Milton's England Part 12

Fifty years before Milton's birth, as Aggas's old map of 1562 gives evidence, London had extended but a little way beyond the city walls and the Strand. But in Elizabeth's prosperous age, n.o.ble mansions and extensive gardens began to replace the fields, commons, and pastures that stretched westward from St. Martin's Lane. One of the busiest spots in modern London, that is, Covent Garden, begins to come into prominence in London history just as Milton reached early manhood. For three centuries before his time the abbots of Westminster had owned "fair spreading pastures" here, now all included in the general name of "Long Acre." Part of this they are thought to have used for the burial of their dead. In Aggas's old map, a brick wall enclosed all but the southern side where the houses and enclosures separated it from the Strand. The property belonged to John Russell, Earl of Bedford, to whom it was given by the Crown in 1552, at which time it had a yearly value of less than 7. To-day his successor holds one of the richest rentals in the world. In 1631 a square was formed, and the famous architect Inigo Jones built an open arcade about the north and east sides. Upon the west rose a Renaissance church by the design of the same artist, and the south was bordered by the garden of Bedford House and a grove or "small grotto of trees most pleasant in the summer season." The duke, in ordering the erection of the chapel, declared that he would go to no expense for it, and it might be a barn.

"Then," said Inigo Jones, "it shall be the handsomest barn in England,"

and fulfilled his promise. It was the first important Protestant church erected in England. Only the portico of the original church remains, as the first building was destroyed by fire in 1795.

In the popular dramas written in the last part of Milton's lifetime, constant allusion is made to the fashionable and even licentious companies that frequented the piazza of Covent Garden, and it is safe to say that it was never at any time a haunt of the serious-minded Puritan. The poet Gay, writing in the next generation after Milton, thus describes the Covent Garden that he knew:

"Where Covent Garden's famous temple stands, That boasts the work of Jones' immortal hands, Columns with plain magnificence appear, And graceful porches lead along the square; Here oft my course I bend, when lo! from far I spy the furies of the football war: The 'prentice quits his shop to join the crew, Increasing crowds the flying game pursue."

At first, peddlers of fruit and vegetables used the gravelled centre of the square for their booths, and gradually the market grew into a well-recognised establishment, and the open square was finally in 1830 covered over. In Milton's later years Covent Garden was fashionable as a residence for the n.o.bility. Bishops, dukes, and earls had here their town houses, and among the t.i.tled residents was the painter, Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SOMERSET HOUSE

This view represents the house as it stood in Milton's boyhood, previous to the alterations by Inigo Jones. Adjoining it is the Savoy, and immediately behind it is the only view extant of Exeter House.

_From an ancient painting in Dulwich College._]

The palace on the Thames known as "Somerset House" was in Milton's lifetime a magnificent structure; built in 1544-49, it was from the time of Elizabeth to 1775 a residence much favoured by royalty. Pepys tells us in 1662: "Indeed it is observed that the greatest court nowadays is there." It was then the residence of the queen mother, whose rooms he describes as "most stately and n.o.bly furnished," and he remarks upon the echo on the stairs, "which continues a voice so long as the singing three notes, concords one after another, they all three shall sound in concert together a good while most pleasantly." The site occupied an area of six hundred feet from east to west and five hundred from north to south. The present large edifice, which was erected on the site of the old one, demolished in 1775, is used for many important public purposes.

CHAPTER XIV.

WHITEHALL.--WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, discloses in its cramped and dingy quarters little if anything that remains of the time when Milton lived within its precincts. In the days when he dwelt here and a.s.sisted Cromwell as his Latin secretary, some remnants of the former palace of the Scottish kings, which once had occupied this site, were still to be seen. Hard by at one time lived both the greatest architects of that age of building, Jones and Wren. From Scotland Yard to Cannon Row, Westminster, there extended in Milton's lifetime the stately old palace of Whitehall, built in the Tudor style of Hampton Court. A writer in the last days of Queen Elizabeth tells us that it was truly royal; enclosed on one side by the Thames, on the other by a park which connects it with St.

