Chapter XIII: Act III (8)

“Well,” said Dörfling, “here have I been dreaming of nothing more than sewing button-holes in Berlin, and now have I a prospect of a marshal’s _bâton_. It’s a long road however from a recruit’s barracks to a marshal’s saddle. I doubt I had better stick to the needle.”

The fact however was that he had little or no doubt about the matter. He did not fling his bundle away, as he was enjoined to do. He turned its contents into a knapsack that was offered to him, and in five minutes he was crossing the ferry, a recruited soldier in the service of the Elector of Brandenburg. He was quick-witted, docile, and zealous; and the handsome and able recruit was not only speedily noticed, but he made himself worthy of the observation devoted to him. He performed every duty of his station without a demur; was the first on parade after _réveillé_, and the last in the military class of instruction as long as teaching was going on there. That he was the neatest man of his corps was his least merit, for his old habit helped him to keep tidiness in his new. Therewith was his good humour unimpeachable and unruffled. Like all truly brave men, he was of a sunny disposition, loved children and music, and, if he had a somewhat dangerous tongue and rather too winning ways on some occasions, why the Fräuleins never complained of either; and if they who were the most concerned did not, I do not know that any one else has a right to reproach him.

Promotion was rapid, and with promotion he gained celebrity. He was talked about near other watchfires than those of Brandenburg, and in other camps than the one in which the once private soldier now served as captain. His merit may be judged of when I say that the great Count Thurn solicited his co-operation; and that, under that renowned leader, the ex-tailor in epaulettes fought like a lion at Prague, and won golden opinions, not only from friends who witnessed, but from foes who suffered by his bravery.

He was not a mere fire-eater; he had a clear head as well as a heavy hand, and was as apt in planning enterprises sure of success, as he was ready to serve in the enterprises projected by others. There was a spice of Major Dalgetty about him too. He loved, next to a good cause, touching which the major was indifferent, good living; and knowing that he should find the one, and hoping to enjoy the other, under the banner of the great Gustavus, he served as “General-Major” in the Swedish army, in 1642, and never once sheathed his sword during the Thirty Years’ War.

At that time he certainly possessed the advantage of shedding his blood on the righteous side of the quarrel; but, as for good living, why, if by that be meant light diet, he had that daily. Visionary theories he said he could endure well enough, but visionary dinners were an abhorrence. It often happened that in his own quarters there was not even the _vision_ of a dinner: in that case he had no objection to head a species of _razzia_, and carry off the supplies from the commissariat of the enemy. On one of these occasions the hungry foragers encountered strong opposition, and in the struggle which ensued Dörfling’s lieutenant was shot dead by an arquebusier. He was the most nearly famished of the lot, and had contended for the meal with all the ardour which appetite can give. “Young Naumann is dead,” remarked an aide to Dörfling. “Poor fellow!” rejoined Dörfling, “he would have cared for it less had it only been after he had dined.”

The swiftly slain got but scanty epitaphs and shallow graves in those times; and if any mourned the loss of the lieutenant, they found consolation in the fact that his absence from the mess left one share more to be divided among the hungry members. They drank out of the enemies’ flasks to the memory of their ill-fated comrade, who had perished before dinner; and that done, they hurried to a work the issues of which prevented several of them from ever again seeing supper-time. Dörfling however was not among the missing. _He_ was ever active, happy, and energetic; most at home where the fire was thickest and the fray hottest, and too busy to be unhappy, until the Peace of Westphalia, which put so many notched swords that need never have been drawn back into their scabbards, and laid down temporary arrangements, which might have been permanent had the parties concerned used reason before resorting to ramrods.

In rusty inaction however neither could Dörfling nor his sword ingloriously lie. To cut throats was accounted a more honourable occupation than to cut cloth, and the “General” was not at all disposed to retire as yet from business; particularly as his renown increased with the number of his fields. He was absent from scarcely one, if from one, of Frederick William’s great battles, fought up to the year 1695, against Swedes, Poles, and French. As he grew old He grew less nice as to the complexion of the quarrel in which he was engaged; nor would the circumstances of the time admit of this. At the best a soldier is but a legalized and hired _bravo_, bound to sustain all the quarrels of the master whose livery he wears. Such servants must serve and be silent; strike hard, and speak little, except to the purpose in hand. To do Dörfling justice, he performed this sort of duty after a most exemplary fashion. He preferred feeling that the cause in which he fought was a good one; and if it were not, he threw the responsibility on his employers, and took his share of the plunder with an easy conscience. His share was often to a very considerable amount; and long before he died, he was accounted as rich as all the retired tailors and living field-marshals in Europe put together.

As morality then went, he had fairly earned it all; and truth to tell, it had not all been won on the battle-field, or in towns given up to plunder, or at hearths devoted to devastation. He gained no inconsiderable portion by diplomacy; that is, not by mendacity in courteous phrases and elegant circumventing of the truth, but by serving the monarch by whom he was accredited with honest fidelity, irrespective of how he might offend those _to_ whom he was commissioned.

