78. Wine bottle of the rare half-bottle size and decorated with the seal of an unidentified Rose Tavern and the owners’ initials W.M.H. Found at Breaston, Derbyshire, and dating from about 1660. Height 6¾ inches.
Another “Rose Tavern” bottle came to light at about the same time that the Breaston specimen was sold, but unlike the latter, which steadfastly refused to surrender any more of its history, this one was shamelessly ready to tell all—and there was plenty to tell. It came from the notorious Rose Tavern in London’s Covent Garden, the setting for William Hogarth’s famous orgy scene in his A Rake’s Progress series. Now in the collection of Henekey’s, the London vintners, the bottle’s eroded surface indicates that it had been buried and presumably unearthed on a construction site, but just where or when, no one knows (Fig. 79). It is the bottle’s early history, however, that makes it interesting. The seal on its side bears a Tudor rose and in its center the initials WLM for William and Mary Long who, besides producing twenty-two children, found time to be the landlords of the tavern that stood at the mouth of the passage leading to the King’s House theater.
79. Another Rose Tavern bottle, this one identified as belonging to William and Mary Long, operators of the notorious establishment in London’s Covent Garden. Before 1661. Height 9½ inches.
Like my pursuit of William Deaven’s pewter tankard, the trail began amid the pages of Boyne’s catalogue of seventeenth-century tokens, but with results that were immediately more successful. Although William was unlisted, Mary Long appeared on her own at the sign of the rose and with an inscription which established her as living in Russell Street, onto which the Rose Tavern faced. Not all seventeenth-century tokens are listed in Boyne, and as Figure 80 shows, a token issued by William and Mary Long AT THE ROSE TAVERN IN COVENT GARDEN was one of them, its triple initials identical to those on the bottle seal. Neither token is dated, but subsequent research revealed that William Long died in 1661, proving, therefore, that the bottle was in use before that date. Like Margaret North of the Ship Tavern on St. Mary Hill, the widow Long continued in business on her own, issuing a token, and probably continuing to serve from her husband’s old bottles until her own death in 1673. It is entirely possible that these same bottles were put before Samuel Pepys, whose diary records three visits to the Rose, the first on the night before Christmas in 1667.
80. William and Mary Long’s Rose Tavern trade token. Brass, and pre-1661.
And so took my coach, which waited; and drank some burnt wine at the Rose Tavern door while the constables came, and two or three bellmen went by, it being a fine light moon-shine morning: and so home round the City.1
Few passages in the diary are as evocative as these few lines. One can almost hear the clop of the horses’ hooves as the coach rumbles away from the tavern through the sleeping Christmas streets.
Pepys’s next visit was in May, 1668, in broad daylight and in quite different weather, when he drank a tankard of some unspecified cool drink before going into the playhouse to see what turned out to be a particularly dismal play. Four days later, he was back again to see another play, The Mulberry Garden, by Sir Charles Sedley, “of whom, being so reputed a wit,” wrote Pepys, “all the world do expect great matters. I having sat here awhile and eat nothing today, did slip out, getting a boy to keep my place; and to the Rose Tavern, and there got half a breast of mutton off of the spit, and dined all alone.”2 He did not comment on the quality of the meal, possibly because the play stuck so deep in his craw. “I have not been less pleased at a new play in my life,” Pepys concluded. He should have stayed at the Rose!
