The Golden Falcon Chapter XVII/1 - Golden the GOLDEN AFTERNOON
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Search billions of records on Ancestry.com First Name Last Name Search The Golden Falcon Chapter XVII/1 - Golden THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine With a cargo of ivory And apes and peacocks Sandalwood, cedar wood and sweet wine. Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shore, With a cargo of diamonds Emeralds, amethysts Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores. Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack Butting the Channel in the mad March days Road-rail, pig-lead Firewood, ironware and cheap tin trays. (John Masefield 1878-1967) The 55-year old Hanoverian George I (1714-27), who spoke no English, was invited over to rule England when Queen Anne died in 1714 but the exiled Stuarts made severa attempts during his reign to regain the throne, the most important being the 1714 Jacobite rebellion. George I was succeeded by his grandson George II (1727-60) during whose reign there was another Jacobite invasion in 1745. Offences punishable by death during hi reign were picking pockets, being in the company of gypsies, burning a hayrick or stealing sheep. In 1763 John Wilkes, fighting for the freedom of the Press, raised the cr "For Wilkes and Liberty", was exiled to France but returned to be the focus of fresh riots. During the reign of George III (1766-1820), the first English-born Hanoverian to succeed, there were riots against the Catholic Emancipation Bill in England, led by Lor George Gordon. Canals were built for the first time in England in the Dutch fashion and barges carried goods and raw materials of the Industrial Revolution. The great architect Robert Adams redesigned Syon Park near Isleworth, Middlesex, property of the Dukes of Northumberland, the walls of which were covered in crimso silk woven by Huguenot weavers of Spitalfields, whose trade was then declining as French silk was being smuggled into England. De la Motte of Holland was a sil smuggler and the fines paid by some of the English merchants involved in smuggling silk went towards setting up the Greenwich Seamen's Hospital. Factories rose wher workers used the mechanical "Spinning Jenny" which put many cloth workers out of work. Silk imported from India led to the Spitalfields silk industry eventually dying out. There was a great increase in population at the time and people moved from areas where their families had lived for centuries to find work elsewhere. The powerful East India Company, which still ruled the British posession in India and dominated every aspect of trade and politics, continued to bring great wealth int England. The graceful merchantmen stood at anchor by the docks along the Thames and cargos were unloaded at the Adelphi warehouses: iron and grindstones from Sweden (an New England), tea from China, sugar from the West Indies, tobacco from Virginia (sold to Moscow), English cloth and tallow (sold all over the world), logwood, indigo cochineal, woad and other dyes were imported from the Indies and the Middle East, flax, tow, madder, and whole fins from Rotterdam,alum from Hamburg, wine, cherr brandy and prunes from Bordeaux, wheat, rye, barley, beans and hops from London, and chocolate. The merchant princes were wealthy and owned fine houses; their wives had two or more maids in attendance. Soames Jenyns described the merchants in 1767: "The merchant vies all the while with the first of our nobility in his houses, at table, furniture and equipage, the shop-keeper who used to be well contented with one dish of meat, one fire, one maid, has two or three times as many of each, his wife has her tea, her card parties and her dressing room and his 'prentice has climbed from the kitchen fire to the front boxes at the playhouse." In 1772 "As much ceremony is found in the assembly of a country grocer's wife as in that of a duchess". The merchants controlled the Bank of England, supplied the army and the navy, lent money to the government and even paid Charles James Fox's gambling debts. "The merchants were not only directors of the Bank of England but also controllers of the East India Company, the Africa Company and the Levant Company" ["Sir Rober Walpole, the Making of a statesmen" - J. H. Plumb quoted in "English Genealogy" - A. R. Wagner, Richmond Herald]. During Regency times the "nouveau riche" bought up country estates. Cobbet wrote "The new gentry, the lickspittle lords from "Change Alley" and Lombard Street sometimes sons of Moses" and maintained "the war and Mr Pitt's paper money brought in the nabobs, negro drivers, governors, admirals, generals, loan jobbers contractors, pensioners, bankers and stock jobbers into the countryside." The "nabobs" (“nawabs”) who came home