There is one marvellous tale which is hardly likely to be forgotten so long as men can look down from Notre Dame de la Garde on the sunny beauty of Marseilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into oblivion, the sight of Château d'If as it rises glowing from the blue waters of the Mediterranean will serve to recall the wonders of 'Monte Christo.' But the true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its mere command over the wonderful but in the peculiar sense of wonder which it excites. It was the first literary attempt to raise the mere dead fact of money into the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the dormant poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single age in the world's history when wealth has told with any force upon the imagination of men. Unpoetic as the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst upon it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled insenators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, wild and extravagant as it seems, has in some of its qualities found no parallel since. The feast of Lucullus, the gluttony of Heliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth of vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport of a day, the encounters of navies in the mimic warfare of the Coliseum, are the freaks of gigantic children tossing about wildly the slowly-hoarded treasures of past generations; but they are freaks which for the first time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in the future of wealth.
It is hard to say whether such a time will ever return. No doubt the world is infinitely richer now than it was in the time of the Romans, and no doubt too there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of proconsuls. But the wealth of the modern capitalist is a wealth which has grown by slow accumulations, a wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its enormous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has never had brought home to him with the same sort of shock as that which Lucullus must have felt when he fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or Clive when hethreaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the royal vaults of Moorshedabad. So far indeed is wealth from stimulating the imagination nowadays that a banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a financier an object of suspicion to the money market. But it is conceivable in the odd freaks of things that we may yet see the advent of the Poet-Capitalist. It is almost impossible to say what new opportunities the possession of fabulous resources might not add to the fancy of a dreamer or to the speculations of a philanthropist. It is not till after a little thought that we realize how materially the course of human progress is obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, or how easily the sum of human happiness might be increased by the sudden descent of a golden shower on the right people at the right time.
There are dreams which men have been dreaming for generation after generation which require nothing for their realization but the appearance of such a capitalist as we have imagined. To take what may seem perhaps an odd instance, just because it is an odd instance, let us remember what a wonderful amount of hope andanticipation has been thrown by a great religious party into the restoration of the Jews. Rightly or wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of excitement through the life of quiet parsonages and kindles a new fire even in the dreariest May meetings at Exeter Hall. But in point of actual fact there is not the slightest necessity to await any great spiritual revolution for the accomplishment of such a dream if its accomplishment were really desirable. A league of Evangelical bankers who fully believed in the prophecies they are so fond of quoting could turn the wildest fancies of Dr. Cumming into sober earnest with very little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would undertake the transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; the bare limestone uplands of Judæa could be covered again with terraces of olive and vine at precisely the same cost of money and industry as is still required to keep up the cultivation of the Riviera; and Mr. Fergusson would furnish for a due consideration plans and estimates for a restoration of the Temple on Zion. We are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity for investing money to any great profit, but it is odd to live in a world of wealthy people who believe firmly that its realization would make this world into a littleheaven below and yet never seem to feel that they have the means of bringing it about in their cheque-books. Or to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which has actually been brought a little nearer to practical realization. Some time ago a body of Welsh patriots determined to save the tongue and literature of the Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh nation on the shores of Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were to be read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam of the codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The plan failed simply because its originators were poor and unable to tide over the first difficulties of the project. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a passion for nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the cost of a few hundreds of thousands creating perhaps a type of national life which might directly or indirectly affect the future of the world. Such a man might secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with less trouble than he could obtain a large estate and a share in the commission of the peace for a midland county.
But there is no need to restrict ourselves simplyto oddities, although oddities of this sort acquire a grandeur of their own at the touch of wealth. The whole field of social experiment lies open to a great capitalist. The one thing required, for instance, to render the squalor and misery of our larger towns practically impossible would be the actual sight of a large town without squalor or misery; and yet if Liverpool were simply handed over to a great philanthropist with the income of half-a-dozen Dukes of Westminster such a sight might easily be seen. Schemes of this sort require nothing but what we may term the poetic employment of capital for their realization. It is strange that no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties—those, we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships of the farmer's position, and those which arise from the terrible serfage of the rurallabourer. But the experiments which have been as yet carried on are on too small a scale either to produce any influence on the labour market as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer.
Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties for scientific inquiry whoare at the present moment pinned down to the daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of international politics. Already those who come in contact with the big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman,but by the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no European Gould has risen up to "finance" Downing Street into submission, or to meet the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the Stock Exchange. Of all the schemes however which we have suggested, this is probably the nearest to practical realization. If not we ourselves, our children at any rate may see International Congresses made possible by a few people quietly buttoning their breeches-pockets, and the march of "armed nations" arrested by "a run for gold."
