The poor boy from Gloucestershire who set out for London to make his fortune accompanied by his cat was actually the son of a very wealthy family in Gloucestershire who sent me to London to work as a textile trader and it was just me, no cat accompanied me.
The bit where i met with little success and on the way back home heard the Bow Bells of London ringing and takes that as a message, i'm afraid that never happened and i was actually so successful in selling silk and velvet's to the nobility and Royals such as King Richard II who i actually loaned large sums of money to when he had a bit of a financial crisis.
As for the cat, in the original etching i was holding a skull for some reason (artists, what you gonna do) but that was later deemed a bit odd and eerie and the style of the time when having your portrait painted was to be holding or stroking a cat so the skull was replaced by a cat and somehow the moggy became became part of my story but i never owned a cat let alone loaned it out to sailors to catch rats.
I did marry Alice FitzWaryn and i was the Mayor of London three times, the first time offered the role by the King as a short term replacement for the previous Mayor who died and then elected twice by grateful Londoners who approved of me personally financing the rebuilding of the London Guildhall and creating a hospital ward for unmarried mothers, drainage systems, libraries, churches and a 128 seat public lavatory.
I died childless and left most of my money to charity when i died and as far as i knew that was that and i would be a footnote in the history of London but at some point in the 17th Century i became a character in an English story that was adapted for the stage as a play and then made into the pantomime everyone knows today so it was probably a good thing that the cat replaced the skull in my portrait because otherwise that would be a very different, and scarier, kids show each Christmas.
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