reat splendour in Old Jewry,
where Charles and the Duke of York supped with him during his mayoralty.
There is a portrait of him, worthy of Kneller, in Drapers' Hall, and
another, with carved wood frame by Gibbons, in the Guildhall Library.

In 1681, when the reaction came and the Court party triumphed, gaining a
verdict of L100,000 against Alderman Pilkington (Skinner), sheriff, for
slandering the Duke of York, Sir Patience Ward (Merchant Taylor), mayor
in 1680, was sentenced to the ignominy of the pillory. In 1682 (Sir
William Pritchard, Merchant Taylor, mayor), Dudley North, brother of
Lord Keeper North, was one of the sheriffs chosen by the Court party to
pack juries. He was celebrated for his splendid house in Basinghall
Street, and Macaulay tells us "that, in the days of judicial butchery,
carts loaded with the legs and arms of quartered Whigs were, to the
great discomposure of his lady, 'driven to his door for orders.'"

In 1688 Sir John Shorter (Goldsmith), appointed mayor by James II., met
his death in a singular manner. He was on his way to open Bartholomew
Fair, by reading the proclamation at the entrance to Cloth Fair,
Smithfield. It was the custom for the mayors to call by the way on the
Keeper of Newgate, and there partake on horseback of a "cool tankard" of
wine, spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with sugar. In receiving the
tankard Sir John let the lid flop down, his horse started, he was thrown
violently, and died the next day. This custom ceased in the second
mayoralty of Sir Matthew Wood, 1817. Sir John was maternal grandfather
of Horace Walpole. Sir John Houblon (Grocer), mayor in 1695 (William
III.), is supposed by Mr. Orridge to have been a brother of Abraham
Houblon, first Governor of the Bank of England, and Lord of the
Admiralty, and great-grandfather of the late Viscount Palmerston. Sir
Humphrey Edwin (Skinner), mayor in 1697, enraged the Tories by omitting
the show on religious grounds, and riding to a conventicle with all the
insignia of office, an event ridiculed by Swift in his "Tale of a Tub,"
and Pinkethman in his comedy of _Love without Interest_ (1699), where he
talks of "my lord mayor going to Pinmakers' Hall, to hear a snivelling
and separatist divine divide and subdivide into the two-and-thirty
points of the compass." In 1700 the Mayor was Sir Thomas Abney
(Fishmonger), one of the first Directors of the Bank of England, best
known as a pious and consistent man, who for thirty-six year