Wine, my boy; we’ll sing and laugh,
All night revel, rant, and quaff;
Till the morn stealing behind us,
At the table sleepless find us.
When our bones (alas!) shall have
A cold lodging in the grave;
When swift death shall overtake us,
We shall sleep and none can wake us.
Drink we then the juice o’ the vine,
Make our breasts Lyæus’ shrine;
Bacchus, our debauch beholding,
By thy image I am moulding,
Whilst my brains I do replenish
With this draught of unmixed Rhenish;
By thy full-branched ivy twine;
By this sparkling glass of wine;
By thy thyrsus so renowned,
By the healths with which th’art crowned;
* * * *
To thy frolic order call us,
Knights of the deep bowl install us;
And to shew thyself divine,
Never let it want for wine.
It would be thoroughly to the liking of such a patient that Dr. Tobias Whitaker (1638) should publish his Blood of the Grape, ‘proving the possibility of maintaining Life from Infancy to Old Age without Sickness, by the Use of Wine.’
In point of sobriety the Cavaliers have often been unfavourably contrasted with the Roundheads. The evidence for this, apart from mere recrimination (which in this case is a two-edged sword), has yet to be produced. The manners of the two factions were doubtless diverse. ‘Your friends, the Cavaliers,’ said a Roundhead to a Royalist, ‘are very dissolute and debauched.’ ‘True,’ replied the Royalist, ‘they have the infirmities of men; but your friends the Roundheads have the vices of devils—tyranny, rebellion, and spiritual pride.’ We would fain hope that they were sober all round, and that Cromwell’s description of his troops was unassailable. The mother of Cromwell set up the brewery at Huntingdon which is still flourishing. It was this slight connection with ‘the trade’ which gained for Cromwell the agnomen of ‘the brewer.’
The story is told, ‘a tradition’ (Hume), that one day sitting at table, the Protector had a bottle of wine brought him, of a kind which he valued so highly that he must needs open the bottle himself; but, in attempting it, the corkscrew dropt from his hand. Immediately his courtiers and generals flung themselves on the floor to recover it. Cromwell burst out laughing. ‘Should any fool,’ said he, ‘put in his head at the door, he would fancy, from your posture, that you were seeking the Lord, and you are only seeking a corkscrew.’ One sees here that Cromwell is addressing his ‘men of religion.’ There was much of it real or unreal; and a curious monument of the fashion then prevalent of giving sacred names to everything and everybody is furnished by the tavern sign of the ‘Goat and Compasses,’ which reveals the naked truth that ‘Praise God Barebones’ preferred drinking his tankard of ale at the tavern whose sign was ‘God encompasseth us’ to any other ale-house. On the other hand it should be noted that, according to the late Thomas Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, ‘the stories of his wild living while in town ... rest exclusively on Carrion Heath.... Of evidence that he ever lived a wild life about town, or elsewhere, there exists no particle.’
The funeral of the Protector is thus described by Evelyn:—
It was the joyfullest funerall I ever saw, for there were none that cried but dogs, while the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streetes as they went.
Club life was becoming more and more unfavourable to sobriety. The ‘Everlasting Club,’ instituted during the Civil War, was especially bibulous and riotous. So much so, that a good-for-nothing devotee of the bottle was satirically dubbed a member of that club. A writer cited by Timbs notes that ‘since their first institution they have smoked fifty tons of tobacco, drank thirty thousand butts of ale, one thousand hogsheads of red port, two hundred barrels of brandy, and one kilderkine of small beer.’ They sat night and day, one party relieving another. The fire was never allowed to go out, being perpetuated by an old woman in the nature of a Vestal. The delight of the members was in ‘old catches which they sang at all hours, to encourage one another to moisten their clay, and grow immortal by drinking.’
But Eastern products were soon to create a revolution in the national diet. Sir Anthony Shirley, one of the celebrated trio of brothers, travellers, when he arrived at Aleppo in 1598, first tasted a drink that he described as being made of a seed which will ‘soon intoxicate the brain,’ and which, though nothing toothsome, was wholesome: this was coffee. In 1650 was opened at Oxford the first coffee-house by Jacobs, a Jew, at the Angel, in the parish of St. Peter in the East; and there it was, by some who delighted in novelty, drunk. Hence the antiquary Oldys is incorrect in stating that the use of coffee in England was first known in 1657.
Mr. Edwards, a Turkey merchant, brought from Smyrna to London one Pasqua Rosee, a Ragusan youth, who prepared this drink for him every morning. But the novelty thereof drawing too much company to him, he allowed his said servant, with another of his son-in-law, to sell it publicly, and they set up the first coffee-house in London in St. Michael’s Alley in Cornhill.[148]