At 53 Fenchurch Street, in Milton’s time, stood the Queen’s Head Tavern, where the Princess Elizabeth dined on pork and peas after her release from the Tower in 1554. The modern building erected on the site bears a commemorative statue of her.
Mincing Lane, in the vicinity, was named from houses which belonged to the Minchuns or nuns of Saint Helen’s. Near its entrance is the Hall of the Clothworkers’ Company, whose badge is a ram; within are gilt statues of James I. and Charles I., which were saved from the Great Fire. Its garden was once the churchyard of All Hallows, Staining, whose fine old tower, which escaped the Fire, still stands as when Milton strolled past and gazed on it. The church, which was demolished recently, was reputed to have been the earliest stone church in the city. “Stane” is the Saxon word for stone, and the word “Staining” indicates the fact mentioned above.
Passing north to Aldgate, Milton must have seen the great gate, which was not destroyed until 1760. It was the chief outlet to the eastern counties from the time of the Romans until its destruction.
In the dwelling over the gate, according to Loftie, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer lived in 1374. Thisgate, however, was pulled down just before Milton’s birth, and rebuilt the year after he was born, in 1609. When he saw it, a gilded statue of James I. adorned its eastern side, and on the west were statues of Peace, Fortune, and Charity.
Aldgate to-day is the entrance into that sordid, dismal region, known as Whitechapel, where within easy walking distance from the site of the ancient gate is its chief attraction to all tourists. On Commercial Street, standing in a group, are the little church of St. Jude, and close beside it that Social Settlement, reared in memory of the gentle Oxford scholar and philanthropist, Arnold Toynbee. This is one of the few beautiful oases in a desert of squalor and commonplaceness, which the name Whitechapel now signifies to most readers.
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ST. CATHERINE CREE CHURCH IN 1736
The steeple dates from about 1505. The old church was pulled down in 1628, and the present one finished in 1630. Cree Church is a corruption of Christ-Church.
From an old engraving.
But for Milton’s haunts, we need not wander farther east than Aldgate; for though Whitechapel Street was thickly lined with houses for some distance even in his day, little of interest remains. Turning back through Leadenhall Street, one sees a little gray stone church, with a low tower and round-arched windows, known as St. Catherine Cree’s. This was rebuilt in Milton’s youth in 1629, and consecrated two years later by the ill-fated Archbishop Laud. The ceremonies which he used on this occasion savoured so much of Popery, however, thatthey were later brought against him, and helped to accomplish his downfall. In an older church, upon this site, the famous Hans Holbein, to whom we are indebted for his portraits of Henry VIII., Sir Thomas More, and other famous Englishmen, was buried in 1554, after his death by the plague. Within the church may be seen the effigy in armour of a man who played an important part in England when Milton’s father was a boy. To-day, only the historian recalls the name of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, whose daughter married Walter Raleigh, who was chamberlain of the exchequer, ambassador, and chief butler of England. The stories of his fruitless embassy to Mary Queen of Scots to prevent her marriage with Darnley, and the records of his trial, imprisonment, and death of a broken heart must have been as familiar to the youth of Milton’s time as the life of Disraeli or Joseph Chamberlain is to Cambridge youth to-day.
Above the gateway, in the churchyard, is a ghastly memorial to the builder of it in the form of a shrouded skeleton on a mattress. In Shakespeare’s time, within this churchyard, which is now much smaller than it was then, and is concealed by modern buildings, scaffolds were erected on all sides, and religious plays were performed on Sundays.
Every year, on October 16th, the “lion sermon”is preached within the church in memory of an ancient worthy, who in 1648 gave it the sum of £200, in remembrance of his delivery from a lion’s paws in Arabia. As at St. Olave’s, the noon hour, when daily service is performed for the benefit of the one or two worshippers who may stray in, is the time to visit this historic church.
The first edition of “Paradise Lost” bears the imprint: “Printed, and are to be sold by Peter Parker, under Creed Church near Aldgate, 1667.” “Creed Church” was this same Catherine Cree’s.
A little north of Leadenhall, at the entrance to the ancient street called St. Mary Axe, stands the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, another of the churches which remain, of those that Milton saw within the city walls. Its name recalls the ancient English custom of the May-day dance. A lofty May-pole, higher than the tower of the church, once stood beside it, and was pulled down on “Evil May Day,” in the reign of Henry VIII., about the time the church was built, 1520-32. It is a gray stone edifice, well preserved, and well worth a visit if for no other end than to see the tomb of the learned and devoted chronicler, Stow—a name dear to every student of ancient London and of English history. Of his “Survey,” Loftie says: “It was a wonder even in the age which produced Shakespeare.”
Stow was bred a tailor, but in middle life retired on a modest competence, and for forty years almost immediately preceding Milton’s birth had with unparalleled industry studied the history of his city and native land. His collection for the Chronicles of England, now in the British Museum, fills sixty quarto volumes. Every street of London and prominent building, every church, and almost every monument and inscription, are faithfully recorded in his volumes on London and Westminster. To him and to his editor, Strype, who has continued his work until a later period, modern London, and all who love her and her long history, owe an incalculable debt of gratitude.
But so little was his invaluable service recognised in his day that his great collection of books aroused suspicion in some quarters, and his outspoken words on public questions stirred up the jealous and malevolent, as his biographer shows. He was reduced to poverty in his old age, for he had spent his substance in his great enterprise. Like a genuine historian, he sought original sources, and “made use of his own legs (for he could never ride), travelling on foot to many cathedral churches and other places where ancient records and charters were; and with his own eyes to read them.” He studied the records in the Tower, and was expert in decipheringold wills and registers and muniments belonging to monasteries. He seems to have been somewhat conservative; perhaps, as his biographer suggests, “being a lover of antiquity and of the old Religious Buildings and monuments, he was the more prejudiced against the Reformed Religion, because of the havoc and destruction those that pretended to it made of them in those days.” One instance of Protestant fanaticism that tended to make him more opposed to zeal without knowledge was that a curate of St. Paul’s, which was his parish, inveighed “fervently against a long Maypole called a Shaft in the next Parish to his, named St. Andrew Undershaft, and calling it an Idol; which so stirred up the devotion of many hearers that many of them in the afternoon went, and with violence pulled it down from the place where it hung upon hooks; and then sawed it into divers pieces, each householder taking his piece as much as hung over his door or stall, and afterward burnt it.”
