"Up into the church, with full devout singing;And when he had made his offering,The mayor, the citizens, bowed and left him."
While all the dark troubles still were pending, we find the Duke of York taking a solemn oathon the host of fealty to King Henry. Six years later, after the battle of St. Albans, the Yorkists and Lancastrians met again at the altar of St. Paul's in feigned unity. The poor weak monarch was crowned, and had sceptre in hand, and his proud brilliant queen followed him in smiling converse with the Duke of York. Again the city poet broke into rejoicing at the final peace:—
"At Paul's in London, with great renown,On Lady Day in Lent, this peace was wrought;The King, the Queen, with lords many an one,To worship the Virgin as they ought,Went in procession, and spared right noughtIn sight of all the commonalty;In token this love was in heart and thought,Rejoice England in concord and unity."
THE CHURCH OF ST. FAITH, THE CRYPT OF OLD ST. PAUL'S, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR
Alas for such reconciliations! Four years later more blood had been shed, more battle-fields strewn with dead. The king was a captive, had disinherited his own son, and granted the succession to the Duke of York, whose right a Parliament had acknowledged. His proud queen was in the North rallying the scattered Lancastrians. York and Warwick, Henry's deadly enemies,knelt before the primate, and swore allegiance to the king; and the duke's two sons, March and Rutland, took the same oath.
Within a few months Wakefield was fought; Richard was slain, and the duke's head, adorned with a mocking paper crown, was sent, by the she-wolf of a queen, to adorn the walls of York.
The next year, however, fortune forsook Henry for ever, and St. Paul's welcomed Edward IV. and the redoubtable "king-maker," who had won the crown for him at the battle of Mortimer's Cross; and no Lancastrian dared show his face on that triumphant day. Ten years later Warwick, veering to the downfallen king, was slain at Barnet, and the body of the old warrior, and that of his brother, were exposed, barefaced, for three days in St. Paul's, to the delight of all true Yorkists. Those were terrible times, and the generosity of the old chivalry seemed now despised and forgotten. The next month there was even a sadder sight, for the body of King Henry himself was displayed in the Cathedral. Broken-hearted, said the Yorkists, but the Lancastrian belief (favoured by Shakespeare) was that Richard Duke of Gloucester, the wicked Crookback, stabbed him with his own hand in the Tower, and it was said that blood poured from the body when it lay in the Cathedral. Again St. Paul's was profaned at the death of Edward IV., when Richard came to pay his ostentatious orisons in the Cathedral, while he was already planning the removal of the princes to the Tower. Always anxious to please the London citizens, it was to St. Paul's Cross that Richard sent Dr. Shaw to accuse Clarence of illegitimacy. At St. Paul's, too, according to Shakespeare, who in his historic plays often follows traditions now forgotten, or chronicles that have perished, the charges against Hastings were publicly read. Jane Shore, the mistress, and supposed accomplice of Hastings in bewitching Richard, did penance in St. Paul's. She was the wife of a London goldsmith, and had been mistress of Edward IV. Her beauty, as she walked downcast with shame, is said to have moved every heart to pity. On his accession, King Richard, nervously fingering his dagger, as was his wont to do according to the chronicles, rode to St. Paul's, and was received by procession, amid great congratulation and acclamation from the fickle people. Kemp, who was the Yorkist bishop during all these dreadful times, rebuilt St. Paul's Cross, which then became one of the chief ornaments of London.
ST. PAUL'S AFTER THE FALL OF THE SPIRE, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR
Richard's crown was presently beaten into a hawthorn bush on Bosworth Field, and his defaced,mangled, and ill-shaped body thrown, like carrion, across a pack-horse and driven off to Leicester, and Henry VII., the astute, the wily, the thrifty, reigned in his stead. After Henry's victory over Simnel he came two successive days to St. Paul's to offer his thanksgiving, and Simnel (afterwards a scullion in the royal kitchen) rode humbly at his conqueror's side.
The last ceremonial of the reign of Henry VII. that took place at St. Paul's was the ill-fated marriage of Prince Arthur (a mere boy, who died six months after) with Katherine of Arragon. The whole church was hung with tapestry, and there was a huge scaffold, with seats round it, reaching from the west door to the choir. On this platform the ceremony was performed. All day, at several places in the city, and at the west door of the Cathedral, the conduits ran for the delighted people with red and white wine. The wedded children were lodged in the bishop's palace, and three days later returned by water to Westminster. When Henry VII. died, his body lay in state in St. Paul's, and from thence it was taken to Windsor, to remain there till the beautiful chapel he had endowed at Westminster was ready for his reception. The Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's were among the trustees for the endowment he left, and the Cathedral still possesses the royal testament.
A Venetian ambassador who was present hasleft a graphic description of one of the earliest ceremonies (1514) which Henry VIII. witnessed at St. Paul's. The Pope (Leo X.) had sent the young and chivalrous king a sword and cap of maintenance, as a special mark of honour. The cap was of purple satin, covered with embroidery and pearls, and decked with ermine. The king rode from the bishop's palace to the cathedral on a beautiful black palfrey, the nobility walking before him in pairs. At the high altar the king donned the cap, and was girt with the sword. The procession then made the entire circuit of the church. The king wore a gown of purple satin and gold in chequer, and a jewelled collar; his cap of purple velvet had two jewelled rosettes, and his doublet was of gold brocade. The nobles wore massive chains of gold, and their chequered silk gowns were lined with sables, lynx-fur, and swansdown.