Taking however men as they are, it is far more wonderful that no one has hit on the enormous field which wealth opens for the developement of sheer downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense which goes quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over from mere want of opportunity. The boy who wants to trip up his tutor can easily find a string to tie across the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the simpler joys of childhood strings are not so easy to find. To carry out a practical joke of the Christopher Sly sort we require, as Shakespere saw, the resources of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimitedwealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grandeur such as the world has never realized. The Erie Ring taught us a little of what capital might do in this way, but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these considerations overboard and treat a great question in the spirit of sheer mischief, and the results may be simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a capitalist getting the railways round London into his power, and then in sheer freak stopping the traffic for a single day. No doubt the day would be a short one, but even twelve hours of such a practical joke would bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has never seen. But there would be no need of such an enormous operation to enable us to realize the power of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every omnibus and every cab in the metropolis and compel us to paddle about for a week in the mud of November before the loss was replaced.
It is quite possible indeed that gigantic mischief of this sort may find its sphere in practical politics. Already Continental Governments watch with anxietythe power which employers possess of bringing about a revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing thousands of unemployed labourers on the street; but it is a power which in some degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an important factor in political questions.
Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England the political power which such a national employment of their wealth would give them—a blindness which is allthe more wonderful in what is at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions, and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.
It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by"panem et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who own half London to construct the Thames Embankment at their own cost, and to hand it over free from the higglings of Mr. Gore to the people at large. Even now we may hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with fabulous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury by the offer of a National Gallery of Art, or checkmating the jobbers of South Kensington by the erection of a National Museum. It seems to be easy enough for peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at Newmarket or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand would establish in the crowded haunts of working London great "Conservatoires" where the finest music might be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama may be perishing in default of a State subvention, but it never seems to enter any one's head that there are dozens of people among those who grumbled at the artistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a subvention at the present cost of their stable. As yethowever we must be content, we suppose, with such a use of wealth as 'Lothair' brings to the front—the purely selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which selfishness has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, costly studs and costly conservatories, existence relieved of every hitch and discomfort—these are the outlets which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For nobler outlets we must wait for the advent of the Poet-Capitalist.
A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to the huge mass of the Houses of Parliament, lies a broken, irregular pile of buildings, at whose angle, looking out over the Thames, is one grey weatherbeaten tower. The broken pile is the archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth; the grey weatherbeaten building is its Lollards' Tower. From this tower the mansion itself stretches in a varied line, chapel and guard-room and gallery and the stately buildings of the new house looking out on the terrace and garden; while the Great Hall, in which the library has now found a home, is the low picturesque building which reaches southward along the river to the gate.
The story of each of these spots will interweave itself with the thread of our narrative as we proceed;but I would warn my readers at the outset that I do not purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself, or to attempt any architectural or picturesque description of the place. What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.
Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So long as the political head of the English people ruled, like Ælfred or Æthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the Kings finally to Westminster thatthe Archbishops were permanently drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been simply the head of the ecclesiastical order—a representative of the moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest, the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of the People.
Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the traditional constitution ofthe realm. It was his to call on the people to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the observance of the covenant of that solemn day, to raise obedience and order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the Church,—this was the political office of the Primate in the new order which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over Thames.
From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which together were to make up the England of the future laymarshalled over against each other on either side the water.
With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again, its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway ofMorton to the garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorway at the angle of Lollards' Tower, and mounting a few steps, they will find themselves in a square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with a single small window looking out towards the Thames. The chamber is at the base of Lollards' Tower; in the centre stands a huge oaken pillar, to which the room owes its name of the "Post-room," and to which somewhat mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been tied when they were "examined" by the whip. On its western side a doorway of the purest Early English work leads us directly into the palace Chapel.
It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart of the ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls beneath which the men in whose hands the fortunes of English religion have been placed from the age of the Great Charter till to-day have comeand gone; to see the light falling through the tall windows with their marble shafts on the spot where Wyclif fronted Sudbury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the stately screen-work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad communion of Sancroft originated the Nonjurors. It is strange to note the very characteristics of the building itself, marred as it is by modern restoration, and to feel how simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the beauty of Salisbury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the Church that finds its centre there.
And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roystering figure of the Primate to whom, if tradition be true, it owes this beauty. Boniface of Savoy was the youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece Eleanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to build up a foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Amadeus was richly enfeoffed with English lands; the Savoy Palace in the Strand still recalls the settlement and the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third and younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in the State save the Crown itself. "The handsome Archbishop," as his knights loved to call him, was not merely a foreigner as Lanfranc and Anselmhad been foreigners—strange in manner or in speech to the flock whom they ruled—he was foreign in the worst sense: strange to their freedom, their sense of law, their reverence for piety. His first visit set everything on fire. He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the Pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary of his tyranny. When the threat of sequestration recalled him after four years of absence to his see, his hatred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish Lambeth. Certainly he went the wrong way to stay here. The young Primate brought with him Savoyard fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground a prior who opposed his visitation. It was the Prior of St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield; and London, on the King's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy crowd of citizens were soon swarming beneath the walls of the palace, shouting threats of vengeance.
