Read Online The House by the Thames by Gillian Tindall - Free Book Online

established in 1555, in an attempt to regulate and raise the status of what had always been considered rather a rough profession. Watermen, having customers literally at their mercy, had had a reputation for over-familiarity, smart backchat, swearing, spreading scandalous stories, extortionate fare-demands and also for fighting and drunkenness. John Taylor maintained it was frequently members of the public who treated the watermen badly: parties of drunken, upper-class young men, he said, would hire a boat, have themselves ferried, tell the boatman to wait for them and then not return. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the Company had acquired its own coat of arms and Watermen’s Hall was built in Upper Thames Street. A proper system of a seven-year apprenticeship was established and a fare-scale was laid down. John Taylor, with his aspirations to literary fame and to a general rise in status, and his championship of the watermen’s cause, was highly representative of the new, meritocratic world that was being born in his lifetime, against a background of revolution and change, out of the wreck of a feudal society.
    He was a man of radical views in some ways, puritanical about Sin but a great eater, drinker and merrymaker, a fervent egalitarian but also a convinced royalist. He became one of the watermen ceremonially appointed to James I and helped row the Queen’s barge to Oxford, although by that time most of the daily rowing of his own boat was done by apprentices. In the early seventeenth century London had for the first time in history a large number of inhabitants who could read. It was for this public that Taylor poured out writing of all kinds: satires on current life, joke books, religious reflections, accounts of his own travels, scripts for water pageants, tirades against the new hackney coaches – which he actually managed to get banned for a generation from taking passengers on short journeys that began and ended within two miles of the river. But his most fervent ambitions, social as well as personal, were invested in his poems, and in plays which were never particularly successful. A showman himself by nature – he and a vintner friend once rowed down the Thames in a boat made of paper, and later made a much-publicised trip down the Rhine and the Elbe – he cultivated the actors of Bankside just as eagerly as he did the great and good of London. John Aubrey, who was familiar with some of the cleverest men of his time, described John Taylor as ‘very facetious and diverting company’. Thomas Dekker, the playwright, called him ‘the ferryman of heaven’, but there may have been a touch of irony in this description.
    This life strung out, literally as well as metaphorically, on the moving waters between the two constrasting banks, periodically brought Taylor into trouble. In 1613, when he had just been appointed a King’s waterman, the Bankside theatres were going temporarily through a bad time: Burbage’s Globe had caught fire and burnt during a performance of Henry VIII , though it was soon rebuilt, and the Rose was out of action too. There were evidently fears among the watermen that the theatres would migrate back to the northern shore (as indeed they eventually did, though not till after the Restoration) and that the watermen would thereby lose a significant part of their trade. Espousing their cause, Taylor petitioned the King to issue a prohibition against theatres on the City side. Maybe he thought this would also please the Bankside theatre set, but it did not. The players did not care where they were located provided the show went on, and in any case, under royal patronage, the profession was becoming more respectable: theatre-people could now aspire to be gentlemen, and why not in London proper? This was the point at which a group of them, including Philip Henslowe, took Taylor to supper at the Cardinal’s Hat. No doubt, in the course of a