Milton's England Part 7

At the end of Great Tower Street is the church of All Hallows, Barking, anciently known as "Berkynge Church by the Tower." The edifice, which is situated close to Mark Lane Station on the Metropolitan Railway, ranks as the oldest parish church with a continuous history as such in the city of London. One hundred and fifty years before the union of the seven kingdoms under Egbert, over four hundred years before the Conqueror and the building of the White Tower, a thousand years before the boy Milton visited its historic site, the foundation of the church was laid. For six hundred years a close connection existed between the court and this church when the Tower was a royal residence.

Some traces of old Norman work remain, but the present building belongs to the Perpendicular type, and a.s.sumed nearly its present shape about one hundred years before Milton's age.

From its nearness to the Tower, the church became the burial-place of some of its victims. Here was placed the headless body of Lord Thomas Grey, uncle of Lady Jane, who was beheaded in 1554 for taking part in the rebellion under Wyatt. The heart of Richard the Lion Heart was once placed under its high altar. After his execution on Tower Hill, the body of Archbishop Laud rested here some years, and was "accompanied to earth with great mult.i.tudes of people, whom love or curiosity or remorse of conscience had drawn together, and decently interred ... according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, in which it may be noted as a remarkable thing, that being, whilst he lived, the greatest champion of the Common Prayer Book ... he had the honour, being dead, to be buried in the form therein provided, after it had been long disused and almost reprobated in most of the churches of London."

Two hundred and fifty years later an Archbishop Laud Commemoration was celebrated here, and where the scaffold stood on Tower Hill services were held.

The chief interest of the church for American visitors may be the baptismal register, in which is recorded the baptism, during Milton's early manhood, of Sir William Penn's infant son, the apostle of peace, who was destined to found a great state in the New World. The Great Fire of 1666 touched the church so closely that Pepys tells us the "dyall and part of the porch was burnt." Its interior is beautifully preserved. Its old bra.s.ses attract so many who desire to make rubbings that a snug sum for church purposes has been raised by the small fees charged. The church possesses the oldest indenture for the construction of an organ known in England. Its date is 1519.

On the south side of Tower Street, at number 48, was formerly a public house painted with the head of the Czar of Muscovy. Here Peter the Great, when he was studying the dockyards and maritime establishments of England under William III., used to resort with his attendants and smoke his pipe and drink beer and brandy. Near by is Muscovy Court, a present reminder of the ancient name.

A little farther north, on Hart Street, once stood the richly decorated timber house, called "Whittington's Palace." According to doubtful tradition this was where the famous d.i.c.k Whittington, with princely magnanimity, burnt the royal bond for a debt of 60,000, when Henry V. and his queen came to dine with him. "Never had king such a subject," Henry is reported to have said, when Whittington replied to the hero of Agincourt, "Surely, Sire, never had subject such a king." This palace, with its whole front of diamond-paned windows, stood in Milton's time.

Near by, on Hart Street, is the church of St. Olave, which with All Hallows, Barking, escaped the Great Fire, and stands as it stood in Milton's life. The tourist must time his visit to it on a week day to the noon hour, as, unlike All Hallows, Barking, it is not open all day.

The monastery of the Crutched Friars must have covered in ancient days a large part of the parish of this church. Its dimensions are of the smallest--it is only fifty-four feet long. Its name takes us back to the times of the Danish settlement, for St. Olave is but the corruption of St.

Olaf, the Norwegian saint who was the martyred king of the Northmen. The body of this saint rests in the great cathedral at Trondheim, Norway. His history is closely connected with the immediate region. As a boy of twelve he started on his career as viking; later he fought with Ethelred against the usurping Danes in London. The latter held the bridge which connected the walled town with low-lying Southwark across the Thames. The struggle waxed desperate, when the bold Norwegian at a critical juncture fastened cables to the bridge, and then ordered his little ships, which were attached to them, to row hard down stream. The piles tottered, the bridge, which swarmed with the Danes, fell, and those that were not drowned were driven away. When William the Conqueror sailed up the Thames a half century later, the stories of the intrepid Olaf, who had become Norway's king and had died in battle, must have been fresh in mind.

Not only this church, but others in the city were erected in his name. The present structure was probably built about 1450, and was repaired about the time that Milton returned to London from Italy.

