MEMS. OF “MERCHANT TAILORS.”
“My heart is yours,
And you shall see it spring, and shoot forth leaves
Worthy your eye; and the oppressed sap
Ascend to ev’ry part, to make it green
And pay your love with fruit, when harvest comes.”
Love Tricks, by Shirley, a pupil of M. T.
I regret to say it, but the Rev. H. B. Wilson, the reverend author of that half-hundredweight quarto which gives the history of the Merchant Tailors, and which the author hoped would find its way into our villages, is ashamed of the origin of his heroes. He has even enough of false pride to beg that writers will spell Merchant Taylors with a y, and not with an i! Tailors with an i, he says, may be mistaken for a trade; while Taylors with a y may be taken for a name! So was Sir Piercie Shafton ever blushing at the idea of his father’s calling; and so do the Smiths with an i, fancy that they glide into gentility and euphony by becoming Smyths with a y.
How long the City guild of tailors has sustained a corporate dignity it would be hard to say; we know however that Edward I. confirmed the guild under their old name of “Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers.” Their symbolic shield bore a tent between two mantles, denoting that the honest men of the guild made cloaks for all customers, and tents for the royal army. Many a marquis has not half so delicate a device; and the Mercatores Scissores have been worthily translated by those far less useful gentlemen,—the members of the College of Arms. The oath of the livery bound the new brother to the utmost possible respectability of life; but the oath was not broken when the taker of it, in a fit of enthusiastic pride, broke the head of a “Merchant Skinner” who dared claim precedency over the “Tailor.” A “bloody coxcomb” was too often the crest of the valiant Mercatores Scissores.
Of the members of the company, in the olden time, the most illustrious was Hawkwood, to whom I have assigned a chapter, as becoming his super-sartorial dignity. Here I will only briefly speak of the school, and the more illustrious men whom it has furnished to the public service. The latter are bound to drink the immortal memory of the royal founder of the “Merchant Tailors and Linen Armourers.”
The school was established by the company in 1560-1, “for children of all nations and countries indifferently;” a liberal provision, which was contracted in 1731 by an order of court, whereby express exclusion was made of the children of Jews. Among the statutes, there is especial injunction that, “in the schoole, at noe time of the yere, they shall use tallow candle in noe wise, but wax candles only;” an injunction which shows less regard for grammar than gentility. The school rather tripped at the beginning; for though Mulcaster, the head master, was an accomplished scholar, the ushers brought with them from the north such a Bœotian accent, that the boys went home talking “broad Yorkshire!”
Mulcaster, the master, too could occasionally indulge in very harsh English of the vulgar tongue, abusing the “visitors” roundly,—a rudeness that ought not to have been seen at a school lit only with wax candles, and having six or seven and thirty scholarships at St. John’s. Mulcaster was a choleric man; but in his mastership of a quarter of a century he “turned out” four bishops. These, when boys, had been the widest awake, while the master slept; for, as Fuller tells us, “he slept his hour (custom made him critical to proportion it) in his desk in the school, but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity, as soon as he to pardon. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children.” In our days, Dr. Hessey can make good scholars by a more merciful and dignified process.
Wilkinson, the successor of Mulcaster, had the famous Whitelock for a pupil; and under the third master, Smith, we find at the school a boy named Juxon, who afterwards stood on the scaffold with Charles I., and smoothed the sovereign’s path from time into eternity. Boyle and Dee were also at this time young “Merchant Tailors,” whose subsequent manly merits reflected lustre on the old foundation. Smith’s successor, Haynes, was, like Mulcaster, rather ready with his tongue and heavy with his hand. He chastised unmercifully; and, on being menaced with complaint to the wardens, he was so audacious as to declare that he did not care a “phillip” for them. His ushers, too, appear to have been rough of speech; and “Bridewell rogue” was the tutorial epithet for a rebellious pupil. Haynes too was accused of encouraging little lotteries for his own profit, and not for the recreation of the pupils. “For,” says the complaint, “you suffer none to drawe any one lott, but those that bring xiiᵈ. or above. Your biggest lot is one grammer of xᵈ. which is the greate lott; the rest are ink-hornes, hobby-horses, gingerbread, paints, and puddings of very small value.” The master of Merchant Tailors’ is indignant thereat, and protests that not only is the matter one of pure entertainment, but that he makes nothing by it, and that he finds the drawers in “dyett bread, comfitts of all sorts, ffiggs, raysonnes, allmonds, stewed prunes, wiggs, beare, and some wine, and all kinds of ffrute, which the season of the yeare affordes.”
