lone in an altogether different
version of this historic event. He says:

"In 1652 Sir Nicholas Crispe, a Levant merchant, opened in London the
first coffee house known in England, the beverage being prepared by a
Greek girl brought over for the work."

There is nothing to substantiate this story; the preponderance of
evidence is in support of the Edwards-Rosee version.

Such then was the advent of the coffee house in London, which introduced
to English-speaking people the drink of democracy. Oddly enough, coffee
and the Commonwealth came in together. The English coffee house, like
its French contemporary, was the home of liberty.

Robinson, who accepts that version of the event wherein Edwards marries
Hodges's daughter, says that after the partners Rosee and Bowman
separated, and Bowman had set up his tent opposite Rosee, a zealous
partisan addressed these verses "To Pasqua Rosee, at the Sign of his own
Head and half his Body in St. Michael's Alley, next the first
Coffee-Tent in London":

Were not the fountain of my Tears
Each day exhausted by the steam
Of your Coffee, no doubt appears
But they would swell to such a stream
As could admit of no restriction
To see, poor Pasqua, thy Affliction.

What! Pasqua, you at first did broach
This Nectar for the publick Good,
Must you call Kitt down from the Coach
To drive a Trade he understood
No more than you did then your creed,
Or he doth now to write or read?

Pull Courage, Pasqua, fear no Harms
From the besieging Foe;
Make good your Ground, stand to your Arms,
Hold out this summer, and then tho'
He'll storm, he'll not prevail--your Face[70]
Shall give the Coffee Pot the chace.

Eventually Pasqua Rosee disappeared, some say to open a coffee house on
the Continent, in Holland or Germany. Bowman, having married Alderman
Hodges's cook, and having also prevailed upon about a thousand of his
customers to lend him sixpence apiece, converted his tent into a
substantial house, and eventually took an apprentice to the trade.

Concerning London's second coffee-house keeper, James Farr, proprietor
of the Rainbow, who had as his most distinguished visitor Sir Henry
Blount, Edward Hatton[71] says:

I find it recorded that one James Farr, a barber, who kept the
coffee-house which is now the Rainbow, by the Inner Temple Gate
(one of the first in England), was in the year 1657, prosecuted by
the inquest of St Dunstan's in the West, for making