By the end of the seventeenth century, Covent Garden had earned itself the kind of reputation now enjoyed by New York’s Central Park. “In those days a man could not go from the Rose Tavern to the Piazzi once but he must venture his life twice,” wrote playwright Thomas Shadwell.3 Sixteen years later George Farquhar in The Recruiting Officer had one of his characters declare, “If I had you in the Rose Tavern, Covent Garden, with three or four hearty rakes or four smart napkins, I would tell you another story, my dear.”4 It is evident from Hogarth’s engraving that at the Rose just about anything went (Fig. 81). Thus, the patch-prettied doxie in the foreground in the process of disrobing, long ago outdid (or undid) the topless go-go dancers of our own time. Capping the talents of the pregnant singer of bawdy ballads, and with the aid of the candle and Rose Tavern serving dish held by Leather-coat the waiter, Aretine, the “posture woman,” did her celebrated thing. Behind her the liquor freely flows from bottles much like those found on the Sandwich beach but eighty years later than that of William Long (Fig. 79). To those who see bottles simply as glass, that is all the Rose Tavern bottle is, an antique desirable because of its early date. To others it is a hundred years of wine, women, and song, a link with Samuel Pepys, Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, and most of the great names in the eighteenth-century British theater—including the now forgotten but once immensely popular young actor Hilderbrand Hordern, who was murdered in a room at the Rose in 1712.
Of much the same date as the Rose bottle, but with a recent history as remarkable as its past, was another that nearly met its end for the second time, in a London street called Aldermanbury. Unearthed by workmen digging test holes to determine the subsoil’s bearing capacity before erecting a new office building, this bottle, and an undetermined number of others like it, was thrown against a wall for the pleasure of hearing glass break. It proved to be a blessing most cunningly disguised, for the rude shattering of the city’s Saturday-afternoon silence drew an antiquary colleague to the scene. Knowing that I was interested in wine bottles, he rounded up a miscellany of the fragments and some weeks later gave them to me, saying that he thought they came from a cellar sealed over after the Great Fire of 1666 and breached by the test-hole diggers. My informant died very soon after, and I was never able to determine exactly where the cellar lay, but I was able to put the best part of two bottles together, both of them bearing a seal impressed with the initials R. W. (Fig. 82).
81. The Rose in Covent Garden was renowned for its divertissements. Here, in a detail from William Hogarth’s 1735 engraving of a room at that tavern in his A Rake’s Progress series, Aretine, the “posture woman,” prepares to entertain.
Throughout the second half of the seventeenth century it was common practice for bottle factories to provide separate letter stamps which could be set up in combinations of two or three initials to “personalize” the bottles of people who could not afford, or be bothered, to have their own dies made. The R. W. seals were of this type, and it is reasonable to suppose that if other customers with those initials ordered bottles from the same factory, the chances of the letters being set up again in precisely the same juxtaposition would be very slim. Nevertheless, more than four thousand miles away as the brigantine sailed, at Jamestown, Virginia, there was another R. W. seal, identical even in its flaws.
In the summer of 1956 I was invited to visit the United States for the first time and to spend four months in Williamsburg making a study of the wine bottles found there in nearly thirty years of archaeological excavations. At the same time I examined the bottle fragments in the National Park Service collections at Jamestown and so encountered the other R. W. seal. It had been found in excavations on a lot once owned by Captain Ralph Wormeley, who died in 1651. Some historians have placed his death rather later (1655 and 1669), but the argument in favor of 1651 is the most convincing. If correct, it follows that the R. W. bottles were made before that date and thus would be the oldest documented specimens of their type on record. The earliest actually dated seal is in the London Museum and bears the name John Jefferson and the year 1652, while the oldest intact, dated bottle bears a seal decorated with a Carolean royal profile (presumably the sign of a King’s Head tavern), along with the initials R. M. and 1657. This is in the collection of the Northampton Museum.
82a, b, & c. A wine bottle made for Ralph Wormeley of Jamestown in Virginia, but found in London; shown with it ar
e a detail of its R W seal (Fig. 82b) and a matching fragment found on Wormeley’s house site at Jamestown (Fig. 82c). Before 1652. Height of bottle 9¼ inches.
