“THIS is to certify that the Master of the Cock and Bottle, commonly called the Cock alehouse, at Temple Bar, hath dismissed his servants and shut up his house for this long vacation, intending (God willing) to return at Michaelmass next so that all persons who have any accounts or farthings belonging to the said house are desired to repair thither before the 8th of this instant July and they shall receive satisfaction.”
Certainly those were dull times, and well might that fashionable establishment close for the “long vacation,” for the plague was then coming to its highest pitch; all the gallant customers had fled town, and according to Defoe’s computation, “not less than 10,000 houses were forsaken of the inhabitants in the city and suburbs:”—
“There was not so much velvet stirring as would have bene a cover to a little booke in octavo, or seamde a Lieftenant’s Buff-doublet; a French hood would have been more wondered at in London, than the Polonyans with their long-tayld Gaberdynes; and, which was most lamentable, there was never a Gilt spur to be seene all the Strand over, never a feather wagging in all Fleet Streete, vnlesse some country Fore-horse came by, by meere chaunce with a Raine-beaten Feather in his costrill; the streete looking for all the world like a Sunday morning at six o’Clocke, three hours before service, and the Bells ringing all about London, as if the Coronation day had beene a half a yeare long.”[292]
But there was a good time coming after the plague and fire, when troops of gay courtiers might quaff their wine and sparkling ale, as happy as the “merry monarch” himself. Amongst them, our friend Pepys, who informs us, that on the 23d of April 1668, he went “by water to the Temple, and then to the Cock alehouse, and drank and eat a lobster, and sang, and mighty merry. So almost night, I carried Mrs Pierce home, and then Knipp and I to the Temple again and took boat, it being darkish, and to Foxhall, it being now night, and a bonfire burning at Lambeth for the king’s coronation day.”
Exactly one hundred years later, the Cock is named with encomiums on its porter, in the “Art of Living in London;” but it is to be hoped the porter was better than the poetry:—
“Nor think the Cock with these not on a par,
The celebrated Cock of Temple Bar,
Whose Porter best of all bespeaks its praise,
Porter that’s worthy of the Poet’s lays.”[293]
In William Waterproof’s Monologue, the fame of a waiter of this tavern is handed down to posterity in the harmonious verses of the Poet Laureate.
Jackson the pugilist, who has a pompous epitaph on his grave in the Brompton burial-ground, kept for some time the Cock alehouse, Sutton, on the Epsom Road; but being patronised by the Prince of Wales and a great many of the leading members of the “nobility and gentry,” he was in a very short time enabled to retire with a £10,000 fortune. Finally, some twenty years ago, there was a Cock and Bottle public-house in Bristol kept by a man named John England, who added to his sign the well known words:—
“England expects every man to do his duty.”