Finally, under the mastership of Cherry, Townley’s successor, a scene of another description took place, which caused infinite commotion. When the French Revolution broke out, the “Tailors” became infected; and inscriptions scrawled on the walls of the school-passages proved how disloyalty pervaded the breasts of the youthful writers. But from writing they proceeded to action. On the 13th of January, 1796, the Queen’s birthday, a tricoloured flag was hoisted on the Tower Walls, where, strange enough, it was allowed to remain for three hours, side by side with the royal standard. The City burst forth into a tumult of indignation or delight. When the authorities, acting on information, proceeded to the fortress, the insulting emblem had disappeared; but it was traced to a hiding-place beneath the bed of the son of the Rev. Mr. Grose, assistant chaplain at Merchant Tailors’. The horrified sire burnt the rag of rebellion to ashes, while his son confessed his guilt, and implicated in the raising of the insurrectionary standard a fellow-pupil named Hayward, under whose suggestions young Grose professed to have acted. Their fellow-pupils showed the vigour of their loyalty by nearly pounding Hayward to a pulpy consistence like that of the men whom Professor Whewell, as I have elsewhere noticed, concedes as possibly existing in the wide plane of Jupiter. The offenders were solemnly expelled; and since that period, the establishment has flourished in usefulness to the public and credit to its conductors.
It is an establishment which, despite some drawbacks, has produced not a few eminent “Merchant Tailors.” I can cite but a few, and, among the many, name the good and modest Bishop Andrews, and the learned Dove, who in the reign of James preached the funeral sermon of Mary Queen of Scots, at Peterborough. Spenser the Greek scholar, and the three virtuous sons of the virtuous Sandys, Bishop of London; Fox, the son and biographer of the Martyrologist; Heth, who logically tranquillized the public in 1582, when Harvey of Cambridge informed the world that it was coming to an end; the pious Bowsfield and Gwinne, who renewed a love for Church music after the Reformation, were all “Merchant Tailors.” So too were those eminent Oxford men, Searchfield and Perin; Paddin, the physician at James’s death-bed; Ravens and Buckridge, Latewar, Whitelocke, and Boyle; Price, Tomson, and Lymby, Rawlinson, Rainsbee, Sansbury, Lauson, and Tuer; with Wren and Campin, who upheld the honour of Merchant Tailors’ at Cambridge. What they did in general learning, in divinity, poetry, or law, in the Hampton Court Conference, in the student’s closet, in ambassadorial councils or the tented field, behold, is it not written in the dictionaries of biographers?
To them may be added Hutton the controversialist, and the clever and profligate Hill, who lived an Epicurean and died a Romanist, and to whose opinions Ben Jonson alludes when he says:—
“Thou Atomi ridiculous,
Whereof old Democrite and Hill Nicholas,
One said, the other swore, the world consists.”
Glancing our eye adown the long roll, we distinguish the name of Whitelocke, who was indebted for much of his education to Laud, and who, when that prelate was in difficulty, refused to act on the committee whose members had determined to push that difficulty to death. Pious Juxon, the poetic Lodge, and honest Foster, the country clergyman,—who wrote a treatise called ‘Hoplocrissma Spongus, or a sponge to wipe away the weapon-salve, wherein is proved that the cure taken up among us by applying the salve to the weapon is magical and unlawful,’—these follow; and, not less honoured, succeed the names of Sutton and Buckland,—the first, zealous Reformer; the second, as zealous Romanist. To these may be added Wilde, the dramatist; Jones, the ornament of the English Benedictines; tuneful Shirley, a greater dramatist than Wilde; and Hutton, who was distinguished for his learning in French and Italian as well as in classical literature. Further we find Dr. Speed, the son of the chronologist; William Meaux or Meuse, who is described as having “entered in the physick line;” the loyal divines Walwyn, Good, and Edwards; and a host of men less known to fame, and who were expelled the University for being consistent in their political opinions. Calamy is a name not to be omitted; and Archdeacon Layfield is remembered as the clergyman who was punished for having the letters I. H. S. in his church, by being dragged in his surplice through the City, and who refused to pay either fifteen hundred pounds or five to save himself from being sold to the Algerines or the Plantations.
Snelling, the tragic writer; Howe, the naturalist; Frank Goldsmith, who wrote for love and not for hire; Gayten, pleasant author of ‘Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixote;’ Hewit, the clergyman, executed for loyalty to the cause of Charles, and whom his old schoolfellow Wilde attended on the scaffold; and perhaps greater than all, Davenant the commentator, brother to the laureate, and son to Shakspeare’s melancholic host at Oxford, were others of the alumni of our house.
Nor must I omit the name of Will Quarles; Calamy and Shirley, men even more noted, I have already incidentally mentioned: they both died within the same week, of fright caused by the Great Fire of London, a catastrophe which made a poet of another “Merchant Tailor,” the well-known Markland. Indeed a great many of the pupils became at least respectable poets, which is, after all, no great praise, as applied to the sons of song.
Pepys and Evelyn record no more interesting incidents connected with the Great Fire than are to be found in the reports, given by other writers, of the deaths of these two distinguished pupils of Merchant Tailors’. Shirley had exceeded by two years the allotted aggregate of “threescore years and ten” when he and his second wife, Frances, were driven from their habitation in Fleet-street. They took refuge from the flames in the neighbouring parish of St. Giles’s in the Fields. But so overcome were this much-tried and ancient pair, that they both died on the same day, and within a month of the great calamity. The hapless couple were buried in one grave in St. Giles’s, and became the associates of a goodly but silent company,—among others, Chapman, the poet, and translator of Homer, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury; a company that was afterwards enlarged by the mute presence of Charles the Second’s “Dick Penderell,” Andrew Marvell, the infamous Countess of Shrewsbury, who held Buckingham’s horse while the Duke slew her husband in a duel, and Sir Roger L’Estrange, who is called “the wit,” upon the principle of naming ill-painted animals on village sign-boards,—you would not have made the necessary discovery without the explanatory ‘legend.’