When Walton published The Compleat Angler, he was sixty years old. He was a mature, wise gentle fisherman, who had developed a calm and deeply philosophical attitude towards his sport. Reading his book, one imagines him a charming old man, a ready friend, not unlearned, yet quite simple and remote from the great world. And one is entitled to the opinion, for Walton himself says of his book: "...the whole Discourse is, or rather was, a picture of my own disposition; especially in such days and times as I have laid aside business . . . "
  The qualification is an important one, for Walton was intimate friends of some of the truly great minds of his time. A devout Protestant and staunch Royalist, he lived through some of the most troubled political and religious years of his nation's history. He was a craftsman and a businessman, of whose formal education we know little or nothing. Yet he wrote a lot of good and important things besides The Compleat Angler.
  Altogether, it is dangerous to form too simple a picture of just what manner of man he was. Perhaps his capacity for friendship, based on a tranquil and tolerant nature and deep understanding, is the key to him. Unfailingly sincere he was; simple, he cannot have been.
  So far as anyone knows, Walton was the son of unpretentious country folk, small landowners perhaps, in Staffordshire. He moved to London, as an apprentice ironmonger, when he was seventeen or eighteen, and was admitted to the guild as a full-fledged craftsman when he was twenty-five. For the next twenty or thirty years he carried on his trade, in small shops in or near Fleet Street, and found time to build the experience from which he wrote The Compleat Angler.
  It is tempting to wonder just what manner of store he kept and what manner of iron he wrought. Did he, perhaps, forge fish hooks, the Pennells and Limericks and offsets of his day? Was he the original prototype of the hardware-sporting goods dealer of North America? There is no direct evidence of this, yet it was in his business years that he entered into close friendship with some of the great men of his day, several of whom are known to have been keen anglers. In his little store he would have made and sold such small things as hinges, lock, latches, and weathercocks. Occasionally he may have undertaken larger work, such as wrought-iron gates or railings.
  In The Compleat Angler, Walton puts little emphasis on tackle, but this is natural enough, for his tackle was quite simple, and he had advanced far beyond the youthful stage where enthusiasm for tackle almost obscures angling itself. There can be no doubt that he had more practical skill with his hands than most of his friends, or that he was able to help them in many little mechanical problems. Walton was a thirty-year old ironmonger, with strong literary interests, and with growing skill and experience in the art of angling.
  Among Walton's closest friends during his business years were several who were twenty or thirty years older than he, and who died nearly fifty years before him. Sir Henry Wotton was an ambassador and poet, Provost of Eton College, a famous man and an angler. Dr. John Donne, an enormously popular preacher and a poet who powerfully influenced later poets, was so precociously brilliant that he entered Oxford at eleven years of age. He was known as a difficult and exacting man, yet Walton became his intimate and adoring friend. He was also an angler. Michael Drayton, often known as the river poet, was an intimate of Shakespeare and Ben Johnson as well as Walton, and he too must surely have been an angler. John Hales, scholar and fellow of Eton College, known as "one of the clearest heads in Christendom," was Walton's friend, and fished with him.
  It requires no stretch of the imagination to see such men meeting in Walton's shop to discuss with him literary, political, and religious affairs of the day, forgetting his comparative youth as they drew upon the reserves of faith and cheerfulness that were so strongly in him. It may have been they were attracted a little by the chance to pick over a batch of hooks, fresh from the forge, or test out a new rod butt bound with hoops of iron. Certainly there would have been some seventeenth-century equivalent of "The Thames is hot right now, out by Waltham Cross," and envious attention to Walton's accounts of great fish hooked on his latest trips to the wilds of Staffordshire or Derbyshire.
  These men were men of the world, involved in large affairs and not without strenuous ambitions. The times they lived in were difficult and dangerous times for men of ideas and ambition. Donne had been in prison and had known extreme poverty. John Hales was thrown out of his fellowship at Eton for refusing to take a seventeenth-century loyalty oath and died in poverty. Sir Henry Wotton once fell into severe disfavour during his foreign service, and was arrested for debt when he was Provost of Eton. Drayton had seen the whole edition of his first volume of poems destroyed by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was a harsh time in which to think vigorously, but Walton had standards of religious faith and earthly loyalty that seemed to grow stronger all through his life. He knew, perhaps more fully than any other man ever has, the sources of fulfilment and freshness that were to be found in the countryside and in his gentle art. No doubt he talked as easily and gracefully as he wrote. It is not very difficult to believe that his powerful friends found him at once stronger more rewarding, surer in his assessments of life and living, than they were themselves. And it is unlikely that ever, in all their discourses together, they could have suspected him of a false or insincere word.

