Chapter XII: Drury Lane (3)

Now, “regular action” was one of Henley’s peculiar prides. The rejection hurt his vanity and nearly drove him crazy. Losing his temper, he rushed into the vestry-room. “Blockheads!” he roared, “are _you_ qualified to judge of the degree of action necessary for a preacher of God’s Word? Were you able to read, or had got sufficient sense, you sorry knaves, to understand the renowned orator of antiquity, he would tell you almost the only requisite of a public speaker was ACTION, ACTION, ACTION. But I despise and defy you: _provoco ad populum_; the public shall decide between us.” He then hurried from the room, soon afterwards published his probationary discourse, and taking a room in Newport Market, started as quack divine and public lecturer.

But he first consulted the eccentric and heretical Whiston, whom Swift bantered so ruthlessly--Whiston being, like Henley, a Leicestershire man--as to whether he should incur any legal penalties by officiating as a separatist from the Church of England. Whiston, himself an expelled professor, tried to dissuade the Orator from his wild project. Disagreement and abuse followed, and the correspondence ended with the following final bomb-shell from the violent demagogue:--

“To Mr. WILLIAM WHISTON,

“Take notice that I give you warning not to enter my room in Newport
Market, at your peril.

“JOHN HENLEY.”[602]

The Orator patronised divinity on Sundays, and secular subjects on Wednesdays and Fridays. The admittance was one shilling. He also published outrageous pamphlets and a weekly farrago called The _Hyp-Doctor_, intended to antidote _The Craftsman_, and for which pompous nonsense Sir Robert Walpole is said to have given him £100 a year. He also attacked eminent persons, even Pope, from his pulpit. Every Saturday an advertisement of the subject of his next week’s oration appeared in the _Daily Advertiser_, preceded by a sarcastic or libellous motto, and sometimes an offer that if any one at home or abroad could be found to surpass him, he would surrender his Oratory at once to his conqueror.

In 1729 Henley, growing perhaps more popular, removed to Clare Market, where the butchers became his warm partisans and served as his body-guard. The following are two of his shameless advertisements:--

“At the Oratory in Newport Market, to-morrow, at half an hour after ten, the sermon will be on the Witch of Endor. At half an hour after five, the theological lecture will be on the conversion and original of the Scottish nation and of the Picts and Caledonians, St. Andrew’s relics and panegyric, and the character and mission of the Apostles.

“On Wednesday, at six or near the matter, take your chance, will be a medley oration on the history, merits, and praise of confusion and of confounders, in the road and out of the way.

“On Friday will be that on Dr. Faustus and Fortunatus and conjuration. After each the Chimes of the Times, Nos. 23 and 24.”

Very shortly afterwards he advertised from Clare Market:--

1. “The postil will be on the turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. 2. The sermon will be on the necessary power and attractive force which religion gives the spirit of a man with God and good spirits.

2. “At five--1. The postil will be on this point:--In what language our Saviour will speak the last sentence to mankind.

3. “The lecture will be on Jesus Christ’s sitting at the right hand of God; where that is; the honours and lustre of his inauguration; the learning, criticism, and piety of that glorious article.

“The Monday’s orations will shortly be resumed. On Wednesday the oration will be on the skits of the fashions, or a live gallery of family pictures in all ages; ruffs, muffs, puffs manifold; shoes, wedding-shoes, two-shoes, slip-shoes, heels, clocks, pantofles, buskins, pantaloons, garters, shoulder-knots, periwigs, head-dresses, modesties, tuckers, farthingales, corkins, minnikins, slammakins, ruffles, round-robins, fans, patches; dame, forsooth, madam, my lady, the wit and beauty of my granmum; Winnifred, Joan, Bridget, compared with our Winny, Jenny, and Biddy: fine ladies and pretty gentlewomen; being a general view of the _beau monde_ from before Noah’s flood to the year ’29. On Friday will be something better than last Tuesday. After each a bob at the times.”

This very year, 1729, the _Dunciad_ was published, and in it this Rabelais of the pulpit had, of course, his niche. Pope had been accused of taking the bread out of people’s mouths. He denies this, and asks if “Colley (Cibber) has not still his lord, and Henley his butchers;” and ends with these lines, which, however, had no effect, for Henley went on ranting for eighteen years longer--

“But where each science lifts its modern type,
History her pot, Divinity his pipe;
While proud Philosophy repines to show,
Dishonest sight! his breeches rent below,--
Imbrown’d with native bronze, lo! Henley stands,
Tuning his voice and balancing his hands.
How fluent nonsense trickles from his tongue!
How sweet the periods, neither said nor sung!
Still break the benches, Henley, with thy strain,
While Sherlock, Hare, and Gibson preach in vain.
O great restorer of the good old stage,
Preacher at once and zany of the age!
O worthy thou of Egypt’s wise abodes!
A decent priest when monkeys were the gods.
But Fate with butchers placed thy priestly stall,
Meek modern faith to murder, hack, and maul,
And bade thee live to crown Britannia’s praise
In Toland’s, Tindal’s, and in Woolston’s days.”[603]

In another place he says--

“Henley lay inspired beside a sink,
And to mere mortals seemed a priest in drink.”

