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PART OF WHITEHALL
The Banquet-Hall by Inigo Jones is in the centre at the rear.
From an old engraving.
Milton remained in Spring Gardens about seven months, when his new apartments in the north end of Whitehall Palace were ready. These opened from Scotland Yard, in which was the Guard House. The yeomen of the guard wore red cloth roses on back and breast, and must have seemed very gay and imposing personages to the little girls of the Milton family. Their rooms were connected with the various courts and suites of apartments that extended down to the Privy Garden. The palace in Cromwell’s time probably retained in residence a large portion of the small army of caterers, butchers, brewers, confectioners, glaziers, etc., who provided for the constant needs of the huge establishment. The Horse Guards, built for gentlemen pensioners, was erected in 1641, and wasstill quite new. This apparently was not on the site of the present Horse Guards, which was built in 1753.
At Scotland Yard, Milton’s only son, John, was born, and here his protracted labours in his vehement controversy with Salmasius brought on the blackness of great darkness which, at the age of forty-three, for ever shut his world from view. For the next twenty years and more it is the blind poet whose life we follow, during the period when his fiery spirit was chastened not only by his own afflictions, but by the nation’s also.
In 1652 Milton moved to Petty France, now York Street, near the Bird Cage Walk, which was so named from the king’s aviary there. Here the next year his little daughter Deborah was born, and soon after his wife, at the age of twenty-six, after nine years of married life, died. After the first estrangement and reconciliation, so far as we know, all had gone well. Her little John, who had scarcely learned to speak his father’s name, soon followed her to the grave.
The household then consisted of the poet, his nephew and amanuensis John, and his three motherless little girls. Masson describes the house as he saw it before its destruction in 1875. It was then No. 19 York Street, and had a squalid shop in itslower part, and a recess on one side of it used for stacking wood. On entering by a small door and passage at the side of the shop, one groped up a dark staircase, where several tenants lived, in the rooms that were once all Milton’s. “The larger ones on the first floor are not so bad, and what are now the back rooms of the house may have been even pleasant and elegant when the house had a garden of its own behind it, and that garden opened directly into the park.”
Jeremy Bentham, who over a century later was landlord of the house and lived close by, placed a tablet on the rear wall inscribed “Sacred to Milton, Prince of Poets.” After 1811 Bentham’s tenant was William Hazlitt; before that his friend James Mill occupied the house.
Lord Scudamore, who had given Milton an introduction to Grotius, was his next-door neighbour at York Street. To-day the loftiest apartment house in London stands upon the unmarked site of Milton’s house. The frequent walk which Milton took to Whitehall, with a guide to his dark steps, during his eight years’ residence here, led him half a mile across St. James’s Park from Queen Anne Gate to Spring Gardens or the Horse Guards. The ornamental water was not then there, but there were ponds and trees and pleasant stretches of green turf.Charles II. had it later all laid out by the famous French landscape artist, Le Nôtre.
Occasional sonnets—those to Cromwell, Vane, “On his Blindness,” and “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”—appeared in the increasing leisure of this period, when his duties lessened, and he retired on a diminished salary. But Milton was become a man who was sought out by foreigners of note and persons of quality; among his friends, Andrew Marvell, the poet, and his pupil, Cyriack Skinner, were frequent visitors, with charming Lady Ranelagh, his neighbour, who persuaded him to teach her little son, and who he said had been to him in the place of kith and kin.
After four years of widowerhood, when his little girls were sadly in need of a mother, Milton married Katharine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney, in the church of St. Mary Aldermanbury, on November 12, 1656. Her coming into the home in Petty France brought serenity and happiness to all its inmates. During the brief fifteen months of their married life, a little daughter came, who followed her soon after to her grave in St. Margaret’s Church beside the Abbey, and the sorrowing husband was again left in his blindness to bring up his three motherless little daughters.
After eighteen years, the poem, sketched out inSt. Bride’s Churchyard, was resumed, and in the lonely house in Petty France, the first lines of “Paradise Lost” were dictated, just before the closing days of Cromwell’s life. Under Richard Cromwell, Milton retained his secretaryship, but with the return of Charles II., in May, 1660, he fled his home in Petty France, for he well knew the vengeance that might follow. His little girls were sent no one knows whither, and he took refuge in a friend’s house in Bartholomew Close, a passage which led from West Smithfield, through an ancient arch. It was filled with quaint old tenements, where Doctor Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, had lived, and also Le Sœur, who had modelled the statue of Charles I., which, as has been stated, was concealed during the Commonwealth, and was soon to be erected. Sixty-five years later, young Benjamin Franklin set up type in a printing-office here. To the blind refugee, it mattered little that he had left his garden to be hemmed in by narrow walls. The labyrinth of little courts and tortuous passages was his safeguard. During those days of arrests and executions of his friends, Milton must have known that any day might bring the hangman’s summons for him. Many a time during the nearly four months that he was hidden here must he in imagination have heard the shouts of the ficklepopulace, and seen himself haled in a cart to Tyburn gallows. Says Masson: “Absolutely no man could less expect to be pardoned at the Restoration than Milton,” and “there is no greater historical puzzle than this complete escape.” But his faithful friend, Andrew Marvell, pleaded for him, and other powerful friends did their utmost in his behalf; the brain that was to give birth to a great epic was spared to England.
Though Milton lay in some prison for a little time, during which his “infamous” books “were solemnly burnt at the Session house in the Old Bailey by the hand of the common hangman,” he was soon a free man, though many of his companions were meanwhile hanged and quartered, or like Goffe and Whalley fled beyond seas and even there scarcely escaped the king’s swift avengers.
In December, Milton emerged from prison and moved temporarily into a little house on the north side of Holborn near Red Lion Square, which was behind it, and nearer Bloomsbury than was his former residence upon the street. Close by was the Red Lion Inn, where in January, on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., lay on a hurdle, amidst a howling mob, the ghastly bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw, which had been disinterred and were on their way to Tyburn to beswung upon the gallows. It was well for Milton to sit behind barred doors in silence in those days, while Sir Harry Vane languished in prison, bold Algernon Sidney was in exile, and the England that he loved seemed in eclipse.
In 1661, Milton, who had good reason to reside as far away from Petty France and the court end of town as possible, returned to the neighbourhood of his early married life, and took a house in Jewin Street, off Aldersgate, at the end of the street nearest St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, where his father lay buried. For the remainder of his life, here and in Artillery Walk, he was a parishioner of this church. During the three years spent here, Vane was beheaded, two thousand clergy were ejected from their livings, and many, as Richard Baxter tells us, starved on an income of only eight or ten pounds a year for a whole family; men of Milton’s way of thinking struggled for daily bread on six days in the week, and preached on the seventh with the police upon their track.
