NOTES AND QUERIES. 
[No. 27. 
upon his face, ‘ The cramps are leaded, and they may 
pull to doomsday.’ ‘The cramps are the iren bolts 
fastening the statue to the pedestal. The attempt was 
soon abandoned.” 
Hyde Park Corner. —“ There were cottages here in 
1655; and from the middle of the reign of George II. 
till the erection of Apsley House, the small entrance 
gateway was flanked on its east side by a poor tene- 
ment known as § Allen’s stall.’ Allen, whose wife kept 
a moveable apple-stall at the park entrance, was recog- 
nised by George II. as an old soldier at the battle of 
Dettingen, and asked (so pleased was the King at 
meeting the veteran) ‘what he could do for him,’ 
Allen, after some hesitation, asked for a piece of ground 
for a permanent apple-stall at Hyde Park Corner, and 
a grant was made to him of a piece of ground which his 
children afterwards sold to Apsley, Lord Bathurst. 
Mr. Crace has a careful drawing of the Hyde Park 
Corner, showing Allen's stall and the Hercules’ 
Pillars.” 
Pall Mall. —“ Mr. Vox told Mr. Rogers, that Sy- 
denham was sitting at his window looking on the Mall, 
with his pipe in his mouth and a silver tankard before 
him, when a fellow made a snatch at the tankard, and 
ran off with it. Nor was he overtaken, said Fox, 
before he got among the bushes in Bond Street, and 
there they lost him.” 
Lansdowne House. — “ The iron bars at the two ends 
of Lansdowne Passage (a near cut from Curzon Street 
to Hay Hill) were put up late in the last century, in 
consequence of a mounted highwayman, who had com- 
mitted a robbery in Piceadilly, having escaped from his 
pursuers through this narrow passage by riding his 
horse up the steps. This anecdote was told by the 
late Thomas Grenville to Sir Thomas Frankland Lewis. 
It occurred while George Grenville was Minister, the 
robber passing his residence in Bolton Street full 
gallop.” 
Newcastle House. —“ The old and expensive custom 
of ‘ yails-giving,’ received its death-blow at Newcastle 
House. Sir ‘Timothy Waldo, on his way from the 
Duke's dinner table to his carriage, put a crown into 
the hand of the cook, who returned it, saying: ‘ Sir, I 
do not take siiver.’ ‘ Don’t you, indeed ?’ said Sir 
Timothy, putting it in his pocket; ‘then I do not 
give gold” Hanway’s ‘ Eight Letters to the Duke of 
; had their origin in Sir Timothy’s complaint.” 
Red Lion Square. —“ The benevolent Jonas Hanway, 
the traveller, lived and died (1786) in a house in Red 
Lion Square, the principal rooms of which he decorated 
with paintings and emblematical devices, ‘in a style,’ 
says his biographer, ‘ peculiar to himself.’ ‘I found,’ 
he used to say, when speaking of these ornaments, ‘ that 
my countrymen and women were not aw fuit in the art 
of conversation, and that instead of recurring to their 
ecards, when the discourse began to flag, the minutes 
between the time of assembling and the placing the 
card-tables are spent in an irksome suspense. To re- 
lieve this vacuum in social intereourse and prevent 
cards from engrossing the whole of my visitors’ minds, 
I have presented them with objects the most attractive 
I could imagine—and when that fails there are the 
cards.’ Hanway was the first man who ventured to 
walk the streets of London with an umbrella over his 
head. After carrying one near thirty years, he saw 
them come into general use.” 
Downing Street. —“ Baron Bothmar’s house was part 
of the forfeited property of Lee, Lord Lichfield, who 
retired with James II., to whom he was Master of the 
Horse. At the beginning of the present century there 
was no other official residence’ in the street than the 
house which belonged, by right of office, to the First 
Lord of the Treasury, but by degrees one house was 
bought after another: first the Foreign Office, increased 
afterwards by three other houses; then the Colonial 
Office ; then the house in the north corner, which was 
the Judge Advocate’s, since added to the Colonial 
Office; then a house for the Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer; and lastly, a whole row of lodging-houses, 
chiefly for Scotch and Irish members.” 
Whitehall. —“ King Charles I. was executed on a 
scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House, 
towards the park. The warrant directs that he should 
be executed ‘in the open street before Whitehall.’ 
Lord Leicester tells us in his Journal, that he was 
‘beheaded at Whitehall Gate.’ Dugdale, in his Diary, 
that he was ‘beheaded at the gate of Whitehall ;’ and 
a single sheet of the time preserved in the British Mu- 
seum, that ‘ the King was beheaded at Whitehall Gate.’ 
There cannot, therefore, be a doubt that the scaffold 
was erected in front of the building facing the present 
Ilorse Guards. We now come to the next point which 
has excited some discussion. It appears from Her- 
bert’s minute account of the King’s last moments, that 
‘the King was led all along the galleries and Ban- 
queting House, and there was a passage broken through 
the wall, by which the King passed unto the scaffold.’ 
This seems particular enough, and leads, it is said, to 
a conclusion that the scaffold was erected on the north 
side. Wherever the passage was broken through, one 
thing is certain, the scaffold was erected on the west 
side, or, in other words, ‘in the open street,’ now called 
Whitehall; and that the King, as Ludlow relates in 
his Memoirs, ‘ was conducted to the scaffold out of the 
window of the Banqueting House.’ Ludlow, who 
tells us this, was one of the regicides, and what he 
states, simply and straightforwardly, is confirmed by 
an engraving of the execution, published at Am- 
sterdam in the same year, and by the following memo- 
randum of Vertue’s on the copy of Terasson’s large ~ 
engraving of the Banqueting House, preserved in the 
library of the Society of Antiquaries : —‘ It is, aceord- 
ing to the truest reports, said that out of this window 
King Charles went upon the scaffold to be beheaded, 
the window-frame being taken out purposely to make 
the passage on to the scaffold, which is equal to the 
landing-place of the hall within side.” The window 
marked by Vertue belonged to a small building abut- 
ting from the north side of the present Banqueting 
House. From this window, then, the King stept upon 
the scaffold.’ ” 
We shall probably next week indulge in a few 
Queries which have suggested themselves to us, 
and to which Mr. Cunningham will perhaps be good 
enough to reply. 
