CHAPTER VII
Enquire at London 'mongst the taverns there.
—Richard II. V. 3.
You know the place well enough, or failing yourself—if so be that you are less than three-score years and ten—then your father would remember it well.
It was situate in the Strand until that time, close to its junction with Fleet Street and within a pebble's throw from St. Clements. A tall narrow building, raftered and gabled, the timbers painted a dark chocolate colour, with alternate lines of a luscious creamy tint rendered mellow with the dirt and smoke of London. It stood on that selfsame spot two hundred and more years ago, when it was the favourite resort of that band of young rakes who adorned the Court of the Merry Monarch.
It were somewhat difficult to say why my lord of Craye, or Sir Anthony Wykeham, or the Earl of Stowmaries had chosen this very unprepossessing tavern for their evening assemblies. The exterior, as your father could tell you, was certainly not inviting, for the gables were all askew, the stories low and widening one over another, all awry as if ready to fall, the front door, too, was cracked from corner to corner, nor were the public rooms much more alluring. In the coffee room the window with its small panes of bottle glass hardly allowed any daylight to filter in; the floor had once been neatly covered in bricks, but now most of these were broken in half, with pieces of them missing, showing little three-cornered holes which suggested dirt-grubbing insects and storehouses of dust.
There were other disadvantages, too, about the place, which should have scared off any fastidious young man however bent on pleasure he might be, but we have it on M. Misson's own authority—and he was no great admirer of things English and speaks somewhat ill-naturedly of everything he saw during his voyage—that the cellars at the sign of the Three Bears were exceedingly well stocked with Spanish and Rhenish wines and even with French brandies which were heady and vastly pleasing to the palate first and to the temper afterwards.
We are also told by that same highly-critical French traveller that Mistress Janet Foorde, wife of the landlord of the Three Bears, could turn out a better supper than any other cook in London, and fashioned a lamprey pie, or a fricassée of rabbits and chickens, in such a delicious manner that once eaten it could never be forgotten.
Be that as it may, we know it for a fact that in this year of grace 1678 the Tavern in the Strand at the sign of the Three Bears was, every evening after the hour of eight, frequented by the very élite of London society. Supper was served in one of the smaller rooms at a table around which sat those same gentlemen who in the earlier part of the day had graced His Majesty's levee, or the Court of the unhappy Queen, or that narrow circle which stood as a phalanx round the person of the unpopular Duke of York.