During these fruitful years in Jewin Street, while “Paradise Lost” was growing apace, Milton had about him his motherless and ill-educated girls. The oldest, about seventeen years of age, was handsome, but lame, and had a defect of speech. It fell to Mary and little eleven-year-old Deborah toread, with scanty comprehension of the words, as their father required their services, from his Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian works. To them, and to a group of young men who felt it an honour to serve him, he dictated the sonorous lines of his great epic. No wonder that girls of a dozen or sixteen years of age found life in Jewin Street dull, and Greek dictionaries and the daily records of the doings of the hosts of heaven and hell abominably irksome. They served their father with grudging pen, and pilfered from him, and tricked him in his helpless sightlessness—small blame to them, perhaps, whose rearing had been by servants and governesses, but pitiable for the father of fifty years, who fought his daily battles with fate alone in the dark.
Andrew Marvell and Cyriack Skinner sought him out, and doubtless told him the latest literary news of Henry More, the Platonist; of Howell, but just appointed historiographer royal; of Samuel Butler, who had just gone with the Lady Alice of “Comus” to Ludlow Castle; of Richard Baxter, whose popular book, “The Saints’ Everlasting Rest,” Milton had doubtless read when it appeared five years before; of Pepys, now secretary to the Admiralty; of Izaak Walton, whose “Complete Angler” Milton may have read ten years before; of Evelyn andof the poet Cowley; of Bishop Jeremy Taylor; of George Fox, the valiant Quaker, and the philosophers, Hobbes, and John Locke, who was then at Oxford; and the budding poet, John Dryden.
We learn from Richardson that Milton usually dictated “leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it, though often when lying in bed in a morning.” Sometimes he would lie awake all night without composing a line, when a flow of verse would come with such an impetus that he would call Mary and dictate forty lines at once. During these days a newly converted young Quaker, Thomas Ellwood, who was desirous of improving his Latin, and to see John Milton, who, he writes, “was a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the learned world,” betook himself to the modest home on Jewin Street, got lodging hard by, and engaged to read Latin to him six afternoons a week. Milton, noticing that he used the English pronunciation, told him that if he wanted to speak with foreigners in Latin he must learn the foreign pronunciation. This Ellwood by hard labour accomplished, when Milton, seeing his earnestness, helped him greatly in translation. These happy hours were interrupted by Ellwood’s arrest for attending the Quaker meeting in Aldersgate Street. Three months were spentin Bridewell and Newgate, where he saw the bloody quarters and boiled heads of executed men, and wrote out in detail an account of the hideous spectacle. One heavenly day in a quiet library reading of Dido and Æneas with Milton, the next in an English hell of bestiality, filth, and cruelty—a memorable experience for a young man of twenty-two, was it not?
Household affairs were going from bad to worse in Jewin Street, and the unhappy home needed a wife and mother. When the news came to the daughter Mary that her father was to marry again, she exclaimed that it was “no news to hear of his wedding, but if she could hear of his death, that would be something.” The third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, was twenty-four years old when Milton married her, in the church of St. Mary Aldermary, a little south of his boyhood’s home near Cannon Street. She proved an excellent wife, and was of a “peaceful and agreeable humour.” There are traditions that the young stepmother had golden hair and could sing; her good sense and housewifely accomplishments brought peace, comfort, and thrift into the discordant household.
Soon after his marriage, the Milton family removed to a house in Artillery Walk, leading to Bunhill Fields. This was on the roadway which isthe southern part of Bunhill Row. Not only was there a garden here, but the site of the present Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where Defoe, Bunyan, Richard Cromwell, and Isaac Watts lie buried, was then an open field; while, close at hand, was Artillery Ground, where trained bands occasionally paraded, as they have done from 1537 to the present time. Of the house we know little, except that it had four fireplaces. Near by was “Grub” Street, since changed to “Milton” Street, partly perhaps to commemorate the fact of the poet’s residence in the neighbourhood. In June, 1665, while the Great Plague had begun its desolating course, Milton had completed the last lines of “Paradise Lost.” It was then that young Ellwood came to his assistance, and engaged for him “a pretty box in Giles-Chalfont,” whither he was driven with his wife and daughters.
If the pilgrim to the shrines of Puritans and poets has thought worth while to spend an afternoon at Horton, he may well spare two or three days more for a drive from there to Stoke Pogis, Harefield, and the region thirteen miles north of Horton in lovely Buckinghamshire, among the Chiltern hills.
Here stands, about twenty-three miles northwest of London, in the little village of Chalfont St. Giles, the only house that still exists in which Milton ever lived. The village lies in a quiet hollow among the hills, three or four miles removed from the shriek of any locomotive. One may approach it by train from the little stations of Chorley Wood or Chalfont Road. It will well repay one before doing so to make a detour of a mile and a half to Chenies,—one of the loveliest villages in all England,—beside the tiny Chess, where Matthew Arnold loved to angle. A delightful hostelry is the “Bedford Arms,” where he always “put up.” The chieffeature of the place is the mortuary chapel of the Russells, where the family have been buried from 1556 until the present day. But the lover of the picturesque will more admire the adjoining Tudor mansion. American multi-millionaires have built no Newport palace that is so attractive to the lover of the beautiful.
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IN MILTON’S HOUSE AT CHALFONT ST. GILES
As one drives toward Chalfont, he enters it at the end farthest from Milton’s cottage, which is one of the last houses upon the left of the main street. It is on the road that leads to Beaconsfield, four miles away. The cottage lies at the foot of a slope close by the roadside; it is built of brick and timber, and has two entrances, four sitting-rooms, and five bedrooms.
On the floor which is level with the garden are two sitting-rooms that look toward the hill slope and Beaconsfield. Their quaint old windows are filled with diamond panes, which are set in lead and open outward. The long carved dining-table, in the room at the left, and the small table, cabinet, and stools in the room at the right, which is seen in the illustration, were Milton’s own. Here at the open casement, during those days of horror in the stricken city, Milton sat and breathed the fragrant air, and in the evening listened to the nightingales which haunt the Chalfont groves. Hither the braveyoung Ellwood came to greet him, fresh as he was from another imprisonment; he returned with his comments the manuscript of “Paradise Lost,” which Milton had loaned to him, and added: “Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found?” To which the poet answered nothing at the time, but, as the result proved, the query brought later a fitting response in “Paradise Regained.” Perhaps the visitor may be allowed to ascend the narrow winding stair with its carved railing to the humble chambers under the gables, whither the poet groped his way to bed, and to glance into narrow cupboards, where he may have piled his books and manuscripts. There is a tender, pathetic charm about the place, which even the greater poet’s house at Stratford lacks. The man Shakespeare—the successful dramatist—we know little of; his inner life we only guess at and infer. His consummate genius wins our worship; it does not touch our hearts. But the blind poet, the passionate lover of liberty and fearless pleader for justice, the man who like blind Samson shook his locks in defiance of fate, and would not be cast down, this man we know. We have followed step by step his brilliant youth, his strenuous manhood, and his brave, declining years. With all his faults of temper we love him as we love Dante and MichaelAngelo and Beethoven. We linger reverently in the little house made dear to England by his presence there.
