When Milton was a lad at St. Paul’s School, it is more than likely that he sometimes visited the boys of Charterhouse. Let us imagine him on some holiday taking a stroll outside the city wall through Newgate, over Holborn Bridge, that arched the Hole Bourne or Fleet, which flowed southward to the Thames, at Blackfriars; then up Holborn Hill and to the right to Charterhouse Square. It is still a quiet square of green shut in by pleasant residences, which replace the handsome palaces, such as Rutland House, which stood here during the Stuarts’ reign.
If his father accompanied the lad he may have recalled to him the horror of the pestilence which three hundred years before had swept from Asia across Europe. In foul, crowded London, it so filled the churchyards to overflowing, that in 1348, when thousands of bodies were flung into pits without a Christian prayer said over them, the Bishopof London purchased three acres for a burial-ground upon this spot. Near here fifty thousand bodies were buried, one above another in deep graves. But three hundred years is a long time to one who has lived something less than ten, and perhaps these grisly tales of a shadowy and forgotten past appealed less to Milton’s boyish heart than those of a nearer time, which his father’s life had almost touched.
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THE CHARTERHOUSE
From an old engraving.
Above the monastery doors which rose here after the Great Plague, might have been seen, only a half century before, the limb from the dismembered body of the martyred prior, who fell beneath the wrath of Henry VIII. He, with divers of his brethren, perished for their faith as nobly as John Rogers, a few years later, died for a different one. Heroism belongs to no one creed. Thus ended the monastic institution, the House of the Salutation of the Mother of God, which since 1371 had housed twenty-four Carthusian friars. Their quiet lives and austere fasts had been in sharp contrast to those of the Knights of St. John, their ancient neighbours, whose habitations perished at about the time when theirs arose.
Some remains of the old monastery may be seen within the gates to-day, and doubtless there were many more reminders of it when Milton was shown about by his boy-friends. Perhaps the tall youth,Roger Williams, nine years his senior, whose later life was to touch his, may have noticed the handsome lad who read the Latin inscriptions as easily as boys of his age now read English, and who showed a marvellous comprehension of the antiquities of the place.
The visitor to-day on entering the chapel, as Milton did, may notice at the left of the door a white marble tablet framed in yellow marble, on which an American citizen, in memory of the founder of Rhode Island, almost the only tolerator of all religious faiths in an intolerant age, has recently inscribed the fact that Roger Williams studied here.
Since Milton’s day the character of Charterhouse has not much changed, though many buildings have been added. The present foundation marks the benevolence of one of the richest merchants of Elizabeth’s day, whose prayer was: “Lord, thou hast given me a large and liberal estate; give me also a heart to make use thereof.” In 1611, Thomas Sutton purchased the Charterhouse for £13,000, from the Earl of Suffolk and his relatives, and made over twenty manors and lordships and other rich estates, including the Charterhouse, in trust for the hospital.
The pensioners were originally eighty in number, and the boys, forty-four. Hubert Herkomer’swell-known, beautiful painting in the Tate Gallery of the Charterhouse chapel and the venerable figures of the aged gentlemen who daily worship here in their quaint gowns, depicts a scene that Milton saw, and that the modern visitor may see to-day. Beyond the huge, pretentious monument of Sutton, that fills one corner of the chapel, is the side room, where, until quite recent years, the boys sat at morning service. Now their numbers are increased, and they are more happily housed out in the country, where outdoor sports and rural life can do more for them than this region, which is now hemmed in by the encroachments of commercial London. Stow tells us that the master was required to be twenty-seven years old, and that the highest form must every Sunday set up in the Great Hall four Greek and four Latin verses, “each to be made on any part of the second Lesson for that day.”
