Old and New London Part 32

The Protector Somerset, who was desirous of building rapidly a sumptuous palace in the Strand, pulled down the chapel and charnel-house in the Pardon churchyard, and carted off the stones of St. Paul's cloister.

When the good Ridley was installed Bishop of London, he would not enter the choir until the lights on the altar were extinguished. Very soon a table was subst.i.tuted for the altar, and there was an attempt made to remove the organ. The altar, and chapel, and tombs (all but John of Gaunt's) were then ruthlessly destroyed.

During the Lady Jane Grey rebellion, Ridley denounced Mary and Elizabeth as b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. The accession of gloomy Queen Mary soon turned the tables.

As the Queen pa.s.sed to her coronation, a daring Dutchman stood on the cross of St. Paul's waving a long streamer, and shifting from foot to foot as he shook two torches which he held over his head.

But the citizens were Protestants at heart. At the first sermon preached at St. Paul's Cross, Dr. Bourne, a rash Ess.e.x clergyman, prayed for the dead, praised Bonner, and denounced Ridley. The mob, inflamed to madness, shouted, "He preaches d.a.m.nation! Pull him down! pull him down!"

A dagger, thrown at the preacher, stuck quivering in a side-post of the pulpit. With difficulty two good men dragged the rash zealot safely into St. Paul's School. For this riot several persons were sent to the Tower, and a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at St.

Paul's Cross. The crosses were raised again in St. Paul's, and the old ceremonies and superst.i.tions revived. On St. Katherine's Day (in honour of the queen's mother's patron saint) there was a procession with lights, and the image of St. Katherine, round St. Paul's steeple, and the bells rang. Yet not long after this, when a Dr. Pendleton preached old doctrines at St. Paul's Cross, a gun was fired at him. When Bonner was released from the Marshalsea and restored to his see, the people shouted, "Welcome home;" and a woman ran forward and kissed him. We are told that he knelt in prayer on the Cathedral steps.

In 1554, at the reception in St. Paul's of Cardinal Pole, King Philip attended with English, Spanish, and German guards, and a great retinue of n.o.bles. Bishop Gardiner preached on the widening heresy till the audience groaned and wept. Of the cruel persecutions of the Protestants in this reign St. Paul's was now and then a witness, and likewise of the preparations for the execution of Protestants, which Bonner's party called "trials." Thus we find Master Cardmaker, vicar of St. Bride's, and Warne, an upholsterer in Walbrook, both arraigned at St. Paul's before the bishop for heresy, and carried back from there to Newgate, to be shortly after burned alive in Smithfield.

In the midst of these horrors, a strange ceremony took place at St.

Paul's, more worthy, indeed, of the supposit.i.tious temple of Diana than of a Christian cathedral, did it not remind us that Popery was always strangely intermingled with fragments of old paganism. In June, 1557 (St. Paul's Day, says Machyn, an undertaker and chronicler of Mary's reign), a fat buck was presented to the dean and chapter, according to an annual grant made by Sir Walter le Baud, an Ess.e.x knight, in the reign of Edward I. A priest from each London parish attended in his cope, and the Bishop of London wore his mitre, while behind the burly, bullying, persecutor Bonner came a fat buck, his head with his horns borne upon a pole; forty huntsmen's horns blowing a rejoicing chorus.

The last event of this blood-stained reign was the celebration at St.

Paul's of the victory over the French at the battle of St. Quintin by Philip and the Spaniards. A sermon was preached to the city at Paul's Cross, bells were rung, and bonfires blazed in every street.

At Elizabeth's accession its new mistress soon purged St. Paul's of all its images: copes and shaven crowns disappeared. The first ceremony of the new reign was the performance of the obsequies of Henry II. of France. The empty hea.r.s.e was hung with cloth of gold, the choir draped in black, the clergy appearing in plain black gowns and caps. And now, what the Catholics called a great judgment fell on the old Cathedral.

During a great storm in 1561, St. Martin's Church, Ludgate, was struck by lightning; immediately after, the wooden steeple of St. Paul's started into a flame. The fire burned downwards furiously for four hours, the bells melted, the lead poured in torrents; the roof fell in, and the whole Cathedral became for a time a ruin. Soon after, at the Cross, Dean Nowell rebuked the Papists for crying out "a judgment." In papal times the church had also suffered. In Richard I.'s reign an earthquake shook down the spire, and in Stephen's time fire had also brought destruction. The Crown and City were roused by this misfortune.

