CHALFONT ST. GILES.--ARTILLERY WALK
If the pilgrim to the shrines of Puritans and poets has thought worth
while to spend an afternoon at Horton, he may well spare two or three days
more for a drive from there to Stoke Pogis, Harefield, and the region
thirteen miles north of Horton in lovely Buckinghamshire, among the
Chiltern hills.
Here stands, about twenty-three miles northwest of London, in the little
village of Chalfont St. Giles, the only house that still exists in which
Milton ever lived. The village lies in a quiet hollow among the hills,
three or four miles removed from the shriek of any locomotive. One may
approach it by train from the little stations of Chorley Wood or Chalfont
Road. It will well repay one before doing so to make a detour of a mile
and a half to Chenies,--one of the loveliest villages in all
England,--beside the tiny Chess, where Matthew Arnold loved to angle. A
delightful hostelry is the "Bedford Arms," where he always "put up." The
chief feature of the place is the mortuary chapel of the Russells,
where the family have been buried from 1556 until the present day. But the
lover of the picturesque will more admire the adjoining Tudor mansion.
American multi-millionaires have built no Newport palace that is so
attractive to the lover of the beautiful.
[Illustration: IN MILTON'S HOUSE AT CHALFONT ST. GILES]
As one drives toward Chalfont, he enters it at the end farthest from
Milton's cottage, which is one of the last houses upon the left of the
main street. It is on the road that leads to Beaconsfield, four miles
away. The cottage lies at the foot of a slope close by the roadside; it is
built of brick and timber, and has two entrances, four sitting-rooms, and
five bedrooms.
On the floor which is level with the garden are two sitting-rooms that
look toward the hill slope and Beaconsfield. Their quaint old windows are
filled with diamond panes, which are set in lead and open outward. The
long carved dining-table, in the room at the left, and the small table,
cabinet, and stools in the room at the right, which is seen in the
illustration, were Milton's own. Here at the open casement, during those
days of horror in the stricken city, Milton sat and breathed the fragrant
air, and in the evening listened to the nightingales which haunt the
Chalfont groves. Hither the brave young Ellwood came to greet him, fresh
as he was from another imprisonment; he returned with his comments the
manuscript of "Paradise Lost," which Milton had loaned to him, and added:
"Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of
Paradise found?" To which the poet answered nothing at the time, but, as
the result proved, the query brought later a fitting response in "Paradise
Regained." Perhaps the visitor may be allowed to ascend the narrow winding
stair with its carved railing to the humble chambers under the gables,
whither the poet groped his way to bed, and to glance into narrow
cupboards, where he may have piled his books and manuscripts. There is a
tender, pathetic charm about the place, which even the greater poet's
house at Stratford lacks. The man Shakespeare--the successful
dramatist--we know little of; his inner life we only guess at and infer.
His consummate genius wins our worship; it does not touch our hearts. But
the blind poet, the passionate lover of liberty and fearless pleader for
justice, the man who like blind Samson shook his locks in defiance of
fate, and would not be cast down, this man we know. We have followed step
by step his brilliant youth, his strenuous manhood, and his brave,
declining years. With all his faults of temper we love him as we love
Dante and Michael Angelo and Beethoven. We linger reverently in the
little house made dear to England by his presence there.
Then we wander back a little on our way, to a row of antique houses and go
through a passage to the venerable parish church and churchyard where
Milton's feet doubtless have trod.
_En route_ to Beaconsfield the traveller will not fail to pause at
Jordan's, a plain, square structure in a leafy grove, beside a green God's
Acre. It was the Quaker meeting-house in Milton's day as it is still. At
the rear is a concealed gallery where the worshippers took refuge when
their service was broken up by armed pursuers. Close by are many unmarked
graves, and among them is Ellwood's. But the grave of William Penn, the
founder of a great American State, and the graves of his wife and
children, have low modern headstones, for their position was well known.
Here the man of gentle birth, the hero and saint, who is dear to all
Americans, sleeps peacefully among his English kindred. During the year
when Milton was at Chalfont, Penn was a youth in Paris, seeing the world,
but keeping himself unspotted from it.
At Beaconsfield we drive through a broad country road to the Saracen's
Head--a conspicuous landmark. We turn our steps at once to the gray old
church and its battlemented tower, whose walls of flint rise in rugged
strength from the churchyard with its mossy tombs. Within the centre aisle
lies buried the valiant apostle of American freedom--Edmund Burke.
He was a man with whom the refugee at Chalfont would have found much in
common had he lived a century and a quarter later. The inscription over
his grave is modern, and so are the bas-relief and inscription to him on
the side wall. His former seat within the parish church is marked upon the
floor, and a fine carved desk is made from his old pew. Within the
churchyard gay roses and solemn yews droop over ancient monuments, among
them, the showy obelisk on Waller's grave. Nothing is lovelier than the
drive late in an afternoon over the high hills, from which one catches far
distant views, to Amersham, which lies in a little valley among the hills.
