"It
began in the old and golden days of England, in a time when all the hedgerows
were green and the roads dusty, when hawthorn and wild roses bloomed, when
big-bellied landlords brewed rich October ale at a penny a pint for rakish
high-booted cavaliers with jingling spurs and long rapiers, when squires ate
roast beef and belched and damned the Dutch over their claret while their
faithful hounds slumbered on the rushes by the hearth, when summers were long
and warm and drowsy, with honeysuckle and hollyhocks by cottage walls, when
winter nights were clear and sharp with frost-rimmed moons shining on the
silent snow, and Claud Duval and Swift Nick Nevison lurked in the bosky
thickets, teeth gleaming beneath their masks as they heard the rumble of
coaches bearing paunchy well-lined nabobs and bright-eyed ladies with powdered
hair who would gladly tread a measure by the wayside with the gallant tobyman,
and bestow a kiss to save their husbands' guineas; an England where good King
Charles lounged amiably on his throne, and scandalised Mr Pepys (or was it Mr
Evelyn?) by climbing walls to ogle Pretty Nell; where gallants roistered and
diced away their fathers' fortunes; where beaming yokels in spotless smocks
made hay in the sunshine and ate bread and cheese and quaffed foaming tankards
fit to do G. K. Chesterton's heart good; where threadbare pedlars with sharp
eyes and long noses shared their morning bacon with weary travellers in
dew-pearled woods and discoursed endlessly of ‘Hudibras’ and the glories of
nature; where burly earringed smugglers brought their stealthy sloops into
midnight coves, and stowed their hard-run cargoes of Hollands and Brussels and
fragrant Virginia in clammy caverns; where the poachers of Lincolnshire lifted
hares and pheasants by the bushel and buffeted gamekeepers and jumped o'er
everywhere …
"An England, in short, where justices were stout and gouty, peasants
bluff and sturdy and content (but ready to turn out for Monmouth at a moment's
notice), merchant-fathers close and anxious, daughters sweet and winsome, good
wives rosy and capable with bunches of keys and receipts for plum cordials,
Puritans smug and sour and sanctimonious, fine ladies beautiful and
husky-voiced and slightly wanton, foreigners suave and devious and given to
using musky perfume, serving wenches red-haired and roguish-eyed with
forty-inch busts, gentleman-adventurers proud and lithe and austere and
indistinguishable from Basil Rathbone, and younger sons all eager and
clean-limbed and longing for those far horizons beyond which lay fame and
fortune and love and high adventure.
"That was England, then; long before interfering social historians and
such carles had spoiled it by discovering that its sanitation was primitive and
its social services non-existent, that London's atmosphere was so poisonous as
to be unbreathable by all but the strongest lungs, that King Charles's
courtiers probably didn't change their underwear above once a fortnight, that
the cities stank fit to wake the dead and the countryside was largely either
wilderness or rural slum, that religious bigotry, dental decay, political
corruption, fleas, cruelty, poverty, disease, injustice, public hangings,
malnutrition, and bear-baiting were rife, and there was hardly an economist or
environmentalist or town planner or sociologist or anything progressive worth a
damn. (There wasn't even a London School of Economics, which is remarkable when
you consider that Locke and Hobbes were loose about the place).
"Happily, the stout justices and wenches and gallants and peasants and
fine ladies – and even elegant Charles himself, who was nobody's fool – never
realised how backward and insanitary and generally awful they might look to the
cold and all-too-selective eye of modern research, and if they had, it is
doubtful if they would have felt any pang of guilt or shame, happy
conscienceless rabble that they were. Indeed, his majesty would most likely
have raised a politely sceptical eyebrow, the justices scowled resentfully, and
the wenches, gallants, and peasants, being vulgar, gone into hoots of derisive
mirth.
"So, out of deference and gratitude to them all, and because history is
very much what you want it to be, anyway, this story begins in that other,
happier England of fancy rooted in truth, where dates and places and the
chronology of events and people may shift a little here and there in the mirror
of imagination, and yet not be thought false on that account. For it's just a
tale, and as Mark Twain pointed out, whether it happened or did not happen, it
could have happened. And as all story-tellers know, whether they work with
spoken words in crofts, or quills in Abbotsford, or cameras in Hollywood, it
should have happened."
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