Not that he ever gave offence to man or woman, prince or peasant girl, willingly or knowingly. The gentle tailor lad of the remote Bohemian village was ever gentle, yet not undetermined, at the council boards and levées of kings. Never was there man more gallant. It is said of the late Duke of Wellington that, at past fourscore, he, in one day, attended early morning prayer, gave away two brides, transacted business at the Horse Guards, took his usual rides, made his ordinary visits, was present at a council and a “Drawing-room,” looked in at one or two exhibitions, entertained forty people at dinner, gave a ball after it, and escorted the last of the fair dancers to her carriage, gallantly saluting her as she stepped therein at sunrise! This was a well-spent day for a veteran; and it was just such a day as Dörfling loved to pass, full of mingled pastime and business. For it was his maxim, as it was the Duke’s, that a man must be _doing_ something, unless he wished to become the devil’s man. And so, at various courts, the gallant old Dörfling was an example of activity courteously performed, to all who cared to profit by it. As ambassador, he was highly welcome whithersoever his credentials took him; and it was said of him that his suavity was such, that an unwelcome missive delivered by him fell less harshly on the ears, than a compliment from the lips of messengers not so exquisitely trained in the school of _bienséance_. Not that Dörfling lacked language to apply properly to acts which displeased him. Had the Czar stolen his “carpet-bag,” as that stupendous felon did Sir G. H. Seymour’s, the German soldier would have called him an arrant knave, and not a “gracious sovereign,” as the British diplomatist did, in his excessive good-nature.

Dörfling lived to enter his ninetieth year! When he passed from the shop-board to the barracks, people accounted of him as a man who, in abandoning a peaceful calling for a perilous vocation, had committed a sort of early suicide. There were plenty of old tailors, it was said, but very few aged soldiers,—at least, sound ones. It may be doubted however, humanly speaking, whether he would have lived half so long as a quiet, meditative tailor, as he did by exposing himself to be shot at, moderately computated, once an hour during nearly three-quarters of a century of his subsequent life.

During that term he never met reproach but once. It was at the hands of the officer who had induced him to enter the army, and who could never forgive the recruit for rising to a very superior greatness to that achieved by the recruiter. They were both old men, when the officer in question sneeringly alluded to Dörfling’s origin. “True!” roared the hearty veteran, not a bit ashamed of the fact (the less perhaps that it was known to everybody),—“True! I have been a tailor, and have cut cloth; but harkye, the sword at my side is the instrument with which I shall cut the ears of those who are audacious enough to make of that fact a ground for mockery or reproach!”

Well said, brave tailor! nobody raised a sneer at thy expense after that, I warrant! No wonder that at thy grave tailors, soldiers, and honest men yet repair, as to the shrine of a saint whose memory is worthy of respect.

But if Germany has one, we have a hundred of such heroes. When the Spanish Armada was threatening our shores, the tailors were among the first to enrol themselves among the patriotic defenders of the country. They are said to have been mounted on mules, and, when intelligence was once brought to Queen Elizabeth,—intelligence as false as though it had come by Electric Telegraph,—that a brigade of tailors and their mules had been destroyed, “Let us be consoled,” said the royal lady, “we have lost neither man nor horse.”

I may also again notice the fact, that, at the siege of Gibraltar, the brigade which did Elliott best service against the enemy consisted almost exclusively of tailors from London. Really the profession is overdone with heroes! It has its one in the navy, and of him I will now speak, though more briefly than of his predecessors.

ADMIRAL HOBSON, THE NAVAL TAILOR.

“Commend us to the Admiral, and say,
The King will visit him, and bring health.”

SHIRLEY: _Chabot_.

In the reign of Queen Anne, in the pleasant village of Bonchurch, in the Isle of Wight, there lived an honest villager, whose son he had apprenticed to a tailor in the not less pleasant insular locality of Niton.

Young Hobson was here engaged at his humble craft, when he heard that a British fleet was passing the back of the Wight; and he went with his fellow-workmen to view that goodly sight. It was a spectacle which fired his youthful breast with naval ardour; and, abandoning his articles of indenture to serve the Queen under the articles of war, he proclaimed himself a volunteer, jumped into a boat, and was taken on board one of the ships of the fleet, where likely lads, such as he was, met with warm welcome and hard usage.

The youthful volunteer rejoiced at the first, and defied the second. He was just of the stuff of which sailors should be made; and when, the day after he joined, they fell in with a French squadron, the Niton tailor exhibited such undaunted valour, such self-possession, and such joyousness of spirit, that his promotion was at once commenced, nor did it stop until he had attained the rank of admiral.

