Record Office

“The Walks of Lincoln’s InnUnder the Elms.”Ben Jonson.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields are bordered on the east side by Lincoln’s Inn, but I like better to approach the old squares by the brick gatehouse in Chancery Lane. It is the oldest part of Lincoln’s Inn, and a very fine example of Tudor brickwork. The Sir Thomas Lovel who built it in 1518 put his own arms over the gateway, never dreaming that when his name would mean nothing to the passer-by, the name of a bricklayer, one Ben Jonson who worked, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the other, at the adjoining buildings about a hundred years later, would need no coat of arms to preserve his memory. People like Mr. Muirhead, who see things in the light of cold reason, argue that in 1617 Jonson was forty-four and already famous, so he had probably laid down the trowel,—but I prefer to believe old Fuller, who said Ben Jonson helped in the building of the new structure in Lincoln’s Inn.

There are four of these old Inns of Court, that have lasted since the thirteenth century—the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn. Few visitors to London go out of their way to stroll in their shady courtyards, but there are not many corners of London where you can so easily shake off the oppression of the blare of machinery and recapture the spirit of a time when the study of the law was not thought incompatible with many pleasanter, more frivolous things.

One old chronicler says: “There is both in the Inns of Court and the Inns of Chancery, a sort of academy or gymnasium where they learn singing and all kinds of music, and such other accomplishments and diversions (which are called revels) as are suitable to their quality and usually practised at court. All vice is discouraged and banished. The greatest nobility of the kingdom often place their children in those Inns of Court—not so much as to make the law their study but to form their manners.”

I have no predilection for the legal profession, being, like most of my kind, filled with amazement at the lack of logic and the crass inconsequences that attend the administration of justice in any country. In fact I have a fellow-feeling for Peter the Great, who knew his own mind and had no herd opinions. When he was taken into Westminster Hall, he inquired who those busy people were in wigs and black gowns. He was answered, “They are lawyers.” “Lawyers?” said he, with a face of astonishment. “Why, I have but two in my whole dominions,and I believe I shall hang one of them the moment I get home.”

I suppose in no country in the world is the study and practice of the law surrounded with such debonair amenities as in London. Who would not be a lawyer, since that profession is the Open Sesame to shady gardens, lodgings in history-haunted rooms, and a prideful possession in such rare buildings as the Church of the Knights Templars?

Lincoln’s Inn takes its name from a thirteenth century Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, who had a mansion in Chancery Lane near the first church of the Knights Templars. His arms are carved over the brick gateway, separated from those of the builder, Sir Thomas Lovel, by the royal arms of England. None of the existing old buildings are later than Tudor times.

The old Inn has had many illustrious members, lodgers and visitors. Oliver Cromwell used to come here to see Thurloe, his secretary of state, who lived at 24 Old Buildings, and there is the story of how he nearly killed a young clerk he found apparently asleep when he had been plotting with Thurloe to seize Prince Charles. Thurloe dissuaded him by passing a lighted candle before the young man’s eyes to prove he was really asleep, and the clerk lived to warn the prince, who when he became king paid several visits to Lincoln’s Inn. Both Pepys and Evelyn record his presence at the “revels,” when learning was encouraged byindulgence in dancing. In the Admittance Book are the signatures of Charles II., the Duke of York, Prince Rupert and the Duke of Monmouth, written in 1671.

Dr. John Donne and Sir Thomas More were both connected with Lincoln’s Inn. Dr. Donne laid the foundation-stone and preached the consecration sermon of the chapel that Inigo Jones designed in 1623, since so disastrously restored. It is built on arches, so you can walk about under the Gothic roof, as Pepys said he did “by agreement” on the 27th of June, 1663, but you will not see the six seventeenth-century windows, for they were shattered by an explosion in October, 1915.

Sir Thomas More has a more intimate connection with the Inn, for his father and grandfather held the office of butler and steward, and for their long and faithful services were rewarded by admission into the Society of Lincoln’s Inn and by the much-prized office of Reader.

The wonderful law library is now housed in the new red-brick hall, decorated with Watts’ fresco of “The Lawgivers of the World,” but the old hall built about 400 years ago is still in use, though it, too, has suffered from the hands of the restorer.

