SIR JOHN HAWKWOOD, THE HEROIC TAILOR.
“The dew of grace bless our new knight today.”
Beaumont and Fletcher: Knight of Malta.
On the 10th day of August, 1668, Mr. Samuel Pepys passed a portion of his morning at Goring House, the mansion of Lord Arlington, a nobleman who conversed with him amicably, and introduced him to other lords, with whom the gallant secretary prattled after his fashion, to say nothing of the flattery and compliments paid him by Lord Orrery. In the afternoon we find him at Cooper’s, the miniature painter’s, who was painting the portrait of that excellent lady Mrs. Pepys. The portrait was excellent in every way, save that it was not like Mr. Pepys’s wife, and that she wore a blue garment, which he could not bear. However, the courteous husband paid £38. 3s. 4d. for the picture, crystal, and case, that he might, as he prudently says, be out of the painter’s debt; and thereupon he adds:—“Home to supper, and my wife to read a ridiculous book I bought today of the History of the Taylors’ Company.”
The title of the book which Mrs. Pepys read aloud to her husband, and which is a book that a lady might well blush to read either aloud or to herself, runs as follows:—‘The Honour of the Merchant Taylors; wherein is set forth, the noble arts, valiant deeds, and heroic performances of Merchant Taylors in former ages; their honourable loves and knightly adventures, their combating of foreign enemies, and glorious successes in honour of the English nation; together with their pious acts and large benevolences, their building of publick structures, especially that of Blackwell Hall, to be a market-place for the selling of woollen cloaths. Written by William Winstanley. London, 1668, 8vo. With the head of Sir Ralph Blackwell, with a gold chain, arms of London on the right, and of the Merchant Taylors on the left.’
Just twenty years later another volume was printed with nearly a similar title. The alleged object was to give a biography of the renowned tailor and soldier, Sir John Hawkwood; and for this reason we will give the later work priority of notice. There will be amusement, if not instruction, in remarking how exquisitely our ancestors wrote biographical works in the days of dark King James.
This black-letter biography describes Hawkwood as a modest tailor lad who fell honestly in love with his master’s daughter, Dorinda. But Dorinda had a soul above buttons, and having given up her heart unasked to Impolite, a young, foolish heir, she cut the thread of Hawkwood’s desire with the shears of cruelty, and tore away from his protestations in a heat that even the paternal goose had never known.
Hawkwood, for a gallant man, committed an ungallant action; he discovered the lover of Dorinda by reading the correspondence locked up in the lady’s cabinet, and he avenged himself by writing a note in the lady’s name which brought poor Impolite to a meeting, whereat he was seized and led to a madhouse as incurably insane through the sweet passion of love.
The victim was subjected to a treatment which would undoubtedly have rendered a sane man mad, but he prattled so respectfully of medicines to the doctor, that the latter dismissed him as “cured.” In the meantime Dorinda refused to ratify her bond with a discharged lunatic; and the uncle of Impolite, a sort of melodramatic Gaspero, hired two ruffians, Bragwell and Daniel, to mutilate Hawkwood, as a punishment for his having been the cause of the breaking off of the match.
These gentlemen fell upon the bold young tailor as, “ever frolic and gay,” he was returning from Green-Goose Fair, held at Bow, on St. Wilielmus’s day, “so much honoured by the tailors as their patron.” But the ruffians found a Tartar, and Hawkwood incontinently slew both. The gallant apprentice, having slept upon the matter, resolved to go abroad, in order to avoid unpleasant inquiries; and having composed a score of execrable verses to his mistress, wherein he committed worse murder upon the Muses than before upon the ruffians, and having thrust the same under the bedroom-door of the cruel Dorinda, he went his solitary way with a heavy heart and a small bundle under his arm.
Winstanley, the author of this delectable bit of historical romance, exhibits a merry trait of originality by suddenly announcing that the murdered ruffians were, after all, like our friend Mr. John Robinson in the song, “not dead at all;” and delicately does he narrate how those respectable individuals, by coming to themselves, found that they were in the very worst possible society. Forthwith they slew a sheep, and having cut out the heart thereof, they exhibited the same to Gaspero, as the heart of the valiant tailor, and received from their employer not only their wages of sin, but an invitation to stay and dine and spend the night at his house.