A story is told of one of Haynes’s pupils, which, like many other stories, has had different individuals for its hero. It is to this effect. A very proud and an intolerably ignorant gentleman was constantly boasting that he enjoyed the advantage of having been a member of both Universities. “You remind me,” said the old Merchant Tailors’ pupil, “of a circumstance worth narrating. I have two cows at home which calved at the same time. One calf died, but I let the other calf suck both the cows.” “Well,” said the member of two Universities, “what was the consequence?” “A prodigiously great calf indeed, Sir.”
For many years the scholastic portion of Merchant Tailors’ appears to have suffered by repeated visitations of the Plague. Then came the Great Rebellion, with a modifying of the rules, which were made excessively stringent, and under which the pupils were converted to as sour a series of classes as if they were enrolled in Dotheboys Hall. But then came the Restoration, and therewith relaxation; and the young “tailors” pushed up their beavers from off their eyes, turned up their lank hair into seductive curls, put their hands on their hips, and looked saucily at the maids of Cheapside. In the midst of it all burst forth the Great Fire; and the “tailors,” for a time houseless, got their lessons by fits and starts, till they were once more tabernacled, in high spirits, within a comfortable dwelling.
One would have thought that all would have been harmony in the new house; but such was not the case. For some time, indeed, nobody could discover a grievance; but having looked everywhere to find one, and all in vain, recourse was had to religion, and of course a few were created instanter. Good, the master, continued to pray as heretofore in Latin. The boys roared out for plain English precations. The City took various sides of the question,—for, against, and a little of both languages. The Latinists at last prevailed, and the orthodox declared that the heel of the Apocalyptic Beast was on the brow of the scholars, and that the sun of England had set for ever. It is a sun however that hitherto has exhibited a great alacrity in rising again.
Of course the zealous party ousted Good in time. The members of it held that daily prayers and much devotion after a ceremonious manner savoured of Popery, and poor Good was turned out as a Papist; the boys marvellously improved, and became very remarkable for their habits of “profane swearing and debauchery, and misdemeanours.” St. Lawrence Pountney was imitating Whitehall. A good deal of irregularity prevailed throughout the periods of James II. and William and Mary. One instance may be cited, namely, that of treating the boys who missed their election to St. John’s College with canary and cake. It was like teaching them that drink was a solace for disappointment. To be sure they had a sermon first from the chaplain; but chaplains in those days were particularly addicted to punch.
See the consequence! The school-kitchen was enlarged; the boys were divided into the “table” and the “bench;” and, as an illustration of these jolly juvenile “tailors,” it may be stated that Sam Phillips, a “tailor” of the “table,” seduced little Will Nash, a “tailor” of the “bench,” and took him to taverns, and playhouses, and gaming-houses, and was tried for the same before the school authorities, who found him guilty indeed, but construed mild of human frailty, and condoned him on promise of his mending his naughty ways,—which he, like a gallant “tailor,” scorned to do, and turned out a reprobate accordingly.
Not that the pupils were generally reprobate, but the masters unwise, and regardless of their own regulations. Thus, when young Buckingham, who was a very worthy juvenile “Merchant Tailor,” wrote the play of Scipio Africanus, and had it represented, the masters, who denounced stage representations, suspended the duties of the school, and sent all the boys into the pit to clap the piece. It was like the British Senate solemnly adjourning, as both Houses once did, in order to see Master Betty play Hamlet.
