THE CLARES
The Abbey of St. Clare, which stood on the site of the church called
Holy Trinity, Minories, was founded by Blanche d’Artois in 1293. The
following genealogy sufficiently explains the connection of Blanche
with this country and with London:—
Robert, Comte d’Artois = Maude of Brabant
│
Henri le Gros, = Blanche, = Edmund, Earl of = Adeline
King of Navarre, │ b. 1250, │ Lancaster, King (1st wife)
m. 1270, d. 1274. │ d. 1300. │ of Sicily, b. 1245,
│ │ m. 1274, d. 1296.
Jeanne │ 2nd son of
= Philippe le │ Henry III.,
│ Bel. │ called Crouchback.
..│.. │
┌──────┴───────────┬───────┬───────┐
│ │ │ │
Thomas, E. of Lancaster, Henry. John. Daughter.
beheaded 1322.
The House was founded in 1293 for the reception of “certain nuns
devoted to the service of God, St. Mary and St. Francis, expected
shortly to arrive and to settle in this realm.” The first nuns were
Frenchwomen, brought over by Blanche. They belonged to the Order called
Clares, their name being that of St. Clare, the foundress of the
Franciscan nuns, who was canonised in 1253, two years after her death.
They called themselves _Sorores Minores_—as their Franciscan Friars
were _Fratres Minores_; they were also called “rich Clares,” because
they were allowed to possess endowments and lands; others of the same
Order being “poor Clares,” who subsisted entirely on the charity of
the people. They were also called Urbanists, because their rule had
been revised by Pope Urban; and they were _inclusæ_, that is to say,
forbidden, except by reason of pestilence, war, or fire, to go outside
the convent walls.
The endowments began with three tenements and four parcels of ground
near, or upon, the site of the House, together with some houses in West
Chepe, yielding £30 a year.
Subsequent endowments included a large number of messuages, tenements,
wharves, and shops in London and Whitechapel. It would be interesting
to ascertain how much of London actually belonged to the Religious
Houses.
The infant Convent received three Bulls from Pope Boniface VIII. In the
first he received the House, with all its buildings and property, under
his own peculiar jurisdiction. In the second he declared the House
free from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop
of Canterbury. In the third he pronounced the House inviolable, and
ordered the Bishop of London to consecrate for the nuns all the Church
plate and sacred vessels.
In the reign of Edward the Second the King exempted the sisters, on
account of their poverty, from all tallage payable to the Crown for
their lands and houses in London.
In the reign of Edward the Third they obtained a grant of thirty marks
a year, and another of twenty marks from private persons. They also
obtained from Isabella, mother of Edward the Third, the advowsons of
three churches, on the condition of praying for the soul of the late
King. Edward the Third also endowed them with lands and houses.
The writer of a paper in _Archæologia_ enumerates many gifts of
messuages, etc., made to the sisters during the two hundred and fifty
years of their existence. In the _Calendar of Wills_ between 1341 and
1519, I find twenty-five bequests to this House, of which all but seven
belong to the fourteenth century.
A considerable mass of ruins of the Convent House remained standing
down to the end of the eighteenth century, when most of them were
destroyed. In 1706 it was found that the north wall of the present
church of the Holy Trinity was part of the wall of the Sisters’ Chapel;
in 1793, in digging the foundations of a house, in Haydon Square, a
massive stone wall was discovered, certainly part of the House, as it
formed the boundary of the parish. On the west side of the Square the
houses in 1803 were part of the original building, the walls being of
stone, even the partitions between the rooms. In 1797 a fire, which
consumed many of the houses south of the church, from the Minories to
Haydon Square, eastward, laid open the remains of a Hall which seemed
to be the Refectory.