One cannot but feel that the old gentlemen must sadly miss their sprightly young comrades, and long for the sound of their merry shouts and whistles. Their numbers are falling off, for the revenues, drawn from agricultural sources, are diminishing. To-day about fifty-five are entered. All must be over sixty years of age. They have all the freedom of private citizens, except that they are expected to dine together in the great panelled dining-hall, andat night to be in by eleven o’clock. Each pensioner has a bedroom and sitting-room, and a loaf and butter is brought him for his breakfast. About £30 a year are allowed each for clothing and other food, and a female attendant is assigned to each half dozen gentlemen. Thackeray’s description of Founder’s Day is most touching, and deserves to be read by all who visit Charterhouse, where he studied, and in imagination saw the last days of Colonel Newcome:
“The custom of the school is on the 12th of December, the Founder’s Day, that the head gown-boy shall recite a Latin oration, in praise of our founder and upon other subjects, and a goodly company of old Cistercians is generally brought together to attend this oration, after which we go to chapel and have a sermon, after which we go to a great dinner, where old condisciples meet, old toasts are given, and speeches made. Before marching from the oration hall to chapel, the stewards of the day’s dinner, according to the old-fashioned rite, have wands in their hands, walk to church at the head of the procession, and sit in places of honour. The boys are already on their seats with smug fresh faces and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches, the chapel is lighted, the founder’s tomb, with its grotesquecarvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful lights and shadows. There he sits, Fundator Noster, in his ruff and gown, awaiting the Great Examination Day. We oldsters, be we ever so old, become boys again as we look at that familiar old tomb, and think how the seats were altered since we were here, and how the doctor used to sit yonder and his awful eye used to frighten us shuddering boys on whom it lighted; and how the boy next uswouldkick our shins during the service time, and how the monitor would cane us afterward because our shins were kicked. Yonder sit forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about home and holidays to-morrow. Yonder sit some three-score old gentlemen—pensioners of the hospital, listening to the prayers and psalms. You hear them coughing feebly in the twilight—the old, reverend black gowns.... A plenty of candles light up this chapel, and this scene of youth and age and early memories and pompous death. How solemn the well-remembered prayers are here uttered again in the place where in childhood we used to hear them! How beautiful and decorous the rite! How noble the ancient words of the supplications which the priest utters, and to which generations of bygone seniors have cried, ‘Amen,’ under those arches.“
We pass up, as Milton may have done, the broad carved oak staircase of the period antedating Sutton’s purchase, when Lord North welcomed the Princess Elizabeth as his guest and entertained her royally, five days before her coronation. In these spacious rooms, with deep-set windows, and richly decorated ceilings, the cautious princess held meetings daily with her councillors. The lofty fireplace and the tapestry hangings that remain recall in their dim splendour days when lords and dukes and maids of honour waited in trepidation upon the behest of the haughty woman who was soon to become their dread sovereign. It was in one of these rooms that the pupil orator gave his oration upon Founder’s Day.
One of the rooms not always shown to visitors should not be missed. It is the long, cosy library of the pensioners. Here, leaning out of the diamond-paned windows upon a summer’s day, or grouping themselves in easy chairs about the blazing hearth in gray November, one loves to think of these lonely gentlemen, who have seen better days, spending their last, quiet years among their books.
The visitor to the Charterhouse will not fail to spend a half day within the vicinity. In spite of its sordid and commercial aspect, it possesses many of the most precious relics of the past.
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ST. JOHN’S GATE, CLERKENWELL
From an old engraving.
A little to the northwest of Smithfield, where it spans a narrow and somewhat squalid street, stands the huge stone gateway of St. John’s. Nothing in its vicinity reveals the fact that once beside it stood a conventual church, and a bell-tower that was one of the glories of London, and nothing to indicate that, centuries before these, one of the richest and most famous of all the monastic establishments around London was built here. The history of the Knights of St. John is one of the longest and most romantic of mediæval histories. The prototype of their ancient hospital was in Jerusalem, where the knights of the order lived lives of abstinence and charity. The English establishment in Clerkenwell was founded in 1100 A. D., only a generation after the coming of the Norman Conqueror. This was the time of Godfrey of Bouillon and of the first Crusade. Forty years later the monks in Jerusalem became a military order, and thenceforth their history is one that seemed guided by Joshua rather than the Prince of Peace. Large gifts and power led them soon far from the simple habits of their early days. Of their fights with pirates and with Turks and with rival Christian bodies, there is no space to tell. Like the Christian Church itself, in many periods, they waxed fat and gross, and became the hated “plutocrats” of the working menof their time. In that sweet story, written in Saxon English, by William Morris, of the monk, “John Ball,” we have a picture of the brave men of Kent who rose in wrath to destroy, as did the Paris mob of 1793, the men who long had mocked at their impotence and fed upon their toil. The rebels marched with spear and bow to London, and wreaked their vengeance on many, but especially those whose travesty on the teaching of the saint whose name they bore had maddened them to fury. They burnt all the houses belonging to St. John’s, and set on fire the beautiful priory, which burned seven days. King Richard II., safe in the Tower, in vain besought his Council for advice in this extremity. The prior himself did not escape, but fell beneath the relentless axe of the men of Kent, as thousands for a like cause fell under the guillotine in Paris.
The present gateway was not erected until the following century. In the reign of Edward VI., the church with the “graven gilt and enamelled bell-tower” was undermined and blown up with gunpowder, and the stone was used for building the Lord Protector’s House upon the Strand. To-day the members of the revived English League of the Order of St. John hold their meetings in the gate.
With the exception of Westminster Abbey, probablyno church has more of interest than St. Bartholomew’s at Smithfield. Within the century that saw the White Tower of the Conqueror begun, a monastery and church rose on this site. “A pleasant-witted gentleman, who was therefore called ‘the king’s minstrel,’” as Stow relates, was blest with a most singular vision on his pilgrimage to Rome. Like Saul of Tarsus, he felt the Lord’s command to leave his old life and begin anew. Accordingly on his return to England he established a priory for thirteen monks, and in 1123 built the Norman church, part of which stands practically as he left it. Says a nineteenth-century antiquary: “Except the Tower and its immediate neighbourhood, there is no part of London, old or new, around which are clustered so many events interesting in history, as that of the priory of St. Bartholomew-the-Great and its vicinity. There are narrow, tortuous streets, and still narrower courts, about Cloth Fair, where are hidden away scores of old houses, whose projecting eaves and overhanging floors, heavy, cumbrous beams and wattle and plaster walls must have seen the days of the Plantagenets. There are remains of groined arches, and windows with ancient tracery, strong buttresses, and beautiful portals, with toothed and ornate archways, belonging to times long anterior to Wyclif and John of Gaunt yet to befound lurking behind dark, uncanny-looking tenements.... When Chaucer was young, and his Canterbury Pilgrims were men and women of the period, processions of cowled monks and chanting boys, with censers and crucifix, wended their way from the old priory of the Black Friars beside the Thames; and when Edward III. had spent the morning in witnessing the tourney of mailed knights at Smithfield, have they and their attendants, with all the pomp and pageantry of chivalry, passed beneath this old gateway to the grand entertainment of the good prior in the great refectory beyond the south cloisters.... As we go round the Great Close we pass by some very old houses that occupy the place where was once the east cloisters. Behind these houses used to be a great mulberry-tree, only removed in our own time.”
Here may Milton, during those dark days of the Restoration, when he retired to the seclusion of these narrow streets to escape observation, have sometimes ventured. Here sitting on the stone seat beneath its shade, he may have seen in fancy the processions of sandalled monks, with rosaries dangling against their long gray robes, move silently by as in the olden time, and pass within the portals of the church. And stepping beneath its round arches, he may himself have stood, ascountless monks and pilgrims before him have done, before the recumbent painted figure of the tonsured monk, Rahere, who lies under a beautifully wrought Gothic canopy of a much later period. Around him rise the solemn, massive pillars with their cubiform capitals, which seem scarcely less fresh and solid than when Rahere gazed on them with pride. Here are to be seen the slight intimations, even amid Norman semicircular arches, of the Gothic pointed arch that was to supersede them in the near future. Of the four superb arches which once supported the great central tower, two are the half-circle and two are slightly pointed.
An interesting and lovely feature of the church is the oriel window by the triforium, opposite Rahere’s grave, built by the famous Prior Bolton. Here the prior seems to have had a kind of pew or seat from whence he could overlook the canons when he pleased, without their being aware of his presence, as it communicated with his house. The aisles form a fine study for the architect. The horseshoe Moorish arch is much used, as well as the simpler Norman arch, and there is seen a regular gradation from one to the other.
Among the tombs that must have most interested Puritan Milton was one of James Rivers, who died in 1641 just as the civil war was about to breakforth, who evidently, had he lived, would have thrown in his lot where Milton did. His epitaph contains the lines:
“Whose life and death designed no other end,Than to serve God, his country, and his friend;Who, when ambition, tyranny, and prideConquered the age, conquered himself and died.”
A tomb that may have interested Milton is that of Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which sent so many Puritans to the new colonies in Massachusetts. It was this Mildmay to whom, when he came to court, Queen Elizabeth said: “I hear, Sir Walter, that you have erected a Puritan foundation.” “No, madam,” was the answer, “but I have set an acorn, which when it becomes an oak, God knows what will be the fruit thereof.”
In Milton’s time many Puritans lived in the parish, and a manuscript book preserved in the vestry records that there was “Collected for the children of New England uppon 2 Sabath daies following in february, 1643, £2, 8. 9.” This was a goodly sum for those days, and was doubtless much appreciated by the English cousins, who in their bare pine meeting-houses beside the tidal Charles remembered that the Puritans who remained at homewere called to wage a fiercer fight with priestcraft, prerogative, and privilege than they, with poverty.
The church to-day is but a fraction of its former size, in fact, hardly more than the choir of the noble building which Rahere erected. The entire length of the church as it left his hand is supposed to have been 225 feet. In 1539 Sir Richard Rich bought church and priory for little more than £1,000, and the thirteen evicted canons were pensioned off.
Close by old St. Bartholomew’s is Smithfield, so near that, in the reign of the Tudors, the ruddy light of martyrs’ fagots must have cast a glow upon its roof and its walls must have resounded to the screams of sufferers in their last agonising moments.
On the south side of Smithfield, in Milton’s day, rose St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, founded by Henry VIII., upon the site of Rahere’s earlier one. The great Harvey, the physician of Charles I., who discovered the circulation of the blood, was physician to this hospital for thirty-four years, and here, in 1619, he lectured on his great discovery. The present structure dates from a period early in the eighteenth century.
Directly opposite St. Bartholomew’s Church, in 1849, excavations three feet below the surface exposed to view a mass of unhewn stones, blackened as by fire, and covered with ashes and human bones,charred and partially consumed. This marked the spot where martyrs, facing eastward toward the great gate of St. Bartholomew’s, were chained to the stake. The prior was generally present on such occasions. An old print of the burning of Anne Askew displays a pulpit erected for the sermon, and raised seats for the numerous spectators who came to view the spectacle with probably no more shrinking than the Londoners of the early nineteenth century viewed the hangings at Newgate.
Of the two hundred and seventy-seven persons who in Mary’s reign here perished for their faith, none is more lovingly remembered in Old England or in New England than John Rogers, the first martyr in the Marian persecution, to whom we have already referred. For a century or more, Calvinistic New England taught its children from that quaint little book known as the “New England Primer,” and now treasured in many families as a curiosity. No one among its wretched little woodcuts struck such a solemn awe into the child’s mind,—making the courage of the soldier on the battle-field shrink to nothing in comparison, as that picture where John Rogers, surrounded by his wife and nine children and another at the breast, testified to his faith within the flames. “That which I have preached I will seal with my blood,” said the indomitable man,when offered pardon for recantation. “I will never pray for thee,” quoth his angry questioner. “But I will pray for you,” said Master Rogers. History does not record that his little children saw their father die, but only that they met him on the way, and sobbed out their farewells. But enough; we need not enter on the hideous story of this spot in the generation that followed this martyr.
In early days, Smithfield, or Smoothfield, was the Campus Martius for sham fights and tilts. All sorts of sports, archery, and bowls, and ball games were played here, and it was a resort for acrobats and jugglers. In 1615, says Howes, “The City of London reduced the rude, vast place of Smithfield into a faire and comely order, which formerly was never held possible to be done, and paved it all over, and made divers sewers to convey the water from the new channels which were made by reason of the new pavement; they also made strong rails round about Smithfield, and sequestered the middle part into a very fair and civil walk, and railed it round about with strong rails, to defend the place from annoyance and danger, as well from carts, as all manner of cattle, because it was intended hereafter that in time it might prove a fair and peaceable market-place, by reason that Newgate Market, Moorgate, Cheapside, Leadenhall, and Gracechurch Street,were immeasurably pestered with the unimaginable increase and multiplicity of market folks. And this field, commonly called West Smithfield, was for many years called Ruffian’s Hall, by reason it was the usual place of frays and common fighting during the time that sword and bucklers were in use. But the ensuing deadly fight with rapier and dagger suddenly suppressed the fighting with sword and buckler.” In his “Henry IV.,” Shakespeare makes Page say of Bardolph: “He’s gone to Smithfield to buy your worship a horse.” To which Falstaff replies: “I bought him in Paul’s, and he’ll buy me a horse in Smithfield; an I could get me but a wife in the stews, I were manned, horsed, and wived.”
Ben Jonson’s merry play, “Bartholomew Fair,” written in 1613, gives a good account of the babel of entreaties and advertising boasts that assailed the ears of the unwary customer: “Will your worship buy any gingerbread, gilt gingerbread; very good bread, comfortable bread? Buy any ballads? New ballads! Hey!
“Now the fair’s a filling!O, for a tune to startleThe birds of the booths here billingYearly with old St. Bartle.
“Buy any pears, pears, very fine pears! What do you lack, gentleman? Maid, see a fine hoppy-horse for your young master. Cost you but a farthing a week for his provender.
“Buy a mouse-trap, a mouse-trap, or a tormentor for a flea?
“What do you lack? fine purses, pouches, pin cases, pipes? a pair of smiths to wake you in the morning, or a fine whistling bird?
“Gentlewomen, the weather’s hot; whither walk you? Have a care of your fine velvet caps; the fair is dusty. Take a sweet delicate booth with boughs, here in the way, and cool yourself in the shade, you and your friends. Here be the best pigs. A delicate show-pig, little mistress, with sweet sauce and crackling, like de bay-leaf i’ de fire, la! T’ou shalt ha’ the clean side o’ the table-clot’ and de glass vashed!”
From all which, and much more to the same purport, one may judge that whether in Ben Jonson’s time or Browning’s, whether in Smithfield or in the modern charity fair, the art of alluring or browbeating the man with a purse into buying what he does not want is much the same. Long after Milton’s death, the fair was famous, and drew gaping throngs to witness mountebanks swing in mid air, and to view the fat woman and double-headedcalf, for all the world like “The Greatest Moral Show on Earth” to-day.
