This excellent person, the son of a country gentleman, filled many offices during a long life of over eighty years. He was Master of the Ordnance to Queen Elizabeth; he became, at the advanced age of fifty, a citizen of London, joining the Girdlers’ Company, and married the widow of one John Dudley, lord of the manor of Stoke Newington. On her death he removed to Hackney, living in a great house which you may still see standing at the present day, one of the very few old houses remaining. It is a house with a center and two wings; formerly there was a large garden behind it. Sutton died in 1614, only a few weeks after signing deeds by which he endowed the Charter House with his estates for the maintenance of eighty almsmen and a school of boys. The foundation still exists; they have foolishly removed the school; the almsmen remain, though reduced in numbers. Colonel Newcome, as of course you remember, became one of them.
Enough of great men. Let us speak of smaller folk who have distinguished themselves each in his own way.
It is given to few to achieve distinction by ways petty and mean and miserable, or bold and villainous. These suburbs can point to one or two such examples, adduced here on account of their rarity. Perhaps the most illustrious of the former was a certain hermit. His name was Lucas; he belonged to a West Indian family; he became a man of Hackney only when he was buried in the churchyard. His house was about thirty miles north of London; on the death of his mother he became suddenly morose; he shut himself up alone in the house; he refused all society; he barricaded his room with timber and lived by himself in the kitchen, where he kept a fire burning night and day, wrapped himself in a blanket, slept upon a bed of cinders, and neither washed nor cut his hair nor shaved, but remained in this neglected condition, which he seems to have enjoyed greatly, after the manner of hermits, for twenty-five years, when he died. He lived on bread, milk, and eggs, which were brought to him fresh every day. He was an object of great curiosity; people came from all parts to gaze upon the hermit; he was very proud of a notoriety which he would probably have failed to acquire by any legitimate efforts; and he conversed courteously with everyone. He was found in a fit one morning, after this long seclusion, and was removed to a farmhouse, where he died the next day.
We may revive the memory of John Ward, formerly of Hackney, as a specimen of the villainous resident.
His career was chequered with coloring of dark, very dark, and black shade. He began life in some small manufactory; he wriggled up, and became a member of Parliament; he was prosecuted for forgery, he was pilloried, he was imprisoned, and he was expelled the House of Commons. He was also prosecuted by the South Sea Company for feloniously concealing the sum of £50,000. He suffered imprisonment for this crime. He is held up to execration by Pope:
“there was no grace of Heaven
Given to the fool, the mad, the vain, the evil;
To Ward, to Waters, Charters and the Devil.”
He added to his villainies a kind of pinchbeck piety, that perverted piety which manifests itself in beseeching the Lord to be on his side in his money-getting. The following is, I imagine, almost unique as a prayer.
“O Lord, thou knowest that I have nine estates in the City of London and likewise that I have lately purchased an estate in fee simple in the county of Essex: I beseech thee to preserve the two counties of Middlesex and Essex from fire and earthquakes: and as I have a mortgage in Hertfordshire, I beg of Thee likewise to have an eye of compassion on that county and for the rest of the counties Thou mayest deal with them as Thou art pleased. O Lord, enable the bank to answer all their bills, and make all my debtors good men.