At Lullingstone Castle, in Kent, the residence of Sir Percival Dyke, Bart., there is, says a correspondent of Notes and Queries, a representation of a rose nearly two feet in diameter, surrounded with the following inscription:—
“Kentish true blue
Take this as a token,
That what is said here
Under the Rose is spoken.”
The Dutch have a similar phrase. In an old Book of Inscriptions of the seventeenth century is a device written round a rose painted on the ceiling:—
“Al wat hier onder de Roos geschied,
Laat dat aldaar en meld het niet.”[333]
There is one sign of the Rose, the origin of which it is difficult to ascertain, this is the Rose of Normandy, a public-house in the High Street, Marylebone. It was built in the seventeenth century, and is the oldest house in that parish. In 1659 it is described as having
“Outside a square brick wall set with fruit trees, gravel walks 204 paces long, 7 broad; the circular wall 485 paces long, 6 broad; the centre square, a bowling-green, 112 paces one way, 88 another—all, except the first, double set with quickset hedges, full grown, and kept in excellent order, and indented like town walls.”[334]
The street having been raised, the entrance to the house is at present some steps beneath the roadway. The original form of the exterior has been preserved, and the staircases and balusters are coeval with the building; but the garden and large bowling-green have dwindled into a miserable skittle-ground.
As a sign the [Marygold], it is said, arose from a popular reading of the sign of the [Sun]; a very natural and plausible origin. At the same time, it is just worth mentioning, that this flower (originally called the Gold) seems to have been considered as an emblem of Queen Mary; so, at least, it would appear from a lengthy ballad of “the Marygolde,” composed by her chaplain, William Forrest, in which, amongst many other similar allusions, the following words are found:—
“She [the Queen] may be called Marygolde well,
Of Marie (chiefe) Christes mother deere,
That as in heaven she doth excell,
And golde on earth to have no peere,
So certainly she shineth cleere,
In grace and honour double fold,
[238] The like was never erst seen heere,
Such as this flower the Marygolde.”
The flower was a favourite one in the middle ages, deriving the first part of its name from the Virgin Mary. No mention of the actual use of the sign, however, has been met with previous to 1638, when it appears on the title-pages of Francis Eglisfield, a bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard. His name still occurs at the same house in 1673,[335] when it was also the sign of “Mr Cox, milliner, over against St Clement’s Church in the Strand.”[336] This must have been the same house in which Richard Blanchard and Francis Child, the goldsmiths, kept their “running cashes.”[337] It is the oldest banking firm in London. Francis Child, the founder, was, in the reign of Charles I., apprenticed to a goldsmith, William Wheeler, whose shop stood on the same spot now occupied by the bank. He married his master’s daughter, and thus laid the foundation of his immense fortune. Many bills and other papers relating to Nell Gwynn are still preserved by this firm, as well as various documents concerning the sale of Dunkerque. Alderman Blackwell, who was ruined by the shutting up of the Exchequer in the reign of Charles II., was at one time a partner in this house. It was here that Dryden deposited the £50 offered for the discovery of the bullies of the “Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade.”[338] The old sign of the house is still preserved by their successors, together with various relics of the Devil Tavern, on the site of which it was built.