London

When the play was finished, the ale, the apples, and the nuts were passed round, and the noise began again. Then the clown came in and began to sing, and the music played – but oh, how poor it seemed after the great emotions of the play! The old man plucked me by the sleeve, and we went out, and with us most of the better sort.

"The first plays," said the antiquary, "that ever I saw were those that were played on stages put up in the court-yards of inns, where the galleries afforded place for the audience, and the stage was made of boards laid upon trestles. Tarleton used to play at the Bull Inn, Bishopsgate, and at the Cross Keys, Grasse Street. He was reckoned a famous player, yet, compared with those we have seen this day, a fustian mouther, no doubt. Rude plays they were, and rude players; but I dare say they moved the spectators as much as this fine theatre."

Not far from the Globe stood another building of circular form; a throng of people pressed about the doors, and a great noise of barking and shouting came from within. "It is the Bull-baiting," said my guide. "But the place is full of rough men, whose wrath is easily moved, and then out come knives and there is a tumult. I am too old for such things. Nevertheless, it is a noble sport; and when you come to whipping the blinded bear, who lately broke away and bit a piece out of a man's thigh, it passes all." He lingered as if he would join in it once more with a little encouragement. Finding none, he walked slowly away to the river-bank.

"This place," said Stow, "hath an ill name, by reason of evil-doers, who were long permitted to live here – a place notorious for three hundred years as the common sink of the city. No reputable citizen would have his country-house and garden on Bank Side. Why, there are private gardens all round London as far north as Islington, and as far east as Ratcliffe Cross, but none here. The air is fresh and wholesome coming up the river, the ground fertile: see the trees and hedges how they flourish; yet there is never a private garden in the place. For this reason the bull-baiting was here, and Paris Gardens with its bears – an' it were Sunday, I would show you the bears – old Harry Hunks and Sackerson. For this reason was the Globe built here, without the city precincts. Where are the theatres and the baitings, the musicians and the shows, thither must gather together the poets, singers, mummers, and all those who live by ministering to the merriment and pleasure of the world. A company of keen wits they are, their tongues readier than most, and their talk bolder. Sober merchants, who think more of the matter and less of the manner, like not such company." Here the tinkling of a guitar, followed by a burst of laughter, interrupted the discourse. "I doubt not," said Stow, "that we have here – 'tis the Falcon Tavern – a company of wits and poets and players. Let us tarry but the drinking of a single flask. It may be, unless their tongues are more free than is seemly, that we shall be rewarded."

The Falcon Inn stood at the western end of Bank Side, at the head of the Falcon stairs. In front a small garden stretched out towards the river. Part of the garden was an arbor, formed by a vine raised on poles, so as to form a roof of leaves. Here was a table placed, and round the table a company of ten or a dozen. At the head of the table was a young gentleman richly dressed. Behind him stood two servants. At his right sat a man of about thirty, of large frame and already corpulent, his brown hair short and curly, his beard cut short, his eyes singularly bright.

"'Tis Ben Jonson," whispered Stow. "Let us sit here, without the arbor, so that we can drink and listen. Ben is but lately out of prison, where he was cast for writing reflections on the Scottish nation. 'Twas said that he would lose his ears and have his nose slit, but the King showed mercy. He at the head of the table is some young nobleman, patron of poets, but, alas! I live now so retired that I know not his name. On the left of him is William Shakespeare, whom some think a better poet than Ben – a quiet man who says little. I have seen him here before. 'Twas he wrote the piece we have seen this day. He has a share in the theatre of Blackfriars. Burbage, the actor, sits next to Shakespeare, and then Alleyn and Hemying opposite, and Henslowe. And there is John Marston, another poet."

