of Edward IV. in the sanctuary of Westminster, sitting" alone below on the rushes, all desolate and dismayed," returning home to York Place in the dawning of the day; “and when he opened his windows and looked on the Thames, he might see the river full of boats of the Duke of Gloucester his servants, watching that no person should go to sanctuary, nor none should pass unsearched." Cavendish, in his ‘Life of Wolsey,' furnishes as graphic a description of the great Cardinal hurrying to and fro on the highway of the Thames, between his imperious master and the injured Katharine, when Henry had become impatient of the tedious conferences of the Court at Blackfriars sitting on the question of his divorce, and desired to throw down with the strong hand the barriers that kept him from the Lady Anne:-" Thus this court passed from session to session, and day to day, in so much that a certain day the king sent for my lord at the breaking up one day of the court to come to him into Bridewell. And to accomplish his commandment he went unto him, and being there with him in communication in his grace's privy chamber from eleven until twelve of the clock and past at noon, my lord came out and departed from the king, and took his barge at the Black Friars, and so went to his house at Westminster. The Bishop of Carlisle, being with him in his barge, said unto him, (wiping the sweat from his face,) Sir,' quoth he, ‘it is a very hot day.' 'Yea,' quoth my Lord Cardinal, if ye had been as well chafed as I have been within this hour, ye would say it were very hot." Between Westminster and the Tower, and the Tower and Greenwich, the Thames was especially the royal road. When Henry VII. willed the coronation of his Queen Elizabeth, she came from Greenwich attended by "barges freshly furnished with banners and streamers of silk." When Henry VIII. avowed his marriage with Anne Boleyn, she was brought by "all the crafts of London" from Greenwich to the Tower, "trumpets, shawms, and other divers instruments, all the way playing and making great melody." The river was not only the festival highway, but the more convenient one, for kings as well as subjects. Hall tells us, "This year (1536), in December, was the Thames of London all frozen over, wherefore the king's majesty, with his beautiful spouse Queen Jane, rode throughout the city of London to Greenwich." The interesting volume of the Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII.' contains item upon item of sums paid to watermen for waiting with barge and boat. The barge was evidently always in attendance upon the king; and the great boat was ever busy, moving household stuff and servants from Westminster to Greenwich or to Richmond. In 1531 we have a curious evidence of the king being deep in his polemical studies, in a record of payment "to John, the king's bargeman, for coming twice from Greenwich to York Place with a great boat with books for the king." We see the “great Eliza" on the Thames, in all her pomp, as Raleigh saw her out of his prison-window in the Tower, in 1592, as described in a letter from Arthur Gorges to Cecil:-" Upon a report of her majesty's being at Sir George Carew's, Sir W. Raleigh, having gazed and sighed a long time at his study-window, from whence he might discern the barges and boats about the Blackfriars stairs, suddenly he brake out into a great distemper, and sware that his enemies had on purpose brought her majesty thither to break his gall in sunder with Tantalus' torment, that when she went away he might see death before his eyes; with many such-like conceits. And, as a man transported with passion, he swore to Sir George Carew that he would disguise himself, and get into a pair of oars to ease his mind with but a sight of the queen." In the time of Elizabeth and the First James, and onward to very recent days, the North bank of the Thames was studded with the palaces of the nobles; and each palace had its landing-place, and its private retinue of barges and wherries; and many a freight of the brave and beautiful has been borne, amidst song and merriment, from house to house, to join the masque and the dance; and many a wily statesman, muffled in his cloak, has glided along unseen in his boat to some dark conference with his ambitious neighbour. Nothing could then have been more picturesque than the Strand, with its broad gardens, and lofty trees, and embattled turrets and pinnacles. Upon the river itself, busy as it was, fleets of swans were ever sailing; and they ventured unmolested into that channel which is now narrowed by vessels from every region. Paulus Jovius, who died in 1552, describing the Thames, says, "This river abounds in swans, swimming in flocks; the sight of whom, and their noise, are vastly agreeable to the fleets that meet them in their course." Shakspere must have seen this sight, when he made York compare the struggle of his followers at the battle of Wakefield to a swan encountering a tidal stream: But there were those, during three centuries, to whom the beauties of the silent highway could have offered no pleasure. The Thames was the road by which the victim of despotism came from the Tower to Westminster Hall, in most cases to return to his barge with the edge of the axe towards his face. One example is enough to suggest many painful recollections. When the Duke of Buckingham was conducted from his trial to the barge, "Sir Thomas Lovel desired him to sit on the cushions and carpet ordained for him. He said, 'Nay; for when I went to Westminster I was Duke of Buckingham; now I am but Edward Bohun, the most caitiff of the world.' " But these exhibitions, frequent as they were, occupied little of the thoughts of those who were moving upon the Thames, in hundreds of boats, intent upon business or amusement. In the beginning of the seventeenth century the river was at the height of its glory as the great thoroughfare of London. Howel maintains that the river of Thames hath not her fellow, "if regard be had to those forests of masts which are perpetually upon her; the variety of smaller wooden bottoms playing up and down; the stately palaces that are built upon both sides of her banks so thick; which made divers foreign ambassadors affirm that the most glorious sight in the world, take water and land together, was to come upon a high tide from Gravesend, and shoot the bridge to Westminster." Of the "smaller wooden bottoms," Stow computes that there were in his time as many as two thousand; and he makes the very extraordinary