ROUND ABOUT HOLBORN
“Yet London lacks not poetry,
She has her voices, whose deep tones
Are human laughter and human moans,
And all her beauty, all her glory,
Spring from or blend with man’s strange story.”
MAXWELL GRAY.
Take that chilly-sounding gateway, the Marble Arch, as a _point de
départ_ for a walk some idle afternoon, and I will show you what I found
the day I turned my back on it. It looks as bored by its inactivity as
Théophile Gautier’s Obélisque; perhaps it regrets the days when it faced
Buckingham Palace and feels it came down in the world when it was moved
to its present position some seventy years ago.
And that, too, is another indignity. Very many people ask why the Marble
Arch is stranded all by itself, like a rock from which the flood has
receded. The reason is as simple as most utilitarian things. The press
of traffic at the Marble Arch was so great that the space had to be
widened. It would have been too costly a matter to move the Marble Arch
back, so the park railings were moved and the Arch left high and dry, no
longer a gateway but only an object of interest.
I grant you that at first sight the Oxford Street and Holborn of to-day
have a blatantly modern look. There is little to remind one in the
kaleidoscopic vista of badly-dressed shop windows, gaudy buildings and
dingy offices, that Roman soldiers once tramped along this very road. It
took about a thousand years from the time that Agricola recalled his
Roman legions from England for the discomfort of the Holborn mudholes to
become unendurable, and for Henry V. to follow in 1417 the earlier
example of his French _confrère_ Philippe Auguste and cause the king’s
highway to be paved at his expense. The paving does not seem to have
been kept in good repair, for the garrulous Pepys says, 250 years later,
that the king’s coach was overturned in Holborn.
Travellers along Holborn, at the other end of the social scale, shared
in the royal benefit, for from 1196 to 1783 condemned criminals were
brought in carts from Newgate Prison to Tyburn Tree. Everyone has heard
of the famous gallows, but few people know that the exact spot where it
stood is marked to-day by a triangular stone set in the roadway, almost
opposite the beginning of the Edgware Road. A bronze plate on the
railings of the Park, on the other side of the road, commemorates the
fact, but if both stone and plate elude you, the friendly policeman who
is always on duty here will point them out.
From the Marble Arch to Holborn there is nothing to look at but
interminable shops till you come to the quaint old houses of Staple
Inn, as disdainfully out of keeping with their vulgar surroundings as an
orchid would be in an onion bed.
STAPLE INN
“I went astray in Holborn through an arched entrance,
over which was Staple Inn.”--HAWTHORNE.
Staple Inn is one of the most delicious things in London. Out of the
roar and hurry of Holborn you pass through the old Jacobean gateway with
the façade of oaken beams into the tranquil old-world court where the
noise suddenly dies away, and you can sit peacefully under the shade of
the plane-trees, as far removed from the bustle and racket without the
gate as if you had been suddenly transported a hundred miles on a
magician’s carpet. From a kindly porter may be bought, for one shilling
and sixpence, a delightful little history of this “fayrest Inne of
Chancerie,” where Johnson lived after finishing his _Rasselas_ in a week
to pay for the expenses of his mother’s funeral.
When you are tired of sitting quietly in this “veriest home of peace,”
go across the courtyard to the hall of the Inn and look at the carved
oaken roof and the grotesque ornaments, at the Grinling Gibbons
clock-case and the old stained glass windows, and before you leave
Staple Inn go through the second court and look at the old sunk garden
that is so unconcernedly green in the very heart of this big city. At
the back of the Patent Offices that make the southern boundary of
Staple Inn is Took’s Court--the Cook’s Court where Mr. Snagsby of _Bleak
House_ lived--once a place of those curious semi-prisons called
sponging-houses that were like debtors’ boarding-houses with the bailiff
for the landlord.
[Illustration: Staple Inn]
Took’s Court is a sordid enough place now, and some of it may soon
disappear, but it has a vicarious interest because Sheridan spent some
of the last years of his life in a sponging-house here.
GRAY’S INN
“Whene’er through Gray’s Inn porch I stray
I meet a spirit by the way;
I roam beneath the ancient trees,
And talk with him of mysteries;
He tells me truly what I am--
I walk with mighty Verulam.”
Gray’s Inn, another of the gracious, leisurely London corners that few
of London’s visitors discover, lies to the north of Holborn in the
Gray’s Inn Road. Any of the buses along Holborn will take you there, and
it is only a few minutes’ walk behind Chancery Lane Station on the
Central London Railway. You could once wander in the old gardens more
freely than in the other Inns, and if you slipped his _Essays_ in your
pocket could read what Sir Francis Bacon wrote about gardens in the very
garden that he made. Bacon was once Treasurer of Gray’s Inn and he
interested himself in the laying out of “the purest of human pleasures”
that he found there. Gray’s Inn Gardens used to be as fashionable a
place for a walk as Hyde Park is to-day. Pepys the Chatterer related the
doings of numberless people when he wrote: “When church was done my wife
and I walked to Gray’s Inn to observe fashions of the ladies, because of
my wife’s making some clothes.” Pepys must have gone there very often,
for two months later the frivolous Secretary wrote: “I was very well
pleased with the sight of a fine lady that I have often seen walk in
Gray’s Inn Walks.”