But let me do all justice to the masters. If they turned their Christian pupils into the pit of a very licentious theatre (Lincoln’s Inn Fields), they exhibited their anxiety for pure morality by again turning all the Jewish pupils out of the school. Israel was their scapegoat.
Quin’s ‘Scipio’ inoculated the boys and masters too with a scenic furor; and the latter individuals consistently upheld the morals of the alumni by permitting them to perform the most beastly of the beastly pieces of Terence,—the ‘Eunuchus.’ Thus Merchant Tailors’ sank or rose to the nasty practice of Westminster; and again I say, “See the consequence!” Garrick, who used to patronize the performances, enticed Silvester, who played in the epilogue to the ‘Phormio,’ to a wider stage; and Silvester’s readiness to play anything, from Hamlet to harlequin, was subsequently immortalized by Bannister, Junior, in the character of Sylvester Daggerwood.
Nor can excuse be taken under the plea that the masters only patronized the classic drama in a tongue defunct. One of the masters, himself a clergyman, the Rev. P. Townley, wrote one of the most lively farces in the English language, namely, ‘High Life below Stairs.’ This, too, was long before the Terence period of the Merchant Tailor plays. It has had two very lively results. Mrs. Abington’s Lady Bab fired many a “tailor” youth, and the whole piece caused an insurrection among the liveried gentlemen in the free list who waited for their masters in the Edinburgh gallery. As for Dublin, when the Abington went there and played Kitty, the fashion of her cap set the whole town in a fever; and nothing else was seen on fashionable heads but one made after that illustrious fashion.
The matter was not mended at Merchant Tailors’ when musical performances were subsequently introduced, and the satires in Ruggles’s ‘Ignoramus’ were sung by the boys to sacred airs by Soper, by Hasse, and by Handel. The mothers of some of these lads had to regret, like Niobe, that the gods had made their children vocal. These operatic displays were ultimately suppressed.
Finally, under the mastership of Cherry, Townley’s successor, a scene of another description took place, which caused infinite commotion. When the French Revolution broke out, the “Tailors” became infected; and inscriptions scrawled on the walls of the school-passages proved how disloyalty pervaded the breasts of the youthful writers. But from writing they proceeded to action. On the 13th of January, 1796, the Queen’s birthday, a tricoloured flag was hoisted on the Tower Walls, where, strange enough, it was allowed to remain for three hours, side by side with the royal standard. The City burst forth into a tumult of indignation or delight. When the authorities, acting on information, proceeded to the fortress, the insulting emblem had disappeared; but it was traced to a hiding-place beneath the bed of the son of the Rev. Mr. Grose, assistant chaplain at Merchant Tailors’. The horrified sire burnt the rag of rebellion to ashes, while his son confessed his guilt, and implicated in the raising of the insurrectionary standard a fellow-pupil named Hayward, under whose suggestions young Grose professed to have acted. Their fellow-pupils showed the vigour of their loyalty by nearly pounding Hayward to a pulpy consistence like that of the men whom Professor Whewell, as I have elsewhere noticed, concedes as possibly existing in the wide plane of Jupiter. The offenders were solemnly expelled; and since that period, the establishment has flourished in usefulness to the public and credit to its conductors.
It is an establishment which, despite some drawbacks, has produced not a few eminent “Merchant Tailors.” I can cite but a few, and, among the many, name the good and modest Bishop Andrews, and the learned Dove, who in the reign of James preached the funeral sermon of Mary Queen of Scots, at Peterborough. Spenser the Greek scholar, and the three virtuous sons of the virtuous Sandys, Bishop of London; Fox, the son and biographer of the Martyrologist; Heth, who logically tranquillized the public in 1582, when Harvey of Cambridge informed the world that it was coming to an end; the pious Bowsfield and Gwinne, who renewed a love for Church music after the Reformation, were all “Merchant Tailors.” So too were those eminent Oxford men, Searchfield and Perin; Paddin, the physician at James’s death-bed; Ravens and Buckridge, Latewar, Whitelocke, and Boyle; Price, Tomson, and Lymby, Rawlinson, Rainsbee, Sansbury, Lauson, and Tuer; with Wren and Campin, who upheld the honour of Merchant Tailors’ at Cambridge. What they did in general learning, in divinity, poetry, or law, in the Hampton Court Conference, in the student’s closet, in ambassadorial councils or the tented field, behold, is it not written in the dictionaries of biographers?
