When Macaulay, in his Third Chapter, depicted the English squire of the 17th century as looking down upon those of his neighbours who “were so unfortunate as to be the great grandsons of aldermen,” he attributed to a past age prejudices derived from his own. A little serious investigation might have taught him better. The Earl of Danby, afterwards Marquis of Caermarthen (1680) and Duke of Leeds (1694), was the great grandson of an alderman—the clothworker Sir Edward Osborne, one of the founders of the Levant Company. The Norths, whose Lives he often quotes, emerged from obscurity when the first North of whom we have any distinct knowledge settled in London and became a merchant, sometime before the end of the fifteenth century; his son rising to the peerage about the middle of the next century. Sir John Finch’s brother, the Earl of Nottingham, married the daughter of Daniel Harvey (about 1650); his cousin, the Earl of Winchilsea, the daughter of John Ayres (1681); and his successor at the Constantinople Embassy, Lord Chandos, the daughter of Sir Henry Barnard (about 1670)—all of them merchants of London. Another London merchant, Sir Josiah Child, as Macaulay himself notes, married his daughter to the eldest son of the Duke of Beaufort (1683). Further illustrations of the absence of any chasm between the two classes will readily occur to any student of literary history. For instance, the father of Sir Thomas Browne (who was born in London in 1605), a merchant, sprang from a good Cheshire family; the father of John Milton (who was born in London in 1608), a scrivener, came of an ancient Oxfordshire stock; Edward Gibbon was descended from a younger son of the Gibbons of Kent, who, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, had migrated to the City of London and become a clothworker. In mentioning this fact, Gibbon very truly remarks that “our most respectable families have not disdained the counting-house or even the shop” (Memoirs of My Life and Writings, 1st ed., p. 5). Hume also, in speaking of the Commonwealth, observes, “the prevalence of democratical principles engaged the country gentlemen to bind their sons apprentices to merchants” (History of England, chap. lxii.): he is only wrong in the time he assigns to this social revolution—it was much older than the Commonwealth, and was due to economic causes rather than to political principles.
APPENDIX VIII
Of all the excesses of the age the most fashionable was excess in drink. Smyrna was particularly famous for a kind of wine which connoisseurs pronounced only inferior to Canary:[317] so excellent, indeed, was this wine that a butt of it formed a most acceptable present from an English Ambassador to a Secretary of State.[318] The Franks made it in their own houses, buying the grapes in the town. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that inebriation nowhere attained greater heights than at Smyrna. When ships from home came into port, captains and merchants vied with each other in feats of conviviality. Here is a picture of these jollifications drawn by a competent and appreciative eye-witness: “Les marchands vont quelquefois se divertir à bord des vaisseaux.... Ils y viennent de bon matin et s’en retournent fort tard. Très souvent les conviés ont besoin qu’on les mette dans leurs bateaux avec des palans, de crainte que les pieds leur manquent en descendant par les échelles. Cette précaution est sage et nécessaire après ces sortes de longs festins où l’on a bu beaucoup, et, pour l’ordinaire, beaucoup trop.... Quand les divertissements se font à terre chez les marchands, et surtout chez les Anglois, on ne peut rien ajouter à la magnificence des festins ni à la quantité de vin qui s’y boit. Après qu’on a cassé tous les verres et les bouteilles, on s’en prend aux miroirs et aux meubles. On casse et on brise tout pour faire honneur à ceux à qui on boit et on pousse quelquefois la débauche si loin que, ne trouvant plus rien à casser, on fait allumer un grand feu et on y jette les chapeaux, les perruques, et les habits, jusqu’aux chemises, après quoi ces messieurs sont obligés de demeurer au lit jusqu’à ce qu’on leur ait fait d’autres habits.”[319]
FOOTNOTES:
[317] Thevenot, Travels into the Levant, Part I. p. 92 (Eng. tr. 1687).
[318] Sir Daniel Harvey to Lord Arlington, Dec. 9, 1668; Jan. 31, 1670; Paul Rycaut to the Same, June 29, 1671, S.P. Turkey, 19.
[319] D’Arvieux, Mémoires, t. i. pp. 131-2.