Times have changed and fine ladies are no longer allowed to walk in
Gray’s Inn Gardens, unless indeed they have relations among the benchers
who are complaisant in the matter of keys.
[Illustration: GRAY’S INN HALL]
The Hall is the oldest and most beautiful thing in Gray’s Inn. Queen
Elizabeth once came to a banquet here, and it was here that the _Comedy
of Errors_ was first performed. The old Inn has had many famous names
among its members, the Sydneys, Cecils, Bacons, etc., and a man no less
distinguished in another circle, Jacob Tonson, had his first bookshop
just inside Gray’s Inn Gate.
The old bookseller and publisher’s name has a very modern interest, even
for the London visitor who never turns the pages of Pope or Walpole,
because his house at Barn Elms is now used as the Ranelagh Club. The
people who go out to Ranelagh of a fine afternoon to drink tea and watch
the polo, are following the footsteps of the members of the famous
Kit-Cat Club founded in 1700, it is popularly supposed as an outcome of
the dinners Tonson offered to his patrons. The club, of which Tonson
became secretary, consisted of thirty-nine members--authors, wits and
noblemen--their portraits hang in the halls of the Ranelagh Club to-day.
Tonson published for Addison and Pope, and was the first man to print
cheap editions of Shakespeare. He had innumerable friends, and his
portrait shows him as a genial creature who must have merited the
description of him, written in 1714, that I found in _Old and New
London_:
“While in your early days of reputation,
You for blue garters had not such a passion;
While yet you did not live, as now your trade is,
To drink with noble lords and toast their ladies,
Thou, Jacob Tonson, were to my conceiving,
The cheerfullest, best, honest fellow living.”
Tonson moved from the Gray’s Inn Gateway in 1712 to his more celebrated
bookshop in the Strand that stood on part of the present site of
Somerset House. I hear that another old landmark connected with this
prince of publishers is doomed to disappear, for the Upper Flask, in
Heath Street, Hampstead, that was known in Tonson’s day as the “Upper
Bowling Green House,” used as the summer quarters of the Kit-Cat Club,
may have to give way to the new buildings of some philanthropic
institution.
Gray’s Inn takes its name from the Grays of Wilton. There is a document
registering the transferring in 1505 of the “Manor of Portpoole,
otherwise called Gray’s Inn” from Edmund Lord Gray of Wilton to a Mr.
Denny. The public, alas, are never admitted to the Gardens, but any
visitor may see the Hall on a week-day between the hours of 10 and
12.15.
HATTON GARDEN
“My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn,
I saw good strawberries in your garden there.”
_Richard III._
Staple Inn and Gray’s Inn are not the only old-world souvenirs to be
found in prosaic Holborn. A little further east, on the left-hand side
as one strolls towards the City, lies another sordid street whose name
is redolent of Elizabethan romance.
Hatton Garden, named after the queen’s handsome chancellor and now the
haunt of the diamond and pearl merchant, and also of organgrinders and
ice-cream vendors, is built on the site of the gardens of Ely Palace,
the town house of the Bishops of Ely whose story is noted on another
page. Round the corner is Ely Place, the most astonishing little square
in London.
If you pass this spot on the stroke of the hour after ten o’clock on a
summer’s evening, you may well rub your eyes and wonder if time has been
rolled back and you are suddenly living in the London of two centuries
ago. For the iron gates of the little place are closed, and out of the
tiny porter’s lodge in the middle comes an important person with a
gold-laced hat, who solemnly makes the tour of the square, crying five
or six times, “Past ten o’clock and all’s well!”
The crying of the hours by the night watchman is not the only custom of
this old-world corner, so carefully guarded by the commissioners in
whose hands the rights of Ely Place are vested. The little square, now
given over to law offices and business premises, was once a “sanctuary,”
a place where law-breakers could take refuge and where the civil
authorities had no right of arrest. To this day the caretakers who form
the bulk of the resident population of Ely Place are inordinately proud
of the fact that they are independent of police protection, having their
own standing army of three porters, who take eight-hour turns in
guarding the tranquillity of their self-contained domain.
They even have a public-house of their very own, for in the tiny passage
that connects Ely Place with Hatton Garden is a dim little inn of
dubious antiquity, that takes its name of the “Mitre” from the carved
stone mitre set in the façade which once formed part of the old palace
of the bishops of Ely. The innkeeper is very proud of the remains of a
Methuselah of a cherry-tree now incorporated in one corner of the house.
You can see the whitewashed remains of the tree that may have shaded
good Queen Bess if you peer through the left-hand corner window.
At ten of the clock the iron gate leading into Hatton Garden is duly
fastened, and the “Mitre” is closed to the outside world.
I have kept the best and most amazing of the treasures of Ely Place
until the last.
Walk down the left-hand side of the square to the far corner, and you
will find your way into one of the most beautiful things in London,--a
thirteenth century chapel practically intact. It is so beautiful that if
it were necessary to pay a high entrance fee or write for cards of
admission, it would probably be the Mecca of every artist and
antiquarian. But since it is in London, prodigal of such treasures, and
anyone may walk in and look at its beauty undisturbed at any hour, St.