He was an upright and gallant English sailor. Less actively employed than the other brave ocean chiefs of this stirring period, his name is less familiar to us; but he was never wanting when called upon, and was always rejoiced to find his services were required. The Company of Cordwainers however, it must be confessed, have more fair reason to be proud of their admiral than the tailors of estimable Hobson. The latter had not the chance, like Sir Cloudesley Shovel, the son of a shoemaker, to whom the future admiral was bound apprentice, to take Gibraltar in bold companionship with such a comrade as Rooke; and accordingly his effigy is not to be found in Westminster Abbey like that of Shovel. Not that the shoemaking admiral has much to boast of. Addison truly remarks of the figure of the latter, that “instead of the brave rough English Admiral, which was the distinguishing character of that plain, gallant man, he is represented on his tomb by the figure of a beau, dressed in a long periwig, and reposing himself on velvet cushions under a canopy of state. The inscription is answerable to the monument; for, instead of celebrating the many remarkable actions he had performed in the service of his country, it acquaints us only with the manner of his death, in which it was impossible for him to reap any honour.” Horace Walpole, in alluding to the tailoring and upholstering spirit of the statuary, remarks that “Bird bestowed busts and bas-reliefs on those he decorated; but Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s, and other monuments by him, made men of taste dread such honours.”

I have dealt with the naval tailor here, in order that he might not be separated from his gallant brethren ashore. We will now pass to the civilians; and first, of a brace of worthies who wore their honours meekly, but whose labours deserve no less eulogy than posterity has awarded to them: I allude to the tailors and antiquarians, Stow and Speed.

JOHN STOW, THE ANTIQUARIAN TAILOR.

“Such a man
Might be a copy to these younger times.”

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

It has been well said of John Stow, that he was, in his way, a sort of Hebrew of the Hebrews; a citizen born of a citizen; like his father, a tailor; but he was in himself a tailor, “and something more.”

He was born in Cornhill, the year that the gossips there were admiringly eloquent on the glories of the royal tournament and ball at Greenwich, where Henry VIII. helped to break three hundred lances before supper; and then, attired as a Venetian nobleman, led out Anne Boleyn to dance, and set all present calculating on the coming events shadowed forth beneath the lights, by such a pair of dancers. The year was that not uneventful one of 1527.

It was a jovial place, that Cornhill, at the time I speak of; less so, perhaps, than some dozen years before, when Chantry priests lounged at the open stalls and talked as familiarly with the tailors’ wives, as French abbés of later days with jocund lady duchesses. The Chantry priests were the Giovannis of the district,—the abhorrence of grave husbands, and the especial favourites of their wives. In 1527 something of this had ceased, but Cornhill was still the emporium of jokes as well as jackets; and many were the witticisms which the apprentices, from their unfronted shops, exchanged with the passers-by, and more particularly with the damsels.

The household of our ancient friend John must necessarily have been a jovial one; for when the female head thereof was at the point of death, leaving four sons, three daughters, and an ex-husband to follow her to St. Michael’s, Cornhill, she made a bequest which tends to show the predilections of her family,—perhaps the fashion of the time. She left them ten shillings to be spent in drink, on the day of her funeral; while she bequeathed but half that sum to be laid out in the purchase of bread for the poor.

These were only incidental bequests. John Stow, the father, was, like John Gilpin, a citizen of credit and renown; and if he had a place of business in Cornhill, he did not sleep there, as vulgar tailors might. Not he! he had his country house, Sir, and that where you now might look for one in vain—“at the backside of Throgmorton-street.” It was then a rural district, and the old tailor tabernacled with gentility. His immediate neighbour was no less a man than the minister Cromwell. John had a garden forty-four feet long, for which he paid “six and eightpence” annual rent; but Cromwell forcibly took possession of a portion of it, and refused to pay for what he had stolen. Honest John submitted, for the reason that he knew he could get no redress; and perhaps he was residing in dudgeon in Cornhill when his eminent son was compensatingly sent to shed a halo round his name.

There is an establishment in the City, drafts on which are not so much coveted as on Jones, Lloyd, and Co. I allude to the venerable Aldgate Pump. Adjacent to the well, to which the “one-arm’d City cow” is now the crown, Stowe, the son, was driving his double trade of hopeful student and rather indifferent tailor, in 1549. A stirring little incident took place in front of his house, which caused him to deeply reflect as to the way in which men wrote history.

There had been an insurrection in Norfolk and Suffolk. It was the chronic malady of our constitution at that time to be always suffering from “breakings-out.” As many lying reports thereof reached the City, as if London enjoyed, as we do now, electric telegraphs, “own correspondents,” and unpurchasable newspapers rather interested in the stocks. Indeed, truth was as perilous as gunpowder. Thus, the Bailiff of Rumford had kissed his wife in the morning ere he came to London market. He was standing at his stall in the latter place, running his fingers through samples of corn, when “Sir Stephen,” a priest, asked, “What news?” “Well,” said the Bailiff, “men are rising, even in Essex. Thank God, all is quiet however, my way.”

Now Sir Stephen was a casuist; and he had a case and an accident, by which he argufied a conclusion in no time that the Bailiff was a traitor. “Men are rising even in Essex, thank God!—be that thy speech, then, naughty traitor? Have him away to the Sheriff!” The market having been dull, the standers-by were delighted to find something wherewith to enliven it. They would not listen to the offered explanations of the bewildered Bailiff; he _must_ be a rebel; and they hoped for a fine day for the hanging. The poor fellow was examined, tried, pronounced guilty upon the deposition of the priest, and sentenced to be hanged, opposite Stow’s house. The convict entered a meek protest against being put in so painful a state of suspense, which they promised to attend to after the ceremony.

