Chapter XII: Act III (7)

Snipsnap is the tailor of the poets’ own period. He calls for drink with the airy freedom of a be-plumed gallant, pays magnanimously, as be-plumed gallants did _not_, cuts jokes like a court-jester, and boasts that he can “finish more suits in a year than any two lawyers in the town.” Blacksnout’s remark in reply, that “lawyers and tailors have their several hells,” is rather complimentary than otherwise to the last-named gentle craft; for it places the tailor, who exercises the time-honoured observance of “cabbage,” on a level with the lawyer, who purchases his luxuries through the process of partially stripping his clients. The “hell” here named is supposed to be the place wherein both lawyers and tailors put those shreds, of which Lisauro speaks in the ‘Maid in the Mill:’—

“The shreds of what he steals from us, believe it,
Make him a mighty man.”

Ben Jonson alludes to this particular locality in ‘The Staple of News.’ Fashioner waiting past the appointed time upon Pennyboy, Jun., compensates for his dilatoriness by perpetrating a witticism, and the young gentleman remarks thereupon:—

“That jest
Has gain’d thy pardon; thou hadst lived condemn’d
To thine own hell else.”

Fashioner was like Mr. Joy, the Cambridge tailor of an olden time. If that hilarious craftsman had promised a suit to be ready for a ball, and did not bring it home till the next morning at breakfast, his stereotyped phrase ever took the form of—“Sorrow endureth for a night, but ‘Joy’ cometh with the morning!” But, to return to the _hades_ of tailors. The reader will doubtless remember that Ralph, the doughty squire of Hudibras, had been originally of the following of the needle, and—

“An equal stock of wit and valour
He had laid in, by birth a tailor.”

Ralph dated his ancestry from the immediate heir of Dido, from whom

“descended _cross-legg’d knights_,
Famed for their faith.”

And then are we told, with rich Hudibrastic humour, that Ralph, the ex-tailor, was like Æneas the Pious, for—

“This sturdy squire, he had, as well
As the bold Trojan knight, seen _hell_;”

which locality, as connected with the handicraftsman, is described as being the place where tailors deposit their perquisites.

We have digressed a little from Snipsnap, the English tailor, whom Beaumont and Fletcher have placed with other thoroughly English artisans in the piece already named, ‘The Faithful Friends.’ Snipsnap holds his profession to be above that of a soldier, but yet modestly excuses himself from fighting, on the score that, although a tailor, he is _not_ a gentleman. Being provoked, however, he knocks down the rude offender, and has a thorough contempt for the constable,—a contempt in the entertaining of which he is so well justified by the logical remark of Blacksnout:—

“A constable’s
An ass. I’ve been a constable myself.”

The bravery of Snipsnap is a true bravery: he is conscious of the peril in which he stands as a soldier, and, ere going into action, bethinks him of old prophecies that he should be slain; but when he pictures to himself the public scorn that ever follows cowardice, and that, if he and his fellows be poltroons, every wench in Rome will fling dirt at them as they pass by, saying, “There are the soldiers who durst not draw their blades,” then is the heroic soul fired, and Snipsnap exclaims:—

“But they shall find we dare, and strike home too:
I am now resolved, and will be valiant;
This bodkin quilts their skin as full of holes
As e’er was canvas doublet.”

“Spoke like a bold man, Snip!” says Bellario, the old soldier. Ay, and like a discreet and thinking man. There is no foolhardiness and rash action in Snipsnap; but, like the greatest of heroes, he looks his peril calmly in the face, and then encounters it with a gallantry that is not to be resisted.

And it is to be observed that the tailors of the poets are as generous as they are brave. Witness Vertigo in ‘The Maid in the Mill;’ the lords among whom he stands owe him money, and yet affect to have forgotten his name. One of them ventures, indeed, to hope that he has not come to press his claims; and what says this very pearl and quintessence of tailors?

“Good faith, the least thought in my heart; your love, gentlemen,
Your love’s enough for me. Money? hang money!
Let me preserve your love!”

Incomparable Vertigo! What a trade might he drive in London upon those terms! A waistcoat for a good opinion, a fashionable coat for esteem, and a full-dress suit to be paid for with the wearer’s love, in a promissory note made payable at sight!

Vertigo understands the dignity of his profession; indeed, he wears a double dignity, for he is a “woman’s tailor,” as well as “man’s;” and when he is about to measure Florimel, how bravely does he bid the lords “stand out o’ th’ light!” How gallantly does he promise the lady when he swears—or asserts rather (for the tailors of the poets never swear,—that is, never swear profanely; they are like the nun in Chaucer, whose prettiest oath was but “by St. Eloy!”)—when he asserts then that she has “the neatest body in Spain this day;” and further, when Otrante, the Spanish Count, in love with Florimel, remarks that happily his wardrobe, with the tailor’s help, may fit her instantly, what self-dignity in the first line of the reply, and what philosophy in the second!—

“If I fit her not, your wardrobe cannot;
And if the fashion be not there, you mar her.”