In the same reign Richard Fitz James, the fanatical Bishop of London, persecuted the Lollards, and burned two of the most obstinate at Smithfield. It is indeed, doubtful, even now, if Fitz James, in his hatred of the reformers, stopped short of murder. In 1514, Richard Hunn, a citizen who had disputed the jurisdiction of the obnoxious Ecclesiastical Court, was thrown into the Lollard's Tower (the bishop's prison, at the south-west corner of the Cathedral). A Wycliffe Bible had been found in his house; he was adjudged a heretic, and one night this obstinate man was found hung in his cell. The clergy called it suicide, but the coroner brought in a verdict of wilful murder against the Bishop's Chancellor, the sumner, and the bell-ringer of the Cathedral. The king, however, pardoned them all on their paying £1,500 to Hunn's family. The bishop, still furious, burned Hunn's body sixteen days after, as that of a heretic, in Smithfield. This fanatical bishop was the ceaseless persecutor of Dean Colet, that excellent and enlightened man, who founded St. Paul's School, and was the untiring friend of Erasmus, whom he accompanied on his memorable visit to Becket's shrine at Canterbury.
In 1518 Wolsey, proud and portly, appears upon the scene, coming to St. Paul's to sing mass and celebrate eternal peace between France, England, and Spain, and the betrothal of the beautiful Princess Mary to the Dauphin of France. The large chapel and the choir were hung with gold brocade, blazoned with the king's arms. Near the altar was the king's pew, formed of cloth of gold, and in front of it a small altar covered with silver-gilt images, with a gold cross in the centre. Two low masses were said at this before the king,while high mass was being sung to the rest. On the opposite side of the altar, on a raised and canopied chair, sat Wolsey; further off stood the legate Campeggio. The twelve bishops and six abbots present all wore their jewelled mitres, while the king himself shone out in a tunic of purple velvet, "powdered" with pearls and rubies, sapphires and diamonds. His collar was studded with carbuncles as large as walnuts. A year later Charles V. was proclaimed emperor by the heralds at St. Paul's. Wolsey gave the benediction, no doubt with full hope of the Pope's tiara.
In 1521, but a little later, Wolsey, "Cardinal of St. Cecilia and Archbishop of York," was welcomed by Dean Pace to St. Paul's. He had come to sit near Paul's Cross, to hear Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, by the Pope's command, denounce "Martinus Eleutherius" and his accursed works, many of which were burned in the churchyard during the sermon, no doubt to the infinite alarm of all heretical booksellers in the neighbouring street. Wolsey had always an eye to the emperor's helping him to the papacy; and when Charles V. came to England to visit Henry, in 1522, Wolsey said mass, censed by more than twenty obsequious prelates. It was Wolsey who first, as papal legate, removed the convocation entirely from St. Paul's to Westminster, to be near his house at Whitehall. His ribald enemy, Skelton, then hiding from the cardinal's wrath in the Sanctuary at Westminster, wrote the following rough distich on the arbitrary removal:—
"Gentle Paul, lay down thy sword,For Peter of Westminster hath shaven thy beard."
On the startling news of the battle of Pavia, when Francis I. was taken prisoner by his great rival of Spain, a huge bonfire illumined the west front of St. Paul's, and hogsheads of claret were broached at the Cathedral door, to celebrate the welcome tidings. On the Sunday after, the bluff king, the queen, and both houses of Parliament, attended a solemn "Te Deum" at the cathedral; while on St. Matthew's Day there was a great procession of all the religious orders in London, and Wolsey, with his obsequious bishops, performed service at the high altar. Two years later Wolsey came again, to lament or rejoice over the sack of Rome by the Constable Bourbon, and the captivity of the Pope.
Singularly enough, the fire lighted by Wolsey in St. Paul's Churchyard had failed to totally burn up Luther and all his works; and on Shrove Tuesday, 1527, Wolsey made another attempt to reduce the new-formed Bible to ashes. In the great procession that came on this day to St. Paul's therewere six Lutherans in penitential dresses, carrying terribly symbolical fagots and huge lighted tapers. On a platform in the nave sat the portly and proud cardinal, supported by thirty-six zealous bishops, abbots, and priests. At the foot of the great rood over the northern door the heretical tracts and Testaments were thrown into a fire. The prisoners, on their knees, begged pardon of God and the Catholic Church, and were then led three times round the fire, which they fed with the fagots they had carried.
Four years later, after Wolsey's fall, the London clergy were summoned to St. Paul's Chapter-house (near the south side). The king, offended at the Church having yielded to Wolsey's claims as a papal legate, by which the penalty of præmunire had been incurred, had demanded from it the alarming fine of £100,000. Immediately six hundred clergy of all ranks thronged riotously to the chapter-house, to resist this outrageous tax. The bishop was all for concession; their goods and lands were forfeit, their bodies liable to imprisonment. The humble clergy cried out, "We have never meddled in the cardinal's business. Let the bishops and abbots, who have offended, pay." Blows were struck, and eventually fifteen priests and four laymen were condemned to terms of imprisonment in the Fleet and Tower, for their resistance to despotic power.
