(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 slow-
matches 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, Rookwood, 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;