Then we wander back a little on our way, to a row of antique houses and go through a passage to the venerable parish church and churchyard where Milton’s feet doubtless have trod.
En routeto Beaconsfield the traveller will not fail to pause at Jordan’s, a plain, square structure in a leafy grove, beside a green God’s Acre. It was the Quaker meeting-house in Milton’s day as it is still. At the rear is a concealed gallery where the worshippers took refuge when their service was broken up by armed pursuers. Close by are many unmarked graves, and among them is Ellwood’s. But the grave of William Penn, the founder of a great American State, and the graves of his wife and children, have low modern headstones, for their position was well known. Here the man of gentle birth, the hero and saint, who is dear to all Americans, sleeps peacefully among his English kindred. During the year when Milton was at Chalfont, Penn was a youth in Paris, seeing the world, but keeping himself unspotted from it.
At Beaconsfield we drive through a broad country road to the Saracen’s Head—a conspicuous landmark. We turn our steps at once to the gray oldchurch and its battlemented tower, whose walls of flint rise in rugged strength from the churchyard with its mossy tombs. Within the centre aisle lies buried the valiant apostle of American freedom—Edmund Burke.
He was a man with whom the refugee at Chalfont would have found much in common had he lived a century and a quarter later. The inscription over his grave is modern, and so are the bas-relief and inscription to him on the side wall. His former seat within the parish church is marked upon the floor, and a fine carved desk is made from his old pew. Within the churchyard gay roses and solemn yews droop over ancient monuments, among them, the showy obelisk on Waller’s grave. Nothing is lovelier than the drive late in an afternoon over the high hills, from which one catches far distant views, to Amersham, which lies in a little valley among the hills. This was a seat of the Puritan revolt and earlier martyrdoms. John Knox preached here—an obnoxious personage to the worthy sexton of the beautiful church, who told the writer that he had buried every man and woman in the parish for forty years. “The fact is,” quoth this worthy, “John Knox traduced Mary Queen of Scots; now I’ve no use for a man who isn’t good to the ladies.” On being reminded that Elizabeth did worse and cuther head off, he condoned that as being “probably an affair of state.” A lover of poets was this sexton. “I’ve read ’em all,” he said, “but my favourite is Pope.” Isaac Watts likewise shared his approval, and he volunteered upon the spot a number of his hymns from memory. “But I take a lugubrious view of life,” continued this digger of many graves, “for it’s just grub, grub, grub, all your life, and then be shovelled under; the fact is, as any man can see with half an eye, that this is the age of mammon and no mistake.” Shakespeare would have found a gravedigger to his mind in the sexton of Amersham.
Amersham does not offer so favourable accommodations for the night as does Wendover, which has a choice of hostelries, and is but a few minutes’ ride by train from the Amersham station, a quarter of a mile away. After viewing the early English church in Wendover next morning, one may hire a trap and drive to Great Hampden, three miles distant, to the stately home of John Hampden, within a large park. There are still traces of the ancient road which was cut through the park for Queen Elizabeth. The shady avenue of beeches around the side leads up to the little church of gray flint stone which stands near the great mansion and its mighty cedars of Lebanon. The little churchyard is carpeted with velvet turf, starred with tiny white flowerswhich recall the foregrounds in the brilliant paintings of Van Eyck.
The reader of Puritan history is reminded of that mournful day after the battle of Chalgrove Field, when the body of John Hampden was brought home. As many soldiers as could be spared accompanied it, marching with arms reversed and muffled drums, while, with uncovered heads, they chanted the solemn words of comfort that begin the ninetieth Psalm: “Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations.” They laid him in a grave within the chancel, which still remains unmarked; it is close beside the slab on which he had written his beautiful epitaph to his wife. When they marched back beneath the beeches their voices rang out with the lines of Psalm Forty-three: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God.” Says a writer of that time: “Never were heard such piteous cries at the death of one man, as at Master Hampden’s.”
Within the spacious mansion, which once was red brick and now is covered with gray plaster, are various relics of Hampden and Cromwell, and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the room which she occupied on her visit here. Two miles further, on one of the finest estates in the county, is Chequer’s Court, an imposing brick mansion of the Tudorperiod, once owned by Cromwell’s youngest daughter and her husband. It stands in a park, and contains the greatest collection of Cromwelliana in the kingdom. But these and the Hampden relics owned by the Earl of Buckingham at Great Hampden are rarely shown to visitors who do not apply in writing some time in advance of their visit. It is to be hoped that some day the nation may own these and make them freely accessible to all scholars. Through a circuitous drive between beautiful fields of grain, in view of the Chiltern Hills, the traveller reaches the old parish church at Great Kimble, where John Hampden, the sturdy cousin of Cromwell, in 1635 made his refusal to pay King Charles’s demands for ship money. Near by lies the field whose tax was in question. The sum was paltry,—only twenty shillings,—but, like George Third’s tax on tea in the colonies, the refusal to pay it meant war in the end. This whole section of beautiful Bucks is rich with memories of Milton, and of the men whom he knew and loved.
Ellwood records that “when the city was cleansed and become safely habitable,” the Miltons returned to Artillery Walk. This must have been about March, 1666. The open fields close to their house had been filled with the bodies of thousands of the plague victims, many of whom were uncoffined.Thereafter it was made a regular cemetery, and was surrounded with a brick wall, and became what Southey called, “the Campo Santo of the Dissenters.” On a side street near by, next to a kind of institutional meeting-house belonging to the Friends, is a beautiful green inclosure where fourteen thousand Quakers lie buried in unmarked graves. One humble headstone alone marks a grave near the fence, which was opened in the nineteenth century, and was found to be that of Milton’s contemporary,—George Fox,—the tailor with the leather suit, who founded the sect of the uncompromising democrats who called no man “Lord,” who used no weapons but their tongues, and who thundered with them to such purpose as to make men quake.
While Milton was on the point of publishing his “Paradise Lost,” another calamity, to be described later, befell the stricken city. For three days the Great Fire crackled and roared, and drove man and beast before its fearful heat westward to Temple Bar, and swept away Milton’s birthplace, which he still owned. It wiped out the church where he was christened, the school where he had studied, and came so far north as almost to bury his father’s grave under the walls of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. Amid the horror of smoke and the sound of distant explosionsand wild confusion, the poet sat during those awful days, when it seemed as if the fate of Sodom had befallen his dear London town. Up to that date his birthplace had been visited by admiring foreigners. This was the only real estate that he then owned, and its loss must have crippled his resources.