In 1535 nineteen German Anabaptists were examined in St. Paul's, and fourteen of them sent to the stake. Then came plain signs that the Reformation had commenced. The Pope's authority had been denied at Paul's Cross in 1534. A miraculous rood from Kent was brought to St. Paul's, and the machinery that moved the eyes and lips was shown to the populace, after which it was thrown down and broken amid contemptuous laughter. Nor would this chapter be complete if we did not mention a great civic procession at the close of the reign of Henry VIII. On Whit Sunday, 1546, the children of Paul's School, with parsons and vicars of every London church, in their copes, went from St. Paul's to St. Peter's, Cornhill, Bishop Bonner bearing the sacrament under a canopy; and at the Cross, before the mayor, aldermen, and all the crafts, heralds proclaimed perpetual peace between England, France, and the Emperor. Two months after, the ex-bishop of Rochester preached a sermon at Paul's Cross recanting his heresy, four of his late fellow-prisoners in Newgate having obstinately perished at the stake.
In the reign of Edward VI. St. Paul's witnessed far different scenes. The year of the accession ofthe child-king, funeral service was read to the memory of Francis I., Latin dirges were chanted, and eight mitred bishops sang a requiem to the monarch lately deceased. At the coronation, while the guilds were marshalled along Cheapside, and tapestries hung from every window, an acrobat descended by a cable from St. Paul's steeple to the anchor of a ship near the Deanery door. In November of the next year, at night, the crucifixes and images in St. Paul's were pulled down and removed, to the horror of the faithful, and all obits and chantreys were confiscated, and the vestments and altar cloths were sold. The early reformers were backed by greedy partisans. The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister. When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar were extinguished. Very soon a table was substituted for the altar, and there was an attempt made to remove the organ. The altar, and chapel, and tombs (all but John of Gaunt's) were then ruthlessly destroyed.
During the Lady Jane Grey rebellion, Ridley denounced Mary and Elizabeth as bastards. The accession of gloomy Queen Mary soon turned the tables. As the Queen passed to her coronation, a daring Dutchman stood on the cross of St. Paul's waving a long streamer, and shifting from foot to foot as he shook two torches which he held over his head.
But the citizens were Protestants at heart. At the first sermon preached at St. Paul's Cross, Dr. Bourne, a rash Essex clergyman, prayed for the dead, praised Bonner, and denounced Ridley. The mob, inflamed to madness, shouted, "He preaches damnation! Pull him down! pull him down!" A dagger, thrown at the preacher, stuck quivering in a side-post of the pulpit. With difficulty two good men dragged the rash zealot safely into St. Paul's School. For this riot several persons were sent to the Tower, and a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at St. Paul's Cross. The crosses were raised again in St. Paul's, and the old ceremonies and superstitions revived. On St. Katherine's Day (in honour of the queen's mother's patron saint) there was a procession with lights, and the image of St. Katherine, round St. Paul's steeple, and the bells rang. Yet not long after this, when a Dr. Pendleton preached old doctrines at St. Paul's Cross, a gun was fired at him. When Bonner was released from the Marshalsea andrestored to his see, the people shouted, "Welcome home;" and a woman ran forward and kissed him. We are told that he knelt in prayer on the Cathedral steps.
In 1554, at the reception in St. Paul's of Cardinal Pole, King Philip attended with English, Spanish, and German guards, and a great retinue of nobles. Bishop Gardiner preached on the widening heresy till the audience groaned and wept. Of the cruel persecutions of the Protestants in this reign St. Paul's was now and then a witness, and likewise of the preparations for the execution of Protestants, which Bonner's party called "trials." Thus we find Master Cardmaker, vicar of St. Bride's, and Warne, an upholsterer in Walbrook, both arraigned at St. Paul's before the bishop for heresy, and carried back from there to Newgate, to be shortly after burned alive in Smithfield.
In the midst of these horrors, a strange ceremony took place at St. Paul's, more worthy, indeed, of the supposititious temple of Diana than of a Christian cathedral, did it not remind us that Popery was always strangely intermingled with fragments of old paganism. In June, 1557 (St. Paul's Day, says Machyn, an undertaker and chronicler of Mary's reign), a fat buck was presented to the dean and chapter, according to an annual grant made by Sir Walter le Baud, an Essex knight, in the reign of Edward I. A priest from each London parish attended in his cope, and the Bishop of London wore his mitre, while behind the burly, bullying, persecutor Bonner came a fat buck, his head with his horns borne upon a pole; forty huntsmen's horns blowing a rejoicing chorus.
The last event of this blood-stained reign was the celebration at St. Paul's of the victory over the French at the battle of St. Quintin by Philip and the Spaniards. A sermon was preached to the city at Paul's Cross, bells were rung, and bonfires blazed in every street.