Sir Walter Besant, in a delightful chapter in his “London,” describes an imaginary visit to the learned man, and a stroll with him through the town five years before Milton opened his eyes in Bread Street: “I found the venerable antiquary in his lodging. He lived—it was the year before he died—with his old wife in a house over againstthe Church of St. Andrew Undershaft. The house itself was modest, containing two rooms on the ground floor, and one large room, or solar, as it would have been called in olden time, above. There was a garden at the back, and behind the garden stood the ruins of St. Helen’s Nunnery, with the grounds and gardens of that once famous house, which had passed into the possession of the Leathersellers’ Company.... I passed within, and mounting a steep, narrow stair, found myself in the library and in the presence of John Stow himself. The place was a long room, lofty in the middle, but with sloping sides. It was lit by two dormer windows; neither carpet nor arras nor hangings of any kind adorned the room, which was filled so that it was difficult to turn about in it, with books, papers, parchments, and rolls. They lay in piles on the floor, they stood in lines and columns against the walls; they were heaped upon the table. I observed too that they were not such books as may be seen in a great man’s library, bound after the Italian fashion, with costly leather, gilt letters, golden clasps, and silken strings. Not so; these books were all folios for the most part; their backs were broken; the leaves, where any lay open, were discoloured, many of them were in the Gothic black letter. On the table were paper, pens, and ink, andin the straight-backed armchair sat the old man himself, pen in hand, laboriously bending over a huge tome. He wore a black silk cap; his long white hair fell down upon his shoulders. The casements of the window stood open, and the summer sunshine poured warm and bright upon the scholar’s head.”
In an age of many elaborate and tasteless monuments, Stow’s is singularly interesting and tasteful. An almost life-size figure of him is seated, dressed in a long robe, before a table on which rests a book in which he is writing. The whole is placed within a niche in the tomb; upon the sculptured sides, the artist has carved, among other devices, a beggar’s wallet, indicative of Stow’s poverty, for which James I. in his old age issued him letters patent permitting him to solicit aid. These letters grant “to our loving subject, John Stow, who hath to his own great charge, and with neglect to his ordinary means of maintenance, for the general good of Posteritie, as well as the present age, compiled and published diverse necessary books and chronicles, and therefore we in recompense of his painful labours, and for the encouragement of the like ... authorise him and his deputies to collect among our loving subjects their contributions and kind gratuities.” Thus was the man who has chiefly contributed toour knowledge of ancient London allowed in his extreme old age to live in unappreciation and neglect.
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CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT IN 1737From an old engraving.
The visitor cannot but query, as he surveys the handsome monument erected to him by his wife, how this was paid for, but there are many explanations that suggest themselves.
Many a time may Milton as a boy and man have stood before this tomb, and viewed the fine timber roof and the late Perpendicular windows, which to-day remain just as he saw them. If the modern visitor would study the fashions of his day, he can do no better than inspect such monuments as the costly Hammersley erected here. The date thereon is 1636, when Milton was a young man of twenty-eight. The absence in the life-size kneeling figure of the huge stiff crinoline on the tombs of a little earlier date shows that the fashions changed as sharply as in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The date of the handsome organ is 1695.
Passing by the tiny churchyard of St. Andrew Undershaft, by several narrow and obscure passages amid crowded business blocks, one comes upon the famous Crosby Hall on Bishopsgate Street. This presents to-day one of the most picturesque examples of the beam and plaster houses of the fifteenth century to be found in England. It was, says Stow, “the highest at that time in London,” that is, about 1475. Doubtless his reference is to a high turret which once surmounted it, but of which no traces now remain. This was before the more pretentious Tudor buildings of the next century, of whose high towers Stow’s biographer says: “He could not endure the high turrets and buildings run up to a great height, which some citizens in his time laid out their money upon to overtop and overlook their neighbours. Such sort of advanced works, both towers and chimneys, they built both in their summerhouses in Moorfieldsand in other places in the suburbs, and in their dwelling houses in the City itself. They were like midsummer Pageants, ‘not so much for use and profit as for show and pleasure,’ ‘bewraying,’ said he, ‘the vanities of men’s minds. And that it was unlike to the disposition of the ancient citizens, who delighted in the building of hospitals and almshouses for the poor; and therein both employed their wits, and spent their wealth in the preferment of the common commodity of this our city.’”
Crosby House was, as Sir Thomas More relates, where Richard, Duke of Gloucester, “lodged himself, and little by little all folks drew unto him, so that the Protector’s court was crowded and King Edward’s left desolate.” Here he probably planned his treasonable and malicious scheme for the death of the little princes. In his play of “Richard III.,” Shakespeare mentions Crosby Hall more than once; doubtless he knew it well, for ten years before the birth of Milton it seems evident that he resided in a house hard by. It is quite certain that it is to his immortalising Crosby Hall that its preservation to this day is due, when almost everything else that was contemporaneous in secular architecture has disappeared in its vicinity.
The building has been much restored, and its banquet-hall is now utilised for a first-class restaurant,where he who will may dine where dukes and princes dined four centuries ago. Sir Thomas More lived here for several years, and here doubtless wrote his life of the base king, to the echo of whose voice these walls had once resounded. Sir Thomas sold the place to that dear friend to whom he wrote with a coal a sad letter of farewell from his Tower cell before his execution. Later, his daughter, who loved the place where her dear father had passed so many days, hired it, and came here to live.
Some years later, in 1594, the rich mayor of London, Sir John Spencer, bought the place, and entertained an ambassador from Henry IV. to King James I. An interesting incident of this visit is related in the memoirs of this ambassador. It appears that much scandal had been wrought by the mad pranks and rioting of the attendants of former envoys. What, then, was the horror of the French duke, when he discovered that one of the young nobles in his train, on going out of Crosby Hall in quest of sport, had got into a fight and murdered an English merchant close by in Great St. Helen’s. The duke, determined on making an example, bade all his servants and attendants range themselves in a row against the wall, and taking a lighted torch, he looked sharply in the face of each in turn until he found the terrified face of the guilty man.Determined to wreak speedy vengeance, he ordered, after the arbitrary method of the times, his instant decapitation. But the lord mayor pleaded for mercy, and the youth’s life was spared; whereupon, the duke records, “the English began to love, and the French to fear him more.”
