Jewry. If you can fancy the three slim Graces rolled into one, with no
other result but delicious increase of beauty in form, motion, look,
and expression, you may have a very fair idea of this most blooming
and best endowed of widows. Physically, morally, materially, she was
not to be equalled throughout the realm of mature womanhood. Fair of
face, frank of speech, with an inheritance of two-thirds of her late
husband’s property, a prosperous business, plate, diamonds, cash, the
mansion in which she lived, a coach, six horses, and all things that
tend to make life enjoyable, Mistress Bennett took her widowhood with
that sort of resignation which is denoted by an air of calm content
with providential dispensations. She was in such esteem that at least a
score of lovers were contending for the honour of rendering her happy.
Even the ladies were busy in commending certain of the suitors. The
widow would not be persuaded. The lady advisers were frivolous. She
would rely on the grave counsel of a grave man. Mr. Recorder would be
her truest support if she ever found herself in any perplexity on the
subject of marrying again. At the moment it was a subject that was not
in her thoughts.
‘The subject is in the thoughts of young Butler, of Bramfield,’ said
Lady Skinner. ‘He is a gentleman----’
‘He is a black, blunt-nosed one,’ interrupted the widow. And indeed
Butler was not an Adonis.
‘I pity poor Sir Peter Temple,’ said another of Love’s messengers that
morning. ‘Stowe does not make him happy; _you_ might.’
‘Eleanor Tirrell _will_,’ replied the widow. ‘I wish they were all as
well provided for.’
‘All!’ exclaimed Sir Peter’s friend. ‘Why, to what tune does the list
run?’
‘First,’ answered the widow, ‘there is Sir Henry Mainwaring, a poor
old battered knight, who is not master of as much land as his shoes
can cover; and yet he is as proud as if he were a Mainwaring of Over
Pecover. His worship was brought hither by the hand of the Countess of
Bridgwater, but I speedily rid myself civilly of both. There have been
other silly knights, and lords too, who have come and gone, and some
of whom come and come again. Lord Bruce took a frank answer, and did
not present himself twice. Lord Lumley, all in the glitter of his new
title, will not take _nay_. Dr. Raven has even dared to offer himself
without first feeling my pulse, and he swears his daring has not come
to an end. Only the other day Sir Sackville Crowe beset me; and, heaven
help me! I believed, for a moment, that Sir Heneage Finch himself had
views towards me. But Sir Heneage _could_ take an answer, and he besets
me with hints of his aspirations no longer.’
‘Crow, Finch, Raven!’ exclaimed the group of ladies who were gathered
round the twenty-thousand-pounder in her best room at St. Olave’s.
‘What a singular gathering of birds! You will be flown away with,
widow, in spite of yourself.’
Mr. Recorder Finch, erst Speaker of the House of Commons, came into
London to perform his legal duties, and returned in the evening to his
house at Kensington. The house still stands. It is the kernel round
which has grown the shell called Kensington Palace. Heneage Finch’s
gardens extended only to what is now called the Broad Walk. The latter
was then a pathway through Hyde Park from Kensington to Bayswater. The
wicked public loved to connect his name with those of Crowe and Raven
as ‘birds of a feather.’ The truth is, that Raven was the real, daring,
and most persistent lover. Sir Sackville Crowe, indeed, had been the
more serious in his pretensions, as he most needed the widow’s money.
He was ‘a thief on the wrong side of Newgate;’ that is, he outspent
his income and ruined his tradesmen. He paid them by agreement just
a quarter of what he owed those poor fellows, and thus he submitted
to be three-quarters kept by his butcher, baker, and tailor. He made
an ‘appearance,’ which it was an easy thing to do at other people’s
expense. He had been the official keeper of public funds, of which he
unluckily failed to give satisfactory account. He alleged that his
book-keeping had been done by deputy, and his deputy seems to have
been loose in his arithmetic. Altogether, this Crowe was a supreme
rogue, but he was one of a very large family. The widow’s fortune would
have saved his post, if not his credit, at the Navy Treasury Office.
The widow, however, scornfully refused to sit on the same branch with
Crowe, and Sir Sackville, thoroughly plucked, was ejected from the
office in question.
But, Dr. Raven! The doctor was of another quality. The physician would
not be said _nay_. The _nay_ was _decies repetita_, but it was not
heeded. Still, he was not the nearer to his object by being impeded.