Pope often attacked Henley in the _Grub Street Journal_, and the Orator retaliated. A year or two after the _Essay on Man_ was published, Henley (Dec. 1737) announced a lecture, “Whether Mr. Pope be a man of sense, in one argument--‘Whatever is is right.’” If whatever is is right, Henley thought that nothing could be wrong; ergo, he himself was not a proper object of satire.

Henley’s pulpit was covered with velvet and gold lace, and over his altar was written, “The PRIMITIVE Eucharist.” A contemporary journalist describes him entering his pulpit suddenly, like a harlequin, through a sort of trap-door at the back, and “at one large leap jumping into it and falling to work,” beating his notions into the butcher-audience simultaneously with his hands, arms, legs, and head.

In one of his arrogant puffs, he boasts that he has singly executed what “would sprain a dozen of modern doctors of the tribe of Issachar;” that no one dares to answer his challenges; that he can write, read, and study twelve hours a day and not feel the yoke; and write three dissertations a week without help, and put the Church in danger. He struck medals for his tickets, with a star rising to the meridian upon them, and the vain superscription “Ad summa” (“To the heights”), and below, “Inveniam viam aut faciam” (“I will find a way or make one”).

When the Orator’s funds grew low, his audacity and impudence rose to their climax. He once filled his chapel with shoemakers, whom he had attracted by advertising that he could teach a method of making shoes with wonderful celerity. His secret consisted in cutting the tops off old boots. His motto to this advertisement was “Omne majus continet in se minus” (“The greater includes the less”).

In 1745 Henley was cited before the Privy Council for having used seditious expressions in one of his lectures. Herring, then Archbishop of York, had been arming his clergy, and urging every one to volunteer against the Pretender. The Earl of Chesterfield, then Secretary of State, urged on Henley the impropriety of ridiculing such honest exertions at a time when rebellion actually raged in the very heart of the kingdom. “I thought, my lord,” said Henley, “that there was no harm in cracking a joke on a _red herring_.”

During his examination, the restorer of ancient eloquence requested permission to sit, on account of a rheumatism that was generally supposed to be imaginary. The earl tried to turn the outlaw divine into ridicule; but Henley’s eccentric answers, odd gestures, hearty laughs, strong voice, magisterial air, and self-possessed face were a match for his somewhat heartless lordship.

Being cautioned about his disrespectful remarks on certain ministers, Henley answered gravely, “My lords, I must live.” Lord Chesterfield replied, “I don’t see the necessity,” and the council laughed. Upon this Henley, remembering that the joke was Voltaire’s, was somewhat irritated. “That is a good thing, my lord,” he exclaimed, “but it has been said before.” A few days after the Orator, being reprimanded and cautioned, was dismissed as an impudent but entertaining fellow.[604]

Dr. Herring whom the rogue ridiculed was a worthy man, who in 1747, on the death of Potter, became Archbishop of Canterbury, and died in 1757. Swift hated Herring for condemning the “Beggars’ Opera” in a sermon at Lincoln’s Inn, and wrote accordingly: “The ‘Beggars’ Opera’ will probably do more good than a thousand sermons of so stupid, so injudicious, and so prostitute a divine.”[605]

In 1748 Dr. Cobden, the Court chaplain, an odd but worthy man, incurred the resentment of King George II. by preaching before him a sermon entitled “A Persuasive to Chastity”--a virtue not popular then at St. James’s. He resigned his post in 1752. The text of this obnoxious sermon was, “Take away the wicked from before the king.” Henley’s next Saturday’s motto was--

“Away with the wicked before the king,
Away with the wicked behind him;
His throne it will bless
With righteousness,
And we shall know where to find him.”

If any of the Orator’s old Bloomsbury friends ever caught his eye among the audience, he would gratify his vanity and rankling resentment by a pause. He would then say, “You see, sir, all mankind are not exactly of your opinion; there are, you perceive, a few sensible persons in the world who consider me as not totally unqualified for the office I have undertaken.” His abashed adversaries, hot and confused, and with all eyes turned on them, would retreat precipitately, and sometimes were pushed out of the room by Henley’s violent butchers.