At Elizabeth's accession its new mistress soon purged St. Paul's of all its images: copes and shaven crowns disappeared. The first ceremony of the new reign was the performance of the obsequies of Henry II. of France. The empty hearse was hung with cloth of gold, the choir draped in black, the clergy appearing in plain black gowns and caps. And now, what the Catholics called a great judgment fell on the old Cathedral. During a great storm in 1561, St. Martin's Church, Ludgate, was struck by lightning; immediately after, the wooden steeple of St. Paul's started into a flame. The fire burned downwards furiously for four hours, the bells melted, the lead poured in torrents; the roof fell in, and the whole Cathedral became for a time a ruin.Soon after, at the Cross, Dean Nowell rebuked the Papists for crying out "a judgment." In papal times the church had also suffered. In Richard I.'s reign an earthquake shook down the spire, and in Stephen's time fire had also brought destruction. The Crown and City were roused by this misfortune. Thrifty Elizabeth gave 1,000 marks in gold, and 1,000 marks' worth of timber; the City gave a great benevolence, and the clergy subscribed £1,410. In one month a false roof was erected, and by the end of the year the aisles were leaded in. On the 1st of November, the same year, the mayor, aldermen, and crafts, with eighty torch-bearers, went to attend service at St. Paul's. The steeple, however, was never re-erected, in spite of Queen Elizabeth's angry remonstrances.
In the first year of Philip and Mary, the Common Council of London passed an act which shows the degradation into which St. Paul's had sunk even before the fire. It forbade the carrying of beer-casks, or baskets of bread, fish, flesh, or fruit, or leading mules or horses through the Cathedral, under pain of fines and imprisonment. Elizabeth also issued a proclamation to a similar effect, forbidding a fray, drawing of swords in the church, or shooting with hand-gun or dagg within the church or churchyard, under pain of two months' imprisonment. Neither were agreements to be made for the payment of money within the church. Soon after the fire, a man that had provoked a fray in the church was set in the pillory in the churchyard, and had his ears nailed to a post, and then cut off. These proclamations, however, led to no reform. Cheats, gulls, assassins, and thieves thronged the middle aisle of St. Paul's; advertisements of all kinds covered the walls, the worst class of servants came there to be hired; worthless rascals and disreputable flaunting women met there by appointment. Parasites, hunting for a dinner, hung about a monument of the Beauchamps, foolishly believed to be the tomb of the good Duke Humphrey. Shakespeare makes Falstaff hire red-nosed Bardolph in St. Paul's, and Ben Jonson lays the third act of hisEvery Man in his Humourin the middle aisle. Bishop Earle, in his "Microcosmography," describes the noise of the crowd of idlers in Paul's "as that of bees, a strange hum mixed of walking tongues and feet, a kind of still roar or loud whisper." He describes the crowd of young curates, copper captains, thieves, and dinnerless adventurers and gossip-mongers. Bishop Corbet, that jolly prelate, speaks of
"The walk,Where all our British sinners swear and talk,Old hardy ruffians, bankrupts, soothsayers,And youths whose cousenage is old as theirs."
On the eve of the election of Sandys as Bishop of London, May, 1570, all London was roused by a papal bull against Elizabeth being found nailed on the gates of the bishop's palace. It declared her crown forfeited and her people absolved from their oaths of allegiance. The fanatic maniac, Felton, was soon discovered, and hung on a gallows at the bishop's gates.
One or two anecdotes of interest specially connect Elizabeth with St. Paul's. On one occasion Dean Nowell placed in the queen's closet (pew) a splendid prayer-book, full of German scriptural engravings, richly illuminated. The zealous queen was furious; the book seemed to her of Catholic tendencies.
"Who placed this book on my cushion? You know I have an aversion to idolatry. The cuts resemble angels and saints—nay, even grosser absurdities."
The frightened dean pleaded innocence of all evil intentions. The queen prayed God to grant him more wisdom for the future, and asked him where they came from. When told Germany, she replied, "It is well it was a stranger. Had it been one of my subjects, we should have questioned the matter."
Once again Dean Nowell vexed the queen—this time from being too Puritan. On Ash Wednesday, 1572, the dean preaching before her, he denounced certain popish superstitions in a book recently dedicated to her majesty. He specially denounced the use of the sign of the cross. Suddenly a harsh voice was heard in the royal closet. It was Elizabeth's. She chidingly bade Mr. Dean return from his ungodly digression and revert to his text. The next day the frightened dean wrote a most abject apology to the high-spirited queen.
The victory over the Armada was, of course, not forgotten at St. Paul's. When the thanksgiving sermon was preached at Paul's Cross, eleven Spanish ensigns waved over the cathedral battlements, and one idolatrous streamer with an image of the Virgin fluttered over the preacher. That was in September; the Queen herself came in November, drawn by four white horses, and with the privy council and all the nobility. Elizabeth heard a sermon, and dined at the bishop's palace.
The "children of Paul's," whom Shakespeare, inHamlet, mentions with the jealousy of a rival manager, were, as Dean Milman has proved, the chorister-boys of St. Paul's. They acted, it is supposed, in their singing-school. The play began at four p.m., after prayers, and the price of admission was 4d. They are known at a later period tohave acted some of Lily's Euphuistic plays, and one of Middleton's.
In this reign lotteries for Government purposes were held at the west door of St. Paul's, where a wooden shed was erected for drawing the prizes, which were first plate and then suits of armour. In the first lottery (1569) there were 40,000 lots at 10s. a lot, and the profits were applied to repairing the harbours of England.
In the reign of James I. blood was again shed before St. Paul's. Years before a bishop had been murdered at the north door; now, before the west entrance (in January, 1605-6), four of the desperate Gunpowder Plot conspirators (Sir Everard Digby, Winter, Grant, and Bates) were there hung, drawn, and quartered. Their attempt to restore the old religion by one blow ended in the hangman's strangling rope and the executioner's cruel knife. In the May following a man of less-proven guilt (Garnet, the Jesuit) suffered the same fate in St. Paul's Churchyard; and zealots of his faith affirmed that on straws saved from the scaffold miraculous portraits of their martyr were discovered.