For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the tumult he caused the sentences of excommunicationwhich he had fulminated to be legally executed in the chapel of his house. But bravado like this soon died before the universal resentment, and "the handsome Archbishop" fled again to Lyons. How helpless the successor of Augustine really was was shown by a daring outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace, his official, had thrown into prison the Prior of St. Thomas's Hospital for some contempt of court; and the Prior's diocesan, the Bishop of Winchester, a prelate as foreign and lawless as Boniface himself, took up the injury as his own. A party of his knights appeared before the house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set Master Eustace on horseback, and carried him off to the episcopal prison at Farnham. At last Boniface bowed to submission, surrendered the points at issue, recalled his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He had learnt his lesson well enough to remain from that time a quiet, inactive man, with a dash of continental frugality and wit about him. Whether he built the chapel or no, he would probably have said of it as he said of the Great Hall at Canterbury, "My predecessors built, and I discharge the debt for their building. It seems to me that the true builder is the man that pays the bill."
But Boniface never learnt to be an Englishman. When under the guidance of Earl Simon of Montfort the barons wrested the observance of their Charter from the King the Primate of England found shelter in a fresh exile. The Church had in fact ceased to be national. The figure of the first Reformer, as he stands on the chapel floor, is in itself the fittest comment on the age in which the chapel was built, an age when the interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom had sheered off from the church which had so long been their protector. With them the moral and spiritual life of the people sheered off too. The vast ecclesiastical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury solely on its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a single man summed up in himself the national, the mental, the moral power it had lost, and struck at the double base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect of his day, national and English to the very core, declared its tradition corrupt and its wealth antichrist. The two forces that above all had built up the system of mediæval Christianity, the subtlety of the schoolman, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united to strike it down.
It is curious to mark how timidly the Primate of the day dealt with such a danger as this. Sudbury was acting in virtue of a Papal injunction, but he acted as though the shadow of the terrible doom that was awaiting him had already fallen over him. He summoned the popular Bishop of London to his aid ere he cited the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was not as a prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel: from the first his tone was that of a man who knew that he was secure. He claimed to have the most favourable construction put upon his words; then, availing himself of his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that where they might bear two meanings his judges should take them in an orthodox sense. It was not a noble scene—there was little in it of Luther's "Here stand I—I can none other;" but both sides were in fact acting a part. On the one hand the dead pressure of ecclesiastical fanaticism was driving the Primate into a position from which he sought only to escape; on the other Wyclif was merely gaining time—"beating step," as men say—with his scholastic formulæ. What he looked for soon came. There was a rumour in the City that Papal delegates were sitting in judgment on the Reformer, and London was at onceastir. Crowds of angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, and already there was talk of attacking it when a message from the Council of Regency commanded a suspension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dismissed his prisoner with a formal injunction, and the day was for ever lost to the Church.
But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peaceably before Wyclif, it was not from any doubt of the deadly earnestness of the struggle that lay before her. Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Maitland has shown that the common name rests on a mere error, and that the Lollards' Tower which meets us so grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the popular voice showed a singular historical tact in its mistake; the tower which Chichele raised marked more than any other in the very date of its erection the new age of persecution on which England was to enter. From a gateway in the northern side of the Post-room worn stone steps lead up to a dungeon in which many a prisoner for the faith must have lain.The massive oaken door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one narrow window looking out over the river, tell their tale as well as the broken sentences scratched or carved around. Some are mere names; here and there some light-pated youngster paying for his night's uproar has carved his dice or his "Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." But "Jesus est amor meus" is sacred, whether Lollard or Jesuit graved it in the lonely prison hours, and not less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum actio" that marks perhaps the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of the near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to think, as one winds once more down the stairs that such feet have trodden, how soon England answered to the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over the Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown grey under the buffetings of a hundred years ere Lollard was no longer a word of shame, and the reformation that Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the chapel where he had battled for his life.
The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in LambethChapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown. The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its broad arch-window, recalls an age—that of its builder, Archbishop Morton—when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on, and of perfectlytransferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept away.
It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still, impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to his rest,—"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is thepossessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning.
Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world—for I cling to a word so eminently expressive of a truth that historians of our day seem inclined to forget or to deny—of that regeneration of mankind through the sudden upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in England the shrine. With the Reformation which followed it Lambeth, as we shall see, had little to do. But the home of Warham was the home of the revival of letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library which still preserves their tradition, ousted from its older dwelling-place by the demolition of the cloister, has in modern days found refuge in the Great Hall, the successor and copy of that hall where themen of the New Learning, where Colet and More and Grocyn and Linacre gathered round the table of Warham.