The ruffians having been soon after got out of the way, Gaspero took to seeing ghosts and other unpleasant things, by way of showing his remorse for having been accessory to the murder of a tailor. But in the meantime his supposed victim was mirthfully passing from inn to inn; and as those establishments were ever furnished with a haunted room, it was his humour to sleep in the same, and lay the ghosts and other spirits which he found there.
Soon, weary of this life ashore, Hawkwood took to the sea, accompanied by Lovewell, another young tailor, and another victim of the gentle vision, who had unsuccessfully endeavoured to sun himself in a Lamira’s eyes. At the conclusion of the voyage, the adventurous youths landed in Ireland, and became ’squires of dames, taking up their quarrels, fighting in their behalf against any odds, and performing wonderful actions, such as could only have been imagined by the most unscrupulous of liars. When Pelion has been mounted upon Ossa, and the heap of mendacity is reared to a sufficiently stupendous height, the author grows tired of romantic fibbing, and descends to the lie commonplace. He brings his heroes to England, and with them two pages, who had joined their slim selves to the heroic tailor-knights’ fortunes; and who of course turn out, as is perfectly natural, to be Dorinda and Lamira in disguise. Then, at the end of the first act of the drama, there is a double wedding, a dance of characters, and an elaborate detail of after circumstances which I will not pause to relate.
Such was the treatment which Hawkwood and history received at the hands of an anonymous author in the year 1687. The volume in question, of which there are two copies in the British Museum, is, in fact, a coarsely printed black-letter tract; the paper such as even a modern grocer would turn up his nose at; and the woodcuts violating every propriety, regardless at once of perspective and humanity.
The volume however which Mrs. Pepys read to her husband is worse in every respect. There is a copy in the Guildhall Library; and I have to thank the most courteous of librarians, Mr. Allchin, for the opportunity I have enjoyed of perusing it. Perhaps the second edition, of which I have spoken above, was prepared expressly for the benefit of the youthful mind. The first is certainly bad enough to pollute the minds of all who read or listened to the reader. I will only add, that the illustrating artist has been so hard put to it, that he frequently makes one design represent two different events, the scenes of which are wide apart. He might have alleged one thing in favour of his so doing; namely, that the illustration in question quite as truthfully represented one scene with the actors therein, as it did the other. Of this there can be no doubt; and I may further add, in behalf of the pictorial illustrations, that they assuredly did not offend against the second commandment, for there is nothing in them that is a likeness of anything in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth; and if it be an old joke to say so, it is, at all events, better than any of the jokes to be found in the volume which Mrs. Pepys read with complacency to that wicked little man, her redoubtable husband.
The true story of John Hawkwood needs no romance to lend it brightness, or season it with wonders. It has marvels enough of its own; and these, redolent of romance, are, in fact, sober and incontrovertible truth.
If Essex has been famous for calves, it has also had its share of heroes; heroes (if one may say so) in evil as in good; with its very villages producing them, and that in the humblest localities. If Frinton rejoices because of Cornelius and Tilbury, the poison swallowers, Sible Hedingham is glad because of John Hawkwood, the tailor and soldier.
In the village last-named, and in the reign of Edward the Second, there lived a tanner called Gilbert Hawkwood. His vocation not being a profitable one, he resolved that it should not be followed by his son. The latter, instead of tanning hides of brutes, was taught the mystery of covering those of men. In simple, honest English, he was apprenticed to a tailor; and did not at all like it.
Cornhill was at that time the stage whereon tailors most did congregate; and as troops were constantly passing that way, to and from the vicinity of the tower, John Hawkwood, wherever he met with them, sighed as he contrasted their jolly swash-buckler sort of air with his own melancholy look, gait, and calling. The King, Edward the Third, was then waging a most unjust war with France, and needed soldiers to champion his bad cause. Hawkwood recked little of the merits of the quarrel, but when a roving party of heroes pressed him to join, he met them more than half-way; and never was he more jubilant than when he changed his ’prentice muffin-cap for a peaked morrion, his dark rags for a gay suit, and a sword and a shield were the implements of his work, instead of a needle and thimble.