Etheldreda’s Chapel is only known to a few people.
It was built in the last decade of the thirteenth century by a certain
Bishop de Luda, as the chapel for Ely House, the town residence of the
bishops of Ely.
John of Gaunt took refuge here and must have heard mass within these
very walls. Shakespeare reminds us, in _Richard II._, of John of Gaunt’s
death in Ely House, and it was in these cloisters that Henry VIII. first
met with Cranmer. Queen Elizabeth’s chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton,
worshipped here till his unlucky tenancy of Ely House was ended by his
death in 1591, and so did his nephew’s imperious widow, the famous Lady
Hatton who married and flouted Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer and
rival of Bacon for her hand.
It was at “Elie House in Holborne” in the reign of James I. that the
last mystery play was represented in England, before the Spanish
Ambassador Gondemar, who was a next-door neighbour to Ely Palace. The
later history of the chapel may be briefly told. When the bishops
finally sold the property to the Crown in 1772 and betook themselves to
Dover Street, it was bought by an architect who preserved the chapel for
the use of the residents of the houses he built in Ely Place. Afterwards
it passed through several hands, being finally bought by the Fathers of
Charity from the Welsh Episcopalians in 1871. When the work of
restoration was finished, St. Etheldreda’s, the only pre-Reformation
place of worship restored to the Roman Catholic Church, was reopened on
St. Etheldreda’s Day, the 23rd of June, 1876.
ST. SEPULCHRE’S
“Here lies one conquered that hath conquered kings.”
Epitaph to Capt. John Smith, 1631.
A little further along Holborn, in Giltspur Street, you come to the old
Church of St. Sepulchre, where we meet again the Tyburn prisoners.
Everybody who has heard the _Beggar’s Opera_ (and who has not?) will
remember the picture Polly Peachum draws of Macheath on the road to
Tyburn: “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely
than the nosegay in his hand.” It was at St. Sepulchre’s that the
amorous highwayman would have got his nosegay, on the steps of the
church, for an old benefactor had left money to provide flowers for
every criminal going to be hanged. It was St. Sepulchre’s bell that
tolled the hour of their hanging, and another legacy provided for an
admonition and prayers for the condemned.
There are more cheerful memories connected with the old church. There is
a mention of it in the twelfth century records. It was rebuilt in the
middle of the fifteenth century--the south-west porch still remains a
thing of beauty--and after it was nearly destroyed in the Great Fire in
1666, Wren practically rebuilt the church with its four weathercocks,
whose differences of opinion about the wind gave rise to the saying of
Howell: “Unreasonable people are as hard to reconcile as the vanes of
St. Sepulchre’s tower.”
Two very noteworthy Elizabethans lie buried in St. Sepulchre’s, one a
scholar, the other a brilliant adventurer. The former was Roger Ascham,
the queen’s tutor, and the latter, Captain John Smith, “sometime
Governor of Virginia and Admiral of New England,” of Pocahontas fame.
Captain Smith’s adventures in America have rather overshadowed his
earlier exploits. Mr. Walter Thornbury, in his wonderful _Old and New
London_, tells that he fought in Hungary in 1602, and in three single
combats overcame three Turks and cut off their heads, for which and
other equally brave deeds Sigismund, Duke of Transylvania, gave him his
picture set in gold with a pension of three hundred ducats, and allowed
him to bear three Turks’ heads proper as his shield of arms. Pocahontas,
who you remember found the English climate too much for her, lies buried
in the parish church of St. George, Gravesend. In 1914 the Society of
Virginian Dames placed two stained glass windows to honour her memory.
STONE EFFIGIES
Not the least of the quaint things that the seeing eye may note in
London streets are the small statues and reliefs that give an odd
variety to some of the houses.
At No. 78, Newgate Street, five minutes’ walk from St. Sepulchre’s, and
on the same side of the road, is a bas-relief (probably an old
shop-sign) of a giant and a dwarf. These were William Evans and Sir
Jeffery Hudson, freaks whom it pleased Charles II. to keep about him at
the Court, as readers of _Peveril of the Peak_ will remember.
Just opposite is Panier Alley, so called from the basket-makers who once
lived here. On the left, cased in glass in order to preserve it from the
weather, is a somewhat battered effigy of a fat boy sitting upon a
panier, and, underneath, this inscription:
When ye have sought the citty round,
Yet still this is the highest ground.
August the 27th, 1688.
It was put up a few years after the Great Fire, that landmark in the
history of the City. I am told its claim is not strictly founded on
fact, and that part of Cannon Street is a few feet higher, but one would
like to believe the cherub.
Another bas-relief of a fat boy, at the corner of Cock Lane, even nearer
to St. Sepulchre’s, I mention in another chapter, and there is a quaint
old vintner’s sign of an infant Bacchus on a barrel, to be found at the
junction of Liverpool Street and Manchester Street, in the rather
depressing vicinity of King’s Cross. It is believed to be the only one
of its kind left in London.
[Illustration: LINCOLN’S INN]