statement, that there were forty thousand watermen upon the rolls of the company, and that they could furnish twenty thousand men for the fleet. The private watermen of the court and of the nobility were doubtless included in this large number. It is evident, from the representations of a royal procession in the early times of James I., that, even on common occasions, the sovereign moved upon Londinopolis, p. 403. *Henry VI., part III. † Hall. the Thames with regal pomp, surrounded with many boats of guards and mu : The Inns of Court, too, filled as they were not only with the great practitioners of the law, but with thousands of wealthy students, gave ample employment to the watermen. Upon the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Palatine, in 1613, the gentlemen of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn presented a sumptuous masque at court. "These maskers, with their whole train in all triumphant manner and good order, took barge at Winchester Stairs, about seven of the clock that night, and rowed to Whitehall against the tide the chief maskers went in the king's barge royally adorned, and plenteously furnished with a great number of great wax lights, that they alone made a glorious show: other gentlemen went in the prince's barge, and certain other went in other fair barges, and were led by two admirals: besides all these, they had four lusty warlike galleys to convoy and attend them; each barge and galley, being replenished with store of torchlights, made so rare and brave a show upon the water, as the like was never seen upon the Thames." When Charles was created Prince of Wales, in 1616, he came from Barn Elms to Whitehall in great aquatic state. In 1625, when Henrietta Maria arrived in London (June 16), "the king and queen in the royal barge, with many other barges of honour and thousands of boats, passed through London Bridge to Whitehall; infinite numbers, besides these, in wherries, standing in houses, ships, lighters, western barges, and on each side of the shore."+ What a contrast does this splendour and rejoicing present to the scene which a few years disclosed!" The barge-windows," (says Mr. Mead, the writer of this letter,) "notwithstanding the vehement shower, were open and all the people Ellis's Letters, vol. iii. p. 196. *Howes' Continuation of Stow's Annals, p. 1007. : shouting amain. She put out her hand, and shaked it unto them." The Whitehall, to which the daughter of Henri Quatre was thus conveyed, had another tale to tell in some twenty-three years; and the long tragedy of the fated race of the Stuarts almost reaches its catastrophe, when, in a cold winter night of 1688, the wife of James II. takes a common boat at Whitehall to fly with her child to some place of safety; and when in a few weeks later the fated king steps into a barge, surrounded by Dutch guards, amidst the triumph of his enemies, and the pity even of those good men who blamed his obstinacy and rashness: "I saw him take barge," says Evelyn,-" a sad sight." But let us turn from political changes to those more enduring revolutions which changes of manners produce. We have before us a goodly folio volume of some six or seven hundred pages, closely printed, and containing about seventy thousand lines, for the most part of heroic verse, entitled "All the Works of John Taylor, the Water-Poet, being sixty and three in number, collected into one volume by the Author."* John Taylor, who made this collection of his tracts in 1630, was literally a Thames waterman, working daily for his bread. He says, The waterman's verses are not so ambitious as those of the Venetian gondolier, Antonio Bianchi, who wrote an epic poem in twelve cantos; but they possess a great deal of rough vigour, and altogether open to us very curious views of London manners in the early part of the seventeenth century. Taylor is never ashamed of his trade; and he cannot endure it to be supposed that his waterman's vocation is incompatible with the sturdiest assertion of his rights to the poetical dignity:— "It chanc'd one evening, on a reedy bank, To fill my pate with verse, and empt my purse." In one of his controversies--for he generally had some stiff quarrel on hand with witlings who looked down upon him-he says, addressing William Fennor, "the king's rhyming poet," Such a spirit would go far to make a writer whose works would be worth looking * Taylor, after the publication of this volume, printed about fifty more tracts, in prose and verse. at two centuries after the praise or abuse of his contemporaries was forgotten; and so homely John Taylor, amongst the race of satirists and manner-painters, is not to be despised. "The gentleman-like sculler at the Hope on the Bankside" (as he makes Fennor call him) lived in a poetical atmosphere. He probably had the good fortune to ferry Shakspere from Whitehall to Paris Garden; he boasts of his acquaintance with Ben Jonson; and the cause of his great quarrel with Fennor is thus set forth: "Be it known unto all men, that I, John Taylor, waterman, did agree with William Fennor (who arrogantly and falsely entitles himself the King's Majesty's Rhyming Poet) to answer me at a trial of wit, on the 7th of October last, 1614, at the Hope Stage on the Bank-side; . . and when the day came that the play should have been performed, the house being filled with a great audience who had all spent their money extraordinarily, then this companion for an ass ran away and left me for a fool, amongst thousands of critical censurers." Taylor had taken his waterman's position in a spot where there was a thriving trade. The Bankside was the landing-place to which the inhabitants of Westminster, and of the Strand, and of London west of Paul's, would daily throng in the days of the Drama's glory; when the Globe could boast of the highest of the land amongst its visitors; when Essex and Southampton, out of favour at court, repaired thither to listen, unsatiated, to the lessons of the great master of philosophy; when crowds of earnest people, not intent only upon amusement, went there to study their country's history, or learn the "humanities" in a school where the poet could dare to proclaim universal truths in an age of individual dissimulation; and when even the idle profligate might for a moment forget his habits of self-indulgence, and be roused into sympathy with his fellows, by the art which then triumphed, and still triumphs, over all competition. Other places of amusement were on the Bankside-the Paris |