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"ABOUT MY FATHER'S BUSINESS."
(The Rights of Translation and of Reproduction are Reserved.)
"ABOUT MY FATHER'S BUSINESS"
Work Amidst the Sick, the Sad, and the Sorrowing
by
THOMAS ARCHER
Author of
"Strange Work," "A Fool's Paradise," "The Terrible Sights of London,"
"The Pauper, The Thief, and the Convict," etc., etc.
Henry S. King & Co.
1876
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE RARITY OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY 1
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE STRANGER 9
WITH THE CHILDREN'S CHILDREN 18
WITH THE STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND 34
WITH THOSE WHO ARE LEFT DESOLATE 44
WITH THEM THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS 53
WITH THEM WHO WERE READY TO PERISH 62
CASTING BREAD UPON THE WATERS 74
WITH THE FEEBLE AND FAINT-HEARTED 84
WITH THE LITTLE ONES 100
IN THE KINGDOM 112
WITH LOST LAMBS 125
WITH THE SICK 135
BLESSING THE LITTLE CHILDREN 144
WITH THEM THAT FAINT BY THE WAY 157
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH 165
WITH THE HALT AND THE LAME 178
WITH THEM WHO HAVE NOT WHERE TO LAY THEIR HEADS 190
TAKING IN STRANGERS 200
FEEDING THE MULTITUDE 209
GIVING REST TO THE WEARY 220
WITH THE POOR AND NEEDY 227
GIVING THE FEEBLE STRENGTH 248
HEALING THE SICK 261
WITH THE PRISONER 273
"ABOUT MY FATHER'S BUSINESS."
_THE RARITY OF CHRISTIAN CHARITY._
Would it not be useful to ask ourselves the question whether we are
forgetting the true meaning of "charity" in the constant endeavour to
take advantage of organized benevolent institutions, about the actual
working of which we concern ourselves very little? As the years go on,
and what we call civilisation advances, are we or are we not losing
sight of "our neighbour" in a long vista of vicarious benefactions,
bestowed through the medium of a subscription list, or casual
contributions at an "anniversary festival?"
At the speeches that are made on such occasions, when the banquet is
over, and the reading of the amounts subscribed is accompanied by the
cracking of nuts and a crescendo or decrescendo of applause, in
proportion to the liberality of the donors, we are so frequently
reminded of "the good Samaritan," that we begin to feel that we may
claim some kind of relationship to him; and may shake our heads with
solemn sorrow at the inexcusable conduct of the priest and the Levite.
It would be worth while, however, to ask ourselves whether we quite come
up to the mark of him who, finding the man wounded and helpless by the
wayside, dismounted that he might convey the sufferer to the nearest
inn; poured out oil for his wounds and wine for his cheer; left him with
money in hand for the supply of his immediate needs; and did not
scruple--with a robust and secure honesty--even to get into debt on his
behalf: since the crown of good-will would be the coming again to learn
of the patient's welfare. The debt was a pledge of the intention.
That was the Lord Christ's way of looking at charitable responsibility,
and at benevolent effort; and even granting that He illustrated the
answer to the question, "Who is my neighbour?" by an extreme case of
sudden distress, the longer we look at the peculiar needs of the man who
was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, the more perhaps we shall be
convinced that there are greater, far greater evils, and more terrible
accidents, than to fall among thieves, who temporarily rob, strip, and
disable their victim.
The present fashion of dealing with such an unfortunate traveller would
very much depend on which particular class of philanthropists the modern
Samaritan who found him by the road-side happened to belong to.
Of course, it would be a scandal to our Christianity to follow either
priest or Levite, although our cowardly sympathies might lie between the
two; so, in order to make all safe, we hit on a compromise, and,
according to our circumstances, try to find a medium line of conduct
between Samaritan and Levite, or Samaritan and priest. We are ashamed to
pass on without doing something, and so we call at the inn on our way,
and leave the twopence there, in case anybody else should think fit to
bring on the man who is lying, stunned and bleeding, in the roadway. Or
else, having contrived to rouse the poor fellow to a little effort, we
borrow an ass and take him back with us, to find some organised
institution for the relief of those who fall among thieves, where the
wine and oil are contracted for out of the funds. And there we leave
him, without remembering anything whatever about the twopenny
contribution which would represent our own share in the benefaction.
It is an awful thought, and one which it may be hoped will soon become
intolerable, that, with the mechanical perfection of means for relieving
the necessities of those who are afflicted, there seems to grow upon us
a deadly indifference to the very deepest need of all--that personal,
human sympathy, without which all our boast of benevolence is but as the
sounding of brass and the tinkling of a cymbal. Can it be possible that
we are approaching a condition when, refusing to have the poor and the
afflicted, the widow and the orphan always with us, we shut them away
out of our sight, leaving the whole duty of visiting them, of clothing
them, of giving them meat and drink, to be done by an official
committee; a charitable board, distributing doles, exactly calculated,
on a carefully devised scale, and divided to the ounce or the inch, in
supposed proportion to the individual need of each recipient? Will there
ever come a time when we shall persuade ourselves that we fulfil the law
of Christ by paying so much in the pound for a charity rate, and leaving
all the actual "relief" to be effected by an official department, or a
series of official committees?