Alleyn it was who held the guitar. At this time he was in the prime of life, not yet forty, his face full of mobility and quickness. He ran his fingers carelessly over the notes, and then began to sing in a clear, high voice:

"'Twas I that paid for all things,'Twas others drank the wine;I cannot now recall things,Live but a fool to pine.'Twas I that beat the bush,The bird to others flew!For she, alas! for she, alas! hath left me.Falero – lero – loo!"If ever that Dame Nature(For this false lover's sake)Another pleasant creatureLike unto her would make,Let her remember this,To make the other twice!For this, alas! for this, alas! hath left me.Falero – lero – loo!"No riches now can raise me,No want make me despair;No misery amaze me,Nor yet for want I care.I have lost a World itself;My earthly Heaven, adieu!Since she, alas! since she, alas! hath left me.Falero – lero – loo!"

"Sir," said the young gentleman, "'tis an excellent song well sung. I drink your health."

This he did rising, and very courteously.

Now, in the talk that followed I observed that, while the players amused by relating anecdotes, Ben Jonson made laughter by what he said, speaking in language which belongs to scholars and to books, and that Shakespeare sat for the most part in silence, yet not in the silence of a blockhead in the presence of wits, and when he spoke it was to the purpose. Also I remarked that the guitar passed from hand to hand, and that everybody could play and sing, and that the boldness of the talk showed the freedom of their minds. Who can repeat the unrestrained conversation of a tavern company? Nay, since some of them were more than merry with the wine, it would be an ill turn to set down what they said. We drank our cups and listened to the talk.

Presently Ben Jonson himself sang one of his own songs, in a rough but not unmelodious voice:

"Follow a shadow, it still flies you;Seem to fly it, it will pursue.So court a mistress, she denies you;Let her alone – she will court you.Say, are not women truly, then,Styled but the shadows of us men?"At morn or even shades are longest,At noon they are or short or none;So men at weakest, they are strongest,But grant us perfect, they're not known.Say, are not women truly, then,Styled but the shadows of the men?"

We came away about sunset, or near half-past eight in the evening. Some of the company were by this time merry with their wine, and as we rose one began to bawl an old tavern ditty, drumming on the wood of the guitar with his knuckles:

"There was a Ewe had three lambs,And one of them was blacke;There was a man had three sons —Jeffrey, James, and Jack."The one was hanged, the other drown'd;The third was lost and never found;The old man he fell in a sound —Come fill us a cup of Sacke."

It was nearly high tide on the river, which spread itself out full and broad between the banks, reflecting the evening glow in the western sky. Numberless swans floated about the stream. It was also covered with boats. Some were state barges belonging to great people, with awnings and curtains, painted and gilt, filled with ladies who sang as the boat floated quietly with the current to the music of guitars. Others were the cockle-shell of humble folk. Here was the prentice, taking his sweetheart out upon the river for the freshness of the evening air; here the citizen, with his wife and children in a wherry; here the tilt-boat, with its load of passengers coming up from Greenwich to Westminster. There were also the barges and lighters laden with hay, wool, and grain, waiting for the tide to turn in order to unload at Queenhithe or Billingsgate.

"This," said Stow, "is the best place of any for a prospect of the city. Here we can count the spires and the towers. I know them every one. Look how Paul's rises above the houses. His walls are a hundred feet high. His tower that you see is near three hundred feet high, and his spire, which has been burned down these forty years, was two hundred feet more. Alas, that goodly spire! It is only from this bank that you can see the great houses along the river. There the ruins of White Friars – there those of the Dominicans. Ruins were they not, but splendid buildings in the days of my youth. Baynard's Castle, the Steel Yard, Cold Harbor, the Bridge – there they stand. The famous city of Venice itself, I dare swear, cannot show so fair a prospect. See, now the sun lights up the windows of Nonesuch on the Bridge – see how the noble structure is reflected in the water below. Good sir," he turned to me with glowing face and eyes aflame with enthusiasm, "there is no other city in the whole world, believe me, which may compare with this noble City of London, of which – glory to God! – I have been permitted to become the humble historian."