Only the benchers and members of Lincoln’s Inn may use the elm-shaded gardens. They not only fulfil Pepys’ prophecy that they would be very pretty, but they had a useful war record, as a memorial tablet shows.

I am told that the Curfew is still rung at Lincoln’s Inn. At a quarter to nine each evening the chief porter climbs to the tower of the chapel and when the hour has struck he sounds the curfew fifty times. The bell used was brought from Cadiz by the Earl of Essex in 1596.

“Dull would he be of soul who could pass byA sight so touching in its majesty.”Wordsworth.

Coming out into Chancery Lane once more and turning down towards Fleet Street, you will see on your left a huge grey building in Tudor style, where once stood the House of the Converts.

It was called by that name when Henry III. founded a House in 1232 to receive converted Jews. I hardly like to tell you that the present name is the Record Office. It is too pompous and official-sounding, and perhaps that is why people pass the House of the Converts never suspecting the presence of the entrancing, memory-evoking things within.

You enter the enchanted room by descending a short flight of stone steps, after going through a forbidding portal and along a green sward into a modern grey building in one of the very busiest of the London streets.

You will know why I call it an enchanted room as soon as you see the beautiful chapel-like precincts named the House of the Converts nearly 700 years ago, before it was used from Edward III.’s time as the Chapel of the Rolls.

The stained glass windows give a mellow light to the admirable Torrigiano monument of a sixteenth century Master of the Rolls and the delicately carved alabaster tomb of Richard Alington and his wife Jane. Near by is the recumbent figure of another Master, with the little figures of his children kneeling below, one of them the little daughter born on Christmas Day and married when she was only twelve years old, “a pretty red-headed wench,” to William Cavendish, afterwards Earl of Devonshire, in the year of grace 1608.

There are all sorts of other treasures in this mysterious room, that is open to all comers between the hours of two and four, any day in the week except, alas, Saturday or Sunday.

You may look on the handwriting of “Jane the Quene,” in one of the very few documents signed by Lady Jane Grey during her nine days’ reign, or read the pathetic letter written by Mary Queen of Scots to Sir William Cecil, “Mester Cessilles,” she calls him in the queer Scottish-English sometimes used by “yowr richt asured good friend, Marie R.”

For here are guarded poignant souvenirs of long-dead men and women, of whose sorrows and anguish of mind nothing is left but the yellowing paper covered with the almost illegible writing of their times. You will find the cry ofSir Philip Sidney to Jaen Wyer the Court surgeon of His Highness of Cleves, written when he lay dying from his wound at the battle of Zutphen: “Come, my Weier, come. I am in danger of my life and I want you here. Neither living or dead shall I be ungrateful. I can write no more, but I earnestly pray you to make haste. Farewell. At Arnem. Yours, Ph. Sidney.” And Sir Walter Raleigh’s letter to Queen Anne, the wife of James the First, where he says: “My extreme shortness of breath doth grow fast on me, with the dispayre of obtayning so mich grace to walke with my keeper up the hill within the Tower.”

The letters are not all sorrowful, but they all have the power to breathe life into the dry bones of history. Not far from the heart-felt appeal of the great Cardinal Wolsey to Henry VIII., praying for “grace, mercy, remissyon and pardon,” and signed “Your Graces moste prostrat poor chapleyn, creature, and bedisman,” is a letter from ten-year-old William of Orange, quaint letters from Leicester and Essex to their fickle queen, and a dignified epistle, lamenting the outbreak of war between France and England, but renouncing his fealty and homage to Richard II., from a fourteenth century member of that noble Picardie family whose proud device was:

Roy ne suis,ne prince ne duc,ne comte aussy:Je suis sire de Coucy.

Old letters are not the only treasures in this corner belonging to another age. There are beautiful fourteenth-century chests, a bulla carved by Benvenuto Cellini, that prince of goldsmiths and autobiographers, and indeed the greatest treasure of all, that I have kept till the last.

One first hears of the Domesday Book in the days when one has visions of a vast tome with some vague connection with the Day of Judgment. Not evenLittle Arthurcould dispel the prodigious respect and awe one felt for it. I confused it with the book in which one’s manifold sins are recorded, and even mature age does not prevent a little secret satisfaction that has nothing historical at the sight of those fat, brown hundreds-of-years-old books that we owe to William the Conqueror’s Norman love for exact accounts.

