Leeds coach, the “Express.” It was racing with the opposition “Courier,”
which had been stopped at the bottom of the hill for the purpose of
taking off the drag, and in the effort to pass was upset, with the result
that a woman was killed on the spot, another was laid up for a year with
a broken leg, and other passengers were more or less injured. Probably
because of the evident recklessness displayed by the coachman, a deodand
of £1,400 was laid on the coach. The mail-coaches were not so often
involved in disasters as the stages. They had not the incentive to race,
and smashes arising from this form of competition were infrequent. But
other forms of accident threatened them and the stage-coaches alike.
There were, for instance, fogs, and they were exceedingly dangerous.
Penny, an old driver of the Edinburgh mail, was killed from this cause.
Starting one foggy night, he grew nervous, and asked the guard, a younger
and stronger man, to take the reins. He did so, and drove up a bank.
The mail was upset, and Penny was killed.
Snow and frost were the especial foes of the mails on the northern
stretches of the Great North Road, just as widespread floods were in the
Huntingdonshire and Nottinghamshire levels, by Ouse and Trent; so that no
mail-coach was completely equipped which did not in the winter months
carry a snow-shovel.
But it was not always the north-country coaches that felt the fury of the
snowstorms. The famous storm of December 1836 blocked all roads
impartially. The Louth mail, which left the Great North Road at Norman
Cross, had to be abandoned and the mails transferred to the lighter
agency of a post-chaise, while numerous others were buried in the snow as
far south as St. Albans.
The earlier and later periods of coaching were productive of accidents in
equal degrees. Stage-coaches may be said to date, roughly, from 1698,
and continued as lumbering, uncomfortable conveyances until competition
with the mails began to smarten them up, soon after 1784, when their
second period dawned. Stage-coachmen of the first period were well
matched with their machines, and not often fit to be trusted with any
other cattle than a team of tired plough-horses. Their want of skill
generally caused the accidents in those days, and the efficiency of
others was affected by the conditions of their employment. The “classic”
age had not arrived, and bad roads, ill-made coaches, and poor horses,
combined with long hours of driving to render travelling quite dangerous
enough, without the highwaymen’s aid. Coachmen drove long distances in
those days, and sometimes fell asleep from sheer weariness—a failing
which did not conduce to the safety of the passengers. But the old
coach-proprietors did not do the obvious thing—make the stages shorter
and change the coachman more frequently. No; they contrived a hard,
uncomfortable seat for him which rested on the bed of the axletree in
such a manner as to shake every bone in his body, and to render repose
quite out of the question.
[Picture: The Louth Mail stopped by the snow]
To these clumsy or worn-out fellows succeeded the dashing charioteers of
the palmy age of coaching, which we may say came into full being with the
year 1800, and lasted for full thirty years. Many broken heads and
limbs, and bruises and contusions innumerable, can be laid to the account
of these gay sportsmen. Washington Irving has left us a portrait of the
typical stage-coachman of this time, in this delightful literary jewel:—
“He cannot be mistaken for one of any other craft. He has commonly a
broad full face, curiously mottled with red, as if the blood had been
forced by hard feeding into every vessel of the skin; he is swelled
into jolly dimensions by frequent potations of malt liquors, and his
bulk is still further increased by a multiplicity of coats in which
he is buried like a cauliflower, the upper one reaching to his heels.
He wears a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, a huge roll of coloured
handkerchief about his neck, knowingly knotted and tucked in at the
bosom, and has in summer-time a large bouquet of flowers in his
buttonhole—the present, most probably, of some enamoured country
lass. His waistcoat is commonly of some bright colour, striped; and
his small-clothes extend far below the knees, to meet a pair of
jockey-boots which reach about half-way up his legs.
“All this costume is maintained with much precision; he has a pride
in having his clothes of excellent materials, and, notwithstanding
the seeming grossness of his appearance, there is still discernible
that neatness and propriety of person which is almost inherent in an
Englishman. He enjoys great confidence and consideration along the
road; has frequent conferences with the village housewives, who look
upon him as a man of great trust and dependence, and he seems to have
a good understanding with every bright-eyed country lass. The moment
he arrives where the horses are to be changed, he throws down the
reins with something of an air, and abandons the cattle to the care
of the ostler; his duty being merely to drive from one stage to
another. When off the box, his hands are thrust into the pockets of
his great-coat, and he rolls about the inn-yard with an air of the
most absolute lordliness. Here he is generally surrounded by an
admiring throng of ostlers, stable-boys, shoe-blacks, and those
nameless hangers-on that infest inns and taverns, and run errands,
and do all kinds of odd jobs for the privilege of battening on the
drippings of the kitchen and the leakings of the tap-room. These all
look up to him as an oracle, treasure up his cant phrases, echo his
opinions about horses and other topics of jockey-lore, and, above
all, endeavour to imitate his air and carriage. Every ragamuffin
that has a coat to his back thrusts his hands in the pockets, rolls
in his gait, talks slang, and is an embryo coachey.”
