ELY PLACE.--INNS OF COURT.--TEMPLE CHURCH.--COVENT GARDEN.--SOMERSET HOUSE
Holborn was paved long before Milton's birth, and was a street of
consequence, because of the Inns of Court, which opened north and south
from it. From his time until 1868 a row of small houses southward from
Gray's Inn blocked up the street, and became even in his day "a mighty
hindrance to Holborn in point of prospect."
Ely Place, off Holborn, is little known to hasty tourists who have not
time to leave the beaten track of sightseeing. But any one who has a quiet
hour to spend in the exquisite little church of St. Etheldreda, and to
recall the glories of the past which its Gothic walls have witnessed, will
be well repaid.
Ely Place, a rectangle of dull, commonplace houses, at its entrance gives
no glimpse of the chapel, which is shrinkingly withdrawn a little among
the interloping walls that now replace the gardens and the palaces of
Milton's day. In Chaucer's lifetime, the Bishop of Ely built this very
chapel to the Saxon saint, the daughter of the king of the West Angles,
who was born about the year 630. She took part in the erection of the
Cathedral of Ely amid the morasses of the "Fen" country, and was chosen as
its patron saint. In 679 she died, the abbess of the convent of Ely.
Singularly enough, this modest lady gave the origin to the word "tawdry,"
so Thornbury declares. For her name was sometimes called St. Audry, and
some cheap necklaces sold at St. Audry's fair at Ely were known as
"tawdry" laces, whence the name was applied to other cheap and showy
ornaments.
After long continuance in the hands of Protestants, the church has again
reverted to the faith of those who built it. It is the only instance of a
"living" crypt in London, _i. e._, one in which tapers burn and kneeling
worshippers assemble before shrines. On any week day, one may in three
minutes turn from Holborn into its mediaeval quiet and seclusion and tell
one's beads, either in the upper or lower sanctuary, or gaze at the
glorious decorated east window, and on the chaste proportions of an
unspoiled Gothic structure. Its wealth of windows remotely reminds one of
the Sainte Chapelle of good King Louis, whose jewelled windows in their
slender lofty frames are one of the marvels of the island in the Seine.
In the Plantagenet and Tudor period, vineyards, kitchen garden, and
orchard surrounded the magnificent buildings of Ely Place. Hither, at the
Duke of Gloucester's bidding, as Shakespeare, following history, records,
the bishop sent hastily for the strawberries for which his garden was
famous.
"My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn
I saw good strawberries in your garden there;
I do beseech you send for some of them."
In the reign of Elizabeth, Sir Christopher Hatton was the owner of Ely
Place. Except a cluster of houses,--Ely Rents,--standing on Holborn, the
land round about this great estate seems to have been unbuilt upon.
Sir Christopher, who rose to be Elizabeth's lord chancellor, was a
striking looking man and a graceful dancer. He captivated the queen, who
was very susceptible to manly beauty. The state papers in the Record
Office, it is said, disclose her fond and foolish correspondence with him.
In Milton's lifetime, Lady Hatton--a gay and wealthy widow--was wooed and
won by the famous Sir Edward Coke. But Hatton House saw many an open
quarrel between the ill-matched pair.
In the time of Charles I., a pageant almost unparalleled in magnificence
was arranged in Ely Place. The redoubtable Prynne, who had preached
against all such frivolities in the customary strong language of the time,
had not yet lost his ears, as he did later, in the pillory. But his
strictures had given offence at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, who
was minded to amuse herself with masques; consequently this famous masque
came off. Mr. Lawes, the famous musician and friend of Milton, was set to
composing music for the occasion. On an evening in 1633, when Milton was
living at Horton, the magnificent procession wended its way through crowds
of enthusiastic spectators toward Whitehall. One hundred gentlemen on the
best horses that the stables of royalty and the nobility could offer, all
clad in gold and silver, and each accompanied by a page and two lackeys
carrying torches, were only one feature of the pageant; the others were
some of them as odd as these were splendid. Tiny children, dressed like
birds, rode on small horses; every beautiful or fantastic conceit
imaginable was carried out, and the cost of the whole was no less than
L21,000, a sum which meant far more in purchasing power than it does
to-day. Some of the musicians, however, received L100 apiece--a fee quite
satisfactory to many a prima donna in our time.
