And yet the fourscore years which had just passed from the day of his birth, when he was finally deposited in the consecrated ground of St. Andrew Undershaft, were not unhappy years. Under trial, next to trust in God, I do not know of any better anodyne, more potent balm, than literary occupation; and of that, Stow, that tall, thin, cheerful, pleasant, bright-eyed, strong-memoried, sober, mild, courteous, truth-loving tailor and antiquary, had his fill.
He loved truth above everything, and quite as intense was his hatred of quacks, pretenders, and those stupendous “shams” which have so often made eloquent and bilious the energetic Carlyle. He loved one thing with as strong a love as he felt for truth,—antiquarian pursuits. If ever old times should come round again, the Society of Antiquaries should feel themselves in duty bound to adopt him, properly authorized, as a patron saint; and appeal to him at much-perplexed meetings with a “Sancte Johanne de Stow, ora pro nobis!” to which he will doubtless answer “Sto, adjutorius!”
What a sifter he was of old legends! And what truths he, after all, did save from much rubbish! How well he proved that the sword in the City arms was not there because of the Lord Mayor’s having struck down Jack Straw or Wat Tyler, but that it stood there as the Sword of St. Paul, in honour of the apostle. He swept away the fables of old London with herculean power, clearing them away as Niebuhr has those of ancient Rome, yet leaving nothing half so pretty in their place. He was the first who insisted that Richard the Third was by no means such a deformed fiend as he was painted by those who had written under his enemy Henry VII. and his successors.
James IV. of Scotland owes it to Stow that his head found a burial-place, after a world of adventure quite enough to turn it. James the Fourth, as my readers doubtless remember, was slain in the fatal fight at Flodden Field. At the end of the day of bloody arbitrement there brought to a close, the body of the unlucky monarch was found among a heap of the fallen. The discoverers made prize of the corpse, wrapped it up in lead, and transmitted it as a thanksgiving offering to the monastery at Sheen, in Surrey. It was well taken care of by the honest people there as long as the monastery stood; but when the dissolution of these religious establishments took place, and the edifice was converted into a mansion for the Duke of Suffolk and his warm-hearted spouse, Mary, the sister of Henry VIII. and the widow of Louis XII. of France, the new occupants put their royal cousin’s body into a fresh wrapping of lead, and unceremoniously rolled it into an upper lumber-room. There it served for sundry vile purposes, until some rude workmen engaged in the house lopped off its head out of sheer wantonness. Their master, a glazier of Wood-street, Cheapside, anxious for as much of a king’s company as a glazier could possibly get, carried the head with him into the City. There, on the man of putty’s sideboard, the dried remnant of a crowned king, with its red hair and beard, and a “sweet savour” thence springing, was long the admiration of the glazier’s evening parties, and a never-ending subject of conversation for his guests. There Stow saw this skull of the anointed James, but at a time when the savour had ceased to be sweet, and when it had become a too familiar bore at the soirées of its proprietor.
The soul of the honest and refined tailor, the sentiment of the zealous antiquary, was shocked at the spectacle of gallants, emancipated apprentices, and giggling City girls, knocking about the mazzard of the gallant king, as they sipped their muscadel or tasted their cakes and ale. John Stow expostulated, and the glazier consented to ransom the royal sconce. The tailor quietly and decently interred it within the old Church of St. Michael’s, Wood-street, the site of which is now occupied by Wren’s edifice; and the dust of the once-crowned brow of James of Scotland forms a portion of a path daily trodden by the unconscious lieges of Wood-street.
I have already noticed what incident induced our literary tailor to meditate upon the delusions of history. Another incident taught him that appeals to the passions are destructive in their results, and confirmed him in his opinion that gentleness has more real power for good than violence.