Ben Jonson does the trade full justice with regard to their possession of generosity; thus, in ‘Every Man Out of his Humour,’ Fungoso not only flatters the tailor who constructed his garment out of the money due for its fashioning, but he borrows some ready cash of him besides. Upon this hint did Sheridan often act; and thus posterity suffers through the vices as through the weaknesses of our ancestors. But the philosophical spirit of the true artistic tailor has been as little neglected by rare Ben, “the _Canary_-bird,” as the same artist’s generosity. The true philosophy of dress is to be found in a speech of Fashioner’s, in the ‘Staple of News,’ and which speech is in reply to the remark of young Pennyboy, that the new clothes he has on make him feel wittier than usual: “Believe it, Sir,” says Fashioner,

“That clothes do much upon the wit, as weather
Does on the brain; and thence, Sir, comes your proverb,
_The tailor makes the man_. I speak by experience
Of my own customers. I have had gallants,
Both court and country would have fool’d you up,
In a new suit, with the best wits in being,
And kept their speed as long as their clothes lasted,
Handsome and neat; but then as they grew out
At the elbows again, or had a stain or spot,
They have sunk most wretchedly.”

The policy of the tailor is as good as his philosophy, and has the same end in view, for Pennyboy exultingly says:—

“I wonder gentlemen
And men of means will not maintain themselves
Fresher in wit, I mean in clothes, to the highest;
For he that’s out of clothes is out of fashion;
And out of fashion is out of countenance;
And out of countenance is out of wit.”

And the moral of all is, that if a man would prosper in the world, he should, at all events, not neglect his tailor.

Of all the poets yet named, Ben Jonson is the only one who introduces a somewhat dishonest tailor, Nick Stuff, in ‘The New Inn;’ but Apollo was angry at the liberty, and visited the poet with the retributive damnation of the piece. Stuff is a “woman’s tailor;” we have none such now in England, except as makers of ladies’ riding habits. They are rare in France, but there are as many women’s tailors as female dressmakers in Vienna; and the latter often order the tailors to take measure for and cut out the dresses, which the female sewers then, to use a French term, _confection_. Nick Stuff used to attire his wife Pinnacia in all the new gowns he made; and in ever-changing and gallant bravery Pinnacia—but let her describe Nick’s ways of vanity after her own fashion:—

“It is a foolish trick, madam, he has;
For though he be your tailor, he is my beast;
I may be bold with him, and tell his story.
When he makes any fine garment will fit me,
Or any rich thing that he thinks of price,
Then must I put it on and be his ‘Countess,’
Before he carry it home unto the owners.
A coach is hired and four horse; he runs
In his velvet jacket thus, to Romford, Croydon,
Hounslow, or Barnet.”

Pinnacia proceeds to portray further excesses, but I think there must be some exaggeration in this; and _for_ this the poet was punished by the condemnation of his piece. The thing is as clear as logical deduction can make it. The ‘New Inn’ contained great reproach against the tailors: the ‘New Inn’ was hissed off the stage: _argal_, for a poet to speak reproachfully of tailors, is to bring down ruin upon his head! This deductive process is borrowed from Cardinal Wiseman; and if it be found defective, I beg to shield myself under that gentleman’s eminent authority. It _is_ something like accounting for Tenterden steeple by Goodwin Sands; but of course _I_ cannot help _that_. Let the candidate for the tiara look to it!

Taking Nick Stuff as a true sample of those of his craft, who formed the exception to the general rule of professional honesty, I must say for such as he, that if he were a knave, it was because for years he had had an evil example before his eyes in the persons of men better off than himself, who had not _his_ plea of small means and long credit as an excuse for bettering his condition at the public cost. If the fashioners of clothes were sometimes not so careful as they might be in the application of the principle of honesty, the makers of the cloth were infinitely worse. _They_ lay under the imputation of being universally fraudulent. We have no better, and need no better, proof on this matter, than what is afforded us by the testimony of good old Latimer, who had a sharp eye to detect vice, and a bold tongue to denounce it. In his third sermon preached before King Edward VI., there is the following graphic passage:—“I hear say that there is a certain cunning come up in the mixing of wares. How say you?—were it not a wonder to hear that clothmakers should become ’pothecaries, yea, and as I hear say, in such a place whereat they have professed the Gospel and the word of God most earnestly of a long time.” And then the preacher, after some animadversions on the devil,—whom he styles in another sermon as the only prelate he knows who is never absent from his diocese, nor idle when in it,—thus proceeds:—“If his cloth be seventeen yards long, he will set it on a rack, and stretch it out with ropes, and rack it till the sinews shrink again, till he hath brought it to eighteen yards. When they have brought it to that perfection, they have a pretty feat to thick it again. He makes me a powder for it, and plays the ’pothecary. They call it flock-powder. They do so incorporate it to the cloth, that it is wonderful to consider. Truly, a good invention! Oh that so goodly wits should be so ill applied! they may well deceive the people, but they cannot deceive God. They were wont to make beds of flock, and it was a good bed, too; now they have turned the flock into powder, to play the false thieves with it. These mixtures come of covetousness. They are plain theft.” From this singular passage it is apparent that what is popularly known at Manchester as “devil’s dust,” was an invention which the cotton lords of today have inherited from their fathers in Mammon, the cloth lords of some three centuries ago. That ever-active prelate, the devil, is therefore as busily engaged in his diocese now as he was in the days whose doings are condemned by Latimer. In some respects however there is improvement, if we may believe the assertion made by Mr. Thackeray, in his ‘Essays on the Essayists,’ to the effect that even hermits out at elbows would lose their respectability now if they were to attempt to cheat their tailors. Other men succeed in doing so, without forfeiting the privilege conceded by Mark Antony to Brutus of being “an honourable man.”

