In 1688 Sir John Shorter (Goldsmith), appointed mayor by James II., met his death in a singular manner. He was on his way to open Bartholomew Fair, by reading the proclamation at the entrance to Cloth Fair, Smithfield. It was the custom for the mayors to call by the way on the Keeper of Newgate, and there partake on horseback of a "cool tankard" of wine, spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with sugar. In receiving the tankard Sir John let the lid flop down, his horse started, he was thrown violently, and died the next day. This custom ceased in the second mayoralty of Sir Matthew Wood, 1817. Sir John was maternal grandfather of Horace Walpole. Sir John Houblon (Grocer), mayor in 1695 (William III.), is supposed by Mr. Orridge to have been a brother of Abraham Houblon, first Governor of the Bank of England, and Lord of the Admiralty, and great-grandfather of the late Viscount Palmerston. Sir Humphrey Edwin (Skinner), mayor in 1697, enraged the Tories by omitting the show on religious grounds, and riding to a conventicle with all the insignia of office, an event ridiculed by Swift in his "Tale of a Tub," and Pinkethman in his comedy of Love without Interest (1699), where he talks of "my lord mayor going to Pinmakers' Hall, to hear a snivelling and separatist divine divide and subdivide into the two-and-thirty points of the compass." In 1700 the Mayor was Sir Thomas Abney (Fishmonger), one of the first Directors of the Bank of England, best known as a pious and consistent man, who for thirty-six years kept Dr. Watts, as his guest and friend, in his mansion at Stoke Newington. "No business or festivity," remarks Mr. Timbs, "was allowed to interrupt Sir Thomas's religious observances. The very day he became Lord Mayor he withdrew from the Guildhall after supper, read prayers at home, and then returned to his guests."
In 1702, Sir Samuel Dashwood (Vintner) entertained Queen Anne at the Guildhall, and his was the last pageant ever publicly performed, one for the show of 1708 being stopped by the death of Prince George of Denmark the day before. "The show," says Mr. J.G. Nicholls, "cost £737 2s., poor Settle receiving £10 for his crambo verses." A daughter of this Dashwood became the wife of the fifth Lord Brooke, and an ancestor of the present Earl of Warwick. Sir John Parsons, mayor in 1704, was a remarkable person; for he gave up his official fees towards the payment of the City debts. It was remarked of Sir Samuel Gerrard, mayor in 1710, that three of his name and family were Lord Mayors in three queens' reigns—Mary, Elizabeth, and Anne. Sir Gilbert Heathcote (mayor in 1711), ancestor of Lord Aveland and Viscount Donne, was the last mayor who rode in his procession on horseback; for after this time, the mayors, abandoning the noble career of horsemanship, retired into their gilt gingerbread coach.
Sir William Humphreys, mayor in 1715 (George I.), was father of the City, and alderman of Cheap for twenty-six years. Of his Lady Mayoress an old story is told relative to the custom of the sovereign kissing the Lady Mayoress upon visiting Guildhall. Queen Anne broke down this observance; but upon the accession of George I., on his first visit to the City, from his known character for gallantry, it was expected that once again a Lady Mayoress was to be kissed by the king on the steps of the Guildhall. But he had no feeling of admiration for English beauty. "It was only," says a writer in the Athenæum, "after repeated assurance that saluting a lady, on her appointment to a confidential post near some persons of the Royal Family, was the sealing, as it were, of her appointment, that he expressed his readiness to kiss Lady Cowper on her nomination as lady of the bed-chamber to the Princess of Wales. At his first appearance at Guildhall, the admirer of Madame Kielmansegge respected the new observance established by Queen Anne; yet poor Lady Humphreys, the mayoress, hoped, at all events, to receive the usual tribute from royalty from the lips of the Princess of Wales. But that strong-minded woman, Caroline Dorothea Wilhelmina, steadily looked away from the mayor's consort. She would not do what Queen Anne had not thought worth the doing; and Lady Humphreys, we are sorry to say, stood upon her unstable rights, and displayed a considerable amount of bad temper and worse behaviour. She wore a train of black velvet, then considered one of the privileges of City royalty, and being wronged of one, she resolved to make the best of that which she possessed—bawling, as ladies, mayoresses, and women generally should never do—bawling to her page to hold up her train, and sweeping away therewith before the presence of the amused princess herself. The incident altogether seems to have been too much for the good but irate lady's nerves; and unable or unwilling, when dinner was announced, to carry her stupendous bouquet, emblem of joy and welcome, she flung it to a second page who attended on her state, with a scream of 'Boy, take my bucket!' In her view of things, the sun had set on the glory of mayoralty for ever.