Now Smithfield has banished mountebanks and bellowing herds. Only the carcases of the latter may be found in the huge brick market that covers a large part of the once open space. The original size of Smithfield was but three acres, but since 1834 it has been over six acres in extent.
Holborn was paved long before Milton’s birth, and was a street of consequence, because of the Inns of Court, which opened north and south from it. From his time until 1868 a row of small houses southward from Gray’s Inn blocked up the street, and became even in his day “a mighty hindrance to Holborn in point of prospect.”
Ely Place, off Holborn, is little known to hasty tourists who have not time to leave the beaten track of sightseeing. But any one who has a quiet hour to spend in the exquisite little church of St. Etheldreda, and to recall the glories of the past which its Gothic walls have witnessed, will be well repaid.
Ely Place, a rectangle of dull, commonplace houses, at its entrance gives no glimpse of the chapel, which is shrinkingly withdrawn a little among the interloping walls that now replace the gardens and the palaces of Milton’s day. In Chaucer’slifetime, the Bishop of Ely built this very chapel to the Saxon saint, the daughter of the king of the West Angles, who was born about the year 630. She took part in the erection of the Cathedral of Ely amid the morasses of the “Fen” country, and was chosen as its patron saint. In 679 she died, the abbess of the convent of Ely. Singularly enough, this modest lady gave the origin to the word “tawdry,” so Thornbury declares. For her name was sometimes called St. Audry, and some cheap necklaces sold at St. Audry’s fair at Ely were known as “tawdry” laces, whence the name was applied to other cheap and showy ornaments.
After long continuance in the hands of Protestants, the church has again reverted to the faith of those who built it. It is the only instance of a “living” crypt in London,i. e., one in which tapers burn and kneeling worshippers assemble before shrines. On any week day, one may in three minutes turn from Holborn into its mediæval quiet and seclusion and tell one’s beads, either in the upper or lower sanctuary, or gaze at the glorious decorated east window, and on the chaste proportions of an unspoiled Gothic structure. Its wealth of windows remotely reminds one of the Sainte Chapelle of good King Louis, whose jewelled windows in their slender lofty frames are one of the marvels of the island in the Seine.
In the Plantagenet and Tudor period, vineyards, kitchen garden, and orchard surrounded the magnificent buildings of Ely Place. Hither, at the Duke of Gloucester’s bidding, as Shakespeare, following history, records, the bishop sent hastily for the strawberries for which his garden was famous.
“My Lord of Ely, when I was last in HolbornI saw good strawberries in your garden there;I do beseech you send for some of them.”
In the reign of Elizabeth, Sir Christopher Hatton was the owner of Ely Place. Except a cluster of houses,—Ely Rents,—standing on Holborn, the land round about this great estate seems to have been unbuilt upon.
Sir Christopher, who rose to be Elizabeth’s lord chancellor, was a striking looking man and a graceful dancer. He captivated the queen, who was very susceptible to manly beauty. The state papers in the Record Office, it is said, disclose her fond and foolish correspondence with him. In Milton’s lifetime, Lady Hatton—a gay and wealthy widow—was wooed and won by the famous Sir Edward Coke. But Hatton House saw many an open quarrel between the ill-matched pair.
In the time of Charles I., a pageant almost unparalleled in magnificence was arranged in Ely Place.The redoubtable Prynne, who had preached against all such frivolities in the customary strong language of the time, had not yet lost his ears, as he did later, in the pillory. But his strictures had given offence at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, who was minded to amuse herself with masques; consequently this famous masque came off. Mr. Lawes, the famous musician and friend of Milton, was set to composing music for the occasion. On an evening in 1633, when Milton was living at Horton, the magnificent procession wended its way through crowds of enthusiastic spectators toward Whitehall. One hundred gentlemen on the best horses that the stables of royalty and the nobility could offer, all clad in gold and silver, and each accompanied by a page and two lackeys carrying torches, were only one feature of the pageant; the others were some of them as odd as these were splendid. Tiny children, dressed like birds, rode on small horses; every beautiful or fantastic conceit imaginable was carried out, and the cost of the whole was no less than £21,000, a sum which meant far more in purchasing power than it does to-day. Some of the musicians, however, received £100 apiece—a fee quite satisfactory to many a prima donna in our time.