Charles Lamb remarks, in his ‘Essay on the Melancholy of Tailors,’ that “drink itself does not seem to elevate him.” This assertion seems contrary to that in the acting tragedy of ‘Tom Thumb,’ wherein Queen Dolalolla so enthusiastically exclaims:—

“Perdition catch the railers!
We’ll have a row, and get as drunk as tailors.”

It is to be observed, however, that Fielding is not responsible for this illustration, which has been made by some adapter, who has had the temerity to do for the heroic tragedy in question what Cibber did for ‘Richard,’ and Tate for old ‘King Lear.’ The lines however were delicious when Wilkinson played Queen Dolalolla in the tragedy-style of Peg Woffington.

The illustration is insulting; and therefore is it anonymous. The poets generally have, as I have shown, been complimentary to the tailors. Few of the sons of song have reviled the true “makers of men.” When they _have_ done so, they have not dared to expose themselves to the sartorian wrath by boldly avowing their name. None ever did so on so extensive a scale as the author of the three-act piece, called ‘The Tailors: a Tragedy for Warm Weather;’ and no author has remained so utterly uncomeatable by the public curiosity. What is the mystery about Junius, touching whom there are a thousand guesses, compared with the greater impenetrability of this secret author, about whom no man ever heard a conjecture?

It is now nearly ninety years ago since a manuscript was sent from Dodsley’s shop to Foote, the manager of the “Little Haymarket.” The manuscript was that of the Warm Weather Tragedy, and Foote was requested to return the copy if it were not approved of. The great comedian knew better. The burlesque play of the anonymous author was acted with a strong cast. Foote himself was the Francesco; Shuter played Abrahamides, the Flint; Western did justice to Jackides; old Bannister was ponderous as Campbello; and gay Jack Palmer was just the man to enact that Lothario of stage-tailors, the seductive Isaacos. Mrs. Jeffries represented the false wife Dorothea, and Mrs. Gardner the faithful maid Titillinda. It was said by the critics of the period, that the radical fault of this burlesque play was, that “in burlesque, the characters ought to be persons of consequence, instead of which they are here tailors;” but the truth is, that the fault lies in the fact, that the tailors talk as correctly as persons of consequence, and are not half so bombastic as Nat Lee’s kings and queens. The profession exhibited much unnecessary susceptibility in being offended at this piece. Its tendency, if it have any at all, is rather to elevate than depress the public appreciation for the tailor, whether in his aspect of master or of “Flint” out upon strike. The entire action is devoted to the history of a strike for wages, with a supplemental love-plot annexed. The head master-tailor is a highly respectable individual, who has our sympathy because he is betrayed by his wife; and the chief Flint wins admiration, because he gets hanged and is cheated out of his mistress. The strike ends unfavourably for those who make it; but though the author sets out with the determination to render all his _dramatis personæ_ ridiculous, he cannot do it. He is like the prophet who was compelled to vaticinate against his inclinations; and the deity of dramatic poetry and tailors compels him to reverence where he would fain have committed desecration. The very first sentence in this play contains an allusion to Elliott’s brigade, that famous band of warriors made up almost entirely of tailors. I must refer my readers to the piece itself, if they be curious to see how the subject is treated in evident contrariety to the author’s own design; he makes all the characters utter commonplace common sense, when his intention was to make them lose themselves upon stilts in a sea of tropes, tirades, and thunderings against tyranny.

The antiquarian will not fail to notice that Bedfordbury is a locality set down in this piece as a place where tailors’ men did congregate some century ago. They still much do congregate on the same spot. A century before the period of the piece, Frank Kynaston, the poet, resided in a house adjacent to the “Bury,” and the memory thereof is still kept up in the name Kynaston-alley, which is within that same “Bury” of classical associations. Thus do tailoring and the _belles lettres_ continue to be in close connection; and where Kynaston’s muse kept itself warm, the sacred goose of the _schneider_ still glows with fervid heat. The operatives of the “Bury,” moreover, look as much like poets as tailors,—so abstract are they of air, so romantically heedless of personal appearance, and so unromantically and really “half-starved.” Not of them can be said what Titillinda says of Abrahamides—

“Whose form might claim attention even from queens.”

Finally: want of space, and not of material, brings that troublesome adverb upon me. If it be objected, that the tailors of the poets _do_ sometimes waver in critical situations, and condescend to tremble in presence of emergency, I have to answer, that such facts prove their heroism, as being akin to that of the Conqueror and Cœur de Lion. When the former was being crowned at York, he heard such an uproar in the streets, caused by the massacre of the inhabitants by the amiable Normans, that he sat upon his throne shaking with affright; “vehementer tremens,” says Orderic Vitalis, and he is very good authority. As for that tinselled bully, Richard, nobody doubts his single virtue—courage; but bold as he was, we all know that when in Sicily, he discreetly ran away from a bumpkin who threatened to cudgel him for attempting a matter of petty larceny. Francis Feeble and his brethren may, therefore, not be ashamed if they have foibles in common with William of Normandy and Richard of Bordeaux.

Dr. O. Wendell Holmes has cleverly conjectured what a tailor, poetically given, might say of the beauties that cluster about the closing day; and he has thus described

Evening.

BY A TAILOR.

“Day hath put on his jacket, and around
His burning bosom button’d it with stars.
Here will I lay me on the velvet grass,
That is like padding to earth’s meagre ribs,
And hold communion with the things about me.
Ah me! how lovely is the golden braid
That binds the skirt of night’s descending robe!
The thin leaves, quivering on their silken threads,
Do make a music like to rustling satin,
As the light breezes smooth their downy nap.