Nearly opposite the East India House stands the Church of St. Andrew Undershaft, “because that of old time, every year,” says Stow in that admirable ‘Survey of London’ with which his name is associated, “on May-day in the morning, it was used that an high or long shaft or May-pole was set up there before the south door of the said church.” The church was not so high as the pole or shaft, and it received, in consequence, its name of “Undershaft,” to distinguish it from other edifices dedicated to St. Andrew. Chaucer, describing a lofty braggart, says he “bears his head as high as the great shaft of Cornhill.” The pride of the shaft fell, and the shaft too, on the evil May-day of the year 1517.
Edward III. had confirmed the enactment of Edward I., permissory to the unrestrained settlement of foreigners in this country. The first monarch especially encouraged the Flemish cloth-workers, whose looms were shortly equal to the manufacture of the whole wool England could produce. Thereupon the exportation of English wool, and the importation of foreign woollen cloths, were alike prohibited; and Cornhill and tailors had a paradisiacal time of it. But in course of years, foreigners poured in to traffic in this country, and as they took no English wares away with them, but heaps of English gold and silver, a very general discontent was engendered, gradually grew, and had reached its height in 1517. In the Lent of that year, John Lincoln, a citizen and demagogue, called upon Dr. Bell, who was engaged to preach the Spital sermon at Easter, and so worked upon him, that Bell denounced the foreigners from the pulpit, with a fanatic fervour that might be envied by Dr. Cahill, when descanting on the never-to-be-forgotten “glorious idea” of massacring English Protestants. “The heavens,” thus rang the Bell, “belong to the Lord of Heaven, but the earth he hath given to the children of men. England is the spot which he has given to Englishmen; and as birds defend their nests, so ought Englishmen to defend their soil from the intrusion of aliens. Yea, even as the swallow repelleth the usurper from her ancient abode, should they drive out those who would divide with them the inheritance of their fathers.” On this hint, the valiant tailors’ apprentices, and others of like kidney, began to insult all foreigners whom they encountered in the streets; and on the eve of May-day, an encounter, foolishly brought about by the authorities and some lads playing at bucklers in Cheapside, and who objected to disperse at rude bidding, swelled to a tumult, in which the foreigners’ dwellings were plundered and burned; but no personal hurt inflicted. Down descended the troops upon the rioters; some hundreds were captured; Lincoln, the leader, was hanged; and the King was reconciled to the City at a banquet of grace, given in Guildhall. Two-and-thirty years elapsed before the May-poles were again erected, as signals for those light of foot and of heart to come and dance and be merry.
When the old pole was once more erected, decked with ribbons and spring flowers, in front of St. Andrew’s, the holy wrath of a curate, “Sir Stephen” of old, was fired against it. He flew into the stone pulpit at Paul’s Cross, and he denounced the parishioners of St. Andrew’s as accursed idolaters, inasmuch as they had set up an idol, and by naming their church “under the shaft,” they had done honour to the pole as well as to the apostle. Stow, who appears to have been ubiquitous, was among the listeners, but not among that portion of them who were subsequently actors, and who rushed from beneath the pulpit, swept along St. Mary Axe, and seizing the idolatrous shaft, righteously hewed the same into fragments, and then religiously burnt the whole at the very church door. Ah, thought honest John with a sigh, if they thus destroy what was old yet lovely, I will take more pains than ever to preserve the memory of what perishes;—and he faithfully did so.
It was the over-zeal of members of adverse parties that made of this learned tailor a Christian, rather than a Romanist or a Reformer; and he was too gentle of heart to feel unlimited wrath against any but the defacers of monuments: his own was as little free from assault however as his own stall had been, when he was alive. The idle deboshed fellows about Cornhill used foully to assail him and his apprentices, for no better reason than that he would not share in their naughtiness. He received the battery of their heavy tongues without reply, and even bade his loving helpmate to be quiet when the queans on the pavé mocked her as the spouse of a poor scholar. For be it said, Cornhill was frequented by the lowest as well as the highest in the land, and its prison “Tun” for night-brawlers, and its pillory for other offenders, bespoke a neighbouring lawless population; and this is further proved by Lydgate, who says, in his ‘London Lick-Penny:’—