Cherry & Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague

by Anne Manning

From this same spot the dust of saints may rise,

And the King’s prisoners come to light unbound.”

So when she turns to the sixteenth century, with its sordid materialism and its coarse handling of things most sacred, not merely does she recognise, as an Englishwoman, the grandeur of its struggles, but she sees its best embodiment in the tragedy of an almost perfect life. As she seeks refuge in that time of stress with the Household of Sir Thomas More, so in the next century she turns aside from the pettiness of Pepys or the realism of Defoe to the life of a simple girl born and nurtured on the great bridge that spans the Thames.

“Quali colombe dal disio chiamante

Con l’ali aperte e ferme al dolce nido

Volan per l’aer dal voler portate.”

With “The Household of Sir Thomas More” we walked in the dangerous days when the Lion found his strength. With “Cherry and Violet” we are in the still more alarming atmosphere of the Commonwealth and the Restoration. Year by year, as old houses open their chests, and scholars hunt among their yellow papers, we learn more of the reign of terror which marked the closing years of the Protectorate. We see one Verney living a “lude life” with “my lord Claypoll” and other “my lords” the kindred of the Protector; while another, the honest Sir Ralph, stoutest of Parliamentarians, is clapped in prison, no man knows why; and at the same time John Howe, pious Puritan preacher (whom Mistress Cherry herself knew of), is confessing how impossible it is to win the family which reigns at Whitehall to think of the welfare of their souls. Yet all the while there hangs over the land the outer gloom of an enforced conformity, which Miss Manning so happily describes. When we find ourselves in the heyday of the Restoration, or when we watch the splendours and the scandals of the Court of Charles II., we learn from the scandalous Pepys—now so much more than ever since Mr. H. B. Wheatley has given us all that it was possible to print of the wonderful Diary as Pepys really wrote it—how utterly rotten was the social life of the age, even among those, too often, who might seem to sit sedately above its more flagrant iniquities.

And then there comes in Defoe with his marvellous photographic realism of fiction, and tells us of the horrors of the Plague with a fidelity which those who had lived among them could, we fancy, hardly have approached.

From sources such as these—from Pepys and Defoe, as well as from the more sober pages of the stately Evelyn, it is that Miss Manning takes much of the mise-en-scène of her “Tale of the Great Plague”; and we find, as historic evidence accumulates around us, how true her imaginary picture is.

It was a happy thought which made the story begin on old London Bridge—happier still, readers will now think when they see Mr. Herbert Railton’s beautiful drawings. Something we learn of the stress of the time as we recall, with Mistress Cherry, the strange pageants which the bridge-dwellers watched from their windows. They saw the double tide, portent of unknown woes. They saw how the mighty Strafford went serenely to his death, and the old Archbishop passed up and down under guard on the long days of his weary trial. They saw the King come to his own again—and some of them may have looked out of windows that wet Sunday night in 1662 when Mr. Pepys had left his singing of “some holy things” and went back by water, shooting the rapids under “the bridge (which did trouble me) home, and so to bed.” The life on the bridge must have been something which an Englishman’s experience of to-day can hardly help to picture. Something of it we may fancy as we enter an old shop on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, or look out upon it and the Arno from the long corridor that connects the Uffizi with the Pitti. But on that narrow space is no such crowded life as on old London Bridge—no such dangers for foot-passengers, drivers, and horsemen. To picture this in seventeenth-century England we must cross near mid-day from Stamboul towards Pera by the far-famed Galata Bridge. Scarce anywhere but in Florence and in Constantinople can we now recall what sights old London Bridge must have witnessed. Mr. Railton sees them, though, very clearly, and we are more than content to see with his eyes. Something idealised they are, perhaps. Old London Bridge was hardly so beautiful, surely, as he pictures it; and his drawings, perhaps, are more like what the houses ought to have been than ever they were. “More Nurembergy than Nuremberg,” says Mr. Ruskin of some of Prout’s famous work. We may say it of Mr. Railton’s old London; and high praise it is. And as Mr. Railton brings back to us the scenes, so Mr. Jellicoe gives us the persons of old time in their habits as they lived.