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SOMERSET HOUSE
This view represents the house as it stood in Milton’s boyhood, previous to the alterations by Inigo Jones. Adjoining it is the Savoy, and immediately behind it is the only view extant of Exeter House.
From an ancient painting in Dulwich College.
The palace on the Thames known as “Somerset House” was in Milton’s lifetime a magnificent structure; built in 1544-49, it was from the time of Elizabeth to 1775 a residence much favoured by royalty. Pepys tells us in 1662: “Indeed it is observed that the greatest court nowadays is there.” It was then the residence of the queen mother, whose rooms he describes as “most stately and nobly furnished,” and he remarks upon the echo on the stairs, “which continues a voice so long as the singing three notes, concords one after another, they all three shall sound in concert together a good while most pleasantly.” The site occupied an area of six hundred feet from east to west and five hundred from north to south. The present large edifice, which was erected on the site of the old one, demolished in 1775, is used for many important public purposes.
Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, discloses in its cramped and dingy quarters little if anything that remains of the time when Milton lived within its precincts. In the days when he dwelt here and assisted Cromwell as his Latin secretary, some remnants of the former palace of the Scottish kings, which once had occupied this site, were still to be seen. Hard by at one time lived both the greatest architects of that age of building, Jones and Wren. From Scotland Yard to Cannon Row, Westminster, there extended in Milton’s lifetime the stately old palace of Whitehall, built in the Tudor style of Hampton Court. A writer in the last days of Queen Elizabeth tells us that it was truly royal; enclosed on one side by the Thames, on the other by a park which connects it with St. James’s, another royal palace. He speaks of an immense number of swans,—birds favoured by royalty then as now,—which floated on the salty bosom of the tidalThames as now they do upon its sweeter waters at Runnymede and Windsor. He also mentions that deer were numerous. An open way led through the palace grounds from Charing Cross to Westminster, which, although shut in by gates at either end, was an open thoroughfare. When Cardinal Wolsey owned Whitehall, it was known as “York Place,” and did not receive the former title until Henry VIII. had taken possession of it. Here the voluptuous monarch visited his great rival in magnificence, and at a masque within these walls cast covetous eyes upon fair Anne Boleyn. Within these richly tapestried and stately halls a few months later, the “little great lord cardinal” bade a long farewell to all his greatness, and with a heavy heart entered his barge at the foot of Whitehall stairs.
Henry added many features to his new possessions, among others a stately gateway of three stories with mullioned windows and octagonal towers designed by Holbein. Sir Thomas More at Chelsea had discovered the merits of this artist, and there presented him to the king, who was a clever connoisseur in art as well as wives. It was in Whitehall that Hans Holbein painted the well-known portrait of the straddling monarch. From the advent of that shrewd politician, great sovereign, yet vain and silly woman, Elizabeth, Whitehallbecame definitely the seat of royalty, though the Tower theoretically remained so. The library of this learned woman was well filled with books, not only English, but French, Latin, Greek, and Italian. Masques, tournaments, and every form of gorgeous entertainment, from Wolsey’s time to that of William III., made money flow like water in Whitehall, except during the short domination of the Puritan party. James I., upon the burning of the Banquet Hall in 1615, determined to commission Inigo Jones, not only to build a new one, but to build a whole new palace, of which this hall was but the fortieth part.
The Banquet Hall is in the Palladian style of architecture, and is 111 feet in length, and half as great in width and height. Its ceiling is decorated with pictures by Rubens, painted on canvas and sent from abroad. They represent the apotheosis of James I. and scenes from the life of Charles I. The original plan, which was not carried out, was to have included a number of mural paintings by Van Dyck, which should represent the history and ceremonies of the Order of the Garter. The palace was planned to cover the whole space from the Thames to St. James’s Park, and from Charing Cross to Westminster. In Milton’s time of residence in Whitehall upon the south was the Bowling Green,and north of it the Privy Gardens. The front consisted of the existing Banquet Hall,—the only part of the plan of Inigo Jones that ever materialised,—the gateways, and a row of low gabled buildings. Behind these were three courts or quadrangles. East of the Banquet Hall were a row of offices, the Great Hall or Presence Chamber, and the Chapel and private rooms of the king and queen. The art treasures and library were in the “Stone Gallery,” which ran along the east side of the Privy Garden. The magnificence which was displayed at Whitehall in Milton’s early boyhood may be perceived from the pomp and luxury of George Villiers, afterward Duke of Buckingham, when he came to make his fortune at the court of James I. “It was common with him at any ordinary dancing to have his cloaths trimmed with great diamonds; hatbands, cockades, and earrings to be yoked with great and manifold knots of pearls—in short, to be manacled, fettered, and imprisoned in jewels, insomuch that at his going over to Paris in 1625, he had twenty-seven suits of cloaths made, the richest that embroidery, silk, velvet, gold, and gems could contribute; one of which was a white, uncut velvet, set all over, both suit and cloak, with diamonds valued at fourscore thousand pounds, besides a great feather stuck all over with diamonds; as were also his sword,girdle, hatband, and spurs.” He drove in a coach with six horses, and was carried sometimes in a sedan-chair, which mode of conveyance then was new and caused much outcry against the using of men as beasts of burden.
We have already alluded to the famous masque, which was planned by members of the Inns of Court at Ely Place, and carried out in 1633 to please the queen—an entertainment so unique in its splendour as to be referred to in every account of Whitehall. But the palace is chiefly notable, not for scenes of gaiety, but for that mournful sight which struck terror to the breast of every European monarch, and horrified every believer in the divine right of kings. On the 27th of January, 1648-49, the death sentence was passed upon Charles I., of whom a few months later one of his followers wrote:
“Great Charles, thou earthly god, celestial man,...Thy heavenly virtues angels should rehearse,It is a theam too high for human verse.”
Cromwell hesitated long before he signed the death warrant. If banishment of the king could have secured their rights to Englishmen, gladly would he have urged a milder sentence. But with the king alive, he felt there was no surety of peaceor justice, and after painful hesitation he set his seal to the death warrant. Says Masson: “At the centre of England was a will that had made itself adamant, by express vow and deliberation beforehand, for the very hour which now had arrived. Fairfax had relented ... Vane had withdrawn from the work ... there was an agony over what was coming among many that had helped to bring it to pass. Only some fifty or sixty governing Englishmen, with Oliver Cromwell in the midst of them, were prepared for every responsibility and stood inexorably to their task.Theywere the will of England now, and they had the army with them. What proportion of England besides went with them, it might be difficult to estimate. One private Londoner, at all events, can be named who approved thoroughly of their policy, and was ready to testify the same. While the sentenced king was at St. James’s, there was lying on Milton’s writing-table in his house in High Holborn at least the beginnings of a pamphlet on which he had been engaged during the king’s trial, and in which in vehement answer to the outcry of the Presbyterians generally ... he was to defend all the recent acts of the army, Pride’s Purge included, justify the existing governments of the army chiefs and the fragment of Parliament that assisted them, inculcaterepublican beliefs in his countrymen, and prove to them above all this proposition: ‘That it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary magistrate have neglected or denied to do it.’ The pamphlet was not to come out in time to bear practically on the deed which it justified; but while the king was yet alive, it was planned, sketched, and in part written.”
Three days after his sentence the king bade farewell to his sobbing little son and daughter at St. James’s Palace, and walked across the park between a line of soldiers to the stairs, which then were on the site of the present Horse Guards. From thence he crossed the street by a gallery, which led him past the scaffold draped in black, and into his own bedchamber in the Banquet Hall. From there, a little later, he passed through a window, or possibly an opening in the wall, upon the scaffold, with his attendant and Bishop Juxon. Two unknown men in masks and false hair had undertaken the grim and dangerous task of executioner. For among the throngs that filled the streets from Charing Cross down to Westminster there were many who would readily have torn them in pieces. The “martyr-king,”as Jacobins still call him, now that the end of his arbitrary reign had come, behaved with dignity. His last words were: “To your power I must submit, but your authority I deny.” From the roof of a neighbouring mansion, Archbishop Usher stood until he sickened at the sight and swooned, and was carried to his bed. Andrew Marvell’s well-known lines upon this scene will be recalled:
“While round the armed bands,Did clasp their bloody hands,He nothing common did or mean,Upon that memorable scene,Nor called the gods with vulgar spite,To vindicate his hopeless right;But with his keener eye,The axe’s edge did try;Then bowed his kingly head,Down, as upon a bed.”
Strangely enough, it was on this very spot where his death forecast the dawning of that new principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, which his whole nature loathed, that London had seen the beginnings of the civil strife. Here a company of the citizens, “returning from Westminster, where they had been petitioning quietly for justice, were set upon by some of the court as they passed Whitehall, in the whichtumult divers were hurt, and one or more slain just by the Banqueting House.”
The regicides, who felt their bloody deed to be a sad necessity for England’s safety, had no desire to wreak a mean revenge upon the body of the king. Unlike those of many far nobler men who had died as “traitors,” his body was not dishonoured, but was treated with due respect. It was embalmed, and lay for days under a velvet pall at St. James’s Palace, where crowds came to see it. The authorities objected to his burial in Westminster Abbey, as the place was too public, and crowds might gather there. But they accorded him a burial in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, whither his body was taken in a hearse drawn by six horses and followed by four mourning coaches. His coffin was placed beside that of Henry VIII. within the choir. The next month after the death of Charles, the Parliament voted the use of a large part of Whitehall to Cromwell. Every Monday he dined with all his officers above the captain’s rank. Milton, as his Latin secretary, and Andrew Marvell must have been often at his board, and Waller, his kinsman, and perhaps the youthful Dryden. He was a great lover of music and entertained those who were skilful in any form of art. It is through Cromwell that England owns to-day the Raphael cartoons at Kensington. Hepurchased many other of the paintings which had belonged to the magnificent collection of Charles I. and had been sold. Here his old mother died, and here in 1658, on a wild August day, amid the tumult of a storm that raged and howled over a large part of England, the great heart of the Protector ceased to beat. On the day that he lay dying, a lad of fifteen years, named Isaac Newton, turned the violence of the storm to his account by jumping first with the wind and then against it, and computing its force by the difference of the distances.
As the dying Oliver approached his end, he was much in prayer; an attendant has recorded some of these last utterances in which he commended God’s people to the keeping of the Almighty: “Give them,” he prayed, “consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual love; and go on to deliver them and with the work of reformation; and make the name of Christ glorious in the world. Teach those who look too much on thy instruments, to depend more upon thyself. Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are thy people too.” Probably never by any master of Whitehall was such a sincerely devout and magnanimous petition raised to heaven. Of the decapitation of his dead body and its subsequent history, when Charles II. was able to wreak his vengeance, weneed not speak. Neither need we rehearse the well-known record of the dissolute monarch who on the Restoration set up his profligate court at Whitehall. Of the last hours of Charles II. Evelyn paints a loathsome picture: “I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which I was witness of: the king sitting and toying with his concubines, a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset around a large table, a bank of at least two thousand pounds in gold before them.... Six days after all was in the dust.” In the reign of William III. two fires, in 1691 and 1697, consumed all of the palace except the Banquet Hall of Inigo Jones.
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WESTMINSTER ABBEY AS MILTON KNEW IT
From an old engraving.
The Westminster Abbey that Milton knew, unlike the old St. Paul’s of his day, was indeed a house of God, and was not defiled with the intrusion of hucksters and dandies and the bustle of the Exchange. Its lofty walls, ungrimed by smoke, rose fair and stately; the present towers of the west front were then unbuilt, and its mass presented a long, unbroken, horizontal sky-line. Under its high, embowered roof, Milton may have seen less warmth of colour than we, for the stained glassis modern, but he was spared the majority of the pretentious and tasteless monuments which crowd the transepts and the side aisles to-day, and for the most part are in bulk in inverse proportion to their artistic merit, and to the importance of those whom they honour. Perhaps there was no man in England to whose sensitive soul the solemn minster spoke more eloquently. With a mind richly stored in history, and with the artist’s eye and prophet’s soul, every stone of this most venerable and beautiful of English churches must have been dear to him. It is not within the scope of this little volume even to touch upon the romantic history of this centre of English life or to examine its noble architecture, but only to indicate what may most have touched the mind and heart of the great scholar and patriot-reformer who often passed its portals on his walk from Petty France to Whitehall.
In the south aisle of the nave are buried two ladies whom Milton probably knew. They are the two wives of Cromwell’s secretary—Sir Samuel Morland, the inventor of the speaking trumpet and improver of the fire-engine. The inscriptions by their husband appear in Hebrew, Greek, Ethiopic, and English. In the north aisle is a curious monument of 1631 to Jane Hill. At the rear of the lady’sfigure is a skeleton in a winding-sheet. Among the memorials of his contemporaries which must have peculiarly interested Milton was the little slab in the nave marked, “O rare Ben Jonson,” which slab was later removed to the Poets’ Corner. Beneath a modern paving stone, which now covers the spot, in an upright posture was placed the coffin of the poet who in his last days of poverty, in 1637, asked Charles I. for eighteen inches of square ground in Westminster Abbey. He died in a house between the Abbey and St. Margaret’s Church. Newton’s tomb near by Milton never saw, as the youth of the man of science covered only Milton’s later years. On entering the south transept, the first monument that must have claimed his interest was that of Camden, the learned antiquary. Just before going to Cambridge, in 1623, Milton may have attended the funeral of this man, whose great work, “Britannia” added new lustre to Elizabeth’s glorious reign. Camden did for England what Stow did for London, and preserved the knowledge of the nation of that day. His bust, in the rich costume of his time, presents a speaking likeness, and with his portrait in the National Gallery make the eminent scholar seem a personality as real as Raleigh’s. Ben Jonson, who was one of his pupils when he was head master ofWestminster School, lovingly ascribes to him the source of his own inspiration:
“Camden, most reverend head, to whom I oweAll that I am in acts, all that I know.”
Camden wrote in 1600 the first guide-book of the Abbey, which, being in Latin, would have served Milton better than it would the modern visitor. In an unmarked grave lies the body of Richard Hakluyt, the great geographer, who died in 1616.
Just beyond Camden’s tomb is that of the great scholar, Casaubon. On its front are plainly scratched the initials of the gentle angler, Izaak Walton, by himself, with the date, 1658. A few feet distant on the pavement a slab marks the grave of the “old, old, very old” man who died in 1635 at the reputed age of one hundred and fifty-two. “Old Parr,” as he was known, is said to have been born in 1483, and married his first wife at the age of eighty, and his second in 1605, when he was one hundred and twenty-two years of age. The Earl of Arundel, determined to exhibit this “piece of antiquity,” had him carried by litter from Shrewsbury and presented to Charles I. On being questioned by the king about religious matters he cautiously replied that he thought it safest to hold whatever religion was held by the reigning monarch, “for he knew that hecame raw into the world, and thought it no point of wisdom to be broiled out of it,” an opinion quite to be expected of a man who had lived through the reigns of all the Tudors.
Further on, within the Poets’ Corner, two monuments especially must have been dear to the author of “Comus” and “Lycidas.” One marks the grave of Chaucer, who lies under a beautiful Gothic canopy erected in 1558, after the removal of his body to this spot; the other marks that of Edmund Spenser, who died in 1598 in King Street, hard by, “for lacke of bread.” Yet Dean Stanley tells us that “his hearse was attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb. What a funeral was that at which Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and, in all probability, Shakespeare, attended! What a grave in which the pen of Shakespeare may be mouldering away!” Of the author of the “Faërie Queene” Milton himself said: “Our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” Near by to Spenser’s tomb is the monument to Ben Jonson, at some distance from his grave, as has just been said, and close at hand are the memorials to Dryden, Drayton, Cowley, and Francis Beaumont, Milton’s famous contemporaries. If the poet couldhave looked forward two generations he might have seen his own counterfeit presentment in marble upon these walls. By that time the royalist feeling against him had abated, and when in 1737 this belated recognition of his greatness was placed upon the wall, Doctor Gregory remarked to Doctor Johnson: “I have seen erected in the church a bust of that man whose name I once knew considered as a pollution of its walls.”
After Shakespeare’s death there was a strong desire to remove his bones from Stratford to the Abbey, upon which Milton and Jonson both protested. The former wrote:
“What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bonesThe labour of an age in pilèd stones?”
and Jonson more emphatically exclaimed:
“My Shakespeare rise! I will not lodge thee byChaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lieA little further on to make thee room;Thou art a monument without a tomb,And art alive still while thy book doth liveAnd we have wits to read and praise to give.”
In St. Benedict’s Chapel may be noted the graves of Bishop Bilson, Doctor Tunson, Sir Robert Anstruther, and Sir Robert Ayton,—famous men of Milton’s time.
In St. Edmund’s Chapel, farther on, Milton as a lad of fourteen may have seen in 1622 the young man interred whose tomb is surmounted by a beautiful figure of a youth in Roman armour. Hard by under a lofty canopy lie two notable recumbent figures, which mark the grave of the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury, and show the style of costume of Milton’s boyhood years.
Among the monuments of his contemporaries in the chapel of Henry VII. that must have awakened a sensation of disgust in the mind of the Puritan poet, was that of the Duke of Buckingham, whose barbaric splendour of attire has already been noted, and who was murdered in 1628. Near by his huge and ostentatious tomb, so characteristic of the man whom it commemorates, lie under the pavement the graves of his king, James I., and his consort.
We may be sure that the graves which most interested Milton here were those of Oliver Cromwell, his mother and sister, and his daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, his son-in-law, Ireton, and Bradshaw, who was president of the tribunal which condemned Charles I. The Genoese envoy of the time thus described Cromwell’s death and burial in his despatch to the Council of Genoa: “He left the world with unimaginable valour, prudence, and charity, and more like a priest ormonk than a man who had fashioned and worked so mighty an engine so few years.... His body was opened and embalmed, and little trace of disease found therein; which was not the cause of his death, but rather the continual fever which came upon him from sorrow and melancholy at Madame Claypole’s death.” Cromwell’s body lay in state at Somerset House, and was thence escorted to the tomb by an immense throng of mourners, which included the city companies. “The effigy or statue of the dead, made most lifelike in royal robes, crown on head, in one hand the sceptre and in the other the globe, was laid out on a bier richly adorned and borne hither in a coach made for the purpose, open on every side, and adorned with many plumes and banners.” It is said that Cromwell especially loved the Abbey, and instituted the custom of commemorating English worthies within its walls. Admiral Blake was the first to receive this honour in 1657. “Cromwell caused him to be brought up by land to London in all the state that could be; and to encourage his officers to adventure their lives that they might be pompously buried, he was with all solemnity possible interred in the Chapel of Henry VII., among the monuments of the kings.” Who can doubt that Milton stood in sightless grief beside these tombs,before the desecration of “Oliver’s Vault?” Only the body of Cromwell’s daughter was left in peace, and still remains. His mother and sister were reburied in the green, and the reader already knows what was the vile treatment of the other bodies. It is said that to the royalist dean of Westminster, Thomas Sprat, we owe the refusal of interment in the Abbey to the “regicide” John Milton. Had he been buried later where Cromwell’s body had lain, he too might have been thrust forth. It was this dean who esteemed Cowley as a superior poet to Milton, and called the former the “Pindar, Horace, and Virgil of England.” In the south aisle lie General George Monck and Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, eldest daughter of James I., whose marriage we have seen was celebrated by a merry masque within the Temple grounds. This was the English princess for whom a part of Heidelberg Castle was built; she was mother of Prince Rupert, whose strenuous efforts to save the fortunes of his uncle, Charles I., did not endear him to Milton and his friends. In this chapel lies a wretched victim of her cousin, James I. This is the Lady Arabella Stuart, whose marriage so displeased the king that he immured her in the Tower, where, bereft of reason by her miseries, she died when Milton was a boy.
At the eastern end of the north aisle of the chapel of Henry VII. is a baby’s cradle-tomb, which has been the frequent theme of verse. Standing beside the little marble form of this daughter of James I., Milton may have felt a pang of heart as he thought of his own little one buried in St. Margaret’s, but a stone’s throw distant. Of those who were associated with Milton’s public work at Whitehall, was Admiral Edward Popham, general of the Fleet of the Republic under Cromwell, who died in 1651. He was buried at the state’s expense in the chapel of Henry VII., but after the Restoration his monument, on which is his figure full size in armour, was removed to John the Baptist’s Chapel and the inscription on it was erased. Opposite his tomb is the grave of Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, son of Elizabeth’s unhappy favourite, who, after serving King Charles, became General-in-Chief of the Parliamentarian army in 1642. He died in 1646, and was buried with high honours by the Independents. In St. John’s Chapel rests the body of the wife of Colonel Scot, one of the judges of Charles I., who was executed at Charing Cross.
At the foot of the steps which lead to the chapel of Henry VII., in 1674,—the same year in which Milton died,—was laid under a nameless stone the body of the famous Earl of Clarendon, who wasborn in 1608-9, the same year in which the poet was born. This famous Tory, the historian of the Civil Wars and Restoration, was perhaps more responsible than any other man for creating that popular detestation of the name of Cromwell which prevailed until the present generation had been better instructed by less partisan critics. After two hundred years his name was inscribed upon the stone that covers his ashes. Within the Abbey rest twenty of his relatives and descendants, among them his royal granddaughters, Queen Mary and Queen Anne. Not far distant, in the north ambulatory was interred in 1643 the body of the redoubtable John Pym, nicknamed “King Pym” by the Royalists, for as Clarendon himself said: “He seemed to all men to have the greatest influence upon the House of Commons of any man, and in truth I think he was at that time (1640), and some months after, the most popular man and the most able to do hurt that hath lived in any time.”[2]Twoyears after Pym’s burial, there was laid close to his grave the body of William Strode, one of the five members demanded by Charles I. when he made his famous entry into the House of Commons with an armed force in 1641-2. The bodies of both were exhumed in 1661, and flung with others of their compatriots into a pit outside the Abbey walls. There is every reason to assume that Milton would have attended the funerals of both of these men. A man whom he must have known well by reputation, Doctor Peter Heylin, who died in 1662, is buried beneath the sub-dean’s seat in the north aisle of the choir. He was Laud’s chaplain, and wrote a life of the great archbishop; under Charles I. he had for a time supreme authority in the Abbey and superintended its repairs. During the Civil War he suffered and was deprived of his property, but on the accession of Charles II., he was reinstated in the Abbey. It is interesting to note that the coronation chair of oak, decorated with false jewels, which has been used at coronations since the time of Edward I., has never left the Abbey except when it was taken to Westminster Hall, when Oliver Cromwell was there installed as Lord Protector.
A few of the scenes that the great minster witnessed in Milton’s time may be alluded to. The funeral of James I. in 1625 was the most magnificent that England had ever seen. The hearse was fashioned by Inigo Jones. The sermon was two hours in length. Mourning cloaks were given to nine thousand persons, and the rest of the outlay was proportionate. No wonder that Charles I. within two months sent word to the Commons that “the ordinary revenue is clogged with debts, and exhausted with the late king’s funeral and other expenses of necessity and honour.” The Abbey suffered somewhat from the Puritan hatred of images and “idolatry,” during the Commonwealth. By order of Parliament the sacred vestments were seized and burned. Of the curious wax effigies of monarchs who antedated Milton’s death, only one is still preserved. It is that of Charles II. and is robed in red velvet with collar and ruffles of real point lace. For a long time it stood above his grave in the chapel of Henry VII. These waxworks used to be publicly exhibited, after which the cap was passed around for contributions. Milton, in his boyhood, may have gazed in wonder at the gorgeous figure of Elizabeth arrayed as a later one still is to-day, in her own jewelled stomacher and velvet robe embroidered with gold; doubtless he founda visit to the effigies of Westminster Abbey as entertaining as a modern boy finds a visit to Madame Tussaud’s to-day. From the time of Edward I. it was customary to make effigies of kings. Up to the time of Henry V. the embalmed bodies and not the effigies were displayed upon the funeral car. At first these figures were made of wood, with perhaps the faces and hands of plaster. These were set up in the church for a season, after which many of them were preserved in presses standing in a row, and shown as has been described. In Milton’s time it seems evident that the list included Edward I. and Eleanor, Edward III. and Philippa, Henry V. and Katherine, Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York, James I. and Anne of Denmark, and Henry, Prince of Wales.
It is probable that Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for the completion of the Abbey would have materially added to its beauty. His scheme is said to have included a graceful Gothic spire rising from the low central tower. The incongruous towers of the west front were chiefly due to Hawksmore.
During the Civil War, the spot within Westminster which most interested every reformer was that where, for over five years, the famous Westminster Assembly gathered. During that time this body of one hundred and forty-nine prelates and learned men held over fifteen hundred sessions, at first in the chapel of Henry VII., and later in the warmer and cosier apartment known as the “Jerusalem Chamber.” This room was in the present generation occupied by the scholars who for years laboured together on the revised version of the Bible. The Assembly was called by Parliament “to be consulted with by them on the settling of the government and liturgy of the Church, and for the vindicating and clearing of the doctrine of the Church of England from false aspersions and interpretations.” In that age, when religious questions were paramount, the work that devolved upon these men demanded insight, honesty, and great courage. The members, for the most part,were elected from the different counties and merely confirmed by Parliament; but to these, ten members of the House of Lords and twenty members of the House of Commons were added. Only those questions could be considered that should be proposed by either or both houses of Parliament. Four shillings a day for his expenses was allowed each clerical member, with freedom from all other duties except attendance on the Assembly. Among the one hundred and forty-nine were several members, like Archbishop Usher, who were defenders of Episcopacy. In that age no modern questions as to inspiration disturbed the minds of devout men, but church government was to them a matter of such serious moment as the modern mind can scarcely understand. As the results of these prolonged and serious conferences, Dean Stanley says we have the “Directory, the Longer and Shorter Catechism, and that famous Confession of Faith which, alone within these Islands, was imposed by law on the whole kingdom; and which, alone of all Protestant Confessions, still, in spite of its sternness and narrowness, retains a hold on the minds of its adherents to which its fervour and its logical coherence in some measure entitle it.”
During Milton’s lifetime the Chapter House, which had become public property after the Dissolution,was used for storing public documents, and here he may have seen the ancient Domesday Book, which until within fifty years was treasured there. At the time of the Commonwealth, the ancient chamber close by the Chapter House, and known as the “Pyx,” held the regalia, and was broken open by the officers of the House of Commons, in order to make an inventory, when the Church authorities refused to surrender the keys. The Pyx no longer holds the regalia, which, after the Restoration, was transferred to the Tower. The keys of its double doors are seven, and are deposited with seven distinct officers of the Exchequer. The door is lined with human skins. Within the cloisters Henry Lawes, the musician, was buried in 1662.
Near by the Abbey stands Westminster School, founded early in the sixteenth century upon the site of the ancient monastery. The dormitory has been turned into a noble schoolroom ninety-six feet in length. Camden, the famous antiquary, was once master of the school, and among its famous pupils whose lives touched Milton’s, were the poets, George Herbert, Cowley, who published poems while he was at school here, and Dryden. Among men famous in other walks of life were the great geographer, Hakluyt, and Sir Christopher Wren. Hakluyt, who died the same year that Shakespeare died,in 1616, tells us that his interest in discovery and in naval science began when he was a Queen’s Scholar in “that fruitful nurserie.” At Oxford he pursued his favourite studies, and read “whatsoever printed or written discoveries or voyages he found extant in Greeke, Latine, Italian, Spanish, Portugall, French, or Englishe languages.” Evelyn says in his “Diary:” On “May 13th, 1661, I heard and saw such exercises at the election of scholars at Westminster Schools to be sent to the university, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, in themes and extempry verses, as wonderfully astonished me in such youths, with such readiness and wit, some of whom not above twelve or thirteen years of age.” Here Milton may have witnessed, on a Christmas-tide, a play of Plautus or of Terence, given by the boys of Westminster according to their annual custom, which is still maintained.
In the seventeenth century, the double Gatehouse of Westminster, which once stood on the site of the Royal Aquarium of to-day, held as prisoner Sir Walter Raleigh, who passed the last night of his life here. The night before his execution his cousin called on him; Raleigh tried to relieve his sadness with pleasantry, when his cousin remonstrated with the words, “Sir, take heed you go not too much upon the brave hand, for your enemies will takeexceptions at that.” “Good Charles,” replied Raleigh, “give me leave to be merry, for this is the last merriment that ever I shall have in this world, but when I come to the last part, thou shalt see I will look on it like a man,” and even so he did. When he had reached the scaffold in Palace Yard the next day, and had taken off his gown and doublet, he asked the executioner to show him his axe. When he had taken it in his hands he felt along the edge, and smiling said: “This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases.” Then he granted his forgiveness to the sheriff who knelt before him. When his head was on the block, before the fatal blow, he said: “So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lies.” So perished the bold discoverer and coloniser, the author and gallant knight, when ten-year-old John Milton lived in Bread Street. Near the spot where his body rests in the church of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, now rises a memorial window presented by Americans and inscribed by Lowell in remembrance of Raleigh’s connection with America:
“The New World’s sons, from England’s breasts we drewSuch milk as bids remember whence we came;Proud of her past, wherefrom our future grew,This window we inscribe with Raleigh’s name.”
In this prison, afterward, John Hampden and Sir John Eliot were confined, and Richard Lovelace,who was imprisoned for his devotion to Charles I., wrote the well-known lines:
“Stone walls do not a prison make,Nor iron bars a cage;Minds innocent and quiet takeThat for a hermitage.”
Where Westminster Palace Hotel now stands, in the ancient Almonry of the Abbey, Caxton set up his press, and in 1474 printed his first book—the “Game and Play of Chess.”
In Milton’s day, a grim old fortress marked the “Sanctuary,” or place of refuge for criminals. From the sacred shelter of this retreat the mother of the little Edward V. surrendered him with sad misgiving to his cruel uncle, who carried him to the Tower. This spot was a resort for persecuted saint and guilty sinner. Within its walls he was as secure as was the ancient Hebrew in his city of refuge. When Milton lived in Petty France and passed from there to Whitehall by the Sanctuary, it had fallen into disrepute and only the most abandoned sought its shelter. The Sanctuary at Westminster was only one of thirty known to have been contemporaneous with it in the monasteries of England before the Dissolution.
