THE PRECINCTS OF THE ABBEY.--WESTMINSTER PALACE.--ST. MARGARET'S
During the Civil War, the spot within Westminster which most interested
every reformer was that where, for over five years, the famous Westminster
Assembly gathered. During that time this body of one hundred and
forty-nine prelates and learned men held over fifteen hundred sessions, at
first in the chapel of Henry VII., and later in the warmer and cosier
apartment known as the "Jerusalem Chamber." This room was in the present
generation occupied by the scholars who for years laboured together on the
revised version of the Bible. The Assembly was called by Parliament "to be
consulted with by them on the settling of the government and liturgy of
the Church, and for the vindicating and clearing of the doctrine of the
Church of England from false aspersions and interpretations." In that age,
when religious questions were paramount, the work that devolved upon these
men demanded insight, honesty, and great courage. The members, for the
most part, were elected from the different counties and merely confirmed
by Parliament; but to these, ten members of the House of Lords and twenty
members of the House of Commons were added. Only those questions could be
considered that should be proposed by either or both houses of Parliament.
Four shillings a day for his expenses was allowed each clerical member,
with freedom from all other duties except attendance on the Assembly.
Among the one hundred and forty-nine were several members, like Archbishop
Usher, who were defenders of Episcopacy. In that age no modern questions
as to inspiration disturbed the minds of devout men, but church government
was to them a matter of such serious moment as the modern mind can
scarcely understand. As the results of these prolonged and serious
conferences, Dean Stanley says we have the "Directory, the Longer and
Shorter Catechism, and that famous Confession of Faith which, alone within
these Islands, was imposed by law on the whole kingdom; and which, alone
of all Protestant Confessions, still, in spite of its sternness and
narrowness, retains a hold on the minds of its adherents to which its
fervour and its logical coherence in some measure entitle it."
During Milton's lifetime the Chapter House, which had become public
property after the Dissolution, was used for storing public documents,
and here he may have seen the ancient Domesday Book, which until within
fifty years was treasured there. At the time of the Commonwealth, the
ancient chamber close by the Chapter House, and known as the "Pyx," held
the regalia, and was broken open by the officers of the House of Commons,
in order to make an inventory, when the Church authorities refused to
surrender the keys. The Pyx no longer holds the regalia, which, after the
Restoration, was transferred to the Tower. The keys of its double doors
are seven, and are deposited with seven distinct officers of the
Exchequer. The door is lined with human skins. Within the cloisters Henry
Lawes, the musician, was buried in 1662.
Near by the Abbey stands Westminster School, founded early in the
sixteenth century upon the site of the ancient monastery. The dormitory
has been turned into a noble schoolroom ninety-six feet in length. Camden,
the famous antiquary, was once master of the school, and among its famous
pupils whose lives touched Milton's, were the poets, George Herbert,
Cowley, who published poems while he was at school here, and Dryden. Among
men famous in other walks of life were the great geographer, Hakluyt, and
Sir Christopher Wren. Hakluyt, who died the same year that Shakespeare
died, in 1616, tells us that his interest in discovery and in naval
science began when he was a Queen's Scholar in "that fruitful nurserie."
At Oxford he pursued his favourite studies, and read "whatsoever printed
or written discoveries or voyages he found extant in Greeke, Latine,
Italian, Spanish, Portugall, French, or Englishe languages." Evelyn says
in his "Diary:" On "May 13th, 1661, I heard and saw such exercises at the
election of scholars at Westminster Schools to be sent to the university,
in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, in themes and extempry verses, as
wonderfully astonished me in such youths, with such readiness and wit,
some of whom not above twelve or thirteen years of age." Here Milton may
have witnessed, on a Christmas-tide, a play of Plautus or of Terence,
given by the boys of Westminster according to their annual custom, which
is still maintained.
In the seventeenth century, the double Gatehouse of Westminster, which
once stood on the site of the Royal Aquarium of to-day, held as prisoner
Sir Walter Raleigh, who passed the last night of his life here. The night
before his execution his cousin called on him; Raleigh tried to relieve
his sadness with pleasantry, when his cousin remonstrated with the words,
"Sir, take heed you go not too much upon the brave hand, for your enemies
will take exceptions at that." "Good Charles," replied Raleigh, "give me
leave to be merry, for this is the last merriment that ever I shall have
in this world, but when I come to the last part, thou shalt see I will
look on it like a man," and even so he did. When he had reached the
scaffold in Palace Yard the next day, and had taken off his gown and
doublet, he asked the executioner to show him his axe. When he had taken
it in his hands he felt along the edge, and smiling said: "This is a sharp
medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases." Then he granted his
forgiveness to the sheriff who knelt before him. When his head was on the
block, before the fatal blow, he said: "So the heart be right, it is no
matter which way the head lies." So perished the bold discoverer and
coloniser, the author and gallant knight, when ten-year-old John Milton
lived in Bread Street. Near the spot where his body rests in the church of
St. Margaret's, Westminster, now rises a memorial window presented by
Americans and inscribed by Lowell in remembrance of Raleigh's connection
with America:
"The New World's sons, from England's breasts we drew
Such milk as bids remember whence we came;
Proud of her past, wherefrom our future grew,
This window we inscribe with Raleigh's name."