The present aspect of charitable administration would be truly appalling
if this were likely to be the result, for there are far too many
evidences of that deadly indifference which will get rid of all real
personal responsibility by paying a subscription, and will pay
handsomely, too, at the same time smiling grimly, and half satirically,
at the recollection that there are a number of people who always have on
hand "cases," of whom they are anxious to rid themselves by placing them
in any institution that will receive them without payment.
Let it not be imagined that these latter words of mine are intended to
apply to those workers among the poor, who, with small means of their
own, cannot do much more than speak words of advice and comfort, and
give their earnest help to better the condition of sordid homes and of
neglected children. There are scores of true, tender-hearted women who,
spending much time amongst the sick and the afflicted, feel their hearts
sink within them as they see how much more might be done, if they had
but the wherewithal to appease the actual physical needs of those to
whom they try to come spiritually near.
If but the miracle so easy to others were first performed, and the five
thousand fed, then indeed might follow that still greater miracle, the
earnest listening of the once turbulent multitude to the words of the
Bread of Life.
But there are those who pursue what they regard as "charitable work" as
an excitement--an amusement--just as children are sometimes set to play
with Scripture conversation cards, and puzzles out of the Old Testament,
with a kind of feeling that the employment comes nearly to a religious
exercise. There is as much danger of these persons missing the true work
of charity as there would be in the employment of paid officials--indeed,
the latter would have one advantage; they would be less likely to be
imposed upon by those who to obtain some special advantage would cringe
and flatter.
The first great difficulty in visiting and temporarily relieving the
lower class of destitute poor, is to disabuse their minds of an
inveterate notion that the benevolent visitor and distributor is paid by
some occult society, of which the recipients of bounty know nothing, and
for which they care very little. Unfortunately, the sharp determined
amateur visitor, who "does a district" as other people with leisure do a
flower show or a morning concert----but, alas! these very words of mine
show how common is that lack of true charity of which I designed to
speak. Who am I that I should sum up the disposition and the heart of my
brother or my sister? Only I would say that this suspicion on the part
of the ignorant poor, which is so often complained of--the notion that
their interviewers are paid for the work of charity--can only yield to
the conviction that the work itself is undertaken with warm living human
sympathy. Before the true relief shall come to any man, it must come by
faith. "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness," and _in_
righteousness also.
The two tendencies that are driving us away from charity to a kind of
selfish economy, are the habit of "relieving our overcharged
susceptibilities by secreting a guinea," and thinking we have thereby
fulfilled the claims of religion and humanity, and the practice of going
about seeking where we may find candidates for other people's guineas,
and so becoming a kind of charitable detectives, with an eye to
reputation and advancement in the force.
We are forgetting that heartfelt sympathy, that clasp of the hand and
beam of the eye which will make even a cup of cold water a benefaction,
if we have no more to give, or if the need goes no further than a
refreshing draught, that shall be turned from water into wine by the
power of loving fellowship. Or we may be saying, "Be ye clothed, and be
ye fed," trusting to some other hand to do the necessary work, without
having ourselves first wrought for the means of taking our part in it,
either by a deep personal interest in the relieving institution or in
the destitute recipient.
"Yet one thing thou lackest,"--even though out of thy great possessions
a large proportion is given to the poor; "follow thou me." "Go about
doing good," do not think to have fulfilled the law without love--that
which you call charity; the mere _giving_--is but to offer a stone when
bread is required of you, unless it be done with love in your
heart--personal, human, and therefore Divine love. "If ye have not been
faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give you that which
is your own?" Use the benefits of institutions--even though you use them
only for others--as you would use your own property. Recommend only
cases that are known to you to be worthy and necessitous, and, should
the institution depend on voluntary support, let a contribution
accompany your "case," if you can any way afford it, as an act of
justice as well as of mercy.
Don't join in the traffic in votes, and never go begging for "proxies,"
in order to have an exchangeable stock on hand, that you may secure a
candidate for any particular institution. This kind of gambling is a
cancer that is eating the heart out of genuine, pure, charitable effort,
and is making way for the cold impersonal system of distribution, which
is now being advocated by those who would make the relief of human
wretchedness and distress a mechanical organisation without the soul of
love. At the same time, let us not forget that no charitable effort
which would be efficacious in affording relief to the widely-spread
distress by which we are surrounded, could be even so much as attempted
without associations established for the express purpose of relieving
particular forms of suffering. This, indeed, is the glory of our
country, that humanity is so strong among us as to lead us not only to
combine, but to emulate. The absolute concentration and centralization
of charitable effort would be a calamity. The breaking up of the best of
our institutions, which have grown from small beginnings in almsgiving
into wide and influential centres of benevolent effort, would be
destruction.
