The Queens and the Hive by Edith Sitwell

Author:Edith Sitwell [Sitwell, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448201525
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty

On 23 January 1571, the Queen of England visited the Bourse erected by the great city merchant Sir Thomas Gresham, who, after the death of his only son, who would have inherited it, used his vast fortune for the good of the city. Here, near to St Paul’s (which had been the meeting-place for all rogues, beggars, ghosts of ill-fortune come back from hell to some new hell of destitution), Sir Thomas built the greatest shopping centre in London.

The royal splendour and pageantry (after visiting the Bourse the Queen dined with Sir Thomas at his house in Bishopsgate) passed by the overhanging horror of the slums, by the nation of beggars, by the open gulf of horror called the Fleet Ditch.

This, said the editor of Ben Jonson’s Epigrams, ‘was the name given to that part of the City Ditch which extended from Fleet Lane … by Bridewell Walk and Holborn to the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge’.

All that they boast of Styx, of Acheron,

Cocytus, Phlegethon, ours have proved in one,

The filth, stench, noise, save only what was there

Subtly distinguished, was confuséd here.

….1

And for one Cerberus, the whole coast was dogs.

Furies there wanted not: each scold was ten,

And for the cries of ghosts, women and men,

Laden with plague-sores and their sins, were heard,

Lashed by their consciences, to die afeard.

In the first jaws appeared that ugly monster

Yclepèd mud, which, when their oars did once stir,

Belched forth an air as hot as at the muster

Of all your night-tubs when the carts do cluster.

Between two walls, where on one side, to scar men,

Were seen your ugly centaurs, ye call car-men,

Gorgonian scolds, and harpies, on the other

Hung stench, diseases, and old filth, their mother,

With famine, wants, and sorrows, many a dozen,

The least of which was to the plague a cousin.1

By the banks of this, in the aisles of St Paul’s (the latter devoted to ‘all kinds of bargains, meetings, brawlings, murders, conspiracies’, as the Bishop of Durham said in a sermon after St Paul’s had been struck by lightning in 1561) and, too, in the Inns of Court, strutted, crawled, and flapped the nation of the beggars—no longer a kingdom within a kingdom, as in the time of King Henry, when they were ruled over by Puffing Dick, who according to Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common Cursitors, was ‘a man crafty and bold; yet he died miserably. For, after he had commanded now fully eight years, he had the pining of the pox and the Neapolitan scurf [syphilis] and there was an end of Puffing Dick.’

Now, instead of this well-regimented nation, each beggar was a republic in himself.

Here come the ‘Upright men and Rufflers’, who, according to Thomas Dekker’s The Bel-Man of London, ‘walke with cudgels alike; they profess Armes alike, though they be both out at elbows, and will sweare they lost their limmes in their Countries quarrel, when either they are lame from diseases, or have been mangled in some drunken quarrell…. The Palliards, or Clapperdudgeons’, who ‘to give cullor to their lame wandring: with Sperewort or Arsenick will they in one night poyson their leg….

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