The Domesday Books used to be kept in the Chapter House at Westminster and were only moved to the Record Office in 1839.

“Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts.”—Dr. Johnson.

A stone’s throw from the east end of the Record Office is one of the most curious unnoticed corners of old London. Go up Fetter Lane, which is the next turning to Chancery Lane out of Fleet Street, and at No. 34, closeto the Moravian Chapel, you will see a narrow passage called Nevill’s Court. This passage leads you straight into one of the oldest bits of London still existing, for here in the very heart of newspaper land are little ancient seventeenth-century houses with cottage gardens. They give one the same feeling of unexpectedness as those other queer little wooden houses with their high gables that you may see in Collingwood Street, just on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge (I think it is the third turning to the right). They stand beside the church, just as they stood nearly three hundred years ago, when the Thames washed right up to their doorsteps.

At No. 6 Nevill’s Court, secluded in its walled garden, is a big seventeenth-century house, which must once have been inhabited by citizens of wealth and position. It is extraordinary that Time and the Vandal have left it still intact. I think the reason must be that they have never been able to find it, like those other old houses in Wardrobe Court near St. Paul’s, whose whereabouts certainly ought to be set as a problem in a London taxi-driver’s examination.

But before seeking the house, there is something to notice in Nevill’s Court. The main entrance to the Moravian Chapel is in Fetter Lane, at No. 33. I once went to the service there at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon under the influence of the story of the messenger sent while Bradbury was preaching, to announceQueen Anne’s death and the safety of the Protestant succession. I hoped to find something to remind me of the chapel’s great age: it is the oldest place of Protestant worship in London, going back to Queen Mary’s day, when persecuted Protestants are supposed to have met in the sawpit of the carpenter’s yard on this site.

Down the long, narrow passage, I found a bare, uncompromising chapel, with a high, wooden pulpit, that I looked at with more respect than its ugliness warranted, remembering that Baxter had preached here in 1672, and that John Wesley and Whitefield had addressed crowded congregations during the year Wesley spent with the Moravians between the time that he left the Church of England and the founding of the Methodist persuasion in 1740. The boundary line between St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, and St. Dunstan’s in the West is just in front of the pulpit, so the preacher and his congregation are in different parishes.

The chapel has been used by the Moravian sect since 1738, and as their lease does not expire for about another 250 years, it is not likely to change ownership, in spite of the dwindling congregation.

It has been so many times restored and rebuilt that one gets a much better idea of the antiquity of the building from the back entrance in Nevill’s Court, for this is the only part that could possibly have existed before the Great Fire.

“Oh! London! London! our delight,Great flower that opens but at night.”R. le Gallienne.

Between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane is the entrance to Clifford’s Inn, the oldest of all the Inns of Chancery. In January, 1921, big flaunting notice-boards announced that Clifford’s Inn would be sold by auction, but no immediate purchaser was found, and this quiet corner is still unmolested, though by the time this book is printed it may have received itscoup de grâcefrom the pickaxe.

Go and look at it while you may. It was founded in 1345 and takes its name from a certain Robert Clifford of Edward II.’s reign. Sir Edward Coke, the great Elizabethan lawyer, was a member of Clifford’s Inn and left it for the Middle Temple in 1572.

Some of the Inn survived the Great Fire, and in the crazy-looking little old hall the judges sat who decided the many boundary disputes after that catastrophe. At the moment it is the headquarters of some society “duquel je ne sçais pas le nom.”

Samuel Butler lived at No. 15 Clifford’s Inn for thirty-eight years, and many an admirer of the genius of the man who wroteErewhonandThe Way of all Fleshhas made a pilgrimage to the quiet corner hidden away a few yards from bustling Fleet Street.

“At length they all to mery London came,To mery London my most kyndley nurse.”Spenser.

Indays of old, when London’s present meatmarket was the fashionable jousting-ground of the time, the knights and squires used to ride to Smithfield up a road still called Giltspur Street, either from the armourers who dwelt there, or from the jingling of the champions’ spurs as they clattered by.

