Milton's England Part 11

CHAPTER XIII.

ELY PLACE.--INNS OF COURT.--TEMPLE CHURCH.--COVENT GARDEN.--SOMERSET HOUSE

Holborn was paved long before Milton's birth, and was a street of consequence, because of the Inns of Court, which opened north and south from it. From his time until 1868 a row of small houses southward from Gray's Inn blocked up the street, and became even in his day "a mighty hindrance to Holborn in point of prospect."

Ely Place, off Holborn, is little known to hasty tourists who have not time to leave the beaten track of sightseeing. But any one who has a quiet hour to spend in the exquisite little church of St. Etheldreda, and to recall the glories of the past which its Gothic walls have witnessed, will be well repaid.

Ely Place, a rectangle of dull, commonplace houses, at its entrance gives no glimpse of the chapel, which is shrinkingly withdrawn a little among the interloping walls that now replace the gardens and the palaces of Milton's day. In Chaucer's lifetime, the Bishop of Ely built this very chapel to the Saxon saint, the daughter of the king of the West Angles, who was born about the year 630. She took part in the erection of the Cathedral of Ely amid the mora.s.ses of the "Fen" country, and was chosen as its patron saint. In 679 she died, the abbess of the convent of Ely.

Singularly enough, this modest lady gave the origin to the word "tawdry,"

so Thornbury declares. For her name was sometimes called St. Audry, and some cheap necklaces sold at St. Audry's fair at Ely were known as "tawdry" laces, whence the name was applied to other cheap and showy ornaments.

After long continuance in the hands of Protestants, the church has again reverted to the faith of those who built it. It is the only instance of a "living" crypt in London, _i. e._, one in which tapers burn and kneeling worshippers a.s.semble before shrines. On any week day, one may in three minutes turn from Holborn into its mediaeval quiet and seclusion and tell one's beads, either in the upper or lower sanctuary, or gaze at the glorious decorated east window, and on the chaste proportions of an unspoiled Gothic structure. Its wealth of windows remotely reminds one of the Sainte Chapelle of good King Louis, whose jewelled windows in their slender lofty frames are one of the marvels of the island in the Seine.

In the Plantagenet and Tudor period, vineyards, kitchen garden, and orchard surrounded the magnificent buildings of Ely Place. Hither, at the Duke of Gloucester's bidding, as Shakespeare, following history, records, the bishop sent hastily for the strawberries for which his garden was famous.

"My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn I saw good strawberries in your garden there; I do beseech you send for some of them."

In the reign of Elizabeth, Sir Christopher Hatton was the owner of Ely Place. Except a cl.u.s.ter of houses,--Ely Rents,--standing on Holborn, the land round about this great estate seems to have been unbuilt upon.

Sir Christopher, who rose to be Elizabeth's lord chancellor, was a striking looking man and a graceful dancer. He captivated the queen, who was very susceptible to manly beauty. The state papers in the Record Office, it is said, disclose her fond and foolish correspondence with him.

In Milton's lifetime, Lady Hatton--a gay and wealthy widow--was wooed and won by the famous Sir Edward c.o.ke. But Hatton House saw many an open quarrel between the ill-matched pair.

In the time of Charles I., a pageant almost unparalleled in magnificence was arranged in Ely Place. The redoubtable Prynne, who had preached against all such frivolities in the customary strong language of the time, had not yet lost his ears, as he did later, in the pillory. But his strictures had given offence at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, who was minded to amuse herself with masques; consequently this famous masque came off. Mr. Lawes, the famous musician and friend of Milton, was set to composing music for the occasion. On an evening in 1633, when Milton was living at Horton, the magnificent procession wended its way through crowds of enthusiastic spectators toward Whitehall. One hundred gentlemen on the best horses that the stables of royalty and the n.o.bility could offer, all clad in gold and silver, and each accompanied by a page and two lackeys carrying torches, were only one feature of the pageant; the others were some of them as odd as these were splendid. Tiny children, dressed like birds, rode on small horses; every beautiful or fantastic conceit imaginable was carried out, and the cost of the whole was no less than 21,000, a sum which meant far more in purchasing power than it does to-day. Some of the musicians, however, received 100 apiece--a fee quite satisfactory to many a prima donna in our time.