It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to the Primate's board. Warham addressed a few kindly words to the poor scholar before and after dinner, and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall (his usual way when he made a present to any one) slipped into his hand an acknowledgment for the book and dedication he had brought with him. "How much did the Archbishop give you?" asked his companion as they rowed home again. "An immense amount!" replied Erasmus, but his friend saw the discontent on his face, and drew from him how small the sum really was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string of indignant questions: was Warham miserly, or was he poor, or did he really think such a present expressed the value of the book? Grocyn frankly blurted out the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had been prefixed to the 'Hecuba,' and it is likely enough that the Primate's suspicion was right. At any rate, Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It isthe way with you scholars," stuck in his mind even when he returned to Paris, and made him forward to the Archbishop a perfectly new translation of the 'Iphigenia.'
Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly than Warham the new conception of an intellectual and moral equality before which the old social distinctions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this group of friends he seems utterly unconscious of the exalted station which he occupied in the eyes of men. Take such a story as Erasmus tells of a visit of Dean Colet to Lambeth. The Dean took Erasmus in the boat with him, and read as they rowed along a section called 'The Remedy for Anger' in his friend's popular 'Handbook of the Christian Soldier.' When they reached the hall however Colet plumped gloomily down by Warham's side, neither eating nor drinking nor speaking in spite of the Archbishop's good-humoured attempt to draw him into conversation. It was only by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that the Archbishop was at last successful; and when dinner was over Colet's ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus saw him draw aside an old man who had shared theirboard, and engage in the friendliest greeting. "What a fortunate fellow you are!" began the impetuous Dean, as the two friends stepped again into their boat; "what a tide of good-luck you bring with you!" Erasmus, of course, protested (one can almost see the half-earnest, half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most unfortunate fellow on earth. He was at any rate a bringer of good fortune to his friends, the Dean retorted; one friend at least he had saved from an unseemly outbreak of passion. At the Archbishop's table, in fact, Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle with whom he had long waged a bitter family feud, and it was only the singular chance which had brought him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of the 'Handbook' that had enabled the Dean to refrain at the moment from open quarrel, and at last to get such a full mastery over his temper as to bring about a reconciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly very lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite as fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tempered as Archbishop Warham.
Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by the settlement of Erasmus at Basel, but the severancebrought no interruption to their friendship. "England is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a rich German prelate; "if that goes, I must beg." The anchor held as long as Warham lived. Years go by, but the Primate is never tired of new gifts and remembrances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe was yelping. Sometimes indeed he was luckless in his presents; once he sent a horse to his friend, and, in spite of the well-known proverb about looking such a gift in the mouth, got a witty little snub for his pains. "He is no doubt a good steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, "but it must be owned he is not over-handsome; however he is at any rate free from all mortal sins, with the trifling exception of gluttony and laziness! If he were only a father confessor now! he has all the qualities to fit him for one—indeed, he is onlytooprudent, modest, humble, chaste, and peaceable!" Still, admirable as these characteristics are, he is not quite the nag one expected. "I fancy that through some knavery or blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a different steed from the one you intended for me. In fact, now I come to remember, I had bidden my servant not to accept a horse except itwere a good one; but I am infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's temper must have been tried as he laughed over such a letter as this; but the precious work of art which Lambeth contains proves that years only intensified their friendship. It was, as we have seen, with a letter of Erasmus in his hands, that on his first visit to England Holbein presented himself before Warham; and Erasmus responded to his friend's present of a copy of this portrait by forwarding a copy of his own.
With the Reformation in its nobler and purer aspects Lambeth—as we have said—had little to do. Bucer, Peter Martyr, and Alasco, gathered there for a moment round Cranmer, but it was simply as a resting-place on their way to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to Austin Friars. Only one of the symbols of the new Protestantism has any connection with it; the Prayer-Book was drawn up in the peaceful seclusion of Otford. The party conferences, the rival martyrdoms of the jarring creeds, took place elsewhere. The memories of Cranmer which linger around Lambeth are simply memories of degradation, and that the deepest degradation of all, the degradation of those solemn influences which thePrimacy embodies to the sanction of political infamy. It is fair indeed to remember the bitterness of Cranmer's suffering. Impassive as he seemed, with a face that never changed and sleep seldom known to be broken, men saw little of the inner anguish with which the tool of Henry's injustice bent before that overmastering will. But seldom as it was that the silent lips broke into complaint the pitiless pillage of his see wrung fruitless protests even from Cranmer. The pillage had began on the very eve of his consecration, and from that moment till the king's death Henry played the part of sturdy beggar for the archiepiscopal manors. Concession followed concession, and yet none sufficed to purchase security. The Archbishop lived in the very shadow of death. At one time he heard the music of the royal barge as it passed Lambeth, and hurried to the waterside to greet the King. "I have news for you my chaplain!" Henry broke out with his rough laugh as he drew Cranmer on board: "I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent!" and pulling a paper from his sleeve he showed him his denunciation by the prebendaries of his own cathedral. At another time he was summoned from his bed, and crossed the river to find Henry pacing the gallery at Whitehalland to hear that on the petition of the Council the King had consented to his committal to the Tower. The law of the Six Articles parted him from wife and child. "Happy man that you are" Cranmer groaned to Alexander Ales, whom with his wonted consideration for others he had summoned to Lambeth to warn him of his danger as a married priest; "happy man that you are that you can escape! I would that I could do the same. Truly my see would be no hindrance to me."
