On September 20, 1714, George the First was received by the Mayor and Corporation at St. Margaret's Hill, Southwark, with much the same state as that of William III. seventeen years before.
The Lord Mayor's Pageants, of which there were so many, had nothing to do with Southwark at all, except when they were water processions, in which case they could be seen as well from the South as from the North. But, in fact, Southwark was wholly disregarded in all these Pageants. The sovereign rode through the City, not through Southwark. Why should the place be regarded at all? Practically, as has been shown over and over again, it consisted of nothing at all but a causeway and an embankment, and what was once a broad Marsh drained and divided into fields and gardens and woods.
I have set down what royal processions Southwark was permitted to see, but I do not suppose that among the four hundred citizens who went out in one livery to meet King Richard there was one man from Southwark, nor do I suppose that when nine hundred and sixty citizens, each man carrying a silver cup, rode through London with the Coronation procession, there was a single man from the quarter south of London Bridge. In other words, although in course of time there was appointed--never elected--an Alderman of the Bridge Without, at no time in these Pageants or in these functions was Southwark ever regarded as part of the City, nor were her wishes consulted or her interests considered.
One Pageant alone--that of our own time--the splendid Pageant of 1897, reversed this position. As is well known, the Procession which celebrated the Sixty Years' Reign passed through the Borough as well as the City.
I have to speak of a 'worthy' of Southwark who is only now remembered by the curious as the alleged original of Sir John Falstaff. If Shakespeare drew his incomparable knight from a portrait of Sir John Fastolf, then one can only say that the portrait in no single particular resembled the original. Sir John Fastolf was a great and, on the whole, a successful soldier who spent forty years fighting and commanding in France. Shakespeare's knight was unwarlike, even cowardly; fat: a frequenter of taverns and of low company, with no dignity and no authority. The only point that may lend colour to the theory that Fastolf was Falstaff lies in the fact that Fastolf was accused of cowardice at a certain battle, one of the many which he fought: and that on his return from France, the English, exasperated at their losses, laid the blame as they always do upon their most distinguished soldiers. Fastolf was as unpopular in his old age as any defeated general: there is no unpopularity so great: yet Fastolf was never a defeated general.