No more characteristic part of Milton's London exists to-day than the various Inns of Court that lead north and south from Holborn. As the sightseer pa.s.ses from the jostle and turmoil of the thoroughfare, he is transported in a moment into a silence and seclusion that remind one of a Puritan Sabbath. Quadrangle opens out of quadrangle, shut in by rows of unpretentious buildings, whose monotony is broken by Gothic chapels or Tudor dining-halls surmounted by carved cupolas. Occasionally a cloistered walk under low Tudor arches, or a group of highly ornate terra cotta chimneys is seen, as one wanders around the dim and shadowy pa.s.sages. All at once a turn, and behold, here in the heart of the life of this six million people of the great overgrown metropolis, still stretch long reaches of greensward, locked safely from the intrusion of the public by their handsome wrought-iron gates.

In Gray's Inn, to the north of Holborn, Francis Bacon wrote his "Novum Organum," which he published in 1620, when Milton was a schoolboy at St.

Paul's, and when the Leyden Pilgrims in the _Mayflower_ landed on Plymouth Rock.

The gardens of Gray's Inn, which Bacon set out with trees, became a fashionable promenade in Milton's old age. Pepys tells us that he took his wife there after church one Sunday, "to observe the fashions of the ladies, because of my wife's making some clothes." It was, in short, quite as much a dress parade as Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday in New York.

Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth's great minister, was, next to Bacon, the most eminent of the members of Gray's Inn.

Its hall, which dates from 1560, is little inferior to any hall in all the Inns of Court. It has carved wainscoting, and a timber roof, and windows emblazoned with the arms of Lord Bacon and Lord Burleigh. In Milton's time, Gray's Inn marked the northern limit of the town, and all beyond it was green fields and country lanes. Therefore we now turn south and west to explore briefly the numerous other inns that must often have echoed to the steps of Milton when he lived almost within stone's throw of them.

d.i.c.kens's description of the little Staple Inn gives the reader an exact impression of the place to-day: "Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, where certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long since run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into which, out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on his boots.

It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter on smoky trees, as though they called to each other, 'Let us play at country,' and where a few feet of garden mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks that are legal nooks; and it contains a little hall with a little lantern in its roof."

Walking through the further quadrangle, and following the narrow street down past the towering, vulgar conglomeration of every incongruous architectural device,--the new Birkbeck Bank,--we enter presently the wide s.p.a.ces of Lincoln's Inn.

The style of buildings, whether new or old, is largely Tudor of the type of Hampton Court. The walls of red brick are inlaid with diagonal lines of darker bricks. The chapel, of Perpendicular Gothic, built by Inigo Jones, is raised on arches which leave a kind of open crypt below, where Pepys tells us he used to walk. The stained gla.s.s windows antedate Laud's time, and Laud is said to have wondered that the saints emblazoned on them escaped the "furious spirit" that was aroused against those "harmless, goodly windows" of his at Lambeth.

At number 24 of the "Old Buildings," the secretary of Oliver Cromwell lived from 1645 to 1659, where his correspondence was discovered behind a false ceiling. The tradition that the Protector was overheard to discuss with him here about the kidnapping of the three little sons of Charles I.

may be dismissed as mythical.

Beside the n.o.ble brick gateway of Lincoln's Inn, which bore the date 1518, it is said that rare Ben Jonson, in his early days of poverty, was found working with a trowel in one hand and his Horace in the other, when some gentlemen, having compa.s.sion on him, as did Cimabue on the gifted child, Giotto, rescued him, and let loose the imprisoned genius who found Shakespeare for a friend, and the Abbey for his tomb.

Of Furnivall's, Scroope's, and Barnard's Inns, and Thavie's, oldest of them all, we have no s.p.a.ce to write. The characteristics of the four great inns are stated in the lines:

"Gray's Inn for walks, Lincoln's Inn for wall, The Inner Temple for a garden, And the Middle for a hall."

The modern sightseer finds, as probably Milton found, much more of interest in the two latter, which lie south of Fleet Street, than in all the others combined.

