In the reign of Charles I. the Old Jewry, which runs from Cheapside to Cateaton Street, was a fashionable locality. Merchant princes lived and died there. The old church, St. Olave Jewry, or St. Olave Upwell, was a fashionable church. Merchant princesses worshipped there, and their daughters were worshipped by the undevout apprentices. The Jewry had its fashionable old hostelry in the Windmill. It lives in Ben Jonson’s drama. It was there that Captain Bobadil told of his heroism at the siege of Strigonium, and there he pished at the idea of Master Stephen’s Provant rapier passing for a Toledo blade. One May morning, A.D. 1628, George Newman, the rich widow Bennett’s first serving-man, was taking his early draught at the Windmill. His master, the rich mercer, a Bennett of the stock from which the Tankerville earls have sprung, was then lying, a month old in his tenantcy, in a grave in St. Olave’s, next to another mercer, Robert Large, the master of one who came to be more famous, namely, Caxton, the father of English printing. Bennett’s widow was then sitting behind her rich curtains in Jewry Street meditating on a world of speculative subjects. ‘She’s a twenty-thousand-pound widow,’ said Newman, as he wiped his lips with the sleeve of his coat. ‘She’ll be a bride, and a lady to boot, before long. She has as many suitors as she has thousands.’ ‘And,’ said a bystander, ‘will maybe marry the biggest knave or the most perfect fool of the lot.’ ‘Not so,’ rejoined the serving-man. ‘Do you see Mr. Recorder passing by from his court? He is a friend of the family, and will see that neither rogue nor ass carries off the wealthy widow.’ ‘Ay!’ cried the host of the Windmill, ‘Mistress Bennett is in safe hands, with Sir Heneage Finch for her guardian and her little son’s guardian.’ And so said all who stood within hearing.
The scene now changes to the widow’s best room, in her mansion in Old Jewry. If you can fancy the three slim Graces rolled into one, with no other result but delicious increase of beauty in form, motion, look, and expression, you may have a very fair idea of this most blooming and best endowed of widows. Physically, morally, materially, she was not to be equalled throughout the realm of mature womanhood. Fair of face, frank of speech, with an inheritance of two-thirds of her late husband’s property, a prosperous business, plate, diamonds, cash, the mansion in which she lived, a coach, six horses, and all things that tend to make life enjoyable, Mistress Bennett took her widowhood with that sort of resignation which is denoted by an air of calm content with providential dispensations. She was in such esteem that at least a score of lovers were contending for the honour of rendering her happy. Even the ladies were busy in commending certain of the suitors. The widow would not be persuaded. The lady advisers were frivolous. She would rely on the grave counsel of a grave man. Mr. Recorder would be her truest support if she ever found herself in any perplexity on the subject of marrying again. At the moment it was a subject that was not in her thoughts.
‘The subject is in the thoughts of young Butler, of Bramfield,’ said Lady Skinner. ‘He is a gentleman——’
‘He is a black, blunt-nosed one,’ interrupted the widow. And indeed Butler was not an Adonis.
‘I pity poor Sir Peter Temple,’ said another of Love’s messengers that morning. ‘Stowe does not make him happy; you might.’
‘Eleanor Tirrell will,’ replied the widow. ‘I wish they were all as well provided for.’
‘All!’ exclaimed Sir Peter’s friend. ‘Why, to what tune does the list run?’
‘First,’ answered the widow, ‘there is Sir Henry Mainwaring, a poor old battered knight, who is not master of as much land as his shoes can cover; and yet he is as proud as if he were a Mainwaring of Over Pecover. His worship was brought hither by the hand of the Countess of Bridgwater, but I speedily rid myself civilly of both. There have been other silly knights, and lords too, who have come and gone, and some of whom come and come again. Lord Bruce took a frank answer, and did not present himself twice. Lord Lumley, all in the glitter of his new title, will not take nay. Dr. Raven has even dared to offer himself without first feeling my pulse, and he swears his daring has not come to an end. Only the other day Sir Sackville Crowe beset me; and, heaven help me! I believed, for a moment, that Sir Heneage Finch himself had views towards me. But Sir Heneage could take an answer, and he besets me with hints of his aspirations no longer.’
‘Crow, Finch, Raven!’ exclaimed the group of ladies who were gathered round the twenty-thousand-pounder in her best room at St. Olave’s. ‘What a singular gathering of birds! You will be flown away with, widow, in spite of yourself.’
Mr. Recorder Finch, erst Speaker of the House of Commons, came into London to perform his legal duties, and returned in the evening to his house at Kensington. The house still stands. It is the kernel round which has grown the shell called Kensington Palace. Heneage Finch’s gardens extended only to what is now called the Broad Walk. The latter was then a pathway through Hyde Park from Kensington to Bayswater. The wicked public loved to connect his name with those of Crowe and Raven as ‘birds of a feather.’ The truth is, that Raven was the real, daring, and most persistent lover. Sir Sackville Crowe, indeed, had been the more serious in his pretensions, as he most needed the widow’s money. He was ‘a thief on the wrong side of Newgate;’ that is, he outspent his income and ruined his tradesmen. He paid them by agreement just a quarter of what he owed those poor fellows, and thus he submitted to be three-quarters kept by his butcher, baker, and tailor. He made an ‘appearance,’ which it was an easy thing to do at other people’s expense. He had been the official keeper of public funds, of which he unluckily failed to give satisfactory account. He alleged that his book-keeping had been done by deputy, and his deputy seems to have been loose in his arithmetic. Altogether, this Crowe was a supreme rogue, but he was one of a very large family. The widow’s fortune would have saved his post, if not his credit, at the Navy Treasury Office. The widow, however, scornfully refused to sit on the same branch with Crowe, and Sir Sackville, thoroughly plucked, was ejected from the office in question.