We took boat at Falcon stairs – Stow told me there were two thousand boats and three thousand watermen on the river – and we returned to Queenhithe, the watermen shouting jokes and throwing strong words at each other, which seems to be their custom. By the time we landed the sun had gone down. Work for the day was over, and the streets were thronged with people. First, however, it was necessary to think of supper. My guide took me to an old inn in Dowgate; you entered it as at the Mitre by a long passage. This was the well-known Swan, where we found a goodly company assembled. They seemed to be merchants all; grave men, not given to idle mirth, so that the conversation was more dull (if more seemly) than at the Falcon. For supper they served us roast pullet with a salad of lettuce, very good, and a flask of right Canary. My ancient guide swore – "Bones a' me" – that it contained the very spirit and essence of the Canary grape. "Sir," he said, "can a man live in London for eighty years and fail to discern good wine from bad? Why, the city drinks up, I believe, all the good wine in the world. Amsterdam is built on piles set in the ooze and mud. London floats on puncheons, pipes, and hogsheads of the best and choicest. This is truly rare Canary. Alas! I am past eighty. I shall drink but little more."

So he drank and warmed his old heart and discussed further, but it would be idle to set down all he said, because most of it is in books, and my desire has been to record only what cannot be found, by the curious, already printed.

After supper we had more wine and tobacco. Some of the company fell to card-playing, some to dice. Then the door opened, and a man came in with two children, boys, who sang with him while he played the guitar. They sang madrigals very sweetly, each his own part truly and with justice. When they finished, the boys went around with a platter and collected farthings. And having paid our reckoning we went away.

In the streets outside, the women sat at their doors or stood about gossiping with each other. At every corner a bonfire was merrily burning. This was partly because it was the Vigil of St. John the Baptist, partly because in the city they always lit bonfires in the summer months to purify and cleanse the air. But because of the day every door was shadowed with green branches – birch, long fennel, St. John's wort, orpin, white lilies, and such like – garnished with garlands of beautiful flowers. They had also hung up lamps of colored glass, with oil to burn all the night, so that the streets looked gay and bright with the red light of the bonfires playing on the tall gabled fronts, and the red and green light of the lamps. From all the taverns, as we passed, came the sound of music, singing, and revelry, with the clink of glasses and the uplifting of voices thick with wine. There was the sound of music and singing from the private houses. Everywhere singing – everywhere joy and happiness. In the streets the very prentices and their sweethearts danced, to the pipe and tabor, those figures called the Brawl and the Canary, and better dancing, with greater spirit and more fidelity to the steps, had I never before seen.

At last we stopped once more before the door of John Stow's house.

"Sir," he said, taking my hand, "the time has come to bid you farewell. It has been a great honor – believe me – to converse with one of a generation yet to come, and a great satisfaction to learn that my name will live so long beside those of the poets of this noble age. Many things there are into which I would fain have inquired. The looking into futurity is an idle thing, yet I would fain have asked if you have put a new steeple on Paul's; if you still suffer the desecration of that place; if London will spread still more beyond her walls; if her trade will still more increase; if the Spaniard will be always permitted to hold the Continent of America; if the Pope will still be reigning; with many other things. But you came this day to learn, and I to teach. When next you come, suffer me in turn to put questions. And now, good sir, farewell. Behold!" He raised his hands in admiration. "I have spent a day – a whole day – with a man of the nineteenth century!! Bones a' me!!!"

So he went within and shut the door.

