ROUND ABOUT THE TOWER
“I do not like the Tower, of any place.”--_Richard III._
Having amused myself many times in Paris by hunting up the pieces of the
old wall that Philippe Auguste built before he departed to the Holy Land
on one of his Crusades, I set out one day to see how much remains of the
wall the Romans built round London.
I discovered some bits of it, but I discovered a great many other things
in the process.
There is very little left of the city that the old Romans called Augusta
and the older Britons Llyn-Din--that some say means “the Lake Fort” and
some “The Hill by the Pool.” In the Guildhall and London museums there
are statues and vases and ornaments and mosaic pavements belonging to
those times, but in the city streets there are hardly any traces to-day
of the Roman occupation. Watling Street, a piece of Roman road that
still bears an Anglo-Saxon name, runs citywards from the back of St.
Paul’s, but that may better be reached from Cheapside. Most of the Roman
wall that remains is now below ground level. The best places to see what
is visible are in St. Olave’s, Hart Street; at Trinity Place, Tower
Hill; at Barber’s bonded warehouses in Cooper’s Row; and at The Roman
Wall House at No. 1, Crutched Friars, a new building whose plans were
altered by the Sadlers’ Company so as to preserve a good specimen of the
old wall in one of the basement rooms.
I began my search for Roman remains in Strand Lane, which lies next door
to the Strand station on the Holborn tube, and can be reached either by
bus along the Strand or by District train to the Temple, whence you go
uphill up Arundel Street and, turning to your left along the Strand,
find it after two or three minutes’ walk. Half-way down the little
winding passage that once led to the waterside there is on the left a
dingy sign, “The Old Roman Bath.”
The English reputation for liking cold baths must have been a legacy
from the Romans. Time was when the venerable cold spring bath was used
daily. David Copperfield had many a cold plunge in it when he was living
in Peter the Great’s house at the lower end of Buckingham Street. But
now it is only open from 11 to 12 on Saturday mornings to the very
occasional visitor who turns aside to look at this 2,000-year-old relic
of the London of the past.
As in the Frigidarium of the Cluny Museum in Paris, it seems as if one
steps back into the world as Julius Cæsar knew it, across the threshold
into the little vaulted chamber where the waters from the spring, once
famed for miraculous cures, flow through the marble walls of the
identical bath used by our Roman conquerors. The Romans contented
themselves with a brick lining that still exists under the marble slabs,
but the latter have an interest of their own, for they came from the
famous bath built in the Earl of Essex’s house near by, which Queen Bess
herself is said to have been the first to use. The spring comes from the
old Holy Well, that gave its name to Holywell Street, on the North side
of the Strand, a street destroyed to make room for Kingsway and Aldwych.
There is a Roman bath of a different kind underneath the Coal Exchange
in Lower Thames Street, but on your way to this from the Temple station
(or bus 13 from the Strand), get out at Cannon Street, where in a sort
of cage against the wall of St. Swithin’s Church, directly opposite the
station, is the very oldest relic in the whole of the city of
London,--London Stone, the stone that the Romans set up to mark the
centre of the city; the starting point from whence they marked the miles
along their branching highways. As long as history has been written in
this land, there has been mention of London Stone. Do you remember how,
in _Henry VI._, Shakespeare makes Jack Cade proclaim himself King of the
City, striking his staff against the block? Once it was a big pillar and
set on the other side of the way, but famous stones are seldom allowed
to rest in peace, and time, the weather, and clumsy mediæval cart-wheels
have chipped and worn it to its present size.
