Part 11

The “Spectator” voiced a very general feeling among the Podsnap family in writing of Mr. Lloyd-George’s reference to the hereditary principle and his simile that a peer became a legislator by being “the first of the litter.” The word ‘litter’ quoted without its context may seem a little harsh, but the point of the allusion was that, although we chose our legislators in that way we did not choose our spaniels by this curious and, as he argued, obsolete method. The “Spectator” found this to be mere vulgarity. I have a great affection for the “Spectator,” having been brought up from earliest childhood to reverence her teachings. I say “her” because I always visualise the “Spectator” as some being like Charles Lamb’s aunt, who was “a dear and good one ... a stedfast friendly being, and a fine old Christian ... whose only secular employment was the splitting of French beans and dropping them into a china basin of fair water.” Much as I honour the “Spectator,” I cannot but think the prevailing Podsnap is warping her better judgment.

But there is an excuse for the “Spectator” that cannot be offered for the average man of the world who claims to be righteously offended at the vulgarity of Mr. Lloyd-George’s similes.

I met a friend upon the golf links who used language upon the last green, where he failed to hole out in three, that no Bishop could have sanctioned, even although he fully appreciated that my friend was for the moment a “bottom dog.” On the way to the Club-house he vented his wrath upon the offending Chancellor of the Exchequer for the language he used on the platform. I pleaded in mitigation that just as my friend had been endeavouring to hole out a lively “Helsby” on a tricky green, so the Chancellor was endeavouring to put the House of Lords in a hole, a process in which that rubber-cored institution refused to assist him. To express your feelings and beliefs at a moment like that required that some latitude should be allowed to you in the choice of simile and language.

But so far had the microbe of Podsnap entered into my friend’s understanding that he treated my poor pleasantry as an added insult and complained bitterly that such vituperation, as he called it, was “not English, and never used to be done.” Curiously enough, I had in my mind a passage in a political speech that created even greater pleasure and displeasure to Reds and Blues more than a quarter of a century ago. It was that famous passage in which Mr. Chamberlain scorned Lord Salisbury as constituting “himself the spokesman of a class—of the class to which he himself belongs—‘who toil not neither do they spin,’ whose fortunes, as in his case, have originated in grants made long ago, for such services as courtiers render kings, and have since grown and increased while their owners slept by the levy of an unearned share on all that other men have done by toil and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country of which they form a part.” There was not so much whining over a few hard words in those days, and Lord Salisbury himself could hit out with his “black man” allusion and the famous Hottentot simile, and, lost, as the ‘Town Vicar’ would think, to culture and right feeling, could talk of “having put our money on the wrong horse.”

Memory may be misleading after a gap of twenty-five years, and the wisest of us is apt to grow “_difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti_,” yet I cannot but think that there are signs in the air that our old friend Podsnap is having it too much his own way. He is a good fellow in the main, and some of the ideas he worked for are sound. His belief in the young person had its touching and beautiful side as it had its ridiculous side. The young person, however, has grown up since his day, and has her own movements which are but lightly clad with Podsnappery of any kind. And for grown-ups dealing with the everyday affairs of the world we must, in the old English way, stick to our fighting instincts, and give and take hearty blows in good part, and win pleasantly and lose ungrudgingly, as most of our fighters, fair play to them, still do. And we must not be afraid of the Town Vicar’s “mere vulgarity.” For, after all, our language is a vulgar tongue, and we are proud that our Bible is printed in it, and our speeches have to be made in it. As a vulgar tongue vulgarly used it brought forth the triumphs of Elizabethan literature, and was the medium of such varied writers as Fielding, Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. And when it is the duty of wisdom to cry without and utter her voice in the street, she must do it without fear of Podsnap and in the vulgar tongue.

AN ELIZABETHAN RECORDER.

“I assert that all past days were what they must have been, And that they could no-how have been better than they were.”

—_Walt Whitman._

Many years ago, when I happened upon a few extracts from the letters of Mistress Dorothy Osborne, I wondered how they had escaped the grasp of the historian learned in the domestic annals of the Commonwealth. And in the same way it has always surprised me that the correspondence of William Fleetwood, Recorder of London from 1571 to 1591, should have been left hidden in the scarce but charming collection of Elizabethan Letters edited by that excellent antiquary and man of letters, Thomas Wright.

Some day, perhaps, popular interest may demand a Life and Letters of Fleetwood; but, meanwhile, a mosaic of the man and his work, pieced together from his own written words, may interest latter-day readers. His career was similar to that of many another minor Elizabethan official, and the records show him to have been an honest, active Protestant magistrate, full of zeal for his religion, honour for his Queen, and integrity in his office. In his letters we have a twenty years experience of an Elizabethan Quarter Sessions which we may use as a base to measure our progress in law and humanity during the last four hundred years.