Thrifty Elizabeth gave 1,000 marks in gold, and 1,000 marks' worth of timber; the City gave a great benevolence, and the clergy subscribed 1,410. In one month a false roof was erected, and by the end of the year the aisles were leaded in. On the 1st of November, the same year, the mayor, aldermen, and crafts, with eighty torch-bearers, went to attend service at St. Paul's. The steeple, however, was never re-erected, in spite of Queen Elizabeth's angry remonstrances.

In the first year of Philip and Mary, the Common Council of London pa.s.sed an act which shows the degradation into which St. Paul's had sunk even before the fire. It forbade the carrying of beer-casks, or baskets of bread, fish, flesh, or fruit, or leading mules or horses through the Cathedral, under pain of fines and imprisonment. Elizabeth also issued a proclamation to a similar effect, forbidding a fray, drawing of swords in the church, or shooting with hand-gun or dagg within the church or churchyard, under pain of two months' imprisonment. Neither were agreements to be made for the payment of money within the church. Soon after the fire, a man that had provoked a fray in the church was set in the pillory in the churchyard, and had his ears nailed to a post, and then cut off. These proclamations, however, led to no reform. Cheats, gulls, a.s.sa.s.sins, and thieves thronged the middle aisle of St. Paul's; advertis.e.m.e.nts of all kinds covered the walls, the worst cla.s.s of servants came there to be hired; worthless rascals and disreputable flaunting women met there by appointment. Parasites, hunting for a dinner, hung about a monument of the Beauchamps, foolishly believed to be the tomb of the good Duke Humphrey. Shakespeare makes Falstaff hire red-nosed Bardolph in St. Paul's, and Ben Jonson lays the third act of his _Every Man in his Humour_ in the middle aisle. Bishop Earle, in his "Microcosmography," describes the noise of the crowd of idlers in Paul's "as that of bees, a strange hum mixed of walking tongues and feet, a kind of still roar or loud whisper." He describes the crowd of young curates, copper captains, thieves, and dinnerless adventurers and gossip-mongers. Bishop Corbet, that jolly prelate, speaks of

"The walk, Where all our British sinners swear and talk, Old hardy ruffians, bankrupts, soothsayers, And youths whose cousenage is old as theirs."

On the eve of the election of Sandys as Bishop of London, May, 1570, all London was roused by a papal bull against Elizabeth being found nailed on the gates of the bishop's palace. It declared her crown forfeited and her people absolved from their oaths of allegiance. The fanatic maniac, Felton, was soon discovered, and hung on a gallows at the bishop's gates.

One or two anecdotes of interest specially connect Elizabeth with St.

Paul's. On one occasion Dean Nowell placed in the queen's closet (pew) a splendid prayer-book, full of German scriptural engravings, richly illuminated. The zealous queen was furious; the book seemed to her of Catholic tendencies.

"Who placed this book on my cushion? You know I have an aversion to idolatry. The cuts resemble angels and saints--nay, even grosser absurdities."

The frightened dean pleaded innocence of all evil intentions. The queen prayed G.o.d to grant him more wisdom for the future, and asked him where they came from. When told Germany, she replied, "It is well it was a stranger. Had it been one of my subjects, we should have questioned the matter."

Once again Dean Nowell vexed the queen--this time from being too Puritan. On Ash Wednesday, 1572, the dean preaching before her, he denounced certain popish superst.i.tions in a book recently dedicated to her majesty. He specially denounced the use of the sign of the cross.

Suddenly a harsh voice was heard in the royal closet. It was Elizabeth's. She chidingly bade Mr. Dean return from his unG.o.dly digression and revert to his text. The next day the frightened dean wrote a most abject apology to the high-spirited queen.

The victory over the Armada was, of course, not forgotten at St. Paul's.

When the thanksgiving sermon was preached at Paul's Cross, eleven Spanish ensigns waved over the cathedral battlements, and one idolatrous streamer with an image of the Virgin fluttered over the preacher. That was in September; the Queen herself came in November, drawn by four white horses, and with the privy council and all the n.o.bility. Elizabeth heard a sermon, and dined at the bishop's palace.