This same Lord Spencer, Mayor of London, had one fair daughter, a gay deceiver of her honoured sire, and as much a lover of fine clothes and service as any modern dame who orders gowns from Worth’s, or buys her jewels on Bond Street. She loved, or at all events made up her mind to marry the Earl of Northampton, a man who waspersona non gratato her father, who had no mind to wed his daughter, the greatest heiress in England, to this gentleman. But the young folks were not daunted. One day when the mayor gave a sixpence to the baker’s boy, who had come with a covered barrow to bring bread, he learned later that the barrow contained not bread, but his own naughty Elizabeth, who was trundled off by her lover in disguise.
When their baby came, some time later, grandpapa was wheedled into a reconciliation, and the gay young bride again lived in Crosby Place, the past forgiven. As an illustration of what wealthy ladies in Milton’s boyhood demanded for their pleasure, a quotation from her letter written to her husbandshortly after marriage, may prove entertaining: “I pray and beseech you to grant me, your most kind and loving wife, the sum of £2,600 quarterly to be paid. Also I would, besides that allowance, have £600 quarterly to be paid, for the performance of charitable works; and those things I would not, neither will be, accountable for. Also I will have three horses for my own saddle, that none should dare to lend or borrow; none lend but I, none borrow but you. Also I would have two gentlewomen ... when I ride a hunting or a hawking, or travel from one house to another, I will have them attending; so for either of these said women, I must and will have for either of them a horse. Also I will have six or eight gentlemen. And I will have my two coaches, one lined with velvet to myself, with four very fine horses; and a coach for my women, lined with cloth and laced with gold, otherwise with scarlet and laced with silver, with four good horses. Also I will have two coachmen. Also, at any time when I travel, I will be allowed not only coaches and spare horses for me and my women, but I will be having such carriages as shall be fitting for all; orderly, not pestering my things with my women’s nor theirs with their chambermaids, nor theirs with their washmaids.... And I must have two footmen; and my desire is that you defray all thecharges for me. And for myself, besides my yearly allowance, I would have twenty gowns of apparel. Also I would have to put me in my purse £2,000 and £200, and so you to pay my debts. Also I would have £6,000 pounds to buy me jewels, and £4,000 to buy me a pearl chain. Now, seeing I have been and am so reasonable unto you, I pray you do find my children apparel and their schooling, and all my servants, men and women, their wages.... So for my drawing-chambers in all houses, I will have them delicately furnished, both with hangings, couch, canopy, glass, carpet, chairs, cushions, and all things thereunto belonging.... I pray you when you be an earl to allow me £2,000 more than I now desire, and double attendance.”
The Countess of Pembroke, sister of Sir Philip Sidney and friend of Ben Jonson, once lived as mistress in the halls of Crosby Place. The latter’s epitaph upon her is well known:
“Underneath this sable hearseLies the subject of all verse:Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother.Death, ere thou canst find anotherGood and fair and wise as she,Time shall throw a dart at thee.”
Crosby Hall originally occupied far more ground than is indicated by that part of it which standsto-day. A wine cellar with finely groined roof probably belonged to a crypt of its chapel, which has vanished. In its great hall, fifty-four feet long and forty feet high, one sees to-day, in beautiful modern workmanship, the arms of St. Helen’s Priory, the earliest proprietor of the place; of Sir John Crosby, its builder; of the “crook-backed tyrant,” Richard, and of the wise, the gentle, the learned author of the “Utopia.” Its “louvre,” or opening in the roof, is found in ancient halls in lieu of a chimney. This hall, however, has a regular fireplace, but perhaps of later construction. The louvre now is closed by the same piece of woodwork that formerly was raised above it. The beautiful carved roof itself is now as it was over four centuries ago, the chief glory of the place. Beneath it the most accomplished musicians of the past discoursed sweet music, and the noble, the learned, and the fashionable gathered at the hospitable board. Not unlikely, the author of “Comus” and “Lycidas,” in the days before its owner fought under Charles I., may have been among their company.
In Milton’s blind old age, Crosby Hall became a Presbyterian meeting-house, and for a century afterward devout worshippers sang psalms beneath its carved oak roof, which had echoed for two hundred years to sounds of mirth and feasting.
A little to the left of Crosby Hall, through a low gateway, the sightseer passes from the noisy thoroughfare into a quiet court. Its pavement covers the ancient garden of Crosby Place. But it is not all paved. A small green churchyard still occupies a part of the site of the ancient priory of St. Helen’s, and surrounds the low Gothic church to which one descends a few steps from the modern pavement.
Helena, the mother of Constantine, according to tradition, discovered the tomb of Christ and thereupon was canonised. From remote antiquity a church in her honour has stood here. Three centuries before Milton’s day, the Benedictine nuns built a priory close by the ancient church. They built their church, and finally, getting possession of St. Helen’s, incorporated it with their own. To-day the ends of the two naves, with a little cupola at the intersection, present an irregular and picturesque aspect; the interior, likewise, by its irregularities, recalls the curious origin of the structure. An agreeable harmony of differing forms and proportions has been accomplished. The old, old church, dim even on a sunshiny June day, is pervaded by a strange charm. Business has crowded to its very walls; but the rumble of the streets is dulled by the intervening structures of modern prosaic type thathem in its peaceful solitude. Unlike the last three churches of which we have spoken, its doors are open all day long, and the traveller has not to make painful search amid warehouses and down cross streets for the sexton’s keys. St. Helen’s is large enough and beautiful enough to lure the frequent visitor; and perhaps it is a welcome refuge to many a perplexed and overwearied man of business, who, for a few moments, now and then, flees from his office and commercial cares, to rest and lift his thoughts to heavenly things within this sanctuary.