Stow has the following particulars concerning this House:—
“The License for founding it bore Date 21 E. I. to the Abbess
of St. Clare without Aldgate. There was a Charter granted 9 E. II.
that the Sisters Minoresses without Aldgate should be quit of Tallage
on account of their Lands and Tenements in the City of London. In
another Charter 14 E. II. it is called the Abby of the Minoresses of
St. Mary of the Order of St. Clare without the Walls of the City: In
which Charter are confirmed certain Messes of theirs in the Vintry, in
Wood Street, Lad Lane, Old Fish Street, and one Mess and two Shops in
Lombard Street, Christ’s Church Lane, and Shirburgh Lane; gotten of
divers well affected Persons: What the Charters and Liberties of these
Minoresses were, may be seen by the Confirmation thereof in 1 H. V.
and Anno 16 and 25 and 2 H. 4, which remain in the Tower Records. The
Manour of Apeldercome was granted to the Prioress of the Minoresses
without Aldgate, 1 H. IV. and 22 H. VI. A Mess called the Herteshorn,
in the Parish of St. Mary Matfelon, was granted to them by Nicholas
Walshe, 7 E. IV. To all the rest let this be added.
That this House was first erected to receive Nuns that were to be
brought over by Blanch, Queen of Navarre, Wife to the abovesaid Earl
Edmund: And they were professed to serve God, the blessed Virgin, and
St. Francis; as appears by this Charter of Licence, which the said
Edmund obtained of the King his Brother the 21st of his Reign.”
The House attracted and maintained the greatest respect of the
citizens. This is shown by the bequests which were showered upon the
sisterhood; these were continued far into the fifteenth century, long
after the stream of benefactions had ceased for the other religious
houses of London. It is also shown by the request of many ladies
that they should be buried in the Chapel of the Nuns—among them was
Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk, who died in 1506, only thirty years
before the Dissolution. It has already been noticed in another place
that there is nowhere to be found any scandal, or suggestion of
scandal, concerning the Religious women of the London Houses.
The House has no history. For two hundred and fifty years the sisters
carried on their quiet lives; they produced no saint; they enjoyed no
ecstatic visions; they obeyed the Rule with such modifications as were
introduced from time to time; their lives were monotonous, but they
had their little distractions. One event alone is recorded of them—the
plague of 1515—when within these walls alone twenty-seven of the
sisters were carried off, besides the lay sisters and the servants.
At their dissolution their income amounted to £318: 16: 5. If we
consider that the stipend of a Chantry Priest was no more than £6 or £7
a year, on which he could live, we may multiply this income by ten at
least, and we may conclude that the number of sisters, making allowance
for the maintenance of the House, was not more than thirty, and perhaps
less, the tendency in the latter days, when there were few bequests,
being to keep down the number of the sisterhood, therefore they were
well off.
The Clares were not included in Cardinal Wolsey’s first suppression of
the smaller Houses of 1528, nor in that of 1536. The Abbess, however,
Lady Elizabeth Savage, resigned her charge in 1538, the year before the
final Act was passed.
For two years the place remained empty and deserted. In 1540 however,
the King granted the House to the See of Bath and Wells for a London
residence. The Bishop at that time was John Clarke, a man whose share
in the momentous events of the day has somehow been passed over by
historians.
He was born about the year 1480; he took the degrees of B.A. and M.A.
at Cambridge; he studied law at Bologna; he took Holy Orders and
received many benefices, including the Mastership of the Maison Dieu at
Dover. Since these preferments were scattered about in many counties,
it is evident that he performed none of the duties. He was otherwise
occupied. In 1519 he was sent by the King with a message to Louise of
Savoy; he was made Archdeacon of Colchester, Dean of Windsor, Judge
of the Court of the Star Chamber; and he was charged in 1521 with the
presentation of King Henry’s work against Luther. He remained at Rome
as the King’s Ambassador and the servant of Wolsey for four years;
he was employed in an embassy to the Court of France, and was sent a
second time to Rome. He returned with Cardinal Campeggio. By this time
he had been promoted to the Bishopric of Bath and Wells.