The Orator figures in two caricatures, attributed, as Mr. Steevens thinks, wrongly to Hogarth. In one he is christening a child; in another he is on a scaffold with a monkey by his side. A parson takes the money at the door, while a butcher is porter. Modesty is in a cloud, Folly in a coach, and there is a gibbet prepared for poor Merit.

Henley, who latterly grew coarse, brutal, and drunken, died October 14, 1756. The _Gentleman’s Magazine_ merely announces his death thus:--“Rev. Orator Henley, aged 64.” “Nollekens” Smith says that he died mad.

It is somewhat uncertain where his Oratory stood: some say in Duke Street; others, in the market. It was probably in Davenant’s old theatre, at the Tennis Court in Vere Street.[606]

The beginning of one of this buffoon’s ribald sermons has been preserved, and is worth quoting to prove the miserable claptrap with which he amused his rude audience. The text is taken from Jeremiah xvi. 16, “I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them; and after that I will send many hunters, and they shall hunt.”

“The former part of the text seems, as Scripture is written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the world are come (an end of all we have in the world), to relate to the _Dutch_, who are to be fished by us according to Act of Parliament; for the word ‘herrings’ in the Act has a figurative as well as a literal sense, and by a metaphor means Dutchmen, who are the greatest stealers of herrings in the world; so that the drift of the statute is, that we are to fish for Dutchmen, and catch them, either by nets or fishing-rods in return for their repeated catching of Englishmen, then transport them in some of Jonathan Forward’s close lighters and sell them in the West Indies, to repair the loss which our South Sea Company endure by the Spaniards denying them the assiento, or sale of negroes.”[607]

Among other wild sermons of Henley, we find discourses on “The Tears of Magdalen,” “St. Paul’s Cloak,” and “The Last Wills of the Patriarchs.” He left behind him 600 MSS., which he valued at one guinea a-piece, and 150 volumes of commonplaces and other scholarly memoranda. They were sold for less than £100. They had been written with great care. When Henley was once accused that he _did all_ for lucre, he retorted “that some do nothing for it.” He once filled his room by advertising an oration on marriage. When he got into his pulpit he shook his head at the ladies, and said “he was afraid they oftener came to church to get husbands than to hear the preacher.” On one occasion two Oxonians whom he challenged came followed by such a strong party that the butchers were overawed, and Henley silently slunk away by a door behind the rostrum.[608]

There are still popular preachers in London as greedy of praise and as basely eager for applause as Orator Henley. Equally great buffoons, and men equally low in moral tone, still fill some pulpits, and point the way to a path they may never themselves take. To such unhappy self-deceivers we can advise no better cure than a moonlight walk in Clare Market in search of the ghost of Orator Henley.

There was in Hogarth’s time an artists’ club at the Bull’s Head, Clare Market. Boitard etched some of the characters. Hogarth, Jack Laguerre, Colley Cibber, Denis the critic (?), Boitard, Spiller the comedian, and George Lambert, were members. Laguerre gave Spiller’s portrait to the landlord, and drew a caricature procession of his “chums.” The inn was afterwards called the “Spiller’s Head.” One of the wags of the club wrote an epitaph on Spiller, beginning--

“The butchers’ wives fall in hysteric fits,
For sure as they’re alive, poor Spiller’s dead;
But, thanks to Jack Laguerre, we’ve got his head.

* * * * *

He was an inoffensive, merry fellow,
When sober hipped, blithe as a bird when mellow.”[609]

The Bull’s Head Tavern in Clare Market, the same place in which Hogarth’s club was held, had previously been the favourite resort of that illustrious Jacobite, Dr. Radcliffe, who is said to have killed two queens. Swift did not like this overbearing, ignorant, and surly humorist, who, however, rejoiced in doing good, and left a vast sum of money to the University of Oxford. When Bathurst, the head of Trinity College, asked Radcliffe where his library was, he pointed to a few vials, a skeleton, and a herbal, and replied, “There is Radcliffe’s library.”[610]

Mrs. Bracegirdle, that excellent and virtuous actress, used to be in the habit (says Tony Ashton) of frequently going into Clare market and giving money to the poor unemployed basketwomen, insomuch that she could not pass that neighbourhood without thankful acclamations from people of all degrees.

In 1846 there were in and about Clare Market, about 26 butchers who slaughtered from 350 to 400 sheep weekly in the stalls and cellars. The number killed was from 50 to 60 weekly--but in winter sometimes as many as 200. But the butchers’ market has now become almost a thing of the past.

Joe Miller formerly lay buried in a graveyard on the south side of Portugal Street, but the graveyard is now turned to other purposes. At the corner of Portugal Street and Lincoln’s Inn Fields is the “Black Jack” Inn, a hostelry whose name is connected with some of Jack Sheppard’s feats.