St. Helen’s is noted for its tombs, and has been called the Westminster Abbey of the “City.” Here lies that noted and remarkable man, Sir Thomas Gresham. The visitor to the upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery, in those rooms where hang the portraits of the Elizabethan era, will remember the strong face and figure, elegantly clad, of the man whose bones rest here, and of whom we shall have more to say in connection with his college and the exchange which rose under his direction. His monument is a large marble slab full of fossil shells, and raised table high. The date is 1579. From the beautiful, great window of the Nun’s Church, the coloured rays of his own arms fall on his tomb.
Upon the wall behind it are niches; one of themfaced by a little carved arcade, through which, it is said, the nuns who were in disgrace listened to the mass from the crypt below. A large ugly piece of masonry on the same wall near the farther end once contained the embalmed body of Francis Bancroft, whose face was visible through the glass lid of his coffin. A few years since both body and tomb were placed within the crypt. According to his will, on the occasion of an annual memorial sermon for which he had arranged, his body was exhibited to certain humble folk for whom he had erected, in expiation of his misdeeds, the almshouses now at Mile End. Browning has with characteristic power depicted the Roman Jew scourged to the Christian church, and forced to hear a sermon once a year for his conversion. Perhaps some later poet may find as gruesome a theme for his sarcastic pen in the scene which imagination conjures up when these feeble and aged recipients of the gift of this erratic snob were yearly brought to listen to the tale of his benefactions, and to gaze upon his shrivelling corpse. Bancroft as a magistrate had been so unpopular that the people tried to upset his coffin on its way to the tomb, and pealed the bells.
The oldest monument in the church is to Thomas Langton, chaplain, buried in the choir in 1350. One tomb bears the remarkable name of Sir JuliusCæsar. The inscription is in form of a legal document with a broken seal, in which Sir Julius gives his bond to Heaven to surrender his life whenever it shall please God to call him. If one would see Sir Julius as Milton saw him, let him look upon his portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery with his great contemporaries.
The obdurate father-in-law, the rich Sir John Spencer of Crosby Hall, is commemorated, by his son-in-law, the Earl of Northampton, in a stately alabaster tomb. The figures of Sir John and his wife rest under a double canopy, and at their feet kneels the runaway daughter, in the enormous stiff crinoline of 1609, the date of her father’s death. Some thousand men in mourning cloaks are said to have attended his funeral. The tomb of Sir John Crosby and his wife, of 1475, the beautiful and perfectly preserved tomb of Oteswich and his wife, of the time of Henry IV., and the fine figure of a girl reading, are a few of the works of art that deserve careful attention. The beauty of that which antedates the Tudor and Stuart periods, as contrasted with the works of art of those periods, is almost as marked as it is at Westminster Abbey.
When Milton lived he must have seen still standing the refectory and cloisters, and the old hall of the nuns, which was later used by the Companyof Leathersellers. The whole group of buildings, with the adjacent gardens, must have formed a highly picturesque reminder of the days before King “Hal” had ruthlessly swept his besom of destruction over the many houses in the land which sheltered nuns and friars.
During Milton’s life there stood on Bishopsgate Street the first charitable institution for the insane that was ever established. Its name, “Bethlehem Hospital,” was corrupted into Bedlam, and has become a term of general application to scenes of disorder. Just after Milton’s death, it was removed to Southwark, where the gray dome of the present structure rises conspicuous amid the London smoke.
Passing northeast along the crowded thoroughfare of Bishopsgate Street, but a short distance from St. Helen’s, the student of antiquities may see, almost concealed by parasitic houses, the little ancient church of St. Ethelburga. He will need to cross the street in order to perceive the name inscribed in large letters upon the church, beneath the short tower and cupola, and above the clock and the shop that masks its front. In Milton’s boyhood, this church was ancient, and had been standing for at least three hundred and fifty years, for it is mentioned as early as 1366. Here Chaucer may have knelt to say his Paternosters.
The visitor should time his coming to the middle of the day, when the door opening upon the sidewalk is unlocked, and he may enter into the solemn little sanctuary, and at the farther end step out into the tiny garden at the rear. Here, if it be summer, he may sit in this shady retreat and meditate upon the history of the bit of ancient wall said by the verger to be a Roman wall, the fragments of which are preserved here. The church itself is plain and bare; simply a Gothic nave, with no side aisles. Its chief interest to some may be its antique organ, of uncertain date, but old enough from its appearance to have been heard by the little lad from Bread Street whose soul was full of music. One can easily imagine the father of John Milton, who was himself so skilled in the great art, bringing his son to every church within his neighbourhood that boasted such an instrument.
The church stands on the site of a much older one, and is named from the daughter of the French princess, Bertha, who brought to Canterbury, to the home of her Saxon husband, Ethelbert, the Christian religion, which was then new to pagan England. Visitors to the little church of St. Martin’s at Canterbury will recall the font in which this king was baptised into the faith of his wife.
Not far down Bishopsgate Street, upon the oppositeside from St. Ethelburga’s, when Milton lived, stood a house with such a marvellous carved front with oriel windows, that when it made way for a modern business block, it was transferred to the South Kensington Museum, where it may now be seen in one of its lofty halls. In Milton’s youth, Sir Paul Pindar, its owner, was the richest merchant in the kingdom, and often loaned money to James I. and his son Charles. As ambassador to Constantinople, he did much to improve England’s trade in the East. On his return, when Milton was a schoolboy of a dozen years at St. Paul’s School, he brought, among his other treasures, a great diamond, valued at £30,000, which he loaned to the king to wear at his opening of the Parliaments; it was afterward sold to Charles I. Twenty years later, when Cromwell and Milton were fighting for the rights of Englishmen, and Charles’s strength was failing, this same Paul Pindar provided funds for the escape of Queen Henrietta Maria and her children.
He gave £10,000 for the restoration, before the fire, of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But his loyalty to the house of Stuart was put to a hard test, for the king borrowed such enormous sums that he was all but ruined. When Milton walked down Bishopsgate Street, past his quaint dwelling-house, he must have seen the mulberry-trees planted in the parkto please James I. by his devoted subject. These ancient mulberry-trees disappeared only within the memory of men now living.
