CHAPTER XIII.

MERCHANT TAYLORS' SCHOOL--(continued).

THE Scholars of Merchant Taylors' welcomed the Restoration of Charles II. as a return to the Golden Age. The effect on them does not, however, seem to have been altogether favourable. Wilson tells us that for some time "mirth and merriment superseded all application to books". At this juncture a Merchant Taylor, John Goad, resigned the headmastership of Tonbridge School and accepted the same post at his old school. John Goad seems to have had many good qualities, but whatever they were, they were all tarnished by his insincerity. While a professing member of the Church of England, he was a secret member of the Church of Rome. In December 1660, at Somerset House, he was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church by a priest of the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, then recently returned from France; it was not till 1686 that he publicly declared himself a Roman Catholic. In the interim for nearly 20 years John Goad, a crypto-Catholic, was instructing the Protestants of Merchant Taylors' in (what was to him) the heretical catechism of the Anglican Church. His comments on the Catechism had not escaped public attention, and on the 4th March, 1681, the Grand Jury of London presented a complaint to the Company. Goad was ordered to appear before the next Court, and his explanations proving unsatisfactory, he was dismissed as "popishly and erroneously affected.” 1

At the time of the Restoration it was a tradition that

Titus Oates and the Merchant Taylors' Company, by C. M. Clode: a pamphlet courteously lent me by the late Head Master of Merchant Taylors' School.

the stage rogue should bear a dark coloured wig. The merry monarch objected to this, and remarked that the greatest rogue in England wore a light coloured one. His Majesty referred to a Merchant Taylor of the name of Titus Oates. It is curious to note that Wilson, writing so late as the commencement of the nineteenth century, regards Titus Oates as a benefactor of his species. He refers to "the famous conspiracy known in England as the Popish Plot, carried on by the Jesuits, promoted by Pope Innocent XI., against His Majesty's life, the Protestant religion, for a narrative of which we are indebted to Titus Oates, who, after receiving his school education at Merchant Taylors', etc. etc." Oates entered Merchant Taylors' in June 1665, but was expelled in the course of the first year. This seems to have been the customary termination of Oates' course of study at all places of education, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic. The fictitious details of the Popish Plot were fabricated in 1678. In September of that year Oates appeared before the Privy Council and repeated his story. The Council (with one exception) appear to have been as credulous as the Mob. That exception was the King, who naturally was not a believer in the existence of a Popish Plot to kill himself, a concealed Papist. Most unfortunately, in October 1678, a respectable timber merchant and an Old Westminster, Sir Edward Berrie Godfrey, was found dead under suspicious circumstances. Godfrey had sworn Oates to his depositions, and therefore the public jumped at the conclusion that he had been murdered by the Papists. Writing after the lapse of 150 years, when passions had cooled, Wilson still held to this belief. Then followed several judicial murders of innocent men, culminating in that of Lord Stafford, who was beheaded on the 29th December, 1679. Not only did the House of Commons take Oates' evidence and vote their full conviction that there was a Plot, not only did the House of Lords follow suit, but what is even more remarkable, many of his old schoolfellows believed in him. Through the courtesy of Dr. Baker, late Head Master of Merchant Taylors' School, I have myself inspected the School Probation Book. It is a list of the scholars, but gives no details of their subse

quent careers. It is in fact treated as a volume too sacred for marginal notes. Against the name of Titus Oates only is there a note, and to the following effect-"The Saviour of the Nation, first discoverer of that damnable hellish Popish Plot in 1678." Another and a later hand has added, "Perjured upon record and a scoundrel fellow." This later entry is apparently in the hand-writing of William Du Gard, the former Head Master.

But before the tide turned in 1681 there were a few Protestants who recognised the utter falsity of Oates' charges against the Papists. One of those was an Old Merchant Taylor, Isaac Backhouse, who had been elected to St. John's, Oxford, the year before Oates entered the school. From 1674 to 1680 Backhouse was a master at his old school. In 1681 Oates charged Backhouse with being popishly inclined, and tried to get him removed from the Merchant Taylors' School at Wolverhampton, of which he was Head Master. The same Court of the Merchant Taylors' Company that dismissed John Goad from the post of Head Master in London came to a conclusion with the like discernment, but in favour of their Head Master at Wolverhampton. This was probably Oates' first rebuff and does the Merchant Taylors' Company credit. Oates then brought an action against Backhouse for calling after him in St. James' Park-"There goes Oates, that perjured rogue." The action never came to a hearing, for in the course of this year Oates' evidence began to be appreciated at its proper value. Four years later and within three months of the accession of James II., Oates was tried and convicted of perjury. The sentence was a disgrace to the man who passed it-"bloody Jeffreys"-a servant worthy of his Royal master. Wilson, an Eldonite Tory, faithfully reflects the feeling of the Whigs of Oates' day in declaring that "both in the sentence and the execution revenge had a greater share than justice, and that Oates was made a sacrifice to the manes of the five Jesuits executed in the late reign." The Popish Plot was a fiction, but the cruelty and bigotry it aroused are among the ugliest facts in English History. There is nothing that can be compared to it until you come to France of the present day, and witness a popular