Well, the man was put to death, and it was a most fortunate thing that Stow, the tailor, was there to see it. He beheld the composure of the victim, believed his denial of guilt; and when he heard him proclaimed as a traitor, he was struck with the fact, that, if such proclamations were the documentary ground-work of history, the latter was very pretty reading indeed for those who loved fiction. He forthwith removed to Lime-street Ward, where he undertook to repair records as well as what he had hitherto put his hand to. For nearly half a century he passed his days, and good portion of his nights, in the search after that most ticklish of virgins to catch—historical truth. The natural consequences ensued. He did not make money as an author, and he starved as a tailor. Tailor and author! double the ordinary woe of men! The little he made at his trade he devoted to the purchase of books useful to him in his profession.

Now honest John was of a Romish family, albeit the _gaillardise_ of the Chantry priests had helped to make a convert of him. But he had a respect for the antiquity of things, if not of facts, connected with the old faith; and when mention was made of a tailor who worked little, but who studied much, who professed a reverence for truth, and yet who spoke almost lovingly of antiquated ceremonies, he was at once suspected of being suspicious. The suspicion was heightened by the false accusations of a younger brother; and down came Ecclesiastical Commissioners upon his little library, to see if out of it they could not prove him a Papist and rebel, worthy the scourge and the stake. They made sad havoc among his dearly-beloved books; and were more than once on the point of committing him to prison, when a volume with an incomprehensible title came under their thumb. But John answered so wisely and so well, that they could find no guile in him; and they left him in some little peace, and up to his ears in papers.

He was thus visited more than once, and always at the instigation of his vagabond brother. It was after one of these harassing, and to him perilous perquisitions, that he happened to be reading an account of some sorry knave who was hanged at the Elms in Smithfield; the comment which he himself hung upon the text was significant, and to this effect:—“God amend, or send like end to, all such false brothers!” But he was rewarded for many of his vexations by the honour which he reaped out of the harvest of criticism which sprang out of the publication of his first great work, the ‘Chronicles’ of England from the coming of that uncertain gentleman Brute, to the accession of his certain descendant, bluff Harry the Eighth. John did not hurry over this work; he took his time; thought over it when making liveries for the corporation, walked miles for it, read libraries for it, and spent all the cash thereon which he possessed, could beg, or could borrow. O ye gentlemen literateurs, who turn out successive volumes of history faster than John Stow could make jerkins, think of a plodding forty years spent in perfecting this one work!

The author was poorer when he completed his novel, painfully elaborate, yet clear and useful book, than he was when he commenced it. He was not a better tailor than before; and altogether his prospects were not brilliant. But he wore a stout heart, lived upon hope, and fondly thought, good old man! (I trust that no “d—d good-natured friend” disturbed that thought), that every phrase he wrote was rich in truth. Now some of it is as true as Robinson Crusoe, and yet quite as veracious as much with which we trouble ourselves under the venerated name of “history.”

Towards the end of the sixteenth century the now feeble old tailor, but cheerful scholar, produced his ‘Annals of England,’ the dedication of which had been accepted by Archbishop Whitgift. He had asked the City, proud to call him her “Chronicler,” to help him in his heavy charges, by bestowing on him two freedoms. I do not remember that the application was successful, but I do retain in my memory how truth-loving John was treated by the Vintners’ Company. The modest author, to support his petition for some slight favour prayed of them, read to those jolly fellows in court assembled some sheets of his great work. They were bored to death, and treated him like a beggar. They would neither help him, nor let him help himself by examining the records in their possession.

He kept a cheerful heart through it all. He winced indeed under the ignorant additions made to his works by other editors, but he not the less cordially aided them in perfecting their own contributions to antiquarian history; and when he met with crosses in either his literary or his sartorial aspect, the old man calmed his irritation by reading and by annotating ‘Chaucer.’ But he was growing old and helpless. Although he was called the City’s fee’d Chronicler, it is not certain whether this was or was not a mere “façon de parler.” Of one thing there is no doubt whatever. That ill-dressed king, James I., contemplating Stow rather as a tailor than an author, granted him a license whereby he was empowered to go about and collect charity,—gather benevolences, a chartered Bedesman. But as he happened to be so afflicted with gout in the feet that he could not perambulate with his petition, the license was next to useless. Stow looked at his willing but helpless legs, and said with a melancholy smile that he was maimed in the members wherewith he had most offended; for that no man had walked as many miles as he had in search of material for his books. Nevertheless, strengthened by the royal license, he set up for a weary day or two as a beggar; and all that he gained was seven and sixpence from St. Mary’s Wolnoth. Magnificent alms for a veteran antiquary!

