathy with the fierce frenzy, the unutterable horror, of his unmasked soul. Assuredly, no more terrible proof could be required that ‘sooner or later sin is its own avenger,’ than the suicide of John Sadleir.