VIII

CHARLES THE SECOND

It is not proposed here to swell with any new groans the general chorus of lamentation over the deplorable morals of King Charles's court. Let us acknowledge that we want all the available groans for the deplorable morals of our own time. Let us leave severely on one side Whitehall, with the indolent king: his mistresses, his singing boys, his gaming tables, his tinkling guitars, his feasting and his dancing. We will have nothing whatever to do with Chiffinch and his friends, nor with Rochester, nor with Nell Gwynne, nor with Old Rowley himself. Therefore, of course, we can have nothing to do with Messrs. Wycherley, Congreve, and company. It is, I know, the accepted excuse for these dramatists that their characters are not men and women, but puppets. To my humble thinking they are not puppets at all, but living and actual human creatures – portraits of real men and women who haunted Whitehall. Let us keep to the east of Temple Bar: hither come whispers, murmurs, rumors, of sad doings at court: sober and grim citizens, still touched with the Puritan spirit, speak of these rumors with sorrow and disappointment; they had hoped better things after the ten years' exile, yet they knew so little and were always ready to believe so well of the King – and his Majesty was always so friendly to the City – that the reports remained mere reports. It is really no use to keep a king unless you are able to persuade yourself that he is wiser, nobler, more virtuous, braver, and greater than ordinary mortals. Indeed, as the head and leader of the nation, he is officially the wisest, noblest, bravest, best, and greatest among us, and is so recognized in the Prayer-book. Even those who are about the court, and therefore are so unhappy as to be convinced of the exact contrary, do their best to keep up the illusion. The great mass of mankind still continue to believe that moral and intellectual superiority goes with the crown and belongs to the reigning sovereign. The only change that has come over nations living under the monarchic form of government as regards their view of kings is that they no longer believe all this of the reigning sovereign's predecessor; as regards the present occupant of the throne, of course. Are the citizens of a republic similarly convinced as regards their President?

The evil example of the court, therefore, produced very little effect upon the morals of the City. At first, indeed, the whole nation, tired to death of grave faces, sober clothes, Puritanic austerity, godly talk, downcast eyes, and the intolerable nuisance of talking and thinking perpetually about the very slender chance of getting into heaven, rushed into a reckless extreme of brave and even gaudy attire and generous feasting, the twang of the guitar no longer prohibited, nor the singing of love ditties, nor the dancing of the youths and maids forbidden. Even this natural reaction affected only the young. The heart of the City was, and remained for a hundred and fifty years afterwards, deeply affected with the Puritanic spirit. It has been of late years the fashion of the day – led by those who wish to saddle us again with sacerdotalism – to scoff and laugh at this spirit. It has nearly disappeared now, even in America; but we may see in it far more than what has been called the selfish desire of each man to save his own soul. We may see in it, especially, the spirit of personal responsibility, the loss of which – if we ever do lose it, should authority be able to reassert her old power – will be fatal to intellectual or moral advance. Personal responsibility brings with it personal dignity, enterprise, courage, patience, all the virtues. Only that man who stands face to face with his Maker, with no authority intervening, can be called free. But when the young men of the City had had their fling, in the first rush and whirlpool of the Restoration, they settled down soberly to business again. The foundation of the Hudson's Bay Company proves that the Elizabethan spirit of enterprise was by no means dead. The Institution of the Royal Society, which had its first home in Gresham College, proves that the City thought of other useful things besides money-getting. The last forty years of the seventeenth century, however, might have been passed over as presenting no special points of change, except in the gradual introduction of tea and coffee. As London was in the time of Elizabeth, so it was, with a few changes, in the time of Charles the Second. A little variation in the costumes; a little alteration in the hour of dinner; a greatly extended trade over a much wider world; and, in all other respects, the same city.

Two events – two disasters – give special importance to this period. I mean the Plague and the Fire.

The Plague was the twelfth of its kind which visited the City during a period of seven hundred years. The twelfth and the last. Yet not the worst. That of the year 1407 is said to have killed half the population: that of 1517, if historians are to be believed in the matter of numbers, which is seldom the case, killed more than half. Of all these plagues we hear no more than the bare, dreadful fact, "Plague – so many thousands killed." That is all that the chronicles tell us. Since there was no contemporary historian we know nothing more. How many plagues have fallen upon poor humanity, with countless tragedies and appalling miseries, but with no historian? We know all about the Plague of Athens, the Plague of Florence, the Plague of London – the words require no dates – but what of the many other plagues?

The plague was no new thing; it was always threatening; it broke out on board ship; it was carried about in bales; it was brought from the Levant with the figs and the spices; some sailor was stricken with it; reports were constantly flying about concerning it; now it was at Constantinople; now at Amsterdam; now at Marseilles; now at Algiers; everybody knew that it might come again at any time. But it delayed; the years went on; there was no plague; the younger people ceased to dread it. Then, like the Deluge, which may stand as the type of disaster long promised and foretold, and not to be avoided, yet long delayed, it came at last. And when it went away it had destroyed near upon a hundred thousand people.