James's, another royal palace. He speaks of an immense number of swans,--birds favoured by royalty then as now,--which floated on the salty bosom of the tidal Thames as now they do upon its sweeter waters at Runnymede and Windsor. He also mentions that deer were numerous. An open way led through the palace grounds from Charing Cross to Westminster, which, although shut in by gates at either end, was an open thoroughfare.

When Cardinal Wolsey owned Whitehall, it was known as "York Place," and did not receive the former t.i.tle until Henry VIII. had taken possession of it. Here the voluptuous monarch visited his great rival in magnificence, and at a masque within these walls cast covetous eyes upon fair Anne Boleyn. Within these richly tapestried and stately halls a few months later, the "little great lord cardinal" bade a long farewell to all his greatness, and with a heavy heart entered his barge at the foot of Whitehall stairs.

Henry added many features to his new possessions, among others a stately gateway of three stories with mullioned windows and octagonal towers designed by Holbein. Sir Thomas More at Chelsea had discovered the merits of this artist, and there presented him to the king, who was a clever connoisseur in art as well as wives. It was in Whitehall that Hans Holbein painted the well-known portrait of the straddling monarch. From the advent of that shrewd politician, great sovereign, yet vain and silly woman, Elizabeth, Whitehall became definitely the seat of royalty, though the Tower theoretically remained so. The library of this learned woman was well filled with books, not only English, but French, Latin, Greek, and Italian. Masques, tournaments, and every form of gorgeous entertainment, from Wolsey's time to that of William III., made money flow like water in Whitehall, except during the short domination of the Puritan party. James I., upon the burning of the Banquet Hall in 1615, determined to commission Inigo Jones, not only to build a new one, but to build a whole new palace, of which this hall was but the fortieth part.

The Banquet Hall is in the Palladian style of architecture, and is 111 feet in length, and half as great in width and height. Its ceiling is decorated with pictures by Rubens, painted on canvas and sent from abroad.

They represent the apotheosis of James I. and scenes from the life of Charles I. The original plan, which was not carried out, was to have included a number of mural paintings by Van Dyck, which should represent the history and ceremonies of the Order of the Garter. The palace was planned to cover the whole s.p.a.ce from the Thames to St. James's Park, and from Charing Cross to Westminster. In Milton's time of residence in Whitehall upon the south was the Bowling Green, and north of it the Privy Gardens. The front consisted of the existing Banquet Hall,--the only part of the plan of Inigo Jones that ever materialised,--the gateways, and a row of low gabled buildings. Behind these were three courts or quadrangles. East of the Banquet Hall were a row of offices, the Great Hall or Presence Chamber, and the Chapel and private rooms of the king and queen. The art treasures and library were in the "Stone Gallery," which ran along the east side of the Privy Garden. The magnificence which was displayed at Whitehall in Milton's early boyhood may be perceived from the pomp and luxury of George Villiers, afterward Duke of Buckingham, when he came to make his fortune at the court of James I. "It was common with him at any ordinary dancing to have his cloaths trimmed with great diamonds; hatbands, c.o.c.kades, and earrings to be yoked with great and manifold knots of pearls--in short, to be manacled, fettered, and imprisoned in jewels, insomuch that at his going over to Paris in 1625, he had twenty-seven suits of cloaths made, the richest that embroidery, silk, velvet, gold, and gems could contribute; one of which was a white, uncut velvet, set all over, both suit and cloak, with diamonds valued at fourscore thousand pounds, besides a great feather stuck all over with diamonds; as were also his sword, girdle, hatband, and spurs." He drove in a coach with six horses, and was carried sometimes in a sedan-chair, which mode of conveyance then was new and caused much outcry against the using of men as beasts of burden.

We have already alluded to the famous masque, which was planned by members of the Inns of Court at Ely Place, and carried out in 1633 to please the queen--an entertainment so unique in its splendour as to be referred to in every account of Whitehall. But the palace is chiefly notable, not for scenes of gaiety, but for that mournful sight which struck terror to the breast of every European monarch, and horrified every believer in the divine right of kings. On the 27th of January, 1648-49, the death sentence was pa.s.sed upon Charles I., of whom a few months later one of his followers wrote:

"Great Charles, thou earthly G.o.d, celestial man,...