[Illustration: LONDON STONE, CANNON STREET]
Now take the train again, or another 13 bus, and go on to the Monument,
where King William IV. stands on the very spot where Falstaff and Prince
Hal made merry at the “Boar’s Head,” Eastcheap. Going down by the
beautiful column which Sir Christopher Wren built to commemorate the
Great Fire, hard by where it started in Pudding Lane, turn to your left
in Lower Thames Street opposite the church of St. Magnus, and walk along
this unattractive causeway till you come to the Coal Exchange with its
Corinthian porch. You will find the porter through a door up the
side-street of St. Mary-at-Hill. Do not go on Monday, Wednesday or
Friday afternoons, for those are marketdays or whatever the correct term
is on Coal Exchanges, and, as that most agreeable porter explained to
me: “We found it didn’t do, Ma’am; for when the genelmen on the Exchange
see me taking a lady or genelman or it might be a party down below into
the cellar, they naturally says to me ‘What for?’ And when I say ‘Roman
bath,’ they say ‘Roman bath, Jones! Did you say Roman bath? You don’t
mean to say there’s a Roman bath below and me here forty years and never
know it!’ And down they goes with all their friends, all equally
surprised, and business gets neglected. That’s how it is, Ma’am.”
Business in the coal trade has been too much neglected for anyone to
wish to hinder it further, so go on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday
afternoon. It is quite worth the exertion, for this hot-air or sweating
chamber, with its fire-blackened bricks, forming part of an elaborate
system of baths, is even more interesting than the Roman bath in the
Strand.
The Coal Exchange, with its curious rotunda floor of inlaid wood, was
only built in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it has two more
unexpected links with the past. I am indebted to Messrs. Thornbury and
Walford for pointing out that the black oak used in the woodwork is part
of a tree, four or five centuries old, that was discovered in the River
Tyne, and the blade of a dagger in the shield of the City arms is made
of wood from a mulberry tree that Peter the Great planted when he worked
as a shipwright in Deptford Harbour.
Turning up St. Mary’s-at-Hill into Great Tower Street, I found, nearly
opposite All Hallows, Barking, a prosperous merchant’s house still
standing practically untouched, as it was built a year or two after the
Great Fire. At No. 34, an ordinary-looking archway leads into a
courtyard fronting a perfect example of the home of a wealthy citizen of
Charles II.’s time. A flight of steps leads up to the doorway, from
which you catch a glimpse of panelled walls and noble staircase. The
counting-house is on the right, and upstairs are the living rooms where
the merchant lived with his wife and family and servants, in the fashion
of those times. They entertained, too, after the day’s work was done,
for amongst the private papers still treasured here is one complaining
of the excessive noise of carriages and coaches turning in the cobbled
courtyard at night.
It is worth while pushing open the door of the fifteenth-century
perpendicular church of All Hallows, Barking, just opposite, to see the
Norman pillars and the fine brasses. The best one is in front of the
litany desk, and in the corner to the right is a brass to the memory of
William Thynne and his wife.
This is not the Thynne who has such a gruesome monument in Westminster
Abbey, but a more worthy sixteenth-century ancestor, who was “chefe
clerk of the Kechyn of Henry VIII.,” and who published the first edition
of the entire works of Chaucer. Both of them are descendants of that
John of the Inn whose soubriquet became the name of the Bath family.
All Hallows gets its surname from the Abbess of Barking, the head of the
seventh-century Benedictine convent of Barking. She was a powerful
lady,--one of the four abbesses who was a baroness _ex officio_, and she
held the lands of the king by a baronage, furnishing her share of
men-at-arms. Only an old gateway of the Chapel of the Holy Rood, eight
miles out of London by the Fenchurch Street railway, is left of the
nunnery, but All Hallows, which was connected with it, survived the
Great Fire and is still intact.
Turning your back on the old church, and walking up Seething Lane, where
Pepys went to live in 1660 and kept his diary for nine years, you come
to St. Olave’s Church on the corner of Hart Street, where his pretty
young wife was buried. Church manners have vastly changed since Pepys’
day. When a bomb from an avion fell just outside the Verdun Cathedral
one Sunday morning, two months before the big attack, no one turned his
head except one little acolyte, who couldn’t resist a surreptitious grin
at his comrade in the front pew. But listen to Pepys:
6 June, 1666. To our own church, it being the common Fastday, and
it was just before sermon; but Lord! how all the people in the
church stared upon me to see me whisper (the news of the victory
over the Dutch at sea) to Sir John Minnes and my Lady Pen. Anon I
saw people stirring and whispering below, and by and by comes up
the sexton from my Lady Ford to tell me the news, which I had
brought, being now sent into the church by Sir W. Batten in
writing, and passed from pew to pew.