If anything that may be written hereafter concerning some representative
(large and small, but still truly representative) efforts to do the work
that Christianity demands as its first evidence of reality, should lead
to a deeper and wider personal interest in their behalf, it will be
matter for rejoicing. The larger the number of people who ask what is
being done, the greater will be the desire to continue the good work, or
to declare it. The attention that might in this way be directed to the
mode of affording relief would exercise so keen an influence in the
reformation of abuses, and the adoption of improvements, that all our
charities would soon become truly "public." With the more earnest
conviction of the duty of personal inquiry, and real sympathetic
interest in the individual well-being of our poorer brother or sister,
would come the satisfaction that we belonged to an association, or to a
chain of associations, which will afford to him or to her the very
relief which otherwise we should despair of securing.
I purpose in another chapter to ask you to read the story of an
institution that was in its day wonderfully illustrative, and even now
serves to take us back for two centuries of history. Only yesterday I
was speaking to some of its inmates. One of them had nearly completed
her own century of life, most of them had seen far more than the
threescore years and ten which we call old age; but they come of a
wonderful race, the men of fire and steel; the women of silent
suffering--the old Huguenots of France.
_WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE STRANGER._
A hundred and eighty-seven years ago a French army invaded England and
effected a landing at various places on the coast. Smaller divisions of
that army had previously obtained a footing in some of the chief towns
of Great Britain; and for about fifty years afterwards other contingents
arrived at intervals to find the compatriots settled among the people,
who had easily yielded to their address and courage, and by that time
were apparently contented to regard them as being permanently
established in the districts of which they had taken possession. The
strange part of the story is, that for a large part of this time England
was successfully engaged in war with the country of the invaders, and
not only with that country, but with a discarded prince of its own, who,
having received assistance from France, strove to regain the throne
which he had abdicated by raising civil war in Ireland. Then was to be
seen a marvellous thing. A detachment of the French army of occupation
in England went with King William to the Boyne, and when the mercenaries
who were at the back of James in his miserable enterprise came forth to
fight, they beheld the swords of their countrymen flash in their faces,
and heard a well-known terrible cry, as a band of veteran warriors cut
through their ranks, fighting as they had been taught to fight in the
Cevennes and amidst the valleys and passes of Languedoc. For the army
that invaded England in 1686, and for four or five years afterwards, was
the army of the French Huguenots, against whom the dragoons of Louis
XIV. and the emissaries of Pope and priests had been let loose after the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Four hundred thousand French Protestants had left their country during
the twenty years previous to the revocation of that pact, which had been
renewed after the siege of Rochelle, and though the attempt to escape
from the country was made punishable by the confiscation of property and
perpetual imprisonment in the galleys, six hundred thousand persons
contrived to get out of France, and found asylums in Flanders,
Switzerland, Holland, Germany, and England, after the persecutions were
resumed.
Comparatively few of the men who came in the second emigration had
fought for the religion that they professed. They had learned to endure
all things, and with undaunted courage many of them had suffered the
loss of their worldly goods, the burning of their houses, hunger,
poverty, and the imprisonment of their wives and daughters in distant
fortresses, because they would not forswear their faith. Hundreds of
their companions were at the galleys, hundreds more had been tortured,
mutilated, burned, broken on the wheel. Women as well as men endured
almost in silence the fierce brutalities of a debased soldiery, directed
by priests and fanatics, who had, as it were, made themselves drunk with
blood, and seemed to revel in cruelty. With a resolution that nothing
seemed able to abate, pastors like Claude Brousson went from district to
district, living they knew not how, half famished, in perpetual danger,
and with little expectation of ultimately escaping the stake or the
rack. Nay, they refused to leave the country, while in the woods and
wildernesses of the Gard great congregations of their brethren awaited
their coming, that they might hold services in caves and "in the
desert," as they called that wild country of the Cevennes and of Lozére.
These men were non-resistants. They met with unflinching courage, but
without arms. Those of them who remained in France stayed to see the
persecutions redoubled in the attempt to exterminate the reformed faith.
They were the truest vindicators of the religion that they professed. Up
to the time of the siege of Rochelle, and afterwards, Protestantism was
represented by a defensive sword, but these men discarded the weapons of
carnal warfare. Only some years later, when the persecutors (rioting in
the very insanity of wrath because their declaration that Protestantism
was abolished was falsified by constant revivals of the old Huguenot
worship) directed utter extermination of the Vaudois, did the grandeur
of the non-resisting principle give way before the desperation of men
who came to the conclusion that, if they were to die, they might as well
die fighting.
It must be remembered that some of them knew well how to fight. Some of
their leaders--men of peace as they were, and men of an iron
determination, which was shown in the obstinacy with which they refused
to take up the sword--had come of stern warriors and were
_Frenchmen_--Norman Frenchmen--Protestant Norman Frenchmen. A rare
combination that;--cold hard steel and fire.