madness as ruinous in its results. That God's Providence brings good out of evil sounds a paradox, yet history proves the paradox true again and again. Had Gordon not died at Khartoum, the Soudan slave-trade would not have been suppressed, at least in our life-time; had not Oates roused the passions of the multitude to fever-heat, there probably would have been no Revolution in 1688. Sir George Sitwell hits the right nail on the head when he calls Titus Oates "the real parent of the Revolution." We who enjoy the Civil and Religious Liberty estabished by law in the land on the final expulsion of the Stuarts are scarcely conscious of the depths of brutality and bitterness reached by both political parties during the reigns of the two last sovereigns of that line. This was the direct result of Oates's action. But Oates's perjuries were based on a number of strange coincidences. The King was a concealed Catholic. The heir to the throne was a declared Catholic. The Head Master of Oates's old school was a concealed Catholic, while professedly a clergyman of the Church of England. Richard Pearson (an Etonian, brother of the Bishop of Chester, sub-librarian at St. James's Palace, and a favourite with Charles II.) was said to have died a Roman Catholic in 1670. Another Merchant Taylor, James Shirley, the last of the Elizabethan dramatists, had renounced his Orders in the Church of England and died in the Church of Rome. These facts, which were whispered abroad, formed the dry tinder on which Oates and Tonge boiled their caldron of hate and lies. Wilson remarks on the amazing bitterness of those days, which "set at variance many schoolfellows who had hitherto travelled through life without a quarrel."

2

The Revolution of 1688, which brought peace and security to the nation, entailed deprivation and loss on a few conscientious clergymen. One of these was Ambrose Bonwicke, the Head Master of Merchant Taylors', who was ejected for not taking the oaths to William and Mary. His successor, Matthew Shortyng, was required to produce a certificate that

The First Whig, privately printed, 1894. 2 Harwood's Alumini Etonenses, p. 243.

he had taken the oaths, and this he did. One of Shortyng's pupils was Samuel Harris, first Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Another was John Thomas, successively Bishop of Lincoln and Salisbury. He was one of the few bishops of the 18th century whose preferment was due to personal merit, and not to political connections; he certainly is the only English Bishop, who owed his promotion to his knowledge of German. Mr. Nicholas Carlisle has confused him with John Thomas his immediate predecessor in the See of Salisbury. These two episcopal brothers were both called John Thomas, were both King's Chaplains, both preached well, and both squinted. The only way to differentiate between them is that our John Thomas was alleged to be the son of a brewer's drayman, the other of a colonel in the Guards. The first was a Merchant Taylor, the second a Carthusian. Charterhouse was a very select Foundation; Merchant Taylors' was free to all sorts and conditions of men, provided they could obtain a nomination. Most of the Bishops of the last century, who were men of humble birth, had to thank our public schools for their free education. John Hinchliffe was the son of a livery stable-keeper. He was successively a King's Scholar and Head Master of Westminster (1764), Master of Trinity, Cambridge, and Bishop of Peterborough.

Queen Mary and Queen Anne were indebted for their succession to the throne to the care with which Dr. Crowther, a Merchant Taylor, preserved the proofs of the marriage ceremony, which he celebrated late at night and in the greatest secrecy between their parents, the then Duke of York and Anne Hyde. The Duke, they say, would have disowned the marriage, but happily his wife possessed the proofs that established the legitimacy of her children,

John Criche, who for thirty years (1730-1760) was Head Master of Merchant Taylors', belongs to an interesting class the Jacobite and Nonjuror. Criche was both, as every logical and fearless partisan of the Stuarts in the 18th century was bound to be. Whether Dr. Snape, Head Master of Eton (1713-19), became a Jacobite is very doubtful.

1 Carlisle's Grammar Schools, Vol. ii., p. 68.