This was a seat of the Puritan revolt and earlier martyrdoms. John Knox
preached here--an obnoxious personage to the worthy sexton of the
beautiful church, who told the writer that he had buried every man and
woman in the parish for forty years. "The fact is," quoth this worthy,
"John Knox traduced Mary Queen of Scots; now I've no use for a man who
isn't good to the ladies." On being reminded that Elizabeth did worse and
cut her head off, he condoned that as being "probably an affair of
state." A lover of poets was this sexton. "I've read 'em all," he said,
"but my favourite is Pope." Isaac Watts likewise shared his approval, and
he volunteered upon the spot a number of his hymns from memory. "But I
take a lugubrious view of life," continued this digger of many graves,
"for it's just grub, grub, grub, all your life, and then be shovelled
under; the fact is, as any man can see with half an eye, that this is the
age of mammon and no mistake." Shakespeare would have found a gravedigger
to his mind in the sexton of Amersham.
Amersham does not offer so favourable accommodations for the night as does
Wendover, which has a choice of hostelries, and is but a few minutes' ride
by train from the Amersham station, a quarter of a mile away. After
viewing the early English church in Wendover next morning, one may hire a
trap and drive to Great Hampden, three miles distant, to the stately home
of John Hampden, within a large park. There are still traces of the
ancient road which was cut through the park for Queen Elizabeth. The shady
avenue of beeches around the side leads up to the little church of gray
flint stone which stands near the great mansion and its mighty cedars of
Lebanon. The little churchyard is carpeted with velvet turf, starred with
tiny white flowers which recall the foregrounds in the brilliant
paintings of Van Eyck.
The reader of Puritan history is reminded of that mournful day after the
battle of Chalgrove Field, when the body of John Hampden was brought home.
As many soldiers as could be spared accompanied it, marching with arms
reversed and muffled drums, while, with uncovered heads, they chanted the
solemn words of comfort that begin the ninetieth Psalm: "Lord, Thou hast
been our dwelling-place in all generations." They laid him in a grave
within the chancel, which still remains unmarked; it is close beside the
slab on which he had written his beautiful epitaph to his wife. When they
marched back beneath the beeches their voices rang out with the lines of
Psalm Forty-three: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou
disquieted within me? hope in God." Says a writer of that time: "Never
were heard such piteous cries at the death of one man, as at Master
Hampden's."
Within the spacious mansion, which once was red brick and now is covered
with gray plaster, are various relics of Hampden and Cromwell, and a
portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the room which she occupied on her visit
here. Two miles further, on one of the finest estates in the county, is
Chequer's Court, an imposing brick mansion of the Tudor period, once
owned by Cromwell's youngest daughter and her husband. It stands in a
park, and contains the greatest collection of Cromwelliana in the kingdom.
But these and the Hampden relics owned by the Earl of Buckingham at Great
Hampden are rarely shown to visitors who do not apply in writing some time
in advance of their visit. It is to be hoped that some day the nation may
own these and make them freely accessible to all scholars. Through a
circuitous drive between beautiful fields of grain, in view of the
Chiltern Hills, the traveller reaches the old parish church at Great
Kimble, where John Hampden, the sturdy cousin of Cromwell, in 1635 made
his refusal to pay King Charles's demands for ship money. Near by lies the
field whose tax was in question. The sum was paltry,--only twenty
shillings,--but, like George Third's tax on tea in the colonies, the
refusal to pay it meant war in the end. This whole section of beautiful
Bucks is rich with memories of Milton, and of the men whom he knew and
loved.
Ellwood records that "when the city was cleansed and become safely
habitable," the Miltons returned to Artillery Walk. This must have been
about March, 1666. The open fields close to their house had been filled
with the bodies of thousands of the plague victims, many of whom were
uncoffined. Thereafter it was made a regular cemetery, and was surrounded
with a brick wall, and became what Southey called, "the Campo Santo of the
Dissenters." On a side street near by, next to a kind of institutional
meeting-house belonging to the Friends, is a beautiful green inclosure
where fourteen thousand Quakers lie buried in unmarked graves. One humble
headstone alone marks a grave near the fence, which was opened in the
nineteenth century, and was found to be that of Milton's
contemporary,--George Fox,--the tailor with the leather suit, who founded
the sect of the uncompromising democrats who called no man "Lord," who
used no weapons but their tongues, and who thundered with them to such
purpose as to make men quake.
While Milton was on the point of publishing his "Paradise Lost," another
calamity, to be described later, befell the stricken city. For three days
the Great Fire crackled and roared, and drove man and beast before its
fearful heat westward to Temple Bar, and swept away Milton's birthplace,
which he still owned. It wiped out the church where he was christened, the
school where he had studied, and came so far north as almost to bury his
father's grave under the walls of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. Amid the
horror of smoke and the sound of distant explosions and wild confusion,
the poet sat during those awful days, when it seemed as if the fate of
Sodom had befallen his dear London town. Up to that date his birthplace
had been visited by admiring foreigners. This was the only real estate
that he then owned, and its loss must have crippled his resources.