Now young Hawkwood was not a lad to be satisfied with being simply a “man-at-arms.” Michel, in the French play, when he recounts how he was pressed into the service, says, “Mon Général me nomma soldat; mais ma nomination n’a pas eu de suite.” The boy from Sible Hedingham was made of other stuff than that which could make him be content with singing, like the pleasant gentleman in the ‘Dame Blanche,’—“Ah! quel plaisir d’être soldat!” He was resolved to lead as well as serve; and he served well, to give him the better chance of leading. It is the only policy that permanently succeeds.
Officers were not dainty in those days, either of speech or anything else. Difficult as they were to satisfy, Hawkwood accomplished it. The man who laid on his blows with such good heart, and thwacked the foe so lustily and to excellent purpose, albeit in anything but an excellent cause, was a man whose sword was sure to carve out fortune for him. Accordingly, he soon passed from poor private to plumed captain. His purse was not much the better filled because of his brighter corslet and his new feathers; and as the foe he had to encounter was as badly furnished as himself, he got abundance of honour, but few pistoles. The King beheld him mowing down adversaries, as though he had been expressly engaged by Death to gather in his harvest. On the battle-field, the royal Edward dubbed the tailor knight. “Thou art the bravest knight,” said he, “in all the army.” “Umph!” murmured the cavalier of the needle, “and the poorest too!”
But he had what to a brave man was better than bezants, dearer than dollars, and above marks and moidores,—he had praise from the Black Prince. That chivalric personage was perfectly ecstatic at witnessing the deeds which Hawkwood enacted on the bloody, but glorious, day at Poitiers. The praise enriched him as though it had been pistoles. What baron, standing in need of a gentleman cut-throat, would hesitate to engage, at any cost (it was only promising and breaking a pledge), a man with a sharp sword and a stout arm, who had a verbal character from such a master as he whose sword is now rusting in peace above the time-honoured tomb at Canterbury?
Hawkwood needed some such testimony. The Peace of Bretigny had been ratified in 1360; and they who before had not had leisure to be ill, were all becoming seriously indisposed for want of action. As employment did not come, they made it for themselves. If kings could be stupendous scamps, why not commoner men? They waited long enough, as they thought, for hire for their swords, till at last they put the latter to private use. A band was formed, and called “Les Tards Venus,”—the “Come-at-Lasts,”—as if apologetically and modestly expressive of their patience. Some people would have been the better pleased had the self-styled tardy gentlemen been content to “wait a little longer.” The more learned members of the society, perhaps the chaplains, called the band the “Magna Comitiva,” or “Great Band.” A greater band of brigands certainly never existed, the chaplains included!
When it is thus said of those worthy gentlemen, of course the expression is based upon the principles, and measured by the standard, of these our own later and degenerate days. Hawkwood and his truculent friends thought they had a vested right to remain in undisturbed possession of every castle, their ownership of which was founded on their having murdered the last proprietor at his own hearth. We have foolish ideas on such matters; and we must only judge of these perfect gentlemen,—so at least historians tell us,—not by the criterion of that Christianity which they professed, but by the customs which they observed. As Mr. Justice Erle remarked the other day, we shall soon have thieves pleading the custom of Hounslow Heath.
Hawkwood was one of the most terrible of those men who either made war on their own account, or let out their swords and sinews in the service of any party who promised to pay them, and guaranteed the plunder. He became awfully renowned under the not very menacing title of “John of the Needle.” But his needle was four feet long; and if to “sew up” a person means to slay him, the phrase probably had its origin from the times and the actions of this most ruthless of tailors. He swept, with his English followers, the south of France; where the sound of his bugle and the flutter of his pennon always heralded devastation or death. England and France were at peace at that time, and the King of France complained to his brother of England. The gracious Edward, who thought as little of lying as the Czar Nicholas, gave his “parole de gentilhomme” that he was highly disgusted; but privately he signalled the freebooter with a “Well done, Hawkwood!”
“John of the Needle” did not fail to prick his way according to his fancy and profit after this hint. He was captain of the most famous and most successful “horde” that ever sang, “Stand and deliver!” Not that he acted in rough highwayman fashion,—not he! Meek tailor as he had been, he had become too much of a gentleman and soldier for that. He robbed and murdered only in accordance with the rules of chivalry; and he would have hung a common thief who had dared to hint that he was a brother by profession.