Thy heavenly virtues angels should rehea.r.s.e, It is a theam too high for human verse."

Cromwell hesitated long before he signed the death warrant. If banishment of the king could have secured their rights to Englishmen, gladly would he have urged a milder sentence. But with the king alive, he felt there was no surety of peace or justice, and after painful hesitation he set his seal to the death warrant. Says Ma.s.son: "At the centre of England was a will that had made itself adamant, by express vow and deliberation beforehand, for the very hour which now had arrived. Fairfax had relented ... Vane had withdrawn from the work ... there was an agony over what was coming among many that had helped to bring it to pa.s.s. Only some fifty or sixty governing Englishmen, with Oliver Cromwell in the midst of them, were prepared for every responsibility and stood inexorably to their task.

_They_ were the will of England now, and they had the army with them. What proportion of England besides went with them, it might be difficult to estimate. One private Londoner, at all events, can be named who approved thoroughly of their policy, and was ready to testify the same. While the sentenced king was at St. James's, there was lying on Milton's writing-table in his house in High Holborn at least the beginnings of a pamphlet on which he had been engaged during the king's trial, and in which in vehement answer to the outcry of the Presbyterians generally ...

he was to defend all the recent acts of the army, Pride's Purge included, justify the existing governments of the army chiefs and the fragment of Parliament that a.s.sisted them, inculcate republican beliefs in his countrymen, and prove to them above all this proposition: '_That it is lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any who have the power, to call to account a tyrant_, or wicked king, and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death, if the ordinary magistrate have neglected or denied to do it.' The pamphlet was not to come out in time to bear practically on the deed which it justified; but while the king was yet alive, it was planned, sketched, and in part written."

Three days after his sentence the king bade farewell to his sobbing little son and daughter at St. James's Palace, and walked across the park between a line of soldiers to the stairs, which then were on the site of the present Horse Guards. From thence he crossed the street by a gallery, which led him past the scaffold draped in black, and into his own bedchamber in the Banquet Hall. From there, a little later, he pa.s.sed through a window, or possibly an opening in the wall, upon the scaffold, with his attendant and Bishop Juxon. Two unknown men in masks and false hair had undertaken the grim and dangerous task of executioner. For among the throngs that filled the streets from Charing Cross down to Westminster there were many who would readily have torn them in pieces. The "martyr-king," as Jacobins still call him, now that the end of his arbitrary reign had come, behaved with dignity. His last words were: "To your power I must submit, but your authority I deny." From the roof of a neighbouring mansion, Archbishop Usher stood until he sickened at the sight and swooned, and was carried to his bed. Andrew Marvell's well-known lines upon this scene will be recalled:

"While round the armed bands, Did clasp their b.l.o.o.d.y hands, He nothing common did or mean, Upon that memorable scene, Nor called the G.o.ds with vulgar spite, To vindicate his hopeless right; But with his keener eye, The axe's edge did try; Then bowed his kingly head, Down, as upon a bed."

Strangely enough, it was on this very spot where his death forecast the dawning of that new principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, which his whole nature loathed, that London had seen the beginnings of the civil strife. Here a company of the citizens, "returning from Westminster, where they had been pet.i.tioning quietly for justice, were set upon by some of the court as they pa.s.sed Whitehall, in the which tumult divers were hurt, and one or more slain just by the Banqueting House."