We read the marvellous history of the Plague as it presented itself to the imagination of Daniel Defoe, who wrote fifty years after the event. Nothing ever written in the English language holds the reader with such a grip as his account of the Plague. It seems as if no one at the time could have been able to speak or think of anything but the Plague; we see the horror of the empty streets; we hear the cries and lamentations of those who are seized and those who are bereaved. The cart comes slowly along the streets with the man ringing a bell and crying, "Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!" We think of the great fosses communes, the holes into which the dead were thrown in heaps and covered with a little earth; we think of the grass growing in the streets; the churches deserted; the clergymen basely flying; their places taken by the ejected nonconformists who preach of repentance and forgiveness – no time, this, for the Calvinist to number the Elect on his ten fingers – to as many as dare assemble together; the roads black with fugitives hurrying from the abode of Death; we hear the frantic mirth of revellers snatching to-night a doubtful rapture, for to-morrow they die. The City is filled with despair. We look into the pale faces of those who venture forth; we hear the sighs of those who meet; nobody – nobody, we imagine – can think of aught else than the immediate prospect of death for himself and all he loves.

Pepys, however, who remained in the City most of the time, not only notes down calmly the progress of the pestilence, but also allows us to see the effect it produced on his own mind. It is very curious. He reads the Bills of Mortality as they are published: he, as well as Defoe, records the silent and deserted appearance of the town: he confesses, now and then, that he is fearful; but his mind is all the time entirely occupied with his own advancement and his own pleasures. He feasts and drinks with his friends; he notes that "we were very merry." Occasionally he betrays a little anxiety, but he is never panic-stricken.

In the entry of September, when the Plague was at its height, and the terror and misery of London at their worst, he writes: "To the Tower, and there sent for the weekly Bill, and find 8252 dead in all, and of these 6978 of the Plague, which is a most dreadful number and shows reason to fear that the Plague hath got that hold that it will yet continue among us. Thence to Branford, reading 'The Villaine,' a pretty good play, all the way. There a coach of Mr. Povy's stood ready for me, and he at his house ready to come in, and so we together merrily to Swakely to Sir R. Viner." And the same week, hearing that Lord Sandwich with the fleet had taken some prizes – "the receipt of this news did put us all into an extasy of joy that it inspired into Sir J. Minner and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth, that in all my life I never met with so merry a two hours as our company this night was." Perhaps, however, this excess of mirth was not due to insensibility, but was a natural reaction from the gloom and terror that stalked the streets.

The summer of 1665 was curiously hot and dry. Every day a blue sky, a scorching sun, and no breath of wind. If bonfires were kindled to purify the air, the smoke ascended and hung overhead in a motionless cloud. From May till September, no wind, no rain, no cloud, only perpetual sunshine to mock the misery of the prostrate city.

At the first outbreak of the disease the people began to run away; the roads were black with carts carrying their necessaries into the country; the City clergy for the most part deserted their churches; physicians ran from the disease they could not cure, pretending that they had to go away with their patients; the Court left Whitehall; the Courts of Justice were removed to Oxford. The Archbishop of Canterbury, however, remained at Lambeth Palace, and the Duke of Albemarle and Lord Craven remained in their town houses. And the Lord Mayor, Sir John Laurence, ordered that the aldermen, sheriffs, common councilmen, and all constables and officers of the City should remain at their posts.

As the Plague increased, business of all kinds was suspended; works were closed; ships that arrived laden, went down the river again and across to Amsterdam; ships that waited for their cargoes lay idle in the Pool by hundreds; shops were shut; manufactories and industries of all kinds were stopped.

Consider what this means. London was not only a city of foreign trade and a great port, but a city, also, of many industries. It made an enormous quantity of things; the very livelihood of the City was derived from its trade and its industries. These once stopped, the City perished. We have seen how the Roman Augusta decayed and died. The people had no longer any trade or any work, or any food. Therefore, the City died. The same thing, from different causes, happened again. Trade and work were suspended. Therefore, the people began to starve.