And first a word or two of the man himself that his message may be the more clearly understood. The Recorder was a descendant of the ancient Lancashire Family of the Fleetwoods of Hesketh, in which village Baines, Lancashire’s historian, thinks our Recorder was born, and the probable date of his birth seems to be 1535. He is said to have been an illegitimate son of Robert Fleetwood, third son of William Fleetwood of Hesketh, who married Ellen Standish, daughter of another old Lancashire family. Their second son, Thomas, came to Buckinghamshire, and was known as Thomas Fleetwood of the Vache in Chalfont St. Giles. He was Master of the Mint, and Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. The Recorder must have been recognised by the family, and no doubt visited his uncle Thomas, for he himself married a lady of a well known Buckinghamshire family, Mariana, daughter of John Bailey of Kingsey. He was educated at Oxford, and was of Brazenose College, but he took no degree, and came to London to study law at the Middle Temple, where at the age of twenty-eight we find him appointed Reader. In Mary’s reign he was member for Lancaster, and afterwards sat in the House for Marlborough and the City of London. The Earl of Leicester was his patron, and it is said to be through his influence that in 1571, at the early age of thirty-six, he became Recorder of the City of London.

This office he held for twenty years, when he retired on a pension of £100 a year, and becoming Queen’s Serjeant the following year, did not live to enjoy the further honour, for he died at his home in Noble Street, Aldersgate, in February, 1593, and was buried at Great Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, where he seems to have had considerable estates.

Altogether he stands before us as a type of successful professional lawyer coming from the ranks of the county families into the larger world of London, bringing with him a certain amount of Lancashire grit and humour, and a strong sense of duty to the Government and the public. Nor does he seem to have been in any way a hide-bound, dry-as-dust, technical minded official, but there is evidence that he had a wide sympathy with many social movements of the time. He was an eager Protestant, but I cannot find that he was fanatical in his dislike of the Roman Catholics, whom it was his duty to prosecute. Anthony Wood describes him as “a learned man and a good antiquary, but of a marvellous merry and pleasant conceit”; and it is said he contributed much to the last of the old editions of Holinshed. Strype, the annalist, speaks of him in reference to a speech in the House of Commons as “a wise man,” and he seems to have combined wisdom and humour with a stern sense of official duty. That he was not a mere creature of Leicester’s and the Court is shown in his examinations of one Bloss, who had uttered terrible scandals concerning Elizabeth and her favourite, but Fleetwood reports upon his conscience as a lawyer, that it is “a clear case of no treason.” A weak man would have been tempted to strain the law against the prisoner, who was an undeserving and dangerous person. There is a pleasant incident, too, of his writing to Secretary Walsingham about some young orphans whose Catholic mother had committed suicide, begging him to acquaint Peter Osborn, the Lord Treasurer and the Master of the Wards, with the details of the unfortunate case, in order that their monies may be kept for them. “Such was the care,” writes Strype, “of this good Recorder, of the Children of the City.”

There was one exciting incident in his life when in 1576 he was cast into the Fleet Prison. Lord Burghley seems to have suggested a raid upon the Charterhouse, where unlawful Mass was being celebrated. The Recorder carries out his instructions, and writes a vivid account of his proceedings. Unfortunately, Lady Geraldi, the wife of the Portuguese Ambassador, was present, and her husband carries his complaint of her treatment to Court, with the result that Elizabeth—after the manner of all rulers of all times—promptly disavows her agent, and by way of a pleasant apology to Portugal, throws Fleetwood into gaol. The Recorder, who probably thoroughly understands that he is only in the Fleet, “without prejudice” and for purely Pickwickian state purposes, writes to Lord Burghley: “I do beseech you thank Mr. Warden of the Fleet for his most friendly and courteous using of me, for surely I thank God for it. I am quiet and lack nothing that he or his bedfellow are able to do for me.” And after a short experience of gaol he sums up the situation much as Mr. Stead did after a similar experience: “This is a place wherein a man may quietly be acquainted with God.”

It is in passages like these in the man’s own letters that his figure becomes dimly discernible to us across the ages of time, and when our eyes grow accustomed to the sight, we see before us the form of an Englishman not unlike many we have known in our own time. The more one studies the unaffected domestic documents of any period written without afterthought of publication, the more convinced one is that social progress moves like the tide and the rocks and the trees; its growth is nearly imperceptible, and four hundred years in the development of mankind is but a small moment of time.

The correspondence of William Fleetwood with Lord Burghley commences in 1575, when my Lord Burghley was at Buckestones—what a charming spelling of the prosaic Buxton—for his health. In those days an English Premier got rid of his gout in his own country, and knew not Homburg. The knowing ones in the political circles of London whispered with emphasis that the Prime Minister was “practising with the Queen of Scots,” then in custody at Sheffield, but the historical evidence points to mere gout.