To them may be added Hutton the controversialist, and the clever and profligate Hill, who lived an Epicurean and died a Romanist, and to whose opinions Ben Jonson alludes when he says:—
“Thou Atomi ridiculous,
Whereof old Democrite and Hill Nicholas,
One said, the other swore, the world consists.”
Glancing our eye adown the long roll, we distinguish the name of Whitelocke, who was indebted for much of his education to Laud, and who, when that prelate was in difficulty, refused to act on the committee whose members had determined to push that difficulty to death. Pious Juxon, the poetic Lodge, and honest Foster, the country clergyman,—who wrote a treatise called ‘Hoplocrissma Spongus, or a sponge to wipe away the weapon-salve, wherein is proved that the cure taken up among us by applying the salve to the weapon is magical and unlawful,’—these follow; and, not less honoured, succeed the names of Sutton and Buckland,—the first, zealous Reformer; the second, as zealous Romanist. To these may be added Wilde, the dramatist; Jones, the ornament of the English Benedictines; tuneful Shirley, a greater dramatist than Wilde; and Hutton, who was distinguished for his learning in French and Italian as well as in classical literature. Further we find Dr. Speed, the son of the chronologist; William Meaux or Meuse, who is described as having “entered in the physick line;” the loyal divines Walwyn, Good, and Edwards; and a host of men less known to fame, and who were expelled the University for being consistent in their political opinions. Calamy is a name not to be omitted; and Archdeacon Layfield is remembered as the clergyman who was punished for having the letters I. H. S. in his church, by being dragged in his surplice through the City, and who refused to pay either fifteen hundred pounds or five to save himself from being sold to the Algerines or the Plantations.
Snelling, the tragic writer; Howe, the naturalist; Frank Goldsmith, who wrote for love and not for hire; Gayten, pleasant author of ‘Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote;’ Hewit, the clergyman, executed for loyalty to the cause of Charles, and whom his old schoolfellow Wilde attended on the scaffold; and perhaps greater than all, Davenant the commentator, brother to the laureate, and son to Shakspeare’s melancholic host at Oxford, were others of the alumni of our house.
Nor must I omit the name of Will Quarles; Calamy and Shirley, men even more noted, I have already incidentally mentioned: they both died within the same week, of fright caused by the Great Fire of London, a catastrophe which made a poet of another “Merchant Tailor,” the well-known Markland. Indeed a great many of the pupils became at least respectable poets, which is, after all, no great praise, as applied to the sons of song.
Pepys and Evelyn record no more interesting incidents connected with the Great Fire than are to be found in the reports, given by other writers, of the deaths of these two distinguished pupils of Merchant Tailors’. Shirley had exceeded by two years the allotted aggregate of “threescore years and ten” when he and his second wife, Frances, were driven from their habitation in Fleet-street. They took refuge from the flames in the neighbouring parish of St. Giles’s in the Fields. But so overcome were this much-tried and ancient pair, that they both died on the same day, and within a month of the great calamity. The hapless couple were buried in one grave in St. Giles’s, and became the associates of a goodly but silent company,—among others, Chapman, the poet, and translator of Homer, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury; a company that was afterwards enlarged by the mute presence of Charles the Second’s “Dick Penderell,” Andrew Marvell, the infamous Countess of Shrewsbury, who held Buckingham’s horse while the Duke slew her husband in a duel, and Sir Roger L’Estrange, who is called “the wit,” upon the principle of naming ill-painted animals on village sign-boards,—you would not have made the necessary discovery without the explanatory ‘legend.’