His black-mail produced him tons of “red gold,” and his forays now extended to the banks of the Po. There was something of the spirit of Merry Sherwood in him, for he had a sort of jolly delight in attacking the palace and stripping the person of a bishop. This kind of gentle amusement however was not at all to the taste of the Bishop of bishops at Rome; and the appeal made by the Vatican to the King of England had better success than that which had been made by the King of France.
Hawkwood submitted both to his own sovereign and to the Church. From the latter he purchased peace,—making large gifts, which were thought nothing the worse of that they were the product of robbery. John thereupon took to regular service: he first entered that of the Pisans, in 1364, and those roystering individuals soon furnished him with as much fighting as he could reasonably have stomach for: when they were not inclined to fight, he hired out his sword and person to powers willing to fight against them. Sometimes a single baron, having a quarrel with another baron, and wishing to get possession of his goods, engaged Hawkwood to transact the little business for him. He of the needle went at it with a will; and when he had secured the castle and property of the fallen noble, he generally defied the other to take them from him, with a “Come, if you dare!”
This system was never objected to: an arrangement à l’amiable was entered into, and Hawkwood was accounted as honest a man as before. In twenty-three years’ service in Italy he thus fought on any and every side. It was only when he got satiated with variety that he settled down to constancy, and swore stable allegiance to the Florentines. One incident of the style of warfare, and his skill in carrying it on, will suffice to show of what metal our Essex needle was fashioned.
One of the most creditable pieces of work ever accomplished by Sir John, was in the course of the war which Florence carried on against Milan in 1391. No one of the Condottiere captains hired to lead mercenaries to battle ever achieved such glory as our old Essex tailor on this occasion, and Florence deemed the cause safe that was entrusted to his management. In the present case, Milan was to be assailed on two opposite sides. The noble Count d’Armagnac attacked it from the west, and got thoroughly beaten ere Hawkwood had sufficiently advanced to make his onslaught by the east. The latter with his army was about five leagues from the city when he heard that his colleague had been routed: he became thoughtful, but not dismayed.
The country in which he found himself was like one of the pattern-books once so well-known to him. It was all patches of land, and between those patches intersections of streams. Indeed, the country had nothing of the regularity of a tailor’s pattern-book, for the patches were of various shapes, and the intersecting streams running in all directions: the country between the Alps and the Po has ever been a doubtful and spongy sort of land whereon to struggle for the award of victory.
Hawkwood was retreating, but the Adige, the Mincio, and the Oglio were yet to be crossed when the Governor of Milan, Giacopo del Verme, came upon him with his conquering legions. He sat mute and observant: the hazard was extreme. He could not cross the rivers without first beating a vastly superior enemy: to attempt it after a defeat would have been utter destruction. He therefore did nothing but bide his time; and when the enemy had become weary of looking on at him, and had learned to despise him, he suddenly fell upon them with a power against which there was so little preparation that, having thrashed his foe into a condition that made immediate pursuit impossible, he struck his tents and crossed the Oglio, under no worse fire than the sarcasms of his sore and helpless antagonists.
He went on, picking his way, until he reached a plain which was surrounded by the dykes of the Po, the Mincio, and the Adige, and lying below the level of those rivers. The dykes of the last river had been pre-occupied and fortified by the foe; the stream of the river too was broad and rapid, and when Hawkwood had surmounted all other obstacles he was terribly puzzled as to how he was to overcome this. The puzzle was not made easier to him when, from the little eminence on which he and his little army were stationed, like rats upon a brick in a flooded sewer, he beheld the entire plain turning into a lake. The progress of the change worked like a dissolving view at the Polytechnic; and, when the ex-tailor felt the water percolating through the lower chinks of his leg-armour, he was thoroughly satisfied, or rather dissatisfied, that his opponent was playing him a sorry joke. “Nay,” cried he, on second thoughts, “it is not so; the men shall not catch so much as a cold!”
The dykes had been cut, and he forthwith began himself to cut out a plan of triumph. He would neither be starved, nor beaten, nor moistened into submission. So he averred; and he had just declared as much when a messenger from the hostile leader, who occupied the only strip of land on which a man could walk dry-shod, sent by that road and messenger a present, which was delivered into Hawkwood’s own hands: it was a fox shut up in a cage! “Umph!” lowed the Essex calf, “it may be that I am a bit of a fox, and Reynard may know a trail that will take him safe home, and may spoil the sport of his pursuers by a ‘stole away.’”