The "children of Paul's," whom Shakespeare, in _Hamlet_, mentions with the jealousy of a rival manager, were, as Dean Milman has proved, the chorister-boys of St. Paul's. They acted, it is supposed, in their singing-school. The play began at four p.m., after prayers, and the price of admission was 4d. They are known at a later period to have acted some of Lily's Euphuistic plays, and one of Middleton's.

In this reign lotteries for Government purposes were held at the west door of St. Paul's, where a wooden shed was erected for drawing the prizes, which were first plate and then suits of armour. In the first lottery (1569) there were 40,000 lots at 10s. a lot, and the profits were applied to repairing the harbours of England.

In the reign of James I. blood was again shed before St. Paul's. Years before a bishop had been murdered at the north door; now, before the west entrance (in January, 1605-6), four of the desperate Gunpowder Plot conspirators (Sir Everard Digby, Winter, Grant, and Bates) were there hung, drawn, and quartered. Their attempt to restore the old religion by one blow ended in the hangman's strangling rope and the executioner's cruel knife. In the May following a man of less-proven guilt (Garnet, the Jesuit) suffered the same fate in St. Paul's Churchyard; and zealots of his faith affirmed that on straws saved from the scaffold miraculous portraits of their martyr were discovered.

The ruinous state of the great cathedral, still without a tower, now aroused the theological king. He first tried to saddle the bishop and chapter, but Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's friend, interposed to save them. Then the matter went to sleep for twelve years. In 1620 the king again awoke, and came in state with all his lords on horseback, to hear a sermon at the Cross and to view the church. A royal commission followed, Inigo Jones, the king's _protege_, whom James had brought from Denmark, being one of the commissioners. The sum required was estimated at 22,536. The king's zeal ended here; and his favourite, Buckingham, borrowed the stone collected for St. Paul's for his Strand palace, and from parts of it was raised that fine watergate still existing in the Thames Embankment gardens.

When Charles I. made that narrow-minded churchman, Laud, Bishop of London, one of Laud's first endeavours was to restore St. Paul's.

Charles I. was a man of taste, and patronised painting and architecture.

Inigo Jones was already building the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The king was so pleased with Inigo's design for the new portico of St.

Paul's, that he proposed to pay for that himself. Laud gave 1,200. The fines of the obnoxious and illegal High Commission Court were set apart for the same object. The small sheds and houses round the west front were ruthlessly cleared away. All shops in Cheapside and Lombard Street, except goldsmiths, were to be shut up, that the eastern approach to St.

Paul's might appear more splendid. The church of St. Gregory, at the south-west wing of the cathedral, was removed and rebuilt. Inigo Jones cut away all the decayed stone and crumbling Gothic work of the Cathedral, and on the west portico expended all the knowledge he had acquired in his visit to Rome. The result was a pagan composite, beautiful but incongruous. The front, 161 feet long and 162 feet high, was supported by fourteen Corinthian columns. On the parapet above the pillars Inigo proposed that there should stand ten statues of princely benefactors of St. Paul's. At each angle of the west front there was a tower. The portico was intended for a Paul's Walk, to drain off the profanation from within.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHAPTER HOUSE OF OLD ST. PAUL'S, FROM A VIEW BY HOLLAR (_see page 243_).]

Nor were the London citizens backward. One most large-hearted man, Sir Paul Pindar, a Turkey merchant who had been amba.s.sador at Constantinople, and whose house is still to be seen in Bishopsgate Street, contributed 10,000 towards the screen and south transept. The statues of James and Charles were set up over the portico, and the steeple was begun, when the storm arose that soon whistled off the king's unlucky head. The coming troubles cast shadows around St. Paul's.

In March, 1639, a paper was found in the yard of the deanery, before Laud's house, inscribed--"Laud, look to thyself. Be a.s.sured that thy life is sought, as thou art the fountain of all wickedness;" and in October, 1640, the High Commission sitting at St. Paul's, nearly 2,000 Puritans made a tumult, tore down the benches in the consistory, and shouted, "We will have no bishops and no High Commission."

The Parliament made short work with St. Paul's, of Laud's projects, and Inigo Jones's cla.s.sicalisms. They at once seized the 17,000 or so left of the subscription. To Colonel Jephson's regiment, in arrears for pay, 1,746, they gave the scaffolding round St. Paul's tower, and in pulling it to pieces down came part of St. Paul's south transept. The copes in St. Paul's were burnt (to extract the gold), and the money sent to the persecuted Protestant poor in Ireland. The silver vessels were sold to buy artillery for Cromwell. There was a story current that Cromwell intended to sell St. Paul's to the Jews for a synagogue. The east end of the church was walled in for a Puritan lecturer; the graves were desecrated; the choir became a cavalry barracks; the portico was let out to sempsters and hucksters, who lodged in rooms above; James and Charles were toppled from the portico; while the pulpit and cross were entirely destroyed. The dragoons in St. Paul's became so troublesome to the inhabitants by their noisy brawling games and their rough interruption of pa.s.sengers, that in 1651 we find them forbidden to play at ninepins from six a.m. to nine p.m.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DR. BOURNE PREACHING AT PAUL'S CROSS (_see page 243_).]

When the Restoration came, sunshine again fell upon the ruins. Wren, that great genius, was called in. His report was not very favourable.

The pillars were giving way; the whole work had been from the beginning ill designed and ill built; the tower was leaning. He proposed to have a rotunda, with cupola and lantern, to give the church light, "and incomparable more grace" than the lean shaft of a steeple could possibly afford. He closed his report by a eulogy on the portico of Inigo Jones, as "an absolute piece in itself." Some of the stone collected for St.

Paul's went, it is said, to build Lord Clarendon's house (site of Albemarle Street). On August 27, 1661, good Mr. Evelyn, one of the commissioners, describes going with Wren, the Bishop and Dean of St.

Paul's, &c., and resolving finally on a new foundation. On Sunday, September 2, the Great Fire drew a red cancelling line over Wren's half-drawn plans. The old cathedral pa.s.sed away, like Elijah, in flames.

The fire broke out about ten o'clock on Sat.u.r.day night at a bakehouse in Pudding Lane, near East Smithfield. Sunday afternoon Pepys found all the goods carried that morning to Cannon Street now removing to Lombard Street. At St. Paul's Wharf he takes water, follows the king's party, and lands at Bankside. "In corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the city, a most horrid, b.l.o.o.d.y, malicious flame, not like the flame of an ordinary fire." On the 7th, he saw St. Paul's Church with all the roof off, and the body of the quire fallen into St. Faith's.

On Monday, the 3rd, Mr. Evelyn describes the whole north of the City on fire, the sky light for ten miles round, and the scaffolds round St.

Paul's catching. On the 4th he saw the stones of St. Paul's flying like grenades, the melting lead running in streams down the streets, the very pavements too hot for the feet, and the approaches too blocked for any help to be applied. A Westminster boy named Taswell (quoted by Dean Milman from "Camden's Miscellany," vol. ii., p. 12) has also sketched the scene. On Monday, the 3rd, from Westminster he saw, about eight o'clock, the fire burst forth, and before nine he could read by the blaze a 16mo "Terence" which he had with him. The boy at once set out for St. Paul's, resting by the way upon Fleet Bridge, being almost faint with the intense heat of the air. The bells were melting, and vast avalanches of stones were pouring from the walls. Near the east end he found the body of an old woman, who had cowered there, burned to a coal.

Taswell also relates that the ashes of the books kept in St. Faith's were blown as far as Eton.

On the 7th (Friday) Evelyn again visited St. Paul's. The portico he found rent in pieces, the vast stones split asunder, and nothing remaining entire but the inscription on the architrave, not one letter of which was injured. Six acres of lead on the roof were all melted. The roof of St. Faith's had fallen in, and all the magazines and books from Paternoster Row were consumed, burning for a week together. Singularly enough, the lead over the altar at the east end was untouched, and among the monuments the body of one bishop (Braybroke--Richard II.) remained entire. The old tombs nearly all perished; amongst them those of two Saxon kings, John of Gaunt, his wife Constance of Castile, poor St.

Erkenwald, and scores of bishops, good and bad; Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth's Lord Keeper, and father of the great philosopher; the last of the true knights, the gallant Sir Philip Sidney; and Walsingham, that astute counsellor of Elizabeth. Then there was Sir Christopher Hatton, the dancing chancellor, whose proud monument crowded back Walsingham and Sidney's. According to the old scoffing distich,

"Philip and Francis they have no tomb, For great Christopher takes all the room."

