Moll King's Coffee House
On Tom's death the coffee house became known as Moll King's Coffee House, but business continued much as before. Moll, however, took to drinking and became more quarrelsome, and the reputation of the shacks for bad behaviour and violence worsened. Moll would also occasionally fleece inebriated patrons by littering their tables with broken crockery and then presenting them a bill for the damages, confident that they were too drunk to realise that they were being taken advantage of. The patronage of fashionable society continued though: on one occasion even George II paid a visit, accompanied by his equerry Viscount Gage, but having been challenged to a fight for admiring the companion of one of his neighbours (who had not recognised him) he left immediately. Eventually, in June 1739, a riot erupted in the Long Room and spilled out in the piazza. Moll was charged, found guilty, and fined £200, sentenced to three months in prison and required to find sureties for her good behaviour for three years after her release. Moll refused to pay the fine on the grounds that it was both excessive and unwarranted and managed to get it reduced to £50. She suffered little from her stay in prison: her nephew William King took over the running of the coffee house and by bribing the guards Moll managed to get many of the comforts of home. She continued to run the coffee house until around 1745, when she retired to live in her villa at Haverstock Hill. She died on 17 September 1747, leaving a large fortune.
Read more about this topic: Tom King's Coffee House
Famous quotes containing the words moll, king, coffee and/or house:
“Come round me, little childer;
There, don’t fling stones at me
Because I mutter as I go;
But pity Moll Magee.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The King said to his son: “Enough of this!
The Kingdom’s yours to finish as you please.
I’m getting out tonight. Here, take the crown.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid.... Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one’s inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness.”
—Coleman Dowell (1925–1985)
“Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute or a subscription of stock; for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry; for a new house or a larger business; for a political party, or the division of an estate;Mwill you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)