Passing westward along the northern site of the old city wall, in search of the few landmarks that escaped the Great Fire and still remain, we come to that church of all others most dear to Milton lovers. St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, is not easily entered on Sunday, except during hours of service. But a courteous question to the burly guardian of the peace who patrols the neighbourhood may effect an unlocking of the gates and a quiet stroll through the green garden that surrounds the church upon two sides. The big policeman is a good talker, and relates with gusto the ravages of the great fire a few years since, which came so near as to melt the lead upon the church roof.
The massive wall which forms a corner of the green yard is a bastion of the city wall in the time of Edward IV. Possibly the long, narrow bricks which still gleam red in the lower part may be a lingering remnant of the old Roman wall. Certainly they are the type that the Romans were wont to use. The policeman assures us that there are mysterious “submarine” passages leading from this wall, and one may well believe almost anything as one thinks of the strange sights that it has witnessed.High walls of business blocks of nondescript style replace the gaps made by the recent fire, which fortunately stopped before it touched the narrow, gabled houses of wood which cluster close about the church. These give almost the only example to-day in London of the type of building which housed the poorer class of Londoners of Milton’s time.
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CHURCH OF ST. GILES CRIPPLEGATE IN 1737
Dedicated to St. Giles, who lived about the year 700; founded in 1090; destroyed by fire in 1545, and rebuilt within the Liberty but without the City of London.
From an old engraving.
The church is on the site of an older one of 1090, and was built about one hundred years before Milton’s birth. It is late Perpendicular, and has some good detail.
As one enters the church from the garden, the first monument on his right is Milton’s, which contains his bust, under a Gothic canopy. The poet’s bones lie by his father’s, under the pavement near the choir. According to the evidence of a little book written about 1790, it seems that his coffin was opened by irresponsible persons, who found the lead much decayed and easily bent back the top. A servant-maid for a consideration let in sightseers through a window, some of whom, after satisfying their curiosity in gazing on the well-preserved figure, snatched hair and teeth and even an arm-bone to carry away as relics. A later authority questions whether it is certain that the grave thus desecrated was indeed Milton’s or another’s, and leaves a grainof comfort in the thought that perhaps his honoured remains still rest untouched by vandals.
Within this church Ben Jonson was married in 1623, and here Oliver Cromwell, a sturdy youth of twenty-one, married his bride on August 22d in 1620. Little thought the parson, as he and Elizabeth Bourchier knelt before him, to be joined in holy wedlock, that one day he would be entitled not only “Protector of England,” but “Protector of Protestantism.” A marvellous man, this Oliver, whose deeds left much to be forgiven by a later age, for they sometimes had more of the spirit of Joshua than of the Founder of the Christian Faith, and yet as a lover of England, and a minister to the court of Queen Victoria from England’s lusty kin beyond the sea has said:
“He lived to make his simple oaken chairMore terrible, more grandly beautiful,Than any throne before or after of a British king.·····One of the few who have a right to rankWith the true Makers; for his spirit wroughtOrder from Chaos; proved that right divineDwelt only in the excellence of truth;And far within old Darkness’ hostile linesAdvanced and pitched the shining tents of LightNor shall the grateful Muse forget to tell,That—not the least among his many claimsTo deathless honour—he wasMilton’sfriend,A man not second among those who livedTo show us that the poet’s lyre demandsAn arm of tougher sinew than the sword.”—“A Glance Behind the Curtain,” Lowell.
One grave within the church may have been dear to Milton besides that of his honoured father. As he lived only one generation removed from the martyrs of Smithfield, he must often have pored over the record of their heroism and cruel deaths, by Fox, the famous martyrologist. Near the west door lies the slab above his grave. The date is 1587. Here, no doubt, Milton, who, as has been said, at different times had dwellings near the church, must often have entered within its doors and paused.
Says the historian Marsden: “Fox placed the Church of England under greater obligations than any writer of his time, and had his recompense in an old age of poverty and shame.... Nor were his writings undervalued even then; they were commanded to be chained up in churches by the side of the homilies and the English Bible;... thus the ‘Book of Martyrs’ stood amongst the high, authentic records of our Church, whilst its venerable author yet lived.”
Frobisher, the great navigator, is also buried within the church.
On the left wall, as one faces the choir, is a curious doggerel inscription to one Busbie. If it be on a Sunday afternoon, and the children have gathered for the Sunday school, it may be interesting to pause a bit, as we have done, before the epitaph, and, while copying it, to lend a half ear to the teaching that goes on within hearing. Three small boys sit on a bench before a solemn youth who holds a book and instructs their infant minds as follows: “Who is God? Where is God? How many persons are there in the Godhead? Keep still there—don’t answer until it is your turn. When God put Adam and Eve out of Eden, what did he promise them?” “That they should be saved,” mumbles one youngster. “Whom did he promise should save them?” “His Son.” “What do we call his Son?” “Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” The next class and all the others scattered through the church are progressing in Christian nurture in much the same way, and one wonders whether the pedagogical skill of the teachers has advanced one whit in all the hundreds of years since the church was built. We hear no “opening exercises,” no joyous singing, no tender, earnest talk about right-doing and the temptations that little boys on Fore Street may encounter on Monday morning. There is nothing but a purely formal catechising of theseeager, impressionable little souls as to a theology that they cannot understand, and a history of the world which their first lesson on geology will undermine. This modern Sunday school is the one blot upon the memory of the beautiful old church so dear to every lover of Milton.
On a week day one may stand on Redcross Street, and behold, as did the travellers in “The Hand of Ethelberta,” “the bold shape of the tower they sought, clothed in every neutral shade, standing clear against the sky, dusky and grim in its upper stages, and hoary gray below, where every corner of stone was rounded off by the waves of wind and storm. All people were busy here; our visitors seemed to be the only idle persons that the city contained; and there was no dissonance—there never is—between antiquity and such beehive industry.... This intramural stir was a fly-wheel, transparent by infinite motion, through which Milton and his day could be seen as if nothing intervened.”