The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words of hardly less bitterness which he had listened to on a visit to Lambeth years before. If there was one person upon earth whom Cranmer loved it was Anne Boleyn. When the royal summons had called him to Lambeth to wait till the time arrived when his part was to be played in the murder of the Queen his affection found vent in words of a strange pathos. "I loved her not a little," he wrote to Henry in fruitless intercession, "for the love which I judged her to bear towards God and His Gospel. I was most bound to her of all creatures living." So he wrote, knowing there was wrong to be done towards thewoman he loved, wrong which he alone could do, and knowing too that he would stoop to do it. The large garden stretched away northward from his house then as now, but then thick, no doubt, with the elm rows that vanished some thirty years back as the great city's smoke drifted over them, and herein the early morning (it was but four o'clock) Ales, who had found sleep impossible and had crossed the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and stillness of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the preceding day Anne had gone through the mockery of her trial, but to the world outside the little circle of the court nothing was known, and it was in utter unconsciousness of this that Ales told the Archbishop he had been roused by a dream of her beheading. Cranmer was startled out of his usual calm. "Don't you know then," he asked after a moment's silence, "what is to happen to-day?" Then raising his eyes to heaven he added with a wild burst of tears, "She who has been Queen of England on earth will this day become a queen in heaven!" Some hours afterwards the Queen stood before him as her judge, and passed back to the Tower and the block.
Cranmer was freed by his master's death from thishelplessness of terror only to lend himself to the injustice of the meaner masters who followed Henry. Their enemies were at least his own, and, kindly as from many instances we know his nature to have been, its very weakness made him spring eagerly in such an hour of deliverance at the opportunity of showing his power over those who so long held him down. On charges of the most frivolous nature Bishop Gardiner and Bishop Bonner were summoned before the Archbishop at Lambeth, deposed from their sees, and flung into prison. It is only the record of their trials, as it still stands in the pages of Foxe, that can enable us to understand the violence of the reaction under Mary. Gardiner with characteristic dignity confined himself to simply refuting the charges brought against him and protesting against the injustice of the court. But the coarser, bull-dog nature of Bonner turned to bay. By gestures, by scoff, by plain English speech he declared again and again his sense of the wrong that was being done. A temper naturally fearless was stung to bravado by the sense of oppression. As he entered the hall at Lambeth he passed straight by the Archbishop and his fellow-commissioners, still keeping his cap on his head as though in unconsciousness of hispresence. One who stood by plucked his sleeve, and bade him do reverence. Bonner turned laughingly round and addressed the Archbishop, "What, my Lord, are you here? By my troth I saw you not." "It was because you would not see," Cranmer sternly rejoined. "Well," replied Bonner, "you sent for me: have you anything to say to me?" The charge was read. The Bishop had been commanded in a sermon to acknowledge that the acts of the King during his minority were as valid as if he were of full age. The command was flatly in contradiction with existing statutes, and the Bishop had no doubt disobeyed it.
But Bonner was too adroit to make a direct answer to the charge. He gained time by turning suddenly on the question of the Sacrament; he cited the appearance of Hooper as a witness in proof that it was really on this point that he was brought to trial, and he at last succeeded in arousing Cranmer's love of controversy. A reply of almost incredible profanity from the Archbishop, if we may trust Foxe's report, rewarded Bonner's perseverance in demanding a statement of his belief. The Bishop was not slow to accept the advantage he had gained. "I am right sorry to hear your Gracespeak these words," he said, with a grave shake of his head, and Cranmer was warned by the silence and earnest looks of his fellow-commissioners to break up the session.