The precious manuscript of “Paradise Lost” fell to the censorship of the young clergyman of twenty-eight, who had married Milton to his youthful wife, Elizabeth. This man, named Tomkyns, like Pobedonostzeff two hundred and fifty years later, held that liberty of conscience was a “highly plausible thing,” but did not work well in practice, and he came near suppressing the volume, so tradition says, for imaginary treason in some lines; but he relented, and the world was spared its greatest epic poem since the Æneid.
The many booksellers around St. Paul’s suffered terrible losses, and Pepys estimates that books to the value of £150,000 were burnt in the vicinity. Most of them were hurriedly stowed in the crypt of old St. Paul’s Church, but when the walls of the great cathedral fell, they let in the fire which consumed them. In April, 1667, when the ruins had hardly ceased smoking, Milton agreed, for £5 down and three times as much at certain future dates, to sell his copyright to Samuel Symons, printer.Thirteen hundred copies constituted the edition. Through the days of dusty turmoil while the new city was slowly rising on the ashes of the old, the proof-sheets passed from the printing-press in Aldersgate Street to Artillery Walk. There was only an interruption of five anxious days in June, when the bugle sounded, and terrified citizens assembled to ward off the Dutch, who, bent on vengeance, burnt English ships and sent cannon-balls hurtling at English forts. In August “Paradise Lost” appeared as a rather fine looking, small quarto of 342 pages, which could be bought for three shillings in three bookstores. For artistic purposes the poem is written according to the Ptolemaic theory of cosmos, though Milton of course accepted the Copernican view.
While John Milton was expecting £15 or £20 for his work of more than seven years, John Dryden, who was much more in fashion in those days of Nell Gwynne and the reopened theatres, was receiving a yearly income of £700. But John Dryden knew a poet when he read him. After reading “Paradise Lost,” he exclaimed: “This man cuts us all out, and the ancients, too.”
About 1670, Milton’s three daughters left their father’s home. Knowing that they needed to be fitted for self-support, he paid for their apprenticeship, and had them taught embroidery in gold andsilver. Doubtless bright silks and gay patterns were much more to their mind than their father’s folios, and the change was best for all concerned. Their father sat at his door on pleasant days, dressed in his gray camblet coat, wearing a sword with a small silver hilt. He received many visitors—some of them men of rank and note.
He is described as wearing at this time his light brown hair parted from the crown to the middle of the forehead, “somewhat flat, long and waving, a little curled.” His voice was musical and he “pronounced the letter r very hard.” He rose early, began his day by listening to the Hebrew Bible, and spent his morning listening and dictating. Music, as much walking as his gouty feet permitted, and, in the evening, a smoke, were his sole recreations. He belonged to no church, and attended no service at this period.
As his end drew near he told his brother that he left only the residue of his first wife’s property to their three daughters, who had “been very undutiful;” but everything else to his “loving wife, Elizabeth.” Just one month before he had completed his sixty-sixth year, John Milton died on a Sunday night, November 8, 1674. He was buried beside his father in St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, and was followed to the grave by many friends. Whathymns were sung we do not know, but certainly none could more fitly have been sung than that noble one by his dear friend, Sir Henry Wotton:
“How blessed is he born or taughtWho serveth not another’s will,Whose armour is his honest thought,And simple truth his highest skill.·····“This man is freed from servile bands,Of hope to rise or fear to fall;Lord of himself, though not of lands,And having nothing, yet hath all.”
Milton’s wife was thirty-six years old when the poet died. She lived to be nearly eighty-nine years old, but never remarried. Deborah lived until 1727, when Voltaire writes: “I was in London when it became known that a daughter of blind Milton was still alive, old and in poverty, and in a quarter of an hour she was rich.” The latest descendants of John and Christopher Milton died about the middle of the eighteenth century, but their sister Anne’s posterity may perhaps be traced to-day.
The forgotten Duke of York has his great column in Waterloo Place. The scholarly but uninspired Prince Consort has his gorgeous Memorial, and a hundred nobodies have their lofty monuments scattered all over England, teaching the rising generationtheir fathers’ estimation of the relative worth of names in England’s history. The only statue of Milton known to me in England, except the one on the London University Building, is the modest figure which stands, together with Shakespeare and Chaucer, upon a fountain in Park Lane opposite Hyde Park.
No student of the period which is treated in this little volume should fail to visit the upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery, and view the portraits of the many noted men who were Milton’s contemporaries. Besides portraits of the royal families, he will note those of William Harvey, Samuel Pepys, Cowley, old Parr, Sir Henry Vane, Andrew Marvell, Cromwell and his daughter, Inigo Jones, Selden, Sir Julius Cæsar, Samuel Butler, Hobbes, Dryden, Ireton, Algernon Sidney, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Chandos Shakespeare portrait. Milton’s own portrait in middle life, which is little known, is most impressive, and very different from the common portraits.
Except Westminster Abbey, no spot in England is so connected with every phase of England’s history as is the Tower of London. A map, printed in the generation before Milton, shows us the ancient moat full of water, and the space within its walls that now is gravelled then covered with greensward. North of St. Peter’s little church, where lay the bones of Anne Boleyn, stretched a row of narrow gabled houses like those seen in the neighbouring London streets. The White Tower, built by William the Conqueror, stands to-day practically as it stood in William’s time and Milton’s. Built of durable flint stones, it has withstood time’s decay as few other buildings erected far more recently have done, when they were of the soft, disintegrating quality of stone so often used in London. True, Christopher Wren faced the windows with stone in the Italian style, and somewhat modernised the exterior, but the interiorremains practically as it was built over eight hundred years ago.
As there is no need of duplicating here the main facts about its history, which are to be found in every guide-book, let us confine ourselves to the chief literary and historical associations with it, that must have appealed to the boy and man, John Milton.
One can imagine few things more exciting and stimulating to the mind of an observant boy in 1620 than a visit to the Tower. In the days when circuses were unknown, and menageries of strange beasts were a rare sight, the view of such behind the grated walls of Lion’s Tower must have delighted any London lad. The wild beasts were not very numerous,—only a few lions and leopards and “cat lions,”—but no doubt they were as satisfactory as the modern “Zoo” to eyes that were unsatiated with such novelties. Whether small boys were allowed for sixpence to see the rich display of state jewels is not quite clear, yet it is certain that they were shown to strangers.
Says that indefatigable antiquarian, Stow, whose old age almost touched the babyhood of Milton: “This Tower is a citadel to defend or command the city; a royal palace for assemblies or treaties; a prison of state for the most dangerous offenders; the only place of coinage for all England at thetime; the armory for warlike provisions; the treasury of the ornaments and jewels of the Crown; and general conserver of the records of the king’s courts of justice at Westminster.”