Through Milton’s lifetime and for nearly a century after, there stood on Gresham Street and Basinghall Street the famous Gresham College, founded in 1579, in honour of Sir Thomas Gresham, who gave the Royal Exchange to the city on condition that the corporation should institute lectures on divinity, civil law, astronomy, music, geometry, rhetoric, and physics, to be delivered at his residence. His dwelling-house was a spacious edifice of brick and timber, “with open courts and covered walks which seemed all so well suited for such an intention, as if Sir Thomas had it in view, at the time he built his house.” Seven professors were appointed and lectured in the morning in Latin, in the afternoon in English for two hours each day. Among the number was Sir Christopher Wren, who not only was the greatest architect, but, as is elsewhere said, was one of thefamous astronomers of his day. It was out of his lectures on astronomy, which were attended by learned men, that the Royal Society originated. On Cromwell’s death, all college matters were put in abeyance, and the college was temporarily turned into barracks, and so polluted that Bishop Sprat wrote to Wren that he “found the place in such a nasty condition, so defiled, and the smells so infernal, that if you should now come to make use of your tube [telescope] it would be like Dives looking out of hell into heaven.”
After the Fire, Gresham College was temporarily used for an Exchange, where merchants met. “Gresham College became an epitome of this great city, and the centre of all affairs, both public and private, which were then transacted in it.”
Except “London stone” and bits of the Old Wall, little more remains to consider among the important landmarks of the city that was nightly locked within the city gates, and which still endures after the Great Fire. Of this little part, Austin Friars Church, on the site of the Augustinian Convent, is the most notable. Of the extensive and magnificent establishment that was founded here in 1253, nothing to-day remains but the nave of the great church of former days, which is now reached through narrow passages from Old Broad Streetnorth of the Bank. Originally the church was cruciform, with choir, transepts, and a “most fine, spired steeple, both small and straight.” Henry VIII. at the Dissolution bestowed the house and grounds upon the first Marquis of Winchester, but the church was given by the young King Edward VI. “to the Dutch nation in London, to be their preaching place.” From that day to this the Dutch have worshipped here, and in the days of persecution it was the religious home of other Continental refugees. In the generation before Milton, thousands of the skilled artisans of the Netherlands and France had fled to England, impoverishing the lands of the short-sighted tyrants who drove them forth, to add to English industry and commerce. The most eminent pastor of these exiles was a Polish nobleman, John a Lasco, who shepherded, not only this flock, but all the other foreigners in England, and superintended their schools as well. He was a friend of Melanchthon and Erasmus, was with the latter when he died, and became possessed of his library.
It was to these refugees in London, Norwich, and other towns that harboured them, that England owed the introduction of many new, choice flowers, among them, the gillyflower, carnation, Provence rose, and others. The handiwork of these industrious folk produced many new stuffs unknown toEnglish ladies, among others the fine light fabric known as bombazine. One of the Dutch ladies, who taught the English to starch and launder cambric ruffs, was so much sought after and charged such high fees, that she soon earned herself a competence. Evidently these strangers paid their way.
The church assigned to them in London once possessed a marvellous array of tombs of noted men. The register is crowded with the names of earls and barons, all of whose monuments were sold by the impecunious and callous marquis for £100. Just before Milton’s birth the fourth Marquis of Winchester was compelled to part with all his possessions in Austin Friars. At about this time the tower, declared to be “one of the beautifullest and rarest spectacles” in the city, was pulled down, and the choir and transepts were demolished. The size of the original building may be imagined when we remember that the length of the nave alone is one hundred and fifty feet to-day. The chronicler records that in the beginning of the Dutch services, the church was filled to overflowing. Whether there are fewer Dutch in London four centuries later, or fewer who are glad to worship in their own tongue, cannot be said. But to-day, the visitor, who on a Sunday morning walks through the silent and deserted streets north of the Bank of England, andpenetrates to the seclusion of Austin Friars Church, will find but a scant congregation of perhaps two hundred, who gather cosily within the curtains in the centre of the nave, which shut out the great bare aisles. If he thinks of the old days when Roger Williams taught Dutch to his learned pupil, John Milton, he may let his fancy picture to him these men, who ranked among the nation-builders of their day, stepping some Sunday morning under its Gothic arches from out the greensward that then surrounded them, and listening to the gospel in the tongue of those brave exiles who, like them, had fought for freedom of conscience.
If the visitor waits after service, he may see in the pastor’s room the portrait of John a Lasco, to whom all the congregation point back with pride, as the first and greatest preacher in their history; and the courteous pastor may point out many things of interest that would escape the casual observer. Standing at the front of the church, beside the little tower at the left, whose beautiful spire no longer rises aloft, one finds himself in the heart of the modern business world, relentless, pushing, loving neither beauty nor the sacredness of age. One sign—Barnato Brothers—may attract his attention in a window close to the gray church walls. Here the ambitious and ill-starred king of African mines,Barney Barnato, brought his power to bear upon the men on ’Change a decade since. A decade hence his name, like John a Lasco’s, will be remembered by few. These names and the associations they suggest are no unfitting theme for meditation on a Sunday morning stroll amid the stony streets of London past and present.
Further west, amid the district swept by the Great Fire, stands Guildhall, not as it stood either before or after the fire, but still worthy of mention in the category of buildings that withstood the flames. Only the roof perished in the fire, and its walls stood intact; but so great have been the changes since their restoration that very little which belonged to Milton’s London remains above the crypt.
A clergyman, writing the year after the Great Fire, thus describes it, as he saw it during that terrible conflagration: “And amongst other things that night, the sight of Guildhall was a fearful spectacle, which stood the whole of it together, after the fire had taken it, without flames (I suppose because the timber was such solid oake), like a bright shining wal, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished brass.”
The present roof is as nearly as possible a reproduction of the one that perished in the fire: itis an open oak roof, and has a central louvre. The figures of giants in its hall represent Gog and Magog, who were the Corineus and Gogmagog of the ancient city pageants. The former was a companion of Brutus, the Trojan, and according to tradition killed Gogmagog, the aboriginal giant.
