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

convivial evening, he charmed them again and swore that he would do nothing against their wishes. The petition to the King failed anyway: there was no particular reason for the King to agree to it, and probably Taylor had misled his fellow watermen by boasting of his royal appointment and his friendships in high places. But many watermen believed that his actor friends had bribed him not to press his suit, and they were not pleased with him.
    Taylor retained his leading role in the Company, however, and a few years later, in the bitterly cold winter of 1620–21, regained favour among his peers by publishing a passionate poem about their sufferings. The Thames froze over above London Bridge, and for weeks the watermen were out of work, most of them with no other resources to keep them going. Taylor reckoned that all-in-all about twenty thousand people – wives, children, apprentices and servants, as well as the men themselves – were affected by this misfortune. Since a mini ice-age set in as the seventeenth-century progressed, with long spells of winter frost becoming more common than in the preceding centuries, this lament was to be repeated and repeated again by other voices. During the following century, too, the Thames froze solid some twenty times. The last of these ferocious winters did not occur till 1813–14, after which the climate became a little milder again. But by that time the watermen had a number of other threats to their ancient livelihood.
    The theatre trade on Bankside collapsed with the beginning of the Civil Wars in 1642, and by then Taylor had other, more pressing problems. In the general social unrest the power and prestige of the Watermen’s Company had also collapsed; Taylor was threatened by enemies he had carelessly made and was once nearly lynched; his royal salary was at an end and, as a known royalist, his goods were confiscated. His wife died, and he had to flee from London, taking refuge with a brother who was an innkeeper near Abingdon. Aubrey saw him then and judged him to be ‘near fifty’, handsomely dressed, with ‘a good quick look’. In fact, he was over sixty, too old to row any more for a living. He came back to London later, and in his last years we find him living in near-poverty but married again, to a wife who kept a small ale-house off Longacre in the recently developed district of Covent Garden, where he held court. ‘His conversation was incomparable for three or four morning’s drafts: but afterwards you were entertained with crambe bis cocta [stale old stories]’ – Aubrey again. Taylor made one last great journey on foot round England, but died a few months later, in the summer of 1653, before he could see the Stuarts return to the throne. His dust is buried somewhere behind St Martin-in-the-Fields, where the graveyard of the old church lay, and where present-day travellers and aspirants to fame gather with backpacks and their own travellers’ tales.
    With the Cromwellian closing of the theatres, Bankside’s glory days were over. But then London in general passed through a bad time during the Commonwealth, with many of the great houses abandoned and shut up. Valuable collections, such as those in Whitehall Palace or at Arundel House on the Strand, were pillaged or left to deteriorate. The Bishop’s palace on Bankside was divided into tenements and the buildings were much damaged. Churches suffered further assaults on their fittings and decorations, as they had done at intervals since the Reformation almost a hundred years before. The altar rails of St Saviour’s, which had stood there ‘anciently, time out of mind’, were thrown down to conform to low Church ritual; the medieval Lady Chapel at the eastern end became a bakehouse, and then a pig-stye. At least that church continued to function: at the height of the Civil Wars St Paul’s cathedral was used by Cromwell’s trained bands as a stable