The ruinous state of the great cathedral, still without a tower, now aroused the theological king. He first tried to saddle the bishop and chapter, but Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's friend, interposed to save them. Then the matter went to sleep for twelve years. In 1620 the king again awoke, and came in state with all his lords on horseback, to hear a sermon at the Cross and to view the church. A royal commission followed, Inigo Jones, the king'sprotégé, whom James had brought from Denmark, being one of the commissioners. The sum required was estimated at £22,536. The king's zeal ended here; and his favourite, Buckingham, borrowed the stone collected for St. Paul's for his Strand palace, and from parts of it was raised that fine watergate still existing in the Thames Embankment gardens.
When Charles I. made that narrow-minded churchman, Laud, Bishop of London, one of Laud's first endeavours was to restore St. Paul's. Charles I. was a man of taste, and patronised painting and architecture. Inigo Jones was already building the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The king was so pleased with Inigo's design for the new portico of St. Paul's, that he proposed to pay for that himself. Laud gave £1,200. The fines of the obnoxious and illegal High Commission Court were set apart for the same object. The small sheds and houses round the west front were ruthlessly cleared away. All shops in Cheapside and Lombard Street, except goldsmiths, were to be shut up, that the eastern approach to St. Paul'smight appear more splendid. The church of St. Gregory, at the south-west wing of the cathedral, was removed and rebuilt. Inigo Jones cut away all the decayed stone and crumbling Gothic work of the Cathedral, and on the west portico expended all the knowledge he had acquired in his visit to Rome. The result was a pagan composite, beautiful but incongruous. The front, 161 feet long and 162 feet high, was supported by fourteen Corinthian columns. On the parapet above the pillars Inigo proposed that there should stand ten statues of princely benefactors of St. Paul's. At each angle of the west front there was a tower. The portico was intended for a Paul's Walk, to drain off the profanation from within.
THE CHAPTER HOUSE OF OLD ST. PAUL'S, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR
Nor were the London citizens backward. One most large-hearted man, Sir Paul Pindar, a Turkey merchant who had been ambassador at Constantinople, and whose house is still to be seen in Bishopsgate Street, contributed £10,000 towards the screen and south transept. The statues of James and Charles were set up over the portico, and the steeple was begun, when the storm arose that soon whistled off the king's unlucky head. The coming troubles cast shadows around St. Paul's. In March,1639, a paper was found in the yard of the deanery, before Laud's house, inscribed—"Laud, look to thyself. Be assured that thy life is sought, as thou art the fountain of all wickedness;" and in October, 1640, the High Commission sitting at St. Paul's, nearly 2,000 Puritans made a tumult, tore down the benches in the consistory, and shouted, "We will have no bishops and no High Commission."
The Parliament made short work with St. Paul's, of Laud's projects, and Inigo Jones's classicalisms. They at once seized the £17,000 or so left of the subscription. To Colonel Jephson's regiment, in arrears for pay, £1,746, they gave the scaffolding round St. Paul's tower, and in pulling it to pieces down came part of St. Paul's south transept. The copes in St. Paul's were burnt (to extract the gold), and the money sent to the persecuted Protestant poor in Ireland. The silver vessels were sold to buy artillery for Cromwell. There was a story current that Cromwell intended to sell St. Paul's to the Jews for a synagogue. The east end of the church was walled in for a Puritan lecturer; the graves were desecrated; the choir became a cavalry barracks; the portico was let out to sempsters and hucksters, who lodged in rooms above; James and Charleswere toppled from the portico; while the pulpit and cross were entirely destroyed. The dragoons in St. Paul's became so troublesome to the inhabitants by their noisy brawling games and their rough interruption of passengers, that in 1651 we find them forbidden to play at ninepins from six a.m. to nine p.m.
DR. BOURNE PREACHING AT PAUL'S CROSS
When the Restoration came, sunshine again fell upon the ruins. Wren, that great genius, was called in. His report was not very favourable. The pillars were giving way; the whole work had been from the beginning ill designed and ill built; the tower was leaning. He proposed to have a rotunda, with cupola and lantern, to give the church light, "and incomparable more grace" than the lean shaft of a steeple could possibly afford. He closed his report by a eulogy on the portico of Inigo Jones, as "an absolute piece in itself." Some of the stone collected for St. Paul's went, it is said, to build Lord Clarendon's house (site of Albemarle Street). On August 27, 1661, good Mr. Evelyn, one of the commissioners, describes going with Wren, the Bishop and Dean of St. Paul's, &c., and resolving finally on a new foundation. On Sunday, September 2, the Great Fire drew a red cancelling line over Wren's half-drawn plans. The old cathedral passed away, like Elijah, in flames. The fire broke out about ten o'clock on Saturday night at a bakehouse in Pudding Lane, near East Smithfield. Sunday afternoon Pepys found all the goods carried that morning to Cannon Street now removing to Lombard Street. At St. Paul's Wharf he takes water, follows the king's party, and lands at Bankside. "In corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the city, a most horrid, bloody, malicious flame, not like the flame of an ordinary fire." On the 7th, he saw St. Paul's Church with all the roof off, and the body of the quire fallen into St. Faith's.
