London: The Biography полностью

During this period, too, the parish and local congregation were also of strongly Puritan sympathies. Then in 1645 there were weekly public lectures “near Coleman Street,” established by women proselytisers and characterised by “confusion and disorder” during discussions subsequent to the lectures. A few years later, in a “conventicle” in an alley off Coleman Street, “that dangerous fanatic Venner, a wine-cooper and Millenarian, preached to ‘the soldiers of King Jesus’ and urged them to commence the Fifth Monarchy.” During the rising of the Anabaptists we read that “these monsters assembled at their meeting house, in Coleman Street, where they armed themselves and sallying thence, came to St. Paul’s in the dusk.” Even after the Restoration Coleman Street maintained its Puritan allegiances: the old Dissenting preacher, who had been presented with the living of St. Stephen’s in 1633, “opened a private conventicle” after the destruction of the Commonwealth from which he ministered to the “too-too credulous soul-murdered proselytes of Coleman Street and elsewhere.” We read of “Radical independents inhabiting the same quarter,” among them “Mark Holdesby of St. Stephen Coleman Street.”

So there is evidence here of a broad continuity over several centuries, from the Lollards to the Anabaptists, suggesting once again a certain destiny or pattern of purpose among the streets of the capital. Arthur Machen was only one commentator who recognised that “the stones and regions of the great wilderness have their destinies and that these destinies are fulfilled.” Thus there are certain “quarters which are appointed as sanctuaries.”

So the secret life of Clerkenwell, like its well, goes very deep. Many of its inhabitants seem to have imbibed the quixotic and fevered atmosphere of the area; somehow by being beyond the bars of the city, strange existences are allowed to flourish. Mrs. Lewson lived in Coldbath Square until her death at the age of 116; in the early nineteenth century she still wore the dress of the 1720s, thus earning herself the nickname of “Lady Lewson.” She lived in one room of a large house which for thirty years was “only occasionally swept out, but never washed.” In addition it is revealed in W.J. Pinks’s The History of Clerkenwell that “She never washed herself, because she thought those people who did so were always taking cold, or laying the foundation of some dreadful disorder; her method was to besmear her face and neck all over with hog’s lard, because that was soft and lubricating, and then, because she wanted a little colour on her cheeks, she bedaubed them with rose pink.” Her house was lined with bolts and boards and iron bars so that no one might enter, and she never threw anything away; even “the cinder ashes had not been removed for many years; they were very neatly piled up, as if formed into beds for some particular purpose.” The case of “Lady” Lewson has other parallels in London history; there are many instances of old women for whom time has suddenly come to a halt, and who characteristically wear white as some emblem of death or virginity. It may be that, for those whose lives have been damaged by the turbulence and inhumanity of the city, it is the only way of withstanding chance, change and fatality.

Another lady of Clerkenwell, living outside London time, was the Duchess of Newcastle, known as “Mad Madge.” She rode in a black and silver coach with her footmen all in black; in addition “she had many black patches because of pimples about her mouth,” wrote Samuel Pepys (1 May 1667), “… and a black juste-au-corps.” This lady in black wrote books of experimental philosophy, the most famous being The Description of A New World, called The Blazing World. “You will find my works,” she told a friend, “like infinite Nature, that hath neither beginning nor end; and as confused as the chaos, wherein is neither method nor order, but all mixed together, without separation, like light and darkness.” Pepys, having read some of them, called her “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman.”