CHARTERHOUSE.--ST. JOHN'S GATE.--ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S.--SMITHFIELD
When Milton was a lad at St. Paul's School, it is more than likely that he
sometimes visited the boys of Charterhouse. Let us imagine him on some
holiday taking a stroll outside the city wall through Newgate, over
Holborn Bridge, that arched the Hole Bourne or Fleet, which flowed
southward to the Thames, at Blackfriars; then up Holborn Hill and to the
right to Charterhouse Square. It is still a quiet square of green shut in
by pleasant residences, which replace the handsome palaces, such as
Rutland House, which stood here during the Stuarts' reign.
If his father accompanied the lad he may have recalled to him the horror
of the pestilence which three hundred years before had swept from Asia
across Europe. In foul, crowded London, it so filled the churchyards to
overflowing, that in 1348, when thousands of bodies were flung into pits
without a Christian prayer said over them, the Bishop of London
purchased three acres for a burial-ground upon this spot. Near here fifty
thousand bodies were buried, one above another in deep graves. But three
hundred years is a long time to one who has lived something less than ten,
and perhaps these grisly tales of a shadowy and forgotten past appealed
less to Milton's boyish heart than those of a nearer time, which his
father's life had almost touched.
[Illustration: THE CHARTERHOUSE
_From an old engraving._]
Above the monastery doors which rose here after the Great Plague, might
have been seen, only a half century before, the limb from the dismembered
body of the martyred prior, who fell beneath the wrath of Henry VIII. He,
with divers of his brethren, perished for their faith as nobly as John
Rogers, a few years later, died for a different one. Heroism belongs to no
one creed. Thus ended the monastic institution, the House of the
Salutation of the Mother of God, which since 1371 had housed twenty-four
Carthusian friars. Their quiet lives and austere fasts had been in sharp
contrast to those of the Knights of St. John, their ancient neighbours,
whose habitations perished at about the time when theirs arose.
Some remains of the old monastery may be seen within the gates to-day, and
doubtless there were many more reminders of it when Milton was shown about
by his boy-friends. Perhaps the tall youth, Roger Williams, nine years
his senior, whose later life was to touch his, may have noticed the
handsome lad who read the Latin inscriptions as easily as boys of his age
now read English, and who showed a marvellous comprehension of the
antiquities of the place.
The visitor to-day on entering the chapel, as Milton did, may notice at
the left of the door a white marble tablet framed in yellow marble, on
which an American citizen, in memory of the founder of Rhode Island,
almost the only tolerator of all religious faiths in an intolerant age,
has recently inscribed the fact that Roger Williams studied here.
Since Milton's day the character of Charterhouse has not much changed,
though many buildings have been added. The present foundation marks the
benevolence of one of the richest merchants of Elizabeth's day, whose
prayer was: "Lord, thou hast given me a large and liberal estate; give me
also a heart to make use thereof." In 1611, Thomas Sutton purchased the
Charterhouse for L13,000, from the Earl of Suffolk and his relatives, and
made over twenty manors and lordships and other rich estates, including
the Charterhouse, in trust for the hospital.
The pensioners were originally eighty in number, and the boys, forty-four.
Hubert Herkomer's well-known, beautiful painting in the Tate Gallery of
the Charterhouse chapel and the venerable figures of the aged gentlemen
who daily worship here in their quaint gowns, depicts a scene that Milton
saw, and that the modern visitor may see to-day. Beyond the huge,
pretentious monument of Sutton, that fills one corner of the chapel, is
the side room, where, until quite recent years, the boys sat at morning
service. Now their numbers are increased, and they are more happily housed
out in the country, where outdoor sports and rural life can do more for
them than this region, which is now hemmed in by the encroachments of
commercial London. Stow tells us that the master was required to be
twenty-seven years old, and that the highest form must every Sunday set up
in the Great Hall four Greek and four Latin verses, "each to be made on
any part of the second Lesson for that day."
One cannot but feel that the old gentlemen must sadly miss their sprightly
young comrades, and long for the sound of their merry shouts and whistles.
