Once upon a time, so tradition hath it--there was a barmaid in a Westminster tavern who married her master. After his death, she continued to carry on the business, and had occasion to seek the advice of a lawyer named Hyde. Mr. Hyde wooed and married her. Then Hyde became Lord Chancellor and was ennobled as Lord Clarendon. Their daughter married the Duke of York, and was the mother of Mary and Anne Stewart. So the landlady of an inn became the grandmother of two queens. Most history books are content to describe Lord Clarendon’s second wife as the daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury; but the supporters of the traditional view maintain that this was an invention of the Court Party.
[Illustration: The Recreation Room in the “Skittles” Inn, Letchworth]
We have not yet encountered an innkeeper exactly of the same type as old John Willet, of the _Maypole_ at Chigwell, that “burly large-headed man with a fat face, which betokened profound obstinacy and slowness of apprehension, combined with a very strong reliance upon his own merits.” We meet occasionally in other walks of life these small-minded individuals whom chance has endowed with pride of place and the opportunity to tyrannize over all around them. Like the sovereign owner of the ancient hostelry with its “huge zigzag chimneys and more gable ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day,” not to speak of its diamond-pane lattices and its ceilings blackened by the hand of time and heavy with massive beams, they imagine that their reign will endure to the end. Is there in all literature a more pathetic piece of writing than that in which Charles Dickens depicts the humiliation of John Willet, when the Gordon rioters invade the _Maypole_, and the fallen tyrant finds himself “sitting down in an armchair and watching the destruction of his property, as if it were some queer play or entertainment of an astonishing and stupefying nature, but having no reference to himself--that he could make out--at all?”
Innkeepers have been reckoned among the poets. John Taylor, the “Water Poet,” so called because he commenced life as a waterman, and because so many of his voluminous works deal with aquatic matters, kept a tavern in Phœnix Alley, Longacre. Being a faithful royalist he set up the sign of the _Mourning Crown_ over his house to express his sorrow at the tragic death of Charles I, but was compelled by the Parliament to take it down. He replaced it with his own portrait and the following lines: