insufficient, and a large aisled structure, four bays long, was
raised in its place, being duly consecrated by Heraclius, Patriarch
of Jerusalem, in 1185. The church remained in this form until the
rising of the commons under Wat Tyler in 1381, when the rebels, besides
murdering the prior, set the house on fire, “causing it to burn by
the space of seven days together, not suffering any to quench it.”
The round nave was never rebuilt, its successor being a rectangular
three-aisled building with a magnificent tower at the north-west
corner. At the dissolution in 1540 the house was not touched, but a few
years later the nave with the great tower fell a victim to Protector
Somerset. The choir was walled in and again applied to its original
purpose during Queen Mary’s reign, but once more desecrated under her
successor. It served in turn as a private chapel and a dissenting
meeting-house until 1721, when the remains, patched and repaired,
became the parish church of St. John’s, Clerkenwell.
The crypt under the present church is the finest of these structures
still standing in London. It is of two dates, the western portion
of the central aisle being contemporary with the foundation. The
quadripartite ribbed vaulting with broad responds and transverse
bands between the bays belongs to the simpler type of Norman work.
The two eastern bays with the flanking chapels were added when the
aisled choir was built above (1185). The pointed vaulting springs from
clustered shafts, and the whole is an elegant example of transitional
work of the same date and character as the still existing “Round” of
the Temple Church. Of the aisled choir above, the outer walls and the
bases of the columns remain, but this part of the building underwent
extensive alteration under Prior Thomas Docwra (1501–27), who inserted
the windows and constructed two buildings against the south wall. Both
of these can be identified from the Loseley Survey as the vestry on
the east and “My lord Dockerys chappell.” The latter was entered by
two wide brick arches piercing the side wall, the earlier buttresses
between being pared away at the angles to form semi-octagonal piers.
The nave of the church was also of three aisles, the length of the
leads being respectively thirty, twenty-nine, and twenty yards. The
discrepancy of the north aisle is accounted for by the presence, at its
western end, of the great tower, described by Stow as “a most curious
piece of work graven, gilt, and enamelled, to the great beautifying
of the city.” The tower was evidently about ten yards square, and its
position is still marked by a set-back in the existing building line;
the lead from the steeple was about the same in quantity (five fothers)
as that covering one of the side aisles.
The later work in the church all dates from the foundation of the
parish in 1721. The massive carved hood over the west door is an
admirable piece of woodwork of that date, the carved panel of the three
Saints John in the door-head being a modern addition.
The simple and unpretentious reredos is a no less satisfactory example
of early eighteenth-century work, but the remainder of the building
calls for little remark, the plain west front and galleried interior
presenting no features of special interest.
Turning now to the domestic portion of the “hospital,” we find an
extensive range of embattled buildings, with a pleasantly diversified
outline, depicted in Hollar’s view on the north side of the church, and
there is little doubt that the principal apartments occupied this side.
[Illustration: FIG. 74.—EAST END OF CRYPT.
_Photograph by H. W. Fincham._]
[Illustration: FIG. 75.—SOUTH CHAPEL, CRYPT.
_Photograph by H. W. Fincham._]
[Illustration: FIG. 76.—WEST FRONT OF CHURCH.
_Photograph by H. W. Fincham._]
[Illustration: FIG. 77.—WEST DOOR OF CHURCH.
_Photograph by H. W. Fincham._]
[Illustration: FIG. 78.—FIREPLACE, ST. JOHN’S GATE.
_Photograph by H. W. Fincham._]
Remains of vaulted substructures, on the opposite side of St. John’s
Square, prove, however, that the buildings extended far beyond the
destroyed nave in this direction. The Loseley Survey apparently starts
with the buildings shown by Hollar and passes westward. The first
building mentioned is a house called the Priests’ Dorter, 120 ft.
long, and evidently the dormitory of the knights; next follows the
“Armoury,” 54 ft. long, and very narrow, as the roof measures
only 9 ft. on either side of the ridge. The great chamber with other
apartments formed a block 120 ft. long, with the great staircase, 24
ft. by 18 ft., at one end of it. Connected with these buildings were
numerous smaller chambers, the use of which is generally unspecified,
but evidently offices, as they include a “stillitorne,” or distillery,
a “comptyng house,” and the wardrobe. The Prior’s Lodging contained a
parlour and “my lordes chamber,” and the great hall was a magnificent
apartment 105 ft. in length.