On Monday, the 3rd, Mr. Evelyn describes the whole north of the City on fire, the sky light for ten miles round, and the scaffolds round St. Paul's catching. On the 4th he saw the stones of St. Paul's flying like grenades, the melting lead running in streams down the streets, the very pavements too hot for the feet, and the approaches too blocked for any help to be applied. A Westminster boy named Taswell (quoted by Dean Milman from "Camden's Miscellany," vol. ii., p. 12) has also sketched the scene. On Monday, the 3rd, from Westminster he saw, about eight o'clock, the fire burst forth, and before nine he could read by the blaze a 16mo "Terence" which he had with him. The boy at once set out for St. Paul's, resting by the way upon Fleet Bridge, being almost faint withthe intense heat of the air. The bells were melting, and vast avalanches of stones were pouring from the walls. Near the east end he found the body of an old woman, who had cowered there, burned to a coal. Taswell also relates that the ashes of the books kept in St. Faith's were blown as far as Eton.
On the 7th (Friday) Evelyn again visited St. Paul's. The portico he found rent in pieces, the vast stones split asunder, and nothing remaining entire but the inscription on the architrave, not one letter of which was injured. Six acres of lead on the roof were all melted. The roof of St. Faith's had fallen in, and all the magazines and books from Paternoster Row were consumed, burning for a week together. Singularly enough, the lead over the altar at the east end was untouched, and among the monuments the body of one bishop (Braybroke—Richard II.) remained entire. The old tombs nearly all perished; amongst them those of two Saxon kings, John of Gaunt, his wife Constance of Castile, poor St. Erkenwald, and scores of bishops, good and bad; Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, and father of the great philosopher; the last of the true knights, the gallant Sir Philip Sidney; and Walsingham, that astute counsellor of Elizabeth. Then there was Sir Christopher Hatton, the dancing chancellor, whose proud monument crowded back Walsingham and Sidney's. According to the old scoffing distich,
"Philip and Francis they have no tomb,For great Christopher takes all the room."
Men of letters in old St. Paul's (says Dean Milman) there were few. The chief were Lily, the grammarian, second master of St. Paul's; and Linacre, the physician, the friend of Colet and Erasmus. Of artists there was at least one great man—Vandyck, who was buried near John of Gaunt. Among citizens, the chief was Sir William Hewet, whose daughter married Osborne, an apprentice, who saved her from drowning, and who was the ancestor of the Dukes of Leeds.
After the fire, Bishop Sancroft preached in a patched-up part of the west end of the ruins. All hopes of restoration were soon abandoned, as Wren had, with his instinctive genius, at once predicted. Sancroft at once wrote to the great architect, "What you last whispered in my ear is now come to pass. A pillar has fallen, and the rest threatens to follow." The letter concludes thus: "You are so absolutely necessary to us, that we can do nothing, resolve on nothing, without you." There was plenty of zeal in London still; but, nevertheless, after all, nothing was done to the rebuilding till the year 1673.
ST. PAUL'S (continued)
The Rebuilding of St. Paul's—Ill Treatment of its Architect—Cost of the Present Fabric—Royal Visitors—The First Grave in St. Paul's—Monuments in St. Paul's—Nelson's Funeral—Military Heroes in St. Paul's—The Duke of Wellington's Funeral—Other Great Men in St. Paul's—Proposals for the Completion and Decoration of the Building—Dimensions of St. Paul's—Plan of Construction—The Dome, Ball, and Cross—Mr. Homer and his Observatory—Two Narrow Escapes—Sir James Thornhill—Peregrine Falcons on St. Paul's—Nooks and Corners of the Cathedral—The Library, Model Room, and Clock—The Great Bell—A Lucky Error—Curious Story of a Monomaniac—The Poets and the Cathedral—The Festivals of the Charity Schools and of the Sons of the Clergy.
The Rebuilding of St. Paul's—Ill Treatment of its Architect—Cost of the Present Fabric—Royal Visitors—The First Grave in St. Paul's—Monuments in St. Paul's—Nelson's Funeral—Military Heroes in St. Paul's—The Duke of Wellington's Funeral—Other Great Men in St. Paul's—Proposals for the Completion and Decoration of the Building—Dimensions of St. Paul's—Plan of Construction—The Dome, Ball, and Cross—Mr. Homer and his Observatory—Two Narrow Escapes—Sir James Thornhill—Peregrine Falcons on St. Paul's—Nooks and Corners of the Cathedral—The Library, Model Room, and Clock—The Great Bell—A Lucky Error—Curious Story of a Monomaniac—The Poets and the Cathedral—The Festivals of the Charity Schools and of the Sons of the Clergy.
Towards the rebuilding of St. Paul's Cathedral, Charles II., generous as usual in promises, offered an annual contribution of £1,000; but this, however, never seems to have been paid. It, no doubt, went to pay Nell Gwynne's losses at the gambling-table, or to feed the Duchess of Portsmouth's lap-dogs. Some £1,700 in fines, however, were set apart for the new building. The Primate Sheldon gave £2,000. Many of the bishops contributed largely, and there were parochial collections all over England. But the bulk of the money was obtained from the City duty on coals, which (as Dean Milman remarks) in time had their revenge in destroying the stone-work of the Cathedral. It was only by a fortunate accident that Wren became the builder; for Charles II., whose tastes and vices were all French, had in vain invited over Perrault, the designer of one of the fronts of the Louvre.