Their numbers are falling off, for the revenues, drawn from agricultural
sources, are diminishing. To-day about fifty-five are entered. All must be
over sixty years of age. They have all the freedom of private citizens,
except that they are expected to dine together in the great panelled
dining-hall, and at night to be in by eleven o'clock. Each pensioner has
a bedroom and sitting-room, and a loaf and butter is brought him for his
breakfast. About L30 a year are allowed each for clothing and other food,
and a female attendant is assigned to each half dozen gentlemen.
Thackeray's description of Founder's Day is most touching, and deserves to
be read by all who visit Charterhouse, where he studied, and in
imagination saw the last days of Colonel Newcome:
"The custom of the school is on the 12th of December, the Founder's Day,
that the head gown-boy shall recite a Latin oration, in praise of our
founder and upon other subjects, and a goodly company of old Cistercians
is generally brought together to attend this oration, after which we go to
chapel and have a sermon, after which we go to a great dinner, where old
condisciples meet, old toasts are given, and speeches made. Before
marching from the oration hall to chapel, the stewards of the day's
dinner, according to the old-fashioned rite, have wands in their hands,
walk to church at the head of the procession, and sit in places of honour.
The boys are already on their seats with smug fresh faces and shining
white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches, the
chapel is lighted, the founder's tomb, with its grotesque carvings,
monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful lights
and shadows. There he sits, Fundator Noster, in his ruff and gown,
awaiting the Great Examination Day. We oldsters, be we ever so old, become
boys again as we look at that familiar old tomb, and think how the seats
were altered since we were here, and how the doctor used to sit yonder and
his awful eye used to frighten us shuddering boys on whom it lighted; and
how the boy next us _would_ kick our shins during the service time, and
how the monitor would cane us afterward because our shins were kicked.
Yonder sit forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about home and holidays
to-morrow. Yonder sit some three-score old gentlemen--pensioners of the
hospital, listening to the prayers and psalms. You hear them coughing
feebly in the twilight--the old, reverend black gowns.... A plenty of
candles light up this chapel, and this scene of youth and age and early
memories and pompous death. How solemn the well-remembered prayers are
here uttered again in the place where in childhood we used to hear them!
How beautiful and decorous the rite! How noble the ancient words of the
supplications which the priest utters, and to which generations of bygone
seniors have cried, 'Amen,' under those arches."
We pass up, as Milton may have done, the broad carved oak staircase of the
period antedating Sutton's purchase, when Lord North welcomed the Princess
Elizabeth as his guest and entertained her royally, five days before her
coronation. In these spacious rooms, with deep-set windows, and richly
decorated ceilings, the cautious princess held meetings daily with her
councillors. The lofty fireplace and the tapestry hangings that remain
recall in their dim splendour days when lords and dukes and maids of
honour waited in trepidation upon the behest of the haughty woman who was
soon to become their dread sovereign. It was in one of these rooms that
the pupil orator gave his oration upon Founder's Day.
One of the rooms not always shown to visitors should not be missed. It is
the long, cosy library of the pensioners. Here, leaning out of the
diamond-paned windows upon a summer's day, or grouping themselves in easy
chairs about the blazing hearth in gray November, one loves to think of
these lonely gentlemen, who have seen better days, spending their last,
quiet years among their books.
The visitor to the Charterhouse will not fail to spend a half day within
the vicinity. In spite of its sordid and commercial aspect, it possesses
many of the most precious relics of the past.
[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S GATE, CLERKENWELL
_From an old engraving._]
A little to the northwest of Smithfield, where it spans a narrow and
somewhat squalid street, stands the huge stone gateway of St. John's.
