CROYDON
Croydon Palace.--A Neglected Relic.--Queen Elizabeth's
Waiters.--John Whitgift.--Hospital, chapel, and school.--A Record of
Cricket.--Macaulay's tyrant.--Izaak Walton differs.--Queen
Elizabeth's Little Black Husband.--Croydon colliers.--John
Ruskin.--By the Parish Pump.--John Gilpin.
Croydon is best reached by rail. It cannot be called a convenient
centre, for one returns to centres, and Croydon has little that would
recall a traveller. But it is an easy point of departure either for the
country east, by Addington and the Kentish border, or south through
Sanderstead to Coulsdon and Chaldon, or west by Beddington and the
Carshalton trout ponds to Epsom. You may walk in any direction, except
perhaps north, where you will walk into North Croydon. But in Croydon
itself there are still two or three things worth seeing.
One is the Archbishop's Palace. An Archbishop's Palace is the very last
building which would naturally associate itself with the Croydon tram
lines and Croydon up-to-dateness, and it is the last building with which
Croydon appears to wish to associate itself. The Palace stands apart
from the bustle of the place, unhonoured, unhappy and ignored. Since the
last Archbishop left it in the reign of George II it has served its turn
as business premises for a bleacher and a calico-printer; it has been a
wash-house, and is now a girls' school. One thing it has never been--of
sufficient interest to Croydon to be rescued from sacrilege and neglect,
and to take the place which is its due among historic national
possessions. Perhaps one should be thankful that the palace of Cranmer,
Whitgift and Laud is to-day in no rougher hands than the gentle
Sisterhood of a children's day-school.
If Croydon Palace were rightly restored, how fine a relic it might be!
The great banqueting-hall, with its noble roof of Spanish chestnut,
which has even survived the steam and chemistry of a bleacher's vats;
the long, panelled gallery where tradition has set Queen Elizabeth
dancing; the guard chamber, perhaps built by Archbishop Arundell, who
burnt the Lollards; the chapel with its oak stalls, its poppy-head
carvings, and the gallery added by the archbishop who stood by Charles
the First on the scaffold; if the oak were cleaned and the paint taken
from the panels, and if under the mellow brick walls there were set out
lawns and flowers; then Croydon might justly boast of its tram lines,
its admirable sanitation, and its new Town Hall. It would possess
something else.
When Queen Elizabeth lay at Croydon Palace, it was not an easy matter to
find room for her train of courtiers. She came in July, 1573, to visit
Archbishop Parker, and wished to come again in the following May, with a
larger train than before. The steward, entrusted with the task of
finding more room where there had never been enough, was in despair, and
made out his list of lodgings for the archbishop, or, perhaps, the
Queen's chamberlain, to see. The Lord Treasurer was to be "wher he was";
the Lord Admiral "at y^e nether end of the great chamber"; the "maydes
of honnor wher they wer"; the "La Stafforde wher she was"; the
"gentylmen husshers ther olde" lodging; and so on with a very long list.
But the letter ends in a hopeless puzzle:--
"For the Quen's Wayghters, I cannot as yet fynde anye convenyent
romes to place them in, but I will doo the best y^t I can to place
them elsewher, but yf y^t please you S^r y^t I doo remove them. The
Gromes of the Privye Chamber nor Mr. Drewrye have no other waye to
ther chambers but to pas thorowe that waye agayne that my Lady of
Oxford should come. I cannot then tell wher to place Mr. Hatton; and
for La Carewe here is no place with a chymeney for her, but that she
must ley abrode by Mrs. Aparry and the rest of y^e Prvy Chambers.
For Mrs. Shelton here is no romes with chymeneys; I shall stage one
chamber without for her. Here is as mutche as I have any wayes able
to doo in this house."
Of the great archbishops few, strangely enough, have left memorials
behind them at Croydon. Whitgift, Grindal, and Sheldon have their
monuments in the church; of the others, Juxon added some carving to the
Palace Chapel. Whitgift was the great Croydon archbishop, and did for
Croydon what Abbot did for Guildford. He founded a hospital, and
endowed a school.
[Illustration: _Whitgift's Hospital, Croydon._]
Whitgift's Hospital stands to-day almost as its founder left it. His
initials, I.W., worked in patterned brick into a gable, and the motto he
chose for the doorway, "Qui dat pauperi nunquam indigebit," face a
roaring thoroughfare and flaring shops, but inside the oak doors little
can have changed. Weatherbeaten red-brick, mullioned windows looking out
over flowers and shaven lawns, tiled roofs and tall chimneys make up a
picture of solid goodness which fits well with the archbishop's memory.