But it was not till some time afterwards that these men became the
leaders of the peasantry, the chestnut-fed mountaineers who came down
from their miserable huts and joined what had then become an organised
army of insurrection. Before this time arrived a strange aberration
seemed to move the people. The old simple non-resisting pastors had been
done to death by torture and execution, and the people met, it is true,
but often met amid the ruin of their homes, or in desert places, and as
sheep having no shepherd. Then a wild hysterical frenzy appeared among
them. Men, women, and even children claimed to be inspired, and at
length fanaticism leaped into retaliation. On a Sunday in July, 1702, a
wild mystic preacher, named Séguier went down with a band of about fifty
armed men to release the prisoners. They were confined in dungeons
beneath the house of one Chayla, a priest, who directed the
prosecutions, and invented the tortures which he caused to be inflicted
for the conversion of heretics. The Protestants broke open his door,
forced the prison, and ultimately set fire to the house, in attempting
to escape from which Chayla was recognised and killed. This was the
beginning of a series of retaliations by the tormented people, the
success of which changed the whole attitude of the Protestants of the
district. They had formerly endured in silence; now they were desperate
enough for insurrection. And the insurrection followed. Séguier was
captured, maimed, and burnt alive; but others took his place. The war of
the "Camisards" had commenced. Then it was that the leaders of the
Protestant army in the Cevennes arose;--Roland and Cavalier, and the men
who for a long time waged successful warfare against the royal forces,
till defeat came accompanied by a new _régime_.
The rumbling of the revolutionary earthquake was already shaking the
throne and the persecuting church. Voltaire, educated by the Jesuits,
and hating religion, was helping to deliver the martyrs of the
Protestant faith even before he began to "philosophise."
The struggle of the Camisards can only be said to have ceased when the
persecutions were nearly at an end, and France itself was tottering. But
what of that great Huguenot contingent which had invaded Britain, and
was growing in number year by year as the _émigrés_, leaving houses and
land, shops, warehouses, and factories, fled across the frontier, or got
down to the shore, and came over the sea in fishing-boats and other
small craft, in which they took passage under various disguises, or were
stowed away in the holds, or packed along with bales of merchandise, to
escape the vigilance of the emissaries who were set to watch for
escaping Protestants? It is a little significant that of these
non-combatant Protestants eleven regiments of soldiers were formed in
the English army; but the truth is that of the vast number of _émigrés_
who left France, some 30,000 were trained soldiers and sailors, and
doubtless a proportion of these came to England, though probably fewer
than those of their number who served in the Low Countries. At any rate,
in 1687, two years after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, there
arrived in England 15,500 refugees, some of whom brought with them very
considerable property, and most of them were men of education, or
skilled in the knowledge of the arts, or of those manufactures and
handicrafts which are the true wealth of a nation. At Norwich and
Canterbury they quickly formed communities which became prosperous, and
helped the prosperity of the districts, where they set up looms, and
dyeworks, and other additions to the local industries. In London they
formed two or three remarkable colonies, so that when Chamberlain wrote
his "Survey of London," there were about twenty French Protestant
churches, the greater number of which stood in Shoreditch, Hoxton, and
Spitalfields--in fact, above 13,000 emigrants had settled in or near the
metropolis. The one French Protestant church founded by Edward VI. was,
of course, inadequate to receive them, and their immediate necessities
were so great that a collection was made for their relief, and a sum of
60,000_l._ was by this means obtained in order to alleviate their
distress.
Among these _émigrés_ were many noblemen and gentlemen of distinction,
who, with their wives, were reduced to extreme poverty by the
confiscation of their property. These had learned no trade, but with
characteristic courage many of them set themselves to acquire the
knowledge of some craft by which they might earn their bread, while some
of their number learned of their wives to make pillow-lace, and so
continued to support themselves in decent comfort.
