the honoured guest of the Third Napoleon in 1867, was destined in 1871 to ride once more under the

proud monument of the Étoile at the head of the victorious German armies, to find the dynasty of the Bonapartes in the dust, and to listen haughtily to terms of peace sued for by a Republican Government.

161

CHAPTER XLV.

THE CLERKENWELL EXPLOSION AND THE

"CLAIMANT."

An Execution at Maidstone-Lord Mayor Allen and his Chariot-The Queen's State Carriage-The Clerkenwell Explosion-The Boat Race of 1868Buckstone and Toole and the Old Cognac-The Tichborne Claimant and his Friends.

I HAD been absent from England for nearly two years when the Exposition ended; and was glad enough to get back to London, and to the comforts of home and club life. We did not, however, choose London as our abode; but took a pretty house on The Terrace, at Putney, over against the "Eight Bells' Tavern. Both The Terrace and the tavern have long since been demolished; and the last time that I strolled through Putney I found the heretofore quiet little village transformed into a bustling suburb of quite metropolitan brilliancy in the way of shops; and I sought in vain for an old-fashioned Tudor or Jacobean house, with many windows, which mansion, it is said, had been inhabited during the Civil Wars by Oliver Cromwell. Ubiquitous Oliver! If tradition is to be trusted, he must have had as many habitations as he had heads.

I have good reason to remember the late autumn of 1867; since I was sent down to Maidstone to witness the first execution under the provisions of the Act for abolishing public executions. It is a disagreeable

topic to touch upon, and I am disinclined to recur to it here at any length. I may just say, nevertheless, that I was accompanied on this dismal errand by two journalistic colleagues and old friends, Mr. Edmund Yates and Mr. Joseph Charles Parkinson. We each

wrote a faithful narrative of the scene at Maidstone, which was a sufficiently sickening one, and we were all abused for having simply done our duty. Oddly enough, I received in the autumn of this present year of grace, 1894, a letter from an amateur autograph collector, who mentioned, among other things, that he was the possessor of an autograph letter of mine, addressed to the editor of a provincial newspaper, by which communication, he said, he set some store. I give a copy of it; inasmuch as the document may be considered as a contribution towards this candid, and, I hope (errors excepted), modest Apology for my Life.

Marine Hotel, Hastings,

Wednesday, 14th August, 1872.

DEAR SIR,-I beg to acknowledge receipt of your note. not a reporter; and were such my vocation I could not write anything of a journalistic nature save for the newspaper to which I am exclusively attached-the Daily Telegraph. I have seen a great many executions in my time; and, some four years since, wrote an account in the Daily Telegraph of the first private execution at Maidstone. I thereafter made up my mind never to witness another hanging: first, because the spectacle at Maidstone made me sick; and next, because I was very foully abused in the Saturday Review and the Pall Mall Gazette on account of the narrative I wrote.

The abuse of which I speak was manifestly

prompted by mere newspaper jealousy and spite. Mr. Yates, Mr. Parkinson, and I were dubbed "ghouls," vampires," "men with muck-rakes," and the like, merely because we drew a faithful picture of a novel and ghastly occurrence. But no one had reviled Dickens when, as an amateur, and not professionally, he attended he attended the execution of Courvoisier. Nobody quarrelled with Thackeray when, equally unprofessionally, he witnessed an execution at the Old Bailey, and in Fraser's Magazine wrote an article called "Going to See a Man Hanged." Finally, nobody was shocked when Ingoldsby (the pseudonym of a clergyman of the Church of England, mind you) wrote the poem about My Lord Tomnoddy in Bentley's Miscellany.

I see in my diary two events which occurred towards the close of 1867, both of which call for a few words of comment. On the 9th of November the unusual, and, I should say, almost unique, sight was presented to the multitude gathered together to witness the Lord Mayor's Show, of the Chief Magistrate proceeding from Guildhall to the Law Courts at Westminster in a simple chariot, chocolate in hue. A third of London was amazed; another third was horrified; and the remainder laughed at the elimination of the time-honoured State-carriage from the procession. The Lord Mayor who ventured on this bold innovation was Mr. W. H. Allen, a member of a well-known firm of publishers in Waterloo Place; and his action in excluding the old-fashioned gilded ark on wheels from the pageant was not, I should

say, prompted by any feeling of penuriousness, but by the conviction that state-coaches, Gog and Magog, men in armour, the banner of the late Countess of Kent, Mr. Common Hunt and the Water Bailiff's Young Man, were grotesque anachronisms. which might well be improved off the face of the Lord Mayor's Show. I was not, and am not, of Mr. Alderman Allen's way of thinking. Goodness preserve us from the day when there will be no Lord Mayor's Show, no visit of the Chief Magistrate and his train to the Law Courts, and no Guildhall banquet! All these paraphernalia may be practically without use, and, to some extent, childish; but they serve to remind us of an historic past, dignified, picturesque, and grandiose; and I would no more abolish Gog and Magog, and the rest of the medieval properties of the 9th November, than I would call for the suppression of the Queen's Beefeaters and the Gentlemen-at-Arms, or give the power of licensing-or refusing to license-the Royal Italian Opera to the London County Council.

By the way, it is worth while marking the fact that such of my readers as have not been favoured with a card of admission for the Royal Stables at Buckingham Palace, and are not less, say, than thirty-five years of age, have never seen the Statecarriage of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. The equipage in which Her Majesty rode from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey on the joyous day of the Jubilee was a "dress" carriage, with glass upper panels, but it was not the Royal State-carriage, which