Milton's England Part 10

CHAPTER XII.

CHARTERHOUSE.--ST. JOHN'S GATE.--ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S.--SMITHFIELD

When Milton was a lad at St. Paul's School, it is more than likely that he sometimes visited the boys of Charterhouse. Let us imagine him on some holiday taking a stroll outside the city wall through Newgate, over Holborn Bridge, that arched the Hole Bourne or Fleet, which flowed southward to the Thames, at Blackfriars; then up Holborn Hill and to the right to Charterhouse Square. It is still a quiet square of green shut in by pleasant residences, which replace the handsome palaces, such as Rutland House, which stood here during the Stuarts' reign.

If his father accompanied the lad he may have recalled to him the horror of the pestilence which three hundred years before had swept from Asia across Europe. In foul, crowded London, it so filled the churchyards to overflowing, that in 1348, when thousands of bodies were flung into pits without a Christian prayer said over them, the Bishop of London purchased three acres for a burial-ground upon this spot. Near here fifty thousand bodies were buried, one above another in deep graves. But three hundred years is a long time to one who has lived something less than ten, and perhaps these grisly tales of a shadowy and forgotten past appealed less to Milton's boyish heart than those of a nearer time, which his father's life had almost touched.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHARTERHOUSE

_From an old engraving._]

Above the monastery doors which rose here after the Great Plague, might have been seen, only a half century before, the limb from the dismembered body of the martyred prior, who fell beneath the wrath of Henry VIII. He, with divers of his brethren, perished for their faith as n.o.bly as John Rogers, a few years later, died for a different one. Heroism belongs to no one creed. Thus ended the monastic inst.i.tution, the House of the Salutation of the Mother of G.o.d, which since 1371 had housed twenty-four Carthusian friars. Their quiet lives and austere fasts had been in sharp contrast to those of the Knights of St. John, their ancient neighbours, whose habitations perished at about the time when theirs arose.

Some remains of the old monastery may be seen within the gates to-day, and doubtless there were many more reminders of it when Milton was shown about by his boy-friends. Perhaps the tall youth, Roger Williams, nine years his senior, whose later life was to touch his, may have noticed the handsome lad who read the Latin inscriptions as easily as boys of his age now read English, and who showed a marvellous comprehension of the antiquities of the place.

The visitor to-day on entering the chapel, as Milton did, may notice at the left of the door a white marble tablet framed in yellow marble, on which an American citizen, in memory of the founder of Rhode Island, almost the only tolerator of all religious faiths in an intolerant age, has recently inscribed the fact that Roger Williams studied here.

Since Milton's day the character of Charterhouse has not much changed, though many buildings have been added. The present foundation marks the benevolence of one of the richest merchants of Elizabeth's day, whose prayer was: "Lord, thou hast given me a large and liberal estate; give me also a heart to make use thereof." In 1611, Thomas Sutton purchased the Charterhouse for 13,000, from the Earl of Suffolk and his relatives, and made over twenty manors and lordships and other rich estates, including the Charterhouse, in trust for the hospital.

The pensioners were originally eighty in number, and the boys, forty-four.

Hubert Herkomer's well-known, beautiful painting in the Tate Gallery of the Charterhouse chapel and the venerable figures of the aged gentlemen who daily worship here in their quaint gowns, depicts a scene that Milton saw, and that the modern visitor may see to-day. Beyond the huge, pretentious monument of Sutton, that fills one corner of the chapel, is the side room, where, until quite recent years, the boys sat at morning service. Now their numbers are increased, and they are more happily housed out in the country, where outdoor sports and rural life can do more for them than this region, which is now hemmed in by the encroachments of commercial London. Stow tells us that the master was required to be twenty-seven years old, and that the highest form must every Sunday set up in the Great Hall four Greek and four Latin verses, "each to be made on any part of the second Lesson for that day."

One cannot but feel that the old gentlemen must sadly miss their sprightly young comrades, and long for the sound of their merry shouts and whistles.