To those who knew the "old French folk," as they came to be called in
after years, when the later emigration had again increased the number of
the weavers' colony in Spitalfields, nothing was more remarkable than
the cheerfulness, one might almost say the gaiety, that distinguished
them. Reading the account given by French writers of the old Huguenots
in France, one might be disposed to regard them as stern and sour
sectaries, but that would be a very erroneous opinion. Perhaps the
sudden freedom to which they came, the rest of soul, and the opportunity
to endeavour to serve God with a quiet mind raised them to a tranquil
happiness which revived the national characteristic of light-heartedness;
but however it may have been, the real genuine old French weaver of
Spitalfields and Bethnal Green was a very courteous, merry, simple,
child-like gentleman. The houses in which these people lived, some of
which are still to be seen with their high-pitched roofs and long leaden
casements, were very different to the barely-furnished, squalid places
in which their descendants of to-day are to be found; and, indeed, the
Spitalfields weaver even of seventy years ago was usually a well-to-do
person; while in the old time he could take "Saint Monday" every week,
wear silver crown-pieces for buttons on his holiday coat, and put on
silk stockings on state occasions. This was in the days when French was
still spoken in many of the little parlours of houses that stood within
gardens gay with sweet-scented blooms of sweet-william, ten-weeks-stock,
and clove-pink. When there was still an embowered greenness in
"Bednall," and Hare Street Fields were within a stone's throw of
"Sinjun"--St. John, or rather St. Jean Street,--or of the little chapel
of "_La Patente_," in Brown's Lane, Spitalfields. Even in later times
than that, however, I can remember being set up to a table, and shown
how to draw on a slate, by an old gentleman with a face streaked like a
ruddy dried pippin. I was just old enough to make out that the tea-table
talk was in a strange tongue; but I can remember that there were
evidences of the refinements that the old refugees had brought with them
across the sea. Not only in their neat but spruce attire, in their
polite grace to women, in their easy, good-humoured play and prattle to
little children, in their cultivation of flowers, their liking for
birds, and their taste for music, but in a score of trifling objects
about their tidy rooms, where the click of the shuttle was heard from
morning to night, these old French folk vindicated their birth and
breeding. By tea-services of rare old china, rolls of real "point" lace,
a paste buckle, an antique ring, a fat, curiously-engraved watch, a few
gem-like buttons, delicately-coloured porcelain and chimney ornaments;
by books and manuscript music, or by flute and fiddle deftly handled in
the playing of some old French tune, these people expressed their
distinction without being aware of it. It has not even yet died out.
Unfortunately, many of their descendants--representatives of a miserably
paid, and now nearly superseded industry--have deteriorated by the
influences of continued poverty; and even so long ago as the evil
war-time of Napoleon I., many of the old families anglicised their names
in deference to British hatred of the French, but there are still a
large number of people in the eastern districts of London whose names,
faces, and figures alike proclaim their origin.
But we must go back once more to the time when the great collection was
made. It is at least gratifying to know that the £60,000 soon increased
to £200,000, and was afterwards called the "Royal Bounty," though
Royalty had nothing to do with it during that reign. In 1686-7 about
6000 persons were relieved from this fund, and in 1688 27,000 applicants
received assistance, while others had employment found for them, or were
relieved by more wealthy _émigrés_ who had retained or recovered some
part of their possessions. But there were still aged and sick people,
little children, widows, orphans, broken men, homeless women, and lonely
creatures who had become almost imbecile or insane through the cruelties
and privations that they had suffered. For these a refuge was necessary,
and at length--but not till 1708--an institution was founded in St.
Luke's, under the name of the French Hospital, but better known to the
"old folks" as the "Providence."
Of what it was and is I design to tell in another chapter.
_WITH THE CHILDREN'S CHILDREN._
That great invading French army of nobles, gentry, artists, traders,
handicraftsmen, of which some account has already been given, was added
to from time to time, even as lately as the Revolution, and the
restoration of the dynasty after the downfall of Napoleon, when a
strange reaction against the Protestants was commenced, partly as a
pretence for concealing political animosity. The department of the Gard
was once more the scene of horrible atrocities, against which Lord
Brougham invoked the aid of the English Parliament, and obtained the
help of Austrian bayonets to protect the people, who were being
murdered, tortured, or outraged, in defiance of feeble local
authorities. But by this time there was a new generation of the first
great Anglo-French colony in London. Spitalfields had grown to the
dimensions of a township. Bethnal had begun to lose its greenness. There
was, as there still is, a remarkable settlement about Soho. "Petty
France" was as well known as the exhibition of needlework in Leicester
Square, or Mrs. Salmon's wax figures in Fleet Street.
Those poor refugees who fled to escape from the horrors of Sainte
Guillotine, or the ruthless cruelties at Nismes, came to brethren many
of whom had never seen the glowing valleys and golden fields of
Languedoc, whence their forefathers escaped only with life and hands to
work. They had preserved their national characteristics; they attended
churches and chapels where the pastors still spoke their native tongue,
and where they had established schools for their children; but they had
settled down to a quiet, though a busy life, in the heart of the great
workshop of the world, and only a few of them--principally the gentry,
some of whom had regained a portion of their property--felt frequent or
urgent impulses to return. More than a hundred and twenty years had
elapsed since the "Royal Bounty" had been expended in the relief of the
27,000 _émigrés_ who yet were without any permanent refuge for the
destitute, the sick, the aged, and the insane among their number. This
was in 1688, and it was not till nearly twenty-eight years afterwards
that any regular institution was organized. The earlier refugees had
become aged or had died, after having obtained such temporary help as
could be afforded by subscriptions or the large benefactions of their
more wealthy fellow-countrymen. Still, the later emigrations increased
the number of applicants for permanent relief. At last, in 1718, a great
concourse of French refugees assembled in a chapel which formed a
special portion of a building only just completed, but which had already
received the dignity of forming the subject of a Royal charter granted
by His Majesty King George I. to his "right trusty and right
well-beloved" cousin, Henry de Massue, Marquis de Ruvigny, Earl of
Galloway, and a number of trusty and well-beloved gentlemen, all
naturalized refugees, who made the first governor and directors of the
"Hospital for Poor French Protestants and their descendants residing in
Great Britain;" otherwise known as the French Hospital, but soon to be
spoken of with simple pathetic brevity as "La Providence."
The idea of founding such a charity was due to a distinguished refugee
in Holland--no less a personage than M. de Gastigny, Master of the
Hounds to Prince William of Orange; a ruddy, jovial-looking gentleman
withal, whose portrait, should you go to see it, will set you wondering
whether he could ever have been classed among the "sour sectaries" to
whom it was the fashion to attribute a disregard of social pleasures. A
bequest of a thousand pounds sterling from the bluff keeper of the
kennels was to be divided into equal sums--£500 for the building, and
the interest of the remaining £500 to be spent on its maintenance.
Not a very adequate provision, truly, for any such purpose; but
sufficiently suggestive to set the more prosperous members of the great
Anglo-French colony to increase the amount. The astute Master of the
Hounds must surely have foreseen this result when he left this legacy to
the management of the trustees of the already existing relief fund,
still miscalled "the Royal Bounty." They exhibited that prudence in
money matters which is a French characteristic, and let the thousand
pounds accumulate for eight years, after which a general subscription
was invited from successful merchants and traders, while with a just
appreciation of the benefits which had been conferred by these good
citizens on the land of their adoption, some wealthy Englishmen added
their contributions to the general fund.
Thus it came about, that a piece of land was purchased in the Golden
Acre--a queer old half-countrified precinct of St. Giles,
Cripplegate--that a building was erected for the reception of eighty
poor persons, that a charter was granted, and that the new charitable
association was consecrated in the new chapel by Philippe Menard, the
minister of the French Church of St. James's and secretary of the
enterprise.
This was, indeed, something worth working for. The aged or afflicted
poor among the refugees were no longer mere mendicants living on
precarious alms. Out of their abundance the more prosperous gave
cheerfully. In 1736 another adjoining site was purchased, and another
side of the great open quadrangle of garden ground was built upon, so
that by 1760 the "Providence" numbered 230 inmates. This, however, was
its culminating point of usefulness. Religious persecution had
diminished, and at length may be said to have ceased altogether. Even as
early as 1720 only 5000 persons required relief from the "Bounty," so
that eventually the trustees were enabled to devote part of it to the
assistance of those who fled from the Revolution--many of whom were the
descendants of those who had been the persecutors of the Protestants.
The great industrial colony, prudent, temperate, and industrious, had
almost grown beyond its earlier needs--and all that it required was that
some adequate provision should be made for infirm or aged men and women,
who being widowed or unmarried, and without means of support, required a
refuge in which they might peacefully end their days. The same causes
which had diminished the number of applicants had also reduced the
amount of current subscriptions, so that some portion of the building
was removed, as being no longer necessary, and in order to secure a
sufficient endowment an Act of Parliament was obtained, empowering the
directors to let their land on building leases. By that time the
neighbourhood was known not as "the Golden Acre," but as St. Luke's, and
on the ground once purchased by the Marquis de Ruvigny and his trusty
and well-beloved companions, grew Radnor Street, Galway Street, Gastigny
Place, and part of Bath Street, while the number of inmates was reduced
to sixty--that is to say, about twenty men and forty women, all of whom
were to be above sixty years of age, of French extraction, and
professing the Protestant religion. It was a queer old range of
building, that retreat; pleasant enough, perhaps, when as a rather blank
series of red brick houses, it looked across its own formal walled
garden to the pleasant fields and open country, but strangely silent,
and with a crumbling, dreary look about it, when the lunatic asylum of
St. Luke's dominated all the surrounding tenements of a crowded, sordid
neighbourhood. Only the initiated could easily find the little low black
door that opened in the bare wall, and led to the large irregular space,
which was laid out in weedy beds and stony borders, distinguished by an
air of decay rather than of production--especially where in certain dank
corners a tangle of sapless stalks and tendrils indicated some faintly
hopeful attempt to rear an arbour, in which persons of robust
imagination might fancy they were sheltered from impending blacks that
issued from the manufactory chimneys close by. The visitor to this
out-of-the-way corner of the great city, seeing the old people walking
up and down the paved causeway in front of the row of crooked-paned
lower windows, or airing themselves at the doorsteps, might be excused
for the fancy that they had the imaginative faculty of children; and
were expected to "make believe" a good deal before they could quite
reconcile themselves to the notion that this dingy area of quadrilateral
plots and paths, in which the wet stood in small puddles, was ever a
"pleasaunce" gay with garden blooms, and smelling of knotted marjoram
and fragrant thyme. Yet there were still evidences of the invincible
cheerfulness of the old French nature, among the old creatures with
faces streaked like winter apples, and hands which, even though they
trembled, were swift of gesture and of emphasis.