Nothing in its vicinity reveals the fact that once beside it stood a
conventual church, and a bell-tower that was one of the glories of London,
and nothing to indicate that, centuries before these, one of the richest
and most famous of all the monastic establishments around London was built
here. The history of the Knights of St. John is one of the longest and
most romantic of mediaeval histories. The prototype of their ancient
hospital was in Jerusalem, where the knights of the order lived lives of
abstinence and charity. The English establishment in Clerkenwell was
founded in 1100 A. D., only a generation after the coming of the Norman
Conqueror. This was the time of Godfrey of Bouillon and of the first
Crusade. Forty years later the monks in Jerusalem became a military order,
and thenceforth their history is one that seemed guided by Joshua rather
than the Prince of Peace. Large gifts and power led them soon far from the
simple habits of their early days. Of their fights with pirates and with
Turks and with rival Christian bodies, there is no space to tell. Like the
Christian Church itself, in many periods, they waxed fat and gross, and
became the hated "plutocrats" of the working men of their time. In that
sweet story, written in Saxon English, by William Morris, of the monk,
"John Ball," we have a picture of the brave men of Kent who rose in wrath
to destroy, as did the Paris mob of 1793, the men who long had mocked at
their impotence and fed upon their toil. The rebels marched with spear and
bow to London, and wreaked their vengeance on many, but especially those
whose travesty on the teaching of the saint whose name they bore had
maddened them to fury. They burnt all the houses belonging to St. John's,
and set on fire the beautiful priory, which burned seven days. King
Richard II., safe in the Tower, in vain besought his Council for advice in
this extremity. The prior himself did not escape, but fell beneath the
relentless axe of the men of Kent, as thousands for a like cause fell
under the guillotine in Paris.
The present gateway was not erected until the following century. In the
reign of Edward VI., the church with the "graven gilt and enamelled
bell-tower" was undermined and blown up with gunpowder, and the stone was
used for building the Lord Protector's House upon the Strand. To-day the
members of the revived English League of the Order of St. John hold their
meetings in the gate.
With the exception of Westminster Abbey, probably no church has more of
interest than St. Bartholomew's at Smithfield. Within the century that saw
the White Tower of the Conqueror begun, a monastery and church rose on
this site. "A pleasant-witted gentleman, who was therefore called 'the
king's minstrel,'" as Stow relates, was blest with a most singular vision
on his pilgrimage to Rome. Like Saul of Tarsus, he felt the Lord's command
to leave his old life and begin anew. Accordingly on his return to England
he established a priory for thirteen monks, and in 1123 built the Norman
church, part of which stands practically as he left it. Says a
nineteenth-century antiquary: "Except the Tower and its immediate
neighbourhood, there is no part of London, old or new, around which are
clustered so many events interesting in history, as that of the priory of
St. Bartholomew-the-Great and its vicinity. There are narrow, tortuous
streets, and still narrower courts, about Cloth Fair, where are hidden
away scores of old houses, whose projecting eaves and overhanging floors,
heavy, cumbrous beams and wattle and plaster walls must have seen the days
of the Plantagenets. There are remains of groined arches, and windows with
ancient tracery, strong buttresses, and beautiful portals, with toothed
and ornate archways, belonging to times long anterior to Wyclif and John
of Gaunt yet to be found lurking behind dark, uncanny-looking
tenements.... When Chaucer was young, and his Canterbury Pilgrims were men
and women of the period, processions of cowled monks and chanting boys,
with censers and crucifix, wended their way from the old priory of the
Black Friars beside the Thames; and when Edward III. had spent the morning
in witnessing the tourney of mailed knights at Smithfield, have they and
their attendants, with all the pomp and pageantry of chivalry, passed
beneath this old gateway to the grand entertainment of the good prior in
the great refectory beyond the south cloisters.... As we go round the
Great Close we pass by some very old houses that occupy the place where
was once the east cloisters. Behind these houses used to be a great
mulberry-tree, only removed in our own time."