No more characteristic part of Milton's London exists to-day than the
various Inns of Court that lead north and south from Holborn. As the
sightseer passes from the jostle and turmoil of the thoroughfare, he is
transported in a moment into a silence and seclusion that remind one of a
Puritan Sabbath. Quadrangle opens out of quadrangle, shut in by rows of
unpretentious buildings, whose monotony is broken by Gothic chapels or
Tudor dining-halls surmounted by carved cupolas. Occasionally a cloistered
walk under low Tudor arches, or a group of highly ornate terra cotta
chimneys is seen, as one wanders around the dim and shadowy passages. All
at once a turn, and behold, here in the heart of the life of this six
million people of the great overgrown metropolis, still stretch long
reaches of greensward, locked safely from the intrusion of the public by
their handsome wrought-iron gates.
In Gray's Inn, to the north of Holborn, Francis Bacon wrote his "Novum
Organum," which he published in 1620, when Milton was a schoolboy at St.
Paul's, and when the Leyden Pilgrims in the _Mayflower_ landed on Plymouth
Rock.
The gardens of Gray's Inn, which Bacon set out with trees, became a
fashionable promenade in Milton's old age. Pepys tells us that he took his
wife there after church one Sunday, "to observe the fashions of the
ladies, because of my wife's making some clothes." It was, in short, quite
as much a dress parade as Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday in New York.
Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth's great minister, was, next to Bacon, the most
eminent of the members of Gray's Inn.
Its hall, which dates from 1560, is little inferior to any hall in all the
Inns of Court. It has carved wainscoting, and a timber roof, and windows
emblazoned with the arms of Lord Bacon and Lord Burleigh. In Milton's
time, Gray's Inn marked the northern limit of the town, and all beyond it
was green fields and country lanes. Therefore we now turn south and west
to explore briefly the numerous other inns that must often have echoed to
the steps of Milton when he lived almost within stone's throw of them.
Dickens's description of the little Staple Inn gives the reader an exact
impression of the place to-day: "Behind the most ancient part of Holborn,
where certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking on
the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has
long since run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular
quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into
which, out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the
sensation of having put cotton in his ears and velvet soles on his boots.
It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter on smoky
trees, as though they called to each other, 'Let us play at country,' and
where a few feet of garden mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to
do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is
one of those nooks that are legal nooks; and it contains a little hall
with a little lantern in its roof."
Walking through the further quadrangle, and following the narrow street
down past the towering, vulgar conglomeration of every incongruous
architectural device,--the new Birkbeck Bank,--we enter presently the wide
spaces of Lincoln's Inn.
The style of buildings, whether new or old, is largely Tudor of the type
of Hampton Court. The walls of red brick are inlaid with diagonal lines of
darker bricks. The chapel, of Perpendicular Gothic, built by Inigo Jones,
is raised on arches which leave a kind of open crypt below, where Pepys
tells us he used to walk. The stained glass windows antedate Laud's time,
and Laud is said to have wondered that the saints emblazoned on them
escaped the "furious spirit" that was aroused against those "harmless,
goodly windows" of his at Lambeth.
At number 24 of the "Old Buildings," the secretary of Oliver Cromwell
lived from 1645 to 1659, where his correspondence was discovered behind a
false ceiling. The tradition that the Protector was overheard to discuss
with him here about the kidnapping of the three little sons of Charles I.
may be dismissed as mythical.
Beside the noble brick gateway of Lincoln's Inn, which bore the date 1518,
it is said that rare Ben Jonson, in his early days of poverty, was found
working with a trowel in one hand and his Horace in the other, when some
gentlemen, having compassion on him, as did Cimabue on the gifted child,
Giotto, rescued him, and let loose the imprisoned genius who found
Shakespeare for a friend, and the Abbey for his tomb.