And yet the fourscore years which had just passed from the day of his birth, when he was finally deposited in the consecrated ground of St. Andrew Undershaft, were not unhappy years. Under trial, next to trust in God, I do not know of any better anodyne, more potent balm, than literary occupation; and of that, Stow, that tall, thin, cheerful, pleasant, bright-eyed, strong-memoried, sober, mild, courteous, truth-loving tailor and antiquary, had his fill.

He loved truth above everything, and quite as intense was his hatred of quacks, pretenders, and those stupendous “shams” which have so often made eloquent and bilious the energetic Carlyle. He loved one thing with as strong a love as he felt for truth,—antiquarian pursuits. If ever old times should come round again, the Society of Antiquaries should feel themselves in duty bound to adopt him, properly authorized, as a patron saint; and appeal to him at much-perplexed meetings with a “Sancte Johanne de Stow, ora pro nobis!” to which he will doubtless answer “Sto, adjutorius!”

What a sifter he was of old legends! And what truths he, after all, did save from much rubbish! How well he proved that the sword in the City arms was not there because of the Lord Mayor’s having struck down Jack Straw or Wat Tyler, but that it stood there as the Sword of St. Paul, in honour of the apostle. He swept away the fables of old London with herculean power, clearing them away as Niebuhr has those of ancient Rome, yet leaving nothing half so pretty in their place. He was the first who insisted that Richard the Third was by no means such a deformed fiend as he was painted by those who had written under his enemy Henry VII. and his successors.

James IV. of Scotland owes it to Stow that his head found a burial-place, after a world of adventure quite enough to turn it. James the Fourth, as my readers doubtless remember, was slain in the fatal fight at Flodden Field. At the end of the day of bloody arbitrement there brought to a close, the body of the unlucky monarch was found among a heap of the fallen. The discoverers made prize of the corpse, wrapped it up in lead, and transmitted it as a thanksgiving offering to the monastery at Sheen, in Surrey. It was well taken care of by the honest people there as long as the monastery stood; but when the dissolution of these religious establishments took place, and the edifice was converted into a mansion for the Duke of Suffolk and his warm-hearted spouse, Mary, the sister of Henry VIII. and the widow of Louis XII. of France, the new occupants put their royal cousin’s body into a fresh wrapping of lead, and unceremoniously rolled it into an upper lumber-room. There it served for sundry vile purposes, until some rude workmen engaged in the house lopped off its head out of sheer wantonness. Their master, a glazier of Wood-street, Cheapside, anxious for as much of a king’s company as a glazier could possibly get, carried the head with him into the City. There, on the man of putty’s sideboard, the dried remnant of a crowned king, with its red hair and beard, and a “sweet savour” thence springing, was long the admiration of the glazier’s evening parties, and a never-ending subject of conversation for his guests. There Stow saw this skull of the anointed James, but at a time when the savour had ceased to be sweet, and when it had become a too familiar bore at the _soirées_ of its proprietor.

The soul of the honest and refined tailor, the sentiment of the zealous antiquary, was shocked at the spectacle of gallants, emancipated apprentices, and giggling City girls, knocking about the mazzard of the gallant king, as they sipped their muscadel or tasted their cakes and ale. John Stow expostulated, and the glazier consented to ransom the royal sconce. The tailor quietly and decently interred it within the old Church of St. Michael’s, Wood-street, the site of which is now occupied by Wren’s edifice; and the dust of the once-crowned brow of James of Scotland forms a portion of a path daily trodden by the unconscious lieges of Wood-street.

I have already noticed what incident induced our literary tailor to meditate upon the delusions of history. Another incident taught him that appeals to the passions are destructive in their results, and confirmed him in his opinion that gentleness has more real power for good than violence.

Nearly opposite the East India House stands the Church of St. Andrew Undershaft, “because that of old time, every year,” says Stow in that admirable ‘Survey of London’ with which his name is associated, “on May-day in the morning, it was used that an high or long shaft or May-pole was set up there before the south door of the said church.” The church was not so high as the pole or shaft, and it received, in consequence, its name of “Undershaft,” to distinguish it from other edifices dedicated to St. Andrew. Chaucer, describing a lofty braggart, says he “bears his head as high as the great shaft of Cornhill.” The pride of the shaft fell, and the shaft too, on the evil May-day of the year 1517.