One evening he took up a copy of Green’s ‘Quip,’ which was then a work
of some thirty years old. His eye fell on these words: ‘Lawyers are
troubled with the heat of the liver, which makes the palms of their
hands so hot that they cannot be cooled unless they be rubbed with oil
of angels.’ Forthwith Dr. Raven bethought him that Abigails were very
like lawyers, and that he would try a few angels on the palms of Widow
Bennett’s waiting-woman, to gain access to whom, however, he had to
oil many a serving-man’s palm also. Abigail was willing to betray her
mistress for a consideration, and it was made worth her while to admit
Raven (like Iachimo into the chamber of the sleeping Imogen) into the
apartment where the widow lay in a lapse of loveliness, buried in lace
and rosy slumbers. Raven awoke the sleeping dove with all gentleness;
as she did not scream he pressed his suit, craftily pointing out to her
that as his presence compromised her reputation, the latter could only
be saved by an immediate marriage. Then the thoroughly awakened goddess
lifted up her voice to tremendous purpose. ‘Reputation,’ indeed! She
knew hers to be safe, and she lustily screamed ‘Thieves!’ and ‘Murder;’
in order to bring in her household to keep it so. The men-servants,
seeing no further chance of angels or marks from the physician, flung
themselves upon Raven, as if he had really been more intent upon murder
than marriage. They held him till the august parish constable arrived,
and the constable ‘run him in’ to the Compter for the night. On the
following morning Raven was brought up before Mr. Recorder Finch.
That impartial judge, sympathising with the insulted widow, whom he
so highly respected, committed Dr. Raven for trial at the ensuing
sessions. It was not at all likely that Sir Heneage Finch would be slow
in protecting the beautiful widow of his deceased friend from such
saucy rogues as Dr. Raven, who was subsequently imprisoned for half a
year.
The dramatists certainly had their eye upon this escapade of Raven’s.
Rowley, especially, adopted the bed-room incident in his ‘City Match,’
where Alexander Bloodhound gets into the Widow Wagge’s chamber.
Alexander half-undresses himself, and so frightens the widow that she
consents to marry him to save her credit; but she disappoints the
audacious wooer at last. Mr. Planché reproduced this scene in 1828 in
his ‘Merchant’s Wedding.’ The daring suitor there was Frank Plotwell
(C. Kemble); the lady was Aurelia, a wealthy heiress, played by Miss
Chester, who was as superb a beauty as Widow Bennett herself. How
glorious, too, Charles Kemble looked in his King Charles suit, and how
like a jockey in his silks when he half-stripped, are things only to be
remembered by old play-goers with good memories.
At this time there was a Kentish knight keeping lonely state in
London. He was a widower twice over; but loving matrimony so well
from his sweet experience of it that he was dying to find another
mate. The Derings were of a very old stock, and Sir Edward, thirty
years of age in 1628, might have looked high in search of the mate in
question. He was of Magdalen College, Oxford, and was a sound scholar.
In religion rather austere, but with an anti-episcopalian bias. His
tastes would have made him a very acceptable member of the Society of
Antiquaries. In person he was a handsome fellow, was gifted with kindly
dispositions, of good carriage and expression in speaking, was fond of
applause, and was unaffectedly conscious that he deserved all he could
get of it. Some ladies thought so too. Elizabeth Tufton, one of the
nine muses--daughters, we should say--of Sir Nicholas, put her hand in
his as frankly as he asked for it; and King James made a knight of the
bridegroom, who was none the more a gentleman for the dignity conferred
on him. The bride died after the birth of a son, and therewith ended
a brief day-dream of married happiness. They carried the young mother
to the grave when she was little more than twenty, nor was the young
widower much older.
That young widower found consolation, however, at a pretty early period
of his mourning time. He took to his home a new bride from Sussex, Ann
Ashburnham, whose mother was connected with the family of the great
Buckingham. Thenceforward, for a season, Sir Edward Dering became a
public man. He was busier in Kent than his father, Sir Anthony (a
baronet), and he was to be seen about court, a gentleman of the Privy
Chamber, attending more closely upon the Duke than upon Charles the
First, and hoping to get into Parliament under Buckingham’s favour.
But fate was against him. The Duke was assassinated in 1626, and Sir
Edward was called from court by the sickness of his fair young wife.
In one of her letters to him, while he was at Whitehall, she wrote, ‘I
cannot send any good news of my couge’s going away, yet I eat joyes
of lecarich.’ The ‘couge’s’ signified ‘cough’s.’ The futile remedy
was ‘juice of liquorice.’ At the age of twenty-three this second Lady
Dering was laid by the side of the first, leaving a son and daughter
too young to remember their mother.