In this prison, afterward, John Hampden and Sir John Eliot were confined,
and Richard Lovelace, who was imprisoned for his devotion to Charles I.,
wrote the well-known lines:
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for a hermitage."
Where Westminster Palace Hotel now stands, in the ancient Almonry of the
Abbey, Caxton set up his press, and in 1474 printed his first book--the
"Game and Play of Chess."
In Milton's day, a grim old fortress marked the "Sanctuary," or place of
refuge for criminals. From the sacred shelter of this retreat the mother
of the little Edward V. surrendered him with sad misgiving to his cruel
uncle, who carried him to the Tower. This spot was a resort for persecuted
saint and guilty sinner. Within its walls he was as secure as was the
ancient Hebrew in his city of refuge. When Milton lived in Petty France
and passed from there to Whitehall by the Sanctuary, it had fallen into
disrepute and only the most abandoned sought its shelter. The Sanctuary at
Westminster was only one of thirty known to have been contemporaneous with
it in the monasteries of England before the Dissolution.
The magnificent royal palace of Westminster, which was built by Edward the
Confessor, and improved by William the Conqueror, had largely disappeared
in Milton's time. The Great Hall and the crypt under the chapel of St.
Stephen are almost all that now remain, but Milton, in addition to these,
saw the chapel itself and its cloisters, and the famous "Star Chamber" and
"Painted Chamber," which were preserved until the fire which burned the
Houses of Parliament in 1834. Previous to the Dissolution, the Commons had
sat within the ancient Chapter House of the Abbey, at an inconvenient
distance from the House of Lords. Then they were transferred to St.
Stephen's Chapel, an oblong building ninety feet in length and thirty in
width, which had externally at each corner an octagonal tower. It was
lighted by five windows on each side, between which its walls were
supported by great buttresses. It had two stories, and the upper one was
occupied by the House of Commons. These walls have echoed to the ringing
words of Eliot, Hampden, Pym, Sir Harry Vane, and Cromwell, to Burke and
Fox and Pitt, and the long line of valiant Englishmen who never confounded
patriotism and loyalty to country with subserviency to the will of any
fallible man whom chance had placed upon the nation's throne. Here Eliot,
in sharp, emphatic words, which contrasted with the ponderous phraseology
of the time, cried out against the gorgeously apparelled and arrogant
Buckingham: "He has broken those nerves and sinews of our land, the stores
and treasures of the king. There needs no search for it. It is too
visible. His profuse expenses, his superfluous feasts, his magnificent
buildings, his riots, his excesses, what are they but the visible
evidences of an express exhausting of the state, a chronicle of his waste
of the revenues of the Crown?... Through the power of state and justice he
has dared ever to strike at his own ends." Bold words! which took more
courage than to face the cannon's mouth, for his protest then and later
meant to face a dungeon in the Tower, from which only death gave him
release.
But Eliot's words were a tonic to his fellows, and when they met two years
later, in 1628, Sir Thomas Wentworth showed himself a worthy follower: "We
must vindicate our ancient liberties," said he, "we must reinforce the
laws made by our ancestors. We must set such a stamp upon them, as no
licentious spirit shall dare hereafter to invade them." Of the Petition of
Right, and the Remonstrance; of the dissolution of Parliament, and the
eleven years when these walls were silent; of Charles's revival of Star
Chamber trials to fill his empty exchequer by the fines, and the
Parliamentary history of the Civil War, and all that centres around these
walls which echoed with the eloquence of England's noblest statesmen,
there is no space to speak.
The Star Chamber was probably so named from being anciently ornamented
with golden stars. It stood parallel with the river on the eastern side of
Palace Yard and was formerly the council chamber of the police. It was a
beautiful panelled room with mullioned windows. The lords who tried
offences were bound by no law, but they created and defined the offences
which they punished. Every penalty except death could be inflicted. In
such tyrannies the Star Chamber could have been exceeded only by the
terrible Council of Ten in Venice. One of the first deeds of the new
Parliament of 1641 was to abolish the Star Chamber. That year a mob of six
thousand citizens in Old Palace Yard had come armed with swords and clubs,
and had seized the entrance to the House of Lords and called for justice
against Lord Strafford.
