Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume I Part 3

The Hall was built by Archbishop Juxon in the reign of Charles II., on the site of the hall built by Archbishop Boniface (1244), which was pulled down by Scot and Hardyng, the regicides, who purchased the palace when it was sold under the Commonwealth. Juxon's arms and the date 1663 are over the door leading to the palace. The stained window opposite contains the arms of many of the archbishops, and a portrait of Archbishop Chicheley.

Archbishop Bancroft, whose arms appear at the east end, turned the hall into a Library, and the collection of books which it contains has been enlarged by his successors, especially by Archbishop Seeker, whose arms appear at the west end, and who bequeathed his library to Lambeth. Upon the death of Laud, the books were saved from dispersion through being claimed by the University of Cambridge, under the will of Bancroft, which provided that they should go to the University if alienated from the see; they were restored by Cambridge to Archbishop Sheldon. The library contains a number of valuable MSS., the greatest treasure being a copy of Lord Rivers's translation of the "Diets and Sayings of the Philosophers,"

with an illumination of the Earl presenting Caxton on his knees to Edward IV. Beside the King stand Elizabeth Woodville and her eldest son, and this, the only known portrait of Edward V., is engraved by Vertue in his Kings of England.

A gla.s.s case contains: The Four Gospels in Irish, a volume which belonged to King Athelstan, and was given by him to the city of Canterbury; a copy of the Koran written by Sultan Allaruddeen Siljuky in the fifteenth century, taken in the Library of Tippoo Saib at Seringapatam; the Lumley Chronicle of St. Alban's Abbey; Queen Elizabeth's Prayer-Book, with illuminations from Holbein's Dance of Death destroyed in Old St. Paul's; an illuminated copy of the Apocalypse, of the thirteenth century; the Mazarine Testament, fifteenth century; and the rosary of Cardinal Pole.

A staircase lined with portraits of the Walpole family, leads from the Library to the Guard Room, now the Dining-Hall. It is surrounded by an interesting series of portraits of the archbishops from the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Through the paneled room, called Cranmer's Parlor, we enter the Chapel, which stands upon a Crypt supposed to belong to the manor-house built by Archbishop Herbert Fitzwalter, about 1190. Its pillars have been buried nearly up to their capitals, to prevent the rising of the river tides within its wall. The chapel itself, tho greatly modernized, is older than any other part of the palace, having been built by Archbishop Boniface, 1244-70. Its lancet windows were found by Laud--"shameful to look at, all diversely patched like a poor beggar's coat," and he filled them with stained gla.s.s, which he proved that he collected from ancient existing fragments, tho his insertion of "Popish images and pictures made by their like in a ma.s.s book" was one of the articles in the impeachment against him. The gla.s.s collected by Laud was entirely smashed by the Puritans: the present windows were put in by Archbishop Howley. In this chapel most of the archbishops have been consecrated since the time of Boniface....

Here Archbishop Parker erected his tomb in his lifetime "by the spot where he used to pray," and here he was buried, but his tomb was broken up, with every insult that could be shown, by Scot, one of the Puritan possessors of Lambeth, while the other, Hardyng, not to be outdone, exhumed the Archbishop's body, sold its leaden coffin, and buried it in a dunghill.

His remains were found by Sir William Dugdale at the Restoration, and honorably reinterred in front of the altar, with the epitaph, "Corpus Matthaei Archiepiscopi tandem hic quiescit." His tomb, in the ante-chapel, was re-erected by Archbishop Sancroft, but the bra.s.s inscription which encircled it is gone.

The screen, erected by Laud, was suffered to survive the Commonwealth. At the west end of the chapel, high on the wall, projects a Gothic confessional, erected by Archbishop Chicheley. It was formerly approached by seven steps. The beautiful western door of the chapel opens into the curious Post Room, which takes its name from the central wooden pillar, supposed to have been used as a whipping-post for the Lollards. The ornamented flat ceiling which we see here is extremely rare. The door at the northeast corner, by which the Lollards were brought in, was walled up, about 1874.