The church of St. Olave’s has a proud history. There are records of the
parish in Henry I.’s day, and in 1283 of a church dedicated to St. Olaf,
an exiled Norwegian. The present building dates from about 1450. It is
one of the eight existing churches that escaped the Great Fire.
The mid-Victorian Vandals who filled up the marble crypt, and removed
the old galleries and square pews, with their candlesticks, have
mercifully left the fine roof intact, and St. Olave’s possesses a number
of quaint Elizabethan treasures. On the door there is one of the few
remaining sanctuary knockers used by a fugitive from justice if he
wanted to claim sanctuary protection: on four of the six bells in the
church peal is engraved “Anthony Bartlet made mee 1662.” The crown on
the weather vane is supposed to commemorate the visit of Queen Elizabeth
in 1554 when she gave silken bell-ropes as a thank-offering for her
release from the Tower, and on the front of the organ gallery are the
wrought-iron hat-stands with which the clergy of those days emphasised
their protest against men wearing their hats in church.
The beautifully wrought iron sword-stands are used to this day when the
Lord Mayor and Sheriffs attend an official service at St. Olave’s. The
old church has been intimately connected with the navy since the days
when the Admiralty lodged in Mark Lane and Crutched Friars, and it is
still the parish church of the Master and Brethren of Trinity House, who
come humbly on foot, _via_ Catherine Court and Seething Lane, to the
annual special service on Trinity Sunday, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, as
Master, making his pilgrimage like the rest.
But for the ordinary visitor who has no part in these ceremonial
happenings the great interest of St. Olave’s lies in the memories
connected with its greatest parishioner, Samuel Pepys, Esq., Secretary
to the Admiralty.
The fame of his _Diary_ has rather obscured Pepys’ well-merited
reputation as an admirable and faithful public servant at a time when
these qualities were rare. He was living at the Navy Office in Seething
Lane in 1666, and it is thanks to his sagacity in ordering all the
workmen from the Royal Dockyards to blow up the intervening houses that
St. Olave’s, Hart Street, Allhallows Staining, and Allhallows Barking
were saved from the Great Fire.
Pepys and his pretty wife are both buried in their parish church of St.
Olave’s. Mrs. Pepys died when she was only twenty-nine, and though he
had teased the jealousy of “my wife, poor wretch,” Pepys ordered her
bust to be carved, not in the usual profile, but with the lovely head
turned so that he could see
[Illustration: THE TOWER OF LONDON. BYWARD TOWER]
it from where he sat in his gallery pew on the other side of the church.
There are other interesting things to be seen at St. Olave’s: the
doorway to the old churchyard that Dickens-lovers will recognise from
his description in the _Uncommercial Traveller_, the carved pulpit and
quaint vestry and several fine old monuments, and, as I mentioned
before, part of the old Roman wall.
If you have no passion for discovering bits of ancient walls, there are
other more beautiful things near the bottom of Seething Lane. One of
them is very new, so new that when I saw it all the scaffolding had not
been removed from the buildings at its base--I mean the great tower of
the Port of London Authority. I hear that Sir Joseph E. Broodbank has
just written a fascinating _History of the Port of London_, that will
waken everyone who has three guineas to spare to the interest of
London’s immense docks and the organisation that has power over seventy
miles of the Thames. The beautiful tower of the new buildings, with its
fine groups of statuary, is worth a special pilgrimage to see. It is not
very far from Trinity House, that unique institution that, as Mr.
Cunningham says, has for its object “the increase and encouragement of
navigation, the regulation of lighthouses and sea marks, and the general
management of matters not immediately connected with the Admiralty.”
The Guild of Trinity House was founded in 1529 by Sir Thomas Spert,
Henry VIII.’s Controller of the Navy and commander of the magnificent
four-master, the _Harry Grace de Dieu_, which took the King to Calais on
his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. You can see exactly what it
looked like in the picture of Henry VIII.’s embarkation at Dover that
hangs in Hampton Court Palace.