During the Reformation, in 1553, St. Olave's had "a pair of organes."

During the Civil War in 1644, an ordinance was pa.s.sed that all organs in churches "should be taken away and utterly defaced." It is very certain that the music-loving Milton, who joyed to hear

"... the organ blow, to the full-voiced choir below"

must have mourned this stern decree. In consequence of this, most organ builders for sixteen years were obliged to work as carpenters and joiners.

The famous diarist, Pepys, who attended St. Olave's, writes on June 17, 1660: "This day the organs did begin to play at Whitehall Chapel, where I heard very good musique, the first time that ever I remember to have heard the organs and singing men in surplices in my life." On April 20, 1667, he records: "To Hackney Church, and found much difficulty to get pews. That which I went chiefly to see was the young ladies of the schools, whereof there is great store, very pretty, and also the organ, which is handsome, and tunes the psalms and plays with the people, which is mighty pretty, and makes me mighty earnest to have a pair at our church"--which meant St.

Olave's.

About the time of Pepys's writing, a peal of six remarkably sweet-toned bells was placed in the tower. In the church are quaint bra.s.ses and monuments, the most interesting of which is the tomb of Pepys. An elegant monument of alabaster, with a bust of Pepys, taken from his portrait in the National Gallery, was unveiled in 1884. It bears the dates: "b. 1632, d. 1703." The monument is near the door where Pepys used to enter the church from Seething Lane.

Pepys, like Milton, was educated at St. Paul's School. His fame rests chiefly on his diary, which was written in cipher, and not deciphered and published until 1825. On the unveiling of his monument, James Russell Lowell, in his address, spoke of Pepys as "a type perhaps of what is now called a Philistine. We have no word in English which is equivalent to the French adjective 'bourgeois,' but at all events, Samuel Pepys was the most perfect type that ever existed of the cla.s.s of people whom this word describes. He had all its merits, as well as many of its defects." With all these defects, perhaps in spite of them, Lowell maintained, Pepys had written one of the most delightful books that it was man's privilege to read in the English language, or in any other. There was no parallel to the character of Pepys in respect of navete unless it were found in that of Falstaff, and Pepys showed himself, too, "like Falstaff, on terms of unb.u.t.toned familiarity with himself.... Pepys's navete was the inoffensive vanity of a man who loved to see himself in the gla.s.s." It was questionable, he said, whether Pepys could have had any sense of humour at all, and yet permitted himself to be so delightful. The lightest part of the diary was of value historically, for it enabled us to see the London of two hundred years ago, and, what was more, to see it with the eager eyes of Pepys. It was not Pepys the official, the clerk of the acts and secretary of the Admiralty, who had brought that large gathering together--it was Pepys the diarist.

Pepys's diary was begun in 1660, when he was in his twenty-seventh year.

Ten years later, when he feared blindness, he ceased writing it. He bequeathed it in six volumes, written in cipher as above stated, with his library of three thousand books, to his old college, Magdalen, at Cambridge, and it is now its greatest treasure. Pepys was no Puritan. His comments on the Calvinistic teaching of his pastor, Daniel Mills, are characteristic. In 1666, he writes: "Up and to church, where Mr. Mills, a lazy, simple sermon upon the Devil's having no right to anything in this world;" and again he writes: "Mr. Mills made an unnecessary sermon on original sin, neither understood by himself nor the people." He writes that when he invited the reverend gentleman to dinner on a Sunday, he "had a very good dinner and very merry."

Among the notable men buried near Pepys is William Turner, an early Puritan, who was educated under Latimer and died in 1568. He wrote the earliest scientific work by any Englishman on botany. His great object was to learn the _materia medica_ of the ancients throughout the vegetable kingdom. But he wrote against the Roman Antichrist as well. The t.i.tle of one book ill.u.s.trates the orthography of his day: "The Hunting and Fynding of the Romish Fox: which more than seven years hath been among the Bysshoppes of England, after that the Kynges Hyghnes, Henry VIII. had commanded hym to be driven out of hys Realme." Of Sir James Deane, a merchant adventurer to India, China, and the Spice Islands, it is recorded that he gave generous bequests, and directed 500 to be expended on his funeral, a vast sum for those days, yet probably no more than was customary for wealthy men.