from India with great fortunes in the later 18th and 19th centuries were of the merchants class. G. M. Trevelyan wrote that the "made themselves objectionable to the old-established aristocracy of the society into which they intruded their outlandish ways." Thackeray's biographer Professor Gordo Ray noted "The clannishness developed among these empire-builders by the circumstances of their residence in India, was reinforced in England by the prevailin indifference or hostility with which returned "Indians" were regarded." ["Thackeray, the uses of Adversity 1811-46", p. 19 - Gordon N. Ray quoted in "English Genealogy" - A R. Wagner, Richmond Herald]. Rev. Charles Henry Winter's grandfather, George Winter, left England during the reign of William IV (1830-37) who had succeeded his brother George IV (1820-30) whos scandalous life led to anti-Monarchist feeling. George Winter's father James, a bricklayer of Clapham., was born about 1771 in the 18th century which was a strange mixture of squalor and elegance. His son Georg married Sarah Cresse, descended from Spitalfields silk workers. People in 18th century met at coffee and chocolate houses to discuss politics, gossip and hatch futile Jacobite plots. There were houses for Dissenters, Quakers an Papists. It was reported the Jacobites met on Sundays in a large room over a coffee house in Aldersgate Street (one of the areas where there were anti.Hanoverian demonstration subsequently). A Non-Juring clergyman officiated and they prayed for the right King they called the Pretender. The door was kept tightly closed and no one was admitte except those they trusted. The fashionable met at White's Chocolate House in St. James Street, where the Tory Prime Minister Robert Harley complained to Jonathan Swift that young noblemen wer fleeced and corrupted by gamblers and profligates. Tories went to the Cocoa Tree Chocolate House, Whigs to St. James Coffee House, the litterati to Will's near Coven Gardens, the clergy and Greek scholars to Trubys. People strolled in St. James Park where duels were fought till they were banned in 1828, flocked to the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Walworth, to the Rotunda a Ranelagh, to Smith's Tea Gardens, Finch's Grotto Gardens and St. George's Fields. They danced at Hampstead Wells, played bowls at Epsom or went to Lambeth Well where gypsies camped or to Southwark Fair to watch cockfights, bar-baiting or boxing. By 1788 the Lake District at Windermere became a popular tourist resort. They sailed down the Thames to Hampton Court and to Don Saltero's at 18, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea where the best creams in all London were sold, to see the curiositie there. James Salter, Sir Hans Sloane’s Irish valet, had taken it over in 1718 and founded a museum. Salter was described by Sir Richard Steele in the "Tatler" as "a sage o thin and meagre countenance of that sect which the ancients called "gingivistae" - in our language toothdrawer - my love of mankind made one very benevolent to Mr Salte for such is the name of this eminent barber and antiquary." His tavern became a meeting place for local celebrities who went there to hear him play "Bonny Christchurch Bells" very badly on the fiddle and to see his collection - cast offs from the Sloane Museum - which was sold in 1799 and contained "lignified hog, heads of four evangelists carved on cherry stones, an elf's arrow, a piece of Solomon' Temple, idols, stuffed animals, corals, crystals, shells, a Spanish apparatus to prevent cuckoldom" and in Richard Steele's words "Pontius Pilate's wife's chambermaid' sister's hat" - a straw hat made in Bedford. The place remained a pub until 1876. Windows were taxed and the results can be imagined. London's sewers were awful. The inhabitants of a house in Spital Square used to punt themselves across from th cellar steps in a wash tub to draw their daily beer. Chamber pots were emptied into the street and on the piles of dung in the corner of the yards. Until the Fleet Ditch wa covered in the 1730s it had dead dogs and offal from the tripe dressers, sausage makers and catgut spinners. Paupers graves were left open until the last corpse wa buried and fumes from coal burning and the brick kilns blackened the air. Towards the end of the Georgian period it was considered that "cleanliness was next to godliness so things improved. Clapham (were George Winter was born), then in Surrey and in the countryside, was the haunt of foot pads and highwaymen and Rev. Henry Venn used to on shooting trip on the Common. It was drained in 1751 and by 1811 had a population of 5,000. When the Common was drained by the local magistrate, a large number of trees known as "cotton trees" were planted there, said to have been brought back by Cook wh sailed from Whitby.