Edward III. had confirmed the enactment of Edward I., permissory to the unrestrained settlement of foreigners in this country. The first monarch especially encouraged the Flemish cloth-workers, whose looms were shortly equal to the manufacture of the whole wool England could produce. Thereupon the exportation of English wool, and the importation of foreign woollen cloths, were alike prohibited; and Cornhill and tailors had a paradisiacal time of it. But in course of years, foreigners poured in to traffic in this country, and as they took no English wares away with them, but heaps of English gold and silver, a very general discontent was engendered, gradually grew, and had reached its height in 1517. In the Lent of that year, John Lincoln, a citizen and demagogue, called upon Dr. Bell, who was engaged to preach the Spital sermon at Easter, and so worked upon him, that Bell denounced the foreigners from the pulpit, with a fanatic fervour that might be envied by Dr. Cahill, when descanting on the never-to-be-forgotten “glorious idea” of massacring English Protestants. “The heavens,” thus rang the Bell, “belong to the Lord of Heaven, but the earth he hath given to the children of men. England is the spot which he has given to Englishmen; and as birds defend their nests, so ought Englishmen to defend their soil from the intrusion of aliens. Yea, even as the swallow repelleth the usurper from her ancient abode, should they drive out those who would divide with them the inheritance of their fathers.” On this hint, the valiant tailors’ apprentices, and others of like kidney, began to insult all foreigners whom they encountered in the streets; and on the eve of May-day, an encounter, foolishly brought about by the authorities and some lads playing at bucklers in Cheapside, and who objected to disperse at rude bidding, swelled to a tumult, in which the foreigners’ dwellings were plundered and burned; but no personal hurt inflicted. Down descended the troops upon the rioters; some hundreds were captured; Lincoln, the leader, was hanged; and the King was reconciled to the City at a banquet of grace, given in Guildhall. Two-and-thirty years elapsed before the May-poles were again erected, as signals for those light of foot and of heart to come and dance and be merry.

When the old pole was once more erected, decked with ribbons and spring flowers, in front of St. Andrew’s, the holy wrath of a curate, “Sir Stephen” of old, was fired against it. He flew into the stone pulpit at Paul’s Cross, and he denounced the parishioners of St. Andrew’s as accursed idolaters, inasmuch as they had set up an idol, and by naming their church “under the shaft,” they had done honour to the pole as well as to the apostle. Stow, who appears to have been ubiquitous, was among the listeners, but not among that portion of them who were subsequently actors, and who rushed from beneath the pulpit, swept along St. Mary Axe, and seizing the idolatrous shaft, righteously hewed the same into fragments, and then religiously burnt the whole at the very church door. Ah, thought honest John with a sigh, if they thus destroy what was old yet lovely, I will take more pains than ever to preserve the memory of what perishes;—and he faithfully did so.

It was the over-zeal of members of adverse parties that made of this learned tailor a Christian, rather than a Romanist or a Reformer; and he was too gentle of heart to feel unlimited wrath against any but the defacers of monuments: his own was as little free from assault however as his own stall had been, when he was alive. The idle deboshed fellows about Cornhill used foully to assail him and his apprentices, for no better reason than that he would not share in their naughtiness. He received the battery of their heavy tongues without reply, and even bade his loving helpmate to be quiet when the queans on the _pavé_ mocked her as the spouse of a poor scholar. For be it said, Cornhill was frequented by the lowest as well as the highest in the land, and its prison “Tun” for night-brawlers, and its pillory for other offenders, bespoke a neighbouring lawless population; and this is further proved by Lydgate, who says, in his ‘London Lick-Penny:’—

“Then into Corn Hil anon I rode,
Where was much stolen gear among;
I saw where hung mine own fair hood,
That I had lost among the throng.
To buy my own hood, I thought it wrong;
I knew it well, as I did my creed,
But for lack of money I could not speed.”

Stow’s monument was ostensibly raised to his memory by his widow, but there is no doubt that it was by subscription. It is of terra cotta; and the figure, once painted to represent life, is seen as the original used to be seen, seated at a table, engaged with pen and book. Maitland states that the remains were disturbed, and even removed, but he does not say whither nor wherefore, in the year 1732. Like the mortal remains of Fernand Cortes, no man can speak decisively of their resting-place.

Leaving those who love such research to make due inquiry after them, we will now hold brief converse touching another celebrated “John of the Needle,” the Chronicler Speed.

JOHN SPEED, THE ANTIQUARIAN TAILOR.

“Summus et eruditus Antiquarius.”—SHERINGHAM.

So said a learned antiquary of a humble, but also learned, and a pains-taking brother. Far more reluctant was Nicolson to give praise where praise was due. The latter person does indeed say of the laborious John, that he had a head the best disposed towards history of any of our writers. “Speed,” says Nicolson, “would certainly have outdone himself, as far as he has gone, beyond the rest of his profession, if the advantages of his education had been answerable to those of his natural genius. But what,” he adds most impertinently, “what could be expected from a tailor? However,” reluctantly continues this costive eulogist, “we may boldly say that his chronicle is the largest and best we have hitherto extant;”—nay, he even adds that Sheringham was right in speaking of honest John Speed as “summus et eruditus antiquarius.”

So, go on, little Farington, in pleasant Cheshire, to be proud of your son. Just three centuries have dissolved in the abyss of Time, since his father, on his shop-board, heard the boy’s first cry from an inner room; and if any one could have _then_ asked, “What could be expected from a tailor?” he might have pointed to the little stranger, and exclaimed, _Ecce filius!_

Stow was an indifferent tailor, yet excellent author. Speed was both; and he was more fortunate than his brother antiquary and tailor. After he had _served_ in Cheshire, he settled in London as master, and he had Sir Fulke Greville for a customer. The men, wide as they were apart socially, were brothers intellectually; and both loved and comprehended literature. Sir Fulke paid his tailor after a better fashion than that of most fine gentlemen of his day. He took the artisan from his board, and set him a student at his books. The result was profitable not only to those then present living, but also to posterity. Speed nobly inaugurated the opening years of the seventeenth century by producing his ‘Theatre of Great Britain,’ wherein the three kingdoms of our own empire are presented in their exact geography, and there is an elaborate detail not only of counties, but of county towns. The maps were designed by the author, who applied to his use, in the text, much scattered matter from other sources.