Hence we ascend the Lollard's [Footnote: The name Lollard was used as a term of reproach for the followers of Wyclif. Formerly derived from Peter Lollard, a Waldensian pastor of the thirteenth century, more recently from the Middle Dutch "lollen," to hum.] Tower, built by Chicheley--the lower story of which is now given up by the Archbishop for the use of Bishops who have no fixt residence in London. The winding staircase, of rude slabs of unplaned oak, on which the bark in many cases remains, is of Chicheley's time. In a room at the top is a trap-door, through which as the tide rose prisoners, secretly condemned, could be let down unseen into the river. Hard by is the famous Lollard's Prison (13 feet long, 12 broad, 8 high), boarded all over walls, ceiling, and floor. The rough-hewn boards bear many fragments of inscriptions which show that others besides Lollards were immured here. Some of them, especially his motto "Nosce te ipsum," are attributed to Cranmer. The most legible inscription is "IHS cyppe me out of all al compane. Amen." Other boards bear the notches cut by prisoners to mark the lapse of time. The eight rings remain to which the prisoners were secured: one feels that his companions must have envied the one by the window. Above some of the rings the boards are burned with the hot-iron used in torture. The door has a wooden lock, and is fastened by the wooden pegs which preceded the use of nails; it is a relic of Archbishop Sudbury's palace facing the river, which was pulled down by Chicheley. From the roof of the chapel there is a n.o.ble view up the river, with the quaint tourelle of the Lollard's Tower in the foreground.

The gardens of Lambeth are vast and delightful. Their terrace is called "Clarendon's Walk" from a conference which there took place between Laud and the Earl of Clarendon. The "summer-house of exquisite workmanship,"

built by Cranmer, has disappeared. A picturesque view may be obtained of Cranmer's Tower, with the Chapel and the Lollard's Tower behind it.

d.i.c.kENS'S LIMEHOUSE HOLE [Footnote A: From "A Pickwickian Pilgrimage." The persons mentioned in Mr. Ha.s.sard's account of Limehouse Hole will be recognized as characters in the novels of Charles d.i.c.kens. By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.

Copyright, 1881.]

BY JOHN R.G. Ha.s.sARD

I took a steamboat one day at Westminster Bridge, and after a voyage of 40 minutes or so landed near Limehouse Hole, and followed the river streets both east and west. It was easy enough to trace the course of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, as they walked under the guidance of Riderhood through the stormy night from their rooms in The Temple, four miles away, past the Tower and the London Docks, and down by the slippery water's edge to Limehouse Hole, when they went to cause Gaffer Hexam's arrest, and found him drowned, tied to his own boat. The strictly commercial aspect of the Docks--the London Docks above and the West India Docks below--shades off by slight degrees into the black misery of the hole. The warehouses are succeeded by boat-builders' sheds; by private wharves, where ships, all hidden, as to their hulls, behind walls and close fences, thrust unexpected bowsprits over the narrow roadway; by lime-yards; by the shops of marine store-dealers and purveyors to all the wants and follies of seamen; and then by a variety of strange establishments which it would be hard to cla.s.sify.

Close by a yard piled up with crates and barrels of second-hand bottles, was a large brick warehouse devoted to the purchase and sale of broken gla.s.s. A wagon loaded with that commodity stood before the door, and men with scoop-shovels were transferring the gla.s.s into barrels. An enclosure of one or two acres, in an out-of-the-way street, might have been the original of the dust-yard that contained Boffin's Bower, except that Boffin's Bower was several miles distant, on the northern outskirt of London. A string of carts, full of miscellaneous street and house rubbish, all called here by the general name of "dust," were waiting their turn to discharge. There was a mountain of this refuse at the end of the yard; and a party of laborers, more or less impeded by two very active black hogs, were sifting and sorting it. Other mounds, formed from the sittings of the first, were visible at the sides. There were huge acc.u.mulations of broken crockery and of sc.r.a.ps of tin and other metal, and of bones. There was a quant.i.ty of stable-manure and old straw, and a heap, as large as a two-story cottage, of old hoops stript from casks and packing-cases. I never understood, until I looked into this yard, how there could have been so much value in the dust-mounds at Boffin's Bower.

Gradually the streets became narrower, wetter, dirtier, and poorer.

Hideous little alleys led down to the water's edge where the high tide splashed over the stone steps. I turned into several of them, and I always found two or three muddy men lounging at the bottom; often a foul and furtive boat crept across the field of view. The character of the shops became more and more difficult to define. Here a window displayed a heap of sailor's thimbles and pack-thread; there another set forth an array of trumpery gla.s.s vases or a basket of stale fruit, pretexts, perhaps, for the disguise of a "leaving shop," or unlicensed p.a.w.nbroker's establishment, out of which I expected to see Miss Pleasant Riderhood come forth, twisting up her back hair as she came. At a place where the houses ceased, and an open s.p.a.ce left free a prospect of the black and bad-smelling river, there was an old factory, disused and ruined, like the ancient mill in which Gaffer Hexam made his home, and Lizzie told the fortunes of her brother in the hollow by the fire.

