“ROGUES AND PROCTORS”
On the last day of her visit, the queen was entertained by “that charitable man but withal most determined enemy to Rogues and Proctors,” Master Richard Watts, whose almshouse for the lodgment of six poor travellers bears still upon its front the evidence of his aversions. Controversy has long raged around the term “proctor,” and the victory seems to rest with those who declare that the class thus excluded from the benefits of Master Watts’ charity was that of the “procurators” who were licensed by the Pope to go through the country collecting “Peter’s pence”; but I have my own idea on that point, and I believe that the “proctors” referred to were not papists, but either “proctors that go up and downe with counterfeit licences, cosiners, and suche as go about the countrey using unlawfull games”; or the “proctors” especially and particularly mentioned in the Statute Edw. VI. c. 3, s. 19, licensed to collect alms for the lepers who at that time were still numerous in England. These privileged beggars were deprived of their immunity from arrest by the “Act for Punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdie Beggars” (39 Eliz. c. 4), wherein “all persons that be, or utter themselves to be Proctors, procurers, patent gatherers, or collectors for gaols, prisons, or hospitals”[5] are, together with “all Fencers, Bearewards, common players of Interludes, and Minstrels” to be adjudged Rogues and Vagabonds. Now it is sufficiently remarkable that this Act was passed (perhaps with the strenuous help of Master Watts, who was a Member of Parliament, and who we see hated proctors so ardently) at about the time when the “Six Poor Travellers” was built, and the reasons for refusing admission either to a true Proctor of a lazar-house, or to a pretended one, must be sufficiently obvious.
Master Watts entertained the Queen at his house on Boley (? Beaulieu) Hill on the last day of her visit, and when that courtly man apologised for the “poor cottage” (he didn’t mean it, but ’twas the custom so to do) Her Majesty is supposed to have graciously answered “Satis,” and so Satis House it remained, and the hideous building that now stands upon its site still bears, grotesquely enough, its name.
Quite a train of miscellaneous Royalties and celebrities came here after Elizabeth’s second visit in 1582; the Duke of Sully; James the First, who angered the seafaring population because he didn’t care for the ships, loved hunting, and was afraid of the cannon—James the First again, with Christian the Fourth of Denmark and Prince Henry; Prince Henry by himself in 1611; Frederick, Elector Palatine of Bohemia; Charles the First on two occasions, on the second of which “the trane-bands ... scarmished in warlike manner to His Majesties great content”; the French Ambassador, in 1641, who thought Rochester was chiefly observable on account of its Bridge “furnished with high railings, that drunkards, not uncommon here, may not mix water with their wine”; and nineteen years later, Charles the Second, on his “glorious and never-to-be-forgotten Restoracion.”
How Charles was fêted here, and how he stayed at the beautiful old place that has taken the name of “Restoration House” from this visit, these pages cannot tell; the story is too long.
PEPYS
And here, in the name of all that’s lewd and scandal-mongering, comes old Pepys again. It is no use trying to keep him out of one’s pages: suppress him at one place, and he recurs unfailingly at another, with a worse record than before. I discreetly “sat on” him at Deptford, but here he is at Rochester, “goin’ on hawful,” to quote one of Dickens’ characters (I forget which, and the society of so many Kings and Queens on the Dover Road is so fatiguing that I have neither sufficient time nor energy to inquire).
Well then, it was in 1667[6] that Mr. Samuel Pepys came here, and, putting up at the “White Hart,” strolled into the Cathedral, more intent upon the architecture than the doctrine, it would seem; for when service began he walked out into the fields, and there “saw Sir F. Clark’s pretty seat.” And so “into the Cherry Garden, and here he met with a young, plain, silly shopkeeper and his wife, a pretty young woman, and I did kiss her!” And after this they dined, and walked in the fields together till dark, “and so to bed,” without the usual “God forgive me!” which, considering how he had shirked the Cathedral service, and how questionable had been his conduct in the Cherry Garden, was more needful than ever, one would think.