In Milton’s boyhood, the royal palace in the southeast corner of the inclosure was standing. But in his manhood, his staunch friend, Oliver, having got possession, it was pulled down. The little Norman chapel of St. John, within the Tower, is one of the best bits of Norman work now extant in England. Its triforium, which extends over the aisles and semicircular east end, probably was used in ancient days to permit the queen and her ladies to attend the celebration of the mass, unseen by the congregation below. The chapel was dismantled before Milton’s time. But doubtless as he entered it he could picture in it, more vividly than we in our later age, that scene when from sunset until sunrise forty-six noblemen and gentlemen knelt and watched their armour, before King Henry IV., on the next day, bestowed upon them the newly created Order of the Bath.
In this chapel, while he was kneeling in prayer, the lieutenant of the Tower received an order to murder the young Edward V. and his brother, and refused to obey it. Here Queen Mary attended mass for her brother, Edward VI.
In the present armory, once the council chamber,King Richard II. was released from prison, and sceptre in hand and the crown on his head, abdicated in favour of Henry IV. Shakespeare thus depicts the scene, and puts the following words into the mouth of the mournful king:
“I give this heavy weight from off my head,And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;With mine own tears I wash away my balm,With mine own hands I give away my crown,With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,With mine own breath release all duteous oaths,My manors, rents, revenues I forego;My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny.God pardon all oaths that are broke to me,God keep all oaths unbroke are made to thee.Make me that nothing have with nothing grieved,And thou with all pleased that hath all achieved!Long may’st thou live in Richard’s seat to sit,And soon lie Richard in an earthen pit!God save King Henry, unkinged Richard says,And send him many years of sunshine days!”
On this same spot, in 1483, the Protector, afterward Richard III., came in among the lords in council, and asked the Bishop of Ely to send to his gardens in Ely Place, off Holborn, for some strawberries. The terror which royalty inspired—and with good reason in that day—is well described by Sir Thomas More, who was himself a prisoner inless than a half century after the scene which he so graphically describes:
“He returned into the chamber, among them, all changed, with a wonderful sour, angry countenance, knitting the brows, frowning and frothing and gnawing of the lips; and so sat him down in his place, all the lords much dismayed and sore marvelling of this manner of sudden change, and what thing should him ail.” Then asking what should be the punishment of those who conspired against his life, and being told that they should be punished as traitors, he then accused his brother’s wife and his own wife. “‘Then,’ said the Protector,” continues More, “‘ye shall see in what wise that sorceress and that other witch ... have by their sorcery and witchcraft wasted my body!’ And therewith he plucked up his doublet sleeve to his elbow upon his left arm, and he shewed a werish withered arm, and small as it was never other. And thereupon every man’s mind sore misgave him, well perceiving that this matter was but a quarrel ... no man was there present but well knew that his arm was ever such since his birth. Nevertheless the lord chamberlain answered, and said: ‘Certainly, my lord, if they have so heinously done they be worthy heinous punishment.’ ‘What,’ quoth the Protector, ‘thou servest me ill with ifs and with ands; I tell thee theyhave so done, and that I will make good on thy body, traitor!... I will not to dinner until I see thy head off.’ Within an hour, the lord chamberlain’s head rolled in the dust.”
The author of the “Utopia,” being a knight, was leniently treated while in the Tower. He paid ten shillings a week for himself and five shillings for his servant. Occasionally his friends came to see him, and urged in vain that he should propitiate Henry VIII. and his wife, Anne Boleyn, against whose marriage he had objected. But he remained immovable. “Is not this house as nigh heaven as my own?” he asked, serenely, when wife and daughters pleaded with him to reconsider. Lady More petitioned Henry for her husband’s pardon, on the ground of his illness and her poverty; she had been forced to sell her clothing to pay her husband’s fees in prison. But Henry had no mercy on the gentle scholar, the greatest English genius of his day, and who had been lord chancellor of England.
For a time he was allowed to write, but later, books and writing materials were removed; yet he occasionally succeeded in writing to his wife and daughter Margaret on scraps of paper with pieces of coal. “Thenceforth,” says his biographer, “he caused the shutters of his cell to be closed, and spent most of his time in the dark.”
When the end came, his sentence to be hanged at Tyburn was commuted by the king to beheadal at Tower Hill. Cheerful, and even with a tone of jest, he said to the lieutenant on the scaffold, “I pray thee, see me safely up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.” He removed his beard from the block, saying, “it had never committed treason,” and told the bystanders that he died “in and for the faith of the Catholic Church,” and prayed God to send the king good counsel. More’s body was buried in St. Peter’s Church, where that of the fair young Anne Boleyn herself was soon to lie. His head, after the savage custom of the time, was parboiled and affixed to a pole on London Bridge.
Dark and bloody were the associations that centre around the Tower in the century preceding Milton’s. Few of these have touched the popular heart more than those which cluster around the girl-queen of nine days—the fair Lady Jane Grey. In the Brick Tower, where she was imprisoned, she wrote her last brave, pathetic words to her father and sister upon the leaves of her Greek Testament. From her prison window she saw the headless body of her boy-husband pass by in a cart from Tower Hill, and cried: “Oh, Guildford! Guildford! the antepast is not so bitter that thou hast tasted, and which I soon shall taste, as to make my flesh tremble; itis nothing compared with that feast of which we shall partake this day in heaven.”
When she was ready to lay her fair young head upon the block, she cried: “I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman.” “Then tied she the handkerchief about her eyes, and feeling for the block, she said, ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ One of the standers-by guiding her thereunto, she laid her head down upon the block, and then stretched forth her body, and said: ‘Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’” So perished this girl of eighteen, whose beauty, learning, and tragic fate make her one of the most pathetic figures in history.
The most interesting parts of the Tower, including St. Peter’s Church, the dungeons, Raleigh’s cell, and the spot where he wrote his “History of the World,” are not shown to ordinary visitors. They can be seen, however, by the receipt of a written order from the Constable of the Tower, and should not be missed by any student of English history. Even a few moments spent in those dark lower vaults help the torpid imagination of those who live in freedom as cheap and common as the air they breathe to realise through what horror and bloody sweat of brave men and women in the past his freedomhas been bought. Though these dungeons now are clean and a few modern openings through the massive walls admit some feeble rays of light, it is not difficult to conjure up the black darkness, filth, and vermin, and noisome odours of the past, or the shrieks of saint or sinner, who, like Anne Askew and Guy Fawkes, suffered upon the rack. Only two years before Milton’s birth, the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot were immured in these dungeons, and then hanged, cut down, and disembowelled while they were still living.