But how different the last years of this gorgeous figure! When railways
were projected, the coachman laughed at the idea. He thought himself
secure on his box-seat, and witnessed the preparations for laying the
iron rails with an amused confidence that his horses could run the
“tin-kettles” off the road with little trouble. He kept this frame of
mind even until the opening of the line that competed with him; and even
when it was proved to demonstration that railways could convey passengers
at least three times as swiftly as coaches, and at about a quarter of the
cost, he generally professed to believe that “it couldn’t last long.”
His was the faith that should have moved mountains—to say nothing of
blighting locomotives; but it was no use. His old passengers deserted
him. They were not proof against the opportunities of saving time and
money. Who is? Nor did they come back to him, as he fondly thought they
would, half-choked with cinders and smoke. He was speedily run off the
road. There were those who liked him well, and, unwilling to see him
brought low, made interest with railway companies to secure him a post;
but he indignantly refused it when obtained; and, finding a cross-country
route to which the railway had not yet penetrated, drove the coachman’s
horror—a pair-horse coach—along the by-ways. Gone by now was his lordly
importance. He had not even a guard, and frequently was reduced to
putting in the horses himself. He grew slovenly, and was maudlin in his
drink. “Tips” were seldom bestowed upon him, and when he received an
infrequent sixpenny-piece, he was known to burst into tears. The
familiar figure of Belisarius begging an obolus is scarce more painful.
The last of him was generally in the driving of the omnibus between the
railway station and the hotel; a misanthropic figure, consistently
disregarded by his passengers, lingering, resolutely old-fashioned in
dress, and none too civil, superfluous on the stage.
[Picture: Entrance to London from Islington, 1809]
VII
THESE long preliminaries over, we may duly start for the North from the
General Post Office, coming to Islington by way of Goswell Road. Here,
at the “Peacock” or the “Angel,” travellers of a century and a-half ago
were one mile from London, or from Hicks’s Hall, which was the same
thing. A milestone proclaimed the fact, and its successor, with a
different legend, stood until quite recently opposite the Grand Theatre,
on Islington Green. Here stood the first toll-gate as you went out of
London. Here also was the village pound for strayed horses and cattle.
Here again, according to those who do not know anything at all about it,
the bailiff’s daughter of Islington might have met her lover; only,
unhappily for this Islington, the old ballad refers to quite another
Islington, away in Norfolk.
The usual suburban perils awaited wayfarers to Islington at any time
during the eighteenth century, and those bound for it from the city were
accustomed to wait at the Smithfield end of St. John Street until a
number had collected, when they were convoyed outwards by the armed
patrol stationed there for that purpose. But the footpads were quite
equal to the occasion, and simply waited until those parties dispersed
for their several homes, and then, like skilful generals, attacked them
in detail. The Islington Vestry were obliged to make a standing offer of
£10 to any one who should arrest a robber; but that this failed seems
certain, for at a later period we find the inhabitants subscribing a fund
for rewards to those who arrested evildoers.
Time has wrought sad havoc with Islington’s once rural aspect, and with
its old coaching inns. That grand coaching centre, the “Peacock,” has
utterly vanished, and so has the picturesque “Queen’s Head,”—gabled,
Elizabethan—wantonly destroyed in 1829; while the “Angel,” pulled down in
1819 and rebuilt, and again rebuilt in 1900, has since retired from
business as a public-house, and is now a tea and lunch place, in the
hands of a popular firm of caterers. In early days, and well on into the
nineteenth century, the Green was really a pleasant spot, with tall elms
shading the footpaths, and a very rustic-looking pound for strayed
cattle. Near by stood for many years a little hatter’s shop, bearing the
legend in large characters, “Old Hats Beavered,” and it is curious to
note how, in a long succession of old prints, this shop and its now
curiously sounding notice kept their place while all else was changing.
[Picture: Islington Green, 1820]
Islington was once a Cockney paradise, and to it retired, as into the
country, the good citizens and shopkeepers of London, setting up
miniature parks and pleasances of their own. So favourite a practice was
this that the witlings of that period, a hundred and fifty years ago,
used to publish absurd notices supposed to have been found displayed at
the entrances of these haunts. “The New Paradise,” ran one of them,
“Gentlemen with Nails in their Boots not Admitted.” Perhaps also
“Serpents Warned Off.” At that time, and long before, Islington was
resorted to on account of some alleged mineral waters existing here.