As for poor Calamy, he too died of the Fire. He was driven through the burning ruins, and so shocked was he at the sight of the destruction that had fallen on the great theatre of his popularity, that he never again quitted the room at Enfield, whither he was conveyed, but died on the day that Shirley and his wife were buried. Thus perished two of the greatest of the alumni of whom Merchant Tailors’ can boast. To the roll of those pupils we will again resort.
First among them we find handsome Ezekiel Hopkins, with whom all the women were in love,—in love both with his preaching and his person. Oh, happy Ezekiel! cunning Hopkins! Presbyterian when Presbytery was in power; Independent when to be so was to be “No. 1;” and winning all hearts from the episcopal pulpit of St Mary’s, Exeter, and subsequently St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, when Episcopacy and Royalty walked hand-in-hand among the lieges. Excellent Ezekiel! But, if he had his conceits, his schoolfellow Webb had his hobby; and nothing could convince him that the Chinese language was not the language spoken by Adam and Eve before the Fall.
Moreover there was the penniless and threadbare student Bonwicke; and the well-paid Bernard, tutor to the Dukes of Grafton and Northumberland, sons of Charles II. and the Duchess of Cleveland; but for his employers he was too pure and grave a man. And there was Wells, the Nonconformist and, sad blot in the school escutcheon, Titus Oates, who was also a nonconformist to morality and religion; and Needler, fit name for pupil of such house, and who wrote in defence of the Trinity when half England had more delight in the argument than the end for which the argument was raised. Several others of the pupils, now grown men, in the reign of James II., were hanging over their pulpits, half Romanists, half Reformers. Like the tomb of the old prelate at Canterbury, they were neither in the Church nor out of it, but a little of both. Indeed many of these men were singularly constituted; and we may cite as an instance the case of young Dawes, who began his poetical career by composing a poem, which I should not like to read, entitled the ‘Anatomy of Atheism.’ Nevertheless Merchant Tailors’ School boasted of Dawes, and of Boulter and Wilcox, whose election to Magdalen was called by Dr. Hough, the President, the “Golden Election,” as the Charterhouse boasted of Addison. The “small change” here hardly represented the value of the larger piece.
Sayer and Oliver, two fellow-pupils of the school, were successive Archdeacons of Surrey; Joshua Barnes and Peter Heylin were also of the “Table” or the “Bench;” and Wright, Vicar of Okeham, was of the latter, and not less famed for his steady refusal of all preferment. Like ‘Silver Penny,’ so named for his pure eloquence, though it might have been also for his liberality, and who has made so exquisite a restoration of Mongeham Church, near Deal, he loved the temple of which he was the priest too well to wish to change his office. Then there were botanical Sherrard; Torriano, of Italian blood; Dee, descended from that Dr. Dee who fooled Elizabeth so “consumedly;” and William Bridge, himself the son of a tailor and draper, and who contributed a Threnodia to the cairn of melodious mourning heaped upon the dead body of William the Third.
Merchant Tailors’ had peculiar joy in the accession of Anne, for it was through one of the pupils that the succession of this sovereign lady was undisputed. Crowther had married her mother, Anne Hyde, to the Duke of York; and he did this so cautiously and entirely according to law, with ample proof to support it, that James strove in vain to procure an annulling of the marriage, and Merchant Tailors’ looked on the position of the female monarch as one which had been achieved for her by one of the popular scholars of the house. It was expected that she would have shown her royal gratitude by conferring the Bishopric of Lincoln on little Doctor Dawes, another scholar; but Dawes preached unpalatable truths to her, and Anne would not move him from an honorary chaplaincy. “You have lost a bishopric by your preaching,” said a good-natured friend to him. “I do not know how that may be,” said Dawes, “but I certainly never mean to try to gain one by preaching.” Divinely well said, O doughty Dawes! You well deserved what you afterwards attained, the See of Chester.
