London - Edward Rutherfurd [484]
“It ain’t so bad,” Sam admitted. “You should see the food. Not a bleeding oyster in sight.”
“Well, then,” his father declared. “Have a good life. If you get in trouble you know where to find me, but if you give this lot up I’ll take a strap to your backside till you’ll wish you was a lord again.”
“All right.” He paused. “Dad.”
“What?”
“Tell Sep he can have all my savings.”
His father nodded.
“Goodbye, Sam.” And the costermonger went off, whistling a merry tune.
It was the subject of fashionable mourning which lasted fully a day, when Mrs Meredith, formerly Lady St James, died in childbirth the following year. Her husband, though he married again, continued to act as guardian to the young Earl of St James, which obligation he carried out fully and faithfully, taking only a perfectly proper fee from the estate for his trouble. The young earl was very fond of him. Those who remembered the old earl, however, would remark that the son was a much more amusing fellow than his father.
Sep Dogget, who had indeed been born Lord Bocton, was happy as a fireman, and, as he never realized he was owed a legacy, never missed it.
But the greatest legacy, perhaps, was that of Isaac Fleming, whose invention brought him fame and wealth, and a fine, bow-fronted shop – though still in Fleet Street – and whose wedding cakes will continue as long as there are weddings.
LAVENDER HILL
1819
Soon, he thought, he would be in paradise.
As the Dover to London stagecoach came over the long, straight drag of Shooters Hill, the young man sitting up on the box had to wipe the dust from his spectacles twice. He was anxious not to miss anything. On his head was a large cloth cap with a peak; a woollen scarf flapped loosely round his neck. Eager, excited, eighteen-year-old Eugene Penny was making his first entry into London.
Just as they reached the end of Shooters Hill and saw the metropolis laid out below them, his expression changed first to one of surprise, and then, as they descended the slope and the afternoon suddenly grew darker, to one of horror.
“This is London?” he cried. And the coachman laughed.
If those who seek patterns in history were to look for a time when civilization moved beyond the glories of ancient Rome, then in the English-speaking world, they would surely have to choose the reign of King George III. His was a long reign which lasted, nominally – since the poor king, who suffered from porphyria, was declared mentally incapable for extensive periods – from 1760 to 1820; and it spanned two epic events.
Nothing could have been more Roman than the character of the thirteen American colonies who had proclaimed their independence from the British monarchy in 1776. Even those states which had begun as religious refuges had, by then, developed into societies not unlike those of the city states of independent farmers and merchants which formed the nucleus of the early power of Rome. Stoic General Washington with his patrician views, his country villa at Mount Vernon and his million acres of land behaved not unlike a Roman noble. The framers of the Constitution, with its elected Congress and its élite Senate, too were mostly men steeped in the classics. Most of the new American states even repeated the practice of the Roman republic with their massive use of slaves.
As for the great cataclysm of the French Revolution a dozen years later, it openly proclaimed itself to be Roman. Inspired by the Enlightenment – the triumph of classical reason over what was seen as the medieval tyranny and superstition of a Catholic monarchy – the revolutionaries quickly adopted every attribute of the ancient Roman age. The king’s subjects were called ‘citizens’ like Roman freemen. Liberty, equality and the brotherhood of man soon found their new champion in Napoleon who made his armies march under Roman eagles, who gave France and much of Europe a system of Roman law, and whose favoured artists, furniture makers and artisans developed the ‘Empire’ style, inspired in every