I turned down a muddy alley, where 12 or 15 placards headed "Body Found,"

were pasted against the wall. They were printed forms, filled in with a pen. Mr. Forster tells us in his life of d.i.c.kens that it was the sight of bills of this sort which gave the first suggestion of "Our Mutual Friend."

At the end of the alley was a neat brick police-station; stairs led to the water, and several trim boats were moored there. Within the station I could see an officer quietly busy at his desk, as if he had been sitting there ever since d.i.c.kens described "the Night Inspector, with a pen and ink ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office as studiously as if he were in a monastery on the top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the back yard at his elbow." A handsome young fellow in uniform, who looked like a cross between a sailor and a constable, came out and asked very civilly if he could be of use to me. "Do you know," said I, "where the station was that d.i.c.kens describes in 'Our Mutual Friend'?"

"Oh, yes, sir! this is the very spot. It was the old building that stood just here: this is a new one, but it has been put up in the same place."

"Mr. d.i.c.kens often went out with your men in the boat, didn't he?"

"Yes, sir, many a night in the old times."

"Do you know the tavern which is described in the same book by the name of The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters?"

"No, sir, I don't know it; at least not by that name. It may have been pulled down, for a lot of warehouses have been built along here, and the place is very much changed; or it may be one of those below."

Of course, I chose to think that it must be "one of those below." I kept on a little farther, by the crooked river lanes, where public houses were as plentiful as if the entire population suffered from a raging and inextinguishable thirst for beer. The sign-boards displayed a preference for the plural which seems not to have escaped the observation of the novelist. If I did not see The Six Porters, I came across The Three Mariners, The Three Cups, The Three Suns, The Three Tuns, The Three Foxes, and the Two Brewers; and in the last I hope that I found the original of the tavern so often mentioned in the story.

I had first noticed it from the steamboat--"a narrow, lop-sided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veranda impending over the water,"--a tavern of dropsical appearance, which had not a straight floor in its whole const.i.tution, and hardly a straight line. I got at the entrance on the land side after a search among puzzling alleys, and there I found still stronger reminders of "Our Mutual Friend." Stuck against the wall was an array of old and new hand-bills, headed, "Drowned," and offering rewards for the recovery of bodies. The value set upon dead persons in Limehouse Hole is not excessive: the customary recompense for finding them seems to be ten shillings, and in only one instance did the price reach the dazzling amount of one pound.

By the side of the house is an approach to the river: most of the buildings near are old and irregular, and at low tide a great deal of the sh.o.r.e must be exposed. Going upon the slippery stones, beside which lay a few idle and rickety boats, I found the expected range of windows with "red curtains matching the noses of the regular customers." I looked in at the door. A long pa.s.sage opened a vista of pleasant bar-parlor, or whatever it may have been, on the river-side; and, perhaps, I should have seen Miss Abbey Potterson if I had gone to the end. Several water-side characters were drinking beer at the lead-covered counter, waited upon by a sharp young woman, who seems to have replaced Bob Gliddery. Instead of the little room called "Cozy," where the Police Inspector drank burned sherry with Lightwood and Wrayburn, there was an apartment labelled "The Club." A party of "regular customers," all evidently connected with water (or mud), sat around a table: beyond question they were Tootle, and Mullins, and Bob Glamour, and Captain Joey; and at ten o'clock Miss Abbey would issue from the bar-parlor, and send them home. If The Jolly Fellowship Porters is still extant, this must be it.

WHITEHALL [Footnote: From "Walks in London."]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C. HARE

The present Banqueting-House of Whitehall was begun by Inigo Jones, and completed in 1622, forming only the central portion of one wing in his immense design for a new palace, which, if completed, would have been the finest in the world. The masonry is by a master-mason, Nicholas Stone, several of whose works we have seen in other parts of London. "Little did James think that he was raising a pile from which his son was to step from the throne to a scaffold." The plan of Inigo Jones would have covered 24 acres, and one may best judge of its intended size by comparison with other buildings. Hampton Court covers 8 acres; St. James's Palace, 4 acres; Buckingham Palace, 2-1/2 acres. It would have been as large as Versailles, and larger than the Louvre. Inigo Jones received only 8s. 4d.

a day while he was employed at Whitehall, and 46 per annum for house-rent. The huge palace always remained unfinished.

