Her life and prophecies have at all times been a favourite theme in popular literature. If we may believe her biographers, she predicted the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the dissolution of the monasteries, the establishment of the Protestant religion under Edward VI., the cruelty of Queen Mary, the glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth, the defeat of the Armada, the Plague and Great Fire, and many things not yet come to pass. Like the Delphic oracles, her predictions were given in metre, and veiled in mystery. The plague and fire, for instance, are thus foretold:—
“Triumphant death rides London thro’,
And men on tops of houses go.”
She is represented as of a most unprepossessing appearance; although we certainly might have expected better from the daughter of a necromancer, or “the phantasm of Apollo, or some aerial dæmon who seduced her mother;”—“her body was long, and very big-boned; she had great goggling eyes, very sharp and fiery; a nose of unproportionable length, having in it many crooks and turnings, adorned with great pimples, and which, like vapours of brimstone, gave such a lustre in the night, that the nurse needed no other light to dress her by in her childhood.”[95]
Another necromancer, Merlin, shares renown with Mother Shipton, both in chapbooks and on signboards. Merlin’s Cave is the sign of a public-house in Great Audley Street, and in Upper Rosomon Street, Clerkenwell, in which places he doubtless still plays his old pranks, of changing men into beasts. Innumerable romances and histories of Merlin were printed in the middle ages. He appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth as early as the twelfth century, and Alain de l’Isle gave an ample explanation of his prophecies in seven books, printed in 1608. “This Merlin,” says M. de la Monnoye, “tout magicien et fils du diable que l’on l’a cru,” has by the good Carmelite, Baptiste Mantuanus, been metamorphosed into a saint. At the end of his “Tolentinum,” a poem in three books, in honour of St Nicholas, (anno 1509,) he thus speaks of Merlin:—
“Vitæ venerabilis olim
Vir fuit et vates, venturi præscius ævi,
Merlinus, laris infando de semine cretus.
Hic satus infami coitu pietate refulsit
Eximia superum factus post funera consors.”[96]
His prophecies were also translated into Italian, and printed at Venice in 1516. The annotators say it was reported that Merlin, by his enchantments, transported from Ireland those huge stones found in Salisbury plain. His cave was in Clerkenwell, on the site where the alehouse now stands, and was in the reign of James I., one of the London sights strangers went to see.[97]
We have a well-known chapbook hero in Jack of Newbury, who had already attained to the signboard honours in the seventeenth century, when we find him on the token of John Wheeler, in Soper Lane (now Queen Street, Cheapside,) whilst at present, he may be seen in a full-length portrait in Chiswell Street, Finsbury Square. This Jack of Newbury, alias Winchcombe, alias Smallwoode, “was the most considerable clothier England ever had. He kept an hundred looms in his house, each managed by a man and a boy. He feasted King Henry VIII. and his first Queen Catherine at his own house in Newbury, now divided into sixteen clothiers’ houses. He built the Church of Newbury, from the pulpit westward to the town.”[98] At the battle of Flodden in 1513, he joined the Earl of Surrey with a corps of one hundred men, well equipped at his sole expense, who distinguished themselves greatly in that fight. He is buried in Newbury, where his brass effigy is still to be seen, purporting that he died February 15, 1519. An inn bearing his sign in Newbury, is said to be built on the site of the house where he entertained King Harry. Thomas Deloney, the ballad-writer, wrote a tale about him, entitled, “The pleasant history of John Winchcomb, in his younger years called Jack of Newberry, the famous and worthy clothier of England, declaring his life and love, together with his charitable deeds and great hospitalitie. Entered in the Stationers’ Book, May 7, 1596.”
Whittington and his Cat is still very common, not only in London but in the country also. Sometimes the cat is represented without her master, as on the token of a shop in Longacre, 1657, and on the sign of —— Varney, a seal-engraver in New Court, Old Bailey, 1783, whose shopbill[99] represents a large cat carved in wood holding an eye-glass by a chain. The story of Whittington is still a favourite chapbook tale, and has its parallel in the fairy tales of various other countries. Straparola, in his “Piacevole Notte,” is, we believe, the first who mentions it. The earliest English narrative occurs in Johnson’s “Crown Garland of Golden Roses,” 1612, but there is an allusion to “Whittington and his Puss” in the play of “Eastward Hoe!” 1603. For more than a century it was one of the stock pieces of Punch and his dramatic troop. Sept. 21, 1688, Pepys went to see it: “To Southwark Fair, very dirty, and there saw the puppet-show of Whittington, which is pretty to see; and how that idle thing do work upon people that see it, and even myself too.” Foote, in his comedy of the “Nabob,” makes Sir Matthew Mite account for the legend by explaining the cat as the name of some quick-sailing vessels by which Whittington imported coals, which should have been the source of the Lord Mayor’s wealth. In the Highgate Road there is a skeleton of a cat in a public-house window, which by the people who visit there is firmly believed to be the earthly remains of Whittington’s identical cat. The house is not far distant from the spot where the future Lord Mayor of London stopped to listen to the city bells inviting him to return. It is now marked by a stone, with the event duly inscribed thereon.
King Arthur’s Round Table is to be seen on various public-houses. There is one in St Martin’s Court, Leicester Square, where the American champion, Heenan, put up when he came to contest the belt with the valiant Tom Sayers. The same sign is also often to be met with on the Continent. In the seventeenth century there was a famous tavern called la Table Roland in the Vallée de Misère at Paris. John-o’-Groat’s House is also used for a sign; there was one some years ago in Windmill Street, Haymarket; and at present there is a John-o’-Groat’s in Gray Street, Blackfriars Road. Both these and the Round Table contain, we conceive, some intimation of that even-handed justice observed at the houses, where all comers are treated alike, and one man is as good as another.