The precious manuscript of "Paradise Lost" fell to the censorship of the
young clergyman of twenty-eight, who had married Milton to his youthful
wife, Elizabeth. This man, named Tomkyns, like Pobedonostzeff two hundred
and fifty years later, held that liberty of conscience was a "highly
plausible thing," but did not work well in practice, and he came near
suppressing the volume, so tradition says, for imaginary treason in some
lines; but he relented, and the world was spared its greatest epic poem
since the AEneid.
The many booksellers around St. Paul's suffered terrible losses, and Pepys
estimates that books to the value of L150,000 were burnt in the vicinity.
Most of them were hurriedly stowed in the crypt of old St. Paul's Church,
but when the walls of the great cathedral fell, they let in the fire which
consumed them. In April, 1667, when the ruins had hardly ceased smoking,
Milton agreed, for L5 down and three times as much at certain future
dates, to sell his copyright to Samuel Symons, printer. Thirteen hundred
copies constituted the edition. Through the days of dusty turmoil while
the new city was slowly rising on the ashes of the old, the proof-sheets
passed from the printing-press in Aldersgate Street to Artillery Walk.
There was only an interruption of five anxious days in June, when the
bugle sounded, and terrified citizens assembled to ward off the Dutch,
who, bent on vengeance, burnt English ships and sent cannon-balls hurtling
at English forts. In August "Paradise Lost" appeared as a rather fine
looking, small quarto of 342 pages, which could be bought for three
shillings in three bookstores. For artistic purposes the poem is written
according to the Ptolemaic theory of cosmos, though Milton of course
accepted the Copernican view.
While John Milton was expecting L15 or L20 for his work of more than seven
years, John Dryden, who was much more in fashion in those days of Nell
Gwynne and the reopened theatres, was receiving a yearly income of L700.
But John Dryden knew a poet when he read him. After reading "Paradise
Lost," he exclaimed: "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients, too."
About 1670, Milton's three daughters left their father's home. Knowing
that they needed to be fitted for self-support, he paid for their
apprenticeship, and had them taught embroidery in gold and silver.
Doubtless bright silks and gay patterns were much more to their mind than
their father's folios, and the change was best for all concerned. Their
father sat at his door on pleasant days, dressed in his gray camblet coat,
wearing a sword with a small silver hilt. He received many visitors--some
of them men of rank and note.
He is described as wearing at this time his light brown hair parted from
the crown to the middle of the forehead, "somewhat flat, long and waving,
a little curled." His voice was musical and he "pronounced the letter r
very hard." He rose early, began his day by listening to the Hebrew Bible,
and spent his morning listening and dictating. Music, as much walking as
his gouty feet permitted, and, in the evening, a smoke, were his sole
recreations. He belonged to no church, and attended no service at this
period.
As his end drew near he told his brother that he left only the residue of
his first wife's property to their three daughters, who had "been very
undutiful;" but everything else to his "loving wife, Elizabeth." Just one
month before he had completed his sixty-sixth year, John Milton died on a
Sunday night, November 8, 1674. He was buried beside his father in St.
Giles's, Cripplegate, and was followed to the grave by many friends. What
hymns were sung we do not know, but certainly none could more fitly have
been sung than that noble one by his dear friend, Sir Henry Wotton:
"How blessed is he born or taught
Who serveth not another's will,
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his highest skill.
* * * *
"This man is freed from servile bands,
Of hope to rise or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all."
Milton's wife was thirty-six years old when the poet died. She lived to be
nearly eighty-nine years old, but never remarried. Deborah lived until
1727, when Voltaire writes: "I was in London when it became known that a
daughter of blind Milton was still alive, old and in poverty, and in a
quarter of an hour she was rich." The latest descendants of John and
Christopher Milton died about the middle of the eighteenth century, but
their sister Anne's posterity may perhaps be traced to-day.
The forgotten Duke of York has his great column in Waterloo Place. The
scholarly but uninspired Prince Consort has his gorgeous Memorial, and a
hundred nobodies have their lofty monuments scattered all over England,
teaching the rising generation their fathers' estimation of the relative
worth of names in England's history. The only statue of Milton known to me
in England, except the one on the London University Building, is the
modest figure which stands, together with Shakespeare and Chaucer, upon a
fountain in Park Lane opposite Hyde Park.
No student of the period which is treated in this little volume should
fail to visit the upper floor of the National Portrait Gallery, and view
the portraits of the many noted men who were Milton's contemporaries.
Besides portraits of the royal families, he will note those of William
Harvey, Samuel Pepys, Cowley, old Parr, Sir Henry Vane, Andrew Marvell,
Cromwell and his daughter, Inigo Jones, Selden, Sir Julius Caesar, Samuel
Butler, Hobbes, Dryden, Ireton, Algernon Sidney, Sir Christopher Wren, and
the Chandos Shakespeare portrait. Milton's own portrait in middle life,
which is little known, is most impressive, and very different from the
common portraits.