Of Sir John Mennes, who is buried here, Pepys tells us that "he brought many fine expressions of Chaucer which he doats on mightily," and navely adds, "and without doubt he is a very fine poet." Droll, lively, garrulous Pepys! Who would have dreamed that this boyish writer was in reality a great military authority, and in a large measure responsible for the care of England's navy?

As in All Hallows, Barking, and several old "city" churches, the visitor will notice in St. Olave's the remarkable, wrought-iron "sword-stands,"

used in Elizabeth's reign and placed in the pews of distinguished persons.

The pulpit, with its elaborate carving, said to have been done by Grinling Gibbons, is one that was removed from the "deconsecrated" church of St.

Benet.

St. Olave's had one of the churchyards in which the victims of the plague were buried in great numbers, and of which Pepys writes: "It frightened me indeed to go through the church, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard where people have been buried of the plague." The gruesome skulls and crossbones, carved over its gateway, are a dismal reminder of the horrors of that time. In the chapter on the "City of the Absent," in his "Uncommercial Traveller," d.i.c.kens thus graphically describes his visit to it: "One of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint Ghastly Grim; touching what men in general call it, I have no information.

It lies at the heart of the City, and the Blackwall Railway shrieks at it daily. It is a small, small churchyard, with a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is ornamented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought in stone; but it likewise came into the mind of Saint Ghastly Grim that to stick iron spikes atop of the stone skulls, as though they were impaled, would be a pleasant device.

Therefore the skulls grin aloft, horribly thrust through and through with iron spears. Hence there is attraction of repulsion for me in Saint Ghastly Grim, and having often contemplated it in the daylight and the dark, I once felt drawn toward it in a thunder-storm at midnight. 'Why not?' I said; 'I have been to the Colosseum by the light of the moon; is it worse to go to see Saint Ghastly Grim by the light of the lightning?'

I repaired to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found the skulls most effective, having the air of a public execution, and seeming, as the lightning flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes."

In the chapter on "A Year's Impressions," in which d.i.c.kens depicts repeated visits to the deserted churches of the London of the past, he, with a deft touch, describes the commercial atmosphere which now impregnates all of what poetry, history, and romance remain to-day.

"From Rood Lane unto Tower Street, and thereabouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine. In the churches about Mark Lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of wheat, and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged ha.s.sock in one of them. One church near Mincing Lane smelt like a druggist's drawer. Behind the Monument the service had the flavour of damaged oranges, which, a little farther down toward the river, tempered into herrings and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan blast of fish.... The dark vestries and registers into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on my memory, distinct and quaint. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating, there is not a line but made some heart leap, or some tears flow, in their day. Still and dry now, still and dry, and the old tree at the window, with no room for its branches, has seen them all out. These churches remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them--monuments of another age. They are worth a Sunday exploration, for they echo to the time when the City of London really was London; when the Prentices and Trained Bands were of mark in the state; when even the Lord Mayor himself was a reality."

In Milton's day, on the street of the Crutched Friars, named from the ancient convent of Crossed Friars, was the row of almshouses built by Sir John Milborne in 1535 in honour of G.o.d and the Virgin. In some way, the relief of the a.s.sumption of the Virgin at the entrance gate escaped destruction by the Puritans, and remained with the almshouses to a late period. To the American, to whom the word "almshouse" signifies the English "workhouse,"--an inst.i.tution of paupers where all live in common,--little idea is conveyed of the comfortable, and usually quaint and picturesque retreat which "almshouse" signifies to the English mind.

In many London suburbs one may see little rows of cottages within walled gardens, where, in quiet and comfort and serenity, aged couples spend their last days, in some ways the happiest of their lives, though it be in an almshouse.

At 53 Fenchurch Street, in Milton's time, stood the Queen's Head Tavern, where the Princess Elizabeth dined on pork and peas after her release from the Tower in 1554. The modern building erected on the site bears a commemorative statue of her.

Mincing Lane, in the vicinity, was named from houses which belonged to the Minchuns or nuns of Saint Helen's. Near its entrance is the Hall of the Clothworkers' Company, whose badge is a ram; within are gilt statues of James I. and Charles I., which were saved from the Great Fire. Its garden was once the churchyard of All Hallows, Staining, whose fine old tower, which escaped the Fire, still stands as when Milton strolled past and gazed on it. The church, which was demolished recently, was reputed to have been the earliest stone church in the city. "Stane" is the Saxon word for stone, and the word "Staining" indicates the fact mentioned above.

Pa.s.sing north to Aldgate, Milton must have seen the great gate, which was not destroyed until 1760. It was the chief outlet to the eastern counties from the time of the Romans until its destruction.

In the dwelling over the gate, according to Loftie, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer lived in 1374. This gate, however, was pulled down just before Milton's birth, and rebuilt the year after he was born, in 1609. When he saw it, a gilded statue of James I. adorned its eastern side, and on the west were statues of Peace, Fortune, and Charity.

Aldgate to-day is the entrance into that sordid, dismal region, known as Whitechapel, where within easy walking distance from the site of the ancient gate is its chief attraction to all tourists. On Commercial Street, standing in a group, are the little church of St. Jude, and close beside it that Social Settlement, reared in memory of the gentle Oxford scholar and philanthropist, Arnold Toynbee. This is one of the few beautiful oases in a desert of squalor and commonplaceness, which the name Whitechapel now signifies to most readers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. CATHERINE CREE CHURCH IN 1736

The steeple dates from about 1505. The old church was pulled down in 1628, and the present one finished in 1630. Cree Church is a corruption of Christ-Church.

_From an old engraving._]

But for Milton's haunts, we need not wander farther east than Aldgate; for though Whitechapel Street was thickly lined with houses for some distance even in his day, little of interest remains. Turning back through Leadenhall Street, one sees a little gray stone church, with a low tower and round-arched windows, known as St. Catherine Cree's. This was rebuilt in Milton's youth in 1629, and consecrated two years later by the ill-fated Archbishop Laud. The ceremonies which he used on this occasion savoured so much of Popery, however, that they were later brought against him, and helped to accomplish his downfall. In an older church, upon this site, the famous Hans Holbein, to whom we are indebted for his portraits of Henry VIII., Sir Thomas More, and other famous Englishmen, was buried in 1554, after his death by the plague. Within the church may be seen the effigy in armour of a man who played an important part in England when Milton's father was a boy. To-day, only the historian recalls the name of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, whose daughter married Walter Raleigh, who was chamberlain of the exchequer, amba.s.sador, and chief butler of England. The stories of his fruitless emba.s.sy to Mary Queen of Scots to prevent her marriage with Darnley, and the records of his trial, imprisonment, and death of a broken heart must have been as familiar to the youth of Milton's time as the life of Disraeli or Joseph Chamberlain is to Cambridge youth to-day.

Above the gateway, in the churchyard, is a ghastly memorial to the builder of it in the form of a shrouded skeleton on a mattress. In Shakespeare's time, within this churchyard, which is now much smaller than it was then, and is concealed by modern buildings, scaffolds were erected on all sides, and religious plays were performed on Sundays.

Every year, on October 16th, the "lion sermon" is preached within the church in memory of an ancient worthy, who in 1648 gave it the sum of 200, in remembrance of his delivery from a lion's paws in Arabia. As at St. Olave's, the noon hour, when daily service is performed for the benefit of the one or two worshippers who may stray in, is the time to visit this historic church.

The first edition of "Paradise Lost" bears the imprint: "Printed, and are to be sold by Peter Parker, under Creed Church near Aldgate, 1667." "Creed Church" was this same Catherine Cree's.

A little north of Leadenhall, at the entrance to the ancient street called St. Mary Axe, stands the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, another of the churches which remain, of those that Milton saw within the city walls. Its name recalls the ancient English custom of the May-day dance. A lofty May-pole, higher than the tower of the church, once stood beside it, and was pulled down on "Evil May Day," in the reign of Henry VIII., about the time the church was built, 1520-32. It is a gray stone edifice, well preserved, and well worth a visit if for no other end than to see the tomb of the learned and devoted chronicler, Stow--a name dear to every student of ancient London and of English history. Of his "Survey," Loftie says: "It was a wonder even in the age which produced Shakespeare."