Donne, Drayton, and Herbert all died before Walton was forty. Sir Henry Wotton went not long after them. They left Walton, with other friends, to live on into far more troubled times or revolution and religious persecution. For all his serenity and strength, Walton must have been forced to test and search his conscience many times.

In 1649, he saw his king executed. He himself was living in Clerkenwell, only a few doors from Cromwell's house, where the death warrant is said to have been signed. In 1651, at the time of the Battle of Worcester, and only two years before The Compleat Angler was first published, he was in Stafford, no doubt quietly fishing the Sow and the Trent. Shortly after the battle he visited a Mr. Milward, a Royalist friend, who was imprisoned in Stafford. Milward handed to Walton a ring known as the lesser George, which belonged to the King, and asked him to deliver it to Colonel Blague, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Walton did exactly that, and Blague escaped from the tower and returned the Lesser George to the King in France.
  To understand the full meaning of this, it is necessary to remember the importance that men of those days set upon such symbols of office and power. Cromwell's regime deliberately destroyed the ancient crowns of England, including St. Edward's crown, as though by so doing the return of kings could be prevented. Nearly forty years later, the last despairing act of Judge Jefferies, after the abdication of James ll, was to throw the privy seal into the Thames. Men were hung, drawn and quartered for far more trivial offences than Walton's. Yet it is certain he went about it with a calm mind and conscience, secure in the conviction that what he did was right and necessary.
  One wonders what precautions he took, for he must have been known as a Royalist. It would be statisfying to believe he went out beside the Thames with grasshopper or minnow (the latter by preference, for Thames trout are big and hard to persuade) and caught himself a great trout. Then, having dressed it as he dressed the chub, "making the hole as little and near to the gills as you conveniently may," he slipped the Lesser George into the fish's belly and carried it safely to his friend the colonel in the Tower. But it seems more likely that, secure in the armour of a clear conscience and a simple courage, he just walked through the guards with the jewel in his pocket.
  This is sometimes referred to as "the only known adventure" in Walton's long, quiet life. Yet clearly it was not. Having the friends he had, holding the beliefs he held, he must often have been in danger. It is known that he moved from Chancery Lane, in 1644, because it was "dangerous for honest men to be there." We know, too, that many of his friends, perhaps the majority of them, were highly placed churchmen, at a time when churchmen were always in trouble.
  Two years after The Compleat Angler was first published, there was much religious persecution, and the clergy were banished from London. Walton quietly records that he met Bishop Sanderson in London that year "in sad-coloured clothes" and spent an hour with him in a tavern where "he made to me many useful observations of the present times, with much clearness and conscientious freedom." Some of the conversation is recorded in Walton's Life of Sanderson, and the words were directly against recent state orders and against "the unhappy Covenant...brought amongst us." If we know of these two incidents through records so casual as to have been little more than chance, plainly there must have been others.
  Yet Walton, for all his convictions, was truly a quiet and inoffensive man, too deeply sincere ever to look for glory, too honest a Christian ever to provoke trouble, too calm and reasonable ever to be contentious. In this at least, we may safely trust his book's picture of his own disposition. His choice of rivers, his choice of angling methods and ways, closely matched the happy serenity of his character.
  There is little doubt that Walton was a great walker, as must have been most of the anglers of his day. It has been suggested that he kept a horse in London and rode it out to his fishing. But, even so, he must often have walked. He is walking when he meets the fowler and hunter of his book, and they walk for many a mile after the meeting. Walton thinks nothing of a mile or three or four along the stream to a favourite fishing place: "We are not yet come to a likely place; I must walk a mile yet before I begin." But I think he walked them easily and companionably, talking if he was with friends, looking about him to love the wilder Dove, and he himself wrote of Hampshire, which he knew well: "I think [it] exceeds all England for swift, shallow, clear, and pleasant Brooks, and store of Trouts..."
  Much of The Angler is written of the Lea, near Waltham Cross and Tottenham and Ware. In Walton's day it was a wonderful stream, wandering gently among lovely meadows, with "primrose banks" and "honeysuckle hedges" to sit down upon or under, altogether a perfect place for Walton's method of catching a trout on a hot summer evening. "Get a grasshopper, put it on your hook, with your line about two yards long, standing behind a bush or a tree where his hole is, and make your bait stir up and down on the top of the water." A good place, too, for drifting quill or cork over a quiet, smooth roach "swim," or for leaving a rod to fish for itself, which, Walton says, is "like putting money to use; for they both work for the owners when they do nothing but sleep, eat or rejoice..."