Their numbers are falling off, for the revenues, drawn from agricultural sources, are diminishing. To-day about fifty-five are entered. All must be over sixty years of age. They have all the freedom of private citizens, except that they are expected to dine together in the great panelled dining-hall, and at night to be in by eleven o'clock. Each pensioner has a bedroom and sitting-room, and a loaf and b.u.t.ter is brought him for his breakfast. About 30 a year are allowed each for clothing and other food, and a female attendant is a.s.signed to each half dozen gentlemen.

Thackeray's description of Founder's Day is most touching, and deserves to be read by all who visit Charterhouse, where he studied, and in imagination saw the last days of Colonel Newcome:

"The custom of the school is on the 12th of December, the Founder's Day, that the head gown-boy shall recite a Latin oration, in praise of our founder and upon other subjects, and a goodly company of old Cistercians is generally brought together to attend this oration, after which we go to chapel and have a sermon, after which we go to a great dinner, where old condisciples meet, old toasts are given, and speeches made. Before marching from the oration hall to chapel, the stewards of the day's dinner, according to the old-fashioned rite, have wands in their hands, walk to church at the head of the procession, and sit in places of honour.

The boys are already on their seats with smug fresh faces and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches, the chapel is lighted, the founder's tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful lights and shadows. There he sits, Fundator Noster, in his ruff and gown, awaiting the Great Examination Day. We oldsters, be we ever so old, become boys again as we look at that familiar old tomb, and think how the seats were altered since we were here, and how the doctor used to sit yonder and his awful eye used to frighten us shuddering boys on whom it lighted; and how the boy next us _would_ kick our shins during the service time, and how the monitor would cane us afterward because our shins were kicked.

Yonder sit forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about home and holidays to-morrow. Yonder sit some three-score old gentlemen--pensioners of the hospital, listening to the prayers and psalms. You hear them coughing feebly in the twilight--the old, reverend black gowns.... A plenty of candles light up this chapel, and this scene of youth and age and early memories and pompous death. How solemn the well-remembered prayers are here uttered again in the place where in childhood we used to hear them!

How beautiful and decorous the rite! How n.o.ble the ancient words of the supplications which the priest utters, and to which generations of bygone seniors have cried, 'Amen,' under those arches."

We pa.s.s up, as Milton may have done, the broad carved oak staircase of the period antedating Sutton's purchase, when Lord North welcomed the Princess Elizabeth as his guest and entertained her royally, five days before her coronation. In these s.p.a.cious rooms, with deep-set windows, and richly decorated ceilings, the cautious princess held meetings daily with her councillors. The lofty fireplace and the tapestry hangings that remain recall in their dim splendour days when lords and dukes and maids of honour waited in trepidation upon the behest of the haughty woman who was soon to become their dread sovereign. It was in one of these rooms that the pupil orator gave his oration upon Founder's Day.

One of the rooms not always shown to visitors should not be missed. It is the long, cosy library of the pensioners. Here, leaning out of the diamond-paned windows upon a summer's day, or grouping themselves in easy chairs about the blazing hearth in gray November, one loves to think of these lonely gentlemen, who have seen better days, spending their last, quiet years among their books.

The visitor to the Charterhouse will not fail to spend a half day within the vicinity. In spite of its sordid and commercial aspect, it possesses many of the most precious relics of the past.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. JOHN'S GATE, CLERKENWELL

_From an old engraving._]

A little to the northwest of Smithfield, where it spans a narrow and somewhat squalid street, stands the huge stone gateway of St. John's.