Towards the end of the list mention is made of “a tyled rooffe which
was called the Yeoman’s Dorter,” so that the house at Clerkenwell
contained definite accommodation not only for the knights but also
for a lower grade, the yeomen, who were perhaps body servants and
attendants.
The great gate of the precinct which still spans St. John’s Lane was
built by Prior Docwra, and though drastically restored is still in
outward appearance largely as he left it. The finely ribbed vault to
the gate itself is untouched, and the interior contains many remains
of ancient work. Chief among these is the handsome carved fireplace
originally in the “Baptist’s Head” tavern, and bearing the arms of
Sir Thomas Forster, who died in 1612. The carving on the frieze is of
considerable delicacy, and the design is quite unusual.
It is a singular fact that only two representations of members of the
order have survived in English monumental art, namely, an emaciated
figure to Prior Weston in St. James’s, Clerkenwell, and the effigy of
Prior Fresham at Rushton (Northants). The former died within a few
months after the suppression of his house, and the remainder of his
monument was removed when St. James’s Church was rebuilt.
The smaller establishments of the Knights Hospitallers in England have
suffered even more than the mother house, and their remains are few
and inconspicuous. The circular church of Little Maplestead, Essex,
is, however, an exception, and the building has suffered far more from
restoration than decay. The three “Early English” chapels at Moor Hall
(Middlesex), Swingfield, and Sutton-at-Hone, Kent, are also relics of
the order, and the little establishment at Chibburn, Northumberland, is
still almost complete; but though not lacking in individual interest,
they were at best but granges of the great dwelling at Clerkenwell,
which was the combined recruiting and receiving house of the order in
England.
—A. W. C.
NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE,
STRAND
[Illustration: FIG. 79.—NORTH FRONT (BEFORE 1874).
_Photograph by London Stereoscopic Co._]
XII.
NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE, STRAND.
Of olden time London’s great highway was the Thames, and this important
fact must be remembered when we would cast our minds back to the times
of Hollar, who portrayed our picturesque city with such infinite art.
So busy was the traffic that Stow tells us in the year 1598 “that,
omitting to speak of great ships and other vessels of burthen, there
pertaineth to the cities of London, Westminster, and the borough of
Southwark, above the number, as is supposed, of two thousand wherries
and other small boats, whereby 3,000 poor men, at the least, be set on
work and maintained.” Nor does this include, presumably, the barges of
state and those of the noblemen and rich citizens, to whom the barge
was as important a possession as the motor-car of to-day, and an object
of even greater pride. The changed position and character of the main
artery of the city’s life and movement is responsible—perhaps as much
as the passing of its ancient buildings—for the difficulty which we of
the present day experience in attempting to enter into the spirit of
mediæval and Tudor London.
As was natural, the northern bank of the great highway of the Thames
held the most coveted sites for the residences of kings, nobles, and
prelates. William FitzStephen, in his oft-quoted description of London
towards the end of the twelfth century, tells us that “nearly all the
bishops, abbots, and magnates of England are, as it were, citizens and
freemen of London, having there their own splendid houses to which
they resort, where they spend largely when summoned to Great Councils
by the King or by their Metropolitan, or drawn thither by their own
private affairs.” From the “Palatine Castle”—the Tower of London—in
the east, to the western limits of the city and its liberties, the
bank was furnished with fine buildings. “Also upwards to the west the
Royal Palace [Westminster] is conspicuous above the same river, an
incomparable building with ramparts and bulwarks, two miles from the
city, joined to it by a populous suburb.”