The crypt is reputed to be the finest now remaining in London. It is a portion of the ancient hall of 1411. The north and south aisles had formerly mullioned windows, which are now walled up. The vaulting, with four centred arches, is notable, and is probably of the earliest of that type.
The Guildhall was founded in 1411, in the time of Henry IV., and when Milton was a boy had attained a certain venerableness. Within its walls had taken place, not merely the civic banquets for which its modern successor is noted, but also many tragic scenes in English history. Here the evil-minded Protector who wished to supplant his boy-nephew, Edward V., had his name presented to the assembled multitudes as the legitimate monarch, by his oily courtier, Buckingham. The people, “marvellously abashed,” listened in dead silence, as the accomplished orator proclaimed the bastardy of the little prince, and urged the claims of his ambitious uncle. The speaker, somewhat disconcerted, explained again, louder and more explicitly, his meaning.“But were it for wonder or fear, or that each looked that other should speak first, not one word was there answered of all the people that stood before; but all were as still as the midnight.” Then the recorder was summoned to use his efforts with the people. “But all this no change made in the people, which alway after stood as they were amazed.” At last some servants of the duke, and ’prentices and lads “thrusted into the hall amongst the press,” began suddenly to cry out aloud: “King Richard, King Richard,” and “they that stood before cast back their heads marvelling thereat, but nothing they said. And when the duke and the mayor saw this manner, they wisely turned it to their purpose, and said it was a goodly cry and a joyful to hear every manwith one voice, and no man saying nay.” Thus a boldcoup, struck with a masterful hand, surprised an honest people without organised opposition and leadership, and as so many times in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, the voice of a small and powerful minority was impudently declared to bevox populi.
One of the saddest sights that the Guildhall Milton knew ever witnessed was the trial, in the reign of Henry VIII., of that young lady, Anne Askew, whose courage and devotion never were surpassed within the Colosseum, among theChristians who fought with beasts or were sawn asunder. Having become a Protestant, she was driven by her husband, who was a papist, from his home. King Henry, it might have been supposed, would have at least taken no action against her, but she was arrested and examined. The lord mayor of London asked her whether the priest cannot make the body of Christ, to which she replied as shrewdly as Jeanne d’Arc to her inquisitors: “I have read that God made man; but that man can make God, I never yet read.” She was condemned at Guildhall to death for heresy. A daughter of a knight, this delicate lady, reared in comfort, was carried to the Tower, thrust into a cell, where but for a few brave friends she would have starved, and then her tender body was put on the rack, and Chancellor Wriothesley himself applied such power as nearly rent it in sunder. The story of her cruel death amid the flames at Smithfield belongs rather to that bloody spot than to the Guildhall. Her life she could have saved, even at the last moment, had her heroic soul faltered, and unsaid what conscience taught. Those were tales to freeze the life from out young hearts, that grandames told in Milton’s boyhood. To the men of his day, Guildhall stood chiefly connected with some of the most remarkable trials in England’s history.
Among them was that of Throckmorton for complicity in Sir Thomas Wyatt’s attempt against the Catholic Queen Mary. In those days, when trial usually meant speedy death, his acquittal, due to his own forensic skill and eloquence, is recounted in detail by historians as most remarkable. He it was whose tomb in St. Catherine Cree’s is mentioned, and for whom a London street is named.
The church of St. Mary Aldermanbury is one that few visitors to London ever enter, but the follower in Milton’s footsteps will not fail to seek out, a little west of the Guildhall, this church, whose registers record that here Milton, at the age of forty-eight, married his second wife, Katherine Woodcocke. Aldermanbury derives its name from the ancient court orberyof the aldermen, which is now held at the Guildhall. The church stands in its tiny green churchyard closely surrounded by business blocks, amidst the bustle of the city; on a summer noontide, in its shady retreat, the seats are filled with loiterers who chat or meditate or read their papers around the central monument.
This monument, though modern, is of great interest. It records the fact that J. Heminge and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and personal friends, lived many years in this parish, and are buried here. Says the inscription: “To theirdisinterested affection the world owes all that it calls Shakespeare; they alone collected his dramatic writings, regardless of pecuniary loss, and without the hope of any profit gave them to the world.
“First Folio: ‘We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, without ambition of selfe-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend alive, as was our Shakespeare.’
“Extract from Preface: ‘It had been a thing, we confesse, worthie to have been wished, that the author himselfe had lived to have set forth and overseene his own writings, but since it hath been ordained otherwise,... we pray you do not envy his Friends the office of their care and paine to have collected and published them, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them, who as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expression of it. His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered, with that easiness that wee have scarse received from him a blot on his papers.’” In 1656 Milton’s marriage took place in the earlier church, of very ancient foundation. The present building was designed by Wren, and was begun in 1668, during Milton’s blindness. It has a square tower capped by a square bell turret about ninety feet in height.
The register of the church, which was preserved,records that: “The agreement and intention of marriage between John Milton, Esq., of the parish of Margaret’s in Westminster, and Mrs. Katharine Woodcocke of Mary’s in Aldermanbury, was published three several market days in three several weeks ... and no exception being made against their intentions, they were according to the act of Parliament, married on the 12th of November, by Sir John Dethicke, Knight and Alderman, one of the Justices for the Peace in the City of London.” A justice instead of a clergyman was prescribed by the Marriage Act which was then in force.
Judge Jeffreys of bloody memory is buried in the church (d. 1689).
A little west of it is Christ’s Hospital, which, since its establishment in 1552 by the boy-king, Edward VI., until the summer of 1902, has been one of the most noted of London schools. Its revenue is about £60,000. Its removal to Horsham in the country will provide the ample playgrounds and modern accommodations that the times demand; but even an American, to say nothing of native Londoners, must feel a pang of regret at the disappearance from the street of the bright-eyed, bare-headed lads, whose quaint costume has for centuries given their school its name of “Blue Coat School.” Anciently the boys wore caps, but now they go bare-headed through the year.