Whitehall attained its greatest splendor in the reign of Charles I. The mask of Comus was one of the plays acted here before the king; but Charles was so afraid of the pictures in the Banqueting-House being injured by the number of wax lights which were used, that he built for the purpose a boarded room called the "King's Masking-House," afterward destroyed by the Parliament. The gallery toward Privy Garden was used for the king's collection of pictures, afterward either sold or burned. The Banqueting-House was the scene of hospitalities almost boundless.

The different accounts of Charles I.'s execution introduce us to several names of the rooms in the old palace. We are able to follow him through the whole of the last scenes of the 30th of January, 1648. When he arrived, having walked from St. James's, "the King went up the stairs leading to the Long Gallery" of Henry VIII, and so to the west side of the palace. In the "Horn Chamber" he was given up to the officers who held the warrant for his execution. Then he pa.s.sed on to the "Cabinet Chamber,"

looking upon Privy Garden. Here, the scaffold not being ready, he prayed and conversed with Bishop Juxon, ate some bread, and drank some claret.

Several of the Puritan clergy knocked at the door and offered to pray with him, but he said that they had prayed against him too often for him to wish to pray with them in his last moments. Meanwhile, in a small distant room, Cromwell was signing the order to the executioner, and workmen were employed in breaking a pa.s.sage through the west wall of the Banqueting House, that the warrant for the execution might be carried out which ordained it to be held "in the open street before Whitehall."....

Almost from the time of Charles's execution Cromwell occupied rooms in the c.o.c.kpit, where the Treasury is now, but soon after he was installed "Lord Protector of the Commonwealth" (December 16, 1653), he took up his abode in the royal apartments, with his "Lady Protectress" and his family.

Cromwell's puritanical tastes did not make him averse to the luxury he found there, and, when Evelyn visited Whitehall after a long interval in 1656, he found it "very glorious and well furnished." But the Protectress could not give up her habits of nimble housewifery, and "employed a surveyor to make her some little labyrinths and trap-stairs, by which she might, at all times, unseen, pa.s.s to and fro, and come unawares upon her servants, and keep them vigilant in their places and honest in the discharge thereof." With Cromwell in Whitehall lived Milton, as his Latin Secretary. Here the Protector's daughters, Mrs. Rich and Mrs. Claypole, were married, and here Oliver Cromwell died (September 3, 1658) while a great storm was raging which tore up the finest elms in the Park, and hurled them to the ground, beneath the northern windows of the palace.

In the words of Hume, Cromwell upon his deathbed "a.s.sumed more the character of a mediator, interceding for his people, than that of a criminal, whose atrocious violation of social duty had, from every tribunal, human and divine, merited the severest vengeance." Having inquired of G.o.dwin, the divine who attended him, whether a person who had once been in a state of grace could afterward be d.a.m.ned, and being a.s.sured it was impossible, he said, "Then I am safe, for I am sure that I was once in a state of grace." Richard Cromwell continued to reside in Whitehall till his resignation of the Protectorate.

On his birthday, the 29th of May, 1660, Charles II returned to Whitehall.

The vast labyrinthine chambers of the palace were soon filled to overflowing by his crowded court. The queen's rooms were facing the river to the east of the Water Gate. Prince Rupert had rooms in the Stone Gallery, which ran along the south side of Privy Gardens, beyond the main buildings of the palace, and beneath him were the apartments of the king's mistresses, Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine, afterward d.u.c.h.ess of Cleveland, and Louise de Querouaille, d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth. The rooms of the latter, who first came to England with Henrietta, d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, to entice Charles II into an alliance with Louis XIV., and whose "childish, simple, baby-face" is described by Evelyn, were three times rebuilt to please her, having "ten times the richness and glory" of the queen's. Nell Gwynne did not live in the palace, tho she was one of Queen Catherine's Maids of Honor!

Charles died in Whitehall on February 6, 1684. With his successor the character of the palace changed. James II, who continued to make it his princ.i.p.al residence, established a Roman Catholic chapel there.