Here may Milton, during those dark days of the Restoration, when he
retired to the seclusion of these narrow streets to escape observation,
have sometimes ventured. Here sitting on the stone seat beneath its shade,
he may have seen in fancy the processions of sandalled monks, with
rosaries dangling against their long gray robes, move silently by as in
the olden time, and pass within the portals of the church. And stepping
beneath its round arches, he may himself have stood, as countless monks
and pilgrims before him have done, before the recumbent painted figure of
the tonsured monk, Rahere, who lies under a beautifully wrought Gothic
canopy of a much later period. Around him rise the solemn, massive pillars
with their cubiform capitals, which seem scarcely less fresh and solid
than when Rahere gazed on them with pride. Here are to be seen the slight
intimations, even amid Norman semicircular arches, of the Gothic pointed
arch that was to supersede them in the near future. Of the four superb
arches which once supported the great central tower, two are the
half-circle and two are slightly pointed.
An interesting and lovely feature of the church is the oriel window by the
triforium, opposite Rahere's grave, built by the famous Prior Bolton. Here
the prior seems to have had a kind of pew or seat from whence he could
overlook the canons when he pleased, without their being aware of his
presence, as it communicated with his house. The aisles form a fine study
for the architect. The horseshoe Moorish arch is much used, as well as the
simpler Norman arch, and there is seen a regular gradation from one to the
other.
Among the tombs that must have most interested Puritan Milton was one of
James Rivers, who died in 1641 just as the civil war was about to break
forth, who evidently, had he lived, would have thrown in his lot where
Milton did. His epitaph contains the lines:
"Whose life and death designed no other end,
Than to serve God, his country, and his friend;
Who, when ambition, tyranny, and pride
Conquered the age, conquered himself and died."
A tomb that may have interested Milton is that of Sir Walter Mildmay, the
founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which sent so many Puritans to the
new colonies in Massachusetts. It was this Mildmay to whom, when he came
to court, Queen Elizabeth said: "I hear, Sir Walter, that you have erected
a Puritan foundation." "No, madam," was the answer, "but I have set an
acorn, which when it becomes an oak, God knows what will be the fruit
thereof."
In Milton's time many Puritans lived in the parish, and a manuscript book
preserved in the vestry records that there was "Collected for the children
of New England uppon 2 Sabath daies following in february, 1643, L2, 8.
9." This was a goodly sum for those days, and was doubtless much
appreciated by the English cousins, who in their bare pine meeting-houses
beside the tidal Charles remembered that the Puritans who remained at
home were called to wage a fiercer fight with priestcraft, prerogative,
and privilege than they, with poverty.
The church to-day is but a fraction of its former size, in fact, hardly
more than the choir of the noble building which Rahere erected. The entire
length of the church as it left his hand is supposed to have been 225
feet. In 1539 Sir Richard Rich bought church and priory for little more
than L1,000, and the thirteen evicted canons were pensioned off.
Close by old St. Bartholomew's is Smithfield, so near that, in the reign
of the Tudors, the ruddy light of martyrs' fagots must have cast a glow
upon its roof and its walls must have resounded to the screams of
sufferers in their last agonising moments.
On the south side of Smithfield, in Milton's day, rose St. Bartholomew's
Hospital, founded by Henry VIII., upon the site of Rahere's earlier one.
The great Harvey, the physician of Charles I., who discovered the
circulation of the blood, was physician to this hospital for thirty-four
years, and here, in 1619, he lectured on his great discovery. The present
structure dates from a period early in the eighteenth century.
Directly opposite St. Bartholomew's Church, in 1849, excavations three
feet below the surface exposed to view a mass of unhewn stones, blackened
as by fire, and covered with ashes and human bones, charred and partially
consumed. This marked the spot where martyrs, facing eastward toward the
great gate of St. Bartholomew's, were chained to the stake. The prior was
generally present on such occasions. An old print of the burning of Anne
Askew displays a pulpit erected for the sermon, and raised seats for the
numerous spectators who came to view the spectacle with probably no more
shrinking than the Londoners of the early nineteenth century viewed the
hangings at Newgate.