The Painted Chamber was named from its mural decorations, which antedated
Milton's time at least three hundred years. It was strangely proportioned,
eighty feet long, twenty broad, and fifty feet high. Here the Confessor
died. Here was the trial of Charles I. when it was adjourned from
Westminster Hall. Here his death warrant was signed, which is now
preserved within the library of the House of Lords.
Says Knight: "Amid all the misgovernment of the reign of Charles II., the
rights of the House of Commons and its true position in the Constitution
were recognised in a manner in which they had never been in the former
days of the monarchy. Attempts were made to manage the Parliament, and
also to govern without it; but when it was suffered to meet, its debates
were nearly as free as they are at present, and took as wide a range as
they have ever done since. The Commons for session after session during
this reign discussed the question of excluding the heir presumptive to the
throne, the king's own brother, and even passed a bill for that purpose.
Would any approach to such an interference as that have been endured
either by Elizabeth or James I.?... and this change, this gain had been
brought about by the Long Parliament and the great Rebellion."
In the time of Milton the pillory stood before Westminster Hall, and here
he may have seen, on one of his trips from Horton in 1636, the
stiff-necked Prynne branded on either cheek, and exposed with one ear cut
off, according to the barbarous methods of the time, for writings which
were supposed to have reflected on the queen. In those days the noble
proportions of the hall were partly masked by neighbouring shops. The
architecture and the long history of this famous hall of William Rufus are
almost as familiar as those of Westminster Abbey, and therefore need
little comment here. The story of Guy Fawkes and the sentence passed upon
the conspirators here in 1606 was one of the first bits of English history
that a boy born but two years later would have heard. In 1640, Charles I.
and his queen, concealed behind the tapestry of a dark cabinet, listened
to the trial of Strafford, which lasted eighteen days. Nine years later
the king sat at his own trial beneath the banners of his troops, which had
been taken at the battle of Naseby. When the clerk read the words:
"Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer," etc., the king is said
to have laughed in the face of the court. In Pepys's diary we get a
glimpse, a few years later, of the commercial uses to which this stately
edifice had been degraded, for we find little booths and stalls for
selling scarfs and trifles were ranged along the walls of the interior.
More than a hundred years later, part of the hall seems to have been
reserved for stalls, which presumably were removed for coronation days and
the great functions, for which its stately proportions are so well fitted.
The building is one of the most spacious edifices of stone whose roof
is unsupported. The roof of Irish oak is said to be always free from
spiders and insects.
[Illustration: WESTMINSTER HALL
Begun by William Rufus in 1097. Here William Wallace, Sir Thomas More, Sir
Thomas Wyatt, Robert Devereux (Earl of Essex), Guy Fawkes, the Earl of
Strafford, and Charles I. were condemned to death. The chief access to the
House of Commons in Milton's lifetime was by an archway on the east side,
through which Charles I. passed to arrest the Five Members. Here Cromwell,
in 1653, wearing the royal purple, and holding a gold sceptre in one hand
and a Bible in the other, was saluted as Lord Protector.
_From an old engraving._]
Close under the shadow of the towering Abbey lies the little church, St.
Margaret's, which must have had peculiarly tender associations in Milton's
mind. Here he buried his beloved second wife, whom, from Aldermanbury
church, he had taken to his home in Petty France, near the Abbey, for one
short happy year of married life. It is of her that he speaks in his
beautiful sonnet beginning:
"Methought my late espoused saint,
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave."
The large memorial window to Milton at the west end of the church was in
recent years presented by Mr. Childs of Philadelphia. This depicts
numerous scenes from "Paradise Lost" and from Milton's life. He is
represented as a youth visiting the aged Galileo, and as the old blind
poet dictating his immortal lines to his two daughters. The inscription by
Whittier expresses the thought and feeling not only of the New England
poet, but of every American scholar:
"The New World honours him whose lofty plea
For England's freedom made her own more sure,
Whose song immortal as his theme shall be
Their common freehold while both worlds endure."
Amongst the Puritans who preached here was the famous Richard Baxter,
author of "The Saints' Rest," whose glum visage in the National Gallery
reveals little of the true nobility of his character and of his
well-ordered mind. The modern inscription by Lowell on Raleigh's memorial
here has been already mentioned.
The church is rich in monuments of figures clad in the fashions of
Milton's time and that which just preceded it, the architectural
accessories of which indicate the gradual deterioration of Renaissance
decoration. The rare old glass of the chancel window is referred to in
every guide-book, and its remarkable history need not be here detailed. In
the reign of Charles I. fast-day sermons were preached here, and both
houses of Parliament met here with the Assembly of Divines, and prayed
before taking the covenant.