“Islington,” according to M. Henri Misson, who travelled in England, and
wrote a book about us and our country in 1718, “is a large village, half
a league from London, where you drink waters that do you neither good nor
harm, provided you don’t take too much of them.” This is decidedly a
“palpable hit,” and may be commended to those who take medicinal waters
in our own time.
“It is not much flock’d to by People of Quality,” he goes on to observe.
Here, at least, he is not out of date. People of Quality do not flock to
Islington. The medicinal waters are all gone; and that Islington is,
even now, not in any great degree a resort of fashion is an
incontrovertible fact.
Between this and Highgate, the road leading to what the poets call the
“true and tender North” is by no means happy. Any other of the classic
highways of England begins better, and however delightful the Holloway
Road may have been in the coaching age, it is in these crowded days a
very commonplace thoroughfare indeed. The long reaches of mean streets
and sordid bye-roads combine with the unutterably bad road surface to
render the exit from London anything but pleasurable.
Sir Walter Scott, on his way down to Abbotsford in 1826, calls the Great
North Road “the dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,”
and the description, minus the convenience, might well stand for its
suburban portion to-day. In Sir Walter’s time, however, these first few
miles were only just emerging from a condition in which dulness could
have had no part. In fact, it may well be supposed that the travellers,
who up to that time went by coach to York, well armed, found the journey
a thought too lively. Indeed, the Holloway Road, into which they came,
from the last outposts of civilisation, was, as it were the ante-chamber
into that direful territory of highwaymen and footpads, the veritable
Alsatias of Finchley Common and Whetstone. In fact, a few years earlier
still, when there were no houses at Holloway at all, and no district
known by that name, what is now called the Holloway Road was a lonely
track, full of mud and water, through which the coach route ran, infested
all the while by the most villainous characters, compared with whom the
gay highwayman in ruffles and lace, and mounted on a mettlesome horse,
was a knight indeed—a chevalier without fear or reproach. This stretch
of road lay then between high banks, and considerably below the level of
the surrounding fields. It was a “hollow” road, as such roads are called
wherever they exist in the country—the actual, original Hollow Way from
which, in the course of time, a whole residential district has obtained
its name. Such roads, worn down through the earth by constant traffic,
are always very ancient, and though the story of the Holloway Road at a
period from a hundred and fifty to eighty years ago was a disgraceful
one, the inhabitants of that part can console themselves by the soothing
thought that, although it cannot claim the Roman ancestry of the route by
Shoreditch, Waltham Cross and Cheshunt, which was the Ermine Way, the
road in question probably dates back to the respectable antiquity of
mediæval times.
VIII
THE road has been ascending ever since the General Post Office was left
behind, and now we come to the beginning of Highgate Hill, where the old
way over the hill-top, and the more recent one, dating from 1813, divide
left and right. Here, at the junction of Salisbury Road with Highgate
Hill, stands the Whittington Stone, marking the traditional spot where
Dick rested on his flight, and heard the bells inviting him to
“Turn again, Whittington,
Thrice Lord Mayor of London.”
It is a pretty story, and one which, let us hope, will never be forgotten
or popularly discredited; how the boy, running away from ill-treatment at
his master’s house in the city, halted here in his four-miles’ flight,
and resting on the slope of Highgate Hill, saw the clustered spires of
London and the silvery Thames—it _was_ silvery then—down below, and heard
the prophetic message of Bow Bells inviting him to return. If we can
believe that he had his favourite cat with him, let us believe with joy,
because it goes far to complete the tender story which has always held
captive the hearts of the children; and God forbid we should grow the
less tender towards the beautiful legends of our forbears as we grow
older.
Bow Bells fulfilled their prophecy in full measure and running over, for
Dick Whittington was chosen to complete the year of Mayor—Adam Bamme—who
died in 1397, and was Mayor on three separate occasions as well; in 1397,
1406, and 1420. He was knighted, of course, and, moreover, he became one
of the richest men of his time. Perhaps the most dramatic thing recorded
of his prosperous career as Mayor and a member of the Mercers’ Company,
is that splendid entertainment which he gave to Henry the Fifth and his
Queen at Guildhall in his last year of office, when he threw into the
fire bonds equal to £60,000 of our money, due to him from the king—a
generous, nay, a princely gift.
But he was not “Lord” Mayor. The tradition is wrong in that respect.
There were “Mayors,” but no “Lord Mayor” until 1486.
Who was Richard Whittington? We know him well in his later career as a
Mercer, and as a pious and patriotic citizen; but whence came he? Was he
the poor and friendless lad of legend? Well, not quite that. Poor,
perhaps, because he was the youngest of three brothers; but not
friendless, for his family was of no mean descent. His father, Sir
William Whittington, had an estate on which he lived, at Pauntley, in
Gloucestershire, and other possessions of the family were at Sollers
Hope, Herefordshire. Misfortunes fell upon Sir William, who seems to
have died not long after Dick was born; but the family had friends in the
FitzWarrens, of whom one, Sir John, was a prominent Mercer in London.