There were old fellows there who had still about them indications of
true comeliness and grace that distinguished them from all vulgar
surroundings;--ancient gentlemen, who would go out on wet days to sweep
away any rainpools that might lie before the doors of the old ladies,
and so besmirch an otherwise immaculate shoe. It should be remembered,
too, that there was no livery there. Those who had some one to help them
to the garb of gentility wore what pleased them; those who were
dependent on the charity for clothing, were neither bound in one
pattern, nor condemned to the uniform of poverty. Neat or lively cotton
prints, or warm stuff gowns, with proper hose and caps and kerchiefs,
for the women; plain Oxford mixture, black, steel grey, or brown, for
the men, and each one measured for his suit. Those who entered there
were not the recipients of a dole grudgingly conceded. It was no
poorhouse, but the "Providence." Only eleven years ago there were some
evidences of the old meaning of the place in the remnants of the antique
furniture which adorned the queer rooms. They were not wards or
dormitories, but veritable bedrooms; and each one had its own
peculiarities, even in the bedsteads with spindle posts and dimity
hangings, the boxes and cupboards, and special chairs which
distinguished it from the rest. Some of these things had evidently been
heirlooms either of the institution or of the individual; and, indeed,
the preservation of individuality was a cheerful feature of the place,
despite its dim and somewhat dreary surroundings.
The Board Room was, in its way, one of the most extraordinary apartments
in London: with its tables supported by a tangled puzzle of legs, its
high-backed, polished chairs with leather seats, worn till they reminded
one of the cover of an antique ledger bound in unfinished calf; its
wonderful old black-framed prints representing the meetings of the
Huguenots in the Clerk's field in the times when men and women carried
their lives in their hands, and dragoons rode congregations down and
slashed them with sabres as they fell. Its dimly-seen portraits of the
noble, broad-browed, dark-eyed Ruvigny (the first governor), who refused
to go back to France even at the invitation of the King; of the gentle
Pastor Menard, with high, capacious forehead, and calm, strong mien; of
hale, shrewd, ruddy Gastigny; and of some men of later date, with
Frenchman written in every line of their finely-marked faces.
The little room set apart as a chapel--a barely-furnished place enough,
with desk and raised platform and plain seats--was venerable because of
all the meaning that lay in its studied absence of all ornament, and
because of the significance it must once have had to the sad-eyed men
who crowded into it, some of them thinking, perhaps, how it had come
about that they could stand there in peace and without a hand upon the
hilt of a sword.
There were, even at that later time, old men and women in the dim old
building who could repeat family legends of the emigration--for they
lived to a great age, these French folk, many of them being still alert
of eye and ear, and foot, even though they had heard the click of the
shuttle and the rattle of the loom eighty years before.
Some of them have survived the old place itself; for while they are in a
new home, the ancient building has changed, if even it be not altogether
dismantled. The leases paid good interest, and eight years ago a new
French hospital arose--away from the dingy old precinct of the Golden
Acre.
To see this later "Providence" aright, you must come through the very
heart of that neighbourhood which was once the great Silk Colony, thread
the bye-ways of Poverty Market, note the tall silent houses where the
looms no longer rattle, nor the sharp whirr of the shuttle stirs
cage-birds to sing; pass across the debatable land lying on the edge of
Shoreditch, where human beings live in sties built in the backyards of
other houses, in streets that are still with the blank silence of misery
and want. You should walk amidst pigeon and dog fanciers; call in at
certain dingy, slipshod taverns, where at night a slouching company will
meet to hear bullfinches pipe for wagers, and where starving men and
women stand and drink away the pence that are all too few to buy food
for the starving brood at home, and so are flung upon the sloppy counter
in exchange for the drugged drink that feels like food and fire in one.
Through Bethnal Green, with its "townships" and its "Follies," extending
in sordid rows of tenements built to one dreary pattern. Over districts
which, only a few years ago, were fields and open spaces, leading to
farm lands and hedgerows, and so away to the great expanse of marsh land
where the dappled kine wade knee-deep in the lush pastures, and the
stunted pollards stand like patient fishermen upon the river's brink.
