London: The Biography

In London, the home of pride and wealth, the devil was always greatly feared. In 1221, according to the Chronicles of London, “that ys to say vpon seynt Lukys Day, ther Blewe a grete Wynde out off the North Est, that ouerthrewe many an house and also Turrettes and Chirches, and fferde ffoule with the Woddes and Mennys orcherdes. And also fyrye Dragons Wykked Spyrites weren many seyn, merveyllously ffleynge in the eyre.” A similar vision of flying fiends was vouchsafed at a much later date in London’s history in Stopford Brooke’s Diary: “Oct. 19, 1904. England was in sunshine till we came to the skirts of London, and there the smoke lay thick. I looked down to the streets below, filled with the restless crowd of men and cars. It was like looking into the alleys of Pandemonium, and I thought I saw thousands of winged devils rushing to and fro among the mad movement of the host. I grew sick as I looked upon it.”

In medieval London many noble personages were buried within the precincts of Blackfriars, suitably robed, because it was believed that to be interred in the habit of a Dominican monk was a certain means of warding off the devil. Yet there were some who were so far beaten down by the city that they identified with the fiend. When one London thief and beggar was taunted for his infamy on his way to the Tyburn gallows he replied: “What would the Devil do for company, if it was not for such as I?” “A Straunge Sighted Traueller,” of 1608, coming to London in a poem by Samuel Rowlands, visited the whores of Shoreditch and the statue of King Lud, “and swore in London he had seene the Deuill.” A real devil was supposed to have appeared at a performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in the Belle Sauvage Inn on Ludgate Hill.

Yet when the devil does emerge in London he is often, according to folklore, gulled and outwitted by the cheating citizens who are more than his match in dishonesty and double-dealing. In Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, the foul fiend is first shown the city as a kind of inferno:

Child of hell, this is nothing! I will fetch thee a leap

From the top of Paul’s steeple, to the Standard in Cheap.

But within twenty-four hours “he has been cheated, robbed, cudgelled, thrown into prison and condemned to be hanged.”

The devil can be found everywhere and anywhere in London, ranging far and wide from his own street, Devil’s Lane in Lower Holloway which has since been renamed. Richard Brothers, the self-styled prophet, claimed to have met him “walking leisurely up Tottenham Court Road.” Some claim to have seen him near the stake of the martyrs-“Thou art the seat of the Beast, O Smithfield”-and, at midnight in the streets of Victorian London, where “The devil puts a diamond ring on his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt, and takes his walks abroad.” In ancient fashion Punch tells Old Nick that “I know you have a deal of business when you come to London.” One of the devil’s duties is to wander through the prisons. Coleridge and Southey envisaged him touring the notorious Coldbath Prison, and admiring the interior of the cell set aside for solitary confinement. Byron called London the “Devil’s drawing-room.”

He has his guests, and his familiars. There is a tradition of witches in London, with the names of Old Mother Red Cap and Old Mother Black Cap still used upon shops and signs. Perhaps the most notorious was Mother Damnable of Camden Town, whose cottage lay at a fork in the road where the Underground station is now to be found. In the mid-seventeenth century she was known as a healer and fortune-teller with “her forehead wrinkled, her mouth wide, and her looks sullen and unmoved.” Her story is told in The Ghosts of London by J.A. Brooks. On the day of her death “Hundreds of men, women and children were witnesses of the devil entering her house in his very appearance and state, and … although his return was narrowly watched for, he was not seen again … Mother Damnable was found dead on the following morning, sitting before the fire place, holding a crutch over it, with a tea-pot full of herbs, drugs, liquid.” And what a sight that must have been, the devil making his way through Camden Town.