"The king was as much amazed as the princess had been amused; and a well-inspired wag of the Court whispered an assurance which increased his perplexity. It was to the effect that the angry lady was only a mock Lady Mayoress, whom the unmarried Mayor had hired for the occasion, borrowing her for that day only. The assurance was credited for a time, till persons more discreet than the wag convinced the Court party that Lady Humphreys was really no counterfeit. She was no beauty either; and the same party, when they withdrew from the festive scene, were all of one mind, that she must needs be what she seemed, for if the Lord Mayor had been under the necessity of borrowing, he would have borrowed altogether another sort of woman." This is one of the earliest stories connecting the City with an idea of vulgarity and purse pride. The stories commenced with the Court Tories, when the City began to resist Court oppression.
A leap now takes us on in the City chronicles. In 1727 (the year George I. died), the Royal Family, the Ministry, besides nobles and foreign ministers, were entertained by Sir Edward Becher, mayor (Draper). George II. ordered the sum of £1,000 to be paid to the sheriffs for the relief of insolvent debtors. The feast cost £4,890. In 1733 (George II.), John Barber—Swift, Pope, and Bolingbroke's friend—the Jacobite printer who defeated a scheme of a general excise, was mayor. Barber erected the monument to Butler, the poet, in Westminster Abbey, who, by the way, had written a very sarcastic "Character of an Alderman." Barber's epitaph on the poet's monument is in high-flown Latin, which drew from Samuel Wesley these lines:—
"While Butler, needy wretch! was yet alive,
No generous patron would a dinner give.
See him, when starved to death, and turned to dust,
Presented with a monumental bust.
The poet's fate is here in emblem shown—
He asked for bread, and he received a stone."
In 1739 (George II.) Sir Micajah Perry (Haberdasher) laid the first stone of the Mansion House. Sir Samuel Pennant (mayor in 1750), kinsman of the London historian, died of gaol fever, caught at Newgate, and which at the same time carried off an alderman, two judges, and some disregarded commonalty. The great bell of St. Paul's tolled on the death of the Lord Mayor, according to custom. Sir Christopher Gascoigne (1753), an ancestor of the present Viscount Cranbourne, was the first Lord Mayor who resided at the Mansion House.
In that memorable year (1761) when Sir Samuel Fludyer was elected, King George III. and Queen Charlotte (the young couple newly crowned) came to the City to see the Lord Mayor's Show from Mr. Barclay's window, as we have already described in our account of Cheapside; and the ancient pageant was so far revived that the Fishmongers ventured on a St. Peter, a dolphin, and two mermaids, and the Skinners on Indian princes dressed in furs. Sir Samuel Fludyer was a Cloth Hall factor, and the City's scandalous chronicle says that he originally came up to London attending clothier's pack-horses, from the west country; his second wife was granddaughter of a nobleman, and niece of the Earl of Cardigan. His sons married into the Montagu and Westmoreland families, and his descendants are connected with the Earls Onslow and Brownlow; and he was very kind to young Romilly, his kinsman (afterwards the excellent Sir Samuel). The "City Biography" says Fludyer died from vexation at a reprimand given him by the Lord Chancellor, for having carried on a contraband trade in scarlet cloth, to the prejudice of the East India Company. Sir Samuel was the ground landlord of Fludyer Street, Westminster, cleared away for the new Foreign Office.
In 1762 and again in 1769 that bold citizen, William Beckford, a friend of the great Chatham, was Lord Mayor. He was descended from a Maidenhead tailor, one of whose sons made a fortune in Jamaica. At Westminster School he had acquired the friendship of Lord Mansfield and a rich earl. Beckford united in himself the following apparently incongruous characters. He was an enormously rich Jamaica planter, a merchant, a member of Parliament, a militia officer, a provincial magistrate, a London alderman, a man of pleasure, a man of taste, an orator, and a country gentleman. He opposed Government on all occasions, especially in bringing over Hessian troops, and in carrying on a German war. His great dictum was that under the House of Hanover Englishmen for the first time had been able to be free, and for the first time had determined to be free. He presented to the king a remonstrance against a false return made at the Middlesex election. The king expressed dissatisfaction at the remonstrance, but Beckford presented another, and to the astonishment of the Court, added the following impromptu speech:—
"Permit me, sire, to observe," are said to have been the concluding remarks of the insolent citizen, "that whoever has already dared, or shall hereafter endeavour by false insinuations and suggestions to alienate your Majesty's affections from your loyal subjects in general, and from the City of London in particular, and to withdraw your confidence in, and regard for, your people, is an enemy to your Majesty's person and family, a violator of the public peace, and a betrayer of our happy constitution as it was established at the Glorious and Necessary Revolution." At these words the king's countenance was observed to flush with anger. He still, however, presented a dignified silence; and accordingly the citizens, after having been permitted to kiss the king's hand, were forced to return dissatisfied from the presence-chamber.