Three days after, the addition of Sir Thomas Smith, the bitterest of Reformers, to the number of his assessors emboldened Cranmer to summon Bonner again. The court met in the chapel, and the Bishop was a second time commanded to reply to the charge. He objected now to the admission of the evidence of either Hooper or Latimer on the ground of their notorious heresy. "If that be the law," Cranmer replied hastily, "it is no godly law." "It is the King's law used in the realm," Bonner bluntly rejoined. Again Cranmer's temper gave his opponent the advantage. "Ye be too full of your law," replied the angry Primate; "I would wish you had less knowledge in that law and more knowledge in God's law and of your duty!" "Well," answered the Bishop with admirable self-command, "seeing your Grace falleth to wishing, I can also wish many things to be in your person." It was in vain that Smith strove to brush away his objections with a contemptuous "You do useus thus to be seen a common lawyer." "Indeed," the veteran canonist coolly retorted; "I knew the law ere you could read it!" There was nothing for it but a second adjournment of the court. At its next session all parties met in hotter mood. The Bishop pulled Hooper's books on the Sacrament from his sleeve and began reading them aloud. Latimer lifted up his head, as he alleged, to still the excitement of the people who crowded the chapel; as Bonner believed, to arouse a tumult. Cries of "Yea, yea," "Nay, nay," interrupted Bonner's reading. The Bishop turned round and faced the throng, crying out in humorous defiance, "Ah! Woodcocks! Woodcocks!" The taunt was met with universal laughter, but the scene had roused Cranmer's temper as well as his own. The Primate addressed himself to the people, protesting that Bonner was called in question for no such matter as he would persuade them. Again Bonner turned to the people with "Well now, hear what the Bishop of London saith for his part," but the commissioners forbade him to speak more. The court was at last recalled to a quieter tone, but contests of this sort still varied the proceedings as they dragged their slow length along in chapel and hall.
At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions, without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to practise as they do in London and elsewhere—answer it as you can!" Then bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the officers to the Marshalsea.
From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the midst of the chapel. But a reaction from the mere iconoclasm and bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism showed itself in the tapestries hung for the day along the eastern wall and in the rich carpet which was spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Ordination Service reappeared, but in their midst came the new spirit of the Reformation, the oath of submission to the royalsupremacy, the solemn gift no longer of the pastoral staff but of the Bible. The very dress of the four consecrating bishops showed the same confusion. Barlow, with the Archbishop's chaplains who assisted him in the office of the Communion, wore the silken copes of the older service; Scory and Hodgskins the fair linen surplice of the new. Yet more noteworthy was the aged figure of Coverdale, "Father Coverdale," as men used affectionately to call him, the well-known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so hardly wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Rejecting the very surplice as Popery, in his long Genevan cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan controversy over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Parker on to Laud.
The library of Parker, though no longer within its walls, is memorable in the literary history of Lambeth as the first of a series of such collections made after his time by each successive Archbishop. Many of these indeed have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the glory of Corpus College, Cambridge; the Oriental collections of Laud are among the most precious treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his fall Sancroft withdrew his books fromLambeth, and bequeathed them to Emmanuel College. The library which the munificence of Tenison bequeathed to his old parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been dispersed by a shameless act of Vandalism within our own memories. An old man's caprice deposited the papers of Archbishop Wake at Christ Church. But the treasures thus dispersed are, with the exception of the Parker MSS., far surpassed by the collections that remain. I cannot attempt here to enter with any detail into the nature of the history of the archiepiscopal library. It owes its origin to Archbishop Bancroft, it was largely supplemented by his successor Abbot, and still more largely after a long interval by the book-loving Primates Tenison and Secker. The library of 30,000 volumes still mainly consists of these collections, though it has been augmented by the smaller bequests of Sheldon and Cornwallis and in a far less degree by those of later Archbishops. One has at any rate the repute of having augmented it during his primacy simply by a treatise on gout and a book about butterflies. Of the 1,200 volumes of manuscripts and papers, 500 are due to Bancroft and Abbot, the rest mainly to Tenison, who purchased the Carew Papers, the collections of Wharton,and the Codices that bear his name. If Wake left his papers to Christ Church in dread of the succession of Bishop Gibson the bequest of Gibson's own papers more than made up the loss. The most valuable addition since Gibson's day has been that of the Greek Codices collected in the East at the opening of this century by Dr. Carlyle.
The importance of Parker's primacy however was political and ecclesiastical rather than literary. The first Protestant Archbishop was not the man to stoop to servility like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the queen to ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two tacitly arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite of Burleigh and Walsingham, was perhaps a greater curse both to nation and to Church than the meanness of Cranmer. The steady support given by the Crown to the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker moulded into shape was repaid by the conversion of every clergyman into the advocate of irresponsible government. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat that the Queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 1573. On either side the chapel in that day stood a greater and lesser cloister. The last, whichlay on the garden side, was swept away by the demolitions of the eighteenth century, the first still fills the space between chapel and hall but has been converted into domestic offices by the "restoration" of our own. Even Mr. Blore might have spared the cloisters from whose gallery on the side towards the Thames Elizabeth looked down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who leaned from the barred windows beneath and on the crowd of meaner subjects who filled the court, while she listened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit set by the well in the midst. At its close the Queen passed to dinner in the Archbishop's chamber of presence, while the noble throng beneath followed Burleigh and Lord Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told freshly of Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short as it was, it marked the conclusion of a new alliance between Church and State out of which the Ecclesiastical Commission was to spring.