Before crossing Fleet Street, mention should be made of Temple Bar, which was erected by Wren four years before Milton's death, and marked the transition from Fleet Street to the Strand. The "Old Cheshire Cheese" in the ancient and dingy Wine Office Court, which opens north from Fleet Street, probably was built a dozen years before Milton died. It was Doctor Johnson's restaurant, and his fame brings many customers to sit in his old seat, which is still carefully preserved.

Between the Tower and Westminster stands half-way one little edifice more ancient than any other on that route. It is the little Temple Church of Norman and transitional design, which stands secluded from the traffic of the streets within a stone's throw of Temple Bar.

Of its dimensions and manifold restorations, the ordinary guide-books say enough, and make a repet.i.tion unnecessary. The round church with its interesting arcade of grotesque, sculptured heads, and its rare proportions; the choir, "springing," as Hawthorne says, "as it were, in a harmonious and accordant fountain out of the cl.u.s.tered pillars that support its pinioned arches," are both a delight to every lover of the beautiful.

Hardly more than a century after the Norman conquest we find the Knights Templars on this spot. The year after their removal here from Holborn in 1185, they built their Temple church, the finest of the four round churches that still remain in England. The choir, which is one of the most beautiful specimens of pure early English, was finished in 1240.

In early times, the discipline of the knights was most severe. The Master himself scourged disobedient brethren within its walls, and on Fridays there were frequent public whippings within the church. In a narrow, penitential cell to be seen in the church walls, only four and a half feet long and two and a half wide, a disobedient brother is said to have been starved to death.

The interesting rec.u.mbent figures clad in mail, upon the Temple floor, are not, as is popularly supposed, Knights Templars, but a.s.sociates of the Temple, who were only partly admitted to its great privileges.

Shortly after the downfall of the Templars, the property pa.s.sed into the hands of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, whose priory, as we remember, was burned by the wrathful men of Kent in Wat Tyler's rebellion.

The knights leased it to the law students who belonged to the "King's Court." Therefore, when the rebels reached London, they poured down on the haunts of the Temple lawyers, carried off the books, deeds, and rolls of remembrance, and, in vengeance on the Knights Hospitallers, burned them in Fleet Street. So determined were these men, goaded by years of tyranny, to put an end to all the laws that had oppressed them.

In later years, we find that the Temple church in the time of Henry VIII., and later still, of Milton and Ben Jonson, was used in term time for the students as a place for rendezvous. Discussions on legal questions sometimes waxed boisterous, and, as a contemporary said, as "noisy as St.

Paul's."

In Elizabeth's day the Middle Temple abandoned the old Templar arms--a red cross on a silver shield with a lamb bearing the sacred banner surmounted by a red cross--and subst.i.tuted a flying Pegasus. Both of these emblems meet the visitor's eye as he winds through the labyrinthine pa.s.sages of the old quadrangles, and comes at every step upon some spot rich with the a.s.sociations of centuries.

Of the well-known story of the origin of the Wars of the Roses within the Temple Gardens it is not necessary here to speak.

An old print of Milton's later years shows the gardens of the Inner Temple laid out in many straight rows of trees, like apple-trees in orchards, which extended down to the wall that bordered the Thames. North, toward Fleet Street, rows upon rows of gabled houses, four stories in height, enclosed quadrangles and courts. The dining-halls, built in the Tudor period, stand as they stood when Spenser, in the generation before Milton, wrote of--

"those bricky towers, The which on Thames' broad back do ride, Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers; There whilom wont the Temple knights to bide Till they decayed through pride."

The little Fountain in Fountain Court is dear to lovers of d.i.c.kens, for here Ruth Pinch tripped by with merry heart to meet her lover. In Queen Anne's time, a fountain of much loftier alt.i.tude sparkled and splashed here, and for aught we know made music when Milton and Shakespeare wandered within the Temple precincts.

