IF he asked his way to Saint James’s, his informants sent him to Mile End.* If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee house, he became a mark for the insolent derision of fops* and the grave waggery of Templars.*
Enraged and mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and the conversation of his boon companions,* found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the Judge,* or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.*
Thus sending him out of his way by a little over four miles, from St James’s near the Houses of Parliament to Mile End in the west, where Queen Mary University of London now stands.
A fop is a now dated term for a rather silly man with affectedly fine manners and dress. Sir Percy Blakeney, in Baroness Orczy’s ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, took foppery as his cover. “In repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one’s admiration of Sir Percy Blakeney to an abrupt close.”
‘Templars’ here means elite barristers occupying chambers in The Temple, an area of London named after an old church that once belonged to the Knights Templar.
One’s boon companions are one’s especial friends. ‘Boon’ as an adjective means favourable or convivial, and comes from French ‘bon’ (good). (The noun ‘a boon’, a timely benefit, comes from Old Norse ‘bon’, a prayer or request.)
The Courts of Assize, or Assizes, were assembled periodically in major towns to hear serious cases referred to them by the Quarter Sessions. Senior judges would travel from town to town to try the cases. The system was abolished in 1972, and replaced by a single permanent Crown Court.
The muster of the militia was a gathering of local defence forces in the days prior to the formation of a standing army and the establishment of police forces. The Lord-Lieutenant remains the British monarch’s personal representative in each county of the United Kingdom, though since 1921 he has no longer held the right to call on able-bodied men to form a militia.