The school was originally established on the site of the Gray Friars Monastery, as a kind of asylum for poor children. Stow gives the following account of the opening of the institution. “In the month of September they took in near four hundred orphans, and cloathed them in Russet, but ever after they wore Blue Cloath Coats, whence it is commonly called the Blue Coat Hospital. Their habit being now a long coat of blue warm cloth, close to their arms and Body, hanging loose to their Heels, girt about their Waist with a red leather girdle buckled, a round thrum Cap tyed with a red Band, Yellow Stockings, and Black Low-heeled Shoes, their hair cut close their Locks short.”
“Their fare was Breakfast, bread and beer, 6.30 summer, 7.30 winter. Sunday, beef and pottage for dinners. Suppers, as good legs and shoulders of mutton as can be bought. Tuesdays and Thursdays, same dinner as Sundays. Other days, no flesh—Monday, milk porridge; Wednesday, furmity; Friday, old peas and pottage; Saturday, water-gruel. Rost beef, 12 times a year. Supper, bread and butter or bread and cheese; Wednesday and Friday, pudding pies.”
This seems to have been a liberal table compared with that of the famous Winchester school in its early days, when two meals a day were all that were allowed, except for invalids.
Stow mentions that “the King granted all Church Linnen formerly used in the Churches of London” to the hospital, as a superabundance had been found. Girls as well as boys were lodged and taught here. Stow tells us of the custom which prevailed from his day to ours: “One boy being appointed, goeth up into a pulpit there placed and readeth a chapter ... and prayers. At the end of every prayer all the boys cry ‘Amen,’ that maketh a very melodious sound. The boy that reads is designed for the university. A Psalm is named by the same boy; and all sing with a good organ that is placed in the said great Hall.” He describes the grace said by one boy in the pulpit, and the boys and girls quietly seating themselves while “multitudes of city and court” came to witness it.
An ancient writer recounts the joy of the half-starved youngsters when they were first taken into its dining-hall and saw the baskets heaped with bread, and knew that there was enough for all. Among the buildings which are about to be replaced by mercantile establishments there is little, if anything, that Milton saw. Christ’s Church, beside it, where Richard Baxter lies buried, was built by Wren a little after his time.
Where so many famous men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were to be numbered asstudents,—Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and others,—the one name on its register that would have most interested Milton was that of William Camden who studied here, as well as at St. Paul’s. A visitor from Boston, Massachusetts, is interested to know that in 1626, one little lad in yellow stockings and dark blue coat, who studied Latin here to some purpose, was Ezekiel Cheever, who became the master of the Boston Latin School. For thirty years he taught the Yankee boys in the little wooden house on School Street at the foot of Beacon Hill, and made them learn his famous “Accidence,” which went through many editions. Often as he wandered over the “rocky nook with hilltops three,” where “twice each day the flowing sea took Boston in its arms,” his thoughts must have turned back to the walled city with its spires and palaces and prisons which he and Milton knew when they were boys.
The London tourist, who visits London for the first time after 1902, will miss seeing one of its most fascinating sights, for he can never stand in the great dining-hall of Christ’s Hospital on a Sunday noon and see the procession of pink-cheeked lads in their knee-breeches and long skirts come trooping in an orderly procession into the great hall, bearing great platters of steaming meats and baskets piled with rolls. The “Grecians” and“Deputy-Grecians,” and the less distinguished rank and file will never again pause here to listen to the Latin grace, nor will gaze at the huge canvas on the long wall between the galleries at either end. One wonders what will become of the old desks in the schoolroom, into which a score of generations of schoolboys have carved their names, and whether in their splendid new surroundings they will not look back half regretfully to the dim old cloisters which linked them with their great historic past.
Old Newgate was a foul prison in Milton’s day. Here in filthy chambers, gentlemen like Ellwood, Defoe, and William Penn were thrown together with felons. Diagonally across the street from the huge grim prison of later days, which since 1770 has stretched its length along the thoroughfare which bears its name, is St. Sepulchre’s Church. From its tower the knell was struck for executions at the neighbouring Newgate, and many a time must the boys in Christ’s Hospital and the Charterhouse School north of it have listened in horrified curiosity as the bell tolled, and they knew it meant that a man, blindfolded and with bound hands, was standing on the scaffold in front of Newgate. St. Sepulchre’s has been much altered since Milton entered it, perhaps in search of the same monument that first of all attracts Americans. This is themonument of that bold discoverer and coloniser, John Smith, who settled Jamestown in Virginia the year before Milton was born. Who knows but Milton may have met him, or have gazed upon the dark-eyed Princess Pocahontas, who left her native forests and became the bride of the Englishman Rolfe, after she had saved the life of the gallant Captain Smith.
His old tombstone is nearly defaced, and lies in the side aisle, some yards from its original site. A replica of the original inscription is placed on a brass tablet near it:
“Here lyes one conquered, who hath conquered kings;Subdued large territories and done thingsWhich to the world impossible will seemBut that the Truth is held in more esteem,...Or shall I tell of his adventures since,Done in Virginia, that large Continente?How that he subdued kings unto his yoke,And made those Heathen flee as wind doth smoke,And made their land, being of so large a Station,An habitation for our Christian nation.”...
The above-mentioned “kings” were doubtless Indian sachems. The Anglo-Saxon satisfaction at the way the heathen were made to flee like smoke, and make room for a Christian nation, as shown by the writer of this effusion, indicates that the white Christian of Smith’s day was not unlike his posteritythree centuries later in the time of Cecil Rhodes and of Philippine campaigns.
John Rogers, the Smithfield martyr, was vicar of this church. During his residence in Antwerp, he had made the acquaintance of Tyndale, the translator of the Bible, and continued Tyndale’s work after his death. Dean Milman tells us: “There is no doubt that the first complete English Bible came from Antwerp under his superintendence and auspices. It bore then and still bears the name of Matthews’s Bible. Of Matthews, however, no trace has ever been discovered. There is every reason for believing the untraceable Matthews was John Rogers. If so, Rogers was not only the protomartyr of the English Church, but, with due respect for Tyndale, the protomartyr of the English Bible.”
Among the most eminent men buried at St. Sepulchre’s was Roger Ascham, in 1568. Doubtless Milton, before writing his own remarkable treatise on education, must have studied the progressive theories of this man who taught Latin and Greek to Queen Elizabeth.