“Ha! what is this that rises to my touch,
So like a cushion? Can it be a cabbage?
It is; it is that deeply-injured flower
Which boys do flout us with;—but yet I love thee,
Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout.
Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright
As these, thy puny brethren; and thy breath
Sweeten’d the fragrance of her spicy air;
But now, thou seemest like a bankrupt beau
Stripp’d of his gaudy hues and essences,
And growing portly in his sober garments.

“Is that a swan that rides upon the water?
Oh no! it is that other gentle bird,
Which is the patron of our noble calling.
I well remember, in my early years,
When these young hands first closed upon a goose;
I have a scar upon my thimble-finger,
Which chronicles the hour of young ambition.
My father was a tailor, and his father,
And my sire’s grandsire,—all of them were tailors;
They had an ancient goose,—it was an heirloom
From some remoter tailor of our race.
It happen’d I did see it on a time
When none was near, and I did deal with it,
And it did burn me,—oh, most fearfully!

“It is a joy to straighten out one’s limbs,
And leap elastic from the level counter,
Leaving the petty grievances of earth,
The breaking thread, the din of clashing shears,
And all the needles that do wound the spirit,
For such an hour of soothing silence.
Kind Nature, shuffling in her loose undress,
Lays bare her shady bosom; I can feel
With all around me; I can hail the flowers
That sprig earth’s mantle; and yon quiet bird,
That rides the stream, is to me as a brother.
The vulgar know not all the hidden pockets,
Where Nature stows away her loveliness.—
But this unnatural posture of the legs
Cramps my extended calves, and I must go
Where I can coil them in their wonted fashion.”

To conclude: the poets have been quite as guilty of petty larceny as ever was poor tailor. Pope stole from Pascal, and Addison from Pope; and Churchill’s line in his Rosciad, to the effect that

“Common sense stood trembling at the door,”

is a plagiarism from George Alexander Stevens’s ‘Distress upon Distress; or Tragedy in True Taste.’ This is more of “cabbage,” and less of coincidence, than the line in one of the ‘Roxburgh Ballads’ anent tailors, wherein we find an allusion in the phrase “turn up my ten toes,” which is, as nearly as possible, a translation of part of the ladies’ threat in the ‘Lysistra’ of Aristophanes. Altogether a volume might be filled with examples to prove that poetry and tailoring have one spirit in common.

But it is time to turn from poetry to prose, and come more nearly to our subject “touching tailors.” We will take individually those whose great deeds have shed glory on the craft. First on the roll of fame is noble Hawkwood.

SIR JOHN HAWKWOOD, THE HEROIC TAILOR.

“The dew of grace bless our new knight today.”

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER: _Knight of Malta_.

On the 10th day of August, 1668, Mr. Samuel Pepys passed a portion of his morning at Goring House, the mansion of Lord Arlington, a nobleman who conversed with him amicably, and introduced him to other lords, with whom the gallant secretary prattled after his fashion, to say nothing of the flattery and compliments paid him by Lord Orrery. In the afternoon we find him at Cooper’s, the miniature painter’s, who was painting the portrait of that excellent lady Mrs. Pepys. The portrait was excellent in every way, save that it was not like Mr. Pepys’s wife, and that she wore a blue garment, which he could not bear. However, the courteous husband paid £38. 3_s._ 4_d._ for the picture, crystal, and case, that he might, as he prudently says, be out of the painter’s debt; and thereupon he adds:—“Home to supper, and my wife to read a ridiculous book I bought today of the History of the Taylors’ Company.”

The title of the book which Mrs. Pepys read aloud to her husband, and which is a book that a lady might well blush to read either aloud or to herself, runs as follows:—‘The Honour of the Merchant Taylors; wherein is set forth, the noble arts, valiant deeds, and heroic performances of Merchant Taylors in former ages; their honourable loves and knightly adventures, their combating of foreign enemies, and glorious successes in honour of the English nation; together with their pious acts and large benevolences, their building of publick structures, especially that of Blackwell Hall, to be a market-place for the selling of woollen cloaths. Written by William Winstanley. London, 1668, 8vo. With the head of Sir Ralph Blackwell, with a gold chain, arms of London on the right, and of the Merchant Taylors on the left.’

Just twenty years later another volume was printed with nearly a similar title. The alleged object was to give a biography of the renowned tailor and soldier, Sir John Hawkwood; and for this reason we will give the later work priority of notice. There will be amusement, if not instruction, in remarking how exquisitely our ancestors wrote biographical works in the days of dark King James.

This black-letter biography describes Hawkwood as a modest tailor lad who fell honestly in love with his master’s daughter, Dorinda. But Dorinda had a soul above buttons, and having given up her heart unasked to Impolite, a young, foolish heir, she cut the thread of Hawkwood’s desire with the shears of cruelty, and tore away from his protestations in a heat that even the paternal goose had never known.

Hawkwood, for a gallant man, committed an ungallant action; he discovered the lover of Dorinda by reading the correspondence locked up in the lady’s cabinet, and he avenged himself by writing a note in the lady’s name which brought poor Impolite to a meeting, whereat he was seized and led to a madhouse as incurably insane through the sweet passion of love.

The victim was subjected to a treatment which would undoubtedly have rendered a sane man mad, but he prattled so respectfully of medicines to the doctor, that the latter dismissed him as “cured.” In the meantime Dorinda refused to ratify her bond with a discharged lunatic; and the uncle of Impolite, a sort of melodramatic Gaspero, hired two ruffians, Bragwell and Daniel, to mutilate Hawkwood, as a punishment for his having been the cause of the breaking off of the match.

