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.