No seven-league boots are necessary for me to stride back to my subject, and to the time when my little-boy-hero is forming his earliest acquaintance with the Old Bailey stones. I said that I wanted those last three dying years of the seventeenth century. Let me take them, and endeavour to make the best of them, even when I compress some of their characteristics within the compass of a single London day.
The century, then, is on its last legs. The town seems to have quite done with the Stuarts, socially speaking, although politically another Stuart will reign: a dethroned Stuart is actually at St. Germains, maundering with his confessors, and conspiring with his shabby refugee courtiers; thinking half of assassinating the abhorred Dutchman, and making Père la Chaise Archbishop of Canterbury in partibus, and half of slinking away to La Trappe, wearing a hair shirt, and doing grave-digging on his own account for good and all. Politically, too, this crooked-wayed, impracticable Stuart’s son and grandson will give the world some trouble till the year 1788, when, a hundred years after the Revolution, a worn-out, blasé sensualist, called the Young Pretender, dies at Rome, leaving a brother, the Cardinal of York, who survived to be a pensioner of George the Third, and bequeathed to him those Stuart papers, which, had their contents been known at the Cockpit, Westminster, half a century before, would have caused the fall of many a head as noble as Derwentwater’s, as chivalrous as Charles Ratcliffe’s, and broken many a heart as loving and true as Flora Macdonald’s or Lady Nithisdale’s. But with the Restoration-Stuart period, London town has quite done. Rochester has died penitent, Buckingham bankrupt and forlorn. Archbishop Tenison has preached Nelly Gwynn’s funeral sermon; Portsmouth, Davies, are no more heard of; Will Chiffinch can procure for kings no more: the rigid Dutchman scorns such painted children of dirt; Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, has married one Fielding, a swindling caricature of a “beau;” Wycherly is old and broken, and the iron of the Fleet has entered into his soul; and poor noble old John Dryden, twitted as a renegade, neglected, unpensioned, and maligned, is savagely writing the finest “copy” that has issued yet from that grand fertile brain, writing it with a Spartan fortitude and persistence, and ever and anon giving left-legged Jacob Tonson a sound verbal trouncing, when the publisher would palm on the poet clipped moidores for milled Jacobuses. Ah, little boy Hogarth, you will see Johnson fifty years hence, listen to him behind the curtain in the twilight room, as the Jacobite schoolman raves against the cruelty of government in hanging Doctor Cameron; but you will never behold John Dryden in the flesh, little boy, or hear him at Wills’s on golden summer afternoons, the undisputed oracle of wits, and critics, and poets. The horrible Chancellor Jeffries (however could the ruffian have found patience and temper to deliver a decree in Chancery!) is dead, but he has a son alive, a rake-hell, Mohock Lord Jeffries, who, four years hence, will be implicated in a scandalous disturbance at Dryden’s house, in Gerrard Street; the poet’s corpse lying there. There are brave men hard at work for the nineteenth century. Isaac Newton is working; in ’95 he was appointed Master of the Mint. Pope is beginning to feel his poetic feet. Mr. Joseph Addison is at college. Swift has had the run of Temple’s library. Lely has thrown down the pencil; Knelier has taken it up; and James Thornhill is preparing for vast sprawlings on ceilings, after the model of Verrio and Laguerre.
