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.”
“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.
The first glimpse we have of Pepys and his father is pleasant enough. On
the 26th January, 1659-60, he writes:—“Home from my office to my Lord’s
lodgings, where my wife had got ready a very fine dinner, viz. a dish
of marrow-bones, a leg of mutton, a loin of veal, a dish of fowl, three
pullets, and a dozen of larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat’s
tongue, a dish of anchovies, a dish of prawns, and cheese. My company
was my father, my uncle Fenner, his two sons, Mr. Pierse, and all their
wives, and my brother Tom.” The old man was still a tailor in the City,
when his son, on the 12th of the following February, records:—“Walking
with Mr. Kirton’s apprentice during evening church, and looking for
a tavern to drink at, but not finding any we durst not knock: to my
father’s,”—whom he found rejoicing that “the boys had last night broke
Barebones’ windows.” Pepys was not ashamed of the old tailor, but, a
fortnight later, took him with him “to Mr. Weddrington, at Christ’s
College, who received me very civilly, and caused my brother to be
admitted.” And indeed the old tailor saw very good company at home. In
June, 1660, while yet in business, Pepys and his wife, on repairing
thither, found “Sir Thomas Honeywood and his family were come of a
sudden, and so we forced to be altogether in a little chamber, three
stories high.” The old tailor moreover was a match-maker, in his way,
for in August we find him “propounding Mr. John Pickering for Sir Thomas
Honeywood’s daughter;” a propounding that was certainly made by one of
the most singular of agents that ever undertook the business of the
old firm of Cupid, Hymen, and Co. The father too appears to have been
employed by the son; the latter got him to make “a black cloth coat out
of a short cloak, to walk up and down in,” when London was in mourning,
in September, for the Duke of Gloucester; and in October we find him
again patronizing the paternal establishment, where he calls on a Sunday
“to change my long black cloak for a short one (long cloaks being now
quite out), but, he being gone to church, I could not get one.” When the
old house was broken up, Pepys consented to take his sister from off the
now ex-tailor’s hands. “I told him plainly,” he says, “that my mind was
to take her not as a sister, but as a servant, which she promised me
that she would, and with many thanks did weep for joy,” though it may
have been for something else. Pepys was more generous to the old man
himself. “My father,” he writes in December of this year, “did offer me
six pieces of gold in lieu of six pounds that he borrowed of me the other
day, but it went against me to take of him, and therefore did not.” He
seems to have occasionally had a joyous dinner or two out of his ancient
sire to compensate for the sacrifice. The death of Uncle Robert in the
following year made a sort of country gentleman of our tailor, who needed
the advancement, for the son, on balancing his father’s affairs as a
tradesman, found £45 due to him, with debts to the same amount, and the
balance of _zero_ showing all that he possessed of his own in the world;
and yet the good old workman had sent his sons to college, and _that_
may account for his poverty. In his retirement the elder Pepys exercised
his taste on alterations of his house at Brampton,—changes which his
son speaks of as being “very handsome:” in other respects he was like
great men in their retirement, and amused himself by writing letters,
which appear to have been real “letters of news:” having his crosses
however, as country gentlemen will have, and those chiefly from legal
disputes touching his inheritance, which happily came, nevertheless, to
a favourable conclusion. Pepys the junior warned Pepys senior against
the sin of extravagance, and that with such unction that both counsellor
and counselled and domestic listeners were melted to tears. The end of
the advice thus given was that the sartorius emeritus should keep the
expenses of himself and family “within the compass of £50 a year,”—no
very princely income, it must be confessed, and one that ought to have
saved them from the subsequent reproach of the official son, or rather
of his lady wife, touching “the ill, improvident, disquiet, and sluttish
manner that my father, and mother, and Poll do live in the country, which
troubles me mightily, and I must seek to remedy it.” The remedy adopted
to restore gentility to the hearth of the old tailor was one of some
singularity. “All the morning,” says Pepys, under the date of September
4, 1664, “all the morning looking over my old wardrobe, and laying by
things for my brother John and my father, by which I shall leave myself
very bare of clothes, but yet as much as I need, and the rest could but
spoil in the keeping.” Magnificent benevolence! But the old man doubtless
looked modish in the son’s cast-off suit, and the influence it had on
the locality is perhaps seen in the subsequent offer of marriage made
to “Poll,” the tailor’s daughter, by one who had “seven score and odd
pounds land per annum in possession, and expects £1000 in money upon the
death of an old aunt.” This expectation was, I suppose, never realized,
for “old aunts” are proverbially immortal, or given to cheat, after
tormenting, their heirs, when they do condescend to pay the long-standing
debt of nature. The wooer had however some positive advantages, for he
possessed neither father, mother, sister, nor brother; and the value
of such a man cannot be too strongly impressed upon speculating young
ladies. To balance these advantages he had the slight drawback of being
“a drunken, ill-favoured, ill-bred country fellow.” On the strength
of a prospect of increased gentility, the elder Pepys, now half-blind
and parcel-deaf, rode up to town on horseback, and saw the glories of
the city, and had his picture taken, to hang in the dining-room of his
illustrious son, who enthusiastically records of him that he loved
that son, “and hath ever done so, and is at this day one of the most
careful and innocent men in the world.” Pepys sent him back on a new
horse, and with £20 for the general use of the family. “It rejoiceth my
heart,” says the journalist, “that I am in a condition to do anything to
comfort him,—he is such innocent company.” The old house of business in
Fleet-street perished in the Great Fire; and up rode the ancient occupier
of it on his new horse, to view the spot where he had long toiled and
which he could no longer recognize. The journey was too much for the man
of fine feeling, and he returned home only to wrestle with long illness;
but we find him again in town in the following year, where, with his son
and daughter-in-law, he dined at no less a table than “Sir W. Pen’s,
which they invited us to out of respect to my father, as a stranger,
though I know them as false as the devil himself.” By which remark we may
see that society, two centuries ago, was not better than it is now, which
must be a vast comfort to all who make the reflection. As Pepys records
of his father that he was the simplest of men, we may fairly wonder that
in the year of troubles, present and expectant, 1667, he entrusted the
old gentleman and his own wife with the mission of privately burying his
gold. “My father’s method made me mad,” says the son. “My father and my
wife did it on Sunday, when they were gone to church, in open daylight,
in the midst of the garden, where, for aught they knew, many eyes might
see them.” But Pepys found remedy for this exquisite process; and he
afterwards spent some happy hours in the low-roofed cottage at Brampton,
wherein the secretary expected to pass his own days of retirement, and
therefore loved to adorn it and to see it growing in prettiness.