Among the pupils who were raised to the Bench, Mews, of Winchester, was perhaps as remarkable as any. His death certainly was so. He was subject to fainting fits, from which he was used to recover by smelling hartshorn. He was once in conversation with a clerical friend, when he was suddenly attacked by one of these fits. He was speechless, but he pointed to the bottle of hartshorn on his table. The friend seized the bottle, and, opening the prelate’s mouth, poured the whole of the contents down his throat, by which the bishop was suffocated. Notwithstanding this neat achievement, the zealous clerical friend did not succeed to the vacant see.
I could name many more “prelates” and “parsons,” who were all good men and true, and who did honour to the establishment wherein they had received their earlier education; but the glory of all these pales before the brighter reputation of Ambrose Bonwicke, that “pattern for a student,” who was ever so mild, save when he helped his father, the schoolmaster, to flog the boys; so loyal, save when he refused to read the prayer for the prosperity of the House of Hanover; and so wise, save when, in honour of religion, he brought on death by his austerities. He lacked no eulogists after his decease; and it is suggestive as to what was considered early rising in the days of the first George, when we find young Bonwicke praised for getting up at half-past six! Merchant Tailors’ School was prouder of him than it ever was of the greatly intellectual Lowth. On the other hand, it was ashamed of Tooley, of St. John’s, who edited Tully’s ‘Offices,’ for the good reason that he was a namesake of the author; and this, his poor qualification, was also his solitary one. He effected one other deed,—the seducing of Amhurst to such bad ways, that the latter ex-alumnus of Merchant Tailors’ was expelled the University. Amhurst, in a preface to his poems, declared that he was so punished because he was said to “love foreign turnips and Presbyterian bishops; and to believe that steeples and organs were not necessary to salvation.”
Amhurst was among the “odd fellows” of the school. So was Leigh, who died at Gravelines, and whom the Roman Catholics proved to have died in their faith, by burying him within the church in that lively locality. Duncan Dee belongs rather to the bold than the odd fellows. He will ever be remembered as the intrepid defender of Sacheverel. Among the worthiest fellows was Wheatly, for ever famous for his immortal illustration of the Book of Common Prayer. Among the stout-hearted fellows was that paradoxical Dr. Byrom, of short-hand notoriety, who was loved for his wit and worth, and whose diary has lately been published by the Chetham Society. He was the son of a linendraper; married for love; struggled for life at his leisure; earned a decent maintenance by teaching and practising the system of short-hand which he had invented; spent his last days in well-earned ease; and is famous for his epigrammatic epitaph on that irregular and chemical genius and jolly fellow, Dr. Byfield, who invented the sal volatile oleosum, and who was thus celebrated by Byrom over a flask at the Rainbow:—
“Hic jacet Dr. Byfield, diu volatilis, tandem fixus!”
I may add, as being worthy to be classed among the clever fellows, Derham, whose ability was honoured by a sneer from Voltaire; and finally, among the audacious fellows was Zinzano, a conscientious clergyman, who thought to make Milton be forgotten by writing “an entirely new poem entitled ‘Paradise Regained,’” which turned out to be a treatise on the art of gardening! But the pupil whose name conferred most glory (so it is alleged) upon the records of the school during the Georgian days, was Clive,—that young hero who began by climbing church-spouts, and ended so miserably after he had added a wide empire to our little kingdom. If the celebrated Cline, another “Merchant Tailor,” killed more men in the practice of his profession, Clive, who was by no means contemptible as a slayer of legions, added millions of living subjects to our imperial sway. The only pupil who has been “distinguished from the crowd by being remembered to his infamy,” is Luke Milbourne, the antagonist of Dryden.
It has been said that Dr. South was a pupil of Merchant Tailors’, but this is not the case. He was however appointed chaplain to the Company; and he showed how he appreciated the honour, by taking for the text of his inauguration sermon the words, “A remnant shall be saved!”
The greater portion of the men of whom the Merchant Tailors are proud, are men who made themselves, so to speak, and were not indebted in any way for fortune to their tailors. There was another class of men however, of whom the contrary may rather be said,—men who assumed the poor vocation of the beau, and found it a bankrupt calling. They have existed in all ages, and we will go back to those of old times. Seniores priores.