In Milton’s youth, in 1630, while he was writing Latin verses at Christ’s College, Cambridge, that brave, heroic, noble soul, Sir John Eliot, was committed to the Tower. Those were sad days for England. Free speech in Parliament was throttled. The nation’s ancient liberties were in jeopardy. Says the historian, Green: “The early struggle for Parliamentary liberty centres in the figure of Sir John Eliot.... He was now in the first vigour of manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated, and familiar with the poetry and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and devout, a fearless and vehement temperament. But his intellect was as clear and cool as his temper was ardent. What he believed in was the English Parliament. He saw in it the collective wisdom of the realm, and in thatwisdom he put a firmer trust than in the statecraft of kings.” Of the memorable scene in Parliament in which he moved the presentation to the king of a remonstrance, in the session of 1628, a letter of the times gives a description. By royal orders the Speaker of the House stopped him, and Eliot sat abruptly down amid the solemn silence of the members. “Then appeared such a spectacle of passions as the like had seldom been seen in such an assembly; some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing their sins and country’s sins.... There were above an hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own passions.”
Says President Theodore Roosevelt of Sir John Eliot: “He took his stand firmly on the ground that the king was not the master of Parliament, and of course this could but mean ultimately that Parliament was master of the king. In other words, he was one of the earliest leaders of the movement which has produced English freedom and English government as we now know them. He was also its martyr. He was kept in the Tower, without air or exercise, for three years, the king vindictively refusing to allow the slightest relaxation in his confinement, even when it brought on consumption.In December, 1632, he died; and the king’s hatred found its last expression in denying to his kinsfolk the privilege of burying him in his Cornish home.”
At last the “man of blood,” who had tried to wrest England’s liberties, himself perished upon the scaffold at Whitehall, and in his condemnation the same author cites his treatment of Sir John Eliot as one of his greatest crimes. “Justice was certainly done, and until the death penalty is abolished for all malefactors, we need waste scant sympathy on the man who so hated the upholders of freedom that his vengeance against Eliot could be satisfied only with Eliot’s death; who so utterly lacked loyalty, that he signed the death-warrant of Strafford when Strafford had merely done his bidding; who had made the blood of Englishmen flow like water, to establish his right to rule; and who, with incurable duplicity, incurable double-dealing, had sought to turn the generosity of his victorious foes to their own hurt.”
These grisly tales of executions and of scenes of fortitude we close with a few words on that valiant, noble soul, Sir Harry Vane, to whom Milton dedicated the well-known sonnet beginning: “Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old.”
Speaking before the Phi Beta Kappa of Harvard University, Wendell Phillips, America’ssilver-tongued orator, uttered a memorable word upon the man whose governorship of Massachusetts for two years of its infant history makes the name of Vane for ever dear to the American descendants of the Puritans:
“... Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the two men deepest in thought and bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their day, and equal to any in practical statesmanship. Sir Harry Vane—in my judgment the noblest human being who ever walked the streets of yonder city—I do not forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown. But Vane dwells an arrow’s flight above them all, and his touch consecrated the continent to measureless toleration of opinion and entire equality of rights. We are told we can find in Plato ‘all the intellectual life of Europe for two thousand years.’ So you can find in Vane the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years of American civilisation, with no particle of its dross. Plato would have welcomed him to the Academy, and Fénélon kneeled with him at the altar. He made Somers and John Marshall possible; like Carnot, he organised victory; and Milton pales before him in the stainlessness of his record. He stands among English statesmen preëminently the representative, in practice and in theory, of serenefaith in the safety of trusting truth wholly to her own defence. For other men we walk backward, and throw over their memories the mantle of charity and excuse, saying reverently, ‘Remember the temptation and the age.’ But Vane’s ermine has no stain; no act of his needs explanation or apology; and in thought he stands abreast of the age—like pure intellect, belongs to all time. Carlyle said, in years when his words were worth heeding, ‘Young men, close your Byron and open your Goethe.’ If my counsel had weight in these halls, I should say, ‘Young men, close your John Winthrop and Washington, your Jefferson and Webster, and open Sir Harry Vane.’ It was the generation that knew Vane who gave to our Alma Mater for a seal the simple pledge, Veritas.”—Wendell Phillips, in his Harvard address on the “Scholar in the Republic.”
To the profligate Charles II. few men must have seemed more dangerous than the man who had dared to teach that the king had three “superiors, God, Law, and Parliament.” The man who had once walked through the stately halls of Raby Castle as its master found a Tower cell his last earthly abiding-place.
When Sir Harry Vane was arraigned as a “false traitor,” he made his own defence, well knowing what the end would be, but determined, for the sakeof England and the cause he loved, to put his plea on record. For ten hours he fought for his life without refreshment, then later, in his prison, wrote out the substance of his plea. Though, as his biographer relates, “he had torn to pieces as if they were so much rotten thread the legal meshes in which his hunters sought to hold him fast,” his doom was sealed. Something was gained when the original sentence of hideous torture and dismemberment was commuted into simple beheading. The day before his execution, Vane said to his children: “Resolve to suffer anything from men rather than sin against God.... I can willingly leave this place and outward enjoyments, for those I shall meet with hereafter in a better country. I have made it my business to acquaint myself with the society of Heaven. Be not you troubled, for I am going home to my Father.”
“As one goes through Eastcheap to-day, out upon the open space of Tower Hill, he finds himself among prosaic surroundings. Over the pavement rattles the traffic from the great London docks close at hand. High warehouses rise at the side; the sooty trail of steamers pollutes the air toward the river. In one direction, however, the view has suggestions the reverse of commonplace. Looking thither the sensitive beholder feels with deep emotionthe fact brought home to him, that to men of English speech, the earth has scarcely a spot more memorable than the ground where he is standing. There rise, as they have risen for eight hundred years, the gray walls of the Tower,—the moat in the foreground, the battlemented line of masonry behind; within, the white keep, with its four turrets.... As mothers have shed tears there for imprisoned children, so children standing there have wondered which blocks in the grim masonry covered the dungeons of their fathers and mothers. Again and again, too, through the ages, all London has gathered, waiting in a hush for the dropping of the drawbridge before the Byward Tower, and the coming forth of the mournful train, conducting some world-famous man to the block draped with black, on the scaffold to the left, where the hill is highest.... On the 14th of June in 1662 in the full glory of the summer, Vane, in the strength of his manhood, was brought forth to die.” Thus writes James K. Hosmer in his scholarly biography of Vane. He quotes an eye-witness, who relates how cheerfully and readily Vane went from his chamber to the sledge which took him to the scaffold, and how “from the tops of houses, and out of windows, the people used such means and gestures as might best discover, at a distance, their respects and loveto him, crying aloud, ‘The Lord go with you, the great God of Heaven and Earth appear in you and for you.’ When asked how he did, he answered, ‘Never better in my life.’ Loud were the acclamations of the people, crying out, ‘The Lord Jesus go with your dear soul.’” As Vane stepped upon the scaffold, clad in a black suit and cloak and scarlet waistcoat, a silence fell, and calmly, serenely, he addressed the throng around him. His address displeased the officers, and the trumpets were commanded to silence him. His words, however, had been well prepared and delivered in writing to a friend, so that the world to-day knows with what dignity and truth he spoke. His prayer, however, was not thus broken. “Thy servant, that is now falling asleep, doth heartily desire of thee, that thou shouldst forgive his enemies, and not lay this sin to their charge.... I bless the Lord that I have not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer.”