Sir Edward was again solitary, and was bearing his solitude
impatiently, when chance brought him acquainted with the story of the
fair widow in the Jewry. A new act in the City comedy opens, and to
gay music ‘enter Sir Edward Dering.’ It is St. Edmund’s day. Raven is
in limbo. The widow is alone. The new lover calls in St. Olave’s. Mrs.
Bennett, however, declines to receive him. He sends in a letter to her
by her servant, who brings it back, but the maid tells him that her
mistress _had read_ it. Read it! Then there was hope. Within the next
four days Sir Edward had oiled the palms of men-servants and clerks
to the tune of eighty shillings. He called again, but was denied. He
wrote again, and she kept the letter. Kept the letter! Here was a hint
to proceed further. Sir Edward ‘oiled’ more palms, and moved cousins
of his own and cousins of the widow--being of his acquaintance--to
stir her to be gracious to so handsome and hopeful a lover. He had the
widow’s cash-keeper to sup with him; and, perhaps at the cash-keeper’s
suggestion, on the last day in November, 1628, Sir Edward was to be
seen twice at the Old Jewry Church, near enough to the handsome widow
for her to see him without appearing to turn her eyes expressly for
that purpose. Reckoning on having made a favourable impression, he, on
the following day, wrote a third letter. This Mistress Bennett deigned
to keep, which was favour enough for the present. Presuming on that
favour the ardent lover (who had lodged himself at a house opposite the
widow’s), at the end of two or three days, rang thrice in one forenoon
at the widow’s bell. ‘Mrs. Bennett was not at home.’ She was abroad,
prosecuting the over-zealous lover, Dr. Raven. A friend, and not a
servant of the widow, on Dering repeating his call next day, one Mr.
George Loe, brought a very cautious message to the wooer. It was made
up of what _she_ said, and what _he_ thought. What she said was to this
effect: that a Mr. Steward, from whom she wished to buy the wardship he
had had conferred on him of her own child, but who wished, on his side,
to have legal marital wardship of the child’s mother, was ‘testy,’ and
‘she could give admittance to none till she had concluded all matters
of business with _him_.’ What Loe added was, ‘She has a good opinion
of you. I have spoken nobly of you. You shall hear from me as soon as
Steward is disposed of, and,’ said Loe (probably the sly widow had
told him to say it), ‘don’t refrain from going to the church where
she prays unless you think it disparages yourself.’ Disparagement!
It was an honour. On the very first Sunday in December Dering paid
double worship at St. Olave’s, Old Jewry. He went as parishioner and
lover, uniting, as Mr. Bruce says, in his preface to ‘Proceedings in
Kent,’ ‘the worship of Mrs. Bennett with that ordinarily offered at St.
Olave’s.’ The interference of servants in the affair here curiously
manifests itself. As Sir Edward left the church George Newman, whom he
had ‘oiled,’ whispered in Dering’s ear, ‘Good news!’ As Sir Edward was
sitting after dinner at his own table Newman entered, and the fellow
bade the cavalier be of good cheer. ‘My mistress,’ he said, ‘likes well
your carriage, and, if your land is not settled on your eldest son,
there is good hope for you.’ The news, true or false, was paid for at
the cost of a pound sterling. If he smiled as he went out so also does
Sir Edward, as he leans back in his chair, and murmurs to himself,
‘This evening I will seek counsel of Heneage Finch.’
At the Recorder’s house you may see, in the next scene of the drama,
Finch and Dering at supper. The friends and kinsmen take their claret
and talk of love. The two suitors to the widow were on terms of
unlimited confidence and frankness. ‘Ned,’ said Sir Heneage, ‘I wend no
more to the widow’s house. I have done. I have no success to look for.
I have no desire to go further. I will do or say anything you ask me
in this or any other matter.’ Nothing could be kinder than Sir Heneage
Finch.
Meanwhile Mr. Steward was at the widow’s feet; or, rather, he stood
upright on his own, dictating, rather than asking, terms. The widow’s
heart was set, she said, upon having her child’s wardship in her own
hands. She was willing to pay fifteen hundred pounds for it. As the
words fell from her beautiful lips, Edmund Aspull, Mrs. Bennett’s
cash-keeper, advanced, with the amount all ready. If Steward said
anything gallant it has not reached the audience. He seems to have had
an ‘_aside_,’ in which he murmured that for nothing less than four
thousand pounds would he ever release his right in the ward. ‘With my
good will,’ said the widow, ‘I will never look upon that fellow again!’