These gentlemen fell upon the bold young tailor as, “ever frolic and gay,” he was returning from Green-Goose Fair, held at Bow, on St. Wilielmus’s day, “so much honoured by the tailors as their patron.” But the ruffians found a Tartar, and Hawkwood incontinently slew both. The gallant apprentice, having slept upon the matter, resolved to go abroad, in order to avoid unpleasant inquiries; and having composed a score of execrable verses to his mistress, wherein he committed worse murder upon the Muses than before upon the ruffians, and having thrust the same under the bedroom-door of the cruel Dorinda, he went his solitary way with a heavy heart and a small bundle under his arm.

Winstanley, the author of this delectable bit of historical romance, exhibits a merry trait of originality by suddenly announcing that the murdered ruffians were, after all, like our friend Mr. John Robinson in the song, “not dead at all;” and delicately does he narrate how those respectable individuals, by coming to themselves, found that they were in the very worst possible society. Forthwith they slew a sheep, and having cut out the heart thereof, they exhibited the same to Gaspero, as the heart of the valiant tailor, and received from their employer not only their wages of sin, but an invitation to stay and dine and spend the night at his house.

The ruffians having been soon after got out of the way, Gaspero took to seeing ghosts and other unpleasant things, by way of showing his remorse for having been accessory to the murder of a tailor. But in the meantime his supposed victim was mirthfully passing from inn to inn; and as those establishments were ever furnished with a haunted room, it was his humour to sleep in the same, and lay the ghosts and other spirits which he found there.

Soon, weary of this life ashore, Hawkwood took to the sea, accompanied by Lovewell, another young tailor, and another victim of the gentle vision, who had unsuccessfully endeavoured to sun himself in a Lamira’s eyes. At the conclusion of the voyage, the adventurous youths landed in Ireland, and became ’squires of dames, taking up their quarrels, fighting in their behalf against any odds, and performing wonderful actions, such as could only have been imagined by the most unscrupulous of liars. When Pelion has been mounted upon Ossa, and the heap of mendacity is reared to a sufficiently stupendous height, the author grows tired of romantic fibbing, and descends to the lie commonplace. He brings his heroes to England, and with them two pages, who had joined their slim selves to the heroic tailor-knights’ fortunes; and who of course turn out, as is perfectly natural, to be Dorinda and Lamira in disguise. Then, at the end of the first act of the drama, there is a double wedding, a dance of characters, and an elaborate detail of after circumstances which I will not pause to relate.

Such was the treatment which Hawkwood and history received at the hands of an anonymous author in the year 1687. The volume in question, of which there are two copies in the British Museum, is, in fact, a coarsely printed black-letter tract; the paper such as even a modern grocer would turn up his nose at; and the woodcuts violating every propriety, regardless at once of perspective and humanity.

The volume however which Mrs. Pepys read to her husband is worse in every respect. There is a copy in the Guildhall Library; and I have to thank the most courteous of librarians, Mr. Allchin, for the opportunity I have enjoyed of perusing it. Perhaps the second edition, of which I have spoken above, was prepared expressly for the benefit of the youthful mind. The first is certainly bad enough to pollute the minds of all who read or listened to the reader. I will only add, that the illustrating artist has been so hard put to it, that he frequently makes one design represent two different events, the scenes of which are wide apart. He might have alleged _one_ thing in favour of his so doing; namely, that the illustration in question quite as truthfully represented one scene with the actors therein, as it did the other. Of this there can be no doubt; and I may further add, in behalf of the pictorial illustrations, that they assuredly did not offend against the second commandment, for there is nothing in them that is a likeness of anything in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth; and if it be an old joke to say so, it is, at all events, better than any of the jokes to be found in the volume which Mrs. Pepys read with complacency to that wicked little man, her redoubtable husband.

The true story of John Hawkwood needs no romance to lend it brightness, or season it with wonders. It has marvels enough of its own; and these, redolent of romance, are, in fact, sober and incontrovertible truth.

If Essex has been famous for calves, it has also had its share of heroes; heroes (if one may say so) in evil as in good; with its very villages producing them, and that in the humblest localities. If Frinton rejoices because of Cornelius and Tilbury, the poison swallowers, Sible Hedingham is glad because of John Hawkwood, the tailor and soldier.

In the village last-named, and in the reign of Edward the Second, there lived a tanner called Gilbert Hawkwood. His vocation not being a profitable one, he resolved that it should not be followed by his son. The latter, instead of tanning hides of brutes, was taught the mystery of covering those of men. In simple, honest English, he was apprenticed to a tailor; and did not at all like it.

Cornhill was at that time the stage whereon tailors most did congregate; and as troops were constantly passing that way, to and from the vicinity of the tower, John Hawkwood, wherever he met with them, sighed as he contrasted their jolly swash-buckler sort of air with his own melancholy look, gait, and calling. The King, Edward the Third, was then waging a most unjust war with France, and needed soldiers to champion his bad cause. Hawkwood recked little of the merits of the quarrel, but when a roving party of heroes pressed him to join, he met them more than half-way; and never was he more jubilant than when he changed his ’prentice muffin-cap for a peaked morrion, his dark rags for a gay suit, and a sword and a shield were the implements of his work, instead of a needle and thimble.