He at all events went boldly in the darkness of that same night to look for one. He and his men plunged into the water, and waded through it in a direction parallel to the dykes of the Adige. Through mud and water up to the horse-girths, and across trenches, which engulfed the heavier men, who could not clear them, they all waded on; and, when the second night had nearly been spent, and numbers had been lost by cold, fatigue, and hunger, the survivors—the almost despairing infantry—clinging on to the tails of the horses which floundered before them, at length emerged again on to dry ground, upon the Paduan frontier.
The enemy did not dare to follow him in this hazardous undertaking, which had, as it deserved, so successful an issue. But even that enemy acknowledged that there was not a commander in Italy who, for bravery and for resources in moments of difficulty, could for a moment compare with Hawkwood the Tailor.
If Florence enjoyed an unusually lengthened term of peace and prosperity, the happy result was chiefly owing to the gallantry of Hawkwood and his men. The value which the State set upon his services was exemplified when Florence disbanded all her foreign mercenaries, save John of the Needle and one thousand men, the Macedonian phalanx of the land.
His unwonted ease however was not to the taste of the active soldier. He had ever been in turmoil, and could not exist without it. What says the old naval captain in the French song?—
“A présent, que je suis en retraite,
Je me vois forcé de végéter;
Et bien souvent tout seul je tempête
De n’avoir jamais à tempêter.
Un vieux compagnon de lame,
Aussi folâtre que moi,
Me dit de prendre une femme;
Eh! mais pas si mal, ma foi!
Car j’aime le tapage—
Et je suis tapageur.”
Just so with honest John. He had passed the best years of his life in war, and he could not do without at least a little healthy skirmishing; and he provided that which he had hitherto lacked, by taking a wife, and that wife a dark-eyed, lightning-tongued Italian. The lady, Bianca Sforza, and domestic controversy, kept him from “growing pursy,” like Sir Giles; and there was ever a very hot fire at the hearth of the tanner’s gallant son of Sible Hedingham.
In his later days he did what retired veterans are apt to do, and are wise in their aptness. He took to meditation, and, not to attending Bible societies, as hearty old admirals do now, but to not less praiseworthy service, a sample of which may be seen in his foundation of the English hospital at Rome for the reception of poor travellers. The funds, I believe, still exist, though they are diverted from the purpose contemplated by the founder.
It would serve, he thought, to balance much of a heavy account with Heaven; and he was comforted in that direction by those most skilful drawers of wills, the Romish priests. Having settled this matter, and feeling, like the Irish gentleman on his death-bed, that he had nothing to lay to his charge, for he had never denied himself anything, he calmly died in the Strada Pulverosa, in Florence, in the year 1393. He was buried with a magnificence that perhaps has never been surpassed. The very details of it dazzle the mental vision; and I will therefore leave my readers to conceive of it under the shadow of imagination. He was finally laid to rest in the Church of the Reparata, beneath a tomb in which there is metal enough to make thimbles for all the tailors in Christendom.
There is a cenotaph in honour of the hero in Sible Hedingham church. It is a profusely ornamented memorial, with the pretty conceit of the sort so dear to our forefathers, of hawks flying through a wood. It is due to him in whose honour it was erected, to say that if friends declared his almost superhuman courage and ability, hostile writers conceded with alacrity to the eulogy flung upon him in showers.
There is in Essex a manor of Hawkwood, which is supposed to owe its name to the gallant tailor-soldier; and the house on which, was reputed to have been built by his heirs. It is ascertained, however, that this manor of Hawkwood was so known in the reign of King John; and perhaps the renowned John’s ancestors originally came from its vicinity, and took its name for a surname, when surnames were rare, and they hardly knew what to call themselves. One author indeed has suggested that the received story of the lowly origin of Hawkwood is all fiction, and that he was really of gentle blood. But I protest against any such suggestion, for in that case what would become of all this history I have been telling?
In sober seriousness, the main facts are doubtless as they have been told. They are not mere romantic details of romantic times. In much later days we have heard of tailors turning out heroes. There is no worthier illustration of this fact that I can remember, than “daring Dörfling;” and his little story I will briefly tell, if my readers will only vouchsafe me ear and patience; as Crispin says, “Cela ne sera pas long.”