No more characteristic part of Milton’s Londonexists to-day than the various Inns of Court that lead north and south from Holborn. As the sightseer passes from the jostle and turmoil of the thoroughfare, he is transported in a moment into a silence and seclusion that remind one of a Puritan Sabbath. Quadrangle opens out of quadrangle, shut in by rows of unpretentious buildings, whose monotony is broken by Gothic chapels or Tudor dining-halls surmounted by carved cupolas. Occasionally a cloistered walk under low Tudor arches, or a group of highly ornate terra cotta chimneys is seen, as one wanders around the dim and shadowy passages. All at once a turn, and behold, here in the heart of the life of this six million people of the great overgrown metropolis, still stretch long reaches of greensward, locked safely from the intrusion of the public by their handsome wrought-iron gates.
In Gray’s Inn, to the north of Holborn, Francis Bacon wrote his “Novum Organum,” which he published in 1620, when Milton was a schoolboy at St. Paul’s, and when the Leyden Pilgrims in theMayflowerlanded on Plymouth Rock.
The gardens of Gray’s Inn, which Bacon set out with trees, became a fashionable promenade in Milton’s old age. Pepys tells us that he took his wife there after church one Sunday, “to observethe fashions of the ladies, because of my wife’s making some clothes.” It was, in short, quite as much a dress parade as Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday in New York.
Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth’s great minister, was, next to Bacon, the most eminent of the members of Gray’s Inn.
Its hall, which dates from 1560, is little inferior to any hall in all the Inns of Court. It has carved wainscoting, and a timber roof, and windows emblazoned with the arms of Lord Bacon and Lord Burleigh. In Milton’s time, Gray’s Inn marked the northern limit of the town, and all beyond it was green fields and country lanes. Therefore we now turn south and west to explore briefly the numerous other inns that must often have echoed to the steps of Milton when he lived almost within stone’s throw of them.
Dickens’s description of the little Staple Inn gives the reader an exact impression of the place to-day: “Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, where certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long since run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into which, out of the clashingstreet, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter on smoky trees, as though they called to each other, ‘Let us play at country,’ and where a few feet of garden mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks that are legal nooks; and it contains a little hall with a little lantern in its roof.”
Walking through the further quadrangle, and following the narrow street down past the towering, vulgar conglomeration of every incongruous architectural device,—the new Birkbeck Bank,—we enter presently the wide spaces of Lincoln’s Inn.
The style of buildings, whether new or old, is largely Tudor of the type of Hampton Court. The walls of red brick are inlaid with diagonal lines of darker bricks. The chapel, of Perpendicular Gothic, built by Inigo Jones, is raised on arches which leave a kind of open crypt below, where Pepys tells us he used to walk. The stained glass windows antedate Laud’s time, and Laud is said to have wondered that the saints emblazoned on them escaped the “furious spirit” that was aroused against those “harmless, goodly windows” of his at Lambeth.
At number 24 of the “Old Buildings,” the secretary of Oliver Cromwell lived from 1645 to 1659, where his correspondence was discovered behind a false ceiling. The tradition that the Protector was overheard to discuss with him here about the kidnapping of the three little sons of Charles I. may be dismissed as mythical.
Beside the noble brick gateway of Lincoln’s Inn, which bore the date 1518, it is said that rare Ben Jonson, in his early days of poverty, was found working with a trowel in one hand and his Horace in the other, when some gentlemen, having compassion on him, as did Cimabue on the gifted child, Giotto, rescued him, and let loose the imprisoned genius who found Shakespeare for a friend, and the Abbey for his tomb.
Of Furnivall’s, Scroope’s, and Barnard’s Inns, and Thavie’s, oldest of them all, we have no space to write. The characteristics of the four great inns are stated in the lines:
“Gray’s Inn for walks, Lincoln’s Inn for wall,The Inner Temple for a garden,And the Middle for a hall.”
The modern sightseer finds, as probably Milton found, much more of interest in the two latter, which lie south of Fleet Street, than in all the others combined.
Before crossing Fleet Street, mention should be made of Temple Bar, which was erected by Wren four years before Milton’s death, and marked the transition from Fleet Street to the Strand. The “Old Cheshire Cheese” in the ancient and dingy Wine Office Court, which opens north from Fleet Street, probably was built a dozen years before Milton died. It was Doctor Johnson’s restaurant, and his fame brings many customers to sit in his old seat, which is still carefully preserved.
Between the Tower and Westminster stands half-way one little edifice more ancient than any other on that route. It is the little Temple Church of Norman and transitional design, which stands secluded from the traffic of the streets within a stone’s throw of Temple Bar.
Of its dimensions and manifold restorations, the ordinary guide-books say enough, and make a repetition unnecessary. The round church with its interesting arcade of grotesque, sculptured heads, and its rare proportions; the choir, “springing,” as Hawthorne says, “as it were, in a harmonious and accordant fountain out of the clustered pillars that support its pinioned arches,” are both a delight to every lover of the beautiful.