Some few years after, he published his ‘History of Great Britain under the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans; their originals, manners, wars, coins, and seals, with the successions, lives, acts, and issues of the English Monarchs, from Julius Cæsar to our most gracious Sovereign King James.’ In this work, he judiciously borrowed from Camden, and was supplied with materials by Sir Henry Spelman, Sir Robert Cotton, and other eminent antiquarians. The book very much raised a reputation that was already of no mean height.

Nor did he confine himself to antiquities. Two years had scarcely elapsed since the appearance of his last work, when he produced his octavo volume on a religious subject:—‘The Cloud of Witnesses, or the Genealogies of Scripture, confirming the truth of holy history and humanity of Christ.’ For many a long year was this essay prefixed to the English translation of the Bible and King James vested the copyright of it in the author and his heirs _for ever_;—we emphatically say “for ever,” as a hint to the pirate publishers.

“What could be expected from a tailor, Master Nicolson?” Well, were you yourself a better man? Did you live half a century and seven years in harmony with your wife? and did eighteen children—twelve sons and six daughters—call you father? What could be expected from a tailor? Why, thou sorry slanderer, John Speed excelled thee in all things. A dozen and a half of his children stood at his grave-side, in St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, in 1629; and above that grave his name lives, whereas thine is forgotten.

“What could be expected of a tailor?” Whatever might be expected, he performed much. The most famous of his many sons was that Dr. John Speed, who was patronized by Laud; and from him, through Colonel Speed, descended that Countess de Viri, wife of a Sardinian ambassador in London, whom Lord Cobham adopted as his child, after the death of her own father the Colonel. To her visit to Gray we owe that charming ‘Long Story’ narrated by Gray, and which consequently would never have been written but for John Speed, the tailor and antiquary, of Farington. The ladies are described as

“A brace of warriors not in buff,
But rustling in their silks and tissues.”

Of Speed’s fair descendant the poet sings:—

“The other Amazon, kind Heaven
Had arm’d with spirit, wit, and satire;
But Cobham had the polish given,
And tipp’d her arrows with good-nature.”

Being on the subject of dress, I may add, that Speed’s great-granddaughter was attired “in bonnet blue and capuchine;” and I may further and finally remark, that to have written history and divinity with a learned pen, and to have been remotely the cause of the authorship of Gray’s ‘Long Story,’ may fairly save Speed, and indeed the fellow-craftsmen who should hold him in honour, from such a _nez-retroussé_ sort of sarcasm as “What could be expected from a tailor?”

Speed the tailor is remembered when Bishop Nicolson is forgotten. We will pass from him to consider a tailor’s son of another kidney,—garrulous, vain, rakish, clever, and ever-welcome Samuel Pepys.

SAMUEL PEPYS, THE OFFICIAL TAILOR.

“All gentlemen
That love society, love me; all purses
That wit and pleasure opens, are my tenants.”

FLETCHER: _Wit without Money_.

Samuel Pepys was the son of a tailor of the city of London; and although he affected much gentility when he himself prospered, he was honest enough to confess, in cipher and short-hand which he thought nobody could read, that let others say of his family what they might, he for his own part did not believe that it was of anything like gentle descent. Notwithstanding this confession, our friend Samuel had something within him of the aristocratic cobbler who, in the ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ makes inebriate boast that “the Slys came in with Richard Conqueror!”

As Pepys was born in 1632, and his sartorial sire did not retire from his useful occupation until 1660, Samuel, the elder surviving son of a family which reckoned of offspring a dozen save one, must have had considerable homely experience of a humble life. The elder Pepys, having inherited a small landed property at Brampton, near Huntingdon, of some forty pounds a year, enjoyed his condition of modified squireship for the liberal term of twenty years. It was but a poor condition after all, and the retired tailor was often compelled to have recourse to his son, who sometimes gave him money, now and then bestowed upon him an innutritive compassion, and on one occasion magnifically endowed him with a pair of old shoes!

Old Pepys was still a tailor in the City when Samuel was a sizar at Cambridge, at which seat of learning he obtained the distinction of being reprimanded for being “scandalously overserved with drink yᵉ night before.” It is further remarkable that while his sire was still behind his counter or upon it, the ambitious son, at the age of twenty-three, married a portionless girl of fifteen, with no other possession than the pride of being descended, on the mother’s side, from the Cliffords of Cumberland, and consequently from Henry VII., whose daughter Mary, after being Queen of France, espoused the Duke of Brandon, and from the latter union had issue those two daughters, one of whom became mother of Lady Jane Grey, and the other became wife and mother in the honoured household of the great Cumberland Cliffords. When Aladdin, the tailor’s son of Bagdad, married that sweet princess with the never-to-be-remembered name, two wider extremes scarcely met than when Samuel joined hands with Elizabeth de St. Michael, who brought the blood of Tudor to mingle with that of Pepys.