The heads of Cromwell and Bradshaw hung on the poles of Westminster Hall when Vane’s fell. Blake’s and Ireton’s bodies had been flung into dishonoured graves. Pym and Hampden had died early in the civil strife. Algernon Sidney was to be a later victim. In Jewin Street the blind Milton was solacing himself in an uncertain seclusion and quietude, with the preparation of his “ParadiseLost.” Everything the Puritans had stood for seemed eclipsed. But the truths these men had lived and died for could not die. Says Lowell, writing for his countrymen: “It was the red dint on Charles’s block that marked one in our era.”
The reign of the Stuarts was doomed, and the Nemesis of what they stood for was assured. Says John Richard Green: “England for the last two hundred years has done little more than carry out in a slow and tentative way, but very surely, the programme laid down by Vane and his friends at the close of the Civil War.” It was government of the people, by the people, for the people, for which Vane and Washington and Lincoln lived. Without the foresight and the valour of the brave man who died on Tower Hill the work accomplished by the two later heroes might not have been assured.
At the end of Great Tower Street is the church of All Hallows, Barking, anciently known as “Berkynge Church by the Tower.” The edifice, which is situated close to Mark Lane Station on the Metropolitan Railway, ranks as the oldest parish church with a continuous history as such in the city of London. One hundred and fifty years before the union of the seven kingdoms under Egbert, over four hundred years before the Conqueror and the building of the White Tower, a thousand years before the boy Milton visited its historic site, the foundation of the church was laid. For six hundred years a close connection existed between the court and this church when the Tower was a royal residence.
Some traces of old Norman work remain, but the present building belongs to the Perpendicular type,and assumed nearly its present shape about one hundred years before Milton’s age.
From its nearness to the Tower, the church became the burial-place of some of its victims. Here was placed the headless body of Lord Thomas Grey, uncle of Lady Jane, who was beheaded in 1554 for taking part in the rebellion under Wyatt. The heart of Richard the Lion Heart was once placed under its high altar. After his execution on Tower Hill, the body of Archbishop Laud rested here some years, and was “accompanied to earth with great multitudes of people, whom love or curiosity or remorse of conscience had drawn together, and decently interred ... according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, in which it may be noted as a remarkable thing, that being, whilst he lived, the greatest champion of the Common Prayer Book ... he had the honour, being dead, to be buried in the form therein provided, after it had been long disused and almost reprobated in most of the churches of London.”
Two hundred and fifty years later an Archbishop Laud Commemoration was celebrated here, and where the scaffold stood on Tower Hill services were held.
The chief interest of the church for American visitors may be the baptismal register, in which isrecorded the baptism, during Milton’s early manhood, of Sir William Penn’s infant son, the apostle of peace, who was destined to found a great state in the New World. The Great Fire of 1666 touched the church so closely that Pepys tells us the “dyall and part of the porch was burnt.” Its interior is beautifully preserved. Its old brasses attract so many who desire to make rubbings that a snug sum for church purposes has been raised by the small fees charged. The church possesses the oldest indenture for the construction of an organ known in England. Its date is 1519.
On the south side of Tower Street, at number 48, was formerly a public house painted with the head of the Czar of Muscovy. Here Peter the Great, when he was studying the dockyards and maritime establishments of England under William III., used to resort with his attendants and smoke his pipe and drink beer and brandy. Near by is Muscovy Court, a present reminder of the ancient name.
A little farther north, on Hart Street, once stood the richly decorated timber house, called “Whittington’s Palace.” According to doubtful tradition this was where the famous Dick Whittington, with princely magnanimity, burnt the royal bond for a debt of £60,000, when Henry V. and his queen came to dine with him. “Never had king such a subject,”Henry is reported to have said, when Whittington replied to the hero of Agincourt, “Surely, Sire, never had subject such a king.” This palace, with its whole front of diamond-paned windows, stood in Milton’s time.
Near by, on Hart Street, is the church of St. Olave, which with All Hallows, Barking, escaped the Great Fire, and stands as it stood in Milton’s life. The tourist must time his visit to it on a week day to the noon hour, as, unlike All Hallows, Barking, it is not open all day.
The monastery of the Crutched Friars must have covered in ancient days a large part of the parish of this church. Its dimensions are of the smallest—it is only fifty-four feet long. Its name takes us back to the times of the Danish settlement, for St. Olave is but the corruption of St. Olaf, the Norwegian saint who was the martyred king of the Northmen. The body of this saint rests in the great cathedral at Trondheim, Norway. His history is closely connected with the immediate region. As a boy of twelve he started on his career as viking; later he fought with Ethelred against the usurping Danes in London. The latter held the bridge which connected the walled town with low-lying Southwark across the Thames. The struggle waxed desperate, when the bold Norwegianat a critical juncture fastened cables to the bridge, and then ordered his little ships, which were attached to them, to row hard down stream. The piles tottered, the bridge, which swarmed with the Danes, fell, and those that were not drowned were driven away. When William the Conqueror sailed up the Thames a half century later, the stories of the intrepid Olaf, who had become Norway’s king and had died in battle, must have been fresh in mind.
Not only this church, but others in the city were erected in his name. The present structure was probably built about 1450, and was repaired about the time that Milton returned to London from Italy.
During the Reformation, in 1553, St. Olave’s had “a pair of organes.” During the Civil War in 1644, an ordinance was passed that all organs in churches “should be taken away and utterly defaced.” It is very certain that the music-loving Milton, who joyed to hear
“... the organ blow, to the full-voiced choir below”
must have mourned this stern decree. In consequence of this, most organ builders for sixteen years were obliged to work as carpenters and joiners.
The famous diarist, Pepys, who attended St. Olave’s, writes on June 17, 1660: “This day the organs did begin to play at Whitehall Chapel, whereI heard very good musique, the first time that ever I remember to have heard the organs and singing men in surplices in my life.” On April 20, 1667, he records: “To Hackney Church, and found much difficulty to get pews. That which I went chiefly to see was the young ladies of the schools, whereof there is great store, very pretty, and also the organ, which is handsome, and tunes the psalms and plays with the people, which is mighty pretty, and makes me mighty earnest to have a pair at our church”—which meant St. Olave’s.