Men of letters in old St. Paul's (says Dean Milman) there were few. The chief were Lily, the grammarian, second master of St. Paul's; and Linacre, the physician, the friend of Colet and Erasmus. Of artists there was at least one great man--Vandyck, who was buried near John of Gaunt. Among citizens, the chief was Sir William Hewet, whose daughter married Osborne, an apprentice, who saved her from drowning, and who was the ancestor of the Dukes of Leeds.

After the fire, Bishop Sancroft preached in a patched-up part of the west end of the ruins. All hopes of restoration were soon abandoned, as Wren had, with his instinctive genius, at once predicted. Sancroft at once wrote to the great architect, "What you last whispered in my ear is now come to pa.s.s. A pillar has fallen, and the rest threatens to follow." The letter concludes thus: "You are so absolutely necessary to us, that we can do nothing, resolve on nothing, without you." There was plenty of zeal in London still; but, nevertheless, after all, nothing was done to the rebuilding till the year 1673.

CHAPTER XXI.

ST. PAUL'S (_continued_).

The Rebuilding of St. Paul's--Ill Treatment of its Architect--Cost of the Present Fabric--Royal Visitors--The First Grave in St.

Paul's--Monuments in St. Paul's--Nelson's Funeral--Military Heroes in St. Paul's--The Duke of Wellington's Funeral--Other Great Men in St. Paul's--Proposals for the Completion and Decoration of the Building--Dimensions of St. Paul's--Plan of Construction--The Dome, Ball, and Cross--Mr. Homer and his Observatory--Two Narrow Escapes--Sir James Thornhill--Peregrine Falcons on St. Paul's--Nooks and Corners of the Cathedral--The Library, Model Room, and Clock--The Great Bell--A Lucky Error--Curious Story of a Monomaniac--The Poets and the Cathedral--The Festivals of the Charity Schools and of the Sons of the Clergy.

Towards the rebuilding of St. Paul's Cathedral, Charles II., generous as usual in promises, offered an annual contribution of 1,000; but this, however, never seems to have been paid. It, no doubt, went to pay Nell Gwynne's losses at the gambling-table, or to feed the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth's lap-dogs. Some 1,700 in fines, however, were set apart for the new building. The Primate Sheldon gave 2,000. Many of the bishops contributed largely, and there were parochial collections all over England. But the bulk of the money was obtained from the City duty on coals, which (as Dean Milman remarks) in time had their revenge in destroying the stone-work of the Cathedral. It was only by a fortunate accident that Wren became the builder; for Charles II., whose tastes and vices were all French, had in vain invited over Perrault, the designer of one of the fronts of the Louvre.

The great architect, Wren, was the son of a Dean of Windsor, and nephew of a Bishop of Norwich whom Cromwell had imprisoned for his Romish tendencies. From a boy Wren had shown a genius for scientific discovery.

He distinguished himself in almost every branch of knowledge, and to his fruitful brain we are indebted for some fifty-two suggestive discoveries. He now hoped to rebuild London on a magnificent scale; but it was not to be. Even in the plans for the new cathedral Wren was from the beginning thwarted and impeded. Ignorance, envy, jealousy, and selfishness met him at every line he drew. He made two designs--the first a Greek, the second a Latin cross. The Greek cross the clergy considered as unsuitable for a cathedral. The model for it was long preserved in the Trophy Room of St. Paul's, where, either from neglect or the zeal of relic-hunters, the western portico was lost. It is now at South Kensington, and is still imperfect. The interior of the first design is by many considered superior to the present interior. The present recesses along the aisles of the nave, tradition says, were insisted on by James II., who thought they would be useful as side chapels when ma.s.ses were once more introduced.

The first stone was laid by Wren on the 21st June, 1675, but there was no public ceremonial. Soon after the great geometrician had drawn the circle for the beautiful dome, he sent a workman for a stone to mark the exact centre. The man returned with a fragment of a tombstone, on which was the one ominous word (as every one observed) "Resurgam!" The ruins of old St. Paul's were stubborn. In trying to blow up the tower, a pa.s.ser-by was killed, and Wren, with his usual ingenuity, resorted successfully to the old Roman battering-ram, which soon cleared a way.