Away with Restoration reminiscences, for the more decent century that is to come. By 8th and 9th William III., Alsatia is ruined, and its privileges of sanctuary wholly taken away. A dreadful outpouring and scattering of ragged rogues and ruffians, crying out in what huff-cap cant and crambo they can command, that delenda est Carthago, takes place. Foul reeking taverns disgorge knavish tatterdemalions, soddened with usquebaugh and spiced Hollands, querulous or lachrymose with potations of “mad dog,” “angel’s food,” “dragon’s milk,” and “go-by-the-wall.” Stern catchpoles seize these inebriated and indebted maltbugs, and drag them off to the Compters, or to Ludgate, “where citizens lie in durance, surrounded by copies of their freedom.” Alewives accustomed to mix beer with rosin and salt deplore the loss of their best customers; for their creed was Pistol’s advice to Dame Quickly, “Trust none;” and the debased vagabonds who crowded the drinking-shops—if they drank till they were as red as cocks and little wiser than their combs, if they occasionally cut one another’s throats in front of the bar, or stabbed the drawer for refusing to deliver strong waters without cash—could sometimes borrow, and sometimes beg, and sometimes steal money, and then they drank and paid. No use was there in passing bad money in Alsatia, when every sanctuary man and woman knew how to coin and to clip it. You couldn’t run away from your lodgings in Alsatia, for so soon as you showed your nose at the Whitefriars’ gate, in Fleet Street, the Philistines were upon you. Oh! for the ruffianly soldados, the copper captains, the curl’d-pate braggarts, the poltroons who had lost their ears in the pillory, and swore they had been carried off by the wind of a cannon-shot at Sedgemoor! Oh! for the beauteous slatterns, the Phrynes and Aspasias of this Fleet Street Athens, with their paint and their black visor masques; their organ-pipe head-dresses, their low stomachers, and their high-heeled shoes; the tresses of dead men’s hair they thatched their poor bald crowns withal; the live fools’ rings and necklaces they sported between taking out and pawning in! Beggars, cut-purses, swindlers, tavern-bilks, broken life-guardsmen, foreign counts, native highwaymen, and some poor honest unfortunates, the victims of a Draconic law of debtor and creditor, all found their Patmos turn out to be a mere shifting quicksand. The town does not long remain troubled with these broken spars and timbers of the wrecked ship—once a tall caravel—Humanity. Don’t you remember when the “Holy Land” of St. Giles’s was pulled down to build New Oxford Street, what an outcry arose as to where the dispossessed Gilesians were to find shelter? and don’t you remember how quickly they found congenial holes and corners into which to subside—dirt to dirt, disease to disease, squalor to squalor, rags to rags? So with the Alsatians. A miserable compensation is made to them for their lost sanctuary by the statute which quashes all foregone executions for debts under fifty pounds; but they soon get arrested again—often for sums not much more than fifty pence—and, being laid up in hold, starve and rot miserably. There are debtors in Newgate, there are debtors in Ludgate; in the Clink, the Borough, Poultry, and Wood Street Compters, the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench, and at Westminster Gate houses, besides innumerable spunging houses, or “spider’s webs,” with signs like inns, such as the “Pied Bull” in the Borough, and the “Angel” in Cursitor Street. Little boy Hogarth will have much to observe about prisons and prisoners when he is grown to be a man. Many Alsatians take refuge in the Southwark Mint, likewise, and by the same statute deprived of its sanctuary; but which, in some underhand manner—perhaps from there being only one bridge into Southwark, and that rotten—contrives to evade it till late in the reign of George I. Coining flourishes thenceforth more than ever in the Mint; the science of Water Lane being added to the experience of St. Mary Overy, and both being aided, perhaps, by the ancient numismatic traditions of the place. More of the Alsatians are caught up by alguazils of the criminal law, and, after a brief sojourn at Newgate, “patibulate” at Justice Hall, and eventually make that sad journey up Holborn Hill in a cart, stopping for a refresher at the Bowl House, St. Giles’s Pound—alas! it is not always staying for his liquor that will save the saddler of Bawtree from hanging—and so end at Tyburn. Some, too, go a-begging in Lincoln’s Inn, and manufacture some highly remunerative mutilations and ulcers. And some, a very few, tired of the draff and husks in Alsatia, go back to their fathers, and are forgiven. In this hard world, whose members only see the application of parables that teach us love and mercy on Sundays, it is easier to find prodigals to repent than fathers to forgive. But for our hope and comfort, that parable has another and a higher meaning.
Alsatia was linked hand in glove with the Court of the Restoration. ’Twas often but a chapel of ease to the backstairs of Whitehall, and many a great courtier, ruined at basset with the king and his beauties the night before, found his level on the morrow in this vile slum-playing butt, playing cards on a broken pair of bellows. But now, 1697, Whitehall itself is gone. The major part of the enormous pile went by fire in ’91; now the rest, or all but Holbein’s Gate, and the blood-stained Banqueting-house, has fallen a prey to the “devouring element.”