Any Holborn bus will take you to the corner of St. Sepulchre’s where the dismal bell tolled the passing to Newgate of the condemned criminals. On the right side of Giltspur Street is St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, that survived the Great Fire only to be rebuilt in 1730. The history of this great London hospital goes back eight hundred years, for it belonged to the Priory, but Sir Thomas Gresham’s father persuaded Henry VIII. to refound the institution in 1546.

There was once a naïve inscription under the statue of the fat boy whose stone image is still to be seen at the corner where Cock Lane joins Giltspur Street, on the left. At this point, onceknown as Pye Corner, the Fire of London was stopped in 1666 by blowing up the houses, and the writing underneath the figure of this extremely obese youth reminded the passer-by that “the Great Fire ... was occasioned by the sin of gluttony.” I do not know what authority there was for this allegation. Whoever was responsible for the tablet probably had running in his muddled head the names of Pye or Pie Corner and Pudding Lane in Thames Street where the conflagration started. The fact that it was from the house of a baker that the flames first spread may likewise have influenced him, though it is unusual to be gluttonous on bread alone.

The Fire gave the moralist good cause for thought. It was an event so tremendous, so far-reaching, so overwhelming, that it is strange that the history books of England do not linger over its significance. For in less than a week practically every landmark that went to make up the most interesting old mediæval city in the world was swept away. The ancient cathedral of St. Paul’s, 89 churches, 4 city gates, 460 streets and 13,200 houses perished in the flames. With the exception, perhaps, of the burning of Rome, there has never been so terrible a fire. Pepys wept to see it.

A wonderful account has been left us by Evelyn:

The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonished, that from the beginning, I know not by what despondency or fate, they hardly stirr’d toquench it, so that there was nothing heard or seene but crying out and lamentation, running about like distracted creatures, without at all attempting to save even their goods, such a strange consternation there was upon them, so as it burned both in breadth and length, the Churches, Public Halls, Exchange, Hospitals, Monuments, and ornaments, leaping after a prodigious manner from house to house and streete to streete, at greate distances one from ye other; for ye heate with a long set of faire and warme weather, had even ignited the air, and prepar’d the materials to conceive the fire, which devour’d after an incredible manner, houses, furniture, and everything. Here we saw the Thames cover’d with goods floating, all the barges and boates laden with what some had time and courage to save, as, on ye other, ye carts, &c., carrying out to the fields, which for many miles were strew’d with moveables of all sorts, and tents erecting to shelter both people and what goods they could get away. Oh the miserable and calamitous spectacle! such as haply the world had not seen the like since the foundation of it, nor to be outdone till the universale conflagration. All the skie was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven, the light seen above forty miles round about for many nights. God grant my eyes may never behold the like, now seeing above 10,000 houses all in one flame; the noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, ye shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of Towers, Houses, and Churches, was like an hideous storme, and the aire all about so hot and inflam’d that at last one was not able to approach it, so that they were forc’d to stand still and let ye flames burn on, wch they did for neere two miles in length and one in bredth. The clouds of smoke were dismall, and reach’d upon computation neer fifty miles in length. Thus I left it this afternoone burning, a resemblance of Sodom, or the last day. London was, but is no more!

Everyone lent a hand; even King Charles came down from Whitehall and worked hardbeside his meanest subject—doing something useful for once in a way. But it was a case of saving what one could and fleeing. Some stacked their treasures in the churches (the booksellers of Paternoster Row stored their books in St. Paul’s), but of the churches nothing was left. Some buried their valuables underground and perhaps recovered them two years afterwards, when the last of the rubbish was cleared away. By the end of that fatal September the whole of the large district of Moorfields, north of the city, was one vast camp of the homeless, and there they stayed in shacks and shelters till the city was rebuilt, much as the unfortunate people of devastated France were living during the years of the Great War.

The trade of London ceased for a time; there were no shops, the merchants had lost their goods, the warehouses were gutted, all records of debts and commercial transactions were destroyed, there were no schools, no almshouses.

Yet in four short years the English, with the same dogged energy that they were putting recently into the making of trenches and dugouts, had practically rebuilt their capital city. The churches, of course, took a long time to finish; the beautiful and numerous halls of the City Companies were not replaced in a day, but nearly 10,000 houses were up, and since those seventeenth-century workmen were just Englishmen, with no foreigners at hand to tell them to“ca’ canny,” everything was in a fair way to completion.