As early, then, as 1190 the Palace of Westminster was joined to
Temple Bar by a “populous suburb” of houses, described later by Stow
as “memorable for greatness,” that looked on to the fair “river of
Thames.” The Elizabethan chronicler gives us an interesting account
of them in his day. After the new Temple, going westwards, one came
upon Essex House, formerly built by the Bishops of Exeter and again
new-built by an Earl of Leicester before the Earl of Essex lodged there
and gave it the name which the street on its site still bears. Next
was Arundel House, first built by the Bishop of Bath, and increased
under the occupation of Lord Thomas Seymour, Admiral. Here again
the present Arundel Street preserves the name of the Earl who lived
there in Stow’s time. West of this was Somerset House, built first by
Edward Duke of Somerset in 1549—a building of princely size, upon the
site of which stood formerly an Inn of Chancery called Strand Inn—and
the three houses of the Bishops of Llandaff, Chester, and Worcester.
Beyond the Bishop of Worcester’s stood the great Hospital of the Savoy,
founded by Henry VII. on the ruins of the beautiful palace which had
had a chequered history since its erection in 1245 by Peter of Savoy.
Next came the Earl of Bedford’s house, formerly the London home of
the Bishop of Carlisle, and adjoining it the large and stately house
of brick and timber the work of Sir Robert Cecil, builder of Chelsea
House and Hatfield. The great hotels, the Savoy and the Cecil, still
witness to the importance of these river sites, the beauty of which,
however, has in such large measure departed. Another bishop, the Bishop
of Durham, had the next house to Cecil’s. (_Vide ante_ p. 154.) Then
came the house formerly of the Bishop of Norwich, but in Stow’s time
belonging to the Archbishops of York, and called of them York House. It
came later into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, and the little
water-gate in the Embankment Gardens—still called York Stairs—together
with the names of Buckingham and Villiers Streets, commemorates its
vanished glories.
York House seems to have been the last of the great houses on the
riverside until one came to the precincts of the Palace at Whitehall,
but between it and the Palace we learn there were “divers fair
tenements lately built,” and also “an Hospital of St. Marie Rouncivall
by Charing Cross where a fraternity was founded in the fifteenth of
Edward IV., but now the same is suppressed and turned into tenements.”
Thus Stow describes the site on which, within seven years of the
date of his survey, was to rise the magnificent house of the Earl of
Northampton, afterwards occupied by the Percies, and since known as
Northumberland House. It remained the principal landmark at Charing
Cross until its ruthless destruction in 1874, when it followed the
fate of the old hospital, being in its turn “suppressed” and its site
disposed among the buildings of the new Northumberland Avenue.
Much as we may regret the sacrifice of this commanding building and all
the associations which clung to its fabric, we must remember that it
had suffered considerable rebuilding since its first erection in about
the year 1605, and even the famous front to the Strand was chiefly an
eighteenth-century restoration. The history of the mansion has been
hitherto far from clear, but the recent discovery of a contemporary
plan of what appears to have been its original arrangement affords an
opportunity for a new examination of the little evidence which we have.
The plan referred to, and reproduced here by the very kind permission
of its present custodian, belongs to the interesting collection of
drawings, attributed to one of the Smithsons (a well-known family of
architects of the reigns of Elizabeth and James), which was once in
the possession of Lord Byron and is now preserved by Colonel Coke
at Brookhill Hall, Alfreton. It will be remembered that Mr. J. A.
Gotch brought these drawings before the notice of the architectural
world some short time ago, by reading a most instructive paper upon
them before the Royal Institute. Mr. Gotch was kind enough to draw my
attention personally to this plan, which was entitled “The Platforme of
my Lord of Northampton’s house in London.” The plan was not dated, but
other drawings in the same collection bear dates ranging from 1599 to
1632, and it therefore seems pretty certain that it refers to the house
built in the Strand by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, about the
year 1605. Since, on Northampton’s death in 1614, the house changed its
name to Suffolk House, we can safely refer the drawing to the period
between 1605 and 1614—and its careful delineation of the garden makes
it probable that it is a copy of a drawing prepared to show the design
for the general lay-out of the grounds. There is a MS. note by Inigo
Jones in his copy of Palladio which is preserved at Worcester College,
Oxford, to the effect that the frontage of Northumberland House towards
the Strand was 162 ft. long, and that the courtyard was 81 ft. square.