The regicides, who felt their b.l.o.o.d.y deed to be a sad necessity for England's safety, had no desire to wreak a mean revenge upon the body of the king. Unlike those of many far n.o.bler men who had died as "traitors,"

his body was not dishonoured, but was treated with due respect. It was embalmed, and lay for days under a velvet pall at St. James's Palace, where crowds came to see it. The authorities objected to his burial in Westminster Abbey, as the place was too public, and crowds might gather there. But they accorded him a burial in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, whither his body was taken in a hea.r.s.e drawn by six horses and followed by four mourning coaches. His coffin was placed beside that of Henry VIII.

within the choir. The next month after the death of Charles, the Parliament voted the use of a large part of Whitehall to Cromwell. Every Monday he dined with all his officers above the captain's rank. Milton, as his Latin secretary, and Andrew Marvell must have been often at his board, and Waller, his kinsman, and perhaps the youthful Dryden. He was a great lover of music and entertained those who were skilful in any form of art.

It is through Cromwell that England owns to-day the Raphael cartoons at Kensington. He purchased many other of the paintings which had belonged to the magnificent collection of Charles I. and had been sold. Here his old mother died, and here in 1658, on a wild August day, amid the tumult of a storm that raged and howled over a large part of England, the great heart of the Protector ceased to beat. On the day that he lay dying, a lad of fifteen years, named Isaac Newton, turned the violence of the storm to his account by jumping first with the wind and then against it, and computing its force by the difference of the distances.

As the dying Oliver approached his end, he was much in prayer; an attendant has recorded some of these last utterances in which he commended G.o.d's people to the keeping of the Almighty: "Give them," he prayed, "consistency of judgment, one heart, and mutual love; and go on to deliver them and with the work of reformation; and make the name of Christ glorious in the world. Teach those who look too much on thy instruments, to depend more upon thyself. Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust of a poor worm, for they are thy people too." Probably never by any master of Whitehall was such a sincerely devout and magnanimous pet.i.tion raised to heaven. Of the decapitation of his dead body and its subsequent history, when Charles II. was able to wreak his vengeance, we need not speak. Neither need we rehea.r.s.e the well-known record of the dissolute monarch who on the Restoration set up his profligate court at Whitehall.

Of the last hours of Charles II. Evelyn paints a loathsome picture: "I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness, and as it were total forgetfulness of G.o.d (it being Sunday evening) which I was witness of: the king sitting and toying with his concubines, a French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at ba.s.set around a large table, a bank of at least two thousand pounds in gold before them.... Six days after all was in the dust." In the reign of William III. two fires, in 1691 and 1697, consumed all of the palace except the Banquet Hall of Inigo Jones.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY AS MILTON KNEW IT

_From an old engraving._]

The Westminster Abbey that Milton knew, unlike the old St. Paul's of his day, was indeed a house of G.o.d, and was not defiled with the intrusion of hucksters and dandies and the bustle of the Exchange. Its lofty walls, ungrimed by smoke, rose fair and stately; the present towers of the west front were then unbuilt, and its ma.s.s presented a long, unbroken, horizontal sky-line. Under its high, embowered roof, Milton may have seen less warmth of colour than we, for the stained gla.s.s is modern, but he was spared the majority of the pretentious and tasteless monuments which crowd the transepts and the side aisles to-day, and for the most part are in bulk in inverse proportion to their artistic merit, and to the importance of those whom they honour. Perhaps there was no man in England to whose sensitive soul the solemn minster spoke more eloquently. With a mind richly stored in history, and with the artist's eye and prophet's soul, every stone of this most venerable and beautiful of English churches must have been dear to him. It is not within the scope of this little volume even to touch upon the romantic history of this centre of English life or to examine its n.o.ble architecture, but only to indicate what may most have touched the mind and heart of the great scholar and patriot-reformer who often pa.s.sed its portals on his walk from Petty France to Whitehall.