Yes, the present "French Hospital"--New Providence--was built ten years
ago in the border-land beyond the Weavers' Garden, that great garden and
pleasure-ground known as Victoria Park. It is the only garden left to
the descendants of those old craftsmen who once dwelt in houses every
one of which had its gay plot of flowers, its rustic arbour, or its
quaint device of grotto-work, built up of oddly-shaped stones and
pearl-edged oyster-shells. Do you think there is now no remnant of the
old French folk left? Come for a stroll among the grand beds and
plantations of this East-end playground, and you shall see. On holidays
and alas! on those days when (to use the expressive term handed down
from prosperous times) the weaver is "at play"--that is to say, waiting
for woof and weft, and so wiling away the sad and often hunger-bringing
hours--you will see him, with his keen well-cut face, his dark
appreciative eye, his long delicate hands, his well-brushed, threadbare
coat and hat; and the mark of race is plainly to be noted in his
intensity of look and his subdued patient bearing. He comes of a stock
which had it not been of the hardiest and the most temperate and
enduring in the world, would have disappeared a century ago. On Sunday
mornings, when the bells are sounding round about him, he is to be met
with lingering (with who shall say what inner sense of worship) by the
strange shrubs and flowering plants, or standing with a pathetic look of
momentary satisfaction on his lean, mobile face, to mark the rare glow
and gush of colour made by the blooms in a "ribbon" device of flowers on
a sunny border by a dark background of cedar. But come and see what his
forefathers might have called, in their Scripture phraseology, "the
remnant of the children of Israel;" the old inmates of that French
Hospital founded so long ago when De Ruvigny was the "beloved cousin" of
George I., and Philippe Menard preached at St. James's; when the Duchess
de la Force brought donation after donation to the work, and Philippe
Hervart, Baron d'Huningue gave £4,000, all in one splendid contribution,
to the building fund. Could they have seen (who knows that they have
not?) this great French château rising beyond the park palings in a
neighbourhood fast filling with houses, but still open to the air that
blows from the Weavers' Garden and from the great expanse of land
leading towards the forest, they would have recognised the familiar
style of those grand mansions which in France succeeded the castles of
the feudal nobility when Henry Quatre was king. The high-pointed roof
with its irregularly picturesque lines, the quaint towers and spires,
the slate blue and purple, and rosy tints of colour in slope and wall
and gable; the various combinations of form and hue changing with every
point of view, make this modern copy of the old French château a
wonderful feature in any landscape, and the unaccustomed visitor seeing
it as it stands there in its own ornamental ground, surrounded by a
quaint wall decorated in coloured bands, wonders what can be the meaning
of a building so full of suggestion; while if he be of an imaginative
turn, he may fall into a daydream when he peers through the gate that
stands by the porter's lodge.
But let us pass through this gate, and so up to the entrance-hall, and
we shall seem to leave behind us not only the Weavers' Garden, but most
things English. The hall itself, paved with encaustic tile, leads to a
flight of broad, shallow steps, beneath an arched ceiling of variegated
brick and two screen arches. These steps conduct us at once to a central
corridor, extending for the entire length of the building, and rising to
the greatest height of the open roof of timber with its lofty skylights.
In front of us is a double stone staircase, one branch being for the old
ladies, the other for the men; and immediately at the foot of the former
division is the entrance to the refectory, a large handsome dining-hall,
where, at two long tables, this wonderful company assemble, only the
very infirm having their meals carried to the upper ward, where they are
waited on by paid attendants. Separate staircases are provided for the
servants of the establishment, whose rooms are in the tower above the
main wards--or rather, let us say, principal apartments, for they are
not so much wards as a series of twenty-two large bedrooms, linen-rooms,
and two bath-rooms. The steward of the hospital, a venerable gentleman
with the courteous air and speech of some seneschal of olden time, has
also his own apartments, reached by a third stair, his sitting-room and
office occupying a space close to the entrance. On the right of the main
staircase and at the end of the corridor is the ladies' sitting-room, a
fine high-windowed light and lofty place, admirably warmed, as indeed
all the building is, and so furnished that at each large square table
four old ladies can sit and have not only ample space for books or
needlework, but on her right hand each can open a special separate
table-drawer with lock and key, wherein to keep such waifs and
strays--shreds, patches, skeins, and unconsidered trifles--as children
and old women like to accumulate. There is another day-room beside this,
and a similar, though not quite so large an apartment is provided for
the men, both rooms being furnished with sundry books and a few sober
periodicals of the day.
It must not be forgotten though that many of the old gentlemen have
grown accustomed to the use of tobacco, and here in the basement is a
smoking-room, quite out of the way of the ordinary sitting and
dining-rooms, and not far from the laundry and drying-rooms, which form
an important part of the establishment.
But, hush! there is a hymn sounding yonder in the refectory; a hymn sung
by voices, many of which are yet fresh and clear, though the singers
number more than eighty years of life, and of life that has often been
hard and full of heaviness.
It is the grace before meat, and the hot joints, with the fresh
vegetables from their own garden, have just come up from the big kitchen
by means of a lift to the serving-room.
There are no servants to wait at table, and the family dinner-party is a
private one, inasmuch as it is the custom here for the most active of
the inmates to agree among themselves who shall be butler, or
_beaufetière_, for each day during the week. So the dinner-time goes
pleasantly and quickly, the meat, the vegetables, and the capital
household beer, of which each man has a pint twice a day, and each woman
half a pint, being the only articles that require serving.