Of the two hundred and seventy-seven persons who in Mary's reign here
perished for their faith, none is more lovingly remembered in Old England
or in New England than John Rogers, the first martyr in the Marian
persecution, to whom we have already referred. For a century or more,
Calvinistic New England taught its children from that quaint little book
known as the "New England Primer," and now treasured in many families as a
curiosity. No one among its wretched little woodcuts struck such a solemn
awe into the child's mind,--making the courage of the soldier on the
battle-field shrink to nothing in comparison, as that picture where John
Rogers, surrounded by his wife and nine children and another at the
breast, testified to his faith within the flames. "That which I have
preached I will seal with my blood," said the indomitable man, when
offered pardon for recantation. "I will never pray for thee," quoth his
angry questioner. "But I will pray for you," said Master Rogers. History
does not record that his little children saw their father die, but only
that they met him on the way, and sobbed out their farewells. But enough;
we need not enter on the hideous story of this spot in the generation that
followed this martyr.
In early days, Smithfield, or Smoothfield, was the Campus Martius for sham
fights and tilts. All sorts of sports, archery, and bowls, and ball games
were played here, and it was a resort for acrobats and jugglers. In 1615,
says Howes, "The City of London reduced the rude, vast place of Smithfield
into a faire and comely order, which formerly was never held possible to
be done, and paved it all over, and made divers sewers to convey the water
from the new channels which were made by reason of the new pavement; they
also made strong rails round about Smithfield, and sequestered the middle
part into a very fair and civil walk, and railed it round about with
strong rails, to defend the place from annoyance and danger, as well from
carts, as all manner of cattle, because it was intended hereafter that in
time it might prove a fair and peaceable market-place, by reason that
Newgate Market, Moorgate, Cheapside, Leadenhall, and Gracechurch Street,
were immeasurably pestered with the unimaginable increase and multiplicity
of market folks. And this field, commonly called West Smithfield, was for
many years called Ruffian's Hall, by reason it was the usual place of
frays and common fighting during the time that sword and bucklers were in
use. But the ensuing deadly fight with rapier and dagger suddenly
suppressed the fighting with sword and buckler." In his "Henry IV.,"
Shakespeare makes Page say of Bardolph: "He's gone to Smithfield to buy
your worship a horse." To which Falstaff replies: "I bought him in Paul's,
and he'll buy me a horse in Smithfield; an I could get me but a wife in
the stews, I were manned, horsed, and wived."
Ben Jonson's merry play, "Bartholomew Fair," written in 1613, gives a good
account of the babel of entreaties and advertising boasts that assailed
the ears of the unwary customer: "Will your worship buy any gingerbread,
gilt gingerbread; very good bread, comfortable bread? Buy any ballads? New
ballads! Hey!
"Now the fair's a filling!
O, for a tune to startle
The birds of the booths here billing
Yearly with old St. Bartle.
"Buy any pears, pears, very fine pears! What do you lack, gentleman? Maid,
see a fine hoppy-horse for your young master. Cost you but a farthing a
week for his provender.
"Buy a mouse-trap, a mouse-trap, or a tormentor for a flea?
"What do you lack? fine purses, pouches, pin cases, pipes? a pair of
smiths to wake you in the morning, or a fine whistling bird?
"Gentlewomen, the weather's hot; whither walk you? Have a care of your
fine velvet caps; the fair is dusty. Take a sweet delicate booth with
boughs, here in the way, and cool yourself in the shade, you and your
friends. Here be the best pigs. A delicate show-pig, little mistress, with
sweet sauce and crackling, like de bay-leaf i' de fire, la! T'ou shalt ha'
the clean side o' the table-clot' and de glass vashed!"
From all which, and much more to the same purport, one may judge that
whether in Ben Jonson's time or Browning's, whether in Smithfield or in
the modern charity fair, the art of alluring or browbeating the man with a
purse into buying what he does not want is much the same. Long after
Milton's death, the fair was famous, and drew gaping throngs to witness
mountebanks swing in mid air, and to view the fat woman and double-headed
calf, for all the world like "The Greatest Moral Show on Earth" to-day.
Now Smithfield has banished mountebanks and bellowing herds. Only the
carcases of the latter may be found in the huge brick market that covers a
large part of the once open space. The original size of Smithfield was but
three acres, but since 1834 it has been over six acres in extent.