The former measurement is exactly borne out by the plan, but the
courtyard is drawn and figured as 90 by 86 ft. It is possible that
Inigo Jones’s figures were taken between the projecting bay windows and
porch.
Of the exterior of Northumberland House in its earliest days we have
no drawing, but among a very precious little collection of diminutive
drawings by Wenceslaus Hollar, preserved in the Pepysian Library at
Cambridge, is a delightful sketch of Suffolk House as it was then
called. Wilkinson in his _Londina Illustrata_ published an engraving
based on this drawing, but I do not know that the original has been
reproduced before. I have, however, been able to obtain by the kind
permission of the trustees a direct photograph of Hollar’s sketch,
which is reproduced here with Wilkinson’s engraving, and shows, even
with so slight a rendering, the charming delicacy and picturesqueness
of the artist’s work. Hollar seems to have made these and the
companion sketches with a view to his large panoramic drawing of
London which was published shortly after the Great Fire, and in which
one can easily see how the sketch has been utilised in regard to this
particular subject. It would represent the house, therefore, some fifty
years after its first building.
[Illustration: FIG. 80.—PLAN IN THE _SMITHSON_ COLLECTION.]
[Illustration: FIG. 81.—VIEW FROM RIVER (c. 1650).
_Drawn by Hollar._]
Before examining the plan and drawings in detail it may be as well to
state briefly the successive occupants of Northumberland House, as
we shall have something to say on the changes which certain of the
owners are credited with having made in the form of the building. The
builder of the house was, as already stated, Henry Howard first Earl of
Northampton, the son of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey the poet, and the
founder of the three hospitals dedicated to the Holy Trinity at Castle
Rising, Clun, and Greenwich. (_Vide_ p. 229.) Letters from the Earl
are known to have been written from the house in 1609, and in 1614,
at his death, the property passed by will to his nephew Thomas Howard
Earl of Suffolk, one of the heroes of the Armada. Northampton House
changed its name to Suffolk House during its occupation by himself and
his son the second Earl, and soon after the death of the latter it
passed by the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to Algernon Percy,
tenth Earl of Northumberland. The new owner of the house—called by
Clarendon the proudest man alive—was a son of the “Wizard Earl” who
spent sixteen years of captivity in the Tower of London because of his
supposed connection with the Gunpowder Plot, and in 1612 the son had
joined his father in the Tower in order that his education might be
properly supervised. The ninth Earl had moved his home from Blackfriars
to Russell House, St. Martin-in-the-Fields (perhaps the same mansion
which was called by Stow “Russell or Bedford House,” formerly the
Bishop of Carlisle’s “Inn,” to which we have already referred),
and had also resided for some time in Essex House. Another river
residence, Syon House, Isleworth—still one of the seats of the Duke of
Northumberland—was also presented to the “Wizard Earl” by James I.,
the year after his accession; and when Lord Hay, the future Viscount
Doncaster and Earl of Carlisle, was courting Northumberland’s daughter
he took a little house in Richmond Park, and we read that his barge
came and went twice a day between Richmond and Isleworth.
The marriage settlement of 1642 between Algernon Percy, the tenth
Earl of Northumberland, and his bride, the Lady Elizabeth Howard—who
was, by the way, granddaughter of the Earl of Northampton—arranged
for the transference of Suffolk House to the bridegroom in return for
the sum of £15,000. Gerald Brenan in his _History of the House of
Percy_ states that the name of the mansion was straightway changed to
Northumberland House, but we have the evidence of Evelyn’s Diary and
Hollar’s inscription which testify to the persistence of the name of
Suffolk House for many years later. Algernon Percy was succeeded by
Josceline the eleventh Earl, who died in 1670 and left an only daughter
Elizabeth. The house passed out of the Percy family with her marriage
in 1682 to Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Since there was already a
Somerset House in the Strand it is probable that the mansion was still
called Suffolk House, but in 1749 the Duke’s son Algernon, who had
succeeded his father the year before as seventh Duke of Somerset, was
created Earl of Northumberland with remainder to Sir Hugh Smithson, who
had married Lady Elizabeth Seymour, his only surviving child. Sir Hugh
on his succession to the earldom assumed the name and arms of Percy,
and in 1766 he was raised to the dukedom. From this time the house was
certainly called Northumberland House until the time of its compulsory
sale in 1873 and its demolition in the following year. Thus on three
occasions an heiress of the name of Elizabeth carried the mansion with
her dower.