It was from Whitehall that Queen Mary Beatrice made her escape on the night of December 9, 1688. The adventure was confided to the Count de Lauzun and his friend M. de St. Victor, a gentleman of Avignon. The queen on that terrible evening entreated vainly to be allowed to remain and share the perils of her husband; he a.s.sured her that it was absolutely necessary that she should precede him, and that he would follow her in twenty-four hours. The king and queen went to bed as usual to avoid suspicion, but rose soon after, when the queen put on a disguise provided by St. Victor. The royal pair then descended to the rooms of Madame de Labadie, where they found Lauzun, with the infant Prince James and his two nurses. The king, turning-to Lauzun, said, "I confide my queen and my son to your care: all must be hazarded to convey them with the utmost speed to France." Lauzun then gave his hand to the queen to lead her away, and, followed by the two nurses with the child, they crossed the Great Gallery, and descended by a back staircase and a postern gate to Privy Gardens. At the garden gate a coach was waiting, the queen entered with Lauzun, the nurses, and her child, who slept the whole time, St. Victor mounted by the coachman, and they drove to the "Horse Ferry" at Westminster, where a boat was waiting in which they crossed to Lambeth.

On the 11th the Dutch troops had entered London, and James, having commanded the gallant Lord Craven, who was prepared to defend the palace to the utmost, to draw off the guard which he commanded, escaped himself in a boat from the water-entrance of the palace at three o'clock in the morning. At Feversham his flight was arrested, and he returned amid bonfires, bell-ringing, and every symptom of joy from the fickle populace.

Once more he slept in Whitehall, but in the middle of the night was aroused by order of his son-in-law, and hurried forcibly down the river to Rochester, whence, on December 23, he escaped to France. On the 25th of November the Princess Anne had declared against her unfortunate father, by absconding at night by a back staircase from her lodgings in the c.o.c.kpit, as the northwestern angle of the palace was called, which looked on St.

James's Park. Compton, Bishop of London, was waiting for her with a hackney coach, and she fled to his house in Aldersgate Street. Mary II arrived in the middle of February, and "came into Whitehall, jolly as to a wedding, seeming quite transported with joy."

But the glories of Whitehall were now over. William III., occupied with his buildings at Hampton Court and Kensington, never cared to live there, and Mary doubtless stayed there as little as possible, feeling opprest by the recollections of her youth spent there with an indulgent father whom she had cruelly wronged, and a stepmother whom she had once loved with sisterly as well as filial affection, and from whom she had parted with pa.s.sionate grief on her marriage, only nine years before. The Stone Gallery and the late apartments of the royal mistresses in Whitehall were burned down in 1691, and the whole edifice was almost totally destroyed by fire through the negligence of a Dutch maidservant in 1697.

The princ.i.p.al remaining fragment of the palace is the Banqueting-House of Inigo Jones, from which Charles I. pa.s.sed to execution. Built in the dawn of the style of Wren, it is one of the most grandiose examples of that style, and is perfect alike in symmetry and proportion. That it has no entrance apparent at first sight is due to the fact that it was only intended as a portion of a larger building. In the same way we must remember that the appearance of two stories externally, while the whole is one room, is due to the Banqueting-House being only one of four intended blocks, of which one was to be a chapel surrounded by galleries, and the other two divided into two tiers of apartments. The Banqueting-House was turned into a ehapel by George I., but has never been consecrated, and the aspect of a hall is retained by the ugly false red curtains which surround the interior of the building. It is called the Chapel Royal of Whitehall, is served by the chaplains of the sovereign, and is one of the dreariest places of worship in London. The ceiling is still decorated with canvas pictures by Rubens (1635) representing the apotheosis of James I. The painter received 3,000 for these works. The walls were to have been painted by Vand.y.k.e with the History of the Order of the Garter. "What,"

says Walpole, "had the Banqueting-House been if completed?" Over the entrance is a bronze bust of James I. attributed to Le Soeur.

THE TOWER [Footnote: From "Her Majesty's Tower."]

BY W. HEPWORTH DIXON

Half-a-mile below London Bridge, on ground which was once a bluff, commanding the Thames from St. Saviour's Creek to St. Olave's Wharf, stands the Tower; a ma.s.s of ramparts, walls, and gates, the most ancient and most poetic pile in Europe.... The Tower has an attraction for us akin to that of the house in which we were born, the school in which we were trained. Go where we may, that grim old edifice on the Pool goes with us; a part of all we know, and of all we are. Put seas between us and the Thames, this Tower will cling to us, like a thing of life. It colors Shakespeare's page. It casts a momentary gloom over Bacon's story. Many of our books were written in its vaults; the Duke of Orleans's "Poesies,"