One of the delusions I have had when hastening through the streets of
London filled with excitement at the thought of seeing some ancient
place associated with more colourful days than our own, was caused by
Mr. Wagner’s enticing account of the Crooked Billet in his fascinating
book on old London inns.
Alas, the Crooked Billet, at the eastern extremity of Tower Hill, has
nothing left of its former magnificence. The panelled walls and carved
chimney-pieces have been ruthlessly taken away,--some say to that bourne
overseas whither pass so many treasures of the Old World it affects to
despise. There is nothing left but the sordid dirty rooms of slum
tenements, with here and there the remains of a fine ceiling and a few
wall cupboards. The old building that was once a royal palace, and since
the days of Henry VIII. has been a lordly inn, has fallen into the state
of drab degradation that is the forerunner of the pick and shovel of the
_démolisseur_. Only the rich façade remains to remind the passer-by of
its vanished glories!
THE TOWER
Having wandered so long in its neighbourhood, let me hurriedly make the
shamefaced confession that I share Richard III.’s opinion about the
Tower and that I have never seen it. I have skirted it, I have gazed
into its asphalted moat, I have looked with awe on its battlemented
towers,--but I have never crossed the drawbridge.
[Illustration: THE TOWER OF LONDON]
To me it is the storehouse of mistakes--a place redolent with the memory
of bygone blunders--where the great men of the nation, like Sir Thomas
More, Archbishop Cranmer and Sir Walter Raleigh, and innocent,
beautiful things like the little Princes and Lady Jane Grey, were done
to death. There must surely be left something of Lady Jane’s agony when
she saw the headless body of her young husband carried past her on the
morning when she knew that she too was to die--something of the
sickening sense of injustice that great men like Raleigh and More must
have felt as their doom approached.
Of course, for less squeamish people there is an unending interest in
the historical and architectural features of the Tower. It is open every
week-day from ten to six in summer and ten to five in winter, and on
Saturdays the fees to the White Tower and the Jewel House are not
necessary. It is staffed by a constable, a lieutenant, a resident
governor and about 100 yeomen warders called Beefeaters, all of which
information, as well as the fact that the best way to reach it is from
Mark Lane station on the Underground, is writ large in Mr. Muirhead’s
excellent Blue Book on London.
Writ more small are tales that almost make me want to go and see for
myself the place where Charles d’Orleans, the royal French poet, who
wrote such haunting songs as “Dieu qu’il la fait bon regarder,” was held
a prisoner for fifteen long years. Other things it seems besides murders
happened in the Tower,--Henry the Eighth made two of his marriages here,
James the First lived here for a time (a fact that does not mitigate my
distaste for the Tower), and
[Illustration: TRAITOR’S GATE, TOWER OF LONDON
North or Inside View of Traitor’s Gate being the principal entrance of
the Tower of London from the River and through which stole prisoners of
rank and dignity were formerly conveyed to the Tower]
Charles the Second slept here the night before his coronation in 1661.
No monarch has done that since his day. Then, if guide-books may be
believed, there are hundreds of things in the armouries and weapon room
and small-arms room, the cloak on which Wolfe died in far-off Quebec, a
Grinling Gibbons carved head of Charles the Second, and armour and
weapons of every period.
Most of these historic places are sepulchres of bygone crimes, but the
Tower has known tragedy within its walls in these latter hideous years,
for nearly a score of our enemies were put to death there in the Great
War.
One or two of them were brave men, serving their country even as we
served ours; one likes to think that they were treated as such. The
story of Carl Lody has already been published, but I give it again
because it redeems some of the Tower’s tragic history.
I believe he had asked to be allowed to testify to the fair and just
treatment he had received, and when the last moment came the German said
to the Provost-Marshal: “I suppose you wouldn’t care to shake hands with
a spy?” The Englishman replied without hesitation, “I am proud to shake
hands with a brave man.”