With this historical framework before us, let us now examine briefly
the plans and drawings of the building. It has been freely stated that
the plan of “Northampton House” as first built constituted only three
sides of a quadrangle, and that Algernon Percy, the tenth Earl of
Northumberland, added the fourth side towards the river, employing as
his architect Inigo Jones. The reason given for this enlargement was
that the principal apartments formerly faced the Strand, but that the
Earl, desiring greater privacy, removed them to the river front. On the
face of it this story seems highly improbable, for a house of this size
and position would naturally be approached by a gateway on the north
side towards the Strand, and its great hall would be as certainly in
the southern range. The plan from the Smithson collection shows this
arrangement just as we might expect—the hall, a noble apartment of 73
by 43 ft., having the mediæval form and shape and being screened by
a loggia or “cloyster” quite in keeping with the fashion during the
opening years of James I.’s reign. It seems scarcely possible that the
planning of the southern range as shown here could be by Inigo Jones,
especially at so late a date in his career as 1642, and indeed all
the evidence of the plan, besides its inscription, tends to support a
much earlier period. It remains only then for the sceptic to suggest
that the original design of the house was not completed, but we must
remember that we have Hollar’s evidence for the southern staircase
towers, and it seems more than probable that any work by Inigo Jones
must have taken the form of a rebuilding or merely a new facing to the
front. The Strand elevation became so famous that Walpole attributes
its design to Bernard Jansen and Gerard Chrismas. It must originally
have been as fine a composition as any Jacobean building could show.
The centre or gatehouse of four storeys, flanked on either side by bold
double pilasters, each pair separated by niches, was furnished with a
fine oriel window over the archway like those at Burghley and Bramshill.
At the extremities of the front rose the two characteristic towers,
carried up two storeys above the roof and furnished with fine lead
cupolas; and between the towers and the gateway the intervening wall
was divided into three storeys, the upper two being pierced with
windows and the ground floor having recessed niches set in square
frames. Above was a parapet formed of letters, for Evelyn tells us,
when on a visit to Audley End (August 31st, 1654), that “instead
of rails and balusters there is a border of capital letters as was
lately also on Suffolk House, near Charing Cross.” From the register
of burials in St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields we learn, too, that at the
funeral of Anne of Denmark a young man was killed by the fall of the
letter S from this parapet. It has been stated that part of the letters
C Æ remained after the removal of the rest, and Vertue, and Walpole
following him, interpreted them as standing for “Chrismas ædificavit.”
It is quite possible that in 1642 the Earl of Northumberland employed
Inigo Jones to design some alterations in the house, the more so as
we find the general dimensions figured in the famous architect’s own
handwriting in his copy of Palladio already mentioned. But I very much
doubt whether he really rebuilt the garden front. Inigo Jones died in
1652, and on June 9th, 1658, we find the following note in Evelyn’s
Diary: “I went to see the Earl of Northumberland’s pictures, whereof
that of the Venetian Senators was one of the best of Titian’s.... This
was in Suffolk House: the new front towards the gardens is tolerable,
were it not drowned by a too massy and clumsy pair of stairs of stone
without any neat invention.” Evelyn is evidently referring to work
which had just been executed, and not to an alteration of some fifteen
years before. Hollar’s view, too, suggests that the earlier design had
been little altered, and his drawing was probably not executed until
after Inigo Jones’s death.
[Illustration: FIG. 82.—VIEW FROM RIVER (c. 1650).
_Engraved in Londina Illustrata._]
[Illustration: FIG. 83.—NORTH FRONT, AFTER _CANALETTO_.]