Our Recorder, being Leicester’s creature, and being also a man of the world and looking for promotion as his deserts, writes careful reports to my Lord Burghley, telling him of London that from a police point of view “the state of the city is well and all quiet.” The Star Chamber had received the city fathers, and my Lord Keeper with the Chancellor of the Duchy, the Master of the Rolls and others had met the Recorder, and Master Nicholas the Lord Mayor, and divers Aldermen who had reported to them of city affairs. And as is the way of official men, they reported all to be well.

“And as,” writes the Recorder, “my Lord Keeper’s order is to call for the book of misbehaviours of masterless men, rogues, fencers, and such like, we had nothing to present for London, for Mr. Justice Southcot and I had taken fine of six strumpets such as haunt the hedge and which had lately been punished at the Assizes at Croydon, and two or three other lewd fellows, their companions, whom we despatched away into their countries. As for Westminster, the Duchy (the Savoy), St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John’s Street and Islington, (they) were never so well and quiet for neither rogue nor masterless man dare once to look into those parts.” Could Scotland Yard make a better report than that to-day? No doubt Fleetwood believed with the optimism of a modern Home Office official that he and his fellows had purged London of crime.

Crime being well in hand, these good men set out with feverish energy to put down the source of crime, and like the social reformer of to-day, thinking that pimples were the origin of disease rather than mere evidence of a disordered system, commenced a crusade on the alehouse.

One is apt to think of the Star Chamber as merely a Court for the oppression of English freedom and the abolition of Magna Charta, but in Elizabeth’s day it was busying itself with much the same problems that are troubling Parliament and the magistrates to-day. It is very modern reading to learn that my Lord Keeper and the residue of the Council at the Star Chamber have set down in writing certain orders for the reforming of certain matters, and that the very first of these is “for the suppressing of the over great number of alehouses, the which thing upon Wednesday last my Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Hayward and myself for the liberties of Southwark, and Mr. Justice Southcot and myself for Lambeth town, Lambeth Marsh, the Mint, the Bank, Parr’s Garden, the Overground, Newington, Bermondsey Street and Kentish Street, sitting altogether, we have put down, I am certain, above two hundred alehouses and yet have left a sufficient number, yea, and more, I fear than my Lord Keeper will well like of at his next coming.”

All this was done on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Wednesday there was an influential dinner party at Mr. Campion, the brewer’s—one wonders if he owned tied houses in those days and whether their licenses were spared—and “at after dinner, Mr. Deane and I went to Westminster, and there in the Court we had before us all the officers of the Duchy and of Westminster, and there we have put down nearly an hundred alehouses. As for St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John Street, and Islington, Mr. Randall and I mean this Saturday at afternoon to see the reformation, in like manner Mr. Lieutenant and Mr. Fisher deal for the East part. I am sure they will use great diligence in this matter.”

One may piously hope that the souls of these good men are not vexed to-day with the knowledge of the futility of their work on earth and that they know nothing of our modern licensing system. Could Master Fleetwood return to listen to the procedure of a local licensing bench in the twentieth century he would perhaps laugh in his sleeve to think that the methods of the Star Chamber were yet with us and that magistrates of austere mind were still using “great diligence in these matters.”

Fleetwood’s earliest letter is dated from Bacon House, August 8th, 1575. The vacation is on, yet it seems the Temple is full of students. For as Richard Chamberlayne tells us this is the “second learning vacation” which began on Lammas Day. Readings continued for “three weeks and three days,” and the Recorder seems to think my Lord Burghley would take an interest in the matter of legal education, which is not an affair that has troubled the mind of any minister of modern times. The plague is with them and the study of the law has to give way to the plague, for the Recorder tells us that “as touching the Inns of Court it so fell out that at Gray’s Inn there was no reading this vacation because one died there of the plague. At the Inner Temple there hath been a meeting, but by means that the plague was in the house, the reading being scarce half done, is now broken up. In Lincoln’s Inn yesterday being Friday, at afternoon one is dead of the plague and the company are now to be dispersed. In the Middle Temple, where I am, I thank God we have our health and our reading continually. I am always at the reading, and I have taken stringent order upon the pain of putting out of commons, that none of the Gentlemen of our house or their servants shall go out of the house except it be by water and not to come in any place of danger, the which order is well observed.”

“Our house” is the old world phrase familiar to Templars and means the Middle Temple, and “putting out of commons” was in that day a serious penalty. The “readings” took the form of “moots” or arguments on a case put by the reader, and argued not only by students but by lawyers of position. They must have been of considerable educational value and have always been prized by the older generation of lawyers. I remember well an old learned Judge solemnly exhorting me in the days of my youth, to become a good “put-case,” a phrase which one does not hear used nowadays. Moots and readings might, one would think, be revived especially in the interest of the newly called barrister, who can say with but too much truth as Fleetwood wrote in August, 1575, “For my own part I have no business but go as quietly to my book as I did the first year that I came to the Temple.”