But, in legal matters she, of course, would consult her good friend,
Sir Heneage. To do him justice, Finch was always ready to give prudent
counsel whenever he was asked for it.
‘Madam,’ said George Newman, entering the room, ‘Sir Edward Dering is
at the door; he prays of your kindness leave to present himself.’
‘Desire Sir Edward,’ replied the widow, ‘to excuse me. I am not willing
to entertain discourse of that kind.’
Newman went to the outer door, where Aspull, the cashier, was talking
with Sir Edward, and delivered the reply.
The lover stood in sad contemplation, and then he remarked, ‘I am in a
wilderness of uncertainty.’
Aspull carried the ‘pretty phrase’ upstairs to his mistress.
‘Tell Sir Edward that I will see him,’ said Mrs. Bennett.
When serving-man and cash-keeper had left the wooer and the wooed to
themselves, the latter went methodically to matters of business and
matters of sentiment. Sir Edward had the privilege which custom gave
a lover, on declaring himself; he ‘saluted’ the lady. He then went
into details as to his state and estate, to all of which the widow
listened with interest. When he touched on the question of affection,
the handsome widow looked at the handsome widower, but she answered
neither _yea_ nor _nay_. She kept him as he was. Indeed, the knight
begged her to defer her answer till he again presented himself to her.
She consented, but therewith she remarked, ‘I have no present purpose
of marrying.’ She would name a second day for the meeting, after her
cousin Cradock (a friend of Sir Edward’s) should come to town. Dering
saw that she was desirous he should then leave her to herself. He
respectfully kissed the formally offered cheek, and bowing, withdrew.
He, no doubt, went and told all to Sir Heneage.
Mistress Bennett said of Dering, soon after he had retired, ‘He comes
not as boisterous as Steward and Sir Peter come. Steward! As soon as I
get from him the broad seal which releases my child, he may be hanged
ere I have anything more to do with him.’ What she said of both these
suitors was duly reported to the third. Whereupon he pressed his suit
and he got friends to press it for him. The widow, however, could not
be hurried. Her cousin Cradock was a man it behoved her to consult
upon a family question like the present; and the Recorder, being not
only her friend but her suitor’s, would be indispensable authority on
matters both of law and of property.
Day after day Dering’s patience waned till there was none left. On New
Year’s day, 1629, the scene was of the liveliest at the widow’s house.
Sir Edward had thought to frighten her into favouring his suit by
courteously asking for the returning to him of his letters. The widow
sent them back without a word of comment. Her friends standing round
her wondered at her decision, and, if the lady and cavalier told their
respective stories to Finch he probably looked as wise as a judge while
he listened.
The scene is still at the widow’s house, and there again Sir Edward
treads the stage. He cannot call on Mistress Bennett, but he can on
Mistress Norton, who is his good friend, and the widow’s companion.
From her and other household sources he hears that the widow is often
sad and silent. If she breaks silence, it is only to remark that she
will never marry at all. If Mrs. Norton commends Sir Edward the widow
beshrews her companion, and protests that she hears so much of him all
day long, she ‘can’t sleep all night for dreaming of him.’ Perhaps in
one of those night visions she confounded Dering with Raven, for she
dreamed that she ran away from him in her nightgear, out of the bedroom
into her great parlour, whereby she caught catarrh. However, Sir Edward
could not push his renewed suit to a happy termination. He sat for
an hour with Mrs. Norton, talking of the widow, when he would have
preferred to be talking with the widow herself. The latter was reported
to be sad, in perplexity, and not likely to marry at all--just yet.
This did not render Sir Edward’s suit desperate; but he wrote himself
‘fool’ for having asked for the return of his letters, when Newman told
him that she had double services of plate, for town and country use,
and that she had that glory of all proudly furnished houses of the
olden time, beds, worth one hundred pounds the bed.
Again, the scene shifts to the street before Sir George Croke’s house.
The lady is about to descend from her chariot, and lo! the lover is
there with a petition to be allowed to assist her. He does more, of
course; he escorts her into the parlour, where the judge and many
ladies are assembled. While general conversation went on, Sir Edward
assiduously courted the widow from behind her chair. They talk in
whispers, and are let alone. It is all prayer on one side, fencing
prettily on the other. Prettily made accusations are humbly answered;
she will not be pressed, not she. Her final reply should be made
through her cousin, Cradock.
