CHAPTER
I. The Three Cranes
in the Vintry
II. Sir Giles Mompesson
and his partner
III. The French ordinary
IV. A Star-Chamber victim
V. Jocelyn Mounchensey
VI. Provocation
VII. How Lord Roos obtained
Sir Francis Mitchell’s signature
VIII. Of Lupo Vulp, Captain Bludder,
Clement Lanyere,
and
Sir Giles’s other Myrmidons
IX. The Letters-Patent
X. The ’prentices
and their leader
XI. John Wolfe
XII. The Arrest and the Rescue
XIII. How Jocelyn Mounchensey encountered
a masked horseman
on
Stamford Hill
XIV. The May-Queen and the
Puritan’s Daughter
XV. Hugh Calveley
XVI. Of the sign given by the
Puritan to the Assemblage
XVII. A rash promise
XVIII. How the promise was cancelled
XIX. Theobalds’ Palace
XX. King James the First
XXI. Consequences of the Puritan’s
warning
XXII. Wife and Mother-in-Law
XXIII. The Tress of Hair
XXIV. The Fountain Court
XXV. Sir Thomas Lake
XXVI. The forged Confession
XXVII. The Puritan’s Prison
XXVIII. The Secret
XXIX. Luke Hatton
“I will make a Star-Chamber matter
of it.”
Merry wives of Windsor.
CHAPTER I.
The Three Cranes in the Vintry.
Adjoining the Vintry Wharf, and at the corner of a narrow lane communicating with Thames Street, there stood, in the early part of the Seventeenth Century, a tavern called the Three Cranes. This old and renowned place of entertainment had then been in existence more than two hundred years, though under other designations. In the reign of Richard II., when it was first established, it was styled the Painted Tavern, from the circumstance of its outer walls being fancifully coloured and adorned with Bacchanalian devices. But these decorations went out of fashion in time, and the tavern, somewhat changing its external features, though preserving all its internal comforts and accommodation, assumed the name of the Three Crowns, under which title it continued until the accession of Elizabeth, when it became (by a slight modification) the Three Cranes; and so remained in the days of her successor, and, indeed, long afterwards.
Not that the last-adopted denomination had any reference, as might be supposed, to the three huge wooden instruments on the wharf, employed with ropes and pulleys to unload the lighters and other vessels that brought up butts and hogsheads of wine from the larger craft below Bridge, and constantly thronged the banks; though, no doubt, they indirectly suggested it. The Three Cranes depicted on the large signboard, suspended in front of the tavern, were long-necked, long-beaked birds, each with a golden fish in its bill.