The Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor Jeffreys, who continued the work of persecution against the partisans of the Duke of Monmouth,—the man whose Bloody Assizes will not be easily forgotten in England,—once nearly paid with his life the foolish desire to climb up on a signpost in a happy hour of complete intoxication. After a wild orgy in company with the Lord Treasurer, he and his companion decided to undress until they were “almost stark naked” and to drink the king’s health from the airy height of a signpost. Jeffreys took a severe cold and alarmed not a little the king, who feared the irreparable loss of such a valuable servant.
After the uncanny stories of the signpost’s function as a gallows, we find a certain comfort in hearing that the sign occasionally offered a refuge to persecuted political offenders. In the days of the Corsican, the partisans of the Bourbons, called by the beautiful name of “Chouans,” were happy to find such a refuge, “une cache fameuse,” behind the big sign of the perfumer Caron. The persecuted Chouan had only to step out through a window and to close the blinds behind him and he was perfectly safe against the detectives of Fouché, the chief of the police. If the fugitive, however, made a blunder and stepped by mistake into the barber shop of M. Teissier, he was undone; because this was the man who had the honor of shaving the Cæsarean face of Napoleon.
Before the French Revolution another great event in the world’s history had produced considerable changes on the signboard—the Reformation. We have already noticed how the new ideas and motives of the Renaissance influenced, not only the sculptured frame of the sign, but created new forms, such as the Dolphin, the Siren, the Pegasus, the Sagittary, Fortuna, Apollo, Phœnix, Minerva, Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Bacchus, all favorite themes of this classical period. The discovery of America at the same time brought the “Wild Man” into great popularity, and the newly introduced tobacco, “the filthy weed,” caused the creation of countless Indian and Huron signs, “black-a-moors and other dusky foreigners.”
The Reformation itself had a more negative effect on the sign. It tried to eliminate or to change the old saint signs. Cromwell in England declaimed against Catholic-sounding tavern names. “St. Catherine and Wheel” was changed to “Cat and Wheel,” and degenerated further into “Cat and Fiddle,” a sign still popular in England and celebrated in the famous children’s rhyme :—
“Heigh diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle.”
On some signs the fiddling cat inspires with its music a cow to jump in ecstasy over a grinning moon. Thus we see everywhere the old religious motives and symbols turned into ridicule and blasphemy. This process began at the end of the Middle Ages, as the study of miniatures and of cathedral sculptures will amply prove. We cannot be surprised, therefore, to find such anti-papal signs as “Le cochon mitré” in Compiègne. The mediæval illuminators and sculptors loved to “hommifier” the swine and to attack under this disguise hypocritical and voluptuous priests. In the “Doctrinal rurale” of Pierre Michault of 1486 (in the National Library at Paris), we see a fat monk in the pedagogue’s chair, representing “concupiscence,” and evidently making such shocking remarks that his girl pupils put their fingers in their ears, while in the delicate framework of the miniature a preaching swine reveals the real character of this strange teacher.
The touching scene of the “Salutatio,” which inspired the artists of the Renaissance with such noble creations as Donatello’s marble relief in Florence, is degraded now to a ridiculous bowing and scraping between a lady and her partner or between two stylish gentlemen. The fanatical Puritans who thundered even against the harmless Christmas customs, so dear to the people, of course took offense at the use of the cross for a sign and in 1643 forced the landlord of the “Golden Cross,” in the Strand, London, to take his “superstitious and idolatrous” sign down. It is a curious irony of fate that Cromwell, who to the present day is made responsible for nearly all destructions in English cathedrals and who probably was an enemy, not only of Catholic but of all signs, was himself made an object of the signboard.
In England more than anywhere else the sign stands for heroes and hero-worship. Peter the Great and his visit to London were remembered in “The Czar’s Head”; English admirals and great generals like Wellington and the Prussian King Frederic, “the great Protestant hero,” all receive “signboard-honors.” London possessed still in 1881 thirty-seven “Duke of Wellington” taverns.
No less patriotic are the Dutch sign-painters, who love to picture their own celebrities Rembrandt, Ruysdael, or Erasmus of Rotterdam and the beloved Princes of Orange. One of them, the future King William III of England, we find even as a boy on a signboard with the inimitable Dutch inscription:—