Nothing in its vicinity reveals the fact that once beside it stood a conventual church, and a bell-tower that was one of the glories of London, and nothing to indicate that, centuries before these, one of the richest and most famous of all the monastic establishments around London was built here. The history of the Knights of St. John is one of the longest and most romantic of mediaeval histories. The prototype of their ancient hospital was in Jerusalem, where the knights of the order lived lives of abstinence and charity. The English establishment in Clerkenwell was founded in 1100 A. D., only a generation after the coming of the Norman Conqueror. This was the time of G.o.dfrey of Bouillon and of the first Crusade. Forty years later the monks in Jerusalem became a military order, and thenceforth their history is one that seemed guided by Joshua rather than the Prince of Peace. Large gifts and power led them soon far from the simple habits of their early days. Of their fights with pirates and with Turks and with rival Christian bodies, there is no s.p.a.ce to tell. Like the Christian Church itself, in many periods, they waxed fat and gross, and became the hated "plutocrats" of the working men of their time. In that sweet story, written in Saxon English, by William Morris, of the monk, "John Ball," we have a picture of the brave men of Kent who rose in wrath to destroy, as did the Paris mob of 1793, the men who long had mocked at their impotence and fed upon their toil. The rebels marched with spear and bow to London, and wreaked their vengeance on many, but especially those whose travesty on the teaching of the saint whose name they bore had maddened them to fury. They burnt all the houses belonging to St. John's, and set on fire the beautiful priory, which burned seven days. King Richard II., safe in the Tower, in vain besought his Council for advice in this extremity. The prior himself did not escape, but fell beneath the relentless axe of the men of Kent, as thousands for a like cause fell under the guillotine in Paris.

The present gateway was not erected until the following century. In the reign of Edward VI., the church with the "graven gilt and enamelled bell-tower" was undermined and blown up with gunpowder, and the stone was used for building the Lord Protector's House upon the Strand. To-day the members of the revived English League of the Order of St. John hold their meetings in the gate.

With the exception of Westminster Abbey, probably no church has more of interest than St. Bartholomew's at Smithfield. Within the century that saw the White Tower of the Conqueror begun, a monastery and church rose on this site. "A pleasant-witted gentleman, who was therefore called 'the king's minstrel,'" as Stow relates, was blest with a most singular vision on his pilgrimage to Rome. Like Saul of Tarsus, he felt the Lord's command to leave his old life and begin anew. Accordingly on his return to England he established a priory for thirteen monks, and in 1123 built the Norman church, part of which stands practically as he left it. Says a nineteenth-century antiquary: "Except the Tower and its immediate neighbourhood, there is no part of London, old or new, around which are cl.u.s.tered so many events interesting in history, as that of the priory of St. Bartholomew-the-Great and its vicinity. There are narrow, tortuous streets, and still narrower courts, about Cloth Fair, where are hidden away scores of old houses, whose projecting eaves and overhanging floors, heavy, c.u.mbrous beams and wattle and plaster walls must have seen the days of the Plantagenets. There are remains of groined arches, and windows with ancient tracery, strong b.u.t.tresses, and beautiful portals, with toothed and ornate archways, belonging to times long anterior to Wyclif and John of Gaunt yet to be found lurking behind dark, uncanny-looking tenements.... When Chaucer was young, and his Canterbury Pilgrims were men and women of the period, processions of cowled monks and chanting boys, with censers and crucifix, wended their way from the old priory of the Black Friars beside the Thames; and when Edward III. had spent the morning in witnessing the tourney of mailed knights at Smithfield, have they and their attendants, with all the pomp and pageantry of chivalry, pa.s.sed beneath this old gateway to the grand entertainment of the good prior in the great refectory beyond the south cloisters.... As we go round the Great Close we pa.s.s by some very old houses that occupy the place where was once the east cloisters. Behind these houses used to be a great mulberry-tree, only removed in our own time."