The great architect, Wren, was the son of a Dean of Windsor, and nephew of a Bishop of Norwich whom Cromwell had imprisoned for his Romish tendencies. From a boy Wren had shown a genius for scientific discovery. He distinguished himself in almost every branch of knowledge, and to his fruitful brain we are indebted for some fifty-two suggestive discoveries. He now hoped to rebuild London on a magnificent scale; but it was not to be. Even in the plans for the new cathedral Wren was from the beginning thwarted and impeded. Ignorance, envy, jealousy, and selfishness met him at every line he drew. He made two designs—the first a Greek, the second a Latin cross. The Greek cross the clergy considered as unsuitable for a cathedral. The model for it was long preserved in the Trophy Room of St. Paul's, where, either from neglect or the zeal of relic-hunters, the western portico was lost. It is now at South Kensington, and is still imperfect. The interior of the first design is by many considered superior to the present interior. The present recesses along the aisles of the nave, tradition says, were insisted on by James II., who thought they would be useful as side chapels when masses were once more introduced.
The first stone was laid by Wren on the 21stJune, 1675, but there was no public ceremonial. Soon after the great geometrician had drawn the circle for the beautiful dome, he sent a workman for a stone to mark the exact centre. The man returned with a fragment of a tombstone, on which was the one ominous word (as every one observed) "Resurgam!" The ruins of old St. Paul's were stubborn. In trying to blow up the tower, a passer-by was killed, and Wren, with his usual ingenuity, resorted successfully to the old Roman battering-ram, which soon cleared a way. "I build for eternity," said Wren, with the true confidence of genius, as he searched for a firm foundation. Below the Norman, Saxon, and Roman graves he dug and probed till he could find the most reliable stratum. Below the loam was sand; under the sand a layer of fresh-water shells; under these were sand, gravel, and London clay. At the north-east corner of the dome Wren was vexed by coming upon a pit dug by the Roman potters in search of clay. He, however, began from the solid earth a strong pier of masonry, and above turned a short arch to the former foundation. He also slanted the new building more to the north-east than its predecessor, in order to widen the street south of St. Paul's.
Well begun is half done. The Cathedral grew fast, and in two-and-twenty years from the laying of the first stone the choir was opened for Divine service. The master mason who helped to lay the first stone assisted in fixing the last in the lantern. A great day was chosen for the opening of St. Paul's. December 2nd, 1697, was the thanksgiving day for the Peace of Ryswick—the treaty which humbled France, and seated William firmly and permanently on the English throne. The king, much against his will, was persuaded to stay at home by his courtiers, who dreaded armed Jacobites among the 300,000 people who would throng the streets. Worthy Bishop Compton, who, dressed as a trooper, had guarded the Princess Anne in her flight from her father, preached that inspiring day on the text, "I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord." From then till now the daily voice of prayer and praise has never ceased in St. Paul's.
Queen Anne, during her eventful reign, went seven times to St. Paul's in solemn procession, to commemorate victories over France or Spain. The first of these (1702) was a jubilee for Marlborough's triumph in the Low Countries, and Rooke's destruction of the Spanish fleet at Vigo. The Queen sat on a raised and canopied throne; the Duke of Marlborough, as Groom of the Stole, on a stool behind her. The Lords and Commons, who had arrived in procession, were arranged in the choir. The brave old Whig Bishop of Exeter, Sir Jonathan Trelawney ("and shall Trelawney die?"), preached the sermon. Guns at the Tower, on the river, and in St. James's Park, fired off the Te Deum, and when the Queen started and returned. In 1704, the victory of Blenheim was celebrated; in 1705, the forcing of the French lines at Tirlemont; in 1706, the battle of Ramillies and Lord Peterborough's successes in Spain; in 1707, more triumphs; in 1708, the battle of Oudenarde; and last of all, in 1713, the Peace of Utrecht, when the Queen was unable to attend. On this last day the charity children of London (4,000 in number) first attended outside the church.
St. Paul's was already, to all intents and purposes, completed. The dome was ringed with its golden gallery, and crowned with its glittering cross. In 1710, Wren's son and the body of Freemasons had laid the highest stone of the lantern of the cupola, and now commenced the bitterest mortifications of Wren's life. The commissioners had dwindled down to Dean Godolphin and six or seven civilians from Doctors' Commons. Wren's old friends were dead. His foes compelled him to pile the organ on the screen, though he had intended it to be under the north-east arch of the choir, where it now is. Wren wished to use mosaic for internal decoration; they pronounced it too costly, and they took the painting of the cupola out of Wren's hands and gave it to Hogarth's father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill. They complained of wilful delay in the work, and accused Wren or his assistant of corruption; they also withheld part of his salary till the work was completed. Wren covered the cupola with lead, at a cost of £2,500; the committee were for copper, at £3,050. About the iron railing for the churchyard there was also wrangling. Wren wished a low fence, to leave the vestibule and the steps free and open. The commissioners thought Wren's design mean and weak, and chose the present heavy and cumbrous iron-work, which breaks up the view of the west front.