Now young Hawkwood was not a lad to be satisfied with being simply a “man-at-arms.” Michel, in the French play, when he recounts how he was pressed into the service, says, “Mon Général me nomma soldat; mais ma nomination n’a pas eu de suite.” The boy from Sible Hedingham was made of other stuff than that which could make him be content with singing, like the pleasant gentleman in the ‘Dame Blanche,’—“Ah! quel plaisir d’être soldat!” He was resolved to lead as well as serve; and he served well, to give him the better chance of leading. It is the only policy that permanently succeeds.

Officers were not dainty in those days, either of speech or anything else. Difficult as they were to satisfy, Hawkwood accomplished it. The man who laid on his blows with such good heart, and thwacked the foe so lustily and to excellent purpose, albeit in anything but an excellent cause, was a man whose sword was sure to carve out fortune for him. Accordingly, he soon passed from poor private to plumed captain. His purse was not much the better filled because of his brighter corslet and his new feathers; and as the foe he had to encounter was as badly furnished as himself, he got abundance of honour, but few pistoles. The King beheld him mowing down adversaries, as though he had been expressly engaged by Death to gather in his harvest. On the battle-field, the royal Edward dubbed the tailor knight. “Thou art the bravest knight,” said he, “in all the army.” “Umph!” murmured the cavalier of the needle, “and the poorest too!”

But he had what to a brave man was better than bezants, dearer than dollars, and above marks and moidores,—he had praise from the Black Prince. That chivalric personage was perfectly ecstatic at witnessing the deeds which Hawkwood enacted on the bloody, but glorious, day at Poitiers. The praise enriched him as though it had been pistoles. What baron, standing in need of a gentleman cut-throat, would hesitate to engage, at any cost (it was only promising and breaking a pledge), a man with a sharp sword and a stout arm, who had a verbal character from such a master as he whose sword is now rusting in peace above the time-honoured tomb at Canterbury?

Hawkwood needed some such testimony. The Peace of Bretigny had been ratified in 1360; and they who before had not had leisure to be ill, were all becoming seriously indisposed for want of action. As employment did not come, they made it for themselves. If kings could be stupendous scamps, why not commoner men? They waited long enough, as they thought, for hire for their swords, till at last they put the latter to private use. A band was formed, and called “Les Tards Venus,”—the “Come-at-Lasts,”—as if apologetically and modestly expressive of their patience. Some people would have been the better pleased had the self-styled tardy gentlemen been content to “wait a little longer.” The more learned members of the society, perhaps the chaplains, called the band the “Magna Comitiva,” or “Great Band.” A greater band of brigands certainly never existed, the chaplains included!

When it is thus said of those worthy gentlemen, of course the expression is based upon the principles, and measured by the standard, of these our own later and degenerate days. Hawkwood and his truculent friends thought they had a vested right to remain in undisturbed possession of every castle, their ownership of which was founded on their having murdered the last proprietor at his own hearth. We have foolish ideas on such matters; and we must only judge of these perfect gentlemen,—so at least historians tell us,—not by the criterion of that Christianity which they professed, but by the customs which they observed. As Mr. Justice Erle remarked the other day, we shall soon have thieves pleading the custom of Hounslow Heath.

Hawkwood was one of the most terrible of those men who either made war on their own account, or let out their swords and sinews in the service of any party who promised to pay them, and guaranteed the plunder. He became awfully renowned under the not very menacing title of “John of the Needle.” But his needle was four feet long; and if to “sew up” a person means to slay him, the phrase probably had its origin from the times and the actions of this most ruthless of tailors. He swept, with his English followers, the south of France; where the sound of his bugle and the flutter of his pennon always heralded devastation or death. England and France were at peace at that time, and the King of France complained to his brother of England. The gracious Edward, who thought as little of lying as the Czar Nicholas, gave his “parole de gentilhomme” that he was highly disgusted; but privately he signalled the freebooter with a “Well done, Hawkwood!”

“John of the Needle” did not fail to prick his way according to his fancy and profit after this hint. He was captain of the most famous and most successful “horde” that ever sang, “Stand and deliver!” Not that he acted in rough highwayman fashion,—not he! Meek tailor as he _had_ been, he had become too much of a gentleman and soldier for that. He robbed and murdered only in accordance with the rules of chivalry; and he would have hung a common thief who had dared to hint that he was a brother by profession.

His black-mail produced him tons of “red gold,” and his forays now extended to the banks of the Po. There _was_ something of the spirit of Merry Sherwood in him, for he had a sort of jolly delight in attacking the palace and stripping the person of a bishop. This kind of gentle amusement however was not at all to the taste of the Bishop of bishops at Rome; and the appeal made by the Vatican to the King of England had better success than that which had been made by the King of France.

Hawkwood submitted both to his own sovereign and to the Church. From the latter he purchased peace,—making large gifts, which were thought nothing the worse of that they were the product of robbery. John thereupon took to regular service: he first entered that of the Pisans, in 1364, and those roystering individuals soon furnished him with as much fighting as he could reasonably have stomach for: when they were not inclined to fight, he hired out his sword and person to powers willing to fight against them. Sometimes a single baron, having a quarrel with another baron, and wishing to get possession of his goods, engaged Hawkwood to transact the little business for him. He of the needle went at it with a will; and when he had secured the castle and property of the fallen noble, he generally defied the other to take them from him, with a “Come, if you dare!”