Dick’s brothers had, as elder brothers have nowadays, the best chances,
as it seemed, and remained in the country, enjoying the family property,
or following rural employments. Dick we may readily picture as being
sent to FitzWarren, to learn a trade. The great man probably took him
for old acquaintance’ sake, and, having received the lad of thirteen, and
turned him over to one of his many underlings, promptly forgot him. It
is a way with the great, not yet obsolete. We may with a good conscience
reject that part of the legend which tells how Dick was found, an obscure
waif and stray, on FitzWarren’s doorstep, and taken, in compassion, to
serve as a scullion. The pantomimes always insist on this, and on the
ferocious cook’s ill-treatment of him; but pantomime librettists have
many sins to answer for.
No; Dick was an apprentice, a poor one, and doubtless taken without a
premium; but not scullion. There can be little doubt that the country
lad, thus thrown into the midst of many other apprentices in FitzWarren’s
house, must have been an object of sport. They would taunt him with his
country ways, and, superior in their clothes of London cut, ridicule,
with the cruel satire of boys, his homely duds. Possibly his flight had
some such origin as this.
But it is chiefly on the legend of the cat that more or less learned
antiquaries have so savagely fallen, with intent to explain it away. The
cat, they assure us, was a fable, and they go on to say that it was from
coal vessels called “cats,” in which Whittington embarked his money, that
the story grew. Another school of commentators, eager to reduce the
pretty tale to commonplace, tell us that it originated in the old French
word for a purchase, _achat_. To what shifts will they not proceed in
this hunt for an ignoble realism! Whittington is not known to have
engaged in the ownership of colliers, or in the carrying of coal. A
Mercer has no commerce with such things. Then, that derivation from the
French _does_ smell of the lamp, does it not?
Now for the truth of his embarking his favourite cat as a venture, to be
sold at a profit in some foreign port. The story, regarded with a
knowledge of those times, is by no means an improbable one. Indeed, to
go further, it is quite likely. Cats were in that era comparatively
rare. They had a high value at home; were even more valuable in Europe,
and in the darkly-known countries on the confines of the known world—a
small world, too, before the discovery of America—they were almost
priceless.
Many childish searchings of heart have arisen over Dick’s parting with
his cat for love of gain. Did Dick, like the Arab who sold his steed,
repent with tears? Perhaps Dick was the happy possessor of two cats, and
his favourite was a “tom.” If the other was a she-cat, and as prolific
as are our own, no doubt Dick would have been glad to have got rid of
her; except that the progeny themselves were marketable. To this, then,
we are reduced: that Dick Whittington as a boy bred cats for exportation,
and that his black-and-white Tom, as the progenitor of them all, was the
founder of his fortunes. The legend tells us of only one cat, which,
when the vessel was driven out of her course to the coast of Barbary, was
sold for immense riches of gold and precious stones to the Sultan, whose
palace was infested with mice. That may do for the pantomimes; but,
unhappily, the ships that were so unfortunate in those times as to be
driven on those shores were plundered and their crews slain. It was
cheaper than buying.
But whatever the details, it is certain that Whittington owed his first
successes to his cat. Several things, despite all destructive criticism,
point to the essential truth of the popular story. Firstly, original
portraits, painted from the life, testify to it by showing Whittington’s
hand laid caressingly on a black and white cat. Then, Whittington was
the rebuilder of the old New Gate, and his effigy, with a cat at his
feet, stood in one of its niches until the building was pulled down
hundreds of years afterwards. Finally, a very remarkable confirmation of
the story came from Gloucester in 1862, when, on a house occupied by the
Whittington family until 1460 being repaired, the fragment of a carved
chimney-piece of that century was discovered, bearing the sculpture of a
boy carrying a cat in his arms. It may reasonably be claimed that these
evidences, together with the popular belief in the story, which can be
traced back almost to Whittington’s own day, confound unbelievers.
The present Whittington Stone is the degenerate and highly unornamental
descendant of quite a number of vanished memorials to the great Lord
Mayor which have occupied this spot since his day. It is not by any
means a romantic spot to the sight nowadays, but for those who can bring
romance with them in their own minds, it matters little that the heights
just here are crowned with suburban villa roads, that a public-house—the
“Whittington Stone Tavern”—stands by, or that the whole neighbourhood
reeks vulgarity. The present stone is dated 1821, and succeeded one
which had disappeared shortly before, itself the successor in 1795 of a
cross. The existing inscription was recut, and railings enclosing the
stone put up in 1869; a public-house gas-lamp now crowning and
desecrating the whole.
IX