As for Sir Christopher Wren, that amazing architect who stamped the impress of his genius on the great city as we know it, who shall give him enough honour? He designed and erected over forty public buildings, amongst them the lovely and unique cluster of churches that lie around St. Paul’s, yet for this work he was rewarded by the miserable salary of £100 a year, with £200 a year for the rebuilding of the great cathedral.

“The citye of London that is to me so dere and sweete.”Chaucer.

Opposite St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is Smithfield, new and blatant, and smelling hideously of raw meat. Take courage and go on northwards, for in a few minutes you will come to the most wonderful old church in London—older than any other except the chapel in the White Tower. There is something about the almost primitive simplicity of its massive stone pillars that carries one back more directly to the times of the Norman conquerors than a thousand long descriptions gathered from history books.

What you see is only the choir and transept of a much larger church built for the Priory of St. Bartholomew by the founder Rahere in or about the year 1102. His tomb is on the leftas you enter, and high up on the right is the lovely oriel window where Prior Bolton, who died in 1532, could sit or kneel at his ease, without even the trouble of coming downstairs from his house, and look down into the church he did so much to rebuild and restore.

RAHERE’S TOMB IN ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH

St. Bartholomew’s has had a turbulent history. There is the dramatic story of Archbishop Boniface of Lambeth Palace, a Savoyard who took it into his crafty head that he would liketo annex the offertory of St. Bartholomew’s. On a certain Sunday morning he set out from Lambeth, with a train of attendants with mail armour under their robes. The description of what happened is delicious in Matthew Paris’s words, as quoted by Stowe:

Amongst other memorable matters, touching this priorie, one is of an Archbishop’s Visitation, which Matthew Paris hath thus. Boniface (sayeth he) Archbishoppe of Canterbury, in his Visitation came to this priorie, where being received with procession in the most solemne wise, hee said that hee passed not upon the honor, but came to visite them, to whom the Canons aunswered that they having a learned Bishop, ought not in contempt of him to be visited by any other; which aunswere so much offended the Archbishop that he forthwithe fell on the Supprior, and smote him on the face, saying, indeede, indeede, dooth it become you English Traytors so to aunswere mee, thus raging with oaths not to bee recited, hee rent in peeces the rich Cope of the Supprior, and trode it under his feete, and thrust him against a pillar of the Chauncell with such violence, that hee had almost killed him: but the Canons seeing their supprior thus almost slayne, came and plucked off the Archbishoppe with such force that they overthrewe him backwardes, whereby they might see that he was armed and prepared to fight, the Archbishoppe’s men seeing theyr master downe, being all strangers and their master’s countrimen born at Prowence, fell upon the canons, beat them, tare them, and trod them under feete, at length the Canons getting away as well as they could, ran bloody and myry, rent and torne, to the Bishoppe of London to complaine, who had them goe to the king at Westminster, and tell him thereof, whereupon some of them went thether, the rest were not able, they were so sore hurt, but when they came to Westminster, the king would neither heare nor see them, so they returned without redresse, in themean season the whole Citie was in an uprore, and ready to have rung the Common bell, and to have hewed the Archbishoppe into small pieces, who was secretly crept to Lambhith, where they sought him, and not knowing him by sight, sayd to themselves, where is this Ruffian, that cruell smiter, hee is no winner of soules, but an exactor of money, whome neyther God, nor any lawfull or free election, did bring to this promotion, but the king did unlawfully intrude him, being utterly unlearned, a stranger borne, and having a wife etc: but the Archbishop conveyed himselfe over, and went to the king with a great complaint against the Canons, whereas himself was guilty.

But in spite of Henry III.’s refusal to see the outraged sub-prior and his loyal canons they had their revenge in time.

The final result of that little Sunday morning jaunt of Archbishop Boniface was that he was obliged to build the chapel of Lambeth Palace about the year 1247 as a penance for having tried to encroach on the right of the holy Prior of St. Bartholomew’s.

The quaint gateway by which one enters the scene of the exploits of these energetic churchmen adds a special charm to the place. The timbers of the old Elizabethan house above it were only discovered in 1915, when some of the tiles that long concealed them were loosened.