Such an alliance would have been deadly for English religion as for English liberty had not its strength been broken by the obstinate resistance in wise as well asunwise ways of the Puritan party. There are few more interesting memorials of the struggle which followed than the 'Martin Marprelate' tracts which still remain in the collection at Lambeth, significantly scored in all their more virulent passages by the red pencil of Archbishop Whitgift. But the story of that controversy cannot be told here, though it was at Lambeth, as the seat of the High Commission, that it was really fought out. More and more it parted all who clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episcopate in a closer alliance with the Crown. When Elizabeth set Parker at the head of the new Ecclesiastical Commission, half the work of the Reformation was in fact undone.
Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyranny was perverted to the uses of civil tyranny of the vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical invectives of a Martin Marprelate deepened into the national fury of 'Canterburie's Doom.' With this political aspect of his life we have not now to deal; what Lambeth Chapel brings out with singular vividness is the strange audacity with which the Archbishop threw himself across the strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men noted as a fatal omen the accident thatmarked his first entry into Lambeth; the overladen ferry-boat upset in the crossing, and though horses and servants were saved the Primate's coach remained at the bottom of the Thames. But no omen brought hesitation to that bold, narrow mind. His first action, he tells us himself, was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud managed it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the Reformation had done.
"I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay so nastily," he wrote long after in his Defence, "that I was ashamed to behold, and could not resort unto it but with some disdain." With characteristic energy the Archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of the windows, and racked his wits "in making up the history of those old broken pictures by help of the fragments of them, which I compared with the story." In the east window his glazier was scandalized at being forced by the Primate's express directions to "repair and new make the broken crucifix." The holy table was set altar-wise against the wall, and a cloth of arras hung behind it embroidered with the history of the Last Supper. The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the richly-embroidered copes of thechaplains, the silver candlesticks, the credence-table, the organ and the choir, the genuflexions to the altar, recalled the elaborate ceremonial of the Royal Chapel.
High-handed however as the Archbishop's course had been, he felt dimly the approaching wreck. At the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a great storm that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to pieces as they lay before his gate. A curious instance of his gloomy prognostications still exists among the relics in the library—a quarry of greenish glass, once belonging to the west window of the gallery of Croydon, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On the quarry Laud has written with his signet-ring in his own clear, beautiful hand, "Memorand. Ecclesiæ de Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure combustæ sunt. Januar. 14, 1638-9. Omen avertat Deus."
The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war, the Bellum Episcopale, the Bishops' War, as men called it, was soon going against the King. Laud had been the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud that the popular indignation at once directeditself. On the 9th of May he notes in his diary: "A paper posted upon the Royal Exchange, animating 'prentices to sack my house on the Monday following." On that Monday night the mob came surging up to the gates. "At midnight my house was beset with 500 of these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little prelate. He had received notice in time to secure the house, and after two hours of useless shouting the mob rolled away. Laud had his revenge; a drummer who had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and then hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this was useless. The gathering of the Long Parliament sounded the knell of the sturdy little minister who had ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is in his upper study—it is one of the pleasant scholarly touches that redeem so much in his life—"to see some manuscripts which I was sending to Oxford. In that study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture is at Lambeth still), "and coming in I found it fallen down upon the face and lying on the floor, the string being broken by which it was hanged against the wall. I am almost everyday threatened with my ruin in parliament. God grant this be no omen." On the 18th of December he was in charge ofthe gentleman-usher of the Lords on impeachment of high treason. In his company the Archbishop returned for a few hours to see his house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, and such papers as pertained to my defence against the Scots;" really to burn, says Prynne, most of his privy papers. There is the first little break in the boldness with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will, the first little break too of tenderness, as though the shadow of what was to come were softening him, in the words that tell us his last farewell: "I stayed at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of the people. I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms of the day (Ps. 93 and 94) and cap. 50 of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me worthy of it, and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of my poor neighbours stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my house. For which I bless God and them."
So Laud vanished into the dark December night never to return. The house seems to have been left unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep it for public service." The troopers burst open thedoor "and offered violence to the organ," but it was saved for the time by the intervention of their captain. In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be restrained. Even in the solitude and terror of his prison in the Tower Laud still feels the bitterness of the last blow at the house he held so dear. "May 1. My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." But the crowning bitterness was to come. If there were two men living who had personal wrongs to avenge on the Archbishop, they were Leighton and Prynne. It can only have been as a personal triumph over their humbled persecutor that the Parliament appointed the first custodian of Lambeth and gave Prynne the charge of searching the Archbishop's house and chambers for materials in support of the impeachment. Of the spirit in which Prynne executed his task, the famous 'Canterburie's Doom,' with the Breviat of Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent evidence. By one of those curious coincidences that sometimes flash the fact upon us through the dust of old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, bold "Dum spiro spero, C.R." of the King himself. It is hard to picture the thoughts that must have passed through Charles's mindas he read the bitter triumphant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried and then flung into prison for life had come out again, as he puts it brutally, to "unkennel that fox," his foe.