It was not until after Milton's birth that James I. in 1609 granted the whole property to the two societies of the Inner and Middle Temples; whereupon they presented his Majesty with a precious gold cup of great weight, which cup was esteemed by the monarch as one of his most valued treasures. When the king's daughter Elizabeth was married four years later, the Temple and Gray's Inn men gave a masque, which Sir Francis Bacon planned and executed. The bridal party came by water and landed at the foot of the Temple Gardens amid peals of the little cannon of that day, and with great pomp and merriment. The king gave a supper to the forty masquers. This masque, however, did not compare in splendour with the one given twenty years later, and already alluded to, which was planned by members of the Inns of Court meeting in Ely Place.

In Milton's middle life the learned Selden, who died in 1654, was buried in the choir of the Temple church. Of him Milton writes that he is "one of your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land." When Milton was in his thirty-sixth year and had published his treatise on divorce, he writes of Selden, then in his sixtieth year, whose acquaintance he had probably made, and begged those who would know the truth to "hasten to be acquainted with that n.o.ble volume written by our learned Selden, of 'The Law of Nature and of Nations,' a work more useful and more worthy to be perused, whoever studies to be a great man in wisdom, equity, and justice, than all those decretals ... which the pontifical clerks have doted on." Of his well-known "Table Talk,"

Coleridge observes: "There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer."

One of the greatest names connected with the Temple is that of Richard Hooker, author of the famous "Ecclesiastical Polity." He was for six years Master of the Temple--a position which Izaak Walton, who wrote his life, says he accepted rather than desired. The interest in music in the seventeenth century is evinced by the fierce contest which lasted for a year, as to the organ which should be erected in this church. Two organs were put up by rivals. The great Purcell performed on one which was finally selected by Judge Jeffreys of the Inner Temple. He was a capital musician, and in his case at least the adage seemed disproved that "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast."

With the Restoration and the opening of the floodgates of luxury and licentiousness, which the stern Puritan had for twenty years kept in abeyance, the Temple renewed the banquets and merry-makings of an earlier day. At a continuous banquet which lasted half a month, the Earl of Nottingham kept open house to all London, and entertained all the great and powerful of the time. Fifty servants waited on Charles II. and his company, while twenty violins made merry music at the feast.

The Great Fire of 1666 ceased ere it reached the Temple church, but it was not stopped until many sets of chambers and t.i.tle-deeds of a vast number of valuable estates had perished. Another fire only a dozen years later destroyed much more of the establishment which Milton knew. Of the Inner Temple Hall little exists to-day that his eyes rested on. But the stately Middle Temple Hall, built in 1572, still stands, and is one of the best specimens of Elizabethan architecture that London boasts. The open roof of hammer-beam design, with pendants, is especially characteristic of the work of that period. The screen is an elaborate one of Renaissance work, more interesting for its age and a.s.sociations than for its conformity to true principles of art. This famous hall witnessed the performance of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" in 1601. The same strong, oak tables of the days of Bacon, c.o.ke, and Jonson still stretch from end to end. Viewed from the western dais, the portraits, armour, and rich windows combine with the ma.s.sive furniture and carved screen to present a scene of sober richness hardly equalled outside of a few dining-halls of Oxford and Cambridge which belong to that same period. Among the eminent men of the Middle Temple whose lives Milton's life touched were Sir Walter Raleigh, John Pym, Ireton,--Cromwell's son-in-law,--Evelyn, Lord Chancellor Clarendon, and many others of equal note in their day.

Only one who has delved long in the biography and literature of this great age can realise the stupendous scholarship of the men of this period,--c.o.ke, Selden, Bacon, Newton, Milton, and their contemporaries across the Channel, Grotius, Spinoza, and Galileo,--who, with the men of action of their day, make the century in which they lived one of the most significant since time began. What period since the Golden Age of Greece can match their achievements? Where on earth since the days of Periclean eloquence and wisdom in Athens could be found one spot where so much genius and learning had its centre as in the England into which Milton was born, and in which he lived for two-thirds of a century?

"We are apt," says Lowell, "to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterises them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we.

They had fewer books, but those were of the best. Their speech was n.o.ble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato." Of the long list of eminent men who studied here in the century after Milton, perhaps none was more akin to him in scholarship than the learned Blackstone; none who more deeply understood his Puritan seriousness than Cowper; none who in boldness, love of liberty, and justice more resembled him than Edmund Burke.