Of Furnivall's, Scroope's, and Barnard's Inns, and Thavie's, oldest of
them all, we have no space to write. The characteristics of the four great
inns are stated in the lines:
"Gray's Inn for walks, Lincoln's Inn for wall,
The Inner Temple for a garden,
And the Middle for a hall."
The modern sightseer finds, as probably Milton found, much more of
interest in the two latter, which lie south of Fleet Street, than in all
the others combined.
Before crossing Fleet Street, mention should be made of Temple Bar, which
was erected by Wren four years before Milton's death, and marked the
transition from Fleet Street to the Strand. The "Old Cheshire Cheese" in
the ancient and dingy Wine Office Court, which opens north from Fleet
Street, probably was built a dozen years before Milton died. It was Doctor
Johnson's restaurant, and his fame brings many customers to sit in his old
seat, which is still carefully preserved.
Between the Tower and Westminster stands half-way one little edifice more
ancient than any other on that route. It is the little Temple Church of
Norman and transitional design, which stands secluded from the traffic of
the streets within a stone's throw of Temple Bar.
Of its dimensions and manifold restorations, the ordinary guide-books say
enough, and make a repetition unnecessary. The round church with its
interesting arcade of grotesque, sculptured heads, and its rare
proportions; the choir, "springing," as Hawthorne says, "as it were, in a
harmonious and accordant fountain out of the clustered pillars that
support its pinioned arches," are both a delight to every lover of the
beautiful.
Hardly more than a century after the Norman conquest we find the Knights
Templars on this spot. The year after their removal here from Holborn in
1185, they built their Temple church, the finest of the four round
churches that still remain in England. The choir, which is one of the most
beautiful specimens of pure early English, was finished in 1240.
In early times, the discipline of the knights was most severe. The Master
himself scourged disobedient brethren within its walls, and on Fridays
there were frequent public whippings within the church. In a narrow,
penitential cell to be seen in the church walls, only four and a half feet
long and two and a half wide, a disobedient brother is said to have been
starved to death.
The interesting recumbent figures clad in mail, upon the Temple floor, are
not, as is popularly supposed, Knights Templars, but Associates of the
Temple, who were only partly admitted to its great privileges.
Shortly after the downfall of the Templars, the property passed into the
hands of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, whose priory, as we
remember, was burned by the wrathful men of Kent in Wat Tyler's rebellion.
The knights leased it to the law students who belonged to the "King's
Court." Therefore, when the rebels reached London, they poured down on the
haunts of the Temple lawyers, carried off the books, deeds, and rolls of
remembrance, and, in vengeance on the Knights Hospitallers, burned them in
Fleet Street. So determined were these men, goaded by years of tyranny, to
put an end to all the laws that had oppressed them.
In later years, we find that the Temple church in the time of Henry VIII.,
and later still, of Milton and Ben Jonson, was used in term time for the
students as a place for rendezvous. Discussions on legal questions
sometimes waxed boisterous, and, as a contemporary said, as "noisy as St.
Paul's."
In Elizabeth's day the Middle Temple abandoned the old Templar arms--a red
cross on a silver shield with a lamb bearing the sacred banner surmounted
by a red cross--and substituted a flying Pegasus. Both of these emblems
meet the visitor's eye as he winds through the labyrinthine passages of
the old quadrangles, and comes at every step upon some spot rich with the
associations of centuries.
Of the well-known story of the origin of the Wars of the Roses within the
Temple Gardens it is not necessary here to speak.
An old print of Milton's later years shows the gardens of the Inner Temple
laid out in many straight rows of trees, like apple-trees in orchards,
which extended down to the wall that bordered the Thames. North, toward
Fleet Street, rows upon rows of gabled houses, four stories in height,
enclosed quadrangles and courts. The dining-halls, built in the Tudor
period, stand as they stood when Spenser, in the generation before Milton,
wrote of--
"those bricky towers,
The which on Thames' broad back do ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers;
There whilom wont the Temple knights to bide
Till they decayed through pride."
The little Fountain in Fountain Court is dear to lovers of Dickens, for
here Ruth Pinch tripped by with merry heart to meet her lover. In Queen
Anne's time, a fountain of much loftier altitude sparkled and splashed
here, and for aught we know made music when Milton and Shakespeare
wandered within the Temple precincts.