Not even the Archbishop's study with its array of Missals and Breviaries and Books of Hours, not even the gallery with its "superstitious pictures," the three Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to the bar of the House of Lords, so revealed to this terrible detective "the rotten, idolatrous heart" of the Primate as the sight of the chapel. It was soon reduced to simplicity. We have seen how sharply even in prison Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse profanation was to follow. In 1648 the house passed by sale to the regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall was at once demolished, and the chapel turned into the dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker was levelled with the ground; and if we are to believe the story of the royalists, the new owner felt so keenly the discomfort of dining over a dead man's bones that the remains of the great Protestant primate were disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field.
The story of the library is a more certain one. From the days of Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained secure in the rooms over the great cloister where Parker's collection had probably stood before it passed to Cambridge. There in Parker's day Foxe had busied himself in work for the later editions of his 'Acts and Monuments;' even in the present library one book at least bears his autograph and the marginal marks of his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth century, with Selden among them, had carried on their labours. The time was now come when Selden was to save the library from destruction. At the sale of Lambeth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts to be sold with the house. Selden dexterously interposed. The will of its founder, Bancroft, he pleaded, directed that in case room should not be found for it at Lambeth his gift should go to Cambridge; and the Parliament, convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered the books to be sent to the University.
When the Restoration brought the Stuart home again, it flung Scott into the Tower and set Juxon in the ruined, desecrated walls. Of the deeper thoughtsthat such a scene might have suggested few probably found their way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. The whole pathos of Juxon's position lay in fact in his perfect absorption in the past. The books were reclaimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel was rescued from desecration, and the fine woodwork of screen and stalls replaced as Laud had left them. The demolition of the hall left him a more serious labour, and the way in which he entered on it brought strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had but a few years to live, and he set himself but one work to do before he died, the replacing everything in the state in which the storm of the rebellion had found it. He resolved therefore not only to rebuild the hall but to rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was destroyed. It was in vain that he was besieged by the remonstrances of "classical" architects, that he was sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned"; times had changed and fashions had changed, but Juxon would recognize no change at all. He died ere the building was finished, but even in death his inflexible will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The result has been a singularly happy one. It was not merely that the Archbishop has leftus one of the noblest examples of that strange yet successful revival of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, furnishes so exquisite a specimen. It is that in his tenacity to the past he has preserved the historic interest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque woodwork of the roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the quaint mullions of its windows, the student may still recall without a jar the figures which make Lambeth memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Erasmus, of Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there was a darker side to this conservatism. The Archbishops had returned like the Bourbons, forgetting nothing and having learned hardly anything. If any man could have learned the lesson of history it was Juxon's successor, the hard sceptical Sheldon, and one of the jottings in Pepys' Diary shows us what sort of lesson he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at noon to dine with the Archbishop in company with Sir Christopher Wren, "the first time," as he notes, "that I ever was there, and I have long longed for it." Only a few days before he had had a terrible disappointment, for "Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my Lord ofCanterbury, but when we came to Lambeth the gate was shut, which is strictly done at twelve o'clock, and nobody comes in afterwards, so we lost our labour." On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He found "a noble house and well furnished with good pictures and furniture, and noble attendance in good order, and a great deal of company, though an ordinary day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so much that ever I think I saw." Sheldon with his usual courtesy gave his visitors kindly welcome, and Pepys was preparing to withdraw at the close of dinner when he heard news which induced him to remain. The almost incredible scene that followed must be told in his own words:—"Most of the company gone, and I going, I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that was to be there; and so I stayed to hear it, thinking it to be serious, till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mockery by one Cornet Bolton, a very gentlemanlike man, that behind a chair did pray and preach like a Presbyter Scot, with all the possible imitation in grimaces and voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps upon the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, exclaiming against bishops and crying up of my good Lord Eglington till it made us all burst.But I did wonder to hear the Bishop at this time to make himself sport with things of this kind; but I perceive it was shown to him as a rarity, and he took care to have the room door shut; but there were about twenty gentlemen there, infinitely pleased with the 'novelty.'"
It was "novelties" like these that led the last of the Stuarts to his fatal belief that he could safely defy a Church that had so severed itself from the English religion in doing the work of the Crown. The pen of a great historian has told for all time the Trial of the Seven Bishops, and though their protest was drawn up at Lambeth I may not venture to tell it here. Of all the seven in fact Sancroft was probably the least inclined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers of the great multitude at their acquittal brought least sense of triumph.