CHURCH OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT

“For knighthood is not in the feats of Warre,As for to fight in quarrel right or wrong.But in a cause which truth can not defarre.”Stephen Hawes.

Not very far away, stretching across St. John’s Lane, on the other side of Smithfield and the Charterhouse Road, is another gate, dating from 1504, with the arms of Prior Docwra, Who built it, above the archway. This was once the south entrance of the great Priory of the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, one of the richest and most powerful of the religious houses that spread over London in the Middle Ages. With the exception of this gate and of the Norman crypt in the church of St. John adjoining (the keys are at the caretaker’s, 112 Clerkenwell Road), nothing is left of that great monastery that the people grew to hate for its pride. When Wat Tyler led his band of peasants to burn and pillage, they burnt and pillaged with special zest the manors of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, wherever they found them, and particularly the priory in London, incidentally beheading the Grand Prior. The buildings rose again and lasted till the reign of Edward VI., when they were blown up and pulled down and some of the stone used to build the Somerset House of the day.

But the old gate still stands, austere andturret-crowned, and we may still “behold it with reverence,” like Dr. Johnson. The modern representatives of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which devotes itself to ambulance and hospital work and did admirable service in the war, went back in 1887 to live within its ancient walls.

There are many things of interest in the gatehouse that make the trouble of writing to the secretary of the Order for permission to see them worth while. There are relics from Malta and Rhodes, an Elizabethan chimneypiece in the chancery, and other souvenirs, but the coffer that contains these treasures is more interesting than anything it holds, and that every passer-by may see.

“I never think of London, which I love, without thinking of that palace which David built for Bathsheba.”—Lowell.

Coming back to Charterhouse Street and turning to the left, five minutes’ walk will bring you to Charterhouse Square, where you can find one of the most lovely and gracious things in all London.

People often bewail the passing of old London without knowing that within this short distance from Holborn Circus they can see a perfect specimen of a sixteenth-century nobleman’s house. There it stands, only needing the addition of a little furniture of the period, that

Sᵗ. John’s Gate Clerkenwell Residence of Edward Cave

would never be missed from South Kensington Museum, and you could see exactly how my Lord Howard lived when he entertained—and plotted against—his royal mistress three hundred years ago.

One does not like to think of the number of people who leave London without ever having seen the Charterhouse. It is one of the most beautiful places in all London, and its story is packed with romance, intrigue, adventure and benevolence.

The tale falls into three parts. It is begun by that gallant Hainaulter, Sir Walter de Manny, as the English called Walter, Lord of Mausny near Valenciennes, who came over to England in the train of Philippa of Hainault.

According to Froissart he was a “very gentil parfyte knighte,” and when he saw the ghastly heaps of dead bodies of plague-stricken people lying in the streets in 1349, he bought from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital a piece of land called No Man’s Land and caused the dead to be decently buried there. Their bodies at rest, he had thought for their souls, and on March 25, 1349, he laid the foundation-stone of a chapel where the relations might pray for their dead. Twenty years later Sir Walter Manny laid another stone, that of the first cell for the Carthusian monks he brought over from France. The wives and sisters of the dead had prayed so long in the chapel that the right could not be taken from them, so for once the strictCarthusian rule was relaxed and a special place was set apart for the womenkind to come and pray.

Sir Walter Manny died in 1372. He was buried at the foot of the step of the great altar in the chapel that may be seen to-day, and in the Charterhouse his Carthusian monks prayed according to the tenets of their faith for a hundred and sixty-five years more before the last prior, John Houghton, having been hung on Tyburn Tree, and many of the brothers tortured, the rest submitted to the king’s will. The House of the Salutation of the Mother of God in the Charterhouse near London was dissolved shortly afterwards.

The second phase of the Charterhouse story is a very different one. Twice during the following years it was prepared for the coming of a fair queen, whose head was bowed on Tower Hill instead of in the old chapel.

Charterhouse was granted to that wily old courtier, Sir Edward North, in 1545, and eight years later he “conveyed” it to John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, the father-in-law of Lady Jane Grey. The Earl of Northumberland never wanted it for himself, as he had already Durham House in the Adelphi, but there was his son Guildford with his fair young wife to be lodged fittingly. So he brought up much furniture from Kenilworth and stored it hard by, little dreaming that his bold plans would miscarry and that he would die on Tower Hill ayear before the children whose home he had planned shared the same fate.

