My original may be as high as anybody’s for aught I know, for my mother kept very good company; but that part belongs to her story more than to mine. All I know of it is by oral tradition, thus: My nurse told me my mother was a gentlewoman, that my father was a man of quality, and she (my nurse) had a good piece of money given her to take me off his hands, and deliver him and my mother from the importunities that usually attend the misfortune of having a child to keep that should not be seen or heard of.
My father, it seems, gave my nurse something more than was agreed for, at my mother’s request, upon her solemn promise that she would use me well and let me be put to school; and charged her, that if I lived to come to any bigness, capable to understand the meaning of it, she should always take care to bid me remember that I was a gentleman; and this, he said, was all the education he would desire of her for me; for he did not doubt, he said, but that, some time or other, the very hint would inspire me with thoughts suitable to my birth, and that I would certainly act like a gentleman, if I believed myself to be so.
But my disasters were not directed to end as soon as they began. It is very seldom that the unfortunate are so but for a day; as the great rise by degrees of greatness to the pitch of glory in which they shine, so the miserable sink to the depth of their misery by a continued series of disasters, and are long in the tortures and agonies of their distressed circumstances, before a turn of fortune, if ever such a thing happens to them, gives them a prospect of deliverance.
My nurse was as honest to the engagement she had entered into as could be expected from one of her employment, and particularly as honest as her circumstances would give her leave to be; for she bred me up very carefully with her own son, and with another son of shame like me, whom she had taken upon the same terms.
My name was John, as she told me, but neither she or I knew anything of a surname that belonged to me; so I was left to call myself Mr. Anything, what I pleased, as fortune and better circumstances should give occasion.
It happened that her own son (for she had a little boy of her own, about one year older than I) was called John too; and about two years after she took another son of shame, as I called it above, to keep as she did me, and his name was John too.
As we were all Johns, we were all Jacques, and soon came to be called so; for at that part of the town where we had our breeding, viz., near Goodman’s Fields, the Johns are generally called Jacque; but my nurse, who may be allowed to distinguish her own son a little from the rest, would have him called captain, because, forsooth, he was the eldest.
I was provoked at having this boy called captain, and I cried, and told my nurse I would be called captain; for she told me I was a gentleman, and I would be a captain, that I would. The good woman, to keep the peace, told me, ay, ay, I was a gentleman, and therefore I should be above a captain, for I should be a colonel, and that was a great deal better than a captain; “for, my dear,” says she, “every tarpauling, if he gets but to be lieutenant of a press smack, is called captain, but colonels are soldiers, and none but gentlemen are ever made colonels. Besides,” says she, “I have known colonels come to be lords and generals, though they were bastards at first, and therefore you shall be called colonel.”
Well, I was hushed indeed with this for the present, but not thoroughly pleased, till, a little while after, I heard her tell her own boy that I was a gentleman, and therefore he must call me colonel; at which her boy fell a-crying, and he would be called colonel. That part pleased me to the life, that he should cry to be called colonel, for then I was satisfied that it was above a captain: so universally is ambition seated in the minds of men that not a beggar-boy but has his share of it.
So here was Colonel Jacque and Captain Jacque. As for the third boy, he was only plain Jacque for some years after, till he came to preferment by the merit of his birth, as you shall hear in its place.