In the south aisle of the nave are buried two ladies whom Milton probably knew. They are the two wives of Cromwell's secretary--Sir Samuel Morland, the inventor of the speaking trumpet and improver of the fire-engine. The inscriptions by their husband appear in Hebrew, Greek, Ethiopic, and English. In the north aisle is a curious monument of 1631 to Jane Hill. At the rear of the lady's figure is a skeleton in a winding-sheet. Among the memorials of his contemporaries which must have peculiarly interested Milton was the little slab in the nave marked, "O rare Ben Jonson," which slab was later removed to the Poets' Corner. Beneath a modern paving stone, which now covers the spot, in an upright posture was placed the coffin of the poet who in his last days of poverty, in 1637, asked Charles I. for eighteen inches of square ground in Westminster Abbey. He died in a house between the Abbey and St. Margaret's Church. Newton's tomb near by Milton never saw, as the youth of the man of science covered only Milton's later years. On entering the south transept, the first monument that must have claimed his interest was that of Camden, the learned antiquary. Just before going to Cambridge, in 1623, Milton may have attended the funeral of this man, whose great work, "Britannia" added new l.u.s.tre to Elizabeth's glorious reign. Camden did for England what Stow did for London, and preserved the knowledge of the nation of that day. His bust, in the rich costume of his time, presents a speaking likeness, and with his portrait in the National Gallery make the eminent scholar seem a personality as real as Raleigh's. Ben Jonson, who was one of his pupils when he was head master of Westminster School, lovingly ascribes to him the source of his own inspiration:

"Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in acts, all that I know."

Camden wrote in 1600 the first guide-book of the Abbey, which, being in Latin, would have served Milton better than it would the modern visitor.

In an unmarked grave lies the body of Richard Hakluyt, the great geographer, who died in 1616.

Just beyond Camden's tomb is that of the great scholar, Casaubon. On its front are plainly scratched the initials of the gentle angler, Izaak Walton, by himself, with the date, 1658. A few feet distant on the pavement a slab marks the grave of the "old, old, very old" man who died in 1635 at the reputed age of one hundred and fifty-two. "Old Parr," as he was known, is said to have been born in 1483, and married his first wife at the age of eighty, and his second in 1605, when he was one hundred and twenty-two years of age. The Earl of Arundel, determined to exhibit this "piece of antiquity," had him carried by litter from Shrewsbury and presented to Charles I. On being questioned by the king about religious matters he cautiously replied that he thought it safest to hold whatever religion was held by the reigning monarch, "for he knew that he came raw into the world, and thought it no point of wisdom to be broiled out of it," an opinion quite to be expected of a man who had lived through the reigns of all the Tudors.

Further on, within the Poets' Corner, two monuments especially must have been dear to the author of "Comus" and "Lycidas." One marks the grave of Chaucer, who lies under a beautiful Gothic canopy erected in 1558, after the removal of his body to this spot; the other marks that of Edmund Spenser, who died in 1598 in King Street, hard by, "for lacke of bread."

Yet Dean Stanley tells us that "his hea.r.s.e was attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb. What a funeral was that at which Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and, in all probability, Shakespeare, attended! What a grave in which the pen of Shakespeare may be mouldering away!" Of the author of the "Faerie Queene" Milton himself said: "Our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." Near by to Spenser's tomb is the monument to Ben Jonson, at some distance from his grave, as has just been said, and close at hand are the memorials to Dryden, Drayton, Cowley, and Francis Beaumont, Milton's famous contemporaries. If the poet could have looked forward two generations he might have seen his own counterfeit presentment in marble upon these walls. By that time the royalist feeling against him had abated, and when in 1737 this belated recognition of his greatness was placed upon the wall, Doctor Gregory remarked to Doctor Johnson: "I have seen erected in the church a bust of that man whose name I once knew considered as a pollution of its walls."

After Shakespeare's death there was a strong desire to remove his bones from Stratford to the Abbey, upon which Milton and Jonson both protested.

The former wrote:

"What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones The labour of an age in piled stones?"

and Jonson more emphatically exclaimed:

"My Shakespeare rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further on to make thee room; Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give."

In St. Benedict's Chapel may be noted the graves of Bishop Bilson, Doctor Tunson, Sir Robert Anstruther, and Sir Robert Ayton,--famous men of Milton's time.

In St. Edmund's Chapel, farther on, Milton as a lad of fourteen may have seen in 1622 the young man interred whose tomb is surmounted by a beautiful figure of a youth in Roman armour. Hard by under a lofty canopy lie two notable rec.u.mbent figures, which mark the grave of the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury, and show the style of costume of Milton's boyhood years.