It was not until after Milton's birth that James I. in 1609 granted the
whole property to the two societies of the Inner and Middle Temples;
whereupon they presented his Majesty with a precious gold cup of great
weight, which cup was esteemed by the monarch as one of his most valued
treasures. When the king's daughter Elizabeth was married four years
later, the Temple and Gray's Inn men gave a masque, which Sir Francis
Bacon planned and executed. The bridal party came by water and landed at
the foot of the Temple Gardens amid peals of the little cannon of that
day, and with great pomp and merriment. The king gave a supper to the
forty masquers. This masque, however, did not compare in splendour with
the one given twenty years later, and already alluded to, which was
planned by members of the Inns of Court meeting in Ely Place.
In Milton's middle life the learned Selden, who died in 1654, was buried
in the choir of the Temple church. Of him Milton writes that he is "one of
your own now sitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in
this land." When Milton was in his thirty-sixth year and had published his
treatise on divorce, he writes of Selden, then in his sixtieth year, whose
acquaintance he had probably made, and begged those who would know the
truth to "hasten to be acquainted with that noble volume written by our
learned Selden, of 'The Law of Nature and of Nations,' a work more useful
and more worthy to be perused, whoever studies to be a great man in
wisdom, equity, and justice, than all those decretals ... which the
pontifical clerks have doted on." Of his well-known "Table Talk,"
Coleridge observes: "There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than
I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer."
One of the greatest names connected with the Temple is that of Richard
Hooker, author of the famous "Ecclesiastical Polity." He was for six years
Master of the Temple--a position which Izaak Walton, who wrote his life,
says he accepted rather than desired. The interest in music in the
seventeenth century is evinced by the fierce contest which lasted for a
year, as to the organ which should be erected in this church. Two organs
were put up by rivals. The great Purcell performed on one which was
finally selected by Judge Jeffreys of the Inner Temple. He was a capital
musician, and in his case at least the adage seemed disproved that "Music
hath charms to soothe the savage breast."
With the Restoration and the opening of the floodgates of luxury and
licentiousness, which the stern Puritan had for twenty years kept in
abeyance, the Temple renewed the banquets and merry-makings of an earlier
day. At a continuous banquet which lasted half a month, the Earl of
Nottingham kept open house to all London, and entertained all the great
and powerful of the time. Fifty servants waited on Charles II. and his
company, while twenty violins made merry music at the feast.
The Great Fire of 1666 ceased ere it reached the Temple church, but it was
not stopped until many sets of chambers and title-deeds of a vast number
of valuable estates had perished. Another fire only a dozen years later
destroyed much more of the establishment which Milton knew. Of the Inner
Temple Hall little exists to-day that his eyes rested on. But the stately
Middle Temple Hall, built in 1572, still stands, and is one of the best
specimens of Elizabethan architecture that London boasts. The open roof of
hammer-beam design, with pendants, is especially characteristic of the
work of that period. The screen is an elaborate one of Renaissance work,
more interesting for its age and associations than for its conformity to
true principles of art. This famous hall witnessed the performance of
Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" in 1601. The same strong, oak tables of the
days of Bacon, Coke, and Jonson still stretch from end to end. Viewed from
the western dais, the portraits, armour, and rich windows combine with the
massive furniture and carved screen to present a scene of sober richness
hardly equalled outside of a few dining-halls of Oxford and Cambridge
which belong to that same period. Among the eminent men of the Middle
Temple whose lives Milton's life touched were Sir Walter Raleigh, John
Pym, Ireton,--Cromwell's son-in-law,--Evelyn, Lord Chancellor Clarendon,
and many others of equal note in their day.
Only one who has delved long in the biography and literature of this great
age can realise the stupendous scholarship of the men of this
period,--Coke, Selden, Bacon, Newton, Milton, and their contemporaries
across the Channel, Grotius, Spinoza, and Galileo,--who, with the men of
action of their day, make the century in which they lived one of the most
significant since time began. What period since the Golden Age of Greece
can match their achievements? Where on earth since the days of Periclean
eloquence and wisdom in Athens could be found one spot where so much
genius and learning had its centre as in the England into which Milton was
born, and in which he lived for two-thirds of a century?