North was granted the Charterhouse again by Queen Mary, and when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 she stayed six days there before her coronation.

Three years later she paid the old house another visit, but North died in 1564 and Charterhouse passed into the hands of crafty, brilliant, fickle Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk.

Once more Charterhouse, now known as Howard House, was to be prepared for a royal mistress, and in a royal manner.

The new owner, buoyed with hopes of a marriage with Mary, Queen of Scots, began to put his new house in order. He added the screen in the great hall and the “Tarrass Walk,” the lovely tapestry room, the duchess’s withdrawing-room and the magnificent great staircase.

On the 6th of August, 1568, Elizabeth came in state from Hampton Court to Howard House, to pay a visit to her disloyal servant, already plotting against her and arranging the duchess’s salon for her rival. The air was thick with intrigue, and by the autumn the rumour of the marriage with Mary had reached Elizabeth. Norfolk denied it, but a year later the truth came out, and he spent some time in the Tower,to be released, under surveillance, when the Black Death threatened that district.

He had learned no lesson. Either a devouring ambition or the attraction of the most fascinating woman in Europe lured him on. Plots and counterplots were hatched in the long gallery that now forms part of the upper-story quarters of the Master and Registrar of Charterhouse. Mary’s emissaries were seized—one of them, called Bailly, has carved the lesson these events taught him in the Beauchamp Room in the Tower—and the luckless queen was betrayed in her turn, even as Elizabeth had been, by the man who so short a time before had decorated the Charterhouse to receive her as a bride.

He told, like a coward, the place where her cipher was hidden under a tile in the Charterhouse, but nothing could save his own neck, and he followed his father and his two girl cousins, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, in June 1572.

The next owner of Howard House, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was only a boy of fifteen when he inherited his father’s property, but he was of sterner stuff, for he refused to abjure the Roman Catholic faith he had embraced, even to see his wife and children, before he died, worn out, and under sentence of death, in 1595. Elizabeth had kept him prisoner in the Beauchamp Tower for ten years, and it

THE CHARTERHOUSE FROM THE SQUARE

was there, in 1587, that he carved the words, “The more suffering for Christ in this world, so much the more glory with Christ in the life to come.”

He had lived very little at the Charterhouse, and when it passed into the hands of his half-brother Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, the fortunes of the old house changed with the advent of the great English Admiral who could swear with truth “’Fore God I am no coward,” when he was admiral of the squadron at Flores in the Azores, “and the littleRevengeran on right into the heart of the foe.”

Lord Thomas Howard was one of the honoured, trusted servants of Elizabeth, and she came once more in 1603, not long before her death, to pay him a visit in the Charterhouse.

In a few months James I. came there, even as she had done, to spend the days before his coronation as the guest of the son of the man who had been his mother’s false suitor.

But brave Lord Thomas Howard was building a new house at Audley End, and needing money he sold Howard House for £13,000 to Sir Thomas Sutton. The brilliant days of the Charterhouse as a nobleman’s mansion were at an end—another chapter was concluded and the third phase of the story was to begin.

Sir Thomas Sutton, the new owner, was the Lord Rhondda of the sixteenth century. He was a Lincolnshire man with a wide knowledge of men and things, whose military professionnever prevented his having a keen eye for business. He made a large fortune before he died in 1611, leaving the provision to found a hospital for eighty impoverished gentlemen and a school for forty boys, under the name of the Hospital of King James in Charterhouse.

There was much discussion, “about it and about,” before Sir Thomas Sutton’s chosen trustees could carry out his wishes. James I., true son of his father Darnley, had to be placated by apourboireof £10,000, and even Bacon, jealous at not being among the trustees, tried to belittle the bequest and advise that the money should be used for his master’s benefit instead of for the poor. Sir Edward Coke, Lady Hatton’s husband, steered the hospital through the shoals that surrounded its launching and the more dangerous peril of the king’s genial idea that the Charterhouse revenues might fitly be used to pay for his army. The Charterhouse was founded, and for three hundred years the school has produced great Englishmen and the hospital harboured men who have found that in the evening of a working life the stars do not always appear.