This system was never objected to: an arrangement _à l’amiable_ was entered into, and Hawkwood was accounted as honest a man as before. In twenty-three years’ service in Italy he thus fought on any and every side. It was only when he got satiated with variety that he settled down to constancy, and swore stable allegiance to the Florentines. One incident of the style of warfare, and his skill in carrying it on, will suffice to show of what metal our Essex needle was fashioned.

One of the most creditable pieces of work ever accomplished by Sir John, was in the course of the war which Florence carried on against Milan in 1391. No one of the Condottiere captains hired to lead mercenaries to battle ever achieved such glory as our old Essex tailor on this occasion, and Florence deemed the cause safe that was entrusted to his management. In the present case, Milan was to be assailed on two opposite sides. The noble Count d’Armagnac attacked it from the west, and got thoroughly beaten ere Hawkwood had sufficiently advanced to make his onslaught by the east. The latter with his army was about five leagues from the city when he heard that his colleague had been routed: he became thoughtful, but not dismayed.

The country in which he found himself was like one of the pattern-books once so well-known to him. It was all patches of land, and between those patches intersections of streams. Indeed, the country had nothing of the regularity of a tailor’s pattern-book, for the patches were of various shapes, and the intersecting streams running in all directions: the country between the Alps and the Po has ever been a doubtful and spongy sort of land whereon to struggle for the award of victory.

Hawkwood was retreating, but the Adige, the Mincio, and the Oglio were yet to be crossed when the Governor of Milan, Giacopo del Verme, came upon him with his conquering legions. He sat mute and observant: the hazard was extreme. He could not cross the rivers without first beating a vastly superior enemy: to attempt it after a defeat would have been utter destruction. He therefore did nothing but bide his time; and when the enemy had become weary of looking on at him, and had learned to despise him, he suddenly fell upon them with a power against which there was so little preparation that, having thrashed his foe into a condition that made immediate pursuit impossible, he struck his tents and crossed the Oglio, under no worse fire than the sarcasms of his sore and helpless antagonists.

He went on, picking his way, until he reached a plain which was surrounded by the dykes of the Po, the Mincio, and the Adige, and lying below the level of those rivers. The dykes of the last river had been pre-occupied and fortified by the foe; the stream of the river too was broad and rapid, and when Hawkwood had surmounted all other obstacles he was terribly puzzled as to how he was to overcome this. The puzzle was not made easier to him when, from the little eminence on which he and his little army were stationed, like rats upon a brick in a flooded sewer, he beheld the entire plain turning into a lake. The progress of the change worked like a dissolving view at the Polytechnic; and, when the ex-tailor felt the water percolating through the lower chinks of his leg-armour, he was thoroughly satisfied, or rather dissatisfied, that his opponent was playing him a sorry joke. “Nay,” cried he, on second thoughts, “it is not so; the men shall not catch so much as a cold!”

The dykes had been cut, and he forthwith began himself to cut out a plan of triumph. He would neither be starved, nor beaten, nor moistened into submission. So he averred; and he had just declared as much when a messenger from the hostile leader, who occupied the only strip of land on which a man could walk dry-shod, sent by that road and messenger a present, which was delivered into Hawkwood’s own hands: it was a fox shut up in a cage! “Umph!” lowed the Essex calf, “it may be that I am a bit of a fox, and Reynard may know a trail that will take him safe home, and may spoil the sport of his pursuers by a ‘stole away.’”

He at all events went boldly in the darkness of that same night to look for one. He and his men plunged into the water, and waded through it in a direction parallel to the dykes of the Adige. Through mud and water up to the horse-girths, and across trenches, which engulfed the heavier men, who could not clear them, they all waded on; and, when the second night had nearly been spent, and numbers had been lost by cold, fatigue, and hunger, the survivors—the almost despairing infantry—clinging on to the tails of the horses which floundered before them, at length emerged again on to dry ground, upon the Paduan frontier.

The enemy did not dare to follow him in this hazardous undertaking, which had, as it deserved, so successful an issue. But even that enemy acknowledged that there was not a commander in Italy who, for bravery and for resources in moments of difficulty, could for a moment compare with Hawkwood the Tailor.

If Florence enjoyed an unusually lengthened term of peace and prosperity, the happy result was chiefly owing to the gallantry of Hawkwood and his men. The value which the State set upon his services was exemplified when Florence disbanded all her foreign mercenaries, save John of the Needle and one thousand men, the Macedonian phalanx of the land.

His unwonted ease however was not to the taste of the active soldier. He had ever been in turmoil, and could not exist without it. What says the old naval captain in the French song?—

“A présent, que je suis en retraite,
Je me vois forcé de végéter;
Et bien souvent tout seul je tempête
De n’avoir jamais à tempêter.
Un vieux compagnon de lame,
Aussi folâtre que moi,
Me dit de prendre une femme;
Eh! mais pas si mal, ma foi!
Car j’aime le tapage—
Et je suis tapageur.”

Just so with honest John. He had passed the best years of his life in war, and he could not do without at least a little healthy skirmishing; and he provided that which he had hitherto lacked, by taking a wife, and that wife a dark-eyed, lightning-tongued Italian. The lady, Bianca Sforza, and domestic controversy, kept him from “growing pursy,” like Sir Giles; and there was ever a very hot fire at the hearth of the tanner’s gallant son of Sible Hedingham.

In his later days he did what retired veterans are apt to do, and are wise in their aptness. He took to meditation, and, not to attending Bible societies, as hearty old admirals do now, but to not less praiseworthy service, a sample of which may be seen in his foundation of the English hospital at Rome for the reception of poor travellers. The funds, I believe, still exist, though they are diverted from the purpose contemplated by the founder.