Whitehall, then, has gone by the board. In vain now to look for Horn Chamber, or Cabinet Room, or the stone gallery that flanked Privy Garden, where the imperious, depraved Louise de la Quérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, lived amid “French tapestry, Japan cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, great vases of wrought plate, table stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braseners, all of massive silver, and out of number.” All these things, worthy Master Evelyn, of Sayes Court, Deptford (who about this time has let his said mansion and ground to Peter Velikè, czar of Muscovy, and thinks him but an evil tenant, with his uncouth, uncleanly Russian fashions, his driving of wheelbarrows through neatly-trimmed hedges, and spitting over polished andirons, and gorging himself with raw turnips sliced in brandy)—worthy, sententious Evelyn shall see these things no more. Nay, nor that “glorious gallery,” quoted from his description innumerable times, where was the dissolute king “sitting toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, &c.; a French boy singing love-songs, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and others were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000l. in gold before them. Six days after, all was in the dust.” And worse.
Little boy Hogarth, you shall often pass by the banqueting-house—ay, and admire Hans Holbein’s wondrous gate of red brick, tesselated in quaint and beauteous design; of which the fragments, when the gate was pulled down in 1760, were begged by William, Duke of Cumberland, and the pieces numbered, with the project of having them transferred to Windsor park and there re-erected as a royal ducal lodge. But the project was never carried out, and the duke probably forgot all about it, or found something more worth begging for than a lot of old building materials. So exit Whitehall palace: buttery, bakehouse, wood and coal yards, spicery, charcoal-house, king’s privy cellar, council chamber, hearth-money office, and other fripperies in stone. It must have been a grand place, even as the heterogeneous pile that existed in William Dutchman’s time; but if James or Charles had possessed the funds to rebuild it according to Inigo Jones’s magnificent plan, of which the banqueting-house is but an instalment, the palace of Whitehall would have put to the blush the Baths of Diocletian, the golden house of Nero—yea, and the temple which Erostratus burnt, to prove that all things were vanity, even to incendiarism.
Will it please you to walk into the city, now that we have done with Westminster, any day in these three years of the moribund seventeenth century. London is busy enough, noisy enough, dirty enough; but not so smoky. There is little or no foot pavement; but there are plenty of posts and plenty of kennels—three hundred and eleven, I think, between Newgate and Charing Cross. When the humorous operation, resorted to with ugly frequency about this time, of whipping a man at the cart’s tail, takes place, the hangman gives the poor wretch a lash at every kennel the near wheel of the cart grates against. Newgate to Ludgate, Charing Cross to the “Cockpit” at Westminster, are considered the mildest pilgrimages to be undergone by these poor flagellated knaves; but Charing to Newgate is the real via dolorosa of stripes. That pilgrimage was reserved for the great objects of political hatred and vengeance in James II.’s reign—for Titus Oates and Thomas Dangerfield. The former abominable liar and perjurer, stripped of his ambrosial periwig and rustling silk canonicals, turned out of his lodgings in Whitehall, and reduced to the very last of the last, is tried and sentenced, and is very nearly scourged to death. He is to pay an enormous fine besides, and is to lie in Newgate for the remainder of his life. I wonder that like “flagrant Tutchin,” when shuddering under a sentence almost as frightful, he did not petition to be hanged: yet there seems to be an indomitable bull-headed, bull-backed power of endurance about this man Oates—this sham doctor of divinity, this Judas spy of Douai and St. Omer, this broken chaplain of a man-of-war, this living, breathing, incarnate Lie—that enables him to undergo his punishment, and to get over its effects somehow. He has not lain long in Newgate, getting his seared back healed as best he may, when haply, in “pudding-time,” comes Dutch William the Deliverer. Oates’s scourging was evidently alluded to when provision was made in the Bill of Rights against “cruel and unusual punishments.” The heavy doors of Newgate open wide for Titus, who once more dons his wig and canonicals. Reflective persons do not believe in the perjured scoundrel any more, and he is seldom sworn, I should opine, of the common jury or the crowner’s quest. He has “taken the book in his right hand,” and kissed it once too often. By a section of the serious world, who yet place implicit faith in all Sir Edmondbury Godfrey’s wounds, and take the inscription on the Monument of Fish Street Hill as law and gospel, Titus Oates is regarded as a species of Protestant martyr—of a sorry, slippery kind, may be, but, at all events, as one who has suffered sorely for the good cause. The government repension him; he grows fat and bloated, and if Tom Brown is to be believed (Miscellanies, 1697), Doctor Oates, about the time of Hogarth’s birth, marries a rich city widow of Jewin Street.
