Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/569

 (thanks to the grant of Mr. Fowkes in 1686) of sending two boys to Christ's Hospital, where, probably, at this very moment, two noisy hearty Barking boys, in belted blue petticoats and canary-bird stockings, disport behind the playground bars, or con undelectable Dilectus in vaulted rooms. If you were to call out, "Any one here from Barking?" off the Dogger Bank or in a fleet of herring vessels off the Scotch coast, a good many hoarse Essex voices would answer you; for Barking's sons are hardy Norsemen, and frequenting all the finest waters round our tight little island, return to bear their scaly spoil to Billingsgate. Other hardy Norsemen bring coal and timber to Barking Wharf, while her less enterprising, but still scarcely less commendable, children cultivate the great tracts of potatoes that bloom around Barking.

But have we not forgotten the one great event which convulsed Barking since the arrival of the Conqueror and his luggage? It was in a sly house near Barking that the Gunpowder Plot is supposed to have been brewed. At Barking, and in a house at Butcher-row (Pickett-street, now pulled down for the new Law Courts), the bloodthirsty enthusiasts planned the destruction of the King, Lords, and Commons in one instantaneous whirlwind of fire. It was the wild and desperate thought of Catesby, and he had proposed it to Percy, one of the Northumberland family, who, in a sally of passion, had talked of killing the king. These two "instruments of divine wrath" against the heretics, as they believed themselves to be, had sent Thomas Winter to Flanders to bring over Fawkes. They had, at first, scruples about destroying the Catholic noblemen who might be present as spectators or attendants of the king when he opened the Houses of Parliament; but Desmond, a priest, and Garnet, the superior of the English Jesuits, had reasoned them out of all those absurd doubts, and proved to them that the interests of true religion required the holocaust. Four of the conspirators, Sir Everard Digby, Rookwood, Tresham, and Grant, when the mines were fired, were to attack Lord Harrington's house in Warwickshire, seize the Princess Elizabeth, and proclaim her queen. The king's second son, Charles, was to be seized or assassinated by Percy. All through the spring and summer of 1604, after the Hampton Court conference, where the pedant king sat as an arbitrating Solomon between the servile bishops and the anti-Ritualistic Puritans, these black-souled men of Barking lurked in ambush in the quiet Essex town, and laid their plans. They bound some twenty conspirators to secrecy, and made them, when they took their oath, receive the sacrament. All that spring and summer they spent to and fro between Butcher-row and Barking, or shut up with arms and provisions in the house they had hired next door to St. Stephen's Chapel, where they dug through a wall three yards thick, and hiring a coal-cellar next it, filled it with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, covered with fagots and billets of wood. We all know how the attempt failed; the midnight before parliament opened, Fawkes was seized at the door of the vault, with slowmatches and tinder in his pocket. Under the combined tortures of the dungeon of Little Ease, the Crushing Boots, the Scavenger's Daughter, and the dislocating Rack his spirit gave way, and he disclosed the names of all his accomplices. There is an old London tradition that Catesby, Percy, and other of the conspirators, stood on a hill, still unbuilt over, a little to the right of the Hampstead-road, and waited for the great crash to come, and the, pillar of red smoke to rise; but, hearing that Fawkes was taken and the game lost, they took horse there and dashed off to Warwickshire to aid Digby in seizing the Princess Elizabeth, who had, however, already escaped to Coventry and roused the country. Fawkes, Digby, Hookwood, Winter, and Garnet, the Jesuit, were all beheaded and quartered in Smithfield.

From Barking to Epping is no great flight. Of all places of Cockney pilgrimage round London, there is none so dear to the Eastern Londoner as Epping, and the ten thousand acres of brushwood, coppice, and scrubby plantation that constitute those romantic and agreeable fictions known as Epping and Hainault forests. Thither, all the year through, from cold, cheerless, early spring and the later time of May blossoms—all through burning dusty Junes down to oak-apple days or the fall of the leaf, those long covered vans, indigenous to London holidays, repair. Temperance clubs, and the reverse, Foresters in green tunics and brigand boots, citizens of all kinds, jovial, noisy, ever fond of refreshment and "kiss in the ring," drive out to the quondam forest, and return more jaded than their horses. The habit of these revellers is to reappear waving green boughs, roaring Champagne Charlie, Tommy Dodd, or some other convivial idiotcy of the day; it is considered "the right thing" among them for the men to wear the women's bonnets, and the women the men's hats; also to shout at every other vehicle they pass, to beat each other playfully about the head with violins, and to bray defiance at any one who laughs at them at public-house doors. These impromptu carnivals of the East-end are neither gay nor attractive, but there is plenty of eating and drinking and a good deal of coarse hearty fun, such as the unsophisticated Saxon affects. It is something, too, to have been told your fortune by real gipsies, and a consolation to know that while the fair lady slights you, the dark lady looks kindly towards you, and will, moreover, eventually give you her hand, and present you with a large and flourishing family.

As early as Elizabethan times, the forest was a place where citizens disported themselves, blew off the smoke of London, came to see real trees growing, and fly their shafts in accordance with good old Roger Ascham's rules. Here they could set up their ringed targets at High Beeches, and try the long flight and the clout and rover shots, or pop away at the popinjay for cups of sack or flagons of ale;