SQUARES 
2 33 
Mr. Hooke of our Society [the Royal] after the French 
manner.” This house was burnt down ten years later, 
and rebuilt with equal magnificence ; but when the Duke 
moved to Montagu House, Whitehall, in 1757, it became 
the home of the British Museum. The old house was 
pulled down and the present building erected in 1845. 
The Square was laid out at the end of the eighteenth 
century on the gardens and the open fields of the parish 
of St. Giles-in-the-Fields beyond. Lord Loughborough 
lived in No. 6, and after him Lord Eldon from 1804 to 
1815. At the time of the Gordon Riots in 1780, when 
Lord Mansfield’s house was plundered, troops were 
stationed near, and a camp formed in the garden of the 
British Museum. That garden was also of use when, in 
March 1815, Lord Eldon’s house in Bedford Square was 
attacked by a mob, and he was forced to make his escape 
out of the back into the Museum garden. 
Of Queen’s Square, built in Queen Anne’s time, 
but containing a statue of Queen Charlotte, and all the 
other squares of this district there is little of special 
interest to record directly connected with their gardens. 
They all have good trees, and are kept up much in the 
same style. 
Red Lion Square is an exception. It has a longer 
history, and now its garden differs from the rest, as it 
is open to the public, and a great boon in this crowded 
district. It takes its name from a Red Lion Inn, which 
stood in the fields long before any other houses had 
grown up near it. It was to this inn that the bodies 
of the regicides Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were 
carried, when they were exhumed from Westminster Abbey 
and taken, with all the horrible indignities meted out to 
traitors, to Tyburn. A tradition, probably without foun- 