He did not long enjoy his London residence. In the same year in which
he received the gift, he was sent on an embassy to the Duke of Cleves,
and, with his servants, was poisoned. He came back to die in January
1541, and was buried in the Chapel of the Clares.
The House was once more taken over by the Crown, being exchanged by
Bishop Barber for other property in 1548. Edward granted it to the
Duke of Suffolk in 1552. It does not appear, however, that Lady Jane
Grey, his daughter, was ever resident at the House of the Clares. The
Duke was executed on the 23rd of February 1554. We may believe that
some of the old sanctity was still lingering about the Chapel of the
vanished nuns. There is some reason to believe that the head of the
Duke was brought to the Chapel and buried before the altar. In 1852
the then Earl of Dartmouth was inspecting the vaults under the modern
church, where some of his ancestors are buried. He came upon something
that might have been a basket full of sawdust. On examination there
was found to be a head well preserved, with the marks of decapitation
on the neck. The features resembled those of the beheaded Duke, and it
seems probable that either by his own request, or by the pious care
of a servant, the head was brought here to be laid in the Duke’s own
Chapel, the former Chapel of the _Sorores Minores Inclusæ_.
After the accession of Queen Elizabeth, the Precincts of the Abbey
remained, like many other Precincts, a quiet place, in whose Close
houses were built. The church was granted to the people of the place
on the condition of their maintaining a minister for the parish, which
occupied exactly the same site as the former Abbey.
It was a small parish, no more than 255 feet in length, facing the City
Wall. The old buildings were gradually pulled down, and the materials
used for the new houses, but enough remained, even as late as the end
of the eighteenth century, to form a picturesque collection of ruins.
A fire in 1767 destroyed most of the buildings. As to the church, it
became that of the Holy Trinity; it was repaired in 1618, in 1624, in
1636; it escaped the Fire of London. But most unfortunately it was
taken down in 1740—with the exception of the north Wall—and rebuilt a
mean and poor little church, which will remain standing as a Church
House while the Parish, consisting of Haydon Green and little else, has
been absorbed in that of St. Botolph, Aldgate. The new church contained
something of the old chapel: the font, the reredos, the pavement before
the altar, the monuments which were put up on the north wall. The
church plate is also rich and curious. The charities are very small,
amounting to no more than £13 a year in all.
The church was at one time—about the close of the seventeenth century—a
favourite place for weddings. In 1697 there were 956; sometimes there
were six, eight, or ten weddings in one day. The reason seems to have
been that the church claimed to be a peculiar, and exempt from the
visitation of the ordinary, therefore licenses were not required for
this church any more than for St. James’s, Duke Place, or the Fleet, or
May Fair.
A Roman sarcophagus, discovered within this parish, is now preserved in
the British Museum.
The church is much richer in associations than would be expected from
its outward appearance. There is a brass to Constance Lucy, one of the
well-known Lucy family; there is the tomb of Sir John Pelham and his
son; there are buried here the first Lord Dartmouth, son of Colonel
William Legge, and thirty-two of his descendants; there is a portrait
of Sir Isaac Newton, with the tradition that he once lived in Haydon
Square and worshipped in this church; Miles Coverdale preached here,
as the historian of the church, Dr. Kinns found, on eleven occasions.
The tomb of Colonel William Legge, who lived in the Abbey, bears his
shield, on which are impaled the arms of the Washington family, with
the stars and stripes which are the origin of the American flag. The
connection of the Washingtons and the Legges is given by Dr. Kinns in
the following pedigree:—
Lawrence Washington = Margaret Butler.
of Sulgrave, │
d. 1616. │
│
┌───────────┴─────────────────────────┐
│ │
Sir William = Anne Villiers. Laurence = Amphilis.
Washington │ Washington │
d. 1643. │ │
│ │
Elizabeth = William Legge. John = Ann Pope.
│ │
The Earls of Dartmouth. Laurence = Mildred Warner.
│
Augustine = Mary Bede.
│
George Washington.