Among the Charterhouse scholars have been the bearers of great names such as Lovelace and Crashaw, Addison and Steele, John Wesley, Sir Henry Havelock, Thackeray, Leech, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Lord Alverstone and many others. The school was removed in 1872 to Godalming, and the buildings were taken overby the Merchant Taylors’ Company for their boys’ school.

The hospital for the poor brothers no longer harbours eighty men. Their number is reduced to sixty owing to the depreciation in the value of Sir Thomas Sutton’s land and the fact that since the Charterhouse has always been considered a wealthy foundation no further bequests have ever been made to bring the number once more up to the four score of the founder’s intention.

That, briefly told, is the dramatic tale of the Charterhouse. You will readily believe it all if you take the District Railway to Aldersgate Street and go and see the Charterhouse for yourself. Its beauty is unimpaired by time. The Guesten Hall where the poor brethren take their meals, the great sixteenth century carved staircase, the chapel where Colonel Newcome sat, the false duke’s arcade, and the old gatehouse—all are there and many more things to recall the most dramatic pages of England’s history.

“And all that passes inter nos,May be proclaimed at Charing Cross.”Swift.

Dr. Johnsononce said, “Why, sir, Fleet Street has a very animated appearance, but I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross.”

Certainly Charing Cross is the best of all starting-points for exploring expeditions, and by Charing Cross I mean the south-east corner of Trafalgar Square.

From there you may wander along the Strand, or north into Bloomsbury, or through Cockspur Street into the realms of Mayfair, or southward to the Thames, and in every direction there are unnoticed stories to be found.

“More kindly love have I to that place than to any other in yerth.”—Chaucer.

One day I turned my back on Charing Cross to go to St. Margaret’sviaWhitehall, blissfully unconscious of the fact that it happened to be Saturday and that the church closes its doors every day at 4 p.m. and for all day on Saturdays.

At the corner of the Horse Guards Avenue I paused undecided, having taken months to summon up courage to pass the giant at the entrance to the United Services Museum!

He snorts with such a supercilious sniff at the would-be visitor that you have to remember it may possibly be only the good-natured contempt of one service for another, and that the Orion’s figurehead may really be elevating his nose at the Horse Guards across the way, on which I notice that Spencer Compton, 8th Duke of Devonshire (b. 1833, d. 1908) also bends a grave and somewhat disapproving eye from his elevated statue in the middle of the road.

Mr. Street, in his deliciousGhosts of Piccadilly, says, “There is ever a Devonshire filling his eminent position, calm, retiring, imperturbable, and never an amusing thing to tell of any one of them,” and this statue tells you to believe him.

To come back to the United Services Museum—a thing that far too few people do, for it is one of London’s many buried treasures—don’t be misled by any optimistic guide-book that tells you the admission is sixpence. That is only true on Saturday afternoon; at other times you part with a shilling unless you are a soldier or sailor in uniform, or one of the many troops of schoolchildren that are admitted free every week.

There are myriads of things to delight any childish heart—cunningly contrived models of ships, plans of battles, the actual walking-stickand snuff-box of Sir Francis Drake, Oliver Cromwell’s sword, the very bugle that sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade, a room devoted to souvenirs of Lord Wolseley, and rows of other treasures with heroic stories of brave men.

I have yet to find a museum without a Napoleonic souvenir, and here there is a startling one—“Marengo’s” skeleton. You are so engrossed by the relics of General Wolfe and Nelson and Wellington and other heroes, that you almost forget what you came to see—the Old Banqueting Hall where they are lodged, the beautiful Palladian structure that Inigo Jones built in 1622—all that is now left of the old palace of Whitehall.

The nine ceiling paintings that Rubens did at Charles I.’s request look as fresh as if they had been painted yesterday, having been restored too many times. Rubens got £3000 for them, while Wren only received £100 a year for rebuilding all the City churches and £200 a year for rebuilding St. Paul’s—but Wren was an Englishman and Rubens a foreigner.

The Banqueting Hall was all that James I. accomplished of the great palace he meant to let Inigo Jones build for him in Whitehall, and just outside the hall Charles I. met his death, a short distance from the statue where

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