"We are apt," says Lowell, "to wonder at the scholarship of the men of
three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterises
them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we.
They had fewer books, but those were of the best. Their speech was noble,
because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato." Of the long
list of eminent men who studied here in the century after Milton, perhaps
none was more akin to him in scholarship than the learned Blackstone; none
who more deeply understood his Puritan seriousness than Cowper; none who
in boldness, love of liberty, and justice more resembled him than Edmund
Burke.
Fifty years before Milton's birth, as Aggas's old map of 1562 gives
evidence, London had extended but a little way beyond the city walls and
the Strand. But in Elizabeth's prosperous age, noble mansions and
extensive gardens began to replace the fields, commons, and pastures that
stretched westward from St. Martin's Lane. One of the busiest spots in
modern London, that is, Covent Garden, begins to come into prominence in
London history just as Milton reached early manhood. For three centuries
before his time the abbots of Westminster had owned "fair spreading
pastures" here, now all included in the general name of "Long Acre." Part
of this they are thought to have used for the burial of their dead. In
Aggas's old map, a brick wall enclosed all but the southern side where the
houses and enclosures separated it from the Strand. The property belonged
to John Russell, Earl of Bedford, to whom it was given by the Crown in
1552, at which time it had a yearly value of less than L7. To-day his
successor holds one of the richest rentals in the world. In 1631 a square
was formed, and the famous architect Inigo Jones built an open arcade
about the north and east sides. Upon the west rose a Renaissance church by
the design of the same artist, and the south was bordered by the garden
of Bedford House and a grove or "small grotto of trees most pleasant in
the summer season." The duke, in ordering the erection of the chapel,
declared that he would go to no expense for it, and it might be a barn.
"Then," said Inigo Jones, "it shall be the handsomest barn in England,"
and fulfilled his promise. It was the first important Protestant church
erected in England. Only the portico of the original church remains, as
the first building was destroyed by fire in 1795.
In the popular dramas written in the last part of Milton's lifetime,
constant allusion is made to the fashionable and even licentious companies
that frequented the piazza of Covent Garden, and it is safe to say that it
was never at any time a haunt of the serious-minded Puritan. The poet Gay,
writing in the next generation after Milton, thus describes the Covent
Garden that he knew:
"Where Covent Garden's famous temple stands,
That boasts the work of Jones' immortal hands,
Columns with plain magnificence appear,
And graceful porches lead along the square;
Here oft my course I bend, when lo! from far
I spy the furies of the football war:
The 'prentice quits his shop to join the crew,
Increasing crowds the flying game pursue."
At first, peddlers of fruit and vegetables used the gravelled centre of
the square for their booths, and gradually the market grew into a
well-recognised establishment, and the open square was finally in 1830
covered over. In Milton's later years Covent Garden was fashionable as a
residence for the nobility. Bishops, dukes, and earls had here their town
houses, and among the titled residents was the painter, Sir Godfrey
Kneller.
[Illustration: SOMERSET HOUSE
This view represents the house as it stood in Milton's boyhood, previous
to the alterations by Inigo Jones. Adjoining it is the Savoy, and
immediately behind it is the only view extant of Exeter House.
_From an ancient painting in Dulwich College._]
The palace on the Thames known as "Somerset House" was in Milton's
lifetime a magnificent structure; built in 1544-49, it was from the time
of Elizabeth to 1775 a residence much favoured by royalty. Pepys tells us
in 1662: "Indeed it is observed that the greatest court nowadays is
there." It was then the residence of the queen mother, whose rooms he
describes as "most stately and nobly furnished," and he remarks upon the
echo on the stairs, "which continues a voice so long as the singing three
notes, concords one after another, they all three shall sound in concert
together a good while most pleasantly." The site occupied an area of six
hundred feet from east to west and five hundred from north to south. The
present large edifice, which was erected on the site of the old one,
demolished in 1775, is used for many important public purposes.