Dick Whittington

Dick Whittington by Iain Laughlan & Will Brenton

The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 1995

Dick Whittington really existed. He was born around 1350, the third son of Sir William Whittington of Pauntley Court, Pauntley, a small village in the picturesque valley of the River Leaden in Gloucestershire.

In 1360 Dick’s father died an outlaw, but the family were allowed to keep their estates. In fact their association with Pauntley was to last a further two hundred years. One of the towers of the local church was almost certainly built by Richard Whittington, and in one of its stained-glass windows you can still see his coat of arms linked with the arms of the Fitzwaryn family, proving that Dick did indeed marry his master’s daughter, Alice.

Cloth was to prove the foundation of Dick Whittington’s fortune. He became apprenticed to the trade of mercer or clothier in 1371 under Sir Ivo Fitzwaryn, a distant relative on his mother’s side. Sir Ivo was a Merchant Adventurer, one of that small select band within the Mercers’ Guild who traded in textiles overseas.

Keen to get on in his chosen trade, Dick must have made swift progress because by 1379 his name had appeared on the Mercers’ Poll of London, indicating he was trading independently in textiles, especially silks and other such expensive materials. By 1387 he was a serving member of the city’s governing body, the Court of Common Council, and in 1393 he was chosen as Alderman for the Broad Street Ward and also elected sheriff.

When the current Mayor of London died in 1397, Richard II awarded the post to Dick Whittington, possibly in recompense for a loan of 10,000 marks which he required from the City. Dick was obviously by this time a very rich and powerful figure, and the King was certainly bending the rules by installing him as mayor without election. But the new incumbent was obviously the right man for the job, as the people of the city voluntarily returned him to the post three times – in 1398, 1406 and 1419 – making him unique among all the Lord Mayors of London

He was also elected three times as Master of the Mercers, the richest and most influential of the London Guilds. Meanwhile his personal generosity was improving the fabric of the capital itself. His gift of £400 established a library at Greyfriars Church; he founded an almshouse for the poor and paid for repairs to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield ‘outside the wall’; he put up the money for half the library at the Guildhall, the ‘civic palace’ of London; and he rebuilt the prison of Newgate to accommodate debtors, who otherwise would have put an intolerable strain on the already overcrowded Ludgate Prison.

In the last twenty years of his life, up to 1423, he was a regular source of finance for the Crown on an almost annual basis. When these loans were eventually paid back, it is recorded that several of them had been made interest-free. The reason for this may have been Dick Whittington’s sheer instinct for business no less than a shrewd eye for what would be best for him in the long run.

The Middle Ages were a time of great political intrigue and you had to choose your friends carefully. Dick was a survivor and obviously knew how to play the game. He acted as ally and benefactor first to Richard II, then to the cousin who deposed him, Henry IV, and later to Henry’s son when he became King Henry V.

This was the Henry V who won Agincourt, and Dick Whittington was at the Guildhall in his capacity as Lord Mayor to welcome the King on his return from that campaign in 1419. Larter that same year, when Henry wrote from Rouen asking for as many boats as possible to be sent via Harfleur loaded with provisions, Dick was able to persuade the Aldermen of London to send additional gifts of wine, ale and beer as a token of loyalty and affection.

In return for his support of the Crown, whoever happened to be wearing it at the time, Dick was rewarded with frequent commissions from the Grand Wardrobe. This meant he was the main supplier of all cloth and liveries used in the royal household. Between 1392 and 1394, for instance, he provided velvets, cloth-of-gold, taffetas and damask for which he was paid the staggering sum of £3,500. He also supplied the wedding dresses for two of Henry IV’s daughters.

Not even this level of public service, however, was rewarded in the way it would come to be in later years. Lord Mayors of London, in time, would be knighted as a matter of course. Dick Whittington, despite decades of loyal duty in this and other capacities, was never accorded this honour, although he was elected a Member of Parliament in 1416. He died a childless widower in 1423.

Grimaldi the famous clown was the first performer to make use of Dick Whittington’s story in pantomime in Covent Garden in 1814. Harlequin Whittington, or the Mayor of London was the first in a long line that stretches all the way down to us today.

Two hundred years before that, his story had first been written down as a fine uplifting moral tale – hard work and loyalty will always win you your reward in the end – and by 1668 Dick’s fame had spread sufficiently for Samuel Pepys to be noting in his diary “To Southwark Fair, which was very dirty, and there saw the puppet show of Whittington, which was pretty to see.”

Only the question of the cat remains. Although any merchant whose trade depended on shipping would recognise the value of a good rat-catcher, there is no indication that the historical Dick Whittington ever had a particularly close relationship with a single feline. It could be that ‘cat’ refers to a specific type of vessel, like the cats that used to ship coals from Newcastle. Or the word could simply be a short, anglicised form of the French word achat, meaning a purchase.

No matter what the truth of it is, Dick Whittington and his cat show no signs of losing their popularity for pantomime audiences. From Gloucestershire to Bow his fame is undimmed, and this year he is at Coventry seeing off the rats with his trusty feline friend, shyly wooing the beautiful Alice, and generally putting the world to rights with his industry and straightforward goodness of heart. Long may he continue to do so.

PS

Around panto time at Proscenium, I developed the habit of writing a synopsis of the show in acrostic form, starting each paragraph with the letters spelling out the name of the show in sequence. This one turned out to be a biography of the historical Dick Whittington probably because in this instance I never got sight of the script so I wouldn’t have known what to base it on, and an acrostic synopsis, in the cold light of day thirty years later, strikes me as being a complete waste of time anyway. Why did nobody tell me? Ah well.

Acrostic synopses of Aladdin, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty including an acrostic history of the tale itself, The Tale of the Sleeping Beauty (God help us), can be found in the Articles section.