The chapel stands open, a dark, simple little place. The oak benches are
the same on which the first pensioners sat, and down upon them look
curious faded pictures, dingy in black and gold. One is a fine portrait
of the founder at his writing-table, with his seal, his sandbox, a bell,
quill pens and a compass (or is it a watch?). Before him lies an open
Latin Bible, and he points to his favourite text--_Cast thy bread upon
the waters_. On another wall hangs a framed poem in manuscript, some
forty or fifty lines of extravagance in which the archbishop is compared
in turn to a straight sound cedar, a lost gem, a pearl, and a "fairest
knotlesse Plant," whose death forces the poet to
"Wish, that with a Sea of teares, my Verse
Could make an Island of thy honour'd Herse."
Another poet writes a prodigious Latin elegy "containing the briefest
summary of the miseries and calamities of the human race." A painter
adds a picture of Death digging a grave.
Whitgift's School is an old foundation in a modern building, and has
added a record to cricket history. Mr. V.F.S. Crawford, one of the
hardest hitters of his day, was a Whitgift boy, and has done remarkable
batting as a schoolboy and since. But his most remarkable innings was
played at Cane Hill, when he scored 180 out of 215 made while he was in,
and reached his first 100 in nineteen minutes.
That the school buildings should be modern is inevitable, for the school
outgrew itself forty years ago. But the school house which Whitgift
built was pulled down in consequence--an act which doubtless sits
lightly enough on Croydon's conscience. Four years ago the Hospital
nearly followed the school, the argument being that there was
insufficient room for the tram-lines.
Croydon church, like nothing else in the town, became modern by
accident. It was burnt down in 1867, and Sir Gilbert Scott rebuilt it
into the finest church, perhaps, in the county, next to St. Mary's,
Southwark. In the fire the tombs of the archbishops almost disappeared.
Grindal's is no longer to be seen, though possibly some tumbled stones
collected into odd corners may be part of it. Sheldon's is a pile of
fragments, heaped together behind a railing, charred and broken, hideous
with the sculptured skulls, bones, worms, and winged hour-glasses with
which our ancestors grimly decked their graves. Whitgift's monument has
been restored and is a striking example of rich and intricate
decoration, even if the pomp and colour of it are too garish for a tomb.
One looks at the stern, quiet features of his effigy and wonders what
was the truth about the man. Was he what Macaulay has called him--"a
narrow-minded, mean, and tyrannical priest, who gained power by
servility and adulation, and employed it in persecuting those who agreed
with Calvin about Church Government, and those who differed from Calvin
touching the doctrine of Reprobation." Could he ever have been rightly
described--Macaulay so describes the Master of Trinity who was to be
Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of Canterbury--as "in a chrysalis
state, putting off the worm and putting on the dragon-fly, a kind of
intermediate grub between sycophant and oppressor"? Perhaps Macaulay was
naturally unlikely to judge him well. A portrait drawn by one who lived
nearer his day is Izaak Walton--another, perhaps a gentler, I.W.:--
"He built a large Alms-house near to his own Palace at Croydon in
Surrey, and endowed it with maintenance for a Master and
twenty-eight poor men and women; which he visited so often that he
knew their names and dispositions; and was so truly humble, that he
called them Brothers and Sisters; and whensoever the Queen descended
to that lowliness to dine with him at his Palace in Lambeth,--which
was very often,--he would usually the next day show the like
lowliness to his poor Brothers and Sisters at Croydon, and dine with
them at his Hospital; at which time, you may believe there was joy
at the table."
Walton thought him a very tactful prelate. He managed Queen Elizabeth
admirably, and "by justifiable sacred insinuations, such as St. Paul to
Agrippa--'Agrippa, believest thou? I know thou believest,' he wrought
himself into so great a degree of favour with her, as, by his pious use
of it, hath got both of them a great degree of fame in this world, and
of glory in that into which they are now both entered." Queen Elizabeth
was devoted to him, and nicknamed him "her little black husband."
Without a licence from her little black husband she would not touch
flesh in Lent.
The archbishops left Croydon, in 1758, when Archbishop Hutton died. The
line of archbishop tenants of the Palace had been broken in the days of
the Commonwealth, when Sir William Brereton, one of the Parliamentary
Major-Generals, lived there. He was a soldier of conviction, and was
nearly torn in pieces by the mob at Chester, "for ordering a drum to be
beat for the parliament." Croydon's historian, Steinman, quotes from a
pamphlet of Cavalier days, _The Mystery of the Old Cause briefly
unfolded_, a quaint appreciation of him. He was "a notable man at a
thanksgiving dinner, having terrible long teeth, and a prodigious
stomach, to turn the archbishop's palace at Croydon into a kitchen, also
to swallow up that palace and lands at a morsel." Brereton, as a reward
for his military services, had been given several sequestrated
properties, a chief forestership, and a seneschalship.