About the time of Pepys’s writing, a peal of six remarkably sweet-toned bells was placed in the tower. In the church are quaint brasses and monuments, the most interesting of which is the tomb of Pepys. An elegant monument of alabaster, with a bust of Pepys, taken from his portrait in the National Gallery, was unveiled in 1884. It bears the dates: “b. 1632, d. 1703.” The monument is near the door where Pepys used to enter the church from Seething Lane.
Pepys, like Milton, was educated at St. Paul’s School. His fame rests chiefly on his diary, which was written in cipher, and not deciphered and published until 1825. On the unveiling of his monument, James Russell Lowell, in his address, spoke of Pepys as “a type perhaps of what is now calleda Philistine. We have no word in English which is equivalent to the French adjective ‘bourgeois,’ but at all events, Samuel Pepys was the most perfect type that ever existed of the class of people whom this word describes. He had all its merits, as well as many of its defects.” With all these defects, perhaps in spite of them, Lowell maintained, Pepys had written one of the most delightful books that it was man’s privilege to read in the English language, or in any other. There was no parallel to the character of Pepys in respect of naïveté unless it were found in that of Falstaff, and Pepys showed himself, too, “like Falstaff, on terms of unbuttoned familiarity with himself.... Pepys’s naïveté was the inoffensive vanity of a man who loved to see himself in the glass.” It was questionable, he said, whether Pepys could have had any sense of humour at all, and yet permitted himself to be so delightful. The lightest part of the diary was of value historically, for it enabled us to see the London of two hundred years ago, and, what was more, to see it with the eager eyes of Pepys. It was not Pepys the official, the clerk of the acts and secretary of the Admiralty, who had brought that large gathering together—it was Pepys the diarist.
Pepys’s diary was begun in 1660, when he wasin his twenty-seventh year. Ten years later, when he feared blindness, he ceased writing it. He bequeathed it in six volumes, written in cipher as above stated, with his library of three thousand books, to his old college, Magdalen, at Cambridge, and it is now its greatest treasure. Pepys was no Puritan. His comments on the Calvinistic teaching of his pastor, Daniel Mills, are characteristic. In 1666, he writes: “Up and to church, where Mr. Mills, a lazy, simple sermon upon the Devil’s having no right to anything in this world;” and again he writes: “Mr. Mills made an unnecessary sermon on original sin, neither understood by himself nor the people.” He writes that when he invited the reverend gentleman to dinner on a Sunday, he “had a very good dinner and very merry.”
Among the notable men buried near Pepys is William Turner, an early Puritan, who was educated under Latimer and died in 1568. He wrote the earliest scientific work by any Englishman on botany. His great object was to learn themateria medicaof the ancients throughout the vegetable kingdom. But he wrote against the Roman Antichrist as well. The title of one book illustrates the orthography of his day: “The Hunting and Fynding of the Romish Fox: which more than seven years hath been among the Bysshoppes of England,after that the Kynges Hyghnes, Henry VIII. had commanded hym to be driven out of hys Realme.” Of Sir James Deane, a merchant adventurer to India, China, and the Spice Islands, it is recorded that he gave generous bequests, and directed £500 to be expended on his funeral, a vast sum for those days, yet probably no more than was customary for wealthy men.
Of Sir John Mennes, who is buried here, Pepys tells us that “he brought many fine expressions of Chaucer which he doats on mightily,” and naïvely adds, “and without doubt he is a very fine poet.” Droll, lively, garrulous Pepys! Who would have dreamed that this boyish writer was in reality a great military authority, and in a large measure responsible for the care of England’s navy?
As in All Hallows, Barking, and several old “city” churches, the visitor will notice in St. Olave’s the remarkable, wrought-iron “sword-stands,” used in Elizabeth’s reign and placed in the pews of distinguished persons. The pulpit, with its elaborate carving, said to have been done by Grinling Gibbons, is one that was removed from the “deconsecrated” church of St. Benet.
St. Olave’s had one of the churchyards in which the victims of the plague were buried in great numbers, and of which Pepys writes: “It frightenedme indeed to go through the church, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard where people have been buried of the plague.” The gruesome skulls and crossbones, carved over its gateway, are a dismal reminder of the horrors of that time. In the chapter on the “City of the Absent,” in his “Uncommercial Traveller,” Dickens thus graphically describes his visit to it: “One of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint Ghastly Grim; touching what men in general call it, I have no information. It lies at the heart of the City, and the Blackwall Railway shrieks at it daily. It is a small, small churchyard, with a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone; but it likewise came into the mind of Saint Ghastly Grim that to stick iron spikes atop of the stone skulls, as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device. Therefore the skulls grin aloft, horribly thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence there is attraction of repulsion for me in Saint Ghastly Grim, and having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn toward it in a thunder-storm at midnight. ‘Why not?’ I said; ‘I have been to the Colosseum by the light of the moon; is it worse to go to see Saint GhastlyGrim by the light of the lightning?’ I repaired to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found the skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution, and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes.”
In the chapter on “A Year’s Impressions,” in which Dickens depicts repeated visits to the deserted churches of the London of the past, he, with a deft touch, describes the commercial atmosphere which now impregnates all of what poetry, history, and romance remain to-day.
“From Rood Lane unto Tower Street, and thereabouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine. In the churches about Mark Lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of wheat, and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock in one of them. One church near Mincing Lane smelt like a druggist’s drawer. Behind the Monument the service had the flavour of damaged oranges, which, a little farther down toward the river, tempered into herrings and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of fish.... The dark vestries and registers into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on my memory, distinct and quaint. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating, there is not a line but madesome heart leap, or some tears flow, in their day. Still and dry now, still and dry, and the old tree at the window, with no room for its branches, has seen them all out. These churches remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them—monuments of another age. They are worth a Sunday exploration, for they echo to the time when the City of London really was London; when the Prentices and Trained Bands were of mark in the state; when even the Lord Mayor himself was a reality.”
In Milton’s day, on the street of the Crutched Friars, named from the ancient convent of Crossed Friars, was the row of almshouses built by Sir John Milborne in 1535 in honour of God and the Virgin. In some way, the relief of the Assumption of the Virgin at the entrance gate escaped destruction by the Puritans, and remained with the almshouses to a late period. To the American, to whom the word “almshouse” signifies the English “workhouse,”—an institution of paupers where all live in common,—little idea is conveyed of the comfortable, and usually quaint and picturesque retreat which “almshouse” signifies to the English mind. In many London suburbs one may see little rows of cottages within walled gardens, where, in quiet and comfort and serenity, aged couples spendtheir last days, in some ways the happiest of their lives, though it be in an almshouse.