Although the pre-1651 date for the Wormeley bottles is only inferred, they can claim other distinctions: They are the only objects made for a seventeenth-century Virginian yet found in England, and they are among the oldest objects associated with a known American family. That my enforced interest in wine bottles should have been instrumental in bringing the bottles to me (they would otherwise have been left where the work-men threw them), and that I, in turn, should have been brought to Jamestown and to the R. W. seal stored there is another of those coincidences that, for me, recurrence renders commonplace. I readily admit that any reader who suspects that they are too numerous to be true has a right to be skeptical. The fact remains, however, that the morning after the foregoing paragraph was written I received a parcel of artifacts recovered by divers from wrecks off the coast of Maine. Among them was an earthenware pipkin, lead-glazed on the inside, and with traces of paint on the rim. It looked French, but I had no idea of its date, and I had never seen anything quite like it. In the afternoon I was visited by an archaeologist who had been excavating on the home site of John Watson, the early American portrait painter, at Perth Amboy in New Jersey. My caller brought with him only a few of the many artifacts he had recovered, but among them was an inch-long rim fragment bearing traces of paint. He set it down on the same table on which stood the Maine wreck material; the sherd matched the pipkin exactly, and thus the latter revealed the shape of the Perth Amboy vessel, while that, in turn, provided the Maine pipkin with a date in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Over the years I have examined hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of pots and potsherds and have no recollection of having seen one of these before—until two turned up on the same day, each needing the other and a catalyst to make them meaningful. On such occasions it is hard not to hear the secret laughter of Macbeth’s weird sisters and to give credence to their supernatural soliciting.
Both in archaeology and in antique collecting we are constantly groping into the unknown and more often than not we quickly find ourselves with nowhere to go. It is only natural, therefore, that American collectors should be most interested in objects that can be proved to have belonged to individuals whose names are familiar in colonial and later American history. Consequently, a wine bottle bearing the seal of Bernie Schwartz of Poughkeepsie is unlikely to be as desirable as another that belonged to a Signer or a Founding Father. It is by no means a latter-day prejudice, as a bottle in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg can testify. On its seal it bears the name JOHN CUSTIS and the date 1713, and on its shoulder has been affixed a silver plaque engraved with the following inscription:
Found 1810 in the Cellar on the “Six Chimney Lot” the old residence of the Custis Family in Williamsburg Va. and Presented by Mrs. Galt to Jas. W. Custis. 1852.
One might reasonably suggest that had not John Custis become the reluctant father-in-law of Martha Dandridge-Custis-Washington, the bottle would have had considerably less historical interest and certainly a far smaller chance of aspiring to a silver talisman (Fig. 83). In truth, however, John Custis was a much more interesting individual than his daughter-in-law would ever be—as I slowly learned as we began excavating his house site in 1964.
John Custis was the fourth of that name and the son of John Custis of “Wilsonia” on the Eastern Shore of Virginia (Fig. 84). At some date between 1712 and 1717, after marrying Frances Parke, the daughter of another wealthy plantation owner, John the Fourth built or acquired a brick house on the outskirts of Williamsburg. His wife died in 1715, leaving him wealthy and relieved, so much so that forty-four years later his will instructed that his tombstone should record that he died “Aged 71 Years, and yet liv’d but Seven Years, Which was the space of time He kept a Bachelors house on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.” He never remarried; instead he took up gardening, and being the man that he was, he carried his enthusiasm to obsessive lengths. Not content with flowers in the garden, we find him ordering fire screens from England ornamented with painted blooms, and for those times when live flowers could fill his fireplaces he ordered green-painted urns. His tremendous and increasingly scholarly interest in horticulture caused him to embark on a voluminous correspondence with the famed London botanist Peter Collinson, and, fortunately, copies of most of the letters survive. One of them, believed to have been written in August, 1737, is concerned with the dispatch to Collinson of a collection of fossils. The pertinent passage reads as follows:
83. Dated 1713, this wine bottle was made for John Custis of Virginia, but it was not its age or Custis’s fame that earned the bottle its silver label and stopper. They were added because he happened to have been the sometime and reluctant father-in-law of America’s first First Lady. Height 7 inches.
84. John Custis at the age of forty-five, a painting believed to be by John Wollaston and now in the collection of Washington and Lee University. About 1726.