Hardly more than a century after the Norman conquest we find the Knights Templars on this spot.The year after their removal here from Holborn in 1185, they built their Temple church, the finest of the four round churches that still remain in England. The choir, which is one of the most beautiful specimens of pure early English, was finished in 1240.
In early times, the discipline of the knights was most severe. The Master himself scourged disobedient brethren within its walls, and on Fridays there were frequent public whippings within the church. In a narrow, penitential cell to be seen in the church walls, only four and a half feet long and two and a half wide, a disobedient brother is said to have been starved to death.
The interesting recumbent figures clad in mail, upon the Temple floor, are not, as is popularly supposed, Knights Templars, but Associates of the Temple, who were only partly admitted to its great privileges.
Shortly after the downfall of the Templars, the property passed into the hands of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, whose priory, as we remember, was burned by the wrathful men of Kent in Wat Tyler’s rebellion. The knights leased it to the law students who belonged to the “King’s Court.” Therefore, when the rebels reached London, they poured down on the haunts of the Temple lawyers,carried off the books, deeds, and rolls of remembrance, and, in vengeance on the Knights Hospitallers, burned them in Fleet Street. So determined were these men, goaded by years of tyranny, to put an end to all the laws that had oppressed them.
In later years, we find that the Temple church in the time of Henry VIII., and later still, of Milton and Ben Jonson, was used in term time for the students as a place for rendezvous. Discussions on legal questions sometimes waxed boisterous, and, as a contemporary said, as “noisy as St. Paul’s.”
In Elizabeth’s day the Middle Temple abandoned the old Templar arms—a red cross on a silver shield with a lamb bearing the sacred banner surmounted by a red cross—and substituted a flying Pegasus. Both of these emblems meet the visitor’s eye as he winds through the labyrinthine passages of the old quadrangles, and comes at every step upon some spot rich with the associations of centuries.
Of the well-known story of the origin of the Wars of the Roses within the Temple Gardens it is not necessary here to speak.
An old print of Milton’s later years shows the gardens of the Inner Temple laid out in many straight rows of trees, like apple-trees in orchards,which extended down to the wall that bordered the Thames. North, toward Fleet Street, rows upon rows of gabled houses, four stories in height, enclosed quadrangles and courts. The dining-halls, built in the Tudor period, stand as they stood when Spenser, in the generation before Milton, wrote of—
“those bricky towers,The which on Thames’ broad back do ride,Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers;There whilom wont the Temple knights to bideTill they decayed through pride.”
The little Fountain in Fountain Court is dear to lovers of Dickens, for here Ruth Pinch tripped by with merry heart to meet her lover. In Queen Anne’s time, a fountain of much loftier altitude sparkled and splashed here, and for aught we know made music when Milton and Shakespeare wandered within the Temple precincts.
It was not until after Milton’s birth that James I. in 1609 granted the whole property to the two societies of the Inner and Middle Temples; whereupon they presented his Majesty with a precious gold cup of great weight, which cup was esteemed by the monarch as one of his most valued treasures. When the king’s daughter Elizabeth was married four years later, the Temple and Gray’s Inn men gave a masque, which Sir Francis Bacon plannedand executed. The bridal party came by water and landed at the foot of the Temple Gardens amid peals of the little cannon of that day, and with great pomp and merriment. The king gave a supper to the forty masquers. This masque, however, did not compare in splendour with the one given twenty years later, and already alluded to, which was planned by members of the Inns of Court meeting in Ely Place.
In Milton’s middle life the learned Selden, who died in 1654, was buried in the choir of the Temple church. Of him Milton writes that he is “one of your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land.” When Milton was in his thirty-sixth year and had published his treatise on divorce, he writes of Selden, then in his sixtieth year, whose acquaintance he had probably made, and begged those who would know the truth to “hasten to be acquainted with that noble volume written by our learned Selden, of ‘The Law of Nature and of Nations,’ a work more useful and more worthy to be perused, whoever studies to be a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice, than all those decretals ... which the pontifical clerks have doted on.” Of his well-known “Table Talk,” Coleridge observes: “There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer.”
One of the greatest names connected with the Temple is that of Richard Hooker, author of the famous “Ecclesiastical Polity.” He was for six years Master of the Temple—a position which Izaak Walton, who wrote his life, says he accepted rather than desired. The interest in music in the seventeenth century is evinced by the fierce contest which lasted for a year, as to the organ which should be erected in this church. Two organs were put up by rivals. The great Purcell performed on one which was finally selected by Judge Jeffreys of the Inner Temple. He was a capital musician, and in his case at least the adage seemed disproved that “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.”
