Thomas Lodge, Doctor of Physick *

If Thomas Lodge, the doctor and poet, appears to have been somewhat quarrelsome and definitely litigious as his years increased, he came by those qualities honestly. His father was a merchant of consequence, having been successively Warden and Master of the Company of Grocers and Alderman, Sheriff, and Lord Mayor of the City of London. He was also, and this is more important, a man given to speculation and a person of arrogant and overbearing temper of mind. He was engaged with Sir John Hawkins in the beginnings of the slave trade in 1563 and he was concerned with trade in Russia and America. In 1556, when Sir Thomas was awaiting the birth-of a second child, he laid a bet with George Stoddard, his business agent. The methodical Stoddard entered the wager in his diary, among a deplorably long list of items of indebtedness from his master, as follows: ". . . my Master owes me for a wager laid upon a boy or a girl, the which I have won, so that he oweth me £1 1 Os. 3d," that is, probably, at odds of three to one in gold angels. In 1554, when Sir Thomas was made Master of the Grocers' Company, the event was celebrated with a two-day feast worthy of the occasion. Among the supplies consumed were thirty gallons of hippocras, nine gallons of beer and ale, two and one-half hogsheads of wine, a barrel of sturgeon, over four hundred capons, geese, and quails, 120 long Marybones, three sirloins and a rib of beef, a sheep, half a calf, and sixteen bucks, one of which had been sent by Queen Mary herself. Sir Thomas outraged conservative opinion by being the first Lord Mayor to wear a beard, and he shocked the City by declaring himself bankrupt toward the end of his term, probably as a result of too optimistic indulgence in speculation. He seems to have gone to debtor's prisons for a time for this, just as he was to go to prison again later in life for striking an aged associate during a controversy over a matter of business. What must have been one of his last and most characteristic acts is noted in the records of the church of St. Mary Aldermary in London. Sir Henry Keeble, Grocer, and Lord Mayor in 1510, had been a great benefactor of the church, "and yet was not long permitted a resting place