At Bristol there is a large Neptune of lead roughly modelled; the limbs are contorted with too much life and yet it is a decorative feature in the centre of a wide street. On the pedestal has been engraved a little history of the statue, an example that might be followed--“Neptune, cast and given A.D. 1588 by a citizen of Temple parish to commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Re-erected on its fourth site in 1872.” This seems to be a tradition unsubstantiated by record, but the time is not so remote that it may not as well be true, especially as the style of the figure would seem to agree with the date named. The story says that it was the gift of a plumber in the town, the metal being that of the captured ships’ pumps.
At Bungay in Suffolk there used to be a large statue at the Market Cross known as “Astræa.”
One of the most interesting portrait statues in London, the Queen Anne at Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, is of lead. The surface ornament on the robes is especially appropriate to the material. There is also in Golden Square a statue of George II. which seems to be nearly a repeat of the stone statue on Bloomsbury steeple; it suggested the statue in Fred Walker’s picture, “The Harbour of Refuge.”
There were also many full size equestrian statues founded in this metal, that of George I., until 1874 in Leicester Square, was one of these, and like the last it was brought from Canons, the celebrated house of the Duke of Chandos at Edgware, dismantled about 1747. The George I. resembled Le Sieur’s statue at Charing Cross and was known as the Golden Horse, for the whole was gilt, as many of the statues seem to have been at Canons, in that garden where, according to Pope, “The trees were clipped like statues--the statues thick as trees.”
The statue of William of Orange at Dublin is another of these, and it is celebrated alike in political demonstrations and Catholic polemics. Cardinal Newman wrote of it, “The very flower and cream of Protestantism used to glory in the statue of King William on College Green, Dublin, and though I cannot make any reference in print I recollect well what a shriek they raised some years ago when the figure was unhorsed. Some profane person one night applied gunpowder and blew the king right out of his saddle, and he was found by those who took interest in him, like Dagon, on the ground.”