After all, Pepys the tailor was allied to good blood before, in spite of the self-denying modesty of the son. Sir Edward Montague, afterwards Lord Sandwich, was the cousin of Samuel, and a kinsman worth having; for he lifted young Pepys from his father’s shop-board to the Board of Admiralty. In our own days it would be difficult to find an Earl at the West End who had for his cousin a tailor, or tailor’s son, in the East; and if such relationship did now exist, the occidental noble would show scant alacrity in benefiting his oriental and hard-working kinsman,—unless indeed the latter were an illegitimate son: then the illicit relative would be sure of a post in a public office. It is wonderful how legitimately in some of those offices the interests of England are now served by illegitimate gentlemen,—gentlemen who owe nothing to their scampish sires but the disgrace of their birth, and the good luck of a very desirable appointment.

The career of the old tailor’s son was a remarkable one. He left a yet quiet home, and a not yet jealous wife, to attend Sir Edward Montague upon his expedition to the Sound, in March, 1658.

On his return from this expedition he became a clerk in the Army Pay Office, and commenced keeping his incomparable Diary,—the record of his profitable toil, his immoderate vanity, and his little rogueries. As secretary to the two “generals” of the fleet, he was on board the flag-ship which brought back Charles II., and which bestowed on England a gift for which the Church is annually thankful. In 1660 he was promoted to the office of Clerk of the Acts of the Navy; and if to the scenes of his labour, like Charles Lamb at the South Sea Office, he repaired very late in the morning, but compensated for _that_ by retiring very early in the afternoon, it must be also confessed that he accomplished much useful work in a short time, and achieved objects for which his superiors got all the honour.

In the time of a disastrous war, this tailor’s son continued to exercise hope and energy when all around him was despair. Samuel Pepys then stood amid desponding officials, like the great Guise amid the sullen French officers in Italy ere victory had consented to sit upon their helms. In the time of the Plague too, the little man (he was as tall as Epaminondas) ungrudgingly took his turn of the pestilence as others had done of the sword; and when nine-tenths of the healthy but craven people had fled from town, he remained at his office and daily stood face to face with grimmest death.

He held temporarily the appointment of Treasurer to the Commissioners for the Affairs of Tangier, and also that of Surveyor-General of the Victualling Department. He had been passively engaged during the Great Plague; he was actively and usefully so during the Great Fire; and when the Officers of the Navy Board were summoned to answer before Parliament for the enterprise of De Ruyter against Chatham in 1668, his bold eloquence procured an acquittal for himself and colleagues. He occupied a seat in Parliament, where he, at different times, represented Castle Rising and Harwich; and when excess of toil induced him to undertake a tour through Holland and France, he devoted much of his time to making collections respecting the affairs of the navies of those countries. Pepys was a widower, when his powerful enemies, envying the greatness achieved by a tailor’s son, twice endeavoured unsuccessfully to bring him into grievous trouble on the alleged ground of his being a Papist. The accusation did him no disservice in the eyes of Charles, who appointed him Secretary for the Affairs of the Navy; which appointment he retained from 1673 until the constitution of the Admiralty was changed in 1680. Three years after, he accompanied Lord Dartmouth on the expedition for demolishing Tangier; and shortly after his return was appointed Secretary of the Admiralty, with a salary of £500 per annum,—an appointment which he retained till the period of the accession of William and Mary, when he suffered temporary imprisonment in the Tower, and subsequent brief captivity in the Gatehouse, on the charge of being attached to the royal family of the Stuarts, and especially to the ex-King James II., at whose coronation he had served as one of the Barons of the Cinque Ports. In his dignified retirement at Clapham he led a life of some luxury and considerable usefulness. Christ’s Hospital reckons him among its benefactors, and the Royal Society among its honoured Presidents. He died in 1703, leaving behind him more books than money-bags; but yet, as he bade his heirs remember, “more than what either myself or they were born to.” He best deserves to live in our grateful memories as the renovator of the navy of England. James II. long got for this the credit that was due to the gay yet efficient secretary; but we now know that to a tailor’s son is due the merit of once more raising the naval bulwarks of Britain to be a defence for those at home, and a terror to her assailants. When the Company of Clothworkers drink “the memory of Samuel Pepys” out of the splendid cup which he conferred on that Company in honour of his father’s calling, let them never forget why that memory especially deserves to be honoured. When the elder Pepys refused to bind his son to his own vocation, he was unconsciously helping his country to achieve future naval victories. Of such a man then the profession may be proud; and we will now proceed to collect from the son’s diary some evidences as to how tailors lived, moved, and had their being some two centuries agone.