Different, and not so prosperous, is the end of the assistant villain, Dangerfield. He, too, is whipped nearly out of his skin, and within a tattered inch of his miserable life; but his sentence ends before Newgate is reached, and he is being taken to that prison in a hackney-coach, when the hangman’s assistants stop the vehicle at the Gray’s Inn Coffee-house, to give the poor, tired, mangled wretch a drink. Steps out of the coffee-house one Mr. Francis, a counsel learned in the law of Gray’s Inn aforesaid, and who has probably been taking a flask too much at the coffee-house. He is an ardent anti-plot man, and in a railing tone and Newmarket phrase asks Dangerfield whether he has “run his heat and how he likes it.” The bleeding object in the coach, revived to pristine ruffianism by the liquor his gaolers have given him, answers with a flood of ribald execrations—bad language could surely be tolerated in one so evilly intreated as he had been that morning—whereupon the barrister in a rage makes a lunge at Dangerfield’s face, with a bamboo cane, and strikes one of his eyes out. In the fevered state of the man’s blood, erysipelas sets in, and Dangerfield shortly afterwards gives the world a good riddance (though it were better the hangman had done it outright with a halter) and dies. The most curious thing is, that Francis was tried and executed at Tyburn for the murder of this wretched, scourged, blinded perjurer. He was most likely tried by a strong Protestant jury, who (very justly) found him guilty on the facts, but would very probably have found him guilty against the facts, to show their Protestant feeling and belief in the Popish plot; but I say the thing is curious, seeing that the Crown did not exercise its prerogative of mercy and pardon to Francis, who was a gentleman of good family, and manifestly of the court way of thinking. The conclusion is: either that there was more impartial justice in the reign of James II. than we have given that bad time credit for, or that the court let Francis swing through fear of the mob. You see that the mob in those days did not like to be baulked of a show, and that the mob derived equal pleasure from seeing Francis hanged as from seeing Dangerfield whipped. The moral of this apologue is, that Oates and Dangerfield being very much alike in roguery, especially Oates, one got not quite so much as he deserved, and the other not quite enough; which has been the case in many other instances that have occurred in society, both vulgar and polite, since the days of William III.
There, I land you at Temple Bar, on whose gory spikes are the heads of the last conspirators against William the Dutchman’s life. “Forsitan et nobis,” whispered Goldsmith slyly to Johnson as they gazed up at the heads which, late in the reign of George III., yet rotted on those fatal spikes. We will not linger at Temple Bar now. Little boy Hogarth, years hence, will take us backwards and forwards through it hundreds of times. The three last years of century seventeen glide away from me. Plumed hats, ye are henceforth to be cocked. Swords, ye shall be worn diagonally, not horizontally. Puffed sleeves, ye must give place to ruffles. Knickerbocker breeches, with rosettes at the knees, ye must be superseded by smalls and rolled stockings. Shoe-bows, the era of buckles is coming. Justaucorps, flapped waistcoats will drive you from the field. Falling bands, your rivals are to be cravats of Mechlin lace. Carlovingian periwigs, the Ramillies’ wig is imminent. Elkanah Settles, greater city poets are to sing the praise of city custards. Claude du Val and Colonel Jack, greater thieves will swing in the greater reign that is to come. And wake up, little boy Hogarth, for William the Dutchman has broken his collar-bone, and lies sick to death at Kensington. The seventeenth century is gone and passed. In 1703 William dies, and the Princess of Denmark reigns in his stead. Up, little boy Hogarth! grow stout and tall—you have to be bound ’prentice and learn the mystery of the cross-hatch and the double cypher. Up, baby Hogarth, there is glorious work for you to do!