Rose Street
Names
- Rose Street
- Rose Alley
Street/Area/District
- Rose Street
Maps & Views
- 1660 ca. West Central London (Hollar): Rose Street
- 1720 London (Strype): Rose Street
- 1746 London, Westminster & Southwark (Rocque): Rose Street
- 1799 London (Horwood): Rose Street
Descriptions
from the Grub Street Project (2006–present)
Rose Street. See also "Rose Street," by Pat Rogers.
from A New View of London, by Edward Hatton (1708)
Rose street, on the Sly side of Long acre, near Martin's lane, or at the SW end of King str. Covent garden.
from A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, by John Strype (1720)
[Rose-street.] I shall begin on the South Side, next to St. Martin's Lane; and the first is Angel Alley, which, with a long and narrow Passage, leadeth into Rose-street, a Place of an ordinary Building, and as ill inhabited. Rose-street; of which there are three, and all indifferent well built and inhabited; but the best is that next to King-street, called White Rose-street, which is in Covent Garden Parish, with some Part of Red Rose-street; where the Parish Stone is fixed on the Houses; that Part towards Long Acre being also White Rose-street.
from London and Its Environs Described, by Robert and James Dodsley (1761)
Rose street, ... Long Acre. ✽
from Lockie's Topography of London, by John Lockie (1810)
Rose-Street, King-Street, Covent-Garden,—at 23, adjoining New-St. and leading to Long-acre.
from London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, by Henry Benjamin Wheatley and Peter Cunningham (1891)
Rose Street, Covent Garden, a dirty and somewhat circuitous street, between King Street and Long Acre, for the most part cleared, or absorbed, in forming Garrick Street.
Rose Street, of which there are three, and all indifferent well-built and inhabited; but the best is that next to King Street, called White Rose Street, which is in Covent Garden Parish.—Strype, B. vi. p. 74.
It was in this street ("over against" which he was living at the time) that on December 18, 1679, Dryden1 was barbarously assaulted and wounded by three persons hired for the purpose, as is now known, by Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. In the Mercurius Domesticus, the first number of which appeared on the following day, the affair is thus described.
Upon the 18th inst., in the evening, Mr. Dryden, the great Poet, was set upon in Rose Street, in Covent Garden, by three persons, who calling him rogue, and son of a whore, knockt him down, and dangerously wounded him, but upon his crying out murther, they made their escape; it is conceived that they had their pay beforehand, and designed not to rob him, but to execute on him some Feminine if not Popish vengeance.
Fifty pounds were offered for the discovery of the offenders, and a pardon from the King, in addition, if a principal or an accessory would come forward. Rochester took offence at a passage in Lord Mulgrave's Essay on Satire, of which he thought Dryden was the author, and, three weeks before this cowardly revenge, had written to his friend Henry Saville that he intended to "leave the repartee to Black Will with a cudgell." There are many allusions to this Rose Alley Ambuscade, as it is called, in our old State Poems. So famous, indeed, was the assault, that Mulgrave's poem was commonly called "The Rose Alley Satire." Eminent Inhabitants.—Samuel Butler, author of Hudibras, died here (1680) poor and neglected. Edmund Curll, the bookseller, was living here when he published Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence.
1 The biographers of Dryden relate that the poet was on his way home from Will's to his house in Gerard Street; but no part of Gerard Street was built in 1679, and in that year the Rate-books of St. Martin's show that Dryden was living in Long Acre, over against Rose Street. That he was on his way home from Will's is only an assumption.