Here may Milton, during those dark days of the Restoration, when he retired to the seclusion of these narrow streets to escape observation, have sometimes ventured. Here sitting on the stone seat beneath its shade, he may have seen in fancy the processions of sandalled monks, with rosaries dangling against their long gray robes, move silently by as in the olden time, and pa.s.s within the portals of the church. And stepping beneath its round arches, he may himself have stood, as countless monks and pilgrims before him have done, before the rec.u.mbent painted figure of the tonsured monk, Rahere, who lies under a beautifully wrought Gothic canopy of a much later period. Around him rise the solemn, ma.s.sive pillars with their cubiform capitals, which seem scarcely less fresh and solid than when Rahere gazed on them with pride. Here are to be seen the slight intimations, even amid Norman semicircular arches, of the Gothic pointed arch that was to supersede them in the near future. Of the four superb arches which once supported the great central tower, two are the half-circle and two are slightly pointed.

An interesting and lovely feature of the church is the oriel window by the triforium, opposite Rahere's grave, built by the famous Prior Bolton. Here the prior seems to have had a kind of pew or seat from whence he could overlook the canons when he pleased, without their being aware of his presence, as it communicated with his house. The aisles form a fine study for the architect. The horseshoe Moorish arch is much used, as well as the simpler Norman arch, and there is seen a regular gradation from one to the other.

Among the tombs that must have most interested Puritan Milton was one of James Rivers, who died in 1641 just as the civil war was about to break forth, who evidently, had he lived, would have thrown in his lot where Milton did. His epitaph contains the lines:

"Whose life and death designed no other end, Than to serve G.o.d, his country, and his friend; Who, when ambition, tyranny, and pride Conquered the age, conquered himself and died."

A tomb that may have interested Milton is that of Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which sent so many Puritans to the new colonies in Ma.s.sachusetts. It was this Mildmay to whom, when he came to court, Queen Elizabeth said: "I hear, Sir Walter, that you have erected a Puritan foundation." "No, madam," was the answer, "but I have set an acorn, which when it becomes an oak, G.o.d knows what will be the fruit thereof."

In Milton's time many Puritans lived in the parish, and a ma.n.u.script book preserved in the vestry records that there was "Collected for the children of New England uppon 2 Sabath daies following in february, 1643, 2, 8.

9." This was a goodly sum for those days, and was doubtless much appreciated by the English cousins, who in their bare pine meeting-houses beside the tidal Charles remembered that the Puritans who remained at home were called to wage a fiercer fight with priestcraft, prerogative, and privilege than they, with poverty.

The church to-day is but a fraction of its former size, in fact, hardly more than the choir of the n.o.ble building which Rahere erected. The entire length of the church as it left his hand is supposed to have been 225 feet. In 1539 Sir Richard Rich bought church and priory for little more than 1,000, and the thirteen evicted canons were pensioned off.

Close by old St. Bartholomew's is Smithfield, so near that, in the reign of the Tudors, the ruddy light of martyrs' f.a.gots must have cast a glow upon its roof and its walls must have resounded to the screams of sufferers in their last agonising moments.

On the south side of Smithfield, in Milton's day, rose St. Bartholomew's Hospital, founded by Henry VIII., upon the site of Rahere's earlier one.

The great Harvey, the physician of Charles I., who discovered the circulation of the blood, was physician to this hospital for thirty-four years, and here, in 1619, he lectured on his great discovery. The present structure dates from a period early in the eighteenth century.

Directly opposite St. Bartholomew's Church, in 1849, excavations three feet below the surface exposed to view a ma.s.s of unhewn stones, blackened as by fire, and covered with ashes and human bones, charred and partially consumed. This marked the spot where martyrs, facing eastward toward the great gate of St. Bartholomew's, were chained to the stake. The prior was generally present on such occasions. An old print of the burning of Anne Askew displays a pulpit erected for the sermon, and raised seats for the numerous spectators who came to view the spectacle with probably no more shrinking than the Londoners of the early nineteenth century viewed the hangings at Newgate.