The new organ, by Father Bernard Smith, which cost £2,000, was shorn of its full size by Wren,perhaps in vexation at its misplacement. The paltry statue of Queen Anne, in the churchyard, was by Bird, and cost £1,130, exclusive of the marble, which the Queen provided. The carvings in the choir, by Grinling Gibbons, cost £1,337 7s. 5d. On some of the exterior sculpture Cibber worked.
In 1718 a violent pamphlet appeared, written, it was supposed, by one of the commissioners. It accused Wren's head workmen of pilfering timber and cracking the bells. Wren proved the charges to be malicious and untrue. The commissioners now insisted on adding a stone balustrade all round St. Paul's, in spite of Wren's protests. He condemned the addition as "contrary to the principles of architecture, and as breaking into the harmony of the whole design;" but, he said, "ladies think nothing well without an edging."
The next year, the commissioners went a step further. Wren, then eighty-six years old, and in the forty-ninth year of office, was dismissed without apology from his post of Surveyor of Public Works. The German Court, hostile to all who had served the Stuarts, appointed in his place a poor pretender, named Benson. This charlatan—now only remembered by a line in the "Dunciad," which ridicules the singular vanity of a man who erected a monument to Milton, in Westminster Abbey, and crowded the marble with his own titles—was afterwards dismissed from his surveyorship with ignominy, but had yet influence enough at Court to escape prosecution and obtain several valuable sinecures. Wren retired to his house at Hampton Court, and there sought consolation in philosophical and religious studies. Once a year, says Horace Walpole, the good old man was carried to St. Paul's, to contemplate the gloriouschef-d'œuvreof his genius. Steele, in theTatler, refers to Wren's vexations, and attributes them to his modesty and bashfulness.
The total sum expended on the building of St. Paul's Cathedral, according to Dean Milman, was £736,752 2s. 3¼d.; a small residue from the coal duty was all that was left for future repairs. To this Dean Clark added about £500, part of the profits arising from an Essex estate (the gift of an old Saxon king), leased from the Dean and Chapter. The charge of the fabric was vested not in the Dean and Chapter, but in the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and the Lord Mayor for the time being. These trustees elect the surveyor and audit the accounts.
On the accession of George I. (1715), the new king, princes, and princesses went in state to St. Paul's. Seventy years elapsed before an English king again entered Wren's cathedral. In April,1789, George III. came to thank God for his temporary recovery from insanity. Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of York were present, and both Houses of Parliament. Bishop Porteous preached the sermon, and 6,000 charity children joined in the service. In 1797, King George came again to attend a thanksgiving for Lord Duncan's and Lord Howe's naval victories; French, Spanish, and Dutch flags waved above the procession, and Sir Horatio Nelson was there among other heroes.
The first grave sunk in St. Paul's was fittingly that of Wren, its builder. He lies in the place of honour, the extreme east of the crypt. The black marble slab is railed in, and the light from a small window-grating falls upon the venerated name. Sir Christopher died in 1723, aged ninety-one. The fine inscription, "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice," written probably by his son, or Mylne, the builder of Blackfriars Bridge, was formerly in front of the organ-gallery, but is now placed over the north-western entrance.
The clergy of St. Paul's were for a long time jealous of allowing any monument in the cathedral. Dean Newton wished for a tomb, but it was afterwards erected in St. Mary-le-Bow. A better man than the vain, place-hunting dean was the first honoured. The earliest statue admitted was that of the benevolent Howard, who had mitigated suffering and sorrow in all the prisons of Europe; he stands at the corner of the dome facing that half-stripped athlete, Dr. Johnson, and the two are generally taken by country visitors for St. Peter and St. Paul. He who with Goldsmith had wandered through the Abbey, wondering if one day their names might not be recorded there, found a grave in Westminster, and, thanks to Reynolds, the first place of honour. Sir Joshua himself, as one of our greatest painters, took the third place, that Hogarth should have occupied; and the fourth was awarded to that great Oriental scholar, Sir William Jones. The clerical opposition was now broken through, for the world felt that the Abbey was full enough, and that St. Paul's required adorning.
Henceforward St. Paul's was chiefly set apart for naval and military heroes whom the city could best appreciate, while the poets, great writers, and statesmen were honoured in the Abbey, and laid among the old historic dead. From the beginning our sculptors resorted to pagan emblems and pagan allegorical figures; the result is that St. Paul's resembles a Pantheon of the Lower Empire, and is a hospital of third-rate art. The first naval conqueror so honoured was Rodney; Rossi received £6,000 for his cold and clumsy design;Lord Howe's statue followed; and next that of Lord Duncan, the hero of Camperdown. It is a simple statue by Westmacott, with a seaman and his wife and child on the pedestal. For Earl St. Vincent, Bailey produced a colossal statue and the usual scribbling, History and a trumpeting Victory.
Then came Nelson's brothers in arms—men of lesser mark; but the nation was grateful, and the Government was anxious to justify its wars by its victories. St. Paul's was growing less particular, and now opened its arms to the best men it could get. Many of Nelson's captains preceded him on the red road to death—Westcott, who fell at Aboukir; Mosse and Riou, who fell before Copenhagen (a far from stainless victory). Riou was the brave man whom Campbell immortalised in his fiery "Battle of the Baltic." Riou lies