With the Restoration and the opening of the floodgates of luxury and licentiousness, which the stern Puritan had for twenty years kept in abeyance, the Temple renewed the banquets and merry-makings of an earlier day. At a continuous banquet which lasted half a month, the Earl of Nottingham kept open house to all London, and entertained all the great and powerful of the time. Fifty servants waited on Charles II. and his company, while twenty violins made merry music at the feast.
The Great Fire of 1666 ceased ere it reached the Temple church, but it was not stopped until many sets of chambers and title-deeds of a vast numberof valuable estates had perished. Another fire only a dozen years later destroyed much more of the establishment which Milton knew. Of the Inner Temple Hall little exists to-day that his eyes rested on. But the stately Middle Temple Hall, built in 1572, still stands, and is one of the best specimens of Elizabethan architecture that London boasts. The open roof of hammer-beam design, with pendants, is especially characteristic of the work of that period. The screen is an elaborate one of Renaissance work, more interesting for its age and associations than for its conformity to true principles of art. This famous hall witnessed the performance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in 1601. The same strong, oak tables of the days of Bacon, Coke, and Jonson still stretch from end to end. Viewed from the western dais, the portraits, armour, and rich windows combine with the massive furniture and carved screen to present a scene of sober richness hardly equalled outside of a few dining-halls of Oxford and Cambridge which belong to that same period. Among the eminent men of the Middle Temple whose lives Milton’s life touched were Sir Walter Raleigh, John Pym, Ireton,—Cromwell’s son-in-law,—Evelyn, Lord Chancellor Clarendon, and many others of equal note in their day.
Only one who has delved long in the biography and literature of this great age can realise the stupendous scholarship of the men of this period,—Coke, Selden, Bacon, Newton, Milton, and their contemporaries across the Channel, Grotius, Spinoza, and Galileo,—who, with the men of action of their day, make the century in which they lived one of the most significant since time began. What period since the Golden Age of Greece can match their achievements? Where on earth since the days of Periclean eloquence and wisdom in Athens could be found one spot where so much genius and learning had its centre as in the England into which Milton was born, and in which he lived for two-thirds of a century?
“We are apt,” says Lowell, “to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterises them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, but those were of the best. Their speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato.” Of the long list of eminent men who studied here in the century after Milton, perhaps none was more akin to him in scholarship than the learned Blackstone; none who more deeply understood his Puritan seriousness than Cowper; nonewho in boldness, love of liberty, and justice more resembled him than Edmund Burke.
Fifty years before Milton’s birth, as Aggas’s old map of 1562 gives evidence, London had extended but a little way beyond the city walls and the Strand. But in Elizabeth’s prosperous age, noble mansions and extensive gardens began to replace the fields, commons, and pastures that stretched westward from St. Martin’s Lane. One of the busiest spots in modern London, that is, Covent Garden, begins to come into prominence in London history just as Milton reached early manhood. For three centuries before his time the abbots of Westminster had owned “fair spreading pastures” here, now all included in the general name of “Long Acre.” Part of this they are thought to have used for the burial of their dead. In Aggas’s old map, a brick wall enclosed all but the southern side where the houses and enclosures separated it from the Strand. The property belonged to John Russell, Earl of Bedford, to whom it was given by the Crown in 1552, at which time it had a yearly value of less than £7. To-day his successor holds one of the richest rentals in the world. In 1631 a square was formed, and the famous architect Inigo Jones built an open arcade about the north and east sides. Upon the west rose a Renaissance church by the design ofthe same artist, and the south was bordered by the garden of Bedford House and a grove or “small grotto of trees most pleasant in the summer season.” The duke, in ordering the erection of the chapel, declared that he would go to no expense for it, and it might be a barn. “Then,” said Inigo Jones, “it shall be the handsomest barn in England,” and fulfilled his promise. It was the first important Protestant church erected in England. Only the portico of the original church remains, as the first building was destroyed by fire in 1795.
In the popular dramas written in the last part of Milton’s lifetime, constant allusion is made to the fashionable and even licentious companies that frequented the piazza of Covent Garden, and it is safe to say that it was never at any time a haunt of the serious-minded Puritan. The poet Gay, writing in the next generation after Milton, thus describes the Covent Garden that he knew:
“Where Covent Garden’s famous temple stands,That boasts the work of Jones’ immortal hands,Columns with plain magnificence appear,And graceful porches lead along the square;Here oft my course I bend, when lo! from farI spy the furies of the football war:The ’prentice quits his shop to join the crew,Increasing crowds the flying game pursue.”
At first, peddlers of fruit and vegetables used the gravelled centre of the square for their booths, andgradually the market grew into a well-recognised establishment, and the open square was finally in 1830 covered over. In Milton’s later years Covent Garden was fashionable as a residence for the nobility. Bishops, dukes, and earls had here their town houses, and among the titled residents was the painter, Sir Godfrey Kneller.