  But even in Walton's time industrialization of the Lea had begun. Sir Hugh Mydleton's canal was in course of construction; much building followed it, and then pollution. The charm of the countryside is largely gone, and little of the stream would now be recognizable to Walton, though the river still holds a fair supply of coarse fish and an occasional trout.
  Like the Lea, the Trent, river of Staffordshire, Walton's home county, has been greatly changed since his time by industrialization pollution. Once "the most famous coarse fishery in England and a salmon river of value," it has been slowly restored in this century to produce fair fishing, which is still improving. Its tributary, the Sow, which flowed through Walton's property at Shallowford, and where he may have fished as a boy as well as in later life, is now preserved by an anglers' association, and holds perch, pike, roach, chub, dace, and trout - an assortment that could hardly have been exceeded in the seventeenth century.
  Walton fished the Thames, even as many of his followers fish it today. It is changed, of course, perhaps in many places beyond his recognition. But one place he would surely know: the end below the playing fields at Eton, called "Black Potts," where he fished through many an afternoon with Wotton and John Hales. There are chub there still, and roach and dace and pike, perhaps even a fine trout or two. For the Thames still yields some enormous browns to a devoted fraternity of Thames Trouters.
  The Kentish Stour still holds sea trout, but whether they are great "Fordidge trout" of which Walton wrote I do not know. Walton called them "the rarest of fish, many of them near the bigness of a salmon, but known by their different colour; and their best season they cut very white." If they were rare in Walton's day, perhaps they are still rare - but not unknown.
  Walton spent much of the last thirty years of his life near Winchester. He worked quietly on his Lives, and certainly fished as keenly as ever. Marston imagines him on the Itchen, near Shawford, and I certainly hope it was so, for the Itchen is a lovely stream, full of trout and grayling. Walton would have hunted them with worm or minnow or grasshopper, as the season directed; but no doubt he fished the natural mayfly when the big ephemera was up, dapping it skilfully over the deep pools, wafting it ahead of him on the wind over the shallows. And he must have tried, often enough, the wet-fly techniques he would have learned from Cotton on the Dove.
  The Itchen is still a fine trout stream, broad and clear and weedy, one of the classic dry-fly streams of England. I saw fine trout rising freely along it during the war years, and once, as I crossed a footbridge near Shawford, I knelt and scooped up a great swatch of weed that was caught there. It was crawling with handsome, healthy fresh-water shrimps, pale grey and brilliant, the sure abundance of feed that grows big trout. It is unlikely that the Itchen today, like the Test and a few other well-preserved south-country chalkstreams, holds more trout and bigger trout than in Walton's time.
  I have said little of Charles Cotton and his Derbyshire Dove. Cotton was thiry-seven years junior to Walton, who had been a friend of his father. He was a traveller, soldier, poet, courtier, and man of the world, yet a dear and close friend of Walton's later years. Cotton was full of Walton's own sincerity and gentleness and friendliness, and Walton must have found him a refreshing and enlivening companion.
  Cotton's stream, the Dove, is, like Cotton himself, lively and strong and bright, carrying the wildness of the Derbyshire hills. Walton travelled north to visit his friend, perhaps to discuss with him the great translation of Montaigne that Cotton was later to undertake, certainly to fish and to discuss Cotton's addition to The Compleat Angler, which was published with the fifth edition in 1676. It is the most famous friendship in the history of angling, and one of the most touching of all times.
  In 1674, Cotton built the little square fishing house on the banks of the Dove that is the true shrine and tabernacle of modern anglers, with its famous interlacing of initials I.W. and C.C. over the doorway, and the inscription "Piscatoribus Sacrum, 1674." The fishing house has been through many vicissitudes and restorations, yet it stands today with the exterior just as it was in Cotton's time. I hope it will always so stand, sacred to fishermen and especially to the memory of two fishermen. There is reason to believe that it will, for, with much of Dovedale, it is now the property of the National Trust of Great Britain.
  As for the Dove itself, the footbridge and the slippery cobblestones are gone. Little stone weirs across the stream are new. Pike Pool is unchanged, with the tall rock still breaking the water, and all the essential beauties of the stream and its valley are as they were. Walton and Cotton would recognize the beloved place, notice the changes, and be well pleased by the gentle treatment of almost three centuries. May all anglers and very honest men find the way there once before they die.
 

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