‘Pray,’ said Dering, ‘sweeten the answer with your own breath.’ And
then Sir George drank to him in a glass of muscado while Sir Edward
kissed the lady’s cheek. As the judge and the lover parted at the door,
the former did not hesitate to declare his conviction that the widow
was not to be won.
‘Won she must be,’ thought Sir Edward, ‘by one means or another.’ He
rather stooped to find them. For instance, on a certain morning the
widow’s four-year-old son was walking with his nursemaid, Susan, in
Finsbury Fields; Susan was induced by a friend to take the boy to Sir
Edward’s lodging, where Dering regaled him with cake, gave him an amber
box, treated the maid to a glass of wine, hoped her mistress would not
be angry with him, and put in the maid’s hand a five-shilling piece.
‘Lor, sir!’ exclaimed Susan, ‘I, and all the house, pray for you; and
young Master Simon here does ever call you Father!’
The widow did not seem to be in haste to ratify the relationship.
Viscount Lumley’s chariot was at her door five times in one week. My
Lord went to St. Olave’s, and escorted her home after service. All
London began to take part in the comedy. New lovers again went to the
Old Jewry only to meet denial. Lumley himself, who was but a ragged
sort of viscount, was constrained, at last, to take reluctant leave,
after his hopes had been buoyed up by interference in his favour by no
less a person than the Earl of Dorset, the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain.
Sir Edward did not benefit by the withdrawal of the Viscount. Reports
reached him that the widow had expressed some liking for him, but
not enough to induce her to marry with him. Driven to the extreme of
perplexity, Sir Edward engaged another supporter, namely, the Cheapside
mercer, Izaak Walton. Izaak celebrated Dering’s praises; mutual friends
reported small incidents with much exaggeration. Cousin Cradock knew
how Sir Edward might win her; another knew that she was already won,
but was coy to confess it. One Master Catesby swore that Dering should
both ‘win and wear.’ Lady Cleere told Dering’s father, Sir Anthony,
that such a capricious widow was hardly worth the wearing; but Lady
Wroth stood up for her as a good and wise gentlewoman, whom any lover
might be proud to make his wife.
The grand scene of the comedy occurred when Sir Edward was admitted to
see the widow, on condition that he made no reference to the subject
of marrying. The interview was a scene for Frith to paint. Sir Edward,
with formal low bow, acknowledged the graciousness which admitted
him to this interview; but he hoped it would not be the last of that
sort of happiness which he might enjoy. Mistress Bennett murmured that
chance might still bring them within sight of one another. Then the
lover stretched the contract a little, without breaking it. He touched
upon his love, her happiness, and cleverly thanked her for forbidding
him to pursue making further proposals, as therein might lie the fact
that she need not forbid what she, perhaps, had resolved to grant. Some
more word-fencing went on; but it ended with a denial on the lady’s
part, and a request from the gentleman that she would authorise him to
give a public reason for the denial.
‘Say,’ she replied, ‘that you left me, and take the glory of it.’
‘Nay!’ said Sir Edward; ‘I will never withdraw my affection nor my
respect till I see you give your hand to another.’
We fear the widow was a dreadful coquette, for subsequent to the above
‘last sight,’ as the interview was called, Mistress Bennett granted
an audience to Lord Lumley, when she went so far as to accept a ring
from him--a step which almost implied a contract. But this roused the
anxiety of her friends, and particularly of Viscount Campden, whose
viscountship was just as new as Lumley’s. Lord Lumley, however,
was an older member of the peerage. Lord Campden, like the deceased
Bennett, had been a mercer; his name then was Baptist Hicks. Even
after he had been knighted, Sir Baptist served customers in his open
shop in Cheapside. He was now a peer, and people who were unable to
attain the same dignity laughed at him. What was the use of Sir Baptist
Hicks being a peer, when he had no son to inherit the title? But Lord
Campden had a daughter; and the Cheapside mercer’s fair daughter (she
was his eldest) was married to Edward, Baron Noel, of Ridlington.
The mercer was resolved that Baron Edward should not dream of having
derogated by such a match. Accordingly, the ex-shopkeeper succeeded in
having the ‘remainder,’ that is, succession to the title, settled in
the said son-in-law. In due time, Lord Noel became Viscount Campden,
and then gained a step in the peerage by wedding with Juliana, the
richest heiress of Cheapside. From them is descended the present Earl
of Gainsborough, one of whose daughters, Lady Blanche Noel, made that
romantic marriage two years ago with her father’s organist, Mr. Murphy.