Among the monuments of his contemporaries in the chapel of Henry VII. that must have awakened a sensation of disgust in the mind of the Puritan poet, was that of the Duke of Buckingham, whose barbaric splendour of attire has already been noted, and who was murdered in 1628. Near by his huge and ostentatious tomb, so characteristic of the man whom it commemorates, lie under the pavement the graves of his king, James I., and his consort.

We may be sure that the graves which most interested Milton here were those of Oliver Cromwell, his mother and sister, and his daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, his son-in-law, Ireton, and Bradshaw, who was president of the tribunal which condemned Charles I. The Genoese envoy of the time thus described Cromwell's death and burial in his despatch to the Council of Genoa: "He left the world with unimaginable valour, prudence, and charity, and more like a priest or monk than a man who had fashioned and worked so mighty an engine so few years.... His body was opened and embalmed, and little trace of disease found therein; which was not the cause of his death, but rather the continual fever which came upon him from sorrow and melancholy at Madame Claypole's death." Cromwell's body lay in state at Somerset House, and was thence escorted to the tomb by an immense throng of mourners, which included the city companies. "The effigy or statue of the dead, made most lifelike in royal robes, crown on head, in one hand the sceptre and in the other the globe, was laid out on a bier richly adorned and borne hither in a coach made for the purpose, open on every side, and adorned with many plumes and banners." It is said that Cromwell especially loved the Abbey, and inst.i.tuted the custom of commemorating English worthies within its walls. Admiral Blake was the first to receive this honour in 1657. "Cromwell caused him to be brought up by land to London in all the state that could be; and to encourage his officers to adventure their lives that they might be pompously buried, he was with all solemnity possible interred in the Chapel of Henry VII., among the monuments of the kings." Who can doubt that Milton stood in sightless grief beside these tombs, before the desecration of "Oliver's Vault?" Only the body of Cromwell's daughter was left in peace, and still remains. His mother and sister were reburied in the green, and the reader already knows what was the vile treatment of the other bodies. It is said that to the royalist dean of Westminster, Thomas Sprat, we owe the refusal of interment in the Abbey to the "regicide" John Milton. Had he been buried later where Cromwell's body had lain, he too might have been thrust forth. It was this dean who esteemed Cowley as a superior poet to Milton, and called the former the "Pindar, Horace, and Virgil of England." In the south aisle lie General George Monck and Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, eldest daughter of James I., whose marriage we have seen was celebrated by a merry masque within the Temple grounds. This was the English princess for whom a part of Heidelberg Castle was built; she was mother of Prince Rupert, whose strenuous efforts to save the fortunes of his uncle, Charles I., did not endear him to Milton and his friends. In this chapel lies a wretched victim of her cousin, James I. This is the Lady Arabella Stuart, whose marriage so displeased the king that he immured her in the Tower, where, bereft of reason by her miseries, she died when Milton was a boy.

At the eastern end of the north aisle of the chapel of Henry VII. is a baby's cradle-tomb, which has been the frequent theme of verse. Standing beside the little marble form of this daughter of James I., Milton may have felt a pang of heart as he thought of his own little one buried in St. Margaret's, but a stone's throw distant. Of those who were a.s.sociated with Milton's public work at Whitehall, was Admiral Edward Popham, general of the Fleet of the Republic under Cromwell, who died in 1651. He was buried at the state's expense in the chapel of Henry VII., but after the Restoration his monument, on which is his figure full size in armour, was removed to John the Baptist's Chapel and the inscription on it was erased.

Opposite his tomb is the grave of Robert Devereux, third Earl of Ess.e.x, son of Elizabeth's unhappy favourite, who, after serving King Charles, became General-in-Chief of the Parliamentarian army in 1642. He died in 1646, and was buried with high honours by the Independents. In St. John's Chapel rests the body of the wife of Colonel Scot, one of the judges of Charles I., who was executed at Charing Cross.