Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

by Dr. Doran

There is an establishment in the City, drafts on which are not so much coveted as on Jones, Lloyd, and Co. I allude to the venerable Aldgate Pump. Adjacent to the well, to which the “one-arm’d City cow” is now the crown, Stowe, the son, was driving his double trade of hopeful student and rather indifferent tailor, in 1549. A stirring little incident took place in front of his house, which caused him to deeply reflect as to the way in which men wrote history.

There had been an insurrection in Norfolk and Suffolk. It was the chronic malady of our constitution at that time to be always suffering from “breakings-out.” As many lying reports thereof reached the City, as if London enjoyed, as we do now, electric telegraphs, “own correspondents,” and unpurchasable newspapers rather interested in the stocks. Indeed, truth was as perilous as gunpowder. Thus, the Bailiff of Rumford had kissed his wife in the morning ere he came to London market. He was standing at his stall in the latter place, running his fingers through samples of corn, when “Sir Stephen,” a priest, asked, “What news?” “Well,” said the Bailiff, “men are rising, even in Essex. Thank God, all is quiet however, my way.”

Now Sir Stephen was a casuist; and he had a case and an accident, by which he argufied a conclusion in no time that the Bailiff was a traitor. “Men are rising even in Essex, thank God!—be that thy speech, then, naughty traitor? Have him away to the Sheriff!” The market having been dull, the standers-by were delighted to find something wherewith to enliven it. They would not listen to the offered explanations of the bewildered Bailiff; he must be a rebel; and they hoped for a fine day for the hanging. The poor fellow was examined, tried, pronounced guilty upon the deposition of the priest, and sentenced to be hanged, opposite Stow’s house. The convict entered a meek protest against being put in so painful a state of suspense, which they promised to attend to after the ceremony.

Well, the man was put to death, and it was a most fortunate thing that Stow, the tailor, was there to see it. He beheld the composure of the victim, believed his denial of guilt; and when he heard him proclaimed as a traitor, he was struck with the fact, that, if such proclamations were the documentary ground-work of history, the latter was very pretty reading indeed for those who loved fiction. He forthwith removed to Lime-street Ward, where he undertook to repair records as well as what he had hitherto put his hand to. For nearly half a century he passed his days, and good portion of his nights, in the search after that most ticklish of virgins to catch—historical truth. The natural consequences ensued. He did not make money as an author, and he starved as a tailor. Tailor and author! double the ordinary woe of men! The little he made at his trade he devoted to the purchase of books useful to him in his profession.

Now honest John was of a Romish family, albeit the gaillardise of the Chantry priests had helped to make a convert of him. But he had a respect for the antiquity of things, if not of facts, connected with the old faith; and when mention was made of a tailor who worked little, but who studied much, who professed a reverence for truth, and yet who spoke almost lovingly of antiquated ceremonies, he was at once suspected of being suspicious. The suspicion was heightened by the false accusations of a younger brother; and down came Ecclesiastical Commissioners upon his little library, to see if out of it they could not prove him a Papist and rebel, worthy the scourge and the stake. They made sad havoc among his dearly-beloved books; and were more than once on the point of committing him to prison, when a volume with an incomprehensible title came under their thumb. But John answered so wisely and so well, that they could find no guile in him; and they left him in some little peace, and up to his ears in papers.

He was thus visited more than once, and always at the instigation of his vagabond brother. It was after one of these harassing, and to him perilous perquisitions, that he happened to be reading an account of some sorry knave who was hanged at the Elms in Smithfield; the comment which he himself hung upon the text was significant, and to this effect:—“God amend, or send like end to, all such false brothers!” But he was rewarded for many of his vexations by the honour which he reaped out of the harvest of criticism which sprang out of the publication of his first great work, the ‘Chronicles’ of England from the coming of that uncertain gentleman Brute, to the accession of his certain descendant, bluff Harry the Eighth. John did not hurry over this work; he took his time; thought over it when making liveries for the corporation, walked miles for it, read libraries for it, and spent all the cash thereon which he possessed, could beg, or could borrow. O ye gentlemen literateurs, who turn out successive volumes of history faster than John Stow could make jerkins, think of a plodding forty years spent in perfecting this one work!

The author was poorer when he completed his novel, painfully elaborate, yet clear and useful book, than he was when he commenced it. He was not a better tailor than before; and altogether his prospects were not brilliant. But he wore a stout heart, lived upon hope, and fondly thought, good old man! (I trust that no “d—d good-natured friend” disturbed that thought), that every phrase he wrote was rich in truth. Now some of it is as true as Robinson Crusoe, and yet quite as veracious as much with which we trouble ourselves under the venerated name of “history.”

Towards the end of the sixteenth century the now feeble old tailor, but cheerful scholar, produced his ‘Annals of England,’ the dedication of which had been accepted by Archbishop Whitgift. He had asked the City, proud to call him her “Chronicler,” to help him in his heavy charges, by bestowing on him two freedoms. I do not remember that the application was successful, but I do retain in my memory how truth-loving John was treated by the Vintners’ Company. The modest author, to support his petition for some slight favour prayed of them, read to those jolly fellows in court assembled some sheets of his great work. They were bored to death, and treated him like a beggar. They would neither help him, nor let him help himself by examining the records in their possession.

He kept a cheerful heart through it all. He winced indeed under the ignorant additions made to his works by other editors, but he not the less cordially aided them in perfecting their own contributions to antiquarian history; and when he met with crosses in either his literary or his sartorial aspect, the old man calmed his irritation by reading and by annotating ‘Chaucer.’ But he was growing old and helpless. Although he was called the City’s fee’d Chronicler, it is not certain whether this was or was not a mere “façon de parler.” Of one thing there is no doubt whatever. That ill-dressed king, James I., contemplating Stow rather as a tailor than an author, granted him a license whereby he was empowered to go about and collect charity,—gather benevolences, a chartered Bedesman. But as he happened to be so afflicted with gout in the feet that he could not perambulate with his petition, the license was next to useless. Stow looked at his willing but helpless legs, and said with a melancholy smile that he was maimed in the members wherewith he had most offended; for that no man had walked as many miles as he had in search of material for his books. Nevertheless, strengthened by the royal license, he set up for a weary day or two as a beggar; and all that he gained was seven and sixpence from St. Mary’s Wolnoth. Magnificent alms for a veteran antiquary!