Stow was bred a tailor, but in middle life retired on a modest competence, and for forty years almost immediately preceding Milton's birth had with unparalleled industry studied the history of his city and native land. His collection for the Chronicles of England, now in the British Museum, fills sixty quarto volumes. Every street of London and prominent building, every church, and almost every monument and inscription, are faithfully recorded in his volumes on London and Westminster. To him and to his editor, Strype, who has continued his work until a later period, modern London, and all who love her and her long history, owe an incalculable debt of grat.i.tude.

But so little was his invaluable service recognised in his day that his great collection of books aroused suspicion in some quarters, and his outspoken words on public questions stirred up the jealous and malevolent, as his biographer shows. He was reduced to poverty in his old age, for he had spent his substance in his great enterprise. Like a genuine historian, he sought original sources, and "made use of his own legs (for he could never ride), travelling on foot to many cathedral churches and other places where ancient records and charters were; and with his own eyes to read them." He studied the records in the Tower, and was expert in deciphering old wills and registers and muniments belonging to monasteries. He seems to have been somewhat conservative; perhaps, as his biographer suggests, "being a lover of antiquity and of the old Religious Buildings and monuments, he was the more prejudiced against the Reformed Religion, because of the havoc and destruction those that pretended to it made of them in those days." One instance of Protestant fanaticism that tended to make him more opposed to zeal without knowledge was that a curate of St. Paul's, which was his parish, inveighed "fervently against a long Maypole called a Shaft in the next Parish to his, named St. Andrew Undershaft, and calling it an Idol; which so stirred up the devotion of many hearers that many of them in the afternoon went, and with violence pulled it down from the place where it hung upon hooks; and then sawed it into divers pieces, each householder taking his piece as much as hung over his door or stall, and afterward burnt it."

Sir Walter Besant, in a delightful chapter in his "London," describes an imaginary visit to the learned man, and a stroll with him through the town five years before Milton opened his eyes in Bread Street: "I found the venerable antiquary in his lodging. He lived--it was the year before he died--with his old wife in a house over against the Church of St. Andrew Undershaft. The house itself was modest, containing two rooms on the ground floor, and one large room, or solar, as it would have been called in olden time, above. There was a garden at the back, and behind the garden stood the ruins of St. Helen's Nunnery, with the grounds and gardens of that once famous house, which had pa.s.sed into the possession of the Leathersellers' Company.... I pa.s.sed within, and mounting a steep, narrow stair, found myself in the library and in the presence of John Stow himself. The place was a long room, lofty in the middle, but with sloping sides. It was lit by two dormer windows; neither carpet nor arras nor hangings of any kind adorned the room, which was filled so that it was difficult to turn about in it, with books, papers, parchments, and rolls.

They lay in piles on the floor, they stood in lines and columns against the walls; they were heaped upon the table. I observed too that they were not such books as may be seen in a great man's library, bound after the Italian fashion, with costly leather, gilt letters, golden clasps, and silken strings. Not so; these books were all folios for the most part; their backs were broken; the leaves, where any lay open, were discoloured, many of them were in the Gothic black letter. On the table were paper, pens, and ink, and in the straight-backed armchair sat the old man himself, pen in hand, laboriously bending over a huge tome. He wore a black silk cap; his long white hair fell down upon his shoulders. The cas.e.m.e.nts of the window stood open, and the summer sunshine poured warm and bright upon the scholar's head."

In an age of many elaborate and tasteless monuments, Stow's is singularly interesting and tasteful. An almost life-size figure of him is seated, dressed in a long robe, before a table on which rests a book in which he is writing. The whole is placed within a niche in the tomb; upon the sculptured sides, the artist has carved, among other devices, a beggar's wallet, indicative of Stow's poverty, for which James I. in his old age issued him letters patent permitting him to solicit aid. These letters grant "to our loving subject, John Stow, who hath to his own great charge, and with neglect to his ordinary means of maintenance, for the general good of Posteritie, as well as the present age, compiled and published diverse necessary books and chronicles, and therefore we in recompense of his painful labours, and for the encouragement of the like ... authorise him and his deputies to collect among our loving subjects their contributions and kind gratuities." Thus was the man who has chiefly contributed to our knowledge of ancient London allowed in his extreme old age to live in unappreciation and neglect.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW UNDERSHAFT IN 1737