Four hundred years ago, Croydon was the centre of a great Surrey
industry. The Croydon colliers were proverbial. They supplied London
with coal, that is, charcoal, before the days of "sea-coal," the coal
which blackens London smoke to-day. Then it reached London by sea. One
Grimes, or Grimme, the greatest of the Croydon colliers, who lived in
the reign of Edward VI, was actually sued by an archbishop for creating
a nuisance with his smoke. The collier won. He was sufficiently
celebrated to become the hero of two sixteenth-century plays, one of
which bears his name, _Grim, the Collier of Croydon_. To be "as black as
a Croydon collier," was to be as black as a sweep; and "a right Croydon
sanguine" was a deep red-brown.
Once Croydon, always Croydon. The first railway line built in the
country and sanctioned by Parliament ran from Croydon to Wandsworth. It
was part of an original scheme proposed in 1799 for linking up London
with Portsmouth by an iron railroad running through Croydon, Reigate,
and Arundel. But it was thought best to begin with the part which ran
from Croydon to Wandsworth, and perhaps it was as well that the scheme
went no further, for it cost L35,000, and was a complete failure. The
shareholders lost every penny. One feels it ought to have succeeded. The
carriages or trucks were drawn by horses, and the wheels ran along
grooved iron rails. Anybody who had a cart which fitted might put it on
the rails and let his horse pull it along, if he paid the tolls, which
were not heavy. However, its life was short. The Croydon canal, opened
in 1809, robbed it of much of its heavy goods traffic, and the London
and Brighton railway demolished it altogether. This is how "Felix
Summerley" (his real name was Sir Henry Cole, and he liked a good walk
with a good dinner at the end of it) described the change in his
_Pleasure Excursions_ in 1846.
"A small single line, on which a miserable team of lean mules or
donkeys, some thirty years ago, might be seen crawling at the rate
of four miles in the hour, with small trucks of stone and lime
behind them.... Lean mules no longer crawl leisurely along the
little rails with trucks of stone, through Croydon, once perchance
during the day, but the whistle and rush of the locomotive, and the
whirr of the atmospheric, are now heard all day long."
Felix Summerley must be suspected of admiring the change. One who knew
old Croydon well, and admired its changes less, was John Ruskin, who had
relations there and visited them as a boy. Of one he writes in
_Praeterita_:--
"Of my father's ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother's more
than that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the Old King's
Head in Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and
I could paint her Simone Memmi's King's Head, for a sign."
Of his aunt at Croydon he has a pleasant memory:--
"My aunt lived in the little house still standing--or which was so
four months ago--the fashionablest in Market Street, having actually
two windows over the shop, in the second story; but I never troubled
myself about that superior part of the mansion, unless my father
happened to be making drawings in Indian ink, when I would sit
reverently by and watch; my chosen domains being, at all other
times, the shop, the bakehouse, and the stones round the spring of
crystal water at the back door (long since let down into the modern
sewer); and my chief companion, my aunt's dog, Towser, whom she had
taken pity on when he was a snappish, starved vagrant; and made a
brave and affectionate dog of: which was the kind of thing she did
for every living creature that came in her way, all her life long."
The Old King's Head and the fashionablest house in Market Street have
gone. So has much else that Ruskin would have recognised. To guess at
what his Croydon was like you may open Steinman's _History_ at a little
engraving of Whitgift's Hospital, from a drawing made at the
cross-roads. The Hospital stands as it is to-day. Opposite it, a square,
two-storied inn stretches over the road a fine carved bracket with a
bunch of grapes in iron, proclaiming that here are post horses to be had
from Nich: Jayne. A tall-hatted rustic pensively wheels a barrow in the
middle of the road opposite the inn; a group of villagers in stout
boots, smocks and stockings stands at the street corner; and, precisely
on the spot where to-day's tram-lines swing north and west, a
lazy-looking person in a straw hat, perhaps a sailor ashore, leans
against a post within a yard or two of an imposing parish pump.
Croydon tradition claims John Gilpin. He is said to have lived in a
farmhouse, which Croydon pulled down in 1897. It was known as Collier's
Water Farm, and stood near what is now Thornton Heath Railway Station.
Undoubtedly a John Gilpin lived there; but the author of the local
guide-book who asserts that he was Cowper's original refers all
inquirers to Dr. Brewer for corroboration; and that admirable sage
informs me that Gilpin was Mr. Beyer, an eminent linendraper of
Paternoster Row.