In July, 1577, Lord Burghley is again at “Buckstons” [_sic_] and the faithful recorder sends him a budget of news. He has been at the Mercers’ feast “and there were we all very merry ... and I told them that I was to write privately to your Lordship; and they required me all to commend them to your good Lordship; at which time the Master of the Rolls, who is no wine drinker, did drink to your Lordship a bowl of Rhenish wine and then Sir Thomas Gresham drank another, and Sir William Demsell the third and I pledged them all.” It reads like a page from the Book of Snobs.

And after the “great and royal banquet” which took place at the house of the new Master, some time we may suppose about mid-day, Fleetwood, as he tells us “walked to Powle’s to learn some news.” For in that day St. Paul’s was the Exchange and the club and the Market Place of the men of the world where news came from all quarters of the world and where news passed from lip to lip and thence out into the corners of England in such letters as this of Fleetwood’s to Lord Burghley. The extraordinary uses to which the Cathedral was put in Elizabeth’s time, are a constant theme of reproach from religious-minded men. Idlers and drunkards used to sleep on benches at the choir door, and porters, butchers and water bearers were suffered in service time, to carry and re-carry their wares across the nave, and in the upper choir itself irreverent people walked about with hats on their heads, whilst if any entered the Cathedral booted and spurred, the gentlemen of the choir left their places and demanded “spur-money” and threatened their victim with a night’s imprisonment in the choir if the tax were not paid. Such was “Powle’s” on this July afternoon when Recorder Fleetwood went down in search of news, and indeed he heard terrible tidings; for there “came suddenly into the church Edmund Downing, and he told me that he was even then come out of Worcestershire and that my Lord Chief Baron died at Sir John Hubbard’s house and that he is buried at Leicester. And he said that the common speech of that country is that Mr. Serjeant Barham should be dead at Worcester, but that is not certain. The like report goeth of Mr. Fowler, the Clerk of the same Circuit ... and a number of other gent that were at the gaol delivery at Oxon are all dead. The inquest of life and death are almost all gone. Such Clerks servants and young gent, being scholars as were at the same gaol delivery, are either dead or in great danger. Mr. Solicitor’s son and heir being brought home to his father’s house at Woodstock, lieth at the mercy of God. Mr. Attorney’s son and heir was brought very sick from Oxon to his father’s house at Harrow, where he lieth in as great danger of death as might be, but now there is some hope of amendment. The gaol delivery of Oxon, as I am told, was kept in the Town Hall, a close place and by the infection of the gaol as all men take it, this mortality grew.”

We know now all about the Oxford Black Assizes of the 5th and 6th of July, 1577, and how Judges, Sheriffs, Knights, Squires, Barristers and members of the Grand Jury were stricken down with what was probably typhus. The disease spread to the Colleges. Masters, Doctors and heads of houses left almost to a man. “The Master of Merton remained _longe omnium vigilantissimus_ ministering to the sick. The pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, pixides and every kind of confection.” Wild rumours spread abroad that it was the result of a Papist plot. In a few weeks of the Assizes, some five hundred perished, nearly all men of the better class. The disease did not attack the poor or women. There seems little doubt that the infection was among the prisoners and there is a record that two or three thieves had died in chains shortly before the Assizes. One would have supposed that such a visitation would have been a signal for prison reform, but those who have read of Howard’s experiences, know how little was done to mitigate the horrors of life in gaol until a much more recent date.

Fleetwood tells us a great deal about his own activity at this time. He is holding an oyer and terminer at the Guildhall in the vacation “to keep the people in obedience.” He sits with the Justices to discuss the abolition of alehouses and the advancement of archery, he is constant in his search after rogues and masterless men and there being cases of plague in the Savoy, he takes occasion to pass with all the constables between the bars and the tilt-yard in both the liberties, to see the houses shut, which he notes with pride “neither the Master of the Rolls nor my cousin Holcroft the Bailiff, would or durst do.” At the same time he was writing a book on “The Office of a Justice of the Peace” which was printed a hundred years later. Amidst these various employments however, he finds room for the lighter social duties and spends an afternoon with the Shoemakers of London, who “having builded a fair and a new hall, made a royal feast there for their friends, which they call their housewarming.”

A really heavy sessions must have been a terrible experience since this is what the Recorder evidently regards as a light one. “At the last Sessions,” he writes, “there were executed eighteen at Tyburn, and one, Barlow, born in Norfolk but of the house of the Barlows in the county of Lancashire, was pressed. They were all notable cut-purses and horse-stealers. It was the quietest Sessions that ever I was at.” At the beginning of the year he makes an audit of known criminals “that I may know what new may be sprung up this last year and where to find them if need be” and he makes out a list of “receivers and gage takers and melters of stolen plate and such like.”