As you are a very curious gentleman I send you some things which I took out of the bottom of A well 40 feet deep; the one seems to bee a cockle petrefyd [,] one a bone petrefyd; [this] seems to have been the under beak of some large antediluvian fowl. Wish they may bee acceptable.5
We found the well and discovered it to be forty feet and one inch to the bottom—seated in a bed of Miocene marl rich in fossils. Although no antediluvian fowl beaks were forthcoming, there were fragments of whale bone amid the shells. According to Earl G. Swem, who published the Custis-Collinson letters in his book Brothers of the Spade, the fossils sent by Custis were seen in the 1930s in the collection of the Mill Hill School in north London which now occupies the site of Peter Collinson’s home. Today, however, the school disclaims any knowledge of them, stating that the only surviving link between Collinson and America are some of the trees standing in the grounds. Although this has something to say about the fate of private collections, it was not the fossils from the well that were important. Much more interesting was the discovery in its filling of examples of no fewer than seventeen different types of plant, shrub, and tree described in the Custis letters as being in the garden during his lifetime, among them the leaves of American holly and Dutch box still green after being buried for nearly two centuries.
It was evident that the well had been filled over a protracted period ending at the close of the eighteenth century, but it was the lower levels that were the most productive. From the bottom four feet came two intact bottles bearing the John Custis 1713 seal, and the seals and fragments of sixty more. Other broken and intact bottles were of shapes attributable to the 1730s, and were simply marked I CUSTIS, the “I” being the common form of capital “J” until the late eighteenth century. These may well have been some of the bottles that Custis ordered through Messrs. Loyd and Cooper of London in 1737:
I sent for 3 gross of quart bottles by Rumsey markt I. Custis; I hope you will see yt they hold full quarts since ye price you say is ye same; and desire you will likewise send me all I desired by Rumsey; let ye bottles bee carefully packt….6
This, however, cannot have been his only order of I CUSTIS sealed bottles, for the collection in the well included examples of half-bottle size which are not mentioned in the 1737 instructions to Loyd and Cooper. One of the quart bottles had had its seal deliberately defaced, the letters being ground down until they almost disappeared (Fig. 85). Could this have been done by someone with a deep and abiding malice toward John Custis? It was a question jokingly asked and lightly dismissed, but it would surface again when the character of Martha Washington became an element in the story.
Among many other items found near the bottom of the well (which included the finest group of early-eighteenth-century drinking glasses yet found in America) was a group of iron keys of various sizes, suggesting, perhaps, that they and the rest of the material in the well had been cleared up and thrown out when the Custis house changed hands. As neither t
he bottles nor the glasses were dated later than the 1730s, it at first seemed reasonable to conclude that they were discarded at John Custis’s death in 1749. We would probably have gone on believing that had we not found a salt-glaze mug and a cream-colored earthenware cup of types introduced in the 1750s but lying under some of the earlier objects. It was more likely, therefore, that the well began to be used as a rubbish dump five or ten years after John’s death, and the documentary records pointed to another major upheaval on the property in 1757.
85. Wine bottles from John Custis’s well at his house site in Williamsburg. The seals are undated and are marked simply I Custis, though not simply enough for someone’s taste, and the center example has had the name carefully defaced. About 1735. Tallest ½ inches.
John Custis’s brief and stormy marriage had yielded four children; two died in infancy, the third and oldest died in 1744, leaving him but one son, Daniel Parke. Just how close was the young man’s relationship with his mercurial father is unclear, but there is evidence that John Custis had another and favored natural son by his slave “young Alice,” a boy named John, known as “Jack,” and for whom Custis signed a deed of manumission in 1747. A month later he prepared a deed of gift giving the boy a tract of land on the estate inherited from Frances Parke Custis, and at the same time presenting him with his own mother and four other Negro boys. Custis also gave Jack a bond of £500 besides making various annual provisions for him until he should reach the age of twenty. Seeing that Jack was all right appears to have been one of John Custis’s latter-day obsessions, and in his will he required that his executor should build and furnish a house for the lad and that he should continue to live in the household of Daniel Parke and there be “handsomely maintained” from the profits of the estate until he came of age.
All the Best Rubbish Page 18