The magnificent royal palace of Westminster, which was built by Edward the Confessor, andimproved by William the Conqueror, had largely disappeared in Milton’s time. The Great Hall and the crypt under the chapel of St. Stephen are almost all that now remain, but Milton, in addition to these, saw the chapel itself and its cloisters, and the famous “Star Chamber” and “Painted Chamber,” which were preserved until the fire which burned the Houses of Parliament in 1834. Previous to the Dissolution, the Commons had sat within the ancient Chapter House of the Abbey, at an inconvenient distance from the House of Lords. Then they were transferred to St. Stephen’s Chapel, an oblong building ninety feet in length and thirty in width, which had externally at each corner an octagonal tower. It was lighted by five windows on each side, between which its walls were supported by great buttresses. It had two stories, and the upper one was occupied by the House of Commons. These walls have echoed to the ringing words of Eliot, Hampden, Pym, Sir Harry Vane, and Cromwell, to Burke and Fox and Pitt, and the long line of valiant Englishmen who never confounded patriotism and loyalty to country with subserviency to the will of any fallible man whom chance had placed upon the nation’s throne. Here Eliot, in sharp, emphatic words, which contrasted with the ponderous phraseology of the time, cried out against thegorgeously apparelled and arrogant Buckingham: “He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land, the stores and treasures of the king. There needs no search for it. It is too visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the visible evidences of an express exhausting of the state, a chronicle of his waste of the revenues of the Crown?... Through the power of state and justice he has dared ever to strike at his own ends.” Bold words! which took more courage than to face the cannon’s mouth, for his protest then and later meant to face a dungeon in the Tower, from which only death gave him release.
But Eliot’s words were a tonic to his fellows, and when they met two years later, in 1628, Sir Thomas Wentworth showed himself a worthy follower: “We must vindicate our ancient liberties,” said he, “we must reinforce the laws made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them, as no licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade them.” Of the Petition of Right, and the Remonstrance; of the dissolution of Parliament, and the eleven years when these walls were silent; of Charles’s revival of Star Chamber trials to fill his empty exchequer by the fines, and the Parliamentary history of the Civil War, and all that centres aroundthese walls which echoed with the eloquence of England’s noblest statesmen, there is no space to speak.
The Star Chamber was probably so named from being anciently ornamented with golden stars. It stood parallel with the river on the eastern side of Palace Yard and was formerly the council chamber of the police. It was a beautiful panelled room with mullioned windows. The lords who tried offences were bound by no law, but they created and defined the offences which they punished. Every penalty except death could be inflicted. In such tyrannies the Star Chamber could have been exceeded only by the terrible Council of Ten in Venice. One of the first deeds of the new Parliament of 1641 was to abolish the Star Chamber. That year a mob of six thousand citizens in Old Palace Yard had come armed with swords and clubs, and had seized the entrance to the House of Lords and called for justice against Lord Strafford.
The Painted Chamber was named from its mural decorations, which antedated Milton’s time at least three hundred years. It was strangely proportioned, eighty feet long, twenty broad, and fifty feet high. Here the Confessor died. Here was the trial of Charles I. when it was adjourned from Westminster Hall. Here his death warrant was signed, whichis now preserved within the library of the House of Lords.
Says Knight: “Amid all the misgovernment of the reign of Charles II., the rights of the House of Commons and its true position in the Constitution were recognised in a manner in which they had never been in the former days of the monarchy. Attempts were made to manage the Parliament, and also to govern without it; but when it was suffered to meet, its debates were nearly as free as they are at present, and took as wide a range as they have ever done since. The Commons for session after session during this reign discussed the question of excluding the heir presumptive to the throne, the king’s own brother, and even passed a bill for that purpose. Would any approach to such an interference as that have been endured either by Elizabeth or James I.?... and this change, this gain had been brought about by the Long Parliament and the great Rebellion.”
In the time of Milton the pillory stood before Westminster Hall, and here he may have seen, on one of his trips from Horton in 1636, the stiff-necked Prynne branded on either cheek, and exposed with one ear cut off, according to the barbarous methods of the time, for writings which were supposed to have reflected on the queen. In those days thenoble proportions of the hall were partly masked by neighbouring shops. The architecture and the long history of this famous hall of William Rufus are almost as familiar as those of Westminster Abbey, and therefore need little comment here. The story of Guy Fawkes and the sentence passed upon the conspirators here in 1606 was one of the first bits of English history that a boy born but two years later would have heard. In 1640, Charles I. and his queen, concealed behind the tapestry of a dark cabinet, listened to the trial of Strafford, which lasted eighteen days. Nine years later the king sat at his own trial beneath the banners of his troops, which had been taken at the battle of Naseby. When the clerk read the words: “Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer,” etc., the king is said to have laughed in the face of the court. In Pepys’s diary we get a glimpse, a few years later, of the commercial uses to which this stately edifice had been degraded, for we find little booths and stalls for selling scarfs and trifles were ranged along the walls of the interior. More than a hundred years later, part of the hall seems to have been reserved for stalls, which presumably were removed for coronation days and the great functions, for which its stately proportions are so well fitted. The building is one of the most spacious edifices of stone whoseroof is unsupported. The roof of Irish oak is said to be always free from spiders and insects.