Tavistock Row

Tavistock-Row, Covent-Garden,—forms part of the S. side, extending E. from Southampton-st.

Tavistock Row, Covent Garden, a row of houses, fourteen in number, on the south side of Covent Garden Market, now (1890) entirely cleared away. In No. 4 lived Miss Martha Reay, the mistress of Lord Sandwich, killed in the Piazza (1779), by the Rev. James Hackman, in a fit of frantic jealousy.

A Sandwich favourite was this fair,
     And her he dearly loved;
By whom six children had, we hear;
     This story fatal proved.

A clergyman, O wicked one,
     In Covent Garden shot her;
No time to cry upon her God,
     Its hop'd he's not forgot her.

Grub Street Ballad on Miss Ray, quoted by Sir Walter Scott in his Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad.

Hackman was recruiting at Huntingdon; appeared at the ball; was asked by Lord Sandwich to Hinchinbrooke; was introduced to Miss Reay, became violently enamoured of her, made proposals, and was sent into Ireland, where his regiment was. He sold out; took orders, but could not bend the inflexible fair in a black coat more than in a red. He could not live, he said, without her. He meant only to kill himself, and that in her presence; but seeing her coquet at the play with Macnamara, a young Irish Templar, he determined suddenly to dispatch her too. [See Tyburn.] In the upper part of the same house died, July 11, 1797, Charles Macklin, at the great age of ninety-seven. Here the elder Mathews called to give the aged actor a taste of his boyish quality for the stage. In No. 5 William Vandervelde the younger died, in 1707:¹ and in 1799, in the front room of the second floor of the same house, died Thomas Major, the engraver.² It was afterwards occupied by "Irish Johnstone," the actor. No. 13 was Zincke's, the celebrated miniature painter; and Dr. Wolcot (Peter Pindar), wrote many of his invectives against George III. and the Royal Academy in the garret of the same house. William Godwin was living in Tavistock Row in 1755. One of John [Lord] Campbell's early London lodgings was at No. 3, "a couple of rooms," he wrote to his father, February 17, 1800, "for which I pay only nine shillings a week."

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¹ Smith's Nollekens, vol. i. p. 209.
² Ibid., vol. ii. p. 335.