It would serve, he thought, to balance much of a heavy account with Heaven; and he was comforted in that direction by those most skilful drawers of wills, the Romish priests. Having settled this matter, and feeling, like the Irish gentleman on his death-bed, that he had nothing to lay to his charge, for he had never denied himself anything, he calmly died in the Strada Pulverosa, in Florence, in the year 1393. He was buried with a magnificence that perhaps has never been surpassed. The very details of it dazzle the mental vision; and I will therefore leave my readers to conceive of it under the shadow of imagination. He was finally laid to rest in the Church of the _Reparata_, beneath a tomb in which there is metal enough to make thimbles for all the tailors in Christendom.

There is a cenotaph in honour of the hero in Sible Hedingham church. It is a profusely ornamented memorial, with the pretty conceit of the sort so dear to our forefathers, of _hawks_ flying through a _wood_. It is due to him in whose honour it was erected, to say that if friends declared his almost superhuman courage and ability, hostile writers conceded with alacrity to the eulogy flung upon him in showers.

There is in Essex a manor of Hawkwood, which is supposed to owe its name to the gallant tailor-soldier; and the house on which, was reputed to have been built by his heirs. It is ascertained, however, that this manor of Hawkwood was so known in the reign of King John; and perhaps the renowned John’s ancestors originally came from its vicinity, and took its name for a surname, when surnames were rare, and they hardly knew what to call themselves. One author indeed has suggested that the received story of the lowly origin of Hawkwood is all fiction, and that he was really of gentle blood. But I protest against any such suggestion, for in that case what would become of all this history I have been telling?

In sober seriousness, the main facts are doubtless as they have been told. They are not mere romantic details of romantic times. In much later days we have heard of tailors turning out heroes. There is no worthier illustration of this fact that I can remember, than “daring Dörfling;” and his little story I will briefly tell, if my readers will only vouchsafe me ear and patience; as Crispin says, “Cela ne sera pas long.”

GEORGE DÖRFLING, THE MARTIAL TAILOR.

“Of stature tall, and straightly fashion’d;
Like his desire, lift upwards, and divine.”

MARLOWE: _Tamburlaine_.

George Dörfling was born in Bohemia, in the year 1606. It is popularly said in that country, that when a child is born there, a fairy presents herself at his side and offers him a purse and a violin, leaving to him to choose which gift most pleases him. According as he makes his selection, is his future character determined. If he takes the fiddle, he turns out a musician. If he grasps at the purse, he invariably becomes a thief. Every Bohemian is declared to be either the one or the other. I may add, that under the shadow of the Hradschin, I have met with “Czeks” who were both, and with very many who were neither.

I fancy that at Dörfling’s birth there was much confusion, both in the domestic and the magic circle. In the former there must have been something peculiarly wrong. George could make no Shandean calculations touching his birth, for he never knew his parents’ names; and as he turned out neither player nor robber, except on a very heroic scale, the fairies do not appear to have afforded him the usual exercise of judgement which they commonly permitted to discriminating infants.

There _was_ one thing, however, of which young George would _not_ doubt. He felt quite sure that he was born. He had no hesitation upon that question; and he was a philosopher of the Descartes school, without ever having heard anything of the Cartesian philosophy. He soon gave himself, or had given to him, a name. He had first seen light in a village; and he was accordingly called George Villager, or Little Villager. “Dorf” implies _village_, and “Dörfling,” _villager_; and accordingly the little Bohemian took that humble name,—nobody having the slightest idea that he would ever make it famous, and upon it place a baron’s coronet.

The village authorities had no coronets wherewith to grace his head, and in place thereof they put a thimble on his finger and a needle in his hand. Greatness could hardly have begun with smaller pretensions. The boy was apprenticed to a tailor, and a very excellent tailor he made.

But what he did _not_ make was money. In his village he could acquire little cash and no fame. The boy was ambitious, and he declared that he would walk to Berlin, and build wide-skirted coats for the army generals. The villagers thought him mad; and the melancholy sexton’s laughing daughter ceased to laugh when the handsome lad spoke of his resolve. He was not to be turned from his resolution by Katinka the fair; and so, with a light bundle, a lighter heart, and a purse lighter than all, he kissed his Ariadne, with the easy air of a dragoon leaving garrison, and with hope in his heart, turned his face towards Berlin.

He walked on uninterruptedly until he reached the banks of the Elbe; there he found the waters out, and his purse in the same condition. And yet not in the same condition; for the waters had overflowed, and his purse had not. He had reckoned upon fording the stream, but if he would cross he must needs ferry it. The Styx itself is not to be traversed without a fee, and in that respect the Elbe was like the Styx. Charon was inflexible. Dörfling solicited aid from a group of young officers. Like Lieutenant Perry, he was called “a fool for his pains.” The police standing near, finding him penniless, deemed him disreputable. They asked for his papers; and when one little official, a mere starveling, read aloud that the stalwart lad was only a tailor, the crowd pushed him aside with contempt, and bade him stand out of the way of better men.

One of the officers nevertheless approached him, with more of a seductive than a contemptuous look about him. “At your age,” said he, “a handsome fellow like yourself should have handsome clothes to help his looks, and a well-furnished purse to give dignity to his clothes. If you want to starve, by all means continue tailoring; but if you would become a man, and a gay one too, throw away that accursed bundle of rags, and cross the ferry in a better service.”