Of the two hundred and seventy-seven persons who in Mary's reign here perished for their faith, none is more lovingly remembered in Old England or in New England than John Rogers, the first martyr in the Marian persecution, to whom we have already referred. For a century or more, Calvinistic New England taught its children from that quaint little book known as the "New England Primer," and now treasured in many families as a curiosity. No one among its wretched little woodcuts struck such a solemn awe into the child's mind,--making the courage of the soldier on the battle-field shrink to nothing in comparison, as that picture where John Rogers, surrounded by his wife and nine children and another at the breast, testified to his faith within the flames. "That which I have preached I will seal with my blood," said the indomitable man, when offered pardon for recantation. "I will never pray for thee," quoth his angry questioner. "But I will pray for you," said Master Rogers. History does not record that his little children saw their father die, but only that they met him on the way, and sobbed out their farewells. But enough; we need not enter on the hideous story of this spot in the generation that followed this martyr.

In early days, Smithfield, or Smoothfield, was the Campus Martius for sham fights and tilts. All sorts of sports, archery, and bowls, and ball games were played here, and it was a resort for acrobats and jugglers. In 1615, says Howes, "The City of London reduced the rude, vast place of Smithfield into a faire and comely order, which formerly was never held possible to be done, and paved it all over, and made divers sewers to convey the water from the new channels which were made by reason of the new pavement; they also made strong rails round about Smithfield, and sequestered the middle part into a very fair and civil walk, and railed it round about with strong rails, to defend the place from annoyance and danger, as well from carts, as all manner of cattle, because it was intended hereafter that in time it might prove a fair and peaceable market-place, by reason that Newgate Market, Moorgate, Cheapside, Leadenhall, and Gracechurch Street, were immeasurably pestered with the unimaginable increase and multiplicity of market folks. And this field, commonly called West Smithfield, was for many years called Ruffian's Hall, by reason it was the usual place of frays and common fighting during the time that sword and bucklers were in use. But the ensuing deadly fight with rapier and dagger suddenly suppressed the fighting with sword and buckler." In his "Henry IV.,"

Shakespeare makes Page say of Bardolph: "He's gone to Smithfield to buy your worship a horse." To which Falstaff replies: "I bought him in Paul's, and he'll buy me a horse in Smithfield; an I could get me but a wife in the stews, I were manned, horsed, and wived."

Ben Jonson's merry play, "Bartholomew Fair," written in 1613, gives a good account of the babel of entreaties and advertising boasts that a.s.sailed the ears of the unwary customer: "Will your worship buy any gingerbread, gilt gingerbread; very good bread, comfortable bread? Buy any ballads? New ballads! Hey!

"Now the fair's a filling!

O, for a tune to startle The birds of the booths here billing Yearly with old St. Bartle.

"Buy any pears, pears, very fine pears! What do you lack, gentleman? Maid, see a fine hoppy-horse for your young master. Cost you but a farthing a week for his provender.

"Buy a mouse-trap, a mouse-trap, or a tormentor for a flea?

"What do you lack? fine purses, pouches, pin cases, pipes? a pair of smiths to wake you in the morning, or a fine whistling bird?

"Gentlewomen, the weather's hot; whither walk you? Have a care of your fine velvet caps; the fair is dusty. Take a sweet delicate booth with boughs, here in the way, and cool yourself in the shade, you and your friends. Here be the best pigs. A delicate show-pig, little mistress, with sweet sauce and crackling, like de bay-leaf i' de fire, la! T'ou shalt ha'

the clean side o' the table-clot' and de gla.s.s vashed!"

From all which, and much more to the same purport, one may judge that whether in Ben Jonson's time or Browning's, whether in Smithfield or in the modern charity fair, the art of alluring or browbeating the man with a purse into buying what he does not want is much the same. Long after Milton's death, the fair was famous, and drew gaping throngs to witness mountebanks swing in mid air, and to view the fat woman and double-headed calf, for all the world like "The Greatest Moral Show on Earth" to-day.

Now Smithfield has banished mountebanks and bellowing herds. Only the carcases of the latter may be found in the huge brick market that covers a large part of the once open s.p.a.ce. The original size of Smithfield was but three acres, but since 1834 it has been over six acres in extent.